[Edited March 25, 2009 here. Edited July 3, 2010 here.]
Stirrings of Stage Four
It was Saturday, September 27, 2008, and I was in my new room where I study, pray, and meditate. I was reflecting on the possiblities of pursuing Stage 4 "prematurely" by fasting. I also had an ear-ache that felt like another resurgence of an ear infection. I had been struggling with that for months, and my doctor was going through a sequence of increasingly stronger antibiotics to treat it. What was possibly complicating it was a severe soreness in my right jaw due to knuckle biting and "clenching" of my teeth. While I considered a re-visit, I asked the Holy Spirit, in a sudden uncharacteristic lark, how I would handle it in Stage 4. There was a virtual shrug and the comment "Apply variance management to 3D solids."
I WAS going to start on Stage 2, the Spirit leading us unto all Truth, but what happened in the next few hours after getting that comment led me to write this essay. I originally conceived it as as another essay in Stage 1, but as I worked on it, I came to realize that putting it there would blunt the import of what this essay is about.
Charity requires that I insert a warning. As I was modifying the main page to include the link to this essay, it struck me that, although I had taken great pains to emphasize the miraculous aspects of what this essay is reporting to refute the objections of atheists, it is those who heed what is written here and follow it to the point of experiencing some of the benefits that I have experienced who are under greater obligation and potential condemnation. The writer of Hebrews notes, in chapter 6, verses 1 through 3, that getting one's doctrines right is required during one's spiritual immaturity. They are the lessons one must learn to move on to spiritual maturity, and in that moving on, they are left behind. When one is mature, one moves from learning to doing. One moves from knowing to experiencing. One moves from reading to "tasting the powers of the age to come".
With Spiritual Maturity comes accountability.
If you read on, there is no turning back.
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