{"id":1831,"date":"2025-01-13T21:11:40","date_gmt":"2025-01-14T02:11:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/?p=1831"},"modified":"2025-02-07T05:23:32","modified_gmt":"2025-02-07T10:23:32","slug":"the-housetops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/?p=1831","title":{"rendered":"The Housetops"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/span> 4<\/span> Minute Read<\/span><\/span>\n

I have recently written my first Instagram posts. Four, in fact. They represent the consummation of a 25-year intention to be deliberate about the life of the spirit. Now that I have broken through what increasingly feels like receding resistance to the commitment, here are my initial offerings from @TheHousetops<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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Depictions of Jesus and the Man at Bethesda<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Housetops<\/em><\/strong> is a safe place to share the wonders of the human spirit, amplified by the whisperings of the Heavenly One.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jesus said, “What I say to you in the dark, say it in the light, and what you hear in a whisper, proclaim on the housetops.” <\/p>\nMatthew 10:27; Wayment<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I am today embracing this invitation and invite you to join me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scott Knell
The Housetops
8 January 2024<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This past Sunday, I was asked by my nephew Rob to assist in a religious ordinance performed for his eight-year-old daughter Maggie. She had just been baptized and, like Jesus, was to receive the Gift of the Holy Ghost on coming out of the water. In the blessing, Rob placed his hands on Maggie\u2019s head and, after citing his authority to do so, said to his daughter, \u201cReceive the Holy Ghost.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each time those words are uttered \u2014 \u201cReceive the Holy Ghost\u201d \u2014 a dependable range of emotions (peace, goodness, holiness) courses through my body, whispering that some power beyond words is at work. During Maggie\u2019s blessing, these same feelings were accompanied by an unbidden, tangible warmth and love I had yet to experience in my sixty-year history with that ordinance. The wave flooded over me again as Rob promised Maggie she would hear the voice of God in her life whenever she felt the need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born unable to hear, Maggie has learned to read lips and otherwise converse freely with the outside world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there is an inside world. And as her father spoke to her in the name of Jesus Christ, Maggie was promised to hear the words of Heaven not through her physical senses but by the perfect hearing of her divine spirit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A firefighter battles the Palisades Fire as it burns a structure in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025. (AP Photo\/Ethan Swope)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Five years ago, my father came to me in a dream with a dire prediction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c[Your cousin] J__ will one day lose all he possesses. When that happens, you will want to count yourself among his friends.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My mother an only child, my father’s niece and nephew are my only cousins. But J__ and I are not close in age, grew up two states apart, and for the past forty years have lived on opposite coasts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We caught up at the funeral of J__’s father when I shared with him parts of my strange dream\u2014papering over its bizarre warning\u2014and committed to be a better cousin and friend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in the years since, I have paid little more than lip service to my vow, sharing the odd pic of his dad found in a box of my father\u2019s things or a Malcolm Gladwell piece on his dad\u2019s time in The<\/em> Bomber Mafia<\/em>. Hardly enough to qualify as being \u201camong his friends\u201d should a tragedy spring up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today I learned that one of the wildfires in California took away from J__ everything but the clothes on his back, a basket of wet laundry, and a couple of cats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What good are the voices in our heads if we choose to ignore them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Der Himmel \u00fcber Berlin<\/em>, Written and Directed by Wim Wenders<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I often wonder how it came to be just me inside my head. Why not, say, her? Or him? Or all of you? Why is the only thing I see from behind what Vonnegut calls my \u2018peephole\u2019 the view that is only mine? I could ask the same of my \u2018thinkhole.\u2019 Or what I feel. Or, for that matter, everything I do. I don\u2019t wonder long. The return on investing in the imponderable will likely be as elusive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wouldn\u2019t call it a hack that keeps me feeling alone back here. Sensing the presence of some \u2018other\u2019 (or others) has been a thing for me, if ineffable, since hacking was what I once did to an apple tree with a machete my father brought back from the Orient. Easy enough to suspend belief while in a dream; why not when awake? If there was a point in the development of my peephole before you were visible from it, a time when it was just me behind me, not yet knowing who or even what you were, would the terror of being utterly alone have been too much?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his 1987 film Der Himmel \u00fcber Berlin, Wim Wenders bathes us in loved ones we cannot see but unfathomably sense. They read to us when we think we read to ourselves. They sit with us on the metro when all we see are vacant strangers. They rest their heads on our shoulders and we on theirs. They stand alone between our fragility and the unimaginable dread of sheer singularity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<\/span> 4<\/span> Minute Read<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I have recently written my first Instagram posts. Four, in fact. They represent the consummation of a 25-year intention to be deliberate about the life of the spirit. Now that I have broken through what increasingly feels like receding resistance to the commitment, here are my initial offerings from @TheHousetops.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1832,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-changefulness"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/miracles_of_jesus_pool_of_bethesda.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1831"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1870,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831\/revisions\/1870"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indirections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}