The Help

I just finished watching the film, The Help. What struck me was the different categories of people in the film. There were the truly nasty people like Hilly and the president of the Daughters of America. They were people who had some sort of power or hold over others. They knew they had this power and they used it to full effect to antagonise others, especially the African-Americans. The other category of people were the ones who were used by the people to inflict pain on others like Skeeters mother and Elizebeth. They didn't have the courage of their convictions (Skeeter's mother discovered her own in the end) even when they didn't agree with what was being done or said. At times, they were forced to do something they didn't want to do. They kept quiet because they wanted to belong to a group or clique and they ended up treating others like dirt.

Most Christians are like the latter. It's not as if we don't know the truth. It stares us right in the face everyday and speaks to us loudly at night. But we choose to ignore because we would rather take the path of least resistance. We see the trouble that other get because of standing for the truth and we feel that we cannot take the hassle so we keep quiet.

Regardless of whether or not we keep quiet in the face of truth, the fact remains that truth cannot be killed, thrown away or ignored. It will always be there. It would be a different matter altogether if we didn't know the truth,but we do. Instead of admitting the truth, we try to obfuscate it with our own ideas about what should be. The world has been gripped by the fever of "equality" and so we are afraid of going against the flow, so to speak. The world wants to give us a concept of God that is untrue but we are either ashamed of him or afraid of the backlash to speak our minds.

The world hates the truth. Paul told Timothy that in the last days, people would have itching ears and would only want to hear what they want to hear. That is also the case even about "Christians". We want to be at "peace" with the world even when the world wants nothing to do with us. We just so want to blend in that we are ready to do anything, including not saying anything in the hope that the world will look more kindly at us. We hope that this will make us happy but we end up miserable. In the end we will discover that the only thing that will endure is truth and every lie will fade. So me might as well just get with the program and be happy.

JC Cruz is the author of DECEPTIO published by WestBow Press (http://www.westbowpress.com/) , a division of Thomas Nelson Publishing. You can follow him on Twitter @Cruz_JCReal

DECEPTIO (EXCERPT)

Calvin had broken into a run with his gun drawn from its holster before the senator’s body had hit the ground. He knelt down beside the body which was lying on the stage face down, where it lay after falling from his wife’s hands. He placed his fingers on the neck to feel for a pulse. There was none. The man was dead, he thought grimly. He looked around the field, trying to see if he could see who had shot his principal. Former principal a voice said. The whole place was in an uproar as everyone was trying to run away from the field or was running toward the body. He was soon joined on the stage by FBI agents and police officers some of whom were trying to keep curious onlookers and their phones, away from the body. One of them began feeling his body for a pulse like Calvin had done earlier.

“There’s no pulse. He’s dead,” he said to the FBI agent, trying to save him the trouble of looking for a pulse and then finding none.

“Who are you?” the agent asked with a frown on his face.

“I’m, well, I was one of the senator’s bodyguards,” he said.

“Can someone tell me what is going on here?” a loud, gruff voice asked.

Calvin looked up at the newcomer who had spoken from where he was beside the senator’s body.

"He’s dead sir,” the agent that had been checking his pulse said.

“I’m sure that if you had half of your head blown away, you’d be dead too,” the man said dryly. His eye fixed on Calvin as he asked, “And you are?”

Calvin stood. “My name is Calvin Cordell, part of the Senator’s security detail,” he answered, stretching his hand out for a handshake. When the other man stared at his hand but refused to shake it, Calvin shrugged, bringing his hand back to his side.

“Are you the one in charge?”

“No,” Calvin answered.

“Then who is?” the other man barked.

“I am.”

The FBI agent turned to look at who had spoken. “And you are?”

“Anthony Greaves,” the head of the senator’s security detail and Calvin’s boss answered. He had walked up to the crime scene to see what was happening.

“Marcus Granville, Special Agent in Charge of the Chicago office,” the other man said. The two men shook hands.

Anthony looked down at the senator’s lifeless body. “I take it he’s dead?” he asked.

“You take correctly,” Marcus answered. “I believe you were aware that he was being threatened?”

“Yes,” Anthony answered. “We tried to stop him from coming to give the speech today. There were too many things that could go wrong. And it seems something did go wrong. But he wouldn’t listen.”

Marcus grunted. He turned to Calvin and asked, “Where were you?”

“There,” Calvin said, turning and pointing toward the back of the stage.

“Did you see anything?”

Calvin shook his head. “Nothing.”

Marcus sighed. “It figures.”

Just then, the doctor pushed through the crowd and bent down beside the senator’s lifeless body. A pool of blood had collected under his head.

“I’ll spare you the trouble doc and let you know that the man is dead,” Marcus answered. “I’m sure you’d be more useful attending to the family he left behind,” he said, pointing with his head in the direction of the senator’s widow and children. “And please, can someone take them home?”

The doctor got up and went in Susan Partridge’s direction. Marcus turned to another agent and asked, “Where’s Rutger with the camera and other equipment? We need to process the body and find out all we can before any evidence is trampled upon. And I’d like it to be done while I’m still alive.”

Marcus motioned Calvin and Anthony away from the body. “Have you always been in charge of his security or did he hire you when he got the threats?” he asked.

“Our firm has always provided security for him and his family,” Anthony answered. “We even provided security for his father before him, but the thing is he beefed up his security when he got the threats.”

“And he still got killed,” Marcus said but his tone didn’t indicate he was attaching any blame to anyone. He wiped his face with his hand, a wearied look on his face. “Either they had some help or these religious kooks are very good. I can guess what’s going to happen now. The president is going to hear about this and he’s going to talk with the Director. Then the Director is going to call me and my ulcer is going to start acting up again.” He sighed and looked at Calvin. “Are you quite sure that you didn’t notice anything out of place? Maybe you need to think about it,” he said hopefully.

Calvin thought about it for some time but shook his head. “I’m quite sure I didn’t see anything.”

Marcus sighed again. “I’ll probably need to get a statement or something from you although I don’t see how it’s going to help. Drop your contact details with one of my people. I’m really beginning to wish I didn’t get out of bed this morning.”

Calvin and Anthony watched as he walked back toward the senator’s dead body and started barking orders.

“This is a right mess,” Anthony muttered, running his hand through his hair and looking around. “Something tells me we haven’t heard the last of this whole thing and that it’s going to get worse.”


JC Cruz is the author of DECEPTIO, published by WestBow Press (http://www.westbow.com/) a division of Thomas Nelson Publishers. You can follow him @Cruz_JCReal

Life is Unfair!?

A friend posted the statement above on his Facebook page but it wasn't a question. It was a categorical statement. I know there are a lot of people out there who think that life in unfair. But I don't think that life is unfair. Life I will admit can be hard, but it's not unfair.

If we were to say that life was unfair, it would be saying that we have a feeling of entitlement. You work hard 5 days a week and you feel that after a number of years you should be able to afford your own house, car and everything that you think should come with it. But then life throws us a curveball and all of our expectatations are thrown out of the nearest window.

I remember reading a few years ago the story of the German billionaire who killed himself because he lost money in the stock market crash that followed the start of the reccession. He was still a billionaire but he just couldn't take the loss of the money so he ended his own life. He didn't have money, money had him.

Life is hard but Jesus came not to take away the hardness but to give us peace in the middle of the storms we gon through. The storms that make other people tear out their hair in despair are the storms we are to drop anchor in, hold on to Jesus and find peace for our souls. Jesus didn't come to take us to heaven immediately we got born-again but he asked us to stay here and point the way for others to him. Life is hard but if we focus on the hardness, we will never get anything done. We are to keep our focus on Jesus because if we keep our focus on the problem, we will sink like Peter.

We need to be able to hold on to him and trust him. The Bible says "the just shall live by faith". Our faith is not tested when things are going according to plan or well. It is at the times when all hell is breaking loose, that is when we need to trust God and keep our eyes fixed on Him even as we keep in mind his promises. That he has only thoughts of good towards us for example. That there is no evil in Him, only goodness. I can promise that if we don't let go and hold on to the end, we will find salvation.

What's Love Got To Do With It (Part 2)

I have recently been learning about the grace of God. I have come to understand that love is the most powerful thing on the face of the earth. Not guns, not missiles. not atomic weapons. They can all cause massive destruction but in the end, they really cannot cause change like love has the potential to. Like I have said before, I'm not talking about Hollywood's portrayal of love, but the real thing.

I once read a quote by someone who said that all the major wars and troubles have been caused by religion. While I believe that is untrue, I do not dispute the fact that there have been some wars fought based on the premise that they were "Christian" wars. But a war that is unleashed in the name of someone who is called the Prince of Peace cannot be a true representation of him. I believe that there would be less wars if there was more love. But unfortunately, we don't know what love looks like so we can't recognise it when we see it. We can't even express it because we have never felt it ourselves.

Love is not about who is right or who is wrong. It's not about what we deserve or don't. It's not even about why, who or what. It just simply ...is.  When you desire the good of someone other than yourself, it shouldn't be because of something they've done or have don't it should be because you love them. The Bible tells us that we love God because he first loved us. We are only able to love Him because he showed love to us first. His love was and is unconditional and without any strings. We didn't do anything to earnn it. In fact, we were quite unloveable. But it spite of this, God still choose to love us.

The essence of the Word was that He came to show us what the father is like. He broke down a list of rules and do's and dont's into two and asked us to love God with all our heart, soul, might, strenght. He asked us to love others as we love ourselves. We cannot really achieve the second without understanding and living out the first. We need to understand that there is nothing we can do or say to make God love us more. It's time we accepted that fact and accept the free gift of God's love. until we do, we will never really know what it means to be loved. Or to love. Unconditionally.

What do we need to do to understand and accept God's love today?


JC Cruz is the author vof DECEPTIO out now from WestBowPress, a division of Thomas Nelson Publishers (www.westbowpress.com). You can follow him on Twitter @Cruz_JCReal

What's Love Got To Do With It? Part 1

"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."--C.S. Lewis

If I were to answer the question from that old Tina Turner song, I would say: Quite a lot actually.

Most people vaccilate between two extremes. The one extreme is that growing up, we never understood what love was. We probably had parents, especially fathers, that we never got on with especially if they didn't know Christ. We never really understood then (and probably even know) that they were dealing with us (and we with them) based on the extent of knowledge they possessed. So when someone talks about the love of God and they mention that God loves us like a father, we remember our father who was suppossed to love us and we go, "Thanks but no thanks with that God thing."

Then when we get older, we see the other extreme of love. The false picture. The one that Hollywood and other people have painted. I have used this example in an earlier blog post and I'll use it again. We can all remember a film where the teenage boy (who has an itch to scratch) tells the girl he has been trying to get to sleep with him (but with whom he has been having no luch as she's holding out): "I love you. If you love me, you'll give yourself to me (or some other such words). The girl has been holding out since the beginning of the film but because a challenge has been thrown to her to prove her love, she puts her hand in his and says "Yes'. By the time she says yes, there is not a dry eye in the theater. But the fact is that he didn't love her. If he did, he wouldn't ask her to prove her love. The fact is that he just has an itch to scratch and any girl would do. It's just that she has been unlucky enough to be chosen.

The definition of love by C.S. Lewis is one of the best definitions of love there is. If I were to add anything, it would be that if you loved someone, you would give of youself if you really are seeking the good of the person you say you love. I have never seen a better expression of love than that in John 3:16. That is the model that has been laid down for us. That is the model we must follow.

What do you think?


(JC Cruz is the author of DECEPTIO out now from WestBow Press, a division of Thoma Nelson Publishers (http://www.westbowpress.com/). You can also follow him @Cruz_JCReal)

God's Riches At Christ's Expense (GRACE)

It's quite interesting that the Bible says that: "O taste and see that the Lord is good." Ps. 34:8. It also says that "the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?" Rom 2:4. But it's quite interesting that even though the Bible says that God is good, quite a lot of people, including me, came to Christ after being "threatened" by God's wrath. We were asked to repent or face damnation if we did not turn our lives over to Christ.

Even Jesus testified about about the goodness of God. Someone walked up to Jesus and called Him good. Jesus asked why the man was calling him good and that there was none good except God! That's quite interesting. Even Jesus the sinless sacrifice acknowledged that only God was good. Then where did we get the idea that God was some angry being out for us?

I think there is a lot of truth in the statement that quite a lot of us had father's that we felt were not good or loving enough and we projected those angry and ambivalent feelings that we had toward our earthly fathers at God. For some of us who grew up in Orthodox churches, this is especially true. And the people who revealed God and Christ to us also had this same problem. Which is why we have never fully understood the topic of God's grace. We have been vaccilating between grace and the law because we just couldn't believe in a God who loved us so much and yet there was nothing we could do to earn his love. Many of us knew our father's and some of us know the things we did or tried to do in other to please our fathers. And in the end, we were always dissappointed when we came up short because we just couldn't match up to their expectation of us.

God is not like us. There is nothing we can do to win his love. He loved us even before we came to him and he will continue to love us, no matter what we do. That is a hard concept for us to grasp. In future posts, I hope to share what I have discovered about the grace of God and his love for us.


(JC Cruz is the author of DECEPTIO out now from WestBow Press. (http://www.westbowpress.com/). You can follow him on Twitter at @Cruz_JCReal)

DECEPTIO (EXCERPT)

CHAPTER 2

Special Agent Camilla Rodriguez scanned the crowd gathered on the Les Miller field from her vantage point at the back. From where she stood, she had a good view of everything and everyone. Personally, she didn’t think anyone in his right mind would try to kill the senator with the police and the FBI present. Only a suicidal maniac would attempt anything would think of making an attempt on his life. Therefore, to her it was a monumental waste of time that so much manpower had been allocated to prevent something she didn’t think would happen. There were other things she and her colleagues could be doing rather than sitting and twiddling their thumbs as they waited for something that was never going to happen.

Camilla had been shown the letters sent to Senator Partridge. There were three of them and they were supposed to be from some hitherto unknown fundamentalist Christian group called Christ’s Warriors opposed to his message of freedom and rights. The letters had been composed from newspaper cuttings pasted on white paper. They had been analyzed by FBI experts but they had been unable to come up with any prints. All they had been able to find out was the fact that the paper was of the cheap variety that could be obtained from any store. They were also not any closer to finding out more about the group that had threatened his life. That was if such a group actually existed.

Her friends and colleagues knew that Senator Partridge wasn’t exactly Camilla’s favorite person in the world. But the fact that she didn’t like him wasn’t why she wasn’t convinced that there actually was a plot on his life. It was that there were just too many things that didn’t add up. The group that allegedly wanted to kill him was not on the FBI database of fundamentalist or terrorist groups and had never been heard of before. The first they had got to hear about the group was when the senator had come to them with the letters. While she admitted that it was possible for a totally new group who had as their sole aim and purpose, the killing of Robert Partridge to spring up, the fact that they had been unable to find any trace of the group made her skeptical. For all she knew, the only place the group existed was in Robert Partridge’s mind.

The fact that the senator had only come to them after he received the third letter was in Camilla’s view, another reason why she found it hard to believe that such a group actually existed. His excuse had been that when he got the first and second letters, he had believed it was a prank being played by someone he knew. It was only after the third one came that his wife had convinced him to take the matter seriously and come and see the FBI. Camilla found that hard to believe. The senator must have known that he had a lot of enemies because of who he was and the privileged family he came from and that he was making a lot more with his speeches. She therefore expected that if he had received a threat, it was to be taken seriously until it was proved to be a hoax.

Camilla scanned the crowd again this time with the binoculars hanging around her neck. There were quite a few people speaking on their mobile phones but Camilla doubted if there was any one of them who was speaking to the leader of some fundamentalist group. As far as she was concerned, if any one wanted to kill the Senator, he or she had a great chance of succeeding before being caught. Even with all the FBI agents and officers of Chicago police department all over the place and in plain clothes among the people, it was still a nightmare scenario. Not that she was saying that anyone was going to try to kill the senator, especially not any phantom fundamentalist group, but she would breathe easier when the senator gave his speech and left the stage.

Speaking of speeches, she wondered when he was going to come on stage. She looked at her watch. It was some minutes after 11 o’clock. Any moment from now, it would be time for the speech. She hoped that it wasn’t going to be a long one.

“Here, I bought you a hot dog.”

Camilla jumped at the sound. She turned toward the voice and saw her colleague, Jeremiah Walker, holding out a hot dog in her direction with his left hand while in his right hand, he held another hot dog that he had taken a bite from. He had startled her. She had been lost in her thoughts and hadn’t heard him walk up.

“You startled me,” she accused even as she took the hot dog from him. She removed the paper around the hot dog and took a bite. She had not eaten anything that morning. She had only drunk a cup of coffee to fortify herself for the day ahead. Somewhere along the line, she had forgotten she was hungry.

“I didn’t know if you liked mustard or ketchup with your hot dog but I guessed it wouldn’t hurt if it was mustard,” he said. “If you don’t like it, I can go back and get another one,” he offered.

“No, it’s okay. It’s fine,” she assured him even as she took another bite. She sighed with satisfaction as the food hit all the right spots. “What’s a hot dog without mustard any way?” she asked.

He laughed even as he bit into his own. His white teeth showed up against the brown of his face. “Of course.”

“You’re a life saver, you know that, don’t you?” she asked.

“I aim to please,” he replied. He enjoyed the way she ate. She ate heartily like one who was enjoying the food, rather than someone eating just to keep alive. In that regard, she wasn’t like other women. And the fact that she seemed to have a body metabolism that didn’t allow her to put on weight no matter what she eat, didn’t hurt either.

“I was only able to swallow a cup of coffee this morning before I had to rush out of the house,” she said as she chewed. She had almost finished the hot dog. That was another thing; she just seemed unable to take her time while eating. She took the view that it wasn’t the time you took over the food that made you feel full; it was the amount of food you eat. Whether you spent an hour or two minutes, the benefits were the same.

“I’m not really a breakfast person myself,” he said, raising one shoulder in a shrug. He watched as she popped the last bit of the hot dog into her mouth, licking the mustard from her fingers before cleaning her hand with the napkin provided. “You’ve got a bit of mustard beside your mouth,” he said.

“Where?” she asked, raising her hand to clean her mouth, missing the trace of mustard that had somehow gotten on to the side of her mouth from the wrapping around the mustard. “Is it gone?”

“No, it’s still there. Just beside your mouth,” he answered amused.

“Where?” she asked. “Left or right?”

“Right,” he answered, his amusement vanishing as he watched her tongue come out to lick the mustard away. His breathing grew shallow. He wished he could help her lick away the mustard.

“Is it all gone?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered, not sure if his voice sounded normal. He didn’t feel normal. He turned away.

Camilla looked at him. He sounded funny. She was about to ask him if he was alright when it occurred to her what might be wrong with him. If it was what she thought it was, it would be better to let sleeping dogs lie. She didn’t know what had set him off and she wasn’t sure she wanted to find out.

Ever since Jeremiah Walker had been transferred to the Chicago office of the FBI from New Orleans, he had made no secret of the fact that he liked her. So he only liked her, a voice in her head scoffed. Liked? Liked was a lukewarm word, the voice in her head mocked. Well, extremely attracted to her, she revised mentally. And he felt she was attracted to him too, which Camilla didn’t deny. He had therefore seen nothing wrong with taking the mutual attraction to the next logical level by having an affair. But while Camilla was willing to admit that she liked him as a friend, she wasn’t about to get into a relationship with him. Because they were different.

(JC Cruz is the author of DECEPTIO. DECEPTIO is published by WestBow Press, a division of Thomas Nelson Publishers. You can get a copy from www.westbowpress.com/store)