BRANCH- Wilderness Cry- Hilary L Hunt MD

BRANCH- Now here is an interesting word with a million different uses. Generally, it refers to an outcropping of some kind; a tree branch, a branch bank, even a branch of religion. As a child, growing up on a small farm of rolling land, my dad would often refer to a low lying piece of land near a ditch as a “branch-bottom”. I didn’t realized why that designation until I got older and became aware of tributary drainage systems; oceans, rivers, creeks, ditches, streams. Low-lying land along a creek is called a creek-bottom; along a river, it’s a river-bottom; along a ditch which is a branch of a creek, it’s called a branch-bottom. So what we have on this earth is a system of streams, ditches, creeks, rivers draining into oceans, all of which are connected as one. Now lets talk about Christianity. Just what is Christianity? Theoretically, it would be a system of understanding and acceptance of the exact teachings of Jesus the Christ. In which case, we would have the “ocean” of Jesus, branching out through the rivers, creeks, ditches, and streams of His exact teachings to every region of the earth. Each of those flowing entities may vary in width, length and general capacity, but each would transmit the same identical “water” of Jesus’ words. A wonderful, fantastic, glorious idea. The word of God through Jesus would evaporate from the oceans, form clouds which would be carried by the winds of the Holy Spirit world-wide to precipitate back to earth, quenching the spiritual yearning of the faithful on earth. It would be collected by the drainage system and flow back to the source, “The Ocean of God”. I believe that any rational being would perceive such a system as good and beneficial. However, that utopian idea was destroyed almost before the words exited Jesus’ mouth. Instead of a smoothly flowing system of Jesus’ word, what we have is a distorted, multi-loculated system of land-locked lakes and sloughs containing all sorts of contaminated, distorted versions of Jesus’ words. We label those as So-called Christian religions. World-wide, there are 33,000 such institutions, none of which are connected by a flowing, branching system to the Source. Oh, granted, some lakes are larger than others. Some are so tiny as to be barely visible. They all have three things in common; each is screaming that its “version” of Jesus is the correct one; each is collecting all the money it can; each is excavating its banks making room for more occupants. In the meantime, Jesus “real word” has long since been discarded. He only spoke one word and that word is LOVE. Jesus knew that His Spirit and the Spirit of everything in existence were inexorably connected with the spirit of its Creator. His “Good News”, “Gospel”, was LOVE; I will accept you unconditionally with no strings attached. My LOVE is PERFECT. Let my word flow from every stream, ditch, creek and river back to the “OCEAN OF SOURCE”  to, be recirculated through the winds of the Holy Spirit to an even greater area over and over and over again until all hear my word of LOVE. That is why I have called for recognition of the World-Wide Communion of Spirituality, We must dig canals between all the land-locked lakes, connecting them with the rivers of Jesus word. Then, and only then can peace prevail. My powerful little book, Wilderness Cry will make that concept perfectly clear for you. Religion is the illness. Spirituality is the cure. I speak strictly of Christianity today, but the same concept would, could, and should apply to all religions (Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism etc). Amazon, Kindle, ET AL.  Comments welcomed.  handg@comcast.net.