One’s impression of his honesty was almost like carrying a bunch of flowers; the perfume was most agreeable, but they were occasionally an inconvenience. Therefore, all people are rogues, until we find them honest. Creativity is the ability to bring fruition, or produce, whatever it imagined or envisioned.

However, it is also much more. I am now trying an experiment very frequent among modern authors; which is, to write upon nothing: When the subject is utterly exhausted, to let the pen still move on; by some called, the ghost of wit, delight to walk after the death of its body.

When a man can say what he likes with the certainty that every word will be reported, and can speak to those around him as one manifestly their superior, he always looms large. When one is in a great deal of pain, and suffering, daily, and others know this, and they can help, but instead choose to be jealous, the person who suffers happily is truly blessed.

Do what one may, there is no getting an air variety into a court circular. There is a profound monotonousness about its facts that baffles and defeats one’s sincerest efforts to make them sparkle and enthuse. Clarence’s way [of reporting the court circular] was good, it was simple, it was dignified, it was direct and businesslike; all I say is, it was not the best way:

COURT CIRCULAR.

On Monday, the King rode in the park.

On Tuesday, the King rode in the park.

On Wednesday, the King rode in the park.

On Thursday, the king rode in the park.

On Friday, the King rode in the park.

On Saturday, the King rode in the park.

On Sunday, the King rode in the park.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself. In order to produce a work of art, the artist must be able to respond to the unexpected, the chance occurrences or results that are part of the creative process. In other word, the artist must be something of an explorer and inventor. The artist must always be open to new ways of seeing.

True respect, true value lies not in words: words cannot express it. The silent awe, the humble, the doubting eye, and even the hesitating voice, better show it by much than, the rattling tongue of saucy and audacious eloquence. And if we are to appreciate art or the World, we must be willing to open ourselves to new ways of seeing as well.

Many of us think, almost without question, that we can trust the reality of what we see. However, seeing, as we say, is believing. You are surrounded by sights, sounds, odors, tastes, and touch sensations. Which are you aware of?

The first stage of perception is attention, the selection of incoming messages. There is little doubt about the importance of attention. Think, for instance, about an airplane pilot, who fails to notice that the flaps are not down, before landing. This error caused a major air disaster at Detroit’s airport in 1987.

Cecelia Crocker’s body provides her with a constant reminder of the most traumatic event of her life—one that she does not otherwise remember. At only 4 year old, Cecelia Crocker was the lone survivor of a 1987 plane crash that killed 154 people aboard and 2 on the ground near Detroit Metropolitan Airport.

Bodies covered with plastic bag laid strew across the highway, where the plane came down in Romulus, Michigan. A phantom man, the hood of his robes obscuring his face, is sometimes seen walking peacefully along the pathways. Seconds later, the image disappears, transported back to another dimension in time.

Attention—selective attention refers to the fact that we give some messages priority and put others on hold. Psychologists have found it helpful to think of selective attention as sort of a restricted access, it seems to prevent others from passing through. This may be why it is very difficult to listen to two people speaking at once. Typically, you can tune in one person or the other, but not both.

Richard Senate, now a well-known psychic researcher, stayed at the mission for a time in the Spring of 1987. When senate arrived at the mission, his interest lay in archeology, not ghost hunting. However, an encounter in the middle of the night, during his stay at the mission, permanently broadened the man’s scope of interest.

It was after midnight and, although he was extremely tired, Senate was unable to sleep. Thinking that a snack might help him fall asleep, he made his way outside, into the courtyard and toward the mission’s kitchen. As he walked he noted a figure coming toward him.

This did not surprise Senate at all, as there were many archaeologists staying in the isolated buildings, at the time. However, when the image drew closer to him, Senate’s curiosity was piqued. The people living in the mission tended to dress in ordinary street clothes, while this person wore a hooded robe. Stranger still, whoever the guy was, he was carrying a candle.

Then the image abruptly vanished. The figure had come within roughly 12 feet of Senate before inexplicably disappearing. There were no bushes behind which a practical joker could have hidden, no buildings he could have slipped into. As Richard Senate stood and stared in amazement, he realized that he had just seen a ghost.

The next day, Senate inquired as to who it was he had seen in the night. Senate was informed that he was certainly not the first person to encounter the image. It seems that in the early 1800s, people at the mission observed a routine which included rising just after midnight to pray.

They carried candles to light their way. Presumably the specter that had startled the sleepless Senate had simply been a remnant from long ago.

This is not the only ghost story from the area. There is a wonderfully spooky old legend about a woman, who was killed by her husband, it is said that her headless apparition can still be seen riding across the property.

What makes this old tale a bit more convincing than most is that many of the witnesses to her ghostly ride have been members of the military, who were stationed at the base of the mission.

Military police have even pursued the wraith in four-wheel drive vehicles. Despite their apparent advantages, the MPs were not able to catch the phantom—she rode her steed over a hill crest on and vanished into thin air.

The Mission La Purisima Concepcion has now been incorporated into a California State Park. Rangers and other employees of the park report that, no matter how many times a day they straighten it, a particular bed in one of the mission’s bedrooms will not stay neat. Staff can repeatedly tidy the rooms and smooth the blankets on the bed, only to return a little later and find the bedclothes in disarray—with the distinct outline of a human body impressed on it.

Park Ranger Steve Jones has even seen a misty apparition in that room. Although the image is slightly transparent, it is clear enough for Jones to make out an old, long-haired man wearing a gown and sitting on the bed. The ranger’s research indicates that the manifestation is probably the ghost of Father Mariano Payeras, who died in that bedroom in 1823. Presumably his spirit is responsible for the strange outline workers so often find on the bed.

Have you ever felt overloaded when trying to do several things at once? Divided attention arises when you must divide your mental efforts among tasks, each of which requires more or less attention. Distributed responsiveness is related to one limited capacity for sorting and thinking about information. For example, 24 November 1892, Kate Morgan pregnant, distraught and alone checked into the Hotel del Coronado as Lottie A. Bernard.

The luxurious hotel had only been open for four years, but had already established a sterling reputation; then as now, their guests’ comfort was of paramount importance. Many people on staff remembered noting how unwell Lottie seemed, and several offered to arrange for whatever medical help she might need.

Kate “Lottie” Morgan rebuffed all offers of assistance. The last time she was seen alive, Kate was wearing a shawl over a black lace dress and dabbing at her eyes with a hanky. At 8.30 the next morning, Kate Farmer Morgan’s lifeless body was found on an outside staircase, leading to the beach.

As soon as the authorities tried to notify her next of kin, they realized that Kate had used a false name. Rumor, innuendo and gossip spread faster than a storm moving across the bay. A coroner’s inquest determined that the woman’s death had been the result of a pistol shot inflicted by her own hand with suicidal intent. Local reporters, however, suspected that there was considerably more to this case than had been discovered, up to that point.

In the 8 December 1892 issues of the Los Angeles Daily Times, a journalist, Randolph Harris, penned the following provocative phrase: Dark mystery surrounds the suicide of unknown girl at the Coronado Hotel. Meanwhile, because no one came forward to claim it, Kate Morgan’s body was hastily buried in a poorly marked grave on 13 December 1892.

Many people report feeling inexplicable cold spots and hearing strange gurgling sounds, in the first floor computer lab, which is thought to serve as the maid’s quarters, during the early days of the hotel.

Because Kate’s image has actually been seen, she is easy to identify. Most often her ghost either floats through the hotel’s hallways or stands at a window, looking out as though watching for someone. Her presence is also credited with causing both telephones and televisions to malfunction.

Nearly 100 years later, in the summer of 1989 Alan May, a San Francisco lawyer, surprised himself by becoming thoroughly obsessed with both Kate Morgan’s life and death. He embarked on a year-long study of the case. At the end of his investigation, Alan May had not only found convincing evidence that the young woman’s death had been murder rather than suicide, he had also turned up proof that he himself was Kate’s great-grandson!

The chain of events which led Alan May to that conclusion began with a casual remark from a colleague to the effect that there was a ghost at the Hotel del Coronado, and that sent Alan May on an amazing genealogical odyssey.

The bullet that killed Kate Morgan did not match the gun she was found holding; the angle at which the bullet entered her head would not have been possible from a self-inflicted gunshot; and suicide would have made it virtually impossible for her body to have fallen into the position in which it was found. With very little effort, Alan May came to the undoubtedly correct conclusion that Kate Morgan’s death was an unavenged murder.

After checking with an unofficial family historian, Alan May was shocked to discover that he grandfather, Alan Mayer May—the man whose name he himself bore—was the baby boy whom Kate Morgan had left with the minister’s family before she rejoined her husband in his traveling poker scam. Kate Morgan was, therefore, Alan May’s great-grandmother. No wonder she had chosen him to solve the mystery! Motives also play a role in your attention.

The eye functions not as an instrument self-powered and alone, but as a dutiful member of a complex and capricious organism. Not only how but what it sees is regulated by need and prejudice. It selects, rejects, organizes, discriminates, associates, classifies, and analyzes, constructs.

It does not so much mirror as take and make. Nature is health; for health is good, and nature cannot work ill. As little can she work error. Get nature, and you get well. In other words, the eye mirrors each individual’s complex perceptions of the World.

Seeing is both a physical and psychological process. We know that physically, visual processing can be divided into three steps: reception, extraction, inference. In the first step, reception, external stimuli enter the nervous system through our eyes—we see the light.

Next, the retina, which is a collection of nerve cells at the back of the eye, extracts the basic information it needs and sends this information it needs and sends this information to the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes visual stimuli.

There are approximately 100 million sensors in the retina, but only 5 million channels to the visual cortex. In other words, the retina does a lot of editing and so does the visual cortex.

There, special mechanisms capable of extracting specific information about features such as color, motion, orientation, and size create what is finally seen. What you see is the inference your visual cortex extracts from the information your retina sends it.

God saw that the light was good. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day and the darkness he called night. And there was evening and there was morning—the first of the day.  And God said let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water.

So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. God called the expanse sky. And there was evening and there was morning—the second day.

And God said, Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear. And it was so. God called the dry ground land, and the gathered waters he called seas. And God saw that it was good.

Then God said let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds, and it was so.

Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as sign to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give the Earth light.

God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on Earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkens.

Seeing, in other words, is an inherently creative process. The visual system makes conclusions about the World.  It represents the World for you by selecting out information, deciding what is important and what is not.

What sort of information, for example, have you visually assimilated about the United States of America flag? You know its colors—red, white and blue—and that it has 50 stars and 13 stripes. You know, roughly, its shape—rectangular.

However, do you know its proportions? Do you even now, without looking, what color stripes is at the flag’s top, or what color is at the bottom? How many short stripes are there, and how many long ones? How many horizontal rows of stars are there? How many horizontal rows of stars are there? How man long rows? How man short ones?

The point is that not only do we perceive the same things differently, remembering different details, but also we do not usually see things as thoroughly or accurately as we might suppose.

If seeing is a physically creative process, psychologically it is even more so. If you wanted live in a peaceful World, for instance, you would be nice to people, treat them with respect and tell them good things, and concentrate on unity. However, the context in which you see things has a lot to do with how you see it.

Everything you see is filtered through a long history of fears, prejudices, desires, emotions, customs, and beliefs—both your own and the artist’s. In the Marine Corps War Memorial, the flag becomes the symbol not merely of the nation, but of freedom itself.

The flag has been turned into a prison. The flag, during the Civil Rights,  was made to record the World, to give visible or tangible form to feelings, to reveal hidden or universal truths, and to help us see the World in new and innovative ways.

And though we might all agree that the World is real, what we understand about it is very different. You need to be able to understand why you like it and how it communicates to you, which is known as visual literacy.

Many of you assume that you understand what you see, but the fact is that most of you take the visual World for granted. Those of you born and raised to watch TV and use cell phones and the internet are often accused of being nonverbal, passive receivers, like TV monitors themselves.  You are dependent on social media, TV, and it has made you the mass media generation, and you are not necessarily becoming visually literate in the process.

The idea of daring to represent God has been, throughout the history of the Western World, aroused controversy. In seventeenth-century Holland, images of God were banned from Protestant churches, as Peter Saenredam’s stark architectural rendering of the interior of the Church of Assendelft attests.

The image of God is His Word—that is, the Bible—and statues in human form, being an Earthen image of visible, Earthborn man [are] far away from the truth. One of the reasons that Jesus, the son of God, is so often represented in Western art is that representing the son, a real person, is far easier then representing the Father, a spiritual unknown.

God was nude. God is a quandary that is really his own. God is depicted here as the powerful but aged father of all, a father, less merciful than cruel. The scene is the second day of Creation, and God holds a pair of compasses as he measure out a delineates the firmament, imposing order upon chaos.

The creator of the World was not experiencing a particularly happy moment. Creation represents a double bind: One the one hand, to create or make something—for example, a World, or an image—is limiting, because it set boundaries upon the imagination. On the other hand, the imagination is defined by its ability to create. God is distinctly ambiguous.

An image of God, painted 400 years earlier, is much frailer, younger, and apparently more merciful and kind, and certainly more richly adorned. Indeed, judging from the richness of his vestments, God values the World more than the new God.  The newer God despises the material World—the World in which things get made, and that is why American is currently experiencing an $18.2 trillion deficit.

However, the God 400 years ago, admired and trusted the material World. He celebrates a materialism that is proper right of benevolent kings. Behind God’s head, across the top of the throne, are Latin words that, translated into English, read: This is God, all powerful in his divine majesty; of all the best, by the gentleness of his goodness; the most liberal giver, because of his infinite generosity.

God’s mercy and love are indicated by the pelicans embroidered on the tapestry behind him, which in Christian tradition symbolize self-sacrificing love, since pelicans were believed to wound themselves in order to feed their young with their own blood if other food was unavailable.

God is caught up in the collisions of two cultures. Honesty is the best policy—I always find it so. I lost forty-seven pound, ten by being honest this morning.

However, it is all gain, it is all gain! A man who loses forty-seven pound ten in one morning by his honesty is a man to be envied. If it had been eighty pound, the luxuriousness of feeling would have been increased.

Every pound lost would have been a hundredweight of happiness gained. You had better be an honest person than half a rogue. His Solitude with Us. When God gets us absolutely alone, and we are totally speechless, unable to ask even one question, then He begins to teach us.

As you journey with God, the only thing He intends to be clear is the way He deals with your soul. Are we alone with Him now? Jesus cannot teach us anything until we quiet al our intellectual questions and get along with Him.

I declare to you that the LORD will build a house for you: When your days are over and you go to be with your fathers, I will rise up your offspring to succeed you, one of your own sons, and I will establish his kingdom.

God is the one who will build a house for me, and I will establish this throne forever. I will be his father, and he will be my son. I will never take my love away from him, as I took it away from your predecessors. I will set him over my house and my kingdom forever; his throne will be established forever.

And God said, let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the Earth, and it was so. A season is a period of the year that is distinguished by special climate conditions.

The four seasons—spring, summer, fall, and winter—follow one another regularly. Each has its own light, temperature, and weather patterns that repeat yearly.  Spring is supposed to be mild weather with a lot rain, not too hot and not too cold. Summer is supposed to be warm and sunny, with little rain.

Fall is supposed to be cool, with mild sun and clouds. Winter is supposed to be cold, with cloudy gray skies and a lot of rain. This is to keep the planet healthy and in balance.  God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. Thus, the Heavens and Earth were completed in their entire vast array.

As long as the Earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease. Peaceful was the night, wherein the Prince of light, his reign of peace upon the Earth began; the winds with wonder whist, smoothly the waters kist.

Whispering new joys to the mild ocean, who now hath quite forgot to rave, while bird of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave. Oh, magic sheep! Oh, comfortable bird that broodest o’er the troubled sea of the mind till it is hushed and smooth. He cared for the forests and rivers.

Finally, he continued, look round the World and choose whatever you will of what Earth and seas contains most precious—ask it and fear no refusal. This only I pray you will not to urge. It is not honor, but destruction you seek.

Why do you hang round my neck and still entreat me? You shall have it if you persists—the oath is sworn and must be kept—but I beg you to choose more wisely.

They obeyed, and led forth from the lofty stalls the steeds full fed with ambrosia, and attached the reins. Then the Father bathed the face of his son with a powerful unguent, and made him capable of enduring the brightness of the flame.

He set the rays on his head and, with a foreboding sigh, said, If you are my son, you will in this at least heed my advice, spare the whip and hold tight the reins. They go fast enough of their own accord; the labor is to hold them in. You are not to take the straight road directly between the five circles, but turn off to the left.

Keep within the limit of the middle zone, and avoid the northern and southern alike. You will see the marks of the wheels, and they will serve to guide you. And, that the skies and the Earth may each receive their due share of heat, go not too high, or you will burn the Heavenly dwellings, nor too low, or you will set the Earth on fire. The middle course is safest and best. And now I leave you to your chance, which I hope will plan better for you than you have done for yourself.

Night is passing out of the western gates and we can delay no longer. Take the reins; but if at last your heart fails you, and you will benefit by advice, stay where you are in safety and suffer me to light and warm the Earth.

The agile youth sprang into the chariot, stood erect and grasped the reins with delight, pouring out thanks to his reluctant parent. Meanwhile, the horses fill the air with their snorting and fiery breath and stamp the group impatient. Now the bars are let down, and the boundless plain of the universe lies open before them.

They dart forward and cleave the opposing clouds, and outrun the morning breezes which started from the same eastern goal. The steeds soon perceived that the load they drew was lighter than usual; and as a ship without ballast is tossed hither and thither on the sea, so the chariot, without it accustomed weight, was dashed about as if empty.

They rush headlong and leave the travelled road. He is alarmed, and knows not how to guide them; nor, if he knew, has he the power.

Then, for the very first time, the Great and Little Bear were scorched with heat, and would fain, if it were possible, have plunged into the water; and the Serpent which lies coiled up round the north pole, torpid and harmless, grew warm, and with warmth felt its rage revive. Boots, they say. Fled away, through encumbered with his plough, and all unused to rapid motion.

When hapless Phaeton looked down upon the Earth, now spreading in vast extent beneath him, he grew pale and his knees shook with terror. In spite of the glare all around him, the sight of his eyes grew dim.

He wished he had never touched his father’s horses, never learned his parentage, never prevailed in his request. He is born along like a vessel that flies before a tempest, when the pilot can do no more and betakes himself to his prayers. What shall he do?

Much of the Heavenly road is left behind, but more remains before. He turns his eyes from one direction to the other; now to the goal whence he began his course, now to the realms of sunset which he is not destined to reach.

He loses his self-command, and knows not what to do—whether to draw tight the reins or throw them loose; he forgets the names of the horses. He sees with terror the monstrous forms scattered over the surface of Heaven.

Here the scorpion extended his two great arms, with his tail and crooked claws stretching over two signs of the zodiac. When the boy beheld him, reeking with poison and menacing with his fangs, his courage failed, and the reins fell from his hands.

The horses, when they felt them loose on their backs, dashed headlong, and unrestrained went off into unknown regions of the sky, in among the stars, hurling the chariot over pathless places, now up in high Heaven, now down almost to the Earth. The moon saw with astonishment her brother’s chariot running beneath her own.

The clouds begin to smoke, and the mountains tops take fire. On a regular basis, volcanoes hold us rapt for days when a steady stream of smoke or a series of tremors indicates that something big is going to happen.

However, it is not often that a volcano stages an intense, long-term drama, as fascinating as the one that occurred on Iceland’s island of Heimaey in the first half of 1973.

The episode unfolded at such a pace that we were able to watch a mountain forming right before our eyes. The pace also allowed intrepid islanders to leap into the breach o save the town of Vestmannaeyjar.

The eruption began on 23 January 1973, and continued for more than five months. It started with a fissure on the eastern end of the island, a rift that would eventually extend about two miles and from which lava shot at an initially alarming rate. Some 3,500 cubic feet of molten rock and tephra (the residue of airborne volcanic emissions) were spewed every second.

A cone began to rise, and within two days, it was as high as a football field is long. (Today, this cinder cone volcano, called Eldfell, which means “Fire Mountain” in Iceland, is more than 650 feet high.) The lava kept flowing, the hill expanding. The townspeople, living less than half a mile away, started to fret.

Most of the island’s 5,300 residents were safely evacuated in the first several days, but as the eruption subsided, many locals decided to return and fight. The fields were parched with heat, the plants withered, the trees with their leafy branches burned, the harvest was ablaze! However, these are small things. Great cities perished, with their walls and towers; whole nations with their people were consumed to ashes!

The forest-clad mountains burned, because of the major drought, there was no water to put of the fires. The sky was crowned with clouds. The World on fire, and the heat felt intolerable. The air he breathed was like the air of a furnace and full of burning ashes, and the smoke was of pitchy darkness. Then, it is believed that the people of Ethiopia became black by the blood being forced so suddenly to the surface, and the Libyan desert was dried up to the condition in which it remains to this day.

The Nymphs of the fountains, with disheveled hair, mourned their waters, nor were the rivers safe beneath their banks; Nile fled away and hid his head in the desert, and there is still remains concealed. Where he used to discharge his waters through seven mouths into the sea, there seven dry channels alone remained.

The Earth cracked open and through the chinks light broke into Tartarus and frightened the king of shadows and his queen. The sea shrank up. Where before was water it became a dry plain; and the mountains that lie beneath the waves lifted up their heads and became islands. The fishes sought the lowest depths, and the dolphins ventured as usual to sport on the surface.

Even Nereus, and his wife Doris, with the Nereids, their daughters, sought the deepest caves for refuge. A system was devised whereby seawater was pumped onto the creeping lava flow, which stopped it just shy of the town’s harbor area. Given a crisis, the islanders did the best they could.

They harnessed the energy of the cooling lava to heat water and provide electricity—thus, a disaster with a silver lining. Thrice Neptune essayed to raise his head above the surface, and thrice was driven back by the heat. Earth, surrounded as she was by waters, yet with head and shoulders bare, screening her face with her hand, looked up to Heaven, and with a husky voice called on Jupiter.

“Oh, ruler of gods, if I have deserved this treatment, and it is your will that I perish with fire, why withhold your thunderbolts? Let me at least fall by your hand. Is this the reward of my fertility, of my obedient service? Is it for this that I have supplied herbage for cattle, and fruits for men, and frankincense for your altars?

If neither of us can excite your pity, think, I pray you, of your own Heaven, and behold how both poles are smoking which sustain your palace, which must fall if they be destroyed. Atlas faints, and scares holds up his burden. If sea, Earth, and Heaven perish, we fall into ancient Chaos. Save what yet remains to us from the devouring flame. Oh, take thought for our deliverance in this awful moment!”

Thus spoke Earth, and overcome with heat and thirst, could say no more. Then Jupiter omnipotent, calling to witness all the gods, including him who had lent the chariot, and showing them that all was lost unless some speedy remedy were applied, mounted the lofty tower from whence he diffuses clouds over the Earth, and hurls screen to Earth, nor was a shower remaining unexhausted. He thundered, and brandishing a lightning bolt in his right hand launched it against the charioteer, and struck him at the same moment from his seat and from existence!

Phaeton, with his hair on fire, fell headlong, like a shooting star which marks the Heavens with its brightness as it falls, and Eridanus, the great river, received hi, and cooled his burning frame. The Italian Naiads reared a tomb for him and inscribed these words upon the stone:  Driver of Phoebus’ chariot, Phaeton. Struck by Jove’s thunder, rests beneath this stone; he could not rule his father’s care of fire, yet was it much so nobly to aspire.

Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live righteous and virtuous lives, as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the Heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. However, in keeping his promise, we are looking forward to a new Heaven and new Earth, the home of righteousness.

So then dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless, and at peace with him. Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him.

He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.

Therefore, dear friends, since you already know this, be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of the unlawful men and women, and fall from your secure position. However, grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever! Amen.