Of Mice and Men
Published on July 31st, 2010.
Our good friends, Travis and Andrea Williamson, are doing linguistic work in Ethiopia. They visited our children before we picked them up, and hosted us twice for a week at a time when we visited Ethiopia to receive them. We are regularly encouraged by their blog, and yesterday’s post was no exception.
Filled under Uncategorized. No Comments.
Funny The Way It Is
Published on July 27th, 2010.
I have always enjoyed Dave Matthews. There are songs to skip, there are many to enjoy, and there are some to think about carefully.
There is a song on Dave’s newest album that has my attention. Funny The Way It Is is a reflection on the reality of life with all of it’s conflicting circumstances. People die on the same streets where children play. In this world the most beautiful things happen along side the most terrible things.
Funny the way it is.
Apart from divine revelation and the knowledge of Christ, that’s about all we can say. And that’s a line from the chorus of a song by Dave Matthews by that title.
1. Lying in the park on a beautiful day
Sunshine in the grass and the children play
Sirens passing, fire engine red
Someone’s house is burning down on a day like this?2. And evening comes, and we’re hanging out
On the front step and a car goes by with the windows rolled down
And that War song is playing, “Why can’t we be friends”
Someone is screaming crying in the apartment upstairsFunny the way it is, if you think about it
Somebody’s going hungry, someone else is eating out
Funny the way it is, not right or wrong
Somebody’s heart is broken – it becomes your favorite song3. The way your mouth feels in your lover’s kiss
Like a pretty bird on a breeze, or water to a fish
The bomb blast brings the building crashing to the floor
Hear the laughter while the children play warFunny the way it is, if you think about it
One kid walks 10 miles to school, another’s dropping out
Funny the way it is, not right or wrong
On a soldier’s last breath, his baby’s being bornStanding on a bridge, watch the water passing underneath
It must have been much harder when there was no bridge, just water
Now the world is small, compared to how it used to be
With mountains and oceans and winters and rivers and stars4. Watch the sky, the jet plane so far out of my reach
Is there someone up there looking down on me
Boy chase a bird, so close but every time
He’ll never catch her, but he can’t stop tryingFunny the way it is…
Filled under Uncategorized. No Comments.
A Literal Following of Jesus
Published on July 23rd, 2010.
by Josh Harris
HT: Zach Nielsen
Filled under Uncategorized. No Comments.
Lewis on Democracy
Published on July 20th, 2010.
Justin Taylor is the evangelical internet digestive system. Here’s a great quote posted today from C.S. Lewis about the ground for democracy. This is becoming an increasingly critical matter about which to think theologically. What Christians believe about who human beings are on the basis of the word of God has much to do with how best to organize the lives and activity of people for their protection from themselves and their flourishing in this world.
Here’s the quote from Lewis:
I am a democrat [proponent of democracy] because I believe in the Fall of Man.
I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that every one deserved a share in the government.
The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. . . . I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost. Much less a nation. . . .
The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.
—C.S. Lewis, “Equality,” in Present Concerns (reprint: Mariner Books, 2002), p. 17.
HT: Justin Taylor
Filled under Uncategorized. No Comments.
Socrates on Partying
Published on July 18th, 2010.
My good friend, Brian Trapp, is blogging again. He is prolific and he is one of a few philosopher scholars who actually know all of the secrets of the universe. That’s because he’s a believer in Christ. I enjoyed this quote recently posted to his blog.
Socrates:
Therefore, those who have no experience of reason or virtue, but are always occupied with feasts and the like, are brought down and then back up to the middle, as it seems, and wander in this way throughout their lives, never reaching beyond this to what is truly higher up, never looking up at it or being brought up to it, and so they aren’t filled with that which really is and never taste any stable or pure pleasure. Instead, they always look down at the ground like cattle, and, with their heads bent over the dinner table, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. To outdo others in these things, they kick and butt them with iron horns and hooves, killing each other, because their desires are insatiable. For the part that they’re trying to fill is like a vessel full of holes, and neither it nor the things they are trying to fill it with are among the things that are.
– Socrates, in Plato, The Republic, Book IX, translated by G. M. A. Grube
To this, Solomon, who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes, would probably say, “there’s nothing new under the sun.” In his own words, “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart” (7:2).
Filled under Uncategorized. No Comments.
Nothing Natural About Porn
Published on July 17th, 2010.
Doug Wilson on the nature and effect of pornography on the actual enjoyment of sex.
One of the older fears about pornography that has not been borne out has been the fear that widespread pornography would create a sexually enflamed male populace. But what has happened is that porn has actually dampened sexual interest in real women, serving many men as a cheap substitute. When it comes to real people, and real lives, and real beds, it turns out that restraint and prudence are erotic.
Of course the older arguments in favor of porn tried to assert that since sex was natural and healthy, it follows that this porn interest represented something open and fresh after generations of previous repression. Now that we started letting it all hang out, all our hang ups would disappear and what a lovely time it would be too.
But the reality has started to set in, and pastors and counselors are starting to notice. The presenting symptom for husbands with a secret porn problem is often a radically decreased libido for real time sex. If a husband is routinely going without for stretches of time that would render a faithful and normal husband cross-eyed, then porn may well be at the root of it. The “porn is sex and sex is natural” meme has run its course. There is nothing natural about this. Porn provides the kind of sex life that someone living in a Matrix pod could enjoy.
Filled under Uncategorized. No Comments.
Shepherding on the Job
Published on July 16th, 2010.
Pastors shepherd people.
Justin Buzzard, has a helpful pastoral reflection on the importance of visiting men at work, and how to do it.
Pastors, go to where your men work.
During my past 4 years as a pastor in the Bay Area I quickly discovered that one of the most important things for me to do was to hang out with men in my church at their workplace.
This helped the men. It showed them that I care about their callings, how they spend 50+ hours of their week, and the people they work with.
This helped me. It taught me about the unique opportunities & challenges men were facing in their different workplaces, it opened my eyes to a world bigger than our church, and it helped set new trajectories for my preaching and discipling.
This is how I did it (and how I will continue doing it once I get started in Phoenix):
-Schedule a lunch-time visit with a man in your church. The best use of your time is to make most of these visits with men who are leader types. Schedule to meet the guy at his office, not at the lunch spot.
-Once you show up have the guy show you around his workspace. If you’re naturally curious like me, you’ll quickly have 20 questions about all that you’re seeing around you. Ask your questions. Learn the man’s world.
-Introduce yourself to his co-workers. Don’t tell people you’re a pastor, unless asked or introduced that way. They will find out eventually and they’ll be incredibly surprised that a pastor looks and talks like a normal person and doesn’t spend all his time on church property.
-Once you get the tour, take the man out to lunch (if there’s a lunch place on the work campus, go there, it will lead to more learning about the workplace) and let him talk to you at length about his work. You’ll quickly discover how you can best encourage and empower the man in his calling.
-Always speak out against the “higher calling of ministry” idea if it surfaces. Three out of five times when I meet a man at his work he talks to me about how the work I’m doing as a pastor is “so much more important” than what he’s doing as a software engineer, financial analyst, etc. I always immediately crush and correct this unbiblical view of vocation. Your men need you to tell them that all work is a means of glorifying God, and that working for a church is not superior to working for Google. It’s your job to empower your men, to help them see the nobility of the work God has called them to do.
Men need pastors to jump into the fire of their work world with them and empower them to keep their eyes on Jesus and do their work in Jesus’ honor, whatever that work might be.
Filled under Uncategorized. No Comments.
The Meaning of Pain in Heartbreak
Published on July 14th, 2010.
In a recent article at TIME, Why Break Ups Hurt, Belinda Luscombe writes about a study conducted on about fifteen recently dumped college students, to find out why breaking up hurts so much. The article begins,
Say you’re a college student who was recently dumped by the person you thought was the One. You’re moping around campus in your I’ve-given-up sweatpants and eating crappy comfort food when you come across a flyer seeking people who are still pining for their exes. You think, at last, someone to talk to!
Well, not exactly. When about 15 sad sacks responded to the flyers, which had been distributed around the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Rutgers University, they discovered they were actually being invited to take part in a psychological study: researchers wanted to gauge the kind of pain felt by people on the business end of a breakup.
The study required students to stare at a photo of their ex and count backwards from 8,211 by 7s. Then, they were required to do the same while staring at a photo of someone they knew but were not heartbroken over. Not to the researchers surprise, “the brain areas associated with the pain of romantic rejection were the same ones involved in reward, motivation, physical pain, craving and addiction.”
All very interesting. But, of course, there has to be some meaning for this. What is the meaning of the heartbreak we feel when are rejected by a loved one?
The article goes there in this paragraph:
It also helps explain why feelings of heartbreak are so hard to get over and even harder to control. The study notes, with classic academic rigor, that the spurned students had engaged in activities such as “inappropriate phoning, writing or e-mailing, pleading for reconciliation, sobbing for hours, drinking too much and/or making dramatic entrances and exits into the rejecter’s home, place of work or social space to express anger, despair or passionate love.” Sound familiar, anyone?
At least in one sense, this pain is a good thing, according to Brown. “In a way, nature gave us this response as a protection,” she says. “It helps us keep relationships going under adverse circumstances, which is important for keeping our species going.”
Brown is a professor of neuroscience and neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She is a smart, smart woman. But are we to believe that the ultimate meaning in our feelings of heartbreak are really just an evolutionary mechanism naturally selected for “keeping our species going?”
There are some things we can’t get by watching brain activity, and the meaning of our reaction in the shadow of a break up is one of them.
We need the revelation of God in Scripture to know anything about our creation in God’s image, our need for the union of marriage, our broken injustice meter after the fall, our propensity to worship created things, and the ultimate horizon of eternity. Apart from Christ, we are all without “hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). All these things matter for what we make of “15 sad sacks” and the activity in their brains in this study.
Filled under Uncategorized. No Comments.
How to Sin Double
Published on June 30th, 2010.
From J.C. Ryle’s, The Duties of Parents:
Take care what you do in front of your child. It is a true proverb, ‘He who sins before a child, sins double.’ Strive rather to be a living epistle of Christ, such as your families can read, and that plainly too. Be an example of reverence for the Word of God, reverence in prayer, reverence for means of grace, reverence for the Lord’s day. Be an example in words, in temper, in diligence, in temperance, in faith, in charity, in kindness, in humility.
Do not think your children will practice what they do not see you do. You are their model picture – and they will copy what you are. Your reasoning and your lecturing, your wise commands and your good advice – all this they may not understand, but they can understand your life!
Filled under Uncategorized. No Comments.
Knowing Right Where We Are
Published on June 14th, 2010.
Kristi and I are in Michigan for a visit with her family. We feel at home here. Kristi certainly does. In the basement is a room with pink carpet, according to her request in seventh grade – or mauve, to be precise. By now, the children feel at home, at least more than their first day of our visit.
For the first day, as long as Kristi and I were in range, Carson and Madalyn were fine. But panic struck when we put them down in the evening and left the room, much like panic struck when we would put them down on the nights following their homecoming from Ethiopia. These were not fussy cries, but cries of true sadness, even heartbreak. When their faces are soaked with tears, they aren’t just whining. They were in an unfamiliar place, they were in the dark and their parents just disappeared.
We like to be home. We like to be where we belong.
In his book, The Geography of Nowhere, James Kunstler explores “the rise and decline of America’s man-made landscape.” The introduction of the automobile and the rapid expansion of technology, have changed the way we work, the way we live, and the way we live, or don’t live, together. He writes, “The process of destruction that is the subject of this book is so poorly understood that there are few words even to describe it. Suburbia. Sprawl. Overdevelopment. Conurbation. Megalopolis…To me, it is a landscape of scary places, the geography of nowhere, that has simply ceased to be a credible human habitat. This book is an attempt to discover how and why it happened, and what we might do about it.”
Interesting. It’s not just for efficiency that homes are not built with little kitchens in each bedroom. Some space is meant to be shared. We like being together. Early American towns were built with people and community in view, and not just the sale and distribution of property. Kunstler provides a fascinating historical summary of how towns, in different places across time, have been built and the meaning of those spaces for the community.
I will enjoy learning about “the rise and decline of America’s man-made landscape,” but not because I am terribly concerned to do something about it, or fuss too much that it is what it is. Rather, Kunstler’s project is sure to reveal something true about what it means to be a human being. In what frustration he finds in the present situation, the Christian can look to Christ, his church the new creation for a resolution, whether Kunstler points us there or not.
They say that a good way to get the gist of a book is to read the conclusion first. Well, for Kunstler’s book I went right to the last paragraph, and there I found a gem.
All of that is a long introduction for Kunstler’s last paragraph, which is exactly the nugget that I hoped to find:
There is a reason that human beings long for a sense of permanence. This longing is not limited to children, for it touches the profoundest aspects of our existence: that life is short, fraught with uncertainty, and sometimes tragic. We know not where we come from, still less where we are going, and to keep from going crazy while we are here, we want to feel that we truly belong to a specific part of the world (275).
Life is short, it is fraught with uncertainty, it is often tragic. I’m grateful to God that, through his word, we can know where we come from, and that through the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, we can know where we are going, and because we belong to God’s people, the church, we don’t have to go crazy while we are here. In the church, which is an outpost of the new creation in this world, we know exactly where we are, even if we do live in a geography of nowhere.
Filled under Uncategorized. No Comments.
