Status Updates From From the Front Lines

"I have nothing against runners. Some of my best friends are addicted. I even tried the pursuit, waiting for that surge of ecstasy that my friends told me I would experience, only to find that the ecstasy came when I stopped running."

Let me tell you, I totally snickered when I read this. It's true!!!! I'm a sort of runner and the only ecstasy I get is when I finish, so I don't know what those people go on about.

"Do we value the comfort zones of being around 'our own kind'? Of hanging out with people who know us, understand us, think like us, and talk like us? No doubt! But if that clubishness causes us to ignore or, worse yet, look down on other clusters of people, then we have ceased to be followers of Christ. Those who value Christ more than the comfort zone of their own kind drop the nets of prejudice and insensitivity."

The thing that struck me about today's reading was his ascertain that people will not come to believe in Christ, even if he does a miracle in their lives. That's really quite true. And I think he defined the reason for it very well, if we acknowledge that God exists, then we also have to acknowledge that he has a right to intervene in our lives, and we just don't want that.

"God is rarely embraced because the evidence weighs in His favor. God is denied because we do not want Him interfering in our lives."

The world is a truly terrible place, full of pain, fear, destruction and hatred, and yet good things happen to us. Why do we as humans never stop to try and explain the good things? They are taken as a given, to be expected, we deserve to have good things happen to us. We expect everyone to treat us well, even though we don’t treat others well. Why is it? Pure egocentrism?

Ah. I am so glad I am home and can start reading this again. It’s a good book. Sometimes it’s encouraging, sometimes it’s thought provoking. Today it fell on the thought provoking side. Why do we always assume that we are owed blessings and happiness? We rail at God and ask him ‘why?!’ when bad things happen, but we never stop to ask ‘why?’ when good things happen. Why is that? I mean just look at the world...

Ah. I am so glad I am home and can start reading this again. It’s a good book. Sometimes it’s encouraging, sometimes it’s thought provoking. Today it fell on the thought provoking side. Why do we always assume that we are owed blessings and happiness? We rail at God and ask him ‘why?!’ when bad things happen, but we never stop to ask ‘why?’ when good things happen. Why is that? I mean just look at the world...

Ah. I am so glad I am home and can start reading this again. It’s a good book. Sometimes it’s encouraging, sometimes it’s thought provoking. Today it fell on the thought provoking side. Why do we always assume that we are owed blessings and happiness? We rail at God and ask him ‘why?!’ when bad things happen, but we never stop to ask ‘why?’ when good things happen. Why is that? I mean just look at the world...

...smart we are, because that is the kind of thing we seek affirmation for in life.

And that's really true, those are the kinds of things that we, or at least I, seek affirmation for. But do I want written on my tombstone, 'she read a lot of books'? No. I want to be remembered for more noble things, good things, how I lived, well, then, I need to act in that way.

Today's section was just chock-full of really good, thought provoking articles. I can't summarize them all because they were so good.

One of the ones that got me was the last one, how will people summarize our lives once we are gone? What will be our epitaph? He said that it seems like we want someone to mention how busy we were, because that's all we spend time doing, or how good we were with computers, or how...

I had two thoughts today, one serious, one frivolous. The frivolous one was that I understood why my mom likes this author, he used a fishing metaphor!

The serious thought was about his point that we spend too much time as Christians engaging in the politics of our day and not enough looking at ourselves and how to repent and grow ourselves. I thought it related well to Sowell's constrained vision.

"Pastors need to recognize that they will either be examples or excuses for their flock."

A harsh truth.

Nothing really struck me today. That's okay.

Well, he was a prophet. He wrote an article in 1993 about how Christianity would increasingly become the alternative lifestyle in a sea of relativism and postmodernism. I think he can sit back and just say 'Called it!' at this point.

Today a lot of the articles focused on doing. I thought the contrast he drew between the search for identity and the lifestyle of doing things for Christ was really interesting.

...boundaries, I can never succeed at anything. You have to choose a direction to go in, by staying as a sea of potential, you never become anything. You have to voluntarily decide which pieces of potential you are going to allow to die in order to become more of whatever it is that you have decided to pursue.

..the discussion of potentiality. We are born with nearly infinite potential, but we make choices and cut off bits. I could have been a firefighter, a president, a scientist, but I decided to study literature instead. Suddenly the ability to do those things is cut off, I have limited myself, by pursuing something I freely chose, I have placed myself within boundaries. But if I do not place myself within such...

I thought that the article that was particularly intriguing today was the one on freedom.

We so often misdefine freedom, that it is our ability to do anything that we want. But we cannot do anything that we want, we are born into a constrained world, we have limits placed on us from the time that we are born, and yet we are still free. We are free to choose how we live inside these boundaries. It reminded me of...

You don't hear a lot of sermons about greed, or a read a lot of articles about it, but it's a topic that needs to be addressed.

Am I greedy? You bet I am. I want more. I want more time to read books. I want more time to study, I want more money so that I can be secure. Is that a sin? Not necessarily, but when it takes primary position in my life and becomes my driving force? Yes. Yes it is.

Today there were two really good sections.
The first was on being grateful to God for the things that haven't happened to you. That's really true, what kind of life have I been saved from by knowing and having a relationship with God? I could be in the dregs of society, strung out on heroin, a lot of people my age are, but I'm not, by the grace of God. It's something to be thankful for.

The other was about greed.

There were two columns that I thought were quite good here, one was about the necessity of upholding family as a value and the other was about how boundaries are a good thing.

I think these are related ideas. The nuclear family is a type of boundary, there is a mother and a father, and children. Not three mothers, not a government, not a creche, the limitation is what makes the nuclear family successful.

It's good to read books from the past. You start to see that the world hasn't changed all that much. This book was written in 2007 and today I read the author bemoaning the change that had swept over the nation, the focus on victomhood, and the great racial divide. I was actually comforted by that because it sounds so much like the discourse that is happening now, we think our times are the worst, but maybe not.

What stuck with me today was the one about interruption. He talked about how he gets up, has coffee, prays, then plans his day...and yet it never goes according to plan. He never gets his to do list done. Life interrupts. Boy, can I relate to that. I'm constantly getting interrupted. And then he was like, but how are you handling it? Irritation? Anger? Exploding at the interruptor?....oh....yeah, maybe not the best.

He is awesome and all-powerful and downright frightening if you pause to think about him. He's the one who invented black holes and killer hornets. What kind of imagination could make both of those things?!?

It's like sitting outside during a lightning storm, it's pretty, but you wouldn't want to go out and hug it. It's too powerful for that. I agree that it might be good to spend more time on these aspects of God.

So far pretty good. Each chapter is really short, just a blurb really from a magazine. I find myself wanting a bit more. It's like each chapter is the beginning of an idea, but it's not developed as deeply as I would like.

For instance, there was one on the awesomeness of God, how we in our culture tend to make God cute, someone we can rush up and high five, and you know, we can do that, but that's only part of God.