Lee > Recent Status Updates

“…for Paul, what ‘being filled with with spirit’ looks like (anticipating, we recall, God’s filling of all creation) is a life of music and thanksgiving, of delight that turns into song, and of a singing joy which leads naturally into mutual submission as we share in the powerful love of God.”

Not only is Vera my age, she also has a distinct bias towards tea and against photogenic coffee drinks

I really tried.
I’ve renewed this book every three weeks for the last five+ months. I just can’t get through.
Turning it in today.

Now that I have finished book one I can get back to this one. 😅

“The memory of Jesus, and his extraordinary and tender love for them, resonated powerfully with his first followers, and was reinforced by the continuing sense of his strong, loving presence with them in their worship and prayer.”

I love how Wright phrases things. Speaking about 4:22 he says “…hardened hearts and darkened minds cover up their condition precisely by advertising themselves as clever, ‘modern’, ‘ahead of the curve’, whatever. This is what ‘deceit’ is all about. Twisted desires do not present themselves by whispering, ‘If you come this way you will go mouldy and fall apart.’”

I just realized I started Book 2 before reading Book 1 🤦🏼‍♀️

“No ordinary person could have prevented – but what good is it to be Hercule Poirot, with grey cells of a finer quality than other people’s, if you do not managed to do what ordinary people cannot?”

Eph 4:11-13 “…unity doesn’t mean uniformity, but plurifomity doesn’t mean chaos. How easy it has been for leaders with different gifts and styles to develop ministries around themselves, after their likeness, pulling away from what’s going on elsewhere in God’s purposes and priding themselves on doing their own thing”

The setting of the Majestic Hotel sounded so familiar, even though I haven’t read this book. Then I realized BBC used this book as a Miss Marple plot for their TV show.

Paul would be shocked by the very idea of ‘denominations’, close to one another in the same street but not even trying to join in sharing missions and resources…given recent centuries in Christian history it’s better at least to have unity of fellowship, prayer and mutual support…reading Eph 4 we can’t imagine our present multiple disunities don’t really matter.

For The Economy was studying the purpose of The War, which is to purchase and not have. The customers of The War (all of us, that is) purchase life at a great cost and yet lose it. And The War was just as busily studying the purpose of The Economy, which is to cause people to purchase what they do not need or do not want, and to receive patiently what they did not expect.

“…in Genesis, the story is about the creator’s purpose for his creation, and the human responsibility for sharing in that purpose. The failure of humans was as much a failure of vocational obedience as disobedience to one rather strange command.”

“That there will be anymore deaths? Oh, I hope not, my dear. But one never knows, does one? When anyone is really wicked, I mean. And I think there‘s great wickedness here.”
“Or madness,” said Lucy.
“Of course I know that is the modern way of looking at things. I don’t agree myself.”

Interesting angle on the story by giving us the what, when, how, who right at the start and then we have to figure out the why

Ear stomachs 🤣🤣
Ear-stomach-poisoning, up all night vomiting heresy out of our ears 🤣🤣

Sin, in general, and offenses in particular, are what happens when image bearing humans fail to worship their maker and so to reflect the true God into the world. And the death which results is not an arbitrary punishment. It is the necessary and inevitable result of that turning away from the source of life.

True imagination goes beyond visualization. Imagination should employ as many senses as we can muster.

Paul, prays for wisdom. “Wisdom“, as in Proverbs, is what you need to be truly human, to take responsibility in God’s good world... Isaiah 11 reflects the same theme: the messiah is the truly wise human &now the “in–Messiah“ people should have that same spirit of wisdom&insight & knowledge of God. This comes through the eyes of the inmostself being opened to the true God dimension of all the world.

Good quote that sounds a lot like our church gathering’s discussions in recent weeks:
“We find comfort not in the DO of the law but in the DONE of the Gospel, in the work of Christ on the cross, in the font, on the altar, in the Word. Our comfort is not in ourselves, but in Christ, and this sets us free to love and serve our neighbors – not for our comfort, but for theirs.”

Another random library pick. This one is Tyndale House publishing.

I’d forgotten about this really nice section on movement as it ties to emotional health. He gives suggestions for cultivating the growing Emotional Body in children through activities like singing songs, storytelling, drawing, painting, music, clapping games, dancing, children’s eurythmy as well as experiencing nature.

When you spend an entire chapter saying how strange it felt to wear your hair loose you shouldn’t make the mistake of saying the perpetrator grabbed her braid.

Found it at the library. It’s already better than the last book.

If this book were a connect-the-dots puzzle you would be able to see the end result in less than 10 dots.

Another new-to-me author of Christian themed historical fiction. This one isn’t as good as it could be, but interesting because seferal characters are Cherokee and the author has included dialogue in the Cherokee language.

“When the church is worshiping together, cutting across the normal social, cultural and ethnic boundaries, then the filling of the church with the spirit is the true anticipation and advance sign post of the time when all creation will be filled with the presence and glory of God.”

I heard about this author from another author who recommended her for good clean period history fiction. This series takes place in England in the early 1800s

Some very British ways of saying things are making me chuckle…” one of the other major tasks of the promise to the coming king was that he would rebuild or tidy up the temple in Jerusalem” and “ there, David , having built himself a splendid palace…”