Why I think we’re all crazy

by happy_moron Posted on March 12, 2012

I think we’re all crazy. This is why.

Today I was taking the garbage out after a church potluck. This just means carrying it out to the dumpster in the corner of the parking lot.

But it also means taking the key with you, because the dumpster has a lock on it.

So anyway, I’m staring at this padlock on the dumpster and saying, “We’re all crazy”. After all, here I am locking up this precious, valuable garbage. This world really has gone bonkers.

But then I think, maybe it’s not so crazy after all. I’m really locking the dumpster so no one can illegally dump their own trash in there, Whew. Doesn’t that sound sane?

It’s only a little later that the sad truth hits me.

I’m not locking up the precious valuable garbage, I’m locking up the precious valuable empty space around the garbage.

What do you do when you realize something like this? It’s easy; you smile and nod and hang the  Empty Space key back on its hook  (which oddly enough is labelled ‘Garbage Key’) and you ask if someone needs help with stacking chairs. And you pretend that the little bit of sanity you just lost wasn’t really that important, anyway.

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1 John 4:10-12

by happy_moron Posted on March 3, 2012

In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

Isn’t it odd how our first experience of love is not of loving but of being loved? We don’t learn of love as something that comes naturally from within but as something we *receive* from outside ourselves. I guess this makes my Mom and Dad like Jesus. We all start out as little caterwauling narcissists (cute ones, though) demanding to be changed, in all senses of the word.

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Working something out

by happy_moron Posted on February 18, 2012

[ Dear Reader - please accept this article as written in a Christian voice. It is clearly propaganda, but in the sense that telling a child to "Eat their broccoli" is propaganda. That is, it has an unashamed agenda of moving towards something believed to be good. Of course, you're not a child and I'm not your Mommy. You're a reader and this is a random blog on the internet. You're free to decide how the broccoli tastes. Of course, you don't have to be a distant reader, and this blog doesn't have to be random to you; you're free to.leave a comment :-D ]

Recently I took a series of psychological assessments as part of a course; one of them assessed how I dealt with conflict.

It turns out I’m not all that into compromise. Competition and collaboration, yes, but compromise to a lesser degree. [Okay, okay... I scored a zero]. I looked at my results and said, “Well, doesn’t compromise just paper over the cracks of a very real problem? That we should be dealing with?”

Sometimes a little bit of self reflection helps me to understand why I think the way I do. A good example is why I am so bothered by the idea of the separation of Church and State. I get cranky about it.

Separation of Church and State is not an intellectual truth… it’s a compromise. It papers over the cracks of the very real problem that people nowadays tend to disagree with one another. This isn’t exactly a new thing, but in our exciting global times we demand to be able to move freely and live alongside people we disagree with, We see this freedom as a Good Thing. Unfortunately, it is difficult to live alongside people you disagree with.

[The Bible paints the history of much of the world as a constant state of compromise, since humans are in the uncomfortable position of being in disagreement with God. This is illustrated by God killing an animal to clothe Adam and Eve, who were previously not ashamed but became ashamed through disagreement with God and who, all of a sudden, needed clothes.

All of our human systems (government, finance, etc.) reflect this state of compromise and our need to do apparently Bad Things (e.g. confining someone who bears the dignity of God's own image in a jail) as an attempt to mitigate the effect of our bad nature and our disagreement with God. God does not categorically condemn this compromise (in fact, he seems to work in and through it... and even endorses it on occasion) but ultimately, he seeks to resolve the central problem. Christians believe he has resolved the underlying disagreement in the person of Jesus Christ.]

Canada is perhaps the perfect case study for compromise. We teach our children that we are a ‘mosaic’ and not a ‘melting pot’. Apparently, we don’t want an easy answer of everyone thinking the same thing. Fine and good… but if this is our bed, we have to lie in it. [Of course, when it comes to the question of being a mosaic, we all are required to think the same thing; anyone who wants a melting pot is not a welcome part of a mosaic, because they will destroy it. A mosaic cannot retain self destructive elements and remain a mosaic.]

Of course, this means facing thorny questions, like:

“Does it infringe on freedom of religion to force children to learn about other religions at school?

The Supreme Court apparently doesn’t think so.

It blatantly does infringe.

To expose the farce, just look at any religion which believes it evil to learn about other religions. Make no mistake – our government will trample their freedom in the interest of making the country run smoothly. Same for any religion which involves human sacrifice – or anything that contravenes State law. [Actually, any religion that involves a god who is involved in the real world shatters the separation of Church and State.] The ideal is a farce, but the decision is a compromise. Legislation is all about compromise.

But I’m deliberately being unfair to the Supreme Court, only for the sake of sensationalism. Supreme Court Justices are all smart people and they absolutely understand that they’re trampling over freedom of religion. They just also understand that, in this case, it appears the wisest thing to do. They don’t try and deny the infringement. They just try to justify it.

From the court ruling [CBC article]:

“The suggestion that exposing children to a variety of religious facts in itself infringes their religious freedom or that of their parents amounts to a rejection of the multicultural reality of Canadian society and ignores the Quebec government’s obligations with regard to public education.”

Basically, “We’re a mosaic and kids gotta go to school. In the battle between this and religious freedoms… this wins.” Sorry, religious freedoms. [You are all commanded to ignore this blatant contradiction. "We affirm the multicultural reality of Canadian society. At the same time, we affirm that our multiple cultures must all school their children in the same way. We nonetheless affirm that this imposed conformity to our ideal (whose ideal, really?) does not diminish their cultural identity or infringe upon our right to feel warm and fuzzy about being a mosaic." ] Sorry, cultural freedoms. Sorry, logic. Sorry, consistency. You all are less important than compromise.

Ok, I’m just being snide and snarky now. It’s not the court’s fault. I don’t actually believe in full freedom of cultural expression, because (as seen above) it’s contradictory and it’s a Bad Idea and it doesn’t work. Supreme Court Justices are really smart and they understand nuance and they know that compromise papers over flaws of consistency and logic because compromise really. is. that. important. Even if it makes everybody mad.

In a good compromise, everybody goes away mad. Of course they do! The real problem hasn’t been dealt with! That’s because the real problem is that people disagree, and how on earth are we going to deal with that? [The answer is to pick one belief set that everyone is required to fully believe with all heart, soul, mind and strength. Given that we cannot hope to agree on which one to pick, we must choose arbitrarily, and I humbly offer my own :-P . The Biblical answer to this question of disagreement is, I believe, found in the book of Job. When God holds court everybody shuts up. All our beliefs and protests are washed away by the light of his glory - which, incidentally, he desires to reveal to us! Our God is a consuming fire.]

Just like a psychological assessment doesn’t change the reality of things, but instead lets me know what might need to be changed, a ruling like this clarifies the world we’re in, and it’s worth paying attention to. We need to know that when the rubber hits the road, our country will not support religious freedoms beyond what is convenient – because it can’t. It was never built that way. It was built to enshrine a particular Enlightenment value set. It just so happens that this value set has some advantages and some truth to it, in addition to its many failings.

Our court system actually works pretty well. It enshrined some values which were pretty good values [I wonder where they came from?] even if it’s a philosophical sham… er, compromise.

Like my conflict assessment, knowing leaves me in a position to change my ways of acting. It gives me some clues about what I might be able to do, having realized the state of affairs.

Probably a good idea is for Quebec parents to prep their kids for that class. After all, who wouldn’t want the chance to share the gospel… in school? Talk about a captive audience! Of course, if we talk we also have to listen. We need to let others share their stories, and let their views change ours, insofar as they are truthful. [This might sound awful and bigoted, but in fact it's just the plain truth of how anyone listens to anyone else. We all just keep the good stuff and throw away the bad stuff. The challenge is doing it honestly and reflectively. Which is hard.] Prepping also involves learning how to share the gospel in a real way, one that doesn’t come from a can.

Of course, we as Christians will never be able to be honest in sharing the gospel if we have a nagging doubt that it doesn’t stand up to what other religions have to say. Honesty and humility are virtues that never go out of style, and if we can develop that character, I think it will go a long way in our classrooms. We can’t sacrifice those.  This means we have to resolve our doubt by some method that doesn’t involve a broom and a carpet. I recommend good evidence, common sense, the Spirit of God, the Scriptures and the community of the Church. [I'm still trying to figure out the right order of these.]

The spoiler is that this solution means we don’t get to entertain our own sin or hold on to the fantasy that we control our own lives. I mean, we used to have control of our lives, but look where that got us. That’s why we gave control away, right? Right?

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Hungry

by happy_moron Posted on January 28, 2012

Have you ever been hungry without knowing it? But then you walked past a fast food joint and smelled all that good, hot, tasty grease, and went, “oooohhh…,” and then your belly went, “gruurrgh,” and then you realized you couldn’t stop to eat, you really had to be somewhere else, and you went “aauuggh”? :-D

Have you ever worked really hard one day, without eating much? Went straight to bed (just crashed, totally zonked – too bagged for supper and utterly exhausted)? Then woke up in the morning with a ridiculously empty stomach? I do that! I’ll stagger around groggy for a little bit, and then I realize that what I really want is to eat something. As soon as my head clears, I start to hear the voice of my belly and I know it’s time for breakfast.

We all wake up with a voracious hunger, a special hunger, every single morning… but not for food. Often, we don’t consciously realize that we’re hungry, even though that day we’ll be trying our hardest to feed ourselves.

But every morning, we wake up… and we need to have a reason to get out of our beds. We have to have a meaning. How do we satisfy this hunger? We try to fill it by telling ourselves stories.

“I’m going to be a great computer programmer like Charles Nutter or Larry Wall.”
“I’m going to get a beautiful woman to marry me!”
“I’m going to be famous!”
“I’m going to be famous AND rich AND live in that beautiful house I saw yesterday with my beautiful wife and seventeen beautiful children!”

Sometimes I lie in bed after my alarm goes off and I tell myself all kinds of stories about who I can be and what kinds of things I can do. Depending on the kinds of stories I tell, I sometimes get out of bed happy… or sad. I don’t want to be trudging through a random series of meals and classes in school, through a boring set of projects at work! I want to be building a tall tower! I want to be fighting to the end for a noble cause! I want to be standing up and doing something IMPORTANT and having people say, “Look at him, he’s such a hero!”

(In MY stories, I’m always the hero. It makes me feel a little less hungry, because a good story fills my hunger to know who I am, where I’m going, and how I’m getting there.)

My stories have a dark side. I’m not always a nice person in them. (Is it considerate to wish seventeen children upon my wife?) When I win my Olympic gold medals, there’s no-one beside me on MY podium; Did I shove them out of the way to get there? Do I have compassion in the stories I tell? Humility? Not always. There’s usually some anger in my stories, very often some self-pity. ALWAYS pride. Actually, they’re almost always exclusively about me! Pretty narcissistic…

You know what’s scary? I’ll act differently, depending on which stories I’ve been telling myself. I’ll hold a door for a girl if I’m today I’m a knight, and I’ll bury my nose in a book and ignore that same pretty girl entirely if that day I’m busy being a great scholar. It’s frightening that I can act so differently on the basis of a story… but this is what I actually do! And because I live them out, I’m bothered by the dark edge to my own stories, where I am often vindictive, proud, selfish, greedy, lustful, lazy or frightened. When my daydreams bleed into my life, they cease to be harmless fun. And they bleed into my life every. single. day. I can’t stop them from doing so.

I can’t stop them because I’m telling them to myself exactly so that they will bleed over! I need to know who I am, where I’m going, and how I’m getting there. If I don’t know that, I might as well stay in bed, because… why not? Who knows, it might be better! But better or not, I have to tell myself a story if I don’t want to be comatose. Fortunately, the world is full of good things! I have a wonderful loving family and friends who are beautiful people; it’s not so hard to tell a story that gets me on my feet every day.

It’s a sobering thought that these stories are directing how I live. How do I know I that I am listening to and telling the right stories? ARE there “right” stories to tell? How much time should I spend listening to the stories that other people are telling? Are their stories better than mine?

You know what’s interesting? All people everywhere tell stories, and always have. Chinese and English and West African and East African and South and Central American – pygmies and peasants and aristocrats and beggars and sages and atheists and mystics, ancient, modern, and everyone inbetween…Talk to any anthropologist, anyone who studies people, and they will tell you that all peoples have lived and died by the stories they told themselves.[1]

When children are young, we feed them a neverending stream of stories. Just as with that other kind of food they eventually learn to feed themselves – and they will gorge on their own fare of movies, books, television, music (have you ever wondered why most of our songs have words?), playing pretend, and daydreaming. Sometimes they even write stories of their own.[2]

In many of the stories I tell, I’m a very small person in a very big world. This big world has millions (billions!) of people who are not me, and who are all telling themselves stories. But if I myself am bothered about the stories I tell, the dark edge I find on them, and the very little piece of the world that I help to shape, what is happening in the rest of the world?

Our human history is unfolding through the stories we tell: as individuals, as groups, as nations. Are Tutsi people my brothers, strangers, or enemies? Is one race better than another? Is my comfort more important than someone’s hunger? Does it matter that they’re far away from me and were born in another country? The shape of the stories we tell reveals our answers to these questions.[3]

It is terrifying how important these stories are, how essential it is to choose the right ones. This isn’t just about my lazy Saturday morning. This is about the world. We are a world of hungry people, people who have to eat. And we’re feeding ourselves, but are we feeding ourselves good stories?

This is crazy! I look at the news and see stories about the obesity crisis in North America, how we are dying early because we need to eat better… but I never see any story about the starvation for goodness in our cultural narrative. Sometimes I see stories about tragic suicides and school shootings. But do I ever see a story about how the chronic evil nature of our own storytelling is leading to oppression and death, not only of ourselves, but also of the poor around the world?[4]

The fact that we systematically ignore the problem – that we tell bad stories – is itself the very proof of the point. And why can’t we stop? Why can’t we tell a story so good that everyone says, “We should stop being greedy and selfish and show compassion to the hungry?”[5]

I have a sneaking suspicion that it has to do with who we are – with who I am – and is inextricably tied to why, when I’m scaling Mt. Everest one-handed at quarter to seven on Saturday morning, I’m thinking of no-one but myself.

But can I change that? How can I get good stories inside me? What are “good” stories?

I’ve got a fair few other blog posts cooking with my thinking on some of these questions, and I’m interested to know how people relate to my take on things. Opinions come free! Please leave yours via the comment link below,,,

[1] It’s possible to talk about this using terms like worldview, narrative, and modern and postmodern paradigms. But I don’t like that language, because it sounds funny to me. I’m indebted to NT Wright for his comments on worldview, also Henri Nouwen, both as cited here.

It’s also worth noting that if you’re prone to mercilessly mock Facebook as puerile and inane, you should recognize that we are incessantly posting party photographs and statuses not because we’re stupid but because we all have an irrepressible urge to share stories with one another and to be a part of each others stories. Back
[2] From an teaching point of view, it’s interesting that some media are much better at teaching our children how to tell and write their own stories. I think it has to do with how much a medium helps us to do the hard work of imagining. Back
[3]Nicholas Thomas Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis Minn. : Fortress Press, 1992), 122-126 Back
[4] Yeah, those folks whose nations our nations systematically abuse and whose economies ours systematically exploit because they’re small and we’re big. The other 99%. We dump toxic waste on them when we think we can get away with it. Back
[5] It’s tempting to say that we shouldn’t blame bad storytelling for worldly problems – that physical reality has more to say about how we act than the fantasies we tell ourselves. Stories can’t be that powerful, right? A story can’t change anything, can it?

I don’t know about that; just ask Joseph Goebbels. (On second though, don’t. He’s dead and the stories he told are disgusting – sickening. They only really held sway for a few years, anyway.) Why don’t you ask a really good storyteller like Jesus of Nazareth? He changed the course of 2000 years of history, and, on the evidence, isn’t done yet. Back

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Errors

by happy_moron Posted on January 15, 2012

The Captain committed errors. Thank you, Captain Obvious!

No kidding, the Captain committed errors. The ship hit a rock and capsized! I would call that a pretty big error, especially when thinking of those killed.

“Don’t hit a rock and capsize.” is pretty much point #1 on a captain’s job description. Sure, you need to administer the crew and get to your destination on time, but keeping the ship afloat is surely rule #1. If the ship sinks, it’s his fault. He was the captain. Others on the ship can be excused for ignorance or inattention to things outside their jobs, but he is the captain.

The Captain is responsible by definition. I know what the headline intends – that he didn’t follow procedures, that he made questionable decisions. But to say, “Errors were committed” is redundant.

To be fair, there’s a little voice inside me that keeps saying, “But what if he had a subordinate officer who was absolutely incompetent and kept him in the dark and made all the wrong decisions?”

But the office of Captain is significant; the honour of it means that you accept fault, whether it’s a fault of your decision making or the fault of passing on decisions to an incompetent junior. Or am I being too harsh?

It’s worth noting that the world of computer programming teaches us that we all make many errors all the time. All software has dormant bugs and defects that simply go undiscovered… until something changes and brings them to light. Often, disasters occur when multiple ‘everyday’ errors line up in a fashion ‘just wrong’ – the navigator dozes off just when the ship is close to the rocks which is just when the moon is covered by clouds, which is just when the duty officer steps away for a smoke…

For every disaster that happens, there will be many near disasters where six ordinary errors lined up together but not the seventh; the last camel-breaking straw is missing. The crew will say, “Wow, that was close” and either sweep it under the carpet or, if diligent, file a report, that may get read or may just get ignored.

I remember reading a report on the BP oil rig disaster. It turns out the concrete mix was inappropriate and the pressure test was performed incorrectly and the rig terminals were not constantly being monitored and … Any one of those might have averted it.

The question then, is almost never, “Were errors committed?” but “Which errors were committed and how bad were they? Were they forgivable?”

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One letter closer

by happy_moron Posted on January 14, 2012

Forgive the “we’s” and the ‘us’es – this is cross posted from a school blog and I’m too focused on my studies :-D to re-write it.

Here’s a funny thing. I study Christianity, but I live and breath secularism. In fact, I’m constantly being surprised by the pieces of secularism, big and small, that I find inside myself: pieces I have deeply embraced. Let me share one example.

Right now I’m studying. For better or for worse this comes with a lot of thinking about grades. Good ones and bad ones.

But what are good grades?

Now, everyone knows that good grades are higher grades: grades closer to the beginning of the alphabet. We learn this early, probably from kindergarten! (As we grow up, we do learn that our language is flexible and that the word ‘good’ can be contextual. Good grades for a smart student with demanding parents have a different alphabetical position than grades for a less talented student.) But “What are good grades?” is still a relatively simple question, one we can all happily answer. Simple question, simple answer, no?

Heh. The problem with “Everyone Knows” answers is that they are, at the bottom of it, an opinion poll. While opinions can sometimes be right, this depends on who is being asked. (I’m particularly proud of this brilliant deduction!) So what happens when you ask educational questions of a culture that refuses to acknowledge God, that clings to a rigid separation of its education from all things divine… that exalts godless education as the. right. kind. of education? Which opinions come back?

I already know the answers which come back, because they live deep in my gut. I have lived and breathed them for a very long time. Good grades are grades closer to the start of the alphabet.

Now, for Christians, the word ‘good’ has always been defined in terms of God. God is good. In fact, who is good but God alone? Every good and perfect gift comes from God. God looked on his creation and it was good.

Ironically, most of the time the Christian definition of ‘good’ overlaps with the culture’s, even in the most godless of cultures. Doggone, we just can’t help being made in God’s image! We all (so very deeply!) appreciate his goodness. It is good to eat. It is good to live. It is good to love one another and to bear children. This gracious overlap allows us to live together and talk together, even though we are using words that mean different things.

There are edge cases (corner cases, small, uncommon, rare cases)  where our definitions clearly diverge… and these edge cases are absolutely, utterly crucial. Because it is good to live… but when is it good to stop living and die for the sake of something more? It is good to wear clothes… but when is it good to tear them in mourning? It is good to eat… but when is it good to stop eating and fast?

If we wait upon a nihilistic or hedonistic (a postmodern?) answer of “When I feel like it.” for these to happen, we may be waiting a long time.

These extreme cases – of Jesus in the desert (on the cross!), of men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, of the man who sold everything he had for a treasure in the field – these extreme cases are absolutely necessary for teaching us how to live our mundane lives. Who knows? One day, if we stay the course and keep a loose enough grip on earthly sanity, we may ourselves be extreme…

But back to the mundane, which means school: historical and literary contexts, empiricism, and in Hebrew, more phology than I can handle.

Christians have a beautifully simple definition of “good grades”. They are the grades that God wants us to get. But… we can only know what they are in relationship with him. We have to talk to him, listen to him, trust him and obey him in order to get his grades – good grades.

To think of how we get them, let’s think about buying and selling. Let’s think of the man who found a treasure in a field and sold everything to get it. Of Bonhoeffer, who sold his life for his country, his civilization, and his faith. Of Jesus, who sold his life for us. Let’s think about what grades we’re buying and about what we’re selling to get them.

Are we buying grades close to the start of the alphabet at the cost of abandoning people God loves? (Good news, this includes us!) Are we selling shalom – our peace, our well-being, our wholeness – for the sake of getting one letter closer?

Maybe one letter closer to God is one letter closer to the end of the alphabet.

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Directing Study

by happy_moron Posted on January 5, 2012

This is a post I wrote while procrastinating pre-semester study. For some reason I can easily burn three hours writing and editing whenever I have other work to do, but it’s hard to do so when I’m just hanging around bored.

It’s specifically about academic study but I’m sure it’s easily transferable elsewhere with minimal imagination.

John Stackhouse is a professor at Regent College.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Years!
Many moons ago, my mother asked me what I wanted for Christmas. (She prepares for these things, I don’t. I just run out on the 23rd and buy everyone chocolates.) Anyway, I said some Henri Nouwen would be nice. Come Christmas Day and… O joy! A little book bears my name, tidily wrapped and enticingly titled, “Making all things new”… by Henri Nouwen. He writes,

“Boredom is a sentiment of disconnectedness. While we are busy with many things, we wonder if what we do makes any real difference. Life presents itself as a random and unconnected series of activities and events over which we have little or no control. To be bored, therefore, does not mean that we have nothing to do, but that we question the value of the things we are so busy doing. The great paradox of our time is that many of us are busy and bored at the same time.”[1]


Heh. I wish Nouwen would stop spying on me and mind his own business for just once. Fortunately, I don’t have to read him! I also have a NT textbook called “The New Testament and the People of God” by N.T. Wright. This is just bursting with terms like “phenomenalist” and “critical realism,” which are handy for when Nouwen is emotionally too close for comfort. These terms are surely anything but.
Shockingly, however, by ”critical realism,” Wright actually seems to mean something simple that I can understand! He seems to be saying that we understand all things by weaving them into stories about life. He writes,

“Stories are one of the most basic modes of human life. It is  not the case that we perform random acts and then try to make sense of them; when people do that we say that they are drunk, or mad.”[2]
…
“When we examine how stories work in relation to other stories, we find that human beings tell stories because this is how we perceive, and indeed relate to the world. What we see close up, in a multitude of little incidents whether isolated or (more likely) interrelated, we make sense of by drawing on story-forms already more or less known to us and placing the information within them.”[3]


 Yikes! When they’re not spying on me, have Wright and Nouwen been holding secret midnight meetings together? I remember a long time ago my father commenting that our society had “lost it’s narrative,” which I didn’t really understand at the time. What he, and these two gents seem to be saying, is that if I do not understand the story of why I am studying – if my study is fragmented, random and disconnected from a spring or well of meaning – it will quickly dry up and become stale, boring and barren.


To put this another way, when I sit down to study and feel bleh and jaded, perhaps it is because I’m looking too closely at my study and not closely enough at Jesus. He is the one who tells the story that connects my study to something glorious. When I am cut off from him, I will feel depressed.
I wonder if this is why John Stackhouse urges focused, intentional study in his Study Skills Seminar. Knowing what I am doing and why I am doing it, it seems, is the secret to not wasting time and not being distracted. Perhaps this is also Paul’s idea:

Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him. An athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules. It is the hard-working farmer who ought to have the first share of the crops. Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything. Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, as preached in my gospel… –2 Timothy 2:3-8 (ESV)


Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead. If I’m looking for a story in which to weave my studies this semester, perhaps this isn’t a bad one. Maybe, before I attempt a piece of work, I can carve out just five minutes to let Jesus (and Paul) tell me the story of who I am and why I am doing what I am doing. This may, of course, have the awful consequence that I discover I should NOT do it – that perhaps I should be doing something else. But it’s food for thought as a practical, tangible study habit.
Of course, if we we are called to suffering, perhaps that means I should get back to Hebrew and my review of the Qal stem and its associated morphology (Comes FREE with every gutteral!).
Peace be with you.

1. Henri Nouwen, Making all Things New (New York, NY: HarperOne, 1981),29-31
2. Nicholas Thomas Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis Minn. : Fortress Press, 1992), 38
3. Ibid.,40

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Please come back in January

by happy_moron Posted on December 21, 2011

Both of you!

:-D

This blog has been neglected for the past little bit and for the next two weeks it will be neglected some more. Currently I am without a laptop computer, which has dealt both my writing and my internet surfing a mortal blow. For better or for worse, these are the lifeblood of my blog. Also for better or for worse, I am waiting until post Christmas to try and catch a sale for the purchase of a new little netbook.

I will say this, however. The past two weeks with no personal computer have been among the happiest I have known, final exams notwithstanding.

Peace and happy holidays and I’ll see you both in January.

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