“In solitude we confront our own soul with its obscure forces and conflicts that escape our attention when we are interacting with others."On the lighter side, when hearing a sermon it is okay to focus on what is being said and who says it. Below is a little poem (not mine) that speaks to one who has added solitude and silence to his (or her) life:
The color of my pastor's eyes,
In truth I can't define;
For when he prays he closes his,
When he preaches I close mine!
"Diversionism" - The practice of constantly adding sound or activity to our lives (i.e. always turning on the radio in the car, occupying our quiet moments with the internet) as an attempt to avoid the conversation that goes on in our head during times of solitude and silence. Our world suffers from this condition without realizing it's devastating consequences. We become so occupied with things outside of us that we fail to give sufficient attention and thought to what is going on inside of us. The result is an entire population who never listen to their hearts long enough to wrestle with the larger questions of life. Forward momentum has a deafening effect on the voice of both the human soul and the Holy Spirit. The Spirit doesn't send e-mail or text messages. To hear it speak you must sit with it a while.
“Keeping Sabbath is not about some sort of legalistic, moralistic ‘What do you do on Sunday’ question, but about finding enough quiet time to refresh our spirits and turn our hearts back to God. We’re sort of on the fast track to global, cosmic, economic burnout. My sense is that our exhaustion is of the spirit, and this really is God’s way of drawing us back.”
"The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda."~ Martin Buber
Are you there, God? It's me, the Internet.
Prayer has gone digital with help from a new web service that allows people to outsource their holy communication to a computer. On Information Age Prayer, the faithful simply choose their preferred passages and a text-to-speech synthesizer gives voice to them at regular intervals, for a nominal fee.
Available e-prayers include Our Father, for Christians, the Fajr, for Muslims and, for the agnostic, a prayer for financial health — which ironically will set users back about $53 annually. "I don't make any particular claims about efficacy, but I do believe that God is omniscient and He will hear (the prayers)," says creator James Mcarlos, who describes himself as spiritual but not religious. "Whether He listens or not is really a reflection of the subscriber."
The 23-year-old Bostonian says he designed the pay-per-prayer site for people like himself "who don't have time to put in the effort they'd like, to pray." (Read more at Digital Prayers)
The church is never what you expect it to be. You will always be let down, initially. But when you see beyond our expectations for church, when you catch a glimpse of what God intends, of what God welcomes, the beauty is almost overwhelming. It's those glimpses that keep me going. The hope of what God is doing in spite of what we are doing. He has so much more going on. We get so sidetracked on our own agendas for what both we and the world need. Let's begin to call it what it is. A group of sinners clinging to the hope that in Jesus God is doing something amazing. Something beyond us. Something that the world desperately needs. Let's begin to see the beautiful in the let down.We are a beautiful letdown, Painfully uncool.The church of the dropouts, the losers, the sinners, the failures and the fools.Oh what a beautiful let down, are we salt in the wound,Let us sing the one true tune...
"Complexification" - The tendency to make simple things more complicated than they really are. One good example would be the creation of this word itself. The most dangerous aspect of this is in regard to spiritual matters, where the need to understand everything before doing anything often causes us to sink into either paralysis or hopelessness. Jesus is relegated to a nice teacher who had some good ideas or a revolutionary who leads us places that we are too scared to go. In between those two there is a Jesus who teaches us where we are going and walks with us as we go there - a Jesus who seeks little children willing to follow.
"We can do no great things alone. We can only do small things with great love."
“God’s dream for radical newness will require discipline. Not discipline connected to punishment or shame, but discipline that roots us in Christ, deepening our connection to God and one another. This rootedness will come from having consistent, ordered ways in which we remain open to Grace, and they will be unique to each one of us. Grace constantly seeks entrance into our souls in order to effect change, but Grace will never force her way in. Discipline is the means by which we open ourselves to the sort of radical change that has always been God’s intention for us.”--Gordon Cosby
I just finished reading The Hole in Our Gospel by World Vision CEO Richard Stearns. Stearns tells a powerful and compelling story of the events that lead him from being the President and CEO of the Lennox China Company to his current role at World Vision. But it's about more than just his transition. Stearns spends the first third of the book skillfully interweaving his own story with the story of people in need from all over the world. The middle section gives one of the best summaries I have ever read about the scope of world need as well as some of the good news of what is currently happening to address that need. In the final section of the book he takes a hard look at the church of Jesus Christ, calling us to begin to focus on taking action to address the need in our world. SONNET ON THE DEATH OF THE MAN WHO INVENTED PLASTIC ROSES
by: Peter Meinke
The man who invented the plastic rose is dead.
Behold his mark: his undying flawless blossoms never close but guard his grave unbending through the dark.
He understood neither beauty nor flowers, which catch our hearts in nets as soft as sky and bind us with a thread of fragile hours: flowers are beautiful because they die.
Beauty without the perishable pulse is dry and sterile, an abandoned stage with false forests.
But the results support this man's invention; he knew his age:
A vision of our tearless time discloses artificial men sniffing plastic roses.
"...even for disciples like Mary, Easter does not return her and Jesus to the past; Easter opens up a new future. The earthly ministry is over; now the ministry of the exalted, glorified, ever-abiding Christ begins. “Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you’ (16:7). In fact, the one who believes will do even greater works than Jesus did, ‘because I am going to the Father’ (14:12). Therefore, Jesus says to Mary Magdalene, ‘Do not hold on to me’ (v. 17). Rather, she is to go and announce his resurrection and his ascension to the presence of God, from whose presence the Holy Spirit will come to lead, comfort, and empower the church."The resurrection says to us, “The old is gone, the new is come.” From now on our faith builds on the past but looks to the future. God is building a Kingdom. The resurrection proves that what He started He can complete.
Welcome to the first post generated from my new MacBook. The old Dell died and Angela decided to buy me something a bit more durable and higher end. We ordered it on Monday and it showed up at my doorstep late yesterday afternoon. I must say that so far I like it very much. A bit of a challenge to get all my old stuff onto this one. (Google can teach you everything you need to know.) But now it's here and I am happy to have it.
"Looks like a historic legal battle is shaping up over polygamy, the outcome of which will surely be determined by the Supreme Court of Canada. I understand why, for political reasons, the government feels compelled to fight polygamy tooth and nail, but I suspect the government will lose. The polygamists have what seems to be an unassailable constitutional position. If polygamy is an expression of their religion, and if the participants are all consenting adults, then I don't see how the state can say no." (Read the rest here.)
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