The world cannot know the unsurpassable worth of human life without a people who consistently work to protect it - in the fetus, in the convict, in the immigrant, in the soldier, and in the enemy.Read the whole article here. Read the comments too.
Recently I received a copy of the book you see to your left - Small Groups with Purpose, by Steve Gladen. I have to admit I was a bit skeptical. Steve is the small groups pastor at Saddleback. He lives in a whole different "pastoral world" than me. They have over 3500 small groups in their church. That means that for every person I have in the pew on a Sunday morning, Steve oversees 17.5 small groups. But I have found that I really enjoyed and benefitted from reading this book. Steve doesn't present the "tried and true program" that will work for each and every church, but instead tells the story of what he has learned as they have wrestled with helping a church grow smaller as it grows larger.
"Where God tears great gaps we should not try to fill them with human words." (349)
"Just as time-lapse photography makes visible, in an ever more compressed and penetrating form, movements that would otherwise not be thus grasped by our vision, so the war makes manifest in particularly drastic and unshrouded form that which for years has become ever more dreadfully clear to us as the essence of the “world.” It is not war that first brings death, not war that first invents the pains and torments of human bodies and souls, not war that first unleashes lies, injustice, and violence. It is not war that first makes our existence so utterly precarious and renders human beings powerless, forcing them to watch their desires and plans being thwarted and destroyed by more “exalted powers.” But war makes all of this, which existed already apart from it and before it, vast and unavoidable to us who would gladly prefer to overlook it all." (373)
"No one has yet believed in God and the kingdom of God, no one has heard about the realm of the resurrected, and not been homesick from that hour, waiting and looking forward joyfully to being released from bodily existence.
Whether we are young or old makes no difference. What are twenty or thirty or fifty years in the sight of God? And which of us knows how near he or she may already be to the goal? That life only really begins when it ends here on earth, that all that is here is only prologue before the curtain goes up - that is for young and old alike to think about. Why are we so afraid when we think about death? Death is only dreadful for those who live in dread and fear of it. Death is not wild and terrible, if only we can be still and hold fast to God’s Word. Death is not bitter, if we have not become bitter ourselves. Death is grace, the greatest gift of grace that God gives to people who believe in Him. Death is mild, death is sweet and gently it beckons to us with heavenly power, if only we realize that it is the gateway to our homeland, the tabernacle of joy, the everlasting kingdom of peace.
How do we know that dying is so dreadful? Who knows whether, in our human fear and anguish we are only shivering and shuddering at the most glorious, heavenly, blessed event in the world?
Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death." (531)
The link to this book on Amazon.ca or to Amazon.com
"Do I want social justice for the oppressed or do I want to be known as a socially active person? I spend 95 % of my time thinking about myself anyway. I don't have to watch the evening news to see that the world is bad, I only have to look at myself. I talk about love, forgiveness, social justice; I rage against American materialism in the name of altruism but have I controlled my own heart? The overwhelming majority of the time I spend thinking about myself, pleasing myself, reassuring myself and when I am done there is nothing to spare for the those in need. Six billion people live in the world, and I can only muster thoughts for one. Me." -- Donald Miller
"...That was when I realized that Jesus had come to church that morning. Twice. He came as that homeless man – I was hungry and you fed me, I was confused and you took me under your arm, I was sorrowful and you held me as I wept. And he came in the arms of my rich friend with his expensive suit who held a neighbour in his sorrow. He will not judge by what his eyes see, and what his ears hear."
Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. Hope does not come with the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is an action. Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and the more potent hope becomes. Hope never makes sense. Hope is weak, unorganized and absurd. Hope, which is always nonviolent, exposes in its powerlessness the lies, fraud and coercion employed by the state. Hope does not believe in force. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on us all. Hope posits that people are drawn to the good by the good. This is the secret of hope’s power and it is why it can never finally be defeated. Hope demands for others what we demand for ourselves. Hope does not separate us from them. Hope sees in our enemy our own face.
You see, my friends, if in the face of rising military tensions on the Korean Peninsula, in the Middle East, in Afghanistan and throughout the world, you don’t achingly long for a time when nation will no longer rise against nation, then you miss Advent.Read the rest here.
If in the face of gun shots ringing through this city and young men and women lying in pools of blood doesn’t make you cry out for swords to be beaten into plowshares, for guns to be transformed into garden tools, then you miss Advent.
If the foolishness of much ideologically driven scholarship at the University of Toronto doesn’t make you long to see the nations coming to learn wisdom from the God of all of creation, then you miss Advent.
And if the anger, enmity, jealousy, prejudice and hatred of your own heart and your own life doesn’t make you seek out the Prince of Peace to transform your life and lead you on the path of peace, then you miss Advent.
Jesus says that one will be taken and one will be left.
Let us pray that we are left.
Let us pray that his will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Let us pray that we would be an Advent people,
…left behind to beat swords into plowshares,
…left behind to replace implements of violence with the instruments of peace,
…left behind to transform tools of destruction into tools of cultivation,
…left behind to face the violence and embrace the peace.
I am no longer my own but yours,This is one we should pray slowly and often...
Put me to what you will
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed for you or laid aside for you.
Let me be full, let me be empty.
Let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things to Your pleasure and disposal
And now glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
You are mine and I am yours. So be it.
And this covenant now made on earth, let it be satisfied in heaven.
The fundamental truth about health care in every country," notes Princeton professor Uwe Reinhardt, one of the world's preeminent health-care economists, "is that national values, national character, determine how each system works."
"It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains . . . an uprooted small corner of evil. Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person. And since that time I have come to understand the falsehood of all the revolutions in history: they destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them (and also fail, out of haste, to discriminate the carriers of good as well). And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more."
"Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back - in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you."--Frederick Buechner
Well my brother and his family have safely arrived and my children made it through their arrival with no heart attacks from sheer excitement... although it was close. Today we laze around the house through the morning and will head out to Hell's Gate in the afternoon. I have a pass that let's me take in as big a group as I want for free, so it you want to join us show up there @ 1:30....
"Funamily" - The experiences you have when you are enjoying time with family. I realize that some people are sorely lacking "funamily" in their life. I feel sorry for your loss. But I must admit I am looking forward to the next week of "funamily" in my life.
”Several summers ago, I spent three days on a barrier island where loggerhead turtles were laying their eggs. One night while the tide was out, I watched a huge female heave herself up the beach to dig her nest and empty herself into it while slow, salt tears ran from her eyes. Afraid of disturbing her, I left before she had finished her work but returned next morning to see if I could find the spot where her eggs lay hidden in the sand. What I found were her tracks, only they led in the wrong direction. Instead of heading back out to sea, she had wandered into the dunes, which were already hot as asphalt in the morning sun. A little ways inland I found her, exhausted and all but baked, her head and flippers caked with dried sand. After pouring water on her and covering her with sea oats, I fetched a park ranger, who returned with a jeep to rescue her. As I watched in horror, he flipped her over on her back, wrapped tire chains around her front legs, and hooked the chains to the trailer hitch on his jeep. Then he took off, yanking her body forward so fast that her open mouth filled with sand and then disappeared underneath her as her neck bent so far I feared it would break. The ranger hauled her over the dunes and down onto the beach; I followed the path that the prow of her shell cut in the sand. At ocean's edge, he unhooked her and turned her right side up again. She lay motionless in the surf as the water lapped at her body, washing the sand from her eyes and making her skin shine again. Then a particularly large wave broke over her, and she lifted her head slightly, moving her back legs as she did. As I watched, she revived. Every fresh wave brought her life back to her until one of them made her light enough to find a foothold and push off, back into the water that was her home. Watching her swim slowly away and remembering her nightmare ride through the dunes, I noted that it is sometimes hard to tell whether you are being killed or being saved by the hands that turn your life upside down.”
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