Favorite Memory #1: Jet’s Act of Defilement & My Song About It
But once we decided to get us a Lab, Cassie decided we needed to read as many books as possible on Labradors. (This is how she operates with everything – must know all the info going in. Whereas my philosophy is just to jump right in, head first. She has saved me many a headache.)
So after reading all about Labs for about 2 weeks, we finally found one.
When we arrived on the scene we walked back to the cage where Jet and his brothers were locked in. All 4 of them began to try to climb the fence in the same spot. Jet, unfortunately, was on the bottom. When his brothers got so excited to see us that they began to pee on themselves, it all trickled down on Jets noggin.*
We got the seller to give him a good bath. But then on the way home, he defiled our Ford Explorer by taking a huge duce in the back. It wasn’t the last time he pulled such an antic, either. Like the forthcoming times, it was sooo bad that we had to stick out heads out the window to survive the massacre.
Dogs are the best and create the best memories!
NEXT UP FROM THE FAVORITE MEMORY BAG: How Baby Phoebe Defiled the Entire State of Illinois.
*Since that time I have written Jet a song about the whole situation (keep in mind, too, that Jet often stares at me and I swear he’s trying to give me the the googly eyes):
Look into my eyes
Tell me that you love me
Tell me there’s no other
Not even your own brother
Who pee-ed on you one day…
Just repeat that over and over and you’ve got the song down. 
Books I’ve Read in the Last Year
These are the books I’ve read since last June. I was wondering the other day how many books I’ve read in the last year – turns out, the number is 46. There may be a couple I’ve forgotten, but I think this about nails it down.
X indicates not required for class.
- Animal Farm – George Orwell – X
- Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – X
- Utopia – Thomas More – X
- Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad – X
- The Preacher King – Richard Lischer – X
- Exclusion and Embrace – Miroslav Volf
- Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed – Philip Hallie
- Perspectives on Spirit Baptism – Chad Owen Brand
- Recovering the Scandal of the Cross – Joel Green – X
- Flame of Love – Clark Pinnock
- Pneumatology – Veli-Matti Karkkainen
- Gift and Giver – Craig Keener
- God at War – Greg Boyd – X
- Why I’m Not a Calvinist – Walls and Dongell – X
- Instructing Beginners in the Faith – St. Augustine
- Making Room – Christine Pohl
- Myth of a Christian Nation – Greg Boyd – X
- Epic of Eden – Sandra Richter – X
- Women in the Church – Stanley Grenz – X
- The Expectant Father – Armin A. Brott – X
- The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver – X
- Paul in Fresh Perspective – NT Wright – X
- NICNT Hebrews – FF Bruce – X
- Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God – Gordon Fee
- Next – Michael Crighton – X
- Sermons of John Wesley – Albert Outler
- In the Company of Preachers – Richard Lischer
- The Early Dominicans – Simon Tugwell
- Bonhoeffer: Worldly Preaching – Clyde Fant
- Sacred Rhetoric – Michael Pasquarello
- And You Welcomed Me – Amy Oden
- Theology of the OT Vol. 1 – Walther Eichrodt
- Theology of the OT Vol. 2 – Walther Eichrodt
- Old Testament Theology in Canonical Context – Brevard Childs
- Old Testament Theology – Walter Brueggemann
- The Go-Between God – John Taylor
- Moral Virtues – Bernard Adeney
- The Gospel and the Spirit – Gordon Fee – X
- Contours of OT Theology – B. Anderson
- A Plain Account of Christian Perfection – John Wesley
- The Radical Wesley and Patterns for Church Renewal – Howard Snyder
- The Theology of John Wesley – Kenneth Collins
- John Wesley: A Theological Journey – Kenneth Collins
- Divine Rhetoric – Jaroslav Pelikan
- The Cry of Absence – Martin Marty
- Charismatic Chaos – John MacArthur
What I’m Reading on My 2 Week Vacation:
Welcoming But Not Affirming – Stanley Grenz – X
The Stand – Stephen King – X
Interpreting the Bible – Craig Blomberg – X
An Invitation to a Journey – Robert Mulholland – X
A Father’s Patient Love
I’m sure I’ve expressed here before that I often struggle with the concept of God’s love for me. I’m a hyper-self-reflective person and it’s hard sometimes to reflect so much on my own failures (compared with my relatively few successes) and believe that God could really love someone like me, especially with a Fatherly kind of love.
Now, in the following discussion, I don’t mean to redefine sin or minimize its significance as a missing of the mark of God’s glory (that is, God himself!). But I’ve been thinking recently about God’s love in the midst of our failures and I think I’ve come up with something that touches on the reality of it, however imprecisely.
My daughter cannot do anything for me. She doesn’t help with the chores around the house, she doesn’t talk to me about her day, she doesn’t even let me know if I’m doing the right thing (though certainly she lets me know when I’m doing the wrong thing!). At this point in her life, she is simply incapable of doing any of these things.
But my love for her is not based on her performance or her lack thereof. My heart beats for her even though she can’t talk, even though she can’t affirm or deny her own love for me, and even though she cannot share her own heart with me.
I understand that due to her stage in life, there are places she should be emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, and physically. And there are places that I simply cannot expect her to be. It would be wrong for me to hold my daughter accountable for her inability to hold conversations. It would stupid of me to assume there’s something wrong with her b/c she doesn’t think logically.
In the same way, and this isn’t an excuse for not being as spiritually mature as I should be, I believe there are levels of expectation that God has of us – and his expectations are reasonable. Yes, God demands holiness and God desires love from us. But God is also fully aware of those circumstances in our lives which blind us to truth, inhibit our growth, and simply lie so deeply within us that we cannot even see them. And while he wants those things to be redeemed, he has no grand illusion that these things change overnight.
We learn the language of faith as a baby learns the language of her parents. We learn to think correctly about God as a baby learns to think more clearly about the world she finds herself in. We learn to see areas where we can be more obedient and faithful to God as a baby learns increasingly what her parents expectations are and how to lovingly and graciously obey and submit to them.
These things do not come overnight. And I’ve come to think that God doesn’t expect them to come that way. I believe it’s our performance driven culture that asks adult things of little children (think of THAT parent at any little league game you’ve been to). But God is so averse to our performance driven culture. He doesn’t want to leave us as we are, but he is also patient with us as we discover, ever so gradually, who we are in him.
Think on these things, friends.
I Always Knew Calvinist’s Had a Shallow View of God’s Love
Man, if you can’t trusts the Calvinists to make this kind of observation, how can you trust them to make biblical, exegetical, or theological observations?
*If you’re on of my Reformed friends – you know I had to post this for you
I Have Been to the Mountain Top
In honor of my MLK paper being completed, here is a 3 minute video of MLK’s last speech in 1968 before his assassination. Much of the rhetorical style and prophetic imagination that I engage in my paper is represented in this video.
Enjoy – and think on these things.-Pay attention to the use biblical hermeneutic – it is largely typological and not bound by historical-critical questions or Enlightenment presuppositions about the distance between biblical history and contemporary times. For him, sacred time and space are collapsed into the present so that the present becomes an extension of the biblical story.
-Pay attention to the participation of the audience in the sermon – they are a necessary and vital part of his message. He is not a dictator of moral standards, he is a prophet who invites his congregation to participate in the larger biblical narrative of God’s justice and equality.
- Pay attention to the voice inflection. Words in themselves are limited, but tonal inflection communicates theological truth beyond the limitations of the words.
QoD: Atheist NT Scholar Becomes Believer
In the following article, A.N. Wilson, British NT scholar gives a first hand account of his journey from Christianity to Atheism to Christianity. The entire article is worth reading as it is largely centered on why people of faith should not feel bullied by the likes of Richard Dawkins. But I found this quote especially interesting:
“My belief has come about in large measure because of the lives and examples of people I have known – not the famous, not saints, but friends and relations who have lived, and faced death, in the light of the Resurrection story, or in the quiet acceptance that they have a future after they die.”
It just kind of goes to show that the veracity of Christian faith barely if ever hinges on the logical proof for the existence of God or the resurrection of Jesus (significant as these things may be). Rather, it is the everyday, consistent, faithful lives of average believers. For all our attempts at apologetics and argumentation, it is a simple living out of the Christian faith that will convince even some of the most adamant skeptics.
This may also suggest to the degree to which our cheap cliche’s and lack of obedience hinder others from believing the gospel.
Think on these things.
You can read the entire article here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1169145/Religion-hatred-Why-longer-cowed-secular-zealots.html
