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London Terrorist Attacks

Jul7

Christian bloggers are calling for a day of prayer and fasting for London and all those involved including the terrorists.

Please set aside Monday, July 11th as a day of prayer and fasting.

Fast one meal, two meals or the whole day. Pray for revival in the land, wisdom for leaders, patience for the wounded and resolve to continue to fight this form of Islamic terrorism.

Islam is not a religion of peace contrary to some reports. Pray for those ensnared in this false and deadly religion.

I got this information from Stacy at Mind and Media.
Catez in New Zealand: God Bless London
Phil Johnson of Pyromaniac was having breakfast with Adrian Warnock in the train station just before the terrorist attacks. Both bloggers and their respective families are uninjured.
UK Blog Aggregator

Cool Billboard Campaign

Jun22

An example of American secular values, but encouraging nevertheless. We can all use some heroes, and these choices are, for the most part, good role models. I especially liked the story about the mechanic who refused to charge a customer for the time the mechanic spent investigating and deciding that he couldn’t fix the car. Now that’s an everyday hero!

Of course, the billboards don’t tell what many of these heroes would acknowledge: the power to do good and to live courageously comes from the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Even those heroes who are not Christians are sustained and strengthened by the hand of God, whether they know it or not.

This entry was posted on 6/22/2005, in Community.

Grace to the Humble

May21

Proverbs 3:34 He mocks proud mockers
but gives grace to the humble.

I was standing in line while shopping a couple of days ago, and behind me was a woman about my age whom I knew slightly. She works at the store where I shop, and she is mentally handicapped, how mildly or severely, I don’t know, but she does her job well. She was talking to a young lady about 20 years of age, and I wondered what the relationship was. The young lady was not handicapped as far as I could tell and the two were making plans to meet later after the older woman’s work was done. I couldn’t quite figure out what the two women had in common, until at last the older woman proudly introduced the 20 year old to the cashier.

“Have you ever met my daughter?” she said. “This is my daughter. She came to visit me.”

The younger lady smiled and nodded, gave her name to the cashier, paid for her purchases, and told her mother, “I’ll see you later when you get off work.”

It was not a very significant or unusual vignette. A mother introduced her daughter to her co-worker. Nevertheless, I was surprised. I was reminded of the book I read recently, Riding the Bus With My Sister by Rachel Simon. I was reminded that mentally handicapped adults have lives just like the rest of us. They have boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, and even daughters or sons. Developmentally disabled people ride buses and work in grocery stores and love their children and make dates to meet a friend. Sometimes they sin, and they need grace just as I do. They have relationships with other people who are developmentally disabled and with friends and family members who are not handicapped.

I liked reading the book Rachel Simon wrote about the time she spent riding the city buses with her mentally handicapped sister, Beth, because Beth is a real person. She is sometimes a pain in the neck. She’s not always lovable or cooperative. Beth wants to be a “good person,” but she’s also selfish, like the rest of us, and very interested in being the center of attention, again like many others I could name. I liked the movie Napoleon Dynamite for the same reason. Napoleon is not too bright either, at least borderline developmentally disabled. He’s also not always too easy to like. He’s abrasive, and he whines. He’s a real person, and the filmmakers never let viewers forget that. He likes girls, and he has a friend named Pedro. He, too needs grace, just as I do.

Lord, give me the grace to see others I meet , not as members of some artificially contrived group–the poor, the homeless, blacks, Hispanics, whites, middle class, rich, intelligentsia, mentally disabled. Help me to see people as people with families and needs and personality quirks and gifts to share. Give me the grace to be humble and to see Your grace in the humility of others.

Where I Am From . . .

May3

I am from back-yard sheds and front porches, from Holsum bread, Imperial Pure Cane sugar (it’s quick dissolving) and Gandy’s milk.

I am from the edge of the Edwards Plateau, the two bedroom house on the unpaved block of Florence Street, dusty road dividing the widow ladies from the Methodist Church across the street on one corner and the Church of God on the other.

I am from pecans and apricots, mesquite and chinaberry, the tree I sat in to read my ten allowed library books every week and to watch the neighbor lady brush out her long grey hair that had never been cut.

I am from cranking homemade ice cream with ice and rock salt packed into the freezer and going to church every time the doors were open, from Mary Eugenia and Lula Mae, Joe Author and Monger Stacy.

I come from teachers and preachers and hard workers.

From don’t sing at the table and we only expect you to do your best.

I’m from cars with names like the Maroon Marauder and Old Bessie, from carports and driveways instead of garages, from swamp coolers instead of central air, from shade trees and pavement so hot it’d burn your bare feet.

I am from Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong, Girls’ Auxiliary and Training Union, The Old Rugged Cross and It only takes a spark, from old ladies playing the autoharp in Sunbeams and young bearded men playing the guitar around the campfire. Kumbaya.

From the Heart of Texas, the Heartland, the center of the universe, the kind of town everybody wants to be from.

I come from Wales and Arkansas, Comanche, Sweetwater, Claude, and Brownwood, fried chicken, fried potatoes, steak fingers and fried okra.

I’m from y’all and pray for rain and fixin’togo.

From the grandmother who sewed and the Mema who taught music, the grandpa who could sell ice to an Eskimo, and the grandfather who worked on cars and died before I was born.

I am from a house full of memories and craft projects, some completed and hung on the walls, some never finished, waiting for younger hands and newer minds. I’m from dreams and places where doors were not locked and neighbors never let you pay them back when you borrowed an egg or a cup of milk.

Catez’s I Am From
Waterfall’s Adoption Birthday Poem:Where I’m From
Pratie’s Place has a list of links to bloggers who have written poems participating in this meme.
And I think the whole thing started with a poem by George Ella Lyons. You can write your own where-I-am-from, and if you write one, leave me a comment and I’ll link to your poem.

I think I could have done a better job if I had some uninterrupted time to think, but when am I ever going to be from the uninterrupted time place? Heaven only knows.

Cafes, Cathedrals and Communities

Apr4

Cafes and cathedrals are both very good things and have their places within communities. But somehow I think that “cathedral thinking” in this century requires us to consider a vision that is both bigger than a simple cafe and smaller than a city-of-God-type cathedral. We need to be building communities. My problem is that I don’t really know how to go about doing such a thing. I do have several models and threads of ideas from various sources:

1. The mega-churches aren’t all bad, after all. Build a place that becomes a community center, a place for people to come and exercise, study, have lunch, do crafts, and worship. The problem with these mega-church buildings is that the (relatively) rich people who build them sometimes feel such a sense of ownership that the “riff-raff” are discouraged from attending the church or using the building or becoming part of the community. So we need a central space/building that is dedicated to God by the entire community.

2. The Highlands Study Center isn’t a mega-church with a huge multi-purpose building, but they are a group of Presbyterians who are building a community similar to what I have in mind.

The Highlands Study Center exists to help Christians live more simple, separate, and deliberate lives to the glory of God and for the building of His kingdom. And that’s a big job, one done not simply, but deliberately. As a ministry of Saint Peter Presbyterian Church, we stand with the Westminster Standards. Our hope is to help Reformed believers apply those principles to the way we live our lives. To that end we have a number of different ministries.

I doubt if I’m reformed enough or theologically erudite enough for them, but the idea of a community of mostly homeschooling families gathered around a church and study center is appealing. Somehow I still want to add in the outreach and evangelism component of Catez’s Open Late Cafe.

3. In her book The Severed Wasp, Madeleine L’Engle creates a Christian community that revolves around life at a fictional New York Episcopal Cathedral. The setting is based on Ms. L’Engle’s real-life experiences as volunteer librarian and writer-in-residence at the Epsicopal Cathedral of St. John Divine in New York City. Norma at Collecting My Thoughts wrote last year about her Lutheran church and its many ministries, including a Visual Arts Ministry which showcases various artists including, but not limited to, church members. Our churches and cathedrals and communities should be places for artists and poets and writers-in-residence and architects and musicians to work and worship and follow God’s calling in their lives.

4. L’abri Fellowship in its various forms and locations is another model for what I’m trying to articulate.

L’Abri is a French word that means shelter. The first L’Abri community was founded in Switzerland in 1955 by Dr. Francis Schaeffer and his wife, Edith. Dr. Schaeffer was a Christian theologian and philosopher who also authored a number of books on theology, philosophy, general culture and the arts.
The L’Abri communities are study centers in Europe, Asia and America where individuals have the opportunity to seek answers to honest questions about God and the significance of human life. L’Abri believes that Christianity speaks to all aspects of life.

5. Another model is the Celtic monastery that I wrote about here.

6. Our homeschool co-op, called REACH, is yet another example of intentional Christian community that reaches across denominational lines. We have about 100 families participating in a co-op in which mostly moms teach children from babies to high schoolers on Firday mornings. All the moms teach or help in some way; we use the facilities at a large Baptist church. We are not a church, but we have learned to care for one another in a way similar to the way a church cares for its members. And we call on the gifts of each co-op member in a way that parallels the way the great cathedrals were built. To teach our children we need mathematicians and scientists and crafters and artists and nurturers and organizers and bloggers and readers. We all work together to build and maintain an organization that we hope will help educate the children and bring glory to God.

Study and evangelism and the arts and worship and families and churches and libraries and other institutions with actual buildings—I think we should be building all of these things to the glory of God. I would like to see these things built together as a Living Cathedral that forms a vibrant Christian community. I don’t know how you organize such a vision and bring it to fruition without the huge institutional support from the Catholic Church that was in place already during the Middle Ages. I guess what I’m seeing are many scattered communities-in-the-making and ministries and churches with a bit of vision for this or that piece of the Living Cathedral I’m envisioning, but nothing to bring it all together in any one place and make something that would glorify God and draw men to Him for generations to come.
Maybe you start small and trust the Holy Spirit to bring things together into a unified whole in His own time.

Cathedral Building

Apr4

Mark of Pseudo-Polymath is asking for bloggers and others to submit writing on the subject of “cathedral building,” how we as 21st century Christians could/should adapt the vision of medieval Christians who built catherdrals to glorify God and to last through the ages. He’s already received some interesting submissions.

Jollyblogger writes about Cathedral Thinking:

. . . we should teach our children with the mindset that they will embrace and further our work, not reject it for the newest fad. Further, we must rule out discouragement. Even if I fail, even if I die trying to advance the kingdom of Christ, Christ will reign victorious over all the earth.

Mark himself writes about modern cathedral building in terms of building “places, practices, and institutions”that bring people into Christian community and that tax our abilities and resources in the same way that building the cathedrals of the Middle Ages required the work and contributions of generations of Christians in a given community.

Then, Catez at AllThings2All gets specific with a vision of “The Open Late Cafe,” a sort of Christian coffeehouse/aid center for the broken, the needy, and all of us who just need a friend in the night.

I think this topic is great, and it relates to some things I have written about and thought about before. Read what these guys have to say, and then I’ll try to write something tonight about cathedral building and community building.

To Grow or Not To Grow (Up, That Is)

Mar7

I found a link to this interesting (2002) NRO article, Let’s Have More Teen Pregnancy, by Frederica Mathewes-Green at Boar’s Head Tavern, where they’re discussing singleness and marriage and saying that the evangelical church is way too hipped on marriage.
From Mathewes-Green’s article:

Until a century or so ago, it was presumed that children were in training to be adults. From early years children helped keep the house or tend the family business or farm, assuming more responsibility each day. By late teens, children were ready to graduate to full adulthood, a status they received as an honor. How early this transition might begin is indicated by the number of traditional religious and social coming-of-age ceremonies that are administered at ages as young as 12 or 13.

But we no longer think of children as adults-in-progress. Childhood is no longer a training ground but a playground, and because we love our children and feel nostalgia for our own childhoods, we want them to be able to linger there as long as possible. We cultivate the idea of idyllic, carefree childhood, and as the years for education have stretched so have the bounds of that playground, so that we expect even “kids” in their mid-to-late twenties to avoid settling down.

I was discussing this problem with a friend just last Friday. We know a whole group of young men, homeschooled, from Christian homes, professing Christian themselves, who have dropped out of college, are working at minimum wage-type jobs, and playing around with dating. planning to get married “someday.” They don’t seem to be preparing themselves financially for marriage; they don’t have any discernable long term goals. They aren’t preparing for or taking leadership positions in the church either. If this behaviour isn’t a refusal to grow up, I don’t know what to call it.
Then, there are the dozen or more young Christian women that I can name off the top of my head who have graduated from high school, finished college, learned to manage a household in addition to preparing educationally for a career, and who still aren’t married at age 20+ or 30+. I don’t think that for most of these young ladies their standards are too high; there just aren’t as many committed Christian men as there are women. So, any suggestions? What is the key to encouraging the Christian young men that are in our families and churches to grow up and committ themselves–to marriage, to career, to education, whatever the Lord is calling them to do?

By the way, all the discussion at BHT started with this address by Dr. Albert Mohler, Part 1 and Part 2
Then, iMonk wrote this essay asking, Have We Said Too Much (about marriage, that is)?
From there, you can go on to read all sorts of responses, both pro and con.
Put me in the same camp with Dr. Mohler. I see too much anecdotal evidence that young men, especially, are delaying adulthood in many areas, not just delaying marriage. I am praying that the Holy Spirit will bring revival, not so that everybody will get married, but rather so that that the church will have the strong male leadership that it needs to follow Christ in this century.

Good Blog for Lovers of Poetry and Philosophy

Mar2

Amanda at Wittingshire has been messing with my favorite poem. (I always thought it was a rather self-centered poem, but only in the sense that Poe was writing about himself and his child bride.) She also talks about how her seven year old reasoned his way to the existence of God and the truth of Scripture.
And she has this thought about a safe place to be ourselves with all of our idiosyncracies:

The one refuge remaining isn’t a bar–Cheers notwithstanding–but a church, especially small churches, which are today what villages used to be, places where everyone, however peculiar, belongs.
“That’s just Ken,” people say, shrugging. “Oh, you know Lucille . . . ” And the beauty is, they do know Lucille, and they let her be Lucille–shy, perhaps, or moody; generous to a fault, acerbic, gregarious, forgetful, wise, persnickety, all the wonderful variations of human lives.

Yes, I have experienced this kind of grace myself. “That’s just Sherry. She doesn’t mean to be __________.” (unfriendly or sarcastic or any one of a number of bad attitudes I am prone to display.) Of course, I often do intend to have just the bad attitude that I’m showing to the world, but my brothers and sisters extend grace for my sins and my peculiarities.
As for the narrator in Annabel Lee being peculiar and obsessed with death, I say, “Oh, well, you must understand, that’s just Poe.”

Finding a Mate

Feb23

I found these suggestions on “Finding a Mate” at a blog called Homeliving Helper, and I thought it contained some good advice. Since we have four teenagers (I prefer to call them young adults), the subject is of some interest to me.

“I don’t believe in this sitting-around-stuff that some single girls are ascribing to, waiting til someone magically appears. The parents need to be alert and be able to recognize a good man when they see one, and pursue a friendship with him. I agree you shouldn’t chase men, but I do think there are many things you can do to bring one into your life.
In this current day, parents take a greater interest in choosing the college their children will attend, than they do in choosing a future mate. You judge for yourself which is the most important.”