COFFEE! Biblical Counseling! MatSoD!

Alrighty, here is a brief run down of todays events:

Body:
I had a shake an energy drink for breakfast, and Chinese food for lunch/dinner.
I went to my yoga class for today's work out.
Overall I think I could have done without the Chinese food, tomorrow will be better!

Mind: I didn't do too much reading today. No interesting blogs to report or anything really. We are discussing Heidegger in my Roots of Existentialism Class. His thoughts are pretty interesting...his Nazism, not so much. Basically today we talked about the struggle between inauthenticity and authenticity. The closer one gets to becoming authentic the more anxious one becomes, and the more difficult it is not to slip back into the inauthentic. The Professor drew a diagram on the board showing that we can never really reach true authenticity, but that we can become approximate. In my copy of the chart I wrote God underneath the term authenticity because God is really the only authentic being (in the sense that he knows himself and is not capable of losing this knowledge, or being anything except himself).

I also had a healthy discussion about the place of politics (or lack thereof) in a Christian's life. What are your thoughts on this? I'm of the opinion that politics don't really matter too much.

Listened to III by Maylene and the Sons of Disaster today while I was at work.

"Mama said I was a no good son
I think it's time for me to make my mark
Headlines and police cars...
A tragedy from the start"

Soul: I finished reading Ezra today. I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised by the depth of this short book. My favorite part is when it was talking about the old men weeping over the old temple while the young men praised the foundation of the new temple. It's a very powerful image and I think there is a lot of depth to that passage that I need to unearth and explore. Thank God that Jesus is our temple that shall never be destroyed!

I had a lot of interesting conversations today. I talked with Lisa, my fiancee, about the vision we have for our future family and different sins or issues that might prevent that from coming to fruition. I had a talk with Miles and Doug about things that are going on in their lives. That was a lot of fun. God gives us a lot of tough decisions to make, but he gives us the wisdom to make them too. I had some great discussion about Biblical Counseling too. I think it's really clarifying to talk with people you might not necessarily see eye to eye with. Doug made an interesting point about how Christian Counselors should approach the unsaved that I think I need to chew on for a while.

Repurposing of the blog...

"The Cure for Pain is in the Pain
and it's there that you'll find me
till again, I forget and again
you remind me..."

and again,

"Shame is the anchor tied around my ankle
Shame keeps me low and close to the bottom
Where I am the least..."


I feel like this is the level I see at. Everything, and everyone is coated in the unspeakable shame of existence. A shame of living that doesn't know how to live. A living that is death. These are where my thoughts dwell and I can make sense of the world. People tell me about this thing called "joy in the Lord" and in truth, I'm not sure I quite understand what that means. Is that something I hav experienced but just don't remember. All I recall is the quite ache of melancholy existance. Not unstatisfied, but never fully quenched. And so in my honest moments, this is where I find myself. I think it all stems from living my life inside of myself too much. I was telling my fiancee today that I value ideas more than i do people. I think that is a bad place to be. So, I'm trying to be more practicle. More present, so to speak, in the sense that I want my thoughts to be more than thoughts. I want to Try to find what it means to turn my living into dying in the Christian sense where it has meaning and is based on something, rather than the earthly sense where it is something we are simply thrown into.

I say all that to tell you that as of tomorrow, I'm going to repurpose this blog to be more fully rounded. Before I was just focusing on my thoughts, but that is not what we as Christians are to be soley about. So I want to focus on the body, the soul, and the mind.

The Body:
I want to monitor my diet better, so I'm going to be letting you all know about my failings/victories in that area of life.
I want to do the same with exercise as well.
I want to do this in order to become a more disciplined person who is in control of his body.

The Mind:
I want to talk about things that are discussed in my classes. This won't be an everyday thing, more like an 'if it's interesting' type thing.
I'm also going to try and post a book review every few weeks or so.
I still want to keep posting thoughts on different subjects and things, because I don't think I could ever really stop doing that. It just can't be the main focus anymore. Life is multilayered.
I'll be posting blogs of interest. Assorted things that are interesting around the interwebs.
I also want to keep you all informed with my different musical listenings, so I'll be trying to post what I've been listening to lately.

The Spirit:
I'll be posting different notes I take while studying the bible. Mostly, I'm just doing this so I can start learning how to share things I think with people.
I'll be posting notes on different books I'm reading (for pleasure) for the above mentioned reasons as well.
Life lessons- thats pretty self explanitory
bible memorization (weekly)
and I want to post one of Jonathan Edwards Resolutions that I would like to work on every week.

Muddled Watery Language

I was reading this article, http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/analysis.aspx?id=23113 about the recent Supreme Court decision in Christian Legal Society V. Martinez. I already figured how it would turn out as a College has the right to set its own policies and any student organization needs to follow those if they wish to get funds from that university, but the following quote I found to be quite troubling.

"... this language demonstrated that “the Supreme Court definitively held that sexual orientation is not merely behavioral, but rather, that gay and lesbian individuals are an identifiable class.” As a class, gays would more easily qualify for protection under anti-discrimination laws."

Since when are people who share in a common activity a class? We don't do this with anything else, so why sex? Why can people be defined by sexual behavior and not fishing for example? If a group of people enjoy fishing and are a community of fishermen, are they a fishing class? Are gaming licenses discriminatory against the fishing class? Maybe those need to be abolished. If we can start calling people who participate in an activity and group together around said activity and lifestyle a class, then who isn't a class? And then there is the matter of the word "discrimination" which has been throne around far too much and is soaked in a negative connotation. All groups are discriminatory by definition. If you have a group that means there are people who are not in the group; that there are certain qualifications to be in the group. Example: National Honors Society. Example: Football Teams. I mean those groups meet the criteria for discrimination too don't they? It is discriminatory to ask someone who wants to join an organization to not participate in homosexual activity even if it a prohibition equally levied against all those who wish to join because it excludes those don't wish to do that. The mistake people make is thinking that is wrong. It is not singling any one person out. It's not saying change the color of your skin or your ethnic background and homosexual activity does not fit into those categories anyway. Even if it turns out to be a genetic thing it IS something the individual has the choice to activly participate in, or not. With that particular group, if someone wished to continue to participate in that action it would be obvious that they were not willing to meet the criteria for participating in that group. Isn't college itself an example of this? You have to meet certain criteria to get in. It is discriminatory against those who cannot pay, those whose grades were low, and those whose test scores were low. It's about compliance to the groups standards and every group has them. As for associating with that school, that is an entirely different issue, as the school can make it's own policies to which student organizations must conform if they want funding ect. That's a seperate issue. However; I think they will run into the problem of how to distinguish groups at all if they really take what they say seriously. I'm thorougly disturbed by this language though, and I think it has some bad implications for the future.

the truth belongs to God; The mistakes were mine.

The older I get, the more I perceive the worlds thorns. I see how people drift and float in waves of meaninglessness. I hate it. It's hard to watch. But whats to keep any of us from drifting? Whats to keep a man from leaving his wife for sex with another woman? what's to keep any of us from falling into sins like these? I hate that what I see so clearly in others I can also see in myself. The desire to do evil things. Whats to keep me from forgetting this whole 'christian' thing and going my own "I know whats best for me" way?

Isn't it only the cross of Christ? It's the ONLY hope in the whole entire world. Don't look elsewhere. and if your self tries to take you down another road remind yourself of the covenant God made with you for the forgiveness of your sins.Remind yourself that He took you up within Himself and made you whole before you could even ask Him. You are His vassal. He may do with you whatever He pleases. and what pleases Him will surely not be the fleeting pleasures of the flesh (this is to be differentiated from pleasure or joy in its proper place in Kingdom living). I wish that those wanderers, those vagabonds and ragamuffins, should know the Lord and true Hope that only comes from living in subjugation to the authority of God through Christ Jesus our Lord. I want to shake them and wake them up! but how can I do that if I look the same and live like I'm dead though I am alive? We war against the thorns, the want for sin, that prods us on everyside and cling to the cross with everything we are and push through.

Notes from Underground- initial thoughts

I just finished reading Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground" and found it to be a wonderfully vulgar piece of literature. It did not take me to long into the reading to realize that I myself am an Underground Man not unlike the narrator. I'm not much for reader-response criticism, but this book certainly calls for it. The narrator's self-centric anguish is my self-centric anguish, and his living out of books is certainly similar to my own (of course now days we have infinitely more things to distract us/inhance our fantasies). He is ultimately a man who has not learned self-control in any respect because that is something that is learned through social interaction. He doesn't know how to control his thoughts which are led by his emotions and they ruin him. It is raw uncontrolled anguish centered around the self and his lack of ability to control the circumstances around him to fit with his fantasy. He wants "the beautiful and lofty" and fails to realize that the novels he reads do not reflect the truth of the world but escape to a fascade of idealistic fantasy. and he places himself over others in order to criticize them from his idealistic high rise. You cannot criticize on the same footing.

Is the fate of all cynics? The fact that we have an overly developed sense of self and inflated ideology that has no room for reality to participate or influence it? Perhaps what is "high and lofty" must be made "low and meager". Perhaps we must find a way to live outside of ourselves instead of constantly criticizing from the inside.

Acts of (re)Creation and Destruction

Oh! Athenasius, you give me so many good things to dwell on!!

"the renewal of creation has been wrought by the Self-same Word Who made it in the beginning. There is thus no inconsistency between creation and salvation for the One Father has employed the same Agent for both works, effecting the salvation of the world through the same Word Who made it in the beginning."

Salvation, rebirth, comes about through the same person, and esentially does not salvation come about Ex Nihilo much the same as creation?

"The presence and love of the Word had called them into being; inevitably, therefore when they lost the knowledge of God, they lost existence with it; for it is God alone Who exists, evil is non-being, the negation and antithesis of good."

Athenasius says a few paragraphs later that loss of our analogous relationship to God results inevitably in decay and entropy. A slipping back into nothingness. The antithesis of the work of creation that God has done/ is doing.

I find this all completely facinatiing in that these are the things I have been thinking about lately. Those who are at peace with God and as Bonhoeffer correctly asserts, "only the crucified man is at peace with God" are set about joining God, the creator and sustainer of all things, in his acts of (re)Creation. The opposite holds true as well, those who are at war with God are at odds with the creator and sustainer of all things, and thus cultivate nothingness and entropy.

If that sounds confusing let me know, this hasn't been in the oven very long and might not be fully baked, but ultimately it seems to me that all of mans actions are bound in either acts of creation or destruction. Creative acts are totally and completely the domain of God and we can only join Him in the venture by accepting the Word that creates and recreates and by repenting of our acts of destruction.

I think this is a line of thought that might be worth traveling down as half baked as it at the moment.

books books books

I recently went through all the books I have in my closet and was surprised at how many of them I had not actually read yet, or read all the way through. I guess this is the unfortunate price of buying more than one at a time. Anyway, I recently found my copy of "Radical Reformission" by Mark Driscoll and have been finding it extremely relavent to discussions I have been having lately. I just finished reading this part where he was talking about how some churches value tradition over innovation and that this can impede the gospel from going out. The example that imediately popped into my head (showing how ecclectic my head is, most likely) was that of translating the bible. If we didn't translate the bible from the greek and hebrew, who would be able to read it? We need to translate the gospel into modern day vinacular in much the same way. He also mentions the opposite error of valuing innovation over tradition. When this happens it is inevitable that the gospel will be innovated into oblivion. The gospel MUST nessasarily cause offence to sinful humanity with which it is at odds. So we must stay true to orthodox, traditional christian belief while being inovative in our gospel presentation. On the cover of "radical reformission" it says "reaching out without selling out" and that is exactly the right way to phrase it I think.