I second the call for a theology of suffering



Eddie comments:

Good point.



The 'simple gospel' I don't believe in

The (overly) simplistic version of the Gospel of Jesus Christ says: Come to Jesus and your troubles will be over. Or the troubles you experience will be only dramatic and impressive ones that never really bother you because you'll be delivered quickly from the difficulty.

I don't believe it. At least I say I don't believe it. An exhaustive transcript of my prayer life probably would reveal times when I wanted to believe it.

The Simple Gospel




We need to pray for Iraqi Christians

Christians in Iraq have suffered a lot in recent years, as this article points out.

It appears that having to pay money to not be killed is rather common. I've seen other articles that Christians in Iraq have often been targets of violence.


Someone is reading this


Thanks, Jeanne!

Interesting quote

Kevin Phillips The Cousin's Wars 1999. Basic Books p 48.


Diversity and loneliness

It is becoming a commonplace observation that God loves diversity. Many institutions (including the mission I work for) wants to promote diversity, to have more different kinds of people involved and working together. One of our favorite passages is Revelations 7:9-10 "After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice:
"Salvation belongs to our God,
who sits on the throne,
and to the Lamb."

It dawned on me this morning that few people (even introverts like myself) really like loneliness. We don't like being the only one of our kind, the only one who has ever thought X or Y or Z or whatever our idiosyncracies are. We dislike it so much we are tempted to hide what we think or feel when it is very different from what others think or feel. But if God loves diversity, and has never created two people identically the same, doesn't it follow that we are each going to feel alone in some way?

Faith and reality



The true British idealism of our founding fathers

Another July 4 thought



Celebrating the 4th of July

We just finished celebrating the Independence of the USA.

I'm not sure July 4 is the correct day to celebrate the beginning of the United States of America. It should be July 2.

On July 2, the Continental Congress approved a resolution to become independent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Resolution. What they approved on July 4 was the text of the Declaration of Independence. So it seems the decision to become independent was adopted July 2nd, while July 4th was approving how we were going to communicate that decision.

John Adams had this to say in a letter to his wife on July 3rd:



The next letter he wrote to his wife was July 7 and he didn't have anything to say about the vote to adopt the Declaration of Independence on July 4.

But now maybe you have to be a real history trivia nut to really worry if Independence Day is celebrated on the right day or not.

Maybe things aren't supposed to be simple

Since God has many thoughts, and we are supposed to delight in how many there are, why then should it so often surprise us when reality turns out to be more complicated than we thought?

How many are your thoughts, O Lord

One of my favorite verses from the Psalms is 139:17 "How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!" (NIV). I've been fascinated by the vast number of details God put into creation for years now. In college I studied entomology (insects). I remember one afternoon studying some caterpillars preserved in formaldehyde. The guidebook said that caterpillars of this family could be recognized by the fact they had three hairs on body segment number 7 or 8 (I forget the exact number, maybe I'm misremembering the exact number of hairs too). So I looked at these little critters under the dissecting microscope, and sure enough when I counted to the right segment, there were the right number of hairs.

I was in awe. If I were in charge of designing and creating a universe on the scale of the one we live in, I'm sure I wouldn't have ever gotten around to planning the specs of whether certain caterpillars would have three hairs on segment number 7. I might have made an executive decision about the number of galactic clusters, but the rest I would have left to the many subcommittees of angels helping me in the task. But God created a universe in amazing detail, even down to how many hairs a caterpillar has on each segment.