Eternal deliciousness

“Eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath–O Father!–chiefly known to me by Thy rod–mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this is nothing; I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?”

-Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 64.

HJ and I are currently listening to Moby Dick together in the evenings. We have chosen as a couple not to get cable television–our tv watching consists of the occasional movie. With the free time this affords us in the evenings we enjoy reading together. Lately we have both been too tired to read out loud, so we checked out some books on tape from the local library: Moby Dick, followed by a John Grisham novel and then Mere Christianity. Once we return these, The Three Musketeers is on our list. So, it’s whaling for now–the audio version consists of 19 CD’s: 2 down, 17 to go.

More free books

I just stumbled upon another opportunity to receive free books: TYNDALE PUBLISHERS provides bloggers with books for review.

What has happened to the blogosphere?

So asks Dave Black in reaction to my videos of the baby’s hiccups (of course, he’s completely kidding, since he takes a jab at himself for all the pictures he posted of himself walking the dogs). But in all seriousness, while I classify my blog as a “biblioblog”, I simply cannot refrain from also talking about what’s going on in my personal life. I find that a balance of biblical/theological thought mixed with personal reflection is good both for myself and for my readership. Part of the reason I do so is to let the reader know that I am not just some blogger who enjoys meditating on Scripture and spouting out theological posts, but that I am indeed a real person with whom you can relate as a peer. Now, lest I become guilty of logorrhea, I’ll let you decide: do you find it helpful in reading other blogs or in writing your own to provide personal info about your own life?

Word of the day

“logorrhea”

-used by Jacques Ellul in The Humiliation of the Word to describe authors who use a whole lot of words to say absolutely nothing.

Melster has the hiccups

How’s Melody?

(Mel and I talk to my sis Sara on Christmas)

Melster is a snuggler!

Our Christmas snow

We woke up today to 8 inches of snow. Technically it started snowing last night before bed (Christmas night), so you could say we had a white Christmas.

our little abode tucked away in the snow

Ellul on words

“[This watching of images] does not follow the slow and arduous path of language [and] also explains why we are naturally, through laziness, inclined to watch images rather than to read a long book or listen to a demonstration. Intellectual laziness causes the image to win out over the word automatically, and we observe its victory on every hand” (Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word, 37).

U.S. Teens Lagging

A news article from last week deserves comment. Entitled “U.S. Teens Lag on International Test,” it reported that students from 34 countries were evaluated based on their performance on competency tests. Students from the U.S. ranked 17th, or exactly in the middle. Some of the higher ranking countries included China, S. Korea, and Japan. Many surmise that the success of these countries may be attributed to the autonomy granted to individual schools (autonomy over curriculum and teacher pay). The articled stated, “The brutal fact here is there are many countries that are far ahead of us and improving more rapidly than we are. This should be a massive wake-up call to the entire country.”

What do you think about this article? What could some of the reasons be for America’s lagging educational system, is this a problem, and what are some of the solutions?

Advent

There’s alot of talk about the celebration of Christmas, many Christians are rejecting the holidy outright, and understandably so considering all the materialism. To me, it seems that the question is not so much about whether we should celebrate the holiday, but rather HOW we should celebrate it. I think that we as Christians can have a bigger impact and witness by celebrating differently than by not celebrating at all.

I’m very thankful to a review I read about a book called the Advent Consiparcy which brought this point to my attention. The review pointed out that “the amount of money we spend on Christmas in America is 45 times the amount of money it would take to supply the entire world with clean water.” The authors go on to say “it is not enough to say ‘no’ to the way Christmas is celebrated by many . . . we need to say ‘yes’ to a different way of celebrating.” The reviewer writes “Every step we make towards consumerism is . . . one step farther from the path of Jesus the Liberating King.”

We have learned to worship with the wisemen, travelling across the world to bring the gift of ourselves–our presence, our labor, our money, our love–to the hungry, thirsty, sick people who need Jesus . . . . We can inhabit the story of a corrupt world, or we can enter the story of God through Christ.

I think the authors are right on! It seems that we can have the greatest impact by carefully choosing HOW we celebrate Christmas. What would happen if Christians across America began to use Christmas as a time for sacrificial giving, for giving to the poor, for denying themselves by leaving the warmth of the home for the heat of the battle, for forgoing traditions and precious time with family and opting for rewards that never fade instead? What would happen if Christians celebrated Christmas DIFFERENTLY? I’m still working on that one, and still applying this challenge to my own life.