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Go get your motivation. Stand up your discipline, dust him off, and say, Come on you sorry good-for-nothing lilly-livered sap-sucker, let’s get to work. And just do it.
Last weekend I went to Disney with my in-laws and ended up going on several shopping sprees, one of which was a serendipitous pop into a book store in an outlet mall on the way from a leather goods store that smelled like Bonanza to the Nike outlet (which, incidentally, doesn’t smell like Bonanza at all).
Everybody knows it is bad form to kick a man while he’s down—everybody who is Human, that is. But in the world of the internet and modern journalism, Humanity is rare.
Apparently my previous post was confusing, and after some gracious readers gave me some feedback, I can see why. I am ashamed to admit I published it in haste, without any editorial review. What a rookie move. Let me explain...
I have been having this conversation a lot with friends recently--when my writing comes up I keep shaking my head and repeating my apology for how pathetic it has been.
"Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.” ~Percy Bysshe Shelley
Some adults never mature through the adolescent problem of dread, so they adopt a view of cynicism as a coping mechanism against their inability to see the world as redeemable, which view they convince themselves and others is a more elevated and intellectual view of life. It’s my argument that this bullying of hope is simply selfishness and weakness and is only overcome by humility and the Gospel.
Following my Documenting 2015 in Mental Pictures, here are the highlights from my life in 2016. These are just some of the biggest lessons learned in a (pretty) random series of mental pictures. Here we go.
I spend the majority of my time in Bible study re-learning things I thought I knew, and this is especially the case in the Old Testament. I’ve written before of the story of King David and how I learned that he wasn’t the paragon of virtue I was taught that he was. In the same way, the prophet Elijah isn’t without his flaws. The real point is, if we don’t see these men as flawed, we miss the real point of their stories.
Call me Icarus. My God-given name is Adam, and what’s unfortunate is I’ve always lived up to that name. The miracle came when God broke my rebellion and named me Christian, but when I began to suffer, the miracle seemed like wishful thinking.
Hugh Whelchel’s book How Then Should We Work? just keeps on giving. I was reviewing my notes and came across quotes that seemed to answer the very same questions I’d been asking recently. It was uncanny.
This was a paper I submitted for a Systematic Theology class at Seminary a while back, but I never published it here because it is flawed. It can be verbose, broad-brushing, lacking detail and subtlety, and annoying to anyone currently suffering. And yet, I stand by the thesis. God allows evil in order to have something to redeem, to start a holy war that would reveal His character and glory for all to see. But that is a hard pill to swallow.
Zophar is the final guy in the debate segment. This is his last speech, and we still have one more segment to go through, so he doesn’t speak in the last one. Why? There are a lot of answers, but it’s probably because he just shuts up.
Job responds to Bildad, refuting his Internal Causation scheme, proving the limits of science and the need for God to explain to him true reality: that both God and Job can be right: that there must be a Mediator.
I have been delaying this long enough. Hopefully this will explain my previous two posts.