Archives

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.

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 commit 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.

Can Anything Good Come Out of San Angelo?

Jan28

I found this meme on Amanda’s blog The Living Room. She asks us, for her Thursday Thirteen (yes, I’m a day late and a dollar short, as usual) to “name thirteen places in our hometown that you would take the rest of us to if we visited, and why.” I live in Houston, but my hometown, where I grew up, is in West Texas. San Angelo, Texas, The Wool Capital of the World. Many people think that there is nothing in San Angelo worth visiting or seeing. I’m about to prove them wrong.
1. Central High School. This is the high school I graduated from. It is also one of the first high schools in Texas to be built in a campus style, multiple buildings spread out over an acre or so of land, back in the 1950’s. It even has trees.
2. Fort Concho.

“Established in 1867, along the banks of the Concho River, Fort Concho was built to protect frontier settlements, patrol and map the vast West Texas region, and quell hostile threats in the area.
In June 1889, the last soldiers marched away from Fort Concho and the fort was deactivated. After 22 years Fort Concho’s role in settling the Texas frontier was over.
Today, Fort Concho National Historic Landmark encompasses most of the former Army post and includes twenty-three original and restored structures. Fort Concho is a historic preservation project and museum which is owned and operated by the City of San Angelo, Texas.”

3. Zentner’s Daughter Steak House or Zentner’s or DunBar Cafe or . . . Why is it that there are so many restaurants in San Angelo where you can buy an excellent chicken fried steak with cream gravy and so few elsewhere? Those frozen things that are mostly crust with some kind of ground up meat inside are NOT real chicken fried steak.
4. Cactus Hotel. This 14 story hotel was Conrad Hilton’s fourth Texas hotel built in 1929, and it was disentegrating as I was growing up. However, it’s been restored and is used as a cultural center and has a children’s art museum on the first floor.
5. Concho Riverwalk. We go here to prove that San Angelo does have water and beauty.
6. Santa Fe Crossing. A railroad museum, shops, and a senior citizens center.
7. Sunken Garden. In West Texas, you have to cultivate flowers and water them—frequently. Another beauty spot.
8. M.L. Leddy Boot and Saddlery. I don’t know what the in-crowd carried at your junior high school, but when I was in junior high everybody who was anybody had a leather notebook with their name hand tooled on the front. And the notebooks came from Leddy’s. I want to see if they still have them. You might enjoy the handmade boots and saddles.
9. Lake Nasworthy. Again, we are showing you that water is available in West Texas. Plus, there’s a park where we used to drive really fast over this dirt road, and if you did it just right your car would fly over the low places in the road. No, we were not any more hard up for entertainment than teenagers in any other place!
10. Tom Green County Library. I used to work there, and I like libraries.
11. Hudman Drug Store. It had a real old-fashioned soda fountain, like you see in the movies.
12. San Angelo Fat Stock Show and Rodeo. The San Angelo version is not all glitzy with big name singing stars like the Houston one. But if you want to see a rodeo and a lot of animals, San Angelo is the place to go around the beginning of March.
13. Harris Avenue Baptist Church. The last time I visited, my home church was still a Southern Baptist church with hymnals and sermons and a choir and a piano and an organ. Even if you don’t care for that sort of worship, everyone should participate in at least one 1960’s style Southern Baptist worship service soon because they’re an endangered species. Oh, and as far as I can tell, Harris Avenue Baptist Church doesn’t have a website. No surprise there.

Holy Days and Holidays

Jan9

We are not Catholic. We are Southern Baptists who recently joined an Evangelical Free Church. I was raised in a church that did not celebrate any holidays except for Christmas and Easter. However, a long time ago I read two books by Martha Zimmerman, Celebrate the Feasts and Celebrating the Christian Year. These books changed my whole perspective on holidays and celebrations. Jewish holy days were meant to be teaching times, reminders of what God did for the nation Israel and of his continuing mercy, and the Christian liturgical year and the holy days celebrated in connection with that calendar were instituted for the same purpose. I love celebrating and remembering amd learning, and I don’t mind borrowing from the Jewish calendar or from the Catholic or mainline Protestant liturgical calendar to do so. I believe God can use these special days to remind me of his everlasting goodness. So this year I added both Jewish holy days and Christian liturgical feasts and holy days to my iCal calendar And I’ll be sharing some of those with my blog readers–in addition to authors’ birthdays which I see as more occasions for celebration and remembrance. We can celebrate The Great Story, as C.S. Lewis called it, and the many stories that are pale reflections, but nevertheless reflections, of the creative power of the Living God. And it behooves us to learn to celebrate and remember for that is what we are called to do for all eternity as Christians at the Great Banquet of our Lord.

My Favorite Luddite

Dec18

Eldest Daughter is fast becoming a (nonviolent) Luddite. She says I make fun of her, but I actually think she has some good ideas. However, she might want to keep in mind who the original Luddites were:

The original Luddites claimed to be led by one Ned Ludd, also known as “King Ludd” or “General Ludd”, who is believed to have destroyed two large stocking-frames that produced inexpensive stockings undercutting those produced by skilled knitters of the time. The movement spread rapidly throughout England in 1811 with many wool and cotton mills being destroyed, until the British government harshly suppressed them. The Luddites met at night on the moors surrounding the industrial towns, often practising drilling and manoeuvres. The main areas of the disturbances were Nottinghamshire in November 1811, followed by West Riding of Yorkshire in early 1812 and Lancashire in March 1812. Pitched battles between Luddites and the military occurred at Burtons’ Mill in Middleton, and at Westhoughton Mill, both in Lancashire. It was rumoured at the time that spies employed by the magistrates were involved in stirring up the attacks. Magistrates and food merchants were also objects of death threats and attacks by the anonymous General Ludd and his supporters. “Machine breaking” was made a capital crime, and seventeen men were executed in 1813. Many others were transported to Australia. From The Free Dictionary

Tolkien, Caedfael, and Lewis make much better role models. And Middle Earth is a place worth being homesick for.