Thoughts from Making Bread

Well, don't let the title fool you (though, yes I do make bread....my fiance taught me). I just ran across this thing called the "Top 50 Influential Churches/Pastors." Now, while I am as big a fan as the next of looking at lists like these to see what's going on, I generally confine this to things that are as inconsequential as the list-movies, music, and books. I'm a bit concerned that we apparently have a need to make a list like this...did Paul ever make a top 50 list? NO. He instead exhorted the churches and believers to be churches and believers. Who cares about ratings? If you make it onto "way to go list" for doing what you are SUPPOSED to be doing, who cares!!! That's just silly and a willing action of blindness on the part of the Christian community. If you are doing what you should be, you don't need a list to say so. Now, granted many of the pastors/churches on the list are men who could most likely care less (Tim Keller, Mark Driscoll, John Piper, etc.). I think I am slightly disturbed by this because instead of magazines making silly lists like this, I think the Christian community in America should be doing more than congragulating each other and patting backs. Maybe we should (and I say we, myself included) actually go do what we are commanded to do-be the light and the salt to world. When we make a list like this all we do is join in the thousands of other worldly things that we are commanded to stay away from. That's a reason why the world laughs at us. We say we are different, yet we do the same stupid stuff...where's the difference?! It's kind of like when God told the Isrealites to kill/eradicate (choose your own verb) all the peoples of Canaan and to not marry into them. If they do this, problems would explode (and they did-look at the Old Testament...dude). Fast forward to now. Make shiny media lists and ostensibly well-meaing magazines the Canaan. The urge to pat backs and all the people we are not supposed to marry, yet we do. What happens? Everyone thinks we are Flanders from the Simpsons....for goods reason. Two and Two don't make Five folks.

Madness, Markers, and Mayhem

So today my fiance and I got a hold of some black markers and decided we should decorate my rather drab apartment (or, if you're of the british inclination-flat). So we drummed up quotes and thoughts and started to write....a project that will continue until I come back to America and have to paint over it all (except the deadhead bear-it's just too dadgum cool). If you have a quote for the wall, lemme know, and up it goes (as long as it's fairly decent and clean...my students and the team member's kids will read it). As always, the more random and strange the better in my world, so off we go!

Sartre

*n.b.-my treatment here is rather elementary and basic. A more thorough and academic answer to the questions and problems Sartre poses for Christians will follow in the future.

Recently I finished reading a lecture by Jean-Paul Sartre (noted French Existentialist) on Extistentialism and Humanism (and their corresponding ideas in French Existentialism). While I came away with a greater understanding of his approach to this, I also came away amazed that he didn't want to shoot himself in the head...so much of it, to me, was rather depressing. Simple enough theory-existence predates essence, and therefore man is constantly defining himself and the world around him (in a sense, as I understand it, always in creation of himself and others)...seems like a lot of responsibility to me (and undue stress...He argues that this makes us responsible, because of our individual choices, for mankind). All in all, rather depressing to me. Makes me glad that our beliefs aren't set up this way-that we were created with an essence, or simply-a purpose, in mind. Glorify God. That validates our existence. And that makes our decisions and actions much less stressful-we aren't, in every decision, responsible for all of mankind. And we aren't trapped by anguish, despair and abandonment...so all in, I'm pretty glad that God doesn't think like Sartre.