My dad is currently in surgery. Sunday, they found a mass in his right side and they're doing a biopsy and colonoscopy today. In addition to his other problems and the fact that he had a bad reaction to the medication last night, I'm worried.
I and my family would definitely appreciate prayers.
Did I mention that my girls won Bible bowl again this year? I've worked this week for three years now and they're undefeated for the third year in a row. ^_~
I've just returned from a week in which worship means dirt, sweat and bug spray. It means crickets and mosquitoes, sunsets and flashlights. It means wooden bleachers caked with questionable substances, shorts and t-shirts to combat the heat and the word of God read under skies threatening rain. I've just returned from this to my home church where tonight, in an air conditioned building complete with stained glass, carpet and florescent lighting in cushioned pews made to seat a thousand plus decked out in Sunday best, I heard a sermon complete with PowerPoint bullets on God's desire to heal us of our love of stuff.
I sat in the auditorium feeling both happy to be home and distinctly out of place.
For some,the years turn around January -- the first signifying the "new" year. For most of academia, a new year begins in August or September, when school takes up again. While I don't really consider it my "new year marker," camp for me is the highlight of my year. People who know me casually might find that funny. People who know me well are no longer surprised.
People who know me only casually know me well enough to get some idea of my physical prowess and coordination. It doesn't take long for me to sufficiently prove my lack of either. This coupled with the fact that I am allergic to everything tangible, it would make sense if spending a week in the woods were something I'd choose only if I were feeling particularly suicidal.
But this camp is different.
I started out at CRYC as a camper, though an older one. (I think I was 16.) It wasn't long after I'd converted; all of my friends from my mother's church would be going to the Baptist camp down the road, the camp I'd gone to before. I didn't know many people except those from my home congregation at Bono; most of them were younger than I was and would be in other cabins. I felt pretty awkward about the whole thing; it seemed like everyone already knew everybody else from previous years, youth rallies and other activities. I wondered how I'd ever fit in, particularly being "older."
I guess I was lucky in that the campers that year were a pretty wonderful group of people. I felt at home pretty quickly. The counselors were incredible people. I remember being impressed; these people really cared about the kids and about camp.
I counsel with some of those same people now. The people I looked up to as adults and authority figures are now peers. And now I'm one of the responsible adults. How'd that happen?
Honestly I haven't got a clue. Though from my first week as a camper on, I wondered how I'd be able to go back to summers without CRYC. To tell the truth, I still don't know; I haven't yet missed a year. Last year it must have been the hand of God himself that got me through.
I'm stubborn. When I was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia in February of last year, one of my first thoughts was "But what about camp?" I finished the first six week round of radiation radiation the week before camp started. Only Gary, one of the counselors and a good friend, even knew of the diagnosis. Immature as it was, I hadn't wanted to tell the director -- he might tell me not to come!
If I'd been smart, maybe I wouldn't have. But I'm not that bright, really, so I'd gone anyway. It was a hard week, physically and emotionally.
Originally, my doctor hadn't thought I'd have to undergo chemotherapy, that the radiation would be effective enough. But the bloodwork the week before showed otherwise. Wednesday of camp last year, I got the news: I'd be doing six months of radiation starting the Monday immediately after camp. I wasn't sure whether to tell anyone or not. I talked to Gary and Gary decided for me: it wasn't something I should keep to myself.
It was a hard week, but wonderful. Even while I felt like yelling at God, I watched kids turning to him, learning to love him. While my faith was being challenged, theirs was growing. By the end of the week, we were all of us stronger.
This year, I'm in a partial remission. I have my doctor's full approval to rush stubbornly into the woods for another week of camp psychosis: no sleep, sugar rushes, running ourselves ragged on the ropes course. And watching teens grow in faith.
Not all of them do. I realize (as naive as I sound) that for some of them camp is just another social event. For some of them, it's an excuse to get away from home for a week. Others are there because their parents made them come. But regardless of why they come, they're there. And God is constantly doing something. Sometimes it takes a couple of years to see exactly what, but he's always doing something.
Very few people plan their theophanies. God's got a way of reaching people who don't necessarily want to be reached.
Anyway, tomorrow afternoon we start another week. I've been praying all year.
I'm in charge of writing the Bible Bowl questions for Teen Week this year. Trey Reely (the director) wrote them last year and I gave him a hard time about them, so he kindly (?) passed the torch on to me. My instructions are to keep it under a thousand questions and require no more than an associate's degree in Bible to answer.
It's fun putting this thing together. Some of them I came up with off the top of my head, but I decided to just read through my Bible until things struck me that would make good questions -- particularly considering we're dealing with teens here. Which is how I came to include the questions about Ehud and King Eglon. Figured the teens (particularly the guys) would get a kick out of the very fat man whose guards didn't want to open his chamber because they figured he was ... indisposed.
I know they'll grumble, but I'm being merciful. I'm giving them a study guide and I have at least book and chapter (and usually verses) references for each question -- they don't just have to hunt them all up outta nowhere. Too bad they don't seem to get nearly the kick out of this that I do.
Sometimes I wonder how you inspire that in a kid? When I teach classes, it's easy enough to get them interested. But how do you get them to take that home with them? How do you make it stick? How do you convince them that the word of God really IS "sweeter than honey" -- and not only that, it's NOT boring? Because without fail, I have some kid tell me, "I didn't know THAT was in there... that's COOL." (They tend to speak in capital letters.)
That's what I want to do, but not only teens. I want to inspire interest in and love for the Bible in people. Because there's fascinating stuff there -- beyond the fact that it's the history of God's people and the testament to his working in the world and in the lives of man, there's some seriously funny and fantastic stuff in there besides.
I guess it's a question for the ages.
(This blog was supposed to be primarily for -- well, the sort of things it's been for. I write the other stuff elsewhere, normally. But I was bored, I had access to a computer, and the computer happened to be online. All of this could have lead to mayhem, death, destruction and mass chaos. Instead it led to rambling stupidity.)
Just so you know, my birthstone is peridot. It should be a matter of public record and taught to children in school, but sometimes these things get overlooked. My birthstone happens to be peridot primarily because I managed to be born in August. Go me.
Problem is, peridot is very rarely turned into pretty jewelry. In fact (there has been research), large quantities of the jewelry made with peridot are sold to ugly people to make them feel better. There has been only one pretty ring from peridot and ... I think Gorbechev stole it.
I posessed this ring. My parents had given it to me for my 16th birthday. I'd never seen another one like it -- and probably never will. Turns out, it was a custom design. What were they thinking?
Anyhow, I wore that stinkin' ring everywhere. Including, I might add, to the concert in which I and several hundred other Harding choir/chorus/singers members serenaded Gorbechev with a song in Russian about a tree -- and a couple of English songs, too. The rest of the time we spent propping our eyeballs open trying to pretend that the translator was interesting. Because he wasn't.
While I was sitting on a hot stage in ... some month in the spring semester of that year,whenever that was, my hands began to swell. So I took the ring off and placed it in my inadequate pocket.
Short story long now, I lost it. Very sad. (I actually lost another gold ring and a gold bracelet that same year. This may explain why I wear so much silver now. Much cheaper to replace -- which I do nearly so often as I have my oil changed.)
And so I'm cursed to sort through ugly peridot jewelry in search of a decent ring that doesn't exist.
Fin.
Earlier, talking about loss and the things God teaches us through it, I said sometimes I don't want to know what God is going to teach me. And it's true.
Sometimes I don't want to know because sometimes I'm afraid it will hurt. I'm no stranger to pain -- in fact, I'm familiar enough to know that I don't like it. The losses hurt already, do I really want to surrender to the hands of a God who let it hurt?
Yes.
So why don't I? Why don't I let it all go and hand it all over? Sometimes it is because I'm scared. I don't have any guarantee that it won't hurt to heal or that I won't suffer loss again. But I do know that God uses the things that have hurt in our lives to shape us, to mold us more in his image. He knows, too, what it's like to hurt, to lose someone he loves.
God knows what it's like to lose a child. But he also knows the joy of receiving him back -- a joy he offers to us to share. Our God doesn't lead us through valleys he's never seen.
Sometimes it's because I'm angry. Because as often as I ask "Why God?" I know that underlying that question is often, "But why me?" Why my loved ones? Why did it have to touch my life? Why at all?
I don't always have good answers, either. I understand the Yancey/Brand concept of no pleasure without pain -- and that pleasure is the greater puzzle. I understand (but disagree with) Rabbi Kushner's final assessment that God simply can't stop these things, that he would if he could. I've read the story of Job -- and Job was mad, too.
Sometimes we don't get answers. Some relegate all evil and pain to the existence of sin in the world. Is it really sin that causes miscarriage? SIDS? Random cancers? Or other unexplained death? "Who sinned that this man was born blind?" No one.
God didn't cause any of it. And I have to trust him to heal it, even if it hurts, because he's the only one who can. I certainly can't. God didn't cause it, but he can use it for his glory -- if we (I) let him.
The discussion on Mike Cope's blog about women, men, church, worship, gender, roles, etc. has been fascinating. I've still got a lot to say about it, but I took up tons of space there already. So I'll blog it here.
There was one comment in particular that I wanted to respond to, but didn't since a) it was anonymous and b) sounded like an ad for the Piper/Grudem book Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. Comment may be clipped for length here and broken up for the sake of clarity, but it may be found in its uninterrupted entirety somewhere in here.
Doesn't Paul's statement that "There is . . . neither male nor female . . . for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28) take away gender as a basis for distinction of roles in the church?
No. Most evangelicals still agree that this text is not a warrant for homosexuality. In other words, most of us do not force Paul's "neither male nor female" beyond what we know from other passages he would approve. For example, we know from Romans 1:24-32 that Paul does not mean for the created order of different male and female roles to be overthrown by Galatians 3:28.
I think that the Galatians text is often bent into uncomfortable contortions on this issue, so generally I don't mention it. But for a good breakdown of that verse in the larger context of the book, Jan Faiver Hailey has written an excellent essay on it which can be found in Essays on Women in Earliest Christianity, vol. 1. The part of this paragraph that got me was this person's other reference: Romans 1:24 - 32, which says (at least according to the NRSV):
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. They know God's decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die—yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.
Here I'm confused. This passage as explains that Paul did not mean to overturn the "different created order of male and female roles"? I could be wrong, and often am, but to me, this passage says several things:
To me, that doesn't seem to have a lot to do with any sort of created order, unless the commenter meant the part about God ordained sexual unions involve both a woman and a man. I'm not even sure why it was brought into the discussion. It seems instead a negative catalogue in order to highlight the virtues of Christian morality. There's a literary term for that, but I've forgotten it.
The context of Galatians 3:28 makes abundantly clear the sense in which men and women are equal in Christ: they are equally justified by faith (v. 24), equally free from the bondage of legalism (v. 25), equally children of God (v. 26), equally clothed with Christ (v. 27), equally possessed by Christ (v. 29), and equally heirs of the promises to Abraham (v. 29).
I agree wholeheartedly. However, I don't think it's limited solely to that meaning. Because something has one agreed upon meaning, does that negate its having any more applications? I hope not. Preachers rely on bringing new life to old texts, often through new insights. This idea will have put them out of a job: once all passages are preached in their one-meaning context, why continue to talk? Let the people buy the tapes instead.
In 1 Peter 3:1-7, the blessing of being joint heirs "of the gracious gift of life" is connected with the exhortation for women to submit to their husbands (v. 1) and for their husbands to treat their wives "with respect as the weaker partner." In other words, Peter saw no conflict between the neither-male-nor-female principle regarding our inheritance and the headship-submission principle regarding our roles. Galatians 3:28 does not abolish gender-based roles established by God and redeemed by Christ.
The 1 Peter text is also interesting. It begins "In the same way, wives..." Well, in the same way as what? Going back to chapter 2, we can see that Peter is there addressing slaves and telling them to submit to their masters. This is a passage often quoted by those who say it affirms female submission -- but deny that that submission has anything to do with slavery. Apparently for Peter, there is a clear parallel -- so much so that he exhorts a woman to submit to her husband in the same way a slave submits to his master.
And so my quandry is still if the abolition of slavery is a good thing -- although it's obviously not a concept the biblical writers entertained, nothing Paul ever seems to have expected to happen in this life, and really an alien concept to the new testament world -- why would the continued submission of women "in the same way" be seen as virtous? And conversely, why would its eradication be such a downfall to the church and to society?
I dunno.
