“Such people will go on and on about visions they’ve had; they get puffed up without good reason by merely human thinking, and they don’t keep hold of the Head. It’s from Him that the whole body grows with the growth God gives it, as it’s nourished and held together by its various ligaments and joints.”
— Colossians 2:18-19, my emphasis
Paul here—or whoever wrote this wonderful letter—is making a case they the Colossian church shouldn’t listen to people trying to put rules onto them because of visions they’ve had. But I extract a principle here that corrects: Visions are not what will sustain your faith. Connecting to Jesus is what will sustain your faith.
I am grateful for a wife whose life beckons me to be empathic. She came home from work and told me what she had found out from Carole via Facebook: that Janet has been transferred to Danville for a blood transfusion that she needs in order to be able to go through chemotherapy to fight the lymphoma. Carla told me explicitly that she wants me to feel sad like she does. I didn’t at first, and I still don’t very explicitly. It’s the lack of lucidity, the lack of being there that disturbs Carla—and indeed, that is the most disturbing thing about it. She wants to “doula” for Janet, camping out at the hospital or nursing home or wherever to advocate on Janet’s behalf. Janet had conjunctivitis for days before they put her on erythromycin for it—despite her having said something repeatedly to her caregivers about it. I say go, Carla, go, do the good work of advocating on behalf of the woman who taught us how to be neighbors.
I am grateful for a son who knows more and more what he wants out of...
Sullivan, you are a treasure chest.
We’ve known that since the day we were blessed
By your arrival eight years ago.
But I’ll tell you what we didn’t know:
We didn’t know just how rich we’d become,
The manifold wealth of our newly born sum.
Our 20-inch trunk is now fifty-three tall
So say the strokes on our pencil-marked wall.
But ‘tisn’t the size of the box gives a rush,
‘Tis the contents therein that make our hearts flush:
Humor and trust, ‘magination and joy,
Honesty, playfulness, ambition and, boy,
Invention and wonder, forgiveness and caring,
Spontaneity, patience, focus, and sharing.
To know you is to open a lid and behold
A beaming assortment of silver and gold—
(Or palladium, perhaps, since I know that you’re able
To prize all the elements on the whole table).
Anyway, there’s so much in our oaken case,
That I want to sing all over the place:
“Hallelujah, we’re rich! Let’s shower in flowers!
For Sullivan Oake Stilson is happily ours!”
Carla and I watched Transcendence (2014) last night as per Instructions. It probably couldn’t have been more perfect taken as a message from God: People think Him less than human and misconstrue intentions. But, as Paul Bettany’s character Max says at the end of the film, ”He created this garden for the same reason he did everything. So they could be together”—the “they” being us. His intentions are purely loving and beneficent, even if His methods are foreign to us.
And that’s just the core of what you can take from it. It can get much richer than that.
Every miracle has an explanation that competes with the theistic one. For example, Saul’s conversion, Krista’s xenoglossy, Emma McKinley’s healing, Joshua’s dual word of introduction—they are all explicable in terms other than God. Most of the best ones (e.g., the last three above) require the use of explanatory mechanisms yet unknown to science. But some combination of things we do understand—mere coincidence, hallucination, wishful thinking, confirmation bias, misreporting, misdiagnosis, placebo, and hoax—and things we do not understand—extraterrestrials, poorly understood psychosomatic power, the possibility of telepathy—could get the job done in every case.
Following Richard Beck’s lead, I will attempt to answer in quick, bulleted form why I pray, even if and when most prayer requests go unanswered. I pray because in prayer:
amplifies, directs, and actionizes my empathy,
pledges my allegiance to God (or, if He isn’t real, the idea of Him and the virtues it represents to me),
develops self-control,
helps me sort out my thoughts,
gets me outside,
is generally healthy, like meditation, for the mind, and
does, particularly on those rare occasions when I feel like God is directing me to pray something very specific, lead to answers!
Thinking about prayer and remembering Luke 11 and Luke 18, it seems to be Luke’s assumption that God will seem very often seem unresponsive and unjust to us in His delay in answering prayer. It’s probably the norm. We should not be surprised that most prayers appear to go unanswered. But God won’t delay forever: At most, it’ll be the wait of a single lifetime before all begins to made right in the life of the elect (AKA, all of us). Because when we’re in His arms, everything will be A-OK.
This could hold even if Jesus was mistaken about when He was coming back and that’s the quickness to which He was referring.
It certainly won’t hold if God is a fabrication. But if you read the next entry in this journal, you’ll see that most of my reasons for praying hold even if God is a fabrication.
love noun1 Self-donation (e.g., of attention, energy, time, material resources, money) for the good of another, ideally driven by affection, and if not that, then by principled regard for others as at least as important as oneself
When we say “I love you” to someone, we mean that we desire to love them as above.
Father, thank You for all good things: the College Township Bikeway, a family that enjoys walks, the Rookes, the rest of church, a healthy family, enjoyable music, good food, travel plans, gratitude, and so on, and so forth.
Father, please restore Janet’s health that she may live out the remainder of her days happy and well-related to her family, friends, and neighbors. Please hear Éa’s prayer at dinner today that our neighbor might come home from the hospital.
With my current apathy toward orthodoxy and my uncertainty about the whole thing at all, I hope He is moving me toward faith-as-action. I hope this uncertainty is moving me toward action. But whither? In what fields shall I imitate Jesus? How will my imitation be different from before, when I was 100% certain of all my theology? Is He removing my certainty, or am I? Am I just making up this move to console myself as my faith withers? Or is it real?
Well, I asked to see Jesus: My Peruvian friend César got evicted from the defunct Internet café where he was sleeping two days before Christmas. Then, on New Year’s Eve when he was sleeping under a bridge, he was attacked and robbed. He is without food or money, and he was prescribed and charged for some medical cream that he obviously cannot afford.
Father, grant César, Carla, Roberto, and the folks at Misión Familiar Internacional compassion and wisdom.
Actually, while we’re at it, a healing miracle or a miracle of provision—or really any direct touch from You—would be swell.
“Housatonic” means “beyond the mountain place,” and to me it means that my source of life and faith must come directly from You, not mediated by reading others.
I am grateful for the opportunity to help Janet in her time of need. But I want need not to be! Carla has visited a few times over the past several days because Janet has been loopy because of some medication she is one in connection with her perma-asthma that set in this winter like last. Apparently, MRIs at the hospital today may have revealed lymphoma.
I am grateful for the resilience and emotional maturity Éa displayed upon getting her ears pierced at Ikonic Ink downtown today. It hurt, but she displayed (and was multiply congratulated by onlookers for) stoicism while Miranda the “piercing artist” was doing her work. When it was done, she cried honest, quite-but-unashamed tears in Mommy’s arms. May all my children know what to do with their sadness and pain.
And may more families make family outings at tattoo and piercing parlors?
I am grateful for a Father in heaven who doesn’t blink an eye when I return to attending to Him in prayer after almost completely ignoring Him over the holiday period.
I am grateful that last night just after midnight, Josh and Sarah tossed red table grapes into each other’s mouths unbidden after we had agreed that we didn’t need to do it because Carla and Josh were both feeling sick. I feel loved when people enact tradition with me—especially traditions I create. Also included: an energetic indoor snowball fight that revived us for the eleven-o’clock hour. Funny part: We turned on the radio just as the announcer was starting the ten-second countdown to midnight.
I am grateful that Ethan feels comfortable enough in his friendship with us that he walked his two daughters and Andy and Robbie all the way to our house in the cold unannounced. We enjoyed impromptu conversation, crackers, lingonberry jelly, herring, gjetost, and Ethan’s new quadcopter.
