As I read again a few reviews and the publisher’s description of Alan Jacobs’ The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, this time from the corridors surrounding the escalator well at the Washington State Convention Center, I teared up in gratitude as I concluded, tentatively as always, that You, God, had once again spoken directly to me for my good.
The message: You and those around you will be enriched if you heed Jacobs’ advice about reading, which Oxford University Press outlines as:
read at whim,
read what gives you delight,
and do so without shame.
I’d add to this, as I’m sure he will in the book: read deeply and at length.
Why so grateful to God? Well, first of all, because You continue to speak to me in these little words and names I remember upon waking from a night’s sleep. I think I can tell the difference between a random surfacing of my subconscious mind and when You are speaking. But also because this speaks directly to an inner predicament I have felt acutely...
So have you seen your “Kings have no power other than what their subjects give them” anywhere else? Thinking more and more about it in light of 1 Corinthians 1:18 and the Cross being the demonstration of the power of God—precisely because it is the means by which he frees his subjects to become like him.”
me:
I’m not aware of anyone who formulated that thought before I did, although I do connect the highly circumscribed nature of human kingly power to the highly circumscribed nature of divine kingly power posited via the theodicy work of Greg Boyd, Thomas Jay Oord, Christopher McHugh, and John Caputo via Richard Beck. That last link you may find too progressive and deconstructed (as I do), but nevertheless useful. That last link is especially useful because come to think of it, Beck isn’t doing theodicy work with that blog series: He is formulating a rally cry for action. And so are you.
We are ready to send Everett and Oak home. But we’re not. I’m sure these are the typical feelings of a foster parent. Life is going to be different. Quieter. This evening without them because they’re with Mommy and Daddy makes that sure. But as Everett would surely reciprocate, “I will miss you, Everett.” And I will miss you, Oak. We still have three weeks with them, so let’s make them count.
We asked Éa and Sullivan today whether they’d like to foster again. Sullivan said, “I’d like a year.” And Éa said, “Yeah, in like, five thousand weeks.”
A home is fuller if you’re stretched for the sake of relationships. Let us dig in to more people. Let us “love [our] enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return” (Luke 6:35). Then I will live without regret.
“To put off obeying him till we find a credible theory concerning him, is to set aside the potion we know it our duty to drink” (George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, vol. 3, “Justice”).
Baseless speculative interpretation that I already know is wrong but nevertheless want to write down because I’ve never heard it before: the day of the Messiah is the day each of us dies.
I am grateful for Elliott, Amber, and Vinny finally making it over for dinner tonight. I am grateful for a highly contrastive peace of mind today, with no anxiety-producing doubt about God. And I am grateful today for the opportunity to do good work on DiamondBack’s website.
I sang “Where or When” at the last FUSE Production cabaret. The audience said they enjoyed it a lot; I also enjoyed singing it. I managed this time to keep my eyebrows from making me look silly. I also managed to focus on the camera instead of on the audience, which, for this number at least, was a good decision. The next element of my performances I’d like to change is the prolific, side-to-side head-shaking I do every time I attempt to be expressive on a longer note. For my next performances, which will likely be “The Impossible Dream” and “Lily’s Eyes,” I’ll try to eliminate it completely by either keeping my head still or using one long head turn if I have to.
For my book reading, I’m going to alternate between enriching my understanding of the great literature of the world in chronological order and picking and choosing free reads completely whimsically.
I’m grateful for my new friends Greg Bishop and Andrew Marzka, two fellow elementary-school dad with whom I spent the better part of the basketball-and-pizza evening.
I’m also grateful Carla has decided she will return to cutting my hair. She wants to thank me for working hard at work.
Note to self: Don’t spread alternative views, for example about the pseudonymity of Colossians, unless you think those views are worthy alternatives. In the case of Colossians, if stylistic variance is the only thing that advocates of pseudonymity have in their favor, then I don’t think it’s a legitimate argument.
Curiously, when I attempt to view in Firefox anything on Patheos other than the homepage, the browser returns the homepage as if someone had clicked the ‘Back’ button. Firefox is the only browser I use in which I haven’t blocked that website during the workday. And the site works fine in Chrome.
You want to know what I’m grateful for? I’m grateful that I knew just what to do in the face of anxiety-ridden sleeplessness that plagued my eleven- and twelve-o’clock hours: Drink a cup of chamomile tea, give thanks, and sleep in the guest bedroom. I was downright cheery last night as I went to sleep.
You want to know what else I’m grateful for: The present richness of the “little words” I received last year from You, God, to help me through this mind-crippling doubt. Transcendence was risibly thick with metaphor for You, and the realization about my inner skeptic is the H.L. Hunley is very helpful.
This morning I woke up with the words “dipolar theism” in my head. Fascinating, but I’m not sure how to apply the knowledge, except to say I think You’re perfectly capable of all those opposing traits simultaneously. Oh, and I’ll search the text of Satan and the Problem of Evil to make sure I didn’t see it there.
If I am to be the Housatonic, a blockader of doubt-supply, I know what is the H.L. Hunley: my own skepticism. I had trouble getting to sleep last night because of doubt about whether God is real. Nothing external prompted the doubt this time. Well, except doubt about whether Greg Boyd’s theses about freedom, love, and risk in Satan and the Problem of Evil hold.
Is it possible to create a world in which creatures have the freedom to love but not the freedom to harm, contra Boyd? A world in which all harm is prevented? At first glance, I’d say, “Of course! That’s the kind of world I aim to create in my house. If I fail, it is only because I am not fully able, not fully loving (say, in a fit of grumpiness or apathy), or not fully aware. Were I fully all three of those things, there would be no harm in my house.” I’ll have to work on picturing that scenario some more to see how it would play out.
[…]
If I stepped in every time Sullivan were to, say, swing a fist, might he resign me?
