A Litany of Humility. “From the desire of being esteemed, Deliver me, Jesus.”

I’m happy to report that my TV has decent color again. I told you a couple weeks ago how a nearby lightning strike messed up its color, leaving the people with purple faces. The set’s internal degaussing function may have been gradually mproving the problem, but the progress was at a rate of about one pixel per start-up.

My renter persuaded me to take a magnet and pass it over the screen in the bad places. Not just a couple passes, but a real “scrubbing.” And behold, I’ve got my picture back.

Now if only there were anything worth watching on.

The weather today was wonderful (or so I surmised from looking out the library windows and checking the temperatures online). One of those ideal days—lightly clouded skies (though it was clouding up by the time I took my walk), neither too cold nor too hot—that you imagine when you’re young, thinking about what the future will be like. It’s never like that, of course, but sometimes you get a little of the weather.

The world is a-buzz today with news of the publication of letters from Mother Teresa, in which she expressed feelings that God was far away from her.

This is news?

Only to people who a) have never been serious Christians (granted, there are a lot of those) or b) have never read any serious Christian writers. Sure, you won’t get much about Dark Nights of the Soul from Joel Osteen or Benny Hinn, but try reading St. Augustine. Or Pascal. Or C.S. Lewis.

Make up your minds, folks—you can criticize us for being Pollyannas, out of touch with the harsh realities of life, or you can call us posers because we don’t always feel the joy of the Lord.

But you can’t have it both ways.

So which shall we choose? Experience or truth? The left wing of an airplane, or the right? Love or integrity? Study or service? Evangelism or discipleship? The front wheels of a car, or the rear? Subjective knowledge or objective knowledge? Faith or obedience?

Damn all false antitheses to hell, for they generate false gods, they perpetuate idols, they twist and distort our souls, they launch the church into violent pendulum swings whose oscillations succeed only in dividing brothers and sisters in Christ. The truth is that Jesus Christ is Lord of all—of the truth and of our experience. The Bible insists that we take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ. (D. A. Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, p. 234) (found here)

I’m a little later than usual tonight, as I had to go to the dentist for my semiannual (I think that’s right. Can’t be biennial, can it?) check-up and cleaning. Since I know you’re keeping score, you’ll be relieved to know that no cavities were discovered. However there is that tooth with the old root canal that’s going to crumble like an abandoned house deck in Florida one of these days. And there’s the other tooth that’s mostly amalgam, which also needs replacement. But I put them off. I always think that I’ll maybe have some money six months from now.

If you go to this page (which you probably can’t read because it’s in Norwegian), and scroll down (unless you’re reading this article in the future, when everything’s down in Archive territory), you’ll find a story headlined, “Homoprest nekter å vie enkjønnede samliv.” Which means, “Homosexual pastor refuses to bless same-sex relationships.” I’ll translate the rest for you, because this is really interesting, and I can’t find a report in English anywhere:

Homosexual priest Erik Johansson of the Swedish (Lutheran) Church has chosen to live in celibacy. Johansson refuses to bless same-sex relationships, even though this may lead to his expulsion from his own church.

Unfortunately this web site charges you to get the rest of the story, but I really want to know more. It seems to me this is precisely the way it ought to be. A homosexual willing to submit to the same sexual morality the Bible demands of all of us, which in his case means celibacy, is qualified to operate as a pastor and upholds Biblical teaching. Maybe I’m missing something, but this guy sounds like a hero who ought to be celebrated throughout the evangelical world.

Alan of Thinklings says, “It’s amazing what God is doing on the other side of the globe. When we’re able to support guys working for the gospel in places like China and Africa, it feels like buying stock in Microsoft in 1981.” This in response to 10,000 Conversions to Christianity per Day in China

Rev. Henry Luke Orombi, archbishop of Uganda, is scheduled to speak to a Tennessee Valley Presbytery worship service at my home church, Covenant Presbyterian (PCA), in Chattanooga, Tennessee on September 23. If you’re in the area, you may–may–want to drop in around 6:00 that Sunday. It should be glorious. I’m starting to wonder if there will be room to breathe within the sound of Rev. Orombi’s voice. I hope they pipe audio into the hallways.

The archbishop writes about Anglicanism in the current issue of First Things, in which you can see his heart for the word of God and advance of His Kingdom. You can read excerpts, as well as my pastor’s enthusiasm for this service, on Covenant’s website.

Frank Wilson points out an article on Christopher Hitchens’ rant against Christianity, and this statement by Henry Newman is worth requoting. He said, “if anything seems to be proved by astronomer or geologist, or chronologist, or antiquarian, or ethnologist, in contradiction to the dogmas of faith, that point will eventually turn out, first, not to be proved, or secondly, not contradictory, or thirdly, not contradictory to any thing really revealed, but to something which has been confused with revelation.”

Tonight, a Christian Fundamentalist joke to start with:

Q: What do you call a Pre-Trib eschatologist with a drug problem?

A: Hal Lindsey Lohan



(Ba-rump-bump)

It was a good day. I not only got a start on a project I’ve been struggling with, but I caught our former IT guy, recently departed from the staff, on a visit to the school. I begged him to help with a bar code project I’d asked him about just before he left. He’d told me clearly where to find the Microsoft Access file I needed, but I’d been able to locate nothing there. So he came up and looked on my computer, and on the network, and behold, I was right (someone write that down. It doesn’t happen that often). The file had disappeared, like an 80s TV star. So he spent more time than he’d planned on, creating a couple new reports for me. Now I’m back in business. Thanks, Brian, in case you happen to read this.

Earlier I spoke to Dennis Ingolfsland of The Recliner Commentaries. He’s the librarian at a Christian college in our general area, and I’d been asked to call around and find out how those schools figure overdue fines, since we’re considering revising our policies. Nice to speak to Dennis, whose blog I enjoy very much.

Here’s something that occurred to me today:

I was thinking about how, through the centuries, so many of God’s best servants have had very short life-spans. Thinking about Oswald Chambers brought it to mind, but there are many examples. In the great days of the Missions Movement, young people from all over Europe and America trooped onto ships that sailed to Africa or India or Southeast Asia, and the casualty toll was horrendous. Some were lost in storms at sea, hundreds succumbed to disease, and a few were killed by natives. Living in a time when passion for the gospel has narrowed to a trickle in our civilization, that seems like an awful waste.

But you know, God doesn’t build as man does. His Church is the solidest of edifices, as C. S. Lewis says in The Screwtape Letters: “spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners.” In terms of this temporal world, though, God builds like a contractor putting up a house made of ice in Saudi Arabia (or in Minnesota, today). His construction material is forever dwindling away under His hand, and one piece after another has to be replaced.

But this is not a bad thing. He chose that form of architecture, and it may be that the constant replacement prevents problems of petrifaction or rot that He particularly wants to avoid.

Or so it seems to me.