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.