Apr/110
A Meaningful Weekend
The death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ are worth considering daily. This week of Easter, when these events are often given more focus, I have spent some time reflecting on the crucifixion and resurrection of our incredible savior. I thought I would share with you what I hope will be helpful in your own reflection of the Easter story.
There are many things that are important to take into consideration that I would love to spend more time on, but I’ll try to keep it succinct.
Sep/100
The Sum of an Elephant
There is a parable out of India about three blind men who are brought before an elephant and asked to explain what the elephant is like. One of the men reaches out and touches the leg and concludes that an elephant is thick and round and much like a column or pillar. Another man puts his hand on the trunk and concludes that an elephant is slender and flexible and must be something like a snake. The last man pushes on the elephant's side and determines that it is broad and unmovable like a large wall. Sometimes the parable includes five or six men, and you can see from the picture above than there is no shortage of perspectives one could take. The moral of the story is that everything is relative. Each of the blind men told the truth based on their experience with the elephant, but no one man's truth could exclude another's. No truth took precedence, even in the face of completely opposite claims.
I think this parable is an incredibly beneficial illustration for our world today, but for a different reason. If our quest is to find out what an elephant really is, then what are we doing asking blind men when there is one who came to give sight to the blind. Why trust a man's limited experience with an elephant when there is one who created elephants? The religious discussion is full of men espousing experiential truth from their own narrow perspective, but God, the creator and sustainer of the universe, has chosen to speak to us through His Word, the Bible. We should place a higher priority on God's word because His perspective is infinitely wider than ours. He knows more about elephants than 6.7 billion blind men ever could.
Perhaps you don't believe in God, or that He has communicated to man through the Bible. That is ok. My point here is not to convince you of His existence, but to simply show that He is necessary if we are ever to know the true purpose for our existence. Without the broad perspective of the One who set the universe in motion, we have no hope of true understanding. We are merely blind men groping around in the dark, thinking the sum of an elephant is a snake.
Aug/100
Provision
This has been a big week for us. We started classes on Wednesday morning (first up: James & Hebrews) and have loved every bit of it so far. While we are in class, Hudson spends his time flirting with the lady infants in the nursery. Everyone loves him. Everyone. I'm not making that up. The school has filled up with a lot of new faces mixed in with the familiar ones, and we are excited about getting to know them over the course of the year. Life in this community has it's challenges, but there is also much we are grateful for.
We have never doubted God's faithfulness to provide for us here, and He has continued to show us that He is able to meet our needs. Last year I had the opportunity to do some odd jobs for the owner of a local used book store, and upon returning to town earlier this month, I reestablished contact with him and was offered more work. Last week, he offered me a job in his book store with the perfect amount of hours and flexibility. I'm pretty new to the whole retail/cash register thing, but I'm getting the hang of it pretty quickly.
This Jackson economy may be shaky, but our God is a rock!
Jan/100
The Prophets
Lately I've been intrigued by some of the unique ways information is conveyed graphically. An example of this may be seen in the idea behind word clouds. Essentially, a word cloud is an image made up of words, where the size of the word represents the frequency it occurs in a text. Brad Thomas at the identity33.com blog recently made word clouds for all 66 of the books of the Bible using an English translation. The result is an interesting glimpse at what the Bible speaks most about.
Since one of the first classes we'll have when we get back to Jackson is the Prophets, I decided to enter the text of the Major and Minor prophets (Isaiah through Malachi) into the cloud generator at wordle.net. The result is the image you see above featuring the most frequent 150 words (excluding numbers and common words like "the") from the prophets in the NET translation.
For obvious reasons, we have to be careful about the type of conclusions we can make based on a picture like this. What we can get, however, is an idea about context. We can tell right from the start who the main subjects are. God's people, Israel and Judah, the city of Jerusalem and the promised land are all prominent. But my favorite part is the overwhelming size of "Lord". Is there any question what the most used word in the prophets is? This is simple, but something I often neglect to realize: beyond Israel, the prophets, the prophetic message or anything else, the most important thing in the prophets is the Lord. All the events of the Bible, each story told within, is ultimately a chapter in God's redemptive story. No Biblical event has any meaning apart from God's involvement in it.
We're tempted to focus on our part in the story, but the words point us to the real subject.