Stardust Fallout

The list is long and includes deli meat, bacon, sausages, hot dogs, chicken nuggets, frozen meatballs etc. 

 Our desire to make profit, to buy cheap products, to consume things that aren’t good for us, to think small decisions don’t matter, to live with things rather than change, to push consequences into the future, to not think about what goes in to our bodies or the effects of our technology is a slow mix of life silting destruction.  

When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he could be.

—Attributed to Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer, physicist, biologist, and artist. 

John Lennox is a charming, intelligent, explicator of the Christian perspective. It’s hard not to like this mathematician and philosopher of Science. In this Q&A session at Witswatersrand University he talks the non logical correlation between atheism and evolution that Christian and atheist both might have as well as why he himself is a Christian. 

Great little read from scientific american. This article talks about research around four behaviours (contempt, criticism, stonewalling, defensiveness) that could allegedly be used to predict which couples would remain married 14 years later with %93 accuracy. 

Not a dry read though. Each behaviour comes with a clip from Kim Kardashian’s relationship w/ Chris Humpfries showing it in action. 

Prayer is our Christian duty. It is an expression of submission to God and dependence upon Him. For that matter, prayer is arguably the most objective measurement of our dependence upon God. Think of it this way. The things you pray about are the things you trust God to handle. The things you neglect to pray about are the things you trust you can handle on your own.

—

H.B. Charles, Jr.

What do you think? If this is the case there is a lot of self-dependence in me. 

Prayer takes place in the middle voice” writes Eugene Peterson. In grammar the active voice is when we take action, and the passive voice is when we receive the action of another, but in the middle voice we both act and are acted upon. We participate in the formation of the action and reap the benefits of it. “We neither manipulate God” (active voice) or are manipulated by God (passive voice). We are involved in the action and participate in its results but do not control or define it (middle voice).

—Foster & Peterson on praying in the middle voice

Well, first of all, many people today are simply not good at commitments of any kind. In one sense it is hardly our fault. It is in the air. It is the mood of the times. Commitment means responsibility, and responsibility sounds confining.

For example it is common in our day to define freedom as the complete absence of restraint. Once we think about it - even for a moment we realize how utterly ludicrous this idea really is. Absolute freedom is absolute nonsense! We gain freedom in anything through commitment, discipline, and fixed habit. Demosthenes was free to be a great orator only because he had gone through the discipline of speaking above the roar of the ocean with pebbles in his mouth. George Frederick Handel was able to compose his magnificent Messiah only because he had schooled himself in musical composition. By means of intense personal discipline Flannery O’Connor was able to rise above a debilitating disease to become one of the finest fiction writers of the twentieth century. Freedom is the product of discipline and commitment.

—

Foster on freedom arising from discipline and commitment. 

It even seems to me that simply having freedom of expression does not mean that we are tapping into the full range/freedom of what expression itself allows. Good, convincing, clear, ease of expression comes from a discipline to it. 

What then does this tell us of other disciplines. Those of prayer, of sport, or music, and so on? May you revel in the freedom that comes only from discipline. 

Strange as it may sound to modern ears, the contemplation of ones own death is among the most time-honored approaches to personal transformation. In our day of runaway narcism it is a practice we would do well to revive. What would happen if you were to die today? If I were to die today? One of the most sobering insights from such a meditation is the realization that life would continue right on without us - and quite well for that matter. The sun would come up the next day. People would go about their normal duties. Nothing of substance would be changed.

This is a hard reality for us who carry the illusion that the world revolves around our decisions. How could anything of importance happen without us there? How dare anything of importance happen without us there! You see, we are a little like the fly on the chariot wheel in Aseop’s Fables, who looked back and declared, “My, what a dust storm I’m causing!”.

—Richard Foster on the importance of considering one’s own death.