I abandoned this blog several years back. Life got crazy busy. I just stopped.
Last week I read that Einstein quote doing defines insanity as doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result. I am ready for the new, the uncomfortable, the brave, and the uncomfortable. Maybe it will be a crazy venture, but I am ready to try. I figured that this blog (resurrected) would be a good place to chronicle the new adventures of a Pumpkin in the Meta. Here goes.
Saturday, January 08, 2011
Sunday, December 20, 2009
A God worth abandoning yourself to!
As I was tucking my little girls into bed this evening, we read Psalm 103 and my heart worshiped as I read these words:
" The Lord is merciful and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
He will not always chide,
nor will he keep his anger forever.
He does not deal with us according to our sins,
nor repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
so far does he remove our transgressions from us.
As a father shows compassion to his children,
so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.
For he knows our frame;
he remembers that we are dust."
" The Lord is merciful and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
He will not always chide,
nor will he keep his anger forever.
He does not deal with us according to our sins,
nor repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
so far does he remove our transgressions from us.
As a father shows compassion to his children,
so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.
For he knows our frame;
he remembers that we are dust."
Friday, August 03, 2007
Abundant Life
" I have come that you may have life, and have it more abundantly." (Jn. 10:10)
Abundant: present in great quantity
more than adequate
over sufficient
exceeding some number or measure or rank or need
Life: vitality
being
growth
change
animation
Fecundity: the production of offspring, fruit in abundance
prolific, fruitful
very productive or creative intellectually
It is easy to exchange the truth of God for the Lie. To miss the prolific, creative, growing, life around me because my eyes are on that which is not life. To trudge weary and oblivious to the sweet fruit spilling from my arms because the eyes of my heart are set on that which steals, kills, and destroys.
Father, have mercy. Open the eyes of my heart to the abundant life around me. Keep me from that which would rob me of joy, kill my delight, and destroy my life. Keep my eyes steadfastly on You. Let me taste and see that the Lord is good. Make me to hear the voice of rejoicing in the tent of the righteous. Keep your daughter from exchanging Your truth for the Lie.
Abundant: present in great quantity
more than adequate
over sufficient
exceeding some number or measure or rank or need
Life: vitality
being
growth
change
animation
Fecundity: the production of offspring, fruit in abundance
prolific, fruitful
very productive or creative intellectually
It is easy to exchange the truth of God for the Lie. To miss the prolific, creative, growing, life around me because my eyes are on that which is not life. To trudge weary and oblivious to the sweet fruit spilling from my arms because the eyes of my heart are set on that which steals, kills, and destroys.
Father, have mercy. Open the eyes of my heart to the abundant life around me. Keep me from that which would rob me of joy, kill my delight, and destroy my life. Keep my eyes steadfastly on You. Let me taste and see that the Lord is good. Make me to hear the voice of rejoicing in the tent of the righteous. Keep your daughter from exchanging Your truth for the Lie.
" I have come that you may have life, and that more abundantly."
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Torture
Today at lunch, my father in law posed the question of whether or not torture is a legitimate last recourse in the defense of national security. My immediate response was that torture is pragmatic and wrong. However, I needed to figure out why I believed it was wrong. As I considered this issue, these were my thoughts.
Torture is pragmatic. It rationalizes, "Yes, this is not just. Yes, it is not consistent with God's ways as revealed in His word...but." It is precisely that "but" that makes torture so morally wrong. That "but" is an innocuous way of denying the power of the Sovereign Lord. That "but" says, "Yes, I will hold fast to God's commands and ways...until He seems to fail me, and then I guess I will have to do whatever it takes to protect myself."
Isn't that what Abraham felt as he walked up Moriah wanting to vomit with horror at what was about to happen? He wanted to protect and defend Isaac. Isn't that what Job felt when all was lost and God seemed to have failed him? Abraham could so easily have said," God, up to this point I believed in you and your commands and you ways, but now, well, I just can not go there." Job could have cursed God. But neither Abraham nor Job lost hope. Abraham believed God could raise Isaac from the grave, and Job proclaimed that he knew his Redeemer lived. They cried out in faith to the Sovereign Lord believing that despite all circumstances He was faithful, and that He would act.
Pragmatism is the only recourse of a nation which does not acknowledge the Sovereign Ruler of the nations. It is the natural response of a people who do not believe in a God who directs the history of nations according to the Sovereign purposes of His perfect will. It is the rational response of those who exalt themselves against the Lord and His Anointed.
So, once again....an idea gives birth to a consequence. If there is no Supreme Law Giver, no Ruler of the Nations, then absolutely....torture is a justifiable, even necessary evil. However, if Christ is presently Lord over the nations, working out the pleasure of His eternal decrees in space and time, then torture is a unjust, cowardly lack of faith. It is disbelief at its ugliest.
Those who hope in the Sovereign Lord cry out:
" Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I will fear no evil, because you are with me."
"But you, O God, do see trouble and grief;
you consider it to take it in hand.
The victim commits himself to you." (Psalm 23:4)(Psalm 10:14)
Torture is pragmatic. It rationalizes, "Yes, this is not just. Yes, it is not consistent with God's ways as revealed in His word...but." It is precisely that "but" that makes torture so morally wrong. That "but" is an innocuous way of denying the power of the Sovereign Lord. That "but" says, "Yes, I will hold fast to God's commands and ways...until He seems to fail me, and then I guess I will have to do whatever it takes to protect myself."
Isn't that what Abraham felt as he walked up Moriah wanting to vomit with horror at what was about to happen? He wanted to protect and defend Isaac. Isn't that what Job felt when all was lost and God seemed to have failed him? Abraham could so easily have said," God, up to this point I believed in you and your commands and you ways, but now, well, I just can not go there." Job could have cursed God. But neither Abraham nor Job lost hope. Abraham believed God could raise Isaac from the grave, and Job proclaimed that he knew his Redeemer lived. They cried out in faith to the Sovereign Lord believing that despite all circumstances He was faithful, and that He would act.
Pragmatism is the only recourse of a nation which does not acknowledge the Sovereign Ruler of the nations. It is the natural response of a people who do not believe in a God who directs the history of nations according to the Sovereign purposes of His perfect will. It is the rational response of those who exalt themselves against the Lord and His Anointed.
So, once again....an idea gives birth to a consequence. If there is no Supreme Law Giver, no Ruler of the Nations, then absolutely....torture is a justifiable, even necessary evil. However, if Christ is presently Lord over the nations, working out the pleasure of His eternal decrees in space and time, then torture is a unjust, cowardly lack of faith. It is disbelief at its ugliest.
Those who hope in the Sovereign Lord cry out:
" Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I will fear no evil, because you are with me."
"But you, O God, do see trouble and grief;
you consider it to take it in hand.
The victim commits himself to you." (Psalm 23:4)(Psalm 10:14)
Sunday, March 04, 2007
Again, I concur
"The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism."
- C.S. Lewis, On the Reading of Old Books
Friday, March 02, 2007
I concur
"Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books."
-Harper Lee
-Harper Lee
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Scout on Education
My husband read me the following excerpt from Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird last night. It reinforced to me once again some of the reasons why I bother to teach my own to children. Yeats once said that " Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire.". I want to kindle a passion for growing and learning and broadening in my children. I do not want to smother them in a weighty burden of educational "twaddle".
This excerpt is narrated from the perspective of a eight year old Southern girl named Scout:
"The remainder of my school days were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved int a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics. What Jem called the Dewey Decimal System was school-wide by the end of my first year, so I had no chance to compare it with other teaching techniques. I could only look around me: Atticus and my uncle, who went to school at home, knew everything-at least what one did not the other did. Furthermore, I couldn't help noticing that my father had served for years in the state legislature, elected each time without opposition, innocent of the adjustments my teachers thought essential to the development of Good Citizenship. Jem, educated on a half-Decimal half-Duncecap basis, seemed to function effectively alone or in a group, but Jem was a poor example: no tutorial system devised by man could have stopped him from getting at books. As for me I knew nothing except what I gathered from Time magazine and reading everything I could lay my hands on at home, but as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me."
This excerpt is narrated from the perspective of a eight year old Southern girl named Scout:
"The remainder of my school days were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved int a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics. What Jem called the Dewey Decimal System was school-wide by the end of my first year, so I had no chance to compare it with other teaching techniques. I could only look around me: Atticus and my uncle, who went to school at home, knew everything-at least what one did not the other did. Furthermore, I couldn't help noticing that my father had served for years in the state legislature, elected each time without opposition, innocent of the adjustments my teachers thought essential to the development of Good Citizenship. Jem, educated on a half-Decimal half-Duncecap basis, seemed to function effectively alone or in a group, but Jem was a poor example: no tutorial system devised by man could have stopped him from getting at books. As for me I knew nothing except what I gathered from Time magazine and reading everything I could lay my hands on at home, but as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me."
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