Skip to main content

my habitat and me



I am listening to my bug zapper doing its work outside as I write this. We have a lot of mosquitoes in our yard due to being on the edge of a bush and having some standing water to the rear of our property. Some thoughtful friends gave Dean a bug zapper for his birthday and we installed it today.

The world is a friendly place at times for us humans, but at other times, it seems rather hostile and we must protect ourselves from it. Shelter is one of the primary needs of people in intemperate climates and we spend most of our income on our elaborate shelters. I am spending a month improving my shelter because we deem it a worthy investment.

What does God deem a worthy investment? What does he choose to spend himself on? Jesus spent himself on mankind, not because mankind is the central figure of history and had to be redeemed in order for the story to end well, but because God IS and his character will always shine through, no matter how we distort it or mar our godly image. God so loved the world not because we are lovable but because HE IS LOVE. He is building HIS kingdom, not merely a shelter for humanity.

I was reading some posts on a religion forum today and both atheists and religious people assumed that this world was created or evolved in order to accommodate mankind and his needs. How arrogant and Adamic of us to think that this world was and is here now in order to make things work out better for us. Let me never forget who the main character is in my story - the ONE whose character is at the foundation of the world.

This is my arm after a bout of sanding and a quick hand wash.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Names of God

The Hebrew word "YHWH" (read from right to left) This past Sunday I gave a talk on the Names of God, the beginning of a series on this topic. This first talk was to be a gentle introduction so I thought it wouldn't take too many hours of preparation. Well, I quickly discovered that the research is almost bottomless; every time I thought I had a somewhat definitive list of names, I found another source which added a few more or gave a different twist on some of the names I had already come across. After several hours I was getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data (and that was only looking at the Hebrew Bible). I wondered how I could present this to people in an orderly and accessible fashion and within a reasonable time frame. Not everyone is up for a 3-hour lecture crammed full of detail on a Sunday morning. So I took a break and spent a bit of time meditating on this problem and asking the Spirit for guidance. And then I thought that being overwhelmed by Go...
3 comments
Read more

Esther's protest

I have been hesitant to write anything here pertaining to the student protests in Montreal, partly because I didn't believe I had any solutions to offer and partly because I just wanted to stay out of the controversial mess it has become.  Besides, I have studying to do.  But this weekend, something changed.  I read the book of Esther. First, some background:  the unrest started early in the year when a group of students decided to protest the tuition hikes proposed by the Quebec government ($325 a year for the next 5 years).  Seeing that tuition rates have been frozen for almost ten years, it seemed reasonable to the government to increase them to reflect rising costs.  This did not sit well with some students, and they organised an ongoing protest in which students were encouraged to boycott classes and refuse to hand in assignments.  It has now grown into a movement which has staged several organise...
9 comments
Read more

it's a mad mad mad world (of theology)

The mad dash for the end of term has begun.  I have finished all my required readings and have jumped into research reading.  One of my papers is on the madness of theology (the correlation seems more obvious to some of us than to others).  Truly inspiring stuff, I am finding.  Let me share a few quotes here: There is a certain madness in Christianity – in a desert God who is jealous and passionate, in a saviour who speaks in apocalyptic terms, in a life of sacrificial love, in the scandal of particularity.   In principle, a confessional theology should bear the mark of this madness, but the mark or wound must constantly be renewed. - Walter Lowe, "Postmodern Theology" in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology , 2007.   “In the Scriptures the odd phenomena constituting the ‘Kingdom of God’ are the offspring of the shock that is delivered by the name of God to what is there called the ‘world,’ resulting in what I call a ‘sacred anarchy.’   C...
10 comments
Read more