outWORD by Matte Downey

William Blake's illustration of Job 40:15 Image from wikipedia.org These days I am spending a lot of time in the book of Job. It is not as depressing as it sounds. There is a compelling story, a cast of interesting characters, a lot of impassioned and honest dialogue, some amazing poetry on the subject of creation, and a good number of philosophical and theological questions to ponder. Readers of Job looking for solutions to the problem of suffering or seeking to justify God's goodness in the face of unexplained tragedy are inevitably disappointed. This is not a book of answers; it is a drama. And it is a good one. I don't know about you, but if I were to read a book or watch a movie about someone whose life was easy and everything worked out well, time after time, I would toss that boring book in the corner after the first chapter or two, and I would walk out of that trite, simplistic movie. Because life is hard, we know it is, and a story with nothing but innocence a...

I just finished an online spiritual formation course. The final assignment was a creative project based on some concepts we studied over the last 4 weeks. Usually, ideas line up in my brain and eagerly pepper me with scenarios for possible projects. But this week, much to my dismay, everything was silent. On Saturday, I tried to put some ideas down on paper, but after three attempts to come up with something creative (all of them whined about the fact that I was uninspired), I stopped. What do you do when you lack inspiration? Everything seems deflated and limp, void of life. Words fall flat - monotone and without meaning. Music becomes mechanical. I abandoned another idea mid-sentence and scribbled two words beneath the mess: phone book. My lack of inspiration was reminding me of a saying. When something does not hold our interest, we say that it is about as exciting as reading the phone book. On the other hand, it is also said of someone who has great charisma that they can read the ...

I used to think that life was hills and valleys - you go through a dark time, then you go to the mountaintop, back and forth. I don't believe that anymore. Rather than life being hills and valleys, I believe that it's kind of like two rails on a railroad track, and at all times you have something good and something bad in your life.. No matter how good things are in your life, there is always something bad that needs to be worked on. And no matter how bad things are in your life, there is always something good you can thank God for. - Rick Warren Someone sent me a Rick Warren interview just over a week ago and as I have been thinking about this excerpt, I have found that there is much truth in it. I do tend to see things quite black and white, good and bad for the most part, and that means I miss much of the richness and depth of the multi-dimensional life we live, not to mention the accompanying mystery and beauty of it! For example, I know that I am sometimes easily influenc...

Dean and I were watching Mythbusters on Monday night. He had just come home from a business trip, so we talked, ate, and chilled on the couch and had the TV on while we were doing so. It was an entire episode dedicated to seeing if there was any merit to the theory that the landing on the moon had been faked. Pictures and videos of the landing were analysed and the common so-called discrepancies were tested. Two of the tests they featured caught my attention. One was the claim that the American flag that was planted on the moon is seen to be waving in the breeze in a video and the reasoning is that in the vacuum of the moon, this should not be possible. The other one was that in a picture taken of an astronaut climbing down from the lunar module, he is in the shadow of the space vehicle and yet he is quite brightly lit, leading some to claim that this was a staged photo with a second light source. They tested the first theory by swiveling a flag (as if planting it in the ground) in ...