Skip to main content

feed me

I am getting used to being somewhat perpetually tired and hungry, at least Monday to Friday. It is good for me. It puts things in another perspective. Some ugly thing called worry wants me to believe that there is never enough time, but I know that there will always be just the right amount of time each day to be the person I am to be and do the things that God sees as important right now. And there always is. God can be trusted regarding time. Seeing that play out every day is like witnessing the miracle of sunrise over and over again; no matter how many times I experience it, it still takes my breath away and extracts a sigh of gratefulness and wonder.

The other impulse I have the joy of engaging and seeking to get some self-control over is the one that raises its horny head when my reserves are down. When missing the recommended amount of food and sleep, the needy devil starts to scream for all kinds of soul fast food to satiate its selfish appetite. It wants attention lavished on it and looks at others as competitors in this arena. It wants to be served and coddled and fed flattery one juicy tidbit at a time. It wants presents and adulation and admiring looks and to be desired. It wants to be the one to say no instead of having no said to it and can throw a hissy fit if it senses rejection in any form coming its way - it can even project rejection being tossed its way where there is none! It wants someone to read its mind and make sure it never lacks for anything. It wants the universe to revolve around it and pouts if that is not happening. All the secret fears and wants that I get so good at keeping under the surface can no longer hide. They come out in my dreams, my emotions, my actions, and my words. And that is a good thing.

Let me starve out the selfish parts of my soul and feed the generous, loving, trusting, submissive, strong, and hopeful bits. This is the strategy for overcoming my worst enemy - my unruly self.

Here is a picture of the most amazing stir fry I made last night right next to the reading I still have to do this weekend.

Comments

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

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.’   Consider but a sampling o

comedic timing

Comic by Joel Micah Harris at xkcd.com One of my favourite jokes goes like this: Knock, knock. Who's there? Interrupting cow Interrupting cow w--- Moooooooo!! Timing is important in both drama and comedy. A well-paced story draws the audience in and helps it invest in the characters, while a tale too hastily told or too long drawn out will fail to engage anyone. Surprise - something which interrupts the expected - is a creative use of timing and integral to any good story. If someone is reading a novel and everything unfolds in a predictable manner, they will probably wonder why they bothered reading the book. And so it is in life. Having life be predictable all of the time is not as calming as it sounds. We love surprises, especially good surprises like birthday parties, gifts, marriage proposals, and finding something that we thought was lost. Surprises are an important part of humour. A good joke is funny because it goes to a place you didn't expect it to go. Sim