01 October 2016

A Worthy Read

With a little bit of, er, colorful language tossed in, but the main message is quite sound. This is good, solid common sense. His point here has really made a difference for me: focusing attention and efforts on items under my control or influence and refusing to live in perpetual anxiety over the bewildering (and ever growing!) array of things I cannot. It's not been an easy lesson, but it is an important one. 

I'd add that glory of the freedom we have as Christians is that we are not to seek to enforce anything on anyone. Seriously. We want rather by our experience of the freedom of being the children of God, loved with an eternal love in the Son, to coax and to invite others into the freedom we've tasted as the beloved children of God. What joy to be living in our heavenly Father's world and experiencing it as always urging us on toward its fulfillment, its telos! How we miss the whole point of Sabbath as stopping not to twiddle our thumbs, but to be present to the creation. To move outside ourselves and enjoy the goodness of creation that still cries out to us “Let us go to the Father!” A goodness that our sin has marred but has not and could never eliminate (we're not so strong as all that!). The heavens still declare the glory of God.

And as I read and pondered this post, I was also reminded of how C. S. Lewis eschewed the media of his day: the newspapers (do people still buy those???). He pointed out that they made him feel badly about situations he could not help, all the while distracting him from the neighbor beside him whom he could

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