so english isn't my language

it has also been recently been pointed out that english isn't my language....

Matching clothes...

My girlfriend tells me I can’t my feet together. It’s a painful truth, but I just plain don’t know how to match nothin’ I guess. For example I went up to visit her in Portland two weeks ago and I wore a green t-shirt with a tan dress shirt over it with blue jeans and some sneakers. She waited until the next day and subtly told me that I didn’t match the day before. Honestly, I thought I was stylin’. On Sunday I thought I would push my luck and wear a similar outfit, another green t-shirt and the tan dress shirt. After church on the way to lunch one of my buddies tells me I don’t know how to dress and decides he’s going to take me on has his new style project. This is hilarious to me. I guess I will always be an engineer no matter how hard I try. Personally, I still think the outfit wasn’t lookin’ so bad.

Identity in ministry?

This past week was a bit discouraging. I debated not writing about it, fearing that some of the college students at our church might read it, but I guess it will be a good lesson in the imperfection of humans. Here we go.

I put a lot of time and effort in arranging something recently in the ministry God has placed me in. By all human measurements, it failed rottenly. I found myself struggling with basing my identity in my performance in ministry. I know that I shouldn’t base my identity or feeling God’s ‘approval’ in how well I am doing, but still when I fail, it’s not a good feeling and the temptation to believe that God is disappointed in me because I failed is real. In retrospect, I’m glad when God lets me fail on some level because I think it helps me re-evaluate what I’m really thinking, not what I think I’m thinking. It caused me to really deal with how God views me when I fail.

To which I must agree in asking, "Is this one for the people? Or is this one for the Lord? Do I simply serenade the things I must afford?"

modern scholars

It has finally turned fall here in Lexington. I’m sad to say that I’m actually kind of glad that it is here. School is going well, I’m reading a lot of commentaries and trying to decide how to best deal with all the modern scholarship against the traditional writers of the NT. I don’t agree with modern scholars, and frankly I’m not really convinced by their case but I have to wonder how I’m going to deal with it. How do you approach a bunch of Christians that don’t think that the people claiming to have written the NT aren’t really the writers? If the writers don’t have the integrity to be honest in who’s writing them (writingin the sense of dictating or directly writing the letter), then why in the world would we take them as a credible source? I think the answer is that a lot of modern scholars while acting like they still would keep the credibility if the author was other than asserted in the letter, really want to use it as a basis for throwing out whatever they decide they don’t like, something that rubs against the culturally accepted values. It’s odd to me because I think most Christians (outside of these ‘great’ scholars) would agree that the Bible is always counter-cultural. That’s what being the Bible means! If it didn’t rub the cat the wrong way so to speak, then what value would it be? Would it be valuable to tell us, “Hey you’re doing everything right, don’t bother reading!”

fixing...

I have no idea what to write about so I’ll talk about what God’s teaching me. He’s teaching me to be thankful for what he’s given me. I can see this in the convictions I’ve felt lately. I’m by nature a fixer. I fix things. Whatever it may be from relationships to electronics to church systems to whatever, I just have a tendency to see the problems, address them and move on. The down side is that I have a tendency to see all the problems and get frustrated with them. It definitely can burn people around me as well as burn myself if I don’t take time to focus on the good, thus the lesson I’m learning. It’s like I’m being shown how to fix the fixing fixation!