Life and Stuff

Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

The most recent sunset picture, taken from the front sidewalk, since the sunset has now moved too far south to be seen clearly from the porch.

Despite my best efforts, I'm not getting to the 'new post' page nearly as often as I'd like.  So a little bit of catching up...

This was the first real week of moving stuff from our current church building, where we've been since 2003, to the new building ...a 50-year-old retired high school.  We cleaned out the attic storage, some closets, the high bay construction area...anything that isn't going to be actively needed for ministry in the next three months.   We have to be out of the building...which has been sold to a church who has been setting up and tearing down in a local high school every week and is READY to have a building...on Feb 1.  But our new sanctuary won't be ready until May.  So we'll add an extra service and have four every Sunday in the theater...which is only about 17 years old and in great shape but only seats 750.

The decision has just been made to move the offices on December 15, so we can have a decent Christmas rest and then spend January basically cleaning out the rest of the building.  I've no idea what that last service is going to look like.  It's going to be bittersweet but we outgrew that building, like, three times and just kept making extension campuses to hold the overflow.

So I'll be packing up my office pretty soon...bringing home my personal stuff and generally getting the rest ready to haul.

Because that first bit of December is kind of up in the air for us.

My Sweet Babboo has had some off and on health issues for a very long time.  For the last year, it's been more on than off and he finally got sent to a specialist who did a CT scan and found a bronciogenic (the spell check doesn't recognize that and I'm too lazy to google it again; the spelling's close) cyst between his windpipe and the upper lobe of his right lung.  It's a birth defect.  He's had it his whole life...which could be the explanation for a lot of things.  The cyst itself is not a dangerous thing, but they can grow/turn into other stuff so the medical protocol is to remove them.  But it's too deep for laparoscopic surgery so...full on cut-through-back-muscles surgery that the dr says will have him in the hospital for threeish days and out of work for likely a month, although he can work from home as he feels up to it.  That will be just before Thanksgiving.  I'll likely be working from home as well, just to be around if needed for the first couple of weeks or so.  So I'm not sure how much packing I dare leave until after the surgery. Or how much Christmas shopping.  Or any other thing that requires time and attention.

Needless to say, our plans to travel to Indiana for Christmas have changed, although the kids might still make the trip to spend the holiday with their grandparents.   So anyway you look at it, this is going to be a ...unique...holiday season.

Gonna be tough to get everything in the Annual Christmas Epistle, I think...

'Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the LORD's great love, we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail.  They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness...the LORD is good to those whose hope is in him...'  -- Lamentations 3:21-23, 25a  NIV84

The Christian Message

Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

I stumbled across a linked up post on social media in the last week or so that has had my stomach churning.  I haven't been able to focus on writing a blog post because I wanted so much to answer the accusations made, but I didn't trust myself to do so coherently.  I still may not make a good pass at it, but I've waited about as long as I can wait.  I don't like to go too long without some kind of post and since this is the thing that has had me stewing, sigh, I'm gonna have to address it.

It would be tedious to track it down again;  but the gist of the post was that Evangelic Christianity is not authentic Christianity but is, in fact, toxic, and should be destroyed.  But what I could not understand is that the author was not rejecting the idea of following Jesus but just the message of sinful mankind requiring a savior.  I don't have a clue what the author thought of the Bible; I can't for the life of me imagine how anyone could make a consistent Biblical argument against what is basically the meta-narrative of the entire collection of 66 books.

But, Barna tells us that a shockingly small percentage of folks actually claim to believe the Bible is, in the words of the Statement of Faith that we repeated over and over again in Friends and Girls Only clubs, 'the inspired and only infallible and authoritative written word of God'.

This is where I get totally flummoxed.  I can understand someone not agreeing with the doctrines of Christianity...that is, after all, the freedom of choice.  But what I don't get is someone who wants to be a Christ-follower while rejecting the very documentation that provides the foundation for the faith. That simply does not make sense. If one rejects the authority of the Bible...what is left upon which to base one's faith? 

Not much.  Without the Bible, there really is no Christianity.  So to reject the Bible, but yet claim to be Christian...doesn't make sense.

The Christian Message...that Adam and Eve chose disobedience and passed that inclination down to all their offspring, rendering human kind unable to enter the presence of God (an aside...can you take darkness into light?  What happens to the darkness when the light comes on?  Likewise a person cannot come into the presence of God with unrepented, unatoned sin..because sin cannot coexist with the holiness of God.)  Because God loves the humans that He created, He himself became a human, to live the sinless life that we could not live and pay the wages sin demands so that people could receive His righteousness in place of sin and so be able to live in His presence.  He works in those who do so to transform their thoughts, desires and behaviors so they conform to Him.  In the end, the eternal spirit of each person will dwell with God if they have allowed him to remove their sin and follow Him as Lord ...or ...elsewhere...if they did not.

Of course, there's lots of details I've left out for the sake of brevity, and I'm not going into the weeds of one one denomination or another believes regarding those details, but in a nutshell...that's the Evangelic Christian message.  I won't deny that there are many folks who have taken the message and twisted it and used it to advance their own agendas, or that those folks haven't managed to all but obliterate the purity of the Gospel at times.  But the message of the Gospel...that God loves people and desires to walk in relationship with them...is one of love and hope.

The idea of destroying a message of hope and love...that, to me, sounds toxic.

Sigh.  I don't feel like I've really expressed what I wanted to express. But maybe it's a start.