Tuesday, December 13, 2005

in search of nothing

I've spoken about the need to engage in solitude before here, but even if you felt the urge to do so, would you know a place where you could hope to find true quiet? Do such places exist in our locale that don't require an hour-long commute each way? Funny you should ask. Have a look at this link: http://solitudehub.blogspot.com/


"Peace, be still"

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

The Balance of Life

Today I read this article http://www.slate.com/id/2129883/?GT1=7428 on msn.com about a writer named Marjorie Williams who died this past January of liver cancer. This article is something you should read because within it’s sentences I see a parallel of our own Christian life, and more specifically a balance of how our lives should be in the world but not of the world. Meghan O’Rourke writes that Marjorie Williams is a “journalist that made feminism matter.” She describes Marjorie as a woman who brought feminism back to the center, who packed real life struggles and emotions into the daily decisions and hardships of life into her writing.

“The aim to achieve true equality at home was harder than it looked. Working moms were always going to feel torn between the playroom and the laptop, and there were no homiletic answers. There was only the truth, in her case, that "the complexity of doing right by those you love" is tougher than being a brain surgeon. You can't get it right.” As Christians, we have this dichotomy within our hearts of sinful nature and desiring to serve and honour a righteous king. We don’t have this simply laid out plan that we can follow every minute of the day and lay out with every suffering that comes into life. Decisions have to be made and our desire is that they bring us deeper into intimacy with Christ. Every decision has consequence and our ultimate goal is to honour God and we aspire to make decisions that emulate Christ and show His love, and what it looks like to love like Him. So, though Marjorie bases her truth on the love of her family, we base our truth on the love of a saviour.

I want to be a person who makes Christianity matter here. I’m not going to get everything right, and I will always make mistakes, but realizing that life’s decisions are difficult and have consequence to those around me, is so important to understand. We can’t run so far from the "line" that we disengage from those who don’t know Christ and for that matter don’t understand why we live the way we do. We also can’t become so a part of this world that we are no longer any different. God brings order to the world, and so, as his children, we also need to strive to have order in truth that we live and understand.