Blogging?
“Better to write for yourself and have no public,
than to write for the public and have no self.”
Cyril Connolly
Making Ripples
I don’t want the “same old”, do you? We’ve got one shot at this deal, so I want to live with passion. I want to live with a sense of purpose… Wasn’t it Braveheart’s William Wallace who said, “All men die. Very few ever really live.”
What an encouraging book! I read this yesterday (it’s quite short, a lovely wee book if your looking for something to give away as a gift). Mike Breaux, who is now a teaching pastor at Willow Creek Community Church, basically just shares his story of faith, his journey in following Jesus. He talks about how he wandered as a teen, really just played at church without knowing Jesus. He shares openly about how he grew tired of his double-life, and wanted what he saw in some other people, a genuine real-ness.
When people reflect on their lives in their old age and are asked, “What would you change if you had to live all over again?” there are three common themes that come out:
- They would reflect more. Slow down, savour more sunsets, eat more ice cream, laugh more.
- They would risk more. Take more chances. Go on more adventures. Live life out on a limb.
- They would do something with their lives that would live on long after their dead and gone.
Here’s a short passage from near the end of the book, which I love:
I wonder how you get into a swimming pool. Any chance you might be a toe dipper? You stick your big toe in and you go, “Wooooo, that is cold!” And then your ankles, woooo, thats cold! Then your calves, wooo; your knees, wooo; your thighs, wooo! It’s miserable!
You know what’s really the best way to do it, don’t you? Cannonball!! You take a running start, tuck up your knees, hit the pool, and water goes flying everywhere! The ripples go out, hit the side, and come back in. They go back out and they come back in….
I think that’s what God had in mind for us. He’s saying, “Trust me – jump! Make a splash with your one and only life, and we can make ripples together. Live your life in such a way that you touch someone else’s life.
I love that passage. I think I identify with it because when I go to the beach, I play this little game I call chicken. We’ll just close our eyes and run straight into the water and keep going until the coldness stops us. None of this toe-dipping business! But what am I like when it comes to relationships? I’m 100% sure I don’t play chicken with my relationships… am I just a toe-dipper there? That’s the challenge for me.
And that’s the challenge for you, too.
Silence Is Crummy
Hey, church, what’s it gonna take?
Does Jesus himself have to make a special guest appearance, point at Africa and shout, “Yo, a little help over here?!” before you realise it’s unquestionably your responsibility to do something significant to stem the tide of the AIDS pandemic there?
I read this from an article in a book I’m currently reading, The aWake Project. That cuts me to the bone. What’s it going to take before we act on this? How long before we understand that it’s us who have to stand up and shout, make a difference on behalf of those who have no voice?
“You speak of signs and wonders
But I need something other
I would believe if I was able
But I’m waiting on the crumbs from your table”
Our Greatest Fear
Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate,
but that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant,
gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
[Marianne Williamson]
At War
“You are dizzyingly busy, yet continually find yourself looking over your shoulder. There isn’t a moment that you completely relax, every moment fighting a war inside, simultaneously wanting to bump into him and wanting to avoid him at all costs.”
This is how I feel.
Those lemmings the literalists!
“All translation is inherently mistranslation. The particular genuis of a language cannot be carried over into another. By this criteron every translation is an adulteration of the original, a watering down, a reduction. And if the language being translated is the word of God, and translation by its very nature is falsification, then we’d better not do it.
Oh?
Preference for the literal has a long life. But I have come to believe that it is an unthinking preference. My experience… cautions me that the peril of the literal is that it ignores the inherent ambiguities in all language, takes the source language prisoner and force-marches it, shackled and chained, into an English that nobody living speaks. The language is lobotomized – the very quality that gives language it’s genuis, it’s capacity to reveal what we otherwise would not know, is excised.”
An excerpt from Eat This Book, by Eugene Peterson.
(Interested in the title of this post? It is a quote by Luther, grandfather of reformation translators. Not what you expected, eh?!)
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