I read a lot. I read a lot because I’m doing a PhD in literature and because I’ve always loved books. Some books just grip you and others you learn to love (I’m hoping that’ll happen with my authors I’m focusing my PhD on - Charles Brockden Brown, Walt Whitman, James Fenimore Cooper, and Herman Melville). What have been some of the books you’ve loved and why?
The nature of blogging is often selfish - everyone reads about me or us. So, how are you? How have you experienced God’s grace in a small way today?
And…a poem:
Thy way, not mine, O Lord
However dark it be!
Lead me by Thine own hand;
Choose out the path for me.
Smooth let it be or rough,
It will be still the best;
Winding or straight it leads
Right onward to Thy rest,
I dare not choose my lot;
I would not, if I might;
Choose Thou for me, my God,
So shall I walk aright.
The kingdom that I seek is Thine;
So let the way
That leads to it be Thine,
Else I must surely stray.
Take Thou my cup,
And it with joy or sorrow fill,
As best to Thee may seem;
Choose Thou my good or ill.
Choose Thou for me my friends,
My sickness or my health;
Choose Thou my cares for me,
My poverty or wealth.
Not mine, not mine the choice,
In things or great or small;
Be Thou my Guide, my Strength,
My Wisdom, and my All.
–Horatius Bonar
So you will get a list of some complete sentences and some sentence fragments - because it’s late and my brain is frying (but not like that egg/drugs commercial - oh no, it’s starting, the crazy endless referents that happen late at night). Welcome to experience the ramblings of my brain …
- I jump from reading assignment to reading assignment - there is a pile of endless emigrant guides in the National Library and it feels like I’ll never get through enough for the papers I have to write for conferences in Jan and Feb
- my editorial assistantship never ends either - there’s always more formatting, more to revise, more checking and emailing; and I haven’t even started trying to do a preliminary index
- another thing that piles up: dishes
- oh and junk, lots of junk, stuff, books, trash, mail, scattered about the flat; I don’t know where a lot of things are to even put them away!
- tzatziki sauce is yummy - except for persistent garlic breath for a number of hours, or days …
- my toothbrush fell in the toilet this morning for about .01 seconds; didn’t know my reflexes were so fast in the morning; but also wondering how the heck it flipped out of my hand
- who and how have the same letters, but sound so different
- B and I had a date night at Starbucks; I splurged on a gingerbread latte (with real milk and cream!)
- still wishing and hoping and praying our flat will be fixed (now I’m thinking of that song from ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’ intro)
- things that I don’t like about being an adult: remembering after you’ve gone to bed at 1 am that you forgot to spin the laundry and you must get out of bed and fix it so your clothes are not moldy in the morning; sending nasty emails to the university about them sucking re: our flat; dishes; bills; money in general (not having any, loans, etc)
- hope i’m not sounding depressed, am just venting! 
(B after all, is much more busy than I am) I do like my life, study, being an adult and even having a dusty, dirty flat - but sometimes I wish it were a little less hectic - the problem is that doing a PhD, it never ends, not until graduation. At least we’re commanded to observe the Sabbath, otherwise I might go nuts!
- I will leave you with something I read today: (from an 1823 journal by W. Faux, an English farmer)
‘Whatever she [America] does is by instruction and foreign aid, without which she cannot advance. […] yet she possesses the boasting, vain-glorious egotism of all-knowing Europe, although of and in herself, knowing nothing’.
What I thought was most interesting about this is this sense of a lack of self-awareness attributed to a national consciousnes and that America is immediately contrasted with Europe; Europe is the seat of knowledge and America is the tabla rasa where those ideas are played out or imagined, but these ideas never actually take root within the nation’s landscape or people. There seems to be a lot of references in emigrant guides which point out the action and labour needed to make it as an immigrant in the States but paired with this is a fear of disappearing as emigrants enter the New World, of not knowing rather than knowing. So I’ll be reading some epistemology for all this!
Feel free to leave me your ramblings.
P.S. I’m teaching my first tutorial to 2nd year undergrads on Friday on Keats! Eek! Please pray!
I have upgraded our photo gallery so that you should be able to leave comments now (and there’s also an RSS feed, for the geeks). If you haven’t already noticed, there are some new pics there too.
I’ve also messed around with our blog template to try to accomodate those of you who are using Internet Explorer on Windows. Let me know if it still doesn’t look right, or, do yourself a favour and download Firefox.
O Lord, we bless you for truth, we bless you for not keeping yourself hidden from us but disclosing yourself to us in the works of your creation, in the events of your providence, and in the written disclosure given to us in Holy Scripture; and in all the self-revealing events which lie behind that Word of Holy Scripture. So we ask you, Lord, now as we continue to reflect that your Spirit would indwell our thinking, would preserve us from error, and enable us to see with clarity. Preserve us also, Lord, from intellectual laziness, from refusal to face questions, refusal to explore Scripture, refusal to synthesize what your word says to us. Deliver us from the willingness not to know, and help us, Lord, to pursue truth wherever we find it and wherever it leads, for the sake of your own glory in Jesus.
Amen.
I feel like it is almost pointless for me to respond to your comment, because your basic assumption is that all Christians should vote Republican. I don’t think that assumption is at all based on biblical reasoning, and so I don’t share it. (For the record, I think the appropriate thing for Christians to do in this election was to feel incredibly conflicted about voting for Bush…but since my absentee ballot just arrived today my opinion doesn’t make much difference now).
My comment on the election was very vague and certainly did not elicit the response you left. What I was intending to communicate was that this is a complicated matter. The number of Christians who simply assume that all Christians voted Bush is simply inexcusable.
First off, the argument that we should vote for Bush because he is a Christian is fundamentally flawed. It is not the responsibility of Christians to vote for Christians: it is the responsibility of Christians to vote for the candidate that will be most beneficial to Christians as they work towards fulfilling the Great Commission. It possible that a candidate would hold to a dispensational form of Christianity that would lead him to pursue certain policies in the Middle East in an effort to bring about Armageddon. Since dispensationalism is unbiblical, however, it would be the responsibility of Christians to vote against such a candidate. Along the same lines, it is not the responsibility of a Christian employer to hire Christians; some Christians, to the shame of all of us, are lazy and not good employees, particularly (it seems) when they know they work for a Christian. But the responsibility of the Christian employer is to run his business in such a way that it brings the most glory to God. Sometime hiring an unbeliever will produce a more beneficial result; and sometimes voting for a nonchristian is the more responsible option.
Secondly, when did I say anything about anyone being a liar or idiot? Of course it’s inappropriate to say such things about anyone, but why are you even bring it up now? On the other hand, however, just calling someone an idiot does not make that person unqualified for the presidency. Heck, I’ve called people idiots more than once or twice! I get the impression that you are just looking for an excuse to make Kerry (and democrats in general) look bad, and I don’t think that is acceptable. We often feel the temptation to make personal attacks on those with whom we disagree. This is not an appropriate Christian response, however. We can certainly disagree with people, but we are not to devalue their worth as a person, nor are we to exalt our own worth over theirs.
Thirdly, you say that Bush ‘will try to unite’ because he is a Christian. It really is not a simple as that. I hope this statement is not so obvious that it is insulting, but Christians don’t always do the right thing. We continue to sin, and so the fact that Bush is a Christian does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that he will try to unite. For one thing, his track record does not indicate that he will make an effort to bring unity. I know you will say that there were a number of nations that supported the U.S. in the Iraq war. While this is certainly true, the simple fact is that the U.S. did not have the support of the UN, and withdrew its motion rather than have it voted down. While the UN is not the infallible judge of international affairs, it is the recognized body for overseeing the type of war that the US undertook. The international perception is the Bush doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. Whether or not this is true is beside the point; it is what people think, and it must be addressed. Americans have the reputation for being ethnocentric, and it is not entirely unjustified. For another thing, I did not pin the blame for national and international division solely on Bush. Of course Kerry and other democrats are to blame, and so are other countries. This is not all Bush’s fault. But he is the President of the most powerful country in the world, and so he has both the responsibility and the ability to do a lot of things that others don’t. Do you want to sit around and point fingers, or do you think it might be better to actually do something positive? How many times as I was growing up did you tell me to be part of the solution, not the problem?
Fourthly, you say maybe my hope ‘ought to be that those who lost the election might try a little harder to understand the values of the nearly 60 million voters who supported the President’. There are so many problems with this statement that I don’t really know where to begin. Again, I’m not saying that Bush has the sole responsibility to make everything right. But he is the President; a little well displayed, sincere humility on his part would go a long way about now. The fact that nearly 60 million people voted for Bush does not make everyone else wrong. Nor does it make everyone else stupid. Of course you must realize that not everyone who voted for Bush did so for the same reason. I think the fact that Bush won the election says more about Kerry’s utter incompetence than it does about the nation’s support for Bush. It is utterly ridiculous to say that the nearly 60 million people who voted for Bush did so because of a shared set of values. I would suspect that a lot of people voted against Kerry, rather than for Bush. I also have serious problems with saying that because a large number of people did something, even it they all DID do it for the same reason, that it is obviously right. It’s simply not the case. Thousands of people see really bad movies every week. Tons of people drive really ugly cars. More people listen to music you can’t stand than listen to music you would own. And, most of all, millions of people are not Christians. In each of these cases I’m sure you would say, with varying degrees of certainty and seriousness, that the majority of people are in the wrong. Also, along the lines of your own statement, perhaps you should try to understand the values of the nearly 55 million people who voted for the loser. Many people voted for Kerry for very good reasons. I hope you can at least acknowledge that.
Again, I seriously doubt that what I have briefly said here has changed your opinion. However, my fundamental concern is to think Christianly about everything I encounter, and to try to help others do the same. I think it is unacceptable to equate evangelical Christianity with being a Republican. Being a Christian means being concerned for the poor; it means caring for the environment, God’s creation, with which we have been entrusted as stewards (and for which we will one day be called to account); it means pursuing peace; it means being completely honest about what we know and being able to admit it when the evidence in inconclusive; it means respecting human rights in EVERY situation. On some of these issues (and I said SOME, so don’t freak out) the Republican Party does not have a stellar record. The Democratic Party doesn’t have a great record on a number of issues that are important to Christians either. This is why voting is not a black and white issue. But in each instance we are called to evaluate the circumstances and make the decision that is most glorifying to God. Simple voting Republican on every issue is not the appropriate thing to do. God gave us intellects because he expects us to use them for his glory.
…probably about as well as can be expected. I stayed up until 3am refreshing CNN.com, watching the results come in until I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore. I suppose I’m glad Bush won. I’m really just happy that the election is over. I hope Bush will actively work to bring unity to the country and heal international relationships. I think that will be the real task and test in the next few months.
In other news…it’s really busy around here. Ash is working on her PhD like a star, spending hours on end at the library, and preparing to teach her first tutorial. I have an essay due in church history a week from Tuesday, and I’m also preaching at my school the same day, and then I’m preaching the following Sunday at our church. The good thing is that my research for the church history essay overlaps with my dissertation, which I haven’t started yet.
Thanks to everyone who commented on the ‘why do people object to Christianity’ post, I appreciate it. I may post a compilation of the list when I get around to it.
I think that’s about all that’s going down in our neck of the woods. OH, by the way, bleaching your hair in this country is a pain. No one knows how to deal with it. I don’t think I’ll do it again.
I’m gonna get in on the latest rage and leave you with a brief questionaire:
1) How often do you visit our blog?
2) What 1 book do you think everyone should read? *edit: excluding the Bible, which is a given*
3) Would you ever live in another country? If so,why, and which one?
4) True or false: people are poor as a result of their own decisions?
5) Tea or coffee?
6) Haggis: try it, or avoid it like the plague?
As promised, here are some pictures from the Halloween party. Enjoy.
Andrew (Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde) and Kay (a Goth, I think):
Jonathan (not really sure) and Sarah (dead school girl):
David (a Canadian, I guess):
Neyre (Betty Rubble) and some dude with sweet hair:
Scott (death, or something), Lori (wicked witch), and Sarah:
Me (Billy Idol, but also bearing a remarkable resemblance to my brother, strangely) and Ashley (hot 80’s chick):
I bleached my hair, if you haven’t already heard.