Discernment

Plain Old Stuff

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It’s been a tough week for the Danster here at Cerulean Sanctum. Nearly every day has brought one bit of bad news after another. I’m having trouble concentrating as a result, and my typing has suffered considerably this week. I was typing notes from a transcription I was making and I think every other word was mistyped. 🙁

Sometime around 3:00 PM today I just cashed it in and took a nap. That didn’t seem to help much, so I walked around my property and prayed. That prayer consisted mostly of one word, Help! Such is the nature of my spiritual profundity right now.

With that in mind, I’ll instead resort to a few observations…

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This deal in the Southern Baptist Convention, especially the Missouri faction, reasserting their position that drinking alcohol is akin to sin, kind of riles me up—for a couple of reasons:

  1. Great Commission anyone? Feeding the poor? Healing the sick? You know, the stuff Jesus was primarily concerned with? Hello, SBC, aren’t those the real concern here?
  2. When Jesus turned water into wine, I find it hard to believe that the wedding master would question why the “good stuff” was held in reserve till the end if it wasn’t “real wine.” Honestly, Welch’s vs. Latour. Yeah, right, SBC. Check Psalm 104, too.

Of course, the Boar’s Head Tavern weighed in on this one and added the right amount of snark.

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After my impassioned plea for proper understanding of who’s responsible for kids as dumb as dirt, Julie Neidlinger at Lone Prairie Blog came to the defense of the smarts of rural kids, especially when questioned by West Coast city-slicker reporters who talk about “fly-over states.” Julie gives a nice defense.

Now I wish I could say that my county proved the point from my post the other day, but then they went and voted down a public library levy that would’ve added the crushing load of about $30 a year to the taxes of the average household in this county. And they killed it by a pretty fair margin, 56 percent to 44.

Heck, our libraries can barely buy books as it is considering the big state cuts. Used to be that having a library was an enormous source of civic pride for small, rural towns. Today, it seems asking some folks to go without smokes for a month to pay for books is tantamount to murder.

So much for learnin’.

Heck, bring on that Wal-Mart and casino! We deserve ’em both.

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In what it also a clear victory for the two ginormous Baptist megachurches in town, the ballot issue to allow the local sports bar to sell alcohol on Sundays failed by four votes.

I don’t know about you, but if Sunday’s supposed to be a day of rest mandated by God, what better day to enjoy an adult beverage? Honestly.

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In the aforementioned Wal-Mart news, I spent most of the week trying to gather info from local government sources only to wind up with two lines of minutes from the village meeting discussing the project, and a zoning document that claims the property is zoned for a business of a certain size. Otherwise, I’ve been pointed in a hundred different directions for everything else I requested.

I smell a conspiracy of silence! 😉

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Juxtaposition: Considering what just happened to the library levy, perhaps Wal-Mart will just forgo having a book section in the store, seeing as only a handful of brainiacs read them in this county.

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Did I mention it was a tough week?

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Prayer request: I have some friends in Missouri (there’s THAT state again) who are facing a serious threat to their business and means of making a living. Could you take some time to pray for them? Just ask God to bless Dan’s old friends and protect them and their business from harm.

Thanks.

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Been trying to live on a low-glycemic diet, but finding an adequate sugar substitute is tough. We use only pure honey here. Hey, if it was good enough for “The Land of Milk & Honey” it should be good enough for consumption. But no, say the low-glycemic gurus. They claim it’s worse than sugar at spiking one’s blood sugar levels.

Hmm.

Now the gurus also recommend artificial sweeteners which I believe are as close to being “the devil’s sugar” as is possible, so I spent a lot of time looking up healthy alternatives, and I’ve found some.

Sweet & Slender features the sweet extract of the Luo Han Guo fruit from China. It’s cool with the FDA (unlike another natural sweetener, Stevia) and, while not completely at zero on the glycemic index, is still a low-glycemic foodstuff with zero calories. Plus, the fruit has many positive bodily benefits. That scores with me and I’m going to buy some of this stuff and let you all know.

Xylitol is a natural birch bark derivative found most often in chewing gum. Erythritol, another sugar alcohol, is similar and may be even more effective. The cost on both of these is low. They also have some powerful anti-bacterial properties and may even reverse tooth decay. Both also pass with the FDA.

I’ve known about xylitol and most of the other “-itol” sugar alcohols for a long time, but erythritol and Luo Han Guo are new to me.

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And it’s now midnight, so my work is done. Have a great weekend.

The Loss of Imagination

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Ever drive by one of the new breed of churches and think, It’s just a big, ugly box ?

Ever wonder why what passes for Christian art in most Christian bookstores is only a step or two removed from velvet paintings of Elvis?

Ever wonder where the great contemporary Christian literature vanished to?

I think about that last one a lot. As a writer, I struggle with the dearth of avenues for Christian fiction that veers outside the mainstream. I recently wrote a story called “Killing Lilith” that deals with the crushing load of sexual guilt that many men carry. Not only does that story suffer from being brutally frank, but it’s a short story, a form of fiction that lies in a coma in secular realms, and has been dead, buried, and its grave trampled in Christian ones.

If you struggle with fasting, write short fiction for the Christian market. Just be wary of the tendency to starve to death. 😉

I hate to see loss of imagination triumph in the Church. I meet too many Christians who long ago relegated creativity to the devil. It saddens me to no end to encounter dull, lifeless children from Christian homes who have had the imagination beaten out of them, who if asked, “Tell me a story,” can’t dream up one. Somehow we’ve gone overboard in rooting out “vain imaginings” and removing any and all things that stem from our “deceitful hearts,” never questioning whether we have to throw our minds out altogether or if our imaginings and hearts can be redeemed.

So in our purges, I wonder if we’ve left Christianity a shell of what it’s supposed to be.

What should we think when God demands the finest craftsmen for His OT tabernacle and temples? That He asks that the lampstands around His altar be crafted in the likeness of almond branches and their blossoms? Or that He chooses men to write down His inspired words of Truth in a wealth of styles?

I can think of few things more appalling than ugly churches. I mean, if we’re going to spend millions on building a church building (and there’s an ethical question for you), what could be worse than spending all those millions on something that’s ugly as sin, an edifice glorifying mediocrity? Whatever happened to building that building to the glory of God and making it look like something honoring a supreme and majestic Lord?

And why so much bad art in Christian circles? It’s okay if Thelma Lou Posey makes a cross-stitch of the ubiquitous “Footprints” poem and sells it as a church auction, Fridtjof Schroder - 'The Pieta' - 1961but God forbid if some trained Christian artist creates a challenging oil painting and asks for support.

I wrote a couple weeks ago in my “100 Truths in 30 Years with Christ” post that we need to honor our artists and intellectuals as highly as we do our pastors and preachers. Are we? If we were, what then explains the stifled creativity that inhabits the Christian circle of influence? Why such lowest common denominator art and expression? Shouldn’t we be the ones who foster imagination and the creative spirit?

One of the most underappreciated aspects of us being made in the image of God is that God is a creator at heart. Therefore, so are we.

If we can’t evangelize that truth as much as some of the others we so readily support, we’ll wind up impoverished people. I can’t help but think that if the world saw that Christians led the arts again, they’d be more open to the Gospel.

Yet what would do they think when they encounter a huge multi-million dollar building of cinder block and corrugated metal passing itself off as a church? I know that I don’t immediately think, That’s where life, redemption, and joy happens.

It’s tough to be in the arts and know that few of your tribe value your work enough to pay you to do it. I’m struggling now to know what to do with the short story form, one that I enjoy writing but pays nothing. When I think of God demanding only the finest artisans for His works, I wonder how we got off base.

I wonder.

 

Update…

Additional links from previous Cerulean Sanctum posts on this issue:

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones on the Spirit, Love, and Mysticism

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Adrian Warnock posted an outstanding excerpt from D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, one of my favorite authors, detailing how Christ’s love through the Holy Spirit changes people and does so in a way the mystics of old understood, but we have discredited in large swaths of Evangelicalism.

There are, unfortunately, even many evangelical Christians who deny that God has any direct dealings with men today, and who hold feeling and emotion at a discount. They frequently substitute for true emotion a flabby sentimentalism. They are afraid of the power of the Holy Spirit, and so afraid of certain excesses which are sometimes found in mysticism and in certain people who claim to have unusual experiences of the Holy Spirit, that they ‘quench the Spirit’ and never have any personal knowledge of Christ. Indeed, they often go so far as to deny the possibility of such a knowledge….

(HT: Rick Ianniello)

As they say in the blogging biz, read the whole thing. It’s great stuff.

Considering that Lloyd-Jones said this decades ago only shows how entrenched the malaise has been. Even in a charismatic age, too many of our churches want to hold the Holy Spirit at arms length, fearful of how He might change us and draw us to a more intimate knowledge of Christ that is, dare I say it, mystical.

My question then is, how do we who believe as Lloyd-Jones does go about eliminating that fear in our churches of the Holy Spirit and of that deeper place of intimate, mystical love for Christ?