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"For this must be my lot, to dream of a mysterious strength that will never find me. Never tug at my sails. I have been locked away in a cage of my own making and I shall never find the key."

Reality's Defense

"There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless. These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy begging for a few rupees, walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, "business as usual." But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.

...The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart. Meanwhile, the lot of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their defense, not God's that the self-righteous should rush."

The Life of Pi
–Yann Martel

Site Of The Day

Site Of The Day

Slippers

It's truly unfortunate that only crazy people can get away with wearing slippers out in public.

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This is going to be one intense year.

Facial Boredom

Do you ever get bored with your face? I get bored with my face.

I get bored with looking at the same person in the mirror all the time. Sometimes I make faces in the mirror just to spice things up a little. But it inevitably and irresistibly returns to the same old slack expression that was looking at me not 30 seconds earlier.

And to address the screaming truth, yes, this is a weird post.

Again, sorry if you were expecting more.

Phone Book?

Do people seriously still use phone books? There's about a trees worth of paper bagged in plastic sitting in front of my building promising to hold valuable information about my city, buried between a billion useless ads. Not that Google couldn't provide me with the same info in a fraction of the search time. Plus I don't even have to get up from my seat. Not to mention the fact that trees shan't suffer because of my search efforts.

Who's responsible for this? It really needs to stop.

Sorry this is my first post in months. You may have been expecting something more but...whatever.

The Twenty Dollar Peach

I was eating a peach today over my kitchen sink and noticed a brochure sent to me by World Vision International informing me of the widespread starvation taking place in Sudan right now. There was a picture of a little boy looking longingly towards me and my peach. I had to turn the brochure over in order to continue.

I like to think that I'm not choosing ignorance, apathy, or blindness in this scenario -if one can choose such things-but you never can tell really.

I think I'll send them $20.

News?

Please tell me there's something more news worthy happening in this world than Paris Hilton's temper tantrums in court.

Collateral Damage

It would seem, when God wages war on the ugly and dark things in our hearts, there's always collateral damage. That having been said, be careful what you pray for. God is more interested in the whole package, our wholistic health, than he is in the specific trial we may be facing in the moment.

Coming

Trust Jesus in the midst of these tempests. In the face of this onslaught.

Trust Jesus in this great blindness. You know that he sees you in spite of this darkness.

Wrench free with weary hands from a dry throat, with all power and resolve the words of hope, the voice of joy from your broken mind. In this scattered expanse you've not been lost. Not forgotten. Hope springs forth like a great cry, no sooner released from your lips it seems to roll down your cheeks backwards. Almost lost amidst the torrent, but not lost.

Trust Him as you once did. For these are the times your heart will grow in strength and wonder at this One who remains. Faithfully.

He will come. He will come.

Salvation

The center of salvation is the Cross of Jesus, and the reason it is so easy to obtain salvation is because it cost God so much. The Cross is the point where God and sinful man merge with a crash and the way to life is opened – but the crash is on the heart of God.

- Oswald Chambers

Technology

It was agreed upon last night over a PBR and chai that the direct effect of technology on humanity is the simultaneous creation of couch potatoes and terrorists.

Church Militant

"I do not assert nor have I ever asserted that every Christian must be a martyr, even though I think that every true Christian should - and here I include myself - make the humble admission that he has been let off far more easily than true Christians in the strictest sense. Without authority, Christianity now creeps around in worn-out, shabby clothes, and we do not know whether we should take our hats off to it in the name of progress, or whether it should bow to us, whether we need its compassion, or wether it needs ours."

-Kierkegaard

The Persuit of God

Taken from A.W. Tozer's "The Persuit of God"

"The idea of cultivation and excursion, so dear to the saints of old, has now no place in our total religious picture. It is too slow, too common. We now demand glamour and fast-flowing dramatic action. A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals. We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God. We read our chapters, have our short devotions and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer lately returned from afar.

The tragic results of this spirit are all about us: shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies, the preponderance of the element of fun in gospel meetings, the glorification of men, trust in religious externalities, quasi-religious fellowships, salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit. These and such as these are the symptoms of an evil disease, a deep and serious malady of the soul.

For this great sickness that is upon us no one person is responsible, and no Christian is wholly free from blame. We have all contributed directly or in directly, to this sad state of affairs. We have been too blind to see, or too timid to speak out, or too self-satisfied to desire anything better than the poor, average diet with which others appear satisfied. To put it differently, we have accepted one another's notions, copied one another's lives and made one another's experiences the model for our own. And for a generation the trend has been downward. Now we have reached a low place of sand and burnt wire grass and, worst of all, we have made the Word of Truth conform to our experience and accepted this low plane as the very pasture of the blessed.

It will require a determined heart and more than a little courage to wrench ourselves loose from the grip of our times and return to biblical ways. But it can be done. Every now and then in the past Christians have had to do it. History has recorded several large-scale returns led by such men as St. Francis, Martin Luther and George Fox. Unfortunately there seems to be no Luther or Fox on the horizon at present."