(This post is a cut and paste from my Friday night sermon notes, but I'm sure you can piece it together.)
It's a fundamental mistake to think that life is about achievement and accomplishment. It's not. Life (as our Creator intends it) is primarily about
becoming. The journey through life is not primarily about where you go, or even what you do; the journey through life is mainly about what you
become.
Today I came across this in
The Week:
Mike Tyson has been humbled by life, said Ivan Solotaroff in Details. The former boxing champ—known for his savage brutality in the ring and his destructive behavior away from it—feels real remorse for the way he's behaved over the years, from his 1992 sexual-assault conviction to biting off a chunk of another boxer's ear in 1997. "Objectively, I'm a pig," says Tyson. "The first stage of my life was just a whole bunch of selfishness. I thought I was a god. Now I'm 44 and I realize my whole life is just a f---ing waste." Ruled by rage for most of his life, Tyson was finally broken last year when his 4-year-old daughter, Exodus, died after inadvertently becoming tangled in an exercise cord dangling from a treadmill. "If you're not humble, life will visit humbleness upon you," he says. "After I lost my daughter, all these people reached out and I realized: I just want to be of service to people. I need to help. I need to have something, finally, that I can offer to people in this world. I’m a really damaged human being and it's still such a struggle, but I'm going to fight to the end this time. I'm just trying to be a man."
Here is the 4th of July prayer we offered in church today.
Father God, Creator of heaven and earth—
You have made all the peoples of the earth for your pleasure,
You have appointed the nations of the world for your glory.
As a people who in faith have pledged allegiance to our Lord Jesus Christ,
We pray today for the nation in which we dwell.
Because I cannot leave well enough alone and lack the sense to let sleeping dogs lie,
I post this prayer from a modern day prophet.
I have drafted a statement which explains the friendship and cooperation I have with Ahmed El-Sherif (an Arab-American Muslim) and Samuel Nachum (an Israeli-American Jew) as we work together in the
Let The Children Play for Peace project. It goes like this:
Here is a brief reflection on the final episode of LOST.
I'm a late-comer to the Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn, but I'm making up for lost time. I love his work. I've been listening to his
Dweller By A Dark Stream over and over. It's a beautiful love song to Jesus that gets so much right. This little song has a ton of good theology on atonement, incarnation and eschatology. Not bad for a song! Check it out.
A one quote blog worthy of much meditation.
"The first precondition of being called a spiritual leader is to perceive and feel the falsehood that is prevailing in society, and then to dedicate one's life to a struggle against that falsehood. If one tolerates the falsehood and resigns oneself to it, one can never become a prophet. If one cannot rise above material life, one cannot even become a citizen in the Kingdom of the Spirit, far less a leader of others." —Vladimir Solovyov regarding Fyodor Dostoevsky
Now think.
Now pray.
Now rise.
Forsake falsehood.
Abandon Babylon.
BZ
PS: Recommended music:
The True False Identity by T-Bone Burnett
