Unusual Thanksgiving Blessings

I have taken to sending Thanksgiving cards a few years ago. They tend to be noticed and not lost in the hustle and bustle of the Christmas season.
Following are two unusual “blessings” I came across while selecting cards for friends and family:

Thanksgiving…
When else would you celebrate
by giving your loved ones the bird
after they tell you to stuff it!

Let’s eat
until our butts
quiver
like cranberry sauce
out of a can.

I must confess that I did indeed use both of those cards,
Happy Thanksgiving.

Joy is not the same as Happiness

The other night a discussion lead to the above statement, and now this morning I read some additional thoughts on the subject in a little book by Henry Nouwen.
Nouwen toward the end of his essay spoke of gravitating toward the light which drives darkness away. He said:
Hope is more real than despair
Faith more real than distrust and
Love more real than fear.
Being able to recognize the spiritual reality from the shadow of darkness is not sentimentalism but truth.
Nouwen went on to describe a friend whose joy was contagious.
“The more I am with him, the more I catch glimpses of the sun shinning through the clouds.”
Knowing that there is a sun behind the clouds however is not sufficient in itself when darkness surrounds and colors all other aspects with its suffocating twilight.
Continuing the description of his friend Nouwen goes on to say that “while his friend always spoke of the sun I (Nouwen) keep speaking about the clouds, until one day I realized that it was the sun that allowed me to see the clouds.”
May we become messengers of hope, speaking of the sun while walking under the dark skies.

Consider This

Consider this from journey through willzhead blog

Please pray for Ted Haggard and his family -
Even if you do not agree with all of his politics, he is in the middle of a private hell that most of us cannot relate to. This is true whether the allegations are confirmed or not.
Don't rejoice with either outcome - I
find too many people, even some in the Church, hoping for one outcome or the other. Sadly, even my first reaction was to take sides. But love does not delight in evil. Period. If these allegations turn out to be true, how sad. If they are false, how sad. I pray we have the conviction to think this way.
Pray for Haggard's successor at the NAE -
While Ted Haggard is stepping aside from his church temporarily, it appears that he has resigned permanently from the National Association of Evangelicals. And, while I was not a fan of all his politics, Haggard was nonetheless a champion for the environment and human rights, and expressed openness on the issue of domestic partnership benefits for homosexuals. I fear a conservative backlash within the NAE to this incident, whatever the outcome.

Good stuff.

From a Desert Father:

Abba Mios was asked by a soldier whether God would forgive a sinner. After instructing him at some length, the old man asked him: Tell me, my beloved, if your cloak were torn, would you throw it away? Oh, no! he replied; I would mend it and wear it again. The old man said to him: Well, if you care for your cloak, will not God show mercy to his own creature?

Currently Reading

The Humor of Christ
Elton Trueblood

A bold challenge to the traditional stereotype of a somber, gloomy Christ. The Humor of Christ inspires Christians to redraw their pictures of Christ and to add a persistent biblical detail: the note of humor. (From the book covers)

Last Dance: Behind the Scenes at the Final Four
John Feinstein

Feinstein has long been a favorite sports writer since reading Season on the Brink. As a college basketball fan, I couldn’t help but check this book out from my local library. This book is a great look behind the scenes at the Final Four and is full of valuable insight and interesting side stories. Feinstein does a great job of really capturing the essence of the Final Four and the magnitude of the event from a coaches and players perspective blending a richness of the history and the event with the 2005 tournament.

A Primer on Postmodernism
Stanley J. Grenz

This has long been on my “need to read” list. Grenz does a great job at providing a background leading up to and a readable exposition of current postmodern thought. His book is written in such a way that those with little to no previous background knowledge of philosophy won't be lost. (Works for me.) An excellent introduction into postmodernism Grenz takes the reader historically into an understanding of the modern thinkers who have defined postmodernism in very readable terminology. Toward the end of the book Grenz contemplates similarities between the Christian faith and postmodernism and a response in presenting the message of Jesus.

The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality
Brian Greene

As a boy, Brian Greene read Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus and was transformed. Camus, in Greene's paraphrase, insisted that the hero triumphs "by relinquishing everything beyond immediate experience." After wrestling with this idea, however, Greene rejected Camus and realized that his true idols were physicists; scientists who struggled "to assess life and to experience the universe at all possible levels, not just those that happened to be accessible to our frail human senses." His driving question in The Fabric of the Cosmos, then, is fundamental: "What is reality?" Over sixteen chapters, he traces the evolving human understanding of the substrate of the universe, from classical physics to ten-dimensional M-Theory. (From Amazon.com review)

You are Accepted

Paul Tillich wrote about grace, “Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!” If that happens to us, we experience grace.”

What Kind of Christian Are You.

Sitting against a bare concrete wall amid the rubble of a construction site during break the other day, I was asked, “What Kind of Christian Are You?”
No malice or derision intended, just curiosity. Conversations ebb and flow on a construction job. Being a crew member resurrected from “long ago”, I am the validater of stories that are told of the old days when “Cave-Man Construction” really did almost everything physically. “We didn’t need no stinkin’ power tools.” I was there when “line-dancing” while singing with the Temptations while carrying 40 foot cages of beam steel, or the time Nick spun Randy (the boss) over his head – picture WWF helicopter drop, but I regress.
It seems that the radio was pronounced evil by a former Christian employee. Moreover, I even know most of the music played on the oldies station and can converse about movies, television and current culture.
Back to the topic, at hand, this former employee who Has grown increasingly legalistic from his high school through college and mow married life.
His hyper-legalism had caused my inquisitor to label him as a militant Christian.
Perhaps due to my less than legalist view of life and my utter lack of judgment or criticism of anyone’s language, music, life choices, lead my co-worker to lean forward from the wall, stare quizzically, and ask, “What kind of Christian are you?”
As to my answer, I thought and simply said, “I desire to be a follower of Jesus Christ, but often I have settled for being a Christian.”
Break was over, but I have been struggling with that statement for over a year. I do not want to settle for being a Christian. I don’t think Jesus did either.