Category: Warnings

Greatness by Consistency.

The Key to True Greatness is NOT normally achieved by doing great things well now and then or before the eyes of man but, rather, by doing ordinary things excellently, day-in and day-out, especially when no one (human) is watching. (Epiphany to me, DKB.)

“Gilded with Goodbyes…”

“Every moment of every day is ‘gilded with goodbyes,’ per Frederick Buechner. It may sound somber to say that you’re experiencing everything for the last time, but this perspective makes every moment a holy moment…if you want to ‘win the day,’ you’ve got to live like it’s the first day and the last day of your life.” Mark Batterson, Win the Day, pg. 150.

The Power of a God-word…

“Prophets use words to remake the world. The world—heaven and earth, men and women, animals and birds—was made in the first place by God’s Word. Prophets, arriving on the scene and finding that world in ruins, finding a world of moral rubble and spiritual disorder, take up the work of words, again to rebuild what human disobedience and mistrust demolished. These prophets learn their speech from God. Their words are God-grounded, God-energized, God-passionate. As their words enter the language of our communities, men and women find themselves in the presence of God, who enters the mess of human sin to rebuke and renew.

“Left to ourselves, we turn God into an object, something we can deal with, some thing we can use to our benefit, whether that thing is a feeling or an idea or an image. Prophets scorn all such stuff (really, it’s pursuing false comforts, ‘wanting-it-all’ [like Lucifer], AKA idolatry). They train us (instead) to respond to God’s presence and voice (through repentance and regeneration).

“Micah, the final member of that powerful quartet of writing prophets who burst on the world scene in the eighth century B.C. (Isaiah, Hosea, and Amos were the others), like virtually all his fellow prophets—those charged with keeping people alive to God and alert to listening to the voice of God—was a master of metaphor. This means that he used words not simply to define or identify what can be seen, touched, smelled, heard, or tasted, but to plunge us into a world of presence. To experience presence is to enter that far larger world of reality that our sensory experiences point to but cannot describe (nor really discover)—the realities of love and compassion, justice and faithfulness, sin and evil…and God. Mostly God. The realities that are Word-evoked are where most of the world’s (true and lasting) action takes place. There are no “mere words” (there!).” Commentary re. the Book of Micah in the Message Bible, pg. 1269, by Eugene Peterson (words in parenthesis added by me).

Jonastic Jostlings

“Everybody knows about Jonah. People who have never read the Bible know enough about Jonah to laugh at a joke about him and “the ‘whale.’” Jonah has entered our folklore. There is a playful aspect to his story, a kind of slapstick clumsiness about Jonah as he bumbles (borne out of inconsistent obedience/’subtle’ rebellion, rooted in distrust of God/His Ultimate & Universal Goodness and/or self-absorption/pride/thinking he knew better than God) his way along, trying, but always unsuccessfully, to avoid God.

But the playfulness is not frivolous. This is deadly serious. While we are smiling or laughing at Jonah, we drop the guard with which we are trying to keep God at a comfortable distance, and suddenly we find ourselves caught in the purposes and commands of God. All of us. No exceptions.

(Real-life) Stories are the most prominent biblical way of helping us see ourselves in “the God story,” which always gets around to the story of God making and saving us. Stories, in contrast to abstract statements of truth, tease us into becoming participants in what is being said. We find ourselves involved in the action. We may start out as spectators or critics, but if the story is good (and the biblical stories are very good!), we find ourselves no longer just listening to but (actually) inhabiting the story.

One reason that the Jonah story is so enduringly important for nurturing the life of faith in us is that Jonah is not a hero too high and mighty for us to identify with—he doesn’t do anything great. Instead of being held up as an ideal to admire, we find Jonah as a companion in our ineptness. Here is someone on our level. Even when Jonah does it right (like preaching, finally, in Nineveh), he does it wrong (by getting angry at God). But the whole time, God is working within and around Jonah’s very ineptness and accomplishing his purposes in him (and through him)! Most of us need a biblical friend or two like Jonah.” Eugene Peterson, in commentary preceding the Book of Jonah, in his Message Bible, pg. 1265 (words in parenthesis and italics added by me).