In May we were driving home from a whirlwind tour of Corpus Christi and McAllen, and I suggested that Paula tell her life story. For the next few hours she did, starting with her earliest memories. It’s quite a tale of grace and mercy. In fact, it’s a marvelous story, because from a natural standpoint her life had few roots and little stability – yet God protected her and fashioned her into a godly woman who has been able to provide for her children a foundation that she never had.
Another thing that intrigued me was how fascinated Kristian and Ethan were by her story – though she talked for hours, they wanted more. And when we climbed into the car for our drive to Shreveport, they asked for my story.
You have a story too. Why don’t you tell it? As you sit around the table with your family, tell your stories. Perhaps one of you today, then another tomorrow, and so on until all of you have told your stories. When we share our stories, we share our lives.
A few words to supplement my previous post on Dalrymple’s book: In the second half he exposes the depths to which British society has plunged as a result of its delight in barbaric culture – and the recounting of the perversion is gruesome. These essays are not easy reading, and anyone not unsettled by them is surely hardened. They are strikingly reminiscent of the closing chapters of the book of Judges, when Israel had no king and everyone did what was right in his own eyes - but drawn in more detail. I would not put them in front of my young sons, but after reading them I feel the need to prepare Kristian and Ethan to face this sort of world.
And I am shockingly forced to revisit how well I understand what Jesus meant when he said that he came “to seek and to save the lost.”
I’ve now read enough of Theodore Dalrymple’s Our Culture, What’s Left of It, to commend it to you. He is a master at deconstructing the barbarism of much of western culture, and that’s helpful to Christians who want to understand the worldview of people around them. He clearly shows the emptiness, which paves the way for Christians to proclaim the only hope of deliverance from the mindless vulgarity around us.
His weakness is his own answer to the problem. He doesn’t appear to be Christian, though he accepts what he calls a “religious view” of human nature: “that man is a fallen creature for whom virtue is necessary but never fully attainable.” But for him barbarism is the enemy – not the same as what a Christian means by sin; and his answer is civilization, not grace. My guess is that his god is Culture – High Culture.
This is most clear when he pauses (more than once) to admire those who, in their last hours on earth, knowing that they would soon be killed by the Nazis, chose to spend their time playing Beethoven. Poignant, yes – but that hardly compares with the stories of the Christian martyrs who have died praying for their enemies.
Still, read the book.
“There is a permanent temptation … to suppose that one’s virtue is proportional to one’s hatred of vice, and that one’s hatred of vice is in turn to be measured by one’s vehemence of denunciation.”
Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It
I’ve been admiring and thinking a lot about Van Gogh’s Sower. A sower of seed is an obvious representation of our new calling, our new lives. I’d like to be as faithful to that calling as this sower who casts seed in his field day after day, year after year – even till the shadows grow long at the end of the day.
The hardworking farmer should be the first to receive a share of the crops. [2 Timothy 2:6]
No, this isn’t Kansas. The field pictured below is just outside Trnava, the city we will live in. The children belong to the Gregoires, a family who just joined our team on the field (no pun intended) in February.
The United Nations has a great map library here. Of course I stumbled across it when doing research on Slovakia….
Consider Psalm 118:8-9
It is better to take refuge in Yahweh
than to trust in man.
It is better to take refuge in Yahweh
than to trust in princes.
Franky Schaeffer interviewed his father and mother about their lives of faith at L’Abri. They talked at length about the fact that Francis and Edith never asked anyone (except God) for money to support L’Abri. Francis was careful to explain that they believed this was God’s call on their lives – a means for them to live at that time and in that place in a way that demonstrated that God exists. He stressed that it was not a model or law for everyone, but their own sense of the leading of the Spirit. (more…)
The folks at Third Millennium Ministries are now making their video series available online–for free. Click here to watch Richard Pratt’s introduction to Systematic Theology. You can also listen to some audio courses online. I highly recommend Pratt’s material on the prophets, and John Frame is always good as well.
In the final pages of Mark T. Mitchell’s introduction to the life and thought of Michael Polanyi, he summarizes the state of western thought with such precision and insight that I can’t resist recording a bit of it for you here. After the summary I quote, he goes on to his conclusions about how Polanyi’s philosophy offers an escape from this desperate situation—and that’s helpful too. But these paragraphs alone should stir us all to some careful reflection. If you dare read this, ask yourself whether you find your own idols named here. (If some of the vocabulary or concepts intimidate you at first, please keep reading—I think you will more than catch his drift before you finish.)
Philosophical materialism, when injected into an industrialized society, manifests itself socially in another form of materialism—namely, consumerism. While all living creatures are necessarily consumers, consumerism as such is something altogether new. Industrialization provides the mass production necessary to sustain a society of individuals dedicated primariliy to the acquisition of material goods, while philosophical materialism provides the psychological and spiritual license for this headlong, subhuman pursuit. In such a milieu, fidelity to one’s home or community is eroded by the primary value of acquisition. Thus, we see modern consumers embracing a relentlesely mobile existence, trading ties with extended family and community for the promise of a bigger paycheck or, more generally, an improved “quality of life,” which is almost always reducible to material terms (or more broadly hedonistic ones, which is merely an instance of the commodification of pleasure). In short, modern man is characterized in large parts by a skepticism that manifests itself in both consumerism and rootlessness. And as the scope of human concerns has narrowed and lowered, the social commitments and priorities necessary for the sustenance of healthy communities have been largely jettisoned…. When the acquisition of material goods or hedonistic satisfaction becomes the engine of desire, although we may still utter words of fidelity to parent, sibling, or community, those attachments will always find themselves in second place to the more urgent and tangible. Modern rootlessness is, at least in part, a function of skepticism concerning the sacred nature of one’s family or home, which are reduced merely to accretions we must, often with considerable pain, scrape away as we pursue that for which our hearts truly long.
… it would seem than an increase in material goods should make us better equipped to engage our neighbors and actively participate in the lives of our communities. But where the material means may be available, the spiritual urge seems to diminish inversely. All too often, the modern person finds himself barricaded behind a mountain of material goods and lacking the desire to extend himself beyond the confines of a narrow circle of friends and family.