January 26, 2006
Posted by thomas in : xanga , add a comment “….and near Moscow zookeepers fed an Indian elephant a bucket of vodka to keep it warm; the elephant then went on a rampage, tore radiators from a wall, and calmed down only after it was given a hot shower.”…maybe Trinity Western is on to something with its no-drinking policy?
January 16, 2006
Posted by thomas in : xanga , 1 comment so far
…These were the thoughts of God which filled Daniel’s mind, as witness his prayers (always the best evidence for a man’s view of God)…
J.I. Packer, Knowing God
This little line from Packer’s evangelical classic caught my eye; our view of God is found in the content and context of our prayers. I think there is a good deal of truth in this statement. We can have an articulate and “acceptable” image of God that never gets past the brain stem to the guts of who we are. I think prayer is spoken from the guts of human life: it is giving voice to our weaknesses and wants and worries and joys and doubts and loves and hopes and brokenness and praise. In our conversations with others it is too easy to pull out jargon to disguise the truth of who we think God actually is - in prayer our jargon and catchphrases are revealed for the absolute idiocy they actually are. We can sing “blessed be your name / on the road marked with suffering” (with a whole lot of dancing and arm waving in time with that crunchy chord progression) and throw phrases like a “people of integrity” around with marvelous abandon, but more likely than not, our prayers reveal (at least for me sometimes) that we are a people who hope that the road God has planned for us will fit within comfortable upper middle class suburban boundaries and that transgressions of the integrity of who we are in Christ are easily dealt with through formulaic requests for forgiveness: prayer as magic.
If you don’t believe in God, then you probably don’t pray much at all. If you say you believe in God and don’t pray much, then you probably don’t really believe in Him much at all either. Some of us treat God like a fragile old man who, if we push too hard or yell angrily at Him too much, will simply start sobbing and suffer a nervous breakdown. Some of us treat Him like a cosmic vending-machine. Some of us like He’s a guy who’s recently had jaw surgery and so we take it upon ourselves to speak in his stead. He’s our life jacket when we fall overboard on the ship of life - the number we keep in our palm pilot for the times when we find ourselves in jail after a night of heavy drinking and a scuffle at the local bar. We sometimes like to treat God like we would our mother, not wanting to let Him in on what we’re really thinking, the deep dark dirty stuff that we know would cause mom to start smoking and drinking large tumblers of gin in the middle of the afternoon again.*
Prayer is deeply related to the earthiness, the here and now, of faith I think. It is encountering the transcendent and connecting it with the presentness of life. The most earthy book of the Bible is the Psalms, and it is a book full of prayer - of the guts of human life. I think if prayers reveal our view of God, seeking to try and change the way we pray can also change the way we see God, and maybe, just maybe we might find that if we change our view of God our lives might change in some way for the better, and maybe this ugly beautiful world (with guts splattered all over the place) will too. I’ve always struggled with prayer (if God knows…why do we gotta tell Him? - and the whole unanswering and silent God I often am met with) - but I think part of prayer must be this knowing - this act of us knowing God and talking to Him from the guts and not just the brain stem.
*note: God probably knows already anyway I think (and your mom probably does too). And also…my mother doesn’t smoke or drink large tumblers of gin . I know she sometimes peruses my “blob” as she calls it, so I just wanted to make sure that I wasn’t defaming her good name by attaching it with smoking or alcoholism - she has handled some of my deep dark dirty stuff with (even if I didn’t think so then) what I think is a good deal of wisdom, and incidentally, prayer.
January 9, 2006
Posted by thomas in : Uncategorized , add a comment The little boy walking behind me on the airport ramp as we arrived was so excited.“Did you like visiting the cockpit?” his dad asked him.
“Yeah! Yeah! It was COOL!! Flying is FUN!!” (arms flailing excitedly, struggling for breath as he tries and get out all that he is trying to say) ”I wasn’t even scared Dad, I wasn’t even scared a little bit!!”
“You were very brave,” his dad assured him.
I looked over my shoulder and gave the kid a smile (I had noticed his dad teaching him to thumb wrestle when we were waiting to board in Edmonton), but I don’t think he saw me, his eyes were filled with visions of jumbo-jets and round rooms covered in buttons.
So begins the final semester…I’m a little bit scared…but I’m going to try and be very brave. And get in some thumb-wrestling matches along the way.