Forgive my inconsistent posting. It's all for good reasons though. Life is just so grand right now that we've been rather busy. On top of that, working 40 hours a week makes it hard to fit smaller things into my schedule.
To bring you up to speed, Brian is officially the youth minister at a church in Brighton - about 25 miles north of Memphis. So, we're in the process of trying to move there and find a house. Yeah. That's a pretty big step for two very naive and clueless kids. But we love the area, adore the kids, and are just ready to plant our lives in a community that we can invest in and minister to.
I have a couple of things I'd like to blog about, but seeing as that I *am* on work time right now, I'm going to put that off. However, I'm putting it off with a promise to actually return to write it!
In the meantime, some thing for you to chew on:
"Ultimately, Jesus was calling them to abandon themselves. They were leaving certainty for uncertainty, safety for danger, self-preservation for self-denunciation. In a world that prizes promoting oneself, they were following a teacher who told them to crucify themselves. And history tells us the result. Almost all of them would lose their lives because they responded to his invitation." - excerpt from Chapter 1 of Radical by David Platt
Brian and I were discussing this the other night on our way home. Do we ever stop to realize or think about the first Christians? The ones who were so radically abandoned to Christ that they stopped at nothing to tell the world about what He had done for each and every one of them? Even if it cost them their LIVES!
Friends, that's why America has fallen to the pitiful spiritual state she is in today. We are all about a comfortable Christianity: the kind where we go sit in our cushioned pew for an hour a week, robotically sing a few lyrics without giving a thought to their meaning, and listen to some man say something about the Bible. Then we leave and assume we've "done our Holy deed" for the week. We spend the rest of time working to make money to spend on worthless "treasures" that have no eternal significance. Instead of asking the lady in front of us at the store if she knows Christ, we judge her by what she wears/says. We don't associate with the lowly because we are from another class. We watch movies that are in direct opposition to everything scripture teaches us (this is a biggie for me), and then we partake in our fleshly desires without concern.
What a twisted image of following Christ. I don't wonder why life (as a whole) is the way it is. God certainly cannot want to look down and see "His people" living the way we are, without giving one thought to accountability among the brethren. It has to pain his heart to see that we are so concerned with accumulating big houses, fancy cars, nice clothes, etc and only give a passing thought to the millions of people who die each day from STARVATION. We don't want to live a radical Christian life because, well, perhaps we don't really believe what we say we do.
If you haven't picked up Radical, I challenge you to do so. But beware, David Platt will step on your toes and make you very uncomfortable. But everything he presents is biblical. He does a great job in opening the reader's eyes to the truth that "The American Dream" isn't a biblical idea at all. It certainly broke me of my selfish ways and allowed me to take a hard look at the way I lived and the goals I was going after.
Okay, see, now I've gone on too long. :) Back to work.
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