For the Joy of the Journey

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Failing to tell the truth, and failing to face the truth, is ultimately more harmful than the opposite.
Rod Dreher

Calvin and vaccines
Sixteenth-century Reformer John Calvin taught this creational theology with particular verve. “Wherever you cast your eyes,” he wrote in Institutes, “there is no spot in the universe wherein you cannot discern at least some sparks of God’s glory.” What many today call the “natural world” was, for Calvin, a “dazzling theater” of God’s glory. He lamented that “scarcely one man in a hundred is a true spectator of it!”
Calvin insisted that through medicine God “provides us with the capacity to attend to our illnesses.” Indeed, he exclaims, “whoever does not take account of the means [medicine] which God has ordained does not have confidence in God but is puffed up with false pride and temerity.”

Telling a story
But you can’t convincingly tell a story until you’ve made it your own. Until we allow the story of Jesus to shape our own, to make us more and more into his likeness, we just sound like Pharisees, bleating about religious freedom, insisting on our rights, and demanding the world conform to our esoteric form of holiness. And that’s what people like my Uber driver see. They might be neutral about Jesus, but their views about the church are anything but impartial. Indeed, the reputation of church has never been lower.
Michael Frost

center of the cosmos
…why not put human being at the center of the cosmos? The universe might be vast, but it is cold and empty. Yet here, in the midst of that vast icy silence, exists a hot, burning flame. You are a candle in the darkness. Incandescent. More mysterious and remarkable than anything reveled by astrophysics. 
Richard Beck

“Pursuing one goal to the utter exclusion of all others is not to make a choice but to run from it. It’s not leadership; it’s abdication.”
Mitch Daniels

Electric Christians
Among the “new” things of that era [19th century] were new religious ideas. An interesting group of those ideas fall under the heading of the powers of the mind. It was the great century of electricity and it seems only inevitable that such a force would become a power image for spiritual energy. Already in the late 1700’s, there arose “electrotherapists.” One such physician, T. Gale of upstate New York, who used electricity for the cure of mental and physical diseases, described it as the “soul of the universe.”

For Gale, his fellow electrotherapists, and their numerous patients, electricity was a material current of divine love; matter and spirit, nature and grace, were different aspects of a single reality. God, for Gale, was the “spiritual sun” whose love was “spiritual nutrition”; electricity was that spiritual substance in material form, “participation of the same element as the natural sun diffused through all the natural world.” There was, in Gale’s view, “no animation in the natural world” except by the heat of the “ethereal fire.” Echoing [Jonathan] Edwards, Gale believed that the discovery of electricity and its divine healing properties augured a worldwide Christian millennium. (McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon, p. 136)

I often think that in our contemporary times we are tempted to become “electric Christians.” We “send out thoughts and prayers” as though they were radio signals. We gather as many people who will agree to join us in prayer as though its power and effectiveness were somehow increased if more people “generate” it. It is a powerful image, and our thoughts in that direction are not intentionally wrong. But prayer and matters of the Spirit are not electrical forces (nor even like electrical forces). The Holy Spirit is quite silent for the most part (Jn. 16:13). Nevertheless, the Spirit is a person – not a force to be used. It is not for us to create such false images in an effort to explain what cannot be known.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Fundamentalist
A fundamentalist … is absolutely certain that his system of thought gives him access to unvarnished truth, and therefore doesn’t waste time examining contrary evidence or engaging in dialogue with nonbelievers. The fundamentalist is unshakable in his belief that his viewpoint is perfectly clear and so cannot be misinterpreted. He reasons down from initial premises to what he takes to be unchallengeable conclusions.
Persuasion Community

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Victor Frankel

Still on the Journey

My “So much to Think About” posts are, as you know, usually an anthology of notes I have saved to share in “Tweeter-ish” fashion. Occasionally I come across thoughts worthy of more than a “Tweet”. Today’s post is such an occasion.

Mark Manson, a blogger I follow, wrote some thoughts in answer to the question: “What stuff should we pay attention to?” This is personally relevant to me. I am inundated with information. There really is —”So Much to Think About” Much of what I read, and I read a lot, is good stuff , creating a nagging frustration that I need to write, talk, or even pray about it. Manson is helpful: “What stuff should I pay attention to?”

[The following excerpt is from Manson’s article entitled “Attention Diet”, (btw Manson uses adult language)]

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…the name of the game is quality over quantity. Because in a world with infinite information and opportunity, you don’t grow by knowing or doing more, you grow by the ability to correctly focus on less.

There are three steps to the Attention Diet:

Correctly identify nutritious information and relationships.
Cut out the junk information and relationships.
Cultivate habits of deeper focus and a longer attention span.

So, how do we define “junk” information and relationships and “nutritious” information and relationships?

Well, without getting all philosophical, let’s keep it simple.

• Junk information is information that is unreliable, unhelpful, or unimportant (i.e., it affects few to no people in any significant way). Junk information is short-form, flashy, and emotionally charged, encouraging addictive consumption patterns.
• Nutritious information is information that is reliable, helpful, and likely important (i.e., it affects you and others in significant ways). Nutritious information is long-form, analytical, and encourages deep engagement and extended thought.
• Junk relationships are people/groups who you have little face-to-face contact with and/or little mutual trust, who bring out your insecurities and consistently make you feel worse about yourself or the world.
• Nutritious connections are people/groups who you have frequent face-to-face contact with and/or a lot of mutual trust who make you feel better and help you grow.
  
  The Attention Diet should be emotionally difficult to implement. Ultimately, junk information hooks us because it is pleasing and easy. We develop low-level addictions to it and end up using it to numb a lot of our day-to-day stresses and insecurities. Therefore, getting rid of the junk information will expose a lot of uncomfortable emotions, trigger cravings, and compulsions, and generally suck for the first few days or weeks.
  The goal here is to push yourself to stay more focused on what adds value to your life. If it’s not difficult, then you’re probably not really cutting out all of the junk.

I think this is good advice. I plant to adopt an “Attention Diet” in consuming information that comes my way.

Afterword:
Ruminating on the idea of Attention Diet” I am wondering what would happen in churches
—if leaders vetted information to determine if it is junk or nutritious, before sharing it?
— if congregants vetted their relationships in the same way, junk or nutritious?

So much to think about…

Still on the journey…