The Little Prince
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"I am looking for friends. What does that mean - 'tame'?"
"It is an act too often neglected," said the fox. "It means to establish ties."
" 'To establish ties'?"
"Just that," said the fox. "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a for like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world ... "
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"It would have been better to come back at the same hour," said the fox. "If, for example, you come at four o'clock in the afternoon, then at three o'clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o'clock, I shall already be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what heart is to be ready to greet you ... One must observe the proper rites ... "
"What is a rite?" asked the little prince.
"Those also are action too often neglect," said the fox. "They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours. There is a rite, for example, among my hunters. Every Thursday they dance with the village girls. So Thursday is a wonderful day for me! I can take a walk as far as the vineyards. But if the hunters danced at just any time, every day would be like every other day, and I should never have any vacation at all."
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"Goodbye," said the fox. "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
---
"It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important."
---
"But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. ..."
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The little prince went away, to look again at the roses.
"You are not at all like my rose," he said. "As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world."
And the roses were very much embarrassed.
"You are beautiful, but you are empty," he went on. "One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you - the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose."
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"The men where you live," said the little prince, "raise five thousand roses in the same garden - and they do not find in it what they are looking for."
"They do not find it," I replied.
"And yet what they are looking for could be found in one single rose, or in a little water."
"Yes, that is true," I said.
And the little prince added:
"But the eyes are blind. One must look with the heart ..."
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One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets himself be tamed ...
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"All men have the stars," he answered, "but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems. For my businessman they were wealth. But all these stars are silent. You - you alone - will have the stars as no one else has them - "
"What are you trying to say?"
"In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night ... You - only you - will have stars that can laugh!"
And he laughed again.
"And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure ... And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!' And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you ..."
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Saturday, December 8, 2007
Friday, December 7, 2007
Faith Journey Update - December 6
PRAISE and PROGRESS
- The LORD has called us individually and provided us a team of five in the past three weeks.
- He provided me a promotion air ticket. As a result, my budget decreased to $---.
- The LORD has provided me the full amount of support I need for the trip. In face, He has provided for me exceedingly and unexpectedly, through you all.
- Through the process of support raising, the LORD has taught me to trust HIM and His provision more.
- He has prepared my heart for missions by giving me opportunities to share the gospel with friends right now. It has been such an encouragement to see one of them responding to His love and growing joyfully.
- We have made contact with the local workers.
- The LORD has been carrying me through the hectic end-of-semester time. Officially school does not end until next week. But He has helped me to finish up my class assignments and my teaching/grading responsibilities. It is clearly His power and strength that sustains me. (It is awesome to be carried by HIM, enjoying the Isaiah 40:31 experience :-)
PRAYER REQUESTS
- Please pray for continued examination, purification, and preparation of our (team members') hearts.
- Please pray for spiritual protection. Please pray that we will know the LORD who is the object of our faith more each day. As a result, our faith will grow daily and we will continue to walk by faith, not by sight.
- Please pray for physical protection of health and strength.
- Please pray that we will love the people the LORD puts in our path and we will have wisdom to know how to share the good news with them.
- Please pray for the preparation of the hearts of those who will cross path with us and for the stirring of their spiritual hunger.
- Please pray for the unity of the team.
- Please pray for our time to spend with family after the trip, especially for the salvation of E's and my own parents.
- Please pray that the LORD will help me with the practical things of the trip preparation and will govern my mind and heart with His Peace that surpasses all understanding.
I thank the LORD for you and all your support! Thank you for joining us on HIS team. The LORD is my fortress and you all are the proof of HIS faithfulness. Thank you!
WEST VIRGINIA'S FINEST COOKIES
Printed from COOKS.COM
1 c. butter (no substitutes)
1 c. sugar
1 c. light brown sugar, packed
1 egg
1 c. oil
1 c. rolled oats
1 c. crushed corn flakes
1/2 c. shredded coconut
1/2 c. chopped walnuts
3 1/2 c. sifted all-purpose flour
1 tsp. vanilla
In a large bowl cream butter, sugars, oil until light and creamy; add egg; mix well. Add oats, corn flakes, coconut and nuts. Mix well. To same mixture add flour, soda, salt and vanilla. Stir well. Form into balls the size of a walnut. Flatten with fork dipped in water. Bake on an ungreased baking sheet, 350 degree oven for 12 minutes. Allow to cool a few minutes before removing from pan.
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Sexual Abuse Reading - Dec. 2, 2007
Object Relations Therapy of Physical and Sexual Trauma (by Scharff & Scharff)
TML RC569.5 A28 S32 1994
p. 47 - Unresolved Rapprochement Crisis in Incest: Mahler
The developmental stage of separation-individuation
split-off sense of goodness and safety --> carry on being, remains tied to the internal representation of the bad mother; Ambivalence and rage were denied to preserve a semblance of a good internal parent. Fisher (1991) believed that this is the reason for the need for secrecy, lack of recall, memory that is only somatic, and lack of affect of incest victims. (The Trauma of Transgression: Psychotherapy of Incest Victims - Kramer & Akhtar)
Kramer (1985) - "Object-coercive doubting" only in women abused by their mothers.
p. 227 Focusing only on actual events represents the sense of going-on-being that the abused child works so hard to preserve as a defense against trauma and chaos (Siegel 1992). I had to let these psychologically uneventful times simply be and not try to unravel them or find more in them than was there. These times actively maintained me in a neutral attitude and prepared the therapeutic alliance to bear the next exploration of the encapsulated trauma and its impact on the transference.
p. 62 The transitional space for going-on-being: Winnicott
The psychosomatic partnership
Contextual and centered holding
Going-on-being in the potential space
Rebuilding the transitional space
Using countertransference to reach trauma
Providing a generative analytic relationship
Speculations:
1. A CL - cause of incest - incest - cut off of feelings
2. C CL - sexual abuse, stimulated/excited - shame, guilt - defend against enjoy sexual touch and intimacy?
TML RC569.5 A28 S32 1994
p. 47 - Unresolved Rapprochement Crisis in Incest: Mahler
The developmental stage of separation-individuation
split-off sense of goodness and safety --> carry on being, remains tied to the internal representation of the bad mother; Ambivalence and rage were denied to preserve a semblance of a good internal parent. Fisher (1991) believed that this is the reason for the need for secrecy, lack of recall, memory that is only somatic, and lack of affect of incest victims. (The Trauma of Transgression: Psychotherapy of Incest Victims - Kramer & Akhtar)
Kramer (1985) - "Object-coercive doubting" only in women abused by their mothers.
p. 227 Focusing only on actual events represents the sense of going-on-being that the abused child works so hard to preserve as a defense against trauma and chaos (Siegel 1992). I had to let these psychologically uneventful times simply be and not try to unravel them or find more in them than was there. These times actively maintained me in a neutral attitude and prepared the therapeutic alliance to bear the next exploration of the encapsulated trauma and its impact on the transference.
p. 62 The transitional space for going-on-being: Winnicott
The psychosomatic partnership
Contextual and centered holding
Going-on-being in the potential space
Rebuilding the transitional space
Using countertransference to reach trauma
Providing a generative analytic relationship
Speculations:
1. A CL - cause of incest - incest - cut off of feelings
2. C CL - sexual abuse, stimulated/excited - shame, guilt - defend against enjoy sexual touch and intimacy?
Saturday, December 1, 2007
Faith Walk - Nov. 30
* It is interesting how the staying in B came about so easily, when I had tried so hard without success. His provision beyond my knowing!
* It surely was nice to see NS again. It was nice of her to buy dinner for us. It was a jolly time to go sightseeing. Or should I have sticked to my plan of getting work done.
* I do feel overwhelmed as the departure date seems to come closer than I expected. Dear LORD, please give me YOUR peace, the peace that transcends all understanding. Dear LORD, help me prepare for the trip, spiritually, emotionally, physically, and practically.
* It was nice to have the first follow-up with Foundation material. :-) What a blessing and a joy it was to spend time together like that.
* My supervision pointed out my being overly active in BI during the intensive time of graduate school training. I know I have decided (probably since this summer) that I would make time for the things I really wanted to do, instead of letting the demands of graduate school run my life. However, am I now swinging too much the other way? I have always thought my increasingly active involvement as a result/reflection of my spiritual growth, God' s leading for me and His training opportunities to prepare me for what He has made me for. However, it is also a fact that I have been behind on my clinical record keeping and have not worked much, if at all, on my dissertation project. Is it really God's leading for me? Or am I letting my life run by urgency instead of importance? I guess this is a more general question regarding the pattern of my day-to-day living. Where is the balance between being planful and organized and being flexible? Dear LORD, please do help me become wiser with my time and thus my life. Dear LORD, draw me closer to YOU in prayer to seek Your leading and guiding. Let YOU and the leading of Your Spirit be the only foundation and motivation of my actions. May YOU be gloried in my life! I do specifically pray for the commitment regarding BSF. Please do speak to me clearly. Dear LORD, I will not commit myself unless I know clearly it is what You have planned for me.
* Whatever it is, I know NP is a calling from YOU and I am committed. Dear LORD, hold me and keep me.
* I still have not heard back from CoG regarding the support. As I drove to campus, my heart was full of bitterness. I was upset that the announcement was made at the very end, that there was no E-mail sent out on it, that it was included in the shorter-than-usual weekly updates, that I still did not hear back regarding it even if there was nothing given. I was upset at CoG, at everyone who chose not to give, and ... I guess ... at God for not making it a little easier. I thought of leaving CoG. I thought of withholding my giving for a whole year and then leave. What a moment of spiritual warfare! How dangerous is the power of the dark side. I had to come before God and ask Him to help my lack of faith and my tendency to walk by sight. Then I realized that I had been relying on CoG to provide for me, but that is different from relying on God to provide for me. It helped me come before God and correct my attitude. Well, I have been praying and asking God to "examine my heart and take away the things that are not pleasing to Him." He apparently has answered my prayer again as He did when I prayed the same prayer this past summer. I guess this is one of the spiky prayers and it often hurts when the prayer gets answered. Yet I have been learning to praise the LORD and be thankful for His pruning. I have also been learning to be patient with myself and the process. Dear LORD, please protect my heart and my spirit. Please help me to know YOU more and know YOU better, because YOU are the object and foundation of my faith. Please forgive me for my lack of faith and the urge to take things in my own hands. Please keep me from yielding to such temptation and choose to trust in YOU and Your provision no matter what, every time I get tempted. Dear LORD, sweet Jesus, I yield to YOU and ask you to take over my life, my heart, my desires, my thoughts, my feelings, and my all in all. Amen!
* It surely was nice to see NS again. It was nice of her to buy dinner for us. It was a jolly time to go sightseeing. Or should I have sticked to my plan of getting work done.
* I do feel overwhelmed as the departure date seems to come closer than I expected. Dear LORD, please give me YOUR peace, the peace that transcends all understanding. Dear LORD, help me prepare for the trip, spiritually, emotionally, physically, and practically.
* It was nice to have the first follow-up with Foundation material. :-) What a blessing and a joy it was to spend time together like that.
* My supervision pointed out my being overly active in BI during the intensive time of graduate school training. I know I have decided (probably since this summer) that I would make time for the things I really wanted to do, instead of letting the demands of graduate school run my life. However, am I now swinging too much the other way? I have always thought my increasingly active involvement as a result/reflection of my spiritual growth, God' s leading for me and His training opportunities to prepare me for what He has made me for. However, it is also a fact that I have been behind on my clinical record keeping and have not worked much, if at all, on my dissertation project. Is it really God's leading for me? Or am I letting my life run by urgency instead of importance? I guess this is a more general question regarding the pattern of my day-to-day living. Where is the balance between being planful and organized and being flexible? Dear LORD, please do help me become wiser with my time and thus my life. Dear LORD, draw me closer to YOU in prayer to seek Your leading and guiding. Let YOU and the leading of Your Spirit be the only foundation and motivation of my actions. May YOU be gloried in my life! I do specifically pray for the commitment regarding BSF. Please do speak to me clearly. Dear LORD, I will not commit myself unless I know clearly it is what You have planned for me.
* Whatever it is, I know NP is a calling from YOU and I am committed. Dear LORD, hold me and keep me.
* I still have not heard back from CoG regarding the support. As I drove to campus, my heart was full of bitterness. I was upset that the announcement was made at the very end, that there was no E-mail sent out on it, that it was included in the shorter-than-usual weekly updates, that I still did not hear back regarding it even if there was nothing given. I was upset at CoG, at everyone who chose not to give, and ... I guess ... at God for not making it a little easier. I thought of leaving CoG. I thought of withholding my giving for a whole year and then leave. What a moment of spiritual warfare! How dangerous is the power of the dark side. I had to come before God and ask Him to help my lack of faith and my tendency to walk by sight. Then I realized that I had been relying on CoG to provide for me, but that is different from relying on God to provide for me. It helped me come before God and correct my attitude. Well, I have been praying and asking God to "examine my heart and take away the things that are not pleasing to Him." He apparently has answered my prayer again as He did when I prayed the same prayer this past summer. I guess this is one of the spiky prayers and it often hurts when the prayer gets answered. Yet I have been learning to praise the LORD and be thankful for His pruning. I have also been learning to be patient with myself and the process. Dear LORD, please protect my heart and my spirit. Please help me to know YOU more and know YOU better, because YOU are the object and foundation of my faith. Please forgive me for my lack of faith and the urge to take things in my own hands. Please keep me from yielding to such temptation and choose to trust in YOU and Your provision no matter what, every time I get tempted. Dear LORD, sweet Jesus, I yield to YOU and ask you to take over my life, my heart, my desires, my thoughts, my feelings, and my all in all. Amen!
Friday, November 30, 2007
Learning by Hearing & Reading - Nov. 30
* We must not allow age, our personal giants, or yet-unfulfilled promises to prevent us from believing that God still honors His word to us. (Joshua 14:6-13)
* Faith & The Object of Faith
- Acrobat performance
- Executive and Window Jumping
- Wagon on the Ice Story
Not the stronger of the faith, but the better knowing of the object.
* Faith & The Object of Faith
- Acrobat performance
- Executive and Window Jumping
- Wagon on the Ice Story
Not the stronger of the faith, but the better knowing of the object.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
NP 2007 Update
* 11/26/2007 - The joining of the fifth member (I prayed specifically for this :-) God is GOOD! And thoughtful
- Received the second support check, doubling the expected amount
* 11/25/2007 - the official announcement at Community of Grace
- the preparation and practice using the 4SL. And encouragement
* Praying for the third person so that a team can be formed and sent
* 11/16/2007 - First thought in the morning - "What have I done?!" --> Refocus on the calling of Jesus and His faithfulness
* 11/15/2007 - Receiving the phone call with the opportunity presented, especially the urgent need to form a team (Prior to the phone call, I just finished reading the book Dangerous Wonder :-)
- Later, making the commitment to go. I can almost see Jesus winking at me and asking if I am ready to live out the life I have been aspired to live by the book, Dangerous Wonder (the precise timing of our God)
- Received the second support check, doubling the expected amount
* 11/25/2007 - the official announcement at Community of Grace
- the preparation and practice using the 4SL. And encouragement
* Praying for the third person so that a team can be formed and sent
* 11/16/2007 - First thought in the morning - "What have I done?!" --> Refocus on the calling of Jesus and His faithfulness
* 11/15/2007 - Receiving the phone call with the opportunity presented, especially the urgent need to form a team (Prior to the phone call, I just finished reading the book Dangerous Wonder :-)
- Later, making the commitment to go. I can almost see Jesus winking at me and asking if I am ready to live out the life I have been aspired to live by the book, Dangerous Wonder (the precise timing of our God)
Heart Murmuring - Nov. 26, 2007 Monday
* It was wonderful to pray with JB. Somehow it felt so long. She shared with me her prayer journey, stating that she regards me as one of her own children. The prayers were so beautiful. I am grateful to the LORD for giving spiritual mothers who pray for me as their own. I was also told that her mother "adopted" me too and had something for my birthday. Officially my birthday celebration will be extending for two months or longer. Dear LORD, thank YOU so much to make sure that I am loved and I feel it.
* My attitude at work changed. I think the conversation earlier helped and the small group Bible study did too. I am more solemn now *_^ It might be a little too big a word to use, but you get the gist of it. It is interesting what you notice with a sober attitude. I am still kind of debating about the carefree vs. careful approaches. I guess it is not supposed to be dichotomous, just as everything else. It is a fine balance to keep, just as everything else. It is a delicate art.
* I got a little cross earlier, because my work is not done. It is still not done, but I am not really cross and apparently less anxious. It was clear how dependent I can be when I am with others and encounter something I do not like to do. There is a time when it is helpful for me to be with other so that I can be kept accountable. At the same time, there is also a time when it is profitable for me to be by myself so that I will take responsibility and get tough things done. Know yourself and know the times as well. I guess I was a little resentful also toward my dear friend. But at the same time, I felt that I should not be resentful and it is myself who is to be blamed. Dear LORD, will YOU please help me grow in patient and grace? Help me season my speech with salt and minister to others with Your love.
* It was a surprise to get my second support check with the amount doubled from what was promised and thus expected. It was wonderful to have JH join us on the team. The LORD surely provides for us according to His riches above and beyond what we ask for. God, YOU ARE AWESOME! It is AWESOME to be yours. Love, J.
* Now my LORD, grant me the wisdom to finish my assignment. Help me write to build up instead tearing down. Humble my heart. Mold me and shape me so that YOUR glory will be reflected in my life.
* My attitude at work changed. I think the conversation earlier helped and the small group Bible study did too. I am more solemn now *_^ It might be a little too big a word to use, but you get the gist of it. It is interesting what you notice with a sober attitude. I am still kind of debating about the carefree vs. careful approaches. I guess it is not supposed to be dichotomous, just as everything else. It is a fine balance to keep, just as everything else. It is a delicate art.
* I got a little cross earlier, because my work is not done. It is still not done, but I am not really cross and apparently less anxious. It was clear how dependent I can be when I am with others and encounter something I do not like to do. There is a time when it is helpful for me to be with other so that I can be kept accountable. At the same time, there is also a time when it is profitable for me to be by myself so that I will take responsibility and get tough things done. Know yourself and know the times as well. I guess I was a little resentful also toward my dear friend. But at the same time, I felt that I should not be resentful and it is myself who is to be blamed. Dear LORD, will YOU please help me grow in patient and grace? Help me season my speech with salt and minister to others with Your love.
* It was a surprise to get my second support check with the amount doubled from what was promised and thus expected. It was wonderful to have JH join us on the team. The LORD surely provides for us according to His riches above and beyond what we ask for. God, YOU ARE AWESOME! It is AWESOME to be yours. Love, J.
* Now my LORD, grant me the wisdom to finish my assignment. Help me write to build up instead tearing down. Humble my heart. Mold me and shape me so that YOUR glory will be reflected in my life.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Self-control - Nov. 26, 2007
- 1 Corinthians 6:12- All things are lawful for you, but not all things are profitable.
- 1Corinthians 6:19,20- Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and so you should glorify God with it.
- 1 Thessalonians 4:3,4,5- You should learn to control your body in a holy and honourable way, not in passionate lust like the heathens.
- 2 Peter 2:19- You are a slave to whatever has mastered you.
- James 4:17- If you know you should do something, but fail to do it, it’s sin.
MMPI-2 Basic Clinical Scale & Code Type
Prototype of elevations --> Profile definition (If the scale or code-type prototype scores are elevated at least five points higher than the next scale in the code, then rely on the descriptors for that index. However, if the profile is not well-definted, then also take into consideration the next highest score in the profile code. This secondary score might "move up" in placement in the code at retesting.) --> empirical discriptors --> Harris-Lingoes subscales.
Harris-Lingoes subscales
- an appraisal of the extent to which a patient has endorsed particular contents that served to elevate the scale in question.
- They should not be interpreted in isolation from the parent scaleonly be interpreted as an adjunct to the parent scale to provide clues about which of the scale correlates for the parent scale are most salient
- below T = 60 are probably not useful in the interpretive process.
- interpreting a 1-point code involves referring to the established descriptors for the highest score
- Complex code types should be used when two or more scales reach interpretive significance and empirically derived descriptors are available for them.
- The appropriate behavior descriptors for the code should be applied. If there are not sufficient empirical descriptors to provide much information for the code type, the most appropriate 2-point code should be used and if no 2-point applies, a scale-by-scale interpretation strategy should be followed.
His Fingerprints - Nov. 25, 2006 Sunday
I can't believe that it is only a month till Christmas. I can't believe I am leaving in two weeks. It seems awfully short.
* It was so much fun to see the casting and shooting of the Christmas pageant. :-)
* How wonderful it was to share the 4SL with AL and to witness her praying to accept Jesus into her heart. God is GOOD, ALL the time!
* My trip was announced. I was encouraged by people who came to talk with me. At the same time, I was overly concerned about the financial aspect of things. Dear LORD, help me trust in you FULLY. And YOU alone!
* I was so grieved that I lost my patience with my parents during the course of the conversation. I could not explain where I felt blocked and stuffed so often by my parents. Is it smothering? Anyhow I was quite irritated by the comment on my voice (Should I be always overly excited to satisfy my parents?) and the inquiry regarding the trip (I guess I knew my parents' opinion and felt my boundary was violated). Whatever it is, I should not have raised my voice and got annoyed. My heart was saddened after the conversation. I called back to apologize and once again my mom denied any need for apology stating that it was natural for parents to tolerate. Once again I felt the blocked and stuffed feeling. I was in tears. Dear Lord, please help me.
* I had a thought to have a fast of TV shows and movies from now to my departure. It felt hard, but maybe I should do it. Maybe I should share during the prayer time tomorrow morning and get some accountability from JB.
* It was so much fun to see the casting and shooting of the Christmas pageant. :-)
* How wonderful it was to share the 4SL with AL and to witness her praying to accept Jesus into her heart. God is GOOD, ALL the time!
* My trip was announced. I was encouraged by people who came to talk with me. At the same time, I was overly concerned about the financial aspect of things. Dear LORD, help me trust in you FULLY. And YOU alone!
* I was so grieved that I lost my patience with my parents during the course of the conversation. I could not explain where I felt blocked and stuffed so often by my parents. Is it smothering? Anyhow I was quite irritated by the comment on my voice (Should I be always overly excited to satisfy my parents?) and the inquiry regarding the trip (I guess I knew my parents' opinion and felt my boundary was violated). Whatever it is, I should not have raised my voice and got annoyed. My heart was saddened after the conversation. I called back to apologize and once again my mom denied any need for apology stating that it was natural for parents to tolerate. Once again I felt the blocked and stuffed feeling. I was in tears. Dear Lord, please help me.
* I had a thought to have a fast of TV shows and movies from now to my departure. It felt hard, but maybe I should do it. Maybe I should share during the prayer time tomorrow morning and get some accountability from JB.
In the Name of Jesus (by Henri Nouwen)
In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership (by Henri J. M. Nouwen)
Prologue
* I also came to see that I should not worry about tomorrow, next week, next year, or the next century. The more willing I was to look honestly at what I was thinking and saying and doing now, the more easily I would come into touch with the movement of God's Spirit in me, leading me to the future. God is a God of the present and reveals to those who are willing to listen carefully to the moment in which they live the steps they are to take toward the future. "Do not worry about tomorrow," Jesus says, "tomorrow will take care of itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own" (Matthew 6:34).
* Even though the long and often complex presentations and discussions were far beyond his mental capacities, he had a real sense of belonging to the group. He felt accepted and loved. He received much and, with his generous heart, gave much in return. His Baptism, Confirmation, and First Communion during the Easter Vigil became a real high point in his life. While limited in his ability to express himself in many words, he felt deeply touched by Jesus and knew what it meant to be reborn by water and the Holy Spirit.
* Those who are baptized and confirmed have a new vocation, the vocation to proclaim to others the good news of Jesus.
Introduction
* I asked myself, "What decisions have you been making lately and how are they a reflection of the way you sense the future?" Somehow I have to trust that God is at work in me and that the way I am being moved to new inner and outer places is part of a larger movement of which I am only a very small part.
* Everyone was saying that I was doing really well, but something inside was telling me that my success was putting my own soul in danger. I began to ask myself whether my lack of contemplative prayer, my loneliness, and my constantly changing involvement in what seemed most urgent were signs that the Spirit was gradually being suppressed. It was very hard for me to see clearly, and though I never spoke about hell or only jokingly so, I woke up one day with the realization that I was living in a very dark place and that the term "burnout" was a convenient psychological translation for a spiritual death.
In the midst of this I kept praying, "Lord, show me where you want me to go and I will follow you, but please be clear and unambiguous about it!"
I - From Relevance to Prayer
The Temptation: To Be Relevant
* Not being able to use any of the skills that had proved so practical in the past was a real source of anxiety. I was suddenly faced with my naked self, open for affirmations and rejections, hugs and punches, smiles and tears, all dependent simply on how I was perceived at the moment. In a way, it seemed as though I was starting my life all over again. Relationships, connections, reputations could no longer be counted on.
This experience was and, in many ways, is still the most important experience of my new life, because it forced me to rediscover my true identity. These broken, wounded, and completely unpretentious people forced me to let go of my relevant self - the self that can do things, show things, prove things, build things - and forced me to reclaim that unadorned self in which I am completely vulnerable, open to receive and give love regardless of any accomplishments.
* ... the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self. That is the way Jesus came to reveal God's love. The great message that we have to carry, as ministers of God's word and followers of Jesus, is that God loves us not because of what we do or accomplish, but because God has created and redeemed us in love and has chosen us to proclaim that love as the true source of all human life.
* Beneath all the great accomplishments of our time there is a deep current of despair. While efficiency and control are the great aspirations of our society, the loneliness, isolation, lack of friendship and intimacy, broken relationships, boredom, feelings of emptiness and depression, and a deep sense of uselessness fill the hearts of millions of people in our success-oriented world.
* The leader of the future will be the one who dares to claim his irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation that allows him or her to enter into a deep solidarity with the anguish underlying all the glitter of success and to bring the light of Jesus there.
The Question: "Do You Love Me?"
* We have to hear that question as being central to all our Christian ministry because it is the question that can allow us to be, at the same time, irrelevant and truly self-confident.
* He (Jesus) whose only concern had been to announce the unconditional love of God had only one question to ask, "Do you love me?"
* In our world of loneliness and despair, there is an enormous need for men and women who know the heart of God, a heart that forgives, that cares, that reaches out and wants to heal. In that heart there is no suspicion, no vindictiveness, no resentment, and not a tinge of hatred. It is a heart that wants only to give love and receive love in response. It is a heart that suffers immensely because it sees the magnitude of human pain and the great resistance of trusting the heart of God who wants to offer consolation and hope.
* The Christian leader of the future is the one who truly knows the heart of God as it has become flesh, "a heart of flesh," in Jesus. Knowing God's heart means consistently, radically, and very concretely to announce and reveal that God is love and only love, and that every time fear, isolation, or despair begin to invade the human soul this is not something that comes from God. This sounds very simple and maybe even trite, but very few people know that they are loved without any conditions or limits. This unconditional and unlimited love is what the evangelist John calls God's first love. "Let us love," he says, "because God loved us first" (1 John 4:19). The love that often leaves us doubtful, frustrated, angry, and resentful is the second love, that is to say, the affirmation, affection, sympathy, encouragement, and support that we receive from our parents, teachers, spouses, and friends. We all know how limited, broken, and very fragile that love is. Behind the many expressions of this second love there is always the chance of rejection, withdrawal, punishment, blackmail, violence, and even hatred. ... Often it seems that beneath the pleasantries of daily life there are many gaping wounds that carry such names as: abandonment, betrayal, rejection, rupture, and loss. These are all the shadow side of the second love and reveal the darkness that never completely leaves the human heart.
The radical good news is that the second love is only a broken reflection of the first love and that the first love is offered to us by a God in whom there are no shadows. Jesus' heart is the incarnation of the shadow-free first love of God. From his heart flow streams of living water.
* From that heart come the words, "Do you love me?" Knowing the heart of Jesus and loving him are the same thing. The knowledge of Jesus' heart is a knowledge of the heart. And when we live in the world with that knowledge, we cannot do other than bring healing, reconciliation, new life and hope wherever we go. The desire to be relevant and successful will gradually disappear, and our only desire will be to say with our whole being to our brothers and sisters of the human race, "You are loved. There is no reason to be afraid. In love God created your inmost self and knit you together in your mother's womb" (see Psalm 139:13).
The Discipline: Contemplative Prayer
* To live a life that is no dominated by the desire to be relevant but is instead safely anchored in the knowledge of God's first love, we have to be mystics. A mystic is a person whose identity is deeply rooted in God's first love.
If there is any focus that the Christian leader of the future will need, it is the discipline of dwelling in the presence of the One who keeps asking us, "Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?" It is the discipline of contemplative prayer. Through contemplative prayer we can keep ourselves from being pulled from one urgent issue to another and from becoming strangers to our own and God's heart. Contemplative prayer keeps us home, rooted and safe, even when we are on the road, moving from place to place, and often surrounded by sounds of violence and war. Contemplative prayer deepens in us the knowledge that we are already free, that we have already found a place to dwell, that we already belong to God, even though everything and everyone around us keeps suggesting the opposite.
* The central question is, Are the leaders of the future truly men and women of God, people with an ardent desire to dwell in God's presence, to listen to God's voice, to look at God's beauty, to touch God's incarnate Word and to taste fully God's infinite goodness?
The original meaning of the word "theology" was "union with God in prayer." ... But for the future of Christian leadership it is of vital importance to reclaim the mystical aspect of theology so that every word spoken, every advice given, and every strategy developed can come from a heart that knows God intimately. ... But that battle (0n theology) is often removed from the experience of God's first love which lies at the base of all human relationships.
* Christian leaders cannot simply be person who have well-informed opinions about the burning issues of our time. Their leadership must be rooted in the permanent, intimate relationship with the incarnate Word, Jesus, and they need to find there the source for their words, advice, and guidance. Through the discipline of contemplative prayer, Christian leaders have to learn to listen again and again to the voice of love and to find there the wisdom and courage to address whatever issue presents itself to them. Dealing with burning issues without being rooted in a deep personal relationship with God easily leads to divisiveness because, before we know it, our sense of self is caught up in our opinion about a given subject. But when we are securely rooted in personal intimacy with the source of life, it will be possible to remain flexible without being relativistic, convinced without being rigid, willing to confront without being offensive, gentle and forgiving without being soft, and true witnesses without being manipulative.
For Christian leadership to be truly fruitful in the future, a movement from the moral to the mystical is required.
II - From Popularity to Ministry
The Temptation: To Be Spectacular
* Living in a community with very wounded people, I came to see that I had lived most of my life as a tightrope artist trying to walk on a high, thin cable from one tower to the other, always waiting for the applause when I had not fallen off and broken my leg.
* Not too many of us have a vast repertoire of skills to be proud of, but most of us still feel that, if we have anything at all to show, it is something we have to do solo. You could say that many of us feel like failed tightrope walkers who discovered that we did not have the power to draw thousands of people, that we could not make many conversations, that we did not have the talents to create beautiful liturgies, that we were not as popular with the youth, the young adults, or the elderly as we had hoped, and that we were not as able to respond to the needs of our people as we had expected. But most of us still feel that, ideally, we should have been able to do it all and do it successfully.
The Task: "Feed My Sheep"
* In many ways, he (Jesus) makes it clear that ministry is a communal and mutual experience.
* We cannot bring good news on our own. We are called to proclaim the Gospel together, in community. ... You might already have discovered for yourself how radically different traveling alone is from traveling together. I have found over and over again how hard it is to be truly faithful to Jesus when I am alone. I need my brothers and sisters to pray with me, to speak with me about the spiritual task at hand, and to challenge me to stay pure in mind, heart, and body. But far more importantly, it is Jesus who heals, not I; Jesus who speaks words of truth, not I; Jesus who is Lord, not I. This is very clearly made visible when we proclaim the redeeming power of God together. Indeed, whenever we minister together, it is easier for people to recognize that we do not come in our own name, but in the name of the Lord Jesus who sent us.
* We should not only live in community, but also minister in community. Bill and I were sent to you by our community in the conviction that the same Lord who binds us together in love will also reveal himself to us and others as we walk together on the road.
* Ministry is not only a communal experience, it is also a mutual experience.
* As Jesus ministers, so he wants us to minister. He wants Peter to feed his sheep and care for them, not as "professionals" who know their clients' problems and take care of them, but as vulnerable brothers and sisters who know and are known, who care and are cared for, who forgive and are being forgiven, who love and are being loved. ... But how can anyone lay down his life for those with whom he is not even allowed to enter into a deep personal relationship? Laying down your life means making your own faith and doubt, hope and despair, joy and sadness, courage and fear available to others as ways of getting in touch with the Lord of life.
We are not the healers, we are not the reconcilers, we are not the givers of life. We are sinful, broken, vulnerable people who need as much care as anyone we care for. The mystery of ministry is that we have been chosen to make our own limited and very conditional love the gateway for the unlimited and unconditional love of God. Therefore, true ministry must be mutual. When the members of a community of faith cannot truly know and love their shepherd, shepherding quickly becomes a subtle way of exercising power over others and begins to show authoritarian and dictatorial traits. ... The leadership about which Jesus speaks is of a radically different kind from the leadership offered by the world. It is a servant leadership - to use Robert Greenleaf's term - in which the leader is a vulnerable servant who needs the people as much as they need him or her.
* From this it is clear that a whole new type of leadership is asked for in the Church of tomorrow, a leadership which is not modeled on the power games of the world, but on the servant-leader Jesus, who came to give his life for the salvation of many.
The Discipline: Confession and Forgiveness
* What discipline is required for the future leader to overcome the temptation of individual heroism? I would like to propose the discipline of confession and forgiveness. Just as the future leaders must be mystics deeply steeped in contemplative prayer, so also must they be persons always willing to confess their own brokenness and ask for forgiveness from those to whom they minister.
* Confession and forgiveness are the concrete forms in which we sinful people love one another. ... The sacrament of Confession has often become a way to keep our own vulnerability hidden from our community. Sins are mentioned and ritual words of forgiveness are spoken, but seldom does a real encounter take place in which the reconciling and healing presence of Jesus can be experienced. There is so much fear, so much distance, so much generalization and so little real listening, speaking, and absolving, that not much true sacramentality can be expected.
* How can priests or ministers feel really loved and cared for when they have to hide their own sins and failings from the people to whom they minister and run off to a distant stranger to receive a little comfort and consolation? How can people truly care for their shepherds and keep them faithful to their sacred task when they do not know them and so cannot deeply love them? I am not at all surprised that so many ministers and priests suffer immensely form deep emotional loneliness, frequently feel a great need for affectivity and intimacy, and sometimes experience a deep-seated guilt and shame in front of their own people. Often they seem to say, "What if my people knew how I really feel, what I thing and daydream about, and where my mind wanders when I am sitting by myself in my study?" It is precisely the men and women who are dedicated to spiritual leadership who are easily subject to very raw carnality. The reason for this is that they do not know how to live the truth of the Incarnation. They separate themselves from their own concrete community, try to deal with their needs by ignoring them or satisfying them in distant or anonymous places, and then experience an increasing split between their own most private inner world and the good news they announce. When spirituality becomes spiritualization, life in the body becomes carnality. When ministers and priests live their ministry mostly in their heads and relate to the Gospel as a set of valuable ideas to be announced, the body quickly takes revenge by screaming loudly for affection and intimacy. Christian leaders are called to live the Incarnation, that is, to live in the body - not only in their own bodies but also in the corporate body of the community, and to discover there the presence of the Holy Spirit.
Confession and forgiveness are precisely the disciplines by which spiritualization and carnality can be avoided and true incarnation lived. Through confession, the dark powers are taken out of their carnal isolation, brought into the light, and made visible to the community. Through forgiveness, they are disarmed and dispelled and a new integration between body and spirit is made possible.
* ... the awareness of God's healing presence in the confessing community of those who dare to search for healing.
* All of this does not mean that ministers or priests must, explicitly, bring their own sins or failures into the pulpit or into their daily ministries. That would be unhealthy and imprudent and not at all a form of servant-leadership. What it means is that ministers and priests are also called to be full members of their communities, are accountable to them and need their affection and support, and are called to minster with their whole being, including their wounded selves.
I am convinced that priests and ministers, especially those who relate to many anguishing people, need a truly safe place for themselves. They need a place where they can share their deep pain and struggles with people who do not need them, but who can guide them ever deeper into the mystery of God's love. I, personally, have been fortunate in having found such a place in L'Arche, with a group of friends who pay attention to my own often-hidden pains and keep me faithful to my vocation by their gentle criticisms and loving support.
III - From Leading to Being Led
The Temptation: To Be Powerful
* Without realizing it, the people I came to live with made me aware of the extent to which my leadership was still a desire to control complex situations, confused emotions, and anxious minds. It took me a long time to feel safe in this unpredictable climate, and I still have moments in which I clamp down and tell everyone to shut up, get in line, listen to me, and believe in what I say. But I am also getting in touch with the mystery that leadership, for a large part, means to be led. I discover that I am learning many new things, not just about the pains and struggles of wounded people, but also about their unique gifts and graces. They teach me about joy and peace, love and care and prayer - what I could never have learned in any academy. They also teach me what nobody else could have taught me, about grief and violence, fear and indifference. Most of all, they give me a glimpse of God's first love, often at moments when I start feeling depressed and discouraged.
* The temptation to consider power an apt instrument for the proclamation of the Gospel is the greatest of all.
* What makes the temptation of power so seemingly irresistible? Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love. It seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life.
* Ever since the snake said, "The day you eat of this tree your eyes will be open and you will be like gods, knowing good from evil" (Genesis 3:5), we have been tempted to replace love with power. Jesus lived that temptation in the most agonizing way from the desert to the cross. The long painful history of the Church is the history of people ever and again tempted to choose power over love, control over the cross, being a leader over being led.
* One thing is clear to me: the temptation of power is greatest when intimacy is a threat. Much Christian leadership is exercised by people who do not know how to develop healthy, intimate relationships and have opted for power and control instead. Many Christian empire-builder have been people unable to give and receive love.
The Challenge: "Somebody Else Will Take You"
* They touch the core of Christian leadership and are spoken to offer us ever and again new ways to let go of power and follow the humble way of Jesus. ... Immediately after Peter has been commissioned to be a leader of his sheep, Jesus confronts him with the hard truth that the servant-leader is the leader who is being led to unknown, undesirable, and painful places. The way of the Christian leader is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross. This might sound morbid and masochistic, but for those who have heard the voice of the first love and said "yes" to it, the downward-moving way of Jesus is the way to the joy and the peace of God, a joy and peace that is not of this world.
* ... the most important quality of Christian leadership in the future ... is not a leadership of power and control, but a leadership of powerlessness and humility in which the suffering servant of God, Jesus Christ, is made manifest. ... I am speaking of a leadership in which power is constantly abandoned in favor of love. It is a true spiritual leadership. Powerlessness and humility in the spiritual life do not refer to people who have no spine and who let everyone else make decisions for them. They refer to people who are so deeply in love with Jesus that they are ready to follow him wherever he guides them, always trusting that, with him, they will find life and find it abundantly.
* The Christian leader of the future needs to be radically poor, journeying with nothing except a staff - "no bread, no haversack, no money, no spare tunic" (Mark 6:8). What is good about being poor? Nothing, except that it offers us the possibility of giving leadership by allowing ourselves to be led. We will become dependent on the positive or negative responses of those to whom we go and thus be truly led to where the Spirit of Jesus wants to lead. Wealth and riches prevent us from truly discerning the way of Jesus. Paul writes to Timothy: "People who long to be rich are a prey to trial; they get trapped into all sorts of foolish and harmful ambitions which plunge people into ruin and destruction" (I Timothy 6:9). If there is any hope for the Church in the future, it will be hope for the Church in the future, it will be hope for a poor Church in which its leaders are willing to be led.
The Discipline: Theological Reflection
* Just as prayer keeps us connected with the first love and just as confession and forgiveness keep our ministry communal and mutual, so strenuous theological reflection will allow us to discern critically where we are being led.
* Real theological thinking, which is thinking with the mind of Christ, is hard to find in the practice of the ministry. Without solid theological reflection, future leaders will be little more than pseudo-psychologists, pseudo-sociologists, pseudo-social workers. They will think of themselves as enablers, facilitators, role models, father or mother figures, big brothers or big sisters, and so on, and thus join the countless men and women who make a living by trying to help their fellow human beings to cope with the stresses and strains of everyday living.
* The Christian leader thinks, speaks, and acts in the name of Jesus, who came to free humanity from the power of death and open the way to eternal life. To be such a leader it is essential to be able to discern from moment to moment how God acts in human history and how the personal, communal, national and international events that occur during our lives can make us more and more sensitive to the ways in which we are led to the cross and through the cross of the resurrection.
* The task of future Christian leaders is not to make a little contribution to the solutions of the pains and tribulations of their time, but to identify and announce the ways in which Jesus is leading God's people out of slavery, through the desert to a new land of freedom. Christian leaders have the arduous task of responding to personal struggles, family conflicts, national calamities, and international tensions with an articulate faith in God's real presence. They have to say "no" to every form of fatalism, defeatism, accidentalism or incidentalism which make people believe that statistics are telling us the truth. They have to say "no" to every form of despair in which human life is seen as a pure matter of good or bad luck. They have to say "no" to sentimental attempts to make people develop a spirit of resignation or stoic indifference in the face of the unavoidability of pain, suffering, and death. In short, they have to say "no" to the secular world and proclaim in unambiguous terms that the incarnation of God's Word, through whom all things came into being, has made even the smallest event of human history into Kairos, that is, an opportunity to be led deeper into the heart of Christ. The Christian leaders of the future have to be theologians, persons who know the heart of God and are trained - through prayer, study, and careful analysis - to manifest the divine event of God's saving work in the midst of the many seemingly random events of their time.
* Theological reflection is reflecting on the painful and joyful realities of every day with the mind of Jesus and thereby raising human consciousness to the knowledge of God's gentle guidance. This is a hard discipline, since God's presence is often a hidden presence, a presence that needs to be discovered. The loud, boisterous noises of the world make us deaf to the soft, gentle, and loving voice of God. A Christian leader is called to help people to hear that voice and so be comforted and consoled.
* ... centers where people are trained in true discernment of the signs of the time. This cannot be just an intellectual training. It requires a deep spiritual formation involving the whole person - body, mind, and heart.
* Formation in the mind of Christ, who did not cling to power but empties himself, taking the form of a slave, is not what most seminaries are about. Everything in our competitive and ambitious world militates against it. But to the degree that such formation is being sought for and realized, there is hope for the Church of the next century.
Conclusion
* Too often I looked at being relevant, popular, and powerful as ingredients of an effective ministry. The truth, however, is that these are not vocations but temptations. Jesus asks, "Do you love me?" Jesus sends us out to be shepherds, and Jesus promises a life in which we increasingly have to stretch out our hands and be led to places where we would rather not go. He asks us to move from a concern for relevance, to a life of prayer, from worries about popularity to communal and mutual ministry, and from a leadership built on power to a leadership in which we critically discern where God is leading us and our people.
* I leave you with the image of the leader with outstretched hands, who chooses a life of downward mobility. It is the image of the praying leader, the vulnerable leader, and the trusting leader. May that image fill your hearts with hope, courage, and confidence as you anticipate the next century.
Prologue
* I also came to see that I should not worry about tomorrow, next week, next year, or the next century. The more willing I was to look honestly at what I was thinking and saying and doing now, the more easily I would come into touch with the movement of God's Spirit in me, leading me to the future. God is a God of the present and reveals to those who are willing to listen carefully to the moment in which they live the steps they are to take toward the future. "Do not worry about tomorrow," Jesus says, "tomorrow will take care of itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own" (Matthew 6:34).
* Even though the long and often complex presentations and discussions were far beyond his mental capacities, he had a real sense of belonging to the group. He felt accepted and loved. He received much and, with his generous heart, gave much in return. His Baptism, Confirmation, and First Communion during the Easter Vigil became a real high point in his life. While limited in his ability to express himself in many words, he felt deeply touched by Jesus and knew what it meant to be reborn by water and the Holy Spirit.
* Those who are baptized and confirmed have a new vocation, the vocation to proclaim to others the good news of Jesus.
Introduction
* I asked myself, "What decisions have you been making lately and how are they a reflection of the way you sense the future?" Somehow I have to trust that God is at work in me and that the way I am being moved to new inner and outer places is part of a larger movement of which I am only a very small part.
* Everyone was saying that I was doing really well, but something inside was telling me that my success was putting my own soul in danger. I began to ask myself whether my lack of contemplative prayer, my loneliness, and my constantly changing involvement in what seemed most urgent were signs that the Spirit was gradually being suppressed. It was very hard for me to see clearly, and though I never spoke about hell or only jokingly so, I woke up one day with the realization that I was living in a very dark place and that the term "burnout" was a convenient psychological translation for a spiritual death.
In the midst of this I kept praying, "Lord, show me where you want me to go and I will follow you, but please be clear and unambiguous about it!"
I - From Relevance to Prayer
The Temptation: To Be Relevant
* Not being able to use any of the skills that had proved so practical in the past was a real source of anxiety. I was suddenly faced with my naked self, open for affirmations and rejections, hugs and punches, smiles and tears, all dependent simply on how I was perceived at the moment. In a way, it seemed as though I was starting my life all over again. Relationships, connections, reputations could no longer be counted on.
This experience was and, in many ways, is still the most important experience of my new life, because it forced me to rediscover my true identity. These broken, wounded, and completely unpretentious people forced me to let go of my relevant self - the self that can do things, show things, prove things, build things - and forced me to reclaim that unadorned self in which I am completely vulnerable, open to receive and give love regardless of any accomplishments.
* ... the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self. That is the way Jesus came to reveal God's love. The great message that we have to carry, as ministers of God's word and followers of Jesus, is that God loves us not because of what we do or accomplish, but because God has created and redeemed us in love and has chosen us to proclaim that love as the true source of all human life.
* Beneath all the great accomplishments of our time there is a deep current of despair. While efficiency and control are the great aspirations of our society, the loneliness, isolation, lack of friendship and intimacy, broken relationships, boredom, feelings of emptiness and depression, and a deep sense of uselessness fill the hearts of millions of people in our success-oriented world.
* The leader of the future will be the one who dares to claim his irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation that allows him or her to enter into a deep solidarity with the anguish underlying all the glitter of success and to bring the light of Jesus there.
The Question: "Do You Love Me?"
* We have to hear that question as being central to all our Christian ministry because it is the question that can allow us to be, at the same time, irrelevant and truly self-confident.
* He (Jesus) whose only concern had been to announce the unconditional love of God had only one question to ask, "Do you love me?"
* In our world of loneliness and despair, there is an enormous need for men and women who know the heart of God, a heart that forgives, that cares, that reaches out and wants to heal. In that heart there is no suspicion, no vindictiveness, no resentment, and not a tinge of hatred. It is a heart that wants only to give love and receive love in response. It is a heart that suffers immensely because it sees the magnitude of human pain and the great resistance of trusting the heart of God who wants to offer consolation and hope.
* The Christian leader of the future is the one who truly knows the heart of God as it has become flesh, "a heart of flesh," in Jesus. Knowing God's heart means consistently, radically, and very concretely to announce and reveal that God is love and only love, and that every time fear, isolation, or despair begin to invade the human soul this is not something that comes from God. This sounds very simple and maybe even trite, but very few people know that they are loved without any conditions or limits. This unconditional and unlimited love is what the evangelist John calls God's first love. "Let us love," he says, "because God loved us first" (1 John 4:19). The love that often leaves us doubtful, frustrated, angry, and resentful is the second love, that is to say, the affirmation, affection, sympathy, encouragement, and support that we receive from our parents, teachers, spouses, and friends. We all know how limited, broken, and very fragile that love is. Behind the many expressions of this second love there is always the chance of rejection, withdrawal, punishment, blackmail, violence, and even hatred. ... Often it seems that beneath the pleasantries of daily life there are many gaping wounds that carry such names as: abandonment, betrayal, rejection, rupture, and loss. These are all the shadow side of the second love and reveal the darkness that never completely leaves the human heart.
The radical good news is that the second love is only a broken reflection of the first love and that the first love is offered to us by a God in whom there are no shadows. Jesus' heart is the incarnation of the shadow-free first love of God. From his heart flow streams of living water.
* From that heart come the words, "Do you love me?" Knowing the heart of Jesus and loving him are the same thing. The knowledge of Jesus' heart is a knowledge of the heart. And when we live in the world with that knowledge, we cannot do other than bring healing, reconciliation, new life and hope wherever we go. The desire to be relevant and successful will gradually disappear, and our only desire will be to say with our whole being to our brothers and sisters of the human race, "You are loved. There is no reason to be afraid. In love God created your inmost self and knit you together in your mother's womb" (see Psalm 139:13).
The Discipline: Contemplative Prayer
* To live a life that is no dominated by the desire to be relevant but is instead safely anchored in the knowledge of God's first love, we have to be mystics. A mystic is a person whose identity is deeply rooted in God's first love.
If there is any focus that the Christian leader of the future will need, it is the discipline of dwelling in the presence of the One who keeps asking us, "Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?" It is the discipline of contemplative prayer. Through contemplative prayer we can keep ourselves from being pulled from one urgent issue to another and from becoming strangers to our own and God's heart. Contemplative prayer keeps us home, rooted and safe, even when we are on the road, moving from place to place, and often surrounded by sounds of violence and war. Contemplative prayer deepens in us the knowledge that we are already free, that we have already found a place to dwell, that we already belong to God, even though everything and everyone around us keeps suggesting the opposite.
* The central question is, Are the leaders of the future truly men and women of God, people with an ardent desire to dwell in God's presence, to listen to God's voice, to look at God's beauty, to touch God's incarnate Word and to taste fully God's infinite goodness?
The original meaning of the word "theology" was "union with God in prayer." ... But for the future of Christian leadership it is of vital importance to reclaim the mystical aspect of theology so that every word spoken, every advice given, and every strategy developed can come from a heart that knows God intimately. ... But that battle (0n theology) is often removed from the experience of God's first love which lies at the base of all human relationships.
* Christian leaders cannot simply be person who have well-informed opinions about the burning issues of our time. Their leadership must be rooted in the permanent, intimate relationship with the incarnate Word, Jesus, and they need to find there the source for their words, advice, and guidance. Through the discipline of contemplative prayer, Christian leaders have to learn to listen again and again to the voice of love and to find there the wisdom and courage to address whatever issue presents itself to them. Dealing with burning issues without being rooted in a deep personal relationship with God easily leads to divisiveness because, before we know it, our sense of self is caught up in our opinion about a given subject. But when we are securely rooted in personal intimacy with the source of life, it will be possible to remain flexible without being relativistic, convinced without being rigid, willing to confront without being offensive, gentle and forgiving without being soft, and true witnesses without being manipulative.
For Christian leadership to be truly fruitful in the future, a movement from the moral to the mystical is required.
II - From Popularity to Ministry
The Temptation: To Be Spectacular
* Living in a community with very wounded people, I came to see that I had lived most of my life as a tightrope artist trying to walk on a high, thin cable from one tower to the other, always waiting for the applause when I had not fallen off and broken my leg.
* Not too many of us have a vast repertoire of skills to be proud of, but most of us still feel that, if we have anything at all to show, it is something we have to do solo. You could say that many of us feel like failed tightrope walkers who discovered that we did not have the power to draw thousands of people, that we could not make many conversations, that we did not have the talents to create beautiful liturgies, that we were not as popular with the youth, the young adults, or the elderly as we had hoped, and that we were not as able to respond to the needs of our people as we had expected. But most of us still feel that, ideally, we should have been able to do it all and do it successfully.
The Task: "Feed My Sheep"
* In many ways, he (Jesus) makes it clear that ministry is a communal and mutual experience.
* We cannot bring good news on our own. We are called to proclaim the Gospel together, in community. ... You might already have discovered for yourself how radically different traveling alone is from traveling together. I have found over and over again how hard it is to be truly faithful to Jesus when I am alone. I need my brothers and sisters to pray with me, to speak with me about the spiritual task at hand, and to challenge me to stay pure in mind, heart, and body. But far more importantly, it is Jesus who heals, not I; Jesus who speaks words of truth, not I; Jesus who is Lord, not I. This is very clearly made visible when we proclaim the redeeming power of God together. Indeed, whenever we minister together, it is easier for people to recognize that we do not come in our own name, but in the name of the Lord Jesus who sent us.
* We should not only live in community, but also minister in community. Bill and I were sent to you by our community in the conviction that the same Lord who binds us together in love will also reveal himself to us and others as we walk together on the road.
* Ministry is not only a communal experience, it is also a mutual experience.
* As Jesus ministers, so he wants us to minister. He wants Peter to feed his sheep and care for them, not as "professionals" who know their clients' problems and take care of them, but as vulnerable brothers and sisters who know and are known, who care and are cared for, who forgive and are being forgiven, who love and are being loved. ... But how can anyone lay down his life for those with whom he is not even allowed to enter into a deep personal relationship? Laying down your life means making your own faith and doubt, hope and despair, joy and sadness, courage and fear available to others as ways of getting in touch with the Lord of life.
We are not the healers, we are not the reconcilers, we are not the givers of life. We are sinful, broken, vulnerable people who need as much care as anyone we care for. The mystery of ministry is that we have been chosen to make our own limited and very conditional love the gateway for the unlimited and unconditional love of God. Therefore, true ministry must be mutual. When the members of a community of faith cannot truly know and love their shepherd, shepherding quickly becomes a subtle way of exercising power over others and begins to show authoritarian and dictatorial traits. ... The leadership about which Jesus speaks is of a radically different kind from the leadership offered by the world. It is a servant leadership - to use Robert Greenleaf's term - in which the leader is a vulnerable servant who needs the people as much as they need him or her.
* From this it is clear that a whole new type of leadership is asked for in the Church of tomorrow, a leadership which is not modeled on the power games of the world, but on the servant-leader Jesus, who came to give his life for the salvation of many.
The Discipline: Confession and Forgiveness
* What discipline is required for the future leader to overcome the temptation of individual heroism? I would like to propose the discipline of confession and forgiveness. Just as the future leaders must be mystics deeply steeped in contemplative prayer, so also must they be persons always willing to confess their own brokenness and ask for forgiveness from those to whom they minister.
* Confession and forgiveness are the concrete forms in which we sinful people love one another. ... The sacrament of Confession has often become a way to keep our own vulnerability hidden from our community. Sins are mentioned and ritual words of forgiveness are spoken, but seldom does a real encounter take place in which the reconciling and healing presence of Jesus can be experienced. There is so much fear, so much distance, so much generalization and so little real listening, speaking, and absolving, that not much true sacramentality can be expected.
* How can priests or ministers feel really loved and cared for when they have to hide their own sins and failings from the people to whom they minister and run off to a distant stranger to receive a little comfort and consolation? How can people truly care for their shepherds and keep them faithful to their sacred task when they do not know them and so cannot deeply love them? I am not at all surprised that so many ministers and priests suffer immensely form deep emotional loneliness, frequently feel a great need for affectivity and intimacy, and sometimes experience a deep-seated guilt and shame in front of their own people. Often they seem to say, "What if my people knew how I really feel, what I thing and daydream about, and where my mind wanders when I am sitting by myself in my study?" It is precisely the men and women who are dedicated to spiritual leadership who are easily subject to very raw carnality. The reason for this is that they do not know how to live the truth of the Incarnation. They separate themselves from their own concrete community, try to deal with their needs by ignoring them or satisfying them in distant or anonymous places, and then experience an increasing split between their own most private inner world and the good news they announce. When spirituality becomes spiritualization, life in the body becomes carnality. When ministers and priests live their ministry mostly in their heads and relate to the Gospel as a set of valuable ideas to be announced, the body quickly takes revenge by screaming loudly for affection and intimacy. Christian leaders are called to live the Incarnation, that is, to live in the body - not only in their own bodies but also in the corporate body of the community, and to discover there the presence of the Holy Spirit.
Confession and forgiveness are precisely the disciplines by which spiritualization and carnality can be avoided and true incarnation lived. Through confession, the dark powers are taken out of their carnal isolation, brought into the light, and made visible to the community. Through forgiveness, they are disarmed and dispelled and a new integration between body and spirit is made possible.
* ... the awareness of God's healing presence in the confessing community of those who dare to search for healing.
* All of this does not mean that ministers or priests must, explicitly, bring their own sins or failures into the pulpit or into their daily ministries. That would be unhealthy and imprudent and not at all a form of servant-leadership. What it means is that ministers and priests are also called to be full members of their communities, are accountable to them and need their affection and support, and are called to minster with their whole being, including their wounded selves.
I am convinced that priests and ministers, especially those who relate to many anguishing people, need a truly safe place for themselves. They need a place where they can share their deep pain and struggles with people who do not need them, but who can guide them ever deeper into the mystery of God's love. I, personally, have been fortunate in having found such a place in L'Arche, with a group of friends who pay attention to my own often-hidden pains and keep me faithful to my vocation by their gentle criticisms and loving support.
III - From Leading to Being Led
The Temptation: To Be Powerful
* Without realizing it, the people I came to live with made me aware of the extent to which my leadership was still a desire to control complex situations, confused emotions, and anxious minds. It took me a long time to feel safe in this unpredictable climate, and I still have moments in which I clamp down and tell everyone to shut up, get in line, listen to me, and believe in what I say. But I am also getting in touch with the mystery that leadership, for a large part, means to be led. I discover that I am learning many new things, not just about the pains and struggles of wounded people, but also about their unique gifts and graces. They teach me about joy and peace, love and care and prayer - what I could never have learned in any academy. They also teach me what nobody else could have taught me, about grief and violence, fear and indifference. Most of all, they give me a glimpse of God's first love, often at moments when I start feeling depressed and discouraged.
* The temptation to consider power an apt instrument for the proclamation of the Gospel is the greatest of all.
* What makes the temptation of power so seemingly irresistible? Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love. It seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life.
* Ever since the snake said, "The day you eat of this tree your eyes will be open and you will be like gods, knowing good from evil" (Genesis 3:5), we have been tempted to replace love with power. Jesus lived that temptation in the most agonizing way from the desert to the cross. The long painful history of the Church is the history of people ever and again tempted to choose power over love, control over the cross, being a leader over being led.
* One thing is clear to me: the temptation of power is greatest when intimacy is a threat. Much Christian leadership is exercised by people who do not know how to develop healthy, intimate relationships and have opted for power and control instead. Many Christian empire-builder have been people unable to give and receive love.
The Challenge: "Somebody Else Will Take You"
* They touch the core of Christian leadership and are spoken to offer us ever and again new ways to let go of power and follow the humble way of Jesus. ... Immediately after Peter has been commissioned to be a leader of his sheep, Jesus confronts him with the hard truth that the servant-leader is the leader who is being led to unknown, undesirable, and painful places. The way of the Christian leader is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross. This might sound morbid and masochistic, but for those who have heard the voice of the first love and said "yes" to it, the downward-moving way of Jesus is the way to the joy and the peace of God, a joy and peace that is not of this world.
* ... the most important quality of Christian leadership in the future ... is not a leadership of power and control, but a leadership of powerlessness and humility in which the suffering servant of God, Jesus Christ, is made manifest. ... I am speaking of a leadership in which power is constantly abandoned in favor of love. It is a true spiritual leadership. Powerlessness and humility in the spiritual life do not refer to people who have no spine and who let everyone else make decisions for them. They refer to people who are so deeply in love with Jesus that they are ready to follow him wherever he guides them, always trusting that, with him, they will find life and find it abundantly.
* The Christian leader of the future needs to be radically poor, journeying with nothing except a staff - "no bread, no haversack, no money, no spare tunic" (Mark 6:8). What is good about being poor? Nothing, except that it offers us the possibility of giving leadership by allowing ourselves to be led. We will become dependent on the positive or negative responses of those to whom we go and thus be truly led to where the Spirit of Jesus wants to lead. Wealth and riches prevent us from truly discerning the way of Jesus. Paul writes to Timothy: "People who long to be rich are a prey to trial; they get trapped into all sorts of foolish and harmful ambitions which plunge people into ruin and destruction" (I Timothy 6:9). If there is any hope for the Church in the future, it will be hope for the Church in the future, it will be hope for a poor Church in which its leaders are willing to be led.
The Discipline: Theological Reflection
* Just as prayer keeps us connected with the first love and just as confession and forgiveness keep our ministry communal and mutual, so strenuous theological reflection will allow us to discern critically where we are being led.
* Real theological thinking, which is thinking with the mind of Christ, is hard to find in the practice of the ministry. Without solid theological reflection, future leaders will be little more than pseudo-psychologists, pseudo-sociologists, pseudo-social workers. They will think of themselves as enablers, facilitators, role models, father or mother figures, big brothers or big sisters, and so on, and thus join the countless men and women who make a living by trying to help their fellow human beings to cope with the stresses and strains of everyday living.
* The Christian leader thinks, speaks, and acts in the name of Jesus, who came to free humanity from the power of death and open the way to eternal life. To be such a leader it is essential to be able to discern from moment to moment how God acts in human history and how the personal, communal, national and international events that occur during our lives can make us more and more sensitive to the ways in which we are led to the cross and through the cross of the resurrection.
* The task of future Christian leaders is not to make a little contribution to the solutions of the pains and tribulations of their time, but to identify and announce the ways in which Jesus is leading God's people out of slavery, through the desert to a new land of freedom. Christian leaders have the arduous task of responding to personal struggles, family conflicts, national calamities, and international tensions with an articulate faith in God's real presence. They have to say "no" to every form of fatalism, defeatism, accidentalism or incidentalism which make people believe that statistics are telling us the truth. They have to say "no" to every form of despair in which human life is seen as a pure matter of good or bad luck. They have to say "no" to sentimental attempts to make people develop a spirit of resignation or stoic indifference in the face of the unavoidability of pain, suffering, and death. In short, they have to say "no" to the secular world and proclaim in unambiguous terms that the incarnation of God's Word, through whom all things came into being, has made even the smallest event of human history into Kairos, that is, an opportunity to be led deeper into the heart of Christ. The Christian leaders of the future have to be theologians, persons who know the heart of God and are trained - through prayer, study, and careful analysis - to manifest the divine event of God's saving work in the midst of the many seemingly random events of their time.
* Theological reflection is reflecting on the painful and joyful realities of every day with the mind of Jesus and thereby raising human consciousness to the knowledge of God's gentle guidance. This is a hard discipline, since God's presence is often a hidden presence, a presence that needs to be discovered. The loud, boisterous noises of the world make us deaf to the soft, gentle, and loving voice of God. A Christian leader is called to help people to hear that voice and so be comforted and consoled.
* ... centers where people are trained in true discernment of the signs of the time. This cannot be just an intellectual training. It requires a deep spiritual formation involving the whole person - body, mind, and heart.
* Formation in the mind of Christ, who did not cling to power but empties himself, taking the form of a slave, is not what most seminaries are about. Everything in our competitive and ambitious world militates against it. But to the degree that such formation is being sought for and realized, there is hope for the Church of the next century.
Conclusion
* Too often I looked at being relevant, popular, and powerful as ingredients of an effective ministry. The truth, however, is that these are not vocations but temptations. Jesus asks, "Do you love me?" Jesus sends us out to be shepherds, and Jesus promises a life in which we increasingly have to stretch out our hands and be led to places where we would rather not go. He asks us to move from a concern for relevance, to a life of prayer, from worries about popularity to communal and mutual ministry, and from a leadership built on power to a leadership in which we critically discern where God is leading us and our people.
* I leave you with the image of the leader with outstretched hands, who chooses a life of downward mobility. It is the image of the praying leader, the vulnerable leader, and the trusting leader. May that image fill your hearts with hope, courage, and confidence as you anticipate the next century.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Spiritual Gifts
Spiritual Gifts Test Inventory
Spiritual Gifts Test Results
The Spiritual Gifts Test you just took asseses which of the seven gifts listed in Romans 12:6-8 you may have. Look at the list of gifts below and pick the gift, or two, in which you ranked the highest score. That gift(s) would probably be one of your primary gifts.
You can learn more about your gift by clicking on the word "define." Click on the word "uses" to go to a page where you can locate ministries that use your gift and find books and links to help equip you in it. (Use the back button of your browser to return to this page.)
Learn More About Ministry Profiles
Friday, November 23, 2007
Baked Acorn Squash - Nov. 23, 2007
It is nice to have the recipe (cooking instruction to be more specific) on the acorn squash, which I brought at least more than two weeks ago. I still don't know what I have been busying about. Studying or whatever in the library definitely is to be blamed on, at least partially.
Here is the instruction that came along with the squashes.
* Cut in half, remove seeds.
* Bake in a dish skin side up in about 1'' water at 350F for 40min or until tender.
* Fill with 1 tsp brown sugar, butter, salt, and pepper to taste. (or brown sugar & seasoned sausage)
* Continue to bake for 10min. (20min)
* Microwave on high 4-6min --> fill --> 2min
Here is the instruction that came along with the squashes.
* Cut in half, remove seeds.
* Bake in a dish skin side up in about 1'' water at 350F for 40min or until tender.
* Fill with 1 tsp brown sugar, butter, salt, and pepper to taste. (or brown sugar & seasoned sausage)
* Continue to bake for 10min. (20min)
* Microwave on high 4-6min --> fill --> 2min
Encouraging Thoughts For Christians (from Eileen F.)
* The beginning of anxiety is the end of faith, and the beginning of true faith is the end of anxiety. - George Mueller, Orphanage, Bristol, England
* A little faith with bring your soul to Heave, but a lot of faith will bring Heaven to your soul. - D. L. Moody, Moody Bible Institute, Chicago
* "From prayer that I may be
Sheltered from winds that beat on Thee,
From fearing when I should aspire,
From faltering when I should climb higher,
From silken self, Oh Captain, Free Thy soldier
Who would follow Thee.
From subtle love of softening things,
From easy choices, weakenings,
(Not thus are spirits fortified,
not this way went the Crucified)
From all that dims Thy Calvary,
Oh Lamb of God, deliver me.
Give me the love that leads the way,
The faith that nothing can dismay.
The hope no disappointments tire,
The passion that will burn like fire,
Let me not sink to be a clod:
Make me Thy fuel, Flame of God."
- Amy Carmichael, Dohnavur Fellowship, India
* Forbid it, LORD, that our roots become too firmly attached to the earth, that we should fall in love with things.
Help us to understand that the pilgrimage of this life is but an introduction, a preface, a training school for what is to come.
Then shall we see all of life in its true perspective.
Then shall we not fall in love with the things of time, but come to love things that endure.
Then shall we be saved from the tyranny of possessions which we have no leisure of enjoy, of property whose care becomes a burden.
Give us, we pray, the courage to simplify our lives.
So may we be mature in our faith, child-like but never childish, humble but never cringing, understanding but never conceited.
So help us, O God, to live and not merely to exist, that we may have joy in our work.
In Thy Name, who alone can give us moderation and balance and zest for living, we pray. Amen!
- Peter Marshall, Liberation & Materialism
* A little faith with bring your soul to Heave, but a lot of faith will bring Heaven to your soul. - D. L. Moody, Moody Bible Institute, Chicago
* "From prayer that I may be
Sheltered from winds that beat on Thee,
From fearing when I should aspire,
From faltering when I should climb higher,
From silken self, Oh Captain, Free Thy soldier
Who would follow Thee.
From subtle love of softening things,
From easy choices, weakenings,
(Not thus are spirits fortified,
not this way went the Crucified)
From all that dims Thy Calvary,
Oh Lamb of God, deliver me.
Give me the love that leads the way,
The faith that nothing can dismay.
The hope no disappointments tire,
The passion that will burn like fire,
Let me not sink to be a clod:
Make me Thy fuel, Flame of God."
- Amy Carmichael, Dohnavur Fellowship, India
* Forbid it, LORD, that our roots become too firmly attached to the earth, that we should fall in love with things.
Help us to understand that the pilgrimage of this life is but an introduction, a preface, a training school for what is to come.
Then shall we see all of life in its true perspective.
Then shall we not fall in love with the things of time, but come to love things that endure.
Then shall we be saved from the tyranny of possessions which we have no leisure of enjoy, of property whose care becomes a burden.
Give us, we pray, the courage to simplify our lives.
So may we be mature in our faith, child-like but never childish, humble but never cringing, understanding but never conceited.
So help us, O God, to live and not merely to exist, that we may have joy in our work.
In Thy Name, who alone can give us moderation and balance and zest for living, we pray. Amen!
- Peter Marshall, Liberation & Materialism
Let Me Be a Woman (By Elisabeth Elliot) - Part IX
Let Me Be a Woman: Notes on Womanhood for Valerie
* Who is it you marry?
* What is marriage?
* What makes marriage work?
Chapter 44 Be a Real Woman
* The second thing that makes marriage work, the most explosively dangerous element in our human nature, the source of the greatest earthly pleasure - even, if you ask me, of the greatest fun - the thing you've been wondering when I'd get around to discussing, is sex.
What a real woman wants is a real man. What a real man wants is a real woman. It is masculinity that appeals to a woman. It is femininity that appeals to a man. The more womanly you are, the more manly your husband will want to be.
* We are not required somehow to "overcome" our sexuality. We affirm it. We rejoice in it. We seek to be faithful to it as we seek to use it as a gift of God. ... One, called to be a man, and another, called to be a woman, become one flesh in which, as one flesh, they become one with God.
* You are, Valerie, by the grace of God, a woman. This means you have responsibilities. You are fully a woman, and this means you have privileges. You are only a woman, which means that you have limitations. Walt is a man, he is fully a man, and he is only a man. Thank God for this, and live it to the hilt!
Chapter 45 The Courage of the Creator
* "Every good endowment that we possess and every complete gift that we have received must come from above, from the Father of all lights, with whom there is never the slightest variation or shadow of inconsistency."
Chapter 46 The Inner Sanctum
* God did not limit the gift of sexuality to those who He foreknew would marry. But the gift of sexual intercourse He ordained exclusively for those who marry. This is unequivocal in Scripture. There are no exceptions. Intercourse without total commitment for life is demonic. This supreme intimacy was mysterious ...
* No stronger language could have been found to denote the intimacy which exists between Christ and His Bride. Unquestionably it is because of these mysteries that physical union is reserved for husband and wife, two who have given themselves unconditionally to one another before God and the world. They enter into "knowledge" which no one else is permitted to enter. It is the inner sanctum of human knowledge. "And Abraham knew his wife."
* "If you get too technical you're going to miss the blessing." As with New Testament Greek, so with sex. Beware of the how-to-do-it books. There is danger in analysis. You can't learn the meaning of a rose by pulling it to pieces. You can't examine a burning coal by carrying it away from the fire. It dies in the process. There is something deadly about the relentless scientific probe into the mechanics of sexual activity - ... - to say nothing of the volunteers who participate in the collective experiments, willingly exhibiting themselves for the cause of science and reducing this precious gift not merely to banality but to a bodily function as devoid of meaning for the human being as it is for an animal.
* By throwing away the very things which guarded its meaning, we have thrown away the thing itself. What was once priceless is now the cheapest commodity on the market.
* The nudity is not supposed to move us. ... But I don't want to look at nudity without emotion. I want it reserved to enhance, not exhibited to destroy, the depth of individual experience. I feel I am being robbed of the incalculably valuable treasures of delicacy, mystery, and sophistication. Modesty was a system of protection. But the alarms have all been disconnected. The house is wide open to plunder.
* There is no longer a sense of occasion or appropriateness. What ought to be hidden is displayed. What ought to be whispered or covered in silence is shouted. What ought to be kept out for a chosen time, a chosen place, and a chosen individual is thrown out into the thoroughfare.
Sex is not the most important thing that makes a marriage work. But it is important. It has no authority of its own. It cannot lead to freedom. It must not control. It cannot finally fulfill. In love's highest ecstasies the lover knows that this is not all there is. The closest closeness is not close enough. The "I-Thou" that we ought was ultimate brings us ultimately to that other Thou. It is the will of God that leads to freedom. It is the will of God that finally fulfills. "The world and all its passionate desires will one day disappear, but the man who is following God's will is part of the permanent and cannot die."
* Read the beautiful Song of Songs, a love poem included in the inspired Word of God which describes the beauties of the lover in the eyes of the beloved, and of the beloved in the eyes of the lover. They saw each other. His head, his hair, his eyes, his cheeks, his lips, his arms, his body, his legs, his appearance, his speech are all cited with rapture. "My beloved is all radiant and ruddy, distinguished among ten thousand." This woman had eyes to see, a heart to love, and the ability to put it into words.
* A wife needs eyes to see the man, in all his aspects, which God has given her. She needs a heart trained by practice to love him. She needs to be able to express what she sees and how she loves. We are human beings, made of flesh and blood as well as with brains and emotions. The Word had to be made flesh before we could truly understand what God was like. A man prefaces his proposal for marriage with a declaration of love - "In the beginning was the Word." He says it in as many ways as he can think of - words, gestures, looks, gifts, flowers. But it is not until he marries the woman that the word finally becomes flesh, and his love is expressed most fully. But then the flesh must once again become word. Both the woman and the man need to be told, and told again and again and again, that they are loved. "Behold, thou are fair, my love. There is no spot in thee." Word, then flesh, then word, and so on through life.
* The essence of sexual enjoyment for a woman is self-giving. Give yourself wholly, joyfully, hilariously. (Have we ever talked about the hilarity of sex? No one had prepared me for how rollicking it can be at times!) ... You will find that it is impossible to draw the line between giving pleasure and receiving pleasure. If you put the giving first, the receiving is inevitable.
There are times when you will find it impossible to give, and your husband, in love to you, does not demand. There are times when you will be ravenously hungry and he will want nothing so much as to go to bed and go at once to sleep. Your love, then, will want what he wants more than what you wanted yourself. This is another kind of giving.
You will want to bring forth, for your lover, your own treasures. They are not to be revealed ahead of time to him nor in retrospect to anyone else. These are your own gifts, unique and exceptional and not to be delivered over to the commonplace. Hold them sacred. As Rabindranath Tagore wrote, "My moments signed by God need not be appreciated in the market place."
It will not always be clearcut and simple. In this matter, as in all others where your life is bound closely to your husband's, you will sometimes be aware that you need help. Remember first that love itself - the "educated heart" - has a way of teaching you what to do. Worry is worse than useless, it's destructive. Paul wrote, "Don't worry over anything whatever, tell God every detail of your needs in earnest and thankful prayer, and the peace of God which transcends human understanding will keep constant guard over your hearts and minds as they rest in Christ Jesus." It's God who thought up sex. "Every detail of your needs" includes sexual ones. You can talk to Him about them. You can't shock or embarrass Him. "If any of you does not know how to meet any particular problem he has only to ask God, who gives generously to all men without making them feel foolish or guilty."
Chapter 47 Loyalty
* A third thing that makes marriage work, in addition to the acceptance of hierarchical order and the proper use of sex, is loyalty. Loyalty is based on pride, the right sort of pride that recognizes intrinsic worth in the country or institution or place or person which is the object of loyalty.
* When she takes her husband's name she consents to be known as his wife.
* Pride involves identity. You must identify yourself with someone in oder to be proud of him.
* This loyalty will bring you suffering. ... If you are proud of your man and loyal to him you will suffer when he is criticized. No man in a public position escapes criticism and you must stand by him when it comes. You will know sometimes that the criticism is a just one and because you are loyal you will suffer the more. You will be, by your identification with this man, included in the criticism.
When he fails you cannot be proud of his failure, but you can be loyal. You can maintain that faith in the idea that God had when He made him, and you can comfort and support him, giving him the strength of your love and the incentive which your pride in him will always instill.
Chapter 48 Love Is Action
* We would talk about the fourth thing - love. It is not fourth in priority. I have not arranged these in order of importance because, quite simply, I don't know how. The ideal marriage, I think, cannot do without any one of them. There must be acceptance of the hierarchical order, there must be sex, there must be loyalty and pride, and there must be, in and through all, love.
* The kind of love that makes a marriage work is far more than feelings. Feelings are the least dependable things in the world. To build a marriage on that would be to build a house on sand. When you promise, in the wedding ceremony, to love, you are not promising how you expect to feel. You are promising a course of action which begins on your wedding day and goes on as long as you both live.
Your feelings cannot help but be affected by riches and poverty, health and sickness, and all the other circumstances which make up a lifetime. Your feelings will come and go, rise and fall, but you make no vows about them. When you find yourself, like the unstable man in the Epistle of James, "driven with the wind and tossed," it is a great thing then to know that you have an anchor. You have made a promise before God to love. You promise to love, comfort, honor, and keep this man. You vow to take him as your wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish "according to God's holy ordinance," till death parts you.
Not one of us can fully face up to all the details of the possibilities at the time we make these staggering promises. We make them in faith. Faith that the God who ordained that a man and woman should cleave together for a lifetime is the God who alone can make such faithful cleaving possible. We are not given grace for imaginations. We are given the grace needed at the time when it is needed, "this day our daily bread." And because you have given your word you have committed yourself once and for all. "This, by the grace of God, I will do." Nothing that has ever been worth doing has been accomplished solely through feelings. It takes action. It takes putting one foot in front of the other, walking the path you have agreed together to walk.
* The underlying principle of love is self-giving. It seems to that this is inevitable for a woman who truly loves. You already know how deeply, how urgently you long to give yourself to your husband. It is the essence of femininity to give. Perhaps it is more difficult for a man to give himself, but both husband and wife must learn this. In the wife, this takes the form of submission. ... When in the course of daily life the love which they so naturally feel for their husbands is not sufficient for the wear and tear, the action then required is submission.
But Paul knew that a man's love was of a different sort. His virile drive for domination, God-given and necessary in fulfilling his particular masculine responsibility to rule, renders it more difficult for him to lay down his life. So Paul imposed the heaviest burden on the man when he commanded him to love his wife as Christ loved the Church.
Chapter 49 Love Means a Cross
* The Cross must enter into marriage. "Who loveth sufferth too."
The Cross enters the moment you recognize a relationship as a gift. The One who gives it may withdraw it at any time, and, knowing this, you give thanks in the receiving. Desiring above all else to do the will of God, you offer back to Him this greatest of all earthly gifts as an oblation, lifted up in worship and praise, with faith that in the offering it will be transformed for the good of others.
This is what sacrifice means. This is why the Cross of Christ "towers o'er the wrecks of time." Love is sacrificial. Sacrifice is a giving, an offering up, and the meaning of sacrifice in the Bible is the giving of life to another.
* Maturity starts with the willingness to give oneself. Childishness is characterized by self-centeredness. It is only the emotionally and spiritually mature who are able to lay down their lives for others, those who are "masters of themselves that they might be the servants of others."
* Christian love is action. It is the warp and woof of marriage, and because marriage itself is a life-work, this love is worked out through all the days and years of marriage, growing as it is practiced, deepening as cares and responsibilities deepen, and turning, at the same time, those cares and responsibilities (and even the drudgeries) into deeper joy.
* This love of which I speak is slow to lose patience - it looks for a way of being constructive. ... You can't, of course, be constructive if you don't perceive weakness. But when you recognize a place where a little construction or reinforcement is needed you can begin to build up, to encourage, to strengthen. Don't lose patience. Building takes a long time and you have to put up with many delays and inconveniences and a lot of rubble in the process.
* Love is not possessive. ... By remembering first that it is a gift, and second, by remembering the limitations of the gift. God has given you to each other in a particular way for a particular time. He is still Master of each of you, and it is first of all to Him that you answer. There is a possessiveness which is greed, a clutching, clinging lust that overwhelms and overpowers. There is no faith in this kind, no thanksgiving, no reverence for the person made in the image of God. He is treated as an owned object to be disposed of at the will of the owner. There is fear of loss - he might get away or be taken away. Trust the God who gave him to you, believe Him to keep you both.
* Love is not anxious to impress nor does it cherish inflated ideas of its own importance. ... You have already impressed him. You are enormously important to him. There is no question about that. Accept the fact and be at rest with him. Be meek, acknowledging that there are areas in his life where he can do without you.
* Love has good manners and does not pursue selfish advantage. ... not that she is helpless and in need of physical assistance, but that he cares about her. She is pleased to be recognized in these special ways, and he is pleased because she is pleased. It's a small price to pay for a warm feeling. It's another little tug on the cords that bind them together.
* Love is not touchy. Love is touched - that it is, it is deeply sensitive to the feelings of another, sad when he is sad, hurt when he is hurt, glad when he is glad. But love is not touchy. Touchiness refers to the reaction to another's treatment. When two people are living in love they operate on the assumption that love is at the bottom of whatever treatment they get. This eliminates a lot of potential hurts. It's true that it's always easier to hurt someone you love because everything you do and say matters so intensely to him. But to react in an injured way is touchiness. Love is not touchy. Love gives the benefit of the doubt. And ever if doubt persists, react in love. Don't pay back evil for evil.
* Love does not keep account of evil or gloat over the wickedness of other people. On the contrary, it is glad with all good men when truth prevails. ... Love keeps a clean slate. This doesn't mean, of course, that it's possible to forget every offense. "To forgive is human, to forget divine." You may have to forgive him when he hurts you and then forgive him again and every single time you remember the offense even if it springs to mind four hundred and ninety times. You'll find that forgiveness is not nearly so much as a full-time joy as resentment.
* Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. It is, in fact, the one thing that still stands when all else has fallen.
* You can't talk about the idea of equality and the idea of self-giving in the same breath. You can talk about partnership, but it is the partnership of the dance. If two people agree to dance together they agree to give and take, one to lead and one to follow. This is what a dance is. Insistence that both lead means there won't be any dance. It is the woman's delighted yielding to the man's lead that gives him freedom. It is the man's willingness to take the lead that gives her freedom. Acceptance of their respective positions frees them both and whirls them into joy.
* If you can understand your womanhood, Valerie, in this light, you will know fullness of life. Hear the call of God to be a woman. Obey that call. Turn your energies to service. Whether your service is to be to a husband and through him and the family and home God gives you to serve the world, or whether you should remain, in the providence of God, single in order to serve the world without the solace of husband, home, and family, you will know fullness of life, fullness of liberty, and (I know whereof I speak) fullness of joy.
* Who is it you marry?
* What is marriage?
* What makes marriage work?
Chapter 44 Be a Real Woman
* The second thing that makes marriage work, the most explosively dangerous element in our human nature, the source of the greatest earthly pleasure - even, if you ask me, of the greatest fun - the thing you've been wondering when I'd get around to discussing, is sex.
What a real woman wants is a real man. What a real man wants is a real woman. It is masculinity that appeals to a woman. It is femininity that appeals to a man. The more womanly you are, the more manly your husband will want to be.
* We are not required somehow to "overcome" our sexuality. We affirm it. We rejoice in it. We seek to be faithful to it as we seek to use it as a gift of God. ... One, called to be a man, and another, called to be a woman, become one flesh in which, as one flesh, they become one with God.
* You are, Valerie, by the grace of God, a woman. This means you have responsibilities. You are fully a woman, and this means you have privileges. You are only a woman, which means that you have limitations. Walt is a man, he is fully a man, and he is only a man. Thank God for this, and live it to the hilt!
Chapter 45 The Courage of the Creator
* "Every good endowment that we possess and every complete gift that we have received must come from above, from the Father of all lights, with whom there is never the slightest variation or shadow of inconsistency."
Chapter 46 The Inner Sanctum
* God did not limit the gift of sexuality to those who He foreknew would marry. But the gift of sexual intercourse He ordained exclusively for those who marry. This is unequivocal in Scripture. There are no exceptions. Intercourse without total commitment for life is demonic. This supreme intimacy was mysterious ...
* No stronger language could have been found to denote the intimacy which exists between Christ and His Bride. Unquestionably it is because of these mysteries that physical union is reserved for husband and wife, two who have given themselves unconditionally to one another before God and the world. They enter into "knowledge" which no one else is permitted to enter. It is the inner sanctum of human knowledge. "And Abraham knew his wife."
* "If you get too technical you're going to miss the blessing." As with New Testament Greek, so with sex. Beware of the how-to-do-it books. There is danger in analysis. You can't learn the meaning of a rose by pulling it to pieces. You can't examine a burning coal by carrying it away from the fire. It dies in the process. There is something deadly about the relentless scientific probe into the mechanics of sexual activity - ... - to say nothing of the volunteers who participate in the collective experiments, willingly exhibiting themselves for the cause of science and reducing this precious gift not merely to banality but to a bodily function as devoid of meaning for the human being as it is for an animal.
* By throwing away the very things which guarded its meaning, we have thrown away the thing itself. What was once priceless is now the cheapest commodity on the market.
* The nudity is not supposed to move us. ... But I don't want to look at nudity without emotion. I want it reserved to enhance, not exhibited to destroy, the depth of individual experience. I feel I am being robbed of the incalculably valuable treasures of delicacy, mystery, and sophistication. Modesty was a system of protection. But the alarms have all been disconnected. The house is wide open to plunder.
* There is no longer a sense of occasion or appropriateness. What ought to be hidden is displayed. What ought to be whispered or covered in silence is shouted. What ought to be kept out for a chosen time, a chosen place, and a chosen individual is thrown out into the thoroughfare.
Sex is not the most important thing that makes a marriage work. But it is important. It has no authority of its own. It cannot lead to freedom. It must not control. It cannot finally fulfill. In love's highest ecstasies the lover knows that this is not all there is. The closest closeness is not close enough. The "I-Thou" that we ought was ultimate brings us ultimately to that other Thou. It is the will of God that leads to freedom. It is the will of God that finally fulfills. "The world and all its passionate desires will one day disappear, but the man who is following God's will is part of the permanent and cannot die."
* Read the beautiful Song of Songs, a love poem included in the inspired Word of God which describes the beauties of the lover in the eyes of the beloved, and of the beloved in the eyes of the lover. They saw each other. His head, his hair, his eyes, his cheeks, his lips, his arms, his body, his legs, his appearance, his speech are all cited with rapture. "My beloved is all radiant and ruddy, distinguished among ten thousand." This woman had eyes to see, a heart to love, and the ability to put it into words.
* A wife needs eyes to see the man, in all his aspects, which God has given her. She needs a heart trained by practice to love him. She needs to be able to express what she sees and how she loves. We are human beings, made of flesh and blood as well as with brains and emotions. The Word had to be made flesh before we could truly understand what God was like. A man prefaces his proposal for marriage with a declaration of love - "In the beginning was the Word." He says it in as many ways as he can think of - words, gestures, looks, gifts, flowers. But it is not until he marries the woman that the word finally becomes flesh, and his love is expressed most fully. But then the flesh must once again become word. Both the woman and the man need to be told, and told again and again and again, that they are loved. "Behold, thou are fair, my love. There is no spot in thee." Word, then flesh, then word, and so on through life.
* The essence of sexual enjoyment for a woman is self-giving. Give yourself wholly, joyfully, hilariously. (Have we ever talked about the hilarity of sex? No one had prepared me for how rollicking it can be at times!) ... You will find that it is impossible to draw the line between giving pleasure and receiving pleasure. If you put the giving first, the receiving is inevitable.
There are times when you will find it impossible to give, and your husband, in love to you, does not demand. There are times when you will be ravenously hungry and he will want nothing so much as to go to bed and go at once to sleep. Your love, then, will want what he wants more than what you wanted yourself. This is another kind of giving.
You will want to bring forth, for your lover, your own treasures. They are not to be revealed ahead of time to him nor in retrospect to anyone else. These are your own gifts, unique and exceptional and not to be delivered over to the commonplace. Hold them sacred. As Rabindranath Tagore wrote, "My moments signed by God need not be appreciated in the market place."
It will not always be clearcut and simple. In this matter, as in all others where your life is bound closely to your husband's, you will sometimes be aware that you need help. Remember first that love itself - the "educated heart" - has a way of teaching you what to do. Worry is worse than useless, it's destructive. Paul wrote, "Don't worry over anything whatever, tell God every detail of your needs in earnest and thankful prayer, and the peace of God which transcends human understanding will keep constant guard over your hearts and minds as they rest in Christ Jesus." It's God who thought up sex. "Every detail of your needs" includes sexual ones. You can talk to Him about them. You can't shock or embarrass Him. "If any of you does not know how to meet any particular problem he has only to ask God, who gives generously to all men without making them feel foolish or guilty."
Chapter 47 Loyalty
* A third thing that makes marriage work, in addition to the acceptance of hierarchical order and the proper use of sex, is loyalty. Loyalty is based on pride, the right sort of pride that recognizes intrinsic worth in the country or institution or place or person which is the object of loyalty.
* When she takes her husband's name she consents to be known as his wife.
* Pride involves identity. You must identify yourself with someone in oder to be proud of him.
* This loyalty will bring you suffering. ... If you are proud of your man and loyal to him you will suffer when he is criticized. No man in a public position escapes criticism and you must stand by him when it comes. You will know sometimes that the criticism is a just one and because you are loyal you will suffer the more. You will be, by your identification with this man, included in the criticism.
When he fails you cannot be proud of his failure, but you can be loyal. You can maintain that faith in the idea that God had when He made him, and you can comfort and support him, giving him the strength of your love and the incentive which your pride in him will always instill.
Chapter 48 Love Is Action
* We would talk about the fourth thing - love. It is not fourth in priority. I have not arranged these in order of importance because, quite simply, I don't know how. The ideal marriage, I think, cannot do without any one of them. There must be acceptance of the hierarchical order, there must be sex, there must be loyalty and pride, and there must be, in and through all, love.
* The kind of love that makes a marriage work is far more than feelings. Feelings are the least dependable things in the world. To build a marriage on that would be to build a house on sand. When you promise, in the wedding ceremony, to love, you are not promising how you expect to feel. You are promising a course of action which begins on your wedding day and goes on as long as you both live.
Your feelings cannot help but be affected by riches and poverty, health and sickness, and all the other circumstances which make up a lifetime. Your feelings will come and go, rise and fall, but you make no vows about them. When you find yourself, like the unstable man in the Epistle of James, "driven with the wind and tossed," it is a great thing then to know that you have an anchor. You have made a promise before God to love. You promise to love, comfort, honor, and keep this man. You vow to take him as your wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish "according to God's holy ordinance," till death parts you.
Not one of us can fully face up to all the details of the possibilities at the time we make these staggering promises. We make them in faith. Faith that the God who ordained that a man and woman should cleave together for a lifetime is the God who alone can make such faithful cleaving possible. We are not given grace for imaginations. We are given the grace needed at the time when it is needed, "this day our daily bread." And because you have given your word you have committed yourself once and for all. "This, by the grace of God, I will do." Nothing that has ever been worth doing has been accomplished solely through feelings. It takes action. It takes putting one foot in front of the other, walking the path you have agreed together to walk.
* The underlying principle of love is self-giving. It seems to that this is inevitable for a woman who truly loves. You already know how deeply, how urgently you long to give yourself to your husband. It is the essence of femininity to give. Perhaps it is more difficult for a man to give himself, but both husband and wife must learn this. In the wife, this takes the form of submission. ... When in the course of daily life the love which they so naturally feel for their husbands is not sufficient for the wear and tear, the action then required is submission.
But Paul knew that a man's love was of a different sort. His virile drive for domination, God-given and necessary in fulfilling his particular masculine responsibility to rule, renders it more difficult for him to lay down his life. So Paul imposed the heaviest burden on the man when he commanded him to love his wife as Christ loved the Church.
Chapter 49 Love Means a Cross
* The Cross must enter into marriage. "Who loveth sufferth too."
The Cross enters the moment you recognize a relationship as a gift. The One who gives it may withdraw it at any time, and, knowing this, you give thanks in the receiving. Desiring above all else to do the will of God, you offer back to Him this greatest of all earthly gifts as an oblation, lifted up in worship and praise, with faith that in the offering it will be transformed for the good of others.
This is what sacrifice means. This is why the Cross of Christ "towers o'er the wrecks of time." Love is sacrificial. Sacrifice is a giving, an offering up, and the meaning of sacrifice in the Bible is the giving of life to another.
* Maturity starts with the willingness to give oneself. Childishness is characterized by self-centeredness. It is only the emotionally and spiritually mature who are able to lay down their lives for others, those who are "masters of themselves that they might be the servants of others."
* Christian love is action. It is the warp and woof of marriage, and because marriage itself is a life-work, this love is worked out through all the days and years of marriage, growing as it is practiced, deepening as cares and responsibilities deepen, and turning, at the same time, those cares and responsibilities (and even the drudgeries) into deeper joy.
* This love of which I speak is slow to lose patience - it looks for a way of being constructive. ... You can't, of course, be constructive if you don't perceive weakness. But when you recognize a place where a little construction or reinforcement is needed you can begin to build up, to encourage, to strengthen. Don't lose patience. Building takes a long time and you have to put up with many delays and inconveniences and a lot of rubble in the process.
* Love is not possessive. ... By remembering first that it is a gift, and second, by remembering the limitations of the gift. God has given you to each other in a particular way for a particular time. He is still Master of each of you, and it is first of all to Him that you answer. There is a possessiveness which is greed, a clutching, clinging lust that overwhelms and overpowers. There is no faith in this kind, no thanksgiving, no reverence for the person made in the image of God. He is treated as an owned object to be disposed of at the will of the owner. There is fear of loss - he might get away or be taken away. Trust the God who gave him to you, believe Him to keep you both.
* Love is not anxious to impress nor does it cherish inflated ideas of its own importance. ... You have already impressed him. You are enormously important to him. There is no question about that. Accept the fact and be at rest with him. Be meek, acknowledging that there are areas in his life where he can do without you.
* Love has good manners and does not pursue selfish advantage. ... not that she is helpless and in need of physical assistance, but that he cares about her. She is pleased to be recognized in these special ways, and he is pleased because she is pleased. It's a small price to pay for a warm feeling. It's another little tug on the cords that bind them together.
* Love is not touchy. Love is touched - that it is, it is deeply sensitive to the feelings of another, sad when he is sad, hurt when he is hurt, glad when he is glad. But love is not touchy. Touchiness refers to the reaction to another's treatment. When two people are living in love they operate on the assumption that love is at the bottom of whatever treatment they get. This eliminates a lot of potential hurts. It's true that it's always easier to hurt someone you love because everything you do and say matters so intensely to him. But to react in an injured way is touchiness. Love is not touchy. Love gives the benefit of the doubt. And ever if doubt persists, react in love. Don't pay back evil for evil.
* Love does not keep account of evil or gloat over the wickedness of other people. On the contrary, it is glad with all good men when truth prevails. ... Love keeps a clean slate. This doesn't mean, of course, that it's possible to forget every offense. "To forgive is human, to forget divine." You may have to forgive him when he hurts you and then forgive him again and every single time you remember the offense even if it springs to mind four hundred and ninety times. You'll find that forgiveness is not nearly so much as a full-time joy as resentment.
* Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. It is, in fact, the one thing that still stands when all else has fallen.
* You can't talk about the idea of equality and the idea of self-giving in the same breath. You can talk about partnership, but it is the partnership of the dance. If two people agree to dance together they agree to give and take, one to lead and one to follow. This is what a dance is. Insistence that both lead means there won't be any dance. It is the woman's delighted yielding to the man's lead that gives him freedom. It is the man's willingness to take the lead that gives her freedom. Acceptance of their respective positions frees them both and whirls them into joy.
* If you can understand your womanhood, Valerie, in this light, you will know fullness of life. Hear the call of God to be a woman. Obey that call. Turn your energies to service. Whether your service is to be to a husband and through him and the family and home God gives you to serve the world, or whether you should remain, in the providence of God, single in order to serve the world without the solace of husband, home, and family, you will know fullness of life, fullness of liberty, and (I know whereof I speak) fullness of joy.
The Dangerous Duty of Delight (by John Piper)
The Dangerous Duty of Delight: The Glorified God and the Satisfied Soul
Preface
* The truth and beauty of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, are breathtaking.
* Well, the human race does in fact crave the experience of awe and wonder. And there is no reality more breathtaking than Jesus Christ. He is not safe, but He is stunning.
* God has put eternity in man's mind and filled the human heart with longing. But we know not what we long from until we see the breathtaking God. This is the cause of universal restlessness.
* "You made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace till they rest in you." - St. Augustine
* The world has an inconsolable longing.
* "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." - C. S. Lewis
* "The steadfast love of the LORD is better than life" (Psalm 63:3, RSV). Infinite delight is a dangerous duty. But you will not regret the pursuit. I call it Christian Hedonism.
Chapter 1 Treating Delight As Duty Is Controversial
* "Christian Hedonism" is a controversial name for an old-fashioned way of life.
* Deuteronomy 28:47-48; Psalm 43:4; Psalm 100:2; Psalm 37:4; Psalm 90:14; Psalm 16:11; Matthew 5:11-12; John 15:1; Hebrews 12:2; Matthew 25:21; James 1:2; 2 Corinthians 6:10; 2 Corinthians 1:24; Philippians 4:4; Romans 5:3; 1 Peter 4:13
* "Delighting in Him, may be the work of our lives" - Richard Baxter, The Saints' Everlasting Rest; This joy would "arm us against the assaults of our spiritual enemies and put our mouths out of taste for those pleasures with which the tempter baits his hook." - Matthew Henry
* "The happiness of the creature consists in rejoicing in God, by which also God is magnified and exalted." - Jonathan Edwards
* "The end of the creation is that the creation might glorify [God]. Now what is glorifying God, but a rejoicing at that glory he has displayed."- Jonathan Edwards
* Christian Hedonism insists that joy is not just the spin-off of obedience of God, but part of obedience. ... Because joy is an act of obedience. We are commanded to rejoice in God. If obedience is doing what God commands, then joy is not merely the spin-off of obedience, it is obedience.
* "It is a Christian duty, as you know, for everyone to be as happy as he can." - C. S. Lewis
* Maximum happiness, both qualitatively and quantitatively, is precisely waht we are duty-bound to pursue.
* One wise Christian described the relationship between duty and delight this way:
Suppose a husband asks his wife if he must kiss her good night. Her answer is, "You must, but not that kind of a must." What she means is this: "Unless a spontaneous affection for my person motivates you, your overtures are stripped of all moral value." (E. J. Carnell, Christian Commitment) In other words, if there is no pleasure in the kiss, the duty of kissing has not been done. Delight in her person, expressed in the kiss, is part of the duty, not a by-product of it.
* Let it be crystal clear: We are always talking about joy in God. Even joy in doing good is finally joy in God, because the ultimate good that we always aim at is displaying the glory of God and expanding our own joy in God to others. Any other joy would be qualitatively insufficient for the longing of our souls and quantitatively too short for our eternal need. In God alone is fullness of joy and joy forever.
* "In Your presence is fullness of joy; in Your right hand there are pleasures forever" (Psalm 16:11).
Chapter 2 Glorify God by Enjoying Him Forever
Chapter 3 Affections Are Not Optional
Chapter 4 Pursuing Pleasure Undermines Pride and Self-Pity
Chapter 5 Pursue Your Joy in the Joy of the Beloved
Chapter 6 What Does It Mean for Worship?
Chapter 7 What Does It Mean for Marriage?
Chapter 8 What Does It Mean for Money?
Chapter 9 What Does It Mean for Missions?
Epilogues: A Final Call
Endnotes
Do You Want To Know More?
Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist
The Pleasures of God - the nature of God
Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ - the excellence of Jesus Christ
Let the Nations Be Glad - the power and the price of world evangelization
What's the difference? - the meaning of manhood and womanhood
The Purifying Power of Living by Faith in FUTURE GRACE - the daily battle against unbelief and sin
A Hunger for God - the discipline of prayer and fasting
The Legacy of Sovereign Joy
The Hidden Smile of God
God's Passion for His Glory - the foundational life and thought of Jonathan Edwards
A Godward Life - the dozens of nitty-gritty issues that we face in daily life
Preface
* The truth and beauty of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, are breathtaking.
* Well, the human race does in fact crave the experience of awe and wonder. And there is no reality more breathtaking than Jesus Christ. He is not safe, but He is stunning.
* God has put eternity in man's mind and filled the human heart with longing. But we know not what we long from until we see the breathtaking God. This is the cause of universal restlessness.
* "You made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace till they rest in you." - St. Augustine
* The world has an inconsolable longing.
* "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." - C. S. Lewis
* "The steadfast love of the LORD is better than life" (Psalm 63:3, RSV). Infinite delight is a dangerous duty. But you will not regret the pursuit. I call it Christian Hedonism.
Chapter 1 Treating Delight As Duty Is Controversial
* "Christian Hedonism" is a controversial name for an old-fashioned way of life.
* Deuteronomy 28:47-48; Psalm 43:4; Psalm 100:2; Psalm 37:4; Psalm 90:14; Psalm 16:11; Matthew 5:11-12; John 15:1; Hebrews 12:2; Matthew 25:21; James 1:2; 2 Corinthians 6:10; 2 Corinthians 1:24; Philippians 4:4; Romans 5:3; 1 Peter 4:13
* "Delighting in Him, may be the work of our lives" - Richard Baxter, The Saints' Everlasting Rest; This joy would "arm us against the assaults of our spiritual enemies and put our mouths out of taste for those pleasures with which the tempter baits his hook." - Matthew Henry
* "The happiness of the creature consists in rejoicing in God, by which also God is magnified and exalted." - Jonathan Edwards
* "The end of the creation is that the creation might glorify [God]. Now what is glorifying God, but a rejoicing at that glory he has displayed."- Jonathan Edwards
* Christian Hedonism insists that joy is not just the spin-off of obedience of God, but part of obedience. ... Because joy is an act of obedience. We are commanded to rejoice in God. If obedience is doing what God commands, then joy is not merely the spin-off of obedience, it is obedience.
* "It is a Christian duty, as you know, for everyone to be as happy as he can." - C. S. Lewis
* Maximum happiness, both qualitatively and quantitatively, is precisely waht we are duty-bound to pursue.
* One wise Christian described the relationship between duty and delight this way:
Suppose a husband asks his wife if he must kiss her good night. Her answer is, "You must, but not that kind of a must." What she means is this: "Unless a spontaneous affection for my person motivates you, your overtures are stripped of all moral value." (E. J. Carnell, Christian Commitment) In other words, if there is no pleasure in the kiss, the duty of kissing has not been done. Delight in her person, expressed in the kiss, is part of the duty, not a by-product of it.
* Let it be crystal clear: We are always talking about joy in God. Even joy in doing good is finally joy in God, because the ultimate good that we always aim at is displaying the glory of God and expanding our own joy in God to others. Any other joy would be qualitatively insufficient for the longing of our souls and quantitatively too short for our eternal need. In God alone is fullness of joy and joy forever.
* "In Your presence is fullness of joy; in Your right hand there are pleasures forever" (Psalm 16:11).
Chapter 2 Glorify God by Enjoying Him Forever
Chapter 3 Affections Are Not Optional
Chapter 4 Pursuing Pleasure Undermines Pride and Self-Pity
Chapter 5 Pursue Your Joy in the Joy of the Beloved
Chapter 6 What Does It Mean for Worship?
Chapter 7 What Does It Mean for Marriage?
Chapter 8 What Does It Mean for Money?
Chapter 9 What Does It Mean for Missions?
Epilogues: A Final Call
Endnotes
Do You Want To Know More?
Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist
The Pleasures of God - the nature of God
Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ - the excellence of Jesus Christ
Let the Nations Be Glad - the power and the price of world evangelization
What's the difference? - the meaning of manhood and womanhood
The Purifying Power of Living by Faith in FUTURE GRACE - the daily battle against unbelief and sin
A Hunger for God - the discipline of prayer and fasting
The Legacy of Sovereign Joy
The Hidden Smile of God
God's Passion for His Glory - the foundational life and thought of Jonathan Edwards
A Godward Life - the dozens of nitty-gritty issues that we face in daily life
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Heart Murmuring - Nov. 22, 2007
* I feel sad. I am not sure why. But there is a sense of sadness and a sense of grief in my heart. I just saw the E-mail from XJ again and the sadness deepened. Dear LORD, I remember that there was a time when I too was uncomfortable to disclose my identity in You. Dear LORD, how it must have grieved YOU so. Dear LORD, will you draw my friend clear to you? Will you give me wisdom and boldness in my daily living as one of yours. Dear LORD, you know my heart and my desire to share the gospel with other, for it has touched my heart so. Dear LORD, thank you for saving me. Dear LORD, will you bless my friends, believers and unbelievers alike, as you have so blessed me? I pray for the opening of hearts to respond to your love. I pray for the opening of ears to hear your message and the opening of eyes to see you face and the opening of mouths to proclaim your name and your transforming power.
* Dear LORD, prepare my heart for the trip. Prepare my heart to the conference. Keep me from all evil and distraction. Draw me close to your heart as I draw close to you. Speak to me and mold me and shape me. Provide for me and sustain me with your sufficient grace. Use me and comfort me in you, and you alone. Whet my appetite for you and you alone that all else will be bland.
* Dear LORD, I pray for MH and AL that you will prepare their hearts and you will provide a time for me to share the 4SL with them. I pray for Y and L that you will be working in their hearts as well that they will be open to your good news. I pray for GY that she may know that it is not self-will and strength but your power and enabling that make all the difference.
* Dear LORD, I pray for my parents. Will you bless them and send them people to talk with them about spiritual things? Will you reveal your love to them and their needs for you? Dear LORD, will you be with them and pour your mercy and grace on them? Dear LORD, I ask for their souls. Dear LORD, touch their hearts and save them.
* Dear LORD, I do pray for my heart. Please do protect and guard my heart until the right time and only for the right person. Dear LORD, will you protect and guard his heart as well until the time is right and until we shall finally meet? Grow Him as you grow me in you. Raise him up as the godly man you has ordained him to be and a spiritual leader for the family-to-be. Shape me into the graceful godly woman you made me to be and a suitable helpmate for him. Dear LORD, prepare us for the time that we shall finally come together and serve you together hand in hand and serve each other and others as well.
* Dear LORD, please do be with SH and comfort her heart. Speak to her in a sweet whisper. Help her to see herself as you see her. Restore her and keep her purity for you and for the one you have ordained for her.
In His sweetest, glorious name, with all my heart, Amen!
* Dear LORD, prepare my heart for the trip. Prepare my heart to the conference. Keep me from all evil and distraction. Draw me close to your heart as I draw close to you. Speak to me and mold me and shape me. Provide for me and sustain me with your sufficient grace. Use me and comfort me in you, and you alone. Whet my appetite for you and you alone that all else will be bland.
* Dear LORD, I pray for MH and AL that you will prepare their hearts and you will provide a time for me to share the 4SL with them. I pray for Y and L that you will be working in their hearts as well that they will be open to your good news. I pray for GY that she may know that it is not self-will and strength but your power and enabling that make all the difference.
* Dear LORD, I pray for my parents. Will you bless them and send them people to talk with them about spiritual things? Will you reveal your love to them and their needs for you? Dear LORD, will you be with them and pour your mercy and grace on them? Dear LORD, I ask for their souls. Dear LORD, touch their hearts and save them.
* Dear LORD, I do pray for my heart. Please do protect and guard my heart until the right time and only for the right person. Dear LORD, will you protect and guard his heart as well until the time is right and until we shall finally meet? Grow Him as you grow me in you. Raise him up as the godly man you has ordained him to be and a spiritual leader for the family-to-be. Shape me into the graceful godly woman you made me to be and a suitable helpmate for him. Dear LORD, prepare us for the time that we shall finally come together and serve you together hand in hand and serve each other and others as well.
* Dear LORD, please do be with SH and comfort her heart. Speak to her in a sweet whisper. Help her to see herself as you see her. Restore her and keep her purity for you and for the one you have ordained for her.
In His sweetest, glorious name, with all my heart, Amen!
MT Record - Nov. 22, 2007 (Thanksgiving Special)
I am thankful for the opportunity to share with you what the LORD has recently taught me and how He called me to go on a second CSTMT this December. It was just last Thursday (11/15) that I received a phone call regarding an urgent need to form a team for a CSTMT. The team will work with the local believers in university campus outreach and evangelism before Christmas. My first reaction was it was too short a notice and I had planned otherwise. However, earlier that evening I just finished reading the book Dangerous Wonder by Michael Yaconelli on childlike faith, on knowing God, who is dangerous and good and playful, and on following Jesus with WILD ABANDON. Loving Jesus and living for Him is not always safe, neat, convenient, or well-planned, and it is not supposed to be. It is wild, dangerous, and scary at times, but fulfilling, exciting, and rewarding ever more. I decided to go on the mission trip as a small statement of my desire to follow Jesus despite all the worldly concerns. I decided to go, because I know that He is ABLE, and that the will of God will never call me where the grace of God will not sustain and provide for me. In this past week, He has already provided us a team of four so that we can go together in His name. Dear --- family, would you please pray for me and the team, for our spiritual and practical preparations, safety traveling and during the mission trip, and transformation of hearts and lives of those we will meet and ourselves? I do need to raise -- before December 9, which is only three Sundays away. It sounds wild, does not it? I suppose our Jesus is rather wild, and trustworthy. Will you prayerfully consider supporting me on the trip by giving sacrificially? Thank you!
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Let Me Be a Woman (By Elisabeth Elliot) - Part VIII
Let Me Be a Woman: Notes on Womanhood for Valerie
* Who is it you marry?
* What is marriage?
* What makes marriage work?
Chapter 32 What Makes a Marriage Work
* (Richard) hooker himself was satisfied with Joan, calling her his "well-beloved wife," and writing, "Woman was even in his first estate framed by nature not only after in time but inferior in excellency also unto men, howbeit in so due and sweet proportion as being presented before our eyes might be sooner perceived than defined. And even herein doth lie the reason why that kind of love which is the perfectest ground of wedlock is seldom able to yield any reason of itself.
Chapter 33 Acceptance of Divine Order
* One thing that makes a marriage work is the acceptance of a divine order. Either there is an order or there is not, and if there is one which is violated disorder is the result - disorder on the deepest level of the personality.
* He (Jesus) could do that (washing the disciples' feet) because He knew who He was and whose He was. He could also face the events of the coming night and day. It was not weakness which enabled him to become a slave. It was not resignation that took Him to Calvary. He has both accepted and willed the Father's will.
* You and I can be steadied, directed, and held by the knowledge of where we came from and where we are going. To know that the whole world moves in harmony at God's bidding is wonderfully stabilizing.
Chapter 34 Equality Is Not a Christian Ideal
* "Wherever you draw the lines is where the battle will be."
* Men and women are equal, we may say, in having been created by God. Both male and female are created in His image. They bear the divine stamp. They are equally called to obedience and responsibility, but there are difference in the responsibilities. Both Adam and Eve sinned and are equally guilty. Therefore both are equally the objects of God's grace.
* The statement "All men are created equal" is a political one, referring to a single quality for a single purpose. C. S. Lewis called this a "legal fiction," useful, necessary, but not by any means always desirable. Marriage is a place where it doesn't belong at all. Marriage is not a political arena. it is a union of two opposites. It is a confusion to speak of "separate but equal," or "opposite but equal" in referring to this unique union of two people who have become, because they were made different in order that they might thus become, one flesh.
Chapter 35 Heirs of Grace
* Our joy is in the very discipline of the thing. The discipline doesn't stifle, it gives power, it makes beauty possible.
* Servants are to submit to their masters, whether they are good or bad, for Christ suffered unjustly and it is His example they are exhorted to follow. Married women are to adapt themselves to their husbands, following the example of Sarah who obeyed Abraham. Husbands are to "try to understand" their wives, honoring them as physically weaker, yet "equally heirs with you of the grace of life."
Chapter 36 Proposrtional Equality
* Marriage is not a fifty-fifty proposition. As soon as it is thought of as such it becomes a power struggle, with picayune scorekeeping to make sure one doesn't outdo the other.
* Your equalities have been delineated: equally sinners, equally responsible, equally in need of grace, and equally the objects of that grace. That's where the fifty-fifty matter ends. You take up life as husband and wife and you start laying down your lives - not as martyrs, not as doormats or ascetics making a special bid for sainthood, but as two lovers who have needed and received grace, andn who know very well that they are going to keep on needing and receiving it every day that they live together.
* If there was what my father called a "squabble" among the children, they were summoned separately to testify. The minute a plaintiff began with "Well, he ..." he was stopped . "What did you do?" as the question; "I only want to hear what you did." Sometimes this resultsed in the testimony's petering out altogether and charges being dropped.
* This household justice was based on household authority. In marriage, if two mature people love each other, this whole matter of authority is almost entirely a tacit understanding. I could probably count on one hand, maybe one finger, the times in my own marriages when it became a conscious issue. When it did, of course, I had to remember that lines had been drawn - not by my husband, but by God. I was the one originally created to be a help, not an antagonist.
Chapter 37 The Humility of Ceremony
Chapter 38 Authority
* The question is not who he thinks he is but whom does he represent.
* Acceptance of the divinely ordered hierarchy means acceptance of authority - first of all, God's authority and then those lesser authorities which He has ordained. A husband and wife are both under God, but their positions are not the same. A wife is to submit herself to her husband. The husband's "rank" is given to him by God, as the angels' and animals' ranks are assigned, not chosen or earned. The mature man acknowledges that he did not earn or deserve his place by superior intelligence, virtue, strength, or amiability. The mature woman acknowledges that submission is the will of God for her, and obedience to this will is no more a sign of weakness in her than it was in the Son of Man when He said, "Lo, I come - to do Thy will, O God."
Chapter 39 Subordination
* Equality is, for one thing, a human possibility in marriage.
* Submission for the Lord's sake does not amount to servility. It does not lead to self-destruction, the stifling of gifts, personhood, intelligence and spirit.
* God is not asking anybody to become a zero. What was the design of the Creator in everything that He made? He wanted it to be good, that is, perfect, precisely what He meant, free in its being the thing He intended it to be. When He commanded Adam to "subdue" and "have dominion over" the earth He was not commanding him to destroy its meaning or existence. He was, we may say, "orchestrating," giving the lead to one, subduing another, to produce a full harmony for His glory.
* But we have a loving God who arranged things not only for our "best interests" (we're not always eager to have what is "for our own good") but for freedom and for joy.
* And it is the will of God that woman be subordinate to man in marriage. Marriage is used in the Old Testament to express the relation between God and his covenant people and in the New Testament between Christ and the Church. No effort to keep up with the times, to conform to modern social movements or personality cults authorizes us to invert this order. Tremendous heavenly truths are set forth in a wife's subjection to her husband, and the use of this metaphor in the Bible cannot be accidental.
Chapter 40 The Restraint of Power
* Husbands, who are to initiate, command, and dominate, are specially commanded to love their wives. It is no ordinary kind of love that it is meant here. They are to love them in two ways - first, ... means self-giving. No man who sets this as the first principle will initiate, command, and dominate in a self-aggrandizing way. His acceptance of the authority God has given him is his obedience to God. His acceptance of the way that authority is to be exercised will prove his love for the woman. Second, he is to love his wife "as his own body," which means he is to nourish and cherish her. ... a nourishing and cherishing love, a love that takes responsibility for the care of her.
* As man's power over woman is restrained by love, woman's power over man is restrained by the command to submit. Any woman knows that she has ways of getting her own way. It is not physical strength that is most powerful. It is not the ability to deal with high-level abstractions. She may be as intelligent as or more intelligent than her husband, she may be more gifted than he is. Whether this is the case or not, she also has "wiles," emotional power, and she has sexual power. These must be restrained. The kind of restraint God asks of her is submission.
* John Calvin wrote, "God is the source of both sexes and hence both of them ought with humility to accept and maintain the condition which the LORD has assigned to them. Let the man exercise his authority with moderation ... Let the woman be satisfied with her state of subjection ... otherwise both of them throw off the yoke of God who has not without good reason appointed this distinction of ranks."
* It is impossible for love not to give, and that giving often means giving over one's own preferences. The husband is not in such a case knowledging his wife's authority. He is laying down his life.
Chapter 41 Strength by Constraint
* ... this necessity of restraint in order to have freedom ...
* Stravinsky's Poetics of Music, "In art, as in everything else, one can build only upon a resisting foundation: whatever constantly gives way to pressure, constantly renders movement impossible ..."
"My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.
* The love of a man and a woman gains immeasurably in power when places under the divine restraint we have been talking about. A river flowing through a chasm, walled in by high rock, moves with a rush of concentrated strength which dissipates the moment it reaches the flat plain.
Chapter 42 Masters of Ourselves
* "Make us masters of ourselves," wrote the prison reformer Sir Alexander Paterson, "that we may be the servants of others."
* No woman who has not learned to master herself can be trusted to submit willingly to her husband. And that word willingly means that she does not merely resign herself to something she cannot avoid. It means that by an act of her own will she gives herself. With gladness she submits because she understands that voluntary submission is her very strength. Because it is the thing asked of her by her Creator, it is the thing which assures her of fulfillment. It is the task assigned her which, willingly performed, actually strengthens the husband in his weakness.
* The husband strengthens the wife in her weaknessby obeying the command to command. But he, too, must first have mastered himself. George MacDonald points out that the strong-willed one is not the willful one. ... The strong-willed person wills against himself, chooses that which he does not naturally choose, refuses that which he would naturally choose.
* But the roles are not assigned on the basis of capability. They were determined at the beginning of Creation to be a man's role and a woman's role and again, we are not free to experiment, tamper with, or exchange them.
* It takes self-discipline and it takes humility to do your job. We can count on the God who issued the order to provide the strength to carry it out. No man has sufficient strength in himself properly to be the head of his wife. No woman can rightly sumit to his headship. It takes grace, and grace is a gift, but we are to use the means of grace. Self-discipline helps. Prayer helps. Christ, who is the Head of all of us, stands ready to help any man or woman who asks Him.
Chapter 43 A Universe of Harmony
* We have been talking about the first thing that makes marriage work - the acceptance of divine hierarchy - which is, it seems to me, another aspect of this harmony. The man and woman who recognize that they are heirs together of the grace of life move in time to the thythm, accepting their boundaries as do the waves, yielding their self-life to the Will of Life Universal (which Henry Beston didn't capitalize), moving always toward the final fulfillment and joy - the perfect Music - which is the Will of God.
* Who is it you marry?
* What is marriage?
* What makes marriage work?
Chapter 32 What Makes a Marriage Work
* (Richard) hooker himself was satisfied with Joan, calling her his "well-beloved wife," and writing, "Woman was even in his first estate framed by nature not only after in time but inferior in excellency also unto men, howbeit in so due and sweet proportion as being presented before our eyes might be sooner perceived than defined. And even herein doth lie the reason why that kind of love which is the perfectest ground of wedlock is seldom able to yield any reason of itself.
Chapter 33 Acceptance of Divine Order
* One thing that makes a marriage work is the acceptance of a divine order. Either there is an order or there is not, and if there is one which is violated disorder is the result - disorder on the deepest level of the personality.
* He (Jesus) could do that (washing the disciples' feet) because He knew who He was and whose He was. He could also face the events of the coming night and day. It was not weakness which enabled him to become a slave. It was not resignation that took Him to Calvary. He has both accepted and willed the Father's will.
* You and I can be steadied, directed, and held by the knowledge of where we came from and where we are going. To know that the whole world moves in harmony at God's bidding is wonderfully stabilizing.
Chapter 34 Equality Is Not a Christian Ideal
* "Wherever you draw the lines is where the battle will be."
* Men and women are equal, we may say, in having been created by God. Both male and female are created in His image. They bear the divine stamp. They are equally called to obedience and responsibility, but there are difference in the responsibilities. Both Adam and Eve sinned and are equally guilty. Therefore both are equally the objects of God's grace.
* The statement "All men are created equal" is a political one, referring to a single quality for a single purpose. C. S. Lewis called this a "legal fiction," useful, necessary, but not by any means always desirable. Marriage is a place where it doesn't belong at all. Marriage is not a political arena. it is a union of two opposites. It is a confusion to speak of "separate but equal," or "opposite but equal" in referring to this unique union of two people who have become, because they were made different in order that they might thus become, one flesh.
Chapter 35 Heirs of Grace
* Our joy is in the very discipline of the thing. The discipline doesn't stifle, it gives power, it makes beauty possible.
* Servants are to submit to their masters, whether they are good or bad, for Christ suffered unjustly and it is His example they are exhorted to follow. Married women are to adapt themselves to their husbands, following the example of Sarah who obeyed Abraham. Husbands are to "try to understand" their wives, honoring them as physically weaker, yet "equally heirs with you of the grace of life."
Chapter 36 Proposrtional Equality
* Marriage is not a fifty-fifty proposition. As soon as it is thought of as such it becomes a power struggle, with picayune scorekeeping to make sure one doesn't outdo the other.
* Your equalities have been delineated: equally sinners, equally responsible, equally in need of grace, and equally the objects of that grace. That's where the fifty-fifty matter ends. You take up life as husband and wife and you start laying down your lives - not as martyrs, not as doormats or ascetics making a special bid for sainthood, but as two lovers who have needed and received grace, andn who know very well that they are going to keep on needing and receiving it every day that they live together.
* If there was what my father called a "squabble" among the children, they were summoned separately to testify. The minute a plaintiff began with "Well, he ..." he was stopped . "What did you do?" as the question; "I only want to hear what you did." Sometimes this resultsed in the testimony's petering out altogether and charges being dropped.
* This household justice was based on household authority. In marriage, if two mature people love each other, this whole matter of authority is almost entirely a tacit understanding. I could probably count on one hand, maybe one finger, the times in my own marriages when it became a conscious issue. When it did, of course, I had to remember that lines had been drawn - not by my husband, but by God. I was the one originally created to be a help, not an antagonist.
Chapter 37 The Humility of Ceremony
Chapter 38 Authority
* The question is not who he thinks he is but whom does he represent.
* Acceptance of the divinely ordered hierarchy means acceptance of authority - first of all, God's authority and then those lesser authorities which He has ordained. A husband and wife are both under God, but their positions are not the same. A wife is to submit herself to her husband. The husband's "rank" is given to him by God, as the angels' and animals' ranks are assigned, not chosen or earned. The mature man acknowledges that he did not earn or deserve his place by superior intelligence, virtue, strength, or amiability. The mature woman acknowledges that submission is the will of God for her, and obedience to this will is no more a sign of weakness in her than it was in the Son of Man when He said, "Lo, I come - to do Thy will, O God."
Chapter 39 Subordination
* Equality is, for one thing, a human possibility in marriage.
* Submission for the Lord's sake does not amount to servility. It does not lead to self-destruction, the stifling of gifts, personhood, intelligence and spirit.
* God is not asking anybody to become a zero. What was the design of the Creator in everything that He made? He wanted it to be good, that is, perfect, precisely what He meant, free in its being the thing He intended it to be. When He commanded Adam to "subdue" and "have dominion over" the earth He was not commanding him to destroy its meaning or existence. He was, we may say, "orchestrating," giving the lead to one, subduing another, to produce a full harmony for His glory.
* But we have a loving God who arranged things not only for our "best interests" (we're not always eager to have what is "for our own good") but for freedom and for joy.
* And it is the will of God that woman be subordinate to man in marriage. Marriage is used in the Old Testament to express the relation between God and his covenant people and in the New Testament between Christ and the Church. No effort to keep up with the times, to conform to modern social movements or personality cults authorizes us to invert this order. Tremendous heavenly truths are set forth in a wife's subjection to her husband, and the use of this metaphor in the Bible cannot be accidental.
Chapter 40 The Restraint of Power
* Husbands, who are to initiate, command, and dominate, are specially commanded to love their wives. It is no ordinary kind of love that it is meant here. They are to love them in two ways - first, ... means self-giving. No man who sets this as the first principle will initiate, command, and dominate in a self-aggrandizing way. His acceptance of the authority God has given him is his obedience to God. His acceptance of the way that authority is to be exercised will prove his love for the woman. Second, he is to love his wife "as his own body," which means he is to nourish and cherish her. ... a nourishing and cherishing love, a love that takes responsibility for the care of her.
* As man's power over woman is restrained by love, woman's power over man is restrained by the command to submit. Any woman knows that she has ways of getting her own way. It is not physical strength that is most powerful. It is not the ability to deal with high-level abstractions. She may be as intelligent as or more intelligent than her husband, she may be more gifted than he is. Whether this is the case or not, she also has "wiles," emotional power, and she has sexual power. These must be restrained. The kind of restraint God asks of her is submission.
* John Calvin wrote, "God is the source of both sexes and hence both of them ought with humility to accept and maintain the condition which the LORD has assigned to them. Let the man exercise his authority with moderation ... Let the woman be satisfied with her state of subjection ... otherwise both of them throw off the yoke of God who has not without good reason appointed this distinction of ranks."
* It is impossible for love not to give, and that giving often means giving over one's own preferences. The husband is not in such a case knowledging his wife's authority. He is laying down his life.
Chapter 41 Strength by Constraint
* ... this necessity of restraint in order to have freedom ...
* Stravinsky's Poetics of Music, "In art, as in everything else, one can build only upon a resisting foundation: whatever constantly gives way to pressure, constantly renders movement impossible ..."
"My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.
* The love of a man and a woman gains immeasurably in power when places under the divine restraint we have been talking about. A river flowing through a chasm, walled in by high rock, moves with a rush of concentrated strength which dissipates the moment it reaches the flat plain.
Chapter 42 Masters of Ourselves
* "Make us masters of ourselves," wrote the prison reformer Sir Alexander Paterson, "that we may be the servants of others."
* No woman who has not learned to master herself can be trusted to submit willingly to her husband. And that word willingly means that she does not merely resign herself to something she cannot avoid. It means that by an act of her own will she gives herself. With gladness she submits because she understands that voluntary submission is her very strength. Because it is the thing asked of her by her Creator, it is the thing which assures her of fulfillment. It is the task assigned her which, willingly performed, actually strengthens the husband in his weakness.
* The husband strengthens the wife in her weaknessby obeying the command to command. But he, too, must first have mastered himself. George MacDonald points out that the strong-willed one is not the willful one. ... The strong-willed person wills against himself, chooses that which he does not naturally choose, refuses that which he would naturally choose.
* But the roles are not assigned on the basis of capability. They were determined at the beginning of Creation to be a man's role and a woman's role and again, we are not free to experiment, tamper with, or exchange them.
* It takes self-discipline and it takes humility to do your job. We can count on the God who issued the order to provide the strength to carry it out. No man has sufficient strength in himself properly to be the head of his wife. No woman can rightly sumit to his headship. It takes grace, and grace is a gift, but we are to use the means of grace. Self-discipline helps. Prayer helps. Christ, who is the Head of all of us, stands ready to help any man or woman who asks Him.
Chapter 43 A Universe of Harmony
* We have been talking about the first thing that makes marriage work - the acceptance of divine hierarchy - which is, it seems to me, another aspect of this harmony. The man and woman who recognize that they are heirs together of the grace of life move in time to the thythm, accepting their boundaries as do the waves, yielding their self-life to the Will of Life Universal (which Henry Beston didn't capitalize), moving always toward the final fulfillment and joy - the perfect Music - which is the Will of God.
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