A while back I posted complaining about the propensity of some people to assume that scripture contradicts experience and that you had to choose one over the other. You can read those here and here.
It seems others are responding. Hobbes at Yes, but… has a quote by Alister McGrath and some discussion that is very good. He says it a lot better than I did.
2. Dental assistants know everything. Dentists know nothing. Continue reading “Thoughts on Dentistry”
Went to the dentist today. That’s not what the ouch is about. It’s been 10 years. **That’s** what the ouch is about. I’d been putting it off until I had money, or barring that, insurance. Well, I don’t got money, but I got this here dental card when I started working full-time. I figured it was time for a visit. The co-pays are going up in January, so I’m trying to get my visits in ahead.
The news is bad, but not so bad as it might have been. Continue reading “Ouch”
Our devotions speaker spoke on revival this morning–a subject dear to my heart. One of the things he did was to read some articles on the Welsh revival (1904-05) and a similar one I had never heard of in Korea (around 1907).
The Welsh revival is one of my favorite stories, just because of the dramatic change that occurred there in such a short time. In 2 months, over 70,000 people were converted. Factories shut down and major sports events were cancelled so people could attend church services until 2:00 in the morning. The horses in the coal mines had to be retrained because they didn’t understand commands sans cursing.
One of my (many) dreams is to write historical novels that tackle these kinds of revivals. I’d like to write an epic centering around John Alexander Dowie. For the Welsh revival, a teen romance might be a more gripping story, since 90% of the leaders of the revival were under the age of 22. Probably some kind of long-term saga would be best to cover the Pentecostal movements that swept through the United States around that same time.
The thing that always frustrates me about these things, though, is how little time they last. Continue reading “Revival”
Some of you may have noticed that the subscription option from Bloglet has been broken for like… ever. It’s fixed now. Apparently Bloglet doesn’t like files that end with the letters “php.” It does, however like the letters “rss” so I changed the file name.
Woot. 🙂
3 to go.
Finished my first exam. I’ve got a final and two 10-page papers left. I think I did pretty good: somewhere between an 85 and a 95, I’d say. In the long essay section, I wrote a real zinger of an essay, followed by a ho-hum attempt, so we’ll see where “acceptable” hangs out.
No. I don’t mean this service. I mean me. I’m not too good with the blogging technique. Either I drown you with a book, or I don’t say nuthin at all. Life’s been busy for me, so I ha’n’t said anything at all.
My excuse? I have a mid-term tonight. I think I’m going to do pretty good, but it’s a bit unnerving, since I haven’t taken any tests for a year, and the last one I took, I bombed. (40 hours really is the max while part-timing it as a student.)
I keep running across things every day that I could blog about, but I usually get it out of my system by talking, and then there’s an end to that. For instance, my sister had her stepson semi-kidnapped last Friday. He’s back now. Everybody’s “happy.”
Other news: be sure and check out the Jolly Blogger (not to be confused with Jolly Roger, like I did for months). He’s about to convert us all to classic Presbyterianism by sheer grace and reasonableness. (Trans.: read him. He’s got some really good stuff to say.)
For myself, I will try to be a better blogger as I can. We should be switching over to the new site some time in January. All we’re waiting on is for Valerie to finish the banner at the top (It’s a beautiful picture–just not web ready yet.)
Blessings!
This is from my Chambers daily.
Faith in antagonism to common sense is fanaticism, and common sense in antagonism to faith is rationalism. The life of faith brings the tow into a right relationship. Common sense is not faith, and faith is not common sense; they stand in the relation of natural and spiritual; of impulse and inspiration. Nothing Jesus ever said is common sense, it is revelation sense, and it reaches the shores where common sense fails. Faith must be tried before the reality of faith is actual….For every detail of the commonsense life, there is a revelation fact of God where we can prove in practical experience what we believe God to be. Faith is a tremendously active principle that always puts Jesus Christ first….God brings us into circumstances in order to educate our faith, because the nature of faith is to make its object real. Until we know Jesus, God is a mere abstraction, we cannot have faith in Him; but immediately we hear Jesus say, “he that has seen Me has seen the father,” we have something that is real, and faith is boundless.
neumatikos 