I am regretful about that we did the wrong thing, please forgive that we tried to do things ahead without waiting for your leading and calling. I know I have failed You. But, please forgive me--cleanse my heart! Let me reborn. I know that only being willing to die can make me reborn.
Embrace me again, my Lord.
I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, "I will confess my transgressions to the Lord"--and forgave the quilt of my sin.
Psalms 33:5
Living The Message
Dec. 12
The Escapist Pleasures
Our cottage industry in murder mysteries didn't last long--a few weeks as I recall. But it was enough to introduce me to the escapist pleasures of detective fiction. I soon found that it is a pleasure much indulged in by scholars, pastors and theologians. Gabriel Marcel always insisted that we have to choose whether we will treat life as a problem to be solved or as a mystery to be entered. Why then do so many of the men and women who choose to enter the mystery slip aside from time to read mysteries that aren't mysteries at all, but problems that always get solved by the last page? I think one reason may be that right and wrong, so often obscured in the ambiguities of everyday living, are cleanly delineated in the murder mystery. The story gives us moral and intellectual breathing room when we are about to be suffocated in the hot air and heavy panting of relativism and subjectivism.
[Jesus said,] "We're not keeping secrets, we're telling them. We're not hiding things; we're bringing everything out into the open."
Luke 8:17
