Living the Message Dec.20

Sin and the Devil

The most contemporary spiritualities pretty much ignore sin and the devil. The prevailing assumption seems to be that men and women are basically innocent and good, and all that is needed is training and encouragement to become our best selves," and "blossom where we're planted." "Selfism" is fobbed off as spirituality. Sappy aphorism from Khalil Gibran substitute for the tempered steel imperatives of Jesus.
But we Christians are well warned not to be fooled by superficial appearances of holiness, especially at those times when we think we catch glimpses of them in the mirror. We need rigorous and detailed schooling in the nuances of temptation, the ways of the devil, and our seemingly endless capacity for deceiving ourselves and being deceived.

Keep a cool head. Stay alert. The Devil is poised to pounce, and would like nothing better to catch you napping. Keep your guard up.

IPeter 5:8-9A

Am I an Intelligent Woman or Stupid Girl?

This is the question I have been asking to myself today...still no clues.
By the way, picked up "Friends" today.

Q: where is the relationship going?
1. I love spending time with you.
2. I like the ways you are.
3. When I see you two, there is no love there.
4. I really like you, I love hanging out with you; I had a lot of fun.
5. There’s no point in spending time with someone if it’s just fun.

So where are we?
Well, well to sum up, we’re having fun... BUT Ross gave his key to Mona.
Ha! Funny episode.

Living the message

Dec. 18
Our Wiser Ancestors

Herman Melville once wrote to a friend, "I love all men who dive." Most of us do. But where do we find them? Not in the men and women who attract attention. The trivial and evil feed the appetite for gossip in a journalistic culture. Neither goodness nor righteousness make headlines. Anything which cannot be programmed for mass production, particularly moral excellence, is discarded. Maturity, since it cannot be mastered in a semester course, is no longer a personal goal.
Our ancestors were wiser. They looked around for saints looked for the men and women whose lives were courageously conversant with God, and let them be their teachers in how to live as human begins, which is to say, how to live holy lives. Our secularized world, surfeited on celebrities and victims, has lost the capacity to see God working in ordinary and often unlikely people, that is, to recognize saints. The word itself has been so drained of meaning that it is more likely to be heard as disclaimer--"I 'm no saint"--than as an honorific. Leon Bloy puts us on the way to recovering appreciation and insight in this blunt and bold sentence, "The only sadness, not to be a saint"(Tristesse--de pas etre Saint).

I'm about to die, my life an offering on God's altar. This is the only race worth running. I've run hard right to the finish, believed all the way. All tha'ts left now is the shouting--God's applause!

2 Timothy 4:6--8A

Thai Green Curry

It tastes just like what we can have from a Thai restaurant. Amazing! I always feel confident of my cooking, as long as there is no audience around. Usually I look like a dumb having hands like feet when cooking and will forget what to do suddenly; or I don't like let people see me doing the "magic," because they will figure out it is not a big deal. Thus, to keep it as a mystery sounds better to me.
Frankly, what I did just to spend some time browsing the Internet (earlier is recipe books), gathering the materials what I need and then finding a right way to put everything in. OVER! Even a mouse can cook--what's his name? Ratatouille~ haha...

Time to enjoy my green curry~

Soul Tie Prayer

Living the Message Dec. 17

The Business of Holy Living

All Christians, in some way or another, are about the business of holy living, whether we have acquired a suitable vocabulary for it or not. But it is difficult to know exactly what it consists of. We hardly know what to look for anymore. For the last hundred years and more, those who have set themselves up as our authorities in how to live have been taking us on thrilling roller-coaster prospects of either social utopianism or psychological fulfillment--or both. And we are worse. The only things that have improved, if that it the word for it, are our capacities to move faster and spend more.

There are husbands who, indifferent as they are to any words about God, will be captivated by your life of holy beauty....Cultivate inner beauty, the gentle, gracious kind that God delights in. The holy women of old were beautiful before God that way...

I Peter 3IB, 4-5
(I like today's verse so much.)

Living the Message Dec.15

Dec. 15
A Holy Place

The following is a reflection on Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It and Other Stories.

I know a man who used to buy this book in lots of ten or twenty and give it away, as he put, to "those who are worthy of reading it." He gave me a copy. It soon become a family book as my wife and children and I would read it aloud to each other. One reason that we liked it so much was that it gave dignity and a sense of holiness to take place a hundred miles from where I grew up in Montana and where our family returned each summer for holidays. We already knew it was a holy place, but the book confirmed and deepened out reverence. The book functioned as shrine, calling attention to this place: this is holy ground--worship God here.

...Judas, his betrayer, also knew the place because Jesus and his disciples went there often.

John 18:2

Living The Message --Conversation with Friends

Living The Message

Conversation with Friends

Among those for whom Scripture is passion, reading commentaries has always seemed to me analogous to the gathering of football fans in the local bar, replaying in endless detail the game they have just watched, arguing (maybe even fighting) over observations and opinion, and lacing the discourse with gossip about the players. The level of knowledge evident in these boozy colloquies is impressive. These fans have watched the game for years; the players are household names to them; they know the fine print in the rule book and pick up every nuance on the field. And they are immensely about what happens in the game. Their seemingly endless commentary is evidence of how much they care. Like them, what I relish in commentary is no bare information but conversation with knowledgeable and experienced friends, probing, observing, questioning the biblical text. Absorbed by this plot that stretches grandly from Genesis to Revelation, captured by the messianic presence that in death and resurrection saves us one and all, there is much to notice, much to talk over.

I am chewing on the morsel of a proverb;
I 'll let you in on the sweet old truths,
Stories we heard from our father,
counsel we learned at our mother's knee.

Psalm 78:2-3

X'Mas Song

by Meiko

I don't think Santa's coming this year
'Cause I've been a bad, a bad girl.
I've made my bed, now I'm lying in it
Without a care, a care in the world.
And I took his heart, I tore it apart.
I left him outside in the cold.
I shot him down, in the middle of town.
Oh, I left him outside in the snow.
I won't have no presents this year
'Cause I've been a bad, a bad girl.
I've made my bed now I'm lying in it
Without a care, a care in the world.
And he took me in, he made me sin,
And I never wanna go back again.
So I did him in, I made it all in,
No I never wanna go back again.
Maybe next year I'll be good,
Maybe next year I'll be better.
Maybe next year I'll be good,
Maybe next year I'll be better.
[Dee doo doo doo....]
Maybe next year I'll be good,
Maybe next year I'll be better.
Maybe next year I'll be good,
Maybe next year I'll be better.
Maybe next year I'll be good,
Maybe next year I'll be better.
Maybe next year I'll be good,
Maybe next year I'll be better.