Snow will cover nearly all of Latvia in the second half of the week, and a blizzard is likely on Thursday, meteorologists said.
Source: Leta News
Looks like the winter is arriving later this week here in Latvia!
Monthly Archive for October, 2006
Upon the recommendation of Jo Norton, my old corps officer from Wandsworth, I’m reading The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne. Jo’s gave it with a warning that it could “mess your head up” and she wasn’t wrong.
If you want to live a nice comfortable Christian life then don’t under any circumstances pick up this book. If, however, you want your faith challenged then by all means read it to your hearts (dis)content. I’m not sure everyone that Shane has done during his still relatively short life is required of all Christians, but there is a lot in there that will breed a holy discontent with much of what Christianity has become!
I’m only half-way through myself, but intend to post on a few of the points that are raised over the coming weeks.
Well I went through the process of updating the Wordpress software that runs this blog. What should have been an easy process was turned into a nightmare when I accidentally deleted the wrong folder on the server and ended up removing the themes and plugins from the site. Still it all worked out well in the end!
Yesterday and today I’ve had a bit of a revelation. Our minds are simply too small to understand God, so we might as well stop pretending we do.
It’s not as if I didn’t already know that God’s mystery is too much to understand, but it suddenly dawned on me that we talk as if we understand Him totally. One of the biggest problems with Evangelicalism is that there is a tendency to act as if God is our best friend. This sort of mentality makes the step to acting as if we know His will and His thoughts very small.
Yet the Bible makes it very clear that He is very different to us. We all know Isaiah 55:8-9
where God declares that His ways and thoughts are higher than ours. Certainly some of the things He does are prone to go contrary to everything we expect to happen.
Despite this we still have a tendency to act and speak as if we are totally aware of what God is going to do in any given situation. Strangely though I’ve noticed that in the majority of these cases God tends to conform to our own ideas. We seem to have fallen into a habit of using God as a sort of divine trump card that can be drawn to make our argument impossible to argue against.
Maybe this is a fault of our theology, or our teaching. I honestly don’t know! I do know that for many years I have longed to have a deeper understanding of God that embraces elements of the Orthodox understanding of the Mystery of God. I look at the Christian mystics of history and see within them an understanding that they are able to glimpse something deeper about God whilst accepting they can never fully know Him. I’m sick and tired of a religion that has all the answers to life’s questions and never really seems to accept that some things happen for a higher purpose that God chooses not to reveal.
God is mysterious! Sometimes His ways seem absolutely crazy and sometimes He doesn’t give us an answer to why things happen! To have an answer all the time leaves no room for faith!
One of the things I find most difficult within the Church is the divisions that exist within the Body of Christ. The various denominations have so much to offer each other in terms of our understanding of God and how to be effective Salt and Light in a fallen world. It is a shame that we concentrate far too often on the things that divide the different expressions and not enough on the things that unite us together.
The thing that brought this to mind was a conversation about exchanging pulpits that I was involved in the other night. The particular area that this coversation was about is a pretty good model of how the Church can work together in unity, across the spectrum of denominations, to improve the community of the whole area. However, when it comes to an exchange of pulpits there are so many barriers in place over who can preach in which church that the divides are highlighted.
This highlighting of the divisions is possibly nowhere more strongly felt than between certain areas of the “Evangelical” tradition and Roman Catholicism. Over the years I have seen a disturbing trend in some circles to write off all those who belong to the Church or Rome as at best non-Christians and at worst the very spawn of satan himself.
Now, personally I have some real problems with some Roman Catholic theology, but to write off everything because of these issue is just plain stupid. I’ve recently seen Roman Catholicism lumped together with Mormonism in an article on one blog and this suggests ignorance of both groups on the part of the writer. Anyway, if we want to face up to the truth, those of us in the Evangelical arm of the Christ’s body find it difficult to agree on some pretty fundamental stuff ourselves and are well and truly divided over it. So who are we to cast stones at other parts of the body?
When I look around at the significant influence that many Roman Catholics have had over the past century, I would suggest that more than one Christian from other denominations would have something to learn. Mother Theresa, Archbishop Oscar Romero, Fr Maximillian Kolbe, and countless other unknowns show us what it means to live out Christ’s call to live out his teachings.
But its not only across denominations that we feel this division. I’ve known Salvation Army Corps in the same town who have a spirit of rivalry rather than one of unity.
To my mind this rivalry between denominations and within them is an unmentioned aspect of how we in the Church have bought into modern western society. In a world that is dominated by a sense of competition in which winning is all that counts, we are absorbed by numbers instead of depth, quality of sound instead of a heart of worship, beating our competitors instead of church unity.
(from www.ekklesia.co.uk) A new Bible translation is causing controversy after it cut out difficult parts surrounding economic justice, possessions and money.
The new bible version, released by the Western Bible Foundation in the Netherlands, has created a storm by trying to make the Christian gospel more palatable.
According to Chairman Mr. De Rijke the foundation has reacted to a growing wish of many churches to be market-oriented and more attractive. “Jesus was very inspiring for our inner health, but we don’t need to take his naïve remarks about money seriously. He didn’t study economics, obviously.” Continue reading ‘Controversial new Bible cuts out difficult gospel passages’
Is God really Omnipresent, or is He somehow limited in His omnipresence by the sight of Christians?
It seems to me that we’ve fallen into a trap of limiting the presence of God in some way! We know either in our heart or in our mind that God is everywhere at the same time in some way in which we can’t fathom, but our actions say that we don’t really believe it!
Over the years I must have heard countless testimonies about how people have seen God’s presence in the beauty of creation. I know I have given a few myself! Then we have the whole thing of being in a wonderful worship service and when talking about it say that we had great worship and “then God turned up!” as if in some way He wasn’t already there. We also talk about ‘taking Jesus’ to other communities, again as if in some way He is only where Christians are.
Now I know that the majority of this is more due to our use of language than anything else, but I do think there is an underlying problem. It really is as if we only see God where we expect to see Him! Consequently we fail to see Him amongst the very people that Jesus showed us we should work with. I sometimes wonder whether we actually have started to equate wealth and success with God as well, because we often celebrate those things as a sign of God’s blessing!
Yesterday was the farewell meeting of our current Regional Commanders and the first Bible Reading he used was Habakkuk 2:14, which to my mind sums up what I’m trying to get at.
For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”
The knowledge of the glory of God! The key word there is knowledge as the glory of God already exists throughout the whole of His creation. Nowhere is there a place where God cannot be found if only we seek Him out!
So let’s stop limiting God through our careless use of language. Instead of talking about taking God to places, let’s talk about helping people see God where they are. Instead of only seeing God in the people we expect to see Him in, let’s search for Him in the most unlikely people and through them learn more about the glory of God ourselves.
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