“Sir. I clocked you at 65 mph as you came by me in the 45 mph construction zone. ”
“Sir. I indicated on the citation that no workers were present in the construction zone,”
Sitting on our 7th floor balcony listening to the waves coming in from mist and fog. I’m posting from my iPod so it’s brief. More later.
We leave this am on our migration toward Florida. Our first stop will be Nashville. Visits with family and friends will be good. After that we are going to my Aunt Imogene’s in Rogersville, Alabama. Following a brief stay, we will meet our friends Lovell and Frances from Louisville and we will drive together to Destin, Florida where we will stay for a week with them. The main course comes when we go to Cape Haze for the month of February.
My ambition for the time in Florida is to relax, mentally and spiritually. For me, that seems like an oxymoron. I’ll have to be intentional if I am going to be successful. It is also my intent to initiate a training regiment to get ready for the Triple Crown of Racing in Louisville when we return.
There are a number of people that I hope to visit with while we are in Florida. A little fishing will be good too. Perhaps I’ll even blog a bit??
This has been a harsh winter. The cold has disrupted my daily rhythm. Naturally I miss the front porch and the opportunities to visit with my neighbors. The workshop is not heated so that has limited my activities there. I have found it hard to motivate myself to exercise. I’ve been outside only once it the last five or six weeks. Although, not as regular as it needs to be, I have been working out on the treadmill. The lack of activity also increases my appetite.
I am trying to decide whether I am going to participate in the Louisville Triple Crown Races when we return from Florida. I will need to do some serious training while in Florida. The races include a 5K, a 10K and a 10 miler. Since finishing is my objective rather than speed, I’m pretty confident about the first two but the 10 miler is real challenge. I ran it year before last and it was tougher for me than the half-marathon I ran the year before. I think it would be good for me. I need something to focus my efforts.
Although the pace of my reading has slowed recently, I picked up several books at the library and have a significant wish list on Amazon. I expect to get a lot of reading done in Florida. The most influential reading I have done recently is Shaped By the Word and Eat this Book. I am still reading Eat this Book but my understanding and practice of formational reading has already been positively impacted. Peterson’s Eat this Book has generated a number of topics I plan to pursue this year.
I have had a lot of thoughts that I am pondering but, for some reason, I have been unable to blog about them. Every time I start to write I just seem to lose interest. I don’t know what that is all about.
In any case, I am looking forward to the warmth of Florida and visiting with some friends and a little fishing. Spring is coming.
One of the phrases I remember growing up in church was “We are a people of the Book.” Proudly proclaimed and worn as a badge of honor, one demonstration of the truthfulness of our claim was the ability to quote passages on demand in order to prove our correctness and defeat any who thought differently. As long as they were in agreement with our interpretation, we were “united”. If there was not agreement the conclusion was that the other party just had it wrong and, of course, were not “people of the book”. Perhaps, that is not so much the case today, but Eugene Peterson in “Eat This Book” describes an equally damaging perversion of what it means to be “a people of the book”.
“Eat this book” is my metaphor of choice for focusing attention on what is involved in reading our Holy Scriptures formatively, that is, in such a way that the Holy Spirit uses them to form Christ in us. We are not interested in knowing more but in becoming more.
The task is urgent. It is clear that we live in an age in which the authority of Scripture in our lives has been replaced by the authority of the self: we are encouraged on all sides to take charge of our lives and live our own experience as the authoritative text by which to live.
The alarming thing is how extensively this spirit has invaded the church. I more or less expect the unbaptized world to attempt to live autonomously. But not those of us who confess Jesus as Lord and Savior. I am not the only one to notice that we are in the odd and embarrassing position of being a church in which many among us believe ardently in the authority of the Bible but, instead of submitting to it, use it, apply it, take charge of it endlessly, using our own experience as the authority for how and where and when we will use it.
One of the most urgent tasks facing the Christian community today is to counter this self-sovereignty by reasserting what it means to live these Holy Scriptures from the inside out, instead of using them for our sincere and devout but still self-sovereign purposes.