Ryan has been visiting us all week. We have have been building a loft bed for his new bedroom at home. It has been a lot of fun and work. Ryan has done a lot of work and I have learned a lot. We completed the construction today and got started on painting. We will take him home Saturday and help him set it up. Tomorrow after we finishing painting we will find some time for fishing.
Earlier I posted some quotes from the Internet Monk on his journey experiences and remarked how they echoed some of my own experiences. In a post today he summarized his journey and again I was impressed with how much I identify with him in my own experiences.
This line is a gem:
Oh, I thought I needed a friend, so I bought a dog. The dog hates me.
You can read his post in its entirety here.
Yesterday I was invited to join a guys’ night out. The Crockett, Walt and Long men/boys went to Lake Herrington to fish, swim, tube, eat hot dogs and smores and celebrate David Walt’s eighth birthday. The evening was topped off with an Indiana Jones movie which did not keep me from going to sleep. We returned home today about 1 pm. I really enjoyed being along. The kids were great and had a wonderful time. We had good conversations and I appreciated getting to know Fred Long and J.D. Walt.
Dr. Erland Waltner at age eighty quoted in Dissent Discipleship:
During the last decade of my life … I have sensed I am in transition on my experience of God …For many years my time with God was something like a quick stop while driving on a long and sometimes rough road … a pit stop in the Indianapolis 500 when drivers stop to refuel, to check tires, to watch for possible trouble ahead before hurrying back to fast lane as quickly as possible. I called mine a “spirituality of the road.”
Now I am beginning to see my relationship with God as being like a river which helps me get from here to there, to carry me along from day to day, from task to task, from one experience to the next. I am experiencing God as One who is not only daily present with me, but One who is in motion, bearing me up, sustaining, renewing, enabling me.
Spirituality of the river asks for a higher kind of trusting of in God, a deeper kind of love, a profound hope to be carried on by this river.
There is ultimately no justification for a private piety that doesn’t work out in actual mission, just as there is no justification for people who use their activism in the social, cultural, or political sphere as a screen to prevent them from facing the challenges within their own lives – the challenge, that is of God’s kingdom, of Jesus’s lordship, and of the Spirit’s empowering. If the gospel is not transforming you, how do you know it will transform anything else?
N.T. Wright – Surprised by Hope