Soccer balls have been terrierized.
Mommy gets first fruits of the “garden.”
The house becomes a canvas for sand art.
Mud puddles are mandatory.
Brother’s potty break gives a wee one a chance to seize the hose.
Shirts (and pants) are optional.
Â
It’s been a blissful week, this first one of the Summer of Lewis. We walked with our wagon, ate popsicles, got terribly muddy, bathed everyone, lunched on dairy (since the allergy seems to be gone!) and napped all afternoon.
On the way home from church we sang about a boy named David and how he konked “Goliva” in the forehead. The song was a big hit.
Gramma Lewis taught us Gavin’s favorite song to sing all by himself, “We’re Glad Today!” He sang it on the way to church. “Dankoo, dankoo” is all he sings perfectly to this Mommy’s ears. After we thanked God for each family member, Isaac asked, “Where is Heaven?” :) A precious question that Mommy and Daddy hope we answered so that it sounds very different from Disney World. For bedtime tonight, Mommy and Isaac read What About Heaven?, a gift from Aunt Sarah when Isaac and Gavin’s older sister went to Heaven 6 summers ago.
So I’m glad today for my Isaac and Gavin today. Thank you, God in Heaven.
As I continue my familial campaign to subvert poorly-theologized kids’ songs. . . . This one is in desperate need of a rewrite.
Read your Bible, pray every day, pray every day. Read your Bible, pray every day, and you’ll grow, grow, grow.
Neglect your Bible, forget to pray, forget to pray, forget to pray. Neglect your Bible, forget to pray, and you’ll shrink, shrink, shrink.
Like the sanctification process all depends upon us! I tried a few re-writes and Isaac kept asking for the “grow, grow, grow” part. So I figured I had to include it. How about this:
Read your Bible, pray every day, pray every day, pray every day. Read your Bible, pray every day, and you still need Christ.
Since God chose me and helps me each day, helps me each day, helps me each day. Since God chose me and helps me each day, I will grow, grow, grow.
Since God chose me and helps me each day, helps me each day, helps me each day. Since God chose me and helps me each day, I can’t shrink, shrink, shrink.
If you sit down to read a whole nest of fundy blogs (this one included) at once, you realize we’re a pretty preachy bunch. :lucy We’re always preaching a sermon. And not the sweetly pious one my mom was urging when she taught me the little ditty, “Do you know, Oh Christian, you’re a sermon in shoes?” No, it’s more heat than light. And it’s exhausting after awhile!
I think it’s in our weft and woof. I always say that my fundy students are better speakers than my secular students because they’ve been weaned on public address. Well, that public address is usually polemical, so I guess it’s only natural that when we open our mouth, a polemic is usually what comes out.
But I’ve realized something about this spot recently. When I’m the most polemical, I’m preaching to myself alone. It’s an outpouring of what the Holy Spirit is saying to me. So if you get caught in the crossfire, I don’t know if I should apologize or be thankful that God’s speaking to you too. :bowtie
I love this day.Â
I love the ceremony. Marching to hymns with more verses than I ever knew existed. Feeling the organ music in your feet. Watching those extra-tall ectomorphic boys leading us with the banners and flags.
I love the gaudiness. One day a year we teachers dress like old scholars. Each degree’s garb is a kind of brass ring to goad and inspire. First, the black rayon for the Bachelor (a big step from the high-schoolers matching poly-gowns). The tippet sleeve for the Master (great storage for car keys, graduation programs, and snacks). And the velvety, lavish doctoral gown with sleeves so big you can sit on and catch them on stair rails. I love that you can never hood yourself; you need help to don the whole costume. We all need help, otherwise the hood will be crooked or upside-down.
I love the energy during Commencement. The hugely sincere grins, hearty hugs, and easy congrats everywhere. I even got a congrats today from a befuzzled pair of happy grandparents.
It’s just a blessing to punctuate each year rejoicing with these dear souls ripe with promise. I love these students. I am so blessed. Congrats m’dears. Well done.
I never understood this before. I had been taught “Total Depravity” as one of the two points of Calvinism we non-Calvinists would concede (the other being the Perseverance of the Saints.). But even still it wasn’t until just recently that I understood the idea in its context. I’d love to know where we messed it up.
Calvin and the -ists that follow him do not mean that human beings are absolutely evil. Never have. They mean, instead, that we are absolutely incapable. It’s a negative statement about our goodness, not a positive statement about our evil. Robert Petersen explains it as “sin pervad[ing] the human being and human life so that there is no part of man that is not affected by sin. . . . It is a forthright denial of the notion that sinners have the ability to believe. They do not have that ability. They have lost it in the fall and they need God’s grace in order to be saved.” Michael Williams describes it as “spiritual inability. We are unable to reach God because all of our capacities and faculties have been overturned in the corruption of sin.” Berkhof pictures it as “the contagion of his sin at once spread through the entire man, leaving no part of his nature untouched, but vitiating every power and faculty of body and soul. This utter corruption of man is clearly taught in Scripture, Gen. 6:5; Ps. 14:3; Rom. 7:18. Total depravity here does not mean that human nature was at once as thoroughly depraved as it could possibly become. In the will this depravity manifested itself as spiritual inability.”
That contagion metaphor makes sense. We are diseased, dead in our trespasses and sins. Wesley talked about it as a systemic blood infection that totally incapacitates us. We’re sin-sick sinners bound to our hospital beds, unable to even ask for help. The Great Physician pursues us since we can’t even find or push that call button (Luther would add that we probably don’t even want to push it. The will binds us in our sin, he contends. Erasmus disagreed.).
The idea isn’t original to Calvin. Of course, it originates in Scripture. But Augustine really develops the notion of Total Depravity against his foil Pelagius. Pelagius argued that human beings could save themselves (so grace was unnecessary), and semi-Pelagians like Erasmus and Charles Finney noodled a sort of participation in our own salvation (so grace could be earned).
Augustine defied both positions. Because of our total inability, Grace was all we had. The two doctrines require each other. To have Total Depravity without Grace is nihilism. To have Grace without Total Depravity is aristocracy. Together, however — that’s the Gospel.
Eggheads say that the bureaucratic style eats all the others. It’s the great linguistic PacMan that thrives off the Realistic, the Courtly, and the Republican dots, munching them like vitamins. In other words, we’re all eventually bound and gagged by red tape. So the real danger is not chaotic diversity, but mind-numbing, power-hungry singularity. Goose-stepping unity is our real fear, not grass-roots chaos.
But information, like life, always finds a way. It seeps, leaks, and runs. It’s messy and invigorating.
I always thought digg got it. But it, too, has now jumped the shark. Their recent interview reveals that not only do they think they single-handedly control the messy users, but they have so beneficently gifted us with our own empowerment.
Thanks, but no thanks, gentlemen. We can figure it out quite nicely.
Why weepest thou, Christian? Art thou mourning over thine own corruption? Look to thy perfect Lord, and remember, thou art complete in Him. Thou are in God’s sight as perfect as if thou hadst never sinned: nay, more than that, the Lord our Righteousness hath put a divine garment upon thee, so that thou hast more than the righteousness of man–thou has the righteousness of God. O thou who art mourning by reason of inbred sin and depravity, remember, none of thy sins can condemn thee. Thy standing is not in thyself, rather it is in Christ; thine acceptance is not in thyself, but in the Lord; thou art as much accepted of God today as thou wilt be when thou standest before His Throne, free from all corruption. O, I beseech thee, lay hold of this precious thought. . . perfection in Christ!
Charles Spurgeon
