Road Trip

This week's word for the One Word Blog Carnival is "road". Check out Peter's post, and the posts of those who link up to this blog carnival by clicking here.

I have had roads I dreamed of opened up to me, paved, with flowers bordering the sides.  

I have had roads I hoped to travel blocked with impassable boulders and floods.

I have had roads I never wanted to walk along become the only one available to me.

I have roads I'm unsure of opened up before me, now.

But I have not traveled, nor will I ever travel, alone.

I have loved the following song from the first time I heard it, listening to the radio in my room as a teen.   I loved it even more when I heard it while driving on an actual road for the first time.  (I learned to drive when I was 23, after my daddy died.)   I love it even more now that I look back at roads I've been on as well as to those I still hope to travel.

On the roads we travel both together and apart, Kyrie Eleison.  Lord, have mercy!

The wind blows hard against this mountainside

Across the sea into my soul

It reaches in to where I cannot hide

Setting my feet upon the road

My heart is old it holds my memories

This heart it burns a gem like flame

Somewhere between the soul and soft machine

Is where I find myself again

Kyrie Elison down the road that I must travel

Kyrie Elison through the darkness of the night

Kyrie Elison where I go you will follow

Kyrie Elison on a highway in the light

When I was young I dreamed of growing old

Of what my life would mean to me

Would I have traveled down my chosen road

Or only wish that I could be

Kyrie Elison down the road that I must travel

Kyrie Elison through the darkness of the night

Kyrie Elison where I go you will follow

Kyrie Elison on a highway in the light

Lewis's Trilemma : I Choose to Believe Jesus is God

"The better stuff a creature is made of-  the cleverer, stronger and freer it is- then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong."


That is Clive's explanation as to why free will requires that evil be possible.  For us to enjoy being with God forever in Heaven, there had to be another choice.   He wants us to want Him, but to build us so that we had no choice would make us His slaves instead of His children.  He created us to be His children.  (And my heart soars and I praise Him in my heart for this.)

Chapter three, book two of Mere Christianity ends with a quote I have often read in other Christian books.

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."


The women's prayer group I attend every other Monday has been reading a discussing the Gospel of John. Jesus actually refers to Himself as "I Am" (the Jewish name for God) in this Gospel.  So yes, Lewis is right.   One can believe that Jesus is either really really good, because He is God, or really really bad (or at least messed up) because He claims to be God and isn't,  but "Great Moral Teacher" is an impossibility.  If He is God, and I believe He is, then He is better than that, and if He isn't, well, how can He be moral while claiming to be one with the almighty if He isn't.


On a personal note:  Why I believe Jesus is God, and not a madman.


Because He rose from the dead.   I'm sure that until He rose from the dead, the best I could have believed is that He was mad and should be prevented from speaking publicly for His own sake.  Sorry.   (I know that sounds blasphemous, but He knows my heart, so hiding this thought is pretty silly.)   Perhaps when He raised Lazarus, had I been around, I'd have allowed my heart to open a bit and allow for another possibility, as others did.  But today, now, I believe Jesus is God because He rose from the dead, and there were witnesses.   These witnesses did not live lives of comfort and luxury due to their testimony, but were beaten, burned, flayed, boiled and killed because of it.   And still, they didn't retract because they knew the truth.   There was no reward for them if they were lying, only pain and suffering.  What made the pain and suffering worthwhile to them?   The hope and belief in their own future resurrection.   Had they been lying, they wouldn't have had such hope, and would have had no reason to claim Jesus rose.
I thank God for providing faithful witnesses to His Son's  Resurrection so that I could and would believe.


May I be so bold as to ask you why you believe as you do?

Small Success Thursday on Tuesday!!!

For some reason, a blog I follow is doing "Small Success Thursday" on a Tuesday.   That's JUST random enough for me!  :-)

1)  I went to the gynecologist yesterday.   I can watch a needle go into my arm and draw blood, but the sight of a speculum lying on the counter in plastic makes me feel faint.  Really, it looks like it should be used to repair the exam table, when, in fact, it is a medieval torturing device.  You women know what I mean.   Gentlemen, I suggest you just nod your heads and move on to the next number.  Do not google speculum.  I repeat, gentlemen, do NOT google speculum.

2)  I mailed out a note to a lady from a Church group I belong to who has been sick for awhile.  We aren't close, so I didn't know what to write.   I ended up writing the minutes of our last meeting with get well wishes and blessings on a note card with my initial on the front.

3)  I have made arrangements to meet my husband's best friend's girlfriend.  They have only been going out for three years.   What's the rush, right?  ;-)

Go to "Chocolate for Your Brain" to see Sherri's successes and those of others who have linked up.

My Strength is My Weakness

While this is not what the cover of my
copy looks like, I think it is prettier, and
that my blog deserves the prettier picture.

Today we are discussing Chapter two of Book Two in Mere Christianity.  I know that I missed last week's discussion.   My husband was on vacation and we spent so much time holding hands, that I wasn't able to type.   I need both hands to type.   That's just the way my mind works.  I learned using all my fingers (but not my thumbs, except on the space bar) to type, so now more than twenty years later, I must use all my fingers to type a blog post.   I imagine this generation feels that way about their thumbs for texting, but I digress.   We are supposed to be discussing Mere Christianity, not our thumbs, so quit distracting me and let's get down to discussing!

Clive explains in the chapter why Dualism proves false.   The gist of it is that evil is a perversion of what is good.   Evil can not exist without the good, so therefore the good not only had to have come first, and foremost, and evil has to be rebellion to that good.   It makes sense to me.

Years ago I remember reading a series in a Chicago paper about how to conduct oneself in a job interview.   I didn't like everything I read.   Come to think of it, all these years later, I don't even remember everything I read, but what I do remember quite well is the suggestion by the author that when the interviewer asks what our greatest weakness is, we should play it off of whatever our greatest strength is.   For example, my greatest strength is that if I really want to fix something, I will stay with it until it is fixed.   The weakness is that this determination can turn to a sort of stubbornness where I stay with something that can not be fixed and waste time and energy.   I have since worked on this weakness by giving myself time limits and learning to put a thing aside for a bit and reassess later.   Often after putting it aside, a solution will come to my mind.   Other times, whatever I distracted myself with will loom more important at that point, and I will decide to let it go.   My point is that I can see how something good can be turned into something bad.   I'm sure mine isn't the only strength which can be turned into a weakness.  My guess would be that the only strength that can't be twisted like that is love for the Lord.

While my example is merely small potatoes, Clive manages to describe how Christianity's position on the devil being an entity created by God for something good who then went into rebellion makes more logical sense than a belief that evil and good are equal and opposite forces, with evil being entirely independent of the good (Dualism).  

Please visit my friend Sarah, where you will find her take on Chapters 1 and 2 from Book Two of Mere Christianity, and links to more discussions of Chapter 2.

What do you think?  Are our weaknesses related to our strengths?