… of blueberries.
We have blueberry bushes on the side of our house. They were prolific this year and we were thankful. He is the Lord of the Harvest.
Behold… the pie!
Click the image for a close up look at pie perfection.
And yes it tastes as good as it looks.
al sends
I’m not a military strategist. I’m not a foreign policy expert. I’m sure that all of my Truly Conservative friends will just think this is a bunch of liberal hooey, but I like the hearts and minds approach this guy talks about. At one point he says something to the effect that you make a lot more progress with a road or a school, by being involved, than you do by being removed and throwing bullets.
It really has a gospel sound to me. As a postmil leaning sort of fellow, this seems to be at least pointing in the right direction.
Woodlief is rather prolific these days. Here’s a new post on the unhappiness of parenting. I’m with Tony.
… but I will pick up his slack.
Thanks to Frank at www.centrui0n.blogspot.com we have been introduced to Dr. Horrible.
Please enjoy responsibly…
al sends
This post it totally ripped off from Justin Taylor.
I believe in the sovereignty of God, the Five Points of Calvinism, the Solas of the Reformation, I believe that grace precedes faith in regeneration. Theologically, I am Reformed. Sociologically, I am simply a Christian – or at least I want to be. The tricky thing about our hearts is that they can turn even a good thing into an engine of oppression. It happens when our theological distinctives make us aloof from other Christians. That’s when, functionally, we relocate ourselves outside the gospel and inside Galatianism.
The Judaizers in Galatia did not see their distinctive – the rite of circumcision – as problematic. They could claim biblical authority for it in Genesis 17 and the Abrahamic covenant. But their distinctive functioned as an addition to the all-sufficiency of Jesus himself. Today the flash point is not circumcision. It can be Reformed theology. But no matter how well argued our position is biblically, if it functions in our hearts as an addition to Jesus, it ends up as a form of legalistic divisiveness.
Here’s the conclusion:
My Reformed friend, can you move among other Christian groups and really enjoy them? Do you admire them? Even if you disagree with them in some ways, do you learn from them? What is the emotional tilt of your heart – toward them or away from them? If your Reformed theology has morphed functionally into Galatian sociology, the remedy is not to abandon your Reformed theology. The remedy is to take your Reformed theology to a deeper level. Let it reduce you to Jesus only. Let it humble you. Let this gracious doctrine make you a fun person to be around. The proof that we are Reformed will be all the wonderful Christians we discover around us who are not Reformed. Amazing people. Heroic people. Blood-bought people. People with whom we are eternally one – in Christ alone.
… and not enough of either.
It is a pool in China. Crazy
By the way… I have been writing stuff. Just not here. Check out The Cedar Room and my discussions with Matt on Mary and her place in redemption and heaven.
al sends
In case you’ve not been able to keep up on national events, Tony Woodlief breaks it all down for us…as only Tony can.
So, I’m loafing for a minute while in between things I ought to be doing and I clicked on the “Drafts” thingy on the dashboard. There were six items there, three of which were mine. Well, I thought to myself, I ought to have a look see. Then, after giving them a once over, I decided to post them as they lie. (Note: I did finish the Wells quote and put a period at the end of a sentence. Apart from that, they are as they were.)
The first one was from a while back. I was obviously still reading the Wells book. It reads:
David Wells wraps up his chapter on God with a discussion of the consequences of God’s holiness. He speaks of the law, sin, the cross, conquest (over evil and sin), and obligation. In this section on obligation he writes:
What would the church be like if it saw [the holiness of God] more clearly? What would it be like if its preachers and teachers took the Word of God more seriously so that God’s holiness could be understood more fully? What would it be like if individual Christians took more seriously their study of Scripture’s truth for their homes and places of work?
We may never know, for holiness is slipping from the grasp of American born-againers today! The evangelical movement is simply at sea when it comes to matters of holiness. In fact, according to a Barna study in 2006, there is very little difference between the born-again and the non-born-again in understanding what holiness is. Of the wider American public, only 35 percent believes that God expects people to be holy, and within this category young people are less well represented than those who are older. As we think about the future, this is indeed a straw blowing in the wind.
But even among the born-again, fewer than half have any idea what holiness means. This ignorance, from among those who should know what Christianity is all about, no doubt has many causes. It certainly is related to what churches are - or, more accurately, are not - teaching. It is certainly an outcome of the cut-rate Christianity now being marketed by the seeker-sensitives. It is an inevitable outcome of the emergents’ disposition not to think in terms of absolutes and not to be “judgmental” about the lifestyles and behavior of people. And by whatever route we have reached this point, it is also related to the fact that when it comes to spirituality, knowledge of the Bible ranks at the bottom of the list. So goes our knowledge of God as holy. So goes our understanding of holiness.
- David Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant, p. 131
The Second is short and sweet. It reads:
God loves us very much.
I’m not sure what I was thinking, but it did come in handy just today as I was reflecting on things eschatological.
The third was clearly written in a cloudy moment, although I have absolutely no recollection of writing it. (Maybe David was working it up and decided to put my name to it. [Is that technically possible, Al?]) At any rate, it reads:
We live what we believe. We believe what we like. We like what we know. We know what we are taught. We are taught by our culture. Our culture is representative of our collective lives.
We need an in-breaking or the whole thing does go to hell in a handbasket.
Outbasket™ empty.
(p.s. Al, the three that remain are yours…ahem.)
… who might tear up a bit.
Justin doesn’t actually read this backwater of a blog. Perhaps some of you regulars can point him our way just for this post.
I love it when the Church bells begin to peal for peace. It is at the end of the video and I know that some of you have a short attention span - stick with it!
The piece is by Haydn - A Mass in a Time of War - and seems to hit home right now.
al sends
Fox Newsie and Whitehouse spokesman Tony Snow died this morning at the age of 53 after a long battle with cancer. He did his job well. He will surely be missed.
EDIT: Justin Taylor, whose blog you should read regularly, adds the following -
Snow, an evangelical, wrote an article for Christianity Today in 2007 entitled Cancer’s Unexpected Blessings. Here is an excerpt, the ending of his essay:
I sat by my best friend’s bedside a few years ago as a wasting cancer took him away. He kept at his table a worn Bible and a 1928 edition of the Book of Common Prayer. A shattering grief disabled his family, many of his old friends, and at least one priest. Here was a humble and very good guy, someone who apologized when he winced with pain because he thought it made his guest uncomfortable. He retained his equanimity and good humor literally until his last conscious moment. “I’m going to try to beat [this cancer],” he told me several months before he died. “But if I don’t, I’ll see you on the other side.”
His gift was to remind everyone around him that even though God doesn’t promise us tomorrow, he does promise us eternity—filled with life and love we cannot comprehend—and that one can in the throes of sickness point the rest of us toward timeless truths that will help us weather future storms.
Through such trials, God bids us to choose: Do we believe, or do we not? Will we be bold enough to love, daring enough to serve, humble enough to submit, and strong enough to acknowledge our limitations? Can we surrender our concern in things that don’t matter so that we might devote our remaining days to things that do?
Al
davidbryant
Rob
Filling the Basket