The story of a friend with multiple personalities

     Tim’s excellent sermon Sunday and his comments on the evil accusations often received as a child that go into their personality reminds me of a friend I once had. She was very normal but told me the most unusual life-story I’ve ever heard. She grew up and suffered some sort of abuse as a child. And to cope, her mind split into various personalities. She had around four dominant ones, but around fifteen or so personalities in total. Each of these personalities had their own wardrobe in the closet, their own food likes and dislikes in the fridge, and of course their own types of emotions; and none of them knew what the other did. So if she wasn’t the same personality today as she was yesterday, she didn’t remember what she had done. But Jesus healed her mind and this is how it happened.

The Vision of Conversation

     Christians should be the best conversationalists on the planet—conversing well with God and man. After all, it was the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us according to John. Vincent’s word study on the word logos in John 1:1 here says, “The word here points directly to Genesis 1, where the act of creation is effected by God speaking (compare Psalm 33:6). The idea of God, who is in his own nature hidden, revealing himself in creation, is the root of the Logos-idea, in contrast with all materialistic or pantheistic conceptions of creation.”

Becoming a conversational partner with people and the Holy Spirit

     I read the scriptures as if they were written by my best friend or brother—sometimes He will have a special message in it for me. The more I really know his character, that is Jesus’, and the more I really want to hear from him, the better the chance is that I’ll hear what it is that my brother is saying to me, if anything.  As the writers of the Psalms say they do, I meditate on his writings. I ruminate on them. I consider certain parts in them that keep coming back to me, even in the watches of the night (see Psalms 119). I have a daily ongoing conversation with my brother and so if he has a specific message for me it will usually be along our topics of conversation or certain terms we’ve been using together. I look for their double meaning—one meaning written to someone thousands of years ago and one like it written to me.

Towards a more realized eschatology

     I was recently talking with two friends from my seminary (Nashotah House), postulants for the priesthood, and I mentioned that of all that I’ve learned in my classes I think that the perspective that most changed for me was my view of eschatology and they agreed. (I know this seems far from our Theology of the Body discussion but it actually does relate—I just have to lay this background first.)

Some "together" words in literature

     Sometimes there is a move of God’s spirit. God acts. And he acts upon us corporately because he has joined us as a spiritual body (see my previous post here). We’re all in this together. I like how Fyodor Dostoevsky talks of this in The Brothers Karamazov. Here’s a couple quotes:

The New Testament's "together" words

     In case some think that I have completely left the reservation in my last post talking about God’s character of “presence-with,” I’m actually working with something that I read that gave me this new perspective. Many of us have heard how the New Testament writers took an obscure Greek word, agape, and used it extensively in the New Testament as a description of God's love. But I recently was amazed to read of a word that they completely coined which doesn’t even occur in classical Greek (from Dennis Kinlaw’s book Preaching by the Spirit, pages 39-40). In fact, they added the prefix sun to many words and used it all over the place! Here’s some examples.

Prolegomena

     ”The Greek term prolegomena could be translated as ‘forewords’ – in other words, thing that need to be said before beginning the study of theology itself,” says Alistair McGrath in his Christian Theology: An Introduction. Where we start from—what lens we use—makes a huge difference in how we view God, the Bible, and the world in general. As I was talking about with my son yesterday, everyone has a lens. And it is very helpful to recognize what yours is and decide whether it is a valid one for discovering and discussing God.

Let me count the ways

     So we took four of the kids on a family vacation to a condo at Smith Mountain Lake last week to do some waterskiing, tubing, and general chilling. And it was time to return the ski boat to the rental shop before it closed for the night and a storm was coming, so my husband and daughter quickly drove the boat up the lake through the wind and rain to return it, only to discover upon arriving there that the tube we rented that used to be on the back of the boat wasn’t anymore.

Hewing and hacking with ToB

     I love the definition of Gideon’s name: Hewer or Hacker. True he wasn’t the bravest of the judges, but after speaking to the angel he did go and chop down his family’s Asherah pole and altar to Baal (Monday’s lectionary reading, Judges 6:25-40). Afterwards his dad at least stood up for him against the people saying, “If (Baal) is a god, let him contend for himself, because his altar has been pulled down.” Yes, let’s find out if Baal can defend himself.