Monday Music - "Streets of Bakersfield"

Dwight Yoakam and Buck Owens -  "Streets of Bakersfield"

Sunday Supplication - True Devotion

O Lord God, we acknowledge your power and your holiness. You are the author and giver of all good things. Work in our hearts and teach us to truly love you. Nourish us with goodness. Help us to live out true devotion and to worship you in all we do. Help us, by faith, to do the good things you have in mind for us to do.

Thank you for the forgiveness and renewal you have given to us through Christ Jesus.  Help us as we extend that same forgiveness to others who have sinned against us. Help us become a community called grace. Help us to have a redemptive and healing impact on the world around us.

We thank you, O God, for life, and hope, and salvation. Lead us away from temptation. Deliver us from evil. Provide for our needs this day. Protect us from discouragement, and encourage us by your Spirit through your word, your people, your promises, and all that is beautiful and true.

Through Christ, we pray. Amen.

Saturday Smile - Pundits

Friday Favorites - Vinegar Cucumbers

Vinegar Cucumbers are one of my favorite tastes of summer. Great on a plate with tomatoes and a scoop of cottage cheese (or plain yogurt) with salt and pepper. Just love them in sandwiches too!

1. Put sliced cucumbers, onion (and peppers) in a jar.
2. Pour in vinegar and water until covering cucumbers, at a 3-1 ratio between vinegar and water. (I like to use apple vinegar).
3. Allow to marinate overnight before serving.

Thursday Thinking – Christian Higher Education

Earlier this year, New York Times columnist David Brooks recently delivered a speech in Washington, D.C. at an event celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the Consortium of Christian Colleges and Universities. If you're interested in higher education and culture (as everybody should be), I recommend that you take the time to read it.

The Cultural Value of Christian Higher Education
Christian colleges can develop students in ways few other institutions can.

A Short Excerpt...
"Many of our institutions, and especially our universities, don’t do much to help our graduates achieve that transcendence. But for Christian universities and other religious institutions, this is bread and butter. This is the curriculum. This is the chapel service. This is the conversation students are having late at night. It’s lived out. Now, you in this room, have the Gospel. You have the example of Jesus Christ. You have the beatitudes; the fire of the Holy Spirit; you believe in a personal God who is still redeeming the world. As Pope Francis demonstrated, when a single person acts like Jesus, the whole world is transfixed. Carrying the Gospel is your central mission to your students and to those you serve beyond the campus walls, but that’s not all you have. You have a way of being that is not all about self. You have a counterculture to the excessive individualism of our age. You offer an ideal more fulfilling and more true and higher than the ideal of individual autonomy."

Wednesday Words - A Poem on Hope

It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old,
for hope must not depend on feeling good
and there’s the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight.
You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality
of the future, which surely will surprise us,
and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction
anymore than by wishing. But stop dithering.
The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them?
Tell them at least what you say to yourself.

Because we have not made our lives to fit
our places, the forests are ruined, the fields, eroded,
the streams polluted, the mountains, overturned. Hope
then to belong to your place by your own knowledge
of what it is that no other place is, and by
your caring for it, as you care for no other place, this
knowledge cannot be taken from you by power or by wealth.
It will stop your ears to the powerful when they ask
for your faith, and to the wealthy when they ask for your land
and your work.  Be still and listen to the voices that belong
to the stream banks and the trees and the open fields.

Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground underfoot.
The world is no better than its places. Its places at last
are no better than their people while their people
continue in them. When the people make
dark the light within them, the world darkens.


"A Poem on Hope" from Leavings, Counterpoint Press, © 2011by Wendell Berry.

Tuesday Tome - Beyond Doubt (Belief)

Cheri and I are reading this book together as part of our morning coffee times. It's very thoughtful yet approachable. The title of the book (probably the publisher's marketing idea) is a bit misleading since the book really isn't as much about doubt as it is about how faith shapes the Christian's life. Beyond Belief would actually have been a much better title. That said, these short meditations have provoked many good conversations, most of which last longer than the time it took to read the meditation itself.

Beyond Doubt: Faith-Building Devotions on Questions Christians Ask
by Cornelius Plantina

Publisher's Description...
From the pen of award-winning author Cornelius Plantinga Jr. comes this book of flesh-and-blood Christian meditations with a theological spine.

Building on the success of two earlier editions and now splendidly updated, Beyond Doubt unpacks the deep truths of the Christian faith by raising basic questions like What is God like? Why pray? What is the shape of the godly life? If the Lord is with us, why do we suffer? How do we face death?

Plantinga addresses such questions through short, vivid meditations, all written in the graceful, polished prose that he is celebrated for. Thoughtful and challenging throughout, the meditations each start with a Bible verse and end with a brief edifying prayer.

Monday Music - River Whyless

CLICK HERE OR ON IMAGE

Sunday Supplication - To Be a Living Demonstration

O God, we are so thankful for your mercy and love. We thank you for your Son, Jesus, and for the life and salvation he has made possible for us. Help us, as part of your Church, to be a living demonstration of your power to save and transform and renew. Make us a true community of grace.

Forgive us our sins. Help us to turn away from darkness and to love the light. Make us willing and able to forgive others as you have forgiven us. Help us to think, speak, and act in ways that restore lives, nurture relationships, create peace, and bring honor to you.

Thank you, Lord God, for Jesus, who did not regard equality with You a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself and became a servant. Help us, like him, to reach across barriers, to welcome the weak, to serve, and to look to the interests of others. It’s in His name that we pray all these things.

Amen.

Saturday Smile - Organized My Book Shelves

Friday Favorites - Stockholm Pie & General Store

Take a day trip to Pepin and check it out on the way!

Thursday Thinking - St. Augustine on Loving God

WHAT DO I LOVE WHEN I LOVE MY GOD?
What is it then that I love when I love you? Not bodily beauty, and not temporal glory, not the clear shining light, lovely as it is to our eyes, not the sweet melodies of many-moded songs, not the soft smell of flowers and ointments and perfumes, not manna and honey, not limbs made for the body’s embrace, not these do I love when I love my God.

Yet I do love a certain light, a certain voice, a certain odor, a certain food, a certain embrace when I love my God: a light, a voice, an odor, a food, an embrace for the man within me, where his light, which no embrace can contain, floods into my soul; where he utters words that time does not speed away; where he sends forth an aroma that no wind can scatter; where he provides food that no eating can lessen; where he so clings that satiety does not sunder us. This is what I love when I love my God.

—Augustine of Hippo (354-430) from THE CONFESSIONS OF ST. AUGUSTINE, Book 10, Chapter 6, translated by John K. Ryan. Garden City, New York: Image Books, 1960, pp. 233-34. Here is the chapter at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library: www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/confess.xi.vi.html

Wednesday Words - The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

"The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems: Volume 1,
© Copyright 1992 by Mary Oliver.

Tuesday Tome - After You Believe

Now that we're in the thick of the political season,  I'd like to suggest a good book for all my Christian friends about character and integrity. I often hear people criticize politicians for a lack of character, and while that is certainly understandable, I wish more Christians were concerned about their own integrity. Faith and character go hand-in-hand. Let's be sure we take care of the logs in our own eyes before we worry about the specks in the eyes of others. We can't help others with the specks in their eyes unless we take the logs out of our own.


After You Believe: 
Why Christian Character Matters 
by N. T. Wright

Publisher's description...
From the author of the acclaimed Simply Christian and Surprised by Hope comes a book that addresses the question that has plagued humans for centuries—what is our purpose? As Christians, what are we to do with that ambiguous time between baptism and the funeral? It's easy to become preoccupied with who gets into heaven; the real challenge is how we are going to live in the here and now.

Wright dispels the common misconception that Christian living is nothing more than a checklist of dos and don'ts. Nor is it a prescription to "follow your heart" wherever it may lead. Instead, After You Believe reveals the Bible's call for a revolution—a transformation of character that takes us beyond our earthly pursuit of money, sex, and power into a virtuous state of living that allows us to reflect God and live more worshipful, fulfilling lives.

We are all spiritual seekers, intuitively knowing there is more to life than we suspect. This is a book for anyone who is hoping there is something more while we're here on Earth. There is. We are being called to join the revolution, and Wright insightfully encourages readers to find new purpose and clarity by taking us on an eye-opening journey through key biblical passages that promise to radically alter the work of the church and the direction of our lives.