BlakeAtwood.com

I have been very slowly working through Uprising by Erwin McManus because I keep reading other books. This is not meant as a slight to Mr. McManus. In fact, I think I keep finding other things to read because Erwin challenges me too deeply. To wit, from today’s reading:

We are seldom afraid when our opposition is smaller than us. When we keep our challenges manageable, we not only manage our fear, but squelch our faith. One way to deal with our fears is to surround ourselves with security and predictability. We may look courageous when in fact all we’ve done is minimize our risk. Whenever God calls us to something, it inspires not only faith, but also fear. God always summons us to something bigger than ourselves. When he calls us to battle, the opposition will always be greater than the strength we have.

Here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

These are the words of David Foster Wallace, an author I somehow had not heard about until his untimely, recent death. Infinite Tragedy is now on my ever-lengthening to-read list.

The above quote was copied from Purple State of Mind, the blog of Craig Detweiler.

“Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off…The only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy… Murder is no better than cards if cards do the trick. Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

- C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Via Tim Stevens, pastor at Granger Community Church

One of the quotes I’ll be sharing is from the book Movies that Matter: Reading Film Through the Lens of Faith by Richard Leonard. The first 25 pages is worth the price of the book. Mr. Leonard, a Jesuit priest with a PhD in Film and Theology (wow, what a combination!), says the following…

“Given the power of media, becoming conversant with its mixed messages is an essential tool for Christian life. This involves the process of inculturation—discovering where Christ is already active within a given culture. Inculturation has traditionally been about uncovering Christian resonances in faraway places and exotic rituals. Yet the risen Christ sends us out to our media-saturated culture as well, and in it we labor with Christ to expose the signs of God’s saving love already present there. We cannot speak to a culture we do not know or one we despise…we have to learn its language and discover how Christ has already gone ahead of us, inculturated in some of media’s values, stories and style.”

Surely, Keith Richards is a missing member of Spinal Tap.

In what can only best be described as either the hallucinations of a worn-out, road-weary, drug-saturated, wrinkled old rocker or the actual rock and roll truth, Keith Richards has confessed to snorting his father. Some may think he did this years ago during the heyday of the Stones, but no. His father died in 2002. Richards thought it might be a good idea to snort some coke mixed with his father’s ashes. I’m sure it sounded sane to him in the moment…

I’m disgusted, but amused. You have to wonder…has this ever been done before? Actually, no, I don’t want to know the answer.

It definitely seems like a deleted scene from This is Spinal Tap.

A day later, there’s this retraction. I don’t know if I believe it.

[brought to you by Ephedra, probably a drug Keith Richards has never used. Then again, I might be giving him too much credit.]

“I was an English major in college. If you ever get the chance to be an English major, do it! It opens so many doors to your future: with your English degree you can teach English! Or, also, starve!”

[tvsquad.com]

I chose option #3. Marry up, then you stave off starving.

Users tag their quotes then vote on ‘em. Fun to search.

“There is nothing so stupid as the educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in.“ - Will Rogers

Quotiki.com

{I’m starting to think that the only thing you need to start up a startup is a dumb name}.

“Yatooma said this is where his clients drank ‘the Kinkade Kool-Aid.’”

- this article 

“Being a good writer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the Internet.”

“What I am trying to do is end the apartheid of absolutism and relativism in Christian theology. I am a relative absolutist. That means that absolute truth has to become incarnate in relative time. Faith is for the living of this hour, and the Bible has reference to and relevance for the living of this hour.
The world in which Jesus came could not conceive of a world without slavery. In fact, the ancient economy was based on slavery. Jesus did not deal violently with human nature and first-century culture. He did not go about brandishing “absolute truth.” He dealt tenderly and patiently with the culture and people of his day. If he was harsh with anyone, it was the religious establishment.”

[rest of interview]