Sunday, January 29, 2006

How I Know

Jenn made a comment on my last post, and I thought it would be fitting to give my response to it a post of its own.

Jenn wrote:

...I also wanted to tell you I envy you so much in that you know where you are going when you die. I mean, I know some pretty faithful Christians and even THEY don't know for sure...They *hope* they make it to heaven but really just aren't sure if they are good enough. I have no idea personally...I suppose knowing in your heart that God will find you worthy after you die might be the reason you sleep so well at night ;-) I'm very happy for you that you have that confidence and I wish everyone had it.

Wow. First of all I have to say that if my eternal destiny relied on me being good enough, I wouldn't just wonder, I would know I was toast. Burnt toast. (ooh, that was a bad one, Rachel).

But it doesn't. And therein lies the reason I can know -- I know that Jesus took my sins to the cross, and that when I placed my faith in him for my salvation, they were separated as far from me "as the east is from the west." (Psalm 103:12). I am not good enough to bring this about, no. I never could be. Nobody is, nobody could be, except Him. Titus 3:5 tells us the following:

"It is not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us."

In other words, no matter how many good works we do, no matter what good people we are, that's not what makes us, to use Jenn's term, worthy. If we think we can count on such things to get us into heaven, we're wrong. If we hope we can manage it, we're hoping the impossible. This is what religion has historically been about: Do. Do this and do that, and hope that what you do is good enough. Whereas this relationship we have with God through his son Jesus isn't about doing; it's about faith, and trust, and love. The things we do as a part of that relationship are a byproduct of it, not a cause or a condition of its existence. The faith comes first -- then the works.

Col 1:13-14 For He rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. (NAU)

We don't rescue ourselves. We can't. Romans 3:23 tells us that all have sinned (and do we really need it to tell us that?); Romans 6:23 tells us that the wages of sin is death (but then comes the good news, if you keep reading: The gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus. Whew!).

So what can we count on, then? Can we know where we're going when we die?

Yes. We can have faith that trusting in Jesus will save us. To put it in beautifully familiar terms:

John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believed in him might not perish but have everlasting life."

A little more about that eternal life:

I Jn 5:11-13 And the testimony is this, that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life. These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life. [emphasis mine] (NAU)

God didn't want us to wonder. He didn't want us to struggle through life trying our best and hoping that it would be good enough. He wanted us to trust in His sacrifice on the cross, to give ourselves to Him, and to know.

I know. I really, really do. And most importantly I know that it's not because of me or because of anything I could ever do or be. It's because He loved me enough to die for me, and because I trust in that love to save me.

Thursday, October 20, 2005

This entry really isn't about Anne Lamott

I recently finished reading Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott. My initial impressions were all over the map; a short list would include: great writing, poignant, honest, dark, bleak, uplifting, raw, sweet, heartfelt, real. Theologically (Anne claims to be a Christian and may well be one) my thoughts showed similar conflict. When it comes right down to it, based solely on what I read in this book, I don't know, but I lean toward believing that Lamott does follow Jesus. Not that her personal salvation is for me to judge -- that's Jesus' job -- but that same Jesus tells us that we will know His followers by their fruits:

Matt 7:15-21 (Jesus is speaking)'

15 "Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn {bushes,} nor figs from thistles, are they? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit; but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know them by their fruits. Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven; but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven."

(NAS)

It behooves us to study the beliefs and actions of a person claiming Christianity before we look to them as someone we might follow or learn from. At the very least we must use discernment as we accept input, and separate the wheat from the chaff.

One thing I definitely took away from this book of essays is the difference between coming to Christ as a young person, when Biblical beliefs shape the foundation of who you are and will be, and coming to Him later in life, when your life's foundation is already fully formed. This is something I'd been thinking about a lot lately for other reasons as well. Yes, Christ is to come in and be a new foundation, but realistically that's easier said than done. Can a person truly follow Christ, and not have given over every area of thought to Him -- not see every issue the way Jesus would see it? I think so. There's a maturing process that has to go on, and that's one thing that I think happens much more readily to a person who becomes a Christian early on in life than one who's already lived what seem to be several lives, all of them rougher than mine by a long shot, before meeting Jesus and letting Him in. That said, I'll move on to a few specific issues that I did have with Lamott's essays, theologically speaking.

Lamott did have a life-changing "salvation experience." She knew about Jesus, knew who He is, resisted Him for a long time, and finally decided (in a rather non-conventional way ;) to let him into her heart and her life. Many, many of the things she says about her life from that point on are sound and Biblical -- in the aforementioned poignant, honest, dark, bleak, uplifting, raw, sweet, heartfelt, real way. That said, Lamott is a social liberal. She's ardently pro-abortion. Now, personally, that sets my teeth on edge, and makes me angry. Honestly, however, I have never related my anti-abortion stance to my Christian beliefs. Yes, there are verses in Scripture that indicate that God sees unborn people as just that -- people -- and that He made them and is concerned for their well-being (take Jeremiah 1:5 for example), but I have been anti-abortion since I was a child, long before I was a Christian, and hence I don't tend to connect the two nearly as often as other people (on both sides of the issue) do. It's an ordinary issue of morality for me; people in the womb are people, and killing people for the sake of your own convenience or even your own well-being is wrong. Anyway. I digress. So does Anne Lamott's position on abortion mean that I should not see her as a believer in Jesus? I am less inclined to think so than other Christians are, but the possibility definitely exists.

Lamott also describes (in a scene I loved, where two Christians of violently different temperaments, who annoy the hell out of each other, are able to find community simply in the fact that they love the same Jesus -- one of my favorite moments in the book) a well-known series of Christian novels as "homophobic", among other derogatory terms, some of which I definitely agree with. Now, it's entirely possible that Lamott was referring to something in the books (I personally remember nothing like this, but then I didn't find the books particularly memorable and will never re-read them) that treats homosexual people unkindly, and that she believes the Bible where it says that homosexuality itself is wrong (which doesn't mean that we are allowed to treat the people who practice it unkindly, any more than we are allowed to treat any other sinners -- that's everyone -- unkindly merely because they are in fact sinners). Or it could mean that she thinks those of us who believe that part of the Bible are intolerant, backward nutcases, which is generally the case when people are throwing the word "homophobic" around in the context of Christianity. If the latter is the case (and again, without knowing a lot more about Anne Lamott than I do, it's impossible for me to know) then this is where I have to ask myself: Where is the line? How much of Jesus' teaching and the message of the Bible can you disregard and still follow Jesus? Because the Bible is very clear about the practice of homosexuality as a sin. It would be really easy to say, "oh yes, I believe in Jesus and trust him as my savior," if you were then free to define 'Jesus' however you choose. So easy, in fact, that there are entire religious systems based around un-Biblical ideas of Jesus, and innumerable individuals who think of themselves as followers of Jesus, but who disclaim his claimed deity or otherwise don't follow His teachings (which goes back to the verse above: "Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord..."). It's less easy to look at the Biblical Jesus and accept Him, knowing everything He teaches and claims to be.

In the end, that's what this entry is really about -- believing in the real Jesus, and what that means in the life of the believer. It's not about Anne Lamott. She was simply a catalyst, who got me thinking about this issue and has had me thinking about it for days. I do recommend her book for discerning readers, for that reason, even if I wouldn't recommend it for any other -- and I do.

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Biblical fellowship

At the outset, I want to ask that if you know me in real life, and you know the congregation(s) of which I'm speaking... please keep this post to yourself. Thank you.

We've left churches in the past. I left the Methodist church, where I grew up, at the age of eighteen when I accepted Christ and knew that the place I'd been going most Sundays since birth was not going to feed a healthy personal relationship with Him. My husband and I left a group we loved when we were told by the leadership there that we had to, because we wouldn't cease fellowship with a brother who had angered said leadership. We left a home fellowship when it whittled down gradually to only two families; we left a small Baptist congregation because the pastor and his wife (dear brethren and friends of ours to this day) started saying things like "Well, we know what the Bible teaches, but..."

We've been in our current congregation for six years. That's the longest we've been anywhere, except for my many years as a socially awkward little Methodist. We have put up with minor differences in those six years, knowing that since local congregations are made up of human beings who are sinful, there will never be a perfect one no matter how hard we look. We've stayed at times simply because we are relatively certain that our chosen congregation is as close to perfectly Biblical as we'll be able to get in our local area, where selection is rather limited. We already drive fifteen miles (out of town, where we live) to meet with these people whom we love, where our kids have friends and so do we. So even thinking about thinking about leaving is terrifying in a way, and thoroughly disheartening in, well, in every way. But how many instances do we need of leadership putting aside the Bible to follow the dictates of some other book or idea -- even when a good portion of the men in leadership disagree with the action -- before we decide that we have found yet another place where we can't in good conscience sit under this kind of leadership?

Ack. I guess I'm just thinking out loud here.

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

tradition, tradition

We're at the point with the planning and preparation for our mostly-annual beach vacation where I'm starting to mentally tally the number of hours of enjoyment will be required to offset the stress of packing. We're only taking a three-day trip this year, so this may be the first time where I end up with a negative number when all's said and done. Well, except that time we went in December and there were really amazing rain- and windstorms and our tent nearly blew away and you could hear the snapping of the tarp we'd stretched across our campsite to keep things dry all the way to the beach -- over the roar of the waves -- and we ended up cutting our trip short. That trip may have wound up as a negative, even though LT learned to ride his bike without training wheels between cloudbursts. But every year some of the same issues crop up surrounding the traditions I've erected around the whole adventure. Is it really necessary for C to have her last year's Morro Bay t-shirt on when we arrive this year? Will Morro Rock crumble into the sea if she just wears a generic gray t-shirt? Do the kids each need a book-bag full of things to do in the car on the way there? We've listened to all the Secret Seven books on tape we can get through the library; should we "read" something else in the car on the way there, or would it be better do one of the Secret Sevens for the second time? Traditions enrich experiences for us as they do for most people; It's hard to let go of the ones that have meant so much to us in their small way in the past.

Likewise, my husband drives a car in our local destruction derby every year. At the end of each fair, after the derby, he and his derby buddies generally decide that the next summer will possibly be their last, and at any rate they'll only do one car each year from here on out. Yet every year, the same six or eight guys go through all the hassle and work (and expense) to fix up two cars (so that they sometimes they frankly look better and run better than our daily drivers, if much more noisily) so that they can go smash them up against cars fixed up by other similarly early-middle-aged men (and one woman). I think they'll be sixty years old and saying, "only one next year... I'm having that hip replacement in December, after all...". How much of this is because of tradition and how much is because of actual enjoyment varies from one discussion to the next, but the fact is that if it didn't matter that they'd run two derby cars in every county fair since 1992, they probably would have stopped long ago, as their families got larger and their free time got smaller.

Which (kind of) leads me to my point. How much of what we do as Christians is done because "it's always been done that way"? Is it really necessary, or Scriptural, to have one man up in front who does all the studying every week to present a message to the people who sit in the pews and listen? What about the "worship by proxy" element of a church choir? What about all the emotion that surrounds a boy wearing a ballcap into a chapel building for a club meeting? What about having a chapel building at all? Responsive readings (eighteen years in a lukewarm-to-cold denominational church fraught with responsive readings and the like has left me with a severe aversion to any kind of unison speech beyond the Pledge of Allegiance)? Saying the rosary? Our worship and communion and fellowship experiences are all fraught with tradition from beginning to end. Tradition is comfortable; it's what we're used to; in a lot of ways it defines us as a group. It can even be really valuable, more so to some people than to others. The question is, how much is necessary? To what extent does it get in the way of real life, real worship, real study, a real relationship?

For three years our family was part of a home fellowship, where we basically threw tradition out the window. We met in homes, as the defining phrase "home fellowship" would indicate. Each week, any of the men who had something to share could prepare a message and give it when we met. We took requests for hymns and praise songs and sang them a capella (for a while we had a pianist, but she left for a place where she could be in charge of a Music Program). The music wasn't professional, or sometimes even very good, but it was stirring and heartfelt and I think God liked it just fine. We did not have a proper nursery (which was sometimes a problem, honestly); our pulpit was an old music stand; we had no committees or teas or elders' meetings or pews or bulletins. We did eat a potluck lunch after every Sunday meeting and my mouth still waters at the thought of it. And most importantly, we were all thriving in our personal relationships with God, and growing closer to Him and to each other. The learning and loving and helping that went on from week to week was phenomenal. Which made it terribly sad when the whole thing fell apart gradually, as first one family left and then another (and when you only have about six families meeting, each departure is keenly felt) for various reasons.

I like the place we worship now. I really do. I like the people there; I like that my kids have friends and that there are activities we can all take part in. I like that my whole family attends in one place so that every Sunday is like a miniature family reunion. And I can overlook or work with the things I don't like. But I miss the bare-bones Christianity we experienced for those three years in the home fellowship; I miss the intimacy and the pressure (I use that word with its best possible meaning) to be in the Word often and intensely. I miss the fact that if we didn't like the way we did something, we could discuss it and just change it if it was appropriate to do so. Most of all I miss the stripping away of traditions to leave us with the important, genuine, life-changing aspects of a life spent loving God.

Monday, July 25, 2005

is your quiver full?

One issue that confronts any Christian family sooner or later is that of the "quiver full" mentality (the name is taken from Psalm 127). This philosophy (to some, it's actually more of a theology), boiled down, means that any use of birth control, including natural family planning through periodic abstinence, is a sin. You can find good discussions on this topic in a lot of places, Marla Swoffer's blog and MzEllen & Co being two of them that I've found so far. My own personal position on QF has changed over the years. I went from an unthinking position of "of course people plan their family size", through something akin to QF wherein I didn't necessarily think it was a sin to use birth control, but thought it was not very nice to God, to where I am now, which is that I have no problem with people choosing not to limit their family size, but I have no problem with people choosing to limit it either. (And, hello, my husband had a vasectomy after C was born, and I had a hysterectomy four months ago, so that probably says a lot right there.)

To follow my path from there to here, let's look at that verse first.

Ps 127:3-5 3 Behold, children are a gift of the LORD; the fruit of the womb is a reward. 4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of one's youth. 5 How blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them; they shall not be ashamed, when they speak with their enemies in the gate. (NAS)

Does the verse say "Thou shalt have many children?" No. There's no command. It says that children are a blessing, and indeed they are, and that a man who has a lot of them is a happy guy. It DOES NOT SAY that to not have a quiver full of arrows from the Lord means that you're in rebellion (and God does not mince words when it comes to rebellion). There are a lot of things described in Scripture as blessings, with or without that exact wording, that aren't for everybody. Singleness is a blessing (1 Cor 7:8). Marriage is a blessing (Genesis 2:24). Divine revelation (Matthew 16:17), mourning (Matthew 5:4), poor spirits (Matthew 5:4)... all of these are blessings or characteristics worthy of blessing, but those verses do not mean that those who do not have divine revelations or mourn or feel depressed are in sin.

Another verse that sees heavy use in QF circles is Genesis 1:28:

Gen 1:28 28 And God blessed them; and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it... (NAS)

Um, the earth has BEEN filled and subdued. That command has been fulfilled. I honestly think that those words were specifically for Adam and Eve, and later for Noah's sons, and for the generations after them. Thousands of years later, here we are with six billion people living in pretty much every corner of the globe. Job's done.

Now let's move on to the philosophical arguments put up for the quiver-full mindset.

Are people who practice birth control displaying a lack of trust in God?

Well, maybe. But then, so would anyone be who purposefully tried to conceive, or anyone who paid for homeowner's insurance, or anyone went to the doctor for a health problem, or anyone who did anything that God can do for us... which is, if you carry this to the extreme, well, anything. I mean, if we were going to put the ultimate trust in God we would never work a day in our lives, trusting that He would provide for us. Obviously I'm not advocating that or saying that QF folks advocate it; I'm just pointing out that the line has to be drawn somewhere between trusting in the Lord and using the brains he gave us.

Do people who plan their family size place money and ease on too high a pedestal?

Sometimes. But to paint all non-QF types as money-hungry people who can't be bothered with the hassle and expense of a large family is doing a disservice. I was raised in a household without much money. Until my mom got a good job when I was ten, and my parents got out of debt not long after, we ate a lot of beans and wore a lot of hand-me-downs and lived in some very minimalist (and not in a stylish way) houses in rather undesirable locations (undesirable to the world at large. I LOVED where we lived.) Even after that we were never wealthy, or even close. And yes, I had a very happy childhood, and I am actually a little glad that some aspects of that are similar to what my children experience, because I think it's good for kids to hear "we can't afford that", and so learn that money means work, and that its availability is limited. However. Do I think it would have been wise for my parents to bring three, or five, or ten more children into that environment? No, I don't. The most important aspect of childrearing is love, that's completely true. But kids need to wear shoes, too, and have a place to live and food to eat, and I think it's irresponsible have a family larger than its breadwinner(s) can reasonably afford to take decent care of. I'm really happy for QF people who can afford to feed, clothe, and house ten or fifteen children. I think that's fantastic, I really do. I also know that if we were to do that we would be relying on the kindness of friends or the generosity of a bloated government -- or counting on God to supernaturally provide. Which, no question, God can if He wants to. But I think in addition to His supernatural provision, God has given us intelligence and reason and the ability to take daily care of ourselves, and he expects us to use that.

What about that guy in the Bible who was chastised for using birth control?

When you hear this, people are generally talking about Onan:

Gen 38:8-10 8 Then Judah said to Onan, "Go in to your brother's wife, and perform your duty as a brother-in-law to her, and raise up offspring for your brother." 9 And Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so it came about that when he went in to his brother's wife, he wasted his seed on the ground, in order not to give offspring to his brother. 10 But what he did was displeasing in the sight of the LORD; so He took his life also. (NAS)

Onan didn't get in trouble because he spilled his seed on the ground. He got in trouble because he disobeyed an order to go get his dead brother's wife pregnant as a means of continuing the family line.

Is using birth control the same as infanticide or abortion?

Well, that depends. There are forms of birth control which are actually abortefacients (the "morning after pill", the minipill, the IUD, even to a degree the ordinary birth control pill and Depo-Provera) and those, in my opinion, are the equivalent of abortion, because rather than causing conception to fail to happen, they cause a fertilized egg (which has the complete genetic structure of the adult it will become) to fail to implant and hence to die. (the Pill and DP do this as a secondary "backup" function; their primary function is to prevent conception). But to cause the sperm to fail to meet the egg -- no. Any time a woman has a period, one of her eggs has just died. Billions and billions of a man's sperm will die or simply be re-absorbed by his body over the course of his life. That's the way God made us and there's no sin in that, because the sperm and the egg are still just cells belonging to the man's or woman's body, like skin cells or bone cells. Once they join, a new entity has been created, and that's a person with his/her own DNA and destiny, who just happens to have to live inside his/her mother for the first nine months of his/her existence.

***********************

This has come out rather anti-QF, and I didn't mean for it to be that way. I have the heartiest respect for people who practice that mindset, as long as they aren't being irresponsible with the public's money or the generosity of charitable people, and as long as -- here's a key thing -- they don't set it up as A Command From God. Because I frankly do not see that it is, and their black and white interpretation tends to make them really vehemently opposed to people who, for whatever reason, don't agree with them. Our childbearing history (daughter who died at nine weeks of age due to a congenital heart defect, for those of you who may be new) was an indicator to us that perhaps we shouldn't just keep on having more and more children. The slow, agonizing death of a child tears up a person and a family in many, many ways, and while that time was one in which we drew closer to the Lord than we'd been before or since, out of simple necessity really, I don't think God would advocate putting oneself and one's family through that kind of pain over and over. When Natalie died I was in my near-QF stage, and that didn't change with her death. I clung to my position and told my husband that the fact that he wanted to stop having children because of Natalie's death and because of the very real possibility that our future children would live similarly brief, painful lives (we did have one more afterward, C, who is completely healthy) meant that he would rather Natalie had never been born, that he was negating our love for her in a way. And I can see, looking back, how I could have felt that way then, but I don't, now. It's not so black and white as that. Which is hard for me to say, as a person who sees a lot more black and white in the world than most people do, but it's true.

Maybe, as T said when I would argue this point with him, maybe some couples just have smaller quivers than others.

Friday, April 08, 2005

quiz (EDITED)

Ever the copycat, I saw that Kristen had taken a quiz, so I had to do it too. (Better not jump off the Empire State Building, OK, Kristen?) My results were:

1: Baptist (non-Calvinistic)/Plymouth Brethren/Fundamentalist (100%)
2: Congregational/United Church of Christ (87%)
3: Baptist (Reformed/Particular/Calvinistic) (81%)
4: Anabaptist (Mennonite/Quaker etc.) (79%)
5: Pentecostal/Charismatic/Assemblies of God (75%)
6: Seventh-Day Adventist (69%)
7: Church of Christ/Campbellite (63%)
8: Presbyterian/Reformed (61%)
9: Methodist/Wesleyan/Nazarene (57%)
10: Anglican/Episcopal/Church of England (43%)
11: Lutheran (39%)
12: Eastern Orthodox (37%)
13: Roman Catholic (21%)

The top result I can really see. I have read about the Plymouth Brethren in the past, and from what I read, I found their attitudes about the church, method of meeting/worship, and set of beliefs to be the nearest of any established "denomination" to what I see as Scriptural. Edit: I was mistaken; I was thinking of the Christian Missionary Alliance, I think. The confusion comes in because a man whose biography T and I like to read (R.G. LeTourneau) was brought up as one and converted to the other. Whoops. I don't know enough about Christianese labels to interpret the rest terribly accurately. It is interesting that the more credal, liturgy-based denominations landed nearest the bottom -- rather accurate, considering that even a responsive reading sends me into convulsive Methodism-flashback shudders.

Saturday, March 26, 2005

Happy what?

In a way, this is one of my least favorite times of year. It's not the rain, it's not the chill in the air, it's certainly not the longer days or the green grass or the wildflowers everywhere -- it's the darn bunnies.

You can't go three steps in our town this weekend without being told "Happy Easter". And therein lies the problem. We don't celebrate Easter, for reasons that are pretty important to us (more on that in a minute) but it's to the point where we just gloss over the comment and move on, rather than trying to explain it. Unless people start pestering the kids about it, and then we'll usually go into it a little. Here's what we tell them.

• The name itself, "Easter", is derived from the name of a Babylonian queen (the wife of Nimrod), who was revered as a goddess of fertility in Babylonian "mystery religion". She was originally known as Semiramis but later became known as Ishtar.
  
• Bunnies and eggs have nothing to do with the resurrection of Christ. They are, however, pagan symbols of fertility. (and besides, the Cadbury creme ones are really gross.) I know some people see them as symbols of "new life" and equate that with the Resurrection -- but we don't see a need to stretch them in that direction.
  
• Even the date is not Scriptural in its origins. Ordinarily "Easter" is celebrated on the Sunday after Passover, which is in fact the Sunday on which Christ was resurrected. However, that's just an ornate kind of coincidence, since the actual determination of the date of Easter is that it is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. This year Passover is in late April, but Easter is in late March.
  

We do commemorate the Resurrection. We just don't do it with egg hunts and baskets of candy (this doesn't keep me from overdosing on chocolate during this time of year, however. ;). And this year, we won't be doing it when most people do.

I'm not posting this to say that I'm holier than anyone else, or to imply that Christians who dress up their daughters tomorrow morning and go to an egg hunt after church are unspiritual slackers who don't love Jesus. These are just our family's personal convictions about this one particular issue. Comments and questions about them are welcome.

Sunday, March 13, 2005

If I'm not posting here as much...

It's because of a really cool discussion at my friend Jenn's new journal. Between her and Kristen I'm doing most of my posting in other people's comments sections. I'll try to keep up in all three places, though. ;-)

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

Chapter Summaries

I mentioned chapter summaries a while ago and promised a post about them eventually. Here it is. :) I started this last night, but T needed the computer for a minute, and while he was using it, it froze up. Since I hadn't "saved as draft" before I handed it over to him, I lost what I'd done so far. Clever me. So I'm starting over.

First, why do we do chapter summaries? There are a lot of reasons.

• It's a simple, uniform format, easy to remember.
• It's just you and your Bible, looking into a chapter and finding out what God has to say to you in it; you're not being influenced by someone else's "take" on a passage.
• No matter how many times you've studied the chapter you can always come away with something new.
• It's suitable for virtually any age, since the results can be as long or as short, as complex or simple, as the student is prepared to make them. C, who is a young kindergartener, does one every week, as does LT. T spends hours on his, references various commentaries, and writes sometimes several pages, full of theological (and, especially now as we're doing Revelation, eschatological) insights. The friend of ours who hosts the studies and taught us the format has been doing chapter summaries for thirty-five years, has done the whole Bible more than once, and, as anyone who's read the Bible can attest, hasn't run out of new things to learn.
• Chapter summaries fit in with other study methods. You can use the Bible alone, or look at commentaries and research other scholars' opinions. The format works excellently used alongside the inductive study method taught by Precept Ministries, or without any other method at all.
• If you do it long enough, you end up with basically a simple Bible commentary, written by yourself. We've been doing summaries for eight years, although I took off a few years from mid-week studies when the kids were teeny. T has notebooks containing a summary for every chapter of every book in the New Testament, except Hebrews which I think we're doing next, as well as Genesis and Daniel. It's both a really useful resource, and an interesting look at how he's matured spiritually in that time.
• And lastly, it's the method used in our weekly small group study, and we're conformers. ;-)

Since C has her study done for tonight (Revelation 8), I'll use hers as an example, and maybe occasionally throw in some stuff from mine too. The format, as I mentioned, is simple. It goes like this:

Theme: this is basically a title for the chapter -- the main idea. (C's Rev 8 theme: "The angels and the eagle". Mine: "Only the beginning of the terrible judgments")
Key Verse: Sometimes this is the verse that the student thinks ties in best with his/her theme. Sometimes it's a verse that made you go, WHOA. Sometimes it's a verse the student chooses to memorize. Customize at will. ;-). (C didn't select a key verse this week; she generally doesn't, actually. Mine is verse 13, because it ties in with my theme.)

Teaching: This is where you break the chapter down into sections and describe, as briefly as you want, the content of each section. Some people, like T, like to make these very brief little phrases indeed. Some people, like my dad, basically paraphrase the section and write a paragraph.

(C's teaching:
Teaching:
v. 1-5: The angels with the trumpets and the one with the censer
v. 6-7: The first horn blew and made blood mixed with hail.
v. 8-9: The second angel blew its horn and something like a mountain of fire was dropped into the sea.
v. 10-11: The star was called Wormwood.
v. 12: The lights of heaven became dim.
v. 13: The eagle said, "Woe! Woe! Woe!"

Note: Her spelling is not this good. :) She writes things down as best she can figure out, and then I type it up for her so that it's easy for her to read out loud in the group. I do the same for LT, although before long he's going to start doing his own typing. The words they misspell -- and they are many, especially for C -- serve as spelling words until the next Wednesday. Two birds with one homeschooling stone.)

(My teaching:
Teaching:
v. 1-2: Silence in heaven. (What's coming must be really big.)
v. 3-5: An eighth angel offers up incense mingled with prayers, and then uses the censer to smite the earth with a few preliminary rumbles
v. 6-7: The first trumpet sounds; 1/3 of the earth and the trees, and all of the grass, are burned up in a hail of blood and fire.
v. 8-9: The second trumpet sounds; the seas are struck by a "mountain of fire", bringing death to 1/3 of all life in and on the seas
v. 10-11: The third trumpet sounds; wormwood poisons the waters of the earth
v. 12: The fourth trumpet sounds; a third of the heavenly lights go dark
v. 13: The eagle's warning: It's not over yet by a long shot.)

You get the idea on that.

And here's the part that provides the real meat of the discussion on Wednesday nights:
Meaning:

This can be anything and everything. It can be a mention of something in the chapter you'd never noticed before, or something that really moved you. It can be plain old exegetical teaching. It can be questions. It can be a basic overview of what the chapter meant to you. This is where T waxes really long and scholarly; I generally go for the "something that really moved you" -- the kids write a sentence or a paragraph telling what they thought the chapter was about, or what they think God is trying to tell us in the chapter, or, in C's case, what stuck out in the chapter for her to remember.

(C's example: "The eagle says, 'Woe! Woe! Woe! because the earth is going to be destroyed." LT's: "I think it is important that Jesus opened the seventh seal and seven angels came with trumpets, and they blew them, and things happened to the earth." It would take DAYS to type T's, so I won't, and I haven't done mine yet. But again, you get the idea.)

And then the last part, which is the most optional of all of them, since most people cover it in their "Meaning"...
Application. What does God want you specifically to take away from this chapter? How is your life going to change? Some chapters, this is really easy. Some, like these prophetic ones, not so much.

Anyway. Please pardon the long unfunny post, just wanted to share. :)

Friday, February 25, 2005

Questions from Kristen

1) What book (in the last year) has most impacted your relationship with God (excluding the Bible)?

Well. Most of the actual book-reading I do is novels, some of which affect me positively spiritually (like Jane Eyre, or the Mitford books, and I'm reading Les Misérables right now, for example), some of which are neutral (Austen and many others) and some of which I frankly maybe shouldn't be exposing myself to. Every bit of garbage I put in my head stays there, whether I'm "reading with discernment" or not. Something to think about. ANYWAY. As far as what I've read that's most affected my relationship with God, well, Kristen, your journal would be high on the list. ;-)

2) If you could choose a country to live in other than your current home country, which would it be, and why?

That would be really hard. America has its faults but I do love it, and frankly I can't think of another first-world nation whose policies and lifestyle aren't even further from my ideal than the U.S. is, with the possible exception of Israel, and that's no place to move right now, when you have kids. Maybe in Africa or South America, as a missionary?

3) If you were sent to the Isle of Patmos for the rest of your life and could only bring ONE BOOK of the Bible, which would it be? Why?

This is the question I've been thinking about the most since I first read these questions, and I'd have to answer Psalms. For one thing, it's the longest, and I like variety. ;-) For another, there's a little bit of everything in Psalms -- lots of comfort, plenty of conviction, BIG views of God, personal views of God, prophecies about Jesus, it's all there. So if I could only have ONE, that would probably be it.

4) What was your favorite movie, book, or character as a child?

In early childhood, I liked Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Narnia books, and a whole lot of assorted kids' books like Mr. Popper's Penguins, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, The Phantom Tollbooth, and Blue Willow (note: with the possible exception of The Phantom Tollbooth, I am still enormously fond of all of these books today). Later I discovered Anne (of Green Gables, of course), and as a teenager I added Dickens to my list of favorites, on the strength of David Copperfield and Great Expectations. And let's not forget the obligatory worldy-teenager fit of literary angst which included a profound admiration of John Steinbeck and the socialism he stood for. Ouch.

That's what you get for asking me to pick a favorite. :)

5) What's your very 'favoritest' thing to eat?

Oh, no! You did it again! :)

Probably the food that I MOST love to have in my mouth, no matter what my mood is and dietary considerations aside, is REALLY GOOD cookies-and-cream ice cream over a warm walnut brownie with hot fudge and whipped cream on top.

Thanks for the questions (and everything else as well), Kristen! :)
--------