A Brick in the Valley

Steve Dewitt (and native of the GSOI) responds to a question about being single:

As a single pastor I often get questions related to singleness.  I received some questions from a woman who went through a divorce many years ago and is struggling to be feminine and content when life demands her to assume more masculine roles.  Here is part of my response:

I would like to share a few things.  First of all, thanks for asking me!  The fact that you are seeking dialogue tells me you are in a posture of learning and growing, which is right where God wants us.

Secondly, while I can relate in some ways to your questions about singleness, image bearing, and sexuality, there are challenges to single womanhood that certainly go beyond my experience.  My heart resonates with your comments about being a woman, mom, employee, and other roles which demand a certain masculinity from you that you would rather not have to resource.  This broken world holds many tensions and disparities, that is one of them.

I guess the main thing I would say is you face a decision of perspective in these matters.  Will you define yourself according to how you perceive others to see you OR according to how God sees you.  By some standards (perhaps your family or friends), your singleness is less than ideal (I know that feeling).  You might feel that among Christians as well.  You may feel that from yourself and life dreams/hopes that you had which have not materialized.  All these things are very real but they are very temporary. 

Here for the rest.

Psalm 19:1-6

Watch the bear disappear.

I am often blessed by Patricia Hunter’s blog.  And, her painted bunting pictures are my favorite – - though the first pictures on this post are also a blessing.

How could you look at these and not believe in a Creator?

Justin Taylor has an excellent post summarizing Brit Hume’s testimony.

Journalist Brit Hume isn’t backing down from his recent comments that Tiger Woods should turn to Christ for redemption and forgiveness.

As he says in the follow-up interview below, “Jesus Christ offers Tiger Woods something he badly needs.”

Last year on my blog I mentioned the following about Hume and what he planned to be doing in his retirement.

Brit Hume, the Washington managing editor at Fox News and one of the best in the business, is retiring from his position. Starting in 2009 he’ll become senior political analyst and work 100 days in the year.

When public figures retire at the top of their game they often cite wanting to spend more time with their family. And that’s the case here. But Hume offers an additional reason–one rarely cited in these situations:

I certainly want to pursue my faith more ardently than I have done. I’m not claiming it’s impossible to do when you work in this business. I was kind of a nominal Christian for the longest time. When my son died (by suicide in 1998), I came to Christ in a way that was very meaningful to me. If a person is a Christian and tries to face up to the implications of what you say you believe, it’s a pretty big thing. If you do it part time, you’re not really living it.

From another interview:

And since my son died, I have been, really, I felt rescued by God and by Christ. I have an intense desire to pursue that more ardently and have it be a bigger part of my life than it has been.

When asked how that will translate, Hume responded, “It’ll translate into Bible study.”

Denny Burk also includes this quote from Hume’s interview on WTOP News radio:

Christianity is uniquely and especially about redemption and forgiveness. That is what the cornerstone of what the faith is about. Now other faiths aren’t hostile to the idea, but think of what the message of Christ and Christianity is. It is that the God of the universe sent His only begotten Son, who died a hideous death on the cross, to atone for all of our sins. And we are thereby offered through that act a new covenant in which we are offered forgiveness and redemption on a continuing basis in return for our faith in God and our continuing efforts to live the Christian life. That is a unique doctrine.

More here.

Caleb Crain posts:

James Cameron’s 3-D movie Avatar gave me a four-hour headache. Probably the headache was caused by a combination of the 3-D effect, a seat near the front and at the far edge of the theater, the way the 3-D glasses skewed my plain old glasses beneath, and the dark in which I biked home afterward, my bike light having been stolen while I was in the theater. But I can’t help but also attribute the headache to the movie’s moral corruptness.

It’s a finished corruptness. The easiest way I can think of to describe it is by comparison with The Matrix, a movie which is merely disingenuous, and to some extent struggling with its disingenuousness. The moral lesson that The Matrix purports to offer is that the glossy magic of life inside a simulation distracts from painful truth. But the moral problem faced by the Matrix is that this lesson is betrayed by the fun that the movie has in playing inside the simulation. A viewer enjoys the scenes of jumping over buildings, and of freezing explosions and fistfights in midair and then rotoscoping through them. In fact, the viewer enjoys them much more than the scenes of what, within the conceit of the movie, is considered reality. There may be a brief yucky thrill to learning that in reality people are grown in pods so their energy can be harvested by robots, but as a matter of aesthetics, reality in The Matrix turns out to be drab and constricted by gravity and other laws of physics. The closing sequence, where Neo (Keanu Reeves) plugs back in to the matrix and runs a sort of special-effects victory lap, makes no sense, in terms of the moral victory he is supposed to have won. If he has really joined the blue-pill team, he ought to be sitting down to another bowl of bacterial gruel with his ragged, unshowered friends, and recommitting himself to the struggle. Instead he’s leaping around in a Prada suit. So the viewer departs from the movie with a slightly queasy feeling, a suspicion that visual pleasures aren’t to be trusted. That queasiness is the trace of the movie’s attenuated honesty.

And such queasiness and honesty are completely absent from Avatar. Some might protest: But what about Avatar’s anti-imperialism and anti-corporate attitudinizing? They’re red herrings, in my opinion, planted by Cameron with the cynical intention of distracting the viewer from the movie’s more serious ideological work: convincing you to love your simulation—convincing you to surrender your queasiness.

Read the rest here.

HT: Ross Douthat

There is another amazing collection of pictures on Boston.com.  What struck me as I looked at this collection is the wonder of God’s Creation and the beauty of image bearers in particular.

And, it doesn’t matter where you are in the world, children like the little girl below, are beautiful.

Click here to see Part I, Part II, Part III.  HT: Challies

Pictures of the decade.  HT: Z

And, Christmas 2009.  Again, just look at the children.

John Mark Reynolds reflects on the late Oral Roberts.  This is a post to learn from both in content but also in how to graciously interact with the life of a visible leader.

Oral Roberts lived and believed in the American dream. He was also a devoted Christian. The tension between the two is a good predictor of the successes and failures of an important American and Christian life. Roberts was a complex man who lived a long time and it would be unfortunate if he only receives hagiography or dismissal.

Roberts did much that was good, but it came at a very high theological and intellectual price. Roberts was born in the lower middle class, never graduated from college, but founded a fully accredited university. With little training, he launched a highly successful television franchise and changed the reputation of Pentecostalism in America and helped bring “Spirit-led” worship to a new generation. Sadly, Roberts also introduced some very bad theological ideas into the bloodstream of that same movement.

Roberts was born in 1918 in rural Oklahoma and died in 2009 in Newport Beach, California. He tracked the movement of many American in his generation from relative poverty to comfort in the Golden West. His American populism was his most attractive feature, but an inherent disdain for elites led to his problems. Roberts understood the changes that were going on in the culture and was able to negotiate the relationship between his faith and those changes, but often the integration was overly shallow.

Read the rest here.

Al Mohler reflects on Oral Roberts’ life and ministry here.

John MacArthur here.

Christianity Today: Why the Oral Roberts obituaries are wrong.

Be sure and read the comments at the end of Ed Stetzer’s post on pornography.

A new study done by Patrick F. Fagan examines the effects of pornography on individuals, marriage, family and community. Fagan is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Research on Marriage and Religion at the Family Research Council. He specializes in examining the relationships among family, marriage, religion, community, and America’s social problems. This study is important for everyone to read as it demonstrates that it has damaging effects on individuals and families. In the summary Fagan explains,

Pornography is a visual representation of sexuality which distorts an individual’s concept of the nature of conjugal relations. This, in turn, alters both sexual attitudes and behavior. It is a major threat to marriage, to family, to children and to individual happiness. In undermining marriage it is one of the factors in undermining social stability.

Social scientists, clinical psychologists, and biologists have begun to clarify some of the social and psychological effects, and neurologists are beginning to delineate the biological mechanisms through which pornography produces its powerful negative effects.

Some of the findings inside the study include:

• • Pornography is addictive, and neuroscientists are beginning to map the biological substrate of this addiction.
  • Users tend to become desensitized to the type of pornography they use, become bored with it, and then seek more perverse forms of pornography.

Read the rest here.

Thinking about writing a book?  Here is how the industry is changing.

HT: Challies