The Gumblers - A Children's Tale

These are the gumbler stories I tell
Of their lives in a murkey, blackened realm,
Alight with only a beam from above
That glowed on the ground around a well
Those creatures loved the liquids bright
So they cupped them in bubbles of silver delight.

Clink, clunk, clink, clunk
You never heard the gumblers cry,
Their eyes were fixed and their faces, sunk,
And not one of them looked to the lighted sky.

There were three gumbler girls with scrawny hips
And lipsticks that smeared on their thin-cracked lips,
With grim-green necks all draped in jewels,
They drew a slew of gumbler fools
To bewitch them all with bubbles twinkling
Between their fingers, fat and wrinkling.

Click, clunk, click, clunk,
You never heard the gumblers cry,
Their eyes were fixed and their faces, sunk,
And not one of them looked to the lighted sky.

There was a giant mole with crooked hands
Carrying buckets of water to lands
Where gumblers wanted more than their share,
Promising one day a bucket he’d spare,
So gumblers came from far and wide
Fastened their chains, and followed behind.

Click, clunk, click, clunk,
You never heard the gumblers cry,
Their eyes were fixed and their faces, sunk,
And not one of them looked to the lighted sky.

There once was a gumbler who chased the mole,
Then fell right into a mercury hole!
And everyone sighed and clucked and said,
“He should have seen that crater ahead,
We’d help him get out, if only we could,
But one mile more and a bucket we’ll hold!”

Click, clunk, click, clunk,
You never heard the gumblers cry,
Their eyes were fixed and their faces, sunk,
And not one of them looked to the lighted sky.

That poor gumbler did sit all night in the pit
Where no one else saw him throwing a fit
He knew not what to do with no light
On which to fix his eyes through the night
He wailed and—yes—he cried, he did,
For waterless, he had never been

Click, clunk, click, clunk,
Was the time I heard a gumbler cry,
His eyes were dull and his face was sunk,
And he knew not to look to the lighted sky.

And that gumbler was sad until he saw
Such a sight he had never seen at all
A gumbler who did not look like the rest
For she held no bubble of happiness
With hands scot-free and skin aglow
Her eyes were locked on a heavenly flow.

Click, thrive, click, revive,
Was the time a gumbler ceased to cry,
His eyes were at rest, and his face, alive,
When he gazed for love of the lighted sky.

The Bible--practical liaison to the Kingdom of God

On the divine side, I assume that God has been willing and competent to arrange for the Bible, including its record of Jesus, to emerge and be preserved in ways that will secure his purposes for it among human beings worldwide. Those who actually believe in God will be untroubled by this. I assume that he did not and would not leave his message to humankind in a form that can only be understood by a handful of late-twentieth-century professional scholars, who cannot even agree among themselves on the theories that they assume to determine what the message is.

The Bible is, after all, God's gift to the world through his Church, not to the scholars. It comes through the life of his people and nourishes that life. Its purpose is practical, not academic. An intelligent, careful, intensive but straightforward reading--that is, one not governed by obscure and faddish theories or by a mindless orthodoxy--is what it requires to direct us into life in God's kingdom.

-Dallas Willard

On Historical Methods

"Professional historians are not bloodless templates passively registering the facts: we actively and imaginatively project. Our rationality cannot be extricated from our sentiments and feelings, our hopes and fears, our hunches and ambitions."

-Dale Allison, New Testament scholar, quote in reference to inadequate scholarly attempts to uncover the "historical Jesus."

He always says it right.

While I believe that actual miracles can and do happen, I am sympathetic with those who believe otherwise, and I applaud their desire to live out the meaning of the miracle stories even when they don't believe the stories really happened as written. (I find it harder to be sympathetic with those who take pride in believing the miracles really happened but don't seek to live out their meaning.) 68 A Generous Orthodoxy --Mclaren

God is a fan of union: friendship, family, and marriage

Ecclesiastes 4:9-12

Two are better than one because they have a good return for their labor. For if either of them falls, the one will lift up his companion. But woe to the one who falls when there is not another to lift him up. Furthermore, if two lie down together they keep warm, but how can one be warm alone? And if one can overpower him who is alone, two can resist him. A cord of three strands is not quickly torn apart.

The Divine Side of Prayer.

I'm sure my frustrated, venting prayers look so ridiculous while I'm praying them--especially walking the streets of New York--knowing any person watching thinks I'm talking to myself. Outloud.

Have you ever prayed a prayer something to the effect of this:

"God please take this distraction away. Really, it's bugging me. And I want to obey you, but how can I obey you when I don't know what you're saying? And I want to worship you first, but (long sigh), I just love concrete things more than abstract things. And right now, Jesus seems abstract. So here's my list for tonight: I need this distraction gone, and I need to know that you are real. Help me be okay with the reality of hell, and please show me if I'm really supposed to do music...(longer more exasperated sigh) see, now I'm praying too many things--there's no way I'm going to remember which answers I'm waiting for. Especially with three papers due tomorrow, which, shoot, I haven't started. Yeah, by the way, please help me with those..."

Something inside of me shrinks when I hear people use the phrase, "the power of prayer." Partly because it sounds cliche. Don't get me wrong--I think prayer has great benefits. It makes me verbalize what it is I really desire. It concentrates my will toward those things. In group prayer, it could even concentrate the group on a unified goal. All good things. But there is still this gnawing feeling that I don't really believe prayer invites anything divine into the human side of things.

Why do I think this way?

Simple: I never pray.

But tonight shockingly reminded me that the "power of prayer" lies in God's ability to facilitate in hours what would have taken me months.

First, a phone call from my mom turned my heart away from the distraction. Then, in the back corner of a dimly lit coffee shop, tears welled and wouldn't stop falling from my eyes. Francis Shaeffar's book The God Who is There renewed my faith in a God who does exist, even though the inconsistencies in modern philosophy makes it really hard to believe in him.

The idea that faith and rationality are mutually-exclusive is one that we still haven’t recovered from today. Today, the former is seen as a product of optimistic, “wishful thinking”, and the latter as more of a pessimistic, accurate perspective. This precept is not even true, and yet it keeps thousands of rational people from committing to a belief in Jesus. As a result, most people have developed an understanding of the world that is fragmented, void of an overarching narrative, and meaningless. Schaeffar says, “When we speak of being under the line of despair, we do not mean that these people necessarily sit down and weep, but that they have given up all hope of achieving a rational unified answer to knowledge and life (23).

So the distraction removed, my faith in God renewed, and all of it happened in a way that replaced my worry about hell with a desire to bring people freedom, in this life and the one to come. And to top it off, a few days later, the music stuff was confirmed.

Ha, all that being said, I think I'm going to pray more.

Elegy

Elegy
Dylan Thomas

"Too proud to die; broken and blind he died
The darkest way, and did not turn away,
A cool kind man brave in his narrow pride."