Seatbelts

I'll give our esteemed church father a break for awhile and comment on my own thoughts in relation to Rich Mullins.

I was driving over to Amy's place about a week ago, and as I rolled down the drive of my apartment, I started thinking, "Should I put on my seatbelt? It's only a couple miles..." I did buckle up, but I thought it strange that I should wonder about this. In the past, buckling my seat belt had been a natural thing. No thought involved. I just did what I should. However, as I've grown older, I've started thinking about most of the things I do before I do them, and that leaves me wondering whether the things I am doing are necessary. Even the good things.

Philosophy, sometimes I resent you. Would that I could return to the naturality of goodness! Instead, in an effort to give reason its fair due, I stop and think before even doing what I should. I wonder if that's what caused Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. This growing away from thoughtless good may lead me to a mature evil.

On the blog I had while in Rwanda, I quoted Rich Mullins's song "Growing Young," and I think that it applies here as well:

I've gone so far from my home

I've seen the world and I have known

So many secrets I wish now I did not know

'Cause they have crept into my heart

They have left it cold and dark

And bleeding,

Bleeding and falling apart

And everybody used to tell me big boys don't cry

Well I've been around enough to know that that was the lie

That held back the tears in the eyes of a thousand prodigal sons

Well we are children no more, we have sinned and grown old

And our Father still waits and He watches down the road

To see the crying boys come running back to His arms

And be growing young

Growing young

I don't think it's evil to think before I act. I just wish, rather, that I loved God so much my actions would flow from that. Maybe I should meditate more on his word than on my own attempts at understanding truth.

City of God, again

Man, I just can't get over Augustine. What a babe.

I just finished a paper on historian William Henry Chamberlain. Interesting enough. The really interesting part was talking about a quote I found:

"[The] most important [reason] of all, perhaps, is the inability of collective human intelligence and goodwill to cope with some of the problems which the modern age has posed. This, I believe, is the fundamental cause of the cyclical fall of civilizations throughout history after they have achieved a certain level of cultural and material accomplishment."[1]

So Chamberlain says the ultimate problem in the world is not loving our neighbors. So close. It reminds me of 1 John 4:7-8 "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and anyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not, knoweth not God, for God is love."

And then there's Augustine. City of God. The whole book's about how Rome fell because the Romans were immoral and sought other things than God (as Adam Pontapea sort of notes in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers). Loving neighbors is great, and being your brother's keeper is unbelievably important, but you're just not doing it if you're not doing it because you love God.

Man, Augustine. Just won't leave me alone.



[1] William H. Chamberlain, The World’s Iron Age, (New York: 1941), quoted in Grace Isabel Colbron, Review [Untitled], American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Jul., 1943), 574.

East and West

I've been praying and thinking a lot about the Muslim part of the lands around the Mediterranean lately. I'm not too positive why.

The East always holds the questions and the West offers the answers. At least, that's how I read it. The mystical oriental, the practical yank. Twain's character from Connecticut Yankee even begins his tale with something like "I am a yankee, and as practical and unsentimental as they come..." Western philosophy generally works for the natural world; Eastern looks completely past it. Hard to understand.

Please pray for me as I struggle with starting a career. I really want to serve God, and I'm so afraid of getting too caught up in life to admit that I, too, am supposed to be some kind of missionary. I just want to do what's right. I'm afraid that, out of a desire to take care of Amy, I'll settle for something that's adequate. She doesn't want anything close to that, but when we talk about what kind of material things will be necessary when we're married, I worry that we'll be too tied down to something unimportant to serve the only Thing that matters.

Maybe I should just head East, where people care less about this world. There's a definite truth to transcendentalism: we, for the most part, do not exist in permanence.