Snowshoeing

Snowshoeing in Sanpete Co. Utah! Mmm Mmm Mmm. Living here has led me to believe 7 (maybe 9) out of every 12 months in Heaven will be winter!

Pray for Haiti

About once a week I receive prayer requests through email from a lady who runs a Christian school in Haiti. The following concern comes from her email I got today. I post it to remind myself to pray for the people in Haiti, and of the vast privileges I have and the responsibilities that come with them:

"Please pray for the man I told you about whose house was destroyed in Tropical Storm Noel. Now his son has been diagnosed with tuberculosis. He also takes care of his elderly grandparents. Today I received a letter from him asking if I could find him a job - not an easy thing to do."

Strikingly Similar Points to Heed

I recently finished The Question of God, by Armand Nicholi, a Harvard Psychiatrist who, through the book, examines the thoughts of C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud on God, Love, Morality and other such important issues.

I'm also working on The Language of God, by Francis Collins, who's the scientist who heads the Human Genome Project, and is a Christian.

There's a statement made at the end of The Question of God I found strikingly similar to something Collins says at the beginning of lecture he gave on the relationship between faith and science.

From The Question of God:

"Yet, Freud, and Lewis before his [conversion to Christianity], also avoided confronting the evidence. We find this easy to do. We keep ourselves distracted. We rationalize. We tell our self we will consider such weighty (and anxiety-provoking) subjects when we are older--when time demands will not be as great...As with Lewis before his transition, we really don't want to know--we nurture a 'willful blindness' and a 'deep-seated hatred of authority.' We find repugnant the notion of "a transcendental Interferer." We feel toward our lives as both Freud and Lewis felt toward theirs: 'This is my business, and mine only."' (pg. 242-243)

From Faith and the Human Genome, a lecture by Francis Collins:

"Despite the best efforts of the American Scientific Affiliation to bridge the gap between science and faith, few gatherings of scientists involved in biology include any meaningful discussion about the spiritual significance of the current revolution in genetics and genomics. Most biologists and geneticists seem to have concluded that science and faith are incompatible, but few who embrace that conclusion seem to have seriously considered the evidence."

When it comes to the reality of God, it's amazing how much there is in people that wants not to see.

This all brings to mind a quote from George MacDonald in The Curate's Awakening:

"As for any influence from the direction of religion, a contented soul may glide through all his life long, unstruck to the last, buoyant and evasive as a bee in a hail storm."

Wilberforce

One of my heroes is William Wilberforce. Motivated by his faith in Christ, he fought tenaciously for in the British Parliament for most of his adult life to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire. Because of his commitment to Christ, and a few other Christians who wouldn't compromise, the slave trade in Great Britain ended decades before it ended in the U.S., and without a bloody war to make it happen. The recent movie Amazing Grace is an excellent depiction of Wilberforce's life and accomplishments.

I didn't know until recently he wrote a book called Real Christianity, which has recently been updated in modern language by Bob Beltz. I picked up a copy and it is excellent. It's also amazingly relevant to contemporary American Christianity, even though it was written about the British society of two-hundred years ago.

Here are some quotes from the first few chapters. I couldn't help but share:

"If you love someone who is ruining his or her life because of faulty thinking and you don't do anything about it because you are afraid of what others might think, it would seem that rather than being loving, you are in fact being heartless." (pg. 17)

"Faith is a subject of such importance that we should not ignore it because of the distractions or the hectic pace of our lives. Life as we know it, with all its ups and downs, will soon be over. We all will give an accounting to God of how we have lived." (pg. 18)

"Some might say that one's faith is a private matter and should not be spoken of so publicly. They might assert this in public, but what do they really think in their hearts? The fact is, those who say such things usually don't even have a concern for faith in the privacy of their interior lives." (pg. 21)

"What a difference it would be if our system of morality were based on the Bible instead of the standards devised by cultural Christians. It would be interesting to see the response of men and women who have set their behavior based on the latter when they were confronted with the standard set by God in the former." (pg. 22)

"When we examine the amazing capabilities humans possess and then compare it to what we have done with them, we have a hard time explaining the contrast." (pg. 32-33)