if some people really are...

if some people really are smarter
than other people and
if some people really are better looking
than other people and
if some people really are happier
than other people and
if some people really are more moral
than other people and
if some people really are understand better
than other people and
if God really did make us all that way
and
if he really does love us
and
if we really are going to live together in heaven without being jealous then I guess those things aren't really so important after all, are they?

- Randy Welch
Rappings , edited by Robert Webber, (Wheaton: Tyndale 1971) p. 14

pulsate

My heart beats
Albeit restlessly
3 years
1095 days
26,280 hours
157, 680 minutes
Its pace determined
By the angelic smile
Of this one
Who is so near,
And yet so far
Destiny’s humor
Choices regretted
And this coward heart
That fears…
…the unknown

Alas! 'Tis finished...

Alas! 'Tis finished...

...at least for this semester.

Yesterday I paid my pending balance at the seminary.

That was the last engagement that I'll have with them for this semester.

I must say that studying again has re-kindled a new sense of purpose, and at the same time has also brought about a whole lot of heartache specially since studying theology also involves a deconstruction of long established doctrinal biases and well held beliefs that in reality is tainted more by tradition than Scripture.

After gruelling discussions, sleepless nights writing papers, and relationships that were marred forever by apparent conflicts on things that were not at all that important as exhibiting grace and the likes, I am still unfinished...

...even as I have finally completed everything that's expected by the seminary from my end.

Perhaps this Lent would give time for much needed reflection on life, love and ministry in light of the season upon which we remember and stand in solidarity with the Passion of our Savior....

Finding the perichoresis at Earth Hour

Peri - around
Chorea - dance, (cf Choreography)
Perichorea - To dance around...

In the beginning was the Dance, and the Dance was in God, and the Dance was God...

An eternal Dance; the three persons of the Godhead dancing eternally, in an embrace of love, mutually giving and receiving. Always dancing.

In the beginning God created a Dancing partner...

The world was created in its own dance, and invited to join the Dance. But the lead dancers said No! and started their own dance. The hands of God are extended to restore the Dance, and inviting us to Dance: The Son, and the Spirit, the two hands of God.

The Dance for us has a beginning, and an end, and they are not the same. The beginning starts with anticipation, expectation, and desire; the end concludes with satisfaction, completion, and rest - until the next Dance.

We look upon the Dance of God, as he ever circles about us. We try to understand. We so often fail. The Dance goes on, and the part we have in the Dance goes on, though we are not Dancing, only dancing, yet that dancing seems to be incorprated despite our best efforts. We look, and the Dance seems to change, to reverse, to go back on itself - it repented the Lord that... - and then the Dance goes on, seeking it's goal, never seeking return to the starting point - I the Lord change not. This is the nature of Dance: round and round you go, sometimes to and sometimes fro, but the Dance goes on.

And us? Some of us sit as wallflowers. We won't dance under any circumstances. Some of us are dancing around our handbags in our own dance, while the Dance wheels about us. We dance on our own. But dances are communal, not individual, everyone knows that. Dances are free, though structured: God's Line Dancing.

Will you join the Dance? God's two hands, The Son and Spirit, await you, pull you, invite you, to take you into the Dance, to wheel you about, make you dizzy at times, exhilerated at times, exhausted at times, fearful at times. But it is The Dance.

I am the Lord of the Dance said he...

The miracle of reading the poetry of Rappings

It’s really amazing what one finds in the rubbish bins.

A couple of months ago I was able to rummage a copy of Rappings on the garbage bin of Grace Bible Church, Rappings is a 1971 literary portfolio of Wheaton College seminarians that was compiled by the late Robert Webber, who was then an Associate Professor of Theology at Wheaton the portfolio is an attempt to give wider circulation to the thinking, the probing and the challenging questions of young Christians at the time.

I consider it a miracle that I was able to find this at church where at times I share the same feelings of guilt, frustration towards many things related to my personal faith in God, and my relationships with people at church –that is to say not so great at the moment. Moreover, I consider this a miracle as I have found a sense of empathy with the words that were written in Rappings, particularly because their poetry provides an affinity with my present state where again I am reminded that I am at a lost –and that I do not know everything –and it is in that not knowing everything that I am (as we all are,) rendered into what can be called a re-orientation of faith as it is now derived not with intellectual congruence in systematic theological formulations or in what is seen as ‘sound doctrine’ but in an encounter with the Living Word which confronts us to boldly live faith in the context of hope…

It is in this context of hope that I found this piece of poetry from an unknown * seminarian most worthy of reflection:

Out in the cold I stand,
Looking on at the world sitting tight,
With its people in their nice little world,
And the friends who don’t even know me.
It makes no difference to their world where I am.
If I’m there, it keeps going;
If I’m not, it goes on,
While I walk around, wandering, wondering,
My mind a mass of mixed-up machinery,
Clashing with conflicts and unanswered questions.
I don’t ask if the world is real—
It sits up there on its foundations,
Secure, concrete, hard and stone and real.
But I’m not real—
Or if I am maybe I shouldn’t be.
They answer, “Smile, God loves you.”
But I can’t smile.
I’m numbed by cold inside and out.
Even in the heat in the square brick buildings
Would only warm my body, nothing else.
I’m alone in a world full of people,
Apart, shut up inside myself,
Cold, unfeeling
in a cold
unfeeling world.

* found as it appears above, written on an ink blotter on an empty desk in Fischer Hall.

T-Shirt Theologians 1 | What would Packer do?

I remember back in college when I used t-shirts to express my opinions on something (like my ‘Serve The People!’ or ‘Punk’s Not Dead!’ shirts) or to immortalize people whom I admire (like my Che Guevarra, or Sid Vicious shirts).

This shirt is an attempt to immortalize those who are at present instrumental in my formation spiritually as well as theologically, and I would like to start this post series off with James Innell Packer who is better known in Evangelical Christian circles as J.I. Packer, a British-born Canadian Christian theologian in the low church Anglican and Reformed traditions.

Evangelical Churches and Climate Change: A Call to Action

The brokenness of earth is the brokenness of God’s home.”

It has long been held that the environment is among the most pressing concerns of this generation. In this bygone age of technology and consumerism, ministry pertaining to the natural world of creation has taken a backseat in the teaching and preaching of Evangelical Christian churches in particular. While most Christians appreciate the beauty of nature, many don’t realize there is a strong Biblical basis for creation care, in fact many ethical values, fundamental to the development of a peaceful society, are particularly relevant to the ecological question.

In the Book of Genesis, where we find God’s first self-revelation to humanity (Gen.1-3), there is a recurring refrain: “And God saw that it was good.” [2] Mankind’s first home was Eden –paradise. The Earth was paradise, teaming with life, vegetation, and the wondrous landscape of skies, the land and the sea. Creation in God’s eyes was good, but at the same time entrusted it to the care of man and woman.
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Finding ‘life’ at the end of the Road...

The Road is a film based on Cormac McCarthy's 2006 Pulitzer award winning novel of the same name.

Watching the movie brings to light familiar feelings that are common to any believer who have dared to passionately ask the deepest answers to life's meaning in light of living a life of faith in a God who has revealed Himself in love through the person and work of the crucified and resurrected Christ.

Life at the End of the World

Peering into the end of the world takes you to a place that is very much like home. It takes you to places close to heart –it reintroduces you to familiar emotions of fear, uncertainty and longing.

Furthermore, at the end of the world there is nothing but the vague indecisiveness of the road –serving as a treacherous conduit into man’s journey into the unknown that lies beyond the end.

I find it hard to imagine myself doing the opposite if I were in the same shoes. Love is a powerful emotion, that’s why I could identify with the Father, (Viggo Mortensen) who behaves albeit inhumanely towards others in the midst of a dying planet plagued with extreme natural disasters, departed civilization, savage cannibals and memories of ‘good old days' in order to preserve the life of his Son, (Kodi Smit-McPhee).