Slideshows

I'm just experimenting with a feature my son showed me on my Picasa Web Album site. I posted a photo of the Font Mágica that we saw when my daughter and her friend were here in an earlier post. Thought you might like to see all the photos I took. Let me know if this works on your computer and what you think. Maybe I'll post one of these from time to time. If you hover your mouse over the picture, it will give you some choices. If you click on it, it will take you to my Picasa Web Album.

Back to School

This past Wednesday children went back to school in Cataluña (the province where we live). They looked a lot like American school children as they set off in their new clothes with their new backpacks. I don't know a lot about the school system, but I know their schedule is very different than what we are used to in the States. They begin school at 8:30 or 9:00 (depending on their grade level) and go until about 1:30, when they break for lunch and go home. They return at 3:00 or 3:30 and stay until about 5:00 p.m. If they are in Instituto (which would be 7th-10th grades for us), their day runs from about 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Mandatory education finishes at age 16 here. If they are going on to college, then they spend 2 more years taking college prep courses before they apply to and take entry examinations for the college they would like to attend and the major they are pursuing. They can't just apply to a university and decide later on their course of study. If they don't test well, academically as well as in regard to aptitude for their field of study, the admissions staff can deny their application. It puts a lot of pressure on an 18 year old who may not be sure about what they want to do "when they grow up."

More on Suffering

A few more good quotes from the book, Suffering and the Sovereignty of God.

The suffering of the servants of God, borne with faith and even praise, is a shattering experience to apathetic saints whose lives are empty int he midst of countless comforts.

The suffering of the church is used by God to reposition the missionary troops in places they might not have otherwise gone. This is clearly the effect that Luke wants us to see in the story of the martyrdom of Stephen and the persecution that came after it. God spurs the church into missionary service by the suffering she endures. Therefore we must not judge too quickly the apparent setbacks and tactical defeats of the church. If you see things with the eyes of God, the Master Strategist, what you see in every setback is the positioning of troops for a greater advance and a greater display of his wisdom and power and love.

The lesson here is not just that God is sovereign and turns setbacks into triumphs. The lesson is that comfort and ease and affluence and prosperity and safety and freedom often cause a tremendous inertia in the church. The very things that we think would produce personnel and energy and creative investment of time and money for the missionary cause instead produce the exact opposite: weakness, apathy, lethargy, self-centeredness, and preoccupation with security.

This book is challenging me on almost every page. I will continue to share some of what I read, but would recommend you get a copy for yourself. There's some great stuff in here.

Amusement Parks

One of the things our family always enjoyed was going to amusement parks, whether it was Disneyland when the kids were small or Magic Mountain when they got older (we lived in California when our kids were growing up). We always had a lot of fun. When we visited our friends in Michigan, we often drove over the border into Ohio to enjoy the day at Cedar Point with their family. In USA Today, this article told about Cedar Point winning the award for best park every year for the last 10 years. We are not amusement park experts, but it was always one of our favorites.

Suffering and the Sovereignty of God

The opening paragraphs of this book read:

The impetus for this book comes from the ultimate reality of God as the supreme value in and above the universe. God is absolute and eternal and infinite. Everything else and everybody else is dependent and finite and contingent. God himself is the great supreme value. Everything else that has any value has it by connection to God. God is supreme in all things. He has all authority, all power, all wisdom--and he is all good "to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him" (Lam. 3:25). And his name, as Creator and Redeemer and Ruler of all, is Jesus Christ.

In the last few years, 9/11, tsunamis, Katrina, and ten thousand personal losses have helped us discover how little the American church is rooted in this truth. David Wells, in his new book, Above All Earthly Pow'rs: Christ in a Postmodern World, says it like this:

This moment of tragedy and evil [referring to 9/11] shone its own light on the Church and what we came to see was not a happy sight. For what has become conspicuous by its scarcity, and not least in the evangelical corner of it, is a spiritual gravitas, one which could match the depth of horrendous evil and address issues of such seriousness. Evangelicalism, now much absorbed by the arts and tricks of marketing, is simply not very serious anymore.

In other words, our vision of God in relation to evil and suffering was shown to be frivolous. The church has not been spending its energy to go deep with the unfathomable God of the Bible. Against the overwhelming weight and seriousness of the Bible, much of the church is choosing, at this very moment, to become more light and shallow and entertainment-oriented, and therefore successful in its irrelevance to massive suffering and evil. The popular God of fun-church is simply too small and too affable to hold a hurricane in his hand. The biblical categories of God's sovereignty lie like land mines in the pages of the Bible waiting for someone to seriously open the book. They don't kill, but they do explode trivial notions of the Almighty.

John Piper and Justin Taylor bring together people like Joni Eareckson Tada and Steve Saint, among others, to share their stories about "what God has taught them concerning his mysterious sovereignty in the midst of pain and suffering." It should be a very good read.