Daily pages of reflection...for knowledge, understanding, to wisdom
Section of The Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinci Section of The Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinci

Experience In Imperfection

January 25, 2019
Year 4, Day 25 | No Comments
Section of The Taking of Christ, Caravaggio, 1602

At this writing I am away from my home for a week, at the home of my younger daughter and her husband who are celebrating the twentieth anniversary of their ministry in Coronado, California.  Their schedules are extensive.  I am graciously released from being entertained, so to be permitted to do what I like best to do – write to young men and women, faithful students searching life meaning in a specific value orientation that I believe to be in faithful biblical context.  Another benefit of these days is that I browse through the library my hosts have built, so to revel in the ideas, ancient and modern, that have impacted (or ought to have impacted) persons as individuals and… Read more

Elderly Elders

January 24, 2019
Year 4, Day 24 | No Comments
Section of Adoration of the Magi, artist unknown

The accent of Scripture to the world is the declaration of the redemptive story of God to mankind.  This is done in a rather lengthy book we call the Bible.  In declaring that story, sometimes in scenes of quiet verbal exchange, or in massive meetings to interested persons as well as concentrations to prophets and disciples, the context of that message is cast in a pattern of historical reporting.  It captures life first in the personal boundaries of individuals, then with families, and finally with large society.  The reader can sense the authors’ interest in birth and the individual, forward to children, youth, adults, management of life (with or without faith) in personal belief and conduct, for marriage and the… Read more

Ending Is Beginning

January 23, 2019
Year 4, Day 23 | No Comments
Section of Sistine Chapel ceiling, Michaelangelo, 1508-1512

I was born – on this date in 1923, in Akron, Ohio.  Much has happened in the intervening years, and the range of experience has been extensive.  My childhood was fairly good, despite poverty, in that I had the health and energy to do things, and to be interested in relationships, physical work and formal education in seeking maturity.  My father is remembered only in one event of seeing him on a day a year before he died, in 1929, of killer tuberculosis.  I married in 1943, and grew in that intimate relationship for the next 57 years, enjoying my wife, our four children, and their developing families.  I moved along professionally in the vocational environments of the church and… Read more

Holistic Life

January 22, 2019
Year 4, Day 22 | No Comments
Section of The Descent from the Cross, Rogier van der Weyden, c. 1435

Prayer may not be fully understood even by those who engage it well and often.  It is best engaged when the spirit of prayer prompts the Christian.  The formation of the Christian relates to an intensity of focus in meaning that identifies with the developing devotional nature of the person, a process that relates to the meaning to Nicodemus when Jesus said: Ye must be born again.  It is, when in full process of orientation, a compound in the Christian’s nature that is made up of faith, righteousness, love, learning, peace, service, relationship, prayer and immortality.  In that orientation, each factor is related to the others and the compound (integration) of the Christian life is cultivated in the nature of… Read more

Resistance

January 21, 2019
Year 4, Day 21 | No Comments

There are many words that are helpful to us, sometimes very helpful, in both negative and affirmative contexts, but words that tend to fall into either excessive adoption or reputation in one direction or another. They may have positive or negative impressions on our feelings, so may be given meanings by listeners never anticipated by communicators in this or that situation, to this or that audience or person.  Audience attitudes related to some words cannot be violated for emotions, even for the purpose of discussion. Resistance is built into the human psyche and should be understood and interpreted.  Even though the N-word is used by some Afro-Americans in conversations among themselves in humor, the use of the word by a… Read more

Obsession

January 20, 2019
Year 4, Day 20 | No Comments
Section of Christ and the Woman of Samaria, Benedetto Luti, 1715-20

Today’s Page focuses on addiction for this date in our four years of discussion about the practical and educational Christian life to application.  The plan has been to provide a personal discussion about living in an imperfect world with a concept of God as a friendly and authoritative participant in the lives of those who invite him into their lives, based on Christian principles as revealed in Scripture.  This applies to all of life in a sense of wholeness, found in a context of righteousness, perceived in biblical principles that offer a meaning of life unity and spiritual identity – wholeness to the person living in a complex context of nature that admits of good and evil, of sublimity and… Read more

Distortions

January 19, 2019
Year 4, Day 19 | No Comments
Section of Sistine Chapel ceiling, Michaelangelo, 1508-1512

Some years ago there was an attempt to find out why so much was said, focused and written about persons and relationships that were or seemed to be distorted, conducts that reduced the force of good out of the issues of life under discussion.  Why, for example, do we give so much more time to the distortions of marriage than to the beauty, love, safety, fulfillment of family life?  Why do we not spend more time in identifying and cultivating that which is good and how to achieve it in this or that than to give so much space to the troublemaker, the selfish, the rebel, the drunk, the misfits, the angry, and the irresponsible?  There is a significant movement… Read more

Love Missed By The World

January 18, 2019
Year 4, Day 18 | No Comments
Section of The Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinci

Every child has a father, but many children have no Dad.  It can also be said that every child has a mother, but some children have no Mom.  However, more have Moms than Dads.  The distinction of becoming a father begins with sperm and a momentary experience, but the distinction of a Dad is lifetime experience and relationship that includes a long term period of care, love, values and bonding.  In years, before the end of the twentieth century, why did an increasing percentage of youngsters have no Dads?  Because marriages were and are breaking up in significant numbers; because more single women are giving birth and electing to keep their babies on their own; because artificial insemination is increasing,… Read more

Two Kingdoms

January 17, 2019
Year 4, Day 17 | No Comments
Section of The Taking of Christ, Caravaggio, 1602

There is a sense in which I feel sorry for us, for those who want to include in their earthly sojourn the context of heaven’s life.  The effort is more than difficult in that heaven’s future inhabitants do not have barriers of earth’s imperfection, and earth’s inhabitants do not have heaven’s perfection.  For Christians in the world, life often seems like a jumble, especially as Christians learn more and more what God and heaven, and earth too, are really like.  We blame life for earth problems.  There is so much we do not understand about earth with its contradictions and paradoxes.  Then to add the righteousness God calls us to follow in preparation for what heaven has to offer.  To… Read more

Judgment/Evaluation

January 16, 2019
Year 4, Day 16 | No Comments
Section of The Infant Jesus and St. John the Baptist, Guido Reni, n.d.

Over the decades of my life I have read many writings of scholarly persons, and have been friends of many who enjoy, with me, conversation relating to life on earth in either a humanistic or spiritual orientation.  It is interesting to discover that in both orientations there is something of theology.  Naturalists sometimes seem to argue theology even when affirming an atheistic context for life.  For my purpose on this page I will use the ideas and experiences of Dr. Oliver Sacks, an intrepid neurologist, who at eighty years of age continues his world studies of the functioning of the human mind.  The article from an interview by Ron Rosenbaum accents the issues of hallucination. (The SMITHSONIAN, December 2012, Pgs…. Read more

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