Book Recommendation

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 12:32:58 -0500

I know most of you are probably enjoying your vacation without books, but I was talking with a friend about lots of different stuff the other night and one of the things we talked about for a minute was sin and pride, and it made me think of the book, "Not the Way It's Supposed to Be" by Cornelius Plantinga. So I went back and looked at it and realized how well-written and timely it is. If you are going to read one theological book this year, I would recommend it. Here is an excerpt, with a link to an extended excerpt:

A proud person tries to reinvent reality. He tries to redraw the borders of human behavior to suit himself, displacing God as the Lord and boundary keeper of life. At bottom, the fool is out of touch with reality. For, of course, our wills are not sovereign. We are not really our own centers, anchors, or lawgivers. We have not made ourselves, cannot keep ourselves, cannot ultimately oblige or forgive ourselves. The image of ourselves as center of the world is fantasy - perhaps, in its sheer detachment from reality, even a form of madness. This is especially clear at the most ruinous levels of evil. Only a fool, Milton believed, would rise from his flaming ruins, look out across a "dismal Situation waste and wild," filled with "huge affliction and dismay," and declare: "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav'n."

Check out an extended exerpt here.

The Life of a Student

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 16:11:05 -0400

Wake up, go to class, study, eat, take a nap, check facebook, get some coffee, study, call mom, go to class, take a test, work out, go out with friends, write that paper that's due tomorrow, check email, meet study group, go to bed. Do it all over again, for 16 weeks at a time, for four years.

In the monotony of every day life, sometimes college can be lonely and weird. It can also be the best 4-5 years of your life. In my case, I was ready for college when I was in elementary school. I hungered for independence and freedom, to finally not have a curfew, and to get the heck out of my tiny, rural, home-town. For the first semester I practically skipped to class every day. Everything was amazing! The trees on campus were the most beautiful trees I'd ever seen! The people were great, the environment was new, the food was awesome, I loved my classes, I even began to love reading lots and lots of books. New friends, new roommate, new everything. I loved it all.

But I also wanted something else. I wanted to grow in my knowledge and understanding of the Bible and what it actually meant to claim the faith I grew up with as my own. I met some girls who lived on my floor who shared the same desire, and we joined a Bible study put on by a campus ministry. We learned about our identity in Christ, how to meet with the Lord on a daily basis, the importance of memorizing Bible verses, and most of all, the importance of having each other as friends. We would stay up late at night talking about theological issues that we didn't understand. We shared our life stories with one another, crying and laughing our way through the daily grind of college. some of my sweet sisters in the Lord

It was those friendships and the growing intimacy I had with the Lord, that made college better than I ever dreamed it would be.

How will you thrive in the monotony? Will you party and drink it away? Or will you choose to seek the truth about who God says you are and begin to live it out in a community of like minded friends?

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Book Recommendation

The Life of a Student