Egregious Reader

Lent is coming! so I have been looking ahead at what scriptures will be read and preached in the upcoming weeks. It looks like the writers want us to prepare for Lent and wander through Epiphany focusing on the power of Jesus to cast out evil, heal, cleanse leprosy. This seems a wise word to prepare us for Lent. Lent is a time of prayer and fasting, where Christians focus on repentance, so it is good for us to know the power of God in our weakness before we attempt the discipline of fasting. God has saved the world through suffering, through Christ suffering on the cross. God shapes our souls through suffering as well ... as Kris preached this past Sunday it is often in times of trouble that the kingdom draws near. Lent is a time of chosen suffering. A time to recognize that we are lost without Christ and taking up the disciplines of fasting and prayer to push back the ingrown weeds and let God's kingdom come close. Lent will lead us on a journey through Christ's wilderness tri...

First the old one: "The home is the home of everybody of the nation. No nation can have a proper home unless the women as well as the men give their best to its building up and to making it what a home ought to be, a place where every single child born into it shall have a fair chance of growing up to be a fit, and happy, and a useful member of the community." This is by Emmeline Pankhurst from her famous Women Sufferage speech "The Importance of the Vote" in March 1908. “Every spark of friendship and love will die without a home.” This is by Win Butler (Arcade Fire) from their 2007 release Neon Bible. I am sure it is obvious, but i am very interested in the home and wondering how we will make it through our current destruction. I don't find it strange that in a hundred years we go from the leading feminist voice to one of her great, great grandchildren ... a Canadian artist who knows the experience (like anyone my age does) of the destruction of the home. Pleas...

It's really hard to write. I have had ideas of late of writing something, trying to begin to write something, but so far it it is so difficult, I am not sure how far I am ready to get. No big deal, I doubt I will really have time or be ready to write for another 10 years or so. I tend to get kind of mean when I write. Not sure why that is. Maybe something I should pray about. SO, I guess take this little bit as in the vain of the prophetic ... it isn't directed at anyone specific as much as our whole culture and evil world, the one that Jesus came to overcome and save. Broken homes – Well the stats are that since the 80s 50% of us experienced the divorce of our parents. Of course that is only obvious brokenness, the family has been eternally under attack in this country (it is a land of industry remember … we ran all those family-oriented people out at the beginning, the natives as they are called). So what happens when you have experienced the disruption of something so basic ...

Ah, the perceptivity of novelists. I am reading The Idiot by Dostoevsky and there is an incredible dialogue that happens among all the mad characters drunk off wine and champagne about industry and humanitarian efforts. Lebedev is speaking seriously as the voice of Fydor but is being laughed at by his fellow partiers ... he is making a legal case that we were better off in the 12th century than we are today (even though he states that plauges and famines were a yearly occurrence). Here he is at the beginning: "Hurrying, clanging, banging, and speeding, they say for the happiness of mankind! 'It's getting much too noisy and industrial in mankind, there is too little spiritual peace,' complains a secluded thinker. 'Yes, but the banging of carts delivering bread for hungry mankind may be better than spiritual peace,' triumphantly replies another, a widely traveled thinker, and walks off vaingloriously. I, the vile Lebedev, do not believe in the carts that deliver ...