Now you might think of this as an “Elijah” post, but you’d be wrong. It is however one more notch in the evaluation of my uniqueness in the world. Or explanation of why I am a misfit…. or excuse as to why not lots of people mesh with me and my thinking ( if we were Jungian we would be thinking of the song “Me and My Shadow -but we are not ……… and so the dark laughter fades away….
but truthfully… there are 0 other people with my name in the U S of A, and that means there are no others anywhere. since I do not have an ethnically compatible set of names. Want to know how common your name is…or whether you have doppelgänger of sorts out there in the wide, wide world? There are 49,535 people named ‘John Smith’ -but if that isn’t counting the UK, who knows how many of you there are?
| HowManyOfMe.com | ||
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I picked up this little nugget of information via christian thinker,Brian Trapp …who has lots more interesting things in his posts, but this is the one I picked up on today. For instance on top today is the post on religious dialogue, with the topic question
“If some religious people believe they have a monopoly on truth, then are conversation and common ground possible? If so, what would be the difficulties and benefits of such a conversation?”
discussed between The Washington Post and Newsweek invited participants.
That is just a taste, friends, just a taste.
While we are doing blog visits, why not check in on what another Brian ( and his friends, jlove, Jenn, and Reon) are up to over @ asmallfaith.org . Hmm, they are discussing glib T-shirt Christianity: “Life would be so easy if everyone read the manual”. jlove writes:
“labeling it a ‘manual’ tends to make people think they can just look up a ‘problem’ in the Table of Contents, find the chapter that deals with it, and then read the ’solution’. Presto – problem resolved!”
You know what? There are times I do that. Not with a presto problem resolved, but to find a solution that my natural mind just isn’t getting. Like many, I wait much too long before going to the scripture and , God [mandate rather than forbid] that prayer would be first on my list of “what to do”. But I believe I know what the point is- we are so facile in our handling of the precious things of God, that we blithely label something a manual- as if it were in our hands to make what we desire of it- instead of giving the message and communications of God the respect and reverence it deserves.
A little split on that last one. So many feel uncomfortable with overfamiliarity with the Holy One, yet, He invites us to a place of familiarity and intimacy. Our dilemma is sort of like that commercial on dropped calls- Have you seen it? The new son-in-law to be is talking with his father in law who invites him to a more informal name basis. The son-in-law starts to get all jiggy with it, when -silence! and the consternation of not knowing whether he took it just a bit too familiar. Sometimes, I think it’s like this on some of our postures with the LORD God.
Thanks for the link.
I do know what you mean about not going to scripture but instead looking for answers in other places. Why do we do that, you think? I think I’ll blame mine on pride…
I’m speaking a little bit for Jlove here, but what I take him to mean is that we use scripture to garner “principles” for various life situations but then divorce those principles from the person and work of Christ. What those principles become then is simple moralistic steps which anyone can follow(Christian or not) to get the “results” that they want. We end up not needing Christ, which is the very thing those principles should have driven us to.
I could almost rant about this(ha ha). Keep up the good work on this and your other blogs.