This morning I made congee, or rice porridge, which I hate, but it is a standard Chinese breakfast and the boys like it. The photo was taken Sunday while looking at floods. Now, we have to be at times domestic and consider the house and home and family. You cannot be completely within one’s head. So the agenda today is that of a domestic minion.
Someone has to clean and tidy the house, and do the vacuuming. We do not yet have robots, and Elspeth notes that these things matter.
Until Jesus returns, it ain’t going to get any better, and Western Civilization cannot be saved. You can share the gospel with you next door neighbor. That’s on my list of things to do this week. You can add joy, laughter, and creativity to those in your immediate vicinity. You can be a woman who makes the house she has into a warm and inviting haven for your friends and family.
…
It can’t be all serious dissemination of ideas and debate all the time. I keep telling you all, life is too short. We live in an unprecedented time, and the ease with which we can enjoy life and live in perpetual leisure is a temptation we have to manage daily. All play and no work or witness is not good. But as my dear blogging friend Hearthie recently noted, balance in all things.
But… that is not our prime directive. Which is the witness to Christ. If we preach Christ we grow, if we get distracted we do not. Poverty and travail, indeed frank persecution, fertilize the church: something the liberals forget.
.@David_Cameron mistaken to #say UK is #Christian nation. Only 7% are practising Christians. 65% say they have no faith (YouGov poll 2011)
— Peter Tatchell (@PeterTatchell) April 21, 2014
@Nitrohaze @BongoBongo18 @MoAnsar @TimMontgomerie pic.twitter.com/wr0CI0tntX Division and hatred has no place in a tolerant #Christian UK.
— SIMON (@__S_I_M_O_N_) April 21, 2014
Consider China, which is likely to be the most Christian nation on earth within the decade. The news is not all bad. And this life is not all there is.
If we were all just ghosts in the afterlife, then death would win. The #Christian hope is in the restoration of our physical bodies.
— Boze Herrington (@SketchesbyBoze) April 21, 2014
12Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? 13If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised;14and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. 15We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ – whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. 16For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. 17If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. 18Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. 19If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
20But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. 21For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; 22for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. 23But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. 24Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. 25For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26The last enemy to be destroyed is death. 27For “God has put all things in subjection under his feet.” But when it says, “All things are put in subjection,” it is plain that this does not include the one who put all things in subjection under him. 28When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all.
It is worth noting that the last enemy is not Islam, or Atheism, or the current political enemies. It is death. One of the signs of the enemy is that they tend to love death: either actively seeking it — as may Islamic radicals proclaim, or by killing off the inconvenient by legalizing abortion and euthanasia.
I generally do not get into eschatology. For many years I avoided Revelations (the book) as a reaction to reading too much end times teaching as a teenager. But there is truth there, and it’s worth remembering that there have been godly scholars read the books with care and get completely different interpretations of the text. As Christ surprised the Rabbis of his day by fulfilling prophecy in a way they did not expect, Christ will return in a way that we do not expect.
We tend to see things from the perspective of where we live. At present, the USA is in decline, as is most of the English Speaking world, and that affects our perspective. We have turned away from truth, but truth still exists, and is likely to hit us over the head again.
It’s almost as though there’s a case of collective amnesia about the problems associated with overcrowding and class stratification. Well, to be fair, people don’t read much history in the “information age,” so maybe they never learned in the first place.
From the 50s through the 00s, the US went through a remarkable period during which quality of life steadily improved, but that trend is clearly over. I wonder, in this new age of diminished standards, how well exotic ideologies like feminism and multiculturalism will hold up. Practically speaking, I think they’ll be gutted, whether or not people continue to pay lip service to them. When getting by means leasing your guest room to hookers, living in a virtual chicken coop and paying for your car by giving rides to strangers, what does all that high-minded stuff really mean anyway?
Elspeth gives us a correction to living in a hovel and scribbling theology. We need to live carefully, and give attention to the domestic arts, to the small beauties within this world — if it is pulling out a macro lens to take photos of wildflowers in autumn, or making congee, or tidying the house.
For our witness without words is more important to our witness with words.
I love congee, if it has fermented duck eggs, pork, and or shrimp or scallops in it, and the like, along with pink rice vinegar and chili oil.