The Craw

1929 all over again...or 1979?

This episode of This American Life is scary stuff...the party is over.

Pentecost

Pentecost, the fiftieth day is coming. Pentecost turns the maxim, popular among some in our tradition, "If your church is growing, you're probably not preaching the Gospel" on it's head. Where do we get that idea from anyway?

Opossum

I went out this morning to take my kids to school and found this little dude lying on my lawn. I thought he was dead or nearly so, so I figured a raven would swoop him up for lunch. About noon I noticed he was moving (it appears to have a broken leg) so I put him in a box and called our local wild animal shelter but they kept telling me they'd call me back and didn't. Now I have a baby opossum in a box in my carport, 3 kids getting attached to it, and no idea what to feed it.

Update: We dropped the opossum off at our local nature center and they are going to take care of him. Good thing because it looked like pet possum time.

Television

I just received from Netflix the greatest TV comedy ever. I watched half of the only 6 episodes ever produced of Police Squad tonight. I never get tired of watching the well-staged gags.

What's Happening?

Sorry I haven't been blogging that much (theological stuff in particular). Honestly, I've gotten way too busy and fighting with Reformed know-it-all's is way too boring. So, what's been happening?

Well, I've been doing tons of pastoral care work: (1) I have three couples I'm marrying this summer so I've been doing lots of pre-marital counseling, (2) we are losing quite a few people at Christ Church due to out-of-state moves but we are also getting quite a few new people so this means lots coffee meetings and introduction to Christ Church seminars, (3) The church calendar has been humming along since Epiphany and culminates this Sunday with Pentecost so that has meant lots of liturgy tweeking, Lectionary-based sermons and meeting and inviting people to church during these church holidays.

Meanwhile on the home front my new infant daughter continues to bring great joy to our home, Christiana is playing on her school soccer team, and we have gotten into a serious bread-making routine with the price of food being so high. Last Wednesday we went to get 31 cent ice cream at Baskin Robbins. Unbelievable, 31 cents got us a regular scoop...so we got ten scoops!

This last Saturday I took my three oldest kids to the "Donkey Rescue Festival" with my parents. Basically it was a festival on a farm that had about 500 rescued donkeys, several pot-bellied pigs, a bunch a llamas, giant horses, snakes, a dude wearing a donkey mascot outfit wandering aimlessly in the dust, some desert tortoises, and kids playing fiddles. You get the picture.

Pre Lapsarian Grace

Its a little hard for me to get too worked up over our little Reformed pre-lapsarian (pre-Fall) quandaries when I read stuff like this by Gerstner on Edwards:

“There are problems with this explanation, of course. Edwards tries to escape his own snare by restating the situation with different language. He insists that man succumbed because God “did not give him more” grace. God was willing to give him more if man had asked for it.

But that, of course, was the temptation – not to ask and trust God. Edwards is saying that man did not meet the temptation not to ask for more because God “did not give him more.” That is, man needed more grace to ask for more. God “withheld his confirming grace.” (“Confirming grace” refers to grace which would certainly establish man in his original righteousness.) The “sufficient” grace Adam had was insufficient to get what was unfailingly sufficient: confirming grace.” (John H. Gerstner, Jonathan Edwards: A Mini-Theology, p. 36)