Truth in love is virtuous, but truth without love is vanity and worse....
On truth and love…
An observation…
Faith defended is mere religion....
Wednesday morning musing
Modern wisdom is posterity’s comedy....
What Annie promised…
There are a lot of things running through my head right now about Annie Le, the 24-year old graduate student at Yale who disappeared last week just days before she was to be married. Her body was found this past Sunday hidden in a basement wall of the campus lab where she had been conducting research.
Nothing I might say could add any substantially new comment about how utterly heartbreaking this story is, about how this happened just as Annie was preparing to spend the rest of her life with her husband-to-be.
I’ve wanted to say something about how the mainstream news media has once again sacrificed ethics and principles for sake of an admittedly sensational story. And I’m referring to how the press has been all over the story of Raymond Clark, now the main suspect in Annie Le’s murder (he’s probably being arrested as I write this). ...
The promise of Matthew 7 (Or: Why Christians shouldn’t condemn atheists and agnostics)
“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.”
— Matthew 7:7-8 (NIV)
I’ve never shared much on this blog about how I came to be a follower of Christ. Lately I’ve wondered if perhaps it’s time to elucidate a bit on how I arrived at that, now nearly thirteen years ago. Which in looking back, really does seem like the starting point of not just a phase in my life, but the beginning of true life itself. Perhaps you’ve heard the saying “Don’t forget in the darkness what you’ve learned in the light.” In retrospect there has been more darkness than light in my own time on Earth and considerably greater periods in the valley than on ...
“It’s so hard to say goodbye…”
Well, Bennie, Eric, Gaetan and Fleur just left a short while ago. For most of the past week I have been host to four friends from Belgium: one that I have known since 1992 and her wonderful lil’ family that we have had the pleasure of meeting for the first time.
And already, I’m missing ’em.
It’s been a long time since I’ve known such a fun and action-packed last few days. Eric’s incredibly bold hike through the Rockingham County wilderness yesterday, has truly inspired me. Dude only speaks French, and yet he took off on a fifteen-mile trek through woods and landscape that he had never seen before. Lord willing I’m going to get to bring him back just so I can get him to talk to our Boy Scout troop here, ‘cuz he set a whole new standard for outdoorsmanship here 🙂
And I made sure that Bennie ...
Current agenda
Tonight: paint the rest of my army of Orks for this week’s game of Warhammer 40,000 (I’m also working on some Tyranids and a new chapter of Space Marines).
Tomorrow and Tuesday: pre-production and then filming a commercial in which the entire town of Burlington, North Carolina gets heinously destroyed.
One week from now: playing host to and partying with a contingent of 4 or 5 Belgians.
No rest for the wicked, aye? 😛...
Meditation on baptism
It was ten years ago today that I was baptized. It happened at First Baptist Church of Elon, the church that sponsored our college’s Baptist Student Union. I put on a big white nightshirt and my friend Arnold Gosnell, one of the associate ministers, dunked me down in the bathtub at the front of the church. Later that night I came down with something like the flu and a high fever and leaving the church still damp into late February cold air was admittedly not something conducive to my health…
…But you know what? I couldn’t have cared less how sick I might have gotten. That I had finally been baptized, after very many years of struggling to have faith in God, was one of the supreme triumphs of my personal life. Just as Martin Luther was known to often remind himself that ...
Time to celebrate
Today, after many months of effort, I finished working on something and turned it loose to the will of God or the winds of fate, or whatever it is that you wish to call it.
What is it? I don’t wanna tip my hand just yet, but I will say that in the first three days of 2009, things have been going exceptionally well. Much better than I am used to, even. And I like to believe that it means God is promising even better to come.
Hopefully, I’ll be able to talk about this at length in the weeks and months to come 🙂...
The Return
If you haven’t already, take a look at “Last Day”, the absolutely haunting and beautiful new commercial for Gears of War 2:
In its own way, that spot (which was made by the same crew that pulled off the award-winning “Mad World” ad for the original Gears of War two years ago) conveys more of what I’ve gone through in the past two months than I care to find words on my own to articulate about.
Okay well, my personal life has changed quite a lot. And not in ways that I would have ever expected or wanted to have happened. My faith in many things got rattled to the core. Including my faith in God. That came back. Other things… didn’t. Since the last real post I wrote over a month ago (which was made in very unusual circumstances) things in the outside world have taken a turn ...