June 7, 2006

• The ceremony was awesome last night, I had tears in my eyes because I know how hard he worked, and what was really cool is a lot of his primary friends were also honored. I am proud of the hard work that he has done. Tonight is academic awards for my daughter, and then tomorrow for Christopher, the academic awards. Those are so exacting, the grade average has to be 98 or better in the subject to get them. I wish the standards were a bit less because my middle son is so close to getting them but misses by a few decimal points.

  
  

  For those of you who read a pevious post of mine regarding my daughter and her self-image. My husband and I are now praying and working at building this up for it is not based at all in reality. Thought you might want to see a picture of her. This was taken this fall when she was helping to plant some plants along a local river to help the ecology. She really is pretty, not at all ugly like she feels she is.

  
  

  

  
  

  Eat This Book is excellent. Just so you know, right now my devotional readings are in Genesis, and I have much to share about  that too. Too many thoughts, it is fun.

  
  

  Peterson talks about Genesis, so I thought I would start with this quote, page 3 “The opening page of the Christian text for living, the Bible, tells us that the entire cosmos and every living creature in it are brought into being by words. St. John selects the term “Word” to account, first and last, for what is most characteristic about Jesus, the person at the revealed and revealing center of the Christian Story.”

  
  

  One thing that crossed my mind reading this, is that I was thinking about Ruach, breath, breathing. In order to speak, you breath, in order to speak forth the Word of God, you breath. Any word that comes out of our mouth requires breath, and I was realizing that if it was edifying words – it is God’s spirit speaking forth, if it isn’t edifying, if it is against the truth, then it is another, false, lying spirit speaking forth. We need to be so careful about what spirit is coming forth out of our mouths.

  
  

  Peterson talks about meditating on the scripture and says that the word gives an image of a dog chewing on a bone, burying it, digging it up and chewing on it again – ruminating. so on page 4, Peterson talks about the kind of words used in the Bible, how they are different from ordinary communication. “These are words intended, whether confrontationally or obliquely, to get inside us, to deal with our souls, to form a life that is congruent with the world that God has created, the salvation that he has enacted, and the community that he has gathered. Such writing anticipates and counts on a certain kind of reading, a dog-with-a-bone kind of reading.”

  
  

  He then goes on and uses a term that I love, HOLINESS OF WORDS. How incredible that God’s words are so holy. Peterson mentions lectio divina, spiritual reading for the study of the word. I don’t know much about that type of reading. For me, my joy is in looking up the original meanings of the words and seeing how much is hidden in simple statements. Or looking at where Christ is. I haven’t tried a contrived sort of reading, although sometimes a word or passage will keep going through my mind. Have any of you had any experience with lectio divina reading of the word?

  
  

  What is funny is that years ago when I studied the Tarot, I was taught that by looking at the cards and studying them, a  person could be in prison and if they could read the cards right, they would be able to know what is going on outside in the world, even if they had no outside contact. Peterson makes a similar claim with the Bible. Given many of the occult things I studied are stolen from Godly truths, I can see that perhaps the tarot cards also stole that idea from them. Oh how deceptive the evil one is!

  
  

  Peterson talks about during the war an author, Karl Barth, started studying the Bible in depth, he wrote commentaries, and in his writing in an out-of-the-way village, he spoke of the culture-changing realities in his commentary that was going on in the world. Page 5-6 “It was the first in a procession of books that in the years to come would convince many Christians that the Bible was giving a truer, more accurate account of what was going on in their seemingly unraveling world than what their politicians and journalists were telling them. At the same time Barth determined to recover the capacity of Christians to read the book receptively in its original, transformative character. Barth brought the Bible out of the academic mothballs in which it had been stored for so long for so many. He demonstrated how presently alive it is and how different it is from books that can be “handled”–dissected and analyzed and then used for whatever we want them for. He showed clearly and persuasively, that this “different” kind of writing (revelatory and intimate instead of informational and impersonal) must be met by a different kind of reading (receptive and leisurely instead of standoffish and efficient).

  
  

  Barth in one of his books borrowed a story from Walker Percy’s The Message in the Bottle, where a bunch of men and women were in a warehouse and considered that to be their whole world, the doors were closed permanently and the windows so dirty there was no way to look  out. Some kids clean a patch of window and look out, come back and tell of a world so different from their warehouse, they see people looking up, so they look up and see the ceiling of the warehouse, but the people on the outside see the sky and things going on in the sky. The adults dismiss the comments of the kids as fanciful because this is not their present reality.

  
  

  Page 7 “What would happen, though, if one day one of those kids cut a door out of the warehouse, coaxed his friends out, and discovered the immense sky above them and the grand horizons beyond them? That is what happens, writes Barth, when we open the bible–we enter the totally unfamiliar world of God, a world of creation and salvation stretching endlessly above and beyond us. Life in the warehouse never prepared us for anything like this.”

  
  

  What an incredible description this is. I have to tell you, that the more I read and study the Word, the more in awe I am of what incredible depth of understanding there is. I think of how we look at the world with our human eyes and see many things, if we take that and use a magnifying glass, we see so much more. Add a microscope to that and we can see things invisible to our human eyes. An electron microscope, etc. it just gets progressively and progressively more interesting and complex, yet so simple.

  
  

  In reading Genesis, I realize that every principle ever mentioned in the Bible is contained in this book, that it holds together scientifically, and that Jesus is there from the first verse of Chapter one. I had one thought that kind of shoots the evolutionist’s theory out of the ballpark. When God created the world, who said he had to create a tree with one annual ring to grow succeeding ones. Couldn’t our wonderfully creative, inventive, and interesting creator create the world in an instant, with many stages of development. He could have created seedlings, fully grown trees, layers in the earth that give an impression of ages. He could create a unified whole that is so complex instantly.

  
  

  
  

  Hope you have an awesome day.

  
  

  Heather

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