MIL: Missing In Library

sorry it has been flat here:
9 hours yesterday; going on 5 hours so far today.
By far the most work I have done in a row...

Prosperity and Genesis 12:14-17

A prosperity gospel? Does God really bless those who live righteously with great wealth? So long as you live according to God’s principles, will God give you great riches?

"When you give your first fruits offering, it prepares you for the harvest, and it releases God to do the blessing. To reap the best in 2007, you must give God your best! Put first things first by giving your first fruits to the Lord this first month of the year and get ready for overflowing blessings in 2007!"

Paula White

I struggle to see how that is the case having read Genesis 12 and having just completed Job. For Job was a righteous man with great wealth whose money was taken away from him by God for no apparent reason, other than a whimsical bet with Satan.

Abram in contrast, is supposed to be the father of the covenant between God and humanity. Yet Abram’s wealth is first accredited to Sarai’s beauty and relationship to the Pharoah. Abram gets his money, sheep and animals, because he was a pimp—he lied about Sarai being his sister (really she is his wife) in order to gain esteem in Egypt.

So the idea that one is prosperous/wealthy, because of one's righteous following of God seems too simple. If Job’s wealth is taken from him, though he did no wrong, and Abram gains wealth, though he pimped his wife out, then perhaps the relation between prosperity and godliness is not as easy as we would like to believe. The prosperity gospel is truly a karma and capitalist view of life, where we get what we earn.

God, instead, says in spite of your failings; in spite of all things you have done wrong, I will still bless you. Even though you have given your wife over to another man because you feared for your own personal safety, God will still use this self-absorbed man to become Father Abraham, who had many sons...Though, as we also see in Job’s story, blessing does not have to be money, family, or even health, it could be something as simple as a relational God who speaks to us from a whirlwind.

That is the redemptive story of Christ.

new game in town

Alrighty folks:
Fantasy Football is over, Fantasy NASCAR won't start for a few more weeks.
So Lindsay and I ventured into a new realm of fantasy sports:

Guess the Baby

all you have to do is go register your vote for the gender, day and time, weight and height of our baby. The official day is 2/23/07. The rules are a little backwards, but the lowest score wins (the further you are from the time and stats the more points you get).

We will award the top three with a prize pack of something cool. It's free of charge, and takes about a minute and half to play...then all you have to do is sit back and wait.

Go to Expectnet.com and type in the Game Name: BarryPatch

Job 6:13

"Do you think I can pull myself up by my bootstraps?

Why, I don't even have boots!"

-Job



I had this unsettling feeling after watching "Pursuit of Happyness." While the story was 'heartwarming,' I am concerned that it will perpetuate a lack of concern or initiative to help the poor. When Will Smith, newly hired, ends up tearfully amongst a sea of normal people, he narrates about discovering true happiness. Cinematography wise, Will Smith is amongst white upperclass Americans deligently working hard at their jobs. And when you contrast that to the scenes of him in the homeless shelter, I think the film's message is too simplistic. During one scene of the movie, it not so subtly suggests that the way out of a homeless shelter is to be the one working hard to fix a bonedensity scanner, rather than being like the rest of the "lazy" homeless by sleeping.

I wish it were that easy,
That unsettling feeling had rested for a few weeks now, until I found the above quote from Job (in The Message), and this photograph by Ted Szukalski entitled State of Hope...I hope we can see the plight of poverty is a bit deeper and more complex than pursuing happiness through America's idealized self-made individualistic work ethic.

#1 Best Seller

Having hit my goal last year to read through the Bible, I thought I would give it another go. I was stunned in a recent class when a professor asked students, "who read through the entire Bible before entering seminary?" Very few hands were raised, and the ones that did were seemingly embarrassed by the "achievement"--anyway, I digress. This time I am using the Message to provide a new perspective, since when I read knowing the outcome, it is often difficult to really sit in the moment of the story.

I was inspired by [bookmark worthy]this article, when a bored Jewish man at a briss, opened his pew Torah to discover the vivid stories of sex, murder, death and deceit that populate the scriptures that led his own rediscovery of the "Good Book." So when I sat down and read Angels and Demons in 5 days, I wondered why Bible reading had become such a chore. Though Dan Brown's chapters are shorter than most in the Bible, Scripture really is an interesting narrative that is actually more provocative, and less predictable than Brown's book.

I thought a more lesuire and narrative approach (that is why I am using the Message for you naysayers), rather than the typical textbooky style, would produce a more fruitful experience this time around as the past merges with what is going on now, like when Cain and Abel's story intersected with a conversation at PC(USA) Bloggers regarding Saddam's hanging:

Recently, I have been struggling with retributive justice; The Yahoo gallery is filled with images of Saddam Hussein’s hanging, yet when I look at this story of Cain and Abel, I find God’s response perplexing. Yes, God does punish Cain, He makes Cain a homeless wanderer, but He also 'puts a mark on Cain to protect him so that no one who met him would kill him.' God does not kill Cain, the fitting retribution for Cain killing Abel. Instead God places a mark of protection. Again the cycle of closeness, rejection, broken relationships, and a strange act of God's mercy returns humanity to its closeness.

But back to my digression and soapbox: Seriously, if you are about to go into the ministry fulltime and you have not experienced for yourself the richness of the full narrative in a personal--not a textbook/analytic--approach, I'd get on that.

So I'd download this chronological reading plan before this