a place where friends get together
I just came across this ancient painting which I think is a wonderful reminder that with all our supposed innovation, much of the educational process has remained recognizably unchanged for centuries.
A 700 year old painting of a medieval lecturer and his class by Laurentius de Voltolina from the 14th century, now in the German Nat’l. Museum in Berlin.
We’re encouraged to not count our days… but to make our days count!
Among God’s most precious gifts to us is the creative capacity He’s placed in each person. The fifth word of Genesis reveals God as Creator. We learn later (in Genesis 1:27) that as creator, he has embedded His imago dei (the Image of God–His nature & character) into each one of us. The result is that every individual, in deeply personal ways, is offered a reflection of the precious, God-breathed creativity that ignited and fills all of creation. Creativity is deeply embedded in each person, resulting in endless variation and possibility. To create and to be creative lies at the heart of human flourishing.
I believe for us to be intentional in our actions and conversant in an understanding and theology of the Image of God today is as important (and perhaps as risky) as proclaiming the theology of Salvation by Faith was in the days of the reformation. Both are still just as true today, but no longer will the authorities and the organized church come after you for the latter.
Collaborating as Community
Creative engagement is rooted in community… actually knowing and loving our neighbors.
Collaboration consistently ranks among the most rewarding and significant of human activities. People join together, searching for that which is beautiful and inspiring. Consider the activities throughout the world that involve singing and playing music together, painting murals together, feasts and eating together, festivals, celebrations, but also our work together to address shared problems and needs.
Over the decades I’ve I cherished the opportunity to work on collaborations to build community parks, hiking trails, playgrounds, treehouses, climbing walls and community food gardens; or where communities faced natural hazards or grinding poverty and high child mortality, to collaborate on building water tanks and developing clean water systems, micro-enterprise start-ups, improved food security; to train health workers and establish community-based Health Centers and Community Emergency Response Teams. These activities were simply an outgrowth of our conviction that God has good intentions for all, today. They are part-and-parcel of His good news!
Working in community builds wisdom and unity, as our unified (but not uniform)creative voices offer evidence of our shared convictions and hope.
And I pray everyday that I would be looking for God’s fingerprints in the lives and world around me, that as Jesus said, “I want to only do what God is doing.” God’s on the move and at work at every level of society and creation. He delights to hide things. We’re to delight in seeking them out… in learning new things and perspectives, in recognizing, fanning it into flame and trying to reflect the Image of God–His beauty, His nature and character.
AvailabilityGod is so short on perfect servants, he still has openings for those of us who are merely “willing”!
Parable of the Rich Young Ruler“Right up there with “man-with-a-pitcher-of-water-on-his-head.”
Continue reading “GOOD vs. GREAT”
The Family is the most
essential human community
FAMILY
1. The Family is a Covenant Relationship:
the family is God’s greatest institution for sanctification.
• We are all born narcissistic, (preoccupied with self). A focus outward must be learned.
• You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family.
• The family is forever. Friends come and go.
• The fact that there are more single adults in society today than in recorded history has profound implications for society.
• The family is the first (and often only) place we experience unconditional love, where we know we belong, where we first see that love is not a limited pie, where no one needs be left out.
2. The Family is an Inheritance across the generations:
Our families all pass some positive legacies to us down through the generations, but both blessings and curses can naturally extend down through a family’s generations. Our society is forgetting the blessings of the extended family.
3. The Family is the primary place where an individual’s calling is expressed, championed and supported.
4. The Family holds the primary God-given responsibility (and authority) for raising and training of children.
Families can delegate some or all of this authority for educating children, but they remain responsible. When families abdicate their primary responsibility for their children in abusive ways, other sphere’s of society, particularly government, may then exercise their secondary responsibility for children.
5. The Family is the most essential human community:
The nuclear family reflects God’s triune nature as the essential model of community (authority without domination). It is the universal model for all other extended communities and organizations.
Allan Robbins
June 2003
In a post-modern world, the spirit of the Berean’s to investigate to see if something were true (Acts 17:11), is easily trumped by emotional antidote. However, as a YWAMer who has worked in Global Health and Primary Health Care for over 25 years and also as a father of young children, can I ask you to please don’t delay in getting caught up on your children’s and your immunizations…if not for yourselves, then for the protection of your friends and the children around you.
I learned about Little Fire Ants yesterday….I’ve been stung by Louisiana fire ants around my ankles, had a 6 inch centipede in my shirt bite me 4 times under the arm. I’ve had a large swarm of ground-dwelling yellow jackets attack my back and neck while mowing our campus firebreak and I’ve had an outbreak of Shingles on my neck and the back of my head. All these were REALLY painful, but they all paled in comparison to little fire ants. Yesterday morning while cutting up a large fallen tree and clearing growth for a friend in a neighboring community I got to experience what before I’d only heard about from friends on the Hilo side of our island. Little Fire Ants are hard-to-see tiny and instead of living on the ground, they are up in the trees and bush leaves where they easily fall and drop on you. So as is typical of LFA, I suddenly had 45 stings across my neck, both arms, hairline and left eye lid. But either fire ants have some secret communication where they all agree to sting you at the same time, or more likely the pain from their venom increases in intensity after the bite, I never saw the ants at all. I first thought my dry skin was especially itchy, then that I’d gotten into some nettles, and then that I had three blow torches turned on my arms and neck…I was on fire.Managed to drive home, hardly able to string two words together, I stripped next to our washing machine while Dee fumigated my truck. Took two Benadryl while taking a cold shower. Then a couple hours alternating ice packs and steroid creme until the antihistamine finally knocked me out until evening.Today I’m better. I can open my left eye. The general redness and swelling on my arms has reduced to just the defined little painful-only-when-touched whelps, and most thankfully, the overall “I’m on fire” pain is completely gone.I’m now a motivated LFA fighter and pray you don’t have to learn about them quite like I did. Since their accidental import to our island in 1999, they’ve taken over East Hawaii and are expanding their range in West Hawaii. There are lots of state and local resources to help fight them. The main thing is to regularly monitor your normal ants by placing four or more peanut-butter-dipped popsicle sticks around your property, placing them in a ziplock bag, freezing them and sending them to BIISC, 23 E Kawili St, Hilo, HI 96720. This Hawaii State Invasive Species group has developed a safe, effective gel-bait that needs to be used every 5 weeks for a year, but seems able to eliminate them from a given area.I generally love learning, but not this lesson.
Aug. 11, 2020: If your tire of social media grumbles, creation might have an alternative for you the next couple nights.
The Perseid meteor and fireball shower is at its best tonight and tomorrow night and it was pretty fantastic last night. NASA estimates an average of 50 to 120 meteors per hour, but in my experience you can go up to 10 minutes without seeing a thing and then see 4 in two seconds. The Perseids are especially known for their long slow colorful fireballs that streak clear across the sky every so often…slow enough you can blink a couple times and they’re still going. I include a shot of the only fireball I captured last night, and my phone camera couldn’t pick up all the smaller meteors. but I include a shot taken by another photographer. To watch them tonight, find a dark, starry patch of sky after 10PM (even better after 2PM). (It was 4PM last night before the clouds cleared at our house) Lie on your back and look up about halfway between the horizon and overhead. They are going all directions.