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I’m no David Letterman, and can’t afford top notch writers to form amusing top ten lists, but I’ve got you, my readers, to help me.

There are of course Bible passages which have seeped out into the public consciousness which are often quoted, but not always with understanding or accuracy. Over the past few weeks I’ve had to deal with a couple of them which I think would make a top ten list:

“Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” (John 8:7)

“The truth will set you free.” (John 8:32)

These are well known to those who may not know the Bible well, and are invoked sometimes appropriately and sometimes not.

So, what I’m looking for are other passages to include in a top ten list of ‘Bible Sayings Familiar to Those Unfamiliar with the Bible’. Can you give me some help here?

And for those of you not immersed in the conservative Evangelical church culture as I by vocation and sentiment am, I invite you to nominate verses to populate a list called ‘Bible Sayings Mis-used by Those Familiar with the Bible’. I know there are a number of those out there as well!

Near our house is a veterinary clinic/horse boarding business. They have had trouble with accuracy in their signage in the past, inaccuracy sufficient for me to question the competence of the personnel inside.

Currently the sign makes me wonder if they are running a side business supplying all that a potential bride needs for her dream wedding. And I mean all.

The sign reads:

“February: $5 off all grooms”

If that’s a deal, grooms must come cheap these days.

As those who work with me soon find out, I have particularly strong feelings about certain aspects of the written page. To fail to use ‘smart quotes’, for example, is a particularly grievous crime in my book, and so I expect conformity. And, of course, there is the matter of where to put the comma after a quote.

I’m also bothered by the ‘two-space’ offense. I rarely correct this in others, but I have a macro which searches for places in my documents where I’ve inadvertently typed two spaces between sentences and replaces them with a more aesthetically appealing single space. I confess.

This, apparently, is not a passion held solely my me. Recently I’ve seen a few references to this as being a lively contemporary debate. Historians will note the hot topics of 2011: health care, “don’t ask/don’t tell”, the Iraq/Afghanistan conflict, and the ‘single-space’ standard.

The case for the single space is made in this recent article in Slate.

The author makes a good point. In these days of proportional fonts and computer typography, one space is all that is needed between sentences. That is why all major style manuals recommend it. There is really no need to argue further.

But apparently I’m dead wrong on that last statement. That one would write an article attacking the two-spacers and have it published in a major on-line magazine is surprising enough. That that article would in ten days time generate 2227 comments is astonishing.

Who said that post-moderns don’t argue absolutes?!

+++

UPDATE: When researching this controversy (I’m hopeless. Let’s all face that fact and learn to live with it.) I stumbled across this from a “two-spacer”. A point of agreement between us, it seems:

If you see me “making mistakes with comma placement”, please rest assured that I’m doing it deliberately. In most cases the comma doesn’t belong to the phrase delimited by the quotation marks that enclose it. Placing an exclamation point or question mark to the left or right of a close-quote is a weighty decision! That we violate the atomic purity of quotations with injected commas is an outrage.

Preach it, brother. Just preach it with single spaces, please.

While complaining on Facebook about losing my voice this week, a friend sent me a link to this story. I had not seen this and was amazed not only by this guy’s voice, but the glimpse it gives into a side of homelessness we can too easily overlook – people with abilities who really do want to work.

Let’s hope that this story ends well and that Mr. Williams and the Cavs have a long and mutually beneficial relationship!

There are few books of theology that I have ever read that handle their subject matter as well as Donald Macleod’s work of Christology The Person of Christ. Thoroughly walking his readers through the controversies and exegesis critical to the study, he takes them to where a ‘study of Christ’ most certainly must go if it is paying attention to its subject: worship and adoration and wonder.

In developing for us the reality of ‘the Word’ becoming flesh, he notes that possessing a ‘reasonable soul’, that is, a completely human personality, he faced, as any true human would, fear. And the fear he faced was the darkness of the abandonment of God.

(If you are not a Christian, understand that here is the absolute passionate heart of Christianity.)

“When Moses saw the glory of God on Mount Sinai so terrifying was the sight that he trembled with fear (Heb. 12:21). But that was God in covenant: God in grace. What Christ saw in Gethsemane was God with the sword raised. (Zc. 13:7; Mt. 26:31). The sight was unbearable. In a few short hours, he, the Last Adam, would stand before that God answering for the sin of the world: indeed, identified with the sin of the world (2 Cor. 5:21). He became, as Luther said, ‘the greatest sinner that ever was’ (cf. Gal. 3:13). Consequently, to quote Luther again, ‘No one ever feared death so much as this man.’ He feared it because for him it was no sleep (1 Thess. 4:13), but the wages of sin: death with the sting; death unmodified and unmitigated; death as involving all that sin deserved. He, alone, would face it without a hilasmos, or ‘covering’, providing by his very dying the only covering for the world, but doing so as a holocaust, totally exposed to God’s abhorrence of sin. And he would face death without God, … deprived of the one solace and the one resource which had always been there.

“The wonder of the love of Christ for his people is not that for their sake he faced death without fear, but that for their sake he faced it, terrified. Terrified by what he knew, and terrified by what he did not know, he took damnation lovingly.” [Donald Macleod, The Person of Christ, pages 174-175]

Read it. Weep. And then sigh the relief of one loved beyond what one can imagine.

Some people blog for a living.

I blog between the cracks.

So my timing is often off.

Like now.

I want to wish all a happy Thanksgiving Day. I can be cynical about a lot of things (like politics) but NOT Thanksgiving Day. It is good to take some time to celebrate the good things we have and to be thankful for them.

Many in the world are thankful, but are ambiguous about the one to whom they are thankful. They are happy for their life situation without having any to whom to credit for their happiness. There is an impulse to give thanks, but no ability to fill out the contours of the object of their gratitude.

That is the goal of the Christian preacher and the Christian church: to point people to the one to whom they are thankful; to pull back the curtain and urge them to see the one from whom all good things come.

Of all that I have read in the past few days regarding the giving of thanks, the wisest comes from someone who gives no hint as to whether she has a person to whom she is directing her thanks or not. Nevertheless, her thanksgiving is full of great wisdom.

If your life is in an uncertain place, if you are on an adventure, if you long to live more adventurously but are fearful, there is wisdom here.

A sampling:

1. Be thankful for the fact that you are not bored….
2. Be thankful for the limitless possibilities an uncharted path holds….
3. Be thankful for…all the help you get from those who support you….
4. Be thankful for the opportunity (read: necessity) the path you’re on gives you to be creative….
5. Be thankful for all you do have….
6. Be thankful for the moments of joy….
7. Be thankful for the gift of passion….
8. Be thankful for being alive….

I encourage you to read the whole. Even a day late.

I am a fan of the English Standard Translation of the Bible. Sit me down for a time and I will try to tell you why. I think there are good reasons to like it, but I’m always interested in understanding other’s reasoning for preferring it, and so I watched this video.

Interestingly, none of the speakers here really attempts to say anything more beyond it is readable and trustworthy. The real intention of the video, clearly, is to fix the celebrity status of each speaker behind the ESV.

So, there is little value to be had from the video’s expressed intention. What was interesting to me was the opportunity to see the faces and voices behind the celebrities I’ve heard about and/or read!

“One learns more from failure than from any success.”

Typically those who say this are listened to and quoted because they are speaking from a position of success. People are listening to them because they are assuredly not failures, but those looked up to and respected.

I love irony. And this irony leaves me to take such assertions with a bit of puzzled curiosity.

I conclude that if one learns more from failure than success, then at age 54 I am due to receive my well-earned PhD. at any moment.

But this all begs the question of what passes as success and failure. Herman Melville (ever hear of him?) died in obscurity working for $4/day as a clerk at the New York Custom’s House. Success of failure? Jim Baker at the height of his ministry success couldn’t keep his pants zipped. Success or failure?

Success can be a hard thing to quantify, and yet we all know what it is. Pastors who are NOT pastoring large churches or whose churches are not growing are called ‘faithful’. In my experience, ‘faithful’ is Christian code for ‘struggling’ or ‘unsuccessful’. One rarely hears that platitude applied to those with large, bustling ministries, faithful though their pastors may be.

Such platitudes must be taken for what they are worth. We all have a pretty good idea in our minds what constitutes ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in every field. Though one may learn more from failures, I know of no one craving such an education.

So it is with some interest that I read the literature of failure. I find strange comfort in the honesty which acknowledges that failure is a part of life. It is not a reflection on our character or our status. It is little more than an acknowledgement that we are indeed living.

To know the inevitability of failure is not to be defeatist. It is to acknowledge that in learning to walk every child first falls down, and of those who eventually do master the art, few will run 100 yards in 10 seconds. To know that the falling down and the hitting of limitations is okay and are a rightful part of life is to accept that failure comes to those who dream dreams.

The author of this piece, Lane Wallace, writes a great deal about ‘adventure’ – flying planes, climbing mountains, and the like. But she sees many parallels between the life of the adventurer and the life of the dreamer. The pursuit of dreams is by definition an adventure. It requires a vision, and an ability to change course, to back up, to redirect, to evaluate, and to plot a new course. It is always a risky thing. For those who dream, failure will be a part of our stories. And the simple reality of hearing that expressed does not make me long for success less, but it removes some of the fear of failure.

There is, of course, a gospel context for confronting failure – the knowledge that our acceptance before God is in spite of and unconnected with success or failure in our lives. I don’t discount that.

But I do take comfort in the reminder that failure happens. So, I’ve learned something yet again. Add it to my transcript.

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

– William Shakespeare, A Midsummers Night’s Dream, Act 5, Scene 1

This morning, it seems, has been all about truth. If you want, grab a cup of coffee, sit down, and ponder the realities and ironies of the modern world.

First, Don Sweeting, the President of Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, is attending the Lausanne Congress in Cape Town, and posted this report as a urgent plea for Christians to retain a commitment to truth. He quotes speaker Os Guiness:

“We as followers of Christ must be guardians of truth. Only a high view of truth undergirds our defense of the faith that all truth is God’s truth.”

Then, by contrast, ironically, in an article about atheists holding a similarly themed meeting, one by which they hoped to plot a path for their own ‘reaching the nations’, one fiery participant claimed this:

“The word for people who are neutral about truth is ‘liars.’”

Glad to see that we ‘agree’ on something.

And then, speaking of agreement, I was saddened to read an assessment by David Brooks that I’ve long suspected, that politics does something to a person, is probably true. Truth becomes less precious as it gets bent to serve another end.

Nobody who walks into the valley of our political system emerges unscathed. Today’s political environment encourages narcissism and inflames insecurity. Pols must continually brag about themselves, and Kirk has succumbed. Even with his record, he’s embellished his achievements. He claimed a military award went to him when it really went to the unit he led. He claimed his plane was shot at over Iraq when it wasn’t. He claimed he was a teacher when he was an assistant at the school.

And finally, two articles I have not yet read, but only glanced at, related to the above:

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

Truth Lies Here

Pilate asked, “What is truth?” Perhaps as we ask that question more insistently, we will come to the Answer.

Enjoy your coffee.