Randy Greenwald

I recently have had a conversation with a med student and with an attorney on the subject of which one of us will continue to have a job in heaven.

I told the doctor-to-be that clearly he would be out of a job. The lawyer, too, I am convinced will join the ranks of the unemployed.

But though the lawyer disagreed with me, I’m convinced that the preacher – i.e. me – would still have a job.

Sickness and conflict will have no place in heaven. But the people of God will still wish to know more about God and will wish to be lead in his worship.

That’s job security.

Who else will keep/lose their jobs?

I know. You just got used to the look of the blog after my LAST template change, and here I go changing again.

Sorry.

I wanted something less busy than the last template.

Actually, what I REALLY wanted was to switch to WordPress with that system’s stable of really cool templates. But, to do all I wanted to do would require paying for a domain name (not bad) and a hosting service (bad).

So, hope you like the new look. It’s not quite what I want, but it’s what we’ll keep.

For a while, anyway.

UPDATE: The newish template lasted for about ten minutes. Then I went to another which lasted overnight. Now I’m back to this one, with a couple minor modifications. Looks like I’m stuck.

I have switched to an upgrade of my off-line post editor. It seems that it and Blogger don’t speak the same language. Hence, the extra spacing in the post below. I can fix that on Blogger, but the fix will also remove all paragraphing from all the previous posts.

That is not a tolerable solution.

So, until I discover a cure, I hope you don’t mind the extra spacing!

I admitted to a friend that I had never read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Her reaction?

“SHAME ON YOU! Faith, love, romance, morality, parenting, politics…it is all in there.” (Emphasis hers.)

Careful who you make such admissions to.

Feeling duly shamed, and a bit intrigued, I’ve set out to read all 935 pages of this book. And I’m here to report that I am 9.4% done. My goal last night was to reach 10%, but I fell short. This could take a while.

With Dostoevsky being my only model for classic Russian literature, I’m finding Tolstoy to be far more like Jane Austen than Dostoevsky.

The book is at present not within reach or I would quote the paragraph in which one of the characters equates letting young people choose their own spouses to giving a five year old a loaded gun.

I had to chuckle knowingly at that.

I am by bits and pieces re-reading John Stott’s excellent book on preaching Between Two Worlds . The emphasis in that sentence should be on the re-.

I read this book many years ago, and was blessed by it. Since preaching is a significant part of what I do, I like to read at least one book on the subject each year, if not more. This is the one I’ve been slowly working through in 2009.

When I turned to it last week, I found I had two pieces of paper in it – two markers vying for the title of The Truly Accurate Book Mark when of course, only one could be the one.

I picked the one closer to the beginning of the book. No question, what I was reading bore the aroma of familiarity. After all, I had read the book once before. But as I read it this week, picking up with where I had left off last week, the familiarity began to seem more fresh than two readings fifteen years apart would have allowed.

The truth is, somehow I had at some point shoved a piece of paper into the book randomly which I mistakenly took to be the Accurate one. Hence, it has taken me two weeks to realize that I was rereading something I had only read two weeks earlier.

I have often said that one of my biggest frustrations is my very weak ability to remember and call to mind what I read. Here we have this point well illustrated, and it is clearly this which will keep anyone from ever mistaking me as a scholar.

An old friend recently found me on the internet, which is pretty cool. In our brief conversations, he has told me about his wife’s publishing company which, as he said, publishes some material that might be, for me, a bit ‘out there’. He’s right, but that’s okay.

On the web site, there are some interviews with some of her authors. In one, I was struck by this question and answer, as one might expect that I would be:

Q. What do you think about when you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t sleep?

A. I think about how I can bring under control my fear of death, and my fear of life’s fragility. I go back to sleep without ever finding an answer.

I thought that was a great question, and I must say that I loved the honesty of the answer. Sure, I would like to tell this author about the resurrection of Jesus Christ and to persuade him that we need have no fear of death. But I know that only God can supply his answer.

And I also know that there are nights that I awake and cannot sleep. Am I as honest about my fears as he? And would I be honest with the world that my fears are rooted in unbelief? They are.

I am a Christian because God has been gracious to draw me to himself, not because I’ve been so smart or wise or obedient or good. That I need not fear death is not due to any superiority in me. Heavens no. It has to do alone with the mercy of God in my undeserving life.

…all you need to know is right there in the movie Taken. You simply need to be equipped and prepared to take out half of Paris in the process. If you’ve seen it, you know what I mean.

It’s troubling to know that the background for this movie – sex trafficking – is real. It is one of those awful realities that I like to forget about in my comfortable suburban living room.

That aside, here is Liam Neeson channeling Jason Bourne (and illustrating for me the one consistent thematic reality of action movies: bad guys can’t shoot). It’s roller coaster good.

The last time that I physically read JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was just before the first of the movies had come out. Recently, my wife has given me the entire set of books in an unabridged recording on compact disc (on a BUNCH) of compact discs, that is). These I have converted to an audiobook format which is quite compact and useable on my iPod. So, this time around, I’ve been listening to The Lord of the Rings. At present I am nearing the end of The Two Towers. A few comments seem in order.

1) If you have contemplated getting this set, it is well done. The narrator, Rob Inglis, does a superb job. I can almost imagine Tolkien himself reading the stories to me.

2) Efficient readers will speed up and slow down as they read, skimming sections whose content does not seem greatly relevant, slowing down and mulling over slowly portions which seem to merit such attention. LISTENING does not allow for such efficiency. Though Tolkien’s specification of exact geography was no doubt extremely helpful to Peter Jackson’s screen writer and art director, it can become tedious when being read out loud.

3) This particularly applies to the songs which are abundant in The Fellowship of the Ring. Inglis does a wonderful job of putting tunes to the songs and of actually then singing them. But in my reading of the book, I found the songs tedious and not very helpful, and would skip them. Can’t do this with the recording.

4) In going through the book again after having seen the movies twice, I’m actually quite stunned with the level of fidelity to the book exhibited by the movie. I really don’t see how anyone could seriously quibble. Jackson et. al. created wonderful movies based upon wonderful books without subtracting from or adding to the book any more than was necessary.

I am NOT a fan of listening to books, especially when such listening steals the desire to read a book. At the same time, when I’m traveling alone over a number of miles, Rob Inglis reading JRR Tolkien is vastly more profitable than listening to local sports talk hosts pushing their quasi-pornographic fantasies or enduring political talk show hosts as they mercilessly vilify their opponents.

One day about a year or so ago, we were sitting around our dinner table on a Sunday afternoon joking about the possibility for an ‘oxymoron’ themed dinner. We have made some progress on this, but we are stuck, and are looking for some suggestions from our brilliant and creative readers. Below is the menu for the dinner as we so far have conceived it. If you can fill in the blanks, or have better ideas for what we have already selected, please let us know via our comments section or through email at somberanddull@gmail.com.

Appetizer:
Jumbo Shrimp
(We would prefer something else here, since this is such a prototypical oxymoron that it has reached cliché status. But so far, this is all we can come up with.)

Salad:

Main Course:
Barbecued Boneless Ribs
Linguine Alfredo
(Our alfredo sauce uses a half ‘n’ half base – fat-free half ‘n’ half, that is.)
Edible Brussel Sprouts
(As clear an oxymoron as there ever was, as far as I’m concerned.)

Dessert:

Drink:
Arizona Brand Southern Style Unsweetened Tea
(I’m not making this up. It really exists. I took this picture myself.)

After Dinner:
Decaffeinated coffee
(I mean, what’s the point?)

As you can see, we NEED YOUR HELP!

If ever we get a complete menu, we’ll invite, if possible, contributors to join us in the feast.