Salad

3-4       medium sized beets
3           bunches kale
1           packet Seeds of Change quinoa/brown rice (Costco, Whole Foods)
1/3 lb  deli roast beef
balsamic mustard dressing (recipe below)

1. Wash and remove stems from beets.  Make a foil pocket, put beets in and drizzle with a little oil.  Close pocket and bake at 375 for about 45 min to an hour until tender.
2. Wash kale and remove tough stems.  Roll leaves and slice into 1/2 inch wide strips .  Blanch in boiling water for 2 minutes.  Strain and squeeze out excess water  (OR, rub leaves for 3 minutes with 1/2 tsp of salt until they turn brighter green).
3. Slice roast beef into strips.
4. Cook packet of grains.
5. Prepare dressing (below).
6. Put onto plates:  Kale, grains, roast beef, beets and drizzle with dressing.

Balsamic Mustard Dressing

1/2 cup olive oil
2 TBSP balsamic vinegar
2 tsp whole grain mustard
1 (generous) TBSP sugar, Splenda or honey
1 tsp kosher salt
fresh ground pepper

Shake ingredients together in a jar.

John’s been working through the Heidelberg Catechism with Owen and Corinne in the evenings and it’s been amazing to see their minds working as they memorize such deep biblical truth.  Even though they don’t understand it all yet, I’m so thankful for the categories it’s creating for them to hopefully filter their lives through as they get older.  If you’re interested, pick up Kevin DeYoung’s book, The Good News We Almost Forgot. You’ll find part of the catechism in each chapter, followed by a devotional to go with it.  Here they are, doing their thing:

Village Church (Matt Chandler) has released two worship albums, and one is for kids.  I’ve been listening to them in the car and they’re great!  Better yet, they are FREE to download.  You can go here to get the music.

Also, John and I have recently crossed over to the mini-van market (three kids in the backseat of a Subaru was like packing in little human sardines).  I got a good laugh out of this Toyota Sienna video:

• Groupon – have you heard about it?  You can sign up on-line here and register.  Every day the folks at Groupon will send you an email about the deal of the day (50-90% off) in your city and you can choose if you want it or not.  I usually stick to the restaurants but they’ll have all sorts of deals (car washes, salons, museums etc.)  All of your certificates stay stored on your account and you can print them off whenever you’re ready to use them!
• Cider Salad Dressing – Mmmm, I’ve had this recipe for a while but have been using it a lot since Spring has offered up so many fresh vegetables for salads.
• This blog post by my husband… our favorite comedian clearly depicts the me-centeredness we can all identify with and should be seeking to kill.

I’m also reading Paul Tripp’s book What Did You Expect? on marriage by Crossway.  I’d highly recommend it (even though I’ve not finished it yet!), especially for any of you tying the knot soon.

I was saddened to read this article from the Miami Herald.  Apparently child sex-trafficking follows the Super Bowl like a shadow.  Here’s an excerpt and you can read the whole story here:

The testosterone-fueled Super Bowl is expected to generate as much traffic for prostitutes as it does for bartenders and bookies.  And though the girls who have made camp on South Beach and Downtown Miami may seem to be there voluntarily, authorities say, they almost certainly are former runaways or foster kids who fell prey to human trafficking. Some are barely out of puberty.  Ernie Allen, who heads the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said girls typically enter prostitution at age 11 or 12.  “This is truly an example of supply and demand,” said Allen. “They use these kids as commodities for sale or trade, and go to where demand is the greatest, and where they can make the most money. That’s why they follow events like the Super Bowl.” Allen called child prostitutes “21st-century slaves.”

As we have seen, the Bible indicates that we “suppress the truth in unrighteousness.”  We either let ourselves off the hook, making excuses, or hide from the world in despair of ever being able to face it because of our failures.  The “journey within” that characterizes so much of contemporary spirituality, even in our own Christian circles, easily becomes just another way of running from God as he summons us to appear in his courtroom.  We need God’s Word, standing outside of us, to pass judgment on our lives, calling us out of our optimism and pessimism to hear things as they really are.  If our introspection leads us to greater self-confidence, we have only deceived ourselves…

Paul tells the Roman Christians, “None is righteous; no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks after God” (Rom. 3:10-11).  Can that really be true?  Is Paul exaggerating here?  What about all those people around the world devoting their lives to the search for God, and the many decent people who give their lives to serve humanity?  Surely God will judge the world on the basis of whether we have done our best with the light that we have been given.  But Paul’s whole point in these first three chapters is to convince us that regardless of how much light we have been given, we always do the same thing with it.  We suppress the truth, whether it is the light of nature (God’s existence and moral will known to unbelieving Gentiles) or the light of grace (God’s revelation of the gospel in the Scriptures).  There is enough revelation to render a guilty verdict.  Regardless of our own evaluation, before God’s bar no one is good and no one seeks God.

This does not mean that no one is morally decent before fellow human beings, since Paul has affirmed that even Gentiles without the written law sometimes follow their conscience (Rom. 2:14-15).  Nor does it mean that nobody seeks a god; indeed, Gentiles as well as Jews are very religious.  However, we systematically distort this revelation of God’s moral will in order to justify ourselves and keep God’s truth about us and his righteousness at bay (Rom. 1:21-2:11).  Natural religion, spirituality, and morality are in fact our chief means of running away from God.

Mohler, the fierce foe of liberalism himself, says:

In evaluating the book, it must be kept in mind that The Shack is a work of fiction. But it is also a sustained theological argument, and this simply cannot be denied. Any number of notable novels and works of literature have contained aberrant theology, and even heresy. The crucial question is whether the aberrant doctrines are features of the story or the message of the work. When it comes to The Shack, the really troubling fact is that so many readers are drawn to the theological message of the book, and fail to see how it conflicts with the Bible at so many crucial points.

All this reveals a disastrous failure of evangelical discernment. It is hard not to conclude that theological discernment is now a lost art among American evangelicals — and this loss can only lead to theological catastrophe.

Read the whole article here.

So how does it conflict with the Bible, and does it really matter?  Tim Keller weighs in:

Anyone who is strongly influenced by the imaginative world of The Shack will be totally unprepared for the far more multi-dimensional and complex God that you actually meet when you read the Bible. In the prophets the reader will find a God who is constantly condemning and vowing judgment on his enemies, while the Persons of the Triune-God of The Shack repeatedly deny that sin is any offense to them. The reader of Psalm 119 is filled with delight at God’s statutes, decrees, and laws, yet the God of The Shack insists that he doesn’t give us any rules or even have any expectations of human beings. All he wants is relationship. The reader of the lives of Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and Isaiah will learn that the holiness of God makes his immediate presence dangerous or fatal to us. Someone may counter (as Young seems to do, on p.192) that because of Jesus, God is now only a God of love, making all talk of holiness, wrath, and law obsolete. But when John, one of Jesus’ closest friends, long after the crucifixion sees the risen Christ in person on the isle of Patmos, John ‘fell at his feet as dead.’ (Rev.1:17.) The Shack effectively deconstructs the holiness and transcendence of God. It is simply not there. In its place is unconditional love, period. The God of The Shack has none of the balance and complexity of the Biblical God. Half a God is not God at all.

Read the whole article here.

It is so important that our understanding and view of God be correct.  God reveals himself to us through his Word.  Which is why it’s such an aberration to write something fictionally “sexy” that directly challenges God’s character as revealed in the Bible.

I would highly suggest reading both of these reviews!

Our daily grind seems like a long way from the royal march of Psalm 68 which echoes the parade of the creature kings before the great King on their way into his everlasting Sabbath.  Wake up, dash out the door, return home, watch a little TV, and do it all over again the next day.  In between it all we try to fit in the gym, friends and family, and maybe dabble in a hobby every now and then.  It is ironic that we have more technology to make our lives more efficient, ostensibly reducing our workload, and we work harder than we ever have.  I was dragged into email kicking and screaming.  On most issues technological I’m wrong, but I think I had this one nailed.  Given the way emails come like baseballs from a machine in a batting cage, I spend more time responding to them than I spent manually opening and responding to letters.  My friends from England write beautiful letters: bonded correspondence paper, elegant penmanship, and prose that reads like poetry.  I shoot back an email.  To the equivalent of a well-prepared feast I reciprocate with the equivalent of a bag of chips.

In this context, efficiency threatens quality; depth, breadth, deliberate reflection, thoughtful regard for things that matter (including other people) are driven out by the tyranny of the urgent.  These values show up in our faith and practice as well.  This seems evident not only in our own reluctance to spend time with our Lord in reading his Word, prayer, and meditation, but in public worship:  the often superficial and half-prepared sermons that we hear, in the substitution of a fast-paced and noisy choreography for a well-conceived liturgy, and in the routine concentration on efficiency in our everyday lives with little exposition of a biblical text and teaching for all ages.  The Christian Sabbath is no longer the weekly source of Christian formation, as the values of the marketplace – if not the mall itself – crowd out the holiness of the day.

Busyness does not equal a rich life.  We hear increasingly from the medical community that stress is literally killing us.  We like to stay busy, but busy doing what?  What is the point of it all? Why are we here and what are the goals toward which we so feverishly strive?  Stress is not alleviated by more techniques for relieving it, but by changing our values.  The problem is that when we stop and smell the roses, we also begin to get to know ourselves better.  And that can create more stress than we ever imagined.  The roses are not always sweet.  To be sure, we spend a lot of time on ourselves, but it is usually on improving ourselves in various ways rather than on evaluating our lives in a serious and big picture kind of way.  We often assume that the question, “How can I be happy” can be successfully answered without reference to the love of God and our neighbors.  And the irony is that if our biggest question is our own happiness, we can never know the God in whom we find our ultimate joy and rest…

A few people may say some really nice things about you at your funeral, but when you are lying on your deathbed, evaluating your life, what regrets will you have?  What will be the overall verdict on the investments that you made in time and treasure?  These are some of the questions that help us to take inventory not only of what we say we are all about, but who we really are and what we really count most important in life.

They had a clip of a woman singing it in Creole, and it is so beautiful.  Here are the words in English:

Blessed be the name of the Lord from this time forth and forevermore!
From the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the Lord is to be praised!
The Lord is high above all nations, and his glory above the heavens!
Who is like the Lord our God, who is seated on high,
who looks far down on the heavens and the earth?
He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap,
to make them sit with princes, with the princes of his people.
He gives the barren woman a home, making her the joyous mother of children.
Praise the Lord!

Here are a couple of articles that were most helpful or encouraging to me:

A blog by some missionaries currently in Haiti
A post from the Gospel Coalition
Pictures here. (HT: Justin Taylor)
Albert Mohler’s article “Does God Hate Haiti?” – esp. in light of Pat Robertson’s recent comment.

There is so much death and dying going on around us.  It’s easy to ignore unless it knocks on your brother’s or neighbor’s door.  Even your own door, and even if you’re young.  Just recently our neighbor’s best friend from college found out he has a massive growth in his chest above his heart.  He’s younger than me and in med school.  Apparently he means a lot to a lot of people and it has me wondering what his response to it will be (?)

Some truths I’ve come to cherish about dying (or suffering, for that matter):

• What you believe about God will influence your response to him. Do you define God’s character or determine whether or not he’s fair by what you’re going through?  Or do you believe in what God has revealed to you about himself through his Word?
• Whatever suffering God brings into the life of a believer is for his glory and for your good. When you think about death and dying, is there anything in you that screams, “I won’t accept that a good God would allow… (fill in the blank)”.  But what does the Gospel say?  It says that God did not even spare his own Son from suffering for your good (John 3:16).
• God is omniscient. (He is all-knowing). Do you believe that his thoughts are not your thoughts and his ways are not your ways?  Isaiah 55:8-9 says his thoughts and ways are higher as the heavens are higher than the earth.
• God is sovereign. He created us, he knows us, he is able and he himself determines what is good for us. (Psalm 139)
• Death is the catalyst to eternal life.  There is good news for the believer in the death of our bodies – eternity with Christ!  It will make our lives here on earth seem like a drop in the bucket.  Romans 8:18-25.
• Those who live for this world will be like the man who built his house on the sand. Read Matthew 6:19-34 and then 7:24-27 because it is the same discourse!  When we treasure this world more than we treasure eternity with Christ, things will not make sense.  We will rebel against his plan for us, especially when it means taking us from what we have affection for.  However, when we treasure Christ above all else – we will get what we want.  Him!

Here are some incredibly helpful links which can help us form a correct worldview of death, dying and suffering:

• Rachel Barkey speaking to 600 women in BC, Canada before dying of breast cancer.  This is more than worth your time!  View it here.
• Don’t Waste Your Cancer article by John Piper here.
• Video of Matt Chandler before brain surgery to remove a malignant tumor.

This is a subject we should all study and think about so that we can be ready for whatever God calls us to.  Rachel Barkey said it well, “I’m dying…  but so are you.” And that speaks truthfully to the brevity of our lives.