ideas

#1

A few days ago, something neat happened. Well, a lot of neat things have been happening. But I wanted to write about this one really neat thing.

i had a day the other day, just one day, the first day I can remember having in my adult life, that was absolutely.... perfect. Well sure, you may be thinking, what is "perfect", right? What i mean is....

i had one whole day where i know I did not hurt anyone, i know didn't say or think anything mean to or about anyone or to myself (at least that I could/can remember) and i spent the whole day filled with peace, love, thankfulness, compassion in complete conscious service to God and it was wonderful!

#2

at emerging grace there is an interesting post about spiritual maturity that deals with the unfortunate (?) distinction between "volunteers" involved in mission work and people being trained to lead and function within the church system (ie professional ministry):

The structure of church has become like a noose in the discipleship process. Rather than discipling and training for mission, it seems that the majority of training is for "ministry" which has come to mean service within the church system....

hmmm:

Unless the institutions of church divorce themselves from raising up volunteers for their programs and creating structures of importance and inclusion based upon participation in those programs, we will not see real maturity or discipleship.

?thoughts? i sort of wonder who these people are that the blogger is talking about. i guess that was visible when i left the church around 2000ish. i guess i am not involved enough in churchlife and churchstuff to know, perhaps thankfully, if this is going on around my current neck of the woods. frankly i am not sure i want to know. the church i go to seems to value volunteers. they just had some gigantic volunteer bonanza; they also were able to come up with 50+ volunteers to help the homeless.

conversely my kidchurch (as wonderful as it was with some things) seemed to sort of groom people "into the ministry". maybe that was just my experience though. maybe i was just being "groomed". i guess i had a difference experience than most people.

looking back, i really did feel a lot of pressure to go to bible college and to eventually go into the ministry, even though i didn't want to. this in turn was framed as "running from God". even after i dropped out of high school, i ended up going for a year to a christian college, because i thought it was "the right thing to do".

#3

radiohead is done with their new album :) ---opps-- that wasn't what i was going to say.
i was going to say something... something more importantseeming. something serious. well maybe tomorrow.