Coming up for air

So would you guess that we just had a fourth child? 

Irene's age reflects the nearly 6 week hiatus I've taken from this blog. 

Here's a few pics from a day recently when my mom came to visit and an old friend (John Harper) just happened to be in town.  Another friend showed up bearing a mullet wig (don't ask) and the result was the picture here of my son Isaac sporting the wig during a game of street football.  (Note that this wig was also referred to as a "meth" wig).  You'll also see me in this photo proving that (as some onlookers were heard to say) "he's still got it."

 

Irene Fairley Jones

Born October 7th at 6:15 a.m.
6 lbs, 12 oz.
Momma and baby are doing great.

Augustine and Holistic Witness

It seems to be generally acknowledged now by Christian observers of postmodern culture that old "presentation style" evangelism and rationalistic apologetic approaches are largely ineffective. Tim Keller, Bill Edgar, Lesslie Newbigin, and others have all helped articulate a holistic approach to Christian witness to our age. Keller especially has described coming to faith as a long-term process in which various "mini-decisions" are made regarding the plausibility, relevance, credibility, content of Christianity.

So it was remarkable to run across the following section of Augustine's Confessions where he describes his own holistic, multi-stage journey towards embracing Christ.

Here he describes the impression made upon him by Ambrose: "That man of God received me in fatherly fashion, and as an exemplary bishop he welcomed my pilgrimage. I began to love him, at first not as a teacher of the truth, which I utterly despaired of finding in your Church, but as a man who was kindly disposed toward me." As always, love is the greatest apologetic.

Augustine goes on to describe how he listened to Ambrose's preaching at first more out of interest in his rhetorical abilities than his Christian content. But, he found that the beauty of Ambrose's language carried the content of his message into his heart: "with the words, which I loved, there also entered into my mind the things themselves, to which I was indifferent. Nor was I able to separate them from one another, and when I opened up my heart to receive the eloquence with which he spoke, there likewise entered, although only by degrees, the truths that he spoke." Witness is not just a matter of truth, but also of beauty.

Next, Augustine clearly speaks of reaching a point where Christianity has become plausible to him: "I now judged that the Catholic faith, for which I had thought nothing could be said against the Manichean objectors, could be maintained without being ashamed of it." The gospel first had to become a real option for him before he could take it seriously.

Finally, Augustine, having come this far (and rejected Manicheism), decides to continue seeking the truth in the church, even though he has yet to grasp it fully: "I determined to continue as a catechumen in the Catholic Church, commended to me by my parents, until something certain would enlighten me, by which I might direct my course."

Help

Finding God at Home

I love used bookstores for the same reasons as alot of other people: the highly improbable hope that I will run across a signed, first edition of As I Lay Dying (or something similar) wedged between a copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul and The Book of Mormon.
This hasn't happened to me, at least not yet. Mostly, I scan the religion, philosophy, and psychology sections and then give half a glance at the fiction aisle on the way out the door. But every now and then I stumble upon something that meets some of the more realistic criteria for a good used-bookstore "find." In this case, it's a book that is: 1) cheap, 2) I've never heard of before, 3) looks like it could be great, and 4) actually turns out to be great once I take the plunge to buy and read it.

The recent used bookstore"find" in question is Finding God at Home: Family Life as Spiritual Discipline by Ernest Boyer, Jr. Boyer trained under Henri Nouwen and writes out of the Roman Catholic tradition. His intent is to develop a theology of family life that pays particular attention to the mundane struggles that attend marriage, child-rearing, house-keeping, living together, passing through different familial seasons of life, etc. There's alot of great wisdom here about how to seek God's face in the midst of life at home; below are a few samples.

"In addition to courage, persistence, trust and forgiveness there is a fifth element of the sacrament of the care of others: the ability to balance the tension between holding on and letting go....Caring is holding...But caring is also letting go. It is releasing those we love to go in the direction they need to go and to develop in ways that may at times be perplexing to us their husbands, wives, parents, or friends, but ways essential to their growth. The difficulty comes in finding ways to do both of these, both holding and letting go, within the same relationship...The general movement of parenthood is from holding - a holding that is almost constant in the early days - to letting go, although each stage of raising children involves a little of each....[This process of holding and letting go] involves for the child a long pattern of stepping out and returning, stepping out and returning, each time going further and further, developing more and more, always in ways that ask the parent to let go, then hold, let go, then hold - but each time to let go a bit more fully than before."

"We are reluctant to see how much God loves us not out of humility, but out of pride. Each of us secretly wants to be perfect. many of us carefully avoid looking at those aspects of ourselves that seem to us to be less than perfect. But to really know God's love, those aspects must be acknowledged simply because they too are a part of what God loves."

"Christianity is the story of something that happened in the past that points to a better future through a life with God in the present."

Another cool feature of the book is that there is a prayer at the beginning of each chapter, most of which are perfect for harried parents: "Dear God, whose name is Love, who in love and with love formed all that is, teach me to see the great worth of those small, everyday tasks involved in the care of others. Teach me to see them for what they are: re-enactments of the greatest truth there is, the truth of your unfailing care for me and for all that is."

Famous Waits Interview

Here.

Bird

Someone once asked me, with all seriousness, "are you a redneck?"
I suppose this post answers that question.
Isaac's first kill.