Ladies' Weekend 2013

 

Unfortunately, this is the only picture I have relating to this year's ladies weekend!  We had a lovely time in a rented cottage in Little Rock.  About fifteen Christ Church ladies (counting Audrey) enjoyed a couple days of relaxation, good food, and wonderful fellowship along with choir practice and a little marriage exhortation from Andy Stanley--not to mention a noble attempt at the puzzle pictured above.  Good thing Anna is always willing to pick up anyone's puzzle slack.  We MUST remember to take pictures next year!

Evil Thoughts and Triangulation

Often we combat our evil thoughts most effectively if we absolutely refuse to allow them to be verbalized. It is certain that the spirit of self-justification can only be overcome by the spirit of grace; and it is just as certain that the individual judgmental thought can be limited and suppressed by never allowing it to be spoken except as a confession of sin…. Thus it must be a decisive rule of all Christian community life that each individual is prohibited from talking about another Christian in secret. It is clear and will be shown in what follows that this prohibition does not include the word of admonition that is spoken personally to one another. However, talking about others in secret is not allowed even under the pretense of help and goodwill. For it is precisely in this guise that the spirit of hatred between believers always creeps in, seeking to cause trouble.
--Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. 

Ephesians 4:29

Questions to Ponder
•    Talking with people about someone else you are having trouble with when they are not there is called “triangulation.” In what ways does triangulation harm a community of faith?
•    How can a community of faith enforce the rule “that each individual is prohibited from talking about another Christian in secret”?
•    Would this be a good rule to generalize and apply to the workplace, school, families, among friends? Why, or why not?

Set a guard over my mouth, O Lord;
   keep watch over the door of my lips.
Do not turn my heart to any evil,
   to busy myself with wicked deeds
   in company with those who work iniquity…. 

Psalm 141:3-4

--taken from 40 Day Journey with  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Celebrating Another Princess

Mary Kate is only three days younger than Jocelyn.

They started with a Little House on the Prairie theme but quickly morphed into Wedding Princesses.

The Many Faces of a Sweet Pea

Community of Servants

The other service one should perform for another person in a Christian community is active helpfulness. To begin with, we have in mind simple assistance in minor, external matters. There are many such things wherever people live together. Nobody is too good for the lowest service. Those who worry about the loss of time entailed by such small, external acts of helpfulness are usually taking their own work too seriously. We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God, who will thwart our plans and frustrate our ways time and again, even daily, by sending people across our path with their demands and requests.
Biblical Wisdom

 “The greatest among you will be your servant.” Matt. 23:11

--Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Power and Submission

"We have to keep reminding ourselves lest we slip back into understanding submission as an attempt to cope with raw power. That is not it at all. Authority and submission together are a dance, not a fistfight. Moreover, it is a dance grounded in the way things ultimately are, because this is the way our triune God ultimately is."

(For a Glory and a Covering, p. 66).
--Doug Wilson, Blog and Mablog

A Birthday Fit for a 7yo Princess

Love those Target cards!

Cold hard cash is nice, too!

Birthday Party Server #1

Party Server #2

The Birthday Princess complete with forehead flower tattoo and ladies in waiting.

Baby in a Box

Cheap Grace

 Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church. Our struggle today is for costly grace.
Cheap grace means grace as bargain-basement goods, cut-rate forgiveness, cut-rate comfort, cut-rate sacraments; grace as the church’s inexhaustible pantry, from which it is doled out by careless hands without hesitation or limit. It is grace without a price, without cost…

Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, as principle, as system. It means forgiveness of sins as a general truth; it means God’s love as merely a Christian idea of God. Those who affirm it have already had their sins forgiven. The church that teaches this doctrine of grace thereby conveys such grace upon itself. The world finds in this church a cheap cover-up for its sins, for which it shows no remorse and from which it has even less desire to be free. Cheap grace is, thus, denial of God’s living Word, denial of the incarnation of the word of God.

Cheap grace means justification of sin but not of the sinner. Because grace alone does everything, everything can stay in its old ways. “Our action is in vain.” The world remains world and we remain sinners “even in the best of lives.” Thus, the Christian should live the same way the world does. In all things the Christian should go along with the world and not venture…to live a different life under grace from that under sin…
Cheap grace is that which we bestow on ourselves.

Cheap grace is preaching forgiveness without repentance; it is baptism without the discipline of community; it is the Lord’s Supper without confession of sin; it is absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without the living, incarnate Jesus Christ.
--Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Character of a Happy Life--by Henry Wotton

How happy is he born and taught,

That serveth not another's will;

Whose armor is his honest thought,

And simple truth his utmost skill!

Whose passions not his masters are,

Whose soul is still prepared for death,

Untied unto the worldly care

Of public fame, or private breath;

Who envies none that chance doth raise,

Or vice; who never understood

How deepest wounds are given by praise;

Nor rules of state, but rules of good:

Who hath his life from rumors freed,

Whose conscience is his strong retreat;

Whose state can neither flatterers fee,

Nor ruin make oppressors great;

Who God doth late and early pray,

More of his grace than gifts to lend;

And entertains the harmless day

With a religious book or friend

This man is freed from servile bands,

Of hope to rise, or fear to fall;

Lord of himself, though not of lands;

And having nothing, yet hath all.

HT: William Bennett's Book of Virtues, Honesty chapter

The Baby and The Bubble Blaster

Biggest Brotherly Love

Big Brother Ian: "I wish Audrey could stay a baby forever."

Sympathetic Mom: "That wouldn't be kind to her."

Big Brother Ian: "Okay--just longer!"

The Root of Theological Differences

The language of Scripture is, as a general thing, not philosophical but popular, not scientific but poetic, not so much an analytic language, fond of sharp discriminations and exact statements, as a synthetical language, abounding in concrete terms, the representatives not of abstractions, but of facts of actual existence and experience, and which in their meaning gradually shade into each other, without any definite lines of distinction. (Broadus, Preparation and Delivery, p. 57)

HT: Douglas Wilson, Blog and Mablog

Audrey the Warrior

Minor Detail

. . . the weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones.  They first assume that no man will want more than his share and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motor-car or balloon.
--G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

Meeting Aunt Brittany

Notice the boots--this aunt is now a Texan

getting along well

Nana managing a happy face despite being en route to the airport to return the Texan

Living Large

Thanks is what multiplies the joy and makes any life large.--Ann Voskamp, 1000 Gifts

Mundane but Momentous

the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to . . . that the ordinary view is the right one.
--G.K. Chesterton, Heretics