Teach me, O God, so to use all the circumstances of my life today that they may bring forth in me the fruits of holiness rather than the fruits of sin.

Let me use disappointment as material for patience
Let me use success as material for thankfulness
Let me use trouble as material for perseverance
Let me use danger as material for courage
Let me use reproach as material for long suffering
Let me use praise as material for humility
Let me use pleasures as material for temperance
Let me use pain as material for endurance

- John Baillie

"Fear not! That is the first and last commandment of faith."

- From Coffman's Commentary on Matthew 14

For some time, I've been a student of the history of America's space program. I am fascinated by the early, heady days of the 1960s and early 1970s, when we reached out to the moon and actually managed to land men there and bring them back home safely.

One of the most fascinating journeys of project Apollo was the Christmas voyage of Apollo 8. This mission accomplished something never before even attempted: it was the first time men had flown to the moon and achieved an orbit around the moon. This was an incredibly brave and gutsy thing to try, and the three astronauts aboard Apollo 8, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders, were voted Time Magazine's Men of the Year in 1968.

I'm impressed, at times, when reading these histories, at the cultural differences between that time and our own. One good example of this is the way the Apollo 8 astronauts read some text from Genesis 1 back to earth on Christmas Eve. You can give it a listen at the YouTube below:



Reportedly, Dr. Thomas Paine, NASA administrator, said that the mission was "a triumph of the squares, the guys with computers and slide rules who read the Bible on Christmas Eve." Heh

This wasn't the only example of religious observance in space. Commander Frank Borman of the aforementioned Apollo 8 mission was also a lay-reader at his church and was scheduled that weekend to read prayers in the service, so, during the third of ten orbits around the moon, the following occurred:

During the third pass, Borman read a small prayer for his church, as he was meant to lay read during the Midnight service at St. Christopher's Episcopal Church near Seabrook, Texas, but due to the Apollo 8 flight was unable. A fellow parishioner and engineer at Mission Control, Rod Rose, suggested that Borman read the prayer which could be recorded and then replayed during the service.

From Coffman's Commentary on Matthew 8:

"People are saved to save others. Those who were healed were healed to serve others."

Here are a few quotes seen on Provocations and Pantings (all the quotes in his post are good, but these few stood out to me):

This one will make you think. It makes me wonder if we should re-think what it means to "belong to a denomination".

If you can assume that merely showing up at church is a minimum indicator of spiritual life then it is not too much to conclude that over half of our denomination’s 16.3 million members are spiritually dead.

- Tom Ascol

Well Christian blogs should not be for self-promotion. It is disturbing that far too many Christian blogs are shamelessly pushing self and not seeing the potential for kingdom expansion via the blogosphere. Everything from personal agendas to personal stuff is being pushed. But here, as everywhere else, we must shape our interaction in the public square by humility.

Nor are blogs a place for covertly forgetting the Christian duty to be gentle. Far too many blogs are rude and full of vitriol. And all in the name of boldness for Christ! God forbid that Christian blogs be like such. As Jonathan Edwards–no wimp!–once said, Christian piety is a sweet flame.

- Michael Haykin

“Most people go through life concerned that others will think too little of them. Paul was concerned that others would think too much of him.”

- D.A. Carson (via Naselli)

Tech researcher Gartner Inc. reported earlier this year that 200 million people have given up blogging, more than twice as many as are active.

- Ted Olsen

I read the following tonight in Philip Yancey's excellent book Prayer, Does It Make Any Difference?:

Prayer, and only prayer, restore my vision to one that more resembled God's. I awake from blindness to see that wealth lurks as a terrible danger, not a goal worth striving for; that value depends not on race or status but on the image of God every person bears; that no amount of effort to improve physical beauty has much relevance for the world beyond.

Alexander Schmemann, the late priest who led a reform movement in Russian Orthodoxy, tells of a time when he was traveling on the subway in Paris, France, with his fiance. At one stop an old and ugly woman dressed in the uniform of the Salvation Army got on and found a seat nearby. The two lovers whispered to each other in Russian about how repulsive she looked. A few stops later the woman stood to exit. As she passed them she said in perfect Russian, "I wasn't always ugly." That woman was an angel of God, Shmemann used to tell his students. She opened his eyes, searing his vision in a way he would never forget.

Now, let me say that the church is not the center of God's plan. Jesus is. But, the church is central to God's plan. Jesus places the church in a position of great importance...

If you claim to be a disciple of Jesus, then love his wife. Don't be guilty of going to great lengths to show your love for Christ while ignoring, marginalizing, or attacking the Bride.

- Ed Stetzer

Theodore Dalrymple, a non-believer, writes of both some some very good and some very bad people he has known. Many of the most admirable souls he recalls here were people of faith. It's an interesting piece, with a balanced feel and a final paragraph that I think is tremendous. The article is excerpted below:

I met other nuns in remote parts of Africa who seemed completely happy in humbly serving the local people: a community of Spanish nuns whose cheerful and selfless dedication caused to the ill, the handicapped and the young caused them, rightly, to be loved and revered. In Nigeria, I met an Irish nun, in her mid-seventies, who was responsible for the feeding of hundreds of prisoners who would almost certainly have starved had she not brought food to them every day. In the prison, a lunatic had been chained for years to a post; many of the prisoners had been detained without trial for a decade, the files of their cases having been lost, and they would never leave the prison, even when a judge ordered their release, unless they paid a bribe to the gaolers which they could not afford. They believed they would spend the rest of their lives in detention, seventy to a floor-space no larger than that of my sitting room.

The nun moderated the behaviour of the prison guards by the sheer force of her goodness, It was not a demonstrative or self-satisfied virtue; one simply would have felt ashamed to behave badly or selfishly in her presence. She is almost certainly dead now, forgotten by the world (not that she craved remembrance or memorialisation). I sometimes find it difficult, when immersed in the day to day flux of my existence, to credit that I have witnessed such selflessness.

. . .

I once made the mistake of writing an article in [a] left-wing publication saying that, in my experience, the best people were usually religious and on the whole religious people behaved better in their day to day lives than non-religious once: and I wrote this, as I made clear, as a man without any religious belief.

As a frequent contributor to the public prints, I am accustomed to a certain amount of hate-mail, and can even recognise the envelopes that contain it with a fair, though not total, degree of accuracy. Of course, e-mail has made it far easier for those consumed with bile to communicate it, and on the whole it exceeds in vileness what most bilious people are prepared to commit to paper. I don’t think I have ever hated anyone as much as some of my correspondents have hated me.

Suffice it to say that I have never received such hate mail as when I suggested that religious people were better than non-religious in their conduct. It seemed that many of the people who responded to me were not content merely not to believe, but had to hate.

. . .

Perhaps one of the reasons that contemporary secularists do not simply reject religion but hate it is that they know that, while they can easily rise to the levels of hatred that religion has sometimes encouraged, they will always find it difficult to rise to the levels of love that it has sometimes encouraged.

"Kids' needs are rarely 'convenient.' What they require in order to succeed rarely comes cheaply. To raise them well will require daily sacrifice of many kinds, which has the wonderful spiritual effect of helping mold us into the character of Jesus Christ himself. God invites us to grow beyond ourselves and to stop acting as though our dreams begin and end with us. Once we have children, we cannot act and dream as though we had remained childless."

- Gary Thomas

[as seen today on Thinklings]

I think it's time for a little Lewis*. Here he offers insight into the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand:

Once in the desert Satan had tempted Him to make bread from stones: He refused the suggestion. 'The Son does nothing except what He sees the Father do'; perhaps one may without boldness surmise that the direct change from stone to bread appeared to the Son to be not quite in the hereditary style. Little bread into much bread is quite a different matter. Every year God makes a little corn into much corn: the seed is sown and there is an increase. And men say, according to their several fashions, 'It is the laws of Nature', or 'It is Ceres, it is Adonis, it is the Corn-King.' But the laws of Nature are only a pattern: nothing will come of them unless they can, so to speak, take over the universe as a going concern. And as for Adonis, no man can tell us where he died or when he rose again. Here, at the feeding of the five thousand, is He whom we have ignorantly worshipped: the real Corn-King who will die once and rise once at Jerusalem during the term of office of Pontius Pilate.

- C.S. Lewis, The Business of Heaven, a portion of the reading for April 13th

Inspired by this post from Dan I decided to look up some Watchman Nee quotes.

This one was a doozy. I hope that my ending here on earth carries the same quiet, firm conviction as that posessed by this great man who died in a Chinese prison after 20 years of imprisonment for his faith:

Christ is the Son of God. He died to atone for men's sin, and after three days rose again. This is the most important fact in the universe. I die believing in Christ.

- Watchman Nee - Note found under his pillow, in prison, at his death.