half-way through

The books on the left I've managed to read.  The one's on the right, however . . . I'm workin' on it.

My professors have tried to make me feel better about the reading load by telling me they could have assigned more.  Seriously?  Seriously.

Failblog.org

My classmate, Craig, told me that his students had really been enjoying this blog.  Check it out, it's definitely good for a few laughs.

failblog.org

Hope

I have been reading The Healing Path by Dan Allender for my Intro to Counseling class.  The topic of hope has come up, and some of you know that hope is as much an area of interest for me as it is a challenge.  Allender has come up with a definition of hope that resonates with the tension I feel towards it.

He writes, "Hope is not naive desire but a calculated risk that declares, whatever the loss, it is better than remaining where we are."

The tension for me is in the risk.  I know that pain may be right around the corner, but it is better to experience pain than continue in my desires without taking any action.  When I choose to hope, sometimes I experience pain, but more often than not, I experience a hint of my ultimate desire being met: to be known, to be in deep relationship with others.  Even in the pain, I feel more alive than when I remain paralyzed by the risk of hoping, refusing to put myself out there, where it is safe, and I am ambivalent, numb, static.

Hoping is embracing the life to which we are called.  Refusing to hope is remaining dead to our hearts.

So hope people!  It may hurt, but it will be worth it!

The Bible makes me nauseous

So, for my Old Testament History and Theology class, I get to read the entire OT in a semester.  That means I have had to read 10-20 chapters per day.  Today I am in Leviticus.  I got to chapter 13, about leprosy and other skin diseases.  I had to skim.  I had to skim 2 chapters of the Word of God.  It was making me sick.  What if the Levitical priests of the time had weak stomachs?  If they threw up from looking at the lepers, didn't that make them unclean, too?  I could never be a dermatologist.

Tomorrow I will read about bodily discharge.  Now there's something I can handle!