1. The American church, so drunk on politics, it can conceive of nothing other than full celebratory support or ridicule and hatred, is in complete disobedience. The call to “Honor the Emperor” and pray “for kings and all those who are in authority” is a nonstarter. “We the people” has sunk so far down into our hearts that not only do we not want the kings of England, but we now only want the King of kings as a consolation prize if things do not go well here.
2. It breaks my heart every time I read about Betsie praying for the German pilots as they are bombing Betsie and Corrie’s hometown.
3. There is no passage or Scripture in the NT where Jesus, Paul, John, or anyone else heaps guilt on anyone else for their lack of evangelism. Go look. It’s not there. But the call to discipleship and make disciples is clear. Maybe if we lived a life that actually reflected the life of Jesus as followers of him, we would have to explain our actions and ideas to those who do not understand them. And this seems to be the picture in the New Testament. So I assume that if we seek to be disciples and make disciples, then maybe the end for which we aim in evangelism would be achieved and far more.
4. I could be wrong but my guess is that mot people watch political debates only to build up their arsenal of complaints so as to justify an already formed opinion.
5. Jesus offers a joy and a peace that cannot be touched by whatever it is you fear about politicians and their agendas.
6. I miss teaching and preaching.
7. Classical music forces you to listen differently than popular modern music. And I think that difference causes you to listen more actively . You hear patterns and ideas and sometimes whole stories in the music. Whereas in popular modern music those are handed to you ready-made.
8. My parents got married in a neighbor’s living room before my dad headed back to Germany. It was not instagramable and very little money was spent. And yet I have yet to know of a better and more beautiful marriage then theirs. So not much work on the wedding but a lot of work on the marriage would be a revolution I could get behind.
9. I keep seeing people say, “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.” Paul says to “do everything without complaining and arguing.” I would assume that includes voting.
10. Memorization changes the furniture of your mind. And what you have memorized is what your thoughts will use to make sense of the world. So if you memorize the lines of movies and TV shows, that is the furniture of your mind. And if you memorize passages of Scripture, that will be the furniture of you mind. If will also help you make sense of what is real and unreal. What is meaningful and not. What is truly powerful and not.
Echoes and Stars 
For 9. … those kinds of complainers seem to forget that until some people exercised their 1st amendment right to freedom of the press and assembly to complain about not having the right to vote they didn’t have the right to vote.
Apropos of nothing, I finished Ephraim Radner’s A Profound Ignorance last night and, wow. His proposal that modernity in the West can be read as a battle between utopian pneumatology and a christology that punctures the utopian triumphalist streak in Western pneumatology has given me a LOT to think about. Not that I’m exactly a binge-reader but Radner’s book may be the most riveting and thought-provoking read I’ve done this year.
One of my thoughts for the weekend is about how low church Protestants probably don’t think they can have any heresy of simony but maybe we can. Simony as a heresy could be described as buying and selling “offices” in high liturgical churches … but in the low liturgical traditions the simony is more open, “power encounter”. Selling books on how to get “the annointing” may be the simony of the low church American Protestant scene.
7 … could write tens of thousands of words about classical music and pop but I try to mostly save that for the blog lately. 🙂
7 and 10 are related, it turns out, when we dig into medieval musical practices and how part of the discipline of that era was using an architectural model of associative memory so that, using your analogy, it was considered important how you organized the furniture of your mind for the sake of scripture and musical performance. Read a book about improvisation and medieval musical practice and the author pointed out that there were lengthy treatments on memory organization and memory aid from that period that we can consult to help get an understanding of how they may have approached improvised music performance.
3, oh it took me years to finally realize that! Making disciples and evangelism aren’t the same by a long shot and since I’m introverted and hate sales it’s been liberating to not have to have an American door-to-door style evangelism of the hard sell of salvation as a paradigm for Christian discipleship!