the blog of Jerry Bolton
…inertia exhausted
Current Tunage: Brand New – (Fork And Knife)
Yummy new single from yummy band.
I’m sorry. I really need to learn to not promise incoming posts… it rarely seems to actually materialize. I have two weeks of class left and four papers which, together, conspire to destroy my soul. Among them is a paper doing a critical theory reading on Pedro the Lion’s “Control” record, which should be quite fun – dare I say. Also some other random riffraff. I’ll get them done but in the meantime they own me, quite literally.
I have clever thoughts to share, just no time – such is the realities when you’re no longer single, it seems. I just don’t have the kind of urinate-in-the-wind free time I used to have. Not that I… EVER… urinated in the wind. But just in case I ever did, my point remains.
I guess to sum up, I was just planning to talk about how often it seems we find the thing we desire most when we least expect to find it. That, and how integral “breaking up with my wife” a year ago was in ultimately bringing me to her. My challenge to you, dedicated reader, is to go back and read THAT POST and draw the conjectures yourself. I’m sorry I can’t be more help right now. Sleep calls.
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#3 written by Wikkid Person 4 years agoTrying this with some spelling fixed:
For example: when I was in my late teens, I had, against my parents’ rules and very much as a gesture of freer conscience, amassed the large collection of comic books that I’d been denied as a child. Then, one of my friends who’d started coming out to church with me got all devoted one weekend and said we needed to throw out all of our comics (and him his horror movies and role playing games) as we KNEW God didn’t approve, and they were bad for us.
I didn’t agree, but I tossed all of my comics in a dumpster with his stuff so as “not to discourage him” and also not to let him call me less devoted or endowed with integrity.
Then, a week later, he didn’t really believe in God, again. Never has since, really. Stupid. I was going along with ignorance and stupidity, because of the old “Competitive Piety” game, where you can’t possibly win if anyone is offended by more stuff than you are, so you have to be offended by every single thing they are, or lose.
Also, in my church, if you like anything with any passion, then it’s an idol and you need to give it up and turn back to Christ. So, passion=bad, but ambivalent enjoyment=acceptable and God’s way.
So, big sacrifice (those comics would be fascinating things to still have today, and worth a lot of money in some cases), all for nothing, was stupid anyway. Like New Years resolutions. I’d love to hear how your thing turned out and progressed and so on. Did it just make your wife-to-be swoon at your outlandish devotedness, or annoy her, or what?
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#4 written by StephyJay 4 years ago
I guess I can answer this one, eh? To be honest, Jerry’s honesty in his blogs were one of the things that really drew me to him. I understand what you are getting at (daily faithfulness is more important that dramatic vows)…but I guess I have had the same thoughts as Jerry many times…that my relationship with God is often tied in to how things are going in my other relationships (when it really shouldn’t be that way). The struggle is always how to break that cycle. So that Easter post really resonated with me. It also made me laugh…I thought “who is this guy who breaks up with someone who he isn’t even dating?”
Little did I know that he was breaking up with me before we started dating…lol…. -
#5 written by Wikkid Person 4 years ago
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#7 written by Wikkid Person 4 years ago
I was suggesting that, perhaps for some, “putting God first” can be putting Him in a special place that your regular life doesn’t touch. Like putting Him in a box, or the like.
Here’s what’s behind what I’m suggesting: I was raised to try to take my everyday normal stuff, and elevate it to God’s standards or whatever. This didn’t tend to work. It resulting in a lot of fleshly resolutions and turning over of new leaves, with meeting with other Christians at youth camps and conferences and retreats functioning as scheduled mountaintop experiences that my daily life didn’t have much to do with.
So what started to happen, that really worked, was I started to “include” God into daily, mundane stuff. Stuff like having a beer or watching a movie. Not as a buddy, but in an attempt to not make Him a tiny, gold room in a massive stone temple on a looming giant mountain I couldn’t get the energy to climb most days. As an attempt to live my life, and see Him in the mundane and everywhere, not just in books and resolutions and sacrifices and worship and praise, dedications and rededications. That’s what I’m asking if you’ve considered (or if you already do that).
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#8 written by Jer 4 years ago
Well, yes. What I did was part of a larger effort, in many ways, to do just that. I find it’s way too easy for God to become relegated to a small corner of my life when I know He wants to be in every nook, cranny, and floorboard. More specifically, I noticed something good: that having an object of interest helped me re-evaluate things into a state where God played a more prominent, all-encompassing role (how exactly this worked would require more explanation). The exercise of trying to make that happen without a present interest (at the time) was therefore an effort to give God His full place all the time, not just under specific circumstances. Put in your terms, having interest in a quality girl for me is more or less a mountaintop experience, or at least it always was at that stage.
Does that make sense?
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#9 written by Wikkid Person 4 years ago
It very much does, and adds depth and legitimacy to the whole thing. You were acting almost like Abraham offering to sacrifice Isaac without being told to, just in case God wanted that? Or not?
I’d love to know more about “I noticed something good: that having an object of interest helped me re-evaluate things into a state where God played a more prominent, all-encompassing role (how exactly this worked would require more explanation).”
More explanation, please, privately or on this forum.
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#10 written by StephyJay 4 years ago
I hear what you both are saying. Caedmon’s Call has a cool song about that…a mother is singing about her realization that everything is sacred…from doing laundry to reading a story to her kids. I definitely agree that too often God is relegated to a separate part of our lives when really, He wants to be in everything we do. Living this out is easier said than done, though, because too often, I find that the urgent things in life (or even the mundane) can drown out His voice so that even though He’s in all of those things, I forget to look for Him….which is probably why we naturally tend to look for Him in the mountaintop experiences…camp or church or whatever, since they can be times when things are at least at little bit quieter in our hearts and heads…(not that I would justify this, but I understand why it happens…)
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#11 written by Wikkid Person 4 years ago
Yup. That’s what we do alright.
I’m reading a book called “The Twilight of Atheism,” and it has several criticisms of Christianity in terms of how we “lost our audience.” One is that we (Protestants, the guy argues) when faced with science wanting to dissect everything, differed from the Catholics (who tended to forbid science touching things like human corpses, seeing it as desecration of something sacred,and God-created) in saying “Nature? The human body? That’s not sacred. It is secular. Sacred stuff is what happens in church.”
He seems to feel that Catholics tended to (perhaps superstitiously) mysticise things, while Protestants demystified almost everything a minister wasn’t directly presiding over, shifting the focus in church from “Here is the altar. Magic happens here” to “Here is the pulpit. Listen to what is said, for it is correct.”
To Catholics, what happens in a marriage bed, in a family, that stuff is sacred. To a Protestant, it is more generally seen as mundane, as not happening at church.
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to be a bit rude: I have this idea that God prefers daily, unthinking sacrifices to one-time-only, melodramatic, temporary displays of show-off devotedness. I assume your action ending up being more than the latter?