reset

My cousin is in town! 

Mi casa es su casa. 

Despite the many dysfunctions of family, I’m thankful for the sense of familiarity and comfort - and rawness - that one can find in the company of family that are friends. 

And for Christmas trees! And cinnamon-scented pines cones. 

Back at work, and it’s difficult to build momentum. 

Being a teacher is difficult work, I’d say. To have to create your own materials and content, to design something that engages and inspires students is no easy feat.. I’d say that I’m tired and wondering if I’m better suited for something else.

thoughts and observations:

1. God continually reminds the patriarchs of His everlasting covenant with them, which is established not only with the fathers, but with their families and descendants.

2. Isaac loves Rebekah because she is his wife. It was not because he loved her that she became his wife.

3. The older serves the younger. Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob. God uses the meek to humble the proud.

4. Beersheba. 

Friends are underrated.

… depending on your definition of a friend, of course. Proverbs xvii, 17 says it’s someone who loves you. And love is the value of group-centered attachment. The goal is a community, not exclusivity. What is a “best friend”? All of your friends should be your best friends. If they aren’t, you’re setting yourself up for devastation.

John xv, 13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

Yeah, yeah, everyone quotes it, but no one seems to understand the implications. In this shallow twenty-first-century upper-middle-class world of air conditioning, where Sesame Street is considered educational, we don’t die for each other. This is why true friendship is practically impossible to find. There is no maturity; there is no sense of honor; and there is no struggle for survival that pushes one to an acknowledgement of the greater realities in life. Instead, we stack lie upon lie, pretense upon pretense. The test of true love is endurance, and trials are meant to test that, something thoroughly impossible while we are surrounded by the silly comforts of our land of bubbles.

God laid His life down for us.

We love Him because He first loved us; and we love others because we love Him. You want a strong friendship? Then base it on Christ. Base it on the cross. Base it on humility, selflessness, and meekness. You don’t want your friendship to be lost. You don’t want your friendship to be false. You don’t want your friendship to be dead. But all friendships apart from Him are exactly that, for He is the way, the truth, and the life. Every member of the community of the new covenant should be your closest friend apart from the Friend of sinners. And your every friend should be a member of the community of the new covenant, for friendship is communion, fellowship, and the knitting of our hearts as one in Christ, our one Lord, in whom is our one faith and baptism.

I believe, as the Apostles’ Creed says, in the communion of the saints.