Strangely Normal

noticed my new page?  ye-ah...c28 is a pretty awesome thing.

so i've loved notw (not of this world) brand clothing forever (it's where i get almost all my shoes, t-shirts, and cool accessories) but i only recently discovered it was incorporated into a bigger thing; c28!

colossians 2:8 - See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ

the world today has lots of demeaning advertisement on clothing, purses, jewelry, backpacks, car stickers...everything...but c28 has an uplifitng alternative!

i currently own 2 pairs of notw shoes and get comments on them all the time.  now i'm generally not a fashionista, but still i get comments on my galatians 5:1 inside of them; 'it is for freedom you have been set free.  stand firm then, and do not let yourself be burdened again by a yolk of slavery.'

my second pair has a beehive, bumblebees, and the Bible verse proverbs 16:24 - Kind words are like honey—sweet to the soul and healthy for the body

check out the c28 store for yourself!

http://www.c28.com/309170

so a pastor at a church i visited a week ago was talking about communion for a bit.  he said that the common argument for not having communion every week was it got too routine.  his answer was 'how often do you eat?' their response: 'well everyday' pastor: 'eating has become pretty routine for you, hasn't it?'

which later got me thinking, when i hapened to read over the Lord's supper passages, Jesus said do this as often as you partake of this, in reference to both the wine and the bread.  that doesn't mean make a day every week when you drink wine and eat peces of bread or crackers or whatever you choose to eat, it meant whenever they drank wine.  just coz you don't drink wine everyday doesn't mean you're off scot-free.  in Biblical times, what they drank was wine and what they ate was  bread.  that meant whenever they ate, whenever they drank, whenever they got any sort of physical sustenance, they were to remember that Jesus was their Spiritual sustenance.  That means Communion shouldn't be just every week, not just every day, as some people do, but every meal.  every snack, every sip of water, we should be remembering to take spiritual sustenance as well.

obviously, this isn't me berating those who don't do it right, this is reminding everyone.  this is a message to me as much as anyone else.

this isn't my righteous procalamtion, this is God's revelation, and the mistakes, the incorrect interpretations, the aberrations, are all my feeble tongue (well, hands, i guess) stuttering over them.

green is coming.

ready to come full circle?

wanna trip?

ted dekker is a thriller/mystery/fantasy author that weaves plots so intricate and intricately connected; so complicated and complicatedly connected, that you are weaved into the books yourself. his books don't just hit the ground running, they've been going full speed, and the moment you open the book is just the moment it sprints past you and grabs you by the throat and keeps going, without slow or stop. it goes at such a fast pace that you can't keep up if you sprint with all your might, but slows down just enough for you to get your feet to touch the ground and decide you're not completely in over your head...and then it sprints back up again. the end isn't an end, it's just the point at which the book dumps you in a heap and keeps going. you lay there, catching your breath and watching the book go on, and realize you miss the ride. then another book comes along, but you don't want to get out of the way. you open it and it carries you along, thinking you should have been more used to it the second time around, but knowing you never will. what a trip.

the circle is a trilogy, right now, comprised of black, red, and white, respectively. green is book zero-prequel to black, and sequel to white.

http://www.teddekker.com/green/ explains more.

new recruits to the circle join at http://.teddekker.com/readgreen/. if this post led you there, please enter 5176 in the forest guard number box.

never break the circle

wanna trip?

does this end too cynically?

...

?We were free and made alive the day that True Love died?

-True Love, Phil Wickham

Love is dead

Or truth in love is so

And true love is a mockery

A hypocrisy of deepest kind

Claiming its own very opposite

But Love is not dead

In truth, Love died

Over two millennia ago

True Love died the truest and brutalest death

For being love

And claiming as much

Three nails pierced Love?s flesh

Hammered in by hate

And dropped splashes of the crimson red

Now claimed as the colour of love

True Love died and was dead

But three days later arose

Dead so others might love again

But Love was not recognized before His death

And less so after,

Even while still on earth

And people presume to recognize love today?

The greatest tragedy of love

Lies not in Love Himself

But in the bitter twisting and misrecognition

And blasphemy of claiming love today.

i never really understood why Jesus was compared to a sheep before a shearer.  for a little while i thought i did, but then i read a fable about pigs and sheep.  a butcher was coming to take a pig away from the farm, and the sheep asked the pig why he was squealing so.  the sheep said they were often carried off by strange men and then were later brought back slightly colder, but no worse for the wear.  they never made any sort of complaints.  the pig responded, he doesn't want your meat, but from me he wants my bacon!  from then on, i thought of sheep before shearers as whatever, because they didn't die.  maybe the sheep don't know that, but we do, so why bother trying to compare them?
but i realized something.  Jesus was before shearers.  they were stripping him of something, but it wasn't really His life.  He was killed, He was dead, but not forever.  He came back to life.  He wasn't taken by butchers, He was taken by shearers who stripped Him of His life for a little while, but not for long.
as a sheep before the shearers is silent, so He was.  right down to the shearing.

it is written "God is love."  it's been written "love made history" (history, matthew west).  "true love died" (true love, phil wickham) and therefore made it.  before love, there was no history, there was no was.  evryhting is its own eternal consequences; no forgiveness, no forgetfulness.  no past, we are in sin.  the great deaths make history, but the greatest death made it.  history.  the cross was the way to forgiveness, when we no longer live in the sin we have committed.  it's now in the past, buried, forgotten.  i still sin, but after i do it's gone and over if i am forgiven.  love made forgiveness.  love made past.  love made history.

so we are made in God's likeness.
ya know how when you really like something or someone, you want it to be perfect so you can have a reason or "excuse" almost to like it and to think about it all the time or almost obsess over it?  you know, we overlook its faults or are willing to forgive and forget them if they let us, we wish they were perfect, we imagine them being perfect, and we're overjoyed when they have a clean slate.  and it hurts when they or someone else keeps pointing out their faults and mistakes, or if they don't accept your forgiveness.
well God does too!  He wants so badly for us to be perfect so He can love us, for us to accept His forgiveness.  He wants to forgive us and wants to completely erase and forget about our past sins.  adn it hurts Him when we don't.  He is so sad when we reject His forgiveness or keep reminding Him of our sins by repeating them deliberately.  He wants to be able to love s with nothing at all in the way, but our sin gets in the way because we can't love Him back.

Isaiah 30:18 (New International Version)

man its been a long time.  sorry, school took up so much more time than i realized it would.  eh, no excuses i guess.  well, im back for now.

so, i was reading some Bible verses, and ya know i was thinkin about how we are made in "the likeness of God," "in the image of  God," all that, and i kinda always believed it and had heard both phrases but it never really hit me that maybe the likeness didn't mean looking like, it meant like.  we feel the way He does, feel things He does, just not in the perfect way He does.  we really are in the likeness...meaning like HIm.  we were made to be His companions and who wants a companion that doesn't feel how we feel, or even understand how we feel.  He made us to be like Him, perfect and everything, coz He made us good, we fell ourselves.  He really did make us like HIm.  not a great as Him, but like Him.  not equal, but like.

phil's blog!