Though he slay me

How do you explain the interplay between God's sovereignty and our responsibility in the midst of suffering?

Says Job,

Though he slay me, I will hope in him; yet I will argue my ways to his face. (13:15)

Indeed,

Lord, to whom shall we go?  You have the words of eternal life... (John 6:34)

Google mapping the end of man

Check out this nice piece from Mockingbird on some of the gains and losses that come along with the really spectacular technology of Google maps.

A snippet:

...this is the gist of Walker Percy's critique of modernity, that our age has lost humankind's God-given sovereignty or, better yet, that our age has shipped off our capabilities to Experts in the Field...this loss of sovereignty feigns sovereignty: even in the remotest canyons, I can find me, my blue blinking dot.  I have the illusion of control that I bought (happily) from Google, Inc.

Creation, Fall, Redemption in two poems

See Gen. 1-3, and the following:

To sit and look at light-filled leaves

May let us see or seem to see,

Far backward as through clearer eyes

To what unsighted hope believes: 

The blessed conviviality

That sang Creation's seventh sunrise

Time when the Maker's radiant sight

made radiant every thing He saw,

And every thing he saw was filled

With perfect joy and life and light.

His perfect pleasure was sole law;

No pleasure had become self-willed.

For all His creatures were His pleasures

And their whole pleasure was to be 

What He made them; they sought no gain

Or growth beyond their proper measures,

Nor longed for change or novelty.

The only new thing could be pain.

Also see 1 Cor. 15, and the following:

What hard travail God does in death!

He strives in sleep, in our despair, 

And all flesh shudders underneath

The nightmare of his sepulcher.

The earth shakes, grinding its deep stone;

All night the cold wind heaves and pries;

Creation strains sinew and bone

Against the dark door where He lies.

The stem bent, pent in seed, grows straight

And stands.  Pain breaks in song.  Surprising

The merely dead, graves fill with light

Like opened eyes.  He rests in rising. 

-Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir, "1979: III," "1980: I."

When what was made has been unmade

A gracious Sabbath stood here while they stood
Who gave our rest a haven.
Now fallen, they are given
To labor and distress.
These times we know much evil, little good
To steady us in faith
And comfort when our losses press
Hard on us, and we choose, 
In panic or despair or both,
To keep what we will lose.

For we are fallen like the trees, our peace
Broken, and so we must
Love where we cannot trust,
Trust where we cannot know,
And must await the wayward-coming grace
That joins living and dead,
Taking us where we would not go--
Into the boundless dark.
When what was made has been unmade
The Maker comes to do His work.

-Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 1999), p. 74.

Which way to the master?

My lot is to approach thee with godly fear and humble confidence, for thy condescension equals thy grandeur, and thy goodness is thy glory.

[...]

This is the foundation of my hope, the refuge of my safety, the new and living way to thee, the means of that conviction of sin, brokenness of heart, and self-despair, which will endear to me the gospel.  

[...]

May every part of my character and conduct make a serious and amiable impression on others, and impel them to ask the way to the Master.

-Valley of Vision, "Confidence".

The blood of Christ, neat

The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellarful of fifteen-hundred-year-old, 200-proof grace--of bottle after bottle of pure distillate of scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly.  The word of the Gospel--after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself to heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps--suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started...Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, not the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.

-Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon and Three: Romance, Law, and the Outrage of Grace (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997), pp. 114-115.

See John 4:14, and drink your fill of Jesus, our Redeemer who has come to take back what is his.