Testmony of and Oportunity for The Gospel

At Desiring God's Blog, John Piper talks about a visit to the worst and best prison in the country.

Humility

C.J. Mahaney's book, Humility: True Greatness is a must read. I have read it three times and was thinking just a couple of weeks ago that I need to read it again. To summarize the overarching lesson that I learned from this book (and there are dozens of "underarching" lessons) it was this: the sin that is most likely to hold you back from true greatness is that sin that everyone sees but you. Mahaney likens it to a glob of cream cheese on your face about which you are ignorant. I liken it to a third arm that I am unaware of that flips people the bird when I'm not looking. In either image, the idea is that you can't see it but it is damaging your life and witness and consequently, the glory and honor of the Savior. Humility will help you hold up the mirror to see it, and push you into the kind of community wherein it can be exposed and extracted (though experience has shown this to be an utterly painful extraction).

Blog Pre-Launch

It's presumptuous to name this a pre-launch--as if something publicly significant were taking off. I don't imagine the readership of this blog extending beyond the borders of some close friends, and even they may find the time-consuming nature of the posts too tedious to fastidiously follow. On a personal level however, I hope this will be significant. I have wanted to chronicle some of the media I've read that has--in extraordinary ways--pointed me back to the gospel and back to Jesus. Most often for me, it is an MP3 sermon that I listen to on the way to or from work. I burn through a lot of MP3 audio on my commute. And occasionally, something I listen to will hit me in an extraordinary way that I want to remember. Likewise, a phrase, or a sentence, or a paragraph from a book or article will also hit me in a way that I want to remember. At other times, it may be a moving video that joggs my sleepy affections and I'll want to somehow remember that notion--however abstract it may be.

But my flesh fails me and my memory right along with it. I don't remember things well.

Part of this is due, I am convinced, to the fact that I rely too much on my computer for organizing my life (I missed a lunch appointment with a really good friend today because I was not at work--where my calendar and re-MINDers are). And I suppose that if I want to gain that part of my mind back I should go the way of the neo-Luddites rather than more deeply intertwine my mind with e-things.

But (sorry Neil) because a small handful of friends have also found some of these media snippets helpful toward good and eternal ends, and because I am not optimistic about any ensuing conversion to the Luddite camp to exercise my memory's synapses, I proceed with my logging. I say "logging" because purists will tell you that a 'blog is really a "web-log"--that is, a log of where you have been on the web. While I get most of my MP3 sermons or seminars from the web, my books are usually simply purchased in that most antiquated form with pages, ink, and the like. I intend to include them both. The purist will also tell you (see point #2) that "if you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility." Which serves as the perfect segue to my first official post...