Have I mentioned lately that I married a phenomenal cook? In all truth, she has yet to cook something that is less than a resounding success. She herself may be disappointed with the results from time to time, but from a taste standpoint and from the opinions of her husband and son (amply confirmed by the gusto with which we devour the meals), every dish has been a chef d’oeuvre<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Diane and I have been feeling the tension lately that many believers experience between the necessity of using our God-given abilities for His glory and toward socially-constructive ends (speaking out against abortion, homosexual “marriage,” the growing moral degeneration of society) and the peace which must be present knowing that He is in control of all human events. The central question echoes the title of one of the most influential books in our lives, “How shall we then live?” How indeed, with a downward spiral of culture and society anticipated in the Bible but with which we have a mandate (in all obedience to Him) to work against. How do we invest ourselves in the world (to love it, truly), but not develop an attachment to it in the sense that our sense of elation or despair allies itself with every moral fluctuation and we grow resentful of that which God has revealed in His Word about these days? Most believers feel this, I think. Many times (and such is the case for us) it manifests itself as a sense of guilt for living in the culture we are when we hear about missionaries overseas pouring out their lives for the gospel. Diane and I were talking yesterday about it and speculating that this drive toward overseas missions may be an instance of the same drive that compelled men and women in ages past toward the monastic life, secluded in abbeys and monasteries. The new monasticism, in other words: the conscious removal of oneself from one’s “world” (in our case, our culture) with the added desire–always present, I am sure, to a degree in the “old” monastic paradigm–to see His Word go forth. The counterclaim remains that not everyone is called to this, that many of us are meant to remain where we are and minister exactly where we are, but thinking about our position on it in light of the cycles of history, it certainly was food for thought. More on this later, perhaps, when I am not at work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Have I mentioned lately that I married a phenomenal cook? In all truth, she has yet to cook something that is less than a resounding success. She herself may be disappointed with the results from time to time, but from a taste standpoint and from the opinions of her husband and son (amply confirmed by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}