Claudia and Duffy

Raised Incorruptible

This morning Pavel, from Kazahkstan, preached at my church - about the return of Christ. Phil Keaggy sang a song last night that asked him not to leave us waiting too long. These things made me happy and sad.

Oh! I found out a new thing about the world that made me reel in wonder and horror. There's a delicacy in existence known as "salted licorice," and a friend who just discovered it on the recommendation of a British friend mailed me some. It comes in little circles, about penny-sized but a good bit thicker, and look like rubber.

So I put one in my mouth and was immediately overwhelmed by the awful, awful, toxic-seeming saltiness of the stuff. For about six seconds I chewed, trying to get to some other sensation (I don't like licorice, but it would have been a relief to taste it at that point), but my stomach was rebelling at that point (even though I had not yet swallowed) and I had to go spit it out and go eat some plain bread to try to erase the taste from my system.

This was an entirely amusing experience. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how anyone ever eats the stuff.

I was thinking about people that lived for hundreds of years, back in the OT days, and wondering if they got to be five or eight or ten times holier than we who only get to live a century at the very most. (Man, think about the last seven hundred years - how crazy would it have been to live through all of that? And I bet that scientific innovation would go at a faster pace, because you wouldn't have to spend as much time teaching and passing on information - you could put six hundred years of work into a project yourself.) But then, as we're waiting to actually meet Jesus, it's sort of a relief to know that you only have so long before you get to move on to the next stage.

Things That Are Good For Christians. List now includes - having an extended e-conversation with a person who insists on epistemological correctness in your speech about your Christianity. I have been told "you can't say that" more times in the last five weeks than I have in ages. And the guy is right - which is really cool, because my confusing language around my faith and knowledge of God is getting stripped down and I'm finding out just what a hold God has on me. I'm finding out a ton about how much of my identity springs out of the Spirit - and it's actually wonderful to be freed from having to try prove God's existence to just telling about him.

I saw The Talented Mr. Ripley a couple of days ago. It was brilliantly done in several aspects, but gosh, what a horrible movie. I couldn't fall into deep sleep all night because I was so troubled by it. I actually just threw the movie away - didn't sell it back to McKay or anything. The last movie that affected me this badly was Event Horizon. Both kept me watching until the end in the hopes that something good would eventually happen - but it didn't.

Posted by tuggy at 04.17.05 13:11 | TrackBack