Sunday, October 26, 2008

mood ring is black

last week i tried giving the unresponsive job market the silent treatment. "that'll show them!" i thought to myself. surprisingly, that did not provoke anyone to give me a job, or at the very least, an interview. sigh.

in brighter news, my brain is not atrophying i have much time to read and an excellent balcony to read on. "real" summer in the bay area is indian summer - september and october. pity to tourists who think a good summer vacation trip is to come here in june.

last week, i was fortunate enough to see n.t. wright and bart ehrman debate the nature of suffering & God ( this link is to their online debate on beliefnet - some of what they write is what they covered live). unfortunately i missed the free booze and hors d'Ĺ“uvres accompanying the hefty admission. it was well worth it though. ehrman kind of reminds me of psalm writers in the old testament - they look around at the state of the world and demand, cry out, to know why it is happening. wright reminds us of the long-term plan of god to bring total reconciliation and healing to the world. of course they could both talk until they are blue in the face and be no closer to an answer. but it is good to consider suffering, to care about what is happening in the world, to push our assumptions in our faith and see where it cracks and figure out how to respond to that. i find myself sympathetic to ehrman's position, but cannot bring myself to become an agnostic - i would be intrigued to read his book. i was talking about the debate to someone, and they responded "oh, well it's because ehrman went to princeton seminary, that's how he lost his faith" ... this statement irritated me, in the same way as when another person stated to me that "she didn't believe in global warming." i'm not really getting the jump in logic there.

it was interesting to go from this debate between calm collected academics to the conference "global slavery and the plague of poverty" at my church. speakers came from india, southeast asia, bolivia and uganda. through a written account, elizabeth shared how she had been forced into the sex trade, spent a year in a brothel and how the international justice mission helped her. she just graduated from college, the first in her family to do so. in the face of incredible abuse and suffering her faith remained intact she prayed each day, wrote this psalm on her wall:
1 The LORD is my light and my salvation—
whom shall I fear?
The LORD is the stronghold of my life—
of whom shall I be afraid?
2 When evil men advance against me
to devour my flesh,
when my enemies and my foes attack me,
they will stumble and fall.
3 Though an army besiege me,
my heart will not fear;
though war break out against me,
even then will I be confident.

i found myself silent in the face of ehrman's questions in the same way i was silent after her testimony. in the great tension, in the great awfulness and evil present in the world, we cry out, and we find that He is there. in more ways than we can ask or imagine. in other ways that we ask or imagine.

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