Grace and Peace

Paul loves to open his letters with "grace and peace". I love this - why, you may ask? Because I forget. I forget that my friends love me, that my elders love me, that my family loves me, and sometimes that Jesus loves me. I tend to forget conversations, feelings, and even whole events are sometimes erased. And so I need someone to remind me. And that is what Paul does; he writes to those churches: "Hey, remember me? I love you, still, even though I'm far away from you and even though you keep messing up, even when we've been over this before. And not only me, but the Lord loves you like nothing else. Here, let me show you again how much He loves you." And then you get the letter to the Ephesians with the great love of predestination and election, or Philippians, detailing Paul's love for those people.

So, remind me, and I hope that I help to remind you.

New template

Spring approaching, and gloomy winter mood fading, and pink becoming my favorite color again, and life being happy, and feeling liberated from making life decisions, I have decided to change my template.

Now that's a Greek sentence construction, if there ever were one!

Greek and why I like studying it

I love Greek. I really do.

For a while I thought it was because it made me look smarter because it is of such small interest in this part of the country. Or because I got to specialize early on and look cool talking to a professor like I knew what was going on. Or because I got to belong to a very narrow group and exclude other people (because we all know that exclusion is the key to superiority).

But lately, I've noticed that, though these things are probably still true and I'm a sinner, I love Greek. I like getting tough passages and solving the puzzle. I like seeing what difference a tense can make. I love to read through familiar parts of the Bible slowly while translating and see it come to life anew. I like bickering about tiny little translating things, trying to figure out the best English version for the Greek (Gringlish is unintelligible). I also like getting to know people in the context of translating. You start to see what is important to them in passage and sometimes their translations can be very telling about them.

So, I love Greek. I do. You should study it. Doug will teach you.

Big news!

I got accepted to William and Mary School of Law. This is my fall back school, but one that I would actually go to (unlike Harvard or Georgetown). Yay!

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After visiting UVA, Georgetown and William & Mary, I have to say that I'd go to any of them. Very cool places with some awesome people. I got into Vanderbilt and William & Mary has offered me a $50,000 scholarship in order to boost their numbers. So, this is really flattering.

How does this sound: defer scholarship and law school for a year and stay in Norman, working in an OKC hotel doing dinners (learning about the catering business), maybe working at Veritas, doing the RUF faux internship, and generally hanging out more with Doug and Julie. Then, being confident that the Lord leads where he will, go off to law school and start that kind of career. Sounds pretty cool. We'll see.

Mormon girls

Jessie introduced me to the Mormon girl missionaries just before the end of last semester and this semester they've been over probably half a dozen times for dinner or dessert. They are very sweet people and I find them quite interesting.

At dinner on Sunday they showed me the cup illustration which demonstrates how their church is set up, based on the 12 apostles with one prophet at the head (first Jesus, and then Peter). I found it, one, unnecessary to what makes a good church, and, two, wrong to think that the church has had it wrong since the apostles died out and that the true organization of the church was restored in the 1850s under Joseph Smith.

This also got me thinking about church government and how important it is to have such and such a structure. Obviously I think the Presbyterians have got it right, with a system to check each other and keep churches and presbyteries accountable, as well as providing a means of reform or augmentation of doctrine. My Mormons seem to think that without the apostle/prophet structure, the church can not fulfil her duties. But was Christ saying (by example) that we need modern apostles and prophet? This ends up sounding rather Catholic to me. The early church seems more to give the example (and direct teaching) that congregations need to be headed by godly men who are wise and ordained to guard souls.

So I went to Acts for history and enlightenment. Acts 1: Judas has committed suicide and the apostles (now 11) meet together and cast lots to decide a replacement apostle. Acts 12: James, brother of John (sons of Zebedee), is killed by Herod (the Twelve are again the Eleven). Acts 15: the Jerusalem Council (to talk about Gentiles needing to be circumcised); at the council, wherein meet the remaining apostles, other elders, and Paul, no new apostle is chosen, though everyone necessary for such a decision was assembled.

Seems to me that the apostles were specifically chosen and gifted for the nascent ministry to have a focal point and that their ministry was to be handed over to the elders of the church. Why don't we need apostles? We have men ordained to guard the individual churches and yearly councils to make sure they are continuing the Lord's work. Maybe I do think that the Presbyterian way is most biblical. Hmm.

And the link goes to ...

Wow - so I got put on the RUF blogger list. What an honor! Sorry there's not more to read. I have to go babysit.