Personal – Page 4

E Pluribus Unum

July 19, 2021 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

My wife and I were eating lunch in a restaurant yesterday when a girl walked by in a T-shirt that said “Lexington Soccer.” I caught her eye and asked, “Lexington where?” She said, “Massachusetts”—as I hoped she would. I smiled and said, “I graduated from Lexington Christian.” She said, “So did my Dad.”

Small world.

And that got me to thinking about all the places I’ve lived and people I’ve known—which leads me to recycle what follows, a minor reworking of something I posted on Facebook on September 4, 2016.

I spent the first half my youth in the Pacific Northwest (Spokane, to be precise), and the second half in greater Boston (Newton, mostly). (And when I say “half,” I’m being precise; we headed east 3 days after my 10th birthday.)

But I’ve spent well over 2/3 of my life in the American South. There are lots of things I like about the region:

Barbecue. And to my friends in California, bless your hearts, you’re not “barbecuing”; you’re grilling. It ain’t barbecue unless you’re usin’ wood and takin’ more than 8 hours.
- Side note: in South Africa they “braai,” and they use wood, but they cook hot and fast rather than low and slow, so that’s not barbecue either. Though it is delicious.
The way Southerners soften their insults with “bless your heart.”
Biscuits and sausage gravy for breakfast.
Calling other adults “Sir” and “Ma’am,” even when they’re younger than you.
Dinner on the grounds. And persimmon pudding. Preferably simultaneously.
Fireflies.
The good people in mill towns like Poe and Slater and Zoar and Lockhart. (RIP, Eunice Loudermilk.)
The way everything’s sweeter here–cornbread and potato salad and of course iced tea.
The sound of the kudzu growing on a dog day afternoon.
Grits. Yes, really. Fresh and hot, with butter and pepper—and not a single crystal of sugar. What were you thinking!?

I am blessed for having lived in multiple regions. It’s helped me realize that despite our differences, we are all more alike than we think–that there really is more that unites us than that divides us. That reaching across regional boundaries and disbelieving stereotypes is good for the soul. And for the country. And that as polarized as we are in this country, “e pluribus unum” really is possible. But it starts with us, one at a time.

Our leaders, and our journalists, and social media are united in their efforts to keep us ginned up, angry and hostile toward the “other side.” They’re doing it almost entirely for the ratings, for the money, for the power. They’re posturing; they don’t believe half the things they’re saying, and you shouldn’t either.

Don’t buy it. You’re in the image of God; you’re not a beast. Think for yourself. And reach across the unbreachable boundary. Because they’re in the image of God too.

Photo by Joey Csunyo on Unsplash

One Body

June 10, 2021 by Dan Olinger 3 Comments

This post is going to be a little different. It’s about an experience I had this weekend. I just feel like telling somebody about it.

Every so often I do an internet search on my name, just to see if somebody’s saying something I ought to know about. Some years ago when I did that, I found a web page giving the history of a church. Well, I was interested right away, because I’m interested in churches, and it involved a fellow with my name, and surprisingly, it was a Black church in Hazard, Kentucky.

Apparently back in 1886 a preacher traveled from Virginia over the ridgeline into eastern Kentucky and did some circuit riding, accompanied by a teacher named Dan Olinger. A few years later some of the converts organized a church with 9 charter members, including a guy with my name, who I assume was the same person who had come from Virginia. (Perhaps he came up from Olinger, Virginia?)

Eventually a couple of former slaves gave the church a small piece of land just west of Hazard, up against the side of Town Mountain. The story on the web page stops in the 1990s, when one Dr. John Pray was the pastor. But that story resonates with me, not just because my family name is part of it, but because it tells of a handful of people who had experienced God’s gracious regeneration and who sought to gather regularly for worship in the face of considerable difficulty.

These are my people, in the most significant way possible.

Another family name that shows up repeatedly in the story is Combs. Back when I first encountered the web page, I emailed the address at the bottom of the page and asked about the history. The respondent gave me the name of a member of the Combs family and said, “He knows as much as anybody.” So I emailed him, and we began a brief exchange. My first question was whether the Dan Olinger mentioned in the story was Black. Mr. Combs said he was. I’ll admit to being a little worried at that point; I knew that some of my general line were substantial landowners in the area of Staunton, Virginia, before the Civil War, and I wondered if perhaps they had owned slaves. So I asked, “Do you know where the Black Olingers came from?” Mr. Combs said that he thought there had been an interracial relationship in North Carolina, and that Dan was descended from that.

I don’t know if there was any love involved—we all know that the rape of Black women by white men was not at all uncommon in those days—but it does seem to indicate that the relationship between the white and Black Olingers is biological, not just the legal fiction of a slave taking his owner’s last name.

Hazard isn’t a place you get to by accident; it’s not really on the way to anywhere. So I filed that story away in my memory, thinking, “Boy, I’d sure like to see that place someday.”

This past weekend I was asked to participate in the ordination of a former student in eastern Kentucky, about an hour or so from Hazard. I thought immediately of Town Mountain.

After the ordination service on Sunday morning, I got in the car and headed for Hazard. The trip was complicated by the fact that for most of the drive I had no cell service and thus no GPS; I had to stop at a convenience store and ask directions. (Yes, sometimes we men do that.) But around 2 pm, thanks to directions from a guy with an apricot-sized wad of tobacco in his cheek, I found US 451 heading west out of Hazard, crossed the steel bridge, and saw the road sign: “Dr. John Pray Memorial Highway.” This has to be the right road.

On about the 19^th bend in the road there was a yellow diamond sign: “Church.”

I hadn’t been this excited in a long while.

Rounded the bend, and just past Fred Combs Road (paved) and Olinger Lane (not so much), there she was—a little red-brick church building, with two small white-sided extensions, and a parking lot and picnic area just beyond. She’s snuggled up alongside the road, the drop-off so steep that the entry door is six feet down from the road. Beside the front door is a plaque:

I’ll confess that I was hoping they had scheduled a dinner on the grounds for that day, so someone would be there to talk to. Afraid not. I left a business card and a brief note on the back.

The globe is covered with little groups of believers who gather and worship, who laugh and weep together, who care for one another through hard times, who celebrate weddings and mourn at funerals.

And we are all one. Often biologically, which should be expected in social communities, but more importantly, because we are united in a single body in Christ Jesus.

May it be so for as long as earth endures.

On God’s Ongoing Speech

April 12, 2021 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

The Reformers were well known for their battle-cry, “Sola Scriptura!”—“The Scripture alone!” They were battling the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church that Scripture and tradition—as defined in the statements of the ecumenical councils and the papal encyclicals—were equally authoritative.

I’m a sola scriptura guy too. And so is everybody I work with at my school.

So my students are sometimes surprised when I tell them that the Bible isn’t the only place where God speaks—and that the Bible itself tells us that.

God speaks to us through his Word, most certainly. But he also speaks in other ways.

Theologians have long recognized two classes of revelation: special revelation, or divinely inspired prophecy, which used to happen in different times and different ways (Heb 1.1) but today is confined to his Word (Heb 1.2); and general revelation, or what he shows us through his works—most notably in creation (Ps 19.1ff); in his direction of human affairs, or providence (Dan 2.21); and in human conscience (Gn 1.26-27). God is still speaking today in those ways.

We should note, as we always do when teaching this principle, that general revelation is not authoritative or inerrant in the way special revelation is, because the world and everything in it is broken by sin; what we’re seeing today is not exactly what God created. But the heavens still declare the glory of God, and humans at their worst are able to be informed and moved by what they see all around them.

Paul is a good example of someone putting this to work in ministry. When he’s introducing the gospel to members of a Jewish synagogue in Pisidian Antioch, he references primarily the Scripture, because they know and recognize it. His sermon (Ac 13.14-41) focuses on the metanarrative of Scripture and Jesus’ fulfillment of the messianic prophecies. But shortly later, when he’s addressing pagan Greeks in Athens, he takes an entirely different approach. Rather than quoting the Hebrew Scriptures, which would mean nothing to this audience, he cites their own poets—Epimenides and then Aratus (Ac 17.28)—because anyone in the image of God is eventually going to say something worthwhile. And he argues not from biblical authority but from logic—because even imperfect images of God can be logical.

Throughout history people have found spiritual meaning in the beauties of nature. One of my favorite examples of this, because it’s both observant and deftly rendered, is a poem written by Odell Shepard in 1917. Shepard was a professor of literature at Trinity College in Connecticut and then served a term as Lieutenant Governor. In 1938 he won the Pulitzer prize for biography for his work on Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s father.

“Whence Cometh My Help”

Let me sleep among the shadows of the mountains when I die,
In the murmur of the pines and sliding streams,
Where the long day loiters by
Like a cloud across the sky
And the moon-drenched night is musical with dreams.

Lay me down within a canyon of the mountains, far away,
In a valley filled with dim and rosy light,
Where the flashing rivers play
Out across the golden day
And a noise of many waters brims the night.

Let me lie where glinting rivers ramble down the slanted glade
Under bending alders garrulous and cool,
Where they gather in the shade
To the dazzling, sheer cascade,
Where they plunge and sleep within the pebbled pool.

All the wisdom , all the beauty, I have lived for unaware
Came upon me by the rote of highland rills;
I have seen God walking there
In the solemn soundless air
When the morning wakened wonder in the hills.

I am what the mountains made me of their green and gold and gray,
Of the dawnlight and the moonlight and the foam.
Mighty mothers far away,
Ye who washed my soul in spray,
I am coming, mother mountains, coming home.

When I draw my dreams about me, when I leave the darkling plain
Where my soul forgets to soar and learns to plod,
I shall go back home again
To the kingdoms of the rain,
To the blue purlieus of heaven, nearer God.

Where the rose of dawn blooms earlier across the miles of mist,
Between the tides of sundown and moonrise,
I shall keep a lover’s tryst
With the gold and amethyst,
With the stars for my companions in the skies.

Photo by Steve Carter on Unsplash

On Cultural Understanding, Part 2: The United States

February 18, 2021 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: The World

For all of America’s geographical isolation and reputation for cultural closed-mindedness, I’d suggest that the US has much more cultural diversity than many people realize—diversity from which we all can gain the same benefits enjoyed by multicultural societies in the rest of the world.

I spent the first half my youth in the Pacific Northwest, and the second half in greater Boston. (And when I say “half,” I’m being precise; we headed east 3 days after my 10th birthday.)

At that tender age I was given the pronounced privilege of glimpsing a sample of the cultural diversity of my own country.

The American West is still driven by its frontier past, which includes ranching (“cowboy,” if you will) culture: you herd animals, not people. You don’t tell people what to do; you show them a more efficient way—by example—and you leave them to make the free individual choice to adopt it. Discovery learning at its best.

My Dad, born on the frontier in 1918, always groused at the stanchions and cords set up to direct large crowds through long lines. “Sheep,” he would mutter.

Westerners are more likely to stop and help somebody who’s stranded on the highway. It’s big country out here, and we look out for one another. In many ways this thinking is similar to the hospitality culture of the Ancient (and modern) Near East.

Moving to Boston was an experience. New England is older than the PNW—Washington had been a state for only 80 years when I lived there—and considerably more set in its ways. (The phrase “Boston Brahmin” means something.) People are more taciturn, less likely to run on about their opinions or to listen to yours. My public schools in Newton were considerably more liberal politically than those in the hard-scrabble desert farmland of Eastern Washington. I had a lot to learn.

(An aside—of course we’re in danger of stereotyping here. But there are real and significant distinctions between these cultures, observed and catalogued by serious sociologists.)

I left Boston for college in the South when I was 17 and moved there permanently, as it turned out, at age 27 after my graduate work. Now, in my sixties, I’ve spent nearly 3/4 of my life in the American South. This is a region that, frankly, is held in low esteem by much of the rest of the country, often the target of stereotypes and ridicule, as well as a certain level of distrust that is historically well-founded.

But there are lots of things I like about the region:

Barbecue. And to my friends in California, bless your hearts, you’re not “barbecuing”; you’re grilling. It ain’t barbecue unless you’re usin’ wood and takin’ more than 8 hours.
The way Southerners soften their insults with “bless your heart.”
Biscuits and sausage gravy for breakfast.
Calling other adults “Sir” and “Ma’am,” even when they’re younger than you.
Dinner on the grounds. And persimmon pudding. Preferably simultaneously.
The good people in mill towns like Poe and Zoar and Lockhart. (RIP, Eunice Loudermilk.)
Country roads slicing through the kudzu.
The way everything’s sweeter here–cornbread and potato salad and iced tea.
Tommy’s Country Ham House, which is closing due to Tommy’s imminent retirement, an announcement that has us all reeling.

Our leaders, and our journalists, and social media are united in their efforts to keep us ginned up, angry and hostile toward the “other side.” Don’t buy it. You’re in the image of God; you’re not a sheep. Think for yourself. And reach across the unbreachable boundary.

You won’t be sorry.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

On Sloth

January 14, 2021 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Since my previous post was on doing less and thereby getting enough sleep, I suppose I should balance it to keep folks out of the ditch on the other side of the road.

Life is about stewardship. We’re given abilities and responsibilities by the Lord’s providence, and he holds us accountable for how diligently we carry out those tasks. My assumption in the previous post was that we do better when we have enough sleep; I’ve learned that from long experience, and so, I suspect, have you. Sleeping, then, is a stewardship responsibility, and we should adjust our commitments to allow for enough of it.

But rest and recuperation are not laziness, and the same principle of stewardship is no call for us to lie around doing as little as possible; it calls for us to use our waking hours, which are limited, to the best and most efficient purpose. When we wake up, we should get going—since we’ve gotten enough sleep—and use the day wisely. Maybe that means taking care of other people—little ones, perhaps, or disabled ones—or producing things—shoes or artwork or widgets. Maybe it’s playing a part in a process, through meetings or paperwork or organization. Your mind’s well rested, and you jump in and give it all you’ve got.

Part of stewardship, I suppose, is doing your best to devote yourself to tasks that you’re good at. Some people absolutely thrive on an assembly line; others would go insane working any kind of a regular schedule. Different folks, different strokes. God made us all different, and we really should celebrate all kinds of diversity. (And no, that phrase is not redundant.)

Not everybody can get a job that’s a good match for his skills. Sometimes you just have to take the job you can get. How do you steward that? By diligence, of course—being on time, doing what you’re told, working hard (and if you do those three things, you’re ahead of 90% of the workforce, it seems). By learning all you can about your responsibilities, to make up for lack of natural ability. By finding your joy in God’s empowerment to do well the things that don’t come naturally to you.

Over the years I’ve worked a lot of different jobs—custodial, food service, retail, security, facilities management, writing, publishing (with some marketing and sales along the way), and now teaching. I feel most qualified for what I’m doing now—for which I’m grateful—but I can honestly say that I’ve enjoyed all the jobs I’ve had, and I’ve benefited from all of them beyond just the paycheck.

Our culture has come to view work as something you do to pay for the stuff you really want to do—whether it’s partying on the weekends, or summer vacations, or retirement. That’s a shame. We’re much healthier psychologically when we’re given to a mission, especially one that’s bigger than we are. We’re designed to spend our time making a difference, in ways great and small.

An even worse trend in our culture is to come home from work, fall onto the couch, and watch entertainment for the rest of the night. We’ve conditioned ourselves to sit passively for hours on end, even to the point where we’ll give up sleep for it. How profoundly unhealthy, both physically and spiritually.

When she was in early elementary school, one of my daughters observed that if she watched TV for a long time, she felt sad—she was happier when she was up and about and accomplishing things (though I don’t think she knew the word accomplishing at the time).

She was right; I’m glad she learned that lesson so young.

We’re made to accomplish things—different things, in different ways, certainly, but accomplishments all.

If you haven’t though about that lately, why not sit yourself down and spend a little time thinking about what you’re good at (it’s probably the same as what you love) and how you can invest in that activity for the good of others?

Photo by Stephen Tafra on Unsplash

On Sleep

January 11, 2021 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

Some years ago I decided to adopt a lifestyle that prioritized getting enough sleep. Decades later, I’m more confident every day that it was the right choice.

When you’re a kid, staying up late is an adventure, a chance to live as the grown-ups do. Most parents have entertained themselves by occasionally telling a child that tonight he can stay up as late as he wants, and then watching him drop off to sleep on the couch not long after his regular bedtime.

Eventually, we get old enough to succeed at staying up late. Most high-schoolers will attend a school-sponsored event that lasts all night, perhaps a lock-in with basketball in the school gym and lots of those snacks that will kill you when you’re older. I can clearly recall coming home from one of those around 6 or 7 am and walking wordlessly past my waiting Mom and straight to bed.

In college, and especially grad school, all-nighters are a standard tactic. I took one course in seminary that required a long, detailed expository sermon outline every Friday, and many students had a regular ritual where they’d each check out the maximum allowed number of books from the library and gather in someone’s apartment to pool their resources and clatter away at their typewriters all night long. Sometimes the all-nighters were a consequence of poor time management during the day, but not always. I’ve had students, both undergrad and graduate, who were married, with kids, working full-time jobs and carrying a full academic load, and I don’t know how they did it.

Once we enter into our post-school life, the old habits die hard. Those of us with 8-to-5 jobs still feel like staying up until midnight just because that’s what we do. When children come along, there’s the sleep deprivation that comes from overnight feeding and miscellaneous wakefulness. When that phase of life is over, we stay up to stream TV or movies or lounge through social media.

And we’re tired. We need an alarm clock—maybe several alarm clocks—to get up, and then coffee, and during the workday more coffee, and dozing through those after-lunch meetings.

I decided that that life wasn’t for me.

These days I’m usually in bed by 10 and up by 6, which gives me time in the morning for devotions and ablutions and some time in the office to sort out priorities for the day ahead. That gives me 8 hours a night, and after doing that for a while I find I don’t need an alarm clock, and the fact that I can’t use caffeine doesn’t interfere with my ability to meet my responsibilities. I wake up awake.

I referred to this approach as a “lifestyle.” By that I mean that it involves more than just going to bed earlier. If you want to go to bed earlier, there are some other things that have to happen.

Most obviously, I’ve found that I need to get less busy. And that means taking on fewer responsibilities.

Now, some responsibilities are mandated.

I’m a husband, and I need to spend time with my wife.
I’m a father, and even though my children are now grown and out of the house, I need to interact with them.
I have a job, and the responsibilities there are significant. My classes meet at a certain time, on certain days, and I have to be there, and I have to have something prepared. I’ve seen to it that my job responsibilities can be completed in the normal 40-hour work week, and beyond that I turn down extra responsibilities if I can. I rarely if ever take work home.
Church is not optional. I’m faithful there, and I do more than just attend, but I don’t offer to help with everything. I try to do one thing well, rather than a little bit of everything.

I know that for some people this studied approach to life is simply not possible. Financial or medical or family responsibilities take all the time you have. I experienced that when I was my father’s caregiver for the last 5+ years of his life. I can tell you that those exhausting seasons are temporary.

But for those of you streaming entire seasons of zombies at night and then living as zombies through the day, there’s a better set of priorities.

Photo by Cris Saur on Unsplash

Top Ten

December 30, 2020 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Here at year’s end, it’s customary to list the year’s top ten blog posts. Here are mine:

And here are the top ten for all time:

And here is a list of my personal favorites.

Photo by HENCE THE BOOM on Unsplash

On Thanksgiving

November 26, 2020 by Dan Olinger

Here’s my annual Thanksgiving post.

Even in tumultuous times, we have much to be thankful for.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Why Putting Bullets in the Stove Is a Bad Idea

November 9, 2020 by Dan Olinger 3 Comments

Every so often I take a post here to share a personal story I find entertaining. This seems like a good time to lighten the mood a bit.

This story actually isn’t about me; it’s about my Dad.

Dad grew up on the frontier, in primitive conditions. His father homesteaded just up the Lemhi valley from Salmon, Idaho, on Sandy Creek, just a couple of miles down from the Continental Divide. They eventually lost the farm and ended up sharecropping on another piece of land nearby (the “Kadletz ranch,” as he referred to it). When that wasn’t all that successful either, they ended up in town (Salmon), in a small house with one of those desk-sized woodburning stoves that functioned as a combined furnace, stovetop, and oven—you know, the ones with those circular “burners” that you could lift up by hooking with a handle, to see how the fire was doing underneath. A stovepipe came out of the top and angled out through the wall.

Charlie and Minnie (Agee) Olinger on the Sandy Creek homestead, about 1920.

Dad was the second-youngest of 11 kids. Most of the older ones were on their own by this time, and his mother had died several years before. As a result, he was often left alone in the house to entertain himself.

One day he discovered, over in the corner, a coffee can full of ammunition—miscellaneous rounds for miscellaneous firearms. It occurred to him that it might be fun to drop a .22 short into the stove, by, you know, lifting up the circular burner thing with the hooked handle.

He did.

And after a few suspenseful seconds, he was rewarded with a “pop!” and the sound of the slug ricocheting around inside the stove.

In retrospect, he showed remarkable self-restraint for a 12-year-old. I’d have emptied the whole can that day. But he decided that every day, as a special treat, he’d drop another round in the stove after his Dad left.

Time passed.

And as he got down toward the bottom of the can, he found a rifle shell. I don’t know exactly what it was, of course, but probably something along the lines of a .30-06, with, you know, a more serious gunpowder charge and a pointed slug.

This’ll be fun, he thought.

The next morning he managed to contain his excitement through breakfast, waiting for his Dad to leave the house. When he (finally!) did, Dad rushed over to the can in the corner, grabbed the rifle round, ran to the stove, lifted the circular burner thingy with the hooked handle thingy, dropped in the round, and stood back to see what would happen.

At that moment his Dad came back into the house. Apparently he’d forgotten something.

It was a cold day, and his Dad walked over to the stove to warm his hands, then turned around to get some BTUs on his behind, when

Ka-BLAM!

The round went off. The little circular burner thingies went cartwheeling across the room in random directions. The stovepipe came out of the wall. The room filled with smoke and soot.

And my grandfather—whom, incidentally, I never met—spun around and said something I can’t in good conscience report here, but which could be loosely paraphrased as “Well, what do you suppose might be the matter with the stove, eh?”

In the split second before H-hour, he had noticed that his 12-year-old son was in the corner, hunkered down, as though he suspected there might be something about to happen.

The stove wasn’t the only warm thing in the house that day.

For years I thought this had happened when Dad was around 3 or 4. Toward the end of Dad’s life, we were talking about it, and he said, no, he was actually about 12 at the time.

I said, “You were old enough to know better!”

He said, “Seems to me Dad said something to that effect at the time.”

Apply this true little parable any way you like.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

On Retreating

September 21, 2020 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

I’ve just returned from the annual BJU Seminary retreat at The WILDS in North Carolina. The event made several impressions on me, all of them positive:

I drove one of the vans up, carrying 7 students, both graduate and undergrad. As it happened, mine was the “late van,” leaving well after the main vehicle surge, to enable students with late commitments to attend. The van was filled with chatter and laughter as the students interacted as friends and colleagues in this adventure called school. They know they’re having a good time, but they probably don’t realize to what extent these experiences, and especially the relationships and interactions, are formative, changing them in ways that will endure for decades. We have serious conversations as well, about doctrine and ministry and the questions that most young people in this stage of life wrestle with. If Jesus tarries, I’m confident that this generation will carry well the load that their times place on them. I’m especially sure of that when I recall that my generation grew up in the 60s, when our parents had every reason to despair of the future—the times, they were indeed a-changin’—and by God’s grace we carried our load as well.

The WILDS is a remarkable resource. It’s designed for its purpose—to enable fellowship with one another and with God—and it’s run by people who are committed to that purpose, who are competent, and who are as selfless as any I’ve ever met. Every time I go there I see some other activity or facility set up, ready to increase the overall strength of the program and reinforce the mission. I have lots of memories there—the record for terminal velocity hitting the post at the bottom of the land trolley is one that I’m particularly proud of—and all of them tied directly to experiences with God and with his people in ways that have influenced my thinking and direction in life. They have been an unmitigated blessing to me.

The Seminary is a grace-filled institution, with faculty who combine solid biblical scholarship with whole-hearted devotion. It’s good to see that balance maintained in the fifth decade after I studied there.

General revelation is indeed revelation. Every camp ministry knows that when you get people out into nature, their thoughts tend to turn Godward. All our senses are bombarded with evidence of the Creator’s greatness and goodness—the sights, the sounds, the smells, the tastes, the textures all draw us back to our roots in him, to his ample and rich provision for us as inhabitants of this planet, and to the wonder of what he has done in creating a world at once complex, beautiful, and calming. In the artful words of Odell Shepard,

All the wisdom, all the beauty, I have lived for unaware
Came upon me by the rote of highland rills;
I have seen God walking there
In the solemn soundless air,
When the morning wakened wonder in the hills.

But these beauties are not gods. They are rather gifts from the One True God, to be delighted in, but not to satisfy apart from him. As we were reminded in the sessions by our former colleague Dr. Robert Vincent, Christ is all, and he is more than enough. To delight in his gifts, but to have no meaningful relationship with him, is to miss the whole point. To delight in him is to be fulfilled in the only ways that matter. By a kind providence, my personal Bible study during August and September is in Colossians, where Bob’s point this past weekend is precisely Paul’s point. We are offered many substitutes for Christ—the Colossians were offered angels—but he is before all, above all, over all, and he is Enough.

What a gift of 26 hours filled with reminders of God’s goodness and greatness. The surroundings, the people, the shared experiences, the worship, the time with God, all serve together to draw us to him, to extract our thanks, to strengthen us for the tasks that lie ahead.

God is great, and God is good.

Let us thank him.

Photo by Wes Grant on Unsplash