Chris Garneau - Fireflies

Found this video via fork/knife. It succeeds in being hilarious and disturbing at the same time. Check it out! The artist is Chris Garneau.

Mumford & Sons - Sigh No More

Meet Mumford & Sons. Sorry, this isn't much of a video, but the song is great so I just want you to hear it. It has a great feel and the banjo player is wailing. Cheers! "Man is a giddy thing!"

Sovereignty II.I

It reminds me of this saying I saw on the wall of this substance treatment facility I used to work in. It goes like this:

“Please do not feel personally, totally, irrevocably responsible for everything. That’s my job.”

-God

That was revolutionary for me. A lot of times we go around thinking our lives are our responsibility, but if God set this whole thing into motion, ultimately, everything that happens is his to own.

Sovereignty II

More about God's "sovereignty" (which is a fancy way of saying that God is in control of everything; it means different things to different people, depending on how they think God exerts his control)...

I was thinking the other day that God might actually be more involved in my life than I thought. I think before I had this belief that God was only involved sometimes, like when I begged him to be, or when he needed to swoop in and save me from my own awful mess, or when he came in just to give me a brief consult on how to not make everything go in the crapper.

Partly because this is the way I tend to act with other people. I tend to be pretty laissez-faire. I kind of just let things go and don't act until I absolutely have to. But God is probably a little more involved than that. He's not your dad sitting on the couch watching football until you scream loud enough to get his attention. In fact, he's probably right there with you, watching what's going on in your life, focused on what you're thinking and feeling about things, but not being overly controlling...

This has changed things for me. It reminded me that this whole thing we got going on here is God's project - it's his thing. It was his idea. We are just small players working with and for him. God is including us on his thing.

Movement (Sovereignty I)

Maybe this is the wrong way to go about landing on a belief about God, but I was thinking about how I want God to be. And I was thinking about what I would want in a dad. I think a good dad has to be flexible. There is not a prescribed set of behaviors that "works" every time when dealing with your children, or anyone for that matter. You have to be willing to experiment and change what you do in any given situation. It's hard work, but it's real.

People like to go off about how they think God works - you know like "God is doing this and that in my life," and I don't know about you, but to me it makes it seem like they understand how God works every time. I just think it's hard to know what God is doing sometimes. Sometimes God is present. Sometimes he is not. Sometimes he is making things happen. Sometimes he is sitting back and waiting. Sometimes he is speaking very directly. Sometimes he is letting us figure stuff out on our own.

That's because God is personal. He's the best example of what a person should be like, so wouldn't it make sense that he would be flexible and move? If there is a prescribed set of behaviors to which he must adhere, he is no longer a personal being and we no longer have to trust him - we already know what he is going to do.

(More on sovereignty coming in the next few posts.)