Jonny Heart: The Summer

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

The Summer

“The summer always seems to go rather quickly,” people always say; it just flies by. Currently I reside in Tampa Florida with a nice family who has taken me in for the next 9 weeks. I am working at a small recovering church recently renamed Discovery Christian Church in hopes to lay down a brighter future in spite of the strenuous past. I am not sure what to expect from this summer, what lessons to learn, what about ministry I need to understand but I hope that God can use me and let me grow. Things never seem to happen as I plan them and if they do then great. This summer I live away from my home, my family, my friends, and my normal everyday life. What will happen? I do not know but I expect great things.

Moses never had things go the way he would have planned them. He grew up under the care of the pharaoh escaping the slaughtering of the innocence, a Hebrew amongst Egyptians, living as an Egyptian. Then around the age of 40, kills a guard for attacking a Hebrew and fleeing into the desert to escape retribution. There he becomes a lowly shepherd tending to sheep and marries a local girl. Then does that for another 40 years until a burning bush begins to talk. Commissioned by God he returns to his “home” land and demands his people be let go. Only After devastating Egypt with ten plagues and at the death of Pharaoh’s own son does Ramesses II (Pharaoh) relinquish his assertion over the slaves. God used Moses to accomplish greatness for his predestined people.

I sometimes wonder what could possibly happen this summer, what I might learn, who I could meet. When will I come across the next burning bush? God used the unexpected to change the course of history. Only he knows whom he will use next. This summer I look forward to the unexpected, when I find it, I will look for greatness. Right now I am just expecting a summer job but who knows what God could do with a college student, a staff of three, and a small congregation.

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Quotes from my Senior Patron

-Clive Staples Lewis-

"The Love of knowledge is a kind of madness."

The Problem of Pain

"We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which he will not be satisfied until it has a certain character."

Mere Christianity - (Pg. 31)

"This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies."

The Problem of Pain - C.S. Lewis (Pg. 31)

"What would really satisfy us would be a God who said anything we happened to like doing, what does it matter so long as they are contented? We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven - a senile benevolence who, as they say, liked to see young people enjoying themselves, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, a good time was had by all."

"If we wish to be rational, not now and then, but constantly, we must pray for the fit of faith, for the power to go on believing not in the teeth of reason but in the teeth of lust and terror and jealousy and boredom and indifference that which reason, authority, or experience, or all three, have once delivered to us for truth."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 139-140)

"It is not reason that takes away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other... Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your ganging moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know by experience..."

A Grief Observed - (P.g. 9-10)

"I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.' That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 7)

"It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 32)

"In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth-only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did the same about religion."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 56-57)

"Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something mush harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person-and he would not need it."