China

My parents just came back from China where they were overseeing a medical aid effort to provide heart surgery for impoverished children with congenital heart disease. The children live in the barren wasteland of Qin’an County, Gansu, China where food is a luxury. They live in literal shacks with no running water. There are no farm animals, just dust and crabgrass. The daily diet is composed potatoes which may or may not grow throughout the year. Recently a number of children were sponsored by my family’s foundation to receive heart surgery to fix their congenital heart defects. In one case, a young girl was chosen and due to her failing condition, her mother had to carry her 3 hours to the bus station on her back. Then the two of them then took a series of trains and buses to reach the hospital. After the operation was over, the only thing the mother had to give the child to eat was some poorly kneaded mantou (buns) which she had dried ahead of time for the journey. Before feeding it to her recovering child she first had to dip the buns in water to make them soft enough for her daughter to eat. If anyone of you have had a mantou you know it’s void of nutrition, dry, and relatively tasteless, but it’s the best they had. After the operation these families usually have spent all of their life’s savings on the journey, and no longer have the money to pay their way home. It’s a heartbreaking situation. I wanted to share this with you guys, because it’s such a reality check for us. Listening to my dad tell the story of these impoverished families reminds me that 95% of my life is luxury.

A brief series of Thoughts concerning Sin and Sacrifice

Thought 1. Sin is a tremendous problem.  Its effect upon our souls is infinitely severe.

Thought 2. For a problem of infinite severity you must either have infinitely numerous solutions each with limited effect OR a single solution with infinite effect.

Thought 3. In the Old Testament, under the Mosaic Law, Israel sought to propitiate their sins by means of numerous sacrifices of limited effect, year after year.  But even after many thousands of years, the vast number of sacrifices could no less touch infinity than when they first began.  So even though the sacrifices were of valid effect, they could never fill the boundless void of Sin’s cost.

Thought 4. The boundless cost of Sin, is satisfied by the boundless worth of God. Christ was this boundless worth clothed with humanity.  For there contained in one Man, was the infinity that all men could never attain.  With a single sacrifice of unlimited effect, The God Man paid the infinite price for our Sin.

EDIT: And that explains how sacrifices can be effectual while also being insufficient.

A diet of music

This will not be a long post.  But I was thinking about this in the car today as I drove home from work.  I was listening to a great song by Phil Wickham called “You’re Beautiful.”  I enjoyed it much.  Not merely because of the musical sensibilities that were so similar to my own, but also because of the substantial content and the theologically charged images it provoked.  Listening to that song was good for me.  Good for my soul and for my mind. Which started me thinking, if my ipod could be likened to a refridgerator filled with eats, what kind of food was mine filled with?  And I concluded that my music diet was composed of 60% candy (cool sounding stuff, ie ear candy),  10% alcohol (emotional sap music that makes you unstable after too much) , 15% water (marginally beneficial ccm and secular but christian sounding mainstream alternative/pop)  and  15% real food (theologically substantial and emotionally healthy music or classical compositions).  Now just as what is found in your fridge doesn’t always equate to your actual diet, neither does the distribution of music in my ipod.  If I was to equate the actual amount of time I listened to music with what I ate the most in this wonderful illustration, I would basically be eating candy all day, with the occasional shot of veggies and meat.

I thought that was interesting.  No conclusions. just a note.