Post number one

I’ve lived a while.  Not a particularly dramatic life, but a good one.  A life a little easily swayed towards the convenient, the default.  I’m currently planning a class on hermeneutics for church (oooh!  big word!).  Not because I am an expert, but because I’m not.  It’s hard to win a “discussion” about personal beliefs when I can’t back them up appropriately.  So… since “looking stuff up” has never been a problem for me, I’m starting a class on the subject.  And this has led me to thoughtful books, which I am enjoying reading.  And one of them had an opening comment.

“You cannot study the Bible without writing something down.”  Warren, Bible Study Methods.

Of course I can’t.  I make my students write things down.  I need to as well.  It forces me to organize, to record, to think about coherence.  All kinds of good things.

Eugene Peterson writes in “Eat This Book:”

Contemplation means living what we read, not wasting any of it or hoarding any of it, but using it up in living.  It is life formed by God’s revealing word, God’s word read and heard, meditated and prayed.  The contemplative life is not a special kind of life; it is the Christian life, nothing more but also nothing less.  But lived.

And so I begin.