The ‘Mundaneness’ of the Divine

I strongly suspect that one reason folks either don’t submit their lives to Christ or fall away is because it is boring.

Yeah, that’s a provocative statement. Hang with me for a minute, though. After every spiritual ‘high,’ daily life has a nasty way of rearing its, well, daily head. It’s routine, it’s boring, it’s mundane, it’s a distraction from the glory of the resurrection. It’s trials, it’s pain, it’s frustrations, it’s carnal, it’s ordinary.

When we read about the abundant life, we expect flowers blooming in our footsteps, angels singing as we pass, the feeling of Christ’s closeness uplifting us and constraining us from our natural selves, and in that freedom from falling to temptation, we will draw people to the Gospel like a lodestone.

Hah.

Adventageous

Today was the first Sunday in Advent, which is the period defined by the four Sundays before Christmas. While the Advent season itself is not prescribed by Scripture, the concept is very much so. Advent is a time for preparing ourselves for the upcoming celebration of Christ’s birth and all it represents.

Throughout Scripture and life there are times of preparation dictated for momentous events. In Scripture, there are only two days in the week that are given names, the Sabbath, and the Day of Preparation, which is the day before the Sabbath where the people were to make all necessary preparations for food and chores that would not be done on the Sabbath.

The Church and Sex

A friend posted the following link on the ubiquitous facebook:  “$28-Billion-Crime: New film shows the dark connection between sex addiction and sex trafficking.” I had to really think through whether and how to cover this deep of a subject without diluting it by overhype or platitudes. The topic of sex and sexual sin is both over- and under-exposed in the Church. Because the topic seems so private, it can be hard to realize the global implications of one’s personal choices.

C.S. Lewis put the topic of lust and pornography in his typically unique way by comparing it to gluttony. He described both hunger and the sex drive as natural God-given aspects of being corporeally human, yet, we would think it quite odd for someone to drop a coin in a machine to have pictures of a roast turkey or ice cream or pizza pop up in a titillating fashion for a few seconds before disappearing until the arrival of the next coin. Such a person would rightly be viewed as mentally unstable or not quite right in the head, needing professional help. Why would we consider porn any different?