Job; joeb

This weekend I have started and almost finished (am just finishing in the next hour) to read the book of Job. It's a short book, only 42 chapters. I encourage you to take a day or two and read it, then lets talk about it. Alright?

Drops Like Stars

Quotes and Thoughts from Rob Bell's new book, Drops Like Stars

"In 1941, in a village in nazi-controlled polard, a young man came home to discover that his father had died while he was at work. what made his father's death exceedingly more unbearable was that several years earlier, both this young man's sister and mother had died. As he held his father's dead body in his arms, he lamented, "I'm all alone. At twenty, I've lost all the people I've loved"
One writer described it like this: "ripped out of the soil of his background, his life could no longer be what it used to be. He now began a journey to deeper communion with God. But it didn't come without tears, and it didn't come without what seems to have been a certain existential horror." Suffering can do that to us. We've jolted kicked, prodded, and shoved into new realities we never would have brought about on our own. We're forced to imagine a new future because the one we were planning on is gone. The key word here is, of course, "imagine." That young polish man sitting on the floor with his dead father in his arms was having all his boxes smashed to pieces. "His life could no longer be what it used to be."
That young polish man? His name was Karol Jozel Wojtyla, but later in life he was known as Pope John Paul II."

The first Christians insisted that Jesus died on the cross,

this wasn't just another execution by the Roman Empire.

They believed this was the divine, in flesh and blood, hanging there on the cross, bloody, thirsty, suffering.

A god who is not somewhere else - remote, detached, distant - but among us, feeling what we feel, aching how we ache, suffering like us.

"God came into the world and screamed alongside us. Interesting idea, that"

Perhaps that's why people across the religious spectrum, for thousands of years, continue to identify with the cross. It speaks to our longing to know that we're not alone, that there's someone else "screaming along side us"

Is the cross God's way of saying, "I know how you feel?"

Basically, this book is a Nooma film turned into a book. It's awesome.

I cried yesterday

I just couldn't fall asleep, but I felt a real urge to turn off my music and watch a nooma video. The one I felt appropriate was #5, titled Noise.

While watching it I just started to cry, I know why now too. It's funny how things become quite obvious to us once they are pointed out.