Stuff Michael Meeks is doing
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This is my (in)activity log. You might like to visit
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- Up earlyish, bid 'bye to G. & S. and
off to NCC. Derek preaching on Sin - If you want
a talk on plumbing - ask a plumber, if you want a talk
on swimming - ask a swimmer ... - and so they asked me to
talk on sin. Rather droll, quite interesting.
- Back home with Ryan for lunch - just back from
Belgium on exercise. Great to catch up with him, apparently
one of the young Lieutenants had temporarily liberated all
his underwear while his flight bag was in the hall; poor
old Ryan.
- Ryan re-convinced me that the US foreign policy
is fundamentally isolationist, 'foreign' to the average US
citizen being in the next state. Interesting to talk politics.
- A rather good sermon on 'Love' - from the famous
1 Corinthians 13 by Gordon:
- The passage breaks down into the necessity,
character and permanance of love. Despite almost everyone's professed
desire to love and be loved, it's celebration in the arts etc. most of
us hardly have a clue what love is. We think of love as something that
you 'fall into' or 'fall out of' and (by the way - if you fall out of it
you can't fall back into it - or so we're told). Or we think of love
as something you 'make' not infrequently with someone you barely know.
And even if we have a firmer grasp on it's true nature, very honestly
most of the time we're not putting it into practice.
- Despite the attention society gives to 'love'
we seem to be utterly blind to our failure to love. The introduction
to Fromm's The Art of Loving - not how to become more lovable,
nor how to find a more worthy object of love; the problem is with you
not with your workmates, boss, wife/husband.
- We suppose it's perfectly easy to love, the only
difficulty is finding the right person; a 30yr old leaving Park-Street
having 'scoped out all the eligable men' - all deficient in some way,
amazing having 450 people, majority single in that age range; a picture
of our situation.
- A 1977 survey of high-school seniors in SAT tests,
~1million high school students were asked to evaluate themselves vs.
their peers. wrt. Athletics < 10% rated themselves as below average,
same with 'Leadership ability' - the most astounding feedback on 'the
ability to get along with others' [how great are you as a lover] - 829k
students answered, not one rated themselves below average - not even by
mistake. 15% rated themselves average, 60% in the top 10%, and 25% rated
as in the top 1%. Everyone assumes if there is a problem - it's got to
be the other guy. It can't be so:
Psalm 36
... for in his own eyes he flatters himself too much to detect, much
less hate, his own sin.
- Very few at church troubled by their inadequate
ability to love others - 1 Cor 13 a call to wake up; our desparate
need to love the people we already know more.
- If I speak in the tongues[1] of men and of angels,
but have not love ... - the necessity of love; Jesus when asked to
prune back the law:
Matthew 22 - "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?"
Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all
your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it:
'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets
hang on these two commandments." - If God had just told us to
'love each other' at Sinai, we would have deluded ourselves that we
were doing that - so God teases it out into the law, with explanations
of what Love is, what it's got to look like.
- The radical claim is - without love, nothing else matters,
closing Corinthians
15v14 - Do everything in love. Some scholars with
(apparently) nothing better to do suggest this chapter doesn't belong here;
but - in context the whole point is that the spiritual gifts are about love,
and to be used with love. The gifts are not about you, but about each other
- for the common good. 14v1
Make love your aim and so earnestly desire the greater gifts.
- It's true Chapter 13 - is not in the middle of teaching
about Weddings - although that's where we frequently hear it. The examples
about indispensibility are all spiritual gifts. Speaking in tongues
could have been speaking with eruditon, glib words etc. but if
not spoken in love - it all amounts to nothing.
- Augustine's besetting sin was an
irrepressible tendancy to correct other people wrt. their
pronunciation or grammar; he cared less about what they said
but how they said it. For us the love of learning can
become a lethal substitute for the love of others.
- C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man
of the academic - "It is not excess of thought but defect of
fertile and generous emotion, that marks many intellectuals
out. Their heads are no bigger than ordinary; it is just the
atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so."
- The true test of knowledge is that it
feeds your love of your fellow creatures; Not to throw away
knowledge but invigorate it's persuit with love.
- It's not what you do, if I give all I
posses to the poor - but you have to have love; in
affection and deep care, preferring other's interests to
our own.
- Love is: 'Patient', 'Kind' - passive
and active; of which the following 8 negative characteristics
are just expressions, outworkings of that.
- 'I slept like a baby' - said by folks who
have never had a baby. Gordon went for 6 years without a
single night's uninterrupted sleep; the problem not to avoid
being rude, but patience. You need patient love faced with
cholic, inconsolable crying etc. At the end of life; celebrating
a 50th wedding aniversary - wedding bliss for 1/2 a centuary, often
if you know the couple well enough - what is most needed is a
love that's patient, one finds a surprising prickliness /
irritability about minor things.
- Patience - resliance, so we don't get
unhinged by every little mishap.
Prov 19:11 A man's wisdom gives him patience, it is to
his glory to overlook an offence - a love that covers a
multitude of sins;
- Don't mis-construe patience as an invitation
to apathy; God has been patient with us, we should be patient
with others. It's not permission for bystander apathy. God cares
deeply about our lives, but gives us space to repent. Old
translations render 'patience' - 'suffers long', do we love in
a long-suffering, patient way.
- Very challenging indeed; how foolish and impatient I am.
- Bed early.
My content in this blog and associated images / data under
images/ and data/ directories are (usually)
created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under
the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0
license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for
themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes /
improvements / corrections by private mail.
In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my
own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE,
Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International),
or anyone else.
It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy.
Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences
or fun.
Michael Meeks (michael.meeks@collabora.com)
