She's Back from South Africa

 

Oldest daughter returned to us on Sunday evening, itching from bed bugs bites. She loved and she hated it at the children’s home, which is, I suppose, the way it is with all things like that.

 

It was exhausting and difficult work. Constant crying, she says, from morning to night, because there were not enough people volunteering to work over the weeks around Christmas. That’s one of the parts she hated.

 

And there is a fair bit of corruption, locally, that shows up in things like portable jungle gyms appearing before a dignitary’s visit and disappearing two hours after he left. That’s another part to hate.

 

But then,  she got to hang around with cute kids like the one above and feel needed by them. And that’s where the loved it came in.

Which is the first commandment?

The first commandment is, Thou shall have no other gods before me.[1]

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Book Review: The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment

by Tim Challies.

Let’s cut right to the chase from the start: This is a very good book.

It’s a good book, first of all, because it’s a needed book. If you’ve been paying attention to what’s going on around you, you’ve probably noticed that there are a whole lot of conflicting ideas out there all claiming to be God’s truth. I don’t know if I can say that there are more varied ideas than there ever were—how would I know?—but I do know that more of them show up on my radar screen than did in the good old days before I had cable TV and internet access, when I managed to live my life mostly oblivious to the constantly changing trends in evangelicalism.

That I am constantly bombarded by different ideas, all demanding that I embrace them in order to be more in tune to the real truth, means that I am constantly called on to make judgments about the correctness of concepts or practices. And I’m betting my experience isn’t much different than the experience of most of us who claim to be Christians. Real life in the real world calls for frequent evaluations as to truth or error, and right or wrong. In other words, every single one of us needs to be discerning in regards to all sorts of things all the time.

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