Friday night Ceil and I split a chicken entrepreneur from Moxie Burger.
Saturday I watched some of the Tech game. Poorly coached. Undisciplined. Among the national leaders in most penalties. A foul on almost every play. Not a rambling wreck, but a train wreck.
Saturday night: chili.
At work people are starting to get super careful again, like back in April careful. Outside salespeople have pretty much been pulled back off the road. No Christmas parties or dinners. Shoot at my hair cutting place everyone wears masks.
Guy from small group is having outpatient surgery next week. Friday he got tested as a precaution, so he can’t come to small group next week. Thursday night someone was in our regular meeting room, so we found an even bigger classroom with four tables, one in each corner of the room. Each of us sat behind one table, even further spaced than we’d been in the past. I almost took a picture. After getting back from South Carolina the small group has been the once place I’ve gone. Kroger once, and a couple of drive thrus. Supposed to meet up tonight to pray for our missionary friends, but we’re going to do that via the computer.
Christmas cards: I suppose in this day and age the cards we’ll be receiving will be getting less and less Christian. The cards companies are making will be more and more secular. I’ve discussed my family card with Anna, but left most of it up to her.
Many years after Christmas I would take all the cards we’d received that year and put them in this piece of furniture in our foyer. From time to time I’d see them there.
Denison: we can do more together than we can apart. Safety in a pandemic depends on keeping each other safe. The same is true of nearly every dimension of life, from driving a car, to bridging partisan divides, to engaging in social media—when we work with each other for each other, everyone benefits. However, mutual interconnectedness directly contradicts the self-centeredness that is central to Western culture. As Denison noted yesterday, our society has insisted that life centers on the individual. From religion to politics to economics, I filter the world through a lens that focuses on what is best for me. You do the same. It's the way we are socialized to think.
Writing for the Public Discourse, biblical scholar Carl R. Trueman notes: "The notions that human flourishing is found primarily in an inner sense of well-being. Authenticity is found in being able to act outwardly as one feels inwardly. Who we are is a matter of personal choice not external imposition, are intuitions we all share." Building on this individualism, secularism has demoted "the notion of transcendent human nature" and rendered our purpose as "the attaining of personal psychological happiness in whatever form happens to work for the individual concerned." Marxist thinkers convinced many that we must reject the social conformity imposed by traditional family structures, and embrace sexual liberation in any and all its expressions.
We are told that unless we affirm each person's individual choices, we are denying their sense of self. Freedom of speech and freedom of religion must be subsumed to this pathological "new normal." Trueman accurately forecasts a future rife with fragmentation. "Only by modeling true community, oriented toward God, can the church show a rapidly destabilizing world of expressive individuals that there is something greater, more solid, and more lasting than the immediate satisfaction of personal desires." In other words, whether we are confronting coronavirus, responding to political divisions, or offering an alternative to the radical existentialism of our day, we are best when we are together.
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