Wilderness Wonderings...

While I enjoy writing very much, I also enjoy reading.  In fact, my love for writing has probably grown out of my love for reading.  The two are closely related, and I believe the research will bear out the relationship—those who read more will tend to be better writers; when you find a good writer, you can almost bet he or she is a reader.  So, I thought I’d bring it all together here and write some about what I’m reading! Eco has long been a noted author, know best in our part of the world for novels such as The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum .  In this particular work, Experiences in Translation , Eco talks about the difficulties of translation, using his own works in large measure to show us that the process of translation is a difficult, multi-layered task.  I first became aware of Eco’s interest in this area of writing when I saw his work in Mexico – Decir casi lo mismo… because that is what translation ends up being—saying almost the same th...

When we lived in Santa Catarina, Nuevo León, Mexico, we were blessed to have a large sports park about two blocks from our home. Most mornings, you would find me there early walking around that park—exercising and having my “quiet time.” On that hard packed dirt path each morning, I would walk super fast, almost to the point of running, doing what I could to maintain my physical health. What any on-looker would not see was that I was also working on my spiritual health--talking to the Lord, running by Him all that I had thought about, things I had read in the Scriptures, sermons I had heard from pastors, and things I had read in books. That time was so important as I made sense of the world, of my life and ministry, and I as strived to understand our God as best as I could. On one morning, back in September 2009, I had been wrestling especially hard to reconcile some things that I was encountering in the church we attended with some passages of Scripture that “had hold of me and would...

  When my wife laid out the question in the middle of our lunch-time discussion last week, I knew that it grew out of our own frustrations…and gave voice to the frustrations and earnest desires of many, many more.  When we sit in church and hear the preacher…then we listen to various and sometimes competing messages of contemporary Christian music on the radio…and finally we sit with our Bibles in hand, we can at times come away asking that very question—”Okay, so what does God REALLY want from me?  What does He REALLY expect of me??” The question—at least in our conversation—was centered on what the Christian life should look like.  What should our lives look like on a day-to-day basis??  How does God expect us to live??  All too often, we seem to receive these convoluted, complex designs for Christian life.  Some of the recipes for faithful Christian living call the ‘faithful’ to a life of incessant religious work—at the church every time the doo...

Well, a new year is upon us...2012. I can hardly wrap my mind around the idea that we are already in 2012. When I was a child, I recall seeing, reading articles that predicted what future life would be like. I even remember that show, Space 1999. The idea was that we would be avid space travelers by the turn of the century. Another article I recall from National Geographic proposed that we would have holiday resorts on the Moon...with hotels and shopping malls there. Obviously, none of that has come to pass...and I'm not too disappointed. In fact, it's probably a good thing we're not spreading our tainted humanity around the universe.... But, that is really neither here nor there...not the purpose of this small bit of prose. Here, I simply want to think a bit on the newness that a New Year brings to me, to many. A new year means a chance to start anew...to start over...to get a do-over. Of course, we cannot undo what we've done in the past, cannot escape the...