Wheat and Chaff

This is one of the funniest things I've read in a long time. Excerpt:

BMc: I thought I was the one being interviewed. Aren’t you sort of inverting the whole reason we got together?

DC: Yeah, but so what? You’re pomo, you figure it out. Let’s transgress the conventions of interviewing. Or do you believe in some ‘Form of the Interview’ that we must conform to?

BMc: It just seems odd…and perhaps that you lured me here under false pretenses if you’re going to not ask me questions.

DC: I was asking you questions and you interrupted me as I was building up to my big question about your contradiction. You interrupted and said you didn’t want me painting you in a corner and then asked me why I wanted to engage in this sort of silliness. So I’m answering. Now you’re bitching that I’m answering.

BMc: It was rhetorical.

DC: So you don’t really want to engage in a real conversation.

Fantastic! Poking fun at the Postmodernist Christian movement (er, conversation).
See part I too.

Great post from Rusty about the tendency in modern evangelicalism to focus on Jesus exclusively in worship today. This is a fascinating insight. Being in a little bit different worship tradition than a lot of other folks in the Christian world today, I don't tend to see these things, so I appreciate the perspective here.

I'd argue that if we worship Jesus to the exclusion of the other two persons of the Trinity, then we're not even really worshiping Jesus. How can we worship the Son without knowing the Father who sends Him? And Jesus said Himself that He must go away, so that the Holy Spirit can come. How do we know Jesus except by the Spirit?

Rusty asks,

What is it about our culture, here in America, that motivates us to emphasize a personal relationship with this Jesus who loves us? Do we tend to overemphasize this aspect and, as a result, the person of Jesus in our worship?

Perhaps our fear of actually dealing with the real God makes dealing with the man Jesus appealing? Perhaps by cutting off two persons of the Trinity, I'm really cutting off all three, and thinking really of Jesus only as a man, and therefore creating a relationship that I can control?

Perhaps our un-confronted rebellion makes us hesitant to accept the need to submit ourselves to the judge and king, and so this romanticized, feminized relationship is appealing for its nonthreatening nature?

We had our baby. Today was actually the due date, but we had Titus Carroll Powell four weeks ago, by emergency c-section. He was six pounds, five ounces, and so his prematurity was not really a problem. Andrea is recovering nicely from her c-section, though she still can't lift much and has to be careful how she moves.

Thanks for all of your prayers. It was a tough month or so before she was born, but everything has turned out great. God has been gracious to us.

Last night, I attacked my daughter Katie.

She sometimes comes in the middle of the night to get in bed with us. And last night, I woke up in the middle of who knows what dream, thinking that some pint-sized imp was trying to climb into bed with us, and in terror, I pushed her over.

Poor Katie. She cried and cried. I said to Andrea, "It was trying to get us." Once I figured it out, I was appalled, and hugged poor Katie until we were friends again. She was unhurt, you'll be glad to hear.

Andrea said she was just glad I didn't repeat my performance when I dragon-kicked the floor fan in the middle of the night.

As my close friends and enemies will both tell you, I'm not exactly an animal person. I am opposed to animals in the house as a general rule. I believe that one of the purposes of thousands of years of civilization was to keep the animals away from us. I regard other people's pets with indifference at best. St. Francis I am not.

But I don't actively pursue cruelty to animals, either. "The righteous man regards the life of his beast", the Proverbs tell us. And so I find myself disturbed at a rather alarming trend in my life, that of roadkill.

Now I've ran over my fair share of animals in my day. I put about 3-400 highway miles a week on my car, and it only takes about that week for my car to develop a fine patina of dead bugs. I've killed so many bugs with my car, I feel like I could have wiped out whole subspecies. I have hit a lot of mice and squirrels, and I ran over a pretty big jackrabbit a while back (the rabbits all seem to stare at me now). This morning, I went out to the car and was extremely disturbed to see an entire actual bird in the grill of my car.

So I was already a little bit rattled when I drove down to Rocky Ford on some church business tonight. There was a thunderstorm out, and the wet must have brought the animals out, because I think I hit six mice on the road on the trip. And on the way back, I hit a raccoon.

Stephen King once wrote a horror story about huge vicious rats, but he really needn't have billed it as a horror story, because such things exist, and they're called raccoons. This 'coon was right in the middle of my lane, and I followed my well-honed instinct to never swerve to miss an animal on a rainy night while driving 70 MPH. This particular beast was probably the biggest 'coon I've ever seen. Perhaps the horror of the moment has inflated my memory, but it was two feet tall at the top of his back, and probably weighed over a hundred pounds.

It made quite a revolting wet thud when I hit it, much as a large dog or Paris Hilton might, were you to run into one of them. Actually, the use of the subjunctive in the previous sentence is not entirely accurate. I should have said, "the sound a large dog makes when you hit one." I did run over a good-sized dog once, and that was in fact the most expensive animal I have ever killed with my car. I speak not of the replacement cost, for I have no idea what a raccoon would cost you to replace, were you so inclined. But hitting the dog cost me a headlight, as well as a half-days work off to go to court to get a completely ridiculous ticket dismissed. I have, for the record, never run over Paris Hilton.

But the raccoon was especially disturbing. The things just look evil, for one thing, and it was staring straight at me when I hit it. It broke some piece of underlayment of some sort under my car, which I hope is either non-essential or cheap to replace. And after the raccoon, I saw a deer standing on the side of the road, looking at me, as if daring me to cross that particular karmic line.

Speaking of karma, I'm glad I don't believe in reincarnation. Otherwise, I would be terrified that I, Arthur Dent-like, was continually killing the same person, in whatever reincarnated form he took, over and over.

I can't wait to see the Google hits this post brings. "Paris Hilton karmic roadkill"