That’s obviously taken from Desiring God website

“He scarce had said, when the bare Earth, till then Desert and bare, unsightly, unadorn’d, Brought forth the tender Grass, whose verdure clad Her universal Face with pleasant green, Then herbs of every leaf, that sudden flour’d Op’ning thir various colours, and made gay Her bosom smelling sweet…”

John Milton’s Paradise Lost – Book 7, lines 313-319a

I was at the banq (Bibliothèque des Archives Nationales du Québec) today in between my translation and psychology class, reading a book I started two years ago in my English literature course. I only had to read the first two books of John Milton’s Paradise Lost for the course, now I’m working my way through the 12 books that make up the whole book. I was sitting in a comfy banq chair by the large windows facing the bus depot on the third floor and those lines (313-319ff) really struck me.

I don’t know about you but my life can most of the time be defined by Robert Coles’ words: “… the only consistency in my life is my inconsistency”. I know that from the outside I’m a pretty boring and stable person, but inside, my relationship with God and this “new creation” that I am, is more a constant struggle of flesh against Holy Spirit, lots of ups and downs and redefining what I think I believe and being confused and not trusting God enough and not expecting great things from God and wanting to be 24/7 in God’s Word for a few days and then just totally waste my time and not caring about giving Him more than my 25-minute reading and praying a day. I don’t know, that’s just me right now, and it’s been me for … several years. So that’s me, reading those lines of Milton’s book.

At the same time, I think of people around me who are going through some tough times, waiting for God to act on their behalf or freeing them from A, B, C or D, crying over their sins, needing liberation, or bearing some health problem burden when it just seems to get worse or having to deal with some emotionally heavy issue in their lives or having to bear that with someone else. Life’s full of ups and downs and sometimes those downs and struggles, whether they be on a spiritual, relational, emotional or physical level, just seem to be never-ending and impossible to get through, seeing some light just seems impossible, we just don’t see how things could change, how springtime could come.

Milton reminded me that when the earth was still formless and as a “Desert and bare”, God, out of nothing, “Brought forth the tender Grass”. There was nothing to make the earth produce grass and trees and vegetation of its own. Nothing. It was bare like a desert, dry and cold. On its own, the earth was just a mass of I don’t know what without life. But when God simply spoke the word, grass appeared. Life appeared.

I know this sounds cheesy, but I really think that cheesy’s good a lot of the time: No matter the inconsistency I’m going through or the burdens I’m bearing, there’s always, always hope. God speaks and the earth lives. God only needs to will it and springtime appears wherever He desires and that can be in my life, at any level, because of Jesus who became sin for me and covered me with His righteousness so that God’s justice could be satisfied in Him and I, become an heir, a daughter of God. Crazy. That’s why I can’t give up clinging to Him and seeking after Him, because He gives life, He gives healing, even in the most barren of worlds.

Yes. I should be doing some reading or studying or homeworking or assignmenting (ahahah the words you can make up), I know. But I feel that it’s all I’m always doing and I actually feel almost guilty when I do anything else than school stuff. But I still need small breaks to retain my sanity. This time, my break project was to present to you my birthday present-to-be, from you to me. Hopefully you were planning on getting me something for my birthday and you were still idea-less. I kind of like talking to “you” ’cause it really might not apply to any of “you” reading this!

So, my shoes are hurting me. I’ll be able to wear them until… well knowing me I could wear them for several months still just ’cause I don’t consider small pain in my feet and legs and getting wet heels when it rains such a big trial. But since it’s my birthday soon I thought I’d grant you the privilege to store one more birthday present idea in your head. But please, don’t buy me shoes! Shoes are like clothes, you don’t buy clothes to people (well, generally) you give them money to that end.

I think myself pretty funny right now, but eh, you’ve been asking for birthday presents ideas!

Oh, I also need a new ink cartridge, pay for my drivers license that I never use, and… that’s about it!

Oh and lastly, here’s a proof I’m turning 25 soon!

Can you see the white hair? Well, I’ve had those for a while now but…

I really am having fun writing all that stuff! But you know, what’s amazing is that I have SO MUCH MORE stuff than needs. That’s so true. I need ink, but I have a printer and a laptop and paper and pens. I need new shoes, but I have socks and nice shoes for teaching and feet to walk and run and jump (I don’t dance!). I need to pay for my drivers license but I have the ability to drive a car, with glasses though… but that means that I have glasses and still don’t need new ones, that shows that I can see! Man, there is no use in counting my needs ’cause they’re so small in comparison with my blessings. God is always good and our Provider.

Psychology isn’t brighter (smarter) but the going-to-class looks brighter (isn’t as dark and hopeless as before) now.

I was in class, it was break time. It was good ’cause I needed a break from hearing the usual evolution garbage that I alway hear in my psychology class. Especially when the prof had just explained away why family members had a hard time getting along, basically the parent/child relationship  is always easier than e.g. brother/sister or brother/brother relationship because parents and their children share 50% of the same genes whereas siblings only share 25%. The less similar the genes, the more competition you get (competition involves survival, but also stuff like: There are two bedrooms and three children, they’re going to fight to get one of the two bedrooms, food, etc.). So after the prof talked about that for a while, I needed to take a break. I can’t believe how easy it is to replace the word “sin” by “genes” just about everywhere.

So it was break time, I needed to stretch my legs a bit, so I was standing by a door, reading a Piper book entitled Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ. A girl passed by me, obviously looking at my book, then she stepped back and took a closer look at the cover. She then proceeded in asking me, “Are you interested in him?”, so looking at the cover together I said, “You mean, Jesus Christ or John Piper?” So we started talking just to find out she and I were Christians. It didn’t take long before she said, “You’re a Christian eh?”. Crazy. Anyway, I just praise God for this little blessing He’s given me. Just to know that there is someone else who probably has the same kind of perspective on this psychology cheered me up for the rest of the class. We didn’t get to talk so much but I’m sure we’ll get to know each other a bit through this, now brighter, psychology class.

I really should be reading stuff on second language acquisition or working on my anglicismes assignment, but it’s a grey Saturday. Instead, I’d rather think about confession. I usually would prefer doing assignments than having to think about confession, let alone actually confessing my sins. It’s not something I’m prone to do, it’s not natural for me to want to confess sins, so assignments looks more interesting or at least, easier to deal with than confession.

But confession is good. It’s more than merely ‘good’, I just don’t have the words. I remember that as a teen I’d “confess” my sins (that is, I believed that confession was the ‘reading’ of a list of sins to God) every night and I couldn’t believe how a person could fall asleep without going though that kind of confession. I suppose it wasn’t a bad thing for me to go to God and tell Him the sins I’d done during that day and ask for His forgiveness, but confession has taken on a different meaning or depth maybe in the last few years for me.

Confessing my sins to God (that is, acknowledging that God is in the right and I am in the wrong about a bunch of stuff I’ve thought, said and done), can be easy. I don’t see God and I don’t have a great enough fear of Him and understanding of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, so that makes confession seem easier. I do realize that my sins are always done in rebellion against Him, no matter who else is involved, but confessing to God often seems easy. At other times, confession is tough and doesn’t want to get out of me, but those times aren’t as frequent as the other times.

Confessing my sin to the person I’ve sinned against is one, tough thing. But when my sin is just between me and God, I’ve found that confessing those sins to a trusted sister (well I’m a girl eh) is like being put through fire to be refined. For me, it’s so much more demanding to confess to a human being than to God. It should be the other way around, but I’m obviously a human being and a great sinner. So I’ve discovered a bit more, how that kind of confession is good and healthy for me. It’s not that my friend has the authority to forgive my sins, but having to humble myself before that other human being provides me with a proper shame and repentance that should accompany confession… such things, unfortunately aren’t necessarily with me when I only “confess” to God. It’s no fun to have to confess, once again certain sins to someone who keeps me accountable, but it’s helped me a great, great deal to deal with certain sins.

Anyway… those are some of my thoughts.

I was talking on the phone with a friend and we happened to discuss church membership. I don’t particularly have a strong conviction on either of the positions (church membership is not needed and unbiblical or church membership is important and biblical). So I was wondering if any of you had any thoughts about this topic. Does membership in a church promote the idea that a church is a business? Does membership in a church put you in a box as being “Lutheran” or “Baptist” or “Mennonite”? is that such a big deal, does it matter? What are the biblical foundations for church membership? If it has none, then when did it start and in what context? … I don’t expect answers, but who knows, a couple pastors read my blog every once in a while eh.

I kind of like my psychology course this semester ’cause it’s the one I should have had before the one I got last semester, thus everything is more simple. What I also like about the course is the fact that I am the only person from my cohort taking it, that means that I’m the only fourth year student in a sea of unknown faces in a big auditorium. It never happens. Some of you know that I’ve got issues with psychology, even when it’s taught by Christians, so it’s obvious that I got major issues with psychology taught by university professors and most specifically when you spend three hours learning and discussing “Evolutionist Psychology”. That’s what we did this afternoon.

I simply couldn’t believe a thing I heard in class today. I just couldn’t. I don’t usually swear but that class made me feel so strongly upset that I kept replying “Bulls**t!” to most things I heard (well in my head). Sorry for my bad language. So here’s just an example of what I heard:

So, we know that our society is dealing with the problem of obesity. People are overweight. Do you know why people are overweight? It’s because they eat too much sugar. Do you know why we tend to love sugar so much? Well, we don’t know exactly when, but probably hundreds of millions of years ago, human beings found themselves in a time and place where food was scarce and they realized that when they got to eat food that was sweet,  it sustained them longer (because of a greater amount of calories). So our “ancestors” developed this need and hunger for sweet food because sweet food was highly valued in such a context.

I just wanted to raise my hand and ask the prof what he meant by “sweet food”, hundreds of millions of years ago, what kind of “sweet food” was there? He wasn’t talking about carbs here. But that’s kind of a trivial question. What I really wanted to ask the prof was: “So… does that mean that we are not to be held responsible for over-eating?” Because that’s what this theory is teaching. We are what we are today because of what happened in the past and how we learned to adapt to certain conditions at that time and those “adaptations” are still with us today. I couldn’t believe it.

Another things the prof said that really shocked me was the following:

Genes that are different compete against each other. The more similar our genes are and the more friendly we are toward each other. For example, genes that are most similar are found in families. That’s why parents would be willing to put themselves in pretty dangerous situations to save their child and the same goes for brothers and sisters but less with cousins and even less with strangers. A parent will want to protect his/her genes that are in their child, there is little to no gene competition here. But when it comes to strangers, genes are so very different that strangers won’t care or won’t help or won’t be compassionate toward other strangers because they have genes that are so different, thus are in competition for the fittest and the strongest.

He also talked about a “help others gene” that some of us possess, which allows an individual to be readier to help and care for people outside of his family. Isn’t that just crazy? Again, my interpretation of Evolutionist Psychology says that we are not responsible for our behavior because it is programmed by our genes. It’s all our genes’ fault.

That’s what I learn at university. Fun eh? What saddened me the most is to look around and see how students seemed to drink in the prof’s words and asking questions and realizing all sorts of stuff about why we act the way we do in certain context: Our genes! Ah man, where is this world going.

“For although they knew God, they did not honor Hims as God or give thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools.” (Rom. 1:21-22)

“If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.” (Gen. 4:7)

So I’ve been listening to Brandon Heath lately and more specifically to a song entitled, “Love never fails”. You can hear it here. The song is based on I Corinthians 13, here are the lyrics:

Love is not proud // Love does not boast // Love after all matters the most // Love does not run // Love does not hide // Love does not keep locked inside // Love is the river that flows through //Love never fails you //

Love will sustain // Love will provide // Love will not cease at the end of time // Love will protect // Love always hopes // Love still believes when you don’t // Love is the arms that are holding you // Love never fails you //

When my heart won’t make a sound // When I can’t turn back around // When the sky’s falling down // Nothing is greater than this // Greater than this //

Love is right here // Love is alive // Love is the way // The truth // The life // Love is the river that flows through // Love is the arms that are holding you // Love is the place you will fly to // Love never fails you //

My university’s buildings are all over downtown and I was walking to one that’s quite far away from the others. I was listening to this song and something struck me. I usually think of I Corinthians 13 as the love Christians should have toward one another and unbelievers and probably rightly so. But this morning I realized that this love that we are to have for one another is the love God has for us and more specifically, I was struck by “love never fails you” I know that I Corinthians 13 doesn’t say, “Love never fails you”, but rather, “Love never fails” but still, I just realized that God’s love does not fail and won’t fail me. All of the sudden I had this big smile on my face. What comfort, what peace it is for us to know that God’s love for us won’t fail, won’t ever fail! We are secure for ever in His love, this love that we can’t be seperated from.