Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

I think the Snicker's commercial from 2000 is better at depicting the real struggle.
 

I'm glad you got that out of your system early on. :-) I'm not kidding when I say it sent me to my knees, and left me weeping and breathless. If you don't struggle, be glad. I do, and for me, this vido is a perfect depiction of it.
 

Of course, you might be serious, I guess. If so, see if you can find the commerical, or tell me about it.
 

Ya know, timing is everything, in everything. I've been having a particularly hard time lately WITH everything: Dr. Er being gone, being by mself, trying to figure what I'm gonna do with the rest of my life, the economy teetering, housing is deep doodoo just when I need to sell a house -- you know, "little" things like that.

That's why this thing knocked me down, I think. I mean, you know, plus the fact that I simply cannot leave well enough alone when it comes to the faith. I'm always messing with the details. I was ready for some sort of reset.
 

Ha!!

"My dad and I wear the same pants!"

"I invented pants!"

I found it. YouTube, search for Snickers 2000. :-)

That does, indeed, capture certain elements of The Struggle. :-)
 

BTW, the skit depicts the enticements as the usual sins, it looks like: lust, greed, etc. Death makes an appearance. Some will see more specific behaviors depicted.

The enticements that I've been wrestling with lately are things like Fear of the Credit Crunch Keeping Us from Buying a House in Colorado; Fear of Not Being Able to Find Meaningful, Gainful Employment; Fear That I Won't Get Enough for My Current House to Break Even On It; Feeling Sorry for Myself Because I'm All By My Lonesome; and, related to online squabbles of late, A Big, Black, 10-Foot-Tall-and-Bullet-Proof Scofield Reference Bible with a Big Banner with the Word "Guilty" Printed On It.

None of which are of God -- not the fears, not the the self-pity, not "Scofield's notes and references," and especially not false cultural guilt. But boy, how they do tussle sometimes.
 

Who am I to remind you of a specific housing trend, but think on this. When money gets hard to get? Interest rates get higher? Doesn't that put people in the renting business. They rent rather than buy. Thus rental rates go up.
Rent your house until the sellers market returns. No?

Snicker's knows.
 

When I suddenly and unwillingly became a single parent 13 years ago, and went back to school part-time (with three young children) 9 years ago, I would see people moving ahead, they never seemed to struggle with faith issues, they graduated and got great jobs - and I felt like it was taking so long, sometimes God was talkative, sometimes He seemed so silent all the jobs would be gone by the time I finally finished, I hated being alone - and God just kept saying (often in verses in the OT)that I wouldn't be left behind.

So I call(ed) Him on that and remind(ed) Him and myself that He said he would do just that, and that really relaxes me when I' m ready to freak out at existence.

So in the last three years, I've met my lovely husband (who never struggles, and I tell him that that's not normal...), two daughters are in 2nd year university, and with a thesis half finished, I teach at a university college and love it - we've just built a beautiful house, and are being presented this week to a Birth Mother for a two day old baby.

Why we go through long stretches living fearfully in a storm or a desert for it then to all suddenly comes together, I don't know - but it sure keeps us hanging on to the only One who can keep us sane in this crazy life.
This exactly has been my experience:
"I believe that God wants to give us just enough strength of resistance for every stressful situation, as we need it.
He does, however, not give it to us in advance, so that we don't rely on ourselves, but only on Him."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

(Sorry - fast translation)
 

Oh, we've been talking about that possibility. I don't think interest rates are going up, though. As long as the stock market is soft, bonds are more attractive, which pushes bond yields down, and mortage rates follow bond yields. That's the way it works. So, I'm cheering on my 401(k) with one breath and finding sick joy in its struggles with the other!

Actually, I mispoke. No doubt my house will sell -- whether at the price I need or not is anotgher question. The REAL question is getting a loan for the next one. They were growing on trees until this summer and the Big Boys on Wall Street who buy all our humble little mortgages all shit their britches at the same time and chopped all the trees down.
 

I am being driven forward
Into an unknown land,
The pass grows steeper,
The air colder and sharper,
A wind from my unknown goal
Stirs the strings
Of expectation.

Still the question:
Shall I ever get there?
A clear pure note
In the silence.

Markings, Dag Hammarskjoeld
 

That was really cool. The only thing that bothers me is that the Jesus didn't start going to her until she went through all other other "temptations" first. I would have preferred that we see his hand help throw the gun away and he meets her there and then. Unless it's designed to depict a path of redemption and Jesus only waits at the end of the redemption. I can't buy that on it's face My grandma used to say, "From the stirrup to the ground, he mercy sought and mercy found." This depiction is the opposite of that. I can see how ER would see this as very good depiction of struggle and how it's very personal. Very cool production...
 

ER, dammit, remember -- the only thing you have to fear is fear itself. And FEAR should have been one of those characters in that skit, for God's sake. At the most basic level, fear (fight or flight) is something that helps us survive. The kind of fear that one might metaphorically put on as clothing every morning is not the kind that helps one survive -- it prevents survival.
 

I think you missed the order of the encounter. Jesus comes to the girl, and she dances with him. Later, she is enticed away despite his intentions to stay with her; she flirts with the enticements and fights her way back to where SHE walked away from HIM; the instant she gets close enough to him to grasp his hand, he rushes to her, goes AFTER her -- and then he kicks ass. She HAD to come back a ways though, since she was the eone who walked away. That's the 1. Jesus saves. 2. It's easy, but you gotta be willing to be saved. 3. If you walk yourself away from him, you gotta fight your self back -- it's hard, not to be saved again, but to continue the dance. The status of her relationship with Him is never changed. The quality of the relationship does.
 

I think I said the above better at Neil's place in response to someone who didn't like that the Jesus character seemed "powerless" to get to the girl for awhile:


The only thing that Jesus is powerless over is our self will. Jesus came to her, and she went with him, and it was easy. She was enticed away, and she flirted with the enticements, then at the point of utter desperation (the gun), she turns back, and then she has to fight — her self, and the entangling enticements she’d gotten close to — to GET back. The instant she gets close enough to grasp his hand, THEN, he RUSHES to her, shelters her and, if you’ll pardon the expression, he kicks ass. He wasn’t powerless. That interpretive dance depicts one’s will versus Jesus’s willingness to dance with us, and the way the relationship can change for ill if careless, for good when repentant. Note, I do not say the state of the relationship changes, only the quality of it — but I concede that that is debatable. But not very, I don’t think.
 

Karen: Thank you.
 

A portion of what I ment is that "money" itself is a commodity.
As it becomes scarce, it's cost will go up. Investment strategies follow events. They are not precursers.

I bought my home in a poor buyers and sellers market. Money was expensive ( we had to shop our loan for two weeks) and homes were cheap due to the integration of the local schools.

Two years latter money was almost impossible to obtain. We just thought we were paying too much for our loan.


Hunkering down sometimes just doesn't serve you well.
 

ER said: "....then he kicks ass..."

Years ago I watched an episode of Hawaii Five "O". The robbers were attacking an amoured truck. They used armour piercing ammo to kill the driver. Then they placed a gas canister in the air intake. There was scene of the gaurd inside choking on the gas and crying something like, "Jesus, dear Jesus, help me, please help me." And then he died.

Jesus is not John Wayne.
Jesus is not Jehova.
Jesus does not kick ass.
Jesus saves, but not from the world around you.
 

I agree. But I see the characters in this skit as representatives of entanglements that the girl either wandered into carelessly or consciously toyed with -- and by entanglements, I don't mean "the bottle" or "the money" or "sex." I mean the power of sin that each manifests. A "principalities and powers thing." Just because I don't think the Bible is inerrant doesn't mean I don't think the writers wrote about real, true things. An axiom of mainstream Chrisdtianity -- as oppose dto "mainline" -- is that Jesus defeated sin on the Cross. In that sense, he didm indeed, kick ass. And as his followers stumble, and wander, and screw up, and get sins all over 'em, over and over and over, I believe Jesus does stand ready to intervene, to kick ass, at the first hint of turning back. I'm not being literal, as in Jesus stayed her hand when she put the gun to her head. She stayed her own hand, then fought the spirit of death, and lust, and greed, and the others, who she had consorted with -- and then he rushed to embrace her, on her return, just as the father rushed out to greet and embrace the Prodigal Son as soon as he saw him on the horizon.

Talkin' rich metaphor, and parable, and allegory here, dude. If Jesus doesn't kick ass for us, in some way mysterious, metaphysical, supernatural way that's hard to depict, then he really was just a good dude with some radical ideas, and we might as well just follow Dale Carnegie.
 

Ha! "There are no words to argue over," I wrote. True. But if a picture is worth a thousand words, a moving picture is worth exponentially more. :-)

Expanding on my comment above, although I do tend toward a "moral influence" view of atonement, I do have a higher christology than most of my fellow members of the church I attend, although I don't think it matters that much either way, as long as we agree that "Jesus is Lord." Soteriologically, I tend toward Luther's brand of justification -- by faith alone" -- BUT seasoned with large doses of James' insistence that works naturally proceed from faith. I must have developed an Arminian twinge somewhere, because I do see how if one abandons one's faith entirely, I mean consciously turn from it and discards it, how one's relationship with God could continue -- but then, !!, I realize I'm ,once again, trying to cram God into a little human box, which is lunacy, and I throw my hands up and my heart out to the world and remember that God IS Love, and that Love TRUMPS justice or we're all screwed, and I land so close to Universalism it would make my chicken-fried Southern Baptist kin freak plumb out.
 

BTW, re: "money was expensive."

I confess I don't know what to expect in that regard. When anything gets scarce, it gets more expensive, by definition. But I know what generally influences mortgage rates most, and it's the flow of money between stocks and bonds as investments -- not the money supply per se. If the Fed tamps down interest rates next week, although it will not directly affect mortgage rates, it will increase the money supply, which will make money less expensive by definition. But the real problem now, in the wake of the subprime mess, which led to the other messes, isn't a shortage of money -- it's a shortage of credit. Ya know, during the Depression, loans were going at interest rates of less than 1 percent, and people still weren't taking any out. ... I think before this deal is all said and done, a new word will be coined to describe some financial situation we haven't experienced or thought of yet -- like "stagflation in the '70s.
 

Oh, and I'm not sure I know the difference between "money" and "credit" in this sense.

And, a correction in my Arminian comment: "I do NOT see how if one abandons one's faith entirely, I mean consciously turn from it and discards it, how one's relationship with God could continue." Then ... Universalism, etc., etc.
 

Have you been following the Mother Teresa stories: Time Sept. 3 Newsweek Sept. 10 ?
 

"Talkin' rich metaphor, and parable, and allegory here, dude. If Jesus doesn't kick ass for us, in some way mysterious, metaphysical, supernatural way that's hard to depict, then he really was just a good dude with some radical ideas, and we might as well just follow Dale Carnegie."

Reminds me of a poem and a song title.
"...some would as throw it all as throw a part away..."
--Frost

"Do You Believe in Magic"
---XXXXXXX
 

I've read where Mother Teresa had major doubts. Are you saying she abandoned her faith? If she said in her diary that she did, yet continued to do the work she thought, or even previously thought, she was called to do, then James would be pleased. So would Calvin.
 

I read the Time article and also the response from Christopher Hitchens in Newsweek. Even when she complained about the absence of God in her life, she was complaining to Him. It's been interesting to see how people have interpreted her letters. She didn't want them published, though, she wanted them destroyed. I kinda think the church should have respected that.

Crystal
 

mafpasIt is not a unique phenomena, the lapse of absolute faith. If there is a minister or priest that has ever lived that hasn't lost the feeling that they were in God's will or that God was even there then they are lying probably to themselves as well as other.

Indeed there are those whose faith is so shallow in understanding that they fail when faced with more than they can handle. That is more common than you would like to think. It is not probable that Mother Teresa fits in that group.

Of course it may be that some come to an understanding that religion is a human construct and that their faith was in their religion and not God. Thus their rejection and emptyness is a reasonable response.

I am glad that the letters of Mother Teresa were not destroyed.
They take a simplist story and stereotype and give her a dimension far beyond her actual good works. Will they enhance her saintlyness? Will they prove her God was false? It probably depends on the reader more that the one that wrote them as to what they will mean in the future.

Adoniram Judson the first "Baptist" missionary to Burma suffered through a similar crisis, in some way much more Job like than Mother Teresa. There are many more examples. Many Christians are scared shitless when they encounter this level of doubt in their role models. It is a hard thing to grasp, but well worth the effort. Platitudes and truisms are not workable at this level.
 

"mafpasIt is not a unique phenomena"

Yes, I am dyslexic, but how in the hell did "This is..." become "mafpasIt..."?
 

Well, the first comment I ever leave on your blog, I do it while bawling my face off.

Wow, does that just hit home the hard way.

A friend of mine were chatting awhile back and the conversation turned to our relationship with God. I said, "You know, I've felt alone so many times and it's only recently that I've realized that He's always been here - I was the one that walked away. He was just waiting for me to come back." And that video just hit me like a ton of bricks.

Thank you, thank you for posting it.
 

RD, this little video could spark a revival. It might be, actually. It'll take if nobody tries to organize it. :-)

Thanks for the first comment. Come back anytime. :-)
 

Yep. Just watched it again. Still makes this big ol' redneck bawl.