Remonstrance

A newspaper printed the obituary of Alfred Nobel, and it said that he got rich from the death of others. He was the inventor of dynamite. Fortunately, Nobel wasn’t actually dead, and when he read the newspaper’s obituary, he was horrified!

Nobel got a chance to do something few of us can do: he watched his life from the viewpoint of death. It rattled him, and he didn’t like what he saw. So he took his fortune and set it aside into the Nobel Prize foundation, and today "Nobel" is famously associated with excellence in the arts and sciences. People are surprised to discover that Alfred Nobel was the inventor of dynamite.

How would they write your obituary? What we do with our money speaks tellingly what we did with our lives. Money is "compressed life". When we give it to God’s purpose, we’re saying, "Here is my life, my time, my effort, my life’s blood!"

God offers us a glimpse of our obituary, if we are but only willing:

For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them. Ephesians 2:10

This immediately follows the famous passage, "For by grace you have been saved…" Do we make the same connection in our lives? We’ve been saved by God’s grace in order that our lives might be transformed from meaningless wandering and self-indulgence into a life of testimony to the glory and beauty of the Lord.

Filed under: worthy Purpose by kmcc
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Tags: history

Observe the famous Simon Stylite perched atop his pole for 37 years:

simon

Amazingly enough, his 37 year hermitage inspired a popular movement among monks in the fifth century:

After spending 37 years on his pillar, Simeon died on 2 September 459. He inspired many imitators, and, for the next century, ascetics living on pillars, stylites, were a common sight throughout the Byzantine Levant. He is commemorated as a saint in the Coptic Orthodox Church, where his feast is on 29 Pashons.A contest arose between Antioch and Constantinople for the possession of Simeon’s remains. The preference was given to Antioch, and the greater part of his relics were left there as a protection to the unwalled city. from Wikipedia

Now compare this against what the Bible says:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but I do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 13:2 And if I have prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so that I can remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 13:3 If I give away everything I own, and if I give over my body in order to boast, but do not have love, I receive no benefit.

Filed under: humor by kmcc
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Tags: folly, history

I just gotta blog about Michelangelo’s painting in the “Sistine Chapel” showing God creating Adam:

click the picture to see the details

Does anyone other than me see a problem with this picture?

Well, I’ve changed the diapers of three boys now, and I’m telling you I’ve never seen anything that small except, maybe, in the first six months. Now, I don’t presume to tell God what he’s doing, but I just gotta believe He would do a better job than that thing.

Then it hit me why Michelangelo drew it that way: some pope in the dark ages declared sex was the “original sin” that caused “The Fall.” Since Papal Bull (as the Catholic church labels it) is axiomatic and rarely deprecated, this weird view of human sexuality permeated everything back then–and still is Catholic dogma!

So of course this explains why Michelangelo thought God gave Adam only something big enough to pee with. They came up with so many wacko beliefs in the dark ages!

Now if Papal Bulls were wrong about Galileo (the Vatican admitted recently), wrong about the Spanish Inquisition (never reversed), wrong about all non-Catholics are doomed to hell (Vatican-reversed in ‘64),¹ and wrong to ban private reading of the Bible (also reversed in ‘64), is it not possible this is the ‘Wrong Schlong’ after all?

Far less humorous but equally non-biblical was the Papal Bull that stipulates salvation requires good works. But it isn’t the exclusive purview of Catholicism, because many Protestants also think salvation requires good works. Weird the way that works.

(As an aside, I asked a couple of the leaders in Greg’s CG what they thought was wrong with the picture, and, well, let me just say it took a while for one of them to figure it out…hmmm.)

1. From Vatican II, Wikipedia: the Church knows that she is joined in many ways to the baptized who are honored by the name of Christ, but who do not however profess the Catholic faith in its entirety or have not preserved unity or communion under the successor of Peter.” [↩]

Filed under: humor by kmcc
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Tags: history