the glory and the horror

We saw The Passion of the Christ tonight. It’s impressive. As in it leaves an impression on you. It can’t help but do that. It may make you disgusted, it may make you cry, it may shock you, but you can’t walk out without it doing something to you.

I want desperately to be a good steward of the opportunity and skills God has given me, in particular, the chance to be in medical school. But I’m not really good at staying focused. It’s really hard when I really don’t care. I’m not sure how much of it is my own fault/laziness/lack of discipline, and how much is just the inherent struggle it would be, given that there’s so much to know and I’m not really motivated to study it, It just seems to be that much harder, and that much less efficient for me to study. I’m not even sure what to pray for. Right motivation. Motivation, period.

It’s also hard after getting your butt whipped on the test you just took.

One more test down. Hm. I feel bad after taking tests. I know I could have studied harder, and done better. But I’m barely motivated to study as much as I do. and I really do squander a lot of time away. But that’s even sorta based on the fact that I’d rather be reading/studying other things, but when I do pick up Schaeffer, or Hauerwas, I don’t really enjoy reading them as much either, because then I feel bad for not studying medical school stuff. And it’s not like I can ever really reach an “endpoint” in my medical studies. There’s always more to learn, more to memorize. So I’m constantly feeling pulled in multiple directions.

It snowed quite a bit last night here. At least a lot for Dallas. There’s a nice even blanket of about 4-5 inches over everything. Very nice.

S. F. authorities officiate at scores of same-sex unions

And so it begins. I wonder how much time and effort the Church ought to devote to “fighting” for what is right and Scriptural here. When should we just let people go in their sin? How much energy should we devote to slowing the decline of society? I wonder if the early Church had to deal with this as the Roman Empire morphed into the mess it became in the 5th and 6th century.

So some people over at the Derek Webb message board think I look like Vern Yip from Trading Spaces. What do you think?

From Escape from Reason by Francis A. Schaeffer:

Man has value because of who he was originally before the Fall… We cannot deal with people like human beings, we cannot deal with them on the high level of true humanity, unless we really know their origin – who they are. God tells man who he is. God tells us that He created man in His image. So man is something wonderful.

From the Derek Webb messageboard:

I don’t expect the ungodly to be anything other than ungodly, but I won’t allow their ungodliness imperial advancement. in this sense, I see that I am at war. and it is the most necessary kind of war; it is not one of hatred, but of love. because I love the mind of Christ, I will fight the mind of the world.

spoken by realboy

I had the most random car trouble last night/today. So there’s apparently a cable between my transmission and my starter/engine/something there. It completely disconnected, so my gear selector was sliding all over the place and my car wouldn’t start. It wouldn’t go into any gear. Even in P, it was in neutral. And because of that, my car wouldn’t start. But at the time, I didn’t know that this cable had come out, so some friends of mine and I pushed my car about a third of a mile up and down two pseudo-hills to get to a mechanic (who was very helpful and very kind, by the way, even though his English wasn’t the best) only to have the mechanic tell us that he didn’t do transmissions. I asked him to take a look anyway, and for a while, he thought it was the starter. Then I showed him what the gear selector was doing, and asked “Is it bad?” to which he responded, “Sounds.” We got a kick out of that, even though that wasn’t really encouraging at the time.

Anyway, he ends up figuring it out, and I got my slow leaky tire patched as well. You wouldn’t think that a 99 Toyota would give me this much trouble in the last couple of months. Sheesh.