THANKSGIVING!

It was not a holiday in the U.K. There was no turkey, no stuffing, no mashed potatoes, no cranberry sauce, no candied yams, no pumpkin pie, or any of the other highly calorific entities. Not in this part of the world.

To be perfectly honest, most of the “dawgs” (see an earlier blog “CANINES!” for the genesis and exposition of the term) didn’t particularly miss it. And I’m not much of a turkey aficionado myself, I must confess.

This lack of an affectionate disposition towards the flesh of the species of fowl that gobbles did not, however, preclude us from giving thanks. Minus the bird! What we Americans (and most of us are from the South) missed was … Mexican cuisine! So here we were celebrating Thanksgiving last week with tortilla soup, tacos, and the rest (and varieties of shortbread—a nod in the direction of our newly acquired Scottish heritage!).

And give thanks we did! Especially since one of the motley crew, David, had just successfully emerged from a grueling viva voce—the two-hour oral interview that constitutes the final rite of passage towards a Ph.D.—earlier in the week. This “dawg” was now, for all practical purposes, a “doctor”! And, after four years in the hallowed, medieval halls of University of Aberdeen’s King’s College, after four years of doggie-life, he would be leaving us for Brazil, his homeland, in a few days.

Thanksgiving, tinged with the pain of parting. The way it always has been, is, and will be, in this less-than-perfect world. Pain and pleasure. Bane and blessing. At least for now.

There are few permanent things that we can give thanks for. Not many, are there? But there are some. Some magnificent reasons for giving thanks. Some eternal reasons for giving thanks. For which we will always be giving thanks, now and forevermore. Amen!

For the sovereignty of the Father who loves us. For the grace of the Son who gave Himself for us. For the empowering of the Spirit who binds us all in koinonia. We give thanks!

For our time here that is short. And for our future there that is eternal. We give thanks!

Nevertheless, despite the fleeting temporariness of this life’s pleasures, thanks we must give, even for today’s transient and temporal joys. Even for the smiles streaked with tears.

For the impermanent things we experience here, are nothing but the glimmers of the permanent things we will enjoy forever! Grace that breaks through the dark clouds that often gray the skies of our lives. Glimpses of glory irrupting into the gloom. Rumors of Another World, as Philip Yancey titled his latest offering.

The foreshadowing of the abundant and overflowing. The adumbration of the bliss of fellowship. The preview of things to come. The trailer of our inheritance ….

Blessed be the God and Father
of our Lord Jesus Christ,
who according to His great mercy
has caused us to be born again to a living hope
through the resurrection of Jesus Christ …,
to obtain an inheritance
which is imperishable and undefiled
and will not fade away,
reserved in heaven for you
who are protected by the power of God ….
through faith for a salvation
ready to be revealed in the last time.
In this you greatly rejoice,
even though now for a little while, …
you have been distressed by various trials ….

1 Peter 1:3–5 (NASB)

Let’s always—always—be thankful for God’s blessings that bespeak a glory to come, far beyond compare.

Postscript: Another “dawg,” scheduled to finish his Ph.D. next month, donated his car to me last week. For free! A ’92 Volkswagen Golf. (See picture: Das ist ein anderes gutes deutsches Auto!) A car that had been bestowed upon him by another canine several years ago! And so the blessings continue. He giveth, and giveth, and giveth again!

Thank You!

OMNISCIENT!

I had just gotten off the phone with her. The cold weather, I had just told her, was positively affecting my research: it was forcing me to work and work and work, since I had nowhere to go and nothing else to do. So she knew I was at my computer pretty much all day, reading, writing, ….

And I had just disconnected from her, when Amy called right back. “Hey, how do I get to 777 N. Central Expressway? I’m lost!” she declared. She was on her cell phone, calling from her car.

777 N. Central Expressway? Never seen it. Never been there. Don’t know what it is. Don’t know where it is. Probably somewhere along N. Central Expressway, was my perspicacious and profound pronouncement! In North Dallas, I added, for emphasis, just in case.

Compounding this problem of my abysmal geographical ignorance was the fact that I was 4,500 miles away from this dear lady! There she was, on the labyrinthine layers of asphalt in North Dallas, clueless and disoriented in her Honda Civic, with only a cell phone for company. Here I was, all wrapped in swaddling clothes by a blazing fire, and drinking hot tea, while reading philosophical hermeneutics and, between spoonfuls of peanut butter, jotting idle—but nonetheless profound!—thoughts on my laptop, in my flat in Aberdeen.

But Amy knew one thing—I was by my computer. And I had broadband internet access.

maps.google.com to the rescue!

Instantly, I had pinpointed her location and her destination. I knew where she was and I knew where she was headed. “OK, you’re lost!” (I guess I am prone to making profound remarks!) “Make a U-turn at Arapaho, and head south now.” She complied, informing me of her progress. “Alright, now pass the light at Beltline, and make another U-turn at the next light—Spring Valley—and head back north again.”

It sounded, I admit, suspiciously like I was leading her around in circles—“two U-turns,” “head south,” then “head north”! But to her credit, she dutifully followed my instructions.

“Now 777 N. Central Expressway should be the … let me see … 1 … 2 … 3 … 4 … yes, the fifth building on your right, just off the access road.” I could even see that venerable concrete hulk—“777 N. Central Expwy”—on the satellite image on Google!

Amy made it!

Here I was, thousands of miles away, a whole ocean away, several time-zones away, directing someone to a precise location on another continent. In real-time, live! Technology!!

But you know what? There is One who doesn’t use Google to know where you are, or where I am. I strongly doubt if He uses a laptop. He’s certainly not connected to the internet—no dialup, DSL, cable, or fiber-optic! And He doesn’t keep track of His creation with GPS either. Oh, no!

But He does deal with a lot of lost people, though. The marvelous thing is, He knows how to get us discombobulated folks back on track.

There are times, I’ll confess, when I wonder if He knows what He is doing. But our omniscient God sees! He knows! He cares! And being God, He knows what He is doing. Inscrutable, He might be. But unerring, He defintely is. He knows what He's doing.

Thou dost know when I sit down and when I rise up;
Thou dost understand my thought from afar.
Thou dost scrutinize my path and my lying down,
And art intimately acquainted with all my ways.
If I take the wings of the dawn,
If I dwell in the remotest part of the sea,
Even there Thy hand will lead me,
And Thy right hand will lay hold of me.
How precious also are Thy thoughts to me, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
If I should count them,
They would outnumber the sand.
When I awake, I am still with Thee.

Psalm 139:2–3; 9–10; 17–18 (NASB)

What a relief to know there is Someone who sees and knows and cares!
We can trust Him for His sovereign direction and control of all things. What a blessed relief!

What a great God!

EAVESDROPPING!

I am still buying books. The “disease” is incurable. Besides, now I have a good excuse—I need them for research!

One of my more recent acquisitions was Models of Interpretation of Scripture, by John Goldingay. I purchased this one off the web, from an online used-book store in the US. Thinking I wouldn’t need it immediately, and not wanting to incur the high cost of shipping to the UK, I had them send it to the home of a friend, Dave, in Dallas. But I was mistaken: I did need it sooner than I realized, and so Dave FedEx-ed it to me.

The tome was in great condition for an item that was second-hand. And second-hand it was, for on the flyleaf was another’s name.

And that’s what caught me by surprise. It was a name I recognized!

“Walter M. Dunnett”

Probably doesn’t mean much to most folks, but I know that name. Prof. Dunnett is a fairly well known theologian who used to teach at Moody Bible Institute (and elsewhere). In the late 80s, he was President of the Evangelical Theological Society. Author of several books (and I have at least one of them).

Fancy that, I thought. Dunnett’s personal copy of Goldingay. I flipped through the pages with interest, hoping for annotations and marginalia that would be revelatory. However, not everyone, I realized, reads books the way I do, visibly interacting with the author by means of scribbles and scratches, staining and scarring the pages as I go through them! Walter was a more gentle reader. Underlining—discreet and discriminating. Lines in the margin to demarcate paragraphs of interest. A few check marks on other pages.

Still, to go through a book owned by a scholar was quite an experience. I felt I was eavesdropping on a personal conversation between Goldingay and Dunnett. A private correspondence. A confidential communiqué, now violated by the barbaric invasion of a used-books junkie armed with a pencil. Eavesdropping!

There are many who claim that’s what we do when we read the Bible. It’s simply a correspondence from someone to someone else in some other situation in some bygone era, they assert. Eavesdrop, by all means, they urge. Just don’t take it seriously, because it’s got nothing to do with you, they declare. Paul wrote to the Romans, not to the Texans; and, of course, those polemics directed to the Israelites, Edomites, and Ninevites, those epistles to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, all rightly belonged to those respective worthies. Spurgeon once wished the Hebrews had kept the book to themselves!

But they didn’t. Neither did any of the other recipients, thank God!

Not only were these writings inspired, God by fiat appropriated these utterances as His own and they were recognized as such by His people. Personal notes they might have been. But “divine discourses” they are now. (Check out Nicholas Wolterstorff’s terrific book Divine Discourse.) The New Testament is replete with instances of “eavesdropping” upon Old Testament “conversations.” At the same time, it perpetuates this practice of “listening at keyholes” (“I adjure you by the Lord to have this letter read to all the brethren,” writes Paul in 1 Thess 5:27). For what was written aforetime is now applicable to us.

All Scripture is inspired by God
and profitable for teaching,
for reproof, for correction,
for training in righteousness;
so that the man of God
may be adequate,
equipped for every good work.

2 Timothy 3:16–17 (NASB)

Let’s keep “eavesdropping.” For God is talking—divinely discoursing—to you, to me!

PRAY!

My brother and I have downloaded Skype on our computers in SC and here in the UK.

(For the uninitiated, Skype—www.Skype.com—is a terrific piece of free software that enables those with broadband internet connections to “phone” one another anywhere in the world—for no charge! We speak into our computer mics and listen on its speakers.)

A week or so ago, Susan, my sister-in-law, “Skyped” me. The funny thing was, I could hear her loud and clear, but she couldn’t hear me. Unbeknownst to her, my nephew, John, who’d been tweaking the sound on their computer earlier, had apparently shut its speakers down. So I resorted to instant-messaging (IM—writing in real-time) my replies to Susan.

There she was in the US—reading my IMs and speaking her responses. Here I was in the UK—listening to her and writing my responses. Trying hard to maintain a semblance of normal “conversation,” struggling to keep up with the speed of a back-and-forth exchange, my jottings were necessarily cropped and somewhat cryptic.

It was, indeed, a strange way to communicate with another! And in the background, I could hear my father wondering what was going on—his daughter-in-law seemed be to carrying on a one-way conversation with her computer! From his perspective, this already strange exchange was even stranger! We didn’t continue very long.

She was reading a written message. She replied by speaking.

Was there someone truly there at the other end of the line? Was the other listening? What was he thinking? Feeling? Except for those somewhat enigmatic written lines from across the divide, there appeared to be no clue that the other actually was present in that "conversation." Was this really working? Or was it all a waste of time? One risks looking mighty foolish speaking to someone who may or may not be listening, if they are there, in the first place.

To another doubter, a long time ago, Jesus said, “Because you have seen Me, have you believed? Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed.”

[And, yes, sir, sometimes those written messages are mighty cryptic and enigmatic. That’s why we need “hermeneutics”—the science of interpretation. But I’ll save that for another aBeLOG!]

Verily, there is nothing like conversing in the very presence of the other, tête-à-tête—a true dialogue.

We will. Soon. But until then …

[Be] always of good courage, … knowing that
while we are at home in the body
we are absent from the Lord—
for we walk by faith, not by sight—
we are of good courage, I say,
and prefer rather to be absent from the body
and to be at home with the Lord.

2 Corinthians 5: 6–8

Let's keep reading His stuff. Let's keep speaking to Him. He is there. He is listening.