I guess Mr. and Mrs. Trump were discovered by Twitter during the night to have covid. I made the mistake of glancing at my phone at some unspeakable hour, saw the news and the threads, consigned my soul to God, and went back to sleep, which is itself some kind of amazing miracle. That’s just not a thing that happens to me anymore.
Two
My two oldest children are taking a French class this year, and, as I did in the same circumstance, they are resisting every opportunity to actually speak French. Every now and then, after impressive amounts of nagging, they will badly say a word—on purpose badly—with a heaping of insincerity, so that no dignity will be lost in the scuffle. And then maybe one again the next day. It’s so bad, I’ve actually started to have nightmares of being in a room of people who only speak French and me myself being both unwilling and unable to say anything…while wearing a mask. It’s horrible.
Three
I’ve written my whole thing about the Enneagram and am just tweaking one last thing, which officially makes it late, I guess, and then I found a podcast of Andy Stanly talking to Ian Cron—I haven’t finished it, so don’t hold me to any real opinion. I now regret not saying in the piece, which was way way too long, that the problem is not really the Enneagram (well, that might be part of the problem) but that the way the Bible thinks of relating to God is so hard and, as I’ve said before, a touch boring. Christians talk all the time about how the Bible is sufficient for salvation, bla bla bla, but then when they really look at “salvation” or maybe “justification” would be a more precise word, and it’s annoying sister “sanctification,” they just can’t bear it. I mean, I’ve fallen into this trap. Sanctification is a process directed by God, for which there are no delightful mile markers to let you know you’ve arrived anywhere interesting. The more holy you try to be, the worse you feel about everything. And just when you think you’ve accomplished something or changed something about yourself, or understood something, or just not been a jerk for thirty seconds, God pokes you in your wicked soul, knocking you back into the astonishingly discouraging mire of your own self. You didn’t know how bad you were—over and over and over and over. Your only recourse is to throw yourself on his mercy and ask for his help–again. My sense of the Enneagram is that it lets you just not deal with any of that. You get to direct the process, and it turns out to be much more shallow than it ever would be if God did it. But because you’re using words like “sin” you feel basically ok. Of course, I know there are true Christians who really know what sanctification is who also like the Enneagram, so I’m probably not thinking about them. I thinking more about the entire swath of complacent Evangelicalism who just can’t be bothered with actual Christianity (AndyCOUGHStanley).
Four
This was an interesting article. I’d like to read that book. I mean, I’d like to…but will I ever? I’m seriously backed up on so much reading. As to the Evangelical question of novel reading, I’ve lately wondered how many Christian people (like me) had to endure deconstructionism in college, as a way of reading books, which kinds of ruins everything (not kind of—it does). That and the fact that I only learned to love reading big fat novels—rather than the Jeanette Oake or Grace Livingston Hill which is what was available in the bookshelf in the dorms of my school, what was I going to do, wander all the way over to the library to read something important and worthwhile, not when you walk by Crimson Roses four or five times a day—because that was all there was to read at home. Also, speaking as a lazy person, digesting piles of Christian non-fiction about how to get more joy, and be less of a sinner is easier than learning that by struggling through Great Expectations. It’s like using the Enneagram to sort out yourself, rather than the exhaustion of the church and the Bible.
The point is,reading has become so hard for normal people to do, even Christians when the Bible says, “Study to show thyself approved”. You shouldn’t be begged to get knowledge.
About The Author
Harrison Okafor
editor
Judith is a believer, a lover of Christ and a Gospel freak person. A passionate gospel blogger and press writer. I work with GospelHitsNaija.net Media, no 1 Gospel music platform.
