Careful Thought

When I started Careful Thought and put King’s Kid blog to bed it was my intention to start a group blog. Only problem was that there was no group.

Now there is. Welcome Ray and now Greg. Together again for the first time, now with the collected wisdom of the ages.

Cool.

Now what?

Hokule’a at My Wide Blue Seas posts an interesting meme: what five questions would you ask God? Maybe I’m still struggling with the whole “God is the omnipotent Creator and I am His creation so how do I dare ask Him questions” thing. But He is also Abba, Daddy, so I guess it’s okay.

1. Since believers will spend eternity in Heaven (and that’s a looonnngggg time), what will we be doing?
2. We will have new, glorified bodies and will be given the privilege of eating from the Tree of Life (Rev 2:7, Gen 2:9). I interpret the Tree of Life to be Christ. What else will we eat? Who cooks? We’ll have physical bodies, but will we need physical food?
3. Will we care about when the earth was created?
4. Who let them in here? (Okay, I’m joking. I think we may be surprised at who is there and who is not. Doubtless some will be surprised that we are there!)
5. Will all believers get to meet everyone? I’d especially like to talk to Peter.

Your useless item of the the day, courtesy of Wordorigins.org…

Hello: This greeting is much newer than most people think. The use of hello as a greeting is only as old as the telephone. The first recorded use is from 1883. It does, however, have earlier origins in other senses. It is a variant of hallo, which dates to 1840 and is a cry of surprise. That in turn is related to halloo, a cry to urge on hunting dogs. Halloo dates to about 1700, but a variant, aloo, appears in Shakeepeare’s King Lear a century earlier than that.

Hello was not a shoo-in for the telephone greeting either. It competed with several other options, including Alexander Graham Bell’s suggestion of Ahoy, but pulled into an early lead and by the end of the 1880s was firmly ensconced.

What Google censors in China

Google announced that it’s operations in China will include restricting searches which might embarrass China or lead to further freedom in that coountry. Michelle Malkin rightly pushes the “For Shame” button. She says,

“I’m collecting photoshopped/altered Google logos by bloggers and others in response to the search engine company’s decision to kowtow to China. Let a thousand protest icons bloom!”

Here are a few:

Now this is scary. This clown thinks he is the Islamic messiah. (Another one courtesy of Boker tov, Boulder!):

“When addressing the United Nations in September, Mr. Ahmadinejad flummoxed his audience of world political leaders by concluding his address with a prayer for the Mahdi’s appearance: ‘O mighty Lord, I pray to you to hasten the emergence of your last repository, the Promised One, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace.’

Here’s a clue - he’s not talking about the Second Coming of Jesus here.

On returning to Iran from New York, Mr. Ahmadinejad recalled the effect of his U.N. speech:

[One] of our group told me that when I started to say ‘In the name of God the almighty and merciful,’ he saw a light around me, and I was placed inside this aura. I felt it myself. I felt the atmosphere suddenly change, and for those 27 or 28 minutes, the leaders of the world did not blink. And they were rapt. It seemed as if a hand was holding them there and had opened their eyes to receive the message from the Islamic republic.”

No, I think it dawned on the assembled delegates that they were in the presence of a genuine madman with nukes. Can we talk preemption here?

From Smooth Stone (via Boker tov, Boulder!):

“Don’t get me wrong. I am open-minded, modern, progressive and tolerant. I just refuse to be one of the billions invested in the pretense that Islam has something more to offer than just terrorism, rioting, the death of free speech and artistic expression, Jew-hatred, female genital mutilation, limb amputation, gang rape, stoning to death for victims of gang rape, hanging underage girls in public parks, well, you get the idea. But that’s just me.”

Squid beaks or not, this is a bit much….

SI.com - MLB - Robinson’s daughter objects to Clemente honor:

“NEW YORK (AP) — The daughter of Jackie Robinson thinks Major League Baseball should not retire Roberto Clemente’s No. 21, the New York Daily News reported Tuesday.The Hispanics Across America advocacy group wants Clemente’s number set aside the way the late Robinson’s No. 42 was nine years ago. But Sharon Robinson said that honor should remain for her father only.

‘To my understanding, the purpose of retiring my father’s number is that what he did changed all of baseball, not only for African-Americans but also for Latinos, so I think that purpose has been met,’ Robinson told the newspaper at a birthday celebration for her father in Times Square. ‘When you start retiring numbers across the board, for all different groups, you’re kind of diluting the original purpose.’”

How many basketball numbers have been retired? Hockey? Roberto Clemente was a great player who deserves the honor. It does nothing to demean Jackie Robinson.

Let’s be clear here. The previous post was not intended to imply that God will not have His judgment on a sin-filled world. Revelation is pretty clear on that topic. Christ will come again in judgment. My point is that we spend too much time and energy in pointing to the day and the hour of His return and blaming every calamity on the Wrath of God. The Great Commission is not to go to the ends of the earth smacking people on the head about coming wrath, but to reach them with the Good News of salvation.

A subtle distinction, or not.