Rate Your Pain...

My good friend Matt is getting his hip surgically repaired. It is a pretty gruesome process. His wife wrote on their blog today...

The nurses often ask Matt to rate his pain on a scale of 1-10. I think he's rating his pain too low. He said a ten on his scale would be for someone to rip his femur out of its socket and beat him with it.

Oh Matty. Made me think of this...

Woman in a Basket

So there was this woman sitting in a basket with a leaden lid. Then this angel popped open the lid, pointed at her and said, “Her name is Wickedness.” Just when you thought it could not get any stranger, two stork-winged women grabbed the basket (lid closed!) and flew off to Babylon.
Such was one of Zechariah’s visions and in its context what a remarkable image it is of what God has done for us in Christ – He has taken our sins away. Our sins themselves, along with all our guilt for them have been “flown away.” Forever.
Last night we pondered that truth for a few minutes at our meeting to pray. I asked folks to think of their sins, then we took a few minutes to state to each other the following: “Jesus died to take away my __________...” and they would fill in their sin (pride, gossip, immoralities, anger, unbelief, etc). I even encouraged them to ponder some of those sin “grocery lists” you find in places like Romans 1 to properly identify their sin.
As one after another spoke I got happier and happier! It was, to press the analogy, like we were all dumping our wickedness in the basket that was soon to be flown away. I reminded our folks that this was not a rehearsal of failure, but a rejoicing in substitutionary atonement! Jesus died for real sins that we commit. But He died! The wrath of God against these wicked deeds was paid in full.
It sure is easy to pray to a Saviour like that.

A New Poster-boy for Catholicism? Conrad Black: Why I became a Catholic

Conrad Black: Why I became a Catholic - Holy Post:

"As a nominal Anglican, I had always had some problems with Henry VIII as a religious leader. The Anglicans, moreover, have never really decided whether they are Protestant or Catholic, only that they “don’t Pope,” though even that wavers from time to time. Luther, though formidable and righteous, was less appealing to me than both the worldly Romans, tinged with rascality though they were, and the leading papist zealots of the Counter-Reformation.

The serious followers of Calvin, Dr Knox and Wesley were, to me, too puritanical, but also too barricaded into ethnic and cultural fastnesses, too much the antithesis of universalism and of the often flawed, yet grand, Roman effort to reconcile the spiritual and the material without corrupting the first and squandering the second. Fanatics are very tiresome, and usually enjoy the fate of Haman in the book of Esther; of Savonarola, Robespierre, Trotsky, Goebbels, and Guevara...

...Though there are many moments of scepticism as matters arise, and the dark nights of the soul that seem to assail almost everyone visit me too, I have never had anything remotely resembling a lapse, nor a sense of forsakenness, even when I was unjustly indicted, convicted, and imprisoned, in a country I formerly much admired."