Shalom!

Greetings from Jerusalem.

This is quite a trip--literally and figuratively.

After a great week in Uganda with Terry Brennan at Kampala Childrens' Centre and at Pastor Arnold's pastor conference, I have come to Israel for a week.

The last two days I have spent touring Jerusalem with my good friend. He is a Messianic believer and a missionary to Japan. He also has a home in Jerusalem, where I have been staying. We have been touring the city of Jerusalem together and taking in the sights. We also have been meeting some very amazing believers in Jesus--some Jewish and some Arab.

Today we had lunch with a former PLO activist who came to faith in Jesus after he appeared to him in a vision. He is an evangelist and pastor, as well as a shop-keeper and dealer in biblical antiquities in the old city of Jerusalem. What an amazing man and a great heart. I was very encouraged by his testimony and love for Muslims. As he said--we love Muslims, Islam is the problem. That is, the spirit behind Islam is the driving force of so many difficulties--Jesus died for Muslim people and he loves them.

Tomorrow we go to the Dead Sea area and Jericho and then the next couple days to Galilee.

Got to go now. More thoughts later.

Blessings,

RM

The book is done and at the publisher. The project started ten years ago is now completed.

Thanks to all who have prayed for this book to come to fruition, encouraged me along the way and helped to make it a reality.

It is kind of weird to say, 'It's done.' To hold an actual copy in your hand.

The thesis of the book is that God's highest ideals for the genders is full and equal partnership. This was how he created us to operate and what got twisted through the fall has been and is being restored through the redemption Jesus brings. Mostly it is a study of pertinent biblical passages to demonstrate the thesis, along with some personal and practical stuff mixed in.

I wrote it because the Lord told me to write it. And because it is a message that needs to be repeated again and again until the church really grabs hold of it. And I wrote it because I needed to conform my own heart and practice to what my study has shown. Writing it down has a way of making one accountable.

Soon copies will be in for a gala book-signing at Wellspring. Plans are being laid for a conference by the same name as the title this spring. For those of you who can't wait--you can order your copy at Amazon.

Anyway, that's all I'm gonna say about that for now.

RM

After a month or more of abstaining from blogging I am renewing my efforts as we enter a new calendar year.

Why have I not been posting, you ask?

Not for lack of things to say, certainly. But I have felt the need to censor myself and purge this blog from the political rants and raves that characterized it much of the time over this past year. In coming days I plan to continue to share perspectives and thoughts about many topics, but I hope to do so with less rancor and (hopefully) with greater wisdom.

To begin this new 2010 edition of Blog 222 I want to quote a poem by Wendell Barry. It comes from a volume of his poems that I received from my daughter Kate as a Christmas gift (thanks Kate!). It is entitled "A Warning to my Readers." I think it applies here.

I came across this word, 'sehnsucht,' recently. It is a German word. There seems to be no good English equivalent. It denotes profound homesickness or longing or yearning, but with transcendent overtones. C. S. Lewis speaks of this spiritual homesickness in his famous essay, "The Weight of Glory." I thought you might like to explore this glorious bit of prose--it is careful thinking expressed by a precision that is scintillating.

Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wadsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things--the beauty, the memory or our own past--are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself . . . Now we wake to find . . . we have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken in . . .

Our life-long nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.

Sehnsucht is never discovered easily or else everyone would find it--like a Starbucks on every corner.