It's definitely all the rage to be asking lots of questions about life and purpose etc and it seems that a criticism of someone like Rob Bell is that he asks lots of questions but doesnt really provide answers.
I heard this quote the other day:
"It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers."
James Thurber
...which is a very good point.
But I think its very hard to know (for sure) really many answers. There are some very solid truths that we can cling too and that are GOOD answers for many things. But I think we need to acknowledge the mystery in life - whilst trying to pursue truth.
Getting over my head now and i'm starting to go cross eye'd
over and out
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
A thought from my time in Ethiopia
So one of the things that really made us (the 17ppl that traveled as part of the DEEP program) super uneasy was the amount of food we ate while over there. I mean, we ate A LOT of food! It was really laid out of us and sometime we even had silver service in top restaurants! This caused some serious issues because, well, we were in Ethiopia and there were starving people all around us and we didnt really go there to eat heaps of food - in fact many of us were going EXPECTING to eat very little (and loose weight!).
So, I can hear you saying "well... why didnt you just eat less"? And this certainly is what we were thinking too but there was a complication. We were being hosted by VERY hospitable Ethiopians (who were partners with TEAR Aus). Part of the culture in Ethiopia is to really really really look after your guests, and they certainly did. As you can imagine, it would have been extremely rude of us to refuse this food and even to eat less! (yep, thats right. We were often TOLD to keep eating/order more in quite a stong and repetative way!)
One day quite early in the trip we visited a feeding program run by Hope Enterprises in Addis Ababa - they fed over 1000 very poor people every day. It was quite an experience for all of us and we felt totally useless standing there observing.
Aftet seeing this, we walked 3 shops down and had lunch in a nice restaurant - which was the most awful thing I think many of us had ever experienced. We just had to take up a big offering and deliver it up to the feeding program so that we didnt kill ourselves.
But I've been thinking abdout that experience latelty and have really come to realise that this is waht I/we do everyday anyway... its just not right next door! We need to have that same feeling of 'wrongness' every time we exploit how much we have.
Once again - this is waaaay to challenging even for me to handle... hopefully we can learn from this though.
So, I can hear you saying "well... why didnt you just eat less"? And this certainly is what we were thinking too but there was a complication. We were being hosted by VERY hospitable Ethiopians (who were partners with TEAR Aus). Part of the culture in Ethiopia is to really really really look after your guests, and they certainly did. As you can imagine, it would have been extremely rude of us to refuse this food and even to eat less! (yep, thats right. We were often TOLD to keep eating/order more in quite a stong and repetative way!)
One day quite early in the trip we visited a feeding program run by Hope Enterprises in Addis Ababa - they fed over 1000 very poor people every day. It was quite an experience for all of us and we felt totally useless standing there observing.
Aftet seeing this, we walked 3 shops down and had lunch in a nice restaurant - which was the most awful thing I think many of us had ever experienced. We just had to take up a big offering and deliver it up to the feeding program so that we didnt kill ourselves.
But I've been thinking abdout that experience latelty and have really come to realise that this is waht I/we do everyday anyway... its just not right next door! We need to have that same feeling of 'wrongness' every time we exploit how much we have.
Once again - this is waaaay to challenging even for me to handle... hopefully we can learn from this though.
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