Ok so this morning someone asked the professor if it was a joke that we have class from 9 to 9 tomorrow…that was one of the funniest things that has happened today J
Partly for my classes we are encouraged to keep up journals to journal about our spiritual process over the semester (well and from now on out for that matter). I have always kept a journal but lately have not had quite as much time but also because I blog now I often think of that as my journal, however I should prob print off it at some point to have it in my records. So what I have been doing is writing some stuff in my journal and some on my blog (since they both count). And what I just realized is that with Office 2007 I can just type this into a word document and then blog it from here…what great technology advances however as much as I appreciate Office 2007, I still don't appreciate Microsoft…anyways the class I am in this weekend (and my last weekend class!! YEA!) is about spiritual classics and spiritual direction. Part of what we are looking at this weekend is about individual differences and how they affect the way we worship and relate to God. I thought this was a very profound thought because as he talked about this morning this is where the worship wars often gets started. Each of us are individuals and that was God's intention and plan. However, within that plan we sometimes butt heads because the way we relate to God is not always the way another does. Hence for some people, praise songs that repeat things are how people relate best to God…the ability to sing songs that repeat and to just tell God over and over again what we feel and for some it is necessary to repeat to get it into their hearts. For others they relate to God through the classic hymns that sometimes have a deeper theology in them. Neither way is wrong as long as the song is theologically sound but what is wrong is when we cannot see the fact that it is individual differences and a gift from God and in that process we are rude and mean to those who don't see things the same way we do. I think of how rich we are to have so many differences and viewpoints. Think about if we all saw things the same way how boring it would all be and how we may never be able to realize the depths of something without the other's view point.
Another concept we talked about today was the difference between transformation and information. We talked about the fact that you cannot have just information in the Christian faith but you often cannot have transformation without information. One of the things he said was that part of the Christian life is that when you receive information it should lead to transformation. I really appreciated that because I have been really struggling the last couple weeks with just what it means to be a Christian and how does that relate to how I live my life. We have been talking at Perimeter about the book of Daniel and how Daniel did not let Babylon (or the world) bring down his convictions. Randy was saying that the world is working so hard to minimize the difference between Christians and themselves and how they have done a good job. He was also talking about how change often starts small such as speeding and not feeling bad about it or not taking the Sabbath seriously…I was really convicted because recently I really have been striving to honor the Sabbath which is rather hard sometimes as sometimes it is my only day off during the week. I entered into a "debate" with PSI regarding this class this weekend since it will be meeting on Sunday as well. After a week of going back and forth it was decided I would attend these two days (Fri/Sat) and then do extra work through an Independent Study for the Sunday portion. I was having a hard time and feeling like maybe I did something wrong by saying I needed an exception because I couldn't justify going to class on Sunday till we got to that point today and I thought, "if what I hear doesn't change my life in church, what does it really all mean" and I realized that through information I had been transformed. It is all rather interesting and I still have a lot to process just from this morning!
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