Knowing and Living

Dear Eugene,

What is a father?  What is a leader?  What is a man?

Just because I am doing all the things that people expect me to do, it does not make me any of these by default.  There is always a vocation to ascend to.

Thinking and doing, knowing and living, they can't do without one another.  I am trying to put things in very simple terms here, but the reality is far from being simple.  Volumes can be written, and in fact were written, about the great gulf between what we claim to believe and how we actually live.  Ephesians would be one.

Walker Percy also asked the same question, in form of the many subtitles he gave to his book "Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book": or

The Strange Case of the Self, your Self, the Ghost which Haunts the Cosmos or

How you can survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million fundamentalist Christians or

Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos--novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes--you are beyond doubt the strangest or

Why it is possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you've been stuck with yourself all your life or

How it is possible for the man who designed Voyager 19, which arrived at Titania, a satellite of Uranus, three seconds off schedule and a hundred yards off course after a flight of six years, to be one of the most screwed-up creatures in California-- or the Cosmos.

We get the point :)

How can we systematize our theology with such ingenuity yet still live with so little congruity?  How do we claim to worship a good God when we are living so very badly, in every way big and small?  Can we brush it off as an unfortunate incident of arrested development in our "sanctification" when the misfortune seems to be rather pervasive, if not of epidemic scale in our society, in our church?

How we live gives away what we actually believe.  Is the implication so very difficult to apprehend for those of us who claim "justification by faith alone"?

Struggling to live what I know, Alex

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