Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, I feel too weary to write, but still I shall. You've written much about this, how when we use things and people for the usefulness we find in them, it is an act of desecration, dishonoring the very God who is the creator of all things and people, the Christ who fills all in all. This weekend I was talking to a lady who felt used by her manager, even though she could understand and even tried to be understanding about how her manager was in turn used by her superior who also has to answer to the demand of some higher-up nameless force.  A few hours before that conversation, a church lady called my cell (instead of sending a text, which is more courteous and discrete especially on a Sunday) and asked where my son was, only for me to realize later that she was really interested in the whereabouts of her own son and not mine.  The day before that when I was serving in the church café someone came up to me and made a demand in a manner even more ungracious than "

Dear Eugene, It's been a weekend like what John declares at the end of his account of Jesus' life, that if everything happened were to be written down, "I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written." I am sure people today could and would object this way: Well, it's only thirty-plus years on earth, narrowly focused on no more than three; if a camera is to fixate its lens on Jesus for the whole time, it would not yield more than a thousand days of footage, hardly what one would call filling the "whole world." How technology and "knowledge" has shriveled our imagination, that we can only think in a straight line, and the most boring one at that! Of the many suggestions John might have made, one has to be Jesus' life can hardly be reduced to the narrative strands John has propose, as variegated and far-reaching as they are. Well, that's the kind of weekend I just had.  I am too drain

Dear Eugene, Last night I had a strange dream. In the dream, J. I. Packer was thumbing through a Bible, while mumbling and grumbling, "Here we go again, N. T. Wright, undermining justification, saying this and that, blah blah blah...The Bible clearly says here--wait, I will find it ( thumbing violently through the pages )--but the Bible says...here the Bible says--wait, almost got it..." Of course that ain't the real Packer, though it might be the right Wright (from the fake Packer's perspective).  In real life Packer does not need to thumb through the Bible violently to find his proof text.  In real life, despite their serious disagreement in even some crucial doctrines , Packer proclaims, "Brilliant Bishop Wright is one of God’s best gifts to our decaying Western church..."  Here are two great Christians, great human beings showing us how God's family members disagree--even "fight"--in the Spirit, in the name of Christ, for the sake of