Asking the homeless what they want for Christmas
Beautiful.
"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
Beautiful.
“He came down from heaven” can almost be transposed into “Heaven drew earth up into it,” and locality, limitation, sleep, sweat, footsore weariness, frustration, pain, doubt, and death are, from before all worlds, known by God from within. The pure light walks the earth; the darkness, received into the heart of Deity, is there swallowed up. Where, except in uncreated light, can the darkness be drowned?
– C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
The Lord did not come to make a display. He came to heal and to teach suffering men. For one who wanted to make a display the thing would have been just to appear and dazzle the beholders. But for Him Who came to heal and to teach the way was not merely to dwell here, but to put Himself at the disposal of those who needed Him, and to be manifested according as they could bear it, not vitiating the value of the Divine appearing by exceeding their capacity to receive it.
― St. Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation
I haven’t done one of these in a while, but I thought it’d be good to get into the habit of posting the recipes I’ve been trying. Here’s a really simple chicken sauce recipe I recently learned:
1. Make Sauce
Make a sauce using the following ingredients:
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons soy sauce
3 tablespoons ketchup
3 tablespoons white sugar
2. Cook Chicken
Finely chop one onion and saute in 2 tablespoons of olive oil until translucent. Add 4 skinless, boneless chicken breast halves.
3. Simmer
Pour sauce over the chicken, and bring to a boil.
Cover, reduce heat, and simmer for 25-35 minutes.
The first time I cooked this I used the measurements listed above, but the next time I attempted it, I doubled the measurements for the sauce, changed it to a red onion…and it all worked out wonderfully:
Jesus Christ is not only truly God, he is human like every one of us. He is human without limitation. He is not only similar to us, he is like us.
– Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline
After doing so badly on my New Year Resolutions this year, I’ve decided to keep it simple next year. That doesn’t mean that it’s going to be easy though! I’ve decided that in 2014 I am going to read the entirety of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments.
I’ve spent the last hour or so looking at different reading plans online. Many that I’ve found have been Protestant and have unfortunately therefore lacked the Deuterocanon. If I were to use any of those I would have to squeeze in the extra books (Tobit, Wisdom, Maccabees, etc.) at some point in the year. Moving on…
Some reading plans, such as YouVersion, don’t actually cover the entire Bible and instead just cover the majority of the text. While practical, that also seems a bit “meh”. Moving on…
I also found one plan which has quite a mix of daily readings. Each day there there are two Old Testament readings, a Psalm and a New Testament reading. That is contrasted with the plans from Presentation Ministry and Catholic Doors, both of which assign one book at a time.
As far as I can tell, the most popular plan is one which is put out by the Coming Home Network, which is available in PDF here and which some nice person converted into hypertext format here. It has an Old Testament reading, New Testament reading and then something from the Wisdom literature, such as Psalms or Proverbs. I think this is the plan for me. It even has the option of reading through the Catechism too…but maybe I’ll think about that for 2015!
If anyone else has the same goal for 2014, please leave a message below 🙂
UPDATE 05/20/14: Meg Hunter-Kilmer has added an article on this subject and presents an alternative reading plan.