Here we go!!

Since I’m relatively new to this whole blogging thing, I don’t guarantee anything exciting, earth-shattering or deeply philosophical. Every now and then I might have a book review or share a news article or whatever. And even if nobody’s reading this, it won’t be the first time I’ve talked to myself. So here goes.

While getting ready for work this morning, I noticed it was unusually warmer than it should have been in the house considering the A/C had been running. I felt the vent and sure enough, there was lukewarm air coming out. Not exactly what you want to find out during the hottest part of the summer. Fortunately, we were able to have a repairman come that afternoon and fix it. Sarah and the boys breathed a sigh of relief for that one!

All this week, our church has been having VBS. Sarah is teaching a class and Carlos is going as well. Both seem to enjoy it, but Sarah is definitely looking forward to the end of the week. Believe me, so am I! It’s just been Jeremiah and me in the evenings since Sunday. Although this has been a pretty good father/son bonding time. Not quite sure what he thinks about it all, but he seems to enjoy having his daddy all to himself!

I’ve just recently finished two books – one fiction and one non-fiction. (Yes, I have the bad habit of reading more than one book at a time.) The non-fiction book was Surprised By Joy by C. S. Lewis, and I must say I came away rather disappointed. I’ve heard a lot that Lewis is a great writer, interesting to read, etc., ad nausem, so I purchased two volumes containing eight of his books. I finished Pilgrim’s Regress a few months ago and actually enjoyed that one. Surprised By Joy on the other hand was rather difficult to wade through. Lewis has (and even admits in one book) a rather bad habit of assuming the reader knows exactly what Lewis is talking about, whether the subject be French, Latin, philosophy, or Norse mythology. All through the book, he is trying to convey his lifelong search for Joy by chronicling his journey through philosophies in an autobiographical sort of way. On the one hand, you could almost throw out the entire book except for the last two chapters and still get the idea. On the other, however, I wonder if the point would be made if Lewis hadn’t wrote about all the other worldviews he went through to arrive at Christianity.

Lewis very rightly states “There was no doubt that Joy was a desire….But a desire is turned not to itself but to its object. Not only that, but it owes all its character to its object.” Our joy as Christians should be found or rather culminated in God, and to seek after God is to seek Joy itself! Yet even though Lewis hints at this, he doesn’t really directly make this point entirely clear, even in his closing paragraph where he states: “But what, in conclusion, of Joy? For that after all, is what the story has mainly been about. To tell you the truth, the subject has lost nearly all interest for me since I became a Christian…. [Joy] was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer.” Overall, he seems obsessed not with defining Joy or how it relates us to God, but painstakingly detailing his intellectual pursuits. I would rate the book a 4 out of 10 and probably never read it again.

Wow, that was a long first blog! Hopefully if you’re still reading this, you haven’t fallen asleep. I’ll blog more later on the other book I read of one of my favorite authors, Ted Dekker.