Seven Quick Takes - Rotting beans, teenagers and tender mercies

Visit This Ain't the Lyceum

1.  If you read any of my other posts you will note that on Monday I proudly stated that I was soaking some beans and lentils for a homemade soup.  On Thursday I announced that on Wednesday I realised I'd forgotten that I was soaking the beans.  Thursday I went out to go give my Grandma a shower and clean her flat, on my return G announced that he had found the beans in the microwave and the slimey bean-water had overflowed all over the microwave.  He refused to throw the beans away, such was the smell.  And he was right - they smelled like feet and vomit.  How on earth did I manage to recount the beans tale and then forget to actually throw them away?  How?  It's a mystery to me to be sure.

I think I need to point out that I am not disgusting, we just don't use the microwave much and the beans were hidden. I do clean! :D

2.  My plans today are to do some cleaning and some ironing whilst I wait for a friend to let me know that she has the keys to their new house and then I'm going to go and help scrape some wallpaper for them.

3.  My eldest daughter has reached a peak of teenageryness.  Anyone who has teenagers will understand what this means.  But G and I mostly look like this:

Well, especially G what with him having a beard and all...and the fact that I would be wearing a top... haha

4.  I am waiting in trepidation for the washing machine to finish.  It has our bedding in and I just KNOW that it is not going to like it.  We got the washing machine with the house.  It's a small top-loading machine and for some reason, especially when it's doing our bedding it decides to announce that it needs servicing (well it doesn't announce it, a little red light comes on) and then it seizes up for half the day.

5.  We visited some friends at their caravan on Wednesday.  We had a lovely time chatting whilst the girls played with their daughter and some other kids from the campsite all day...well except for a time of teenageryness from Chatterbox who sat in the car for about three hours reading her book.  She did emerge when they announced they were going to play hide and seek.

6.  Whilst we were chatting we talked about various things and one of the things is forgiveness.  If Jesus died 'once for all' do we need to keep asking for forgiveness?  I say, "Yes".  I won't go into a big theological treatise as to why I believe this, because this is seven QUICK takes and would defeat the object of this meme.

7.  I've been thinking a lot about selfishness, self-less-ness, etc.  I read this Gentle Selfishness.  I'm not sure but they suggest that the Spiritual fruit of Gentleness can 'kill' gentle selfishness because it is 'not weakness but controlled strength'.  I always think of godly gentleness more like tender mercy, I think if I look at it like that, then mercy does kill selfishness.  Something to ponder.

Happy weekend!  

Forgiveness

I'm reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, it's one of those books I pick up and read from time to time but I'm not sure I've ever sat down and read it cover to cover in one single time frame.

Anyway, there are some things that have struck me and so I don't forget them I'm going to record them on my blog here and there.

[W]e might try to understand exactly what loving your neighbour as yourself means.  I have to love him as I love myself.  Well, how exactly do I love myself?...

A good many people imagine that forgiving your enemies means making out that they are not such bad fellows after all, when it is quite plain that they are.  Go a step further.  In my most clear-sighted moments not only do I not think myself a nice man, but I know that I am a very nasty one.  I can look at some of the things I have done with horror and loathing.  So apparently I am allowed to loathe and hate some of the things my enemies do.  Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a man's actions but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin  but not the sinner.

For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man?  But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life - namely myself.  However much I might dislike my own cowardice or greed, I went on loving myself.  There had never been the slightest difficulty about it.  In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man.  Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things. Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery.  We ought to hate them.  Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid.  But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible,. that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.
~Chapter 7, Forgiveness, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis.