brians blah blah blahg

i like cottage cheese. but i admit that cottage cheese is very strange thing. i could in no way run down the scientific process that turns some kind of dairy product into a curded side dish, salad, even pass for dessert if it had peaches or strawberries on it. but cottage cheese lives on the edge…of “mmmm good and that is putrid!” a couple days or degrees different and what was edible and good becomes rotten. as it gets cultured it gets better but then like prime beef it teeters on the culinary precipice of going from good to nasty, green and bad.

seems like there are a maersk frieghter full of pop thoughts and philosophies that teeter on the edge of good and bad. like “what feels good”. for sure God loaded us up with countless ways to experience good feelings and sensations, but for what reason? for the pursuit of Him or for the pursuit of more and more “what feels good”? another news network headliner  life operation system is “whatever works”. just check the results, if the bottom line is profitable then that must have been chicken dinner winner decisions that led us there. promote that guy, give him a book deal and send him out on the “i have the answer of the day” speaking trail. but what about when what works for me hurts somebody else? how do “they” matrix in to my bottom line success results? and how do you tally what actually works versus what made a bigger stack of  numbers? the one life os that is really getting facebook foddered and talk show twittered is “my God”. it is nice to finally have a customizable homepage, playlist, and gps even knows what i like and how i like to get there. so if i can just shape, trim, snip, maybe even add to-God- (sorry God for even writing that) that would be so sweet. i could worship that God. except that God would be radically and regularly disappointing.

wouldn’t it be more mysterious, a bigger than life adventure, sometimes unpredictably scary to road trip with the deity God. God who opens His mouth and and unleashes better than sound bites that send me scrambling to write down and plagiarize as soon as i can. God who didn’t just make things, but contrived the processes that reproduce things. God who created adventure in the first place. God who isn’t cut and pasted by me. God who scribbled the original thought, art, philosophy, syllogisms, elements, standards, conundrums, and revelations on the board in the first place?

mortals make elaborate plans, but God has the last word. humans are satisfied with whatever looks good; God probes for what is good.  -proverbs 16.1-2

there is a way that seems right to a man,
but in the end it leads to death.-proverbs 16.25

nothing clever, nothing conceived, nothing contrived,
can get the better of God.-proverbs 21.30 (msg)

so for the next three weeks at cedar ridge we will excavate some not so conventional wisdom from chapter 21 of proverbs in the original book of wisdom and mystery-the bible. we will see what it says about

what feels good-april 19

whatever works-april 26

my God-may 3