Thursday, October 30, 2008

HEAVEN ENTRANCE EXAM

PhotobucketA man dies and goes to Heaven. Of course, St. Peter meets him at the Pearly Gates. St. Peter says, "Here's how it works. You need 100 points to make it into Heaven. You tell me all the good things you've done, and I give you a certain number of points for each item, depending on how good it was. When you reach 100 points, you get in."

"Okay," the man says, "I was married to the same woman for 50 years and never cheated on her, even in my heart."

"That's wonderful," says St. Peter, "that's worth three points!"

"Three points?" he says. "Well, I attended church all my life and supported its ministry with my tithe and service."

"Terrific!" says St. Peter. "That's certainly worth a point."

"One point?!!" "I started a soup kitchen in my city and worked in a shelter for homeless veterans."

"Fantastic, that's good for two more points," he says.

"Two points!?!!" Exasperated, the man cries. "At this rate the only way I'll get into Heaven is by the grace of God."

"Bingo, 100 points! Come on in!"

Thanx Tim & Lori!

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Worth reading



PhotobucketFrom rebellion to responsibility???

from>> http://www.thinkchristian.net/index.php/2008/10/28/from-rebellion-to-responsibility/

Posted October 28th @ 4:43 pm by Andy

Ran across an interesting book review today of Sam Anderson’s Five Lives, which charts the lives of five famous cultural rebels: Arthur Rimbaud, Emily Post, Hugh Hefner, John Lennon, and Eminem. It’s a motley crew, but their life trajectories share many elements in common. All lacked attentive fathers in their youth, and all burst onto the scene with shocking or challenging moral messages and then struggled for the rest of their lives in the shadow of their initial outbursts. From the review:

All five of these figures warmed their hands around a common fire: the public performance of morality. Fatherlessness seems to have frozen them in a kind of permanent adolescence. They answered adult questions (How should one behave?) prematurely and exaggeratedly, then stubbornly clung to those answers for life. Their careers were built entirely on bad manners—whether excoriating them, glorifying them, or reveling in them. They sacrificed their lives to oversize visions of righteous living. And while they all have their own special failures and triumphs—that’s what makes them fit for biography—the saddest figures, to me, for precisely opposite reasons, are Rimbaud and Hefner. The French poet burned through his world-stomping revolutionary phase in less time than it takes most people to finish college. By 19, he was facing a whole second lifetime of pure sad, unheroic frustration: He wound up in Africa, trying unsuccessfully to get rich, and died of very painful cancer at 37. Hefner, on the other hand, still clings to his adolescence. At 82, he brags of being a “babe magnet” and collects young platinum-blonde “girlfriends.”

Sounds like a fascinating book. And it makes me wonder about the firebrands of Christian history and how their lives played out. Who’s your favorite Christian “rebel”—and after they arrived loudly on the scene of Christendom, how did they live out their lives? Did they quietly work in pursuit of their original message? Did they flame out dramatically? Or spend the rest of their lives slowly backing down from the message or theology they preached in their (spiritual) youth?