It's past eleven o' clock at night. I should go to bed. But I don't _want_ to go to bed. Bed's the last place I want to be right now. Tomorrow morning I'll be tired and regret staying up. This morning at 6.30 _all_ I wanted to do was to stay in bed (and that was not an option - it never is). But right now: I do _not_ want to go to bed.
I
Am an owl
And not
A lark.
I went to my first ever bible study group this evening. It scored 10/10 for being interesting: "I could've talked all night" (now there's a new take on an old song!)
Anyhow, with regards to absolutely nothing, I heard a saying I've never heard before at this bible study group. It came from a wonderful pragmatist of a grandmother - she dealt it out as she might deal advice on how to best bake bread, or when to plant your carrots:
"don't be so heavenly as to be of no earthly use" (she even has the lovely west-country lilt to go with it)!
"Doen't bee so evunllee az to bee of no urrthlee yooss"
Don't read this and think I'm aiming it at you or anyone else - I can't actually see that it applies to anyone I've ever known, real or in blog-world. It may be the best advice ever given; it may the worst; it may figure elsewhere on the scale of good / bad advice. But I just loved the way she said it, and the ensuing silence, as we all wondered.....?
??
7 comments:
I can hear the accent, you write accents so beautifully!
Fab advise too.
Ruth, I'm the same way. I hate to go to bed...I might miss something! I sit at my computer late at night and say to myself, "If I go to bed now, I can get 8 hours of sleep. But if I have to nurse Joshua in the middle of the night, I'll only get 7, and if he wakes up early that means I'll only get 6 1/2." And despite my best efforts to talk myself in to going to bed, I always stay up too late!
Hmmm. I'd be interested in a presentation of how someone can be so heavenly minded and not be of earthly use - as heavenly minded is to be focused on the one who is love, I think the cliche is not thought out at all! I prefer, "If you are not heavenly minded, you will not be of any earthly use."
1) Love God
2) Love our neighbor
There's a reason He put them in that order.
What is the subject of your Bible study?
Nothing is ever simple...
Subject of bible study was "the bits of Luke's gospel that don't appear in any other gospel".
The comment did not relate to the subject of the bible study, but was in relation to an offshoot discussion, where someone mentioned an aquaintance who had left her young children and husband to go and help sick children in Africa, having felt a very strong call to do so.
I take your point, Hammer, and it's an interesting one, really it is. I'm very much with Louise: nothing is simple.
What a great aphorism. I understand "so heavenly minded" to mean an unhealthy preoccupation with salvation. In 1939, C.S. Lewis addressed a sermon to Oxford University students who were necessarily preoccupied with the war, and compared their situation to Christians pondering eternity. He said,
"..I think it is important to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective. The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with ‘normal life.’ Life has never been normal.”
The sermon was made into an essay called "Learning in Wartime," and is worth staying up late to read!
When I was at uni I was involved in campaigning for social justice (www.speak.org.uk) and tried to get my Christian Union involved in it too. There was one guy there who would often be quite disruptive when I tried to lead prayer on justice issues and start praying about other 'non-secular' things. He maintained that we were soldiers for Christ and "a good soldier does not get involved in civillian matters". Definitely too heavenly to be any earthly use.
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