Posts
Here are some links for today:
1. Whitney Houston talks with Diane Sawyer about her struggle with drug addiction (see here). I don’t know if this is the same video that I watched yesterday, but, in the one that I watched yesterday, Whitney was telling Diane about her faith that Jesus loves her. She was also saying that her greatest problem is herself. Recovery, living out a positive and an affirming faith, and battling one’s inner demons can be for many a struggle that needs to be affirmed and re-affirmed each day.
2. According to this article, Osama Bin Laden did not want for his children to follow his path of jihad, but rather to get a good education and live in peace with the West. That makes me wonder why he was even conducting jihad, if he did not believe that it was a suitable path for his children. Was it because he was angry that the U.S. set up a base in Saudi Arabia, which he considered to be holy soil, and so he felt that he was fighting things like that rather than the West in general? Did he believe that it was too late for him to follow a righteous path, even as he was seeing that the path of jihad that he was on was futile? Did he feel that Westernization was inevitable and so his children had best make peace with it, while maintaining some devotion to Islam?
3. A theme that comes up on my blog, and which will come up again this coming April (which is National Autism Month), is social skills. In books that try to teach social skills, we are told that we should be interested in other people’s lives and ask them questions about themselves. But there are right and wrong ways to do this. In this post and this post, the topic is whether or not it’s appropriate to ask parents with children adopted from other countries about their children.
4. Something that turned me off to evangelicalism was how people around me appeared to be hearing from God, whereas God didn’t seem to know my address. Not only did this influence me to beat up on myself, but I also tended to look down on others who did not hear from God. I’ve been wanting to get away from beating myself up and spiritual elitism. Carson T. Clark has a post on this issue. Both the post and the comments are good.
