Day 8: In Which I Sort of...Give Up

There wasn't much of a day 8, actually. Within a couple hours of posting my last entry, I lay in bed dreaming of all kinds of food, feeling weak and wasted. I finally got up and fixed a small spinach salad, ate 1/3 of a banana, and had a small piece of cheese and some melba toast.
Oh well.

As I said, most of fasting is psychological, and something happened to me during the Mardi Gras meal yesterday- probably a combination of the food and the heavily tobacco-poisoned atmosphere, which had me feeling like I was going to die after being in that environment for two hours. Psychologically, I wanted fixing, and bad.

Other than losing 10 pounds, and finding out more about the mess in Iraq, which continues to be generally murky as far as information goes, there is one unexpected benefit to this experience: I started journaling again.

From 1982 till 1996, I kept a journal. Since I got saved in '84, it was interesting to look back at those particular entries. but for the most part, looking over the journals in 1996, what I saw was too much introspection, self-flogging, and depressing insights. So, while housemoving in the spring of '96, I tossed my journals out. I saved excerpts from entries having to do with getting saved. I was never much of a keeper of things I though had outlived their usefulnes. It wasn't the kind of stuff I wanted anyone reading after I was gone, anyway.

What I'll do with these entries is copy them into a Word file, and keep adding to them daily for my own amusement. I read not too long ago in Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac about a writer who kept a journal all of his life. in which he simply sketched out in a few words what he did that day. Now that's my kind of journaling. Enough of this introspection business! If I remember a few things about a certain day a number of years ago, that tends to trigger more complete memories of the day. This is something completely useless, I suppose, but, as I said, it amuses me. Ok, so I'm 53. Better late than never getting started on this sort of thing. It will be fun to read when I'm 80 and beginning to forget things.

A final word about Iraq: I continue to pray for the region, and continue to be concerned, and continue to believe that if one looks at the situation politically, one is missing the most significant factor. What is really important is what is happening there in the spiritual realm, and how that fits with Biblical prophecy.

I myself tend to think that the Second Coming will be a fairly long time coming- maybe as much as 200 years, if for no other reason than the preponderance of Biblical "scholars" who grow progressively more hysterical at the latest signs of the coming of the Antichrist, or the immanence of the Great Tribulation.

But I digress. Perhaps the most key insight about Iraq that I've read in the last couple months is this, from some unremembered journalist or pundit: "What we have done in Iraq is walk into a 1,000 year-old civil war between Sunni and Shia," or word to that effect. This thought, perhaps more than anything else I've read, defines the situation there most succinctly.

But on the other hand, with 150,000 troops there, surely at least 10-20,000 of them are people who know and love the Lord. What, one wonders, is the effect they are having on the region? These are people who know the Creator, love and pray for the Iraqi people, and perhaps are involved with getting Bibles into the hands of its citizens. The word is that thousands of Iraqis are getting saved, and churches are springing up all over the place. Will we ever read about this in the secular press? What do you think?

The mass conversions of millions of people in the Third World to Christianity, in lands mostly south of the equator, and in the southern and rural US, is perhaps the biggest underreported event of the last 50 years. That's not my view, but the view of a secular author who recently wrote a book on this subject. Sorry, I don't remember who this person was, nor the title of his book, so you have to trust I'm telling the truth.

"God is using the US as a policeman in the world," a Greek friend of mine said recently. He didn't mean it negatively at all. In his view, what many see as the imperial overreaching of American power, he views as part of how the Lord uses nations against one another as a mechanism of correction and judgment. This, by the way, in no way expresses the view of the average Greek, nor of the average Greek Christian.

I'll keep this blog up for a week or so, then I'll delete it. Thanks for praying-----Dan