Contractions

I have recently decided to use as few contractions as possible. One, because it is simply poor writing to do so. My sister and I were just talking (well, about an hour and a half ago) about how our writing is so much more mature, so much prettier than our talking is. Our vocabulary is larger, our thought patterns are more well developed; it is just better to read our writing than to listen to us spout off about nothing.

Another reason is because of a sentence I wrote during some reflection time earlier tonight. The sentence: Why is it that we do not talk about Jesus relationship to the Wisdom Literature?

While that is a huge topic in itself, and one I plan to spend a lot of time contemplating and exploring this summer (secretly I have wanted to since a peculiar conversation (see end of paragraph) I had in Australia), I found something rather sinister in that sentence. If I were merely to say "Why is it that we don't talk about Jesus..." it could be taken as a suggestion, a somewhat lamentable fact of life, a passing idea that floated through my brain and right out your other ear. But to say that "Why is it that we do not talk about Jesus..." seems to me more sinister a thing. We do not talk about some way we could understand Jesus. That thought strikes me as a problem (unrelated to the problem of the general topic) is just that we do not talk about Jesus! I find myself having a lot of meaningless conversations about alcohol or about girls or about whatever, and they don't contribute anything to me loving the Lord with all my heart or soul, or holding fast to Him.

Anyways, the general topic. After one service at St. Paul's last fall, I was talking with Mat and his brother-in-law about something or other, and made some kind of offhand remark meant as a joke that Ecclesiastes tells us that life is meaningless! And Mat's brother-in-law quickly made the remark "But ONLY before the incarnation!"

Since then I've been rather struck at the relationship between Jesus and the Wisdom Literature. The sum of my rather paltry thinking thus far is that perhaps the Wisdom literature an help us to make a link between the God in the Old Testament that is often preached as an angry God of Judgment and Fire and the God of the New Testament, the Jesus obsessed with love and non-violence and acceptance.

Obviously that generalizes the pictures of God found in the Old and New Testaments, but I feel as though those generalizations are preached and talked about a lot. There really is something to the need to study and think about and write about God, to let him inhabit and renew and even enlighten our minds, so that when we KNOW Him more we can then love Him more, and give more of ourselves to Him.