Normal Abnormality

My weekend is over and I have had a wonderful day. After church we had some friends over for lunch and had soup, breads and cake out on the deck on an unusually standard winters day. I say unusual as we have not had an usual winter’s day this year until yesterday. I blame the volcanic dust cloud that has been hanging around since the time our winter was meant to settle down. But today our thermometer dropped below one degree (Celsius)  and we had a decent frost. The skies remained clear and the sun beat down upon us over lunch, keeping us warm and happy. This is a normal South Canterbury winter’s day.

Another abnormal normality, if you can have one, is 160km (100 miles) to the north. Christchurch has not had a decent quake (around 4.0) since 9:40 Thursday morning and only a few non-decent with the last two being 41 hours apart from each other; both coming in at around 3.5 which is a good jolt but nothing compared to the 4.0+ aftershocks that had been happening daily or even hourly a week or so ago. Has the fault lines finally come to rest? I hope so and pray that the alternative (building up of pressure) is not the case.

Our church follows the lectionary and thus our readings today were Romans 7:15-25a and Matthew 11:15-30. It was a good reminder to me that even Saint Paul was not able to abstain from sin, something I have been beating myself up about this week when my greed has been overtaking my sensibilities. I will attempt to remember to take on Jesus’ yoke, as per the reading from Matthew next week and allow him to guide my motives.. We will see though, as like Paul, “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” Sin is all around us, and it is only through Jesus’ guidance we can move forward into a sinless life. But if Paul himself relapses, what hope have I? I guess that is why I am studying theology to sort these questions out.

So we probably should stop beating ourselves up and start looking towards Jesus and the wonderful life ahead in his name.

Cheers and blessings to you all.