Thoughts

I had a great visit to Doug, who owns Salem Storehouse, a Christian bookstore.  He was wholly lacking any cheesiness or insincerity.  It was cool.  (his daughter married my cousin, and I thought I'd buy a different translation of the bible from the one I was pretty much beaten with growing up, introduce myself, and give him a copy of my book The Screwtape Emails to give me some feedback upon.)

I picked up a compendium of C.S. Lewis, an ESV translation in paperback, and a book that was on sale called "Loving God When You Don't Love the Church."  I'm trying to get some good out of it, and it's hard.  The thing is, for each chapter, there's like a good point he is trying to make which can be expressed in a couple of sentences.  He is a pastor, however, so his writing style is horribly irritating to me.  When I am irritated, I like to mock.  This guy writes that this is bad.  He's probably right.  However, I will not name him, and mock anyway.  He writes like this:

CHAPTER THREE: THOUGHTS

  Do you think?  *I* sure do!  Sometimes I can just think and think and then think some more!  Sometimes I even go into a room in our lovely beachfront house and do nothing but think for a whole blissful hour, cradling a cup of my personal favorite kind of chai tea, perched on the divan  looking at the wonderful pictures of my beautiful wife and three beautiful children that we have prominently displayed in there!  Usually I try to think about really happy things, but other times, I surely find myself slipping into thoughts that are sad.

  I hope I haven't made thinking sound depressing.  It isn't!  Thinking can be good but it can also be bad!  It all depends on what sort of thinking we do!  Do you ever think in a way that your conscience tells you is a bad one?  I know I do!  If you knew some of my thinking, you'd throw this book away in a hurry, I can tell you!

  Let me tell you something a little bit personal about myself: I like to think with my brain.  Some people think in other ways (Stephen Colbert thinks with his gut!), and I don't mean to say that thinking with your brain (or your "mind" as some people prefer to refer to it) is the only way to think, but that's just how I do it, I guess.  This comes from a long practice I started years ago in seminary school in Iowa.  (What a blessed time that was!)  I would just wake up, turn on my brain, and I could then use it to think with all day long!  Do we always remember to be thankful that God gave us a brain to think with?  We should!  If He hadn't, we couldn't even remember to thank Him to begin with!

  Thoughts can be very fun.  Do you have fun with thoughts?  I do!  But remember that thoughts can be the Devil's Cordless Drill if we aren't careful!  Good thoughts are good, but bad thoughts are not good.

and so on.  I think there must be a course in condescension taught at divinity school.