Wednesday, September 24, 2008

But I'm trying really hard!

<idle musing>
We got back from Minnesota early this morning. You can see pictures of a hike we took here.

While we were there, I was sitting on a deck and watching a grasshopper. I don't know why, but the grasshopper was trying to climb the wall of the house. He would carefully place each of his six legs and advance up the wall. Each step took about 15-20 seconds. But, every time he got about 2-3 inches up the wall, he would lose his grip and fall to the ground. He did this for quite some time; sometimes he managed to get 4 inches off the ground, but he always fell back down. Once he landed on his back and had a terrible time getting upright. I thought maybe he would give up and hop away, but no! He tried again.

I finally walked away, but he was still trying—he might still be for all I know.

I thought the grasshopper was the perfect parable of how we try to make ourselves holy. We try and try and fall and fail and try again—all in vain. Only Christ can live a holy life and he has promised to do it in us. All we have to do is surrender.
</idle musing>

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

welcome back! I love and miss Minnesota. Its such a beautiful state.

A while back when I wrote a post about Caragounis, you mentioned that you were curious about a critique of Porter would look like from a linguist. I've tried to do that in a collection of posts while you were gone and I have one more in process.

Porter and the Greek Verb

On Porter's View of the Greek Verb II

On Porter's View of the Greek Verb III

Anyway, I'd be interested in your feedback or thoughts.

Joel Brueseke said...

I've often talked about the 'treadmill' of religion/religious effort but I think this analogy tops that. It never works but they keep on trying.