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Home and Eden

Jul 28, 2005 Print This Post

//MOOD: Relaxed
//NOISE: Birds

We finally made it home at about 7:30am this morning. I drove the first late shift until 2:30 and listened to an amazing sermon by Mark Driscoll and then a bunch of hymns. I don’t know why I was in the mood for hymns, but it actually kept me driving. Grace then took us the rest of the way home.

We put the kids to bed, hoping they would let us sleep a bit and they actually did. We woke up at 10:30, cleaned out the van, hired a guy to mow our lawn (amazing deal…he mowed and trimmed and everything…looks great) and we are basically settled back in.

In other news, I have been reading “East of Eden” by John Steinbeck. I am suprised that for whatever reason, I have never read this before. My brother in law John gave it to me for Christmas and I started it in MB. I am about halfway through right now and loving it. Here is a section I read yesterday in the van that struck me for a variety of reasons:

“The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.”

This section reminded me of this quote:

“Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.”

-G. K. Chesterton

Anyhoo, the section in “East of Eden” continues…

“The sectarian churches came in swinging, cocky and loud and confident. Ignoring the laws of debt and repayment, they built churches which couldn’t be paid for in a hundred years. The sects fought evil, true enough, but they also fought each other with a fine lustiness. They fought at the turn of a doctrine. Each happily believed all the othes were bound for hell in a basket. And each for all its bumptiousness brought with it the same thing: the Scripture on which our ethics, our art and poetry, and our relationships are built. It took a smart man to know where the difference lay between the sects, but anyone could see what they had in common.”