Thursday 9 October 2014

Blogging Below the Line Day 4



 
"Homesickness" by Kristina Alexanderson Source: Photopin


Meals
Breakfast: N/A[1]
Lunch: Omelette (1 egg) and 30g of rice. One glass of budget cola (200ml).[2]
Dinner: Pizza dough with quarter of a can of spaghetti. One glass of budget cola (200ml).
Total Kj consumed: 2905j
Total burnt off through exercise: 532kj
Recommended minimum Kj intake: 4187kj
If every day was like today: I’d lose 9kg over 5 weeks. 

Observations
They say that the second and third days of Live Below the Line are the hardest. I disagree. Today is the hardest. I’m just so sick of tasteless food and all I can think about is chocolate, bacon, and chicken, and how this will all be over soon.

Also, I’ve started having nightmares about Live Below the Line. Well not full on nightmares but I keep dreaming that I’m halfway through a really nice meal and then I remember I’m actually supposed to be doing the challenge, and that I’ve cheated everyone who sponsored me.
On the bright side, I’m going out for breakfast on Saturday morning. Baaaacon…

Reflection
I recently came across the Parable of the Rapture by theologian/philosopher Peter Rollins. I think it provides a very interesting spin on the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats found in Matthew 25:31-46.


I really like this spin on the parable because it confronts the idea that the Gospel is all about shooting off to Heaven after you die to go and live in the clouds to escape the fate of earth. Although this is a very popular view in the Church today, I think more and more people are coming around to realise that this simply isn’t all that Biblical and that the Gospel is as much about life BEFORE death as it is about life AFTER death.[3]  


In his latest book, Surprised by Scripture, the prominent New Testament scholar N.T. Wright writes:


“The early Christians were not very interested, in the way our world has been interested, in what happens to people immediately after they die. They were extremely interested in a topic many Western Christians in the last few hundred years have forgotten about altogether, namely the final new creation, new heavens and new earth joined together, and the resurrection of the body that will create new human beings to live in that new world.”[4]


He goes on to write:


“But what is inheritance? Here centuries of the Western Christian tradition have given the emphatic, though often implicit, reply: heaven. Heaven is our home, our inheritance; we have reread the story of the Exodus in those terms, with the crossing of the Jordan symbolizing, as in Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan, the bodily death that will bring us to heaven itself, the Canaan for which we long. But 0 and this, as you will realize, is the whole point I’ve taken so long to get to – this is precisely not what Paul says. What he says would have been clear had not the whole Western tradition been determined to look the other way at the crucial point. The inheritance is not heaven. Nor is it Palestine, a small geographical strip in the Middle East. The inheritance is the whole renewed, restored creation. I will say it again: the whole world is now God’s holy land. That is how Paul’s retold Exodus narrative makes full and complete sense. And that, I suggest, is the ground plan for a fully biblical, fully Christian view of creation and of our responsibility towards it.”[5]


Seriously, if you haven’t read his book go out and buy it now.


[1] Okay so I know that breakfast is the most important meal of the day but I just could not stomach eating porridge today.
[2] Okay so I know that I rationed myself to one glass a day but I’m under budget for today so I figured why not?
[3] I wrote about this in two of my earliest posts: “Citizens of Heaven?” and “Forgetting the Gospel
[4] N T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues (New York: HarperOne, 2014), loc1281.
[5] N T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues (New York: HarperOne, 2014), loc1415.

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