Gravity of Relationships

I moved into Sydney at the start of the year from Wodonga. Part of me is still very much in love with that place, but after spending my entire life there up until the move it was time to move on and experience new things. Now I live in a large church-run student lodging hostel.
Living with a large number of 18-22 year-olds who have all moved into Sydney at the start of the year in quite bizarre. I always liked watching Dr. Phil because of the exaggerated character traits you could see in the guests. You could learn a lot about the average person you met, because you could learn to see those character traits, even in a much less extreme form. I've discovered that the "Dr. Phil" effect applies if you put average people in exaggerated circumstances as well.

One thing I've noticed now, and previously in different circumstances, is that the moment two people overstep the conventional friendship lines, it's assumed that it has developed into a romantic relationship.
I have no doubt that this is another product of the modern trial-and-error philosophy of romance. Which goes, "Just keep trialing until you stop erroring, and for goodness sake, don't think to hard!" I do understand how the "don't think to hard" got there. It is a function to remind us that we are only human and can misjudge. If a Christian is really in communion with the Living God, it seems quite superfluous though. If God has an input into your life, and you are open to it, He'll let you know if your being dumb.
This is another demonstration of the way modern thinking has infiltrated the Church of the West. It's all the little things that give us away. In this case the seeming equality between the divorce rates inside and outside the Church is the killing blow.
It's time we began to rethink how we go about things, because right now we're only doing as well as the world, and this is a matter of love, so as children of love we should be pretty good at it.
To be fair, I advocate a trial-and-error philosophy myself, but it's a bit different. Apart from tending to be far more cautious and far more picky it states, "Learn from all your errors, so you know better what you need and want, and for goodness sake, ask God for help and understanding!"
God invented marriage, surly His people should be able to do it properly! Yet we can see ingrained the cultural precept that if you like the look of something you should try it, whatever is at stake. Even if that something is a person and what is at stake is a friendship.

Poverty in Thine Eyes

Last night I went to the residents Bible Study which I have not attended for some time. I had been distinctly put off by the new series on poverty. I tend to find that whenever a group of Christians, or for that matter "Christians", gets together and starts talking about a topic of social justice they get very slippery, and begin talking about grand ideals and noble sentiments that they keep as removed from themselves as possible.
It soon turns into a type of committee making snap decisions on what the Church and the West should do. Almost always delegating the hard jobs to people who were unable to attend that night, such as the pastors of major churches, Kevin Rudd, and the Pope.
You see there is a fascinating tendency to make decisions and commitments in order to clear consciences, all the while not really looking into the engineering of the situation, but instead assuming that we "know it all" and that everything we happen to have picked up from watching the news and in general conversation gives us a complete picture.
That's the reason why Bible Studies and the topic of poverty rarely mix well, because Christians have become so devastatingly good at keeping themselves personally removed from the topic beyond making themselves more committed to donating to charity and such, which are actions that allow us to do something about poverty without needing to have contact with it.

Fortunately, I was pleasantly surprised on this occasion. I actually found the discussion quite well informed, indeed, more informed then I was. This was greatly aided by the presence of two overseas students, one of them a girl from Sri Lanka who had simply fascinating information and perspective.
Beyond that it was actually a very self-analyzing session. The question was really asked, "Are we were we need to be?" and that my friends is a question the Church of the West needs to be seriously asking itself.