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christiancrouch
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Name: Christian
Country: United States
State: Tennessee
Birthday: 7/26/1986
Interests: God. Life. Music. Movies. Foreign languages. Waffle House.
Expertise: Sarcasm. Self-deprecation. Guitar tomfoolery. Vocabularization.
Occupation: Student
Industry: Entertainment
Message: message meEmail: email me
AIM:  christianhcrouch
Member Since:
8/2/2005
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| Everybody's Workin' for the Weekend I was, anyway. Hebrew is kickin' my Gentile booty. It's a beautiful language. I love it. God chose it for a reason. That being said, I've put in about 8 hours on translating Deuteronomy 1, and I've only managed about 20 verses. That, my friends, is called "frustrating" in my native tongue.
I also have another reason to love B.B. Warfield. When it comes to cool quotations, he's like a Presbyterian Spurgeon.
"Perhaps the simplest statement of it is the best: that [Calvinism]
lies in a profound apprehension of God in His majesty, with the
inevitably accompanying poignant realization of the exact nature of the
relation sustained to Him by the creature as such, and particularly by
the sinful creature. He who believes in God without reserve, and is
determined that God shall be God to him in all his thinking, feeling,
willing -- in the entire compass of his life activities, intellectual,
moral, spiritual, throughout all his individual, social, religious
relations - - is, by the force of that strictest of all logic which
presides over the outworking of principles into thought and life, by
the very necessity of the case, a Calvinist. In Calvinism, then,
objectively speaking, theism comes to its rights; subjectively
speaking, the religious relation attains its purity; soteriologically
speaking, evangelical religion finds at length its full expression and
its secure stability. Theism comes to its rights only in a teleological
conception of the universe, which perceives in the entire course of
events the orderly outworking of the plan of God, who is the author,
preserver, and governor of all things, whose will is consequently the
ultimate cause of all. The religious relation attains its purity only
when an attitude of absolute dependence on God is not merely
temporarily assumed in the act, say, of prayer, but is sustained
through all the activities of life, intellectual, emotional, executive.
And evangelical religion reaches stability only when the sinful soul
rests in humble, self-emptying trust purely on the God of grace as the
immediate and sole source of all the efficiency which enters into its
salvation. And these things are the formative principles of Calvinism."
Indeed.
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| Title There was a time in my life when keeping this blog updated was one of the most important things to me. The last six months have not been one of those times.
Also, since my premium membership ran out, my site layout has gone back to plain-jane stuff. I'm wondering if I should take the path of the beloved and get a Wordpress, which just look a lot lot cleaner to me.
Thoughts?
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| Who Gets to Decide How the Church Should Worship?
This is one of the best articles on worship I've ever read.
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| Auf Wiedersehen, Bamberg [Note: this is a copy of an email I sent tonight to my friends and family]
My room is empty except for two overstuffed suitcases. In the morning I'm using up the last of my bread to make two honey sandwiches for the road. I'll put away the dishes I bought, fold up the sheets I bought, and stuff the two pillows I bought into the closet for someone who didn't buy them. I'll put the toiletries I'm taking back with me into my carry-on bag, call a cab, and make another last-minute inspection before walking down the hallway and giving a Bulgarian girl my keys for when the super comes back on Monday. I'll close the big orange door for the last time.
The last couple of days have been a big blur. I've had to close this account, cancel that service, and each day has had its own last-minute hassles. I spent today running around buying souvenirs from shops I've scooped out throughout the whole semester only to discover that I owed my super 9.50 (euros) for not paying my rent in time. That was about 9.50 (euros) more than I had (unexpected fees have a way of draining your bank account). After lots of emailing and phone calling, I got it all worked out.
I feel like the whole semester has been like that: putting this off to the last minute, finding unexpected fees and hassles all the time - just one more thing. I've really enjoyed my time here - don't get me wrong - but from the minute I stepped off the plane in Munich last February, an internal timer has been counting down the time until I come back home. There were definitely times where I could not see the light at the end of the tunnel, when I was frustrated with everybody and everything. I had to grow up in a lot of ways over the last six months. Like digging ditches over Christmas break, I can look back on it now and say it was good, but at the time - during the duress and hassle of the whole thing - I hated it.
I've met a lot of cool people, some of whom I'm looking forward to keeping in touch with. I also visited a lot of places where few poor white boys from Franklin County have ever been. I've seen and smelled and touched and lived more of Europe than I ever expected. Yet throughout the whole thing, the familiar things of home were always at the forefront of my mind. "If I were in Sewanee right now, I'd be taking finals/at church/serving overpriced food/laying on top of my car at the lake with my friends." Even in the middle of the last few nights, where I spent all kinds of time with my new friends in the (now) most comfortable of German pubs, I thought about how none of it equaled one cherry limeade with Chelsey, not one Thursday night Bible study, not one single conversation past midnight in Waffle House. I will look back very fondly on Germany, and I won't regret what I might have missed this summer back home, but I won't fool myself by saying, "I'm sad to leave." I'm not.
Germany is a great place, full of great people (and especially great food). The language and the culture are just unmatched - that is, until you compare it with a cool spring afternoon at the Cross, or one night watching episode after episode of "Law and Order" with good friends. We try to pour ourselves into the right-here, right-now, and I think that definitely has a time and a place. Thing is, we'll always go back to what feels like home for us in our hearts. Germany is great, but it's not home.
God says that He has placed eternity in our hearts. He also tells us that Christ doesn't just redeem us from a deserved death, but from the fear of death in this life. We will always be missing something that we don't have right now. It's not just us - all of creation is groaning under the weight of sin and the hope of final redemption. Deep inside me, I know that Sewanee is not my home. Neither is Winchester or Richmond or Columbia. While I live in this tent, this temporary shelter, I will always yearn to leave the tension of "already, not yet" in which the people of God live for now. One day we will live in a city whose Builder and Architect will Himself be our glory, to the exclusion of all places and people we have ever loved. The sun will be embarrassed to show his face in a land where God dwells with people and provides more light in His mere presence than the thousands of nuclear bombs going off every second in our little star. That is something to remember, whether in Bamberg or Sewanee.
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| A Post A Month Keeps the Readers Away Well, so much for social justice, at least as far as my desire to write is concerned. I really would like to write about it, but seeing as it feels like homework, I'm going to let it stew a bit. As I heard one pastor say once, "I can't preach on it, for it has not properly potted." Indeed.
I'm leaving in an hour or so to go to Heilbronn, which is where I attend church. It's a few hours away by train, so an elderly couple in the congregation has been gracious enough to open up their home and let me use their spare bedroom on Saturday nights. Grace upon grace! Even better, I'm leaving with them and a small group from the church to go to the annual School of Theology at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London. Formerly under the ministry of the Prince of Preachers himself, it is now one of London's healthiest and most active churches. The theme this year is "The Glory of Christ in the Working Church," and it seems like they've pulled together a really stellar program.
This is my first trip to the UK, and to be honest, I'm looking forward to hearing some English for once. Of course, if the Disney Corporation hasn't led me astray, everyone talks like Mary Poppins, which is pretty cool. I'm looking forward to that, too. With the recent bomb attempts in the city, it even feels like going to a dangerous country, which stokes the smoldering embers of testosterone within me. Who'd have thought that London would be dangerous for Christians?
I'm also less than a month away from being back in the States. By the time I get back from London, it'll be less than two weeks (thirteen days, actually, as someone keeps reminding me). I'll have a couple of finals exams, about which I'm not worrying in the least, and then just taking care of my bureaucratic duties to unregister from everything I had to register for when I first got here (city government, rail pass, bank account, etc., etc.). It should be a hectic last week, but at the end of it all stands the beloved, so I'm not too worried.
I'm starting to get sort of excited about home. As funny as it sounds, I really am anxious about hearing English again. It's been so long that I heard it all around me. When I first got to Germany, I would have a headache at the end of the day for the first couple of weeks just from having to re-tool my brain to German mode. Will that happen once I'm back in the land of free refills? I'm also wondering about church, school, finances....you could say I'm hitting the ground running. The Lord is big enough to handle it all, I've been assured, so I'm trying to keep it all in perspective.
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