I didn’t burn the place down
May 23rd, 2006
The term at L’Abri is almost a week old, and we’re having a really good time. I cooked my first meal for the students the other morning, and it went off pretty well. The baked French toast that I found on AllRecipes.com garnered thumbs ups from the crowd as well as food-comas from all.
The title of this post actually doesn’t have anything to do with that meal though. A few days before the students arrived, I was frying up some bacon for me and Jen, and inadvertantly produced more smoke than the fire alarm would tolerate, alerting the entire house to my presence in the kitchen. It was quite embarrassing. But I didn’t burn the place down.
The weather here is warming up, and it’s looking like the rain has finally left us for the time being. It’s something like mid-60s outside and we’ve got a cool breeze coming through the windows at the moment.
Friday night Dick gave a good lecture on self-control. A couple things that he said resonated with me. The first was an observation he made about how our American culture gives us mixed messages about self-control. On one hand the workplace wants employees who are dedicated and efficient, and are willing to work long hours giving 110%. But once they leave work, our entertainment culture wants them to have no self-control, spending lots of money gratifying every whim.
Another more personal thing I took away from the lecture is that how we live out self-control is dependant on personality. We don’t need to strive to live up to another person’s level of discipline and structure. This was really good for me to hear, because for the past two years I’ve been surrounded by Christians who are highly structured people, and found myself feeling guilty because I couldn’t live up to their level of discipline.
The summer term here at L’Abri is shaping up to be a good one. I hope to send more updates as the term progresses, and perhaps I can coax Jen into putting her two cents in as well.