like a fire

A friend of mine saw this and I thought I misunderstood it until I visited the site. Apparently a protestant youth group in Germany is offering a calendar with pictures based off the more “erotic” events in the Bible. The site is quoted as saying, “There’s a whole range of biblical Scriptures simply bursting with eroticism,” said Stefan Wiest, the 32-year-old photographer who took the titillating pictures. What are these erotic stories, you might be wondering. Well, it’s not from the Song of Solomon as I expected. It is from supposedly erotic stories such as Delilah cutting Samson’s hair. That’s erotic? I don’t doubt that it could be, but I think they are reading a lot into the Bible. Another picture shows Eve offering an apple to Adam. Is that erotic? I don’t know what to think of this. One of the women who poses in garters and stockings said, “We wanted to represent the Bible in a different way and to interest young people.” That’s certainly true. I think the whole affair is summed up in one other statement though. They say, “Anyway, it doesn’t say anywhere in the Bible that you are forbidden to show yourself nude.” While this is true, there are other statements like “don’t cause your brother to stumble” that I might add to their thinking.

Link to Story at MSNBC.com
www.bibelkalender.de

I recently was at a retreat that hosted Keith Kneeshaw as a guest speaker. I was really blessed by his talks and especially with his ideas on who God calls fools. In Proverbs God says just as a dog returns to its own vomit, so a fool repeats folly. “So basically there are three kinds of people.” Keith told us. There is the person who never learns or the fool that returns to the things they do that are foolish. There are those of us who “live and learn.” These are the people who live life, see mistakes and then change their behavior to correct mistakes. But the remakable few are those who learn and live. They don’t have to make mistakes and then learn from them. They are told what is right and trust that it is right and learn that way of life. In doing this they learn before they live out those mistakes and effectually head them off.

What a great concept. Learn the way to do something first, then do it.