i have a neat job.

so thursday is my day off, and it's a good day to have off since wednesdays are usually on the order of anywhere from eleven to thirteen hour days. i denote it on the blog with lyrics thursday, which will come back next week after taking this week off to commemorate lisa's birthday. i guess the whole point of mentioning that is to show that there are exceptions, there are always exceptions.

like once a month on thursday i meet with a few peers, guys, and a couple girls, in the same like of work as me, for lunch and even though it's "work" i never mind giving up part of my day off in order to have that. so anyways, we met this past thursday, a couple days ago, and we were talking about discipleship, which isn't as esoteric as it might first sound. mostly because even though the word seems to be relegated to this sort of evangelical lexicon, the root word of discipleship is the word discipline. everybody's a disciple of something, and in as much as people discipline themselves, either consciously or unconsciously, into certain behaviors, they practice discipleship.

"discipleship". . .it may not sound esoteric anymore, but it still sounds heavy handed. nobody likes discipline, it usually conjures up thoughts of time-outs from when you're a lil kid, or detention or getting grounded when you're in junior high and high school. move beyond that though, because beyond that there lies a point at which you (hopefully) reach a level of maturity such that you understand the role that discipline plays and that more than being mere punishment, it's a vital component of the search for pleasure.

with that understanding comes the realization that discipline is employed as a means to the end of acheiving something worth the effort put forth. we're very utilitarian people, generally, and we assign value to things based on what they can get us, which is to say that it's rare that we want to, will, or even can evaluate something on its own merits, without demanding to know its relevance to any number of other things that we perceive to be more important. now i got where i am on this because here lately i've been reading and listening to a whole lot of john piper whose whole life's work it seems is to get people around him to understand that our pursuit of pleasure and God's pursuit of glory, both of which require discipline on our part, are not at odds, they're not different things so much that they're exactly the same.

he cites c.s. lewis (surprise, surprise) who writes that though we perceive our desires to be too strong, when our attention is called to what we could be desiring, we find that our desires are instead too weak. he says to imagine being offered infinte and immeasurable joy and pleasure and instead accepting in its place things that are totally mundane, a good job, some nice stuff, sex maybe. we want what we want, and we want it now, mostly because we don't know any better that what we want right now pales in comparison to what we could get if we could train ourselves to desire those things that are inifinitely greater.

if it sounds like we have to train ourselves to want the really good stuff, i think it's because we do.

feeling: liberated
thinking of: wrestling
music: "thought menagerie" sixpence