Ortho-blank-xy (Jan 21-28)
This week in snapshots:
Lived in: Fresno, CA
Reading: Surprised by Hope (NT Wright)
Podcast: Bema
Album: Eulogies (Wolves at the Gate)
Playing: Assassin's Creed Brotherhood
Making: A church sound good 😍
Happy today, you beautiful human you 🥰
One of the many things I love about my job is the diversity of things I do, and how much I get to learn while on the job. Because sometimes ya just gotta spend 8+ hours in the ceiling hiding wires, or connecting them to a plate. And that's so cathartic and peaceful~
What are some things you would "work" at for 8+ hours and stop as happy or happier than you started?
One of the things about working on a new construction project is the required use of hardhats. They are, in regulation, required whenever you are on the jobsite. But in practice? I don't wear a hardhat doing any of the things I'm doing unless there's a regulation. In fact, I'm more likely to bump my head while wearing a hard hat than I ever bump my head without one.
The Desert Fathers were Christ-believers who fled their ordinary lives in the Christianized Roman Empire to live out their new kind of life with some resistance, as a plea to be closer to God. The "city folk" were so busy debating orthodoxy (right regulation/belief) that they were quite completely missing out on orthopraxy (right practice). They got so caught up in doctrines and creeds that they stopped radically loving their neighbor, let alone their God.
Now I still don't understand how these Desert Fathers did any better at loving their neighbors from the isolation of the wilderness, but I do relate to their desire for orthopraxy over orthodoxy. As the letter of James might say, if you have orthodoxy without orthopraxy, what good is your orthodoxy? But I will show you my orthodoxy by my orthopraxy.
So even though I do not have the right belief that a hard hat is safer on the job site, in practice? I keep it on. Not just when someone is watching, not just because I don't want to get written up, not just to avoid OSHA violations, but because it is the right practice for my environment.
And it doesn't violate my orthopraxy of loving my God or my neighbor in the slightest, so really. Who needs to look cute or comfortable on a new construction site? Not me 😂
In my church culture we obsess over believing the right things because, we say, it leads to doing the right things.
Do you agree with this? What are some beliefs that allow you to do the right things, that you wouldn't do without those beliefs? Do you wear any hard hats in your life because it's right, not because you believe in it? Or do you follow your right-believing convictions all the way into practice every time?
Tell me more! And have a love-filled week until we speak again 🥰
—Beth
