Mind of a Christian - Chapter 2

More book keeping

Here we are, with another Mind of a Christian!

I decided to make a separate publication of it, instead of continuing on the first one. Some years have passed since I last wrote for Mind of a Christian 1, and that's been a lot of time for life turbulence and new learning material to make its changes on me. Now, those changes are both positive growth, and negative setbacks (or old habits that get older), so it's not as if I'm this new, revolutionized person.

But, there's changes enough - and thus, we start off Mind of a Christian 2 with a long winded paragraph that essentially says: I learned new things, and I want to have a fresh start in writing!

Influences and material:

At the time of writing, I started listening to more BibleProject podcast episodes. In 2022, they have an ongoing Torah series, which is cool. I also came across Tim Mackie's sermon series on the gospel of Matthew. The BibleProject continues to be a leading source of learning and contemplating material for me.

I'll be picking up a lot of their language, like referring to Old Testament books as scrolls, referring to the restored state of reality and humanity as Eden-state, Eden-esque, and so on. I've also taken a habit of reading LORD/ADONAI as Yahweh, since they make a compelling point of how a name being used is part of a relationship. However, I do understand the counterpoints to that general idea, and to God's name in particular - so let me know if this is an issue for you.

I also read a book called The Biblical Cosmos: A Pilgrim's Guide to the Weird and Wonderful World of the Bible by Robin A. Parry. It's a neat read on biblical cosmology, which I'll draw from in some of my chapters here. The name's pretty long, so I might just refer to it henceforth as The Biblical Cosmos, unless I pick up a book with the same title.

In the past, I referenced David Guzik's Enduring Word commentary (enduringword.com). It's highly accessible, and great for piecing together passages that are hard to follow.

If there's any resource in particular that I'm heavily drawing upon in a chapter, I'll try to mention them in the footnotes.

Biblical translations and quoting:

I'm still a big fan of the Tree of Life Version (TLV) translation. As of October 2022, I'm continuing my bible read-through in this translation, at the book of Jeremiah. As a heads up: some TLV verses are numbered differently.

NASB has been the translation of my first bible read-through, so I "grew up" in its language. I may borrow some phrases from this translation.

I came across an online interlinear bible that's been super useful in seeing how the Hebrew/Greek sentences line up with our English renderings. You can find it in scripture4all.org, with links to the Hebrew OT and Greek NT under the Interlinear Bible sub header.

The TLV-NASB-Interlinear has been a personal trifecta of sorts, and I invite you to have your own stack of bible translations for studying! When I draw on these resources when quoting scripture, it might look something like this:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was chaos and waste, darkness was on the surface of the deep (תְהוֹם), and the Ruach Elohim (Spirit of God) was hovering upon the surface of the water (הַמָּיִם).

If there's a particular word I want to highlight in Hebrew, I'll add the word in parentheses. If there's Hebrew words transliterated, I'll either have the English equivalent in parentheses, or just replace the transliteration with the English. In case you don't trust my rendering (or even if you do), I encourage you to cross-check my scriptural quotes with biblegateway.com or your own personal bibles.

Chapter categories:

If I have multiple chapters that have a recurring format (e.g. short 2-5 minute reads for when an interesting thought pops in my head), then I'll add a prefix to the chapter title. I'll try to maintain a list here that describes each prefix:

To ponder: quick things that pop up in my head that I want to share, which can lead to deeper pondering.

Christmas: chapters about the holiday celebrating Jesus' birth. If I do multiple chapters on something like Easter, then it will have its own category.

Re: chapters either responding to something another author wrote, or to my own old writings.

That's it for now with book keeping. Onwards we go! The LORD, huzzah! The LORD, huzzah!! The LORD, huzzah!!!