I dealt with this paticular scripture in the bible the other day so felt compelled to write you once I read your post. I was shaken, because it specifically said women are not aloud to take pastoral roles in the church, that God didnt want it that way. Now when I asked a source who I knew knows their stuff they put it this way( also being a woman who has served years as leadership roles in head of womens ministries) God sent his only son to be the head on the church, the body. So therefore it makes sense that God only wanted Men, born testosteron packed to be leaders. I just know that the word of God is stronger than anything and must be trusted.
Anyways I hope you get some insight that may help you sooner or later, and God bless. =]
Gabie

I find the same beauty in the evolution story as you do. At the same time I find horror.

After reading The Origin of the Species I think most of us, like you and like me, are ready to agree with Darwin, who wrote in the last sentence: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

When I think about evolution, or natural selection, especially while I am hiking in the wilderness, I enjoy the connection I feel with all of life. I love thinking about my relatedness to such beauty and the long struggle for life.

What horrifies me is natural selection’s indifference to love and hatred, to kindness and cruelty, and to beauty and hope. It is only when I forget about these things that I feel comfortable thinking about the narrative represented by the metaphor “natural selection.” It is this narrative that tells us that we are accidents in a long struggle for existence, that our lives and loves have causes but no meaning, and that in the end we suffer and die without hope.

In spite of the grandeur he saw, I think Darwin also felt this horror. It shows, for example, in his discussion of the wasp that paralyzes its victim and then feeds the victim’s living body to its young, or in his saying that we “ought to admire the instinctive maternal hatred of the queen bee” who kills her fertile daughters” – saying “we ought to admire” seems to be a way of acknowledging that he did not, could not, and never would.

I got this one from Richard Rice’s Reign of God: Communion is a symbol that participates in the experience it represents.

I don’t remember where I heard this one, but some literary person said: “I read the book like the fire reads the wood.”

Jesus is the word of God.

If you don’t eat his flesh and drink his blood, you can’t enter the kingdom of Heaven.

You are what you eat.

Thanks for sharing your secret sharings with us.

We are honored.

I’m a big fan of Jane Goodall, so thanks very much for this well written article.