Food For Thought:

What is my friend saying about God if she decided to get re-baptized?

What is she saying about those christians who were baptized as infants?

If it’s about us, what’s keeping someone from getting baptized a third or fourth time?

What makes baptism valid?

Me: I’m so stressed and tired. Final exams are here. There’s so much going on around me. My church is going through uncertain and uneasy times. I feel like a Judas in some ways. I’m messing up some of my relationships and not being faithful to other. I should be more diligent in my studies, but my mind is elsewhere. Emotionally, I’m being drawn in a thousand directions. I feel like running away. I feel like crying. I feel like a failure. I feel like a disappointment. I don’t know what to do. What’s going to happen?

God: I love you.

and respect the secular vocation. She has allowed work and religion to become

separate departments, and is astonished to find that, as result, the secular work of the

world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends, and that the greater part of the

world’s intelligent workers have become irreligious, or at least, uninterested in

religion.

But is it astonishing? How can any one remain interested in a religion which seems

to have no concern with nine-tenths of his life? The Church’s approach to an

intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and

disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church

should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon

him is that he should make good tables.

Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly – but what use is all

that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad

carpentry? No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of

the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they

were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth. No piety in the worker

will compensate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its

own technique is a living lie.

Yet in Her own buildings, in Her own ecclesiastical art and music, in Her hymns and

prayers, in Her sermons and in Her little books of devotion, the Church will tolerate

or permit a pious intention to excuse so ugly, so pretentious, so tawdry and twaddling,

so insincere and insipid, so bad as to shock and horrify any decent draftsman.

And why? Simply because She has lost all sense of the fact that the living and eternal

truth is expressed in work only so far as that work is true in itself, to itself, to the

standards of its own technique. She has forgotten that the secular vocation is sacred.

Forgotten that a building must be good architecture before it can be a good church;

that a painting must be well painted before it can be a good sacred picture; that work

must be good work before it can call itself God’s work.

Let the Church remember this: that every maker and worker is called to serve God in

his profession or trade – not outside it. The Apostles complained rightly when they

said it was not meet they should leave the word of God and serve tables; their

vocation was to preach the word. Bu the person whose vocation it is to prepare the

meals beautifully might with equal justice protest: It is not meet for us to leave the

service of our tables to preach the word.”  -Dorothy Sayers (Why Work)