The Brilliant Shades of Morality

When people talk about moral choices, they often describe things as being a "black or white" issue, (basically meaning something is clearly right or clearly wrong), or they talk about "grey areas," where there's no clear right and no clear wrong.

As useful as these terms are, I think they can, excuse the pun, color our view of morality. Black, white, and grey are precisely the colors that characterize the view we often have of morality: drab. Bland. Boring. Etc.

To me, morality can potentially be so much more, and should be so much more, especially when you introduce Jesus into the picture. When the light of Jesus's teachings illuminate that picture of morality, I find it full of the most brilliant colors. Morality can then be all sorts of different shades of green and blue and red and orange and purple and yellow and everything in between.

What I'm saying is, morality need not be dull. It only seems that way because we force it into rules, lessons, tracts, and 3-point sermons, and we hardly see it played out in real circumstances. Ask William Wallace if fighting for the freedom of his people was boring. Ask Martin Luther King if he was bored when he was battling racial injustice. Ask Mother Theresa if dedicating her life to the poor and oppressed was dull.

If morality conjures up bland, grey images in our minds, it's only because we don't understand it's true power.

Friends IX

Hello Blog of Fire faithful. Welcome to the 9th installment of my Friends series. The subject today is (though I unfortunately don't have access to any pictures of him) one of my bestest friends, Ryan Theriot. Now, since a good majority of my readers are people who know me from UL, I guess a lot of you don't know who Ryan Theriot is. Well let me introduce him to you:

Ryan and I's friendship stretches back over 15 years! We became friends in the 4th grade at Berwick Elementary school, and we've been best of buds ever since. To this day, Ryan is the friend that I always make an effort to see every time I go home.

There's so many memories, I couldn't possibly touch the surface of them here. I remember just staying up all night playing basketball. Or staying up all night playing video games. Or staying up all night watching TV and movies. Or staying up all night playing Magic: the Gathering. As you can see, whatever we did, it usually involved staying up all night.

Now Ryan is married to a cool young lady named Christina, and they even have a little one on the way. I still hang out with them whenever I go home, though we're unfortunately too old to stay up all night anymore. : ( But we still love to play games and/or watch movies. And that, in a nutshell, is my friendship with Ryan Theriot.

~Ken, Born of Fire