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Wednesday, July 09, 2014

Blessed and Holy: An Explanation on My Change of Focus

Sometimes a speaker must adapt to their audience rather than wait for the audience to adapt to them.  This has come to a real threshold the last couple of months.  There is no vigilance by scholars or lay people on the topic of holy - the ability to hold a topic in the attention span long enough for it to make a difference.  So this is one of those times that I must adapt to my audience and start equipping them further back in the process.

As I have dealt with holiness, I have noticed that Christian minds especially are not well-equipped to handle the topic.  Their emotions and thinking are sloppy.  I don't say this to insult anyone.  But "the fear of Yahweh is the beginning of wisdom".  So in this case, the fear that our thinking may be sloppy is the right place to begin.  So I am taking a new approach.

I'm narrowing my focus in TEACHING AND MINISTRY (down from holiness) due to emotional aimlessness and due to a lack of mental focus or over-focus among Christians.  So the solution, I figure, is to focus on the first health the US and Christians in the US need - mental health.  I'll deal with world mental health later, since the issues are different across the globe.  I'll also go back to other health areas under holiness later.

Please don't think that I have lost my vigilance on holiness.  I am not at all distracted from the topic, but there comes a time as a teacher when adaption is your only option.  Even my supervisor at my current seminary didn't seem to get what I was accomplishing.  So I believe that there are basics that are missing.  I need to provide those to those I teach.

If you go to my communication basics blog, I will be producing much more there than here for the time being. I am also under a self-imposed deadline to finish the transcript for my book by the end of July - "Mental Health for Everybody".  It will focus on the mind and how it is supposed to work and how we should equip our minds as opposed to the current approach.  That will then form a basis both emotionally and logically for what holiness means by definition, by implication and by significance.

Go there for more.  Thank you for your understanding.  I will say this, I have more and more reasons to believe from the biblical text and not from etymology or cognate languages that holy as translated from words in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek means ethical or moral wholeness.  Have a blessed day.

In Christ,

Jon