Points of Departure

Day One.

How many times have we all said that before, right? 

If you have found your way here, we're glad. Its a very good place to start. This blog is intended to be an outpost. It is a forward operating base placed in enemy territory and stocked with resources to prevent a counter attack from the enemy. Think of it as a way of taking back the internet. Our goal is to have videos, podcasts and links that will encourage you. 

But for my first post, we begin where I began when this journey started for me, when someone gave me a copy of J.I. Packer's excellent book Knowing God. I immediately encountered this section...namely because it was in the introduction. For the record, I did make it farther than the introduction, although that hasn't always been the case with my Christian book scholarship. 

I hope this will frame the goal for this blog. I have taken a little creative license at the end which I hope you will permit:

In A Preface to Christian Theology, John Mackay illustrated two kinds of interest in Christian things by picturing persons sitting on the high front balcony of a Spanish house, watching travelers go by on the road below. The "balconeers" can overhear the travelers' talk and chat with them; they may comment critically on the way that the travelers walk; or they may discuss questions about the road, how it can exist at all or lead anywhere, what might be seen from different points along it, and so forth; but they are onlookers, and their problems are theoretical only.

The travelers, by contrast, face problems which are essentially practical- problems of the "which-way-to-go" and "how-to-make-it" type, problems which call not merely for comprehension but for decision and action too.

Balconeers and travelers may think over the same area, yet their problems differ. For instance, in relation to evil, the balconeer's problem is to find a theoretical explanation of how evil can consist with God's sovereignty and goodness, but the traveler's problem is how to master evil and bring good out of it. Or in relation to sin, the balconeer asks whether sinfulness and personal perversity are really credible, while the traveler, knowing sin from within, asks what hope there is of deliverance. 

Now this a blog for travelers, and it is with travelers' questions that it deals.