#working the angles

[nike-apteros]

Work that angle girl, you work it 🐺❤️

[thetornprincebrightside]

It me. That one time I worked the angles and tried to be an Instagram thot.

[stoneyy-bbaloney]

Since my big bad breakup last year I’ve had a really tender spot for my best friends. I’m over here listening to Caroline Polachek kicking my feet scrolling through their instagram pages.

[siderealscribblings]

me, writing a ML future!AU: okay so first step is to make sure Gabriel is either dead or imprisoned and once he’s taken care of we can go from there...

[undercovernun]

Most of the people we meet, instide and outside the church, think prayers are harmless but necessary starting pistols that shoot blanks but get things going.... It is an outrage and a blasphemy when pastors adjust their practice of prayer to accommodate these inanities.

Eugene Peterson, in Working the Angles: the Shape of Pastoral Integrity

Undercover Nun may be wrong, but I sense that the esteemed Mr. Peterson has an opinion on this subject.

[bookofprayer]

"Prayer is not something we think up to get God's attention or enlist his favor. Prayer is answering speech. The first word is God's word. Prayer is a human word and is never the first word, never the primary word, never the initiating and shaping word simply because we are never first, never primary. . . . We require repeated and forceful reminders: the first word is everywhere and always God's word to us, not ours to him."

— Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity

[godthings]

"Prayer is not something we think up to get God's attention or enlist his favor. Prayer is answering speech. The first word is God's word. Prayer is a human word and is never the first word, never the primary word, never the initiating and shaping word simply because we are never first, never primary. . . . We require repeated and forceful reminders: the first word is everywhere and always God's word to us, not ours to him."

— Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity

[godthings]

"The biblical context for understanding sabbath is the Genesis week. Sabbath is the seventh and final day in which 'God rested [shabath] from all his work which he had done' (Gen. 2:3). We reenter that sequence of days in which God spoke energy and matter into existence, and repeatedly come upon the refrain, 'And there was evening and there was morning, one day. . . . And there was evening and there was morning, a second day. . . . And there was evening and there was morning' — on and on, six times.

This is the Hebrew way of understanding day; it is not ours. American days, most of them anyway, begin with an alarm clock ripping the predawn darkness, and they close, not with evening, but several hours past that, when we turn off the electric lights. In conventional references to day we do not include the night hours except for the two or three that we steal from either end to give us more time to work. Because our definition of day is so different, we have to make an imaginative effort to understand the Hebrew phrase evening and morning, one day. More than idiomatic speech is involved here; there is a sense of rhythm. Day is the basic unit of God's creative work; evening is the beginning of that day. It is the onset of God speaking light, stars, earth, vegetation, animals, man, woman into being. But it is also the time when we quit our activity and go to sleep. When it is evening 'I lay me down to sleep and pray the Lord my soul to keep' and drift off into unconsciousness for the next six or eight or ten hours, a state in which I am absolutely nonproductive and have no cash value.

Then I wake up, rested, jump out of bed full of energy, grab a cup of coffee, and rush out the door to get things started. The first thing I discover (a great blow to the ego) is that everything was started hours ago. All the important things got underway while I was fast asleep. When I dash into the workday, I walk into an operation that is half over already. I enter into work in which the basic plan is already established, the assignments given, the operations in motion.

Sometimes, still in a stupor, I blunder into the middle of something that is nearly done, and go to work thinking that I am starting it. But when I do I interfere with what is already far along on its way to completion. My sincere intentions and cheerful whistle while I work make it no less a blunder and an aggravation. The sensible thing is to ask, 'Where do I fit? Where do you need an extra hand? What still needs to be done?'

The Hebrew evening/morning sequence conditions us to the rhythms of grace. We go to sleep, and God begins his work. As we sleep he develops his covenant. We wake and are called out to participate in God's creative action. We respond in faith, in work. But always grace is previous. Grace is primary. We wake into a world we didn't make, into a salvation we didn't earn. Evening: God begins, without our help, his creative day. Morning: God calls us to enjoy and share and develop the work he initiated. Creation and covenant are sheer grace and there to greet us every morning. George MacDonald once wrote that sleep is God's contrivance for giving us the help he cannot get into us when we are awake.

We read and reread these opening pages of Genesis, along with certain sequences of Psalms, and recover these deep, elemental rhythms, internalizing the reality in which the strong initial pulse is God's creating/saving word, God's providential/sustaining presence, God's grace."

— Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity