Holiness is not a known side effect of Ambien

( This series starts with: racism, pride, pro-life, debt, prosperity, fear)

Holiness in this post is defined as "set apart for God". How many times have I sat in church and heard the preacher say, "the reason the world doesn't believe Jesus, is because Christians act exactly as the unsaved do".

Truer words can never be spoken. I do. I get up in the morning, drink coffee, eat something, check my email .... just exactly like the rest of the developed world. Except where and why I differ.  I realize that racism, bigotry, and prejudice has made inroads into my thinking. I realize and admit that anyone could find something about my life to say, "see, Stephen said/thought/wrote/did this, AND HE CLAIMS TO BE A CHRISTIAN", and I do not say this in defense of sinning! There is just a lot of real estate to attend to.

Peter was a fisherman, Amos was a shepherd, I'm an educator and author of several successful non-fiction books, and a few unsuccessful ones as well; one of the latter group was Ethics in IT. Oh my. Another common preacher statement is, "as I was preparing this lesson, the LORD kept causing related events to happen in my life". I get that in a big way. Not only did that happen for each issue in the book, but afterwards for a year everything I said and did seemed to elicit someone saying to me, "that's not ethical". Happened five times in a single week. I wanted to scream, at least I'm trying.

And trying, I think, is the core issue. Trying to be aware that as I am going, goal one is to make disciples of all nations. As an academician, my responsibilities are to gather knowledge, mentor the next generation, and chronicle the events of our time. I need to try to do that in a way that is sensitive to the goal of making disciples.

This series of essays was inspired by Rosanne Barr's outburst. Jeepers, what a lot of damage for one tweet that resulted from thinking about the wrong things; I know, the same thing happened to me not long ago. And what a brilliant retort by Sanofi/Ambien, they scored a huge amount of brand awareness with their tweetsponse. However, Ambien is a far more powerful drug than most people realize and Ms. Barr's story is actually fairly pale in terms of Ambien errors, sleep eating doesn't sound like that big of an issue until the entire cookie package is gone. The documented cases of sleep driving on Ambien should give one pause and sleep sex, well, I'll let you research that.

Up till now the most important Bible verse for me has been James 1:5 NIV, If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. I was praying that with Fred Kerby and the Ellricks in Bowie Curry's church. I am praying that now facing the largest writing project I have ever taken on. And while I need every spec of wisdom God will grant me, eventually that project will get done and boxed up. I think for myself, Galatians 5: 22, 23 NIV,  needs to be my focus as I go forward.

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But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.
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