From John 9

Sin didn't cause the man to be born blind. But sin does cause blindness.

It's like putting on glasses with someone else's prescription and paint stains on them. The information coming in via photons of light is correct, but it gets distorted on its way in. 'The Jews' didn't reject Jesus because of poor education or lack of information. Their sinful heart distorted how they saw things. In their sin they decided they were good.

No thanks Jesus, I can see quite fine without you. I don't need your light. I don't need anyone to teach me.

Yet the man born blind...

Do you believe in the Son of Man?

I don't know Jesus. No idea. But you've opened my eyes. You tell me what to believe, and I'll believe it. What should I believe? Who do I believe in?

I want the faith of a man born blind.

Snippets from Rob Bell's interview

In response to the question "Is heaven a real place?", Rob Bell says that it is. He does on to discuss the peace that a dying man had in his final moments as his body is about to give out, and describes his experience of being with that man as 'rubbing up against' the reality of heaven.

He essentially says (about as close as he ever seems to go to actually saying anything concretely) that heaven is a reality that is experienced by humans in the here and now. That man's peace as his body was about to give out, was him being in heaven.

Of Jesus, he says:

As opposed to 'how do we get there?', his interest is more about 'how do we get 'there' to be here?'.

A bold typeface

Thought various members of the Campbell and Richardson families would like this:

Story magazine nearly foundered for a lack of Ws. The publishers, Whit Burnett and Martha Foley, lived on Majorca, and their Spanish printer’s character set could not accommodate their English prose.

They bought some supplementary Ws from a Madrid foundry, but the new type was distractingly sharp on the page. So the printer advised them to “make those new letters old.”

“We sandpapered those Ws,” wrote Foley, “we stamped on them, we hammered them and hurled them around to give them in an hour all the wear and tear the printer’s other type had endured for many years. We finally subdued them so that they lost most of their prominence. But I have been W-conscious ever since.”

Courtesy of the futility closet.