Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!bcm!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: henning@acsu.buffalo.edu (Karl scribe Henning) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Born Again 101 Message-ID: Date: 16 Feb 91 00:03:40 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: SUNY Buffalo Lines: 30 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu Glenn Chappell writes: >... to think about it another way, consider the director of some sort of >performing group, be it musical or dance, or whatever. He's >running a rehearsal and things aren't going too well, so he explains >what's wrong and then tells the performers to start over - he says, >"Okay, everyone, from the top ....", and it no longer matters how >bad the last rehearsal was anymore, because they've started over. >[Note: you can't really take the analogy much farther than this.] Actually, I think you've hit on an excellent analogy. The director takes time in the middle of the rehearsal to try to improve some aspect of the performance. When the rehearsal resumes, the group is going to try to incorporate those corrections ... but it's NOT going to sound like a group of ten, or twenty, or however many utterly different people; the piece before and after the corrective interlude is going to be substantially the same (hopefully with the gradual -- seldom immediate and entire -- assimilation of the corrective elements). It seems that a lot of christians let themselves in for a lot of unnecessarily self-destructive disappointment when they're "born-again", and they find that they're substantially the same people they had been before, after all. kph -- "The shrewder mobs of America, who dislike having two minds upon a subject, both determine and act upon it drunk; by which means a world of cold and tedious speculation is dispensed with." -- Washington Irving