"I am - Here I am"

Another thought provoking contemporary philosphy class prompted me to blog. So here it goes....

I keep hearing in church/chapel that we need to be agents of change in the world. This is one of the foundational missions of Dordt itself...to prepare people to change the world. Don't get me wrong... I think this idea is a good one as long as we do not let oursleves think along the lines I am going to describe.
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When we understand ourselves as the "agents" of change it tends to make ourselves the center of the idea. It can be seen as thinking---"what I recieve I redirect to others". To put it simply we have talents and we can use them or we can not use them. Honestly, I find myself thinking this way quite often. It really doesn't sound all that bad. I mean God gives us gifts and we share those with others right?
or...
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We can understand that "I can only recieve what I recieve for others". In this way there is a proir devotedness to others. That makes things a lot clearer to me because before we are anything..... we are called to responsiblity. We are not just recievers and redirecters, but recievers. A qoute that quarelates nicely is "To find yourself is to find yourself devoted" (Levinas) Well, Once again my pride takes a hit...its not me...God is setting things in motion.

Interestingly all this stuff stemmed from a conversation about prayer which is equally fastinating.
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We read an article that examined prayer as the posture of a decentralized self. One part of the article talks about how hard it is to praise in prayer; the other 4 types - thanksgiving, confession, petition, and intercession (for others) - are not as hard because they involve using "I" "Me" or "We". These are much easier to pray because we can benefit from them. Especially in public it seems like we have a hard time praising and adoring God...because we do not want to feel arrogant. Basically what I took out of the article so far is that the real test of prayer is when I am in my room alone with God. From there I can have a stronger sense of peace about praising God in front of other people.

Sorry, this is a long post.

One more thing....I was searching some blogs the other day and I ran into something that struck a chord with me. Travis Burgers wrote (after you click scroll down to july23 04 "givin it my all") this....
Ok Im done now. good night