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I go under the knife again this week for my sixth eye surgery. At least, I think it's the sixth; to be honest, I've kind of lost count. Truth be told, I'm not too worried about it -- I am an old pro, after all. But those first few surgeries were "moments of deep unrest" for me, to borrow a phrase from the 19th century song writer, George Matheson. Matheson was well acquainted with moments of deep unrest, and I find myself returning to a prayer of his when I can't quite figure out what to pray

I was reading a book recently that makes that case that traditional cultures have always believed that too high a view of yourself is the real root cause of most evil in the world. Crime, violence and abuse all stem from people having too high a view of themselves. So what is the remedy? You clamp down. You modify external behavior. You tell people they’re bad.

My dad turns 81 today. Sadly, Parkinson’s Disease has robbed much of his latter years of what he and my mom hoped they would be. And yet, my dad has described this terrible disease as a kind of “severe mercy” for him. For the first 55 years of his life, my dad saw little need for God, at least not a personal God. We were connected to a church community, but that was more tied to our Italian and Irish heritage than a personal faith in Jesus. My dad saw himself as a self-made man: business owner, happily married (on the second try), a good father, a marine. This poor kid from Boston had carved out for himself a piece of suburbia in the Midwest. He had the life he wanted.

In 1 Corinthians 4:6 Paul says, I don't want you to be "puffed up." Some translations say, “I don’t want you to be proud. I don’t want you to be arrogant.” But here Paul doesn’t use the normal for hubris, or pride. The Greek word is physioo. It’s an unusual word. Paul uses it 6 times here in 1 Corinthians, and then once in Colossians; and then it’s not found anywhere else in the Bible, which leads the commentators to think this is a special theme of Paul.