Words.Lines.Thoughts.

I've Moved my Blog

2010-08-30T09:05:00.000-07:00

HERE

(http://wordslinesthoughts.wordpress.com/)

3 Things I'm looking forward to

2010-08-19T21:16:00.000-07:00

1. Church - I'm excited to get into the rhythm of worshiping with friends and being challenged by the body of Christ at Vestavia.

2. Challenge - I don't miss the homework one bit, but I miss wrestling with ideas and being forced to think through Biblical, theological, and spiritual things with my good friends at seminary.

3. Community - it's best when you're learning and living with people who love you and push you, and i'm excited to enter back into my birmingham community.

thoughts on "living a better story" PART 2

2010-08-06T13:53:00.001-07:00

Of course the best thing about the desire to want to live a better story is that it reveals a deep hunger in our lives for making an impact, for joining a cause bigger than ourselves. It can be just the right message for someone who’s listless and wandering through life without any kind of anchor. It can also be a good wake-up call when you’ve sort of dozed off at the wheel and gotten too complacent and comfortable with life.

So for all those reasons I think the “living a better story” philosophy has some great things going for it. But I think in the end it’s really just a distraction from a deeper commitment, a commitment that is harder and less glamorous than we might like. One of the great attractions of “living a better story” is that it makes you think of all those stories you love the most. Whether they are tales of adventure, love, war, or whatever, you immediately identify with your favorite characters and think about how awesome it would be to start living a little bit more like them.

But the problem is that most stories highlight the 10% of life and completely gloss over the 90%. The most dramatic scenes are often what we remember the most, but we forget that the decisions made in the most dramatic scenes are cultivated over years and years of making everyday decisions.

N.T. Wright recently penned a book entilted After You Believe which deals with the exact thing I’m referencing. He argues that character isn’t something you make a decision about one day and then immediately become a person of good character. He reminds us that character is forged over time, through days, months, and years of making small, seemingly insignificant decisions.

I’m realizing that when I pay too much attention to the big moments in life (the “most dramatic” ones) I miss so many little things. The decisions I make every day are often so much more significant than how I make them out to be. How I treat people, how I attend to the responsibilities that God has given to me, how I speak and use my time all make up the 90% of life that isn’t so glamorous. I don’t know about you, but most of my days aren’t filled with uber-dramatic moments where I’m deciding on some heroic course of action. But then again maybe they are, but maybe they are hidden in the guise of the plain and simple and everyday.

It’s not that I’m against living a better story. It’s just that I think it’s too weak a philosophy to build your life upon. In the end, as a follower of Christ I am to make him my foundation. My life already has significance and meaning. I don’t have to go around searching for it. Jesus Christ, the Word, the Creator, lives and dwells inside me and has redeemed me from myself (read: sin). He is renewing me everyday, transforming me from the inside out. Even when I can’t see or feel him at work.

And that is where it is sometimes hardest to have faith. That is where my faith has to be placed in Jesus Christ, not myself. So I guess what I’ve been trying to say is that living a better story isn’t a bad thing, it’s just an incomplete thing if it’s not anchored in Jesus Christ.

New Andrew Peterson music

2010-08-06T13:20:00.001-07:00

thoughts on "living a better story" PART 1

2010-08-05T22:58:00.000-07:00

Life seems such an adventure when you're traveling about. You feel excited about exploring new places, seeing new things, and even the little moments have a tinge more mystery to them than usual. It's pretty much the way I felt for an entire semester back a few years ago when I studied in London. Around every bend seemed to be something fun and new to do, and that season of life was filled with exploration. The hard part, though, is finding the adventure when you're not traveling about. Which is exactly where I am.

Summer is always the time when everyone is moving around. Vacations, mission trips, weekend trips, moving to a new city. Summer seems to be a great time to do all those things. And usually I'm right there with all the other travelers. But not so this year.

I don't think I would have appreciated Wendell Berry's writing while I spent my semester in London. His is a writing style that embraces a two-feet on the ground kind of approach to life, that rooted "I am here", "I know every inch of this property" philosophy of life that seems kind of old-fashioned. Until you are in the thick of it yourself.

There are times for moving, times for exploring, and times for growing in the shoes you are already in. Ecclesiastes says there's a time for everything, and maybe this is what it's hinting at. It's much easier to look back fondly at the adventurous times in life and gloss over the more ordinary bits. I can spend hours remembering London but I have a hard time doing the same with other parts.

I've noticed a trend in people my age, and maybe I guess just "my generation" in general. A trend of wanting to "live a better story". I don't know where it started, and I'm pretty sure it's not just something that's sprung up in the last few years or so. But it's been gaining a head of steam, and it's cropping up in books and blogs and all sorts of other media. I've sort of latched on to it myself because I really like a lot of things about it. But I've become equally wary of it as well over the course of the summer.

If all I do is think about how to live a better story and then go and pat myself on the back when I go and do adventurous or bold things, I don't think I'm doing anything other than seeking to fill an empty void. A carpenter doesn't spend all his time transfixed by the beauty of his hammer, unable to work, and then when he actually does use the hammer, stop and marvel at its power. No, he rather gets on with it. He makes things.

Maybe this whole thing about wanting to live a better story is really just a lack of faith that God can work in the mundane and ordinary parts of life. I certainly do want my life to count for something greater than what I can do on my own, and I want people to see Christ in my actions. But sometimes it's not about helping another person. Sometimes it's about confronting the great fear and doubt and uncertainty raging inside my own heart, the fear that maybe God isn't actually working in my life. Sometimes it's about slowing down enough to be in communion with him, to be still with him. To find him in the everyday, the ordinary, the plain.

Halfway to Christmas

2010-07-26T09:54:00.000-07:00

August is almost here. And august, at least for students and teachers, is a transition month. I've gotten used to the day to day routines of summer life, but those are about to go away. I don't really know what to expect with this new school year. I'm nervous and excited all at the same time, which isn't really any different than how things were last year.

This time around, some of my dearest and closest friends won't be around for the day to day and week to week. We're all setting out in different directions (well, at least they are) and it seems adventurous and exciting to see them go and follow where they've been led. Every now and then a good shake-up is what you need in life, and even though I'm a mixture of sad and hopeful about this next year, I'm comforted when I look back and remember what God has done in the past when I've felt similar apprehension about the future.

Things won't be the same, but they don't need to be. I try to remind myself of Moses and Abraham and Joshua, how they all must have felt as they set off in new directions. In a way, you've got to be kind of crazy to really follow where God leads.

Lifelong friends are a precious gift from God. They are the people who you can come in and out of life with, not see for long periods of time, and still find warmth and connection. People are the best gift God gives to us outside of our relationship with him, and I feel so blessed to have people in my life who I can share life with, listen to, and share struggles.

To my friends who have moved and are moving (the farmers, James, Paul and Andrew) I want you to know how much I love y'all. You have blessed me beyond measure, and it's been an honor to be your friend.

I look forward to the new roads ahead, and to following where the Lord leads.

Walking, not running

2010-07-22T10:12:00.000-07:00

I was out running the other night, making my way through a dark trail because in Texas you have to wait until the sun is long gone before it's remotely possible to enjoy outdoor activities not including water. Things were going along smoothly until about 10 minutes into the run. That's when I started to realize that I should have waited an extra 30 or so minutes because dinner wasn't done digesting. What I thought would be a good long run turned into a walk instead.

But it was awesome. It was great to be forced to slow down, to actually hear the crickets chirping and the water moving in the creek by my side, to hear the big swoosh of tree limbs as they swayed with the force of wind. I had wanted to run, but it turns out I needed to have that walk, instead. I sort of laughed because this happens to me a lot. I want one thing, but it turns out it's not really what I need. A great reminder to me that being in control isn't always the best thing.

just take a few minutes and appreciate some good music

2010-07-18T14:24:00.000-07:00

Rediscovery

2010-07-15T08:56:00.000-07:00

It's beautiful when you can come back to a place you've been before and find something new. As you realize new dimensions to a familiar thing, that familiar thing becomes something more dear to your heart. It's why friendships and relationships get better with time. It's why the best music gets better the more you listen to it. It's why you keep coming back to something long after the initial thrill of excitement has worn off.

And it's something that I am discovering in my walk with God, too. I read a few chapters from Hebrews last night, and the Word spoke to me anew, even though I've read it before. I guess I am learning to be thankful that walking with God isn't a transactional thing, where I learn a set of precepts once and then go on about my life. I'm more like a small pile of embers that continually needs to be fanned into flame by the Spirit.

And as I continue to apply myself to reading the Word and doing what it says I am involving myself in the process of rediscovery. I make too many mistakes and fall too often for my walk with God to be defined in terms of progress of some sort. I am infinitely glad this day that the progress that our world defines itself by and prides itself in is not the benchmark of faith.

I have a hard time being content

2010-07-13T08:55:00.000-07:00

"But wherever it is recognized that the power of death has been broken, wherever the world of death is illumined by the miracle of the resurrection and of the new life, there no eternities are demanded of life but one takes of life what it offers, not all or nothing but good and evil, the important and the unimportant, joy and sorrow; one neither clings convulsively to life nor casts it frivolously away. One is content with the allotted span and one does not invest earthly things with the title of eternity; one allows to death the limited rights which it still posses. It is from beyond death that one expects the coming of the new man and of the new world, from the power by which death has been vanquished."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from Ethics

I read this and stopped and thought about it for a moment, because I have a tendency to think of the boring or dull moments in my life as things to be avoided. I want it all to be exciting, "meaningful", when in reality it is all meaningful already. To find God in the everyday is sometimes the hardest thing to do when I'm blinded by my own expectations.

What was it like, for you?

2010-07-10T08:06:00.000-07:00

So it's Saturday morning. I'm finishing up my little pot of coffee I made earlier, enjoying the quietness of the morning. Summer has flown by, don't you think? I realized just the other day that summer is already half way over, and the way that realization dawned upon me it was as if I had been spinning my wheels inside a windowless room, unaware of time.

The pace of life during school this past semester was always hard to describe. It would be slow and steady some weeks, while others were just horrendously jam-packed. One week I'd be able to enjoy and think about the stuff I was assigned to read and write about, while the next I was trying my hardest to cram it all in and crank a decent paper out. This summer though, has been different. Very steady pace, with limited variation. And you know what? I'm finding that I like both.

But one of the constants among the two different paces of life has been weekend retreat. A few years ago I went on a spiritual formation retreat where the speaker talked about Sabbath and how we as busy college kids could learn a lot from the habits of ancient Christians who practiced rest, solitude, and reflection. At the time it was a revolutionary concept to me. It sort of took me by storm. At first I had to be really make an effort to make time during the weekend for sabbath rest. Then, slowly, it sort of sunk into me and became something I looked forward to, anticipating throughout the week.

Everybody has a different idea of what Sabbath is, and I think that's one of the great things about it. Some people really get into the solitude thing, while others just enjoy feeling free from work. I've found that I just really like the openness of the time. What I mean is that I like having (even if it's brief) unscheduled time, time where I can sit and hang out with friends if that's what's going on, or time to read a good book, or any number of things that brings rest and relaxation.

If i don't watch it, it becomes difficult for me to unplug. I know most people have an easy time just hanging out and doing fun stuff, but for some reason I find it sort of difficult after a heavy week in the books to disengage. That's where the unscheduled time comes in. I found that most of the time I needed a bit of time to fully unwind, and that's where the old habit of sabbath came back to help me.

I was thinking about all this as I was sitting down with my coffee this morning. The quiet all around me, unscheduled time before me. It's good to work hard, to be stretched, to do something hard. Because that's when the rest really becomes valuable. It's when you're able to appreciate the people and blessings in your life that they start to mean more, and sometimes it takes a little unscheduled time in order to count those blessings.

all kinds of debt

2010-07-01T08:13:00.000-07:00

I recently had lunch with a good friend of mine who is a successful banker. He has an MBA and is working towards a doctorate, and I was enjoying soaking up his knowledge and wisdom about all things economics. In just a few short minutes I realized how much I do not know about all that kind of stuff, and how much I base my decisions about both personal and governmental finance on large generalizations I've made through the years. Needless to say it's great to have friends who are gifted and knowledgeable about things that I am not.

One thing he recommended me to do was to start reading some business magazines. He said the Economist was usually pretty trustworthy and went in depth in its articles. I decided to pick up a copy, and I've spent some time this week reading through its sections. Just last night I finished their special section on debt. Each week they tackle a specific issue or country with about 20 pages of analysis, and while it's a bit overwhelming at first, the writing style was easy to read and i found that i was beginning to understand how debt works and how it has affected our world so much in the past few years.

But I'm not interested in just the pure economics of debt. I'm interested in what it has done to us as people, as individuals within a system, living and breathing and making real-time decisions. As I was reading the article, it became clear to me that the culture of debt that we live in has seeped through to every part of our lives, and affects us in more ways than we even realize.

One of the reasons we have piled up such an enormous public and private debt as a country is because of our "buy now, find the money later" attitude. Since there are so many ways to finance something, buying a product doesn't seem like a monumental decision in the moment. We learn to buy from impulse, and the whole business world has learned to cater to this impulse nature by focusing on design and aesthetics in a product, figuring out how to make us become emotionally attached to the products they are selling. As a result, many of our purchasing decisions are made on the surface, on the fly, if you will.

Because I believe that habits in one part of life affect every part of life, I think that the "impulse buy attitude" we've cultivated in our society permeates all parts of our lives. It's clearly a part of social networking, where we learn to connect on multiple fronts with tons of people, but few of the interactions achieve a level of meaning that a personal interaction achieves. It's a part of our educational system, where learning how to skip and flit through large tomes of data by boiling them down to the "essential points" has adversely caused us to misrepresent and mischaracterize entire movements of thoughts. Our society values nimble thought, and we've learned how to achieve it.

You may not see the connection as intertwined as I see it, but I think our shopping (read: consumeristic) habits have bled into our entire lives and led us down pathways with consequences we haven't quite fully realized. We are people, in many ways, dealing with all kinds of debt. Learning how to save and be smart with resources is the same remedy that would help us with many of our other social problems as well. Learning how to value and invest in people, diving deeply into subjects of interest and becoming good at them. Overcoming these kinds of impulse habits doesn't happen overnight, and doesn't require us to chuck the baby out with the bathwater. Impulse is a positive part of our human nature, as is our ability to critically think and evaluate. But we need to learn how to effectively achieve a balance between the two.

Essentially an Ethical Problem

2010-06-26T09:28:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to figure out what exactly is going on with the gulf oil spill, and I'm running into the same problems you are probably running into as well. There seems to be confusion everywhere: from both BP and the government. We're seeing the classic battle of government vs. business being played out, and I'm already tired of the partisan answers that have been flashed by both sides. Political opportunism reeks as I hear politicians use this disaster to further their own ends instead of trying to come up with a way to help the people most affected.

Some people think the disaster proves we need more government oversight of industry. Some claim that this is the turning point for the environmental movement, a salient visual reminder of the consequences of industrialism. Others blame the government for the confusing response. There's plenty of blame to go around, sure, but is now the time to be trumpeting the blame so loudly when real peoples lives are, to put it mildly, in upheaval?

I think the oil spill further reveals the ethical problem facing America and it's leaders. From a macro to a micro level, ethics is eschewed as a tangential issue of little relevance to a society which has more to worry about than what is right and wrong. After all we're on the cusp of technological breakthroughs and business innovation. Who has time to stop and wonder if what we so blatantly term "progress" is actually the right kind of progress?

We don't need, as some would assert, to harken back to our "Christian roots" at the founding of our country. The fact is, there was very little that was Christian about our founding, unless you equate Christianity with a kind of therapeutic moral deism. Rather, we need individuals inside the Church to take civic responsibility seriously. We don't need to "take back the government", we just need people who will actually listen, discuss, and be willing to come up with smart solutions to tough problems.

The gulf oil spill is a complicated mess, too complicated to neatly place blame on one side or the other. It shows, however, that we as a society have more to do in terms of catching up morally and ethically to the vast complexity of technology that we let rule our lives.

Technology vs. Creation = Creation Wins

2010-06-23T13:50:00.000-07:00

I crave beauty. As I spend more time with technology, gadgets, and web development strategies, I am constantly aware of a nagging urge to be in the presence of beauty. The natural world is alive in a way that exudes beauty and energy. Technology only approximates beauty. It attempts to mimic what we find everywhere in nature.

I've been researching design over the past few weeks, looking at it mathematically, conceptually, visually, and ideologically, asking the question: “what makes something beautiful?” One thing has become clear throughout my research: God is the ultimate designer, and anything we humans design is nothing if not a distant approximation of what he has already done. Technology is driven by functionality on one side, but equally as important it is driven by design. If something doesn't both feel right and work right, it's hard for that piece of technology to gain widespread use. From cars to cell phones, design and functionality are the two key principles driving technology.

But the more time you spend with technology, the more lackluster it becomes in comparison with the grandeur of God's created world. There are constant annoyances, bugs, caveats, and problems with every single piece of created technology. Show me, though, one design or functionality flaw in an oak tree. What about a duck? Each thing that God created was and is perfectly designed for the role for which it was created.

I see so much arrogance and greed in the world of technology. I start to adapt these habits myself when I'm blindly following where they lead. There is a constant urge under the surface to have something more, something better, and to have it exclusively. It's why people wait in line for a product, why people devote their entire lives to blogging about a particular device and/or company. Of course technology is not all bad, and I would hate for that to be the point taken from this little rant. However, I've noticed firsthand how difficult it is to turn off the roaring engine that is the desire to possess something new. It is perhaps one of the most silent, yet dangerous dispositions to let creep in to your life. It is the exact opposite of contentment, and the Bible is clear throughout that a constant desire for material possessions (mammon) is sinful and idolatrous.

And that is where beauty comes in. All around us is a world created by God that we all too often fail to recognize. Technology drives us inward, but creation points to the Creator. With such created beauty everywhere around us, it should sadden us all the more when horrific man-made disasters like the gulf oil spill occur. We would all go up in arms if someone were to throw a can of oil on a da Vinci, Monet, or Rembrandt painting, yet I am surprised and confused by the response, or lack thereof, of many professing Christians to the oil spill. Where is our sense of creation care? We are highly protective of our “own” possessions, but when it comes to the world that has been given as a gift for us to live in, we balk at our responsibility.

I appreciate technology, and I get excited to think about the possibilities and new horizons that it opens up. But I am equally aware of the frightful limitations and negative consequences that it brings our way as well. More on this later.

What Lies Beneath

2010-06-16T06:04:00.000-07:00

A few days ago news came out that nearly $1 trillion worth of untapped mineral resources lies beneath the surface of Afghanistan. The New York Times article gives more detailed facts, but I want to focus on the implications behind this discovery. I happened to first hear the story while driving back from spending the day with Andrew Crosson at Schlitterbahn water park in south Texas. We were listening to NPR at the beginning of the long drive back, and they had a 5 or 6 minute spot about this particular story.

Honestly, the first thing I thought about when I heard this news was not how great it would be for Afghanistan, but how much more oppression, greed, and manipulation would follow. While having that much untapped potential under the surface seems like an incredible blessing, I can’t help but think about the multinationals that are licking their chops, ready to pounce on this already impoverished nation in order to simply gain a larger profit.

This seems like the story of DR Congo and Nigeria all over again. Relatively poor, unstable countries that were found to have huge natural resources which huge multinationals soon began to extract, only to lead to terrible exploitation and poverty for the vast majority of citizens. Hopefully Afghanistan won’t go the same way, but it has the conditions needed for this same tragedy to take place.

For one, it is a nation that in the middle of a war. Politically, its stability teeters on the edge of survivability at the best of times. In the worst, it’s been labelled as one of the most corrupt governments in the world. Then consider its economy. Because of the war, long-term planning that we take for granted in the relatively stable and secure West is not an option for people that are just trying to make it through the winter. As a result, cash crops are by far the easiest and most profitable business for most citizens, and the most lucrative cash crops are the ones that become illegal drugs.

The government is not quite stable, while the economy still searches for profitability in something other than illicit drugs. One would hope that the news of all this new wealth under Afghanistan would lead to a more stable, peaceful, and prosperous future for these people. They have endured a tremendous amount of both internal and external strife in the last few decades, and they certainly deserve a brighter future.

Let’s hope the story of DR Congo and Nigeria (along with numerous others) doesn’t repeat itself in Afghanistan and that, indeed, this is news to celebrate for a people who surely deserve some good news.

Think of it as a Gift

2010-06-07T21:27:00.000-07:00

I'm slowly reading my way through Karl Barth's Dogmatics in Outline. I was caught by an idea that corresponded to what I was reading in Scripture, and it helped shine a light of gratitude into my heart, so I wanted to share it.

In one of the first few chapters, Barth talks about proving the existence of God. He thinks these proofs we've constructed about the existence of God don't really do anything but prove our short-sightedness. He thinks the other way around. To him, the idea of God is more concrete than the idea of himself. The experience of life can seem like a dream; how do you know it's real? Basically, he is working from the framework that God is the solid rock of understanding and that we are like shifting sand.

It's a highly philosophical point, and one that I don't quite know that I fully understand, but the Spirit brought an "aha!" moment to me as I was reading this section of Scripture in 1 Corinthians 2:

For the Spirit searches everything, even p the depths of God. 11 For who knows a person's thoughts q except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12 Now r we have received not s the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God.13 And we impart this t in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit,u interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual

The realization dawned on me: knowing God is a gift! To interact with, to think about, to have a relationship with God is quite an astonishing thing when you stop to think about it. It is a precious gift to know him. It's undeserved grace. Knowing God. It helps to think of it as a gift. This isn't a relationship I control or manage. It's interactivity, it's submission and obedience, and it's joy.

I'm not sure that's what Karl Barth intended when he wrote that section of his book, but the beautiful thing about communicating the things of God is that the Spirit works to bring understanding in mysterious ways.

3 things

2010-06-04T21:15:00.000-07:00

1) 3 songs i'm loving right now

Susan Enan Bring on the Wonder

The Boxer Rebellion These Walls are Thin

The Radio Dept. Heaven's on Fire

2) 3 books I'm loving right now

Philip Yancey & Paul Brand Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

Khaled Hosseini (sp?) A Thousand Splendid Suns

C.S. Lewis The Grand Miracle (a collection of selected essays)

3) 3 observations from happenings this week

The Armando Gallaraga almost-perfect game fiasco seemed to get everyone riled up except Armando Gallaraga. Do we place too much emphasis on sport in America when an umpire is getting death threats because he missed a call?

The Oil Spill disaster continues. BP has not responded appropriately, and most Americans don't seem to care that this might be the biggest national environmental disaster in our history. Should this teach us a few things about how we live in God's created world?

Sprint showed off its newest 4g phone this week, the HTC Evo. Added to Verizon's HTC Incredible and the new iPhone due out in a month, phones are getting more powerful and will vie for more of our attention. But as much as I love technology, I'd rather have a nice, long, personal, face-to-face conversation with a good friend any day.

some thoughts on translations

2010-05-28T08:38:00.000-07:00

Good morning! The last few days I’ve been working backwards through Proverbs. I started with chapter 10 and read backwards because that’s not something I usually do, and I wanted to see what it was like. I spent an evening in the section about staying away from the adulteress, trying to soak up the wisdom of “can a man put coals in his lap and not be burned?” (6:27).

I’m bad about placing differentiations on sin. I’m a pro at rationalizing what’s right and what’s okay, and what’s not okay but probably isn’t too bad. But reading these chapters, and really, this whole book, is a solid reminder that the way of wisdom turns away from all unrighteousness. Not in a holier-than-thou elitism, but in a pure, humble heart that honestly desires to please God. If I’m honest, more often than not i’m more concerned with pleasing myself than pleasing God, and my actions, words, and thoughts reflect this.

So Proverbs is turning out to be a wonderful dose of medicine to my heart. I’ve been reading it in the NLT, because I enjoy the beautiful translation that they employ. It is so difficult to balance beauty with precision and accuracy in translating. I know this from the last year of Greek. Sometimes you want to force a word here or there but the context just won’t let you do it. But the thing I like to keep in mind when I’m translating is this: as a translator, i’m trying to make the text as clear and as beautiful as it is in the original. I’m not spinning my own narrative. I’m not pushing my own theological opinions. I’m trying to do the best I can with my knowledge of english and greek/hebrew to bridge the gap between the two.

Peterson’s Message is a little bit too much on the side of subjectivity. When you stray as far as he does from original meaning you begin to make leaps that you just can’t sustain. But texts like the NIV, the NLT, which are closer to the original while still being readable, are a better blend of the beauty/clarity/precision triangle. If I’m honest, after learning Greek I have a hard time reading a looser translation of the New Testament and would rather have a more literal translation. But the Greek language, just like English, deserves to be unchained from the strict shackles of literality if we’re going to let the Spirit speak in various ways.

Achieving a good balance is the goal, at least it seems that way to me. I need the hard-nosed literal translations (NASB) as well as the looser, freer translations (NLT, Good News). And in between, the NIV and ESV emerge. All of these translations are worthy of our time and attention, because they bring us closer to the Word, and that’s the whole point of it all. Not to develop some uber particular way of interpretation, but rather to just spend time with God through his revealed Word. As I’m reminded in Proverbs 4, “My child, pay attention to what I say. Listen carefully to my words. Don’t lose sight of them. Let them penetrate deep into your heart.” That’s the whole point. When the words penetrate our heart, our actions can't help but be changed.

beautiful reminder

2010-05-26T20:01:00.000-07:00

Wisdom has built her house;

she has carved its seven columns.

She has prepared a great banquet,

mixed the wines, and set the table.

She has sent her servants to invite everyone to come.

She calls out from the heights overlooking the city.

"Come in with me," she urges the simple.

To those who lack good judgment, she says,

"Come, eat my food,

and drink the wine I have mixed.

Leave your simple ways behind, and begin to live;

learn to use good judgment."

Proverbs 9:1-6 (NLT)

Learning from Lebron

2010-05-23T22:25:00.001-07:00

I’m not going to spend an entire post exclusively talking about sports, even though that would be so much fun (i’ve always wished I could blog for ESPN, ha). But something kind of hit me as I was watching the collapse of the cleveland cavaliers in their playoff series against the Boston Celtics. A collapse few saw coming, but when you really begin to think about it, it’s easy to see why it happened.

In case you’re lost, here’s a quick rundown. So the Cavs were favorites to win the NBA title going into the playoffs this year. They have the best player on the planet in Lebron, and, did I mention, they have the best player in the planet? They don’t really have many other marquee guys but that didn’t seem necessary. They had Lebron. Lebron would carry them to the title.

They cruised through the first round, but then the collapse started. They met the Boston Celtics, a tough, veteran, talented team who absolutely crushed them into the ground. I was watching the game at the Farmer’s house, and Andy and I both marveled at the way Boston was simply beating the Cavs at all the fundamentals of the game: desire, teamwork, focus, hustle, leadership. You name it, the Celtics were outshining the Cavs.

Lebron mostly had amazing statistical games during the series (except for one game), including the final game where he had a triple-double. But the problem wasn’t so much with Lebron as it was with the rest of the Cavs team. They looked scared, tentative, even disinterested at times, as if they expected Lebron to make every big-time shot while they spectated.

Shortly after the game I was left trying to figure out how something like this happened. The best team in the NBA loses embarrassingly without even putting up much of a fight. And then I realized, it’s the Lebron effect. The Cavs employed a “we can win it all without really working as a team or being interested in each other because we have Lebron”. And, you could see a little bit of that ego surfacing in Lebron. He didn’t need help. He could carry the Cavs on his own.

The 2010 Cleveland Cavaliers teach us that you can be successful with a one-man show, but you can’t make it through adversity as a team with one guy. Every player on the court is important and needs to do their part. And when one player sees another player who’s disinterested or frustrated, it’s their job to encourage their teammate and get them back on the same page. You can’t do it alone. You’ve got to stick together. These are the kinds of lessons that, while they come from a game, transcend sport and touch the very center of our lives as human beings as well.

Do I believe this?

2010-05-20T08:53:00.000-07:00

I really like the image of God as shepherd, walking with us, his sheep. I like the image because I find myself so often like a sheep that has wandered away from the shepherd, following my own nose and ending up in peril because of it. I like to do my own thing, create opportunities, make things happen. None of those things are bad traits, in fact they’re all wonderful if they are the natural outflow of life connected to God. The problem is when they are the result of me thinking I can do it all on my own.

Walking in faith is no passive activity. It’s not like closing your eyes blindly to the world around you and acting like you don’t have a care in the world. No, faith is confronting those fears and anxieties face to face, which takes quite a bit of courage. And because faith is a daily journey, it’s new every day. When I wake up in the morning, and I’m reading some particular passage of Scripture, I have to come face to face with faith and ask myself, “do i really believe THIS?”

1 John 3:16 “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.” So this is the verse I read this morning, and as I read it I thought, my goodness, do I really believe this? Do I really believe that we don’t know what love is until we’ve sacrificed something for it? This verse could either be a really nice spiritual thought for the day, or it could end up being a radical, transformative message for how I live my life THIS day.

And really, isn’t our interaction with God, and with Scripture, supposed to be like that every day? What am I going to do with what this says? How does this change me? What does this require of me? Faith! Is that what faith looks like? Scanning even the most mundane parts of our lives and finding out that God is there too, wanting to make us more like him?

Do I believe this? It’s such a disrupting question. Faith is disruptive. It’s unpredictable. It requires much of me. Thank goodness my Shepherd is right there with me.

Three Things

2010-05-18T20:38:00.000-07:00

Three Things I'm Thankful for Today

1. Cross Canadian Ragweed's song "Burn Like the Sun" because it has an awesome electric guitar solo. The whole cd (Happiness and All the Other Things) has helped me recover my air guitar skills.

2. being healthy enough to run. i'm not thankful for this precious gift of health enough.

3. meals. not heart-attacks-in-a-sack like i ate all during finals, but real, genuine meals!

driving white-knuckled through a Texas thunderstorm

2010-05-15T10:37:00.000-07:00

I could see the clouds looming in the distance. They were like a dark wall in the sky, and i was heading right towards them. Just a few weeks ago we had a series of storms pass through birmingham, and I remember looking out the window trying to figure out which direction they were coming from. I had to resort to looking at an online radar to figure out where and when the rain was coming. There was an element of surprise in this, because with all the trees, hills, and valleys, most of the horizon was invisible to me.

Fast-forward to yesterday. I’m on my way back to Dallas, and I’m about 20 miles into east Texas. That’s the first time I saw the clouds. For the next couple hours they were my backdrop. And with each mile I drove, I was inching my way closer and closer to this line of thunderstorms.

It got me thinking about how we react to stuff that happens to us in life. There are times when something comes right out of the blue and surprises you, leaving you spinning with either joy or confusion (and sometimes both). Then there are the times when you can see something coming for miles and miles. There is a sense of foreboding as you wait for the inevitable to happen. All you can do is brace yourself.

My path eventually collided with the oncoming storm. I found myself in the middle of a good ole Texas thunderstorm, wind whipping up patches of dust and trees shaking with the raucous gusts. Rain fell on my windshield like bullets from a gun, with those big splatters that leave crater-like impressions on the glass. The cloudline was so low and dark it seemed to brush against the tops of the trees. I turned my wipers on full blast, put both hands on the wheel, and just drove right on through it.

Sometimes you can brace yourself for things that happen in life, and sometimes you get blindsided. Either way, you’re never fully in control, and thunderstorms have a great way of reminding you of that fact. When the good times, and the bad, roll in, we’re called to keep our eyes fixed on the Author and Perfecter of our faith, not getting consumed by the current around us. There is something reassuring about that call. It reminds us that our attitudes and our reactions are choices. You can either ride the roller-coaster of daily emotions or choose to let joy and hope light up your life regardless of the circumstances.

His Glory Appears

2010-04-05T22:42:00.000-07:00

The glory of the Lord God Almighty is too intense for our earthly bodies to behold. That is why the closest approximations we will get are metaphors, or visions of the imagination, if you will. Too often our worship is self-centered, limited in scope. Rarely do we take in the full breadth, depth, and sheer height of our majestic Lord and Savior. The Word gives witness to our great God, and opens the eyes of our inner spirit to God. The Spirit itself comes alongside the Word and shakes us out of our stupor, beckoning us to the beauty of the Lord. If only we would lift our heads and turn our eyes away from our own reflections.

Light is one of the most common metaphors in the Bible, and it is closely connected to the glory of the Lord. The encounters of God in the Old Testament tell us that God cannot be seen face to face. The New Testament depicts the glory of the Lord so blinding Paul with its brilliance that he is brought to his knees in utter subjugation. The glory of the Lord is both beautiful and terrifying.

If you have ever seen a shaft of sunlight pierce a line of dark clouds, you begin to understand the metaphor. If you have ever seen a sunset that so captures your attention all you can do is utter monosyllabic words like “wow”, you begin to understand the metaphor. If you have ever woken up to a bright, beautifully sunlit day after several repetitively gloomy days, you begin to understand the metaphor.

One of my favorite worship songs declares: “and His glory appears, like the light from the sun”. Metaphors like this, along with the breathtaking witness of Scripture, reorient my imagination around the living Savior. And oh, does my imagination need reorienting. It too often functions in the goopy, smelly mess of sinfulness that I live in. It needs rescue, just like the rest of me, every single day. It needs the fresh breath of the Spirit to wake it up, to fill it with newness and goodness instead of filth and destruction.

Worship fills the imagination with a glimpse of the beautiful glory of the Lord. It arrests our hearts with images of light. And the worshipping heart cannot help but bleed this light into the world around it. There is no fathomable way that the heart can contain the light of the glory of the Lord. It is too powerful. It is too strong. It is too intense. It is never contained. It passes through, filling and awakening, but shining through to others. It is not ours to control, but is instead a most precious gift.

Worship brings our hearts into closer communion with the Trinity. It envelops all elements of time. We look to the past, seeing the transforming and utterly astonishing act of Jesus Christ being crucified but rising victorious on the third day. We look to the future, declaring our hope in the promise of our Savior. And in the present, our imaginations are being transformed. What an incredible gift the Lord has given to us, worship.

Faith Life College

2010-04-05T09:27:00.000-07:00

The idea for a college ministry website has been germinating in my mind for a long time. I’ve only recently taken purposed steps to make that vision become a reality, and I wanted to share it with you.

HERE

It’s called FaithLifeCollege, because I want to emphasize topics and posts that are intersecting points between faith in Christ and life as a college student. It’s fairly straightforward, then, when you begin to think about what kind of content will be appearing on the site.

The main idea is to try to engage and connect with a college demographic that includes such a broad range of people.

So, take a look at the site, let me know what you think, and let me know how you think it could improve. I very much appreciate it!

On this Saturday

2010-04-03T09:14:00.000-07:00

Listening to:

The Avett Brothers: Four Thieves Gone

This is such resonant music. It’s the kind of music that one moment makes you rest your head on your hands and stare out the window and then the next start tapping your foot in a delightful rhythm. The Avett Brothers have a way of making me wish I was walking through a wooded path.

Watching:
The branches of a tree gently moving with the breeze. And the sun as it slowly moves its way across unconquered sky.

Thinking:

About Greek and how learning this language is teaching me so much about faith in general. I am such a “wantitallrightnow” person and Greek just won’t give itself up that easily. It’s teaching me to work slowly, steadily, to come back day after day, and to be patient when it doesn’t come as natural as I wish it would.

Thankful for:
The way the sun, in these particular few weeks before summer, is more warming than annoying, and for the way the earth brightens up with a bit of splashy sunlight. Makes me constantly want to go outside.

Holy Week Meditations

2010-03-29T20:58:00.000-07:00

It’s difficult to really take the time necessary to slow down and get quiet when the world pays little attention to the significance of this week and keeps going at the same frantic pace as usual. I’ve found myself already struggling to quiet my heart and mind around the remembrance of this week’s events. There is just too much going on, and I set the bar so low for myself. Why is this?

Well for one, it’s not like my spirituality dramatically changes during the major events of the Christian calendar. These days were not meant to be more holy and spiritual than any other day, but rather they are beachheads, reminders, if you will, of the great story of God’s saving work in the world through Christ. So instead of trying to hype myself up for this week I simply need to slow down and open up the eyes of my heart and mind to imagination. I need not to construct more edifices of spirituality, but to clear away the muck of artificial idols that litter the landscape of my life. And in this clearer space the gruesome, brutal, difficult parts of the Christ story will invade the very parts of my heart that need it the most.

There is just so much to think about this week. So much happened in this relatively short span of time. And with such vast, upending implications. Like Christmas, it’s best if I can learn to just immerse myself in the story of Scripture and let the Spirit convict me and lead me to the places I need to go. And there’s no better place to do this than through the community of Christians he has placed around me.

So as I’m trying to clear away this area of space in my life, I want to leave you with a link to some wonderful holy week reflections by one of my favorite writers and thinkers, Andrew Peterson. Here it is.

The Kindle: A Review

2010-03-24T12:22:00.000-07:00

I’ve been using Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader for a few months now, and wanted to write about my experience with the whole e-book world. I was hesitant at first, because I was afraid that by capitulating to the Kindle I would, in essence, be condemning physical, printed books. There is this huge debate going on, centered mainly around electronic versus physical media. Like almost all debates right now in America, each side is so polarized that it’s hard to get a clear picture of what is actually going on. On the one side you have e-book users, who say convenience is supreme, and on the other hand you have old-school hold-the-book-in-your-hands people who think the e-book trend is a defamation of the sacred ethos of reading.

The problem is, once you actually use a Kindle (or any type of e-book, for that matter), you realize that the external debate is largely blown out of proportion. I love the convenience and simplicity of the Kindle, but I still enjoy holding a physical copy of a book and underlining the pages. And to my astonishment, you don’t have to give up physical books when you start using a Kindle. People would like for you to think that by purchasing an e-book reader you are inevitably saying goodbye to ever holding a physical book in your hands, but that’s just absurd. The truth is, living in both worlds is better than either one by itself.

For the physical book purists, I can see where the e-book format seems repulsive. But let me explain some of the benefits. For one, you don’t have to carry around multiple books (especially when you travel), as they are all stored in one device. As well, at least on the Kindle, the digital-ink that they use is the same experience for your eye as reading printed words, so you don’t experience eye fatigue like you do reading from a computer screen. The digital ink also allows the Kindle to be read even in direct sunlight (i’ve done it, and it is fabulous), which can sometimes be difficult even with a physical book (and almost impossible with a laptop).

The other advantage besides convenience and ease-of-use is the way that the Kindle brings different types of media into one location. I wasn’t familiar with the Kindle version of magazines and newspapers until I started using it, but as I started to investigate these features I found them to be some of the most compelling cases for owning one. Allow me to explain. Not only can you get most major newspapers and magazines delivered wirelessly to your Kindle, but you get them before the printed versions are available. Magazines tend to generally cost a few dollars more per year than their physical cousins while newspapers are usually about the same price or a little cheaper.

Most people write-off the newspaper and magazine feature for the Kindle because it doesn’t deliver the stunning graphics and pictures that you get with a nice, glossy magazine. I can see where that could be a problem. But, on the other hand, I’ve found myself actually reading magazines and newspapers cover-to-cover without the distraction of pictures and advertisements. For someone like me who gets distracted by all the extraneous elements in a newspaper or magazine, the simplified, text-only emphasis allows me to focus on what the writers are actually trying to communicate, and in so doing, I’ve found that I’ve had a much better experience with these types of media than ever before.

Sure, the Kindle and e-book format has its drawbacks, but on the whole I’ve enjoyed using the device and have found it a great counterpart to physical media. It isn’t going to replace the printed book any time soon (that’s just ludicrous), but there is definitely a niche for what it provides. Overall, I find the device to be great for what it says it will do, and as long as you don’t expect it to be anything more than what it promises, I think you’ll have a good experience with it as well. Finally (and I may decide to explore this further in another post), I think the e-book market is going to help change the publishing and writing world in a positive way by bringing innovation and leveling the playing field that has been marred by mega-publishing firms and their strangle-hold over the book market (from writing all the way to distribution). So, if you get the chance to use an e-book (and specifically a Kindle), go ahead, I think you’ll enjoy it.

Health Care Reform and Mother Theresa

2010-03-22T09:12:00.000-07:00

Everyone has a strong reaction to Health Care Reform. Those opposed have let it be known quite certainly that they are opposed. Those in favor have trumpeted loudly their opinion on the matter. And even those in the middle and those who enjoy a certain level of political autonomy have joined the chorus just as strongly, except their line is “quit the bickering!” All sides have weighed in.

I am not concerned here with whether or not Health Care Reform (henceforth HCR) is in and of itself right or wrong for the United States. I am more concerned with how we move forward. How we, more specifically as Christians, move forward. So how do we respond Christianly in such a raucous environment?

“Seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness”
Disoriented. That is how I would describe most of our responses to the political moves in Washington over the past few decades. We have either thrust Jesus into the role of glitzy politician or divorced him from real life by relegating him to a distant “spiritual” realm. Both sides have been a part of both moves. People on both sides of the isle would like to champion Jesus as the raison d’etre for their cause. Just as equally, both sides have wanted to dismiss Jesus altogether and simply focus on the “reality” of the world situation.

After so many years of this, we have wedded ourselves to Washington. Instead of centering everything in our lives around the Kingdom of God and the hope therein for both present and future realities, we have settled for a kind of psychotic fixation on Washington. This means that we are either incredibly elated or utterly crushed by the decisions of politicians. Our responses are evidence of this. What does it mean, though, to seek first and foremost the Kingdom of God? Would it really change the way we respond to Washington?

“Fixing our eyes on Jesus”
We must strip away all the incorrigible layers in our hearts. We must do business with God, asking him to forgive us and cleanse us. In Christ’s life we find the way to move forward. Jesus lived a life fixed upon the will of his Father (read John for particular emphasis on this theme). This did not mean that he removed himself from daily interaction, though, as if he were somehow detached from the world. Instead, his close communion with his Father invigorated and established his activity and pursuits on earth.

What is establishing our actions and pursuits? Are we trying so desperately to create God’s Kingdom on earth that we are forgetting that He himself does this? Is our conception of Heaven so small that we think it must be some far-off ultra-spiritual realm completely different than this green earth that we live in now? We all tend to both directions throughout the courses of our lives, and I think the great difficulty right nows lies in cultivating the garden of our Hope in Jesus Christ.

“In Him all things hold together”
Our very imaginations need a transformation, a radical centering around the hope of new life in Jesus Christ. His death and resurrection form the entire reason for our existence. In Him we find our orientation to the world and to the HCR situation specifically. We live in the hope of promise, the belief that God will continue His saving work on earth. This hope in Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of our activity in the world. Therefore we are not hopeless when things seem difficult and neither have we arrived when all seems good.

Our task as Christians remains the same as it always has. We are to love God with our entire lives and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. We are to embrace the broken, the despised and rejected of the world. We are to care for the spiritual and physical needs of all people. Simply put, we would do well to study the habits of saints like Mother Theresa, who have given their whole lives in humble service to others. Washington does not dictate the Christian’s response to the world. Our eyes are fixed on Jesus. He has told us what to do. But the hard task of doing it remains up to us. May we all humble ourselves before our Lord and Maker and ask Him to make us people who “live by the Spirit”.

Staying Informed

2010-03-18T16:51:00.000-07:00

How do you get your information regarding what goes on in the world? How do you really figure out what you think about contemporary topics? I’ve been doing some self-examination when it comes to these types of questions, and I’ve been startled at what I’ve found.

I had to instantly separate the question “how do you figure out what you think about contemporary topics?” from “how do you stay current with the news?” There is a subtle difference in the question that hints at a problem with which we are just now coming to grips. I’m referring to the tendency we have today of falling into the trap of “news-byte” syndrome. Most college students or people my age are too cool to admit they watch television (unless it’s “occasionally Lost or the Office”) and so would immediately recognize the troubling trend on network and local news of watering down news items into 30-second clips. But this trend has been going on for a while, and people my age haven’t really watched network news for years anyway.

The new “news-byte syndrome” comes from the internet. From facebook, twitter, and the social networking worlds to the google news, yahoo news, etc., we are falling into the same trap as those who watch news on TV. We are staying current, yes, but do we actually know anything about what’s really going on? It goes like this: I check twitter, see an earthquake has happened somewhere, and click over to google news to figure out more. I quickly scan the bare-bones article and move on. I’ve now made myself informed, or so I think.

The problem is, I’m substituting a wide, sweeping, and generally shallow approach to news information for a more sophisticated, intelligent, and deeper understanding of what is going on around me. The problem isn’t necessary the news media. There are plethora of web sites and tv shows that give you a relatively “in-depth” understanding of an issue. I just don’t stay plugged in long enough to pay attention to them.

Our opinions (and i’m speaking here of people my age) and stances are being formed by our “fill-in-the-blank” approach to information. In this model, we pay attention long enough to think we have all we need, then we “fill-in-the-blank”, make the mental jump, and leave the topic altogether. After all, you have to find some way of organizing and categorizing the vast amount of information we are bombarded with on a daily basis.

But it gets really tiring to try to keep this model up. And you start to realize how shallow your understanding of issues is when you talk to people who are actually informed on issues. At least that’s been my finding. So I’ve decided to try and alter the way I’m taking in information and processing it. I’m reading magazines like BusinessWeek and Time in order to get deeper into issues I previously knew very little about. I’m watching video clips of the PBS News Hour so I can better understand what’s happening around the globe. These are just some small steps. And they aren’t really taking that much more time out of my schedule. I’m just using my time better.

I think what it comes down to is this: I can see myself slipping into this kind of “informed haze” where I know the basic facts about what’s going on, but have never engaged with the issues themselves in a deep manner. And then I’m walking into my local polling booth without any idea whatsoever about what I’m getting ready to do. And that’s just a lazy way out. That’s no way to show gratitude to the countless people who have sacrificed for my generation to have the opportunity to vote. That’s simply no way to be a good citizen.

In Response

2010-03-10T22:01:00.000-08:00

I don't have much in the way of coherent thoughts to offer right now, so I'm going to just post a poem I wrote recently called "In Response".

You skirt the edges of my mind,

You pound in my very chest,

You linger in a quiet thought,

You burst through the bleeding west.

Your love is like a roaring furnace,

like a journey back to home,

Your voice is warm, in thundrous silence,

calming me when I’m alone.

You are preeminence, august, glow,

You hold the world, its beams,

my hope.

A Better Resurrection

2010-03-04T16:13:00.000-08:00

A poem by one of my favorites, Christina Rossetti:

I have no wit, no words, no tears;

My heart within me like a stone

Is numbed too much for hopes or fears.

Look right, look left, I dwell alone;

I lift mine eyes, but dimmed with grief

No everlasting hills I see;

My life is in the falling leaf:

O Jesus, quicken me.

My life is like a faded leaf,

My harvest dwindled to a husk:

Truly my life is void and brief

And tedious in the barren dusk;

My life is like a frozen thing,

No bud nor greenness can I see;

Yet rise it shall - the sap of Spring;

O Jesus, rise in me.

My life is like a broken bowl,

A broken bowl that cannot hold

One drop of water for my soul

Or cordial in the searching cold;

Cast in the fire the perished thing;

Melt and remould it, till it be

A royal cup for Him, my King:

O Jesus, drink of me.

Snow, Roots, and Hearts

2010-03-02T07:42:00.000-08:00

The falling snow this morning has me thinking about the parable of the sower. I'm not sure how or why this connection came to mind, but maybe it has something to do with the way the snow is falling so beautifully but melting as it lands on the ground. You could spend hours watching the snow fall and look expectantly down at the ground waiting to find a white blanket, but instead all that you would get today is a picture of soggy, saturated mud.

Our church has been reading and listening through the New Testament during the season of Lent. The goal of this endeavor is to become more acquainted with the Scriptures that we profess so heartily yet spend such little time with. As we have been going through the Word the past few weeks, I've been astonished at how much the Spirit can do through such a simple act.

Jesus' teaching on the Sower is found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke (the synoptics) and thus we can infer that it is pretty important teaching. The story goes that there was a farmer who went to sow seed, but the seed had problems taking root. Some of the seed was snatched up by birds, some of it fell on shallow soil that inhibited the growth of the seed, thus causing an immature plant to be scorched by the sun, and other seed fell among thorns, which choked the growth attempts of the seed. Then there is the good soil, which received the seed and there it flourished.

I wonder, if Jesus were to examine the soil of our hearts today, what would he find? Would he find shallow soil that is filled with the rocks of distraction, idols, and indecision? Would he find soil that is filled with the thorns of self-centeredness, deceit, and fear? I wonder what he would find.

The seed that fell on the good soil "took root". The seed on the shallow soil, "immediately sprang up, because there was no depth of soil". My heart is, more times than not, the shallow soil. I assume that if I do my Christian duty of spending a few minutes a day with God I am fulfilling what I am supposed to fulfill. But what a shallow approach! The seed of the Word, then, continually fails to take root.

Would that my heart be fertile soil. Would that I tend to the garden of my heart, digging up the weeds and clearing away the debris. Would that I clear time each day to calm down and receive the Word.

Because I know the power of the Word to change my heart, my life. But do I really want it to?

From a distance

2010-02-27T08:34:00.000-08:00

Christianity, from a distance, seems safe. Christ as preached by many in America seems tame, passive, and lifeless. Why have we deluded ourselves into pigeon-holing the Gospel to fit our desires?

It is so much easier to live life with Christ as your self-help coach or "co-pilot" than to let him reign as Lord over your life. When you spend only a few minutes a day in solitude with God, it is all too easy to let the other 23.95 hours be ruled by your own ego. I speak from experience.

What happens when Christ invades your life, though? What happens when you earnestly yearn for a deeper connection with God? What happens when you start immersing yourself in the Word of God?

You become like a seed. You fall into the soil of God's creative power, die, and are reborn as a beautiful, new plant. John captures it in his gospel: "verily I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit".

But why have we confused ourselves into thinking that this decision is merely a ONE-time decision made when we decide to follow Christ? The "moment" of salvation has become distorted in our contemporary context. We have placed so much emphasis on making a decision for Christ that we have failed to properly explain that it is a decision that must be made every single day.

Each day is a creation unto its own. It is not yesterday, neither is it the future. It is a precious gift. The Word also says "Choose you this day whom you shall serve". But we are content with believing that if we've made our one-time decision we've done what it takes to punch our salvation-ticket.

The "choose you this day" version of faith, though, is what we need to learn. We must, as a generation, immerse ourselves in the Word, giving Christ complete Lordship over our lives, praying for the faith to be able to follow where he leads. This is the kind of Christianity that is not safe. This is the kind of Christianity that requires much of me.

No, it requires all of me.

two of my favorite books

2010-02-21T21:09:00.000-08:00

I would like to introduce you to Leif Enger. Maybe you've heard of him, but I'm guessing you probably have not. Therefore I'm going to spend the rest of this blog post trying to convince you to read his two books: Peace Like a River and So Brave, Young, and Handsome.

There are very few contemporary writers who capture the full essence of being human without becoming overly fixated on employing wordy prose in the descriptions of their characters. So many writers, you can tell, are trying so hard to find their voice that it just becomes awkward to make it past a few chapters. So they usually resort to one of the many ready-made formulas for whatever genre they wish to be successful in.

For instance, look at all the magic themed books that came out after the popularity of the Harry Potter series. Or take a peek at the burgeoning vampire fiction at your local bookstore. These are just the big-name trends, but each sub-genre has its own little formula for what it means to be popularly successful in the publishing industry. (sidenote: for the Christian version, just walk through the "Christian living" section of your bookstore and read the different titles. it's amazing how many popular titles have personal pronouns or some sort of need-based marketing gimmick.)

But then there are the few writers who push away from the crowds and go out on their own in search of their creative voice. These are the writers who are few and far between, and sadly, they usually don't receive much attention. Sure, there are the occasional Khaled Hosseini's (The Kite Runner) who write incredible books and are enormously popular, but there just aren't many.

Leif Enger is one such writer who has largely escaped attention. His two novels were well-received and are easy to find in bookstores, but you don't find many people talking about them. They have that elusive quality to them. They charm readers, but people seem to quickly forget.

For the past three years I have hardly read any better fiction. From the classics to popular modern titles, I just can't find another novelist who writes with the ease and gravity of Leif Enger. He writes in a style that makes you forget the time. But the best description for these two books is beautiful. Instead of taking you to a different world, his writing inspires you to see the world in a completely different fashion. He is a writer who has noticed the beauty around him, and his novels, in all their story-telling goodness, also have that added delight of re-awakening your mind to the beauty of the earth.

Please tell me someone has heard of Leif Enger. If you have not, I hope you will take the time to stop and at least read a few chapters of either book. I don't think you will regret the experience.

7 Words

2010-02-13T08:57:00.000-08:00

Challenging. Fun. Colloquial. Inspiring. Brisk. Introspective. Expressive.

Scripture as our Playground

2010-02-09T19:03:00.000-08:00

Communication creates our interpretation of reality. Words form the very backbone of how we live, think, and express ourselves as human beings. They have power far beyond our understanding, yet they are as commonplace as the air we breathe.

I agree with the social critics who have said that those of us in America live in a culture that devalues the word. It's not that we have lost all sense of what words mean to us, rather it is that we have allowed the visual image to supplant the word as the primary way we find expression.

If it is true that communication creates our interpretation of reality, then the amount of images we take in daily plays a tremendous role with how we perceive our lives. Basically, images shape us more than we realize. And as we are moving, as a culture, to a more image-saturated culture through the mediums of cell-phones, television, and computers, we are losing our ability to communicate through the word.

Words requires our minds and imaginations to form a picture from within, while an image requires no imagination to understand. Both words and images are incredibly powerful forms of communication, but we've let images carry us too far and have thus become word-weary and word-wimpy people.

Some examples, you ask. Certainly. How about our ability to listen to speeches, or in a context that hits closer to home, how about our ability to listen to sermons? It's one thing for a 5 year-old to get fidgety after 10 minutes, but it's another thing altogether when the entire congregation can't make it past 15 minutes. Or what about our ability to sit and focus on reading a book? I often find it extremely difficult to focus for the first 20 or 30 minutes I sit down to read, because my mind has been traveling so fast and needs time to acclimate to a slower pace.

If our imaginations were athletes, they'd be out-of-shape. But not dead. Not dead. We still have the ability to recapture a truer sense of imagination even though we are surrounded by a culture that is doing everything it can to force-feed us pre-processed images. We can do our best to re-acclimate ourselves to the written word, tearing ourselves away from the televisions, computers, and cell-phones in our lives that keep us away from face-to-face interaction. We can do our best to re-learn the importance of reading good books, the kind that stimulate us to think and imagine the world in different ways.

And ultimately we can re-learn the significance of the word in our lives by digging into the Scriptures and communicating with God through prayer. By reading His Word to us and learning to communicate with him through prayer we will be enrolling ourselves in the greatest class of all time, where the teacher is God himself, in the person of the Holy Spirit. In this classroom we will learn how to be shaped and moved by the Living Word, and we will see the beauty of worshipping through the spoken and sung word.

God is at the center of this endeavor as Trinity: Father, Son, and Spirit. By focusing in on, and communing with the Trinity, we will come to the fullest understanding possible of the power of the word for our lives. The Scriptures are our playground in all of this--the best possible place for our imaginations to reside.

Let the word come alive!

The Deep Waters

2010-02-06T08:15:00.000-08:00

"Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me." - Psalm 69: 1-2

This is what most of us feel at different points in a given week without being able to articulate just what "it" is. Sometimes it's sudden, hitting you like a strong current. Other times it's gradual. You wake up and just feel down. The kind of expression David is talking about here can be either sharp or throbbing.

Where are the waters coming in to your life? Where do you feel the current swirling around you, with no dry ground nearby or life-raft in sight? I think sometimes we do a good job articulating our daily fears and concerns to others and experience the relief of having someone else share a burden with us, but if we're honest, I think most of us do an even better job hiding these fears deep in the recesses of our minds and hearts.

We as a generation are not very good at listening. I am a pretty bad listener. I don't exactly know why we're just not very good listeners anymore, but maybe it has to do with all the distractions, both internal and external, that crash around in our minds like hyperactive bumper-cars. Listening requires presence. It requires attention. Both of which are hard to do when you have a cell phone in your pocket and a list of things to do begging you to attend to them.

We're just pretty distracted, when it comes down to it. And these distractions are tools the enemy uses to keep us busy when we know we need to slow down. These distractions in our lives are like sunglasses that dull the magnificence of the hope found in the promises of God. When we are distracted, we don't pay attention to the foundational promises of our faith. Like the promise that God will never leave us or forsake us. Or the promise that God's wisdom is better than our wisdom. Or even the life-altering promise that God has a plan and purpose for our lives.

We need to learn to meditate on these promises and there find deep wells of encouragement. These promises are the lifeblood of our hope as Christians. They are what enable us to face the coming waters and stand steadfast. I love how David ends this Psalm:

"For the LORD heareth the poor, and despiseth not his prisoners...For God will save Zion"

He is standing in the turmoil of the present but rejoicing in the hope of the promise of God. This is our way forward. Not glibbly shutting our eyes to the struggles around us, but standing in the midst of them and proclaiming the truths of God's eternal promises to us. There we find encouragement and strength strangely not of ourselves. There we find the Risen Savior. And He is all we need.

Like Fire

2010-02-02T08:09:00.000-08:00

I watched the movie Dante's Peak last night, in its entirety, on AMC. So I saw more commercials than I needed to see for the entire week. I muted a few of the commercial breaks, but ended up passively waiting through the rest of them to get back to the movie. Some observations:

We are told two things when it comes to our image/appearance/self-worth. Either A) we do not look good enough or are not good enough so we need a product or service to make us look and feel better, or B) don't let people determine your worth, you are amazing just the way you are. Both options are lazy misconstructions of how we are really supposed to handle ourselves. They've both got enough truth in them to make us want to go in their direction, but they are dangerously flawed as well.

There's something about love that makes it like fire. You cannot come into contact with real love without being changed. I don't have to tell you that for you to intuitively understand what I'm talking about. Love changes you.

Now, the beautiful thing about grace is that God does not require us to clean up our act before coming to him. He just wants us to come to him. And since most of us are screwed up in so many different ways, there aren't many people who end up coming to God with white robes on. We come to God as we are, but the love that we come into contact with changes us.

I too often shy away from the hard task of sanctification. I end up either relying too much on my own strength or thinking that it's just a needless attempt at doing something that's not really possible. But sanctification is not something we can choose to ignore, because in so doing we cheapen grace. Coming into contact with God's love changes us, every day, transforming us into people that are more Christlike.

It's why we keep getting back up when we fall down, because of the strength of the grace of God. His love compels us forward, and every time we make mistakes he calls us closer to himself.

You and I are called to be holy, to lay ourselves before the altar of the Lord. Sure, God is full of grace, but living with the mantra of "i'm not perfect" is just an immature way to live out a relationship with the living and active God. It comes down to this: do we really believe God is powerful enough in his love and grace to change us, to really transform those deepest parts of our lives where we do not let anyone else go? Are we willing to come completely before him and ask for his help? And are we really ready for the consequences of such a radical step of faith?

Turn your eyes upon Jesus

2010-01-27T19:14:00.001-08:00

When's the last time you surrendered yourself completely to Christ? Your talents, your hopes, your dreams, your failures, your uncertainties? After days and weeks in which I've lived completely in my own strength, everything just seems so tense and difficult. My head and heart race off ahead and leave my will faltering in the dust.

We weren't meant to approach surrender like camels approach water, just drinking every once in a while. Camels can go days and weeks without water. We simply cannot go days and weeks without the water of surrender. Exhaustion steals on us quickly.

I'm learning the simple, yet hard truth of surrender. Every day. To Christ. Trying to live for God does not substitute for complete and total surrender. It's like walking on hot concrete without shoes. The hymn comes to mind, "turn your eyes upon Jesus". The Word reminds me "come to me", "take up your cross and follow me". "Whoever seeks to keep his life will lose it and whoever loses his life will preserve it".

Choosing

2010-01-24T22:12:00.000-08:00

I love the way certain themes seem to thread themselves through the events of a day. I'll read something in the morning that comes up in a later conversation and then gets confirmed by yet another conversation. It's as if someone wants me to learn something. I think you've probably had a similar experience.

Well today one of those threaded themes was choosing Christ. In the interspersed events of the day this theme kept finding its way to the surface, slowly working its way into my mind and heart. Sometimes I think the Lord works this way because I'm too stubborn and inattentive to notice something unless He reminds me several times. By the end of this particular evening, though, I finally realized that the message I had been sent was centered around the daily choice I make, whether to sacrifice myself to Christ and be under his lordship, or to choose to live by my own wisdom and understanding.

I needed to be reminded about this choice, because it had lost its sharp edge in my heart. Choosing Christ each day should remain something that my heart is sensitive to, not something that I either don't think about or put off to do later. That's the "sharp edge" that I need to have in my heart. Sensitivity.

"Choose you this day whom you will serve; as for me and my house, we shall choose the Lord". This decision I make has such vast and far reaching implications on the rest of the day, yet how many days do I go where I don't even think about it? If I'm honest, most days I take myself too seriously and don't take God seriously enough. I'm all too ready to dive into the challenges of my day, but when it comes to surrendering myself to Christ in order to seek His direction first, well, that's something I need a lot of help with.

Thankfully it's not something to get discouraged about, but is something to be encouraged about. Each day is new. Each day affords opportunities that will never happen again. And even when I'm fumbling around, unable to choose Christ, He always prevails. It's because of his love that I desire to surrender myself to him, and this helps me remember that this whole "choosing" business isn't about outward action but is instead focused on my inner heart of hearts. It's in these moments that I realize what a patient Lord I serve. And this gives me new hope for today.

Learning to live without

2010-01-22T09:06:00.000-08:00

I was browsing google's fastflip news source when I came across a U.S. News article about things we Americans are learning to do without during this recession period. The author lists 21 things that we've learned to curb or do away with altogether. I identified with a lot of items on the list and I think you will too. It's good for a laugh, too. I think cultivating creativity is one of our most important calling as Believers, and this includes employing creative measures to curb poor spending habits.

HERE

Fragrance of Christ

2010-01-21T08:29:00.000-08:00

It's powerful what a certain smell can conjure in your memory. Whenever I smell an orange being peeled, I immediately think of track season, because all the track moms would bring us orange slices to eat in between events. Other smells bring back more specific memories, time-bound memories, and bring crashing to mind the intensity of that moment. They can be positive or negative associations, too. A scent can repel you from something or it can draw you in and put you at ease.

I was thinking about this when I came across Paul's metaphor of us as fragrances in 2 Corinthians 2. In this little snippet of Scripture he says that we are a "fragrance of Christ" to the world around us. A sweet smelling fragrance in the midst of the stench of death and hopelessness.

I don't often feel like a sweet smelling fragrance of Christ. I would not compare my life to the latest Giorgio Armani fragrance, and most of the time I wonder if people can even tell that anything is different about my life. But Paul's reminder is that I don't have to go around wondering what kind of fragrance I'm putting out, as if one day I can produce stench and the other day something intoxicatingly beautiful.

Instead, Paul simply says that I am a fragrance of life among a fragrance of death. This gives me tremendous hope, realizing it does not depend upon my effort. I don't have to try to be a different kind of fragrance, I am a different kind of fragrance already. Christ has done the work.

Our lives tell a story, and our lives give off a fragrance. In Christ we are assured that both are redeemed and given new dimensions. Just because our effort doesn't determine the goodness or badness of our fragrance doesn't exempt us from doing something, however. We are called to go into the world, to bring that fragrance to the world.

So while we don't have to go around wondering what our lives are smelling like, we are commanded to go and bring that fragrance to other lives. Which turns everything outward. It exposes the lack of trust we have in Christ to actually bring about that sweet fragrance. It's easier to ponder how we smell, trying to produce a "better" fragrance, than it is to simply trust that Christ makes us sweet smelling fragrances and that all we need to do is walk by faith.

"Cease striving", the Psalmist reminds us. "Come to me", says Jesus. "Seek first the Kingdom". If we reorient our lives around Christ, He will take us where we need to go. He will guide our steps and take us to the places that desperately need the fragrance of Christ. What a good thought, that we don't have to try so hard on our own. All we have to do is follow Christ, placing our complete trust in Him, and submitting our lives to radical obedience. He will show us the way.

class, haiti, and

2010-01-15T15:53:00.000-08:00

So much has been happening this week, both on a cosmic scale and a personal scale. I've been seeing 6am on my bedside clock every day this week, for starters. It was just a small part of the very odd rhythm that you get into when you take a two week class. The days start to melt together and you have to take each day one step at a time or all the pressure just slams down on you.

But this week was more than just about class. It was so bizarre, sitting in class next to my friend Joel who had been scheduled to go to Haiti for a mission trip this next week. We were both trying to keep up with the news while trying to remain focused on what the professor was saying. Every time we'd get a short break Joel would rush out of the classroom to get on his phone and make frenzied phone calls.

It was a week of too many assignments, but somehow they all got done. You can't do this sort of thing alone, and it was good to be able to study, laugh, and be frustrated with several other good friends in the class. It's the kind of week you don't expect to be able to learn anything, but you end up learning so much. Maybe the best word to describe this week is full.

The classes got under my skin, frustrating me while also encouraging me. You don't either love or hate classes like these, you kind of hold the love and hate in tension and end up feeling that it was really worth it in the end.

My favorite part of the week was this afternoon's wrap up session in racial reconciliation. It was the part of the class where we all went around and told about our ideas for being racial reconcilers in our current and future ministries. I love hearing from different perspectives when it comes to this sort of thing, and i was incredibly challenged and encouraged by the ideas my classmates presented.

I walk away from this week extremely grateful that it is over, but slightly sad at the same time.

The Clamor

2010-01-13T04:58:00.000-08:00

The world is shouting at us. Voices competing for our attention, for our time, for our belief. The never-ending cadence just gets exhausting to listen to, yet it is so much easier to stay tuned in to its messages than it is to turn off the dial and listen to a different message.

You know how sometimes when you have been watching TV for a while it just gets hard to turn the thing off? It's sort of like that.

Meanwhile God is whispering, speaking, even shouting life-giving and hope-filling words to me that I miss because I am caught in the chasm of my own laziness. The Word doesn't need hours and hours of my time in order for it to be effective and sharp to my soul, but it does need time.

What things is God speaking to me today? I think this is the attitude I want to cultivate as this new year emerges and unfolds.

The Call to Christian Community

2010-01-09T09:07:00.000-08:00

I wrote this little essay last year.

I am absolutely convinced that I would rather live life in the raging storm of community than in the dull solitude of myself. I would rather be subject to the flaming fires of people’s unmet expectations than to be merely thought of as a good person. I would rather be exposed as the bumbling, stumbling coward of a friend that I am than to be looked upon with respect from afar.

In these endeavors of community there is an inevitability to the fact that the true person will be revealed. Oh, and what a good thing this is! Especially for the white-washed, too-proud believer, who needs the sunlight of community to expose those glaring blotches of blackness in our souls. I am here speaking of the result which occurs from living and striving for a common purpose in Christ. For the common purpose of ministering in Christ’s name manifests itself in so many different ways, yet flows from a single source: the awesome love of God. We are each gifted with various habits of ministry which show forth God’s glory in multiple ways. But we are thereby united through the love of Christ, and it is to that great beachhead that we hold onto so dearly. For we would quickly disintegrate into the chaos we see all around us if it were not for this single unifying force.

Therefore in all our endeavors we must remember what pulls us back together at the end of the day. Our disagreements in style might seem large to us, but compared to the vastness of God’s love they are but small matters. We should each seek to serve Christ as He has called us, always looking to Him as our source and encouragement, and should employ grace in generous amounts to our brethren who are involved in the same great task. We remember through it all that we serve the God who redeems us through grace, not the work of our hands.

We should recognize, then, that while differences abound, God’s love seen through Christ unifies more perfectly than our differences separate. We should see it as an honor to be so sharpened by our fellow believers, and I do mean sharpened, because sharpening involves pain. To be sharpened is to be cut, to be formed, and to be thus refined. In losing ourselves we truly see the beauty of Christ’s strength being made perfect in our weakness. And when we are weakened, we can begin to live in the awesome power of God’s strength. This is the place where we have the power to forgive those people who have deeply hurt us. This is the place where we have the fortitude to keep running the Great Race when all our energies are spent. And this is the place where we are transformed as agents and enactors of beautiful grace, able to bring hope to a world lost in despair.

That is why it is so important that we take the call to Christian community so seriously. For in showing grace and mercy to our fellow brothers and sisters we are learning the great truths of God. We are active participants in transformational redemption through learning to live with and serve our community. We become more like Christ when we choose to love others in spite of their mistakes and shortcomings. We absolutely MUST learn to let the love of Christ so rattle the foundations of our hearts that we become steadfast in encouraging and forgiving our brothers and sisters.

Christ’s call is not to dive deeper into oneself, but to fall headlong into the raging current of Himself, where love and mercy persist. It is through these holy waters that we must pass in order to come out purified on the other side. Our hidden weaknesses and our glaring imperfections must be brought to light in order that Christ would redeem them; and He does! Through this amazing, wondrous process we find the strength to live in community. We find the strength to struggle through the difficulty of loving our brethren, and we find enough grace to live each day as it comes. The task of Christian community is hard, but more important than ever. Let us bow before our Almighty Father in Heaven as we attempt such an endeavor.

the story of a Christmas snow

2009-12-28T08:36:00.000-08:00

It doesn't snow in Dallas. It shouldn't snow in Dallas. But somehow, on Christmas Eve, it did. It began in the morning as a steady, chilling rain, the kind that gets inside your skin and rattles your bones. I was walking around with families at a mission center close to home and wondering at how much we all have progressed with scientific innovation and such yet still an ordinary thing such as the weather can simply make life miserable. Families standing out in the cold rain. There isn't a whole lot more miserable than that.

At first when the rain turned to snow, nothing stuck. The ground was having nothing to do with the snow, melting it before it had a chance to make a home for itself. The resistance kept up through the afternoon. Ground versus snow. As the wind picked up and the flakes turned into a flurry, the ground still stubbornly refused to house the snow. With the setting of the sun, however, the ground lost its greatest ally.

It was so peculiar and so mesmerizing to behold the elements from the other side of the window at my house. With the wind howling fiercely and the tree branches shaking violently in response, there was a kind of coziness that you feel only when you stand safely behind a window watching such a spectacle. And a kind of awe, as well.

When the sun drifted away and the darkness began to set in, the ground finally began to acquiesce to the persistence of the snow. It was like watching someone grudgingly decide to do something. The snow took to the ground, slowly layering itself. The dark ground magically transformed into white.

It was like a great picture, a reminder, if you will, of the force of redemption. Here we have the holidays, the old Christmas Story you and I have heard a hundred times, and it becomes harder and harder to enter into the remembrance of the baby Savior Jesus that this holiday is all about. The story keeps persistently trying to make a home for itself in my heart, but I stubbornly refuse to let it have its way with me. It's easier to just let myself become distracted by everything else going on.

But when I finally relent, an amazing transformation begins to take place. The Story has won out. It takes my own story, simple as it is, and redresses it in a new garment, giving it new purpose and beauty.

It doesn't snow in Dallas. But redemption still finds a way to come to us in the strangest of places.

a few Christmas prayers and wishes

2009-12-22T08:58:00.000-08:00

For my imagination to be stretched. For my heart to be expanded. To be transfered from the kiddie pool to the big kids' pool.

To entertain thoughts deeper and more compelling than my selfishness allows.

For the language of the Word to taste like fresh-baked bread. For the creativity and diligence to not separate God from the everyday.

To receive love instead of working to earn it. To give love instead of trying to earn it. To learn the selflessness of love and the exuberance of giving.

To notice. To laugh. To smile. To enjoy.

For renewed hope. For fresh eyes. For a heart of obedience.

Simeon's Hope

2009-12-17T09:32:00.000-08:00

Waking up is really an amazing thing. It is something completely out of our control, when it comes down to it, and it is something that we all must do each new day. This morning, like almost every morning in the recent past that I can remember, reminds me of my neediness.

No matter what I'm thinking about before I go to bed, whether it is something stupid or something a few paces from trivial, the undercurrents of sleep seem to wash it away so that when I wake up, I have a few moments where I've forgotten everything. It's a slightly disorienting feeling, until the weight of whatever I'm supposed to be doing for the day comes crashing through the cobwebs and I'm restored to "reality".

In that little moment before reality has set in there is something big at work that I'm not sure I always remember in the moment. It's the little choice to either carry my own burdens or remember I have a Savior.

Do you ever feel like you need to be reminded of hope? I've been feeling it quite often. For whatever reason, my mind and heart wander from the path that is trusting in Jesus and need reorientation every single morning. But there are so many mornings when I just don't care. The day looms and doesn't seem to care either. There are things to be done and places to be. There doesn't seem to be time to sit down and breathe before it all begins.

Simeon, the old man in the Luke 2 version of the birth of Christ, has been teaching me what it means to feel my need to be reminded everyday of the hope I have in Christ. Simeon was a man who was waiting expectantly for the birth of the Messiah, and from the story we can gather that he has been waiting his entire life. He is on the brink of death, but the Holy Spirit has promised him that he will not die until he meets Israel's Savior.

So Simeon cultivates a life of expectant hope. Some days it must have seemed like it would never happen, but Simeon kept pressing on, earning an advanced degree in Hope. How in the world did he do this? I'm not entirely sure, but I think part of the answer is that he submitted himself as a servant to God. He gave himself up, and in so doing recognized his great neediness before God.

I need, every morning, to be reminded of the hope of Christ. I need to have the great Story told to me again, so that my mind and heart can massaged into remembering the radical hope that Jesus has brought to this world. I need it more than I need breakfast.

Hope was the heartbeat that kept Simeon going. Which causes me to think, what's making my heart beat today?

Christmas and Rachmaninoff

2009-12-12T08:17:00.000-08:00

So what is the story trying to tell us? Well in order to fully answer that question we each have to create space in our lives to actively listen to the story. And it also helps to hear the story told us in different ways.

I want to introduce you, if you aren't familiar already, with The Vespers. They are a sort of wonderful musical storytelling experience, encompassing such a broad spectrum of Biblical currents and themes, all culminating in and around Christ. Written by Russia's great composer, Rachmaninoff, the Vespers are how we translate Rachmaninoff's Russian title for the work, which most literally means "all-night vigil".

The Vespers are 15 choral movements, with each section focusing on a specific section of the Scriptures, from creation to the resurrection. I've been listening to them over the past few days, and it's been like jumping into a deep, refreshing pool on a hot summer day. With all the Christmas hubbub occurring right now, it is absolutely vital that we each take time to absorb and conform ourselves to the Biblical story of Christmas. This is a great way to do so. It takes a little bit of time, and a bit of patience to let the story unfold, but it is well worth the effort!

Here is the link to the first movement (all 15 are on Youtube, just follow on the sidebar for the next movement)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn5dpIECTds&feature=related

Here is the link to the text where you can follow along with both the original language and the English translation. it also has some good background on the Vespers.

http://www.signumrecords.com/catalogue/sigcd054/programme.htm

I hope you enjoy! Find ways this Christmas season to get wrapped up in the real Christmas story.

mark.

Snow Angels

2009-12-07T09:03:00.000-08:00

What exactly are we getting ready to celebrate as we enter into this Christmas season? Better yet, what are we celebrating now as we live out each day of this month of December?

These kinds of questions always seem to pop into my head as Thanksgiving ends and Christmas season bursts upon the scene. But this year the answers are coming in a very real and tangible form: through the first Christmas story, as described by Luke and Matthew in the Gospels. Here are a few things I think they are telling us.

1. Slow down. We can't be changed by the Story if we don't take the time to enter into the Story and allow our hearts and minds to be gripped by its awesome force.

2. Notice. Luke and Matthew point out different things in their accounts, and each writer calls us to see the broad range of characters in the Story. What was it like for those shepherds in that cold field? What is Joseph doing that is so important? Why should we pay attention to Simeon and to Anna?

3. Sacrifice. The Story calls us to give up ourselves in worship and adoration of the Word made flesh, to pursue a different reality than the one our culture subscribes to.

The Story should be telling us all sorts of different things as we engage it this Christmas season. What is it trying to tell you?

Decade in Music

2009-11-24T08:51:00.000-08:00

Well we're almost to the end of the decade of 2000, and as I'm on thanksgiving break I thought I'd go through some of my favorite cd's of the decade. I bought my first cd in 2000, so this was definitely the decade I first really got into music. So without further ado, here are my favorite albums of the last decade:

2000 - Coldplay's Parachutes ; Nickel Creek's Nickel Creek

2001 - Caedmon's Call's In the Company of Angels

2002 - Coldplay's Rush of Blood to the Head; Kutless's Kutless

2003 - Switchfoot's Beautiful Letdown; Enter the Worship Circle's 1st Circle; Over the Rhine's Ohio

2004 - Andrew Peterson's Behold the Lamb of God

2005 - Mae's The Everglow; Jack Johnson's In Between Dreams; Over the Rhine's Drunkard's Prayer

2006 - John Mayer's Continuum; mewithoutYou's Brother, Sister; Sufjan Stevens' Seven Swans; Switchfoot's Oh! Gravity; The Weepies' Say I am You; Fernando Ortega's The Shadow of Your Wings

2007 -The Avett Brothers' Emotionalism; Sara Groves' Tell Me What You Know; Anberlin's Cities

2008 - Andrew Peterson's Resurrection Letters; Coldplay's Viva la Vida

2009 - The Avett Brother's I and Love and You

Top 5 Albums of the Decade

1. Coldplay A Rush of Blood to the Head

2. Andrew Peterson Behold the Lamb of God

3. The Avett Brothers I and Love and You

4. John Mayer Continuum

5. Mae The Everglow

There it is. That was fun. Chide me where you think I need chiding, agree heartily where hearty agreement is necessary.

mark.

All the difference in the world

2009-11-07T07:45:00.000-08:00

Over the summer I read a book by GK Chesterton about Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi. I certainly enjoyed it, but I didn't realize it would continue to have reverberating effects through much of this semester. Somehow a key theme of the two biographies has stayed with me like a shadow trailing behind me as I walk.

All of my 5 classes at seminary have by now intersected on more than a few topics, and while I know this is by design in order that we would learn better by repeated exposure, I don't think they planned the intersection that has meant the most to me so far. That intersection is prayer. In some form or fashion, all of my classes have dealt with far-ranging things related to prayer, and it is as if the Chesterton book I read this summer is the matte-board to which they are all sticking.

We've gone over the Lord's prayer in interpretation class. We've discussed the theology of the prayers of the Psalms in Old Testament. We've examined the prayers of the early church in church history. We've thought about the deeper layers of prayer in spiritual formation. And we've even tackled praying in Greek class, going through a few short sections of the Scripture together.

While these points of emphases on prayer have not been underlined and highlighted by my professors, the little light in my head has been going off all semester as the Spirit has revealed connection after connection. And the central theme connecting everything together is gratitude.

Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi learned through a long lifetime of obedience to see God in all aspects of life, from the tiniest parts of creation to the loftiest of existential questions. But this didn't just occur overnight in their conversion experiences. It was a sort of gradual process that was facilitated through daily gratitude. As they learned to give thanks to God for everything in their lives, these men of faith started to have the scales removed from their eyes, and I don't think we've had two such persons since who have seen God at work so actively in the world.

If we can't be thankful in the little things, what kind of heart do we have? If we can't thank God for the small moment of rest or the sandwich we had for lunch then what does that say about the alignment of the motives of our heart? Gratitude sees God, selfishness sees ourselves. Gratitude realizes that the gifts of life are from God, and are not to be possessed and worried over, but are to be thanked, praised, and enjoyed. Selfishness might not be as scary a thing on the outside as some of the more grievous, hard-hitting sins, but I venture to say (from experience) that it is the most debilitating disposition for the disciple of Christ to have.

Selfishness turns us sour from the inside out and affects every part of our lives. It grows scales over our eyes that keep us from seeing our brothers and sisters in need, and keeps us as well from seeing the beautiful gifts that God has given us through creation and through his more personal daily activity. In short, selfishness is a disease, and must be purposely fought. The great antidote to selfishness comes in the unassuming form of gratitude. Thanking God for the good times and the bad, for our very breath in the morning and the gifts he bestows upon us every day, for the big and the small. Slowly gratitude works inside of us to bring us new eyes and new hearts, through the wondrous work of the Spirit, and we begin to walk down the same road that the great disciples of our faith (including Aquinas and Francis) journeyed upon, and it makes all the difference in the world.

Looking in the Closet

2009-11-02T16:27:00.000-08:00

My pastor has been preaching a series on the Blues, discussing the similarities between this type of music and living faith. I've been trying to put myself in the shoes of the people in the stories he's been telling, trying to think about what life must have been like during those those decades in the early part of the 20th century.

If you ever looked in your grandparents (or even great-grandparents) closet as a youngster, you will probably recognize many of the clothes represented in this slideshow of pictures. I found this story about a photographer from the 50's who recently died. He focused on normal every day people, and I enjoyed browsing these elegant photographs and stepping into another world. Take a look for yourself:

Here

the Real World

2009-10-21T16:41:00.000-07:00

A few afternoons ago I went for a walk. After being in class all morning and in the library for most of the afternoon, I really needed to get outside for a little bit. Since I normally run, and run with an ipod, I thought it would be a good change-of-pace to slow down and walk, without the ipod. I tried to count how many different animals I saw and how many different varieties of plants that I passed, but I gave up after about 20 minutes. It hit me pretty hard: I pass by so much detail and so much variety and rarely, if ever, stop to recognize and take pleasure in it.

I've been reading a book by Eugene Peterson for one of my classes. It's called The Wisdom of Each Other, and it's a series of based-on-reality fictional letters between Peterson and a distant friend who has just converted to the Christian faith. Sprinkled throughout the letters are numerous one-liners that catch you off guard and make you want to put the book down and stop and think. And since most of the letters are fairly short in nature, Peterson really has to pack-in what he wants to say. I think he does a fine job.

One of the key themes he talks about in the book is church--what it is, what it does, and some of its pitfalls. In describing these elements of the church, I found myself really resonating with one particular description of the act of church, ie worshipping God with other believers. Peterson says, "every call to worship is a call into the Real World". Maybe that doesn't strike you as that astounding of a quote, but let me unpack it a little bit.

What he is referring to with regards to waking up to the Real World is what I experienced in my walk the other day. Our daily realities more often than not resemble the worldly conception of reality rather than the Godly conception of reality. The world's conceptions of truth, beauty, community, family, self-worth, freedom, etc., are like fractions compared to whole numbers. They work up to a certain point, but inevitably falter because they are too shallow.

The truth is, our conception of reality (which is most often just like the world's) is too shallow. We fail to see the invisible mysteries of God at work all around us or witness the tiny miracles of daily living, mostly because we are either too self-absorbed to notice anything other than ourselves (this describes me accurately) or we are running too fast on the treadmill of life. Church, then, or rather the act of worshipping together, reminds us of the Real World. It brings us back to the truth that God is big and God is in control and God is at work all around us. That is the story we enter in when we worship together on Sundays.

I need that wake-up call every day, especially in those days that feel like re-runs, like nothing new is happening, that all that is really going on is something that has happened before. It's in those times, more often than not, that the tiny miracles of God are embedded, waiting for me to notice. Waking up to the reality of God every day is difficult, but it is to discipleship what brushing our teeth in the morning before we walk out the door is to the rest of the day.

Ten Thousand Words

2009-10-12T09:49:00.000-07:00

Great song by the Avett Brothers that gives a lot to think about.

Peace Prizes

2009-10-09T12:58:00.001-07:00

So if you haven't seen the news, President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. Regardless of where you stand politically, there are a few things going on with this story that I think are noteworthy and should help us think more about what actual peace-making entails.

People tend to either get nominally excited over news like this, irrationally fired up (in a negative way) or just feel totally ambivalent to the whole idea. Why is this so? How can something produce such far-reaching emotions and draw so many different responses from people?

To arrive at the answers to those questions, I want to borrow a tactic that my pastor has recently been using in his re-framing of the health-care debate. He has been preaching about what true health is really all about (see andy's recent post for more info) and highlighting that we don't have a big enough view of health as we debate the issue of health-care.

Similarly, what are our ideas of peace? If nothing else, I hope that by such a controversial figure (by controversial i mean someone who elicits far-reaching opinions) being awarded the nobel peace prize people will start asking questions about what peace is really all about. Because we desperately need to think about this issue, especially in our Churches and Bible studies and personal lives as well.

And when we engage the question of what peace is really all about, there is really only one figure in all of history who stands out above all the rest: Jesus Christ. He is the starting place in our discussion of peace, and from Him we can derive the true meaning of peace.

Peace isn't simply about peace with each other, you know (although that's a huge part). It's also peace with the rest of creation. Since Genesis 3, we human's have been at odds both with ourselves and the rest of creation, and the Biblical narrative spends the rest of the Old Testament telling the story of God's work to redeem the whole of creation.

And then it happened! In Jesus. He brought true peace to the earth, the answer Israel had been waiting for for so long. Peace towards God, peace towards men, and peace that renews the whole of creation.

We are privileged people in the West, having so much knowledge and resources at our fingertips. But aren't we equally impoverished, like a thirsty man trying to get a drink from a fire hydrant with so much information around us and so little connection between information and life-transformation?

Peace. We desperately need peace. In our planet, in our relationships with one another, even with ourselves. And Jesus Christ should be the starting point for our discussion, because in Christ (like it says so beautifully in Colossians 1) all things hold together. It's time for a different conception of peace, one grounded in Christ.

Here is the best example of peace I can point you to, namely Jesus Christ. What a beautiful picture this is:

15 i He is the image of j the invisible God, k the firstborn of all creation.16 For by [6] him all things were created, l in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether m thrones or n dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created o through him and for him. 17 And p he is before all things, and in him all things q hold together. 18 And r he is the head of the body, the church. He is s the beginning, t the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. 19 For u in him all the v fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and w through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, x making peace y by the blood of his cross.

(Colossians 1, ESV translation)

Spiritual Fervor

2009-09-30T07:30:00.000-07:00

Where is our spiritual fervor in this generation? Where are the children of the most high God praising Him and serving Him with their whole hearts? Is there even such a thing as spiritual fervor anymore, or have we reduced faith to gnosis (knowledge) and kept it at a safe distance from our hearts?

Chances are, the phrase spiritual fervor brings to mind images we would associate today with pentecostalism, or something of that nature. Why has spiritual fervor been co-opted and associated with one particular expression of the faith, though? Why do most of the terms we use to describe the elements of Christianity and/or faith become associated with one particular expression and lose their meaning for the whole of Christianity?

Spiritual fervor is not the sole property of the pentecostals! If that were the case, spiritual malaise would naturally be the sole property of everyone else. But yet we still cling to such skewed notions of common descriptors of Christianity.

Spiritual fervor is present through all aspects of the history of our faith. From the Nazirites in Numbers (chapt 6) to John the Baptist, the early church in Acts, and the subsequent martyrs we have a picture of what it means to have spiritual fervor. Even the "dark ages", as we modern westerners like to call it, was replete with persons of intense spiritual fervor (see: st. francis and thomas aquinas).

So why have we come to associate spiritual fervor with only one expression of faith? Maybe it's because we have a warped view of what spiritual fervor is really all about. After all, most of us probably have a negative connotation of spiritual fervor anyway. But what if it is the one thing we are lacking in the Church in the west? We have all this gnosis, all this head knowledge about God, about theology, about how to balance faith and praxis. We live at a time of unrivaled educational opportunities, yet our numbers are declining with each generation!? Why?

Lack of spiritual fervor. Our faith barely informs how we live and treat other people. We have become so acquainted with our position of cultural power that we have lost the ability to understand suffering and humility. We are so trapped, now, by being powerful and being relevant that we've totally chucked out the Gospel (the euangelion: good news in greek).

The Psalms have a lot to say about spiritual fervor, as do the Prophets and the entire New Testament. Spiritual fervor exists when complete devotion to God meets humility and submission to His Lordship in our lives. Faith gives us hope, and in faith we have the love of God poured out on us from above.

So spiritual fervor is not a crazy, out-of-body experience (a notion we still cling to, given to us by plato and his followers) that causes us to become so entranced with the spiritual that we lose sight of the world. It is the opposite. Spiritual fervor is embedded in the love of God, the love shown to us through Christ, and that love came down from heaven to change the face of the earth forever.

Neither is spiritual fervor a sort of social gospel, where we make it our mission to establish a visible kingdom where wrongs are righted and justice is served (doing good is wonderful, but it is not our starting point, God must be our starting point, otherwise we will run out of gas). Spiritual fervor gets its energy from God and gives fresh eyes with which to see the world. Spiritual fervor recognizes that God is in control, that He is present through His Spirit wherever there are believers, and that the victory is won in Christ Jesus.

So spiritual fervor has more to do with balance than it does with hyper-extremism. But it is a weighty balance, one that has such faith in God and His plan and promises that we are loosed from the chains of our own selves. Christ unlocks the prison door and calls us into new life with Him, where we learn to submit to Him and obey His voice and His teaching in our lives. This is certainly something that would lead to spiritual fervor, right?

But maybe we don't really see the Gospel as heavy and as important as it really is. Maybe we see Christ as just another item to collect, a genie who will bless us along our own way. Or maybe we just want to get eternal life-insurance. But when our eyes are opened to see the awesome, amazing, and astounding transformational power of Jesus Christ to deliver us from our lives of sin and death, we should get a little glimpse of what it means to have spiritual fervor. Is our conception of the Gospel big enough? Do we really believe that Jesus Christ can transform lives?

Maybe it's time for a new conception of spiritual fervor.

Rediscovering the Weekend

2009-09-28T07:54:00.000-07:00

Very rarely did I get regularly excited about the weekends when I was an undergrad. Sure, I looked forward to Saturday and Sunday, but they weren't a whole lot different than the week days. College was like one big giant weekend (at least for the first two years!), so the weekends kind of diminished in their significance for me.

Now that I'm at seminary, weekends are like a lighthouse on a stormy night. I get really excited about the next weekend the minute the last weekend ends. I look forward to the time to rest, to sit back and do some of my own reading, and most of all, to spending lots of quality time with good friends.

Don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying the rest of the week, too, but it's hard to remember much about it when it goes by so fast and I'm spending most of it with my nose stuck in a book. We were made to work, and to find fulfillment in our work. But work's wife, rest, insists that we take time to appreciate her as well.

Along with my rediscovery of the Weekend, the Lord is helping me rediscover a lot of things in my heart that I've left in the dusty parts for too long and haven't dealt with. Things like trusting Him with every day. It's easy for me to get in a routine and get so comfortable in that routine that I barely recognize the Sustainer and Giver of each and every day. Things like slowing down and listening to what people have to say and seeking to encourage others through both just the physical presence of listening as well as through carefully selected words as well.

These are good things to learn, and I'm glad that the Lord has not given up on me and is still teaching me these things.

Neighbors

2009-09-19T08:46:00.000-07:00

For one of my classes this week we read a short story from Wendell Berry entitled "The Boundary" along with a chapter from Leviticus (19) and a short snippet of commentary on that text. It was quite an interesting combination of readings. Wendell Berry, the poetic storyteller, and Leviticus.

But they are more alike than I thought. I've always had this terrible idea of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, like they are these horribly depressing and boring books. But that was because I had never really read them! I've had these preconceived ideas in my head without even giving them a chance. It took a professor assigning them as required reading before I woke up to the realization that these books are incredible!

While Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy were for my Old Testament class, the Wendell Berry book was not (even though that would have been awesome). But the way they intersect is incredible. Berry has a wonderful view of what it means to be a neighbor, a citizen in a larger community. It's nestled in all of his stories, and especially so in "the Boundary", the story we read for class.

His whole notion is built around the principle that we cannot do life without each other, that we intrinsically need each other. And I wholeheartedly agree, especially from the viewpoint of the post-modern, 20something who lives in a suburb largely disconnected from the kinds of notions Wendell has of land, family, and neighbor.

To Berry, land, family, and neighbor are all interconnected in the tapestry of life. You couldn't take one away without the rest of the threads all coming undone. And it's the same message you get from Leviticus. You can't do life without other people! The materials in Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy are all about Israel's relationship to God and Israel as a nation. They follow the ups and downs of this nation who were given laws by Yahweh but repeatedly failed to trust God and follow the commands.

Many of the laws are about how Israel's people are to treat each other, and it's an amazing view into the role of justice and equity in a community of people who otherwise would be striving for their own success apart from the betterment of the community. It really gets you thinking about how we treat each other nowadays. No, we aren't Israel, and largely we've written off these "ancient" laws as irrelevant to us, but we would really do well to re-examine their significance for our lives as people trying to live out the dual commands of loving God and loving neighbor.

Choosing love. Choosing to stay together when the going gets tough. Choosing to confront instead of passively letting emotions turn into monsters. These are the things of community. Tough things. It gave me so much to think about. Thank you Wendell Berry and Leviticus!

this is no paper-plate hope, it is Real hope

2009-09-12T08:53:00.000-07:00

Where have you lost hope today? Where in your life do you feel despondent, unresponsive, unable to see the hand of the Lord working? I think if we’re all brutally honest, not a day goes by without some area or another of our lives being affected by temporary hopelessness. You might say, wow, that’s a strong word to put on it: hopelessness. But really, that’s what is happening, even if it is just a momentary thing. It’s not just other people that struggle with hopelessness, people without Christ, but more often than not it’s we, the believers in Christ, who struggle the most with hopelessness.

Throughout the storylines of the Old Testament Israel repeatedly loses hope in God. Reading the Exodus narrative and Jeremiah or Isaiah show Israel on this roller-coaster-like faith journey. One minute they are up, doing the will of God, following and obeying His commands. Then they turn aside and turn inward to themselves (see: Aaron and the golden calf, ex. 32). They lose hope. It’s not the nations outside of Israel that have lost hope, because they have never had it in the first place. And it’s the same with us today. It’s not the unbelievers who struggle the most with hopelessness, because they have never tasted true hope found in Jesus Christ. We are the ones who have met the all-powerful Living God and have let our lives remain the same.

In my last post I mentioned how we can let our sinfulness become the controlling narrative of our lives. How when we focus so much on ourselves, it leads to us filtering our lives through ourselves and not through the lens of God and His promises to us. I think this is especially problematic for those of us who are more introspective in nature. Even good, healthy introspection, examining one’s heart, can turn into unhealthy self-centeredness if it is not done with God’s grand narrative as the backdrop.

When we take away the promises of God and have no framework of His amazing faithfulness, we are left with only ourselves, and that’s enough to make anyone hopeless. It’s the controlling narrative of God’s faithfulness, though, that has guided the Church ever since Jesus came and declared the arrival of the Kingdom of God. Think of those lengthy Psalms (104 & 105, for instance) which retell the story of God’s faithfulness to His covenant promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Think of Isaiah 40, where God, through Isaiah, reminds the people of Israel that he has never left them, that He does not grow weary, and that He is their everlasting God.

Remembering the faithfulness of God gives us hope for every aspect of our lives. By meditating and dwelling on His faithfulness, our fluctuating levels of self-confidence turn into complete God-confidence. We do not live in the power of ourselves, but in the power of God, so how much confidence we feel in ourselves doesn’t matter anymore. God-confidence chooses to remember the faithfulness and the promises of God, giving us hope and boldness in the name of Jesus Christ. God-confidence was a central ingredient of the Church in Acts. It ceases to matter if one person has more ability than another or if one person seems to continually make the same mistakes. God-confidence washes away our self-centered attitudes about our lives and puts the focus back on God’s redemptive work through Jesus Christ, which turns our despondency and hopelessness into life-changing and life-giving hope.

What does this entail, though? How is this kind of God-confidence something that can become the controlling narrative of our lives? There’s no quick solution here. It comes down to absorbing oneself in the Word of God, His eternal promises and plan of redemption. It comes down to choosing to worship and pray, even when we don’t feel like it, knowing that God is not interested in our ideas of efficiency. He just wants us. All of us. Here we are, much like Moses felt right after God told him he would be the one to go to Pharaoh to demand the release of the Israelites. But it’s God’s response that matters, and it is a response that has resonated throughout the Scriptures to bring hope and promise to lives that otherwise are broken and despondent:

“But Moses said to God: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?” He (God) said, “But I will be with you.” (Ex. 3:11-12)

a new way to do life

2009-09-09T13:39:00.000-07:00

I'm really enjoying my seminary experience so far. The studying is rough, but it's really cool to be digging in the truth of God so intensely. It's kind of like trying to eat a 20oz steak for every meal. Think about that one for a while...

Usually I leave class thinking about something the prof brought up, and the past few days it's all run together, centered around this question: Do I live like I really believe in the resurrection power of Jesus Christ?

Here's the deal: we can get so caught up in our doctrines of total depravity and how sinful we are that we let that become the controlling narrative of our lives. Day after day we become so caught up in me, me, me that we forget that true discipleship is following Jesus Christ. Certainly part of following Him is denying oneself and taking up our crosses. And we must constantly be aware of our neediness before Him (John 15).

However, if we become too engrossed in our sinfulness, we totally miss out on Jesus and the work that He has done and is doing in us. This is no cheap prosperity gospel, where all we have to do is ask for the blessing of the Lord. Neither is this a name it and claim it short equation for always being upbeat in the faith.

The life of Christ was marked by humility and power, woven together so beautifully that it is hard for us to understand how they can exist together. Jesus died on the cross for our sins; an agonizing death that should bring us to our knees in gratitude. But the story is not over with His death. We are Christians because of His resurrection. And it is in the resurrection where we find the strength to live in the now and not yet.

We live in a broken world, where the doctrine of sin is the most empirically verifiable fact. But thanks be to God that He didn't leave us in our sin. He redeemed us through Jesus, the Christ, and His Kingdom has come to the earth! That should wake us up in the morning. It's certainly what gave the early Church, as seen in Acts, the motivation to be so bold and courageous with the Gospel.

We fall down more often than we succeed. In fact, we make the same mistakes over and over. But the power of Christ to change lives and change hearts is still as real as it was in the pages of Acts. The power of the resurrection should so invade our lives that it transforms how we do our Christian faith. We serve Christ in faithfulness, because He is the source of faithfulness. We choose to follow Him the hard way, because He has surely shown us the right way to live. But we also fellowship with the most powerful force in the universe, the power of Christ through the working of the Spirit in our lives.

It's not easy, and Jesus didn't say it would. Some days will be harder than others, and most will include pain and sorrow. But those are not places to dwell in: Christ is risen! Let that be the framework for how we live as believers. Christ is risen! And He loves us. Oh how He loves. And it's a love that in all the history of the world is impossible to contain (see: martyrs)

What is our response to the wickedness, despair, and hopelessness around us? The resurrected Christ, who redeemed us and offers a new way to do life. A life of continual redemption; discipleship to Christ. I want in.

He'll take care of the rest

2009-09-03T07:46:00.000-07:00

This morning it was difficult to get out of bed. I could hear the plink, plink, plink of raindrops falling outside my window, and it was clear that the sun had already decided against waking up. Precedent had been set, so I had a choice to make.

Well of course I got out of bed. But why was it so hard in the first place? Usually it's not a big deal, but today was just one of those days. Maybe it's the fact that I had a hard time falling asleep last night. It's usually not very hard for me to fall asleep, especially after long days at school and at the library studying. But last night my body and mind couldn't get on the same page, and as a result my mind raced right on by as my body called out for sleep.

I was thinking about something that is very simple to say, but is so nuanced once you start thinking about it and going deeper. I was thinking about this question: what does my life say? What is the message that my life is speaking? Is it a unified message, or is a discordant cacophony of mixed messages?

I want my life to speak of Jesus Christ. In all my life, every aspect, I want to point to Christ. It seems so simple, and in a way, it really is: look to Christ, continually, submitting to Him and obeying Him each moment of the day. But therein lies the difficulty. My selfishness wages war against this lifestyle of submission and obedience, and more often than not wins out. It's in the little things, the seemingly small and meaningless decisions of the day that the battle is won or lost. What I choose to think about when no one is around. What my heart holds dear and longs for.

Being a good person on the outside is not the goal. It's too demanding, and there is no fulfillment, because fulfilling the self with more self is like pouring water into a bottomless jar. I was not designed for moralism divorced from Christ. I was designed for Christ, for direct intimacy with Him, which produces the fruit that other people see.

So it comes back to the small, daily decisions, which no one but God sees. These are the crucibles where I grow, where I learn the way of faith through obedience and submission to Christ. I may not understand why it is so difficult, volitionally, to choose against seemingly innocuous things, but in my heart I know what the Lord requires of me.

It's not that playing the xbox is wrong, or watching television, or surfing through my favorite websites, even. It's not that these things in and of themselves are wrong, it is the wisdom of knowing what place they have in my day. The battle is not so much against the things I know are wrong, clearly wrong, but it's against the things that really are not bad in and of themselves, but which push me towards mediocrity, laziness, and complacency.

I need rest. I need time to relax and just hang loose. But wisdom is knowing when I need to drop those things and sit a while with Christ, resting before Him and letting Him breathe His Word and Spirit into me afresh. Daily submission and obedience to Him, even when I don't feel like it, and even when I don't even think I need it.

So what is my life saying? Well, I'll try to follow the advice of Jesus himself: "seek first the kingdom of God". And, as Keith Green liked to say, "he'll take care of the rest".

Pots and Pans and Failures

2009-08-31T08:20:00.000-07:00

I started seminary last week. Back to school, except this time 'round, I had no pre-conceived idea of what it would be like. For the past few years during my time at college, I could generally know what to expect when I walked into a new class at the beginning of a semester. This kind of knowledge lulled me into a state of ease and contentment. I knew for the most part that my classes would have their time of difficulty (usually two or three times a year, depending on tests and papers), but that in general they wouldn't require too much of my time or effort.

Not so in my new classes. I need every ounce of attention and focus inside of me in order to retain what I'm learning. I'm learning what Brother Lawrence termed "simple attention". He explains "simple attention" as the pathway He took to resting in the presence of God, allowing himself to be fully present in his current situation, not distracted by the events of the last few moments or the tyranny of the future.

This is a concept that is very difficult for me, especially with all the technology and other tools of distraction around me. Being fully present before the Lord is so essential in experiencing the joy of fellowship with Him, but it requires intentional self-sacrifice, a decision to shut off all other avenues that seek entrance into the mind. It's something that looks different for each of us as disciples of Christ. As a student, my distractions are different than those of someone juggling a job, marriage, or other commitment. But we are all the same in that we need the fellowship of the Lord.

Learning to "practice the presence of God" and to give Him my "simple attention" is proving to be a difficult journey, but one that has its rewards as well. With all the theology, hermeneutics, language, and Bible knowledge I'm learning in seminary, the garden of my heart can easily become crowded and choked with weeds if I am not attentive to keep the simple concept of "practicing the presence of God" before me continually. For what does it matter if I believe in Biblical authority yet never open the Bible to drink deeply from it? What does it matter if I know the ins and outs of Old and New Testament theology if it is not changing the way I treat other people?

Knowledge is good, but it puffs up. True wisdom is knowing Christ, and it starts with the fear of the Lord, being humble before Him. Only when I start with humility can I reach the higher plains of academia without becoming inflated by my own desperate ego. Simple attention. Practicing the presence of God.

It's a new day

2009-08-27T05:18:00.000-07:00

Early morning circles around me, the rising sun spreading its wings in the eastern sky outside my window. It is so still in the morning. The air seems to hold the expectations and hopes and fears of the day, waiting to exhale. It's mostly quiet, except for the random barking of the neighborhood dogs.

The rising of the sun each day reminds me of the evernew mercies of God. "For his mercies are new every morning". What a beautiful concept to remember. I need that mercy new today, just like I need to be reminded of the sacrifice of my Savior who defeated death and rose again to new life, offering me new life as well. The rising sun points to Jesus in that way, too.

Nature is laced with little reminders of God, and I can't think of a better way to start the morning than with a cup of good, strong, coffee, a Psalm, and a window with a view.

I found grace watching my computer die

2009-08-17T08:28:00.000-07:00

So it's the night before my internship finishes for the summer, and I'm getting ready to ease into another long summer evening. As usual, I pop open my mac and check emails and baseball scores when my computer informs me that, to finish "updating" my computer, I must restart the computer. Easy enough. I've done it countless times through my three year journey with this particular computer. So I dutifully click the "Restart" button, and wait for my machine to rev to life again. And that is where the fun began...

As I'm waiting for the computer to restart, I go over and take a swig of water, trying to stay somewhat hydrated before my run later that evening, but when I come back to the computer, I see that it's stuck on the white apple start-up screen. 10 minutes later I start to get worried. This has never happened with my computer, hopefully it's just a little glitch, right? I reboot the computer several times, all with no luck. That darn white apple start-up page is the farthest it will go. After 30 minutes of this, I start to realize something very profound, and it causes me to slightly panic, kind of like that slow, horrible feeling you get when you realize you've locked your car keys in the car...

I'm an idiot. I haven't backed up my computer in 4 months. Not a single file, since the end of school, is safely backed-up on a thumb drive or external hard drive. They are, all of them, trapped inside my computer, hostages from their creator. (it's okay, you can laugh) It's at this point that I am kicking my self, well, at least i'm doing so in my head. How could I be so stupid? Tomorrow I'm presenting all of my files to my supervisor, and here I am with zero access to them. How great will that sound..."uh, so I lost all my files last night, sorry"...

In the midst of my internal panic and fascination with the new depths of stupidity that I had reached, I started to finally get a grip. Come on mark, you know a thing or two about computers, put that limited knowledge to some sort of use here. So i try the few tricks I know, but they are all hopelessly falling short, reminding me that I am utterly and completely out of control.

I need some sort of miracle here, or at least i need my computer to start acting properly. I've tried everything I know to do, but still I'm completely helpless, in need of some saving grace...

Fastforward 2 hours, in which time i've succumb to the realization that I won't get these files back. I've started the tricky process of rationalizing this bizarre event in my head, coming up with clever excuses to feed my supervisor tomorrow. But there's that sinking feeling down deep, realizing that nothing I can say will hide my idiocy. "You mean in 3 months you didn't back up one single file?...wow mark, college degree taught you a lot, eh?"

I walk back to my computer, to the lost cause that it is, and give it a go one last time. It hems and haws, but then, strangely, and for reasons i still can't really quite put together, it comes back. Oh my goodness! I race to my room to get my external hard drive, sprinting up the stairs like i'm back in high school finishing a leg of the 4x100 meter relay. I get to my computer, plug the hard drive in, and set to work backing up all those crazy files. 30 minutes later, i'm done, and absolutely astonished at the events of the evening.

With my backup complete, I finally take that run i'd been gearing up for earlier in the evening, starting out way too fast and screwing up any notion of "pace" known to man. But I didn't care. It was great. I felt like a man with a monkey off his back. After cooling down, showering, and grabbing some water, I come back to the computer, turn it on, but get nothing. That's right, nothing...

Miraculously, in the long, slow, process of the death of my computer, I somehow got 30 minutes with it before it croaked. Like one of those old stories from the middle ages where the dying monk holds on to life until receiving his last rites, my computer somehow managed to give me 30 minutes before it finally died...

Needless to say, I gained a new perspective on mercy that evening. Undeserved, unmerited, mercy. I found grace watching my computer die.

Meditations

2009-08-13T18:34:00.000-07:00

"For all men commend patience; few, however, they are, who are willing to suffer...For our worthiness, and the proficiency of our spiritual estate, consisteth not in many delights and comforts; but rather in thoroughly enduring great afflictions and tribulations." - Thomas a Kempis in The Imitation of Christ

"Life without Jesus is like a dry garden, baking in the sun. It is foolish to want anything that conflicts with Jesus. What can the world give you without Jesus? His absence is hell; his presence, paradise. If Jesus is with you, no enemy can injure you. Whoever finds Jesus has discovered a great treasure, the best of all possible good. The loss of him is a tremendous misfortune, more than the loss of the entire world. Poverty is life without Jesus, but close friendship with him is incalculable wealth." - Bernard Bangley, paraphrasing Thomas a Kempis

Summer: the best of

2009-08-10T10:54:00.000-07:00

summer is, sadly, drawing slowly to a close. However, it's not quite over, and maybe even the best is yet to come. I thought I'd stop and describe a few of my favorite things about summer, so here we go:

Peaches: the soft, slightly fuzzy peach is one of my favorite summertime snacks. it's one of those fruits that I get more excited about as I eat. Each bite brings me more enjoyment, and the juicier the peach, the more fun it is. It's a total tactile experience.

Baseball: i'm not usually that excited about baseball in april or may, partly because i'm still in basketball mode, but once June hits, I usually start to slowly get excited about the baseball season. Maybe it's the fact that it's pretty much the only summertime sport to follow besides golf. Perhaps it's because the days are longer, and baseball just seems like the right thing to follow. Whatever the case, summertime is a great time to go to a ballpark and watch a good baseball game, or sit down on a weekend afternoon and snooze in between innings while in a comfortable chair. (maybe all of the above is an attempt to just rationalize my bordering-on-obsession with fantasy baseball)

Long Days: it's such a nice thing to experience the season of summer, when the sun stays afloat till almost 9 PM after going through winter, when darkness sets in before dinnertime. there are all sorts of things to enjoy about the longer days: more time to sit outside (if there's a good breeze), more reason to go on a dusk-inspired jog, even the simple joy of watching a nice sunset.

Good Music: okay, so i'm purposefully being vague here. insert your own favorite music for summer. mine always seems to be a mix of acoustic/groove/jazz. I'll go from listening to Mindy Smith to Woody Guthrie, to Guy Clark, to Art Tatum, to Wild Sweet Orange. And this summer, as it happens, my soundtrack for the summer happens to be the new cd from Wild Sweet Orange.

that's just a small list, and there's so much more. what are some of your favorite things about the summer?

A Common Scene

2009-08-06T21:35:00.000-07:00

A thin, silky ribbon of orange is all that is making it through the clouds tonight. Usually the sky is open, broad like a giant canvas and colorful as a stage set with props, but tonight the curtain of clouds obscures the usual drama of the setting sun. Even though the clouds are in the way, they create a drama of their own as they storm across the sky high above, marching in slow, subtle pursuit of the east.

My eyes wander for a moment from the teeming skies above and land on a different scene. The lake is far enough away so that it looks a little bit tamer than it looks right up close, and from my vantage point perched on a hill a hundred yards away, the ducks that call it home look like little toys. They flap their wings as they fly inches above the surface, crisscrossing the lake when they get tired of swimming. But plenty of them are content with swimming, and they glide silently across the water, leaving tiny wakes that turn into big V’s as they continue on their journey. I don’t know why they fly and swim from one side of the lake to the other, but am glad they do.

It is all a drama, and it is all unfolding in front of my eyes whether I am paying attention to it or not. It is all there, and it speaks timeless truths to the discordant life. Maybe I should stop to watch more often.

Boiling it Down

2009-08-01T22:18:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wonder how it is that each of us can have such a different perspective on life, arriving at conclusions as varied as the colors in a rainbow. It’s as if we all have on a different set of glasses, filtering our thoughts and lives through its unique perspective. It’s astonishing, really, how we can come to any kind of consensus at all when our lives are such complicated mazes of this and that. A perfectly normal event from one angle can be seen from another angle as a complete outrage. One person’s fight for freedom is another person’s act of sedition.

I’m seeing more and more that the method of “boiling it down”, “it” being situations, people, arguments, ideas, etc., is one of the worst ways to approach life, yet it is such a hard thing to unlearn. It goes like this: I’ve learned my whole life, through a wonderful education, that a quick shortcut to doing well in school is “boiling it down” to what you “need to know”. Don’t get lost in the trees and miss the forest. So, instead of really trying to wrap my brain around difficult concepts, I take the easier approach and memorize the acronym for the test, ready to sum up, in a nutshell, the main points of this argument or that theory.

It turns out that this method of processing information is terribly unsuited for really arriving at satisfying conclusions in life. But it just gets easier and easier to do. You quickly turn from boiling down the facts for the test to boiling down “those democrats” or “those republicans” to whatever label is easiest to understand. As this boiling down process starts to infect other areas of your life, it gets to be a kind of disease that paralyzes you from sympathizing with anyone that looks at life remotely differently than you do.

Before we know it, we end up looking around and all we see are people who look exactly like us, talk exactly like us, and think exactly like us. Maybe it’s easier this way, but it sure doesn’t involve any effort on our part to make our inner character translate to outer actions. The fact is, the most challenging and rewarding times in my life have come when I’ve been around people who’ve thought differently and approached life differently than I do. The summer I spent at Food for the Hungry with college students from all around the country, the year I spent on University Ministries council with people from different backgrounds, these were each moments in my life when my character was being sharpened.

These kinds of experiences have been good for me, I think, for several reasons. First of all, I’ve come to see the incredible value of truly listening to other people. I remember early on in my studies, one of my professors said that the whole idea of “putting yourself in the other persons shoes” was a terrible way to actually try and understand the perspective of someone else. And you know what, it’s true. It’s impossible for me to understand what another person is going through 95% of the time. But by opening my ears and heart and listening, truly listening, I can open up a flow of compassion that can speak to that person more than my feeble attempts to understand them. Listening really does matter.

I also found out quickly that one of the most important virtues I can seek from the Lord is wisdom. How do you know when to truly stand up for what you believe? How do you know when to shut up and listen? How do you, on the one hand, not cut off the other persons’ ear, and on the other stand up for what you believe even when it's not popular? It’s where the daily walk of faith is so vitally important, and where seeking after wisdom like a thirsty deer seeking water becomes a daily necessity. Wisdom is that intangible, and it’s only learned from the Father of wisdom. And, for those times when wisdom escapes me, it’s good to ask for forgiveness and seek reconciliation, for love covers a multitude of things.

I wonder how we each can see life so differently, but then again, maybe I’m glad that we do, because life wouldn’t be so interesting if everyone thought exactly like me.

Social Justice and Saint Francis

2009-07-28T15:30:00.000-07:00

This excellent biography of the much-beloved but oft misunderstood Saint from Assisi is often bundled along with the biography on Aquinas that Chesterton wrote as well. Such was the case with the book that I read. It came with both biographies bundled into one bound edition. In my discussion on the Aquinas biography, I spent more time talking about Chesterton as a biographer, trying to explain the traits and qualities that make him one of the most respected biographers of these two individuals. In this little review, I want to focus much more on the actual Saint Chesterton wrote about, Francis from Assisi.

Chesterton points out early on that it is hard to find a person who doesn’t like St. Francis if they know even the slightest bit of information about him. He is thus too-often over generalized and claimed as a champion of certain causes just because of the aura of his persona. He is the ultimate poster-boy for environmentalists, animal right’s activists, and the followers of the now trendy social justice movement in evangelical Christianity. It’s easy to see why when thinking of Saint Francis in only quant and idealized images. After all, he talked to the birds and renounced possessions in favor of spending time with the poor and outcast around him.

But to boil him down in such a narrow fashion misses the larger point that Chesterton makes so well. We like to focus on the Saint Francis who talked to the birds and hung out with the poor, but we don’t like as much to talk about his strict observance of the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, or even his deeply devotional asceticism. Many people want to boil down St. Francis to some mystical animal lover, with a rather detached sense of reality, more in line with a hippie of the American tradition than the actual vagabond that he was.

In reality, St. Francis was not detached from reality but rather so attached to it that we moderns have a hard time even understanding how someone can achieve such a state. When we boil him down we take for granted that he was a devout follower of Jesus Christ, who based his entire life around the concept that God created the natural world and we should thus revel in His creativity. We would rather point out his environmentalism and his social justice than his intense devotion and discipleship to Jesus Christ.

After reading this wonderful little account of the life of Saint Francis, I’m convicted to re-examine my own life and the reasons I do certain things. It was an unforeseen encouragement to read this book and discover, in so doing, that the devotion and relationship that Francis had with Jesus is something that you and I can cultivate deeper in our own lives. The Saint from Assisi lived his life in complete praise and thanksgiving before His Creator, and we who live in the Age of Progress would do well to spend a little time studying this man from Assisi who seemed to have his priorities in the right place.

St. Thomas Aquinas

2009-07-28T14:39:00.000-07:00

I have never read more than a few selected excerpts from Thomas Aquinas, so I walked into this biography, written by G.K. Chesterton, with little background details of this famous theologian. I knew Aquinas mostly for his cosmological argument for the existence of God. But I quickly realized that what I knew of Aquinas was just a boiled down, over-simplified argument from one of the most brilliant minds to walk the earth.

Chesterton is a great writer, and he is great because of his versatility and his lucidity. He writes rollicking fiction, penetrating philosophy, and engaging biography, all the while retaining his distinct writer’s voice. He doesn’t get bogged down in the details of Aquinas’ daily life, which is the common cause for so many biographies being completely mind-numbingly boring unless you already care about the person. Instead, Chesterton chooses to tell the story of Aquinas, of his incredible intellect and his remarkable use of common sense.

The book makes you want to read Aquinas for yourself, and I think it gives you the necessary tools to do so. Chesterton shows not only the historical significance of Aquinas, but offers him as a bastion of clear thinking in an age we moderns like to look down upon. He turns our preconceived notions of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and modern philosophy upside down, revealing the traits of Aquinas’ thinking that offer so much insight into our world today. And that is why I found the book fascinating. He takes Thomas Aquinas out of the tomb of compartmentalized history, shedding the rose-colored lens of progressivism that we tend to look through when we analyze anybody in history. What comes out is a story of a man whose way of thinking could be so useful for us today.

Chesterton doesn’t give the biographer’s usual golf clap to his subject’s life, making the person seem so far removed from the present. Rather, he tells the story of Thomas Aquinas, and along the way you get the sense that there are truths to be mined in the writings of Aquinas that speak to our current lives just as much as they did to the people of long ago.

All these traits make this book a solid read for anyone who enjoys a good story, and I think it’s safe to say that you will come out the other side with a fresh perspective not only on Aquinas, but on the broader realm of thinking in general.

How fit are you?

2009-07-22T09:29:00.000-07:00

Outside magazine recently published an article entitled "How fit are you?", replete with charts, pictures, and diagrams to help you figure out how fit you are. They talked about different kinds of fitness: flexibility, core strength, cardio, power, etc., and had different exercises to try to see how fit you are with regards to each measure. I thought it was fascinating, and after I tried most of the exercises (some better than others!) I thought I'd try my hand at my own "How fit are you?" diagnostic:

Physical
Get winded after a leisurely jaunt up a flight of stairs? Try running for 30 minutes 3-4 times a week, incorporating some yoga or pilates, buying new workout clothes and eating high-protein power bars, because we all know fitness is all about making other people think you are fit.

Spiritual
Bored after reading or praying for 10 minutes? Try creating some Sabbath time each week, using that time to reconnect with God. Or, if that doesn’t work, go to your nearest bookstore and make yourself feel better by buying the nearest copy of Your Best Life Now or Your Own Jesus.

Mental
Go to the grocery store and have a hard time keeping track of your tab as you are shopping? Tired of being outwitted in conversation? Boost your mental acumen by checking out a few literary classics from the local library. If that doesn’t work, stand in front of your mirror and repeat the phrase “I am a smart person” 10 times per day (or until you start laughing)

Emotional
Explode into tears as the slightest bit of sentimentality? Iced-over stone replacing your heart these days? Why don’t you try starting a journal. It can be a wonderful step to letting your emotions run their course. Or, if you don’t want to actually take the time to process your emotions, turn on a bit of popular radio or make a special effort to be a caller on the next edition of Delilah.

Relational
Dread the 10 minutes a day you spend without your closest buddies? Interact with more books per week than people? Try organizing a board-game party (note, stay away from throwing bored-game parties) or go on a weekend adventure with a few good friends. If those two options don’t sound appealing, spend an evening catching up on facebook statuses.

Environmental
Does your room look like a yard-sale waiting to happen? Spent more time in the shower than outside? Why don’t you take a few moments and organize your room, develop a recycling system for your house, and take a walk around the neighborhood. Or you could just forget it all and read the latest national geographic “100 ways to save the environment” article.

Total fitness. There you have it.

the trouble with Effort

2009-07-20T08:03:00.000-07:00

I listened in to my church service in birmingham over the internet this weekend. My pastor spoke about tuning in to God, learning to hear Him speak in our lives. And it got me thinking.

I think we're all good at different things. Some people are really good artists. Some people are really good at making things and then fixing them. Others are good at sports. It goes on and on. And I think the same is true, to an extent, with our dispositions and attitudes. Let's face it, some people are better at comforting than others. Case in point: I wouldn't want my track coach in the room if i had just found out some terrible bit of news. But, on the other hand, he was really great at motivating and encouraging, and i'd sure want him around if i was given an incredibly difficult task that i didn't think i could complete.

But whether or not we're disposed to being more encouraging or more compassionate or whatever, that's not really the point. I'm re-learning (and i think it's a lifetime education) that effort alone does not produce the fruits of a life connected to God. More times than not, effort just produces temporary results and ends in a frustrating failure.

Knowing God is more important than my efforts to try to serve God. I keep thinking of John 15, about the vine and the branches. Too often I rush off to go and try my best to fight the ills of the world or to convince people that this or that principle is right or wrong. When this happens, I forget that the most important thing I can do is just seek after God.

There are boundless depths in learning who God is by being in relationship with Him, by spending time seeking after Him. His Words promise me that if I spend myself entirely on seeking Him, THEN will I bear good fruit. THEN all these things shall be added unto me.

I don't become a better listener or turn into a more compassionate person by trying harder, because that's like drinking sand when I'm really thirsty for water. All of those things proceed from a heart and mind and strength that is learning how to be in relationship with God. God has not called me to change the world or to try harder to help Him bring people into His Kingdom, even though those are noble goals. Instead, He is calling me to a deeper relationship with Him, to trust in Him instead of my own efforts. And out of that relationship with Him will flow grace, mercy, and love, because how can you come into real contact with the ferocious love of God without being changed?

I wouldn't become a great impressionist painter by just seeing a Monet painting in a museum and then trying really hard to paint like him. I may learn a few things if I cracked open a "how to be a better impressionist painter" book, but I still wouldn't be a great impressionist painter. But think about what would happen if I went and lived with Monet and learned from him, day after day, watching him plan and paint, learning the process of being a impressionist painter. I couldn't help but become a better painter.

It's hard for me to take an "effort siesta" when i look all around me and hear those voices in my ear telling me to try a bit harder, or that, no, what you really need is THIS"....

The path I need to follow is well-worn, but it is narrow and treacherous and difficult. I'm called to seek God, to walk with Him by faith, trusting and learning from Him. He knows the way. Maybe John 15 is a good place to start.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

2009-07-16T08:33:00.000-07:00

I still remember the feeling of reading this book for the first time, of being guided through the imaginary land of Hogwarts alongside Harry and his pals. Being introduced to all the main characters: Hagrid, Dumbledore, Professor McGonnagle, Professor Snape, Ron, Hermione, the Weasley family, was like meeting a crazy family. As I made my way through this relatively short book (considering the length of the others) two things really stuck out to me.

First and foremost was the incredible world that JK Rowling had created through Hogwarts. I’m a fan of imaginative literature, but I still have a hard time getting my head around Middle Earth and Narnia and the like. They’re all of them wonderful imaginative places, but Hogwarts stands out. I like it because the characters make the place come alive, not the other way around. Rowling excels at creating characters who are so incredibly relatable. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be friends with Ron, Hermionie, and Hagrid? Also, it is a world full of humor. I don’t think I really caught all the humor as much on my first read, but since then I’ve come to absolutely love the little snippets of humor she wriggles into the story. Her little descriptions of the magic candy’s, her descriptions of the idiosyncrasies of the characters, they all go a long way toward making the story not just exciting, but fun.

And that leads me to my second favorite part of this book, the friendships that are formed. Each of the books seem to have their own key points that stand out, and by far in this book I’d say the theme that stands out is the friendships that are formed by Harry, Ron, and Hermione. The most pivotal scene in all the book, to me, is when Harry and Ron are running back to Gryffindor tower after Professor Quirrell has interrupted the feast by proclaiming that a troll has entered the castle. In a split second, Harry and Ron make a decision that will affect the rest of their lives. Harry turns to Ron and says “but wait, Hermione is in the girls bathroom (she’d been crying all afternoon and had missed dinner), we’ve got to go and get her!”

In that one single action, Harry and Ron decide that friendship is more important than selfishness, and the rest of the story builds from there. Thereafter they become a team that sticks together at all costs. I love how intricately interwoven this thread of friendship is throughout all of the books, and particularly this one. Few books in our time really explore the power of friendships in the way that the HP books do. And that’s why they are some of my favorite books.

Joseph, pt 1.

2009-07-14T08:59:00.000-07:00

(Genesis 37:1-11 provides the context)

Joseph was a teenage boy. He was younger than all of his brothers, and he had a kind of cocky arrogance that can only come with being a teenage boy. You know that kind of arrogance; the certain feeling of invincibility that emanates like a pungent odor; the rashness that causes them to speak without thinking first, or maybe without even thinking at all. All of us who were once teenage boys (not so long ago for me) will remember that, um, special, time of life.

So it doesn't seem too harsh to think about Joseph's brothers feeling hatred toward him. After all, Joseph was telling his father bad things about his brothers, and that coat of Josephs sure did make it appear like old Jacob really did love Joseph more than the others. They had every right to have a certain amount of disdain for their young, cocky, lovable brother.

Hate is a powerful emotion, though. It creeps into our hearts in our most fragile moments, and begins spreading inside of us like a venomous cancer. Before long, the hatred that began with a little bit of disdain has become a monstrous, uncontrollable rage that has burrowed deeply inside of us. It is every bit as real as the clouds and trees and grass outside, and it has devastating effects on all parts of our lives.

Hate was there before any of Joseph's brothers did anything to him. It existed in their hearts long before they thought about hurting him. Just like it exists in your heart and my heart long before it explodes in our actions. Before we ever say a spiteful word or utter a mocking phrase of vitriolic sarcasm, hate is present in our hearts.

It's what Jesus worked so hard to warn us about in the sermon on the mount. These things like murder and adultery are first conditions in our hearts. It's why surrender, each and every day, to our Savior and Redeemer Jesus Christ, is the foundation of our new lives in Him. I have to own up to those things in my heart that look so tame, that elicit an "oh, it's just a little bit of ______. It's really no big deal."

What looks so tame as a cub, though, can grow into a ferocious lion. It makes me realize that I am in need of grace, and not just a teaspoon but a raging shower of grace across all parts of my life. And in the seeds of this story, Joseph was learning how powerful these two things are, hate and grace.

The Prayer of Andy Farmer

2009-07-11T09:49:00.000-07:00

(photo from: http://home.comcast.net/~edbethui/mustards_retreat_sm.jpg)

As I think I have mentioned before, I thoroughly enjoy Saturday mornings. I think they should at least be mentioned on the official list of endangered species. We work hard for a lot of things in life, but the one thing we need the most we don’t seem to work very hard for: rest. I’m reminded of the many dimensions of rest and how not only our bodies need them, but our minds and our hearts as well.

I like to play guitar. I have what you would call a entry-level acoustic. It won’t impress anyone with the richness of its sound, but at least it has sound. I haven’t changed the strings in a long time, so I have to tune it almost every time I sit down to play. But none of those things really matter, unless of course I start to do with my hobbies what I do in so many other things in my life: compare.

I absolutely love the feeling of sitting down and hammering out a favorite tune, or plucking out a simple melody and just humming along. There’s something so simple and beautiful about creating music, and it has nothing to do with the skill involved. The Enemy, though, notices this and does all that he can to try and distort this simple blessing. More often than not, after a few songs my mind will start to critique my playing and my vocals, and I’m instantly on the wrong path.

Even in today’s world, where almost anyone can pass under the ubiquitous title “singer/songwriter”, I will not pretend for a moment that I am such a person. Oh yes, I have visions every once in a while of a cozy, jam-packed coffee-house with the fresh scent of roasted beans lingering in the air along with my vocals, both equally mesmerizing the crowd. But then I snap back to reality when my voice cracks trying to reach a moderate falsetto.

But the point is, I have a genuinely good time playing the guitar. My skill level shouldn’t matter, because it’s taking joy in the simple gift of music that should matter instead. The enemy knows that my taking joy in a simple thing is a moment more holy than I realize, so he works to get me comparing myself to others.

I’m sure none of you experience this problem,….right?

I think if we’re all honest with ourselves, we realize that the culture around us shapes us more than we’d like it to. One of the marks of our culture is a fierce level of competitiveness and comparison. I can hardly go to ESPN.com without seeing an article pop-up every so often listing the power rankings of some sport or other. Heck, they have already come out with a power ranking for this upcoming college football season, and we’re still a month away.

It’s not just sports, though. It’s on the news, embedded in our conversation, and permeates more levels of our living than we tend to notice. That’s why I’m realizing that rest and time alone with my Creator are such necessary things. They are not only amazing in and of themselves, but they act as antidotes for the virus of comparison.

So I may not be the next indie singer/songwriter phenom. But I don’t really want that either, do I? I just want that satisfaction of feeling good about myself, finding my worth in something I can do. And as Dallas Willard and a host of others tries to remind me, my worth has nothing whatsoever to do with the work of my hands.

That’s good to know. I can go back to just playing the guitar because it’s fun, because it’s relaxing, and because I like it.

Let’s learn a prayer together, I’m naming it after the person who inspired it, Andy Farmer:

The Prayer of Andy Farmer:

Lord, help me not to take myself as seriously as I do, but instead to take You more seriously.

The Kite Runner

2009-07-07T10:27:00.000-07:00

When I read a good story, all my senses get involved. Every time I read the Harry Potter series, I want to sit down at a creaky wooden table in a small shop lit by a crackling fire with a mug of butterbeer. I don’t even know what the stuff would taste like, but I’d just like to go there and at least try it. Or when I read Wendell Berry, I want to just discard all of my possessions, move to a small rural farm, and bask in the simplicity of life. I doesn’t matter that I would fail miserably at such an effort, my senses don’t care about reality when I’m reading.

Good stories take you places, places you don’t have to work very hard to understand. That’s because good storytellers don’t just tell you that a place is scary or that the woods are enchanted, they describe the place and let it come alive in your imagination. I don’t have to read very far into the Narnia series or the Lord of the Rings trilogy to begin to feel the place come alive in my mind.

Before I get too mystical about the whole experience of reading a good story, I should get to the point. The point is that different stories have varying effects on us, but the really great ones invite all our senses along for the journey.

The Kite Runner is one such book. As I read through the story, I started to get this desire for lamb kebabs and strong tea. But I could tell quickly that this wasn’t going to be a story that would just cater to my sense of imagination. This was going to be tougher than just imagining lamb kebabs and strong tea.

It is an absolutely brutal story. Ups and downs, twists and turns, and more sadness than any book I’ve read in recent memory. It paints a picture of a boy who grows into a man in Afghanistan, coming to grip with all sorts of baggage as he copes with his past and tries to push forward in life.

I kept saying “NO!” inside my head as the plot unfolded, with one tragedy after another. But in the end, Hosseini weaves the threads of the story together beautifully to create one amazing fabric.

This is not the kind of story that I will return to again and again. It does not carry the imagination to a fictional place. Instead, it is troubling. It is hard to digest. It is too real to be imagined. But it is a story that needs to be heard, and it’s a story well worth the time to read, because it opens the eyes of the mind to the human condition.

Dependence Day

2009-07-06T07:54:00.000-07:00

I am so grateful to be living in a free country. I am thankful that I can worship freely, and have the freedom to express myself. It is wonderful, and I’m glad that we have a whole day to celebrate as a nation. But the way some churches have come to celebrate independence day is almost sickening. When did our nation’s day of celebrating independence become more celebrated within the church than Easter, the day our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ rose from the grave, defeating death once and for all and bringing a new Kingdom to reign upon the earth?

I’m an independent person. You all that know me well know that. And so these words I’m writing are words that come from the experience of falling into the trap of thinking I can pull myself up by the proverbial bootstraps and control my own destiny. It’s because it is such a tendency of mine to fall into this dangerous level of independence that I feel like we would do well to rediscover what the Bible has to say about all this.

When’s the last day we as a church celebrated our dependence on God as much as we do our independence as a nation? Many of us sang songs yesterday in church asking God to bless our nation, or something along those lines. But when did we last ask forgiveness for the way we’ve squandered so much wealth in the face of so much devastating poverty across the world? Many of us heard sermons where the pastor proclaimed that we need to reclaim America for Jesus, but when did we last ask the Lord to help us be a people marked by Jesus’ radical 70x7 forgiveness, his individual concern and compassion for others, and his redemptive love that offers people a new way to live in the present, not just a ticket to a far-away heaven?

The Lord works through His people, and always will. He’s chosen the Church as his vessel, with the power of his Holy Spirit, to be the tangible presentation of the Gospel. Jesus over and over again throughout the Gospels proclaims that He’s brining a new Kingdom to the earth. And Easter is the climax of what it all means, that yes, indeed, a new Kingdom has come to the earth, and that death really has been defeated.

Like many other aspects of faith, it’s too simple to say that we’re either dependent or independent creatures. Hundreds of years of theological debate prove that much. But one thing is for certain, if we call on the name of Jesus as our Lord and Savior, we place lordship of our lives in His control. And I don’t know about you, but one of the hardest things for me each day is giving up the control that I so desperately want to have and placing my faith and trust and hope in the God who lives and breaths and moves. I am a pro at making my own decisions, steering the rudder of my ship into chaos and stupidity. And I need to be reminded more often than not that I serve a God who most of all wants my heart, wants my obedience, and wants my life, so that he can take and breathe into it the life and hope and purpose that He has for me. A purpose that involves daily submission to Him. A choice. I need to be reminded of my dependence on Jesus.

A Long Way UP

2009-07-03T08:48:00.000-07:00

(photo courtesy of AP)

I absolutely loved this little story about the new glass observational balconies in the Sears Tower in Chicago. Most adults are too scared to go into these things (including me. you could not pay me to spend 5 minutes in one of those). But kids. Just browse these photos. the kids are having the best time, without a care in the world. I feel like this is a powerful image that speaks to more than just a news story. "You must become like the little children"

Here's the story

We could be the best of friends

2009-06-26T16:10:00.000-07:00

For the better part of the last few months, I've stuck myself in a musical box. Listening to the same stuff, good stuff, just the same stuff. There's nothing wrong with getting some good mileage out of your music, and in fact it's a great thing. But I sort of acquired a very narrow minded view of music during this time. So i was in the funnel, or vortex, if you will, where i was mainly listening to the same stuff, shunning friends' attempts to turn me on to new stuff.

But thankfully in the past few weeks I've slowly come around. Kind of like the aging slugger who takes a few months in the season before he's cranking out home runs. Or maybe more like I was just hit upside the head with a kettle pot, and I am just now realizing what kind of box i had been living in.

Whatever the case, here's some new stuff that I've been listening to a lot, mainly through myspace and last.fm and such. The music industry is just so different now with Itunes and amazon offering digital copies, and it's great for us consumers. We get to listen to way more music for free, and after we've sifted out the wheat from the chaff, we can make better purchasing decisions. I love it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Priscilla Ahn - A Good Day (listen to the whole album here)
she is the perfect summer singer/songwriter, easy on the ears. the post title is also a snippet of one of her lyrics

Wild Sweet Orange - We Have Cause to be Uneasy (listen to selected clips here)
they're from birmingham, and their music is like eating a snickers bar...its satisfying

Meiko - Meiko (listen to selected clips here)
another nice summer album. it's not for everybody, but there are some good tunes on this album. kind of like a bag of skittles.

mewithoutYou - It's All Crazy!... (listen to the album here)
like any other mewithoutyou album, you've just got to listen to it for yourself. it is absolutely impossible to try to explain. make sure and check out the lyrics, or contact andy farmer or james fenwick if you want to try to figure out the deep meanings of these songs. i've still got to listen to this album a lot more before formulating a good opinion

Honorable Mentions:
Ingrid Michaelson
U2's new album
Manchester Orchestra's "Mean Everything to Nothing"
Fiction Family

so i want to hear from you. what's some music i should check out? are my selections terrible?

Formalities or Extraordinalities?

2009-06-21T19:04:00.000-07:00

Throughout this past weekend, anticipating, getting ready for, and ultimately celebrating Andy and Emily's wedding, a lot of things were going through my mind. Seeing one of your closest friends get married is an incredible experience, especially when you know the other half (in this case emily) is just as amazing as the friend you've known for a long time.

As I stood up on stage in my chocolate colored tuxedo (handpicked by andy, no less), I had the opportunity to just drink in the wedding. And I ultimately kept coming back to the same thing.

You see, Andy and Emily had been dating for quite a while, and so in a lot of respects it began to feel like the wedding was just the final step in a already well-underway project. It almost seemed as if the wedding was just a mere formality. They already know each other so well, we all thought. They are so good together. They bring out the best in each other. On and on. Even Mr. Edmonson, who conducted the wedding, talked about how well prepared Andy and Emily were coming into the day of the wedding.

But all of that was laid to rest for the 40 minutes or so of the ceremony. Because in those moments, the wedding, the ceremony of marriage, would not be relegated to mere formality. To all those present, and especially to me, it was evident that this ceremony was extraordinary.

Seeing the union of two committed Believers who have each strived for the Lord on their own, now coming together under the Lordship of Christ, was no formality. No, it was an extraordinality. From the way they looked at each other during the vows, to the way the pouring of the two colors of sand into the one new jar symbolized the union taking place, to the way that Jamie (Andy's mentor during high school) couldn't look at Andy during communion because everyone in the building would have lost it, I felt the power present in the room through the Holy Spirit.

If marriage is a metaphor for our relationship with Christ, it took on new meaning for me over the weekend. No, this wedding was no formality. It was an extraordinality.

Congratulations Andy and Emily!

Secret Believers

2009-06-17T18:38:00.000-07:00

The past ten days saw me in Alaska, where the mountains are tall and the wilderness vast. The weather turned out to be amazing, with only an hour of rain the whole trip. This in the rain capital of the US. I biked in Ketchican, kayaked in a glacial inlet, and hiked through a spruce forest. When I wasn't out in nature, I was reading, and I spent the the first half of my trip on the book Secret Believers by Brother Andrew.

Brother Andrew, if you're not familiar with the name, is a man who has dedicated his life to serving the Lord through strengthening the Church where it is most persecuted. During the era of communist Europe in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, Brother Andrew smuggled carfulls of Bibles, commentaries, and other resources to the underground Church, providing the living water of the Word to the Believers in those countries where it was illegal to own the Bible. The story is incredible, and worth reading on its own. (you can find that part of his journey chronicled through the book "God's Smugglers". I highly recommend it).

Well to make a long story short, Brother Andrew felt the Lord calling him the shift his area of ministry to the Islamic world, strengthening the Church in Islamic countries. That's where this book comes in. Secret Believers paints a picture of what life is like for Muslim Background Believers (MBBs) in Islamic states. It chronicles the faith, persecution, and hope of a handful of fictional characters (based on real people, they just can't write the actual names or else these Believers would be found out).

So as the Alaskan scenery passed by, I sat and read this book. It was more of an experience, if I am to be honest. With each page, I felt my heart being softened, and I felt the Holy Spirit sweeping afresh through my soul. At the end of the book, I felt that I had not finished the book, but that the book had finished me.

The call of Brother Andrew throughout the book is that the West must wake up and be serious about taking the Gospel to Muslims. We must get on our knees and pray for the strength to love where force and weapons seem like a better option, and we must continually practice forgiveness.

There's a lot of hoopla about Islam, the West, and terrorism these days. It's one of the bigger fears for many Americans. But Brother Andrew here is calling for a Gospel offensive, characterized by love, compassion, and forgiveness, not a hunkering, defensive posture that too many of our Churches have taken. Truly the power of Christ is at work all across the world even in this moment, and many of our brothers and sisters in Christ are suffering for their choice to follow Jesus.

This book won't make the bestseller list, and won't win literary awards, but it is a story that absolutely must be told for our generation.

Father Brown

2009-06-05T16:58:00.000-07:00

Do you read before you go to bed? Many nights, especially when it's been a full day, I'm too tired to do anything else so I just plop right into bed and fall asleep almost instantly. But on the nights that I'm not too tired, I love to do a bit of reading, to clear the mind of all the nagging things that are circulating in there restlessly, and to let my mind drift away into a fictional world.

I've had the pleasure the last week or so of reading a cracker of a mystery series, the Father Brown mysteries by G.K. Chesterton. If you know anything about Chesterton (and I hope you do) you'll already have an idea of what I'm about to describe. If you're knew to Chesterton, you're in for a treat. He was, perhaps, one of the 20th centuries' most prolific, wide-ranging author. Among other things he wrote plays, poetry, biography, literary criticism, works of theology, fiction, and mystery. He was a frequent contributer to several London newspapers, and participated in debates and lectures throughout the city. He's remembered best for Orthodoxy (a nonfiction work on theology), The Man Who Was Thursday (a suspense novel), and the Father Brown mystery collection (of which there are 5 collections).

Being new to the Father Brown series, I decided to go with a particular edition that included some of the most popular of the stories. If an author's writing style is like a set of fingerprints, then Chesterton's fingerprints look different than the regular set. He writes with a command of the English language, using strong verbs and descriptive adjectives to set a scene and develop the story. In these particular stories, Father Brown serves as sort of master sleuth, solving particular mysteries with a keen intellect and a humorous wit. Imagine a quiet, unassuming priest, content with frumpiness and the clerical life, and you've got Father Brown.

One of my favorite things about the stories is the way Chesterton probes the human heart through Father Brown. These are not long, drawn out, complicated stories, and Chesterton doesn't try to make them into a type of sermon, but along the way you actually feel as if you're LEARNING while you are enjoyably soaking up the book. There are varying types of criminals that we meet along the way, and Father Brown has a way of getting to the bottom of a situation.

I've read Chesterton's novel "the Ball and the Cross", and now that I've read this collection of Father Brown mysteries, I am ready to say that he is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers. He writes on a lot of topics, and chances are, he wrote a book about a topic that you like. So the next time you see a Chesterton book in the bookstore, or lying around your friend's room, pick it up!

The Hobbit

2009-05-29T21:08:00.000-07:00

Every so often this past semester I would walk into my my friend Paul's room, which was right beside mine, and browse through the books on his tall, dark-wooded bookshelf. In between the volumes on Spanish history and political theory was a sizable collection of fiction, from Forster to Dostoevsky. Every time I would scan the titles looking for something new, my eye would pause for a moment as it came across the particular shelf with the Lord of the Rings series. I would get excited, seeing the prequel to this wonderful series, the Hobbit, sitting right beside the others, and my hand would always move to grab it. But every time, right as my hand was instinctively reaching out, my brain would catch up to my impulses and I'd realize that Paul owned the Spanish version of the Hobbit. My hand would drop and I'd always get a little bit sad. I know a fair amount of Spanish, mind you, but there's no way in Texas that I am going to try to wade through the verbiage of philologist J.R.R. Tolkein in another language! I have a hard enough time keeping up with him in my English!

Well, Paul's bookshelf is packed up all neatly in a box somewhere, and I've made my way back to Texas for the summer, so I knew that if I wanted to read the Hobbit, I'd have to go get it myself. And that's what I did. I had planned to hold off on reading it until a vacation I'll be taking in the near future, but there are only so many times you can pass by a book that looks that delicious without picking it up.

The Hobbit is a storytellers story. It's in a class of fiction all by itself. The people at Barnes and Noble don't quite know what to do with it. They have it in the Sci-Fi area, but it's not really all that Sci-Fi. It's just incredibly good fantasy, so unless you actually go to the nerdy section of the bookstore, you're likely not to come across this great work just browsing through the normal fiction section.

I love how Tolkein tells stories. He lets the action guide you, and he slowly builds a framework for your imagination to run wild with. He doesn't just say a place is beautiful, he gives details that make the beauty come alive in your mind. It's fair to say that this book is a wonderful way to work out your imagination. If all you read is non-fiction, or the Dan Brown type fiction, you'll come out of the literary world of Tolkein's Hobbit feeling like you've dunked your head in a pool of fresh, cool water.

The story is built around the classic method that Tolkein used in the Lord of the Rings: an epic journey. Here Bilbo Baggins, the Hobbit we meet in The Fellowship of the Rings, sets off on an adventure with a team of dwarves and the always-likable wizard Gandalf. They set off for the mountain which the Dwarves used to call home, hoping to displace the terrifying dragon that has taken up residence there and re-claim the buried treasure they left behind.

It's a story that you need to let yourself fall into. It is a quick read, but there's enough meat to keep you chewing as well. It gave me a taste of a kind of storytelling that often gets pushed to the side in our modern, cookie-cutter world. And any book that grabs your hand, carries you off to a far-away land, and deposits you in the middle of the action like Tolkein does is a worthy way to spend some time. Make sure and read The Hobbit before it comes out on the silver screen in 2012!

Hope, basketball, and the Hobbit

2009-05-24T20:22:00.000-07:00

I. Hebrews. 'there is a bringing in of a new hope' (7.19) What fascinating implications come from this short little clause tucked in the middle of a fairly tedious section on Melchizedek the priest. It's just incredible how the Scripture still lives and breathes and moves, even though it was written such a long time ago. It's the living Logos, continuing to bring truth and clarity and conviction and hope to my life every time I engage it. Think about it. The Jewish citizens of Jesus' time were waiting for a Savior, strong and mighty, to come and rescue them from the hands of their pagan oppressors. And then Jesus comes and proclaims that if you've seen him, you've seen the Father. He comes and indeed saves, but not in the way that everyone was expecting. I wish I could go back and figure out what was going through the head of the writer of Hebrews during the penning of these initial chapters. Hebrews works so hard explain the hope that has arrived because of Jesus' death and resurrection, and I have to wonder how it was received. It gets me thinking further, how are we receiving this news today?

II. I'm watching the NBA Conference Finals, and as I've been watching the games so far, here are some observations:
a. The Cavaliers have been exposed by the Magic as a one dimensional team. Where is the rest of the team? Lebron is playing
phenomenally, but the rest of their team leaves me wondering how they won so many games in the regular season.
b. The Lakers are the team to beat. The combination of inside/outside with Kobe and Gasol is just too much for any of the
remaining teams to handle. But the funny thing is, the NBA playoffs are incredibly unpredictable, and this year is proving
just as much.
c. Charles Barkley is back to his old form as TNT's half-time comic relief. The bit with the M&M's was hysterical.

III. The Hobbit. I think i'm going to start making this blog more of a book review place than a "what's going on in my life" page. So i'll start soon with a review of The Hobbit, from esteemed writer J.R.R. Tolkein.

Packing, Summer, and Steps

2009-05-20T20:34:00.000-07:00

I. Packing up my stuff at the end of the year always reminds me of the uselessness of so much stuff that I own. Simplicity is something I'd like to strive for in my life. Not the kind of simplicity that is bare-bones, but the kind of simplicity which exhibits taste but not showiness. You know what I mean? I've always thought that the way Jesus taught us to live was to never become controlled by our stuff, but instead to be grateful for what we do have and realize that it is what it is: temporary stuff. All this packing up just puts a visual reminder to the principle of storing up treasures in Heaven, reminding me that life is about the more subtle things like relationships, love, and learning to forgive than it is about accumulating and having the right kind of stuff.

II. I am grateful to still have the presence of Summer in my life. I shudder when I think about the future when Summer becomes just another season. Summer to a student means a whole different thing than it does to the average citizen, and I'm just not ready to relinquish my enjoyment of Summer for another few years...

III. Life is a series of steps. Each chapter in the book has its own twists and turns, climaxes and new beginnings. I'm at the start of a fresh chapter, and i can't even begin to imagine the story that will emerge. I just want a grateful heart and thankful eyes as I experience whatever lies up ahead.

on Graduating

2009-05-16T21:19:00.000-07:00

Earlier today, I walked across the platform, received my diploma, and walked back to my seat. The culmination of four years of growth and learning, more than just a degree. This hymn does a better job than I can do of giving thanks to God for his great faithfulness through these four years:

Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father;
There is no shadow of turning with Thee;
Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not;
As Thou hast been, Thou forever will be.

Great is Thy faithfulness!
Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see.
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided;
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!

Summer and winter and springtime and harvest,
Sun, moon and stars in their courses above
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To Thy great faithfulness, mercy and love.

Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth
Thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide;
Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow,
Blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside

Tiger and Phil

2009-04-12T21:36:00.001-07:00

It was the kind of moment you dream of as a sports fan. Two athletes head-to-head, letting it all hang loose as they both tried to do the improbable.

There was no way either one of them was going to actually pull it off and win the Masters. Going into the last round, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson were 7 shots back of the leaders. 7 Shots. As people woke up on this glorious Easter sunday, no one really expected Tiger and Phil to do what they did. Everyone in their right mind knew that it would take something so monumental, like a freak accident involving Angel Cabrera, Chad Campbell, and Kenny Perry all losing the ability to control their arm muscles, for Tiger or Phil to pull off the upset. And it almost happened.

What ensued was one of the more incredible sporting events I've watched in recent memory. Immediately after the first few holes, Tiger and Phil had stolen the show, and the Masters would be lost in their grip for the next few hours. Phil made that incredible run on the front 9, shooting an improbable 30, with string after string of incredible shot. Tiger, while doing his best, looked like he was going to get left in the dust.

You'll only understand how incredible these guys played if you've actually tried to play golf yourself. Whatever your handicap and skill level, we all know how dang hard it is to control that tiny little golf ball every sing shot. And yet, Tiger and Phil were making it look as if 175 yard shots around a stack of pine trees and 10 foot, sweeping par putts, were as easy as a 1 foot tap-in.

I sat mesmerized after the first 9, believing it would indeed be Phil's day. Tiger just seemed off, like he was 50% or something. But as the back 9 unravelled, Tiger made his march. Eagling a hole with a 25 foot putt catapulted him right back into contention, and even though he never really got above that 50%, his 50% is better than most people's 80 or 90%. It was like watching a machine. He couldn't command his shots most of the round, but he sure as heck knocked in almost ever putt within 10 feet that mattered.

Until the final two holes. It was like the car had just run out of gas, and Tiger and Phil woke up from their dream. As soon as they hit 17, they went down hill faster than a rabbit with a fox on its tail. They hit such incredibly poor shots that even the commentators had a hard time covering for them. They stumbled their way into the clubhouse, leaving behind a memorable short-coming.

And when they finished 18, the Masters was over. The commentators knew it, the gallery knew it, the CBS executives knew it. It suddenly got a whole lot more boring. It was humorous watching the commentators trying to rebound from such an emotional roller coaster of a round put up by Tiger and Phil. They had stolen the Masters, leaving the guys with the actual lead with almost no gallery following them.

Angel Cabrera ended up winning after a play-off, and, while he played well and deserved the win, everyone knows the Kenny Perry lost the Masters. This will go down as one of the wackiest golf tournaments every played, but one thing is for certain. On this day, it was fun to be a golf fan again.

all around me

2009-03-28T21:40:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it's the simplest things that can evoke the most powerful emotions within us.

Tonight I was upstairs waiting on some laundry to finish. All the lights were off, and I was the only one in the house. The kitchen window above the sink was open, leaving nothing but the thin screen between me and the outside world. I walked over to the sink and put bent over just a bit so that my face could feel the wind coming in through the window. As the cool breeze swept across my face, I had one of those simple moments. A feeling of complete satisfaction, in which joy came upon me, tapped me on the shoulder, and left as soon as it had come.

C.S. Lewis spent a good part of his life pursuing this ever evasive kind of joy. The kind of joy that is like sneaking a peek behind the curtain of heaven and seeing something new for the first time.

The busier I am, the less I experience these intense moments of joy. And I think there's a simple reason why. When I'm busy running around, even with the best intentions, I just do not have the capacity to feel that special kind of joy. It's a bit like trying to look through binoculars at a bird in the distance. When I'm busy, experiencing intense joy is like trying to view the bird from the backseat of a moving landrover...it's nearly impossible.

The earth has perked up around me these past few weeks. One day while I was running, I looked away from the trail in front of me for a moment and realized that I was witnessing the dawn of spring. The buds were still sleeping the day before. But as I was running, the buds seemed to have just opened up overnight and cast a spell on everything around them. It was as if spring had come in the middle of the night, wanting to make some sort of grand entrance. Which it accomplished easily in my opinion.

These moments of joy don't have to be few and far between. The Psalmist writes that the Heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork. The King James makes it a little bit edgier to me, a little bit more majestic. Each day the glory of God is being displayed, by all parts of creation, both through the natural world and through humans.

My eyes, I fear, are not often open, though. My disposition becomes an entrapment. I focus on just the few square feet around me, seeing the world through the distorted lens of my selfishness. It is only when I take off these glasses, and allow the Lord to let me see with new, fresh eyes, that I am awakened to His goodness all around me.

What are we missing today?

Rwanda, Bishop John, and Redemption

2009-02-14T09:59:00.000-08:00

I want to share a journal entry that I wrote after the visit of Bishop John Rucyahana (rooshahana) this past week. I mark this as a transformational week in my life and my heart, and The Lord is to be praised for bringing this man of God to our campus to speak to us and encourage us to pursue Christ. So here's the journal entry:

After just walking out of convo, I am left with so much weight upon my heart. A weight placed directly by God, I am sure. Bishop John, the leader of the reconciliation movement in Rwanda, spoke to us about the grace of God and how his nation has recovered after such a horrific genocide. He told of the deep pain and hurt that filled the hearts of the perpetrators of the genocide, and how through the power of God the families of those killed were able to forgive the perpetrators.

His message was powerful because he spoke of the living God, not the distant, abstract God that we talk about so often in America. He spoke of a God, mighty in power to save, and full of grace and redemption, actively working to recreate a place where death and pain had reigned. He spoke of a God that loves deeply and whose fire burns bright for all the world to see. He spoke of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Scripture at large.

We so desperately needed to hear this message. My community here at Samford is so God saturated ,but we keep Christ and the fury of His love at a safe distance. We are comfortable with God and with religion, but we squirm when we hear that Christ requires our full submission and our entire lives, calling us to deeper discipleship to Him.

I'm still sorting out this week, with all that God revealed to me, and trying to figure out what the Lord wants me to learn. I am so thankful for Bishop John's visit. The Lord is good.

Gibraltar and the Sabbath

2009-01-31T14:02:00.000-08:00

About 13 months ago I was sitting in a rickety old train traveling slowly through southern Spain. Andrew Crosson and I were making our pilgrimage across Spain together, and one of the last stops was Gibraltar. We were both excited and intrigued to see what this giant rock would look like in person. Already we'd made stops in Madrid and Sevilla, with incredible results. I was clearly getting the picture that Spain was an incredibly beautiful country with so much history and culture.

Andrew and I were on our way next to Gibraltar, and we were both excited and a little bit tired. By this point we were already 13 days into our travel break (the break at the end of our semester studying abroad in London), and it was getting tiring lugging around a giant pack with that many days worth of provisions. So with a little bit of fatigue and a steady reserve of untapped energy we got on our train to head to Gibraltar.

It was one of those journeys that just sucks the life out of you. The train stopped so many times I began to wonder if it would have been quicker to rent a moped...It also had this weird vibe the whole time. There were literally only a few other people in the train with us, and as we followed the tracks south and the sun set to the west, there was this eerie feeling you get when you're traveling to an unfamiliar place and you're not quite sure if you're going the right direction...

Well we finally got there, and after a quick stay in the hostel that night, we headed out the next morning to see Gibraltar. And what a disappointment it was. I mean it was just a huge let down. Yeah there was a big rock and lots of ocean surrounding the whole peninsula, but the streets were dirty and cramped and the place had an ultra-touristy feel to it. Both Andrew and I left Gibraltar more than a little bummed as we headed to our final destination in Spain.

After 13 months, though, I've realized that it wasn't really Gibraltar that was the let down. It was how we got there. The long, tiring train ride eeked out any of that untapped energy we had in our reserves and left us totally deflated. By the time we even got to Gibraltar our excitement level was so low that it would have taken one of the 7 wonders of the world to shake us out of our stupor. I guess that's just how traveling is. Sometimes when you pack too much in, the journey just gets long and hard and frustrating, and the destination loses its appeal.

You're probably already following where I am going with this. It's kind of the same reason God commanded us to observe the Sabbath and to guard it fiercely. We are creatures designed to work, but in order to do our work well we have to have periods of rest and rejuvenation. If we don't take the time to rest and get recharged, the journey starts feeling like a slug through the mud. Everything, even the fun moments of life, lose their luster when you're so tired and worn down that you can't enjoy them.

I'm starting to see just how much of a difference observing the Sabbath can have in my life. It's amazing. And I want to highly recommend that you try it as well. It just might make the journey that much better.

Coats and Jackets

2009-01-25T11:30:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I had the beautiful opportunity to rest with good friends. We took a little car drive and rode out into the country, past the blinking lights and the strip malls that seem to be everywhere around us. There was good music in the car, and just the right amount of good conversation. As we drove, I thought about how rarely I take notice of the night sky, the way it blinks and shines with little lights, like a free art show every night.

I thought about how the biting of a sharp gust of wind reminds me that I am alive and that I can not rely on myself. It works itself to your skin, wriggling through your jackets and coats like a hunter stalking prey, and when you feel it in the deep of your bones you realize that even with all these layers on you are vulnerable still. You walk with brisk steps, intent on reaching a destination of warmth. And when you do, you exhale and the blood seems to rush all through your body like a dam being broken. It's a wonderful feeling, and it reminds me that I am alive, and that I am needy as I live out this journey of life.

We have to put on so many layers just to keep warm out in the cold, and it's no different with our hearts. To survive in a world where hurt and pain, distrust and indifference, and hate and grudges are so pervasive we quickly learn to fit our hearts with coats and jackets, insulating ourselves from getting too hurt. When someone says something out of anger to us for the first time, we feel the pain right in the center of our hearts, and we look for wars to keep that from happening again. When we reach out in love to someone and the love is not returned, we turn back toward ourselves like a turtle withdrawing into its shell, never wanting to feel that way again.

So we learn that in order to protect our hearts we must insulate them with coats and jackets. We quickly become very good at this, and learn to be wary of the outstretched hand of another person, of the kind words they offer to us, and of simple hospitality. We present ourselves in just the right light so that the people we meet can know what we want them to know about us. We may even let a few people peek at the heart that lies behind the coats, but it is never for long. And as we do this, we learn how to fit in, with whatever crowd we want to fit in with. We wear the clothes, say the right things, and laugh at the right times. But down deep the heart becomes restless under the weight of so many jackets and coats. It's getting stiflingly hot in there.

It can take a long time to realize this, and thus it takes a long time to replace the coats and blankets with the right kind of insulation. But when we meet the person of Jesus, we know that He sees right through those layers in our hearts. And beyond that, He tells us He wants to recreate us, to make us new in His image. We have to learn to take off these coats and jackets and let the love and mercy of Christ seep into every corner of our thirsty hearts. And there's a certain amount of trust that we must place in Jesus. We have to trust Him because it takes time for Him to fit us with new insulation. Not the old kind of coats and jackets we were used to, but a layer of peace, grace, and love. It is this kind of insulation that protects us from the searing arrows that come our way, but also allow us to open up and be transparent with other people, all at the same time.

It's amazing how intricately God wants to recreate us, and how much He will if we will simply submit ourselves to Him. It's just so hard for me and you to trust that God can do better than we can. When we do, though, we find that the journey is anything but safe, but it is the most amazing journey of new life and new creation.

Rain, Rain, go away

2009-01-06T22:12:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I took up the initiative of trying to get back in shape. I don't know exactly where "back" is, but it sounds good because I remember being in fairly good physical condition in my high school years. I felt that the time was right for me to try to get back to that state.

Maybe it's better if I look at it as just getting in shape. After all, I can't really even remember how good or bad of shape I was in at any particular moment, i just remember feeling in shape. The point is, I wanted regular strenuous exercise to be a normal, re-occuring thing as I started out the new semester.

So I laced up the shoes and started out with some simple stretching exercises, realizing that it's pretty hard to be effective with any form of exercise if your muscles feel more like wooden boards than pliable tissue. After a few days of intense stretching I was ready to commence with the running.

And boy did it feel good. Running is just so good for so many different reasons. It satisfies that physical urge to feel utterly exhausted, but it also is just such a simple thing that it becomes an easy pleasure. I pushed myself, knowing that without goals my training would amount to nothing more than a series of let downs. If I've learned one thing in personal fitness, it's that you have to learn how to push your body, how to keep going, how to be disciplined.

Well, as I arrived back in birmingham, eager to continue the running, I was met with more rain in the past few days than I could have imagined possible. Seriously. Most of the last three days has been rainy, and not the kind where there is a break, but the kind of steady, sodden rain.

But while the rain has kept me indoors, it's been a good thing in many respects. It's in these kinds of situations where I learn again the truth of the verse that says "a man's heart plans his ways, but the Lord directs his steps". The rainy days that keep me indoors remind me that I must not get so caught up in my daily schedules, my plans and schemes that I miss out on the things the Lord wants me to do, and the things He wants to teach me.

Indeed the Lord works in mysterious ways.

New Redemption Song

2008-12-24T09:55:00.000-08:00

It's Christmas eve, which means we are hours away from Christmas and all of the strangely wonderful things that it entails. Kids around the world (and many adults too!) can hardly wait to find out what is in those beautifully wrapped packages sitting underneath the tree. Families are coming together to happily, and in some cases, unhappily, share in the creation of new memories through Christmas.

For some, Christmas is nothing more than a lonely time that highlights the pain and despair of life. With so much "happiness" floating around, some people just feel left out. And some people are just trying to make it through Christmas, wondering anxiously where the next paycheck will come from, unsure of the their future.

In the middle of all of this, I think it's time we learn a new song. For those contented folks, like me, who have more than we need and so much to be thankful for, it's time we learn a new song. For those who are lonely or worried this Christmas season, it's time to hear a new song.

We need a song that will break the normal rhythms of Christmas time just a little bit. This song needs to shake us complacents up, calling out in a fresh new way, and the song needs also to carry with it a new, transcendent element, that of hope, for all the downtrodden.

So here we are, Lord. All of us, with all our stuff or lack thereof, are before you, united in our desperate need for the real reason of Christmas to shine through this year. Redemption is what we need. Redemption from the complacency and false trust we've put in the stuff of this life, and redemption from the despair that follows us like an unwanted shadow. Come and teach us a new song, Lord. Come teach us a new redemption song.

Over the Rhine ~ New Redemption Song

Lord we need a new redemption song
Lord we’ve tried
It just seems to come out wrong
Won’t you help us please
Help us just to sing along
A new redemption song

Lord we need
A new redemption day
All our worries
Keep getting in the way

Won’t you help us please
Help us find the words to pray
To bring redemption day

Good things to carry

2008-12-16T22:08:00.000-08:00

I'm in that spot right now. That spot of being a good night's sleep away from driving all day back home, where, in 24 hours time I will in my childhood house, enjoying the Christmas break with family. This time around, going home feels a little different. For one, I've done this trip so many times, and I guess I just know what to expect. But I've also just savored so much the various aspects of this semester, and driving home feels like i'm closing part 1 of a really good book.

So I'll drive home, relishing all the good times I've been able to have in the past few days, soaking up time with good friends. I'll realize what it is to be loved by such a good and gracious Savior. The whole "finality" thing doesn't really bother me right here, because I realize that without phases and seasons in life, we'd never really appreciate the times we have. With no ends comes no missing people, and with no struggle comes no expectant hope of something new. These are the things that make our lives the unique pieces of pottery that they are.

We are fragile and yet we have such thick shells. We need love but we have a hard time giving it. As I drive home tomorrow, i know that I have had a good semester, and that the Lord, as He always does, has cared for me and watched over me, leading and guiding me along the way. I'm so thankful for this.

And that's something to carry with you on a long, long drive.

November

2008-11-24T10:18:00.000-08:00

November is a time of transition. All of creation is slowly getting used to the fact that its about to be winter, and the whole process just happens so subtly. One day the trees are full of green leaves, then the next time you notice them they have turned all shades of brilliant colors. Maybe it’s our noticing that is at fault here instead of the speed of change, but regardless, something happens in those moments that takes a tree’s leaves from green, to yellow, red, or orange, and then causes them to die.

Of course I could open a textbook and explain exactly what chemical processes occur when a leaf changes color. But wouldn’t that just be a little trivializing to something so unique? Taking something that is so beautiful and trying to explain it would just be to miss the larger point.

The point for me is this: God certainly didn’t have to make the world with such breathtaking aesthetic beauty, but He did. He didn’t have to make cliffs rise out of the pounding sea, but He did. He didn’t have to make sweeping fields blanketed with wildflowers, but He did. He didn’t have to make sunsets the 30 minute melding and fusing of such brilliant hues that they are, but He did.

God could have created a world that just met the bare minimum of what we needed. He didn’t have to fill it with all measure of beauty and surprise. But he did, and praise Him for that!

This is especially meaningful when I think about the great suffering and tragedy that is woven into the fabric of our existence on this earth. The beauty is there, but so is the hurt, the pain, and the unexplainable. The skeptic points to those things and says that there can be no God. But even as heart-felt as this argument can be, the bad in this world is never strong enough to overcome the good. There will always be shoots of grass in the middle of the concrete mess of our world. Beautiful voices will continue to sing even amidst the noisy clamor of a broken world.

We as Christians must not lose the ability to behold the great paradoxes of this world and to let them bolster our praise of God. He is the God of beauty and of truth, and He is also the God of mystery and question. We must be content, as the child is content to not know everything. We must continue to ask our questions and to seek our God with all of the energy we have, but we must also be able to stop and wonder at the greatness and goodness of our God in Heaven, thanking Him for all He has given us.

Morning Reflection

2008-11-20T13:18:00.001-08:00

The mighty presence of the Lord has again swept across the barren wasteland of my heart, making dead fields come alive with the green of spring. His presence is like the rain that brings newness and life to the dry earth, and my soul is that dry earth. Each day as the sun rises, my arid soul is in need of the fresh rains of God’s presence. Who am I to think that I am fine on my own? What kind of arrogance has so gripped my entire being that I would think that I am not desperately in need of God’s grace, mercy and love each new day? How many lies have I let take root in my heart that I would be content with 15 minutes with God in the morning, brazenly dipping merely my hands and my feet in the pools of the presence of God without submerging my whole body?

I am like a child that comes to a banquet feast and eats only candy. I am in continual need of time with the Lord, time to let Him shape and mold my character and yet I do not carve out the time necessary for this to happen. This is where the mercy of the Lord is so evident in my life, because He takes even my meager offerings of time and blesses them beyond measure. How deep is His love that He would put up with all my wavering and wandering. Praise the Lord his grace does not depend upon my actions, because that would just be dreadful.

Isn’t it amazing that God wants to pursue us? That He wants a deep and personal relationship with us? And the even more astounding thing is that He wants us this very day to come to Him and find refuge and peace.

Fall

2008-11-07T13:57:00.000-08:00

I saw Fall today. Driving to school this morning was like driving through a national geographic photo feature, replete with falling leaves and a steady rain. It was one of those moments that I could so tangibly sense God calling out to His world through creation. I wasn't really even fully awake, but my senses came alive through the simplicity of seeing something beautiful. It was like putting flesh and blood to the Psalms which proclaim the greatness of God.

It is so good and so necessary to have those kinds of moments. Especially in the middle of a busy time of year when I'm rushing through my days. Being reminded of the awesome power of God has been so encouraging to me this week.

mark.

Forever

2008-10-10T21:08:00.000-07:00

The stock market may have fallen fast,
but the Word of the Lord endures forever

America may seem like it is more divided than it is unified,
but the Word of the Lord endures forever

Fear and negativity may be pervading the media all around us right now,
but the Word of the Lord endures forever

Character may seem to be losing out to selfishness,
but the Word of the Lord endures forever

Hope and Trust may be hard words to realize right now,
but the Word of the Lord endures forever

You and I may think that our actions don't really matter,
but the Word of the Lord endures forever

There is still Hope out there. There is still Goodness out there. There is still Love, and Faith, and Courage.
because the Word of the Lord endures forever

don't. lose. heart.
because the Word of the Lord endures forever