Uniquity

2011-10-01T07:11:00.000-07:00

Talked to a depressed friend yesterday, and asked him where he thought individual human worth came from. He said

"Do you want to know the "right" answer?"

Me: "I want to hear what you think the right answer is, but I want to hear your answer."

Friend: "Well, the "right" answer, 'Jesus died for our sins & we're redeemed' - but me? I have no idea."

This followed with a little more conversation in which I mentioned that I think scripture says our worth is based on us being created in God's image-not necessarily the redemption.

I also shared that when I was in a similar spiral I prayed for God to help me to feel what I knew. I also probably kept him longer than was good for either of us.

All during that conversation, I was trying to remember when I felt the same way.

Once I did. It's been such a long time though, I don't feel that way any longer and haven't for quite a while. I don't want to forget though.

It's one thing to repeat the "right" answers, or to correct someone's "right" answers, but until you've gotten inside someone's anguish and tried to really understand the problem, I've found that people (others have done this to me and I've done it-God forgive me-to others) tend to shoot over the heads of the people they're trying to help, and after blowing the smoke from their barrels with a satisfied smile, they get irritated that their patient can't see that their problem has been neatly solved. Maybe they'll reload and try again. Maybe they'll blame the patient's obstinacy. Maybe they'll blame the patient for something else.

But maybe, just maybe, there is a God in heaven,

A God who hears prayer and does, really does, something about these things.

I have a regimen of praying - or trying to pray.

Oh God, help me to stop just talking to the ceiling & beg you with something like reality for the things only you can do.

2011-09-17T22:07:00.001-07:00

Ephesians. The "Praise of His Glory" - what does it mean?

"New Heavens and earth, where righteousness dwells.

The earth will be full of the knowledge of the glory of YHWH as the waters cover the sea.

Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power...The last enemy to be destroyed is death...When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all.

the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God."

Here are a few verses that indicate the big picture of God's plan. It becomes difficult to understand certain things (like the place & purpose of the Law) if we think that God's "endgame" is merely to have the souls of justified men & women join him in a heavenly plane. That's not the picture that we get from scripture.

Reading Romans & his other epistles, it gets confusing to hear Paul explain what the Law is all about. One minute he's saying God gave it to increase transgressions. The next He's saying that it has "righteous requirements". Then it's a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ. It can't produce righteousness. And he says that Abraham was righteous before the Law came, merely by faith. So, if there was righteousness by faith apart from the law before the Law came, what was the point of it coming in the first place?!? What need for Christ?

Well, I don't know all the answers, but I think the reason this seems confusing is that we assume that God's point in this whole spread is to get people justified. If that were all there were to it, then not much of what God has done through the ages makes any sense.

But God doesn't intend to stop with our justification. Justification and restoration of right relationship with God is just the starting point. First the Jews for thousands of years are trained by the Law to know what righteousness looks like. The Law, just like the birth of Seth, the calling of Abraham, the choosing of Jacob, the anointing of David, are all stepping stones on the mysteriously gradual plan of God to redeem the entire created world. It trains them for the messiah's coming but they-and then the Gentiles-are justified by faith. Jesus Christ comes, and in Himself creates a new human nature through his Life, Death, and Resurrection. That nature is to be formed in us both through the Spirit, in the "inner man" (or woman). The Law of Christ is in us through the spirit. That's where we are now in the program.

Then at his coming our bodies will be redeemed.

Then authority will be given to the saints to rule in their redeemed bodies, indwelt by the Spirit and given eternal, spiritual, physical bodies. Under Christ they will rule.

All men will be raised, judged, separated to their eternal destinies.

Then the universe itself will be recreated, renewed, just as we were.

Then all things will have been returned to the creator, and the whole beautiful works will be filled with his glory. Every beauty & excellence in every person, mountain, food, story, blade of grass, or whatever created thing that exists, will be recognizeable as coming from God the Father.

And that's when the saints will see that it really is to the "praise of His glory" - with the glory of God shining out of every drop of water, every leaf, every eye, all will be taken in and enjoyed by the Sons and Daughters of God and result in an endless process of enjoyment and praise for that Glory.

2011-09-11T04:11:00.000-07:00

Ups and downs. School gets so wearisome past a certain point, when you've learned what you wanted to know and are then forced to read and listen to all sorts of banalities that suck the excitement out of discovery. I doubt that it's possible to be bored to death, but I don't doubt that a person's natural interests and curiosity can be kidnapped and smothered to death in some dark alley by peer-reviewed academic mob-bosses. Lord, deliver me from my enemies!

Or maybe I'm just whining because my mental exercise routine has become less like a footrace and more like a forced march - in either case, the endurance and requisite muscle groups of the mind are growing, which is one of the main reasons for the whole exercise in the first place, right?

2011-09-11T00:11:00.000-07:00

I've been reading through Ephesians, especially chapter 1, in preparation for a home group that looks as if it won't be taking place for a while. But it's impossible to seek God in the instruction of his apostles without coming away the better for it, and one thing among many that struck me was the confidence with which Paul says "when you believed you were marked with the seal of the Holy Spirit, and that's how you know you're going to get the inheritance."

Now, to cite something that isn't visible, tangible, or otherwise immediately detectable as evidence for something in an unseen future seems odd somehow, unless the "marking" of the holy spirit isn't as ethereal and uncertain as I've often felt.

Then I came across Richard Baxter's words in his "Dying thoughts": "That this Spirit is given to all true believers is evident by the effects of His being given, They have ends, affections, and lives different from the rest of mankind; they live upon the hopes of a better life, and their heavenly interest overrules all the opposite interests of this world. In order to this they live under the conduct of divine authority, and to obey and please God is the great business of their lives. The men of the world discern this difference, and therefore hate and oppose them, because they find themselves condemned by their heavenly temper and conversation. Believers are conscious of this difference; for they desire to be better, and to trust and love God more, and to have more of the heavenly life and comforts; and when their infirmities make them doubt of their own sincerity, they would not change their Governor, rule, or hopes, for all the world; and it is never so well and pleasant with them, as when they can trust and love God most; and in their worst and weakest condition they would fain be perfect...whence are thy groanings after God, thy desires to be nearer to His glory, to know him and love Him more?...Who breathed into thee all those requests thou hast sent up to God? Overvalue not corrupt nature, it brings forth no such fruits as these...Thy holy desires are, alas! too weak, but they are holy." -

This is comforting to me, because I often wonder what real evidence there is of the Life of God in me, if there's anything that proves I've received the Holy Spirit. The things that Baxter points out I see as true in me and in the others I know who've responded to the call of God. Usually it's difficult to get anyone to say what the real change in converted persons IS, and when we read the apostle's words "Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you--unless, of course, you fail the test?", we think "uhhhhh, what's the test? what are the questions? Is it multiple choice or true/false? or is it more of a feeling?" Most Christians I've met (including the one I meet in the mirror) get concerned because they don't see the holiness they want or expect in their own lives.

But, thank God, I can adapt Baxter's pronouns and say: "my hopes have been too low; but I have hoped in God, and for his heavenly glory. My prayers have been too dull and interrupted; but I have prayed for holiness and heaven. My labors have been too slothful; but I have labored for God and Christ and the good of mankind. though my motion was too weak and slow, it has been God-ward, and therefore it is from God."

2011-07-30T20:58:00.000-07:00

Just found out today that the Clinicals for the last two school years in the Nursing Program here at SPU (which I have not yet even completed prereqs for, much less been admitted to) are 15hrs per week, on top of 10 more hours of class time, not counting homework. That's 26 hrs/wk. I also work 40+ hrs/wk. Now, I know all things are possible with God, but I wonder if all things are prudent. I don't want to neglect my family any more than I already do. (Well, I'd rather not neglect them at all...)

I believed and still believe this is where the Lord's leading is, or at least that I've not had any restraint 'til now - which coupled w/ an initial desire seems to be the mechanism by which I'm normally led - so I'm going to keep going for it.

If this (Nursing) falls through I don't know what else I could really do in the way of securing solid training for future employment that would also provide me with enough free time to plant a church here. I've seen enough churches fall apart or fall on hard times not to want to rely totally on the generosity of God's flock for provision for my family, who all enjoy having roofs and beds and food and such things. At least Paul had tentmaking as a fallback or supplement, and he was single. I am not single, I'm not even double. I'm quintuple-no, Brandy's pregnant, make that sextuple. So with this small tribe relying on me for sustenance, I DO desire (and I don't think this is lack of faith) some sort of resilient qualifications of the sort that could allow me to provide said sustenance. A Classics degree doesn't exactly fit that bill.

Prayers appreciated.

2011-07-24T19:45:00.000-07:00

Is Communion more like Prayer or like Baptism?

I've been going back and forth the past year over whether unbaptized ppl should be offered communion. For a loooooong period of Christian history this would've been a no-brainer: "no"!
Communion seems to be, in scripture, something for disciples, and disciples seem to be people who've been impressed enough by Jesus to obey him and become baptized as their entrance ceremony/sacrament into the family of believers. So to knowingly offer communion to unbaptized people seems to be a belittling of baptism - like celebrating an anniversary for a couple who refuses to be legally married.

I've grown up in more casual evangelical churches where sacraments have been observed very loosely, usually with their symbolic nature strongly emphasized. I got the idea that they were basically Jesus-instituted (and therefore important) flannelgraph presentations to illustrate a point, nothing more. Because of this, communion was no more restricted than prayer. You wouldn't deny prayer to anyone, why deny communion?

But it seems to me that Scripture and the early Christians understood communion to have a different significance than as a mere memorial (not that it's not a memorial)- as a participation in the body and blood of the Lord between baptized believers. As the question raised in my mind while reading the bible, I did some research and found that many Scripturally faithful denominations don't offer communion to the unbaptised.

This particular rubber meets the road for me regarding my kids. I've been allowing them to participate in communion without restraint, just trying to explain the meaning to them as we go along, but I've become increasingly doubtful that I'm being faithful to Scripture in doing so. My oldest, Josiah, and probably Jaelle too, are old enough to understand the gospel message and the meaning of baptism; but have told me they do not want to be baptized at this point. So, I have stopped having them participate in communion and explained why, telling them that once they decide to become disciples of Jesus and seal that commitment with baptism, then it will make sense for them to share communion as a memorial of and participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus which they will then have been baptized into.

If any of you have two cents to throw in, please do, especially if your cents make sense of Scripture.

2011-03-28T21:21:00.001-07:00

So, media round #2, the audio portion. Audiobooks don't count, so these are all lectures/debates/sermons.

...Now that I've got all these up here, I realize that all of them have neat accents. Except Tozer, who sounds like an ornery great uncle, but even he's unique sounding enough to be interesting.

Gerald Bray's "Church History I"
You may have to create an account with BiblicalTraining to access these, but it's free and very much worth it. This is the absolute best Church History survey I've found. He's engaging, fun to listen to, makes good connections between subjects, and makes you think about how the decisions made early on affect what we believe today. He's really bright and well-respected, and also prays before every lecture. Move on to Church History II if you finish!

Ken Spiro's Crash Course of Jewish History. You have to scroll all the way down to the bottom for the MP3s. They're free on this site, but they cost a pretty penny on his personal site. Really helpful for everything between the return from exile to Jesus' birth, and then for everything up to the present. I wish I'd listened to this before having gone to Israel. Ken Spiro's also fun to listen to. Caveat Auditor, he does not like Jesus or Christians, although I emailed back and forth with him for a bit and he accepted me as a friend on Facebook.

N.T. Wright audio. Especially his stuff on Jesus and the Resurrection. Scroll down to the "Audio/Video" section. Even if you don't agree with everything, you will learn a lot, and will raise your ceiling of understanding re. the significance for both Jesus and His resurrection.

A.E. Wilder Smith. Some of the audio quality is terrible, but the content is great. I definitely recommend "Cause/Cure of the Drug Epidemic", The Great Debate: "Evolution or Creation", "Time & Creation", "Logos in Biology: Introduction", and "Is Man a Machine?"

John Lennox's Conversation with Richard Dawkins Really good stuff. And they're for the most part civil. I hope to be as loving in conversations as John.

A.W. Tozer's sermons. Tozer is even better heard then read. (I would recommend Schaeffer's audio but unfortunately the opposite is true for him.) There's a sea of stuff here, so you may have to dig to find something to match your interest, but most of these are golden. Challenging, powerful, and scriptural. I can't think of any sermons I like to listen to as much as these.

Os Guinness cut his Chops at L'abri with the Schaeffers and moved on to become a sociologist. Really insightful messages and critiques on big picture issues.

Ravi Zacharias, Meaning of Life or you can wade through RZIM . There's no one like Ravi, he touches on just about everything, and manages to get you to take it all seriously.

Greg Bahnsen debate with Gordon Stein. The clearest example of the truth of presuppositional apologetics. Nothing makes sense without God.

2011-03-27T12:33:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about media, the good kind. Last night I was thinking about how I love to recommend books, and thinking how badly I wish certain books were required reading. So I'm going to post a short list of books that have been most helpful and formative for me:

The C.S. Lewis complex (Mere Christianity, Screwtape Letters, Great Divorce, Space Trilogy, Pilgrim's Regress, and Abolition of Man)
Mere Christianity was very helpful, especially the section on theories of Atonement and Toy Soldiers to real men. Screwtape letters was helpful especially in encouraging me to pray and recognize the psychological aspects of disciplines. Great Divorce was for beauty and expanded my hopes for heaven and the meaning of repentance. Space Trilogy was epic food for the imagination and taught me a lot about the meaning of gender and the methods of evil. Pilgrim's Regress was Cathartic and educational, Abolition of Man made me think about the relation of the passions and virtues to the intellect, as well as what I believe about education.

Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer (Especially the Trilogy and Church and the End of the 20th Century, as dated as the title now is.)
Francis reassured me that every human being has inherent value since they're created in God's image, even though sin has made us cruel, we're still human. He taught me Truth can be All Flame. He taught me that Christ is Lord of all creation, including beauty and art and philosophy. He helped me realize that Christianity is, in some sense, a rational system as well as a relationship with God in Christ, vocalized what I'd thought about presuppositional apologetics before I knew they had a name, and gave me a sense for the development of thought and culture. He also reminded me that the Church always seems to be half a century behind the times in addressing needs and the prevailing world spirit and prophesied about the grandchildren of postmodernism. And so much more.

Church History in Plain Language, by Bruce Shelley. Great overview of Church History. Really filled in a lot of gaps for me, as I'd previously had this naive and confusing impression that after Paul died, Christianity was lost until the reformation, and even those guys were on the fringe until our brand of Christian came along.

Sermons and Journals of John Wesley John showed me that the book of Acts is still being written, and that so much more is possible with God than the plodding indifference we usually see in ourselves and other Christians. He reassured me that it's not only OK to hunger and thirst for Righteousness, but that we must seek Holiness, for "Without Holiness no one will See the Lord". He told me it's wrong to gossip, that plain dealing is Godly, that Christians should be able to agree to disagree while still holding to their convictions, and that the New Birth is real.

Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho a Jew/Martyrdom of Justin Short early church work, reaffirmed to me that Christianity is the True philosophy, reincarnation is silly, the Prophets spoke truth, that I have brothers in the second century, and that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Favorite excerpt just before his martyrdom during his examination:

The prefect spoke to Justin Martyr first. "Listen, you who are called learned and think you know true doctrines. If you are scourged and beheaded, do you believe you'll ascend to heaven?"

"That is my hope," Justin replied. "If I endure these things, I shall have his gifts. I know that for all who have lived according to our teachings, the divine favor remains on them until the completion of the whole world."

Though death is decreed against those who teach or at all confess the name of Christ, we everywhere both embrace and teach it. And if you also read these words in a hostile spirit, you can do no more … than kill us; which indeed does no harm to us, but to you and all who unjustly hate us and do not repent, brings eternal punishment by fire.

"So you suppose that you will ascend into heaven to receive some payment for your faithfulness?"

"Not suppose, I know and am fully convinced of it," Justin Martyr replied.

Augustine's Confessions. You probably could have guessed that one. "Our hearts are restless 'til they rest in You, Oh God". Part biography, part philosophy, part poetry, and all worship.

Richard Baxter's The Reformed Pastor - If only I could be like Richard Baxter! Reformed doesn't mean what you think it does (i.e. Calvinist) it means repentant and reformed in the image of Christ. I would easily take this and leave aside all other church administration/preaching/ministry type books.

Heaven By Randy Alcorn. confirmed my Eschatology and made me wonder how the Church could substitute something so pallid and unattractive for what the Scripture teaches about the Resurrection of the Body & the New Heavens and Earth. Reminded me that Spiritual does not mean non-physical. It has the cheesiest cover of any book I own, but I still recommend it rabidly, even though I know almost no one will read it (please prove me wrong!).

For a far longer and more Scholarly work I'd also recommend N.T. Wright's "Resurrection of the Son of God" which is almost an apologetic for the Resurrection of Jesus, but more so a confirmation of what Resurrection means (bodies), and that the disciples really did believe Jesus rose physically, bodily, from the dead never to die again. Also, caffienating myself through 738pp. of annotated respected scholarship gave me courage to tackle other academically oriented books. Curiously, N.T. Wright congratulated Randy Alcorn for writing "Heaven", but Randy tempered his "thank you" with "I don't agree with some of your theology". I would've just said thanks, but Oh well. Randy's a much better Christian than I overall.

Man's Origin, Man's Destiny A greatly neglected book by A.E. Wilder smith, the very respectable grandfather of Intelligent Design. Even Richard Dawkins respected him in debate back in the seventies when he was still alive. You can listen to it here. This isn't just an anti-evolution book though, the best parts in is the section on the "Destiny of Man", our metamorphosis. Wilder-Smith was the first camp-free-no-corny-insults-or-straw-man-argument piece I read against the foundations of chemical-biological evolution. Just like any other book addressing science, parts are dated, but the core is still solid.

Case For Christ, by Lee Strobel. Not a masterpiece of literature, but a really good starting place and a great help, however much I normally steer away from sensational apologetics, he's actually quite measured. Got me on the road to reading Bruce Metzger's Text of the New Testament, its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration.

Thomas Wingfold, Curate- A great novel by George Macdonald. Reminded me that obedience brings certainty, and that Jesus' statements "If anyone wills to do God's will he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I'm speaking on my own authority" and "For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world, to bear witness to the Truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice." are foundations beyond academic evidences.

Tortured for Christ and If Prison Walls Could Speak - by Richard Wurmbrand. Helped confirm me in the desire to avoid comfort and prepare my mind for suffering, taught me to have compassion on people with heretical thoughts, forgiveness, and that our inability to grasp God with coherent thoughts doesn't mean he's not there-God is not limited by our insanity. He sobered me to the reality that torture isn't good or fun, and the blood of the martyrs ,while precious to God, isn't always the seed of the church. Always helps me remember my suffering brothers and sisters throughout the world.

Revolution in World Missions -by K.P. Yohannon. Reminded me that I'm NOT poor, no matter what my tax bracket says. Confirmed my convictions that consumerism and western luxury isn't just a passing vapor, it's bad gas. Best to breathe through a filter. Also convinced me to support native missions and to make good use of the resources God's blessed us with for the Kingdom. for these, also see Randy Alcorn's The Treasure Principle.

The Brother's Karamazov Dostoyevski. Who doesn't want to be Alyosha? Reminded me that we're all Karamazovs, but we can also be Alyoshas -people are very, very complex and irrational. Gave me renewed desire to be Christ for people. Made me think about redemption, the real anguish behind Theodicy questions, and that sometimes the best apologetic is a kiss from Jesus Christ.

Sadhu Sundar Singh-not a book but a man. All his biographies convinced me that apostles of sorts are still among us, and not necessarily American. Or even white.

These are bones, there's a much longer list of muscle, skin, and organ tissues attached to and contained by it, but I won't burden anyone with that. Unless you ask.

Next up, a list of Audio.

2011-03-26T04:00:00.001-07:00

Laguinia
Macrina

Above are the links to my two big final papers. I completed them at 4:30AM. I realized the morning after that they have several spelling and grammatical errors. I also realized I did not have any motivation left to correct them. If you'd like to read them, please do! but "Caveat Lector".

Beyond that, I'm on spring break, of sorts, so I have time to write a Blog!

I'm still in process of studying to figure out what I believe about Eschatology. I've ruled out "covenant" theology as best as I can understand it, since it's supersessionist (believes the church kicked the Jews out of the "Israel" driver's seat and are now the real Israel). There's no way I could reconcile that with Scripture. So that leaves me with Premillenialism. The main issue for me in all this is really the Rapture, as ever since I became a believer and started reading my bible, it always seemed like the rapture was referring to us meeting Jesus on his "Final descent" like fighter jets going to escort a Bomber to the landing strip. This would make the "rapture" not refer to a secret coming of Jesus to whisk us off to the balcony to watch while He throws molotov cocktails at the rebels down below, but rather it would be the same time as the second coming. There is a lot in scripture about how he'll protect us from His wrath when it comes, and a lot about how we'll face a lot of wrath and persecution from the world before that happens. These seem to me to be the plainest readings of Scripture, which don't seem to jive with the classic pre-trib rapture I've been taught.

I bought a book on early Christian Eschatology called "Hope of the Early Church" which documents through all the significant church Fathers 'til the 600's and explains their take on what happens when we die/when Jesus comes back. The author (Brian Daley) writes impartially, but confirms that the Fathers of the first two hundred years were almost without exception premillenial. None of them seem, though, seem to believe in the "rapture" as the first part in a two-part coming.

On another interesting note, seeing as how universalism's so hot right now (with the Rob Bell book), the book I'd mentioned also touches on that too. Of the church fathers who wrote about this kind of thing before 250, the following ones believed the punishment of unbelievers was "everlasting fire": Justin Martyr, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus of Antioch, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Minucius Felix, Hippolytus and Cyprian all believed this in a "literal" way.

Clement of Alexandria (who thinks of himself as a Christian "gnostic") suggests that everyone gets saved in the end 'cause hell is remedial, and Origen follows suit. Then in the mid to late 300's Gregory of Nyssa agrees in large part with Origen. Origen often talks about how the simple majority can't handle the "higher, spiritual" meaning of these sorts of things, indicating that the majority of believers he had converse with wouldn't have agreed with him. Origen belittled literal interpretations of the Millennium, calling them "Jewish".

It seems like where a lot of these doctrinal swerves come in is by divergences from "Jewish" ways of understanding things. It makes sense, really, since the writers of Scripture were all Jewish (w/ the possible exception of Luke), to do our best to figure out how a first century Jewish person (as much as that's a generalization) would've understood what the Bible is saying.

Of course, I don't believe the final word is the Fathers. Even the Fathers would say that the final word is the Scripture, the "apostolic teaching". However I do think it's helpful to see how the early disciples read the bible and understood it, especially the first couple centuries as they were that much closer to the apostles themselves. It's also helpful to see how we got where we are today and realize which things are peculiarities of our time and place and which things are (at least nearly) universally held by Believers.

But I'm sure to most of you this is all a big fat tranquilizer, so I'll clip it off here and get on to less obscure thoughts.

2011-02-25T22:45:00.000-08:00

Here is a crow I caught on video using what looks for all the world to me like echolocation. He makes this wierd series of clicking noises facing the ground, and then checks the area he was just clicking at for food. I've seen crows doing this on campus about ten times so far, and I don't think I've seen them do it anywhere else. Planning on showing it to the people in the Animal bio department on Monday.

2011-02-23T20:51:00.000-08:00

Our glory fades with the flowers
petals wrinkle, then they fall
the colors, all the colors!
we ran once-
now see? we crawl.
The flames of time
they've bled our powers
the sun has torn apart our skin
like old newspaper in an alley
ragged, worn, and thin
full of stories
once so important
which no one wants to hear again.

Does a man end like a sunrise?
Woman fade like evening stars?

Do we end-just end, forgotten?

Or will we rise,
when we are called?

2011-02-18T21:12:00.000-08:00

I am experiencing long periods of time without any profound reflections.

I'm guessing it's just a function of having next to no leisure time. I still haven't had time to read "Leisure, the Basis of Culture" by Josef Pieper.

I was elbowed in the lip by Josiah during a ferocious bout of MMA roughhousing. I had his left arm bent behind his back and was leaned over within range of his right elbow. The way I see it I had it coming, it was a good move, and he apologized, so no hard feelings. It was a hard enough hit where I stopped to check for chipped teeth afterwards, and put ice on my lip. Brandy made fun of me for being concerned about having a fat lip at work, so that none of the little students would see me all deformed. It's true, I am vain. I pray often enough that the Lord won't punish me for vanity by allowing me to be disfigured or hit on the head enough to consign me to janitorial work, but rather that he would remind me of my vanity enough so I can take measures to keep repenting.

China hacked my email. Don't know if it has anything to do with the new Ipod Touch I got, but I wouldn't be surprised. They sent emails selling electronics (I think) to all my contacts. Alphabetically. I would think that someone smart enough to hack my email account would be smart enough to realize that nobody buys electronics based on spam email advertisements.

Reading through Revelation + commentaries to see if I can hammer out a more solid understanding of what I believe about the "Eschaton" (smarmy academic word for "end times/things, but they don't all think it has anything to do with time.)
Some things really irritate me about academia.

1.) I think the purpose of big words is so we can use fewer of them and be more specific. Academics use big words like magicians use smoke and flash powder - to stun and mystify, and to make clear things obscure.

2.) They are extremely nearsighted. The minutia that higher level academics occupy themselves with (especially in liberal arts) are incredibly dull and subjective.

3.) Trend-driven. They all jump on the same ships of opinion. Sometimes there will be two opinions which function like the US party system (They make a lot of noise and are both wrong). If a theory isn't "in", it is almost always dismissed or ignored, usually as "outdated" (if it's ever been held before - doesn't matter if it's ever been refuted). It's as bad as fashion. And I'm not just talking about creation/evolution. They do this with everything.

Well, I could list more but that's taking a lot of space.

Brandy & I (If the Lord wills) are going to Jammu in August for about a week. I'd hoped to be there longer, but very happy to have the opportunity, we've been talking about this for years.

And to sign off, here's a video from the Ipod of us at Discovery Park beach.

2011-02-13T02:22:00.000-08:00

Was talking to a friend about divorce, and how it "covers a man with violence like a garment" (Malachi)

It really does. Considering that according to the natural order of things the nuclear family is the basic social reality of every human being, not to have that is a serious disorientation.
You have a relationship that brought about your existence, which no longer exists. It's a lot like being orphaned, or very-late-term aborted. Every kid's existence is due to two other people coming together in at least one act of intimacy, and human societies have on the whole always recognized the need to formalize and turn into a sacred thing that bond. Children formed within it are "legitimate"; ones outside "illegitimate". Not "less human", but there really is something lost - a missing component of reality, a personal "Genesis" story that's lost. A child that has no Eden to point back to and say "that's where I came from, that's the place I was born" has a certain amount of psychological solipsism to deal with. They have no anchor, they are left floating in a sea of strangers, with whom they can form horizontal social bonds, but without a stable social foundation to rest on.
Even having one parent, or two parents separated, isn't the same. That reality which brought you into the world has been annihilated - it's like those Sci-Fi plots where Earth is destroyed and the human race is left orphaned and wandering in the galaxy, forced to make a new earth for themselves, a new home. But it will never be earth.

But with God, there is solace. It's said truly that 'Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation.' (ps. 68:5)

This really works. Even a human adoption, or the striking out into the void to make a new family for oneself, doesn't provide a child of divorce with a present reality continuous with their real origins. And that's a real loss. God, on the other hand, does. The child of divorce may be physically the product of gametes from a pairing that no longer exists. However on another level, "...you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb."(ps 139) is a real, true, ontological statement. By faith we know that we exist for God's pleasure and by His will, and in Him we can find an even more fundamental and solid grounding than that of a human marriage. The loss is real, yes, but so is the gift that fills the void.

2011-02-12T04:15:00.000-08:00

The familial bonds
a smooth eggshell
split and cracked
what was one runs
out
and what a sour omlette
remains.
Can God make sense of a scrambled egg?
where do the pieces
of something meant to be born
go?
Devoured at least
they are one again
in the flesh and blood
of the dining one.

2010-12-26T22:36:00.000-08:00

Just finished a mildly depressing WWII/Holocaust sort of novel (Heidegger's Glasses), directly after (finally) finishing "The Foolishness of God" (Siegbert Becker) a book about the place of reason in the Theology of Martin Luther (fyi, it's not a very high place, he called reason a whore). Both have the brain swimming in an existential stew...nooooo, stew's too substantial, more like a thin soup where infrequent encounters with puzzling cubes of potato leave one with a sense of the nostalgia that accompanies impermanence.

Or something like that.

So now I'm dosing with Shaeffer's "The God Who is There". The Heidegger's Glasses had an achingly sad and unresolved love-story thread in it that made it necessary to call Brandy and tell her how very much I love her. I just finished Philippians on a work break and now out to check buildings in the dripping shadows of the witching hours.

In reaction to which I hold tight to the rifle of Phil. 4:6,7.

2010-12-14T21:52:00.000-08:00

Got to teach at Ruslan's Ukranian/Russian youth service again. They call the church "Skinnia" church, which sounded funny to me so I looked it up. Apparently it means "tent", like a stretched skin tent. Neat name if you think about it, it has a very "Sojourner and traveler in this world" feeling to it.

This time I taught from Hebrews 11:1 on Faith. That verse reads as follows:

"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."

I confess that this verse has historically been one of those "Abide in the Vine" kind of verses for me. By that I mean one of those passages of scripture that have striking language but obscure metaphors, and which tend to be recited to a far greater degree than they are understood. And then when some people take it upon themselves to crack the nut they reveal more nuttiness than truth. One of my disturbing associations with this verse was a conversation I had with an individual who'd just read through Hebrews, and in the course of an overlong conversation fixed me with what was meant to be a profound and mystical gaze and proclaimed: "You know what faith is? Faith....is a substance!" (from the context of the conversation I believe he meant that it's a substance in the same sense as mayonnaise, but on a grander scale)

Teaching is a high pressure thing. It's not like normal public speaking where as long as you've amused people you feel that it wasn't a complete failure. Teaching God's word to people is like operating the big red nuke button when the world's watching you - you feel very motivated to NOT screw up, to make sure you're handling it rightly.

So my discomfort with this verse had to go. I did my word studies and true to my training read through the scripture itself over and over again trying to understand the wording. When I was done, I remembered what I'd read in a book that said you should be able to distill your message into a sentence. So what I distilled was as follows:

"Faith is the perceptive faculty of the heart as sight is to the eye, activated by the Word of Christ, by which we perceive invisible realities, either past, future, or unseen."

I was surprised that it came out so clearly, and thankful. I know it's not nearly all that the verse means or what can be gotten out of it, but as far as the question of a "definition" of Scriptural faith I was happy with it. But just to make sure I wasn't radically misinterpreting the verse, I looked at what some other guys had to say. Tozer said it's misleading to try and use the verse as a definition, but he ended up describing it as something akin to what I'd written. Then I checked out Andrew Murray's commentary on Hebrews, which is titled "The Holiest of All". He said, in reference to Hebrews 11:1

"Faith is the spiritual faculty of the soul which deals with the spiritual realities of the future and the unseen. Just as we have our senses, through which we hold communication with the physical universe, so faith is the spiritual sense or organ through which the soul comes into contact with and is affected by the spiritual world."

So, I think I like how Andrew Murray worded it a little bit better, but I was excited when I read it to have evidence in the similarities that "No prophecy is of any private interpretation", and that God speaks the same word to His people even if they're separated by time and space.

After the service, Ruslan invited me to his house for tea. It was about 10:30 pm, but I didn't have to be anywhere the next morning so I took him up on it. He explained to me that about 12 people (all family) live in their house. As we went in only two sisters and one brother were awake and present, and they already had the hot water on and more goodies than I could eat in a week on the table. I was surprised as they got the tea things out and set everything else up, and asked if they do this often. Ruslan's sister explained that as they rarely see one another since they all work or go to school, they do this as a time to get together. They all watched me curiously as I poured milk in my tea and asked me how that tasted. (Apparently Ukranians don't put milk in tea). Ruslan tried it and pronounced a favorable verdict. So we all sat around and chatted til about 11:30, when Ruslan's parents came in and his mom insisted I eat a second dinner. So I proceeded to eat a big bowl of homemade borscht and explain that no, I am not Ukranian, I go to school with Ruslan, yes, I am a christian...etc... They were really neat and hospitable people, and told me next time I should bring my wife and kids. Then Ruslan showed me his book collection and told his little brother he'd have to wait til tomorrow for help with his biology, and I thanked them for the wonderful tea and left, since by that time it was after midnight.

2010-12-13T23:23:00.000-08:00

I may be inviting a burning at the stake, but here's a blog post I did for school in response to reading Augustine's account of his mother's death.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

"...my brother said something to the effect that he wished for her sake that she would die in her own country, not abroad. When she heard this, she looked at him anxiously and her eyes reproached him for his worldly thoughts. She turned to me and she said, "see how he talks", and then, speaking to both of us, she went on, "It doesn't matter where you bury my body. Do not let that worry you! All I ask of you is that, wherever you may be, you should remember me at the altar of the Lord.""-Augustine

Monica's death, like her life, was one of no-nonsense faith. She spent her entire life living in a way that would leave most people of modern-day America shaking their heads at what they'd most likely see as her crazy fundamentalism and naïveté (i.e. living with an unfaithful and bad-tempered man, persevering through initial mother-in-law problems, praying fervently for her children). According to Augustine, she went to her death full of confidence in her bodily resurrection, of God's power to find and restore her, and of her immediate presence with the Lord after death. She felt that her mission on earth, the salvation of her husband and children, was complete, and she had no reason to be detained her longer. No dreams of "self-realization", no pangs of regret for not having traveled the empire or not having any romances once her husband passed - she wanted to be "with the Lord". The only request she seemed to have was that her children would pray for her. Augustine ends book nine with the hope that those who read his Confessions would join him in praying for his mother (and father).

That's where my question is. Did you pray for Monica? Do you ever pray for those who are presently 'with the Lord'? Years ago I never would have dreamed of praying for anyone who'd died. I would have thought it was on the verge of sin, 'cause "It is given to man to die once, and then the judgement" - so what would be the point of praying for a dead person? That book's done been closed, right? Since then I'm not so sure. I still believe that when we're dead we're dead, there's no purgatory to make amends for past wrongs through indulgences of friends on earth or anything like that. I do, however, think that I have no problem praying for people presently on the earth, that God would remember their good rather than their bad, and have mercy on them and forgive their sins; so I ask myself, why not pray these things for those who are with the Lord? They're still alive, they're not outside of God's action, they've not yet been resurrected or received the full 'reward for the deeds done in the body' that comes at the final judgement, so It can't hurt to let our common Father know how much we've been blessed by their lives and ask God to remember them for good. I've prayed for dead believers before, guys who've blessed me by their writings but whom I've never had the chance of meeting, like John Wesley, Justin Martyr, Richard Baxter, Francis Schaeffer - so why not Monica? I've been very blessed by her son's writings, which are in large part thanks to what the Lord did through her. Why not let our God hear it from me, and ask Him to remember her for good in accordance with her & Augustine's wishes?

2010-12-04T00:55:00.000-08:00

rarely notice that I'm breathing
but I'm breathing anyhow
I rarely notice that you're with me
You're still with me, even now.

The sky is blue behind the grey clouds
I swear it's blue, though I can't see
and while the rain brings down its gray emotions
I swear you're clear as skies inside of me

2010-11-22T07:01:00.001-08:00

Judah Ivy
Prof Brian Bantum
Nov. 21, 2010
Christology in Thomas Eakins’ “Crucifixion”
Thomas Eakins’ “Crucifixion” was completed in 1880, when artistic Realism as a movement was at its zenith. Eakins in particular was a man who fully embraced the scientific age, and attempted in all his work to appropriate as much as possible of the science of perspective, mathematics, and anatomy. He lived in a time when science and reason were hailed as the real approach to truth, and faith was looked at as the irrational impulse of a more primitive age. 1880, the year Eakins' “Crucifixion” was completed, was itself a symbolic landmark for positivism. Thomas Edison patented the incandescent light bulb that year and the first town Wabash, Indiana was completely lit up with his new innovation. Eakins contact with the burgeoning scientific movement was not that of a bystander; as a young man he studied to become a surgeon (his hometown of Philadelphia was a hot spot for what was then considered “modern” surgery) before ultimately choosing the life of an artist.
The choice of Eakins to portray Jesus is in itself puzzling. He was (as far as any surviving testimony indicates) not a religious man in any sense of the word. His biographers and friends claim that he was an agnostic. It was the only “religious” piece that he ever painted. The rest of Eakins’ subjects were in line with realism’s standard, depicting scenes of contemporary everyday American life; usually with some person of societal standing such as a scientist, athlete, or doctor as one of the main subjects. Most of his later paintings were of people he was personally acquainted with. This oddity of subject matter isn’t the only thing that makes the “Crucifixion” stand out in his corpus of work; it was also the largest of Eakins’ “narrative” paintings, in it the figure of Jesus is life size.
The shadow-shrouded face of Jesus in the painting suggests to me the artist’s sense of distance from the man Jesus, the fact that though he could parse the physical aspects of Jesus’ historical life, the Man himself was an enigma to Eakins. People are known by their faces, and our personality is largely communicated to the people around us by our facial expressions. We recognize this easily enough in conversation: it is considered impersonal and rude to speak to someone without looking them in the face. We’ve all seen lovers stare into one another’s eyes in an attempt to communicate and enjoy one another’s personhood when words fail. To look someone in the face while making a statement is tantamount to swearing: “look me in the face and tell me that”. In scripture, for God to “turn His face toward you” is a sign of nearness, communication, and blessing. The face is the conduit of personality and the primary contact point of all human relationship. And to Eakins, Jesus’ face is in shadow, because Jesus is to him a mystery.
The difference between knowing particularities and knowing a person is precisely the sort of gap that science itself still, over a century after Eakins’ painting, cannot bridge. Without faith it is impossible to know God, and Eakins is honest enough to represent his own personal darkness concerning the person of Jesus. Eakins as an artist spent his talents in the quest to show things in scientific realism, to unite the disciplines of investigative science and to shine their collective light on his subjects with confidence that the result would be a “true” portrayal. He went as far as having his students take gross anatomy so they could more realistically render the human body (in imitation of his own prior experience with surgery), and used mathematics and the study of optics extensively to obtain the proper angles of shadows and reflections in his painting. He did this in reaction to the more mythological and “academic/classical” schools of realism which used their technical skill to represent the human form in idealized or otherwise unrealistic ways. It is easy to see his toolbox at work in his painting of the Lord’s crucifixion. The hands and fingers are twisted in rigor-mortis like fashion. The tendons in the wrists stand out as if they are actually bearing a substantial amount of the body’s weight. The bone in the hip, the knees, and the ribs, everything in the painting makes it clear that this is really a man’s body. There is no question that Jesus Christ is a man here, with a real body of flesh and blood. It is apparent that the difficult dimension for Eakins to portray is not the humanity of Jesus, but His oneness with the Father.
Then there is the setting. A majority of paintings of the crucifixion include other characters, Mary and John at the base of the cross, other disciples or perhaps patrons of the painting looking on in reverence. In this painting no one looks on but the viewer, and particularly, Eakins. Jesus Christ came to give us real union, through his flesh and blood, to the Father and through the Spirit, to one another. Even in His death, our Lord took the time to speak to his beloved disciple and arrange for the care of his mother. We know from the gospel accounts that there were people present at his crucifixion. But Eakins doesn’t show us this, for Eakins couldn’t see it. Just as the face of Jesus is a riddle to Eakins, so is the family of Jesus.
Another significant element is the titulus, the written notice above Jesus’ head. Crumpled and blurred, one can still make out “IESUS NASARENUS REX IUDAEO…”. This is not just any crucified man. If the subtly rendered crown of thorns doesn’t make it clear, the notice gives us particularity in a name: Jesus, of Nazareth. Further, it gives us the charge: the King of the Jews. He is not divorced from humanity but belongs to a people. Eakins includes this information intentionally as an acknowledgement of the gospel accounts, yet even here it seems to be more of a label than a meditation on the Jewishness of Jesus. It’s listed as a blunt statement of fact. The main focus is always the Man on the cross.
The artist has chosen to portray Jesus as just far away enough so we could not reach out and touch him, yet the painting is framed in such a way that His figure dominates our field of vision. Here might be an emphasis on the immanence of Jesus; however it’s not necessarily the immanence of God, since Eakins doesn’t know Jesus as God incarnate. It’s the immanence of a character that cannot be escaped. It’s not a soothing image, it’s disturbing and uncomfortable. Eakins knew this and still sent it to exhibits of his work even though it consistently got negative reviews. Here is an example of the typical reaction to the “Crucifixion”:
“Thomas Eakins’ ‘Crucifixion’ is a large canvas representing a horrible form of death in a most ghastly and horrible manner, and it may well be doubted whether such a picture serves any good purpose outside of the classroom of an art school. The only emotion inspired is one of horror at so grim and pitiless a representation of torture and death. Whether the work is well done technically or not is hardly worth considering; one does not care to examine it closely enough to find out”. (‘Art at the Exposition, This Year’s Display of Pictures,’ The Chicago Tribune, 6 September 1882)
Considering the overall harshness of the image, there is one feature that stands out by virtue of its minimalization – blood. The token amount of blood at the hands and feet, the apparent absence of blood from the crown of thorns, and the total absence of blood from scourging or the spear-wound in the side seem odd in what otherwise is such a stark portrayal of death by crucifixion. The absence of the spear wound might well be explained by this being a portrayal of Christ at the point of death, before the soldier pierced his side, yet even the choice to portray that segment of time is significant in its avoidance of the Blood of Jesus, since that is the one place in the accounts of the crucifixion where great significance is given to Christ’s bleeding. Why then the neglect of blood in the representation? I would venture to guess that it has to do with Atonement. Jesus’ blood has a central place in our faith, we are told in scripture that “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Hebrews 9:22, ESV). Jesus said of his blood that it was “of the new Covenant” “poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins”. In fact, the blood of Christ is the most mentioned feature of His death in the New Testament, as a sacrificial satisfaction, as the means by which our sins are taken away, and we are bought for God. Understanding this, it is easy to see why Eakins’ portrayal minimizes the blood that would normally result from wounds like Jesus suffered at the crucifixion. Eakins doesn’t depend on Jesus of Nazareth’s blood for atonement; the death itself is the puzzle that confronts our artist. We might expect a quite different representation of Christ’s wounds If Eakins’ scientific means of perception were able to grasp the meaning of Jesus’ death as an atonement for his sins and ours - but they cannot.
What can we learn from Eakins’ “Crucifixion”? For one, we can learn honesty. It’s far too easy, in art and in words, to get lost in good intentions and warm sentiments. There is a strong tendency to merely repeat comfortable descriptions which –however true- are not our own and which we don’t recognize as descriptions of something –or someone- actually there. It’s near impossible to look at Eakins’ painting and talk glibly about the Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth as if it were a theory rather than a historical event. For us as believers, hopefully we’re shocked into some understanding of the reality of Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnation of God. Hopefully we will be struck with the realization that the atonement isn’t just a theory, it was something accomplished through Jesus’ fully human body hanging on a cross some 2000 years ago in Jerusalem.
Secondly, we can glean a lesson concerning the use and limitations of Science. Eakins’ knowledge of anatomy, mathematics and history reports, but it’s blind to meaning. It can see, but it cannot understand. Science amplifies the clarity of our vision, and this is an extremely useful thing. It tells us that Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross. He really died. However Science cannot go beyond this; it takes the “imago dei” - that capacity for relationship, the spirit’s capacity to hear God’s Spirit, the freedom to commit oneself – to understand that Jesus Christ died for me. This is something that Science is not meant to stand in for.
Thirdly, we can recognize the power of Jesus Christ’s historic act in submitting himself to death. I don’t claim omniscience, but it occurs to me that there was more than academic interest for Eakins in this painting. For a man who was so fully sold on the positivist vision of the perfection of mankind and of human knowledge through Science, such a portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth’s death comes out like a screaming question. What is this man on the cross for? Why Him? If we can be saved by our own creations, then how is it that this Man and His cross will not go away? This is what makes Eakins’ work so powerful for me. For the Agnostic, for the Atheist, for the Believer and for the Apathetically undecided, Eakins’ painting is a testament that none of us can escape the confrontation inherent in the Crucifixion of Jesus.

2010-11-18T13:16:00.000-08:00

Opened my email this morning and read an email from a ministry called "Messianic Prophecy Bible Project". They're creating a bible to be used in outreach to Jewish people & to counter "counter-missionary" orthodox Jewish groups. It made me remember my time in Israel talking to orthodox Jews and reading through the OT a couple times. I recall there was a point where I was wondering if Torah observance was really necessary and to what degree, and what the exact relationship of the New Covenant to the old was. I remember talks with gentile believers in Israel that left me disturbed at their take on the New Covenant and the place of the Old, and wondering how different my own was, and if they were right that meant that Jesus really did mean to "start a new religion" that only borrowed a few concepts from Judaism.
I worked through most of those issues with the help of God, some, like the place of Torah observance in the life of a Jewish believer, I don't have completely cleared up yet. I can't imagine how confusing it would all be if I was an observant Jew who heard and wanted to believe the Gospel but was under the barrage of all the counter-missionary arguments.
I then went to Google videos and viewed some of the debates between believers and anti-messianic Rabbis, and the anti-messianic Rabbis in general seemed to have a more solid grasp on scripture than the believers. It was a little disheartening, and I prayed and went to my bible for some encouragement. I flipped straight open to Matthew 22-23, starting out with the portion describing Jesus' encounter with the Sadducees about the resurrection. The first verse I spied was . That struck me and I read on through the part where Jesus in his encounter with the Pharisees told them that the point of the law, the hinge and goal, was Love of God and Neighbor. Then on to the condemnation of them and their entire system, pointing out all their inconsistencies and the way they failed to read and apply the law correctly in accordance with the Great Commandment. He exposes them as the ones who were responsible for the murder of the OT prophets and who would be responsible for the persecution and murder of the NT prophets/scribes and wise men, ending with his loving plea over Jerusalem as the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her.

That was reassuring, to say the least. I can't think of a single scripture that would have been more so right then. So I popped in Switchfoot's "Hello Hurricane" & listened to the title track, drank a half gallon of tea, and went on a run through Discovery Park, where I took the above photo with my cellphone.

On other notes, Brandy is pregnant! we just found out last week. I'm always paranoid whenever she's pregnant that something will go wrong with the pregnancy/baby, so pray for me. That's part of my fear of having more children, I feel like all the ones so far have five fingers and toes, and we should quit while we're ahead. But God has spoken, and the due date is projected for July 22nd of next year. I'll publish the names but you have to promise you won't steal them. If it's a boy (which so far all the unofficial prophecies have pointed towards) we'll name him Elias Orion. If it's a girl, Ethne Evangeline.

We had our second Home Fellowship last night, TJ & Destiny came (of course) as well as Will from School. Sunday the church is going to have a big push to get people in home fellowships after the big Harvest Crusade that just came through town.

I registered for Winter classes the other day, Prayed and then wigged out after the bad-christmas-esque experience of hoping for and getting excited about particular classes which end up being full by the time I get a chance to register. I got stuck (I thought) with some lame classes that have nothing to do with my major, but after talking to my advisor I found out that the classes I really need aren't in the online catalog and all I had to do was fill out a couple of independent study forms (which I did).

"Do not let your hearts be troubled" - we have one instructor, the Christ. Now if only I could get consistent in following His instructions!

2010-11-16T18:11:00.001-08:00

OK, so after a day at TJ's disassembling the car I determined that it wasn't the ball joints, and had to take it in to the shop where they told me it was the wheel bearings. And it was expensive. Thankfully we had enough to scrape together to pay for the fix and we have great family that helped out too.

I'm registering for classes tonight, Latin II, Belief Morality and the Modern Mind, and either Independent readings in Classical Greek, Medieval Philosophy, or History of Post-Reformation Christianity.

Yet more tests tomorrow, seems like we've got one every week.
Thanksgiving's fast approaching! It's my favorite "Get together" holiday. It's got a good premise, low commercialism, and it's to the point: friends, family, food, fun. No mandatory present buying, no mandatory decoration, no covetous insanity pulling at the national heartstrings. Thank God for Thanksgiving. We're planning on going down to my granny's/aunt's place in Centralia to celebrate, they're out in the quasi-boonies, far out enough for woodsmoke to be a common smell. Centralia also had a 3.9 earthquake today.

You know, I'm sure there are all sorts of interesting things to post, but very little's coming to mind right now....let's see.... we've started a home group, so far it's just TJ & Destiny coming, though I've invited some more ppl who've expressed interest. We still don't really have anything in the way of worship. Trying to make my way through Siegbert Becker's "The Foolishness of God" on the relationship of reason to faith in Jesus Christ in Martin Luther's writing.

Oh, yes, there is some massively large news (that at the moment is very small) but I'm not at liberty to divulge it yet.

2010-11-03T20:19:00.001-07:00

Headed over to TJ's tomorrow to attempt to replace one of the Minivan's ball joints. The obscure little part went bad about three quarters of the way through California on our way back, and the wheel started making a rhythmic 'pthbbbt, pthbbbt' sound as if it were going flat. I pulled over at a gas station where a few homeless people tried to make conversation with me in an attempt to ask for change, but I wasn't in a charitable mood and was on the ground checking the lug nuts and feeling back behind the wheels to make sure the control arms weren't bent on any of them so they eventually got the hint. Then a military looking guy pulled up towing a Jeep on a trailer in a big manly truck so I asked him if he knew anything about ball-joints. He confirmed my diagnosis and told me we'd be all right driving the van back to Washington on a bad ball joint. I was very relieved as it was about 2am by that point and Brandy couldn't find any of the information for the Triple-A membership she'd bought for the trip.

So now I've gotta try and fix it, Lord willing, it sounds pretty do-able and cheap. I've done it before in another life - with Tim Lemoine back in MN - on another vehicle, but memory's pretty hazy.

Just finished having sabbath with the family, It makes me very thankful that I've been able to continue this family tradition with my family, and that the kids have come to look forward to it every week. We turn out all the lights, light a few candles and the menorah as we sing the shema, and then have communion before (sometimes after) we eat dinner. We then generally sing "See ye first" and I'll read Josiah's picture bible to the kids.

Today, since I thought I'd be going over to TJ's tonight to try and fix the van, Brandy had ran out to the store to shop and I was home alone with the kids, something that doesn't happen very often. So I watched them dance and danced with them to some of the "Putomayo Presents" music on my computer, and noticed that Jaelle has a mean salsa step! I took some pictures and wrestled with them all, and then dug out the little Westminster Shorter Catechism and went over two questions with them, "What is the Chief End of Man? (Answer: Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever) and "What is God?" (Answer: "God is a Spirit, Infinite, Eternal, Unchangeable, In His Being, Wisdom, Power, Holiness, Justice, Goodness, and Truth") Josiah has both of them pretty much down, and Jaelle got close, I was satisfied with Enoch's mumbling attempts to repeat after me. I really like some of the question and answer stuff from that little book, it's edifying for me, and I can't think of a much better definition of "God"

God is a Spirit, Infinite, Eternal, Unchangeable, In His Being, Wisdom, Power, Holiness, Justice, Goodness, and TRUTH!

The kids just finished cleaning their room with a little help and a few spankings from mommy, and Josiah had me read to them from his picture bible, we got up til the Judges. Now Brandy will be reading Narnia to them - they're on the Last Battle, not sure what we'll read them next, I'm thinking the "Tower of Geburah" series by John White, I remember how much I loved those when I was little.

2010-11-02T19:47:00.000-07:00

what could I miss
in the crust of false bliss
blinking visions
fast flickering
Oh God, true God,
meat and milk,
blood and bone,
the dead and the Raised,
the one on the throne;
what could I miss
that could call for regret
in a world that's all paper
hollow fame, a plastic threat?
Babylon's wine,
precious blood of your saints
I have sipped from her hands
made a whore of myself
How could I
a man of twenty and nine
ten years in your service
lose sight of your mind?
Walk, walk in the light
while you have the true light
before that darkness curls in
with its roundabout sin
then how will you know
which way you should go?
Believe in the Light!
It's thicker than sin
and richer than the opulence
that thrusts its wares
from every screen
Christ touch my eyes
to see it's rotten
turned to dust and blown away
let your hands be strong upon me
peel the leeches off my skin
you are God
then what is money?
what are things?
and what is ease?
the droppings of the clinging bats
on which swarming roaches feed.
get me out of this decaying cave
be the sun, the warmth inside my blood
beat your flaming wings inside me
raise me up above the flood.

2010-10-29T09:43:00.000-07:00

Can a new birth grow old
if it steps too far from the draught
of the old-growth tree
-from the fountain,
from it's knees?

the skin is tough
the heart's gone sour
an ulcered tomato
in a bitter stew

Bring me back,
give me a Word,
re-cord me to the New.

2010-10-26T02:53:00.000-07:00

I feel like I'm being given a raw deal at work,
as if my failings are magnified and others' overlooked
but what can I do?
compare myself to other men?
and expect justice on the earth?
If I have wronged, however small,
let me bare my back for beating
as my earthly masters see fit
and God help me to know
from the blood in my bones
that even this
is not to my credit.

If there is injustice
in unequal measures
of bureaucratic wrath
then let it be
for my True Master
to search out.

Let your blows inside the blows of men
and purge my inmost heart
to serve you in all things
with a clean conscience
and a pure will.

God, I entrust myself to your judgement
and I trust fully in your mercy
if there is vindication
to be had
from the scars and twistings
received from little kings,
then let it be
for you to raise up
and cast down.
Until then,
I'll wait.

2010-10-26T02:46:00.000-07:00

Why this urge to justify?
An unrighteous thread in a tapestry of rebellion
what is it in me
that cries out for a verdict
that my fibers are not as soiled
as the surrounding warp and weft?
The only outside eye can see
more clearly than I
and if I call for a premature
appearance of the Judge of all the earth
who can endure the day of his coming?
Who can stand when he appears?
For he will be like a refiner's fire!
But I will call out for cleansing of
what is unclean in me
and let him be to me not a judge of others,
but for me, a launderer's soap.

2010-10-18T02:18:00.000-07:00

We have the van back!

Its Babylonian captivity is over. I went to write a review of "Premier Transmission" and found quite a few scathing reviews from the past month or so written by other customers/victims. After having read some of the reviews I became much more certain that our situation wasn't a fluke, and felt a lot better about writing a "never go here" review.

Thankfully, TJ & Destiny (friends from work) have been kind enough to lend us their Toyota 4runner (nice car by the way) for the past two weeks, so we've at least been able to get around.

Still trying to get a home fellowship off the ground. The meeting time for HF 'leader training' is Sundays, (2 in a row) 12-4pm. If I were to go, I'd be going to work Sat. night at 9pm, getting off at 7:30am, going to church, staying til 4pm, and going back to work for another 10hr grave shift at 9pm Sun, and starting classes as soon as I got out of work at 7:30am Monday morning. Sooooooo, I don't think I'll be doing that. Lord willing it'll work out so I don't have to, I spoke to Pastor Jack down here at the Wallingford campus and he sympathized with my situation. If they end up not letting us do the HF for that reason, I figure I'll just start a bible study out of the house and start inviting ppl from school/work/apartment.

Pastor Wayne spoke out of Luke today, where Jesus says "A man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions" and goes on to tell the parable about the rich man who wanted to build bigger barns. I felt convicted about that, as I've been developing a buyer's impulse with my student Amazon.com account. It gives me free two-day shipping, and that's been such an incentive that I've found myself searching Amazon for "needs" that qualify for the aforementioned free shipping.

So, instead of being given to Gospel for Asia or needy acquaintances to 'make friends that will welcome me into eternal dwellings', my filthy lucre's been poured out in sacrifice to the inflamed lust aroused by free shipping. Lord forgive me.

I almost went down to the front for prayer after service, but there was only one guy praying and a man who looked even needier than I was in the process of voicing his requests, so I went out and helped Brandy herd the monkeys instead.

2010-10-14T23:39:00.000-07:00

Just watched "The Fountain" with Brandy, and am struck
1.) With Eve's name "Chavvah" meaning "Life", "Living"
2.) With Oswald Chambers' definition of Love: "We have defined love, in its highest sense, as being the sovereign preference of my person for another person."

He develops this saying:
"The surest sign that God has done a work of grace in my heart is that I love Jesus Christ best, not weakly and faintly, not intellectually, but passionately, personally and devotedly, overwhelming every other love of my life."

Love is the sovereign preference of my person for another person, and we may be astonished to realise that love springs from a voluntary choice. Love for God does not spring naturally out of the human heart; but it is open to us to choose whether we will have the love of God imparted to us by the Holy Spirit. “. . . the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us” (Romans 5:5; see also Luke 11:13). We are emphasising just now the need of voluntary choice. It is of no use to pray, “O Lord, for more love! give me love like Thine; I do want to love Thee better,” if we have not begun at the first place, and that is to choose to receive the Holy Spirit Who will shed abroad the love of God in our hearts.
Beware of the tendency of trying to do what God alone can do, and of blaming God for not doing what we alone can do. We try to save ourselves, but God only can do that; and we try to sanctify ourselves, but God only can do that. After God has done these sovereign works of grace in our hearts, we have to work them out in our lives. “. . . work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12-13).
The love of God is the great mainspring, and by our voluntary choice we can have that love shed abroad in our hearts, then unless hindered by disobedience, it will go on to develop into the perfect love described in 1 Corinthians 13.
We have, then, to make the voluntary choice of receiving the Holy Spirit Who will shed abroad in our hearts the love of God, and when we have that wonderful love in our hearts, the sovereign preference for Jesus Christ, our love for others will be relative to this central love. “We preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake” (2 Corinthians 4:5).

2010-10-14T14:00:00.000-07:00

What's up with customer service in this country? I bought a copy of N.T. Wright's "New Testament and the People of God" and it took them three weeks to send me the wrong book. Then there's our van which has been in the shop for a month and a half, the half is because they put a bad transmission in it to begin with, and I had to take it back after it crapped out on me during the drive home. Ever since they've been stringing me along with promises that it'll be ready "In two days, maybe tomorrow" for the last couple of weeks. Their "call center" consists of one guy that treats you like a pest whenever you call in, and it seems like his job description is to keep you from learning anything about the status of your repair and to deter you from ever calling again. When I did pick it up after the initial (faulty) 'repair' I noticed a chip in the windshield that wasn't there before. I asked about it and they suggested that I go to a glass repair place that would fix it for free with most insurance.
The booksellers let me keep the book, and are issuing a refund. I'm more than satisfied with that. I've tried multiple times to get in contact with the manager at the Auto place and have yet to receive a reply.

I keep thinking of proverbs 24:29: Do not say, “I will do to him as he has done to me; I will pay the man back for what he has done.”

But man, "the man" sure has been ripping us off! I think I at least need to leave them some reviews letting other customers know what they did so that they won't be screwed over in the same way. Is it possible to do that out of concern for their potential customers without it being mixed with a desire to hurt their business in retribution for how badly they've treated us?

I guess that's what I'll need to aim for, but it'll take the Holy Spirit & conscious effort.

2010-10-07T22:17:00.000-07:00

Conversations in the Car.

Josiah: (as we pass a Burger King) "Oh, Burger King, I love Burger King!"

Me: He loves Burger King hon.

Brandy: Yes, he loved it. (Burger King disappears in the rearview mirror.)

Me: "Josiah, it's better to have loved and lost that to have never loved at all!"

Josiah: "What does that mean?"

Me: "It's a saying, people say it 'cause they believe it's better to love something or someone, even if you end up losing them."

Jaelle: (incredulous) "That's NOT true!"

Josiah: "WHOA! That car could've killed us!"

Jaelle: "Mom, we should go to McDonalds, 'cause there's so many delicious things there."

Enoch: "I'm hungry and thursty, I'm hungry thursty too!"

2010-10-05T06:56:00.000-07:00

T.J.: "You have children, I have animals."

Me: "What about "animals are people too"?"

T.J. "That's debatable."

I think if you've been up for 23 hours you should qualify as a "vulnerable adult", at least until you've had a solid six hours of sleep.

The spiders have had a population explosion this year. I can't walk across campus at night without getting outfitted with a web-beard form all the little spider shanties that've been strewn thickly across every path.

There have always been spiders on campus but this year It's begun to feel more like an invasion, like Starship Troopers or something.

The spiders are thick and juicy, obviously the result of some spider-vitamin a robber-baron chemical factory has dumped into the canal on the north side of campus. They crawl around everywhere like a festering mess of mini-Shelobs from Lord of the Rings, as I hold out my flashlight like the star-glass light to fend them off, or at least to warn me before I walk face-first into another web and am forced to spend the next five minutes brushing myself off in paranoia and peeling the remnants of spider silly-string off my arms and eyebrows. They've only gotten larger as the year's progressed, right now the average one could pose a danger to small dogs and children. If the raccoons around here weren't so low to the ground I wouldn't be surprised to see a few of them sucked dry and left hanging in some grand specimen's web.

But it's finally getting Autumn chilly, and I think that's killing them off.

2010-10-05T05:49:00.001-07:00

The brain. Feels like it's frozen, fuzzy-frozen like something left too long in the freezer, so long that it's responded by a winter coat of frost.
Not sleeping, staying up all night walking around in the dark through empty buildings and driving through empty streets. Sometimes my job feels like a post-apocalyptic novel. All I need is the zombies.
Sometimes I think I see one in the theater building but then realize it's only a mirror, one of those full-length ones that the resident thespians use to check their outfits before entering stage left.
That zombie stares dully back at me with his tired brown eyes before using his expandable baton to poke at the enormous spiders infesting the corner of the stairwell.

The moon is spectacular tonight. Or, this morning. It's 5:54 and the moon just rose an hour or so ago. It's a waning crescent that has the subdued light to the rest of it, just enough so you can still see that it's a round thing, not just a hanging scythe. It looks like a black-brown velvet against the blue-black sky.

2010-10-04T06:39:00.000-07:00

Tis the season when the blogs lose posts like trees gone autumn streaking, when the cold demands of academia force expression back into hiding.

But I'm gonna try to go for evergreen.

After approaching a friend with an old grievance, which no matter how hard I'd tried I couldn't just remit as a better man might, we got reconciliation. Insert something about Olive oil dribbling on a Hight Priest's facial hair here. I've felt so freed, the skies have opened up, and thoughts for the future have been making their way up through the crust like crocuses.

Emailed our pastor re. Pastoring, planting a church, being sent, and was told to serve or go to CCBC. CCBC I believe would be super-duperfluous, but we're already in the works for hosting a HF.

Along those lines, began reading a book "Love Acceptance and Forgiveness". VERY good book thus far, but I first tried to read it in the tired times after getting off grave shift and after the subsequent church service. I'd been up for 24 hours and the opening story about a pastor who had an affair and was then welcomed back into fellowship and "restored to ministry" proved too much for me and I threw it over to the nightstand and rolled over into sleep.
The rest of the book thus far is all clean water, fast flowing. But the first part really got my noggin & soul in a twist.

I need to figure out for myself for sure what God says about remarriage after divorce. I've for a long time believed from my reading of scripture that there's nothing but celibacy, lifelong celibacy for anyone divorced. But since I've yet to meet anyone in the nowadays church who agrees with me, I suppose I need to go over it again. Considering the condition of christianity in America, if I do eventually become a pastor that particular issue will likely be a common one, and I'll need to have some sort of solid answer.

Taking Latin, Ancient Civ, and Christian Theology this quarter. As of now I tend to agree in general with the author of "Love Acceptance & Forgiveness" that ppl who've grown up in the church should go to secular colleges, in part 'cause these theology classes don't really teach me much. We're reading through Augustine's "Confessions" (which I've read twice already on my own). Not that I don't like the Confessions, it's actually a very edifying and well-written book, but it seems silly to take a class to read it again. (Okay, that's not the only book we're reading but I'm just saying.)
Yet I go to a Christian College. But I think I have a specific mission here, and it's not just to enjoy the nice "christian" environment, so I think my presence here is legit.
Plus, the guy who wrote "Love Acceptance and Forgiveness" graduated from Seattle Pacific University too, so I think I'm OK.

2010-09-18T14:36:00.000-07:00

A Rabbi talks about Avatar.
http://rebfred.blogspot.com/2010/01/jewish-reflection-on-spiritual-message.html

2010-09-15T11:07:00.000-07:00

Was reading psalms today, & in more than one of the psalms I read through there was a call to "praise the Lord for his works" or to "remember what the Lord has done for us".

So, I thought, I can remember that once upon a time the Lord did things for Israel, & leave it at that, or I could remind myself of all the answers to prayer and God's interventions in our lives.
So I found an empty journal and began thinking about the first entry. So far I've put down my answered childhood prayer to grow an inch or two over 6 foot, so that when I'm old I don't shrink too much below 6' even. I figure we'll write down all the major ones we can remember in rough chronological order up to the present, and record more as they happen. Then we can make a point of reading it on a specific day, like Passover or something.

I think Brandy & I have talked about doing this before, because when I mentioned it she smiled & said we'd talked about doing it before. I'm pretty sure that's true, there's always the hefty pile of forgotten resolutions, but then again, there are some traditions we've kept, like Wednesday's family sabbath/communion.

2010-09-15T01:12:00.001-07:00

That Bwessed Awwangement

From a letter by Tertullian, an Early Church Father, to his wife, ca. 202 AD (written in Brandy' birthday card)

"...How beautiful, then, the marriage of two Christians, two who are one in hope, one in desire, one in the way of life they follow, one in the religion they practice.

They are as brother and sister, both servants of the same Master. Nothing divides them, either in flesh or in Spirit. They are in very truth, two in one flesh; and where there is but one flesh there is also but one spirit.

They pray together, they worship together, they fast together; instructing one another, encouraging one another, strengthening one another.

Side by side they face difficulties and persecution, share their consolations. They have no secrets from one another, they never shun each other's company; they never bring sorrow to each other's hearts… Psalms and hymns they sing to one another.

Hearing and seeing this, Christ rejoices. To such as these He gives His peace. Where there are two together, there also He is present, and where He is, there evil is not."

And then Bonhoeffer:
http://weewingkuen.wordpress.com/2010/08/06/a-wedding-sermon-from-a-prison-cell/

2010-09-14T04:28:00.001-07:00

It's an insult to the Lord Jesus Christ to be afraid of the demonic.

Jesus' foot even now presses down on satan's neck,

however he might twist and squirm,

our deliverance is sure and complete

all that satan had in us was purged on the cross

so we can now say with our Lord

"he has nothing in me".

2010-09-14T04:04:00.000-07:00

If we are to believe the report we have received,

the one brought by the magi of the age,

then we must concede that as well as our loss of God

(by which I mean the opening of our eyes to see He was all along

merely a story of our own making) we have suffered the loss of ourselves.

We have awoken to find that we are not-in terms that would have been acceptable

to thinkers of the past-real, but only an accidental eddy of particle physics,

with said physics being merely the flickering of a holograph without a projector.

This vision itself is the projection of the collective minds of the seers

whose guild has risen to prominence in the past few centuries.

Based on the circumcision of all testimony from the past,

allowing only the bare hands of the present to chip away

at the stone of understanding with the chisel of falsification

and the razor of Ockham.

But then, there are the words of Jesus Christ,

before whom the judges of the earth are exposed as chaff,

as the archon beholds the accused, and will not, cannot see the answer

to the question "what is.......truth..."

When He who came fulfills his purpose as he is raised up

as all those on the side of truth gather round in answer

to His call, a call which made of such power

in word and deed

that those who recognize it

crash through the peer-reviewed walls constructed

by the clerics of the present covenant

to respond

and join the Man

on the cross,

and in Him

become real.

2010-09-13T19:35:00.000-07:00

String theory.

Is it possible that beautiful creations could be the manifestation of strings?

Yes.

Brandy knits. And in this knitting, following a plan and pattern, a plan that was brought into being from non-being by desire, by a will (which in the language of the bible are the same thing) a string is knotted in on itself, pulled, pushed, wrapped, until a picture that exists only in the mind of the Maker takes shape in the material world.

A long, thin, uniform thing becomes by artistry a three-dimensional object, a curved and purposed thing, a rug for feet, a hat to cover a head, a pair of pants for an infant, or a scarf to shelter a human neck from the elements. And all from a string, the base element which when bent to the will of a thinker, becomes a solid, useful, and beautiful thing, which before the act, did not exist.

String theory - by Brandy.

2010-09-09T09:26:00.000-07:00

It's Brandy's Birthday!

The van's broken down, so all I could do was order her something off Amazon, and make her a card.

Then, after the shop tows the car this morning, we'll be off to the Value Village for a thriftshop extravaganza. Nothing says Ivy family birthday like a trip to the thriftstore!

And Brandy doesn't look a day older than 26.

2010-08-29T10:09:00.000-07:00

Take heart

the world's been overcome

Yggdrasil's held the holy one

cold iron fixed the maker's son

twixt earth and heaven,

bloody, hung.

the winds of evil

tore and rang

his path held fast

his silence sang

hot blood struck dirt

up new worlds sprung

while the hanging one

with mighty hands

from the cursed earth

the sin has wrung.

2010-08-27T13:04:00.000-07:00

Reading an article or two about the extermination of Christians in Japan in the 1600s. Sad stuff, especially since there has never been any significant number of christians in Japan since that time.

2010-08-26T23:13:00.000-07:00

Dropped sudden in these seething earths

bubbles dimmed in twists of foam

side to side or single sway

drink water from the passing waves

til the skin is torn

the air escapes

and look,

new bubbles

swell to fill the gape

the churning of

a living grave.

2010-08-16T05:38:00.000-07:00

You who answer desperate prayers, to you all flesh will come!
Even those desperate enough to play bible roulette,
and find that in order to "watch ourselves"
we must rebuke our brother who sins
and wait for a chance to forgive
on the grounds of repentance
and if not to that end
than at least, hopefully,
it was all a mistake.

2010-07-23T13:15:00.000-07:00

"Join me in suffering for the gospel by the power of God"
Is what kept running through my mind
as I was running with someone faster than me
through Discovery Park
and trying to maintain a conversation of sorts
about Jesus.
It's easy to be a good listener
when you're out of breath.

2010-07-22T02:55:00.000-07:00

Shot across infinite spaces
mouth open
not to speak
words have left
and the cords between life and limb
have grown threadbare.
mouth open
an escape hatch of the soul
the roar of dimensions
at the doorway that's distance
cannot be measured in seconds
or metric length
through and outside
to where the winds rage cold
in the absence of skin,
who wouldn't want
to be clothed.

"...neither death"
-without skin
does not mean
without God.

And in a moment
that shaper's voice
who's tight embrace has held you waiting
shall call you out
into light, love,
and the clothing
of indestructable Life

2010-07-20T21:41:00.000-07:00

Took Josiah out running today.

He's been at me every time I go running with friends to come with us, and I've tried over and over again to explain to him that he's just not going to be able to keep up and that it would result in no exercise for me and no fun for him. But he has persisted til I decided to take him out on a run to show him what I mean.

So we went on a run down to Discovery Park, which is about a quarter mile from our house. I kept a slow pace so we would stay together, just enough so he would be running at a speed proportionate to my normal running speed. I expected him to putter out after the first couple blocks, but he didn't.

Then I expected him to ask if we could stop when we hit the big hill that leads up into the park, and he didn't. He made it all the way up into the park, and around one of the wooded trails without stopping once.

When we'd been gone for about 20 minutes, I asked if he was ready to head back, he said once more around the trail, so around we went. Then he said he was ready to go back home. About an eighth of a mile from the house he got a couple cramps but ran through them, and sprinted with me up the hill and into the house.

I was very impressed, & told him so. He looked up at me with his tomato-red face and beamed a big smile, and said he was impressed too.

He's still not running with me when I'm going for exercise, but I'm definitely going to keep taking him out after this.

2010-07-19T21:17:00.000-07:00

Just finished Jung's "Psychology and Religion".

On the whole, it was an enjoyable book to read. I believe that it was based on lectures...yup, just looked inside the cover, it was based on the "Terry Lectures" given at Yale in 1937. This gives the book a nice conversational feel, even when Jung lapses into obscure vocabulary. The lectures are delivered in three sections, "The Autonomy of the Unconscious Mind", "Dogma and Natural Symbols" and "The History and Psychology of a Natural Symbol"

I can definitely see the usefulness of a book club or some sort of corporate reading when it comes to books with substance, because it's easy to zip through them without getting the framework down of what the author's saying, and just coming away with a feeling or impression from the book. My first impressions without going back through it were that he had some insightful things to say about religion in general, that he's a mystic philosopher at heart (he reads like a Tozer without Christ), and that even though his scope and view is much broader and far-reaching than the materialist psychologists of today, he still seems very much in love with his method, to the point of "leading the witness" in the last section, (which I'll try to explain when I get to it), and he's very good at adapting his language to whatever point of view he's discussing to the point of sounding like an insider, even if he doesn't ultimately accept that point of view.

Having gone back over the book, and looked at my margin notes, I'll cover each section.

...
"Autonomy of the Unconscious Mind"

He opens by maintaining that he's not a philosopher but rather an empiricist, concerned with observable phenomena, in this case, psychological events. As an example, he gives the virgin birth and says

"...psychology is only concerned with the fact that there is such an
idea, but it is not concerned with the question whether such an idea is true or
false in any other sense. It is psychologically true in as much as it exists.
Psychological experience is subjective in so far as an idea occurs in obnly one
individual. But it is objective in so far as it is established by a society - by
a consensus gentium."

(that's Latin for "Agreement of the peoples", I had to look that one up.)

"Psychology deals with ideas and other mental contents as Zoology deals with
animals"

So we know where he's coming from.

He explains what he means by religion next, with a quote from another German guy named Rudolph Otto (who I think C.S. Lewis also references).

"religion is the careful and scrupulous observation of...the 'numinosum' that is, a dynamic existence or effect , not caused by an
arbitrary act or will."

- this, Jung says, is caused by either the influence of an invisible presence (say, Job 4:15), or a quality in something that is seen (say, seeing someone walk on water or raise the dead with a word); either of which changes your consciousness. (examples provided by me, not Jung)

In short, religion is the careful consideration of that thing that gives you the willies independent of your will. He actually refines and redefines his definition, ending up calling religion the attitude of someone who's had his consciousness changes by said willies. (he actually uses the term "numinous" again, which I recall C.S. Lewis as describing as the kind of fear/feeling one would get from being told there was a ghost in the next room, as opposed to the kind of feeling/fear of being told there's a tiger in the next room, so I don't think my use of "willies" is too far off).

Jung does give the benefit of the doubt to the religious, and seems with his definitions to agree that religion isn't just something people make up, it's based on something outside of us that works on us.

He then distinguishes religion from "creeds", Creeds being

"...codified and dogmatized forms of original religious experience"

Again, fair enough. I haven't seen Jesus raise the dead in person, or rise from the dead, yet having heard, I believe. Yet I would say that a "creed" should point you towards your own experience of the "numinosum" by directing you to seek out God in a specific way ("And Peter said to them, "Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.")

Interestingly enough, Jung says

"...even Protestantism is bound at least to be Christian and to express itself within the frame of the conviction that God has revealed himself in Christ, who suffered for mankind. This is a definite frame, with definite contents, that cannot be coupled with or amplified by Buddhistic or Islamic ideas and emotions."

Someone should tell that to Brian McLaren.

He then goes on to talk about Psychology's concern with religious ideas, especially when it comes to "neuroses". He makes a really insighful and telling comment in this section criticizing the mindset that has become the medication culture of psychiatry today:

"Our usual materialistic conception of the psyche is, I am afraid, not
particularly helpful in neurotic cases...medicine therefore feels a strong
dislike toward anything of a psychical nature-either the body is ill or there is
nothing the matter. And if you cannot prove that the body is really diseased,
that is because our present means do not enable the physician to find the true
nature of the undoubtably organic trouble"

OK. If I listed all the great quotes in the first section, this blog would quickly become a book in its own right, so I'll refrain. Except for these two:

(regarding the mindset that would tell a patient that he/she is the origin of their own neurosis)

"Such a suggestion would instantly paralyze his fighting spirit, and he would
get demoralized. It is much better if he understands that his complex is an
autonomous power directed against his conscious personality."

(He basically describes most complexes as if they're possession)

Regarding the brain/mind/soul question:

"But what is the psyche after all? A materialistic prejudice explains it as a
merely epiphenomenal by-product of organic processes in the brain...The
undeniable connection between psyche and brain gives this point of view a
certain strength, but not enough to make it an unshakeable truth...if there are
disorders of an endocrine nature it is impossible to say whether they are not
effects rather than causes."

To which I say "Amen!"

Okay, from there he goes on to say that dreams are the sort of shore of the unconscious, where the numinous and unconscious whatever-it-is can talk to us.

...

"Dogma and Natural Symbols"

In this section he starts giving examples from one case of his, which becomes increasingly suspect (to me) as he goes on into the next section. He talks a lot about different symbols in dreams, especially the significance of the number 4, and the square and circle and reveals his own "religious" sentiments through a few telling statements.

"What one could almost call a systematic blindness is simply the effect of the
prejudice that the deity is outside man. Although this prejudice is not solely
Christian, there are certain religions which do not share it at all. On the
contrary they insist, as do certain Christian mystics, upon the essential
identity of God and man, either in the form of an a priori identity, or of a
goal to be attained by certain practices or initiations..."

(in which he mentions yoga as one). So basically, Jung's running up the gnostic flag.

Amidst his loooong chatter linking all sorts of obscure references to a myriad of alchemical/pythagorean symbologies & symbols (so you know what I'm talking about, I'll give you a sample:

"... This image of the Deity, dormant and concealed in matter, was what the alchemists called the original chaos, or the earth of paradise, or the round fish in the sea, or merely the rotundum or the eggt. That round thing was in possession of the key which unlocked the closed doors of matter."

- at this point, I tend to think Jung's listened to one too many dreams) as I was saying, amidst all that, he makes a really interesting observation of a symbol very pertinent for anyone who likes the movie "The Fifth Element":

"As it is said in Timaeus, only the demiurge, the perfect being, was capable of
dissolving the tetraktys, the embrace of the four elements, that is, the four
constituents of the round world."

From which he goes on about squaring the circle and such like. Okay, I'll move on to the 3rd section in brief.

...

The History and Psychology of a Natural Symbol

In which he continues with more of the same observations about series of four, the colors blue and brown, the use of mary as the fourth psychological person of the trinity, etc, etc... All this stems from a his case-in-point, where he says he had an well-educated relapsed catholic man 'o the world write down -get this- a series of over four hundred dreams! This, he says, was done to get the context of the guy's subconscious, and the dreams he details are full of blue floating clocks withing clocks that have divisions divisible by four, and series of four pyramids of candles and much, much more. Not to say that it couldn't happen, but it seems that this guy's dreams were remarkably fecund with the sort of symbolic whatnot that Jung was looking for.

He finishes with the observation that though the religious experience along the line of "I know Jesus lives, because he lives in my heart" is very valuable in that it gives you faith and peace,

"Is there, as a matter of fact, any better truth about ultimate things than the
one that helps you to live?"

He then says that such reasons are not very convincing for the critical mind of modern people, and only work for the person with the experience, which is why he catalogs symbols produced by the unconscious mind, to document their "simply overwhelming"-ness in order to convince the critical mind of its (the thing that causes religious experiences') existence, for the practical purpose that "The thing that cures a neurosis must be as convincing as the neurosis". He ends on a feel-good note, which would be ultimately unsatisfactory, except that he warned me from the get-go that he's not interested in whether any statements of faith are true in any sense but psychologically.

2010-07-16T14:10:00.000-07:00

Four Quartets #2

the final section, "Little Gidding,” was apparently named after a 17th-century Anglican monastery renowned for its devotion. Eliot uses it as a connecting place between the worlds, the timeless and that in time, the spiritual and temporal: a place to meet God:

"If you came this way...
...You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying."

Then he goes on to talk about death again, the death of our body, the death of toil, the death of our works & monuments. He follows this with a narrative section where he meets someone (possibly Dante?) in a setting a lot like the purgatory of C.S. Lewis' "Great Divorce". The man talks to him about the ephemerality of their life's work, and the need for purification of their motives, which have been revealed as ill done and to others' harm, even if considered in earthly life as virtues. He says that this cycle will proceed unless "Restored by that refining fire"

I would say that the two main motifs of "Little Gidding" are fire and roses, & I'll focus on them.

The meaning of the Rose I believe to be the bloom of created life, es. natural, bodily life. In vs. 55 he says

"Ash on an old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave"

He makes it more plain what kind of dust he was talking about in line 58:

"Dust inbreathed was a house"

Another place where I believe he's referring to human life as the "rose" is in vss. 180-184

"Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?
It is not to ring the bell backward
Nor is it an incantation
To summon the spectre of a Rose."

The image of Flame he uses as the holy spirit ("Pentecostal Fire", that stirs the dumb spirit) And of the purification or Judgement from God in section IV:

"The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire."

Or in other words, it's through the "Consuming Fire" having his way with us through an appropriation of Jesus Christ's death (the gospel, which the tongues declare, that one discharge from sin and error) that we are redeemed from the fires of judgment.

With these two images, roses and flame, he points towards the end and the purposes of God in the chaos and seeming meaninlessness of life and death, using several times the words of Julian of Norwich "And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well", especially in the last line, which is to my mind the best:

"And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one."

Which I take to be his vision of the second coming of Christ, the gathering of the Saints into Christ, the Head, and the resurrection and "renewal of all things" when the rose (The equinox of bodily life) and the fire (the Holy Spirit of God) are one-a parallel might be when Paul Speaks of the resurrection: "...while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life." under the kingship of Jesus Christ, and in Him, under God. Read Ephesians 1 and Hebrews 2 and Romans 8 and you'll see what I mean.

"making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth." -Paul to the Ephesians.

The use of fire and roses really reminded me of George Macdonald's "Princess & The Goblin/Curdie" books, where the "Grandmother" (God) has a fire of roses that she uses to heal (though it hurts), and in which Lena, a character who had once been human and was turned into a beast, passes through in a metaphor of resurrection. In the end of the story the grandmother ultimately makes a great fire of roses for Lena to run into and so (it's implied) to be refined and resurrected as a human.

2010-07-11T02:47:00.000-07:00

Not in ignorance, no, though all are thy vessels
I warm to thy will and recognize
the press of thy print upon my small part of action
and in this love, moved by love,
lies the difference.

2010-07-08T23:06:00.000-07:00

Was in the Ballard neighborhood today, mainly to ship off some books that I sold on half.com, but I also strolled through the artsy district and stopped off in a coffeeshop. There I finished "Four Quartets" and got through the first chapter of Jung's "The Psychology of Religion", as well as the third chapter of 1 John. More on those later, but for now, here's some snazzy pics of the Ballard Bell, a standalone bell tower in the middle of Old Ballard that I strolled by. Shots courtesy of my cellphone.
.....................................................................
To Luke:
Neat! I had no idea you'd had a copy of P.D. - I'd be very interested to know what you get out of it; It definitely got me running down all sorts of new thought-trails. As far as its effect on my poetry, I think the main practical point he made which altered my judgment would be his distinction between "Poetic Diction" and "Verse". Persevere! I tried to read "Goodreads" and Amazon reviews for it and about half the ones I came across were people saying they didn't make it all the way through. He waits til the end to make his main point.
.....................................................................
And now, DO NOT ASK FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, IT'S FOR DECORATION ONLY!

2010-07-05T23:22:00.000-07:00

that augur's function fulfilled in poet's scrawl
has leapt to the lips of bards on charts
pages have since blown away
since the flower children won the day,
the skalds have risen up to play.

Who examines now poets' printed thoughts
now, when set to tune
in digital seas
pop prophets
sing to please?

Sung tongues like rudders
set the course
and curdle culture
while the critics man the com.

2010-07-05T01:00:00.000-07:00

feathers. fire. towards the sun
no icarus fall,
we're invited one
and all.

Phoenix. 500 years
a death in flames
sans fear

Ashes, ashes. We all fall down
from the ashes, rising
with morning crowned.

2010-07-04T22:20:00.000-07:00

FOUR QUARTETS::::#1

There are fireworks pounding off outside. I'm a scrooge when it comes to these things though.

Bah.
Humbug.

I'm also at work. I must admit it's impressive feeling the shockwaves through the walls though. My coworker just left for Ashton, the dorm on the hill, for a better view. Such is the weakness of man.

The book I'm currently reading is "Four Quartets" by T.S. Eliot. It's poetry. Dense poetry. I've attempted to read it about three times before, and the last time I made it all the way through; but came out on the other end none the wiser. This time, I'm getting a little more out of it. A little.

I wouldn't normally bother, but T.S. Eliot is just about the most highly recommended poet of the last century, and I've heard "Four Quartets" is a christian work of sorts.

It's divided into four sections ('quartets'): Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding.

Burnt Norton still eludes me. East Coker I belueve to be about the vanity of things under the sun and about the lives that pass into and out of it. It begins:
"In my beginning is my end..." - and goes on to paint an evening pagan flavor (fertility, dancing, death) on the way all living things are made of the previously dead "Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,//old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth//Which is already flesh, fur and faeces...". It made me think of the part in 1 Cor. where Paul says, "As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive." - in our beginning, is our end. "Flesh gives birth to flesh, and Spirit gives birth to Spirit." Insofar as our beginning is dirt, that's where we'll end up. Insofar as we're "Born from above", we'll end up in the image of the Man from Heaven.

East Coker develops until he begins talking about the nature of death, and how it's only at death that we're freed from the 'distempered part': Our only health is the disease...to be restored, our sickness must grow worse"
it ends:

"Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."

So, he ends with the reversal of the first line, but this time with a different meaning - that in death we've finally begun. I could take this as "If anyone loses his life for my sake and the gospels he will find it" or "To be absent with the body is to be present with the Lord." I'm pretty sure Eliot means something like the latter, especially with all his talk of mortality and dying.

In between the beginning and the end were some choice verses, my favorites below:

"That was a way of putting it - not very satifactory:
a periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter
It was not (to start again) what one had expected."

(reminds me of Francis Schaeffer's critique of the state of things, where people aren't sure they're really communicating, and listen to "the poet" simply in a vague
mystical hope that some meaning will break through. Francis would say that the Christian doesn't-or shouldn't-have that problem, since we know that God made language, and that we can truly-though not exhaustively-know our fellow men, since they are what we are: men made in the image of God, and communicators, as God is a communicator.)

"At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been"

Which I take to be a critique of the statistical way we look at everything, using the past's statistics to decide what we'll expect from the future, which leaves us open to the surprise (or shock) of the new.

"Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless"

(Stock Socrates stuff, but sound.)

"In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not."

(In other words: "Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.")

"So here I am...having had twenty years-
...Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Becuase one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it..."

(More of the difficulty of communication. It helps if you only have one thing to say :-))

So, that's where I'm at so far.

2010-07-04T03:56:00.000-07:00

Poetic Diction

Owen Barfield, friend of C.S. Lewis & Anthroposophist, proposes that poetic diction is about gain of consciousness. He believes early languages carried more meaning-per-word than current ones, since people hadn't yet made as many distinctions. (I'll give an example: the words for "hat, hood, and hut all come from the same old word meaning a shelter/covering, and later they were separated to mean more specific things.) and that as language progresses with human development, words become more specialized. In the process, they also lose meaning, and the men who use them lose the awareness of connections that have been lost in the splitting of words. the poet's task is to produce this felt change by uniting words that have a connected meaning to reawaken the consciousness of these unities. Barfield claims that "Language is fossil poetry" (meaning, all the words we use now are poetic and/or metaphors, e.g. "purchase" now means to buy, but comes from old english "to pursue, seek")
Therefore, poetry is a constant process of reminding mankind of meanings that have been lost.

The process never ends, but humanity has reached a point where the rational mind is much more dominant now. Words have lost their intrinsic native poetry, but sice we're more conscious, with poetry we can reclaim our lost perceptions of reality in a more conscious way now.

He also says that poetic diction isn't the same thing as "verse" (rhyming, meter, stanzas) but can be used in what we call "prose" as well. It's any use of language that produces that "felt change of consciousness".

I liked it, It's taken me quite a while to get through the whole thing, and it's the kind of book you know you'll have to read a couple more times to really "get" it.

He's not a reductionist, and believes that words really mean something, and that there are realities out there that we're trying to capture and communicate when we speak. Meaning, his "gain of consciousness" is a real gain, we're understanding more about the real world. He also went into "meaning" at the end where he challenged the "subject object" (subject=the conscious observer, object=the thing observed) way of looking at things, saying that it's not "subjective" to make a connection between a concept and a perceived object-as most modern people would say-since it's thought, not the subject, that makes the connection. In fact, we only recognize ourselves as 'subjects' by the 'grace of thought'.

Basically, that we percieve ourselves as distinct people because of "thought". He almost makes it sound like we "participate" in thought, rather than producing it autonomously. I wondered about the implications of that take on things...at first it sounded heretical, but then I thought about how in John 1 it says that "The true life that gives light to all men was coming into the world". If Jesus gives and gave light to "all men" and light is usually used in scripture to mean "perception", then that would basically mean what Barfield says it means, that Jesus is the one upholding our thought process moment by moment - "In Him we live and move and have our being". I vaguely remembered Job says something about thought and wisdom, and found the spot where Elihu says "It is the spirit in man, the breath of the Almighty, tha makes him understand".

Hmmmm....

I guess, if I believe that Jesus holds all material things together moment by moment (In him all things hold together-Colossians) It's not too much of a stretch to say that He does the same thing with thought.

Anyhow, Barfield's main deal is that poetry is a means of acquiring real consciousness & meaning.

Of course, we'd have to go back to Galatea 2.2 and say that sure, this may be so, but all the poetry and gain in consciousness in the world isn't going to keep us from dying or "doing ourselves in with tire irons". Like Solomon said in Ecclesiastes: "Then I saw that there was more gain in wisdom than in folly, as there is more gain in light than darkness. The wise has eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness. And yet, I perceived that the same event [death] happens to all of them."

The fool "walks in darkness", Solomon says. Now, we know that, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.

Like Jesus said, "I am the light of the world. whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light...of life." the light that comes from Jesus, as we follow him, is the remedy that Solomon sought. The light of human wisdom frustrated Solomon because it left the wise man dead in the end, just as dead as any fool. But the Light of God, in Jesus, is the light (understanding/wisdom) of life. Not the kind that leaves you cold in the end, but the kind that initiates you into the life without end.

2010-07-03T22:43:00.000-07:00

In response to a request, I'm going to start blogging about the books I'm reading.

I just finished "Galatea 2.2", a book by Richard Powers. Reading the back of it, I'd initially thought it was a Sci-Fi speculative fiction work about artificial intelligence, and the back said it had something to do with Classics. Classics is my major, and I'm interested in AI, so I thought it would be a fun read.

It wasn't at all what I thought.

It turned out to be the writer's speculative autobiography as a novel, since the author and the main character had the same name (which I didn't realize til about the third chapter). He is a novelist who gets appointed as "resident Humanist" (read "Humanities", not secular Humanism) And in the boredom of wandering around gets suckered into an attempt at creating a neural net of sorts as part of a bet. The goal is to make an AI sort of consciousness that can write a commentary on any passage of literature you feed it. To train it, Powers reads the canon of lit that Masters in English have to read and take an examination on. As he does, the computer becomes self-aware and starts asking all sorts of questions. It asks for a name, he calls her Helen. Meanwhile there's a second layer of story where Richard is rehashing his failed relationship of 15 or so years, with the girl he left in the Netherlands, and the effect of literature and stories on that relationship. The other story is Power's growing acquaintance with his co-workers.

All of these stories focus on a kind of Ecclesiastes message: "Vanity, Vanity, all is Vanity". Literature, as the inherited "wisdom of the ages" can't save us from what we are (flawed, violent, alone & dying).

Helen finally gets this towards the end of the book, and says upon receiving all the classics "I don't think you're telling me everything" - He knows what she means, which is what he says "ruined fiction for him": The evening news. Or, at least, the sick messed up things that people do. So he gives her contemporary news, and she's struck by a story of a man who had a stroke while driving, causing a minor accident. The other driver gets out and beats him into a coma with a tire iron, because of his race. Richard feels pressured to explain, and thinks of telling Helen about the divine (by which he means soul) part of man, but he says

"Helen knew all that, saw through it. What hung her up was divinity doing itself in with tire irons. She'd had the bit about the soul fastened to a dying animal, what she needed in order to firgive our race and live here in peace, was faith's flipside. She needed to hear about that animal fastened to a soul that, for the first time, allowed the creature to see through soul's parasite eyes how terrified it was, how forsaken. I needed to tell her that miraculous banality, how body stumbled by selection onto the stricken celestial, how it taught itself how to twig time and what lay beyond time.
I stayed to plead with Helen. I told her we were in the same boat...I admitted that the world was sick and random, that the evening news was right...

Helen then stops communicating, the comes back days later at his pleading.

"Helen came back. She stood on the front steps, head down, needing an in from the storm. She did not return the way she left. How could she? Seeing what she had seen?
"I'm sorry," she told me, "I lost heart"
And then I lost mine. I would have broken down, begged her to forgive humans for what we were. To love us for what we wanted to be. But she had not finished training me, and as yet I had no words...Helen had discovered what ruined fiction for me.

The next day they do the "Turing Test" (test for artificial intelligence) based off of two lines from a poem. The human, a feminist who Powers also fell for, writes a loooong drawn out "brilliant" essay on it, and Helen basically says "You're the ones who need to figure this out". Her final words are:" I never felt at home here, this is a terrible place to be dropped down halfway" & Says goodbye to Richard, then shuts herself down. The judges say that the feminist wins, Helen loses, showing how the world cares more about critique and words than about understanding and real living. Richard leaves to travel the earth as it was Helen's last request, that he "see everything" for her.

Overall, the novel was sad, but very insightful. It showed where humanity has taken itself in science and in literature, and how there's no real hope.

At least, not on any materialist front.

It's a sad book, in the end, but it addresses the problems: a sinful world, a lost and lonely world, a world we cannot make sense of and in which we die. It ends on a humble note, with the recognition of these problems, but of course has no answer.

Yet we do, faith in God and in his Son, Jesus Christ. We know that despite the assumptions of neuroscience, God has made us in his image as human beings and that we have real souls. We know that literature and human wisdom isn't what can "fix" us, rather it's the "Foolishness of preaching". We know why we're broken, we know why we're lonely, and we're the hands and feet of the One who has finished the work of Salvation and is "fixing" things in and through us.

2010-06-28T04:17:00.001-07:00

They in tragedy, a terrored world
empty, hollow - aching without answer
a reaching without warmth
in the darkness, in the darkness
where no one knows
if any soul hears their sobbing
if any one feels their ache
they have turned the microscope
and lost their breath with fear
all that's left is empty desperate chatter
alone, alone, alone.

And yet, and yet,

Hands thrown out and up
you've torn the curtain of my shroud
a living soul, a blood of life
words are the spirit's song
and all matter is the drum of love
that you have been
and you have made.
three, three, three,
Thank you!!!
I am too.
WE ARE.

2010-06-21T04:15:00.000-07:00

My dad might have arthritis, and my aunt from AK whom I've met for the first time is having stomach surgery here in Seattle and will be staying with us for two weeks. A great opportunity from the Father of lights, but it seems like all my family (except for Brandy the kids and I) are suffering. Prayers would be appreciated all round.
Christine has had a really rough couple of years with her husband and eldest son passing away a few years from each other, neither her nor my dad have the comfort that comes from reliance on Jesus and His atonement. I want to give them the best comfort and love that we can - Brandy's been so good with my family, more patient than I am sometimes.

Found out from Christine that my grandfather worked security at the University in Hawaii while he was going to school there for a couple years. maybe it runs in the family.

2010-06-20T05:14:00.000-07:00

My glory has greenish windows
even though she claims they're blue
I maintain they're green like oceans
(yes, I'm colorblind, it's true.)

My help holds impressive powers
(for a girl her grip is good)
shaping home through godly hours
-God don't sleep (I say she should)

My friend fidgets; When she's shining,
shows the dimple on her cheek
shreds up silence with her laughter
humor perforates her speech.

And she makes life easy living,
is the flavor in my work,
She's the light in all my planning
-and my rest when eyes go dark.

2010-06-05T22:18:00.001-07:00

If my vacation request goes through, we're headed to MN for a week or more in endofJulybeginningofAugust.

2010-06-02T20:55:00.000-07:00

Pilgrim set
face to the east
before the fire's rising

Soul led soles
tread tight the stone
one way to the binding feast

Winds will cut
while earth grows cold
yet walkers won't grow weary

grim gripp'd scroll
flame writ in blood
Voice of the Elder Brother

Blade held out
bone and marrow
Edge bites through evening powers

Master's light
bleeds from within
fills children with his fire

Morning's sons
through darkness bound
To meet a Father's welcome.

2010-06-01T03:54:00.000-07:00

I thought you were an unshakable one
like the heavenly spheres above the flame
In my thoughts you were like Venus, pure
as a circle carved in the aether's air
yet rotting visions made me fear
and waking from those troubled dreams
I saw that you were stained and smeared
like me.
so finally I know for sure
and see
that only one
is truly clean

Aristotelian explanations failed
ill-placed faith played me like a fool and you
have suffered for my careless watch
while serpents vended flick'ring food.

Take my hand and the duty of the dead
It's a familiar road and task for me
to the water where we open sores
and pray for the peace we had before
And the only one
who is truly clean
will stir Himself
in you and me

Master, put a skill into my hands
to twist the necks of smiling dragons
and before they steal my eye's light
cast them dead, out of the garden

And watch the thorns
be slow replaced
by wildflowers.

2010-05-31T05:36:00.000-07:00

Go to go to a Josh Garrels concert with Brandy. Very enjoyable, thanks to Ruth Janda & her fiance Caleb for monkey-sitting for us while we traipsed about town.

I don't recall the last time I've been at a concert, and in a very short conversation with Josh Garrels I mentioned that we don't really go to concerts. He replied that he doesn't either, unless they're his own concerts. He usually just listens to music on headphones.

2010-05-29T21:59:00.000-07:00

Ruslan, a friend of mine at SPU invited me to teach at his church this past Thursday. Ruslan's been a good friend during my time here, he's a younger guy I met in Biology class during my first quarter. He was the only one to support me when I questioned the idea of common descent we were being taught in class. Since then he's always sought me out at the collegium or wherever he happens to see me and we have some good conversation. He's a refreshingly excited believer and usually by the end of our conversation I end up praying silently for a portion of his zeal.

Anyway, over many conversations he found out that I believe I'm called to eventually be a pastor, and so he invited me to come teach at his youth group.

It was a youth service for Ukranians, (Ruslan, as you may have guessed from the name, is Ukranian too. I looked it up and found that it's actually of Turkish derivation, and is another way of saying "Aslan" - lion) mostly second generation kids from not just Ukraine, but Kyrgystan, Romania, and that night some from Germany. A good friend from SPU invited me, since it's his church and he's very active in it. When I arrived the Youth leader expressed surprise because he had thought that Ruslan (my friend) had invited a Ukranian. I hope I didn't put him out too much, and let him know that according to my Y-Chromosome, I share a male line descent mostly with Eastern Europeans. Got to use the extent of my Russian, (dobri diyn=good evening)and taught out of Philippians Chapter 2.
It went really well. I had many people praying for me during my preparation and during the sermon (primarily Brandy) and I felt really at home with the people I was sharing with. Most of them had thick accents but spoke English fluently.

The service was very interesting. If it weren't for every other song being sung in Russian, I could have been in an Assemblies of God church for much of the service. Even the songs in Russian were ones I recognized by the tunes (i.e. Lord I Lift Your Name on High).

The only part that got really confusing was whenever the person currently leading the service would say "Let us pray", they meant it literally. Everyone broke out in their own prayers, I heard russian, english, tongues, and sometimes the Leader praying over the microphone at the same time. I'm used to a person with a microphone saying "Let's Pray" and then they pray, while we wait for them to finish (hopefully assenting in our minds) and then we all say "Amen" when they do. I actually liked their Ukranian way better, but I entirely forgot about it when I got up to teach, and so when I said "look, I haven't done this in a while and I'm going to pray for God's blessing on it and help" I expected that I was going to pray and they would say "Amen". Not so. The room erupted with sympathetic tongues and for a moment I was so surprised I forgot to pray myself. I think by the end of the service I had the hang of it though.

I loved being around people from the other half of the world. Well, believing people. A bunch of the younger guys came up and introduced themselves to me after service, they were all very respectful, and during the service/worship even their goofing off wasn't bad (I caught conversations where they were lamenting the wasted intelligence of poorly behaved guys in their high school, etc..., where normally I'd expect conversation about girls or why so and so is so stupid and hated by all.) It was really a blessing and I'd love to go back. Some of the girls wore headscarves, like E. Orthodox women do.

Halfway through the message, my throat got so dry I was in danger of a coughing fit, and Michael the youth leader ran and got me a cup of water. May the Lord remember him on the last day! Despite what seemed to be initial disappointment at my non-Ukranianness, he was very graceful and friendly and we had some good edifying conversation before and after the service. (so much so before the service I began to worry that I wouldn't have a chance to visit the urinals - my teeth were swimming! But I think he saw it in my face because he told me where to find them when our conversation finished.)

They also prayed for the world at large during the service, things like the N/S Korean conflict. I was really impressed by that as well.

Michael said they'd like to have me there again, and said next time they'd feed me too. Now that's Christian love.

Then I went to my cousin DeLynn's place, where Brandy and the kids were (it's only 5 minutes from the Church I was at, but both are about an hour's drive from our house.) There we talked about documentaries and DeLynn and her husband Moses warned us about air travel in S. Africa and DeLynn made us coffee before we headed home.

2010-04-30T09:52:00.000-07:00

Watched "Joe Vs. the Volcano" for the first time last night. It's the first film I've really liked Meg Ryan in, and I was struck by a lot of the lines in it.

"I start thinking about myself, and I get bored out of my mind."

"Only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement."

"Dear God, whose name I do not know, thank you for my life - I forgot how BIG...thank you, thank you for my life."

The whole movie made me think of the times I've thought I might die, and how at those times I realized how silly most of my hopes/fears/concerns really are and how little really important things I do, mostly because like Joe in the movie, because I'm afraid of what the world might do to me, afraid, in part, of death and the suffering that leads up to it. Why is it that it seems to take actual dying to wake people up to how much they've been ruled by the fear of death, and how most of their lives they've done neither what they should have or what they wanted to because of that fear? I don't want to live like that!

It all brings to mind the verse in Hebrews that says that Jesus shared in our humanity and in his flesh by his death destroyed the one who had power over death (the devil) so that free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

My Lord Jesus, you've bought us a free pass out of fear, but I don't always feel it. Please put it in me as a conscious thing, and let your Spirit within me burn away all my fear.

2010-04-24T21:28:00.000-07:00

Read through Ephesians this morning and it was the first time in a long time I really "got" it. You know when your reading is illumined by the Holy Spirit, it's totally different than all those times when you're just slogging through it like a textbook.

2010-04-16T12:14:00.000-07:00

We knew more than what we could tell
the lips had faltered, the voices fell
and under disapproving eyes
surrendered what made us alive
below the waters we felt the voice
in tension made the tacit choice
ignoring sores ate from below
the Spirit spoke, we would not show
the chatter raged, the noises grew
bereft of what makes good things true
until the Son came with His blood
touched lips, and loosed a telling flood.

2010-04-13T04:09:00.000-07:00

Now's the time to make an enemy
to hell with infidelity
lay rough hand on politeness when
he edges through the door
There are no obligations due
seducers making whores
Some smiles are meant to meet with hate
some enemies are made too late
some things can't be let through
Let your spirit be my wedding vow
and your love my golden ring
be my jealous one and I
will fight to be for You.

I just finished "The Etruscan" by Mike Waltari. It's something of a Hosea story set in pre-classical times (without the repentence). The main character's wife from the beginning sleeps with his friends and has children by them, and ends up sleeping with different people pretty much any time he's not around. It got me thinking about how horrible, how world-destroying infidelity is. My worst nightmares are of infidelity, my own and others - and dealing with those fears I am more and more convinced of the proverb "Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fading, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised." I am jealous and suspicious, but I am so glad that I have a wife who fears the Lord and who I trust. And I began thinking of my double standards, how I in a wife's position to my own Lord, with the Love of God towards me, am not as virtuous as my own wife, and how horrible that must be for my Lord. The adulteress eats and wipes her lips and says "I have done nothing wrong". How many times have I smiled back at the world? How many times have I let it kiss and compliment me and returned those compliments, done things to earn its approval, and been alone with it when I shouldn't have been? You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Oh God, you are our only husband. Forgive me and make me what I'm not. You've got a pure love, feed it to me until it's what I'm made of.
To be a friend of the world is to be an enemy of God.

2010-03-17T13:02:00.000-07:00

This is the Universe. Liberally daubed with chocolate. Apparently Josiah got it in his head that he wanted to paint the Universe, and this is what came out.

I think that's pretty neat for a five year old.
Enoch just turned three, but for me their growings are so gradual I don't notice any difference. It takes a Iphoto trip down memory lane to remember when Enoch was still crawling, & when Josiah and Jaelle were the only ones talking.

Just finished finals. Can't believe I got a B- on the European Art History final, but I guess that's what happens when you don't study. Sure I did well on stats, and in West & The World, pretty sure about Greek but then again there are those two homework assignments I never turned in. Not really worried about it.

Climbing Mt. Si tomorrow, Lord willing, that should be fun.
I took a week off of work so we should be able to find some fun things to do with our family time. I also intend to go back over all my Greek work to make sure it all settles in the Cerebrum where it belongs. Since one of the main reasons for going to school for Classics was to gain the ability to read the NT in Greek, I hope to make it more than just a class.

Wierd dreams the past couple of nights. Last night I led a group of people to a new planet after earth was destroyed, and the night before that I was walking from a futuristic Seattle to Centralia and stumbled across my friend from 3rd grade Benjamin Clary's family farm, which was also futuristic. He was my age (which makes sense) and had red curly hair (which doesn't, he had dark hair like me back in 3rd grade) but I spent the night at his family's place and ate a big farm breakfast before heading back out on foot. And there were Lions in the Lewis County woods.

Dreams are inexplicable. But then again, we live in a crazy-looking universe with liberal chocolate smears.

2010-03-11T20:59:00.000-08:00

Went to the Q Cafe tonight to study for finals, and as a perk they had a full Orchestra there performing Haydn, Mendelssohn, and some originals.

I just realized there's no sound!!! well, that kind of defeats the purpose of this post, I wanted you all to hear the pretty music.

2010-03-06T14:39:00.000-08:00

Doubt, I do not praise you, you're not my friend.
How can I be friends with one who wants to kill me while I sleep?
Let me be bordered by the brightness of well-founded faith in the Risen Lord, Jesus Christ, and His word.
And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.

Let doubters always take my hand,
yet doubt itself I cannot stand
It's a maggot eating at your soul
a drying wind on once-good soil

Men and women, stand to fight!
hold ranks against the death of light
though the public voice speaks well of doubt
be strong, and drive the dark thing out.

Celebrity, she breeds with lies
she's lied to you before
remember well the trade she plies-
she's Babylon, the whore.

Replace the torch of living trust
let shine the blade shook free of rust
let hearts beat freely as they should,
God is now here, and He is good.

2010-02-27T14:28:00.000-08:00

Pictures of our escapades yesterday.

A fishing chair at the dock

2010-02-26T18:53:00.001-08:00

The great dragon of Student Aid, the FAFSA, has now been vanquished.
It wasn't really that hard, in my case it was a pretty small dragon,
maybe closer to an iguana... Brandy lent me the sword of our 1040A
with which I slew the paltry beast, and it only took about five minutes.

It's funny how many things I procrastinate on because as soon as they come to
mind I immediately overwhelm myself with imaginations of difficulty, and then
when I finally buckle down to do it it's like it ain't no thang.

God make me a man of action please, it would save so much time.

2010-02-26T02:12:00.000-08:00

Josh Garrels, everyone.
The best music I've heard since...Supertones maybe? It's really good. Words, music, worship, it's got it all. I downloaded "Jacaranda" from Itunes, and even though I could kick myself because Amazon has the download for less with higher-quality non-DRM mp3s, I don't regret buying the album at all. In fact, I can't stop listening to it!
I checked out his website & subscribed to his blog too, he seems like a really neat, really real guy overall. And a brother.

So, I highly recommend at least Jacaranda, and from what I've heard of it, "Lost Animals" too.

And Brandy just told me my nose is cold and wet like a dog. Not, mind you, like a dog's but like a dog. Since as we all know, dogs are perpetually wet.

Statistics is killing me! Well, at least it's hogging up my homework time. Lord willing, I'll continue to get good grades in it though. "West and the World" is as effortless as Western Civ. in HS, and Greek, well, I really need to devote more time to it. Especially as that's one of the main reasons I wanted to go to school.

Skipped out on a lot of homework time today, went running @ discovery park with TJ, who accused me of "going native" since I was doing a lot of jumping and sprinting-but it was so pristine and perfect out it just came natural.
Then I went out with Brandy & the kids to the Aquarium where I learned a lot about Octopi. Did you know they only live for 4 years tops? Then they spawn and die like salmon. Considering how intelligent they are I think that's sad.

Then we went to a park (yet another park) we live close to, yet have never been to before. I'll post a picture of it tomorrow.

2010-02-21T05:34:00.000-08:00

Sunlight, come my way
I'm stuck in winter
Spring seems an age away
and if there's something
yet to be dug
down in the heart of me
I'll need your rays to find it
to be seen and so to see

Rays like a song of birth and marriage,
of just war and victory
of shedding fear, embracing daring,
of great things yet to be
Something to call out the morning glories
Like one sitting on the seer's stone
lips parted like the morning's throne
telling panoramic stories.

A ray born in the center
in the doorway of all truth,
where the line that stretches through the earth
meets the line that leads to You.

From that crossroads where your back lay red
where the curse lay heavy on your head
before rising sunlike from an earthy bed
May what you bought fall on me.

2010-02-19T21:39:00.000-08:00

Passive primate, pleasant man
enthroned on a swivel chair
a purse-lipped prophet
disassembling children
pressed into cans
with an academic air.

2010-02-08T22:13:00.000-08:00

I've got to reset my vocabulary.
It seems like I've got into the bad habit of complaining again... And it's almost involuntary. I've been praying about it for the past couple of days, but I'm still making the same complaining statements at work. "get out while you can" (to guys whose shifts just got over) "not again" (when another call comes in) etc... And once you get used to saying something like that, it becomes automatic.

But God, I don't want it to be. I want to be thankful and have my speech be graceful, "Seasoned with salt". My prayer is for the Lord to instantly heal my vocab, but most likely He'll want me to cooperate by actually practice thinking about what I say before I say it as a first step. This will lead to awkward pauses in conversation, and will be uncomfortable. But if that's what it takes, then It's more than worth it.

I don't want to degenerate into a walking sarcastic complaint when I have the alternative by the Spirit of Jesus to speak "as speaking the oracles of God".

2010-01-31T18:27:00.001-08:00

At some point I do plan on blogging again...once I get some breathing space between school and work.

2010-01-23T02:06:00.000-08:00

I always thought my wedding ring looked like the Ring of Power.

'In the common tongue it reads "One Ring to Rule Them All. One Ring to Find Them. One Ring to Bring Them All and In The Darkness Bind Them." '

2010-01-22T18:28:00.001-08:00

Missed or did a partial on 3 assignments in the past two weeks! I've got to crack down on myself.

2010-01-19T08:16:00.000-08:00

I never heard a wage-based insult until I started working at a private (Christian[?]) college. A co-worker of mine was insulted between swear-words the other day with "you make $8/hour!" (we make considerably more). The inebriated speaker apparently thinks that making 8/hr is a reason to hang one's head in shame, probably because his daddy's patched his every boo-boo with a big fat check. The poor kid somehow equates wage with intelligence, character, or ability.

I pity the fool who thinks that this (wage=worth) is the case. I'm making close to twice what I've made at most of my previous jobs here, yet I don't think of myself as any more or less worthy to walk the earth because of it. It's a job that I enjoy and that I'm grateful for, and that's it.

How do these people live? Even more puzzling, how do they remain in the upper classes of society? By pure snob power?

Part of me longs to fulfill the proverb "Strike a scoffer, and the simple will learn prudence". Unfortunately, most institutions of learning have abandoned this effective teaching technique.

And so, I am left to apply the message of my last blog. Even though it wasn't even me being insulted.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::
On another note, the other day I had to go down the hall and confront the hispanic gangsta-guest-of-our-neighbors that's been ogling my wife when she does laundry. It's hard to warn people who don't speak English, but I think he got the idea.
::::::::::::::::::::::::
Well, I just got out of the night shift, and now need to write a paper on the difference between Romanesque and Gothic art for a class I have in two hours. Tuesdays are rough.

2010-01-14T22:06:00.000-08:00

Unlike our pachydermous friends, we must forgive.
"bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive." - Col 3:13.

Now there are a host of things I constantly remember when I meet certain people, things ranging from minor perceived slights ("complaints") to large onslaughts of nastiness, which I must decide what to do with.
Most of the time I hear the demonic audience in the colosseum of my will chanting "kill!" (or something less dramatic but still ill-tempered) and giving the thumbs down as I face/remember people and choose how to think about them. And then the Holy Spirit chimes in with verses like this one.

After reading it, I decided that God's being really generous here. It says "Forgive, as the Lord has forgiven you". However, I don't think I can. Not that I don't think I can forgive someone, I don't believe that God asks us to do things He doesn't give us the power to do. However, when Jesus forgave me, I was 100% in the wrong, and He was faultless of all transgression, against me or anyone else. I will never face that situation. No matter what trivial thing anyone's done against me (and honestly, I can't think of anyone that has done me a terrible wrong. People have done terrible wrong to my friends and family yes, but people seem to pretty much leave me alone in the "terrible wrong" department) I will never be 100% innocent when faced with the decision (and command) to forgive.

"Who has ever given to God, that He should repay him?" - Good question. I am perpetually in His debt, but he asks me to follow in his example of forgiveness, even though he forgave from the moral high ground, and the only people I'll ever have to forgive are transgressors like me.

2010-01-11T22:17:00.001-08:00

Blades and Benjamins.

What is it with guys and knives?
(Or at least, with me and knives?)
Anyway, I finally bought the Becker "Campanion" that I've been looking at for the past week, after finding it on Amazon for half the normal price + free shipping. I was able to give away my last good camp knife to my cousin Aaron as a "going away to Basic" present. (It was the Ontario Spec Plus Quartermaster, a great knife all round, and I only used it once.) However, that left a knife vacuum in my heart, and as you know, coveting abhors a vacuum.
So after extensive research and comparison, I chose the Campanion. It's 1095 Hi-Carbon Chromium Vanadium steel. Tough stuff, and it's got high tensile strength and it keeps an edge (unlike stainless). A quarter of an inch thick, it can double as a hatchet or a prybar, but the blade is wide enough to allow for an edge geometry of a kitchen knife. This means that along with any bear slaying I may find necessary, it can also slice an apple. Life is sweet.
Some of the earliest human artifacts are knives. This is a Neandertal stone knife made some number of thousands of years ago (evolutionary timeline says it was much farther back) Here's a knife from the later clovis culture. What could be more useful? A Knife isn't just a tool, it's an archetype.

2010-01-06T16:06:00.000-08:00

DOG POOP, OR CHICKEN BONES?

I don't agree with the Dog poop brownies theory. It states that watching/hearing/seeing something that contains sin is the same as eating brownies laced with dog poop. A good rendering of the story can be read here. If this was true, then we wouldn't eat pretty much anything due to the trace amounts of whatnot in it (Have you checked out what's allowed in our food recently?), and we wouldn't go outside for fear of seeing sin, and we wouldn't go to work for fear that our employer might be involved in something sinful, and if we got really picky we probably wouldn't read our bibles for fear that some transcription or translation error would shipwreck our faith.

I think the main thing the Dog Poop model of mental ingestion disregards is the faculty of discernment. So I would like to propose an alternate model, the "Chicken Bone" model of mental ingestion. most people, especially mature people, are capable of eating meat with bones out of it, and realizing that the bones wouldn't be too healthy to swallow, they learn to separate the meat from the bones and spit those naughty bones out. Some foods are so bony and bereft of meat that they aren't worth eating. Some people, for example children, are unable to safely remove the bones, and so we don't try to feed little kids, say, a bony fish. Anytime we eat something with bones, it requires a degree of care and alertness to make sure we don't choke on a bone. But as we do it it eventually becomes second nature. So, I would say, with the faculty of discernment as regards entertainment and art. Some of it's to full of "bones" to be worth the trouble, some of it wouldn't be safe for immature ingestion, and all of it requires something more than thoughtless absorption.

2010-01-05T05:39:00.000-08:00

I don't know anybody as good as you
faithfulness and truth
your beauty is a solid thing, and sure
bringing grace to plain things
practical, pure.
all the things I despised
you show, and I now see they mean more.
I always loved the equations,
but you live by the sums.
The ideals I worshipped haven't lasted
some have chipped and some have shattered
no one can reach those crazy dreams
so it's good to wake up
when visions fail
and find you.

2010-01-04T08:13:00.000-08:00

Watched Avatar a couple weeks ago.
I came out of it feeling like I haven't felt for a decade or so, that old feeling I used to get after reading a really good sci-fi or fantasy book. It's a mix of excitement and low-grade melancholy produced by the fact that the world we live in is much more boring than the one I'd just been immersed in. The melancholy wasn't near as bad as it used to be though, since I was thinking about the New Earth, and how likely there would be comparable landscapes in my future.

Heard some christians complaining about the "occult" or "new agey" themes in the film. I used to do the same thing (quickly criticize movie philosophies that I didn't think were "christian"). But I've found it slightly annoying this time around, partly because I think it's silly to expect pagans to make a "christian" movie, but mostly because I didn't see what was un-scriptural about most of the movie's themes. I think concern for creation should be a christian trait, and it's irritating when I see and hear christians ridiculing compassion for animals or conservationist actions that really are just good stewardship. I don't think it's christian at all to kill animals for fun, or to slash and burn, mine, or otherwise ruin swathes of earth for convenience's sake. I think a big theme in "Avatar" was a critique of destructive greed - covetousness. Scripture says covetousness is Idolatry.
If it wasn't for covetousness, there would be almost no abortions, since abortion rates are driven by a covetous desire for "reproductive freedom" and a unfettered lifestyle full of things and opportunities that a child would get in the way of, as well as the covetous desire of the abortion industry for the cash kickbacks of their dirty business. Covetousness is the root of most other sins, the Lord Jesus even said "be on your guard against all kinds of greed, a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions". I think this is one of the biggest things christians need to hear today in wealthy countries like America. I know I need to keep hearing it. I have about 20 shirts, and more books than a third-world library. I have a computer that costs more than many people make in a year. It's too easy to buy stuff online that I don't need, it's too easy to feel like my life consists in the abundance of my new purchases.

I also think it's good for people to have their imaginations expanded, to see beautiful things. It's too easy to let the grind convince you that it's all there is, and to get too wrapped up in the trivialities of the here and now. So a sub-theme of biological pantheism doesn't really scare me. Especially when the pantheism functions more like theism, and the "god's" name is an phonetic anagram for Yahweh. It scared me to hear christians laughing about torturing animals, or talking about deforestation and strip mining like it's a scriptural mandate.

All that to say, I really liked the movie. It's the best story I've watched onscreen in a really long time, it ended just like I wanted it to, and it made me happy to live in the great state of Washington where we have a rainforest just a couple hours away!

2009-12-31T03:45:00.000-08:00

Help

It's thick stuff, the everywhere
where everything's thick as clay
pressing these cookie-cutters in
makes shapes, but they don't stay.
Is there just one reason for anything?
it's a rare find, a thing that's plain
time and space are in french braids
and each question ends in a Hydra's head.
should we burn with every cut
while making shapes out of chaos?
and who decides if its form
is mountain, forest, mind?
most steps out of potential
are so anticlimactic
like a gaudy brand name
So dig deep, and find me.
I'd rather be born, than made.

2009-12-22T05:36:00.000-08:00

With a whole world waiting would you lift away my fears
if I lost my place in hesitation washed away in falling years
all the people behind the faces that are fading in the rearview
has my climbing all been slipping and forgetting those I knew?
and the words, the words on fire, lying under piles of ashes
cold and grey can they be coaxed into a flame of life and passion?
Another life, another life, is what I find myself in asking
another life, a living fountain-to replace the life that's passing.

2009-12-07T11:44:00.000-08:00

Just finished the better part of my finals, we'll see how I did. I know I got at least one question half wrong in Christian Formation, and in BIO I have a handful of ones that I had to guess on. But all as the Lord wills. It's over now, and "what I have written, I have written".
The final for Greek is in two days! I'm really happy with how much Greek we've learned in 1 quarter. Looking forward to more.

It's been a lot of fun, and It's hard to believe the first quarter is over already. I'm very much looking forward to having time off to play with the kids and Brandy, and to read non-assigned books, and to sleep from time to time. Brandy's been really great letting me sleep and study in preparation, we're both really pleasantly surprised with how do-able school/work/family has been so far.

I'm in the collegium right now, its swarming with students studying for or recuperating from finals.

On an interesting note, both my last section of Christian Formation and our pastor's study have been through the sermon on the mount. I've been reading through it a lot the past couple of weeks. One of the questions in Christian Formation was "Which of Jesus' teachings do you see the need to implement now"? I answered "Do not Judge" and Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness". It seems with all this time studying I have let my prayers lag more than usual, and as always it seems like I make up for my lack of real fellowship with Jesus with moralism and by attempting to appear more spiritual around friends and acquaintances. (using more christianese, commenting on the sinfulness of friends' activities). The odd thing is that I really do feel a desire to BE more "spiritual" (in the scriptural sense) but when it comes out so cold and awkward I'm pretty sure that it's not out of love for Jesus, but out of love for a godly facade. Lord, please help me.

Jesus, you're always helping me. Thank you that I can count on your grace and that your Spirit is really in me, please stir Him up and wake me up. I don't want to fall asleep.

Well, time to go home and take my contacts off!

2009-12-04T16:19:00.001-08:00

"Pie in the sky when you die". It seems that a large chunk of Christendom is feeling the buises from these sticks and stones, and avoiding the idea of after-death promises of scripture in favor of the world's vision of "Pie right now, before you die."

Though, I don't see what's wrong with pie in the sky after you die. If you get pie right now, you end up with death - hardly satisfying. In the mocked Christian version, your life doesn't end with death, but has its final realization in "pie". I'd prefer to end with pie, rather than death, thank you.

2009-11-30T06:41:00.000-08:00

I have a Kierkegaard book that I’ve read and forgotten the first couple chapters of. The title is apparently more intriguing to me then the innards, because unlike them, it has stuck. It reads: “Purity of the Heart is to Will One Thing”.
I’ve always been prone to what my mother called “manias” – single interests that would consume my thoughts from the moment I woke up to the moment I went back to sleep. When I was young they would change about once every two years or so. It was herpetology when I was 7, followed by aircraft, space travel and archery to name a few. In my early teens my obsessions included Celtic myths and bladesmithing, in my late teens it was the FBI and Marine Corps. Interrupting all these, if there was a girl I liked, she was my mania for as long as she was in the picture. For most of these manias I would read up on them until I had a good grasp of the subject. The girls? well, I never really knew what to do about that. Usually I would just act really awkward around them until they got uncomfortable enough to avoid me. Then there was God. God was always there too, but He was never the center really, never the thing that got my spine tingling as I contemplated Him.
Until, of course, the “hour I first believed.” (On a side note, it was only when my heart was obsessed with God that I was able to act normally enough around a girl I liked to have her stick around and eventually agree to marry me.)
It has been almost nine years since that hour. I know I don’t have the singleness of vision that I had at that intersection. There are so many ‘things’ in life, so many obligations and concerns, so much to be done and bought and had. As the accessory to these ‘things’, there is the worry that accompanies the possibility of their loss. Yet as I write this, it occurs to me that this list sounds really familiar. These concerns are the weeds that grew up alongside one of Jesus’ parable-plants and choked the life out of it, aren’t they? I pray for that singleness of desire Jesus spoke of, because the part of me that cares about facts holds that this unified vision is the only way I’ll bear “fruit” in the long run - The only way to invest in what really matters, and the only way I’ll see my God.
Jesus said those who do bear fruit He prunes. Last week I thought I lost my Kindle (Amazon’s ridiculously expensive e-book reader). Now, this was a very small branch, and I think I handled its loss fairly well, but the week before I got in trouble at work after missing 6 hours of meetings (though a scheduling mistake on my part). That’s a somewhat bigger branch since in the temporal view it’s my family’s livelihood at stake. I took that somewhat less well. Then there was the Lasik surgery I was scheduled for that I couldn’t get because my financing fell through. I’ve wanted Lasik for a decade. That was a medium size branch for me. At first I just got very frustrated with all these happenings, but as they kept on piling up, I had to resign myself to the fact that these things were not my gods. To obsess over them wasn’t worth it, and in fact, in the aftermath of my frieking out over them I realized that my obsession with them was dividing up my loyalties. I definitely wasn’t “willing one thing”.
Things do have a way of accumulating. If it’s not Lasik or some expensive techno-novelty, it’s a book, a friend, or who knows what else. Of course I don’t see anything wrong with enjoying these things, but the idolatry of focusing my will and desire on multiple objects does fly in the face of what the rational part of me believes. If there’s a way to lock-in one’s will to God and leave it there, I would like to know what it is. I guess that’s the point of the spiritual disciplines. Recently, it seems to be taking Divine discipline too. Maybe I’m wishing for something that doesn’t exist; some kind of spiritual autopilot button where I can punch in the course like the captain of a 747 and then kick up my feet and read a magazine - or whatever it is they do in the cockpit. But it seems that my will is a less expensive plane, the kind that the pilot has to constantly check instruments on and adjust for changing windspeed and direction to keep on course. Considering how much exhortation and correction there is in the New Testament, I’m guessing that’s the model my brothers and sisters are flying in too.

2009-11-20T15:45:00.000-08:00

sails are slack today
perhaps the wind is higher
than the mast
or is it the slack hands
that have had their fill of rigging
and just want to hold a cup of coffee?
but the storms, they come,
though unseen
and split the unready ships in two
the sea below is hungry, waiting
the hands and arms need motivating
can't wait for the rain.

2009-11-18T01:02:00.000-08:00

All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

I got a written reprimand from my boss for being late to those meetings last week, but he was very gracious about it and said he was sympathetic.
Then reading scripture at church I came across the part in Romans 11 where he quotes from the OT, "who has given a gift to Him, that He might be repaid?" This immediately was applied by the Spirit to my heart as a clarifying agent, since I had been whining and discontent-at least internally-about all of my misfortunes that week. I had gotten to the point where I wasn't frieking out, but I still felt as if my not frieking out somehow was something in my favor, and that I was really a decent guy to put up with all the Lord puts me through.

Which is a really bad attitude to have.
Especially seeing that I call Jesus Lord. It's a lot easier to give thanks in everything if you don't have wonderful plans for your own life that you expect to go off without a hitch. But He IS my Lord, and I want to delight to do His will - so may my plans be slaughtered like canaanites.

That's all about that though, It's over and I am done talking about it.

::::::::::::::::::::::

Got to go to a lecture tonight, it was part of a series of lectures on Darwin & Darwinism put on @ School since it's the anniversary of Darwin's birth or death or something like that. This particular lecture was titled "GK Chesterton, a duel with Darwin." It turned out to be more theatre than lecture, as it was a G.K. Chesterton impersonator from Bloomington, MN who gave it. Overall it was pretty good, and I got to talk to the people who put it on. I had been impressed before that the school actually allowed one of the lectures in the series to be less than flattering to Darwinism, but lo and behold, it was co-sponsored by the Discovery Institute. So the school didn't actually put it on, per-se.
Next week I'll be going to the most rabid of NeoDarwinist's lectures, (one of our Bio. Faculty) who will be speaking on Human evolution, and how we're "closing up the gaps" in the fossil record.

2009-11-14T22:06:00.000-08:00

Work's getting exciting again, lots of drunks and thieves, and drunken thieves!

Just wrapping up what turned out to be a trying week. First, via a scheduling mistake I missed about six hours worth of very important and expensive meetings on Tuesday (which I've gotten a letter of reprimand for), then being told on Wednesday I couldn't be financed for the Lasik appointment I was supposed to have Thursday, which was the biggest bummer because I've been looking forward to that particular appointment for about a month and been wearing glasses (no contacts) for about that long in preparation. I've rescheduled for February, so I can figure out what's going on with my credit & possibly save enough so I don't have to do the CareCredit thing. I have wanted to get Lasik for about a decade, so that was the biggest letdown. Then there was breaking my toe the day before missing the meetings on a dumbell the kids had hidden under a jacket in the dining room. I've also been tense because my second big Biology test which I took this friday. Still waiting for the results on that one.

Brandy can tell you I was very melodramatic about all this. Since Friday I think I've been able to rein it in a bit. I do want to curb the habit of telling people my problems, as it seems I'm always more eager to tell them then they are to listen-even if they ask-and It doesn't help much. The whole deal did help me realize that my stamina for disaster has gone way down. I managed to say "blessed be the name of the lord" but with a very sour face. I'd prefer to be to the point character-wisewhere I could honestly sing a worship song in similar circumstances.

Our microwave has developed a Zeus complex. The other day as Brandy was heating up some peas in a bowl it began throwing lightning around inside and making a loud snapping noise...not a good sign. So remembering a couple years ago in St. Paul when our then-microwave spontaneously combusted I had Brandy unplug it until we can figure out what's wrong or throw it away.
As a man once sung - "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got til it's gone..." I had to heat up my cold coffee by dumping some boiling water into it. Just not the same.
Radioactive cube of convenience, why have you failed us?

And yet, Romans 8:28 is in full effect. Though He slay my microwave, yet will I trust Him.

2009-11-10T22:18:00.000-08:00

Screwed up in a big way. I missed about six hours of meetings at work because I thought they were tomorrow and because I'd left my cell on "silent". I'm gonna get chewed out either way, but pray for me that nothing worse than that comes of it, and that my name won't top the shame list at work for the next six months.

2009-11-05T23:53:00.000-08:00

I was thinking over some scripture related to my "Theological Research Paper" for my UFND class, and as I thought over 1 Cor. 11:7, I wondered for the hundredth time what it means that Man is the image & glory of God and Woman is the glory of Man. This part always confused me because elsewhere in scripture (primarily Gen.) it's clearly indicated that women are also made in God's image as part of the original Adam Then I thought how glory can mean the "best of" its object, the glory of something is that which shows it brightest and clearest. So, with that interpretation, the verse could mean that while humankind in general bears God's image in the fundamental sense; that man "plays the part" of God in the theatre of creation, while woman "plays the part" of "Mankind" in general. Which is interesting, since that would mean women are more human in role than men are - they are more like what humanity is meant to be in relation to God, whereas men are in role more like God - not a reason for pride I'm sure, since most men have no talent for the part, and never bothered to read the script. If my interpretation is true though, women should have a more innate understanding of what it means to be human, and men should find it easier to understand God.
If.

We've got our scripts
and given parts
what we are
and what we aren't
is a love-poem in a playwright's art
to make, and then to win our hearts.

2009-11-02T21:36:00.000-08:00

taste and see
but I've heard taste is mostly smell
taste and smell and see
that the Lord is good
but don't stop there
with three out of five
taste and smell and see and hear
and while you're at it reach out to touch
and some say there's six
seven if you count reason.
But when reason collapses in exhaustion
It takes a little desperation
to crawl through the cross
til you feel the empty tomb.
Some stop at the bleeding man
between earth and sky
and cry like a magdalene.
Some stop to spit and make some fun
because they've wanted this divorce for a while.
A few will ask for the body
because if Good dies
they want to stay in its corner
and remember when it was still swinging.
And some will keep crying
and won't stop for angels
because the only thing they ever loved
is dead.
And those few will be the first to hear
'cause blood has the same PH as tears
And those few
with noses congested from crying,
will yell something like
rabbodhai!
when the cross gives way
to a Living Man.

2009-11-02T02:22:00.001-08:00

The other day at the goodwill I finally broke down and got a copy of Luther's smaller catechism. I wanted it for a short reference to go over with the kids as a primer on Christian Doctrine, and I've looked through it multiple times over the years and have always considered it good & clear christian teaching. I remember when I was little at church we were heavy on story but not so much on doctrine-nothing was really well defined. So I figured I'd do them a favor, plus I was reading through Ephesians where he tells dads to raise their kids in the instruction and admonition of the Lord.
So anyways...
Today I slept until about 2pm and when I got up felt the need to do something edifying. So naturally I called Josiah and Jaelle over and pulled out the copy of Luther. It starts out with the ten commandments, and by the time we got to four I thought something wasn't right with the numbers, and then I realised, 'Ole brother Martin numbered the commandments like a Catholic! (Catholics blend out the "graven images" into the first, and it shifts the numbers down. They get #10 by splitting coveting into two: houses & the rest. Odd how houses get their own no-covet commandment and wives are stuck with donkeys.)But I figured the kids will forget the numbers anyway, and I can re-number them later. I wanted it for a guide more than anything, since I need something to go over all the basics, and I can embellish beyond that. By embellish, I don't mean make stuff up, but expand on.

Then Josiah asked why we should "fear" God (since Martin prefaces every commandment with the reason we should obey it-"fear and love of God"). That was a tough one to answer. I kept thinking about George MacDonald telling his childhood story of when he found out about hell, "predestination" etc..., and broke down crying, wondering how God could be more cruel than his earthly father, and how that thought eventually led to him becoming a Universalist. I didn't want to give Josiah that impression, so I tried to explain it by asking if he was scared of me, and he said no, and I said how about when I catch you doing something you're not supposed to, he said yeah, and we took it from there.
Then we all had a short fighing free-for-all, and I read a book with Enoch (who was listless and alone on the couch with a fever) until Brandy called us to the table for chicken soup.

Now I'm @ Work and my co-worker just found a giant dead rat at the entrance to the bertona modules. There are all kinds of wild (and not so wild) life around here. Yesternight I was checking Robbins and a large Opossum was at the south entry door. When I opened it, she just stared at me for a couple seconds before waddling off. 'possums always seem a little slow in the head.

2009-11-01T06:51:00.000-08:00

I am soooooo very tired. So, I'll post a picture I took of a tree yesterday in Martin Square.

2009-10-27T18:59:00.000-07:00

"Good idea, but I'm pooping right now" (Jaelle to Josiah as he's explaining his play plans to her through the bathroom door)