On Avatar

I have a thing now about writing about the good movies that i see.
Here's my latest collection of thoughts.
Uhm, spoiler alert.

Just got back from seeing Avatar in 3d.
James Cameron did an excellent job. It was the most immersive film i've seen since in a long time. When they say that he was after Star Wars, that's got to be what they're referring to. Immersion. Its most definitely not the 3d. It's the movie's ridiculously powerful ability to take your mind, your body, and your emotions and transport them into a compelling universe where James Cameron's imagination is king.

The faces. That's what I think made the film. The faces on the aliens. You know that they aren't supposed to be human. But at the same time you know that Cameron wanted us to mistake them for ourselves.

There is something unmistakably powerful about "waking up".
The Matrix did it. Avatar does it in completely the same way.
We do the same thing with video games- this movie ties in to what i was thinking about here.
There are no references to video games in the movie at all except when the researchers are talking about how much time they'd logged on their Avatars. But what makes Avatar so much cooler than the Matrix is that when they "plug in" to their avatars, they're still in reality. They're just in a different part of it. They become something that they could never in human form be, become part of a society that would never allow them in.

Honestly, whether James Cameron intended it or not, Avatar is self-referencing. Sure, its a great movie and delivers nicely for entertainment. But that's exactly it.
We've gotten to a point where we put on 3d glasses and plug ourselves into made up worlds where we have legs and can jump around in trees and interface our neurological system with giant awesome lizard bird things.
And unlike the lame ending of the movie, we can't just transfer our bodies into that falseness.
Time after time, we have to face the reality that we need oxygen to breathe. That all around our movie theater, while we're vegetating there staring at a 75 foot wide glowing screen, people are returning to their lives in the giant parking lot outside, sitting in traffic, inhaling cigarette smoke.

I have a lot of respect for Amish people. Someone 150 years ago realized that innovations in technology were making us schizophrenic, and decided to keep life as simple as possible. As a result of ourselves, a really scary amount of people in our world are simply unable to keep Reality straight. They don't like what's going on in their lives, so they turn to all the wonderfully convincing escape routes that we've spent the last 100 years spending all our money creating. And all the while that they're learning the language of some tribe of humanoids, their actual body, their actual mind, their actual spirit is sitting in a metaphorical bed link device, atrophying into nothingness.

On the way back from the movie, Chris Pike mentioned something about a guy feeling called by God to go to africa. He had no way of getting there, but went to an airport on faith thinking that maybe someone would give him a ticket or something would come up. He went to the bathroom, and when he came back out, he was in Africa.

I always come out of really good movies really pumped up.
If our population will buy into James Cameron's imagination, think about what they'll do when they figure out reality- that Jesus Christ fixed the world and everything else is a bonus.

On Shepherds

I love reading through the old testament and finding a passage that clearly and vividly points to Jesus. Some of the prophesies about Jesus are pretty vague. But there are certainly plenty of very obvious, clear ones.

Read Ezekiel 34:1-16.
"The word of the Lord came to me: 'Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy and say to them: 'This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Woe to the shepherds of Israel who only take care of themselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock? You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock. You have no strengthened the weak or healed th sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally. So they were scattered because there was no shepherd, and when they were scattered they became food for all the wild animals. My sheep wandered all over the mountains and on every high hill. They were scattered over the whole earth, and no one searched or looked for them.

Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, because my flock lacks a shepherd and so has been plundered and has become food for all the wild animals, and because my shepherds did not search for my flock but cared for themselves rather than for my flock, therefore, O shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I am against the shepherds and will hold them accountable for my flock. I will remove them from tending the flock so that the shepherds can no longer feed themselves. I will rescue my flock from their mouths, and it will no longer be food for them.

For this is what the Sovereign Lord says: I myself will search for my sheep and look after them. As a shepherd looks after his scattered flock when he is with them, so will I look after my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places where they were scattered on a day of clouds and darkness. I will bring them out from the nations and gather them from the countries, and I will bring them into their own land. I will pasture them on the mountains of Israel, in the ravines and in all the settlements in the land. I will tend them in a food pasture, and the mountain heights of Istael will be their grazing land. There they will lie down in good grazing land, and there they will feed in a rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. I myself will tend my sheep and have them lie down, declares the Sovereign Lord. I will search for the lost and bring back the strays. I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak, but the sleek and the strong I will destroy. I will shepherd the flock with justice.'""

For the entire time I read this passage, I couldn't stop smiling and thinking about Jesus.
In John 10:11 Jesus told the Pharisees,
"I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep."

This is really interesting because Pharisees spent their entire lives memorizing scripture- including Ezekiel, the third of the major prophets. They would have been able to instantly recall that, about 500 years ago, God had spoken to his people and said that he was throwing out the shepherds. And not only that, but He, Himself, would take over the roll. Assuming that the Pharisees recognized themselves as the "shepherds" in the prophesy, the priests, the ones in charge of leading God's chosen people, his sheep, then by Jesus calling himself "the good shepherd", he was stating himself to be God incarnate.
Mind blowing.

And it's so true. God knew that the laws and priests were crummy shepherds, so he came down to fix it himself. Jesus is our shepherd, he tends to us, and searches after the lost, bringing them home strikingly like the parable of the lost sheep in Luke 15.

Reading through the Old Testament is one of the coolest ways to affirm Christianity as truth. It would be humanly impossible to write a book with so many different "authors" over such a long time period and have it result in the perfect handbook to Life.

On a Way Out

Look at your hands.
Move your fingers.
These are your fingers.
Out of the entire infinite expanse of the universe, only YOU, whatever "you" actually is, can control your fingers.

I've always been intensely interested in video games. I'm not all that great at playing them, but the philosophical connotations are neat. I know people that easily spend 3 hours every day playing xbox. When they're done, they get up, put the controller down, and walk away, usually to get food.
Video games are really cool because you can turn them off. And when you turn off a video game, life returns to normal- back to reality.

Descartes wrote a book trying to convince himself that he was alive and that God was real. I don't need to go through that much work. My assurance is this: Ever since I was little, I've never been able to shake the notion that throughout our lives we've been holding a video game controller, and that one day we'll have to put it down. And when that happens, we'll return to reality.

That's what I like about eastern religions- they get that. They understand that we don't live here just to reproduce, but that there is so much more beyond our pale blue dot of a planet. The early Christians understood this too- Judaism loosely shares some concepts with, say, taoism and buddhism. But somewhere along the road, maybe blame the 900-year reign of the Catholic Church that created the western world, we lost touch with that fundamental reverence that There Has To Be a Way Out.

Our bodies are fundamentally foreign. The idea that the jumble of biology in our heads somehow gives us Existence seems impossible. I've heard the body referred to as an "earthsuit" before- a protective layer that allows us to live on Earth, much like how a spacesuit is a protective layer that lets astronauts move around in space. Spacesuits are the very essence of "limiting". They restrict body movement by being big and clunky. In the same way, our bodies limit our ability to think, to move, and to live.

On Honor

Here's a decently well known story. Moses is in the middle of leading Israel to the Promise land, and everyone, as usual, is complaining:
"Now there was no water for the community, and the people gathered in opposition to Moses and Aaron. They quarreled with Moses and said, 'If only we had died when our brothers fell dead before the Lord! Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to this terrible place? It has no grain or figs, grapevines or pomegranates. And there is no water to drink!'
Moses and Aaron went from the assembly to the entrance to the Tent of Meeting and fell facedown, and the glory of the Lord appeared to them. The Lord said to Moses, 'Take the staff, and you and your brother Aaron gather the assembly together. Speak to that rock before their eyes and it will pour out its water. You will bring water out of the rock for the community so they and their livestock and drink.'
So Moses took the staff from the Lord's presence, just as he commanded him. He and Aaron gathered the assembly together in front of the rock and Moses said to them, 'Listen, you rebels, must we bring you water out of this rock?' Then Moses raised his arm and struck the rock twice with his staff. Water gushed out, and the community and their livestock drank.
But the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, 'Because you did not trust in me enough to honor me as holy in the sight of the Israelites, you will not bring this community into the land I give them.'"
Numbers 20:2-12

Whoosh. That's hard luck right there.
God just told Moses that he won't be the one that brings the nation of Israel into the promised land. After almost 40 years of wandering around, putting up with all the complaining of his people, having to beg God to show them compassion, fighting through the disunity and overcoming his fears of leadership, he blew it. No milk and honey for Moses.

So what exactly did Moses do?
The scripture doesn't tell us. All it does is not tell us what he doesn't do.
"Then Moses raised his arm and struck the rock twice with his staff"- Moses hits a rock and water comes out. He was completely obedient to God.
But here's the deal.
We know that Moses has a problem with public speaking- that's why Aaron signed on in the first place. Moses hits the rock and God follows through with his promise of water, but Moses fails to recognize God's power in front of the Israelites. In fact, he almost uses the event to glorify himself.
He didn't say, "the Lord will pour water out of this rock for you". On the contrary, he said, "must we bring you water out of this rock?" The 'we' is very much referring to himself and Aaron, not God.

The Israelites weren't particularly grounded people. When they were hungry, they complained about food, and when they were thirsty, they complained about water. When Moses was on mount Sinai, they complained about him taking too long. These are a people that were never good at having their eyes on God- that was Moses' job. So when Moses makes the problem worse by lifting himself up with his water-from-the-rock magic trick, the people look to him as a great leader, rather than a great follower of God.

Moral?
Everything we do is for God's glory, and if we don't recognize His power and His works, we're being like Moses. Moses died before he could get into the place he toiled for decades to get to.

Now here's something else.
When you read, "Water gushed out, and the community and their livestock drank.", what mental image do you have?
Whatever it is, its probably wrong.
In Numbers 26, we learn that the number of fighting men (over age of 20) in Israel about this time was 601,730. Double that for their wives, and double it at least again for their young children. I'd say that a decent approximation of how many people were at the rock: 2.4 million.
That's a lot of people. You can't imagine that many people. Luckily for us, a very recent event also had roughly 2.4 million people at it: President Obama's inauguration.
Here's some perspective.
Look at this picture:
http://cache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/44_01_21/4403_17681689.jpg

That's about 2.4 million people. they look like ants.
Here's a different view:
http://cache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/44_01_21/4402_17676747.jpg

And my favorite is the Gigapan image, taken from the press box next to the capitol building:
http://www.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=17217

Zoom in all the way in the top-right. The end of the crowd is at the Washington Monument.


That is a ridiculous amount of people.
With those images fresh in your mind, try to re-imagine enough water gushing out of a rock for all those people and their livestock to drink. This is not a garden hose. This is a river.

Also, now that you know what 2.4 million people looks like, go back and read Exodus. Everything in that book means a lot more when you realize the insane logistical challenges facing Moses and Aaron to keep track of, communicate to, and feed that many people.

On Davidisms

Whenever I don't know what to read in the Bible, I turn to one of the books of history- Samuel, Kings, Chronicles. Every single story in those pages is absolutely vivid and full of things to learn.
In 1 Samuel 21, David is running away from Saul, the king at the time, because he wants to kill him. He arrives in a town and goes to the priest, Ahimelech, to ask for supplies.
"David asked Ahimelech, "Don't you have a spear or a sword here? I haven't brought my sword or any other weapon, because the king's business was urgent."
The priest replied, "The sword of Goliath the Philistine, whom you killed in the Valley of Elah, is here; it is wrapped in a cloth behind the ephod. If you want it, take it; there is no sword here but that one."
David said, "There is none like it; give it to me.""
-1 Samuel 21:8-9

How awesome is that?
David needs to find a sword. He ends up with the sword of the guy that he killed years ago that led to his rise to fame in the first place. When people see David out on the battle field with Goliath's sword they will be full of instant respect. Here's a guy fighting with a sword probably twice as big as it needs to be that he took from a giant when he was just a shepherd.

You never know when you're gonna find yourself like David- when our past victories will come back to help us in our times of need. Take every chance you can to fight a battle because if you win, that's one more sword stored away that you might be able to use later on in life.

On Prophesy

I read through a little bit of Micah a few days ago.
One of my new favorite verses:
"But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from days of eternity."-Micah 5:2, NIV

"Origins from of old, from days of eternity"
That's pretty poetic. Jesus Christ, our new testament savior, is from of old. He's eternal. He was alive billions and billions of year ago. He was around when Moses and Aaron were in charge. He watched Jewish history unfold as humanity proved to itself that the Laws couldn't possibly be enough to save us from our sins. And he waited patiently until the Father said, "go", and then joined us on this lonely blue speck where humanity is just a phrase to cover up all the shortcomings of our lives.

On Christians

I think it was Ghandi that once said, "I love your Christ but can't stand your Christians" or something like that. Here in the West, we have this weird, stupid, wrong disconnect between faith and "religion" and the "real world".
We have 1/3 or so of our America full of people who say that they are Christians.

News Flash: Adding the enclitic "-ian" to a word turns it into an adjective. A Christian is someone who has taken Christ- literally, Jesus Christ, and made Him the adjective for their life. We are modified by Christ. That should be more significant than just a "thing" that we do every now and then with other "christians".
When you take the word out of its literal context, you get it to mean a "Follower of Christ".
That definition also doesn't quite see itself given justice in westernland. To be a follower of Christ LITERALLY means that you LITERALLY follow Christ.
That means you read the New Testament, find out what Jesus did, and follow it.

If i were to ever start a church, the emphasis would be on the basics; the most important things, and nothing else. Literally making our lives line up as close as humanly possibly with Jesus and proclaiming him as savior of the world. And not much else.

I've never liked "salvation messages". Don't get me wrong, but when you stand up in front of a group of people and try to convince them to change every single thing about how they look at their world and where they fit into it within an hour-long segment of time is just BEGGING to need the grace of the holy spirit to have any impact. I know that it's biblical that its only by the spirit that anyone can understand, but seriously... it would take a lot more than a single sermon to convince me to change everything about my life.
And i think maybe that's one of the causes of shallow Christianity. That maybe people don't understand everything that it means to call yourself a "follower of Christ", or maybe that their parents didn't tell them that and that's how they grew up... just going through the motions because no one ever said, "hey, there's an eternity more to this stuff than you can talk about in one sermon".
I dunno.
Follow Jesus, tell others. seems simple enough, right?

On Praying

A month or so ago I went to a weekend intervarsity retreat. I don't remember much from it, but i did write a few things down. As i was just reading through my notes, i spotted something that i had wanted to remember- "Pray like a texting conversation"

I think it was a reference that one of the speakers made, but it got me thinking.
Ever since the advent of "unlimited texts", teenage girls (and some guys) will spend the entire day with multiple conversations running with multiple people.
Like, they start off each day with a "hey" to the same person, and then throughout the day, they have their noses in their phones going back and forth and back and forth until bedtime.

Its really annoying.
Constant connected communication is one of the great paradigms of the 21st century- incredibly useful and also incredibly crippling.
But i think its really cool that we can stay in touch with our friends for the entire day, even if we don't see them once.

Prayer ought to be exactly the same thing.
Mature christians usually have a "quiet time" or a "prayer time" set apart in their day where they pray to God- and that's a good thing.
But it's a much deeper place when in addition to that, you never take your mind off of God- praying ceaselessly, like a texting conversation, every minute, every day.
back and forth, back and forth. That includes listening.

on "society"

You've heard it in church thousands of times:
"society is going downhill, blah blah blah."
church people always talk about how our culture is ruining our minds and money money money girls girls girls blah blah blah.
society isn't going downhill, and i'm sick of hearing about it.
society is reverting to how it used to be.

the "Western World" we've all learned to love is the culture that the church created.
Before that was Roman times, and Mayan times, and Babylonian times, and Greek times, and Sumerian times, and Chinese times.
Romans in the year 0 had a culture that any of today's teenagers would be shocked at. The world isn't going downhill. The world has always been at the bottom of the hill. We've just grown up in an age where the world has been in a temporary state of "suspend", where for a brief 1500 year timespan, Christianity defined our society. That is coming to a close. We have to stop wishing that things would be all warm and cozy and be willing to actually do something with our faith besides have potluck dinners and hang out with old people. It's time to get out there and actually win souls.

on funerals

My uncle passed away this past thursday.
Sunday morning at noon i boarded a train to penn station, then got on the LiRR to huntington to get picked up by my dad. Ate pizza, and got to the church at 6:15.
Left the church at 11.
My dad decided to drive me back instead of taking a train in the morning. Drove from 12am until 3:30. I just finished my physics homework. I'll be going to bed for 3 hours shortly.

Basically, My entire sunday and the first 4 hours of monday have been spent getting to, going to, and coming back from my uncle's funeral.

It was entirely worth it.

The church had a pretty good size sanctuary.
It was absolutely jam-packed. 1500 people came out to the service.
My mom, my other uncle, and my cousin gave speeches.
I learned a lot about him that i never knew.
I also learned this:
His dying wish was that his entire family would be saved.

My uncle's speech turned into a salvation message.
After the pastor gave a sermon, he gave a call for salvation, and about 25 people answered that.

I never got a chance to really get to know my uncle that well, and i'm regretting that. He wasn't a pastor, he owned an auto shop with his brother. But his influence on the community was enormous. His funeral saved 25 people. That's wild.

The pastor then compared death with physical birth.
After 9 months of being in the womb, we simply can't stay in there any longer. We have to bust out of it and experience real life, not the safety of the inside of Mom. I think that's a cool way to think about death from a christian perspective. After 18 years of lymphoma in and our of remission, and after 2 months of leukemia, my uncle needed to bust outta here. From the stories i've heard, from the pictures i've seen, he lived at least 3 lives' worth on earth. He needed to get out of here and go hang out with Jesus in real life.

I had more to say but my 8am calc quiz is in 4 hours. and this kitchen smells disgusting.

genre

Worship Genres that i would like to see more of:

Hip-Hop Worship.
Dance-Worship.
Ambient Instrumental Worship.
Progressive Indie Alt-Rock Mutemath "reset-EP" style worship.

i miss jumping around with my bass on my shoulder.

on churching

just got back from watching the iHeart film.
it was incredible.
So much passion.
So much awesome.
SO. many. people.

There was a really good quote from Reuben Morgan.
I can't remember it entirely, but it's paraphrased roughly as such:
"The Message is perfect. The message is infallible. The message is complete. So there must be something wrong with the way people are telling it."

I love that. The only reason billions of people in the world aren't running to God with everything they have is because we're really, really, really bad at telling people about Him. All the successful witnessing and conversions are direct results of God's work.

I've read a lot about the "Local Church" lately.
How important it is, how integral it is to have a Local Church for our walk with God.
And Hilllsong is here showing us that the "Local Church" isn't a building, isn't a sunday morning worship service, it's US.

I want to start a Local Church that doesn't "do" church.
I want to start a "local church" that has a sunday morning service that consists of some musical worship and a quick sermon.
And then every other day of the week, i want my local church to have small groups for believers to actually grow.
And then every other day of the week, i want my local church to actually DO something. To volunteer. To serve. To love.
I don't want a local church that collects a tithe on sunday mornings and then structures a budget around that.
I want a local church that consists of its members giving unconditionally regardless of what day it is, and one where the "operating budget" is a teeny, tiny, sliver of what is actually collected.
I want a local church that sends anyone and everyone to the corners of the earth for the sole purpose of loving other people.

i want a church that the people invest in.
i want a church where there is no "inside" and where there is no "outside".
i want a church that is everyone.

I realize that there is a lot of "me" in this post.
I apologize. It's late. I'm emotional. This is my 100th blog post since January 9th, 2006, when I was a highschool freshman riding a school bus to and from somersworth highschool every day.

On Scale

Read this a few nights ago and it stuck with me:
"Then the king and all Israel with him offered a sacrifice of fellowship offerings to the Lord: twenty-two thousand cattle and a hundred and twenty thousand sheep and goats. So the king and all the Israelite dedicated the temple of the Lord."
-1 Kings 8-62-63

This is as king Solomon completes the Lord's temple, and is dedicating it with an enormous offering to God.
Imagine the scale of 120,000 sheep being sacrificed.
Imagine what it took just to get them all in one place.
Imagine how huge of an undertaking that would have to be. Where do you keep 120,000 sheep before you kill them? Not to mention 22,000 cows.
And imagine having to be the guy that cuts them open!
And imagine having to be the guy that keeps the fire going on that altar for hours and hours and hours.
Ridiculous.
Also it sounds like all of Israel was there to see this.
That's like 6 million people.
That's a lot of people.
This thing going on here, it's a big deal.
I mean, a cow weighs about 1200 pounds, right?
That's 132,000 TONS of beef.
Imagine how many meals that is!
That's 1,056,000,000 quarter pounders.
A billion hamburgers.
That's a lot of food.
But God was important enough for that.
Solomon made a big deal out of opening the Temple of the Lord because it was BIG deal! Before this point, God had literally been living in a tent.
He goes from a crummy tent that moves around into a massive, awesome, beautiful temple, and the inauguration ceremony consists of hundreds of thousands of animals being sacrificed.

Imagine if we made as big a deal about every new church plant as Solomon made about the temple? Imagine if everything we did for God had the same sort of scale that Solomon threw this ceremony on. That would be pretty cool.

Memories

I saw an XKCD comic that reeeeally got me thinking, because it brings up a fundamental issue with our minds:
http://www.xkcd.com/647/
click the link, read the comic, and then read the mouse-over text.

8 year old kids are old enough to have intelligent conversations about an event that they never witnessed. An event that happened when I was 10, that I remember very clearly.
And then you realize that 8 years is a pretty long time- it's long enough for a human being to grow from a newborn into a fully cognitive child.

I'd like to suggest something:
Thinking about our memories is one of the closest things we can get to understanding God's eternalness.

As humans, we can't get our minds around that concept.
God is forever. He is the beginning and the end.
He completely transcends time.
And so do our memories.

In our minds, we mark time based on our memories.
But very vivid memories often seem to be more recent than they actually are.
For example, 9/11. Or watching your favorite childhood cartoon on saturday mornings.
Those memories feel recent. They're vivid, you remember the "like it was yesterday".
And so time doesn't seem to matter that much.

My family went to the same church from before I was born until I was in 8th grade.
I have fuzzy memories of being a baby and my mom carrying me into the nursery during the worship service.
I can also remember being a little kid and one of the pastors giving us pez every morning.
That's pretty much all i remember until i was in 7th grade and started going to youth group.
Within that time frame, my family got pretty involved on the worship team and i played bass on sunday mornings for at least a year's time. I don't really remember much from that. All i remember are those really early times and then later.
It's significant events that we keep clear in our minds.
When you think about something, you tend to retain it much better.
We think about significant events => we remember them.

The result is like a timeline of events comprised of what we think about most, with no datestamps.
The time itself is not important to our minds. What's important is the content.

I like to think about time as a "container" that the physical world happens to be inside of. Our memories aren't physical- they transcend time.
So I think that's as close as we can ever get to understanding timelessness.

Quick Metaphore

me and my suitemate both use acne treatments before we go to bed at night.
Mine is one of those creams that you put on.
His is a pill.
I never knew that they made swallowable acne medicine.

But here's the deal.
Acne cream works by drying out your skin.
It draws the junk out of zits and makes them go away temporarily.
The pill medicine actually modifies your body's immune function so that you don't get zits to begin with. It works to eliminate the problem rather than dealing with it after it exists.
That's really cool.
For something as superficial as acne, the treatment method isn't particularly important. They both get the same results. But does the comparison sound familiar?

Here's a more significant example:
"You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell." -Matthew 5:21-22

Oh hello there, Jesus. What is this strange new thing you have to say?
In the sermon on the mount, Jesus outlined a bunch of "new laws" for the people-
He went over a bunch of common jewish laws and turned them around.

The law back then didn't actually solve any problems.
It just treated the surface.
Jesus came along and showed people that it's the root of the problem- the heart, the attitude, the thoughts- that lead to the actions that the law attempted to fix.

I thought that was neat.

Unity of Purpose

Enclosed in red on the image below is the 275-acre RPI main campus.
The building in blue is Troy High School, which happens to be adjacent to the eastern side of campus.
Go ahead and click on the picture to get a better look.
Troy High School is a pretty impressive building. Actually, it's massive.
It houses about 1200 students during the day.
















RPI has 6,000 students on our almost 300 acre campus.
Take your finger and pinch troy highschool.
Fit 6 of those buildings within RPI's boundaries.
You'll notice that you could probably fit a dozen more.

A student at Troy High School spends the exact same amount of time in that building that an RPI student spends on campus. 4 years of study. Same amount of life.

Think about the drastic difference between what gets accomplished from one 4 year period to another.
High School students spend much of their time not wanting to be there.
College students spend much of their time wanting to graduate.
But year in and year out, a highschool doesn't accomplish anything material.
It educates teenagers and that's it.

Research universities, on the other hand, teach students and then develop new ideas, grow industries, and file patents.
RPI owns a 1200 acre industrial park a few miles down the river.
There are 70 corporate tenants and about 2400 employees in that industrial park.
It has absolutely nothing to do with undergraduate education.
But RPI, as a college, is able to support it.
Because it has a unity of purpose.

Every RPI student has a personal objective: to complete the degree that they are working towards. But in the process, they fulfill a secondary objective: to grow the university and spread its reputation.
Universities are entirely self-perpetuating. Successful graduates donate money to the institution, growing it and causing more students to invest their careers into it.

Look back at that map.
That's 275 acres you're looking at.
I walked around about half of the campus tonight. It took me about an hour.
It really gave a sense of how enormous the place is. Many of the buildings are incredibly impressive. EMPAC is that funny looking white blob in the very lower left of the map. That's 7 stories tall. It's a pretty big building.
Its entire purpose is for audio research and performance.
In order for an organization to spend so much money and resources on something of that nature, there needs to be an intense unity of purpose.

But walking around the campus, this thought came to my mind: Its all such a waste.
Here we have the cutting edge of mankind's splendor. 6,000 students and hundreds of professors saying that they are a part of this body and this is what they have to show for it. It's incredible.
But that purpose that we're all unified in is pretty lame.
RPI exists for RPI, and to a lesser extent, for the furthering of mankind through technological innovation and whatnot.

That's a lame purpose.

Imagine if those same people with the same resources could be unified for the purpose of nothing more than to bring glory to God.
What would the academic campus look like?

Research Paper

I just wrote a 5 page paper for one of my classes, and am about to go to bed for 3 hours.
I figured i might as well put it on the internet in case somebody feels like reading it.

"Recordings don't compare"

Ever since ancient times, perhaps since the “beginning”, music has been seen as a substance in the spiritual and emotional realms. It cannot be touched, yet is felt on a deep level within our minds and souls. Music has been performed for millennia for varieties of purpose: religious worship, the entertainment of kings and royalty, the enjoyment of the elite class, and most recently for the recreation of common people. Over the past few centuries, the culture of music has changed dramatically as not only ideas and styles have evolved but also as technology has been developed. The introduction of recording technology changed the primary mode of listening to music from a performance of the wealthy into an inexpensive pastime for the common man, yet as recorded medium becomes irrelevant there has been a marked upturn in the importance of live performances.
Two hundred years ago, Beethoven was actively composing works during the Classical movement in Vienna. He wrote his pieces, often commissioned by aristocracy, in music manuscripts that could be printed for the members of an orchestra to play to an audience. This was the way that music was listened to in the 19^th century: it had to be played. If someone knew how to play an instrument, the one could entertain himself or others. But otherwise, in order to hear music, one had to be a patron of a theater, a luxury that lower-class members of society couldn’t afford to begin with.
With Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877, and more so with the advent of more practical 78rpm record discs, came a paradigm shift in the concept of “recorded music”. No longer was music recorded merely with notation, but now the actual sounds of the instruments could be preserved, separated from the musician and the stage. With the industrialization of every aspect of society under way, by the end of the Second World War most Americans could feasibly own their own record players and a personal music collection. The burgeoning recording industry exploded as music became a defining force in the lives of young people. Musicians enjoyed the results of this widespread media as now a band with relatively little experience could sign a record contract and make a livelihood off of their music through the private listening in consumers’ homes.
Momentum built up and the recording industry grew to become enormous. By the middle of the 20^th century, concerts were no longer a significant force in experiencing music: “A mutation of musical communication has occurred in which live performance has become a mere adjunct to most people’s musical experience, which now comes to them overwhelmingly through loudspeakers and even earphones. (Chanan, Repeated Takes 18)” As the market for music expanded, it became capable of supporting more and more musicians. Styles changed and evolved as popular music became a driving force in modern life. From swing to blues, jazz to rock, music became increasingly diverse in its offerings. But with everything good that the recorded album had to bring to the world, it was still an imperfect way to experience the music that it stood for.
In the most obvious sense, recordings are imperfect through their mediums. Early phonographs were limited by their mechanical reproduction systems, and even after electrical amplification, the materials could not fully capture all the nuance that the Human ear is capable of. This physical imperfection has been mostly rendered a moot point in recent years with digital reproduction and high quality components, but a more pressing limitation is highlighted with recorded media: in a word, distance.
When music is performed live for an audience, that audience is there with the musicians, experiencing the emotion as it unfolds, surrounded by the atmosphere of a hall and enjoying the company of others. When a person puts on a pair of headphones and listens to a recorded album, there is none of that. There is no personal connection with the performers, no excitement of ‘being there’. This effectively takes the music out of context, save for electronic music that could not be performed any other way. An advantage to this, though, is in its portability. Music means different things based on its surroundings, and we can experience it in new ways never before possible: “…we can listen to opera while riding the underground, Mahler while driving along the motorway, or Spanish monks singing Gregorian chant while flying high above the ocean…”(Chanan 8) People are able to use music as a ‘soundtrack’ to their day, making their lives much more enjoyable.
Despite all the business that the recording industry has amassed, in recent years it has been struggling. When recording technology advanced to digital, the industry had no way of knowing the implications of such a move. The combination of inexpensive personal computers and the internet allowed the file sharing craze of the early 21^st century. Digital formats have reduced the physical media to nearly irrelevant. CD sales dropped about 25% from 1999 to 2005 due to the distribution of music over the internet. Luckily for the record companies, music is now often purchased digitally rather than simply shared; from 2005 to the first half of 2006, legal music downloading increased by 457%. Yet even with the success of digital purchasing, the internet has nevertheless produced an age where merely listening to music is no longer enough to satisfy the consumer appetite.
Digital media has produced an age where anyone can listen to virtually any music at no direct cost. The newest generation of listeners have no sense of novelty in recorded music the way there was at the turn of the last century, it is just expected to be that way. What results is a desire for even more, a further dimension to the recorded experience. In a world used to multiple camera angles, the visual experience has come to be depended upon just as much as the auditory one.
What may be observed is a renaissance of the performing venue. Not that live music went on any sort of hiatus while the recording industry took off, but it became a sort of secondary experience. Now that recorded music has become such an integral part of society, from commercials to video games, a person must do more to actually feel a part of the music. A significant contributor to this idea is the evolution of the “rock concert” over the past few decades. Subwoofers in sound reinforcement systems are a relatively new development, and hi-fidelity reproduction at such volumes is a luxury that wasn’t available 30 years ago. The development of intelligent lights and visual effects and video projections over the past two decades or so have dramatically changed the experience of a live contemporary show. With digital technology being implemented in all aspects of a performance, developments are making leaps and bounds every year.
The end result is that a live performance isn’t about simply the music, and it never was. Two centuries ago a venue was the only way to experience that music, and that experience came with the whole bargain. After stripping the music away from its performance, we’ve come to find that there is so much more to be found in a live setting than people may have realized at the advent of recording, and now we’re spending more time trying to experience it.
A step further may be to say that musical performance has become almost a “genre” in itself. Many independent bands have a grassroots promotional campaign involving simply the internet and as many live performances as they can book. Recording and performing have become markedly different in the modern age where recording often takes place in an acoustically deadened room to a click track, one instrument at a time until the final piece is produced until satisfactory. Live performances, meanwhile, are often composed of remarkable on stage energy and showmanship. This is art on more than a purely musical level. It has musical elements but also the factor of visuals, lights and atmosphere coupled with the actual performance on stage of the musicians. These are two completely different ways of producing music with completely different results.
I think that it is reasonable to say that live performance has made a return as a major way that patrons appreciate music after being surpassed so much by recorded media for nearly a century. It has a new place, one not as an exclusive outlet but rather of a more appreciated one where a listener can truly experience everything that the artist has to offer, not just the mere acoustic representation of his or her work.

Works Cited

Bernstein, Arthur, Naoki Sekine, and Dick Weissman. The Global Music Industry. New York: Taylor &
Francis Group, 2007. Print.

Chanan, Michael. Repeated Takes. New York : Verso, 1995. Print. 

Barbec, Jeffrey, and Todd Barbec. Music, Money, and Success. New York: Schirmer Books, 1994. Print.



"Music." Wikipedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Oct. 2009. .

"Art music." Wikipedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Oct. 2009. .

"Music industry." Wikipedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Oct. 2009. .

On Worship Music

In my digital media class we've spent the past 6 weeks looking at experimental music from the dawn of the tape recorder and of records and how composers used mediums in ways that they weren't particularly designed for to completely re-write the rules of what music is and can be.
This week the professor played pieces that were created out of words.
For example, there was a piece that was made out of a man saying simply the words "rainbow", "bandit", "bomb", and "chug".
It was really cool, and here's why:
Words are neat because they mean things.
Those 4 words have inherent meanings- they create pictures in your mind that are representative of what they mean, and ideally everyone has a similar mental picture, and that's how we communicate with each other.
Interestingly, those 4 words lose their meanings when they are combined- they don't mean anything together, they don't form a complete thought.
However there are cool things you can do with the rhythm and with multitrack recording that is good for experimental music.

It brings up a really interesting thought.

Music by itself, with no words, evokes emotion. It causes the listener to feel.
Words by themselves convey a complete thought to that listener, with or without emotion.
Together they are a powerful way of conveying a message full of emotion.

In bible times, writing "worship music" was a big deal. Solomon employed musicians constantly in his palace. The middle of the Bible is the book of Psalms, which is a pretty big deal.
Churches around the world have Hymnals in the back of their pews.

Psalms and hymns have something very in common: we don't usually think about them from a contemporary music standpoint.
You can sing hymns with music, but you can also sing them without it, or you can merely speak them. The Psalms were most definitely very poetic and musical in the original hebrew, and there have been english songs made out of quite a few.

But non the less, they are not in the format of a modern low-art "song".

So here's what I got to thinking about.
You can worship God with words.
You can worship God with music.

But here in the modern times, we can pull up 'worship music' at any point of the day and listen to it.
Is listening to worship music the same thing as worshiping?
Not necessarily- you can listen to music without worshiping, but you can also engage in the music and worship God with the ideas presented by the songwriter.

But what happens when you have music with no words?
Can you worship God by listening to music with no lyrics?
Its one thing to play music, and use an instrument to worship God with, they did that in the old testament.
But just by listening?

Music without words presents no specific thought, just moods, emotions.
So an instrumental "worship song" wouldn't be able to help the listener by suggesting words to sing or think.
But that emotion definitely does something.
Any good worship set has periods of instrumentals that give space for people to meditate and bask in God's glory.

I think that a wordless worship song does nothing that we can't do on our own, not in the sense that lyrics give us words to sing.
But music can definitely put us in a mindset, an attitude of worship.
A state of being where we can be more receptive to God, more sensitive to His presence.

Music is a powerful thing.
I would like to write an instrumental album and release it as "worship music".

On gifts

Here's some more John 17 for you.
Jesus is praying to God, and starts to talk about his Disciples:
"I have revealed you to those whom you gave me out of the world. They were yours; you gave them to me and they have obeyed your word. Now they know that everything you have given me comes from you. For I gave them the words you gave me and they accepted them. They knew with certainty that I came from you, and they believed that you sent me."
-John 17:6-8

Now there's something really neat to think about. Jesus' disciples were God's the whole time; even while Peter, Andrew, John, and James were lowly fishermen, they were God's possessions that He was planning on giving to his son.

Now i'm no calvinist, but how cool is it that nonchristians all around the world could actually be owned by God, future gifts to His Son that will go on to serve in ministry or leads hundreds to the way.
Being owned by god.
Being gifts to Jesus.

And there's another gift mentioned in those verses: the gift of the word.
John 1:1 opens with: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
And God gave that word to Jesus to tell us.
God's word was in the beginning, just like how Jesus' disciples were God's from the beginning. Both were gifts to his son.

That's some pretty neat gifting going on.
And we're a part of it.
Awesome.

You're looking forward to the wrong thing

So i've joined two small groups at RPI this week. Really looking forward to how they unfold.
On wednesday nights there's a group on the subject of prayer. Yesterday we covered a bunch of ground, but spent the most time on John 17.
Throughout the chapter, Jesus is praying to God before he is turned over to the chief priests. A lot of verses stuck out at me. Here's the first 3 of them:

"After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed: "Father, the time has come. Florify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent." [John 17:1-3, niv]

Traditionally, humans think about "eternal life" as never dying. Living forever. Immortality.
Christians usually recognize this as something that can only be achieved by "knowing Jesus".
But that's not what Jesus said in his prayer; He didn't say that "they get eternal life by knowing you".
No, he defined eternal life as "knowing you".
That's so awesome.

Eternal life.
If you're looking forward to living forever and not having to worry about mosquitoes, you're living a sad shell of a life. What we ought to be looking forward to is getting to know Jesus.

Reality

I don't know if i've talked about this before, but i think about it all the time.
I have a very difficult time holding on to "reality".
I don't think that this is a deficiency on my part.
I think we all have trouble with this, i just don't know how many people actually think about it. And i can't possibly describe to you what i'm talking about, you just have to experience it on your own.

But tonight I spent almost an hour laying down on a hillside listening to worship music.

When you climb a mountain, one of the first things you do when you get to the top is look down- or out- at the view. You usually see an expanse of landscape, lakes, trees, and other mountains for miles and miles. It's beautiful.
It's a sight that makes many people think about God and how big he is, and that He created all of this beautiful world. Old ladies buy posters of mountains and hang them on their wall because they wish everything was as pretty as a view of a lake, or a sunset.

The view from the hillside I was on tonight is pretty much exactly that. You can see for miles and miles. Except the view is of downtown Troy, NY. (that's the actual view from next to where i was laying down)
At night, this view is one of the dingiest looking things you've ever seen.
It's all yellow streetlamps and roads. Police sirens and ambulance horns are an almost constant drone. That's pretty much the best way to describe Troy: Dingy.

The sky above troy tonight was a beautiful deep, velvet black, peppered with a few stars. After looking between "up" at the night sky and "down" over troy for a while, I decided that it's one of the coolest contrasts i've ever seen.

That's where I start to lose my grasp on reality.

I think that in America today, we are one of the worst reality-recognizers of all time. Our culture is escapism. Books, tv, movies, sex, our jobs, and video games are all ways that we forget about how we are living beings on a tiny blue planet hurtling through space.

That's what I think about when I look up at the sky- when you look up, you see the vastness of the universe. When you look down, you see the pitiful, dingy mess that mankind has made on our little blue planet.

Do you think that when God looks down on our planet, he sees Troy NY as just as beautiful as the mountainside in north western new hampshire?
I think maybe He does.

When I look at Troy, i see dingy. When I look out from a mountain top, I see natural beauty.
When God looks down at the landscape, He sees his handiwork, his Creation.
When He looks at Troy, I bet he doesn't even notice all the buildings falling apart, or the nasty smell of the streets. Because inside Troy are 50,000 of his best creation of all- 50,000 desperate human beings trying the best they can to live within the walls that we've created for ourselves that we call "reality".

I met a guy a few weeks ago on the bus to walmart.
He was having a lively conversation with the bus driver.
When we got off, he put on a visor and went to work.
He doesn't have time to go to a hillside and look at his city and think about the ridiculous boundaries that we put on our lives through our culture.
His "reality" is completely different from mine.

He knows all the bus drivers on his route because he probably doesn't have a car and probably works 14 hours a day to pay his bills. or his alcoholism. or both. or neither.

I walk around the RPI campus ignoring homework, watching people, and looking out at Troy.

These two lives are so different, we might as well consider them to be in different universes. We would have never met or affected each other's lives if we hadn't crossed paths on that bus. And two weeks later, all i have is a brief memory of his existence- an awareness. That's it.

God knows all of us, even when we don't know him, or choose to ignore His love.
That's so powerful.

The end-all point in Hinduism is Nirvana: the point where you simply cease to exist because you've somehow broken out of the endless chain of reincarnation. Buddhists claim that they know how to reach Nirvana, or that they know how to strive for it. They say that they know how to break out of our earthly "reality" and enter into the true, real, truthfulness of the universe.
Here's what I think.
I think that as soon as you realize who God is and begin to notice His Love for each and every one of us, at the moment when you stop thinking about reality in terms of your little personal mundane life and start to think about it in terms of everything, of how only God could possibly encompass everything- that's "Nirvana". I think that's the point where the Hindus 5,000 years ago were trying to get to, where Buddhists think they know how to get to. A realization of reality.

Closing thought:
As I lay down on that hillside, the wind was blowing in my face. It was cold. It was amazing. We spent money on fog and hazers, and HVAC systems that can move cold air to enhance the experience of a live show. Youth church services are like that a lot- we use fog at Uturn because it looks cool.
But when you're outside, looking at a city, you don't need atmospheric effects.
You have the atmosphere around you.

opportunity land

during the weeks leading up to going off to college, I began to really dread leaving. I'm definitely homesick. And i definitely believe that my place in the world isn't in academia, or troy, ny.

I did, however, know that I couldn't stay at home.
I could have gone to UNH.
One major reason that I didn't is because I knew there would be a tremendous ammount of stress trying to give my all to my studies and at the same time wanting to give my all to uturn. It would split me into two pieces that would leave me an empty shell of an overstressed human being. By going somewhere that I don't know anyone, It ought to be easier to focus on schoolwork entirely and get it over with.

It's also proven to be a sea of opportunity:
Opportunities to get involved with technical theater, opportunities to have a job at one of the most acoustically perfect performing spaces in America, opportunities to give what I know and can do to other churches, to new people, to work with lights on campus, to join IEEE, to meet in 4 weeks double the amount of people that i've built relationships with in the first 18 years of my life.
And to learn like crazy.
My primary objective anytime i'm not in class (i have 17 hours of class each week and therefore 95 waking hours each week where I'm not sitting in a lecture hall) is to simply absorb everything I see and do.
I pay special attention to venues. I've seen more venues in a month than i've ever seen in my life- the RPI playhouse, each lecture hall, each church, each of the 4 theaters in EMPAC.
Every space is different, and seeing how different spaces can be utilized is really inspiring to me.

so that's that.
opportunity land.

On no grounds for Arguing

i read this verse last night and i love it.
Paul is in Corinth and, as the usual, people are trying to persecute him and the people people with him.
"'This man,' they charged, 'is persuading the people to worship God in ways contrary to the law.'" [acts 18:13]

Read that again.
"this man is persuading people to worship God in ways contrary to the law."

Paul wasn't preaching against God.
he was preaching a different way to worship God, a way that the Jews didn't see as part of their custom.
They didn't like that.
But like it or not, he was still preaching that people worship God. And, in fact, to worship him in better ways.

Sometimes people in the Church have a mindset like that.
"it's not what we're used to."
but it might be better.
Just be glad that people are worshiping God, don't try to put 'em in "jail" because of it.

Missing

I've been to three church services in a row away from home, and one college campus service.
What I miss most is jumping.
Not necessarily actually jumping, as much fun as it is, but what motivates people to jump around during a worship service- the energy, the all-out total abandon of praising God with everything.
This week as well as last week I attended a church of 1200 people that meets in what used to be a strip mall.
The building is nice.
But I wanted nothing more than to break out of the acoustic worship set and start jumping around like a maniac.
I miss it so much.

I want to be in a church like Hillsong, with crazy energetic people and members that don't stand around, ever.

I guess i'm pentecostal or something.

On Unexpecting

've definitely learned a lot in my first few weeks at college.
There are a number of things that i didn't expect, or that i hadn't considered before leaving home.

However, one thing that I was actually a bit worried about was alone time.
Living with someone else, in a building full of hundreds of other people, sharing a bathroom with 3 others, i was figuring that I wouldn't have much time to myself.
And sometimes that's true. when 7 people are in my dorm room playing xbox, there is no privacy.

But i was not at all expecting the level of privacy that I have here. First of all, my roomate frequently has classes when I don't. So I find myself with the room all to myself during most of friday afternoon, which is pretty neat. But other than that, there's an important note about RPI: There's 2 kinds of people here. People who go out every night to party, and people that never leave their rooms.
The easiest way to get privacy is to just start walking around campus, because no one ever does that.
And that's really cool for me, for two reasons:
1) I can't accomplish anything when other people are around me. Can't think, can't write, can't do homework without someone helping me, can't read.
2) I am much better at thinking and talking when i'm walking around. I pace when i talk on the phone. I can't avoid it.

So that works out really really well for me. If i want to get alone, I just have to start walking around campus. It's also really neat because I can pray outloud and not worry about anything. I love walking alone because it's like i'm hanging out with God, one on one. The added bonus of talking out loud is a big plus.

Anyway, Today was pretty unexpected.
I went to my first RCA (Rensselear Christian Association) meeting. It was different then i expected. Worship wasn't as energetic as i'm used to, and much less refined. But still very deliberate. Instead of a sermon, they had a few reams of lined paper and pens, and we wrote letters to servicemen/women in honor of september 11th. Pretty thoughtful.

The meeting started at 7. At 8, I had been planning on going to a concert at EMPAC. But as i was sitting in the RCA room, trying to decide if i should leave early for it, I just sort of felt like I should stay.
I left at 9 and wandered towards the empac building to see if anything was still going on. People looked like they were beginning to leave, so I kept wandering through the campus.

Then I noticed something that i've never noticed or thought about before.

the RPI campus has a church on it. Except it's really just a church building, a 150 year old massive stone church. In 1977 the school turned it into the computing center. And to do it, they actually built a building inside of it. with interior walls and everything. It's very interesting. really. The building is open 24/7.

As I was walking by the VCC, that is, the church, I looked up. They kept/restored the stained glass windows in the church. And the windows were working opposite of what they were designed to do. They were lighting up the night sky from the inside of the church.
It was very, very cool.
And unexpected. I've never seen stained glass light up the night.

I started walking back to my dorm. When i was pretty close, one of the guys from RCA was walking towards me. I waved.
He invited me to Friendly's.

Friendly's after youth group is/was a tradition back home.
I felt like I should go.
I went. They paid for me dinner.
Then they invited me back to an upperclassman dorm and we watched a bunch of episodes of the flight of the conchords.

Today was unexpected.
For the first time in a month, I feel a little belonging.
RCA made me pumped to visit home there. I can't go anywhere without being completely overwhelmed by plans, ideas, and details. Everywhere. Its nuts.

On Hearing

I have a textbook for my digital media class titled, "Audio Culture, readings in modern music" by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner.
It is a compilation book of essays written about modern music.
The assignment I just read was incredibly interesting. It was about how, over the years, silence has steadily been removed from our society. We fill our lives with noise, which makes it more difficult for important sounds to have any meaning. The author referenced "signal to noise ratio" a few times, but giving it a new meaning in what we hear with our ears.
Very cool.
What was most interesting to me, thought, was a paragraph that i'm going to reproduce here. Read it all. I dare you:

"We will not argue for the priority of the ear. Modern man, who seems to be in the process of deafening himself apparently regards this as a trivial mechanism. In the West the ear has given way to the eye as the most important gatherer of information. One of the most evident testaments of this change is the way in which we have come to imagine God. It was not until the Renaissance that God became portraiture. Previously He had been conceived as sound or vibration. In the Middle East the message of Mohammed is still heard through the recitation of his Koran...."
"Clairaudience" from The Music of the Environment by R. Murray Schafer

how cool is that?

I've heard it said that blind people have a much easier time interacting with the world than deaf people. Because the ears are, inherently, much more useful than the eyes.
Think about this.

All art conveys emotion. That's what makes us look at it or listen to it. But visual art and musical art are inherently different: most people can't look at a bunch of colors on a piece of canvas and understand what the artist was thinking. Visual art usually represents something: pictures of objects that we already recognize, shapes with lines that our eyes follow to perceive thoughts, and colors that influence our thinking.
Music is different.
You don't have to recognize sound for it to convey emotion.
You could be a time traveling blacksmith from the 1650s and listen to ambient electronic music and still feel the emotions of the composer, without ever knowing what you were listening to.

Our ears are rooted to our subconscious. They are sensitive.


So many problems that people have with God would be nonexistent if we were better at using our ears instead of our eyes.
You can't see God. But you can feel him. Like you can feel wind.
And you can hear wind.
God's name in Hebrew was a bunch of "breath noises"-no vowels. His name was literally breath. Vibration.
God is much more fundamental to life than what we can see.

on belonging

so i was thinking a little bit as i was walking across the rpi campus today.
(sidenote: first blog post as a college student)
I was thinking about belonging.
I've been plenty of places during my short life on earth: i've been through private middle school, public highschool, private highschool, juggled churches, and now i'm a student at a university with a ~$800m endowment.
And what i've realized is that i've never really "fit in" anywhere, the exception being cwc.

In middle school i was the kid that threw pencils at people.
At somersworth i was the fattish kid in the corner that didn't talk to people.
At BA US i was constantly stretched in every direction and couldn't ever focus on academics. And all my friends weren't in my grade.

At RPI i'm the kid in engineering that doesn't want to be an engineer, the kid with a bicycle that doesn't use it because i enjoy walking, the kid that is completely lost in physicsII and mostly lost in calcII, the kid that gets locked inside stairwells in EMPAC, who misses job interviews because the interviewer's phone didn't ring, who doesn't go to frat parties, whose laptop needed reimaging 10 minutes after he got it because vista lets you create limited user accounts when there are no administrator accounts on the machine, the list goes on.

So i'm thinking, maybe its not that i don't fit in here.
Maybe it's that i just don't like fitting.
Example:
In highschool, I amassed a collection of geeky tshirts because a) they were funny and b) no one else had them.
Now i go to a school where everyone wears geeky tshirts and i no longer wear them. because other people do.

But i think that there are advantages to being somewhere that you don't fit.
Mostly, people remember you.
I missed my job interview at EMPAC today because i was supposed to call the guy's cell phone so that he could open the door for me. I called it at exactly 4:40, the time of my interview, and it went straight to voicemail. Thinking that he was running late, I just hung around in the hallway for a little bit.
There was a stairwell next to me.
I started looking out the window.
The door shut behind me, and it locked.
And i soon discovered that every door leading to the inside was locked.
So i ran down 6 flights of stairs as fast as i could, luckily there was an outside door at the bottom, and then ran back inside the main entrance and up 6 flights of stairs again.
Then i waited where i was before.
At 5:17 he came out the door.
me: "are you heading out?"
him: "yes, did you want to meet with me?"
me: "yeah i had an interview at 4:40"
"well it's 5:..." (shows phone clock)
"yeah i thought you were running late"
"i've been standing here by the door, you were supposed to call.."
"i did..." (takes out phone) "it went straight to voicemail"
"oh... well i'm sorry about that, how about you email me for another time slot"
"okay, sorry. thank you"

then we left. But with any luck, my unfortunate exchange will help him to remember me next week when i get an actual interview. maybe.

anyway, some parting thoughts:
psalm 119:19 says "i am a stranger in this world"
and that's how i feel every day.
But i don't mind it too much, because i think that i'm supposed to be here.
also, in verse 11 says, "i have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you"
and that's also how i feel- that through the daily troubles of college life i have nothing to worry about because I have God's word hidden inside of me, forever, holding a spot that cannot ever be usurped. And if i rely daily on it, nothing can go wrong because i'm convinced that inside of God's will, there is no wrong.

On the Nature Around Us

Got the new MuteMath cd on monday.
It's excellent.

The very last line in the whole album is, "The devil is not the nature that is around us // but the nature that is within us all."

I heard that line and decided to think about whether or not i believed it.
My conclusion: both yes and no.

The line brings in an element that is prevalent in Eastern thought- we go around pegging things as "good" and "bad" based on how they pertain to us. For example, a hurricane might be considered "bad" because it destroys houses and makes people cry. But in reality, the hurricane isn't "good" or "bad" because nothing in eastern thought is good or bad, just is. The good and the bad is our interpretation that is often wrong. In this case, the word "devil" in the line up there might refer not to the devil in the traditional christian sense, but to the concept of "evil". Nature isn't evil. People are.

That's how I think that Paul Meany intended his lyric to be read.
But there's a whole lot more under that.

Taken literally, the line doesn't actually make sense. The devil is a being; a fallen angel. So he can't be equated to any sort of "nature". He is his own distinct thing, not 'within' us but hanging around in the natural world.

But I started thinking about the devil and his role in our lives, and his role in "nature".

First, some prose:

“How you are fallen from heaven,
O Day Star, son of Dawn!
How you are cut down to the ground,
you who laid the nations low!
You said in your heart,
‘I will ascend to heaven;
above the stars of God
I will set my throne on high;
I will sit on the mount of assembly
in the far reaches of the north;
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.’
But you are brought down to Sheol,
to the far reaches of the pit.
—Isaiah 14:12-15

Let's journey back in time to sometime after God created the heavens and the earth, but not very much after. Your name is Lucifer. You're an anointed angel, with responsibilities above other celestial beings. But you want more. You want to be as powerful as God himself.
But God, being God, knows this, and throws you down to earth.
bummer.

Here's a similar situation:
We're back in the present time.
Your name is Johnny, and you're a 7 year old boy.
It's Christmas time.
For the past few months, you've been asking for a Nintendo Wii. It's all you want. It's all you hope for. You want nothing more than to play Sumer Smash Bros Brawl against your older brother. You're fixated on it.
You're sure that your parents Santa is gonna get it for you.
Christmas morning rolls around.
You see a box that looks something like a Nintendo Wii sitting under the christmas tree!
excitedly, you rip into the wrapping paper... it's an n64 with no games and no controller. $7 at a yard sale. You throw a temper tantrum.
Dad just looks at you and says that he doesn't want you getting fat in front of the TV. Not yet, anyway.

What does a disappointing christmas morning have to do with the fall?
Johnny wanted a really cool video game for christmas. He got something that he couldn't use. Satan wanted the really cool ability to control everything in the universe.
He got the earth.

In John 4:8-10, the Bible reads:
"Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. 'All this I will give you,' he said, 'if you will bow down and worship me.'
Jesus said to him, 'Away from me, Satan! For it is written: 'worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.''"

The devil tried to get Jesus to bow down to him in exchange for the Earth. the Earth!
That's like Johnny trying to pawn off his n64 on the school playground for his friend's dad's brand new car.
It makes no sense whatsoever.

Because the earth is lame. It consists of trees and mountains, lakes, rivers, and wild animals. They just kind of hang around. They don't have relationships with God. They just simply are. Just like how an n64 isn't playable without controllers or games. It's pretty to look at, if you're a video game collector, just like how the earth is pretty to look at if you're into nature. (everyone should be, by the way).

If you were Satan, you'd probably have pulled a temper tantrum just like Johnny over there. You wanted it all, and you got a bunch of lame animal friends that don't even have souls.

I asked Pastor Nate a bunch of questions about Nature this week.
Here's my conclusion:
Nature isn't good nor evil. in a sense, them eastern guys are right on that.

But, rather, it's broken.
God created Nature to be perfect; He said that it was "good". Good as in, "swell job, Self." Then Man came over and messed it up by bringing Sin into the world.
We decided to disobey God.
Not only that, we decided to disobey God while standing on his Creation.
That's digging a hole in somone's front yard and then refusing to leave.

So we broke Nature. Now dogs bite children and hurricanes drown old people.
And the devil gets to hang out with it all day long like a kid without an n64 controller.

None of it matters. Jesus fixes it all. And gives us all Wiis.