1/3

As of yesterday, I am 1/3 of the way through the Bible for 2010.
I've been reading with a pen. Passages that get underlined also get written down for future reference.
Each time I read through the Bible this year, i'm going to compare notes from each version to see how they're different. Just to see. Just to see.

Watched Star Wars Episode II last night.
One scene stuck out to me in particular. It was after Anakin finds his mother. She died in his arms. He then became full of rage and killed all of the Tuscan Raiders who had taken her captive.
Then he and the family that had purchased his mother buried her in the sand of Tatooine. There was another grave stone. It had everything the final ceremony has here on earth- mourning, tears, flowers.
But no pastor.

That's something that I've noticed more than ever this time through watching Star Wars: the complete paganism of the entire galaxy that George Lucas created. Everyone does their own thing. There is no direction, other than the general consensus that Jedis are usually right. In fact, everyone except the Jedis and those that deal with them regularly seem to be motivated entirely by greed and nothing more. There's violence in all corners of every planet. Everything is corrupt. By the middle of Episode II, Emperor Palpetine controls both sides of two powers about to go to war. That's messed up.

The world without Jesus is messed up.

On Learning this Week

we've been watching movies every night this week. by "we", i mean some folks from RCA. By "movies", i mean mostly Star Wars. We watched Episode I yesterday and today we watched Gladiator.

Here's my thoughts on Gladiator:
I never realized that being a Charioteer would involve so much drifting. That would be so awesome.

Here's my thoughts on Star Wars I and Gladiator together:
Movies are made infinitely better by the addition of a cute kid that gets a lot of screen time without lines.

Here's what I learned from the Bible today:

In reading through the Old Testament, I'm about halfway through Numbers, not even to Deuteronomy. But one thing has become absolutely clear: redundancy.
I keep feeling like i'm reading the same things over and over again. If I was a little Jewish boy 2100 years ago, all this stuff would literally have been pounded into my head by now. There is no possible way that anyone could have said that they didn't know any part of the law. It's written down like 20 times in like 20 ways in several different books.
Its crazy how after so many examples through Moses alone where someone turned away from God and then God made the earth swallow them or sent fire down or something ridiculous like that, people still disobeyed the laws. Constant reminders just aren't enough. Watching people die just isn't enough.

In Gladiator, Commodus (evil emperor) saw over and over again what it took to make a good leader. He was surrounded by success in his Father, surrounded by success in his friend and general Maximus. But even after throwing opportunities to reform his ways out the window time and time again, he would not budge. He decided to stick with being the evil emperor. And he died for it, killed by the already fatally wounded slave of a former general of a former friend.

We're so stupidly stubborn. Our flesh is doomed to die and stay here on earth. Why are we so determined to remain with it when the reminders and the opportunities are never ending?

Movies are made better by cute kids. And so our lives are made better when we make ourselves like cute kids. Innocent, with few lines, content to be with our master, to win a podrace regardless of the stakes on our victory. (that was a starwars reference)

I could never be a film maker. I wouldn't know where to start.

Goal

I think my tentative goal for 2010 is to read through the entire Bible 4 times, in 4 different translations. It shouldn't be too difficult to remember to give myself 45 minutes at the end of each day for reading. Except, of course, when you consider all the other books I have to read this year and how busy this next (and next fall's) semester are going to be. Ick.
I'm starting the year with NLT, and my plans are to pick up an Amplified Bible and an ESV study bible along the way. But that leaves one more translation open to picking. any suggestions?

On Bottlenecks

This winter break is almost over. It's been 4 and a half weeks so far, but from this end, it just flew by. I spent the last two weekends at conferences, which is good in that conferences are amazing, but bad in that I come back from them with a notebook of stuff I thought about and no time to re-read anything or collect my thoughts.
OIL was probably the longest conference i've been to thus far, and it was without question intense. I have a program booklet full of notes from seminary professors and a few more books I have to read. But one thing that one of the speakers said as an aside got written down on the back page:
"Just about every American leader went to college."

Think about that.
Almost every person of influence in our world went to a college of some sort.
We have created a culture that puts a great deal of emphasis on higher education, which is in most cases a good thing.

I did some searching for some numbers. Here's what I found.
There are about 24 million 18-24 year olds in the United States.
There are roughly 7,000 colleges in the United States.
College tuition is climbing at a freakily fast rate.
That's because everyone knows that in order to succeed in our world, you have to go to college. So since everyone goes to college, those 7,000 colleges get to charge lots of money for tuition. It's a bottleneck. Every leader in America has to pass through at least one (often more) of those 7,000 institutions.

Interesting fact I just learned from Wikipedia's article on the US's Demographics: There are about 7,000 Episcopal churches in america. That's one Episcopal church per college. There are hundreds of thousands of other churches in our country.

So... how does it make sense that people are capable of graduating college and going on to lead governments and organizations having not heard the Gospel?
There are plenty of churches. They're just not doing their jobs very well.

One thing I've learned so far as a college student is that the first month or so in the water sets a trajectory for the semester, the year, and for life. The first people that meet each other tend to stick around each other. And the company we keep sure affects everything about ourselves. People join frats, clubs, and study groups. The people in those groups are the people that hang around each other. It's an absolutely critical time.
And if you ask me, it seems like a really, really, incredibly easy time for evangelism. People go into college with "open minds", soft fertile soil for any idea and every idea. Might as well take advantage of it.

College campuses. You have thousands of young people concentrated in a teeny tiny area. There's no reason for UNH to be the 11th top party school in the USA when it could easily be the #1 churched school in the USA. How could the world be different if every year, a few thousand young adults graduated on fire for God instead of graduating mostly drunk? You can't fathom it. Don't even try.

On Advice

Mark Batterson reads the bible through in a different translation every year.
I decided I wanna try that out, and kick it up a notch, so i found myself a nice 90-day bible reading plan and i'm going to tackle my NLT bible with it. The reading plan does 3 different sections each day, so for right now it has me reading chapters in Genesis, Job, and Matthew.

Anyway, i've never actually gone through the entire Bible methodically before. I've done the new testament several times, but there are definitely sections of the OT that i've missed. I'm excited.
This verse in Job made me giggle:
"A wise man wouldn't answer with such empty talk! You are nothing but a windbag."
-Job 15:2, NLT
The book of Job is well known for its exhibition of poor advice.
Those words were spoken by one of Job's friends after Job was pleading with God to show him how he had sinned and deserved to have everything taken from him.
But this man, Eliphaz, wasn't someone that Job should have listened to, and luckily he didn't. His advice was crummy, even though it makes logical sense in the context of the whole chapter.

Its good to have mentors and to seek advice from people wiser than ourselves. But it is incredibly important for us to know who we should be taking advice from in the first place. Without discernment on that front, we can end up more lost and disoriented than if we had never asked for direction in the first place.

nothing but a windbag. Not even a good insult.