Postmodernist

My family is all musicians.
My mom is a classically trained violist. My dad plays so many instruments that I don't even know what they all are. My brother plays piano. I play bass. My family has also always been involved in church music.
So a few weeks ago my dad brought home a book by a church worship leader called "Why I Left the Contemporary Christian Music Movement". The author is a former rock musician who transitioned several evangelical and baptist churches from "traditional" style services to "contemporary" styled services. The big differences being organ music and hymns vs. CCM rock-style music.
In his book, he maintains that CCM is generally a bad thing and urges churches to retread and go back to holding traditional services. He has a number of arguments, most that don't make sense to me, but my family has had some pretty neat discussions about it.
What we all seem to agree on is this:
The author associates ALL rock music with bad things that don't belong in church services, and he believes that the music- driven beats that virtually everyone enjoys listening to, is inseparable from evil, lustful desires.
As a musician, I am mostly taken aback by this claim.
Music is a wonderful thing, and, to quote Jack Black, "Rock is not the devil's work, it's magical and RAD."
My family decided that the author of the book has a personal issue with rock music: in his mind, he cannot separate it from immoral things, even if many other people have no problem with it. The problem with that is he seems to believe that people the world over are being influenced by rock music for worse.
One claim he made to support this is that rock music was born out of rebellion.
Which it very likely was.
But my mom, who has a masters degree in music education and seems to know all sorts of things about music history made the point that all art movements are born out of rebellion to the movement that preceded it.
So yes rock music is rebellious. But the romantic movement was rebellious against the classical period, which was rebellious against the baroque period, all the way back to forever. Each generation throws off the customs of the generation before it. It's just the way human society seems to work.

The deeper thing at work here is Modernism verses postmodernism.
The author appears to have grown up in the 70s, when Rock music was really taking off.
My dad grew up in the 60s, and made an off-hand remark about how ever since the 60s, music has been junk. Now i'm no psychologist or philosopher, but it seems to me that everyone loves the music they grew up with. My dad loves music from the 60s and earlier, and it can't just be coincidence that it's the music that was around when he was growing up. Old people listen to old music. Everyone knows that.
But the time period when my dad was growing up is considered to be part of the modernist movement. Like all philosophical and artistic movements, modernists revolted against the styles and thinking of their parents and grandparent's generations.

But the age we're in now is considered Postmodern. To quote the first sentence in the wikipedia article, "Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth."
That is to say, postmodernists reject the idea of objective truth, whereas modernists embraced it.
"Truth" to a Modernist is absolute; it is the way things are.
"Truth" to a postmodernist is all in our heads; it's how we perceive the way things are.
The author of that book is modernist; he believes in objective truth.
I am a child of postmodernism. That means that INSTINCTIVELY, I believe that the author, as a modernist, believes that his truth is the only truth.

It's different ways of looking at the same thing, and arriving at a completely different conclusion.
Growing up in church, I never believed that truth was relative. That's absurd. Truth is out there, it's fact, and it exists.
But as i've grown older, my ideas about truth have changed. I haven't ever studied postmodernism but maybe the people who label our society know what they're talking about. I still believe in absolute truth. I'm a Christian and I believe that Jesus taught Truth with a capital T.
But i've also realized that absolute truth isn't nearly as important as church people make it out to be. Because our society is postmodern. Truth isn't objective in our culture. Truth to each person on the planet is completely different, because each person perceives the world completely differently. And PEOPLE, it turns out, are more important than anything else on the earth.

Especially in an age where your insurance premiums are determined by an algorithm and not a friendly lady over the telephone, people out in the world are becoming more and more in need of being understood by other people.
Jesus's ministry was all about the people he taught.
If we don't try to understand people, if we don't realize that the truth we think is right isn't the same truth that everyone else thinks is right, we will be completely useless to help those people.
 And that's why I  have a personal aversion to CCM; not the style of music, but the Industry. Making music for other christians isn't inherently bad, but it encourages us to ignore the entire world. That's absolutely not what being a christian is all about.

Us vs them

"One of the things that the Church has to understand about people... The lost world, they're not the enemy. Its not us vs. them."
-Perry Noble

If I can't think of any other reason to not like christian radio, that's it right there.

Indispensable Man

The following was in the "drafts" section of my blog. I didn't even know I had a "drafts", apparently I never posted this:


I must have reached that point where i'm realizing how smart my parents actually are.

Over this thanksgiving break my dad shared some apparently Rickover-era "shipyard wisdom" with me. Being a '90s child, I googled it and there is a poem by one Saxon N. White Kessinger, and this is the stanza that my dad quoted to me:

Take a bucket and fill it with water,
Put your hand in it up to the wrist,
Pull it out and the hole that's remaining
Is a measure of how you will be missed.

But the problem is that when you pull out your hand, it is wet.  There is no indispensable man, but that's not the point. The point is the sticky nature of human relationships. We all wear pieces of each other everywhere we go and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

On What Sort Of Greeting

Luke 1:26-30
"In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, 'Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!' But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, 'Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.'"

This is from the Christmas Story. I think its tremendous that Mary was staring at an Angel, and she had to sit there and try to figure out what the junk was going on. Because seriously, how often to angles show up and announce to you that you're pregnant? It's happened once.

I think we spend a lot of time trying to discern "what sort of greeting" God's giving us. Every time I face a major life decision, I spend hours "trying to discern". I think it might be endemic to evangelical christianity. We teach ourselves that we need to listen to God. You tell someone, "i'm thinking about studying abroad", and all they say back to you is, "Pray about it. Listen to God."
That's more or less a useless answer, obviously I asked for your advice because I wanted your advice, not a canned response that's just going to paralyze me with inaction.
How do we get over the trying to discern part? Mary didn't have to understand what was going on. For all we know, she didn't know what was happening until after Jesus rose from the dead. Somewhere along the way, like His disciples, she must have thrown in the towel on trying to discern and just let Jesus reveal himself to her.
How do we do that?
How do we let go of trying to understand the universe? And how do we let go of always trying to figure out what sort of greeting this is?

Retreat

Matthew 15:21:
"And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon."
...this passage introduces the story where a Canaanite woman asks Jesus to help her daughter. Jesus tells her no, that he's only there to help the Jews, and she answers, "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table." And Jesus heals her daughter.

What struck me is that Jesus Withdrew to an area where non-Jewish people lived. The way its written makes it look like Jesus decided he needed a break from religious people. He Withdrew. He went somewhere else. He got away from there, and went to go hangout with people who didn't try to make him fit into their religious box. And if you knew that everyone around you wanted to kill you, you would probably do the same thing...
We make religion into a huge deal here in America. We play politics off of it, we get into family feuds over it, we allow it to steer our choices and dictate which brands of toilet paper we boycott or not.
Jesus had to withdraw from religious people.
Can't blame non-christians for not liking something that even Jesus couldn't deal with.

study

an hour ago i found a love note that was hidden for me to find, dated over 4 years ago.
how am i supposed to concentrate on BJT amplifiers?

What's a libertarian?

I'm pretty sick of bipartisan politics.

The Left wants to tax business owners and wealthy people, and then give money and aid to poor people.
The Right only contains those people who are wealthy and business owners, so they naturally oppose this.

The only problem with the Left's ideals is that they aren't fair, and they essentially amount to Robin Hood and certainly close in on socialism.
The Left will stand there and yell at you all day about how the Right isn't fair.
Look, if you were wealthy, you wouldn't want to have a 30% tax, either. That's just plain ridiculous, and it discourages anyone from actually wanting to succeed.
The Left then turns around and tries to convince you that you can make life better for millions of people by giving them jobs in the government doing literally nothing for a paycheck. Funded by the Right, those people who were blessed enough to make it to your higher tax brackets.

I'm sorry that you don't like capitalism. I hear that China is nice. Go move there and enjoy the good life.

Now, are corporations greedy? Absolutely. That's the whole reason they exist. Public companies exist for the sole purpose of making money.
The problem is that we've built society around a lie, the idea that stocks go up and jobs are added every year. That's simply false. The stock market isn't supposed to go up every year. It's supposed to go up and down. We've built companies, markets, jobs, families, and government on the assumption that bear markets are a terrible, rare catastrophe. Then we try to force reality into that lie, creating bubbles and then crying when they burst.

Stop electing politicians that promise to make you richer. For the love, can we just find someone who wants to have a sustainable government? I don't even care if its big or small or in between. I just want it to be sustainable. Like, on a balanced budget. After we fix that, we can worry about greedy people and lazy people. Or we can forget about them, because its the people in between who have been hurt the most.

Or maybe Apple can build an assembly plant in the USA. that would literally solve 1/2 of the problems we have, and it would prevent the government from spending billions on an ambiguous "jobs" act that claims to give americans jobs by spending america's money. Preposterous.

Zelda

Remember the bosses in the Zelda games? Like the baddies in those caves. They swung stuff or shot stuff at you, and you hopefully made it through the dungeon with full hearts so you could shoot your sword of power or whatever at them. You would have to wait for them to be done with their routine of deathly killing, and for just a moment, you could take a break from running away, shoot at them, and then go back to playing defense. Invariably you would get hit, and then you would have to either use special whatnots or just melee attack the thing, swinging your sword with no regard to how much you got hurt back.
But mostly, you avoided the boss's attacks.

That's the closest simile I can make to being an EE student.
At the end, I've been told, there is a princess. 

This isn't my english homework.

I don't talk much about things that go on in my life, mostly because I don't think much about things that go on in my life. But I'm starting to grow weary of just taking life as it comes. I want to accomplish something, and in order to do that, I have to figure out how to organize my thoughts, organize what I stand for, organize who I am.

I'm listening to Rob Bell right now. He's almost as funny as Francis Chan and Judah Smith. Why do so many people have issues with him? Also as far as I can tell, he's the among the most thoughtful speakers in the christian community.

But that's unrelated.

Over NNED Summer Camp this year, I sketched out a word in my notebook.
Parable.

I remembered a note in the ESV study bible for Psalm 78:2 (I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark saying from of old, things that we have heard and known, that our fathers have told us.)
The note says, "Parable and dark sayings are the tools of wisdom teachers, and require imagination to unlock their meaning."

If you've ever read the Gospels, you know that Jesus taught in Parables a few times. He pretty much never just went out and told people (crowds) something. He always did it with a story.
I've heard sermons preached about parables before.
Almost all the time, the pastor will talk about a parable like a story with a one-to-one correspondence to something about Jesus. But that's not the impression I get from the term "dark saying". In fact, I have never ever seen the word Parable described as a "Dark Saying". I think that's an awesome perspective of them.

These things that Jesus taught about weren't just a nursery rhyme like we reduce them to in sunday school or a trite lyric from a christian song. The words Jesus spoke in parables contain the absolute truth about reality. Nothing underscores this better than a dark saying. Like this is important stuff, the very fabric of the universe. That verse in Psalms and the ESV note imply that the truth in Jesus' words is locked up in meaning. I don't think that Jesus' parables were just a metaphor for the afterlife. I think that they contain truth that can't be expressed any other way.  Like how you can only store hydrofluoric acid in a plastic container, some truths need to be contained in a dark saying.

I think that's one area that the modern Church has neglected.
Evangelism has been a booming business since the 200s.
We talk a whole lot about Jesus, and that's great.
But I don't think we spend enough time saying what Jesus said.
Obviously it was important enough for him to say it. We probably should, too.

I think that Movies are the modern-day parable.
Sadly, so many of them are created for the sole purpose of consumption.
People pay for movies, so people make movies to make money.
They are selling a story. The best ones make the moviegoer think. Usually they leave a happy cathartic feeling at the end. But few movies successfully tell a parable of truth, a dark saying of old, something that really, truly introduces people to reality as it really is.


For some reason, christian subculture hasn't embraced the idea that you can't tell someone something that they don't want to know. They will just ignore it or reject it or explain it away. Even if its true. Even if its the gospel. The vast majority of people I know do not want to hear someone talk about the bible. That is boring and sober. In order to get truth inside of someone, it has to go in sideways, through a dark saying, a parable, a movie, a carefully constructed discography, anything that isn't direct. It has to dwell in them unnoticed in order to survive.
If we diverted any small percent of the resources that the church spends on ineffective ministry strategies into getting truth inside of people without them rejecting it, we wouldn't have to spend billions of dollars sending food to starving people, because starving people wouldn't exist.
But I don't want to talk about food, food is one of the most broken, messed up things in America.

Where this is going

I love stories. I love "serial dramas" because they take years and years to tell a story and by the end, there are millions of people watching every move on screen.
I also love some of the new advertising techniques that are getting people completely absorbed into a whole made-up world, uncovering minute details and telling the story as its made.

I think its absolutely incredible that there are artists who spend their entire careers telling a single story. We live in a world where FAST and NOW and SHORT and CHEAP are important action-words. We have musicians or singers releasing a new album each year while touring nonstop. Production lead-times on movies and TV shows have been reduced substantially since years past. And the result is more and more quick projects that consumers will buy over and over again.

I want to spend my life telling one story. Whether it's creating one to tell others or just living my reality, I want it to be one story, unified from beginning to end.

Rumor

There's a line in the Bible about the end times that there will be "Wars and Rumors of Wars".
I always wondered what a "war rumor" is.

Here in modern times, we always know about wars. Thanks to the televised and internet-driven media, we as consumers can be there with the fighting right as it's happening. We know about the war we are fighting in the middle east. We can turn on a screen and watch it.
But will there be a time when great America is harboring secrets and rumors about wars?

I'd say that ever since the transition from Colonial militias to the Department of Defense, we have kept war out of the eye of the general public. Sure, the public is aware of it and is involved, but people who aren't actually in the armed forces don't have a clue what's going on besides what we watch on TV. Our country has around 80 submarines in the ocean and no american citizen knows what they are doing at any given time. We don't know what all the air force's fighter jets are doing. We don't know where infantry units are heading.
It's safe to say that War breeds Secrets.

Successful war demands successful secrets. That's why there is wartime propaganda and its why we don't know what the military is doing or where they're planning on going tomorrow.

John Locke, one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers, compared Nations to Individuals. He noted that one of the problems with leading a state is that there is no individual who is more suited to judge a nation than any other individual, hence the need for democracy. But there is much more than that.

In Daniel 10:20, Daniel has a vision of a messenger.
"He replied, 'Do you know why I have come? Soon I must return to fight against the spirit prince of the kingdom of Persia, and after that the spirit prince of the kingdom of Greece will come. Meanwhile, I will tell you what is written in the Book of Truth. (No one helps me against these spirit princes except Michael, your spirit prince. I have been standing beside Michael to support and strengthen him since the first year of the reign of Darius the Mede.)'"

Now, ignoring all the prophesy things, it is absolutely incredible to think that Nations have Spirits.
Not only do they have spirits, but they have names and they fight each other. Other Bible translations call them just "princes" or Angels, but there are spiritual beings that represent the nations on our Earth.
Nations are alive. Not just as a collection of people. They are living. They have personality. They fight.  Just like you and me.

I believe that one of the big problems with politics today is that we have lost this realization. Politicians and business executives treat countries as a line separating two groups of people that is crossed very easily by the internet. But these nations are individuals. We have ignored that they have spiritual underpinnings and as a result we have mistreated them.

I think that will probably change soon.

150

This is the 150th post on this blog.
Don't go reading all the ones you missed.
Or do.

I listened to a podcast today where someone said the average tenure of a church Technical Director was 18 months. This is the same lie stat that they say about full time youth pastors.
People always talk about how miserable and lonely ministry is.

I don't think ministry is miserable or lonely.
Here's what I think the issue is.
Tech directors and youth pastors both work for "senior pastors".

Now i've never been a pastor, and don't have any plans on being a pastor.
But at the moment, I have plenty of friends who are in bible school because they feel called to be a pastor.
Here's my question:
What in heck are the odds that everyone who is called to pastor a church or preach are also gifted with excellent management skills?

I'm learning a lot about management this summer.
The managers I see every day spend about 2/3 of their time putting out fires, and the remaining 1/3 trying to stay connected with their personnel.
Even if you are a senior pastor who is also a great manager, if you're a preacher you should be spending your time being a good preacher. Or if you're a councilor you should be counseling. If there is time left over to properly run a church and manage your staff, you are probably cheating something somewhere.
Jesus Preached and taught.
He let other guys deal with the logistics.

I think the "average tenure" of ministry positions is so low because too many pastors don't realize when they should let other people be in charge of things.

I'll be impressed when I see a church with an excellent main communicator who doesn't also pretend to run the whole show. But that's a book, not a blog post.

Piano

A long time ago, a family from our church moved out west. I don't remember where they moved or why they moved, but since they moved from new hampshire, any of the 48 states to the left are all "out west" to me.
They gave our family a spinet piano that has been in our dining room ever since.
I quit piano lessons when I was in 3rd grade, something that I regret now. But it has meant that I hardly ever touch the piano in the dining room.
Every now and then, when no one else is home, I noodle around on it. But that's the extent of my experience playing piano.

With that said, I have just experienced something that every person reading this needs to experience.

Find a piano sometime when no one is around. I suggest a big room. There are few things in the World of Man-Made-Things that I love more dearly than enormous empty rooms.
Play a single note up high.
For your sake right now, just imagine it.
Its just a note.
A single, solitary note that has almost no effect.
It has a brief life, but no matter how hard you play that high note, it quickly dies away.

But then you have to try using the sustain pedal.
When you hold down the sustain pedal, you unlock every string in the piano and allow them all to move freely. When you hold down the pedal and play the exact same note, you get something amazing and pretty unnerving.
Instead of just quickly dying out, that note causes every string to make noise. It literally effects everything around it. That same note now lasts almost forever. Even after the initial note has faded, the entire piano keeps talking and talking and talking. Its chilling to listen to.

I'm just a little bit obsessed with how I don't know the name of any of my great-great grandfathers. After 4 generations, I have no idea who those people were. But they set in motion a chain of events that caused me to be born, in the process causing God only knows how many other things to happen on this earth.

Usually in our heads, we think about our actions like a single note on a piano. We go about our lives as a string of isolated incidents. But the reality is that everything impacts everything.
Everything we do that comes in contact with the rest of Humanity reverberates like a note on a piano.
Our actions die out quickly. We live and die. But the results and consequences of even the little things last for a really, really long time.

Mending Wall

There is a Robert Frost poem that we read in highschool english class. "Mending Wall". I don't remember what year we read it, or what we discussed about it or the conclusions we came to about it. But I will always remember that we read it, and the proverbial line that "Good fences make good neighbors", that Frost may or may not have been telling us not to believe.

I'm not one to examine myself much. It's not something that I have ever left time in my day for me to do. I hate when people talk about "love languages" and Meyers-Briggs personality tests and junk like that because from what I can tell, if you're an adult, you should already know what makes you tick, what your personality is like, and whether you like hugs or getting gifts more. None of that is quantified, because by golly there is no human way to quantify your brain. So instead, we have to use subjective words to describe ourselves, which isn't really useful.
But one thing that I have noticed about me is that I really, really can't stand walls.

Walls are something that you jump over.
Walls are something that you knock over.
Walls are something that you can watch as they slowly fall apart over time.

We all spend our childhood within the confines of the walls that adults put around us.
Usually for our "protection" or "own benefit" but even if most kids can't see the "real" benefit of these walls, most if not all can see that they are just a wall.
Not even a real wall.
A metaphorical one.
Walls inside your head are easier to jump over than a wall made out of rocks.
So I did a lot of that when I was growing up.
And today, when people put a wall in front of me, my first reaction is to break it.
Every time.
It usually takes a great deal of effort for me to decide to let it be.
Maybe i'm just combative. I'd like to think of myself as never being content with status quo.

Yesterday morning, I watched Dean Kamen tell about 70 extraordinary highschool seniors to chase after their dreams and that if people who care about you try to hold you back, it probably means that you found something that needs to be done.

Easy words for an incredibly successful person to say to a bunch of kids who have never experienced failure. But hey. He's on to something.

emotional

yesterday, I ate breakfast at 7:30, took a final at 8, wasted a lot of time, and 12 hours later found myself at a place that desperately tried to be home almost 2 years ago. I laughed, I stared, I played Angry Birds, I ate ice cream, I watched laundry, I met new people, I climbed an insane staircase to a bell tower full of bird poo and bat skeletons, sat on a roof, searched in the dark for a place to put my feet, found out that I could have shared an apartment with a 12 foot Pepsi sign, and tried to sleep at 4:30 am. Today I ate breakfast at 10 and then put food on plates for a room full of homeless people, each one with a story screaming to be told and understood, and used to change the lives of others.
then I was gifted lunch from Chipotle.


tomorrow, reality returns with its usual unforgiving, trips-you-down-the-stairs ways.
i think.
i thought i knew which was the dream and which was the staring at the ceiling with your head on a pillow, but I suppose i really don't. and perhaps I never will.
maybe its all a dream, and you wake up when you're 65 and realize you slept through your alarm and you're going to be late for school, once again, and you graduate with the most number of tardy marks in the senior class.

i need to understand how to use multivariable calculus to describe engineering probability models before 8:00 monday morning.

before i forget

if there's anything I have learned as an engineering student so far, it is that you can't solve a problem by looking at the problem. you have to look past the problem to the other side and see the answer. the solution is what connects the two together. Engineering doesn't care much for the answer, you usually already know what that is (for instance, better life for all). It's the solution, the substance that allows us to reach the answer, that is elusive.

Magical

This past saturday I spent the morning waiting for the Comcast guy to show up at the Strand Theater to install internet. After 5 hours and a no-show, I at least got to spend the time with my best friend. Also changed the marquee, which is exciting because people always stop and ask what's going on or tell their children to watch out for that guy struggling with the ladder.

More importantly, i caught the saturday performances of Berwick's dance shows this year. Even disregarding how awesome it is to walk into a building and immediately have people running up to you asking how your life has been or having people you don't remember meeting start talking to you, i love watching production happen. Especially in a place where i spent hours upon hours trying to make musicals and dance shows happen as smoothly as possible from a lights/sound/video perspective, tech booths feel like home to me. I could do technical theater for the rest of my life and enjoy every minute of it. Watching stressed-out performers and producers and stage managers fight and yell and pour their passions into something that everyone has to share, that is more magical than an iPad.

Million Miles

I've been reading Donald Miller's blog for a while now. Awesome stuff. He's giving away copies of his book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.
 Get it and read it!


What story are you telling? from Rhetorik Creative on Vimeo.

On Smell

I just read through Jonah.
Chapter 1, Verse 17 reads:
"And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights." (ESV)
Jonah then goes on to say a 9 verse prayer from inside the fish.

Yesterday at restoration church, a certain someone's office smelled pretty terrible. Chris said, "i think someone put poop in here." and he wasn't joking.
After looking around for a while, he found what was making the smell. A white paper bag that at one point had someone's lunch in it. I believe he accurately attributed it to chris tower. It was in the trash can. Now, you could smell this thing from the hallway. It was strong.
When we leaned over the trash can, it became difficult to take a breath.
And when chris picked up the bag and brought it to his nose, he choked, i'm pretty sure he teared up, and he quickly put it down.
No doubt about it. A 5 day (possibly plus a few weeks) old sandwich can smell pretty horrible.
Lets suppose that whatever fish Jonah was in had a stomach about the size of chris's office.
Fish, or wales, or whatever you have here, eat more than a sandwich from Calef's every day.
Raw fish, on its own, isn't really the best smelling stuff.
Imagine what stomach bile, half digested carcasses, and potentially other animals probably the same size of Jonah would smell like all mixed together.
With no fresh air.
For 3 days and 3 nights.

It was difficult for me to concentrate in that office, because there was the constant nagging of foul odor.
I couldn't have lasted a few minutes with my face next to that sandwich bag.

Jonah prayed for 9 verses, thanking God that he was in the fish.
If you can read through that without being completely taken aback, you simply don't understand it.

None of us have ever been swallowed whole by a whale.
But then again, most of the times, we don't thank God for the smelly situations we are in, either.

Shoes

There are a few decisions that I made in Highschool that I'm proud of. One of them was running cross country.
You hear sports analogies a lot. High profile coaches from all sorts of sports teams in all sorts of leagues routinely take the "motivational speaker" track. People can relate to sports, and sports can relate to life. But Running is different.
Most sports require a combination of Teamwork, Athletic Ability, and Strategy. We like this because it makes us feel good that we can apply a similar formula to things like the workplace, or family life, or whatnot. But distance running has nothing to do with teamwork. It has very little strategy. Success in running is being both the most athletic person, and the person most able to push himself far beyond the point of giving/throwing up.

Does this lend itself to good motivational speaking?
It should. Unlike just about every other sport, running is not learned or taught. There is no official rulebook. There is just your feet. It is a part of us. Everyone is a runner. We are born with it. Something so fundamental to our bodies ought to have many things to teach us about ourselves.

I got new shoes this weekend. In highschool I started wearing "last season's" shoes as my everyday beaters, and its a habit that I continue. Modern running trainers are one of the most noticeable types of shoes. They are all made out of mesh, they are usually reflective, and they always have an enormous heel cushion. They are built for utility. That heel cushion is designed to absorb impact and help reduce injury from the constant pounding that running puts on your body. They are great.
They are also lousy to run races with.

In fact, a great deal of runners run races with "flats", if not spikes. Flats are still mesh and reflective, but instead of a heel cushion they have a thin piece of rubber under your foot. They can hurt your feet. They can damage your body. But they make you run faster, because they are light and don't absorb energy that you should be using to run with.

During cross country season in highschool, race days were pretty much the best day of the week. On a training day, you would spend 2 hours running as much as you can, constantly wondering why you were putting yourself through so much misery. You would try to eat healthily, since you wanted to be in shape for races. In fact, large lunches made practice super-ultra miserable, so you learned to only eat just enough to not be hungry.

But on a race day, you could eat more lunch because races were later in the day. We got to ride on a bus for an hour or three and relax, do nothing, and enjoy our afternoon. Then you would race for 20 minutes, whereby you put everything out of your mind and do what you trained to do. Then you eat as many cookies as you could possibly hold in your stomach, drink as much vitamin water as you had fit in your bag, and enjoy the ride home.

Race Day is a party.
Except race day is absolutely meaningless if you never put the effort into training.
On Race Day, how good your feet and knees feel is not a concern because running fast is the only concern.
But training is grueling, and precautions have to be taken to ensure that training doesn't interfere with racing.
On Race Day, you need to replenish the hundreds of Calories you burn during a race.
But during training, you need to eat a balanced diet.

Everything in life has a preparation stage and an action stage. You prepare for your career by training in school. If you don't work hard in school, you might not have what it takes to be the top of your field. You prepare for your marriage by maintaining good character and living with purpose, not by listening to Avril Lavigne lyrics. By all accounts, training days are more difficult than race days. But when it comes down to it, the race is the only thing that matters.

Torn

currently cleaning my room, which means going through the plastic tubs that hold my life as it was one year ago, preserved as if time was at a standstill.

I'm very sentimental. As i'm looking at a bulletin from Terra Nova church, I realize that I hardly remember anything about it, and that I may never in my life go there again.

Having transferred schools feels a lot like having an ex girlfriend who is now married. Its as if my life is divided up into pieces of a timeline that roughly fit together, but are in no way related to each other, and can never be re-visited. I am literally burying my past, inside a filing cabinet, just in case I ever need the warranty papers for my computer.

Annual Report

My church released its annual report this week, and I've read through it.
First let me say: I love my church. With all of me.


According to the numbers, it looks like my church spent about 7% of its total budget on "missions" this past year.
Most of that was out of the separate, not-tithes "mission fund".

Which means that we spent 93% of the church's total resources on ourselves, and we relegate most of that missions money to the extra offering that people are asked to make.
In perspective, our church spent almost as much money on our mortgage payment as we spent on all "missions" for the year.

From my experience reading about the Church in America,  this isn't a problem with my local church. It's a problem with The Church as a whole. If our money is where our mouth is, then we're saying that the 20-years-ago purchase of a wooden building is almost as important as spreading the Gospel.
I'm uncomfortable.
I want you to be uncomfortable, too.

New

2010 is gone.
In 2010, for the first time, I made a New Years Resolution.
It was to read the Bible cover to cover Four times, in Four different english translations.
I almost realized this goal. Over the past 365 days, I read the entire NLT, AMP, and MSG versions. And I'm exactly 2/3 of the way through the ESV study bible I started in October. It turns out that It's really hard to read a study bible cover to cover, especially in 3 months. And especially when you're busy. I made barely any progress in the past 2 weeks, due to having an irregular schedule and spending 57 hours at church last week, and about 20 hours at church this past tuesday and wednesday. Hopefully by the end of January I'll be done with 2010's goal.
And then I will move on to my goal for 2011:
Over the course of 2010, every time i read a bible verse that interrupted me, made me think, stopped my train of thought, i wrote it down. This year my plan is to re-read all those notes i took, and make sense of them on an individual basis. Maybe I will try to make sense of them on a collective basis too. But no promises. If i stay consistent, there will be more than enough material for 2 blog posts each week.