Musings of a Curious Child

Complicated Explanations

2012-02-03T13:20:00.003-05:00

The most profound quote I heard this week was from my stage lighting teacher. He's an old guy who has clearly done theater for his entire life, stagecraft and lighting and all that drudgery. "I remember working 62 hour days." Technical theater indeed.
But he was going over some terminology in class and had this to say:
"When you don't really understand something, you can only explain it in complicated ways."

That is to say, when you really understand something, you can explain it easily, and could write the Simple Wikipedia article about it. But when you don't understand something and someone asks you to explain it, you find yourself BSing some sort of answer that sounds like you know what you're talking about.
Example, I could probably explain calculus to a middle school student, because everything I've done in school for 4 years has been based on calculus. I could not, however, explain to you Spanish grammar. I could probably fake it because i long ago studied latin, but I really know nothing about spanish.

This observation is important to me because it really makes sense of so many "complicated" things in the world.
Economics, politics, theology, non-newtonian physics, the history of ancient cultures, global warming, global hunger, the weather. These things appear very complicated. There are all sorts of scientists dedicated to studying them, writing textbooks about them, debating the importance of different theories.
But the bottom line is, no one really knows how the economy works.
And that is dangerous for two reasons: One, lots of people have successfully convinced politicians that they do, in fact, know how the economy works. And Two, because of this, people/government try to control the economy based on their inaccurate models that don't really work. But this regulation is complicated because that is the only way people know how to explain the economy. The result is things like housing bubbles, debt crises, and inflation.

How about theology?
There are disgustingly long books written about theology. You can devote your entire life to just studying a single religion, and you would never even know what the guy down the street believes. Theology is complicated because it is invented by people to describe things that we don't actually understand. Think about the Romans. They had hundreds of gods, all responsible for little things in daily life, and the result was a ridiculously complicated set of social observances to make sure you didn't offend any deity.

Now, there is nothing wrong with studying complicated things. But I believe that there are far too many people out there who talk like they know more than they do.
As an engineering student, I am surrounded by other students who think they understand how transistors work, but really, no one knows for sure why electrons behave the way they do.

This is one of the coolest things about Jesus. He said simple things. Short sentences. Little stories. Because He actually understood what was going on, so He could put it in simple terms. And christians have been complicating it ever since.

One million workers

2012-01-14T20:03:00.002-05:00

I love this time of year because its when big companies publish fancy, good looking reports about how great they are. Apple routinely toots their own horn over their environmental record and their labor policies.
Here's a quote that caught my eye:
"Apple-designed training programs have educated more than one million supply chain employees about local laws, their rights as workers, occupational health and safety, and Apple’s Supplier Code of Conduct."
(from http://www.apple.com/supplierresponsibility/reports.html)

Apple has literally Hundreds of factories in China working to produce your glass-coated consumer products. Imagine if instead of outsourcing all of that mindless labor, Apple opened a manufacturing plant in America?
There are certainly a million highschool dropout Americans who could benefit from a solid manufacturing job. Apple is really about the only American company that has enough financial resources to do something like that. And they don't, simply because everyone wants cheap electronics.
Instead, we're fueling economies that are at odds with us, putting the nail in our own coffin by being a lazy society that doesn't particularly want to work for a living.

Postmodernist

2011-12-31T02:47:00.004-05:00

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

2011-12-11T01:18:00.001-05:00

"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

2011-11-27T00:08:00.001-05:00

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

2011-10-21T23:02:00.000-04:00

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

2011-10-20T21:53:00.000-04:00

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

2011-10-02T23:41:00.000-04:00

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?

2011-09-28T22:04:00.000-04:00

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

2011-09-20T18:19:00.000-04:00

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.

2011-09-13T23:47:00.000-04:00

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

2011-08-29T19:52:00.000-04:00

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

2011-07-23T02:35:00.000-04:00

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

2011-07-05T17:40:00.000-04:00

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

2011-06-17T20:08:00.001-04:00

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

2011-06-12T21:31:00.002-04:00

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

2011-05-14T23:05:00.000-04:00

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

2011-05-13T15:59:00.002-04:00

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

2011-05-10T14:54:00.000-04:00

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

2011-03-06T23:10:00.002-05:00

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

2011-02-19T01:23:00.000-05:00

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

2011-02-15T20:30:00.000-05:00

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

2011-02-02T16:04:00.000-05:00

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

2011-01-28T14:50:00.000-05:00

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

2011-01-01T15:21:00.001-05:00

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.

theology?

2010-12-11T19:10:00.002-05:00

I sent this as a text message to myself in July. I just realized that i never actually posted it.

sometimes it feels like the church is losing influence. in the changing culture that we live in, people don't necessarily want to have anything to do with Jesus. What they want is answers. I think that very few people actually believe that this is it, that we live and die and then there's nothing else to it. So i think there has go to be something wrong with the way we're presenting the gospel. In Acts, they reported having thousands of people being converted at a time. We have the same basic message that they had back then. But even huge, enormous churches in America get excited about just a few hundred salvations in a weekend. What is it that we're lacking? The world we live in is trying desperately to pretend that it isn't lonely. I think thats a key. For more and more people, the world is doing a good job pulling the wool over their eyes. We have fancy toys these days that take our mind off of reality. We have more drugs that we can medicate ourselves with. We have relationships, friends, family, maybe a happy marriage here and there.
But the reality is that none of those things can ever change the fact that everything you and i have ever experienced in this life has been flawed. Everything we have ever seen and felt has been seen and felt removed from our Creator.
The world is lonely. Not the kind of lonely that you feel when you don't have a girlfriend or when you first go to college or your parents leave you home alone for the first time. The world is lonely in a deep, tangible way, lonely in a way that we sometimes don't notice because we have never not felt it. Because the world does not offer us God, our creator and dad, the only one we can have a perfect relationship with. The only one who can make us not lonely. People don't realize that. And maybe that's on us because we don't do a good enough job telling people. It might have been easier converting Jews to Christians 2000 years ago because Jews already had half the story. They were waiting for Jesus for hundreds of years, and the Early Church just had to convince them that Jesus was who he said he was.
We face a different challenge now, where people have no idea what to believe or where to start. Back then, their challenge was to complete a theology. Our challenge starts with defining what theology is. Not too many churches that i've been in do that.

Roads

2010-11-06T00:57:00.001-04:00

Went on a roadtrip a few weeks ago to New York city to experience Hillsong NYC's opening extravaganza.
It was awesome.
I drove on the way there. Didn't stop once.

Highways absolutely mess me up.

When you're on an interstate, all you see is the road that you're on. At 70mph, you're always looking almost a quarter mile ahead of you. With the exception of passing through (over) big cities, there's usually a wall or trees on either side of you.
Your world consists of your car, and the line that is the road that you are on.

Eventually, when you exit the highway, you look around and realize just how far away you are from where you started. Hundreds of miles. A journey of several days 150 years ago. Several weeks if you were on foot.
Technology has come to a point where "travel" is no longer a Grand Adventure like it might have been when our great grandparents were young.
It is now an inconvenience- we measure the distance away from places in "minutes". We groan when we find out our friend's birthday party is "an hour away" and think about the precious gas money slipping away from us.
Before cars were invented, that would have been a great excuse to take a Holiday, go on an adventure with friends, travel to see people you hardly ever see.

On the route between my home and Barrington NH, there's an overpass that goes over local Route 16. Tebbetts Road. Right before you hit that bridge, there's a street sign next to someone's driveway: "Old Tebbetts Road". If you slow down enough, you can see that the trees on the other side of that driveway are thinner brush than the woods of the surrounding area.
The view from Google Maps makes it even clearer: Tebbetts Road is not where it used to be.
Sometime when they turned "Route 16" into a highway, they had to move Tebbetts Road. It probably made local residents unhappy. Or at the very least, Frazzled.
In fact, whenever they decided to cut down a 150 mile stripe of woodland and pour asphalt over the ground, people must have been frazzled.
We love highways. Roads in general. Without them, we would be confined to our local towns, and Somersworth would have to bring back the Trolly line that it used to operate.
But then you think about the millions of people who have been displaced by them.

"Sorry sir, you are going to have to move your house so people can go on family vacations. You have no choice."

Sounds wonderful.

These are all the things that you don't notice when you're driving on a highway.
You don't notice all the people who live literally a hundred feet from where you're driving at breakneck speed, down that line of black tar, staring at the car in front of you. You don't notice the neighborhoods, the businesses, the people.
Let alone the nature.

Me and Karen Mawikere visited the Rochester Toll Plaza a few weeks ago.
Here's how it went: Drove into what could easily be any random business's parking lot. Walked into the woods for maybe a hundred feet. Stepped over a low fence. Looked up and BAM, there's a toll booth. Cars everywhere. Cars on their way home from work. Cars full of people not liking to pay tolls. Just driving, a part of their daily routine. With absolutely no idea that they were just moments away from a parking lot in Gonic, from what could only have once been a christmas tree farm, from a ministorage place, from everything else that you don't notice when you're on a highway.

Think about all the local things that there are in your town. Parks. Local stores. That Gorge in Troy. People "driving through" on the highway that is no more than ten minutes from your house go by in a matter of seconds, and miss everything completely.

We have turned towns into white words on 8-foot tall green signs. Maybe with an arrow. Maybe with a "miles to" number.
Just one more thing that I'm unhappy about.

Climate Change

2010-09-29T00:31:00.001-04:00

There's a lot of hype these days around global warming. I heard the other day that the last major incandescent light bulb factory is shutting down. Apparently, our government has mandated that everyone switches to CFLs in their homes. I don't understand why this is, since CFLs have a much more detrimental effect on the environment than regular light bulbs, requiring more energy to manufacture and causing plenty of problems when not recycled.
Pay attention:
None of you care about global warming. None of you care about the environment as a whole. In fact, pretty much no one on earth cares. Not enough for it to matter.
Because if you did care, you wouldn't be reading this.
In fact, you wouldn't have a facebook account. You wouldn't own a computer. You would live in a log cabin, maybe on Walden Pond, and might spend your free time telling everyone you can about how absolutely horrific the internet is for the environment by simply existing.
"Green" is a marketing term that companies use to get you to buy their stuff. Apple, in all their talk about making environmentally friendly products, doesn't care about the environment. Maybe they recognize that its smart business to try to make a smaller impact on the natural environment, but if they actually cared about the earth, they would just stop manufacturing computers.
See what i'm getting at? No one actually cares about the earth.
Not enough to actually change how we do life around here.
One thing that is true is that there are plenty of fans of global warming.
You know, it seems like everyone in america wants to be "green". That's no surprise, seeing as how "green" products like CFLs are marketed as energy saving, which is identical to money-saving. No one has to "sell" the green movement, it literally buys itself.
But its also so phony. No amount of "reducing our carbon footprint" can ever save the planet. You can reduce and reduce but you will never eliminate it. And as long as a carbon footprint exists, we're destroying the earth.
And you don't care.

Jesus also has a lot of fans. The Bible is the number one top selling book of all time. But just like global warming, not a whole lot of people seem to actually try to work out in their own lives what Jesus was all about. Like, literally, being a Christian means trying to live like Jesus. I'd say that in general, most christians are pretty bad at that because in general, i don't see a whole lot of Christians even trying to heal sick people or even walk on water. Not as a part of their daily lives. Plenty of people, though, enjoy showing up to church, wear christian t-shirts, and listen to christian music. You know, things that fans do.
And its probably for the same reason most people buy CFL light bulbs yet still drive cars.
Its easy to be part of a movement. We're wired to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to participate in a mob. It's a different story to live completely radically.

true inspiration

2010-09-11T00:02:00.000-04:00

Inception was one of those movies that kept me smiling almost the entire time.
Not because it was particularly well made. I have a few peeves with the plot, relating mostly to how none of it actually made sense to me and how they couldn't bother to do math for us (if 5 minutes is an hour then 10 hours gets you 5 days > 2 months > a little less than 2 years).

But i was smiling more because of how relateable it is.

Now i really have no idea if the rest of you ever feel this way but i have a disturbingly loose grip on reality.

I, every day in my life, feel like I'm lost.
Not lost in a dream. Not lost on a road, but lost in general.
Not lost in a particularly bad sense. Just like I have no idea where I am.
Usually when i have "work" to do to keep me busy, this is not an issue.
But by golly, an almost 3 hour movie is a great place to think.

Here's one way that I often feel lost: My memory, for the most part, only works when other people are talking about things that happened to me.
It doesn't take much for me to stand back and wonder how I got "here".
I can look around and recognize where I am, and I can know where I've been, but sometimes none of it has any meaning.

This has happened to me on almost every math test I've ever taken:
I look at the page, see some numbers and some funny symbols, and have no idea what to do with it. Like, I probably know how to solve a first order linear differential equation. But it takes quite a bit of effort for me to make sense of what the heck that writing on the paper means. Lost. Very lost.

Another subject that the movie vamped on a bit was Inspiration.
Like, what does it actually take to create an original idea?
They mentioned always knowing when someone else thought of something.
They also covered that feeling you get when you're not actually creating, but "discovering". You know, that musician-architect-designer feeling where the piece reveals itself. It is so incredibly sketchy to me, but i absolutely know the feeling.

That, to me, hits at the very core of what it means to be alive.
A biologist will tell us that in a way, we're not all that different from a tree. We're related- we're both "alive", and made up of the same general materials.
But a tree can't create.
Is creation even possible?
If we don't have souls, then we're just biological engines, reacting to our surroundings, responding to inputs. How can a universe-wide chemical reaction make anything new? Let alone ideas?

I wrestle with the concept that the moment you just spent reading what i am right now writing is GONE. FOREVER.
Yes, you have a memory of it. If you didn't, you wouldn't be able to look at words on a screen and connect them to the language that gives them meaning. But the actual moment, the infinitely small piece of reality, is gone forever.
And that's why I struggle with the knowledge that every day, literally millions of hours of reality in America get used up watching tv. yelling at children. yelling at parents. Checking facebook. Picking at zits.
LIKE HELLO, THOSE MOMENTS ARE GONE FOREVER, WE COULD HAVE USED THEM BETTER.

Growing up, i've always had this unshakable notion that i could be anything that i want to be. This is difficult for me because i really do want to be and do everything. I want to be rich, I want to develop world-changing innovations, I want to drive a UPS truck, I want to be the CEO of general motors, I want to be an engineer, I want to be a toshiba authorized service person, I want to work on an oil platform, I want to be in the navy, I want to be a researcher, I want to be an IT guy, I want to get a degree from Yale, I want to work at a church. the list really does go on and on.
And I don't want to have to choose.

And so I'm lost. I don't understand how people get stuck with careers that bring them no joy. I don't even understand how people can pick careers.

This is not a dream that we can realize and wake up from. It is very, very real.

I forgot, i was originally going to write about inspiration.
I think I need a kick.

On Camp

2010-07-24T17:21:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I got back from this summer's NNED camp. Our church brought a handful of teenagers and me and josh were on rec staff, which means that josh got to tell people how to play games and gave teams points while I spent every day with a video camera and every night editing footage. I've never not been a camper at a camp before. The perspective is pretty good.

My favorite part of the whole trip was watching the pieces come together. Here you have 30 or so individual staff members, all from different churches, half of which were college kids from Valley Forge on the band, and a guest speaker who you've never met before, and in the time between dinner on sunday night to lunch time monday afternoon, you have to all get on the same page and make a weeklong summer camp that actually works.
And it actually works.
Because even though you've never met half of those people before, let alone collaborated with them on anything, you are all already on the same page. Everyone was there for the same purpose, to see lives transformed.
Its encouraging to me that individuals from different backgrounds can have enough in common to get that done.

Half

2010-07-10T16:44:00.001-04:00

Summer is half over.
This year of 2010 is half over.
I've read the entire Bible through twice so far. I've started a third time with the Message Remix 2.0. I love it. Its easy to read and challenges everything you've ever thought about the Book.

All of it flew by.
So far this summer has been nonexistant.
I started working 50 hours a week over two jobs. I'm making enough to pay off a little more than half my student loan from this past year. All of my personal belongings are still in plastic bins scattered around the house. I've been keeping my clean clothes in a laundry basket in the middle of my room. The last time I picked up my bass was 2 weeks ago. Most days i open my laptop for about half an hour to keep current on facebook before going to bed. I don't know where i'm living yet this school year. I hate paying five dollars a day for gas to go to work. I hate paying maine taxes and social security that will not exist by the time i can retire. Often i fall asleep in my chair at 10pm and wake up at 3. My alarm is set for 430am. I leave for work at 530 when i'm not late. This past week i started running a mile and a half in the morning. I think it makes me less tired during the day. 4 days of the week I don't get home until after 9, which is already past when bedtime should be.
I'm not looking forward to school. I have never in my life looked forward to school. Starting over trying to connect with people i've never met before is a real challenge for me. Especially considering the hit-or-miss personality i seem to have. But somehow I managed to only sign up for 15 credits, and I only have one class on tuesdays, in the late afternoon. For once i never have anything earlier than 10am.

I have not read anything other than the bible since winter break. I have a growing stack of books that i need to go through, some that i was excited to read 8 months ago. I have a growing list of books that i want to read but can't justify buying without first getting through some of the ones that i already have.
Got the new hillsong cd last week. They always all sound the same until you've listened to it over and over and over again.

I still really want prescription sunglasses. But I haven't found a pair of anything that looks good on me. I also have been unable to find any place that sells columbia eyewear, and I could really use a new pair of actually good regular glasses.
I've also always wanted a pair of kangaROOs shoes. That company stopped making shoes in April. I'm torn. Combined with the puma outlet store being closed for who knows how long, and i just now bought my first pair of new shoes since this time last year. Asics. blue. On sale. Just like every year for the past 4.

Last week i wrote a 21-text long text to myself so i could remember a thought that i wanted to blog about. I just re-read it and its depressing, so i probably won't post it. I wonder if its actually possible to measure progress.

On Adventure

2010-05-11T12:35:00.002-04:00

For the first time since 8th grade I've been watching tv regularly- one show, mondays at 8pm. Adventure Time. Amazing. The most creativity in television in a long time. And hilarious. And animated. The main character will go out of his way to make sure he seizes upon every single opportunity he has for an "adventure". It usually involves "bad guys" and new invented words for 'awesome'.

As the semester wraps up, i've been presented with several opportunities for adventure. There's three in particular that have been "big decisions" for me.
One is whether or not to sacrifice the first week of summer vacation, when i could be relaxing and preparing for sl8, for the intervarsity retreat going on up at saranac lake.
Increasing the bracket is the summer internship i got offered for which would be a full time job all summer long. Again, i've been struggling with the notion of all my time this summer disappearing. Not really a fan.
Lastly would be where I'm going to college for the rest of my degree.

And the conclusion I think i've come to on all three fronts is for adventure.
I keep thinking back to the only book i finished reading in 2009. Go read it. Its worth it. Fact is, i really really like being comfortable. It takes work for me to go do something different and unknown.
So i'm going to the IV trip, even though i didn't really want to. I'm taking the summer internship even though i still don't really want to. And i'm thinking about transferring to unh.
The way i'm feeling about it is that RPI was last year's adventure. I didn't really want to go to RPI. I was set to go to unh and stay home. But most of the reason i decided to come here was that I could, and it would be a waste to not walk through a door that swings open on its own. I've been here for 2 semesters. I've gotten comfortable. I'm not sure how i feel about that. RPI is a system that's easy to learn. School is easy, you just have to figure out the motions. But i feel like i've accomplished nothing here. I have nothing to show for my 2 semesters in nerdopolis. And i don't know if that's pushing me to leave quicker or calling me to stay. Either way, life is an adventure and its a complete shame to not make the absolute most of it and chase what God is throwing at us.

On Wonder

2010-05-06T23:25:00.001-04:00

Yesterday in between classes i stopped for a few minutes to watch a dump truck empty out some dumpsters.
I was watching from a second floor balcony and got to watch the truck crush the trash inside. Very cool. As an engineering student and as someone who has always been fascinated with big machines, i got a kick outta it.
There's a lot of money, work, and planning that goes into designing and building something that we think of as trivial. Everyone's seen a garbage truck. But they really are impressive bits of engineering. Teams and teams of people worked on that truck, from the fluids guys that designed the hydrolics to the automotive engineers that got drivable.
I can appreciate that. Money, work, effort, and it pays off in real ways.

As I was leaving and walking going to my next class, a squirrel scurried by, looking for food. Squirrels are also everywhere, just like garbage trucks. We've all seen them. Students at RPI are quite familiar with their personalities and the way they act. I don't know anyone around here who hasn't stopped to watch a squirrel at some point.
They are also quite fascinating.
They're small. They're also much, much more complicated than a garbage truck.

I feel like, yeah engineering is vitally important to humanity and all that jazz. But when i look at the results of the very best that humanity has done, it is simply not comparable to what God has already put before us. I also read an excellent line from Perry Noble yesterday: "Disney created a mouse…GOD created the Grand Canyon…HE HAS THE TRUMP CARD!"
That totally sums up everything i was thinking then and there.

Unrelated: Last night i listened through what might be my favorite album of all time. I don't know why, but after all the worship music i've listened to, that one still feels very close to me. It could be because its the first hillsong album i owned. Or because of the memories of learning the songs on it after youth convention that year. Or because its one of the few albums that i've sat down with my bass, and played along from start to finish. Or maybe its just very good worship music to begin with. Its good stuff. Left me feeling nostalgic and warm-fuzzy for the future at the same time.
Also, in wonder of the ridiculous thing we live in called life. What an insane, unimaginable concept.

Action-y

2010-05-03T17:14:00.001-04:00

Last wednesday was a pretty different day. It marked the end of a work-intensive few days, and i found myself suddenly without anything important to do. So as I was eating lunch in Commons I ate with some other RCA kids and we got to talking. A certain person kept asking probing questions about me. Not really useful questions. But then again, maybe there are no useful questions. I feel like every question I answered was more frustrating because sometimes, you can't learn much about a person by asking them very specific questions.
Oddly enough, I ate dinner later that day in a different dining hall with a different few RCA friends. Completely different story. We started talking about Bible translations. We cracked out a laptop and started reading the awesomeness of the Message:Remix. I then ended up forcing them to watch videos from church services. I was really excited. I love showing people how much more awesome church can be than what they are used to.

I think the two people I was with for dinner gleaned a lot more about me during the shorter time I had with them than the group I ate lunch with. They saw what I was interested in, what I spend my time doing, where my heart is. And they didn't ask me any questions.
Analytical people bother me. RPI is full of analytical people for some reason. It stresses me out. Why can't we just appreciate what we're a part of without tearing it apart, analyzing it, and graduating with an engineering degree? Ick.

t-shirt lesson

2010-04-16T12:55:00.001-04:00

sometime around winter break, i went around telling people that I was going to start wearing solid color american apparel t-shirts. The main reason for this was that i have a profuse sweating problem to the point where all my t-shirts get really disgusting pitstains after a little while. I love t-shirts. If i wasn't poor, i would collect them. There's something that i really really like about wearing art. Except that i end up buying shirts and then ruining them. So i figure, why not just wear $5.50 shirts and not be sad when they start looking nasty.

So here's what i did.
I started telling everyone i know that i was gonna wear solid color shirts.
Then i bought some.
I got 6.
I only really wear 4 of them, since i'm not bold enough to wear bright pink or purple around people i might want to make a good first impression on.
I have enough shirts where i only wash them every 2 weeks. In any given 2 weeks, 4/14 days i wear a solid color shirt without anything printed on it.
That's less than a third of the time.

But strangely enough, people mention it to me, often enough for it to be memorable.
things like, "i can't picture you not wearing a solid color shirt"
or on the 10/14 days, "woah! you're not wearing a solid color shirt!"

I seem to have created a bit of a reputation for non-printed t-shirts.
I don't wear them most of the time. I only have 6 to begin with. But the reputation is there.
I think there's something to be learned from this.
That it doesn't take nearly as much work as some people think it does to build a reputation for yourself. All it takes is communication and some action. But mostly communication. The important part is any action at all. It doesn't need to be grandiose or extravagant or all-consuming. It just needs to be enough to show that you follow through with what you tell people you are going to do.
I could be wrong on this, but it seems to be what happened with my t-shirts.

On Excellence

2010-04-10T22:51:00.001-04:00

Excellence is always lacking.
Not in the sense that it is unachievable, since excellence in a mostly relative term.
But no one will ever tell you, "nah don't worry about it, we have enough excellence."

Joseph gave us a great example of excellence in action in Genesis 41.
The Pharaoh of Egypt, of whom Joseph has been a prisoner for more than 2 years, has a dream. It freaks him out so he calls all of his officials together to see if any of them can tell him what it means. No one can, but his cup bearer remembers that there's this guy named Joseph in the dungeon.
"I had a dream last night, and no one here can tell me what it means. But I have heard that when you hear about a dream you can interpret it." (Pharaoh)
Joseph replies in 41:16, "It is beyond my power to do this, but God can tell you what it means and set you at ease."

So they go over the dream and Joseph interprets it.
"This will happen just as I have described it, for God has revealed to Pharaoh in advance what he is about to do. The next seven years will be a period of great prosperity throughout the land of Egypt. But afterward there will be seven years of famine so great that all the prosperity will be forgotten in Egypt. Famine will destroy the land. This famine will be so severe that even the memory of the good years will be erased." [41:28-31]

Cool. Surplus. Famine. Thanks Joseph. Thanks Joseph's God.

but what comes next is cooler.

"Therefore, Pharaoh should find an intelligent and wise man and put him in charge of the entire land of Egypt. Then Pharaoh should appoint supervisors over the land and let them collect one-fifth of all the crops during the seven good years. Have them gather all the food produced in the good years that are just ahead and bring it to Pharaoh's storehouses. Store it away, and guard it so there will be food in the cities. That way there will be enough to eat when the seven years of famine come to the land of Egypt. Otherwise this famine will destroy the land." [41:33-36]

pharaoh didn't ask for advice.
he had all sorts of royal advice-givers and planners and such who were in charge of telling pharaoh what's what. All Joseph needed to do was mention seven years of surplus and seven years of famine. Then he was free to go back to his dungeon and be sad.
Instead, he followed up on his interpretation. He thought up a good idea on how to deal with the situation, and it was good enough (or God enough) to get him hired up as the chief adviser in charge of everything except for sitting on the throne.

I believe that we are called to exceed expectations and break barriers of "good enough".

Another Pet Peeve

2010-04-02T22:58:00.001-04:00

Going on right now is Air1's spring pledge drive.
That means they play much less music and do much more harassing to convince people to give them money.

I would be alright with supporting them if they were a radio station.
But what bothers me is how they're talking about how they have 5 pastors "on staff" and "on call". Phone pastors. Not a fan.
I put my radio at air1 so i can listen to music.
Not so i have the option of calling a pastor i've never met so i can tell him my problems.
Counseling, support, growth, that's all what the Local Church is for. Not radio stations.
I don't want to listen to a parachurch ministry. I'm glad you think you're making a difference, but i'm not into that. Play music. Do nothing else. Be good at what you claim to do and don't stretch yourself into what you shouldn't be doing.

Kinda like churches with "libraries" and thrift shops.
There's no need for that. Get your books at a bookstore. Steal your clothes at walmart.
That is all.

A Complaint

2010-04-02T00:19:00.001-04:00

Last night i finished reading through the entire Bible in 90 days.
Today i'm starting reading through the entire Bible in 90 days.
On January 1st I decided to read from the New Living Translation, since i've had a NLT bible for a few years and have never really read from it.
Now i have.
I don't mind it as much as i used to.

Today I'm starting through with the Amplified bible.
The amplified is a little scarier. The language isn't as nice.

At some point this week, i also have to get around to looking at the notes i took in the past 3 months.

One thing that bothers me is how difficult it is to find a 90-day Bible reading plan.
The internet is full of "one-year bible" plans, but i'm struggling to find even the original list that I used last time.
This is ridiculous.
Christianity is supposed to be based entirely on the bible.
With the sheer amount of marketing done in the "Christian" industry with music and books and other consumer nonsense, you'd think someone would encourage people to actually get to know what they say they're living for. Come on. A year?
In a year's time, I've gone from an overstressed highschool student wanting to get out of "here" into an overstressed college student wanting desperately to get out of "here".
Seriously though, a lot has changed in a year's time.
...if my life can change dramatically in less time than it takes to understand what my life is all about, i'm not in a good place.
So that's my complaint.
That christians don't read the bible enough, and aren't demanding that people help them read and understand it completely.

Frustrating.

On Apple

2010-03-24T20:50:00.001-04:00

Go to Apple's website. As of this writing, you'll be greeted by a full-page spread of the iPad, along with a line describing it as "Magical and Revolutionary".

This has been bothering me for a while.
A little while ago, Apple released the "Magic Mouse", which replaced the already single-button apple mouse (or the however many button 'mighty mouse') with a touch-sensitive surface.

I watched the speech where Steve Jobs revealed the iPad, months ago.
He stood up there and called it "Magical".
Like, not even joking. It was as if he was calling it, "awesome".
Except he called it Magical.

Magic doesn't exist.

But what does exist, is a famous quote from Sir Arthur C. Clark, the writer of 2001, A Space Odyssey: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

And everyone knows that science fiction writers are always right.

But the quote is pretty accurate. Think back to things like electricity, magnetism, the first computers... as far as anyone in the general public was concerned, it might as well have been magic.

But for a company, especially one as in-the-limelight as Apple Computer, to actually assert that their product is Magical is entirely nutty.
Maybe they're trying to be cute.
I'm sure Apple doesn't actually believe their product to be magical.
They probably know that their latest offering will work magic with their stock prices, but there's nothing unexplainable about it.

Here's what I don't like.
Even with the recession and people remember how to be thrifty, we're still a completely consumer-entrenched culture. Companies aren't even trying to sell us their stuff anymore- they don't have to, we buy it anyway. Advertising dollars are literally spent for the sake of selling brands and corporate identities rather than the products that merely carry those identities into peoples' homes.

And you know, i'm sure Apple payed out a pretty penny for that slogan. Have our minds become so numb that a company has to yell "LOOK AT OUR MAGICAL PRODUCT" in order for us to be interested?

Its insanity. I don't like being treated like a consumer.
RPI tried to convince the class of 2013 that we were gonna "Change the world".
Whatever that means.
I'd rather go around yelling at people, "LOOK AT MY MIRACULOUS JESUS" than buy an iPad that claims to have magic.

On 1000 Years

2010-03-21T13:38:00.002-04:00

There's a bible verse that causes a fair amount of disunity between different schools of thought- in 2 Peter 3:8 Peter says, "...A day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day."
There are people who use that concept to justify "old-earth" vs. "new-earth", saying that the 6 "days" in Genesis could have been millennia.
But that isn't really important at all.
What I think a lot of people miss is the other half of that statement- that a day is like a thousand years.

I don't know about you, but a thousand years is a long time. Think about everything that's happened in the world since the year 1010. Its essentially all of modern history. There are people who spend their lives devoted to studying a single decade; there's a whole lot of stuff that goes on in a thousand years, and I think you and me probably have no grasp on the size of that scale.

Now think about what you did yesterday. You could probably make a list of events that happened. Pretty boring. Pretty lame.

Christians usually hold that God "Has a plan for each of us". I'm not really sure where the Bible says that, but i believe it to be true. I think that there's no reason why God doesn't plan out our days for us, how we're going to interact with each other, the way that the weather influences us, the wind blowing on our faces.
Imagine if God put the detail of a thousand years into each single day of our lives.
He is familiar with every micro-second that goes down. From your life-changing decisions to how hungry the dust mites inside your pillow are.
What we think about as another mostly boring day is actually jam-packed with everything you could find in a thousand years.
I think we should try a little harder to appreciate that.

On CCM

2010-03-11T23:44:00.001-05:00

If you asked me to make a list of the things that i dislike about college, somewhere towards the top would be, "no car."
I love driving. I made my brother let me drive the entire way back from a conference in PA over winter break. 2 stops, not counting getting pulled over. It was wonderful.
Part of not having a car is not having a radio.
And part of not having a radio is not having Air1.
...Which makes vacations nicer, actually. Because the time in between my breaks gives the station a chance to change a few songs in the line-up. I come back and there's something different, which is excellent, because it lessens my view of the radio as a song-destroying consumer machine that cashes in on christian subculture.

There's always one or two songs that are just really annoying. Usually its because they are overplayed, but there is a certain example I want to harp on. It's "God shaped Hole" by Plumb. It's not only overplayed and annoying to begin with, but fundamentally distressing. The chorus goes, "There's a God-shaped hole in all of ussss". I couldn't disagree more.
The idea of the song, of course, is that we're all missing something- God- and that He fits right into us and makes us complete. That's about as theologically sound as jello is concrete.

I think a better comparison might be to think of ourselves as Ground Zero after 9/11. A giant heap of burning rubble responsible for hundreds of deaths. It will be 12 years later when the replacement building is finished. That's a long time, and a lot of complicated mess to deal with. But ultimately, One World Trade Center will be a much better, taller, nicer looking place to be.

There's no "god-shaped hole" in anyone. Just a smoldering mound of junk. It takes us to recognize that and realize that we can cash in the insurance and get the Best instead. Simple in concept, often times difficult in practice.

On Unleash

2010-03-06T15:11:00.002-05:00

This weekend was absolutely the best 3 days of my life. Actually, it wasn't even the weekend. But that's okay. Went to Unleash at Newspring church in Anderson, SC. It was an 18 hour each way road trip with my favorite people in the whole world.

Newspring's campus is amazing. Perry Noble, their pastor, has talked a lot about how the church ought to be the most creative place on the planet, and that secular organizations should be looking at the church and asking, "how can we do that?" instead of the other way around. His church is an excellent example of that concept at work. Original architecture and definitely a contender for the most creative kids ministry ever conceived. The church bleeds excellence. From the 600 volunteers at the conference to the 109 staff members that pour their hearts into their ministries.

The conference was divided up into 4 teaching blocks, 2 main sessions taught by the Man Perry Noble and then 2 break out sessions ran by staff members on various topics. As valuable as the teaching time was the space in between, some of it occupied with the free chick-fil-a lunch but the rest with literally being able to wonder around everywhere and absorbing absolutely everything possible.
I'm not going to lie, my face literally started twitching from smiling.

Worship was unbelievable. Newspring is the first church i've been to where i was satisfied with the way the audio was mixed. They had not-too-huge line arrays but lots and lots of subs. And with a D-Show for both FoH and monitor world, everything about everything screamed that they mean business.

We stopped by Elevation Church's main building in North Carolina on the way back. Their graphic arts guy was bomb enough to give us an impromptu full-on tour of the place. Looking back on it, the contrast between Elevation and Newspring might be the most awesome part of the trip. Newspring is an example of a church with a 13.7 million dollar annual budget, with a very deep bucket of resources and some 15,000 total attenders.
Elevation on the other hand, just turned 4 years old and have 1/3 of the members. They have a lot less staff members and have focused a lot of their attention on stretching everything they have as far as possible. Their facility was impressive in its own right, not for how huge it is or for nice equipment, but for how they've utilized what they have. Example, their graphic designer is one guy. Newspring has a team of 9 full time employees complete with an internal 2-week turnaround on all requested work. I saw more graphic arts in the 45 minutes that we were in Elevation than the 10 hours that we spend at Newspring church. He also gave us all t-shirts. That's sweet.

But what do you care?

Sound and Light guys, as well as musicians, are completely obsessed with gear. All of them. You can go up to a sound technician after any show and start asking questions and he will all of a sudden turn into a kid in a candy store talking about his own equipment. Its part of his job to love that. Its part of his job to know exactly how it all works together and seamlessly to produce what you paid money to see. There was no shortage of that enthusiasm at Newspring.
But on the car ride back home, I realized that over the past year or so, i've started to become pretty much church obsessed. I watch church services online. The last time I missed a sunday morning was when I was 12 years old. I love talking about church. I love hearing about church. I loved our 36 hours worth of being on the road for a one day conference about church.
If the symmetric property applies to occupation, then something becomes glaringly obvious.

On a pile of Dirt

2010-02-21T22:32:00.001-05:00

I finally had a free moment to pick up Praise Habit again. I read a page before i had to put it down and think about how good it is. Here he's talking about Psalm 1.
"And to live in ways that twist and distort His creation brings death. Real death. Not just the redundant (none of us are getting out of here alive) burring of corpses, but the walking around kind that tastes of dust rather than the Maker's exhale of love. It is repulsive. It doesn't hold together. It is not the genesis-shape imagined for a human.
...Our cultural conditioning of Western nationalistic Christianity typically sends us headlong into pharisaical discussions of R-rated movies and cussing and drinking and smoking and the dangers of associating with heathen who do any of the previously mentioned activities. I am familiar with a copious quantity of people who do not participate in any of these activities yet walk around lifeless, as dead and intriguing as a pile of dirt."

I can remember sitting around as a younger child, being completely terrified of dying. I think we all have moments when we realize that we cannot, as humans in human bodies, comprehend death. Because you can't imagine yourself not existing. That's why Heaven is such an excellent thing. But as much as we're afraid of it, so many people really are dead. And more serious of a death than being physically dead.
That's what's incredible. People are walking around, breathing air and drinking water, and they're more dead than some of the people in your local cemetery. Literally, more dead. That isn't symbolism. People are literally dead. And we need to do something about that.

On the Elderly

2010-02-14T01:00:00.001-05:00

Old people are really cool. A good majority of them somewhere along the way stop caring about what people think about them, accept the fact that they're old, and are completely okay with saying everything that comes to their mind, with no censorship.
It's adorable.

The RCA worship band, accompanied by some of Russel Sage's gals and later by other kids from RCA played a set of 5 hymns at a nursing home yesterday.
I've never liked hymns.
I've also never liked nursing homes- as cool as old people are, i get a bit apprehensive when i'm surrounded by them on all sides.
But don't get me wrong, I liked playing. It was a good night, disregarding the lamp that I knocked over with my bass case, shattering a glass tabletop.
But what I couldn't get out of my head was this:
In 20 years, the people living in nursing homes will not want to have college students come to them playing hymns. The old people in nursing homes 20 years from now will be former Dead-Heads. Baby boomers. Unchurched and apathetic.
In fact, I think we were assuming a lot by playing hymns and praying at a nursing home. If it weren't for the fact that nursing home residents will welcome any kind of entertainment you throw at them, i would have expected someone to mention something. Buddy Holly may have been more their style.

But it underlined to me the growing rift between Christians and society.
For example, in the 1200s, the Church was the only thing holding western society together. By the 1800s there were plenty of people who had decided that it wasn't for them. Since world war II, it feels like american culture has been rapidly splitting away from the Church. And in response to that, we have created "Christian Subculture", the horrifying, impact-reducing, relevance-decreasing bombshelter that christians in churches the world over are encouraged to hide away in.

Don't get me wrong. Worship music is awesome. Its almost entirely the only thing i've listened to while in college- Hillsong and David Crowder. And christian bands in general are cool. But the rift between our separate cultures is too big for comfort. We've made ourselves freaks, uneducated and insensitive to the people around us.
I wish there were more bands like Switchfoot.
Jon Foreman writes songs from the perspective of a christian that force people to think, without being a part of that rift. Like you can actually address issues of faith without dragging people inside of the bomb shelter and talking about how nice the stuffy air is and how great the canned peas taste. I like that. I wish more people would do that. Paul took the Gospel to all the corners of the known world. We sit on it and spend our creativity presenting it to ourselves over and over again rather than bringing it to people who need it.

Do me a favor. If you're reading this on facebook, like it. I have no way of knowing how many people actually read these things.

On Unused

2010-02-12T15:54:00.002-05:00

I went to EMPAC today to get a ticket for a show tomorrow. For those of you tuning in not on the RPI campus, EMPAC is the 220 million dollar building that is very cool and very unused. They tell us that they do research there, but then again, the RPI student union has to pay RPI for ice time for RPI's Div1 hocky team on RPI's own ice.

But here's the deal. The northern wall of EMPAC is 7 stories of glass showing a really cool staircase that goes from the bottom of the building to the top. The top is where the Box Office is, where you get tickets.
Except the box office is really just a wrap-around stainless steel desk.
And there's only one guy working it.
Empac is 7 stories of about 22,000 square feet.
You can walk around in the building all day, and unless there's a show going on, the only person that you'll ever see is that box office guy, staring at his iMac indefinitely.

EMPAC has employees. I'm going to guess maybe 10 or so full time workers.
They have really nice offices in the back. They're the guys that are in charge of programming, getting artists into the place, administrative and creative work.
But you walk inside the building, and there's simply an overwhelming sense of Space. Like you're surrounded by open-ness, you can look out the enormous window at Troy, everything is blue slate, glass, and stainless steel.

But it feels abandoned. Because there are no people in it that aren't shut away behind their locked suites in their nice offices.

I feel like the church has a lot of similarities to this.
Jesus paid much more than 220 million dollars for the church. He died. The guys that wrote the New Testament, most of them died for the church. Centuries of Saints died for the church.
But what are we doing with it?
Paying a single person to sit in the entree way waiting for a few sparse people to come buy tickets? Locking our pastors away in offices while we have theaters and auditoriums full of unused space? (think figuratively, not literally)

The Church is the greatest organization on the planet. We could at least do more than EMPAC with the resources we've been given.

On Stages

2010-02-07T21:29:00.000-05:00

Its been a really long week.
By the looks of it, they're only going to be getting longer each time around. I'm not looking forward to that. I'm stressing a bit about where all the time I thought I had to do homework went. It just isn't there.

I watched a few snippets of a church conference this week. There was a lot of talk about home-based churches that are moving especially in california. cool stuff. But I still like Perry Noble's stance- that the church ought to have the most creativity, the best shows, the most captivating experiences, since we have the greatest message of all and we might as well back it up the way it should be.
That couldn't have been underlined more clearly than with The Who's performance at halftime less than an hour ago.
I spent all of the Halftime Report staring at the background behind the commentators trying to get a glimpse of the setup going on the field.
Greatest. Stage. Ever.
I feel like stadiums have always been one of the most difficult places to pull off a good looking stage, since you have people on every direction. A circle is a natural route to go, but an enormous curved LED screen with flash pots inside of it and media that complements its shape perfectly is absolutely phenomenal.

The problem?
Pete Townsend is 64. His days of rock and roll are over. All those guys looked like frail grandparents at a college reunion, enjoying their 12 minutes in the middle of the Sun Life Stadium.
We have the most excellent stage and lighting plot celebrating a bunch of old guys way past their prime who are celebrating football, beer, and wings.

we can do better. It would be my dream to be directly involved with something better than that. But seriously. Jesus >>> football. We make a big deal and throw parties to watch two teams of professionals, neither of whom we particularly cared for during the regular season, and then don't see anything wrong with merely showing up to church on sunday morning. Where's Jesus' circular screen-around-a-stage? Where are his lasers and his Showguns? And by golly, where are His fireworks and His flash pots?
If we did church like that every sunday, the entire state of new hampshire would, at the very least, be really really interested in what was going on.

On Praise Habit

2010-02-02T22:44:00.001-05:00

I'm starting to read a book by David Crowder, "Praise Habit".
My brother got it for me for Christmas this year.
It is excellent.
I know this because after reading the introduction I couldn't stop smiling because he expressed everything I've ever wanted to say about eastern religion and its relationship to Christianity so perfectly.

Here's an excerpt:
"The consequences of this discovery were huge. If He was in a sandwich, where else could He be found? Every moment was becoming holy. Nothing was nonspiritual. This was habitual praise- a perpetually sacred acknowledgment of the Giver of every good thing. A relentless embracing of good and a discarding of bad with an awareness of the one who in the beginning spoke those life-affirming words."
-David Crowder

Then last night I read Psalm 148. It goes as follows:
"Praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord from the heavens!
Praise him from the skies!
Praise him, all his angels! Praise him, all the armies of heaven!
Praise him, sun and moon! Praise him, all you twinkling stars!
Praise him, skies above! Praise him, vapors high above the clouds!
Let every created thing give praise to the Lord, for he issued his command, and they came into being.
He set them in place forever and ever. His decree will never be revoked.

Praise the Lord from the earth, you creatures of the ocean depths, fire and hail, snow and clouds, wind and weather that obey him, mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars, wild animals and all livestock, small scurrying animals and birds, kings of the earth and all people, rulers and judges of the earth, young men and young women, old men and children.

Let them all praise the name of the Lord. For his name is very great; his glory towers over the earth and heaven!
He has made his people strong, honoring his faithful ones- the people of Israel who are close to him.

Praise the Lord!"

It seems to gel well with what Crowder was talking about. The idea that "Nothing was nonspiritual" has always been something that i've thought about. When i've learned about eastern religion it seemed to go along the same lines- that holiness, that truth is everywhere, in everything. Which is the right idea, just a pivotally wrong focus. God can be found in everything, because he made everything. You can find praise in absolutely everything you do, everything you look at, everything you think about. And when that happens, you're probably in a good place.

1/3

2010-01-31T20:05:00.001-05:00

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

2010-01-29T00:16:00.002-05:00

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

2010-01-23T18:21:00.002-05:00

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

2010-01-20T01:21:00.001-05:00

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

2010-01-04T00:25:00.001-05:00

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.

On Avatar

2009-12-27T23:29:00.000-05:00

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

2009-12-26T22:40:00.001-05:00

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

2009-12-22T01:15:00.001-05:00

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

2009-12-12T19:49:00.002-05:00

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

2009-12-05T20:22:00.000-05:00

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

2009-12-03T19:02:00.001-05:00

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

2009-12-01T00:21:00.001-05:00

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

2009-11-18T22:34:00.001-05:00

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"

2009-11-15T12:40:00.000-05:00

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

2009-11-09T04:21:00.001-05:00

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

2009-11-05T12:39:00.001-05:00

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

2009-11-04T22:44:00.002-05:00

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

2009-10-31T18:11:00.001-04:00

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

2009-10-15T10:47:00.001-04:00

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

2009-10-12T13:19:00.001-04:00

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

2009-10-09T01:32:00.005-04:00

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

2009-10-08T04:19:00.002-04:00

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

2009-10-07T02:33:00.002-04:00

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

2009-10-03T00:11:00.002-04:00

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

2009-09-24T20:38:00.002-04:00

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

2009-09-18T23:47:00.001-04:00

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

2009-09-15T15:19:00.000-04:00

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

2009-09-15T01:28:00.002-04:00

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

2009-09-13T13:15:00.002-04:00

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

2009-09-12T02:12:00.001-04:00

'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

2009-09-06T00:24:00.001-04:00

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

2009-09-04T18:38:00.001-04:00

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

2009-08-20T23:46:00.001-04:00

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.

On General Research

2009-08-16T01:15:00.001-04:00

I read an article in Popular Science today about how IBM has built a supercomputer that they are going to pit against contestants on Jeopardy. It's going to participate just like a human, with a buzzer and everything, and offer spoken answers. The showcase here is the programming that has to be able to read Alex Trebek's voice and interpret it's meaning, not only literally but also through tone of voice and inflection.

I told my brother, "Why is IBM doing this? They've been losing money for 20 years, it seems like a waste."
He replied cooly: "General research. Companies make money by doing research."

And he's completely right.
Example: NASA spends billions of dollars each year in weird little projects that don't seem directly related to space exploration. Yet NASA projects have given us things like memory foam mattresses and the protective coating on the outside of the statue of liberty.
Bell Telephone in the 40s through the 70s had one of the most successful think tanks in the world- Bell Labs, which created UNIX (aka every modern computer operating system), thousands of advances in electronics, MOSFET amps, C, and all sorts of things that have shaped our very world. None of which, of course, seem to have anything to do with telephone. 6 Bell Labs researchers received Nobel Peace Prizes.
And you know what?
Bell Telephone was one of the most successful companies of all time before it was split up by the government.
Companies get successful by putting money into research.

And you know, it got me thinking.
Think about how much more successful church ministry would be if we invested more into general research?

I've sat through innumerable "salvation sermons". Some have been better than others. But the problem with every salvation sermon is that at the end of 40 minutes or so, they challenge a listener to make a radical, life-changing decision.
That's not something that i think I, personally, would do after a 40-minute sermon, at least not without help from the holy spirit.

Recently in our area i've noticed an increase in general church ministry- there's more outreach going on, which is a good thing. But i still think the church is lacking in the area of community "research": Spending time and money getting our foot in the door by creating community building projects and being generally charitable. Things that have no apparent use for getting people to church. Because when you make something obviously about getting people to church, they won't want to go. Because there's valuable experience and reputation that can be built by "just being there" in the community at every available time.

I want to be part of a church that puts emphasis on that: "just being there", even and especially when it doesn't make sense to "church people". Because just like Bell Labs, you never know when you'll stumble on something that changes the world.

On Identities

2009-07-18T22:56:00.000-04:00

This weekend I went to my student orientation for RPI.
It may have been the most socially awkward event that i've ever been to, because at RPI, everyone is socially awkward in some way. At 8:00 last night, they told us that we were going to the "New Student Celebration". It was essentially a highschool dance, except 80% of the kids didn't even go on the dance floor. And we're in upstate new york, so all they played was slow, annoying club music, not the high-energy disco that i'm used to for dances. There was a few good minutes of enjoyment, but most of it was just noise and advisors encouraging people to mingle.

Here's my overall impression:
RPI is a lot like my highschool. This is both good and bad, but i don't know which it is more of. I'm not too worried about my schedule, as it looks like its going to be a lot of the familiar struggles with calculus and physics that I spent my whole senior year getting used to. That's a little comforting, though I'll admit I was beyond joyous when AP tests were over. Summer break feels like a fleeting respite from the agony.
More familiar than the sinking i'd-better-find-someone-smarter-than-me-and-be-their-friend feeling was the faces: I met at least 10 different people who all eerily resemble someone that I already know. That's playing tricks with my head, because I will probably forget about the people that i currently know as I get to be friends with the people that look like them. There's even a girl here named Kathryn who calls herself Katy. I kept doing double-takes because she looks exactly identical to a "katy" from Maine.

I really feel a lot like i did the first week I went to somersworth high school.
There's this familiar deal with stereotypes: At RPI, there seems to be three(3) mixable, interchangeable, fashionable stereotypes: The Nerd/Geek (of which there are several flavors), the "Smart Jock", and the "Minority". Everyone seems to have at least one of these traits down pretty good.
Except me.
I believe that I have succesfully avoided stereotype as a teenager through my mish-mash of changing schools, intense time divisions, and diverse assortment of friends. Resultingly, I don't have a recognizable "clothing style", unless jeans+tshirt with the occasional khaki/polo has a style named for it, I don't play any sports, I have good hygine and don't talk about videogames during lunch...

I feel very out of my own environment. I'm sure everyone does.
But I'm starting to get used to that feeling.
So far my only hope is that the christian group here isn't lame. Because I know i never would have made it through highschool without Uturn, and maybe, just maybe, there will be continuity through a campus group that will allow me to keep my bearings.

This is going to be a pretty nutty next couple of months.
But as Paul said to Timothy one day, "Continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus." [2tim 3:14+15]

It is impossible to ever be completely lost, completely alone, or completely forgotten.

on Transformers

2009-06-25T03:47:00.001-04:00

I saw transformers last night. Midnight showing.
It was exactly what I expected, and exactly what I wanted to see- a highly produced action movie full of alien robots and lots of explosions.

But here's the deal.
For that 2 and a half hours in the wee morning, I was completely engaged in the movie.
Halfway through, I caught myself thinking, "i don't want this movie to end.. ever."
And then it ended.
And I got up slowly from my seat and trudged wearily out of the theater.
And then I went home.

This morning, during the ride to work, here's what i started thinking about.

Even though I was incredibly tired from the long night of watching Transformers, I was completely "pumped up". I had difficulty falling asleep because I was still thinking about the movie. It had seeped into my mind.
And I realized one of the reasons i felt so empty immediately after the movie ended: because I had become so engrossed in the film, when It ended, I suddenly had to return to reality.
Reality, which is so much less awesome than the fictional world of transformers.
There are no massive alien robots fighting a war on our planet.
There is no Shia LaBeouf to save the world.
There is no ancient mystical "energy" that holds the universe together.

Micheal Bay and his contemporaries have figured out how to tap into our heads.
He can make a movie that engrosses us, makes us feel a part of the action.
And movies like that sell. We consider such movies "good movies".

50 years ago, movies didn't have to be that good.
Most young people don't like to watch anything made before the 90s.
Why?
Because production budgets weren't what they are now.
60 years ago, nobody spent 80 million to make a movie.
It seems like a natural thing that movies would get better and better.
But how come we don't like old movies anymore?

Here's what I think.
I don't think that it has anything to do with getting "used to" the highly produced nature of modern films. I think we need it.
We need movies to "move" us.
we need movies to make us feel there.
we need something to get us riled up and want to get out and do something.

because real life is boring.

that's what i think.
As our society gets more advanced, we don't spend time on tasks like we used to.
Washing clothes and the dishes is now a matter of loading and unloading a machine.
Getting somewhere is a matter of driving or flying there.
Communicating is as efficient as typing.
Re-connecting with old friends is a facebook search.

we've removed all of the adventure from life.
and we've created a longing for a cause.

that's why people play video games.
they don't just need a way to kill time.
they need to be a part of something.
That's why people spend months of their life dedicated to participating in advertising campaigns.

but here's the problem.
life isn't boring.

if people lived lives that glorified God and strived to be more like Him every day, they wouldn't find themselves needing "something more".

Here's what I think.
If someone created a movie half as good as Transformers about reality, as it really is, as it should be, no one would leave the theater feeling bummed out. They would want to participate. If only a few people put as much energy into Reality as they did into viral ad campaigns, there would be no world hunger problem. There would be no economy collapse. There would be no poverty.
Just the Love of God showing through people's lives.

On Questions that Aren't Really that Difficult to Answer

2009-06-14T22:05:00.001-04:00

I was going to post a blog today attempting to recap a stream of consciousness i had last night about reality.
then i opened a bible and the first passage i started reading caused me to change that plan.
Reading the bible has a funny way of messing with your thinking.
in a good way.

Anyway, the passage is Mark 8, 1-10.
It's where Jesus feeds 4,000 men along with women and children, off of seven loaves of bread and a few small fish.
It's a familiar story to anyone who grow up in church or has spent time in or around a church for any time- a simple message of faith, right?
Just believe in it and God can feed thousands of people off of nothing.

And as I was reading that, here's what I was thinking, in chronological order:
1: "God can do anything"
2: "God could feed all of the starving people all over the world with zero effort"
3: "Maybe the reason He doesn't is because of a lack of faith."
4: "No way. Millions of people have faith in God and pray for hungry children every day"

And I realized that this is one of the common traps that nonchristians try to spring to see if a christian really knows what he's talking about: "If God's so good, why are people dying from hunger?"

And you know, usually you consider that one of those "really difficult questions", the kind that you sometimes have to admit that no one really knows and the best we can do is pray.

And then I kept reading from that passage.
Mark 8:11-13 goes as follows:
"The Pharisees [religious leaders] came and began to question Jesus. To test him, they asked him for a sign from heaven. He signed deeply and said, 'Why does this generation ask for a miraculous sign? I tell you the truth, no sign will be given to it.' Then he left them, got back into the boat and crossed to the other side."

This passage follows immediately after he fed north of 4,000 people.

a) that's quite a bit of a miraculous sign.
b) Jesus answered the "difficult question" right after I thought about it.

It's there in writing.
We complain about how God isn't feeding a few million people.
Quite frankly, we should be doing something (more) about it.
Rather than tell God we want to see him do something spectacular, we should be thinking of ways to solve the problem.
Remember, it was the disciples who physically handed the food to the crowds.

So why doesn't God feed all the starving people in the world?
I'm sure he wants to.
But he can't just come down and throw food at them, because our generation just wants a miraculous sign. He's telling us to start breaking our own bread and to give it to others.

On Patience and Confidence

2009-05-31T00:41:00.001-04:00

I was reading through 2 chronicles the other day and got to this part about king Asa.
Check it out.

"The spirit of God came upon Azariah son of Oded. He went out to meet Asa and said to him, "Listen to me, Asa and all Judah and Benjamin. The Lord is with you when you are with him. If you seek him, he will be found by you, but if you forsake him, he will forsake you. For a long time Israel was without the true God, without a priest to teach and without the law. But in their distress they turned to the Lord, the God of Israel, and sought him, and he was found by them. In those days it was not safe to trabel about, for all the inhabitants of the lands were in great turmoil. One nation was being crushed by another and one city by another, because God was troubling them with every kind of distress. But as for you, be strong and do not give up, for your work will be rewarded."
When Asa heard these words and the prophecy of Azariah son of Oded the propget, he took courage."
[2 chronicles 15:1-8]

Firstly, there's a huge theological point to be made by that statement, "If you seek him, he will be found by you..."
Secondly, Azariah the prophet had encouraging words for his king.
He told him to stick with it and to ramp up what he was already doing to improve his kingdom and to glorify God.

The story continues.
"They assembled at Jerusalem in the third month of the fifteenth year of Asa's reign. At that time they sacrificed to the Lord seven hundred head of cattle and seven thousand sheep and goats from the plunder they had brought back. They entered into a covenant to seek the Lord, the God of their fathers, with all their heart and soul." [2 chr. 15:10-13]

Let's back up a moment.
Asa had been king for 15 years before any of this happened.
He had been doing the "right thing" for a decade and a half before we have any inclination that God even appreciated the efforts, save for a few military vicroties.
And by "right thing", i mean he was trying to abolish idolatry and the worship of "foriegn gods" in Jerusalem. He made his people worship God.
I'm sure he made many enemies. his grandmother was not happy with him.
But he perservered.
And fifteen years later, God sent a profit to tell him not to give up.

There's something to be said there about doing what we know we have to, even when it looks like it's not paying off right away.

On Malarkey

2009-05-22T23:53:00.001-04:00

The last two weeks at my school for seniors go as follows:
seniors stop going to classes and instead spend 20 hours per week on a "senior project", learning new skills or helping the community.
During this time, it is a tradition to play a game of Assassin, where teams of 2 all have another team of 2 to try to kill.
The end result is that when not at their projects, you have 40 teenagers running around Portsmouth, dover, rochester, and stratham with water guns, scheming and plotting endlessly.
It's a big childish game.
And there's really no point.
In years past, cops have been called on students for various reasons.
It's gotten incredibly serious.
Yet there's a small cash prize for all the malarkey it causes. It's more than worth it to simply not play the game.

For what it's worth, there isn't much difference between senior Assassin and "the real world".

Paul said, "Since, then, yo have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory." [Col. 3:1-4]

Think about how much of "the real world" is complete malarkey.
Businesses want money and spend all their resources making as much as they can.
Soccer moms spend their afternoons gossiping with each other about each other.
Day in and day out, people run around like nut cases trying to accomplish this or succeed in that.
We forge friendships and then break them.
There's drama and scheming everywhere you look.

All for a small cash prize.

Henry David Thoreau once said, "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone."
He also said, "Our lives are frittered away by detail."

We live our lives looking intensely at the ground, trying to make something out of it.
But all the while, God has incredible things planned for us. Paul said to set our hearts and minds on the things of God, since we no longer need to worry about all this malarkey that goes on down here.
It's all such a waste.

On Chocolate Chip Pancakes

2009-05-19T23:18:00.001-04:00

I ate chocolate chip pancakes for dinner last night.
Actually, I've had chocolate chip pancakes at least once every day in the past 3 weeks.
Had them for breakfast the day after the ap calc test.
then had them for breakfast almost a week later after the ap physics test.
and had them for dinner yesterday.

Here's the deal about chocolate chip pancakes.
I love eating them, so much.
All you have to do is say, "this place has pancakes", and i will immediately crave them.

There's a single other food item that works this way for me: tacos from Dos Amigos.
For all of the first semester this year, i had 4 beef tacos every friday for dinner.
And i didn't get sick of them because they are so delicious.
And you know what? all you have to do is mention tacos and i'll crave them.

There's something else that we should crave at the very mention.

Jesus said, "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded to you." [matt. 28:19]
Telling people about God's promise to us and sharing the truth should be something that we always want to do and never get tired of.
It's better than eating chocolate chip pancakes and tacos.
It has eternal rewards rather than brief satisfaction.

On Tailfins

2009-05-05T20:09:00.001-04:00

Everytime i see a cadillac on the road, i get a little warm-fuzzies.
Not because i like them, or think that they're good cars.
I have more negative feelings toward Escalades than any other car ever made.
No, these warm-fuzzies stem from a simple fact: Cadillac still makes cars with tailfins.

Whether or not the breaklights on the back of a CTS are actually "fins" is up to you, but the fact is that ever since the 50s, just about every cadillac car has had verticle tail-lights. I don't think that cadillac does it to be remeniscent, either. I think it's part of their identity. People see vertical taillights and they instantly know, "that's a cadillac."
Also, notice that Cadillac doesn't make a single model name that was around 20 years ago. Their entire line is like 10 years old. Most auto makers have at least a few models that have survived a few decades. Not cadillac. Everything's new. They haven't kept anything except the leather and the fins.

I've been thinking a lot about identity lately.
Seeing as how I have less than 10 days to decide where i spend the next four years of my life, I think that's perfectly okay.
But while wrestling with how different my life could turn out depending on this one simple decision, I've realized that we all have our own vertical tail-lights. No matter where I go, I'll be taking me along, too. Sure, my life could be different depending on where I go to school. But it won't change who I am, and it won't change the way I think and the way I react to situations. Different opportunities will come and go, but who we are remains who we are.

On Daily Affirmation

2009-04-10T23:03:00.001-04:00

It's calculus season.
in 3 weeks, I'll be about to take the AP Calc AB exam. Until then, every day I have to spend 2 hours on homework trying to not fail.
But in the midst of school, i've had a little time to think.

It's Easter Season.
Today was Good Friday.
Easter's the best holiday because as long as you avoid shopping centers, you're allowed to just sit and think reflect. listen.
It's a much needed respite before the College Board takes over my life.

Christians spend a lot of time complaining about the world- society, culture, nonchristians... we complain about everything that makes us uncomfortable.
It's one of those things that we shouldn't be proud of, and it's one of society's main reasons for not liking christians to begin with.

A few people in America have been trying to get every aspect of Christianity out of our federal government. The words on our money, the line in our pledge of allegiance, the customs of courtroom proceedings.
These are things that aren't in our laws, but that were adopted by various organizations at various times because people back then were predominately christians. No one complained when "In God we Trust" was first printed on our money. They probably liked it. Thought it was a nice touch. That was the culture then.
But since then, times have changed, and Christians in our usual remonstrative way have been disenchanted with the idea that "God" would be taken off our money.
But there's one aspect of society that is so intermingled with Christianity that isn't going to change anytime soon; one place where no one is going to sue the United States of America for violation of "separation of church and state".
That aspect is the Date.

The date for me, right now, is the 10th of April, 2009.
The reason today is that day is because 1,484 years ago, a Romanian monk named Dionysius tracked the years back (slightly inaccurately) to Jesus' birth and used that to keep track of the years.
Eventually it caught on and here we are, year 2009.
What I really like is the term "AD."
Now, some scholarly folk prefer the term "CE" to mean "Common Era" because they don't like Jesus. But from what I can tell, most americans still say "AD".
Which is an abbreviation for Latin which, when translated, means "In the year of our lord".
Here's what's cool about that:

Before Dionysius came around with his AD/BC numbering system, the year was kept track of by who was the local ruler.
For example, when Augustus came into power, the year was "1 Augustus" and started over when Tiberius became emporer. If you've ever read the old testiment of the Bible, numbering schemes like that are absultely everywhere.

But think about that. The year used to be determined by how long your ruler was in power.
And yet, nothing is any different today.
Every time you say that the year is 2009, you're reaffirming that Jesus Christ has been lord for (roughly) 2009 years. And counting.
The reason why we never started over with a new "year 1" is because Jesus never had a successor. And he never will.
Society probably doesn't like to think about it that way.
but that's alright with me. They'll figure it out someday.

On Splinters

2009-03-18T01:55:00.001-04:00

I just pulled a splinter out of my finger.
It took me about a half an hour's worth of digging into my skin with a needle before i could finally nab it with the tweezers.

At one point, my finger got all inflamed from poking at it for so long, so i sat down and knawed on some munchies until it calmed down again.

I first became aware of this splinter at around 11:00 this morning. But it was smallish, and i couldn't tell if it was just a cut or not. So I ignored it. There just wasn't enough incentive for me to find some place with a bright enough light to sit down and see what was wrong with my finger.

Then some 12 or so hours later, I finally looked at it, annoyed that it was still bothering me. Upon deciding that it was, in fact, a splinter, i set about trying to get it out.

Splinters.

They're annoying.

And they take effort to remove them.

Yet how much effort does it take to get one?

zero.

In fact, it takes so little effort to get a splinter, you generally can't try to get one.

Have you ever taken a piece of paper and tried to give yourself a paper cut?

It usually takes several attempts before you realize that it's a stupid idea. They just happen.

In my case, not only did the splinter just happen, but i didn't notice it until it had been lodged in my finger for several hours.

Left unchecked, splinters can get infected.

Metal splinters can give you Tetanus.

Heck, people probably die from them every year.

Now, i know splinters are kind of a lame example.

But isn't the scenario applicable to the way we go about life?

In Hebrews 2:1-3, the writer tells us, "We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away. For if the message spoken by angels was binding, and every violation and disobedience received its just punishment, how shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation?"[NIV]

Here's how The Message translation puts it:

"It's crucial that we keep a firm grip on what we've heard so that we don't drift off. If the old message delivered by the angels was valid and nobody got away with anything, do you think we can risk neglecting this latest message, this magnificent salvation?"

Sometimes we slip away, slowly enough that we don't even notice it. Or maybe we're just too lazy or unmotivated to seriously examine our lives. But if we dig deep for a little while, we can remedy a potentially big problem.

And splinters feel the best of all when they're gone.

On Improving Handwriting

2009-02-28T23:42:00.001-05:00

Today was a nutty day.
I woke up at 6:45 to go to the Uturn Flapjack Fundraiser. left at 10:30 ish. We made like $200 in the two hours people were there.
Then i went home.
Now the way i had planned my weekend was to do ALL of my homework during the following time period. However, as soon as i got home i promptly fell asleep. I woke up at 3:00 in the afternoon, only to fall asleep again. I eventually pulled myself out of bed at 5:00, which was when i had to put black clothes on to go to the second performance of my school's musical. At this point i hardly remembered anything about pancakes, because the nap i took essentially made two days out of one.
We teched the musical until 10:30. Because i'm a senior, and this is my last musical, i got a rose and a short speech from the director on stage.
Then as we were walking to my car, we saw a school minibus idling in the parking lot. Inside were my friend and the teacher who runs our school robotics team. There was a big robotics match in Massachusetts that i couldn't go to today for the above two reasons. We ended up in the final rounds, and got a trophy.
My friend had gotten 30 minutes of sleep last night because he spent the entire night fixing our robot, and they had to leave school at some ridiculous hour in order to get to mass by 10:00 in the morning. Everyone on the team got medals for making it to the finals.

So i walked off my school today with a rose, a medal, and quite a good feeling.
Tomorrow is more complicated.
I have church in the morning, followed by a 12:30 call time for the last performance of the musical, followed by youth group.
I'm going to be spending a lot of time driving through downtown dover without time to stop for food. So I don't know when i'm going to eat all day.

But here's the deal. Lately, i've found that I am incapable of remembering what i have to do every day. In the past i've made lists in my head of thing to accomplish in a week or day, but i can't do that any more. I've started writing things down. I have to write down my classes in order to figure out what i have to do for homework. I have to make lists of things to remember to bring with me when i go places. I think i'm going to use it as an excuse to get a G1.

But what i've realized recently is that i like having no free time. I sincerely enjoy knowing that i am actually accomplishing something with my time. And when you walk off of your school feeling like you made a difference, you're glad you don't get enough sleep.

But one of the reasons that i have so little free time is that i have to constantly balance doing things at my school and doing things at church. The personal feeling of accomplishment is the same whether you help organize an event for a church or organize an event for your school. But personal accomplishment isn't what matters in life. Or maybe it does, and maybe it shouldn't.
What ought to matter is accomplishing things for God, not setting lights for small children dressed as orphans. When i graduate highschool, i'll go to college.
Who knows how involved i'll be wherever i go. But one thing that i want to do is make sure i get more involved with church, or ministry of some sort.

In Matthew 9:37, Jesus says, "The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field"
To qute Gene Wilder, "So much time and so little to do. Wait a minute. Strike that. Reverse it."
We have our work cut out for us.

On God Not Disliking Science

2009-02-24T23:15:00.001-05:00

There's an article in the most recent issue of Wired that is an interview with a scientist who recently published a book titled, How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn't have to Be Forever. The idea is that modern-day chicken embryos contain all the ingredients that you need to make a dinosaur. All you have to do is mess with a few genes that regulate the development process, and you end up with a chicken that looks like a dinosaur.
Awesome.

But here's why i'm telling you about this.
One of the statements from the interviewer was this:
"It would certainly prove the creationists dead wrong."
Oh boy, i thought.
But here's where it gets good.
The scientist replied with this cutting remark.
"Religion is about faith, not evidence. Comparing science and religion isn't like comparing apples and oranges - it's more like apples and sewing machines."
ouch.
and excellent.

Here's the deal.
Science and Christianity, or any faith, for that matter, aren't mutually exclusive.

A lot of times, hard-core conservatives will go neck-and-neck with people who think in scientific terms. You end up with a whole group of people who believe that global warming is a government plot, who don't care about following any scientific process, and who won't listen to anyone with a master's degree, versus a whole group of 'intellectuals' who will immediately stop taking you seriously if you mention anything to do with God.

This shouldn't be the case.
There is nothing in Science that is mutually exclusive with God.
In fact, until the past 70 years or so, pretty much every scientist believed in God anyway. It's merely a coincidence that much of our modern scientific community is made up of atheists. People look at science and say that it's better than religion, that it's a more worthwhile endeavor than worshiping God.
Maybe those people are just looking for a way to add usefulness to their lives where they haven't discovered the purpose God has for them.

Evolution doesn't have anything to say about creation.
The theory of evolution is widely accepted by the scientific community, but i'd say that the Big Bang theory is on a much smaller pedestal. Darwin was a christian. He believed in creation. But he also believed that organisms change over time.
I'm not supporting evolution here, i'm just trying to flesh out my point.

Science can only prove theories wrong.
It can't just come out and say something.
And since science can't prove God, creation, or anything in the Bible wrong, it's perfectly legitimate to be in the scientific community and not be an atheist.

Isaiah 29:14
"Therefore once more I will astound these people with wonder upon wonder;
the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."

science is good, but God is better.

On The Piano

2009-02-16T22:29:00.000-05:00

For the past week or so, we watched a movie in my english class: The Piano.
We have sort of been looking at different women roles in modern drama, and The Piano is an admittedly stark contrast to the role women play in many "modern dramas", whatever that means.

Basically, the movie is about a mute woman in the 1850s who is married off to a missionary in the New Zealand rain forest.
If you want the entire plot, read the wikipedia article, it sums the entire thing up.
Here's what i have to say for it:
It is the most traumatizing, emotionally tearing, nasty, and uncomfortable movie i have ever seen.
Before showing the film, my teacher told us, "there are scenes in this movie that I can't watch. and i cry every time i see it."
my teacher is a man, by the way.

And here is what i told people when they asked me what i thought of it:
"I think i would have been better off not ever seeing The Piano."

Think about it.
What did i gain from that movie?
A perspective on femininity that i could have had by someone telling me about it.
What did i lose from that movie?
It ruined every day that i had english class. It seriously disgruntled me.
And so much more.

By simple logic, i would have been better off not seeing the movie.

Modern society tells us that there is a world out there to experience.
There are places to see, people to meet, things to try, and every new experience we have is a gain.
That's almost entirely untrue.

Paul said in 1 Corinthians, "'Everything is permissible for me' - but not everything is beneficial."
I feel like if i could go back in time and un-watch The Piano, i would.
And i would have gained back some valuable time.

Here's my point.
Some things in life are simply not worth spending time on.
There is no way to learn everything, experience all there is, or have 2,000 different jobs. So you might as well pick and choose what will benefit you the most.

On making a day

2009-02-10T21:02:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I was incredibly tired.
It seems like every time i get 7 hours of sleep, my body freaks out.
As if it's so accustomed to getting only 5 or 6 that it doesn't know what to do with the extra hour.
So in order to actually have a good night's sleep i need to bargain for more than 8 hours so my brain has time to figure out how to continue sleeping.
The biggest problem is that it makes it virtually impossible for me to have a restful sleep on a school night, as when i actually try to go to bed early, i just end up screwing up my day even more.

Anyway, you get the idea.
I was really tired and not feeling tip-top yesterday.
So after school i found myself at the local neighborhood South Berwick Cumberland Farms, which is actually only about an 8th of a mile away from the next local neighborhood Cumberland Farms, across the boarder in Rollinsford.
I had $10.
I bought a small bag of beef jerky, a quart of chocolate milk, and some candy.
As the guy rang it up it turned out to be $9.76.
I was relieved, because with Maine taxes, you never know when you're going to go over your $10 bill, they're always taking your money for their good education system and low property taxes.

As i handed the guy my money, he said, "i'll throw in a penny so i can give you back a quarter."
At first i was confused, but when he handed me a quarter in change, my mood changed entirely.
I thanked him, and went back to my car happier than i had been since i woke up that morning.
You could say that the cashier made my day by giving me a quarter.

Now, we could get into the details on why quarters are so good; every quarter i get in change goes into the cupholder in my car so that i can pay for tolls when people randomly tell me that they want to hang out in newington.
I'd go as far as to say that quarters are the only useful coin in our currency system.

Thinking back on it later, I realized that the cashier probably had no idea how much he impacted me. He just tossed a penny into the cash register to make my life a little easier.
Maybe that's what was so good- he made an effort, small as it may have been, to make someone else- me- have a better day.

I'm a firm believer that if we all were just a tad bit nicer to each other, just a smidgin more thoughtful, we'd be much further than we are now.

On Tangentialism

2009-01-26T22:41:00.001-05:00

A number of weeks ago, i walked into latin class.
I forget what i did, but it was something in accordance with my usual style of going about things, which is "out of the ordinary" for most people.
My latin teacher looked at me and said, "Peter, your life really is just a tangent."
I laughed, looked around, and heartily agreed.
Then i sat down and thought about what that meant.

From geometry and trigonometry, we say that a line is Tangent to a curve if it is perpendicular to that curve and sharing a single point with it.
The classic example being: you have a circle, and you draw a line next to and touching the edge of the circle.
That line shares a single point with the circle.
If you were to follow that line, you would realize that it quickly goes away from the shape. The only time the line is actually near the circle is where it's right next to it.
Everywhere else, it's just another line.

I'd like to think that the world would be a much more interesting place if everyone lived their lives like "tangents" to the world around them.
If we could all learn not to take ourselves seriously.
If we could all understand that the world is impermanent.
If we could all realize that what we do here doesn't mean hardly anything in the long scheme of 'history'.

I think that's how Christ would have us think of our lives.
You have the world, caught up in all of itself.
And then you have Eternity.
Eternity has almost nothing to do with the world.
It's this line that briefly, for a single point, is connected with it.
And that single point is all the time we have to do everything we're here to do.
As soon as the line moves on, we're gone from here, on to bigger and better things.

Jesus said, "my kingdom is not of this world."
And so, i believe, neither should our lives.
But we're here now, and we have work to do.

On Changing

2009-01-13T03:19:00.000-05:00

As i was sitting in my room tonight i started thinking about all of the junk that has accumulated in it over the years.
I currently live my life without much interaction with my room; I come home, sleep, do homework, and that's about it.
But i have various trinkets that at one time were interesting or "cool", books galore which are mostly unread, and mounds of dust.
None of this gets any attention on a day to day basis.
My eyes fell on my Somersworth High School Class of 2006 yearbook.
Freshman year.
As I flipped though i realized that i barely knew anyone in it.
Now, this makes perfect sense because i only spent one year there and wasn't social at all. But it troubled me in a more-than-on-the-surface sort of way.
Here were all these people that I never had a chance to have an impact on. Here were all these people who i never got to get to know, be friends with, or be part of.
And then there were the people i actually recognized.
Kids i had classes with, other freshmen.
The most obvious thing is how much everyone looks like children.
You look at pictures on facebook of people you haven't seen in 3 years, and they look completely different. Towards the end of the pictures was my photo.
I laughed and cried.
I had no idea that they were taking school pictures on the day they did.
As such i wore an ugly black polo. and my hair looks rather awkward.
And i look so young.
I dug up my freshman id card so i could have a juxtaposition for you:

There is a marked difference.

Then my thoughts turned to all the people on facebook with "somersworth highschool" as their network.
I guess you could say that there's some "buyers remorse" from me not staying at somersworth. There are kids that i can barely remember the names of who i wish i could have gotten to know. It's like this intense feeling of failure.
Sure, i might have a better chance of getting into college now.
But what about the people?

Approaching the far edge of highschool has me thinking about how much i've changed in the past 3.5 years. And it has me thinking about how much everyone else has changed as well.
A lot of the time, we change with our surroundings.
Easy example: You notice when one of your friends gets a haircut.
You don't notice when, every day, their hair gets micrometers longer, because you get used to the hair growing out. Your perception of their hair changes ever so slowly with the passing of time.

So i can say that i've 'grown up' with my friends at berwick; i've known them for the past 3 years, most of them much longer, and i've grown with them. We've impacted each other, shaped each other's personalities and thoughts, what we think is funny. We've created inside jokes, not payed attention in any math class of any sort, and still manage to survive.
This is a good feeling.

However, much worse feeling is how much i've missed all those people i've had just glancing friendships with.
This question keeps me up at night, seriously: What about the people who I could have been friends with?
I have forever missed the chance to be a part of their time growing up.
I can't start inside jokes with them, can't not learn precalc with them, and i will never see almost all of them ever again.

It's just another thought in the infinitely useful mantra: "Life is complicated. Living is simple."

On Accidents, or lack thereof

2009-01-09T22:51:00.001-05:00

With the new semester starting this past week, i got a new course in my senior schedule: Humanities.
This class isn't "humanities" in the traditional sense. It's not a history class, or even much of an english class. It's more of a religion and philosophy course, covering all the bases but starting with a focus on eastern religion.

As such, this week we started reading the short novel Siddhartha, which is about a young Hindu who goes out into the world to seek "truth".
Anyway, in reading this book our teacher has tried to explain some of Hinduism to us. The main picture that i'm walking away with is that hinduism is inherently enormous in the complexity of beliefs. But there are some key concepts that i find very interesting that Hindus and other easterners take to heart.
One that caugt me unprepared was this: There are No Accidents.

Sure, events can happen that aren't intended.
But someone is always responsible. It is related to the concept of Karma.

I for some reason was on Miley Cirus' wikipedia article over the weekend, and i was thinking about the kind of persona that "stars" have, and the sort of idle time-wasting connotations that are associated with them.
Thanks to the media, we have this idea, and i'm sure it's usually correct, that when people in the entertainment industry aren't earning big bucks, they're out partying all night.

On Monday, my Latin teacher brought ancient Rome into modernity. We are translating parts of the Satyricon, the first novel written. He noted how back then, as in modern times, the wives of famous people didn't have much to do. Sure, they'd sit around, give press releases, and donate money to charity.
But there wasn't much else to do.
So they started these sort of cult clubs.
All the wives of famous politicians and generals would hang out together and have this massive party consisting very much of drinking and debauchery. But they had elaborate cover-up schemes: they were "actually" devotions to different roman gods and godesses. Men weren't allowed around, so no one ever knew. They just thought that their wives were paying respects and devotion to their gods. But in reality they were partying it up.

In our world, nothing is a secret to consumers thanks to the media.
We know which celebrities hang out together, who's dating whom, who's planning on dating whom, who just broke up with whom, and all this stuff.
And then every now and then a celrbtiy will post an apology, either official or unofficial, or in the form of a song, for something that they did. Like when Miley Cirus had her photoshoot that wasn't exactly what parents would want their middle school kids aspiring to.
But here's the point: no celebrity, or celebrity's wife, ever has any valid excuse. There are no accidents in that industry. Stars get out of jail sentences all the time because they can afford good lawyers. But the united states legal system is one of the worst judges of character in this country.
When famous people do drugs and waste their lives, or pay innordinate ammounts of money for religious safegaurd, yes, we can blame them, because no, it's not an accident.

Here's a great quote from Paul in Galations 1:10:
"Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ."

You think about celebrities, and you realize that their entire fortune is centered around making consumers happy. Entertainment is, by defenition, the business of making men (people) happy. They give us what we want to see and hear, and in exchange we give them money and allow them to live their prolific lives.
Then we sit here and complain about how rich people get away with everything and do whatever they want, but keep out of sight the concept that entertainment wouldn't exist if people didn't pay for it. But that's a different story.

Here's the point.
Paul wouldn't have made a good movie actor.
At least, not a successful one.
He wasn't at all interested in satisfying people; all he lived to do was spread God's word and bring all men the truth.
When people didn't like what he had to say, it was tough luck for their hard headedness.
And nothing he did was an accident.

On Babbling Madmen

2008-12-22T02:10:00.001-05:00

2 Kings 9:1-3 reads as such:
"The prophet Elisha summoned a man from the company of the prophets and said to him, "Tuck your cloak into your belt, take this flask of oil with you and go to Ramoth Gilead. When you get there, look for Jehu son of Jehoshaphat, the son of Nimshi. Go to him, get him away from his companions and take him into an inner room. Then take the flask and pour the oil on his head and declare, 'This is what the Lord says: I anount you king over Israel.' Then open the door and run; don't delay!""

Back in the day, Elisha was like this wicked awesome prophet. And it so happened that other prophets that we might assume to be his pupils hung out with him.
Imagine him sending one of his eager pupils on this 'mission', the same way a research professor gets a grad student to do all the menial tasks for their experiments.
And reflect on how odd a request that is.
"hey dude. tuck your cloak in (i'm guessing this entails an air of swiftness), and take this bottle. run up to an army commander, dump oil on him, tell him that he's the king of israel, and then run away. fast."

the story goes on.
After this guy finds Jehu, anoints him king, and runs away, Jehu went back to his buddies:
"When Jehu went out to his fellow officers, one of them asked him, "Is everything all right? Why did this madman come to you?"
"You know the man and the sort of things he says," Jehu replied.
"that's not true!" they said. "tell us."
Jehu said, "Here is what he told me: 'This is what the Lord says: I anoint you king over Israel.'"
They hurried and took their cloaks and spread them under him on the bare steps. Then they blew the trumpet and shouted, "Jehu is king!"

I think that the officer's judgment of the prophet being a 'madman' was justified. That's pretty much the only sane way to react when some guy runs up to your friend and proclaims him king of Israel.

But here's the kicker: they believed him.
The writers of 2 Kings doesn't record any conversations between Jehu and his friends trying to convince them that yeah, he was king of Israel. In fact, it seems like Jehu was a little embarrassed that he was randomly selected as the next king.
Instead, the commanders spread out their cloaks and proclaimed him king.

That would be kind of like a band of University professors proclaiming Al Gore to be the President of the United States.
But only if those professors believed enough in Al Gore to assassinate obama and proclaim gore the president. Except assassinating people for power and believing in al gore are mutually exclusive. So ignore that.

HERE was my point:
At first glance, the unnamed prophet was said to be a "babbling madman", but no one disputed his authority.

Kind of like how John the Baptist ate wild honey and wore clothes made out of camel hair, like a freaky hippy, but was regarded by his contemporaries as a prophet and and inspiration.

Kind of like how Jesus healed crippled people on saturday (oh no! not saturday!) and had to wake up extra-early in order to get away from people.

The "things of God" often times are presented to us in ways that appear completely ridiculous. As if God is a crazy eccentric old guy. But it's our job to roll with that, presuming we use discretion and don't assume that everything nutty is divine.

On Falling Trees

2008-12-15T22:39:00.002-05:00

When a tree falls in a forest, and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?

People have always asked that, and quite frankly, I never understood why.
The next time someone says it, here's how i'll counter:
"If a tree falls on the side of the road, and nobody hears it, but it takes out your power for 4 days, does anyone care if it made any sound? no sir. You're just ticked at that tree because you know PSNH won't get their trucks to your house until halfway through next week."

I don't think i've ever been without power for so long because, and it presents an interesting juxtaposition.

I woke up friday morning to no electricity and no final day of school before midterms. I then sat around until 3:00 when my dad turned on the generator. At that point I took a shower and drove to a friend's house who didnt' lose power. I didn't return until 11:00. Saturday was the same drill. Woke up, showered, left, and came home at 8:00.
What was so striking is how little there is to do when there's no power.
Literally all you can do is sit around in the dark.

Weirder still is how different life can be just a block away. For people who didn't lose power, its as if they lived in Utah, where the only way they know about any "state of emergency" is though CNN telling them that 300,000 people in New Hampshire have no electricity.

Meanwhile, though, my parents have kerosene lamps going and are freaking out about food in the refrigerator. Its like, two completely different worlds, right next to each other.

Apostle Peter referred to his fellow christians as "strangers in the world", "aliens", and in the kjv, "peculiar people".
In 1 Peter 1:13, he said, "therefore, prepare your minds for action; be self-controlled; set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed."

Here's what I take away from this:
There is a distinct difference between christians and nonchristians.
This whole weekend, as soon as i stepped into my house, i realized that there was absolutely nothing to do. And when i went to someone else's house, it was as if everything was normal.

But when i was sitting around with nothing to do, i realized that, 150 years ago, that's how everyone lived. There was no electricity, no modern conveniences.
We complain and yell and whine when our power goes off, and sit around with "nothing to do", but clearly they had ways of filling their time up in the 1850s... just ask the Amish.

That's how nonbelievers should see our lives.
They should look at us and say, "woah man. all this time i thought life was awesome, but now i look around and theres nothing to do."
They should be asking us to hang out because they're "bored".
We never have to sit around in metaphysical darkness when the "power" goes out. No matter what happens to us, we still have our best friend at our side.

That's totally way more awesome than not having running water.

On Finitness

2008-11-28T00:55:00.001-05:00

Teenagers are often a good topic to talk about because they present a concentrated form of Humanity.
By the time we're teenagers, we've figure out everything that we can get away with, but we haven't learned what we shouldn't do. We know what we're capable of, but don't have the wisdom to live responsibly.
Case study: Teenage girls who get their first job.
I know a bunch of girls who work after school or on the weekends.
Baggers at Market Basket make well above minimum wage, and they typically make more than $50 per week.
Now, with gas prices so excellently low, $50 is way more than it takes to fill up a gas tank for a week, even with the ridiculous amount of "let's go to the mall!" and "i'll drive" that they do.
So what do you spend all your money on?
Well, the answer is obvious, right?
clothes and shoes!

Lets buy 3 pairs of shoes that, in 6 months, either won't fit, will be worn out, or will be out of style. Then we'll buy one of everything in Hollister, and pick up $15 worth of pretzel bites on the way out.
When we get home, we'll make sure our parents get us a nice semi dress that we'll never wear again, and then spend the whole afternoon talking to cute boys instead of doing our homework/chores/etc.
Then we'll watch some completely unredeeming tv and yell at our parents for asking where we've been all day.

Do you get my drift?
good.
Now on to other things.

I read about a guy in the old testament a few months ago, and i've been wanting to write about it ever since, but couldn't seem to make it fit anywhere.
But i think now i have it.

During the reign of King David in Jerusalem, there was a really smart guy that David would seek advice from.
His name was Ahithophel.
2 Samuel 16:23 states that "In those days the advice Ahithophel gave was like that of one who inquires of God."
Essentially, this guy knew what he was talking about.

Now, at one point, one of David's sons, Absalom, got on this power trip and ran his dad outta town. Whilst he was trying to commandeer the throne, he asked Ahithophel to give him his advice.
One such tidbit of advice was concerning the best way to ensure he would stay on the throne:
"I would choose twelve thousand men and set out tonight in pursuit of David. I would attack him while he is weary and weak. I would strike him with terror, and then all the people with him will flee. I would strike down only the king and bring all the people back to you. The death of the man you seek will mean the return of all; all the people will be unharmed."

Now there was another advice-giver in town.
His name was Hushai, and he was still loyal to David.
Hushai said something completely different:
"The advice Ahithophel has given is not good at this time. You know your father and his men; they are fighters, and as fierce as a wild bear robbed of her cubs. Besides, your father is an experienced fighter; he will not spend the night with the troops. Even now, he is hidden in a cave or some other place. If he should attack your troops first, whoever hears about it will say, 'there has been a slaughter among the troops who follow Absalom.' Then even the bravest soldier, whose heart is like the heart of a lion, will melt with fear, for all Israel knows that your father is a fighter and that those with him are brave. "

Anyway, Absalom decided to do what Hushai said, which meant that David knew what was coming for him and was able to beat him.
Meanwhile, we read in 2 Samuel 17:23:
"When Ahithophel saw that his advice had not been followed, he saddled his donkey and set out for his house in his hometown. He put his house in order and then hanged himself. So he died and was buried in his father's tomb."

and that's all we know about this dude Ahithophel.

What do Ahithophel and teen girls have in common?
They're both excellent examples of one of the human conditions: Finitness.
As people, we're incredibly good at living "in the moment".
we know how to procrastinate, how to enjoy minutes right now, and how to eat candy.
We're notoriously bad about thinking ahead in time, about thinking about consequences, and more importantly, about heeding those consequences and actually doing what we're supposed to.

My biology teacher has, if anything, increased my belief in creationism.
When we were studying enzymes, she constantly said, "this enzyme is designed for this substrate" and "when the wrong substrate binds to the enzyme, the intended substrate can't bind"
Like, shouldn't she have been saying "this enzyme by chance happens to break down this particular substrate" and "when this substrate binds to the enzyme instead, nothing happens and the other substrate can't break down"?
The theories and teachings that we've developed through science are inherently finite. That's why we're still trying to figure the world out: because not everything makes sense to us.
We have been unable to grasp the way the world works.
We have an incredibly difficult job realizing the way the human race fits in to the rest of the universe.
And individually, we are unable to see the "big picture".
we're finite.
And sadly, far too often we don't give the big picture any consideration.
We live as if the little piece of reality that is the present is all there is, and it gets the better of us down the road.
bummer.