On Scale

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

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

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

Memories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quick Metaphore

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

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

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

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

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

I thought that was neat.

Unity of Purpose

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
















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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's a lame purpose.

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

Research Paper

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

"Recordings don't compare"

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

Works Cited

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

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

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



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

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

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

On Worship Music

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

It brings up a really interesting thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On gifts

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

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

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

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

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

You're looking forward to the wrong thing

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

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

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

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

Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

opportunity land

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

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

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

so that's that.
opportunity land.

On no grounds for Arguing

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

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

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

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

Missing

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

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

I guess i'm pentecostal or something.

On Unexpecting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Hearing

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

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

how cool is that?

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

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

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


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

on belonging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Nature Around Us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First, some prose:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On General Research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.