David Whitley’s Thoughts on the Unreal

For me, the most ethereal faerie enchantments have just as much charm as a solid piece of sci-fi hardware. I love the unreal: the power, and wonder, and delight of worlds where nothing can be taken for granted, and everything is new.

The only question is...why?

What is it about fantasy that is so beguiling? I mean, one of the cardinal rules of fiction is supposed to be the possibility for the audience to identify, to sympathise with the characters and recognise their own lives. In Poetics, Aristotle suggested that the purpose of fiction was to purge emotions, to let us experience all the joy and grief that, were it real life, might otherwise overwhelm us. (Whitley’s article)

What do you think?  Why do you love the unreal in fantasy?

Aiming for the wrong target

Remember the story from a recent Olympics when the athlete nailed the bullseye perfectly, and then was disqualified when they pointed out the fact that he was aiming at the target in someone else’s lane?  Ouch.
I got to thinking about our medical technologies that are proliferating like cyberrabbits.  The fastest growing categories are the “lifestyle” drugs which don’t treat injuries or life-threatening illnesses.  I know there are a lot of good things happening here, but it seems like I run across stories where it gets weird pretty fast.

U.S. Outdoor: about to jump the shark?

Three stories of camping, hiking, skiing, snowshoeing, and rock climbing—all crammed into a busted down historic building in downtown Portland.  Sort of like a Powell’s books for lovers of the Northwest outdoors.

I hadn’t been in for a while, so while downtown recently, my wife and I decided to jump inside and see the latest in excellent and affordable gear.  The top floor had always been our favorite: a huge selection of tents, sleeping bags, backpacks, and all the cooking and packing gear you could imagine.  Seems like every time we went in, we’d find something we really needed for an unbelievable deal: snowshoes for $90, a Gregory multi-day pack on sale for $125, a killer pair of gore-tex full boots for $100.

But what was this?  The top floor turned into a skate shop?  And not really a skate shop, but more a showcase of the latest skate-wear?  Back down on the main floor we looked around, virtually everything on the floor had been moved out in favor of expensive clothing!  A bit frantic at this point, we went to the lowest and final floor.  Here at least was the last redoubt of US Outdoor’s outdoor gear.  A small collection of bags and backpacks, a couple of tents.  A quarter of the room is dedicated to shoes, most of which are various colors of Keens.  Stuffed into the corner: a couple of ropes and some miscellaneous rock climbing gear.

I shed a tear for my beloved US Outdoor.  I knew it would come, sooner or later, just as it does to all excellent gear outlets.  It happened first to Eddie Bauer, which believe it or not used to sell both cheap and excellent outdoor clothing and gear.  Somewhere in the 90’s it decided that there was no money in gear or in cheap clothing, so they decided to become the Gap’s little sister.  Then it happened to REI.  Once a manufacturer of some of the best (and most affordable) gear on the planet, it too embraced the siren call of Abercrombie and Fitch, becoming hip, trendy, and spendy.  I have to wonder if any of the people who visit REI have ever gotten their boots muddy?  Here closer to home, G. I. Joe’s gave up the reliable, rugged, and affordable a decade ago for the trendy and spendy; they also recently closed their doors forever.

I suppose I’ll have to start looking for somewhere to buy decent gear.  Is it really that a business cannot be run on the premise of affordable outdoor adventure gear?  I have money in my pocket, waiting to stumble into your store.

Blogging is dead…long live blogging!

It’s been twenty-two days since Easter, and that means my internet fast has been over for approximately that length of time.  Since, I have returned to updating my status and posting inane comments on people’s Facebook pages, drooling over books at Amazon, and skimming titles of articles in Google Reader.

As I write this, I’m pretty sure blogging is dead.  That is, most people whose blogs I enjoyed reading are now using Facebook to fill the void left by their dead blogs.  It’s faster and more immediately gratifying.  Instead of coming up with 300 words of insightful banter only your insider buddies will find amusing, you can get by with 30 or 40.  And voila!  Instant gratification!  No one checked your blog using her iPhone or offered comments via text message.  Blogs just can’t compete with that kind of progress.  Blogs are as dead as hamsterdance.

No, perhaps they are not dead, but they are increasingly professionalized.  There are a lot of great blogs out there and I read more now than I did three years ago.  But the sources of blogs are changing.  I look at the list of blogs I’m following using Google Reader and nearly all of them are media outlets (Arts and Letters Daily, Christianity Today, Out of Ur, First Things, xkcd, GTD Times) or noteworthy figures (Ed Stetzer, Todd Hunter, Gary Rohrmayer, Scot McKnight).  All of the people I just listed are published authors as well.

So where does that leave blogging?  I am neither a media outlet nor a noteworthy figure, except perhaps in the mind of my daughters.  And that clock is ticking…  Blogging fills a place for me in providing an outlet for my thoughts, something I enjoy immensely and need from a clarity and craft standpoint.  I’ll probably keep doing it, even if the prospect of anyone actually reading these posts is minimal.  Long live blogging!

To the place where possible and impossible meet…

You need to go out and make yourself a video resume right now.  I’m not kidding.  It worked for Barney Stinson:

 

Thoughts on living in time: the sunset as beginning

Melissa and I enjoyed some time on the Oregon Coast recently and one of our favorite things is to go down to beach near sunset.  Watching the liquid gold in all its flaming fury melt into a horizon of cold, blue darkness is one the amazing experiences granted to those who visit the rugged Oregon coast.

Let me ask you this:  what does sunset mark?  The end of a day, or its beginning?

From Genesis 1:

God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

It is the small differences in perception that lead us to radically different destinations.  God saw and named each day “backwards” according to the reckoning of our modern clocks and calendars.

According to our current convention, the day begins somewhere in the dark hours set by the arcane arts of the mathematician and astronomer.  But in terms of how we actually live, the day begins at sunrise (or I-rise, whenever I can stumble out of bed, darkness or no).  We scramble out of bed and the day assaults us with tasks and demands.  Even for the early riser, the day approaches us like the revolving steps of an escalator, and we can only wait so long before setting our foot on the moving steel.

And we are carried thus into a day of work, to be deposited somewhere near its end, darkness gathering (at least most of the year, for us Northwesterners).  We settle into our homes, eat one last meal, together with our families if we can manage it, and then wind down after the whirlwind with the television or a book (or facebook).  At last, we conduct the closing rituals of a wearying day: the swaddling of children in pajamas, the brushing of teeth, the locking of doors, the turning off of lights.  Another day gone, ground into fragments by the jaws of time. 

On our pillows, we ask ourselves at the end of that day: What did I accomplish?  What happened to me?  Was it worth it?  If it was a good day, we close our eyes with the satisfaction that we accomplished something, that we enjoyed ourselves, that nothing bad happened to us.  If it was a bad day, we end with the lingering frustration of important things yet undone, the emptiness of a joyless day, licking the wounds of arguments, things said or unsaid.  And such thoughts trouble our dreams.

Such is the legacy of our culture: our keeping of hours, our reckoning of time.

But for those who look carefully at the words of Scripture in Genesis, there is another reckoning of time available to us.  It is very strange:  what sense does it make to begin the day in gathering darkness?  The ancient Hebrews looked for the appearance of the first stars of evening as the mark of a new day.  For a culture lacking the graces of fluorescent light and Jay Leno, the Hebrews began their day with preparations for sleep.  Backwards, we say.  Day begins at daybreak!  When I arise, when I meet the day, when I arrive on the scene—that is when my day begins!

Already the Holy Spirit is doing His work—we wince a little, knowing better than to entertain long these sorts of thoughts.  We know that we belong to another, that we are not the center of the world or the locus of history, that it is not strictly my day, for “this is the day the Lord has made.” (Psalm 118:24).

We know these things, but it is difficult to live them faithfully.  We mean to depend on God, we know He is at work around us (somewhere…), we trust that God cares for us, has meaningful things for us to do that matter both to Him and to us, and that He hears our prayers.  But once we say the closing amen, we cannot help but lose our spirit of dependence.  We shrug.  And we take up the reins of life ourselves.  We don’t mean to live life this way, but we cannot seem to depend on God anywhere but on our knees.

Allow me to propose as one way toward depending more fully on God that we obey these Scriptures in Genesis.  Let me be clear:  there is no command in this text; this is narrative Scripture.  Scripture like this functions very differently in the life of the church than other kinds of Scripture.  Some of us are used to seeing this text as a battering ram against science or evolution; some of us have been on the giving or the receiving end of those battering rams.  Let us set these things aside and obey this text.  For narrative (and especially poetic) Scripture like this, obeying means letting the rhythms, the imagery, and the perspectives get into us.  To filter past our reason, beyond the part of our heads that think systematically, and down into the deeper parts of us.  Where our habits are rooted, where our perceptions are shaped, the deep soil out of which all our behaviorial fruits grow—that is the level upon which this Scripture might work.

In order for it to do so, the Scripture has to disorient us.  That’s easy—we don’t see our day this way.  It makes no sense for us to think of our day as beginning at sunset.  Our lives are not lived like this.  It is strange:  evening and morning, the first day.  Backwards!  Even so, we allow this rhythm to crowd into our established rhythm, to play over it in disharmony.  We quiet our own rhythms and listen prayerfully to this new rhythm, allowing our hearts to attune to it.

What would it mean, what would it feel like to live according to this rhythm?

Listen.  “And there was evening, and there was morning.”  We begin in gathering darkness.  24 hours yet stretch before us, just as any other day—but this time the emphasis is different, we begin in a different place and everything changes.  We begin in darkness, just as God began His creative work in darkness.  Immediately we are reminded that God is still making, still at work in His creation and in us.  The day begins in darkness, a reality unfamiliar and frightening to us but not to God.  He holds darkness as well as light in the palm of His hand, partitioning them off and setting them to work for His creative purposes.  Here in darkness, we begin.  “This is the day that the Lord has made.  Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

Listen.  “And there was evening, and there was morning.” We begin with preparations for sleep.  Backwards!  But is it really so backwards?  Do we not wish to depend more fully on God?  Is there a more trusting act than giving ourselves over to sleep?  Sleep is like the little death.  Even Jesus conflates the two in the story of Lazarus; they are similar enough from the perspective of God.  We lay ourselves down in the darkness.  We let ourselves go—no one can try to fall asleep, we must give ourselves over to it.  We can force the issue with chemicals, we can fall victim to it when we run ourselves too long and too hard.  But most often, we lay ourselves down and give ourselves over to sleep, a state utterly out of our control.  Begin the day like this?  Isn’t this the perfect metaphor, the most excellent beginning to a journey of dependence on God?  Is not giving ourselves over to sleep an act of radical faith in forces we cannot control but that we trust?  What if, in preparation for sleep, we give over to God all of the do’s and almost done’s and the done-to-me’s of the previous day, scattering them in the darkness never to be seen again?  And there, empty of the previous days encumbrances (and as yet unencumbered by the coming day’s!), we come peacefully to fall asleep, secure in the presence of our Heavenly Father.

But the day is not over, it has just begun!

Listen.  “And there was evening, and there was morning.”  Morning comes to us unbidden.  While we sleep, God keeps watch.  And God is at work in the world.  Jesus tells this parable:  “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.”  The dawn arises by the gentle hand of God, and we are invited into the work God has already begun.  This is what living under the authority of God, living according to the kingdom of God is like.  I do not arise to my day or my work, I arise to our day, our work.  God puts tools in my hands and invites me into the harvest of what He is doing.  Producing wealth for the sustaining of my family?  This is work I do together with God.  Caring for children?  This is work I do together with God.  Enjoying a time of rest from work, enjoying the fruit of our labor, enjoying the blessings of food, friends, family, sports, hobbies, art, music?  This I do together with God, for all of these things originated with God in His creative work.

Even on the hard days when nothing seems to be going my way, I work with God in the field where I’m found.  Whenever and wherever I meet others—the handiwork and image of God, each of them—I meet them as if God has brought us together, to work together in His field where we’re found.  When a great harvest, a bumper crop of blessing, is the result of the swing of my sickle, I celebrate and rejoice with God in the field where I’m found.

And at the end of that day, as my work together with God comes to its temporary pause and darkness gathers again, I put down my tools, wipe my brow and look over all that God and I together have done.  Whether the outcomes of today look good or bad, whether my failures smirched the day with sin, whether the crop of blessing came today or God and I together wait for their coming someday soon—all of this I do together, dependent on God.  The sun falls, the day ends and it is done.  As I cease my working, God brings a new day out of the stuff of gathering darkness.  Already He is busy making something new as I quiet myself.  I swaddle my children in pajamas, I brush my teeth, I lock my doors, I kiss my wife goodnight and turn off of lights.  And I give myself over to peace in His presence.

Is this not a different rhythm?  If we long for the peace and power of depending on God, then perhaps this is the place to begin: in gathering darkness, in preparation for rest, waiting on the one who creates by His powerful word.  We begin each day in surrender to the little death of peaceful sleep in His presence.  We arise to a day already in progress, waiting, watching and listening for His invitation to join what He is already doing.

This is a different way of approaching our days.  I do not mean this to be some sort of quick change you can make or some shortcut to spirituality.  There are no shortcuts in relationship with God or anywhere else.  But there is a life-giving, creating and re-creating rhythm at work here.  Paul speaks in 2 Corinthians of taking every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ. Through the discipline of prayer and remaining silent before God, through the hard work of listening for God’s rhythms in His word and holding up our own rhythms for Him to compare and change according to the lordship we have given Him over our lives—God will change us. 

Let the words of Christ inspire you—this is what the kingdom of God is like; and where kingdom comes, good living, joy, and peace—LIFE—follow!

iTunes goes DRM-free

Okay, so I am on the record as a certified Apple-agnostic.  I can’t imagine ever buying a Mac computer, even though I am a galvanized and enthusiastic iPhone customer.

But even I have to admit that Apple moved a little closer to the light with their announcement of DRM-free music on their iTunes store.  I have steadfastly refused to buy any music from them on principle—I hate DRM and all their endless restrictions of backing up, burning, and updating music licenses.  I have already been bit by the problem and lost $20+ worth of music from other services because of DRM.  Never again.

But the point is moot.  Now that iTunes is DRM free, I am sure they are going to get my loose change ($0.69 to $1.29) and that Amazon is going to lose out on that same change.  Why?  Because it’s just too darn cool to download it straight to your iPhone…

Who knew Will Farrell made such good t-shirts?

Okay, so these aren’t from Will Farrell movies, but they are still awesome:

Feel free to get me one or more of these t-shirts for Christmas.  I dare you.

Writing the next chapter in the story

Melissa and I spent 11 days traveling through the southern United States to tell a variety of people and churches what God has been doing at Cascade Hills.  It was a harrowing trip dragging a 3 year-old and a 1 year-old across two states, six airplanes, and four different sleeping arrangements.  But all in all, the kids did great and we got to catch up with old friends and meet new ones in droves.

The chief purpose of our trip was reporting--meeting with the leaders of several churches that support our work and to share stories of what God is doing.  We had a number of different opportunities to do that.  During the trip, I taught two different Sunday school classes, preached two sermons, elders's meetings, and several other informal gatherings where we presented.  With a belly full of southern cooking, I learned a couple of things:  first, that telling other people about the cool folks God has gathered at Cascade Hills is a lot of fun and energizing for me.  Second, that these kinds of stories really energize churches; it's so easy to get bogged down in the details of what we're doing that we forget that some of the stuff God has accomplished in our midst is amazing.  And third, that there is something powerful about the exercise of preparing to tell these stories.

In order to tell the stories, I had to call them up from memory.  I spent time prayerfully thinking through all that God has been doing (over the span of more than a year), a powerful exercise in itself.  I had to sift through  the tangle of what I wanted God to do, what I thought he should have done, what I had thought were my own failures--all that stuff that comes from living "in the now."  What came out of this time of "holy remembering" was a litany of good things, all centering around people and the transformation God had wrought.

But calling them up from memory was only the beginning; I also had to spend time prayerfully thinking through how to communicate all this in the various forums in which I knew I would find myself.  Telling the story of what God is doing at Cascade Hills in the context of a Sunday School class or a sermon requires that I bring my own stories up alongside Scripture and look for affinities and contrasts with The Story.  This is careful and dangerous work; I don't want to come off sounding like I'm Paul (or worse, Jesus) or that Salem, Oregon is a meaningful analog of 1st century Judea.  But still, the parallels are there:  God still seeks those who are lost; Jesus is still at work in his church through His Spirit and brings new life in amazing, surprising, unexpected ways.

I also had to be careful to be honest.  When presenting to people who are supporting us, it is tempting to over-sell, to omit my own failures and shortcomings.  I have to set the stories in their actual context as much as possible through the lens of memory and personal experience.  I dare not leave out my own struggle and the struggles of others in our church, because to do so diminishes the role of God who works in spite of our weakness.

Last of all, in preparing for telling these stories, I had to "translate" somewhat into the language of a different church culture.  This too is careful work, because I can very easily use words and concepts which are well known to us in our ministry context that mean nothing (or worse, something different) in theirs. I had to speak more carefully, listening to my own words and being sure to explain as needed.

In doing all this, I now carry with me a narrative of my own story against a backdrop of God's faithfulness.  To be sure, it is a partial truth from my limited and fallen vantage point.  But don't we all end up with a picture of a past like this, whether we are intentional about it or not?  Why not prayerfully, devotionally look together with God over our past and discover what He desires to show us?  Why not hear the story He is telling through our lives, and enjoy the next chapter?

Permit me to commend to you this exercise:  look over this last year and prayerfully search your memory for what God has done in and around you.  Make a list of those things which God has done in spite of what you had hoped and in spite of what you wished you had done.  Then, having that list, bring it alongside the Scriptures.  How did your story find continuity with God's Grand Story of redemption He is weaving out of our collective history?  Then take someone out for coffee and tell them the latest chapter in your story (gory bits and all) in language they can understand.

Trust me, this is a path to great blessing.

Tired of paying $40 for your broadband?

This may interest some of you who like your high speed internet:

Free broadband for America has inched closer to reality: The plan, after two years of debate, is finally on the calendar for a full vote by the Federal Communications Commission.

Assuming the plan is approved at the FCC's Dec. 18 meeting, one of the agency's last before President-elect Barack Obama takes office, free broadband could become reality within a year.

First proposed in 2006, the plan calls for a chunk of airwaves called AWS-3 (now idle) to be used for wireless broadband across the USA. Under terms contemplated by the FCC, the winner of the AWS-3 auction would have to reserve at least 25% of network capacity for free broadband.  (full article, USA Today)

The closing of Cascade College: a sign of things to come?

I know a lot of people who have been deeply blessed by the education and ministry of Cascade College.  I have visited the campus many times and participated in campus ministry events, seminars, and training events.  I know some of the faculty and staff and they are good people.  I find myself troubled that such a great institution is forced to close its doors.
Stan Granberg, former faculty member at Cascade College, writes an incisive and challenging call to churches of Christ to see this event in the Northwest as a symptom of what is happening in our fellowship across the country:

December 2, 2008

“Closing strikes blow to Pacific Northwest” is the lead article in the December The Christian Chronicle, On October 27 the Oklahoma Christian Board announced that Cascade College would close its doors on May 31, 2009. The Cascade College administration and board and the board of Oklahoma Christian worked with integrity as they made this decision—still—it is a sad one. Here are two quotes from the Cascade website (www.cascade.edu) that explain the closing:

“The college is closing because, after many years of effort, it has not been able to identify an academic operating model that is compelling and sustainable.”

“In addition, we have seen a significant decline (down 40%) over the last 5 years in enrollment of students from the college’s primary constituency—Churches of Christ.”

Cascade College began in the fall of 1994 on the campus of its predecessor Columbia Christian College, which was founded in 1956 and closed in 1992. There are many reasons that can explain the closing of these two in the Northwest United States. But for me, there is one compelling thought:

Cascade’s closing is a real life analogy that represents the health and well-being of the Churches of Christ on the west coast.

The two quotes above are really quite revealing. The first quote speaks of developing an “operating model that is compelling and sustainable.” Cascade College, like many of our colleges and state university campus ministries, began and operated on the premise of being a safe place for our children to explore their faith as they transitioned into adult life. Fair enough. I experienced that myself at Harding University and accepted that mission with joy when I taught at Cascade College. While that “closed-system” model worked in the 20th century, it does not seem a viable model for the 21st century.
Twentieth century America was a “Christian” century in our country. Christian faith and church was an active and vital piece of the social fabric. That’s why there was such an explosion of new churches across America following World War II, of which we benefited dramatically. But in the 21st century Christianity is relegated to the outskirts of Western society. We’re no longer in a majority position, but a minority one.

Here’s what this means, we must see ourselves as a missionary force in our own country rather than a maintenance force. Our schools and our churches are challenged to shift from a stance of preservation to one of being salt and light, yeast and leaven, among God’s lost people. Our reason for existing is challenged to reorient itself from “maintaining our own” to serving others so they can experience the redemptive presence of God in their lives.

The great thing about this is that those of us who have jumped into this new, 21st century paradigm find the biblical relevance of such missional living amazing, almost intoxicatingly so. We are seeing the living hand of God active and engaged in people’s lives. He is showing himself in the most unexpected events, among the least expected people. We are seeing that God lives!

The second statement refers directly to our fellowship. The number of Cascade College students coming from Churches of Christ dropped 40% over the past 5 years. Why? I know of six congregations that closed in the Northwest in the last two years. We expect to hear of this in greater numbers and more rapidly in the next ten years. There is simply neither the numbers nor the will within our fellowship in the Northwest to sustain an institution like Cascade at this time. Will there ever? That’s one of the decisions we face.
“Hey, but Stan, that’s just the Northwest. We’re doing just fine here in our church.” Consider this. Since about 1985 Churches of Christ in America have been on a growth plateau—same number of churches (about 13,000), same number of members (about 1,300,000). Consider this though. In 1985 the US population was 238 million people. Today it is nearing 306 million people. That is roughly a 30% increase in number of people. That means for the past twenty-three years while we stayed at our 1985 size our impact on the people around us devalued by 30%. Did it hurt when you saw your 401K devalue by 20% this year? A 30% devaluing of our spiritual relevance ought to drive us to repentant tears.

Jim Collins in his brief volume “Good to Great: The Social Sectors” speaks of the need for organizations to “confront the brutal facts.” If the facts above did not speak clearly enough, let me do so now. As a fellowship we are at a watershed time. We are at the point to decide whether we will face the new world around us with the creative abilities with which God has so abundantly endowed our fellowship or we can choose to ignore the brutal facts and stay warm in our blanket of complacency. It’s our choice. This is the time. There are no tomorrows left to us.

And by the way, expect to read of more school closings. Am I being a rainy-day prophet? No, I just know the numbers. It’s time to make a change. The world lies before us; God walks among us; a great heritage lies behind us. Why wouldn’t we want to attempt good and great things for God?

What can you do? Kairos is working with over a dozen new churches with more in the planning stages. We have planter couples who have been assessed, who are moving into their respective mission fields, who are looking for churches to partner with them financially and physically to plant these new churches in new places for new people. Is your church ready to take on the missional role of a partner church to support these couples?

Would you, personally, be willing to support these couples financially? On their prayer teams? As a spiritual mentor to one of the men or one of the women?

Drop me a line at sgranberg@kairoschurchplanting.org if God is moving in your heart and you want to do something different. Become part of a growing movement of missional people and churches who have already made the decision to be 21st century Christians for 21st century America.

In Christ,
Stan Granberg
Kairos executive director

Grist for your creative mill: a treasure trove of fantasy art

Don't tell me that isn't a provocative picture.  Don't tell me that doesn't instantly tell a story you want to follow all the way until the end.  Can't you hear that guy's thoughts?  Don't you wonder why the others behind him don't see the storm brewing above their heads?

I love well-done fantasy art.  I used to think that it was hard to come by, but there are a huge number of people pumping out art by the truckload (okay, USB-drive full) and some of this stuff is really good.

Ran across this site, a huge and rabidly updated (yes I meant 'rabid' not 'rapid') collection of fantasy artists who post their work, sketches, sculptures, and comps.

Fair warning:  once in a while, something naked comes up, and other times something really psycho (and I mean disturbingly so).

But all told, there is a huge amount of high quality art being pumped out by these folks, on a scale I hardly imagined possible.  I get a hundred short story ideas a day falling out of my head from just glancing at some of the character studies and landscapes.

It makes me want to spend a week locked up in a room with no internet access, this piece of software, and one of these.

Ford Prefect lurks in the Romulan Neutral Zone

Comic strips have taken on a whole new life since the widening of the internet.  I thought I'd share a humorous strip from a comic I follow regularly--it is so nerdy that you simultaneously smirk at the insider Big Bang Theory jokes and learn the relative positions of the Pleiades and the Oort Clouds on a log scale.  Good times.

From the comic xkcd:

Wrestling with titans

My writing muse is burned out.  I left it somewhere in January, on the hard road to re-visioning Cascade Hills and our place in Salem.  Writing is for me a creative and spiritual exercise, and it draws from the same well from which I draw inspiration for meeting challenges in church planting.  Not all church planting work draws from this well--but the last six months has been focused on this kind of work.

We have emerged from this time of re-visioning with a renewed sense of God's calling and a clear idea of some concrete actions we can take to embody that calling.

Melissa and I have taken some time off to rest our weary bodies and minds, and after a few days of rest and family time, I have wandered back to the writing workslate and found myself with a very sore and tired creative spirit.  No words come to fill the page with wonders.  I would worry more, but I know that this part of me needs healing and rest like everything else.

As I wait patiently for that rest and peace to do its work, I find myself reviewing some large writing projects that have sat on the back burner for half a year or more now and I can feel the approach of bellows-wind on a bed of embers.  There is some good stuff here, and I anticipate the time in the next six months when I might have some creative energy to spare on these projects.

One of the things I ran across was some thinking I'd done in the last couple of years on the themes which most concern me when I think of the stories I most want to write.  Allow me to share these "big themes" with you in lieu of anything actually creative:

1. Eschatology: what is the goal of everything? Toward what is everything moving? And how are we getting there? What are the dangers along the way? What would a glimpse of that goal look like? How can you get behind a telos (end) without comprehending it fully?
2. Epistemology: how do we know what we know? What must we know? What knowledge must we avoid at all costs? What is the meaning of wisdom, and how do we recognize it when we see it? (Especially with reference to Human Unity below) How much does culture shape what we know or how we gain knowledge and wisdom, how we put it into practice? Unpacking (and smacking down) postmodernism is a major goal for me here.
3. Divine Judgment: from what kind of perspective is the end of the world a good, necessary thing? The apocalypse is interesting, provocative why? How can you hold a love for marred creation and the need for an end in tension?
4. Redemptive Violence: when is violence justified? Okay, what actually is violence? What place does violence play in the divine-human relationship, especially with reference to Divine Judgment, above? Is violence always bad, or a necessary corollary of evil? Can a good man use violence, and how does this affect him? There a serious questions for me here in the pacifism vs. redemptive violence debate.
5. Human Unity: how can two culturally diverse people be made one (i.e., toward the eschaton)? What can they give up without ceasing to be who they are? What must they not give up? How does tolerance relate to a radical call to self-emptying? How should nations, peoples, cultures relate to the outsider? When is it okay (or necessary) to demand that a culture change?
6. Heroism, Ethics, Duty: What is a true hero, and how is he made? How are difficult decisions made in impossible situations? Not merely self-sacrifice but self-surrender for a worthy greater good? What are the hero-imposters and how do they masquerade as true heroism? Is true heroism timeless? And its converse, what is cowardice, inhumanity, vice, dereliction of duty?

If you were to name the big themes in the stories you read and write, what would they be?  What are the titans you wrestle with?

The cyborg shows off his programming: Scot McKnight on his daily routine

I have mentioned my respect for Dr. Scot McKnight before in other blogs, and I have also made the assertion that I'm pretty sure he's a cyborg.  The guy pumps out roughly 3 blog articles a day, has a new (scholarly, thoughtful) book out every couple of months, and teaches as a professor at North Park University.

I came across a great article on his blog where he answers the question how exactly do you structure your life in such a way that all this happens and you have life left to live?

I've become something of a live-life-intentionally junkie in the past few years and have been tinkering with different approaches to daily life that enable me to live into the sort of life toward which God is calling me.  I thought I'd pass on a few thoughts from someone much wiser and more experienced at all this than me.

Go, Scot!  And make sure to keep those servos oiled...

Free blogger templates have come a long way

When I first began blogging a few years ago, I went on a safari to try to find templates that worked with Blogger.  I found here and there a few examples that were barely departures from the default templates.  I looked several times over the last couple of years, whenever the fancy would hit me and came up with a handful of similar nothing.

I looked today, and apparently some folks have been very busy.  If you search for blogger templates, you get dozens of great sites with great looking designs.  Some of these templates push the limits of the template envelope in some great ways.

I have to say, I'm impressed.  Even more so, since getting this new template up and going took me all of about 20 minutes.  Hats off to the folks over at InfoCreek.

Mire-smirched, blowzy...

Now, mind you, I don't really know much about poetry, and I would not consider myself well-read in poetry.  But I've got some good collections, and when I sit down to read them, I find myself savoring the poems the way I do a plate of tiramisu and a carafe of french press from Mother's Bistro.  (If you are looking for a good poetry collection, this is a good place to start, and if you really want to dig into a strong tradition of profound Christian poetry, you need to get a copy of this.)

A friend of mine and I were talking recently about our shared experience of Mr. Hogan's English class, and we both recalled a poem that we were made to read and study, The Sow by Sylvia Plath.  The fact that both of us remember this strange poem from so long ago, especially since at the time, we couldn't possibly care less about poetry of any kind (even the venerable Jabberwocky), ought to say something for the poem itself.  Jake graciously went home and found a link to the poem online.  This is modern poetry at its truest, and all I can say before I share this not-so-lovely-but-lovely poem:  I'm pretty sure Ms. Plath is talking about something more than a smelly pig:

The Sow, by Sylvia Plath

God knows how our neighbor managed to breed
His great sow:
Whatever his shrewd secret, he kept it hid

In the same way
He kept the sow--impounded from public stare,
Prize ribbon and pig show.

But one dusk our questions commended us to a tour
Through his lantern-lit
Maze of barns to the lintel of the sunk sty door

To gape at it:
This was no rose-and-larkspurred china suckling
With a penny slot

For thrift children, nor dolt pig ripe for heckling,
About to be
Glorified for prime flesh and golden crackling

In a parsley halo;
Nor even one of the common barnyard sows,
Mire-smirched, blowzy,

Maunching thistle and knotweed on her snout-
cruise--
Bloat tun of milk
On the move, hedged by a litter of feat-foot ninnies

Shrilling her hulk
To halt for a swig at the pink teats. No. This vast
Brobdingnag bulk

Of a sow lounged belly-bedded on that black
compost,
Fat-rutted eyes
Dream-filmed. What a vision of ancient hoghood
must

Thus wholly engross
The great grandam!--our marvel blazoned a knight,
Helmed, in cuirass,

Unhorsed and shredded in the grove of combat
By a grisly-bristled
Boar, fabulous enough to straddle that sow's heat.

But our farmer whistled,
Then, with a jocular fist thwacked the barrel nape,
And the green-copse-castled

Pig hove, letting legend like dried mud drop,
Slowly, grunt
On grunt, up in the flickering light to shape

A monument
Prodigious in gluttonies as that hog whose want
Made lean Lent

Of kitchen slops and, stomaching no constraint,
Proceeded to swill
The seven troughed seas and every earthquaking
continent.

Morning practices for a good day

Our routines shape so much of who we are, both for the good and the not-so-good.  I'm one of those people who loves his morning routine, and I love even more to fiddle with it, chasing the perfect beginning to that elusive "good day."  With years of experience in such fiddling, I have discovered that how you begin the day has a lot to do with your perceptions of that day at its end.

Here are the things with which (ideally) I'd begin my day:

• Breakfast
• Coffee
• Prayer
• Engagement with the Scriptures
• A GTD daily review
• Exercise
• Writing

When leaving my morning routine and beginning whatever that day holds, I'd like to feel unhurried, fully submitted to God's purposes for my life in general and for that particular day.  I'd like to have the echo of God's voice following me as I heard it in His Scriptures.  I'd like to feel confident about what needed doing that day, as well as feeling confident I was moving toward my larger goals for the week, month, year, and lifetime.

For the sake of contrast, here's how I've been starting my day:

• Breakfast
• Coffee
• Google Reader, catching up on various blogs/sites while shoveling cereal in my face
• Rushing off to start my day, often (but not always) getting in one or more of the following:
  • Prayer (sometimes including some time in the Scriptures) -- usually happens 4-5 days per week.  Less often on non-work, non-week days.
  • GTD daily review -- usually happens 3-4 days a week.  Never on non-work, non-week days.

I have rarely been getting at all to exercise or to writing.

My big pitfalls lately have been:

• Tiredness.  This kills exercise first.  When I'm blasted at the end of the day and have a few spare minutes, I hardly feel like climbing on the treadmill or busting out pushups.  Also drains the goodness from otherwise good mornings; prayers seem dry, Scripture reading hard when I'm tired.
• Creatively spent.  Preaching every week as well as constant attention to envisioning the future tends to drain your batteries on creativity.  I face a blank page now and then, and decide to just surf blogs instead of writing.  Input instead of output.
• No home office.  I love my youngest daughter dearly.  But she stole my office.  In order to have a semblance of a contiguous morning, I often have to leave the house for a coffee shop or something similar.  This adds transit times and distractions, not to mention paying "rent" by buying coffee.
• Feeling overwhelmed with to-do's.  This has the effect of pressing on my morning time, and I find myself wading into the email or task storm earlier than I should, rather than spending adequate time gaining prayerful, godly perspective or giving time to things which energize and sustain me.

I've got a few ideas of things to do to take my morning routine to the next step.  But before I share, any of you have any creative ideas that you use to get your day started off right?

Really? A paper notebook? What's the big deal?

I used to think I was allergic to trendy.  In high school, I refused to wear jeans because "everybody was wearing them."  I refused to watch Titanic because "everybody was talking about it."  The thought of doing something because it was cool or "in" just made me puke.

Now I realize that I'm only allergic to certain trends.  The nerdy ones?  I'm a sucker for 'em, probably for the reason they became trends in the first place.  Google?  Gmail?  Blog?  iPhone?  They had me at hello.

And now I am a sucker for another obscure trend.  A buddy of mine fell first.  I wondered what the big deal was, I really did.  But then curiosity got the better of me.

I tried to fight it, tried to hold out.  I kept passing by the racks at Borders, Powell's, other places, wondering what all these huge racks of journals were all about.  Then I started seeing articles on Lifehack.org about these same journals:  the legendary, world-famous Moleskine notebook.

Used a Borders coupon today to get one on the cheap (couldn't bring myself to pay $18 for a 240 page ruled notebook), but once I got that baby home, I never looked back.  I love my new Moleskine.  And I'm a trendy fool who doesn't care who knows it.

Cosmology's expanding horizons

Once in a while, in an otherwise engaging and trustworthy scientific journal, I run across a line that just reaches out from the page and derails the whole locomotive:

It is hard to think of an area of intellectual inquiry that has changed more in the past century than cosmology, and the shift has transformed how we view the world. But must science in the future always reflect more empirical knowledge than existed in the past? Our recent work suggests that on cosmic timescales, the answer is no. We may be living in the only epoch in the history of the universe when scientists can achieve an accurate understanding of the true nature of the universe. [Scientific American 2/2008, emphasis added]

What happened to the reserved, provisional nature of science? What happened to modest claims about expanding the vision of man? How can anyone who stares into the heavens then turn his eyes to numbers representing radiation emissions over time and say "an accurate understanding of the true nature of the universe?" Boy, clipped out of that paragraph, it sounds like a claim more likely to be seen as bloviated marketing copy on the back cover of the Secret.

It is said by the current cultural pundits that our current culture is allergic to the metanarrative, the "grand story" which purports to account for everything we see and experience. While they may resist a shrinking Christian culture's claims of this nature, our culture has a metanarrative of its own which is not questioned save from the margins. Our sentence above derives from this same metanarrative that the most postmodern among us sing without blinking--the metanarrative of scientific progress. In this view, scientists are always moving forward, always gaining on the elusive "grand theory of everything", always putting more piece of a puzzle which will show us what's really going on.

It has become fashionable for theologians to flaunt mystery and the limits of their knowledge. Those who once held claims of absolute knowledge, who once held office over the land as the keepers of the grand story, those supremely qualified to pronounce on the weightiest matters, have moved (or been thrust) to the margins. Those who have replaced them (and they have been replaced) would have you believe that office of power to be empty, that we are now free from the tyranny of foolish religious speculation. But I begin to wonder when I read statements like the above in the pages of Scientific American.