Further Up and Further In

Made For Glory

2009-04-16T18:39:00.003-05:00

By now many of you have probably read about or watched Susan Boyle's performance on Britain's Got Talent. If you haven't, you can watch it below

Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent

I don't normally like that sort of show but when I came across this this morning I was completely blown away. Here is someone who spent her entire life being despised and rejected. She got up in front of the crowd and was mocked by 3,000 people. Then, over the course of a three minute song all that got turned on its head. Just as He promised He would, God used the foolish things of this world to shame the wise.

The whole time I was watching it God kept raising in my heart Romans 8:19, "For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are."

Christianity offers is a return to the glory we were always meant to have. It's a restoration process that will ultimately one day culminate in God revealing our restored and glorious hearts to the world.

It's so easy to forget that. In our day to day lives a casual agnosticism sets in. We forget that God is fighting for us, is restoring us, is transforming us. We don't worship a distant God. We worship a God who wants to be active in every part of our lives so He can spread His glory in us.

That's why stories like Susan Boyle's, not to mention all the other stories, true and fiction, that stir your heart, are so important. They point us to the larger truth of what God is up to. We might be despised, hated and mocked but in the end He'll reveal the glory, the good work as Paul says, that He's been building in our hearts since we came to Christ.

Susan Boyle's performance is one of the most powerful examples of this I've ever seen. But it's nothing compared to what's coming, the day when God reveals His true children and the glory He's created in them.

Six Months Later

2009-04-11T18:36:00.004-05:00

Six months ago I started working on the largest puzzle in the world (24,000 pieces). As of yesterday it's all done: put together, glued and hung!

I finished it on February 14th, about Four months after starting. It took a few days to glue and then. Annie and I decided to put it in the upstairs living room. Since it wouldn't fit going up the downstairs stairs, I had to wait two months for the snow to melt so I could take it outside and get it in through the front door.

It's great to have it done but unfortunately there's no where else to go but down with my hobby. That might be a good thing though since I don't think I have wall space for another one this size!

Whole and Holy

2009-04-10T19:35:00.003-05:00

I've been spending some time this past week reflecting on Holy Week. What God keeps bringing back to my mind is the Lord's Supper, the wine and bread, His body and blood.

The human race didn't get very far before we crashed and crashed bad. We were intended for glory. Instead we exchanged the glory God had given us for a life of shame and evil. We were meant to live full and complete lives. Instead we willing let ourselves, our hearts, be literally shattered.

We hear a lot of different theories in today's world about why Christ came. Some say He came to be a good teacher or give us a new way to go about our day to day lives. These reasons, and others like them, are true but incomplete. The main reason Christ came, His central mission, was to put us back together again. He came to rescue us from our fall and the eternal consequences that would follow, He came to release us from the sin we turned to in our brokenness and He came to restore us to the glory we were always meant to have. To put it another way, He came so we could be whole and holy.

That's what the Lord's Supper is all about. With His blood He covers our sins. But it doesn't end with forgiveness. His blood might start as a covering but it is meant to go onto complete transformation. The goal of the atonement is not only to set us right with God, though without that we could not go any further, but to make it so that one day, though not one in this world, we can look back on sin as a half forgotten nightmare.

In the second part of the Lord's Supper, Christ's body is broken so that our hearts can be made whole. After the fall, our hearts became evil and wicked (Jer. 17:9). Christ's being broken turns all that around. Our heart of stone is removed and we are given a heart of flesh (Ezk. 36:26). But like with the atonement this is only the beginning. Our basic nature has been changed but the work of Christ isn't done. He wants to put us back together again so that we can be restored to glory. So that we can be whole.

If you spend some time this weekend reflecting on Christ's death and resurrection, remember that it's about more than just forgiveness. Christ wants to restore you to who you were always meant to be. That's why He came, so that we could be whole and holy before Him. No wonder we've spent 2,000 years calling this good news!

The Essence of Fellowship

2009-03-29T17:04:00.004-05:00

I've mentioned a couple times before that Annie and I are part of an awesome small group. This week brought more reminders of the power of fellowship, of what it means to fight for others and to be fought for.

As all this has been going on over the past couple days I've found myself thinking of this quote from the St. Crispian's Day speech in Henry V just before the battle of Agincourt. It sums up perfectly what Christian fellowship is supposed to be about and it only gets more powerful every time I read it.

This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Fierceness

2009-03-25T23:27:00.002-05:00

Well I won't back down, no I won't back down
you could stand me up at the gates of hell
but I won't back down
-Tom Petty

Fierceness. It's not the sort of word we usually associate with Christians, Christianity or Jesus. If you were to ask people to associate words with the name Jesus you'd probably get words like compassionate, merciful, loving, sacrifice, etc. All good, all true, all essential to our faith. But if that's the only side we see of Jesus or of our faith then we're cutting ourselves off at the knees. Because while all those words are true of Jesus they're not the whole truth. He's also a passionate and fierce warrior fighting for our freedom.

Christianity is a fighting faith. We were born into a world at war and we live every day as part of a violent clash between two kingdoms. When Christ came to Earth it was an invasion, an act of war. And what He's fighting for is our hearts, our freedom, His right to restore us to who we were always meant to be.

If you could see the look in Jesus's eyes when He thinks about our freedom it would be a gaze you couldn't possibly meet. It would be so fierce, so devoted, so set, stubborn and determined to do whatever He had to to set us free. In Isaiah 63 God tells us that He is in the field warring for us, fighting so hard that His clothes are literally stained red with the blood of His enemies. No wonder Paul asks, "If God is for us who can be against us?"

We have a role in the battle too. We need to develop that same fierceness, as best we can in this life, as we fight for our own freedom and the freedom of others. It's the type of ferocity reflected in the quote I put at the beginning of this point, the type that says it doesn't matter if I'm backed up against all of hell itself, freedom is worth it and I will not back down even if it kills me.

And hell will come. Not only is our freedom opposed but so is any attempt for us to see God as the warrior fighting for our freedom and calling us to fight alongside Him. To survive this fight we're going to need more than just grace, mercy and love. Those are important but we also need the fierceness of Christ when He went to the cross and tore open the kingdom of darkness.

Now it's our turn to follow Him and fight alongside Him. Our world is at war. The enemy's kingdom is going down but it's not there yet. And in the meantime there are many hearts, including yours and mine, that need to be passionately fought for so we can be free and fully alive. Let's recover our fierceness and fight.

Intimacy With God

2009-03-18T17:24:00.002-05:00

I'm going through a time in my life right now where I'm stepping into my calling as never before. Even this week over the past few days I've watched God reveal His mission for me and show me how to begin living it out.

It's a wonderful experience and as it happens I feel His pleasure. But it also reminds me that there is something in the Christian Life that is higher than living out the mission. The more I step into my purpose, the more it leaves me thirsty for intimacy with God and I'm reminded that that is really the point of it all.

Matthew 7 provides a sobering picture for us. In it, Jesus explains that there will many people who will come to Him wanting to tell Him all about the great stuff they did in life. He sends them away saying, "I never knew you."

I'm not suggesting, and I don't believe Jesus is either, that intimacy is a requirement for salvation. What I believe His point is that intimacy is a natural and expected outcome of a heart that has been reconciled to God and is being restored to glory.

All that we do is meant to flow out of this closeness with God and all that we do is meant to drive us back to into it. Intimacy is the hub, the center, of all God means for us to do and experience in the Christian Life. And thank God for that! For as wonderful as stepping into purpose is, it can't satisfy our hearts the way intimacy can. It was never meant to.

Finally, let me say that this is available. This isn't something that's reserved for those who've made ministry their vocation, the very holy or the super spiritual. God intended intimacy with Him to be a normal part of the Christian Life no matter where we're at in that journey. We're not to wait until we have it all figured out. We're to figure out by walking closely with Him, hearing His voice and feeling His presence. Only then will our hearts find the satisfaction they were meant to experience.

Recovering The Spiritual Middle Ground

2009-03-11T14:18:00.003-05:00

For the past couple weeks I've been reading Ed Murphy's The Handbook For Spiritual Warfare. Towards the beginning of the book he spends some time looking at spiritual worldviews. He points out that we have a tendency, especially in Western theology, to acknowledge both the spiritual and physical worlds but deny the middle ground where they interact. The result is that while we believe in angels, demons and all the rest we tend not to see that world as having much of an impact on our day to day lives.

I really think he's got a point. We've lost something both in our theology and in practice. The Life that God has for us is fiercely opposed and if we're to find it we're going to have to recover the middle ground between the physical and spiritual worlds where the two interact.

As I've thought about this, I've been rethinking the story of Balaam in Numbers. In case you need a refresher the basic gist of it is this: Israel's enemies hire Balaam to curse Israel. Balaam is on his way to do the job when his donkey stops dead in its tracks. He beats the donkey but it won't move. Then God opens the donkey's mouth and it tells Balaam that there's an angel that's going to kill him if he takes one more step, that God is not about to let him curse His people.

It's a great story. Normally when we hear it our reaction is something like, "that's pretty neat that God made the donkey talk!" And while that is pretty cool, the question I keep asking myself is why did God make the donkey talk? If we live in a world where the physical and spiritual don't meet and mix, where spiritual warfare is the exception not the rule, where curses don't matter, then what possible difference would it make if Balaam went on his mission and cursed Israel?

The implication of the story is that what Balaam did or did not do mattered. He was a man gifted with being able to interact in the spiritual world and the choices he made about how to use that gift had huge ramafications in both the spiritual and physical worlds.

We might be uncomfortable with it in our scientific, "enlightened" era but that is still the reality today. Angels, demons, curses and blessings not only exist they impact our lives in ways we're not even aware of. We are not just physical beings, we are spiritual beings and those two aspects of ourselves are not all that separate. Spiritual warfare is not an option, we live in a spiritual war whether we acknowledge it or not.

There are a lot of heavy implications here and I'm all too aware of how the enemy loves to exploit them for fear. I want to make it clear that while this stuff is true, God's love it truer. The point of recovering the spiritual middle ground isn't fear, it's to wake us up so we can fight the battle and step even deeper into the Life God has for us.

Mythic Music

2009-02-28T19:18:00.002-06:00

This is something of a tag-on to my last post. If you haven't, you should read that first.

Music is, for me, probably the most powerful source of myth in my life. These are two of the songs God has been speaking to me through recently.

The first is May It Be by Enya. Both the lyrics and the music are incredible.

The second is Metamorphosis One by Philip Glass. The piano music here is haunting and beautiful.

To See With Our Hearts

2009-02-28T18:56:00.003-06:00

It is God's highest desire to pour life into us and restore us to who we were always meant to be. All that He's doing and working for comes back to that: restoration and life.

But it's often very hard for us to see that. Not only is this world full of distraction the takes our focus off of God's focus but we have an enemy hell bent on blinding us to what God is up to. To get through the lies and push aside all distraction we need to approach what God is doing completely different from how we approach any other part of our lives. Our minds are not enough. We must see with our hearts.

To do this we must begin to look at our world mythically. The word myth has come to mean something very different than what it originally meant. We've come to see the word as synonymous with false. But it's not and that's not how I am using it. When I say myth what I mean is anything that stirs your heart to look towards Truth. Myth calls us into the Larger Story. It is that which focuses our hearts on God and His work.

To see mythically all you must do is pay attention to the movements of your heart. You're walking in nature and your heart is overwhelmed by the beauty of it all. That's myth pointing your heart to the beauty of God. You're listening to music and the sound of notes expresses something in your heart that could never be put into words. That's myth at it's deepest level. You're reading a book or watching a movie and a scene or character stirs you and makes you feel caught up and alive. That's God calling your heart to what He has for you.

There's no formula to living mythically but if this is something that's new to you I'd recommend starting with story. Think about the stories you love. Not the ones you find just entertaining but the ones that seem to awaken something in you when you revisit them. Start there and pay attention to why your heart is drawn there. Open up to God and let Him speak through the myth and draw your heart to Him.

And above all else, walk with God in this. The more you're open to His voice, the more He'll bring myth into your life in ways you didn't expect. Annie and I have spent the last year and a half intentionally living mythically and it has changed our lives. Give it chance and watch as God uses to myth to pour life into your life and bring you into who He's always meant for you to be.

A Treasured Possession

2009-02-23T18:35:00.003-06:00

The LORD has declared this day that you are his people, his treasured possession as he promised, and that you are to keep all his commands.
-Deuteronomy 26:18

What are we to do with all of God's commandments in the Bible? That is a question the Church has always struggled to answer and though we've come up with answer I believe that most of those answers are anything but satisfactory.

Most Christians come down somewhere between two extremes. The first says, don't worry so much about the dos and don'ts of the Bible. After all, we're under grace. The second says do whatever you have to to obey. Beat yourself into submission if that's what it takes. After all, God said what He said and He meant it.

There's plenty of middle ground, but if we're honest I think most of us would admit we lean towards one or the other of those extremes.

Thank God there's another option! Thank God He intended us, and His commands, for something better!

Take a look again at the verse at the beginning of this post but this time realize the context. God has just finished reviewing His law with His people before they enter the promised land and in this passage specifically He's explaining how important it is that they do what He has told them to do.

And in the midst of that He says to them, "You are mine. My treasured possession." Think about that for a moment. Those words change everything. They turn our whole preconceived notion of morality and God's commandments on its head.

To the first extreme and those who lean in that direction, how can you say don't worry about what God said to do and not to do? You are His treasured possession and He would not see you degraded and destroyed through sin. To the second extreme and those who lean towards it, how can you say we should beat ourselves submission? We are God's treasured possession. Don't we deserve better than that? The purpose of God's law is not to beat us down but to lift us up.

We need to remember that the story of the Gospel, the story God has been telling since the beginning of the world, is a love story. It's the story of God's love for His creation, a Father's love for His children, a Bridegroom's love for His bride. It is our birthright, our purpose, to live as God's treasured possession.

If we could live like that, live knowing who and what we were made for, it would change everything. Maybe then we'd be able to see that we were always meant, and are supposed to approach God's law from a place of life, passion and love.

The Hands of the King

2009-01-31T10:40:00.002-06:00

There's a great moment towards the middle of The Return of the King (the book, not the movie) where Aragorn has finally returned to his throne at Gondor. He's just finished defending his city in The Battle of Pelennor Fields and though he's escaped unharmed, there are countless others who have not.

After the battle, he comes to the houses of healing where the wounded are. He doesn't come just to visit or boost morale but to heal them. Aragorn may primarily be a leader and warrior but as Tolkien explains in one of the most memorable lines from the trilogy, "The hands of a king are the hands of a healer."

The same is true in our lives. You don't get through this life unwounded. It's a 100% guarantee that you will be hurt and that the pain will often be deep enough to leave permanent wounds. Even Jesus experienced this. All through the Gospels He is constantly being missed and misunderstood by those who should have loved Him the most. Isaiah calls the Messiah "a man of sorrows."

The difference is that Jesus understood who His Father was. He understood that the hands of His King were the hands of a healer. And so well we constantly see Jesus hurt and wounded we also see Him constantly turning to His Father for healing.

Healing like this can only be found in intimacy with God, be letting Him speak into our lives and guide us through our wounds. It's something we've largely lost and forgotten as a church but it's something God always intended to be a normal and available part of the Christian walk.

Most of our problems with sin come because we don't understand this about God. If you don't turn to Him for healing you will turn to something else. And so healing becomes another way for God to rescue us from our sin and restore us to who we were always meant to be.

Rescue and restoration. That's what God is wanting to do in each of our lives. But we won't be able to receive the fullness of all He has for us until we begin to understand what J.R.R. Tolkien knew: the hands of a king, of our King, are the hands of a healer.

Warning: Very Nerdy Post Ahead

2009-01-29T20:53:00.003-06:00

This past week The Guardian published a list of the best scifi/fantasy novels of all time. I love these sorts of lists and my inner nerd compels me to comment. There's a bunch of stuff on the list I've never heard of so I'm only going to comment on the ones I've actually read and then rant about some of the HUGE omissions from the list.

Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy - This is an amusing enough book but way, way overrated. Still, it has a big enough following that it's place here is probably deserved.

Isaac Asimov: Foundation - The first volume of the series is pretty good but the rest get a little tedious. Definitely a classic very much worth reading.

Greg Bear: Darwin's Radio - An OK book but one of the best ever? No way.

Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass - if you've only ever seen the Disney cartoon you have no idea how weird these books are. Great reads.

Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - Cut 500 or so pages off this book and it would be great. But at it's actual length of nearly 1,000 pages it's long, boring and way overrated. It also has no business being on this list.

Philip K. Dick: Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep and The Man in the High Castle - High Castle's place here is well deserved but Electric Sheep is only here because it was the source material for Blade Runner, one of the few movies to be way, way better than the book.

Neil Gaiman: American Gods - I would have chosen Neverwhere instead but I'm glad Gaiman has a book on the list. American Gods is a great read but it gets a little slow in the middle and has too much sex.

Joe Haldeman: The Forever War - I have a strange relationship with this book. I hate and completely disagree with it's ultra left wing politics and stance on war but I still love the novel. It's extremely well written and deeply moving (even though I disagree with where it wants me to move towards!)

Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land - The first half is great. The second is weird and disgusting. Starship Troopers is not only better science fiction but a better novel.

Frank Herbert: Dune - A great, great book. If you haven't read it you should.

Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House - The best and scariest haunted house novel ever. Every page of this novel is unbelievably good.

Stepehn King: The Shining - Probably King's best work. I love how the tension slowly builds and then completely explodes in the final act. If you've only seen the movie you need to read the book.

Stanislaw Lem: Solaris - This is a great book and one of the first to show that science fiction can be deeply emotional, passionate and human.

Richard Matheson: I Am Legend - I don't care what Skip says, this book rocks!

China Mieville: The Scar - This one's pretty good. I don't know if it deserves a place on this sort of list but it's entertaining enough. Unfortunately, Mieville followed it up with the putrid Iron Council, which reads like The Communist Manifesto with monsters (even though that sounds kind of cool, it's really not)

Walter M. Miller: A Canticle for Leibowitz - Yawn. I have no idea what people see in this one.

Larry Niven: Ringworld - Overrated. Niven has written much better.

Chuch Palahniuk: Fight Club - I don't and never would support banning books but if I did this would be at the top of my list. A disgusting, despicable, filthy and worthless novel. If you watched The Dark Knight and found yourself agreeing with everything the Joker said and did, then this is the book for you. For the rest of us who aren't nihilistic anarchists: keep as far away from this one as possible.

Alastair Reynolds: Revelation Space - I'm so happy this book made the list. I'm a huge Alastair Reynolds fan and Revelation Space is my favorite.

J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - I love Harry Potter as much as the next guy but this is not one of the best fantasy novels of all time. The series as a whole, maybe. But not any of the individual volumes and especially not the first couple.

Mary Shelley: Frankenstein - A great monster story even 200 years later.

Dan Simmons: Hyperion - Dan Simmons is my favorite living fiction writer and Hyperion is one of his best. A great, great book.

Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Not nearly as good as you'd think.

Bram Stoker: Dracula - You've probably seen some sort of adaptation of this at some point. Do yourself a favor and read the original. It's well worth it.

H.G. Wells: The Time Machine and War of the Worlds - These are not really that wonderful. Influential: yes. Well written: nope.

T.H. White: The Sword in the Stone - This is the best volume of The Once and Future King. The rest are a little tedious but this one is definitely worth a read.

Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun - I never have finished this one. I found it good but something didn't quite click when I tried to read it. I'll have to give it another try sometime.

Omissions

Lord of the Rings? Narnia? What possible excuse is there for leaving those off this list? None whatsoever. It's too bad, because this is actually a really great list overall. Unfortunately, leaving off Tolkien and Lewis effectively turns it into a big joke. Completely inexcusable.

Roger Zelazny should have had an entry on here. Lord of Light is one of my favorite novels ever. It's not just good scifi, it's a great and very deep literary work.

I also think it's pretty outrageous that Lord of Light, Ender's Game, Fahrenheit 451, A Wrinkle in Time, 1984 and Earthsea were left off. Those aren't as big of omissions as LOTR, Lord of Light and Narnia but each has been extremely influential not to mention they're all great novels.

I also think it would have been nice to see something from Vernor Vinge, Tad Williams, George R.R. Martin, Robert Jordan, Terry Pratchett and Peter Straub. It's memory has been tainted by the horrible movie made out of it but Battlefield Earth is a actually a pretty good book that I would have included.

Overall, I like the list a lot. I can't imagine what possessed them to leave off Tolkien and Lewis. But putting that aside, there a lot of great reads here.

36 Years Later

2009-01-23T11:32:00.002-06:00

Yesterday marked the 36th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. I've been spending some time this week thinking about the pro life movement. In some ways it's a depressing time. Less than a week into the Obama administration we're already feeling the affects of his extreme pro-choice views. One of his first acts has been to issue an executive order overturning a ban on federal funding for international abortion groups.

The evil freedom of choice act also is looming on the horizon and if it passes virtually every pro life gain that's been made, including the partial birth abortion ban, will be overturned. (side note: please, please, please visit fightfoca.com and do what you can to help stop this legislation.)

But I also think this can be an exciting time. Let's face it, with a Democratic president and congress we're not going to get a lot done in Washington over the next couple years. That will force pro lifers to look beyond the political arena and that is a very good thing. Don't get me wrong, I think the political side of the life battle is extremely important. I'm terrified of FOCA passing and I believe President Obama's view on abortion is depressing and tragic. But we need to remember that abortion existed long before Roe vs. Wade and it will be around when that decision is eventually overturned.

The pro life movement didn't begin in politics and even if we win every political battle we cannot let it end there. For as much as I wish we had pro life leaders in Washington, the current situation will force us to look beyond politics and focus on saving lives in our own communities. It will remind us that our primary focus isn't politics but saving babies and caring for hurting mothers who feel trapped.

Finally, we need to pray. Pray for a culture of life to come over our nation. Pray for comfort for scared mothers and life for their unborn children. Pray against FOCA and pray that God will open the eyes of our President on this issue. Pray works. It changes things. And it's a far more powerful weapon than any political victory.

Gran Torino

2009-01-18T18:49:00.003-06:00

Yesterday afternoon Annie and I went to see Clint Eastwood's new movie Gran Torino. We both agreed it was the best movie we've seen in a long, long time. In case you haven't heard of it, Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a retired autoworker and widower who spends his days sitting on the front porch with his dog drinking beer and glaring at the Hmong family that just moved in next door. Walt isn't too big on his new neighbors, mostly because of their race, but through several occurrences he gets drawn into their lives and becomes their protector against the inner city gangs that roam the neighborhood.

There's a lot to like about the movies. Most of it's described in other reviews so I won't bother echoing them here. But one part I haven't seen discussed much, the part that struck me the most is the film's brilliant portrayal of masculine initiation.

The Hmong family has a teenage boy named Thao. At the beginning of the movie he walks around with no self confidence, scared of his own shadow. The only chance he sees at actually becoming a man is to join the local Hmong gang. Walt very reluctantly begins to let Thao into his life and their relationship becomes the center of the movie.

Thao is in what John Eldredge describes in The Way of the Wild Heart as the Cowboy/Ranger stage. A stage in life where a boy moves towards manhood through hard work, adventure and testing. Walt teaches him exactly what a boy needs to learn at that stage. He learns about tools, how to work, how to act responsibly. In the midst of his grumpy, crass demeanor Walt answers for Thao the central question every boy and man is asking (do I have what it takes?) with a resounding "yes!"

Thao is initiated into the Cowboy stage but it doesn't stop there. Walt teaches him how to talk to women showing him the beginning of the Lover stage. I won't spoil the ending but the film ends with Walt initiating Thao as a warrior in a way that is both subtle and brilliant. In the closing scenes the scared boy is gone, replaced by a man prepared for life.

Every man needs initiation and it is exactly what God is offering to us. The source of a man's initiation might be obvious or God might use someone as unlikely as Walt Kowalski. But what is portrayed in the movie is available to every man if only we'll let God begin to work in our lives.

New Year's Resolutions

2008-12-31T18:20:00.002-06:00

Here we are once again at the end of one year and the start of another. Over the past couple of days I've been reflecting on New Year's resolutions. You know the drill, you sit down and write out some personal goals you'd like to see happen over the next year.

The idea of spending some time reflecting on your life and thinking towards the future is good and important. But if you take an honest look at the results of annual resolutions in your life and the lives of those around you it's obvious there's a problem. For starters, most of us hardly make it to the end of the month, let alone the year, before we've given up on or forgotten what we wrote down New Year's Eve.

I was looking online today at some of the most common resolutions people make. It was about what you'd expect: work out more, achieve some life milestone, quit smoking, and the ever popular lose weight. Now those are all fine goals but I think they're also very revealing as to why it's so tough to get the results we hope for when we start the new year.

Most of our resolutions are external. Important and good, sure, but still external. What if instead of starting from the outside, we start with the heart, what the Bible in Proverbs describes as the "wellspring of life"?

God's desire is that we live from the heart and we can't afford to abandon that when it comes to something as important as life goals. Jesus's constant conflicts with the Pharisees are so revealing here. They knew the letter of the law very well. They knew all the external stuff but somehow they missed the spirit of the law. They missed the heart

In Matthew 23:25-26 Jesus says, "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean."

It's not that Jesus doesn't care about the external. He does. But He also knows that if we start there we'll more than likely end there and what God is really after is our hearts. If He can get a hold of our hearts, transform us at the core of our beings, then all that good and important external stuff will follow. That's the promise of the Gospel.

With that in mind I'd like to offer a few ideas when it comes to making resolutions. First, ask God what He has for you this year.

I've been thinking a lot lately about Jeremiah 29:11 "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future"

We don't get to know everything God has planned for us but there are things He does want to reveal to us. If we don't ask, we'll miss out on that part of our relationship with Him. He knows us better than we know ourselves and His plans for us our good. Don't miss out on that.

Second, search our own heart and God given desires and bring what you find there before God.

This is the other half of step one. Just as God wants us to ask Him what He has, He also wants us to look at the desires He's laid on our hearts and then include Him in them.

Third, ask God how these goals and desires will be attacked then be vigilant to fight for your heart.

I can't tell you how important this is. Your heart, your God given desires, will be opposed. I 100% guarantee it. You'll have to fight and fight hard for the life God is trying to give you. But it's worth it. It's incredibly worth it.

Finally, be willing to do this more than just once a year

It's great to have New Year's as an annual milestone and reminder to have this conversation with God but over the course of a year of walking with God your faith will grow and you will find more life. When that happens new desires will be revealed to you. Don't let this conversation end on New Year's. God is constantly pouring out life and we can have it if only we're willing to constantly receive it.

Incredible Piano Music

2008-12-15T11:47:00.003-06:00

A few days ago I came across Lennon Aldort. I'd never heard of him before but after a couple days of listening to his music I'd say he's by far one of the most talented pianists I've ever heard.

The video below is a great example of what I'm talking about. It's 100% improvised with no prethought, sheet music or any other type of preplanning and it's one of the most beautiful pieces I've ever heard. Oh, and did I mention that Lennon Aldort is only 17?!

His youtube channel has videos of him playing Bach and Mozart by ear at age 3! Listen to just one minute and I'll guarantee you'll be hooked.

The Heart of God

2008-12-10T18:29:00.002-06:00

I was revisiting today the parable of the talents that Jesus tells in Matthew 25. As you know if you've read the passage, the basic idea of the story is a master, representing God, gives money to three of his servants. Two of his servants spend it wisely and use it to make more money, earning them praise. The third does nothing earning him his master's anger.

The typical interpretation of this passage is that it is instructing us to use wisely what God has given us. But what struck me today was what the third servant, the unfaithful one, says when questioned by the master. Starting in verse 24:

Then the servant with the one bag of silver came and said, "Master, I knew you were a harsh man, harvesting crops you didn’t plant and gathering crops you didn’t cultivate. I was afraid I would lose your money, so I hid it in the earth. Look, here is your money back."

"I knew you were a harsh man." This line more than anything else shows what went wrong with the third servant. If the master in the story truly represents God then what the third servant says about him is completely untrue. God is not cruel and unkind, but loving and generous. Yes, He certainly is fierce and has every capacity to act harsh when He needs to but those are not the truest things about Him, especially not to those, like the servant, who He calls His own.

The servant in the parable no doubt has reasons for why he believes what he believes but he's missed the larger truth. More importantly, he's missed his master's heart for him. The master wants to make him more than a servant. He wants to give him more responsibility so that he can one day be a partner and a friend, just as does for the two faithful servants. But the servant cannot or will not see this. He's been sold on a lie and has missed the heart of his master.

I believe that more than anything the enemy is trying every day to sell us on the same lie. He may not be trying to convince you that God is harsh and angry. Maybe he's trying to tell you God is indifferent and never becomes angry. Maybe he's convincing you that God's love is entirely conditional. Whatever the lie is, the goal is the same: to get us to miss the heart of God.

God's heart is for us. As David reminds us in the Psalms, we are fearfully and wonderfully made. As Paul says in Ephesians, God had us in mind before the creation of the world. Our sin has caused to fall far from that wonderful creation, from who God had in mind since before time began. God's heart is all about getting us back to who we were always meant to be. Anytime He is harsh or disciplines us, it is towards this goal. Every blessing, every showing of love, is to bring us back to a deeper intimacy with Him. God's heart is about restoring us to be His children, His friends, the Bride of Christ.

Keep that central in your heart and the enemy's lies won't have a chance.

Strike One Match In The Dark

2008-12-06T11:38:00.003-06:00

This being the Christmas season I've been listening a lot to my favorite Christmas music group, The Trans Siberian Orchestra. As I've been listening, one song in particular has stood out. It's called Dream Child off of The Christmas Attic album.

The song is about a man who in a vision sees a child representing Christ. The child leads him into a forest full of evergreens. On every tree is a candle but none of them are lit. Many were, but they're dead now, melted and tarnished by life. The only lit candle, the only light at all, in the whole darkness of the forest is in the child's hands and with it he begins to light the candles creating life where before only death ruled. And then, in the song, we get th

And there to that light
That young Child showed to me
All the things that he dreamt
All the things that might be
How for everything given
That something was gained
Strike one match in the dark
And all the world's not the same

Strike one match in the dark and all the world's not the same. That's it. That's the message of Christmas, of the Gospel, of the story God has been telling from the beginning of time. The Christ child comes into a world full of darkness and death and He alone is blazing with life. From His life He creates more life and the world has never been the same.

Let's remember this year that the offer of Christmas is Life and Life to the full.

Changing How We Look At Christmas

2008-12-04T16:25:00.003-06:00

I love Christmas and this time of year. This year is shaping up to be especially fun. Not only is it Ellie's first Christmas, but it's our first year in our house. This afternoon we bought our first live Christmas tree and decorated it.

But for as much as I love Christmas, I think there's something missing in the way we look at it. I'm not talking about any type of secularization of the holiday, but about the way Christians look at Christmas. I'd say that the typical Christian view of Christmas involves the nativity, the Christmas story as found in Luke and Matthew, songs like Away in the Manger, Silent Night, etc.

Now, all of those things are wonderful and true and I don't want to diminish them at all. But they're also incomplete. For as wonderful and beautiful as songs like Away in the Manger are, their message doesn't come close to capturing what Christmas is all about.

At it's center, Christ's birth was an act of war.

We need to look at the story as part of the Larger Story and to do that we need to go all the way back to Creation. When God created the world He gave authority over it to mankind through Adam and Eve. Unfortunately, as we all know, that didn't last for long. Adam and Eve sinned but their sin wasn't only about their personal fall or even the fall of the human race. In their sin, they gave away all the authority God had given to them and Satan became the prince of this earth.

But God promised that wouldn't be the end. He promised that He would win that authority back.

Christmas was the beginning of God's crusade against the kingdom of darkness the enemy had spent the last few thousand years building on Earth. Christmas was an invasion, the start of a war that's been going on ever since.

The enemy knew what was happening. We need to remember that the Christmas story doesn't end with the shepherds and wise men stopping by. Satan used Herod, his pawn, to murder every baby boy around Bethlehem. There was far more going on there than an arrogant ruler with wounded pride. It was a counterstrike by the forces of hell against the birth of Christ.

And, of course, the story doesn't end there. This battle is the context of all of Jesus's life and ministry. When He is tempted in the wilderness, Satan tempts Him with all the kingdoms of the world, all the authority Jesus came to win back, but with one condition. Satan stays on top and Jesus bows to Him. He refused but in His death, resurrection and ascension He won back once and for all the authority, power and rule Adam gave away at the beginning of the world.

Now, 2,000 years later, the war that began on Christmas between the kingdom of darkness and the Kingdom of Heaven is still going on. The story of Christmas is not over.

Again, I don't want to come across as negative on the traditional Christian view of Christmas. In fact, I don't want to criticize it at all. I simply want to point out that it is insufficient and add in what's missing. So this Christmas season, let's remember that Christ's birth is part of a larger story, a bloody clash of kingdoms. It's a story we are a part of and we are called to join in the fight, to defeat the enemy and to rescue others from the kingdom of darkness.

True Repentance, Relentless Grace

2008-12-01T22:11:00.004-06:00

About a week ago I came across the true and truly awesome story of Stojan Adasevic. He was the top abortion doctor in Communist Yugoslavia during the 80's, performing 48,000 abortions over the course of his career.

Then, one night, something changed. He started to have dreams where he saw children laughing and playing but when he came near, they'd run away from him and become afraid. In the dream, St. Thomas Aquinas came to him and explained that these were the children he'd killed through abortion.

Stojan Adasevic is no longer an abortionist. He is the foremost champion of the pro-life movement in Serbia and has dedicated his life to championing the cause of the unborn.

This story brings tears to my eyes. There's so much about it that's just amazing. So often we catch ourselves offering up half hearted confessions to God and even if we do manage to avoid that same sin again we're doing it because we feel we should not because there's been any real change of heart. Don't get me wrong, it's certainly better to avoid sin half heartedly than to continue doing what we know is wrong. But what God is really after isn't a resigned sense of duty but a complete, miraculous turn around. He's after the type of repentance Stojan Adasevic found and has lived out ever since.

It reminds of the scene in Braveheart where Robert The Bruce has just been manipulated by his father into betraying William Wallace and the cause of Scottish freedom. Standing in the battlefield, surrounded by the bodies of those killed by his betrayl he realizes what he's done. In the next scene he goes to his father and says with all his heart, "I will never be on the wrong side again." That's what God is after.

But to me there's an even more amazing part of Adasevic's story and that's the relentless tenderness of God. If you look in the Bible, it doesn't take long to figure out that God takes the lives of innocents and children very seriously. And here is a man who has single handedly killed 48,000 children. That number is horrifying and heartbreaking.

But God did not give up on him.

That's the type of God we serve. He'll keep pursuing us, doing whatever it takes to get ahold of our hearts. If there was ever a man who it would have made sense to write off as a lost cause it was this man. 48,000 dead and God didn't give up on Him. That's incredible. That type of grace isn't just amazing, it's relentless, it's awesome and it's available.

Challenged Ballots

2008-11-20T20:54:00.003-06:00

Ok, I know I promised no more political posts for a while, but this is simply too good to not comment on. Here in Minnesota, we're still in the middle of figuring out who won the senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken.

I'm on Coleman's e-mail list and tonight he sent out a mailing with images of some of the ballots Franken is challenging. After looking at these it's obvious the Franken campaign has ever (a) lost its mind, (b) become very desperate or (c) lost all respect for the voters of Minnesota. My money's on (d) all of the above.

You can click on any of these images to see at full resolution

This first one has Coleman clearly marked as the vote. However, there's a miniscule dot next the Libertarian candidate, which according to Franken means the voter's intent is unclear. Don't feel bad if you don't see it at first, the dot really is that small.

The second one's the same story. There's a line that's kinda, sorta, not really by Dean Barkley but Coleman's bubble is clearly filled in. You'd have to be on hard drugs to think voter intent isn't clear here.

The last one I'll print here (there are several others like the two above) shows Franken's extreme double standard. On this ballot both the Dean Barkely and Al Franken circles are completely filled in. However, Franken claims the voter intent is obviously for him. So let me get this straight, a small dot next to Charles Aldrich's name is enough to cancel out a vote for Coleman but an entirely filled in Dean Barkely circle means nothing so long as Franken's circle is filled in as well. Despicable.

I'm all for having a recount when the vote is this close but what Franken is doing here is an abuse of the democratic process and insult to voters. It's shameful and an embarrassment to Minnesota. If this is what we can expect from Franken during the recount he ought to concede right now and spare the rest of us this pathetic and petty behavior. Shame on you Al Franken; you have no business representing my state.

The Gospel Plus Nothing

2008-11-14T19:03:00.003-06:00

One of the biggest and most effective attacks the enemy has use against The Gospel throughout church history has been convincing us to take the pure message of The Gospel and add to it.

This attack is no less effective today than it has been for the last 2,000 years. To name just a few that are prominent these days we have The Gospel + social change, The Gospel + morality and good behavior, The Gospel + ritual and religious ceremony, The Gospel + sound doctrine, The Gospel + authenticity. I could go on and on.

Now, I'm not diminishing any of those things. Several of them are essential parts of the Christian walk. Of course we want to make an impact on society and help those around us. Of course we want to encourage right behavior and Christian morality. Of course there is value in Christian rituals such as communion. Of course we want sound doctrine and an authentic approach to our faith and our lives. They're all important, which is why this trap is so effective

However, for as important as all of those issues are they are not The Gospel. The Gospel is Christ bringing us life and life to the full. It is the seeking and salvation of what was lost. It is our rescue from damnation and the promise of Heaven. It is freedom from our sin and our heart of stone being replaced with a heart of flesh. It is healing for the brokenhearted and our transformation into a new creation. It is life flowing fully and richly from the heart.

It is precisely because those other things are so important that The Gospel must be kept central. When we take The Gospel + morality we wind up with a legalism that does little to actually change sinful behavior and brings none of the life Christ promised. When we tack on ritual and religion we get an empty shell of faith where we go through the motions but lack any fire or passion of true faith.

But when The Gospel is central and we live from the heart then we find true transformation and reach a level of holiness unavailable to even the most strident legalist. We find true joy in religion and ritual as they become one more way to express love and intimacy with God.

We all have issues that we care about. It's part of how God created us so that the Body of Christ would work as it was meant to. But when we make those issues central instead of living from the heart, the Body of Christ becomes shattered. Instead of one Church with many functions we have many Gospel +_____ churches, each with one function.

I say this even about issues close to my heart such as truth, sound doctrine and the right to life of the unborn. I care passionately about each of those but they cannot take the place of The Gospel as being central. Doing so not only diminishes Christ's message but it prevents those issues I care about from becoming part of the fuller, complete Body of Christ.

We've all got our own list of issues and if we're honest we'll admit we all have a tendency to want to make the items on our list central. Let's not. Let's take a stand and say that we as a body of believers will accept only The Gospel plus nothing. Only then can we truly see the Body of Christ begin to work and those issues so dear to our hearts begin to be advanced as part of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Something For Your Inner Geek

2008-11-14T18:59:00.003-06:00

This is one of the coolest videos I've ever seen. It's an a cappella quartet singing famous John Williams theme music using dialogue from the Star Wars Trilogy. If this isn't nerdy I don't know what is. The Jurassic Park part is awesome!

Thanks to John C. Wright for the link

Update: so apparently Annie and Ellie just finished watching the video and Ellie was enthralled the whole time. How about that! Less than two months old and she already loves Star Wars!

The Battle Begins

2008-11-07T10:42:00.002-06:00

Ok, I promise this will be the last political post for a while but this is an important enough issue that I'm going to ask you to bear with me through one more post. I want to talk now about the Freedom of Choice Act. This is a pro abortion piece of legislation that will be reintroduced in Congress next year. Among the things it would accomplish would be to:

-Strike down bans on partial birth abortion
-Strike down parental notification laws
-Create a federal law guaranteeing a right to abortion

If you don't think this is a serious threat than you need to watch this video of Barak Obama speaking to Planned Parenthood

Two of the main quotes from Obama in the video:

"On this fundamental issue [abortion], I will not yield."

"The first thing I'd do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act"

I know that not everyone is as conservative as I am or as worried about the Obama Administration. But this is an issue we need to unite around. Please visit fightfoca.com (thanks to John C. Wright for the link), sign the petition and consider donating to help fight this evil piece of legislation.

But more important than that let's pray. We've got over two months until Obama takes office and we can do a lot of fighting in the spiritual realm long before this bill gets to Congress. Let's pray passionately and fiercely. Lives are depending on it.

Here's how I intend to be praying.

I'm going to pray that God will soften the hearts of President Obama and of the pro choice members of Congress. We know from the story of the Exodus and elsewhere in Scripture that God can both soften and harden the hearts of rulers. Let's pray that we see that happen again.

I'm going to pray to bring the Kingdom of God against the kingdom of darkness in this country. At His ascension, Christ gave believers spiritual authority to bring the Kingdom. As citizens of this country, we have authority in Heaven and on Earth over what goes on here. We can bring the Kingdom, and the full work of Christ, against this legislation and against the powers of darkness in our nation. Remember the story of Daniel and the prince of Persia. There is more going on than we can see and we have authority to fight it.

I'm going to pray that the hearts and minds of individuals in this country will be opened and that they will see the truth about abortion and the horror of this legislation.

I'm going to pray for The Church in America. We as a church need to stand against abortion and that's more important now than ever.

Pray as the Spirit leads you but please pray and pray often. Lives are depending on it.

Reflections On A Rough Election Night

2008-11-04T22:50:00.003-06:00

By now it's become pretty obvious that this year's presidential election is not going to end the way that I had hoped and prayed for. Here are a few of the thoughts going through my head as I brace myself for the most liberal administration in American history.

-The legal front of the pro-life movement has been set way, way back. Ginsberg and Stevens will be replaced on the Supreme Court by younger, equally liberal justices and that will prolong Roe vs. Wade for a long time. However, the legal front, though extremely important, is not the only front in the abortion battle. We need to keep praying, keep spreading the message of Christ's healing and grace to those who have had abortions and keep spreading the message of life and redemption to those consider abortions. Make no mistake, this country needs to see abortion outlawed but there's a lot we can do between now and when that happens.

-That said, may God have mercy on us for extending the legal life span of this evil, evil process that much further. It's time for Christians to go back, reread and relisten to what Francis Schaeffer had to say about abortion. It's time to draw a line in the sand. This must be a no compromise issue going forward.

-I believe who we choose as our leaders matters enormously but we need to remember we live in a larger story. Our story began way before any nation and it will still be going long after all nations have passed away.

-Prayer changes things and it is more powerful than any legislature or president. As citizens of this country we have spiritual authority over what goes on in it. Let's use it.

-A lot can happen in four years. Conservatism is far from dead and it will be back.

-America is still the greatest country on Earth and even with a socialist president I'm still enormously proud to be an American.

Why I Will Be Voting For McCain Tomorrow

2008-11-03T13:15:00.005-06:00

I want to preface this post with two quick items. The first is an excerpt from John Eldredge's blog last Friday. The second is a video from CatholicVote.com. It's addressed to Catholics but the message is applicable to everyone.

From John Eldredge:

There is a sort of “moral equivalency” that has crept into our thinking. We’ve come to believe that one issue is just as weighty as another. Or that one set of issues balances out another. That we are free therefore to pick and choose according to those things which “matter to us.” But as believers, we know that some moral questions are far weightier than others. For example, issues of life and death are far more significant than economic reforms we might like to see.
Jesus speaks about “the weightier matters of the law” (Matt 23:23). Some things are more important than others. The Scripture does not teach a level moral playing field where all issues are the same.

The messages in the blog and video above are enough to decide this election for me. Even if I agreed with Obama on everything else (which I do not) I could not vote for him. Abortion matters. Life matters. Whether or not our leaders believe it is ok to partially deliver a baby and then kill it in a way more barbaric than I will describe here matters.

Barak Obama is more liberal than any major presidential candidate has ever been on the issue of abortion. I've heard various excuses from him and his campaign as to why he voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act but his excuses are empty and hollow. This bill would have prevented babies who survived an abortion from being thrown into the trash simply because they were unwanted. There is NO EXCUSE good enough for voting against that bill. There is NO EXCUSE for supporting partial birth abortion. It is evil. There is no other word to describe it. And the fact that Barak Obama's judgment is so impaired that he can't see that disqualifies him in my mind. I'll wear the single issue voter label with pride if the issue is this issue.

But there are other issues too and I want to touch on those briefly.

I'm voting for McCain because I believe in victory in Iraq. Whether we should have gone there in the first place is a great question for historical debate but we're there, thanks to the surge we're winning and we need to finish the job.

I'm voting for McCain because I believe in federalism, in the value of doing as little as possible at the federal level and leaving the rest to state and local governments. The federal government is too big. It's time to shrink it.

I'm voting for McCain because I don't think anyone should have their taxes raised no matter how rich they are.

I'm voting for McCain because I believe it is immoral for government to "spread the wealth around."

I'm voting for McCain because I believe in the second ammendment and in the defense of private gun ownership.

I'm voting for McCain because I oppose activist judges and believe we need a constructionist philosophy in our courts.

I'm voting for McCain because he understands what it means to sacrifice for his country.

I'm voting for McCain because I'm sickened by Barak Obama's messiah complex. The man's arrogance is astounding and horrifying.

I'm voting for McCain because he's capable of admitting when he's wrong. I've never once hear Obama admit he's wrong. All I ever hear from him is spin, excuses and half truths.

I'm voting for McCain because the thought of Joe Biden one breath from the presidency is almost as scary as the thought of Barak Obama in the presidency.

I'm voting for McCain because I don't think it's the federal government's job to give me health insurance.

But mostly I'm voting for McCain because he values human life. Excuse me if I sound like a broken record but I can't restate this enough. Millions of babies are being murdered every year. With Ginsburg and Stevens set to retire on the Supreme Court we have a chance to overturn Roe vs. Wade. Let's take it and begin building a culture of life in this country. Abortion matters. More than anything.

Please vote for life tomorrow.

The Importance Of Beauty

2008-10-31T14:25:00.003-05:00

It's been a busy month. No, scratch that, it's been a busy year. I suppose that buying your first house and having your first child within six months of each other can do that. It's been a good year too, but busyness, even normal every day busyness, is corrosive. It wears us down and the enemy is right there waiting to use it to separate us from our hearts. Despite the joy this year has brought I've felt the busyness of the year beginning to wear on me.

Fortunately God has provided the cure: beauty. I believe that's one reason He placed us in as beautiful a world as He did. He knew we'd need it and lots of it if we were going to survive the busyness of life. Beauty brings restoration if we're willing to let it. And I'm not just talking about Grand Canyon level beauty. I'm talking about the sort of beauty we see when we look out the window at the leaves changing color, the type of beauty we find in the stillness and peace of a quiet afternoon, the way a good story stirs our hearts in a way that seems impossibly true and right.

We need beauty to remind us of the larger story because busyness isn't only corrosive, it's distracting. When Peter got out of the boat to walk on water he got so busy trying to figure out how he was doing what he was doing that he forgot he lived in a story where things like walking on water are an every day occurrence. He got sucked into his own small story where all he could see were the waves and his own inadequacy to do anything about them. It wasn't until he looked again at the beauty of The Master that his heart was restored.

Beauty can't be explained, it simply is. You can't possibly explain why Pachabell's Canon is beautiful and if you could you'd probably ruin it. It just is. And that's so important because for as much as I believe that learning, building, conquering and working are all good and noble parts of life God has given to us, we need to also have times where we simply stand in awe.

Beauty reminds us of God's heart towards us. He is the great romancer who is pursuing us, fighting for us and desperately in love with us. We are the bride of Christ and we must let beauty remind us of this.

For me lately, God has been using music. These are a few of the pieces that have been speaking to my heart.

This is an awesome guitar version of Together We Will Live Forever from The Fountain. I love playing this song on piano. The acoustic guitar used here is nothing short of haunting.

From the third season soundtrack of Battlestar Galactica, but don't let that scare you off. This is a great piece of music for nerds and non nerds alike.

My favorite piece of music, Canon in D. I have a ton of different arrangments on my ipod. I can (and have) listen to this over and over again.

The Insanity Begins!

2008-10-14T14:46:00.006-05:00

If you thought I was nuts when I put together my 8,000 piece puzzle of The School of Athens, then you're really going to think I've lost it now. This weekend I started working on a 24,000 piece puzzle. It's the largest in the world and has only been completed a hand full of times.

The finished puzzle measures in at 14 feet by 5 feet., which presents a little bit of a challenge in terms of space. Thankfully, we have a couple spare rooms still, one of which is just barely big enough.

Before I started I built a foam board backing that I'm using both to construct the puzzle on and later to mount it on. Since no one sells a 14ftX5ft piece of foam board I had to put it together using several 40X32 pieces. I built two overlapping layers to give it stability and then glued them together using spray adhesive. Moving it was a bit of a challenge but we did manage to get it out of the garage and into the downstairs spare room.

The puzzle comes in four bags of 6,000 pieces each and most people who've put this thing together have done it as four 6,000 piece puzzles. To each their own, but for me I've already done a 6,000 and 8,000 piece puzzle and if I'm going to do a 24,000 piece puzzle then I'm going to do a 24,000 piece puzzle. So I emptied all the bags into the box and shook it to mix them up before I started.

I have no idea how long this will take to finish. There's a ton of variety in the picture but 24,000 pieces is going to be tough no matter how you slice it.

Check out worldslargestpuzzle.com to see what the finished product will look like and to see other people who've finished the puzzle. I'm hoping to become the first person in Minnesota to finish after mixing all 24,000 pieces

Ellie helps to model just how big this puzzle is,
even while still in the bags!

Ellie in the puzzle box

After mixing and dumping all 24,000 pieces onto
my foam board monstrosity

Out of Isolation, Into a Fellowship of the Heart

2008-10-11T19:13:00.004-05:00

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone."
-Genesis 2:18a

Isolation is something that can be a struggle for me. I enjoy other people and love deep conversation. But at the same time I am naturally introverted, I love to be home and am perfectly happy to spend an entire weekend by myself with some books, some movies and my piano.

None of that bothers me. It is who I am and I make no apologies for it. But at the same time, I know full well that the enemy loves to exploit those introverted parts of my heart and drive me into isolation.

I've spent much of the last year praying against isolation and that God would lead Annie and I to a good fellowship. It's been awesome seeing Him come through.

This was a bad week. Not because of the stress of a new baby. Actually, Elise hasn't been all that stressful and I'm never more relaxed than when I'm holding her. But despite how well things are going with the baby I felt very assaulted this week. To start with we had a flat tire on our van. It wasn't a huge deal but having a fussy baby in the car well I'm trying to get the spare on made the situation that much more stressful. Add in the normal stress of work and the terrifying economic news and the week was not off to a great start.

But the real assault started Wednesday. Sam, our golden retriever puppy, was outside on his tie out. Since we've been busier with the baby we've tried to have him out there more so he can have some time to explore outside on his own. Anyway, he saw me and took off in my direction at full speed. He reached the end of his rope, his neck snapped back violently and he screamed like I've never heard him scream before. My first thought was, "his neck is broken." Maybe it was an overreaction but I felt positive he was going to die. I ran to him, scooped him up and drove him to the emergency vet.

Sam was ok after a while. He irritated some nerves in his neck pretty bad but the vet seemed confident he'd make a full recovery. She gave us some pain meds and sent us home.

All day Thursday Sam was doing great. He was walking around as though nothing had happened. He wasn't too fond of his new harness collar just yet but he was adjusting. Around 5, I was doing some work in my office and I heard Sam chewing on one of his bones. I thought nothing of it and kept doing what I was doing. After about 5 minutes I got up and realized it wasn't a bone he was chewing on. He'd found his pain medication bottle and by the time I'd found him he'd eaten every pill in there. For the second time in 24 hours I thought my dog was going to die.

We called the vet and were given instructions on how to make him throw up. Thankfully it worked and he seems to be ok. But it was a very scary couple of hours.

On Friday I felt beat up and depressed. I felt terrible for leaving Sam's pills where I did and emotionally wrung out from the previous two days. Sam may be just a dog but he's also become a member of the family and it was very tough feeling that close to losing him twice. I felt depressed like I haven't in a long time.

Friday night was small group. During the day I didn't feel like going or doing anything else but sit on the couch and feel bad. But we went and it was awesome. It's a fairly new group but in the few months we've been meeting we've already grown close. Spending a few hours with our fellowship of the heart was refreshing and healing. I left feeling like a new man

Genesis 2:18, where God says, "It is not good for a man to be alone", obviously has to do with marriage but I think the application goes even deeper. Marriage is important but we also need intimate fellowship and community within the Body of Christ. Now, I'm all for going to church and I think larger meetings of the Body like that are important. But we also need a small intimate fellowship. It's impossible to be intimate with a church of 2,000 or even 200. Church is important but we need more.

When I first started praying a year ago for this sort of intimate fellowship a year ago I didn't know if it would ever happen. I'm pretty shy and am very capable of being socially awkward, saying dumb things, and being obnoxious. But God has been faithful and it's awesome. If you don't have a fellowship of the heart start praying for one and fighting for one now. It's available if we ask for it, even for the introverted and socially awkward.

Abortion and The Election

2008-10-09T14:43:00.004-05:00

These are two of the best videos I've ever seen on abortion and the 2008 Presidential Election. The first one is on abortion specifically. The second is on the election and conservative values. Thanks to John C. Wright's blog for linking to these.

Point for point, this guy is 100% right on the money. Together these are two of the best arguments I've heard in a long time for the pro life movement and conservative values.

Reflections On Becoming a Father

2008-10-06T17:52:00.004-05:00

One week ago today my life changed forever

I've struggled with what to write about this because I'm not sure an experience like having your first child can be put into words. So instead let me just pull a few thoughts and feelings from the jumble of emotions that's been running through me this past week.

I don't care how many ultrasounds I saw or kicks I felt, nothing could have prepared me for the first moments of seeing Elise. It was overwhelmingly wonderful, like nothing I've experienced before. After nine months, it was tough to believe it was real. It's been a great first week with her but nothing compares to those first few minutes.

Having Ellie has been a great reminder of the larger story. Last Monday was not such a hot day for news as the Dow dropped more points than in any other day in history. But even as caught snippets of the bad news later that night in our hospital room, nothing could have changed my mind that this was one of the best days of my life. What goes on in the world is important but my family is a larger and more important story. Thinking about that reminded me that even beyond my family there's a larger story still, God's story. I see introducing Ellie to that larger story as being my primary mission as a parent and it's good to have that reminder in the front of my mind during her first few days.

Ellie is a blast! I've been excited about being a dad but I didn't think it would be this much fun. It doesn't matter if she's awake or asleep, I just love being with her.

I was reminded again this week about how precious life is and how it needs to be defended. The fact that there are prominent leaders in this country (including one who could very well be our President) who, through their support of partial birth abortion, think it would have been perfectly acceptable to end Ellie's life just moments before she was born is horrifying. It makes me sick and furious just thinking about it. Thanks to our current President we don't, for now, need to worry about that particular evil act but there's still a long struggle ahead, both legally and for the hearts and minds of this country, to end abortion and defend life. Looking in my daughter's eyes I'm reminded again of just how worth it that cause is. Please, pray for the end of abortion and that we would have leaders who care about life.

Finally, I've been reminded again and again this week that if I can love Elise as much as I do, how much more does God love me? If I would do anything to protect and care for her, how much more is God desiring to protect and care for me? I'm thankful I'm Ellie's daddy but I'm even happier that she has another Daddy who loves her and cares for her even more than I do.

"He Made Virture Accessible"

2008-09-23T14:44:00.004-05:00

For the past few weeks I've been reading Les Miserables (a fantastic book, by the way. If you're not up for the entire 1,500 page tome at least see the Liam Neeson adaptation). One of the parts that's stuck in my mind is from the beginning of the novel where Victor Hugo is describing the Bishop of Digne. He's talking about the Bishop's relationship with his people, his generosity and how he inspires others around him to good works. Hugo writes that the Bishop made "virtue accessible" to those around him.

That's exactly what Christ wants to do for us. A while back I wrote about holiness and how mistaken views of holiness lead us to lean either towards legalism or moral relativism. I think that we're in danger of both of those tendencies when we miss what God is doing here. When we see holiness as something far away and inaccessible we'll either tend towards legalism, believing holiness is attainable only for those with an extreme sense of discipline, or towards relativism, beliving holiness is so far away that it would be impossible to ever acheive and a waste of time to try.

I believe this is one of the reasons Jesus didn't discriminate over who He spent time with. He hung out with the rich and the poor. He gave some of His most profound teaching to a socially lofty man in Nicodemus and He chose lowly fishermen to be among His closest friends. He made His virtue accessible to anyone and everyone who was willing to receive it and called all of them into a richer and deeper life than they had ever imagined.

Jesus was able to do this because He saw who these people truly are. Beneath all of their sin and pain and woundedness He saw their true selves, their hearts, the people God had in mind before the foundations of the world. He saw it and He called it out. Virtue to Jesus was not something distant and inaccessible. It was and is Him calling His people back to Eden. It's His forgiveness and grace for sin. It's His healing and restoration for our wounds. It's His life that He always meant for us to live.

When we strip away the idea of God being an annoyed father who cannot stand to look at us until we shape up (legalism) or an easy going, distracted father who doesn't care what we do one way or the other (relativism) it's amazing what He can begin to accomplish in our lives. What takes those mistaken views of God is loving, available, passionate Father who is intimately involved in our restoring our lives to what they were always meant to be. God has made virture accessible to us. Now He is waiting for us to make ourselves accessible to Him.

What's Your Glory?

2008-09-15T19:59:00.001-05:00

A while back I posted about purpose and what it looks like to begin to find God's plan for our lives. It's a subject that's stuck with me through the last couple months and one that God has continued to speak to me about. As I've been thinking, I'm beginning to wonder if we're not asking the wrong question. Whenever we begin to look at this topic we usually ask questions like what does God want me to do? What work has He prepared for me? What am I supposed to be doing with my time here on Earth? Those are all valid and worthwhile questions that God does want us to find answers to. But in order to find those answers, I believe we need to ask another question. A question that's at the heart of all our other questions about purpose. We need to ask God what our glory is.

We tend to shy away from this side of purpose because it sounds a bit self centered. Most of us when we think of purpose rightfully believe that that purpose is going to be first and foremost about serving God and others. That's true. We are part of a whole, the body of Christ, the Kingdom of Heaven. Christianity is not a giant ego trip, it's an invitation to step into something much larger than yourself. So yes, it's absolutely true that our purpose, the work God has for us, is going to be for the benefit of others and His kingdom.

But it's not the whole truth.

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know by now that I passionately believe God cares about our hearts and that the heart is central to the Gospel. He cares who He made us to be and restoring us to that person. He cares about healing our hearts and bringing us life. God is passionate about us as individuals. With that conviction in mind, I also believe that God made us individually in such a way so that we will come alive, step into our glory, by doing the work He has for us. In other words, when we talk about the work God has for we're actually talking about the very things that make us come alive.

As I'm beginning to discover more about my glory and purpose one thing I have tried to do is pay attention to what my heart is doing in any given situation. What sort of situations, stories, conversations, etc. make my heart feel alive? Then I go deeper into those things and start to explore what specifically about that situation, story or conversation made my heart alive. What is God saying to me through my heart's reaction?

One example for me has been playing the piano. Ever since I started playing a year ago I've known that I love it and that it's a huge source of joy in my life. But lately I've been asking myself what about it makes me love it. As I've paid attention I've realized that there's something in my heart that loves to play something beautiful and complex and especially to share it with others. My heart had the same reaction when Annie told me she wanted me to put together my puzzle of Monet's Starry Night so I could hang it in the bedroom. I was being invited to create something complex, beautiful and then to share it with my wife. It's not my main purpose or glory but it's certainly a part of it that God is inviting me to live out.

What makes you come alive? How does God want you to live it out in the work He has for? Those two questions are the key to finding your glory and ultimately your purpose. Invite God to show you your glory, to make you come alive. He will and as He does you'll begin to find your purpose and your place in the larger story.

New On My Office Walls

2008-09-12T13:42:00.010-05:00

It turns out that gluing and mounting a gigantic puzzle isn't nearly as tough as you'd think it would be. Up until a week ago I'd never glued any puzzle, gigantic or otherwise, so before I risked ruining my 8,000 piece School of Athens I decided to try gluing and mounting a smaller one.

I settled on a 1,500 piece map of Middle Earth that I'd done once before. I chose it because it's both a pretty cool picture that would look good on my wall if the gluing worked out and because I didn't care that much about ruining it. For some reason I don't really like doing puzzles of maps so while I wasn't going to be too broken up if the project went down in flames. It took a couple days to put together and then came the moment of truth. I opened up the first jar of puzzle glue and started to spread it on. It was so thick and white that I could barely see the picture after I was done. I was thinking, "This should dry clear, right?"

Thankfully it did. I did another coat, used craft glue to put it on foam board, trimmed the edges of the foam board, and the result was fantastic!

Next up was the big one. I had to order more glue since I'd only bought two bottles, the map took over one bottle, and the other puzzle is five times bigger. The glue I used this time I worked even better. It took only one coat for most of the puzzle and then a second around the edges. I mounted it on two 60x40 sheets of foam board, trimmed the edges and used a heck of a lot of 3M mounting tape to get it on the wall.

I don't think I really appreciated just how HUGE this thing was till I got it on the wall. It looks great in the office and I'm really happy I decided to glue it.

I did one more puzzle once all that was done. This one is 2,000 pieces. I'd done it once before and thought it would look good in my office. Unlike The School of Athens, it's by no means great artwork but it's still a fun picture.

My new sword also arrived in the mail this week. It's a replica of the William Wallace sword from Braveheart. It was being sold at Boot Camp and it has Wild at Heart inscribed on the blade. I mounted it using a magnetic sword mount which makes the sword look like it's floating on the wall. Very cool.

Next up I'm doing a 2,000 piece puzzle of Monet's Starry Night. Annie thought it would look good in our bedroom. Then, in a few months I'm hoping to start on this one. It's 14 feet by 5 feet and 24,000 pieces.

More Than Forgiveness

2008-09-09T20:52:00.002-05:00

1 Then the angel showed me Jeshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord. The Accuser, Satan, was there at the angel’s right hand, making accusations against Jeshua. 2 And the Lord said to Satan, “I, the Lord, reject your accusations, Satan. Yes, the Lord, who has chosen Jerusalem, rebukes you. This man is like a burning stick that has been snatched from the fire.”
3 Jeshua’s clothing was filthy as he stood there before the angel. 4 So the angel said to the others standing there, “Take off his filthy clothes.” And turning to Jeshua he said, “See, I have taken away your sins, and now I am giving you these fine new clothes.”
5 Then I said, “They should also place a clean turban on his head.” So they put a clean priestly turban on his head and dressed him in new clothes while the angel of the Lord stood by.
Zachariah 3:1-5

One of the things I try and pray on a daily basis is to renew my commitment in Christ to put off my old, sinful nature. I do this both because it's a much needed reminder of where Christ has brought me from and because not a day goes by where some part of me doesn't return to that sinful nature.

Lately as I've been thinking about this I've realized that while it is helpful and needed to pray this daily, and while I do genuinely believe it, I have a hard time living it. As I've been talking to God about why that is, He's been reminding me that while forgiveness, stepping out of our sin and having our slate wiped clean are all wonderful and beautiful promises God has made to us they're not the whole story.

I love the imagery in the passage above. It's exactly what's going on in our lives. The enemy has done his best to take us out and he's got a list a mile long of reasons why God should reject us but instead God rejects him. The picture of a stick snatched from the fire is a beautiful image of Christ's redemption. Just when everything seems hopeless, He comes and rescues from our sin.

But I also love that it doesn't end there. There's a promise in the last two verses that God isn't about just rescuing us and then leaving us to fend for ourselves. What He's up to is restoration, healing, growth and adoption.

There's a beautiful picture of this in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. Early on in the story, Fantine, a single mother, is forced to leave her infant daughter, Cosette, in the care of the Thenardiers. She is to pay them a monthly rate and in return they will care for Cosette as one of their own. Eight years later the Thenardiers have long since broken their part of the bargain. Instead of treating her like a daughter, they've made Cosette a slave and are constantly demanding more money each month. Fantine is unable to go to Cosette herself but Jean Valjean promises Fantine that he is going to rescue her daughter.

When Jean Valjean arrives at the Thenardier's inn, Cosette is, in between beatings, being forced to knit new stockings for the Thenardier's daughters, even though she is denied any stockings for herself, new or old, and goes the whole winter in bare feet. Jean Valjean buys the unfinished stockings from the Thenardiers and in doing so he buys the time Cosette would have spent knitting them. He tells her that she is to use that time to stop working and play, something she's never been allowed to do.

It's wonderful. He comes into her life and gives her a freedom from her slavery she had never imagined possible. But there's one problem. Cosette has never been allowed a single doll her entire life. She has nothing to play with. She has her freedom but something's missing.

Jean Valjean goes out of the inn and comes back with the nicest, most expensive doll in the village. Cosette has seen it before but always believed that only a princess would be able to own such a doll. In a few moments, Jean Valjean's love has transformed her from a slave to royalty. He goes on to take her far from the cruelty of the Thenardier's and adopts her as his own.

That is exactly what God promises to do for us.

The reason I struggle (and I suspect I'm not alone) with putting off my sinful nature is because I forget that that's not the end of God is up to in my life on any given day. The freedom from sin He offers is wonderful but we must realize that we need more. We must not be content with just forgiveness when what God is really offering, what He truly desires and longs for, is to make us sons and daughters. Put off your sinful nature and do it daily. But remember too to step into your new nature and the life God is offering.

Two Questions

2008-09-03T20:42:00.002-05:00

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
John 10:10

As I've been going through the last few weeks of warfare and starting to live out everything God showed to me at boot camp, I've found myself returning again and again to John 10:10. If you were trying to sum up the entire story of the Bible in a single verse I don't think you could do much better than this one. Yes, there's much more to the Gospel and to the Christian life but when it comes right down to it, what is going behind all of that other stuff is Jesus trying to restore and the enemy trying to destroy us.

With that in mind, as I've been thinking about this verse I've found that God has been using it to ask me two questions: What is Christ doing to give me life to the full? How is the enemy trying to steal, kill and destroy it?

I've found this to be a fantastic way to reorient myself on Christ. It forces me to look at my thoughts, my actions, my desires and think about where they're coming from. It forces me to think about what the fruit of any thought or action is.

For example, I've been feeling worried about work the past couple days. In the past I would have brushed this off as normal human anxiety or maybe even God trying to force me to go find more work. Asking myself these two questions completely changed the way I looked at my situation. If I recognize that the enemy is constantly trying to steal, kill and destroy my life than attempting to paralyze me with fear seems like a pretty effective way to accomplish his goal. Add to that the fruit of my worry wasn't to help me find more work or do anything worthwhile but to make me feel miserable.

On the more positive side, when I am asking myself how God is trying to bring me a full life, it changes everything. It's so easy to simply blast through the day but when I recognize that one of God's goals for the day is to bring me life it changes how I approach everything. I slow down and take in what He has for me in the beauty of the day. I can trust Him more because I know that whatever He's up to, it includes bringing me a full life.

I've known the truth of John 10:10 for quite a while now but drawing these two questions out of it and asking myself them regularly has moved that knowledge into action. Give it a shot. You might be surprised how much God shows you through it.

8,000 Pieces Later...

2008-08-29T14:31:00.003-05:00

After two months (and far more hours than I'd care to admit) spent working on my 8,000 piece jigsaw puzzle I'm finally done. Actually, I shouldn't use the word finally since my original prediction was that this would take me until the end of the year.

This was the largest puzzle I've ever done but it really wasn't that much tougher than the 4,000 and 6,000 piece puzzles I've done. It could be that I'm getting used to doing bigger puzzles but I also think it's because with this many pieces the minute detail actually worked in my favor. For example, if there's a guy in the picture wearing a blue cloak that blue cloak is going to stand out and when there are 8,000 pieces that makes for a lot of blue cloak pieces that can be easily found. This picture also lent itself to being able to group pieces easily. The orange and black arch pieces were easy to find and set apart. Then when I thought I had most of them set aside, I just put the arch together. The same thing for the corners, which were much darker than anything else in the puzzle and were easy to pick out.

I'm going to try and glue this one together but since I've never glued a puzzle before I think I'm going to practice on a couple of smaller puzzles first. If anyone has any ideas on mounting something this size (76X54) by all means let me know.

Unfortunately the pictures are not the greatest. Photographing an 8,000 pieces puzzle is easier said than done. Hopefully I'll be able to take some better ones once it's glued and mounted.

"I'm On Aslan's Side"

2008-08-28T16:42:00.004-05:00

I spent a few days this week under a pretty heavy cloud of warfare. It was the sort of stuff that just seems to cut you off from God. You try and pray and you have to fight tooth and nail just to get a glimpse of His presence. You try and read your Bible and it just seems dry. Those of you who've experienced this sort of warfare know exactly what I'm talking about.

Going through a few days of fighting this spiritual blockade is a brilliant reminder of how we need to daily fight for our freedom. We need to guard our hearts with the utmost vigilance and constantly be centering ourselves on God. In the middle of these spiritual storms it is very possible to walk on water but only if we keep our eyes fixed on Christ.

As I was in the middle of this, I kept thinking about C.S. Lewis's The Silver Chair. In that book Jill, Eustace and the eternally pessimistic marsh-wiggle Puddleglum are sent by Aslan to find the lost prince Rilian. Eventually, they do find him but he's held captive underground by a witch. As they try to escape with him, he puts a spell over them and begins to tell them that there is no such thing as Aslan, or the sun, or the trees, or any world besides her dark and miserable underground kingdom. Her magic is like a dark cloud cutting them off from the truth. And it almost works. Then Puddleglum, barely grasping to the last shred of truth he can find, gives this amazing speech:

Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.

How wonderful it is that our subjective experiences don't define reality. When I was battling earlier this week, there were a few times when everything I've learned from God recently felt untrue. It felt like make believe. But in my heart I knew that even if it was make believe, living as though it was true made for a better reality than the hell the enemy was trying to sell me on.

God will sometimes feel far away, or simply altogether not there. When that happens resolve yourself to be on Aslan's side even if Aslan doesn't exist. The rich and satisfying life Jesus promises in John 10:10 might seem like a naive dream and his kingdom like a fantasy. Live as a Narnian even if there isn't any Narnia. Fight for your freedom and remember the truth.

Remember.

The Constant Need

2008-08-25T22:16:00.002-05:00

In my last post I talked about the challenge of living in the world even as Jesus calls us to be apart from it. There is a disconnect resulting from the rich joy Christ is filling me with and the deep desires He is awakening that feel so impossible to satisfy in this world. As I've been living with the disconnect, the paradox, over the last week I've discovered inside me a constant need for communion with God. It is something I cannot go without. I am entirely addicted and wholly dependent.

I've experienced something similar to this in my walk for a long time. For the past year I've made a point of beginning my mornings with prayer and for a long time before that I'd made an effort to read my Bible on a daily basis. Even then I noticed a difference in my life when I missed those daily times with God. Taking time each morning became an essential part of my day.

What I'm experiencing now is like that but about a hundred times more intense. It's not enough to offer up a brief prayer or two at the beginning of the day, I now need to prey with an intense passion to start my mornings. I need to read the Word because without it I feel lost. And it cannot be once a day anymore. It must be constantly throughout the day.

It takes all different forms. Sometimes it's earnest prayer that God will center me on Him again as I begin to feel the erosion of The Matrix. Sometimes it's a more specific request that God has laid it on my heart to fight for. Other times it's my heart crying out with whatever emotion is raging inside of it. Often I find myself just sitting outside and staring at the world God's created.

I suspect I'm beginning to understand what Paul meant when he talked about praying at all times in the spirit. I can only imagine how much more desperate the need must have been for someone like Paul. For him, no doubt, once a day, once an hour, even once a minute was not enough. For him the constant need was exactly that: constant. And when he said "all times" he meant it quite literally.

Praying for me is not a duty or a discipline, it is a breath of air. It is a need to unplug from The Matrix and remember that there is another reality. It is a desire to share my heart with The One who rescued it.

Not only is prayer not duty or discipline, it cannot be, it must not be. The constant need is only grown by Christ awakening our hearts and calling us further up and further in. No amount of striving or effort on our part will get us there. It is a path of grace and transformation. The only way to find that path is to begin to believe in just how good Jesus is, how much life He has for us right now and how much He desires to restore us to who we were meant to be.

My constant need, my deep desire for prayer and union with God, has been awakened by where God is leading me and where God is leading me I never could have found on my own. It's only by His grace and His love. It's always only by His grace and His love.

Back In The Matrix (but not of it)

2008-08-21T19:01:00.002-05:00

It's been tough coming home. I suspect it always is in some ways after a "mountain top" experience but this is different. Boot Camp wasn't just an emotional and passionate high it was a time of real breakthrough and healing. It's hard to come home from that.

I don't mean that my home life is hard. Just the opposite in fact. I left camp fired up about my relationship with Annie and I can already see that what God did in my life last weekend is now taking our relationship to new heights and depths. It's wonderful. The same is true with my relationship with God. Boot Camp wasn't the high for my spiritual life, it was a starting point, a trailhead, letting my faith take off into new heights. What God did last weekend was wonderful. Watching Him continue it through this week is a deep answer to prayer.

But yet something in me is still struggling with being home. I feel a little bit like Neo in that scene in The Matrix when he's plugged back into the true Matrix for the first time driving to see the Oracle. He sits in the car staring out the window watching the scenes of his old life fly by. And there's a disconnect for him, not because his old life was terrible but because he's experienced something deeper, something truer, than that old reality ever was.

A few posts back I quoted C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory saying, "Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

I've found this week that this quote has become even more meaningful to me. God used Boot Camp to take me away from making mud pies and let me glimpse the holiday at the sea. This, I believe, is one of the true challenges of going further up and further in. It is hard to desire more. It is hard to no longer be satisfied by The Matrix.

I don't mean to make it sound like I'm depressed. In fact, I don't believe I've been less depressed my entire life. My heart is overwhelmed with joy at what God is doing in me and where He's taking me. I am learning to be content with where I'm at but at the same time I've never been less satisfied. Everything I said in my post on contentment and satisfaction has stopped being just words and theory. It has become a stark reality of every moment of my life. It's a strange disconnect but through it I think I'm beginning to understand how Jesus could be full of the joy of the Lord and still be called a man of sorrows.

The enemy is right there trying to use this disconnect, this dissatisfaction, to steal, kill and destroy what happened last weekend. He's whispering to me that Hobbes was right in Leviathan when he said life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." But it's not. Life is abundant and joyful. Life is passionate and heroic. Life is victorious and beautiful. Most of all life is available. Jesus is better than we think He is and there is far more life prepared for us in this life than we are ready to believe.

God is so gracious in this. No one understood living in the world, The Matrix, but not being of it better than Jesus did. He understood the paradox of feeling abundant joy mingled with the ache of our fallen world. We have not been left as orphans. He understands and He is with us.

Jesus has promised that He will make all things new. The whole of creation will one day be restored to what it was meant to be. But we don't have to wait until the second coming and the end of the world. The process can begin today. There is a cost to desiring more. It's difficult to abandon our mud pies not because we miss them but because we've glimpsed the sea and we know we're not there yet. But God has prepared even for that. He has not made us wait until we reach the sea to begin receiving our abundant life. He is offering it now. And even now as I struggle to plug back into The Matrix I can tell you it's worth it. It is worth it.

Wild at Heart Boot Camp Review

2008-08-19T19:52:00.005-05:00

I've been home for almost two days now and I find that I'm still struggling with how to write about what happened this last weekend. How do you describe something that can really only be experienced? How do you speak publicly about that which is deeply personal? I don't have good answers to those questions but I know that I want to, need to, tell you at least some about what happened in Colorado this last weekend.

First off, thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who prayed. This weekend was deeply opposed at every level. Our prayers were needed and they were effective. Sadly, I can also say that not everyone had the same kind of prayer coverage I did. There were guys who clearly got taken out for all or part of the weekend. I didn't and for that I thank you so much.

During the weekend, John Eldredge said a couple times, "Jesus is better than you think He is." If I was summing up what God had me realize this weekend in one sentence, that would be it. Jesus showed up in ways that I wouldn't have imagined. Before I left, God told me this weekend was about both Him caring for my heart and drawing me further up and further in. I didn't realize at the time just how closely connected those two things were. The second would not have happened without the first. God fiercely loved me this weekend. He drew out my true self in a way that I'd never experienced before. And it was good. It was very good.

I don't think we fully appreciate just how much life is available to us in this life. Yes, we're a work in process that, as Paul reminds us, won't be completed until the day of Christ. Yes, there are wounds that will not be healed until we see Heaven. Yes, the battle will continue to rage and evil will often seem dominant on the Earth. But there is an abundance that God has for us here and now and it would be an absolute tragedy if we missed that. Just how much is available? More than we think. A lot more. I tasted it this weekend. It was amazing but it was still only a taste of the riches God has for us here and now.

It was also a weekend of initiation and adventure. During the Friday morning session, John was talking about how when men speak of the best times of their lives the stories will often be stories of adventure. As he was speaking I found myself thinking that I have a few of those sort of stories but not a ton and it would sure be nice if God would provide opportunities for more. That afternoon, a group of guys and I went horseback riding. We were less than two minutes out on the trail when it started to hail. At first it was just a little and then it unleashed. The horses went nuts, running around in circles and getting ready to buck. Meanwhile, the coral had been left open slightly and a bunch of horses got out and started charging down the trail at us. The ranch hands came running down the trail screaming at us to get off the horses. Having not ridden more than a time or two I had no idea how to dismount. But I managed to half jump, half fall off the horse and get to shelter where I watched it hail so much it looked like it had snowed. Once it cleared up the ride was beautiful but my favorite part was the beginning. It was wild, it was scary and it was an absolute blast.

Another highlight from the weekend was the fellowship. You'll remember from my prayer requests that I mentioned that I was most nervous about going alone to a camp of 400 guys I didn't know. It was a complete non issue. I had so many wonderful conversations and made a lot of good friends over the weekend. One example that stands out was when I was going hiking Saturday and as I started out on one of the trails I ran into a guy I hadn't talked to before and didn't talk to after. He said hi and we proceeded to talk for the next 45 minutes about what God was doing in our lives through the weekend. It was awesome and such a gift from God.

There is so much more I could say, so many stories, so many ways God showed up in my life but there's very little that I could truly give justice to with my words. Something like this needs to be experienced and for the men reading this, I hope you do. This is not just another men's retreat or a Christian event that fades into memory as soon as it's over. What goes on at these retreats is deep restoration and healing. I watched men in their sixties and seventies find healing for wounds they have lived with their entire lives. That kind of healing, and the life God promises, is available and a Wild at Heart Boot Camp is a great place to start finding it. For the women, Ransomed Heart also does Captivating retreats a couple times a year that offer the same healing and life to the femine heart.

Remember, Jesus is better than you think He is. It's true and He is desperately waiting to prove it to you.

The First and Greatest Commandment

2008-08-13T16:42:00.003-05:00

One of them, an expert in religious law, tried to trap him with this question: “Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?” Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment.

-Matthew 22:35-38

This week, as I've been preparing to go to Colorado, I've been spending some time asking God what He wants for me in this trip and what my role in that is. It's been a tough and busy week. Most weeks before a trip usually are, but this week has been different. There's been a ton of warfare raging around this trip (let me again say how desperately I need your prayer s over these next four days). On one hand, the battle is encouraging because it tells me God has some awesome plans for the trip. It wouldn't be this opposed otherwise. But even with that hope in mind, I find myself getting buried in the battle. Like Peter walking on the water, my focus slowly drifts from the Master to the waves and I find myself adrift in moments when I need to be clinging to Jesus.

I intentionally took some time this afternoon both to take a break from the busyness and warfare and to just to spend time with God. As we were talking about the trip I heard God telling me that what He wanted from me this weekend was to honor Him and remain faithful and that what He wanted to do was care for my heart and lead me into a deeper life. As I began to think of how those things work together, this passage from Matthew came into my mind.

How easily we lose sight of what Jesus is trying to tell us in this passage. To really understand it we need to remember that the goal of all of God's commandments, of true holiness, is life. What Jesus is saying is that the first and foremost way we are to find life is by passionately loving God and entering into an intimate relationship with Him.

When I first God tell me to be faithful and honor Him, I immediately began to worry and wonder if those were areas I'm failing in. What I heard God say about that was that He wasn't telling me those things to point out failure but to let me know how He wants to be loved by me this weekend. So often I get words like that and I descend into shame and beating myself up in the ways I've fallen short of what God's telling me. And while there certainly is a place for God's gentle and loving correction when we steer of course, I believe that often times when He says these things He's not trying to point out a flaw but to draw us deeper into intimacy with Him.

Fulfilling this first and greatest commandment is not a one way street. It is not only me loving God with all of my heart, soul and mind; it is Him loving me with all of His heart, soul and mind. All of God's commandments are invitations into intimacy and this one above all. It is a command not only to be loved but to also receive love.

I've mentioned before that I really believe this weekend is going to be a milestone moment in my life. It's going to be a big step deeper into Aslan's Country. But the foundation of that has got to be this intimacy with God. The warfare is raging and it will continue to do so all weekend. I can't back down from that battle but I also can't afford to take my eyes off Jesus even (especially!) in the midst of a storm. God's invitation to love and be loved has brought me back to center and so long as I stay there my heart is ready for what He has for me this weekend. Please pray for me. I can't wait to get back and share what He's done!

Contentment and Satisfaction

2008-08-10T15:39:00.004-05:00

How I praise the Lord that you are concerned about me again. I know you have always been concerned for me, but you didn’t have the chance to help me. Not that I was ever in need, for I have learned how to be content with whatever I have. I know how to live on almost nothing or with everything. I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it is with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or little.
Philippians 4:10-12

For a long time I found this passage out of Philippians to be perhaps the most frustrating in all of Scripture. My frustration was not because I doubted Paul's sincerity or honesty but because he seems to be implying that learning unconditional contentment is possible for any of us. Looking at my own life and the world around me, unconditional contentment seemed impossible. There was and is a lot of good in my life but there's plenty of bad too. That Paul was able to look past the fallen world and his own fallen state was all well and good for him but for the rest of us, who are not the giants of the faith he was, it seems an impossibility.

But I couldn't write the verse off that easily. I believe that all of Scripture is authoritative and divinely inspired. Therefore I could not ignore what God was using Paul to say. It was a paradox I could not resolve and so, for a long time, I remained frustrated.

Over the past several years God has led me back to this verse again and again, showing it to me in a new light and teaching me what Paul really meant when he spoke of this sort of contentment. Since that journey began, I've become convinced that the way to resolve this paradox is to realize that there is a significant difference between contentment and satisfaction.

We tend to use the two words as synonyms but they are not. Contentment is about acceptance and finding joy in the moment. Contentment does not demand perfection, it accepts everything as it is and where it is. It recognizes that because God works all for good for those who love Him, it is possible to find true joy in a fallen world. It is possible to be at peace even the most horrible of circumstances because we can trust in the goodness of God.

But yet, there is a hunger God has placed deep inside of all of us that will not be satisfied by this fallen world. We were not designed for the world around us but for Eden. Though our minds have forgotten it, there is a place in our hearts that has not. We attempt to meet this need in a million fallen ways but none of them does the trick.

In The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis writes "Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

A big part of my journey has been realizing just how much God cares for my heart's desires and wants to work in my life through them. We tend to think of desire as a bad thing but it is not bad, only fallen. God redeems it, as C.S. Lewis points out, by causing us to desire more than we could ever imagine. Even many of our desires that appear evil are actually good at the core. Is the man who enters into an affair's core desire for easy sex or is it for the joy, comfort and adventure to be found in life with God? The reason the affair doesn't work, or works only temporarily, is because he is trying to satisfy the deep desires of his heart in a way that can never come close to fulfilling his true want. His sin comes not from desiring but from desiring too little, by attempting to be satisfied by less than he was made for.

We must remember that we are dealing with an infinite God. Do we really believe that we can desire anything so much that He could not satisfy?

It is important to realize that contentment and satisfaction are not opposed to each other but work hand in hand to accomplish God's plan for us. Until you have come to a place of acceptance with life and the world around you, God cannot draw you into the deep life He has for you. Without contentment we'll still busy ourselves trying to make life work on our terms and satisfy ourselves through the world around us. Contentment is really a surrender of our deep desires to God so that they may be satisfied in Him.

On the other hand, until we recognize that God cares for our desires and that we can trust Him to satisfy us, we have no reason to be content. God placed those deep desires in our hearts and they're not going away. Until we surrender them to Him and allow Him to redeem them, they will forever be a roadblock standing in the way of our contentment.

Contentment and satisfaction are what allow us to be in the world but not of it. Contentment lets us be at peace and find joy so long as we live on Earth. Our deep desires are what draw us home to the Father. Without the first we shall live our lives in this fallen world miserable and depressed. Without the second we shall become too comfortable in a place that God never intended as our final destination. God wants to use both of them to restore us to the creation He intended us to be. I pray that we can open up our hearts and let Him.

Wild at Heart Boot Camp

2008-08-07T16:21:00.003-05:00

One week from today I'll be heading to Crooked Creek Ranch in Fraser, Colorado to attend Wild At Heart Boot Camp. The retreat is put on by the Ransomed Heart ministry team and is based on John Eldredge's books Wild At Heart and The Way of the Wild Heart. It's tough to boil the content of two books down into a few sentences but let me give it a shot to try and give you a better idea of what I'll be experiencing next week.

In Wild At Heart, Eldredge lays out three core desires found in the heart of every man: A Battle to Fight, A Beauty to Rescue, and An Adventure to Live. He goes into the different ways these manifest themselves in a man's life and also how the enemy has assaulted those desires using both personal experiences and our culture.

The Way of the Wild Heart takes these themes at looks at how they apply at the various stages of a mans life. The book also goes deep into the process of masculine initiation and specifically how God wants to initiate every man. It's a powerful book and one that's fascinating to revisit regularly as I see new ways God is initiating me and leading me deeper into my masculine journey.

Wild At Heart is a book that has meant a ton to me over the last several years. The great irony is that when I first saw it, I had absolutely no desire whatsoever to read it. A friend of mine had been preparing to go on a short term missions trip to Poland and, based on someone's recommendation, he'd bought several copies as gifts to give away on the trip. He hadn't had time to read it and so, knowing that I love to read, he asked me to take a look and let him know what I thought. I really wasn't interested. At the time my reading of Christian books started and stopped with C.S. Lewis. But, as a favor to my friend, I gave it a shot.

Looking back on that I'm so thankful for how God cut through my cynicism and spoke to me through the book. It took a second reading before the message really began to take root but it was that initial reading when God really began to get ahold of my heart and lead me from being just a Christian to beginning to walk intimately with Him and live deeply from the heart. It's been a long process, in many ways the messages in Eldredge's books have really only begun to come to fruition in my life over the last year. But no matter how long it's taken for what God was trying to say to sink in, my journey to finding full life in Christ all began with Wild At Heart.

It's been about four or five years since then and now I couldn't be more excited to see what He's going to do next. I really believe that this retreat is going to be a major step for me on this journey.

I've been praying about the retreat for a while now and I'd like to ask anyone who is willing to join me in the last week leading up to it as well as in the four days I'll be gone. Here are a few of my prayer requests for the camp:

Pray against fear: I'm a big time introvert and the idea of going to a camp with 400 guys who I don't know is a little intimidating. I don't want to get in the way of what God wants to do.
Pray that I'd be sensitive to God's voice: Pray here that I would be willing to really enter into the weekend and leave my busy, noisy life behind. It's tough to hear God when the cares of every day life and playing through my head. Pray that I can surrender those to God for the weekend (and maybe even beyond that!)
Pray for safety: By this I mean both for me and my travels but also for Annie back home. She's seven and a half months pregnant and well it's been a very smooth pregnancy I'm still a little worried about being in the middle of nowhere in Colorado.
Pray for God's agenda: I've got a lot of stuff I'd love to see happen in my life during this trip. And while that's all God, I really want to be willing to set aside my agendas and listen to what God has for me.
Pray against spiritual attack: The devil hates nothing more than watching the hearts of God's children come fully alive. What happens at this retreat will be opposed! Pray for victory
Pray for the other men and the retreat as a whole: There will be about 400 other guys there. Include them in my requests.
Pray for John Eldredge and the Ransomed Heart team: I know from reading his prayer letters and his blog that these events, well very worthwhile and full of blessings, are also draining for Eldredge and his team. They fight some pretty tough spiritual battles to bring this message. Please keep them in your prayers both leading up to the camp and throughout the weekend.

Moving Beyond Just Trying Harder

2008-08-04T18:14:00.002-05:00

A couple of posts ago, I wrote about finding joy in holiness. As I've continued to think about that issue, I've come to see that one of the ways the devil has deceived the Church in that pursuit is by convincing us that the only way to gain real holiness is by simply trying harder. On the surface it sounds right, godly even. After all, spiritual discipline is an essential and important part of the Christian walk. Furthermore, when I read about how Jesus described walking with Him there is nothing easy about it. Every believer can share countless examples of life with Jesus requiring serious work and effort. Therefore, it seems perfectly logically that, when we're met with difficulties in our pursuit of genuine holiness we should simply try harder, keep striving, bear down and hope for breakthrough.

But the problem is, it doesn't work. Take a look at your own walk. Have you noticed that it seems the more you attempt to beat yourself into submission on a certain issue the more you seem to struggle with it? That sort of striving is worse than a dead end, it is a road that leads off the edge of a cliff. Our hearts can not endure a lifetime of that self abuse. They were never meant to.

In my previous post on holiness, I talked about the two wrongheaded ways we tend to approach pursuing holiness: legalism or moral relativism. If we approach the pursuit of holiness determined to beat ourselves into shape, to simply "try harder" until we see results, it's not hard to see how we wind up leaning in one of those two directions. Those who tend toward legalism have made the agreement that all it will take is bearing down a little more, being a little harsher on ourselves, and that somehow breakthrough will happen. Those who tend toward relativism see how brutal the legalist is with himself and decide they want no part in it, so they chuck the law out the window. Thus in many ways the legalist and the relativist are two sides of the same coin. They have each bought into the same lie, the only difference being that one lives enslaved to it and the other is terrified of finding himself in that same bondage.

The reason the "just try harder" approach doesn't work is because it drives deeper inside ourselves. On the outside it may look godly but it is the ultimate expression of humanism. It is the belief that transformation is not available from God but from ourselves. Jesus's death may be a free ticket into Heaven but beyond that "just try harder" denies the need for a savior. It lives under the belief that all the power of personal transformation is summed up in will power: that we as humans can force ourselves to become the new creation.

Perhaps worse, this approach denies the love of God. Instead of running to the arms of the Father in all of our shame and sinfulness so that He may turn our filthy rags to robes of righteousness, "just try harder" would have us perfect ourselves before we even think of approaching the Father. In Unspoken Sermons, George MacDonald writes about this very issue:

"How the earthly father would love a child who would creep into his room with angry, troubled face, and sit down at his feet, saying when asked what he wanted: "I feel so naughty, papa, and I want to get good"! Would he say to his child: "How dare you! Go away, and be good, and then come to me?" And shall we dare to think God would send us away if we came thus, and would not be pleased that we came, even if we were angry as Jonah? "

But what about spiritual discipline and the genuine hard work of following Christ? Am I suggesting we abandon those parts of the Christian life in favor sitting back doing nothing well we wait on God's transforming power? Absolutely not! The pursuit of holiness is exactly that: a pursuit. It takes work on our part but it is work done at the guidance and direction of Christ. The Christian life is neither us leaving everything to God while we sit back and make no effort (spiritual laziness) nor trying to do everything on our own apart from God (just try harder). It is God inviting us into an adventure, an intimate relationship, a holy partnership. The problem with "just try harder" is not that it requires hard work. It is that it demands we do the hard work apart from God.

"Just try harder" exists in a place of nervous anxiety forever wondering if we've now done enough, if we're now good enough, to please God. The genuine pusuit of holiness exists in the knowledge that while we still struggle with sin, God sees as we will be through the power of the Cross. It recognizes that while we have to daily put off the old man, we have been given the heart of flesh and that we are free from our sins. "Just try harder" is a burden and one too great for us to bear. The pursuit of genuine holiness is an invitation to life and freedom and a promise that someday our sin will be long forgotten.

A good way to tell which method you are living out of is to examine the fruit in your own life. Is how you're handling your sin producing shame, guilt and condemnation? If so, that's not from God. There is no condemnation in Christ. None! Real holiness will never deny sin but it will produce genuine repentence, intimacy with God and a changed life.

I believe that moving away from "just try harder" is a daily struggle. Like so many of the enemy's lies it is very close to the truth. But it's fruit is the exact opposite of genuine holiness and transformation. "Just try harder" will forever leave us stuck in the mess of our sin. God's holiness calls us out of our sin and into real freedom. I pray we will have the courage to follow that call.

Favre in Purple

2008-08-01T10:08:00.004-05:00

There's still a chance. Or at least Judd Zulgad thinks there is.

In the meantime we Vikings fans can still dream

Is There Joy In Holiness?

2008-07-31T19:54:00.004-05:00

Of all the issues where the enemy has invested his efforts in attacking believers and The Church, the issue of personal holiness is one that has received his utmost attention and, unfortunately, one where his attacks have been very successful. That success is evidenced by the disconnect many believers feel when it comes to looking at holiness as a source of joy and life. Intellectually, it seems right. We know that God is good and therefore holiness must be a good thing. But living out the pursuit of holiness is a whole other story. So often it seems it's not life we find there, but guilt and shame and striving.

Attempting to experience holiness from a place of guilt and shame tends to force us towards one of two extremes. Some of us descend into legalism, becoming Pharisees determined to beat our sinful selves into submission. We soon discover that beating ourselves silly with God's laws isn't accomplishing what we want and so we add on new laws of our own. In Jesus' day, the Pharisees twisted and added to the laws of the Sabbath so much that the end result was to actually prevent good! Legalism can control our behavior enough to masquerade as holiness but look at the result. Is it anywhere near the life Jesus had? Is the place it leads us to even remotely desirable?

The other extreme is moral relativism. Frustrated and discouraged, we decide that a loving God couldn't possibly really expect this level of morality from us and so we twist His laws in the other direction in an attempt to make them easier. We water everything down until eventually what we're left believing is so vague it becomes meaningless. Somewhere down the road we're left with a faith that is so empty we might as well give in and become agnostics.

Most of us land somewhere in between these two extremes. Or maybe we settle on a mixture of the two. We beat the crap out of ourselves on some issues and choose to quietly ignore others. We do this because we see the extremes and imagine that true holiness lies in a happy medium. We think we should be a little legalistic and a little relativistic but not too much in either direction. If we aim for the center we're sure to get it right. Right? Unfortunately this doesn't do it either. We're left trying to balance two sinful extremes in search of hitting a mark that doesn't really exist.

But here's the good news. Real holiness is not legalism. It is not moral relativism. It is not a happy medium nor anywhere else on that infernal spectrum. It's something else entirely.

When I first began to realize this, it was difficult to believe. But when I actually read the Bible and saw what it said about holiness I found that the evidence was there. If there's nothing else but the spectrum, what are we to do with David in Psalm 119 declaring his delight and love for the law? There's no delight or love to be found in holiness while we live on the spectrum. What about connecting Jeremiah 31:33 where God promises to write His law on our hearts with Provererbs 4:23 where the heart is declared the wellspring of life? If the law is directly tied to life how do we explain that both relativism and legalism are entirely devoid of life?

Speaking of Jeremiah, that was a book I used to really struggle with. God seemed so angry throughout it. Surely this book at least must be evidence in favor of the beat yourself into submission approach to holiness. But when I read the whole book and saw God's plan for how to deal with the sin of His people I found Him declaring His unending love and promising complete and total deliverance from sin not through legalism or by denying their sin but by transforming them and restoring them. I found a God not furious with unending anger but one passionate about destroying sin completely and redeeming His people.

But even with that evidence something inside of me still hesitated. David may be able to find delight in the law but David was a remarkable guy, a man after God's own heart. Then I began to see that same view of holiness reflected outside the Bible stories. I began reading the work of men like George MacDonald and G.K. Chesterton. They delighted in their personal holiness and the process of transformation. One of my favorite songs has become Purified by Michael W. Smith. It's all about the journey towards holiness but in it there is no element of either legalism or moral relativism. There's only delight and joy at the thought of being searched and cleansed by God.

So what's the alternative? How do we move away from the spectrum and to the place where David found he could delight in the law? One of the resources that has been really helpful to me is a lecture series from John Eldredge called The Utter Relief of Holiness. Of the major themes he focuses on is moving from a behavior only approach to holiness to an inside out approach.

Now behavior certainly matters and matters a great deal. But if you listen to the way Jesus teaches, He focuses a great deal on the motives behind our behavior. The Pharisees kept the sabbath but their motivation in doing so was utterly wicked. Eldredge encourages us to begin examining motivations. Doing so is a humbling experience to be sure, but it's also an experience that's 100% covered in grace through the blood of Christ. The next step is to start realizing what wounds and sins cause us to choose those motives and then to let Christ begin to heal them.

The result is true transformation from the inside out. If we're only concerned about behavior, then beating ourselves into submission can look like the best possible option. But if we're concerned about being redeemed and made holy at the level of the heart, the only way to get there is through real transformation through Christ. The result is freedom. Suddenly what before brought shame, guilt and striving now brings delight, life and joy.

I speak as someone still very much in the middle of the journey from the spectrum to real holiness and freedom. I'm not at the level of Chesterton or MacDonald and certainly no where near where David was. But I have experienced enough of this process to testify to the power of this type of transformation. It is available. God is desperate to lead us away from the bondage of legalism and relativism and to a place of freedom and life.

Does God Really Care About Our Hearts?

2008-07-30T15:41:00.002-05:00

Does God really care about our hearts? I find myself needing to return to that question over and over again. I know what my head says. I can rattle off the verses and even give personal examples of ways in which I've seen God care for me. But to actually put it into practice is something else entirely.

In my previous post, I mentioned this quote from Ruthless Trust: "You will trust [God] to the degree that you know you are loved by Him."

As I've been playing that thought over in my head and praying through it, I've come to realize that it cuts to the heart of this issue. There are areas where I can trust God easily, where I truly believe that He does care about my heart and then there are areas that I struggle even to pray about. I want to seize control and leave God out. The difference is my view of God's love. When I look at the areas where trust comes easy, I can clearly see His love. I don't doubt it for a second. And when I look at the areas where I struggle for control I find that something inside of me isn't at all certain of God's love. Thus the way this question plays out in my life is, "Does God care about all of my heart or just the parts I feel measure up?"

It's important to remember the role of the heart in Christianity and to do that we need to revisit the history of our race. Adam and Eve were not created as fallen creatures. They were whole and perfect until they chose sin over God. Now we are all fallen but that was not what we were meant to be. There is a core to who we are that God is desperate to restore to it's unfallen state. The core is our hearts. It is God's craftsmanship and He loves it passionately.

With all that in mind, I still find I struggle with knowing God's love. He may love that core of me but I'm a long way from being restored to what I should have been. And so the question becomes, does God love our hearts even in their fallen state? I believe He does. It is here we see the power of the cross. The moment we accept the free gift of salvation we are committed to our restoration through the blood of Christ. He has now begun the good work and He will be faithful to complete it. Sin was not the beginning of the story and, thank God, it does not have to be the end.

None of this is to say that God approves of or turns a blind eye to our sin. How could He? If He did then either it would not be sin or He would not be God. But it is to say that He sees through our sin and to the core of who we are. The goal is not to ignore or deny sin, it is to be pulled out of it and into a place where our sin is a distant and forgotten nightmare, cast as far as the east is from the west.

Holding strong to the belief that God truly cares about our hearts is essential to joy. If you do not believe God loves you then what do you have to be joyful about? The reason we can rejoice in the Lord always is because we know that He is faithful to pull us out of our sinful, fallen state and into Aslan's Country.

Even when it is difficult or even impossible to see it, God is passionately in love with us. He cares for every part of our hearts and because of that He is trustworthy. To know this is to glimpse as much of the love of God as we can in this life. To know this is an essential step to knowing life and joy to the fullest. Walking with God in a way that recognizes these truths is not easy to have or to hold onto but it is available. I'm beginning to find it in my life and I pray you do too.

Thoughts For This Week

2008-07-27T15:53:00.002-05:00

These are a few of thoughts that God's brought to my mind for this week. I'm hoping to write about these at some point but for the moment I'm still in the process of thinking and praying through them.

1. I believe that in this world we are guilty of being discontented but at the same time are too easily satisfied. Contentment and satisfaction are not synonyms. Learning the difference is a key to finding life and to knowing true joy.

2. The more I pray about joy and examine it in my own life, the more I begin to realize that I treat joy as a guilty pleasure. How can we be, and what does it mean to be, joyful in a joyless and fallen world?

3. From Ruthless Trust, "You will trust [God] to the degree that you know you are loved by Him"

Busyness As a Substitute For Purpose

2008-07-27T15:33:00.004-05:00

A couple of nights ago I was listening to the Ransomed Heart Podcast. One of the guys on the show, Craig McConnell, made the comment that he often times finds himself turning to busyness to make himself feel purposeful. Hearing that knocked me flat. It's so true and I don't think I've ever even considered it before.

I think this really ties in with a lot of the issues God's been speaking to me about, and I've been writing about, lately. If I don't trust God, if I don't having His joy, if I don't believe He has a purpose arranged for me, then I am invariably going to turn to other things to act as a cheap substitute for purpose.

This goes hand in hand with the post on purpose I made a couple weeks ago where I talked about how finding our purpose will require us to fight a multi-front battle with the enemy. If we do not trust God to lead us to our purpose, we will turn to busy distractions. If we feel overwhelmed by our purpose and decide it's our job to single-handedly right all wrongs, we'll collapse under the pressure and settle instead for busyness. Even if we know our purpose and are living in it, the lies of the enemy are constantly there telling us it's too hard, it's beyond us, that God isn't trustworthy. If we listen to them, even for a moment, it becomes so easy to abandon purpose and descend into distraction.

I don't want to live this way anymore. I don't want to waste a single second of my life hiding in distraction. God has so much more for me than that. Again I find myself asking, do I really trust God with my life and my purpose? Even when "no" seems to only possible answer to that question, God's grace is sufficent to pull us back out of busyness and into purpose if only we're willing to trust.

Joy Part 2

2008-07-25T13:02:00.003-05:00

A couple of posts back I talked about how I feel God is beginning to lead my on a journey to discover what true joy really is and what that would look like in my life. It's a topic I'll probably be posting about a lot in the future. In my previous post I talked about how joy is different from both pleasure and happiness. What I want to do in this post is expand on that idea, specifically the differences between joy and happiness since I feel that is the more difficult of the two, and hopefully begin to get a better idea of what true joy is and how that can look in our lives.

Part of the difficulty in distinguishing happiness from joy is that we tend to use the words interchangeably. To an extent, I think that's fine. Human joy may actually look very similar to happiness in most cases. But at the same time, when the Bible talks about the joy of the Lord it clearly means something more than mere happiness. I used the example last time of Jesus being described both as a man of sorrows and as having joy. But it doesn't stop there. Philippians 4:4 tells us to "rejoice in the Lord always." Now the Bible has some tough commands but I don't believe it ever commands the impossible, and it certainly doesn't command us to do something that even Jesus was unable to do. Therefore, this verse must mean something more than be happy all the time.

As I've been working through these thoughts with God this week, I've found that one of the clearest ways for me to understand the difference between joy and happiness is to look at the difference between sadness and depression. I've struggled with depression throughout my life. God has brought me a lot of healing in this area but there was a time when I was depressed day in and day out. Now, I would not say that I never experienced happiness while I was depressed nor did I spend every moment feeling completely miserable. For me depression was a dark cloud that hung over every part of my life. It turned my sadness into despair and made my happiness muted and dull.

If we turn that view of depression on its head I believe we'll have a very good picture of what true joy, the joy of the Lord, looks like. When we live a life of joy, we do not spend every moment feeling happy or have lives devoid of sadness. But I believe it will make the happy moments better and allow us to feel sadness in a way that is far more authentic and sincere than the misery of depression. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus promises comfort to those who mourn. To me, that is a joyful view of sadness. To be joyful is to embrace mourning when it comes but to not be consumed by it. Joyful mourning recognizes that all sadness and pain leads directly to the arms of the Father. Therefore we can truly rejoice in suffering. It leads us to an intimacy with God we would not experience without it.

Joy also transforms the happy moments in a powerful way. If we are not joyful, not fully alive, then we will invariably look for joy and life elsewhere. I love how John Eldredge and Brent Curtis describe this in The Sacred Romance. They describe the process of looking for life in places other than God as chasing after "less wild lovers." We don't trust God to really bring us life and so we settle for second best. We all have a list of stuff we turn to when we decide not to trust God for life: TV, sex, money, adventure, books, food, and it goes on and on.

Most of the things on our lists are not bad in and of themselves. It's just that they can't bring us the joy and life we're really looking for. That's what's so neat about becoming truly alive and finding real joy. God doesn't want to deny us those things, He wants to redeem them. Once we start turning to Him, instead of the list, for life and joy He is then able to transform us so that we find true happiness in the things on the list. When we stop looking to TV for life we are then able to find more happiness in one half hour show than in an entire night spent zoning out flipping from channel to channel. One chapter in a good book brings more happiness than we would have before gotten from an entire library filled with stories. A little extra spending money to do something fun on the weekend brings more happiness than we would have had before as a multi-billionaire. We enter into one of the paradoxes of Christian happiness: less brings us more.

I believe joy is the assurance that we can trust God with our happiness and therefore do not need to worry about arranging for it ourselves. We can be sad because He is faithful to bring us back from the brink of despair and into His love. We can be happy because we know our happiness comes from God's provision and is therefore holy. Joy not only allows for all emotions in the range of sadness to happiness but redeems them and puts them in the place they were always meant to have in our lives.

I write all this at the beginning of my journey into joy knowing I have not even scratched the surface of what God has to show me here. As I mentioned in my first post, finding true joy will change every aspect of our lives. I'm excited to see where God will bring me in this and I'm looking forward to sharing at least some of that experience here.

Change We Can Believe In?

2008-07-23T11:37:00.004-05:00

Yes, we can! Make it to the Promised Land!
Yes, we can! I know we can!
Yes, we can

The above excerpt is taken from the chorus of a recently written song. Based on the overt religious imagery in the lyrics, you might think that I heard it in church or on Christian radio. And you would be wrong. The lyrics above are from a song released a couple of weeks ago by Boy George about Barak Obama. This is just one of the more recent examples in what is quickly becoming one of the most troubling aspects of the Obama campaign: the candidate's messianic status among many of his followers.

This isn't confined to a few goofy songs or fawning celebrities. In a recent column on Townhall.com, Michael Medved goes into detail on the cult like aspects of some parts of the Obama campaign. Obamaphiles are changing their middle names to Hussein to match their leader. Actor Eric Christian Olsen is quoted as saying, “Nothing is more fundamentally powerful than how I felt when I met [Obama].” Obama is described by a columnist for a major newspaper as a "lightworker." And that's not even going into the secular aspects of the media bias surrounding this candidate (remember Chris Matthews crying on air after Obama lost one of the primaries?)

The obvious objection to this is, "So what? Every campaign has a few nutjobs surrounding it. You can't blame Obama for other people's actions." And I would agree with that were it not for the fact that the Obama campaign is blatantly encouraging this type of behavior and this level of devotion.

Driving home last night, Annie and I passed a car with a bumper sticker that said "Got Hope?" At first, both of us thought it was a Christian sticker with the obvious message being that faith in Jesus is the way to get hope. Not so. As we got closer I saw the official Obama campaign logo and the Obama website in small type at the bottom of the sticker. After a little research at home I found out that these bumper stickers, and matching t-shirts, are being sold on the official Obama website.

There is only one way to interpret that slogan: without Obama we don't have hope. That message is frightening in its implications. My hope is not in Barak Obama or John McCain. My hope is not in politics at all. My hope is in Christ and Christ alone. Obama is a man and nothing more. Even if he is elected and turns out to be a great president, he still will not be the source of hope. I had hope long before he came along and I'll have hope long after he's passed into history.

One of Obama's most famous lines throughout this campaign has been, "We are the ones we've been waiting for." My response is, "I certainly hope not." Here again we are confronted by staggering implications. Anytime throughout history that a political figure has made this sort of statement disaster has followed. I hesitate to give examples because I do not want to give the false impression that I'm equating Obama to any of these men but Napoleon, Stalin and Hitler all came with a similar message. Again, I am not saying Obama, his policies or his campagin are any way representative of the evil of Communism or Nazism. Anyone who does equate Obama with Hitler or Stalin is a fool and has no business commenting on politics. But what I am saying is that history provides us with several examples of leaders who came with similar messages and the results are never good.

Obama's arrogance also lends itself to encouraging the Obama cult. Charles Krauthammer has a must read article on the subject. A brief excerpt:

[Talking about himself] is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history -- "generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment" -- when, among other wonders, "the rise of the oceans began to slow." As economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, "Moses made the waters recede, but he had help." Obama apparently works alone.

I am stunned by the arrogance in that statement. But it goes on from there. Obama tells us we need to teach our children to speak Spanish but neglects to mention that he himself does not speak the language. Obama expects us to believe that he is a deeply commited Christian but that he so rarely attended his church that until a few months ago he was completely clueless that his pastor was spewing anti American venom from the pulpit. Michelle Obama claims that the Obama campaign marks the first time she's ever been proud of America, as though it alone can redeem the sins of slavery and segregation.

Finally, I would blame the rise of the Obama cult on contemporary liberalism. I am not now discussing the virtues and vices of government social programs but after 75 years of liberals sending the message that we ought to depend on government, not as a last resort but as a first, for all our material needs, is it really surprising that a cult like following has sprung up around the most liberal man ever to run for the presidency?

Obama talks a lot about bringing people together but if this is what we are uniting around, count me out. Obama talks about change but if this is what we are changing to I cannot be a part of it. He talks about hope but when I see the effects of his campaign I feel fear. I do not wish to paint with too broad a brush. I am sure that most Obama supporters do not buy into the cult side of the campaign. But I'm not convinced Obama is among that majority. I believe he has bought into himself. He believes he is the answer, the source of hope and the one we've all been waiting for. I find that terrifying. That is change I cannot and will not believe in.

Joy

2008-07-21T14:38:00.003-05:00

Over the past year of my life I have learned a lot about walking with God and what it means to have authentic intimacy with Him. It's been an amazing experience and one I hope and believe will continue for the rest of my life. Lately, however, I've felt God guiding me to slow down on learning new things and start finding life in what He has already shown me. A few weeks back I was praying and God spoke to me clearer than I am usually able to hear. His message to me was simple: "Remember that life is the goal." I wrote it in my journal and I've spent the last few weeks turning that over in my head. I am only at the beginning of exploring that message in my life but I want to begin sharing what I've learned. For this post, I want to talk about what I believe is one of the things at the heart of true life in Christ: joy.

As I've thought about joy recently I've realized just how badly I've misconceived it. I tend to think of joy as something small, a nice bonus at the end of day but not an essential part of the Christian life. But it has become clear to me that my view of joy could not be further from God's. When I open the Bible and read in Nehemiah 8 "The joy of the Lord is your strength" I can see plain as day the disconnect between my personal philosophy and God's truth. To God joy is not optional; it is essential.

Let's consider that verse again. "The joy of the Lord is your strength." I think that's the sort of verse we tend to gloss over and treat as an empty platitude. It seems like a nice thought but do we ever stop and think of all that it implies? If our strength is directly tied to and related to our joy, then if we are not joyful we are setting ourselves up as easy targets for the enemy and the battle for our hearts is lost. Joy is not a platitude; it is a strategy. Joy is not happy thoughts; it is a weapon. If we truly put this verse, with all it's implications, into practice it would start a revolution.

I think part of the struggle I have with joy comes from my confusing it with two things that sound similar but are actually quite different: happiness and pleasure. Let's start with pleasure. To say, "I shall spend my life being joyful" could be easily confused with saying "I will spend my life seeking pleasure." Now I do not believe pleasure is wrong. In fact, I believe God intends for us to have a great deal of it. But it does not take a deep psychoanalysis to realize that we do not experience pleasure every moment of the day. Pleasure exists at the circumference, joy is at the center. Pleasure demands external circumstances be put right. Joy is indifferent.

Let me illustrate this with a silly but, I hope, helpful example. When I went to see The Dark Knight I experienced pleasure. If Annie decided that tonight we are going to go see Mama Mia I doubt I would find very much pleasure in the experience. But I could find joy in it. I could find joy in spending time with my wife and in doing something that brings her pleasure. My joy need not be affected by external circumstances.

Happiness is even more difficult to separate because it is not entirely external. It does exist at a level deeper than pleasure but clearly not at the level of joy. I know this because Isaiah speaks of The Messiah as a man of sorrows. Yet if the joy of the Lord is our strength, Jesus must have been very joyful indeed since He was spiritually the strongest man to ever live. Therefore, joy must go beyond mere emotion. In this way it is like contentment. To be content does not mean to be satisfied. I doubt Paul was satisfied with the weather conditions during his shipwrecks but he was content in all circumstances (more on contentment another time).

Once we realize that joy is neither pleasure nor happiness we begin to see just how powerful it really is. If joy is not affected by either physical, external circumstances or by emotions then it would seem to be untouchable. And if we found it, if our hearts were transformed so that they were truly joyful, we also would be untouchable. I do not mean untouchable in a way that is closed off and defensive but in a way that is able to be open and loving because we are no longer dependent on pleasure and happiness to take the place of joy in our lives. This is why the verse specifies the joy of the Lord. Clearly there is something supernatural about this. The only way to get there is through relationship with God and through being transformed by Him. This is also why I say that truly living that verse could start a revolution. To find this level of joy would leave no part of our lives untouched.

I believe a word of caution is needed here. The contemporary church is not very fond of talking about the cost of following Christ but it exists nonetheless. I believe there is also a cost to finding true joy. To become untouchable is to become hated. To become truly alive in Christ, even in just one area such as joy, is to become the world's enemy. I cannot be more specific because I am still so far away from real joy and life in my own walk but the stories of martyrs are easy to find. Even in a "tolerant" society such as ours, the cost may not be death but it will still exist. Jesus promised this. When He said He came with us a sword, this is at least part of what He meant.

But I believe it's worth it. This place of joy is where I want to go and I believe it is where God is leading me. It's time to move beyond platitudes and happy thoughts. Joy matters and it is worth pursuing.

The Dark Knight

2008-07-19T18:23:00.004-05:00

Last night Annie and I caught the The Dark Knight at the Imax theater near our house (For the record we were not among those crazy people paying $150 for a ticket. We bought ours well in advance at the normal price.) I can't remember the last time I was this excited for a movie. I've been a Batman fan my whole life but was not all that impressed by the original four movies. The first two had their moments, Batman Returns is a good Tim Burton movie, but they completely missed the character. The third, Batman Forever, was alright but forgettable. Don't even start on the putrid, unwatchable Batman and Robin. (It features The Governator as Mr. Freeze who at one point conducts choir practice for his henchmen yelling, "SING LOUDER!" Yes, the movie was that bad.)

Batman and Robin effectively killed the franchise for nearly a decade. There was off and on talk of reviving it but quite frankly the fact that Warner Bros., the same studio that churned out B&R, still held the rights didn't inspire a whole lot of confidence.

That is, until they hired Christopher Nolan. I've been a huge Christoper Nolan fan since Memento came out. It's still one of my favorite movies and is one of the most rewatchable movies ever made. I'm not sure what they saw in him that made them think he was the guy for Batman but were they ever right on the money with their choice.

Nolan's first entry in the series, Batman Begins, was incredible. If you haven't seen it, it's required viewing before you check out The Dark Knight. It goes back to the origins of Batman and treats the character and the story with complete seriousness. It asks the question, what would it be like if someone actually decided to put on a bat suit and fight criminals? The movie is incredible, brilliantly acted and directed. It was the Batman movie that geeks like me had been waiting for. It was way more than any of us had hoped for.

But it doesn't hold a candle to The Dark Knight.

This one takes off from where Begins left off and never looks back. The most talked about aspect of this performance is the much hyped performance of the late Heath Ledger as The Joker and for once the hype is justified. Apart from Daniel Day Lewis, I have never seen an actor so completely disappear into a character. When Ledger was first announced as The Joker, the Internet went abuzz with angry fans and Brokeback Batman jokes. He seemed so wrong for the role. But whatever Christopher Nolan saw that the rest of us missed, he was dead right. It's the best villain performance I've ever seen, including Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter.

Speaking of Hannibal, The Joker has him beat hands down as far as villains go. Hannibal was terrifying but there was also a refined elegance about him. He was a perfect gentleman who also happened to eat people. He was certainly evil and sadistic but not in the way The Joker is in this movie. The Joker has no agenda. He's not after money or power. It's not even correct to say he just wants to kill people. What he wants is to destroy as much as he can. He is an anarchist in the purest sense of the word. He believes in nothing but pain and chaos. And it's terrifying.

A lot is going to be made about the violence in this movie. It's very rough and very shocking. But the amazing thing is that it accomplishes that without being gory or graphic. There's almost no blood in the entire movie but despite that, the violence is more intense than most gore filled movies. Christopher Nolan proves that less is more. In this case almost too much more.

The Joker is the highlight of the movie but it would be a shame for Batman to get lost in the hype. Christian Bale continues to be one of the best actors working today. His performance here is great. The character's transformation through this movie is incredible. There's a scene where he is interrogating The Joker that is just brutal to watch. He's been pushed to his emotional and physical limits by this guy and he completely loses control. But the harder he hits, the more The Joker just laughs and one of the films many philosophical questions is raised: how do you stop a man who thrives on pain and doesn't care if he dies? It's a fascinating question with big time implications for today's war on terror.

The philosophy in the movie is fantastic but never preachy. I don't want to give the impression of this being an Ayn Rand style movie. It's not. But at the same time, the actions and choices of the characters raise big time ethical, philosophical and moral questions. I won't spoil them here but it's a deep film that will leave you thinking.

When I left Batman Begins I couldn't wait to see the sequel. Leaving The Dark Knight I'm almost afraid to. I'd rather have no sequel than a bad sequel. I don't have any idea how you come anywhere close to equaling this, let alone topping it. This is The Empire Strikes Back to Batman Begins' Star Wars. This is The Godfather Part 2. Both of those trilogies (and the Spider-Man series) had disappointing finishes (though I still love Return of the Jedi) and I do not want to see Batman's third entry join that dubious club. Here's hoping Christopher Nolan proves me wrong yet again and makes the third the best one yet.

Side note: The Dark Knight had one of the coolest marketing campaigns of all time. One of the best aspects was the vandalized posters. They released the normal posters and then a few months later put up ones that had been defaced by The Joker. Check out some of the better ones below.

Satire Time!

2008-07-18T10:01:00.004-05:00

I found this online this morning. If you love political satire or just need a break from following the real world exploits of this year's campaign you'll get a big kick out of this.

God's Plans For Us

2008-07-17T14:53:00.004-05:00

It seems to me that a lot of Christians, including myself, often find themselves living under a cloud of guilt when it comes to the work Christ has for us. We seem to know that there's something we ought to do with our lives, after all the Bible makes it clear that God has plans for our lives, but what those plans might be remains elusive. Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life has remained a best seller for half a decade now precisely because of this issue. While I have no big issue with the book and feel there are many good things it, I do think it's safe to say that it hasn't been the final word on this issue. Many of us finished all forty days of the book and a week later felt just as confused, purposeless and guilty as we did before we began.

In finding our purpose, the devil is going to hit us with lie filled guilt trips from both sides of the issue. One moment he whispers "You're lazy, pathetically so. You're not anywhere close to where God wants you and you'll never find what He has for you." The next it's "You have nothing to offer. If you really believe this whole business of God having a plan for you, then you're kidding yourself. As a Christian you're a worthless failure." I mention these two lies here at the outset because I want to make it clear that if we're going to move past these lies and into freedom we're going to have fight a two front war with the enemy. We're going to have to break the agreements we've made with these lies if we are to have any hope of seeing the truth God has for us about our purpose.

Here's the good news: God does have a plan for all of us but guilt is not a part of it. Nor is that plan meant to be yet another thing to check off on the to do list. It's not meant to be something that wears us down and runs us dry. It's meant to be something that makes us come alive. We see the word plan and we immediately think endless duty. But what God wants is to make that plan come alive in us through the passions and desires He has given us.

I believe that to find our purpose and life we need to start living through our passions and desires. The obvious objection to that is that it sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. But our desire is not wrong, it's just fallen and Christ can redeem it, transform it. Once we've received Him our heart is no longer dreadfully wicked. He's removed it and replaced it with a heart of flesh. He gave us our passions and desires and He wants to use them for His kingdom and to make us come alive. (for more on this I strongly recommend Desire by John Eldredge).

Even after we realize what we're passionate about and how those passions lead us to our purpose, the devil does not quit. One of my big struggles in life is with being easily overwhelmed and that plays in big time here. Whatever work God has for me, I am just one small part of His plan but the devil wants to convince me that it's all riding on my back. His goal is to make me forget I live in a bigger story, that I'm only one small part of a part in the Body of Christ.

One example of how this plays out is in helping the needy. The devil will convince you that it's your job to go solve the entire issue of modern poverty but maybe all God has for you here is to help your struggling neighbor. But even if He does have a bigger role for you, we need to remember that He is in control. As the Sunday School song says, "He's got the whole world in His hands." Our purpose, great or small, is to be a part of His larger purpose. To get past this lie we're going to need to let go of pride and step into trust.

The other major trap we fall into is failing to see that God doesn't always have some big job for us to do. Sometimes He just wants us to rest in Him. That time of resting may be for a week, a year or it could even be that your purpose has shifted altogether and you're meant to spent the rest of your life resting in Him and loving Him. We tend to freak out when this happens and think we're doing something wrong. Using the example of helping the needy again, maybe you struggling neighbor has stopped struggling and God hasn't yet show you who He now wants you to help. That's ok. It's part of the Christian walk.

I believe that not only are these times of rest inevitable, they are essential to centering us once again on Christ. The work God has for us is important but at the center of the Christian life is passionate relationship with God. Everything else flows out of that, including our purpose. If we're not centered on that relationship whatever we're doing, no matter how needed, will start to become about us and not about God. Will give our hearts to the work rather than to the one who gave us the work.

Finally I would say that we need to be careful about being too anxious in finding our purpose. God has promised that He knows the plans He has for us but we're not going to get too far in finding them out for ourselves so long as we're nervously sitting around wondering if we're doing a good job of finding our purpose. I believe that if you really want to find what you're supposed to be doing your best bet is to go to the one who already knows what it is. Let Him speak to you, heal you, and lead you in whatever He has for you to do.

Trust Revisited

2008-07-15T21:12:00.003-05:00

A few weeks back I wrote about trust. It's a topic God has been speaking to me a lot about lately and I wanted to revisit the issue now. No doubt this won't be the last time I'll be coming back to it. I don't claim to have anymore of a complete view of trust now than the last time I wrote on it. But I do want to share a little of what God has shared with me in the last few weeks.

I just finished reading Ruthless Trust by Brennan Manning. I love the view of trust found in combining it with a word like ruthless. It suggests that to get through this life, to really trust God in the face of all the pain, sorrow and fear we experience, is going to take a fierceness. We're going to need to approach trusting God savagely, giving no ground. Yet at the same time, the ultimate goal is to be able to rest in the hands of the Father. In a sense, we must fight the lies of the enemy so that we can stop fighting the beautiful truths of God.

One thing the book really exposed to me is just how backward we have our priorities when it comes to trust. Manning writes, "Ruthless trust ultimately comes down to this: faith in the person of Jesus and hope in his promise. In spite of all disconcerting appearances, we stare down death without nervousness and anticipate resurrection solely because Jesus has said, 'You have my word on it.'"

Like most Christians, I've had my doubts in my faith. But by and large I am able to say, without reservation, that I believe I will go to Heaven when I die because of what Jesus did on the cross. I am willing to trust my immortal soul on the belief that Jesus really did what the Gospel's say He did and that it was enough. I've staked everything on this and if it's wrong all I have is the vague hope I'll get lucky. But despite the high stakes, I feel very calm trusting in this. I believe it's true.

So if I'm willing to so calmly trust what will happen to me when I die, why is it so tough for me to believe that God is going to provide work for me next month? Why do I wake up in the morning knowing I have a meeting later in the day and feel I'm doomed to failure? Why do I spend so much time worrying about my basic, earthly needs?

It's all backwards and as I begin to realize that the freedom I feel is unbelievable. Everything I need for eternity has been taking care of on the cross. God handled sin like it was nothing. He pinned it to the ground and took away its power. If He could do that then of course I can trust Him with all this other, smaller stuff.

The objection that rises in me at this point is, "that's nice but what about all that pain? What about the bad things that really do happen?" Manning doesn't side step that question at all in the book. Large sections are devoted to exactly that problem. And as he handles it, he shows that trusting God does not mean trusting that nothing bad will happen. It means trusting Him to carry us through the bad things, to work all things together for good. It's trusting that He is good in a world that is fallen. It's trusting that if God allows evil in our lives, He is faithful to walk beside us through all of it. (Note: For more on the problem of evil I would strongly recommend The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis)

If trust is something you have a tough time with, read this book. It's powerful and life changing. And it doesn't hurt that Brennan Manning is an amazing writer. If you haven't encountered any of his stuff, this is a great place to start.

The Infinite Patience of God

2008-07-13T20:56:00.003-05:00

Another lesson God showed me through Sammy: Tonight he and I were out in the yard playing. I was laying next to him in the grass when He ran up by my head and decided to use my ear as a chew toy (there will be blood). In between trying to get back inside to stop the bleeding (who knew ears bled so much?) Sammy got a spanking and was made very aware that what he'd just done was not ok.

I shut him in the mudroom for a while (given how much he loves being with us, it's about as effective a punishment as there is). A while later I went down to see him. Now, maybe it's my imagination but I think he was genuinely sorry. He was all kisses and snuggles without a hint of his usual playful but painful biteyness. About fifteen minutes later we were outside again and, sure enough, he decided to bite at my fingers. Sammy is a very smart dog but apparently he also has a very short memory.

I don't know how long it's going to take Sammy to figure out that biting is not a good way to have fun and play. But I know that however long it takes I'm going to love the little guy regardless of whether or not my ear is covered in blood.

If I, flawed and imperfect as I am, can have that kind of love and patience for Sammy how much more is that true of God's relationship to us?

It's easy to get caught up in the magnitude of our sin and in part there's some truth there. When we diminish or deny our sins we're invariably headed for trouble. But once we've been adopted into God's family, He doesn't look at us and see nothing but sin. When I look at Sammy I see a great puppy who I love to death, not the bad puppy who ripped into my ear. When God looks at us He sees the good work He's began and is faithful to complete. He sees us turning to Him and being transformed from our sins. And, because God is outside of time, He sees the day when that transformation will finally complete and our sins will be nothing but a distant memory lost amidst the beauty of Aslan's Country.

That's what makes it possible for God to be patient with us day after day, year after year, decade after decade. We're so prone to forget. How many times have each of us found ourselves repenting one moment and almost the very next turning back to the very sin we just repented of? But God's patience and love are so much more powerful than our forgetfulness.

I know it grieves God when we do wrong, and I don't want to appear to deny that. But I think the joy he feels as we let ourselves be transformed by Him is so much greater than the grief. I believe He feels unimaginable delight when simply turn to Him and say, "I know how stuck I am, please deliver me, transform me."

Even when God reveals Himself in moments like this one tonight with Sammy, I can still only wonder at how immense His love is. It's so much greater than our sin and it's the only thing capable of bring real deliverance and transformation. He wants us to let Him love us into a new creation. He's patient and merciful and faithful to complete that good work.

Red is Back!

2008-07-13T13:08:00.005-05:00

For geeks like me, this has already been a really good year for movies. We've had two pretty good superhero movies with Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, plus the long awaited fourth Indiana Jones. But all that is nothing compared to what we have to look forward to in July.

In two weeks the new X-Files movie comes out and speaking as someone who has seen every single episode of the series, I'm pretty psyched. Next week The Dark Knight comes out. The early buzz is universally positive for it. One review even compared it to one of my all time favorite movies (and aside from the first two Godfathers the best crime movie of all time), Heat. Annie and I will be going opening night to the Imax so look for my review next weekend, sure to be filled with nerdy joy.

To help tide us geeks over while waiting for those two movies, Hellboy 2 was released this week. I missed the first one in theaters. Actually I thought it looked kind of stupid but after hearing enough good reviews I checked it out on DVD. It's an absolute blast, one of the funnest movies I've ever seen. So how does the sequel do at living up to that legacy?

HB2 outdoes its predecessor in just about every way. The monsters are cooler and scarier. The action is bigger, louder and better. Plus, this one is even funnier than the first (the scene where Red and Abe get drunk and sing along to Barry Manilow is an instant classic). Where the first movie centered around Nazis and Lovecraftian monsters, there are a lot more fantasy elements here (elves, trolls, etc). That's of special interest to geeks since Guillermo Del Toro recently signed on to direct The Hobbit. It's good to have him show just brilliant he is bringing fantasy to life on the screen.

Unfortunately, the movie has a couple of weak points. While I don't want or expect perfect logic in a movie like this (half the fun is suspending belief) there are a couple of plot holes big enough to drive a truck through. They don't ruin the movie by any means but they're obvious enough to be annoying. Also the main threat in the movie, the golden army, is pretty much wasted.

HB2 isn't perfect but it is a lot fun and, in my opinion, even better than the first. While I'm sure it won't hold a candle to The Dark Knight, it helps get July off to great start for nerds. If you at all enjoyed the first movie or are just in the mood for mindless, quality fun check this one out

The Office Webisodes

2008-07-12T15:21:00.003-05:00

Rejoice Office fans! We may be in between seasons and looking at another potential strike but in the meantime we have new webisodes to look forward to every week. The Accountants, the first batch of webisodes from a couple years ago, was hysterical. The new series is called Kevin's Loan. Based on the first installment it looks even funnier than The Accountants. Enjoy!

Inside the Hanoi Hilton

2008-07-11T14:20:00.003-05:00

US News and World Report published today a pair of pretty harrowing photos from John McCain's solitary confinement.

The article explains what you're looking at there. Apparently the second one is what he was chained to while in the cell.

I'm not posting this so much to make any sort of comment on McCain or the election but because looking at pictures like this reminds me of just how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to all our soldiers, past and present.

We tend to hear mainly just the bad things our soldiers do: civilian deaths, Abu Ghraib, etc. But those incidents are the exception, not the rule. The bravery it takes to spend years in a cell like this is the real story of our soldiers. It's successes like those reported this last week by the London Sunday Times that really matter and make a real difference. If you're at all concerned about the state of affairs in Iraq, please read the Times article. It probably won't change your mind about the war, and it really isn't meant to, but it will show you what a heck of a job our troops are doing over there.

Our troops need our prayers and support. They deserve our gratitude. I can't imagine spending a single day in a cell like that but I'm enormously thankful that there are men like John McCain who were willing to make those sacrifices for freedom. May God bless them for all they've sacrificed, and continue to sacrifice, for us.

Accepting Our Freedom

2008-07-10T21:00:00.004-05:00

A couple of days ago Annie and I got a new puppy. Because Sammy is still a ways away from learning bladder control he spends the time we can't watch him in our mudroom. Since the mudroom has a pair of doors shutting it off from the rest of the house and tile floor, it works well for keeping him out of trouble and making his messes easy to clean up.

Tonight Sammy was not too happy about being shut up. He was barking and jumping against the doors. After a while he calmed down and I went to let him out. He was still sitting in front of one of the doors and as I opened it he got caught between it and the wall. Oblivious to the fact that all he had to do to be free was walk backwards two steps and go to the other side of the door, he began once again to yelp and jump against the door as though I hadn't opened it yet. It wasn't until I picked him up and rescued him that he really experienced the freedom I'd already given to him.

And that's exactly how we so often handle the freedom Christ has given us.

It's a trap that's been around since the cross. We want to earn our salvation, not receive it as a free gift. We spend the first part of our lives giving in to sin until we find ourselves trapped in a deep, dark prison. When we receive Christ, both for salvation and each time we ask for forgiveness, the doors to that prison are smashed open. But for some reason, we often feel compelled to stay. We hide in our shame and guilt, in the knowledge of just how big a mess we've made. We forget that our heart of stone has been replaced by a heart of flesh. Staying stuck in our sin through legalism and shame seems like the right way, the proper way, to atone for what we've done. As if Christ's death and resurrection aren't enough.

Looking at my own life and the times I've fallen into this trap, I find myself asking why this happens. The first answer that comes to mind is that the other way, simply accepting the freedom Christ has given us, seems too easy. But the more I think about the more I realize that's not it all. The gift of salvation is free but there is a cost to following Christ. He promised this. If we've chosen to follow Him we've entered into the relationship with our eyes open to all that could happen. At a minimum, almost every Christian has experienced mockery for his faith. Many are martyred. And that's only the physical side. When we accept Christ we take a side in a spiritual battle that has gone on longer than this Earth has existed. The gift may be free but following Christ cannot be said to be too easy.

I believe the real reason for denying our freedom is that staying in that prison cell, stuck in our sin, seems easier. We want to blend in with the world. Christ calls us to be set apart from it. We want to be in control of our salvation. Christ calls us to give up our compulsion for control and surrender our will to Him. We want to be able to arrange our lives as we see fit. Christ promises us a life of abundance but requires our trust to get us there through the darkness. We don't want to give our time to prayer, relationship and fighting the enemy. Christ issues the call to arm ourselves and prepare for battle.

I think on one level we know that staying stuck in prison isn't better, couldn't possibly be better. But it is easier. The lie of the enemy is this: easier is enough. Life is too hard already. You do not need this extra challenge of fighting day and night for your heart and against the powers of darkness.

But here's the awesome part of all this. God's grace extends even here. So often I find myself painfully aware of my unwillingness to come out of the prison. It is then that I must call on God, ask Him to change my heart and bring me to the fullness of my freedom. And just as I was willing to step over to the other side of the door to rescue Sammy, so God is willing to come to us when we find ourselves stuck in this way.

God accepts this about us. As C.S. Lewis reminds us in Mere Christianity, "Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person - and he would not need it."

God has accepted our humanity and we should too. He has recognized that we will, in this life, always be imperfect. But He is patient and He is faithful to transform us.

Freedom is a good thing but it's also a hard thing. Even after Christ has broken through to our prison it is hard to accept the invitation to go further up and further in with Him. But it's worth it and He is faithful to help us as we struggle every day to leave our prison, our sin, our guilt, and our shame behind and follow Him instead.

The Minnesota Political Circus Is Back

2008-07-09T09:42:00.003-05:00

Brace yourself Minnesota, the most infamous politician in our state's history is back. That's right, Jesse Ventura went on NPR this morning and announced he is running for senate. And what is his great appeal this time around? Is it a dynamic vision for the country? A desire to make a real difference? Nope. Nothing so frivolous. As he explained this morning, "All you Minnesotans take a good hard look at all three of us. And you decide: if you were in a dark alley which one of the three of us would you want with you?"

Now that logic is tough to disagree with. I'm sure not going in any dark alleys with Al Franken and though I like Norm Coleman, when it comes to dark alley protection I'll take a Navy Seal and wrestler any day of the week.

But then again, last time I checked we weren't voting for a body guard.

Now, I don't think Jesse was the worst governor in the world. He certainly had his moments and the entertainment value was great. But the man was a joke. He never took the office seriously. Add to that that he's a 9/11 "truther" and he's about the last person our state or country needs representing us in the senate.

So now in this race we've got a conspiracy theory obsessed wrestler and a perverted, unfunny comedian who makes Michael Moore seem unbiased. Norm Coleman ought to win this thing be default.

Update:

Now Jesse has come out and said he didn't really mean it when he said he was running. Apparently he wants to keep us all in suspense until next Tuesday's filing deadline. Translation: Jesse is loving the publicity but is afraid he might actually win and doesn't like the idea of committing to a six year senate term.

1984 and The Mercy of Jesus

2008-07-08T20:49:00.003-05:00

I'm listening to George Orwell's 1984 right now. As the story was playing yesterday, there were a few lines of dialogue that struck me as really an amazing picture of the mercy and acceptance of Jesus when we finally turn to him.

At this point in the story the protagonist, Winston Smith, is just starting to take his first chances at going against the totalitarian designs of The Party and Big Brother. He lives alone, abandoned by his wife who chose The Party over him. He hasn't had a conversation in years that wasn't laced with Newspeak or supervised by The Thought Police. And then a woman he works with, Julia, passes him a note saying "I love you". They arrange to meet in private, out of the long arm of The Thought Police and it's then Winston's starts this amazing conversation:

"Now that you've seen what I'm really like, can you still bear to look at me?"
"Yes, easily."
"I'm thirty-nine years old. I've got a wife I can't get rid of. I've got varicose veins. I've got five false teeth."
"I couldn't care less," said the girl.

Isn't that exactly how Jesus treats us when we come to him, embarrassed and ashamed of just how desperate our situation is? It's not that He denies the flaws; it's that He chooses to see through them and into the person He always intended us to be. That is what amazing grace is all about.

Note: I would not carry this analogy throughout the rest of the book. But that's the beauty of walking with God and listening to Him. He can take a single line of dialogue, or a lyric from a song, and speak through it, regardless of context. It's only we who insist on everything making perfect sense. He just wants to love us and speak to us

Jesus and Beginners

2008-07-06T21:12:00.004-05:00

Lately I've been trying to add a new dynamic to how I read scripture. While I always try to learn from the Bible and let it strengthen my faith, I also want to sometimes drop the more academic/intellectual stuff, let go of any preconceived ideas from past reading and studies, and just let God speak to me through His word. It's not that the other approach is unimportant (I believe it's extremely important), it's just that, on its own, it's inadequate.

With that approach in mind last night I read in John's Gospel the story of Jesus calling His disciples (found in John 1:35-50). What I wanted to look at was just what type of a person Jesus really is. How does he interact with people, handle their weakness, draw them onward. At this point in the story, the disciples are pretty much blank slates. They're totally clueless. And what amazes me reading this passage is just how brilliantly Jesus, who has everything figured out, handles them as beginners.

In verse 38, just after the first two disciples begin to follow Jesus, He turns to them and asks "What do you want?" He goes straight to their hearts, their desires. And it's too much for them. They dodge the question and instead ask Him where He's staying. Jesus doesn't get mad, or impatient. He answers them and lets them come with Him. To me, there's such tenderness in that. He could have judged them or insisted on an answer but He's willing to let it go and love them so that they will follow Him.

But at the same time, Jesus doesn't just let them stay stuck where they're at. I love how later on when tells Peter flat out that he will be Jesus's rock and then, a couple verses later, He blows Nathanael away by showing His power. Jesus doesn't draw the disciples on through shame or from telling them just how clueless they are. He tantalizes them. He hints to them. He draws them into His mystery and convinces them He's worth following.

I've been a Christian for most of my life and in that sense I could not be considered a "beginner". But yet I find this passage extremely relevant to me and to my walk. I believe that part of the Christian walk is being constantly called to become a beginner again. Not in the sense of going back and relearning everything we already know but in the sense of being called forward into something deeper. The beauty and mystery of an infinite God is that there are always new depths so that no matter how advanced you are, you are still constantly entering into being once again a beginner.

In my original post on this blog, I talked about how the title Further Up and Further In came from C.S. Lewis's The Last Battle. I won't repeat the whole story here but if you've read the book, or my description, you'll remember that as the characters travel through Aslan's Country each time they reach the end of the land their journey begins again, only this time the world is deeper, richer and more beautiful. Being a beginner doesn't mean starting over. It means going through the next door in Aslan's Country.

Or, to use another example, it's the same principle of going from 8th grade, where you are at the height of middle school suprememcy, to 9th grade, where you are now a lowly freshman. You're further on in life and academically, but you're also back at the bottom of the totem pole.

I used to be very discouraged when God called me again to be a beginner. I'd feel like I'd blown it and like everything I thought I'd learned was to be thrown out. But that's not how I see it anymore. Reading this passage, I don't believe that's how Jesus sees it.

This is faith as a child. This is letting God take you by the hand and lead you into a richer and more satisfying life. I believe there is safety in becomming again the beginner because I believe that Jesus will be infintely patient with the weaknesses of where we're at and infinitely loving as He draws us on.

Like so much else it all goes back to trust. We can trust Him as He leads us on. We can trust that what He wants is to give us life to the full, to transform our hearts and our lives. I believe that so long as we're unwilling to trust Him to lead us, as beginners, through that next door in Aslan's Country we won't ever experience the kind of growth and life He desires for us.

I don't say any of this to try and claim any sort of expertise. I say this all as a beginner, sharing what God is showing me as He calls me further up and further in.

Independence Day

2008-07-04T22:11:00.003-05:00

Happy Independence Day! I wanted to take a few moments this 4th of July to talk about why I'm unabashedly, unreservedly and apologetically in love with this country even though I'm not sure that's altogether a popular sentiment these days. Don't get me wrong, I think the vast majority of Americans are patriotic and love their country. But that love is often distant and removed, more passive than active. Well most of his will wave a flag on occasion and sing the national anthem at baseball games, I'm not sure that many of us are in love with our country in a way is passionate and involved.

It seems so passe, naive even, in our globalized age to talk like that. After all, America isn't a perfect country. Our past and our present have deep flaws. We mustn't forget that there are many other fine and wonderful countries in the world and we therefore ought to guard ourselves against international arrogance.

Those things are true but the conclusion we draw from them is not. America has real problems, but those problems aren't really her. America is Thomas Jefferson's immortal words that all men are created equal. The past evil of slavery and the modern evil of abortion aren't America, and when we fight against them we are not seeking to change America but to recover her.

As for other nations, I agree there are many that are fine and wonderful. I am not in love with America because she comes out first in some contest. I am in love with her because of what she is. When I see my wife in a crowded room she is the most beautiful to me not because of what the other women aren't but because of what she is.

Up until recently I've found that, even though I've always tried to wear my patriotism on my sleeve, I'd also fallen in this trap of loving without being in love. Theodore Roosevelt, a man who is a hero to me and one of the finest leaders America has ever had, changed my mind. Throughout his life he was passionately in love with his country. At first glance in his diaries it comes across as arrogant elitism. But the more you get to know the man, the more you realize that's not even close to the truth. His love didn't grow from something ugly and evil, it grew from a childlike wonder and a fiery passion that refused to die long after life had done its best to make old and callous. To use a biblical analogy, it was faith like a child.

And that's how I choose to be in love with my country.

So what is America? America is the belief that God has given us the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and that those rights are worth dying for.

America is George Washington arriving at the First Continental Congress dressed in uniform and ready to go to war for freedom.

America is fifty-six men on July 4, 1776 signing their names to a document that was a death sentence should the war be lost.

America is the Christmas Day crossing of the Delaware River, one last desperate attempt at freedom in a cause that was starting to look doomed to fail.

America is thirteen wildly diverse colonies coming together as states to form a single nation.

America is Abraham Lincoln issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and setting the slaves free.

America is the soldiers landing on Normandy Beach on D-Day to fight the evil of Nazism and keep tyranny at bay.

America is a forty year struggle against Communism and Ronald Reagan calling for the destruction of the Berlin Wall.

America is New York's firemen standing in the rubble of the World Trade Center and hoisting a flag in defiance of a new wave of tyranny.

America is our brave men and women fighting in Iraq to spread freedom and democracy and to defend our country.

America is waking up every morning and knowing you're free from tyranny.

America is passing on this history and these traditions to every child and thanking God they're there to carry the promise of freedom to a new generation.

America is the day (and I pray it is not too distant) when every unborn child will not live in the shadow of legalized abortion.

I am in love with America for all of this and more. God has blessed this country and her people beyond anything the Founders could have imagined. Men and women have spent nearly two and half centuries spilling their blood to fulfill and prolong the promise of the Revolution, of the fifty-six men who on this day committed treason to one nation and pledged allegiance to another. From 1776 to 2008 their sacrifices have always been worth it. And that's something that's not only worth loving but being in love with.

Ultrasound

2008-07-03T21:17:00.004-05:00

We may only be halfway through the year, but I think I can confidently say that 2008 has been the most dynamic and change filled year of my life. Buying our first house and moving to an area of the Twin Cities neither of us was all that familiar with were big changes to be sure but nothing has come close to finding out at the end of January that we were expecting our first child.

Ever since then, I haven't gone more than a few weeks without my world being turned wonderfully on its head. First there was the pregnancy test, more than a little shocking since we hadn't planned on trying for a kid until later this year. About a month later came our first ultrasound. We saw her in the typical 2D ultrasound: black and white and grainy but to me it was the most beautiful picture in the world. We were able to see her heart beat that day. It's a moment I'll never forget.

More recently we found out that we were having a girl and my world changed again. I could put a name, Elise Ruth (Ellie), to the child inside Annie. A couple weeks later I was able to feel her kick for the first time and suddenly my daughter was very, very real.

Today was another one of those life changing moments. Separate from our normal doctor visits, we had a 4D ultrasound. I won't even try to explain the technology but using advanced equipment, this type of ultrasound moves way beyond your traditional dark and grainy picture and lets you see what your baby actually looks like. These are a couple of the pictures from the ultrasound

Even after having watched the ultrasound live (and been through the DVD twice with relatives), I'm still blown away looking at these pictures. When the Psalmist writes of being fearfully and wonderfully made, of being knit together in his mother's womb: this is what he's talking about. It's awesome. It's a miracle.

One final thought. Looking at these pictures I can't help but feel sad knowing there are hundreds of babies, just like Ellie, being killed in the womb every day. Both Ellie and all of the unborn are alive and their lives are worth defending. I watched my daughter smile today. It breaks my heart to know there are unborn children smiling one moment and being killed the next. No matter where you come down on the political spectrum, please pray for the end of abortion. Pray that God would soften hearts, that He would use images like this to help people to see. And for the mothers who have already made that choice, may they know His love and forgiveness and that their child will be waiting for them in the arms of the Father when they come home.

He's Baaaaaack (maybe)....

2008-07-02T17:10:00.003-05:00

Brace yourselves Vikings fans. ESPN is reporting that everyone's least favorite, retired quarterback from that cheese infested team of the state on the other side of the St. Croix River has decided he wants to report to training camp next month and is in talks with the head cheeseheads about returning.

At this point it's still speculation, but based on how ESPN is handling this story, this could develop fast.

Personally, I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry. I love the idea of Favre setting the Packers back one more season and completely destroying all the work they've done to move beyond him this offseason. But then, we do have to play them twice each year and I'd just as soon not have Favre under center for those games.

If this does turn out to be legitimate, lets all cross our fingers, say our prayers, and hope the Madden Curse does its worst.

A Beautiful Image

2008-06-30T18:10:00.003-05:00

This is from John Eldredge's blog. It struck me as both beautiful and powerful. I hope it can do the same for you

So, I’m sitting up on the hillside behind our house early this morning, praying. I love to pray outside when I can, and this morning was beautiful. Anyhow, you might remember from Walking with God the story of Scout’s death (our family’s beloved golden retriever). That took place in December of ’06, and we buried Scout up on the hill in the scrub oak, near where I was praying this morning. You might also recall that we got a new puppy last summer. He’s a golden, and his name is Oban. He’s a year old now, but still very much a puppy at heart (and in the brain) and he sort of runs around while I pray and chases rocks (!?) and finds sticks and brings them back to me.

Anyhow, as I was praying I saw Oban out of the corner of my eye and turned to see what the rascal was up to. He was standing on the spot where we had buried Scout. You have to take this in visually – here is this adorable year-old golden retriever full of life and curiosity, standing in the very place of Scout, the place that commenorates his death.

I was so struck by the living, vibrant, three dimensional picture of the resurrection. We don’t always know how God restores or how he comes to fill the places of loss in our lives, but he does. He does.

This all took place in the very moment I happened to be praying through that part of my daily prayer where I am receiving the resurrection life of Jesus. It was a stunning gift from him, a living proof that life prevails. Life is the truest thing.

John McCain Behind the Scenes

2008-06-30T17:19:00.003-05:00

One of the best and worst aspects of the McCain campaign so far has been the way he's handled his personal life and history. He rarely speaks about such things as his decorated war record or the fact that he has two sons serving in Iraq. In an age where politicians will use just about anything to get elected, I count this as a good thing, an honorable choice. Unfortunately, that choice leaves many people in the dark about his personal character and background.

That's why articles, such as this one in the Jerusalem Post, are so important. It's well worth a read if you have a few moments. A few of the highlights covered in the article:

The McCain's have a teenage daughter with sever medical issues. They adopted her from Bengladesh after Mother Thersa handed Cindy McCain the child.
McCain, whose father was the commander of the US fleet in Vietnam, refused to be sent home early from his POW service. He also refused special treatment throughout his imprisonment
McCain has consistently refused to use any of his children to help his career, even when not doing so has cost him politically

The other reason I find this article so worthwhile is that in modern politics we're almost always told why we should vote against the other guy. There's certainly a place for negative campaigning but it can't be the whole story. Articles like this take the higher ground and give you reasons to support a candidate.

Book Review: Why We're Not Emergent

2008-06-29T20:50:00.005-05:00

In the mid-1990s I was part of what is now known as the Emerging Church and spent some time traveling the country to speak on the emerging church in the emerging culture on a team put together by Leadership Network called the Young Leader Network. But, I eventually had to distance myself from the Emergent stream of the network because friends like Brian McLaren and Doug Pagitt began pushing a theological agenda that greatly troubled me. Examples include referring to God as a chick, questioning God's sovereignty over and knowledge of the future, denial of the substitutionary atonement at the cross, a low view of Scripture, and denial of hell which is one hell of a mistake.

-Mark Driscoll, Senior Pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle

Like a lot of people, I've been interested recently in the Emergent Church. I'll confess up front that I have not read the books or been to the seminars. I've heard a few sermons (online) that could probably be described as Emergent but have not been to an actual service. My experience has been more through reading blogs, articles and a fair amount of basic online research. It's an interesting movement, one that at first glance has a lot about it that's attractive. But the more I've read, the more concerned I've become about certain aspects of the movement.

Over the past few months I've seen Why We're Not Emergent referenced several times in various blogs and articles. I've been excited to read it for a while now and I'm glad I finally got around to it. This is an important book and essential reading for anyone who is part of, looking to join, or just interested in learning about the Emergent Church.

One of the big frustrations with the Emergent movement is that it can be just about impossible to define. In some ways this is a virtue (and Emergent leaders would see at such). It allows for more diversity of opinion and thought, and that's largely good. The problem comes when that group virtue gets applied at an individual level. Just as the movement as a whole is tough to pin down, so are the individual views of its leaders. About a week ago I read a response from Emergent leader Brian McLaren to a question about whether homosexuality is sinful or not. After going through his very lengthy reply twice I still had no idea what his view was.

The book does a great job documenting cases like this. The authors dig deep into the Emergent views on the virtues of uncertainty. Now, I'm personally a great believer that doubt and uncertainty are tools God uses to help us grow. I've seen it in my life countless times. But I also believe we aren't meant to wallow in uncertainty forever. God doesn't mean for us to spend a lifetime in doubt about everything. The latter part of my view is not shared by many Emergent leaders who seem more interested in what we can't know than what God has told us.

The implications of this are very problematic. Take the low view of Scripture held by many Emergent leaders. The book quotes Stan Grenz saying, "It is not the Bible as a book that is authoritative, but the Bible as the instrumentality of the Spirit." That sounds nice at first but what happens when two different people claim the Spirit has told them two different things about the Bible? Is it all just a matter of personal interpretation? At some point we need to trust God that He communicated an authoritative message to us in His word or else what good is it? The authors also discuss how well Emergent leaders will claim respect and love for the Bible, they aren't comfortable with adjectives like infailable, absolute, inerrent, etc. That's a problem.

Even more troublesome than the Emergent love of unending uncertainity is what you can pin them down on. Talking about the doctrine of substitutionary atonement (the beautiful doctrine that Jesus took the place we should have had on the cross) Brian McLaren writes, "It sounds like divine child abuse." On the same topic, Steve Chalke says that if doctrine is true, God was repaying evil with evil.

It doesn't get much better. At one point they quote Rob Bell, pastor of the other Mars Hill Church, talking about how we put too big of an emphasis on the resurrection. His argument is that if we look to Christ for salvation our attitude is selfish since we're just trying to get something out of it. Instead we should just try and live like Jesus. The first part of this breaks my heart. Is there any event more glorious in human history than the resurrection? Can he be so blind he's missed completely the victory, the life, that was won in that moment? The second part sounds nice but how are we to do that without the new life Christ brings us through His resurrection? I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm not all that good at living like Jesus. I need a constant outpouring of the grace He died for at the cross. I need, every moment of every day, the transforming power of His resurrection and acension.

When I first started this book I was angry about a lot of what I was reading. Having finished it, I feel more sad than anything else. There's a lot the Emergent Church gets right. Their emphasis on relationship, both with God and others, is wonderful. But on what foundation is it built? If you strip away all the doctrine and orthodoxy all the good stuff falls apart. What's happening in a lot of Emergent circles is heart breaking. Hearing Christians compare God to an abusive father tears me up. Hearing the miracle of the cross pushed aside by Christians leaves me speachless.

I don't want to end this post on a downer. God has promised that He will build His church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. The Emergent Church is hardly the gates of hell. Even in its imperfections I believe God is using it for good, just like He promised. If nothing else, this book has inspired me to pray and pray hard for the leaders and followers in the Emergent Church. May their hearts be healed where they've been wounded by bad experiences in more "traditional" churches. May they be willing to see Jesus not just through the lens of personal interpretation but the Christ of the Gospels, risen and alive. And when they look at God may they see not an abusive parent but a loving Father who gave everything so that He could save us.

The Joy of the Internet

2008-06-28T20:59:00.003-05:00

Like a lot of people, there are plenty of things about the Internet, and modern technology in general, that drive me nuts. But there's plenty of good too. For me, one of the best things about the Internet is the ability to get expensive books for cheap.

As part of my goal to read a biography on every US President, I'd decided to read Thomas Jefferson & The New Nation by Merrill D. Peterson. Unfortunately the book costs $50 to buy new. For the life of me, I can't figure out why. We're not talking some fancy, gold leafed volume with glossy, color pictures. It's a standard trade-paperback book with only a handful of black and white pictures. Yes it's long, but so are a lot of books I read that cost $10.

When something like this happens, my favorite site to go to is fetchbook.info. This site goes out and searches several used book sites (Half, Abebooks, Ebay) and comes back with the lowest prices. Using this, I was able to get my Jefferson biography, virtually new, for a fifth of the cost.

All 1,000+ pages of historical joy were waiting for me when I got home tonight. So now I'm happy, the used online bookseller is happy, and my wallet is happy. About the only person who's not happy is Merrill D Peterson who's not getting any additional royalty money because of how outrageously expensive his book is. I highly recommend fetchbook.info both for cases like this and for out of print books.

One A Lighter Note

2008-06-27T18:49:00.004-05:00

For Father's Day, Ellie got me the complete DVD box set of Monty Python's Flying Circus (isn't she thoughtful? Especially for still being three months away from birth!) I've been laughing pretty much non stop since I started watching it. The self defense class skit particularly had me in stitches. It's even somewhat relevant given yesterday's Supreme Court ruling. (ok, that's a big stretch). Enjoy!

(note: Unlike some of MP's stuff this one is fairly PG)

Good Quotes

2008-06-27T18:43:00.004-05:00

Yesterday I was writing down quotes from a few of the books I've read recently (more on that odd hobby of mine another time). Here are a few from G.K. Chesterton I thought worth sharing:

"When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for the corner-stone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward - in a word, a man [Peter]. And upon this rock He has built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it. All the empires and the kingdoms of the world have failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible"

"The more hopeless is the situation the more hopeful must be the man"

"Millions of mild black-coated men call themselves sane and sensible merely because they always catch the fashionable insanity, because they aren't hurried into madness after madness by the maelstrom of the world"

"Pride is a weakness in the character, it dries up laughter, it dries up wonder, it dries up chivalry and energy"

"There is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter."

"When [a man] drops one doctrine after another in a refined skepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded"

"When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In other words, when we step into family we step into a fairy-tale"

Trust: Our View and God's

2008-06-25T20:08:00.002-05:00

I came across a great quote yesterday in George MacDonald's Diary of an Old Soul. It goes, "To trust is to step forward out of the night." It's the sort of quote that's easy to nod along to and take as a nice but meaningless platitude without really thinking about it. But if we're really honest, I'd say for most of us our view of trust, or at least the way we act it out, is exactly the opposite.

I'm reminded of the story of Peter walking on the water. From his perspective, following the voice of the master, trusting Jesus, was to step out of the safety of the boat and into the storm. That's the human view of trust. From Jesus's perspective Peter was stepping out of the storm and into peace. What Peter failed to see was that trust didn't mean stepping into the darkness of the storm, it meant stepping out of the night.

That's a tough one to swallow, or at least for me it can be. It doesn't make any sense. It goes against everything we think of as rational. And even here trust is required. Are we willing to step out of the benighted state of our limited reasoning and trust that from God's perspective things do make sense even when we can't see it?

Annie and I have been (imperfectly) living this out over the last month and a half. As many of you know, I'm self employed. June saw the end of a major project I've been working on for the last year as well as a few other billing reductions. Don't get me wrong, I'm very aware of how blessed we are. I know there are so many people in tougher positions than this. Way tougher. But with a new house and a baby on the way, that kind of uncertainty can be rough. At times it's felt like the boat is crumbling away beneath us and we're heading out into the storm whether we like it or not. Trusting is tough.

But here's the neat part. God is extremely faithful. Before we bought this house we prayed long and hard about it. One of the things God told me again and again was "there will always be enough." And there is. I don't know where all the work is coming from but right now I'm busier than I've been in quite a while. New projects keep popping up at various clients. Just this morning I had a meeting where I had three new mini projects handed to me. Now my problem is how to balance it all!

We saw the same thing happen two years ago before we got married. Our biggest contract went away virtually over night. I had no idea what I was going to do from one week to the next but each week for three months I always had enough work. It was awesome to watch then and it's just as awesome now.

Living on the edge, stepping out of the night, is a neat place to be. Work is just one example of how God is teaching me about what trust really means. Trust isn't a bad thing that forces us into unpleasant situations. It's an opportunity for our Father to show how much He loves us. It's a chance to fall into His arms. I can't claim that I love the uncertainity (would that my faith might someday be so great!) but I can tell you God is faithful. He's worth trusting

Battlestar Galactica

2008-06-24T10:20:00.003-05:00

Last night I was finally able to catch up with the last few episodes of Battlestar Galactica Season 4 (Technically we're only halfway through season 4 but since the powers that be split it in half and aren't giving us any new episodes until 2009 (grrrrrr) this is essentially the end of the season.) I'll avoid spoilers for both these episodes and the show as a whole, but as a good and loyal geek I can't help posting about just how awesome this year's finale was.

Like any show BSG has had its ups and downs (mostly ups). The second halves of seasons 2 and 3 each had a couple of lousy episodes but this season has not had a single disappointing show. The finale was suspensful, exciting and maintained BSG's reputation for controversial endings. But what's really great about where this season left us is that it's impossible to know where the show is going from here. There's only ten episodes left and after last night I have no idea what's going to happen in them.

If you're even remotely a sci-fi fan and haven't checked out BSG, what's wrong with you? This is one of the best tv shows of all time, sci-fi or otherwise. Make sure you start with the miniseries and watch every episode IN ORDER. You can get the miniseries bundled with the first season here

Bias Side Note

2008-06-23T13:24:00.003-05:00

A brief add on to the last post. As I've thought about the issue I think it's important to also point out there are some forms of bias and of expressing bias that are always unacceptable. The most common modern example is comparing people we disagree with to the Nazis.

Just the other day I was reading reviews on a Hitler biography and saw several references, irrelevant to the material, comparing Christians, Republicans and George Bush to the Third Reich. Thanks to the moveon.org crowd, these comparisons have become nearly mainstream in the last several years.

This type of bias does nothing but detract from debate. It ought to be possible to believe George Bush is wrong on everything and still recognize he is not Hitler. You should be able to be a card carrying atheist who believes the church a terrible institution and recognize the difference between the church down the street and the Nazi death camps.

I don't limit this criticism to the extreme left. More than once I've heard Hilary Clinton called Hitlery Clinton. For as much as I dislike the woman and am thankful she won't be president, that's wrong and inappropriate.

Hitler and his thugs are enjoying their just rewards in the afterlife. Let's leave them there, where they belong, and recognize that no matter what role bias has in history or public debate, this sort is NEVER ok.

Is Historical Bias OK?

2008-06-20T12:21:00.003-05:00

This week I've been reading The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris. For the most part the book is excellent, engrossing and more than a little tough to put down. However, every now and then Morris, whose voice usually fades into the background as he tells the story, will pipe in with his own opinions on some of TR's choices. For example, when discussing TR's opposition to a minimum wage he spends a couple of paragraphs making it clear he doesn't agree with TR and treating his subject as unenlightened (never mind that it's still a legitimate debate with good arguments on both sides). The same thing occurs when he's discussing TR's hunting exploits. He makes it clear he doesn't approve of how high the body counts were.

As I'm reading the book I've found these incidents to be distracting. But as I thought about it I began to wonder if what was bugging me was that Morris is occasionally commenting or that he's commenting negatively on a man I greatly admire.

I am not someone who considers bias to be a dirty word, especially when it comes to current events and contemporary politics. Actually, I think respectful bias is important and has a long tradition in the American system. A political system without bias scares me far more than one with. However, I do think it's important to be upfront about bias. From that perspective I think my annoyance at Morris is legitimate. This isn't a book making an argument one way or another about TR. It's simply telling the story of his life. To me that makes even occasional bias inappropriate.

I'd gotten this far in my thought process when I began to then wonder what my reaction would be if the historical subject in question was someone I didn't admire as much. If, for example, something similar happened while I was reading a biography of TR's distant cousin Franklin Delano (a great leader to be sure but one who, in my opinion, is more flawed) would I be upset by similar occasional criticism but from a conservative perspective?

The truth is, I don't know.

Intellectually I would say that if you're writing a book that is not agenda driven, you have a duty to keep your opinions out of it. Realistically I'd say I'm not sure that's completely possible and in this case I would say I was probably bothered more by the nature of the criticism than by the criticism in and of itself. Even more to the point, does a highly opinionated/biased guy like myself have any cause to complain about bias no matter what the context is?

And now for the anticlimactic ending of this post: I don't have a good answer to these questions at this point. It's an issue that's very interesting to me both intellectually and personally. I'm still thinking through this one (as you well know after reading through my jumbled thoughts!). If I come up with a more concrete answer on this I'll let you know.

Note: I want to briefly restate that anything I've said in this post isn't meant to take away from Morris's work. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt is a great book. Any small qualms I have do nothing to detract from that.

HULK! SMASH!

2008-06-17T20:52:00.002-05:00

Fear not comic book movie fans, The Incredible Hulk is nothing like the putrid, snore inducing, far too long Ang Lee's 2003 version was. Don't get me wrong, we're not talking Shakespeare here but the new movie does have a coherent plot, great action and mostly good acting.

The first half of the movie is great as Bruce Banner does his best to avoid being captured and occasionally turns very big and very green. There are some great chase scenes here (at times you'll think you're watching The Bourne Hulkamtum). It's suspenseful and a lot of fun.

The second half is way more conventional, culminating in a giant CGI Hulk vs. CGI Abomination battle that would be cool if we hadn't already seen the same thing in virtually every other comic book movie ever made. It's not bad but it's not that good either. Thankfully everything that comes before is more than good enough to make up for any failings here.

This should be a very good movie year for us geeks. We've already had Iron Man and next month we get The Dark Knight, Hellboy 2, and X-Files. This one will probably be the weakest of the bunch but it's still a lot of fun. If you're a fellow geek or just like big green monsters you'll enjoy it a lot

G.K. Chesterton's Heretics: Stand For Something

2008-06-17T20:22:00.003-05:00

Last week I finished reading Heretics by G.K. Chesterton. I've held off writing about it until now since it's a dense book, full of ideas, and therefore takes time to digest. the book is a series of brief essays, most of which decry what is in Chesterton's opinion a heresy contemporary to the early twentieth century.

At times, that makes the book seem dated and confusing. Names that would have been familiar when the book was written are completely foreign to most of us modern readers. But what struck me more than the passages that have aged poorly is just how much of what Chesterton says is relevant to today.

He was combating modernism and many of the issues he has with it are only amplified in our post modern world. He is particularly alarmed by the shift from the pursuit of truth to the idea that there is no truth, no absolutes.

Commenting on so called progressives he writes, "Nobody has any business to use the word progress unless he has a definite moral creed and a cast-iron code of morals. Nobody can be progressive without being doctrinal" In other words, for all the post modern talk of progress the question remains: what exactly are we progressing towards?

That's a very relevant point for today. Not just for society in general but also for the church in particular. One of my great concerns with the Emerging Church is that while it (rightfully) recognizes the failings in an academic, study-first, program oriented approach to Christianity, it's already swinging too far in the other direction and favoring emotion and experience at the expense of doctrine.

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis describes doctrine as a map of the ocean. If the modern church has spent too much time studying the map and far too little voyaging on the sea then I'm afraid that the post modern, emerging church is in danger of throwing away the map altogether, content tot be tossed about on the waves. Sure they're sailing on the ocean, sure they're progressing, but towards what?

God gave us doctrine in the Bible for a reason. Not so that we could use it to hide behind (as we've done), not so we can use it to replace experience with Him (as we've done), not because we should rely on it instead of Him for guidance (as we've done), but so He could use it to protect us, so He could use it to draw us into deeper experience with Him, and so He could use it to guide us in our journey.

I think for a lot of us, a book with a title like Heretics makes us cringe. It seems very judgmental and maybe in part it is. But for me, reading it was refreshing. Chesterton is saying what he believes and defending it as best he can. That's a quality in far too short supply today.

I'm no fan of using doctrine to wag my finger at someone or inform them they're going to hell. How we go about defending our beliefs matters and matters a great deal. God is no fan of self righteousness judgments. But truth matters. It matters a great deal. Christians have a duty to pursue, defend it and, in love, share it

Books Recap

2008-06-15T20:27:00.003-05:00

I'm back! Not in town yet (we've got one more week, this one in Myrtle Beach) but I should be online and able to post a little more regularly this week. Finding a wi-fi signal on Ocracoke Island is no small challenge and proved not worth the effort as the week went on, hence the lack of blogging. Besides, isn't part of vacation being able to disconnect for a while?

Anyway, Annie and I had a great time on Ocracoke. We spent most mornings at the beach (see previous post) and spent the very hot (at least by Minnesota standards) afternoons doing puzzles or laying around reading books. We'll probably post some vacation highlights and pictures on the family blog at some point but in the meantime here are a few highlights from my reading this week.

By far the best book I read last week was The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning. This is the best presentation of grace I've ever read. Manning again and again hammers home that it's not what we do but what He did. It's powerful, deeply moving, and definitely one I'm going to need to revisit often.

As expected Philip K Dick's, The Man in the High Castle was a mind trip but a great read. The book takes place in an alternate post World War 2 America where the Axis powers won. The Nazis control the eastern part of the country and the Japanese the Pacific Coast. Slavery is legal and the holocaust is in full swing in America. All that sounds straightforward enough but the story is told through several loosely connected tales that range from somewhat straightforward to very bizarre. There's also an alternate history novel within this novel where the US won the war but not as it happened in actual history. This only gets more weird as two of the characters begin to suspect that their world is really fiction and the novel is real. Confused yet? Me too! I love books like that!

I'll avoid anymore history talk for now but tonight I finally finished John Adams by David McCullough. It's simply brilliant. One of the best books I've ever read and worth reading no matter how boring you find history.

I finished G.K. Chesterton's Heretics at the beginning of the week but I'll hold my fire on that one for the moment. It's a great book and sometime in the next day or two I'm hoping to discuss some of what it talks about more in depth.

On the docket for this week: Eye in the Sky, A Canticle for Leobowitz, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, and rereading some C.S. Lewis.

Seeing the Small Blessings Part 2

2008-06-10T20:07:00.002-05:00

This is something of a follow up to my post a few days ago about seeing small blessings. I've been trying to put that into practice during this week. Last year on vacation I learned that kite flying is a lot of fun and I knew I wanted to do more of it this year. This morning I found myself standing waist deep in the ocean flying my kite. It was so peaceful, monotonous and wonderful. There's nothing quite like just standing there feeling the waves break over you and enjoying the morning.

To me that's the perfect example of a small blessing. There's nothing hugely complicated about kite flying (at least not for the simple kites I have) and there's nothing really to "do" once you get it up in the air. Nothing except relax and be. Those are the moments where God really speaks to me and it's an awesome experience.

Transformation Through Fire

2008-06-08T18:59:00.003-05:00

Over the past couple days, Annie and I spent some of our drive to North Carolina listening to David McCullough's 1776. The book covers the plights of George Washington and the Continental Army from the siege of Boston through the Christmas Day crossing of the Delaware. Now I know that for some of you the mere mention of history makes your eyes glaze over but bare with me for a few sentences. I promise this post will be about more than (really cool) Revolutionary War history.

What most of us don't know, and what McCullough brilliantly describes, is that George Washington was not always the brilliant commander and leader we remember him as. In fact 1776, his first full year of command, was almost a complete failure. His first major battle, the defense of Long Island, couldn't have gone worse (leading John Adams to summarize "In general, our generals were out generaled"). To make matters worse he followed up Long Island with three more miserable defeats.

Morale was very low and the patriotic fervor that had enveloped the nation following July's signing of the Declaration of Independence was gone. What had begun as whispers of his incompetence had grown into a very loud and open discussion. A good portion of the colonial population (not to mention the British) were convinced that the war was completely lost and that Washington was to blame. He was a failure and he would go down in history as the man who cost America her independence.

But then something happened. Transformation occurred. He began to learn from his mistakes, his indecisiveness started to slip away. He became more comfortable with his command and his daring crossing of the Delaware helped turn the tide of the revolution and save the young country.

None of that transformation would have occurred without the failures.

And that's so much like our lives. So often the only way God can make us grow us by knocking us flat. It's one of the central mysteries of the Christian walk: the only way up is down.

No matter how we look to the outside world, we all go through times where we feel like complete failures. We've let ourselves down, others down and God down. Nothing makes sense. We blew it bad and everything is lost.

I believe that it's at those times God can truly begin to work in us. We cannot be built up sitting in comfort on the sidelines. Washington was commander for over a year before Long Island, before his transformation truly began. It took going through the fire, both literally and politically, for him to become the man he would. It takes going through the failures and disappointments of life for God to make us who He truly would.

This is tough and I don't claim to be any expert in it. But God's grace is always waiting for us to get us through those times and help us to get out of His way so transformation can begin.

Doing Vacation Differently

2008-06-05T17:45:00.003-05:00

Over the past few weeks as we've been preparing for our trip, God has been asking me a question over and over. It goes something like this: Given everything Annie and I have learned over this last year about life, God, our hearts, worship, and so much else, how does that change how we do vacation?

The typical way of doing vacation seems to go something like this. We rush through our lives for fifty weeks out of the year, leave the house feeling more than a little guilty over all the unfinished business we've left behind, try to cram as much fun/relaxation/rest into two weeks and then come home and jump back into the rat race only to feel burned out again after five minutes back in it.

As I thought about the question and the problem it addressed it seemed to me that what was really missing from that whole miserable equation is God. I think so often we leave him out of stuff like vacations and rest. A lot of us even feel guilty about rest and feel like we need to try and hide it from God. It all seems so selfish. Never once do we stop to consider that He cares for our hearts, that He delights in showing us the beauty of life, and that maybe those two weeks where we slow down is just the opportunity He's been waiting for to get a hold of us.

You see, when we leave God out of something like rest there's a subtle shift that happens in our hearts. We look to the trip, instead of to Him, as our source of comfort and rest. We don't trust Him to provide the rest we need so we try to make it happen on our own. That's a dangerous shift, idolatrous even, and one I know I've been guilty of many times.

With all that in mind, here are a few things I'm doing to try and avoid the typical vacation trap. First, I'm making a real effort in prayer before I leave to bring the time before God and invite Him into it. I want Him to meet me intimately during vacation and that won't happen unless I've prepared my heart before I go.

Second, I'm recognizing the spiritual battle surrounding this trip. Lest we forget, let me remind us all that there is an enemy who has a vested interest in us not inviting God into this (or any other) area of our lives. The warfare has really started raging since God started walking me through this a couple of weeks ago. I don't expect it to stop anytime soon but knowing I can fight it and (more importantly) knowing God is faithful throughout all of it makes all the difference in the world.

Third, God is leading me into a deeper, different lifestyle during the rest of the year. Slowly I'm learning to stop striving and start trusting. I'm making time for Him and not just blasting through life. That makes such a huge difference when it comes to vacation. No longer does it need to be my way of recharging the batteries for the rest of the year. It stops being an escape from life and starts being just another part of life. Once I've lowered the stakes on vacation and stopped asking it to be everything for me, then God can make it what He wants it to be and reach my heart in a richer deeper way.

I say all of this as someone who is still learning and still growing. I'm excited to see what God is going to do. If you're going anywhere this summer I'd encourage you to take time and invite God into your trip. The difference may surprise you and, better still, you'll see just how passionate He is about caring for your heart.

Seeing the Small Blessings

2008-06-03T19:53:00.003-05:00

God gave me one of those great eye opening experiences today and I wanted to share it with you. This afternoon Annie and I decided to go for a bike ride. Now neither of us are huge bikers and when we got out we're looking for a peaceful and moderately easy ride. Since moving to Ramsey we'd driven by a park near our house several times that looked like it had good trails so we decided to check it out.

When we got there, we found that most of the trails were very narrow, very curvy and very hilly. There was only one that was wider and more like what we were looking for. We took that one but after about half a mile it ended forcing us to turn around. When we got back to the car I was disappointed and annoyed. What moron decided to put in a half mile trail? Why do all those other trails have to be so advanced? I wanted a good bike ride, not a dippy little one mile jaunt.

A few seconds later Annie rode up behind me. Before I could voice my feelings, she got off her bike, smiling, and started talking about how much fun she'd had being outside and spending time together. She even said she was feeling encouraged since she got up the hills ok.

As I loaded up the bikes I thought about the differences in our reactions. My expectations, demands really, for this bike ride had kept me from experiencing the simple joy Annie had. It wasn't that she was thrilled about the trail ending, we both agreed we probably won't go back to this park, but she saw past that while I was stuck in disappointment.

I wonder how often that happens to me and I don't even realize it. I'm reminded of how during His trial Jesus is sent to appear before Herod. Herod expects a magic show. He wants to see the miracles he's heard so much about. But Jesus won't have any of it. He just stands there silent, refusing to be put on display. How different it might have been for Herod if he'd been willing to lay aside his demands and expectations and simply been content to be in the presence of Jesus.

I think I make Herod's mistake far more often than I'd like to admit. I want big magic shows from God. If I go out biking I want it to be exactly how I like it. And when it doesn't happen I get ticked. Meanwhile God's hands are open wide, filled with small and wonderful blessings if only I'd be willing to set aside my agenda to receive them.

Part of the problem, it seems to me, is the pace at which we live. Just like it's hard to make out the details of the countryside when you're driving by at eighty miles per hour, it's tough to catch anything but the big blessings when you're blasting your way through life. It takes a contemplative mind to both see and receive the small blessings. As A.W. Tozer reminds us, "God has not bowed to our nervous haste nor embraced the methods of our machine age"

I should also point out that small does not mean inferior. The small and subtle blessing of time with my wife is far better than a good bike ride.

Today made me realize how much I still need transformation here. I need to quit demanding magic shows and expecting God to meet me on my terms. It's time to receive the peace He gives, practice contemplation and meet Him on His terms. Only then can I truly begin to receive His blessings, big and small.

Sci Fi Geek Confessional: Alastair Reynolds

2008-06-02T20:14:00.002-05:00

For anyone still in doubt that I'm a full fledged, certifiable, sci-fi nerd wonder no longer. I'm here to confess one of my geek secrets involving the fantastic British author Alastair Reynolds.

I got hooked on Reynolds about four or five years ago when he was in the middle of writing his Revelation Space trilogy. Since then I've bought every one of his books as soon as they've come out in hardcover. Two years ago when Pushing Ice came out I ordered it from Amazon only to find myself extremely disappointed. Not because Reynolds had written a bad book (Pushing Ice is one of his best) but because they'd changed the the cover for the US edition of his book and it was far inferior to its UK counterpart.

Now I was hoping this would be a one time deal, that the US publisher would come to its senses and start using the good cover designs again. No dice. When Galactic North was published that fall the UK cover was beautiful matching all the others he's written. And though the US one did match Pushing Ice in design, it also looked like a bad photoshop job completely butchering the UK cover design.

So what did I do? Simple. I did what any true geek would do. I paid extra to get the UK edition of Galactic North. I've done the same with the two books since and I'll keep doing so until the US covers stop looking like they were made in a high school graphic design class.

Ok, it's not quite as bad as it sounds. It's really only a few bucks more and since I started this practice they've only given me more cause by delaying the US releases of each book by over a year. The Prefect, which I read in April of 07 is just being released in the US (complete with ugly cover) this week. House of Suns doesn't even have a stateside release date yet.

I just finished Reynolds latest, House of Suns, last night and it only reinforced my decision. Not only was the book great but it also looks totally cool with all my other Alastair Reynolds books on my shelf.

As for the book itself, let me give a very brief review. This is the sort of book that reminds me why I read sci-fi. It's chock full of cool ideas like spaceships miles long, sentient robots, clones who've been travelling the galaxy for 6 million years. It's also his most philosophical novel dealing with issues like the nature of reality, bad actions done for good reasons, what defines existence, cloning and identity. It does slow down a little in the middle but the very cool ending more than makes up for that. Highly recommended.

And in case you don't believe me, check out my comparrison of the covers below. The UK ones match House of Suns above

Subtle and Stylish. The UK Prefect Cover:

Ugly and blunt. Especially the yellow/orange lettering. The US Prefect Cover:

Great colors and fits with the ship over planet design of Reynolds early books.
The UK Pushing Ice cover:

Not nearly as bad as the Prefect US cover but this one still comes off as uninspired and boring
The US Pushing Ice Cover

Screaming + Preaching = Screeching?

2008-06-01T19:07:00.004-05:00

The latest from the now infamous Trinity United Church of Christ:

I do want to say I'm glad Barack Obama has finally done the right thing and resigned from this church (though I still have to wonder why it took him 20+ years to realize what most of us managed to grasp after five minutes of video footage).

That said, I'm not posting this to talk about the election. You can find good analysis on that all over the net and you don't need me to regurgitate it for you. I'm posting this video because I believe it's extremely sad to watch this happening from any pulpit. I don't care where you are on the political spectrum, this is NOT what the Gospel is about. I say that not because I think politics are unimportant but because God is after something so much deeper than what's being preached here. And His message is being buried under a heap of bitterness and anger. I'd feel the same way even if the "sermon" was about tax cuts and limited government.

Finally, I think we could all agree that we'd be better off if pastors would avoid nearly giving themselves heart attacks while on stage. What Michael Pfleger is doing is about performance and himself. Even if he was preaching a real message, the Gospel will to some degree get buried if it's presented in such an egotistical fashion. No matter the topic, tone down the screeching and make room for God to speak

A Rich and Satisfying Life?

2008-05-31T21:13:00.002-05:00

I was spending some time tonight praying and, as I try to do regularly, I asked God if there was anything specific He wanted me to read in the Bible tonight. Now I'm not a huge fan of playing Bible Roulette (more often then not using this particular method to find your answers to life's question will land you in the genealogies leaving you more confused then when you started) but as I was praying and waiting to hear from God I absentmindedly flipped open my Bible to John 10. This is a passage that's come to mean a lot to me in the last year and as soon as I saw what I'd done, I knew God had spoken to me. As I read the passage, what stood out to me was verse 10 where Jesus says:

"The thief's purpose is to steal and kill and destroy. My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life."

Wow. That's Jesus's purpose? I don't know about you, but before reading this tonight if you asked me what His purpose was I'd probably have said to come and die for our sins. And certainly that's true but, according to Jesus, it's not the whole truth.

I know the idea of having a rich and satisfying life is going to be a tough pill for a lot of people to swallow. For starters, there's a lot of rough stuff going on in the world today. How can we feel rich and satisfied in a world with so much evil? Is Jesus telling us to just stick our heads in the sand and ignore it all? Of course not. I believe He's telling us to recognize all of that bad stuff, that there is a thief, that there is evil and give it all to Him. NOT as an excuse to ignore it or do nothing about it but so that He can do something about it using us as his vessels. And whether He uses us a lot or a little to help in this world, it's clear to me that in the midst of it all He wants to blow us away with His joy, with His riches, with His blessings.

Of course, that's just part of our objection. Even ignoring the world around us there's our personal lives. Most of us have resigned ourselves to the idea that Hobbes was right when he wrote, "life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Or, to put a more modern spin on it, life sucks and then you die.

But that's not Jesus's opinion. And if you claim to believe the Bible, it shouldn't be yours either. Not by a long shot.

Sure life is tough and there's plenty to mourn in this world. Even Jesus is described as a man of sorrows in Isaiah. But while there is a time to mourn, a time for grief, a time for suffering, those things are clearly not intended to be the focal point of our life.

What Jesus is saying here is that life CAN be good. No, more than that, it can be AMAZING. Even when things are, by the world's standards, terrible, even in the midst of grief and evil, we can wake up every morning and expect God to blow us away. I can only imagine how many blessings I've missed because I simply did not believe what Jesus says here.

This isn't just a platitude. These aren't mere happy thoughts. This isn't a shot in the arm or an extra cup of coffee in the morning to get us through the day. And this is definitely not an excuse to ignore life; it's an invitation to embrace it. I believe God's challenge to me in leading me to this passage was to live like His promise of a rich and satisfying life is true, to live like He's the hero He promises to be. I want to pass on that same challenge to you. It's a step of faith but taking it can revolutionize everything.

And the one sitting on the throne said, "Look, I am making everything new!"
-Revelation 21:5