unamendable discontent

MOVED

2006-08-31T13:39:00.000-07:00

The City of God (2002)

2006-08-14T17:45:00.000-07:00

CITY OF GOD

“For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”
-Gerald Manley Hopkins

Telling an honest story of a place just outside Rio Dejanero, where limbs are not lovely, and eyes are not lovely, Director Fernando Meirelles’ displays a genre-bending epic of a city of slums, and drugs, gang violence, and ten thousand places of rape and features of faces oppressed. Part documentary and story, and part social commentary, this film takes the viewer into the heart of the gun-ridden seemingly god-forsaken world of children who aspire to be a “hood,” and an entry-level position of drug-running and message delivery for the gang, can land you a corner office in munitions distribution and “territory” management. “Rocket,” is the narrator and hero of this film, navigating his way through the haze of crime and drugs in the 60’s and 70’s, and into the street war of the 80’s, saving himself, and ironically precipitating the end of the ongoing crisis, with nothing more than a 35mm camera, and an accidental misprint of the pictures he takes from the “inside” that lands him into a photojournalist role almost by accident. Characters develop as the landscape jumps back and forth between the generations, where the back-story on the leader of a senseless war with senseless killing, includes a murdered cousin, a raped wife, and a former life as a calm and quotidian bus-driver. We never get the perspective on the situation from outside the slum, and the limited perspective puts the viewer in first-hand accounts, with all the bleakness and hopelessness that is to be expected. The violence seems senseless, but to the little boys who live in the City of God, the violence is supposed vindication for a world that has pushed them aside, the sex and rape and inferred orgies followed by blood-spill and terror as well as laughter---all in the same cinematographic sentence---- is not Hollywood sensuality or sentimentalism, it’s little boys becoming men:

“Listen man, I smoke, I snort... I've been begging on the street since I was just a baby. I've cleaned windshields at stop lights. I've polished shoes, I've robbed, I've killed... I ain't no kid, no way. I'm a real man.”

In the City of God, justice is never served, the bodies of children, never vindicated, and the gang violence is perpetuated to the next generation---a far cry from our hope of a new earth, a renewed ‘city’ of God:

"Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."
---Revelation 21:3,4

Film

2006-08-10T07:35:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to pursue my interest in film for some time now. Most of my "cultural engagement" comes to me through books and articles that purpose to inform the reader of the 'zeitgeist' of the day. Often, it seems, that what is spoken in acedemia can be a bit removed from the way things are expressed in the arts, relegated to a theoretical world of historical anylasis and morose philosophical dialogue. The last CD I was really excited about was Hootie and the Blow Fish: Cracked Rear Mirror, or something like that, and after a short stint with PASTE magazine, I found that I was more interested in the short section on films and the occassial shorts that come with the handy DVD than I was in the difficult-to-navigate world of music criticism. I still feel too far behind in music, and my taste-buds for music seem to feel like they do when you have a cold or the flu: there are only a few things I like. I'm open for learning, but also realize that music for me will most like not be my gig...pun intended.

I'm on a trial membership with Netflix, and yesterday was my first arrival. Last night I watched City of God. I'll post my thoughts later today. But I hope that this will be the first of more to follow.

CV Missions trip to Cambodia

2006-07-14T06:43:00.000-07:00

post via John McCollum

Any Central Vineyardites interested in joining John McCollum in Cambodia October 1-22 for our first ever CV missions trip?

John's hosting an informational meeting at Element (directions at elementville.com > contact us) at 7pm next Monday, July 17. If you think there's even a remote chance you might be able to go, you should really attend this meeting.

If you can't make the meeting, but still want to go on the trip, contact John (john [at] elementville [dot] com) this week.

Also, if you know you can't go on the trip, but want to help fund someone else's trip, please contact John at the same email address.

mmm. breakfast

2006-06-30T17:58:00.000-07:00

P6012067
Originally uploaded by jaredpatrickboyd.

Book Review: The Last Word NT WRIGHT

2006-06-28T08:05:00.000-07:00

Like school children bickering over the spot where the ball has landed, inside or outside the box, in a game of four-square, the church for the past 60 years or so has wondered about the role of scripture in the life of the believer and how any text could have authority on this side of modernity. The difficult road for the postmodern church is the road through the path of textual deconstruction, authorial question, and the type of "naive realism" that Wright exposes. The enlightenment myth of history as fully knowable and discoverable has overshadowed a deeper problem of the church: fear of scholarship. Since Galileo, the church has been skeptical of where history and science often lead us. Wright has pointed out that though our method of exegesis is still very basic, it is nonetheless still subject to potential errors. While our goal should always be to know, "what the text said" and therefore "what might it say to me," we must come to terms with the reality that well-meaning people have gotten it wrong on both accounts at several moments in history.

"there is a great gulf fixed between those who want to prove the historicity of everything reported in the Bible in order to demonstrate that the Bible is "true" after all and those who, committed to living under the authority of scripture, remain open to what scripture itself actually teaches and emphasizes." ---pg. 95

All in all, we need to stop trying to support the theological categories as they have come to us from prior generations, and be open to a new and fresh reading of the scripture ourselves, allowing it to tell us things we might not have known were there all along, and some things that we hoped we wouldn't find. To think that all the historical work has been done in the modern period and therefore to resolve ourselves to embracing "modern" categories, is to make a category mistake. If we find pieces of history that help us understand better the historical document that we have before us, say, a letter of Paul's to the Romans, we should look to understand the letter as it is written, in light of our historical finding, irregardless of what our present or past reading of the letter might be.

The authority of scripture rests on the way in which we agree to come underneath the story that it tells and live in light of and part of the story. God has not given scripture for the sole purpose of saving human beings, "but to renew the whole world" (pg. 29). Authority, for Wright, is not defined by us as we stand on the outside and say of the text, "this has authority because it is from God." Authority is recognizing that God has given us a story that communicates the ways in which he has acted, and, if we are attentive and have the kind of ears for hearing, we will live as faithful characters of the same play, being the arms and hands of a sovereign God who aims to heal the world of sin and death. The authority comes from acting alongside and remaining faithful to the story.

Wright's gives a most helpful analogy to unpack the very difficult term of "authority". He calls it the "five-act" hermeneutic.

"The bible itself offers a model for its own reading, which involves knowing where we are within the overall drama and what is appropriate within each act. The acts are: creation, fall, Israel, Jesus, and the church; they constitute the differentiated stages in the divine drama which scripture itself offers....Within this scheme I am proposing, we are currently living in the fifth act, the time of the church.....Those who live in this fifth act have an ambiguous relationship with the four previous acts, not because they are being disloyal to them but precisely because they are being loyal to them as part of the story....We must act in the appropriate manner for THIS moment in the story; this will be in direct continuity with the previous acts (we are not free to jump suddenly to another narrative, a different play altogether), but such continuity also implies discontinuity, a moment where genuinely new things can and do happen. We must be ferociously loyal to what has gone before and cheerfully open about what must come next." (pp. 121,122, 123)

Living in the fifth act means living faithfully to the story-line, immersing ourselves enough in the story to become familiar with the play so as to live a life of faithful "impromptu" in particular contexts and settings. The story "stiffens our resolve, as we work to implement the resurrection of Jesus, and so anticipate the day when God will make all things new..." (pg. 115)

Lost in the Cosmos....

2006-06-01T09:05:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I finished reading Walker Percy’s book LOST
IN THE COSMOS: THE LAST SELF-HELP BOOK.

From the inside flap:

Lost in the Cosmos
The last Self-Help Book

Or

How you can survive in the Cosmos,
about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself,
this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million
fundamentalist Christians

Or

Why is it that of all the billions
and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos---nova, quasars, pulsars, black
holes---you are beyond doubt the strangest?

Or

Why is it possible to learn more in
ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,00 light-years away,
than you presently know about yourself, even though you’ve been stuck with
yourself all your life?

The book ends with a series of questions, both addressing a
particular situation in the book, and candidly, the reader:

Are you in trouble? How did you get in trouble? If you are in trouble, have you sought
help? If you did, did help come? If I did, did you accept it? Are you
out of trouble? Are you out of
trouble? What is the character of
your consciousness? Are you
conscious? Do you have a
self? Do you know who you
are? Do you know what you are
doing? Do you love? Do you know
how to love? Are you loved? Do you hate?

There is now no genre for what this book is and what it
does. It’s not a self-help book,
though wryly suggests itself as such.   It is helpful, however, in the discovery process of
the SELF.   The “I” in
statements that begin with “I am (this or that) …”

The brilliance of the book, it seems to me, is the numerous
“thought experiments” that Percy creates.
“Image you are this, or that person in this, or that situation…the
following conditions apply….(listing various conditions about which he has been
writing)…choose a response.”

Percy lets us say it more than he says it himself:
The SELF, is lost.
In sex, in distraction, in worry and anxiety.   Lost in all the things that we find ourselves getting
into, wanting so badly to get
out…debt…hurt…distraction…lust…boredom…anger…etc. Lost.

I think it is both interesting and telling that what the
television show LOST is about, is not so much about being lost on an island and
surviving the conditions. There is
so little about survival. So
little food-gathering, and water-drinking---it’s all about the self and the
individual “selves” trying to find a way to not be so Lost and confused about
who to love and trust and hate and manipulate.

dens leonis, Organic, & my daughter

2006-04-30T20:42:00.000-07:00

Dandelions. Lions tooth, is what they call it, I guess, because of the jagged shape of the leaves. There were about 100 little patches of them in my front lawn until about 9:30 tonight...pulled out each one by hand, along with the milky white root that keeps them connected the earth.

We're venturing our way forward with a chem-free lawn. I know... Birkenstock wearin' hippie...but it's true...nothing but a combo of chicken crap, corn gluten, hard work, and a few years of all of that before we get a lawn that looks half as good as our neighbors. Click the chem free lawn link to find out why.

The past 2 years or so, Jaime and I have been moving more in the direction of tree-hugging environmentalist than I ever thought I would...I won't speak for Jaime, but my eyes have definately been opened a bit to the consequences of one's perspective on the world. Are we "just passin' through?" Or have we taken the comand to cultivate the earth as seriously as other things? Along our journery has been the switch to Organic Milk...then to Organic fruits and veggies...now it's grain fed free-range Amish chicken from an Ohio farm...and a lawn that the neighbors, I am sure, scoff at. Our grocery budget is about 30% more than what it used to be, and the neighbors yards are green, and ready for the golf swing.
I have a friend who spent most of his life in Denmark. We were talking about the lifestyle that is required to uphold the purchase of Organic foods. It's expensive, however, his remark was that food in Denmark and most of Europe takes as large, if not more, of a chunk of one's paycheck as does Organic food here. "You Americans are just used to cheap food," he said. I think he is right.

I spent the time digging up dandelions, with my daughter, Rayli. She was out there with, rake in hand, dirty knees, and a phrase that held our time together like you hope for as a father that went something like, "daddy, I helping you..." ...and she was. She was helping me live and love and pray. She was helping me enjoy. She was helping me understand why God has given us this earth...to till and cultivate and the dirt to get under our fingers. We did it together. I've got fresh grass seed down...which she trampled. And yes, using her plastic rake from time to time slowed the process...but it was nontheless the cultivation of many things, in me, in her, not least somewhere inside both of us. It's why I buy organic food...not just because it's good for me, but because somewhere in this country, or some other country, somebody is getting dirty, and the water, the rivers, the land---it's staying clean. Somebody is working hard...working with the land and not against it...praying for rain, perhaps.

Half-way through tonights project, Rayli brought me a "white dandelion." The kind you blow. That's how dandelions spread, by the way. That's the seed for multiplicaiton. I spent an hour or so digging up the roots of a hundred (probably more) dandelion plants and my daughter wanted me to blow the fuzzy kind and spread the seed. I blew hard, and she laughed. She brought another one, and I blew again...and laughed with her.

Reading

2006-04-22T20:13:00.000-07:00

The Horse and His Boy...CS LEWIS

The Last Word...NT Wright

Silence...Shusaku Endo

Jesus and the Victory of God...NT Wright

Subversive Spirituality...Eugene Peterson

Home Alone

2006-04-22T19:41:00.000-07:00

I think i have developed a rythm in life that is a bit more efficient and enjoyable with a wife a two kids than without either. Jaime has been out of town at a women's conference with the church since Wednesday morning (she has Tali), and up until this morning Rayli has been with my mother-in-law.

I've stayed up way too late, read too little, worked too hard. I'm not sure what to do with myself. Rayli and I had a fun day today, but until she arrived back in town this morning, I felt a little lost. One of the high-lights of my day is coming home to cook dinner, praying on my knees with Rayli at her bedside, lying in bed with Jaime recounting our day---life lived. "Rayli said this today"...."Someone told me this today"..."wasn't life good today."

I think when life has been so focused these past few years on being a father, and a husband---I haven't quite known how to go back to the life without being able to process through my day or hug the most beautiful 24 pounds that life can be before she goes night-night with her baby-doll and sings "jesus loves me."

I'm looking forward to the rythm again.

Life as work...Life as play

2006-03-31T19:32:00.000-08:00

Over the past year or so I have grown acutely aware that I am at best, a passionate person with high hopes and high expectations and longings for things that seem so out of my reach. The elusive PhD, for example, which is elusive once more, or at least the matriculation of it is. I have made an attempt at getting into a PhD program for the past 3 years, and all three years it has, for some odd reason or another, failed to come to pass. The first year I was pissed. Last year I was devastated. And this year...I'm un-phased. I'll just try again next year. At best I am passionate about life and learning, about teaching, and books, and people's stories and the way those stories are told. At worst, I guess I'm probably a workaholic. Lest anyone think I have labeled myself too quickly, I have been thinking about this for about 2 or so years, engaging into dialogue with some, praying about it as well. Fortunately, my workaholism doesn't manifest itself in working long hours & neglecting my family, and it's not motivated by money or acquiring things (I work in non-profit). The unfortunate part, is that I never fully feel at leisure...never can get comfortable at playing. I've always worked hard at my leisure activity. Reading, for example. I enjoy it, though my enjoyment comes from the knowledge I gain, the understanding that grows, or the way someone writes to touch my soul---and touches it again on the next page. When I pick up a book, I want something from it....I know it has something to give and I work hard to get it.

I think a lot of my spiritual journey right now is trying to find, not the balance, but the fullness of both work and play. A friend of mine asked me whether he thought my issue was a problem in my anthropology, or a problem in my theology---I guess I'm not sure. Which is why I have been thinking about it...and not writing.

I remember one of the first poems I wrote had a stanza that read something to the effect of feeling as though I had my own thumb pushing into my back---pushing me forward with some unknown force. A complex visual, I know...but an effective metaphor. In grade school, I would recopy my homework if I noticed too many smudges across the page, the curse of the left-hander writing with a cheap pen. I had to get it just right...it needed to look good, not for the teacher or my friends...but for me. I suppose all the discussions about "significance" and "identity" are apropos here, but I'll leave those unaddressed, particularly because I've been thinking about those issues for over 15 years now, not least because I wrote the poem about the thumb in my back when I was twelve, and still can't figure out whether my seemingly unwarranted drive for not only "contributing", but doing so with as much perfection as I can muster, is something broken in me that is in the process of being made whole, or something that's been given to me in order to make me feel as inadequate as I do right now for a task so simple as "being at leisure." I guess it can be both. And right now I am feeling both inadequate, and praying for more play in my life.

I'm struck by how much I can relate to G.K. Chesterton when he says:

"I think the name of leisure has come to cover three totally different things. The first is being allowed to do something. The second is being allowed to do anything. And the third (and perhaps most rare and precious) is being allowed to do nothing."

Chesterton wrote over 100 books in his lifetime and I guess I can't imagine him very frequently doing "nothing." I think I have fallen into a trap, along with the rest of our country. It's a trap that believes that being busy is always good, and that doing nothing...well...amounts to nothing. Every time I try to do nothing...I fight the guilt of it and then rationalize that my nothingness, my lack of contribution to the world at this moment in time is actually contributing some value...to someone, or something other than myself---which seems to me to strip it of meeting the qualifications of leisure altogether. It seems to me that in order to really be "playing," my activity would need to not have some utilitarian value...but good just in and of itself.

I'm recognizing my need for more "playing." I think I'm longing for the enjoyment of having literature and story and yes even music, as illiterate as I feel in it---to wash over me with it's creative power and help me play---which for some reason I have forgotten how to do and have left sitting alone somewhere back in my childhood. Somewhere between "kick the can" on the culdisac and catching fireflies when the sun goes down. My daughter drinks deeply from a played life...and with each tea party to which I am invited where she seems to have the patience for filling up my cup over and over again, I'm being drawn into that play...and it's beginning to touch some part of me that I have tucked away.

One is a lonely number...

2006-03-10T19:14:00.000-08:00

“It is surely a fact of inexhaustible significance that what our Lord left behind Him was not a book, nor a creed, nor a system of thought, nor a rule of life, but a visible community. He committed the entire work of salvation to that community. It was not that a community gathered round an idea, so that the idea was primary and the community secondary. It was that a community called together by the deliberate choice of the Lord Himself, and re-created in Him, gradually sought - and is seeking - to make explicit who He is and what He has done. The actual community is primary; the understanding of what it is comes second.”
---Lesslie Newbigin

I've been reading some essays and thoughts by British missionary/pastor Lesslie Newbigin.
I spoke a few days ago to a friend of mine who seems disconnected, depressed, disengaged from life and love and faith.

About eight years ago now I went through a period of my life that still seems hazy. I wasn't drugs...Life and love really. Pain and loss. Idolatry and withrawal. All the making of a full-blown depression. I remember that during this time I was a banquet server downtown at the convention center. It was a big building and many of the events were big enough that I could slip away un-noticed, find an empty room, and cry for God knows what and how long. I was embarrassed by the fact that I'd be in the middle of working, serving up some hot plate of chicken and sauce with vegetable medley to a table of ten at a black-tie affair---and the tears would arrive sometime before coffee and dessert.

I lived with 5 other guys in an apartment near campus. I’d go to class sometimes, until halfway through the quarter I dropped a few of those classes and found my respite in the bottom of a cup of coffee and 10 feet deep inside my soul. Most who knew me knew I was in depression, they knew it by the depth of my eyes and the fact that I had lost about 15 pounds and wasn’t eating all that much. No one knew what to say. Neither did I. I remember telling a friend of mine, “I don’t think I’m doing so well.” ---he still didn’t know what to say.

I have suffered to know what it was about me, or my tears, that made it so hard for those around me to speak something into my life. I felt so alone because it seemed no one understood the depth of pain and loss that I was feeling, albeit somewhat irrational. I wasn’t sure what I was to say to my friend this week. So I prayed with him. I didn’t pray for him, though he has come to my mind to do so since then. I prayed with him. I read a psalm and prayed it with him. I think it was about God’s protection against enemies…and deliverance from those who seek our life. I prayed Mary’s prayer, the Magnificant, which says in part that...“my soul exalts in the Lord, my spirit has rejoiced in God my savior for he has been mind-full of the humble state of his bondservant…” I’m not sure if me and my friend trying to find our place in the story of David being hunted by enemies and the story of Mary finding out that she is with child, has anything to do with the conversation about the complexity of faith , but I think it might. Depression makes faith so hard, makes the leap seem so far and unappealing. I know in part that our business in life with one another, helping friends through depression and offering shoulders (not answers) for crying at funerals, has something to do with helping one another along and leaping together. In this, I echo Leslie Newbigin: “The actual community is primary; the understanding of what it is comes second.”

a possesive pronoun

2006-03-01T20:14:00.000-08:00

I thought quite a bit about my girls today. Rayli is beginning to use such big words...stringing them together as though she had planned all day to use a big word and hoping too that I would notice. I'm sure she doesn't quite care---but complete sentences for a two-year-old who uses correct tense in her verbs is indeed quite impressive. I pulled into the driveway today and Jaime and the girls were outside in the driveway. "My daddy's home." she said. It was the first time, that I can remember, that she used the 1st person possesive pronoun in reference to me..I was 'something' to 'her.'
I have long called her, "my little mocha," or "daddy's girl." She has never said that I am "Rayli's daddy" or "my big hero." For some reason, two-year-olds only use possesives for stickers and blankies...but I made the cut today...entered into something special to her...something she wanted to label as belonging to her.

I felt the weight of fatherhood in all of this.

dialogue as art

2006-02-22T09:09:00.000-08:00

This past monday night I did my first Open Forum. 20 people. some good beer. Some good but cheep wine. 59 minutus of discussion. I felt like I was sipping wine from a local Italian vineyard, even though it was $3/bottle charles shaw. I felt like we were changing the world with our words, even though we were just changing ourselves. I felt like an ancient greek hosting a symposium ---pontificating about issues that will change the course of history, even though we only dialogued about the types of things that go through all our minds. I felt like we were engaging in something that we were always meant to engage in. It seemed as though we were living something out of The Great Gadsby---or some story about the 20 of us who talked for 59 minutes as leaders of the future world working through the issues of culture and society in order to embark on a fuller existence. Maybe we were doing all those things.

Someone commented to me that they wished they could have recorded the conversation. I think my initial response was a nod of approval at the idea, but as I have thought about it some more---I can't help but think it's better to have not captured something that was so free-form and organic, better to let it live and re-create in the minds and souls of those who attended than to digitize it for all. We are growing so accustomed to having our thoughts and life so "out-there" for all to see---I wonder sometimes whether we hesitate to live in a situation if we are at the same time wondering how we will record the experience later. Perhaps this is a has something to do with the hesitant blogger that I can be at times.

As far as dialogue goes---it's beginning to feel like art to me. Forgive me, artists who paint...and sing...and dance...who strum...and hum...and quatrain away...I'm not sure if it was the glass of wine that was pulsing through me or something else...but I sensed that what we were creating that night was as much as symphony and unplugged melody as anything I have heard. If music touches something deep inside your soul in a way that you can't explain, or, if you see a painting at the Louvre and can't seem to walk away...we call it the mystery of the aesthetic. I couldn't help but notice how our dialogue about life and culture, about world-view and stories into which we have immersed ourselves, seemed to captivate people in ways they couldn't explain and planted them firmly there sipping two buck chuck as though they couldn't bring themselves to walk away from those 59 minutes and go back to the mundanity of life that awaits us all.

Tagged by John

2006-02-16T17:09:00.000-08:00

four jobs i've had in my life:
* waiter
* ESL Intructor
* Coffee Shop Manager
* non-profit

four movies i can watch o'er and o'er:
* Shawshank Redemption
* Dead Poets Society
* Good Will Hunting
* Tommy Boy

four places i have lived:
* Cincinnati, OH
* Columbus, Ohio
* Baku, Azerbaijan
*
four tv shows i love to watch:
* Alias (DVD Set)
* Seinfeld (DVD Set)
* ....haven't owned a TV since 1998

four tops: (I don't know what this is, but I'll give it a shot)
* The Chosen, Chaim Potak
* Great Lakes Brewing Co. Christmas Ale
* North Star Cafe
* Lake Tahoe…Desolation Wilderness

four places i have been on vacation:
* Lake Tahoe…Desolation Wilderness
* Pataya, Thailand
* Dubai, U.A.E.
* Cancun, Mexico

four of my favorite dishes:
* Veggie queso’s (Jaime)
* Black Bean Nachos (whole world bakery)
* Asian Slaw (John McCollum
* Aunt Mary’s Home Made Ice Cream

two websites i visit daily:
* universalis.com
* NT WRIGHT page
*
*

four places i would rather be:
* Italy
* Spain
* Backpacking in South America
* Iceland

Brown County Indiana

2006-02-16T06:18:00.000-08:00

Jaime and I spent a day and a half in brown county indiana over the weekend. My parents took the kids...and we drove a few hours to wintered-in ghost-town that I am sure is full of people and popcorn and candy and antique-shoppers when the whether permits----but alas, we were the only ones there. Perfect. I found a deal on a place ($50/night) and we didn't care that the antique stores were all closed, the ice-cream stores were thawed through to the core, and the Marionette show was closed for the season...we had fun walking through the ghost-town and being alone again. We drove another 15 miles for some civilization, a Starbucks and an organic CO-OP grocery store and cafe where we ate both lunch and dinner later that evening. Jaime tried on 45 pair of pants at the local goodwill (she bought two pair) and it didn't matter that it was 10pm when we headed down to the indoor pool to swim and talk till 11pm. We laughed so hard. And hugged so tightly.

Jaime and I were only engaged for 3 months before we got married. Engagement was hard: You've committed your life to this person and at the end of the night they get in their car and drive away across town. Once we got engaged I moved into our first apartment while Jaime stayed in the basement apartment of some family friends. I remember as the night came to a close, wanting her so badly to stay there on the couch---yet wisely forcing her to the door. We lingered on the street in front of her car for another 30 minutes saying the mushy gushy stuff you say when you are so in love and so thankful to be together.

I felt that thankful again this weekend and I wanted to linger even more.
Thank you Jaime for being my bride.

...content

2006-02-08T20:16:00.000-08:00

winter blues...

2006-02-08T18:01:00.000-08:00

Had a case of the blues today. THe "no-reason, can't figure out why my heart is dead today", kind of blues. Thankfully this hasn't been as frequent as other years and other winters and other cold february days. This is winter for me. Random days of feeling the unamendable discontent...which for me is a reminder, of how unsatisfying this life can be. Please...don't get me wrong. I'm as thankful for the blessing that my life is as I have ever been, constantly aware of how fortunate I am, almost embarrassed at times with how little of my life involves the suffering that I read about all over the world and brush past at the grocery store. The unamendable discontent has something to do with the reality that all the suffering can't just go away, can't be loved away, can't be hugged away. The emptiness in the world can't be filled with the beauty. That's the discontent. The fact that it won't go away this side of a new heaven or the making of a new earth.

Today is a reminder of my own brokenness..and the pleasing type of suffering that says from somewhere deep beneath my skin that I don't belong here, or rather, I belong fully someplace else. The unamendable discontent is something I embrace, knowing that if I ever grow toward full contentment---that I will have lost the great blessing of knowing and feeling "displaced." This "lostness" can be, and often is for me, a sweet aroma of sadness that really is the longing that we often sense in our deepest prayers, and sing in our most expressive worship...the prayers and worship that say, "I want more than this..."
I'm reminded of a quote by Malcom Muggeride:

"...the only ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realize, is to feel ourselves to be at home here on earth. As long as we are aliens, we cannot forget our true homeland."

I didn't watch the superbowl

2006-02-06T06:59:00.000-08:00

We had planned, albeit without much gusto, to go to John's house for some football watching. But by 6pm Rayli (2-years old) was going through melt-down, I was trying to finish up the trim on the kitchen floor, (a project I started 3 months ago as an anniversary present to Jaime), and both Jaime and I were tired...

I haven't seen a professional football game in about 4 years. For some, this seems out of touch, lost in some world between my thoughts and my books. I guess I'm just not that interested.

We watched the WALMART movie over the weekend. Traditionally I have been fairly high on the "keep strict capitalism alive" side of the coin. If the movie was made to get me thinking about the dangers of the powers of such capitalism...it has worked. I've been to Walmart once in the past 5 years to develop some pictures. I stayed away, not because I was aware of the devastation it has caused and the greed that powers it...but because I always got a weird, almost closterphobic feeling every time I went in there and generally left with a sense of anger at all the cheep stuff, most of which none of us really needs.
If you haven't seen this movie...you must. The love of Money really is the root of all evil.

READING:
The New Testament & the People of God---NT WRIGHT
Porn Generation---???
Subversive Spirituality---Eugene Peterson
The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society----Leslie Newbigin
The Nihilism of a Birch Tree--- (an unpublished novel by a friend of mine)

Thinking about....

2006-02-02T23:31:00.000-08:00

Money. Generosity. America.
I just got back one of those "year-end-receipts" from a non-profit organization that we gave $ to last year. I was a little disappointed. I guess I thought I had been more generous....but then I began to really think about the concept of generosity.
For some reason, along the way I have picked up a mentality that judges my own generosity by what the number ends up being at the end of the year. I'm trying to give more away each year than the year before and wondering how a second child who showed up in the middle of it all works in the midst of it.
I think this is faulty thinking and I am trying to explore how to remedy my misconceptions of what it means to be generous.
My heart felt generous all year. I lived in tension about what I buy: do I need this? Is this good for me? Can I give more away? Jesus talked about those who worshipped God with their lips but whose heart was far from engaging in the kind of worship he was hoping they would possess deep inside somewhere. I think I just struggle with being an American sometimes. I've lived overseas where you can buy fresh bread every morning for $.25 and lunch for $2.00 and it gets confusing when I begin to look at the culture we have built up around ourselves; knowing this is the culture in which I live, lunch costs $8.00, and I am trying to learn how to live here. It's all a constant tension. A mystery somewhere between living aesthetically, and ascetically. Between foxes having holes and birds having nests...and having no where to lay one's head. Somewhere between extravagant giving and sacrifice, and enjoying the extravagant beauty of God's blessing. Somewhere between the water that provides life and quenches thirst..necessary, and the wine that celebrates life, and love, and creation...and is peripheral.

trying to be vigilant

2006-02-01T22:40:00.000-08:00

"Spirituality is always in danger of self-absorption, of becoming so intrigued with matters of soul that God is treated as a mere accessory to my experience. This requires vigilance. Spiritual Theology is, among other things, the exercise of this vigilance. Spiritual Theology is the discipline and art of training us into a full and mature participation in Jesus' story while at the same time preventing us from taking over the story."
Eugene Peterson
Subversive Spirituality