The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him.

28 Apr 2010

List: Tone Changes Meaning

Spirituality & Faith, Writing

Without realizing it, we read dialogue in the Bible with an imagined tone of voice. Here are three things Jesus said where the meaning changes depending on how I hear him saying it.

1. “You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye.” (Luke 6:41-42)

I always thought of Jesus saying this in a stern, almost reprimanding way. But doesn’t this fit the words better? Given his reputation as a winebibber (Luke 7:34, NKJV), he had to have at least known how to entertain a crowd.

2. “Unless you repent, you too will all perish.” (Luke 13:3)

This is the source of the turn or burn attitude that many have adopted toward unbelievers, especially in the last 50 years. But I don’t think Jesus was ominously threatening hell on those who didn’t accept him. He was telling them the truth, but with love and genuine concern.

3. “God, I thank you that I am not like other men.” (Luke 18:11-12)

This is the opposite of #1: in Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, I tend to imagine a caricature of the Pharisee, speaking in a fake British accent with exaggerated hand gestures. Because of this, I immediately identify myself with the tax collector—a grateful sinner saved by grace—and the purpose of the parable is lost on me. But when I imagine the Pharisee praying sincerely to God in plain speech, it hits much closer to home. Jesus didn’t criticize him for the way he prayed, but for the content of his prayer.

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20 Apr 2010

Informed Apathy

Culture, Writing

It’s hard to imagine how different life was two hundred years ago. The telegraph had not yet been invented. Information only travelled as fast as the person who carried it, and it was valued in proportion to how far it had to be transported. Local news was abundant and travelled quickly, and it usually directly affected those who heard it. On the other hand, news coming from the East Coast to the Midwest was slow, but if it was worth making the trip then it probably also affected the recipients in some way.

Today, information is so easily transported that it has almost no value at all. I can turn on the television and hear about foreign elections, trainwreck celebrities, collapsed mineshafts, topsoil erosion, and dozens of other things that are happening right now; and while some of these news items are very serious, they won’t change what I plan to do with my day.

In his prophetic book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman describes an idea called the information-action ratio, which is a measurement of the correlation between the things we learn and the things we do. He argues that with the technological advancements in the past 150 years—the telegraph, the telephone, and the television—this ratio has changed drastically. (The Internet was still about ten years away when he wrote the book, but it’s probably had a bigger effect than the other three combined.) We now know a lot more about what goes on in the world, and we do much less with what we know.

Information has become just another commodity in a capitalist system, and it must compete to get our attention. Most of the information that is delivered to us via headlines, blog posts, or the evening news had to fight to get there. As a result, most interesting has replaced most useful as the measure of the value of information—not what’s worth knowing, but what will get the most viewers or mouse clicks. This is paradoxically both the effect and the cause of the imbalanced information-action ratio.

We are told that as responsible citizens, it’s good to be informed. And this is true to the extent that the information affects what we do or how we live. But I’ll go on record as saying that it is not good to be too informed. Information that doesn’t affect our actions is worthless, and there are much more important things that God would have us fill our minds with than the endless cycle of novelty.

For my own part—we don’t own a television or subscribe to the newspaper, and I wrote a custom Firefox extension to hide the news headlines from Yahoo Mail. I just couldn’t handle it anymore. My working theory is that any news that’s important enough for me to act on will find its way to me some way or another, and that’s proven accurate in the last six months since I started limiting my information intake.

I mention this not because I want to sound superior to anyone, but because I thought it was important to show that all of the above information actually has affected my actions. Other people probably deal with information differently than I do, and these extremes may not be necessary, but this is how I decided to attack the problem of infomation overload.

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9 Apr 2010

C. S. Lewis: Longing

Spirituality & Faith, Writing

In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both.

We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.

These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

—C. S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory, pp. 29-31

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7 Apr 2010

Kurt Vonnegut: Everything Good As New

Culture, Quote

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living toom, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, pp. 75-76

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5 Apr 2010

Jeff Crump: Mesmerized by the Promise

Culture, Quote

Three quotes this week. They all share a common theme despite their diverse sources.

Marketers know what we want. There is hardly an industrial-grade fast-food burger that is not advertised with images of dewy, plump tomatoes, wholesome bread straight from the oven, some kind of premium beef. The reality of flaccid vegetable matter, a soggy bun and tasteless meat is, of course, rather different. But that’s not really news—jokes about fast food that doesn’t look anything like the commercials aren’t even funny anymore. What is significant is that we are so mesmerized by the promise of fresh, wholesome food that we can be tricked into eating something else. Packages wouldn’t be decorated with images of traditional farms and contented animals, and commercials wouldn’t depict chefs and italian grandmothers carefully tasting this or that “authentic” recipe, if these weren’t the things we all think of as important.

The desire for food grown and prepared with care is not elitist or limited to a band of hippies. It’s what we all want.

Similarly, just as no one says they want tasteless, truck-ripened vegetables or feed-lot beef, no one deliberately plans a rushed meal. And yet, again, that is what we end up eating, wolfing down burgers in our cars or slurping a plastic tray of microwaved pasta as we stand hunched over the kitchen sink. Fast-food companies rarely show lonely people eating in their cublicles at work, or solitary figures heedlessly munching as they watch television at night. As usual, the marketers seem to know what we really want: they show smiling families gathered around the dining-room table. Talking, laughing, spending time together. If marketers know what we want, why don’t we get what we want?

In other words, we’re promised one thing, and we get something else. We end up gulping down food of dubious provenance when what we really want is to linger with friends and family over a meal of fresh, wholesome ingredients, carefully prepared. Fast food is sold to us on the merit of its illusory resemblance to Slow Food.

—Jeff Crump, from the introduction to Earth to Table: Seasonal Recipes from an Organic Farm

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30 Mar 2010

Normal

Culture, Writing

Ryan met me in the parking lot of the Family Video on a Saturday afternoon. We went inside carrying chairs and popcorn, set them up in front of one of those corner televisions in the back, and watched the movie that was playing as though it was our living room. After a half hour, once enough people had cycled through the store to give me something to write about, we packed up and left.

I was a high school senior, and my AP Psychology assignment for the chapter on mental illness was to go to a public place and do something deviant while paying attention to the reactions of the people around me. It was open-ended: we could choose to do whatever deviant act we wanted, and there were no guidelines other than the standard “stay within the confines of the law”. The assignment itself was a one-page paper about the experience.

It taught me something very important about what it’s like to be different. You may have the idea that people who are different get a lot of stares from others, but it’s not true. There wasn’t a single person who looked at Ryan and I for the duration of our deviance. They all walked around us, stiffly and awkwardly pretending everything was normal, as though it was normal to avoid eye contact at all costs.

No, a person who is different usually lives a life of isolation. We notice him in a public place, and these thoughts pass through our minds almost simultaneously: Something’s wrong with him. Act like he’s normal. Don’t stare—he probably gets that a lot. He’s just as much of a person as you are. Don’t let him know that you know he’s different. Just look straight ahead and keep walking. And in trying so hard to prevent him from feeling conspicuous, we make him invisible. I experienced this for a half hour. I can’t imagine a lifetime of it.

Is normal anything more than a democratic idea? I’m only normal because there are more people like me than there are like him. But I have a dozen disabilities of my own.

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23 Mar 2010

Harelip Prayers

Spirituality & Faith, Writing

Every Sunday morning the Christian radio station in Waterloo broadcasts the live service of a small church in the area. When we had band practice before church, Matt usually picked me up right as this church’s band was playing. As we scanned the stations, we’d sometimes go right past their service, but other times we’d stop to listen for a few minutes.

One day as we listened, Matt’s nine-year-old son Ben, in his refreshing youthful transparency, said what Matt and I were both thinking: “These guys aren’t very good.”

It was true. The sound mix was unbalanced, the singers were off-key, and the music had no dynamics. As two musicians on their way to play in their own church band, it was easy for us to be critical. Yes, we sometimes made mistakes during our set, and we weren’t always together, but we definitely didn’t sound that bad. And if we did, we wouldn’t let ourselves be broadcast on the radio for the whole city to hear.

In David James Duncan’s modern masterpiece The Brothers K, the narrator, Kincaid, recounts a story from his fictional childhood. At his church was a girl named Vera. She was a harelip, which is a slang term for someone with a cleft lip, and this gap in her lip caused a severe speech impediment. One day at the end of Sunday school, she volunteered to give the closing prayer.

Vera’s passion is juxtaposed with her garbled speech as she prays: “Oh nYeesus! Nyearest nLord! How snorely nwee need nthy mresence!” Kincaid describes how the rest of the kids began to laugh and mockingly repeat her words (“Snorely!”), but that her determination was unwavering. She continued to pray with fervency to Jesus alone, with no regard for anyone around her, her words almost unintelligible, even as the Sunday school teacher tried unsuccessfully to cut her off.

Let me pause and consider where I could take this. I could say that the band on the radio had the musical equivalent of a speech impediment, a cleft lip, and the lesson to be learned is that it doesn’t matter how talented you are as long as your heart is in the right place.

But that’s not the point I want to make. Not exactly.

I have to go a step farther and say that God Himself fills the chair of Kincaid in that story, and that every last one of us, without distinction, is Vera. No matter how eloquently we may speak or how beautifully we may sing, it’s all impedimented in the ears of a perfect God. It’s only our delusion that makes us believe we are better than anyone else.

Those mornings on our way to church, Matt and I got a small taste of what our band must sound like to Him. I’ve come to realize since then that what we do often obscures who we are, and that the only true test of substance is to burn away all the layers of talent so that we are as God sees us: off-key, harelipped. When we played poorly, was it still evident that we were worshipping God? If our talent was lifted from us, would there be anything left?

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16 Mar 2010

Wonder

Philosophy, Writing

It was late afternoon, probably sometime in November, and I was reading a book. The sun had reached the point in its descent where if I had just then started reading I might have turned on the lamp, but I could still read for a little while longer by the natural light coming in the window.

As I turned the page, my pupils began to expand in adjustment to the gradual dimming of the room. They must have overcompensated, though, because they began to contract, and then expanded again, as though they were trying to find their balance but kept falling forward or backward. After about the third round of this I finally noticed what was going on.

For a good two minutes I watched—is that even the right word?—as my pupils wavered back and forth indecisively. It was a miracle. It occurred to me that my pupils’ muscles tighten and relax thousands of times in a day, but I only ever notice it when someone points a flashlight in my eyes.

My sense of wonder withers away when all of my experiences fit inside the constructs of what I’m used to. At four months old I wondered that I could move my hand in front of my face, and at six years old I wondered that I could catch a fish from a pond with a worm on a hook. These are each legitimate miracles, but they’ve become ordinary to me.

It’s only when I become aware of these constructs that I can again experience wonder at the common things of life. In these moments I realize, with a clarity that comes so rarely and leaves so soon, that life is full of miracles and that all the ordinariness comes from me. How much of it do I miss?

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9 Mar 2010

A Celebration of Excellence: Two Rivers Church

Christianity & Church, Life, Writing

In August of 2003, some friends and I came to Des Moines for a Lifehouse concert. We decided to go down a few hours early to visit Willowbrook Bible Camp, since Christy’s dad was directing the high school camp that week and a few of our younger siblings were among the campers. We ate dinner with them and stayed for the evening session. The concert was at 8:00 so we had plenty of time to spare.

A guy named Rob was speaking at camp that week, and during that evening’s session he told us a little bit about the church he pastored called Two Rivers Church. I had been at one church my whole life at that point, and the things he said intrigued me. Community-focused small groups. A monthly picnic at a park in an impoverished neighborhood, open to everyone. It sounded pretty cool.

Then, as if anticipating my thoughts, he said: “You may be thinking this church sounds pretty cool and you want to check us out. You’re welcome to come and visit, but I’ll warn you ahead of time: We don’t want you. If you want to go to a church because it’s cool, this isn’t the place for you. If you go to Two Rivers, we expect you to get involved with us in our mission.”

A church that had expectations of its members? Rob’s ten-minute description of Two Rivers that evening lingered in the back of my mind during the next few years as I was developing my church theology at Emmaus Bible College.

In August of 2009, six years after the Lifehouse concert, Amanda and I moved to Des Moines. We brought with us a list of churches we wanted to visit in our search for a new ecclesiastical home, and we agreed that we’d go to each of them at least once before we made our decision. Well, we went to Two Rivers the first Sunday, and our search ended on the same day it began. We knew immediately that it was the one and that it’d be a waste of time to even look anywhere else.

Over the coming weeks, we learned that 2009 had been a year of big changes for Two Rivers: in March, they had unexpectedly merged with another small church in the area called Echo Park. Josh, the pastor of Echo Park, had been developing a friendship with Rob over the previous few years. One day near the end of ‘08, Josh felt God tell him very clearly: merge with Two Rivers. It was a crazy idea—both churches were healthy and growing, and merging churches isn’t something pastors just do for kicks. But out of obedience to God, Josh brought it up to Rob over coffee.

After a long discussion, they decided that they would take a few weeks to pray about it. Rob felt that the only way this would work is if the two churches complemented each other’s strengths and weaknesses, so to that end, he came up with a list of ten important character qualities for a pastor. They were to each rank their qualities from 1 to 10, with 1 being the strongest and 10 being the weakest.

When Rob and Josh met again, they compared their ranked lists: Josh’s number 1 was Rob’s number 10… Josh’s 2 was Rob’s 9. This pattern continued down the list until Josh’s number 10 was Rob’s number 1. With one or two minor exceptions, their lists were inverted. The very next month they held their first church service together.

The merge was complementary. They decided to keep the name Two Rivers Church since it had been around longer than Echo Park and had more recognition in the community. They kept Echo Park’s location at Callanan Middle School because it was closer to the part of the city that the church wanted to reach. And Rob and Josh became co-pastors together, alternating preaching each week and dividing up the pastoral responsibilities between them.

If a church division is the highest display of disunity, then a merge must be the highest display of unity; but while I’ve seen many churches divide, I’d never seen a merge before now. Praise God for obedience.

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2 Mar 2010

A Celebration of Excellence: Bethany Bible Chapel

Christianity & Church, Writing

I said a few weeks ago that I have been a part of seven different churches in my life. What I didn’t say is that six of those churches have been in the past six years. But from the day I was born until the day I went off to college, I went to Bethany Bible Chapel in Cedar Falls, IA.

We in the youth group went our separate ways after graduating, but in the past year two of us have ended up in Des Moines, and we are once again at the same church. Christy and her husband Kyle started coming to Two Rivers a few months after Amanda and I, and as we introduce them to our friends, someone always asks how we know each other. Well, we’ve known each other our whole lives, I say; but each time I say it, it sinks in a little bit more how unusual this is.

Owing to our culture’s lifestyle of moving across the country every few years in pursuit of a job, as well as our intrinsic divisiveness, it’s rare for someone to remain at the same church through his childhood and adolescence. But my experience at Bethany was by no means unique. Our family photo album contains pictures of me as a baby playing with other babies (including Christy) with whom I would graduate eighteen years later; all in all, there were maybe five of us within a year of each other who were together from the nursery to the last day of high school youth group.

Christy and I have reminisced about our upbringings, and one of the many things we share in common is that we know the Bible better than just about anyone we’ve met outside of Bethany. We had the benefit of a phenomenal Sunday school program that covered just about every story in the book, and we were both involved in something called Bible Quiz which is essentially competitive Bible memorization. Add to this our Bible-centered summer camp and Wednesday night kids’ club, and you understand.

But Bible knowledge is only one aspect of our rich experience growing up at Bethany Bible Chapel. The picture I mean to paint is that Bethany provided a solid church environment for raising a family. In my generation, there are dozens more who attended Bethany for as long as Christy and I did because their parents understood this. And though life has led most of us away from that particular gathering of Christians, many have gone on to work for the Kingdom in such diverse roles as church planters, Bible college professors, and full-time youth camp staff—as well as nurses, software developers and waitresses, whose work is equally valuable to the Kingdom if it is done in the name of Christ.

Next to God and good parents, it was the dedication of the Sunday school teachers and the camp counselors and the Bible Quiz coaches and the youth leaders that made us who we are.

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