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

9 Sep 2009

Three Excerpts from 2nd Grade Writing Assignments

Life

When we got our house, Mom took the opportunity to bring me the boxes where she had been storing my school assignments since preschool. Amanda and I had a great time going through them tonight. Here are the highlights from my 2nd grade, presented without any context because it’s funnier that way…

  1. “When bears play or beg for food, they usually make people laugh. All bears are EXTREMELY DANGEROUS! You can’t even trust a tame bear.”
  2. “In his dream, he was an Indian cheif. He said, ‘I will help my people,’ he said. ‘Does anyone have an idea?’ He asked. ‘I do,’ said an indian boy. ‘What is it?’ Ika asked. ‘Try cutting down a tree and cut it into thin pieces,’ said the boy. ‘It is white,’ said Ika. So that is how paper came to be.”
  3. “Columbus’s faults were greed, kidnapping, and pride.”
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8 Sep 2009

New Design

Life

As you can see, I changed things around a bit! The old design was too dark, and I wanted the challenge of building a theme myself. It’s not perfect yet, but I’ll be cleaning up and adding new pages during the next month.

Despite the huge layout overhaul, the biggest change is going to be the content. I will still post new entries every Tuesday like I have been doing, but I will also be posting quotes from things I’ve been reading, as well as general “life” updates (including site maintenance, like this one). I have a pretty big collection of quotes I’ve saved from the past couple of years, so I’ll probably post these a couple of times a week.

To accommodate this, I made what I’m calling the “Stream Selector”, just under the navigation links. This is a dynamic filter that will show and hide posts from the above three categories. If you only want to read my original writing, you can hide everything else but that. If you don’t care about anything I have to say, but you think I have a good taste in the things I read, you can choose to only see quotes that I post. And if you just want to read a normal blog, you can do that too by selecting “Life”. I made the category selection consistent across pages, so if you use the “Older” or “Newer” links at the bottom, it will keep your filter intact.

Still to do: Add a good Archives page, as well as an About page and some other stuff. It’s also not very easy to browse old posts right now, but it will be. And some elements that aren’t on the main page need some styling (like the comments box).

Let me know what you think of the new design!

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25 Aug 2009

Green Theology

Culture, Spirituality & Faith, Writing

We must be careful not to let our convictions or our opinions affect our theology. By this I mean crossing the line between “Because I feel like it’s a good thing to do” and “Because God wants me to.”

Some have incorporated “greenness” and environmental consciousness into their beliefs about God. But these people invariably live in the Western world. Environmental awareness is a luxury of the wealthy.

The amount of time God spends telling us to care for the earth is insignificant in comparison to the amount of time He spends telling us to care for the poor. What do you think He values more?

Many things are best left as convictions. Theology should not exclude anyone.

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18 Aug 2009

The Essence of Humanity

Spirituality & Faith, Writing

Do you struggle with materialism? Do you spend much of your time thinking about the next thing you want to buy? Resist the urge, we are told. Ask God to take away your sinful desires, we are told. But this is all wrong. Wanting is good. Don’t wish it away! Just pray that God will change your desires so that you want the right thing with all your heart. (And don’t tell Him what you’d like that to be.)

Do you have a problem with anger? Ask God to add a measure of grace and understanding, and then to help you be angry at the right things. We need more anger in the world, not less, but it must be guided by the Spirit.

Do you work too much? May God redeem this so that you work tirelessly for the Kingdom. Do you not work enough? Pray for the sanctification of your free time. And you each have something to learn from the other.

The same goes for any other sinful habit or preoccupation. Sin is only a corruption of what God has made good, and there is not any sinful thing in the natural world which God will not redeem. He will conquer sin by purifying it, by burning it clean, not by destroying it.

Any strong feeling will quickly become sin if it is not under God’s control. But passion is the lifeblood and essence of humanity. It is precious. Pray not that God would take away your passion, but that he would sanctify it. It would have let you down anyway in the end, so why not?

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11 Aug 2009

George Sodini

Culture, Writing

Last Tuesday evening, a 48-year-old man named George Sodini walked into a fitness club in Pittsburgh and opened fire on an aerobics class, killing three women and injuring nine more before turning the gun on himself. He didn’t have any connection to any of the victims, but his motives were clear: Since November, he had kept a journal on his web site, detailing his despair with life and describing what he called his “exit plan”.

I don’t need to add much to what he said, other than to say that it made me terribly sad when I read it. Not angry, not sick, just sad. Journalists for the past week have exhibited his writing as an example of misogyny, repression, alienation, dangerous religious indoctrination. I say it’s emptiness.

You may have seen this already, but if not, you need to. It’s long, but worth your time. I edited it for language and content, reproducing it here rather than linking to his web site. It is not graphic, but it’s still the journal of a man who planned a mass murder for nine months and carried it out at the end, so out of discretion, I chose to exclude the full text from the front page.

Read more »

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5 Aug 2009

On Giving

Christianity & Church, Writing

Inherited wisdom tells us that the tithe is what we put in the offering on Sunday. Most Christians assume this and do not give it a second thought. But is that all there is to it? How are we to properly view tithing in respect to the local church, the universal church, and those outside the church?

The New Testament speaks of money being given to the poor and needy (Matthew 6:2, Luke 18:22, Galatians 2:10), other believers (Acts 2:45, 4:32), those doing the work of God (1 Corinthians 9:13-14, 2 Cor. 9:10-12), the local church (1 Cor. 16:2), and other churches (Romans 15:26, 1 Cor. 16:3). Other than giving to the local church, these are not commands, just examples. I do believe we are obligated to give regularly to the local church we have chosen to attend, but we must not make the mistake of thinking that our tithe is equal to what we put in the offering plate on Sunday. It is much broader than that.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to the Parable of the Talents. I previously applied it to beliefs given to a person by the Holy Spirit. But what about the actual subject of the parable: money? The servants were commended and condemned for their ability to manage the funds given to them by their master. This is our example to follow when we are entrusted with God’s money.

More specifically, I am accountable for what happens with that money. It is not enough for me to just write a check to a church or charity and be done with it. If I am not handing my money directly to the poor family or the church plant, then it is my responsibility to do my research and to carefully choose who will. If they spend my money poorly, it is my fault.

Now, God is a God of grace, and He honors actions done out of faith. If a servant does his best, he will not be rebuked. (Who knows how the widow’s offering in Mark 12 was used by the temple?) But if I am frugal or conservative with my own money, then how much more frugal or conservative should I be with God’s? I take great care in managing my own finances. God deserves no less from me.

Now the hard question: Say I am convicted that my money should be given to the poor and the hungry in a third-world country. What happens when I find that a non-Christian organization can take my dollar farther than a Christian organization?

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28 Jul 2009

One Man to Die for the People

Culture, Spirituality & Faith, Writing

Racism is alive and well in America. We know this because a high-profile black man was recently arrested in New England for breaking into his own home. He accused the police officer of racial profiling, and said he wouldn’t have been stopped if he was white. A college newspaper picked up the story the next day, and from there the incident gathered nationwide momentum until the President got involved. Two weeks later, it’s still on the news, and it has spawned a nationwide conversation about equality.

This is how we get our information! We are told a story by the news media, and we are expected to infer from that story a wide-reaching cultural truth. A black man was mistakenly arrested, so that proves that we still have some racial walls to scale in our country? It is meaningless, a logical fallacy, but our media diet is founded on such principles, and we react very strongly when we hear of things like this.

I think we so quickly accept this reasoning because we are wired this way. We have an innate need for a representative: someone to be the face of whatever movement or idea we want to uphold or condemn, someone to be punished so that we may take up his cause or blame him for all of our problems.

Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, “You know nothing at all! You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”

He did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, and not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one. So from that day on they plotted to take his life. (John 11:49-53, NIV)

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7 Jul 2009

The Truth

Philosophy, Writing

If we know the truth, and it doesn’t set us free, it is not the truth. (Jn. 8:32)

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30 Jun 2009

Jubilee Campaign

Christianity & Church, Writing

I read this recently and was compelled to share it. It’s from The Irresistable Revolution by Shane Claiborne.

The background of this particular excerpt is that while Shane was doing an internship at Willow Creek Community Church, they embarked on a multi-million dollar building project, which he very much opposed. He was unable to talk the leadership out of it, so he came up with this idea as a sort of compromise:

In the vein of loving our global neighbors as ourselves, I have been able to propose to Willow Creek and to other congregations an alternative vision called a Jubilee Campaign, which would match dollar for dollar the money spent on building projects. The idea came after hearing of a congregation that consistently gave 51 percent of its offerings outside the walls of the church, ensuring that they are committed to loving their neighbor as themselves.

Imagine the ripples something like this could cause. For instance, we have close friends in El Salvador. Some of them are indigenous folks trying to build wells; an estimated fifteen thousand people died in El Salvador last year simply because they didn’t have clean drinking water. My good friend Atom, the scientist who lives on my block, and the water team he and his wife, Tara have organized found that it costs $2,000 to build a well for an entire village. What if evangelical megachurches became known around the world for things like providing water access for entire countries or fighting to end the AIDS pandemic? Imagine what integrity that would give to the good news we preach, especially the gospel that Jesus declares is good news to the poor.

(The Irresistable Revolution, pp. 331-2)

Later on, he says that Willow Creek did not go for that idea either, which was saddening.

His idea is phenomenal, though: it doesn’t err on the extreme of saying that we cannot spend any money on ourselves (which is unrealistic), nor the other extreme of saying that the building itself will promote outreach (which is misguided). Rather, it emphasizes the idea that we owe a debt to the poor just as much as we owe a debt to the bank for the building loan. Until a church can afford to give away a dollar for every dollar they spend on a building, they have no business starting the project.

It is easy enough for us as individuals to be caught up in the things of the world and to lose sight of the eternal. How much easier is it for the church to get entangled with these? We convince ourselves that our church needs new chairs, a new sound system, a new gym, and we spend God’s money before He even entrusts it to us. But we are already in enough debt to the world.

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23 Jun 2009

Belief, pt. 4: The Spirit’s Chisel

Philosophy, Spirituality & Faith, Writing

I live as though believing something makes it real: as though what I believe about God is true of Him, and has always been true of Him, and when I change my mind, He changes along with it. From one day to another, this feels natural, but when I consider how much my conception of God has changed in the past 24 years, and how much more it will change over a lifetime of seventy or eighty years, it becomes senseless. How could my current understanding of God, or even an understanding of God developed over a lifetime, be more valid than any previously-held belief simply because I now believe it?

How can I say I believe in absolute truth, and yet feel so free to change my mind? If my idea of absolute truth is always changing, doesn’t it become relative?

The only conclusion I can draw is that this is not the point.

Jesus told a story about a man who entrusted his servants with a sum of money while he went away. Each of them was given an amount in accordance with his ability and was expected to manage it well. The first two servants were given different sums of money, but managed them equally well and were commended equally by the man. The third servant was given the least, but he buried it in the ground to keep it safe, and was reprimanded when he had nothing to show at his master’s return. In the end, it wasn’t about the total amount of money the servants earned for their master, but what they did with what they were given.

In the same way, the Holy Spirit entrusts each of us with the things of God, and we are expected to be faithful with what we are given. This includes our beliefs. Would you deny that the Spirit reveals different things to different people? Haven’t you met someone whom you know has a very deep and authentic relationship with Jesus, yet who holds beliefs that are contrary to your own? Does this mean that one of you has ignored the Spirit’s convictions of truth? Two people who truly know God can believe very different things about Him.

It is our diverse beliefs which allow us to do diverse work for the Kingdom. Yet our diverse beliefs also cause tension and arguments amongst ourselves. One person says he can’t accept that humans do not have free will, and another says that he can’t accept that God is not in complete control of every moment of our lives. They will argue passionately with one another because each of them is horrified at the thought of what it would mean for him if he had to accept the other person’s belief. But that horrified reaction is the very reason that he was not entrusted with that belief. The Spirit gives us beliefs according to our ability, and according to what will enable us to do His work most effectively.

As we grow in our relationship with Jesus, the Spirit will develop our beliefs, chiseling away at them like a sculptor. If we are listening to the Spirit, then to change a belief is to submit to His chisel. And it is of far more importance what we do with what we are given: we are not rewarded for being right, but we are given a crown for being faithful.

Even then, it is not for us to say that only one person can be right. We are right if we listen to the Holy Spirit and are faithful with the beliefs that have been entrusted to us. I am not at all advocating a relativistic view of truth—we should always strive for a true understanding of God—but I have a feeling that when all of this is over with, we’ll find that God is much bigger than we could have ever imagined, and such small questions as free will or determinism will evaporate in His radiance.

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