The Regency of a Typhoon

Expendables - The Worship Experience

2011-09-30T19:27:00.000-07:00

Having established the groundwork for rethinking church activity/methodology, I wanted to jump into an element of church which has both bothered me and enriched my life throughout the years. This element is what we have commonly come to know as the Worship Experience. The tradition really goes back to the book of Acts, I believe, where it is said that the early followers of "the Way" sang songs of praise together. It goes back further than that, of course, but in terms of documented history of the Christian tradition, we might as well say it was there at the beginning. People sang together in worship to God.

This could be a touchy subject for many people. I have known of not a few Christians who have left churches over a change in worship style or simply because they disliked the music (I am not arguing here that this is a bad reason to leave a church - that is a different discussion entirely - I am simply pointing out that the worship experience seems to be very important to a lot of people). Lots of people go into the worship experience (ie. congregational music) with certain expectations. Some want to feel a sense of reverence, like they're coming before God himself, in awe and trembling. Others may want to feel reassured and calm. Still others prefer to pour their hearts out in thanksgiving, or petition, or even self deprecation. For the most part, people are looking for a certain kind of experience, a certain kind of feeling, and most seem to want to reach this experience in a certain way.

These desires people have for pouring out their hearts, or for reassurance, or for trembling awe, or whatever else one might look for in worship music, are often laudable desires, and the experiences they have are often positive and healthy (not always, but often). What troubles me about them is, first, that they are for most people static, unchangeable expectations, and second, that they are treated as ideals in themselves in place of the highest ideal of living in love, faith, and hope through Christ. Again, this is touchy. I will concede that drawing closer to a very real God is perhaps the essence of living in love and attaining to these qualities, and furthermore, I see the value in these experiences towards reaching these ends. The problem is once more that we've treated the method, and even sometimes the style, as the essential element, as the weight-bearing, indispensable pillars.

As I have fleshed this out, the essential element of the Worship Experience is drawing closer to God. After all, I think we can admit that the whole point of being a Christian is to have God in our lives. Thus, we want to be able to come before him, to talk with him, to worship him, to pray to him and to experience him. But the Worship Experience, as can easily be seen, is only one mere method of this, not the essential element. There are many ways to draw near to God. There are many ways to experience him. Singing songs of praise is a very good way, but it is not the only way, and it is only good if it is done in light of our true essential element. Too often, people practice the method for the express purpose of getting out of it what they've experienced before: an emotional high or a feeling of excitement. Granted, there is nothing wrong with these things, but without placing them in the proper context of drawing near to a very real and personable God and learning to live in love through a humble encounter with him. If we forget the essential element, we might begin to enter a worship experience with a sense of self-importance or pride in our abilities, even pride in our own humility.

There are many ways to draw near to God, as I have said. Singing songs of praise is one, Prayer is another. Service, camaraderie, and virtually any good thing can bring a person before God's presence. And here is what I think is the most important point throughout this whole conversation I seem to be having with myself: Churches need to act according to their spiritual needs, not according to strict methodology. Perhaps the same thing will be effective for a long time in some contexts, but without the essential elements of our meetings together, how can we even know? If we don't have our eye on the goal, on what it really means to live life together in the way of Jesus, how can we even begin to measure whether our teaching or our worship is effective? People can argue all they want about the merits of one teaching style over another, or of one worship style over another, but unless a church learns to be malleable in its application of activities, it will always and only be a specifically catered, production-oriented, Sunday Morning Show. Our activities should be a reflection of the spiritual needs of our community. If the people in our congregations need to learn to be humble, one approach might be to give a sermon on humility. This is a step in the right direction, but even further is to lay down very careful thought about the most effective way to teach people to be humble. Perhaps taking everyone to a homeless shelter for Sunday morning would help teach humility. A sermon may still have an important place for many contexts, and I admit it is the easier choice to facilitate, but our church communities need to be growing not just watching. What if what your congregation really needs is a time for everyone to come to church and be silent for an hour and a half? What if what they really need is a whole morning devoted to getting to know one another? What if they need to sing songs all morning? A church methodology must be designed to fulfill needs, and nobody's needs are static. A person might need reassurance one day, humility the next. One might need to pour their hearts out one morning and listen to a thoughtful sermon the next.

In closing I will say this: an effective and meaningful church needs to be a goal-oriented church, and it needs to know what the most important goals are and direct their energy and activity toward meeting those goals. Know what the essential elements are of reaching those goals, and you're that much closer to being able to think outside the box, and to establish a community that is growing and learning together.

Expendables - Sermons

2011-09-24T09:30:00.000-07:00

Having laid out an initial framework for thinking about how we "do church," I'd like to explore further the kind of changes that can or should be made and the kind of "sacred cows" that many churches keep, refusing to let go, even though they want to do things differently.

All of this depends on what our true goal is. In my opinion, the goal is for God's people to live in love, faith and hope through the Spirit of Jesus Christ. That goal could be embellished some, but that is at the core, since these are the core lasting qualities of God's goodness in the world. So, previously I likened the walls of a structure to the method of how we do things. The support beams and the weight-bearing studs are the essential elements. We don't necessarily need all the walls in place for the structure to stand, but we can do anything without the essential elements. These elements must only be gleaned from our goal, not just from personal tastes, what we enjoy better, or what makes a better show. These factors might influence the method, but they should never influence the essential elements, and if they do, then we have a problem.

Therefore, we have to answer the question: what are the essential elements?

Well in order for anyone to do anything, they have to at some point learn to do it. Thus I will start with an element every church seems to cherish: Teaching. This element might better be called "Learning," since that is what is really at stake, but it could also be called "Discipleship." After all, the real question isn't whether or not there is teaching going on, but whether or not people are learning anything. So, I think we can agree that Learning is essential. Without Learning, we tend to stay much the same people we used to be, and that is counterproductive to living in love and faith and hope.

The problem with Learning is that the church has morphed the essential into the classic "Sunday morning Sermon." It is important that we don't confuse the essentials with the methods. There are many different ways of learning and many different kinds of things to learn, some action-oriented, others thought and feeling-oriented. A "sermon," or in other words, a "lecture," is only one way of teaching someone. But in fact it is not really the best way of teaching anyone, it is simply the easiest for the teacher. Very little interaction and accountability, very little personal investment is involved on the part of the audience to a sermon. In this case, much of the church has invested loads of energy into what I would call a "sacred cow." They've turned the sermon, the lecture, into the primary activity of the church, into one of the most revered elements of the "sunday morning show." If you don't think people regard this as sacred, try suggesting that we do without a sermon on a sunday morning. If it is a special event, that might be fine, but too many people consider it one of the most important parts of church. They've confused it with the crucial support beam of learning, they've misplaced the load-bearing studs of discipleship, and set up what might really be a rather inconvenient and ineffective wall inside their structure.

In many ways actual learning, actual discipleship and changing of a life, becomes secondary to the method. For many people, I think this is just a lack of insight: it's just a default position. Sermons on Sunday morning are what we know. To many of us, that's simply what church is. When they talk about doing things differently, they think of changing the Sermon somehow, to make it more interesting, more exciting, to get people to like it more, and yes, many people want to get the sermon back to actually making disciples. But not very many people will think of it as expendable, just like many homeowners often don't think of any of their walls as expendable. If you don't have strong remodeling experience, you might want something different, but not even realize that big changes are possible. You might be very unsatisfied and even conclude that the only solution is to sell your house and trade it for another.

Many people don't realize that most methods have been handed down to us by human beings. The essentials are God's area: discipleship, connection, unity, growth, service, humility, joy. We can't confuse the methods that have been handed down to us with the essential elements of the Kingdom of God. We need a firm foundation, and some steady pillars, and many people don't recognize the difference between these and the methods and systems in place throughout the church.

Essentials

2011-09-21T08:14:00.000-07:00

When people have talked about reforming church, it used to be that they reformed doctrines or teachings or possibly just teaching styles. Sometimes its a change of focus from one Christian theme to another. More recently, people have tried to "do church different," and to me it has seemed that this means merely trying different things, maybe adding some liturgy or planning more outreach events or service projects and sometimes changing up Sunday morning activities.

But I have noticed that even among churches who want to do things different, there are certain "sacred cows," and there are activities that we still regard as central and essential to our existence. It is my belief that a lot of these are simply default choices, based on what our impressions are of what church is supposed to be, and how it is supposed to go, but in my opinion, these activities still do little to get us away from the "Sunday morning show" dilemma. We say we want an interactive, engaging time at church, but we tend to stick to the old models. We take the old worship time and we update it with the latest technology and musical styles, powerpoint, sound systems, etc., but it is still the same model. We take the old teaching times and we update them with innovative media encounters and we spice them up a bit, but in general, they are the same model.

I am not suggesting that there is something wrong or inferior with old models. However, there is a problem if we treat these models as the core essentials of church in and of themselves. Church reformers of today will get nowhere unless they understand fully what the essentials are, and begin to treat everything else as what it is: decorative. If a church believes in teaching, then they need to understand that the learning and discipleship are the essentials, while the "sunday morning sermon" is the decor. It is merely the structure around which you choose to organize the essential element of teaching. There are other ways to teach and learn.

I prefer to liken it to a house: A house has certain essential support beams. It has pillars and beams that cannot be knocked out without upsetting the integrity of the structure. But many of the walls can be torn down, while new walls can be added. As long as the pillars and support beams are in place, then with a little work, you can make your house look however you want to suit your needs. Unfortunately, many people look at their house and try to change the way they organize the room, putting chairs in different corners, when what they really want is to knock out a wall or add a new little room or expand a bathroom, whatever it is that would really suit their needs. A church who wants to do things differently must take a look at the structure of their meetings and decide if the house is designed to suit their true goals. In order to this they need to know what their true goals are and they need to know what the essential elements of reaching their true goals might be and then restructure the walls to meet the needs of an ever changing population.

"Super" Twisted

2011-08-18T12:17:00.000-07:00

I just finished the movie "Super." Before renting it from netflix, I thought it would be some silly spoof on super-hero movies, but the reality was nothing I ever would have guessed. The reality was an incredibly twisted, disturbing, horrifying, bloody, violent, sad and sometimes funny mess.

At first it just seemed lame, and while there is no doubt the movie went for shock value when it comes to sex and violence - enough to make Cassie quit watching less than halfway through - there turned out to be more to it than just blood, angst and a host of inanities designed to draw pity for the anti-hero played by Rainn Wilson.

What I disliked: the movie was at many times... stupid. Over-the-top scenes of people being ridiculous gave it an almost vicious sadness. Though this very quality made the movie worthwhile at the end, it made it very difficult to care about the characters, relate to them, or even like them at all.

Next it was way too bloody and violent. Again, this gave the movie a certain disturbing quality that may appeal to a twisted or perverse audience, but it was uncomfortable and hard to watch. The sexual scenes had the same problem.

What I liked: the movie ended on a surprising, incredibly uplifting and moving note. There seemed to be no point to the movie except to revel in mediocrity, sadness, and violence, but it turned out much better than expected.

Above all, I believe this move had amazing acting. Rainn Wilson showed an incredible depth and range of feeling, and though his actions seemed over the top, his delivery was always believable and engaging. The other cast of characters were likewise brilliant. Ellen Page was amazing in her awkward excitement and sexually frustrated madness. I also liked Liv Tyler and Kevin Bacon's performances better than in many of their other movies.

That being said, "Super" is not for the faint of heart. It's not even for the average person. It was disturbing and sick, sad and ridiculous, and... in the end... heartwarming.

Men are from where now?

2011-08-03T11:16:00.000-07:00

I've spent some time in the last couple of months reading "Men are from Mars/Women are from Venus," as suggested to me by various people. I have not yet finished the entire book, but I wanted to present my thoughts on what I've said so far.

First let me say what I like about the book. First and foremost, it is a book that encourages spouses to get along. It tells men and women to listen to their mates, to forgive, to be gracious and understanding, supportive and accepting. These qualities, when they play out well n real-life circumstances are laudable and form the framework for success in any relationship. So there is little doubt in my mind that if people follow the advice in this book they will learn to get along with their spouses for a good portion of the time.

That being said, from what I have read there is little evidence actually based on scholarly research that supports his views on men and women being in any way biological. The author apparently got his doctorate from a since debunked university, which was shut down for practically giving out doctorates to people online. His views take established stereotypes and validates them as natural and even necessary, innate differences between men and women. Psychological research has not found this to be the case. John Gray's conclusions are at best a personal leaning about a somewhat uncertain subject in the battle between nature and nurture. There are often biological factors for different personalities and activities, but science has not found any of those factors to necessarily be linked to gender. Thus Gray lands on the side of nature, whilst giving sociological influences (nurture) only a cursory nod.

Here's the essential dilemma and the crucial difference between Gray's biological approach and a more plausible sociological approach: if our gender stereotypes are indeed natural and necessary, then it is only reasonable that we accept them, understand them, and validate them. Gray's approach does just that, encouraging couples to respect their differences and listen to each other in light of an understanding of those differences instead of expecting each other to be more like them. A sociological understanding would suggest to us that the factors involved in our stereotypical habits are external, and can therefore be changed by a change in mental awareness and modifying external factors in helpful ways. In short, the biological approach, though encouraging forgiveness, gentleness and understanding, leaves little room for change and personal growth. A sociological approach, I would argue, need not dispense with the forgiveness and understanding - recognizing that it is difficult for anyone to rise above centuries of socialized behaviors - but also encourages men and women to strive to become better people.

Let's take a couple of stereotypical examples. When I read Mars/Venus, I find it difficult not to sneer at some of the examples he uses for both men and women. His women are whining, complaining, needy, dependent nagging housewives with no control over their emotions who need constant validation and have little self-esteem. His men are lazy, distant, selfish, easily offended, egotists, who require constant admiration and have no feelings. This is, of course, a caricature of Gray's depiction, but as caricatures go, true to form. In Gray's view, these character failings are not failings at all, but rather are natural outcomes of the differences between men and women, and the only solution is to accept them, understand them, and try our best to modify our behavior just enough to leave room for them.

Take, for instance, a woman's tendency to complain. John Gray claims that a woman needs to complain about her day. That in order to feel better, she needs to talk about all her problems and complaints to someone who will listen. A man, he says, will take these complaints as accusations that he is not doing enough to make her happy, and will either get defensive or try to fix the problem, which is supposedly not what she wants.

I find this example frustrating, because what we have here is a problem of a woman complaining too much. Let's give some leeway to women who may be sociologically engineered to talk more than men. Talk away. Talk abut your day. Talk about all the things that interest you and all that was important or meaningful during your day. But if it is mostly complaining, this is what most of the world would call a character flaw. I cannot believe that it is natural and necessary to complain about things. In fact, I believe very strongly that it is counterproductive, stress-inducing, and habit-forming, to complain frequently. Someone who complains a lot, whether male or female, has simply not listened to the simple ancient wisdom that says "look on the bright side." Complaining, might feel like a release for a moment, but people who complain almost always find more to complain about and very soon. This is not a natural activity based on biological needs, this is a bad habit and needs to be changed.

The stereotypes for men have the same issue at heart. Gray claims they are natural, biological needs, when they are really bad habits. He claims that men need to escape into their cave to deal with their problems. They have to become distant and unresponsive in order to sift through their dilemmas. Like a woman's sociological tendency to talk a lot, a man's tendency to escape and deal with things inwardly is not a bad thing in and of itself. Giving some leeway for these sociological tendencies, lets say, "sure," Let your wife know that you need some space for a moment, go and think, have some alone time, process inwardly for a while. But Gray expands this idea into what I believe is a simple habit of laziness. A man, he says, will stay in the cave as long as he has not found an answer to his problems, and he will often need to take a break from thinking and just watch sports, turning his attention to other problems to distract from the his own problems which he is having trouble solving. Thus turning the stereotypical behavior of the unresponsive, uncaring, sports-obsessed man into a biological need. The solution in Mars/Venus is for women to allow him to retreat into his cave, watch sports, work on projects... ignore her... and be there ready for when he comes out.

First of all, I personally enjoy dealing with problems inwardly, and I think there is nothing wrong with that. I also believe that anyone, man or woman, who prefers to deal with problems outwardly, should be validated in that pursuit. But just like complaining about your problems is a bad habit, so is avoiding them. Distraction may help you feel better for a while, but allowed to continue unchecked, you could be distracting yourself for the rest of your life. If you have to process inwardly, go process inwardly (and let your spouse know what you're doing), but distracting yourself, though it might feel good for a moment, is not solving the problem nor will it lead you to a solution. If you are avoiding problems, you are feeding into a cycle just as much as someone who merely complains about them. If you must talk about problems, talk about them constructively. If you must retreat to solve your problems, use that retreat to really focus on solutions. Otherwise, our stereotypical man is just feeding into the bad habits that are expected of him (ignoring his wife).

This is really just a taste, and I might write more later. But that is the gist of it. I wish to contend that men and women in relationships should both strive to be better: better communicators, better people, better spouses. Most of Gray's examples of miscommunication, which he claims are different languages, are just people communicating badly, who should be taught to communicate better.

New Look

2011-07-18T09:07:00.000-07:00

This is my new background. Original design. Quite nice, I'd say.

Feelings

2011-07-11T12:07:00.001-07:00

Since I wrote least time about joy and happiness, I've been wanting to explore the topic of feelings a little more. It's a weird thing I've noticed in our culture that we seem to harbor our feelings like prized possessions, which no one can touch or devalue, and at the same time we theoretically hold feelings in general in contempt. We love reason and sound thinking, but if anyone tries to tell us that they way we feel is silly or unnecessary, then (with the exception that we then feel shame for our feelings) lash out as if they had attacked the ground we walk on. It's just plain weird.

First of all: the importance of feelings. There is a misconception left over from the Enlightenment era that feelings are inferior to reason, to ideas and thoughts. People fear being led astray by their feelings, yet they trust their thoughts. To me this is putting the cart before the horse. Everything you feel is a result of something you are thinking, whether consciously or subconsciously. If you get mad when someone cuts you off on the highway, it is because you instantly think something awful about that person or about what he did. You're thinking that he shouldn't have done that and that you wish people would treat you with more respect and that they would learn to drive. All your anger explodes out from those simple thoughts. If you repeat these thought reactions, then the feelings occur quicker and more easily. The thought patterns in your brain solidify so that it becomes your natural reaction. Within nanoseconds, a signal goes through your brain telling your emotional centers to fire some anger.

We tend to blame our feelings as if we were doing something without thinking. Technically, we were feeling something, without controlling our thoughts, but thoughts were still streaming around. So to say that our feelings are unreliable is really only to say that our thoughts were unreliable first. The old formula went that we felt a certain way and then our sound reasoning could come in and make better sense of it, and our emotions needed to be controlled so that our thoughts could have freedom to do the wonderful work that they do. In reality our thoughts need to be controlled so that our feelings can do the wonderful work that they do, namely making life enjoyable and fulfilling for our selves and for the rest of the people on the road with us.

Now, this leads directly into the problem that people have with letting go of their feelings. Whenever we feel a certain way, we always feel like we have the right to feel that way. If we are angry about something, it might be stupid and it might be small, but it's the way we feel, and so we don't feel as if anyone can say anything to degrade it. We all act this way, male and female (no matter what John Gray says). If we feel angry, we know that we are supposed to feel angry, no matter if anyone tells us to calm down and relax. When I get upset about getting cut off on the road, I can list several reasons in a span of several seconds, why I not only have the right but the obligation to feel upset.

Under the old paradigm, we might have said that our feelings were getting in the way of letting reason do its job. We might have said that if only we could suppress our feelings, we could just go about our business without the tedium of getting angry, because we'd be fine with life under the cold calculating strictures of reason. The problem is that our reasoning is not cold and calculating. For every thought there is a feeling, and if there is an angry feeling, it is coming from an angry thought. To harbor our feelings as if they are unassailable, uncontrollable animals, is silly. We are all thinking beings, and if we let our feelings control us, it is because we are not willing to pay attention to why we have those feelings in the first place. Feelings are not something to be suppressed and they are not something to be harbored. They are to be formed and shaped by forming proper thoughts. If I have three reasons why I should be angry at the car that cut me off, then what I really need to do is take a second look at those reasons and figure out if those are valid reasons, and if there aren't other reasons that would invalidate them or at least balance them out so that I don't have to feel angry. None of us like to be told to calm down and relax. It seems like an attack on our feelings and an invalidation of something we tend to think is beyond our control. But it isn't.

We need to start treating feelings as being interwoven with our thoughts. Taking control of our feelings starts with taking control of our thoughts. And that starts with paying attention. Is your life going to be over because the car in front of you makes you 3 minutes late to work? Do you really know the guy who cut you off doesn't have a good reason? Is the sun going to stop shining because the car in the next lane didn't see you? Are you really supposed to be the center of everyone else' universe? Put things into perspective. If it helps, put into a cosmic perspective. This is why the bible calls our troubles "light and momentary" - and this referred to heavy persecution. Put into perspective, it's almost never as bad as it seems, and if your feelings are telling you differently, it's because there's some faulty thinking floating around. Stop treating feelings like sacred cows. Let them go, and allow your thoughts to come under scrutiny.

Joy and Happiness

2011-06-26T18:28:00.000-07:00

This morning in Church we had a sermon on the difference between "joy" and "happiness." Let me start out by saying that I believe in the basic message that was preached today, which is that we don't want to settle for a momentary happiness that is dependent on our circumstances, but we want a lasting and enduring joy that flows up from within and remains throughout all circumstances we may face in life.

That being said, I have to say that for some time now I have found this distinction between "joy" and "happiness" (very common in many churches) is at best unnecessary and sometimes rather deconstructive to our thinking, and I wanted to lay out some thoughts about it which have troubled me.

First of all, I would argue, many non-religious people in the US might use the term happiness to describe something like what Christians mean by "joy." When people say that they "just want to be happy," I think most of them are talking about a deep satisfaction, inner peace, fulfillment and overall good feeling, which lasts throughout all of life's circumstances." Christians, as far as I can understand, call this "joy", and often differentiate it from "happiness." Non-religious types might call it "true happiness" or possibly "lasting happiness." There may be some who mean by "I just want to be happy" that they only want to fulfill their momentary desires and feel a continual rush of positive emotion based on some exciting experience or other, but I do not think this is what most people mean. I think almost everyone is looking for something lasting, enduring. Thus, when we try to make a distinction, it is worthy of note that the rest of the world is shaking their heads, wondering what we're talking about.

Secondly, the distinction between happiness and joy can lead to some critical judgments against people who are actually looking for the same thing we are. Some Christians can look with scorn on those who are looking for "happiness" as if they're willing to settle for something less wonderful and desirable. Now if they accepted the same distinction, then that would be true, but since they don't, they sometimes end up getting criticized for a semantic issue, which does no good to anyone. Now many may not openly or even consciously think that way, but feelings of superiority tend to set in regardless over a willingness to forsake personal happiness and live in squalor, poverty, and abjection, all along claiming a deep and lasting joy that is so different from what the world thinks of as happiness. Now this is really just an extension of what is a normal pitfall in the faith (pride in one's own faith), but I do think the belief in the distinction heightens its danger.

Now let us return to the actual semantic discussion. Happiness, I think people pretty much understand. We get this feeling of satisfaction. We smile. We laugh. We're excited. Maybe we're crying because it is an experience of emotion that can override our inhibitions if it is strong enough. In the church, people tend to connect this idea with circumstantial happiness. It tends to happen momentarily and only in response to certain circumstances. When alternate, less desirable circumstances come along, the feeling disappears and another replaces it. And so we have pastors preaching from the pulpit about the nature of "happiness" being momentary, fleeting, and completely dependent on circumstances.

Then we get to "joy," a quality that quickly becomes vague, nebulous, and indefinite. From the pulpit, pastors teach that it is something deeper and not dependent on circumstances, and that no matter what is happening around you, it can be accessed and remain, despite difficulty and hardship. I laud the teaching that we should begin to attain this kind of quality, but in making it different and distinct, separate from the feeling of happiness, I find myself confused as to its actual definition and often wonder how people know if they really have it or not.

When I ask people these questions, I don't seem to get straight answers. Is joy a feeling? Well, lots of Christians seem to think no (for the aforementioned reasons about the fleeting nature of feelings like happiness). And yet, when I insist that in order to experience joy, if must at some point be felt, most Christians seem to agree. If it can be felt, then is the feeling really a different feeling from happiness, or is it truly the same feeling, only deeper or more profound. If it is not a feeling, then what is it? Is it an attitude? If so, why don't we just call it a good attitude? Is it a disposition? If so... what does that mean? I cannot seem to get a straight or definitive answer about what it actually is. And if it is a feeling or even if it is something else but you can still somehow feel it, then is it a different sort of feeling than mere happiness, and how so? If it is a lasting, enduring feeling, then can you stop feeling it? If it is something else, that goes on even while we're feeling grumpy, pissed off, anxious, or bitter, then what good is it? Is it just a belief about life that has no impact on how we feel? If it doesn't have an impact on how we feel in the moment, then is it really a belief and is it really doing any good. To me, it all seems rather nebulous. And I think this is why non-religious people wonder what the heck we're talking about when we mention joy as if it is something other than happiness, because we can't seem to tell them what it is or what it feels like.

So then, what's the point of making this distinction. I believe the point is one that can easily be made without making the distinction between the two words. Namely, that instead of looking for lasting happiness in short-term circumstances, we should root ourselves and our minds in Christ and find enduring, lasting happiness, born of an attitude of trust and hope and love and shining through every experience of hardship, loss, or pain. It means we turn our difficulties into challenges, our sorrows into smiles, and our losses into opportunities, and all of this involves what I think is the feeling that the rest of the world identifies as "happiness," only deeper, more meaningful and long lasting.

N.T. Wright

2011-05-23T13:16:00.000-07:00

I've decided I need to spend more time listening to/reading this guy.

This particular video reveals a remarkable ability to cut through our cultural paradigms and address questions clearly and honestly, without bias or personal/cultural baggage.

N.T.Wright on Adam & Eve

Further thoughts

2011-05-07T10:03:00.000-07:00

I was searching online for peoples' thoughts on various matters when I came across a little religious series on YouTube, which further articulated the points of my previous post, but which came to different conclusions, and I wanted to mull them over here.

This video likened church doctrine to a pick-up game of basketball, in which everyone had different interpretations of the rules. These different interpretations caused fights and quarrels to break out all through the "game," in which no one could agree on where the lines were or anything regarding the rules of the game. Some played with a free-throw line in a different spot or no line at all. Some played with no out-of-bounds. Traveling or double-dribble was not an issue for some. The whole game was a mess and it wasn't fun for anyone.

I like this analogy - up to a certain point - because it illustrates what I was saying before about the state of affairs in the church today. Interestingly, their conclusion (I did not hear them address any criticism of this conclusion) was that people in the church need to basically buckle down and learn to interpret scripture properly, so that everyone can understand the "rule book" and agree to "play the game" together the same way. This is where the analogy goes off kilter for me and where I disagree with their assessment.

They make a couple of assumptions in their analogous commentary on the church, and the main one is that the Bible as we know it is some sort of a "rule book." I've heard this idea - grew up with it actually - and it is a very popular notion that the Bible is a precise sort of manual for life or a letter direct from God to his people where he lays out exactly what we're supposed to believe, do and be. The problem is, I have found little or no evidence supporting this view. I've read the Bible a few times, and I have a Biblical studies degree. This does not make me an expert, but I think it is enough to make some intelligent observations (assuming I'm an intelligent guy). The Bible doesn't read like a rule book, unless you're reading Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and part of Exodus. The Torah (the first five books of the OT, also known as "the Law") is really the only part of the Bible that reads this way, where God explicitly sends a message to his people laying out exactly what they are to do or not do. Only in this situation then would the vast wealth of rabbinic commentary be accurately likened to interpreting the rule book. The rest is stories, histories, letters, prophecies, parables, poetry, and scattered teachings.

Teachings are not necessarily about rules and exact do's and don'ts. The words of Jesus in the gospels do not spell out a concise list of steps, and even the more rigorous theological meanderings of Paul are contextual corrections for specific situations. It is easier to interpret leviticus, because it reads like a straightforward list of how to live with God in ancient Israel. Don't eat shrimp. If you do, leave the camp for a few days. present sacrifices in this place in this way, and don't get it wrong or try to do it somewhere else. Don't worship other gods. Practice the Sabbath. Despite possible variations in practice and modifications involving further specification, these are rules, and they are fairly straightforward. Jesus didn't often teach rules. The taught principles. He and Paul and the apostles in the NT corrected aberrant behavior and yes, they often corrected misguided or destructive theology. But a set of beliefs is not a set of rules and there is no perfect interpretations of those set of beliefs, even if you adhere to the idea that none of them ever got it wrong when they wrote the words that eventually ended up in our Bible.

One other thought I had is that this mess of religious debate and strife might be a strong argument in favor of the hierarchy of Roman Catholocism or eastern Orthodox churches. If you have people "in charge" who are responsible for interpretation and theological explanations, then you might not have the big protestant mess, so to speak. While this argument is more utilitarian (and my views often lean utilitarian anyway), I do not believe they hold up under a critical look at history. For one, I believe the hierarchical systems of the past couple millennia have done more harm than good. The religious authority of the pope and of bishops quickly turned to quests for political power and the corruption, greed and fear that led to the crusades and the inquisition. Religious authority was no protection against false teachings and may have harbored a host of them while burning at the stake any who disagreed. Religious authority got us nowhere and such corruption gave rise to the Reformation in the first place, a movement which began as a fight against corruption, but without that centralized authority, quickly turned into a quagmire of various teachings and debates, sometimes resulting in outright bloodshed.

This failure of authority to uphold moral standards might be enough to undermine its reliability in terms of accurate interpretation of sacred texts, but furthermore, it puts the mistakes of the many (multiple strains of Christianity) into the mistakes of the few (centralized authority). Who's to say that errors of one man or a few people would be better or worse than the errors of many? One might argue that a sort of competition in scholastic interpretation could provide an innate check and balance system. If no one was arguing with each other, we might just stray complacently into a theological void. Debate brings out rigorous, disciplined study, and I do believe that there are several out there who have contributed nicely to that process. But we still have the same problems outlined in the basketball analogy. Everyone's arguing about the rules, and so we end up just angry and confused.

This is why I can understand when Brian MacLaren says lets just put a moratorium on the homosexual debate and just not talk about it for five years. Or when people like Doug Pagitt try to undermine arguments themselves by rephrasing the questions. I think these people recognize that because of our arguments about "the rules" we've stopped playing altogether. We need to stop thinking of the Bible as a rule book that no one can interpret correctly, and start living. We're trying to live in the way of Jesus: giving to the poor, loving our neighbor, showing mercy and compassion instead of judgment. Instead we're heaping judgment on each other and passing around verbal abuse like it's candy. Knowing the "truth" about calvinism vs. armenianism will not help you love your neighbor. Knowing what heaven and hell look like will not help you show compassion to the poor. Having the answers does not help you "take up your cross." I am all for serious intellectual study, but I think treating the Bible like something that it isn't has pushed us into being something that we're not.

A Look at Inerrancy

2011-05-04T12:35:00.000-07:00

For some time I have pondered the what many in Christian churches refer to as the the doctrine of Inerrancy: this is the idea that the Bible, the canon of scripture as we know it throughout Christianity, has no errors in it and is all fully and %100... true.

I'd like to steer the conversation, right from the get-go, away from questions of what one might mean by true, as that is a different, though related subject.

For some time I have looked at the apparent contradictions in the Bible and briefly (probably too briefly) assessed the varying views on what is really going on in the writings of Paul, the apostles, and the gospel narrators, plus the breadth of literature found in the Hebrew Scriptures, and I have to confess that I at last find myself baffled by the idea of "Inerrancy."

This is not to say that I cannot understand the desire for systematic theology to be able to meld together words and passages into succinct ideas that form an interlocking structure of truth that we can rely on and rest comfortably in. I do. I really understand that. I know the seductiveness that a promise of complete solidity and reliability carries. But we have somehow staked our claim on ideas that we haven't fully explored, and I find that disconcerting.

In recent weeks, many in the church have been intent on the conversation raised by Rob Bell and probably enhanced by John Piper concerning the nature of the afterlife: heaven, hell, God's judgment, God's love, etc. Many come to this conversation with assumptions about the words of the Bible that may or may not be... Biblical? More importantly, they may not line up with the intentions of Jesus or of the apostles or of, dare I say, God (don't nit-pick and call me out on redundancy). So I'd like to lay out some of the important issues regarding this doctrine of Inerrancy.

1) Let's take a look, briefly, at the formation of the Bible itself as canon (more specifically, the NT). After Jesus ascended and the apostles spread the word (or the gospel, as they knew it), there were a couple hundred years or more of, more or less, stories and teachings being handed around. These stories include written accounts, possibly as early as 40 years after Jesus, as well as oral traditions. In this space of time, (between Jesus and about 300 AD), church leaders began to not only compile these stories into collections, but to interpret them and to expound on the nature of God's work on earth through Christ and by extension through the church. It was not until the time of Constantine that a group of church leaders got together and decided which of these stories and letters were going to be part of the "canon." Until that time, there were a couple of versions of canonical work proposed by various leaders, and there were a lot of strains of early Christianity, often debating and espousing their own interpretations of the "truth." Finally in this council, the bishops of the church decided what was in and what was out, not only in terms of canon, but in terms of acceptable interpretations.
(please keep in mind that I am not thoroughly researching this at the time, so my facts may not be authoritative, though they are the best I can do as I dredge them up from my memory, and I believe the gist of it all is at the very least pertinent, if not %100 reliable, which ironically relates to my views about scripture).

2) From this brief history, we can conclude a couple of things which I find pertinent. First, if you believe in the canon of scripture as it stands and in its authority over Christian life and teaching, then you are putting your trust, not only in the words of the bible, but in the decisions of the council that compiled the canon. If you are going to put your trust in this council, you might want to confirm that you believe in the integrity of the men who were there and the intent with which is was called and carried out (I am not arguing that anyone should lean one way or another on those issues). The question of whether or not God wanted a cohesive dogma and a definitive canon of writings to help define that dogma is rarely questioned by most Christians that I know. Clearly most of the bishops at the time (remember, already a couple hundred years after Christ) believed this was necessary, but then a lot had changed in the Roman culture and in the church over time. Paul may have had a keen interest in "sound doctrine," but did God? We take these questions for granted, because we are told not to question the validity of Sola Scriptura, the sole authority of scripture. Well, if you believe that the Biblical canon cannot be questioned, then you your answer to these questions will support that view, which is of course a logical fallacy.

3) People often criticize those who want to pick and choose. One looks at the biblical texts and says I like this and this and this, but ignores a host of teachings and stories that don't fit in with their world view. At the same time, we often find that "extrabiblical" teachings are met with great skepticism, merely on the basis of authority. In our dogmatic adherence to Sola Scriptura, we have outlawed any persistence on the part of reason or conscience. If one has a plight of conscience aimed at a particular doctrine in a given christian denomination, then he had better look to the Bible and either show that his misgivings are based in it or re-interpret the words to mean something else than the others understand it to mean. This, of course, gives rise to whole heap of nonsense, but also forces different strains of theology to reinforce their dogma with more and more and more biblical "evidence" and to search for reasons to stick to their own interpretations. Often this pursuit is biased and results in self-delusion, and it causes the secular world to shake its head in disgust. There are some, of course, who thoroughly research their interpretations with an open mind, ready to accept what the biblical writers are trying to say based on rigorous research, study, and thought, but these often get lost in the mire of pop theology and it is difficult to decipher which is which. Are the people espousing this unorthodox view being honest in their criticism of the norm, or are the bombastic arguments in favor of tradition really honest attempts to defend what is actually a very thoroughly studied and decisively answered topic? Sometimes, maybe both are true, and often neither is.

4) Given the state we are in, of which the above paragraph is merely a glimpse, one must wonder about efficacy of a book that causes so much dissension and confusion. If such a book is "inerrant" or not, what difference does it make. Suppose such a doctrine is true, and we now have a perfect book, full of words that are absolutely true and artfully and purposely formed by the hand of God to deliver to his people a reliable and succinct manual for life and godliness. If such perfection is seen through an imperfect lens (humankind), then we really aren't receiving a perfect image, are we? If our interpretations distort the text so drastically, in so many different ways, then what is the point of having the original be so cleverly perfect? It's like when a math teacher gives his students a problem far beyond their understanding as something to aspire to, but the problem itself has little value to the students, other than inspiring them to think harder and study more rigorously. In this analogy, scripture doesn't really tell us anything or deliver "sound doctrine," but merely encourages us to try and figure it out ourselves with a various clues thrown into the mix. Perhaps this is actually a good view of what the Bible is, but that's not the doctrine or the purpose of the doctrine of Inerrancy. It's a utilitarian view of the Bible.

So what do I believe about scripture. Well, I believe God has used it in my life to guide me in the right direction to encourage me to rebuke me, to train me in righteousness - things that Paul writes about the Hebrew scriptures. In other words, it is God-breathed. Is it authoritative? Is it complete? Is it inerrant? I fear the answers to these questions might be less useful than we think. But lets think about it? Where would we be if we didn't believe in the authority of the Bible? We'd have a whole bunch of varying views on what it means to live with and follow Christ. We'd have rival schools of thought debating theological points on the basis of their own personal preferences. We'd have anyone and their mother picking and choosing what they believe about Jesus and about God's kingdom and his work in the world. We'd have a disorganized society of confused believers where strife abounds and where numbers continued to dwindle across much of the world. We'd have people following God based on their emotions and we'd have all kinds of wild, ridiculous theories about the afterlife and the meaning of life and the nature of Jesus and the teachings of the apostles.

In short, we would have exactly what we have today - perhaps with a grain more humility in our own judgments.

Critiquing

2011-04-22T22:50:00.000-07:00

I've been spending some time reading book reviews. I often do this after reading a book. I'll read what other people thought of it and see if I agree or disagree. Sometimes people bring up problems with a book that I didn't notice, and it clouds my judgment. Other times I wonder what the heck they are talking about. And still other times, I find their standards so incredibly narrow and subjective, I wonder what the point is in communicating with anyone about what is quality and what is not. I have several issues with the the ways in which people criticize, and I'd like to lay them out here, if I can manage it.

First of all, and I have mentioned this before, anachronisms. I've been reading a piece of historical fiction which makes easy use of modern speech. People complain about anachronisms in historical and fantastical works, as if they are the worst form of writing imaginable, and I have to wonder if these people are out of their minds. Have they read Shakespeare? The characters of the 11th and 12th century spoke in a language that was several centuries outdated in Shakespeare's time, and you expect writers to write like them? Anything that is not horribly convoluted and nearly unreadable in our day is an anachronism, if we're trying to depict the 12th century. One critiquer pointed out a sentence in this book that said, "this place was a real dump," and proceeded to compare such a statement to a medieval knight pulling out a flat screen tv. It's just a stupid way of judging material. The former is a reasonable interpolation of the language of the time into the way we speak today, while the latter is just ridiculous. You really want to read about people who can't speak modern english, jabbering to each other with words we would never use and omitting words that they would never use, despite the perfect functionality of them for communicating to us?

Anyway, I also find that some people complain vigorously about plot constructions or character building or language use, without any clear idea of their own ideal. One commenter will complain that the writing is horrible, without feeling, and bland, while others will praise the same writing as evocative and moving. I have been able to find no discernible standard for these judgments. Some people will complain that there are not enough similes or metaphors, while others complain about the ones they find. Thousands of people read books and think themselves worthy critics, able to objectively and succinctly communicate a proper analysis of this or that work, and yet it all comes out as arbitrary nonsense. It is one thing to say what your own experience of reading was like, but when it comes to criticisms of the author as a professional, people can be incredibly arrogant. Sometimes I agree with the judgments people make, and other times, I want to slap them and shout - "Hey! He's not a bad writer. Maybe you're just a bad reader." People rarely conclude that there must be something wrong with the way they read.

My last yet significant complaint is in the area of character development, especially in the form of "cliches" and "one-dimensional." I rarely hear anyone explain what they mean when or why it bothers them when characters in a book are "one-dimensional" or if they are all cliches. As for cliches, I have to ask what it is they are looking for. What kind of characters do you want to read about? You can complain all you want about the cast of heroic do-gooder, plucky comic relief, bitter rival, self-centered egotist, pious stoic, and angry ruffian, but what are you looking for? Are people under the impression that characters in a story should have no personality, or do they want some kind of ridiculous alternative to the spectrum of human behavior? The fact is that there are people in life who are manipulative people, consistently. There are people who are heroic. There are cynics, optimists, comedians, stoics, egotists, and a plethora of other "cliches," and to write about people who are not any of these things is just stupid. And here's the catch: these same critiquers, who complain about one-dimensional characters, seem to get upset when a character does or thinks anything inconsistent with previous behavior. They want characters who experience a multitude of emotions and are haunted by several competing desires and live complex and difficult lives, but have them do anything out of character and it's the worst character work they've ever read. The obvious problem with this is the irony, but there is more to it. Human beings are not always complex. They are not always experiencing a multitude of emotions, and they often find it difficult to change their behavior. Human beings fall into behavioral patterns which subsist and strengthen over time. The problem is, there is no way to please people. If you explain everything about a character, they'll complain there's no mystery. If you don't, then they'll say things don't make sense. If a character is consistent, he's a cliche. If he's inconsistent, then he's not believable. A villain is either too evil or too weak and wishy-washy. And the worst part is... there's NO STANDARD. There's nothing but headstrong opinion, just dying to be heeded, yearning to be recognized.

And...

it...

drives...

me...

nuts!

East of Eden

2011-03-02T10:38:00.000-08:00

When I found out the rationale behind the title of the book - around halfway through - I was very intrigued. I did not know before opening it that it was a retelling of the Cain and Abel story, nor that it would study the original story in some depth. I have never really been drawn to Steinbeck's work before. I've read "Of Mice and Men" and a few tidbits/excerpts from other works, and I never really cared for the middle-america poor man struggle with life, morals and sorrow. But this story had a very interesting appeal to me from the beginning. Its cast of characters stood out stark, fluid and memorable, without appearing as caricatured or exaggerated (like many-a-Dickens novel). I found I could relate with most of them and understand others. I was impressed with how realistically characters changed throughout the novel, and how the narrator sometimes tried to explain these changes without presumption or arrogance.

I also have never been drawn to the story of Cain and Abel. To me, Cain was always a jealous beast and Abel a humble do-gooder, and I never made the effort to humanize them before that. In this book I found myself annoyed and frustrated with the character of Aron (Abel), and at the same time, I grew to love and cherish the character of Cal (Cain), the more I read of them. Cal's struggle with the bad impulses inside of him and his love for his father and brother held me captive. I found myself hoping that it would all turn out different from the original story, or wondering if there might be some role reversal as a twist for the ending. I won't give away the ending, but I will say that reading it felt like I was reading a completely new story, even though Steinbeck claims "there really is only one story."

Anachronisms

2010-09-21T22:30:00.001-07:00

I've been reflecting the past couple of days on the use of anachronisms in fantasy writing. The basic principle is to beware of using elements in writing that wouldn't exist in the given setting. For a medieval setting, generally, they shouldn't have modern language or technology that wouldn't exist yet. You wouldn't see a medieval knight going to the local bookstore, because without a printing press, books were an expensive commodity, and one would only find them in a store that deals with expensive commodities. For the most part, to find a book, you'd have to go to the personal library of some wealthy lord. If you wanted a book store in your medieval fantasy, just like you might have a butcher shop or a tailor, you would need to explain somehow that your medieval fantasy world actually had the means to mass-produce books that might be distributed to local shops.

People can be varying degrees of particular, though I suppose most professional writers are precise and deliberate about their word choices. For instance, I read from one writer that he wouldn't have one knight say to another that he was being "paranoid," because that particular word originated with the introduction of psychology (though I suppose he may have meant psycho-analysis, but I'm not sure), a study which they didn't have in the middle ages yet. But this same author admits to using contractions and phrases that make the narrative flow for his readers. Though a medieval merchant might not have said "Don't do that!" we can't have the narrative sounding stilted or choppy by having everyone say "Do not," instead of "don't."

So here's my shtick with this issue. People have a range of perceptions about what is anachronistic and what is not. "Sure," "yeah," "okay," might be fine for some and not for others. Most people seem to have problems with more obvious slang choices like, "What's up?" or "Hey, man, how's it hangin." No one seems to recognize that nearly all of today's English Language would be an anachronism in a medieval setting. A knight would never have said, "What's up?" but neither would he have said, "How are you, my lady?" The middle ages cover a lot of time, but think of this, Shakespeare was writing his plays in the late 16th century, more than four hundred years ago. His use of language is understandable, once you get used to it, but the sentence structure and word usage varies largely from our own. The King James Bible was printed in 1611, full of its "Thee"s and "Thou"s and its "haveth"s and "haveth"s "not." Nowhere do we find anyone saying "How are you, my lady?" And yet, most medieval settings are based on the feudal systems of the 11th and 12th centuries. Many are a conglomerate of several time periods, but when asked if it fits in a medieval setting, you're usually asking about the 12th century or so - that's more than four hundred years, again, before Shakespeare. If you look at the way they spoke to one another, it is hardly intelligible to our modern English speakers. You might catch a few words you know, and after a lot of listening pick up a lot you might recognize because it sounds similar, but here's the point: There is nearly NOTHING in our modern language that actually "fits" the medieval setting.

So, if every formation of sentences in modern English is anachronistic, what's all the fuss about "What's up?" or "Hey, dude"? Well, it's a bit difficult to say. I mean, just because paranoid was a psychology word, does that mean they didn't have a word for people who always acted like the world was out to get them? If they did, and it was a completely different word from any we use today, shouldn't we use "paranoid" to convey it, and is it really more out of place than saying, "he thought the world was out to get them"? I'm pretty sure, "out to get them" is a fairy recent phrase that has no business in the mouths of knights, kings and queens. When it comes down to it, aren't we taking a language that doesn't even exist anymore and translating it into the modern tongue? Aren't we taking people and places that don't really exist, assigning them identities in settings that are very little like our own and then articulating in modern-day terms what it was like and what people said to each other in stories that we're making up ourselves? Perhaps "paranoid" were only a psychological term today, I might understand, but considering its use in our everyday language, it seems appropriate to use it to convey what we're trying to convey. If you mention "ibuprofen," I think you'll get some heads turning and wondering, "Really? they had ibuprofen?" It's the kind of element that really interrupts an enjoyable read, and it seems unbelievable if you haven't already been told that a time-traveling doctor has come back in time and altered history with his understanding of medicine.

With this in mind, writers (or aspiring writers, like me) might think that anything is really fair game, and the truth is that yes, it is. You actually can write whatever you want, and anyone who says that a knight "wouldn't have said," "Hey, dude," is just mind-blowingly ignorant of the fact that "Hey, dude" was your interpretation of the way in which a medieval knight, who doesn't speak the same language as us, greeted his fellow medieval knight, who also doesn't speak the same language as us. Clearly, you were trying to convey by using the colloquial expression, "Hey, dude," that this character has an informal attitude and a casual relationship with the object of his greeting. Also, you might be trying to say that his general manner resembles that of a surfer or a hippie, that he roams the earth rescuing damsels in much the same way as a surfer "dude" roams the beach picking up chicks. The problem is that you will find a majority of readers (and editors) who expect to become engrossed in a medieval tale of wizardry and courtly intrigue, and they find themselves interrupted with their formerly fantastical characters suddenly sounding not so fantastical. Many might throw the book/manuscript down in disgust, as if you had just betrayed or insulted them. Despite the fact that it may be their fault for not understanding what you're trying to do or not being able to accept a knight that says "dude," you've still lost a majority of your readership and most likely it won't get that far because you've got no book deal.

Here's the thing: Anachronistic dialogue is purely SUBJECTIVE, in much the same way that writing styles are subjective. If you write a book today with sentences as long and convoluted as you'd find in a John Steinbeck novel, you're going to just end up annoying people, and though you may be a master at what you're doing, it's not what you want to do if you want to sell books. If your word choices jar the reader away from the narrative, chances are, you're not going to be a successful writer, because editors won't want to print your books and people won't want to buy them.

So here' s my dilemma. I recently had a short story sent through "Critters", an online critiquing group. The basic idea is that you write critiques for other people's work, and they'll write some for yours. I was not under the illusion that my work was up to par with today's writing standards, yet I found myself perplexed about the response to some instances of anachronistic dialogue. Some of it I had already wondered about, but here's an example of a critique and what they thought:

(my dialogue)
>..."you've only had your Pa to teach you, and he's respectable, but man... just...
>tell me what your secret is, man."

(his comment)
>The expression "man" is a fairly modern one.
>So it sounds a bit out of place if this is supposed to be medieval.
>Something a little closer would be something like,
>"Pray sir, how have you become so skilled so quickly?"

Can y0u already see where I'm going with this? REALLY? You want me to put that garbage on the page? Now I'm not claiming my use of dialogue is a stroke of genius - in fact, I'll probably have to change it. But "PRAY SIR"? Does that sound like the way ANYONE would talk to people? Now the fact is, he's wrong. His sentence is no closer or farther away than mine to actual medieval language. But the fact is that he's right, because to most people the expression I'm using does sound out of place. It makes them feel like they're not reading a fantasy adventure anymore, and for many fantasy readers, that's just annoying.

Given that there is absolutely no way that I'm going to riddle my narrative with high-and-mighty pseudo-medieval formal babbling, I'm having a dilemma. I need to make my characters come to life in today's language, without using too much of today's language. That's it, I guess. I have not been able to find an intelligent discussion on this topic, but from the critiques I've gotten, opinions vary greatly - plus, everyone has one, and few seem to know why they have it, other than the fact that a certain word or phrase "feels out of place."

not worth the paper on which it was printed

2010-09-09T22:40:00.000-07:00

The following quote was found on a footnote from Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine's online website, on the page devoted to recommending books:

I have morbid fantasies of turning a modern-day editor loose on Dickens. First to be sacrificed on the altar of "pacing" would be the regurgitated parliamentary white papers on working conditions in coal mines and woolen mills. Then the unfair and unbalanced caricatures of clergymen and other worthy members of society. Then the many pages devoted to the private joys, woes, and foibles of bit players who never appear again and in no way move the plot forward. And so on and so forth. The result would be tighter, cleaner, faster-paced, more disciplined writing…and not worth the paper on which it was printed.

I am an aspiring writer, and I have started to notice that the writing world, much like the music world or the business world or the political world, can be geared toward cookie-cutter methodologies with little substance and even less value. For this reason, the bright and shining star of any of these worlds is rare.

Most lazy readers in our society would balk at reading a Dickens novel from start to finish. I myself have read four of them and not without some difficulty. What the above reviewer says is true. Dickens' novels are riddled with extra information, ridiculous caricatures, endless soliloquy's with no bearing on plot or content, and yet, there is a priceless quality to them that the world has been unwilling to forget, even after all this time. I have often said that if Dickens were to begin writing in today's market, a publisher would toss his manuscript in the trash after a page. Just like so many other bright, shining stars of today's literature, he would find rejection after rejection after rejection until his mind went numb. Why? Because an editor wants a piece with today's pizazz. They aren't looking for works of art as much as they're looking for marketable goods. Just like a politician with standards, a businessman with sincerity and a singer with simplicity, a truly creative writer stands little chance of finding that big break without making some compromises first.

All this is not to say that I am in my own work anywhere close to the level of greatness attributed to the likes of Dickens, Hugo, Twain or Tolstoy. It is rather to say that the business is entirely screwed up, and I plan to keep at it, but mainly I"m just going to pray, because it seems only miracles can send the clouds away and open up the sky for all the stars to see.

Visit my Trumpet Blog

2010-07-20T12:45:00.001-07:00

As some of you may know, I've been working for some time on a little writing project called Trumpet, dealing with despair and hopelessness. I have decided to do something I have toyed with doing for the book, and that is to collect journal entries and personal stories from people who have struggled with despair or dealt with difficult times in life when there just seemed to be no light at the end of the tunnel. I have just set up a new blog for just such a purpose, and it is at thelowlycharicks.blogspot.com. If you have a story or if you could dig up some journal entries, even if it is only disjointed sentence fragments and smatterings of emotional diatribes, please be willing to contribute them to my work by posting them on the comments section of my post. As the nature of this material can be extremely personal, I encourage you to post anonymously, and feel free to change names and dates. You don't have to put yourself out there for all the world to see; we just need to see that other people go through this kind of thing all the time. So please take the time to visit the site. I think most of the people I know can think of at least one time in their lives when they felt hopeless. It might be more difficult to find journal entries from the actual time, but if you can't find anything you might have written about what you were thinking, feeling, and going through at the time, then you can at least share what you remember now. And please, encourage others you know to check out the site. This is not limited to any culture, ethnicity, religion, or age group. Please check it out.

Thank you.

The Plan

2010-07-10T17:21:00.000-07:00

When we were young, the church pounded into us the idea that God had a plan for us. If the verse, Jeremiah 29:11, doesn't sound familiar to someone who grew up in the church, then you must have been sleeping. I remember that at the risk of being naive and the further, more likely, risk of fitting a cliche, I took that idea to heart. I believed with all my heart that God was in my life and guiding my steps, guiding me toward some place and time when I would be blessed and be a blessing to others. I made decisions not based on the idea of securing my future, making money, or becoming successful by the world's standards - instead I prayed and tried to discern God's voice and guidance, and this was behind most of my important decisions. I went to college and chose my degree based on what I thought it was that God wanted. I chose to go back to Minnesota after school because I thought it was the right thing.

Somewhere along the line I seem to have lost that feeling. At times I've felt like God was helping me out and guiding me to the right choices (joining the community at solomon's porch, traveling to africa, and marrying my wife, to name a few). But I lost the feeling, the conviction, that God had any sort of plan, just some idea of what was right and good, not really a desire for me to do a particular thing.

In some ways, I felt that this was good. I focused more on the kind of person i was supposed to be than on the constant worry about whether God really wants me to go out to denny's tonight, or if i was supposed to stay in, and wondering either way whether I might be missing something important that God wanted me to experience. It seemed freeing to me to devote my day-to-day life to God without having to ask what his will was every five minutes, and besides, I have had numerous good experiences (see above-mentioned list of notable experiences + many more good things).

But there is a sort of emptiness in my activities sometimes, and it comes out most when I face difficulty - my struggles seem more raw and bitter, and my self-recriminations feel pointless and hollow. I've looked back at my life more and more in the past several years, and there are things that I miss about when I was a youth and things that I scorn. There are things I wish I had done differently, attitudes I wish I had had sooner, chances I wish I had taken, but there are also choices I'm proud to have made, memories that make me smile, and lessons I cherish. Meanwhile, looking back on my struggles, I have begun to recall more and more that feeling, that conviction, that no matter how hard things were, no matter how lonely or disappointed or bitter I felt, God had a plan, and things happened in my life for a reason. That conviction was the foundation of my hope. It was the fuel for my tenacity, the driving force of all my passion. Today, when I struggle, that tenacity seems to have faded, that passion spent, and I begin to realize that it is because I do not know if God really has "a plan" for me.

I think of my own son, how I want what is best for him, and I want him to experience every good thing, and how I hate to hear him cry. I have no plan for his life. I have no particular destination in mind, other than that he lives out his God-given dreams and talents, But truly, if I knew what would please him most and provide him with the deepest satisfaction, I would do all in my power to guide him to it. And when he struggles in life, I can only pray that he can find in him the ability to hope, with the conviction that God has a plan. So I've started thinking I want that feeling back. I want that conviction back in my life. I have tried to tell myself, in times of disappointment, that there was a reason, that God could make a new way for me, but it felt bleak and cold inside.

I don't rightly know how to change my thoughts on this, but I am convinced that I must, for the sake of my own sanity and for my family's happiness.

And he who has not, even what he has will be taken from him

2010-05-06T16:21:00.000-07:00

They used to tell me that I would only meet the right girl when I wasn't looking for her. I always said that was stupid and cliche, not to mention incredibly frustrating. When I went to Africa, people said I'd meet someone and end up married. I replied that that was ridiculous and there was no way I would end up fitting that stereotype. When I met Cassie, I told myself that it was nothing. I said that nothing serious was happening - it was just the excitement and freedom of being overseas in a strange place with new people. As time progressed, of course, I began to see things differently, but the point is, it came when I wasn't looking, when I wasn't worrying or fretting about anything happening.

So I've been wondering if that's just the way things are in all of life. It seems we don't get something until we are content with what we have already. Those who miss out are plagued with the desire for the unattainable. Maybe this is what Jesus was talking about, when he said that those who have will be given more, and those who do not have, even what they have will be taken from them. It's a weird comment, and not a lot of preachers will dwell on it. I believe he was talking more about responsibilities and (the parable of the talents), but if you think about it, he's really talking about what we're doing with what we've already been given. If we take what we've been given and do something with it, then we receive more. When we sit on what we've been given, hide it, keep it safe and secret, then we've wasted our gifts. How many of us spend our lives wishing for things we don't have, all the while burying our gifts and talents. Maybe it really is that simple.

So I've been listening to a lot of ideas recently about being thankful for what you have, about living in the present, savoring the moment, making the most of opportunities, etc. And basically, I'm thinking that we not only have a the opportunity to live life to the full with what we have, but we have an obligation to make the most of all that we've been given, whether that's ten talents or just one. Otherwise, we can expect to lose even the little that we've been given. I don't know if that applies to everything: money, career, personal fulfillment, spiritual sanctity, etc, but it seems like it does. It seems like that's the way it works with all facets of life.

We tend to take Jesus words and only apply them to so-called "spiritual" issues, but I think we miss that there is a pattern in life that applies to everything, something that ties spiritual and temporal together. The scriptures say to do ALL things as unto the Lord. It says to receive all things with thanksgiving. In the meantime, we should seek first the kingdom of heaven and store up for ourselves treasure in heaven. But let us not forget to live life now.

Thoughts from Taoism

2010-03-25T12:54:00.000-07:00

"Today, one is considered productive to the extent that she generates monetary profit for herself or others. In the determination of her social standing, her intelligence, innate talents, and service to others are secondary to her earning capacity. In practice, this means that individuals choose their work on the basis of what will pay rather than on what will give them the most enjoyment and provide the greatest service to others. Again, the Taoists would not see this as productive, for it limits human happiness and leaves many needed things undone, while we scurry about doing things of little real value."

"New gadgetry that comes at the expense of peace of mind or human relationships cannot be considered progress."

"In the later part of the nineteenth century, interest in this problem [of how to produce sufficient goods to supply people's basic needs] began to fade as a second problem came to dominate the thinking of the economists: How to overcome the problem of overproduction, or alternatively stated, How to increase consumption to insure sustained demand for ever-increasing production? The answer lay in tapping into what was conceived of as an endless resource - the human emotion of greed."

"'Constant change... through the entire gamut of material, color, design is essential to the prosperity alike of producers and distributors.'
It is our job to make women unhappy with what they have. --B. Earl Puckett, former head of Allied Stores Corporation."

My little boy has beautiful dark eyes

2010-02-05T09:21:00.000-08:00

So I'm a daddy now, but while the idea of having a son has begun to sink in, the life of a father has not, since we are still at the hospital, waiting for Emmaus to get better. He is on a swift road to recovery, which is great, and Cassie and I are really excited.

When Emmaus was born he wasn't breathing on his own and he didn't cry for several minutes, which is not surprising since his lungs had aspirated a lot of meconium during his long labor. They helped him breathe quickly, and he was moving around, and though he wasn't crying yet, his eyes were open, and they were the most beautiful, dark baby eyes I've ever seen. He was one of those unique newborns who looked everybody in the eyes and was very aware of what was going on, even though he was sick and beat up from the labor. He started crying on the way to the NICU, where they hooked him up to a respirator, gave him a couple of IV's, and continued to clean out his lungs and stomach of harmful particles. The scariest part was when he was first born, not breathing and barely moving, but once they got him on the warmer, got him some oxygen, cleaned him off, and brought color into his skin, I knew he was going to be fine. He is continually getting better, faster than the doctors had anticipated. He's a strong, scrappy little boy. Since that first night, though, they've had him sedated to keep him comfortable, so he's always had his eyes closed. I miss his eyes, and I wish everyone else could see them.

Anyway, I just thought I'd write down some thoughts and memories and feelings for now. I'm really looking forward to take my little boy home.

24 - Series-A-Minute Review

2010-01-20T13:47:00.000-08:00

In the vein of the Movie-A-Minute and Book-A-Minute reviews, found on rinkworks.com, I have made my own Series-A-Minute review of the show 24. For those of you unfamiliar with this idea, it is for those who find watching movies, books, or tv shows, too time-consuming for them but wish to know what happens anyway. I have boiled down each season of the show, 24, into a mini-story, which can be read and enjoyed in a minute or less. In doing so, I hope to have conveyed the true essense of the show and thus bring to all you busy non-viewers out there the enjoyment of each season without the expense of taking up all your time. Check our rinkworks.com for further book-a-minute and movie-a-minute reviews.

24: SEASON 1

Jack Bauer
Hello, fans, look at me. I am the most awesomest, manliest man ever. (stops terrorist attacks)

Fans
Whoa! Jack Bauer is the most awesomest, manliest man ever!

24: SEASON 2

Jack Bauer
I'm really messed up, since my wife died. (stops terrorist attacks)

Kate
I love you, Jack.

Fans
Jack Bauer is the most awesomest, manliest man ever!

24: SEASON 3

Jack Bauer
I’m a messed up JUNKIE now, but I STILL work for CTU (stops terrorist attacks)

Fans
Jack Bauer is the most awesomest, manliest man ever!

24: SEASON 4

Jack Bauer
I am the most awesomest, manliest man ever!

Chloe, Tony, Michelle
Jack, we’re your bestest, bestest friends, and we’ll do whatever you say, even if it is incredibly ILLEGAL and morally QUESTIONABLE, because we trust you IMPLICITLY.

Audrey
I love you, Jack

Jack Bauer
(Stops terrorist attacks. Fakes his own death)

Fans
Jack Bauer is the most awesomest, manliest man ever!

24: SEASON 5

Jack Bauer’s Bestest Bestest Friends
Jack! WE – (die)

Jack Bauer
I will stop these terrorist attacks and solve this conspiracy, even if I have to take down the President of the United States (stops terrorist attacks, solves conspiracy, takes down President of United States)

Fans
Jack Bauer is the most awesomest, manliest man ever!

24: SEASON 6

Ugly President
Aagh! Blurgh!

Jack Bauer
Grrr! (Stops terrorist attacks. Escapes to AFRICA)

Fans
... Huh?...

24: SEASON 7

Government
Jack Bauer, you are hereby charged with… uh… hold on. What we meant to say was, PLEASE save us – but try not to hurt anybody.

Tony
Har! I’m alive, and I’m a BAD GUY now. Haha, I fooled you, I’m really a GOOD GUY now. No, no, look! I’m really a BAD GUY now. Okay, I’m really working on my OWN to achieve REVENGE for Michelle’s DEATH. Boy, I’m messed up.

Renee
Jack, I don’t want to become you, but your methods work.

Jack Bauer
(Stops terrorist attacks) Don’t become me, Renee.

Renee
It’s too late, Jack. I’m really messed up now.

Fans
Whew! Jack Bauer really is the most awesomest, manliest man ever!

24: SEASON 8

Jack Bauer
I am the most awesomest, manliest man ever. But I really just want to be a grandpa now.

Renee
I am so messed up. But I’m ready to be the most awesomest, manliest woman ever.

Jack
No, you’re not. (stops terrorist attacks; dies)

Fans
Woohoo! Jack Bauer is the most awesomest, manliest man ever. We look forward to season 9, where President GOOSIEBRAINS brings Jack Bauer back from the DEAD to defeat yet ANOTHER terrorist attack.

Line from the Dollhouse

2009-12-12T13:50:00.001-08:00

"I think her bad guys are badder than my bad guys."

Dreams, according to the Idiot

2009-10-03T17:30:00.000-07:00

Dostoevsky's "The Idiot," describes that feeling you hae after waking from a vivid dream:

"And why, too, on waking up and fully returning to reality, do you feel almost every time, and sometimes with extraordinary intensity, that you have left something unexplained behind with the dream? You laugh at the absurdities of your dream, and at the same time you feel that interwoven with those absurdities some thought lies hidden, and a thought that is real, something belonging to your actual life, something that exists and has always existed in your heart. It's as though something new, prophetic, that you were awaiting, has been told you in your dream. Your4 impression is vivid, it may be joyful or agonizing, but what it is, and what was said to you, you cannot understand or recall."

I often wake up and want to share my dreams with others, if I remember them, but find myself wondering what was so incredibly magnetic about the experience. I find with surprise that the dream that was so intense and meaningful, at second glance, does not seem to carry the same weight as it had, yet for me, inside, the weight is still there. I just know deep down that there was something very important involved in the dream which I cannot seem to remember or communicate. I love that Dostoevsky had this same experience and articulates it in his story. It makes me feel validated, in some way.

Mis - Communication

2009-08-12T09:44:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot recently about miscommunication. And I've started thinking about the difference between a person's self-image and the image seen by others.

At work I was noticing this lady who struck me as rather rude and probably a bit sad, like her life was just unhappy right now and she was taking it out on the people around her. She wasn't at my table, but I noticed that when her server came around she didn't even look that him. When they dropped off the food for the table, she didn't even show a glimmer of satisfaction, let alone say thank you. And I wondered what could make someone act that way. But I also so this woman when nothing was really happening and she had this dignified look in her eye and and she held herself upright, and I realized, of course this woman doesn't see herself as rude or unappreciative. Her image of herself is completely different. She probably sees herself as a woman of bearing and dignity and purpose, and she probably has no idea or next to none that others see her as rude, and if she did, she probably couldn't guess why.

It amazes me how our images can be so different, but I notice that it happens all the time. People mis-read or miscommuinicate just about everything and it lies behind much of the problems in our relationships. People may see themselves as dignified and appear proud or scornful. Strong may seem brash, noble may seem judgmental. Happy may seem uncaring, exuberant flighty, and sensible rude. We constantly find ourselves in these situations.

I myself often think of myself as logical and sensible, and I have hurt people's feelings with words and manners that I could only describe as such. I have seen many other pitfalls happen with myself and with many others.

Now there are some among us who probably feel like we see more clearly and are able to discern more readily what is really going on, and perhaps some of us do, but who is to say with certainty? Knowing how many times I have been misjudged, I at least should keep in mind how easily others may experience it too, and therefore avoid it altogether. I have a co-worker who I know tries to live positive and who works hard and tries to be perfect in doing her job. I've heard other people talk about her as being arrogant, as if she's trying to be better than everyone else and rubbing it in. I've heard her complain about others having no self-respect and dignity. I believe she just really wants to live the best she can. I also believe that others feel a sense of degradation around her, but that's what happens, isn't it? I've gotten frustrated with people and been rude to them, and when they've told others that I'm not a nice person, people look at them like they're crazy, because we always see so many different sides.

I have to go, so I'll end with a prayer that God would make us wise and we would forsake judgment and condemnation and seek understanding and reconciliation. That we would be aware of how others see us and the things we do, and that we would take lightly and with a grain of salt the way we see others and the things they do. Amen

Phantastes

2009-05-13T22:59:00.000-07:00

I've been reading George MacDonald's Phantastes, and I just finished it today. For a long time I've wanted to read MacDonald, based on what I had heard in snippets of C.S.Lewis' writings. I believe he mentions the man in his autobiographical Surprised By Joy. I am left with mixed feelings about the work. For one thing, it was very disjointed. The main character enters Fairy Land, a place of strange, ridiculous events and creatures, and he stumbles around from one adventure to the next, barely even understanding himself anything that's happening. Every other chapter, Anados seems to be "breaking the rules" somehow and landing himself in trouble. But it's this strange thing, because he could hardly know beforehand what those rules are. For instance, at one point, there is a statue of a woman, whom he is trying to bring to life with his singing. And first his songs merely uncover her from some invisible shroud, but when she doesn't come to life, he flings himself on the statue. Instantly, the woman comes to life and says, "You should not have touched me," and she runs away. So I'm left wondering, what the hell?

This kind of thing seems to happen a lot. Some troll woman tells him not to open a closet, but he does anyway, and that's how a grave shadow enters his life and begins following him around. Every which way, people are telling him to do this or not do that, but no one ever says why, and sometimes if he listens he gets in trouble, and sometimes if he doesn't listen, he gets in trouble, and so on and on. It makes it difficult to read.

On the other hand, each of the stories in and of themselves were in many ways captivating. There was a certain spirit in the writing that made me feel like maybe I had something invested in the stories. It was a nameless quality, which I cannot describe, but nonetheless remains compelling.

So, I was thinking, as I was getting on in the story, it is quite interesting that this type of Fairy Story seems to be more and more what real life is like. I don't mean all the Fairy elements, with sprites and goblins and giants and enchantments. But when we read stories nowadays, there are certain rules which good literature tends to follow. It has a certain set-up, character development, plot intricacies, climax and resolution - all the important elements of a well-rounded novel that one would want to read again and again and again. But the Fairy story, or the Myth, seems to have a different set of rules, or is, perhaps, disinterested with rules in general. Most of us seem to want our lives to be like the former. The story starts out with a deal of set-up and character development, then our lives get messed up in an intricate web of action, and finally we come to an incredible climax, followed by a grand resolution. And the resolution justifies all that has happened before or in some way redeems it, so then we can look back down the road and say to ourselves, "Yes, it was worth it."

But what if life is more like the fairy story. We're thrown suddenly into a world that doesn't make sense, whose rules we might intuit on some level but are never fully explained nor comprehended. We go from one adventure to the next, all the while hoping that we're making our way to somewhere important, and we pick out people and events that seem to us significant and try to piece together some kind of portrait, but it just keeps going on, sometimes weaving in and out of different places and sometimes coming to very important places in life. But perhaps in life there is no climax, no resolution. Maybe we look back and we can see how some things may have led to where we are now and who we've become, but we still don't understand the rules of how we're to make our choices, but we have to live with the consequences. It's just a strange thing to me.

I especially liked the ending of the book, which seemed to give it some purpose and depth. Anados talks of all that he wanted for himself, how he went out hoping to be somebody, hoping to find and become his "Ideal." And in his adventures he learned that it is better by far to love. He says many things near the end which I find profound, but which are made more so with a full reading of his adventures:

"...for now I could love without needing to be loved again."

"I knew now that it is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another, yea, that, where two love, it is the loving of each other, and not the being beloved by each other, that originates and perfects and assures their blessedness. I knew that love gives to him that loveth, power over any soul beloved, even if that soul know him not, bringing him inwardly close to that spirit, a power that cannot be but for good, for in proportion as selfishness intrudes, the love ceases, and the power which springs therefrom dies."

And finally, in the last chapter, he states, "I have a strange feeling sometimes that I am a ghost, sent into the world to minister to my fellowmen, or, rather, to repair the wrongs I have already done. May the world be brighter for me, at least in those portiions of it, where my darkness falls not.
Thus I, who set out to find my Ideal, came back rejoicing that I had lost my Shadow."

The book is utterly strange, and I don't know if I recommend it to just anyone. But there are gems in it worth carrying. Several times I considered just putting it down, but in the end I really enjoyed it, and I'm glad I finished it.

Activities

2009-05-11T13:19:00.001-07:00

At this point in time, I have been getting agitated about my job. I keep pouring myself into activities, and I'm really enjoying them, but I want to be done waiting tables. It is the least fulfilling thing about my life. Everything else is exciting right now. We started playing Ultimate Frisbee every Saturday at noon, and that's been really fun. We've been doing dancing lessons on Saturday afternoon. I started playing bass for the worship team at church this weekend. A friend of mine and I are planning an Improv night, where we will be doing improv games and activities. I recently finished a shorter book called "Trumpet," and I'm planning on sending it to a publisher. It's an inspirational book that I think is really creative and I really like.

So I'm doing a lot, and I'm enjoying life with my wife and our friends here in Utah. And then I go to work, and all that excitement goes away. All that fulfillment disappears. I feel I need God's favor more than ever, but I'm in this balance between being responsible and thinking maybe I'm just supposed to trust him. I mean, I know I'm supposed to have faith - it's just figuring out what faith is telling me to do. Maybe it means I keep going to work and trust that God will keep me going until such time as other opportunities present themselves. I don't know.

Part of me hesitates to ask God for "favor," because it sounds like a televangelist or something like that, but I think the bible paints a pretty good picture of seeking God's favor. I just don't want it to sound like it lacks depth or reveals some kind of unwillingness to endure or to give my all for God.

Anyway, the point is, I try to think positive - and maybe I don't spend enough time in prayer and meditation, but I want my life to be led by the voice of God, by his Spirit's whisper in my mind, and sometimes it just feels like I'm just fumbling my way through.

People talk about living life by God's power or living on your own power. But no one has ever been able to explain what that really means to me. I mean I understand the idea, and maybe there's some truth to it. But what is the difference, specifically. Suppose God asks me to plant a tree. Don't I simply go out, dig a hole, fill in the hole with a little sapling, water it and watch it grow? I mean, is there a way to do that "On my own power" that actually looks different than doing it "by God's power?" Or say I want to tell a friend about Jesus, but I get in this attitude of not needing some extra boost from God's spirit, and I go try to speak to people "on my own power." What does that mean? It seems like what people mean when they say that is that there is some indistinct inner attitude or feeling which, felt a certain way, is centered on God, and felt a different way is relying on the self. But I don't know what that means exactly and I certainly don't know how to measure it or gauge how well I'm accomplishing it.

I get this suspicion that what we're really supposed to do is pray, ask for God's guidance and assistance, enjoy his presence, and then act. And this is what I've been trying to do, perhaps not enough of it, and I've ended up where I am now. And of course, I have a lot of things going for me. I just find that I let a lack of money control too much of my life, and I limit my thinking about what I can do and what I can experience, when God says "I can do all things"

"Through Christ."

So I'm back again at the question: what does that mean, "Through Christ?"

Till we have Faces

2009-04-22T23:20:00.000-07:00

I just realized that I neglected to blog about the book I read a few months ago: Til we have Faces, by C.S.Lewis. I will try to dredge up my thoughts from memory with as much freshness as possible.

As usual, Lewis writes with a compelling clarity. In this case I found it difficult to see where he was going with the story, and I wondered several times if there would be a "point" to it, or if it was merely for our enjoyment, to delve into the genre of "myth" and maybe feel something. And I did not see it all coming until the very end, when it suddenly rose up and overwhelmed me.

I first came across the book in high school. During my senior year I had a study hall hour, during which I often went to the library. I found the book there and read parts of it during that hour, picking it up off the shelf several times on different days, but I never actually checked it out, though I don't know why. The story stuck in my mind, the feeling of it, the depth of it, and I didn't know why that was either, for there was nothing I could really point out about it to say, "here's why everyone must read this book." So I held it in my heart for years that I wanted to one day pick it up again and read it all the way through. There were always other books to read and other tasks to accomplish. So recently I read it, not ever having found out the meaning of the Title. Til We Have Faces always seemed odd and strangely interesting, but the full line comes in near the end of the book.

A woman in the story has a complaint against the gods, because of the sorrows in her life, and finally she faces them, and she makes her complaint, only it wasn't the carefully crafted thing she had been writing, building her noble case against them. It was the ravings of her heart that she read to them and her complaint, heard aloud, became her answer. And she reflects on it as follows:

"The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, 'Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.' A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?"

Somehow it took all our bitterness and suffering and put it in perspective so grand we cannot even fathom the whole truth, like Jonah whining about his vine, chastized by a god who sees ultimately greater and more. I cannot communicate here fully what this accomplishes for me, but I can say that it is a treasure to hold.

"What's Your Story?"

2009-03-04T23:53:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time, I know, and I still don't really know what to write about, but I'm in one of those moods, and I wanted to get something down. It seems like not much has happened since last I wrote. We had our first Arts Group presentation soon after my last post, and it went over very well. We had Christmas and New Years. I wrote a Mafia Murder Mystery party, and our group of friends went through it on New Years, and it was a huge success. Since then, life has kind of just gone by.

The Arts Group is now planning a new presentation event, centered on the theme entitled, "What's Your Story?" Our first event was on the theme of Freedom, and while it was great, we wanted to move into a different approach to art. After hearing my brother speak at church over Christmas and talking about my parents' church "telling each other their stories" as a vital role of community, we decided we wanted the arts group to do something a little more intimate. We wanted to do something that forced the artist (or pseudo-artist) to delve deap into their experience and inner person and communicate their story with the community. We wanted to tell one another the intimate core of who we were and what we've gone through.

For this event I am actually working on a puppet show. Strange as that may sound, it's something I've been wanting to do for a long time. It just so happens that the pastor of E-vin and his wife are pretty much experts on puppets. We've been spending the last few weeks working hard on making puppets (not just for my show - there's a lot of interest in utilizing them for children's activities). It's a little difficult for me to visualize "telling my story" through a puppet show, but my ideas are coming together just fine, and I think it will work out.

So what, you might ask, is my story? I hesitate to share, if only for the people who might see the puppet show and miss out on the suspense. But I think I need to:

When I was in High School, I remember going to a play at the Chanhassen dinner theatre. I don't remember what the show was or what it was about. All I remember was that at some point, the leading male role did a song and at the end of the song he had his arms spread wide, soaking in the applause of the crowd. I thought to myself at the time that that was what I wanted. I wanted to play a great leading role, be a hero, maybe kiss the girl, and soak in the applause of an appreciative crowd. I think there's a difference between mere vanity and truly relishing the moment, and I now see nothing wrong with this desire. My senior year in High School, I played Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. Now you might say that this was just high school, nothing special, not anywhere near the big leagues. But you need to understand that I still get comments to this very day about my performance in that play. And the scale is not really the point anyway. The point is that I got a great role, played it very well, and at the end of "If I were a Rich Man" I had my hands up in the air and I was soaking in the applause of an appreciative crowd. There may have been no kissing girls involved, but the heart of the idea was there. I saw myself in the spotlight and it came to be.

When I got to college, I had a conversation with a guy who was a senior at the time, when I was only a freshman. I remember very well that he told me when he first got to college, he thought he would be the big man on campus, leading all the great Campus Ministries and heading up vibrant activities. But it didn't happen. It was like he was telling me, "I'm nothing special and neither are you." I journaled recently, "In college I started to believe I was nobody special, and I thought I was learning to be humble. I want to believe once again that I am destined for great things."

When we are young, many of us are told that we are special, that we're raally going places, that God has great plans for our lives. Then many of us go off and meet people who have become jaded through disappointment and failures. And they'll tell us how they used to think like we did and how "life" showed them otherwise. We start to believe that maybe our parents just thought we were special because of how much they loved us. Maybe it's not right for us to think so highly of ourselves. Maybe we shouldn't expect great things to happen.

I don't know exactly where I've been since then. I just know I haven't been in a play with my hands outstretched, soaking in the applause of an appreciative crowd. So in the past few years I've been engrossed in the attempt to start thinking positive, and that has led me full circle. I lament the attitude of self-abasement that I absorbed, and I've come to a new strength of faith. I've come to believe that if we are to live our lives in faithfulness to the calling of Christ upon it, we have to believe and think positive. I've been delving into what it means to ask anything in jesus name and believe we've received it. There is a lot of controversy in the church over what that means, but at the very least I am sure that it means we're supposed to dream big and believe. We're supposed to believe in the unseen and we're supposed to live a full life in the spirit of God.

So that's my story, and I'm going to try to communicate it through this puppet show. I'm writing two songs. Cassie is playing one of my puppets named Starla, who will be the voice of positivity and happiness and faith, and she'll be singing one of the songs. And my other puppet is Joe the Vampire, who will be the voice of Mediocrity, cynicism, and self-abasement. It should be fun. I'm really glad I wrote all this down. I'm really enjoying making the puppets, and it's one of the few things happening right now to really mark the passing of time in my mind. Anyway, the presentation is going to be two weeks after Easter, so I've got some time still, but there's a lot left to do. I look forward to it.

Church

2008-12-03T19:31:00.001-08:00

My experience in Church in the past several years has been mixed. I went to Solomon's Porch for four years in Minnesota, and I miss it terribly today. It was a different experience, far different than any church I've ever been. It was a place where I felt comfortable, because I was able to be myself and I was accepted. It was one of the few places in my life where no one really asked me why I don't talk more or make constant comments about how quiet I am. You'd be surprised how many places you find people who are just plain leery of people who are quiet. They wonder what's wrong with you. Me, I'm just not a big fan of small talk. At Solomon's Porch, I felt like that was alright, even a good thing. I suppose I was more outgoing there than a lot of other places, because I liked the place from the get-go and I wanted to be involved. However it worked out, the place was a harbor to me, a place of openness and acceptance, and I went to church with anticipation. It was also a place where I was challenged. There were opportunities to get involved in helpful services, and it was a challenge to me to get off my butt and do something - something more than joining a small group or something "spiritual."

I also, for two years, went to a church called Emmaus Road, leading music for them every week. That was difficult for me, for several reasons. Mainly, I think, was the distance. The place was a 45 minute drive from where I lived, and getting involved in anything other than the music was more than I was willing to invest, due to the extra distance. It doesn't seem like much, but going somewhere that's that far away, in addition to work and other activities you're into, and doing so more than twice a week, is a little much. It made it difficult for me to feel a part of the community. I was asked a couple of times if ER was somewhere I would attend if I wasn't leading music (which I got paid a small wage to do). I still think I would have gone there if I lived closer, didn't already have Solomon's Porch, and could force myself to get up in the morning. And that's saying a lot, because before Solomon's Porch, there wasn't anywhere that I considered a home church for me (other than the one a grew up in, but that changed after I went to college). But it was also a difficult thing at Emmaus Road, because of all the expectations there. It seemed like we couldn't just be the people of God, and come together to share our lives together and live in community. There was always this sense I felt like we were trying to appease people, trying to get them to like us, so that they'd go to our church and we'd be successful. I mean there were some times that problems came up, issues that people had, where we just said - that's just plain too bad. But it just seemed to me like we were still looking for the right formula to get the job done. We had ideas about being a church where that wasn't the case, but when it came down to "how are we going to do this," we just went right back to the formula. By the end of my time there, I think I was liking it much better, and I felt much more connected to several of the people there (several families had left by that time and new ones had joined in, so that made a difference). But that's when I went to Africa, met Cassie and made plans to move to Utah.

Since coming to Salt Lake, I've had a hard time with Church. There's nothing here like Solomon's Porch. When I got here, Cassie was going to a church plant called E-Vin. It's a Vineyard church in town, and the pastor is Cassie's former youth pastor (I think). They were meeting in a hotel, one of those meeting rooms you can rent out, which meant that they would set up and take down before and after the Sunday service, and there wasn't a ton going on in the space. I visited a couple of times, but I was not impressed, and I missed SP so much, I don't think I could stomach anything else. We also had a lot of friends who went to another Vineyard church nearby, and we've gone to a few events there over the past couple years, but it's not a place I wanted to attend either. We also tried one other church that was downtown, and it seemed like it might be a good thing, but when we got there, neither one of us liked it all that much. It was too much a place where we could just get lost in the mix.

I don't like judging churches based on the teachings or the music, but it's really hard not to. I dont' know if I burned myself out on worship music in general, or what, but I just don't get into it. And as far as teachings go, I've heard all the basics before. When I hear sermon after sermon on how Jesus loves you, or anything like that, I just need to get out. I'm not one of those people who can just sit there and say "amen." Without a chance to engage with what we're talking about, it's usually just pointless for me. Like I said, I don't like judging churches on those things only, but I don't like sitting through them either. The biggest problem for me has been that element of involvment. I need to feel like I'm a part of things, like I'm doing something valuable. So for a while, I didn't go to church. Cassie and I went to a young adults Bible Study two or three times a month, and I slept in on Sunday mornings.

Cassie wasn't going to E-vin much after we got married, either. We were both keeping our eyes and ears open for something we really felt was right, but I didn't want to just go church "shopping," a term I abhor. Then we heard that E-vin was getting a place of its own, which I thought might show some promise. We started going there at least some of the time, and I tried to get involved in discussion if there was any. Finally, they got their new place, and after talking with the pastor and his wife, I was feeling pretty good about it, because they wanted it to be a place with a lot of creative expression and where things were done differently.

In some ways I was reminded of Emmaus Road. It was a church plant, just getting on its feet, hoping to flourish and wanting to do things differently, wanting to not be a normal church. There was that element of formula, but there was also the air of accomplishment. In short time they made great progress in remodeling the place, a former court. I went in to help a couple of times, but not as much as I wanted. Still, I thought to myself that here I might be able to get involved.

Some time passed, and we were in church on Sunday morning, and I was getting frustrated. I don't know if I could sit through another sermon or sing one more song. It felt so stale to me. I've heard it all before, sung it all before. I needed something to do, something valuable to contribute. I left the room and paced about. I left the building and walked along the sidewalk. I came back and tried to endure it. I left again and walked around. When I got back I told Cassie I wanted to start something, and we talked to the pastor about having a meeting about art. Thus was born the E-Vin Arts Group, which meets every Tuesday night. Right now we're planning to present art that we've been working on in a couple of Sundays from now. It's also one of the highlights of my week.

I don't know why I'm going through all this, other than to let people know that I'm really happy being involved in a church in a way that is vibrant and productive. And I guess if there are people around who are having a hard time with "church," whether it is finding a church or dealing with the one they have, it is important to get involved in some way that sparks your passion, and if there isn't anything like that, then start something. We can't just attend a church. That is why I think so many youth groups have such a stronger passion and sense of vibrant activity than their own churches, because they tend to be more activity oriented, they emphasize involvement, participation, and experience.

So that's what I have to say for now. It's been a good experience. There's no substitute for Solomon's Porch, but I feel like we have a place and a community to be a part of, and something to contribute.

Perspective shift

2008-11-15T12:18:00.000-08:00

So I've still been reading this book, A New Kind of Christian, and I've been trying to think of when it was, primarily, that my perspective really shifted. I know it was gradual, but by the time I was done with college, I no longer felt at home in most church experiences, specifically, most sermnizing that I found. Then I stepped into Solomon's porch, where the pastor could freely admit that he didn't know if something in the Bible meant one thing or another or could say that he didn't think a portion of the bible was really relevant to the way we were doing things now, and all the practices were a creation in themselves, liturgies that really meant something, personal stories being shared, everyone sitting in the round, facing one another, music that was written by the community and reflected the journey of that community, art happening continually, and much more. And I stepped into this church, and something within me finally found a home for who I had become. I don't know if I would have felt the same when I was in high school or not, and I guess there's no way to know. I just know that a lot of the ideas in this book are ideas that I've encountered before and actually found embodied or celebrated at Solomon's porch, and they're ideas that I found to fit just where I was theologically and personally.

So I'm trying to discover in my memory, when it was that my perspective shifted.

I remember my Intro to Biblical Studies class, taught by Scot McKnight, when we talked about James, and his assertion that salvation (or justification) is "not only by faith, but also through works." Scot described this passage as a direct, opposing response to Paul's assertion that salvation is "through faith, not by works." I guess it was the first time that I had heard someone in authority on biblical issues act is if the goal were not to synthesize everything into a nice compact whole. In our modern mindsets (modern being a period from around maybe the 1500s to a little while ago) we look at the Bible and try to figure out how they are all saying the same thing, or how they all fit together as a cohesive unit. In class I raised my hand and said something about this, without really knowing what was going on, and I was made to feel quite stupid for it.

The point of that experience was to learn that there are other ways. Even if my teacher had been wrong, it would still show that a man who truly loved God could have a different way of looking at the Bible and still be a man who loved God. As it was I saw that he was pretty much right. People could easily take Paul's words and conclude that they don't have to do good works, and they could be saved anyway. Even Paul didn't go that far and sometimes warned against this, but James probably felt he had to set the record straight, and make the truth plain - no, you have to have good works. If you don't that so-called "faith" that you've been saved through doeasn't mean squat.

So maybe that was a big part of the shift for me. And throughout my education in Biblical studies, along with my own personal reading time, I came to a different understanding of how to read the bible, and I developed a kind of aversion to systematic theology.

Another example, and I believe this must have been around the same time, I was in a C.S.Lewis class, and in it we were required to do a paper on anything C.S.Lewis. I went to the library and picked up a book that I had never noticed before, called "the Great Divorce." In the Great Divorce, Lewis creates an afterlife and focuses on people going to hell. In this hell, the world is much the same, only without God in it. People live on the earth and go about their days, drifting further and further apart from one another and winding up in eventual misery. But in this hell there is a bus, a flying bus that anyone can take up to heaven. Woo-hoo, a bus to heaven. When they get to the outskirts of heaven, they're met by a number of angels and heaven dwellers, who offer to lead them up into the great city. But first there's a bit of discourse. First of all, the ground itself is so real, so strong, so incredibly lively, that it is too hard to walk on. The grass bites up through their shoes, the sun is too bright, the rain is too wet, that kind of thing. Their hosts tell them that they'll soon grow into it as they travel, and they'll learn to enjoy it, but this dilemma is in itself enough to send several people back on the bus. Other people have other problems with heaven. Some of them don't want to live under God's rules, they want to live however they pleased, just like they did on earth. Others are looking for Nirvana and refuse to accept their predicament as reality. Pretty much everybody has a problem with heaven, and everybody gets back on the bus and goes back down to hell, where they're free to live out their miserable existence as they please.

On the one hand, this story might pass under the radar of those who will look at it and go, "yeah, that's right. Everybody who goes to hell belongs there." But if you look at it carefully, you can see that's a very subversive idea in our modern contexts. First of all it's saying that the afterlife is not just a verdict and a sentence based on one certain infraction or another, which is how we like to see it in modern Christianity. You've done wrong, you go to hell, and without Jesus to step in and bring you to heaven, you're doomed. It's really a harsh metaphor, and it's one I find disturbing. I much prefer the loving father metaphor, who wants all of his prodigal sons to return and welcomes them with open arms. This story suggests that that love may continue after death.

So I ended up writing my paper on this book. I stayed in that library until like 3 in the morning, reading it. And I ended up mulling over the story for years to come. I consider it a shift in my focus, one that I think I had been longing for. Life was no longer just about heaven and hell, like so many modern evangelicals would have it. Rather, heaven and hell were merely about life. What we did and who we became in this life suddenly became incredibly important. Other religions seemed to have important things to say, now, because they weren't just all wrong, any more than we were all right. It wasn't just about being wrong or right. It was about becoming more real or less real. It was about becoming people who could walk in the reality of that kind of a heaven. And it was about welcoming others instead of ostracizing them. I wondered if there were those who did not know Jesus, who would get to this heaven and say, "okay, I think I can do this." I wondered if Ghandi, who said positive things about Jesus and merely disliked his followers, would get off the bus, find a heaven that he has yearned for throughout life and take the trek up to the city of God.

Those two examples were just my freshman year. I remember going home at some points throughout college and talking theology with my mom and dad, who worried about having sent their son to "that liberal school," but who nonetheless were the best parents one could have and entrusted me to God's care, I think for the better.

Anyway, there is a lot here and there is a lot more beneath the surface and there isn't much explanation, so you'd have to read A New Kind of Christian to get more of what I'm talking about. I'm just left in wonder about my life and finding myself in this different place. I mean I was always questioning, growing up. But after college, I found that I had changed, and I don't think I saw all the changes happening even though I was thoroughly aware of the controversies as they happened, I just didn't see it as an overarching push toward a whole new perspective. If someone told me I'd be here, believing these things or not believing others, when I was in high school, I don't know what I would say. I think I had a relatively open mind at that age, for I was able to carry on conversations with people of other religions or no religion at all, without offending them. That in itself I think proves something good about where I was. But life is strange sometimes, and we end up in places we'd never thought we'd be, and sometimes it's better than the places we had dreamed for ourselves.

A New Kind of Christian, initial thoughts.

2008-11-12T00:25:00.000-08:00

Recently, I lent my copy of "A New Kind of Christian" to a friend, but it turns out, I never actually got past the second or third chapter, even though I really liked what it said. So yesterday I got the book back, and I started reading it, which wa convenient, because I had just finished reading another book and was wondering what to read next. So I'm reading this book, and it really gets me excited. Seriously, the struggle this guy is having with the transition the church is going through is really cool, because I've thought so many of the same things. And now I'm at the point where I can't even stand church in the old frameworks, but when I imagine a church immersed in different ways of thinking, I actually get teary-eyed. There is something in me now, and I think it has grown in me since even before college, that yearns for a different kind of experience.

Heere's some words from the book that I liked:

"It's not just burnout. It's more like I'm losing my faith - well, not exactly that, but I feel that I'm losing the whole framework for my faith. You know, I keep pushing everything into these little cubbyholes, these little boxes, the little systems I got in seminary and even before that - in Sunday school and summer camp and from my parents. But life is too messy to fit."

"Most modern people love to relativize the viewpoints of the others against the unquestioned superiority of their own modern viewpoint. But in a way you cross the threshold into postmodernity the moment you turn your critical scrutiny from others to yourself, when you relativize your own modern viewpoint. When you do thi, everything changes. It is like a conversion. You can't go back. You begin to see that what seemed like pure objective certainty really depends heavily on a subjective preference for yur personal viewpoint.

A quote from C.S.Lewis:

"It would... be subtly misleading to say, 'the medievals thought the universe to be like that, but we know it to be like this.' Part of what we now know is that we cannot, in the old sense, "Know what the universe is like" and that no model we can build will be, in that old sense, 'like' it.... There is no question here of the old Model's being shattered by the inrush of new phenomena. The truth would seem to be the reverse; that when changes in the human mind produce a sufficient disrelish of the old Model and a sufficient hankering for some new one, phenomena to support that new one will obediently turn up. I do not at all mean that these new phenomena are illusory. Nature has all sorts of phenomena in stock and can suit many different tastes."

Another good spot in the book, a girl is speaking after hearing a lecture from "Neo":

"I don't really have a question, but I just wanted to say that everywhere in my life except here and at church, I think I am postmodern. But I think when I go anyplace religious or Christian, I just sort of switch. It's like I click into my parents' way of thinking for an hour, and then I switch back. It's really cool to think that I might not have to keep switching back and forth and could just be one person all the time."

And one of my favorite spots, which I have tried to say to people with a fraction of the success of this great paragraph.

"I protested: 'Neo, I never said that my interpretations were infallible. I'm just saying that the Bible itself is.' He responded, 'Well, I'm wondering, if you have an infallible text, but all your interpretations of it are admittedly fallible, then you at least have to always be open to being corrected about your interpretations, right?' I was nodding again. Yes. Of course. Neo kept talking. 'So the authoritative text is never what I say about the text or even what I understand the text to say but rather what God means the text to say, right? So the real authority does not reside in the text itself, in the ink on paper, which is always open to misinterpretation - sometimes, history tells us, horrific and dangerous misinterpretation. Instead, the real authority lies in God, who is there behind the text or beyond it or abovie it, right? In other words, the authority is not in what I say the text says but in what God says the text says.'"

the thought continues in a later paragraph

"He continued, 'what if the real issue is not the authority of the text down on this line but rather the authority of God, moving mysteriously up here on a higher level, a foot above the ground? What if the issue isn't a book that we can misinterpret with amazing creativity but rather the will of God, the intent of God, the desire of God the wisdom of God - maybe we could say the kingdom of God?"

These are rich ideas here, but you might need to read the book to really know what i'm saying. Just understand that it's a lot like the woman at the well asking about the debate over which mountain to worship on. Jesus response is at first glance not very helpful, but it is incredibly insightful and very important. He basically makes the case that the argument you're having doesn't even translate into the will of God, because it's God's intention to dwell in your hearts. We take a lot of our disagreements over this little theological tidbit or another, and I think God's often telling us, no, the real issue is greater than that.

So I like the book, and I hope I stick with it this time. I don't exactly know how I came to be here in this place where I find all this talk about transition exciting instead of threatening, but i've been here a while, and I expect it to only get better from here.

Writing

2008-11-09T15:32:00.000-08:00

I wrote a short story this summer about Onefist Jel, one of my protagonists in my novel. First I wrote it and sent it in to a critiquing group called critters. It's a good group, and it requires you to critique several other stories before you can get yours onto the list for the week. Anyway, after getting feedback from several critiquers, some good, some not so good, I revised it and began sending it in to different fantasy/fiction magazines, without success.

Sometimes I slack off on the task of sending in submissions, especially after getting frustrated. So after a couple of sendings with either a negative response or no response at all, I forgot about it for a few months, until recently I sent it in again. For the first time, I got a response that was informative, telling me why it was not accepted, what the story lacked or had that was distracting or detracting. The magazine editor was also complimenting, for she mentioned some good things, too. That was the nicest rejection letter I've gotten. She told me I could feel free to resend it after revising the thing, which I have since been inspired to do.

It so happened that while visiting the website for this magazine, I signed the guestbook, and mentioned that the site was rather haphazard. So in respones to this comment, the same editor, emailed me asking what exactly they could do better. It seemed like she could have been a little bit put out by receiving such a remark without specific suggestions or legitimate points (kind of like receiving a rejection letter that doesn't tell you what's wrong with your work. But she also said that if I wrote back with more specific suggestions, she would send me a free copy. I did so, remarking on several ways in which the site needed better organization. It turned out to be a bit of a critique on the site, based on the overall appeal and marketability that people are looking for. It was very much like the writing process, where readers/publishers are looking for a nice package that fits all the rules and is sure to please a majority, but at the same time one wants to be unique and different than all the other stuff out there. It was kind of funny, because she had legitimately told me how my work doesn't fit, and now I was legitimately telling her how hers didn't fit.

So anyway, I've just finished revising/rewriting the short story, Onefist Jel and the Boxer, and I plan to send it back again. I'm wondering if I should send it back through the critique group again. I think I like it. Maybe I'll wait until I get that magazine copy she promised me, and see how my story measure up to the ones in there. That's it for now. It's been a good weekend. I'm hoping the week is great.

Energy

2008-11-03T00:54:00.000-08:00

Why are both candidates talking about clean coal, when we have the technology to convert to wind and solar energy? Is this really a question anymore? Are we serious? Have we gone so far down this path, that we're not even willing to look?

Maybe I'm getting a lot of mixed messages, but from what I understand of where the technology is at right now, we could be free of these limited resources and be completely reliant on natural, clean energy to power our homes, but we don't because a bunch of corporate executives don't want to lose profits, and that scares everybody who stands to lose a job in the related industry, but come on. What ever happened to progress? What happened to "change?" I want a new system.

Jobs

2008-10-28T22:26:00.000-07:00

I am incredibly glad that the election will soon be over. Only one week, and there will be no more of this crap. America will vote and one man will be the next president. I am just tired of this race for the white house. Do I still watch the political news every night? Yeah, okay. But seriously. We have the most unstable stock market since the GD. Today it shot up 900 points. That's not the kind of gains I like to see. Blah, it's just a mess.

Today I served a woman who had just lost her job. She was laid off from American Express. Apparently it was a big day for cuts. It felt strange to me, because I keep hearing about the affects of our economy and people losing jobs, but I rarely meet them, I guess, because my employers don't work that way on such a low level. Servers get fired sometimes, but we don't get laid off. The turnover rate is so high, we're constantly losing people anyway, and the pay is so low, cutting one server from the floor each day doesn't change the company's profits that much. And it just rarely happens to people I know and spend time with. And here someone was having just experienced it. And she was really nice, as she struggled to hold herself together. She had lunch with a friend (or relative), and I gave them good service, and they were both very thankful, and it was cool. I said, "have a good day," and she had a doubtful response, to which I replied that she should think positive, and she agreed.

I don't know what it is about it, but it is just different when it's staring you in the face. My guess is that this woman will be fine. She'll bounce back, she'll think positive and work to achieve her goals and she'll make ends meet and more. This country is the kind of place where people can do just that.

I guess it was just a little unnerving, as I think about where this country is going and realize, no one knows.

Easy Yoke

2008-10-23T16:12:00.001-07:00

First of all, I want to complain for a minute about people on facebook, with whom I have never been friends in my life, and when it has been years since I was loosely acquainted with them, and now they want to be my friend on facebook. I'm sorry, I have no interest in reconnecting with those people, and I can't imagine why they would want to be in contact with me. I just think it's silly.

Anyway, on to what I consider more interesting thoughts. Keeping in the back of my mind the vein of my previous post, I have for several years, been fascinated by Jesus' words, "my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." When I was in junior high school, I read Ecclesiastes, and I was interested to find a little tidbit about wisdom, that said, "wisdom brightens the face and softens its hard appearance." It was the first time I had thought of wisdom that way. Typically, I imagined a wise man as somber and thoughtful, possibly stressed and lined, because of all the weighty matters on his mind. I pictured an old man stooped with the weight of the world on his shoulders. I pictured Jesus carrying his cross. But these words about wisdom began to change my thinking, because they are clearly indicating that wisdom makes a person happy and allows people to live with peace in their hearts. I began to believe that despite Jesus and his apostle's words about suffering, the way of God was really about joy and peace.

As I was growing up, I often heard that being a christian, being a follower of Jesus, was hard. It was something to be considered carefully, because there was great cost involved. These ideas had significant scriptural basis. Jesus specifically told his followers to count the cost, just like someeone building a tower will find out how much it will take in labor and materials and figure out if he had everything he needed to complete the project before beginning it, so we should do with Jesus. Jesus sent people away, because they thought following him would be cushy or fun, and he reminded them, "foxes had holes and birds have nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his head." Was this just his way of telling people they should be serious about what they were doing, or was he trying to tell them this was going to be difficult, that it wasn't going to be a walk in the park. That it wouldn't be... easy?

I don't know the correct balance between "my yoke is easy" and "take up your cross," but I do think that a great portion of the church is wondering how to come to that place and feel the easy yoke on their shoulders. I myself am wondering what we're missing. Sometimes I'm wondering if we're just missing the mindset. Maybe if we believed that wisdom brightened the face, we would seek that kind of wisdom and find it. Perhaps if we seek, then we'll find.

Two Versions

2008-10-21T00:16:00.000-07:00

So I've been thinking recently about Jesus' teachings and the strange dichotomy that resides in them all together. Mainly right now I'm thinking of Jesus' words about riches and poverty. It's this strange thing, and Andrew's blog reminded me of it, when he mentioned how Father Chacour interpreted the scriptures in temporal terms rather than hyperspiritual.

There are two versions of the sermon on the mount: one in Luke and one in Matthew. In Luke, Jesus says, "Blessed are the poor." In Matthew, "Blessed are the poor in spirit." While Luke goes out of his way to portray Jesus as a man of the poor, who went out of his way to eat and drink and fellowship with the outcast and oppressed, Matthew focuses on his clash with pharisaical hypocrisy and really living the life of total obedience to the Father's will. (At least, that's the way I see it. If you're a Bible scholar, feel free to contradict me with your superior knowledge/understanding). So perhaps it's a little of both, the spiritual and the temporal. But what's the right balance?

I have difficulty balancing Jesus saying things like, "if anyone comes after me he must take up his cross and follow me," with, "My yoke is easy and my burden is light." On the one hand he says that it's tough to follow him, and those who come to follow him should consider the cost of doing so, and on the other he says flat out, it's easy. It seems to me a bit paradoxical. He sends the rich man away, because he's unwilling to part with his riches. But he tells his followers to ask in his name for anything they want, believe they've received it, and it will be theirs. Now, I feel a little bit uneasy when either of these emphases are taken to the extreme.

On the one hand, there are people who think we must live in poverty, give everything we can possibly give for the good of others and heaven forbid we enjoy anything we've received ourselves. It's ultra-unselfishness, and it just seems to take the joy out of anything. Every achievement or success is tainted with the necessary awareness of the rest of the world's suffering and lack. I am sorry, but I cannot believe that this is the reason God created the world. And there is just way too much of the story of God, in scripture and history, of God's blessing his people with temporal good, to believe that such is our calling. Whether it was Job, Noah, Abraham, David, God blessed them, he increased their land, their wealth, their station, along with his presence and providence. You can say that these were special cases, for certainly there were many others who did not enjoy such blessing, including several prophets, who suffered greatly. But then, I would say, perhaps these were the special cases. Perhaps both extremes are special cases.

There is also the prosperity theology extreme to consider. God does not want you to suffer or struggle in life, they say. They put special emphasis on his yoke being easy and on receiving anything you ask for. They may tell you that God wants you to have a house, a new car, a great job, an overflowing bank account, a cushy retirement, everything your heard could dream of, and more. Since God loves you, he wants you to have everything that makes you truly happy. It's not necessarily all material, but it's the whole package. But what do they say about taking up your cross? What do they say about sharing in Christ's sufferings, or about giving all that you have? It's difficult to find direct answers. What do they say about Christ's teachings, "do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven..."

There seems to be a contradiction with Jesus, and I've been trying to fathom it, trying to balance it.

There are a couple of things to consider, for those who want to discount the prosperity camp entirely:
There are a lot of little tidbits, that I find incredibly interesting in this matter. There is the story of the old woman who gave two very small copper coins, and the rich men who gave gold and silver by the handful. I notice that jesus' question to his disciples was not, "whose gift was acceptable to God," nor, "who gave what God called them to give." His question was simply, "Who gave more?" The answer was that the woman gave more because she gave everything she had, while the others gave out of their abundance. I find it interesting that Jesus didn't turn to his followers and say, "that is the kind of giver you all should be," nor did he say, "go and do likewise." He merely let the comparison stand. I have to conclude that the comparison itself is the point, not the heart of giving. The point of the question was about judgment. When we look around and say, who's giving more, or who's doing more, the point is, we can't really know, because we don't know what each is giving from. It's really easy to see someone giving millions of dollars and say, what an amazing person, but to look down our noses and those who barely give anything at all, but that is essentially the problem. It wasn't that the rich men weren't giving enough. It was that they were being credited with incredible goodness and others were not. It fits in with one of Jesus' most common themes: judge not, lest ye be judged.

Abraham: the story of Abraham, who was told in a dream to sacrifice his son, I also find interesting. I find it especially poignant that the passage makes a point of the fact that Abraham had a justification for his obedience. He did not sit and reason to himself, the lord giveth and the lord taketh away. He is God and I am not. Unquestioning obedience... must do what God says, no matter the consequences. No, Abraham specifically reasoned to himself that God could raise Isaac from the dead. Abraham followed a God who blessed him and made him certain promises. If God had said in the dream, "Sorry Abraham, but my promise no longer stands and I want you to sacrifice your son to me, because I'm God and you have to do what I say, and don't think for a moment that you will ever see your son again," do you think Abraham would have had the same response? Considering the evidence in the story, I think not. But I glean from this story and others that sacrifice is not a matter of submission to a necessary state of poverty, but rather merely a test of faith in a God who blesses his people.

I say these things, not to boost the prosperity camp's claims, so much as to cast some shadow over the opposite extreme, which seems to hold more sway with a lot of well-intentioned Christians.

There is much, much more to this topic to be mulled over, debated, and set in hopefully some appropriate balance, but that's a lot for right now. Let me just say, I'm trying to take Jesus at his word, plain and simple, taking all of his words as weighty and substantial.

My thoughts on Disillusionment

2008-09-22T16:14:00.000-07:00

Working off of my last post, I've been thinking about what I said about disillusionment. It's just something I feel the need to mull over, because I often find myself wishing and sometimes praying for others to experience it. I guess I do this because my seasons of disillusionment have led to the best times of my life, over and above my few moments of, say, enlightenment or breakthrough. I'm not sure why that is, exactly, but I find that the pain and confusion are like the pangs of birth. Whenever there is a new life blooming, there seems to be groaning to usher it in.

So I find myself wondering, is this the way of life? Is this just how it works? Do we have to dismantle everything in order to lay a new foundation? Primarily, is there another way? Can we experience elation through enlightenment, or must we first enter into sorrow?

In the scriptures there are a few illustrations of what I'm talking about: "Weeping may last for a night, but joy comes in the morning," that kind of thing. But I also remember that according to the creation/fall story, women have childbearing pain because of the fall. It's not something that is part of the original plan; it's a result of our fallen nature. Maybe this is precisely the point of this story: that were we to be alligned with the holiness and goodness of God, then life would spring forth without pain, but because we cling to our own pride and live in selfishness and sin, we need to go through pain in the dismantling process, tearing apart the structure that we have built up through our fallen nature, in order to finally feel the freedom and vitality of the life of God growing in us.

Those are my thoughts.

missionaries

2008-09-20T10:43:00.000-07:00

We finally got visited today. Cassie was at work, so I had to entertain our first Mormon missionaries. I let them in to talk for a bit. I started off by telling my own story, and then they did their spiel. It was odd. I don't know who more uncomfortable, me or them. I didn't challenge them on all the weird ideas that their church has, because I couldn't even get them to tell me what they were. All they wanted to talk about was the authority of the prophet and the true church, and if I would only pray about it then the holy ghost would confirm that it was true. So I stuck to that issue, and tried to explain to them that the whole hierarchy thing goes against the teachings of jesus and his apostles, because we all have access to god through the holy spirit. I asked them several times how their doctrines differed from hours, what they believed that wasn't already in the bible, but other than the authority of their prophet, they either didn't know or didn't want to tell me. So to wrap things up, I prayed for them before they left.

I feel a little sorry for those guys. They're so young, and it seems like they've been manipulated and indoctrinated. I can only hope that disillusionment will come soon and lead them to true life. If all they have to go on is the feeling they had when they prayed about whether their church is true or not, then either disillusionment will come or their passion will fade. If their passion merely fades, they'll become stuck in a morass of mediocrity. If they are disillusioned, they will be forced to come to grips with everything that bothers them.

These two guys in particular didn't seem all that knowledgable about their faith. They certainly didn't know the bible well, other than a couple of key verses (strangely similar to the ones Roman Catholics use to support their own heirarchy ideas). And they didn't reveal anything about the doctrines of their church. From what I've heard about those, I'm not even sure these guys would know what they are. Either that, or they've been instructed to stick to the message and not get into anything too controversial.

One thing that bothered me was their smugness. It wasn't like they acted incredibly superior, but they were so convinced of their own rightness, that there was little interest in what I had to say. I reminded me of many christians I've known. Anyway, that was my experience. It wasn't all that special, but I hope I had some kind of effect on those guys. I'd hate to think they came in here for nothing.

Why I don't write.

2008-07-29T23:28:00.000-07:00

I get asked why I haven't written anything in a while, and I guess a significant reason is that, though I have plenty of thoughts, many of them are entirely too personal to be shared with the outside world. I think a lot of my personal difficulties, about trying to become a better person in this world, about trying to get it right, if there even is such a thing. Getting married changes things a little. A lot of what goes on between me and my wife, whether good or bad, is just that: between us. I am proud to say that we work out our differences with a good amount of communication, and we are very happy in our lives together.

Another reason I do not always write, is because I do not want to gripe. When I first started this blog, as you might see if you check the early archives, there were several moments where I wrote about my complaints, sometimes in a funny way, but not really without at least a trace of sincerity. Since that time, as you'll find in some later blogs, I have tried to live with a more positive thought life, with varying degrees of success. So looking at the bright side has been an important part of what I'm trying to do with myself, and that can hardly include blabbing about all my latest angst-ridden endeavors, nor can I go on and on about the discontent I may feel about my current job or what-not. I suppose I could do so, if I spun it as a discussion of my attempts to think positive, but that just seems like a loophole, an excuse to avoid the extra work of actually purging my mind of such things.

Now that I've got that out of the way, let me talk about my job. I'm waiting tables again, or still, or however you want to style it. I've been at Chili's now for a little over a year. My goal is to be done at the end of this year, by doing music full-time. Sometimes I'm plagued with fears that I am just not good enough at the business end of all this: selling myself and making contacts and all that. Other times I'm just frustrated about how long it takes to get things going, and I start wondering if it's my fault, like I shoudl be trying harder or doing something more. I am blessed with incredible assistance already in getting this going, for which I am grateful. But I cannot seem to help but get restless, which makes me irritable, which makes it difficult to maintain a healthy peace of mind and just exacerbates the whole situation.

So I've been trying to think of this as the springtime of my life. On the one hand that means that it's a new and different era, and basically has been since I stepped aboard that plane to Africa. And so I expect to do away with the pattern of winter, a stagnant, barren time, a time for storing up what's truly important and waiting for the newness to come. Now that newness is here, and it's a time for planting, for nourishing, for frolicking, for digging deep furrows in the soil. I should be active, roiling with possibilities and opportunities. At the same time, it often means more waiting. Watching the seeds grow into plants, slowly, and saving the benefits for a brighter future. Then I start to wonder, is this really a helpful analogy? Isn't my life my own to lead? Don't opportunities just come and go, and some people just happen to be there to take them? Doesn't it all just come down to the fact that I need to focus?

So I've worked myself into a very difficult emotional state, and at the moment I can really only ask for your prayers, because for very little reason at all, I am very discouraged.

The Onion is Funny

2008-06-09T18:42:00.000-07:00

WOWOW

The Office quote

2008-05-29T00:13:00.000-07:00

I have a new favorite quote from "The Office"

"You cheated on me, when I specifically asked you not to?"

Like it's Your First

2008-05-22T00:20:00.000-07:00

I don't remember if I've posted on this idea at all before, but if I have, forgive me, because I feel like talking about it again.

There are plenty of people who talk about living each day of our lives as if it is our last. I know what they mean, that they want to be uninhibited, do the things they've always wanted to do, but are normally too afraid to do, because they can't foresee all the consequences. They want to quit their jobs and go to Peru, or do something outrageous. And I think the most admirable piece of this position is that they want to live without worrying about tomorrow, like Jesus taught us. I applaud that, but I think they're missing the point of what Jesus was saying. I don't think Jesus was saying, don't worry about tomorrow, because I'll fix whatever stupid thing you do today. His words were a call to faith and obedience, both wholehearted and incredibly courageous. So mainly, I think this idea of living each day like it's our last is just too abstract; it's too confusing. It clashes with our reasoning.

I propose that we live each day like it's our first. Now, of course, I don't mean that we should live like we were just born, anymore than those others mean we should live like we were 110 years old, too old and weak to get out of bed. What I mean is that we should look at each day as a fresh start, a new opportunity. We should also approach life with a sort of bright-eyed "faith-of-a-child" attitude. Having that courageous faith I was talking about earlier requires us to approach life and God with an unadulterated mind, untouched by the cynicism of age. Now of course, this is just as much a specified analogy, with a lot of holes if you take it too far. We need wisdom and learning to guide us on our way. We need to learn from our experiences along the way, treasure the lessons and the memories. But here is probably my biggest point: we cannot be tied to what has happened before, as if that is all that can happen again. If you feel God let you down, let it go - it's a new day. If you are disappointed with your lot, let it go - it's a new day. Letting go of the past is essential to moving on to a new life, even if "the past" is five minutes ago.

As I'm making this distinction, I'm reminded of the movie Groundhog Day, which I'm sure most of you have seen since it's on TV every year in February, and not a few times on other days of the year. When Bill Murray starts out his cycle of Feb 2nd's, he suddenly realized there are no consequences. He lives each day like it's the last day of his life, stuffing himself, sleeping around, drinking heavily, jumping off cliffs, doing things no sane man would do, because he can. But as the days go on and on, starting over and over, he begins to realize that none of it was what he wanted. So he has to change his thinking. He starts to live each day fresh. He learns to play piano, he helps his neighbors, he does favors, he perfects the smallest acts of kindness, he begins to live each day like it's the first day of a bright and brilliant future. It's kind of a new look at that movie for me, and I like it.

Anyway, I'm realizing now that what I'm talking about is basically the cliche, today is the first day of the rest of your life, and I'm writing this to shy away from cliches, and that really pisses me off. Not really, but I think I have a valid point, because I'm tired of people saying to live today like it's your last. Because it's not your last, and you shouldn't live it like it's your last. But it is your first, in a very real sense, because you are not who you were yesterday - you've changed, you've grown, or maybe you've shrunk, you've learned, or maybe you've forgotten, you've eaten and pooped, your cells have died, and you've made new ones, you've had new experiences, even if they were similar to most of your other experiences, you're a different person, and today is a brand new day for you, so it is definitely a beginning. And if you think, I don't have to live today by yesterday's rules, I don't have to be today what I hated being yesterday, and I can plant a new seed in me that will grow tomorrow, then you've really started something. And I think we're here to start something, and if we end anything, I think it's mainly so that we can start something else. And that's a really positive way of looking at the world, which will only do us some good.

Juno

2008-04-26T12:40:00.000-07:00

First of all, I wish to apologize to all my adoring fans for neglecting to post any blogs in the recent past. I know there are millions of you out there, just rearing to catch a new glimpse inside the brain of one Jacob Ulasich - or at least one or two. Frankly, I just haven't felt like I've had much to write about, and there's little worse in blogging life than going to post and feeling like you don't have anything.

So, Cassie and I watched Juno last night. I had heard it was really good, of course, but some people I knew said it was just okay. Personally, I think it's far better than okay. I loved it. It's awkward moments made me laugh out loud, it was filled with good characters, good acting, simple (probably realistic) interaction. It was just all-around really cool. But what I really liked were its really poignant moments where the story wrestled with the tough questions of love and of life and encouraged not only viewers to do so as well, but young people, who might relate with the fringe attitude of the main character, Juno, who relates "I don't know who I am anymore." It's not just about discovering identity, the cliche theme for troubled youth. It's about discovering what you're made of, what you really care about, what kind of choices you're going to make, what life means to you. Questions that go deeper than an eneagram test. That made it poignant. That made it gritty. That made it something to wrestle with, something to enter into.

I also liked how this film depicted the naivite of youth, without degrading or patronizing young people. It showed how young people were capable of making responsible decisions, but it also portrayed how adults realistically just tend to know a lot more about relationships, marriages, social do's and don'ts, and it's something you can only learn through experiencing the world. It struck me as a very good balance.

Lastly, the ultimate question of the film, can two people keep on loving each other indefinitely? On the surface, not the most groundbreaking question we've ever faced, but the film's response to the question? Basically, we hope so, and we'll sure try. And I really like that. Another balanced response, positive, without dismissing the realities of multiple failures in our culture. Hopeful, without pretence.

In the end, for me the film was about shedding the bullshit. Looking past the mood-swings, the naive idiocy, the strangling difficulties of relationships, and deciding once and for all, what do I really want to live for, and what do I really want to live with? All of that, encased in a charming, rootsy, kind of film, with an odd quirkiness that is totally my style and a fine-honed sense of humor that I found incredibly entertaining. It was great.

Europeans are Coming to New York to Shop

2008-03-28T00:23:00.000-07:00

"Europeans are coming to New York to shop" -- Chris Matthews, Hardball

There's something appealing to me about politicians talking about politics, especially in layman's terms. I hear so much arguing about this or that person's record and this or that person's plan, but I rarely hear them duke it out over ideology in practical terms. I was watching hardball, and in the course of the conversation on economics and the drop in value of the dollar, the above quote was stated. It made me laugh, so I thought I'd write about it. The short debate was interesting, because they talked about the mortgage crisis and the supposed recession(s) we're having, and the talked about them in tangible ways. It felt like a conversation we could all join into (if they'd slow down and stop interrupting each other).

So really, should the government "bail people out"? Is it the government's job to stimulate the economy? I think it was Henry David Thoreau who said that the government that governs least is the one that governs best. Why can't we have republican treehuggers today?

Honestly, I really like the idea of helping the poor and those in crisis, but should it be the government that does it? And where do you draw the line? The free-market advocate claimed that the people stuck in the mortgage crisis are mainly those who made bad financial decisions, and if the government bails them out, it would be an encouragement to repeat those mistakes. In my opinion, he has a point, despite the numerous exceptions of people who made decent decisions and just got in a bind that they couldn't have foreseen. And the argument from there was, why should the american people, 90% of whom are not making those kinds of awful financial decisions, be responsible for bailing out those who are? The response is that it's in everyone's best interest for the nation as a whole to be doing well economically. Your neighbor forecloses on his home and your home goes down in value as a result, stuff like that.

Shift focus: the dollar. The Bush administration gets us into this war (approved by a majority of congress, lets not forget), and then cuts taxes, meaning we're going to war, but we're not paying for it ourselves - instead we're going to borrow money from China. Result that a twelve-year-old probably could have figured out: dollar loses value and "Europeans are coming to New York to shop." Okay, so props to McCain on this one, a republican who voted against the Bush tax cuts, claiming that if we're going to cut taxes we need to pay for it (ie. cut spending, which was not done) - seriously, other republicans criticize him for this? I don't know exactly what I'm getting at, but I think I'd mainly like to point out that we really need a sense of balance.

When I play monopoly, I borrow money all the time. I'll mortgage a property just so I can buy another one, because in the long term, it will pay off to have as many properties as possible. So I understand the idea of borrowing money. The problem I see is that people borrow money without the promise of that money making more. Kind of like how we borrow money (via credit cards) to buy ourselves "stuff." We borrow money to buy cars, which plummet in value the minute you drive them off the lot. If you borrow to start a business or to invest in a home or something that will raise in value, then it's understandable. So the question is: how much of the borrowed money the government accumulates is actually going to turn a profit in the long term. Considering the fact that we're funneling that money into war, education, health care... road construction? Who's to say what kind of profits those activities will turn? It seems to me that most of that money is basically being given away, kind of like buying a car. If the government buys bombs, it's not like they're just going to turn around and sell them for a profit. They're going to turn around and drop them in other countries. So buying bombs helps us carry on the activity of making war on other countries, which may or may not allow us to benefit financially through resulting economic deals or lack thereof. But there's no measurable expectation for profic, so what the hell are we doing borrowing money for it? It's ridiculous to me, and that's just in the economics of it. Keep praying for the end of all these conflicts. God save us.

So now the Canadian dollar is worth more than the American. Hmmm... it amuses me that we find that to be so ridiculous. The power of the Euro didn't really bother us, but the Canadian dollar? Now we know something's wrong. So... how do we get out of this mess? I honestly don't know, but I think a balanced veiw of our nations leaders is also called for. Just from this small glimpse of what's going on, I get the picture that there are numerous factors to watch out for, to manage. Sometimes we bring a lot of criticism to politics. I know I just said that what's been going on in the past several years is ridiculous, but let's remember that even the best economists in the world would be hard-pressed to manage it all properly, and we don't have control over all the factors that decide our fate. So I say we pray, we love one another, and we hope for the best.

2008-03-22T12:13:00.000-07:00

I'm in the middle of reading the Bourne Identity. I don't have anything profound to say about it - I just wanted to make note, because I'm enjoying it. I've also been spending lots of time recently playing music. I need to learn as many songs as I can, so that I can get gigs to play in various restaurants and bars. Wednesday night Cassie and I visited Dave, and I played several songs, and I really enjoyed it, and the assistant manager liked me, and so I'm supposed to go back tonight (Dave's playing again) and play so that the manager who overseas entertainment can hear me. But I have to have like 40 songs down, so that I have a full set where people won't hear repeats. That might take while - I think I'm approaching close to twenty, if you include a few of my own that I would throw into the set. So if I learn two per week, it would take around 10 weeks for me to be ready. I'm enjoying it, though. When I play guitar and sing, I feel like I'm doing something worthwhile, like I was meant to do it. Sometimes I doubt my guitar-playing abilities. I have a great ear, but... it's just hard to be confident, when I see people playing stuff I haven't learned to do yet. But I am confident in my voice. People like it, and I really enjoy that. It's especially fun when I play a song people know and they get that look on their faces, the one that says "ohhh, yes, I love this song!" and then their heads bob along with the music and a few of them mouth the words. I know I'm helping people enjoy their day, and it's uplifting to me as well.

Other thoughts? ... Well... I'm still trying to figure out life. You know, I spend day after day after day attempting to be positive about everything. And sometimes things at work bother me, and I've been pretty good about taking a moment and turning my thoughts around on the issue, whatever it may be. I try to think how I do the same thing as the person who just did something I didn't like, only maybe in a different way. There are times when I don't listen to others, or when I get in their way or when I disregard their feelings, or whatever, so that reminds me that we're all the same, and I have no right to judge. So I can thank God for the reminders I receive from others that I should listen and I should watch out, instead of being all high and mighty and thinking that they should. But then I have these spells, sometimes. After a whole day of staying positive in an environment I dislike, I can come home and be irritable, even though I'm trying to practice the same things. I don't want to be fighting this battle all the time. Maybe some people will say that it just is a battle and it will be for your whole life, but I can't believe that's how it's meant to be. As they say, practice makes perfect. I should think that doing something over and over and over again should make a difference. And maybe it already has. I think about the past times when I've been irritable, and I'd have to say I've come a long way. But when you're aiming for perfectiong, it seems you can never be fully satisfied. I'm sure there's a balance somewhere. Keep hoping, keep living with faith and love, relax, trust, give thanks, believe. The days will get better and better. They already are.

What's with Today, today

2008-03-13T09:56:00.000-07:00

I don't have a ton to write about right now. I have a short story based on one of my main characters from my novel, and it's up for critique on a critiquing website I joined a month ago. So I should get several critiques on the story in the next week, which will be really cool. I've already gotten one, and the feedback was good. I'm hoping someone will read it who will want to publish it in some magazine or something. If not, I'll probably submit it to one after I'm done editing it. It's a fun story, about how Onefist Jel first became a big name in the outlaw community of Moorlick. If you don't know what I'm talking about, that's just too bad. You'll have to buy my book when it's finally published. Who knows when that will be.

I'm still trying to live in thankfulness. It helps to remind myself "I live by the grace of God." This phrase reminds me that everything I have is a gift, Everything I have I've received. It takes away feelings of entitlement and encourages feelings of trust. Entitlement often leads to bitterness, anger, resentment. Whereas trust leads to happiness, joy, and love. So I thank God for everything I have, because it's all a gift. Life is a gift, and I plan to live it gratefully.

Friends with Everybody

2008-03-04T15:24:00.000-08:00

Today, I went to work with a new idea. Last week was kind of rough at work, at times very busy and stressful, and it was incredibly difficult to remain positive. Anyway, I knew/know that I needed to start looking at people differently, somehow have a new attitude that would be long-lasting and endure any difficulties. So I decided that today I would try my best to look at each person as a friend of mine. They weren't customers, they weren't strangers, they weren't guests - they were my friends, and I got to serve them. It could be that I just got the right people, but I don't think that was it entirely. I think because I was more open, others were more open. Because I was not judging others, they were not judging me. It turned out to be a great day, and it was a lot easier to serve people.

One thing that's really cool about this is that when I got home, I went online and I looked up this teacher guy who was talking about how to live your life in balance. And he had this really cool thing about how we need to approach people without self-righteousness and without self-deprication. Which means, we need to interact with everyone without applying all of our standards to them and without applying their standards to us. When we have this balanced attitude, we're free to approach people with openness and love, and when we do that, we receive the same in return. It was right in line with what Jesus teaches about not judging others, and it was right in line with what I've was trying to focus on for the previous few hours.

I find it really hard to go about life this way. I believe I'm an idealist by nature, I have high expectations, both for myself and for the world around me and the people around me, and that creates a lot of frustration. In the past few years I've been able to overcome a lot of that, but it often comes back, and I find myself angry, frustrated, irritated, scornful, and all those negative attitudes that do no one any good, least of all me. I've been trying to be a positive person these past several years, and I've made great strides, but I'm hoping to make even bigger ones. By the grace of God, I will.

One other thing that was coming to mind was the idea of blessing. I was reminded recently to bless my enemies and not curse them. It was in a book I was reading, but it is also a very strong message in the book of James in the Bible. "Bless, and do not curse." "Out of the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be." I wait tables for a living. In the state of Utah, the minimum wage for servers who make money in tips, is somewhere in the vicinity of $2 an hour, which means if I don't get decent tips, I don't make money. It is very tempting, when people tip badly, especially after receiving good service, to think very low of them and to curse them in my heart. I had one table like that today, and as I was feeling those kinds of feelings and thinking those kind of thoughts inside, but I remembered the reminder I had read in the morning. Bless your enemies. So I prayed for them, not that they would "learn their lesson" but that they would be greatly blessed. It was a very freeing prayer. I myself was freed from bitterness, from self-righteousness, from anger, from my own cursing mouth. Thank you, God, for your lessons, even those which you must teach me time and time again. Thank you for the opportunity to live a new life with each passing day.

I continue to pray for better days to come, greater joy, greater peace, and in all things, greater love.

The Red-billed Quelea

2008-02-14T16:09:00.000-08:00

The Red-billed Quelea is the world's most abundant species of bird. How is it that a bird I've never heard of before is the most abundant species on earth?

I've been watching the Planet Earth documentary series. It is incredibly fascinating, and I've learned several things. First of all, geese are dumb and annoying, no matter what kind of geese they are. Second, cockroaches are gross. And most importantly, grass is the most common plant on earth, covering about a quarter of the world's land.

I'm watching this scene where an arctic fox is looking for a meal among the geese, and it's really cool, because the geese are fighting it off. It's actually really comical. Wolves are definitely more impressive than foxes. What was really cool was watching a polar bear try and take down a walrus.

If you haven't seen this series, I would definitely recommend it. Just watching some of these amazing things can strike you with wonder. I mean I can barely imagine a cave with over a billion bats in it, but it's right there on the screen.

Anyway, Life continues to progress forward. Days go by. It's pretty cool.

I've heard it enough

2008-01-23T18:40:00.001-08:00

I've finally heard it one too many times, and I have to write about it and vent my frustrations. For several years I've shied away from discussing the abortion issue, because of its divisiveness. If I do discuss it, it is usually in private conversations, or I just don't take sides and I point out a few inconsistencies here and there in one argument or another. But I am officially tired of pro-choice democrats, constantly, habitually taking for granted that an unborn baby is not human. I mean what kind of world have we come to, when large portions of the population not only doubt the humanity of a growing creature inside its mother's womb, but take it for GRANTED that the creature cannot be qualified with homo0sapiens. It boggles my mind. It is an all-out assumption with no scientific evidence whatsoever and absolutely no compelling philosophical reasoning that I've ever heard of.

Here's where the dilemma lies: we have yet to conclusively define what it is to be truly "human." It's something a scientist cannot tell us, because all they can give us is their own biological classifications (all of which, I believe, are blaringly present in an unborn child). They can tell us how many chromosomes are in human DNA, what the composition of human cells and tissues are like, and how many eyeballs we should normally have, but that doesn't really get us any closer to the question of what is human? So pro-choicers have sidestepped biology and have gone to strictly philosophical ideas. But the only philosophical idea I've ever heard them land on is "a woman's right to choose."

Double-take.

Head-cocked.

What happened to the humanity question? Is an unborn child human or not? What is it that makes us human? Don't all humans have unalienable rights?

So let's say that to be human is... to be capable of rational thought? Unborn babies are not capable of rational thought, therefore they are not human. Of course, it would strictly follow that newborn babies would suffer the same classification, along with several mentally handicapped individuals, comatose patients and maybe those with Alzheimers and other mental diseases.

Okay, let's try again...

To be human is... to have a soul? And everyone knows that humans don't receive their souls until the baby is ready to be born... uh...

Okay, one more...

To be human is... to be self-aware? (See comments on the "rational thought" hypothesis)

Maybe someone has some ideas somewhere, but I would badly, desperately like to hear those ideas before skipping ahead to the women's rights issue. Because I will support women's rights wholeheartedly, but human rights trumps it. If unborn babies are human (again, a question pro-choicers seem unwilling to explain, debate or consider), then according to the Bill of Rights of the United States of America, they are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, including, but not limited to, the right to life. It makes me angry that so many americans are willing to ignore these questions, and it drives me nuts that a democrat could dare to hold their pro-choiceness over anyone.

I heard this lady on tv, scornfully saying that John McCain was against a woman's right to choose, as if everyone knows that a woman has a right to kill a creature that is living inside her body if she wants to, regardless of whether that creature is human or just some tissue that will later become human upon emerging from said body, because that question isn't really important...

Double-take.

Cocked-head.

What?

Debate

2008-01-22T01:54:00.000-08:00

I'm watching this debate with the democratic candidates and they're on the subject of health care. I must confess that I don't really understand. Because Clinton and Edwards were talking about their plans and representing them as "universal health care" plans. They vaunt their position with nice phrases like "leaving no one out" and "Everybody will be covered." But the way they were talking about it, when they mentioned the specifics, it sounded to me like it wasn't so much universal health care as universal health insurance. Meaning: everybody will be covered, because heatlh insurance will be mandatory. Obviously, this would require making said insurance affordable. I guess I'm just confused, but that seems to me like it's a little more friendly with the insurance companies, and I don't like the long-term implications. It seems like muddling together government policy and insurance could be scary, and could have even worse consequence than those we're facing already in leiu of the incredible monetary power the insurance and drug companies already hold in Washington. Obama, made a little more sense about it, but his opponents jumped down his throat about his plan not being "universal."

Maybe I'm just clueless about policy issues like this, and maybe I'm especially clueless about how people really get things done in Washington, if such a thing is actually possible. Making real changes: it's something every candidate claims he/she will do, but I don't trust a one of them. Everyone bragging about their record and then picking apart that of their opponents: it all just gets tiring. It's uncomfortable watching the candidates rip each other apart for little details that they think exemplify the entire character of their opponents or theirselves.

Small

2007-12-23T01:49:00.001-08:00

I don't know why it helps to think of the world as vast, to picture the universe and me inside it, a small insignificant fraction of a blip on the radar of existence. But it does help. It helps remind me that "these light and momentary troubles" are just that: light, momentary: a blip on my own eternal radar, even less in the scope of the whole of time and space. To know that this solitary foot steps in the path of all, that when my time is passed, no great amount of suffering will have marred the beauty of the whole of creation.

Sometimes, usually when I pray, I experience a feeling of smallness. Everything around me suddenly feels incredibly far away, like we are all stars in the void of space. But it is very strange, because it is not a lonely feeling. Because we are all stars in space... there is nothing between us. We all just... are. And we're all part of something, swirling around in the outer limits, making our own little eddies in the fabric of creation, isolated, yet connected, light traveling back and forth in a million threads of peaceful connection. Not only is it helpful to realize that I am nothing, in the scope of eternity, infinity, but it is incredible to step out in that nothingness of space, and find that I am truly connected to all. When I go about my day, I realize, I am not just me, for I am nothing, but I am embarking on the journey of God's creation, and I become part of something much greater than myself. At the risk of sounding like a Buddhist, I become everything when I realize that I am nothing. Maybe it's just a feeling. I'm not trying to form doctrine or anything. I'm just describing how it's helpful, not thinking of my own silly trivial life, self-absorbed in my own problems and wallowing in deep-seated discontent. Thank God for making me smaller than dust. Thank God for setting my feet on his path and letting me join into something much bigger, infinite, supreme. Thank God.

Earth-Shattering Dialogue... Or something

2007-12-20T17:59:00.000-08:00

I wanted to post something new. Something mind-blowing. Something... earth-shattering. It seems like the closest I can get right now is... I... I can do a Rubik's Cube.

Yeah... I'm also fascinated by the political races for the presidential primaries, Rep. and Dem. Maybe it's just that it's big news right now, and they're making much more of it than they used to. But maybe it's just because I was clueless four years ago and eight years ago about the presidential primaries. Or maybe it's because now I have cable news shows like MSNBC and FOXNews, who seem to talk about these events more. But it is fascinating... sometimes it's rather silly. The ups and downs in the polls and the people talking about those said ups and downs. It's fascinating how so much of this is based on image and marketing. Huckabee keeps rising in the polls in Iowa, and why? Image. Clinton keeps falling in her polls. Why? Image. How well do we know these characters? How closely do we study their policies, their record. How well do we understand the ideologies behind those policies, with all their nuances? I mean it's one thing to say that this candidate stands for such-and-such an issue, like getting out of Iraq, and this one doesn't. But how well do we know what they're going to do? Most people seem to want to get out of Iraq, but most voters don't seem to know or really care how. I mean, even McCain wants to get out of Iraq, but he wants to win first. Do people who say we should just get out and get out now, actually sit down with experts and analyze the long-term international impact of such a move? Do they consider how exactly that should be done? Do they know what each candidate is going to actually do to get that done? The way I see it, most people just look at a candidate's image, and they mistakenly think that that image has something to do with his/her capability to be president.

Anyway, that's my political rant for the day.

Next up, books.

I started reading "The Idiot" some time ago, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I'm about halfway through it right now, and I must confess, though I was at first fascinated, I soon became quite bored. I'm guessing it will turn out something like The Brothers K, in the sense that it will suddenly get really good around page 600, and I won't be able to put it down then, but for now, I might have to switch to another book and come back to it later.

Speaking of books that get boring in the middle, how is it that such books becamee such amazing classics. You can't write a book that's so boring that people won't care to finish it and still be successful in today's book-saturated environment, so how did guys like Dostoevsky make it? I'm writing a book myself, and I'm really trying to make it less boring in the early/middle stages, because it gets really good later on, and I know it does, because I've read through it (making revisions) a couple of times now. Do I have the talent of such greats as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Dickens? I think it's possible, but how would anyone find out. I actually don't think these guys would stand much of a chance in today's market. I don't know. We'll have to see. Back to work on my pet project.

United States of Tears

2007-12-03T00:42:00.000-08:00

Several days ago, Cassie and I watched "The United States of Leland," and something in that movie has been bugging me ever since. It's a decent movie, and it asks a lot of hard questions. It doesn't really provide answers, either. The main guy struggles with life, because of how much suffering and pain and bad feeling there is in it, and one thing he says in the movie just really bothered me. He talked about how people pray and it doesn't change anything and how people cry and it doesn't change anything. He was really despairing at the time, so maybe you can forgive the movie, but it never provides for the other option - namely, maybe prayer does do something. And what'd more interesting to me at this particular moment - maybe TEARS do change things. I think of how we perpetuate our bad feelings sometimes, how we build up anger or sorrow or pain inside of ourselves, and I remember those times that I've cried, I mean really cried, and reflecting on it now, I realize there is some strange healing power in tears. There is a mystical energy in weeping, one that Jesus understood well, one that the writers of the Hebrew scriptures knew well, from the Torah to Lamentations to the minor prophets. I don't think it's something we need to be about all the time, but I truly believe that if we were free to listen to those weeping urges, maybe we'd be a lot more happy.

I don't really know what exactly I think about all that. I don't always feel the need to cry, but when I do, it just seems like a real shame to hold it all back. It just seems like maybe it's our bodies' way of getting rid of all those bad feelings inside. And sometime we build up so much of it, we just have to let it out. I remember when I watched "The Passion of the Christ," I sat through the whole thing, just taking it all in, every ounce of suffering, every bit of pain and sorrow. Afterwards, I went into my car and I bawled my eyes out for five minutes before I could leave the parking lot. Mostly, I remember how good that felt. I don't know why we feel so ashamed of our tears. Maybe it's right that we are, maybe it's supposed to be intimate, private, personal. I just think it is really sad that anyone could think that tears don't help.

I'm writing a new story. I've only told Cassie about it so far, but I nearly believe that it's an inspired idea. I plan on bringing in this bit about tears as part of the story. I've only written four pages of it, but I'm already excited. I'm praying for God's guidance bigtime on this one, because I really believe in it. Anyway, those are my thoughts this late evening. Time to go to bed.

Married Life and Where Babies Come From

2007-11-28T00:40:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time, I know. I've been a little busy, alright? ... What do you mean, doing what? I've been... doing... stuff. No, really I just haven't had much to talk about. Or rather, I just haven't been in a mood to blog about the stuff that's on my mind. But tonight I am, so yippee.

With that bit of enthusiasm out of the way, I can continue to express myself in an un-random weirdo way. Today I was putting some books away, which had previously been lying around. One of them was nice little coffee table book, with a frog on the cover, entitled "The Meaning of Life." It had lots of questions about life. Why this and why that, and it was really quite clever because every statement/question was accompanied by a matching picture of an animal. It made it cute and funny all the way through, while still giving us some meat to chew on. For instance, on one page there is a picture of several penguins all in a row, spread out, and they're racing down a decline until the end of the ice there's one penguin with his beak sticking out looking down into the cold water below. The words at the bottom of the page are, "So we rush, rush, rush to get to a certain ideal point in our life, and then what?" It's funny, it's cute because they're penguins, and it engages vital questions about the lives we live. It's a good book, short but inspiring. So go get "The Meaning of Life" by Bradley Trevor Greive.

I've been playing a lot more guitar recently. For the past year I wasn't doing a whole lot with it, and I don't really know why. But in the past couple of months I've been craving it, missing it, wanting to play a lot more. In the past couple weeks that feeling has grown stronger, and I've actually been playing and practicing every day, and not just pulling it out for a few minutes to play a song and then put it away, but real practicing, and I'm loving it, and I want to do more. Cassie is great, too, because she's always supportive and encouraging.

For those that are completely clueless, I am married now and have been for about a month. Er... make that exactly a month. I love that, too. I feel more motivated as a married man than I've ever felt before. I love my wife and it is amazing to see her every day and share a home with her and everything else. We've still got a lot to do on our apartment, cleaning up, putting things away, putting stuff up on the walls, etc. I guess it's taken a while, but really, we haven't been slacking. We just have lots of stuff to sort out. Some of it's junk that needs to be thrown away. Some of it needs to be organized into nice little boxes to store away in the one big closet that we have. Other stuff needs to be put up on the walls, and still more stuff we just don't know what to do with. So there we are... the apartment's still messy, but we're making progress.

Anyway, all that's to say, I'm doing great. I'm loving life. I've had a few days off from work, and I go back tomorrow. I thank God for all the blessings I have.

I was reading some old journal entries from one summer at camp, and I couldn't believe how lonely I was. I haven't felt that miserable in a long time. I just want to thank God with all my heart for Cassie and for bringing me to a place in life where I'm happy and fulfilled. Life is so wonderful.

2007-10-16T09:48:00.000-07:00

In eleven days, I am getting married. When I take a step back to observe myself and all that is going on in my life, it just seems so strange. For years I ached for the kind of relationship I have with Cassie, and now... I'm in such a different place. It's a great feeling, but I can hardly believe that it's happening. I mean, when I'm going about my days, preparing for the wedding, going to work and talking about the upcoming event, moving into our new apartment, and going to target with my fiance (we seem to go there about two or three times a week, haha), it's like it's always been this way and always will be, but then I think back and remember the many states I have been in, states of longing and pain, or states of joy and freedom, and I wonder at the strange and sudden twists and turns in life. I think God every day for my life and for Cassie, and I hope she knows how much I appreciate her.

I moved into our new apartment this weekend. Cassie will be moving her stuff in next weekend, and then I still have a bunch of stuff to bring from Minneapolis. But for now we've got the essentials: Internet, a BED, Toilet Paper, you know - the stuff you can't live without (hah). Anyway, I love it. I love getting up in the morning and having the place to myself, and walking around in my bedclothes or less. I love having Cassie over, having a place for just the two of us.

I want to write some thoughts, deep thoughts, but I'm not sure if I have any, and I have to go get ready for work. So I'll end here, and just remember to Thank God for every good thing.

off day

2007-10-01T23:38:00.000-07:00

I was somewhat out of sorts today, and I don't know why? Do you ever have those days? You seem to do all you can to stay positive, to let frustrations roll right of your back and expect the best, but you just can't shake the feeling of unease? I don't know what causes it, but there's a kind of restlessness in me right now. I would have thought that it's my lack of freetime - I was busy with Cassie all weekend taking care of four rambunctious children (ages 6,7,8, and 10, I believe). It was enough to convince me I definitely don't want that many, and I'd definitely still like to wait. But It was fun, and it shouldn't have put me out of sorts. I didn't feel this way until I walked into work this morning. And now I've had free time all evening, and I don't feel refreshed.

On the upside, the outside air felt amazing tonight. Something or other drew me outside just about 10 minutes ago, and I just stood out there in the cool air, luxuriating in that sublime freshness after the rain, breathing it in and out and praying. I took some time to consider what it was I truly wanted in life. Frankly, that feeling, the feel of the cool fresh air filling your mouth and throat and lungs, that's up there on my list.

Well, I'm getting married quite soon now. Less than four weeks away. That's unbelievable. I'm really looking forward to it. I move into a new apartment in less than two weeks, too, and I'm looking forward to that, too.

Does it bother anyone else that whenever people pray or talk about spiritual issues, it always seems to be somber? It's like the more passionate sadness you can put into your prayer, the more holy you are. Or the more woeful cynicism you place in your sermons, the more worthy your lesson. There's a place for being somber, a time for it. I'd say, if you feel that way, then pray that way. But if you're feeling good about life and about God, you don't need to suppress that feeling in order to feel his presense. just a little side thought that sometimes bothers me.

Analyze This

2007-09-20T00:34:00.000-07:00

I'm watching Analyze this right now. It's kind of funny, mostly just amusing at the moment. Let me just say right off the bat that Robert DeNiro cannot cry on film. It was so incredibly fake, I really thought that he was supposed to be fake crying as part of the story, but it wasn't the case.

But let me talk more about Billy Crystal. I have not seen him play any role other than this one, excepting the princess bride Miracle Max role. But in everything else, he plays an insincere, relationally inept, semi-intellectual woose. Here he's a psychiatrist, and though he can fit the role well, I'm just tired of it. It's not interesting, when the schmuck is lying to his fiance/wife, because he can't seem to bear to tell someone the truth, for almost no reason whatsoever. Insincerity drips from Billy Crystal's mouth in every role he plays, and it's just not interesting anymore.

Other than that, it's fun to watch Deniro go ape nuts and run his mouth off in angry tirades.

Things Going Good

2007-09-09T21:59:00.000-07:00

My tomatoes have been ripening, finally. We picked and ate the first one about a week ago, Cassie and I. We were invited to dinner by another couple, and we ate it with them. It was probably the best tomato I've ever eaten. So incredibly juicy and tasty.

Anyway, life is going well. I'm looking forward to getting married. For those that are wondering, the invitations are going out soon. I'm really looking forward to living with my new wife. Seeing one another every day, with the convenience of not having to walk one another to the door to say goodnight. I'm incredibly thankful and happy about it.

I finished the third draft of my novel recently. So I just want to ask people to pray for me, because I really want to get it published, and I need to get the attention of an agent/publisher to do so. It's exciting to me, and I really want it to happen soon. So thanks in advance for your prayers.

Pray for my brother, too. He's in Nepal. andrewulasich.blogspot.com, for anyone who's interested. He updates his blog more frequently when he's out of the country than when he's home.

I just want to thank God and everyone else, because I'm so happy right now, with life and all the good things happening. God is very good to me. Thanks

I can't think of any more titles, leave me alone, I just want to write my blog and not have to tell everyone what I'm talking about in a snippy phrase

2007-08-18T23:51:00.000-07:00

"Whether you think you can or can’t either way you are right"

Someone attributed the above quote to Henry Ford, though I have no idea. I just liked it. I wonder how you reconcile that with some of those crazies on reality shows. The weirdos who come on American Idol and abolutely know that they are amazing singers and believe they are capable of winning, and they're so obviously not. Part of me believes that if they'd just drop their horrible self-deception and listen to what the experts are saying to them, then they could really buckle down and work on what they're doing, and maybe they'd make something of themselves. I don't know. Their faith in themmselves just seems to me like self-deception. At the same time, it seems clear that none of us could get anywhere if we didn't believe, so where's that line between self-motivating conviction and self-deceiving lunacy? I wish I knew. I keep thinking that all things are possible. I also can't help but remember to think of myself with sober judgment, not having a higher opinion of myself than I ought. It's a strange balance to find. But the more I live life and contemplate these mysteries, the more I realize that balance is needed in everything. Why does balance have to be so difficult? Why does all of life have to be like a tight-rope walk? Maybe it's not really. It just seems like it is, because I think too much.

Anyway, I don't like to hear the words, "I know I can't" from anyone, and that's why I like that quote.

Rain in the desert

2007-08-17T18:16:00.001-07:00

I got home from work this afternoon. It was hot and I had been riding my bike, and as I rode into the driveway, I started to feel sprinkles falling on my head. For those who do not live in Utah or are unfamiliar with the climate difference between here and Minnesota, but it has been extremely dry for me. I don't love the humidity in Minnesota, but living in a near-desert climate must be taxing on me, because as I felt those sprinkles, I found myself longing for a good downpour. I went out to the back yard to check on my tomatoes, which have been growing nicely by the way, and the sprinkles became a little stronger, and I stood there in the sun, under the single cloud as it passed over our house, and I luxuriated in the wet drops reaching my skin. I prayed for a downpour, so I could be drenched in cool water.

One minute later the rain came falling, and I was drenched along with my tomatoes. It was one of the best feelings in the world.

Ranting

2007-08-17T17:57:00.001-07:00

It's been around a day and a half since I decided to try to stop venting - or as I'd like to call it: ranting. In that small amount of time, I've already had difficulties. I might not have succeeded in not "ranting" but I've become much more aware of it, and it's frightening how much I have to work on.

You see, the problem is, I've noticed, that being a mostly private person, I tend to rant all day... to myself. Yeah, apparently, my self-talk, though not entirely negative, is clearly unbalanced. I've caught myself doing it tons of times today, and I haven't even been driving my car.

Suffice it to say that this is not heartening. Every time I catch myself, whether ranting to myself or to someone else, I have to stop and change the way my mind is working. It's a difficult challenge.

Venting

2007-08-16T15:05:00.000-07:00

I noticed an online article recently about venting to your friends. According to the article, it can be bad for you. It seems like it's something we all do. We get home from work after an awful day and we complain about it to our loved ones. They (hopefully) feel some compassion for us and express their agreement with our gripes, and we feel better about it all. We also feel vindicated about our attitudes. We feel like we're right, and usually the people we vent to don't often argue with us or set us on a straighter course. They nod politely, knowing we need to get it off our chests.

According to this article, though, the idea of getting something "off our chests" doesn't necessarily describe what happens. To get something off our chests means we want to let it go, we want to forget about it and move one. We want to let out all our frustration/anger/bitterness/angst, so that we can just be free of it. But experts, according to the article, are saying that that's not what happens. We don't let go of it. We reinforce it. By venting to our friends, we give validity to our feelings, and unless that venting leads to some sort of conclusive mending, we're not getting ourselves anywhere, except into a cycle of negative attitudes and emotions, which we in turn feel are justified.

Anyway, I do not plan to stop telling my particular loved one (I love you, Cas) how I'm doing, but I am resolving for the next couple of weeks to perform a little experiment. What if, instead of venting to people, I just kept my frustrations and problems a secret? It's really just a commitment to stop complaining. And after two weeks, I'll see how I feel. Better or worse? I don't know if two weeks worth of psychological experimenting will show a conclusive and noticeable difference, but I plan to try it. And with Cassie gone for the weekend, that will make it a good time to start.

Here's why I say this is an experiment, though. Most people might look at this idea and say, well of course. You shouldn't be complaining all the time, or you're going to become a more negative person. The only thing with me is that I've had many instances, even in the last year, where I've talked to someone, usually Cassie, about my difficulties, and talking about it forces me to come to a positive resolution and I benefit from that. But I suppose there is probably a difference between venting and confiding, so I'll have to find what that difference is and act accordingly.

The other thing I want to add to this experiment, since I'm not convinced that merely being quiet about things will be entirely helpful, namely because I am a fairly quiet guy in general, is to commit myself to always finding a proverbial "silver lining" for all my problems. Every time I feel upset about anything, instead of ranting about it, I will look on the bright side.

To me these seem like obvious life choices that should have been taken care of and made into habit years ago, but what can I say? I'm not perfect yet. That doesn't mean I can't try. We'll see how it goes.

Acting Class

2007-07-14T18:18:00.000-07:00

This weekend I've been taking an acting class from a professional coach from L.A. It is some serious stuff, no lie. It goes all weekend long, Friday evening, all day Saturday and all day Sunday. Coach is demanding and rather strange, but she brings the best out of people. I've done some things that please her and some that don't, but it's great because when you don't get it, you know it and she hardly has to tell you, which is great, because it's not about a list of rules or step-by-step thing, it's all about bringing yourself to the scene and finding the character inside and making everything be real. None of this nonsense or technical mumbo jumbo about objectives or anything.

Objectives were something we studied in my Intro to Theater class in college, which really sticks out to me. This packet we read wanted to avoid using adjectives or emotional descriptions and wanted us to always have an objective - an action. It was supposed to make the scene stronger, and in some senses it did, but for me it just felt disjointed. For instance, instead of "feeling mad," and therefore yelling at someone, you would use an action like "attack." So we weren't feeling angry or sad in a scene - we were attacking someone or resisting someone or soothing someone or yada yada yada. This had the positive effect of forcing our acting to be about what's going on between the people in the scene and not just about our own personal crap, which is important. But it just struck me as stupid. People don't attack people or resist. They experience passions which leads them to do them. If you feel angry, you're automatically going to lash out, so feel angry and you'll lash out, most likely at the right moment.

So this acting coach is much more about using your instincts and your gut, rather than thinking through everything. So we do cold read, just running them fresh, and we practice using our instincts. It's great. It's really challenging, because I'm not used to it, and I haven't practiced it. I'm used to getting the script, memorizing the lines and then putting the feeling into it along the way. In this we start with the feeling; we put the feeling in and we're involved in the scene from the get go and we can't let anything be fake or half-assed.

Other cool thing about this weekend - I was carpooling with a couple of girls on the way to class, and we got to talking, and I mentioned I was wriiting a novel. One girl asked me what kind of novel it was, and when I told her it was fantasy/fiction, she exclaimed that her dad wrote fantasy fiction. This revelation was not entirely interesting to me, but I asked who he was in case I had heard of him, and she said he was David Farland, an author whose works I really enjoy. He's the author of the Runelords series, which were great reads for me, and he had recently come out with another one which I have been wanting to read for almost a year. She said that he actually has another one written and is working on yet another. I just thought that was really cool.

Cassie has been out of the country, stomping around Australia - I don't know, I think she's living with some Kangaroos and going crocodile hunting down there. But she's been gone for quite some time, and I really miss her, and I'm very excited to have her back in a few days. Life has been a bit difficult without her. Still... good things are happening, and I'm thankful.

Apocalypto

2007-07-05T21:50:00.000-07:00

I just watched the movie Apocalypto last night. For some reason I never heard great things about the movie. I think I recall hearing that it had a lot of action, but that the plot was weak and there wasn't a whole lot to it. I also go the impression that it would be a dark and bloody movie, more of a sensory overload along the lines of Passion of the Christ. Frankly, it wasn't. To put it quite plainly, this movie was great. I loved it, and the more I think of it, the more I liked it. It was gripping from beginning to end. To be fair, the plot wasn't very intricate, but it was a wonderful story, and it was portrayed with such life and such passion and heart, that I just couldn't turn it off and save it for later at 2:30 in the morning. Anyway, to any who were thinking of seeing it and thought it probably wouldn't be worth watching because Mel Gibson got caught driving drunk and said some rotten things about a certain ethnic people group, I'd suggest you reconsider. Though now that I've put it in that light, it suddenly strikes me as a completely unfavorable idea.

But it's not! It's a good idea! See the movie! It's good!

Ghost Rider

2007-06-19T22:38:00.000-07:00

Just watched Ghost Rider. It was actually a pretty fun film. The action's pretty cool and the effects are fun to watch. Unfortunately the acting leaves something to be desired. Cage does as well as he can with a somewhat pretentious script, and the old guy, the caretaker guy at the cemetary, he's alright too. But the chick and the bad guy are both awful. The main girl, Roxie, she's cute so we can forgive the terrible acting. But the devil's son has no presence. He attempts to be dramatic, cold and unfeeling, cruel and cocky, but it just comes off as boring and uncouth. I prefer my demons to have a touch of humanity, if they're going to be in any way interesting. And this one should be easy. I mean come on - he's the son of the devil; the guy should have some issues. But instead of an interesting Freudian complex of a character, we get a hack actor trying to look cool while he delivers his stock 'evil' lines. It's just lame.

But the rest of it, I liked. It was pretty cool.

"If you don't make a choice, the choice makes you."

Climbing the Sugar Loaf

2007-06-08T14:45:00.000-07:00

I'm in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, right now and having a great time. I'm here with Cassie and two of her long-time friends. The other day we saw the Jesus statue. That was pretty cool. But today was awesome. We went to Sugar Loaf mountain and scaled the entire thing. It was crazy, our rock-climbing guide was really cool. We walked like three or four miles from our hostel to the foot of the mountain, and then we turned into the trees and began the long climb. It took most of the afternoon. I was only afraid for my life a couple of times. I had to go in my regular black shoes, because they didn't have any climbing shoes big enough for me. The scariest part for me, was on the side of the mountain, where it was not too steep, but it was a really long fall and it looked rather smooth. The rock was just right for us to climb up in that spot (our guide basically just walked up), but my shoes were not as good as the others. We were not harnessed in either in that spot - eek! But he did go up and put a rope around a rock for us to hold onto so we wouldn't feel scared. I held on to that rope pretty hard and basically just pulled myself up to safety. There were two times when we actually were harnessed - the rest was a cross between a path and a cliff, if you can imagine - and those times were pretty cool. We actually took the easy way, but I found it really challenging, because I've never been real life climbing before. I've only done those climbing wall things, which do not really have the same effect. It was an exhillerating experience.

After a long afternoon of climbing, we reached the top which was kind of touristy. There were a good amount of people there who had taken the cable car up - ha. So we ate up there, enjoyed the nearly setting sun for a while. Cassie and I got to spend some time alone in a secluded spot, and we saw a monkey there. That was really cool.

... oh, and... we got engaged.

Going to Brazil

2007-06-04T09:37:00.001-07:00

I'm leaving for Brazil today. I'll be back in ten days. Wish me well. Hopefully, the trip will inspire more thoughts to write about on here. That would be nice. Thanks

Balance - Again

2007-06-01T15:58:00.000-07:00

I think I might finally be grasping the tenuous balance between two important principles in life. The two can each be summed up, I suppose, in biblical phrases, namely: "All things are yours" and "All men are like grass." I've been focusing a lot on the former statement the past couple months, which is probably good because I seem to have focused on the latter for a major portion of my life. But it's been a big reversal for me to start understanding, as I see it, the phrase that Paul uses, when he says, "having nothing, but possessing everything." It was a breakthrough, I think, for me to realize that all things are indeed mine and that nothing is out of my grasp, whether I am rich or poor, young or old, etc. It is really revolutionary to me and very freeing. I grew up thinking that we should avoid material things, that if we wish to be free of the grasp of materialism, then we really need to do without. I think today's American poor disprove that idea. It is different in most of the rest of the world, but in the United States, I find that poor people are as materialistic as they come. It seems strange, but the fact is that they're surrounded by material goods/advertisements/influences, and most of it they can't have. But in their hearts they are shackled to those wants. So apparently, the secret to escaping materialism is not in becoming poor. But I've finally started thinking, what if we instead start believing the words of Jesus and the apostles, saying that we have all things. Not just that our basic needs are met, but "ask anything in my name, and you will receive it."

When I bring up those verses, I can't help but clench my stomach a little. Images of faith healers and "name it, claim it" television theologians assault my mind and I instinctually recoil. But I think the promise of those particular forms of interpretation is: start believing this way and then you'll be able to get what you want. Whereas, what I'm looking for is not self-indulgence, but contentment. It's not about satiating your lusts and appetites, but it's about being content in all circumstances. And it goes right along with biblical principles. Paul says he knows the secret - whether he's living with wealth or in want, no matter what his circumstances, "I can do all things through Christ." In other words, "all things are [mine]."

So I've been starting to think this way, and in a moment of reflection, borne of turbulent emotion whose cause I cannot in any way pinpoint - let's just say I was having an off day and had to go be alone to think and talk to God - I came to understand the balance a little better in the latter statement I mentioned: "All men are like grass." It's from a passage in Isaiah, "All men are like grass and their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fail, but the word of the Lord stands forever." It's a humbling thought, to imagine us all as mere blades of grass, flourishing green and tall one day, dry and withering the next. To imagine the whole world as just a field, filled with so many twigs. All the things that we think are important suddenly become nonentities, inconsequential. Our very existence becomes small and maybe a little trite. I really don't want to belittle or degrade the human experience, but when I think about it, I have to admit that we really are pretentious little creatures - thinking our cash flow and our stock options make a lick of difference in the world, or that putting up with traffic and dealing with all our problems are so incredibly important as to merit the world's attention. Even our real problems, death and sickness, deep pains and sorrows, they begin to pale in the light of the fashioning of the universe and the expance of all of creation. As I think of it, I actually begin to remember the end of the book of Job, when God finally talks and reminds Job just how much more there really is than his little experience of life.

Anyway, all this is to say that there needs to be a balance. On the one hand, we really are nothing, just a breath of air in the scope of eternity. On the other, the entire universe is ours, and all we want or need is provided for us - ie. we can do all things. A difficult balance to find, perhaps a bit paradoxical, too. But necessary and, the more I begin to practice it, fulfilling.

Almost over.

2007-05-18T23:34:00.001-07:00

My Fair Lady is drawing to a close. Tomorrow is the last day of the run, and we'll be doing to more shows, one at 2:00 and one at 7:30. It's been a good run, in my estimation. The night runs a bit longer than it should, which is mainly a result of several characters waiting too long to say their lines, or saying them too slowly, the latter being less common and less at fault for the length of the show. But it's been quite enjoyable, and I'm very glad for the opportunity. The cast has been great to work with. But I must say I'm looking forward to the next week and having a few more hours to myself in the evening usually. I've been too much on the go recently and haven't had enough time to stop and 'smell the roses.'

I have tomato seeds growing. They're probably around 3-4 inches tall now, at least a few of them are. I took some seeds from some full-grown tomatoes at the end of last summer, and now I'm growing them into nice big plants. It's exciting. Probably the end of next week I'll be planting them in the ground. I'm hoping I didn't get too late a start on them. I saw some tomato plants in the store recently and they were nice and big and lush. I don't have my own greenhouse or a lot of resources, so I don't know how I can compare with those. Right now mine are in their own little pots by the window. Some of them are looking rather weak, but others are growing into mighty fine plants. I think I have ten of them, and I expect at least six should survive and flourish as long as I tend to them properly. The others might make it, too. We'll see.

I also tried to plant some onions, but I fear I don't know what I'm doing, because I only see about four of them growing up. At one point I believe I saw seven, but a few died and disappeared since then, and now there are even less. Oh well. I'll probably clear up some of that space for the tomatoes instead. That'll be fine, I guess.

For some reason I really really want to get my own place and have some land where I can grow my own fruit trees. It almost doesn't matter to me what kind of fruit it is. Though my dream is to go some place warm and have more tropical kinds of trees and grow fruits like coconuts, avocados, oranges, etc. But here in Utah would be fine too, apples or peaches or what have you. I just like the idea of growing food, and at certain times in the year having it available to you right off the branch.

It would also be nice just to have my own place. For many reasons. Not the least of which is the ability to wander around in just my boxers.

Thinking Thoughts

2007-04-27T22:34:00.000-07:00

Thinking positive has been a difficult step for me. People have often called me a pessimist or a cynic in my life and I've fought to change that part of myself in the last few years.

I've come to a point where on the whole, I am extremely happy. Life is grand, I'm pursuing the things I want and love in life, and I have much to look forward to it. I thank God daily for his blessings, and it is a great improvement over my life a few years back. It's not like I was depressed or doing terrible, but I guess you could say I was stuck in a rut. Perhaps you'd be even kinder and say they were "formative years," for they did force me to become a new sort of person. Don't worry, I'm still me.

So recently I've been thinking about the movie, "the Secret," a film of questionable ideas, which I find quite intriguing. It's a film akin to "What the *bleep* do we know?" and it talks about the Law of Attraction. It claims that the things that happen to us in life are the result of our thoughts, the ideas and images we are holding in our minds attract like situations/objects into our paths. I'd like to avoid the self-centered focus on material goods which this video portrays and turn attention back to the basic principle it portrays. I look at my life in the last three years and I immediately notice that I like my life much more, good things are happening to me and life goes in a basically better pattern than it did before. Since I started thinking positive, I've changed a lot and so have the things that have happened to me. I'd say that's a start worth noticing. So in short, I'd have to lean toward agreement with the movie and believe that our thoughts really do have some impact on the reality around us. I'm not going to argue how much or how it works other than to say that to some significant extent, it does work.

This brings me to my biggest concern, the biggest roadblock I am finding in life. The movie mentions how negative reactions tend to cycle. People at work complain about the same problems and they only get worse. Your friends are always sick or always struggling with money or always having trouble with relationships and it always seems to be the same old story. The movie claims that it's in large part because of their continual thought pattern on negative occurances that negative occurances continue to happen.

I've been thinking about this a lot, because I'm the kind of person that has a hard time letting go. If I'm in an argument, my stubborn mind continues to mull over all the details of the argument over and over inside long after debate is through. If something negative occurs it is easy to continue thinking about it. You want to go to your friends and tell them all about your bad day. In some cases it feels to me like a release. Talking about it seems to help sometimes, because I can get the matter off my chest, hopefully find some support, feel justified in my bad reaction and go on with my day. If I don't find support I continue to mull. Maybe not all of you are remotely like me. I've always been stubborn, so maybe it's a little bit a part of my personality. But maybe it's just a bad habit that has not been dealt with and continued to grow. The point is, I find it difficult to let go, to let those negative occurances slip by and leave them behind me in a matter of minutes. I'd very much like to, I've very much tried to, and I still very much think it is possible. Still, it is my biggest roadblock, and I see it ruining my days. One bad thing happens to ruin my mood, one false word maybe, and I'm thinking about it the whole day, and then later that day, I'm given something else to think about, and then I'm in a bad mood for a week, and it's tough to get back to the thankful, positive, hopeful, joyful person I've been trying to be these past few years.

Maybe a lot of my thoughts are just nonsense, but whether you buy into the whole load of whathaveyou about quantam physics and the power of the mind, I know that many people understand to some extent what I'm talking about. With the exception of my dad and a few other weirdos out there, most people seem struggle with the negativity that is all around them in this life. Maybe I just need a little extra sleep. maybe I'm a little too busy. Maybe this or that or the other thing.

But then I think, are we really supposed to be happy all the time? Lots of people, wise people even, I'm sure would say no. We can't be, they'd say. Sadness is a part of life as much as happiness, pain as much as ease, toil as much as rest. But that's not how life was meant to be, I'd say. Maybe, just maybe, that's not the way it's supposed to be. Maybe we're supposed to be happy, but we're not always because we don't believe we can. We live our lives with so many assumptions, how can we tell reality from perspective, especially if there isn't really a difference.

I confess, now I'm confused. If you've got an open mind, but a careful one, see "the Secret." I'd like to know what other people think about it.

A Child can always teach an adult

2007-04-19T21:22:00.000-07:00

"A child can always teach an adult three things: to be happy for no reason, to always be busy with something, and to know how to demand with all his might that which he desires."

Interesting reflections to me from the book, "The Fifth Mountain." When I see children running with all their might with no particular goal but the joy of running, I wonder what has happened to us as we've grown older. How do we forget to live life with such enthusiasm, with such inflamed ardor. How do we grow complacent and fat. How is it that we come to accept our fate instead of choose it, when God has given us the divine right to wrestle for his blessing. That is the primary theme of this book I'm reading: that we should choose our fate, not accept it. It fits with what I've been reflecting on in life, with other sources that have been influencing me recently, only it is much more God-centered in its mindset.

In this book Elijah recalls the Jacob story, where he wrestled with God and achieved for himself a new name, which God bestowed on him. What he does not recollect is that the angel of the lord who wrestled with Jacob finally gave him a lame leg to end the contest. Jacob prevailed, but he had difficulty walking the rest of his life. I don't know what particular lesson might be in that fact, which may support or defy the lesson of the Fifth Mountain, but I find it interesting. Food for thought.

The Fifth Mountain

2007-04-09T14:36:00.000-07:00

I've started reading a book called "The Fifth Mountain." It is by one of my favorite authors, Paulo Coelho, a brazilian, international bestseller. He's the guy who wrote the Alchemist, a book, to put it simply, about following your dreams. This book is a retelling of the Elijah story, and he has a little forward in the book talking about events of his own life, challenges that appeared to be setbacks, hardships that could discourage one from achieving their end, but which are really steps along the way. He sets Elijah up as a man who was meant to be a prophet of God and wanted to just be a carpenter instead. His life is interrupted by dreams and visions and voices in his head. God tells him to send a message to the king, and he does so thinking that after his task is done, he can just go back to his normal life. But instead, the act triggers a slaughter by the wicked queen Jezebel against all those loyal to the true God. It is a simple, but intelligent interpretation and I really find it compelling. I would suggest reading it, along with the Alchemist, to anyone interested in these ideas. I feel really good about reading it at this stage in my life, while I am in the middle of pursuing the life I was "meant" to live.

I like how my finances keep working out. I keep worrying about them, not to the point of fretting, but enough that it sometimes becomes burdensome and I need to pray hard and remember that everything is going to work out right, and it does. I had a tooth problem, and I had to get a root canal done. This was at a time when I was just beginning to build back up my dwindled savings, and I had to pay for that. Then I found out that I would have to pay a whole bunch more for a crown on that same tooth. But when I went to the dentist for the crown, he looked at it and said he thought it would be fine if he jsut put a filling in it instead, and I did that and it saved me like 600 bucks. Big load off my chest there. Perhaps more clear an example to me of how things just keep working out just right was last week at work. I was working on Friday lunch and I happened to have no rehearsal that night, and Cassie happened to be busy, and a girl happened to call me and ask if I wanted to pick up a shift that night, so it worked out perfectly and I did. I made some extra money, and it worked out just right, because last night and today were extremely slow and I hardly made a fraction of what I expected to make. It's not that I would be fretting or scared, but I'm just impressed how the details fall into place.

I'm going to Brazil in June, and I'll be gone for ten days. It's just for fun - Cassie has a friend down there and we're going to go visit her. I'm excited. I'm really glad that Cassie motivates me to do things I love but might not otherwise do. It really is a blessing to me.

ginger snaps

2007-04-08T00:37:00.000-07:00

We had a mafia party tonight. It was really fun. I was never the mafia again on this night. That makes one game and one game only, out of several sessions over the past three months that I have actually been mafia. I really like trying to read people. What a great game. I do miss playing with my friends in Minneapolis. I often think of people I've enjoyed playing with a lot and I wish I could get them all together in one group and see what happens. I don't know why, exactly. It just fascinates me.

Rehearsal is going quite well. I'm enjoying all the blocking and music. I enjoy the chance to shine on the stage and to have my moment in the spotlight. I have to admit it is quite thrilling to me. It's fun working with great people, too. The director is great; the cast is really nice and really fun, supportive and decent people.

It seems I've had a shortage of deep thoughts lately. I believe I have just had a very different pace of life. I've been more busy and active. I've had a lot of wonderful time spent with my girlfriend. I've been working and playing hard. It just leaves little time for pondering the mysteries of the universe. It's not that I've stopped pondering, really, but it is probably not as much. Sometimes I feel like it's the land around me, too. It feels like you really need to dig deep to find water, in a spiritual sort of way. Or I get the sense that the nourishment of the spirit is all funneling into the primary task of "bearing fruit." I've mentioned before that I believe that I have entered what I might call the spring time of my life. To me that means that all my life energy is beiing put to this task. It's a time for planting, for growth, for rain, for sunshine, for budding, for roots deepening, for vitality, for all those experiences and qualities, physical and figurative, which have to do with Spring. I'm mainly working on expunging old unwanted habits and instilling new ways, new and fresh thoughts and patterns of life. I really like the idea of new life.

Anyway, I feel like I'm on the verge of babbling. Sometimes I wish I had something more profound to write, but then I realize that's entering the realm of vanity, for it is not so much a desire to be of great benefit to all with my vast profundity, so much as a desire to be esteeemed as a deep and profound (oxymoron?) person. So I'll stop here, fearing that I have already waxed more poetic than I meant; I'll quit before my attempt at profundity loses even the appearance of such.

p.s., there's no reason for the title of this blog. none.

Detached

2007-03-31T16:04:00.000-07:00

I haven't written for a while, and that's mainly because I've been busy. By day I'm often at Chili's, waiting talbes again. I'm hoping this won't be for three or four more years. At night I've got rehearsals for My Fair Lady, and those are going splendid, thank you. I really don't have much to say about them. As long as you're working with decent people, it's pretty much going to be good. The only change in the good rehearsal pattern comes when you find yourself paired with not so decent human beings. I know the theatre world can be full of those, but I don't think I've met any in this show. It's been great, but like I said, what more can I relaly say about it. We rehearse, and we rehearse, and then we rehearse. Blocking, singing, acting, etc.

Anyway, I was having a stretch of a few days where life was just difficult. I wasn't getting enough sleep, but even when I did, I was still rather ornary, and though I was doing my best to be thankful, to be at peace, and to be basically everything I've wanted to be, I found myself worse for wear. I finally had a serious prayer time the other night, and after that I've been doing a lot better. It's not like I don't pray. When good things happen, I thank God for them joyfully; when I'm in need, I pray for what is on my mind. I do my best to expect the best, to think positive, and to relax under stress. But somehow, I find that there is absolutely no replacement for good strong earnest reliance on God. Maybe it's very much a spiritual thing. I think there's like some kind of oppressive spirit over this whole place. Though I do not like blaming all my hardships and trials on demons around every corner and under my bed too, I nonetheless believe that there are good and evil forces at work, of which we are not physically aware. As the scriptures say, "your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour." And yet Peter says to guard yourself against evil desires, which war against your souls. It seems quite unfair that we should have both our enemy and ourselves to contend with. I suppose, it more than evens out, if we have God and ourselves on our side. But life is hard sometimes. I miss my support network, people I need to see, people I need to talk to, to benefit from their wisdom and be uplifted by their company and creativity. Sometimes I feel starved here. Sometimes I feel detached, like I'm way out of my element, which I guess I am. At the same time, I'm living a life of faith, and it's challenging and adventurous.

So thanks for your prayers, those of you who take the time. Good things are happening all the time, and I have much to be thankful for. So here's to life and to the Spring. It's a very nice day outside today. I think I'll go to a drive-in tonight.

I knew it

2007-03-16T18:00:00.000-07:00

I knew it! I totally knew it!

So I'm browsing nbc's website for shows that I may wish to watch, and I decide to check out the new show, Raines, with Jeff Goldblum. First off, I like the actor. He's not like my idol or anything, but I usually like him in whatever he does, and this show is no different. The show has a unique spiin to a detective story. Goldblum is the detective Michael Raines, who sees visions of his victims. The visions are not the victims themselves, coming to haunt him, but they are his own imagination, and they change to fit his understanding of the events as he learns more during the case.

So the victim shows up, and you learn that he has a history of this sort of thing happening, and it seems like he thought it had gone away. When it happens, he goes to a friend of his who knows his situation, meets in some office first, and he meets him several other places throughout the episode, each time talking about the case and talking about his vision of this girl who has been murdered. I got the sneaking suspicion and near the end I was almost certain of it, and I was thinking making some kind of prediction on my blog or something, when they actually come right out with it. As they're talking, Raines reveals that his friend is indeed one of his visions. It is a fact of which he is perfectly aware. It left me laughing, and I just had to brag that "I knew it!" I know it wasn't that difficult to piece together, but I liked being able to catch it, and it made the show very entertaining for me. I really like Jeff Goldblum in this show, and I really like the show itself.

Also, I watched an episode of 30 Rock, and was pleasantly surprised, but not really by the show itself. It was okay, entertaining, fun to watch and everything, but what really made me exuberant was seeing a guest appearance by none other than Brian Murray. For those of you who don't know who Brian Murray is, he's a stage actor who is now in the Theatre Hall of Fame, and he was Pope Pious IX in Edgardo Mine at the Guthrie, the show in which I played an extra. He was a magnificent actor and great to work with. He came in, playing the father of Alec Baldwin's character in a little family spat that was the focus of the episode. I was just delighted to see him, short as his role was, and it brought back memories and made me smile.

Speaking of theatre, rehearsals start for My Fair Lady in a week and a day, and I am really pumped. It'll just be awesome to be on the stage again.

I bought a bike the other day. Found it on Craigslist. It wasn't too much, and I like the bike. And I was talking to the guy I sold it to, and he said he and his wife have season tickets to the Grand Theatre, so they'll be seeing the show. It was cool to be like, "I'm in that show!"

Paycheck

2007-03-10T22:52:00.000-08:00

I'm watching the movie Paycheck right now. It's actually not all that bad. It's about an engineer who builds incredible devices and then gets his memory erased, so that he doesn't know what he's done. On this assignment he ends up building a machine through which people can see the future. Only he sees terrible things, and after his memory is erased he finds himself running from death with only clues and little items that he had the forsight to send himself from when he saw the future. It's kind of cool. But somewhere along the line, they figure out that the future telling machine will actually make the world worse. They see pictures of the future, and they realize that knowledge of the future heightens all the world's dilemmas. Knowledge of war leads to preemptive strikes. Knowledge of economic failure leads to stock market panics. Through knowing the future. the people lose their choices. Take away the mystery, says Ben Affleck, and you take away hope. You take away drive, you take away strength and bring despair. I dont' know that this would be true, but I can imagine. If you knew what kind of failures awaited you, perhaps you wouldn't even try. But where would not trying get you? Absolutely nowhere. But trying and failing, that is not the end. It is merely a step along the path. It reminds me slightly of Minority Report. The attempt to change the future vs. the complacent acceptance of what will be. They're some interesting ideas.

The fountain-head

2007-03-02T16:01:00.001-08:00

On the way home from work (We did a store about 2 1/2 hours away, up in Idaho, and we carpooled up there) I was reading Civil Disobedience. It's a small enough book that it fits in my jacket pocket. I was struck by something Thoreau said about truth.

"They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more,and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head."

At first reading, this statement merely strikes me as some pluralistic admonition against bigotry. But I had to reread it a couple of times, and when I did, I did not feel any righteous indignation at people who cannot reach further than the standards and strictures that they know. But I experience conviction for myself. God forgive us for the times that we have replaced him with ideas and creeds, when we have bypassed his presence in favor of definitions and strategies. It is so easy to get into the rut of trying to "figure out" this life, that I often get caught up in the how and the what. After finally coming to understand that this life holds no strict formula, no step by step instructions or three point lecture answers, I yet find myself able to slip into the same old mentality. I somehow convince myself that the "answer" is out there, as if there is some unrevealed "Bible" that we just haven't found. But there isn't. There is only this lake or that pool, and they all come from the ultimate source. You can name any number of great pools of wisdom and spiritual riches, be it the Bible or others, and they are all good places to drink. But they are not the source. I know it is all analogous, all figurative, making it difficult to appropriate. But how else can one come to know the mysterious, the otherworldly, the spiritual, if not by analogy, poetry and song.

Anyway, this is all just to say that I wish to set aside my obsession with figuring it out, and I want to "gird up the loins" and strike out to seek the source of those pools I've been gazing into. I hope that makes sense. But I wish for my faith to rest on the power of God himself and not on human arguments.

Another Civil Disobedience qoute I found quite profound/unsettling:

"We love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire."

How true is that of our society today? How true is that of me?

Jobs

2007-03-01T12:34:00.000-08:00

I'm thinking of picking up another waitering job. My current inventory counting job is too sporadic, and it might be worse once I take off for nighttime rehearsals at the Grand. I need something more regular in the morning or afternoon hours, and I realize that the serving schedule I used to have would fit in perfectly with my time frames, and it would still be fairly flexible. I have been trying to avoid going back to that, but it seems like it might be necessary. And now that I'm cast in a play and I've finished my second draft to my novel, I feel like I'm still pursuing my dreams and making them a priority. I just need better money. It's not like the pay is terrible, but the hours are bad, and I won't even be able to do many of the ones that I do now. The thing with serving jobs here is that they don't pay minimum wage. It's one of those states that pays less than that because you're making tips. with means I won't be making five or six bucks an hour. It would be more like two to four. So I wouldn't be making as much as I was in Minnesota, where minimum wage went up a few years ago to 6.15, and servers were entitled to it. But anyway, I think it would still be better than what I'm doing. Especially if I worked a lot. We'll see.

I started working on my sequel some more. I started it a while ago. But the other night I was really fleshing out what was going to happen to whom and where and how, and I was coming up with a whole bunch of ideas and it was really fun. I really hope I can get my first one published, and I hope it sells well enough that they'll want another one from me. Creating the story is exciting.

My Fair Lady

2007-02-22T16:22:00.000-08:00

I have good news to share. I got a call earlier today from the Grand Theatre, and they cast me in the role of Freddy in My Fair Lady. The Grand is a community theatre that is connected with the community college. It is a beautiful place. Auditions were on Saturday, and then callbacks were on Tuesday. I seriously wasn't certain what to expect. There were only twelve guys at the callbacks, and seven men were going to be cast, so I thought I had decent chances. But there were three of us younger guys reading and singing for this one part, Freddy, and I wasn't sure, if I didn't get that part over the other two guys, whether there would be an opening in other minor roles for someone of my age/look/etc. I'd say that the two other guys who were reading/singing the same stuff as I were easily more talented that the rest of the men in the audition, and I thought perhaps either of them might be considered more suitable for the role, depending on what the director was looking for. One of them had a look and a composure on stage that I thought could be preferable to mine for that particular role, so anyway... I just wasn't sure. So now I'm in, and that's exciting. I hope at least one of the other younger guys gets in the show, too, because I'm dure I'd have a much harder time connecting with any of the older guys there, whereas, I was already talking easily and getting to know those two. Anyway, I'm thrilled. The show runs from May 4 through May 19, and I believe there a couple of matinees in there. So if anyone thinks they might be in the Salt Lake area around that time, they should stop by and see the show.

In other news, Tuesday night seems to have been a stellar night. Not only did I do well in callbacks, securing myself a good role in a decent community theatre, but Cassie and I went bowling. She bowls regularly on a league, which I think is really cool, and so she's gotten me into the game quite a bit more, and I enjoy going as much as I feel I can afford. So we went bowling that same night, after my callbacks were over, and on our second game I bowled a 213. I had a smile on my face the entire evening, I think. It was a lot of fun.

Anyway, not much else to say right now. I'm still reading Civil Disobedience and Blue Like Jazz, and they are both thought-provoking in their own seperate ways, but I still can't process any significant responses to them yet. So I'll leave it at that.

Civil Disobedience

2007-02-19T23:57:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty tired right now, so I doubt I'll develop any truly cohesive thoughts, but I am nevertheless in the mood to write. My reading lately is divided between too many avenues, but nevertheless, I find much of it thought-provoking. Most especially, I am very interested in what I read in "Civil Disobedience," by Henry David Thoreau. I've never read Thoreau before, though I've wanted to, always thought it would be a good idea. He has some interesting things to say about voting, which I think I like. I've gotten flak from some politically active americans for not taking much interest in elections, and though I do not quote the following to excuse my choices (such as not voting), for I do not look for excuses and I do not so far regret them, I do find what he has to say quite poignant. He talks about a respectable man who wishes to make a moral decision in his vote, but is not satisfied with the choices.

"He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought. Oh for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through!"

On some news show, I think on MSNBC, they were talking about Hilary Clinton. Some anti-war people, who arguably are in favor through most of the country, were arguing that Hilary should apologize for approving of the Iraq War in the beginning. I don't know that this has anything to do with the aforementioned quote, nor can I say why I find this interesting. The question on the show was whether she could win the presidency if she didn't apologize. But some were arguing that she probably would apologize, that it would raise more questions from the public and do more harm than good to her candidacy. If she apologizes, then what would we think of her? That she's wishy-washy? That she is swayed by the majority and doesn't follow her convictions? If she does not apologize, some may say she's a hypocrite, but many might not think it an issue.

Anyway, I just found it interesting. And I find it interesting how so much of politics is about image and public opinion. Thoreau says something about majority rule that I found interesting. He talked about how everyone votes according to their morals and convitions, so to speak, but when the decision comes in against their assured convictions, they accept it as just, because it is the decision of the majority. We've been brought up now in a worldview that says that if the majority agrees, then it is just. Clearly, any thinking person is capable of discerning that this is not the case. The majority of Germany went along with Hitler, approved his actions, and followed his orders. Some conscientious men and women, who stood by their convictions, did what they could to resist, taking it upon themselves to break the law, by virtue of the fact that the law was unjust.

Like I said, there's little cohesion tonight, just a bunch of thoughts mulling around in my muddled brain. But I'm sure all of this is connected somehow and quite relevant. And I'm sure if my brain was clear and I had more knowledge of history and government, I would have a lot tosay on the matter. But for now, I will have to be content to simply ponder these musings, and perhaps others will have more to say on the topic of Civil Disobedience.

books

2007-02-18T14:28:00.000-08:00

My second draft is finished. That's really good news. I hope to send the manuscript to an agent or a publisher in a couple of months. I'd like to finish one more draft to the work, and then I'll consider it ready. I finished the last 70-page section yesterday, and frankly, I had a good time reading my own writing. I know there are still some weak areas in the narrative, but I'd like to see what other people say about it before deciding for myself what to fix. But I really like my characters, and I enjoy the storyline.

Now that I have some time, while I wait for several people to get me some feedback on my book, I guess I need to get started on the sequel. I've already "started" it, but it's mostly intros for some other characters and some ideas I have for what needs to happen to them. I'm not going to turn it into another five billion character piece, where every single semi-significant person gets airtime in the story. I just want to focus on a couple of other people. So I'm shifting the focus to a little orphan girl, a priest, and a piece of history section about a queen. The latter will be like a flashback, a story from an ancient past that coincides with the current one. The good and noble knight from the first book will still be the/a central character. This is going to be a difficult story to pull together, I think, but I'm excited about hte characters. I'm looking forward to writing a spunky, intelligent, seven-year-old orphan girl. And I'm happy to delve into the disillusionment of a baffled priest. I needed to have several ideas in place, so I could set up for it in the first book. The first book could definitely stand on its own, but I think it will be a good idea to be ready with a sequel in case I actually get published and start selling books. Plus I enjoy the story, and I think I'll have a good time continuing it.

Anyway, I think I'm going to read some of Blue Like Jazz, because my girlfriend wants me to. Hehe. I'm not promising to finish it. I like it, and all, but those books never hold my interest for any extended period of time.

Hind's Feet

2007-02-07T00:36:00.000-08:00

I moved to SLC at the end of December, 2006. In the short time that I have been here, though it has seemed like much longer for I am by now a bit settled in, I have been sick for a week, failed to achieve anything with two different auditions, gotten a lowly job with not enough shifts and newly discovered the need for a root canal on one of my teeth. The first month and a half in this little town is less than one might expect. The only thing that goes very well is my relationship with Cassie, but I do not plan to talk about that on here, and it will not have much of anything to do with the things I do say, except to mention that she is a great encouragement to me through this time.

But honestly, and I know this may seem trite or not entirely sincere, but I believe it is best for a man to face failure and hardship, setbacks and difficulties. I did not come here to be handed my dreams on a silver platter. I came here to run the race, or fight the good fight, or whatever metaphor you like. I didn't come here for an easy coast through life or a one-shot ticket to the high road. I came to follow a path I believed was right for me. I remember Hind's Feet on High Places with great fondness, for I think of the impossible heights climbed, the lowest valleys braved, the beautiful sights seen all because of hardships and difficulties. If anyone has an easy life, in which all of life's treats are provided for them, I do not imagine they will truly be going anywhere. I am learning to breathe, learning to crawl, learning to walk, learning to run, and soon I will learn to fly. And I do not let go of my hope. That, my friends, is a powerful thing. That is a gift worth getting.

My story continues on the slow editing process. Not nearly so slow as the two years of actually writing the story, but it continues nonetheless. And that is a thing that I have recently found myself driven for. I am on to the fourth section. Just this and the last one to go, and I hope it is going alright. It gets easy to gloss over weaker points in the narrative for lack of invention and a desire for speed, but I believe I adding and subracting what it needs. I still hope to finish the second draft midmonth and then send it to some friends for a lookthrough.

Please, pray for me. I know I ask that more an more recently, but what can I say? I am trying to live life right and it is such a daunting dream to follow. Pray that I could keep my positive mindset, my firm resolve, and pray that events would work out in my favor. Thanks.

At first Frodo felt as if he had indeed been turned to stone by the incantation. Then a wild thought of escape came to him. He wondered if he put on the Ring, whether the Barrow-wight would miss him, and he might find some way out. He thought of himself running free over the grass, grieving for Merry, and Sam, and Pippin, but free and alive himself. Gandalf would admit that there had been nothing else he could do.
But the courage that had been awakened in him was now too strong: he could not leave his friends so easily. He wavered, groping in his pocket, and then fought with himself again; and as he did so the arm crept nearer. Suddenly resolve hardened in him, and he seized a short sword that lay beside him, and kneeling he stooped low over the bodies of his companions. With what strength he had he hewed at the crawling arm near the wrist and the hand broke off;

Hot pics of me with my haircut

2007-02-01T11:12:00.000-08:00

Since my last post, I've received numerous requests from hundreds of crazy stalker-people for me to post some pictures, displaying my incredible good looks. They've begged me and begged me, and I just can't say no to creepy fans, so here they are. New pictures of me with my haircut.

I know you are all stunned. Just, please, no more pounding down my door for more photographs. I think these will be sufficient, thank you. Have a nice day.

Hair/sleep

2007-01-27T14:22:00.000-08:00

I look really good! I mean, seriously! I look good!

I just got my haircut today, with thanks to Cassie and her cousin. I've needed a good cut for some time. And now I look... well, enough narcissism. It never really suited me all that well.

I'm going to nap soon. I don't have much to write about. things are mostly the same. Yesterday was a long day. Got up at 5:00 to be at work at 5:45. Didn't get to bed until 4. No, I wasn't up late doing something productive, but I'm a night-owl, okay? Got up this morning to go get my haircut and so I am... not really... awak.. e...
goo...d...ni...ght.

auditions, job, Lost spoilers, and more 24 madness

2007-01-23T14:31:00.000-08:00

I didn't get called back for Les Miz. No worries, really. Sometimes it's just not in the cards. I've dealt with disappointment before, and I've experienced enough to know that one thing may eventually lead to another, and that I don't have anything to worry about. I'd like to keep doing theatre, though, so pray for me, that I can find the right thing. I'm having trouble finding even good community theater auditions nearby. There were several auditions that happened around the same time as Les Miz, some of which I didn't even hear about until that same weekend. Now it's kind of dry. I'll probably audition at the Hale on Feb. 3, though I don't hold out much hope of getting in. You never know.

My job is alright. It's fairly boring, and I don't know if I'll really connect well with my coworkers. They're kind of an odd sort, just not very much the same sort of odd as I. They like me well enough, and most of them are easy to work with. And I think they're glad to have someone around who can catch on right away. Several times I heard some ladies express their appreciation of my intelligence, almost without my saying or doing anything. Apparently, it's not every day that somebody comes in and does something just as they're told to do it. huh... I hope to get more hours, and I'm sure that won't be a problem once I'm in the swing of things. I just hope I don't get overloaded and get sick of it too fast either. ten bucks an hour isn't too bad a gig for a part time, flexible, fairly mindless kind of work. But I think it may be several early mornings and some late nights. I was there until 12:45 last night. Wednesday night I work again, but not until 9pm. weird.

Not too much else to talk about right now. I'm doing well. I've been catching up on Lost:season 3 on abc.com, and I know that several people have commented to me that season three is a let-down, but I think ya'll are off your rocker. I don't particularly like the way Echo bit it with the smoke thing, and I hope we get some explanation on that. But basically, I think it's pretty intriguing.

Did ya see 24? I could not believe that guy was Jack's brother! I just... unh! wow. Anyway, that's all.

Tomorrow, Today, politicians, and 24

2007-01-16T20:49:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow I go to orientation for my inventory counting job. And then Thursday is my audition for Les Miz. I hope I do well. I pray that I can really wow them. Tomorrow night I'm going to a comedy club with Cassie for her birthday, which is Friday. That should be fun, too.

Let's see. I was in my room most of the day today. Not much was happening. After dinner I went up to my room again and prayed and then I felt in kind of a weird mood. I played guitar with the lights off, and it was really cool. I don't know why I did this. I'm not gonna lie: I like the dark. I can't see in the dark, but I like the dark. There's something peaceful about not using your eyes. There's something relaxing about the lack of visual stimulation. There's something deep and wondrous about it.

During dinner, the Moores, the couple I am staying with, were watching the Utah state address, I think from the governor or something. The politicians who spoke, first the governor (I never heard who it was, but I'm assuming) and then some democrat minority leaders who were responding to the address, were all completely bland. The issues would have been no less emotional and idealistic if a a robot were presenting them. I swear, it takes a good deal of talent to talk about an important issue like health care for children and make it sound completely unimportant. I mean, the words were there, telling everyone how important it was, but not only were there decidedly no solutions offered to suit the dilemma of American children without decent health care, but the man's tone was so bland, that one was encouraged to think no more of it than of last week's board meeting about cost effective management for the showerhead department.

Speaking of showerheads, the one I use is no good. It does not turn more than half an inch in any direction, and it comes up to my chest. The pressure is fine and the temperature is easily manageable, what's the point of a showerhead that does not reach the other side of the tub at need. There's nothing more important to have in your bathroom than a showerhead on a hose, which will reach over to the other side and wash away gross things. I won't say any more about that, because I do not want to gross anyone out. I'll let your imaginations do that for you.

Cassie and I started reading Lord of the Rings, which I find very enjoyable. I've never read the books out loud before, so it's kind of a new experience, even though I've read them to myself about seven times. That story is so wonderful. It is slow-going, though, since we're reading it together and have to match our times with one another. But we've seen a lot of each other in the past week, with has been quite enjoyable to me. But still, a day like today, I could have read for hours at a time. But that's alright.

I kept quite busy this evening with editing my book. I finished two chapters today, and I enjoyed them both thoroughly. That's a very nice change. The end of the first installment was difficult to get through, but now more interesting stuff is happening, I think. I hope my future readers will not be turned off before the reach the exciting parts, but I really don't know how I could make the earlier parts more exciting. It's hardly anything like 24, nonstop action from the get-go, and I don't think I'd much like it if it were.

Speaking of 24, I'm not sure what I think of the season premier. I mean, I was enthralled as usual. But I have to admit, I hate Chloe again. Her first season was annoying. The next one she grew on me. The last one she was like my favorite. And this was she's back to annoying and I kind of hope she dies this season. If it were not a fictional story, I'd feel bad about that, but I don't. I can't believe about Jack and Curtis. That's just nuts. The bomb was nuts too. My mouth was open for some time. So that was cool. I'm still wondering, though, what the Chinese have to do with everything. They never said what deal the president made with the Chinese for Jack's release, and I can't help believing that that issue will come back to haunt them. Oh and the first bombing that they showed, where the bus driver wouldn't let the arab guy on the bus and he drove away. Correct me if I'm wrong but the guy who was sitting on the bus and actually pulled the trigger... was Chinese, was he not? Cassie seemed to disagree with me in recalling the scene, but I'm quite certain that was the case. Anyway, it was cool. I'll still watch it.

That's all for now. I guess I'm kind of in a writing mood. Things are going well. Later

Google and my current state of affairs

2007-01-14T12:45:00.000-08:00

There it is - yet another friendly neighborhood internet device has fallen to the great devourer. I log on to my blogger page and what do I find, but that I now need a Google account so that my blogger material can work with Google from now on. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm sick of this internet powerhouse gobbling up all the nice hometown sites that everyone loves. Today it's YouTube, tomorrow... who knows? the Moon!!! It's scary.

Anyway, my time in Salt Lake is going fine. It's great to be with my girl, and it's been a fun time doing lots of puzzles. I audition for Les Miz this week, Thursday. And I start an inventory counting job this week as well. A flexible little ten dollar an hour gig, replaceable, but will make me money for the time being. It was weird. I went in to fill out an application, which didn't even ask for personal references, which was nice because I forgot most of my contact list in Minnesota. But then I had to take a math test. I had like five minutes to answer at least 21 questions right. They were all counting questions, visual kind of stuff. I finished 36 questions and got them all right, which I suppose is why they told me to come to orientation on Wednesday evening and to help out on Thursday morning with their Kohl's counting. So it should be cool. I like that I won't be doing customer service for now. Restaurant service, specifically, though I suppose the money would probably be better. That's alright. I like the flexibility of this one.

I'm not sick anymore, even my sore throat seems completely gone. It lingered for quite a while. I have to admit that Salt Lake is definitely a different place. I mean, I've only really lived in Minnesota and Chicago, and admittedly those two were different enough in their way, but this place is strange to both. Anyway, my writing is going slower than expected. I suppose part of that was my sickness. I was always tired, exhausted, for a good week, and I fell behind on my editing. It's good, though, that the last couple of chapters have been more interesting to me, and I've needed to do less changes. The first installment (the first of five 60-70 page sections) was difficult and required the most changes, because it was during that time when I was still figuring things out with the plot, the backstory, the characters, everything. And my writing had yet to reach its stride. Once I got into the second installment, it was much smoother, and the characterization came out more captivating. So I'm happy with it, but I've got a lot of work to do.

That's it for now. Down with Google. I'm not moving my site, though.

Oh, one more thing. People asked for my address. My first thought about posting my new address on here, is that other people, worried people, might be afraid of creepy people seeing it and doing something crazy, which would really just be a bad thing for the people I'm living with. But I actually think that's silly. So, I'm writing this as a disclaimer for those who might think along those lines and wish to chastise me for putting "personal information" on display on the net. You're silly!

3939 Starwood St., West Valley City, UT 84120

That's my address, if anyone wants to send snail mail. And to all creepy people, just leave me alone. That should do the trick. Until next time. Hopefully, I'll have good things to say (about auditions and such).

My first day in Salt Lake - didn't see the sights

2006-12-30T10:54:00.000-08:00

I made it to Salt Lake City on the 29th, around 2:30. I slept a little, but I don't think it was enough, because later that night I felt feverish. And then the next day I was bedridden the entire day with sickness, most likely brought on by exhaustion. I slept most of the night, too, and then I got up today at 10:30. I felt a lot better, but I might need to sleep some more today. Anyway, not much else going on. Lots of sleeping, lots of spitting, lots of drinking water. A little bit of socializing, a little bit of eating (basically as much as I can handle of either at the moment) and a little bit of moving away from my bed. And that's it for now. I should be fine by tonight. I think I just pushed myself too hard.

The words I just can't say right in person

2006-12-27T00:43:00.000-08:00

I am not very good at speaking sentimentally, especially in front of too many people. I just wanted to say how much I will miss everyone here in Minnesota. I spent this evening with some friends from Solomon's Porch. I didn't express very well how much you all mean to me. These past four years have not been my easiest stretch of life, but SP has been a solid foundation for me, a bastion of strength for my soul, and the spirit has strung himself through our meetings, our comings and goings, our simple interactions. I can think of no group of people I would rather call my friends. And aside from my actual family, I can think of no other people I would rather call my family. You have each blessed me in your own special ways.

I did not expect to cry when I left. I've been so sure of my destination, so unflinching in my resolve, I've given little thought to how much I will leave behind. People have asked me if I am nervous, and I invariably say no, because I can find no doubts in my mind about my choice to leave. But this past week I have felt wasted and tense and plagued by headaches, and I find myself needing to let loose, to shed tears, craving to exhaust the unasnwered pangs of loss and release the flood of sorrow. I love you all deeply. I can only leave with you this message of my deepest affection and my utmost gratitude. Though I leave now, please know that I will be with you in spirit. My prayers and my thoughts are with you. May the peace of Christ hover over you always, and may God bless you with all spiritual blessings in Christ Jesus. Thank you for your friendship, and thank you for your love and encouragement.

With great affection and with tears, I bid you all a good New Year, and I hope to see you again soon.

Christmas season

2006-12-21T00:18:00.000-08:00

This past Sunday was the last performance of Edgardo Mine at the Guthrie. It's something I'm really glad I did. After several weeks of doing eight performances every week, I can honestly say that I would love to do this for a career. I love the crowds, the feel of the stage, the costumes, the acting, the energy of throwing a performance. It's a great time and working with great people is definitely a plus.

So now it's the Christmas season, and other than preparing presents and enjoying time with family and friends, I'm mostly just waiting to go to Utah, where I can spend a lot more time with someone special. I leave on the 27th, so pray for me and wish me well.

My book is coming along. I've found that I actually really enjoy editing. It's difficult when I come across a scene that I don't really like and I'm not really into it, but sometimes I get to enjoy my own writing, which is great. The rough draft I finished just a couple of weeks ago, and I hope to have the second draft done by the end of January, at which point I'll send it to some friends of mine to look at and see if it's any good, maybe give some feedback.

Otherwise, that's it for me at the moment. I don't really have any interesting thoughts or insights at the moment so I'll just leave you with some fine words:

Pom-Pom... what's up my main... man... my dawg... my ace in the hole... second place.

Astrology

2006-12-06T01:03:00.000-08:00

A little snipet of conversation with my Dad, which based on a couple of comments from a member of the Edgardo cast about astrology, have caused me to think a little more in depth about it. I'm kind of an open-minded person - I think there are a lot of strange, unaccountable things that people believe and really might have some grain of truth in them. My dad, of course indicated that astrology is a bunch of bunk, and I commented that I thought perhaps there might be something to it, though I'm not sure how much. So here are a few of my thoughts on it, though I haven't taken a lot of time to reason it out or do any real research.

I'll start with biblical authority, since I happen to have a degree in biblical studies and I still believe a lot of that stuff is very important. No, my degree in biblical studies did not go in depth on the topic of astrology. But there are certain places mentioned in the Hebrew scriptures in which "divination" is forbidden. I have heard before of people linking this idea to astrology. It is basically saying that astrology is a form of divination, consulting the stars for guidance and truth. Most of those passages refer to mediums and spiritists, consulting the dead. So I dont' think it is talking about astrology. If it is, then I do not really understand why. If it's a complete load of bunk, a bunch of meaningless chatter from idiots who are obsessed with the alignment of the stars for no reason whatever, then who cares that much if someone dabbles in it? It hardly warrants that kind of sanction. It would be more something parents would tell their children: don't pay any attention to that load of crap, it's all hogwash. But what would cause the parent to say: Don't you ever, ever get caught up in any of that astrology crap, you hear me? To me that sounds like it might be dangerous. What's dangerous about people imagining that the stars might mean something? I mean the worst that can happen is that someone will think the end of the world is coming and decide to stop working. But people do that for many reasons, some of which are not half bad. Anyway, that's all to say that if astrology is included in those scriptures, which I in some small way doubt, then I have no idea why, though frankly I'm not completely sure why people shouldn't consult the dead, except I know there is some really freaky stuff there.

Next on the biblical issues: the wise men. There's a little-known story, I know not many people have heard of it, about a little baby being born to a man and woman named Joseph and Mary. And at his birth, over his little manger bed, a star appeared in the heavens. Lo and behold, the Messiah is born, and a star appears in the sky. Bear with me if you've heard this one before, but I'm thinking most of you haven't. This is not just some random star that made someone go, huh, I think the sky is brighter tonight. Apparently some "magi" in the east saw the star and decided it was really really important and they wanted to follow it. In fact, presumably because of their astrology, they knew that it was a very significant star and it was a portent for the birth of a great child, so they brought gifts, very expensive gifts, and when they came they told Herod that they wanted to worship the child. Now I'm sure the response from the anti-astrology crusader would be that the birth of Christ was so important that it reached into areas of life in which God was not previously a part. In other words, astrology really doesn't mean anything, but because God wanted to reach those who practiced astrology, he sent them a sign that did mean something so that they would come and worship him. A good argument, I suppose, if you need a justification. I don't know why God couldn't have spoken to them in dreams, like he did everyone else, instead of validating their "faulty" practices with his involvment, but whatever. Biblically speaking, the star is never attributed to God's actions. And of course, I know that God's actions must be involved, but let's not banty words.

I've known several God-fearing people, who actually put a lot of stock in astrology, and though they are a little weird, I do not have enough knowledge to dispute their claims, nor do I have any desire to do so. I find it interesting in a world filled with so much mystery and created with so much enigma, that we are so scared of believing in the mysterious and strange. Those who adore and worship God should be especially attuned to the mystery and wonder of the world, and yet we seem to be the most fearful. I am not saying we become slavering idiots who believe every little thing they are told. Did I say that anywhere? Anyway, just some thoughts. I'm interested to hear what other people know or believe about this stuff.

End of November

2006-11-30T14:48:00.000-08:00

The end of November is here, and I have to say, November really did go by fast. I know I was busy with the play at the Guthrie, but though I am still there nearly every night, it has not been all that intense in terms of time. Anyway, in a month I am planning to move. I have felt a tug to move on, trying something new and trying out a new place, and now the opportunity for it is finally here. I'll be moving to the Salt Lake City area to be near my girlfriend, Cassie. It is still rather wild to my mind, but that's definitely a good thing. I'll be pursuing theater and music and writing while I'm there, which I'm really thrilled about. I have a place to live for some semi-indeterminate amount of time, no more than a year, and I have some ideas, at lease, for what I'll be doing, involving auditions and resumes and all that good stuff. A friend of mine at the guthrie, who is also an extra in the show, says he does more film type of work. He mentioned that I should find a good agent, give them a resume and a headshot and see if anything comes up in the line of commercials, something like that. That was not the first person to mention this to me, so I'm thinking I should give it a try. At the worst, an agent will decide not to take me on, so there's not much to lose. He said not to give them any money, which I was already somewhat aware was kind of a shady business practice.

Anyway, I've been feeling good about my writing lately. I haven't been so diligent as to finish, and I still don't write three or four pages a day, as I think I should. I said some time ago that if I worked on it like I should, I would be able to finish the first rough draft by the end of November. I haven't yet, because I haven't worked on it enough, but I still feel good about it, because the story is finally beginning to draw to a close. I'm basically right in the middle of the climax, big battle scenes, people dying, all that good stuff. I keep forgeting that there needs to be some sort of resolution at the end, beyond just the victory point of the climax. Some type of epilogue material, and I neglect to include that in my thoughts about finishing the work. But I feel good about it. Even when I only write a couple paragraphs, I look it over and, for good or ill, I usually like it. Soon I will be able to get down and dirty with editing my own material, reworking everything that doesn't fit to gether or doesn't make sense, fixing grammar and plotlines and foreshadowing and backstory and spelling and everything. It seems like a daunting task, but I think I have a better idea of what needs to be fixed/changed than I would have when I was only half-way through the story. Anyway, my goal is still the end of the year, and I suppose I should make that the second-draft deadline. It's exciting to me, in a way, but I don't think I will really be happy about it until it's on it's way to publication... if it gets to that point. I hope and pray that it does.

And in other news, my guitar practicing has been different recently. I haven't been hammering out cover tunes, like I've intended to, but I've been working on fingering a lot. It's actually really good for me, because it builds up my callouses and gives my fingers a really good workout, and it should make me a better guitar player, so I think it's well worth it. That being said, I should get too work on some more S&G. Maybe some other stuff, too.

That's all for now, I think.

quote of the day:
S: Tell me about your girlfriend Marzipan. What's her deal?

H: She told me today that she thinks your baking has really improved lately.

S: Oh, my baking, eh? I do enjoy baking every once and again.

mornings

2006-11-23T10:49:00.000-08:00

I don't do well in the mornings. When I get up out of bed, I seem to need a good hour or two in which no one bothers me, and by that I mean that no one at all is in the same room. There are certain exceptions, people I like seeing right away (*), but for the most part, people being there get on my nerves in the morning. I know this is a character flaw on my part, but I have never found any way to counteract it. Getting a good amount of sleep is no remedy.

This quality I have makes me leery of someday having children. I mean I'd hate to wake up every morning and be able to think of nothing except how annoying my children are. Maybe it's not like that. Maybe I would be a different creature by then. I don't know. Or maybe I'll just have to turn myself into a morning person and get up three hours before anyone else instead of staying up three hours later. I don't know. I'm just thinking about things.

things I've learned

2006-11-23T00:16:00.000-08:00

There are things that one learns over time, over the years, which can be easy to forget. Little lessons, changes of mind, attitude, perspective, sometimes you forget how you once tried to live a certain way. Sometimes life continued as it used to be, not from any particular event or experience causing a reversion on your part to your former way, but merely from forgetfulness. Life goes on, you deal with your struggles, and sometimes, if you're not careful, the things you once knew, which were so profound and vital when you learned them, fade from memory. I'd like to take this time in my night when I should be asleep to write down some of the things I've learned, not necessarily in any profound kind descriptive language that communicates the essence of the lesson, but merely labels for the changes I experienced or sought to put into action.

Think positive.

Turn every disappointment into an opportunity.

Remember that you are nothing.

Remember that you can accomplish anything.

Eating new foods can be fun.

Take every hardship as a chance to see God's hand in your life.

Do not forget in darkness what you knew to be true when you were in the light.

If you are looking for something in particular, your chances of finding it are very small, because of all the things in the world, you're looking for one of them. If you're looking for anything at all, then your chances of finding it are very good, because of all the things in the world, you're bound to find some of them.

Your thoughts have an impact on yourself and on the world around you.

You can live a life of faith. There is no use in worrying about money, and you should not let it hinder you from living the life to which God has called you.

Pray.

And finally, don't forget to get a good night's sleep.

2006-11-21T14:17:00.000-08:00

"But Look around. The grass is high. The fields are ripe. It's the springtime of my life."

Simon & Garfunkel

Opening Night

2006-11-10T23:52:00.000-08:00

Tonight was opening night of the play at the Guthrie. It went great. We had already had about five preview performances, so we'd already established a kind of routine for our performances. It ran as smoothly as could be. Then we had our opening night party. There were lots of people there: cast crew, quite a few audience members who got some party tickets. For a good portion of the time, it was difficult for me to enjoy the social atmosphere. There was one room with food, one with the bar, and one with dancing. The dancing room was fairly sparse for most of the night, and I was able to avoid being enticed onto the floor, for the most part. Otherwise, I just mingled with people. It took a bit for the drinks to kick in, but eventually I was able to relax. Relative to my usual particular stiffness. I met several new faces and I socialized with other members of the cast. It was fun.

One experience in particular, toward the end of the night, was especially significant to me. I got to talking with Brian, the Pope in our show. He's kind of a big deal in the theatre world. Anyway, we got to talking about God and about life, when he asked me about my own life. At one point in our conversation he said to me, "you seem to radiate goodness. I saw it from the first moment I met you." I don't know how that's possible, having intimate knowledge of my own capacity and tendency toward being a big jerk. My own self-deprecation notwithstanding, the compliment touched me greatly. We talked more about life, my dreams, his experience, and it was really great. I remembered tonight one more reason I love the theatre. For some reason, I have the most interesting conversations about spiritual things when I'm involved in the acting biz. It was true in high school. I didn't expect it when I started but it appears to be true now.

Other good theatre-related news: no more rehearsals. Only performances from here on in. Lots and lots of them, Almost every night ('cept Mondays) and several matinees, until we close on the 17th of December. So I'll still be busy, but there shouldn't be any more ten or twelve hour days at the Guthrie.

A lot of other things are on my mind, but I'm not in a state to process it all right now, most of it being related to the previously mentioned conversation with Brian, among other conversations of the night.

Lost and Loving the Theatre

2006-11-08T16:15:00.000-08:00

I've been busy. Yesterday was my day off, and I think I spent it well enough, though I forgot to do my laundry. Ugh. I hate when I do that. But other than yesterday I've been at the Guthrie all day every day, for the most part. We've spent hours in rehearsals, many of which I've spent reading, because I'm not always on stage. But we've also started preview performances, and those are going well. On my off hours, at night after a 10-12 hour day in the city, I've gone home and watched Lost: Season 1. It is amazing. What can I say about that show. I had heard it was very good by many different sources, but I didn't know how good. It's not just creepy and weird and exciting and dramatic. But it deals with real issues: faith, pain, crisis, good and evil, fear, health, troubled pasts, relationships. It's deep, and it's mysterious, enthralling, riveting. If it weren't for Cassie, I think I'd want it for a lover. haha.

Anyway, it's actually hard for me to feel like I'm growing as a person when I'm just constantly busy, so I don't always feel that I have something deep and meaningful to talk about. But at the same time, I feel like what I'm doing with myself has great value. I may just be an extra in a show at a nice theatre in Minneapolis, but I love doing it. I love the energy of the crowd as we give our performances. I love the anticipation in the air as the actors prepare themselves mentally and physically to go on stage. I love immersing myself in the story and placing myself in another time and place.

My writing has suffered from the lack of energy when I get home at night, but I've been able to get some things accomplished, just on Monday and today. The story is starting to wrap up, which means I'm actually building to the climax. It's actually quite difficult. I don't want to rush it, but I want it to move along and build up in intensity. It's a trial, and sometimes I don't feel like I'm up to the task of completing it. It's just daunting, even though I've come this far.

Anyway, that's all for now. I look forward to continuing on Lost as soon as I can. We'll see when that will be. I need to find Disc 6 of Season One, because it's missing from the set I'm borrowing. Urrr... That's, uh... that's my... angry face.

I do not die

2006-10-30T20:31:00.000-08:00

Must I go on forever without end
On this weary road I wend?
Silver streams and starry skies
Break with rocks and bitter lies

Sow my soul inside your flesh
Burn me whole or drink me fresh
I do not die despite these sores
I do not fall despite these wars

But must I go forever on this road
Fighting for what I am owed?
Straggling through the emptiness?
Vagabond and purposeless?

There is no balm in Gilead
There is no strength save what I had
And that was mine but is no more
Yet I relive what was before

Awake, but dreaming, I am blind
Sacred, screaming, far behind
Bury deep my wounded soul
Rake my breath across the coal

I do not die, despite the pain
I do not melt, despite the rain
I do not fall, despite the weight
I do not cry, despite my fate

The pyre is high that burns for me,
That kills my insincerity
They wish I’d go and ne’er return
But I do not die despite the burn.

The Five Rings

2006-10-20T18:13:00.000-07:00

I've been reading the Five Rings. It's an old classic Japanese work about the way of the Samurai. I got an annotated version, which has its upsand downs. The work itself reads pretty well already so the notes tend to have a lot of regurgitating of already established information. On the upside... I can't really think of a significant upside to the "annotated" part, but they're not too bad.

Anyway, the book is cool. There are a lot of basic principles that could be applied to any endeavor or profession in life. So I've been taking notes on excerpts I think are interesting or important. One thing I noted was a little bit about posture.

"In general, you must maintain the fighting stance in everyday life. Your everyday posture must immediately become the fighting stance."

The intensity of this line struck me once I truly considered its implication. The underlying principle is that in order to be a fighter, to walk in the "Way" of this martial strategy, a person has to be a fighter at all times, not just when you fight. Posture, then, becomes not just a good idea and not just something you practice an hour or two a day, but something you make a ceaseless endeavor, an integral part of your identity. My imagination blows me away when I think of how much you could accomplish if you applied that kind of thinking so intensely to everything to which you put your mind.

The book also has a very good emphasis on balance, self-control, and clarity of mind. I am not all that far along in it yet, but I'm enjoying it so far.

Our World

2006-10-17T13:14:00.000-07:00

Maybe this really isn't of any greater importance than it has been before this time, but I've been struck recently with the craziness of all that's been going on in the world. The more I hear about news from all over the world, the more concerned I become for the entire world as a whole. I know violence and strife and even utter madness have been a part of this life for millenia, that war has always been an issue, that poverty has taken its toll throughout the ages and that men and women have done horrific and insane things to one another in the past. But for some reason, the recent string of events has caused me to look at the world with much greater concern, for I get the impression, accurate or not, that the evil in this world is in the midst of an uprising. The idea is one I usually try to shy away from, because it has been touted by religious ultra-evangelicals for some time and it often has to do with someone talking about the "signs of the times", yet another reason for us to just shake our heads and hope Jesus comes back soon to end it all. But that's not what I'm about and that's not the attitude I seek to invoke in myself or others. But something in me says that what's going on in our world today, from the nuclear testing in North Korea to the continuing middle east conflict with Israel to the ongoing struggle in Uganda and Sudan, to local stories of normal people acting ridiculous and even the heated election races, with all their fearmongering.

I know it's easy to say, yeah yeah, that's the news, and they always tell you the worst part of it and things have been bad before, blah blah blah. Some people might not think it's important that there's an underlying trend and movement in all of these crises, a spiritual menace that's making itself known. It's easy to assume that this is the world we live in and we just need to live as well as we can in it and pray for things to get better. For some reason, I cannot say why, but I do say with confidence and conviction, I believe there is an underlying spiritual wave and that it is important to recognize it as we try and live well in this world and pray for God's goodness in it.

That being said, I see there is a lot to pray about in this world, and if anyone is reading this, I want to encourage them first and foremost to pray, and pray hard. Pray, because the times are evil, as the scriptures say. There is hope for this world and we need to cling to it and have faith and be salt and light, as Jesus taught us.