Rest and Restlessness

This Blog Has Died

2006-12-21T15:22:00.000-04:00

Born 2005, Died 2006.

It was a good blog, and it served me well. But it has moved to greener pastures at mattwiebe.com.

If you are reading this in a feed reader, you will no longer see it updated, although to ease the transition this old feed was being updated from my new site. Be sure to update to the new feed. This is probably the last thing that will ever be posted on this particular space.

Vision

2006-11-26T17:16:00.000-04:00

Here's some questions I'm mulling over for the mentorship group that Jac and I are a part of here. What does everyone think?

Personal Vision:

What do you understand "vision" to be? How does it differ from the mission of Christ given to us in the New Testament (i.e. the Great Commission and the Great Commandment)?
Why do you think having a clear sense of vision would be important? Is it not simply enough to know what the above stated mission is and simply walk that out in obedience?
Why could it be said that vision is a two-edged sword?
What would you die for? What will you die for?

Shared Community Vision:

What should be found in some form within any Christian community's shared vision?
How is it discovered?

A Lifetime Of Vision:

How do you keep vision (individual or community) fully alive?
What about Vision Statements? Are they helpful for this or should we have one because they are expected today?

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Quote of the Week

2006-11-26T00:35:00.000-04:00

Last Sunday, Pete Fitch preached a sermon based on C.S. Lewis' famous sermon entitled "The Weight of Glory." The themes of that are still ringing through this week, and the following quote is ringing particularly true:

If there lurks in the most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with [temporal things] when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

This is what pisses me off about all of us: we're so half-hearted in anything we do. We run around saying we're Christians but then we try to get away with as much as we can. If all we're after is pleasure, why don't we come right out and say that we don't really want to follow Jesus, but that we simply want to follow fun. Fine, do it, and do it whole-heartedly, but stop mucking about with all of this half-hearted crap. Stop pretending that the mud is the holiday at the sea, and just play in it. Or don't.

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One Year

2006-11-24T01:47:00.000-04:00

Today marks my one year anniversary in blogging. A year ago, I started this blog by saying, "I'm not quite sure if I really need to have a blog or not, but here I go anyways." A year later, I could hardly imagine not having a blog, so this might qualify as need. More thoughts on blogging and what it means to me to come...

So, here's an announcement for everyone to celebrate my one year blogiversary: I'm closing up shop here and moving over to my own domain. That's right folks, you will soon be able to find me at mattwiebe.com.

There's some stuff to sort out over there before I really get going, but you can help me out by voting on the poll as to what the new name of my blog should be. I think that I might be tired of "Rest and Restlessness," but I'd like to hear what people think. If you vote "other," put an idea down in the comments here or there.

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Get a Mac Spoof

2006-11-19T18:05:00.000-04:00

Now this is quite hilarious. Thanks to Jac's brother Trav on this one.

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Book Un-suggester!

2006-11-17T14:32:00.000-04:00

I use LibraryThing to keep track of the books I'm recently reading, as you can see in my sidebar. But it's also a terrific, rapidly growing community of book-lovers that is starting to reach the kind of critical mass whereby some fun data manipulation can take place.

They've been getting better at suggesting books to you based on the ones in your library, but their newest bit is a piece of pure, devious genius. It's called UnSuggester, and it takes a book that you input and find out the books that you're least likely to want based upon the millions of book lovers in its database. Here's some interesting results...

And then I did an Unsuggest search for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, and the results were interesting to see the results... 3 out of the top 4 books were by John Piper, and out of the top 30 Unsuggestions, only about 3 of them weren't Christian books. Strange, but I suppose not surprising given the track record of Christian cultural engagement.

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Are Hybrid Cars Environmentally Unfriendly?

2006-11-16T17:38:00.000-04:00

I just came across an article titled Doubts Cast on Hybrid Efficiency (HT: Signal vs. Noise) that essentially says that Hybrids are less efficient than their conventional counterparts. Interesting.

A research study was performed that calculated the total energy cost it would take to plan, build, sell, drive and dispose of a vehicle from initial concept to scrappage. When we only consider the fuel efficiency of a car, we miss out on a lot of stuff. And it turns out that far more energy goes into building a hybrid vehicle than into a conventional vehicle.

For example, the Honda Accord Hybrid has an Energy Cost per Mile of $3.29 while the conventional Honda Accord is $2.18. Put simply, over the "Dust to Dust" lifetime of the Accord Hybrid, it will require about 50 percent more energy than the non-hybrid version, CNW claims.

And here's a shocker:

while the industry average of all vehicles sold in the U.S. in 2005 was $2.28 cents per mile, the Hummer H3 (among most SUVs) was only $1.949 cents per mile. That figure is also lower than all currently offered hybrids and Honda Civics at $2.42 per mile.

The conclusion is that things are always more complicated than what we're led to believe:

Basing purchase decisions solely on fuel economy or vehicle size does not get to the heart of the energy usage issue.

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Never Take a Job as a Pastor?

2006-11-11T19:07:00.000-04:00

In the Vineyard, we have a relational-centric idea of authority. Well, ideally speaking, anyways. In that vein, Jac and I are starting to meet with the Bests and some other young leaders to bounce ideas off of each other, draw on the Bests' experience in church planting and learn from each other in community.

There were a number of gems that came up last night, such as Gary saying that he doesn't actually like the term "church planting," although he hasn't come up with a better one yet and he'll keep using it until he does. We didn't get into the why of that, but it was interesting to hear some of his process.

But here was the big one: Gary basically said, "don't take a job as a pastor." We were talking, of course, about being pastors. Thus far I've had the cliche attitude that, 'I'll do whatever God leads me to do.' As far as pastoring was concerned, I thought that I would be just as happy planting a new church or coming on staff at an existing church. But after last night, I'm not so sure any more.

What would the attraction be of coming on staff at an existing church? Money and security, of course. But then you have to slog through the hell of trying to win spiritual authority with these people. You don't know them, they don't know you, and you have to earn their trust. This process will be very frustrating for everyone involved and ultimately won't turn out that well in most cases. You're going to be constantly faced with compromises in order to "win people over." Blech. Of course, this wouldn't apply in the same way if you actually became a pastor at a church that you've been a member of for some time. But that's a whole other line of thought.

Planting a new church presents its own challenges, of course. You'll need to get a job, as this fledgling community won't have any money to pay you. You'll be incredibly busy, but you'll actually be involved in starting a community that won't have nearly as many temptations to compromise. You'll also establish early on that the church is about the whole community and not just about you as the pastor, because you'll burn out otherwise. If the community grows to the point where it wants to pay you a salary to dedicate more time to it, so be it. If that never happens, cool. In either case, you've pioneered a community that didn't demand that you check large chunks of your vision at the door.

Obviously this implies that I disagree with a pretty broad swath of how churches operate. I would like to add, however, that I'm not trying to assert my superiority over them. How to "do church" is never a concrete thing and I believe that God is at work in many churches that I would have a great deal of difficulty in being a part of. What I am asserting is that I have concluded that this is the path that I believe to be the best one. I believe that it best lines up with the priorities that I share with a large number of brothers and sisters that I hope to have the privilege of loving God and others with. I'm excited to be the church and to be a part of a community that stumbles into God's kingdom in the particular context that He invites us into. It won't be safe or easy, but I hope that it will be teeming with the reality of God's kingdom.

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The Cost of War

2006-11-11T02:22:00.000-04:00

What's the cost of war? Obviously there's so many ways to measure it in terms of the devastation it wreaks on untold numbers of lives. But, let's be more crass here: show me the money. The National Priorities Project shows its version of the Cost of War:

Currently, the War in Iraq has cost $341,390,328,877.
Instead, we could have hired 5,916,339 additional public school teachers for one year.
Instead, we could have provided 16,549,869 students four-year scholarships at public universities.

Obviously there's moral, theological and other important issues involved here. But seriously, those numbers are appalling. The site above also has a way to see the impact of the war on local communities in terms of pure $. For instance, the war has cost Fargo, ND (population: 90,672) $59,636,965. This is ridiculous, even from a purely economic point of view.

Go check out the Cost of War site. It has a counter of the Cost of War, and it's now up to $341,392,190,394.

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The Gospel as Good News in Mark

2006-11-10T02:03:00.000-04:00

Well, here's a theological turn. It's surprising how little theology I post compared to how much I'm knocking about theological ideas in me noggin. I'm currently reading Craig A. Evans' article "The Beginning of the Good News in the Gospel of Mark" (in Hearing the Old Testament in the New Testament) for a paper I'm working on for my NT Theology class and it's got some interesting info, some of which I knew, some of which I didn't.

The Gospel of Mark is widely held to have been written just prior (or maybe just after) the fall of Jerusalem, which means that Vespasian had just recently become emperor after a chaotic succession where there had been 4 emperors in one year. Murder, intrigue, yadeeyada. Vespasian had been the General of the Roman Legions who were busy opening up a can of whoop-ass in Judea against those crazy Jews and their insistence on their one God and their hatred of those pesky Roman pagans. Things get interesting when Vespasian captures this Jewish general named Josephus, who prophesies according to the Hebrew Scriptures that Vespasian will become Caesar.

And Caesar he becomes. A little background: Roman emperors were generally held to be divine and to be worshiped by all subjects of the Empire. This is the kind of widespread propaganda that accompanied the newly elevated Caesar:

...Providence, which has ordered all things and is deeply interested in our life, has set in most perfect order by giving us Augustus, whom she filled with virtue that he might benefit humankind, sending him as a savior, both for us and for our descendants, that he might end war... the birthday of the god Augustus was the beginning of the good news for the world that came by reason of him... (Evans, 93).

Augustus (the first emperor) and those who followed him in his office were officially proclaimed in this kind of way. Caesars were also often referred to as the son of God. Furthermore, accounts were spread that Vespasian had healed a blind man by spitting in his eyes.

Is any of this sounding familiar? It should for those familiar with the Gospel of Mark. In this context, Mark writes his Gospel, boldly confronting the imperial propaganda of his day.

He starts, saying, "The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God" (Mark 1:1). Gospel = good news, and good news is found in Jesus, not in Vespasian. Jesus is the true son of God, not Vespasian. In verse 2, Mark uses the Hebrew Scriptures (Isaiah) to show that Jesus' coming has been prophesied, just like Vespasian was claiming. And of course, Jesus is also presented as a savior who came doing miracles, right down to spitting in a man's eyes to heal his blindness (Mark 8:22). The parallels are astounding.

The parallels could be pushed even farther, but I'll leave them there. Vespasian was parading around as the supposed divine savior of the world, but within the community of early followers of Jesus, someone said "that's bullshit." He (or she?) wrote a highly subversive account of the life of Jesus that undermined Vespasian's legitimacy and authority at every step. What we now know as the Gospel of Mark was highly political and what it meant in the context of first century Palestine was:

After three failed emperors, Vespasian ascended to the throne, hailed as the new "son of God," divinely empowered, able to heal. Omens hinted at his coming; Jewish prophecy foretold it. Surely in this man the Roman world would once again stabilize and benefit from the "good news," which has now begun.

Not so, says the evangelist Mark. The good news begins with Jesus Christ, the true Son of God — the Son recognized by God himself at the baptism and later at the transfiguration, the divine Son who is fearfully recognized by the spirits , the Son who can heal great numbers of sufferers with a word or a touch (Evans, 103).

What this might mean for us today, I will not get into at this point.

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Why Blog?

2006-11-09T00:25:00.000-04:00

It seems like this blogging thing will never get past novelty level for most people. I see so many people set up blogs just to have one, it seems, and it's tough to keep any momentum going in this medium when you don't know why you're doing it.

And then you stumble across a guy like Scot McKnight, who blogs prolifically. The guy posts anywhere from 2-4 things a day, writes books and is a professor too. It boggles the mind. One of the questions he often gets asked is, "how do you do it?" His post, Writing — On the Side answers this question and has some gems for me as I evaluate whether or not I can "make time" for this blogging thing in the midst of busy school life.

He insists that writing can't be done on the side. He says:

...writing is a lifestyle, a way of life, a way of being, a modus operandi, a way of breathing and eating and drinking. Better yet, writing is a way of learning, a way of coming to know what someone wants to know, a way of discovering.
Writing is not something to do when everything else is cleared off the desk; no, it is something that makes order of the desk. I don’t get up wondering what I will write about, but I write about what I’m wondering. (That’s almost Chestertonian.) In other words, as Augustine spoke of “faith seeking understanding,” so writing is a pen seeking understanding.

I love what he had to say there. For me, writing is something that I love, and I think that I especially need an outlet like blogging while I'm in school precisely because I have to do so much writing here that I most definitely do not love. It could just as easily be a journal as a blog, but a blog is something that allows some interaction, which is kind of cool. Oh, and it lets my inner geek have something to fiddle with too. To close, some final words from Scot:

...writing isn’t done on the side. It’s in the soul, it’s a way of being, and it’s not for everyone. It’s a scribbler’s itch to get it down.

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A Phew Photos

2006-11-05T22:29:00.000-04:00

Here's a few really nice photos that I've been wanting to share with you all from my time in Halifax with my mom over Thanksgiving. The ulterior motive here is this: I'm trying out a Flickr competitor called Zooomr (what's with cool=no spelling skills these days?) and they give you a free pro account if you're a blogger. So, let's see if this works.

atlantic iconic Hosted on Zooomr

fall saturation Hosted on Zooomr

Oh, and speaking of pimping products, I'm thinking about adding a link to the host of our new website (Bluehost) to my sidebar whereby I'd get $65 if anyone signed up for hosting services with them through my link. Whaddya think? Is this cool? Lame? I'm generally against advertising in nearly all forms, so I'm conflicted on this one for sure. But the money would be good, they're a good web hosting service (so far) and they're very reasonably priced. Hmmm... quandries.

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This, That, and the Other Thing

2006-11-04T21:44:00.000-04:00

Work on the Omada Design Group site is coming along pretty well. The "Interiors" section is mostly up and running. I'd say that we're at version 0.6 of the site right now. The Interior Design section needs a little more fleshing out still, and then I can get to work on the Web & Graphic Design section. The Photography section will stay undeveloped until our friend Matt Frise decides what his photo setup will be.

I'm hosting the site with Bluehost, who has some very generous terms. So far their service has been good, but I haven't had any problems that need solving either! But I mention it because they allow you to host 6 domains on one site. For a mere $10/year, I could be the proud owner of something like mattisacrazygeek.com for my blog. And I could tweak things with infinite power, pleasure, and the like. Muhahaha. So, whaddya think? Should I do it? We'll see...

We'll stay on tech-related things here for a moment. One of the joys of Firefox is that is has Extensions. These are better than the toolbars that many people are familiar with in Internet Explorer, especially because they don't take up half of your screen. No, extensions add little extra bits of ooey-gooey functionality that make me excited. I have more extensions than most people would probably have use for, but here's a few you should consider of you're running Firefox and have never heard of Extensions before this.

1. Adblock Plus. The Internet is getting worse and worse for ads all the time. And seriously, there's some seizure-inducing animated gifs out there. Stop the pain and soul-sucking cesspool that is advertising by installing this extension. It includes a self-updating list of common advertising sites and should keep you relatively ad free on the Web. I cringe in horror every time I use IE because of the ads I get inundated with.

2. Fasterfox. I recently installed this, and it really makes things go quite a bit faster by tweaking some of the ways in which your browser communicates with web servers. The default settings are a happy medium between people on modems and people with high speed, but Fasterfox tweaks things out specifically for those with high speed connections. You'll notice a difference!

3. Web Developer Toolbar. If you develop web pages, you need this extension. I can't emphasize enough that you need it. If you don't develop web pages, move right along.

4. CustomizeGoogle. Do you use Google's services (Gmail, Search, etc.) every day? I do, and I like adding this extension, especially because it has the option of disabling the ads in google's search results and Gmail pages.

5. coComment. This extension helps you to easily keep track of comments that you make on other people's blogs. It's what enables me to have my "Recent Comments" section in my sidebar.

And the last two are very nice for me, but at the bottom because of their more nerdy nature.

6. Greasemonkey. A deceptively simple concept: it allows you to add scripts to pages of your choosing. This allows for very powerful customization of websites to suit your desires. Even better, people share the scripts that they've made over at userscripts.org. For instance, I use a script to help me to tag my posts and link them to del.icio.us, giving me the "Tags" section in my sidebar.

7. Stylish. This is the newest extension I have, and one of my favorite. It allows you to add custom CSS to any website, and it has a corresponding site (like Greasemonkey) called usersstyles.org where people share tweaks and changes they've made to the look and feel of various websites. I'm currently using a tweaked style for Google Reader that makes it take up the whole screen, giving you more viewing area for your feeds.

And finally, I'll recommend that anybody who uses Firefox should use the Qute theme. It changes your Firefox icons to a much more attractive set in my opinion. I'm not a big fan of the original set.

Ah, now if only life was this cutomizable and filled with instant gratification! Wait, maybe this is why the real world is a scary, unpredictable place to me...

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Omada Design goes live... sorta

2006-10-31T02:17:00.000-04:00

As you may recall in an earlier post, Jac had the great idea of starting a design group in the sleepy town of St. Stephen. As of today, Omada Design Group is going live. Jac designed the webpage and I implemented it. I think that it turned out really good.

As you can see though, the page needs finishing up. But, there it is for now!

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For My Fellow Trekkies

2006-10-30T00:39:00.000-04:00

This one goes out to my fellow Trekkies... or Cam at least. I remember watching Star Trek: The Next Generation as a child and dreaming about "to boldly go where no one has gone before." Split infinitives aside, this was some seriously evocative metaphor for life. No, seriously.

Anyways, I've seen pretty much every episode that exists, so I was delighted to see that Wil Wheaton is doing commentary on TNG episodes over at TV Squad. Wil played Wesley Crusher on TNG, and he provides some hilarious commentary and some interesting behind-the-scenes tidbits about TNG episodes. A must-read for any Trekkies out there.

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Walking Barefoot Everywhere

2006-10-26T23:23:00.000-03:00

Photo: "Infinite Walk" by HRKVC

I just thought that this is a beautiful photo. Walking barefoot wherever you go! It says something about bringing simplicity into chaotic and not-so-simple surroundings. Lovely.

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Christian Cultural Engagement

2006-10-26T17:13:00.000-03:00

For today's NT Theology class, we went to my prof's house and watched The Last Temptation of Christ. Released in 1988, this movie took a lot of flak from Christians over its exploration of a fictional version of Jesus' life and death. But I honestly think that most people just didn't watch it and jumped on the critical bandwagon.

Maybe I've just become a flaming liberal, but I didn't find it threatening. But apparently the Christian Reformed Church in Canada did find it threatening, because they bought up the distribution rights so that it is not possible to sell or rent the movie in Canada. I haven't been able to confirm this information independently apart from my prof's word, but I believe it. And I'm perplexed and saddened by this. Is this how Christians should engage culture? Is this "bunker mentality" actually the good news that the world so desperately needs?

EDIT: Well, the above paragraph has turned out to be either erroneous or misheard by me. In either case, this movie is available in Canada. My apologies for false representation of the Christian Reformed Church. My thanks to a blog reader who quickly emailed me and pointed out my error. Maybe I should look for a little more evidence before posting in the future! While this does change my post somewhat, I'll still point out that Christians vehemently opposed this movie when it was released with intense vitriolic attacks on the filmmaker.

Maybe they'd be justified in this action if the movie was grossly blasphemous. I didn't find it to be so, firstly because the movie starts with a disclaimer that says, "This fictional account of the life of Jesus of Nazareth is not based upon the Gospels." There you have it: this is an artistic re-imagining of what could have happened, but it is not trying to make any kind of claims to be true - unlike the more recent Da Vinci Code.

Stop reading here if you care about spoiling the plot of the movie. The overall plot line consists of a somewhat unorthodox but generally faithful rendering of Jesus' life, leading to his crucifixion. But then a little girl-angel appears, tells him that his father is pleased, and he's being spared like Isaac when Abraham was on the brink of killing him. Jesus marries Mary Magdalene, but she dies and he later marries Mary (sister of Martha and Lazarus) and his children. He finishes out his life and is dying while Jerusalem is being burned by the Romans. Then his disciples appear, expose the girl-angel as the devil, and Jesus realizes that he's been tricked. He cries out to God, saying that he wants to be a sacrifice for mankind. And then we flash back to Jesus on the cross, realizing that this whole sequence has been: the last temptation of Christ. He stays true to his mission, whispers "it is accomplished," and dies. The end.

Now, there were some strange things even amongst Jesus' life, but most of it is plausible, even if some of it is highly unlikely. Jesus is portrayed as very human and very confused and unsure of his calling. He figures things out along the way. There's other strange things too (my favorite: John the Baptist as a crazy prophet-dude whose followers are mostly naked ecstatic worshipers reminiscent of some proto-rave) but it calls itself fiction anyways.

Are we this insecure about our story? I do not agree in many areas with the portrayal of Jesus in this film, but I'm not threatened by it. If somebody told me that they'd seen the movie, I'd first ask "what did you think of it?" rather than jumping straight into what I don't like. Maybe we could actually converse then. Call me crazy, but we need to stop trying to act as though God needs our protection. Let's get over our insecurities and get on with the business of living our part of the story that we believe.

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New Browsers

2006-10-24T22:56:00.000-03:00

For the not-as-technically initiated, you are currently reading this post with a web browser. Back in Windows 98, Microsoft made a decision to mesh their web browser (Internet Explorer) into their operating system. The end result was that most people just clicked that blue "e" on the desktop and were whisked away to "the internet," blissfully unaware that Microsoft had robbed them of choice.

This would not have been a huge problem if Internet Explorer (IE) was a good web browser. It wasn't. It's full of security holes and is responsible for a large number of the viruses that plague computer users today. As a quasi-web designer, I'll also say that its support for web standards is pitiful, making it very difficult to design good looking and functional web sites. After IE destroyed its competition, they stopped working on improving it. The IE that most people use today is five year old technology - practically ancient history by web standards.

There have continued to be several other web browsers, but they mostly sucked. Enter a little program called Firefox. I won't diverge into any more history here, but it was a slick product that was easy to use and much better than IE at security and being innovative in the web experience. Long story short: IE used to have 98% marketshare of the web, but Firefox is up to around 12% and growing.

The best part is that Microsoft got off of their lazy asses and updated IE. Just this past week, they released their first update in over 5 years, releasing IE7. It still has a lot of problems, but it's a good step in the right direction. Firefox today released version 2 of their own web browser. It's not a massive departure from their previous browser, but it has spell checking, which is very handy for making blog posts!

The reason all of this matters is because more and more of our life is happening online. A good, reliable and secure browser is key in this. IE6 was none of those things, but Firefox is all of them and has also made Microsoft have to improve its product. As these browsers keep improving, expect there to be more and more "web applications" available. You can already do all of your word processing (goodbye MS Word), email (goodbye, MS Outlook), instant messaging (goodbye, MSN Messenger), calendar-ing (goodbye, MS Outlook) and a ridiculous amount of other things right through your web browser. This means that you don't need to shell out money for Microsoft Office anymore. You might not even need to use Windows-or a Mac-at all. There's something called Linux out there: it's free, and it runs Firefox too.

Not having to pay for either of those things could result in a savings of $600 no problem! This is good news for me and people like me: idealists pursuing the Kingdom of God, not caring for material things but wanting both feet firmly planted within this world. Translation: we're learning how to love people, and it doesn't always pay well!

So, my advice to you: go download and install Firefox. I know you all love to go against the flow anyways. Thanks to any of my non-techie friends who have stayed with me this far! ;)

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A Strange Coincidence

2006-10-23T00:08:00.000-03:00

After my previous post which spoke about issues of war, I found it remarkably coincidental that a Lit reading that I needed to write a short paper on was a war poem. More specifically, it is a shoking anti-war poem that exposes the reality of the trench warfare in World War I. Written by Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est" responds to pro-war propoganda that used the full Latin quote "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori." It means "it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country." He juxtaposes this heroic view of war with jarring imagery from the trenches.

A few notes: Chlorine gas had just been introduced and its horrible effects included filling the lungs with fluid, causing its victims to drown on dry land. The Five-Nines referred to were shells 5.9 inches in diamater. Read this out loud if possible, slowly. And then, if moved like I was, pray for peace such that nothing like this will ever need to be written again.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!–An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

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Social Justice and Miracles

2006-10-20T18:15:00.000-03:00

I'm still working through thinking about something that Brian McLaren said in response to a question last night. As I menioned in my previous post, my friend Joel asked something along the lines of, "Why do charismatic Christians--who want to pray for physical healing--and Christians who work for social justice usually not connect with each other very well? Why can't we do both?"

First off, a little background. I've been a part of the Vineyard movement of churches for about 5 years now. There's a variety of reasons why I wound up with this particular motley crew of Christians, but one of the big things that attracted me to the Vineyard was that people there wanted to experience the life and power of stuff that happened in the Bible. You know, healings and prophecy and that stuff that Jesus and the early followers did that we too easily say "that was then, this is now" to.

On the other hand, I've been increasingly challenged by Christian voices for social justice over the past few years. I blame this primarily on the Winnipeg Centre Vineyard, my family of Jesus followers for a few years who had the audacity to plant themselves in the midst of one of the poorest, most broken neighborhoods in Canada: Winnipeg's North End.

So, here's the essence of Brian's answer as I remember it. He essentially said that the root of our problem lies in our modern separation of the natural and supernatural realms. This is not the biblical worldview where miracles would be taken as a matter of course. The biblical worldview wouldn't ask, "do miracles happen?" but rather, "what do these signs of God's intervention mean?" So, although one of our modern obsessions when we read the Gospels's miraculous accounts is whether or not a miracle happened, the appropriate question to ask is, "what is God communicating through this?"

Once you see this, the miracle stories in the Gospels could take on a whole new light. They actually appear to primarily be speaking about issues of social justice. Interpreting them symbolically does not mean that you disbelieve that the miracles did not occur. That is an anachronistic reading that incorrectly injects our categories of thinking on the biblical narrative. Allow me to demonstrate this symbolic hermeneutic to the following passage about the Garasene demoniac:

When [the demoniac] saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and bowed down before him; and he shouted at the top of his voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.” For he had said to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!” Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion; for we are many.” He begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country. Now there on the hillside a great herd of swine was feeding; and the unclean spiritsc begged him, “Send us into the swine; let us enter them.” So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea, and were drowned in the sea.(Mark 5:6-13, NRSV)

A quick interpretation would easily see the demons' calling themselves "Legion" is actually identifying them with the Roman occupiers. Jesus sends them into a herd of pigs, which everybody knows do not belong in Israel. One can then interpret this sign and wonder to say: God is interested in delivering his people from the tormenting Roman occupiers. They have no place in Israel.

That pretty much concludes the gist of what Brian had to say. What helped me tremendously is that I am challenged by these kinds of symbolic interpretations but I have often felt like they were denying that the miracles had actually happened. I know see how captive my thinking has been to a wrong way of thinking. It's not either-or; it's both. The divide is only as large as Western, dualistic philosophy has made it.

So, the social justice-ers are wrong if they think that their labors exclude the necessity of God's direct involvement in ways that may defy explanation. Sure, setting up a rehab centre for addicts is great, but God healing their addiction is great too. Why not pursue both as manifestations of God's kingdom coming on earth as it is in heaven?

Likewise, charismatics are wrong in being so focused on the "supernatural" that they lose out on the "natural." There are no such things. There is a visible and an invisible realm perhaps, but they are both real and created and loved by God. We do not really love people if we pray for their healing but fail to ask why they're sick. Too many charismatics are just out for the thrill-factor of having God "show up" and fail to remember that God wants us involved in loving people in the real world. If miracles were enough for God's kingdom to come, then I don't think that the Incarnation would have been necessary.

This has been a really helpful evolution for me in my thinking about how I want to be faithful to live out my faith in every biblical way. Maybe now I sould go back and reread Ched Myers' commentary on Mark. It interprets the Gospel in just such a symbolic way and shows just how politically subversive Jesus was.

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Brian McLaren, Conversation and Life

2006-10-18T15:06:00.000-03:00

Today we had the unexpected honor of having Brian McLaren come to SSU and do a chapel. He gave a short talk about what he's thinking about and encouraging us to embrace our different calls to serve God in the world. Then we had a lengthy discussion time with some really thought provoking stuff.

Quote of the day: "The most dangerous thing in the world is the USA." Brian said this in response to a lot of Christian fear-mongering that accuses Islam of being the greatest danger in the world today. He said that the USA has a military budget that's larger than the next 25 countries combined, 23 of which are US allies. Scary. So, whatever you think about Islam, he's absolutely right that they're a drop in the bucket next to the USA.

He also said some terrific things in response to a question from my friend Joel Mason, who asked "Why do Christians who embrace social justice issues and Christians who embrace physical healing not connect with each other very much or very well?" Brian had some terrific things in response to that, and I think that I might even devote a later blog post to unpacking some of that.

Moving from one conversation to another, there's been some terrific discussion a few posts back between a guy (or gal?) named DH and myself about salvation. Read up and chime in if you are so inclined.

Now, back to work. Some exceedingly boring NT Theology awaits...

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I'm a Minority Group

2006-10-15T20:57:00.000-03:00

In today's stroll through cyberspace, I came across this NY Times article titled To Be Married Means to Be Outnumbered. Here's the gist from the opening paragraphs:

Married couples, whose numbers have been declining for decades as a proportion of American households, have finally slipped into a minority, according to an analysis of new census figures by The New York Times.

The American Community Survey, released this month by the Census Bureau, found that 49.7 percent, or 55.2 million, of the nation's 111.1 million households in 2005 were made up of married couples--with and without children-- just shy of a majority and down from more than 52 percent five years earlier.

The numbers by no means suggests marriage is dead or necessarily that a tipping point has been reached. The total number of married couples is higher than ever, and most Americans eventually marry. But marriage has been facing more competition. A growing number of adults are spending more of their lives single or living unmarried with partners, and the potential social and economic implications are profound.

So, being a married man and all, I'm in a minority group. They interviewed Focus on the Family, whose spokesperson admirably (and surprisingly) refrained from breaking out the same old line about N.America's declining morality. His comments were actually quite insightful:

Steve Watters, the director of young adults for Focus on the Family, a conservative Christian group, said that the trend of fewer married couples was more a reflection of delaying marriage than rejection of it.

"It does show that a lot of people are experimenting with alternatives before they get there," Mr. Watters said. "The biggest concern is that those who still aspire to marriage are going to find fewer models. They're also finding they've gotten so good at being single it's hard to be at one with another person."

And that last part is spot on. Marriage has turned from the idea of the two becoming one into this notion of how the other person is going to fulfill me. And since this is a totally consumerist approach to what is a sacred thing, the following familiar comments are unfortunately not surprising:

"Even cohabiting young adults tell us that they are doing so because it would be unwise to marry without first living together in a society marked by high levels of divorce," [researcher] Ms. Smock said.

A number of couples interviewed agreed that cohabiting was akin to taking a test drive and, given the scarcity of affordable apartments and homes, also a matter of convenience. Some said that pregnancy was the only thing that would prompt them to make a legal commitment soon. Others said they never intended to marry. A few of those couples said they were inspired by solidarity with gay and lesbian couples who cannot legally marry in most states.

I wonder why they don't quote the statistics that say that couples who cohabitate prior to marriage have a higher incidence of divorce than that of couples who start living together after marriage. When you approach something that has unconditional commitment at its core with a conditionally noncomittal attitude, it's not surprising that those marriages don't work. It's hard to lose that "let's see if this works" attitude later on when the going gets tough.

But still, it's going to be weird to live in a society where I'm a minority for getting married, staying married, and not having lived with Jac before we were married...

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How Refreshing

2006-10-11T17:16:00.000-03:00

I just finished reading some mind-numbngly boring crap for New Testament Theology class, so when I opened my "Christian Religious Education" text for Philosophy of Education class, I was refreshed to read some interesting, thought-provoking and relevant stuff.

The author, Thomas Groome, is talking about faith as having three dimensions: believing, trusting and doing. After talking about the need to think of faith in terms of doing, he offers this insightful analysis:

...neither is it correct to allow this performative dimension to stand alone as a total description of Christian faith. To overemphasize it to the point where the other two dimensions are excluded or made secondary is an imbalance. To begin with, purely functional Christian faith is likely to become mindless activism, and the activism may well be short-lived. As “doers of the word,” we must inform our doing by a reflected-upon and convinced belief. Secondly, faith as doing needs the grounding of a trusting relationship with God who saves in Jesus Christ. Without such a relationship and felt dependence we fall either into Pelagianism, in which we think we can save ourselves by our own efforts, or into despair when we se how far short our own efforts fall. Our responsibility to be doers of the word must never lead us to assume that w can build the Kingdom alone. And our anxiety about what remains to be done must not allow us to miss out on the signs of the Kingdom already among us. If we fail to celebrate our present, or if we measure ourselves purely on the “results” of our own efforts, then we will be reduced again to the anxiety of an unredeemed people. (Thomas Groome, Christian Religious Education, 65)

As I'm exploring more and more the realms of Christian conviction leading me towards action in the realm of social justice, I found this helpful, instuctive and challenging.

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Splatter

2006-10-11T01:32:00.000-03:00

My mind is all over the place. I just got back from a terrific long weekend in Halifax, hanging out with my mom who came out to visit. That's fading into the rearview mirror as life plods on.

But now I'm back into studenting and my mind is splattered all over a variety of topics. I'm multitasking between deconstructing notions of inspiration of Scripture, parsing Greek nouns, feigning interest in modernist literature, delving into medieval European history, wrestling with teaching as a tool for transformation instead of just education, and recognizing logical fallacies.

Aside from that, I'm theoretically going to be involved with a group of future leaders/pastors that will meet with Gary and Joy Best and Pete and Mary Ellen Fitch for mentoring, community, etc. Great opportunity, but more time. That should be twice a month. And then there's the social justice small group that Jac and I are a part of on Mondays. And I'm leading an SSU-based small group two Tuesdays a month.

I also am supposed to be "doing community" in the midst of this. Oh, and I have a marriage that should be growing in depth, intimacy and commitment.

Why did I want to go back to school again?

Because I honestly love it. But I don't always deal well with the pace. Back to work.

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Thanksgiving in Halifax

2006-10-06T01:28:00.000-03:00

Tomorrow afternoon, I leave St. Stephen to pick up my mom from the Moncton airport. She's flying in to see Jaclyn and I for the Thanksgiving weekend and I'm definitely looking forward to seeing her. It's been since before we went to Europe back in mid-May. Time flies...

We're going to stop in Moncton long enough to pick her up and then spend the weekend in the lovely city of Halifax, since she's already seen St. Stephen and all that it has to offer. Seriously, it's got a lot going for it as a place to live, but it's pretty useless as a place to visit.

Anyways, my blog will be silent over the weekend due to me being gone, as opposed to my blog being silent because I'm busy and/or lazy. (Speaking of not posting, I will be updating our sorely neglected Europe blog with some France pictures soon....)

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Change

2006-09-30T15:38:00.000-03:00

Here at SSU, we've started out the year with a theme of various members of the community sharing their stories/testimonies in chapel. I was asked to share, and I did so this past Thursday.

For starters, I had mostly forgotten that I was going to do so. It's not like I had to prepare what I was going to say: it's my life and I know where I've come from. I've also had the opportunity to share this story many times because God has given me a good story that should be told. And no, I won't be telling it now.

When I tell my story, it's raw. It's also quite dramatic, because that's the way God did things with me. For all you people who feel inferior because you've had a comparably "boring" life story: be thankful. Dramatic is not fun to live. But I digress.

What's the point of me saying all of this? Well, for starters, the story of my coming to faith has a definite moment of coming to faith. It makes for a natural ending to the story, but that's deceptive because it's also just a beginning. This is especially more true as more and more time-over six years now-passes from the moment I started to follow Jesus.

The next day, a friend thanked me for sharing my story and asked if I still tell my story the same way that I used to. I said no, definitely not. As I thought about why, I thought about how much has changed in my understanding of faith, salvation and what it means to be a Christian.

Before, I would have told my story in a way that made my "moment of salvation" the entire focus and climax of the story, reflecting a gospel of sin management that ignores the rest of life. This salvationism is what is preached by many good and sincere evangelical Christians who fail to see that this gospel has nothing to say about the rest of life. It's what I was indoctrinated into.

Now, however, I definitely tell my story differently. I no longer divide my life in pre-saved and post-saved. I'm still working out my salvation and will be until the day that I die. I still ended my story with the moment that I decided to follow Christ, but I did so in a way that said that this was a dramatic event that served as a transition from one chapter of my life to the next.

Salvation is about the past, present and future. I need saving for today and tomorrow just as much as I did for yesterday. I am presented with the choice of whether or not to follow Jesus on this journey on a daily basis. I will say yes, with his help.

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Time Flies

2006-09-21T00:03:00.000-03:00

I guess we'll call this an update of sorts from the land of Matt.

I went on a lads weekend thing this past weekend. It was good times. We threw rocks at rocks and got naked. Good to be with the lads.

After my toying with rock music again lately, I decided to check out the newest album from BT - possibly one of the greatest electronic producers around. It's called This Binary Universe and it's nothing short of brilliant. I'm also gonna get my hands on Hybrid's newest album, I Choose Noise. If these guys can't jump-start my love for electronic music, nobody will.

What else? I dropped a course so that I can take Intro Greek. Jac asked me why I would want to do such a thing and the best response I could come up with was "because that's what all the fancy-pants pastors do." I wouldn't want to get shown up, would I?

Nothing much else to report. It's going to be a short night with all the stuff I have to do between now and tomorrow. I like the idea of learning much more than the process!

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Death Denial

2006-09-10T18:10:00.000-03:00

There's been a few things in the last couple of days that's gotten me thinking on the topic of death and the way we in our culture handle its reality. The most obvious one was the recent death of Steve "The Crocodile Hunter" Irwin. Here's a guy that, frankly, was probably popular because he so gleefully waded into danger that would kill most of us and came out of it unscathed. Then along comes what should have been a routine day of filming that ended with Irwin being stabbed in the heart by the tail of a manta ray - something that has an incredibly low chance of occurring.

I think that the reason that people were so morbidly fascinated with the news of his death is that, at a subconscious level, we were all saying to ourselves, "if this guy who seemed invincible was actually mortal, I bet that I might be too." Of course, this subconscious voice has a difficult time working its way to the surface past our own cultural conditioning.

What cultural conditioning, you ask? Well, to start with, our society has systematically attempted to remove the reality of death from our day-to-day existence. I'm reminded of this as I walk past the funeral home every day as I "commute" (ie walk) between my apartment and the school. We've turned death into an industry reserved for the specialists. It's neatly tucked away from general public consumption in neatly kept buildings and men in suits. To greatly assist this process, we also put our elderly and sick in hospitals and "old folks homes" so that we do not have to be around as the life slowly departs from our aged population.

Add to this neat segregation the prevalence of young, beautiful people assaulting our retinas from every media outlet possible. Every time I shop for groceries, I'm assaulted by Cosmo, People and enough tabloids to keep up on the latest celebrity "news." The message being hammered away at us is that we want to be young, and a specific type of good-looking. Will you ever see an old person here? Nope.

So, my hope is that the world we live in stops living in the fantasy land where death doesn't actually happen to them. I guess that our part as followers of Christ in this is to stop blindly following the youth-worshiping, death denying culture so prevalent in North America. My wife just told me today that she noticed some wrinkles by my eyes, and there's no way I'm buying cream or any crap like that for them!

I will die someday, and I know what kind of life I want to lead between now and then. I also happen to know that death is just the doorway to the rest of my life. How do we live like this is true in a culture that denies death even exists?

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Dallas Willard

2006-09-08T17:15:00.000-03:00

Christianity Today has just released a couple of articles on Dallas Willard. For those of you who don't know me too terribly well, I can tell you plainly that Willard's writings have impacted me more than probably any other. In an evangelical culture that is wary--and sometimes outright hostile towards--higher education, he gave me the courage to pursue it. This is because he displays in his own writings that it is possible to be a faithful Christian while still fully engaging with philosophy and higher learning.

I suggest that any evangelical Christian should read his masterpiece The Divine Conspiracy. From there on I'm sure you'll read anything else by him that you can get your hands on.
So, thank you Dallas Willard for your mentorship of so many through your writings. I look forward to your "The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge" that you're currently working on!

So read, the following articles. The first focuses on the man, and the second on his message.

A Divine Conspirator
Dr. Willard's Diagnosis

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Do You Ever Feel This Way?

2006-09-04T21:57:00.000-03:00

Today I suddenly had this overwhelming feeling like I'm a fraud waiting to be discovered. Does anyone else ever feel that way? Let me give you some context:

Tomorrow is the first day of orientation here at SSU and, although classes don't officially start until Thursday, this basically means that my summer's over. I know people have likely started arriving in droves, but I haven't ventured out to meet them yet. It always takes me a while to work up the social energy for such a thing, which is precisely why living in this kind of learning community is so good for me.

I often start to think deeply when I reach a transitional period in my life like this. I wonder about the friends, new and old, that I'll meet. I wonder how people will think about me and how I'll influence their lives and they mine. I realize that this community will shape me and I will in turn shape it. I was thinking about what kind of member of this community I wanted to be; about how I want to be a bringer of light and goodness and all kinds of other good Christian clichés. That's when it hit me.

As I said earlier, I had this overwhelming feeling come over me like I'm a fraud waiting to be discovered. I felt like the vision of who I want to be in this community didn't actually line up with the way I really am deep down. I felt like I'd become a parrot that had become adept at saying the right Christian things and a snake who had gotten good at deceiving himself into believing that he actually believed them. I was distraught.

But then I realized that this was some kind of combination of my own overly self-critical nature and the enemy of my soul playing havoc with my mind and my emotions. I also realized that all Christian life is caught somewhere between two worlds. All of the best and worst things in the world collide in this age and we get caught up in the middle of that mess. Ideals speak to the next life but are never perfectly realized in this one. I may want to serve the people in my community, but I'm just as likely to be irate at having to do things for other people.

I guess I need to get past simplistic caricatures of what it means to be a Christian. God has made us far more complex than I usually understand and the simulteous existence of both old and new natures within us makes life more complicated than any easy description can account for.

Thanks God, for not leaving me to my own devices. I wouldn't even bother to ask these questions, never mind find answers that bring me peace without Your presence to guide me. You sure do stoop low with such a practiced grace. Help me to make it look that easy...

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Geekery and Such

2006-09-01T02:50:00.000-03:00

First off, things are moving along swimmingly in the design group department. We're still open to suggestions on names though! One of our genius members suggested that we call ourselves "design collective" instead. We agreed. I've been looking into advertising stuff, and basically things feel good.

Next off, I've been geeking away over at the new Blogger Beta ever since they announced that you were able to customize their new-flavor templates. It was a bit of a pain in the ass, since their new system is entirely different from the old one. But hey, what's a nerd with some spare time to do?

You can compare this site to my test site on the beta blogger. Wahoo!

Any Ideas?

2006-08-30T15:54:00.000-03:00

There's a lot of very talented people in our community here in various design areas: interior, photography, print, carpentry, web, and probably more that I'm not thinking of. Jaclyn is thinking of trying to pool the resources of all of these people together to start a design group that will serve the design needs of people across a pretty broad spectrum.

We need a good name for this design group. Initially we thought of calling it the St. Croix Design Group, but that's too area-specific and it would be tough to break out of this immediate area. So, we want a catchy name that's not too cheesy and obviously based in pure marketing catch-phrases. Here's the things we want it to evoke:

we'll work with you to make your vision happen
we're affordable, but take pride in our work
we are not affiliated with any specific brand (there's a couple of designers here in town based out of specific stores that are really just a front for pushing their own products)

So, we still want whatever it is to end in "Design Group." This is important because it'll be a collective of people who have expertise in many different areas. The lady Jac met with today suggested "Fingerprint Design Group," but we're not too sure on that one.

As soon as we have a name, we're gonna make a website and start marketing ourselves locally. So, get on your thinking caps. Any ideas?

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Music: Some New, Some Old

2006-08-28T17:40:00.000-03:00

To start with, I'm uber-frutrated because I lost the last 500 words I'd written when OpenOffice crashed on me. Bollocks. Luckily, some quick thinking prevented the entire thing from being lost, otherwise I'd be starting from scratch.

That aside, I've been listening to a lot of more rock-ish music lately, as I've been ready to listen to something with lyrics and not just the edm that I'm usually into. I've been listening to a combination of new and old, and here's a list of stuff I've been listening to lately:

New:

Keane (bit of a cross between Coldplay and Radiohead)
Imogen Heap

Old:

The Tea Party
U2 (especially older stuff)
Radiohead

Anybody have any good new/old stuff to recommend? It certainly doesn't have to sound like the above...

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Finished Product

2006-08-27T19:16:00.000-03:00

Well, we've finished our peninsula project, finally. It took 5 days, and we are now the proud owners of a functional kitchen. Let's let the pictures do the talking:

Here's what things looked like before. We'd picked up a rickety little table just to be able to put some things on, but it was far from fully useful.
So, my intrepid wife spent a long time refining this here draft of the peninsula that we would build. Looks good in theory...
...and here's what it looks like in reality, once we'd solved a few unforseen problems brought on by our lack of, uh, skill with building stuff. But, we persevered, swore, and finally...
...we had a finished product. Lots of useful, open storage space for our small-ish apartment, and in one fell swoop we probably tripled our counter space.
And of course, why settle for just a counter, when you can have bar-style seating? This is one of the best parts of the design: it's so multi-functional. Great for eating breakfast and lunch, great for meal prep and also great for doing schoolwork at. I was using it yesterday and discovered that it's actually very comfortable to alternate between sitting and standing when one gets uncomfortable.
And finally, a nice little detail shot to show off the cladding (that's "the stuff on the sides" for you non-builder folk) and the countertop. We actually made the countertop out of hardwood laminate and edged it in pine and it turned out surprisingly good!

Anyways, there's the fruit of nearly a week's labor. As always, my wife's craftiness has improved the quality of our life while rudely impinging on my free time... hehe. She's great. Jac, I salute your getting me off my ass and designing a great piece for our apartment.

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This and That

2006-08-25T17:53:00.000-03:00

My last week has been spent constructing an addition to our kitchen. We have precious little counter space, making cooking difficult, yet a fair bit of dead space in our kitchen. Solution? Build a peninsula counter/bar to serve as a counter with additional bar-style seating to serve as a breakfast nook/work area. The initiative on this project was of course my lovely creative wife who never met a space that she didn't have an idea about fixing. She designed the thing and we built it together over the last week. There will be more pics once we slap some paint on it to finish it off.

In other news, I'm beginning work on my final essay for the Europe trip, a mere 13 days before the fall term starts! Bah. The assignment is to "write a 2500-3000 word paper that analyzes the philosophical origins and influences of postmodernism in western society. Make use of the books included in the course." It's due on Sunday, so I best get crackin.

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Very Important Information

2006-08-20T14:08:00.000-03:00

There's very few of these "amusing" little personality tests that I actually enjoy, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to figure out what kind of beer I was.

You Are Guinness

You know beer well, and you'll only drink the best beers in the world. Watered down beers disgust you, as do the people who drink them. When you drink, you tend to become a bit of a know it all - especially about subjects you don't know well. But your friends tolerate your drunken ways, because you introduce them to the best beers around.

What's Your Beer Personality?

Good to know!

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Essays = Bane

2006-08-19T17:56:00.000-03:00

photo © Michael Jastremski for openphoto.net

Well then, I'm writing this as I take a break from the head-bashing-inducing fun of writing a 2500 word philosophy essay in 24 hours that I should have spent the past week working on, but didn't.

I'm comparing the philosophical views of Albert Camus' The Plague, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Douglas Coupland's Shampoo Planet and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. All four fall within the postmodern philosophical milieu in one way or another, although you wouldn't think so at first.

Anyways, although I love philosophy for the most part, I find that I'm currently in agreement with those who think it's too abstract and doesn't really pertain to real life. Of course I'll feel different when my paper's done. Funny how that works eh?

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Easier Said Than Done

2006-08-17T01:44:00.000-03:00

I've been reflecting lately on what it means to be a Christian. More specifically, I've been trying to figure out if my life says that I'm a Christian.

Don't get me wrong, I've had an encounter with Christ that I can barely begin to comprehend. If I hadn't, there's no way that I could be the semi-functional person I am today. I'm married, sober, attending University and I have an inkling as to what reality really is. I can honestly tell you that I would be all kinds of disastrous if God hadn't shown up in my life about six years ago. I'd probably be strung out on crystal meth and wondering why the rave scene (ie my life) was so lame.

The past is something hard for me to reflect on. There's a lot of pain there and a lot of unresolved issues that I'd rather not think about. I prefer looking forward to the future, but I don't always know if it's healthy for me. Why, you ask?

Because, for some reason, when I look to the future, I for some reason focus on what isn't there now. I think about all of the ways in which life will be somehow richer and more alive with the presence of God. I try to think about all of the ways in which I will live up to all that I know about the way God's kingdom works in my life and the world around me.

These are good dreams to have. My problem, as I alluded to, is that the natural progression for me is to move from those dreams and straight into castigating myself for their apparent lack in my present life. If I subjected anybody else to the criticism I continually level at myself, they would probably wither up and die in a gibbering fetal position.

This is, I guess, an uncharacteristically vulnerable post for such a public place as a blog. I remember thinking when I started this blog that it would be a journal that maybe some people would read, but I forget to just "be myself" sometimes. Well, here's my neurotic self.

Perhaps some day I'll be able to look at the past and be thankful for all that God did in my life rather than dwell on the pain that I've been subjected to. Maybe someday I'll be able to dream big dreams for the future without condemning myself for not being completely alive to them today. Possibly someday I'll be content today-while it's called today-that God loves me more than I can bear and that He's probably more accepting of who I am than I am of myself.

God, help those "somedays" come sooner rather than later. Amen.

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Yotophoto

2006-08-15T12:45:00.000-03:00

Now this is a very cool discovery. I came across a site called yotophoto which is a search engine for free-to-use stock photographs and images. The great part about it is that it searches across many free photo sites, so you're culling from a large resource pool. It's way better than using Google's image search because they're discriminating in the sites they index.

But my favorite part is search by color which is accessible on the advanced search page. You can plug in a color value and it'll search for photos that match it! This is great for any kind of design work (Maria!) as a test of searching for colors that match my blog quickly showed. Below are a few photos that match my color scheme rather nicely.

^ photo by josef stuefer

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A New Blogger

2006-08-15T00:08:00.000-03:00

I just discovered today that Blogger is beta-testing a new version. For any who happen to care, I'm very happy about this.

Why you ask? Well, let's see... adding tags to posts is enabled and you can sort a person's blog by said labels. I have a bit of a cobbled-together approach of doing that right now using del.icio.us for my Tags section on the side, but it will be way nicer to have that functionality integrated.

They're going to have a drag and drop template editor, which is cool for people who'd like to customize the look of their blog somewhat but don't know how to monkey around with HTML and CSS code. I set up a quick test blog over there and was able to change a very familiar-looking default Blogger theme to a whole new color scheme without too much effort. I quickly added a nice little LibraryThing widget to show my recent books, and I was up and running.

They've also (finally) added the ability to subscribe to feeds for the entire blog's comments and for individual posts' comments. If they could just add category feeds to the mix, that'd be grand.

One things that's surprised me about Blogger is that, even though they're owned by Google, you have a separate login for the two. Well, that'll change, as your Blogger account will merge into your Google account. One less thing to sign into is nice...

They're also changing the entire back end of how blogs are published so that things should move MUCH more quickly. For more details on that and the rest of the new features, go see their what's new page.

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Demotivational

2006-08-14T15:53:00.000-03:00

Well, I should be writing an essay, which means procrastination! In my wanderings, I came across this ridiculously funny demotivational poster. Enjoy.

See a whole bunch more demotivational posters at despair.com

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Inspirational

2006-08-13T17:44:00.000-03:00

I've come to realize that I can't always be inspired to write things here myself. Today I've had two gems come my way that I've just loved. The first is the third verse of the hymn "The Love of God" by Frederick M. Lehman. We sang it in church this morning and the visual imagery in the lyrics spoke deeply to me:

Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade,
To write the love of God above,
Would drain the ocean dry.
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.

And I'm currently researching Martin Luther for an essay. The man had a way with words, as these samples show:

God creates out of nothing. Therefore, until a man is nothing, God can make nothing out of him.

The truth is mightier than eloquence, the Spirit greater than genius, faith more than education.

Sometimes we must drink more, sport, recreate ourselves, aye, and even sin a little to spite the devil, so that we leave him no place for troubling our consciences with trifles. We are conquered if we try too conscientiously not to sin at all.

If our Lord is permitted to create nice large pike and good Rhine wine, presumably I may be allowed to eat and drink.

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Mahone Bay

2006-08-08T22:36:00.000-03:00

So, we went to the Mahone Bay Vineyard dealio. It was cool.

The best part was definitely being able to hang out with the Riegers and Rademakers from Winnipeg. It was awesome to connect with Winnipeg church family! Jac had a chance to go over some plans for the Vineyard Village Inn (aka transitional housing at WCV) with them and we had a great time sharing a campsite with the Riegers.

I did get a bladder infection and had to waste a beautiful afternoon in Mahone Bay getting antibiotics. My recommendation: don't get a bladder infection.

There was a definite theme of justice and the poor at this gathering, especially for Jac and I because of the workshops we attended. It was good, challenging stuff. The lady in our church here who heads up mercy ministry was at the one with me and wants to get me involved. Yikes!

Now I'll shut up and let some pics do the talking:

The obligatory Vineyard conference worship shot.
Worship in art and song.
Mike Pilavachi informing her: "excuse me, it's only water!" Funny SOB.
Dan Wilt does this Coram Deo thing with an "ancient-future" mix of worship in beautiful old buildings. Here we're in Mahone Bay's lovely neo-gothic Lutheran church.
We finished the night by clustering together at the front to take communion.

You can see a few other photos from Mahone Bay on Flickr. If you want to see photos of the lovely town, take this phototour.

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Good Thought on Emergent

2006-07-27T14:01:00.000-03:00

Some people like to link to good thoughts on other blogs and some people like to subject their readers to the horrors of their own thoughts. I usually choose the latter. However, while reading a book review on Scot McKnight's Jesus Creed blog, I came across a nugget of pure gold in the comments. This paragraph summarizes the difficulties in the emerging church's dance with postmodern thinking:

It seems to me that some in the emergent movement are led astray by those postmodernists who think that a recognition of our finitude and subjectivity means that we must be religious skeptics, bereft of concrete beliefs like those that characterize the Christian story. Since I believe that there can be knowledge with what we might call epistemic humility, I reject the claim that postmodernism entails religious skepticism. It doesn’t. I also know from personal experience that commitment to religious belief, including Christian belief, can coexist (however unhappily) with anxiety, bafflement, sadness, doubt and confusion. I think, however, that some in the emergent movement unwittingly commit themselves to religious skepticism and that, I am convinced, is incompatible with Christian commitment.

All I can say to that is "amen."

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Monasticism

2006-07-23T15:31:00.000-03:00

On our Europe trip we learned about a number of monks who have had a vast influence on Christian spirituality. Benedict of Nursia, Francis of Assisi, Ignatius Loyola, Teresa of Avila and others. These men and women are spiritual giants who were driven to the monastic life in order to pursue God.

We tend to think of the monastic life today as something for crazy zealots, not for people like you and I. Although, in our postmodern age anything old and weird does have a certain "cool" factor attached to it so people are beginning to revive interest in monasticism somewhat.

In any case, monasticism centres around a threefold vow: poverty, chastity and obedience. These are the monastic response to the age-old challenges to Christian spirituality: money, sex and power. There's probably a maximum of one degree of separation between any problem in the world or ourselves and these three things. None of them are bad in and of themselves, but somehow the human condition easily falls prey to the seduction and perversion of these three things.

Now, I do believe that the monks lacked subtletly in shunning these things altogether and forfeited learning the proper use of all three to those in the world who were sure to abuse them. But that's another topic altogether. What I do want to focus on is how to connect their ideas to today. Things obviously haven't changed that much as you see this trinity at the centre of all that's wrong with N.American culture.

As for me, I want to learn how to deal well with all three of these things, but the thing that's sticking out the most right now is power. Christians have an abominable history of dealing well with power, and I saw all kinds of examples of this in Europe where church and state have been one for much of its history. The church has never had nearly as prominent a role in statescraft here in N.America as it had in Europe, but the question remains: how do we deal with power? How can we learn from Jesus to rightly handle the power that we are entrusted with and how can we avoid the trap of its subtle corrupting influence?

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Where to Begin?

2006-07-21T17:01:00.000-03:00

Well now, I've been back for a few days now and I'm trying to decide what to do with two blogs. Obviously most thoughts that I have at this point will still have to do with my European experiences--which certainly provoked a lot of thoughts--so where do I post those thoughts? Well, I've decided that the travel blog will be left for pictures at this point, and you can get used to hearing my ponderings about bigger questions and such on here.

So, here's a small passage copied from my journal that can springboard into a whole bunch of areas. It was written after spending a day in beautiful Barcelona and being awed by how great a city can be built. I'd be interested to hear what anybody thinks...

I keep asking myself the question: why can't we North Americans build cities and culture like Europeans? And yet, although they are vastly superior to us culture-wise, they also have a spiritual pverty here that is far from good. Which is better? Would it be possible to have both? Or am I just longing for a utopia reserved for the age to come?

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And We're Off!

2006-05-22T01:00:00.000-03:00

So, by the time anybody reads this, Jac and I should be on board our bus heading for Halifax to board our flight to Madrid with stops in St. John's and London along the way.

This blog will be put cryogenically frozen while we're gone and our travel blog will be the place where the action's at over the next 8 weeks.

Wow! I'm actually going to Europe!

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Mansionville

2006-05-16T23:34:00.000-03:00

they sure don't build 'em like they used to!

So, the other day Jac decided to walk around the block and check out the hood.
The level of quality in these homes is really quite remarkable. (Plus they sell for about half the cost of homes in Winnipeg. no joke.) The downside is that many are in disrepair.

Our building. This is a close-up of some of the detailing on one of our porches.

. . . the main entrance to our building.
Inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century. In reaction to the mass production and standardization brought about by the industrial revolution, William Morris believed that our lives are enriched when the everyday objects around us are of high quality and craftsmanship.

This odd little raised nook is at the end of the hall from our suite.
I think we might have to do something with it yet. . .

A couple houses down from us. This Queen-Anne style villa was owned by the Ganong bros. (yes, the chocolate guys).

Our neighbors. This is the Fitch residence. (Pete is the pastor of the Vineyard).

Also just across the street.

Many of the houses here have been converted, like ours, into several cheap apartment suites. This one's for sale. Unlike in Winnipeg, houses stay on the market for a while here.

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An Invitation to the Sacred Rhythm of Prayer

2006-05-16T20:48:00.000-03:00

Here's a duplicate of the book review I made on amazon.com for "Praying With the Church":

I was privileged enough to receive a free copy of this book thanks to the generousity of Paraclete Press in a promotion on Scot McKnight's blog. I just finished reading the book and I must say that the book was perfect at doing what it wanted to do, namely: introducing low-church Christians such as myself to the richness and depth of fixed-hour prayer.

For me, the best part of the book was McKnight's obvious but startling revelation that Jesus would have found himself within the Jewish fixed-hour prayer tradition. There is no stronger argument for fixed-hour prayer than the fact that our Lord Himself was most certainly a practitioner of it and following Him would of course mean following Him in this practice. Again, this would be obvious to many, but for those raised outside of liturgical traditions such as myself, this is a fresh insight.

Secondly, I very much appreciated McKnight's continual reminder that this is not a replacement for spontaneous prayer, but a wellspring for it. I currently find my prayer life devoid of much depth or meaning (or consistency for that matter) and the ability to pray along with some of the giants of the Church makes me not have to feel like praying in order to pray consistenly and well.

Probably the other most important point that McKnight raises is that praying in this manner does not necessarily lead to "vain repetitions" any more than telling your spouse that you love them continually will. This and the afforementioned points should clear away any ignorant debris that would prevent non-liturgically reared Christians such as myself from embracing this ancient and valuable practice.

McKnight concludes by walking the reader through the absolute basics of praying the main prayer books from the Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Anglican traditions in addition to the contemporary "Divine Hours" by Phyllis Tickle. The strongest advice he gives is that it would be best to find an experienced person to help you develop this practice in your life. I hope to find just such a person soon!

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I Blog, Therefore...

2006-05-14T23:58:00.000-03:00

Mostly just to remind myself: I started this blog as a way to start getting some of my ramblings and musings out of the pinball machine of my brain and into the visible realm.

I was talking to Jac about this strange phenomenon of blogging and I realized that I hadn't really been posting on here too much because I didn't have anything to say to anybody. And then I realized that I had deviated from my original intention of blogging. I had fallen into the trap which led Nate to discontinue his blog: I was starting to write for others and judging the validity of what I had to say based on how much feedback I was getting. Well, those days are over.

So, although I will still sometimes use this thing to communicate with people, I'm going to hone the focus here a bit. This is mostly going to be a space for me to get visceral with my thoughts and wrestles. A place to find the rhythm of rest and restlessness that will propel me into my place in God's kingdom on earth. A place to help me find the sanity that I don't really have.

So, I'll leave you all with this thought tidbit: explore the notion of fixed-hour prayer. You should currently see the book called Praying with the Church by Scot McKnight in my sidebar and proceed to purchase it and read it. I, however, got mine for free by reading his blog and getting one of 50 free books his publisher gave away! But I digress...

I haven't started to actually do this fixed hour prayer, largely because I don't actually have a book to do so with and I don't want to do it off the screen. But, here's a good site that explains fixed-hour prayer in a basic way and gives you a set of prayers for today. If you're like 99.8% of Protestant Christians, you're dissatisfied with your prayer life. Count me in. I hope that this path richens my intimacy with God and deepens my faith. Let's see where this thing leads...

So, it'd be fitting to conclude with the end of the Vesper's prayer for today: (And you're supposed to cross yourself when you see the † symbol to remind yourself of the centrality of the cross)

The Prayer Appointed for the Week

Almighty and merciful God, in your goodness keep me, I pray, from all things that may hurt me, that I, being ready both in mind and body, may accomplish with a free heart those things which belong to your purpose; through Jesus Christ my Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. †

The Concluding Prayer of the Church

Almighty God, you have surrounded me with a great cloud of witnesses: Grant that I, encouraged by their good example; may persevere in running the race that is set before me, until at last I may with them attain to your eternal joy; through Jesus Christ, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. †

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Check the New Pad

2006-05-12T17:01:00.000-03:00

So, without further ado, I present to you the Wiebe's new pad in apartment 11 of Todd Hall. Our address for any who care to know it is:

11 - 45 Union St.
St. Stephen, NB
E3L 1T6

Oh, and we won't have a phone number until after the Europe trip, so it's just email (or Skype) until then.

Now, on with the show.

Yes, we get to live in a mansion built in 1890! It was built for the lieutenant governor of New Brunswick. We live in a top floor apartment at the back. Great view, but soooo many stairs. (For more info go to this page on St. Stephen architecture and scroll to the bottom).

Here's Matt crashed on our camping gear after the first night. Our house hadn't caught up to us yet, it was somewhere in Quebec.

Here's the bedroom. It's a much nicer color than our last bedroom, but smaller too.

Here's me pretending to do the dishes in our small-ish kitchen.

Here's Jac pretending to read. She continues to do so for the next few pictures as we get the full panorama of the living area. It's still pretty cluttered as we aren't quite unpacked yet.

Jac made me pose for this and the next picture so that you can get a better sense of the scale of the place. My wide-angle lens usage in the four pictures where she's pretending to read make things look a bit bigger than they actually are.
The apartment seems to be the perfect size for us, even though its only approx. 380 square feet. Plus the soaring ten foot ceilings make it feel kind of like a studio loft.

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Arrival

2006-05-10T00:13:00.000-03:00

Well, after four days cooped up in a car together, Jaclyn and I are proud to report that we've arrived safe and sound in St. Stephen, NB. Our backs are bloody sore and we didn't kill each other.

Our apartment looks quite large at the moment - we don't have any stuff in it right now.

Uhhh....

Good night.

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On a Different Note...

2006-05-05T23:16:00.000-03:00

So, on an entirely different note than my last somber post, here's something to lighten your day!

Leavetaking

2006-05-05T20:55:00.000-03:00

Well then, I just received word that I should be gone by this time tomrrow. After speaking the heavily French-accented voice of my trucker, I discovered that I'll be loading a truck between 3 and 4 pm tomorrow and on the road directly after that.

So, does it feel real yet? Nope, not really.

So, as I've had the stray thought leaking into my grey matter regarding this leavetaking, I offer them to you here in approximately the same semi-coherent fashion that they came to me in.

Leaving is making me realize that I don't value the people around me enough. To everyone that I know I say that I'm sorry for taking you for granted.

Leaving is making me realize that I have way too much stuff. I'm not a rich person by any stretch, but most people on this planet would disagree with me. I don't want to spend my life accumulating more and more stuff; I want to spend it experiencing life to the full.

Leaving is making me realize that where I live makes all the difference in the world.

Leaving is making me realize what a great group of people I've had the privilege of knowing over the past year and more. I'll miss you all.

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Travel Blog is Live

2006-05-02T18:18:00.000-03:00

Much to the utter disinterest of my wife, I have set up a travel blog for our Europe 2006 adventures. It will be the place to stay tuned for any and all updates that we (ie I) have to send out to people. I think that it'll be better to do it that way than send out mass emails.

So, go see the Matt and Jac in Europe blog. There's already some goodies on there.

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New Toy

2006-04-25T18:51:00.000-03:00

So, the Wiebe family just made a major purchase prior to the Europe trip. We purchased a Pentax istDL digital SLR camera. That means that it's all fancy and professional-like. Jac got some money from her parents for a deferred grad gift, so we'll know be able to take pictures in Europe that'll be so good it'll hurt our brains. Ouch.

So, the old Sony's on the way out. (As a side note, if anybody wants to buy a Sony DSC-P52 with a 128 MB Memorystick for fairly cheap, talk to Jac or I). The Sony took so-so pictures and you couldn't change any settings, obviously. Well, the settings on the Pentax are customizable heaven! And seriously, the clarity is light years better.

Here's my first foray into playing around with the new camera. I decided to take some pics of the emerging buds from the trees in front of our house. Seeing the new greenery come to life in spring always makes me happy.

Hmm... I guess this makes me a budding photographer...

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A Step Back in Time

2006-04-22T20:26:00.000-03:00

Interesting. I'm sorting through old crap to decide what to bring and what to leave behind when I discovered an old journal. I wrote it sometime in the afternoon and I became a follower of Christ later the same evening. Weird.

6/18/00

I always have a bit of a problem starting to write. "What should I write about?" I ask myself. But at this point in time I think that it's the writing itself that I need to focus on, not the subject material. For once in my life I want to actually dedicate myself to something, not to the same half-ass job of this that I always seem to do.

I think that I have a fear of failure. Some part of me is always so afraid that I won't succeed even if I do give it my all. So, if I never try too hard, I never really failed, did I? It's some pretty twisted logic, but humans are far from rational beings.

And therein lies my other biggest problem in life: I try so hard to be calm, rational, and above all else, unemotional. I need a little more emotion in my life. I've become pretty withdrawn into myself from a lot of people. It's selfish of me to keep myself to myself all the time. The only problem is that I keep thinking that I'll only do more harm than good.

Another thing I've come to realize is that I'm just too closed off to the world around me and the people in it. I need to open myself up to hurt and pain again in order to feel pleasure and love. Love most importantly of all. My world's become too small, too much is only my family, which is probably the root of all my problems.

As always, I am a man of inaction. I think about all my problems, identify their possible and/or probable causes, but I do nothing about them, carrying on the same as always. Far too often I let indecision make my decision for me.

Well, as you can hear in that, I was searching for real life big time. I knew all too well what was wrong with me, but I had no power to do anything about it. Thank You Jesus, for taking me from where I was to where I am now. I truly see that without You, I would still be wallowing in my pain; the world cut off from me and me hiding from the world. Thank You that You're at work in all the areas of my life that sound so much like what I said almost six years ago. Thank You for giving Yourself for me and to me.

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Sacred Rhythms?

2006-04-17T19:13:00.000-03:00

I got to WCV on Saturday night, ready to join in the worship watch leading up to Easter Sunday. I found Nathan C. playing his djembe on the back steps, interceding for the working girls.

I joined Nathan in the rhythm of prayer and play.

Just like our hands, the passage of time became blurry.

A new friend hobbled up and, without a word, added to the rhythm with what was available to him. The division between white and red became as blurred as his sticks; the sounds were resoundinly clear. This was a sacred moment.

Things moved inside, where we continued to fuse the movements of our hands and our hearts.

The rhythms weave in and out of each other as they fuse to express something so much more than the sum of its parts. This is church, these are the called-out-ones.

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He is Risen!

2006-04-16T23:58:00.000-03:00

This is truly the best news that the world could hope for. I wish I lived more like I believed it.

After the Sabbath, as the first light of the new week dawned, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to keep vigil at the tomb. Suddenly the earth reeled and rocked under their feet as God's angel came down from heaven, came right up to where they were standing. He rolled back the stone and then sat on it. Shafts of lightning blazed from him. His garments shimmered snow-white. The guards at the tomb were scared to death. They were so frightened, they couldn't move.
The angel spoke to the women: "There is nothing to fear here. I know you're looking for Jesus, the One they nailed to the cross. He is not here. He was raised, just as he said. Come and look at the place where he was placed.
"Now, get on your way quickly and tell his disciples, "He is risen from the dead. He is going on ahead of you to Galilee. You will see him there.' That's the message."
The women, deep in wonder and full of joy, lost no time in leaving the tomb. They ran to tell the disciples. Then Jesus met them, stopping them in their tracks. "Good morning!" he said. They fell to their knees, embraced his feet, and worshiped him. Jesus said, "You're holding on to me for dear life! Don't be frightened like that. Go tell my brothers that they are to go to Galilee, and that I'll meet them there."

Matthew 28:1-10 from the Message paraphrase

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The Cross

2006-04-13T14:46:00.000-03:00

What can I say to a mystery so great as the cross?

This is one of the pivotal moments in all of history. The birth, death and resurrection of Jesus are the fulcrum of the ages.

My method here is going to be a little old-school. Instead of trying to wax all theological, I'm simply going to insert some scriptures and add a few (hopefully) short reflections. Instead of trying to figure out this great mystery, I'm simply going to approach with fear and trembling and bow down.

You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:6-8)

Jesus, you gave your life for me? Help me to move beyond the Christianese of that phrase and meditate on its wonder. I was your enemy, but you love your enemies and die in their place. You have truly made love into an action, and oh, what an action! It's because of this that I see that I don't really love until I'm willing to die for that person.

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God (1 Corinthians 1:18)

Jesus, how you turn the world upside-down, or is it right side up? That an unjust death on a cruel instrument of torture and execution would be the best news in all of history is truly shocking. Jesus, help me never to lose the wonder of something so great and terrible that we never could have imagined in a million years.

For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—because anyone who has died has been freed from sin. (Romans 6:6-7)

Sin is no longer my master. Thank you Jesus, that you are now my good master. I know that I don't like to think in terms of sin very often these days, but my life was full of it, and it was killing me. Thank you Jesus for killing my old self so that all of the junk that I'd accumulated could be blasted away.

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. (Galatians 1:20)

Jesus, somehow you dying on the cross gives me a new lease on life, and the chance for a new kind of life: your kind. I'm glad that you live in me so that I can really live.

Later, knowing that all was now completed, and so that the Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, "I am thirsty." A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus' lips. When he had received the drink, Jesus said, "It is finished." With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. (John 19:28-30)

Jesus, thank you that it is finished. It is done. I'm so baffled that I don't have to earn a stinking thing. You earned it for me?

Your arms were open wide. You had them forced there, but you chose it all the same. I know that I drove you there, just as you're driving me there now. Help me to follow you, carrying around that strange paradox of death that brings life within me. Help me to meditate on those dark days when nobody knew that you were coming back from the dead. Help me to feel the despair and anguish of those who were now so confused and lost. They are me, and I know it. Help me not to deceive myself.

Jesus: your death for me and for the world is too wonderful for me to comprehend.

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Who Let All of These People in Here?

2006-04-11T20:53:00.000-03:00

So, this is my worldwide audience. Since signing up for ClustrMaps on March 21, I've had 406 visits from every continent except Africa. Well, my Asia representation is pretty weak too, with only Japan representing. It's strange that there's that many people out there reading my verbal diarrhea.

The internet is a strange, strange place.

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The Irresistible Revolution

2006-04-04T18:58:00.000-03:00

Hello all. I'd like to take this opportunity to shamelessly plug Shane Claiborne's book The Irresistible Revolution. If you're wondering about how to follow Jesus in a real way, this book's for you. If you can't afford it, I might even buy it for you or give you mine. It's been a while since a book captured me like this.

Shane is what some might call and "activist" or a "hippie." Mostly, he's just trying to figure out what love and discipleship really are and actually live them. I'm passionate about that first two and very bad at the last one. I hope that this changes.

One reflex I've always had to activists was to dismiss them and despise them, even as I found myself agreeing with much of what they had to say; even when it sounded a lot like Jesus. I was confused, but Claiborne, being a man of action, has experienced activist circles from the inside and gave voice to my stumbling blocks. I hope that this helps at least one person other than me. Here's a few paragraphs:

Dumbfounded and outraged by the apathy of the church, I've at times gravitated toward circles of social dissenters, protesters, and activists. We've shouted at the system that was hurting so many of our friends, and we've yelled at the church to wake up. But I saw very little fruit from those days. My ripped jeans and punk rock hair made me feel pleasantly distant from the "filthy rotten system," but I also found myself estranged from sincere folks who were polarized by the way we preached the truth.

I went to the rallies and marched in the streets. I got arrested for "nonviolent direct action" and "civil disobedience" over and over, losing count after around a dozen times. But my hopes for a perfect revolution were dashed by human imperfection. Among my activist friends, I began to feel a self-righteousness mirroring that of conservative Christianity. I felt an aggressiveness and judgmentalism reminiscent of that which I had grown to despise in the church. I sat through meetings to plan rallies and marches where people argued and gossiped like the best church committee or trustee meeting, destroying one another in their fervor to build a better world. I handed out flyers to convert people to the movement and felt as coercive and detached as I did handing out Christian tracts at the mall.

Later, he adds the following:

Just as "believers" are a dime a dozen in the church, so are "activists" in social justice circles nowadays. But lovers are hard to come by. And I think that's what our world is desperately in need of--lovers, people who are building deep, genuine relationships with fellow strugglers along the way, and who actually know the faces of the people behind the issues they are concerned about. We are trying to raise up an army not simply of street activists but of lovers--a community of people who have fallen desperately in love with God and with suffering people, and who allow those relationships to disturb and transform them.

That's just a taste of the book. It's advocating a life of following Jesus, not a life about "issues." Shane gets called "fundamentalist" by his activist friends and "Marxist" by his conservative friends. I like that, especially because he can actually call both of them friends. Read the book.

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Uh, I'm Tagged

2006-04-01T19:52:00.000-04:00

I've been tagged:

FOUR JOBS I'VE HAD:

1. McDonald's
2. Grinder in an Iron Foundry
3. DASCH (group home for mentally handicapped adults)
4. Educational Assistant

FOUR MOVIES/SHOWS I'VE BEEN ADDICTED TO:

1. Star Trek: The Next Generation
2. Transformers
3. Wayne's World
4. Austen Powers

FOUR PLACES I'VE LIVED:

1. Winkler, Manitoba
2. Ottawa, Ontario
3. Winnipeg, Manitoba
4. St. Stephen, New Brunswick

FOUR COUNTRIES I WOULD LIKE TO VISIT:

1. Ireland
2. Israel
3. Germany
4. Russia

FOUR POPULAR FALSE ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT ME:

1. that I have it all together.
2. that I'm too "holy" to be around the roughness of real life and real people
3. that I've had a charmed, perfect life - FAR from the truth
4. that I'm always serious (ask Jac!)

FOUR PEOPLE I LOOK LIKE (according to some people):

1. Joey Jeremiah from Degrassi
2. My dad
3. uhhh
4. ??

FOUR THINGS (I HOPE) TO DO BEFORE I DIE:

1. Grasp all the mysteries of space and time
2. Take myself less seriously
3. Get out of student debt
4. Live like I'm actually alive

PEOPLE I TAG NEXT:

Nobody. I only did this survey because I felt intense, crushing guilt. Well, not quite that bad.

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Survey
Quiz

Incredible Book Intro Quote

2006-03-30T19:40:00.000-04:00

So, Jac and I purchased a book entitled The Irresistable Revolution by Shane Claiborne. It's a book calling us to an entire life of discipleship to Jesus. I'm just starting to read it, as she got at it first. Many others choose a quote to preface their book and I already love the one that Shane chose. Here it is:

Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual. But the one who has love, courage, and wisdom moves the world.

- Ammon Hennacy (Catholic activist, 1893-1970)

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Doctrine

2006-03-30T16:31:00.000-04:00

Are you still there? Jaclyn told me on my last post that the second somebody read the word "doctrine" they'd run away screaming. Madly. Sounds like fun!

Anyways, when our housegroup started meeting in fall, I made noises about wanting to talk about doctrines and how they actually affect life. Stuff like: the cross, the resurrection, the incarnation, the trinity, baptism, eucharist, God's attributes (omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, justice, etc.) the atonement, and other things that probably have you running away screaming by now.

You see, those are big words and scare us a lot of the time. We also feel like they don't really touch our lives much. Perhaps this is just because we never get around to talking about them. So, from here on in, I'm going to try to talk about various doctrines in such a way as to provoke us to thing about why they're important and how they touch on our real lives. Here's a quote about the doctrine of the resurrection:

...the resurrection, no the death of Christ, was the central fact of the gospel of the early believers... [it] proved that the new life that had already been present among them in the person of Jesus could not be quenched by killing the body.

The resurrection was a cosmic event only because it validated the reality and the indestructibility of what jesus had preached and exmplified before his death--the enduring reality and openness of God's Kingdom. It meant that the Kingdom, with the communal form his disciples had come to know and hope in, would go on. ...the fact that Jesus was not dead after all--and that when we die, we won't stay dead--is what made the resurrection earthshaking, transforming good news.

Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines, pg. 37.

I guess that this quote, if nothing else, shows how different our context is from that to the early believers. Resurrection to them meant, "even if they kill me, they can't take my life away." Today we're less inclined to think of the life we have as something that we even want! Most of the time we're secretly wishing that we could live like the world does, and following Jesus means giving up on pleasure: taking up our "cross."

Resurrection means that we have the life of eternity now. The life we are beginning to lead now is the one that will last forever. Death is no more than a transition from eternal life in a fallen world to eternal life in a better world. The life is within us. The kingdom is at hand, just close enough to reach out and touch.

And perhaps the fact that nobody can take our life away from us will come to mean something to us someday. Maybe somebody we'll actually be oppressed and understand what that means. Anyways, there's a few musings.

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Trinity

2006-03-27T19:20:00.000-04:00

I'm reading "The Plague" by Albert Camus right now, and I despise it. (It's for a school paper) Suffice it to say that the book is heavily depressing and dreary in style and subject matter. So, it started my mind a-working on some more stimulating matter.

I've been hearing and reading a lot of things about the doctrine of the Trinity and its implications for real life. Now, most of us probably relegate this doctrine to some obscure technical jargon that doesn't actual impact on real life. It turns out that this is wrong in a number of ways. Following are some slightly organized, mildly coherent thoughts...

Firstly, the doctrine of the Trinity is at the centre of historic orthodox Christianity. Most doctrinal controversies in the early church centred around issues of defining the Trinity. The Nicene Creed is one of the few things that you can get Catholics, Orthodox and Protestant Christians to agree on, and it was written mainly to ensure that Christians understood the Trinity properly.

Secondly, it doesn't make any sense. And neither does Christianity, until you've embraced it. Or embraced God Himself, more accurately. The Trinity affirms that God is a single Being who exists simultaneously and eternally, as a communion of three Persons: the Father; the Son; and the Holy Spirit. Or, the answer to the question "What is God?" indicates the one-ness of the divine nature, while the answer to the question "Who is God?" indicates the three-ness of "Father, Son and Holy Spirit." (Some of this wording was pilfered from Wikipedia's Trinity article) So, all that makes perfect sense, right? Nope. I mean, sure you can say the words and understand what they mean, but just try and work out how that works and you'll do your head in. Following Jesus is the religion of fools. This makes it much easier not to need an answer for everything. You also don't need to try to make Christianity respectable. (I'm mostly talking to myself here.)

Thirdly, (appropriately!) the Trinity is a relational entity. This has profound implications for how we think about life in our disconnected, lonely culture. The Trinity is the God who underpins the entire universe. Fundamental to reality is relationship and love. Some theologians even suggest that the One-ness of the Trinity is accomplished through the love of all Three Persons for one another. This is slightly unorthodox, but a wonderful beginning in desiring to understand the mystery of the Trinity. So, the relational God creates a relational universe and sacrfices Himself (and even His own completeness for a time?) to restore the broken relationship between Himself and His creation. It does my head in. My heart too.

Fourthly, this adds some spice to life. If the fundamental underlying principle of the entire universe is a mystery, then maybe it's OK to be confused about the world and my place in it sometimes. Maybe I should even expect this, which frees me to partcipate in life as an adventure that I don't know the answer to yet! And maybe never will.

Fifthly, don't forget about the relationality of this. It was worth an extra point to come back to this: relationship runs the world. Maybe I should stop running from it and starting running to it. Love more.

Sixthly, I'm done now. Welcome to the rest of your life!

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Uber-Geek

2006-03-21T20:27:00.000-04:00

Hello everyone. I usually ruminate all deep and stuff on here, but I figured that I would take you on a guided tour of the various doodads that reside in my toolbar. I blame Cam!

LibraryThing

The first and best add-on to my blog. It allows me to catalogue my books and let everyone else know what I'm reading via the highly customizable blog widget. I have mine set to show the five most recent books. Alternately, you could set it to show a random list or a list of books with a certain tag. (Tagging will be explained in the next section) A free account allows you to catalogue up to 200 books.

Del.icio.us Tag Cloud

Tagging is all the rage these days. If you're a geek, anyways. Quite simply, tagging is a way to categorize information. I tag every one of my blog posts with descriptive words which I then bookmark on del.icio.us. The Tag cloud I have allows you to see which tags I've used most often: Bigger fonts=more frequently tagged. If you click on the link in the Cloud or at the bottom of any post, it'll take you to a page where you can view any and all other posts of mine that are tagged the same. And from there you can easily click "Popular" to see what other things out on the Web have been tagged the same way. Careful not to get lost in cyberspace!

coComment

This technology allows me to keep track of the comments that I make on other people's blogs. The sidebar widget also allows anyone reading my blog to see where else I'm reading and commenting. It's a good step to making the blogosphere a little more two-way and relational. Sorta.

Site Feed

I "burn" my site feed through FeedBurner. If you register your site feed with them, it makes it really easy for people to add your site feed to a news reader. Essentially, any site with a feed can be subscribed to via a feed reader. I use Google Reader to automatically check who has made recent blog posts instead of having to check all the different blogs. Click on my site feed and it should help you figure out what's what with feeds and such.

ClustrMaps

This has the most "fun" factor I'd say. Register your site with them and they'll give you a daily map of where in the world people are visiting you blog from! Pretty cool! If you happen to be viewing it today, you'll see nothing because I just signed up for it. Come back tomorrow!

Thus concludes the tour of my uber-geekiness. I hope you endured the ride.

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Quitting Time

2006-03-15T17:48:00.000-04:00

I handed in my notice of resignation at my job today in preparation for my rapidly approaching trip to Europe. No matter how many times I've done it, handing in a resignation always makes me excited. New vistas, new possibilities, poverty... Well, the last one's not that attractive.

As my mind always does, I got to thinking of how this excitement could apply to life in general. Suddenly I was struck with a thought (it didn't hurt too much) and the following happened:

Dear Spirit of this Age

I am writing this letter to give notice of my resignation, effective immediately, as your slave. As you have breached our contract in many ways throughout the years, I am not granting you the customary two weeks notice.

My time in your employment (dare I call it that?) was, in a word, terrible. There was a constantly repeated pattern of unfulfilled promises and shattered dreams that characterized my time in your employ. Perhaps I will offer an example.

I was often told that money would make me happy and contented. And yet, I never had enough of it. I was always promised that it was just around the corner. All I needed was to work a little harder, invest a little better, etc. Well, I must say that the more I pursued money, the more miserable and anxious I was. Big promises, no delivery.

Now, where else could I like for these broken promises? Casual sex, drugs, the latest consumer good, the right body; the list could go on and on. You constantly told me with your flashy ads and your persuasive logic that all the things I was doing to be happy were going to give me a grand life.

It was at this point that I received a job offer from the competition. I must say, the compensation was not what I was used to--what good are "treasures in heaven," really?--but I figured that I'd look into it a bit further. They informed me that my contract with you was for life, no matter how often you broke it, so I needed to die in order to come work for them. These were strange terms, but as I was determined to cease my employment with you, I decided to take the plunge and "lose my life to find it."

I must say, their advertising isn't flashy, but working for the Kingdom of the Heavens is sure great. On my first day, I was promoted to the top! Well it's the bottom, which is the top, but we're all levelled out now. I'm no longer afraid or anxious, I have peace like I've never known, and I didn't have to buy it or work for it! In fact--and I know you'll just hate this idea--they just gave it to me. I was so surprised, it killed me. Really.

So, I'm off to pilfer more of your employees--slaves, really--to come and work for us. Our work environment is exhilarating, and our retirement package absolutely trounces your silly little RRSPs.

Sincerely,

Matt

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Good Quote

2006-03-08T18:15:00.000-04:00

I re-stumbled across the following quote by the philosopher Simone Weil. I first encountered it in Pete Fitch's "Theological Reflections on Suffering" course at SSU.

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.

A great thought for a day and age where evil is cast as the main star in every piece of popular culture.

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The Post-Charismatic Project

2006-02-22T15:05:00.000-04:00

I'd like to point people's attention to Rob McAlpine's Post-Charismatic Project. It is an invaluable resource for understanding the history and doctrines that have underpinned and often caused many problems for those who would pursue a life filled with the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.

Many of you may not be aware of this, but one of the Vineyard's distinctives is that it has attempted to fuse evangelical theology and charismatic practice. But this proves to be a hard path to follow, particularly because a lot of evangelical practice and charismatic theology conflict with the afforementioned attempt.

Frankly, this is one of the reasons that the recent influence of IHOP on WCV has caused some friction. IHOP's theology is sometimes difficult to reconcile to us who are more evangelical in their theology. If you happen to read the project entirely--which I highly recommend--you will get a much better historical context for why some (not all) of IHOP's emphases can be troubling. Specifically, you will see that Mike Bickle and the Vineyard have a history of divergent theology and practice.

Please do not take this to mean that I'm at odds with the people in our community who feel called to start the Sanctuary HOP. One of the great things I've seen is that Mike Bickle and the Vineyard have generally maintained a spirit of brotherly love towards each other while definitely disagreeing about certain things. I hope that we too can maintain that spirit.

Furthermore, as I've gotten to know the heart behind the desire to set up the SHOP, I'm all for it. I think that we need to pray more, not less, for our city. I believe that this could be an incredible blessing on our city and a possible avenue for God to wake us from our apathy. I don't like everything about the package, but I love what's in it.

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Word Quota?

2006-02-17T21:38:00.000-04:00

I've been sick for about the past week and a half, and have mostly lost my voice for the past 4 days. Fortunately I am blessed with paid sick days at my job, so I've actually been able to stay home and recuperate.

Now, a thought struck me as I was driving to pick Jaclyn up from work today. I realized that since talking--actually a croaky-whisper, to be precise--has made me cough like crazy and hurt my throat, I've been trying to say everything in as few words as possible and not talk just for the sake of hearing my own voice.

The thought was this: what if we all had a word quota? What if you only had, say 500 words allotted to you to speak on a given day? What would you talk about? What would you no longer talk about? Would you stop to think before you talked? Think about it...

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C.S. Lewis, the Prophet

2006-02-14T14:48:00.000-04:00

I'm reading C.S. Lewis' autobiography "Surprised by Joy" right now, and it has a wonderful quote on the problems with cars:

I number it among my blessings that my father had no car, while yet most of my friends had, and sometimes took me for a drive. This meant that all these distant objects could be visited just enough to clothe them with memories and not impossible desires, while yet they remained ordinarily as inaccessible as the Moon. The deadly power of rushing about wherever I pleased had not been given me. I measured distances by the standard of man, man walking on his two feet, not by the standard of the internal combustion engine. I had not been allowed to deflower the very idea of distance; in return I possessed "infinite riches" in what would have been to motorists "a little room." The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it "annihilates space." It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from travelling ten. Of course if a man hates space and wants it to be annihilated that is another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once? There is little enough space there.

As one who "needs" to commute to work every day, this made me realize again how backwards our "progress" has indeed taken us.

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Die to False Idols

2006-02-09T16:12:00.000-04:00

I'm reading Rob Bell's "Velvet Elvis" right now, and liking it a lot. He talks about needing to die to being Superpastor, because Superpastor was a lie who needed everyone's approval to be OK. Although nobody had told him this explicitly, Superpastor was some grandiose image of a person who isn't actually human. Some Platonic Ideal or something...

Anyways, here's his encouragement to you me, and anyone struggling to be our internalized Superwhatevers:

I meet so many people who have Superwhatever rattling around in their head. They have this person that they are convinced they are supposed to be, and their Superwhatever is killing them. They have this image they picked up over the years of how they are supposed to look and act and work and play and talk, and it's like a voice that never stops shouting in their ear

And the only way to not be killed by it is to shoot first.

Yes, that is what I meant to write.

You have to kill your Superwhatever.

And you have to do it right now.

Because your Superwhatever will rob you of today and tomorrow and the next day until you take it out back and end its life.

Go do it.

The book will be here when you get back.

My prayer for whoever may be reading this is this: Kill your idealized notion of who you should be. Be a follower of Jesus. He deals with broken people, not Superpeople. He deals with you and me.

Jesus, kill my SuperMatt.

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Jesus is Alive and Well

2006-02-08T01:10:00.000-04:00

So... I had quite the eventful weekend. This and more to follow...

Gary Best was in the 'Peg to lead a "Naturally Supernatural" conference at WCV this past weekend. He was speaking about the Kingdom of God in the classic Wimber-Vineyard style. It was low key, anti-hype and very pro-Holy Spirit. Yeah.

So, over the course of the weekend, I prayed for three people who claimed to have received significant healing from God, one guy who was dealing with lots of shame and God affirmed His love to, and probably some more people that have faded into the ether of my memory. And Saturday night, Gary talked about asking for the kingdom to come and then waiting to see what God would do.

He also spoke strongly to not needing it to happen to me, but rather being happy about and blessing whatever God does in the community, because what is good for one person in the community is good for all of us! So, here I was, anticipating God's kingdom on the verge of breakthrough and waiting to see where I could go and bless what He was doing, when it turned out that He had me in mind. The Holy Spirit fell on me and proceeded to do a whole bunch of stuff in me over the next hour or so.

I hesitate to say too much simply because it's not about me. It's about the gift that He's trying to turn me into for the sake of others. He spoke to my fear of rejection, my need for courage to rise above that fear and spoke powerfully that He would be more than enough in these things. This, amongst a lot of other things such as: it turns out that I have not completely arrived on the other side of my shitty childhood (surprise surprise) and still need God's continuing grace and healing in my life. I thought that I was finished with all of that stuff, but that's of course wishful thinking. How is it that I'm so much of an idealist and a pessismist at the same time?

Anyways, this has mostly been a rambling for my own benefit. I had been in a season where God was more of a concept than a person. He was an idea more than an interactive, loving Father. Well, now I've been reminded that God's actually a person! A ridiculously powerful and loving person at that... Oh, did I mention that He's really good too?

Anyways, I'm not even sure if I'm gonna post this. I'm not the kind of guy who wants to be an experientially driven Christian. I've seen that road and I've rejected it. But if God's a Person, surely there's a role to be played in experience?

Anyways, I think I'm done this stream of pondering. What I know is that God has done what I didn't even know that I needed Him to do. Thanks Father. You sure know how to be God.

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Conform to Whose Christ?

2006-01-27T10:48:00.000-04:00

Jesus the teacher of timeless moral truths.

Jesus the wild eyed apocalyptic prophet.

Jesus the political revolutionary.

Jesus the supporter of imperialism.

Jesus the supplier of my needs.

Jesus the Jew.

Jesus the blonde-haired blue-eyed Christian.

Jesus the anti-religious.

I ended my last post boldly by stating "I will be conformed to Christ." But whose Christ to conform to? The above is simply a smattering of pictures of Jesus that one may stumble across today. I know that I must be conformed to Christ, but how do I choose the Jesus to conform to?

Now, go back to that question that we so easily would be led to ask and see what's wrong with it. I'm not going to spell it out for you yet. Just ask, what does it assume? What cultural ideology does it unwittingly betray? I'm starting to lead you there a bit, but I won't come out and spill it just yet.

Wait for it...

For starters, I found myself asking the same question before I started to question the question. And then I realized that it betrays a consumer mentality to Jesus. I will pick the Jesus most like what I'd like Him to be if I go down this path. Any time Jesus has a "hard saying" that doesn't fit inside my grid of who I've already made Him out to be, I'll try to make him say something else. I won't conform myself to Christ then. I'll instead conform Him to me. And that's just scary.

So, how to proceed? I know this for certain: Jesus is not like me. He likes me, but He's definitely not like me. If His words cause me discomfort, I'm on the right track. I must sense that His life was and is much different than my life. And it is my life that must change, not His.

I also think that I need to keep reading the 4 Gospels to keep His words and deeds in my mind. I just finished reading Binding the Strong Man, and it portrays Jesus in a very "political revolutionary" light. I've definitely been wrestling with that image of Him. It seems "other" enough, that's for sure. The Jesus who confronts the oppressive political powers and calls me follow and do likewise is certainly uncomfortable. So that's probably good. But is it really faithful to Him as the 4 Gospels portray Him? Well, I'm reading through Mark now (which the book was essentially a commentary on) and seeing if what Ched Myers had to say holds water.

I'm sorry if this is more confusing than helpful to anyone out there. This is certainly a newish phase of my discipleship journey and I'm not sure how best to proceed. I know that community has something to do with it too. They won't let me make Jesus just like me. And on that note, does anyone have anything else to add to this?

My prayer for us:

Jesus, we repent of making You in our image.
Jesus, would we see You as You are.
Jesus, cut away the many lies about You.
Jesus, give us strength to follow You.

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Conform!

2006-01-23T00:54:00.000-04:00

I am a conformist.

I am a non-conformist.

Do the previous two statements seem to be self-contradictory. They are, unless they are spoken from two different angles.

We are living in a society that places a premium on being a "non-conformist." Just like everybody else, of course. Have you ever noticed that all the non-conformists have a specific thing that they think you should conform to? Well, they won't come right out and say it, since they're not fully aware of it themselves. You'll know that you've transgressed it when--ironically--they accuse you of being a conformist.

Let me make this real and less theoretical now. I was having a conversation with a guy I knew from back in my rebellious party animal days. He asked "what's new with you?" and I had no way to answer him that didn't include my ongoing journey in following Jesus. So, I explained to him in a moment of God-inspired phrasing, that I reached a point where I decided to rebel against my rebellion. That's right. I'm not conforming to the non-conformity preached to my generation.

But in order for my non-conformity to the non-conformists to have any usefulness to it, I can't be aimless in it. I must be determined and resolute to follow a path that many have trod before me. They have blazed a trail of resisting the powers of this age. I'm talking about the saints here people. Jesus of Nazareth. Paul of Tarsus. Patrick of the Celts. John Wesley. The list could go on and on. They resisted the easy path. They fought the good fight. They went so against the grain of the times that they were in that they are forever remembered for it. All of the waves of time cannot wash away the imprint they have left.

I must conform to the kind of life that they conformed themselves to: the life of the kingdom of God. It will be the greatest non-conformity that the world has ever seen. I must do so with a group of people who are also conforming their lives to this life, so that the world may see that I'm not just a solitary crazy. There are a whole tribe of us marching to a different drum. I hope that we find ourselves worthy to be included amongst those whom the world was not worthy of.

I will rebel against rebellion.

I will not conform to so-called non-conformity.

I will be conformed to Christ.

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New Look Wonderfulness

2006-01-21T15:15:00.000-04:00

Well, I've officially unleashed the new look for my blog. Jac and I collaborated on designing some fresh goodness to better reflect me and my intentions with this blog. Plus it gave me a chance to fiddle. I like fiddling.

I'm happy to report that Jaclyn and I can actually work together on a pratical project. We both had our trepidations, as we both always know that we're right no matter what anyone else says. This does not always lead to the best collaborative enivornment.

Anyways, Jac's saying that we're on the way to being a good web design team. She's the conceptualizer and designer, and I'm the nerd-a-rific CSS/XHTML guy. Perhaps we'll go commercial with this someday to finance our underpaid kingdom work. And stuff.

Any thoughts on the new look?

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Yay!

2006-01-20T17:46:00.000-04:00

AC 155Y 22MAY HALIFAX MONTREAL 605P 638P
AC 864Y 22MAY MONTREAL LONDON HEATHROW 755P 730A 23 MAY
BD 481Y 23MAY LONDON HEATHROW MADRID 0950 1315
AC 861Q 17JUL LONDON HEATHROW HALIFAX 1230 1724

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Funny Stuff

2006-01-15T18:33:00.000-04:00

This will particularly apply to anyone who rides public transit. There is someone next to you-or even many seats away from you-who decides that their cell phone conversation should be shared with everyone around them.

If you've ever wanted to express your displeasure, here's a particularly effective and funny way!

Click: SHHH Cards (It's a .pdf file)

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What Would They Think?

2006-01-15T17:44:00.000-04:00

What do people out there think about me? Is my life at all similar to the life of Jesus? I don't think it is, because I sure don't get a rise out of people like he did.

I'm reading a book called "Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus" which is a commentary on the Gospel of Mark that focuses on the political aspects of Jesus' life and ministry.

One of the things that we forget is how much Jesus was a shit-disturber in his own political context. Of course, religion and politics were completely enmeshed in His day, where they are related to one another very differently today. The question then becomes, should we be messing with political leaders or religious leaders today? In my view, the answer is yes. Mess with anyone who is exercising power in a way that steals, kills and destroys others. Jesus so challenged oppressive business-as-usual that the power brokers wanted to kill him, which they eventually managed to do.

Do I challenge life-as-usual enough in my way of life enough to make people want to kill me? No, I'm too busy trying to get them to like me I think.

Selah.

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Money from the Heavens

2006-01-13T23:12:00.000-04:00

Just a short post of praise here.

You see, I wound up with a whole lot of money in my bank account for no apparent reason. And I was confused. As it turns out, Revenue Canada grossly screwed up my Income Tax return last year, and I got the rest of it back now.

Now, I knew immediately that this money wasn't really from the Canadian government. I've been asking God to provide for our upcoming Europe trip with SSU and let's just say this is part of His provision.

Thanks Father! You sure do take care of your kids...

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The Need for Story

2006-01-07T01:29:00.000-04:00

I went out for coffee today with my friend Cam. It's been great having him here in between terms at Regent. He's gotta be easily among the top ten people on planet earth, but he doesn't always think so...

Anyways, we talked over a nice cup of java over the joys and perils of theology. Did you know that theology is punishment for shoplifting in some countries? Well not really, but I had a sudden burst of Mike Meyers there ;)

We were talking about the need for story in Christianity. We both discovered that this emphasis has really been hammered at us as of late. I've been digging into the whole Emergent thing to some degree lately and Cam's been having the need for Christians to live and preach in story while at Regent. So, we're both hearing it, but what do we need story for? Shouldn't we leave stories to the masters like Tolkien and stick with doing incomprehensible, academic theology?

Of course not. We always place ourselves within a story, whether it's a story that is explicitly or implicitly defined and understood. The story that most evangelicals have heard about the gospel is something like this: When Adam and Eve sinned, they caused everyone who would come after them to automatically be sinful too. You were born a sinner and needed forgiveness. God's justice demanded a sacrifice so in His great love He sent His only begotten Son to become a Man and die on the cross. He paid the penalty for our sins and we can now be forgiven if we just put our faith in Him. That's right, assurance of salvation is a mere prayer away. Confess with your mouth and believe in your hearts that Jesus is Lord and you're on your way to heaven!

Of course that's essentially true, and it's absolutely certain that we need forgiveness desperately. Incidentally, one of the things I'm concerned about in the whole Emergent thing is that in seeking to move away from this paradigm they'll forget just how much we really are sinners in need of forgiveness. But I digress...

Getting back to the point, I find that the standard evangelical story (or meta-narrative for you philosphically-inclined nerds out there) is woefully deficient. It is missing the beginning of the story (Creation), God's redemptive work in history prior to Christ and after Him until our time and, most importantly from a praxis perspective, it has nothing to say about the life that we lead between now and the end of our earthly days. The evangelical gospel story gets you ready to die, but any notion of how to really live like Jesus is written off as mere works. This leads to Christians looking just like the surrounding "sinful culture."

I posted an excerpt from Scot McKnight in a previous post which does a much better job of tapping into a fuller understanding of the gospel. Incidentally, I think that he could take his notions further by couching them within a kingdom framework, but I love the direction he's going. He deals with Creation, he deals with history and there's definitely an impetus to discipleship. Oh, have you noticed that the Great Commission itself is woefully absent in the evangelical story? There is no call to become an actual disciple of Christ; no call to learn and do all that He has commanded within that story. Just "get saved." No wonder the evangelical church doesn't care about anyone in this world. They've never heard that it's actually a necessary part of being a Christian. Sure, there's some super-Christians out there, but why bother, right?

Todd Hunter makes the right shift in thinking in a terrific article called A Tale of Two Gospels:

Perhaps our evangelistic question should change from, "if you were to die tonight, do you know here you would go?" to "If you were going to live tomorrow, whom would you follow? What would you do?" What is the basic and fundamental story around which you are organizing the living of your life?

Too true. When I wake up in the morning and go about my day, what story am I a part of? Do I think life is a movie about me? (Ahh, Donald Miller's the man. Read Blue Like Jazz) Do I think that the world's on a slippery slope down to hell and I'm sure glad that I'm not going with it? Do I believe that Jesus is actually at work in the world today and wants me to work with Him? Do I think that I actually could do so? Yes. But I'm not there yet. I hope I'm closer when I wake up tomorrow morning.

A Simple Prayer:

Lord, help me to see that Your Kingdom is much bigger than just me.
Thank You that You loved me enough to want me in it.
Thanks for dying so that I might live.
What a life You have for me to live with everyone else that's living in Your kingdom already.
What are you up to? Can I help?

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Prospective

2006-01-03T01:23:00.000-04:00

Well, this change from 2005 to 2006 is supposed to make us look ahead to another year. Conformist that I am, I will do so. One thing that makes me scratch my head is that we're over the hump of the '00's!

Without further ado, my thoughts on what will/might/I wish would happen in 2006:

I will go to Europe with my SSU class
I will increase my debt load (see #1)
Oil prices will continue to rise, causing us to rethink our lifestyle once we realize our utter oil-dependency
There will continue to be a cry for true community in this world
Christians will continue to see the need to understand the gospel as pertaining to all of life, not just a moment of prayer
The Liberals will win yet another minority government, this time smaller than the last
Nobody will care until the Liberals or Conservatives get a new leader who isn't a stiff
We will have another 365 days to partner with God in building his kingdom

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Retrospective

2005-12-31T19:18:00.000-04:00

Well, I guess the end of the year should lead to all sorts of musing and such, shouldn't it? Here's my thoughts in no particular order with no particular indicator of significance:

Well, this one's significant: I married my lovely wife Jaclyn on June 27th of the year past. Suffice it to say that this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing with ramifications second only to when God's grace rocked my world about 5 years prior.
I again got an opportunity to participate in a community of Jesus followers in a small group setting, which I sorely missed last year while at SSU.
I didn't go back to SSU this fall -- I'm taking a brief hiatus. See #1
My brother met and married his wife in the short span of four months!
I got a job that allows me to read for a blissful hour and a half everyday!
I started blogging. And there was much rejoicing.
I renovated the entire living area of my grandma's former house to make it liveable, guided and goaded by my ever-so-talented wife.
I became less enslaved to how people think of me.
Song of the year: Fix You by Coldplay
Movie of the year: The Constant Gardener
Book of the year: The Chosen by Chaim Potok

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What is the Gospel?

2005-12-31T01:42:00.000-04:00

The following is a quoted portion from the article What is the Gospel? written by Scot McKnight for Next-Wave Ezine. I discovered it while burrowing through cyberspace and I found the discussion here to be an enlightening one about a surely crucial issue. Click the link above to keep reading and here his thoughts on evangelism too.
(Note: Eikon is the greek word for image. McKnight uses it to call us images of God.)

I have been impressed of late with this thought: how people define the gospel is determined by where they start or, even more interesting, where they end up. Put slightly differently, what is the problem being resolved by the gospel? What is its resolution?

It is common to begin, rather abruptly, with the Fall and to see humans as sinners in need of forgiveness. I do not dispute either that we are sinners or that we all need forgiveness. Sometimes, so it seems to me, our sin is understood as little more than a legal standing or a judicial sentence against us, and that means that forgiveness follows in line: it, too, is understood as little more than a standing or judicially.

But, both of these problems — how we understand sin and how we understand forgiveness — are created by beginning at the wrong place.

Instead of beginning the gospel story with the Fall, I am suggesting we begin with the Creation of humans, both male and female, as Eikons of God. That is, as made in the image of God (imago Dei). The gospel begins, and only begins, because humans are Eikons of God.

Instead of seeing humans first and foremost as sinners, we need to see them as Eikons of God, created to relate to God, to relate to others, and to govern the world as Eikons. The Fall affects each of the previous: our relation to God, our relation to others, and our relation to the world. Humans, then, are cracked Eikons. There is all the difference in the world in depicting humans as simply sinners and seeing sinfulness as the condition and behavior of a cracked Eikon. Humans sin, but their sin is the sin of an Eikon. They can’t be defined by their sin until they are seen as Eikons.

The gospel, when it begins with Creation, is God’s work to restore and undo and recreate (whichever image you might prefer) what we were designed by God to be and to do. To begin here means the gospel is about restoring Eikons rather than just forgiving sinners. This gospel is bigger and it is bigger because the human condition is bigger than a Fallen condition.

Sin itself is more than judicial failings and more than offense against the Law. Sin is the disruption of the relationship of loving God, loving others, and governing our world. Which means, the gospel is designed to heal our love for God, our love for others, and our relationship to the world.

I have also been impressed of late with the thought that the final state of humans shapes what the gospel is all about. That is, the various mosaics of the final state of humans tells us a lot about what the gospel is designed to accomplish. Those mosaics, when put together, reveal a singular clarity about the purpose of humans in this world and that the purpose of God comes about through the power of the gospel itself.

We have looked at the beginning of the Gospel Story, and I suggested it is the story of the Eikon. We also need to look briefly at the End of the Story of the Eikon, and I want to make one major suggestion for your consideration. It is this: the gospel is the work of God to get us from the Eikon state, through the Fallen state, and into the Final State and, in the meantime, in our Earthy state to transform our life on this earth in our relation to God, to others, and to the world.

I do not mean to suggest that we ought to abandon life in this world for a life in the next world. Instead, I am suggesting that the language and rhetoric of the Final State is a clue to what life in this world is supposed to be like. Some, of course, might even deconstruct the language of Eternity as warrant for life in this world. I would not follow them “all the way down” (as Rorty would say), but I would say this: the vision of Eternity is not for the sake of curiosity but for the sake of transformation in this world.

And I rely here, of course, on the images of the whole Bible, including the prophetic literature, the vision of Jesus of the Final Kingdom, and of the Revelation of St. John. And there is one expression that sums up the Final State: worshipping fellowship.

Never mind that the worshipping part is the ultimate expression of our love for God and the fellowship part the ultimate expression of our love for others, the point is this: visions of the Kingdom revolve around two behaviors and conditions. Humans worship God and they do so as a fellowshipping community. No vision of single, isolated humans worshipping God in huts, but of humans packed like sardines into the banqueting hall of God, sitting at the table with one another, and offering worship and praise to the Lamb of God.

Now my point about that gospel: the gospel is designed by God to get humans into that very condition — the condition of being a worshipping fellowship.

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Time Slips By

2005-12-27T17:59:00.000-04:00

Time is a funny thing.

There always seems to be too little of it. Except when there's too much of it. We're either frantic or bored, but rarely at peace in time.

Wasting time, killing time. Sounds like something a gangsta would do. Maybe my attitude should be more reverent towards something that God has created.

Time management. It makes it seem like time is a subordinate that bows to my desires. Maybe I should recognize that I am not in control of much of anything in this world.

Not enough time. This sounds lazy and hopeless. This sounds like excuses, mostly from my own lips. Maybe I should trust and obey more...

Spare time. This means that it belongs to me again, doesn't it? It doesn't, so I need to submit to God.

Free time. Is anything truly free? I don't think so: everything costs, it's just a question of whether or not it costs us anything. Maybe I need to look at anything that I think of as "free" as a gift from the hand of God and respond accordingly.

Maybe I need to think biblically about the time. I pulled Ephesians 5:15-17 from the ESV translation because it said things just right: Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.

What's the time? The time is Today, if I read my Bible correctly. Read this here and then read it again. You can easily try a translation other than the Message if you fancy, but I liked the Message version because I'm far too familiar and not nearly intimate enough with the Word.

His powerful Word is sharp as a surgeon's scalpel. How does it cut through your doubts and defenses, laying you up to listen and obey? Firstly, it makes me realize that I need to listen! Today, I must listen to God. Recognizing that all time is a gift from God, I want to use it wisely in His service. I relinquish any silly notions that I have "free" time. I recognize that I need to enter His Rest right now, and it looks nothing like laziness. Probably more like reliance and trust...

End of time. For this post, but also for this world somewhere down the line. Whether I leave this world or it leaves time first, who knows? I do know that what began will surely end. I read the end of the story. Goodbye death. So long suffering. Good riddance evil. I'd say it was nice knowing you, but I'd be lying and I'm beginning to forget about that.

Hello God. It's great to be here with You. Thanks for coming into time so that I could survive You ending it. Now let's get on with forever, I know You'll make it... the best time that I couldn't imagine!

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Incarnate

2005-12-22T16:17:00.000-04:00

quoted from The Message paraphrase:

The Word was first,
the Word present to God,
God present to the Word.
The Word was God,
in readiness for God from day one.

Everything was created through him;
nothing--not one thing!-
came into being without him.
What came into existence was Life,
and the Life was Light to live by.
The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness;
the darkness couldn't put it out.

There once was a man, his name John, sent by God to point out the way to the Life-Light. He came to show everyone where to look, who to believe in. John was not himself the Light; he was there to show the way to the Light.

The Life-Light was the real thing:
Every person entering Life
he brings into Light.
He was in the world,
the world was there through him,
and yet the world didn't even notice.
He came to his own people,
but they didn't want him.
But whoever did want him,
who believed he was who he claimed
and would do what he said,
He made to be their true selves,
their child-of-God selves.
These are the God-begotten,
not blood-begotten,
not flesh-begotten,
not sex-begotten.

The Word became flesh and blood,
and moved into the neighborhood.
We saw the glory with our own eyes,
the one-of-a-kind glory,
like Father, like Son,
Generous inside and out,
true from start to finish.

John pointed him out and called, "This is the One! The One I told you was coming after me but in fact was ahead of me. He has always been ahead of me, has always had the first word."

We all live off his generous bounty,
gift after gift after gift.
We got the basics from Moses,
and then this exuberant giving and receiving,
This endless knowing and understanding--
all this came through Jesus, the Messiah.

No one has ever seen God,
not so much as a glimpse.
This one-of-a-kind God-Expression,
who exists at the very heart of the Father,
has made him plain as day.

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Lord, Lord...

2005-12-15T12:31:00.000-04:00

I wonder sometimes if I will come before the Lord at the end of time and say "Lord, Lord, did I not think on You all of the time and attempt to plumb the depths of Your ways?" (see Matthew 7:21-23 ... and read it as if he meant it)

And I can hear Him saying, "I don't believe we've met. I was the poor, the needy and destitute. You and those you surrounded yourself with were rich in knowledge but poor in love. You were so busy thinking about love in the abstract that you neglected to love Me in those who were disturbing your solemn reverie all around you.

My son, my son. My gifts are always meant to be perpetually given away. Your intelligence is not yours. I gave you this gift that I may serve those that I love through you. And yet this very thing you stubbornly resisted!"

I don't know if He'd say "away from me, I never knew you" at that point, but I'd fear it. Of course, this is merely speculation, but I don't think that it's anywhere near impossible.

The thing is, I'm pretty much constantly battling whether or not learning and knowledge is of much use in the kingdom. Overall, I believe that it is, but oh, how I struggle sometimes. I fear that I will exchange knowledge of Him (relational) for knowledge about Him and His world (informational).

I guess this is my journey. Not for a second do I subscribe to the anti-intellectualism of the evangelical portion of the church. It is important for Christians - especially leaders - to be well informed and educated, because the world happens to be a very complex place. Knowledge is not necessarily wisdom, but the more knowledge we have, the more potential there is for wisdom, if we will have humble hearts towards Jesus.

It's probably a faith issue, as always. Will I trust Him or my knowledge? Proverbs 3:5-6 sure springs to mind in a hurry:

Trust in the LORD with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;

in all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make your paths straight

As I ponder this further, I suppose that it's a positive sign that I'm asking this question. If I was positive that knowledge is unequivecably good and that I could not be in danger of loving knowledge more than God, then I'd be in trouble. I guess this wrestle is one that I need.

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Quotable

2005-12-15T10:00:00.000-04:00

For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.

Alice Kahn

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I'm a poet? (maybe not)

2005-12-12T12:47:00.000-04:00

What can I say in half-ass prose
of Christ who came to save our souls?

He came on down from heaven's glory
became a part of humans' story

He saw a world enslaved to grief
and brought joy through mere belief

His heart burned with reckless love
He became flesh from God above

He taught us how to live life best
To change the broken lives we've messed

He came to reach out to the low
they're the ones who made Him go

To a cross is where He went
His blood on us is what he spent

Now God and man have been restored
Through the suffering of our Lord

But in the grave he wouldn't wait
Death had no hold on one so great

What can I say of love so true?
I'll love him back and you should too

Thank you Christ for coming here
For bringing God to us so near

Thank you Jesus Saviour, friend
With you we'll spend life without end

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Longing

2005-12-06T13:01:00.000-04:00

What is Good?
It haunts me.
What is Love?
It haunts me.
Will I live Them?
It dominates me.

The above was an attempt to take a snapshot of my deepest places. I don't do so well with reading or writing poetry, but there's something about it that taps into stuff that words don't say too well.

There are definite longings that are unsatisfiable. Philosophers have noted it unceasingly. We see Plato straining towards his world of the Forms, malcontent with the material world that he lived in. Nietzsche's nihilism exemplifies unfulfilled longing turned to bitterness, vainly groping at transient pleasures; believing there to be nothing "out there." And then there's angst, that much-abused word (thank you Kurt Cobain) representing a deep-seated anxiety and unsettled-ness used by Kierkegaard and many subsequent existentialists. This is, of course, but scratching the surface, but the point is that nobody questions this longing. The only question in dispute is thus: does this longing mean anything?

I would not hesitate to point out C.S. Lewis' take on that question. A passage from Mere Christianity answers it as well as I could think:

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger; well there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim; well there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire; well there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not mean that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. (Italics mine)

I guess this is encouraging, right? When I feel dissatisfied, disillusioned and unfulfilled, that means that I'm dealing with the way that things really are. I was not made for this world. How could it fulfill me? I was made for God, and I want to enjoy Him forever.

(P.S. One of the ways that I channel my longings is in electronic music. I just finished a track called DGM. Click here and it'll start streaming and there's a way to download it there too)

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A Hobbit's Life for Me

2005-11-29T01:13:00.000-04:00

So, I'm loathe to admit that I actually did one of these, but I took one of those quiz things. I'm a:

To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?

Now, I knew I had hairy feet, but this is going too far!!

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Quiz
Hobbit

Here we go

2005-11-24T19:08:00.000-04:00

I'm not quite sure if I really need to have a blog or not, but here I go anyways.

I used to journal a lot in the past, and I found it very helpful for my inner life. Then I met Jaclyn, and I kind of forgot to do stuff like that. I'm thinking that I'd like to start doing so again.

So, I guess this might be more for my sake than for the sake of other readers, but merely by posting this in the way that I am, I guess that maybe it'll be for others too. I want it to (hopefully) be a chronology of my journey into Christ; to be thoroughly baptized into his death and life.

I want to know Him. I mistake this for knowing about Him far too often. That's why I'm thankful for my wife and for community. They keep me out of trouble like that. For instance, I led a housegroup talk last night on apathy, but I think that I probably learned more out of it than anyone else on account of the terrific participation of our group!

I learned that we're far too results-oriented as Christians - or at least I am. The way of Christ does not call us to make things happen. Jesus asks us to love Him and be faithful to Him in all our ways. One might even say that it's - at the risk of sounding dreadfully stodgy - about obedience and perseverance. Hebrews 11 talks about all of these people who clung to God in radical faith, and verse 39 says something astounding: "These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised."

All of those incredible God-followers didn't see results. The results were known by the condition of their hearts and by the good works that they persevered in. This message is consistent with the gist of the whole book of Hebrews, which was essentially an encouragement for Christians to remain faithful amidst some very negative results (ie persecution). Read on into Chapter 12 too, it's good stuff.

God, help me to remember that your kingdom does not work on our business models. I need to concern myself with loving You and others, not "results." What a strange kingdom You run. It makes no sense to me at all. I'm enthralled by it, Lord. Let me see it. Let me see You.

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