on the surrender of our heartbeats.

quick poll.  how often do you think about dying?  not in the general “someday i’m going to die, and won’t that be weird” sense, but in the very specific “what would happen if i just jerked the wheel of my car right now so that i collided head on with that combine?” sense.  now, i don’t consider myself a morbid person, and i CERTAINLY don’t consider myself suicidal, at least not to the point where i would start planning my release from this mortal coil.  my fliratations with death teand to be slightly more objective.  if there is a sentiment between “what if?” and “i wish…”, therein would lie my interest in the end of my life.  i don’t want to die, but the narcissist in me finds it incredibly intriguing to know how my death would be taken by everyone i’m in normal contact with.  who would cry?  how would people react?  would my friends pool together in their collective sense of loss?  would everyone have their perception of who i am/was changed, either so that they have a more accurate view or that it becomes MORE convolluted and surreal?  i find it fascinating how someone’s death almost always changes how we perceive them.  sometimes it becomes the lens through which we can better examine their life, but more often it becomes a stained-glass window that distorts everything into glowing colors.
the thing i find ironic about death is how we grant the deceased immortality, and this is particularly true when it is the death of a celebrity.  this is the one thing that we ALL experience, regardless of race, age, socio-economic background, favorite beatle, etc.  sooner or later, we all die.  but what is intersting about the act of dying is, while your mortality is never more evident to you than that single moment, the opposite usually becomes true to maybe 68% of those you leave behind.  especially celebrities.  especially rock stars.  had kurt cobain not shot himself, nirvana would have never transcended from “most important band of the 90’s” to “the definition of life for everyone born between 1968 and 1984″.  if ronnie van zant of lynyrd skynyrd hadn’t died in a plane crash, would rock venues and seedy bars all over this country reverberate with the semi-joking calls for “FREEBIRD!” every night?  would jimi hendrix be the guitar GOD he is considered now if he hadn’t od’ed on sleeping pills just a couple years after finally making it?  
its a ludicrous irony that, sometimes, it takes the most mortal act we can undertake to make us immortal.  we become symbols to everyone else, even those of us who aren’t celebrities.  my grandfather, who died when i was 11, REPRESENTS to me a symbol, rather than the (ultimately far more complex) person he ACTUALLY was, and i hardly knew.  he is a character in a fable, the archtype of an emotion or a feeling, pieced together from the splintered memories i have of visiting him, and the stories my dad tells of when he was younger.  kurt cobain isn’t a really good musician who shot himself, he the epitome of unwanted success leading to terminal self-loathing and depression, and the singular manifestation of an entire generation.  john brown is more than just an example of radical, crazy passion for a singular cause, he IS ZEALOTRY.
which brings me back to my own theoretical premature death.  maybe i’m the only one, which i suppose would worry me, but i think about dying pretty much every day, mostly in a car accident, usually when i’m driving by myself.  and it’s not for the benefit of how it would feel to die, and only sometimes its to think about what, if anything, comes after “life”.  i mostly think about how its would affect those whom i know and interact with and love.  depending on my mood that day, this little thought exercise slides on a scale between the aforementioned questions of “what if” and “i wish”, but it never is 100% one or the other.  i want to  watch how my family, my friends, those whom i love, react to the news.  i want to see how the guy with the weird hair in my 9th grade english class who talked about sex all the time would take it.  co-workers, roommates, ex-girlfriends,  babysitters, cousins, professors, drinking buddies, church members, everyone.  this is so very selfish and egotistical, but i AM human, and these things DO occur to me.  and i know that i won’t commit suicide, or even seriously consider it, ever.  and i shouldn’t give a damn about how others perceive me, really, and sometimes i don’t, but very often i do.  i’d like to think that it’s not some sick sadistic desire in myself to make those whom i love miserable, but rather a survey of who really matters to me.  i don’t know.  maybe it wouldn’t prove anything.  i probably wouldn’t benefit in the slightest from dying, and my life would be boiled down to a paragraph in the obituaries of the local paper for most people.  then i would take on whatever character that person needs me to be. 
 i think that no matter how much we know someone, no matter how close we come to really understanding them, we still “filter” their memory after they aren’t with us, down to a more manageable concept of who they are/were.  we forget those things we don’t want to remember.  we forget the minute factoids, the insignificant details.  and this goes beyond how we  lionize the deceased; we do this for EVERYONE, mostly for the people we don’t see everyday.  we create the “form” of that person, which tends to have a little more luster than the reality.  this can cause disillusionment and depression in regards to the living, but for the dead it means that they become immortal, even if it isn’t really them we remember.  that’s life, and i hope it makes it much easier to understand this.  i’ll get back to you on that.

the veil that draped our youthful faces.

this is one of several older blogs that i have rediscovered and decided to post here to remember what i wanted to tell myself at that point:i remember the way it felt to pretend when i was a child, being COMPLETELY immersed in what i became. the switch from reality to make-believe was so natural then, even when it came to toys and models, or a stick that became a sceptre in some epic game. i made my environment and saw it as i wanted, not as life “really” was. if i was a dinosaur (which i was a lot) everything around me contributed to my own dinosauriness, from the way the tomato garden became a swamp, to how the bush at the end of the yard was a cave of reptillian solitude. i remember large scale war manouvers with action figures that spanned the entire basement, but to ME spanned worlds. blankets and pillows mutated into igloos; that was simply what they were at that moment. i could view a scene from any angle; i could bend time, take on multiple roles, change a storyline, whatever i needed to make myself content. <br>but somewhere along the way, these things faded. imagination became more work. my role in the story became less literal as i tried to occupy myself or entertain my little brothers. then, at some (seemingly) rather abrupt point, it was gone. toys were just toys, couches were just couches, snow was just snow. i was just me, nothing else. i lost the ACTIVE imagination. and what was that part of me replaced by? is there a chunk of “me-ness” that is missing? is there a small chasm that my dinosauricity once occupied that now lays in ruins? as i grow older, do i really lose parts of me, bit by bit, until nothing’s left? or do i exchange the morsels of my childhood for something else, hopefully something greater? i miss the true innocence of childhood, but perhaps that simplicity gave way for the ability to fall in love. these are, after all, the things we cherish most at their respective ages. when i was a child, nothing was more defining of who i was by those things i made myself, not hing was more important to me than my imagination. now, the thing i cherish most is LOVE. i hunger for it, it defines my life, it’s what i spend my time trying to attain. LOVE in all its forms.what i’m scared of is losing that ability to remember what was important to me then. i’ve taught in a handful of middle schools over the past month, and i’m astounded about how vaguely i sometimes remember those years. and one thing that worries me about becoming a teacher is FORGETTING WHAT IT WAS LIKE. i don’t want to forget what was important to me then, for if i do, i lose my ability to really affect my students. i’m not in this to make kids better painters or sculptors, i’m in it to make them look at their lives with intergrity and passion. but how can i do that if i forget what they’re going through? i’d be kidding myself.this reads like a mid-life crisis, and i’m only twenty-two. there’s a couple of significant dates coming up in the next two weeks for me, and i’m starting to reflect on my life in a way that i never have before. i’m terrified. i don’t know what to do next. i don’t want to grow up. it’s like that scene in the breakfast club, where the kids are talking about how when you grow up, your soul starts to die, bit by bit, until there’s nothing left. judd nelson gives a defiant, “who cares?”, and ali sheedy, tears in her eyes, eeks out, “I care.” that’s me. i don’t want to prepare for death by already dying inside. i want to be alive and content and restless and passionate and in love and amazed at EVERYTHING. i’m praying that i can keep the BALANCE, that i can fill in those holes as needed with things that are wholly good.

building a better c[h]ord.

i’ll be honest with you. i’ve always seen faith as a solitary endeavor, that is, something that transpires between you and G-D only. until recently, i had never thought about how our relationships with other people work into that. it has always seemed that how i interact with those around me; how i love them or don’t, care for them or turn the other way, how each of these decisions are some sort of by-product to my faith. they are essentially the result of my relationship to/with G-D.

last week i was delivering chinese, per usual, and thinking about this very concept. the one advantage of delivering is that it affords me plenty of time to think and be alone. i think G-D has been laying the idea of “community” on my heart recently, perhaps because i have begun my search for a new community somewhere in these united states. i’m hesitant to move somewhere i don’t know anyone; i don’t think i know how to “meet” people. anyway, this has all coincided with several conversations with close friends about the importance of having a good community in which to live. my friend josh had a revelation last month, as he quit his job and took a train to montana for a week. he told me that he realized the importance of those whom you surround yourself with. he said he discovered out there in the wild that it’s not WHERE you are, so much as WHO YOU ARE WITH that determines the quality of life. and just yesterday, timbre and i were talking about the simple way christian commune in philadelphia. there seems to be an uprising of young christians in our generation who are returning to the roots of the church, to those simple ideas of living by love for your neighbors and being in fellowship with your brothers and sisters in CHRIST. donald miller speaks about it alot; the fella who started the simple way has written an entire book on communes that i hear is incredible (it’s on my list-to-read).

basically what i’m getting at is this: i’m not really seeing the way in which i love my neighbor as a by-product of my faith so much as an interwoven piece of it. i used to think that if i loved G-D, then i would love people, but i think the relationship within that “if/then” statement is much more intimate, to the point where they are indivisible. to love G-D IS to love my fellow man (and woman). a by-product in industry is something created after the fact, but if i don’t love my neighbors, then my relationship with G-D comes into jeopardy. essentially, i can’t have one without the other. i think in some way this changes the dynamic of how i treat people. it’s like the verses in ecclesiastes say:

Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm.
But how can one keep warm alone?
Though one may be overpowered,
two can defend themselves.
A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.

it’s necessary to our survival to bond together with our brothers and sisters. i like how in these two verses solomon talks about how two is better than one, yet the “punchline” infers that the strongest existence is in a triad; that is, when G-D is woven in and among the other two strands. this is a favorite verse at weddings for that very reason. it’s a great analogy.

i’m hoping that as the LORD reveals more of these mysteries to me that i can start changing how i interact with those around me. i have been pretty ashamed of myself on several occasions in these past few months for the way i’ve treated people. people i don’t know. people that i care about a great deal. i’ve felt like the priest and the levite who passed by the wounded man on the side of the road in the parable of the good samaritan. i’ve been zaccheus, taking advantage of those who trust me. i feel like i could sit right among the tax collectors and sinners that CHRIST dined with so often. but i feel redeemed to know that HE came here to restore community; not just community among HIS people, but that three-stranded type of community, a community built on relationships between G-D and man. a community that cannot break.

viva la revolucion.

i just finished watching “the motorcycle diaries” for the second time, and it floored me as much as my first viewing. for those of you who may not be familiar with the film, it is based on the diary kept by ernesto “che” guevara while on a trip through south america in the 1950’s that led to his decision to become a revolutionist. che and his friend travelled from their upper class residence in argentina all the way to a leper colony in peru, and while on their journey they were exposed to the harsh realities of life for the majority of south americans at that time.

you may or may not know that i have been to south america threes times: twice to bolivia, and once to peru. while there, i worked with various organizations within the anglican church for several weeks at a time. each of these trips became monumental life-changing experiences for me. it was incredible to see in the film that what i knew of my travels was not so different from what el che experienced fifty years earlier. the poverty, the division among neighbors, it’s all so very real even to this day.

now, i’m not here to tell you that you need to go on a mission trip to experience these things. but i think what these excursions taught me was a view of the world that expanded beyond the things that i knew; my middle class home, in a country that (tries) to run the world, where anything i need is attainable, and my wants and needs are too easily blurred. but what really hit me tonight as i watched this movie was how much i’ve forgotten those things that i had learned in south america, as if my world-view has shrunk back to what it was before, perhaps even farther. my last trip in bolivia, i left the orphanage i was staying at for a day and climbed 5000 feet to the top of an ancient volcano that shot up from the back of the sity. i was sunburned at the foot of this mountain, and i was nearly frostbitten at the top. i hurt everywhere by the time i reached the summit, but i looked at the view, and in the most sereotypical of moments, i found myself in awe of G-D’s creation, and my own insignificance in it all. here i was, 20,000 feet above sea level, looking down on a city of over 800,000 people. i had hiked through sand and grass, until i was among campesions who spoke little or no spanish. i can point to this moment as the single most incredible thing i have done.

yet i think back on my life since that last mission trip, and i realize how i gradually came to forget what G-D taught me in those days. what HE showed me about the state of my own life, and the state of our society, how it lives and breathes and what it finds important. i’ll confess this to you right now, with shame hanging over my head, I HAVE FALLEN BACK INTO THE OLD WAYS. i have become entranced by the wares of our materialistic, imperialistic society. i ahve been wooed again by the mentality that places one man above another, and how we most do what we can to climb the heap and succeed, to achieve more than those around us. it reminds me of a prayer that we say in the anglican church every sunday: “most merciful G-D, we confess that we have sinned against you; in thought, word, and deed. we have not loved YOU with our whole hearts. WE HAVE NOT LOVED OUR NEIGHBORS AS OURSLEVES. we are truly sorry, and we humbly repent. for the sake of YOUR son, jesus christ, have mercy on us and forgive us.” recently, this prayer has made me realize how little i was loving my neghbors. and for someone who purports to having a “world view”, that goes beyond the girls that live next door. it goes beyond to everyone. absolutely everyone. in spanish, “everyone” translates to ‘todo el mundo”, which means literally “all the world”. in the film, when guevara and his friend granado begin their internship at the peruvian leprosy colony, they immediately disregard the barriers that are placed between the doctors and nurses and the sick. the response is humbling; the lepers embrace the young men more closely than they had those who had been taking care of them before, because guevara and granado looked on them as fellow human beings, and not as subjects to be held at an arm’s length. THIS is the kind of relationship we need to have with our neighbors. too often we view those who we try to benefit as projects, almost like donations that we can claim on our spiritual tax returns, rather than felsh-and-blood people that are our equals. imagine the changes that would happen if we treated our neighbors in this way! and one doesn’t have to travel to south america or asia or africa to make a difference. look down the street! look at your local homeless shelter! look at the poor communities across the railroad tracks! look at the next generation of children who sit fatherless in schools that don’t have the support to make a difference in their young lives! what are we doing for them, and HOW are we doing it?

i am so disappointed in myself in how i have treated this part of the greatest commandment that christ gave us. “love your neighbor as yourself”. even when placed in a positions as i was to work among my neighbors in peru and bolivia, i was selfish and deceitful, treating it too much as a vacation, and not as my manifestation of the love of christ in my life. and i look at my life since those trips, how poorly i’ve treated those around me, how conceited i’ve been in leeching what i need from people, and not being the best example of love to them. i have let down the person that matters the most, my lord and my G-D. yet HE continues to break my heart. HE shows me those around me thats HE loves. HE encourages me to love them as HE loves them. unconditionally.

it is my prayer that i don’t lose sight of this beautiful world view. that i remember my neighbors, far and near, and love them as much as or more than i love myself. that i destroy myself in order to rebuild in HIS likeness. an unconditional love for something that is more important than myself. this is our revolution, this is our call. there is nothing more important on this earth than love.

our childhoods creep back upon us.

praise GOD from whom all blessings flow.
praise HIM all creatures here below.
praise HIM above ye heavenly hosts.
praise FATHER, SON, and HOLY GHOST.

jehovah-jireh and comraderie with ravens.

i have been in awe recently at the concept of G-D as “Jehovah-jireh”, the Lord as my provider. actually, it translates three ways from what i’ve read: “the Lord will See”, “the Lord will Provide”, and “the Lord shall be Seen”. and i’m really learning what all three of those mean in terms of His interactions with us on the tiniest scale.

for instance. right now, i am poor. very, very poor. this week i have been quite worried about how i am going to pay my bills on the first of next month. well, i started off worried, anyway. but i kept hearing this little voice telling me, “don’t worry. i’m taking care of it. you may not realize it, but i have you under my wing”. so, i try not to worry. good grief. that is such a hard thing not to do. it seems as though it is in our nature to worry. i think at this point in history, above all other, worry is like a plague, an epidemic that spreads quickly into every household and mortgage and college course and heart that beats with blood. because with worry comes his friend fear. and fear can govern our lives like little else. we get so wrapped up in our own, we worry about losing somehow, we fear being without. i think about maslow’s hierachy of needs that i learned about in education courses, and how worry can permeate every level that we appease. especially at the bottom rungs, those that are physiological and safety related. it almost seems like anyone who isn’t worrying about getting promoted at work or buyng a new car or how they’re going to dress to get sex next or refinancing their home to get better APR percentage rates is crazy.

ANYWAY, i mentally checked through everything i would have to do in order to “make ends meet”, as the saying goes. so right now i am sifting through cd’s, records, and dvd’s for anything i can sell. yesterday i went up to jacksonville to visit some friends, and drop of my portfolio at a job i am praying desperately for (if you’re the praying type, please say a little word for me). i KNEW that i couldn’t spend a dime all day; and this is something that i constantly wrestle with, resisting the temptation to spend money. so i was hungry. very hungry. we went to starbucks to get free coffee, and just as we got there, our friend jodi had gotten some food from a local restaurant that she wasn’t able to eat. three seared tuna soft-shell tacos with beans and rice. they gave it to me. for free. an entire meal.

jared and i went outside to sit on the patio, and i found myself just staring at the white styrofoam treasure chest in front of me. i was dumbstruck about the answer to a pray i had hardly uttered. i was hungry, HE finds a way to feed me. i have never felt more like those birds that Jesus talks about in Luke in my life:

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. Life is more than food, and the body more than clothes. Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds! Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?

“Consider how the lilies grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith!”

i mean, it can’t be stated any more plain than Christ says here. we mean more to G-D than birds and flowers. so much more. and if we have faith in HIM, in his abilities to PROVIDE for, to SEE us and know our needs, to BE SEEN by us in our attention to an ACTIVE and LIVING being, we can’t go wrong. worrying doesn’t help a thing. i was hungry, and HE fed me. these are the miracles of our times. and it’s like i’ve said before, if we aren’t paying attention, we’ll mis G-D working intimately in our lives. i don’t know if there are really such things as coincidences, but i’m starting to believe less and less in them, and starting to open my eyes more to G-D’s hand in my life. it floors me. i don’t know what to say to HIM when i have these little revelations like yesterday evening. can he really love me that much? am i that precious to HIM, despite the wretched things i say and do every day? absolutely incredible.

the sound of g-d. vs. the noise in humanity.

I’m not sure exactly where this is going yet, but I’ve been thinking a lot about noise in the context of it’s place in the conceptual make-up of our humanity. What is it that separates us from G-D? So, I did a little research. I’m still trying to figure out how it all fits together, but here’s an idea. Hopefully you can kind of see what I’m slowly learning:

(from wikipedia)
In common use the word noise means unwanted sound or noise pollution. In electronics noise can refer to the electronic signal corresponding to acoustic noise (in an audio system) or the electronic signal corresponding to the (visual) noise commonly seen as ’snow’ on a degraded television or video image. In signal processing or computing it can be considered data without meaning; that is, data that is not being used to transmit a signal, but is simply produced as an unwanted by-product of other activities. In Information Theory, however, noise is still considered to be information. In a broader sense, film grain or even advertisements in web pages can be considered noise.

Noise can block, distort, or change the meaning of a message in both human and electronic communication.

So, I don’t really know yet. Bear with me as I ponder these things, and I’ll try to post a better verbalisation of what I’m getting at.

Love to you all.

sweet.

megafauna.

the sky has gone grey, like the belly a three day-old fish on the bank of the hudson. a reminder of the what-was-once-there lays in the distance, a tease, a stain-covered tablecloth. we are changing our names, by choice or by force. our mothers and fathers have lost us to new titles as we shed the skin they gave us. the lady do-as-you-would-be-done-by has retired to greener pastures that don’t exist, and her petty wares of justice and hope now taste sour on our lips. but we REMEMBER the sweeter days, because they have told us to never forget, to etch those visions into our brains with the sharpest tools money can’t buy. they used to sing of those days, because they lived them. they used the best notes and the beautifulest of time signatures. verse-chorus-verse-chorus ad infinitum ad infinitum. but their melodies became choked by the smog of a new voice that wrenched the chords from their throats, and the world fell under a silence of static and and industry. iron and steel overcame flesh, and they forgot the song. they forgot. they forgot. but their melodies returned to us, broken as they were, and we LEARNED them, humming the notes in tiny basement apartments buried under concrete and pain. our flesh came back to us. we began to look around and see what we didn’t before. behemoth and leviathan are twitching their tails, and we know this now. we see the froth gathering in our footprints, and the ripples in the air blow sand in our hair and beards. anvils are gathering at the peak of mount ararat, and for, and for once, we turn our heads towards the signs with penitence. we stand in the foothills of that holy mountain and fix our eyes to the north. a new dawn, a return to what-was-once-there that seems too far removed from those who have stood in the fields for years and years and years. what does this mean, brothers and sisters? where are we going? not how, but why? we are changing our names, by choice or by force.

its all so much simpler than we’ve been led to believe.

on moving mountains and other irrationalities.

Faith is absurd, when one stops to ponder what it is exatcly that is supposed to comprise the fabric of our belief system. There is nothing about faith that can be reasoned out, quantized, measured. There isn’t a step-by-step program on how to gain faith. For me, this has been one of the hardest concepts about Christianity to wrap my mind around. I think that’s true for a lot of people, especially in this time and place, yet we use the word so often. We talk about our faith in other people, faith in God, faith in our car working on a cold morning. We have our bumper sticker slogans (GOT FAITH?) and we speak of faith that can move mountains when it’s the size of mustard seeds. What on earth are we talking about?

I was on my way to Nashville for a birthday present to myself in mid-February. i was going to see the Phillip Glass Ensemble perform and retrospective of Glass’ works, the earliest coming from 1973 or so. Glass is the most notable figure in minimalist classical music, and probably one of the most important composers of the last 100 years, which is like saying he was the biggest ska band in 1998. Regardless, my friend Timbre and I were incredibly excited to see him. Phillip Glass is to me what Billy Corgan was to kids in the nineties, or the guy from My Chemical Romance might be to kids today, and no matter the cost, I was going to make this journey to witness a once in a lifetime concert. Being low on money, which come to think of it has been the case ALWAYS, I decided to stop in Atlanta to stay with some friends I had gotten to know pretty well last year while on tour with my band at the time. The true joy of being in a band and touring was meeting incredible people everywhere, and forming fast friendships. I still consider many of those people I met on the road as some of my closest friends. The guys in O’Brother are no exception, and as luck would have it, they were playing a show in their hometown just outside of Atlanta the night before I was to be in Nashville. I called them before I left, and they were thrilled to be get the chance to hang out, as we had not seen each other in five months or so. Just about the time I arrived at their home in ATL we packed and headed to the venue.

Now, I’ll let you in on a little secret about being in a band. There is A LOT of time spent waiting around. Loading in, setting up, backlining everyone’s equipment, checking the equipment, tuning, soundchecking, letting other bands soundcheck, waiting for the doors to open, and so on. That’s just when you actually get to the venue. before the show while waiting for a local power pop band to set up, Spencer and I decided to grab a bite to eat. This gave us a great chance to catch up and kill time before the show. it also gave me a chance to talk to Spencer about something he had informed me of by phone a couple weeks prior. He had made the decision to not be a christian. at first this had worried me, but I had told him that as long as he had really considered his choice, REALLY thought about it, I was okay with it. I’m not on this earth to judge anyone, you know. I’ll probably talk about that later.

So ANYWAY, I was excited to spend time with Spencer, mostly because I love his company, but also to make sure he was really searching for answers, and that he hadn’t just given up on God. Inevitably, the conversation turned towards faith, and he explained his reasons for not committing himself to it anymore. I won’t really go into the details here, but it led us to a larger topic of what faith was. Both Spencer and I had grown up in the church, surrounded by these buzzwords and fed every christian cliché in the book. i think there comes a point in every person’s life when they need to examine all the snappy one-liners they’ve been fed, sift through it and decide what they really believe, as opposed to what has been decided for them, whether by family or friends or whomever. What you believe isn’t an ethnicity, you can’t just inherit truth. We started talking about some of the silly analogies that we had fed to us when we were younger, and how much damage many of those little things can cause. Spencer brought up a demonstration a youth pastor had used at a show they had played recently, where he asked a volunteer to hold a cinder block in each hand, so that they weighted him down until he could hardly move properly. He told the crowd that these cinder blocks were all the bad things in your life, and how Jesus comes along and makes all those things disappear. Which is true, to a certain extent, until the youth pastor used the words “sin” and “problems” interchangeably. So the message became about how a relationship with Christ will make your life problem-free and and easy. Well, isn’t that cute. And completely untrue. I think that the Christian life is HARDER, if anything. The reality is that there will always be problems in your life, on two separate plans of existence; physical and spiritual/metaphysical. The Bible tells us Christ gives us “a life more abundant”, which means that our ups will be upper, and our downs will be downer.  Show me a man without trouble in his life, and I”ll check his pulse.

 

 

      One analogy that we had both come across, time and time again, was how faith is like our interactions with electricity or wind.  You can’t see either, but you know they are all around you, when you turn on a light in your apartment, or stand on the beach and get sand blown in your hair.  When I first heard that parallel, I got really excited.  One more tool to argue my point, I thought.  I wanted to stock up my arsenal of clever quips to prove to kids at school that I wasn’t a raving lunatic.  But it was not until I read Fear and Trembling by the Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard a few months ago that I was able to understand what faith REALLY is.  Soren (can I be on a first name basis with a guy who’s been dead for 150 years?) explains that there are two ways to acknowledge God.  The first, where he says so many people get stuck, is what he calls “divine resignation”.  This is what that analogy really speaks of.  It’s true we can’t see electricity or wind, but we know they are there because we see the logical ends to the means.  We all know the laws of physics that govern this world, and electricity and wind are subject to them just as much as we are.  I know when I turn on my stove that electricity will be generated at a power plant, channel into my wall socket, and power the coils.  I can tell you for a fact that the rotation of the moon around the Earth causes the oceans to wiggle and the air to swirl around the globe.  We have topographical maps to prove it.  But there is nothing in the physical world that directly proves the existence of and omniscient God who loves me and cares for me and wants a relationship with me that is so personal that it makes my deepest love for another person pale in comparison.  Sure, we can say that bugs, leaves, pelicans, amoebas, existence proves that there must be a God, but decades of argument with science show that to be a difficult sell.  We can point to miraculous headings as prove there is a God, but then again these are explained away by everyone else as hoaxes or the ability of the human mind over matter; there’s an article in Newsweek every other week about human potential. 

 

 

      This is where true faith comes in.  Soren says, quite simply, that faith is the belief in the absurd.  It’s not something we can justify by science; there is not logic map that will show how we arrived at this conclusion.  There is no basis in the things we can detect with our senses that will explain that there is the Father God that the Bible tells us exists.  Did you know that bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly?  Scientists haven’t figured out how its physically possible yet.  When I was in high school, I loved that concept.  I was obsessed with proving God by science or logic or math, anything I could put in my hands.  I had that naive foundation that every semi-nerdy eleventh grader has that I would be the one to make a discovery that big.  But that line of thought only carried me so far.  Don’t get me wrong, all these things DO point to a God, but it is that leap of faith that gains us the true acknowledgment of a REAL God, a PERSONAL God that loves us and likes us and wants to be an integral part of our lives. 

 

 

      In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, my personal favorite of the trilogy, Harrison Ford has to take on three challenges to arrive at the final resting place of the Holy Grail.  The last one is a bottomless chasm that he can’t jump over, and there seems to be no possible way to cross it.  All his father’s notes tell him is that he must take a leap of faith.  It’s a literal translation, but it works.  Indiana has no reason to believe that walking of the edge of the cliff will bring him to the other side, yet he makes that movement of faith anyway.  This is where so many of us just stand at the edge and stare at the other side.  We want what we can glimpse through the haze that exists just beyond our grasp, but we can’t muster up the courage to take that step.  I know this intimately, because I deal with this about ten times a day.  It is so hard to let go of our comfortable little ledge, everything we can see and hear and smell and touch, and put our toes out into the abyss, not knowing what awaits our footfall.

 

 

Father God, teach me to move beyond my senses, to fall into my faith, which brings me ever closer to You.