On contentment

The other night I went to a fundraiser where two musical acts performed to raise money for a local charity. The first was Lori Willcuts, a local Christian/Country/Folk singer. I’ve had the pleasure to get to know Lori a bit because we work on her website and she’s one the sweetest, most genuine folks I know. More to the point I wanted to make – she a great musician and I really enjoy her music. Besides Lori, or after Lori as the case may be, came a gospel singer who’s name escapes me. This woman had an incredible voice. Her specialty is singing gospel and soul music standards with those remarkable pipes and wow!

So I’m sitting there enjoying this second woman’s performance and I find myself thinking about Lori Willcuts, who presumably is lurking off stage, hearing what I’m hearing. For a moment I imagine Lori, the wonderful musician that she is, watching this woman and close to tears. She’s thinking, “Who am I kidding? I can’t sing. THAT’S singing. How can I possibly compete with that.” And in a flash I see Lori abandoning her fifteen year effort, throwing her guitar in a dumpster and finally deciding if her hair is blonde or brown once and for all.

And as she does, the Devil smiles at the fruit of his labor.

More and more I’m convinced that contentment and satisfaction come almost entirely from simply using the time God gives us, using the talents he gives us, and doing so wholeheartedly. Case in point – even if there were a way to say with scientific certainty that Lori was an inferior singer to this gospel woman, who also sang her heart out for Jesus, the question for Lori in that Great White Throne Room won’t be, “Lori, why couldn’t you sing as well as her?” it will be “Lori, did you sing with all your heart?” and knowing Lori her answer will be “Yes, Lord.”

If this is so, then I suddenly see covetousness as a gigantic problem, and a profound sin. Rather than being thankful for the gifts I have I instead long for others. Neglecting the tools God has equipped me with, I envy the better singer, the better writer, the taller, the balder, the more, the less...the other.

About five years ago (I’m guessing, so give or take two years) I remember being pretty timid about singing in church. I wanted to worship “undistracted, unrestrained” as the song says but I “knew” I had a less than pleasant voice so I kept pretty quiet, singing mostly under my breath. I remember running across the verse about being faithful with little things and got the distinct impression that God was inviting me to sing – and if I did he would teach me how to sing better. Slowly but surely I found my spine – ugly or not I started to find the courage to nothing more complicated than raising my voice and soon I was having a great time! Hell, I couldn’t hear myself, I hadn’t really learning how to do that, but I was having a lot more fun. (Which totally transformed worship for me by the way...but that’s another story)

One day after the singing was over and we were doing the compulsory ‘say hi to the stranger next to you’ thing the woman in front of me turned around with this huge smile and shook my hand. “Praise God for your wonderful voice.” she said. I looked at her with one of those ‘Are you talking to me?” looks and she went on to say how my singing had made her feel. The experience still seems a little surreal to me in memory but it was this odd affirmation of something that I was kinda struggling with. Today, I’m a regular singer with our church worship team and it’s AWESOME! And let me be clear on something, it’s not that I somehow grew a great voice in that time. Rather I offered my mediocre voice to God and he made the most of it, and those days where I’m singing with my church and the Spirit it cutting loose – there couldn’t be anything more precious, more fulfilling!

OK – back to the point. Use what you have. Better yet, offer what you have to God and watch HIM use it. I never learned to sing well – I just sing from my heart, that’s what I learned. I realize that there is a fine line here as well. There certainly isn’t anything wrong with ambition and striving for excellence, but that’s different than coveting.

I reckon the other big stumbling block is fear. There is a great line from Dune – ‘fear is the mind killer’ Fear is probably a bigger problem for most folks than covetousness but it’s also less subtle – easier to recognize. Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of not knowing what to do next – all these things keep us from reaching our potential. God’s call to us so often includes an adventure of some kind and when that happens fears can roll in like a flood.

Remember that parable about the three servants and the master’s talent? It was fear that kept the third servant from doing anything with the money – he just buries it. When the master returns the servant says “I know you a hard man...so I buried the money.” That poor scrub gets thrown into the outer darkness – and for what? For playing it safe. I confess, that has always sounded pretty darn unfair to me. The servant didn’t steal the money, or squander it like the prodigal son. All he does is stick it in the mattress and he winds up in the teeth gnashing. Did you also notice that in Revelation, in the list of people who go into the lake of fire – you know idolaters, sorcerers, murderers – the people at the very top of that list: cowards.

I’ve always read Christ’s “Be anxious for nothing” as an encouragement. Sort of like “everything will be ok – you’ll see.” But I wonder if it shouldn't be seen as more of a command. Taken just as seriously as “Thou shalt have no other God before me” because in a way isn’t that what fear is really about? When I fear, doesn’t it suggest that I’m really not that sure that God’s in charge after all. Or perhaps it hints that I don’t believe God is all that good after all – perhaps he’s capricious, fickle, distant.

Love God.
Know Him and seek his heart – you’ll see that he IS good.
And be yourself – ALL of yourself. Don’t wish you were somebody else, somewhere else, sometime else. Take exactly who you are right now and offer that to the kingdom. Nothing will make you more content and nothing will sooner earn you the accolade “Well done my good and faithful servant.”

What have I missed?

About a week and a half ago I attended something called “Bootcamp Advanced” It was a follow up to the Wild At Heart themed Bootcamp NW and basically covered the Waking the Dead material.

It seemed to me like that single day was a splash of cold water in my face – bracing, invigorating, kinda shocking. It was like waking up after several months of being asleep at the wheel. I had such a tremendous experience at the Bootcamp in April and God loomed large in the following months. But, perhaps inevitably, life’s daily grind caught up and somewhere I fell back into the rut.

But after Saturday it was like POW! That vividness, that awareness of the things around me, and the knowledge of God’s presence were suddenly there again. The next day I found myself singing in one of the most powerful worship services I’ve ever been in, two days later I’m with my BoB and the Spirit is speaking about big things, then Sunday I wake up knowing that I need to be prepared for that day. I wind up reading a chapter on ‘counsel’ and that morning wind up talking to a single mom who really, really needed to hear some good news.

It’s great to fell God’s hand at your back, but the experience on Sunday really got me thinking. In the last several months, how many divine appointments like that did I miss because I simply wasn’t listening to that still, small voice? How many people around me really needed something, something I was able to give, and didn’t get it?

I’m not feeling condemned or anything like that, I’m just realizing, all over again, something I’ve said to lots of men as a may to get them to take their walk seriously – when we fail to be the men and women God calls us to be, real people suffer. If we really are the hands and feet of Jesus on earth then we need to be sober, vigilant, watchful, or people die – sometimes physically, sometimes eternally.

Father – please help me stay alert and not wander from the shadow of your wings.

2006 Goals

Just a few New Years Resolutions – a month late – and entered here so interested friends and family can poke me in the ribs over the course of the year to “encourage” me. ;)

1. Complete my black belt. I reckon it’s about time to make a solid push to wrap this up. I need to finish fire (Ki) and work my way through wind (Foo). No small feat. I’m told that while wind is the easiest element to grasp intellectually, it’s the hardest to get your body to comply. I continue to really enjoy Ninjutsu, but with the baby coming up I’m doubting I’ll have a lot of time to train. So it’s it’s now...or wait an unknown amount of time.
2. Achieve a proper salary for all the monkeys. Really, everybody in Code-Monkeys gets less money than market rate, including myself. In order to do that, and pay all the bills, I figure we need to make about $250k this year – so that’s my goal.
3. Spend as little time as possible in front of the TV. That darn thing sucks up way too much time with no return on investment.
4. Keep my head in the game – the spiritual warfare game...but more on that in another post.
   

The Devil and Sun Tzu Part I

When the enemy strikes at you, look for two lines of attack first and foremost:

1. Disrupt communication
2. Divide and isolate
   

Communication:

We cannot afford to be on this battlefield without constant contact with our CIC.

Because this battle is so fluid, so unpredictable, and so delicate, the boots on the ground, Christians, need up to the moment information at all times. This information comes from two main sources:

1. Scripture
2. Revelation through the Holy Spirit
   

Bear in mind that these two sources need to work together, neither is complete on its own. As a generalization, we should lean heavily on scripture as we’re learning how this all works. Scripture teaches us the timeless, invaluable principles we need to navigate the long-period ebbs and flows of the battle. For example: “Reprove a fool and you will get only disdain. Reprove a wise man and he will love you.” That’s a good principle on which we can base real world action. It’s the same kind of advice as we get from Sun Tzu in The Art of War, axioms like “When you are weak, appear strong. When you are strong, appear weak.” The advice doesn’t necessarily speak to a specific situation, but rather states a principle that a wise soldier applies as the need arises. But principles will, at best, prevail in a war of attrition. They will fail us when we need more granular guidance. Many, many Christians stall at this phase in their development by relying to heavily on the scriptures – which is rather ironic, because I hope to point out that it’s scripture, not me, that points to the need for something more immediate.

As we mature, as our security clearance is raised, we come to value divine revelation more and more. As our ability to discern God’s voice improves with practice we come to information that is custom tailored to a particular situation. Instead of the principle, “Go the extra mile.” we get “John’s wife was recently diagnosed with cancer and he’s overwhelmed. Help him paint the rest of this new drywall, not just the baby’s room.” It’s also the Holy Spirit that breaks the deadlocks we can find with competing principles. The ‘Good Steward’ principle might tell you that you must take that $100 and put it in your kid’s college fund. But the ‘Good Samaritan’ principle gives that same $100 to your buddy who’s car just dropped dead. But it’s the Holy Spirit that will tell you how to break the tie. The danger to revelation is that we can lean too far out on that branch and lose our balance. We can get so ‘spirit lead’ that we take every whim of our heart to be God’s voice and never look for confirmation in scripture. I can’t tell you how many earnest young men and women at George Fox University find themselves saying “God told me we’re supposed to get married....”

Here are two Scripture stories to illustrate my point. Remember Gideon raising and army? Any military advisor, and good principles of war say that more soldiers is a good thing. So the advice of principle says, “We have 30,000 soldiers – awesome!” But God tells Gideon - “No...you want fewer.” “Huh?” If you remember the story, Gideon’s giant army is eventually pared from 30,000 down to 300 – and he wins. Without his ability, and willingness, to listen to God’s immediate, this-time-only counsel, Gideon would have missed a huge opportunity. Principle, including all his Biblical wisdom, wasn’t enough. Now on the other side, we’ll look at the un-named exorcist in Acts. Caught up in the power of the Holy Spirit, probably way pumped after previous victories, this fellow finds himself face to face with a demon way out of his league. The demon says with disdain, “Jesus I know, and Paul I’ve heard of – but who are you?” The poor fellow then has his ass promptly handed to him. This guy needed to cool his jets and check his targets.

OK – if this is the kind of information we absolutely NEED to fight in this battle, this is exactly the information the enemy will try to keep out of our hands. Without it, we’re just swinging blindly if we’re swinging at all. This is also when we find ourselves on the giving end of friendly fire. So how will the enemy try to break communication?

1. Sin
2. Pride
3. Distraction
   

We we fall into sin our pipe to God’s voice closes down from a fire hose to a water weenie. Now before this goes any farther, I want to be really clear about something. I’m not talking anything condemning here. The reality is that we live in a messy world and the battle is fierce. Sin traps the best soldiers on the battle. We need to be mature and wise on these matters, when sin happens to you you must know the danger you are in and the danger you pose so you can act appropriately. Specifically, don’t teach, don’t pick a fight with spiritual forces, and avoid major decisions. Recognize that you’re flying blind.

While pride is also a sin, I wanted to break it out here as  separate issue because it has some unique characteristics. Pride doesn’t make us vulnerable in the way other sin can, instead it makes us stupid. It’s the prideful warrior who breaks formation and goes racing off after the orc scout on his own...right into an ambush. It’s also the prideful warrior who observes his buddy take an arrow and reacts with disdain instead of compassion. It’s the prideful warrior who thinks, “God has placed a powerful anointing on my life and I can face this new challenge just like I did the last dozen.” The first half of that statement might well be true and it’s not prideful to recognize God’s hand in your life, but pride looses track of where the power really comes from – we claim the strength as our own.

Distraction is like that dreadful Gift of the Magi story. It’s the bills, the kids, the career, the soccer games, the Bible studies, the accountability group, the marriage counseling weekend...and when was the last you just sat before God and rested? Our lives can get so crowded with stuff, even really good, valuable, Godly stuff, that we no longer have room for God. It’s like the husband who spends all his days at work to buy nice things for his wife...who only wants to sit and talk to him. Let’s be honest, there’s a lot of pressure to fill our lives with books, and groups, and studies and potlucks. I’m not saying any of those things are bad – but if they crowd out God himself, and the essential down time in His courts – then it’s all nothing. When the crap falls and we recognize that we’ve been operating with no contact to him, this can be a bitter pill – to look back at weeks, months, or years of futility without even the drama and momentary pleasure of some sin tsunami...instead we miss our Gideon moment because we never bothered to pause a moment and ask, “So God, what do you think?”

Rebekah

Seen through the steam of my steeping tea,
she busies herself with a book.
Superimposed on the scene,
mindlessly rolling from finger to thumb,
rests her ring.

A handmade quilt, a lap napping cat,
and lingering strings of Christmas lights
round the corners of my house.
But Rebekah, and only Rebekah,
makes this peace my home.

Thinking About the Weather

See: http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/01/08/D8F0L3GG4.html
and: http://www.enterprisemission.com/weblog/2005/09/more-support-for-undeclared-global.html

“The Fire of God fell from heaven and burned up the sheep and the servants, and I alone has escaped to tell you.” Job 1:16

Can the Devil control the weather? It may seem like a pretty esoteric question, but I wonder if it isn’t quite relevant. In a culture fixated by the weather, and especially after a year dominated by weather related stories, it may be worth asking who is at the wheel.

In general, we think of the weather as an “act of God.” So much so that this is the official term used by most insurance companies to identify things like lightning strikes and tornados. And certainly, there are lots of scripture references that back this point of view up. The Word regularly points to weather events as evidence of His wrath or mercy. From Elijah’s miraculous drought and rain, to Revelation’s angels holding back the four winds. And yet, that’s not the whole story.

In Job, Satan is apparently able to make fire fall from heaven to kills Job’s flocks and a great wind destroy a house with all of Job’s kids inside. Now admittedly, fire from the sky the sky is not exactly a normal weather event, but the wind is certainly normal enough. And you might notice that Job’s servant reports the fire thing as “The Fire of God.” In his mind too, such an event is God’s pervue only. In fact the central thread in Job revolves around very wise, sincere believers who mistake Satan’s activity as God’s judgment. But wait, there’s more...

“...then He arose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and it became perfectly calm.” Matt 8:26
Did you ever think about this verse – Jesus rebukes the weather. Where I come from you only rebuke someone who is misbehaving, but maybe that’s just me. Was the wind somehow misbehaving? The Word says the disciples were afraid for their lives, so we can guess that the storm was significant, but is it possible that it was some kind of an attack, that in some way the weather had turned against Jesus and his disciples? (which reminds me of the withered fig tree – a story that totally bends my noodle, but I digress...)

We’re told that the Devil is the Prince of the Power of the Air (Eph 2:2). Satan huffs and puffs and blows Job Jr’s house down. Jesus sees something about a storm that isn’t right and commands it to get its act together. It would appear that there’s more to this weather thing than what we se at first glance.

Perhaps the real problem is that we still tend to think of the weather as simply happening instead of seeing it as a process that is constantly unfolding. Despite the 24-hour weather channel and the Doppler 800, we still tend to think of storms or heat waves as discreet events that have an immediate and direct cause. Something ‘happened’ and now we have a tornado.

But let me get back to my original point – can the Devil control the weather? Well there at least seems to be the suggestion that he can influence it given the opportunity, and weather control is one the A-1 Big Time Golden Fleece goals of the modern world. At it’s heart, the entire debate about global warming hinges on weather control - the assertion that the weather and climate CAN be effected directly and that if we accidentally screwed it up in the past, we can deliberately fix it now. Now the global warming question is pretty mainstream as far as that goes, but there are subcultures out there who are far more direct about it. See the link at the top of this page for a guy who claims unspecified agencies in the world are engaged in a secret weather war using fancy weather shaping technology. Opposite the camp that is willing to say weather control is within man’s reach is the crowd who asserts that the weather is specifically and unambiguously in the realm of God. Atop both of these is the increasingly intense focus our media puts on the weather. Hurricane Katrina was recently rated as the biggest story of 2005.

Imagine a man stepping onto this stage who can demonstrate his personal ability to control the weather. Whether by saying the magic words or by pushing buttons on a remote control – how would such a man be seen in today’s world? For a populations increasingly fearful of the next ice storm, or the next heat wave, or the next partly cloudy day, such a person would be seen as something of a savior. For those who already think the weather is controllable with the right tools, here is a leader – a man after their own hearts and aims with the proper tools. For those who insist that the weather responds only to God – they may find themselves with some very difficult choices to make.

“For false Christs and false prophets will arise and will show great signs and wonders, so as to mislead, if possible, even the elect.” Matt 24:24

How Arnold Schwarzenegger Screwed Up My Life

“...are you gonna drop the bomb or not?” - Forever Young, Alphaville

I don’t know – I must have been like 14 years old or something. Damon’s parents were at a party and had rented the newest laser disc to keep us boys occupied. A giant naked man looks analytically at the three punkers and speaks in an accent I don’t recognize, “Your clothes. Give them to me. Now.” A terrible, unfeeling thing that looks human, but isn’t human, reaches back from the distant, radiation filled future to destroy a child – no, to prevent a child from ever being born.

One of the truly defining characteristics of my generation, Gen-X, is our inability to make decisions, our unwillingness to commit. We shun organizational structure and programs and we insist that we keep our options open until there is literally no option left but the one we take. Growing up with an unprecedented number of choices to make from which of 129 different coffee drinks to purchase today, to which ‘career’ we’ll pursue...until something better comes along...we see almost every choice not in terms of what a thing is, but instead in terms of what a given choice excludes.

I languished after high school because I was totally unable to pick a major. I lingered at junior college for two years because the idea of actually deciding ‘what I wanted to do with my life’ was terrifying! What if I got it wrong? What if I THOUGHT I wanted to be a writer but only because I’d never taken a fencing class – there could be a whole world out there that I shut out just by declaring a major.

And marriage – forget it! Sure, the idea of finding and marrying my soul mate – my lobster – was a great and heart warming idea...but what if I got it wrong. I couldn’t bear the thought of marrying the ‘wrong’ person only to find myself enduring a loveless marriage and ending up just another datum in the well publicised 50% divorce rate. Probably the only decision that scared me more than marriage was the thought of bearing children.

So instead I just waited. I stalled for several years in my mother’s nest. I avoided finishing school, resting instead on being “a career student.” I had a series of “serious” girlfriends. I wasn’t willing to appear fickle or promiscuous, so these relationships were always at least a year long, but while I think all of these women were in earnest about their willingness to marry, or at least consider marriage, I think I always knew that I was incapable of making that choice (in short I was an asshole). I remember once there was a pregnancy scare and the deepest cry of my heart at that moment was relief. Two of my greatest sources of anxiety, who to marry and when to have kids, had been made for me! It wasn’t like a new pressure suddenly appeared on my shoulders but rather that two huge ones had been removed. When if turned out to be a mistake, the period was just late, I was disappointed – and not because I had glimpsed my child’s eye and now saw that gaze fading away, but because I was back to that old uncomfortable ‘maybe.’ Wanting to BE married, but unwilling to GET married.

Hoping that something outside of myself would make my choices clear, sitting still, becalmed in the fog of my life was better than risking running aground on the rocks that might be ahead, and standing still was far, far better than actively approaching the apocalyptic future I knew to be inevitable.

---

I’m told that my parents used to have nuclear war drills in school, where the sirens would wail and all the Buster Brown wearing kids would duck under their desks. By the time I was in school, knowing that the missiles were coming meant walking out to the Rim and waiting for Norton Air Force base, a mile below us, to go up in a mushroom cloud. Hide under my desk? Attempt to survive? Fuck that noise! I wanted to be fuel for the first fireball and not fighting with mutants for the last dented can of creamed corn. Let me put it more succinctly.

There was no future worth having.

As I grew up, nuclear holocaust was a foregone conclusion. It wasn’t if, but when. And it really had nothing to do with what anybody did – it wasn’t anybody’s fault – it was just going to happen. Sooner or later somebody with a key and a death-wish would launch one little missile, it didn’t matter whether it was Soviet or American, and that would be that. Mutually Assured Destruction was the term – and it said all there was to say – my destruction was assured. Even if somehow the nukes didn’t get us, the pollution would. If it wasn’t the pollution, it was the ice age. If not the ice age, it was the fragging androids. Movies like Blade Runner and The Day After painted a sickeningly dark – but deeply believable picture of what I had to look forward to. And The Terminator, probably more than anything else, was the catalyst for my nightmares.

The movie is set not in the skull strewn future that the robot comes from, but in the sunny, bustling world of modern LA. When Reese explains who he is he says he’s from “one of many possible futures.” It’s not that Judgment Day is inevitable, but it is so powerful, so charged with emotion and blood and stainless steel, that it reaches back into the 80’s, my every day, and literally creates itself. Sarah’s raw, instinctual drive to do nothing more complicated than save her own life, is what actually dooms her and the world. One simple woman, doing only what she thinks is right, kills everybody.

The suggestion is that things might have been different. If she had only given in – not fought so hard – her death, her submission, would have prevented that particular future for ever coming to be. All options were bad options, but some were worse.

---

All futures were miserable futures. That was my childhood and adolescence. No wonder I grew up unwilling to make any sort of decision. Any choice heavier than what to have form breakfast meant having an eye on the future and I wretched at what I saw there. So instead I chose to do nothing – hoping against hope that some escape would open up. When the Berlin Wall came down I was more perplexed than excited. I can’t say that it seemed too good to be true, because it didn’t really seem ‘good’ to me at the time. Better than a poke in the eye – sure – but I really couldn’t understand what it meant.

It took no less than a decade for that event to bloom in my heart as hope. It was that long before dystopian visions of the future like The Matrix felt like warnings instead of prescriptions. It took those years to unlearn my anxiety, to look out ahead of myself and plan.

I look today at this war on terror and even the nuclear threat represented by Iran or North Korea, even China, and find myself wondering at the hand wringing. From my perspective, even the worst possible scenario – say a half-dozen nukes in major cities and 50 million people vaporized – is so much less, by a factor of 100, then what I grew up assuming to be inescapable. As grim as the possibilities are today I’m filled not with a sense of what WILL be, but rather what CAN be.

It’s sort of ironic that as my faith in Christ has grown, and with it my faith that the “real” apocalypse is coming in time, that my hope for the future – my future – grows ever brighter. And not for some morbid sense that I’ll be on the right side of that coming equation but because I’ve come to understand love – love that “hopeth all things” – even hope that there is joy and life and contentment in my future, and that of my children.

That hope allows me to choose, allows me to commit, allows me to move.

---

It was on Easter Sunday, the celebration of life’s victory over death, in the year 2000 that I proposed to my wife. The hysteria and subsequent non-event of the Millennium was the last nail in that coffin of wicked anticipation. Rebekah was the first woman that I felt like I had pursued as opposed to being pursued. I had just graduated from George Fox University – with a major in history, and with honors. I had recently begun my first ‘career’ as a web developer and less than a year later I would purchase my very first house.

I feel now that Hamlet was right. “To be, or not to be...that is the question.” Wandering in the world without purpose, without vision, without action we become like the vampires we seem so enamored with; neither alive nor dead, just there – sucking the life from everything we encounter. Not immortal, but a-mortal. And yet for most of us, life happens anyway. We fall in love despite ourselves. We bear children often on accident, jobs become careers by virtue of how long we stall there.

This change of heart has lead to some unexpected consequences in my life. Not only am I willing to seek things; love, success, my Lord, but it’s also made me willing to risk those same things – to take a loan against my home to start a business for instance. It’s not that I’m sure of my success, but rather I’m sure my ability to get up again if I fail. This is NOT my last chance, and even it it were so the hell what?

So if I’ve learned one thing – forget what lays behind. Strive toward what lays ahead. Press on.

The Nature of Insurance

For some folks, this post will be a big “well, duh!” sort of thing but based on a conversation I had a while back, it seems that there are lots of other, plainly intelligent people who really need to hear this.

Imagine a woman who is thinking about leaving her job to pursue other things. But she’s someone who takes a prescription medication and is concerned about loosing the health benefits her work provides – she doesn’t think she can afford the pills on her own. For the record the pills would be about $100/mo and they are not “life-saving” but rather “comfort-enhancing.”

“It’s not fair!” she says, “Somebody ought to pick up the cost of those pills. I need them!”

After brainstorming on how she might come up with an additional $100/mo I realize that she really isn’t talking about insurance at all. What she’s looking for is a subsidy. What she really wants is for somebody, either the government or her employer, to pay for her medication regardless of the need, regardless of the cost, and regardless of whether she is paying her fair share of the cost either with cash or labor.

This is a particularly important distinction to make as our nation repeatedly argues over health insurance and how much of it should be picked up by the government. Regardless of the details of that debate, it seems to me that we need to be careful about the terms we’re using, and what I generally hear from the left isn’t really about insurance – it’s about a subsidy.

Insurance is supposed to work in this way:

• Statistically (for example) 1 in every 10 adults will break a bone this year.
• Fixing a broken bone will cost $100
• Since nobody wants to pay $100, instead, 10 of us get together with an insurance company and each pitch in $11 a year.
• Then when one of us breaks a bone – and statistically somebody will - the insurance company pays the $100 doctor bill and keeps the $10 left over.
• Folks for whom $100 isn’t really a big deal might choose to keep their $11
• Folks who figure they are significantly less likely than 1 in 10 to break bone might keep their money figuring they’ll just save $11 a year toward that broken bone and can pay for it themselves in just over 9 years.
  

So the point is to spread the financial risk out across a bunch of people so nobody gets hit with a huge bill when they are the unlucky one. Instead, they pay a small bill regularly toward the possibility (inevitability?) that something bad will happen to them.

Here’s where insurance starts to break down:

• In an effort to attract more customers, insurance companies agree to cover more and more eventualities. The broken bone policy becomes a general “health care” policy.
• Doctors, who know that virtually none of their patients actually pay the doctor bill themselves, have no motivation to moderate prices.
• Patients, who never pay more than their $11 a year don’t know or care what any given procedure costs so they don’t shop. Similarly, they use their insurance policy to get things it was never intended to. Got a stuffy nose? Instead of the $8 Dayquil at Rite-Aid, they go get a prescription for Clarinex - $50.
  

In short, insurance only works when there are no more than the same numbers of dollars going into the pot as are being withdrawn. It only takes two people in the example above to break the system in any given year. Two broken bones means the insurance company lost money. They took in $110 and paid out $200.

It’s also important to look at on a purely individual basis. If I pay my $11 on my first year, then break my arm and back out of the deal – I’m screwing everyone in the plan. I paid in $11 and got out $100  - only to take my business elsewhere. You see this kind of thing all the time with folks who are uninsured but then find out they are pregnant. Suddenly The Baby family buys into a $100/mo policy against their $5000 baby in eight months and cancel the policy three months after the baby is born. It’s legal, but it’s exactly the kind of thing that drives insurance rates way, way up. This family has paid about $1000 for a $5000 procedure – you know who paid for the other $4000? You, me, and eventually that same family when they get their acts together. Because when Mr. Baby gets a good job, his company will pick up his insurance premium which is artificially high due to scads of folks like Mr. Baby, and his employer will directly deduct the cost of his health premium from the wage they offer him. In other words – Mr. and Mrs. Baby actually screw themselves – ironic isn’t it?

But that’s the subsidy mentality. At some level, conscious or unconscious, Mr. and Mrs. Baby believe that the money to pay for their baby is “out there” just waiting to be collected. They are willing to eat at this potluck, but not to contribute their fair share. But there is no money “out there” - tax money simply comes from your pocket and mine – we all eventually pay the piper.

So back to this woman who was leaving her job. Over time, she had stopped even noticing the deduction on her pay stub that covered her health benefits. She no longer was even aware that about $220 was taken every month – more than twice the cost of her medicine. Also, it was only when she started thinking about quitting that she asked what her pills cost, before it was a non-issue. And she had never even considered the generic brand pills that were $25/mo – because for her, the money was just ‘out there’ and she had come to think that she was entitled to it. Depending on who gets their way on this issue, she may be in time. But we have to call things what they are – this woman wanted somebody else to pay for her medicine, which is a subsidy. She had forgotten what insurance even was if in fact she ever knew.

Blog on Gog and Magog

Note: This post will likely bore you to tears if you aren’t at least moderately interested in Christian end-times issues. Caveat emptor.

See: http://www.harpazo.net/magog.html

A just read this week’s K-House newsletter (www.khouse.org) and they have a section on the infamous Gog/Magog invasion, AKA The Ezekiel 38 battle. The link above is a pretty good overview of the generally accepted interpretation of this passage. But for those unfamiliar (or uninterested) in the eschatological community here’s the Cliff’s Notes:
Ezekiel 38, 39 describes a battle where the ‘nation’ of Magog, led by Gog, invades Jerusalem/Israel. It is particularly striking because it would appear that God intervenes directly and defeats the invading army with an earthquake and fire from the sky – pretty dramatic stuff. If you’re familiar with the Left Behind book or movie, the Russian invasion that precedes the rapture by several years is this same prophetic battle.

In every discussion of this passage that I can find, the assumption is that this event happens prior to the second coming. - I don’t think so.

The more extensive discussions of this topic (including the one on Harpazo) mention that Gog and Magog starting a fight is also mentioned in Revelation 20:7-9, but they conclude that this Gog fellow (beside living for at least 1000 years) is a real sucker for punishment – one divine kick in the teeth isn’t enough for him. They conclude that these are two separate events that just include he same major player and story line. - I submit that they are in fact a single event and that the Ezekiel 38 battle takes place at the end of the Millennium.

"Thus saith the Lord GOD; It shall also come to pass, that at the same time shall things come into thy mind, and thou shalt think an evil thought: And thou shalt say, I will go up to the land of unwalled villages; I will go to them that are at rest, that dwell safely, all of them dwelling without walls, and having neither bars nor gates, To take a spoil, and to take a prey..." Ezekiel 38:10-12

First of all, this does not describe Israel today or in the foreseeable future. Israel is NOT secure, they don’t FEEL secure and they are in the middle of building a giant wall around themselves. In fact, events in the last couple of years only make this description of Israel more inaccurate. Keep in mind that a central aspect of the Antichrist’s rise is that he brings peace (“...by peace that he will destroy many"  Dan 8:23-25) but if Israel is already secure...what’s the selling point?

Second, God’s weapon of choice in both passages is fire from heaven.
“...and fire came down from heaven and devoured them.” Rev 20:9b
“...and I shall rain on him...hailstones, fire, and brimstone. ” Ez 38:22b
It’s by no means impossible for God to use the same tactic twice, but it does generally contrary to His pattern. And with other similarities, Aukum’s Razor would seem to suggest the simplest explanation is that we’re simply seeing one event from two perspectives as opposed to some kind of divine de ja vu.

The truth is, I can’t find anything that explains why this event is presumed to happen prior to second coming. It’s like it’s this given in the prophecy community that nobody feels the need to restate. The only vague explanation I’ve stumbled across is that Ezekiel 38 directly follows Ezekiel 37, the valley of dry bones. So I guess the presumption is that the two events are closely related chronologically (the dry bones are generally thought to be a vision of Israel’s rebirth and the end of the Diaspora that started at the end of WWII. But Ez 38:1 is “And the word of the Lord came to me saying...” which indicates a new vision, not a continuation of the last one. There is no suggestion that the two visions are near one another in human time.

What about the nukes?
Ez 39:9-16 describes the way in which Israel will clean up after this big ruckus and most modern commentators see a nuclear clean-up operation. All the junk is buried downwind, there is fuel for the entire nation for seven years and civilians are to flag any bone they find in the valley so professionals can come clean it up. The suggestion is that a nuke armed enemy (presumably Russia) makes sense here and therefore we must be really close to this event.

I have to say “no deal” on this one. While the image of a CBR operation is a compelling parallel, that may just be our projection based on what we know today. 75 years ago (a blink in prophetic time) this passage was no doubt an enigma. What could it possibly be describing? But that didn’t make the prophecy any more or less true. In another 50 years, we may have developed some other weapon that more closely matches this description, will we be ‘closer?’ What’s more, there is really no reason to think that the men of the Millennium won’t be equally well armed. There is no scripture that says Christ’s thousand year reign will be characterized by technological simplicity. Gog may very well have nukes then and the best practices of CBR may not have changed much in that time. An alternate is the chance that some some modern nuclear weapon in existence today simply survives that long. I’m no expert, but the idea that some ultra hardened bunker could survive 1000 years, only to be found with an instruction manual right next to it doesn’t seem very hard to believe.

Anyway, I guess that’s what I wanted to say – my take on a favorite prophecy topic.

If anybody can find me some info on why the Ez 38-39 battle is determined to happen prior to the second coming, please pass it on.

Honor Isn't Corny

You know what I loved about The Lord of The Rings? I’m talking about the movies in particular.

It was the first movie in a long while that treated ‘manly’ virtues like honor, courage, duty, and loyalty in a serious manner. There was no shying away from Sam’s rock-solid devotion to Frodo. No blushing at Aragorn’s duty to the world of men and his struggle with the implications of that role. When Gandalf faces off with the Balrog and says “I am a servant of the Secret Fire” (read: Holy Spirit) he’s saying “I am vested with certain authority – not by my own power, but by someone higher than both of us, and I am exercising that authority now.” Evil is real, personified, and non-sexy – the choice for good people of Middle Earth is simple: fight the evil, and fight to win; or submit yourself to slavery, death, or worse. There is no middle ground.

It seems that there has been a generation of movies that treated all such virtues, all such choices as quaint at best, or corrupt at worst – but most often they just treated virtue as silly.

This is so important to what’s happening right now in the church, particularly with men. I had a new experience today – an unknown (random?) person stumbled across this blog and commented on two of the posts. One of the things he said was ‘A relevant Church is a dangerous church....” (Thanks Chris!) If men (and women) come to despise the virtues Christianity cherishes then we wither, and the world will wither with us for lack of our salt.

So much of my awakening in these last years has been about rediscovering a vivid, real root to these things I’ve been raised to mock. But it’s no sleigh ride. Recognizing the Truth of an ideal like steadfastness inevitably leads me to recognize my own fickleness. The warm but uncompromising light of courage casts the shadow of my cowardice. But as painful as this knowledge can be, it reveals itself to be a landscape worth living in, worth wrestling with, one in which I can feel like there is something for me to do – something to fight for! But for so long I’ve found myself in this realm where I have no clear direction on who I should be or what I should strive for. If my (arguably) deepest longing is to be respected, then a culture that makes my impulse toward honor seem corny is deeply disorienting. In a world where the choice is between honor and dishonor, at least a man can make a choice. But one in which my every lurch toward integrity is casually laughed at, dismissed, and scorned – what then?

There’s no question that this group of virtues is an ideal – not the stuff of everyday life and not a simple matter of reading a book or turning off the TV. But that too is so refreshing to me! So invigorating! You mean there is a way of living, a way of worshiping, a way of serving that actually ASKS something of me? Actually challenges me? Sign me up man!

Courage is hard! If it wasn’t, there wouldn’t be much point to it and it would be no virtue at all. A man might do a brave thing in a given moment, but to display courage as a character trait is something else entirely – and finally something worth doing – something worth being.

These ideals, these virtues, stand like pillars in the landscape of our lives. They act as landmarks to guide us from season to season. Mocking them, as so much of the last 30-40 years has done, doesn’t move them, it only drops a fog over the field that obscures our vision and cause us to get lost, wandering in circles. In time, we forget even what the pillars looked like, or if perhaps our ancestors just imagined them in their primitive minds. But sooner or later, in all the stumbling, somebody will bump into one of these monuments almost an accident. “What’s this? Hey everybody, come se what I found!” Climbing that pillar starts to get your head above the fog and you discern other pillars...

What’s happening in the church right now, and also in America in general, is that people are finding these virtues and the light they provide. People are climbing up above the haze and that in itself starts to clear the fog. Spending time with the rock-solid reality of Compassion reveals Nice to be nothing but an imitation made of marshmallow. Grace rises up and reveals Tolerance to be chicken wire and paper maché.

OK – I’ve gone all misty now, but my point can be seen in this: Men in particular have been lost for the last many years because the landmarks that are supposed to be the guideposts of our lives have been hidden from us. Our half of the Christian contribution to life has been diluted because we’ve been scattered and wandering. But that’s changing. Like it or not, movies are the cultural literacy of today, and seeing movies like Lord of The Rings take these guideposts not as relics of an outmoded way of thinking, but rather as relevant to today’s challenges is no small matter. Bid a bitter and overdue goodbye to the anti-hero and welcome again the hero. Celebrate most his flaws, because in them lay the seeds of his humanity and often his redemption.

What if...

A few degrees off from my usual posts...

The way a massive body ‘creates’ gravity has often been compared to a bowling ball set on a taught membrane like a trampoline.

Imagine one of those 3 foot wide exercise trampolines with a marble near one edge – this marble is Earth. The marble doesn’t have enough weight to distort the trampoline at all, so it doesn’t move – it just sits there on the flat surface. Now add a bowling ball to the center of the trampoline. This is the Sun. The bowling ball sinks into the trampoline which causes the entire surface to curve around it, in order to support its weight. As a result, the little marble, our Earth, will now find itself on a slope and roll toward the bowling ball/Sun.

Everybody still with me?

So assuming this metaphor is reasonably true to life – what if we could find a way to alternately tighten or relax the springs that keep the trampoline taught? In other words, what if there was a way to increase or decrease the ‘surface tension’ in local space thereby either increasing or decreasing the gravity in that area.

If I find myself falling toward the Sun because it’s distorted the trampoline we share, tightening a few springs would make the Sun ‘rise’, decreasing the slope, decreasing my rate of falling...decreasing gravity.

And if space and time are really one thing I’m sure time is involved here somewhere, but I haven’t really thought about that at all.

Anyway – just thinking out loud...

The Coming eRenaissance

I’m unqualified to tell anybody if this is accurate or not, but it was once explained to me that the Renaissance, you know – that fascinating period of intellectual and technological innovation from roughly 1450 to 1850, was made possible largely by the fact that the economic situation had created a class of people who were free to basically follow their interests and see where they lead. The creation of the middle class and the first hints of the industrial revolution had made several people marginally wealthy so they didn’t have to spend all day, every day making a living. Instead they could think about the scientific mysteries of the day like ‘What is energy?’ or paint portraits of women holding weasels.

Stand by for Renaissance 2.0.

I’ve been reading Wired magazine for the last couple of years (That is a great magazine by the way, if sometimes a little snarky). Over and over the stories revolve around some dot-com millionaire who has decide not to take his or her windfall and move to the Bahamas, but rather take that money and do something they really enjoy or believe in. Some are altruistic in their endeavors, others just quirky and driven to follow an impulse, but the story gets told time after time.

Right now we’re at this place where US technological progress hinges on the production of new technologies and techniques. The solution to any one of an innumerable list of small problems is worth a million dollars. Similarly, as countries like India and China (multiple billions of people!) race toward modern technology there is a gigantic market to facilitate that race. In short, there are lots and lots of opportunities for folks who only need to be moderately clever, or simply lucky, to find themselves suddenly transcending the rat race.

In Wired, just based on the medium, I’m really only reading about those folks who turn their first tech-million into some other tech project – going to the moon, melting bulldozers, turning lead into gold, that kind of thing. But in other publications I see the same kinds of stories, just not so obvious. Folks who start making toys, or writing that book they always dreamed about, or jump starting some kind of ministry.

What’s more, these kinds of projects thrive in a collaborative environment, where the Oregonian who has figured out Tab A can actually find the Scot who built Slot B. The now world of instant communication where distance really only effects shipping costs, plus computer systems that can search enormous amounts of data in moments – this is gonna be huge!

Here are a few of my futurist predictions:

• Books and paper will NOT go away any time soon. In fact they will thrive. Folks will have more time to read AND to write books. Sure shorter, disjointed writings will move more and more to the web – the new realm for the pamphleteer. But longer works still want and deserve a degree of permanence. But don’t get caught thinking of “books” as paper and leather. Think of a method to store ideas and plot lines. Case in point: the paperless office never happened. Instead, we print more things now then we ever have.
• The flat world that Friedman talks about will be so natural to adapt to on the street level that barely anybody will notice. Only the snooty pants people who live in 32nd floor apartments will wonder at the newness of it all. The farmer in Bend wont think twice about popping up his laptop in his Chevy and asking a question of his irrigation engineer in Thailand. In fact, the biggest hindrance to this trend will be governmental and corporate opposition. As they seek to maintain control and get their nickel, they’ll screw things up. Case in point: Wi-Max in Philly.
• The sciences will be re-democratized. Right now, there is such a barrier to being a scientist – education, funding, peer review, et.al. To the great chagrin of the existing establishment, more and more science will simply go around this structure and produce real results without the Ivory Tower’s blessing. That will be a mixed blessing – innovation? Sure. Quality? Think again. We will once again come to ponder the specter of some mad scientist creating a dark star in his garage that winds up swallowing Cheboygan. Case in point: fake stem cell research out of Korea.
• Cultural spheres will fare the same as the sciences. With huge explosions of music, art, poetry, etc. The bright side is that lots of cool new stuff will be created and lots of people will be able to make a modest living with only a modest audience. The dark side – there will be a raft of absolute crap that needs to be sifted through. That said, this is where feedback tools make the sifting much easier and much harder to be hijacked by economic interests. Case in point: MySpace and other social networks that let widely dispersed networks of people gather to create a market for almost any product or service.
• Universal education will either change into something we don’t recognize or go away entirely. This will dovetail with the home schooling trend and the availability of computerized learning tools. Homeschoolers didn’t set out to create a social trend, but it’s happening anyway. When I can teach my child up to the high school graduate baseline in a matter of eight years instead of twelve, that’s an edge that is more important than the religious impulse that got homeschooling started. Secular homeschooling is just starting to take off because people perceive it produces better results. What’s more, in a world where fresh thinking is the hottest commodity, kids excel in doing the out-of-box thing and will see that learning geography is a luxury, while understanding HTTP is valuable. It will become a valid (but always risky) career path to look for a problem that needs solving but isn’t getting the attention it needs, and devoting oneself to one to four years of hard work with a fat paycheck at the end. I can learn where Oslo is later. Picture kids dropping out of school to join startups instead of to play basketball. What’s more, there are SO many issues that have a potential million on the back end that being a career inventor is again a real job possibility. So that’s pretty cool. Case in point: huge growth in technical trade schools without concurrent growth in 4-year technical degree fields. Folks just want to learn what they need so they can get to it. I’m one of those folks. I already had my certificate in a technical field when I went to GFU to study history. History is a passion, not a job skill, and I absolutely freaking LOVED college because of it. I couldn’t care less about my grades because my future was not on the hook. I was just following something I dug.    
  

Isn’t the truism “Do something you love.” always confounded by “What’s for dinner?” The market economy we call the rat race tightens when we’re in that phase of the cycle where the last generation’s innovation is being consolidated and exploited. The Rat Race become the Renaissance when innovation can get out from under the market for a spell and think crazy thoughts. People with passion, and heart, and chutzpa can run around willy-nilly without caring if this thing will make them a dollar...because they already have that portion of their lives settled. It’s just that Mazlow hierarchy pyramid working its magic.

So if you have some burn in your belly. A story that you really WANT to write, a need that only you can address, a splinter in your mind that WILL NOT go away – don’t put your head down and trudge through life wishing things were different. Look around for one of these problems that the world is just waiting to solve and solve it – then sell it. You don’t need to make a million, you only need to make five year’s salary so your next five years are filled with life and passion and the freedom to do what you love. There is the stuff of happiness. There is the life of deep fulfillment.

What's Good for the Goose...

While it was never my intention, I see that more than one post in this blog has been critical of women in one way or another. The thing is that what could loosely be called "gender issues" has been on my mind a lot lately; I'm not entirely sure why...but regardless of the why I want to set the record straight.
 
As I think about these issues, my most serious criticisms are directed at men, despite how previous entries might seem. In truth, many of my reflections on women are framed as I look at the manifold ways in which we men have failed our wives, our sisters, our daughters. What's more, in the last year or so I've had more than one opportunity to work with 'men's groups' as I see a movement inside the church where men are waking up to how badly we've botched things - usually through inaction. No small part of this rests on an evolving picture of what a genuine Christian male should be, what he should look like and how he should act. I've been trying to write this post now for about two weeks but find that I have so much to say that it gets unreadable. So instead, I'll focus this post on one thing - responsibility.

Gender roles are real.

Deeply real in fact. God-given even. As I say that I'm well aware of the hackles that kind of statement can raise. All the images of chest-beating, sloppy-joe eating "Men's Men" and the litany of evils that kind of man has foisted on the world through an abuse of power. But the fact that power can be misused is no excuse for neglecting to use it all. I'm talking about an honest look at what God says about men (and women) as well as what experience shows me. And I'm soundly convinced that it's no trivial detail that I am a male and not a female. That distinction is meaningful on many, many levels. Being a man, more particularly a husband (even more so for a father) includes a set of non-negotiable duties and responsibilities that we have mostly abandoned for the sake of avoiding conflict - all to the great harm of ourselves and our female counterparts.

We have let them down when they needed us most.

In the garden, Eve was sold a lie as Adam stood silent (Eve took the fruit, and gave some to Adam who was with her...). "Do this and you can be like God." was the pitch, which sounds pretty good. More recently, women were sold a far less interesting lie, "Do this and you can be like men." and for the most part we stood by again.

Guys - specifically Christian guys - it's become pretty "in" these days to say that a man is the head of his household (as if this were some fascinating new discovery), but what does that mean to you? Do you realize that according to God you are the head of your household whether you like it or not. You are leading your family whether you intend to or not, whether your wife is making all the decisions or not, whether you're any good at it or not. The role is granted not by merit, not by vote and not by committee. But solely by the fact that you are assigned those duties upon uttering “I do.”

Think about Strider (big LOTR metaphor ahead - reader beware) - here is a  man afraid of his legacy. Fearful that the same weakness that lead to Isuldur's fall was in his own veins. So he chooses a self-imposed exile where he may do a little good, but not risk doing great harm. The thing is - he is Aragorn, the heir to the throne of Gondor - and there is nothing he can do about it. Walking away from his role only leaves Gondor without any king and creates a power vacuum to be filled by far less noble pretenders. The stewards of Gondor were not power hungry usurpers, they only stepped in when there was no one to occupy to throne and the bills had to be paid.

Gentlemen, when you hear "A husband is the head of his household" does that strike you as a burden? An opportunity? A club to beat your wife with? Maybe it rolls off you back like so many other Biblical statements that are plainly anachronisms. As a husband, this is your job description - and you cannot quit.

I truly believe that one day I will stand before our Lord and I'll be held accountable for how I lead, or failed to lead, my family. I won't be able to say, "But Lord, Rebekah was better at doing the bills." "But Lord, I wasn't cut out to be a leader." "But Lord, those kids are so willful."

There is saying that there is no such thing as a bad student – only a bad teacher. It’s a statement about leadership and the burden of authority. We men have so deeply screwed up the job we were given that we barley even recognize the position exists any more. We’ve so completely abandoned our own authority that we routinely disparage all authority. We’ve so utterly forsaken power that we can barely even say the word without feeling a twinge of guilt. And with these have gone loyalty, honor, duty and pride. We’ve become the worst kinds of teachers – those that don’t even bother to show up – and we’re bitching about the students.

Narnia Rocks

Just a quick post – I and several friends stayed up to see the midnight show of Narnia last night.
While I didn’t walk away from it with the sense of ‘Oh my God!” that I had from Lord of The Rings – this movie was really, really cool.
Aslan was voiced by Qi Gon Jin, I mean Herr Schindler, uh...I mean Ras Al Goul. Anyway – he does a great job.
One issue –didn’t Tumnus wear a waistcoat?

Friendly Fire

"...They revile angelic majesties they do not comprehend...and wind up
with their butts in a sling." (Free translation)

Spiritual warfare is a pretty hot topic In Christian circles right now.
To be honest, I don't know if this is something new (again) in the
church, or if it's been around for a long time, but I've had multiple
opportunities to speak on the topic and I'm not even a pastor. Folks
are interested and the folks who find themselves involved are generally
excited about it and ready to speak...at length...myself included.

I think that in the long run, it's a good trend. I think the most basic
definition of spiritual warfare is simply believing that there is an
enemy, the Devil, and acting accordingly. I think the scope of SW can
cover a wide range of topics from intercessory prayer and fasting to
worship and faithful counsel. The trend is good because it gets people
thinking about the spiritual ramifications and causes of the physical
world and their own lives. In my experience, people who take SW
seriously as a subject for study and practice start taking major steps
in their faith.

Also in my experience, a great many Christians approach the topic far
too lightly, far too innocently and often with bad motives.

Bad motives like:
• A desire for power - "I wanted a sunny day for for grandson's
birthday, so I rebuked that storm!"
• A culturally unassailable excuse for being an asshole - "I'm sorry I
yelled at you, but I've really been under attack recently!"
• An exotic story to impress your friends - "The devil is really
hounding me. It must be that he's against my new quilting ministry!"
• A spiritual bludgeon to get what you want - "I don't like what you
just said. I sense that you have a demon."

The thing is, none of these statements are necessarily off-limits.
Jesus rebuked a storm and we're told that the church will do greater
things; being under spiritual attack will certainly put a person on
edge; my experience is that significant moves toward God tend to meet
opposition; and spiritual discernment is a cornerstone of spiritual
warfare. But motives are everything - it's your heart that matters. And
if a person starts into SW with bad motives they're likely to hurt
somebody else or get hurt themselves.

Spiritual innocence, AKA naivety, looks like this:
• Flash In The Pan - "I cast out this demon of cancer in Jesus' name!
So, now that's over. Where's the potluck?"
• Rambo - "I call you Lucifer by name and bind you! You too Beelzebub!
And Mephistopheles while I'm at it"
• The Flower Child - "Please be gone demon. Don't make me rebuke
you...again...I mean it!"

Angels, and by extension demons (hello!), are incredibly powerful
creatures. Two were sent to destroy the entire Assyrian army. Four will
kill 1/3 of all humanity - that's 2 BILLION people if that were to
happen tomorrow. They shatter mountains, hold back winds, dry up rivers
and the Bible says that there are at least a million of them - one
third of whom want you bleeding in the ditch or dead. Now it's also
true that the spiritual warrior is well armed and equal to the fight,
but we can't afford to underestimate our opponents. We can't afford to
be cocky. We can't afford to be naive.

Similarly, we must understand a few important things about our
adversaries -they are patient, they are tenacious, and they hold no
quarter. In most cases you really shouldn't enter into a spiritual
fight unless you're ready to go the distance. Any significant
stronghold takes time to defeat - sometimes days, but more often weeks,
months and years. Which really should only surprise you if you
accidently thought the phrase was 'spiritual dunk tank' where one well
aimed softball drops the enemy into the water and we go find some
cotton candy. Wars last years, decades, sometimes ages. There are
attacks, counterattacks, flanks and pushes. There is a time to rush the
field, a time to gather intelligence, and a time to strategically
retreat. Don't do anything - ANYTHING - without checking with
headquarters. Wars are also deeply confusing - the 'Fog of War' refers
to the difficulty of comprehending the big picture when the battle is
joined - which brings me to my biggest concern - those Christians who
enter the fight to lightly, too quickly, too foolishly, and wind up
shooting at the wrong team.

'Friendly Fire' refers to the bitter but all too common instances where
combat units accidently engaging friendly units because they are
misidentified as the enemy.

It's foundational to spiritual warfare that our words and prayers have
power, that the spiritual world is more "real" than the physical world,
and that earthly conditions reflect spiritual conditions. Were told
that our words are swords, tongues of fire, able to split sinew from
bone - more succinctly, that we are armed with potent weapons that
deliver mortal wounds. But SOOOOOO many Christians will catch the SW
bug, start binding and loosing everything this side of the Pecos river,
swinging that two edged sword blindly in a crowded room, and deeply
wounding their brothers and sisters.

We have to remember that we're in an environment where 'spirits' come
in more than one shape. You have a spirit, your neighbor has a spirit,
your pastor has a spirit. Why should we think that these eternal being
are any less vulnerable than a demon to being spiritually wounded? Why
should we think that our spiritual weapons are any less indiscriminate
than an MP5?

Special forces units will train heavily in close quarter combat -
moving a team through a tight environment, say a building, without
shooting the wrong people. It requires strict discipline about where
people move, what firing arcs are covered, and how the team
communicates to prevent accidents. "Check your targets!" is a common
admonition.

If Paul, one of the most spiritually discerning people we know of, says
that we see through a glass darkly - we need to listen. Our ability to
understand the spiritual landscape around us is severely limited. We
have to be careful that we don't accidently wound one another.

Let me give you an example - 'The Needy Girl' is crying again and asks
you to pray with her again. Do NOT whip out the 'cast out the spirit of
depression' prayer. Is it possible that her chronic depression is
spiritual in nature? Absolutely. But you better be certain that you're
hearing that word from HQ and not just responding in frustration
because you're tired of praying with her. Because if that's the case
you're almost certain to do far more harm than good. And if her
depression is NOT spiritual in nature, and she's back at your side two
weeks later, you're likely to pretend like that whole demon prayer
never happened - which is the worst kind of non-accountability BS that
makes everybody look bad.

Look, my real point is this - the subject of spiritual warfare is a
good one and important for a healthy church. But we MUST take it with
the gravity and seriousness that it deserves. It's a matter of long
practice, deep humility, and profound respect. WE must NEVER, EVER
promote a "Spiritual Warfare For Dummies" mentality that sees SW as the
kind of thing you pick up on a weekend retreat (I'm guilty here). That
said, I also don't want to scare anybody away from the topic or the
practice of spiritual warfare, just treat your weapons with the respect
they deserve. Especially when you're waving that thing around inside
the church.

Check your targets!

Holidays And My Family

At the moment, it's Thanksgiving day and I'm kicking my feet up in the cozy Africa-theme family room of my in-law's house. My wife and he mother are poring over a dizzying variety of yarns and fabrics discussing quilts, handbags and scarves while Wayne, my second father (third?), listens to NPR thoughtfully. In another hour or two we'll
drive to Ann and Dave's place, picking up Grandma Pat along the way and have Thanksgiving with Julie, Kenny, Ross, Jennifer, Annika, Frank, Codie, and Morgan. If we were in California this year, as opposed to Washington, we'd be looking forward to meeting Gus, Ade, Madeline, Mindy, Gene, Johnny, Pete, Dawn, Dante, Shelby, George, Michael, Scott, Nicholas...etc. etc. (That's the Italian side of my family, and I've frankly fallen behind in memorizing all the wives and kids).

At either venue, either over potato sausage or pirrogie (Gene and Ade are Polish...dear Lord I love their pirrogie!), somebody would say, "What are you thankful for this year?", and most folks, with genuine sincerity, would list 'family' as something they are truly thankful for. Without question, I've been deeply blessed when it comes to family. Not only is my first family large and loving, and generous with their affection, but my wife's family has done so very much to accept
me into their midst, and they did so immediately, even before Rebekah and I were married.

But...

Jesus says, "Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?" - Who is my family?

A few years ago, Rebekah and I stayed home for Thanksgiving. Our only guests were our friends the Foxes and their two boys. It was perhaps the best holiday of my life. For my entire life, holidays meant long drives to relatives houses, often two if we had to spend the morning with mom's family, and the afternoon with dad's family. Holidays meant pressure, business, discomfort and too much to do in too little time. But this one Thanksgiving at home was wholly different. I didn't leave the house once except to take the trash out. The Foxes drove all of 1/2 mile and then back again several hours later. The six of us realized that we were all cooking as if it were still the 30 person table we were used to and our table groaned with food. We all sat down, said grace, and ate like locusts before we all looked up and thought - what are we doing? Everybody laughed and took a deep breath...we spent the rest of the languid day sipping chocolate, nibbling on olives and napping near the fire. It was the best holiday in my life, the first that truly felt like a 'holiday' as in a break from normal life, and I want very much to repeat it.

Over the last several years, the Foxes truly have been our family. It's with them that we've shared our faith, our trials and triumphs, and the day-to-day of our lives. For every hour I've sen my own sister, I've seen Matt 100. I know more about Beth's real state of mind, her spiritual health, and the things that she wrestles with, than I know about my own mother. We've shared our lives and our money, and our time, not to mention our reciprocating saws and spring-form pans and whichever car is working. And it's not just the Foxes, it's also Lisa, and the McLoughlans and others. Quite unexpectedly my life has developed a very tight circle of friends that feels a lot like the book of Acts.

"Whoever does the will of my Father is my bother, and my sister, and my mother."

Christ's statement here about family has always seemed coy to me - a kind of hyperbole to illustrate a point. But I never took the next step seriously. "What point am I making then?" he might ask. "Well...you know...how Christians should be...um...kinda like a family...sorta..."

Listen, God is very clear that family (in the natural sense) is very important to him. We're commanded to honor our fathers and mothers and to do so grants us a blessing. I don't think Jesus is suggesting that Mary and James et. al. are somehow NOT his family while his disciples are, but rather that the language about being adopted into God's family is far more real than I suspected. Calling another Christian 'brother' is not just a euphemism, it's a true expression of the eternal relationship between two believers. Perhaps this relationship is more important than our earthly ties - after all, if a marriage dissolves with death, it may be that our earthly families are equally temporal. In contrast, our salvation is eternal - our integration into God's family is for ever.

When the Foxes moved north from California, I knew Matt by his first name, but really he was "Beth's husband." I knew Beth from my home town. We went to school together, had the same friends, and even dated for a spell. So when they came to Newberg, Beth was my friend and Matt was an acquaintance. Right away, they moved in with us and stayed for about a month. They had moved on faith with no job, no place to live, no idea of what to do next, but they moved and we put them up while they found their feet. I wonder if we would have formed the relationships we have now without that first experience but it set a precedent of intimacy that was unique in my life. Our lives were suddenly intertwined by circumstance instead of by choice. We were sharing a home not because we really wanted to, but because we had to. Rebekah and I were newlyweds at that time. We had purchased this home only a few months earlier because God had clearly orchestrated the purchase and we had three extra bedrooms. I suspect it wasn't the first choice for the Foxes either. One of the big reasons they moved north in the first place is because they wanted their own space - getting thrown into a 'communal' environment was doubtful to be their first choice,

Since then - not quite five years now - Matt and I have become very close. In many ways Matt has become the closest friend I've had in my life. And let my be very candid - it has not been all high fives and pork rinds. Matt and I have fought - hard. Matt and I have punched and kicked each other (literally (see Ninjutsu)), we've yelled and screamed
(OK - mostly, that's me. Matt's pretty quiet) and we've thrown up our hands in frustration, anger, and disappointment. He's offended me and I've offended him, many, many times.

But there probably isn't anybody on Earth I care about more than Matt.

He truly is the brother I never had.

He's forgiven me many, many times. He's corrected me when nobody else could or would. His counsel has been faithful. His peace has been a rock. His family has graced my life with more love and laughter, and joy than I knew was possible. As a man, friends like Matt are few and far between. The Foxes are to me the kind of family that I've never really understood before. Where the eternal reality of our God ordained relationship is thousands of times more meaningful than what somebody said last Christmas. Where we share a table with folks we spoke to yesterday, not six months ago at a Christening that everybody left before coffee was served. These are people that I will know FOR EVER -
but who I also know intimately RIGHT NOW.

This Thanksgiving, I find myself deeply thankful for Matt, for Beth, for Will and for Ben.Which I find to be the same thing as saying "I'm thankful for my family."

Bringing a Knife to a Gunfight

This post will pretty brief since the point I want to make is pretty simple, but it informs a significant portion of what I think and is worth putting in black and white.

The very public, stated goal of the United Nations is to stop and/or prevent armed conflict.

The preamble of the United Nations charter reads “We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war...” In fairness, the preamble also says, somewhat ambiguously “...And for these ends...to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest,”

My point is that it seems a dubious proposition to look to the United Nations for approval of almost any use of force, almost regardless of the circumstances. It’s like asking a bank for permission to kite a check – it’s just not in their nature to see the world through that lens.

Despite how this might sound, I’m not dinging the UN here, only trying to recognize its essence. For better or for worse, there doesn’t seem to be much sense is asking the UN if I can go kick somebody in the shins. By doing so, I have a lot to loose (politically and strategically) and very little to gain. Even when the body resolves that a situation way warrant the use of force, like it did in Iraq a few years back, there is no intestinal fortitude to follow through. They have displayed more willingness to see wring their hands over shed blood, i.e. Sudan, Bosnia, or Rwanda, then to dirty their hands by getting involved.

How Does God Like His Eggs?

I imagine myself at breakfast with God, sitting across from one
another at Pig N' Pancake, sipping coffee and marveling at the White
Sox - when the waitress walks over.

"What can I get you?" she asks...something in her accent sounds
Hawaiian.

Always the decisive one, Our Lord pipes up, "Number three please."

"How would like your eggs?"

"Poached hard, and rye toast please."

"Great. And for you sweetie?"

What do I do? The creator of everything in the universe, including
eggs, just ordered two of them poached. The guy who knows everything
about everything, including this chef's strengths and weaknesses,
decided against the "award winning sourdough pancakes." What does that
really <italic>mean</italic>? Is it unwise to get breakfast four -
pigs in a blanket? Is it foolish to get my eggs over medium? Is it a
sin for me to order a cinnamon roll?

What I'm really asking is whether or not God has opinions. Is it safe
for me to order whatever breakfast I want, even Spam, baked beans,
sausage and Spam, or does any divergence from His perfect will
constitute foolishness at best, or wickedness at worst? Are there such
things as morally neutral choices? Where we truly enjoy liberty in
every sense of the word - not simply the liberty to obey or conform,
to toe the line or to rebel, but real liberty to make a choice between
two or more equally sinless options.

I can imagine myself in that moment, looking nervously between the
waitress and my savior. "I'll have pigs in..." but then He patiently
starts to shake his head...smiling of course...but definitely advising
against that course. "Um...how 'bout a Belgian..." another subtle
shake of the head and the waitress starts to look at me with pity. "I
think...I'll have..." He looks at me expectantly with a sort of "you
can do it!" grin of encouragement. "...um...blintzes?"

But I can also imagine my Lord looking at me with no sense of
evaluation at all. No disappointment, no approval, no surprise -
simply waiting for me to order so we can go back to baseball talk. He
couldn't care less what I ate or how the eggs are prepared - the
choice is entirely mine.

I know the sovereignty crowd will bite their knuckles, but I've come
to believe that God gives us a great deal of freedom to live our lives
the way we see fit. Yes - there are boundaries. Yes - He usually has
input and advice to offer. Yes - He has a bigger plan laid out for me
- good deeds that He has prepared in advance for me to do. But what
does it mean to say 'all things are permissible, but not all things
are profitable" if we cleave so closely to the God's Perfect Will line
that in any given circumstance there is actually only ONE thing that
is both permissible and presumably profitable?

Part of this thought rises up out of my distaste for the doctrine of
total depravity. But I can certainly see how these two thoughts (T.D.
and soverignity) support one another. If no good thing can ever come
out of me, then certainly I can't be trusted to make even the simplest
decision. Everything that comes out of me is tainted. But part of the
promise of the new covenant is that God will provide me with a new
heart - a good heart; one made of flesh to replace the heart of stone.
If it's true that Christ is IN ME - that my heart has become the
tabernacle of the Spirit of God - how can that heart be wholly
corrupt? If you drop me, I fall to Him. If you break me, I bring my
pieces to Him. If you wound me, I cry out to Him. If that is my
baseline response, the deepest impulse of my soul - how can the
deepest part of me be desperately wicked?

So often, I find that clarity comes when I allow God to close the
distance between us. When I allow Him to display His humanity to me -
as weird as that can get sometimes, but more recently this has
happened when I've allowed Him to show me my own glory - the part of
me that was truly made in His image, the part of me that was fearfully
and wonderfully made, those parts of me that God made strong, a little
lower than the angels, and adopted into His kingdom, destined to judge
those same angels and take up a scepter and a crown...someday. The
glory that is mine not because I've earned but for no other reason
than that it pleased him to invest some of himself in me.

In that case - my own will can be good; to the degree to which my own
will is LIKE his, but not his. I'm not splitting hairs here. Allowing
for the possibility that my own will can be redeemed allows for the
possibility that God might leave certain decisions entirely up to me.
"Lord, what should I study in college? Should I marry this girl?
Should I let my kids read Harry Potter?"

If every decision we make has moral weight, then we need answers like
"Biology. No. Yes, but not until they're 15." and to do otherwise puts
us on the sin road. But if the authentic Christian experience contains
more subtlety and complexity than that, more nuance - than the ways in
which we learn to grapple with complex questions of good and evil, or
just good and better, become more important, and far more eternal,
than any given decision, including life changing decisions like
marriage, career and kids. Even those decisions with potentially
eternal consequences - being a jury member in a capital case for
example, are wholly different because our own hearts and minds and
motivations enter the mix. Learning to abide in his glow without being
subsumed by it, we're no longer rebellious puppets simply asked to
accept the hand in our backs but something far more interesting, far
more powerful, far, far more dangerous. We are little princes and
princesses practicing for our future roles.

"You are my friends...no longer do I call you servants...but I have
called you friends for all that I have heard from the father, I have
made known to you." John 15: 14:15

Sympathy for Maureen Dowd

Please see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/magazine/30feminism.html?
ei=5090&en=8d50b0ccea5b798a&ex=1288328400&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pa
gewanted=print

The article cited above is pretty long but well worth reading. In it,
among other things, Ms. Dowd complains about the difficulty modern,
liberated women have finding husbands. There are about a hundred
different points in that article that I want to talk about but I reckon
I'll start with one...

Last week I attended the wedding of a good friend. This was a fellow
who had managed to keep his virtue for 32 years, and he managed to find
a bride who had done the same thing...but for a few fewer years. During
the service the pastor read a fairly common wedding passage, Eph
5:22-23, "Wives, be subject to your husbands...husbands love your
wives...etc, etc. But right there in verse 32 Paul says "...and the two
shall become one flesh. This is a great mystery."

Paul's a pretty bright guy and uses the term "mystery" precious few
times, and yet here it is being used to describe something that we've
come to take for granted. I'm not just talking about sex, the entirety
of marriage is encompassed here, but certainly sex is a big part of it.

The day before my friend's wedding, Rebekah and I celebrated our fifth
anniversary. Every year I make it a point to really look at what the
last year has brought to my marriage. How it's changed, how I've
changed, and what I might learn. Year after year I'm struck by how
integrated she has become in my life, how I not only love her more, but
my overall capacity to love grows. That as I love Rebekah I learn to
love God and vice versa. And each year I marvel at our ability to be
ever more intimate even when it seems that no more intimacy is
possible.

One flesh indeed.

It seems to me that at some point in the relatively recent past, women
believed that their virtue - sex - was a treasure. A thing to be kept,
and valued and protected. But then, perhaps it was part of the sexual
revolution, women were convinced that sex was a source of power. The
truism that men would do and say just about anything to get sex was
taken to mean that women could, and should, use sex as a way to get
what they wanted. It wasn't a treasure, it was a tool, and in fact the
very idea that it was special was just men trying to manipulate women
and control them...again.

Marriage is perhaps the single most civilizing invention ever. When a
society enforces a standard whereby sex occurs inside a marriage, and
only inside a marriage, where children are raised inside a marriage and
only inside a marriage, there is an incredibly powerful force that
supports healthy relationships, healthy kids, and peaceful society.

Part of the message from the sexual revolution was that there were no
healthy marriages - that it was all a scam. There was this "everybody
knows..." way of saying that practically every American family was
riven with sexual dysfunction, wife beating, child molestation and
repressed homosexuality. The image of Ozzie and Harriet stuffing
graveyards full of skeletons into their tract-home closets became a
cliche it was repeated so often in so many books and movies and TV
Specials. And the answer to all this hypocrisy was to cut sex free from
its fetters. To "respect" your sexuality by expressing every facet of
it with anybody you desire and in any circumstance that presented
itself. If you can't be with the one you love - love the one you're
with.

Since then, sex has gone from a source of power to nothing more than
something to do. Casual sex, friends with privileges, fuck-buddies.
etc. etc. Sex is so prevalent on TV because the folks who make TV think
it's puritanical to assign any gravity at all to the act. Sure it can
still be used as a tool. Sure it can still be a source of great joy and
intimacy - but these are only there insofar as the consenting
participants put them there.

But they're dead wrong. There was a time when sex and marriage were
practically synonyms. It was that you got married to have sex in the
proper context, sex WAS marriage. A marriage ceremony wasn't anything
that ceremony was consummated. Sex had intrinsic power - the two were
made one flesh...this is a great mystery...a mystery we've ignored to
our detriment.

I think a great deal of the very real problem Ms. Dowd explores comes
down to the fact that modern, liberated women no longer see sex as a
treasure. (Now before anybody freaks out, I'm not saying that it's all
women's fault, but right now it's women's role that I'm exploring.) If
men know they can only get sex inside a marriage, they will marry - and
that marriage will usually change them for the better almost despite
themselves. But if sex is widely available without taking on that
responsibility, and with attractive, desirable women - then marriage
becomes less and less important. It's a buyer's market and now women,
who long to be wanted, find themselves competing with one another for
who can be the biggest hooch. It's like that dreadful show Elimidate.
And this trend is another thing Ms. Down complains about - not because
it's degrading to the poor ladies who feel it's the only way to get
married, but because she sees it as a step back from the "advances" her
generation made.

In the past, Ms. Dowd has suggested that men wont marry her because
she's too smart, too talkative, and/or too successful. She says, in so
many words, that men feel threatened by her. But if a man knows that he
can sleep with Ms. Dowd with no strings (and I'm not suggesting that's
the case, but it is with many in her cohort), then raise kids with some
woman far less troublesome...what's the reason to deal with Maureeen?
So many of the things that the sexual revolution sold to women as
benefits are actually destructive to what these same women truly
desire.

Maureen - I'm sorry for the situation you and your generation find
yourself in. Unfortunately, I don't think there is anything you can do
about it yourself. Even if any given 'liberated' women were to change
her attitude toward marriage and sex, it wouldn't matter. So you wont
give it up without a ring, but your sweatpants wearing neighbor will,
so a fellow will just go over there. Our culture will need to change on
a more fundamental level and come to value sex as magical again -
special - mystical at some level...a mystery. Like it or not, women are
the gatekeepers of that treasure. Men can learn to respect that
mystery, and play by the rules, but will always be like foxes guarding
the hen house if it's left up to us.