Seasonal Folk Songs

    Back in the days before radio, or records, music was always live.  You can imagine how that might limit your exposure to musical variety.  Of course music could be written down and performed by different people, but still I’m sure people could only say they were familiar with a few “genres.”  I guess everything that was written down is what we would call “classical.”  Pretty much everything else would be folk music.  There weren’t folk music artists (like Bon Iver or Mumford).  No one knew who wrote the songs, but everyone knew the songs.  Of course not everyone in the world knew the same songs, but the farther you went from home, the more the songs changed.  If you came home from a journey and heard a song you were familiar with, then you knew you were close.  Folk songs had to be easy to sing and everyone knew the words.  If you sat at a campfire and started singing a folk song, everyone would start singing along with you.  I think most of them survived for a long time as children’s songs.  I’m sure I knew more when I was a child.  “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” “Yankee Doodle” or “Take Me Out to the Ball-Game” probably count.  I don’t think there are very many songs that everyone could sing together anymore.  Maybe there are a few from The Sound of Music.  Maybe there are a few songs we all learned as kids: “The Alphabet Song,” but it’s just not the same if you know what I mean. 

     Hymns and Spirituals have held that place for a while.  A hymnal was a collection of songs that everyone could sing.  Of course the division became denominational rather than regional, but if you looked through a hymnal you could find a lot of songs that the people around you could easily join in singing with you.  “Amazing Grace” has kept its place as a folk song since the golden era of hymns.  Negro Spirituals were a brilliant update to hymns in certain regions.  They tended to be even catchier, simpler and more repetitive so that they could be more easily sung without hymnals.  Modern churches still keep some songs before the common-folk.  Chris Tomlin, David Crowder, and Michael Gungor feed songs to churches around the country where they present to their congregations the kinds of songs that everyone can sing along to.  The difficulty with them is that they change pretty quickly.  Some churches are quicker to change than others (mine still sings hymns).  Many times I’ve been with a group of friends, started strumming some simple chords on my guitar and people quickly pick up on the tune and help to sing it, even if we have to remind each other of some words. 

    The really cool thing about Christmas music is that everyone knows the same songs.  There’s a particular canon of traditional Christmas songs that are known around the world.  We only allow people to sing them for one twelfth of the year, which probably keeps them from wearing out to quickly.  But think about this: you can start singing “Jingle Bells” or “Silent Night” in a mall or on the street with people who are nothing like you and they just might sing along.  I think my favorite Christmas song is “Welcome to our World” by Chris Rice, it isn’t as universally known as a lot of songs, but it does a great job of making you feel the emotional impact of the Christmas story.  I think there is a universal appeal in the Christmas story.  If all I knew about “the baby Jesus” was that he was born in a manger and shepherds and kings gave him gifts, I might be confused.  Actually, I’m pretty sure I was.  I wondered, if Mary and Joseph are so poor, why don’t the kings give them more money and they won’t be poor anymore.  How do people follow a star?  And how do you know you’ve arrived if you’re following a star?  Why did only a few people find out about the baby and get excited why didn’t other people get excited?  Why did the king get so mad?  Why did he think a baby from a poor family was a threat?

    I think the juxtaposition of the impoverished with the noble and miraculous is what gives most people the warm fuzzies.  Some of us know just how right they are.  I’ve always thought Emmanuel was the best single word for it.  God is with us.  God is in man’s flesh.  The noble has penetrated the ignoble.  The holy has infiltrated the corrupt.  The king is in disguise as a peasant.  It’s sort of funny actually.  His actual arrival was quiet.  Only a few people came to the first Christmas party.  Now we all make a big fuss and scurry around for a month making preparations and buying presents and throwing huge parties!  But those first shepherds, they came because an army of angels told them how important it was.  Why do we celebrate?  If you have some spare time, leave a comment about some favorite singable songs and check out my post from December last year: Emmanuel.

Sincerely Yours,

In my mind the concept of sincerity is deeply linked to Charlie Brown.  It might be particularly his Christmas tree.  The thing about Charlie Brown, is that he doesn't always do things particularly well.  He's outwitted by Lucy, outplayed by any opposing baseball team, and intimidated to the point of paralysis by a cute little girl with red hair.  If that wasn't bad enough, the Christmas tree he picks out is the most pathetic little piece of wood you've ever seen.  Really, it's embarrassing.
Sometimes it's hard to tell if rich people are sincere.  It's really hard to sift through their motives.  If a person has any financial gain from anything, we automatically assume that was their primary motive, which doesn't seem entirely unreasonable.  Money is a good motivation for a lot of things.  There are quite a few things I would do if I got paid that I wouldn't do otherwise.  On the other hand, I've also been paid for quite a few things that I would have volunteered for.  I have two jobs right now that I would still love to do even if I didn't get paid.  I also remember a time when I was working at a polling place campaigning for a really great woman who was running for a political office.  It was one of the few times that I actually was getting paid.  Some impertinent kid came up and asked me how much I was getting paid.  I gave him a funny look and tried to dodge the question.  I really would have been working if I wasn't getting paid.  Regardless, it somehow felt like my support for the candidate was diminished by the fact that I ended up with more money afterwards.
Some things would be easier as a Catholic, or at least a Protestant with a thicker liturgy.  Evangelicals have too many options.  We get to be cynical about everything our church does and criticize it all from our higher perspective.  If we only had one option for a church or denomination, we would have to submit to it, and sincerely follow its traditions rather than thinking, “well we do this well, but maybe if I went to that church it would be better.”  The same thing is true with the huge amounts of information we have about other cultures.  If we didn’t have Chinese restaurants in every mall, we would just assume that Chinese food was weird and sincerely hold to our belief that hamburgers are the perfect food.  But now we can see both and compare them objectively and rationally, so we can see the merits of both and pick one based on our mood.  The same thing goes for Western vs. Eastern philosophy and ethics and culture.  If we were more isolated, we would be jingoistic and xenophobic, but we could say with all sincerity that “the old ways are the best ways.”  And “everything our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents did was right and fit.”  Now we have so many reasonable options to choose from that to pick one and stick with it seems silly and naïve.  Real objects for comparison cause us to question the supremacy and dominance of our previous ways of thinking.  Every country had a self-centered map until a bigger army or an angry scientist forcefully enlightened them.
I think sincerity has become a sort of idol to some people.  You’ve heard the idea that it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you’re sincere.  Well, an extension of that is basically that sincere people go to heaven.  Think about that.  When we try to come up with a feel-good religion, we feel pretty comfortable sending insincere people who believe the truth to hell as long as the people who believe in illusions sincerely get to be happy for eternity.  I’m not really criticizing that right now.  My point is just that our culture really really likes sincere people.  At the same time, we struggle with sarcasm, cynicism, and irony.
Here’s my theory about why everyone says they don’t like sequels.  Usually a movie, starts as a story.  A sequel usually starts as a budget.  Of course, all movies have stories and budgets, but in the first movie, the driving force is someone who wants this story to get onto the screen and to be displayed in a new medium.  Often for a sequel, the company says, we made so much money of these characters, settings, voices the first time, we can do the same thing with the same characters, settings and voices.  All we need now is to come up with some story to squeeze them all back into.
If you've seen the Charlie Brown Christmas movie, you know that the antagonist is commercialism.  Those big, nasty, pink, aluminum trees symbolize the commercial approach to Christmas.  They tower over the pathetic little conifer with its wooden stand that attracts Charlie Brown’s attention.  Well, I guess the little tree is like the first movie.  It stood alone.  It was just planted and grew and was the best tree it could be.  It didn’t really have a “purpose” it just was and then someone who respected that (good ol’ Chuck) decorated it and honored it.  The pink aluminum tree misses the point, because it skips all the in-between steps and goes straight to decoration, which is the “purpose.”
So what about Christmas itself?  Mary and Joseph “celebrated” Christmas because their “Christmas present” was a one-of-a-kind God-baby!  They didn’t have a Christmas tree, but they had Christ.  They were doing it for the first time, so they weren’t going through the motions.  I like Christmas trees, even fake ones (we’ve always had a fake tree at my house).  Shopping and music and presents and singing and cinnamon and gingerbread houses are fantastic.  At times though, I’m skeptical about pretty much every “holiday tradition.”  I’m a bit tired of most of them and a lot of them seem sillier to me than ever before.  I want to just enjoy them the way I always have, but I have all these doubts about whether these things actually have any meaning anymore.
So here I am in the midst of the holidays naïvely enjoying the pretty lights and festive colors but also chuckling at goofy lyrics and scoffing at premature Christmas decorations.  I desperately want to avoid the cliché answers (there’s the skeptic again), but others are difficult and complicated.  All I can think of is that maybe in order to be sincere, you have to risk looking silly to all the skeptics.
If you’re going to look silly though, it might as well be for a good reason.  Here’s a challenge: try to find a connection between every Christmas (or other holiday) tradition you have and the birth of Jesus (or whatever the cause for the holiday).  That way you can stick to your traditions, but you can keep them with a new level of sincerity.  I would love to see some examples in the comments.

Found: Lost for Good

    I just want to tell you a story.  It’s about my first experiment in stealing, and hopelessly lost things being found.

    Some possessions are just special.  Some things give you that little thrill of excitement.  Like a remote control car for the first two days after Christmas, except some other things give you the same feeling for a longer time.  Well, I had this one jacket that was just special.  Several years ago, Dad and I were walking through Sears (or maybe Penney’s)and I put it on. We both thought it looked pretty cool, but jackets aren’t that practical in AZ.  You might find a good reason to wear one about three times a year, and two of those are only if you go camping.  The brand of the jacket was U.S. Army, which I’ve never seen on a clothing label before or since.  I was tempted to buy it, but when I realized that I would probably only wear it twice a year, I decided against it.  I put it back with a shrug.  I was pretty sure I wouldn’t see this jacket again.  It was the last one on the clearance rack, probably the U.S. Army’s one and only attempt to enter the civilian marketing business.  So, then dad picked back up and bought it for me.  Sometimes, he just did things like that.

    Anyway, for some reason, I didn’t bring it to Wheaton my first year here.  I guess it was just lost in my closet somewhere, (which if you’ve seen my closet, might be hard to believe).  I had a bunch of other sweaters and hoodies and fleeces, so I was ready for this cold thing.  So I didn’t have this jacket at all freshman year.  Or maybe I had it at Wheaton and I just wasn’t sure when to wear it (it took me a while to figure out winter clothing, I’m still figuring out proper scarf etiquette).   Then, sophomore year, I started wearing it.  I wore it to a David Crowder Concert in October.  I wore it to HoneyRock on the Men’s Glee Club retreat.  And people kept complimenting me on it.  All that to say, I really liked this jacket.  I had only worn it a few times, but it was comfortable.  It looked cool, (apparently, other people thought so too) and I was finally in a climate that encouraged multiple layers of clothing.

      I know I just spent two paragraphs introducing an article of clothing, but the point is.  I liked this jacket.  I realized just how much I liked it when I looked in my closet and realized it was gone.  Suddenly, it struck me just what a great jacket this was, how special and irreplaceable it was, and how well it fit me.  Whoever ended up with the jacket couldn’t possibly appreciate it as much as I did.  I thought for sure that I had left it behind on the fall break retreat.  It was probably still in Wisconsin.  Entirely irretrievable.

    I hadn’t seen the jacket since last fall.  At the beginning of this year, I remembered it and was pretty bummed out that I knew I would never see it.  It stinks to know you had something pretty special and you lost it in some careless moment.  If only I had been paying attention that weekend and actually thought about hanging on to my jacket.  So then, I was sitting in Chemistry class, in the basement of the science building.  I haven’t spent much time in the basement.  The physics department is on the third floor, so I don’t go down there often.  After class ended, I was packing my backpack and I saw an identical jacket hanging on a hook on the wall.  There’s a little emblem on the left sleeve that makes it pretty distinguishable.  I was struck with mixed emotions.  Was this my jacket?  Did someone else have the same jacket?  Had my jacket been sold in the lost and found sale?  Or did someone donate it to the co-op where someone else found it?  I could go pick it up now and wear it right now, and it would be mine again, but what if someone else had a claim to it?  Would I be stealing it from them?  I decided to leave it for now.  I hadn’t seen my jacket in nearly a year, and there was no way it could have ended up in a classroom in the basement hanging on a hook on the wall.

    The next week I noticed it still hanging there.  Why was it still there?  Maybe the person who owned it worked in one of the basement labs and they kept it there.  They must wear it to school everyday and leave it there.  The next class it was still there.  This time, it was warm outside.  Why would anyone wear a jacket in 80 degree weather.  Maybe whoever owned this other jacket had forgotten it.  I left it again. 

    That afternoon, I came back.  To see if it was still there.  It was.  I struggled with the temptation to take this jacket which looked just like mine.  But even if it was my jacket, maybe someone else had a better claim to it.  Maybe the finders keepers losers weepers thing actually represented some kind of common law.  I envisioned myself picking  up the jacket and being accosted by an angry student who demanded to know why I was wearing their jacket.  Then they would bring a public safety officer with them and an rapid tribunal would take place: 

“Whom does this jacket belong to?”

“Me!”

“me”

“Did you place the jacket on this hook?”

“YES!”

“no”

    On the other hand.  This was mine.  My father gave it to me.  I knew that the jacket in front of me had been given to me, and somehow, I knew it was mine to take and keep, even though I had lost track of it for nearly a year, and I had no idea how it had reappeared in my Chemistry class.  I took it off the hook and stuffed it into my backpack.  It felt all wrong.  I felt like I was stealing.  I really didn’t want anyone to see me stuffing my backpack with this item that sure seemed like it was mine.

    The next day, I was in my apartment.  The jacket was in the couch next to me and I happened to be fiddling with an inner pocket.  Inside the pocket, I found a concert ticket stub.  It was from the David Crowder Band concert I had attended the year before.  With that last confirmation, I knew this was mine.  I knew that what I had certainly lost was once again in my possession.

    Ever since this happened I’ve been trying to think of some significant tie in or spiritual analogy.  There are lots of lost things in the Bible, especially people.  I guess it could be like Jesus, waiting for someone who looks hopeless to come back.  Maybe a tighter analogy would be someone who lost faith or hope or peace and they would never see it again.  But then there it is.  Right under their nose, waiting to be picked up.  The point is, that hopelessly lost thing.  It might not be.  If that’s not good enough for you, make up your own analogy.  (comments beneath =)

Disturbing Universe

    “Do I dare disturb the universe?”  T. S. Eliot mused in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”  I really don’t remember anything else about the poem, but it’s a great question.  I can be pretty shy, so I know the general feeling of “do I dare disturb” pretty well.  I hate disturbing people.  As a kid I was once in a relative’s car on some pretty windy roads.  I started feeling motion sickness, and an oncoming upheaval of my latest meal.  I decided to wait and hope it passed, but it didn’t.  I tried to act like nothing was wrong and just held it in.  Eventually, I knew that something was coming up and there’s nothing I could do about it.  I waited for a break in the conversation and said politely but very quickly that they might prefer to pull over and that I would appreciate it very much.  I’m the guy who will stand over your shoulder for ten minutes at a party, hoping to get in on the conversation, or I might have a great story to tell, but I’m not sure how everyone in the circle will react to it, or if the established members of the group are straining to tolerate my presence and the less words I say, the more accepting they will be of the intrusion.

    Disturbing a conversation and disturbing the universe seem entirely different, but they both help you know what Charlie Brown feels like when he talks about his stomach hurting.  Entropy is this crazy idea that certain things only go one direction.  There’s a certain amount of order in the universe and no possible occurrence can give us more order (it’s not exactly order the way most people think of it, there’s a very technical and mathematic definition).  That means everything you do is introducing a certain amount of chaos into the world and removing some of the order, in a certain sense.  Chemical reactions also have positive entropy.  That means that breathing is introducing a certain amount of chaos.  Of course, in scale with the rest of the universe, it’s not much chaos but still if your very breath is contributing to the perpetual collapse of order in the universe, you will disturb the universe whether you intend to or not, and the more you do, the more the universe will be disturbed.  Think about the people in history books.  Think about how different history might be if not for them.  They disturbed the universe and history and the course of your life.  The nerve! 

    There are a couple different philosophies that have a clear opinion about disturbing the universe.   There’s a school of thought that is very scared to disturb the universe.  For a naturalist (or environmentalist I guess), the world is in working order and operating well enough by itself.  We all know well enough should be left alone.  The idea of harmony with the universe doesn’t seem quite as silly in this context.  If you can make a smaller smudge on the delicately balanced world by behaving peacefully and thinking slowly and living simply, go for it.  On the other hand the humanist wants the people in the world to feel comfortable and for humanity to survive forever.  He knows that the universe is big enough to handle a few dents and scratches.  So we’ll disturb the universe as much as we need to in order to survive or thrive or improve every situation or environment we find.  Between these two options (which are extreme) I would personally pick the first.  For one, it’s more of an eastern idea which means I’m not very used to it, and I’ll probably err on the other side naturally.  Secondly, for pragmatic reasons, I would probably enjoy life more if I wasn’t obsessed with pleasure.

   I need a better reason than pleasure to do something really disruptive.  I’ve already disrupted the universe by being born in it with a sinful depraved nature.  Trust me, I’ve messed up some great stuff already.  I don’t want to be a net negative force on the universe.  I don’t have any brilliant plans to make improvements on the world.

    Some people don’t get the Bible.  It has scores of significances and a million applications.  One way that I like thinking about it is a guide to disturbing the universe in a good way.  OT stuff has some clear lists, biographical examples and poetic motivation.  The NT has essays and some fantastic speeches.  The thing is , within the universe, it’s been established that there are no net positives.  Everything goes downhill eventually.  That’s why the Bible works so well.  It considers consequences that aren’t under the sun or Alpha Centauri or the Milky Way.  Our actions might disturb some of the order in this universe, but there’s another one without laws of entropy.  I don’t mean that we should intentionally accelerate the erosion of the planet, or completely forsake anything enjoyable.  But if we can choose tradeoffs with eternal benefits, (no rust moths thieves or entropy) they’ll prove to be worth it every time.   

In Memoriam T.M.F.

    I’ve spent a lot of time asking “why?” in the last year. I have a few guesses, but frankly none of them are good enough for the part of me that’s still scarred. At least, I used to think those were scars. Days like today I realize that what I thought were scars were scabs and it doesn’t take much to break them back open and make them bleed. I can see how this might be good for me in some way. I can see I’ve gained emotional stability. I notice when people are hurting now. And when they tell me about it, I can feel their pain better. I don’t mind taking risks and making sacrifices now because I’ve already given up one of the most precious things in the world to me, but I still see value in those things so I don’t sacrifice them carelessly. I’ve learned my limitations better and I’ve pushed my limitations more. There’s just one problem. None of that is worth it to me.

    So now I’m looking at the future. I can see some good possibilities. I always wanted to be an inventor. Well, working as a physics researcher or an engineer is basically modern invention. Teaching is exciting and something I really value. Living in the suburbs, deeply involved in a community of believers, strengthening those who are struggling, building the body of Christ, raising a family would be enjoyable and worthwhile. Becoming a respected scientist who travels to conventions giving seminars, having conversations with brilliant scientists who are a step ahead of everyone else in their knowledge of how the world works would be thrilling, and if I was using that knowledge to help doctors beat cancer, I might savor some sweet samples of revenge. Travelling to a place where people are suffering and hopeless and bringing them a little hope would be uncomfortable, but entirely worthwhile. So now I’m sitting here in Wheaton, this place where thousands of people have branched out to the far reaches of the globe and carried out the great commission in thousands of different ways, and I’m realizing I don’t care that much. All my desire is for the past. I would give every dollar I have (not really that much, it’s not really hyperbole) for one hug from Dad. I would drop out of college and work at McDonald’s if I could bring him back. I don’t want to move on. I want to go back.

    I’ve been struggling for hope. Hope is about the future. Hope for the past doesn’t make sense. If it did, I would be fine. My hope in physical things has been at an all-time low, that means that most of what’s left of my hope is real hope. Unfortunately, I think that shows just how little real hope I had to begin with, but there are still these remnants of hope. Dad spent his time pouring into me and other people around me constantly. That’s the reason it hurts so much that he’s gone. While, the shock that people and lives are not safe is a temptation to live in fear, isolation, and inaction, it’s also proof that something more valuable can remain once life is past. I have hope that I will see him again. That’s enough reason to make him proud. Finally, I know he valued other things more than life. I know I should too. I want to live in safety from loss. Suddenly, safety seems silly to me. Anything we cling to under the sun can be pried out of our grip. We’re meant to be funnels, not buckets. Finally, I think God has a plan for me. And even though I’m numb to the excitement of that right now, I know that I should be and will be excited about that plan.

    Last year, dad kept talking to me about planning a Bible study. He wanted to study 1 Timothy, something about how it was Paul’s message to his son in the faith, Timothy. I’ve been thinking about 1 Timothy sort of like a last message, as if there was some secret message hidden in the text that he wanted me to find. Honestly, I don’t really understand 1 Timothy and I haven’t seen any passages that I remember him quoting regularly. But 2 Timothy has some. There’s a lot about pressing on under trial and maintaining confidence in the gospel.

    He left a lot of holes. I could make a long list of the parts he played in my life. Other people have filled some of those and I’ve appreciated that, but looking back over this last year, I can see a lot of gaps that he would have filled. Some really painful events, that would have been immensely more bearable with him around.

    I’ve been curious about the word spiritual lately. I really don’t know what it means, but it’s not quite cognitive and it’s not quite emotional, and I think it’s more important than either. There are three important things that I used to know on an emotional level, and now I’ve lost the emotions, but I know them better on a cognitive level. I constantly pray you and I will grow in our spiritual grasp of them.  Joy, hope and peace.

Romans 15:13

Confidence

    I've heard the word dogma used a lot of different ways.  A "dogmatic" person can be stubborn, tenacious, adamant.  You can spin it either way.  But dogma tends to have negative implications.  Instead of defining it with a dictionary, I think its actually more helpful in this case to see how people in society have used it.  Take a look at these quotes, at least the ones from the names you recognize (Steve Jobs, G.K. Chesterton, Thomas Aquinas). http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/dogma_2.html. Most dictionaries define dogma as unquestionable beliefs which are prescribed by a group or church, but for better or worse very few people accept entirely the dogma of any organization our group as equal to their own personal opinions.  So for practical purposes, in this post, I'm defining dogma on an individual level, as the beliefs which an individual holds and is unwilling to question.
     I've been thinking about the idea of dogma for over a year now.  At first I was trying to figure out whether it was a good thing or a bad thing.  I came to think of it as an antonym for open-mindedness.  But I had heard a lot of conflicting things about open-mindedness as well.  You know how they say if you're open-minded your brains will fall out?  But then in any movie where someone is trying to reform or invent or reconsider anything substantial and faces obstacles, they tell the habit following people not to be so closed-minded.  Well, then I was in high-school and I read London and Shelley and then I went to college and read Descartes, and I realized that some people questioned things that seemed pretty obvious to everyone else.  The thing is, once you start seriously questioning something, it's hard to stop until you find solid evidence for it ("you're waiting for a train").  I did some thought experiments with ideas about reality being an illusion, etc. and realized that those considerations simply weren't beneficial.  So for pragmatic reasons, I simply accepted the idea that our senses and experience are in some sense real, and questioning that could not lead to any benefit.  I memorized Hamlet's famous soliloquy about being or not being and pondered it for a while. Hamlet's initial argument: life is full of pain, death ends life therefore death is good.  He decided against suicide because he thought there might be something worse ("dreams").  That argument didn't really do it for me because I had read C.S. Lewis and he thought dying would be like waking up from a dream (Romans 8:18).  I figured though, if I was going to wake up from the dream eventually, then I really had nothing to lose and I might as well make it the best dream possible and let myself wake up naturally.
   So those were two questions which I settled for myself and decided that pursuing them was worthless.  If someone told me that life was meaningless, so I would be better off killing myself, I would resist the urge to ask why they hadn't taken their own advice and I would have to decide between Proverbs 26:4 and Proverbs 26:5, depending on the person.
   On the other hand, there are some things that I've ruled out that I probably shouldn't have.  In general, my friends are Evangelical, Republican, law-abiding, and the only R-rated movies they watch have Mel Gibson in them.  I remember in high school, a certain set of my friends started  making jokes about how stupid that culture was and they started rebelling.  It looked to me like they were rebelling for rebellion's sake.  I didn't buy it.  I actually thought there was a lot of value in those conservative values, and I didn't see any reason to ditch them unless I found something more valuable.  Then I came to Wheaton.  Wheaton, the town, is about as conservative as Suburban Chicagoland gets.  Wheaton College is pretty quiet itself.  The rebellion here is surprisingly quiet.  A slightly vocal minority complains about strict rules (they're really not that strict most of the time) a smaller minority breaks the rules, but for the most part people are really okay with mandatory chapel attendance and waiting for official dances to bust out their moves.  But I've encountered various perspectives on some subjects that I had set aside as settled.  Economic.  Scientific.  Theological.  There were stances that I never really considered.  I agreed with them because they were things that conservative, Bible believing people believed.  Not necessarily because they were beliefs that are in the Bible.  I hadn't realized that other Bible-believing people believed other things.  Don't panic.  Most of my opinions haven't changed.  Actually, I think the fact that I've seen other reasonable perspectives on so many things has allowed me to be more confident about less questionable things.  I've yet to encounter a situation, story, movie or argument that has caused me to think that my only responsibility or duty for my actions is to pursue my own happiness.  There is a core set of values and virtues that I have never found a good reason to question.  Passion for God's glory, love, humility.  There are other things that I almost put down like loyalty and diligence, but those depend on the prepositional phrases attached to them: Loyalty to what?  Diligence in what?
   When it comes down to it, I have a pretty short list of things that I'm not willing to question at all: axioms.  However, there are a lot of other things that are pretty closely connected to those that you would have to work pretty hard to get me to overrule.  I believe God exists.  It's hard for me to imagine myself sincerely questioning that.  I also believe that Jesus is God.  Based on those two things, it's not much of a jump to believe that I shouldn't be stealing or murdering.  Of course, there is a host of reasons why I could be wrong about that.  I might be completely misunderstanding Jesus' words.  Somebody might have copied them wrong.  Someone else who looked like Jesus might have been impersonating him on the one day that Matthew was paying attention.  But you can see that with something that straightforward, you have to work pretty hard to make a good case against it.
   On the other hand, some beliefs that seem to be completely supported by scripture when the first person convinces you and quotes a Bible verse (Proverbs 18:17, Matthew 4) can get pretty shaky pretty fast when you start to put pressure on them.  Think of it in construction terms.  You want the lowest parts of the building, the ones closest to the foundation to be the sturdiest.  Then you can build other solid, but less critical beliefs on that solid framework.  “Facebook is a detriment to society!”  Sure, that can be part of my belief structure but it’s not close to the core.  Capitalism, save the environment, small government, reformed, anti-Facebook, pro-business, young earth, progressive, Kantian, neo-Marxism, might all be good ideas (probably not all of them).  Those sorts of beliefs need to be put in their proper place and not too closely identified with the heart of Christianity, the gospel.  They cannot become interdependent.  Faith in the gospel must not rely on confidence in interpretive methods and social strategies.
   I think my central point is that dogma should be grayscale, not black and white.  There are some beliefs that should be held very closely.  Once doubts have been entertained they must be dismissed unless a new, separate case is made (like a suspect who can't be tried for the same crime twice).  On the other hand, it is important to bring our beliefs into question at some point so we can determine the basis for those beliefs.  If our justification is solid, then our belief will be all the more steady.  If not, perhaps we should consider alternatives and pursue deeper lines of questioning.  Here’s my parting challenge:  Think of the beliefs that are most important to you, and the beliefs you are most confident in.  Hopefully, there is some overlap.  Then try to support the important beliefs with the ones you are most confident in (1 Peter 3:15).

Summer Research

    It’s summer now, has been for over a month.  Time flies.  Don’t worry about it.  Sometimes I do.  This time I don’t.  I don’t know why.  To my friends from back home, sorry to have missed your graduations and parties.  I’ll be home for a few weeks this summer.  We’ll catch up then I hope.  ‘til then enjoy the sun.  And to my college friends who are scattered across the globe right now, enjoy your various adventures.  I’ll see you when the fall semester begins, unless you graduated.  In which case, you have my best wishes in your pursuits.

    I’m still in Wheaton.  I’m doing research in the physics department for ten weeks.  Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means.  I didn’t really know what it meant until I started doing it.  I’m living in some “on campus” apartments which are farther from campus than a lot of “off campus” housing.  It’s about an eight minute walk to the science building where I work every morning.  I work from about 8:30 to 5:00 Monday through Friday.  For the most part I’m working on a computer that whole time.  The schedule itself is pretty interesting.  I guess it’s what most people do every day.  It’s actually been a lot more relaxing than the school year was, finishing class around 3 or 4, Glee Club, Tolkien Society or small group activities until about 7 and then studying until three or four in the morning.  I’ll admit I get distracted easily, so it’s not as intense as that makes it sound, but I had a pretty rough year.  I’ve always been skeptical whenever I’ve heard a working adult say “enjoy your college years, as soon as you graduate you’ll have to deal with all the stresses of working a real job for the rest of your life.”  I’ve always suspected that a full time job couldn’t possibly be as stressful as my college schedule.  Well, I’m sure there are exceptions, but so far I’m liking the 9 to 5 no homework thing.

    People also say that Wheaton is a ghost town over the summer.  Myth #2 busted.  It’s definitely quieter, but in my personal experience, there’s plenty going on.  Of course, I got lucky.  I happen to have five great friends from my floor living two apartment complexes down working for the college doing maintenance.  I happen to know a bunch of the other researchers in my apartment building and I’m in a full stairwell, plus I happen to know some of the staff and professors decently well.  Honestly it’s been pretty great socially.  It’s easy to find some space tor read or get away, but it’s also pretty easy to round up some friends and have some fun.

    Research has been interesting in a lot of ways.  Maybe it’s a little weird for someone who wants to be a teacher to be doing research as a resume booster.  I think it makes sense though.  For one thing, if a student ever asks what kind of career you can go into from studying physics, I’ll know first hand.  Also, if I ever teach at the college level, some research background might come in handy.  I also like learning for learning sake, and I’ve definitely learned a lot too.  I know a lot more about ultrasound technology than I ever thought I would, and I’ve also gotten some practice with computer programming which I’ve hardly done anything with in the past.

    Basically my project consists of testing a computer program that measures the diameter of a carotid artery lumen.  The lumen is the cavity or the space between the walls of the artery.  There are a lot of different steps, and I tend to go back and forth between all of them, working on one thing until I hit a dead end, then working in another area while I wait for an e-mail or a mental breakthrough.  The final project seems pretty simple, take some ultrasound images of carotid arteries, measure the actual diameters, run the videos through the program (WALDO) and see whether WALDO gets them right.  Really it should be pretty simple, but the whole point of research is that you’re doing something no one else has ever done before.  It turns out, there tend to be a lot of obstacles when you’re doing something no one has ever done before.  You know the Thomas Edison quote about finding so many ways not to make a light bulb.  That actually makes a lot of sense now, narrowing down all the possibilities and taking the time to try them all in the hopes that something works.  I don’t know if all research is like that, but it sure fits my experience.  When I finish a day of  work, that’s usually how I measure my success, “well I can check that off the list, I now know that the bmp_getfile program is not where the zooming problem is coming from.”

    One major piece of my work has been trying to collect good images that simulate carotid arteries well.  We need to have images that are similar to real  blood vessels because we want to know that WALDO works with real vessels.  If it gets us correct diameters images that are completely different, it won’t do us any good.  It would be like testing an apple peeler on oranges.  So to get images that look like arteries, we use phantoms, which are basically tubes (I’ve used latex and brass, brass didn’t work very well) suspended in gelatin, so the gelatin is supposed to look like soft tissues (like fat, skin, or muscle) and the tubes are supposed to look like the walls of the vessel.  We’ve built a few phantoms and we also bought a commercially produced phantom.  The commercial one doesn’t have any tubes, just fluid suspended in gel.  There are also a lot of variations of settings on the ultrasound machine which affect the image.  It’s surprisingly easy to get some image from an ultrasound machine and surprisingly hard to get a good one.

    The other major piece is working with WALDO itself.  It’s a pretty old program and the core piece of it that we’re trying to test is the actual algorithm that measures the diameter, but there’s all kinds of peripheral stuff around the program that lets someone use it.  It had some glitches when I started working with it, and I’ve been making edits to the program in order to get it to run smoothly. 

Today there was an interesting surprise and at the last minute Dr. Poelarends asked me to help him at the observatory.  There must have been about a thousand people from the area who all came to see Venus pass in front of the sun, so I worked one of the telescopes and was adjusting it to make sure the sun was always in view while people stood in line to see the transit.  If you want to know more about the transit and what we did at the observatory follow this link: http://wheaton.edu/Academics/Departments/Physics/Astronomical-Observatory

Legalism

    “Write down a sin, something you’ve done that God doesn’t like.”
    I look down at the slip of paper and try to think of something.  I could write about not cleaning my room when my mom told me to, but it’s not really very bad.  If I write that down everyone will just think that I want to look like a goody-goody.  Everyone does worse stuff than that.  Something silly like that isn’t much of a confession.  If that’s the worst thing I can write down, I must be hiding something from everyone else, or worse myself.  I’m not hiding anything from anyone.  I believe I’m a sinner.  That’s important.  Anyone who says he is sinless is deceiving himself, and I’m not doing that.  What did I do?  Today?  No, I was pretty good today.  I even made my bed.  Well, I must have had a bad thought.  Even thinking bad things can be sinful.  But what bad thing did I think about?  Maybe I was mad at Andrew.  Maybe I had a bad thought about him.  I don’t remember.  There was that one time, years ago when we had that really big fight.  That was pretty bad.  I think I pushed him down the stairs.  I wrote that down.  Maybe we would have to read our sin.  I didn’t really want to.  I was still a bit embarrassed about that fight.  I could share it, but I still didn’t want everyone to think that I was the kind of person who would fight with my brother all the time.

    That was my line of thinking in Sunday school.  That particular instance happened when I was pretty young.  The teacher eventually had us rip up the papers in some symbolic way to show that our sin was paid for and we didn’t have to worry about it or feel guilty anymore.  There were other times though when I was asked to share sins with groups in AWANA or Sunday school.  There was a cycle that went like this: I was told to think of my sin, so I did and felt guilty for it, I was told that it was paid for and that I should forget it, so I did, until the next teacher or book said to remember it again.  When I heard about guilt going to the bottom of the sea or farther west than it could be without me going east, it sounded great.  Now that I think about it, the word “guilt” can mean a feeling of guilt or it can mean actual guilt.  I think I was looking for freedom from a feeling of guilt.  I felt guilty for that fight with Andrew for years.  It was my fallback.  That might make it sound like I just kept mentioning it because I didn’t feel like confessing my actual sin.  I did that sometimes, but I really felt guilty about that for a long time.  For some reason I didn’t feel as bad about all the other smaller arguments which might have come afterwards.  I thought that we were constantly supposed to be confessing our new sins, and then as soon as we confess those new sins, we’ll never think about them again.  We’ll never feel guilty for them again.  I haven’t felt a strong sense of guilt in a while.  I don’t know if that means I’m just unaware of my sin or that I’m finally beginning to understand grace.

    Here’s something else I got mixed messages about as a kid: the hierarchy of sins.  Some sins are clearly worse than others, but then we hear that in God’s eyes they are all the same.  Maybe no one actually said it that way, but that’s how I understood it.  I had the idea that to people, some things are worse than others.  So if you tell a lie, that’s bad, but people kind of understand.  You lose your chance at having stories about cherry trees told about you in the future, but everybody kind of gets it.  They know you’re just human, but if you steal a car!  Then people can’t trust you.  Then you go to jail and nobody wants to be your friend except the other people who steal cars.  On the other hand, I from what I heard I got the idea that All sins were exactly the same to God.  Maybe I never heard that, but I’m sure I thought I heard it.  I think it comes from verses like, “If anyone stumbles on one point he is guilty of all.”  I was still thinking of it numerically though.  It was like God had a list, and when you die there are two lists.  You know, faith on one side, no faith on the other.  Then there’s just  a number next to your name (remember salvation is already taken care of).  So each sin adds one to the count.  Samantha has 4,328,234, including eight murders, fraud, arson and betraying a friend.  George has 6,724,498 but he was a pretty good guy.  He just had more lying slipups, walked off with some extra pens, and there was this one guy he just couldn’t get used to and tended to wish unfortunate accidents on him pretty regularly.  Well, Samantha has a lower count, and God looks at all sins exactly the same way, so George gets a mansion by the park and Samantha gets one by the beach.

    I don’t know exactly what changed or caused me to change my ideas of sin.  I wish I could point to more specific Bible verses or sermons or books or friends I’ve talked to, because those are all the things that have changed my ideas for better or worse.  The last few paragraphs were my childhood thinking about sin.  In retrospect, I think I was a legalist.  I know I was more judgmental.  In the next few paragraphs, I’ll do my best to explain my current ideas about sin.  I hope that it will be accurate to quote 1 Corinthians 13:11-12 in saying this is an area where I thought like a child when I was a child, but that now I have replaced my childish thinking with ideas befitting an adult even if only a dim sighted adult.

    I think we focus on the wrong passages for our moral reasoning.  We like to use lists (or at least I do): drunkenness, carousing, orgies: check, check, check.  None of the above?  Good day.  Here’s the M-W definition of morality: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/morality.  I think the fourth one is interesting.  Morality is virtue.  Romans 12.  I think we like to do the bare minimum and keep living our lives.  We feel guilty when we do anything that falls into a particular list.  So we go through our mental list of confessions and either tell ourselves that we’re doing okay or we pick something we didn’t do so well at, and we beat ourselves up about it, like feeling guilty is the remedy that purifies us from the true guilt of our sin.  The truth is morality isn’t a list.  It’s a life.  Even Webster calls it virtue and “right human conduct.”  That’s not something you do this minute and not the next.  Following rules and feeling guilty might be exactly what needs to be taught in Sunday School, but as adults we know the world is more complicated.  We can’t be satisfied with that anymore.  We need more than keeping a low sin count.  We need a life that pleases God.  Is God really thinking, “Look at Matt, he only committed 7 sins today and ommitted 12 opportunities for good works.”  Or is he pleased with our internal struggles to avoid temptation, our attempts to feel love for an unlovable, our moments of selflessness, our efforts and struggles to do things just because we want Him to be proud, just because we want Him to smile.

    Sin is any action which is contrary to God’s will.  God made a good world.  Every sin is a step in a bad direction.  When we sin, we take a little piece of God’s masterpiece of the world and we smudge it.  I don’t know why God even gave us paintbrushes, but He did.  I often wish God had just painted the whole thing himself, finished the masterpiece and let us come observe it.  Instead, he gave us all our own little corner in space and time.  He gave us some directions, but He really lets us do our own thing.  Maybe somehow the painting will be better for the smudges.  I don’t know how.

    Sin is like a smear  or a smudge.  Even if it’s an accident, we still mar the painting.  We still mar the beautiful creation.  That’s where the hierarchy of sins might come into play.  Some sins mess up our part of the painting a little.  Maybe we replace a good pleasure with a bad one, or we skip over some places where we could add some great detail and just add to the beauty.  But then other things have a bigger affect.  Like a serial killer.  They don’t just mess up their portion, they go around to all the other people around them and interrupt the work of the other artists.  That’s why it’s better for a millstone to be tied around your neck than for you to lead a child astray.  If you cast yourself into the sea, at least you only mess up your part of the beautiful painting.  False teaching is like presenting some other image, like giving the artists instructions for the wrong painting, telling them all that they got the order wrong and this is really cubist or impressionist or a self-portrait rather than a sacred work.  Then those painters grow and teach others to paint self-portraits as well.

    Morality might be like painting well. Which might look different for every person, because every person has been given a different piece of the picture.  I just finished reading A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller.  It’s all about stories, how we should try to live better stories.  That’s kind of like painting a better picture.  We can live stories and paint pictures about tasty food and fun t.v. shows and cozy houses and good books and even nice people.  But somehow those aren’t good stories or pictures.  The good stories are about people leaving their cozy houses and nice people fighting over the right thing to do in a tough spot.  The best paintings have light and dark.  They have the clearest contrast.  I don’t know how a good artist invents works of genius, but I can tell you it’s not by reading a list of rules about mixing paints correctly and not burning down the studio.  Hopefully, they figured that out a few years ago.  I can’t tell you where inspiration comes from, but it’s not from living in guilt and fear of mistakes.  Think about the servant who buried his talent rather than investing it (Matthew 25).  He was just trying to follow the rules and play it safe.  He kept his brushes clean and didn’t paint anything because he didn’t want to goof up.  But the other two, they knew what the master really wanted.  One was a decent painter and the other was pretty good.  They didn’t sit on their brushes.  They just painted the best they knew how.

Writer’s Block

    If you look at the blog archive bar on the right, you can see that I’ve been pretty consistent at writing a post twice a month.  It’s not intentional.  I guess it means I have about one deep thought every two weeks.  The problem is, I haven’t written a single post this year, so my biweekly deep thoughts are piling up.  I can’t decide which one to write about, so I figured I might as well leave it up to anyone who still reads this blog.  I decided to post a few sentences, or whatever fragments I’ve already started to write on the topics I’ve been thinking about.  I’ll add a poll as soon as I post this, so that you can tell me what you think you might want to read a full post of.  Here are the options:

 

Independence

At 16 American teenagers gain the legal ability to drive unsupervised.  15 year olds look forward to their 16th birthdays impatiently, holding out a little while longer until they can go take a joy ride on their own, or meet their friends at the theater without being dropped off.  You know that feeling of jangling keys in your pocket, that sound that reminds you you can walk to the parking lot and drive wherever you want.

Independence is a keyword in American culture, ever since we declared ourselves independent in 1776.  That's often how we judge our success or value as people.  When we realize that we rely on someone else to maintain our lifestyle, we tend to be disappointed with ourselves and frustrated with the people we depend on.  Some people have a much harder time with dependency than others but for the most part , we like to see ourselves as self-sufficient.  The incredible irony is that as we have progressed through modern history we have had a constantly increasing illusion of independence.  Meanwhile, our lives have become increasingly reliant upon more and more people.

We cannot be independent from everything.  If you really want to be as independent as possible, there are a few things you could try…

 

Legalism

I think the standard evangelical understanding of sin is disobedience to God’s commands. AWANA books say that sin is missing the mark. I don’t remember them explaining exactly what the mark is though. 1 Timothy 6:10 says that money is a root of all kinds of evils. So apparently some sins are foundational or branchlike where several specific sins stem from a category of sin which is in itself another sin. So maybe cheating is in fact a form of stealing. Maybe stealing is a manifestation of the love of money. So loving money is a sin that causes other sins. You’ve probably heard conversations about good sins and bad sins. I know I have. We see murder as a lot worse than coveting. But then we’re told that God sees them as the same. This confused me a lot. We can see the damage that murder does very clearly, we have a hard time seeing the damage that covetousness causes, and when we do it seems insignificant in comparison. Coveting might ruin a relationship, but murder destroys the person too….

 

Conflict Resolution

I’ve been involved in some conflict lately.  I’m not going to go into much detail, but I want to mention two sentences that keep popping up in my head, thanks to my parents.  They’re just some pieces of advice that each of them would give me whenever I had a fight or a disagreement with Andrew or Jenny or Liz.  Usually when Andrew and I were trying to decide who got to sit in the front seat, my mom would say, “One of you has to be willing to give up your rights.”  Whenever I talked to my dad about an argument or a fight, I would explain why the things I did were fine, and then tell him all the things the other person did wrong, and he would tell me, “You can’t change what ________ does.  You can only change your behavior.”  I really didn’t like either of those before, but now, I’m beginning to see just how good that advice was.

 

Determined People

Science is really good at explaining causes.  Scientists look carefully at things that people see everyday to figure out what made them the way they are.  As science progresses, we have explained more and more things.  Most of the explanations science gives us are deterministic, or perfectly predictable.  It means that if you know everything about a situation now, the exact state of things and all the factors that will influence it, you know exactly what it will be like in the future.  The problem with that is that it’s not how we really think about the world.  We think of the world as unpredictable, that there are an infinite number of possibilities lying between here and the future, and that we, and our thoughts and emotions and personality can influence the future.  The frontier of physics right now is quantum mechanics.  We’ve learned a lot about how things work on that level, but no one really understands what makes things work.  We can tell what is likely going to happen, but we don’t know for sure.  It doesn’t seem to be predictable.  This means that science might have found the place where the mind, or will, or spirit affects physical outcomes.

 

So those are the options.  I’ll also put some choices on there about things that I’ve been doing lately.  Thanks for reading, don’t forget to vote.