The Untriumphant Return

I’ve been away for far too long.  You know you are truly a writer when you go for a few weeks without really writing and you believe you are starting to lose your mind.  When I started seeing scenes in my head and felt like my characters were giving me dirty looks, I figured it was time to get the right side of my brain working again.  You see, I’ve been avoiding the issue.  Feeling sorry for myself, I guess.  And writing forces me to be honest with myself.  I’m slowly starting to realize that a large portion of my innumerable flaws are changeable.  You’d think that’d be fantastic news.  On the contrary, it’s humbling and humiliating.  Because they’re still there and the while I could’ve changed them, but I haven’t.  Yet. 

Romans 12:1-2: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”  This is a difficult one.  I’ve known this passage for a long time, but only recently have I spent real time thinking about it.  I’ve not been a living sacrifice.  Oh, I’ve been alive.  With two bullet wounds and a broken leg; but that’s hardly living.  I’ve not been renewed.  A new paint job doesn’t help the engine run any better.  

A man I highly respect lately was telling me how we need to be treating our lives more like a war.  Get angry at Satan.  Hate Satan.  Recognize what he's using against us and let that upset us.  In God alone can be the victory, but we must see His enemy as our enemy.  Along with that has come the realization that I've been feeding him.  If there's one thing I've learned in the past few weeks it's that Satan is not fed on sin alone.  We tend to look at things as states of being: I'm either in sin or I'm righteous.  I'm quickly learning that God looks at things in relationship terms instead.  Satan doesn't need me to curse God to His face.  He doesn't me to kill somebody, lie, or commit fornication.  He just needs me to distance myself from God, and the rest will take care of itself.  The sad truth is that so many of us are playing church, and we may even dare to play Christianity.  I'm realizing that the result is always the same: I get burned.  You get burned.  We all get burned.  The subtlety of his attack is so devious, it's almost impressive.  It makes me realize that I don't have a clue what I'm doing.  But I know someone who does.

So I’m changing.  Slowly but surely.  It’s proving to a painful process, and I’m starting to feel awful bruised.  But I’ve seen what I could look like down the road and it’s worth it.  So here goes nothing.

"Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance.  The only thing it cannot be is moderately important." - C.S. Lewis

Snow, Service, and Wibbly Wobbly Impulse

There’s white stuff on the ground now.  My first impulse was to burst into song, specifically “What’s This?” from The Nightmare before Christmas, but I restrained myself.  A good thing, since I was at work at the time.  I’ve never been too crazy about winter, but I figure if it’s got to be cold, we might as well have snow.  That kid that loves snow and I hoped every year around Christmas that it would come never really died in me, and I’m not ashamed to admit that.

It does have its downsides though.  Among them is the difficulty it poses to travel.  As a result Wednesday night services were canceled tonight.  I understand why that has to be done, but still I was pretty disappointed.  I look forward to Wednesday nights.  I need encouragement through the week.  We live in a dangerous and sinful world and it becomes difficult to maintain our focus if we only receive spiritual encouragement one day out of the week.  As I continued thinking about this, it led me to another train of thought: why did I experience disappointment at Wednesday night services being canceled but I find it hard to convince myself to set time aside for God during the week outside of assembly times?  After all, I did study my Bible tonight, but when I got home from work that wasn’t the first thing I did.  First I watched the Doctor Who Christmas Special from last night.  That bothers me.

To be clear, I’m not someone that thinks all entertainment is evil.  I’m listening to Relient K as I’m writing this post.  Instead, I’m concerned with priorities.  I’ve always had an obsessive personality.  When I discover something new or exciting I latch onto it like a parasite.  I read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (over 900 pages) in 4-5 days.  I stayed up reading the novel Unwind by Neal Shusterman until 2 a.m. one morning because I found it that thrilling.  When I first discovered Doctor Who, there were some days I watched four episodes in a day.  Why can’t I get that excited about the Bible?  Why can’t I get that excited about prayer? 

There’s a question that inevitably follows this train of thought: why do I get excited about my obsessions?  Sometimes it has to do with a gem that I find in the message of a particular movie or song.  Unfortunately, though, that’s often more of a perk than a direct reason.  Looking at the things that have attracted my attention in recent months (Doctor Who, Dreamworks Dragons: Riders of Berk, and Owl City), it’s usually because I like it.  I love fantasy and science-fiction and I happen to love Owl City’s music as well.  I’ll be honest, there’s times I don’t feel like reading my Bible or praying.  It makes me feel inadequate and inferior; because I am.  My problem then, as may be the problem of some of you, is that I’m serving myself more than God.  I care more about what I feel like doing than I care about serving God.  Maybe, just maybe, priorities stem from motivation.  Why do I do what I do?  Maybe if I had my motivation straight, I would more feel like doing that which helps me do what I am aiming to do.  If you find yourself in a similar position as I have found myself in, maybe you should do a similar sort of soul-searching.  For everything you “feel” like doing, ask yourself a short but infinitely important question: why?

A Sleeping Giant

  I have a lot to say and I'm not really sure how to begin.  A lot has been going on in the last couple of weeks and my brain has been firing on all cylinders, thinking about a thousand things at once.  I guess you could say that I feel like I'm lost on Hoth, nothing but solid white in all directions and as I've been trying to follow a path, I've realized that I've been using the wrong map from the start.

  What kind of world do you want?  That's a tricky question, I know.  I like to envision worlds outside of our  own realities.  It's what motivates me to be a writer and what makes me a sci-fi and fantasy nerd.  But I've thought about this in a new light: what would I change about our world?  I can tell what I would want in our world: a world where God's special union of marriage is held in honor, unadulterated and unperverted; a world where people are more concerned with the effects of their influences than the enjoyment of them; a world where people don't ask what can do but instead what is best; a world where a person cannot make any observation without being met with a connection to God by a neighbor; a world where good is rewarded and encouraged and evil is punished and discouraged; a world where people are obsessed with the Bible instead of Justin Beiber, Twilight, or The Hunger Games; a world where myself and people like me can proclaim the truth and not be afraid; a world where we truly look at everything through Christianity's lens; that is the world that I want.

  I realize that many of you have very similar dreams for our world.  These are not things that are really unique or original, they are things that we want.  So why do we seem farther and farther away from this the longer that time goes on?  People offer a variety of reasons.  The most common is an answer of utter defeat. It sounds something like this: "this world is evil.  It always has been and it always will be.  Satan has a foothold in the world and so it will continue being evil, and it's too big for me or you or anyone else to do anything about it."  Let me be blunt.  That's about as good of an explanation as saying lightning happens because Thor is angry.  It's true that Satan has a foothold in the world.  It's true that there has been sin in the world since the fall and that there will be until Christ comes back.  But it doesn't explain why marriage was respected in the 1950's, why we used to say prayers in our schools, and why we used to have a God-centered society.  Something changed, and I'll tell you what it is: we shut up.  Somewhere along the line we either got burned or saw somebody else get burned while standing up for the truth and we decided that we were going to save ourselves the trouble.  We got pushed around and we buttoned our lips and have tried to keep our heads down ever since; and if you have been told that there is nothing that you can do that will make a difference in the world, you have been lied to.

  Last Spring, Kirk Cameron made some comments regarding homosexuality on the Piers Morgan show that made national news.  He was labeled as homophobic and was portrayed as someone hating gay people, all because he believed that homosexuality was damaging to society as a perversion of God's plan.  He was attacked for weeks.  Recently Mike Huckabee gave his comments on the shooting in CT and said that if we had not so entirely removed God from our society, perhaps we would have spared ourselves such horrible consequences.  The lash he has received has been drastic; some have said he should not be allowed to speak on the air ever again.  Both of these individuals remained firm in what they said and many have been encouraged as a result.  Let me issue a challenge: what would happen if we all decided to not keep quiet anymore and become passionate about our faith.  What if Mike Huckabee and Kirk Cameron weren't alone?  What would happen?  I daresay if we all stopped caring so much about the next cat video on Youtube and who's going to win the Superbowl and started caring more about serving God, I am brave enough to say He would give us all of the power and resources to change the world we live in.  I dare you to prove me wrong.

Embracing Violence

Yesterday in Newtown, Connecticut, a twenty-year old gunman, after killing his mother, went to a local elementary school where his mother worked, and killed 26 people, 20 of whom were children between the ages of 5 and 10.  He subsequently shot himself.  The shooting was instant national news and there has been an outpouring of sympathy towards the families and a lot of discussion has followed about what to do to prevent these things from happening in the future.  Most of the talk has to do with legislation: gun control laws in some cases and in other cases even giving teachers means to protect their students.  As a huge supporter of the freedom of speech, none of this discussion is bad.  However, I believe we are barking up the wrong tree.

I talk a lot about the influence that culture has on us as individuals.  I want to go back to that for a second.  Earlier this week I read an article about the AMC television show “The Walking Dead.”  If you don’t know about the show, it is AMC’s biggest hit and follows people trying to survive the zombie apocalypse.    The PTC criticized the “TV-14” rating of the show, citing its gory nature and use of profanity to say it should be rated “TV-MA.”  I myself have watched the show a few times.  Among the violent things the show depicts is a man getting stabbed in the eye with a piece of glass and a man breaking off a zombie’s arm and pulling a bone out of the arm.  Sounds quite grisly, doesn’t it?  In video games, the examples are even more direct.  Grand Theft Auto, one of the most popular video game franchises on the market, thrives on the player’s ability to kill and steal in every scenario imaginable.  In the song “Little Piece of Heaven” by Avenged Sevenfold, a somewhat popular hard rock band, the repetitive chorus says “Must have stabbed him fifty ******* times/I can’t believe it/Ripped his heart out right before his eyes.”  At the culmination of it all, we have the latest teen fad, The Hunger Games, which revolves around the story of throwing a bunch of teenagers into a “game” in which the goal is to slaughter everyone else in the game with you and emerge the victor.  And we wonder why tragic shootings happen in our country.

The answer to this situation is not gun control, security, or legislation.  When a culture removes God from among themselves, there is no moral standard left, which inevitably gives way to violence.  When a culture embraces violence as a means of entertainment, it is only a matter of time before that fantasy finds its way into reality.  We have made it clear we don’t want God among us.  This might have been God granting our wish.  Now is the time to stop and reflect: is this really what we want?

Writing Playlist

  To those of you who don't know yet, I'm working on writing a book.  Now before you ask how long into I am, I honestly don't know.  If you want a specific idea, the Word document is at 25,000 words right now.  I may post a couple teasers in the near future.  I almost always listen to music while writing, and what I listen to greatly depends on the type of scene I'm writing.  So here's some of my favorites.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzhNXoo6rwE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWGGSgfkZ0k

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_tUr7Z5jTE&list=UUREP-L_BSC8r3FNgPJ6BnFQ&index=2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7HmzwI67ec

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCl1fDOUpvQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KXNSYL93m4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwpe5pYe-Y0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTbXCnc2qdU

Last but not least:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CihLLn9WTvo

The Petraeous Scandal

It has been quite the tumultuous week for national news.  President Barack Obama was re-elected on November 6^th, but that’s old news now, due to the shocking revelation from David Petraeus.  The CIA director resigned last Friday, citing an extramarital affair as the reason for his resignation, saying that he had shown “extremely poor judgment.”  I don’t disagree with that.  Upon closer investigation, though, some other facts come out that muddy up the waters a little bit.

The affair was with David Patraeus’ official biographer, Paula Broadwell (a married mother of two children, by the way).  She made several trips to Afghanistan with Petraeus as his official biographer when he was still a general in the United States Army (and the face of the wars with Afghanistan and Iraq).  According to Patraeus, though, the affair did not begin until after he took the position as director of the CIA, which was September 6, 2011.  None of this really bothered me at first.  I hate to see another reminder of the failings of our country’s leaders, but it is nice to see someone admit fault instead of covering for it by saying something along the lines that they “deserve to be happy.”  However, there is more to the story.

Let’s start with how this all got unfolded.  If you stopped here, it sounds as if he felt guilty, broke off the affair, and resigned all in a relatively brief period of time.  That’s not the way it happened.  Enter Jill Kelley, a family friend of David and Holly Petraeus’s (Holly is David’s wife).  While Paula Broadwell had been following David as his official biographer, she had been suspicious of Broadwell, saying that she was far too “gushy” about him.  It’s worthy of note that Broadwell is 40 years old and Petraeus is 60.  Earlier this year, Kelley began receiving anonymous emails that she found so threatening that she took them to the authorities.  Upon investigation, the FBI tracked them to Paula Broadwell, and found emails exchanged between her and Petraeus.  In the interest of being delicate, I will say that the emails between Broadwell and Petraeus made it crystal clear that an affair was taking place between them.  So this was not a result of the conscience of David Petraeus, but of an investigation of the FBI.  However, that’s what I find the most upsetting.  According to Petraeus, he ended the affair four months ago.  In other words, what really happened was that four months after the fact, someone ripped back the rug and he resigned since his dirt was uncovered for the world to see.

There is some positive things in all of this: he did admit that it showed extremely poor judgment, he was the one who broke the affair off, he did it before he got caught, and as of yet he and his wife have not divorced, which I hope means they are working it out as married couples should do in these situations.  However, he didn’t apologize until he had no choice.  There’s something here that we can learn from: don’t be sorry you got caught.  Learn true repentance instead.  Aim for true integrity and selfless service and this won’t happen in the first place.  If you lose your place and it does, have the sincerity to correct in the best way possible.  That will save you from these kinds of headaches in the future, and your loved ones will thank you dearly for your honesty and integrity.

Learning from Jack Skellington

A couple of years ago, after having seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Alice in Wonderland, I decided I was going to try and see every Tim Burton film I could.  Last summer I saw Corpse Bride, which completely blew my mind (and is still one of my favorite films to date), and I decided he has a innate gift for animated films.  Still, I had not seen The Nightmare before Christmas.  A friend of mine gave The Nightmare before Christmas on dvd to me for my 20th birthday.  So I watched it.

First of all, "This is Halloween" is still running through my head, and I'm enjoying every minute of it.  There are deeper things to be appreciated, though.  If you haven't seen the film, go watch it before reading the rest of this post, because if I try to explain it all, my brain will get ahead of me and I won't make any sense.  And, you just really need to see it, because you're a person and every person should see this movie.  

The main thing I want to give attention to is the main thrust of the movie: Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King, mayor of Halloween Town, stumbles into Christmas Town and decides to bring Christmas to Halloween Town.  The result, which comes when Jack tries to be "Sandy Claws" is disastrous.  While watching it, though, a thought occurred to me: Jack learns from his mistake by the end of the film, but I wonder what the other citizens of Halloween Town thought?  They watched Jack trying to squeeze Christmas into Halloween Town like trying to plant a rose on Mars; what did they think?  

The lesson that I took away from the film was this: Ecclesiastes 3:1 says that there is a time for everything.  I would argue that this includes not only a time but also the environment as a whole.  When you ignore the obvious as to what it is time for and try to squeeze what you want into your current situation, bad things happen.  For me as a Christian, it means that when I try to force something into my current situation that God has clearly shown me it is not the time for, I may as well start walking towards the bomb shelter, because an affectionately named hurricane will soon be on its way.  On the other hand, when I accept what is obvious, and take everything in its proper time, my life turns into an anthem, which just might be as catchy as "This is Halloween."