Snippets of Doom

I recently read a Facebook status by a major Christian personality stating he'd never missed a day of scripture reading. He went on to assert - insist - we should all take up that standard. He clearly stated it was wrong to skip a day of reading. I'm not living right unless I'm reading scripture daily. Such "snippets of doom" have ruled my life for a long, long time.

I am trying to "live better," so I have to engage with this man's assertion. Will reading scripture daily be part of my plan? What about Fasting? Diet? Exercise? Literature? Prayer? Savings? Insurance? Tithing? Charity? Tidiness? Checklists? Passion? ... Sleep?

Every one of those items has been declared mandatory if we want to "live right." (Except exercise. Paul said exercise is of little profit, so many Christians wipe that one clean off the table.) I want to "live better," so I'd better stop living wrong.

In fact, if I'd only quit living wrong, I'd be living better automatically ... without ever living at all!

Instead, let me share this quote from a tennis training podcast I heard the other day. "There's no right or wrong. There are only consequences."

Fantastic.

Let's agree there are things at the ugly end of the spectrum that really are wrong and things at the lovely end of the spectrum that really are right, but focus for a blog minute on the stuff between those extremes. Should I improve upon my idea of "living better," and replace it with "living right?"

To my misguided ear, trying to live right sounds like the better strategy:
+ Living right conjures images of selecting an unimpeachably correct target then striving to reach it.
- Living better smells like taking a vague step somewhere in a general direction and hoping it ends well.
+ Living right copies the best method of navigating to a far-away city. Pinpoint the goal on the map and follow the instructions for getting there.
- Living better reeks of the process I use to enjoy a walk in the woods. Stumble across a promising path and wander where it leads.

Actually, that hippy-dippy "living better" stuff scares me to death. I instinctively want to know God's standard and the best way to achieve it. Full stop. The idea of proceeding without an ideal sounds like a recipe for becoming lost, and not in any good way. I genuinely fear hearing the Lord tell me, "Take from him the talent he has, and give it to the man who has ten." Living better sounds like the express lane to eternal vagrancy

Still, I'm committed to vagrancy these days and I think I like it.

Looking back across the years, living right didn't make me the righteous man of my dreams. Living as if I were holier than I was paralyzed me. I was afraid to live at all. A man who does nothing does none of it wrong, but he doesn't live.

I think I'm a fundamentalist-ish outlier in this whole area. I believe a good number of people are pretty comfortable with the first part of my quote, "There is no right or wrong." It's popular these days to quit doing everything the preachers call mandatory. So, I'm probably not alone if I do not commit to read the Bible every day. Still, if I resist my fundamentalist nature and quit trying to live right, I still stagnate if I don't aggressively choose to live better.

Daily scripture reading is neither right nor wrong, but we choose our consequences when we decide how we'll use our Bibles. There are questions only God and His children can answer, and it's work to chase them them through scripture, commentary, conversation, and blog. Searching for treasure enriches those who find it. No one makes wealth doing nothing.

For some strange reason, this balance excites me. I like hearing I'm free from doom, and I like even more hearing there's a reason to sweat out the work of living better. Life isn't good to those who believe every snippet of doom. Neither is life good to those who neglect the work needed to live better. Finding the road between those two ditches is the trick.

Do You Want to Live Better: Sleep

Living better requires sleep.

Seriously. If you intend to make your relationships come alive, there may be no single better way to shoot yourself in the foot than regularly to short change your brain on sleep. I've done this all my life, and it's never worked well for me. In seeking solid information on the subject, I found this amazing article:
We don't always want sleep, but we need sleep

God told us something like this a long, long time ago, but science is getting closer to understanding why it's true. I find that helpful.

Every bodily function produces waste, but the brain's wastes are handled uniquely. The brain has to shut down to clear them, and the process takes a long time. It appears the brain clears these poisonous waste products by shrinking our neurons as we sleep, thereby making space to flush a whole slough of damaging waste proteins away.

When we wake up our neurons re-expand, and the waste products begin accumulating again.

I imagine the brain-flush to be somewhat like tooth brushing. It's a critical habit, but missing any individual session isn't risky. Plaque is only a problem, for most people, when it's allowed to take root. The beta amyloid that causes brain plaques doesn't seem to be a problem if we sleep long enough, regularly enough to keep major deposits from forming.

A sleepless night isn't going to kill anyone, but a discipline of late nights and early mornings supported by coffee damages us in real ways. Science is currently connecting beta amyloid accumulations with Alzheimer's, but I find my experience with irritability, impatience, depression, and willpower deficits after accumulating sleep debt plenty convincing. John Wayne, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, and a thousand other red-blooded Americans unite and call me a wimp. With them I must agree. I don't want to be a wimp, but I really am.

God and life both call us to endure times of great hardship, and I'm happy to pull my weight when I must, but I can't call keep it up. If I miss too much beauty rest, I'm truly ugly to be around. I'm daily called to play a part in tending the lives of a few people to whom God has joined me, and I best live up to that calling when I'm reasonably well-rested.

Americans are tough.

Proud Americans take no handouts. We make it by maximizing our productivity, maximizing the number of productive days in every week and the number of hours in every day. My insomnia's always been a flag-waver's blessing, and I'm at home as an American, living the American way. God's way is Sabbath, but Sabbath is difficult. I'm American, from my debit card clear down to the bottom of my 401k, so Sabbath is frankly terrifying. Believing God will meet my needs, while I simply rest, gives me all the warm fuzzies of a bungee jump into deep fog.

If I'm going to live better, though, I must risk rest. With God's blessing, I hope to treat my ongoing insomnia as enemy rather than friend. Ten years ago I was sleeping 5-6 hours per night with very little insomnia. Five years ago I was up to 6+ hours, but as I started getting closer to having enough sleep I started facing insomnia. I've made it to 7+ within the last 5 years, and am working toward 7.5. Evidence is rich I'm not sleeping too much, but I'm rested enough my anxieties lead to insomnia commonly. Here are things I'm trying:

• Absolute darkness
  Science says darkness is necessary for deep sleep. I hate to be a science denier, but darkness never did much for me. I slept in absolute cavernous darkness for a couple months, and observed how my symptoms and degree of restedness didn't change at all.
• Turning off screen devices
  For years, I shut off my computer and fell quickly into sound sleep. These days, I find about twenty minutes after I stop the last activity of the night, often when I shut off the computer, the first wave of sleep hits me. Since my biggest problem is accidentally pushing through that sleep wave into my second wind, I'm finding some ease sleeping when I make sure I stay on the computer until bed time.
• Melatonin
  When I get my second wind, I'm going to be either awake or in an awful, zombified, half-asleep state for a couple hours. As soon as that happens, I take .6-1.2mg of melatonin every 20 minutes until I'm asleep. It works very consistently for me. Happily, on nights when I hit the sack at or before that first wave of sleep, I fall asleep well without the assistance. That assures me the assertions melatonin are not addictive are probably true.
• Prayer
  Prayer cuts both ways, for me. When anxieties entangle my mind, prayer lets me slowly brush away each strand. I'm not wired to just slice through the whole web with one bold declaration of faith, but I can sort of roll each concern up in front of the Father and leave it with Him. That's a necessity for me. Once, however, the wave of sleep hits I don't quit praying! I start obsessing about prayer itself. I can't just quit. Suddenly, I find I'm well into my second wind, and prayer transforms aggressively from solution into problem.
• Talking
  Copy and paste the prayer stuff here. Talk can relax me, but at some point I'm surprised to find I've pushed into my second wind and there's no going back.
• Meditation
  Meditation is a tremendous sleep aid - prior to 7:00 AM. Or practically any other time I should carefully stay awake. As an intentional sleep aid, though, it never has worked for me.
• Thinking happy thoughts
  I always thought I stunk at thinking happy thoughts. Actually, happy thoughts only work if a sleep wave is rolling in. My problem has been trying to "happy thought" my way back to sleepiness after reaching my second wind. Knowing that, and managing my sleep waves better, I finally discovered a happy thought that works consistently for me (I'm reporting against almost 3 weeks of happy experiment with it.) That's kind of cool. The trick for me is to find a thought sufficiently complex and absorbing, but completely without any goal or solution over which I can obsess.

When I do all this, and still fail to fall asleep, I'm not shocked. I remind myself I'm not truly exhausted, refuse to allow myself to solve any of my problems, and wait quietly until the melatonin kicks in.

Life really is measurably better this way.

Living Better

Who has the time, energy, and willpower it takes to live better?

And what business do I have implying people aren't already living the best they possibly can by blogging about it?

I don't know the answer to either of those questions, but the need to live better is filling my mind lately. When something's on my mind, I experiment. Mistakes, victories, setbacks, and questions are avalanching through my life these days, and blogging about it seems like a helpful part of the discovery process.

I hate to sound arrogant by voicing my opinion on what living better means. I'm writing these things because I don't know! Still, I need a hypothesis, so here's where I'm starting.

Living better is doing whatever makes the relationships in my life more alive.

It seems like a tricky thing. To make all those relationships richer I must improve myself, but I'm convinced self-improvement is a dead-end. An awful lot of people tried to teach me how to "be the best 'me' I can be," but they all left me flat. Maybe I can make my point with a quick analogy. If I frequent the gym to have the best body I can have, I'll either love my new body and become a jerk or grow depressed at my lack of progress. (Ask me how I know ... you'll find the answer filed under "Mistakes.") If, however, I hit the gym to improve my ability to serve people, I succeed. I taste the reward of being more helpful, and I don't even mind that I still look like "generic nerd #3."

Forgive me in advance when I sound like I'm proclaiming life's answers. Half my experiments turn out really badly, but I have to try them anyway. Anything I talk about out here is a work in progress. Failure and mistakes are part of the process.

So, The Familyhood Church blog just may warm up again. If I generate any momentum, it will be on the subject of practices that help and hinder my efforts to live better. Writing always helps me sort out my thoughts, so to some degree this is a selfish endeavor. I won't kid you, though. I crave feedback. If mere writing were enough, I'd journal. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Kevin

Hosanna ... No wait. ... Crucify Him!

The young, Arab-American media darling seems oddly withdrawn, given the situation. He's being thrown a spontaneous ticker-tape parade in celebration of his return to New York City on Sunday, June 28th. The kid's been trending on Twitter for months, but no one guessed he'd won this kind of love. He's taken the Tea Party, the Democrats, and everyone else to the woodshed in the polls, and today's spontaneous excitement is spiking his mojo-meter through the roof. Even the main stream media loves him as a member of a trendy minority (it helps they can feature his attacks on the Tea Party every evening.) The country needs something badly, and this kid will be old enough to run for president in just 2 election cycles.

The culmination of this year's 4th of July celebration will be the fireworks display over One World Trade Center, and the kid heads there first thing the next day. On a busy Monday morning he barges in, speaking to no one, and shuts off the entire building's Internet and telephone connections. Office-drones pour out of the elevators, trying to figure out what's happening. He drives them all into the streets and forbids any commerce. For two hours, he kills the business of America's most precious skyscraper.  Erected on the foundation of the Twin Towers, One World Trade Center declares to the world how America reacts to defeat. The show must go on! But this kid stops the commerce. An odd thing indeed, for anyone angling after the presidency!

Suddenly, CNN interrupts their own coverage of the excitement with a tape of the kid - this Arab-American kid - looking up at One World Trade Center and saying, "This tower will fall in smoke and ashes. Not one twisted I-beam will remain connected to another, and I will build it again in three days." Twitter explodes in fury at this "towel-head" who thinks he might level America's tower again. Within the week, CNN is carrying images of our young hero dressed in orange, standing in front of a judge, entering no plea to charges of making terroristic threats. Seconds later, the judge reads off charges of treason.

Our young media darling's still trending, but now under hashtag #CrucifyHim.

NT Wright continues to enrich my understanding of Jesus' life. Jesus didn't cleanse the temple because a few money-changers were lining their pockets. Jesus prophetically enacted the cessation of prayer in the temple, and He emphatically declared the primary reason. The word our bibles translate, "thieves" or "robbers," is used by Josephus to describe a group of Zionist rebels against Rome.  Jesus fingered the temple as a central rallying point for the local anti-Rome movement, and prophetically enacted the emperor Titus's reaction to the inevitable rebellion Israel's narcissism and violence fostered. This makes sense of Jesus odd response to Israel's outpouring of affection in the triumphal entry. Just before He entered the temple, Jesus says:

Luke 19:41-45
As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.” When Jesus entered the temple courts, he began to drive out those who were selling. ...

Unless I'm mistaken, this was the only political act of Jesus' life. Prior to this moment, Jesus never spoke, acted, or encouraged His disciples to consider changing any single thing about any Earthly political or religious government. He maintained He was the king of a great a kingdom in the same way I maintain the air is filled with wi-fi signals. He spoke of His kingdom as a tangible thing, but never expected for one moment Pilate would grasp what it might be. His kingdom is one of love and peace, and with His entrance into the world His kingdom began its work of eroding every other kingdom of men, of power, of bloodshed, and of greed.

This understanding of the cleansing of the temple also makes clearer sense of His crucifixion. The destruction of the temple was written deeply on every Jewish heart, even more deeply than the destruction of the Twin Towers weighs in ours. Israel heard Jesus' prophecy as a threat to repeat that violence against God's house and theirs, and they heard Him more or less correctly. They only misconstrued the means of the temple's destruction. They could only imagine Jesus was promising to raise an army of His own with which to destroy Herod's (presumably profane) temple, and raise up a new one of His own. Their calls to crucify Jesus flowed from hearts jealous for the best things they knew: for Israel, for the temple, for God.

And here's my challenge to you. If nationalism was death to Israel, can our obsession over the loss of America's Christian-ness be life to us?

Find the spiritual half of the explanation of Jesus' thoughts about the temple in this 5-minute youtube. NT Wright presents here how completely Jesus intended to replace the spiritual functions of the temple in His own body.
Wright Explains the Temple

For the second half, I need to refer you to Wright's "The Challenge of Jesus." In this 200 (small) page book, Wright summarizes several hundred (dense) pages of argument detailing how Jesus worked to persuade Israel to give up her nationalism. Israel believed with all her heart the restored temple would again receive the Shekinah glory. From Zion's hill they expected to rule all the Earth. Pages 62-67 highlight the argument I've made here.

Heretics and Heroes by Thomas Cahill

I'm so depressed.

If you'd like to join me, give "Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World," a read. It's hard to imagine how Mr. Cahill can traverse 500 years of European humanity in 300 pages, but he covers it well. And it's not pretty.

European history is a greased pig of a thing in my mind. Just the time I think I've got the connections, there's some underlying cause I've never imagined or some critical connection I've forgotten over the years. (e.g. Did you know the indulgences Luther condemned were funding the works of Michelangelo, whom we all love and admire?) Cahill spends 290 pages connecting art, religion, and atrocity in compelling ways. I love any book that ties things together, making them easier both to understand and to remember. He starts the book memorably by isolating the European slaughter of millions during the conquest of the new world. It doesn't integrate well, but it's stunning nonetheless. His view of Europe's actions is unrepentently, gloriously, depressingly unforgiving.

After putting the new world in his rear-view mirror, Cahill's portrayal of the expansion of human self-understanding as expressed in Renaissance art is intriguing, and even thrilling. I've long understood there are artists I should admire, and could even recite some of the reasons why. Cahill brilliantly captures the growth of self-realization, of what it means to "be." I'd admired Botticelli's work, for example, but Cahill shows me why it was ground-breaking and how I see all people more completely for Botticelli having painted them the way he did. Cahill's exploration of the growing of the human self-concept alone is worth the price of the book.

But, silly me, I bought the book mostly to get a historian's take on the Reformation.

Cahill does not disappoint, unless you're hoping to read about some good thing that may have come to humanity out of Christianity's most famous upheaval. Cahill continues to describe the evolution of ideas as they pass from thinker to thinker. (Erasmus starts at Thomas a Kempis and adds linguistics. Luther starts at Erasmus and adds grace. Zwingli starts at Luther and clarity, and so on.) Calvin gets a thorough treatment and we go up through the kings of England, Elizabeth, and beyond. He does an especially helpful job with Catholicism's delayed and ineffectual response. When Cahill's done, you've seen the whole sweep of Reformation and Counter-Reformation with all its glories and warts. And its blood.

The contrast between the two stories interleaved within this single binding is unspoken, unavoidable, and striking. By the last page, Cahill's shown how the Renaissance ennobled, enlightened, and expanded the worth of mankind. His Reformation disgusts. It killed many, divided all, ennobled none. The neurotic grasping of his sad Martin Luther may have been brave and helpful, but Luther's message of freedom was only narrowly applicable to legalistic obsessives in the first place and in the end was taken up by those kings Europe most able to use it to entrench and establish their political power. Christian disagreement has always existed, but the Reformation became a historical watershed only because the powerful embraced it as a tool. The Renaissance told humanity how beautiful it could be. The Reformation demonstrated how ugly it already was.

Cahill doesn't wrap his story so tightly and conclusively as I've done here. He guides the reader to some conclusions, while leaving others to their own discretion. You're getting my gut feel upon putting the book down. He's comfortable placing the good side of the Reformers on display where he can find it, and he concludes the book with a recital of some positive things he sees Christianity bringing to the world. I cannot, however, reach any other assessment of the tapestry he's woven. The Reformation was a gut-wrenchingly terrible thing.

I only wish my heart could rise to the Reformers', my brothers', defense.

Cahill is substantially correct.

If Jesus is not risen from the dead, we are of all men most miserable, indeed. And yet, Jesus is risen from the dead. The history of bloodshed attending one of our proudest moments, the Reformation, is a stain on our name and attached to His. It was not to foment, spawn, and feed wars Jesus suffered and died. It's incumbent on us to learn from the evil Cahill details so coherently.

In the year 1550, with the Reformation birthing its most powerful changes, is it possible there were Christians humbly loving other Christians in countless communities of Italy, Germany, England, and France? Is it possible lowly Catholic and Protestant people were clothing the naked and building each other up in Christ on both sides of the theological divide? And that God was genuinely displeased with the murders my heroes caused? The Catholics are wrong about countless critical things, but does knowing that make "me" right?

Knowledge breeds narcissism, and narcissism stops at nothing. The heart of Christianity is not in the fire of revival, nor in the whirlwind of media, nor in the earthquake of Reformation, but in the still, small love of community. We need each other and Jesus more than anything the Earthly empire of Christianity can do for us.

Bodily Exercise Profiteth

For bodily exercise profiteth little: but godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come. 1 Tim 4:8 (KJV)

“Physical training is good, but training for godliness is much better, promising benefits in this life and in the life to come.” 1 Tim 4:8 (NLT)

I've dedicated an average of 30 minutes a day for the last 2+ years to the first physical training program I've done since the Army. My inner Damentalist scold (Christian Fundamentalist - minus the Fun) reminds me daily this theft of 200 hours a year from God and myself, stolen from my poverty only to feed my pride, is shameful. In fact, to this day I hide my training like a literature professor hides his Louis L'Amour collection. But, like that professor, I keep doing it.

"Hello. My name is Kevin Knox and I do physical training."

But the faux-Training Anonymous introduction is not quite right, because I'm only writing this to persuade you to train physically, too. I should say something more like, "Psst. Hey, Buddy! Wanna score some pushups? I can hook you up right over here. The  price is right."

I'm probably the only guy I know who avoided exercise because of this verse. On the other hand, somehow, I'm also the only guy I know not currently avoiding exercise! So far as I can tell, everyone else is avoiding it like fermented beet juice. Really, most people avoid exercise for normal, rational reasons: it hurts, it sucks up time better spent not hurting, and all it does is enable them to do more things that also hurt. Most people are already physically able to do all the stuff they really like doing (like watching football players hurt themselves for money) so exercise is a clear and present negative with no positives - at all.

Of course, there is the weight/health thing, but let's ignore that. Everyone thinks they should exercise so they can be thinner. The doctors all say if we're sexier, I mean "thinner", we'll live longer and be able to do all the stuff we want to do. Our TVs, jobs, insurance companies, billboards, radios, Internet pop-up ads, and one of our Facebook friends who just lost 8 pounds all remind us the doctor said it, too. But weight-loss is a crock. I'll get this out of the way quick, losing a single pound of fat by exercise hurts too much for too long to survive as a real option. It works for a couple hormonally blessed people who see tangible results, and it works in short bursts for some unmarried people, but for purposes of this discussion we can profitably toss weight loss out the window. Weight loss persuades few to add physical training to their lives.

What persuaded me?

For me it was tennis. After all these years, I'm still addicted to losing tennis matches, but my knees were tiring of the whole affair. Unable to walk up stairs or crawl into bed like a bipedal primate, I was confronted with an ugly choice. I could start reminiscing at age 47 about my glory days on a tennis court, or start doing squats like a second religion. I chose the latter, and within a couple months I could walk like a created being again. After a year I'd forgotten what it was like to fear stairwells.

The decision was almost magical.

If, on October 1, 2011, I'd been able to pray a quick prayer and live for one day with the knees I have now, I'd have broken down in tears, praised the Divine Healer, and remembered that day for the rest of my life. The healing came, just not overnight. It wasn't magical in practice, but looking back it still feels that way. In practice, I did squats two days a week and went through three kinds of pain. Warmup hurt because the tendons didn't want to play along. Exercise hurt because my muscles didn't want to play along. Recovery hurt because I'm not 25 any more. But when my knees started working again, I was hooked.

I set a goal of 11 pullups. I had no idea what kind of goal that was, but I set it and started the process. Two years in, I'm only up to three, and  I could already do one when I started. Two years is a long, long time to spend getting from 1 pullup to 3. I responded to that frustration in several different ways. Impatience made me unhappy. Intensity led me to injure myself. Doubt was the most profitable. Doubt got my creative juices flowing and drove me to try some of the stuff that's working now.

So, what did I learn by all those pullups? I learned there's technique to the pullup. It doesn't look like it, but poor technique will stall progress and/or lead to injury. There's an obvious need for strength, but I also learned there's a need for coordination. Lastly, I learned the pullup is not the goal! The pullup is a gateway to a whole collection of skills that require real balance in addition to the technique, strength and coordination the pullup builds. There's so much more to this stuff than I ever knew.

The simple process of setting a goal and chasing it taught me about assessing and making honest allowance for my abilities. It taught me to accept what is, rather than demand what I imagine. Training means demanding improvement of myself, but injury is not an improvement, so I learned to slow down. Learning to require of myself what I can deliver, not what some book or video says I can deliver, is the greatest lesson my training program's given me to date.

Now let me remind you of the second half of this post's verse.

"... but training for godliness is much better, promising benefits in this life and in the life to come."

Godliness is hard, too, and I'm learning it's hard in more ways than I could possibly have guessed. Godliness is not just resisting temptation. There are parallels in godliness to the balance, technique, coordination, and strength in physical training. Holiness, relationship, expectation, and good works all work together to achieve the goal of godliness.

It's an odd thing to say, but physical training is opening doors to godliness I never knew existed. And my knees don't hurt any more.

Jesus' Confusing Birth

It came to pass in those days there went out from President Obama a decree all nations under the American Peace must contribute to their own protection. This decree came in the third presidential term of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, and all people went to be counted in a U.N. census, every one to own city.

Joseph also went up from Khandahar in the Southwest Plateau into Ghazni, the city of Mahmud (because Joseph was of the lineage of Mahmud) to be taxed with Maryam, his wife.

Luke wrote his gospel to Greeks and Romans. It can be helpful to look at his gospel through their eyes, and how they'd have seen it very differently from a Jew of their day or a Christian of our own.

+ Presidents Bush and Obama keep the peace in Afghanistan at the cost of the occasional civilian casualty. Caesar Augustus kept his own peace-keeping forces in Judea, though his limited technology led to somewhat different rules of engagement for Roman garrisons.
+ Afghanistan is a province most Americans wish they'd never heard of. Judea was very much the same thing to a Roman. It was a constant cesspool of rebellion, full of enemies, and providing almost no economic worth to the empire.
+ We know Afghanistan as a hidey-hole for terrorists. Judea grew a steady crop of Zealots who'd gladly suicide to take a few Romans with them.
+ Hamid Karzai is the President of Afghanistan, and Herod the Great was the Roman-installed, Roman-monitored leader of Judea.
+ The Taliban promises as soon as the people obey Sharia law fully, Allah will free the nation from their tyrannical overlords. In Judea, the Pharisees insisted essentially the same thing about Rome.
+ One word from a woman's betrothed about her pregnancy would unleash the Taliban's wrath on her instantly. Joseph faced the same concern for Mary.
+ American culture has largely outgrown the stigma of unwed childbirth, and so had the Roman and Greek cultures. Luke had a job explaining Jewish morality to his culturally advanced readers!

The Jesus story was to Luke's readers the story of a nobody born to nobodies in a nowhere backwater ruled by suicidal terrorists, religious fanatics, and a sycophantic king. It was just another weird story from a weird place!

The Jesus story provoked the average Roman to wonder why would God be born in such a place when Rome was available? Rome had the CNN of the ancient world. Anything to happen in Rome could be known the world over in weeks. And if God were to schedule His debutante's ball for Judea, why send an army of angels to announce Himself to shepherds? What kind of glory or intimidation could they bring? Why hide from Herod, Quirinius, and the High Priest of that Jewish religion?

Our God handled the event mysteriously to the Roman mind, and also to the American mind. The American mind grapples with it by asserting God was trying to prove His love to the very least, or He was fulfilling prophecies to His people. American's look at God's odd behavior and need to find some ultimately victorious strategery.

I settle for something simpler.

My sentimental favorite theory is Jesus was unwilling to seat Himself at the head of the table, preferring to seat Himself in the humblest place and allow the host to move Him up. He announced Himself as God in the humblest way imaginable, and He did it for all the reasons He gave His disciples.

Or did He tell the parable because He knew it was true, even of the most important things? What Jesus actually did greatly outweighed what people knew about what He did. The doing was sufficient, even if no gawking spectators are amazed by the event. One doesn't play a fanfare when planting a seed. One plants it. A man who trumpets the planting of his seed doesn't truly trust the mystery of gardening. He wants his credit now, in case the crop never comes. Jesus knew He was planting Himself deeply in rich soil, and the family He reaped would be without end. He needed no audience.

The humility of Christ's birth bears a message, but the message is of God's total confidence. God needs no props from His enemies and only love from His friends.

Book Review: High Price

I found High Price: Drugs, Neuroscience, and Discovering Myself incredibly moving, which is unexpected in a discussion of the neuroscience of addiction. There are two general classes of people who will profitably wrestle with the claims of Dr. Carl Hart, those in relationship with someone addicted and those who care about the state of black opportunity in America. When the book began I was in the first class, but by the end I found myself in both.

Dr. Hart is a reasonable and angry black man living in a nation that imprisons its black drug users at a vastly higher rate than its white drug users. At a time when 13% of America's drug users were black, 46% of those convicted for drug crimes were black. Dr. Hart ties that number to the demonization of crack cocaine. Until 2010, the possessor of an amount of crack cocaine received the same penalty as the possessor of 100 times that potency of powdered cocaine.

Dr. Hart is also a neuroscientist specializing in the effects of addictive substances on the human brain. When this neuroscientist tells me there's no meaningful difference between the effects of powdered versus crack cocaine on the brain, I'm inclined to believe him. And when he tells me inequitable sentencing laws exist because politicians are much more likely to be elected when they're tougher on black crime than on white crime, I grudgingly have to admit he might have a point.

And finally, Dr. Hart is a survivor of the destructive South Florida 'hoods that produced the hip-hop phenomenon Run DMC and countless dangerous gangsta thugs. Dr. Hart tenderly shares how his family has been impacted by too many of the stereotypical dysfunctions of those 'hoods, and his own story is one of success only by the narrowest of margins. He made it out because of his own willpower, but it was a willpower given opportunity thanks to random strokes of luck, the generosity of many mentors, and the necessary support of American liberal politics. Dr. Hart is a walking exception, but he's not forgotten his roots. And he's not forgotten the streets never needed to be so mean.

High Price: Drugs, Neuroscience, and Discovering Myself was written more to fix the root problem of drugs in America than to help individual addicts recover. I'm hesitant to summarize his formula for that fix here, because he builds his radical approach on a carefully constructed foundation, but if I try it's in hopes you'll actually read this book. Let me give just a couple hints of the data and anecdotes he supplies.

1. You know that rat that keeps pushing the button that gives him hits of cocaine until he dies of starvation? And how that experiment was promoted as proving the powerful addictive power of cocaine? Did you know the rats in question were all kept in solitary confinement, and the only things in their cages were cocaine and food? No friends. No mates. No toys. No paths to investigate. Nothing.
   
   Put me in that situation, and I might O.D. on cocaine, too.
   
   Rats placed in a stimulating and normal environment with access to cocaine spend their time very much like rats without access to cocaine. The compulsive behavior of their more famous cousins doesn't exhibit itself in the presence of healthy stimuli. (And don't even start me on the experiments demonstrating Oreo cookies are equally as addictive as cocaine.)
2. There are two significant differences between powdered cocaine and crack cocaine. The first is that crack cocaine can be smoked rather than snorted, which causes it to hit the blood stream in a more concentrated rush. The hit comes faster and harder, but it's no more intoxicating than powdered cocaine. To achieve the same rush using powdered cocaine it has to be injected, which is inconvenient, but both products cause the same intoxication.
   
   The second difference is that crack cocaine is cheaper, making it the drug of choice for poor blacks. It's sold in smaller quantities on street corners, while powdered cocaine is sold in larger quantities behind closed doors.
   
   Crack cocaine is not radically more addictive than powdered cocaine, but it is radically more targeted for enforcement.
3. The social problems of the mean streets of South Florida existed before crack cocaine was ever invented, and the invention of crack cocaine has not meaningfully increased those problems. South Florida had addicts before it had cocaine, and it always will. Addiction is a personal problem, not a drug problem. An addict who cannot obtain one drug will use another, and a non-addict will not become addicted no matter what intoxicants are made available to him. Addiction is a problem of pain management.

Dr. Hart's solution to the root cause of drug addiction is to present other powerful ways to manage pain than chemical relief. Chief among those other pain management tools is the skillset required to succeed in our society, and we are actively taking that tool out of the hands of our black men.

It is painfully obvious our inner cities are not fully equipping their children to succeed in white collar America, but the problem only begins there. Thanks to the war on drugs, one misstep undoes whatever little good may have been done for these people. Being caught one time with a meager amount of crack cocaine results in a life-long felony record, with its life-long impact on every opportunity America has to offer.

Those of you who reveled in Jean Valjean's story as told in Les Miserables should consider the difficulties a black man suffers after being caught with that threshold amount of crack cocaine. No amount of change or growth will remove that scar from his life. The only injustice Valjean suffered at Javert's hand was the blind imposition of unfair justice, but that's exactly what we are imposing on one out of every three black men in America. And when those men finally complete their prison terms, they have no more stake in their own society, our society. We've left them without hope, and that makes them dangerous people indeed.

These facts barely touch the surface of what I learned from High Price. The main thing I learned is that 80% of drug users will go on to lead normal, healthy, productive lives, given the chance. Black drug users no longer get that chance. They go to prison, and when they come out their opportunity at a normal life is gone.

Dr. Hart convinced me, from many different perspectives, we are reaping in violence exactly what we've sown in false justice. We are ruining lives that could be and should be saved.

I highly recommend challenging yourself with this book.

Chasing the Shingle Creek Passage

I’m writing this from a beach chair at Publix beside my dead car, awaiting the tow truck. The Florida sun is doing what the Florida sun does, and the clouds look like they’re stirring up to do what Florida clouds do, what they did yesterday.

 

Yesterday, we dropped the van at a local retirement village, and took the car about three miles away to a public kayak put-in. We’d drop into Shingle Creek, take a south passage through a promising cypress stand to where it joins a more sizable river, and pull back out at the retirement village. There’d we’d visit a friend of ours, and gather everything up a for a nice ride home.

 

...

 

To be continued.

 

...

 

The car's safely at the shop now and I'm back in the air conditioning, clicking a real keyboard.

 

...

 

The put-in went smoothly. We were flowing with the current, concerned only the Florida sun might burn us before we arrived at our friend's. Laziness was our watchword. Dana hates adventure, and we were both content to watch the sun dappling the river-bottom through tannin-infused water. A leaf rolling with the flow tumbled into a sun-beam and glowed fiery red from under the water. Just as quickly, it rolled back over to its brown side and relinquished the spotlight to some duckweed or a spray of stray bubbles rising from the muck.

 

At points there were interesting things on the other side of the river, but paddling way over there was far too much work. We drifted for nearly an hour, enjoying Florida and admiring the stream as it narrowed. Soon, we could touch trees on both sides of our channel at the same time. The water was still there, but it was no longer gathered into a neat creek. Instead, it spread wide throughout a plain of cypress. The Everglades are like this. They call it, "The River of Grass," because it's actually a single miles-wide river running slow and shallow across our virtually level state. 

 

Our creek became a river of cypress.

 

Towering cypress are always surrounded by nubbins called "cypress knees," about 12 inches tall. We found ourselves snaking between knees, dodging peacefully left and right, wending our way, following the best flow of our channel. We noticed quickly the best path was always marked by orange trail blazes. Someone had mapped a course through our maze, and we had only to follow it.

 

Who knows how far we went in the next hour. We don't. One mile? Two? Like the frog in the slowly warming water, we'd noticed the channel overgrowing but we saw only reason for hope. At one point, I'd had to jump out of the kayak to help it over a log. At another we were bunny hopping ourselves over multiple submerged logs. All the while, the tree cover was growing thicker, the shade deeper, the weeds wilder, the water darker, and channel narrower. But the little orange blazes beckoned us onward with their promise of passage. Someone had gone before us.

 

The blazes continued past the sign that said the trail ends, and so did we.

 

The little things kept lightening our mood. A flock of ibis or a beautiful egret not used to seeing people. A wine bottle tied up as a sign to weary travelers. Cypress knees like mini terracotta armies, mothers with babies, or some other abstract art. And the little things kept darkening our mood, too. More and bigger spiders than I'd ever seen in my life falling into our kayak by the dozens, the sound of solid limbs hitting and poking our inflatable kayak, the bubbles popping on the surface when I stepped in especially organic muck. I don't know how many times I looked at the boat to see whether the bubbles were coming from the muck or a puncture.

 

A half hour after passing the end of the trail, the water flowed under some weird field of lily pads too thick to break with paddles. I was out on foot again, but we passed safely through and the orange blazes led us on. There were chainsaw cuts keeping the path clear, but before long I was walking and towing the kayak far more than we were paddling. Once we completed our passage and joined the main river, though, all would be well. We were much later than we'd planned, much muddier than our friend would understand, and anxious to get back to our car again before they locked the gate behind us, but success would make it all worth while. Darkness was still a ways off, even if the gathering clouds hid the sun nearly as effectively.

 

My ankle became a concern. It had been a week and a half since I wrenched it. It had been improving steadily, but none of us was banking on it doing the job I was asking of it today. The water averaged calf-deep, and so did the muck. I was usually thigh-deep in muck and brown water before my feet found purchase, kicking and tripping the whole time over invisible, submerged logs of every shape and firmness. Sometimes I could stand on them, and sometimes I'd slide from them instead. Progress was measured in brown stumbles and hard towing, but progress we did. I'd very nearly decided not to wear an ankle brace for a quiet paddle down a lazy river. I was so glad to have erred toward caution this once. And I was glad for the cooling effect of the water to keep the swelling down.

 

In a final babble of promise, the water sped up. It was an exciting sign. The land was coming together and our channel deepening. Maybe our Shingle Creek passage would finally be complete, and we were about to join our river. We took hope.

 

The river presented us with another log, though, and this one too big to go over. We'd have to portage. Before we did that, I figured I'd walk ahead to see how much further the river really was.  I tried three paths. All were completely impassable. The portage wouldn't work.

 

Shingle Creek said, "No." Instead of triumphing, we'd stumble back through every turn and twist and log and slip. We were going back.

 

The clouds picked up on our mood and chose that minute to do what Florida clouds do. The drizzle gained heft and speed, and drowned our last flicker of hope. We both wear glasses, so the rain added a level of difficulty to our journey. Spotting the faded orange blazes was much more important now, and we had to see them without windshield wipers. Trying to stay in the boat whenever the lightning was especially close only added to the injuries already inflicted.

 

And now we were fighting the clock. Dark comes after 8:00, and we were well past 5:00. We'd been three hours getting so far with the current, and the way back would be harder to find. The way down was only a matter of sticking to the deepest water. The way back held two critical turns we knew we could miss.

 

There were no options. We started.

 

We rolled fifty or more of our orange blazes back up, the clock ticking faster than we could slog or paddle. Every single sighting of orange was a drama, but we kept finding them. And suddenly we didn't see any more. There'd been one confusing decision with an orange to our front and an orange to the left. We'd gone forward. A hundred yards later, we'd seen nothing but white/blue blazes. We were familiar with those, but orange had brung us, and it was orange we'd go home with. Back we went. We tracked left and were rewarded with a dozen more orange blazes, then they dried up, too.

 

We backtracked yet again to our last orange blaze and stopped. Cold. We had options aplenty, but it was 7:00, and the bewildering (today I notice "wilderness" is at the root of "bewilder") cypress didn't have that "I'm Tom Bodett, and we'll leave the lights on," kind of feeling. We didn't sense the welcome to spend our night amongst God's cypress knee armies. We were no more than a mile or two from our car, but we were an hour from dark and the odds we'd find the right path in that hour grew closer and closer to zero.

 

Each moment wasted on hesitation felt like a judgment day.

 

All the obvious thoughts came to mind. Quietly shivering all night in a damp kayak, crying uncle then waiting for the helicopter and floodlights, listening to our friends tell us how we should have been more prepared, several dozen Readers' Digest survival stories, alligators anywhere (along with snakes and untold bugs.) The mind is not always our best friend.

 

We decided.

 

It turns out my ancient BlackBerry actually does have a functioning GPS which the 911 operator can access. She calmly explained to us that at that very moment there was a cozy little subdivision just 150 yards to our West. We squinted as hard as we could to the West, and had to take her word for it. There was nothing but cypress to be seen, but we abandoned the kayak and struck off. She corrected our course to the left as we went, and 70 yards later we finally saw the first rooftop.

 

Cypress swamps are thick.

As near as I can tell, I've mapped our route at MapMyRide (choose Satellite view to see the cypress stand, and zoom out a bit to see where we were trying to go.) Your guess is frankly as good as ours where we stopped, but it was down there somewhere.
 

We ended up having to skirt a retention pond, but soon we were on manicured grass again. (My heart warmed a little bit toward manicured grass.) I went back, found, deflated, and hauled out the kayak. A friend came and drove us back to our car, and we headed back to the van with all our stuff. At 9:00 we did make it to the van just before the car died. Of course, that the car died was only appropriate after the day we'd had so far. The check engine light had been on for a day, but it was just an oxygen sensor warning - no big deal. I figured I'd get it to the shop on Tuesday, and we'd live with bad mileage until then. Not this time. This time we'd be transferring things to the van and leaving the car in the Publix parking lot until I could get back to it.

 

Three days later, we have the car back at home and running well. It was a cracked vacuum line that chose a quiet Sunday afternoon to finally break. The kayak seems no worse for wear, and we've found no ticks or spider bites to remind us of our adventure. I've got a little poison oak, but not enough to really trouble me. Time will have to tell whether our fancy Nikon d3100 survived the adventure, though. We're going to let it dry a bit longer before we put the battery back in.

 

I could not be more relieved things ended so easily. There were no sirens, no night in the swamp, and a story to tell for a long time.

 

Already I'm starting to look back on the trip fondly.

The Progress of Man Toward God

I've been thinking about this too long not to type a little something about it. I'm seeing the Bible as a journal of the progress of man toward God, and a very complete journal. It records God's coaching of us, and our attempts at carrying out our Coach's instructions. It comes complete with progressions and measurable progress.

And maybe a prediction of what comes next?

Let me give you some general headings, and see what you think.

• Adam
  Adam had no idea how to get to God. He didn't even know it was hard. He didn't even know being like God was out of reach! He ignorantly set foot on the stage of life and tried to pull of a miracle by a little culinary adventure. I used to believe Adam would have been home-free had he only eaten from the Tree of Life, instead of from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. My current thinking is had Adam chosen the right afternoon snack he'd have had fewer setbacks in learning to reach God, but he'd still have had to learn.
• Seth to Noah
  We're talking about a handful of chapters here. As nearly as I can tell, these people lived kind of like New-Agers think they can live now. They had some sort of confidence they could just walk with God and that was enough. And it was, for at least one guy. Enoch seemed to handle the freedom and responsibility pretty well. The rest of the world didn't do so well. We're all just thankful God found Noah and his family worthy of preserving.
• Noah to Abraham
  There's even less information here than there was for the last group of people, but we know Melchizedek was leading some folk in worshipping God, and we know Job leaned heavily on the virtue of sacrifice. Basically, Noah probably didn't teach his sons a whole lot about worship, but people built on his memories and whatever direct revelation the Lord gave.
• Abraham to Moses
  God speaks to Abraham and Abraham tells his sons what God said. So far as I know, the memory of walking with God like Enoch disappears from the Earth after Abraham. In its place is one couple and their miracle family. Through one son, then two, then twelve comes a nation of people who've heard from birth God makes promises to people. I don't see a lot of instruction here about how to reach God, but there's a real and amazing confidence God is reaching them. Here's a beginning
• Moses
  Moses is the redwood tree of the Old Testament. God chose Moses to carry His instructions for worship to Abraham's family. The children of Israel's family learn from Moses how to gather together, how to sacrifice, how to celebrate, and how to say thanks. Whenever we study the Old Testament, we focus on the failures of Israel's family to reach God. Focus for a second on the fact they made a skilled effort. Remember whenever you think about this there was at all times a remnant of people successfully reaching God. Many people failed to follow Moses' instructions, but there was always someone "doing it right." From the time of Moses onward, there was always someone pleasing God by doing the things He sent Moses to teach.
• Joshua - Samuel
  Yes, I see success here. After Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, the people of God got down to the business of living in their new world. God made promises to Abraham, and gave instructions to Moses. Now they were living in that fulfilled dream. They had motive and opportunity to know God. They found out it wasn't that easy. Clearing their lives of idolatry was even harder than clearing the land. Following the instructions of God required knowing those instructions, applying yourself daily, and genuine belief that the invisible God was worth knowing. People failed in droves, but there are some great success stories, too. The report is that every man did what was right in his own eyes, but some of them actually saw the Truth. By the end, the people truly did trust Samuel for a while, and the remnant always sought God.
• David to Jehoiachin
  The kings over Israel (and later over the Northern and Southern divisions of Israel) upped the ante considerably. For starters, they got everyone on the same sheet of music. All Israel worshipped pretty much however the king worshipped. David doesn't quite have the stature of Moses, but he's cut from the same cloth. He loved God, heard instructions from Him, and obeyed them with all his heart. By the time Solomon was done, the people had a place to gather, a priesthood to mediate for them, and a clear picture in their mind what it was to be "the" peculiar people God was calling for. From David's day forward, the people had a vision of what it was to be Israel. The remaining Israelite kings led their people as well. The kings of the Northern Kingdom led them astray while the kings of the Southern Kingdom hit every extreme of loss and restoration. In every case, the vision burned a little more clearly in the eyes of the remnant few than in the days of the judges.
• Ezra to Jesus
  And here we pass into the murky age, and into the age filled with treasures. I hope and pray your teaching has been more complete than mine, but I knew nothing of these last 500 years of the Old Testament. There's an upward transition from David to Jesus, and it's right here. Ezra was a stranger to me, but he stands almost as tall as Moses himself and Jesus' message would have been incomprehensible without him.
  
  Jesus could make of us a kingdom of priests because Ezra first transformed Israel into people under priests.

Have you ever noticed 1 and 2 Chronicles is a rerun of 1 Samuel through 2 Kings. There's a reason for that. The first history is told in the mindset of the kings. It tells how God made Israel great by making its kings great. The second history is told in the mindset of the priests and is rich with insights the kings never had - even as they were living the story out. It's a subtle but significant difference.

The twin books of Ezra and Nehemiah begin right where 2 Chronicles leaves off, and essentially become 3 Chronicles. They begin with Israel deeply separated from Yahweh after their best and brightest were carried captive to Babylon. God lived in a building in Jerusalem, and that building had been leveled. Judah's sin caused that disaster, so they had to regard their disaster as their own fault. Yahweh had made promises to Abraham, explained them to Moses, and fulfilled many of them in David, but He ploughed it all under when Israel refused to keep His covenant. God's people had no hope. The isolation was astronomical, hopeless.

But the people of Judah brought the Word of God with them to Babylon. They were separated from the land, the temple, the blessings, but those powerful words spoke into their abandonment. In the darkest of hours Daniel could consult the scrolls. So could Ezra. So could all the remnant.

From Adam to Jehoiachin "The Bible" is almost unmentioned in the Bible. Abraham had Yahweh's promise, but not one little page of The Bible. Moses wrote five books of The Bible, but he didn't start with a single page of it himself. David had Moses' five books and so did a few priests, but the people never heard more than an occasional reading from The Bible. They took their lead from David and his priests. Comfort and guidance came from the temple pageant and the knowledge God was with the king. We can hardly imagine relationship with God apart from His words, but The Bible was truly not central to Israel's spiritual life.

It was during the Babylonian captivity the synagogue system began. Desperate for any connection to God, the people discovered the consolation of the scriptures. They turned whole-heartedly to the scriptures and began to realize how rich and full their lives were with just them. They expected life without the temple to be empty, so the richness of scripture came as a delightful surprise. The synagogue became the place to gather and share the Word of God together.

It was in Babylon the Jewish religion became an individual one. During the time of the kings, Israel was a nation and its reality was whatever its king made of it. Each individual Jew saw himself as a part of Israel's whole, and Yahweh related to the nation. In Babylon, the people began to see Yahweh relating personally to each Jew. Israel could be in captivity for its sins, even while my relationship to Yahweh was healthy and rich.

It's also worth mentioning that from the day of Babylon until now, Israel's main problem was never again idolatry. Legalism, distorted mysticism, and worldliness weren't cured in Babylon, but curing idolatry is an amazing change.

By the time the second temple was completed, Israel was a stronger nation of God-followers than ever before. We focus on Israel's mistakes throughout the 39 books of the Old Testament, but we need to see their success. Following an invisible God is hard! Abraham's pupils were stronger than Noah's, Moses's than Abraham's, David's than Moses's, and Ezra's than David's. The people of Israel struggled, but they grew closer to God each time he revealed a little more about Himself. The nation of Israel fell and fell again, but they were a little higher each time they rose. And never forget the silent remnant received the Lord's commendation in every generation.

It should not be the shock it is to me when I see the Lord succeeded in all those generations, but it's a happy shock. And it makes me want to recalculate everything about how Jesus changed everything when He came.

Excel implementation of the Quadratic Formula

I know very few people who will find this interesting, but I'm one.

I'm teaching a little Algebra 2 this year, and I asserted to my students they'd never need to factor another quadratic equation if they implemented the quadratic formula within Microsoft Excel. For giggles, I decided to do it myself. It turned out to be more than a giggle's worth of effort.

I implemented it using 3 different formulas for each of the possible values of the discriminant (d>0, d=0, d<0 ). The work with the negative discriminant, of course, was the interesting stuff. IMPRODUCT, IMSUM, and IMPOWER were all new to me, and fun to see at work. It might make sense for me to reimplement the whole thing using IM functions, but I doubt I'll ever play with it again.

Anyway, Blogger doesn't allow me to upload arbitrary files like this (unless I name them .png or some such) so I can't post it out here. Drop me a comment if you want an ugly little notepad of an Excel spreadsheet that happens to be able to calculate any value for the quadratic formula.

Of course, if you're actually just interested in the roots of any given formula, you'll find Wolfram Alpha does ten times more than this little spreadsheet. The thought occurs to me to grow jealous and try to compete, but I'm not motivated enough.

Once to Die, and then The Judgment

Picture a young, impressionable man in Egypt about 2500 years ago. He cheated a customer of his, and now he's facing the man in the market. He knows his thumb was on the scale, even as he lies straight to his customer's face, and he knows the man cannot prove a thing. He's scot-free.

His customer knows as much himself, and that he cannot press this young man any harder. But before he leaves he whispers, "Would I could see you in the Hall of Maat!"

The young man, let's call him Thoth, smiles and throws the man a sugared date as he leaves. When the man throws it back, he catches it and pops it in his mouth, thinking for just a moment how it look so very much like a heart.

He bites down on the heart in his mouth, and remembers Ammut.

His mouth becomes very dry.

His mind travels to that day, be it tomorrow or a generation away, when he will appear in the Hall of Maat. Every man dies, and every man appears before the forty-two gods in the Hall of Maat. In that hall, a man makes one profession of innocence before each god. The sixth confession before the Lion and Lioness god is that I have not made light the measure of corn. The seventh before Merti-f-em-tes is that I have not deceived. The twenty-forth before Nekhem that I have not been deaf to the truth.

Maat is "balance", and in the Hall of the Balance Thoth's heart will be weighed against a feather. His heart will be weighed after he has made forty-two negative confessions ("I have not...") to the forty-two gods in the presence of merciful Osiris. If he has told no lies during his confessions, his heart will be lighter than a feather.

Ammut, crocodile, lion, and hippopotamus, will watch the scales on that day. When his heart remembers this day, and it is heavy as a stone, Ammut will devour his heart and he will die forever.

Osiris was once human, and he pleads the cause of the humans who appear in Maat, but Osiris would have nothing to say for him unless he makes his crimes right again. But even then, what hope is there? Thoth would need to be ritually buried, mummified, and buried with the scrolls of the prayers of the dead to even know what to say to Osiris to persuade him to defend his cause. Burial was expensive beyond Thoth's wildest dreams and the books of the prayers he could never afford. Without the scrolls by his side as he entered the afterworld, he would never know what to pray to the gods. And what merchant could afford a book of the prayers?

Thoth was the god who recorded the trial of each human. Our young Thoth could write the divine Thoth's transcript already.

There was no hope.

====

This story was not given at the museum the other day, when I viewed the bodies of Egyptians who'd spent fortunes preserving their bodies. The stories I did read, though, stirred me deeply. These men and women were desparate to live forever, and willing to spend any amount of money to have that chance.

The bodies I saw were those of the rich, but all Egyptians shared the same fears and the same hopelessness. They lived as good lives as they could, and still went to their graves without certainty their many works and prayers could turn Ammut away. They hoped, but their hope was based on nothing more than the stories their priests told.

And that's the last line of questioning. Where did the priests get their stories? And before you answer that question, remind yourself the bible tells how the priests of Egypt were able to turn their staffs to snakes, call lice, and call frogs from nowhere. Would you believe a man who could do these things? Would you fear the stories he told you?

This story is something I imagined as I wondered what a laborer like myself would do in Egypt. I was raised Assemblies of God here in twentieth-century America and I cried myself to sleep many a night wondering whether God would reject me for my sins in the end. What if I knew the decision were in Anubis' hands and only my perfections could keep my heart from Ammut's maw.

====

I've often wondered whether the ancients could really believe the things our scholars say they believed. The three thousand year old bodies I saw this weekend declare the passion of the people whom they were.

I praise the Lord Jesus for the kind and gentle mercy He shows to us all.

Idols? They're a Personal Thing

A thought here about idols in America. Basically, we don't have any and we might be slightly better off if we did.

In Sunday School we were looking at Samuel and how he made Israel throw away their Ba'als and Astartes. The conversation turned and turned until someone said something that made America's problem crystal clear.

The gist was this. When you sacrificed some grain to Ba'al or did a dance for Astarte or whatever it is you did to gain their favor, you rather expected and even felt entitled to a good crop or a son or whatever you prayed for. And that's why God was so offended by those idols. Some Israelite would sacrifice to Ba'al, received rain from YHWH Who sends His rain on the just and the unjust, grow a nice crop, and tell all his friends how trustworthy Ba'al was. The Israelites really trusted Ba'al in his little sphere of the world. God would not share the credit for the things He did with anyone, imaginary or not, so He fought back.

In America, that could never happen. We put our trust in 401k or the Affordable Healthcare Act or the stock market or welfare or private enterprise. When one of those things fails us, we're disillusioned or depressed or angry, but we don't feel personally betrayed. Our systems and processes are not personal. They're not idols.

The same goes for everything else they call an idol in America: TV, rock stars, sports teams, movie stars, political heroes. We're a lot more likely to ascribe the success of our personal favorites to God than we are to praise them for delivering something to us we'd actually received from God. We don't personally trust personal idols the way everyone did three thousand years ago.

Instead, we don't trust anything beyond ourselves and our kind. Our science, our governments, our culture. We trust our systems and processes, and we are simply assured there's nothing relational to them at all. That ancient Israelite trusted a "someone" named YHWH or Ba'al with his crops. Either way, he knew something was beyond in the control of some other being to whom he could and should relate. The modern American buys a tractor, digs a well, irrigates, and handles pests using tools well within his control. As long as rain comes to someone, somewhere, he'll be able to buy water from his neighbors or the aquifer or somewhere and he'll be fine. And if not, there are a couple safety nets he can fall into. There's nothing personal, nothing relational, about it.

American pagans don't have idols any more, but they don't have anyone else to relate to either. And when we become converted, I think it's very hard for us to make the transition to there suddenly being an invisible Being in our lives Who cares for us and about us, to Whom we can relate.

I'm not quite sure what it all means yet, but it was an interesting discussion. I love Sunday School.

Mockingjay

I had strong feelings about The Hunger Games and shared them a couple weeks ago. I didn't decide to read the last two in the series in order to blog review them, but now that I have I may as well share some thoughts.

Up until the very end of the third book, I found the reading pleasant and the story engaging. By the end of Mockingjay, the series was just too heavy for me. I was seriously disheartened by the story, and never felt like the author made it worth that cost for me. My review would be that as a thrill ride, the trilogy meets expectations. As young adult literature, it's a poor offering.

Why? Simple. By the end of the book only a handful of characters have shown themselves unambiguously good, and they have been destroyed. Peeta is the best of the bunch, and by the end he's been destroyed and remade so many times as to be unsurvivable. The series does a phenomenal job of portraying the pointlessness of good.

From here, I'll be putting up big *** spoilers. ***

There were two big hooks on which the story hung, romance and politics. Let me take them in order.

The romantic money quote was Gale's, "Katniss will pick whoever she thinks she can't survive without."

Gale is right, and the author's description of Katniss' self-assessment is consistent with the character's story arc. Katniss really is so mercenary through every the page of the story.

She suffers an army of doubts and guilts as each of her decisions hurts Gale, Peeta, and a legion of innocents  along the way. Suzanne Collins adds Katniss' traumatic issues to her original poverty and loss issues, creating an insurmountable cluster of obstacles to her ability to love. Katniss grows further and further from being able to make those decisions necessary to build a family.

The portrayal is compelling and sad.

Why do this to a character? What's Collins' point?

In the last handful of pages Katniss gives a thumbnail sketch of how she and Peeta overcome the scars each bears. Katniss does not grow into the skills of inner survival within the story. The story is unrelentingly about scar layering on scar. Incredibly and pointlessly, the salvation of Katniss never makes it into the dramatic narrative. Suddenly it's the last chapter of Mockingjay, Gale is gone, and Peeta is inevitable. No choice. No struggle. Just a convenient end to turmoil. Katniss never crawls out of the deep crater into which Collins' story has blown her. She just sort of tells us about her twenty years of recovery as if emerging from it were a difficult but undramatic thing.

Politics holds center stage in Mockingjay (immediately behind the action, of course.) The rebel District 13 stands opposed to the tyrannical capitol, Panem.

Panem gave us the hunger games in the first place. Panem is debauched on the luxuries stolen from the twelve districts. Its citizens are weak in body, mind and character. Its leader is greedy for power in its purest form, and will do anything to make sure his people continually swim in the bread and circuses that are so key to securing his power.

District Thirteen is the mirror image of Panem. Its citizens know no pleasure, and are strong in body, mind and discipline. Its leader is also hungry for power and will do anything to make sure her people continually swim in the revenge dream that's so key to securing her power.

The mirror imaging builds steadily throughout Mockingjay until it culminates in the rebel leader's decision to either exterminate her vanquished foes or subject them to a hunger games populated by Panem's children. Collins labors mightily to move the reader from sympathy with the rebels to disgust with Panem, the rebels, and presumably all governments.

The money quote of the political story is Plutarch's. He delivers this whilst the rebels are dreaming of the peace and the new republic surely just around the corner upon the war's end. Katniss asks him whether he's preparing for another war. He replies, "Oh, not now. Now we're in that sweet period where everyone agrees that our recent horros should never be repeated. But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We're fickle, stupid being with short memories and a great gift for self-destruction. Although who knows? Maybe this will be it, Katniss." Plutarch being named after the great historian and being cabinet-head of the new nation, this quote is quite fitting. More to the point, it's hopeless and delivered in a moment of giddy happiness. The contradiction should not be lost on the reader.

Mayhap government in abstract is OK, but it'll never work in real life. Collins doesn't give us a money quote on the principles of governing (she does offer a vague hope in republicanism) but my impression is she wants to scream out to our children that the worst of us always rise to the top. At the very least, we should be very suspicious of any and every government ... and of any who would oppose government.

To say in giving us Coin she's given us no Washington is the deepest of understatements. Coin is as evil as Snow, and in every way. Before the book ends, Coin has attempted the murder of Katniss, succeeded at murdering Prim, killed hundreds of innocent children, and re-instituted the hunger games for exactly the same purpose as Panem instituted them in the first place. It also bears saying Coin is no Lincoln, and has no interest in reconstruction. Given the opportunity to give our children an incredible set of role models, Collins ignores every redeeming character of history.

Instead, she's given us the ugliness of the French Revolution without all the inconvenient restraints of reality. Robespierre and Napoleon couldn't genetically engineer monsters that hiss Katniss' name, smell like roses, and hardly knew how to die, nor could they invent parachuting presents with which to immolate children. What's more, I question whether even such monsters as Robespierre and Napolean would have done so if they could. Collins' leaders only regret that their evil is thwarted. She carefully mingles her mixture of fantasy and hyper-reality with her presentation of geo-politics. In the end, the conclusion is unstated, subliminal, and unavoidable. Leaders are the real inhuman monsters.
The message can actually be helpful - in its place and time. It reminded me the "helpful" intrusions of the TSA into our privates and the intrusion of thought police for our well-being are not to be blindly trusted. She has a solid point, but I question whether it's the point to be making to adolescents. And I'm sure the use of hyper-violence and the lack of any redemptive character are unconscienable in a book for teens.

America is still a republic, and government of some form is necessary. People do very poorly without some kind of objective justice system in place, and the despair this series promotes is an enemy of that cooperation needed to form a just society. The instinct to cooperation is much harder to build than that to selfish cynicism. If The Hunger Games contained any meaningful example of constructive cooperation, I missed it.

In the end, every character's arc shared one commonality. To the degree that character was strong and willing to be unscrupulous, he or she was a winner. To the degree a character was weak and/or good, he or she was a loser. I believe Peeta, Boggs, and Finnick were the best characters in the book. I hardly need to tell how they were rewarded for their decency. May the Lord shower blessings on those who decide to be like Peeta after all they saw him endure. And need I point out Katniss was a winner? A guilt-plagued winner, but a winner from start to end.

The author's stated purpose in writing this series was to explore the effects of war and violence on those coming of age. I cannot imagine any value in this book, except to inflict a small piece of that  damage on our children, and that without any redeeming counter-example to the destruction. It's an emminently readable series, up until the far too heavy ending, and that discourages me only more. Rather like the taste of fine liquor, once it's grown on you it seems hard to ever lose it again.

I wish our children didn't have such a taste for this fare. I wish I didn't.

The Hunger Games

“The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.”

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, definitely stretches the mind. The author describes herself as continuing to "explore the effects of war and violence on those coming of age," and The Hunger Games fits that bill. Here are my thoughts on whether children should be exploring these effects along with Ms. Collins. Expect large and small **** spoilers **** to follow.

When it became wildly popular a couple years ago, I was approached by several people who thought I'd probably enjoy it. They were right, and yet I decided not to read it. I'd enjoyed Steven King's The Running Man (the book was wildly different and better than the movie, clear down to what the running game actually was.) I was thrilled by Rambo: First Blood (movie only) and Loius L'Amour's Last of the Breed (a fantastic tale of a lone, hunted man trekking across Siberia and living by his wits and skills.) I like this kind of story a lot. I even enjoyed The Lottery, which exposed the evil of utopias built on unjust sacrifice.

I knew I should like this book, but I couldn't get past its backstory. A society enthralled with watching children brutally murder each other was not an imaginary world in which I wished to live. I took a pass. I didn't read the book until last week, when circumstances motivated me to overcome my aversion. Now that I have, I'd like to share the challenges I find in Suzanne Collins' work. I'll save you some suspense and let you know I don't recommend it.

The author surely serves up an edge-of-your-seat thrill-fest. And it's more richly imagined than I'd been led to believe. The book is not merely a rejection of a culture obsessed with reality TV.  In Collins' world, 90% of the populace watches the hunger games solely because it's mandatory viewing. The bourgeios of the capitol, Panem, are rolling in the wealth stolen from its 12 outlying districts and they gleefully savor the drama of watching inferior children slaughter each other. The twelve districts, though, have a much more awkward relationship to the TV show. The government created the hunger games to palpably remind the districts Panem will kill and relish doing so should the districts attempt to repeat an earlier insurrection. Most of the people in the districts hate the hunger games the same way any sane person would hate watching their own children killed for propaganda.

The book is really about one child's formation and probably about revolutionary politics (I've not read the second and third books, but if the series doesn't end with an attempt to overthrow Panem I'd be mystified). Katniss is formed by a youth of extreme poverty -- the near-death-by-starvation and constant-weakness-through-unrelenting-scarcity breed of poverty. Katniss must grow up suddenly at age eleven when she becomes her family's breadwinner. Panem's theft of all her district's wealth leaves her in that awful position, and she deeply resents Panem. Her childhood as a whole shapes Katniss into a person who cannot form relationships easily.

The meat of the book takes place after she's thown into the life or death struggle which is the hunger games. One boy and one girl from each of the twelve districts are dropped into the wild and required to kill one another until only one victorious survivor remains. I don't think it's much of a spoiler to tell you Katniss survives. I knew that when I started the book, and it proved true. There are other spoilers I'd be happy to divulge if there are any parents out there who want a cheat sheet to understand what their children are reading.

The hunger games themselves change Katniss in two ways. Throughout the days of training and publicity leading up to the actual battle, through the weeks of conflict, and even during the closing ceremonies, Katniss is discovering she's loved by Peeta, the boy selected from her district. From the moment they're introduced to each other, Katniss can't make heads or tails of the his kindness. Nor can she understand her own emotional and chemical responses to his love. The struggle unbalances her, but in a milieu of the constant threat of death she has no time to work it out. Peeta honestly loves Katniss, but she is deeply disabled by her childhood. She's incapable of believing and rejoicing that she's loved. Instead, she interprets all his honest care and concern as some carefully devised survival strategy. Katniss is unable to receive Peeta's honest love.

The violence of the games also deeply wounds Katniss. She spends several weeks in the woods with death behind every shrub. Any of us who watch the evening news knows of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the author returns Katniss to civilization with a mondo case of it. Katniss's first trauma happens within seconds of the games' start. A boy coughs up blood on her because he was hit in the back with a thrown knife. It's a gruesome picture, and it's only the beginning. Before the hunger games are over she's killed a handful of children herself, and watched helplessly as another handful die. Death coming so suddenly charges every second, waking or sleeping, with rational, valid, deadly fear, and she's in the arena for weeks. Gathering food, for example, becomes doubly dangerous; a lack of food will kill her, but so might an ambush while gathering it. Every action or inaction might be the thing that kills you.

The author successfully holds us on the edge of our seats while Katniss faces real danger. The author also  successfully portrays the scars Katniss will bear for life after her experiences. Katniss suffers survivor guilt when children she respects and enjoys die instead of her, but is surprised at her lack of joy over the deaths of her enemies. Katniss remembers some of the victory celebrations of previous victors, but finds no such elation in her own heart. Her enemies are just more dead children to Katniss, children who never should have been in the arena at all.

All this is consistent with Ms. Collin's stated goal, to explore the effect of war and violence on those coming of age.

I understand the story and follow its execution accurately. I'm not intrisically turned off by action or violence. I grasp the themes and the concepts the author invites us to digest. And with all this explanation up front, I recommend children not read this book.

Oliver Wendell Holmes' quote at the top of this post weighs heavily on my mind. Suzanne Collins evidently has decided children will profit from having their minds stretched by this brutal introduction to death. I disagree.

We introduce our children to sex. When children introduce themselves to sex, things are difficult for them at best and can easily turn unhealthy. Responsible parents manage this introduction with a degree of care, balancing the flow of information to match the maturity of their children. Handing a child The Hunger Games teaches violence and death to children on the same level as sending them off with a softcore pornographic novel to teach them sex.

Why do we withhold pornography from our children? Because it offers up what I'll call hyper-reality. It paints imaginable situations with imaginable outcomes that speak to our most elemental fears and lusts. Low quality pornography paints barely imaginable situations while the higher quality stuff approaches the believable, but whatever its quality the addictive power of pornography is in its hyper-reality. It condenses and distills the joy of sex into a thrilling ride. It invites the reader to believe for a few pages.

The Hunger Games is hyper-reality. Harry Potter is fantasy. The cruciatus curse, which causes an agonizing death by excessive pain, is simply not real. Les Miserables fits as reality. Gavroche is killed when he bravely runs out in the street to retrieve ammunition. Harry Potter portrays larger-than-life dangers that could never happen, while Les Miserables might really come to any of us some day but its dangers are life-sized. The Hunger Games portrays larger-than-life violence in a believable way. It's highly thrilling, but hyper-reality always is.

Reading The Hunger Games raised a lot of questions in my mind. Despair sells. Violence and chaos are now primary marketing devices. Relatively speaking, The Hunger Games is decent and upstanding in its handling of violence. The late Heath Ledger's character, the Joker in The Dark Knight, sets a hideous standard for the degree of random violence people will pay good money to ingest. Compared against The Dark Knight, Suzanne Collins' book is a nunnery of restraint in its depiction of each death, but then again The Dark Knight doesn't portray children killing children for as children's fare.

Stretching your hamstrings is a good thing, but done wrong it can lead to injury. Stretching the mind is what growing up is all about, but dangerous stretching can leave our children with injured lives. The Hunger Games sets twenty-four very human, very young peers to the task of brutally killing each other, and vividly shows us how they go about it. There's no way to spin that as constructive, or as a healthy way to introduce children to the realities of war and violence. There's no way this book can fail to stretch the young minds of its readers, and no way it can do so safely.

Perhaps, it's just darkest before the dawn. Perhaps, in the third book Katniss shows us the way to overcome the scars of war. Perhaps, Ms. Collins will show our children what Victor Frankl learned in Nazi death camps, that life is always worth living once its meaning has been grasped. If so, then maybe I can make room for her having gone so far over the line. The subject is and should be horrifying, so I doubt I could reconcile to it. Even so, I see no glimmer of Man's Search for Meaning peeking through from The Hunger Games. I'd have to see it to believe it, and I'd need someone to promise me it's there in the third book before I'd have any intrinsic desire to see it for myself, but the Internet is all about people telling me I'm wrong ... and ya'll are right pretty often.

Until that time, at age forty-seven I'm left with the image of the boy from District 9's blood splattered on my face and the orange backpack over which we fought. The image won't ruin my life, but I'm surely no richer for it.

Will our children profit more?

Eleven Pullups

Hello All,

I've started a new, autobiographical blog. I'm calling it Eleven Pullups, and am still cogitating about the subtitle. It'll be something remotely like, "Learning to Talk to God." It's going to deal a lot with exercise and with failing. If either of those subjects interests you, feel free to drop by.

http://elevenpullups.blogspot.com/

Comment Moderation: My apologies

Sorry to the handful of you who made valuable comments out here, and I didn't notice. It turns out Google auto-enabled a setting that turned moderation on for any post over 14 days old, then didn't let me know. I've read all the comments, and appreciated them, though I don't think responding to them all makes sense. If you're interested in a dialogue, try me again. I've given Google an email address. :-)

The Lion's Jaw

I planted my feet in the imperial box, grabbed Caesar by the scruff of his collar, dragged him to his feet beside me. Turning, I presented him to the assembled Romans of the Colosseum. Facing the crowd now, I could see the bloody path I'd wrought to arrive at this place. Using nothing but the jawbone of Caesar's lion, and the strength of the Lord's right arm, I'd fought my way to the seat of power. Behind the carnage lay the marks made when I hit my knees and prayed for this deliverance He'd wrought.

I preached the story of my Deliverer to the stunned ears of Rome's rich and poor. Caesar imagined he was a god, but my God was Caesar of Caesars. I challenged the stunned crowd to tell me how I could possibly be standing here now, with the empire in my hands, if this Caesar were whom he pretended to be. And, jawbone ready behind Caesar's neck, I asked Rome to choose the impostor's fate - thumbs up? or the lion?

It was then, surrounded by 50,000 speechless Romans, I heard the Small Voice. "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it."

The spell of my fantasy was broken.

My knees still pressed into the sand of the Colosseum floor. The lion still roared through the iron grating. Caesar still ruled this place from his seat of splendor. I was still going to die.

And after that, the Light would shine. Still.

A Way to Pray - Whisper a Secret

The perfect way to pray is the way you need to right now. Be it praise or lament, ecstacy or liturgy, the words in your heart are the perfect ones to share with your Lord. There is no perfect way to pray any more than there's a perfect way to talk to your Mom. Still, there are a couple things you can do or remember that can make your life on Earth a little easier.

The first one sounds ridiculous, but give it a shot anyway.

Tell God a secret.

I told you it would sound ridiculous.

God being omniscient and all, it doesn't make a lot of sense to "let Him in on" a secret you've been hiding. But I'm not thinking of a secret you're keeping from God. Tell God something you don't want your boss to know. Tell Him something you don't want your wife, your kids, or your Mom to know. Tell Him something you're glad your pastor doesn't know.

Sometimes we're tempted beyond what we notice, and one day our weakness carries us away. Sometimes we wear down under a heavy burden. Sometimes we're afraid. We all have our limits, and very few of us enjoy advertising them, but they are an important part of who we are. Whispering a secret out loud to God is an important part of letting Him love us fully.

Telling God a secret doesn't make the pain go away, but it opens a dialogue. It turns a subconscious burden into a conscious request we can lay at God's feet, and the Spirit accepts all such invitations. I've been happily shocked at how much richer my conversations are with God after I've intentionally spilled some beans. Once you've told God your secret, you'll find the Spirit enables your spirit to pray with it and pray about it with solid purpose and direction.

Set aside ten minutes. See whether you don't find yourself coming back for more.

Negro Spirituals

I've spent a week distractedly listening to "Let My People Go: Negro Spirituals." And I thought I'd never listen to Jazz. (That's how iTunes classifies the album.)

Conclusion.

The songs use the word, "I," an awful lot, and that sounds pretty immature. They don't sing much about God. Instead, they sing about themselves. Most of the songs could be mistaken for children's songs, or are even childish. And they appear to be the original fountainhead of dozens of musical conventions about which I've complained over the years. They repeat themselves. They seldom seem to engage the mind, but always the emotions. They scream.

Or ...

What if it's me that's wrong.

These are the songs of people who rose from strength to strength and hope to hope and faith to faith while suffering inhumanities I can describe but not possibly imagine. Slavery in the American South was a mixed bag, with some owners dealing honorably with their property as people and others dealing out unimaginable cruelties. The faith of these Africans stood equally strong under both tests.

What's more, when the long awaited blessing of freedom came to these people, they could hardly rise up and call it blessed. Lincoln ended ended some cruelties but Jim Crow Laws ensured the blessings of liberty were yet denied to them and their posterity. In a time before welfare, a time of deep, true poverty I've only seen in foreign lands, these African-Americans continued to declare and live within the kingdom of Jesus Christ.

If it's me that's wrong. If, by some chance it's the fat and happy product of the richest generation that has something to learn about the kinds of songs that strengthen the spirit to face a world where Satan wears a size 11 boot, then I've got much to learn indeed.

I wonder.