is.

What is?

God says “I Am.”

It is very easy to wax philosophical about life. It is entirely too common to make life more complicated than it really is.

As I get older, I face more and more challenges. And I’m only now entering college. Life seems to get harder and harder. Things I was sure were sure aren’t sure. People prove themselves unreliable. I prove myself incapable.

I desire loyalty. I desire love. Beyond those two, I ask very little.

Some people ask more. Some people ask much more.

God is.

I had a Dream.

The Ring and The Badge. Laws of Conflict. The Prodigal. The Last Militia. Stand. Benjamin Partridge. The Wanderer

These are the names of the dreams I have had. Some are film scripts, some are books.

One, the first, was even shot partway. That one was about a family of outlaws in the Wild West, and what happens when one of them meets a Sheriff who doesn’t know he’s reaching out to an outlaw.

Laws of Conflict was a story of two detectives in Chicago and their divergent views of the law and what happened when they acted out on them.

The Prodigal was a story of a father and a son estranged for most of their lives, and the difficult process to become friends again. Or perhaps for the first time.

The Last Militia was about an apocalyptic scenario in which the world nearly falls to pieces, but an American force is raised up from her ashes to defend freedom.

Stand was about a modern-day Job. A musician to whom every possible blow is given.

Benjamin Partridge is somewhat like The Prodigal, but auto-biographical.

The Wanderer.

I do not know what the Wanderer was about. I have an interesting first couple of chapters to that novel, but then it ends. It gives no clue as to where I was headed with the story. It is the lost story.

I should like to revive some of those dreams, but I do not know how or where to begin.

Tact, or more accurately: The Ability to Keep One’s Mouth Shut

People should shut up more.

If working in banking has taught me one thing, it’s that people need to talk about 100% less and listen about 100% more. More often than not, the whole reason a customer gets in trouble with his account or gets mad at a banker is because he was not listening and doing too much talking.

When I was younger, and louder, I derided tact as unnecessary, a lame excuse for dishonesty. Now, I am still young, but much quieter. I wish I had learned to be tactful earlier.

It is too easy not to think of the effect the word we may speak on the person to whom we direct it. It seems that daily I find myself wondering why I said a certain thing to a certain person.

People, including myself, need to shut up more.

Logic in the Starfleet

I tried to come up with a more creative title for this post than simply a list of the topics, but I couldn’t. Sigh. Anyways. Last week I had the chance to go see the outstanding new movie, Star Trek. It was quite the two hour experience.

As I sat there, watching the story of how the way things are in Star Trek came to be, I was particularly struck by the focus they placed on exploring Spock and his logic versus Kirk and his emotionality.

Kirk is a vulnerable character, easily prone to outbursts of anger, running around with bravado and a level of gung-ho perhaps not advisable for the ordinary joe who exists outside of the world of the silver screen. He has a particular fondness for hanging off of things. He’s very sure of himself, arrogant for sure.

Spock, on the other hand, is making every attempt to be what Kirk is not. He wishes to quell his human side, and become a pure mathematical machine. For the most part, he is successful. His father tells him: "I married your mother because it was logical." Spock wants to be just like his father. So he does.

As the film goes along, though, if you’re watching for it, an interesting trend develops with the two main characters. They’re both making nearly all of their decisions based on their emotions, many of which are anger and jealousy. But even though Spock is the most successful in his life, having distinguished himself as one of the more promising young cadets in the Starfleet, you begin to get the distinct feeling that it is Kirk who is destined for long term success. Kirk’s decisions keep working out, and Spock’s keep showing him to be less than what he claims to be.

Why is this? I think it’s how they both were framing their decisions. To Spock, the world must fit into one big logical puzzle, devoid of emotion or feeling, other than perhaps the feeling of fear. What is unfathomable to him, such as someone being able to outsmart him, is rejected as not only illogical, but wrong. If it does not fit into his logical puzzle of the world, then it must be emotion and therefore illogical and therefore wrong. This leads him to incredible rage and anger, which he tries to justify as logical. It’s obvious to everyone that it’s not.

Kirk is the exact opposite in two ways. One, he’s not afraid to let people know exactly what he thinks and feels about them and the situations he’s been presented with. Unlike Spock, he’s not trying to fool everyone into thinking he is logical, he’s just who he is. Secondly, he’s not trying to force the entire universe into his box. He’s accepted the fact that he doesn’t understand everything. But he also comes to the point of realizing he doesn’t have to back down from anything either. He just has to face the obstacles he’s given, albeit perhaps with a bit of overconfidence, and defeat them.

What Kirk may not realize he knows, but he does know, is that the emotions he feels ARE in fact based on logic. It’s subconscious logic that our body tells us. In real life, God has simply given our brains and souls the ability to process what is happening around us in a logical fashion. When we try to force everything into our box of the way the world works, try to force ourselves to be logical, we fail. God hasn’t designed the world to be that way. He wants us to feel. He doesn’t want us making our decisions based on our logic of the world.

We’re not robots. We can’t expect ourselves to act like them. We have feeling. God put it there.

Irony, and other stuff

Tonight, as I was listening to a PCC recording, I remembered one of the young men on PCC’s ministry team who visited our church a few years back. I chuckled as I thought of the time that Sunday afternoon when he sang with a couple of us. I wonder if he would have thought twice if he knew that two of the three guys he was singing with would be at BJU within three years. Oh, the irony.

He was a nice guy. I guess I wanted to get a world-class music education though, as opposed to just a really good one.

Tomorrow, I will post about Star Trek and Logic and Emotion.

Today, I was stuck by needles in the attempt to determine if something is physically wrong with me. Repeatedly. Who knew going to college was so painful? I can come right out and tell them if something is wrong with me. They just have to ask. Oh, well. I supposed I was “immunized” to the needles when I stayed in the hospital for five days and they had to change the IV location three times and were constantly injecting some new something.

Truth.

Unconditional love costs.

I like to think of myself as a loyal person. I can’t stand the thought of hurting my friends and turning on them or worse, turning away from them. I don’t always feel that some of my friends in my life have returned the favor, and I’m fully aware that I have fallen short of my own goals many times. But, whenever I feel that someone doesn’t really care about me, someone who I care about a lot, it’s easy for me to feel wronged.

I realize, however, that me feeling wronged, is, well…. wrong.

Think. Who gives the ultimate in unconditional love? REAL unconditional love. It’s Christ, of course. He loves so much that he not only laid down his life for all of us, he laid it down despite the fact that each of us have made the conscious choice at one point or another in our lives to reject him. That’s unconditional love.

I don’t think I could do that.

Home Again.

That was quick.

Well, except for the waiting for three hours in the small as a pinhead Kansas City Airport terminal. That was miserable. But it was a good kind of miserable, because it gave me more time to think.

Whoever said parting is a sweet sorrow was either crazy or selling pre-arranged funerals. I have yet to experience a goodbye that was happy, comfortable, joyous, OR sweet.

And yet, today, I am glad to be home. It means I am that much closer to being headed off to school. That much closer to being done with having to dwell on and fix the mistakes I made in the last couple years.

I am not bitter. I do not regret. But the pain still lingers, and that pain causes me to act in ways I wish I wouldn’t sometimes.

This trip taught me so much. Mostly, it showed me how much different I am from what I used to be. How much I’ve changed. I am a quiet person now. Not an introvert, but quiet.

In other news, I watched more movies than I have probably watched over the course of two weeks than ever before. In short: UP, Cars, Robots, The Incredibles, Bolt, The Triplets of Belleville, The Princess Bride, Ratatouille, and Star Trek. I had seen none of those before. Yes, most of them were by Pixar. And UP is incredible. Star Trek is good, but Up is one of my new favorite movies. It is so touching.

Home again. Ahh, it feels good. Even if I’m dreading it.

God is Great. God is Good. God is Surprising.

So, almost two weeks ago at my church, I (along with two other guys) preached the evening service. Fifth Sunday is always “Youth Night,” which means that the young men lead the singing and preach, jobs normally held by men who are young, but have seen a bit more of the block. Of course, because our church is so small, it usually ends up being the same couple people who do those jobs on Youth Night, and I almost always preach.

This time, it was interesting. I preached on the topic of “Thriving Through Trials.” It was the most personal message I’ve ever preached, because it dealt with a topic I have struggled to learn about over the course of the last year or so. It was without a doubt the best sermon I’ve ever preached. Of course, it was not my doing, but God’s. He was using things I had been through to speak to His awesome power.

I must admit I felt good about it. I was pleased. And I did feel like God had really used me and taught me some stuff. Was that wrong? I don’t think so.

What was wrong was me thinking that God was done teaching me about it . . . That I had somehow mastered the topic and had moved on. My mistake. My major mistake.

Even though it was a change, suddenly realizing that God had more to teach me about it, I’m glad for what I had learned. I had learned not to fight him. The surrender this time around was so much easier. Sure, it hurts, but I’ve come to understand that God is definitely looking out for me. He knows exactly what the best solution for my life’s interesting situations is, and if I let him do what he wants, I can rejoice in all of it.

This last week has taught me so much about what I preached about. I’m only now beginning to realize that I have such a long way to go. But I have confidence that God is working.

And I’m happy.

Airplane rides…

So, that first flight was awesome. Great view, faster than expected, good conversation.

Second flight, not so much. Boring. Lots of white clouds outside window. Little conversation.

Though I did get to watch a fairly interesting half an hour talk about Classical Music from the Ted conference. Fun.

Marketing

Time to address letters!

Never knew my skills with typing/word processing would end up with me doing almost all the mail marketing work at my job. Oh, well. It’s nice because I get to work in a little back room where nobody bothers me and I don’t have to deal with cantankerous customers.

Cantankerous. Now there’s a word!