Month: December 2003

I just want to clarify. Going to MorningStar didn’t make my dreams any more real. They merely imparted to me, as Frank Herbert would say, “A terrible sense of purpose.” Before, I had plans. Now I am determined to follow through.
My apologies for all the introspection. But, it’s my site, and these are the thoughts that have been interesting me lately.

A quick (not) survey of my schemes.

A Christian Bookstore

This market is so underdeveloped. I have some major problems with nearly every Christian bookstore, chain or otherwise that I have ever encountered. There are three basic categories that I know for Christian media. The first is Theology, by which I mean textbooks. Original texts, Peer-reviewed journals, defining theological treatises, like Calvin’s Institutes. The thick stuff that your average reader doesn’t really want to read.

The second area is Didactic, by which I mean the vast industry I seem to have discovered for producing Sunday-school manuals for the denominations. Teaching aids, lesson plans, daily readers. This area actually ticks me off, because it seems that each denomination has their own specific publishing house that produces their propaganda, er, paraphernalia… oh! whatever, that they use to teach their people. So the vast majority of Christians, at least in the United States, is getting their theology dictated to them by for-profit publishing houses with clear theological slants. Most churches don’t pick and choose. If you’re a Baptist, you buy from Lifeway. If you’re a Methodist, you buy from Cokesbury. Each distributor is completely exclusive of the other irregardless of what may actually be the best teaching available. That strikes me as pretty stupid. Or at least narrow minded.

The third area, Retail (for lack of a better word), is by far the most dynamic. This is where all the books, movies, CD’s T-shirts and whatever else is out there is produced directly for people to just walk in, peruse, and buy. This is where most of our Christian culture comes from: Veggie tales, and Dennis Jernigan; Hank Hannegraff and Rick Joyner. (Yes, I did just use both those names in the same sentence) Ironically, though this is the furthest removed from the “theology” branch of Christian media, in the general public mind is where most of our theology is actually born.

And there are two problems with the way the market is currently being run. First of all, the Theology and Didactic branches of Christian media are usually completely divorced from what vendors sell retail. What’s more, Theology and Didactic materials are further divided by sect. You won’t find much Pentecostal theology at Lifeway, let alone a Pentecostal Sunday-school lesson plan. Secondly, and far more importantly, Christian retail is almost exclusively limited to major distributors. If a Christian CD isn’t distributed by Maranatha, Vineyard, or WorshipTogether.com, you probably won’t find it at your local Christian bookstore. Yet most of the Christian media that is produced is actually indie projects. How many itinerant preachers come to your church and at the end announce, “And be sure and check out my book, which is published by Nelsen Bible Distributors”? No. It was probably published by somebody you never heard of. Especially if the speaker has anything really new to say. Which means that if anything really new happens in the Body of Christ, you won’t find out about it until it’s already over.

I have a plan to fix that. And I could spend the next 3-4 pages explaining all of it. Suffice it to say that I want to create a system of stores that sell every form of Christian media available on a national level, and still manages to focus a good deal of attention on local writing, music, and art. If a book, CD, print, etc. becomes popular enough locally, it will then be distributed on a national level

Oh the plans I have for that… If I hit a high enough level of success, I plan to dabble a little bit in radio and the production end of the stick. Just imagine the potential if we ever hit the international level…

Moving on!

Ministry

 

I will get that degree. I’m not sure exactly what all I’m going to do with it. But I will get that degree.

Christian Fiction and Poetry

 

I’ve got a couple of novels, an epic poem, maybe a Christian TV series floating around here somewhere. I could go into detail on some of them, but I won’t do it now.

Bible Translation

 

This isn’t exactly high on my list. But my major pet peeve with English bibles is that the translators spent years learning to understand the original Greek and Hebrew of the Bible. But they spent about zero time learning the language into which they were translating it. The result has invariably been only half a translation, because the translator knew exactly the meaning of the original word, but didn’t have at his disposal the perfect word out of the 1 million available in the English language. So I’d like to do my own translation of the Bible. You know. In my spare time.

Family

 

This is at the bottom of my list, but it’s actually the most important. I’m 25 years old and I’ve been preparing for at least 20 to be a husband and father in the best family the world has ever seen. I want the world to be able to beat a path to my door and say “here lives the most wonderful family anyone has ever been a part of in a thousand years.” If you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right. I could go on forever about that too, but I don’t want to scare off any interested parties just yet.

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Anyway. I expounded in some detail about the bookstore, but on each of these things, I’ve been scheming for quite some while, and could speak with some great depth on all of them.

These are a few of my favorite dreams.

When I was a kid, my parents used to tease me. (Yeah. It happens.) Normal boys, they would tell me, want to be something when they grow up. You’re supposed to pass through these stages of different kinds of labels where you want to be a fireman, or a policeman. And then you grow up a little and you want to be a pro football player, or an astronaut. And then you grow up a little more, and you want to be a doctor, a lawyer, or a scientist. And then the sorrows and cares of this life rise up and choke the life out of you; you discover that you’re actually pretty good at numbers, and you settle down and become an accountant. Little boys are supposed to be always looking for these pre-packaged niches they can slide into and feel normal and successful at the same time.

And then I’d think to myself, or sometimes I’d say, Yeah, but normal little boys are perfectly content to play with Hot-wheels cars and G.I. Joes. I couldn’t play with toy cars when I was a kid, not really. It was too mundane for me. Yes. Cars. That’s how most people get around in this part of the world. You can go left, or right, or straight forward. If you’re feeling really tricky, you can go backward. We’ve covered that. Nothing new or imaginative here. Let’s move along! What I really liked, though, were those really nifty-cool cars that had doors you could pop open, because then I could pretend that this car had special doors that could fold out into wings, and then they could fly. Now that’s something worth thinking about. Cars that fly. You don’t see that every day. At least most people don’t. I do.

So my mom or my dad would say, “Kyle, what do you want to be when you grow up?” And I’d say, “I don’t know. What I’d really like is this job where I think up these really great ideas and then people get together and make them work. I’d be, you know, an ideas man.” And then my dad or my mom would chuckle (actually, I think it was my dad) and they’d say, “Well, I don’t think they make jobs like that.” And then I’d sort of mentally shrug my shoulders and go back to playing with my flying cars or reading my favorite fairy tales. And that was that. No ambition, really.

Well, sort of. I really did want to be an ideas man. I get these really great schemes.

When I was in, maybe kindergarten or first grade, my house was just across the street from my school. It was a grade school with this HUGE playground, because it used to be the town high school. The town built a new, nicer high school, and turned the old one into a grade school. They took the football stadium, stuck a couple of monkey bars in one end and called it a playground. 100 yards of playground, I guess back in the day they had money, because the wall around our playground was made up of solid red sandstone, about four feet high, all the way around. On one side, though, the wall went up to eight or ten feet, or maybe even higher, because it seamlessly turned into stadium bleachers. There was a low wall sticking out at the bottom, about three feet, and then every foot, foot and a half, it would go up and back, like a series of gigantic steps, all made of red sandstone, topped with cement. It was gorgeous.

It was also old. Old sandstone crumbles. I remember grabbing a friend and pulling him over to the bleachers and taking a stick (or maybe it was just my finger) and scraping along the stones, around the edge of the mortar. The stuff crumbled into powder in my hands. Yep, said my friend, and that red dirt? It’s only found in Oklahoma.

Well, I knew enough about economics, even at the age of six, to know what that means. If it’s rare, it’ll sell. Within days I had an operation going. We were going to harvest some of that red dirt, haul it across state lines, and sell it at exorbitant prices. We’d be the richest first graders in the world. I even had a giant 50 gallon bag (formerly for dog food) to carry it in. I don’t remember exactly what happened to our venture. I probably couldn’t get enough man power together to get anywhere with it. But anyway it fell through. Years later, having moved away from Oklahoma, I have to confess to my embarrassment that red dirt can be found almost anywhere, though perhaps not so often and not so bright. It also doesn’t seem to be much use to anybody.

When I was 13, I was on a swimming team, first though my local YMCA, and then through my high school. It was a different town—my family moved a lot. However, there seemed to be a vast shortage of Olympic sized swimming pools to practice in. The Y had one, and the Goodyear plant had one, but most pools in town were for recreational swimming, not for swimming laps. The only really good pools were to found on the neighboring army base. They had about 4 of them, all 100 meters long. Beautiful swimming pools—that couldn’t be used without a direct military connection. I saw a scarcity, and I jumped on it. I broke the news to my mom: I was going to build a series of Olympic-size swimming pools all across town. By virtue of their superior size and quality, all the teens would come to my pools and everybody would be rich. My mom’s only response was that I’d better wait to see if we were even still here in a few months. In two months we moved.

Understand, these weren’t “what do you want to do with your life” ideas. They were just schemes. Little schemes. The summer before my senior year in high school, I calmly stepped into my parents’ bedroom one night and explained to them my plan to drop out of school, get my GED, and open a new Christian bookstore to pay my way through college. I was completely bewildered that they insisted I complete my schooling. None of these ideas had the ring to me of “I want to be a…” They were projects I wanted to do not be.

Somehow MorningStar changed all that. I’m 19 and suddenly I decide I want to move across the country and attend a school that gives no solid guarantee of exactly how they are going to benefit you. For some reason my parents decided they no longer had the right or need to be my calm voice of reason. So I come lolloping over the mountains, thinking I’ve got the world in my pocket, ready for who knows what. I know I didn’t know what.

And the first thing that I really learned at MorningStar is that I am unimpressive. I just don’t have the star power. I mean, I’m a good talker, when I’ve got something to say, but I stink at jumping on somebody else’s bandwagon. I’m a relatively good writer, but that’s a mediocre skill in a land where hardly anybody really reads. There were a lot of other people there who were a lot more frighteningly beautiful than me, and every one of them was trying to lead somebody somewhere. I had a lot of places I wanted to go as well, but every one of my schemes required some preparation, and a lot of followers, and there weren’t followers left. Or if there were, they didn’t really have the time to sit through any proper preparation. So I decided to be a follower. And I discovered that I’m a terrible follower. Everybody was going the wrong direction.

Then somewhere, in the midst of all that, somebody had the audacity to imply strongly that there was something that I couldn’t do. It wasn’t even at my church. It was my then friend’s dad. I announced one day at his house that I was tired of living off my six dollars an hour at the grocery store, and that I was going to get me a job in a skyscraper, making $10 an hour. He kind of looked at me, rolled his eyes a little, and made a sort of hmph-ing sound. The ever classic snort of derision. And something inside me snapped. If there’s one thing that can get my goat, it’s even the slightest implication that I can’t. I can do anything I set myself to, and don’t you forget it. Within a month, I had a job in a skyscraper, making $10 an hour. I also had no friend, but that’s a different story and will be told at a different time.

Since then I’ve been saving up my schemes, and I have determined in my heart that I will not let one of them fall to the ground. Which is why I pray, Dear Lord, let me live to be 300. I’m going to need every minute of that time.

What am I going to be? I’m going to be me—and I’m going to fly.