Month: July 2004

Thought to Ponder

Are you playing peek-a-boo with God? Why do we keep hiding from our source of forgiveness? We shouldn’t feel shame for our sin if we are truly repentant and turn in a new direction in life. Quit trying to run from God.

What are you hiding behind? Quit being religious and hiding behind your symbols and ceremony; it’s all empty without a relationship with God. Besides, there’s nothing we can hide behind when it comes down to it because we are going to be called to account individually. Our ticket is not membership at a church, owning a Bible, or calling ourselves Christian. It is a relationship that is founded in blood, Christ’s blood, and obedience, our obedience. We are not married into the body of Christ for convenience sake but for conviction’s sake.

Chist is looking for you; he’s coming to look for you because he knows you’re afraid and expecially afraid of him. He wants you. The whole reason he came was to find you. He wants to cure your reasons for hiding from Him. But we have to be the ones to admit that we’re hiding. Christ was sent to seek and to save what is lost; that’s you and that’s me.

Thoughts on Public Morality

I don’t know that I believe in the “separation of church and state” per se, at least not as it seems so often depicted, where religious institutions had better not interfere with the government and the government has to force the religious institutions into compliance with this rule. It seems rather unbalanced, somehow.

I do believe in institutional separation of all organizations, from all sectors. For instance, I believe that Microsoft should be barred from all attempts at dictating the policies of Sun Microsystems. In the same way, I don’t believe that any religious institution should have the authority to dictate the tax code and that the government shouldn’t have the ability to dictate the age of responsibility (when you are old enough to be baptized) to a baptist church, or who should be allowed to have marriage ceremonies at a Mormon temple.

Religious institutions are, de facto, forbidden to establish splinter nation-states within sovereign U.S., and conversely, we have an ammendment in our constitution that forbids the US Government from establishing a sanctioned religious institution. Many nations do not have such an equable agreement. However, institutional separation is as far as that agreement goes. Institutions get to have overlapping influences. Microsoft is completely free to create an operating system for servers and Sun is completely free to create programs and languages designed for home PCs. Steve Jobs gets to be CEO of both Apple and Pixar. Religious conviction gets to affect government policy and government laws very often dictate what kind of religious behavor is acceptable. We can’t be puritanical about our imagined wall between religion and government or the whole thing falls apart. If we had to be absolute monarchs over our spheres of influence, we would destroy the very spirit of cooperation and tolerance that the first amendment was designed to protect.

People can’t abandon their religious convictions the minute they leave their pews any more than they can flaunt the laws of the government the minute they enter the doors of their church. These things overlap–there’s just no way around it. Public morality is the field of both the church and the state. There’s just no human way to separate them. And so, when people go to the ballot box, they have to vote their conscience. How could anyone be expected to vote against what they believe?

You could say that a representative has to vote according to the majority of his constituents, but honestly that’s a little bit backwards. To do that he has to keep on second guessing and ends up never pleasing anybody. Instead, the constituents need to elect a representative who already has like convictions. That way everybody gets to vote their conscience, which is good, because ultimately everyone already does. They might bend on an issue they consider trivial, but nobody votes against what they feel is right when they think it’s an essential issue.

Of course, the people who have the best convictions are not always in the majority. I’m aware of that. We have historical proof: Slavery used to be hard coded into the Constitution. But that still doesn’t mean that anyone has the capacity to live their lives according to someone else’s convictions. The majority can oblige the minority on inessential issues, but nobody can compromise on what they consider to be absolutely essential. They just can’t. Honestly, we shouldn’t expect them to. That is, we shouldn’t be surprised or shocked when people act according to their convictions. We may be surprised to find what their convictions are, but never shocked that they act accordingly.

So what happens when the minority doesn’t agree with the majority on a core issue? The normal thing. People act according to their convictions, regardless of the law. Then the issue becomes not what our beliefs are, but how essential are those beliefs. The majority sets the law, the minority breaks the law, and either the majority determines that their conviction wasn’t so essential after all, or the majority enforces the law until the minority changes their mind. Things automatically escalate until someone decides that some alternative trumps their conviction.

In the case of the civil war, the South seems to have decided that total annihilation was ultimately worse than slaves’ emancipation and an abrigement states rights. Coversely, the North seems to have determined that repealing slavery and forbidding succession were worth the lives they paid.

Sometimes we fight at the ballot box, and sometimes we vote with swords.

Thought to Ponder

This was written by Oswald Chambers.

“My speech and my preaching was not with enticing words.” – I Corinthians 2:4

Paul was a scholar and an orator of the first rank; he is not speaking out of abject humility, but saying that he would veil the power of God if when he preached the gospel he impressed people with his “excellency of speech.” Belief in Jesus is a miracle produced only by the efficacy of Redemption, not by impressiveness of speech, not by wooing and winning, but by the sheer unaided power of God. The creative power of the Redemption comes through the preaching of the Gospel, but never because of the personality of the preacher. The real fasting of the preacher is not from food, but rather from eloquence, from impressiveness and exquisite diction, from everything that might hinder the gospel of God being presented. The preacher is there as the representative of God – “as though God did beseech you by us.” He is there to present the Gospel of God. If it is only because of my preaching that people desire to be better, they will never get anywhere near Jesus Christ. Anything that flatters me in my preaching the Gospel will end in making me a traitor to Jesus; I prevent the creative power of His Redemption from doing its work.

Transitions Continued (concluded)

When last we checked, our hero’s forces were in disarray. The corporation’s financial accounts were rickety at best, infrastructure was failing, and there was a potential move on the horizon. (you didn’t know about the move? I’ll get to it.) Nevertheless, on the news of the upcoming merger alone, stock was holding, even rising, and management was optimistic. Life is transition.

Infrastructure:

I never knew a computer could self-destruct so completely. Valerie’s dad, in order to get the thing to work, had to replace the hard drives, the motherboard, the processor, and the case itself. While he was at it, he went ahead and upgraded the video card. The only thing I have left from the original machine is 768 MB of RAM, a CD-R drive and a floppy drive.

All my data was completely lost. There was no backup. This has completely crushed my college dream of keeping a copy of everything I ever wrote for all eternity. In the future, I think I shall have a much more cavalier attitude toward what I have to say. If it’s really really important, I’ll keep a hard copy. Otherwise… oh well! Eventually, I’ll get another CD Burner and start keeping useful backups of my data. But as it is, I’ve already written too many “important” things that have been lost for me to worry too much about what might be lost in the future. If I one day become a great internationally known figure, the scholars will mourn my carelessness. But as it currently stands, nobody will care anyway.

Finances:

This is the happy part. For two months now I’ve been totally and helplessly broke. It’s been a result of two conflicting situations: First I’m a graduate from a liberally expensive arts school, with the debt load of a new Lexus hovering over my back. And no Lexus to show for it, alas. Secondly, I had a part time job. Those two things don’t really go together. I won’t even discuss the paying off an engagement ring and the ever present opportunity to worry about acquiring funds to pay for a honeymoon, and eventually, a lack of co-paying roommate.

Both these prior burdens have been at least temporarily removed from me: I’m back in school (albeit a correspondence program), which means my $200 monthly payment has quite suddenly withered away (but oh did it linger in the withering!). There’s some extra cash. And I’ve now got a full time job. Same department, new position. I am now Chief Gopher and Lord High Lackey. Same wages, but 8 hours more a week, plus an amazingly good benefits package. I’ve never had any benefits whatsoever, so I’m doubly impressed. I’m still trying to figure out what the heck I’m supposed to do with vacation days. When I was a kid, if I wanted time off from work, I just quit my job. (You think I’m kidding, don’t you?). What’s more, part time people at my company are paid “in arrears” (i.e. a week late), while full time people are paid current. So when I switched, there had to be an adjustment . This came about in the form of about 3 weeks of pay in a single paycheck. It was a very happy day for me. I’m still in shock, though, from two months of paycheck to paycheck and bouncing check sneak attacks. So now that I have money, I’m terrified to spend it.

Moving:

Last of all. I’m moving at the end of the month. It’s not you. It’s not your fault. It’s my roommate’s fault. If he didn’t have a red sports car, none of this would be happening. It’s a used sports car that he bought for $4000, but it’s red and people have been breaking in to it. Our apartment complex is on a major intersection and there are no walls. So people just walk right in and do stupid stuff. Last month, some idiots drilled a hole in the lock of his car and made a botched attempt at stealing his CD Player. All they got was the face and some of the plastic molding on the dash. They also took a new leather overnight bag he had in the trunk. It was the second time in 3 months. So he decided he was moving. Now. Our lease ends July 31, so he’s out on July 31. I had two choices: I could move too, or I could find a new roommate. I chose the lesser of two weevils.

We’re moving together. I gave him an ultimatum that my payments could not go up the year before I got married. His personal mission: find an apartment in the ritziest neighborhood in town. The amazing thing is that we both got what we wanted. An apartment around a mile from Queens University for only $700 a month, utilities included. If you do the math, my rent may have actually gone down.

Meanwhile I keep packing. I was not prepared to move in a month. I’m stealing boxes from everywhere, and looking desperately for a free moving truck.

One last hurdle have I to climb
And then my life will look like…

Normal?

A Life in Transition

The image that I seem to have given everybody of my total abstinence from the ‘Net for the last week has been a little misleading. My roommate happened to have a spare computer somewhere in his closet that I’ve been using for the bare essentials. It’s actually a quaint little piece: it has a cute little wind-up key in the front you have to turn three times to get it to boot up. To connect to the internet, I have an empty can I set on the cable moden and a little string I run back to the computer.

I can check my mail and read Schlock Mercenary. The rest is just too much effort.

I also have pretty good internet access from work, and with my new job, I have enough time to additionally check my bank ballance and verify that I am, in fact, more broke than I have been at any other time in my life. I had more disposable funds than this when I was 12. (That wasn’t a joke–I had a nice little outfit going when I was 12.)

Things are, however, looking up for me. My new job is everything that I had hoped and imagined, which is to say, it’s a big hairy mess–but a fun mess. I’m the low rung on the ladder, but I’m mostly in the thick of things, being sent on errors, and generally the only person in my office who gets to meet people from other offices. I make stupid mistakes and correct most of them before they get caught.

As I was getting stuff moved from one cubicle to the other, and getting permissions for all my new responsibilities, I had several opportunities to run in with some of the IS crew. One of them told me he was surprised I had taken the position I took, since there were several positions open in his department that he was sure I was qualified for. I felt this was a very great compliment, considering I had just single-handedly obliterated the entire insides of my own computer.

Speaking of which, my computer is now in the capable hands of my fiance’s father. He’s an old school pro at this sort of thing. He doesn’t cut any corners, righ up to actually unpluging the machine and running a ground wire before doing surgery.

As far as I can tell, though, it was a lost cause in my case. The only thing that seems to be left is the case and a CD player. The motherboard, processor, two hard drives, and the power supply, all toast. I have no idea how this happened. It seems oddly suspicious that they would all go out at once like that. What I do know is that I have no money at my disposal with which to pay for all those computer parts. Valerie’s dad has been most understanding: he has agreed to take care of everything himself and merely take payment out of my hide. It’s the standard contract: seven years of indentured servitude. My only satisfaction is in the sure knowledge that Valerie does not have an older sister.

Life without a computer has been very surreal for me. I come home and find that there is little left to do. I make some dinner, grab a book, read a little, and collapse into bed: a very simple, orderly, ordinary day. Granted, part of that is that I’m still recovering from two months working the night shift, but I think there’s something more to this than the fact that I’ve finally removed that thick blanket from off my window.

Last year, during the height of the war, I had my radio perpetually set to NPR, mostly because it was the only radio station my car could pick up, and I was bored of all my CD’s. But if you eat a food long enough, it begins to find a way into your cravings, and you begin to desire something you never before really hungered for. I knew I had passed some sort of barrier when I was listening to their saturday news-gameshow and answered nearly every question right. As I smiled and nodded to their jibes, I realized I had become a current events junkie. And then, like too many concurrent bowls of strawberry ice cream, the flavor was gone for me. Suddenly I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to just keep listening until all the important events stop happening. It’s their job to go around making sure that something important is happening. Instead, I discovered that even the important things weren’t really all that important.

They’re just events. They keep on happening. Only the cast and setting change.

I think I’ve had the same sort of revelation forced on me by my recent Net hiatus. I had been frantically scrounging around, looking for good new blogs to read, trying to say something important enough to get mentioned on blogs4God, trying to be a big dog, noticing to get noticed, discussing ideas that other people were discussing. Being forced away helped me to realize that all of it is a bit of a vanity. It’s not like they’re saying anything new. All the Evangelicals are saying evangelical things, and all the Catholics are saying Catholic things, and all the Republicans are saying Republican things. All the business sites are just oozing with free prize inside and this radical new concept called transparency. And I’m not any of those things. I don’t suppose I’m necessarily against any of them, but there’s really no need for me to discuss whether Saved! is a movie worth seeing. The only reason I might discuss such a thing is that other people are interested in it. And I like people.

I like people. But attempting to clamor because they’re clammoring is a pretty silly thing. I’m just not a clammerer(…er). I’ve got too much C.S. Lewis in me for that and not enough G.K. Chesterton. I’m fonder of ideas than of finangling.

Don’t worry. I’m not going to go from here and place some oath on myself to only write a certain way. Studying all these other people has already had the effect of putting too many limiters on what I do and say, while I tried to find some essential standard. What I’ve done is simply to rediscover what I knew before: that I find books far more fascinating than newspapers.