neumatikos

The next few days I’m going to be putting up some articles on some basic theological ideas I’ve been working through. Some of it may be re-hash, I’m not sure. I know a lot of it’s going to be very incomplete. A lot of these ideas would probably be good topics for books all by themselves, and I’m going to try to cover them in a couple or three pages. But they are all interrelated, and they do build upon each other, and I’m trying to work through these ideas, so you’re just going to have to sit there and suffer. Comments are welcome. No doubt there are going to be huge gaps that I’m missing. That’s what comes of trying to cover these kinds of ideas in just a few pages.

I’ve already made an illustrative attempt at expressing how God is the origin and foundation of everything. But let me go back real quick and touch on it again:
From a scientific perspective, the universe is held together by the power of His will. I’m not a scientist, so I’m not going to bother to try to substantiate that idea. I’m a better philosopher, so let me try from that angle.

Descartes is famous for saying “I think, therefore I am.” His basic point was that everything in the world that we experience could be an illusion. The whole darn thing could be a giant virtual reality trip. It seems solid enough, but then, so do the experiences of a schizophrenic man. So how do we know anything exists at all? Descartes’ answer was that we can’t. Since everything I get is filtered in through my senses, I can’t be sure than any of those things are real. The only things that I can ever be certain of are those things that I experience directly, whatever directly is.

So far, I’m actually okay with this. Now, I’ll say again that I’ve never actually read Descartes—I’ve only gotten summaries. But what comes next is where I think he and I diverge. From what I understand Descartes came to the conclusion that the only thing you can experience directly is yourself. Therefore, the only thing you can know exists for certain is yourself. If you turn your attention completely inward and focus on your own existence for just a moment, then you might catch yourself thinking. In that moment you have experienced yourself directly, without any intermediary filter, and you can rest assured that you exist. Typical humanistic foolishness.

Put that way, it doesn’t really sound very Christian, does it? That’s because it’s the farthest thing from Christian that there is. It’s man centered. More specifically, it’s self-centered, and self-absorbed, and as a result, it’s inherently wrong.

Here’s the flaw: No one can perceive himself. I am myself. I’m too busy being myself to experience myself. I can’t pry into people’s minds for an example, so let me zoom out a little bit and use something physical for a reference point: Hold up your hand for a minute. Can your hand experience itself? No it can’t. Unless there is something in particular happening to your hand, your hand doesn’t feel like anything at all. Unless an outside force acts upon your hand, your hand feels like absolutely nothing at all.

Now pick up an ice cube. What does your hand experience? COLD! What does that mean? Well, for one thing, it means that ice cubes are cold. Cold compared to what? Well, compared to your hand. So what does this tell you about your hand? It tells you that your hand is warmer than an ice cube. There was absolutely no way for you to experience the fact that your hand was warm, except for it to come into contact with something that was not warm.

This is true about every area of the human condition. Unless a person is in contact with something… different, then everything about them just feels… normal. Unless it is compared with something else, nothing exists at all.

I have hair on my face. But unless I touch my face or look in a mirror, I can’t tell that I have hair on my face. My face just feels…normal… like it isn’t even there at all. In fact, unless I make a good comparison, my face feels to me exactly the same way it did when I was ten or eleven. So this brings up another point: without a basis for comparison, not only can I not tell what I am, I can’t even tell if I’ve changed from what I used to be.

So much for “I think, therefore I am.” In the moment that I am actually sitting around contemplating the fact of my thinking about my existence, my existence becomes reduced to exactly what it is—nothing. Like I said before, unless I have something outside of me acting upon me, as far as I can tell, I simply do not exist.

Now. If I want to know that I am, all I need to do is have contact with something different. In a physical sense, touching an ice cube tells me that the ice cube exists, and that I exist. It also tells me that the ice cube is cold, and that I am not. If you ever touch an ice cube and don’t notice anything, it may mean that you have the exact same characteristics as the ice cube—which would strongly imply that you were .

That covers it for the physical world. But what if all that’s an illusion? Well, it would have to be somebody else’s illusion. My self-delusions always work exactly the way I want them to. The minute things don’t work out the way I want, I’ve encountered reality. And I know, because it’s different from me. I can rest safely assured that the world is not an illusion, as long as nothing ever goes the way I want it to. Rejoice when you encounter all kinds of trials and afflictions, because when you do, you will know that it isn’t all for nothing. Isn’t it good to know that we don’t live in Nirvana, that state of perfect nothingness?

But what if I want to know who I am? Again, I have to have contact with something different. For instance, I know that I am a morning person, because I grew up with my sister. My sister is not a morning person. She’d rather sleep in till noon every day. But “morning person” is not a very complete description of who I am. If I was left to compare myself only with my sister, it would never even occur to me that I was a bookworm. She’s a bookworm. I’m a bookworm. So if that was all I knew, I would think that “bookworm” was “normal,” that is to say that, as far as my awareness of reality was concerned, that whole aspect of me simply would not exist.

Sounds simple enough. So who am I? I don’t know. I mean, I could tell you a few things, by comparison, but you’d never get an accurate picture from me. You can know who I am by experiencing me, but I can’t experience me, because I am me. I can learn a little bit about me by experiencing everybody else, but humanness is such a smudgy thing. You spend too much time with somebody and you start to become like them, especially in the areas that you were already like them anyway. People are too relative to get a good picture of who I am from them.

Imagine if I got up in the morning and tried to find out what I looked like by looking at my wife (ignore the fact that I don’t actually have a wife right now). I would come back, at best, with the information that I was hairy, had rough skin, and was generally not very pretty. An in-depth perusal might produce the insight that I have separated ear lobes and a narrow nose. What I need is an absolute basis for comparison—something so altogether unlike me that it would show me for what I am. So I get up and go to the mirror. A quick glance at the mirror tells me exactly what I am, down to the individual pores on my face. It can do this because it is flawless. It is absolutely perfect along two dimensions, so that whatever comes to it is reflected back exactly.

Of course, a mirror is only flawless in two dimensions. All attempts at a 3D mirror inevitably result in a flawed 2D mirror. Once you try to bend a mirror around, you get an inaccurate reflection. Is there anything in the world that can do the same for telling me who I am in every dimension? Wanna make a guess about what is out there that is completely different from me in every way, and absolutely flawless in every dimension? Let me give you a hint: His name is Yahewh.

The bible says that God is altogether holy. Holy means to be absolutely different, separate and distinct. This tells me that if I really want to know who I am, or even that I am, then I’m better off looking to God, than looking to my self or to some other person. Self-absorption tells me absolutely nothing, or worse yet, that I am nothing. Comparing with other people gives me an out of focus, and often ridiculously incomplete picture.

There have been a few times where I have really experienced the presence of God in my life, and every time my experience has been to say, “Whoa. That was different.” I honestly cannot be confident that I exist, let alone be certain of who I am and where I stand, except in comparison with the living God. Moreover, not only do I discover who I am, but also who I ought to be. Beyond even that, I discover that he has the ability to make me into what I ought to be. His holiness is as infectious as our fallibility.

I’m waxing poetic, but I need to back up just a little bit. Humanness is a very smudgy thing, and we become like whatever we behold. Which is kind of funky, because we can only know what we’re like by experiencing something different, but then as we experience it, it becomes less and less different. God is… pardon me… different. He’s not very smudgy. He simply is. Part of that, I think, is because he doesn’t behold. God doesn’t learn about me by experiencing me. He simply knows me. He’s already in me and on me and around me and through me. There’s no learning process for Him, because he’s already “well adjusted.” Because God is the origin of the graph, he doesn’t need to compare himself to us to know where he is. Where he is is the center of things. He is Father Son and Holy Spirit, like the x, y, and z planes of the graph and who knows how many other dimensions of him that we simply cannot fathom.

A good example is in Job. This man goes through all these truly awful experiences, and then his friends show up and say,

“Dude, what did you do?”

And Job says, “I didn’t do anything!”

And the friends say, “Aw, come on, man, it’s pretty clear you screwed up something, big time.”

And it goes on like that for some time, and vast confusion ensues. Everybody’s got a point, and they all sound good. Then God shows up. And do you know that God doesn’t answer even one of Job’s questions? He doesn’t even explain how Job or any of his friends got it right or wrong. Instead he goes through a great catalog designed to demonstrate how different He is from everybody else. Job’s response? “Oh.”

I know that you can do all things;

No plan of yours can be thwarted

You asked, “Who is this that obscures my counsel without knowledge”

Surely I spoke of things I did not understand

Things too wonderful for me to know.

You said, “Listen now and I will speak;

I will question you

And you shall answer me.”

My ears had heard of you

But now my eyes have seen you.

Therefore I despise myself

And repent in dust and ashes.

Everything is confusion, until we perceive God. When he shows up, by our very awareness of Him, he puts things in perspective.

We need God, for reference, for relevance, for basic sustenance, but He doesn’t need us. Instead, He loves, He exudes, He gives. The radiance of who He is is so powerful that, from our perspective, we almost can perceive it as a need—a need to give—and we will know that we have become like him when we have beheld him long enough that we no longer absorb his goodness, like so many miniature black holes, and have instead begun to reflect him. We won’t be like him because we will somehow be able to radiate our own goodness (he is different you know), but because we will be shining, like He is shining, with the same substance that he is shining with, like carefully arranged crystal, that makes the light seem that much brighter.

Everything hangs on Yahweh, and you will fade out of existence, unless you can put your whole focus on Him.

It’s taken me a relatively long time to discuss this, evidenced by the lack of postings lately. I’m engaged. I should know this. After all, I bought the ring, I connived her into going hiking with me on a moment’s notice, I brought the conversation around to marriage, and I got down on one knee. Apparently, I even kissed the ring, which act I do not remember doing.

Nobody cried. It wasn’t particularly exciting. There was no moment of intense wondering whether she’d go with it or not. She said ‘yes’ before I got around to asking. It rained on the walk back to the car. All in all, it was rather anticlimactic for me. Rather like getting saved.

But the aftershocks have been phenomenal. It’s very difficult to explain, and I still don’t know if I can. At one point I thought I was going to have to go through my entire life’s career of romantic inclinations… my kindergarten friend who broke up with me after being laughed at for shouting “You stay away from my boyfriend!” at a crowd of older bullies…the embarrassing moment my mom informed me that we would not be buying $200 gold-enameled figurines for any persons that I had a crush on and whose names I had marked in catalogues…and the months of numbness after another fiancée had terminated another life. I may yet recite for you all the gory details, but perhaps not today.

Suffice it to say that, since my official engagement, have opened whole other worlds of dreams inside of me. It’s… more difficult than I thought. What is this? Repression I’ve been harboring inside of me? I can’t tell you. What I can say is…

In Peter S. Beagle’s classic fantasy The Last Unicorn, there is a secret door that our heroes must find to confront their enemy. Their only clue is the riddle “When the wine drinks itself, when the skull speaks, when the clock strikes the right time. Only then will you find the tunnel that leads to the Red Bull’s lair.” In the evil king’s main hall, they find a broken clock that never strikes the right time and the remains of the king’s former commander, but no wine.

The bungling magician manages to get the skull to speak (though first he only cackles) and conjures up some cheap wine, which happens to taste awful. Schmendrick (the aforementioned magician) is about to pour the stuff out when the skull cries out,
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“No, wait, hey, don’t! Don’t do that! Give it to me if you don’t want it, but don’t throw it away!”

Says Schmendrick: “But you’re dead! You can’t smell wine, can’t taste it!”

“But,” cries the skull, “I remember…”

The skull drinks the wine and tells them that the way is through the clock. Of course, the skull cries the alarm as they’re climbing through into the cave at the foundation of the castle.

A ring given is the beginning of a promise. And, as much as cynics may deny it, a promise is a sure foundation to build upon. And suddenly, something dead in me cries out, “But I remember!” And what was dead begins to act as though it was living. The Spirit of God (which often is represented as wine in scripture) begins to drink itself through me. Honestly, it’s rather frightening. I can’t begin to tell you of the hidden worlds that I have found in me. So many dreams that I had given up and totally forgotten. But suddenly, they seem possible.

What, because there is now a woman standing with me who believes in me? In a word, yes. Well, no. Not just any woman. That woman. Over there. The amazing one. No no… There! That one. The one who doesn’t think she dances, though she is made of light. Let me tell you about her:

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Six or seven years ago, when I was someone else, I was head over heels over someone else. Honestly, I was rather embarrassed about it, kind of like when I was a kid and my mom would read Tom Sawyer to me and I would hide my head under the pillows whenever mention of Becky Thatcher came up. It was hard to be so vulnerable then, not to the girl I was in love with, but to all the people around me saying “’Let him commit himself unto the Lord! Let Him rescue him; let Him deliver him, since He delights in him!”

Ok. So I had a perception problem. But anyway, somewhere in there I got a vision: I saw a sword made up of two people standing back-to-back. One was a man, and one was a woman. The man was lifting his hands up to ministry to God, and the woman was reaching out in ministry to the people. The hilt of the sword was an open book, the word of God, and reaching up and around it were tongues of fire, the Spirit of God. I wrote the description down and showed it to my mom, who immediately said, “Hm, thinking of getting married?” Heh. Heh heh. Wrong girl.

So that whole thing went up in smoke, but I remembered the vision. Do you know that crazy typical thing Christian couples say to each other when they’re breaking up? “It’s okay. If God doesn’t want this to happen, it only means he has something (i.e. someone) much better prepared for each of us.” That sentiment seems really trite when you wake up in the morning and realize you’ve got blood in your mouth from gnawing through your cheek. But the truth is… it’s true. Ain’t no woman like the one I got.

Let’s see…

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We met:

I’m taking this poetry class. I have learned since that I hate poetry classes. They teach you form, but no function. So I get told to write a poem. Go! Write a poem! These people have never heard of inspiration. So I go out to the local park and I wait until some thought occurs to me and I go back to school, get my food, take an empty table and set about saying my cool thought in the most cryptic way possible. Queens is a friendly little community, so about 3 people asked me if I was lonely and if I wanted to sit with them. I think it helped that it was about the 2nd week of school, and they were looking out for disenfranchised freshmen.

So I get done writing my poem, and I look up and I pick somebody to sit with who had asked me before. I picked the table occupied by a girl I knew named Julie. I had met Julie about a week before when she peremptorily jumped into a group of friends of mine and turned us into a tightly bound fellowship in a matter of minutes. Mad social skills. I sit down at this table and right across from me is this girl. She don’t got a lot to say, but there’s something about her.

No. Seriously. There was something about her. After months of study I finally figured it out. Unbreakable eye contact. And the most beautiful eyes… But I digress. We had this conversation… I mean, I admit I’m a talker, but that was the longest one-sided conversation I have ever had.

It gets fuzzy after that. I don’t remember if it was that night or the next, or the next week or what, but I asked her to go for a walk. Nothing romantic. Really. No, really, it wasn’t. I’m serious. At other times after that, I asked other people to go to parks and coffee houses and those weren’t romantic either. I was just being friendly.

Heh. Some friend. We talked over dinner for 2 hours, and then we took this walk, and that lasted for 2 or 3 hours, and then we sat around the closed office buildings and that took a couple of hours. All I know is we went to our respective rooms around 2 am that night. Like I said, I don’t remember much of it, but no doubt most of the night was consumed by me talking a lot and her making unbreaking eye contact. The only part of the conversation I can really remember was how delighted I was when I discovered that she was the only girl to whom I could say “I have a new computer with a 900 MHz processor and 750 MB of RAM and 2 HDD totaling 60 MB” and all she would say was “Wow! I am so jealous!” And I thought, man, this girl is amazing.

We fell in love:

Life happened. I wasn’t in love. She wasn’t my type. There was some mystery girl I couldn’t locate who was my type. She was tall and flagrantly beautiful and had this amazing singing voice and these radicalized personality traits… and I couldn’t figure out who or where she was. And then I saw this movie. It was a little classic romance called Emma. It changed my life.

I don’t want to get bogged down with the details of somebody else’s romance, so I’ll just skim over the essentials. There are four main characters: Emma Woodhouse, Mr. Knightly, Mr. Frank Churchill, and Jane Fairfax. The two characters you see the most are Emma and Mr. Knightly. Knightly is the perfect man. He’s powerful, he’s polite, he’s the epitome of courtesy and forethought. A gentleman’s gentleman. He also happens to own pretty much the entire county. Knightly is in love with Emma, who is the only woman who could live through his intolerant lecturing. Emma is amazing. Emma makes coffee nervous. She’s witty; she’s talented; she’s capable and influential. She’s so used to everything falling together for her and being handed her on a silver platter that she never actually applies her self to become really good at something. Life is a series of games for her and she lurches headlong after it. For which, of course, Knightly berates her.

Emma had a thought to fall in love with Frank Churchill if she ever met him, and when she does, it turns out he’s everything she ever imagined. He’s more charming than Bill Clinton. He’s fun. He organizes parties, he plays games and practical jokes. He’s also a bit of a conniver, which is why he is secretly engaged to Jane Fairfax. Frank is due to inherit quite a bit of money from is aunt, and if his aunt knew who it was he wanted to marry, shed disinherit him on the spot. So Frank flirts constantly with Emma to throw the whole town off the track, and shows his affection to Jane privately. At one point he goes to London “to get his hair cut,” and it just so happens that “a secret admirer” sends Jane a grand piano that very same day. Frank tends to be a little extravagant. Jane you hardly see at all. She’s poor, but very well liked and very accomplished. She sings beautifully; she plays piano; she is perfectly capable at every womanly skill. She also has very strong opinions about the world, but generally keeps them to herself unless somebody tries to push her into something.

Jane is quiet and unassuming, and Emma isn’t half the woman Jane is. And Emma knows it, which is why you don’t see much of Jane in the novel. The book is about Emma, don’t you know. Mr. Knightly points out at one point that the reason Emma doesn’t care much for Jane is everything that Emma could be, if she would just apply herself.

Sorry for the long synopsis. So I absolutely love this book. I love everybody in it. And Emma is my dream girl. (Like Anne of Green Gables—another character I like and Valerie can’t stand.) This is very convenient because Mr. Knightly is everything that I want to be. Key word: Everything I want to be. So I’m watching a movie of it, and it occurs to me that I’m nothing like Mr. Knightly. He’s too dang reserved. He thought the piano was an obnoxious, overweening gift to give to a poor girl who then has to deal with the rumors about who gave it to her and why. It occurs to me that I’m not like Mr. Knightly at all. God help me, I’m like Mr. Churchill.

Have you ever watched that old musical South Pacific? There’s this amazing high-tech technique they use all the time in that move, where somebody starts singing (“Here am I, your special island… Bali-hi Bali-hi!”) and the whole sky turns orange and purple. Ooh. Or those scenes where the main character has this sudden shocking realization and the camera suddenly zooms in from a panoramic to a close up and all the background kind of twists around funny? That’s what happened to me. I am not, nor do I ever hope to be, a Mr. Knightly. I am a Frank Churchill. I like giving people secret pianos. My whole life I’ve been chasing Emmas.

Do you know what happens when Frank Churchill goes steady with Emma? Emma goes crazy. You think I’m joking, don’t you? Every single person I have ever dated prior to Valerie has become a good deal more unstable directly after going out with me. I think it’s because I’m a catalyst. Whenever you’re with me, you become so much more of whatever it is you already are. I was constantly going after women for whom “stability” was not a good characterization. Certain people need something calming in their lives. I was one of them. So was every woman I ever dated. Basic rule. Don’t put unstable people with unstable people. Duh.

Well, it was a no-brainer, but I have a lot in common with that scarecrow. But suddenly my whole world shifted. If I’m Frank Churchill, what I really need is a Jane. And I turned around and there was Jane, er… Valerie. And instantly I was in love.

Yes. That is how I work. This is why women who love me go crazy.

I wish I could detail how the next few steps progressed. I wrote it all out once and emailed it somebody or other, but then my computer ate my email. The plan was not to jump out at Valerie in the woods and say “Heya baby! How’s about you bein’ my Valentine?” In fact, I was going to keep my mouth shut about it. You see, over the years, I’ve developed this great technique for getting over being in love with someone—a good skill to have if you fall in love as easily and as completely as I do. I’m like this bad mix of Romeo, Benvolio and Mercutio all in one. It’s an especially good skill if you have ever found yourself inclined to fall in love with someone who, upon cooler inspection, would be a very inappropriate person to fall in love with. The first thing you do is don’t bloody tell anybody. The second thing you do is investigate them for flaws. Make up flaws. Magnify the fact that their hair is the wrong color. Explain to yourself how your parents would kill their parents because they’re pastoring a megachurch. Anything.

Do you know that my fiancée has no flaws? I know what you’re thinking, but it’s true. Oh, I mean, her GPA has dropped a little… down to a 3.9 or something. And she only came over and surprised me by cooking my dinner for me twice last week. But I’m talking about flaws here. I needed to know that she didn’t bathe properly, or that she had an obnoxious laugh. I needed to discover that she never wanted to have any children, or that she was a hard-core Republican who believed in abortion, but not the death penalty. I needed ammunition here. Do you know what I discovered? Valerie is the only woman I have ever met who can be accurately described by the 31st chapter of Proverbs.

I am so totally not exaggerating. I first heard somebody described as a Proverbs 31 woman when I was a freshman. We were taking this speech class, and at one point, every person who had to speak also had to have somebody introduce them. This one girl got up and was introduce by her girlfriend who seemed to come from an AME background. At least, during the introduction, I could hear the Hammond in the background. I can still hear her: “A woman of courage and truth, a Proverbs 31 woman!” And I thought, riiiight. Have you even read Proverbs 31? Nobody can do that. I’ve even heard and agreed that Proverbs 31 was actually a metaphor for “Wisdom” and it’s actually saying that a wise man is “married” to wisdom, and that it is wisdom that works so hard to keep him up. And then I met Valerie and tried to find fault in her.

I spent several days like this. On or around the 3rd day, when I found myself losing sleep and not eating properly and even moved to tears by considering her perfections, I decided I really ought to mention to her how I felt.

This actually proved to be a bit complicated.

The next morning was Sunday, and I resolved to skip my church and spend the morning finding hers. I knew the name of it, and I knew the general vicinity of it, so I just drove down there. I expected to find her car, park mine beside it, and step into the service where I would catch the tail end or so, and then we could go have lunch or something. It did not occur to me that there are approximately 13,000 members at her church. It took me half an hour to find a parking space. It took me 10 minutes to realize that finding her in that crowd would be pointless, and it took me another 15 minutes to find her car instead. Very shortly she came out.

We went to a place at the closest mall to eat, and had the most protracted conversation possible about our romance. Both of us were interested, and both of us were scared out of our minds. Since neither of us is as filled with guile as Frank Churchill, we had allowed the rumors to flourish at school about whether or not we were actually dating. When people asked us, we said no. End of story. But Valerie’s poor roommate (the one who introduced us) was constantly being buffeted by questions about us. Conversation slowly wound around to laughing about Julie’s poor consternation about what our relationship actually was. I tried to hint broadly that maybe we should redefine what exactly was going on between us. But what came out was something more along the lines of “are you confused about what we are?” “Of course not! We’re friends,” came the reply, brooking no discussion. So much for that tack. Clearly, she didn’t want anything more. But I really had to give her a straight question to get from her a straight answer. We went back to school and this kind of discussion went on for the next 6 hours or so. We’d exchange two sentences that were on-topic, recoil with half an hour’s diversion, and try again. It was awful. I think it was around 9 o’clock on Tuesday when we finally agreed that we were going to be “something more.”

It was another 3-4 months before we let it out that we were officially dating.

We got engaged:

I don’t really want to recount to you all the details of how I graduated and saved up for a ring and then immediately lost my job and had to live off my ring savings, how I got a new job and then borrowed from relatives in order to buy the ring. I do want to tell you that I am open to any and all contributions. But I don’t really want to re-describe how I managed to get her to pick her own venue in which to be proposed to, how she picked hiking over a garden walk, how she said yes before I even finished proposing. These are things you should already know. What fascinates me is the inward thing.

I had a relationship some years ago that ended very badly. Very badly. I did not know that it was even possible to end a relationship so badly. In one quake, everything which could be shaken was shaken. I had to re-evaluate everything, from my belief in the existence of God to my function and purpose in life. I did get a warning from God about it. He said that he was going to take me back down to powder and start from scratch. He’s taken a few years to accomplish the rebuilding process, a process which did not take the path I expected at all. The first thing he took away from me was also the last thing he restored to me: a wife.

It’s breathtaking when I really stop to think about it. No really. As in “it’s hard to breathe.” There she is. Over there. The other part of me. In English, the story goes that when God created woman and showed her to Adam, the first thing he said was Whoa, man! In Hebrew it reads better: The Hebrew word for “man” is “ish” (pronounced eesh). The word for woman is “ishah.” So when Adam first saw Eve (since he was obviously speaking Hebrew), he said “Ish! Ahh!” It’s that sigh of relief that I’m experiencing now. Tensions that I didn’t even know were in me are uncurling.

I called Valerie one day recently, when I had suddenly realized that all the old dreams in me hadn’t left me. It has come to my attention that I am an inbound radical. There is nothing worth doing that isn’t worth overdoing. And the plans I have for life, for family, for career, are all radical ones, diverging from the norm. They’re still there and if I’m really going to live my life, I’m probably going to intimidate and offend a lot of people. Maybe even people’s family. I hope not. But chasing the truth is more important than appeasement. With knot in stomach I related these thoughts to her. She told me, “It doesn’t matter. No matter what, I chose you. My job is to be a counter-weight to you. Every thing you’ve told me so far, I’ve agreed with you. And everything you dream up in the future, no matter what I think, I will pray about it before judging.” Well, those probably aren’t the exact words she said, but I’m sure I got the thoughts right.

The best image I ever heard for a marriage relationship was that each of us is a cog in a machine. Your spouse is the one God has placed to run next to you, and they have to fit you in every way. Well, I am a strange and uneven cog, but my darling—she who is my beloved—she fits me perfectly.

I am so sorry.

This is not what I meant to say. I have a lot of things I’d like to say, as soon as I can set myself down enough to say them. But right now I’d like to say to the whole world, on behalf of the body of Christ that I am so sorry.

I’ve been living in a bit of a bubble my whole life. Honestly, I really liked my bubble. I grew up in a family with no TV and no radio. Well, we had a TV and radio, but nobody was allowed to use them. I attribute this fact to my mother. We’d attempt to have the TV on and she’d come home and hear it and cry out, “I hear stupid! Turn it OFF!!” Needless to say the TV wasn’t on much.

Since then I have spent something like 8 years in and out of colleges, ministry schools, and the like. For the most part I have been either too poor or too cheap to really find out what was going on in the broader circles of the church and the world.

I’ve had a few inklings. I was aware that, for the most part, the church has been ineffective in reaching the world of today. From the external perspective, it seems like a lot of this has been because the world has been getting increasingly slick, while most of the church just can’t seem to acquire the funds to put on that kind of a show. Deeper inquiries usually come to the conclusion that there is a substance, called “vival” which we used to have and may one day acquire again, a sort of “re-vival,” if you will.

I hear a lot of people praying for that, expecting that, proclaiming that. REVIVAL IS COMING!! They’d say, like it was just around the corner. I remember my roommate my freshman year coming back from a church service he’d been to where some famous minister or another had proclaimed that IT was coming at the next meeting, like some magical fairy dust that was going to sprinkle down on the congregation and then spread to the rest of the world. Tom was impressed, but I tried to mask my unbelief. I don’t remember if anything ever came of that expected service.

Later, when I was at ministry school, I was talking with my friend, who was telling me that his primary purpose was to pray for and facilitate revival. At that time, I had the opposite problem. My church was so darn vived that I performed no useful function. My question was then, what do you do when there are no needs? I was beginning to think that the world was neatly divided into two groups: We had the world, which had already pretty much decided that they liked “sin” and “fun” more than they wanted Jesus, and we had the church, which had God and all the spiritual answers, but hadn’t really become quite cool enough to get people to peek in.

Lately though, I’ve been a little more out in the world, and I’ve taken enough time to quiet my heart to stop talking and start listening. And I’ve listened to the Spirit of God, and I’ve watched people, and I think I’ve come up with a few observations:

First, people are sheep. This was a shocking discovery for me. I know, we hear it all the time, but it was a real revelation for me, because I’m not a very good sheep. I’m more of a moose. I like my kind and all, but I’m really kind of a loner, and if you listen to what I say, it’s usually really big and kind of goofy. So when I ran into normal people growing up, they didn’t seem like sheep to me. They seemed more like wild dogs. They travel in these great big packs, all doing thing, and automatically forming a hierarchy, and they’re kind of aggressive. And if you’re not the right breed, they’ll rip you to pieces. But they’re really sheep. They travel more in herds than in packs—packs roam all over the countryside, while herds stay in the same place until there’s nothing left to eat.

Second, sheep get scared really easily. They’re not aggressive, but when they feel threatened and there’s nowhere to run, they do butt into you and try to bite you. I thought I was being ripped into because I was the wrong breed. I was getting butted and bit because I was scaring the sheep. Apparently I wasn’t getting the TV memo on how normal people act.

Third, sheep need a shepherd. They want a guy to tell them how the world works, and soothe them, and take care of everything for them. They want an authority figure who can do authority figure things and hold their hand every step of the way.

Fourth, we don’t have enough shepherds. I’m really convinced of this. Most of the people who are set up as shepherds are really hirelings. I mean, they’re not all that bad. In a tight spot, a hireling is better than nothing at all. But the hireling doesn’t leave the 99 to find the one. A hireling conserves resources and moves on. A hireling makes a mental note not to go next to the cliffs from now on.

I’m saying all this because my roommate convinced me to buy an antenna this week. We’re going halves on it, so it’s no big expense or anything. Actually, we’re probably going to take it back. I barely got 12 channels on it. And most of those were fuzzy. But one of those channels that came in pretty clearly was a Christian station. I didn’t even know they made those. I was pretty impressed, so I stayed to watch.

I about gagged twice. These were well known ministers, in fancy suits, leading congregations mounting in the thousands, and they kept saying things that were just wrong. A lot of them were prosperity message issues, that I thought we had gotten over at least a decade ago. But it was all bad. Very entertainingly said, but…wrong! Sometimes I could even hear what they were trying to say and exactly where it was leavened with the stuff of hirelings.

And this is how I know I’m called to be a pastor (no matter what excuse I may make tomorrow)—it kind of made me mad. If Christians are the very possessors of the only word of God, how come what the world sees is this? The truth has been out for 2000 years. Hope and a pure life in Christ Jesus has been available for quite some time now. How is it possible that we keep forgetting? Why are there so few shepherds? Why is the unleavened Gospel so hard to get a hold of? Why is it that when a man is broken and hurting and alone in his house, it’s easier to acquire quality ography than quality preaching? Why is it that, for the man on the street, it’s easier to get someone to lead you to a meth lab, than to the presence of God? Is God so hard to find?

I think maybe He is. He’s as hard to find as fresh fruit at a convenience store. You go in there, and all they’ve got available is that “fruit juice flavored drink” stuff, which you know is made up of 10 percent fruit, 60 percent water, and 30 percent high fructose corn syrup. It isn’t as if the real stuff is harder to make. It just costs more.

So I wanted to say I’m sorry. I had no idea things were so bad. I had no idea we had such a dearth of good Christian teaching. I thought people were rejecting the gospel because they didn’t want the truth. But it turns out that, in a lot of occasions, the gospel hasn’t even been being preached. Or when it has been, the delivery has been so shoddy that it scared the sheep. Jesus said to beware the leaven of the Pharisees, and to this day we still think it’s because we don’t have enough bread.

So I want to make this promise to you (whoever “you” is, in the great big public void): I’m going to read my bible, and I’m going to deliver the obvious stuff. I’m going to say it as clearly and as simply as I know how. And I am sorry. I wasn’t doing it before because I thought somebody was already saying this stuff.