Dying to self vs dying to others

This past week has been... interesting. Interesting in the ancient Chinese curse sense of the world. (Although, according to the great and mighty Wikipedia, that particular Chinese curse could well be western in origin and far from ancient.)

The text for today's post comes from the 22nd chapter of Matthew, begining in verse 37. "Jesus replied. 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it. 'Love your neighbor as yourself'. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

All of the Law is based on those two commandments. The first one, while difficult in implementation, is very simple in concept. "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God." The second one, however...

Who is your "neighbor"? I assume that includes everyone. All people. But it doesn't say love some more than others. In fact, Jesus points out that those who love their friends and hate their enemies are no better than the tax collectors. It is only a matter of degree, then, to say that it is wrong to love their friends and love their enemies less. Perhaps 'wrong' is not exact... God's will is that we love everyone equally. As we love ourselves, to be exact. But that brings up another point of contention; What if we don't particularly like ourselves? And Jesus said that anyone who followed him would have to "deny himself". If 'Love of Self' should equal 'Love of Others', and 'Love of Self' must die for the Cross, then should not 'Love of Others' do the same? But then, that just points to the supremacy of 'Love the Lord your God' and the subordination of 'Love your neighbor'.

My point is this. Is it required that a Christian sacrifice himself for another? We are called to subordinate ourselves to God, to the Cross, and to the pull of the Holy Spirit. We are not required to subordinate ourselves to each other. Let me clarify: If God calls me to sacrifice all that I have, then I am obligated to comply. However, if another person calls me to give him all that I have, I do not have to comply. We are called to love them as we love ourselves. Which can be interpreted many ways. I would say that we provide for our own needs, from what God has provided for us, and then provide for others whose needs have not been met. This means that there will come certain times when God provides only what we need, usually to focus our attention on our reliance upon him.

On the other hand, there is a blessing in given out of our need, in sacrificing ourselves in someway. Jesus gave an example of being a servant, and John tells us that laying down our lives for a friend is the greatest love one can have for another. There are also times when God calls some specifically to sacrifice something for others.

There are applications of this that I will hopefully get into at another time.

So a friend of mine was put into a horrible, horrible situation today. A nightmare scenario. No one should be puit in that place. She was faced with 2 bad choices. But she, amazingly, went God's way, option 3. It was a wholely earthly problem. But she choose to face it as a chance to further God's Knigdom. She still was hurt, badly. Perhaps not physically, but mentally and emotionally. Although I can only assume these things; God's healing has no earthly bounds.

But my point is, her faithfulness astounds me. I am totally impressed, and a little jealous. Because I know that grace didn't come from within her. That was a gift of the Holy Spirit in her time of need. Wow, God is good. I find it amazing that after a day like today, God can still bring my soul to praise Him. Amazing Grace.

Word picture for the day: Yesterday during the service, I imagined a metaphor for the love of God vs the love of people. I pictured a person blowing against a sail vs the wind. First of all, the person blow cannot generate anything close to enough volume to make a differnce. Secondly, the breath of that person may be smelly and probably contains germs, because it's coming from a place inside that is none-too-clean. On the other hand, the fresh breeze can move the largest ships, and is free of bad breath or (most) germs.

Just an idle thought.

And for another thought... I saw a bus ad for the Sierra Club's Day of Action, which is a rally at the Capital for the environment. The thought that occurred to me is how much fossil feul is going to be burned to bring those people together. Wouldn't a Day of Inaction be better; a day to promote telecommuting. However, there probably won't be that big an impact, because I would be suprised if they get 1000 people together for that rally.

Ah, Friday night. How can I have waited so long to comment on Friday night?

Friday night we had an evening of worship at the church that included a time set aside for receiving prophetic word. It was a really awesome time. The Christlife group took part in the prophetic and I know several people were very encouraged by the word received and shared. I don't know how it was received from the majority of those in attendance, but from where I was, it was really cool.

Afterward I had a specific word for an individual who was there. I didn't think it was appropriate to be shared in a public forum, because it could be considered corrective. So as we were dispersing, I approached this individual. At the same time, someone else stopped this person with a word to share and the messages that we had shared were very similiar; they ammounted to "stop running" and "rest". That was pretty powerful.

So for the last week I'm had this "feeling". It defies specific description. It feels to me like things are going bad. No one thing in particular, just things. Maybe all things. It's not quite dread, and it's not quite resignation. I've been thinking about it for several minutes now.

At first I thought it was like driving on slick ice, out of control and headed for a crash. But that's not quite it. First, there is no sense of panic, and while I do feel that it is unavoidable, I still believe I have some control, some part to play in it. Just that nothing I do can prevent it.

Kind of like a master chess game. When grandmasters play, there typically comes a point when the game is decided, but a casual observer can't see that one player is even in trouble. Both players know what will happen. Usually, the losing player will concede at that time. The way I feel now is kinda like I'm past that point when it's decided, but I haven't conceded (or can't).

I can actually trace it back to when it started. Trace it back to a single comment. Not a harsh or mean comment. Not said in ill will at all. But it shocked me and made me re-examine myself and most of what I do. I was hurt. Not by the comment itself, but by what the comment assumed. (For the record, the comment was not made by anyone reading this).

On the other hand, it's not all doom and gloom. It's more like a feeling like I haven't done my taxes, or my homework isn't done. Not life or death. It still important.

So I'm listening to a Rich Nathan Sermon and he mentions that safe sex isn't necessarily safe. He said that covering yourself in latex isn't a failsafe method of preventing the transmission of disease. What occurred to me is that there isn't yet a latex that can cover the heart and mind. The dangers of spiritual and emotional damage in extra-marital affairs are much greater than the fears of disease or unwanted pregnancy.

OK, segue into something completely different. I read other people's blogs, and they relate what's going on in there lives or observations about the weather or hopes and dreams for the future. I, on the other hand, (Why do I *always* wind up on the other hand?), delve into matters philosophic and spiritual, with a variable degree of insight. Is this alright? Do I bear to much of myself to the public?

So, last week I had lunch with our pastor at church. He recommended a couple of books to me, and even lent me his copies. Both are specific to the Vineyard moevment. The first is a biography of John Wimber, subtitled The Way It Was, and written by his wife after his death. I have to admit that I was quite apprehensive of this book. I didn't know much of John Wimber before I started the book. I know that he was a prefessional musician before joining the ministry, and that he was associated with the Righteous Brothers. I have heard that he was a very charismatic man (by that I mean possessiong a personal charisma, not a reference to charismatics) and that he lead the Vineyard Movement (some would say "was" the Vineyard movement) for many years.

Now, normal, this would set off warning bells in my head. If the defining characteristic of a church or group of churches is the personality of a charismatic leader, that church has a very unstable basis. Man is inheirently fallible. However, Wimber died 10 years ago, and the Vineyard is still here. Still, a biography of the man can feel to me like raising an idol.

So that was in the back of my mind as I started reading this book. My initial reaction is that no wife should write a biography of her husband; it is impossible to expect her to be impartial. In some ways it felt like a protestant canonization of the man. However, as I continued on, my impression changed. Instead of seeing a book raising this man up onto a pedestal, it appears to me to be more of a "lessons learned" resource and a history of how the Vineyard became the Vineyard. I have seeing things that Wimber did early on that are good ideas and things that I want to incorperate in our own practices. The first to jump out at me were a set of ground rules that a leadership small group set up. These seem to be pretty good, and something I'd like to include, in one way or another, in our own small group this summer. Here is an excerpt for the book:

One: No prayer requests for anyone else but yourself; you are here for you, not for someone else. Two: we are going to sing to God, not about him, and we are going to learn to worship, whatever that means. Three: different ones will share and no one will monopolize. Four: No bringing up church problems and no church criticism. Five: Let's leave our places and positions and trophies and badges at the door, and all come together on equal ground while God teaches us about himself.

Carol Wimber follows this up by saying that God cannot not show up. Now I'm of the opinion that that God can do whatever he wants to. However, I think the environment that these rules create is one in which God wants to show up. And that's always a good thing.

Saw 300 for a second time last night at the Imax. Wow! The term "pure adrenelin" is over used when describing movies, and actually doesn't apply here. This movie was 100% adrenelin and 100% testosterone. Yeah, that's rtight; that's 200%. There is that much movie.

Running update: As many people now know, I am running on a regular basis. It is my goal to run almost daily. I think I will give myself some flexibility by saying that I can take 2 nights a week off due to circumstance. I say "nights" because that is when I run; anytime between 10:00 PM and 1:00 AM. Also, I am alternating between running 1 mile and running 2 miles. I bought a stopwatch so I can pace myself. So far, I'm running the mile in about 8:00 and intentionally slowing down to about 10 minutes/mile when I run 2 miles.

I post this now in the hopes that in a year, I can look back on it and think "8 minute miles? I eat 8 minute miles for breakfast now." Of course, with my luck, I'll probably look back on it and think "What was I doing to my knees!!!"

So, my grand scheme, once I finished my audiobook while running, was to subscribe to the Renewing you Mind podcast (by RC Sproul) and listen to that while running. It made perfect sense, because to miss a day running would mean missing a broadcast, so there would be additional motivation to run daily. However, I have come to find that while there is, in deed, and Renewing your Mind podcast, it is not, like the radio broadcast, daily. Instead it is weekly. And worse, it is merely the Friday edition of the daily broadcast. Therefore, it only plays 1 out of every 5 programs in each series. Now, all of these daily broadcast can be heard streaming from the web, but that doesn't help me while running outside.

Therefore, I need to find another source of daily podcasts. If anyone has any ideas, I am open to suggestion.

One-Armed Wampa: The Lost Episode

So... Almost a week after forgetting what I had thought of in church, it came back to me. It wasn't a breakthrough in Cheese/Pasta technology as some people have hoped. It was, in fact, merely an interesting definition of a fairly common term. Here it's entirity ('cuz I'm writing it now) is that nascent post. WARNING: The following is post is rated Double Black Diamond in terms of Geek Content, but only a Blue Square for Technobabel.

Abstraction is a term that has been occupying my idle processor cycles for a while now. It occurred to me that there is not a single person, ever, who, if stranded on an island, but with unlimited natural resources, could build even a simple digital computer. There are people how can write applications by themselves. There are people who can write entire operating systems from scratch. There people how can assemble computers. Others can design processors. Others can build them. Some rare individuals can even do two or these things. But no one, anywhere, can do it all. And that doesn't even mention extracting the raw materials, refining them, and processing them into a usable format. Or generating the electricity, etc. etc. etc.

"So alot of people have to work together to build a computer. What's the big deal?" The big deal is that these people don't work together. Certainly not directly. And they don't have to. Each step of the process has a "finished product" that is handed off to the next level. For example, copper ore is processed and shaped into a long roll of copper wire. The processor and component manufactures don't need to worry about copper ore or how to extract copper; All they are concerned with is the properties of the copper that they are given. Taking that several steps up the ladder, the operating system programmers don't need to know how the processor is designed or manufactured. They just need to know what machine commands the processor is designed to respond to. Therefore, each step produces a "balck box", whose inner workings are not revelant to higher order processes. Each Black Box has a function, a set of acceptable inputs, and cooresponding outputs, and these are all that is important about them.

The reason this came to mind is that I am reading a book (actaully listening; see Snowcrash on my What I'm Reading list) that has a lot to do with hacking. The thought occurred to me "What is hacking?" What would the definition be. There was a time when I would have said that hacking is just using something in a way that it was not designed for. But that is simultaneously too broad and inaccurate. For example, I would not call it hacking to use a screw driver as a door stop. On the other hand, overclocking a processor to make it faster would definitely be hacking, but doesn't effect how it's used.

So, while on this search for a more precise definition of Hacking, the whole concept of abstraction came up. Combining the two, the answer is simple (and you, gentle reader, are probably 2 steps ahead of me already). Hacking is merely the practice of breaking into that lower-level Black Box and modifying it to suit your personal upper-level process needs or desires. It is, in essences, changing the rules of the game.

One thing that I will note: Yesterday was the best weather of the year so far. Sunny and warm with snowcover. I sat at the dining room table with the laptop, reading blogs and looking out the window. I look forward to sitting outside this summer on a hot afternoon with a cool drink and share various parts of my inner soul with whatever members of the world care to take notice.

So, yesterday in Church something occurred to me. It was some brillant realization or observation on the human condition. I considering telling my wife about it, but I thought "No, we're here in church, besides, I'll save it for my blog."

Well, here I am, and I've completely lost it. Whatever it was. I do know that it was sheer genius. Perhaps it was the cure for cancer. Or a plan to bring pease to the Middle East. Or a compromise that Senate Democrats and Republicans can all be happy with. Or perhaps even the precise process to get the perfect consistancy of sauce on Kraft Mac and Cheese. But whatever it was, it is now lost to the ages.

On a completely unrelated note, I am digging that new Toby Mac song that I heard on the radio, 'I was made to Love'. And yes, I do feel the haters spittin vapors on my dreams.

So these odd jottings have brought to mind something from years ago. I have a friend at church... Well, he is a friend now. Years ago when this happened, he was just an aquantance. This was probably 3 or 4 years ago, I would wager. This person, whose face I knew, but whose name I did not, handed me a half sheet of paper after service one Sunday. On this sheet of paper was a couple paragraphs. Just idle thoughts, ramblings, and reflections on God. Looking back, I realize now that he was dead-tree blogging. That is a thought that boggles my mind I don't think I ever told him how much I enjoyed reading those. I think I only saw two. I must remember to let him know that I recall those the next time I see him. I cannot remeber the content of either of them, but I do remember the sentiment. And it also helped me learn his name (I am notoriously bad with names, and this was a time when I could only name a little more than a half dozen people in the church, and I was related to most of them).

It was called Java with Jeff, I do beleive. Or something to that effect.

Looks like it's going to be a hard night's day.

Three hours sleep. Bad, bad thoughts running through my head before sleep blessfully came. The dog was trying to take my spot on the bed. And I get bad news from work even before I'm out of the shower.

On top of that, I think I need to make an appointment for a check-up. It's probably nothing, but for the past week, I've had this on-again-off-again pain in my chest, in the upper left. At first I thought it was just a pulled muscle, but it keeps recurring. And worse, I tend to notice it most when I'm under stress or hyped up on caffiene. I'm only 33. I'm too young to have heart problems.

On a lighter note: Observations on the bus ride in today-
Is there a less photogenic business owner on the face of the planet than Denny Hecker? Not that he is particularly ugly, but I just saw a picture of him on the side of the bus. The picture looks like one a photojournalist would have taken about 3 seconds after informing him that he is facing a Grand Jury indicment.

Also seen on the side of a bus: the text read "Toddlers are not born, they are raised." It was an ad for center providing resources for child care providers. The picture was a closeup on the face of a two or three year old girl. And she had earings on. Not, mind you, the cute clipons that some little girls use to play dressup. These were studs. There is no good reason to pierce a child's ears, or any other part of their body. Ear piercing and makeup are what older girls (like 12 or 13) should argue with their mothers about. If these things are given as toddlers (or even infants), what does the 12 year old girl rebel against? I am afraid of that answer.

Mileposts

So every now and again, each of us comes to a point on the road of life that affords us a veiw over the way that we have come. Nothing special about this point, just a chance to reflect on the distance covered and direction traveled.

So I encountered one of these points today. I filled in running Easy Worship for second service. Ever since High School, even before, I have always been more comfortable on the side lines, usually on the technical side. I suspect this is because, if I am"working", then I don't have to really get involved. But today, I realized that I regretted having to run Easy Worship. Running Easy Worship requires thinking ahead and having the next set of lyrics ready. This prevents getting into the worship at all. And I regretted that. Note: I am still happy to serve. But, I think in the past, service has been an excuse to keep things at arms length. But that is no longer the case.

So, David shared some poetry on his Blog, which has inspired me to write some of my own. For you poetic pleasure (or dis-, as the case may be).

*BTW* I wrote this while driving into work this morning.

Untitled
The tree stood on the hill outside town
Ancient and solitary, it has kept its long vigil
But today it slumps. Old and alone
Once it was brilliant green
But the bitter cold has robbed it of color
Once it was covered in a thick canopy
But the fierce winds have driven its leaves to the ground
Once it stood straight and true
But the heavy snows have forced it to sag and droop
Now it is stark and bleak against the cold steel sky
But this is not the end
When the gray clouds split and blue skies return
When the pale wan sun is restored to its fiery glory
When the snows resolve to water and moisten the thirsty ground
Then slowly
Slowly
Very slowly
Green buds appear

"How do you keep the farmboy on the farm now that he's seen Paris?"

I cannot find the exact reference, but I remember this quote, paraphrased, regarding US servicemen returning home to middle America following World War 2. It came to my mind as I was listening to Sara Groves' "Painting Pictures of Eygpt". It will probably always be a mystery to me how we, as humans, and myself included, can so easily be satisfied returning to a worldly, empty, dreary existience after we have experienced the amazing love, incredible grace, and unbelievable presence of God. How I long to always have a wanderlust to follow after God. How I wish that my feet of stone would never find root in the shifting sands.

I was made for Glory, I was built to last.
God formed this feet to walk golden streets
When this hard life has past.
Say "He's doing well on the other side" if anybody asks
'Cuz I was made for Glory, I was built to last.
- Lost Dogs, from the album Scenic Routes

Blogging - Quick thoughts...

Overall, I like Blogging. Both sides of it actually. I like that I have a place where I spew thoughts that other people can see and comment on. And I like that I have friends who spew their thoughts that I can read and comment on. It opens a window into others lives that I think is really cool. I find that I share things in my blog that I wouldn't bring up in normal conversation, let alone initate contact with someone just to express.

On the other hand, it is only a projection, and a pretty weak one at that. If I'm going through a significant crisis in my life, I'm not going to post it in my blog. And a silent blog could mean a crisis or just an abundance of life.

But overall I appreciate being able to reach out to some friends and just give a gentle shout-out, "Hey, I'm thinking about you". And I think most people could use more of that.

Worst night of sleep EVER.

OK, to be fair, there were some night when we had infants of which I have no memory. I think the mind stops recording memories in those circumstances as a defense mechanism. And by defense, I mean defense of the children; If we as parents remembered the difficulties of dealing with our kids as infants, we would be much less "understanding" of them during their pre-teen and teen years.

But last night was pretty bad. At midnight, when I am usually ready to go to sleep, my darling wife decides that she isn't tired yet and she wants to watch Law & Order. I have a history of being able to sleep through anything short of WW3, so I tell her to go ahead. (The TV, BTW, is in our bedroom.) And to be fair to MDW, she did tell me that if it was bothering me, she would turn it off. And it seemed to work. I fell asleep in about 5 minutes to the story of a philandering theologian who may or may not be responsible for the murder of his wife. The problem is I kept almost waking up, catching snipets of the show and incorperating it in my dream. And I was never conscious enough to understand what was happening to me or to tell my wife that it was bothering me. And then after the show, the dreams continued. Getting up with the alarm was a Herculean effort.

But coffe is a wonderful thing, even if the super-brew at work tastes like tire rubber.