Author: Matthew

Many things, I can remember learning. I can roughly remember when I learned something and how I didn’t know what it was before then. I remember the first time I heard Dire Strait’s The Sultans of Swing, when I was about 13, while listening to the classic rock radio station while driving truck during the summer wheat harvest. I remember my father explaining some basic trigonometry to me with a pen and paper when I was about 10 years old. We were trying to calculate how high my model rocket had flown. I remember my mother reading the Chronicles of Narnia to me when I was about 6 years old and having to ask what a Centaur was. I was not familiar with the idea of a half horse/half man.

But somethings you learn so young or they are so ubiquitous, you can’t remember ever having learned them. Dragons are one of those things. I wasn’t born knowing anything about this legendary fiery beast, but I might as well have been. There is no time or place I can recall when and where I didn’t already know a great deal about these creatures. They were already old news when I heard about Eustace being turned into one in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. They were familiar when I saw one in an old episode of Duck Tales. Trogdor was at least the thousandth one I’d seen, though he stands out in the crowd for obvious reasons.

Was there ever a time without dragons? Nearly(?) every culture on earth has them. The serpent in Genesis sounds a bit more dragonish than a modern day danger noodle. Later in John’s Revelation there is no pretension. The original dragon has been around since before the first days of our race. Little wonder that we can’t remember a time without him. Someday we will though.

The Inuit’s have over 50 different words for snow they say. Actually that’s a completely bogus factoid. They don’t. Be we Americans really do have at least 50 different words that mean “good”. Or at least those words do now. Examples:

• cool
• awesome
• dank
• dope
• wicked
• tight
• neat
• groovy
• on point
• boss
• nifty
• keen
• drippin’
• swell
• hunky-dory
• gucci
• 100
• lit
• goat
• etc.

I believe it was Dorothy Sayers who lamented that all males are now called “gentlemen” with faux-respect in the public square. The word “gentleman” used to communicate something about the person’s class, occupation, and family. Now to say a man is a gentleman simple means that he is good. But we already have a word for good. Aaaaaand now we DON’T have a word for “gentleman”. Not helpful and it makes everything we say a little less true.

In a similar fasion and more recently, Finnish comedian Ismo expressed his confusion that if someting is “ass” it’s bad, but if it’s “bad ass” it’s good. Wait, what?

Meanwhile, we in the Pacific Northwest still only have one word for snow and it’s meaning hasn’t drifted much as far as I can tell. We may not be Eskimos, but we are no strangers to the fluffy white ice. We just had some just a few days ago, even though it’s only the second week of October. Time to put some totally boss snow tires on my minivan!

As an adult, video games have largely fallen by the wayside for me during the past twenty years. A few exceptions involved playing through an older Mario and Zelda game with my oldest son a few years ago. Another came with the long-awaited release of Starcraft II back in 2010. It felt strange to actually go purchase a game and then play it in the evenings. It was fun, for a few weeks, but then I discovered something new – that watching other people play it along with colorful commentary was even MORE fun. Of course, millions of other people discovered that as well during the same decade. Twitch.tv, the video streaming site dominated by this genre, was recently purchase by Amazon for $970 million.

When I think of “husky”, I can’t help but smile and think of “Husky Starcraft”, the show name of Mike Lamond, a young fellow Oregonian who daily recorded video commentary of Starcraft II eSports games and uploaded them to YouTube. I barely watched YouTube (still don’t), but my kids do and it’s use is ubiquitous by everyone in the next generation down. For a few months though in 2011, I DID watch it. Every single day. It was fabulous.

Throughout hundreds of “episodes”, who can forget the myriad of inside jokes Husky developed along the way like “Pylo” the Protoss Pylon or the “Drop the Double Forge” dubstep. Then there was the Hero Marine, “Don’t worry guys, I’ve got this…. AHHHHH!!!!!!!!” Who could forget this stuff? Well none of the half a million fans that followed his channel at it’s peak. Sadly, Husky began having serious medical problems with his voice and had to effectively retire from public yelling, errr, speaking rather abruptly. As the game waned in popularity, his star was on the decline as well. In more recent years, he’s been helping his girlfriend (Rosana Pansino) with her own YouTube channel and career. She has ended up being more successful in the long run, judging by the fact that I saw her cookbook for nerds on sale at Walmart not too long ago.

The world is a strange place. I don’t claim to understand much about the latest media trends and youth fads, but I think I would understand them EVEN LESS if I hadn’t (however briefly) indulged and been a devoted fan of an eSports commentator on YouTube. Thanks for the fun times Husky! (P.S. Why did you delete your channel archive!?)

 

My oldest daughter is doing this drawing/writing prompt thing this month and my wife has joined in for some of the days. I figured I would toss in a few for fun too!

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Build

What an imperative! Since before Babel we have been stacking those bricks and placing boards. Nowadays it’s often more metaphorical. Businesses build their “brand”. Yesterday, I typed “build” into a computer’s command line interface to compile an XML validator too that I needed for a project. It didn’t work. Some of the dependencies were jacked up.

What if the builder of the tower woke up one day to lay the next layer of their ziggurat but found the pile of bricks had been inadvertently moved. That really happened once, but the hand of God. It repeats itself now every day, bu the hand of man. Some among us may not openly acknowledge our creator, but we imitate him nonetheless.

Today, I stared at the imperative “build” on my home to-do list. It declared we needed a covered and walled warm winter coop for the chickens and lone duck residing in the back yard. A trip to the lumber yard and four hours later and the coop is complete. My son held the boards in place as I screwed them together. The other son made me a cup of coffee partway through. It came together faster than the XML validator and will doubtless be more durable.

I hope we get the build the New Jerusalem. It would be more like our creator to give us a job to do. But then we’ll have perfect tools and all the right words. That would be more like Him than just plopping it down prefab from the sky, even though that’s what John the Revelator seemed to see the likeness of. Then with each rising, the command “build” would be heard with joy rather than cursing – each new task better than the one before, greeted by the crowing rooster and the quack of the duck, still kept around as comic relief for the builders, world without end.

 

One of my youngest son’s notebooks from school contains this inspirational cover:

We are: Explorers, learners, artists, creative, writers, friends, kind, scientists, dreamers, musicians, athletes, thinkers, readers.

What’s missing from this list?

The things that will dominate proper adulthood: (future) husbands, (future) wives, (future) mothers, (future) fathers, citizens, employees, debtors, servants, soldiers (maybe).

Now I think it’s great to encourage kids. Everything on that notebook cover is good. But when do you break the news to them about all the stuff that isn’t on the cover? Not too soon to taint childhood with grown up worries, but soon enough to prepare them for those challenges, which require serious endurance.

It seems like we still need a much better popular theology of vocation in our churches here in the USA. The dominant voices continue to be either overly dewy-eyed or hyper-cynical. I know some wise people regularly take a stab at it, but it still needs work.

Is there anything useful in this Brene Brown self-help book or is it all just mental gymnastics? But what’s wrong with mental gymnastics anyway? I wrote down a few notes.

Let go of what other people think…

Having kids with special needs (mental, physical, etc.) will definitely force you to do this. Raising them requires different techniques that will look “wrong” to outsiders and they WILL in turn judge you as a bad parent. Oh well.

Be self-aware of your symptoms and triggers. Write them down.

This is probably some of the best advice I found in the book. Common sense self-awareness help. You have got to write this stuff down because your memory will fail you in the moment.

Ordinary courage vs. heroics (not the same thing)
Ordinary courage makes everyone around us a little braver and the world better.

There is no giving without receiving.

The less we talk about shame, the more control it has over our lives.
Name the shame. Talk about it.

There is no selective numbing.

If you numb one thing, you numb everything. (With drugs, booze, binding TV, whatever)

Deliberate lists of crap to do every day (Like the “AEIOUY” list in one of the chapters) drive my crazy. Stupid acrostics? Check. Impossible to-do list? Check.

Take something off your list and add “take a nap”.

Much better advice. Something I’ve only learned as I near 40.

Joyful people “practice” gratitude.

Daily prayers or journaling gratitude. Execution over intention.

Ordinary does not equal boring. Boring does NOT equal meaningless.

This is one lesson I feel I HAVE learned (more of less) over the last couple decades. A lot of my work really is ordinary and boring. But I’m certain it’s not meaningless. I wrestled with this a lot when I was in my young twenties though.

There is no such thing as creative and non-creative people. There are only people who use their creativity and people who don’t. As long as we’re creating, we are cultivating meaning.

The opposite of play is not work.
The opposite of play is depression.

I’m dying to freak out here! Do I have enough information to freak out! Will freaking out help? THe answer is always no.

Over-functioners try to rescue everyone and get in people’s business.

Not using our gifts leads to distress.

Don’t constrain “meaning” to a short list of acceptable things (like being rich and famous).

Near the end of the book, this classic self-help quote is unfurled:

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Howard Thurman

I’ve seen this quote lots of times. Sometimes it’s misattributed (like it is in Wild at Heart). I like it, but I also realize it’s a bit Disney-follow-your-heart. I like this guy’s analysis of it.

So overall, not a bad book, but very lightweight by design. I guess it reassured me that my own psychological hangups are not particularly unique or uncommon, which is good. The way forward is long and plodding though.

I’ve definitely been in a rut with cooking for… well the last decade at least. This week, due to a variety of factors, I decided to just bite the bullet and cook four completely new meals for dinner, all of them relatively healthy (lots of vegetables, low fat and low calorie). They all turned out OK, to my relief. It was fun to use new ingredients I had never touched before though. I’d seem them in the produce section of the store for years, but had always passed them by.

New ingredients used:

• Poblano peppers
• Frozen unprocessed salmon fillets
• Tomato sauce completely from scratch (pureed fresh tomatoes and onions, etc.)
• Hatch chili peppers
• Ground Pasilla chili powder
• Frozen riced cauliflower
• Shiraki noodles

 

Aphorism model: You can pick your nose, you can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose.

A long time ago: You can’t pick your race, you can’t pick your wife, and you can’t pick your wife’s race.

Not so long ago: You can’t pick your race, you can pick your wife, but you can’t pick your wife’s race.

Recently: You can’t pick your race, you can pick your wife, and you can pick your wife’s race.

The woke future: You can pick your race and gender, you can pick your wife/husband/whatever, and they can pick their own race and gender.

Post eschaton: “When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.”, “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the former things have passed away.”

Growing up in evangelical America, the evils of high textual criticism of scripture were frequently referred to and dismissed in the course of bible study. The kinds of “insights” (in scare quotes) that these (probably faithless) scholars came up with nearly always served to undermine to gospel – sometimes directly by calling into question some key component of redemptive history, but often by threatening it slowly through eroding traditional confidence in the text. It was usually suspected that these high textual critics were, at worst, doing this kind of sabotage quite on purpose because they hated God. At best, they were Godly men and women who were misguided and stifled from hanging out in the academy for two long.

The prime example of textual criticism gone to seed was the work of the Jesus Seminar from the early 1990s. Their conclusion that Jesus didn’t say nearly anything attributed to him in the Gospels was truly eye-roll inducing. But does that mean every last nuts-and-bolts technique the scholars used at coming to this ridiculous conclusion was total garbage? That’s a much larger and more complicated question, but one it seems few are willing to put much effort into answering.

Later in my adult life when I encountered well-read and highly intellectual evangelicals, usually of the Reformed variety, this kind of allergy to archeological or linguistic insights into scripture persisted. Simply the idea that such-and-such a passage may have been added by an editor and not the stated author is still something to be scorned and dismissed as clearly anti-biblical and by extension, anti-Christ.

“If Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins!”
– 1 Cor. 15:17

Paul is emphatic that if Christ did not rise from the dead, then all our faith is worthless.

BUT, what if, when the present world is all over and all mysteries are revealed, it turns out that Isaiah chapters 40-55 actually WERE written by a different prophet than the guy that wrote chapters 1-39? Is our faith worthless then? I don’t think so. What if the prologue and epilogue of Job were added later? Does that HAVE to mean they are uninspired by the Holy Spirit and clearly full of lies? I’m always hearing “no, but…” followed by some kind of flimsy slippery slope argument. Better to just not talk about that stuff. One minute you might think Paul didn’t write Hebrews and before you know it, your sleeping with copies of the The Golden Bough and the Nag Hammadi and thinking about voting for democrats.

This kind of persistent fear is obnoxious and undermines our faith rather than strengthens it. We can trust Jesus and God’s gift of scripture without resorting to this kind of dishonesty toward any kind of technique that might have been tainted by the enemy at one time or another. Those things can be redeemed too, and should be.

* Post-script disclaimer: I realize I’m conflating higher and lower textual criticism, but fearful resistance to it often conflates the two as well. Also, it is not my intention to advocate for textual criticism as a deep well of untapped insight that we should all be enthusiastic about. Though I think its utility is limited, censorship is a foolish response.