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| Separate the saucer section! All hands, brace for impact!Good grief (as opposed to morning, afternoon, or evening)!
This post's title is inspired by a scene from the movie Star Trek: Generations where a Klingon Bird of Prey destroys the Enterprise and they separate the saucer section and the warp core explodes, sending the saucer section of the Enterprise D crashing to the planet below. It connects to what I am going to talk about in that it is from Star Trek.
Of late, Star Trek has become unusually spiritually meaningful to me. It is crazy what God can use to speak to you if you are open for that sort of thing--just make sure that you are listening to God speaking in a number of conventional ways so that you know the sorts of things God would say!
I was reading on Wikipedia about how people like Captain Kirk (in the stories) gave up their lives to serve in Starfleet and do something that really mattered. Kirk chose to go back to Starfleet over a woman he loved, and Captain Picard from the Enterprise D (The Next Generation) effectively gave up having a family because he chose to go into Starfleet. His nephew and brother die in a fire, and he is then the last of his family. Thus, as he says in the movie, he is the last Picard.
One of the things that stories do is they provide a way to talk about things in a setting distinctly separate from myself, but yet still these stories are strangely like life.
Recently, I attended a lecture by Phil Vischer, the guy that started Veggie Tales. One of the things that he said was that relationship with God is more important than simply doing work for God. He said that his new company Jellyfish Labs is so named because he finds that he wants to remind himself that he is like the jellyfish and only has form when in the current of God's will.
I find "relationship with God" to be a hard concept to grasp. I have family and I have friends, and family can be easier to have a relationship with because there is an obligatory connection with them. Friends are a little more vague, and then God is invisible. I have been reading a lot of theology lately for school, and a lot of what the theologians describe is the relationship and obligations we as humans have with God the creator. There are certainly obligations I have toward God, and there are things that I have to do whether they are "my thing" or not--i.e. going to church, meeting with other believers, building up the body of Christ, declaring God's word to non-Christians, and discussing things of God with other believers (yes, Deuteronomy 6 and Joshua 1 still apply!) AND with children growing up!
(On a side note, at the Vischer lecture, he talked about how a lot of Christians in America today don't know the BASICS of the Gospel. They could not define grace. We need to be able to do that...)
Doing things is how I build relationships. There is a discussion group that I meet with for class for SIX HOURS EVERY WEEK. I have been in that group for about two years now, and the girls in that group are becoming nigh unto sisters to me and the guys are practically brothers. (One of the kinky things about relationships between guys is that we can sort of keep friends in the freezer. After a few years of no contact, we can start up again and still be good friends after a few minutes' heating.) The point here is that I have been DOING SOMETHING with these people for a long time.
In terms of a relationship with God, we have a history of doing something together. There are guys in my dorm that I play obscenely long board games with from time to time. They are good friends and WE DO THINGS TOGETHER. I have been following God since about age 5 and I have been able to do more and more interesting things with him as time goes on. Following God is interesting--God does not merely save you, he is INTERESTING! When I was in high school, I sought escape because high school was not interesting! If you already know that you want to do linguistics and the people at school that you have most in common with (excluding those with the common bond of knowing Christ--those friends are REGULARLY interesting) are the people that want to go to college (I took as many AP classes as I could), high school is not interesting.
I went to high school with some great people, but I don't think I would have met them if I did not go to high school! There was one girl I knew that had an intelligent opinion of Star Trek. She was pretty cool. There was another that could actually figure out what different linguistics terms meant by pulling apart the words and thinking of what the roots meant. SHE was cool. I have met girls where I go to college and they can actually understand references to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. THAT is cool. There is one who actually knows about the TV show The Prisoner--but I digress. This was supposed to be a disclaimer for if people I knew in high school read this.
At any rate, God is real, and he does things. He has this really cool scheme for world domination that does not involve freaky totalitarian regimes and mass propaganda. He will throw down everything that stands against him, but HE will do it, and his followers will not. When people stand against God, God does not have to do too much to destroy them--people destroy themselves before God really has to do anything. All God wants is for people to do what he says! (There are a thousand things I could say about "all that God wants," but this is a hasty generalization to make a point and move on, not a strict argument.)
I suspect that I have betrayed myself as something of a nerd. Well, if you rearrange the letters in "nerd" you get "rend", as in "rend him limb from limb." That wasn't the point at all. Rolling on...
I don't know what 65z^4(ax^2+bx-23)/(ab)=ab(select)(start) works for having a relationship with God, but I do know that loving God and going with him where no one has gone before is worth giving up a lot of things for.
A final thing from Star Trek: Generations--Captain Kirk got sucked into this thing called The Nexus. In short, if you are there, you do everything that makes you really happy. Whatever it is that makes you happy is in there. However, when considering whether he should stay in the Nexus and let the universe fend for itself (Kirk is retired in the movie and would like a break from saving the galaxy) or to go back and stop the bad guy from blowing up a star and save hundreds of millions of people, Kirk sees that whatever is in the Nexus doesn't matter. It isn't real. In the end, he decided to go back and save the universe (he is Captain Kirk, after all).
I don't know what I would have to do in order to get to be where God is. There is an idea that I have heard of that is like this: "Go where God is working." God works some pretty tough shifts in rough conditions, and I will probably die in following him where he is. (God does not ignore the fact that sharp and pointy objects are deleterious to the continued structural integrity of our fleshy mass, but life does not simply consist of life and death here on earth! Life is now, but life does not stop then when we die.) I don't know how much it will hurt. As a matter of fact, I frequently try to eliminate pain from my daily routine. I don't go above 15 units a semester because there are certain kinds of pain that I don't like. All I can conclude with is this:
"Separate the saucer section! All hands, brace for impact!"
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| The end of the week is coming! (Rerelease)This is a copyover from Facebook. Not everyone who is on Xanga is on Facebook, and vice versa. Is "vice versa" a Latin phrase meaning "it would be a bad thing (a vice) to verse the converse of the previous statement because that would make the ensuing utterance far too long, but that's what I mean"?
The end of the week is here. The beginning of a new semester is here. Another irrititatingly spiritual and didactic internet pondering is here. Wonderful, isn't it? On the internet, anyone can say anything to anyone, barring passwords, user blocking, spam filters, and server space limitations, of course.
This week was the first full week back at Biola for me. I have tagged a random bunch of people that I know for this note because it is general. I know people from a bunch of different places, so they constitute circles of friendship. The circles of friendship concept is an interesting one. Sometimes people appear in two, sometimes there is one friend in one sphere of interaction that never pops over into another one. At any rate, that was a rabbit trail. I sent a dog after the rabbit.
This is year two of a hypothetical four--it may be less, but I know not. I was in an intensive linguistics program over the summer, so I came back this year ready to do work. This summer turned over a bunch of stuff that will give me plenty to think about for a LONG time to come. If God has called me to do something, I have to obey him no matter how difficult it may be. He will train me to do what he calls me to do, but I must obey.
This summer marked the end of the honeymoon phase for me in looking at linguistics. If you have to stay up until squirrelly hours of the morning picking apart the grammatical forms used to make obliques in Salasaca Quichua, linguistics isn't quite so magical anymore. If you did not understand more than the gist of the previous sentence, that means that you have good mental health. Trust me. However, I can now say that when people do something like pronounce the name "Martin" with a glottal stop followed by a syllabic "n" sound, I don't like it. Now I am just showing off.
At any rate, linguistics is difficult, but what in life that is worth anything ISN'T? I found that I can do linguistics. God gave me that capacity, so if he has called me to go into Bible translation, I had better not plead incompetence. I also read <u>The Normal Christian Life</u> by Watchman Nee this summer, and God broke down any ideas I had left that suggested that I might have the strength to do anything that God would find acceptable, other than to surrender to HIS will, but even my strength to do THAT is in doubt.
If I am incompetent and utterly useless, it means nothing. God is my competence and my usefulness. Therefore, if I do ANYTHING--I will say it again--ANYTHING in God, it will work. If God is my strength, nothing will stop me from serving him. The Lord is good! Perhaps I will have to do a separate note on that book, because this one is getting long.
In the end, God knows what he is doing. God knows what I am doing, and I often don't even know that. This is going to be an interesting year.
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| A bit of something or otherGood afternoon, ladies and or gentlemen in the greatest non-exclusive sense possible.
God has been turning over a lot in my heart in mind lately. The interesting thing about what happens when we let God work in our lives is that we don't have to control what he does. God knows what he is doing, AND he knows what WE are doing--this in the light of the fact that I don't even know what I am doing a lot of the time.
Achieving wisdom is something that anyone can do, but apparently few do it. It is simultaneously one of the simplest things to do, and yet very difficult. It takes a lot of attention paid to God, but it also takes moving on with life as it comes.
"If the clouds are full of rain, they empty themselves on the earth, and if a tree falls to the south or to the north, in the place where the tree falls, there it will lie. He who observes the wind will not sow, and he who regards the clouds will not reap." Ecclesiastes 11:3-4 (ESV)
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| An appeal for patienceEat a banana sometime. It is a frightening thing to do. I usually know what is behind the peel, but I cannot peel back too far, lest I lose the whole thing and render my task fruitless.
This is liable to get real cheesy real fast, so I will get a move on it.
Think back to when you were a small child, recently spawned of your parents, and they would peel a banana for you. They would open it halfway, and that would get things rolling for you. You had to eat most of the first part of the banana before you could peel the rest. You had to eat the open part of the banana before you could move on to the rest. Once you finished that banana, you got to move onto the next one. If you ate enough of them, you would got in a bunch of trouble.
God has been teaching me about patience of late. At present, I am at
the Summer Institute of Linguistics in North Dakota after having
finished my freshman year of college. This is something I have
anticipated since my sophomore year in high school. It is all part of
a larger plan that I believe God has put before me for serving him in
Bible translation. Although I have come this far, there is part of me
that wants to go even farther. However, it doesn't matter.
I want to go faster and peel the banana so that I can get on to the next thing God has for me to do. I stuff my mouth full of banana so that I can get on to eat the next one, but then God smacks me upside the head and says, "Is that what it's really all about, eating a bunch of bananas?" Knowing God is more than completing tasks. Yet, living in God involves a lot of work. This is where patience comes in.
We learn to eat bananas slowly not merely because we savor the experience. The way I try to move sometimes, I look like a three-year-old eating a banana. It's a trifle embarrassing because I like to think that I am mature. (Perhaps maturity, like wisdom, is knowing that I am immature, but that's another topic.) Why am I in such a hurry to finish the thing? The banana will go quickly enough. On the flip side, what happens when I finish the banana?
When I finish one banana, it's time to start on an orange. Maturity is not something I can just reach. I cannot just GROW UP ALREADY. If I do that, I might grow up and crush the five-year old that lives in me. (That is how I can explain silly-stringing a friend and his girlfriend right off the floor in my dorm.) I have to keep moving. Thus, I shall round out this pondering with this:
Ladies and gentlemen, let us keep moving in God, and it does not matter if the person next to you has finished more of his banana than you have. You're not eating his banana, you are eating yours.
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| Madness that is interactiveThere is a game my brother Austin used to play called Madness Interactive. You play this guy that shoots his way through a whole bunch of levels, trying to get to the sheriff, who is the bad guy. There is not much to explain, the game does have a great name. How often is life simply confusing? There are times when it does not matter how much I know or how much I have done; it is simply madness--and it's interactive! One of my favorite sayings is, "There is a madness to the method." An inversion it is. There are many things that God has set before me. There is a lot to do, much to endure, but also much to enjoy. Sometimes I cannot get it all straight, and it is a trifle confusing. I shall not renumerate how important God is to the whole of a healthy existence. If there is no God, there is no reason to continue with this wretched state in which we abide. To be certain, the folk advice about how I don't have it as bad as another person does is correct. However, the fact that someone has a worse situation that I do is a problem within the fabric of the universe. When I look at the world, everything seems broken. I try to do my best with what is before me, but in the end, I can only do what I can do with what I have. Life is one wonderful bit of madness. All is fundamentally broken, but God is somehow in the business of putting it all back together again. I hit this line of thought most often when I am doing homework. In this interactive madness, I am going a little bit loopy. Have a nice day, and I shall post again when I have gathered my wits once again. | | |
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