Dusty Acres

The tundra desert

Wild and damned

Dusty acres of promising hurt

A cemetery peace

That kills the unfortified pride of convenience

The hills, near and noble,

Show none of the telltale signs of life -

The green pines polyestered by controlled burns -

Only the detritus of ground squirrels and jacks

And, sometimes, their gutted remains

Tumbleweeds and stark black ravens

Coyotes and saguaros

The twisted Joshua tree

With its rough hewn trunk of thorny sinews

Gnarled boughs like bearded necks and prickly death heads above

Flies and ants and yucca moths

And dozens of miles of flat arid sand

Old dead tires surround the fence posts in piles

And the wood cross stands where something

God knows what

Is buried

But the people are the kind who would tell you

If they knew

Life springs forth from the homestead

Working people, tired people

And children who know nothing of work

To pitch iron shoes at galvanized posts

To run dogs in endless circles

To mine the sand for common antiquities

Treasures of buried rubbish from long ago

To criticize God’s paintbrush

The separation of colors, the orange, red, vermillion

A tapestry of sunset on a one hundred mile afternoon

To live the solitary promise that deadness brings

The two smoking barrels of urbanity

And suburbanity

Have discharged those misshapen

And grizzly-haired, those of redder hue

Sojourners and naturalists

Hippies and nudists

Drunkards and libertarians

Those filled with wanderlust and a desire to live

Within their means

To this northern barren

This land of freedom

The rivers run north here

Not south

Resurrection in the vastness of the sky

And green grass grows up amidst the golden foxtails

The dusty roads lead farther into renaissance

Than most will dare to go

These days

As I sit here and wrestle with all of the things going through my head right now (housework, homework, kids, family Bible time, bills I'm not sure how we're going to pay, background investigation, work, housewarming party tomorrow) I realize that my trash can is starting to overflow. Crumpled up papers, shrink wrap and plastic ties, and a lot of fast food detritus. Stress makes you eat crappy. Period. The more you have to do, or the more you think you have to do, the less time you spend actually doing the things you have to do, and the more time you spend  thinking about all the things you have to do. See how that works?

I have no system. No plan. No calendar for how all this goes together. No routine. I have individual plans for different things. Little routines for work, for bills, etc. I have no overarching organizational theme in my life that holds it all together. Nothing telling me that I can do multiple things in one day, and this is how. I get to work and wonder: what is the most important thing I can do right now? Supply requests? Order? Cycle count? Deliveries? Cleaning for God's sake? (No, definitely not cleaning.) If I don't come up with an answer fast enough, I end up doing homework, or checking my email. Not to say that I shirk my work. I don't. I get it done, and I get it done fast. But my default is indecision, and indecision leads to wasted time. So today I am deciding to decide. What things are important to me? What things are more important than others? Write them down in a list, in order of importance, and then live my life in that order.

Just like in the movie Mission of the Shark (the one about the men of the USS Indianapolis who were in the water for five days before they were rescued after their ship was sunk, if you haven't seen it), the men are too spread out in the water right now. They need to be closer together. There needs to be some ORDER here. Because what happens when men are too spread out? They get eaten by sharks. And that's a fact. I've seen it. And there are all kinds of sharks out there. Loan sharks, creditors, divorce lawyers, bankruptcy lawyers, IRS auditors, etc. Too many to count. Some are great whites and some are sand tigers, but they all have bloody teeth. Today order will be brought in this court. Justice will be done. And my old ways will probably be casualties of war. Oh well. At least they'll die quickly, and won't get eaten by sharks.

Bible Bath

    For a while now, my wife's cell phone has been on the fritz. Besides the large crack down the face of mine (which I had been ignoring), her loud speaker had totally stopped working. No speaker phone? What's the big deal about that? Actually the loud speaker also controls the ringer. Her phone would not ring when someone would call. The alarm would not go off (she runs much of her day's routine around the countdown timer). All it would do was buzz.

    About a week ago I decided that we just need new cell phones. We had decided a couple of days before against the idea of ditching the cell phones completely and going the home phone only approach because it would only save us like 10 bucks a month (we have a really basic plan by today's standards) and we'd lose a ton of the convenience that comes along with having cell phones. So I bought us new phones, Nokia X2's. They are meant for pre-paid plans, but work great with our T-Mobile sim cards. Among the awesome features not available on our old phones is the capacity to hold an 8 GB micro SD memory card. That's the size of my Ipod Nano, folks. Get the picture? I've got about 800 pictures on my cell phone, and the entire audio Bible (NIV) and still have about 4 GB of free space for music and Pimsleur's Spanish system. 

    So why do I tell you all this? Well it's going to get weirder. 

    I have eczema. And so I take baths, in special concoctions that are supposed to help my skin. Tonight is the first night I was able to lay down in a warm apple vinegar spiked bath with my cell phone next to me playing the Bible through the speaker phone. I listened to 1 John, 2 Thessalonians, and a few Proverbs. 

    There is something so fitting about listening to (or reading) the Bible while in the bath. There are so many allusions in the Bible to bathing/washing with water/baptizing that have to do with cleansing uncleanness, healing the sick, and removing the stain of sin. Chuck Missler, an amazing Bible teacher, calls 1 John 1:9 ("If you confess your sins, He is faithful and just to forgive you your sins and cleanse you from all unrighteousness") the Christian Bar of Soap. In fact the Bible is all about taking something that was dirty and making it clean, taking something that was sick and making it well, taking something that was dead and making it alive. 

    Jesus was like that. That kind of cat. He believed strongly in resurrection. In purification. In cleansing. In the renewing of the clean and the judgement of the unclean. He was baptized in the Jordan, but if you'll notice,  in many of the Old Testament laws that God gave the Israelites, He included rituals like washing oneself in the river and washing one's clothes and then one will be clean again. The rise of baptism is not surprising in this light, and in fact is something that Jews were doing long before Jesus was born, although not for the same purpose Christians do it today. Submersion in water has always been a symbol of taking something that was unclean and making it clean. Baptism is that symbol today for Christians, although Jesus put a new spin on it and included in the meaning taking something that was dead and making it alive through resurrection. 

    In response to the critique from an atheist that giving yourself over to reading the Bible and learning Christian doctrine is in essence brainwashing yourself, I once heard someone say, "My brain needed a good washing anyway." How true is that for us? I know that after some of the things I have done/seen/subjected myself to this week, that my brain needed a good washing too.  Thank God that He provided us the tool  in His Word to cleanse ourselves from all of the crap we put into our heads each day. To renew and refocus ourselves on the truth, the only solid foundation. And baths seem all of the sudden like the perfect place for it.

The Wake

In the wake of the Casey Anthony verdict today, I am left with this image in my head:

It's a picture of Caylee Anthony at 2 years old, sometime soon before she was reportedly chloroformed, had her head wrapped in duct tape, and was shoved in a trash bag which was taped shut and then she was thrown into the trunk of her mother's car and left there for over a month. At least that was the original story.

Seeing this picture after re-reading the details of how this precious little girl was found just hits way too close to home for me. My daughter looked just like that a couple months ago, but with blonde hair instead of brown.

The problem of evil comes into sharp focus at times like these. Casey Anthony was found "not guilty" of brutally murdering her daughter, not because she didn't do it, but because they can't absolutely prove that she did. Weather the girl died as stated above, or drowned out back in the pool, as the defense stated, she was still found in a bag covered in duct tape in the middle of the woods 6 months after she went missing. The crime happened, no matter who did it. A 2 year old girl was murdered (or at the very least disposed of) in a brutal way, and we are left to sort out the sick, sick world we live in in which these things can happen.

Hope that is in rightly placed in Jesus Christ, a hope of better things to come beyond this fragile mortal body gasping in the midst of monsters and those who don't care enough to bring them to justice, is the only thing that really sustains us here. It is the only thing that can keep us going sometimes. It's the only thing that makes sense. Sometimes there is nothing you can do but, as the Marines say, move your right foot forward a few inches, then move your left foot a few inches ahead of your right foot, then move your right foot a few inches ahead of your left foot...God save us from this wicked and perverse generation. 

Epiphany

I ran into an old friend at church last night and talked to him a while. He's been doing a lot of disappearing acts lately. He's been in the application and training process for Blackwater. Fairly recently he apparently got picked up by the CIA and they're sending him essentially through officer training school to get his masters in counter-intelligence (From CSU San Bernardino of all places). He said he had no idea the CIA was interested in him (he wasn't pursuing them) when a guy walked up to him on the street one day and slid a folder under his arm, which contained a detailed dossier about him. Apparently the full dossier is about five times the size of War and Peace. He said they had been monitoring him and everyone he knew or was in any way connected with for over a year (kind of scary that that would probably include me) and had collected mountains of information about him before they even offered him a college scholarship. He was telling me a little about global politics, how they had been monitoring Bin Laden for several years at that compound and were using him kind of a like a pawn in their strategies, etc.

Also he said something extremely profound. It actually stops me in my tracks every time I think about its implications. He told me that everyone thinks government agents are brainwashed in order to be able to do the things they have to do. He said that's absolutely false. "You brainwash yourself. The man or woman makes the job, the job doesn't make the man or woman." Then he said, "You're not an assassin because you joined Blackwater. You joined Blackwater because you're an assassin." That's very profound to me. It says, essentially, that you are not in any way controlled by your circumstances, but much more-so by your personality, by your likes and dislikes, by your gifts and talents. This sounds almost like genetic predeterminism.* So by that logic, you're not a warrior looking to "get some" because you're a Marine, you joined the Marines because you're a warrior looking to "get some". I applied the logic to myself and it came out like this: I'm not a lazy and disorganized employee because I have a job that doesn't challenge me. I have a job that doesn't challenge me because I'm a lazy and disorganized employee. Man, that cuts.

That was my first application of the formula. Then I started thinking in terms of my Christian walk. I am not a Christian because I'm a good person. I'm a good person because I am a Christian. Along the same lines, I'm not going to heaven because I'm a good person. I'm a good person because I'm going to heaven. The Bible makes this point dreadfully clear. I don't love others because I get something out of it. If I didn't love first, I would never get anything out of it. So I get something out of it because I love others. I don't seek adventure, physical fitness and discipline because I want to join the Navy or the California Highway Patrol. I want to join the Navy or the California Highway Patrol because I love adventure and physical fitness and discipline. What you are determines what will make you happy, and in some cases what you will do with yourself, not the other way around. 

So the question of the day: What are you? Barring all excuses, hold backs and fears, what are you? I'm slowly figuring this out for myself. Until you know, you will never be happy or fully usable by God.


* I have mixed feelings about genetic predeterminism. You could say from one point of view that it sounds evolutionary, but on the other hand, we're all descended from Adam and Eve, and then from Noah and his sons, and our genes seem to carry the curse of imperfection that fell on our forebears in the garden. I'm a little more solid on the idea of spiritual predeterminism because the Bible seems to make it so clear that God indeed predestined us who believe. But since the predestined were based on those who He foreknew, which essentially means He knew what choice they would make before they made it because He is outside of time and space, I think this question is kind of irrelevant. Either He made the choice, or you did. Either way, He created the choice, and He created you (to possibly make the choice). So He made the choice in that manner of speaking. So shut up and focus on more important things, like Jesus, and how amazing it is that He sacrificed Himself to save you and me from our pitiful self-defeating destructive lives and the death that was inevitably to follow. 


This kind of predeterminism I think has much more to do with gifts and talents that were born in you and in some ways define who you are, which I think is essentially to say, "who you are is found in the specifics of how God made you special."

Murderous compassion

I took a personality/spiritual gifts profile test for the ministry class that I'm in. The results of the DISC test came back that I am a high SC, which are characterized as steady, tediously detailed and over-accurate, organized and non-confrontational. My high spiritual gifts came out to be teaching, knowledge, giving, and then right under those came prophecy and a few others. There was an interesting side note in the report that mentioned that Jeremiah was very likely an SC personality type, and obviously he was a prophet. It said that was an uncommon and kind of paradoxical mixture. For one thing, SC's generally are not bold in proclaiming anything. They are not drivers. They'd rather not rock the boat. They also tend to be extremely compassionate toward others. So when you add in the gift of prophecy, you get someone like Jeremiah. A murderous compassion. Preaching doom and gloom, cutting throats with his words of apocalypse, and then literally crying about it in the very next sentence. He begs God to forgive the people over and over, or to turn His wrath away from them. He prophecies against many nations and peoples and when the things he had prophesied come to pass, he writes a book of Lamentations, lamenting the terrible destruction. It almost sounds bipolar.

But it isn't. And I'll tell you why it isn't. S is characterized by sturdiness. Someone with a strong foundation. S-type people are very slow to anger, slow to act (till all possibilities have been logically weighed), and are generally considered to be loyal and reliable by others. Jeremiah's foundation was God. In Jeremiah 1, God put His word into Jeremiah's mouth. He then threatened him, saying that if he was terrified of proclaiming it, God would terrify him in front of the people he was terrified of. Jeremiah was a steady kind of guy, and at that moment, his steadiness changed foundations, or at least matured. His love for Israel is extremely apparent throughout the two books of the Bible that he authored. That stays the same throughout, as well as his compassion for people in general. He loves people almost like God does.

Human beings are fairly emotionally complex. We are created in God's image which means that He must be too. But emotions are not foundational to a person. Personality is. Emotions come and go. Personality really never goes anywhere. God's personality is loving, kind, forgiving, and yet perfectly holy and just. Jeremiah's was similar to that. So while his emotions go haywire (much like God who does or almost does seemingly rash things at times in His "burning anger"), he himself is still the same steady, compassionate prophet. He based his life on God's word (literally), and while it changed what he did with his time, God chose him, I am convinced, precisely because of who he was. He was loyal to God just as he would have been to anyone else. He was compassionate to people in their heart-rending judgment just as he would have been in other circumstances. He remained wholly himself while being used wholly by God.

Now here's the part that freaks me out. I have these same characteristics. Now that I know what God can do with someone like me, I'm a little anxious (and frankly scared) of what He might have in store for me. I'm going to be reading up on Jeremiah this week. I think this is going to be a wild ride. 

Bapto

Well, last night in my school of ministry class they did a baptism of the Holy Spirit altar call. I went forward, not knowing at all what to expect. I was raised in a church of Bible thumping Pharisees and really don't know much about how the Spirit works at all. They anointed me with beautifully scented oil and laid their hands on me and just prayed that the Holy Spirit would fill me and give me boldness. One guy was praying in tongues, another guy in Spanish. I felt kind of filled up I guess. The guy praying in tongues told me that although I didn't feel anything he could physically see that the Spirit was upon me. I was, though, pretty disappointed that someone who was asking as sincerely as I thought I was could be left out to dry. I looked at the cross on the wall and thought to myself, "it's failed experiments like this that cause people to lose faith and give up."

After I had helped stack up chairs and put some tables away, a guy came up to me. I think he was the one praying over me in Spanish, but I'm not positive. His name just happened to be Angel. He told me that he wanted me to know that he had asked and asked and asked for the Holy Spirit to fill him and had always been disappointed. Then he finally learned what it meant to be filled with the Holy Spirit. That it wasn't a feeling. It was an experience. And he realized that he had been filled all of those times he had asked, but he had not recognized it. And now that he recognizes it, he knows that God never let him down, not once. I thanked him and left.

When I was driving home, the smell of the oil filled the car (although I smelled my hands where he had put the oil and they didn't smell like it anymore). I felt absolutely alive. It was such a rush. I lost myself in the smell and in the words "Thank you Spirit". It was what I would imagine being high is like. For about five minutes. It was beautiful. And I thought to myself that if this is what heaven is like for eternity with God, I will most definitely not be bored. It was a fabulous experience. And then, like Moses' shining face, it faded. It faded, but it still hasn't left completely. I do think I have a bit of boldness that was not there before. More love and courage to reach out to those around me. The power of the Spirit is the power for ministry, and maybe the reason I've been dry for so long is because I've been running from ministry.

I've been running for too long. Last night, God literally sent an Angel to tell me to stop.

Leap of Faith

Well we found out the day before yesterday that in two months our Kaiser health insurance will be rising by another $80/month. It rose $79/month a year ago. We cannot afford it any longer. So we are thinking seriously about taking the leap of faith into the cost share world, with Christian Healthcare Ministries. It would lower our "premiums" a bit from what they are now but the best part is they would not be going up. Pretty much ever, from the sound of it. And all money going into the system (well about 85% of it anyway) goes straight back out to cover the medical expenses of other Christians around the U.S. We don't have to feel like we are feeding our dollars into a greedy black hole. Health insurance is an extremely big drain on us and we cannot afford this hike. If anyone has any experience with CHM please comment. I'd love to get some more info and personal testimonies. Thanks.

Overwhelmed

I am overwhelmed. Every once in a while the realization hits me like a semi truck that I am responsible for the physical, spiritual and emotional health, maturity and growth of my family. I am supposed to lead them like Christ would. I am supposed to be so in tune with the things of God all the time that I can judge cases immediately and wisely like the judges of Israel did. Sometimes I feel like Moses. These cases are too hard for me. I turn to God. God doesn't talk to me like He did to Moses, face to face. So what am I to do? I feel totally inadequate to assume this role. I can see why Paul said to "pray without ceasing". It's almost like you have to in order to get anywhere in this crazy Christian life. That's something that I need to learn how to do. I've never been good at juggling plates. There are broken shards all around my feet. I wish there were 38 extra hours in each day so I could actually do the things I think that I should do. But I waste enough time as it is, and if there were, I would undoubtedly just waste more. Father, give me the wisdom to lead my family and the peace that comes with the knowledge that You are ultimately in control, and that I can only do what I can do. I pray that Your grace would be sufficient for all of the rest. Amen.

It's official

We cancelled our escrow on the house in Mentone. It has been 10 months of frustration, waiting 2 - 4 weeks at a time for one signature, etc. The incompetence out there is incredible. We're looking around for a ranch house kind of deal in the high desert now. Finding them for good prices. Quite the commute, but I've always loved to drive. 

I'm obsessed with this song this week

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUFL8WSxTgY

Oh Hemingway

I have been thinking about Hemingway recently. Yes, Ernest Hemingway, that great American author who swallowed a shotgun blast in 1961. The writer of such brilliant works as Green Hills of Africa, To Have And To Have Not, Dangerous Summer, The Sun Also Rises, and (my personal favorite) Islands In The Stream. There were many more, of course, but these are the ones which I consider to be brilliant.

Hemingway's books strike me at a gut level. It is not generally at an intellectual level. His books are designed to be easy to read. He was a journalist before he was a novelist and he wrote in the journalistic style (never publish anything a 4th grader could not understand). He summed up his writing philosophy beautifully in his posthumous novel The Garden Of Eden: "Know how complex a thing is, and then state it as simply as you can." There was always so much more going on beneath the words then there ever was on the surface, and his word choices, sentence and paragraph structures, and the overall moods that his words inflicted on my spirit I remember with great fondness. Not all of his books were depressing. Not all had obvious social messages. But all of them contained this utter sophisticated simplicity which he strove so hard to produce that kept me coming back book after book. I have read most of them. Not in years, but I have read most of them.

I believe I will read another. His charming simplicity will I remember until I forget.