The lonely tracks (a place description)

Blackness scours the sky with lashes of silver sun streaks. The hills rise, a dark pallid green in the failing light, bumbling like drunks into the jagged rocky slopes of Mt. Reneir. The tracks lie heavily -- steel and cedar, an endless line of dead immigrants and convicts -- in rutted channels dug out of the hillside. They wind around some smaller peaks and disappear near the muted purple remains of the euthanized day. The treeline at the edge of the rocky cliffs is patterned with old-growth firs and younger quaking asps, at once dying and begetting, generations of sentinels casting shadows over a hushed domain.

No idea what happens there - seems like a pretty nice place though.

Tonight, tonight

We'll crucify the insincere tonight. How about that?

What's really going on?

There's a broken window in our dining room that I broke when trying to get it open one evening about nine months ago. I haven't fixed it yet. It's covered with a piece of cardboard and sealed with blue painter's tape. We recently quelched an insane black fly problem in the kitchen, master bedroom and bathroom, mostly due to the fact that I bought screening materials but have not screened the windows yet. I have gained 50 pounds in the last year, which I attribute to stress and lack of time - 'school takes all my time' (which is B.S.). I keep telling myself that I will be graduating in just a couple of months and then I'll get back in shape. Some resolution. The truth is I can't wake up in the mornings and am often a few minutes late to work.

I have not done any kind of daily devotional Bible reading in months. My eczema has been pretty bad this summer. Sometimes I wonder if I should correlate the two.

Today a big rig dumped an entire truck load of wet asphalt across three lanes of the only freeway that will get me home. I moved about four miles in two hours.

But on one very awesome note, my wife and kids have found a way to get along together. They discovered Montessori homeschooling, and everyone is benefiting greatly from it. Amazingly (although I'm at work while this goes on), I am benefiting the most. The kids are happier and a little better behaved. This has dropped a great weight from my shoulders where I had always blamed myself for their constant misbehavior.

We've been getting in Bible time with the kiddos most nights, and every night when I put them to bed I read them six or seven chapters of the Bible while they calm down and try to go to sleep. In the last few weeks we have read Job, Mark, Deuteronomy and tonight we read half of Romans. Even if this is way beyond them now, I hope the questions and comments will start flooding out of them soon. I plan to keep this up. It's probably the only good thing I have ever done for them.

I told my kids tonight that I am so sick of hearing them complain when I put them in their beds. After I put out all the fires, they actually knocked out with little hullabaloo. I hope you're sick of me doing the same thing. From now on, the complaints department is closed.

I've had enough of myself too. If you see me complain again, remind me to give myself a spanking.

Tonight, tonight.

What things are you sick of yourself for? Lay them at the cross. Jesus died for those things too.

You reap what you sow

I'm a good driver. A great driver even. According to the DMV and my insurance company, I'm an ACE. I haven't gotten a ticket in 8 years or had an accident in 6.

And then...

I got pulled over twice this morning. Within 3 hours of each other. The first one gave me a speeding ticket. I was doing 78 in a 55 (but he only wrote me for 70). The second one let me go. I actually wasn't doing anything wrong the second time.

I started looking at my arms. Has living in the desert darkened my skin? Does my car match a stolen vehicle? Why did I get pegged this morning? And then it hit me. It hit me with vigor and clarity.

Amos. I listened to Amos yesterday while driving to work. He's a minor prophet but a major hitter. He accuses the nation Israel of all of their heinous sins before God, and worst of all, accuses them of being unrepentant. He tells them that because of their sins, "prepare to meet your God". He gives them consequences. He explains God's justice system a little more clearly.

After that was over I was like, "that was heavy". Then I turned on the radio to a Christian Talk station I listen to every so often to hear pastor Lance Sparks quoting James and Paul and others in the New Testament about how sin leads to death and all sin carries consequences, whether or not it is repented of and forgiven by God. Examples? They abound. You rob a grocery store: you go to jail. You curse at your spouse in anger: your kids hear it, and then they turn out just like you. You shirk your homework: you don't pass. You don't spend quality time with your family: they flounder and sink, and you live unfulfilled. Whether or not these crimes are forgiven, the consequences remain the same. The Bible says it very clearly: You reap what you sow.

I have been unintentional lately about many things. I have rarely read my Bible (I'm just too busy...), have not spent much quality time with my family, have used homework as an excuse to get out of doing things and then hardly ever actually do my homework in those times, I have been hit or miss with praying for my family and my neighbors each day, let Bible time with the kids fall off the cliff, etc. And now, emergency after emergency at home. A miscarriage. Bleeding and disobedient children. A frustrated and drowning wife. Clogged sinks. Extended family problems. Hospital bills. Bank overdrafts. And now, traffic tickets, traffic school, the stress of being pulled over twice in three hours.

After I said "thank you" to the gentleman who had handed me a citation and shook his hand, I thanked God for the reminder. There are consequences to my actions. This was a very minor one. I needed a slap on the wrist. I deserve a hell of a lot more than that. Thank you Lord for your mercy and for always seeing me through, even when I am keeping you at arm's length you find a way to tap my shoulder and bring me back.

What kinds of things remind you that God is in control and doesn't let you get away with things?

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.