WE NEED LESS / WE NEED MORE
Information / Wisdom (It’s better to understand than to know)
Shallow billionaires / Passionate teachers
Self-promotion / Self-awareness
Multitasking / Control of our attention (Can’t do two things at one; no-one can)
Inequality / Fairness (Income springs to mind)
Sugar / Lean protein (yes!)
Action / Reflection
Super sizes / Smaller portions (I need a smaller coffee cup)
Private jets / High-speed trains (Ontario especially suffers from a lack of transit)
Calculation / Passion (in the movies especially)
Experts / Learners (experts make problems worse)
Blaming / Taking responsibility
Judgment / Discernment (Judging is easy; discernment is hard)
Texting / Reading (Or long-form writing)
Anger / Empathy (Politics especially floats on a shallow sea of outrage; it’s so tiring)
Output / Depth (Don’t pay writers by the word!)
Constructive criticism / Thank-you notes
Possessions / Meaning (Memories and good friends don’t clutter up your house)
Righteousness / Doing the right thing
Answers / Curiosity (Yes! Don’t settle for the answer you get: Dig deeper)
Long hours / Longer sleep (This morning says yes)
Complaining / Gratitude (This is hard to do)
Sitting / Moving (Everything is built around sitting; moving a lot is difficult)
Selling / Authenticity (Although seeking authenticity is the opposite of authenticity)
Cynicism / Realistic optimism
Self-indulgence / Self-control (Ouch. This one’s for me. And banksters)
Speed / Renewal
Emails / Conversations (I remember the last really good conversation I had. It was with a stranger. I don’t really converse with my “friends” who on second though don’t really seem like friends at all)
Winning / Win-win
Immediate gratification / Sacrifice (This is starting to look like the New Testament in bullet points here)

30 Things We Need / 30 Things We Don’t originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2011-03-09.

Since Low’s language is a bit out-dated, I list below Burns’ “Ten Forms of Twisted Thinking,” (adapted from his “Feeling Good” book, a classic read) categories of dangerous ruminations, that when identified and brought into your consciousness, lose their power over you.

1. All-or-nothing thinking (a.k.a. my brain and the Vatican’s): You look at things in absolute, black-and-white categories.

2. Overgeneralization (also a favorite): You view a negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

3. Mental filter: You dwell on the negatives and ignore the positives.

4. Discounting the positives: You insist that your accomplishments or positive qualities don’t count (my college diploma was stroke of luck…really, it was).

5. Jumping to conclusions (loves alcoholic families): You conclude things are bad without any definite evidence. These include mind-reading (assuming that people are reacting negatively to you) and fortune-telling (predicting that things will turn out badly).

6. Magnification or minimization: You blow things way out of proportion or you shrink their importance.

7. Emotional reasoning: You reason from how you feel: “I feel like an idiot, so I must be one.”

8. “Should” statements (every other word for me): You criticize yourself or other people with “shoulds,” “shouldn’ts,” “musts,” “oughts,” and “have-tos.”

9. Labeling: Instead of saying, “I made a mistake,” you tell yourself, “I’m a jerk” or “I’m a loser.”

10. Blame: You blame yourself for something you weren’t entirely responsible for, or you blame other people and overlook ways that you contributed to a problem.

You can learn more about the 15 common cognitive distortions (e.g., the most common forms of twisted thinking with more in-depth explanations and examples), as well as how you can fix cognitive distortions once you’ve identified them.

10 Forms of Twisted Thinking originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2011-02-26.

It’s not really my problem what people in factories overseas do (the world is so small now that I simply can’t worry about every single problem; there are far too many of them), but it is my problem when advertisers violate my personal space. The space inside my head and the space around my head are mind to with what I please.

I think we’re going to have fancy tinfoil hats in the future. If we don’t fight the next world war with sticks and stones, that is.

Advertising In Dreams originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2010-06-22.

Look, I’m a Christian, and I’m supposed to believe that God created the universe. I’m already on board with that. I can look at the world and see God’s handiwork any time I like. I get that. It’s a selection bias, sure, but I am persuaded that it’s a selection bias for truth.

Why abstract this doctrine–that God created the universe, and all universes that may or may not exist–into something cloaked in scientific mumbo-jumbo and try to teach it to kids in schools? What purpose does this serve? Plenty of people admit that a God or an Intelligence or Something created the universe with just the right ingredients to produce people. But those people aren’t Christians in any meaningful sense; this idea of a Designer doesn’t affect their lives in any real way, which is the point, right?

Let public educators teach whatever they like. Let them leave the question of origins open and indeterminate (or let them tease young branes with M-theory if they like). We don’t need to hide God behind a non-falsifiable theoretical screen and then pull Jesus out like a puppet and say, “Oh and this Intelligence is JESUS!”.

That’s not how you get from here to there, you know?

Intelligent Design originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2009-08-27.

I’m not sure what to think of that. Maybe it’s just Nick that’s mellowed, and not me. I’m not even sure what mellowing is, except that it’s probably a lot less interesting than… what’s the opposite of mellow exactly?

If I need, I can always read my old blog posts. All the way back to 2004. You can too, if you wish. They’re all here, along with old pictures of me looking younger, my family looking younger, and other people who I no longer know looking younger.

I used to write a whole lot more. I’m not sure why that was, though I suspect it had something to do with loneliness. There was a time not so long ago when I was lonely most of the time; every once in a while I get a taste of that again and remember how empty my days were. There’s something visceral and wrenching about that feeling. Of course, I don’t regret any of it. What I did and what I didn’t do, who I was with and who I wasn’t made me what I am today, got me to where I am today, and I very much like where I am. Is that wrong? It doesn’t feel like it.

My life isn’t particularly more rushed or hurried than it was then. I’m married to Laura (it feels odd writing that; I don’t write it often enough, I suppose) and we have a particular kind of life, but even in my resting state now she’s always here or somewhere close by. Depending on how you feel about people being close to you, that may sound particularly delicious or decidedly unsettling. Either way. I like it.

Everything is different. I’m no longer an observer watching the course of my own life; I’m involved, doing things, making things better now. There’s something to be said for letting go of that awful passivity that goes along with events simply washing over me. For all my bluster back then, I was cruising, really. Letting things happen to me. Letting my circumstances manipulate me. Letting what happened happen. You can’t ever get entirely away from that, of course, and there are always going to be things I can’t control, but there’s a difference between being on autopilot and taking the yoke.

I hate it when people write about themselves, but I’m allowed to be a hypocrite and a navel-gazer every once in while, I think. I can’t help it; going back to 2004 and reading what the me that was me then wanted to write about… it takes a guy back.

The Me That Was The Me That Was originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2009-08-01.

1) I think that a person can hold two opposing ideas in their head without having any cognitive dissonance whatsoever. You don’t have so be special to do so, you just have to be human. I think a lot of people have a lot of this going on and don’t realise it at all.

2) I bought an iPod once, thinking I would use it. I haven’t really used it and I’m pretty glad I only sprung for the 1gb model. iPods are useless to me.

3) Since I was 7, I’ve read Swiss Family Robinson 34 times. The last time I read it was last year, in the summer.

4) Laura and I went on our honeymoon to Cuba. We forgot to bring a camera. I think we were just so overwhelmed with being married that we just didn’t think about anything else, or at least not anything very clearly. Part of me is glad that we don’t have pictures so it remains one of those pleasant memories; the other half of me knows that one day I’m going to start forgetting things and I’ll wish with 100% of my being that I had pictures at that point.

5) Sometimes I think that there are certain bloodlines that don’t deserve to be propagated. I’m glad I don’t get to make those decisions: I would be incredibly harsh on my own relatives.

6) I don’t really like children. I can picture having some one day, but I think I’ll have to be a bit of a different person to raise them properly (or at all). Thankfully it doesn’t take long for me to become a different person, which is scary when you’re married to someone. When you’re married to someone that wants kids it’s more like a catch-22.

7) Back in the day I used to believe that any person could marry any person and they’d probably get on just fine. Having been married for a while to Laura, I almost want to believe that there’s one person for everyone. I mean, sure, there are some major dimensions in each other that we don’t understand (I have, for instance, never been able to sustain one of those conversations that starts with bread and ends with how our friends’ children look nothing at all like them), but that makes it all the more interesting, right? In most other areas we’re so closely tailored to each other it almost looks like we were designed for each other. Which is freaky, and I understand in some sort of predestination sense that that is in fact true, but from a human perspective? Freaky. Yet I still can’t bear to bring myself to believe that ridiculous modern trope of “completion” and “other half” and whatever other crap so many people believe about love; I think I’ve settled on some sort of compromise in which some people are better for each other than others.

8) I love semi-colons. I really do. If you aren’t using semi-colons, you’re missing out on life. Somewhat ironically, this paragraph doesn’t have any.

9) If I could pick any age to live it, it would be the 1920s. This is also Laura’s pick, oddly enough. I think, though, that the 1920s I have in my head is very different from the 1920s as it existed in the real world.

10) There is a very active world inside my head. You don’t want to know what goes on there. Sometimes I think I’m closer to normal than I think, but when I say something odd, people react negatively; I wish I could figure out if that’s because they’re the same way and overcompensating, or because they’ve genuinely never had a strange though in their lives. I realise this entire bullet point makes me sound like I have Asperger’s. I truly hope I don’t.

11) Books annoy me. The ones I’m supposed to like in order to “get” modern literary culture are the most boring, annoyingly cloying slog-fests imaginable. It seems that I find more enjoyment from low-brow hack-work than from what so many call “art”. I guess that’s okay, but I’m still puzzled about what they see in it. If it’s not enjoyable, why read it? Or do they really enjoy it? How? Then there are those Bourne novels that I swear you have to be only semi-literate to like. I guess I’m a half-snob.

12) I wish I could have one of those Star Trek experiences where you inhabit someone else’s body and then gain a better understand of what it’s like to be them and the plot resolves while you glow with new-found empathy. That never seems to happen, so I’m trapped over here trying to understand why you suck so much.

13) I’m a snob. I’m a snob about being a snob, though, so I think snobs suck pretty hard. This goes back to bullet point #1, maybe?

14) Growing up, I wasn’t allowed to watch much television, listen to much radio (except for 1010, and even then just the conservative talking heads, a phrase which on second though really doesn’t apply much to radio), listen to much music, or generally experience culture in any way. This is fine; I don’t begrudge my parents this at all because so much of it seems like crap to me. Yet its left me with this culture void where I don’t get jokes about the 80s and 90s, don’t understand the references, and what little I do know is basically from modern pop-culture referencing older pop-culture. I only started listening to popular music something like 10 years ago, and most of that was Christian music, most of which was complete shit. (If you want a reason to dislike Christian music you’re unable to find any reasons in scripture — because it isn’t there, you nitwit — try disliking it because almost the entire genre is offensively without artistic or any other value.)

15) I’m like to make people laugh. I identify strongly with the character of Chandler Bing on Friends, but not simply in “humour as a defense mechanism” sort of way. If you’re looking for a real me underneath the humour you’re liable to be very disappointed. I can be serious at the drop of a hat if that’s what’s called for, but at the end of the day cracking jokes is part of my identity. It helps that Laura has a wonderful sense of humour; I’ve dated girls who didn’t find me the least bit funny, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s pretty much a moral failing on their part.

16) I used to be that guy with the strong opinions, but I’m not that guy anymore. Okay, I am, but I have strong opinions on different things now. All those arguments we used to have in church on minor theological point? I’m sure they’re important and I’m sure someone has to hash those things out, but those things aren’t important to me anymore. This doesn’t mean that I’ve become some sort of post-modern weed-smoking hippie guru chanting nonsense at the moon (I’m pretty sure that’s Sigur Ros, actually), but I’m not entirely convinced that life is a series of either right or wrong decisions whose gravity can only be measured insofar as you can tease out the logic and argue the facts. Some things just aren’t wrong or right because they weren’t made wrong or right. Some things are definitely wrong and some things are definitely right. Those are the important things.

17) I disagree with President Obama on many issues. Yet it seems to me that his time in office is a needed relief from the Bush administration. Bush’s terms were so awful that words almost don’t do them justice. Plus, any of the words that I could use are almost certainly not fit for public consumption.

18) There are times when I think I do too many things almost well enough to do publicly, but none well enough to be proud of. If I’m any indication, all those Renaissance Men were driven to distraction by the desire to do everything.

19) I haven’t a clue what to write here.

20) I wish creativity could be turned on like a tip. I admire and dislike those people who can effortlessly bang out a decent tune, but I’m glad I’m not one of them. I like having to wrench out words like prying up flagstones.

21) I own three cats. Or three cats own me. You decide.

22) I love Monty Python SO MUCH.

23) We have about two meals of real food left in the house. I fear we may starve soon.

24) I have never watched a horror movie in my life and I don’t intend to.

25) I got spam (actual spam!) for Christmas from my brother-in-law. It’s not good stuff.

25 Facts About Me originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2009-01-23.

You can look at those people in light of their most recent transgressions and say, Ah, I see the failing that led up to this calamitous fall. Or, Ah, I always suspected. Or, Ah, I told you so.

There is some value to this, of course, if you examine yourself through and through, if you comb through your own life to find if that same root might one day flower into a full-grown plant, to find if you’re hiding the same sort of bodies in a closet somewhere.

As a leader of a church you can ask yourself how you can prevent your charges from falling into grievous sin. But from a human perspective there isn’t anything you can do. People are good at façades, good at erecting walls and appearing perfect when they are in fact anything but.

Quite a few churches seem oblivious to this fact. It’s non-obvious to them, and probably for good reason. After all, if the intensive study of scripture, if participation in an ancient tradition, if having the right doctrine and presumably the right relationship with God, if the right kind of exegetical preaching with enough emphasis on sin, if these things don’t produce a church full of the proper kind of people, what can? Everyone feels like they should be better; they should be sinning less, they should be doing more, they should be… something. And everyone else looks just like this portrait of the perfect Christian, so we all just pretend.

This happens in every kind of church. Post-modern, modern, ancient, whatever. Because it’s human nature, and human nature is a hard thing to get over.

It doesn’t, of course, have to be this way. The recognition of sin shouldn’t drive people ever more into a world of spackle and paste and paint and fabric, but deep into the arms of God’s grace. The recognition of imperfection should drive men and women to break down the walls between then, no matter what these walls are made of. Whether they’re middle-class suburban perfection, or theological precision, or a pious but empty care for the disenfranchised.

What else do we share? Rich, middle-class, poor: We’re all deeply and entirely flawed. Flawed to the point that each of us, apart from Christ, is liable to fall horribly. Even in Christ we still have that old man nipping on our heels.

I speak from deep within this myself. I am imperfect. I am part of a community of believers who are imperfect. Our leadership is imperfect. Our feeble attempts to draw close to God are imperfect.

But the most important thing, I think, is the realisation, and then the action. A kind of humility that gives grace to those who have fallen, who have done terrible things, whether they are living in rebellion against God or not, and whether they are seeking forgiveness and reconciliation or not.

We are all imperfect. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-09-01.

Things I think about whilst doing dishes… originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-08-19.

This is the best life I can possibly imagine for myself. Married to a woman who (it’s true, I didn’t make it up) loves me and who I love back. Living in a pretty nice apartment in a bit of a rough neighbourhood with access to all the amenities we want. Need a coffee? Walk over and get one. Need some groceries? Five minutes down the road. Want to rent a video? Basically across the street. Want to buy Chinese rice and fish heads? Asian supermarket around the corner. Want cheap (in every meaning of the word) furniture? Ten minutes away, an Ikea. You get the picture.

I mean, I can imagine living in a swankier place, owning a house with a backyard and all that jazz, but I don’t think it would make me any happier. It might be the icing on the cake. But right now I have everything I need and more than I ever thought I could have.

That’s good. I don’t miss my subterranean existence in that miserable hovel of an apartment I used to have. I don’t miss being precariously poised on the edge of infatuation and incandescent disaster. I don’t miss the restlessness of wanting something or someone and being constantly outside looking in. I don’t miss much. Maybe, sometimes, I miss the way there were only two bus stops between me and work, but that’s it.

It was never the best of times. It was almost always the worst.

Yet there’s still something about being young. Or younger. I’m pushing 30 here. I don’t feel it at all and I wonder if anyone ever really does. At 20, 30 seemed so very far away. Now, at 27, it feel right around the corner. There was a time when I counted hours in a day. Now I count days in a week. Soon, I suspect, I’ll be counting weeks, and then years.

I miss being a romantic. Not the action of being romantic, not the things I do to make Laura feel loved, but actually being a romantic. I think it was being on the other side of dreams coming true that made me feel as if it must, must happen. As if getting there was the reason behind so many thing. Now that my dreams have come true — in ways different than I could have imagined — I can’t help but notice all those people whose dreams, whatever they are, have not and may never will.

You may always find yourself chasing a dream and never getting anywhere, feeling like you were destined for something bigger than yourself and falling short of your expectations. Or you will fall in and out of love like a person breaking the surface of an ocean and going under again and again. You may never get there. Maybe you will find it and it will leave you.

I’m not a romantic anymore. Oh, I fall for a good love story like anyone else — Endless Love was almost too good to be spoiled by its awful ending, for instance — but I’m not enamoured of the concept that life works out all the time. Maybe that’s because mine seems to be, so far, despite me. I don’t know. God works in mysterious ways, as the song goes, and despite what you may think about God, I’m pretty sure some of those mysterious ways are to teach concrete lessons. Sometimes people get what they don’t deserve, and sometimes they do. Either way.

Tonight I can’t sleep. I think it has something to do with the coffee I had three hours ago. I know, drinking coffee before bed, not a good thing. I used to be able to do that.

To all you people I used to know: Congratulations. At least five or six of you got married. This is good. And to those that I still know: Double congratulations. You’re great people. I hope very much you remain happy.

It’s like everyone’s getting married… originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-08-17.

There’s so much to the creative process I don’t understand. Why two people’s art can look and sound so different, yet be distinctly theirs. Why when you seek to imitate it you feel like a forger and your art like a forgery, no matter how remarkable the result.

I can’t count the number of songs I’ve written and the number of poems I’ve pulled out of my head. I don’t think I’d want to. They come and go in phases and shifts. I could never count on a living as a musician: I simply can’t turn it on like a tap. I can sit at the piano and write fifty different phrases and attach fifty different lyrics to those phrase but they won’t satisfy me. Thirty minutes or two days later I sit down and the first thing I play is magic.

There are so few chords and combinations of notes, really. There are only so many ways to put them together before you run out and have to start recycling.

Sometimes you can want desperately to write about something but find yourself unable to write about it and instead spend a half hour writing about something else when you should be sleeping.

Playing old songs is a challenge. I can never remember exactly how they go. Maybe I’m making them up as I go, again, and I have no way of knowing. Only the few I record I know for certain. The rest are possibly recent.

Isn’t it strange how music can reach out and tweak something inside you that logic and facts and science can never explain, much less themselves touch? I played a song the other day that made me feel sad in a way I haven’t felt for a long time now. It made me feel something. This amazes me.

Thinking back, my former art was a shallow imitation of feeling, a tissue-thin façade less tangible than those things I professed to know and write about. If you had to hear them, I am sorry. If you felt a remarkable kinship for me then, even more so. I should be forgiven, I think, for those songs and the words to those songs. We all should, who wrote like that. We were children. If we had a grasp of irony far in excess of our years, we squandered it on songs we thought were about love. We were obsessed with love and being in love and writing about love and being in love. When you are in the desert you write songs about water. We are adults now and instead of obsessing some of us have moved on and are actually loving and being in love. That’s a much harder thing to write about. There’s almost no way to do it properly.

If I’m being too subtle in my lyrics, I don’t apologise. If you can mine seventeen different meanings or none at all, I couldn’t care less. These songs are for me, not for you. These things are the most intensely selfish things I will ever produce, the most tuned to myself. They can’t help but be. They’re my intellectual and emotional children. That you hear them, some of them, is a raw vulnerability I can’t help but shy away from. This is the singer/songwriter curse, of course. These are not songs written by a group of people in a room. They’re not statements about politics or revolution or technological disorientation. They’re songs that bubble to the surface in privacy, when alone.

I have become too verbose.

Songs originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-07-25.

Not to say he wasn’t right about some things… but who isn’t right about some things? Buddha, for instance, was right about something things. As ad Hitlerum teaches, simply agreeing with something the Fuhrer said doesn’t automatically make you wrong.

Of course, I was a pretty bratty kid. I think I still am. I’m waiting for ten years down the road when I write a blog post (if we still have blogs) about how I would go back and knock the N.T. Wright out of my (younger) self.

Also, if I could go back in time, I’d not stop the piano lessons. And I’d buy a better guitar than I have now. And I’d wear more funky hats (can anyone find me a sombrero?) instead of trying to be cool.

Among other things.

If I could go back in time… originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-06-05.

It’s not that hard, is it? The names roll off my tongues one after another. If you’ve been exposed to the world outside your own borders at all, you’ll recognise them. They have existed, and they exist right now, these places.

There’s so much evil in the world. So much injustice. So much stricken poverty and horrible injustice. There’s so much evil that standing before it makes me feel powerless, unable to help. I’m just one man. What can I do?

It’s always been here: the scale of our atrocities as a species increases, but it’s the same thing that’s been happening since the first humans sinned. It is not right that some go hungry, but some have always gone hungry. It is not right that some die in genocides, but some have always died like that. It is not right that brutal dictatorships flourish while the church is poised at the brink of the abyss, but this awful balance has always just been kept.

So going forward, what now? What is my posture towards these things to be? How do I, as a Christian, effect change in this world?

I don’t have a very good answer for that, I’m afraid. I don’t have a grand revelation. I haven’t had an epiphany or seen a blinding light. All I know is that I am convinced that what I do matters, not simply in the sense that people are important and I should care about getting their souls into heaven, but in the sense that the physical world is important, that taking care of it is important, and that justice here and now is something God speaks of over and over in the scriptures.

All I can say is, keep plugging. The church has done an amazing amount of work in the world. It has done some evil, some grandly evil things it should never have done, but the unspoken kindness and grace and justice it has visited on mankind is a testament to its greatness, its transforming power. The church is a beautiful thing with a great opportunity to do work today, here, now, on this physical planet. We have the keys to the kingdom in our hands, so to speak.

We work in the hope that at the end of this earth, this earth will become something new, but yet not new. That when we rise to life again after the brief sleep of death we will rise to a world without injustice, as God judges and begins to set things aright.

I know judgement is not a particularly comfortable thing, and our culture is decidedly MPD about it, but it must be done. Evil must be identified and pronounced against and rooted out. Jesus will do that when his kingdom comes in fullness, yes, but I am his agent here and now, part of his kingdom or revolution that exists now in bits and pieces. Should I not do the same?

Should we not all do the same? Should we not identify evil, judge against it, and proceed to root it out wherever we can?

Going forward; what now? originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-04-16.

It’s C.S. Lewis saying that Aslan is not safe, but he is good.

We love safety so much, don’t we? And there’s nothing wrong with that. I, for instance, feel incredibly safe with Laura’s love. I don’t feel like she’s going to blow up any minute and abandon me. I know what that’s like, and trust me, you don’t want a relationship (God forbid a marriage) that resembles more a landmine than a safe harbour.

You can find in God that incredible safety as well: no matter what you are going through in your life, if you’ve bought into his grace, if you’ve been granted that faith, you are above all safe. As Mrs Elliot used to say, Underneath are the everlasting arms. From our seemingly impossible disasters to actually impossible disasters, there is hope that will not leave you ashamed for having hoped. Or assurance. You may lose your lover, you may lose your health, you may lose your house, but you will not be ashamed of finding refuge in God. He is a strong tower. You are above all, safe.

But there’s safety and then there’s safety. God isn’t bound by your desire to be financially secure. When Joel mentioned how so much preaching is geared towards a better life now, I wanted to stand up and cheer. (Not to mention that Mr Osteen reminds me of a smarmy used car salesman and I would very much like to punch him in the face, with all Christian love.) Or maybe God does care that you have a better life now, but we’ve simply got the frame right and the picture all wrong. Maybe your better life now isn’t about being financially triumphant or well-loved. Maybe your better life now is about crossing a wilderness and getting to a promised land. The trip isn’t necessarily going to be cushioned. Maybe it will be. You don’t really get to know that.

Laura and I have been very tight for money since we’ve been married. We have one income and some debt from her schooling and from my life as a bachelor. One of the things we’ve been really convicted about, ever since Joel talked about giving, is separating a portion of my income and giving it to God. We do this in several ways, but primarily it’s giving to the church. We don’t have a lot to give, and common sense says that what we do give should be instead squirrelled away for a rainy economy. Yet it seems better to me to live outside of that small comfort and safety zone by obeying God with our giving than using it for ourselves. I’m not going to spin a sob story here: we live very well on what we’ve got, but there are a lot of things we have to forgo whilst living this way.

This is a small thing. There’s a couple from Imago Dei who essentially walked away from a comfortable life to work in the Himalayas with an unreached people group. Joel moved to Mississauga and started a great church. Paul was whipped and beaten and shipwrecked ultimately killed. These are not small things, and they are not safe things.

But they are good things, and things that will ultimately be blessed. Because in following God, sometime you end up dying on a cross. Look at what Jesus did: was his life at all safe? Yet here we are, millennia later, still looking at his legacy and seeing it change the world.

Unsafe originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-04-09.

Maybe this is why when I expect messiah to be a military leader, he comes and conquers things I didn’t expect, using methods I hadn’t foreseen. Or when I assume Jesus will validate my holiness, he exposes me as an illusionist, as a fraud. Or when I show him my methodology, he tells me that true religion is taking care of widows, feeding orphans, that sort of thing.

Jesus is almost maddeningly different from the world I live in. Sometimes he makes me crazy, because even at the best of times, I’m a Pharisee whitewashing my own grave. He asks my why I call him master, even though I don’t do what he says. He tells me that I am blessed if I hear his words and obey them.

He wants me to become like a child. Or a servant. Or a sacrifice. Naturally, I don’t really want to be any of those things.

There’s so much of the old me to toss in the trash. I am supposed to don humility and slough off pride. I have the Holy Ghost working in me, powering me.

I’ve been a Christian for ten or so years now. Why, then, does this all still feel so strange?

Why does this feel so strange? originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-11-08.

You’ll convince them that another way is indeed better, and they’ll agree, but later be back to the original idea. After a while you sort of pick your battles, but even then it’s not really worth it.

Ideas originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-10-31.

Every age has its deep-seated conceits. Are ours better because they are newer? There. That’s one.

Draw a picture of a 5-year-old boy and state in the title that he is a 76-year-old man. Which will the viewer believe? If I can see that the boy is five, why should I not believe it? There. That’s one. The artist may lie. The creator may deceive. The emperor may not be wearing any clothes.

Will you know?

My generation looks back on events only fifty years distant and marvel. Our parents’ parents were simpletons, we say, because they had a cold war, and because that cold war landed men on the moon, and because at the end of it all there was a void waiting to be filled. Someone had to create a new monster.

They did. It was easy. Here, this is a cathedral. There, those are the Turks. We are good. They are evil.

It’s all a lie. The scarlet spires of today are the hubris and manipulation of the past. We are them, in blue jeans, with iPods. The brief flourishings where men understood freedom have died out. You are slowly being starved to death while the architects of your hunger whisper that your belly is full.

Freedom originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-09-18.

I have become convinced that incessantly asking questions is a defence mechanism. At least a certain kind of questioning. After all, what better way to ward off the truth than by constantly prolonging your journey toward it?

I had a thought this morning. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-09-05.

You can easily be a deist and deny free will. You have to, of course, believe that the seeds sown at the beginning of time inevitably lead to the same conclusion, but you can do it if you set your mind to it. (Now you have that song in your head. Ta-da!)

I say this all merely to point out that nothing is entirely certain about anything I see. I appear to have free will, but do I really have it? The fact that I can ask that question is interesting. In a way, asking this question is merely a function of following a bunch of hyperlinks. The hyperlinks were a function of my predisposition to read this or that type of article or blog post. My predispositions are a function of the way I was brought up, the people I knew in my youth, the sort of music I was exposed to, the men and women I admired, my social inclusion or seclusion, or whatever innumerable factors you can think of.

In some way, I can look at the universe both ways, and believe both things at the same time. That I do have free will (I have to believe that if I am to function at all), and that I do not (I have to believe that if I am at all intellectually honest). That is to say, I am a study in cognitive dissonance, except that I don’t believe in cognitive dissonance.

You can view this post as my predisposition to ramble. I like tangents. Who doesn’t really?

On Sunday, I had opportunity to think of the universe as a place that invites belief and disbelief at the same time. An interesting concept. The near-void of space, the loneliness of it all, begs at once faith in a beyond and a rational scientific measurement of what can be felt.

The whole ball of wax seems to designed like that. As if God is saying, Believe or don’t believe, the evidence looks both ways depending on what you look at, and how.

The sum of God’s will is laid out in a book. How silly is that?

I believe that book, the scriptures, at face value, when possible. How stupid must I be?

I am convinced God controls things all the way down to the quantum level. I can’t see him. I can’t feel him. I can’t reach out and lay a finger on God. I can’t even begin to understand how God can relate to a person and yet be the brains behind redshift, gravity, strong nuclear forces, dark matter, black holes, spacetime, quantum entanglement, probability, neutrinos, and a billion other completely and ridiculously amazing things I can barely appreciate, much less understand.

But I can write long sentences about them anyway. But in a way, God’s sentences are much longer than mine. The universe is, by any reckoning, many billions of years old. My life, in that expanse of zeroes, is barely a flicker, barely an eye batting, barely an electrical storm somewhere in my brain.

I cannot tell you how pleased I am that God notices me. That he slows himself down far enough to give me the Book, to let me know what precious little I can grasp, to work like a Ghost in my being and bring me to faith.

But there are countless millions who look at that expanse of space and its intricacies and see nothing at all except what is there. This seems to me unspeakably sad, but also quite normal. Gut-wrenching but mundane.

It’s the way God set it up. The most awkward of manoeuvres, creating men and women, seeding the world with us, sending us a Christ to save us from ourselves. The strangest of procedures, to work through the screwed up psychology of humanity. The oddest modus operandi, to pick the weak, the gullible, the broken, the few.

Isn’t that a weird way to go about things?

I remember once saying that I found belief stupendously hard. I always have. Belief; obedience moreso. I cannot have stumbled into this on my own. No way. My head’s too thick. My tendencies too backwards.

You can look at the universe and see a set of laws that just are, or you can see a Glue holding it together. You can see anarchy or design. You can see free will or guide rails or constraint.

The book says this is the Holy Ghost at work. I believe this. I can’t help it. How odd is that?

Look at the universe and see what you see. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-09-04.

Look, dude. If it’s that difficult, something is wrong.

Can you go on like that for ever? I doubt it. No-one can face the same problems day in and day out, never resolving them or accepting them, without going crazy. No-one should ask themselves — or especially someone else — to do that.

I’m not saying you should drop it at the first sign of trouble. I’m not saying that God can’t stick a finger in an swirl things about. What I am saying is this: don’t actively seek to martyr yourself on a cross of love.

It isn’t worth it.

Your friends can provide you some perspective on this. I’m on the periphery of your acquaintance: I don’t expect you to listen to me. But ask yourself, ask them to be brave, ask them to say what they’re surely thinking.

They’ll probably say that it’s not supposed to be totally easy, but it’s not supposed to be that difficult. It should be a labour of love… not just labour.

You need to decide that for yourself: I could be dead wrong.

Am I?

Not just labour. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-08-31.

One last thought before I go home… originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-08-30.