My Man-Purse and an Argument for Day-Drinking

So I finally broke down and got a man-purse.  Commuting forty-five minutes two ways every weekday was getting old I needed the ability to stash stuff and carry things with me.  Every day I was carrying my lunch, a school book, some book called Tinkers that some guy named Michael gave me, my wallet, MP3 player, keys and phone.

About day four of making this drive, I knew I had to do something.  I haven't looked back since.

It's a tiny little bag.  Just big enough to hold things, not big enough to lug around.  I'll never hurt myself carrying it, I'll never lose anything in it.  It literally holds my programming text, Tinkers, and what usually is held in my pockets.  I never realized how much I prefer to have my pockets free.  I don't have to dig around in my pants to get my keys or anything for that matter.  When I sit, I don't sit unevenly because of my wallet.  I don't have the awkward bunching of material and massive lumps in my pants from keys and a phone.  It is, essentially, the most liberating thing I've experienced since I worked my way out of indentured servitude. (seven years I'll never get back, stupid Rifle Shot game at the carnival . . . I know I hit that person balancing on the beach ball and I knew I could do it again.)(I didn't)

Deuteronomy and Day-Drinking make me more excited than I thought they would.  See my church is going through Deuteronomy this year.  I havn't read Deuteronomy since I got it in my head that I had to read every book of the Bible at least once a year.  That was in 2002; I only ever read them all once and it took longer than a year.  With Larry Trotter at the helm, I'm confident that I will enjoy this series, I just struggle with the juxtaposition of the Old Testament judgmental creator vs the New Testament graceful savior.  I know that God is the same and that the story being told is on purpose, but it is hard to validate the laws in Deuteronomy(bury your feces outside the camp, dammit!  I'm walking here!) in the light of, let's say, Romans.

Day-Drinking is my pet elephant in the room.  My brother and I started drinking at 10:30 AM on Thanksgiving, and now we kind of do it all the time.  Weekends, my sister-in-law's wedding, any day we have free time always turn into this slow creeping drinking fest that leaves us appropriately comfortable with ourselves and those around us.  The joy of the Day-Drinking is this: we don't get hammered or have hangovers.  We drink until we have a sustainable buzz and then nurse two or three beers or sip some bourbon after that.  It's amazing.  We never have to worry about what day we're drinking on in case we work the next day, we never wake up not knowing what happened the night before(looking right into your red-bearded face, Michael) and, truthfully, the tasty things we drink never lose flavor, because we never get that far.  It's just nice to drink without getting drunk . . .

Bits of Conversation

Had a chat with my dad in law this past weekend. He entertained an interesting image. He said that we, as humans, drive with a giant rear view mirror and only a small rear view mirror-sized hole for looking ahead. He said that the only way we can ever hope to switch the two is by trusting in Christ's promises. The problem is that we probably wouldn't trust in them any more if Christ walked in the room and told them to us personally. This giant rear view mirror keeps us focused on where we've been, what we've done and what we were; we should always focus on Christ's promises to us.

Today I read about Nebuchadnezzar eating grass like a cow and what not in Daniel 4. This got me thinking about why this is such a weird story. It is crazy to me because what is the king of the largest kingdom in the world doing eating grass? Heck, what is anyone doing walking around like cattle eating grass? But a king, surely, shouldn't be a cow. We have in our minds these preconceived notions of what a king is supposed to be, what is socially acceptable. How I want to apply this is by asking why we're settling for what we've been, when we've been promised so much more! We're co-heirs to the kingdom with the Son of God and we're content mulling over the past, chewing the cud, if you will.

So often I get myself caught in a string of thoughts that remind me of how lowly I am and how much I've failed, but I never get into a train of thought that reminds me of my adopted status to the King of Kings. I never stop and remember what I've been given and, more importantly, what I will be given. Why am I not constantly remembering and worshiping for my inheritance that I never earned, nor deserved. I was a filthy child brought up by the King.

Not only should I focus on these promises and get out of the past, but I should certainly act more like the prince I was raised to be. No longer do I need to dig in the muck and scrape together a living at the expense of others. Instead, I can be bettered by the grace of God and power of the Holy Spirit so that I can act like my Father and like my Savior. C.S. Lewis' image of the children content with cow patties when offered a trip to the beach comes to mind. This ties in beautifully with the end of Chapter 6 of Romans; we are now bound to God and must obey Him. While he did free us from Sin, we must still fill the role of adopted sons and grow up to be just like Daddy.

You Won't Like Me When I'm Angry...

If I had my druthers, you would be watching a video of me in a satin robe in a lush armchair blowing a bubble pipe in front of a roaring fire with seven rotisserie ducks turning over said fire... in the mean time, I'll just write emails. I figure it's a poor use of resources to build a giant fireplace in my 1,200 square foot home and I don't know the going price for a whole duck.

This is a passage that Spurgeon Wrote about Anger. I love Spurgeon. He is able to communicate to me in my preferred style. He is, at heart, a literary speaker. He speaks in beautiful images and uses wonderful literary references in a lot of his sermons and writings. For those reasons, you'll see me lean on him for putting my feelings into words, because I enjoy reading him.

“God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry?”
Jonah 4:9

Anger is not always or necessarily sinful, but it has such a tendency to run wild that whenever it displays itself, we should be quick to question its character, with this enquiry, “Doest thou well to be angry?” It may be that we can answer, “YES.” Very frequently anger is the madman’s firebrand, but sometimes it is Elijah’s fire from heaven. We do well when we are angry with sin, because of the wrong which it commits against our good and gracious God; or with ourselves because we remain so foolish after so much divine instruction; or with others when the sole cause of anger is the evil which they do. He who is not angry at transgression becomes a partaker in it. Sin is a loathsome and hateful thing, and no renewed heart can patiently endure it. God himself is angry with the wicked every day, and it is written in His Word, “Ye that love the Lord, hate evil.” Far more frequently it is to be feared that our anger is not commendable or even justifiable, and then we must answer, “NO.” Why should we be fretful with children, passionate with servants, and wrathful with companions? Is such anger honourable to our Christian profession, or glorifying to God? Is it not the old evil heart seeking to gain dominion, and should we not resist it with all the might of our newborn nature? Many professors give way to temper as though it were useless to attempt resistance; but let the believer remember that he must be a conqueror in every point, or else he cannot be crowned. If we cannot control our tempers, what has grace done for us? Some one told Mr. Jay that grace was often grafted on a crab-stump. “Yes,” said he, “but the fruit will not be crabs.” We must not make natural infirmity an excuse for sin, but we must fly to the cross and pray the Lord to crucify our tempers, and renew us in gentleness and meekness after His own image.

My temper has been running a little hot the last few weeks and therefore I've tried focusing on reading some things that help me to focus on the worthy things(i.e. God's grace and love).

The Gamer, The Dreamer, and The Truth

I have a new hobby; it is game creation. Historically I've played games, all kinds of games.(i.e. sports, board games, video games, card games, party games, pen & paper RPG's) The step into making games, however, I had never taken.

It started with Christmas last year. My in laws decided to do a dirty Santa/white elephant/whatever you want to call it gift exchange. Rachel and I have a propensity for making gifts because it both saves on monies and makes for great gifts if done properly. So I'm thinking to myself, what can I give that is gender neutral, family centric, and awesome on all counts. First thought I had: a Clue Board Game based on the parent's house. I set to work. Luckily the rule set was already in place, so most of the work was done for me . . . Right?

Well anytime a rhetorical question is asked in that manor, you know the answer is "wrong". The beauty of a Clue Board is how evenly spaced everything is. The game is balanced by virtue of a square house with square rooms. Well most houses, as we know, are not like that. Ranch style houses with basements are certainly not balanced like that.

Needless to say, I had to take quite a few liberties with the Clue formula(things like more weapons than normal to create more variations to make the rooms that are closer together just as difficult to use. I also made liberal use of secret passages and even put in 3 locations in which you can guess the culprit so that one room was never too far from a chance to win. I even had to create help cards to have spaces on the more open parts of the board have a purpose other than empty space.

I say all of this to say: now I'm hooked. Taking a game set and changing it to make it my own was nothing but fun. Since then I made a failure of a pen & paper RPG based on the Harry Potter World. It wasn't a failure because it wasn't fun, I just don't have the friends that would invest into a weekly or bi-monthly meeting to get deeper into the game world.

Now I'm elbow deep in applying the premise I set down in the RPG into a board game that can be played in about 2 hours(or less . . . hopefully). I get to design a new game board, I get to create playable characters, facilitate potential interpersonal dynamics(the game is meant for 4-8 players), balance character abilities, stats, spells, and enemies. I get to pace the game based on the shape and size of the board and how objectives are spread across the game board.

Last week I was kicked in the face with a realization. I don't know if my dream of developing video games and hobby of making games really amounts to much. I can't see the impact of it on society in any kind of worthy way. As I continue my process of sanctification through the power of Christ and the faithfulness of the Holy Spirit, I want to see Christ in my life and to share Him with those around me more. How do games play into that? I get stuck trying to force my spiritual walk into my daily life wondering why they aren't the same. My most hated thought is that I have to give up games because they are of no worth in God's plan. If that's true and it is true that God created me, I would be stuck wondering why God would give me such a desire, appreciation and talent for games.

This has been really heavy on me lately. To think that a hobby that I've had my entire life which has changed into a career dream of mine is a waste of God's time and is just a result of poor stewardship on my part. All I can do is pray that God either show me His plan for my dreams.

Wouldn't it be cool if it was all so easy...

Ding, Dong

The witch is dead! Which 'ol witch? The Wicked Witch...

The correlation is inescapable. The first thing I thought upon hearing of the death of Osama Bin Laden was a recreation of The Wizard of Oz scene. Munchkins representing their Lollypop Guild jumping and celebrating the death of this horrible menace to their miniature society.

There is a trick to all of this however: He didn't just die, he was killed on sight. A man was identified and killed in a matter of seconds along with the four or five people in the room with him. Part of me wants to bust into a munchkin dance and give a "Christian equivalent" to the finger to the entirety of the insurgent groups, political groups, and terrorist cells that protected and supported him. Another part of me, just for a moment, takes pride in the idea that Bin Laden now sees the error of his Islamic ways and is suffering for his crimes. Then another part breathes a sigh of partial relief. My father is in Afghanistan. Part of his purpose in being there is the effort of the military to find terrorist leaders. Mission Accomplished? Then I feel a sense of nationalistic pride and want to watch Rocky IV.

At about this time in my mental process, my heart stops, my breath catches and my demeanor changes. A man just died, yes people die all the time I know, but this particular man died with an unrepentant heart and without saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. Yes, what Osama Bin Laden did in his life was horrific. He ended or brought about the end of thousands of lives in the name of Allah. He cursed Christians and western culture in general; he damned us all to hell under the tenants of his religion. While I take hope in knowing that, by the power and perfection of God, justice will be served, I also can't help but hurt for Bin Laden's soul at the thought of eternal punishment. The grace that Christ extended to me could have saved Bin Laden from such an existence.

As I think about a sell-out crowd(near 50,000 people) in the Philadelphia's Citizen's Bank Park chanting "U-S-A" as news of Bin Laden's death permeated the crowd, I can't help but drop my head and think of Romans 3:22-26(God's prominence in our salvation; we have nothing to boast about) and how I could just as easily be damned in the tenants of the faith to which I hold dear. It is only by God's grace and provision that I'm any different than the man, whose death we cheer.

I can only pray that God make my reflections on this moment in history glorifying to Him. I can only rely God's power and knowledge to manage my conflicting feelings. So hard to see God's love in the face of God's justice, alas I resign myself to the faith and grace that saved and continues to sanctify me.

The Difference a Year Makes

Cold, unfeeling, clinical. That would describe my spiritual walk from late 2006 to mid 2010. I wanted God on my level. My life showed it too. I was uninvolved in church. My young marriage was stunningly stagnant. I lost touch with more people than I kept up with. I found myself unnecessarily dark and cynical. For a guy who was recently married, claimed to know the Savior and maintained a overpaying, albeit unnecessarily stressful, job, I was bitching way too much.

Then I made quite possibly the stupidest decision of my life. I quit my job without any kind of safety net outside of my savings.

The first month was absolute freedom, something I'd never felt before. The kind of freedom that I imagine I would feel if falling from a great height or floating adrift in a small craft in the Pacific. Rachel and I did what we wanted when we wanted. We spent time with friends, we went to Orlando(Magical World of Harry Potter is the best thing ever, Period.), we visited Family, we facilitated holidays at our house and others.

Like the feeling of falling, it ended and I began to see my fate. My tiny boat in the big ocean took on water. I again got stagnant, stale, cold, and bitter. Contentment, it seemed, was unable to be grasped. Somehow my expectations were never met, whether I was employed and working 50-60 hour weeks while taking classes or if I was unemployed and taking a minimal class load.

This is the part where I realized something was missing, but I hate to say it that way because it feels far too much like a crappy Christian novel. Like most cliches, however, there is truth to that sentiment. I was missing something. Fortunate for me and my bride, we knew what we needed, but It wasn't that easy.

We knew we needed to go to church. We knew we needed regular attendance and involvement with a body of believers, but it wasn't what we wanted. We wanted to be a part of a new breed of church(yea we're those people); we wanted a community to form and a Bible Study to start. We wanted to take the friends we maintained and turn them into our local body. We didn't want the regimented, calculated, board approved business that the church looks like today. We just couldn't get our friends on board. Everyone was happy in their herd of sheeple. They wanted to check the box and be a Christian that week.

Rachel and I broke and began attending a church. We weren't happy(and still aren't thrilled) with the system, but it is, undeniably, the body that represents Christ where we are. Not only that, but North Wake is truly doing wonderful things in the community and abroad. They certainly are doing more than Rachel and I were doing on our own.

Step two, we joined a small group; this was more what we were talking about. God showed us that accountability and relationship is available to us, we just have to get our hands dirty and do it. A month later we began fostering relationships with people we would have met otherwise. I met a group of men who struggle like I do. I met weekly with people who want what I want: community and Christ.

Problems don't go away just because you attend church though. We were still barely employed(Rachel and I picked up shifts a local high-end restaurant) and the bills don't stop coming. A new well pump, some tires, and some medical bills later, we were really feeling the strain. Still able to pay bills for several months without income, I wasn't immediately stressed, but I didn't want to give up my comfortable lifestyle and little rainy day fund.

We began praying for job opportunities. We prayed earnestly that God would provide something for us so that we could work together, as we always have. We got more and more pleading; we brought it before our small group, our friends, and random strangers(you never know who you'll meet). We prayed, finally, that God provide something that only He could and that we would give it over to Him instead of making it our own.

A month and a half ago a woman in our small group mentioned a job opening for a Marketing and Events Director where she worked. Naturally, Rachel and I were interested. Unfortunately the pay wasn't all that good and horrifically, we would never be able to work together if I took this job.

I took the job on a trial basis. We're working to see if it will be worth it in the long run. It's hard getting used to not being around Rachel most of the day. Heartbreaking in a way. As soon as I start getting whiny though, Paul won't shut up. All the illustrations of contentment that he brings up in the fourth chapter of Philippians start infiltrating my thoughts and I can't help but feel foolish. God obviously gave us this job, maybe not for a long fix, but for now. In this moment of His provision, perhaps I should feel thankfulness and contentment instead of selfishness and resentment.

I'm not on board the mega-church train, I actively remove "Christianese" from my vernacular. I buck convention for no reason other than to ask "why?". I do everything I can to incorporate my small group into my friends group. I never attend church business meetings. While all of that is true, my life has still been changed by being a part of a church body. Even though it is imperfect, even though it isn't what I want, even though I cringe at the thought of a church having a fiscal year, God is active and living in His churches. It was about time I realized it.

New Stuff

I got a job. Alas, Funemployment has ended and I am called to make monies and such. Pretty awesome job though. It doesn't pay the best, but I'm doing a little web design, some marketing and some sales. Fairly cool skill set to be picking up. Who knows what I'll use that for in the future, but I'm sure I will use it.

Things aren't all gravy though. This is the first time since I started dating Rachel that we aren't working together. I'm not a fan so far(day 1) of being so long away from my wife. I just want to be around her more. I just want to see her more. It hurts to think about spending 40 hours per week away from her. Now more than ever, we need God's faithfulness, strength and joy to give us solace... but maybe that's the point.

Tomorrow is day two. Let us hope that it is as interesting as the first.