Thoughts from Jeff's thumbs

Found on Owen's door: S.i.C. - science investagashon corps.

2011-06-24T21:24:00.001-04:00

Jeff Johnson
609-359-0159

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v.E.1

Owen uses red cabbage to find out base / acid

2011-04-01T19:23:00.001-04:00

Jeff Johnson
609-359-0159

Any disclosure, copying, or distribution of this message, or the taking of any action based on it, is strictly prohibited.

v.E.1

We need to sleep

2011-01-10T13:19:00.001-05:00

I was having trouble sleeping last night, and ran across the two articles below on a "theology of sleep." Reading them actually helped me fall asleep. If you're like me, you spend a good portion of your working and/or home life fighting sleep or fighting for sleep -- meeting a deadline, or rocking a baby, catching a movie or reading a book or hanging out with spouse or friends or just vegetating.

It was good to be reminded that my ability to rest physically is also (sometimes? often? usually?) an indicator of my ability to rest in my God, and release every little thing to him.

blessings,

Jeff

First, from John Piper:

Why did God imagine sleep? He never sleeps! He thought the idea up out of nothing. He thought it up for his earthly creatures. Why! Psalm 127:2 says, "It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved in his sleep." According to this text sleep is a gift of love, and the gift is often spurned by anxious toil. Peaceful sleep is the opposite of anxiety. God does not want his children to be anxious, but to trust him. Therefore I conclude that God made sleep as a continual reminder that we should not be anxious but should rest in him.
Sleep is a daily reminder from God that we are not God. "He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep" (Psalm 121:4). But Israel will. For we are not God. Once a day God sends us to bed like patients with a sickness. The sickness is a chronic tendency to think we are in control and that our work is indispensable. To cure us of this disease God turns us into helpless sacks of sand once a day. How humiliating to the self-made corporate executive that he has to give up all control and become as limp as a suckling infant every day.
Sleep is a parable that God is God and we are mere men. God handles the world quite nicely while a hemisphere sleeps. Sleep is like a broken record that comes around with the same message every day: Man is not sovereign. Man is not sovereign. Man is not sovereign. Don't let the lesson be lost on you. God wants to be trusted as the great worker who never tires and never sleeps. He is not nearly so impressed with our late nights and early mornings as he is with the peaceful trust that casts all anxieties on him and sleeps.

And this from Fred Sanders:

Sleep, or its absence, is a potent symbol in the Bible for God's vigilance and our trusting response to it...
At the very least, sleep is a good opportunity to entrust yourself, your entire self, to God's care. You're trusting something when you lay down your body and, with it, the control of your conscious mind. That moment when you consciously choose unconsciousness, and let yourself go, is a daily opportunity to relinquish control to a God who you have to trust.

We have heard this sound several times this morning!

2010-12-25T08:39:00.001-05:00

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A boy and his helicopter

2010-12-25T08:38:00.000-05:00

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A great essay from Michael Spencer on the "spirituality of ignorance"

2010-09-10T10:28:00.001-04:00

Attached below, a great reminder and lovely essay from the late Michael Spencer. Especially for those of us caught up in academicky atmospheres. My favorite line: "Christ-possessed individuals exist across the spectrums of denominations, education, and sophistication... I can make an 'A' on a theology paper and be useless in a hospital or in the lives of real people... My version of Jesus often looks a lot like an essay question I'd write." Like Michael Spencer, I see in my own life the poisonous temptation of an intellectually/doctrinally correct idea of spirituality that is void of heart and lived-out actions. In a perverse way, it makes my own mind and understanding a kind of idol and ne plus ultra. But I speak only of myself.

cheers,

Jeff

iMonk Classic: Dumb Up, Brother: A Spirituality of Ignorance

from internetmonk.com by iMonk

1 person liked this -

Classic iMonk Post
by Michael Spencer
Originally posted September 27, 2007

Somewhere in the backlogs of this web site I recounted what it was like being on staff at a church full of seminary students. Everyone knew so much that we had real difficulty doing anything- like buying stamps- without endless debate.

Of course, there were advantages to having a lot of smart people in the church. Our liturgy was far ahead of most churches, so on an intellectual and aesthetic level, it was a thing of beauty. We never had problems getting Sunday School teachers. We had problems getting our Sunday School teachers to not use too much Hebrew grammar. And, of course, because we were a rather intelligent bunch, we enjoyed the blessing of not being ignorant.

I'm quite serious. It's not a good thing to be ignorant, and Christians shouldn't hold up ignorance itself as any sort as a virtue. As much trouble as it was, I was glad there was always someone around to remind us that economic decisions had connections and repercussions in the real world. I was glad we were made sensitive to racism, sexism, discrimination against the disabled and so forth. I was even glad when some homosexual Christians came by to talk with the pastoral staff about their concerns. They didn't get what they wanted from us, but it was a conversation that I wasn't ashamed to participate in.

Now I live in a part of the county where ignorance of every sort is widespread. The dropout rate is almost 30%. Running any kind of school here is a battle. And most of the ministers and Christians in this area are untaught, or at the most, self-taught. Comparatively speaking, pastoral ignorance of various kinds is common.

My friend Walter is a local pastor. He's never attended Bible school, much less college. He's not much of a reader. He's too busy in his bi-vocational ministry just trying to make ends meet and do what his job, family and church need of him to be a scholar. Some of Walter's sermons are difficult for me to listen to. They are delivered in mountain style and they are, frankly, hard to understand. Mostly, Walter takes a well known character or story and applies some principle from the scripture to the day to day experiences of his congregation.

Mountain people face many difficulties. These include poverty, drugs in the community, unsafe living conditions, lack of economic opportunities, undependable medical care, crime and so on. A mountain pastor is always facing a congregation who, for the most part, are there because if God doesn't come thorough, life is going to fall apart. Walter's people believe that he can point them to God's power and presence. They believe the encouragement of the Lord comes through the "man of God." They are generally not there to experience a "Christian classroom" with pastor as professor.

Of course, those who are more educated in the doctrines of the Christian faith will tell me that there is much wrong with Walter's ministry. He needs to know many, many things and preach them faithfully. His congregation will be strengthened by doctrinal soundness in way they won't be through Biblical stories and their lessons. His ignorance ought to be repaired and his ministry improved. I'll not argue with that, but I will tell you another Walter story.

One thing I didn't tell you is that two years ago, I was in the hospital with my dying mom, and I needed a pastor. At the time, I didn't have one. I guess I could have called any number of the ministers that I know. Actually, having been the minister in the hospital before, I was fairly certain of what would happen, and while I wouldn't have been ungrateful, it wasn't that important to me.

Walter happened to be in the hospital that day, visiting members of his congregation and the wider community, as was his habit. He found me, my wife and my dying mom in the ER.

Walter stayed with me all day. He found a doctor who would let my mother stay in our hospital and pass there, instead of flying her to Lexington. He helped me talk to the doctors about the course of treatment mom and I had agreed on. He prayed for me. He was a pastor to me. He was Christ to me.

Never once did Walter attempt a theological justification of the ways of God. He never got out the Bible. (Nothing wrong if he'd chosen to, of course.) He was the Bible for me that day. He put flesh and blood on God and hung out with me. He thought for me when I couldn't think clearly. He knew my heart and he helped me listen to my heart at a very confusing moment. He treated me with love and dignity that brought joy into one of the worst days of my life.

Walter showed me that day that if you are going to measure life by how it's lived, and not by how people talk about what they believe, he knows a lot more about God than I do. He's not read anywhere close to the books that I've read and he doesn't have my vocabulary or degrees. He has the the book that matters, and its author, in him. Compared to Walter's embodiment of Jesus, I'm stupid.

Those of you planning to write and tell me the other side of the coin can save your ink. I know the other side of the coin. What I'm going to say to anyone listening is that I see little evidence that great learning or correct doctrine produces Christ-like people. It may, and it certainly has a part to play that can't be eliminated. God has used books in my life to make me more like Him. But a lot of those books have been theologically ignorant and incorrect by the standards of the doctrinally correct and intelligent.

I've spent years listening to claims and counter claims about how various theologies, doctrines and denominations can get you the real Jesus if you'll learn there bit or or join their team. Based on the resulting lives I've seen—starting with my own—I'd say we're all full of "dung" on that one. Christ-possessed individuals exist across the spectrums of denominations, education and sophistication. In fact, I'm starting to suspect God puts his fingerprints all over more people from the wrong side of the tracks than on "our" side just to throw us off. He must enjoy hearing me say someone who does or doesn't believe theology/doctrine "X" can't manifest the deep imprint of the fingerprints of Jesus. (Heaven's Comedy Channel must include hours of stupid things I've said.)

Jesus says that God loves to take a Walter and show me real spirituality. He loves for me to realize that I can make an "A" on a theology paper and be useless in a hospital or in the lives of real people. He loves for me to hearing the banging, clanking, crashing uselessness of much of what I've valued, and then discover the treasure in what I've called trash.

Walter has a life full of Jesus. How did Walter get so full of Jesus? By wanting him there and keeping the doors and windows open for Jesus. Not by learning the outline, the answers and the powerpoint version and stopping there. My version of Jesus often looks a lot like an essay question I'd write. Walter's Jesus- his rough, unpolished and ignorant version of Jesus- is the real deal, at least when it counts.

Remember that Jesus was a teacher, but he never dismissed class. Life was his classroom, because he refused to isolate truth into compartments. He had no intention of producing a disciple who was an expert in theology but useless in a hospital ER. He had no plan to allow the specializations we use to excuse ourselves from what it really means to be a Christian. Carrying the Cross and Washing Feet weren't talks. They were your life.

And if you're smart enough to improve on that, you're too smart. Dumb up, brother.

(NOTE: "Walter" is not a real person, but a combination of several mountain pastors I know who all have the character I am describing. And, yes, one of them spent the day with me in the hospital, just as I described.)

The info-tech god

2010-09-01T07:23:00.001-04:00

Great article on the First Things website about the effect of technology addiction on spiritual devotion. I definitely identify.

Best snippet: <<We consider it peculiar that Muslims stop five times a day to offer prayers to Allah, yet we stop what we do five times an hour to pay homage to our e-mail. "One of the most basic biblical insights," says theologian J.I. Packer, "is that whatever controls and shapes one's life is in effect the god one worships.">>

http://www.google.com/gwt/x?source=reader&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.firstthings.com%2Fonthesquare%2F2010%2F09%2Funplugging-the-info-tech-god

Emily picking flowers

2010-08-28T10:21:00.001-04:00

Jeff Johnson
609-359-0159

Any disclosure, copying, or distribution of this message, or the taking of any action based on it, is strictly prohibited. [v.E.1]

Numbers 15 - manipulating God vs. Responding to him

2010-04-13T08:28:00.001-04:00

The other day I was reading Numbers 15, which the ESV titles "Laws About Sacrifices":

http://www.gnpcb.org/esv/devotions/daily.reading.bible/?date=2010-03-16

I realized I'm so accustomed to the idea of ancient sacrifice that I take it for granted. *Of course* you would sacrifice some part of something that's valuable to a deity of some kind or other. The Hebrew people did it. All kinds of ancient people did it. It's just a not-worth-being-commented-upon-feature of the ancient landscape, right?

But I paused. Really, why sacrifice?

It's easy to assume the sacrifice is transactional, and that the ancient worshipper intended to placate the divinity or, a step further, to constrain or manipulate the divinity. At a crude level: "I'll do this, and therefore you, O Deity, now owe me that."

Undoubtedly this was actually the idea in times and places across the ancient world. You see how an atheist or agnostic might theorize the rise of religion from this. A terrified primitive people want to control a frightening world, and so they look for a magical power behind the calamitous forces, and then seek to manipulate that power. Eventually you're bound to offer a sacrifice just prior to some disaster being averted. Enough of these false positives, and you assume this power is real and partly manipulatible. And if the quid pro quo doesn't work? Well, you didn't do the sacrifice right, or the gods are fickle, or the gods are inscrutable and have some higher purpose

What then strikes me about Numbers 15 is how opposite the thinking is. There is no indication of "I will do this, O Deity, so now you do that." Instead, God seems to say, "I am who I am, and I will do what I will do, so therefore you, O Man, offer the following." The sacrifice here doesn't feel like an attempt to prompt or manipulate God. It's a response to him.

In that light, I thought afresh about the utility of the sacrificial items. If it's a god-prompt I'm performing, then the economic/hedonic utility is straightforward: yes, I'm giving up one of my most valuable animals or the grain I worked so hard to raise, but if it contributes to a world with less calamity, where The Powers smile upon me more favorably, then it's a no-brainer. It's like an ancient homeowner's insurance policy. Would I rather keep the $100 a month and go out to restaurants more often? Sure. But all things considered, I pay the insurance premiums without blinking.

But what if the performance is not a god-prompt but rather a god-response?

In that case, the nature of the sacrifice is altogether different. It's less transactional, not at all like an insurance policy, and - frankly - more arbitrary. Why should I give up my grain or my animal? Because that's the response God wants in this situation. Does it put him in my debt? No. Can I expect a clearly traceable return on this investment? No.

Well, that's weird and not very fair Why should I suffer economic/hedonic loss if it's not tied more clearly to my own economic/hedonic goals?

The answer: "Remember all the commandments of the LORD, and do them, and don't follow after your own heart and your own eyes, which you are inclined to whore after. So you shall remember and do all my commandments, and be holy to your God. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God: I am the LORD your God."

In modern terms -- in my own life, to be specific -- I am forced to rethink the calculations I make every day when I die to myself and sacrifice what I feel like doing or saying, what might gratify me, where my passions and animal hungers lead me, what is fair and equitable in my own eyes, what I deserve from God and from life, what kind of comfort and indulgence pleases me.

Indeed, I must abandon such calculus altogether.

Instead, I must remember my God who brought me out of my own very real and very abysmal Egypt. Distrust my own heart and my own eyes. Respond to my God with obedience that flows irrepressibly from worshipful gratitude and love. I don't gain any claim on God in this way. But the kind of God he is calls forth such a response.

My cute daughter

2010-02-24T16:27:00.001-05:00

Where am I? No, not NY. Columbus OH of all places. Who knew they had the foot traffic to support such Times Square-esque displays?

2010-02-18T07:46:00.000-05:00

Owen's model lungs and diaphragm, Emily's model girl's head

2010-01-14T08:55:00.000-05:00

Emily and Bryleigh

2010-01-04T17:29:00.001-05:00

It's all about the audience

2009-12-17T12:43:00.001-05:00

This morning as she was cleaning, my wife Erica came across a stuffed puppy dog belonging to our 4-year-old daughter.

"Emily, puppy dog needs to find his way home! Can you help him?"

So Emily immediately scooped up the dog with tender care and gently cooed to it, "Oh, poor puppy, poor puppy, let me take you home," and trotted happily to her room to put the dog away.

Wow.

What could have been a knock-down-drag-out turned into a non-event, all because my wife took one second to evaluate her audience and deploy the tactic most likely to generate the desired result.

Did Erica have the positional authority to bark an order and mandate compliance? Sure.

Could Erica have turned it into a retrospective battle about why stuffed animals get left out in the first place? Absolutely.

But neither of those would have gotten the desired result in the desire timeframe. Compliance was not the only goal: some semblance of a joyful and harmonious home-life is right up there too!

My take-away: think twice about my audience, regardless of my position. Whether it's my boss, my colleagues, or a sales pitch - I must deploy the reasons and tone that resonate most with the audience, not just with me.

Review of the Tyranny of Email (John Freeman)

2009-12-07T13:03:00.001-05:00

The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox

By John Freeman

Scribner, October 2009

I picked this book up from the library because I live and breathe the corporate e-mail nightmare. The book is part history-of-the-letter (postcards, telegraph, pony express) and part analysis of e-mail's utility and evil, with wry observations and editorializing thrown in along the way.

Amazingly, other than a cursory nod to a cuneiform tablet, Freeman pays almost no attention at all to any letters or communication prior to colonial America. In that sense, the subtitle "The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox" fails to deliver. In vain will you search for Cicero, the apostle Paul, Pliny, Jerome, Heloise and Abelard, Erasmus, Francis Bacon, Lord Chesterfield, Samuel Johnson, and so on. That's a shame, because Freeman's observations could have been considerably strengthened if he had considered a wider range of historical situations to compare against the present.

But once he gets to his real subject matter, Freeman's pretty interesting. The book makes you think hard about what we've lost through e-mail, and (though Freeman only barely nods at this) what we've gained. For my taste, it's a little too long on polemics and too short on specific answers, alternate ideas, "what if". But the passion at least makes it interesting to read.

A few tidbits

· Response time: One survey of companies found that ½ of all respondents expected to get back to e-mail queries within four hours, and senders expect to hear back in a day. As volume increases and response times decline, has trained people to expect more immediate replies.

· Carelessness: beware the accidental recipient (via auto-complete function), e-mail trails where the original e-mail way down below contains sensitive or confidential information but have never been deleted from the chain, and the easy forwarding of sensitive e-mails.

· E-mail is addictive because of "variable interval reinforcement schedule": your in-box contains a mixture of good bad and indifferent things, so you get a dopamine reward occasionally, but unpredictably (think slot machines). "If we're performing an action that doesn't always pay out, but does some of the time, such as playing the slots, the lesson learned is that if we want a reward we need to keep pulling that lever." Some psychologists are pushing for internet addiction to be classified as a clinical disorder.

· Constant interruption and multi-tasking makes us dumber. Tasks that require sustained attention, creativity, and more meditative qualities become harder and harder, and we get fidgety, lose the thread, etc. etc. etc. . . . Sorry, what was I saying?

· E-mail and the internet mean "dis-inhibition" – because you don't have the real-time feedback and can't see the faces of others, you're more likely to take risks or say things you normally wouldn't. E-mail means you need to be especially on guard against rudeness and aggressiveness, and purposely try to picture the human beings on the other end.

· Erosion of facetime / bricks-and-mortar – whether online banking, online gambling, downloading movies rather than sitting in a theater together – there is a general migration into virtual space, which is part of the context of e-mail.

Freeman has kind of a false start on his conclusion – a chapter called "Manifesto for a slow communication movement". This chapter appeared as a Wall Street Journal excerpt in August of 2009, and in that context it worked nicely. In the book, however, it doesn't sit well, and Freeman should have woven together and reconciled this material with the real conclusions that follow. In the last chapter, Freemen sets out a few practical ideas for how to make e-mail work differently.

Freeman's 10 recommendations

I found varying levels of usefulness / impossibility with these recommendations, but they're worth a think. In particular, I applaud #10 and am making an effort to follow it.

1. Don't send if possible. E-mail begets more e-mail. Don't over-CC. Rather than a long daisy-chain, discuss some things by phone or in person, and then send one summarizing e-mail as follow-up. Some information lives better in e-rooms, group sites, IM, etc. Go wild and send a snail-mail – there's an intimacy and craftedness to your handwriting. So think about whether e-mail is the best answer for any given task.

2. Don't check e-mail first thing in the morning or last thing at night. It blurs the line between work and personal life, and sets the tone for the rest of your day (or for a night of not very good rest). Sending late-night messages sets a bad tone for an organization; if you're one of those people, save to drafts and send during normal business hours.

3. Don't check it constantly. Check only 2x a day or 1x an hour; otherwise you'll never have sustained concentration.

4. Keep a written to-do list. Helps you pull out of the computer and think in a different frame of mind.

5. Send good e-mail. If it's really simple, just use the subject line and keep it short (if it can be stated in a direct, friendly way that doesn't feel like barking out orders). Use FYI and "EOM" or "no response needed" in subject lines to help your audience sort things out. For the urgent, pick up the phone rather than using red exclamation points. Keep e-mail short. Consolidate e-mails to the same person (no sending 5 or 6 or 7 messages to same person in a short time – "machine-gunning" makes you look disorganized and lessens chances your messages will be read closely). Make sure your signature is complete and contains ways of contacting you other than your e-mail address.

6. Read the whole e-mail before replying. 'Nuff said.

7. Do not debate complex or sensitive matters by e-mail. E-mail is too easily misunderstood. It leads to flame wars and hostility.

8. If you have to work virtually, obtain at least 1 group face-to-face. Helps smooth frictions and misunderstandings.

9. Set up your desk to do something besides e-mail. Many jobs benefit from swiveling away from the screen and concentrating fully on a task.

10. Schedule media-free time every day. "At the end of the day, it is important to remember we were not born to e-mail, download, watch YouTube, and play online games. . . Set parameters as broad as you like, but make sure it means at least no e-mailing and messaging. If you want to be bold, cut out all screens – TV, video, handheld, computer. . . Maybe you will finally go back to French lessons, read the newspaper, maybe you can make it home in time to watch your daughter's soccer game. You might begin to think of the people in your life who aren't always in touch via e-mail, wonder how they're doing. This awareness – this presence in the moment – is what gives us the power to act and make decisions, to shape our own lives and truly touch other people."

The LA Times has published an interview with Freeman here, and Simon and Schuster also has a video interview here.

First of Octember craft at Cotsen Children's Library

2009-11-07T13:51:00.000-05:00

Emily with cone after going to classical guitar concert with Daddy

2009-11-06T13:14:00.000-05:00

The glory of God

2009-11-04T14:35:00.001-05:00

From John Piper:

" Seeing and sharing in God's glory is our ultimate hope through the gospel of Christ.

Hope that is really known and treasured has a huge and decisive effect on our present values and choices and actions.

Get to know the glory of God. Study the glory of God, the glory of Christ, the glory of the world that reveals the glory of God, the glory of the gospel that reveals the glory of Christ.

Treasure the glory of God above all things.

Study your soul. Know the glory you are seduced by, and know why you treasure glories that are not God's glory. Study your own soul to know how to make the glories of the world collapse like Dagon (1 Samuel 5:4) in the pitiful pieces on the floor of the world's temples."

http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.desiringgod.org%2FResourceLibrary%2FTasteAndSee%2FByDate%2F2009%2F4377_Rebuilding_Some_Basics_of_Bethlehem_The_Centrality_of_the_Glory_of_God%2F

Owen wrote a proposal - left it on my desk at home

2009-10-26T07:56:00.001-04:00

Any disclosure, copying, or distribution of this message, or the taking of any action based on it, is strictly prohibited. [v.E.1]

One of Owen's first drawings

2009-10-25T11:37:00.000-04:00

T-rex. Owen was 1 and 1/2 or 2 when he made this.

Kids at Fairy Tale Bootcamp, Cotsen Children's Library

2009-10-19T06:26:00.000-04:00

Babies love this videa

2009-10-15T07:09:00.001-04:00

Amusing
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20091014/us_time/08599192977700

The wonders of food science

2009-10-07T21:48:00.001-04:00

Via Michael Pollan:

"...What are we to make of a wonder of food science like the new Splenda with fiber? ("The great sweet taste you want and a little boost of fiber.") Should we call this progress? Is it even food?"

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/magazine/11food-rules-t.xml

On the spiderweb

2009-10-04T14:48:00.000-04:00

Owen jumps off spiderweb

2009-10-04T14:35:00.000-04:00

Kids on spider playground structure

2009-10-04T14:25:00.000-04:00

Tree climbing

2009-10-03T14:00:00.000-04:00

At Kelsey Theater

2009-09-26T14:55:00.000-04:00

Opening day at Princeton Trader Joe's

2009-09-25T14:57:00.000-04:00

Room service in Phoenix

2009-09-21T22:10:00.000-04:00

I'd rather be home

great quote on john seely brown's webpage

2009-09-18T12:24:00.000-04:00

http://www.johnseelybrown.com/contact.html

scorpion suckers

2009-09-14T20:58:00.001-04:00

In Phoenix for the 3rd week in a row last week, I was trying to think what trinket I could take back to the kids that wouldn't break the bank and that I hadn't got the first 2 times. Eureka! Hotlix scorpion candy. Emily chowed down on it. Owen was more hesitant.

http://www.hotlix.com/index.html

Any disclosure, copying, or distribution of this message, or the taking of any action based on it, is strictly prohibited. [v.E.1]

where to put books

2009-09-13T21:38:00.001-04:00

Realizing that the most wasted book space in a house is all around the corners of each room, where most people put up molding. What use is that? We put up a single shelf around the hallway and gained over 30 linear feet of book space! That's a whole wall of books, now up out of the way but still visible and not double-deep.

Sunset in Phoenix while wishing my flight hadn't been cancelled

2009-09-11T21:49:00.000-04:00

good commentary on obama's school speech

2009-09-08T17:58:00.000-04:00

On The President's "Indoctrination" Speech.

from TAPPED

In an ideal world, the folks who spent the last two weeks screeching about how President Obama would "indoctrinate" America's children by urging them to work hard and stay in school would suffer a loss in influence and stature once those charges turned out to be completely and utterly unfounded. While these kinds of speeches have always been subject to partisan criticisms, the qualitative difference between accusing the President of "indoctrination" and of campaigning on the job is massive.

The "indoctrination" accusation also has to be viewed in the context of the larger far right narrative--which is that the elected leader of this country is in fact, some kind of traitor, an outsider who is subverting the nation to his own villainous ends. This is the core feeling animating everything from birtherism to the cries of "socialism" from Republicans who demand government keep its hands off their medicare. Even when it isn't tied to the obvious hysteria of birtherism, the subtext of conservative criticisms of the President's legitimacy are fairly similar, which is that, for one reason or another, Obama isn't a legitimate President.

In the meantime, the President delivered what was mostly an unremarkable speech about the importance of staying in school, with one fairly compelling moment:

Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don't have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there's not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don't feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren't right.

But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you've got going on at home – that's no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That's no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That's no excuse for not trying.
Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up. No one's written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.

There are children in this country for whom this message, coming from any other president, would be meaningless. But because it comes from the first African-American president, a man who grew up without a father in the home, it takes on an altogether different meaning. It's not just something elites say to make themselves feel better about the advantages they were born with. It's coming from someone who's lived with some of those disadvantages. I think on some level it's sort of silly to point to exceptional people as proof that everything comes down to individual will and nothing to do with public policy or individual circumstances--but as long as that message isn't used as an excuse to promote bad policies I don't see a problem.

The message Obama gave today is one conservatives would support, if they didn't believe that everything Obama says and does is illegitimate by definition. The opposition party, by definition, mostly opposes what the majority party does. But at this point, the most mundane gestures from the President are met with a kind of unfettered hysteria. For some reason, every outburst and tantrum is treated with the utmost seriousness in the mainstream press. What that means is that even when the freakouts turn out to be as much of a non-story as this one, the press has to continue pretending they're a huge deal in order to justify the attention they gave it in the first place.

-- A. Serwer

Saturday at the Philly zoo

2009-09-06T10:12:00.000-04:00

Emily's skirt

2009-08-30T09:09:00.000-04:00

Phoenix skyline

2009-08-20T11:14:00.000-04:00

Working from Phoenix today

Economic prospects

2009-07-14T08:47:00.001-04:00

I agree with this, by Mortimor Zuckerman:

"[The economy] may well oscillate between sluggish growth and modest decline for the next several years until the rebalancing of excessive debt has been completed."

http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB124753066246235811.html&_gwt_pg=orig&sig=ALEbrzkzncLGm-SpCEtEnlxGvOON_NyD1A

kid quote of the day

2009-07-10T21:17:00.001-04:00

Emily (age 4), drinking from a water bottle as we're driving around on a hot West Texas afternoon: "Yeah, I really need to stay hibernated!"

"I am making all things new"

2009-07-09T15:55:00.001-04:00

Very good article by David Powlison:

"Jesus is in the rehab business. When He takes a broken thing into His hands, it begins to work again.We are not 'restored', brought back to a previous condition, but we are 'redeemed', turned into something new, something better and different than we ever were. The breaking and remaking leave marks on us... In the Lifegiver's hands, this remaking bears fruit in a sympathetic understanding of others. Consider this carefully. The evils that marked you deeply become channels of mercy from God... True self-knowledge makes you radically extraspective towards God and others. In wise and accurate self-knowledge, you come to see your identity, experiences, emotions, thoughts, actions, and memories with respect to God. This most honest knowing of yourself leads you out of yourself, into 'extraspection' and action. When you truly know yourself (and your relationships, and your church), you are pulled to look outside of yourself in two ways: faith and love."

http://www.ccef.org/i-am-making-all-things-new-0

Quote of the day

2009-07-01T22:03:00.000-04:00

"We want to succeed, and we feel something like joy when we are successful. Yet if we're convinced that joy is based on performance, we'll feel more and more pressure to always succeed. And the greater the pressure, the more likely we are to fail. In this way, joy intensifies sorrow."

- Dan Allender, How Children Raise Parents (2003)

Owen fishing at Spur Ranch

2009-06-28T22:15:00.000-04:00

Kids playing at philly airport

2009-06-22T09:37:00.000-04:00

"I feel just like Archimedes!"

2009-06-16T13:34:00.001-04:00

Erica is taking Owen to swim lessons and Emily (now 4 years old) confessed in the bathroom that she took off her underwear before leaving the house, and so has none.

Erica checked to make sure it was true. It was.

Emily looked up at her and said (this is verbatim), "I feel just like Archimedes!"

Great quote

2009-06-10T23:08:00.001-04:00

http://www.crpc.org/blog/?p=690

Our Greatest Comfort In Life And Death
by Tullian Tchividjian
On Earth as it is in Heaven

In a post I made a few days ago, I quoted Paul Tripp who recently wrote, "There is a Rock to be found. There is an inner rest to be experienced that's deeper than human love, personal success, and the accumulation of possessions. There is a rock that will give you rest even when all of those things have been taken away. That rock is Christ, and you were hardwired to find what you are seeking in him."

In these difficult days when everything seems unstable, all things are unpredictable, and the dangerous unknown looms around every corner, this reminder from the beloved Heidelberg Catechism serves as an anchor to my weary soul:

Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death?

A. That I am not my own, but belong— body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven: in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.

Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.

Any disclosure, copying, or distribution of this message, or the taking of any action based on it, is strictly prohibited. [v.E.1]

TV turnoff research

2009-06-02T18:55:00.000-04:00

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/06/02/tv-can-slow-language-development-even-in-the-background/

TV Can Slow Language Development, Even in the Background

Parents might know that sitting children in front of the television for hours at a time isn't the best way to encourage intellectual growth. But a new study published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine shows that simply having the TV on in the background can stifle interaction between parent and child, decreasing the number of words spoken and possibly slowing the development of a baby's language skills.

Scientists have long suspected that TV viewing can damage early development. In fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends avoiding exposure to television before an infant is two years old, a period when important cognitive changes take place. "We've known that television exposure during infancy is associated with language delays and attentional problems, but so far it has remained unclear why," said lead researcher Dimitri Christakis [LiveScience].

The researchers investigated by attaching sensors to both parents and their children between the ages of two months and four years. On sporadic days over a period of a month, the sensors recorded every word spoken or heard by the subjects. If a television was on, words emanating from the TV were counted, although researchers did not differentiate between whether subjects were actively watching the tube, or just had it on in the background as they went about other tasks.

This technology allowed Christakis' team to quantify exactly the degree to which TV-viewing can cripple parent-child communication: for every hour a television was turned on, babies heard 770 fewer words from an adult, the new study found. Conversational exchanges between baby and parent dropped 15%, as did the overall number of vocalizations made by children [Time]. That's important because previous research has shown that the more words children hear, the better they become at speaking. The exchange of fewer words, therefore, could potentially cause a deficit in language skills.

The effects of background TV could be far-reaching, since researchers say that nearly a third of households in the U.S. keep the boob tube turned on all the time. "The newborn brain is very much a work in progress. All that cognitive stimulation is critical to the underlying architecture that's developing," [Christakis] says. "Every word that babies hear, and every time they hear it, is extremely important" [New Scientist].

This message (including any attachments) contains confidential information intended for a specific individual and purpose, and is protected by law. If you are not the intended recipient, you should delete this message.

Any disclosure, copying, or distribution of this message, or the taking of any action based on it, is strictly prohibited. [v.E.1]

Grace for self-righteous and the guilt-ridden

2009-05-06T21:22:00.001-04:00

"Pharisee-type believers unconsciously think they have earned God's blessing through their behavior. Guilt-laden believers are quite sure they have forfeited God's blessing through their lack of discipline or their disobedience. Both have forgotten the meaning of grace because they have moved away from the gospel and have slipped into a performance relationship with God…Your worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God's grace. And your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God's grace."

- Jerry Bridges (quoted here)

The tiger shall lie down with the pig?

2009-04-08T12:16:00.002-04:00

http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,618181,00.html

My friend Jeff H swears this is photoshopped - the pig looks too big relative to the tiger. Der Spiegel seems to think it's real.

A pessimist succeeds

2009-04-06T10:22:00.003-04:00

Yesterday a friend named Charles was at our house for dinner. Charles has been discouraged in his current role at work, and has been seeking a way to transfer within his company for a couple of years now. This has been a topic of prayer among our group of friends for about that long.

So yesterday Charles gave us the news that he has landed the perfect position in a different group within the same company! It's a great thing.

I've always gotten a kick out of Charles's wry and sometimes dark sense of humor. So I said to him, "You see, this just goes to prove that sometimes good things happen even to a pessimist!"

"Yes, I suppose it does prove that," Charles responded, and after a beat for comedic effect, added, "But I doubt it."

Review of Nick Morgan's Trust Me

2009-03-31T10:48:00.004-04:00

I want to put in a plug for a book by my friend Nick Morgan, who has written an excellent book about authentic, persuasive communications. Reproduced here, the text of my Amazon review:

I work for a large consulting and accounting organization, and I see non-authentic, non-charismatic communication every day. By contrast, it's incredibly powerful when a business leader steps up and communicates passionately, honestly, directly, and in a way that connects deeply with the audience and generates trust.

In this book, Nick Morgan "cracks the code". It's not a matter of chance whether you communicate the right way or the bad way. And it's not that "some people are born that way."

There are teachable steps you can take to up your game.

The thrust of the book is to identify 2 "conversations" that happen every time you interact with someone: the words you say (the verbal) and the nonverbal messages you send. Nick Morgan's project is to identify how you can make both of those conversations as strong as possible. He also lays out how you can make both conversations match the other, since our nonverbals often undermine our spoken messages.

Along the way, Nick lays out four aspects of achieving powerful communications. With each of these, he discusses tips and tricks for both the verbal and also the nonverbal. The four aspects are:

Openness (sincerity, inviting the audience in, warmth)
Connectedness (to your audience)
Passion (for the subject at hand)
Listening (understanding the journey you want to take your audience on, and gathering feedback all through your communication about where they are, so you can make judgments about how to move them along)

They key to aligning your nonverbals and your verbals is this insight: your nonverbals happen a split second before the synapses fire for speaking. In other words, you can't fake it. (There are parallels to method acting here.) Both the nonverbals and the verbal communication have to flow authentically from the same place.

Nick has a great writing style: intelligent and engaging. He also keeps the book lively through the generous use of illustrations and anecdotes. He is informed by the latest brain research, and lays out a sound theoretical basis for the 2 conversations. But Nick never loses sight of the practical. There are passages where you can imagine the implications have to be worked out in 1-on-1 coaching, but overall the book itself will go a long way towards helping even the most experienced communicator.

weightlifting

2009-03-30T12:51:00.002-04:00

Cleaning out the storage shed this weekend, Erica and I came across a set of weights I used every other day back when I was in graduate school and and I was running and swimming and doing sit ups and being healthy. This has been about 5 years ago.

We were trying to decide what to keep from the storage shed and what to give / throw away.

"Do you still use these?" Erica asked.

"No."

"Do you want to start using them again?"

That was a hard question. How could I answer honestly?

I replied, "I want to be the type of person who wants to use them."

Chart of the day

2009-03-28T22:11:00.001-04:00

It's depressing the savings rate got as low as it did, and of course there's the "paradox of thrift" danger - but at least we seem to be realizing we can't go on as before...

It is beautiful in LA today

2009-03-25T18:14:00.000-04:00

Too bad I've been indoors until now...

The other guy's shoe

2009-03-25T08:54:00.004-04:00

I am in Los Angeles to assist in a project where there's already a fully functioning team - a team I'm new to and that has a history working with each other. The leaders of the team are quite receptive to my support - indeed even excited about it. And the other folks supporting the team have been friendly enough.

At the beginning though, before I got on the plane and it was all conference calls, I sensed there might be some tension - or the possibility of tension - between me and a person who had supported the team prior to my arrival on the scene. I'll call her Greta (not her name). By virtue of the job description, what I am being called in to do is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing, and what Great is supposed to do in these situations is step back and assist me. But there is some overlap between my responsibilities and what Greta would have done if someone like me wasn't available to help.

My initial reaction to this nascent dynamic was to feel territorial, defensive, and ready to fight for my position. I landed in LA "loaded for bear".

But for whatever reason, I held back a little and spent the first hours in the office just listening to the team and to Greta in particular. Watching her interact with them, it was clear that she had earned the team's trust through a history of really hard work, savvy and creative ideas, knowledge of the business, etc. In short, Greta is really talented and she has a lot to contribute. Greta's great.

Now, there is still the possibility for tension. Greta is also energetic and perhaps a little ambitious. But from the start, I tried to understand who she is and what she can contribute, and I've incorporated a lot of her ideas into our plans already. And so far, we're establishing a good working relationship.

I had to take a deep breath and ask, "How would I feel if I were Greta?" What if I was the one who had proven myself to the team through a history of really hard work, savvy and creative ideas, and knowledge of the business? And now they are flying in a person I don't know to take over aspects of the project I would traditionally do? If that person dismissed me out of hand or didn't take the time to see all that I had accomplished, then I would have fought back.

Hopefully, we've avoided a fight. And hopefully the good working relationship will continue through the week. We'll see!

Today I am in Los Angeles

2009-03-24T17:50:00.001-04:00

How to persuade Daddy

2009-03-21T10:46:00.002-04:00

This morning Erica and I were watching some videos online about different homeschool curricula, and Emily came in and silently grabbed my hand and tugged at it, to lead me to the living room where she had been playing imaginatively.

"Honey, Mommy and Daddy are talking about homeschool stuff right now. I'll come in there in a minute."

She looked up at me with the most pitiful eyes, and said quietly but firmly, "The princess is dying."

Well, how could I not go with her? We paused the video and I went to help the princess.

Working from Philly today

2009-03-20T12:05:00.001-04:00

View from my hotel room tonight

2009-03-18T19:55:00.002-04:00

Happy chart of the day

2009-03-17T15:45:00.001-04:00

We're not even close...

http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2009/03/16/on-the-job-front-this-is-no-great-depression-not-even-close/

Cake of Resignation

2009-03-17T15:28:00.001-04:00

Cake of Resignation
Originally uploaded by neiltron

I wish that people would give me notices, proposals, documentation, and so on via cake.

Owen's proposal for a vacation

2009-03-16T19:49:00.004-04:00

Owen came in today to ask Erica if the family could go on vacation.

She reminded him that daddy writes proposals for a living, and discussed whether he thought he could write his own proposal to me. What follows is the proposal Owen dictated and which I found sitting prominently on the desk in my home office when I walked in this evening.

Owen's Proposal for a Vacation
3/16/09

Daddy,

I want to go on a vacation or at least a day trip. Like to Texas or an amusement park. I think it would be fun and even mommy wants to go.
We could get some fresh air, and in the airplane we could look at the clouds. It is really cool. It would really be fun.
You could relax and it would be work free if you work hard before it.

Erica told me that as he was writing, Owen asked her "What does daddy really like? Let's put that in so he'll say yes!." The kid is good!

Sesame Street on the Madoff scandal

2009-03-15T22:11:00.001-04:00

Crazy-long Roman aqueduct

2009-03-13T08:46:00.004-04:00

Der Speigel has a fascinating article about an aqueduct chipped through more than 100 kilometers of stone to connect water to cities in the ancient province of Syria. "The soldiers chiseled over 600,000 cubic meters of stone from the ground -- or the equivalent of one-quarter of the Great Pyramid of Cheops."

Cool.

Google Voice - yaaaaaiiiyy!!

2009-03-12T10:21:00.002-04:00

David Pogue reports today:

If Google search revolutionized the Web, and Gmail revolutionized free e-mail, then one thing’s for sure: Google Voice, unveiled Thursday, will revolutionize telephones.

It unifies your phone numbers, transcribes your voice mail, blocks telemarketers and elevates text messages to first-class communication citizens. And that’s just the warm-up.

Google Voice began life in 2005 as something called GrandCentral. It was, in its own way, revolutionary.

It was intended to solve the headaches of having more than one phone number (home, work, cellphone and so on): Having to check multiple answering machines. Missing calls when people try to reach you on your cell when you’re at home (or the other way around). Sending around e-mail at work that says, “On Thursday from 5 to 8:30, I’ll be on my cell; for the rest of the weekend, call me at home.” And having to change phone numbers when you switched jobs or cities.

GrandCentral’s solution was to offer you a new, single, unified phone number, in an area code of your choice. Whenever somebody dialed your uni-number, all of your phones rang at once.

I was an early adopter of GrandCentral, and when Google bought GrandCentral I wondered whether it would come to life even more, or fall by the wayside. I am completely thrilled that Google has not only not given up on it, but is enhancing it with Google Voice. As soon as I get my instructions for signing up to Google Voice, I’m there.

GrandCentral has been a godsend. My exact work location varies a great deal from week to week and sometimes day to day, I’m never in the office, and different cell carriers get different reception in different areas. Plus all the minutes. There were some buggy things about GrandCentral that I put up with: call quality could vary (as with any VOIP), and sometimes a caller had to wait 5 or 6 rings for me to pick up. I'm expecting that these things will clear up with Google Voice.

2 new enhancements I'm particularly looking forward to: free voicemail transription, and free conference calling.

So I can’t wait to play with Google Voice. Here is a video from the Google blog showing how voicemail transcripts work:

The Story Pirates rock!!!

2009-03-10T22:17:00.010-04:00

A couple of Saturdays ago I took Owen and Emily to see the Striking Viking Story Pirates at the local community theater. Their motto is "Stories written by kids, performed by adults who wish they still were." And that's what they do: "adapt and perform stories written by kids as a way of celebrating the words and ideas of young people, to promote literacy as a vital part of early childhood education, and to preserve the spark of youthful creativity often lost in the transition to adulthood."

Wow.

It was great. The Story Pirates combined wise-cracking humor, improv-style craziness, good fun silliness, and the sweet non-sequitur-but-still-makes-sense-logic of children. I love the fact that the Story Pirates take things children have written and treat them really seriously. A kid has written this, and I, a big and honest-to-goodness grown-up, think it is worth putting to music and producing. Not just producing, but producing with enthusiasm and quality. I can only imagine how that makes a kid feel valuable and validated and delighted.

Anyway, googling the Story Pirates - you can find a few of their skits online. The video quality is not superb in some of them, so if you watch those, bear in mind that it doesn't do the Story Pirates justice. In person it really sparkles.

Here is one they performed the day Owen and Emily and I saw them, Kung-Fu Fighting Ninja Girls:

And here is one they took time and money to produce more professionally. Unfortunately the Story Pirates didn't do this one when the kids and I saw them, but it has the same joie de vivre:

And by the way, Jon Stewart loves the Story Pirates. So check them out if you get a chance.

Frightening chart of the day II

2009-03-10T22:00:00.005-04:00

2nd frightening chart today

Via dshort.com via Kevin Drum.

Frightening chart of the day

2009-03-10T09:34:00.001-04:00

Via the Financial Times. http://tinyurl.com/abarm2

"The proposition that sophisticated modern finance was able to transfer risk to those best able to manage it has failed. The paradigm is, instead, that risk has been transferred to those least able to understand it."

There is not a day but sin foils or is foiled, prevails or is prevailed on

2009-03-09T22:31:00.002-04:00

Sin doth not only still abide in us, but is still acting, still labouring to bring forth the deeds of the flesh. When sin lets us alone we may let sin alone; but as sin is never less quiet than when it seems to be most quiet, and its waters are for the most part deep when they are still, so ought our contrivances against it to be vigorous at all times and in all conditions, even where there is least suspicion. Sin doth not only abide in us, but “the law of the members is still rebelling against the law of the mind,” Rom. vii. 23; and “the spirit that dwells in us lusteth to envy,” James iv. 5. It is always in continual work; “the flesh lusteth against the Spirit,” Gal v. 1 7; lust is still tempting and conceiving sin, James i. 14; in every moral action it is always either inclining to evil, or hindering from that which is good, or disframing the spirit from communion with God. It inclines to evil. “The evil which I would not, that I do,” saith the apostle, Rom. vii 19. Whence is that? Why, “Because in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing.” And it hinders from good: “The good that I would do, that I do not,” verse 19 ;—“ Upon the same account, either I do it not, or not as I should; all my holy things being defiled by this sin.” “The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, so that ye cannot do the things that ye would,” Gal. v. 17. And it unframes our spirit, and thence is called “The sin that so easily besets us,” Heb. xii. 1; on which account are those grievous complaints that the apostle makes of it, Rom. Vii. So that sin is always acting, always conceiving, always seducing and tempting. Who can say that he had ever anything to do with God or for God, that indwelling sin had not a hand in the corrupting of what he did? And this trade will it drive more or less all our days. If, then, sin will be always acting, if we be not always mortifying, we are lost creatures. He that stands still and suffers his enemies to double blows upon him without resistance, will undoubtedly be conquered in the issue. If sin be subtle, watchful, strong, and always at work in the business of killing our souls, and we be slothful, negligent, foolish, in proceeding to the ruin thereof, can we expect a comfortable event? There is not a day but sin foils or is foiled, prevails or is prevailed on; and it will be so whilst we live in this world.

I shall discharge him from this duty who can bring sin to a composition, to a cessation of arms in this warfare; if it will spare him any one day, in any one duty (provided he be a person that is acquainted with the spirituality of obedience and the subtlety of sin), let him say to his soul, as to this duty, “Soul take thy rest.” The saints whose souls breathe after deliverance from its perplexing rebellion know there is no safety against it but in a constant warfare.

- John Owen, Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers

All of us are tempted. Our temptations may be of the most infinitely different kinds, but the fact of temptation is common to us all. There is not one of us, young or old, rich or poor, learned or simple, whose whole life is not, in one shape or another, and whether he will acknowledge it or no, one long temptation. There are temptations in adversity, temptations in prosperity; temptations in sickness, and temptations in health; temptations for the poor, and temptations for the rich; temptations for the young, and temptations for the old; things pleasant to the flesh seeking to allure and entice us from our allegiance to God, and things painful seeking to terrify us from that allegiance; the adversary trying with us, as with our Lord, now the door of desire, and now that of fear.

If, then, we would resist him, what shall be our first wisdom? Plainly this, to resist him in the only strength in which he can be effectually resisted, in the strength of Him who has said, “My strength is sufficient for thee;” putting on the armor of God. How often we forget this; not altogether perhaps, but in part; relying on some strength of our own; wielding weapons which are carnal; acting as foolishly herein as David would have acted, if, going to fight with the Philistine, he had encased and encumbered himself with the unserviceable armor of Saul. In all human likelihood this would have proved fatal to him. He would have forfeited and foregone the secret of his strength, that strength lying in the weakness which caused him to lean upon God, and thus to become partaker of a heavenly strength. So, too, let our strength be a strength in God and from God; a strength gotten in prayer, gotten from the Word, gotten through sacraments; a strength not such as that which the rude boisterous Esaus of this world may boast of, but such as the Jacobs know, who have wrestled with God’s angel and have prevailed. And how prevailed? with tears and supplications, which are the only prevailing arms of man with God, refusing to let Him go until He bless them. For of this let us be sure, that, if we lean upon any strength of our own, or trust in our own hearts, there is no temptation so weak but it may prove too strong for us; while, on the other hand, if we lean upon the strength of God, put on his armor, seek his grace, there is no temptation so strong but that we may and shall prove stronger than it.

I can conceive some thoughtful hearer saying in his heart, How does this promise agree with what . . . our own experience bears out, namely, that temptations, though beaten off, will return again and again, that we may never dare to count a corruption to be so absolutely dead as that it can never revive, never trouble us again? Is this consistent with the promise, “Resist the devil, and ho will flee from you”? We are quite sure that it must be, and a little consideration will show us in what way it actually is. The words cannot mean, that after on earnest and successful struggle against temptation, or the devil who is the author of temptation, ho will so leave us as never to return and vex us any more. To give such a latitude to the words would be absurd. This was not true even of Christ Himself. But the words of the promise do meet a very crying need and necessity of the heart; and there are times when they have an exceeding preciousness for the soul. Take some poor, perplexed, tempted man: he is in the fires of some fierce temptation; hitherto he has not been scorched and consumed by them, but he feels as if they must soon kindle upon him. Satan is lying in wait for his soul; he has escaped hitherto, but it seems to him as by miracle; and he says in his heart, as David said at last, “I shall now perish by the hand of Saul.” Some hideous suggestion of the Evils One presents itself again and again to his soul, and he asks himself, almost in despair, Must it be ever thus? must I feel at each moment of my spiritual life that there is but a step between me and death? must I go on through my whole life in this never-ceasing struggle with impure, defiling, hateful, blasphemous thoughts?

The words of the promise of my text say, No; this is not thy portion, this is not the portion of any faithful servant of the Lord. Thou shalt, indeed, always need to stand upon thy guard; from time to time, during thy whole life, thou shalt have to do most strong and earnest battle against thy foes; but this temptation, the devil in the shape he now wears, resist him by faith, and ho will flee from thee presently. Whatever else may hereafter come, the stress of the present temptation will pass away from thee, even as the stress of a mightier passed away from thy Lord; and thou too shalt know something of the joy of a temptation met and overcome, something of the joy which thy Lord and Saviour knew, when, after He had fought and conquered for thee, angels came in the wilderness and ministered unto Him.

- Richard Chenevix Trench, Sermons Preached in Westminster Abbey

Geithner call-in to find crisis solutions

2009-03-08T16:18:00.001-04:00

This is not the Obama bear market

2009-03-08T14:35:00.002-04:00

Like Ryan Chittum, I've noticed this idea in the press lately. Chittum has a great essay on the question. http://tinyurl.com/cdycrh

To pin the stock market today on Obama is blatant foolishness. The market is down because our banking system is teetering on insolvency, because every week another bunch of companies disclose job cuts of 5 to 10 thousand, because over 20% of US mortgages are underwater, and because consumer spending, the engine of our prosperity, has sputtered and is unlikely to crank up again any time soon. As a nation we have been living on leverage, and the party's over.

The very real consequences of these very real problems will continue to pound corporations, as those consequences become more clear, and the market will price them in accordingly. But a chain that was set in motion long ago is what's driving today's stock prices. Call it the Clinton/Bush bear market, if you like. The sources of our problems go back that far and farther. Or call it the Greenspan bear market.

Can Obama make it worse or better? Yes, without question. Could he have done anything in 6 weeks that would have undone the real consequences of the real problems I just sketched? Most cerainly no.

Will this become the Obama bear market? Possibly. But that moment has not yet come, and almost everyone either knows or intuits as much. It rings hollow and partisan when Republicans, supposedly the party of market literacy, claim otherwise.

The greatness of God's power

2009-03-07T21:06:00.002-05:00

We say, we do not doubt of God's Power, but his Will. But indeed it is God's Power that we question. Is any Thing too hard for God? Yet we stagger through Unbelief, as if the Arm of God's Power were shrunk, and he could not help in desperate Cases. Take away a King's Power, and we un-king him; take away the Lord's Power, and we un-God him. Yet how guilty of this we are!

- puritan writer Thomas Watson (c. 1620—1686): England

We labor in servitude to sin; and besieged by a thousand afflictions, we are engaged in a dreadful warfare; Christ, on the other hand, being seated at the right hand of God, has received all government in heaven and on earth, and triumphs wonderfully over his foes as he defeats and overthrows them. We bite the dust, covered with contempt and ignominy; to him is given a name which fills men and angels with reverence, and makes devils and godless men grovel in fright. Here we are impoverished, so poor that we lack everything we need; he on the other hand has been appointed by the Father to possess all blessings and to dispense them according to his good pleasure. In view of all this, we shall be the gainers if we turn our minds to Christ, so that in him, as in a mirror, we may contemplate the wonderful treasures of divine grace and the infinite greatness of God's power, all of which we can hardly discern at present in our own lives.

- John Calvin (1509-1564): France

God's Power is an inexhaustible Power, it is never spent or wasted. Men, while they exercise their Strength, weaken it; but God hath an everlasting Spring of Strength in him. Though he spends his Arrows upon his Enemies, yet he doth not spend his Strength. He fainteth not, neither is weary.

- puritan writer Thomas Watson (c. 1620—1686): England

You see clearly enough that nothing, not even God with all His power, can make 'X' really happy as long as 'X' remains envious, self-centred, and spiteful. Be sure that there is something inside you which, unless it is altered, will put it out of God's power to prevent your being eternally miserable. While that something remains there can be no Heaven for you, just as there can be no sweet smells for a man with a cold in his nose, and no music for a man who is deaf. . . In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud. The matter is serious: let us put ourselves in His hands at once - this very day, this hour.

- C. S. Lewis (1898-1963): England

Frightening chart of the day

2009-03-06T22:25:00.003-05:00

Via SmartMoney:

"As of yesterday's close (Thursday, March 5), the S&P 500 has lost 56.4% from its all-time highs 513 days ago. At the same point in the bear market associated with the Great Depression, that is at the 513 day mark, the S&P 500 had only lost -- only! -- 49%.
In other words, to be no worse than the catastrophe that happened to stocks in the Great Depression, the S&P 500 today would have to rally 17%."

http://tinyurl.com/8e7dm2

Reading is the key to everything... er, most things

2009-03-05T11:36:00.007-05:00

Yesterday Emily read her first book. It was from the Bob Book series, set 1, book 1 - a page-turner titled Mat.

After the family had done a cheer and celebrated, I scooped her up in my arms and said, "Emily! I'm so proud of you! Let me tell you something, and remember this. If you can read, you can do pretty much anything! Reading lets you do anything."

She thought about that momentarily, furrowed her brow, and replied, "But I can not pick up my room."

Brits lying about books

2009-03-05T09:16:00.004-05:00

I've felt under-read before, too...

«
LONDON (Reuters) - Two out of three Britons have lied about reading books they have not, and George Orwell's "1984" tops the literary fib list, according to a survey published on Thursday.

Commissioned by organisers of World Book Day, an annual celebration of reading in Britain, the study also shows that the author people really enjoy reading is J.K. Rowling, creator of the bestselling Harry Potter wizard series.

According to the survey, 65 percent of people have pretended to have read books, and of those, 42 percent singled out "1984." Next on the list came "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy and in third place was James Joyce's "Ulysses."

The Bible was in fourth position, and newly elected U.S. President Barack Obama's autobiography "Dreams from My Father" came ninth.

Aside from a list of ten titles which respondents were asked to tick or leave blank, many admitted wrongly claiming they had read other "classics" including Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Herman Melville.

Asked why they had lied about reading a book, the main reason was to impress the person they were speaking to. (http://tinyurl.com/clpl5e)
»

A few honest reactions:

1.) We all do this in one way or another. The playing field is different (being in-the-know socially, having listened to a certain pop song, etc.) but the game is exactly the same.

2.) Ethics aside, there's something kind of sweet about the Brits in this. That is, if we admit that lying-to-impress-socially is a universal human temptation, and the only question is "about what?", then there's something weirdly noble about Brits lying to appear well-read. Beneath the wrong behavior, there is a right recognition about the sort of qualities a thriving person should have. Looking at the list of most-lied-about books, I fear most Americans wouldn't even know these titles in order to lie about them. And even then, most Americans would enthusiastically admit to not having read XYZ Classic without feeling any sense of shame. So, lying aside, the survey reveals something admirable about British culture.

3) On a personal note, I stand guilty. At first I thought, "I would never do that!" Not so fast. I quickly realized that this was a big part of the schtick back in graduate school. I don't think I ever said explicitly, "I have read ABCD in the original" when I hadn't, but I certainly intended to give that impression. So did everyone. Among the 20 to 30 grad students who came in my cohort and just before or after, I only knew 1 who claimed to have actually read in original Greek and Latin our entire prescribed Reading List. A brilliant Italian named Paolo, and I believed him. There may have been 1 or 2 others, but the rest of us were just holding on for dear life, hoping what we'd gotten to would be enough. And I'd hazard you'll find the same thing in every corner of the academy. The titles are different, but really, how many academics don't purposely create the impression that they have read more or know more than they do? That's ironic, because it's academics who are likely to read least charitably the survey results about book-lying Brits.

4) If you detect that I harbor a certain indulgence towards the Brit-on-the-street lying about having read James Joyce, while I harbor pretty strong judgmentalism towards the grasping climbing academic pretenses - bingo. I said that the phenomenon reveals a kind of right recognition in British culture, whereas I view a very similar phenomenon in academics as highly poisonous. Why? Can't put my finger on it at the moment. I'll keep thinking on it.

Distracting ourselves from thoughts of death

2009-03-04T18:43:00.009-05:00

Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.

- Pascal, Pensées (France, 1623-1662) [Pascal has a lot to say about diversion to distract from thoughts of death]

We want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We want to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very thing we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because the hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.

- Peter Kreeft, writing on Pascal (USA, 1993)

ὡς δὲ ὥρα πάντα μὲν τὸν Ἑλλήσποντον ὑπὸ τῶν νεῶν ἀποκεκρυμμένον, πάσας δὲ τὰς ἀκτὰς καὶ τὰ Ἀβυδηνῶν πεδία ἐπίπλεα ἀνθρώπων, ἐνθαῦτα ὁ Ξέρξης ἑωυτὸν ἐμακάρισε, μετὰ δὲ τοῦτο ἐδάκρυσε.

μαθὼν δέ μιν Ἀρτάβανος ὁ πάτρως, ὃς τὸ πρῶτον γνώμην ἀπεδέξατο ἐλευθέρως οὐ συμβουλεύων Ξέρξῃ στρατεύεσθαι ἐπὶ τὴν Ἑλλάδα, οὗτος ὡνὴρ φρασθεὶς Ξέρξην δακρύσαντα εἴρετο τάδε. “ὦ βασιλεῦ, ὡς πολλὸν ἀλλήλων κεχωρισμένα ἐργάσαο νῦν τε καὶ ὀλίγῳ πρότερον: μακαρίσας γὰρ σεωυτὸν δακρύεις.”

ὁ δὲ εἶπε “ἐσῆλθε γάρ με λογισάμενον κατοικτεῖραι ὡς βραχὺς εἴη ὁ πᾶς ἀνθρώπινος βίος, εἰ τούτων γε ἐόντων τοσούτων οὐδεὶς ἐς ἑκατοστὸν ἔτος περιέσται.” ὁ δὲ ἀμείβετο λέγων “ἕτερα τούτου παρὰ τὴν ζόην πεπόνθαμεν οἰκτρότερα.

ἐν γὰρ οὕτω βραχέι βίῳ οὐδεὶς οὕτω ἄνθρωπος ἐὼν εὐδαίμων πέφυκε οὔτε τούτων οὔτε τῶν ἄλλων, τῷ οὐ παραστήσεται πολλάκις καὶ οὐκὶ ἅπαξ τεθνάναι βούλεσθαι μᾶλλον ἢ ζώειν. αἵ τε γὰρ συμφοραὶ προσπίπτουσαι καὶ αἱ νοῦσοι συνταράσσουσαι καὶ βραχὺν ἐόντα μακρὸν δοκέειν εἶναι ποιεῦσι τὸν βίον.

When he saw the whole Hellespont covered with ships, and all the shores and plains of Abydos full of men, Xerxes first declared himself blessed, and then wept.

His uncle Artabanus perceived this, he who in the beginning had spoken his mind freely and advised Xerxes not to march against Hellas. Marking how Xerxes wept, he questioned him and said, “O king, what a distance there is between what you are doing now and a little while ago! After declaring yourself blessed you weep.”

Xerxes said, “I was moved to compassion when I considered the shortness of all human life, since of all this multitude of men not one will be alive a hundred years from now.”

Artabanus answered, “In one life we have deeper sorrows to bear than that. Short as our lives are, there is no human being either here or elsewhere so fortunate that it will not occur to him, often and not just once, to wish himself dead rather than alive. Misfortunes fall upon us and sicknesses trouble us, so that they make life, though short, seem long.

- Herodotus, Histories 7.45.1 – 7.46.3 (Greece, c.484–c.425)

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.

- Shakespeare, Julius Cæsar. Act ii. Sc. 2.

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

- Philip Larkin, “Aubade” (England, 1922-1985)

I feel life in general - let's say there was no terrorism whatsoever and we were all very nice to one another and we were all kind, we still would be faced with an extremely cruel and hostile universe and existence and so I'm a great pessimist and I feel that it's impossible really to be happy, and that the best you can hope for is to be distracted.

And I feel you can be distracted - you get distracted by your relationships, you get distracted by the meaninglessness of a sporting event, by a movie, by the work that you're doing that you think is important at the time - I think it's so important whether my film works or not when in fact it's completely meaningless, and I think it's important whether the Giants win the Pennant. And so we distract ourselves, and good distraction is the best we can do. But the overall picture - if they sit you down in a chair and really shove reality in your face - I feel about it the way Freud, Nietzche, Eugene O'Neill felt about it, and that is very pessimistic.

- Woody Allen, speaking after the events of September 11^th 2001

2b. Arioso T Ach, Herr, lehre uns bedenken, daß wir sterben müssen, auf daß wir klug werden. (Psalm 90:12)	2b. Arioso T Ah, Lord, teach us to consider that we must die, so that we might become wise.
2c. Arie B Bestelle dein Haus; denn du wirst sterben und nicht lebendig bleiben! (Isaiah 38:1)	2c. Aria B Put your house in order; for you will die and not remain alive!
2d. Chor und Arioso S Es ist der alte Bund: Mensch, du mußt sterben! (Ecclesiasticus 14:17) Ja, komm, Herr Jesu! ( Revelations 22:20) (Instrumental Chorale: Ich hab mein Sach' Gott heimgestellt Er mach's mit mir wie's ihm gefällt Soll ich all hier noch länger lebn Nicht wider strebn Seim Willn tu ich mich ganz ergebn.)	2d. Chorus and Arioso S It is the ancient law: human, you must die! Yes, come, Lord Jesus! (Instrumental Chorale: I have brought my affairs home to God, He does with me as it pleases Him, if I should live yet longer here, I shall not struggle against it; rather I do His will with total devotion).

- Bach, Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (Germany, 1708)

ἐάν τε γὰρ ζῶμεν, τῷ κυρίῳ ζῶμεν, ἐάν τε ἀποθνήσκωμεν, τῷ κυρίῳ ἀποθνήσκομεν. ἐάν τε οὖν ζῶμεν ἐάν τε ἀποθνήσκωμεν, τοῦ κυρίου ἐσμέν.

For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.

- The apostle Paul (Greek / ESV) (Mediterranean, mid-1^st century AD)

A wife who obeys? Decent men don't want them to.

2009-03-02T22:22:00.007-05:00

Erica has been reading the Little House series to the kids, who are loving it. Recently I was in the room when she read a fantastic passage from These Happy Golden Years:

Laura was silent again. Then she summoned all her courage and said, "Almanzo, I must ask you something. Do you want me to promise to obey you?"

Soberly he answered. "Of course not. I know it is in the wedding ceremony, but it is only something that women say. I never knew one that did it, nor any decent man that wanted her to."

"Well, I am not going to say I will obey you," said Laura.

"Are you for woman's rights, like Eliza?" Almanzo asked in surprise.

"No," Laura replied. "I do not want to vote. But I cannot make a promise that I will not keep, and, Almanzo, even if I tried, I do not think I could obey anybody against my better judgement."

"I'd never expect you to," he told her. "And there will be no difficulty about the ceremony because Reverend Brown does not believe in using the word 'obey.'"

"He doesn't! Are you sure?" Laura had never been so surprised and so relieved, all at once.

I love this passage because, in its sweetness and innocence, it get pretty close to how a good marriage works. There's something at once revolutionary and shocking in it (for its time) and also surprisingly pedestrian and traditional and comforting and warm.

It's clear just from this exchange (and even more from the entire Little House series) that Almanzo is exactly the kind of man Laura need never worry about obeying against her better judgment. He's the kind of man who will act in such a way that accords with her better judgment, and should he fail to do so, he's the kind of man she could talk to about it, and I feel certain Almanzo would change course instantaneously if Laura's better judgment indicated he was going in the wrong direction. Because, at the same time, Laura is the kind of woman whose better judgment can be relied on by her husband.

That's how it should be with marital "obedience". The joyful interworkings of helpmates.

Household debt to GDP

2009-03-02T20:51:00.003-05:00

Via Planet Money.

Planet Money quotes Columbia's David Beim:

"The problem is us. The problem is not the banks, greedy though they may be, overpaid though they may be. The problem is us... We've been living very high on the hog. Our living standard has been rising dramatically in the last 25 years. And we have been borrowing much of the money to make that prosperity happen."

http://tinyurl.com/chrbvw

Animated recreation of Hudson River Landing

2009-03-02T11:24:00.000-05:00

Wow.

A soothing bedtime story?

2009-03-01T21:47:00.002-05:00

The other night Owen was afraid of bad dreams and wanted to listen to books on CDs as he went to sleep.

"How about 50 Famous Fairy Tales?" I asked him. No, some of those have witches.

This one? No, that has fighting. This one? No, for a different reason.

"How about Paul Bunyan?"

"Is that the one where a big man chops down a whole forest?" Owen asked. "Yes!" I said, relieved and thinking this would be it. What could be wrong with Paul Bunyan?

"No. I think that one will make me sad," Owen replied. "I think all the animals lost their habitat."

(Finally we settled on Pippi Longstocking.)

Frightening chart of the day

2009-02-28T09:53:00.002-05:00

http://tinyurl.com/dzhjr4

I work with these people

2009-02-27T14:53:00.006-05:00

A friend just reminded me of this spoof on the corporate creative process, and how it squishes excellence and goodness into business-speak and mush. I work with these people. These very people.

I kid you not.

On loyalty

2009-02-25T22:50:00.012-05:00

What does it mean to be loyal? What is loyalty? I’ve been thinking a lot about this over the last couple of weeks because a friend said they were sticking with an institution out of loyalty.

Merriam-Webster gives a definition that has to do with unswerving and faithful allegiance to a person or group or sovereign to whom fidelity is due.

The OED (available online by subscription only) gives the following for loyal and loyalty:

Loyal

True to obligations of duty, love, etc.; faithful to plighted troth.
Faithful in allegiance to the sovereign or constituted government. Also, in recent use, enthusiastically devoted or reverential to the person and family of the sovereign.
(Archaic uses)

Loyalty

Faithful adherence to one’s promise, oath, word of honor, etc.; conjugal faithfulness, fidelity
Faithful adherence to the sovereign or lawful government. Also, in recent usage, enthusiastic reverence for the person and family of the sovereign.
(Archaic uses)

The supplement to the OED turns up some quotations about loyalty-oaths from 1950s America, but nothing really different from the original entry.

So. Loyalty means exercising due faithfulness to the institutions and people who have a claim on you. The etymology traces the word to the Latin lex, legis. Originally, being loyal had to do with keeping legal obligations.

But we must mean something more than that, or why would we not just speak of faithfulness to the state? Or proper rendering of duties to the person who saved my life? Surely we mean something more when we speak of loyalty.

In business-speak, people talk about "brand loyalty" - your willingness to pay a premium in order to make sure the Cheetos you buy really are Frito-Lay Cheetos and not a store brand (like, say, Great Value Cheddar Cheese Crunch). But when we use "loyalty" in this way, we largely mean nothing more than stubborn preference. Certainly Frito-Lay has no greater claim on my loyalty, or anyone else's, than Great Value.

So in addition to the legal sense of loyalty, then, there is an affective sense. I am obligated to Person X, and/or I just plain like Person X and feel attached to him.

There is overlap between these two ideas of loyalty, which has to do with the stubbornness of it, the "unswerving" from Merriam-Webster's definition. In both cases, loyalty is not loyalty (or not demonstrated as such, at any rate) without some inducement to abandon it. I am not especially demonstrating loyalty to my friend if I choose him, as the only other inhabitant of a tropical island, to join me for some celebratory dinner. I am not being loyal to Cheetos if it's the only food choice on a store shelf. True loyalty is dedicated, zealous, resistant to being overcome, and tested.

As George Fletcher points out:

Loyalty, by definition, generates interest, partiality, an identification with the object of one's loyalty rather than with its competitors. Loyalty is expressed in relationships that generate these partialities. The minimal demand of loyalty is the maintenance of the relationship, which requires the rejection of alternatives that undermine the principal bond. A loyal citizen is someone who will not go over to the enemy in a time of conflict. A loyal political adherent will not "sell out" to the opposition. Some of the strongest moral epithets in the English language are reserved for the weak who cannot meet the threshold of loyalty: They commit adultery, betrayal, treason.

There are always three parties, A, B, and C, in a matrix of loyalty. A can be loyal to B only if there is a third party C (another lover, an enemy nation, a hostile company) who stands as a potential competitor to B, the object of loyalty. The competitor is always lurking in the wings, rejected for the time being, but always tempting, always seductive. The foundational element in loyalty is the fact not present - the counterfactual conditional statement that if the competitor appears and beckons, the loyal will refuse to follow.

In one of the most vivid examples of loyalty I know of, my in-laws happened to be very close friends with a man who was caught molesting a young boy. There was tremendous public shame and abandonment of this man by almost everyone in the community. He had done a terrible thing. But my in-laws, without ever condoning the abuse, nevertheless continued their friendship. They prayed for and with this man, and demonstrated redemptive hope, forgiveness, and love. This is an example where loyalty in the legal sense very probably trumped loyalty in the affective sense. That is to say, during the initial shock of what their friend had done, my in-laws were probably not feeling that affectionate for him at all. But aware of their obligations to embody Christ’s love to their friend, they chose a course that was not easy or popular.

I would guess that in America today, we typically elevate affective/emotive loyalty over the loyalty of obligations and faithfulness. There seems to me a very great danger in giving such weight to loyalty-as-affectionate-preference.

The thing that keeps running through my head is that loyalties never exist in a vacuum of obligations. In fact, loyalties often conflict with one another and make competing claims on me. My sense of loyalty to an employer may be trumped by my loyalty as a citizen if the employer engages in unethical or illegal behavior. The obligations of justice and due regard for the safety of innocents trumped claims of family loyalty that David Kaczynski felt for his brother Ted the Unabomber. George Bush fils should have allowed his obligations to the United States to trump his sense of loyalty to the incomparably disastrous Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzalez, or heck-of-a-job Brownie.

George Fletcher reminds us that “blind adherence to any object of loyalty - whether friend, lover, or nation - converts loyalty into idolatry.” I think that gets it about right.

Ultimately, the only person to whom I can pledge absolute loyalty is Jesus Christ. All of my loyalties must begin and end with him. And when my loyalties seem to compete in human terms, I must beg his grace to see myself and others as we truly are, to give the weight to things he wants me to, and to make a wise decision.

It strikes me that using loyalty itself as a primary criteria is probably almost unnecessary. Although the English idea is to some degree implicit in Biblical words having to do with faithfulness, obedience, and trust, still there is not a very exactly corresponding word that shows up much in the New Testament. But if I could just have the grace to live full-time according to, say, 1 Corinthians 13: 4-7 (Greek here) or Philippians 2:1-11 (Greek here) – then I feel pretty sure I wouldn’t go wrong in regard to loyalty. (And there are many passages that would be equally good “just-for-starters”.)

True loyalty then is primarily the faithful execution of my personal and institutional obligations and the living out of gospel grace, and all the better if it can be combined with affection and generosity for the people involved, although this is not a necessary ingredient. Loyalty should also be treated with some caution and skepticism, because it can very easily lead me to intellectual dishonesty and to unwarranted preferential treatment of people and institutions – with bad consequences.

Gate at sunset (sunrise?)

2009-02-24T16:13:00.004-05:00

enter here
Originally uploaded by Paul Del Signore

Gosh, there are some amazing photos on Flickr. This is just beautiful.

Spontaneously disappearing cancer

2009-02-24T08:49:00.005-05:00

(Caveat lector: As someone abysmally ignorant of science, I will probably mangle the discussion below. Forgiveness [and corrections] begged in advance.)

Imagine being this guy:

Charles Burrows noticed a strange lump on his stomach in the summer of 2005. By November the pain was so bad it felt like a knife was stabbing him in the stomach. A ct scan and a biopsy confirmed Burrows' worst fears: He had inoperable liver cancer.

Few cancers have a worse prognosis. His tumor, the size of a baseball, was already starting to strangle the portal vein going into the liver. Doctors at the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care System told Burrows, then 56 years old, there was nothing they could do. "They said, 'Get your affairs in order because you have 30 days to live, maybe 60,'" recalls Burrows, who is divorced with three grown kids.

Burrows quit his carpentry job and spent the next two months in a fog. Then things got very strange. In February 2006 Burrows developed abdominal bloating, shaking, chills and nausea. Soon after that he noticed that the lump on his stomach was gone. By then his daughter had found a doctor in private practice willing to consider treating him. But the doctor couldn't find a tumor. He went back to the VA, where gastroenterologist Nooman Gilani was flabbergasted when computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging scans showed no sign of cancer. Where the tumor had once been, there was "literally empty space," Gilani says.

Burrows remains free of cancer three years later and still seems dazed by the turn of events. "I won a lottery, and I don't understand why," he says. "I would like someone to explain to me what the heck happened."

Forbes has a cover story about cases like this. Apparently it's quite rare, but there're a few hundred documented cases of cancer regressing. That is, the cancer was clearly there and well developed, and then it went away seemingly of its own.

The theory is that there's some kind of attack on the cancer by the body, and this is what makes it go away. In fact some researchers think there's cancer inside lots of us that never gets detected, because it regresses before anyone notices it.

Interestingly and unsurprisingly, the article does not mention prayer at all, or divine intervention. But it does mention vitamins. Apparently some people who've been documented with naturally regressing cancer also happened to take vitamins. The scientists believe these vitamins had no effect, although the patients may be conviced it helped.

Leave aside for the moment that doctors and scientists sometimes overturn their understandings of these things every few decades. Here's the connection I immediately thought of: if there's cancer everywhere, and a lot of it kills people but a lot of it naturally regresses, then you may get all sorts of "false positives" for what made the cancer go away. Vitamins, or prayer, or even medical treatment for that matter. The feel and tone of the Forbes cases reminded me an awful lot of the feel and tone of cancer-healed-via-prayer stories.

Let me be clear: I believe God intervenes miraculously in the 21st century. I believe he still heals illness today, sometimes through doctors, sometimes through natural causes, and sometimes supernaturally.

But say for a moment the cancer-healed-via-prayer stories turn out to have natural explanations. Say it's all about the body's mysterious natural defenses and cancer regression. What does that do to your faith, if anything?

My view is: God's sovereign over all creation, we only sometimes understand his ways and purposes, but we can trust his goodness. I praise him for cancer healed through any means. And when cancer is not healed, I trust him.

But perhaps you think that's ducking the issue?

It's better to taste

2009-02-23T11:41:00.001-05:00

Yesterday at breakfast.

Owen: "How do we know the pancakes will be good?"

Me: "You'll just have to trust me."

Owen: "It's better to taste than to trust. At least when it comes to pancakes."

Hazards of parenting

2009-02-20T11:57:00.002-05:00

The kids love playing with stickers, and they have a set of garage-sale stickers we got for cheap. The stickers are pre-printed with things like ¢25, $1, etc. Out to eat with the family, and as my wife was sitting down we noticed this little gem from the garage-sale stickers prominently affixed to her bottom.

We had a good laugh.

On snobbery and judging others

2009-02-19T14:33:00.005-05:00

One of the most astonishing things of all was that life at Chicago was not founded on status – which is to say, on snobbery – at least not as I had been hitherto accustomed to it. People were not ranked by physical beauty, or athletic skill, or wealth, or family connections. None of these things seemed to matter. All that did was intelligence – or, more precisely, intellectuality, which I would define as the ability to deal in a sophisticated way with the issues, questions, and problems presented by art, science, politics, and things of the mind generally.

- Joseph Epstein, Snobbery: The American Version

How do I evaluate people? Wealth, power, glamor, elegance, physical beauty? James' word picture, church history, and our own experiences chronicle the inconsistent tendency of vibrant Christianity to become discriminatory and given to favoritism. Money – economics – is the principal medium for discrimination. . . . But money is not the only factor of favoritism. We also make too much of education. A man or woman may not be rich, but if they are academically pedigreed they are told, "Welcome to the church board." ...[James refers] to receiving someone with biased judgment based on externals. The Bible repeatedly and categorically condemns such behavior.

- R. Kent Hughes, James: Faith that Works

We can make no mistake if we set what is of God in our neighbor above what is of ourselves in us. Esteem others better than yourselves means that we should not esteem by pretending to esteem, but by thinking quite sincerely there can be a hidden worth in another greater than ours.

- Thomas Aquinas

Don't want in, don't want out... Just want the door open

2009-02-19T06:58:00.002-05:00

Getting ready in the early morning, I had the bathroom door firmly closed so the sound of the shower and the light wouldn't wake the family. I hear a soft but insistent fup-fup-fup-fup-fup-fup-fup, the sound of our declawed cat pawing at the door to be let in. So I open the door a crack, the cat steps in, I close the door, and I start resuming my grooming.

For a moment the cat rubs against my leg, but only for a moment. Suddenly she turns her head and realizes the door is closed. She hurries back to the door and fup-fup-fup-fup-fup-fup-fup.

So, I let her out. And close the door.

No more than 15 or 20 seconds pass before, again, fup-fup-fup-fup-fup-fup-fup.

You can see where this is headed. The cat could have happily enjoyed my presence, or happily curled up next to Erica in the vacated warm spot of the bed, or happily crunched on kitty chow in the next room, or happily have done a dozen different cat-things. But her insistence on preserving her options stole her enjoyment of any of them.

There's a parable there.

(If you're wondering, the cycle only repeated itself for about 5 minutes. The cat eventually chose to be outside the still-closed bathroom, happily doing I know not what. If only we humans recognized the futility of happiness-destroying options preservation as quickly as my cat!)

When your baby girl melts your heart

2009-02-18T08:39:00.002-05:00

I was on my way out the door for a busy day, and Emily stumbled bleary-eyed around the corner, having just woken up. I scooped her up and she snuggled close, her arms flopped around my shoulders, her head totally relaxed on my neck. I scratched her back and she said through her grogginess, "Daddy I love you; I want to play with you today."

No better feeling in the world. Sure was hard leaving the house this morning.

Eventually I got her seated at the table and eating breakfast. She seemed to accept that I had to go to work. So as I was walking out, she said, "Daddy, I love you and I will miss you today. I will pray for you. But I *will* play with Mommy."

Melts my heart.

The anti-gospel of judging others by the usual categories

2009-02-18T02:28:00.003-05:00

In fellowship group Sunday night, we looked at the first few verses of James 2, where the writer commands us not to show partiality in how we treat a rich person who wanders into church vs. a poor one.

Pretty quickly, the group made the leap beyond discussing merely rich and poor. The categories by which humans judge other humans are almost inexhaustible. In addition to wealth, they include:

* education
* nationality, skin color, or accent
* beauty
* fame
* age
* physical limitation
* power / influence
* political views
* sense of cool, hip, "with it", au courant

The list could go on. If I'm honest, there's stuff on that list tempting me to treat someone differently when they sit next to me at church, speak to me at a luncheon, or join my study group.

This is so anti-gospel, and at the same time so habituated into human social interaction. At some level, we are simply forced by the practicalities of life to pass judgments about others. Should I hire this person? Should I trust the wounded parts of my spirit with this person? If I'm a teacher, physician, or counselor, then what's my assessment of the condition of this person under my care, and how do I help them make progress?

In the case of skin color, it's difficult to imagine right uses of the category, whereas there is a time and place when you might legitimately need to know someone's educational attainments or political views.

The problem comes when I use these categories to tell me something they never have the power to tell. All these things never have the power to tell me a person's status in God's kingdom, their role in God's salvation plan, the eyes with which God sees them, or the response he has called for toward them from me.

God said to Samuel, "The LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart". That gets to the essence of the sin of partiality. On the basis of faulty evidence, I'm presuming divine knowledge about someone else's interior qualities that would allow me to make a judgment and discriminate. Put that way, it sounds silly - yet we do it all the time.

God, save each of us from that! May we leave the divine judgments to you, Lord, and may we ourselves be busy about your command to love one another as ourselves.

House prices in the neighborhood

2009-02-17T18:46:00.007-05:00

As a relatively new homeowner without tons of equity, I'd like our house not to go underwater. So I was relieved to see the headline in today's Times of Trenton.

However, if you read the article, you'll see that Mercer County is a hodgepodge, with places like Princeton raising the numbers for the county. And where I live is most definitely not a Princeton property. But overall... ...could be a lot worse!

Check out this stunning photography

2009-02-17T09:12:00.005-05:00

My uncle David Johnson lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, and he's an amazing photographer. Check out some of his recent work in a gallery titled "Urban Light".

What makes a story universally appealing?

2009-02-13T10:36:00.015-05:00

A recent New Yorker article lays out how the big Hollywood studios produce and market films to get as many folks into the theater as possible. The idea is to segment movie-going masses into a "quandrant", and then create the film to appeal to as many parts of the quadrant as possible:

Marketing considerations shape not only the kind of films studios make but who’s in them—gone are lavish adult dramas with no stars, like the 1982 “Gandhi.” Such considerations account for a big role being written for Shia LaBeouf in the most recent “Indiana Jones” (to attract youthful viewers as well as Harrison Ford’s aging fans). They also account for the virtual absence from the screen of children between the ages of newborn (when they appear briefly, to puke on the star for the trailer) and that of the Macauley Culkin character in “Home Alone.” Why have a four-year-old character, when one who is ten will prompt ten-year-olds to find him “relatable,” and four-to-nine-year-olds to look up to him? “If we weren’t making decisions based on marketability, John Malkovich would be in every movie,” a top studio marketer says. “Great actor, but not someone you want to see half-naked in the sheets next to Angelina Jolie.”
...films no longer have time to find their audience; that audience has to be identified and solicited well in advance. Marketers segment the audience in a variety of ways, but the most common form of partition is the four quadrants: men under twenty-five; older men; women under twenty-five; older women. A studio rarely makes a film that it doesn’t expect will succeed with at least two quadrants, and a film’s budget is usually directly related to the number of quadrants it is anticipated to reach. The most expensive tent-pole movies, such as the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, are aimed at all four quadrants.
The collective wisdom is that young males like explosions, blood, cars flying through the air, pratfalls, poop jokes, “you’re so gay” banter, and sex—but not romance. Young women like friendship, pop music, fashion, sarcasm, sensitive boys who think with their hearts, and romance—but not sex (though they like to hear the naughty girl telling her friends about it). They go to horror films as much as young men, but they hate gore; you lure them by having the ingénue take her time walking down the dark hall.
Older women like feel-good films and Nicholas Sparks-style weepies: they are the core audience for stories of doomed love and triumphs of the human spirit. They enjoy seeing an older woman having her pick of men; they hate seeing a child in danger. Particularly once they reach thirty, these women are the most “review-sensitive”: a chorus of critical praise for a movie aimed at older women can increase the opening weekend’s gross by five million dollars. In other words, older women are discriminating, which is why so few films are made for them.
Older men like darker films, classic genres such as Westerns and war movies, men protecting their homes, and men behaving like idiots. Older men are easy to please, particularly if a film stars Clint Eastwood and is about guys just like them, but they’re hard to motivate. “Guys only get off their couches twice a year, to go to ‘Wild Hogs’ or ‘3:10 to Yuma,’ ” the marketing consultant Terry Press says. “If all you have is older males, it’s time to take a pill.”

And we've seen the results in recent years. Sure, some good films. But many of the best films have been "accidental", in the sense that they were not created purposefully to hit the whole quandrant.

Yesterday I heard Josh Whedon (creator of the incredibly hilarious Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog) on Fresh Air. Wheden was talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and stumbling upon this question of what makes a story universally appealing, he got it exactly right:

I coined the phrase BYO-subtext, because I realized that part of art is gonna be people bringing -- it's gotta touch everybody in a way that is totally personal. And I think the problem with a lot of mass art, you know the studio stuff, is they think that means you want to hit everybody in the same way. You want to be able to reach everybody, you want a "four-quadrant" movie. Old people like it, young people like it, men and women. And so you want to sort of homogenize the experience. But in fact, if it's really working, if it's really art, it is touching everybody and it's doing it differently for every person, because what they're doing is incorporating their story into it.

In context, Whedon makes clear that he is skeptical of applying any sub-text or story willy-nilly. But what makes great art is its quality of inviting other stories to fittingly become a part of its own.

There's something deeply gospel about that. Despite popular clap-trap that re-imagines Jesus in every form and shape, the fact remains that his was not a four-quadrant story. He was never a parent. He was never a woman. No romantic comedy. But his story is the universal story, the story that invites us all in, the story that makes sense of all other stories.

Repentance is hard

2009-02-13T10:15:00.014-05:00

Never explain. Never apologize.

- Admiral Lord Fisher (England, early 20th century)

Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realising that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor - that is the only way out of a "hole". This process of surrender - this movement full speed astern - is what Christians call repentance. Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person - and he would not need it.
- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (England, 1940s)

I had seen some, who though when they were under Wounds of Conscience, then they would cry and pray, but they seeking rather present Ease from their Trouble, than Pardon for their Sin, cared not how they lost their guilt, so they got it out of their minde; and, therefore having got it off the wrong way, it was not sanctified unto them, but they grew harder and blinder, and more wicked after their trouble. This made me afraid, and made me cry to God, that it might not be so with me.
- John Bunyan, Grace Abounding (England, 1660s)

We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed, by thought, word, and deed, against thy Divine Majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us. We do earnestly repent, and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; the remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burden of them is intolerable. Have mercy upon us, most merciful Father; for thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ's sake, forgive us all that is past.

- Book of Common Prayer (England, 1660s)

Glorious New Jersey

2009-02-11T20:46:00.029-05:00

What do you think of when you hear the words "New Jersey"?

I bet it's something like this:

The NJ Turnpike around Newark Airport has long defined Jersey. It's the main thing a lot of people see of the state.

Just stumbled across a fantastic article by Lee Siegel in the WSJ about New Jersey. It says the same thing: the horrible industrial wasteland on the Turnpike is what gives Jersey a bad reputation -- that, and the fact that New Yorkers and Connecticut people need someone to look down on.

The article starts out:

New Jersey is America's secret treasure-house of culture.

It goes on to cite New Jerseyans like Bruce Springsteen, Frank Sinatra, Frankie Valli, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, the painters George Inness and John Marin, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, Stephen Crane, Philip Roth, and Junot Díaz.

Siegel cleverly places the greatness of these figures in their rootedness to New Jersey itself. He says there's something about this mixed-up place, the beauty and weirdness of it, that shapes a certain kind of artist, writer, thinker, performer:

New Jersey's small size has a lot to do with both its much-inflated deficiencies and its virtues. A lot is packed into limited territory. Urban squalor is squeezed up against dairy farms; picturesque villages right out of a New England landscape are a sneeze away from sulfurous factories and malodorous highways. For a lot of people, caricature of the state's deficiencies is an efficient way to reduce its multifaceted nature to a clear meaning.

The jumble of contrasts is, on the contrary, the source of Jersey's remarkable harvest of talent. It drives certain people to either build a unified artistic sensibility out of the divisions around them, or to create art unhindered by a narrow identity.

At the same time, you can refine Jersey's countless dimensions into two polarized elements: industrial and pastoral. The struggle for dominance between them is at the heart of the American drama -- the Civil War, for example, or the urban/agrarian friction that has shaped the schism between liberal and conservative to this day.

There may be something to that. When I had newly moved to New Jersey, I remember the strangeness of strolling around swanky Palmer Square in Princeton, watching wealthy people drip their wealthiness, and then spending an hour or two getting stuff for my little apartment at Wal-Mart on Route 1. The first experience was like something out of my worst stereotypes of places like Fairfield County, Connecticut. The one that followed it reminded me of stereotypes about the stupid South, except the accents were all different. That's just one example of the Jersey juxtapositions Seigel's talking about; I can think of several others.

It's a truism that places shape people, and of course every place is different and shapes people in different ways. Siegel has a point: the way New Jersey affects me is not just the idealized moments in the state parks and beautiful places. It is also the jumble of Turnpike, falling-apart street corners in Trenton, the bridges and tunnels to New York, and all the mixed-up-ness of this state. But there's also some grasping in Siegel's claims. New Jersey is by no means the only place where you can find sharp contrasts, or even the primary place. So I'm not completely persuaded.

Still, it was deeply refreshing to read a full-throated defense of New Jersey. My vision of New Jersey is not the Turnpike. My own personal New Jersey includes places like...

Island Beach State Park

Terhune Orchards

Washington's Crossing State Park

and Bull's Island Recreation Area

Ain't New Jersey glorious!

You are not your job

2009-02-10T16:46:00.006-05:00

It can really hurt when you become your job, and then lose the job:

The deepening recession is exacting punishment for a psychological vice that masquerades as virtue for many working people: the unmitigated identification of self with occupation, accomplishment and professional status. This tendency can induce outright panic as more and more people fear loss of employment.

"It's like having your entire investment in one stock, and that stock is your job," says Robert Leahy, director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy in New York. "You're going to be extremely anxious about losing that job, and depressed if you do." (WSJ)

It makes me think of a recent post by David Mathis:

God is sovereign over all finances. Any economic recession—global or personal—is never less than recession-by-divine-design. When the economy plummets, God has his purposes—perhaps thousands upon thousands of purposes.

Mathis goes on to outline 5 of those purposes. Let's elaborate on his 3rd ("To relocate the roots of our joy in his grace rather than in our goods—in his mercy rather than our money, in his worth rather than our wealth"). In this recession (as at all times, but in an especially clear way now), God calls us to find our whole identity in Christ. The ecstasy of feeling essential, valued, competent, skillful, validated -- these trappings are often much more important to us than the money. And they are just as powerless to fulfill our deepest longings.

The "cost" of words and their quality

2009-02-10T15:58:00.006-05:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPQR

SPQR, as you may know, stands for Senatus Populusque Romanus ("the Senate and the People of Rome"). It is one of the most famous abbreviations in the world, and even today you will find it on the drain covers (http://tinyurl.com/bc793a) of Rome.

It exists because once upon a time, Romans wanted to talk about their government on coins and through inscriptions. They felt all three words mattered, but because of the high "cost" of each word (i.e., the small amount of real estate available on a coin, or the effort and expense required to chisel words in stone), SPQR would do.

The same principle leads us today to write LOL or OMG in IMs.

Roman inscriptions had an elaborate system of abbreviations (http://tinyurl.com/avstzw), because when it "costs" so much to make every letter, you make darn sure you actually want and need every letter.

By contrast, consider the explosion of words today, and their relative cheapness. Anything you can think, you can almost instantly post to the internet. It's estimated 175,000 new blogs are created worldwide each day, and from 2006 to 2007 the number of books published yearly rose from 300k to 400k (http://tinyurl.com/cxxunj). Think of IM, e-mail, laser printers, photocopies. The written word has become low-cost.

This has two pronounced consequences, both of which degrade the quality of writing today.

First, we've gotten very flabby about our subject matter. When you have to chisel into stone, bake a clay tablet, or skin and cure animal hide for your writing material, you stick to topics that are monumental (literally - http://tinyurl.com/cc46c6): legal records and sacred texts. As the cost comes down, you write down things that are aesthetically virtuosic and profoundly important for your community. At the next level, you record things that are merely very important and/or very beautiful, and so on. When the written word is ultimately cheap, as it is today, you write down things that matter hardly at all. It is difficult to imagine a society more profligate in this respect. We write down things that didn't deserve to be conceived in our own brains, much less committed to paper, and less still to be read or re-read by another person.

The second consequence is, whatever the topic, we've gotten very shabby in style and excessive in length. It's much easier to spew forth words than to offer a refined shorter version.

A story about Mark Twain illustrates. Supposedly a publisher telegraphed Twain: "Need 2-page short story 2 days". Twain replied: "No can do 2 pages 2 days. Can do 30 pages 2 days. Need 30 days to do 2 pages." (http://tinyurl.com/bmk8k3). Almost no one today takes the time to do the 2 pages. We all do the 30, or its proverbial equivalent. We are prolix, rambling, and unstructured. We go on and on, we never revise or sharpen, and we lose our readers. This problem is especially acute in the business world and academia, but in truth it's everywhere.

Barring apocalyptic disaster, there's no turning back from unimportant subject matter. That's here to stay.

But regarding shabby style and excessive length, I have found one thing surprisingly helpful: typing on my PDA. Granted, it just leads some people to write piddle with misspellings. But it certainly reintroduces a cost to each letter. It slows me down and forces me to think. And knowing that my recipient may also be reading the e-mail on a PDA also motivates me to be concise. If you treat it as a real communication governed by the normal rules of proper English, PDA e-mails can be good training in how to pack more meaning and punch into fewer words.

There are down sides: sometimes you slide from concise to crisp to terse to cryptic. And sometimes you leave out important connectives or context. But my personal weakness is to effuse, so I'll take those risks any day. I'll compose with my thumbs any time and any place, "save to drafts", re-read and revise, say it short, and - hopefully - become a better writer.

(If you're curious, my former PDA was a Treo 700WX http://tinyurl.com/hspg5, and I recently moved to the HTC Touch Pro http://tinyurl.com/5s7c3u).

My happiness and God's redemptive promises

2009-02-09T11:27:00.007-05:00

God calls us to a life of constant work, constant growth, and constant confession and repentance. Making us holy is God’s unwavering agenda until we are taken home to be with Him. He will do whatever he needs to do to produce holiness in us. He wants us to be a community of joy, but he is willing to compromise our temporal happiness in order to increase our Christ-likeness.

Any time we find ourselves in difficulty or trial, it is easy to think we have been forgotten or rejected by God. This is because we do not understand the present process. God is not working for our comfort and ease; he is working on our growth. At the very moment we are tempted to question his faithfulness, he is fulfilling his redemptive promises to us. After all, it’s not like there are only some people who really need to change. Change is the norm for everyone, and God is always at work to complete this process in us.

- Paul David Tripp and Tim Lane, How People Change

The Bible on my PDA

2009-02-09T10:13:00.006-05:00

About 20% of American cell-phone users have a smartphone or PDA, and about 50% plan to get one in the next couple of years. If you work for a large company, chances are even higher.

So let me recommend to you the RSS feeds for the ESV Bible. You can subscribe to a reading plan that makes it very easy to work through the Bible in a year. And you can even choose to listen to an MP3 of the passage rather than read - or you can listen and read at the same time. That's what I did this morning.