Scott Stilson

I am grateful for the loving effort Carla is putting forth these past few days into making Christmas cheery for us all by overcoming her distaste for shopping and spending the better part of today and yesterday shopping. We had decided after last Christmas that we would do 100% of our Christmas shopping locally. We probably won’t end up doing 100%, but the decision does mean Carla has been all over town: Jo-Ann Fabrics, Goodwill, Ross, and Target, to name a few.

I am grateful for our tenant Apoo’s eagerness to share Indian dishes with us. We had her, her husband Vijay, and her father Raju up for dinner this evening so we could meet her father. We shared garden vegetable quiche; she shared chicken biryani. Carla and I overate because everything was so tasty.

I am grateful for the culturally show of fatherly tenderness Raju made by touching Éa’s face when she caught her hand in the globe while fighting Sullivan over it. Perhaps it is purely cultural and doesn’t carry the same meaning in...

Brandon and I swapped photos of our standing desks today.

You may laugh that I write about my standing desk so much. But my body—and I hope Brandon’s back—will be much healthier because of this switch.

“Where God closes His holy mouth, I will desist from inquiry.”

— John Calvin

Now there’s a thought.

Hanging out with people is the only way to save the poor in spirit. Do I remember the two wall-to-wall days I spent with Uncle Chris? What a joy, and it touched his soul. It’s the only way—at least, the only way conceivable for me—for people like him and César to make their way out of moral and circumstantial poverty. But what am I to do? If I were a single man, I think I’d keep my job at DiamondBack and take it with me as I went on medium-term mission trips to live with César in Callao and with anyone I met who was a pariah, and I would hang out with them.

My journal app’s daily prompt is prompting me to describe my cooking skills. I can:

• cook breakfast foods, like eggs, bacon, and pancakes, and
• follow recipes.

Grilling is something I know the movements for but have no deep knowledge of (so don’t ask me to grill your chicken).

Baking is a foreign land. I leave exploring it to Carla.

I’m sorry, posterity. I feel no urge to journal these days. And that’s despite many interesting things happening these days, including:

• Christmas,
• the apparent rise of islamophobia and the specter of fascism in America,
• hunting and butchering in College Township with Ethan,
• questions and answers about the problem of evil and what Jesus accomplished the Cross,
• my old Peruvian pal Cesar living homeless with AIDS on the streets of Callao.

By 10:15 at night, I find little interest or strength for journaling.

I have spent thought and lament the past several evenings trying to understand what exactly Jesus accomplished by dying on the Cross and, more acutely, how He accomplished it. And as if prompted by my worries, one of my favorite bloggers wrote a piece called, “Why Did Jesus Have to Die?” In it he provides the most comprehensive list of understandings of the Atonement I’ve ever seen in one place before.

And none of them are striking to me as it.

Still, there’s enough there to go on, I guess. And more important, I believe Jesus is the promised Jewish Messiah and the living lord of all. And I am going to follow Him.

This is how I feel.

Here is a list of things from today that were gratifying, and which, therefore, because by some strange extension You are the giver of all good things, I thank You, God:

• tapas dinner with the Wendles at Barrel 21,
• deer hunting scouting time on the far bank of Spring Creek,
• agreeing with Ethan to meet him tomorrow morning at 5:45 to make use of said deer hunting scouting time,
• my beautiful wife who sat next to me at Barrel 21,
• my inventive Sullivan who made some Legos light up today at the Wendles’ house (while being babysat by Jeff and Denise), and
• my standing desk.

I am a flexitarian, or a reducetarian, or a pollo-pescetarian. But I also think I’ll keep hunting deer.

Quick brainstorm of everything that I enjoyed about today:

• sitting on Matt Rooke’s dad’s old tree stand behind their old house hunting unsuccessfully for whitetail deer, being distracted by squirrel and chipmunks,
• Matt’s oatmeal with apples and cinnamon,
• Lara’s cookies,
• Aunt Allie’s chicken-sausage-and-bean-and vegetable soup,
• the fact that Matt’s Aunt Diana shot a buck and a doe today,
• the conversation with Matt and Lara on the way home, which ranged all over the place (and during which I probably talked too much),
• the understated gratitude I was able to express to You today throughout the day,
• the safe ride home,
• the service Aunt Allie and Lara provided us by preparing our food.

Doubt baby review:

• empathy
• action-orientation (Jesus' main thing)
• final marginalization of Teen Mania-esque emphasis on making converts
• metaphysical flexibility (for me and for others)
• humility
• pluralism & ecumenism
• lightheartedness
• reset for my fight against sexual sin
• reset for my distraction at work

I think we could resolve some problems if we simply renamed the secular holiday, so that there’s the Christian holiday, “Christmas,” and the secular, gift-giving holiday, “Festivus”.

If, when I’m old, you were to ask me to tell you one thing about my life as it was today, I predict I’d tell you that today I worked on DiamondBack’s new website from the living room of the house of Carla’s Aunt Laurel (actually her cousin once removed). I made my own tea and found some penne and pasta sauce that I made for myself for lunch. It was pleasant.

Scott: Are any of my accents good?
Éa: Well, I don’t like them, so I don’t know.

I am less self-disciplined, less loving, and less diligent whenever Carla leaves.

I’m in no mood to journal: I feel disappointed in myself today for underaccomplishing, mostly because I didn’t make time to exercise today and haven’t managed to wheel back to get any post-launch work done on Frank’s website.

But Ethan and I had a stimulating conversation about how to live our lives following Jesus while we watched Sullivan and Everley take swim lessons and Éa and Anthem clamber around the bleachers. Unfortunately, it makes me want to get Carla to quit her jobs so we can more readily foster children.

Being a Christian family man can be confusing (see 1 Corinthians 7:32–35).

I set up my sit-stand desk this afternoon, courtesy of DiamondBack Truck Covers and Varidesk. Here’s to my long-term physical health. Now to get a standing mat.

Carla has been peevish recently. But so have I. It’s a cycle. I realized one way to break the cycle is to drop my expectation that anyone, including my wife and kids, act perfectly lovingly all the time. I don’t, so why should I expect them to?

I’ll go further: When a demand is made of me or a disagreement voiced, let my first instinct be to satisfy the demand or come to accord quickly and happily. Obviously, I won’t be a pushover, but I will be a volunteer, a happy second-miler.

For this reason we don’t lose heart. Even if our outer humanity is decaying, our inner humanity is being renewed day by day. This slight momentary trouble of ours is working to produce a weight of glory, passing and surpassing everything, lasting forever; for we don’t look at the things that can be seen, but at the things that can’t be seen. After all, the things you can see are here today and gone tomorrow; but the things you can’t see are everlasting (2 Corinthians 4:16-18, KNT).

We look at the things that can’t be seen. That’s a religious paradox strict empiricist might choke on. But besides being poetic, it’s true, and whether the objects of our gaze are real or not, our hope in them has real sustaining power.

It’s also leads to a thought we as believers ought to remember: We are, in the end, talking about Someone invisible. Why balk at the idea that some folks don’t believe?

With apologies to philosophers and neuroscientists who believe there is no such thing as free will, we humans are the only (or perhaps one of just a few) species capable of choosing what we consume and how. We have a huge responsibility.

Here’s an approachable, thorough article about easy measures you can take to extend the battery life of your iPhone between charges, courtesy of former Apple employee David Payette.

As this first day of my sprint toward getting a minimum viable website up for Frank and PolyGreen America ends, I am reminded that hobbies are happiest when they are not only enjoyable, but also seen as a form of generosity. In the case of web-development-on-the-side-that-disturbs-my-schedule-equilibirum, the enjoyment is possible only when I view it as such.

So Lord, let me renew that vantage on this work—and all work, really.

I have started in earnest on marking up Frank’s website. And once again, I ask myself: Why do I do this?

I am proud of my engineering-minded boy, this being an invention of his for transferring goods from his bunk to Éa’s and back, constructed of old box staples, string left over from the driveway sealers, paper, and electrical tape.