If you asked me in my old age to tell you one thing about my life as it was today, I would tell you that I wasted hours of my workday trawling the Internet for religious certainty.
What prompted it was, I think, my wanting to test the strength of the Intelligent Design argument after reading some of Eric Metaxas’ attempt to cast all of existence as a miracle in Miracles, his popular volume which my mother sent me late last year when she first heard about my doubts. What kept me at it for what must have easily accumulated to half the workday was…I’m not sure what: An inner drive for certainty and stable identity? A proud wish to test my faith, which was renewed through the Christmas holiday at my mom’s house? A masochistic streak?
Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t love. My willful diversion today was unloving to my colleagues at DiamondBack, our customers, Carla, the kids, our church, and God. Even if atheists are right, exposing myself to their thinking in this way, via this medium,...
“In themselves and rightly used, the basic things of life are sweet and good. What spoils them is our hunger to get more out of them than they can give.”
— Derek Kidner, The Message of Ecclesiastes, hitting the nail on the head about why I need to stop turning to the Internet in a quest for religious certainty. If I don’t watch out, I won’t spoil the Internet; I’ll spoil me!
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
— Robert Jastrow, The Enchanted Loom: The Mind of the Universe (1981), as quoted in Eric Metaxas’ Miracles (2014)
If you asked me in my old age to tell you one thing about my life as it was today, I would tell you that one motif was its concern for use of space:
I spoke with Molly Hetrick, the Recreation Supervisor at Millbrook Marsh, about coming to discuss discounting their space rental rates for Houserville Social Club. Upon further conversation with Carla, it became apparent that what I really need to talk with them about is modeling their rate schedule after that of State College Area School District, which has rates that are not only considerably lower, but also segmented according to type of group.
I spoke with Dory, a staff member at the State College Area School District, about how Houserville Social Club would be classified on their space rental form, as I am considering gathering the Club in the All-Purpose Room at Houserville Elementary School. She replied that we would be considered a non-profit organization and thus qualify for the lowest rate.
If you asked me in my old age to tell you one thing about January 11, 2015 in my life, I would tell you it was the day I discovered a way to do something about the goosebumps I felt the other day reading Psalm 33: get out the new Kala KA-T] ukulele my mother gave me for Christmas and start making music to God, learning the instrument as I go.
I discovered this as a I sat on the love-seat in our living room this evening, clumsily strumming along with the chord sheet for “Jesus Is Yours” up on my computer, which sat on the seat of the rocking chair across from me while the kids drifted off to sleep in their bunk bed and Carla watched a television program on her computer from the living room sofa.
In time, I hope to write my own songs and perhaps sing-pray with this uke.
I would also tell you that today was the day I was proud of Éa and Carla for working hard enough on learning to read to be able to read the words “creek,” “shrug,” “wreck,” and “recent,” which my dad spelled in bathtub...
“…Sing for joy in the Lord, O you righteous ones;
Praise is becoming to the upright.
Give thanks to the Lord with the lyre;
Sing praises to Him with a harp of ten strings.
Sing to Him a new song;
Play skillfully with a shout of joy.
For the word of the Lord is upright,
And all His work is done in faithfulness.
He loves righteousness and justice;
The earth is full of the lovingkindness of the Lord.
[…]
“Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him,
On those who hope for His lovingkindness,
To deliver their soul from death
And to keep them alive in famine.
Our soul waits for the Lord;
He is our help and our shield.
For our heart rejoices in Him,
Because we trust in His holy name.
Let Your lovingkindness, O Lord, be upon us,
According as we have hoped in You” (Psalm 33:1-5,18-22).
And I think I got goosebumps because I’m supposed to have this same attitude in me. And I’m supposed to sing to Him.
“Rooted in hatred of the light, our blindness is not exculpatory, but blameworthy. It does not remove our guilt. It is our guilt.”
— John Piper, in a tweet that sits very well with me. I am such a chimera: I love so much of what Piper brings to the table, but hate so much of it, too. I think he’s right about human blindness, but I think he is wrong about it, too. Does the above formulation strike me as true and good merely because it’s what I’m used to, merely because it feels like home? Am I, are we, indeed guilty for not being able to see Him?
“When you are convinced it’s broken, read the manual. Your interpretation of ‘obvious’ my differ from its designer.”
— Mike McHargue, in a tweet he left ambiguous as whether he was talking about actual technical documentation, the Bible, or something else. I do think there is something helpful in his formulation in settling the problem of evil.
— Andrew Shearman, as reported by Ethan, with whom a visiting Jason and I sat with at Happy Valley Brewing and discussed many things, including, but this topic of how to govern and steer one’s life being the most salient and edifying. I rephrased Shearman’s idea in a way that was helpful to both my friends: “Unless you have a specific calling—which you’ll know when you feel it—whether you move to Cambodia to end sex slavery or stay here and love people well, you can’t go wrong as long as you love God.”
After an evening at Happy Valley Brewing with Ethan & Jason, I sent them this:
I couldn’t try
to measure the pleasure
of spending my leisure
with you, whom I treasure.
—
And in case you feel like this brushes too closely to our discussion of the homosexuality, please see the photos of platonic male affection included in the article entitled “Bosom Buddies: A Photo History of Male Affection” on The Art of Manliness.
As I got dressed this morning, I realized that the main source of the doubt-borne anxiety I felt so frequently starting in May last year is identity. That explains why not acting Christian scares me: If I’m not acting Christian, that’s the final evidence to me that who I am has changed. Combine that with the fact that the doubt was only very partially volitional meant that I was losing who I am against my will.
Same thing applies at the other loci of my doubt-borne anxiety: I’ve always been one who feels God in nature, so if I find I am able to look at a sunset without feeling God, I’m no longer me. I’ve always been one to stare death in the face and think “no big deal,” so when I find that I’m uncertain about the afterlife, I’m no longer me. I’ve always been a Christian confident of what he believes—including a happy afterlife—and able to communicate it all unashamedly and unalloyedly, including to my children, so when I find that has changed, I’m no longer me.
I woke up Sunday morning with Max von Sydow’s name in my head and an inkling that this name might be a hint from God. All I remembered upon waking was that he was an actor or a director. On Wikipedia that morning I discovered he played the knight in The Seventh Seal, Jesus in The Greatest Story Every Told, the villian in Minority Report, and Karl-Oskar in Troell’s 1971 film adaptation of Moberg’s The Emigrants. I read no further in the Wikipedia entry because I felt the reason I was to be thinking about von Sydow was contained in this opening paragraph’s list of his most notable movies.
I wasn’t sure at first what God might be getting at and asked Him to clarify which film was of interest to Him. It became clear upon further reflection: It was The Emigrants. Carla has recently enjoyed three of the four novels in that series and often talks of how she wishes I could read the books she reads so we could share in them. And I had just the other night and several recent nights before asked...
While on an evening prayer-walk, I noticed a shadowy smoker sitting on the bench along the bike path just on the other side of the Puddintown Road Spring Creek bridge. He would have heard me praying for Frank’s infirmities to be gone. After passing him, the thought occurred to me that I should turn around and offer to pray for the shadowy, silent sitter. I did not.
Why do acts of faith have to involve strangers? Is that merely a product of my charismatic background? Why aren’t I ever sure it’s You in that type of situation?
“I measured distances by the standard of man, man waling on his two feet, not by the standard of the internal combustion engine. I had not been allowed to deflower the very idea of distance; in return I possessed ‘infinite riches’ in what would have been to motorists ‘a little room.’ The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it ‘annihilates space.’ It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from traveling ten. Of course if a man hates space and wants it to be annihilated, that is another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once? There is little enough space there” (C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy [1955]).
“To read without military knowledge or good maps accounts of fighting which were distorted before they reached the Divisional general and further distorted before they left him and then ‘written up’ out of all recognition by journalists, to strive to master what will be contradicted the next day, to fear and hope intensely on shaky evidence, is surely an ill use of the mind. Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; an he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and...
