Or maybe that should be “Happy birthday, Happy!”—or . . . well, the permutations go on for a while. Anyway, it’s not quite as good as an ambush from the waiters at a fine restaurant (though it is easier on the wallet), but I wanted to take this opportunity to wish a happy birthday and a wonderful year to one of the best people I know, and one of the dearest friends I ever expect to have.“May the road rise to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
The rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of his hand.”May the warm rays of sun fall upon your home,
And may the hand of a friend always be near.
May green be the grass you walk on,
May blue be the skies above you,
May pure be the joys that surround you,
May true be the hearts that love you.”
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Not a tame lion
“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”—Annie DillardThat quote (from Teaching a Stone to Talk) is one of my all-time favorites; I thought I’d included it in a blog post once, but when I went looking for it, I hadn’t. So, it gets its own post (since I don’t know that anything I could say could add anything to it anyway); I encourage you to take some time to think about it, if you haven’t recently.
More things in heaven and earth, indeed
Headline you never thought you’d see: Cat turns into woman in P/Harcourt – 5 killed as cultists clash
Nigerian Tribune learnt that three cats were crossing the busy road when the okada ran over one of them which immediately turned into a woman. This strange occurrence quickly attracted people around who descended on the animals. One of them, it was learnt, was able to escape while the third one was beaten to death, still as a cat though.According to a source who witnessed what happened, the cat-woman said she and the two other cat-fellows had travelled from Abuja to Port Harcourt to kill three people. “The woman said they came to Port Harcourt from Abuja and that they came to kill three people. She said they had succeeded in killing two people, but the third person, whom I guess might be a pastor, was difficult for them and that they were preparing to go back to Abuja,” said the source.
I have absolutely no idea what to make of this; but I’m not going to rule out a priori that it might be completely real. I’ve never heard of any such thing, but I know there are many things I don’t know; and I believe in God, I believe there is a Devil, and I’ve come up against demons before, so I have no real reason to say this sort of magic couldn’t happen, given people who believed in it and were willing to give themselves over to it. There are indeed more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in most of our philosophies, after all.Still, that’s pretty weird.
Further evidence that we’re winning the war on terror
comes from Simon Fraser University (in Burnaby, BC, a suburb of Vancouver, across the metro area from where we used to live); as that doughty and perceptive observer Fareed Zakaria noticed (and most of the rest of the American media haven’t), if you drop the practice of counting civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan as deaths from terrorism—which is to say, if you count them as what they are, which is civilian deaths in a war zone, which aren’t counted as terrorist acts anywhere else—the international death toll from terrorist acts has gone through the floor (and that despite Israel, which has seen a rise in deaths from Palestinian terrorism since the withdrawal from Gaza). As regards the US, organized terror groups haven’t managed a successful attack on us since October 2003. There are a number of reasons for this;
the most significant, in the study’s view, is the “extraordinary drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world over the past five years.” These are largely self-inflicted wounds. The more people are exposed to the jihadists’ tactics and world view, the less they support them. An ABC/BBC poll in Afghanistan in 2007 showed support for the jihadist militants in the country to be 1 percent. In Pakistan’s North-West Frontier province, where Al Qaeda has bases, support for Osama bin Laden plummeted from 70 percent in August 2007 to 4 percent in January 2008. That dramatic drop was probably a reaction to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, but it points to a general trend in Pakistan over the past five years. With every new terrorist attack, public support for jihad falls. “This pattern is repeated in country after country in the Muslim world,” writes Mack. “Its strategic implications are critically important because historical evidence suggests that terrorist campaigns that lose public support will sooner or later be abandoned or defeated.”
In other words, going into Iraq and Afghanistan has been critically important to defeating al’Qaeda in that, by taking the war to them, we’ve provoked them to terrorist attacks not in the Western world but in Muslim countries, among Muslims, with Muslim victims; what their fellow Muslims could support or at least tolerate when it was out of sight, out of mind, with victims they didn’t know or particularly care about, becomes intolerable when it’s down the street and the victims are friends, neighbors, and relatives. (As a prominent Saudi cleric wrote last September, “Who benefits from turning countries like Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon or Saudi Arabia into places where fear spreads and no one can feel safe?” [emphasis mine]) Which is no criticism of Muslims—that’s very human, and exactly what we see in Americans and Europeans as well. But it appears to be something that never occurred to al’Qaeda.It might be worth noting one other reason why al’Qaeda specifically has lost a great deal of support: if you publicly declare, “Iraq is the most important of these fields,” then get your butt kicked in Iraq, you’re going to have a hard time convincing people you’re worth supporting. As bin Laden himself said, “when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.” At this point, al’Qaeda is pretty clearly the weak horse.
The parable of laminin
“From the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son,
in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace
by the blood of his cross.“And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast,
not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard.”—Colossians 1:9-23 (ESV)Laminin is a cell adhesion protein, one of a family of proteins which, according to Wikipedia, are “an integral part of the structural scaffolding in almost every animal tissue”; the article also says that “Laminin is vital to making sure overall body structures hold together.” Or, as a molecular biologist in Texas once put it to Louie Giglio, a story he tells in the clip embedded below, laminin is “like the rebar of the human body . . . the glue of the human body.”Now, a great many folks out there already know this story, due to the wide audience the Passion conferences have had, so while this was new to me, it isn’t to many; but it’s still quite remarkable. Take a look—here’s the molecular structure of laminin:
So in other words, this molecule that’s vital to holding us together . . . is cross-shaped. The structure of our bodies, at a deep and fundamental level, is cruciform. What’s more, as my delightfully perceptive wife points out, it echoes the Trinity, as it’s a cross made up of three parts.God has left testimonies to himself buried all through creation, little embedded parables for those who have eyes to see his hand and ears open to hear his voice; this, I believe, is one of them, just a little witness to and reminder of the truth Paul articulates in Colossians: Jesus Christ is the one who holds all things together. This is a spiritual truth, but it’s also a far greater truth about our whole world: Jesus is the one who holds everything together, who holds it all in his hand and sustains it all by his will. He’s the one who keeps the planets orbiting their suns and the suns moving in the vast dance of the cosmos, and the one who keeps protons bound to neutrons and electrons spinning joyfully in their orbitals; all that exists, including us, exists because he continues to will it to exist, because he holds it in his mind and heart and remembers it to itself. And in our own bodies, we have a little echo of that fact, a little parable to point us to that truth, in the tripartite cross-shaped molecule that is “the rebar of the human body.”Thanks, Hap, for teaching me that.
National Geographic‘s thirty pieces of silver
Remember the big media story a while back about the Gospel of Judas? Remember the stories about how Judas was really a good guy? It appears now that the text (which is in any case a late Gnostic text, and thus not as significant as some people wanted to make it) was seriously misrepresented—and that National Geographic is in large part to blame. It’s clear they wanted to make use of Judas for their own purposes, and that one of those purposes was to make their thirty pieces of silver off him. They wanted the media splash, they wanted headlines like “Ancient Text Says Jesus Asked Judas to Hand Him to the Romans” (that one courtesy of the Arizona Republic), and they wanted the profits that came with that, courtesy of the high-profile documentary, the DVD sales, and the book sales. And if proper scholarly procedures, and with them proper scholarly standards, went by the wayside as a result—taking a proper scholarly concern for accuracy and truth with them—then so be it.
On a lighter note
I don’t know how many of the folks who read this blog will care one way or the other that Paul DePodesta, special assistant for baseball operations for the San Diego Padres and former GM for the Los Angeles Dodgers, started a blog this month, but I did think even those least interested in baseball would appreciate its title: It Might Be Dangerous… You Go First. (And if you do like baseball, this promises to be a great place to read about it.)
Have an honorable Memorial Day
This might be from a beer company, but it’s still right on. I grew up around the Navy, so I know our military’s far from perfect, but still: we should be proud of those who served, and those who are serving now; we as a nation owe them far more than we could ever repay, and we should never forget that.
Bridging the culture gap
Calvin Miller has an excellent piece up on the Christianity Today website called “Rethinking Suburban Evangelism,” which is of broader application than the title suggests. Though focused on “the push-button Zion of those who have made it and therefore have it made . . . the new Eden with little need for God: Paradise Found, where churches ulcerate themselves trying to sell self-denial to the pampered,” when he asks, “Can the urgency of the Cross ever be made real to those who cocoon in front of an entertainment center and insist on defining hell as dandelions and heaven as the proper side of town?” he’s raising a question that applies far beyond the bounds of suburbia—and his conclusion speaks to every ministry setting: “We become the most like Christ when our motivation is distilled love.”
Ten random things that make me happy
Pauline at Perennial Student posted her list, and it turns out it’s a meme that’s been going around (having started here, as best as I can tell), so I figured I’d pick it up and send it on; a little light-heartedness is good for the soul. Most of these things aren’t really all that random, or unique to me, either, but never mind.
- Worshiping God
- Holding my wife
- A little-girl hug from one (or more) of my daughters
- Playing “my bunny!” with my youngest daughter
- Preaching—when it’s going well
- Singing along with the music while I’m driving
- Rereading a well-loved book
- Baking a pie—if the crust behaves (if not, there is frustration along the way)
- Watching one of my girls learn something
- Sunshine on a windy day