Aesthetic Adjustments...

One of my biggest attractions to the Mac OS X experience is the overall aesthetic feel. It all just flows and renders so nicely. I've always liked all sorts of design, but haven't had much time to dig into it myself since I was a boy. But, I've got this blog, and I figured I should at least have some design-fun with it. So, I've been dinkin' around with different Blogger hacks that I learned at this site, and I decided to pop in an image-based header. It's kinda fun.

After taking a picture of my semi-hollow body guitar, I created the image within Seashore (a great open source image editor for Mac OS X), which has a very alluring pricetag ($free) for those of us who aren't talented enough to justify the cost of professional tools like Adobe's Creative Suite ($CHA-CHING$). I was also tipped off about Pixelmator (more like a $ch-:) by Matt, which I've been impressed with but haven't pulled the trigger on picking it up just yet.

Also, to round things out, I've added some albums that I'm currently listening to on the sidebar as well as a cool javascript element from LibraryThing below the albums. Plus, I threw in a random iSight picture of the fam, just because. Enjoy!

**Update**
I've also just added a "Recent Videos" sidebar element which dynamically pulls from our Vimeo account. After interacting with Vimeo for the past few months, I can't recommend it enough. The interface is clean and simple, and the whole site is just plain intuitive, in my opinion. Now that our video camcorder speaks to iMovie '08 natively, my export-resolutions and file sizes are much improved, so watch for more video output from the Bams in coming months;-).

Pray for Peace.

My heart and mind are heavy for the Middle East right now. If you're the praying type, please talk to God about the Middle East Peace Conference being held in Maryland this week. More than a dozen Arab countries will have delegates present for the dialogue aimed at ending the seven year impasse between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators. Some are skeptical about any progress that can come from this kick-off meeting, but I’m floundering to find any alternative to latch onto for hope in this region.

To help bring some perspective to one aspect of this cripplingly complex situation, I want to pass on some words to you from the "inside." My friend Philip, an Egyptian-German who was my suitemate in the dorm during our freshman year at Wheaton, maintains a blog titled Tabula Gaza. Over the past couple years, Phil has been residing in the heart of the Gaza Strip in an effort to reach out to the Palestinian people who are suffering and often misrepresented by popular media outlets. Since returning to Cairo for graduate school, Phil’s most recent post is a letter that he received from a friend back in Gaza, which describes the current state of affairs. While I encourage you to read the entire letter, I’m going to present the final paragraph here:

"It's hard to not feel like we're in a large concentration camp as I see Gaza's empty streets, and the hopeless feeling in the air…and just the gloominess that has covered Gaza. I think most people feel abandoned as we are literally locked up in this small, concentrated space and we don't know what the world plans for us, or what to expect next. It's hard to imagine what being in Gaza does to someone's will until you've come here. You no longer feel alive, in fact, you're not living; you're just killing time until some sort of change happens. Sadly, Gaza has become desensitized to the rest of the world, as it feels like the international community has turned a blind eye to the reality that is Gaza, and as long as Israel is allowing some food in and hasn't completely cut off electricity or gas... and as long as we are kept alive, no one will ask about us.

But just because we are breathing, that doesn't mean we're alive."

God wants us to ache for this woman and her people because this is not what He intended for His creation. (For another glimpse of this woman’s bloody reality, read this story.) It doesn't matter where you come down on these issues politically... the current state of this region of the world is something that we are obligated to grieve as human beings… as children of God. In America, where uncensored information about the rest of the globe is so readily available to us, I have a hard time stomaching the fact that our dominant culture is far more interested in the cover of Us Weekly or Sports Illustrated than in having a basic understanding of what’s happening outside of our insulated lifestyle (especially within the Church). How can we expect to learn to be a voice for the voiceless if we don’t even care to learn about their plight, be it outside America or within?

Just as I did not choose to be born in Denver, Colorado, USA, these children of Gaza pictured here do not choose to wake each morning in fear of Israeli raids and airstrikes. And they still have no say in the matter.
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Tara and I watched the film A Mighty Heart this afternoon, which details the events surrounding the 2002 kidnapping and murder of Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and how his pregnant widow, Mariane, coped with the aftermath. It’s a difficult and raw movie, yet it does an artful job of portraying the powerful subtleties inherent not only to Pearl’s story, but to the regional strife in general. The simple lesson that this movie drives home for me is that it is quite nearly impossible for violence to solve anything. This is a lesson I have repeatedly encountered from various mediums over the past year, and one that has really challenged my instincts (I plan to flesh this out in coming posts).

So, to bring this back to my original intent, please seek out peace... pray for reconciliation… long for warring tribes to embrace humility and healing. Kingdom come…

Degrees of Separation (Thorns). [Part 2]

Okay, just to recap the main points from last time:-)
- The advanced world around us (particularly in the U.S.) confronts us with a deluge of distractions from God... oftentimes in unassuming areas of our lifestyle.
- A key temptation is to separate our faith from our lifestyle... to justify certain aspects of how we live (or to glaze over particular social issues) as unrelated to what we believe about who Jesus was and the movement he came to enact on this earth.

Let's jump to some excerpts of one of Jesus's parables (that I'm sure many of you have heard) as recorded in Matthew 13:

"A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop - a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. He who has ears, let him hear."

I want to pull out some ideas from the italicized section above regarding the thorns. Let's hear how Jesus later explained this particular section of the parable:

"The one who received the seed that fell among the thorns is the man who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke it, making it unfruitful."

Also hear how Eugene Peterson adapts the same passage in his interpretation, The Message:

"The seed cast in the weeds is the person who hears the kingdom news, but weeds of worry and illusions about getting more and wanting everything under the sun strangle what was heard, and nothing comes of it."

This is where I conclude degrees of separation = thorns.

Thorns that separate... temporal worries... deceptive "wealth"... wanting more and more... chokes it... precludes fruit. What are these thorns? Fashion trends? Houses? Cars? Electronics? Debt? Church buildings/financial-"needs"? Television? A Job? Career goals? Food? Obviously none of these inherently strangle-out what God is trying to do with those who believe in Him. But I do know that various combinations of this list act as degrees of separation for many people around me... especially myself. And this isn't the kind of situation where we realize what's happening and say, "Hmm... yeah, that's not too good. I should get around to making some changes at some point." If we are who we say we are (follower of Jesus), and we're about what he's about (building the Kingdom), then these separating thorns are severely important to identify and address.

Now, I don't really know exactly where I come down on the whole "once-saved-always-saved" debate, but I find myself leaning towards there being a much more dynamic reality at play than simply saying the proper prayer to shore up your eternal destiny. I guess what I'm resistant to is this view's lulling sense of security that often creates complacency and impotence in its adherents.

Life is to be lived, not won. People are to be unconditionally loved, not converted. The kingdom Jesus spoke of is not simply an enchanted afterlife that we get our ticket for now, but rather it is intended to be brought forth within our world today, our city, our neighborhood, our home by humble action. humble. action.

This takes me to a few final thoughts on degrees of separation = pride.

The common thread in all of this is an adjustment of how we perceive ourselves. I would argue that at the core of building the Kingdom is the minimization of self. The deception of wealth pumps pride into our veins: I need this, I deserve that, I want this, I'm unhappy without that. As we hack away at the gaps between God and ourselves we begin to see how little we really do need (by our cultural standards), and it also bears a genuine mind of gratitude for the essential things that God does provide for us: health for my little girl, shelter for my family, lack of violent war in our streets, etc.

Don Miller gave a fantastic talk at Mars Hill last week titled Story. (I highly recommend giving it a listen). The key takeaway for me is that our lives are all stories being written in real-time. And stories where the main character is primarily driven by self-service, by shallow goals, and by near-sightedness are boring. They don't draw interest to the character's personality and they lack value.

Degrees of separation make our stories boring. They feed our bloated sense of self, and they distract us from what would make for a wildly interesting journey: one charged with challenge, action, devotion, uncertainty, & faith; lined with selfless love. And this is a lesson that I'm trying to learn so that I can pass it on to the next generation.

*Image credit: Flightsaber

Degrees of Separation (Thorns). [Part 1]

And we're baaaaack. (sorry folks, I'll try to be a bit more regular at the blogging here... maybe somebody makes metamucil wafers for blogging, hmm:)


True to form, I've got more swirling around in my hat-rack than I know how to articulate, so I'm going to try my best to flesh out a concept that I've been grappling with over the past weeks (and, as it turns out, my entire life! duh duh duuuuh): degrees of separation.

>>Somewhat Unnecessary Disclaimer: Chances are that if you're reading this, then you know me personally. If you know me personally AND you know that I have a blog, then the chances are fairly high that you are in one of the following categories: a) a Christian; b) at one time were a "believer" and/or are currently investigating spiritual elements. [If you do not fall into either category a) or b), then you should leave. JOKE! Please stay and bear with me. Hopefully these ideas apply generally to the human experience...]

So, degrees of separation. A number of messages and written words that I've been exposed to recently (mostly from Rob Bell and Matthew Sleeth) have planted a new perspective within me. The more I roll it around, the more I realize the breadth and depth of the concept. At face value, it's very simple and logical... yet when I choose to take my personal life down the rabbit hole, I'm confronted with a mosaic of mirrors and pathways.

Here's the simple version:

The world (and more specifically, culture) in which we live can subtly impose degrees of separation between God and ourselves.

Simple enough. Most of us can probably jive with that at some level. Yet it's the personal application that opens things up for me...

In the "God is Green" series that Mars Hill Bible Church in Michigan recently walked through, Rob offered the thought that so much of our "advanced" lifestyle, while admittedly adding "comfort," has simultaneously pumped degrees of separation into our day-to-day. For instance, so many of us feel distant from God's natural creation, yet we go from our garage to our car to the office to our car to the garage (or better yet, if you live in suburban Phoenix, it seems everywhere you look is fully comprised of something manmade or manipulated landscape). We aren't even compelled to think about the origins of our food because it's always right there in the supermarket (nevermind if that particular fruit's in season right now or the distance it traveled to get there). Our beef comes butchered and ground, and our chicken breast comes cleaned and skinless in a shrink-wrapped bag. Our water comes out of a faucet with the turn of a little knob. We get as much electricity as our appliances desire from those plugs in the wall. Our trash disappears in seconds when that truck swings by. Our gasoline always comes out of those filling-stations if we give them enough money.

Point being, as advanced as all of this is, one might argue that these conveniences have profoundly distanced us from God. If we want to actually learn about the implications of our beef's origins, or what kind of power plant shoots electricity to our house, or where our trash goes after it has "disappeared," then we've got to intentionally seek out, read, probe, investigate... or in other words, we have to chop through the degrees of separation. And I am increasingly convinced that to passionately pursue God in the U.S. necessitates an awareness of these separating elements. Notice I say awareness rather than avoidance. I'm not advocating that we all start our own farms while living off of the grid and jogging everywhere we need to be. But I also wouldn't rule any of that out either;-) In my mind, it's the awareness that sets up change... that pricks our heart in a Godward manner. As Rob said in one of his sermons, "Removing degrees of separation brings us closer to God."

We all have our specific situations where radical, counter-cultural changes may be opened up to us... and a willingness to enact these changes in our lives is what I'm advocating. The prevalent temptation that we face is to mold our faith to our lifestyle, rather than our lifestyle to our faith. Maybe this sounds sort of fundamentalist... or hippy...

Anywho, this is getting long, so I'm going to make this a two-part post. In the next installment, I'm going to bounce another notch deeper into the rabbit hole and offer some more personal insights into this concept, as well as expand on these thoughts:

degrees of separation = pride

degrees of separation = thorns

Messages From the Past For the Present...

21st Century Schizoid Man

Cat's foot iron claw
Neuro-surgeons scream for more
At paranoia's poison door.
Twenty-first century schizoid man.

Blood rack barbed wire
Politicians' funeral pyre
Innocents raped with napalm fire
Twenty-first century schizoid man.

Death seed blind man's greed
Poets' starving children bleed
Nothing he's got he really needs
Twenty-first century schizoid man.

Epitaph

The wall on which the prophets wrote
Is cracking at the seams.
Upon the instruments of death
The sunlight brightly gleams.
When every man is torn apart
With nightmares and with dreams,
Will no one lay the laurel wreath
As silence drowns the screams.

Between the iron gates of fate,
The seeds of time were sown,
And watered by the deeds of those
Who know and who are known;
Knowledge is a deadly friend
When no one sets the rules.
The fate of all mankind I see
Is in the hands of fools.

Confusion will be my epitaph.
As I crawl a cracked and broken path
If we make it we can all sit back
and laugh.
But I fear tomorrow I'll be crying,
Yes I fear tomorrow I'll be crying.

From the 1969 King Crimson album, In the Court of the Crimson King