Back in Business!
February 28, 2007
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Announcements, Technical, Work Feedback : 4 comments
Back in business, folks! The replacement hardware showed up about an hour ago, and I’m once again writing from the comfort of my own office rather than fighting a bunch of teenagers posting to MySpace at the library.
You know, as a businessman myself, I’ve longed lived by the truth of “Underpromise & Overdeliver.” I’ll give my satellite Internet service provider kudos in handling this far more professionally than the last time I had this exact problem. Lightyears difference! So, good for them! But still, if you say, “We’re sending this express shipping, so it should be there no later than Monday,” don’t have it show up on Wednesday. Say that it will get there Wednesday and have it show up Monday. (Amazon does just that. I’ve never had an Amazon order ever show up late. It’s always two or three days before they claimed it would get there. Always a happy surprise.)
What is it with American business that they can’t seem to get the “Underpromise & Overdeliver” thing right? About the only company I do business with that gets this is L.L. Bean. It’s interesting to note that L.L. Bean and Eddie Bauer ran very similar companies with similar customer service and warranties. However, now that Eddie Bauer’s ruined their customer service and trashed their warranties, their business has gone down the commode. In fact, they could be out of business soon because they overpromised and underdelivered.
For all this talk of customer service, few companies seem to get it. Dell wrecked their company in part because they sent all their support calls to India and business users didn’t want to talk to someone reading answers onscreen that didn’t fit their problem. (Especially when that support has an accent as thick as chutney yet goes by the name of Skip.) Business professionals wanted real tech support from people who knew something about computers. Same with cars. I’ll take Billy Joe Jim Bob who dreams about engines at night and has hands perpetually stained the color of used engine oil than TJ Slick who spent one year going through the Mister Goodwrench program. I could send Billy Joe Jim Bob a five-second MP3 of the sound of my problem and he’d know exactly what to fix. TJ Slick on the other hand, hitches up the computer diagnostics and still can’t figure it out. Yet companies are rushing over themselves to ditch the higher-paid Billy Joe Jim Bobs of the world with the wet-behind-the-ears Tom Slicks, and we’re all suffering for it.
Anyway…
Should have a new post up tonight at midnight.
Tags: Announcements, Technical, Work
Still Down
February 27, 2007
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Announcements Feedback : 3 comments
Folks,
Still awaiting hardware. I should have known when they said I’d have it a replacement by Monday that it would be at later than that. I guess “Express” shipping means different things to different people.
Will be back as soon as I can!
Tags: Announcements, Zzzzzz...
Down and Out in SW Ohio
February 22, 2007
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Announcements, Blogging Feedback : 7 comments
My satellite Internet modem burned out this morning, so it’s going to be quiet around here until I get a replacement. Sorry. Since we’re literally the last house on the electrical and phone lines, I can’t even get dial-up to work. When the satellite’s down, it’s like 1970 around here. You know, “The Dark Ages.”
I hope to be back online late Monday evening. Right now, I’m writing this from our local library. Though I’m on quite good terms with the staff, I doubt they’ll let me camp out here for the next several days.
So I’m not ignoring you when you comment or e-mail. I’m just Internet-challenged.
Blessings,
Dan
Tags: Announcements, Blogging, Moaning, Self-pity, Whining
Fumbling the Torch
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Best of Cerulean Sanctum, Boldness, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Community, Counterculture, Creativity, Discernment, Love, Maturity, Relevance, Simplicity, Supernaturalism, Youth Feedback : 47 comments
Our television died last weekend.
My parents had a 70’s-era Sony for 25 years. Our JVC lasted only 11. Bought it for my wife when we were engaged. (The vacuum my parents bought us for our wedding croaked this last summer. Thankfully, the marriage still holds up.)
Toward the end of our TV’s life, the favored fix for its tendency to scrunch the entire image down to a line a quarter-inch thick across the middle of the screen consisted of an authoritative whack to its cabinet. Kapow! and the picture would balloon to normal size. Over the last six months, it resembled a speed bag more than a television. Last Saturday, no amount of throttling on my part could bring it back.
Given that a new television compliant with the FCC-mandated digital requirements will set us back a minimum of $750, we may simply have to do without. It’s just the way things are right now.
Though I wish things were not that way, my television viewing’s fallen off to a limit approaching zero since The X-Files went off the air, anyway. Back during its network run, I taped nearly every episode, my devotion to the show evident in my inability to participate in any event that coincided with it, for fear some drunk would crash into a power line somewhere and erasing my carefully crafted programming of the VCR. That, of course, didn’t happen—except on the one night I had no choice but attend an event. The episode in question just so happened to be the infamous inbred family one, which FOX elected never to run again. Ever. Of course.
But that slavish devotion taught me never again to surrender time to TV. I haven’t followed anything since and probably never will.
(Readers: “So, Dan, where does this boring intro actually lead?”)
Imagine a campfire on the plains of Palestine circa 200 AD. A dozen people gather ’round its warmth, trading stories. At one point, the elder of the group stands up and tells of Jesus, His ways, and how those ways became the ways of their people. He talks for an hour, while the younger ones trade questions with him, learning, absorbing. Tomorrow night, the conversation will be similar, but varied enough to take others to a fractionally deeper place than the night before. The faces might be different this night, the main storyteller another of the wise ones, but what lingers in the cooling night air contains the same truth, the same life-giving wisdom.
On some nights, stories surrender to music. But the music doesn’t jar with the oral traditions. No, it reinforces truth, resembling what was taught and told, only in words set to rhythm and melody.
Night after night, this is how it unfolds for those people. This is their entertainment and their revelation.
My parents’ generation was the first to adopt television. I will argue that theirs was the first with a soundtrack from cradle to grave, too. They embodied the first completely media-savvy generation.
And for that reason, my generation got ripped off. My son’s generation will be, also. And his son’s.
Media stole the passed torch. It distracted those who came before us from their primary duty of ensuring the wisdom of the ages survived into the next generation. Whatever that wisdom may have been, that generation preferred the dull gray light of a cathode ray tube, or the voice of a box of transistors, to passing on the only things worth saving.
In time, their newly adopted habits combined with the islandization of the cities and the suburbs to destroy community as known by the denizens of Palestine 200AD. Work habits changed, and employment moved far from home. Every day. Connections withered. Who we were supposed to be in our souls got lost amid The Honeymooners and Little Richard.
My entire twenties consisted of the relentless drone of young Christians around me repeating the the same mantra over and over: “I wish I could find a mentor.” Sorry, but the mentor couldn’t pry himself away from Charlie’s Angels.
But who could blame him? He slaved in an office in some nondescript tower of glass and steel all day, had no one pouring life back into him, so what did he have to give at the end of the day? Better just to tune into Laugh In and tune out for an hour or two than to step out of the cultural programming and back into something older and more lasting.
I look around today and can’t help but think it’s infinitely worse. Cruise the Godblogosphere long enough and it seems like everyone’s glued to a 50″ plasma display OR an iPod OR a PS3 OR the two dozen flicks at the multiplex OR some pointless Internet distraction. Meanwhile, the next generation’s holding out their hands, dying for what little got passed on to us.
So the threads of tradition thin and weaken. Trivia replaces wisdom. Words lose to throwaway images.
Meanwhile, the thief breaks in to steal and destroy. And he plunders the entire house because the homeowner couldn’t pry his attention away from Lost or American Idol or 24 or some other pointless entertainment guaranteed to burn on Judgment Day.
Hey, I know that’s a tough word, folks, but we’re fiddling while America burns. It’s one thing for Christians to be culturally-savvy in cultural distinctives that last for generations, but quite another to be so enamored of pop-cultural artifacts that won’t stand up to a decade’s time.
If the best we can give our kids when they move away from home is the complete DVD collection 
of The Office or our Radiohead box-set, how is Jesus going to get a word in edge-wise?
But He’s Jesus, right? He’ll find a way to compete!
Can we hear ourselves? What life is going to flow into those kids? And into their kids?
My generation got mugged on the way to “maturity.” My parents did a decent job and were good people, but they still suffered from media distractions. They fell prey to disconnection and fractured community. My mother’s generational wisdom should’ve fed me, but by the time I realized I needed it, she was too far gone to help. And I didn’t know I needed it because I was too lost in my own media-driven stupor. Because the generation before me was, too. It was all I knew.
In the end, the torch I should be passing on to my child resembles a paper matchstick.
All that wisdom—gone. When my parent’s generation dies off entirely, so goes heritage, at least for many like me. We won’t remember all the second and third cousins. We won’t know how Christ changed that one great-uncle. Those salvation stories won’t be repeated around campfires any longer. The Bible passages that changed a generation will retreat into the book, to be remembered no more. And the hard-earned wisdom gained through decades of walking with Christ will blow away like dust along with the folks who learned it through bloody prayer, but took it to their graves.
What a grievous loss!
I wish we could grab our old people by the lapels and beg, “Don’t die before you instill in us what you learned about Christ. If you’ve been to the secret places, show us how to get there, too!” Don’t leave our generation to reflect on what might have been!
You know what I wish more of us did on Sunday? Rather than the same old, same old, why not begin a quarterly recollection Sunday (and center it around a full church meal and communion), where people tell stories of how Jesus changed their lives. How He came through and led out of the darkness. Have our kids hear those stories from people besides us for a change. Show them the relevancy of Christ from one generation to the next. And please God, send the fire on us so those stories burn with miracles and deliverance and the kind of supernatural power that proves to the next generation that “Awesome God” isn’t just a tired old song on the radio.
Because that’s the kind of thinking we must resurrect if the generation that follows us is going to have any sense of purpose and history to pass on to their children.
{Image: Rembrandt—Jacob Blessing the Children of Joseph, 1656}
Tags: Boldness, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Community, Counterculture, Creativity, Discernment, Generations, History, Love, Maturity, Oral-Tradition, Relevance, Simplicity, Stories, Story, Supernaturalism, Wisdom, Youth
“The Memory of the Flesh” and the Muse
February 20, 2007
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Announcements, Writing Feedback : 13 comments
A bit of self-promotion, plus thoughts on writing…
One of my old stories, written before 9/11 (and, eerily enough, spotlighting a misguided global response to terrorism), is up at The Wayfarer’s Journal, a new e-zine featuring speculative fiction from a Christian wordview. Character-driven, rather than science-laden, “The Memory of the Flesh” examines the nature of the soul, scientific shortsightedness, and technology run amok. Love for family drives the core of the story, told in first person by a poor farmer living in an unnamed “-Istan” as he watches the unseen dismantle his world. A love story, “The Memory of the Flesh” occupies a rare niche in science fiction. Women readers, especially, have enjoyed it.
As an older work, it’s not the level of writing I’m producing currently, but I like it anyway. Purists may find fault because it contains a fair amount of passive voice, but that’s in keeping with the way people speak in that part of the world, plus it reinforces the idea that things act upon people, rather than the other way around. In other words, I wrote the passivity on purpose; it’s part of the theme of the story.
So, you can tell me what you think. At around 13,000 words, it’ll keep you occupied.
One last writer’s comment on the craft…
Everywhere I go in writers’ circles, I hear this same piece of advice: Write the story within you.
Personally, I think that’s the worst advice writers receive. Here’s why: The story you have within you is no stinkin’ good.
What I mean by that goes back to pushing boundaries. Anyone can write the story they have within them. But the only memorable story is the one that comes from some place beyond you. It’s not what you can produce now, but what you could never write unless the combined muses of Dante, Homer, Clancy, King, Dickens, Dick, and Dr. Seuss descended upon you en masse.
Good writing costs. It forces you to reach to another level. It calls on skills you don’t possess, ideas that aren’t yours, characters you’ve never met, voices from regions unknown, and points of view you’ve never once considered. Anyone can write the story within them. But the kind of story that grabs other people’s hearts isn’t that story. It’s the one you don’t think you could write in a million years, but you’ll still die trying to commit to paper—a story that expands you as much as it expands other people.
Don’t write the story within you. Write the story you consider impossible. Readers will know the difference.
Thanks for reading.
Tags: Announcements, Writing
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