All Sorts of Random Stuff

Lots of things going on right now. Have a million post ideas in my head, but all sorts of other, more diminutive, thoughts keep prattling about in my mind. Perhaps if I get them down in writing, I can actually sleep at night.

If you like hodge-podges, this is it!

Read through Shaunti & Jeff Feldhaun’s two books, For Women Only and (shockingly) For Men Only. Pitched at married couples trying to understand each other, rather than going down the same, tired pop-psych route, they veered into Barna’s territory and polled men and women about what they thought the other sex was thinking. Nothing proved earth-shattering for me, but the accuracy of the comments really hit home. It’s nice to hear you’re not nuts. Given that these two books have quite a following, I suppose they smack of a revelation to some. My wife and I have had good discussions based on the books, and I plan on recommending them to the couples group we’re a part of. The books aren’t filled with tons of Scripture, but they make no pretenses toward that and would even feel a bit forced if they did. Call it common sense. Nice length, taut writing, and easy skim-ability make for two essential reads.

Date-Dabitur has nothing to do with the sexes and everything to do with a Christian agrarian lifestyle. My attempts to live the agrarian way look feeble compared with this blogger. Check out this compelling post, Garrison Keillor On Our Amish Future, then stick around and read some of the controversial, yet compelling, posts on this blog.

Julie R. Neidlinger’s Lone Prairie.net Blog contains the kind of writing that I can only aspire to here at Cerulean Sanctum. In her own Keillor-esque way, Julie captures life as an artist in North Dakota, meditating on a wide range of subjects—always with uncommon insight and wisdom. She deserves a following.

Just down the road to the west, someone drove a car through a house. A through and through. That’s the kind of thing that happens in the country. At the T-intersection just east of me, drunks think the road continues, but it dead ends in a soybean field. Meanwhile, the local newspaper ran yet another story on a crystal meth bust. I never saw so many burned out homes until I moved here. Between the meth labs and three-pack-a-day smokers falling asleep with a lit butt in their hands, it’s a wonder every other house isn’t a charred ruin. People think the country’s idyllic, but with all the work moving overseas, many people here lead lives of quiet desperation. Tim Keller says we should all move to the city in order to minister, but the city’s got nothing on the problems of the country.

On one of those days when it was run, run , run, my son and I ducked into the area Chik-Fil-A for lunch. To our surprise, in one corner of the restaurant, a pretty, young woman soloed on her violin. My son immediately bounded over to her and stood awestruck. A small sign near her case noted she’d been selected to play in an elite orchestra gathering in Beijing and was trying to raise money for her trip. I surveyed her receipts lying strewn in the case and topped the largest bill I saw there, not wishing to repeat the tragedy of a particular social experiment. We sat nearby and enjoyed her playing. At one point, I asked her about the Bell experiment and she expressed similar shock to mine. Over the course of time she played, we enjoyed every note, particularly her rendition of “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific. Thank you, Emma.

The Wall Street Journal ran a horrifying story about the chaos roiling those who took out sub-prime home loans. With the sub-prime mortgage industry collapsing, it’s taking down thousands upon thousands of homeowners with it. The chart the Journal ran of the increases in bankruptcies associated with sub-prime loans looked like the exhaust trail left by a Saturn V rocket. And I have to ask yet again, what are the churches these folks attend doing about it?

Now that I will actually have some time come fall to work on my novel without distractions, I read today that one of the elements of that novel, the search by particle physicists for the elusive Higgs Boson, has been rendered moot because those darned physicists may have found the dad-blamed thing. Supposedly, scientists claimed current accelerator technology didn’t have the horsepower to uncover the boson, but sadly for me, I guess it did. Tip for future novelists: write faster.

Over at the BHT, Bill MacKinnon wonders how his church can go beyond programs and actually witness to the lost. My suggestion? Love them. Be there for them when no one else is. Be their friends, but with no other expectations than friendship. Find out what they need and meet that need. Cry with them. Laugh with them. Invite them into our homes. Show them Jesus by being Jesus in their lives. That’s how you bring people jaded by talk into the Kingdom today.

Yes, I’m still waiting for updates to the WordPress widgets that power the sidebar of Cerulean Sanctum. I’ve dropped numerous hints to the guy who created them, but so far nothing. And thus we see the Achilles heel of open source software.

My satellite Internet provider decided that broadband is a nasty word and has instituted draconian bandwidth limitations. Considering that just one backup of this blog is a 120MB download, I’m hurtin’. I used to stream Internet radio for hours a couple years ago, so I don’t get this sudden policy shift. Let’s be honest: it’s a YouTube, VOIP, tabbed-browsing, iTunes world. I’ve been with them six years now, burned through four modems (*cough* JUNK *cough*), and paid countless thousands of dollars for their pricey service, and now comes a bandwidth limit. Right now, I’m throttled, so it takes about five minutes to open a page (if it opens at all). Note to StarBand: this is not how you please veteran customers.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government continues to imprison believers. What a spoiled brat that makes me when I beef about my ISP, huh?

Not that kind of prophet: looks like I missed on my oracle that gas would be $4 a gallon over the Memorial Day weekend. That’s one of those times when it’s good to be wrong. Still, we need to stop all futures speculation on energy. It makes a few people rich at the expense of the rest of us.

A reader noted my mood’s been all over the map this week. Actually, it’s been generally good lately, but we could always use more prayer. Prayers for prosperity and blessing are especially appreciated now.

Thanks for being a reader. As always, the comments are open.

Unless…

Unless... My favorite Dr. Seuss book is The Lorax. The eponymous main character looks something like an angry groundhog with a walrus mustache. Claiming to speak for the mute trees, he stands in the gap when the story’s narrator, The Once-ler, rides into the pristine forest with profit on his mind. As the Once-ler has his way with the world, despoiling every last square inch of land, chopping down every tree, forcing the forest creatures out, only the Lorax remains to stand up to him.

Many years later, in relating the sad tale of the destruction of the last truffula tree to a boy, the chastened Once-ler speaks these haunting words:

The Lorax said nothing. Just gave me a glance…
just gave me a very sad, sad backward glance…
as he lifted himself by the seat of his pants.

And I’ll never forget the grim look on his face
when he heisted himself and took leave of this place,
through a hole in the smog, without leaving a trace.

And all that the Lorax left here in this mess
was a small pile of rocks, with one word…
UNLESS.
Whatever that meant, well, I just couldn’t guess.

That was long, long ago. But each day since that day
I’ve sat here and worried and worried away.
Through the years, while my buildings
have fallen apart, I’ve worried about it
with all of my heart.

But now, says the Once-ler,
Now that you’re here, the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear.
UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It’s not.

The lesson of The Lorax goes far beyond a simple environmental message. It reinforces a Biblical truth that today’s Church in America best heed—the reality of UNLESS.

UNLESS we Christians share the message of Christ with the lost, they’ll endure eternal punishment for all eternity.

UNLESS we feed the hungry, they’ll succumb to malnutrition.

UNLESS we fight for justice for the disenfranchised, they’ll continue to be exploited.

UNLESS we visit the prisoner, they’ll die in a prison of their own loneliness.

UNLESS we minister to the sick, they’ll get sicker and perish, forgotten.

UNLESS we show the world love, it’ll never know what true love is.

UNLESS….

We can fill in a thousand statements behind that UNLESS, can’t we? The job Christ left us to do is vast and not getting any less so. We are the Body of Christ—His hands, His feet. And UNLESS we do the work He’s called us to, it simply won’t get done.

The Dry, Weary Land

Our grass is brown.

I don’t expect to see that the first week of June. Around these parts, May’s the wettest month of the year. Looking back over the month, though, I suspect we got about a fifth of what we normally get rain-wise.

Being of a profession—farming—that makes one acutely aware of a lack of precipitation, I recalled the pastor’s plea on Sunday for rain. All the farmers around here wear that same scrunched-face-to-the-sky look, as if squinting at the lack of clouds will somehow unloosen the water troughs of heaven. They know what’s at stake. Some people can trot out a garden hose to water their backyard gardens, but when you’ve got acre upon acre to “de-parch,” suddenly relying on the mercy of God to send rain moves into the realm of the essential.

So I spent most of the day watching the heavy clouds roll in—only to witness them lightly sprinkle, as if to spite the dessicated soil. An hour of churning skies yielded forty-seven seconds of piddly rain, not enough to be declared a moistening, much less a genuine rainfall. I could literally watch the tiny dark spots on the patio burn off with one blast of rays from the trailing sun. Repeat this three more times today and you get the climatological picture.

A Psalm of David, when he was in the wilderness of Judah. O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
—Psalms 63:1

I know many Christians who seem just as dry and dusty on the inside as the landscape around here. And it’s not by choice. None desires that state of dessication. Sure, some people exist to soak up pity, but most Christians in those dry places are staring at the heavens with scrunched-up faces, wondering just what the deal is.

Hezekiah encountered the same dryness. Immediately following his healing from what appeared to be a terminal illness, we read this:

And so in the matter of the envoys of the princes of Babylon, who had been sent to [Hezekiah] to inquire about the sign that had been done in the land, God left him to himself, in order to test him and to know all that was in his heart.
—2 Chronicles 32:31

What an arid landscape, the human heart left to its own devices by a God who seems to have gone MIA.

Elsewhere, Job speaks:

“Behold, I go forward, but he is not there, and backward, but I do not perceive him; on the left hand when he is working, I do not behold him; he turns to the right hand, but I do not see him. But he knows the way that I take; when he has tried me, I shall come out as gold.”
—Job 23:8-10

The Lord promises to transform us into gold, from one degree of glory into another. But the process takes us through the dry, weary land, where bones bleach in the sun and every oasis mocks us.

Around 7:30 PM, we got our last drizzle. This one at least painted the gravel driveway a dark gray. The forecast calls for a week of blistering sun. I joined the chorus of farmers around 7:50 as we collectively sighed and wondered how a forecast of three days of thunderstorms yielded 0.1″ of rain.

Mid-headshake, my son came into the house, face beaming, telling me he saw “a double.” A double what?, I thought.

On the south side of Edelen Acres, A double rainbow over Edelen Acres Roy G. Biv hunkered down alongside his twin brother. Two arcs of inverse colors bent across the sky.

I took this time to remind my son of the promise behind the sign, a promise that states that because of His covenant promise, God’s wrath turns away when He gazes from heaven upon the bow stretching across the sky. With all promises come hope, what lingers when all the prayers have been said and the mustard seed of faith is left to sprout in the soil moistened by God’s provision.

It’s a dry, weary land, but it won’t always be.