Burning Ones

Just found this on CNN.com and thought it was really interesting. I wounder if they also factored in the crazy amount of money you save just by buying an older vehicle. I’m definitely going to be applying this rule, though right now I think my Minivan is making noises that I lack the finances to fix… **erm** :|

Anyway, what do you think? Are you a victim of the need for new? Thoughts in the Comments…

<p>So, Sam (my sister in law) was home tonight and began to spout rumours of the devil finally setting up his website.  It was called <a href=”http://peteranswers.com/”>Peter Answers</a> and on it you could get in touch with his spirit and he would answer questions about your surroundings.  Unfortunately, you had to ask your questions through a medium who had him or herself become attuned to the dark one through long practice, and now was the only one you knew that could ask the questions on your behalf.</p>
<p>Luckily for Sam who spent some time asking questions to the devil through her good friend at Eastern, a quick google search lead me to <a href=”http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Peter-Answers”>this</a> website, which describes quite nicely how to utilize Peter Answers to trick your friends.  A quaint little game, I think, and since I hate practical jokes like that, I thought I&rsquo;d post it up here and tell all you guys that if anyone tries to pull this on you, calmly ask him or her to let you type the questions, because you’d like to start your own alliance&#8230;</p>

This is an awesome little though starter. I am so much a victim of feeling crazy levels of attachment to my clothing that it’s ridiculous. In fact, I recently made a resolution to only buy plain t–shirts so that I no longer have to deal with the emotional attachment. They’re cheaper anyway, so it saves me money.

Beyond that, it’s a really good thing to take some time and think seriously about how emotionally attached we are to our things. When something bears almost no functional importance in my life, I should really be able to part with it without a second thought. Unfortunately, I know for me that is rarely ever the case.

What you you all think?

Just found this website which contains an awesome set of tips for how to streamline your e-mail activity.

I’ve recently become enamored with the whole life–hacking concept thanks to sites like Life Hacker and people like Merlin Man. There are awesome tips out there for increasing our productivity and decreasing our stress. Unfortunately, I’m so enamored with the whole process that I waste time doing it, so now I will stop.

Ta-Da

Tonight I’d like to take a few quick minutes to think about how impersonal the web is and how much easier that makes it to share dark parts of yourself in an unvulnereble way. Not necessarily a good thing, so far as I’m concerned.

I found myself looking at some of things that Jess and I have written in the past on this blog and I realized that I would barely be willing to talk with most people (including very close friends) about some of this stuff. It’s got nothing to do really with my opinion of people. It’s that when you’re talking with someone face-to-face, you’re faced with an ugly reality that you’re exposed. There’s no way to turn off a person. When you get involved, you’re involved till the bitter (or sometimes very sweet) end.

This begs the question, is what the web is doing to my ability to interact with others a good or bad thing. On the one hand, issues that I have long kept secret are coming to the forefront, and one might say that this is a good thing. Indeed, anyone of my friends that read this blog now have the opportunity to bring issues up with me that I haven’t had the heart to bring up with them. On the other hand, I’m using an impersonal medium like a Blog to communicate deep issues of my heart to them. This too, is no good.

Now, in the beginning what the blog was supposed to be is an easy way to keep all the people that I want to keep updated updated. In the end, this is a good thing, because with the size of our social circles growing, it’s getting to be impossible to keep in touch with everyone personally. In that way, blogs foster communication between people who would otherwise not really be able to communicate on a regular basis. In fact, news on the blog might even encourage people to communicate with each other.

Despite this, there are millennia behind us where maintaining a huge, distributed circle of friends was simply impossible. The fact just came down to people not having the time to maintain personal relationships with more than a few people (relatively speaking). In that sense, a communication medium like a blog both helps and possibly hinders. I can communicate more things to more people more easily via a blog than I have ever been able to before. In theory, there is no limit to the amount of people who can subscribe to our blog and hear what’s going on in our lives. This is scary and cool all at the same time. However, am I truly communicating with people, or am I only making information available for consumption? I’m not sure.

I’m not at this point, advocating a reduction in the size of our circle. I’m merely trying to think about the wisdom in having 600 Facebook friends and a blog that is mainly about informing people about our lives which also happens to be our main way of communicating with everyone.

Anyway, I want to get off the computer now, as I’m trying to quit using the darn thing so much ;).

What do you think? Has the web degraded our ability to have authentic-human relationships? Thoughts in the comments!

Well, I’m back in school tomorrow and I’m not terribly excited. I’m going to busy at a whole new level and that doesn’t make me very happy being that I already can barely manage my life.

If you want, pray that God would help me get on top of all this

So let me give you a timeline of my life as of late with the help of some quotes from Manning’s “The Ragamuffin Gospel” :-)

Well, I’ve come to the horrifying realization that I’ve never been happy in my life. Oh, sure, I’ve been happy with things, but I can say with a dour pride that I’ve never been content. And although so much of me wants to now say, “but God’s given me contentment! Amen!” it would be a lie and I’m more miserable than I’ve ever been.

I’ve been having a sequence of dreams where I am punching Tim over and over again in the face because he does something that I find offensive and don’t understand. Tim is a symbol for Jesus in most of my dreams and although a part of me finds it quite humorous that I would be punching Jesus in the face, a bigger part of me shudders and I am filled with both fear and remorse.

God gave me the dream to help me realize that I am extremely angry at Him because I don’t understand what He’s doing. And that’s where I am right now: angry.

Here’s the quote. Somebody finally knows what the hell I’m going through: (I’ll be adding in comments between paragraphs).

“Though lip service is paid to the gospel of grace, many Christians live as if it is only personal discipline and self-denial that will mold and perfect me.”

For the past year I have sacrificed so much. So much. And I’m not even talking about the fact that I quit college (for God) and will refuse to work without an OK from God (for God). I’m talking about the days spent fasting, praying- which reminds me- did you know I would spend ten hours in the prayer room without a break? That’s how freakin’ hardcore I was. I spent three hours every day speaking and singing Scripture over myself. I spent hours and hours reading my Bible and other Christian literature I thought God was leading me to. My dialogue wasn’t “I read X amount of chapters today,” it was “I read X amount of books of the Bible today.” I made humility my goal and tried to live the Sermon on the Mount the best I could. I did everything and my pride is still just as big and I feel just as hopeless.

To continue…

“The emphasis is on what I do rather than on what God is doing. In this curious process God is a benign old spectator in the bleachers who cheers when I show up for the morning quiet time.

Our eyes are not on God. At heart we are practicing Pelagians. We believe that we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps- indeed, we can do it ourselves.”

I started to be completely miserable when Tim’s mom died and my whole glorious and “radical” routine was put on hold.

And then I realized that it wasn’t put on hold because it had to be. It was put on hold because I didn’t want to do it anymore. I’d much rather watch Will & Grace, Sex in the City, Friends, Nickelodeon, Charmed, Law and Order, and crappy edgy PG-13 movies that shaped our American culture into the whore it is today.

“Sooner or later we are confronted with the painful truth of our inadequacy and insufficiency. Our security is shattered and our bootstraps are cut.

Once the fervor has passed, weakness and infidelity appear. We discover our inability to add even a single inch to our spiritual stature.

There begins a long winter of discontent that eventually flowers into gloom, pessimism, and a subtle despair: subtle because it goes unrecognized, unnoticed, and therefore unchallenged.”

I had a dream around the time that Tim’s mom died where I was outside of my house and it was warm but, oddly enough, I saw a patch of snow on the ground. When I told Tim about it he got a word from God that “winter was coming.”

I thought he was talking about a time in the wilderness in which case I felt honored and haughty because only really big, radical Christians go into the wilderness. But I was wrong. I am in a winter of discontent. I am filled with pessimism, despair and complacency. I just want to watch TV. Leave me alone. A couple weeks ago I had a dream of me standing in the midst of full-winter. I woke up and understood that this wasn’t a wilderness that I had expected.

“It takes the form of boredom, drudgery. We are overcome by the ordinariness of life, by daily duties done over and over again.”

Ugh. I’m so bored. I walk around my house aimlessly because I am so bored. I feel meaningless, pointless, purposeless and only worth what I can do.

“We secretly admit that the call of Jesus is too demanding, that surrender to the Spirit is beyond our reach. We start acting like every one else. Life takes on a joyless, empty quality.

We begin to resemble the leading character in Eugene O’Neill’s play “The Great God Brown”: “Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living of the earth and the sky and the sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?”

Something is radically wrong.”

I’ve threatened God so many times: “you know? I could just drop this whole thing and take up paganhood.” And with how much time I actually give to God I don’t think my life would look a whole lot different.

There have been moments where I really felt like I was making progress, even in this depression. And then it all gets abruptly taken away (no doubt by God) from me and I’m left with me again. I’m in this stupid sick-cycle-carousel.

So, in my bitterness, all you Christians who are so proud of yourselves because of your sacrifices and how much you give: you’re in for a rude awakening, and I pity you from the bottom of my heart

However, I do seem to have, deep within me, a dark flicker of hope somewhere.

I have very few words to say today.

I just read one of the most beautiful things I have ever read and it was penned by my Sister in memory of my Mom.

It has been sitting in my inbox since July 21 and I had not been able to force myself to read it until tonight. I’ve looked at in my inbox many times now, sometimes for many minutes, with the mouse pointer hovering over it, shaking because I knew that what lay within would be painful for me to read. Finally, I read it.

I’m so proud right now of my sister’s faith and strength in this and her willingness to confront reality head on with sometimes only a finger clinging to the rock of our salvation. I want that kind of faith.

I miss my mother terribly. I miss her oh so terribly. And I love her. I love her so much…

For My Mom - My own paltry contribution to the memory of my Mom

OK, I just wanted to post this up here real quick. Me and the wife take part in Wii Polls which is this nifty little feature of the Nintendo Wii which allows you and many other owners of Wiis to answer poll questions about many different things. As near as I can tell the questions are not able to be used for sale to data mining companies which are attempting to figure out my generation so they can sell products to us, as the questions don’t seem to be too revealing, but it is very interesting to see all the different answers as they then provide the poll results to you. Most of the polls are on a national scale but some are world-wide and it is of one of these world-wide polls that I am writing.

This past poll question was, “Is this the TV your looking at right now a Wide-Screen TV or not?”. Why am I mentioning this? you may ask. Well, the results were quite astonishing as far as Jess and I were concerned.

Now, barring the fact that this is a question asked to owners of the Wii (which obviously will skew the results quite a bit), I was fully expecting that the country with the highest rate of Wide-Screen-TV ownership would easily be the U.S. I mean, come on, we have a reputation that would match that, no? Well, here are the results.

1. United Kingdom
2. Finland
3. Japan
4. Netherlands
5. Norway
6. Italy
7. Ireland
8. Luxembourg
9. Belgium
10. Sweden
11. Switzerland
12. Denmark
13. Greece
14. Portugal
15. Spain
16. France
17. Australia
18. Peru
19. Austria
20. United States
21. New Zealand
22. Germany
23. Colombia
24. Venezuela
25. Canada
26. Mexico
27. Brazil
28. Panama
29. Guatemala

Now what I want you to notice is the location of the United States and the countries that precede it. Countries like Peru, Greece, Ireland… What’s the deal? Anyway, I was so surprised by how far down we were that I just had to publish it. Hope other people find this as interesting as I did.

I’ve found myself asking that question more and more lately. The reason is because I feel very defeated at the moment. I feel very much like I tried my very best to give it all to God, and I asked him to help me where I was deficient (which I was convinced was just about everywhere), and at the end of it all, I got nothing. I had a few small victories here and there, but at the end of the day, I would sit there and struggle in my sin and be begging God to take the trial from me, admitting that I was not strong enough to overcome it on my own, that I would resist it as long as he would back my will up with means to accomplish that will, and then a few hours later find that I had failed. Again. Over and over and over again.

But I would get back up and resist again, as best I could, after my fashion (which as far as I could make it was formed from a Biblical model). I would resist and then fail, resist and then fail, resist and then fail. And suddenly, I realized that I was resisting less and less, that I was getting more and more tired, that I was starting to lose faith that God would ever step in and “take this cup from me.” This past Tuesday, I broke down completely, and when I encountered temptation, I found myself saying words like this. “What’s the point? If I resist now in a few hours I’ll have been broken and I’ll have given in. Why not just give in immediately. I’ll hate myself just as much for doing it now as I will for doing it then. I’ll be just as disappointed, just as depressed, that I failed one more time, if I fail now or then. I’m through, I’m not even going to bother God (who obviously doesn’t have a plan to release me from this anyway) with my little pleas for help. I’m just going to give in.”

So I did.

Notwithstanding the fact that a great majority of the above statement is a lie (God does have a plan to help me overcome my sin, I would be (and indeed I was) more disappointed in myself if I gave in without a fight than if I just gave in without trying, etc. etc.), it seemed to make sense at the time. I was tired. It wasn’t only late at night, but I was emotionally tired. I’d been struggling deeply for awhile at that point and, like I said, every time I stumbled I seemed to not stand up quite as straight again, until I was finally walking along almost doubled over, just waiting to hit the dirt again. When you’re in that state, words and thoughts like that make a lot of sense. It doesn’t seem to matter (at least not to me) how much I quote the Bible or ask God for help or attempt to “just decide” to do the right the thing. You just feel the inevitability of your sin and it breaks you in half. You feel the enormity of your wickedness and it breaks your will to fight against it. Anyway, that was last Tuesday.

I was at church this Sunday and I decided to read through John. It had been a little while since I had picked up that book and it has always brought me comfort. John’s unique view on Jesus and his words almost always bring me great comfort and refreshment. I got to verse 5 and God told me to meditate on it for a little bit. I’ve always liked the verse; “The light [Jesus] shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” However, I had always taken it very abstractly; the light was God(Jesus,Holy Spirit), the darkness was Satan and his forces. I’d never seen it in a personal light. However, as I was thinking about it, I realized quite suddenly that the darkness was the darkness in me as well. The darkness was my own sin and wickedness and evil nature. And then it hit me, my darkness has not and will never overcome the light that is now in me thanks to Jesus Christ.

It may seem like a simple revelation, maybe even a thought that all baby Christians should be intimately familiar with, but some how I had either missed or forgotten that no matter how dark I am at any given point, Jesus shines in me, and his light cannot be overcome. So, I’m going to take comfort in that fact, and attempt to hope in the grace that God has for me; that he was willing to cause his son to dwell inside of dirty, disgusting, dark me. And the very fact that Jesus is there is a guarantee that I will always have light in me, somewhere, even if I have done my best to hide it.

Thank you Lord, for putting your light in me. Help me to feel its presence always, that I would not allow myself to be disqualified when I become aware of the darkness dwelling inside of me as well. I love you, Lord.