Dear God

(dear-god.net)

Dear God, kind of like PostSecret, except prayers and better photography. It was started by the guy who does The Cool Hunter (I'm a fan). Is this helpful? Or, like Liz Forkin used to say in high school, "emotional streaking?"

Not-relatedness:

Why on earth was Paris Hilton partying in St. Louis? (perez hilton)

completely unrelated: the other day I was wondering and asked myself whether i would trade the internet for my relationship with God and it took me a second to decide. scary.

related to 'would you rathers': would you rather take a bite out of a homeless man or go without sex or marriage for your whole life?

L'Abri wrap up:

Instead of giving an outline for each talk I went to (10 total), I'm going to do it "what I'm learning in class" style and give the bullet points for the stuff that I thought was mind-blowing, confusing, or had to look up later. Oh, and most of these points are what I got from the talks, not necessarily what they were trying to put across (I had to put in the postmodern subjective justification on this, sorry)

Jerram Barrs: "Common Grace: the general kindness of God"
- Gerard Manley Hopkins: "God's Grandeur"
- common grace makes people even more inexcusable in their suppression of the truth about God. (whoa.)
- human failure speaks to God's glory by contrast (interesting)

Richard Winter: "Sex: Agony and Ecstasy"
- sex in the beginning is like learning to dance, you step all over each others toes at first
- men and women: Vive la Différence!
- Lisa McMinn: "Sexuality and Holy Longing: embracing intimacy in a broken world"
- Proverbs 6:26 - "for the prostitute reduces you to a loaf of bread, and the adulteress preys upon your very life." - we can treat each other like objects when having sex.

Hans Bayer: "Spirituality in Contemporary Culture"
- definition of culture: what men and women value and deem 'good.' (fascinating)
- I would like to do a study on the 'solutions' in movies, because I think this speaks to the culture at that time, what is accepted as a resolution to a problem?
- the contemporary man has no cause to sacrifice his life for.
- postmodern community is built around actions, not talk. talk leads to division, while action leads to a utopian society of progress and diversity.
- there is transcendence through self-exposure in Facebook. Once it's all out there I will be able to figure it out. It's also navel-gazing (I love that term).

David Richter: "Modern Piracy: the ethics of file sharing"
- there is a whole anti-DRM (digital rights management) movement out there (Defective by Design site)
- the government and record companies are trying to get colleges to police file sharing: CNET news "Colleges must police copyright, or else" - which is extremely expensive and just not their job.
- Spiral Frog - a new type of music website that requires a monthly renewal fee? and covers some of the cost for the music by ads and customer surveys.
- THEY'RE THINKING ABOUT BUILDING A NEW INTERNET??? I'm still trying to figure this one out, but the NSF (national science foundation) - who invented the original internet (yeah, yours) for scientists to share info - are thinking about building a new internet with more safety regulations. Is it 1984 already? some articles: (BBC "Internet's future in 2020 debated", Wired "Old Hands Give Internet2 a Helping Hand", NSF - GENI, more to come...) It's pathetic that I haven't heard about this - all the articles I'm finding are from like 2005.
- Wired and Jeff Tweedy from the talk "Music is not a loaf of bread"

...more to come, must head off to Chipotle.

Baby Jesus

USA Today

My dad always reads the nativity part of Luke for every Christmas. It's a tradition that was started by my Mom's Dad, whom I don't remember because he died when I was 1.5.

While he was reading it this Christmas, it struck me how absolutely awkward the situation was in which Jesus was born. No one seemed ready for it: Mary was awkwardly pregnant without a dude, Joseph seemed to be cuckolded and had to go back home for taxes (which no one likes). And then, they couldn't even find a place to stay in town - probably because they were late. The situation sounds exactly like something that I would get pissed at my friends or high schoolers I work with about - like, why didn't you get reservations at the Inn? Isn't there some way that you can explain to people about why Mary's pregnant? Why the hell is Mary pregnant?

On the flip side - God being in control of the universe - in some way He wanted it to happen like this. He likes it when things happen like this. I don't get it. Somehow it showcases God's glory more when the situation is awkward and painful. This seems completely counterintuitive to me. I always get so worried and freaked out when my friends or kids I work with get in bad situations like that. I lose all hope and want to concentrate on getting them to not make the situation any worse. I don't know what the answer is.

Parties / guys hitting on you / thinking way too much about things / arguments with my mom

I've had an on-going argument with my mom about dressing nicer and more attractively since middle school. Because of the differences in the way we think, the discussion has been frustrating yet informative.

Her argument:
Dressing nicer and more attractively is being a good steward of what God gave you. Not doing so is being ingenuine (is that a word?). But mostly, Marta, you're not going to get a boyfriend if you go out in ratty t-shirts.

My argument:
After being led-on one too many times by guys who make everyone seem like they're the most important thing in the world, I'm a little afraid of being the attractive girl who talks to you but in reality you have a 1% of going out with her. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but it does in my head. Really, I would just rather dress normally and not get hit on than risk getting some guy's hopes up.

So mostly my question right now is how can I give God glory in a situation when a guy I'm not interested in is flirting with me? Does it glorify Him to try to be more attractive, attract guys, and then turn them down? I don't get it.

Just as a final point, my position right now about clothing, appearance, etc. is that it should be an outward manifestation of your insides - like art.

This ongoing argument is also linked to my own semi-internal argument about whether I should get dredlocks or not. Is getting dreds some kind of ticket out of getting hit on for appearances sake alone? Or what? No answers yet.

Boogie Nights

I saw Boogie Nights last night because I had heard a lot about it, and I feel like there's a lot of pop culture references to it, and I heard it was pretty good. Everyone is in this movie. Don Cheadle, Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds, Mark Wahlberg, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Heather Graham, William H. Macy, John C. Reilly. Well, what I didn't know was that it is about a kid trying to break into the porn industry. The movie made me cringe and hate myself afterwards like Requiem for a Dream did. It's just a hard, gross picture of the dregs of humanity. It was hard to watch.

Towards the end of the movie (which took forever - it's 2.5 hours long), each of the characters' worlds started imploding. Mark Wahlberg gets involved in a drug deal that goes wrong and then gets the crap kicked out of him by some dudes in a parking lot. Don Cheadle in denied for a loan and is involved in a convenience store robbery. Heather Graham and Burt Reynolds try to mix reality and porn and kick the crap out of a random guy. Julianne Moore was denied custody of her son because of her involvement in the porn industry. Another guy goes to jail for porn.

I couldn't figure out if the ending was commentary on society not accepting pornographers and our own sexuality (some kind of puritanical backlash like what happened in Brokeback Mountain) or if it was a judgment on the pornographers for their sin and disgusting behavior (kind of like how horror movies kill off the "sinners" first).

Who knows, but it all got me thinking about purity. What is it? Why does God desire it for us? I think the answer is pretty clear of why it is desirable just by its contrast with the movie, but I want to think about it more. Should I not watch things that have a lot of pop culture references and that I hear are good because I know they're disgusting? This, of course, varies from person to person. But what exactly does purity mean?

Life, it is.

As I am working towards to goal of defining what my life passions are, different words, phrases, and ideas seem to fit together to create the larger vision. One of them comes from an email that wasn't written to me by a professor at Covenant Seminary. It is a broad question that shapes a lot of who Covenant Seminary is and their mission. This question makes me want to go to seminary there. "What do you see in terms of spiritual yearnings within contemporary (popular) culture (in the U.S.A. and globally)?"

I was sitting in my 'Cultural and Intellectual History of the US' class this morning and another image came to me. In contemporary church culture, so much is made of Acts 17, when Paul is preaching on Mars Hill. I think Christians enjoy the image of Paul citing the contemporary secular poets and thinkers to make his own case for the existence of one God and for salvation in Christ. It makes the case that the church shouldn't be a fortress on a hill, separated from society by huge walls of distrust and misunderstanding. It should be a city, with streets leading out, inviting trade and dialogue.

It just occurred to me that that is what inspires me too. My favorite part of being at Mizzou as a Christian is being in a sociology class and being able to see the image of God in the writers and other students as we all discuss culture and the nature of man in society. It's fantastic seeing that what the Bible says isn't all crap and that what it says about human nature and the way God created us in His image can be seen in everything we do. Even the ways we set up power elites and have class warfare speaks to our desire to have the God-like power that got us in this whole mess in the first place (Garden of Eden).

In my history class, my professor acts kind of like an Old Testament prophet, highlighting trends of thought that shifted the American culture. I want to learn how to do that. I want to look at a culture and say, "Here is the foundational issue. Here is where we do not believe God." That would be so cool.

treasures in heaven

I was at the Veritas leadership meeting today and we were reading in Luke 6 about something or other and there was about half a verse about us being rewarded in the afterlife for things we do here. It struck me how very odd this idea is, both from the perspective of our current culture and (from what little I know of the) Buddhist perspective.

I generally tend towards the (wrong view) of us not having any right to protest against any wrongs done to us in this life because we have done so much wrong and therefore deserve what ever is coming to us. I am in the (very long and drawn out) process of Christ changing my mind to want justice in the world. As in, wrongs done to us are still wrong (and should be punished) even though we are guilty as well.

Okay, to get to the point. The idea that we are rewarded is possibly absurd. God promises us a reward for our striving. We don't just do things because they are right and the very rightness is self-rewarding. But God pours even more blessing on top. Maybe. This sounds right, but I have just started thinking about this and honestly have no idea.

But one other thing that goes along with this idea: I was talking to Andy Patton on Wednesday and he has been reading By Demonstration: God by Wade Bradshaw (you can read about his thoughts here at his blog). Wade Bradshaw used to be a worker at English L'Abri - where I was for a semester this time last year, and the book was born out of his experiences there. I tried to read the book while I was at L'Abri but got distracted.

But anyway, Andy said that one thing that he's gotten out of the book is the idea that our current culture looks at Christianity and Biblical values as somewhat beneath their own. Like it would almost be a downgrade morally to adhere to Christian values. Traditional Christian moral standpoints such as being pro-life, womens roles in the church and home, and views of other religions seem almost archaic.

This all relates back to treasures in Heaven, I promise. The idea of us getting rewarded for our strivings and faith by some kind of reward almost seems archaic. Morality should be done for morality's sake, right? To be rewarded for faith-acts seems absurd and greedy.

But God knows us, He made us. He engages with our desires and works with us. It's not just Him in the clouds making demands. He lets us see the fruit of our labors. He gives us hope. He's a good God.

p.s. - my Dad has that picture somewhere up in his office at home. i like it.

Love

I've been thinking about how to love others as I love myself. I'm confident I got the beginning of this idea from a talk I've heard recently but I can't remember.
I think I had this idea of loving others as I love myself as this unreachable level of loving others where I didn't even think about myself anymore and kind of dissolved into a nothingness of myself but only goodness pouring out of me.
I don't think that's true, but who knows. If I ever get there and it looks like that, I'll recant.
I've been thinking about how I love myself. In a lot of ways I'm not as easy on myself as I am on others. I don't always assume the best of myself. I want to get better. I think about things and repent. Sometimes I'm mad at myself for a couple days. Sometimes I'm exceedingly happy with myself for a couple days.
But the point of the scripture (as I've always heard it) is to want the best (as in, what God wants for them) for people. And I've always kind of sidestepped that by saying "well, I don't know what God wants for them" or just didn't think about it. But the way that I want the best for myself and what God wants for me is that I repent and concede to Him.

In Malaysia, Kevin Burrell gave a talk where he gave the best definition of repentance I've heard:
"repentance is giving as much of yourself as you know to as much of Christ as you know"

Oh right! D.A. Carson review.

Well, D.A. Carson is a very very smart man. He gave a very very good talk on suffering and backed it up with Biblical everything. Very impressive. But more valuable was that he said things that I needed to hear this week. I like going to events where the townies come out. It's good seeing non-good looking people over the age of 24.

Here's what I got from it:

• "War makes death real to us" - C.S. Lewis. I like this quote because there are a lot of hippie-type people in Columbia (God love them), and the rebel in me wants to bring up points about how war is sometimes a good idea. I don't want to expound on this. My brother has a funny bumper sticker that says something like "War never solved anything except slavery, genocide, nazism, and fascism"

• sometimes we just don't know why we're suffering (take a look at Job - he never really knew)

• the poem 'Jesus of the Scars' by Edward Shillito

• sometimes you can actually see the gravity of your sin in relation to other people's. Even to the point that there exists innocent suffering. This blows my mind, I sway towards the end of the spectrum of assuming that everyone deserves suffering all the time.

Harry Potter and MTW

So a couple weeks ago I was at the Mission to the World (missions organization for the Presbyterian Church in America) Asia-Pacific conference in Malaysia. I had never been around that many missionaries before in my life. It didn't really hit me until later on in the week to actually look at these people. I started thinking about their lives and the places they live and the things they go through every day. I'm not into glorifying missionaries, shoot - I think every Christian is technically a missionary wherever they live.

But anyways, I started thinking about these people and the spiritual battles they've been through and the things they've seen God do in their own and others' lives and the spiritual gifts they have.

Awhile ago, when I was reading the last Harry Potter, I was thinking about how cool it would be if everyone had some kind of power, like something that could define them. Each of the characters has something that establishes their character. They are who they are.

And then I started thinking about the famous line in C.S. Lewis' The Weight of Glory about other Christians: "If we were to see them in their glorified forms we would be tempted to bow down and worship them."

It seems as if, underneath all the superficial dorkiness of the missionaries, they are warriors. They have scars from past battles, and terrifying spiritual gifts.

I love that glimpse of people in this form that you get after hearing their life story. Suddenly they're not someone you say hi to at college group, they're someone to stare at in wonder.

Question: Who coined the word 'God'?

The Germans?

Wikipedia: God (word)