Reading

Memoirs of Marcus Aurelius

Blog posts will follow...

Something funny happened on the way to hell...

Christ saved me.

This morning, I looked at my computer and I saw a box for the first time. I did not see a crutch. I did not see a way for me to feel better about myself for the way I was able to talk well to people, enunciate my position well, or goodness knows, to abuse a girl with the way I looked her over across the internet. I took a step back and I was aghast. I thought to myself "I wanted that? I desired that? Who am I?" I want the love of Christ! I want Jesus! I want my family to know that I live for him. I don't want a complement on my music, my books, or my hair. I want Jesus Christ to strip me clean of my sorrow, shame, pride, and hate. God, give me every desire of my heart in tune to your will. I fail without you. I HAVE failed without you. I put my faith in so many things, that they were trustworthy and good. Foolishness. Just foolishness. God I deserve none of the gifts from which you have brought me to you. None of my life up to now is deserving of your praise till now. Now is the day. I'm not sure why, and I'm not sure what it's supposed to feel like but I want to be different and you will bring me there. I'm done working on my own. That was folly. You are my only support and crutch. God give me peace and then God give me the strength and constitution to do what is necessary. Amen.

Desires of the Heart

Grace is something not hoped for.

Grace is not achieved.

Grace is not owed.

Grace is not expected.

Grace looks down its weary head.

Grace gives when there's nothing left.

Grace is my only hope.

Grace is my greatest failure.

Grace is where the heart is.

Grace has more to say.

Grace is the only way.

Grace bears the pain.

Grace stops the rain.

Grace reaches in and gives back your life.

Grace is your breath when you've no strength to fight.

Grace is my treasure, my hope, and my love.

Grace shows me my Father above.

"The Truth" by Lecrae

Awesome Song

This song right here is for everybody out there looking for truth
And who says, ya know, we all in the same boat
Christians, Muslims, everybody like that…(yo)
You’re looking for truth
(Oh) I got some answers man
(So good to me) uh…let’s get into it.

Let’s go…
Night and day I ain’t scared to sayin we different
They play the prostitute, but they like to say they just intimate
Idols in their heart, they can’t seem to lose the grip on it
Seem em walking in the direction they can get crippled with?
Our world is different like Whitley and Wayne, mayne
They say we look the same, but we ain’t chasin the same thing
It all boils down to they think everything is relative
Jesus might as well be a South American president
Very evident…they say that Jesus was heaven sent
They lifestyle reflects that they worship theyself instead of him
They don’t acknowledge the Christ
If they did, they wouldn’t worship themselves by the way that they live
All these rappers say they got guns that spray of 16
I got a Luke 9 that can take all 16
That’s the Bible, the one they call
But they don’t care about the author, They think he’s a joke

Man, see some folks say, "All truth is relative, it just depends on what you believe." You know, "hey man, ain't no way to know for sure who God is or what's really true." But that means you believe your own statement; that there's no way to know what's really true. You're saying that that statement is true. You're killing yourself. If what's true for you is true for you and what's true for me is true for me, what if my truth says your's is a lie? Is it still true? Come on man!

I promise everybody is askin the same questions, “Who am I? What is my purpose and my direction?”
Probably believe that you exist for no other reason
Than self satisfaction, hedonism, and pleasing things
Life’s about you gettin yours and being happy
Even if it means a divorce and switchin families?
Your job, your house, your car, your spouse
It’s all for the glory of you…else you out
You go to school, get ya degrees, and get a job
So you can make a whole lot of cheese, cuz life’s hard
You never thought of livin to please a real God
And that’s the reason He made you
(See) He gave you breath to breathe, the chest to breathe it
So you can taste and see He’s the best, believe it
He made us for His glory, and not for your own, homie
Our God is holy…you should repent and die slowly…

See, there's this thing called "Secular Humanism", it says man is the source of all meaning and all purposing. You know what i'm saying? We're just the result of a big cosmic explosion. We don't really have a purpose or meaning, so we just come up with our own purpose. We're the source of our meaning and our purpose. How can a man, which is the product of chance, a finite being be the source of purpose and meaning? You can't! You're created with purpose man! Get with The Creator yo!

Man, everybody got a problem with God
And when you mention the Christ, then they really get to turning the knob
But some say they roll with Christ
Cuz some rappers made him seem like He was cool with all the sin in they life
No!
But then some say, “How could God exist when all this evil stuff in the world keep persistin?”
Wrong question, ask again
How come God ain’t let you feel the wrath from sin?
What you thought last night deserves a first class flight to Hell
Where God doesn’t dwell, you got that right
But he brought back life on that cross that night
Christ died
You ain’t know that it cost that price?
All of God’s anger poured on His Son
Been together through all eternity
Now He was shun
Praise God for the life that was won for us
Ain’t got a beef with God because the Son was Christ

Look, man, some people say that God ain't real 'cause they don't see how a good God can exsist with all this evil in the world. If God is real then He should stop all this evil, 'cause He's all-powerful right? What is evil though man? It's anything that's against God. It's anything morally bad or wrong. It's murder, rape, stealing, lying, cheating. But if we want God to stop evil, do we want Him to stop it all or just a little bit of it? If He stops us from doing evil things, what about lying, or what about our evil thoughts? I mean, where do you stop, the murder level, the lying level, or the thinking level? If we want Him to stop evil, we gotta be consistent, we can't just pick and choose. That means you and I would be eliminated right? Because we think evil stuff. If that's true, we should be eliminated! But thanks be to God that Jesus stepped in to save us from our sin! Christ died for all evilness! Repent, turn to Jesus man!"

No Russian

In the newly released game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, there is a mission creating much disturbance in the gaming community. In essence, the level has your character acting as a double agent for the CIA but being forced to witness a terrorist massacre of hundreds of civilians in an airport so that you don't blow your cover. Now, the game does not reward you for killing anyone and it even allows you to skip the mission altogether if you wish to not engage in unnecessary violence.

However, my opinion, having played through the level myself and even killing one or two people in the level, I'm not going to take either road that this ought vilianize the developers at Infinity Ward or that there is an excuse for someone to take some twisted pleasure in killing innocents. Now playing through the campaign again, I skipped the level because I felt one time was enough. I know what happens and experiencing it again isn't something I seriously wanted to engage in.

In the end, I want to just take a step back and see what exactly was created in this gaming experience put together over one of the most impersonal genres in gaming, the FPS. In this game, your character is either shot point blank or stabbed to where the person you control visibly dies. This is also the series that had you fight a mission and then witness the detonation of a nuclear weapon in a city with you still in it. The next scene allows you to walk or crawl around until you bleed out and the level ends. These sorts of experiential media are what constitute the future of the gaming genre. At some point there will always be the games that allow you to step into the shoes of some fantasy life or individual but I believe that the games that fully immerse you into its story and characters is that which will be remembered and thought about for years to come.

Language, or Lack Thereof (from the book, Endangered Minds: Why Our Children Don't Think by Jane Healy)

What distinguishes humans from lower forms of life? Is it the capacity for emotion, community, or motor skills? Can a chimp convince his fellow ape as well as any orator or lawyer? Do the gorillas have their own Cicero or Demosthenes?

My seriously pointed questions simply serve to alleviate the tendency that we have as individuals in a thoroughly modern society to continue to kick our own language to the curb, so to speak. Speaking as one guilty of this practice more than I'd care to admit, what is the point of listening to our iPods for hours? What does it create but monotonous rhythms and, for the most part, some of the most simplistic uses of the English language I've ever heard. Though any pop music today could be victimized for the purpose of illuminating my point, I'd rather speak to the heart of what this tendency creates.

Have you ever had that feeling that you're just not able to get your point across? I might say that I've met people who live their whole existences not having the capacity to communicate well. Is this yet so strange? A life of being taught by our televisions or society's rock stars can produce nothing but such a grasp on the English language.

I'm aware by taking this stance that there are those that would seek to defend this supposed unrighteous victimization of that which they hold dear. Why shouldn't they? I would too if my life was bent around the things which these individuals have chosen to influence their minds(and I would say that at some times my mind has indeed been wrapped around simplistic pursuits). Hear me out. The brain is separated into two halves, right and left. The left is in control of the logical/analytical concepts and the right in control of imagination/emotion. Music and television, that simply serve to entertain or grasp your attention, rarely engage the left side of the brain. Because we as children were opened up to the world of such media at such an early age, it remains that much harder for adults to enforce good learning/education habits that will last longer than the classroom. How can teachers or parents fight against the juggernauts of pop music or the action movie? A song with a completely repetitive chorus edges itself into the now right-emphasized brain of a teen/college student much easier than a quality book or an important thesis.

So what can we do? Well, this is a message to anyone in charge of younger kids, who have this chance to make a difference. Because only so much can be done for older children who've already made up their minds on matters of the mind. Let's not make the intellectual an endangered species before their time.

Suffering

Romans 5

That's pretty much it, we suffer because God deems us able to endure and continue to improve in all things beneficial unto ourselves. What I mean here is one of two types of suffering. There is one that you can experience and then learn to live with in the future and then there is the one that is solely destructive of a person. Non-Christians and Christians alike are often confused as to this sort of dichotomy as if God wouldn't want people to go through the second type of suffering. Often we as Christians are all too eager to defend the first kind because we can "see it coming" or at very least we can "explain it away." But honestly, isn't that the same sort of thing that James talks about when he says even demons believe in God? Even the most hardened atheist can attribute good things to be taken from hard experiences. What the hardened atheist can not reconcile is what happens when a love one dies or when an individual learns of a terminal condition. To this they can only shrug their collective shoulders and chalk your situation up to Darwin being a jerk. Love God for the hard times, for it is there that he is at his closest. You may not feel it, and if that's the case I kinda want to blame you but compassion is something that I already struggle with anyway.

God is there! He wants you SO much to love Him. He's there in the troughs and valleys of life! Oh...my gosh [insert Ross Dixon's voice]. I'm yelling now because this is my prayer as well. It's my prayer recently to pursue God in a way that shows how I'm relying on him when I face struggles. But yeah, it's not easy. God supposedly gets this rap as being unapproachable and there's this book called God's Way of Peace by Horatius Bonar that takes this problem and discusses this beautifully. Because what we don't want to realize is that it's our fault, or at least Adam's. Sin distances us from God and creates strife in our lives. God says that we can find rest in him but this thing called sin has distanced us. Christ and his work on the cross is THE way and THE truth and THE life for peace in a world that's too messed up for any other explanation.