death to life and beyond

chapter 35 of the book of Isaiah talks about God making things new. isaiah paints a beautiful picture of the New Jerusalem (or God’s coming Kingdom) will be like. the New Jerusalem is an overwhelming picture of God’s grace. verse one of chapter 25 calls the world a “desert wasteland blossoming”. i especially enjoyed the passage that said, “Then the lame shall leap like deer, And the tongue of the dumb sing”. i love this passage because it shows how extreme God’s mercy is. not only will the lame walk, they will leap like deer! not only will the dumb talk, they will sing! it reminds me of John 10:10, “…but I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly”. God does not just give us life, He gives us life to the full. God’s kingdom is going to be so far beyond just good.
when i read this it makes me want to remember to be joyful, because of the Lord’s mercies. it is so easy to forget that God is good when we see such devastation in the world caused by sin. everywhere you look there is war and selfishness, a desert wasteland, if you will. it is encouraging to remember that God is in the process of doing His redeeming work. He will make the wasteland blossom. He has brought life to me, and in turn it is my job to reflect God’s love and mercy on others. i want to respond. God is redeeming His creation, and i want to be a part of it. here is a song by sufjan stevens that makes me think about God’s greatness and how He lets us take part in this redemptive work. i'll put some lyrics below too:


if i am alive this time next year
will i have arrived in time to share?
mine is about as good this far
i'm still applied to what You are
and i am joining all my thoughts to You
and i'm preparing every part for You

i heard from the trees a great parade
and i heard from the hills a band was made
will i be invited to the sound?
will i be a part of what You've made?
and i am throwing all my thoughts away
and i'm destroying every bet i've made
and i am joining all my thoughts to You
and i'm preparing every part for You

some of the ideas in this song are taken from Isaiah 55, also awesome.
love you all : )

pretty

i think tattoos are beautiful. i wanted to show you guys some options i'm thinking about.

the Lamb of God symbol looks like this:

















"The next day [John the Baptist] saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" -John 1:29 it represents Jesus!

the fish trinity symbol looks like this:














this not only is a symbol of the Trinity, but also the greek work "ichthus" is a sort of acronym for the phrase "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior".

i suppose i decided i really like symbols with animals incorporated and of course, i want it to have personal meaning. as far as body location i have no idea, but don't worry, there will be no tramp stamp.

thoughts?

family gathering

i am so glad that there are people that love Jesus and each other. today i went to tom and barbara’s house. about 20 people showed up with a white elephant gift in one hand and a dish to share in the other. i got to have some great conversations with interesting people about topics such as: pizza places, knitting, astro-physics, and making soap. we all talked together, ate food together, read the Word together, laughed together, and prayed together. it was beautiful. i am not familiar with most of the people who were there, but i didn’t feel like a stranger. i felt like part of a family. how amazing it is to be part of the body of Christ.

at said gathering, there were some of the coolest white elephant gifts i have ever seen. i just happened to get a book that is a collection of works by sigmund freud…in german! my mom got a little bank from ukraine; it was a little fat man…with a hammer and sickle on his belly! other gifts included, an iron towel rack, teddy bear salt and pepper shakers, and (my personal favorite) a neon lighted guitar wall clock.

Say some prayers for my dad, he’s really sick and frustrated about it because he can’t do much.

on christmas

well, i'm safely in lancaster county, despite the fact that a plane apparently crashed on the turnpike shortly before i got there. http://www.wgal.com/news/18309442/detail.html?rss=lan&psp=news thanks for making sure i wasn't hit by a plane rob. i suppose that's why God let me sleep in past my alarm this morning.

getting on to this christmas buisness. i decided this year to make all of my gifts. i am resurrecting the crafty person within me and putting thought and effort into my gifts. we spend so much time caught up in the trap of consumerism and forget that Jesus gave Himself...not crappy gifts like tickle me elmo or the unicorn princess "my horn can pierce the sky" (see the morrocan christmas episode of the office). ambridge christian center is also kind of going along with this theme. here is an amazing video they showed last sunday:



so true.

so close i can taste it

as my last official act of rebellion and procrastination i will blog rather than finish my independent study. i really do have a problem. this independent study crapness is the last thing to cross off of an extensive to do list that i feel has existed since the beginning of time. i can’t wait for that sense of peace i’ll feel when it’s all done.

but first, let me reflect on this past semester. in some ways it has been the best semester ever, and in some ways it has been the worst, but i thank God for every experience He’s given me, because i know it’s all a part of His awesome plan. let’s look back at some of the highlights:

i got my first apartment, and i live with an amazing girl named jessica!

said bye to jake as he left for wildhorse canyon : (

had fun with friends at homecoming

football game with jessica

did ground-breaking research with amazing friends

got to see ambridge christian center start having sunday services at ambridge high school!





my roommate got engaged : )












went on a boat cruise in pittsburgh with friends

i learned that gender is not dichotomous.

spent a ridiculous amount of money on food

did some learnin'

taught rob and krista about gender differences in facebook profiles

woke up at an ungodly hour...in the name of science

went to a halloween party


wow.
what a semester.

love your enemies? really?

Christ’s coming was not at all like d-day. d-day was when a huge army went to “defeat” the evil regime headed up by adolf hitler. as much as we love to see that day as a time when evil was conquered. the truth is that God calls us to defeat evil in an entirely different way.

if you are a christian i can infer that your model for living is the life of Jesus Christ. a tough task, and it is a much tougher task than we often think about it as being. we seem to be like, “ok, being nice to people is hard, not lying is hard, not gossiping is hard”. yes, all of those things are hard, but there is so much more to loving people than those kinds of commandments. if christians are modeling Jesus, they should go so far beyond that because Jesus loved in a radical way.

back to the idea of d-day. how would Jesus have handled the situation? how we did? probably not. how did Jesus conquer evil when He was on earth? well, ultimately He died on the cross to defeat evil for good, but lets think about His everyday life. His teachings were pretty clear, “You have heard that it was said, ‘And eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on the right cheek turn the other to him also…”(Matthew 5:38). Ecclesiastes tells us that there is, “A time to love, And a time to hate; A time of war, And a time of peace”. i think that what He says in the sermon on the mount is Jesus’ way of saying that there was a time for war, but now is not that time. it’s kind of hard to get around these teachings, yet, we insist that there is more to the story; i think that's our sinful nature. the fact is, Jesus didn’t say “turn the other cheek except when (fill in lame excuse for violence here)”.

in the book of Isaiah, isaiah prophesies about the coming Suffering Servant (Jesus) by saying, “…He had done no violence, Nor was any deceit in His mouth” (Isaiah 53:9). this prophecy is true. Jesus was not a hurter, He was a healer. even to those who were defending good, Jesus insisted on loving rather than acts of violence to solve the problem. the prime example is in Matthew 26 when a huge group of people with swords and clubs came to arrest Jesus. one of Jesus’ friends who was with Him decided to defend Jesus by pulling out his sword and cutting off the ear of the high priest. Jesus doesn’t like this at all. he says, “Put your sword in its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Or do you think that I cannot now pray to my Father, and He will provide Me with more than twelve legions of angels?”. good point Jesus. why wouldn’t we just trust God in this situation? why can’t we let go of all of our earthly thoughts that tell us that we need to take care of a situation our own way instead of the way God told us to? what is interesting about this passage is that after Jesus says this the disciples and everyone else who was with Jesus peaced out (Matthew 26:56). seriously, they ran away from Jesus, who was God! obviously the thought of not being able to defend yourself is scary. the thing is...it’s what God calls us to do. flat out. our command from Jesus is to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. as hard as that is to live out, i think i’m gonna give it a try.

Jesus was ridiculously counter-cultural, especially when it came to loving people. don’t get me wrong, we need courageous people to go to places like iraq, but not with guns. christians should go to those places with the intention of loving the enemy like Jesus commanded. i think it takes a lot more courage to go armed with love than with guns. we need to trust in God’s method to take care of things, not our own. our job is to obey His commandments. so love your enemy.

in fact, beyond just not shooting people, let's ACTIVELY love people. let's find CREATIVE ways that we can GO OUT OF OUR WAY to love people. i mean, that's how Jesus did it after all. He went way out of His way to love us.

little things with great love

i think its interesting that us christians feel that we need to go away somewhere to preach the gospel when we can live out our lives like Christ in everyday life wherever we are. now of course i am not condemning to go overseas to share the love of Christ, i think that’s awesome, but if you can’t afford to go on a missions trip why not do something in your own neighborhood to share Jesus with others. better yet, save your money that would be spent on travel and do something in the community you live in. social justice advocate catherine doherty once said,

“The duty of the moment is what you should be doing at any given time, in whatever place God has put you. You may not have Christ in a homeless person at your door, but you may have a little child. If you have a child, your duty of the moment may be to change a dirty diaper. So you do it. But you don't just change that diaper, you change it to the best of your ability, with great love for both God and that child.... There are all kinds of good Catholic things you can do, but whatever they are, you have to realize that there is always the duty of the moment to be done. And it must be done, because the duty of the moment is the duty of God”.

do what you can where you are. carry out a small act of justice in your hometown, speak out for the oppressed and ignored in your neighborhood. love your neighbor, literally. but here a problem arises. you see, us humans never really seem to want to do what is right. philip k. dick, that author that wrote about the nature of reality, made a statement related to this in his article,

“The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.”

lets change the world in the name of Christ by doing little things with great love.

my head hurts

so i read this article about the nature of reality and all that. it was written in 1978 by this science fiction writer. it’s actually not as lame as it might sound. in fact, you should read it. here you go: http://downlode.org/Etext/how_to_build.html. insert a shout-out to adam here for telling me to read it. and now for some excerpts and thoughts, hopefully they are sort of coherent:

“Do not believe — and I am dead serious when I say this — do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.”

this does seem Biblical. 2 Corinthians 5:17 says,“…if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new”. the universe is moving in such a way that it is going towards the kingdom of God. it doesn't necessarily move from old to new on its own, God uses His people as His tools to do this redeeming work. we are called as christians to engage the world around us and find the redeeming qualities of creation and culture. as followers of Jesus, this should be our goal! but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, we as His followers must be truly changed by Him in order to be able to bring change to the world. After all, “a glass can only spill what it contains”.

the author of the article also talked about how the world around us affects how we understand what is real,
“Because the bombardment of pseudo- realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans — as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides…Fake realities will create fake humans.”
this makes me think about how a relationship with Christ helps us to understand what life is really about. John 10:10 says, “I have come that you might have life and have it to the full.” God wants us to get close to Him...the actual source of Truth. that is how we can have full life, complete with meaning.

don’t be confused now, we can know about God, but not know God Himself. there is a difference. the relationship is key. in Matthew 7 Jesus tells a crowd of people, “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven…Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘Depart from Me, I never knew you…’”. Jesus wants us to talk to Him and to know who He is.

i believe that more we learn about the character of Jesus the more we can realize that God didn’t come to make bad people good, He came to make dead people alive (credit goes to pastor mike from today’s sermon at ambridge christian center). he wants us to have life to the full through the means of a relationship with Him. so how can we know about the nature of reality? we can have life to the full which means a relationship with Jesus and doing His work. life doesn’t get any more real than that.

i am really only touching on this subject. read the link for lots of interesting thoughts.