Just then a woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak. She said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be healed.”

Jesus turned and saw her. “Take heart, daughter,” He said, “your faith has healed you.” And the woman was healed from that moment.

When Jesus entered the ruler’s house and saw the flute players and the noisy crowd, he said “Go away. The girl is not dead but asleep.” But they laughed at him. After the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took the girl by the hand, and she got up. News of this spread through all that region.

- Matthew 9:18-26

My study of the Bible has been devoted to the Old Testament for at least a year now. Realizing how long it had been since I visited the Gospels, I began reading Matthew again a few weeks ago. I have been stalled on this passage for a day or two now, believing there is more to it that I need to think on. Writing has always been my best form of organized thinking, so I share my thoughts now here.

(more…)

So long(.)
Since I’ve tried courting(,/;)
I’ll leave(.)
The decision(’)s for you(./,)
To make the best choice(./,)
You must know about the fishes and birds.

I am a bird(.)
Who says(?/,)
“I fly close to heaven(”)
(“)And hunt you,
(“)But don’t(.”)
Think I’m a bird(?/;)
I am a fish(.)
Who drowns in his doubts(?/.)

I do(.)
Your beauty(:)
Injustice.

I am whichever one of these(;)
That you are not(.)
A bird or a fish should not matter.

Dammit.

27 November 2003

punc·tu·ate (pŭngk’chōō-āt’) v. -at·ed, -at·ing, -ates. 1. To provide (a text) with punctuation marks. 2. To interrupt periodically. 3. To emphasize or stress.*

Interwoven

So long
Since I’ve tried courting
I’ll leave
The decisions for you
To make the best choice
You must know about the fishes and birds.

I am a bird
Who says
“I fly close to heaven
And hunt you,”
But don’t
Think I’m a bird
I am a fish
Who drowns in his doubts

I do
Your beauty
Injustice.

I am whichever one of these
That you are not
A bird or a fish should not matter.

Dammit.

27 November 2003

in·ter·weave (ĭn’tәr-wēv’) v. –wove (wōv’), -wo·ven (wō’vĕn), -weav·ing, -weaves. –vt. 1. to weave together. 2. To blend together: intermix. –vi. To intertwine.*

–
*Source: Webster’s II New Riverside Dictionary. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.

The living liquid wraps itself around
The wound, and starts in perfection to bind
My skin to skin; my body mends itself
In finely-spun linen from He who dwells

Outside of corporeal things—of pain and death,
Of pride, of want, orgasm, sin, or breath;
For when this vessel is devoid of blood
His own He’ll give, and bring me home for good.

(30 October 2000,
7 May 2004,
16 November 2008)

The lyrics are inspired by Psalm 8:1 (an oft-adapted psalm), and Habakkuk 3:18.

Tom Burke and George Walsh - “The Will”

(Note: You may need iTunes to open this file. I couldn’t get it into mp3 for some reason; I’ll convert it a little later if requested.)

The following is a quick list I jotted down today as I thought about what good things could come out of another Great Depression, if the Government does what it should do and leaves the economy alone. It’s a little idealist, at times tongue-in-cheek, but not altogether farfetched, I think you’ll agree.

On October 1 2008, the Government is still deadlocked on a bailout bill for Wall Street. The American economy collapses into a serious depression. As a result:

1. Businesses change their hours and expectations of their employees. They start conserving energy and allowing people to telecommute more often. This allows fathers and mothers to spend more time with their children, and takes millions of cars off the road, putting less strain on the infrastructure, transportation systems, the environment, and emergency services.

2. Households remove extraneous expenditures, such as cable television. As a result, families start spending more time together. Crime decreases in the next generation.

3. Gas prices rise beyond affordability, in the long term causing extended families to choose to live nearer each other. Since they can no longer afford assisted living facilities, the elderly are forced to rely on their families, who take them in in their later years. This results in increased health and longer life among those elderly who do not suffer from debilitating health conditions. (In future generations, effect #7 ensures fewer health complications among the elderly.)

4. Americans finally start pursuing alternative energies in a meaningful and serious fashion, creating millions of new jobs. The Big Three car companies all but abandon combustible engine vehicles and bring back the electric car, revitalizing their revenues, creating thousands of new jobs, and removing millions of gas-burning cars from the road. (See also #10.)

5. Entertainment expenditures of all sorts plummet, causing the populace to seek cheaper forms of amusement, such as outdoor play, camping, hiking, sports, and fishing. This in turn helps families form stronger bonds, and brings more of the population into rural, rather than urban, areas, because the lower cost of living there. (See also #3.)

6. As a result of spending less time with iPods, the Internet, movies, and television, mental and physical health increase across the country. The number of obese children decreases dramatically, as well as those on Ritalin and with juvenile diabetes. The drug industry takes a big hit when sales of antidepressants drop to record lows, and loses a chunk of its hold on Government.

7. Families who have moved into rural areas begin growing their own vegetables in order to save money. Americans’ health improves.

8. More young people are forced to take after-school and weekend jobs in low-paying positions to help support their families. This bolsters their confidence, gains them experience in the work force and pride in their work–and means that Americans now want and take the jobs that in the recent past were relegated only to illegal immigrants.

9. Americans become distrustful of large, global banks and start putting their money into smaller local and regional banks. This mentality helps grow small businesses across the country, and stunts the formation of gigantic financial institutions such as AIG that can, alone, threaten the economy’s stability.

10. Transportation of humans and cargo by train increases greatly, helping stem global warming.

Color and spiky sound wrestle on my tongue,
Trying not to be swallowed,
wanting to linger in their power
over the yawning mind, stretched
in fatigue and want,
despite itself.

When will I be full?
Bite by byte I gnosh and scarf
and comb my tongue, my brain
with its senses;
I stage plays with ASCII characters,
I play symphonies from system errors,
I paint and unpaint with Ctrl+Z.

Will I ever swallow my meal,
or will it swallow me?

A very good man at my second church gave my Sunday school class some very bad advice one day. I was about sixteen. We were discussing ambition, in a general sense, which my male, work-oriented mind translated to “choice of career”. My friend, the teacher on that day, said, “You shouldn’t aim to do what you want in this life, because if you do what you’re good at, then who gets the glory? That’s right: you do, not God. So look for the thing that God wants you to do, and follow after that.” At the time, this made sense to me. So a little switch-track was flipped in my brain, and my thoughts began a course along these newfound neurons, striving to find that thing that God wanted me to do, the plan he had for me. After all, if he has a perfect plan, then he’s got one thing, and one thing only, in mind, right?

For years I labored to find this thing. It became a sub-conscious search, always running like daemon program in the background of my mind, in constant contrast with whatever I was doing at that period of my existence. Life moved me forward, from school to school, from school to work force, and still there was that uneasy feeling that I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing: i.e., what God had in mind for me. It bludgeoned me day by day because I felt powerless to change my course without knowing what I was supposed to change to. I had no pride in what I did, because it was just the layover to what I eventually would take hold of, and then I’d have satisfaction.

Then I reached my current church. And one day, our pastor gave a unique sermon. He talked, as so many Christians do from week to week in America (for I believe this is a singularly American way of thinking) about God’s plan for our lives. And he said something I’d never heard before. He said, “I believe that if you’ve trusted Jesus Christ for salvation, then wherever you are now is exactly where God wants you to be.” And he didn’t limit that to the present: he went on to say that God had most likely been working in our pasts up to this point, even before we came to believe, and that he would continue to work faithfully in the future, so that every step we would take from here on would be likewise counseled and sanctioned by God’s will and his hand.

I’m ashamed to say that this seemed unnatural to me at first. My heart balked at it. Humans have free will, and we won’t always make the exact right decision, will we? If we were really all aligned with God’s good, pleasing, and perfect will, we’d be in Uganda handing out food to the poor and hungry, right? Hubris told me that it was up to me, and me only, to direct my steps and make sure I was conforming to God’s plan. Yet at the same time, because of recent lessons that rendered my human arrogance a less useful defensive weapon, my heart was also more open to this idea of constant guidance than it had ever been, and when I thought more about it, I realized how beautiful an idea it really is. Why wouldn’t an all-powerful God be in control of his servants’ lives? Why wouldn’t the benevolent God we know exists be intervening for the best? My hubris, creeping up just outside my peripheral vision, as it’s so skilled at doing, had kept me from realizing my creator’s power. As if I could usurp God.

This is a matter of pride. I’m not saying my former Sunday school teacher was an awful, prideful man; but I think he fell prey to a misaligned belief system stemming from the bad kind of pride.

Christians tend to deride the word pride. We fear it. It was Satan’s sin, after all, and one could say the mother who gives birth to the other deadly sins. This is true: it’s a dangerous thing to be. But it’s also a healthy one.

We English speakers have only one word for the light and dark sides of this human state of mind. We say, “He’s too prideful,” but we also say “You should take more pride in your work.” When my parents told me they were proud of me, I never thought they were encouraging satanic behavior. The good pride is a healthy part of life: it is the tasty fruit of a job well done, a day full of hearty work. And it spurs us toward improvement, encourages us to love what we do. But Christians get ascetic about pride. We think we need to eschew every form of it, run away from the very word in any sense. So we stop taking pride in our jobs, in our families, in our accomplishments, because we think it somehow drains the reservoir of God’s glory on Earth. As if we could ever remove a drop of it. Even though all creative energy comes from his Spirit anyway, and all glory will eventually flow back to him, I really don’t believe that God hordes our accomplishments for himself, robbing us of any sense of satisfaction for them. I think he shares. And I don’t think he minds if we’re proud of them, especially if we’re proud in the knowledge that it’s all a gift from him anyway.

So when you look at your son, be proud. When you finish the project on time and under budget, be proud. When your daughter gets her scholarship, be proud. When you get done cleaning the bathroom, hey, be proud for that. God rejoices with you. Just remember the Source.

And I really think we need to jettison this belief in one special way that God is going to direct our lives. Wherever go, there we are for him to use. Let a little hippie in: go with the flow. Let the wind, or the job, or your Ford Escort take you where you wind up. The fields are white all across the globe. There’s always work for you and God to take pride in.

I grew a lad with rules to heed.
I grew, a lad without a need,
’til worldly travails herded me in
and taught me a new way to grin.

As shrewd as snakes, as mild as sheep,
we pray the Lord our souls to keep;
that as we wend our way through winds
and navigate with furtive grins

We not forget our spotless kid,
who protests while we keep him hid,
and nags and kicks us in the shins
lest our loopholes knot into sins.

We scuff the line, we scoff at waste,
we season our lifestyles to taste;
Long as our conscience is not seared,
we keep our heads, and fend off fear,
we’ll slip and slide through caves and through
the things we say, and elsewise do.

How many times God has done this for me. I am incredibly fortunate to have an earthly father who exemplifies God’s true character: loving but just, expectant but understanding, patient but demanding discipline. So many of my friends have no such father to look up to, usually because he has left, divorced not only from his wife but from the entire family. This enrages me. At a time in my life when I yearn for a family, I can’t imagine leaving one for selfish pursuits. But I can understand it, because I have experienced the squishy, weak heart that prompts a man to run. To silence his true self and take the silvery path. And since that is the man some of my friends have as a father, it’s become very difficult to convince them of a true, loving Father who created them.

As I look back on that day I was lost, I wonder at a certain memory. I could be fabricating it, but I recall being steady, reassuring myself that I would get out of there. Even if this was the case, it’s only because I knew my father was near. And even as I try to be self-reliant, composed and strong in the midst of self-doubt and situations that chisel at my hope, I can only come to the same conclusion now. I am now a man, roaming in a forest in the midst of my life, and I still need a guide. Sign of weakness or of wisdom, it’s the simple truth.

Now that I find in myself the curious but natural yearning for a child, I think about my own ability to be a father. On some days I have simple confidence; on others, utter skepticism. It is as if I have the opposite problem of those friends I described. How could I hope to be the steadfast example that my father was, when I change so frequently and so extremely? He never did. He never wavered.

But ah–there’s the mistake.

My father never spoke about his work. He worked in corrections, a job no one really wants to take home at the end of the day, so this is understandable. But I always found this curious, why he never vented, never really talked about the challenges he faced there day to day, in that world we as kids could only fantasize about in preparation for our entry into the workforce. But an interesting thing has happened since my father’s retirement. He has begun to speak about those things: the lessons he learned, the very methods of management he used. It’s become a huge boon to me as I take his place in the workforce now. I suspect, and hope, that he’ll start to describe the shortcomings and doubts he held while raising his children.

Just because my father never spoke about his doubts, though, does not mean they didn’t exist, as I was so naively wont to believe. Even as adults we can elevate our parents (or other role models) to superhuman status, but we do so because we cannot see the back of the rug, the gnarly cords and tangled yarn that make up their imperfect yet successful lives. We see our own unfinished and thrice-mended weaving, and weep at the horrible job we think we’re doing. But God sees effort. He sees us trying, and that speaks more to him than we know.

I have no idea if or when I’ll have kids. But I do know that I’m not going to let fear stop me from it. I won’t know what kind of father I’ll be until I get there. But my father will help me. My father will help me.

Of course, I’ve got to find a wife first.