The Interview

She was a tall, lean women, with a slightly round face, which was presently propped up by a hand with four tall, lean fingers and one tall, lean thumb. She smiled pleasantly when spoken to, commenting on the weather in a smooth and comforting manner. But mostly she sat--quietly, anxiously, even pensively. And she waited in the stuffiness of that third floor office suite. The woman picked up a tall, lean brochure and began fanning her face with short twitches of the wrist--the air conditioning was broken, and it was hot for April.

Sigh

I don't understand joy; I find my definition lacking. Where is my dictionary?

The Memory of Elena

We spend our morning
in the flower stalls counting
the dark tongues of bells
that hang from ropes waiting
for the silence of an hour.
We find a table, ask for paella,
cold soup and wine, where a calm
light trembles years behind us.

In Buenos Aires only three
years ago, it was the last time his hand
slipped into her dress, with pearls
cooling her throat and bells like
these, chipping at the night—

As she talks, the hollow
clopping of a horse, the sound
of bones touched together.
The paella comes, a bed of rice
and camarones, fingers and shells,
the lips of those whose lips
have been removed, mussels
the soft blue of a leg socket.

This is not paella, this is what
has become of those who remained
in Buenos Aires. This is the ring
of a rifle report on the stones,
her hand over her mouth,
her husband falling against her.

These are the flowers we bought
this morning, the dahlias tossed
on his grave and bells
waiting with their tongues cut out
for this particular silence.

- Carolyn Forché

The Roma Journeys

Photographer Joakim Eskildsen has a recently published a photography series, "The Roma Journeys," documenting the "Roma" ethnic group spread throughout Europe and India. The photography is great, as is the history of the Roma people, more popularly known as Gypsies.

Lovely Tonight

To borrow a phrase from my good friend Justin, "this song completely dominates." I love this song, it makes me think of my soon to be wife. She was the last thing I saw coming, and when I think about how much I love her, I'm still surprised.

Take a listen.

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I need you to know this won't be broken
And all that we said will not be lost into the dawn
And you would be the last thing I saw coming
I'm still surprised

You are lovely tonight
You, dear, will guide me into the morning light
You are lovely tonight
Lay here beside me - I see the rest of my life with you

Alone we are fine; but when we're two, we are eternal
The moons have aligned our separate lives; here become one
And you would be the last thing I saw coming
I'm still surprised

You are lovely tonight
You, dear, will guide me into the morning light
You are lovely tonight
Lay here beside me - I see the rest of my life with you

All my life I've lived alone without you
All this time I couldn't find a way to belong

And you are lovely tonight
You, dear, will guide me into the morning light
You are lovely tonight
Lay here beside me - I see the rest of my life with you

- Joshua Radin

I Am Hungry

Exodus 16 is amazing. The nation of Israel has just seen God strike Egypt with ten terrible plagues, the last of these being the death of all firstborn males in the land of Egypt. God—He is a great covenant keeper—saves His chosen people, marking them with the purchase price of a lamb’s blood. Israel has been following the visible presence of God, the pillars of cloud and fire, and has seen the Red Sea parted by the breath of God. God is clearly working for His people, in magnificent and marvelous ways.

However, Israel is chronically lacking short and long-term memory. The people complain to Moses and Aaron, “Would that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full, for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger." (Exodus 16: 3) Israel has forgotten both the recent acts of the present, all-powerful God, as well as his promises of old to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In their sinful hearts they pine for a return to slavery, forgetting that they had previously “groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help.” (Exodus 2: 23)

But God is merciful, and seeing their need, provides sweet bread from heaven, manna, to sustain Israel for forty years. The bread is plentiful, filing, and it is deliciously sweet to taste. Here in Exodus we really have a picture of the New Covenant. God purchases His people out of slavery marking them with the spilt blood of the lamb. After they are freed, they are given heavenly bread that sustains them in their journey. Yet these are just a shadow and a copy of their heavenly betters—God is waiting to make a new covenant with His people, a better covenant. (Jeremiah 31:31-34) Christ becomes the mediator of this new covenant. In Christ, these former things are perfected and completed. Christ becomes the Lamb of God, with His blood fulfilling the law of the covenant, and covering man’s sin. Christ’s broken body on the cross, preached through His word, is our bread, our daily manna—by it we are encouraged, sustained, and transformed.

Before His crucifixion, Jesus celebrates the Passover meal with His disciples, and concurrently celebrates His perfect mediation of the new covenant,

And on the first day of Unleavened Bread, when they sacrificed the Passover lamb, his disciples said to him, “Where will you have us go and prepare for you to eat the Passover?” And he sent two of his disciples and said to them, “Go into the city, and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him, and wherever he enters, say to the master of the house, ‘The Teacher says, Where is my guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’And he will show you a large upper room furnished and ready; there prepare for us.” And the disciples set out and went to the city and found it just as he had told them, and they prepared the Passover.

And as they were eating, he took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.” (Mark 14: 12-16, 22-25)

Christ is our food, He is our sustenance, He our hope and our joy. Only in Him shall we be fed.

I’m hungry today. I am really spiritually famished. I know and believe Deuteronomy 8:3. There is only one place I can turn to be fed. Yet I find myself not believing Christ is enough, even wanting Christ to not be enough. Can I really believe that Christ is everything? Do I found myself saying that even though “my flesh and my heart may fail,…God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever?” (Psalm 73: 26) These truths of the new covenant are beautiful, strikingly beautiful and terrible. I find myself easily believing such truths intellectually, you might say in generally. But will this do? Is it enough?

Remember how I chastised the Israelites for their lack of memory and berated them for their sinfully stupid desire to return to Egypt? Well, it still stands as a stupid desire. However, I can sympathize, for I too am stupid. Like me, Israel believed in God generally—they hadn’t literally forgotten the plagues, the pillars of God’s presence, or the Red Sea. When actuality struck, when the reality of fear, exhaustion, hunger, and homelessness settled in, a general belief in a saving God provided little hope.

Here I see my greatest sin. The fallen heart says there is none greater than I. No one is worthy of my trust except I. No, instead I must say, “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” God may bring me into the wilderness where I may die of starvation, but still my heart will say “Blessed be the name of the Lord!”

My faith is weak yet I believe; help my unbelief.

Charity

We are all receiving Charity. There is something in each of us that cannot be naturally loved. It is no one's fault if they do not so love it. Only the lovable can be naturally loved. You might as well ask people to like the taste of rotten bread or the sound of a mechanical drill. We can be forgiven, and pitied, and loved in spite of it, with Charity; no other way. All who have good parents, wives, husbands, or children, may be sure that at some times—and perhaps at all times in respect of some one particular trait or habit—they are receiving Charity, are loved not because they are lovable but because Love Himself is in those who love them.

Thus God, admitted to the human heart, transforms not only Gift-love but Need-love; not only our Need-love of Him, but our Need-love of one another. This is of course not the only thing that can happen. He may come on what seems to us a more dreadful mission and demand that a natural love be totally renounced. A high and terrible vocation, like Abraham’s, may constrain a man to turn his back on his own people and his father’s house. Eros, directed to a forbidden object, may have to be sacrificed. In such instances, the process, though hard to endure, is easy to understand. What we are more likely to overlook is the necessity for a transformation even when the natural love is allowed to continue.

In such a case the Divine Love does not substitute itself for the natural—as if we had to throw away our silver to make room for the gold. The natural loves are summoned to become modes of Charity while also remaining the natural loves they were.

One sees here at once a sort of echo or rhyme or corollary to the Incarnation itself. And this need not surprise us, for the Author of both is the same. As Christ is perfect God and perfect Man, the natural loves are called to become perfect Charity and also perfect natural loves. As God becomes Man “Not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the Manhood into God,” so here; Charity does not dwindle into merely natural love but natural love is taken up into, made the tuned and obedient instrument of, Love Himself.

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For the dream of finding our end, the thing we were made for, in a Heaven of purely human love could not be true unless our whole Faith were wrong. We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like Him, only by being a manifestation of His beauty, loving-kindness, wisdom or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love. It is not that we have loved them too much, but that we did not quite understand what we were loving. It is not that we shall be asked to turn from them, so dearly familiar, to a Stranger. When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it. He has been a party to, has made, sustained and moved moment by moment within, all our earthly experiences of innocent love. All that was true love in them was, even on earth, far more His than ours, and ours only because His. In Heaven there will be no anguish and no duty of turning away from our earthly Beloveds. First, because we shall have turned already; from the portraits to the Original, from the rivulets to the Fountain, from the creatures He made lovable to Love Himself. But secondly, because we shall find them all in Him. By loving Him more than them we shall love them more than we now do.

- C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Eros

The event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that it should be transitory. In one high bound it has overleaped the massive wall of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being. Spontaneously and without effort we have fulfilled the law (towards one person) by loving our neighbour as ourselves. It is an image, a foretaste, of what we must become to all if Love Himself rules in us without a rival. It is even (well used) a preparation for that. Simply to relapse from it, merely to “fall out of” love again, is—if I may coin the ugly word—a sort of disredemption. Eros is driven to promise what Eros of himself cannot perform.

Can we be in this selfless liberation for a lifetime? Hardly for a week. Between the best possible lovers this high condition is intermittent. The old self soon turns out to be not so dead as he pretended—as after a religious conversion. In either he may be momentarily knocked flat; he will soon be up again; if not on his feet, at least on his elbow, if not roaring, at least back to his surly grumbling or his mendicant whine. And Venus will often slip back into mere sexuality.

But these lapses will not destroy a marriage between two “decent and sensible” people. The couple whose marriage will certainly be endangered by them, and possibly ruined, are those who have idolized Eros. They thought he had the power and truthfulness of a god. They expected that mere feeling would do for them, and permanently, all that was necessary. When this expectation is disappointed they throw the blame on Eros or, more usually, on their partners. In reality, however, Eros, having made his gigantic promise and shown you in glimpses what its performance would be like, has “done his stuff.” He, like a godparent, makes the vows; it is we who must keep them. It is we who must labour to bring our daily life into even closer accordance with what the glimpses have revealed. We must do the works of Eros when Eros is not present. This all good lovers know, though those who are not reflective or articulate will be able to express it only in a few conventional phrases about “taking the rough along with the smooth,” not “expecting too much,” having “a little common sense,” and the like. And all good Christian lovers know that this programme, modest as it sounds, will not be carried out except by humility, charity and divine grace; that it is indeed the whole Christian life seen from one particular angle.

- C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Friendship

"Lamb says somewhere that if, of three friends (A, B, and C), A should die, then B loses not only A but "A's part in C," while C loses not only A but "A's part in B." In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald's reaction to a specifically Caroline joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him "to myself" now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald. Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, "Here comes one who will augment our loves." For in this love "to divide is not to take away." Of course the scarcity of kindred souls—not to mention practical considerations about the size of rooms and the audibility of voices—set limits to the enlargement of the circle; but within those limits we possess each friend not less but more as the number of those with whom we share him increases. In this, Friendship exhibits a glorious "nearness by resemblance" to Heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah's vision are crying "Holy, Holy, Holy" to one another (Isaiah VI, 3). The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall have."

- C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Whom Do We Preach?

Trevor, my good friend, brother and roommate, and I had a great conversation last night about the place of Biblical exegesis and citation in writing. These thoughts sprung from that conversation as well as my time in Colossians 2 this morning.
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...I wanted to clarify my thoughts on writing and when one should or should not cite scripture. I am a huge proponent of writing as an art; in fact, it is one of my favorite personal pursuits. Thus, poetry, fiction, and even creative non-fiction does not, and usually should not, be explicit biblical exegesis; they are completely different genres. For C.S. Lewis to pull out a biblical citation in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe would be like a baseball player going to bat with a tennis racket; the absurdity of the sight would detract from the beauty and purpose of the writer's (or batter's) intent, not to mention that it just wouldn't work in either case. On a side note, as a Christian writing in these genres, I believe without a doubt, a writer's pursuit should be revealing truth which ultimately leads to Christ, but that is a tangent worthy of another discussion. In these genres, more often than not, you will not see biblical exegesis, a reality which I will not debunk.

However, when a Christian writer takes on the task of teaching and instructing other Christians or defending the faith, his attempts must be saturated with the Word of God. They must be drenched in the Word for three reasons, because it is mandated by God, because the Word of God contains the message of Christ, and lastly, because the Word of God is life and salvation for the elect.

We see in the Word that we are commanded to preach the Word of God, publicly and constantly.(1 Timothy 4:6-13, Deuteronomy 31:11-13) A good minister, teacher, or writer must be "constantly nourished on the words of the faith and of the sound doctrine,"(1 Tim 4:6) and he must also share that nourishment through his teaching. He must share the Word.

Moreover, the Word of God is about Christ; it is fulfilled in Him! (Luke 24:27) If all things were made by Him, through Him, and for Him, we must know everything about our Savior, Christ Jesus. Jesus is the Gospel, He is the good news.(2 Timothy 2:8-9) The good news of Christ is contained in the words of the Bible, God-breathed scripture.

Finally, the good news of Christ contained in the bible has the power to save. If we are to fulfill the Great Commission, the first thing we must do is preach the Word of God which has power, through the Holy Spirit, to regenerate hearts and cause rebirth.(James 1:18) The Word of God saves and through Christ only is there true knowledge that leads to salvation. All the mysteries of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Him. Every believer must be taught Christ so that no one is persuaded by lies or falsehoods.(Colossians 2:1-4)

Christ is so great and so glorious; how can we preach anything other but the Son of God incarnate, crucified as the propitiation for our sins, resurrected, and seated in glory at the right hand of God the Father. There is nothing more glorious than the completeness of knowledge and truth wrapped up in Christ. There is nothing else to teach but Him. He is lovely, wrathful, beautiful, terrible, and He is glorious!

Remembering What is Forgotten

The word of God is precious. It is a gem of unfathomable wealth. The word contains the very breath of God. It is the utterance of the Creator, the words of the Lord Most High. In its words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and books is the voice of the living God. The word is alive with the breath of the very Spirit that inspired the words at their writing. The word of God is a salve to raw and bleeding hearts. It is the answer to sin and suffering. The word of God is the ultimate story. The word is life and truth to those that will hear. It is good news to all mankind. The word preaches Jesus Christ, God become man, the substitution for our sins, our salvation and redemption. He is the Word, the beginning and end of all things. For and through Him were all things created. The word is the story of the Word, His death and resurrection. To Him be the glory forever and ever.

Green

Brendan James is one of my new favorite artists. His music and lyrics are unique and fresh, and so poetic. His song "Green" is my favorite...read, then listen and enjoy....(Be sure to check out his song 'The Sun Will Rise' as well)
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Zeppelin never left her, never died or second guessed her painted on her body
The stars would never hurt her never lie never desert her painted on her body
She prayed to God when she was young after the storm a calm would come above her
I thought that I could be the one to part the clouds before the sun above her

Green reminds me of everything we did it blinds me
It rushes through my head it finds me close to you again
Green reminds me of everything we said it blinds me
It rushes through my head it finds me close to you again

Mother moves to town again holds her upside down again, said it’s nice to see her
Brendan now you’ve got to come she’s where I get my smile from, I’d like for to meet her
Andrea was pain and pride a step behind oh how she tried I loved her
And all she wore from head to floor were shades of green from our store I loved her

And all for me she cried
And all for love
In retrospect wish I could have said three words that night
Oh me, oh me, oh me

- Brendan James

Engagement Photos

Ashley and I had our engagement photos taken this past weekend. Our photographer's, The Wiebners, did an awesome job. I think they're sweet!