The Dark Knight and the ends justifying the means

Lots of people have mentioned what an amazing movie The Dark Knight is.  And I think they are right.

But there are two things that I think are worth noticing about the movie that are a little more questionable.  They’re idealogical things.  And to get very deep into them, I have to discuss the movie itself.  So if you’re going to get all grumpy with me for blowing some of the plot of the movie, come back and read after you’ve seen the flick.  If you keep going, know that you’ve been forewarned.

The first piece of idealogy that’s creeping around is a bit of hypocrisy around whether or not the ends justify the means.

Early on, I was actually quite impressed with the statement that was made about the ends not justifying the means.  The Joker’s way in the film is to force others into things they wouldn’t do.  At first, he attempts to get Batman to reviel his identity.  Later he manipulates the people of the city of Gotham to kill the accountant dude.  After that he tries to get people to blow up a boat full of people.

In each case, he tries to control people by threatening a much worse result if they don’t do it.  Basically, he’s going to kill more people in each case if the people don’t do what he wants.

There are two different reasons that I think it’s wrong in these cases to do what the Joker wants.  The characters notice these reasons, too, and they point them out.

The first is that there’s nothing to stop this from continuing and no good reason to trust the Joker.  The second is that the ends don’t justify the means.  Just because a good result will happen, (or in this case a comparitively less evil result) this doesn’t mean that we should do it.  Wrong is wrong and right is right regardless of the consequences.  The ends don’t justify the means.

I realize that others might disagree with me.  I wouldn’t complain about if it the characters seemed to believe that the ends did justify the means.  But characters like Batman, Gordon, and and the scientific guy (forgot both the actorts and characters name… Can anybody help me?) all speak out against giving into the Joker because the ends don’t justify the means.

Until suddenly, the ends do justify the means.

At the end of the movie, they decide to pin the blame on Batman for the people that Harvey Dent/Two-Face killed.  In general, this would be a bad thing, to let Batman take the fall.  Lying is the wrong thing to do.  But suddenly, it’s o.k. to compare the ramifications of lying with the ramifications of not lying and choose what we’re going to do based on this.  And the scientist guy in general believes that Batman’s sonar thing is a violation of peoples rights… except that he’s willing to do it that one time. 

Perthaps the idea is that it’s not as easy as it looks, to avoid acting as if the ends justify the means.  Maybe the idea is that the Joker is right: we don’t have morals or values except when it’s convenient.  This brings me to the other idealogy that’s worth noticing in the movie.

I don’t know exactly what the name is for this, but there is this growing … thing in movies.  It started with horror flicks.

Once upon a time, horror movies had heroes.  Consider the first Nightmare On Elm Street.  I choose that precisely because it’s fairly low-brow.  It’s not exceptional, literary, or any of that.

But the climax of that movie is in the main characters taking the power back from Freddy Kreugar.  The idea is that they have to engage in an act of heroism.  The most important thing about humanity is that we can rise above our animal instincts.  Almost any horror movie where the main chatacters live, made before the mid 90’s, is one where the main characters were braver or smarter than the villians.

No matter how bloody, violent, or otherwise immoral a movie or book was, there was something moral about the final message: there is something powerful about goodness and humanity than evil and inhumanity.

Since that time, the ethos is this: our only power is the power of endurance.  We must sink to the level of the enemy or simply try to outlast it.   It’s not so much the violence of these movies as the nihlism that turns me off.   Consider the Saw movies, or The Descent, or The Mist.  In all of these, humanity and goodness are a liabality, a crutch.

Once screen writers asked “What’s the scariest situation I can create.” and I was o.k. with this.  It seems like the new question is “What is the most dehumanizing situation I can create?  How can I turn my human heros into animals?”

I started to notice how “The Dark Knight” fits into this mold when Bruce Wayne and Alfred had some conversations about endurance, and how some of the themes revolved around “Just how far will you go?”

Once in a Batman movie, the Joker might have jumped out at somebody, and we all would have jumped.  Once the most intense moment of these sorts of movies would have been the big battle.  But in The Dark Knight, the most intense moments are when The Joker tries to force Gordon to choose between his family members, as to who will live and who will die.

These two pieces of idealogy work together in the film.  In some ways Harvey Dent’s character is the most idealistic.  (Remember the scene where he and Gordon argue?)  He has the furthest to fall.  He is the most utterly transformed.

Batman does submit some of his own ends-don’t-justify-the-means mentality and he suffers for it as well.  Early on he won’t be bullied into taking off his mask.  But later, he allows his reputation and relationship with the police to suffer when he takes the fall so that nobody will know what become of Harvey Dent.

There’s a level on which Gordon is even less idealistic than Batman.  He suffers in the movie, but he doesn’t really get transformed.   He actually becomes the Chief.  The subtext seems to be: Gordon started off operating in the real world.  He benefits by it.  He seems to begin the movie closest to embracing the idea that sometimes the ends do justify the means.  That’s why he allows crooked cops to continue on the force.   Because he was operating in the real world, he was the one who ends the movie in some ways in a better position than when he started.

Am I thinking too much about all this?

Actually, I don’t think so.  I think it’s there, in the film.  I’m unsure if the script writers were aware of it, or the writers of the comics which these were quite closely based on.  Idealogy that we’re not conscious of is the most dangerous sort, in my opinion.  When these motifs pop up over and over again, I think it’s worth looking at.

(It’s tempting to go-on from here and explore the ways that The Joker seems to be a terrorist and Gordon, Batman, and company seems to symbolize the military and government.  But that’ll get hopelessly political and I’m trying to stay away from politics at this point in my life.)

This post was submitted to Randy Elrod’s Watercooler Wednesdays.  Click here for some great readings on art and culture.

Is Efficiency Godly?

While at the airport yesterday, I was watching the systems and procedures and protocols.  And I realized something.

There are many areas that the airport can be incredibly efficient.  But the more efficient it is, the more dehumanizing it is.  It got me to wondering: is this a strict, almost mathematical relationship?  As we grow in efficiency do we necessarily shrink in how much we make each other feel like real people? 

More importantly, what ramifications does all this have for the church?  I have this fear that we’ve made an idol of efficiency.  Brought it in to a place where it doesn’t belong.  In order to make this point though, consider the airport:

I arrived and stood in the first incredible line.  One person directed me the clueless about where to go.  At the end of that line a second person printed out boarding passes.  He sent me to a third person who sent my bag through the x-ray machine.  If something had looked funny a different person would have searched my bag or put it one of those Jimmy Neutron chemical-sniffing devices.

On my way to another a line: the next worker surveyed my I.D. and boarding pass.  One set of eyes watched the screen that x-rayed my bag and shoes.  Another person watched the metal detector I walked under.  At the gate one attendant makes announcements, another takes my boarding pass, another stands in the plane pointing me to my seat.

Something like 7 people in less than an hour.  Each person had this little tiny job to do: checking ID’s over and over again all day long.  Screening bags all day long.  Each person only dealt with me for a matter of seconds.

It occured to me that the airport is effectively a massive conveyer belt.  It is an enomourous factory.  It churns out travelers who appear safe and pointed in the direction of their destination.  The job of getting people to their destinations has been dissected into impossibly small bits.  People engage in only one of these bits all day long.  Like a worker, tightening the same lug nut on an endless line of cars all day long.

This is not a blog about how annoying airports are.  I am not saying that I want somebody to be my airline-provided friend who walks me through every step of the way.  The truth is, I can’t imagine how you would make airports work other than by turning passengers into a product, dehumanizing them.  There are simply too many people with too many things to do.

There are some unfortunate pieces of fall out from all this, though.

How many of us have been lied to because people know we’ll never see them again?  I remember this nightmarish day several years ago of traveling with my three young children and my wife.  We ended up with boarding passes all of the plane for the five of us.  The guy at the ticket counter smiled and said, “Don’t worry about it.  They’ll get it all straightened out on the plane.” Once on the plane as they split us up from our young kids they smiled and said “This should have been straightened out at the ticket counter.”

Two days ago I was supposed to fly home.  Our flight was cancelled.  Surprisingly, the airport was going to put us up for the night and provide some meals for us.  Because (this time) I was flying without kids, this was not particularly a big deal.  It was more annoying than exciting, but the idea of being put up in a hotel in a strange city is kind-of exciting.

My fellow-travelers pushed for everything they could get.  At the end, the lady promised them rooms that were suites and 24 hour hotel restaurants that they could eat at as soon as they arrived.  Coincendtally, these people ended up at the same hotel as me.  Niether suites nor 24 hour restaurants.  I smiled wryly: my fellow travelers treated the airline worker like a commodity.  In my opinion they were unreasonably pushy.  The worker pushed back: made promises she probably new (or atleast suspected) were bald-faced lies.  But it wasn’t people she was lying to.  It was just the product that she was responsible for moving down the metaphorical conveyer belt.  The belt wouldn’t be likely to bring them back to her, so she did what she needed to do in order to move them along.  She couldn’t care less about the right thing to do, or about how these people felt about her.  The whole action was a-moral, personality-less, dehumanizing, on both ends.

Churches and ministries that are succesful by a variety of different measuring sticks have adapted methods that popular in the business world.  I think maybe at the sizes they’ve reached this is unavoidable… Or perhaps they reached these sizes by adapting these practices.

At any rate, we have mission statements, wins, organizational flow charts… maybe I’m niave and these have always been around.  Certainly the Catholic Church can look more like an organization than an organism.  But it seems like we ought to be careful. 

It might not be good that business turn everything into a commodity, but at least it’s consistent with what they are supposed to be doing.  In the very act of dehumanizing people, the church sells out it’s very reason for existence.

How do we balance efficiency and humanizing people?  Is it even possible on a grand scale to mantain a focus on the fact that others are human beings, not products?  I know that it is for God: scripture tells us that we’re not headed back to a Garden but that we will enter into this amazing city.  It seems like imagining how this city is going to work is a much better model to imitate than the current business models…

God in the Cinammon Rolls

So, I’ve discovered cooking this summer.

I’m not up to anything elaborate.  Actually, nearly all of it has come from a cook book Emeril made for kids.  But it’s been both a yummy and interesting diversion.   It occurred to me that there all sorts of interesting theological ramifications to cooking.

This first occurred to me as I was measuring out the sugar for apple muffins.  I scooped out the sugar, and the measuring cup was almost full.  It occurred to me I had a couple choices: First, of course, I could declare that “almost full” is close enough.  If I did this, I’d dump it into the mixing bowl and continue on. 

Secondly, I could put the measuring cup back in the sugar bag and bring it out again.  When it came out, I knew it would probably be slightly over full. (Isn’t that how it always is: either too much or not enough?)

Finally, I could get all compulsive and level the top off with a knife if it came out that way.  Or I could pour the slightly over-full cup in the mixing bowl.

To use the under-full cup in the mixing bowl felt like an act of stinginess.  To pour in the overly full cup felt like an act of generosity.  And to level it off felt like an act of legalism.

I realize that this association probably says something about me having an unhealthy relationship with food.  But it also says something about the act of providing nourishment for my family, about taking care of their needs in a manner that is much more direct than what I am used to. 

 I’m the families “bread winner” (interesting term, that.)  Work can sometimes feel so disconnected from the money that pays our rent and grocery and other bills.  Investing some time in making some food is so much more of a direct line between me and the nourishment of my family.

As I was kneading the cinnamon roll dough, it was all between my fingers and smelling good.  The physical-ness of the act was probably therapeutic, but, it also felt somehow like an intimate connection between myself and my family, even though I was the only one awake at the time.   Maybe it was because it was like massaging somebody’s shoulders.  Maybe it was because generally I hate having sticky stuff on my hands and I was (in some tiny sense) sacrificing for them.  

I was putting those things together and hoping that it’d come out the way it was supposed to.

It’s instructive that God provides the building blocks in all sorts of different ways.  One of those ways is through the laws of physics and biology.  By all rights, flour and butter and cinnamon and eggs and yeast and stuff should just turn into a sticky mess when you throw them together.  But when you mix them and cook them in a manner that is consistent with the scientific laws that God set up, you end up with cinnamon rolls.

God actually does the real work in everything we do.   All we do is figure out how things work, put them together, and have faith and hope that it comes out the way it is supposed to.  We do the work of planting seeds.  Or sharing the gospel.  Or turning the key in the ignition.

God makes them grow.  Or speaks to the potential convert.  Or igniting the spark plugs.

And sometimes of course, the seed doesn’t grow.  The person doesn’t hear Christ in us.  The engine doesn’t roll over. 

Maybe these cinnamon rolls won’t turn out after all my work, too.  All we have in this life are recipes and hopes that they’ll turn out. 

Another theological ramification of cooking is what I learned about sacrifice.  If I had to kill the chicken I cook, I’d probably be more attuned to this.  I wonder if this is some of the reason that God doesn’t require animal sacrifice anymore.  (I know that there are theological reasons, but presumably, God could have arranged those rules differently if he’d wanted animal sacrifice to outlast the Temple.)  It’s hard for this representation of God’s love to resonate with us, now.

If I had lived in ancient Israel, I’d be killing an animal nearly every day to eat.   The act of sacrficing an animal would connect to my every day experience of killing an animal.   (Especially because of all of the perscriptions about blood and killing animals that the Hebrews contended with in the first place.)  If I lived in the time after Christ, I’d further connect these sacrfices with the crucifixion: if I knew my scriptures I’d know that he so often compares himself to water, and bread, and that this comparison is enacted in the Lord’s Supper.

It’s not even a meat-eating thing.  If I was a farmer, and I watched the crops I’d toiled “dissapear” into my families’ mouths, I’d still be aware that some things must die in order that my family might live.  In the act of cooking, I’m returning myself toward that realization.  The closer I get to making things from scratch, the closer I get to that realization: something had to die in order that I might live.

When I crack open an egg I am reminded that a chicken laid the egg.  If that egg had been fertilized life would have sprung from it.   When I pour in the milk I am reminded that a cow gave the milk.  In different circumstances, that milk would have nourished the cow’s young.  When I pour in the sugar, I know that sugar cane plants had to be hacked down, somewhere far away, in order for me to enjoy this thing that I am now making.

(There is a whole other thing in all this: connections are formed through my awareness that somebody hacked down the sugar plant, tended the chickens and cows, etc.)

If I’d bought one of those nuclear-power cinamon rolls thingees where you burst the canister and then heat the rolls inside, I might have reflected on the machines that created the thing.  Rationally, I’d know that just as many people (and other life forms) where involved in bringing together the various ingredients.  But this is just an after thougt: I’m not holding the eggs in my hands, I’m not pouring out the milk.   I’m not reminded of the fact that things have to die in order for my family to live if I’m operating in a world of prefabricated food stuffs.

It’s a subtle thing, not the first thing we might think about… but it’s incredibly important: things have to die in order for my family to live.

And it’s not a very long walk from this realization to a next one, so much more important: one of the things that had to die, so that my family might live, is Jesus.  His death allowed for the most important kind of life, a deeper life than merely living, a more eternal life than the body will experience.

I’m not saying that we ought to use cooking as a means of conversion, nor am I saying that cinnamon rolls are the place everybody will find God.  But He is everywhere, and as I reflect on this mornings cinammon rolls, I find him there in all sorts of ways.  (They were, by the way, delicious.)

This post was my submission to Watercooler Wednesday, Randy Elrod’s blog carnival.

How happy should we be?

In a comment here, David asked:

“i’ve spent some time thinking about the topic of happiness.. how happy should we be as Christians?”

I’ve been mulling that over.  I was hoping somebody else would come in and offer up some thoughts.  Because I think this is far from a complete answer.  But for whatever they are worth, here goes.

There is a brand of happiness which is shallow but pervasive.  It’s the sort-of happiness that we don’t have to work at.  It’s the result of outward experiences going our way, of getting what we want.  I would feel happy if I won a million dollars (or a thousand, or a hundred, or heck, even ten)

I think Christians have done a lot of damage by acting like God wants them to experience this form of happiness.  They have acted like they feel this form of happiness.  They have sought after it to the point of making it an idol.

I think that this easy brand of happiness can be a crutch to our spiritual development.  Scripture seems clear that sometimes God will challenge us with circumstances that are unfair and not happiness-producing.   Our faith is in the idea that Jesus was undeservedly crucified.  I don’t know of a more thorough argument against the claim that God wants our outside circumstances to be easy.

There is, however, this whole other thing.  It’s like intense satisfaction pepper extensively with joy.  It’s this feeling of worship-surrender.  It comes from recognizing that there are more important things than creating more comfortable life circumstances for me.

I wonder if the guy who wrote “Blessed Be” was thinking about this difference.  In the chorus, it seems like he’s saying “I’ll praise when you have the shallow kind of happiness” and “I’ll praise you when I have that deeper kind of happiness.”  Maybe I’m reading into it a bit… Does anybody have the lyrics to that song?  I can’t remember them word-for-word.

So maybe I’ve got five bucks.  I’m headed to get an iced coffee.  On the way, I see something God calls me to use that money on.

If I get the iced coffee I’ll experience the first kind of happiness.  If I spend it on what God wants me to spend it on I’ll experience that second kind of happiness.  It’s funny how addictive the first brand of happiness is.  And yet the second is so much more fuffilling.  Almost every time I engage in it (which isn’t nearly often enough) I think “Wow, I should do this more often.” And yet without fail, I go back to my buy-the-iced-coffee-for-myself ways.

(A great read which touches on this subject: The Geography of Bliss.  It’s a secular book that started with a list of the most happy and least happy places in the world.  The author travels to these in a quest to get at what makes the people happy.  Along the way he shares some pretty interesting research about the nature of happiness itself.  Some of the conclusions that jump out at me that he shared:

People who report going to church also report being happier.

People who give away a gift report being happier than keeping a gift to themselves.

We appear hard-wired to give in a more primitive portion of our brain than anybody would have expected.

This distinction between the two different forms of happiness is a product of my own brain.  Therefore none of the above mentioned research discriminates between them.)

Open Sourcing: Good, Bad, or inevitable

There’s an outstanding discussion about open sourcing here.

And it got me thinking:

Is the future collaborative or competetive?

More specifically: Will we continue to view our creations as just another form of capital?  Does the open sourcing mentality feed into the good things about capitalism?  Or does it cut these ideas off at the knees?

I probably don’t understand enough about the paradigm shifts that are currently going on to be able to answer these questions with any authority.  But here’s my initial thoughts:

Traditionally, we have looked at creations in a certain manner.  We’ve lumped together a wide variety of creations together in terms of how we treat them.

Roughly speaking, an inventor gets a several year head start.  A creation isn’t allowed to be co-opted by others for varying numbers of years.

If I write a novel I own it.  It’s my property.  If it’s been written any time recently and you try to publish it and make money off it with out my permission than I get to sue you and get most of the money you made off of it.

At some point, this product enters the public domain.  I don’t own it anymore.  Then anybody can publish it.  (Consider, for example, a Stephen King novel.  If I photocopied his latest novel and tried to sell it I would be in big trouble.  Shakespeare or the King James translation of the Bible are public domain and can be published by anybody.)

To the best of my understanding, medicines are pretty similiar.  The time scale is shrunk considerably.  But it’s the same idea: the company that invents a new drug gets exclusive rights to it for the first several years.  At some point, the generics are allowed to step in and compete.

There are problems with this system.  (For example, the fact that some life-saving drugs are not available quickly and cheaply to the third world is nothing short of evil.)  But over all, it seems to be pretty effective.  The two things that we need to balance are consumer’s rights and inentor’s rights.  If it becomes too easy to mass produce something a person worked hard for, then we have just killed the impetus to innovate.  If it became too hard to mass produce new ideas, then we have just killed the possibility of competetion.

In other words, as much as I might wish that a certain medication was cheaper for my family, or for a family in the third world, if companies were required to sell drugs just above the actual physical cost of making the medication, then they would not be able to fund the support network required to make modern pharmecology happen.   If a company can’t tack on extra money to the medications, then how do we pay the salaries of the reps. that sell the meds, or the researchers who developed them in the first place?

There seems to be no way around the fact that the more skilled a person is the more he will command in terms of a salary.  (Perhaps it’s a bit more elaborate than that: the skills need to be in an area where there is a demand, of course.)  Therefore, the organizations that figure out how to make the most profit will be able to attract the most talent.  (All other things being equal, of course.)

Perhaps the revolution of open source is in the realization that the most profit doesn’t necessarily come from the best corporate warrior.  In addition to squashing the competetion, a company might mantain an edge by fostering cooperation.

Nonetheless, so long as we operate under a capitalist system, it’s hard to imagine how the corporations won’t syphon off the best and the brightest.  And it’s further reasonable for these corporations to see a profit in doing so.

As individuals create, it seems like they have a right to reap the benefits of their creations.  Is their a way to balance the innovations that benefit all of us that might result from improvements on these creations with the right of the creator to benefit?

If I create an original song, computer program, or head ache remedy, I deserve to be rewarded for this.  My creation should certainly be protected from out-and-out piracy.  But where is the line between piracy and improvement?  Did Vanilla Ice improve that amazing “Under Pressure” Riff or did he pirate it in “Ice-Ice Baby?”  If you make my medication or computer program a little bit more effective, do you have the right to do so and then market your improvements right after my creation?  If so, how do we stop corporate juggernauts from making cosmetic changes to mom-and-pop operations and then driving them out of business through superior experience and financial clout?

Perhaps the morality is irrelevant.  Perhaps this train won’t stop whether it’s a good thing, a bad thing, or an indifferent thing.  Perhaps all we can do is just try to do is handle these events as best we can. 

I suppose there is a good side to this.  It’s not hard to envision large groups of non-incorporated people both serving as a check on the power of the corporations but also working supportively to those corporations and professionals which take care of them.   Perhaps it’ll be a bit like the relationship between amateur and professional astronomers over the last couple hundred years, where the amateurs supplemented the professionals’ data and observations.

This stuff is all in it’s infancy.  And I’m a bit out of my element in these assumptions.  What do you think?

In praise of the Church, II

Last post, I observed that the church is in something of a catch-22.   On the one hand, every time we mess things up, sin, or make mistakes there are many good reasons to be very public about this.  On the other hand, when we do things right, it can be hard to be as public about this.  There are a variety of reasons for this.  We don’t want to look like we’re just doing it to be noticed, for one.  It’s human nature to notice when things aren’t going right, for another. 

Seriously, have you ever contemplated the number of airplanes that don’t land in a fiery pit of death and destruction every day?  Have you ever read a newspaper article about the cars that reached their destination and failed to cause an 87 cause pile up?  How often do you hear stories about the thousands of politicians, generals, etc. who are playing by the rules and doing what they are supposed to be doing?  The most literal translation of the word “Gospel” is Good News.  Yes, I know that we’re supposed to be sharing Jesus good news, most specifically.  But it’s important here, that at the very root of our faith, is the command to share good news.

A perhaps related issue with the inherent challenges of a church getting good press: For lots of good reasons, we trust an outsider.  If I said “Such-and-such church is …” You’d take me seriously if you thought I was an unbiased observer.  If you felt like I had an agenda, like I had an axe to grind, it would be quite understandable to take what I say with a grain of salt.

However, this creates a dilemna.  The dilemna is this: if somebody loves a church, they are likely to want to get involved with that church.  Unless they are anti-social or a hypocrite (or both) they will want to get on board with it.  In the act of getting on board with a church, we lose some of our credibility in reporting how awesome it is.

More specifically: I say “Fellowship Church is awesome.”

It’d be natural to say “Well, of course you’re going to say that.  You’re involved with the church.  You want everybody to think it’s awesome.”

That’s one explanation.   But what if the causal arrow operated differently?  It’s equally likely that Fellowship Church is awesome quite independently of me, quite before me.  (Actually, it’s much more likely.)   I am attracted to this awesomeness and seek to serve.  I also want to report this awesomeness I see…

At any rate, this is an absurdly long winded introduction for a supporting anecdote that’s pretty straight foreward and simple.  I think this is a pretty good demonstration of why I love my church, though.

The other day we had this little drama.  A borderline crisis, almost.  (Things are pretty much o.k. now, thanks for asking.) 

Nobody was around.  It was the middle of the afternoon.  I called a slew of people and left a message that was some variation on “Hey, it’s me.  I have a  big favor to ask.”

It’s such an amazing blessing to have a list– a healthy sized list– of people I can call in a jam.

But it gets better.

Because these people called back.  Pretty much right away.  The calls came back quicker, I think, than if I’d left out the “I have a big favor to ask part.”

It is so very precious to be part of a community where people are eager to help each other. 

As awesome as it was to simply have a list of people I could try to call, it was twice as awesome that there were so many people who could help us, who would help us.

It was actually a little convicting.  Because there are so many people outside of our immediate circle so desperate for our help, so desperate to see Christ’s love.  Many of my fellow church members do an equally amazing job of taking care of people outside of their social circle.

I haven’t done as good a job with this.  I hope that all the amazing people on that list know that I would do everything I could for them, as they did for me.  But Jesus calls me to do everything I can even for people who can’t or won’t reciprocate.  My hope is that I can take this feeling of blessedness and use it to motivate me to do a better job of reaching out, into the world.

This post was submitted to Watercooler Wednesday, a Blog Carnival on arts and culture.  Click here for some great reads.

Fellowship Church rocks

Maybe you’ve noticed: the church doesn’t have a very good reputation.

One of the reasons that the church doesn’t have a very good reputation is because in many cases it hasn’t earned a good one.  Christians do stupid, heartless, self-centered, Christ-ignoring things.  A lot.

But there’s another reason the church has a lousy reputation.  That reason is this catch-22.

When you’re being all Christ-focused you’re not doing it for the attention.  A church that is doing the right things, for the right reasons, won’t advertise that it’s doing the right thing.  On the other hand, when bad stuff is going down, if we are being principled in our reactions, we are public with our admissions of guilt.

The result is that the church ends up looking worse than it is. 

I want to err on the side of bragging.  I like to think a bragging in Christ, for Christ, which is what we’re told to do.  (Can somebody help me with that verse?  It’s an epistle, I think a Paulian one, where he says “don’t brag about yourself… brag about Christ.) 

The church which I attend and serve in rocks.  I’d like to proclaim that again.  The church I attend rocks.

I’m going to spend a few posts trying to convey the depths and extremes to which my church rocks.  We certainly have our struggles.  To whatever extent we humans are in the drivers seat of the church we’re certainly screwing it up…  but I want to focus on the fact that there are some things being done right in the church, that sometimes Jesus is in the driver’s seat.

Story #1: At Sunday’s outside service, Pastor Marty preached about trying to see problems and issues from a God’s eye view.  And he gave us an experiment to do.

He passed out envelopes.  Inside the envelopes were bills.  One and five and ten dollar bills, and somewhere, a fifty.

(If you’re reading this you might be thinking “O.K., so he put a fifty, a ten dollar bill, and a whole lot of ones.” 

All I can say to this is I know only what three people got.  None of them were one dollar bills.  Not exactly scientific evidence… but it’s highly unlikely that three random people got the only amounts which weren’t one dollar bills.)

He challenged us.  To use the money, however much it was, for somebody other than ourselves.  We weren’t allowed to put it back in the collection plate.  We had to ponder the position from a God’s eye view and use it in the way we feel He would.  Then we have to log what we did at this website.

This would be an awesome exercise even if that’s all it was.  But it’s more than an exercise for us.  It was a profound show of faith and leadership from Marty.  Investing a ton of money in a project such as this is such a beautiful modeling of what Christ was all about: subverting the norm, investing in people, challenging people, taking risks, reversing the status quo.

I haven’t figured out what to do yet with my little envelope.  But it’s really awesome to pray over this decision and be mindful of the question of what to do with it… If it’s appropriate, I’ll share what I do with the money from the envelope in this blog.  And be sure I’ll be revisiting this topic in the next couple days: Fellowship Church rocks.

What we want, what we need

The excellent “Geography of Bliss” spends a couple paragraphs talking about some pretty interesting research.

The bottom line: The portion of our brain that generates our ideas around what we want does not connect to the portion of our brain that makes us happy.

This is not at all surprising to anyone who knows much of anything about human nature.  But it’s interesting verification.

It’s like that upcoming Eddie Murphy movie, where a whole crew is inside our heads, piloting us around.  One guy is in charge of deciding what they want.  The other guy is in charge of being happy.   If the two guys never talked, we’d expect “Eddie Murphy” to keep chasing after things, accumulating them, and still not being satisfied, always wanting more and more, never stopping because he’s never fufilled.

Boy, sure is a good thing we don’t work that way!!!  It’d be horrible if that were true.  (Note sarcasm, please.)

Rights and duties

I followed a post here with some interest.  It was on the topic of flirting.  A few different sides chimed in.

One of the things that emerged was that there were a variety of differences in whether or not flirting was o.k.  One of the differences was that there were a variety of different definitions of just what flirting is.  But some of the other differences were around who should make assumptions, and why.

Perhaps somebody says “I like your shirt.”  Some people felt that the person who says that bares the burden for not coming off as sounding innaprorpriately sexual.  Others felt that the shirt-wearer has an obligation to question, confront, or get out of the situation.

I don’t think anybody in that series of comments would deny that some responsibility lies with both parties.  But there were differences in emphasis.

I had two observations I wanted to make.  Both of them are philosophical points and might apply to this in a variety of ways.

The first is that we tend to avoid occasional big problems in the name of daily little successes.  I don’t know if this is always wise.

Let’s suppose I had a happiness meter.   We score a positive number every time a happy event happens.  We score a negative number every time a sad event happens.  The size of the number corresponds to how happy or sad the event is.

Perhaps confronting somebody is -15.  Wondering if somebody is saying something inaprorpiate is -30.  Dealing with people making untrue assumptions about us  is -25.  All these are results of allowing people to engage in certain behaviors which might be classified as flirtatious.  Ending up in court charging somebody with sexual harassment is -1000.  Ending a marriage is -100,000. 

Feeling good because somebody noticed you have a nice shirt on is +3.  Having people notice that you don’t segregate yourself like a junior high kid at a dance is a +1.  Making a connection with somebody is a +2.  These are smaller but they pop up much more often.

If we were rational, we’d look at all the minuses that are likely to occur.  And we’d look at all the plusses that are likely to occur.  It would be worth it if the plusses outwiegh the minuses.  But I think that some times we’re not rational.  I think that some times, we see that there are big minuses and just don’t do things, regardless of the benefits.  I think that behaviors which some consider “flirtatious” are this sort of thing: we don’t do it to avoid the costs, even though the benefits make it worth it.

I’m not saying we should flirt in every sense of the word to our hearts content.  The more flirtatious we become the greater chance we have of venturing into the territority of really unfortunate things (court, divorce)  The more likely these things are to occur the less rational it is to engage in the activitity.

My second observation is this:

It was interesting that most of the discussion was really focused on rights.  Our society is founded on rights.  I’m allowed to do this.  You’re allowed to do that.

One of the problems that I think happens is the concepts of rights isn’t very biblical.  That’s a huge statement.  It’s a vast oversimplification.  I’m sure there are dozens of verses to prove me wrong.

But on the whole, Jesus doesn’t talk as much as what we have a right to as he does what we have a duty to do. 

A perfectally good ethical scheme could pop up from either approach.  In fact, you could create two nearly identical societies from rights-based ethics and duty-based ethics.

For example, I could write a consitution that says “You have a right to free speech.”  Or I could write a constitution that says “You have a duty to allow people to allow people to say what they wish to say.”

You couldn’t tell, by looking from the outside, which way they expressed this, if both ideas were perfectally followed.

So the thing I noticed is that the discussion about flirtation focused a lot on the rights of the person speaking, and of the person listening.

I don’t know exactly how it all plays it, but I think things start to look different if we shift gears.  If we focus on the duties of the person speaking, and the duties of the person listening, some of this disagreement just fades away, I think.

What do you think?

distraction and rest

I am not the sort of guy who you’d think of as a type A personality.

Maybe more like type H, for hippie-ish.

Or type Z, if Z is the opposite of A.

I don’t think of myself as the sort-of guy who always has to be going, going, going.  I don’t think of myself as the sort of guy who worships the idol of efficiency.  And maybe this was the problem: I’m not on guard in this area, I wasn’t wise enough to watch out.  So I was blind sided.  This whole spiritual battle happened.  And it snuck up on me.

I’m a father of three.  And a Special Education Teacher.  And the director of small groups for my amazing church.  And the leader of a small group.  And I have a second (paying) job in retail.  I have this passion for writing and performing poetry.  And writing prose.   And of course I blog.  And I’m usually reading about three books at the same time.  (Right now it’s The Geography of Bliss, The Protectors, Walking with God, and White Apples and the Taste of Stone.  All are quite good.) 

Due to some intense family stuff, over the last year, I reached this point where I had intense extra family responsibilities.  Very slowly those have been resuming a “normal” level.  For a while they were tremendous.

This last year, my alarm rings at 5:40 on week days.  I have sometimes had two days where after school I went to my retail job and arrived home at 10:30 or even 11:30 at night.  I’ve had maybe an hour in the afternoon to catch my breath and scarf some food.

I’ve had numerous weeks where I’ve gone without a single, full day off.  I’ll work my second job on Saturday or be working on small-group or other church related responsibilities on Sunday.

Please don’t think I’m whining here.  It’s my responsibility for using  discernment in my schedule.  I’ve worked hard at praying about what isn’t a wise, Godly use of my time.  I’ve been able to cut out some.   I haven’t been to a poetry reading in six months, probably.  And for most of the school year, I cut down from reading several books at a time to just 1.  Nonetheless, I continue to work on this.

Furthermore, I’m not bragging either.  I’ve come to the conclusion that God has wanted this season of my life to be busy.  After much prayer and thought I haven’t figured out a way to cut more out of my schedule.   If you’ve shown the discipline to lead a more focused life, you should be bragging, not me.

I just say all this to establish a simple fact:

I’m a busy guy with lots of stuff on his plate.

And when the school year ended this year, you’d think I would have rejoiced.  There have been times I have longed desperately for a little relief in the demands on my time.  In June, a couple weeks back, I got one.

And it was brutal!

I can only describe it as a spiritual battle that happened next.  I was grumpy and depressed and angry.  The worst part was how worthless I felt.  Like such a slacker.  Sitting on the other side of it, I have this clarity about it. 

There were some areas I feel like I’d neglected.  If I’d been rational I would have siezed the opportunity to take care of my soul’s needs for rest and relaxation and also used this time to get caught up in the areas I’d fallen behind in.  But I was in the middle of such a funk that I couldn’t do it.  I spent time on useless stuff: moping around, playing stupid (and obsolete) games on the computer, watching mediocre television, listening to music that doesn’t uplift me…

This could have lasted all Summer.  And what would have happened then?  The School year would have started, I would have even been more behind.  Less rested.  More discouraged.  Even without the pressure and demads of my teaching gig I would have not accomplished much, and I would have felt like a failure.

Satan views me like a gerbil and he puts all these treadmills before me, and sometimes I jump on them and I exhaust myself and he laughs.

God rescued me because that’s what he does.

I started reading The Bible every day again.  (No, I “inexplicablly” still couldn’t find any copies in the house.  Biblegateway.com rocks!)  And then there was the day we lost our electricity.

We spent an afternoon with no power.  And suddenly I got it, that whole Sabbath thing about how many of the ultraorthodox Jewish people don’t even turn on (or off) lights on The Sabbath.  They don’t drive, they don’t use electronics.

I won’t be adopting any of those practices on a regular basis.  But I learned something.

There is a difference between rest and distraction.   Without power, most of my distractions were stopped cold.

What are some differences between rest and distraction?

Rest is quiet.  Sometimes literally but always figuratively.  Distraction is usually loud.  If it doesn’t make noise on the outside it makes noise on the inside.

The quiet of rest allows us to get to what is really going on on the inside, so we can hear our hearts and hear God.

The noise of distraction drowns out God’s voice and our own quietest voices.

Rest is biblical.  Many ways of resting are ancient.  We are close to forgetting some of them.

Distraction has been mastered in the modern era.  We are getting incredibly good at learning more and more about how best to distract ourselves.

Rest is fufilling.  If we are healthy we will reach a point where we’ve got all we need.

Distraction is addictive.  We need more and more to reach the same high.

God gave me this day of rest, real rest.  And in it I heard that he loves me.  He first reminded me that he’d love me if I never accomplished anything.  But he also reminded that I’m a busy guy who has lots on his plate.  The fact that I wasn’t working over the summer as a teacher was a blessing that allowed me to focus on the other things that God has put on my heart.  And as I realized this, I’ve started to do it…