Jesus is God. Serve Him only.
Code tells a story
I could perhaps tell you a story of two star-crossed lovers. Their romance. Their joy. Their tragedy. Their pain. Their anguish. Their untimely deaths.
I could tell you this story, but it might be called incomplete, because these unhappy two are merely players on a greater stage. Perhaps the greater story is about two houses. Their bitterness. Their history. Their sons and daughters lost. Their murders. Their vengeances. Their honor. Their shame.
There is a greater story still, in which the houses merely play. It is a story of cities and nations, kingdoms and empires. Their rises and falls. Their mighty wars. Their explorations. It is a story that spans the entire globe.
Every story told is held within a larger. The layered stories grow until they extend beyond the teller and their telling stops.
Cutting through the layers are single threads which join the tales, single paths which rise from sphere to sphere until they reach the final edges of their universe.
The tragedy of two young lovers whose deaths bring down their houses.
The splintering of houses which sows chaos through their cities and turmoil through their nations.
The collapse of nations into civil strife and a war that spans the globe for a hundred years, a hatred that last a thousand.
Or, I could tell you a story about two small bytes.
Two small bytes out of billions, joining together to form a single word, one instruction out of millions. They are the smallest part of a tiny function in a short file. Their file belongs to a component which works in a system.
Eventually their story grows beyond their universe, past the reaches of their machine. Their system is written by a team; held by a project. The project has a sponsor. It has stakeholders – users, related projects, executives.
The company is owned by a larger company. It plays in a larger market in a still greater economy.
The team have spouses and families who share their joy, grief and stress. It is a human story.
It is the fragile nature of software that when the two bytes fail, the instruction fails.
The function throws an exception, the module returns with an error.
The system crashes and the users swear.
The sponsor explodes and the executives execute punitive action.
The company shudders, the market takes notice and the economy recedes.
The team members go drinking before returning home to harangue their spouses and children.
C’mon folks, test your bugfixes already 
There’s absolutely nothing to see here.
Thank you, Lighthouse Family.
Thank you for your utterly meaningless lyrics which manage to sound vaguely emotional and touching.
Thank you for your mastery of positive word association, where you jam as many emotion-evoking words into a song as possible.
Thank you for ignoring poetry, coherence and message for the sake of a feel-good experience that leaves me feeling marginally wistful.
It’s a comfort to know that we are gonna be forever you and me. That you’ll always keep it flying so high in the sky of love.
Thank you for a music video which perfectly matches your song – a collection of unrelated sensual images designed to incur maximum undirected emotion.
I can always rest secure in the knowledge that whenever I want to walk down a path of feeling that goes nowhere, with no beginning or no end, you’ll take me there.
Thank you.
Dodging Spiritual Snake oil
I’m trying to work through some material on prayer that I’ve been reading for the past couple months. It’s dynamite stuff, and it’s something I desperately want to be able to communicate clearly. Consider this a faltering attempt to lay groundwork for my own understanding.
Dodging Snake oil
I like healthy skepticism. I do. I try to keep some on hand for any occasion, because a guy never knows when he needs to haul out a clue-by-four and start whacking. At least… that’s what I tell myself.
How many times have I read the inside jacket of the newest Christian title: “Be prepared to have your life completely rearranged.” “Are you ready to experience God in a whole new way?” “Warning! This will change your life forever!”? How many times have I gone away disappointed?
There are two common-sense checks that I perform when I run across something that claims that it holds the awesome power of God to be released into my life.
- Is it simple?
- Is it difficult?
Simple
I can’t think of anything important about God that is complicated. How he acts, how he speaks, how he relates to us… It’s all very simple. His commands are simple, atomic things that any person has the capacity to do. Confess. Repent. Believe. Forgive. Love. Serve.
It is very easy to misunderstand our own capacity to complicate things and blame God for it. The things of God are very simple.
Difficult
Easy answers exist only in inverse proportion to how much we desire them. The areas of life where we most demand them are precisely the areas where they don’t tend to exist. Why?For things we care about… if there were an easy answer, we would have found it already. Important problems that have magic bullets never remain important problems. They become old news… yesterday’s pain. And honestly, with today’s problems looming, who has time to revisit yesterday’s?
So if something claims that it has awesome transformational power… Why am I not seeing people dancing in the streets? [Maybe I am ] Why am I not dancing in the streets?
Maybe God only works on Tuesdays. If so, that’s okay. But… if that’s the truth, I expect to see street-dancing on Tuesdays.
Any doctrine that promises life-change has to do one of two things:
- Pony up, and show me the street-dancing
- Explain what is keeping the life-change either hidden or at bay
Generally, life changing stuff is difficult, and the street-dancing is proportionally limited.
There is one case, however, where I’ll accept an answer of, “It really is that easy.” It’s quite a big case; it’s the case where the answer is there, and it’s easy, and I don’t want to accept it. This is the Boiled Okra case: It’s on my plate. It’s edible (nourishing even!). Everything is perfectly simple, perfectly easy and yet… I don’t want to eat it.
Just tell me, “It’s easy, but it’s Boiled Okra” and I’ll cut a whole lot of slack in accepting the lack of street-dancing.
Are these enough?
These checks are just a beginning for dodging spiritual snake oil, but they are (I think) a solid beginning.
Don’t tell me that God acts in a way that is not simple enough for everyone to understand. I don’t want any part of a God that caters to an intellectual elite.
Don’t tell me that it’s easy, unless you can come up with compelling evidence for why the problem it solves has not gone the way of smallpox.
Religion at its… finest?
When the head of the church offers to personally baptize, the birth rate jumps 20%.
Things get ugly fast when religion starts to lead people away from acknowledgement of the truth. What is the truth here? What is more important, the hands which bestow the blessing or the God from which it comes? Are people seeking out God or the patriarch?
Does the church’s behavior in this case reinforce the truth or erode it?
Of course, there’s a lighter side to this. From the article
“To have a child baptised by the Patriarch is so very special.”
…
“The babies will be briefly dipped into a gigantic inflatable font after receiving a blessing from his Holiness, Ilia II.
I implore you, dearest reader – whenever you hear the words, “gigantic inflatable font”… RUN!
I never said it was smart
When I’m trying to accomplish something, and I’ve tried and failed using the the familiar, comfortable approach..
Obviously the problem is that I didn’t use enough of it!
One more time, with feeling…