In Case You Were Wondering

New Website!

2011-02-16T06:34:00.001-08:00

Please continue on to my new site, located at

www.benstevens.de

Thanks so much!

Ben

Younger Barth on Sacramentalism

2010-11-24T08:16:00.000-08:00

An interesting, if ancient, article from the younger Barth on what he called "creeping sacramentalism".

Full Story in Time Magazine - 1957

Belgian Catholics Form Alternative Churches

2010-11-18T11:50:00.000-08:00

Lay leaders in Belgian Catholic parishes have begun taking matters into their own hands.

Click Here to Read the Full Story

On Divorce After Disclosure

2010-11-18T11:22:00.000-08:00

As an intramural debate among Christians, the issue of whether a person can be born with homosexual attraction, or may openly and unrepentantly practice homosexuality, is a complicated. But quite apart from that issue, it is unclear to me on what basis any person, homosexual or not, may excuse themselves from a marital commitment to another person, regardless of what becomes clear to them about themselves in the course of that marriage.

A person who realizes, after a decade of marriage, that they made a less than optimal choice in a partner is not thereby excused from the commitment they made before God to be with that person forever. How, then, even if we were to accept the idea that Scripture can be reconciled with homosexual practice, may a man who is married to a woman excuse himself from his commitment to God, whether he is homosexual or not, upon deciding or realizing that he is homosexual?

Click Here to Read the Full Story

Check Out Dropbox

2010-11-13T10:07:00.000-08:00

When Becky and I were moving into our apartment, we put our printer on the network. This made it easy to print from wherever we were (with our laptops) in the house.

I wanted to do filesharing as well, but that's usually a much more difficult thing to do. So luckily I stumbled on dropbox.com before long. The video on their (very simple) website explains it all, but dropbox is a free and incredibly streamlined way of making a home network, in fact a global file-sharing network, without having to buy any hardware or spending any money.

I HIGHLY recommend it. :)

Dropbox - Home - Online backup, file sync and sharing made easy.

Friends from Germany

2010-09-01T10:52:00.000-07:00

Newsletter No. 18

2010-08-14T07:27:00.000-07:00

Our Prayer Magnet (by Dave Niblack)

(May we send you one?)

One week from today I'll be a married man. In the last 48 hours a large chunk of our support has come in. I've finished moving all of Becky's stuff into our new apartment. And I have made a major strategy decision which will affect the rest of my support-raising process. All that to say, there's been plenty on my mind! In the midst of all of the busyness, God has been in my face about the way this “time of testing” brings all the things I still have to learn from Him to the surface. So I would appreciate your prayers in these important days. Let me explain my prayer requests briefly.

First, God has been teaching me that “the faithless heart disdains the provisions which God makes for us in the wilderness” and that “while weakness is not a sin, faithlessness is”. These are quotes from recent sermons my pastor has preached from the book of Numbers, and they have been heart-piercers and perspective-givers in these last weeks. So with my faithlessness in view, and now major questions in my mind about why God made marriage and how I am to think about it in an eternal context, there's been lots of practical theologizing going on. Please pray that I would refuse “to disdain God's provisions”, and that He would sow a greater faith than ever in my heart.

Support-raising itself has been going well. A large church and a good friend have joined my support team in the last 48 hours, and that puts me very, very close to 50% of my original support. With Becky on board, I will have to raise more than I did as a single, meaning that it's not 50% of my new support goal, but it is a great milestone on the way to raising what we need to make our work possible. Praise God for His provision!

Having traveled at least 1500-2000 miles each month since January, I know that traversing the country takes a greater toll on me than I anticipated it would, and it is especially hard on Becky for me to be gone for weeks at a time. So, while I intend to continue traveling and building my network anywhere I can, the “major decision” I've made is to work hard to raise support in Chicagoland as well (making it easier for me to work and be close to Becky). I am not that well established in Chicago, so the plan has its difficulties, but I have already seen God answer prayers about extending the borders of my network here. Please pray that that would continue. We will be doing a “referral drive” (an idea I had) beginning in about a month to try to get 250 new contacts, so please pray for that effort as well.

God has been good to me, and it has been in spite of myself. Please pray that Becky and I will have a joint vision about why we are here, why we have each other, and why we are on this awesome journey to serve Him and the Gospel in Germany. I hope for us, as I hope for you, that we will see every moment of our lives as a moment of God's story.

Bis Bald!

Ben

P.S. Beginning next month we will be sending paper newsletters as well. Would you prefer to receive a paper newsletter / like one of those in addition to our email newsletters?

Newsletter No. 17

2010-06-11T13:07:00.000-07:00

I have dated more in the last 4 years than any person should ever have to. But there was one who got away, a cute and intriguing girl who worked at the library several years ago (who was dating someone at the time). You can imagine my relief when, after having not seen her for years, she reappeared at the library one day last August. Well, in the time since she has become my best friend, and in a little while more she will be my wife. Let me tell you that story, about our recent trip to Germany and engagement, and what the future holds for us as a team.

Becky Wilhelm is from Antigo, Wisconsin, works as the editor of a trade magazine in Arlington Heights (here in Chicago), and is my dream girl. I can't think of anyone I enjoy talking to more or who is (somehow) able and interested in talking to me about my many and often eccentric passions. The practice of being so deliberate about seeking a partner has led to me to date lots of different kinds of people, and having met so many people helps me see her for the unique person that she is.

From the beginning, we have had a unique relationship. I had just been appointed as a career ministry partner with GEM when we started dating, which is to say that I had just signed on to leave the country soon and permanently. This obviously puts a bit of a strain on any budding relationship. So we have been very intentional from the start. This past semester we took a class together called Perspectives (a great intro to missions), and on June 1st we returned from 11 days in Germany together. It was a trip with the insights of modern sociology in mind: we visited major cities and small villages, friends who spoke English well / knew our culture well and others who couldn’t speak a word of English and had little knowledge of our culture, etc.

It was a terrific experience for both of us and my heart only aches that we still have some more things to take care of before we can leave to be there together permanently.

Having known for some time now that we wanted to get married, and having sought out the approval and blessing of Becky’s parents some time ago, we have already completed a lot of the planning. That will come as a relief to anyone who knows that the wedding is at the end of August. We wanted to wait until after our Germany trip to get engaged (so as to have some time there together to pray about life/ministry together) but get married soon after our return (so that we’d have plenty of time to get used to being married before we ship out at the completion of our support raising).

We were lucky to get a great deal on an apartment close to her work, and this will cut her commute down from around 45 minutes to around 6 or 7. She will continue working as an editor for a while as I continue to raise our support. (Special thanks to George and Judy Goodman and Red and Jo Lyons who graciously opened their homes to me to make full-time support raising possible!)

I am currently pledged up to about 40% of my personal support and pushing hard towards getting to 50%, at which point I will begin to receive income. This will be important for us to make married life fiscally feasible. We would appreciate your prayer and greatly appreciate the 40% of support which is already coming our way. Additionally, because there will be two of us instead of just me, my support level will be going up. In all of this, God has already worked the miracle I was asking for: a girl like Becky. So please pray that I won’t be troubled by the (comparatively trivial) need of finding the support we need to make our ministry possible.

Thank you so much for all of your support! I’ll be giving free guitar lessons this summer in a low income area nearby as part of a summer program, so please pray that that goes well. Also, please pray that I will get things lined up well for my next bit of traveling.

Let us hear from you. Soak up the summer. And in all of it, let every moment of your life be a moment of God’s story.

Ben

Redesign

2010-05-09T21:56:00.000-07:00

I was rather disheartened when I learned a few weeks ago that a publisher had passed on my book proposal. I feel to some extent that I have wasted a great (and unique) opportunity to hit a home run (as the proposal was solicited). At any rate, in the time since then I have thought of dozens of different schemes by which I could rewrite the material I have, material which I think is conceptually sound and which has been warmly received by many people (including published authors).

The proposal (and project) were weakened by my desire to put together a very comprehensive package of materials, one which would (in the space of three short books) walk a non-Christian from utter "alpha" through biblical theological "omega". The greatest problem stemmed from the delay in "getting to the good stuff" caused by the alphas and betas, in this case an intro to Christian apologetics (Book I) which was to be followed by an intro to the Spiritual disciplines (Book II). In both cases I ideologically avoided using the language of "apologetics" or "spiritual disciplines" and operated under the assumption that the reader would have or be willing to accept none of the prerequisite worldview commitments without thorough persuasion. (After thinking it over more, I think I was counting on delivering a kind of persuasion which sometimes even the Holy Spirit doesn't attempt).

I'm now hoping to take the first chapter of Book I, in which I ask the "pleasure principle" question, and link it to the "big story" topic of chapter one of Book III by means of a new chapter on the necessity for any religion (in the wake of the failed project of a "Christian Enlightenment") to be a revealed religion.

After connecting chapter one of Book I, which I think is great in its wide scope, to chapter one of Book III, which I think is great in its appeal to a metanarrative (without the Christianese), I'd then just go ahead with my plans for Book III. It will be a walk through of biblical theology, based around 7 distinct periods or epochs in der Heilsgeschichte (as I understand it), giving four pages to develop each of several subpoints of those "distinct periods".

To salvage the essays which were to be in Book I (almost entirely written) and which were to be in Book II (not written but a great source of interest to me), I'd just package them as collections. The first would be "Vodka on Friday, and Other Essays", and the second one would probably retain the original title of Book II: "The Middle of Somewhere".

I'd try to work the connective idea at the end of Book II, namely the East/West, "all action must eventually be undergirded by a motivation rooted in a belief about reality" piece into the larger compilation book, the one which would serve to do what a longer trilogy was intended to do.

I don't presume many more people than God and Becky Wilhelm will read this. So, God help me and Becky encourage me. :)

Newsletter No. 16

2010-04-17T08:06:00.000-07:00

I have never experienced anything in my life quite like raising ministry “support”. And I think the same thing holds for it as holds for restaurant and retail work: everyone should have to do it for one month. Well, I’ve now done just that.

I’ve been support raising for about a month and have raised somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of my monthly needs. God has been very generous to me. The month of May will be a 10,000-mile, 13-city whirlwind, and I will need your prayers during that time.

Support-raising is a very sanctifying exercise, but I have learned a lot about God, myself, and my community (friends, family, churches) in the process. I recently preached in Memphis on Acts 10-11, and in explaining about Cornelius (person who needed the gospel), Peter (person who brought the gospel), and the church of Jerusalem (people who made it possible), I was able to reflect a lot on exactly what it is that God is doing when he sends us as missionaries. I was grateful for the opportunity to preach, and I believe the message was well-received. If you'd like to hear it, click below:

I've already completed two trips through the South. This map shows the route for my next two American trips, one in May (black) and one in June (green). The full itinerary is listed below.

And this map shows my route through Germany in May. I've had to schedule a trip there last minute, but there are some exciting things happening and I'll try to bring you up to speed on those after I return.

Please pray specifically that during my support raising season, I will have opportunities like this preaching engagement, things that let me minister to others in ways that I am gifted. It can be a drain to spend entire days planning for a ministry you will have in the future. And, finally, please pray that I will learn the lessons of my own sermon and see it as a privilege to work on both sides of the ocean by building up a team here!

As summer approaches, I hope this note finds you doing well. Please keep me up to date on what's going on in your lives! I love little updates. Hope to see you soon. Until then, remember to let every moment of your life be a moment of God's story.

Ben

Full May Itinerary

May 1-6: Support Raising in Chicago land

May 7-9: Sioux Falls, SD

May 10-12: Kansas City, MO

May 13-15: Springfield, MO

May 16: Bentonville, AR

May 17: Memphis, TN

May 18-19: Chicago, IL

May 20-23: Tübingen, Germany

May 24: Leipzig, Germany

May 25-28: Berlin, Germany

May 29: Köln, Germany

May 30-31: Marburg, Germany

June 1-6: Chicago, IL

June 7: Begin trip through central Illinois and Tennessee

Proposed Chapter 2 Summary

2010-03-27T21:36:00.000-07:00

A man’s intelligence won’t do much for him if he’s doing his math based on inaccurate measurements. And, in the same way, all my thoughtful reflections on God and the path of following Him are in vain if my belief in God’s existence is just the byproduct of a evolutionary trick on my brain which developed to help our species survive and will eventually go the way of the appendix.

There are four false ideas at the root of the premise that belief in God is the result of an evolutionary trick on our brain.

1) That a mind which is disposed to believe in God(s) represents a primitive state of cognitive evolution, one which will eventually be replaced by a mind that has evolved and gained the necessary faculties to recognize and comprehend the true (naturalistic) essence of reality.

Whether there is a God/gods or not, this explanation is not logically tenable.

Unless there is, in reality, nothing like what we call “taste” or “opinion”, we have to recognize that two people who can discuss a given topic together (like, whether there is a God) must both inherently have the ability to think any number of things about that topic.

That is, any man who has attained the capacity to comprehend the “idea of the existence of a God” also has the inherent capacity to reject the “suggestion that there is such a being”, just as any man who understands what fascism is, is, by virtue of his comprehension, cognitively at liberty (whether he does so or not) to reject it.

What this means is, the moment when a certain species of animal gains the ability to conceive of God (and may therefore first “worship”), and the moment when a certain species of animal gains the ability to conceive of an explicitly god-less world, is the same moment. One is not more primitive or advanced than the other (in fact both are very advanced), and this only shows the extent to which our common belief that one opinion is more “primitive” or “under-evolved” is based on polemics, not reason.

I’ve recently discovered that there is a deeper significance to this point, but let me save that for a moment.

2) That thoughts about God developed, like all other “hauntings” of the human imagination: due to a number of circumstances, we let our minds run wild with what-if abstractions; those abstractions became real to us; and then we found ourselves overwhelmed and intimidated by the imminent reality of our mental creations.

If this account is true then it is a testimony to the ingenuity and perceptiveness of those who realized it, people who realized that the things they were inclined to think were an illusion.

But this explanation of the development of cognition is not founded upon on a realistic account of how peoples’ individual experiences with the “idea of there being a God” actually work. Let me explain.

When we attend a scary movie, we make a pact with the director of this movie: “I’ll offer you all the imaginative power which my brain can offer for dreaming up all kinds of odd things. Take me on a mental rollercoaster.”

And given the latitude which we give Him or Her, and the seemingly innate desire of humans to be a “part of a story”, it’s no wonder that we go home that night and sleep with the lights on (for fear that the film’s antagonist has become real).

But people experience God very differently from this. Instead of being sought out (and welcomed in by some kind of mental licentiousness), the experience of perceiving or contemplating upon the divine is more often “triggered”.

A student peering through a telescope, somewhere out in the country, may be out for a night of star-gazing and, after being taken aback by the grandeur and beauty of the universe, begin to ask himself very odd questions like “how is this possible?” and “did someone do this?”

An overwhelmed, underpaid immigrant may have their search for the divine triggered in a very different context, say in a moment of exasperation: “Why am I robbed? Why am I slighted? Does nothing I do matter? Do…you…care? Where are you? What are you?”

A first time mother, skeptic by general disposition, may find herself overwhelmed by the first experience of gazing deeply into the eyes of her child and process the thought, “might this chain of creation be a more profound thing than I’ve realized before?”

In each case, the thought may be unwelcome. Or it may seem like a wonderful and timely epiphany.

Either way, it is not so much sought as it is somehow “triggered”, and this sets it apart from the kind of “submit my brain on the altar of entertainment” thing we were just discussing.

Of course, it is fair and prudent to say, “just because you can imagine something doesn’t mean that it exists” but equally fair to add, “it is odd that so many people, from so many different walks of life, via so many different kinds of ‘triggers’, seem to stumble upon the same creative abstraction: the being we call ‘God’.”

3) That it is a belief which primarily exists to aid our survival.

This premise is more guilty of “missing the point” than of “being false”.

Looking out across a vista (or climbing a mountain to get there) and thinking to oneself, “Look what the divine has done” might actually lead to your demise, either because you stood looking while you should have been working for survival, or because climbing mountains is dangerous.

We do climb mountains, though, and I don’t think mountain climbing and all such activities can be easily explained away by saying “we do it to aid our survival”. For some reason, we as humans have a lust to perceive. We want to see and know (this explains a lot of our odd behavior). Climbing mountains are a part of that. And in the same context, a “sense or awareness of the divine” is (theoretically) the most unfathomably grand layer of that perception possible.

It means not only asking, and having the capacity and inclination to ask, “what” of what we see but also fusing the questions “why”, “how”, and “who” into one new kind of question: the question of a maker (however it is that we conceive of Him/Her doing this “making”).

And thus, in asking “Who is responsible for this?” we are only doing what is (for some reason) natural: seeking to perceive, even at the risk of not surviving, what there is to be perceived (and also who is out there).

4) That it is a belief which is related to petty aspects of the human experience, and that it constitutes a barrier to greater development of more worthwhile pursuits, like the humanities.

One can disprove this very simply: by performing amputations on all of the guilty parties. That is, if you begin removing and demonizing all of the parts of the human mind responsible for generating such things as theological reflection, you will with it cut the cords on those parts of our minds which make us humans at all (our interest and longing for truth, goodness, and beauty).

And this is tied to the final point, a point I want to humbly submit to anyone who (like me) has been bothered by the idea that those who believe in God suffer for not having “attained a higher stage of cognitive evolution”:

If there was a point somewhere in the history of our species when we were unable to assimilate the idea of “God” (as is the case for every other known living creature, our closest relatives included), then we have advanced past that stage. The ability to have a discussion on whether there’s a God or not comes as part and parcel of a giant leap forward which humanity somehow has over the rest of nature. And like all advancements, it will not be lost but layered upon.

When I was a child, I think I knew that I had fingers and toes. Now that I have studied anatomy, I have a more advanced understanding of what my body is. But I haven’t lost the simple understanding that I have fingers and toes, and I certainly haven’t lost the fingers and toes themselves, simply by virtue of the fact that I have developed further.

And so it is with our cognition. We may add layers on, as has apparently happened to us now with the “theological”, but the thought that further developments in our species would over-write, or erase the significance of the theological, is the thought that knowing more about one’s fingers and toes means losing a simple knowledge of them, or losing them entirely. It doesn’t add up. Reflections on the theological may therefore be expected to hang around and continue to be a part of the human experience, the advancements which we may experience in the future notwithstanding.

Make It Easy On Yourself: Get the Program Called RocketDock

2010-03-21T13:01:00.001-07:00

I recently had to get a new computer, and I split my budget so that I could get a net-book and an Imac. I'm really happy with the versatility and it seemed like a good idea to be able to use both platforms if I needed to.

People love Macs because they have amazing screens (true) and because of the way they are organized, around a "dock".

So I just want to pass this along: you can get a program called RocketDock which works as well (if not, I think, better than the Mac Dock) for your Windows machine. I use it and a program which hides my Startbar, something I barely need anymore, and I find the new setup to be much simpler.

If you choose to go this route, just observe which folders and programs you use regularly (probably only a handful if you're like me), drag them onto the bar (you can change the icons if you want -- some of the ones which come with it are pretty ugly), and you're ready to go. The Taskbar Eliminator takes the Start Menu out of the way, which I find reduces a lot of clutter, and you can toggle it on and off using "alt-t". By the way, the first time you use the Taskbar Eliminator (I'd just copy the program into the start-up folder of the start menu), hit "ctrl-alt-T", click the "Start with Windows" option, and then hit the x to close the window. (If you hit the button which says "exit", it actually closes down the program, which is probably not what you'll intend to be doing.)

I've included a screen shot to show how it looks on my little netbook. Anywho, I made the icons and the animation a lot more minimal than they are in the presets, and I downloaded a "skin" which looks just like the Mac OSX dock. Those are extras, but for me they were worth the extra 30 minutes. I spend a lot of time looking at this screen and it's helpful to have it look and function in a way which helps me get stuff done quickly.

You should try it :)

Newsletter No. 14

2009-11-13T21:13:00.000-08:00

Last week, while in Colorado, I was offered and accepted a job which involves working long term in Europe with German Christians. I will graduate with my Master of Divinity in 34 days. And in January, I will be embarking on a 10-city trip through Germany, meeting with mentors and visiting old friends, in preparation for my ministry there. Life is good. And, along with Tony Bennett, I’m convinced that the Best is Yet to Come.

As graduation nears, my primary preoccupation has been completing the overhaul of the missions fellowship I lead at Trinity. When I became the leader, I got together with past presidents and, after brainstorming about the group’s problems with them, decided to tweak the setup. So we renamed the group (now “The International Missions Fellowship”) and moved some things around. God has opened doors for us and we have gone from being a student led fellowship of 5 or 6 to a faculty-sponsored fellowship with exciting, well-attended weekly meetings and major events on national radio. On Thursday, over 100,000 people will hear a nationwide broadcast, on Moody Radio, of a panel discussion I organized for our missions fellowship (4:08 CST). Please pray that I will be able to solidify this new arrangement and that the relationship we have with Moody Radio, which has expressed interest in broadcasting our next two events, will be shored up before I leave.

I graduate on December the 18th, and I am surprised at my own excitement about the event! After graduation, I will spend a few weeks at home with family, and then plan to head to Germany, where I will be trying to hammer out the details of my work there, build partnerships, and also film a support DVD. People going on overseas assignment very often have big plans but few ways of assessing their abilities to put those plans into action. By way of this trip, I hope to sit down with some of my mentors and co-workers, revisit my plans with them, and then film their answers to the question: “Can Ben, with God’s help, pull this off?” If you have interest in the ministry at all, please let me know and I’ll send you a copy of the DVD, which will explain my plans, present the interviews with mentors, and give my answers to the “top ten questions” I get about work in Europe.

As mentioned above, I spent all last week in Monument, Colorado, in training and being briefed on the ins and outs of the organization I will be working with. It was an intense time, with 12 hour days and plenty of things to chew on. But I am confident I have found a respected and reputable group with whom to associate myself and look forward to partnering with them and with churches all over Germany in my ministry.

I have now come to that phase in my preparation during which I raise both prayer and financial support. It is an exciting time for me and I hope you will be in prayer for me and for the conversations and partnerships I will build during this season. If you yourself are interested, or you know of a church or an individual who might be interested, in helping support my work in Germany by partnering with me in prayer and finances, please pass this newsletter on to them and their name on to me. I would love to meet to share my story, especially if with those who have a particular interest in Europe.

Well, life gets busy. You all probably know that better than me. But I hope this winter will be an enjoyable one for you, and that we are able to stay in touch via things like this newsletter. Thanks so much for reading! Let me hear from you. And remember to let every moment of your life be a moment of God’s story.

Ben

Newsletter No. 13

2009-07-10T21:31:00.000-07:00

(Photo from a lecture I organized for our missions fellowship)

Last week, for the first time in years, I spent the 4th of July in the United States. It was a great day to be here, to listen to the 1812 Overture, and to reflect on my nationality. Of course, as irony would have it, I spent the day working. This is America, after all. But in spite of inconveniences like that one, my summer has been enjoyable, and, between you and me, I get the feeling that it constitutes the relative calm which precedes what may be a rather terrific storm.

For the first 3 weeks following my final exams, I was unemployed. That is to say, I needed a job desperately and didn’t have one. And that had never happened before. I hope it will never happen again, but the time was very thought-provoking and forced me to think about the horrible experience it must be for people who have families and mortgages to think about. During those weeks, I considered history’s solutions to the problem of unemployment: slavery (to pay the debt I owe), communism (to offer me a job), the welfare state (to pay me from another man’s work), and adultescense (to live off my parents, a luxury few have). None of those sounded especially enticing, and about the time I had been thoroughly sobered by thinking about it all, God provided me with a job.

I am normally rather pessimistic about one’s ability to see, in the short-term, “what God has been doing”, and avoid talking that way (to a fault). But given the options I had a short while ago, it is apparent to me that, at the very least, God spared me a lot of grief and depression by orchestrating my job hunt as he did. The thought of working from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. five days a week (the only job I could find) had begun to sound promising, and in retrospect I’m glad he closed that door.

At the present, there are two jobs vying for my time. The first and primary one is at a local Walgreens, just a mile down the road from my house. I can be found there regularly, helping customers and advising them to buy “The W brand, the brand America trusts.” The job allows for lots of chitchat with customers, a perfect complement to all the studying I do. And the second position involves proof-reading and editing a book being completed by my professor, Dr. Craig Ott, on the subject of church planting. He was one of the major reasons I wanted to come to Trinity, and it is a great honor for me to be helping him on this project now 3 years after coming.

In my spare time, I am completing applications for two ministry organizations and trying to finish my own first book, Haunted by Paradise. And as of late I have been fascinated with and playing a lot of jazz guitar. Pianist Scott Swingle and I hope to do some fun stuff in August, with me on vocals, so I’ll pass that along when we have it. I can’t wait.

This Fall, my last semester, will be light but full of fun stuff like my independent study, with Trinity historian John Woodbridge, on the topic of “the History of the German Church since 1800.” We’ve got neat things planned for Trinity’s missions fellowship too. I’ll be leading the group for one more semester and look forward to some great events. There should be more on that next time.

As I close, with all these opportunities and privileges on my mind, please pray that, in this last semester, my heart will catch up to my head so that I will be able to offer myself to any team or ministry as someone not only trained in but transformed by Scripture. The stories I heard all last semester about ministry failure and spiritual drift are not lost on me, so I would “covet” any prayer in that regard.

I hope you all have a great summer. Please contact me by email or phone if you have even the slightest interest in catching up. And as you’re soaking up the sun or enjoying a summer book, make sure to let every moment of your life be a moment of God’s story.

Ben

Judges 21:23

Newsletter No. 12

2009-03-07T13:26:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I joined the "quarter century" club, and the thought of being 25 has been every bit as sobering as friends promised me it would be. I have had a great semester, and relished the chance to do a bit of birthday celebrating with friends, but as I'm coming to find, both my birthday and my courses are giving me a moment of pause. Or maybe I should say, moments of pause.

Each semester at Trinity has had a slightly different ethos. And the ethos owes a lot to the classes I take. Last fall, for example, was "the culture semester". All my mental energy seemed to be focused on thinking about the way the gospel relates to society. So I was not surprised when this semester began to have a theme. But it has been overwhelming, nevertheless, because the theme has been "disaster".

I took a course on “Conflict Mediation” recently and was blown away to hear the instructor talk about the dismal situations she encounters and the simply unbelievable ways God breaks people and reconciles them through her ministry. My counseling class has forced me to listen (just listen), for long periods of time, to people as they explain their struggles. An all-day workshop on forgiveness just about did me in emotionally. And books like "Facing Messy Stuff in the Church", which would benefit every Christian, are enough to make any person seriously ask themselves, "Are you sure you want to be in ministry?"

He was probably right who said, "If we were ever able to truly grasp the full extent of pain and brokenness in the world, we would probably just collapse and die." But he was also right who said, “If we have placed our hope in Christ for this life only, we should be pitied more than anyone.”

Sometimes I wish the onslaught of stories and heartaches would let up a bit, but it's already clear to me that this has been an important semester. My professors have been terrific at helping me dissect painful case studies and understand them in the light of the gospel. Watching them do so doesn’t make the problems seem less confounding, but it does mean I will be able to walk with people through those problems in a scripturally-informed way. And that is why I’m here in the first place.

In other news, I'm in the application process with a few organizations that I might work for following graduation, each in an overseas setting. So please pray that I'll have discernment as I decide which one fits me the best. And God has put a little creative streak in me as of late (writing and composing), which has been enjoyable, but I'm still searching for the time to make use of it.

Summer is on the horizon, and I hope to spend it doing an internship with a national Christian radio station (K-LOVE), but they have not told me yet whether that is going to pan out. So please keep me in your prayers regarding these things: the tough issues in my courses, the application for work, and my plans for the summer. Thanks so much for reading! Stay in touch. And let every moment of your life be a moment of God's story.

Ben

Judges 21:23

Newsletter No. 11

2008-11-22T10:17:00.001-08:00

(from our most recent evening event)

I had been itching to do something like this for years. My friend Raj and I started talking about GCM (the Global Christian Movement), a missions group here at Trinity, and what we might do with the organization, which has always struggled to find a place on the campus. After speaking with a former leader about the lessons he’d learned, we decided to make it really small and really big. The “really small” are the five people who show up for our prayer group on Mondays. The “really big” are the tens of thousands of people, nationwide, who heard one of our programs on Moody Radio stations this week…For those of you who receive my newsletter by email, I attached a copy of two flyers for (more sensitive) evening events which we hosted and a link to the recording that aired three times on the Moody Radio Network.

To make a long story short, working with GCM has occupied a lot of my time this year, and it has been an amazing creative outlet. Throughout the newsletter, I’ve attached flyers for different speakers we’ve hosted. Overall, we’re excited about how it is raising awareness for missions. Several senior pastors have attended our evening events, a professor will be recommending flyers for GCM as a part of an upcoming sermon on missions, and even students who don’t intend on going overseas have thanked us for reminding them of all that is happening. In case you wonder how we remind them, we have discovered the bathroom. Flyers adorn every stall and urinal in campus.

GCM has been important to my semester because it allows me to use gifts not really applicable elsewhere in my program. Why’s that important? Trinity has been a great experience so far, and I will use the lessons I learn here for the rest of my life. But as good friends get increasingly busy with their ministries , and as I tire of the routine which has been so constant for nearly three years now, I feel I’m entering the semi-burnt-out state that makes otherwise amazing opportunities seem slightly less amazing than they might. With my sights set on departure for full-time ministry overseas in the near future, I can’t help but wonder whether this isn’t a kind of “lame duck” season in my life. I know that it isn’t, but I would love your prayers for that situation anyway!

Other than that fatigue, the semester is anything but a loss. In Systematics III, we are discussing pneumatology (what does Scripture say about the Holy Spirit?), ecclesiology (what does Scripture say about the church?) and eschatology (what does Scripture say about the end of the world?) For my class “Advancing Indigenous Churches”, my partner and I did a 25 page paper assessing the health of a local church called “The Orchard”. Among other semester projects, I’m designing a worship service (for “History of Worship”) and preparing a 50 minute presentation on the Hebrew text of Jonah 4:5 (for Hebrew Exegesis). And I keep busy working as Dr. Ott’s research assistant.

This time next year I’ll be graduating, but the toughest semester of my whole program may be this Spring. I will have a full load, including two canon courses (the highest level course for my program). One of them will be with our Research Professor of New Testament, D.A. Carson, one of the world’s leading scholars on the subject (click here). It will be a tremendous opportunity to grow and to be challenged.

All of these opportunities and successes come with problems. A few days ago, I sat down with Dr. John Woodbridge, a professor of Church History at Trinity, to talk about how Christian leaders fall. Where do they go wrong and what are the warning signs? This is a man who has known many of the figures we read and hear about in Christian circles and literature. He said:

1) They forget that God is responsible for their success, and use that success to critique and belittle others.

2) They let their prayer and devotional lives dry up, and run on vapors, while trying to deceive people to think otherwise.

3) They fall into sexual impurity of one kind or another.

I can see how each of the three could bring me down. If you are looking for ways to pray for me, or for any Christian in ministry, let me suggest these three.

In spite of my better judgment, I am still pursuing several personal projects. There’s an article directly below this one that you might enjoy reading. I think it’s helpful. A major publishing house approached me about submitting a proposal for my little book(s), so I will be spending much of Christmas completing the manuscript for the first one, entitled Paradise Reloaded¸ and preparing the proposal. Lastly, with the few cents I have saved, I hope to buy a bit of new recording equipment, so hopefully the songs will start flowing next semester!

Please keep me in your prayers and in your correspondence. I love the three and four line updates that many of you take time to send, and they help me know how to pray for you. Thanks for reading my letter! Have a great Thanksgiving. And let every moment of your life be a moment of God’s story.

Ben

Just for fun:

(I recently went downtown to see Tommy Emmanuel in concert. Here are some a-m-a-z-i-n-g clips of him playing that I found on youtube)

The Tall Fiddler

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

"Theological Education is a Tough Sell"

2008-10-08T13:45:00.000-07:00

Part I:

There’s trouble in this seminary. And there’s trouble in my church. The trouble is the same, though the two issues seem entirely unrelated, and if you are in the readership of the Graduate Scrawl then the problem stands to do more damage to you than anyone. Let me tell you what that problem is, how I realized it, and how it can be fixed.

A while back, I had a casual conversation with one of Trinity’s staff. And I asked him what theological education should be, at least from his standpoint as an administrator, aside from the obvious need for orthodox theology. He said it should be: available, affordable, and relevant. I think these are pretty reasonable things to hope for. But maybe you’ve noticed that we don’t always live up to those ideals. I dug a bit deeper and found out why.

Affordable

After calling about ten of Chicago’s big name evangelical churches, almost all non-denominational, I did not find a nickel going from those churches to fund seminary education. A staff member at one of them, a church pastored by a Trinity grad, said, “oh, oooohhhhh….seminary education….we are all for it………….but, uh……….no……we don’t’ fund any particular seminary.” They want you to do that.

This table from the ATS (Association of Theological Schools) shows that it’s not only a Chicagoland problem and that it’s not just non-denominational churches. The numbers represent the percentage of costs at all ATS seminaries which are paid for by churches and other religious organizations, both denominational and non-denominational.

	2002-2003	2003-2004	2004-2005	2005-2006	2006-2007
Percent of Total Revenue	10.9	8.2	8.9	7.9	6.5

For the average ATS member school, as of 2007, revenue from Interdenominational/Non-denominational churches covered 3.6% of expenses. So, to put it bluntly, not many churches think it is their responsibility to fund theological education. They are only concerned about their own staff. Even churches which have their own “ministry training” (and I talked to those folks) still require pastors to have seminary training. And one of two things happens as a result: 1) Students attend seminary and accrue so much debt that they can’t get straight into ministry as hoped for (especially missions). Or 2) they take the advice of well-meaning Christian leaders, aware of problems caused by debt, and decide that devoting time to serious theological study isn’t all that important. Either way, theological education is not affordable.

But churches are only part of the problem.

Available

The population of the U.S. has tripled since 1960. People with purely worldly motivation have noticed and are trying to get rich off all the growth. Contrast that feverish activity for what is happening in theological education. Our capacity to train people is flat-lined. We can’t train more people today than we could ten years ago. And schools are not exactly popping up everywhere.

Seminaries train people to “promote understanding of God in order to deepen our community with God and others”. And in the grand scheme of things, I think this is much more important than the services offered by the mega-chains. So you might think development would be a hot issue. But it’s not. And in case you’re wondering, no one in seminary education seems to be losing sleep over that situation. The result is that there are not many schools out there, and normal folks with families and work commitments can’t get to good theological education because the nearest school is hours away.

I talked to the head of admissions at another evangelical seminary, which happened to be heavily endowed. He told me their endowment allowed for x number of students yearly to attend at a low cost. So I asked him when their next planned enrollment increase was and what steps they were taking to get there. He said he didn’t understand and asked me to explain.

To add to the problem, a bizarre mindset has taken over seminary education. I call it theological mercantilism, because it is the belief (betrayed by marketing strategies) that there are only so many people to teach in the world, and that high enrollment is primarily the result of a battle won against other schools. So new schools never crop up. The old ones just try to defend their turf.

The resulting problem of all this is well known. Theological education is not really available. So you uproot yourself and your ministry and you come up here or go down there for years on end. To their credit, American seminaries are trying to solve the problem. They shuttle professors around for crazy weekend seminars and offer 10 hour intensive sessions so that those commuters from Detroit have an easier time getting to campus (I know one). But these are just quick fixes to a much bigger problem. And they have led to the last issue.

Relevant

Most congregants only know one person who has ever been to a seminary, and depending on how they find their minister’s work in the church, they may have a good or bad opinion of the place. For many, it’s where young people go and get overly sophisticated and lose touch with average folks and issues. And of course this is most evident when they start prescribing to you, while you are still in school, the amount of time (in years) that it will take to finally set you straight after all the damage the institute has done to you.

Some of their comments are exaggerations, and some are well-founded. Just as important to me as an individual seminarian’s lack of connection to society is the average congregant’s lack of touch with what a little theological training can do to their outlook on life. One of our professors was recently shipped off to a blue-collar church for the weekend to speak on that most eclectic of topics, open theism. Apparently the crowd could scarce understand why this might be important to them. Until the professor explained it lucidly. He was bombarded afterwards by questions and comments from normal folks who had never been so close to one of those well-trained and balanced seminary people, whose usefulness and even existence they had always called into question. But with the current status quo, these things are rare. A pastor I spoke to, one of a denominational stripe, told me that getting the church to support seminaries is “a tough sell”. Out of sight is out of mind.

The church has lost contact with the seminary and the seminaries are not often corrected by the churches (both are hurting from it). And I think all of this deserves more than an angry sermon, so I have designed what I think is a solution to the problem.

Part II: Solution

At the cost of one salary (or maybe a part-time salary), a church could obtain access for all its congregants to around 25 seminary level courses, of every conceivable stripe and discipline, inside the church itself (compare with the $18,000,000 it would cost to pay for 500 MDiv’s at Trinity). It would be available (where they are) affordable (part of the church budget) and relevant (church plays a corrective role as it is housed there). “How now?” you ask.

Imagine five churches. Five churches hypothetical churches. Let’s call them Town Church of Lincolnshire, South Suburban, JesusChurch of Lake Forest, Savior Anglican, and Intersection Community Church. Each of the five churches supplies the funds needed to pay one salary for a seminary grad (who happens to have a bent towards teaching). This leaves us with 5 seminary grads, each with slightly different interests/concentrations. Each one teaches 5 courses. This leaves us with 25 courses. Teacher one teaches one course on Monday at church 1, another on Tuesday at church 2, etc. and all do likewise.

Now, I know only a handful of people will be interested in each topic. A handful for missions studies, a handful for theology of prayer, a handful for Greek. So traditionally this kind and quality of education has been impossible. But 5 handfuls (for 5 churches) gives you enough for a class of 20 or 30. In this kind of system, people find themselves getting more interested in deepening their understanding of Scripture and life, pastors find hundreds of hours of education going into their people on a regular basis, and the church finds itself teaching people all that He has commanded us by sharing resources amongst ourselves. Larger churches would hopefully try this kind of model, but over time it could trickle down to very rural areas to serve them as well, so that theological education would everywhere be affordable, available, and relevant.

On a more positive, and mercantilist, note, this type of seminary planting might help placement numbers here at a place like Trinity by providing dozens of churches seeking qualified teachers. And it might give people here who want to teach a good first job and resume-builder. In fact, they might love teaching theology in the local church so much that they end up staying there. Either way, existing seminaries could make use of the situation and build themselves up as research centers for more serious academic studies, which is obviously what many of the professors want them to be anyway……(insert sermon here).

If there is enough interest, I may post an article on my blog to “tease this out” a bit more. There are still things to cover like accreditation (whether we need it and if so how to do it) ecumenicalism (hiring staff to serve multiple church confessions) and further development (building in a nest egg in the yearly expense for the development of a library after 5 years, etc).

But hopefully this has been food for thought. And hopefully thought, more than bickering and name-calling, will be employed more in the future to solve these kinds of difficult problems. If you do end up doing something like this in your church(s), write to me and let me know how it is going. And, while you’re at it, give me directions to come take a class.

Book I Chapter VII

2008-09-14T23:11:00.000-07:00

Free at Last

Incomplete

My great-great-great-great grandfather Laban Stafford died in 1811 in North Carolina. He left his slaves to his sons. I know because I have a copy of the will. Another family member, my great-great grandfather William Henry Stevens, worked as a straw boss on a plantation in Northern Mississippi until the outbreak of the Civil War. In light of all that, I confess it seems strange to me how little I have been made to think about the past during the course of my life. Germans school kids have to watch endless movies about the atrocities their predecessors committed in the holocaust, but I don't remember ever having to watch any such film about my people and their mistakes. So, over the years, it has been something I have done on my own. My good friend Yemi, from Nigeria, and I have even discussed how different our relationship might have been had we met 200 years ago.

I visited my friend Josh recently and had a chance to think this all over a bit more. Josh studies law at Ole Miss, and the drive to Oxford, MS, takes you through a beautiful countryside full of pine trees and red clay hills. It was eery to be driving there after dark, with only my headlights interrupting the night, and to imagine what it would be like to suddenly find myself a hundred years earlier at that same spot, at the sight of some midnight Ku Klux Klan rally, or two hundred years earlier, at the sight of some hunt for an escaped slave, maybe even led by my great-great grandfather. A new CD played in my car the whole way, and it repeated the song “O Freedom” over and over as I traveled.

There’ll be singing, there’ll be singing
There’ll be singing over me
And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave
And go home to my LORD and be free

I can’t help but be conflicted at the ways the concept of “what God wants” has been twisted both for and against people’s freedom. On the one hand, this famous slave song captures the belief of slaves across the country that God would vindicate their suffering and actualize their hopes. The former slave and influential statesman Frederick Douglass made a huge contrast between “the Christianity of this land and the peaceful Christianity of Christ”. On the other hand, how many church-goers and church leaders honestly thought that putting people in bondage to them was a part of “what God wants”? And how many of them just used it as an excuse?

While this chapter was coming together, I had a hard time avoiding the question: Have I become just another slavery preacher, updated for the 21st century, using some kind of pseudo-religious reasoning to smooth talk you into giving up your rights and dignity? I wrote it off for a while thinking it was just in my head or that the analogy was too drastic to fit. Then, while I was doing my research, I read a book by a man named Friedrich Nietzsche, and in that book he made the dramatic statement:

A predominant characteristic of Christianity is its hate of freedom.

This was a jab in the face to me. But I now realize it may be what some people have been feeling all along. The decision to do and want "whatever God wants" sounds good on one level, but on other levels it seems very restricting. You might go as far as to say we become a little bit less human by trying to be 'happy' humans. "What is left of us when we give away all our freedom to someone else?", Nietzsche seems to ask.

So I stopped to think about it all for a while. And I realized something that you probably realized a long time ago. Life is a referendum on the type of freedom a person wants to have. We exchange one for another. Wars can usually be explained by looking at how people prefer safe streets over free elections or how they prefer the unity of their nation over the freedom to divide into independent countries. And for that matter, we are all enslaved to something. We willingly and gladly enslave ourselves to our spouse, our kids, and to the causes that we feel are important. The only thing that matters when you realize this is to know which freedoms you want the most. And so the chapter got all the more interesting for me based on those realizations.

The Anti-christ

Nietzsche called his book "the Antichrist" because he was trying to imply his way of doing things was the polar opposite of Jesus' way. But you realize he was actually doing more than that when you hear what meant by "freedom." Usually we think about freedoms as things that the government grants us the right to do or "innate" rights that we have because we are human. Nietzsche was talking more about a permission that we give ourselves. For example, in the book I was reading, he asks himself the question "what is good?" He answers it by saying:

Everything which increases the feeling of power in an individual…

Nietzsche and I have different answers. And he is dead, so you can't watch him live out his principles. But the philosophy is alive and well today, and it's not hard to see it in practice.

My great-great grandfathers probably understood this "liberating" feeling of freedom every time they yelled at slaves for talking out of turn. And sixteen year olds feel this kind of freedom when they cuss their parents out or key the car of some guy at school that they can't stand. They give themselves the permission to do whatever makes them feel in charge and actualized. But insofar as slave owners and sixteen year old kids think they are really on to something by taking this path, I think it is a letdown. I have experienced the life. Nietzsche only emancipates us into a lonely, self-centered world where we are all dictators. That world will not make us happy forever, so it's not the one I'm looking for.

I know Friedrich Nietzsche is a big name in philosophy and that he wrote really intriguing books, but as I got down deeper into his work, I found his ideas petty and unoriginal. His main accomplishment was bringing the mindset of pedophiles and wife-beaters to the university classroom and making them seem cool and risqué instead of cruel and demented. That's why every Nazi soldier went into battle with a copy of one of his books.

I experience the types of "freedoms" Nietzsche talked about all the time. They're not foreign and revolutionary. They are my natural inclination. They are everyone's natural inclincation. That's why we have laws to discourage people from acting that way and prisons to lock them up when they don't. And whether you end up on death row or in the executive boardroom by living for this "whatever I want" mantra, I don't think it will make you happy. Or that you will actually be free in any sense that you are not free now.

The Anti-Nietzsche

Following the "opposite" way, the one I have been suggesting so far, is very different. So I agree with Nietzsche on that point. Instead of "being your own man" you put someone else in the driver's seat. And there's another difference. Instead of simply changing the way he thought, I think in Jesus' life, living perfectly for what God wants changed who he was and what he could do. Instead of "freedom" as some shift of internal perspective, I think Jesus experienced freedoms that were more like "abilities", and that those abilities grew out of his commitment to do and want what God wants.

That's the conclusion I came to one afternoon in Nowheresville, Illinois, when I stopped at a diner and read through the story of his life. I took notes about the things that happened in Jesus' life and the responses he had to those events; the "freedoms" or "abilities" seem latent in the way he was able to react. You can judge for yourself, but it sounded to me like the freedoms he lived out are the same ones everybody today is crying to have but which, for whatever reason, they all fail to get. So, while we are on the topic, maybe you would enjoy hearing a bit more about them.

SECTION 2 OF THIS CHAPTER IS NEARING COMPLETION

Newsletter No. 10

2008-08-22T10:17:00.000-07:00

(The videos below don't necessarily relate to the paragraphs they follow, but hopefully will give you a glimpse into the summer!)

The problem with waiting too long to write a newsletter is that summarizing everything just gets harder with time. I had several “first day of the rest of your life” moments in Leipzig. And I had some pretty frustrating times too. But it was worth all the effort, and I am thankful to have so many of you who ask about the experience and who prayed for me while I was there. Let me try to mention the things worth hearing about that have happened since I wrote last time.

(Interview with My Hostess: Part 1)

Preaching was without a doubt the highlight of my time in Leipzig. I have really developed a love for it, even though it is overwhelming each time, and finally being able to preach in German was the thrill of the summer. I preached three separate times, and each was interesting. In one service, my sermon was prefaced by a congregant’s epileptic seizure (with foaming at the mouth) and a long, angry speech by another congregant about how the church should “sing more songs he knows”. Following the man’s speech, my friend Reinhard leaned over to me and said, “Ben, I wish you God’s wisdom for your sermon” and smiled.

(Interview Part II: The English Translation)

I was really affirmed by the congregations each time, despite those kinds of distractions. One of the pastors told me over lunch that preaching was obviously my gift and that I should keep it central to my ministry. He said he hoped that I would come back through his area and preach at his church again sometime. I hope to do so.

(An Afternoon with Theo, Sabine's grandson)

As far as the more general work in Leipzig, I took part in essentially every ministry of the church: kids Sunday School, middle school group, youth group, elders meetings, pastor get-togethers, weekly small groups, even mother and baby mornings. I led worship for a church-wide breakfast (in German, in harmony!) and organized kids ministry activities for an ecumenical “Park Service” that we had. Each experience was stretching, especially since I was working with so many age groups at the same time (I once taught 4 different age groups in one week). For my part, it takes some gear-shifting to transition from 8 year olds in Sunday school to folks in their mid-fifties in small groups.

(A Glimpse of Leipzig)

Toward the end of my time in Leipzig, several friends came into town from another part of Germany and led a summer “Day Camp”, the same one that I helped out with last year. My two friends, who were leading the group of youth responsible for the camp, asked me if I would go in and rewrite the small group Bible studies and teach them each night to the students who would be leading them. That was a very rewarding job, and it was great to see them put into action the next day. I sat in one group of about 8 kids on Thursday, and after the discussion, asked the group, “Now, I’m just curious. Who here could say, ‘You know, I’ve never really heard anything like this in my whole life about God wanting a relationship with me’?” Five of the eight raised their hands. It was great to be doing such pioneer work.

(A Glimpse of the Room Where We Met)

I left Leipzig and spent a week in Berlin, which I am convinced will be my home in the not too distant future. I felt incredibly well there and found the people to be among the friendliest Germans I had ever met. From Berlin, I left to go visit two of my mentors. As my time at seminary winds down, all of these plans about ministry will need to start taking shape, and several German leaders have been helpful (and patient enough) to listen, encourage, and critique my ideas. The first meeting was very helpful, and the second had to be cancelled unfortunately, as one of the men was having tests run on suspicion of cancer. Please say a prayer for him.

(Visiting a Famous Camp in the West for Ideas)

I have several prayer requests. For a while now, I have been having a hard time with the whole concept of intercessory prayer. It has not made sense to me why I need to pray, and I guess in truth I have been doubting the effectiveness of prayer. God has really helped me, even in the course of the last few days of prayer and study, to understand things a bit more clearly. But there are still very important things to work through. So please pray that this semester, even more than the previous ones, will be a season of very practical studies and reflection, and that it will be time that affects my life, affects my ministry, and affects people who, right now, have no relationship with Jesus.

Thank you so much for your prayers. I need them now as much as I have ever needed them. Please pray that I will stay on task, that my motivation for all the work will be purified, and that I will find joy in the present. Let me know what is going on in your lives and how I can pray for you too. I feel out of the loop. Hope to hear from you soon! Let every moment of your life be a moment of God’s story.

Ben

Newsletter No. 9

2008-06-15T14:38:00.001-07:00

I just got back from an all-church retreat a few hours ago and have several trips coming up this week. Things are moving along at full-speed these days in Leipzig. I think it would be impossible to describe all my experiences thus far, but as this entry phase of the internship comes to a close, there is one main thing to report: it is a strange feeling to finally arrive at a place you have been planning to visit for a long time. I guess it’s like finally getting married, or finally having that first child, or finally receiving a promotion. Getting there, which always seemed like the goal, just becomes another starting point, and it’s hard to know how to be overjoyed and overwhelmed at the same time.

The most comforting thought I have had since being here stems from the words that God spoke to Paul while he was in Corinth, and I think they should be encouraging to every Christian in every city in the world who is trying to share the gospel with non-Christians. In Acts 18, God tells Paul “Don’t be afraid…I’ve got lots of people in this town.” I have found the same to be true here.

Reinhard and Sabine are my hosts, and they have really put themselves out to make sure I have everything I need. They are real locals, and we have had a great time getting to know each other. I would give anything to have a picture of the three of us out on the lake a week ago. Reinhard is a very experienced sailor, but as we coasted out of the harbor into a storm, I was a bit concerned. I confess I have never been on such a large boat which was so close to tipping over in my life, but in hindsight I wonder whether Reinhard did not intend it all to see what I was made of. There will hopefully be a subtitled video interview with them next time that accompanies my newsletter.

One thing I can say now, after my short stay in Leipzig, is this: if you live (or put yourself) in a setting in which you never come into contact with new Christians, people converted out of every conceivable situation, you are missing out on one of the joys of this life. It refreshes me just to hear the kind of incredibly sincere, direct, and hysterical prayers that people pray soon after they give themselves over to God. At a small group meeting last week, I was caught up between different emotions. I wanted to laugh, because the prayers were so funny (“God, while ______ is looking for an apartment, why don’t you give her a great husband so she can just move in with him…that would be a lot easier”). And I wanted to listen carefully in order to learn from these people who were able to talk to God in a way like the Psalmists could. At any rate, it has been a blessing to see what is happening in people’s lives.

I spent the first 10 days here visiting every conceivable meeting or group in the church: the elder’s meeting, the combined church leadership meeting, Kids Club, youth group, young adults get togethers, Sunday School, main service, Mother and Baby Morning (seriously), etc. Now I am beginning to focus in more on kids club and on some teaching. I led the pre-teen Sunday School class this Sunday, will be leading a small group here at the Steinbruch’s house on Wednesday, am team teaching the youth on Friday, and will lead the pre-teens again on Sunday.

There is still a good bit of writing and recording going on in my life these days. I worked on a chapter in my book series for several hours yesterday, and there will be a new song posted on my myspace.com page soon. It would be great to get any feedback on that.

Let me close by thanking you all for your support in my time here. The funding I received was incredibly encouraging, and several of you have sent me really sweet emails. In the grand scheme of ministry situations that a Christian could find himself in, this one is comparatively easy and enjoyable, but that may be just because I know so many people are praying for me. At any rate, I really appreciate it!

I hope your summers have gotten off to a good start with lots of sun and low humidity. Hope to hear from you soon! Let every moment of your life be a moment of God’s story.

Ben

Judges 21:23

Book I Chapter IV

2008-05-25T19:15:00.000-07:00

Would love suggestions on this one? Does it jump around too much?

Take Out the Paper and the Trash

I have been to more than a dozen countries on four continents. But as far as I can tell, there is no place on earth like the Potter’s House Café back in Springfield. About ten years ago, some friends of mine bought an old house on the very edge of campus and made it into a coffee shop. But they left it just like a house. There’s a big basement, where they bake the cookies, with a TV and a bunch of board games. The ground level has some couches and a fireplace; and the upstairs has several little rooms, which are usually packed with twice as many people as you would expect could get in. The front porch has heaters, the deck on the back is screened in, and they use both of them, because on the average Thursday night, it is hard to even get in the door. And it’s not just because of the atmosphere. They have the best strawberry banana smoothies in town.

When I was a student, I spent a lot of time working there, especially later at night. For years they were open until 2 A.M., which was awesome, but with the clean up time, it got to be too much. You might think that it wouldn’t be a problem. Just pay people enough. But everyone who works at Potter’s House is a volunteer. We started at closing at midnight, just to give ourselves time, but because we were totally volunteer run, the atmosphere in the place was unlike any other hang out could possibly be.

Potter’s started when my friends Steve and Berna decided they were ready for a change. Both of their kids were grown, and they were looking for a new way to affect people’s lives. Steve had been a police officer and had worked as a pastor for a while. Berna had stayed at home with her kids. But both of them felt like they could start something really cool if they just took the time to. Their adult friends told them to do it and that they would help support them. So the Potter’s House kind of takes care of its own expenses and friends take care of their expenses. Eventually, Samson came on full time too. He comes in to make drinks, which are usually sweeter than the drinks anybody else there makes, after working all day with violent youth at a local mental care institution. You would think he would be exhausted, but on his five hours a day of sleep, he is the liveliest person in the whole house.

I am not sure they planned every detail of the experience to have some effect. Steve is too laid back to do that. But for whatever reason, Potter’s became one of the most interesting communities I have ever been a part of. When you went into the kitchen to order something, we would write down your order and name, and say, “Got it, we’ll bring it out to you”. Half of the time, we were so busy, we’d just say, “Um, yeah, who are you? Right, could you go find a girl named Amy and give her this Italian soda?”

All the rooms were small, so the place always felt crowded, and Steve would somehow convince people to sit at the bar and watch Cubs games on that tiny TV they had bolted up in the corner. Potter’s became the first place, or the last place, in an evening for many students. They would come by before they went out for the night, or come by after a big night to talk about what they’d been doing. Steve gave all the floor leaders at the college “free drink cards”, and 99 out of 100 of them came by regularly to get their weekly treat. We could never figure out who that one guy was.

Some of the girls who came into the café a lot started going to visit Berna at home, and the core of that group decided to start hosting events, like an annual fashion show and lecture series called, “What Women Really Want”. I remember coming in, after having been gone for a few weeks, and finding them in the living room making the posters for it. I said very tactfully, “Um, may I ask who that you know is qualified to answer that question?” They didn’t ask me to be the keynote speaker, so I assume they found somebody else. But Berna got stuff like that going left and right. And she still found time to make brownies that would make your eyes roll back in your head.

Every night ended differently, but it the end was always my favorite part. Somebody on the porch would yell through the front window that they wanted a dance competition with Samson. He would start dancing in that direction, saying, “I’m comin’, baby”. Meanwhile, there might be a couple on a first date in the living room, some good friends talking about career choices down in the basement, and barstools in a circle in the kitchen, talking about politics or campus life. And you just never knew who would be there.

In addition to the three full time workers, there were lots of students who came in and did different jobs. Being at the front of the kitchen taking orders became a pretty popular position, because it meant you got to shoot the breeze with everybody who came in. And considering the number of women who passed through the place, that was no small honor. I served my time there taking orders for “mudslides” and “ichthugs” several nights a week, although I was unable to make much use of the position for my social life, but eventually I stepped up in the world and became the chief vacuumer and mop-up-man par excellence for Potter’s House. They did not give me a name tag, but the position was pretty much official.

The secret to everything that happened in that place was the desire to serve others. That desire was Steve and Berna’s motivation for starting it and the reason why people were willing to help them. And it was very contagious. Berna was the one who got to everybody. I started mopping and vacuuming one night when I saw that Samson was just too busy to get it done. And Berna, never one to let this type of thing go, made me feel so good for having done it that I made it a habit.

It went on like that for a very long time. The floors got cleaned, I felt like a million bucks, and everyone was happy. If you had asked the regulars, they could have told you so. Life was really moving along smoothly, until the day when someone else decided he was going to do the mopping. I met him coming out of the cleaning closet while I was on my way there, and just stopped speechless. It was like catching another guy with your girlfriend. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but in my mind, I was thinking…

Well. What do we have here? I suppose you realize that’s my mop you have in your hand. And that you mixed the chemicals in wrong? Now, it’s obvious that you’re new, and that you just thought it would be nice to get to know the job and see whether you two are compatible, but the role of chief vacuumer has already been filled, and I think we all know that nobody mops these floors like I do.

I have had some counseling since then, and it’s all water under the bridge between me and that guy, but after it happened, I realized what a profound impact Potter’s had begun to have on me. The outburst (which was a bit dramatized) is not an example of great humility, I grant you, but it showed just how much I yearned to be a part of the Potter’s House vision. No one there would say something as weird as “the Potter’s House vision”, but there is one, and as a part of that, the people who work there get to enjoy it more than the people who just come in for a drink.

When I look back on it now, I can see that that was the beginning of a shift in my thinking, and the beginning of a big distinction between “doing” and “wanting”. I would mop all the bathrooms and both kitchens, vacuum all three floors, and change out all the trash bags in the house, only to go home and live like a slob. I did not go to all that trouble simply because it was what they wanted. I did it because, strangely enough, it is what I wanted. I wanted to be a part of the giving and serving and community that made up Potter’s House. That’s the reason I was ready to fight for the right to do something that would have been punishment in 7^th grade.

This is just a quaint little story, and you probably know what it is like to experience the same thing. But the distinction between “doing what someone wants” and “wanting what someone wants” is fascinating when the person who “wants” is God. It’s fascinating because of all the mistakes we make when we ignore it, and the two which I see all around me are 1) that just “doing what God wants” will make us happy and 2) that just “doing what God wants” will make God happy. Let me stop to think about those for a second.

Rules About Rules

The first mistake people make is thinking that simply “doing” things will make them happy. And as soon as I started trying to think of an analogy to explain my little distinction between “doing” and “wanting to do”, a famous story just jumped out at me. I think the character Javert in Les Miserables embodies a problem found, to some extent, in every person. Javert was a police officer who spent decades of his life chasing down a former inmate. The man he was chasing had paid dearly for a petty crime, received a bit of grace once released, and made himself into a model citizen. But he had broken his parole by becoming the mayor of a town, at the unanimous request and urging of its citizens. Javert is willing to overlook all the benevolence and character of Valjean, the former inmate; he will not allow even such a good man to go on living a life in contradiction to the rules. So he pursues Valjean mercilessly, committing much of his life to the arrest of a man guilty of parole violation.

Javert believes that “doing perfectly what the law says” will make him “happy”. That is not how he phrases it, but whatever word we use to describe his motivation, it’s clear that doing this will give him the kind of satisfaction or lifestyle that he thinks is the most winsome. In the fantastic final scene of the story’s film version, he is torn up inside. He realizes that Valjean is a good man, and he realizes that Valjean has not followed all the rules. Either Javert should lock him up, which he has been trying to do for decades, or he should change his whole outlook on life. He says very dramatically, as he’s taking the handcuffs off of Valjean, who he had just captured, “All my life, I have tried to never break a rule. You’re free.” He handcuffs himself and falls backwards into the river Thames, unable to admit that his way was wrong but also unable to live in a world in which people like Valjean, rulebreakers, were the good citizens.

Simply “doing” what the law says does not lead to happiness. That’s why just societies, in which robbers are not lurking around every corner, and in which no man is enslaved to another, can still be very sad places. And it’s why many people who think they have found the path called “what God wants” get so disillusioned. For all their “hard work”, they expect to find themselves enjoying life a bit more than they do. Lots of people give up on the path at that point.

Others, people you might call “fanatics” or “legalists”, decide that they need to clamp down harder in order to get the right effect, in kind of the same way that a drug user ups his dosage to go higher. This is exactly what Javert does. He is willing to pursue and ruin the life of a man who broke prison parole, for decades on end, simply because he thinks this will bring some great good to society. Javert is not a man, he’s a principle. And the principle is wrong.

But to be fair, who does that? Maybe we identify easier with the opposite starting point, total indifference. We lead difficult lives, not because we are trying to be perfect, but because we could care less – being in abusive relationships, living dishonestly and getting worn down from all the stress that fills our lives. One day we start looking for other options. I have friends from the past, the popular and rebellious types, who are going through this phase right now. When they finally do get fed up with the stress their habits cause, many of them decide to drop he old ways with real intensity. And that’s where the issue gets tricky.

Even when we make this decision to walk the straight and narrow, to “do all the right things”, we often get off track, like the man who thinks buying flowers for his wife is being in love or that giving his children gifts is being their father. We do the right things, but we are too self-focused to stop and seek out what would motivate a person to do those things naturally and willingly. We are never caught up in the strange desire and need to do them. So, for whatever reason, even though we are doing the right things, we aren’t happy. It’s ironic, because we are so close and so far away at the same time. There’s no simple “to-do-list” that will make us personally happy.

And maybe you can figure out what the second mistake is that people make. If the first is that “doing” doesn’t make us happy, the second is that just “doing” doesn’t make God happy either, as if it were somehow his goal to create a bunch of mindless, loyal servants. But that’s where we strike a nerve with lots of religious people and lots of non-religious people, isn’t it? Let me explain.

Ant Farming

One of the reasons I like the film Bruce Almighty is because it does not depict God as an idiot. God is always several steps ahead of people. But in reality I get the impression that people think the opposite, even if they don’t say so. And that impression probably comes from their belief that God is a cosmic ant-farmer. I know I am shifting gears quickly, but see if you can track with me on this one. Many of the 6 billion people alive now think:

(1) There is a God
(2) He created me.
(3) If I do good things, he’ll give me some kind of treat.
(4) If I do bad things, he’ll give me some kind of punishment.

And that seems logical enough to them. It is a no frills religion, gives people some incentive to be good citizens, and gives them hope that they will get some eternal tax returns. Fine. But it is still stupid. We are just a project, “rats in a cage” as one of my favorite song-writers once said.

I assume you know why. When everything is going bad, we stop and ask: “God, why did you create me simply to jump through your stupid hoop and do your little dance?” If you are nodding your head, then I guess you’re guilty. Because everyone who has ever seriously asked God such a question, or thought that this dilemma was the main argument against my answer, is a part of the second category of mistake, thinking that just getting us to “do” tasks is somehow God’s goal.

The four points above seem very logical until you ask, why would God waste so much time on something so pointless? What does he benefit from it? Look at all the anarchy we create.

So if the four points above were true, then I suppose we have to go ahead and add a fifth one:

God would be the dumbest venture capitalist around. He wasted his time and effort creating a group of people He knew would spit in his face. What a poor return on his investment.

But whether it is stupid or not, this is what most people think about when they “try to do whatever God wants”. Religiosity. They attend services, burn incense, chant something, or do a special handshake. And that is not to say anything against burning incense or having a special handshake, but the point is that that is not the point. It’s not what turns God on. But people never seem to get that message. Somewhere in the Bible, God told a bunch of people who were doing all this stuff:

"Quit your worship charades. I can't stand your trivial religious games: Monthly conferences, weekly Sabbaths, special meetings— meetings, meetings, meetings—I can't stand one more! Meetings for this, meetings for that. I hate them! You've worn me out! I'm sick of your religion, religion, religion, while you go right on sinning. When you put on your next prayer-performance, I'll be looking the other way.

In the process of all this kind of abstract talk, I keep stumbling over a realization. That creation, and our existence in itself, is not analogous to an “investment” on God’s part. He is not creating us, pursuing us, and forgiving us in the hopes that we will “do” something for him. Creation is not an investment. It is an affair. In the midst of all our religious “doing” that we somehow think appeases God so He will let us be, God whispers, “I want you to want me”. And that is something we will have to talk more about soon.

The Difference

You can’t begin to talk about these topics, about why we exist, without floating from the pond, down the river, into the ocean, into the more massive story. And we are slowly working our way in that direction if you have not noticed, but the much simpler thing to notice at this point in our discussion is that simply “doing” what God wants, committing to a bunch of actions or behavioral patterns, is way too shallow to make us happy or make God happy. It is the perfect picture of the man, buying flowers for his wife, in the midst of his unbroken neglect of her, and wondering why neither of them is happy.

Potter’s House is a place I still love to visit, and I stay in contact with the powers that be there. But that was an important time in my life for a lot more reasons than Strawberry banana smoothies and barstool discussions. I think it was at Potter’s House that I learned the difference between “doing what God wants” and “wanting what God wants”, the difference between religion and salvation. And that is a difference that really changes the way I think about my answer and the happiness question itself. I hope that has made sense, and has been helpful, because you will need that understanding for the next chapter. All of those neat insights might be overshadowed for you when you hear about the difficulties, and I think this is probably the best time to mention them.

Book I Chapter III

2008-05-25T18:33:00.000-07:00

I am editing this chapter to smooth it out a bit. The content is good, but a version which is easier to read is on the way too.

Vodka On Friday

I am not the kind of person who likes to watch much television, but I read the newspaper a lot to stay up on current events. And I have come to a conclusion. With the type of constant media coverage that we have now, it would be possible to fill your entire day with stories about tragedy and injustice. The editors of my favorite newspaper could easily fill up several more pages just reporting on the heartbreaking stories that float around in the popular press. And every time I read one of those stories, a thought crosses my mind that makes me reconsider the whole notion of the “happiness” question. I am a bit young to be talking about all this. It makes me come across like a kid so busy daydreaming that he fails to see how life works.

I was born into a very privileged situation. That is obvious to me from my travels and from hearing my friends tell their stories. And I think, even in light of that fact, the “happiness” question is a worthwhile one, but not everyone agrees. So I have had to stop and think about their lives and input. Not everyone thinks that this hope for happiness, even the business of sitting around to discuss “the best of all possible worlds” is productive or healthy. My mind started wrestling with that thought the other day while I was watching the movie The Shawshank Redemption.

There is a scene in the film in which Andy, an innocent man convicted of killing his wife, locks himself in the main P.A. room of the prison where he lives and hooks up a record player to the microphone. He blasts an opera recording over all the prison speakers. Red, his best friend, says

I have no idea to this day what those two Italian women were singing about. Truth is I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I like to think that it was something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words and makes your heart ache because of it. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab cage and made those walls dissolve away. And for the briefest of moments, every last man at Shawshank felt free.

The film deals with topics like how a person can survive in the free world after being locked up in a prison for the majority of their life. Along that line, one of the supporting characters, Brooks, a long time inmate and friend of theirs, had been released from prison a few scenes earlier only to commit suicide once they “made him leave”. Andy gets solitary confinement for two weeks because of the thing with the record. After he is released back into the regular part of the prison, he starts talking with his friends.

Friend 1: Hey, look who’s here. Maestro!

Friend 2: You couldn’t play something good, huh? Hank Williams?

Andy: They broke the door down before I could take requests.

Friend 3: Was it worth it? Two weeks in the hole?

Andy: Easiest time I ever did.

Friend 3: Bullshit. There ain’t no such thing as easy time in the hole. A week in the hole is like a year.

Andy: I had Mr. Mozart to keep me company.

Friend 2: They let you tote that record player down there?

Andy: It was in here. (Points to his head.) In here. (Points to his heart.) That’s the beauty of music. They can’t get that from you. Haven’t you ever felt that way about music?

Red: Well, I played a mean harmonica as a younger man. Lost interest, though. Don’t make much sense in here.

Andy: Here is where it makes the most sense. You need it so you don’t forget.

Red: Forget what?

Andy: Forget…that there are places…that aren’t made of stone. That there’s something inside that they can’t…that they can’t get to.

Red: What are you talking about?

Andy: Hope.

Red: Hope? Let me tell you something, my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope’ll drive a man insane. It’s got no use on the inside. You better get used to that.

Andy: Like Brooks did?

What would fifty years in prison do to my thoughts about the search for happiness? Obviously I can’t answer that question because I haven’t spent fifty years in prison. But in the The Shawshank Redemption it has strikingly different effects on different people. Since seeing the film, it has been hard not to notice that theme playing out around me: life bloodying people’s noses and them reacting in one way or another. Aristotle had a term for the effect that watching all of this has on us: catharsis. The word is usually translated “tragedy” but really, it means “purification”. Watching what can and often does happen in people’s lives, in the worst of times, is usually all it takes to sober up from the kind of short-sighted drunkenness that makes us believe we have all the answers, or the even more diluted thought that we do not need any answers.

I guess, more than anything, I have been “purified” from the idea that doing “whatever God wants” is going to keep me safe from the poisonous arrows and general heartbreaks that every other human faces. The answer does not offer, at least for now, any immunity from pain. That has been an important realization because it forces me to ask myself, “so how is it any different?” Is it just one more coping method? I enjoy writing about the answer and life following “whatever God wants”, but to say how it is specifically different, I have had to get more acquainted with other people and the pain in their lives. I can’t take you back there with me to relive those experiences, but for the sake of discussion, let me give you a few of the examples of suffering and letdown that have crossed my path. Maybe that will help make some sense out of my conclusion.

Spices and Stories

While I was living in student housing in Germany, my favorite neighbor was a young guy named Sohail from Lahore, Pakistan. Our floor shared a common kitchen, and he and I would laugh away the nights there talking about our struggles with the German language and our thoughts on foreign policy. Sharing a kitchen meant that we inevitably tried cooking experiments in order to convince the other how good the food from his home country was. We experienced more defeats than victories, but we had a good time in the process.

I could not imagine how to make the different dishes myself, so one day, I went shopping with him at an Arab grocery story to see the all the basic components they use in their cooking. The food was interesting, but honestly, the main thing that stood out to me during our trip was the massive shelf of DVDs in hand-labeled cases behind the front counter. There must have been two or three hundred of them, and I could make out the Urdu writing well enough to realize these were not the same movie but several hundred different ones. Sohail explained that they were Indian movies and that every store like that had them. He said that the plots are so simple the industry churns out hundreds of new ones every year.

My experience with Bollywood, as they call the Indian film industry, is limited. It’s hard for me to get into the movies. They are usually about a wedding, the actors make very dramatic facial expressions to show their emotions, and no less that five times, everyone breaks out into singing and dancing. Sohail was raised on them and so was able to bring me up to speed on the way they operate. After talking about movies at the grocery store, we concluded that this was another area we should spend some time on. So in addition to our culinary experiments, we started watching films together at the beginning of the year. I got some background in Indian movies and we made it through the greater part of my collection of western movies.

One night, after we got finished watching a film, we went to the kitchen to have some chai tea and talk about the art of storytelling in general. I wasn’t sure exactly how to word the question that I had, so I just blurted it out: “Why are the movies in the East like they are? Why do people want to watch something that doesn’t spark a single thought during the two hours you spend watching it? It seems like junk food for your brain. There is nothing realistic about any of the stories, comedy or drama.”

Sohail said that that could be the very reason why people watch them. Half of Mumbai lives in one of the many hellish slums there, and more than 150,000 are homeless. I guess if you don’t have anywhere to sleep for the night, thinking about the plight of an orphan or the emotional journey of a terminally ill person wouldn’t be your idea of entertainment. Life presents plenty of that kind of “entertainment” already. Americans dabbled in the same type of thing during the Vietnam War, when shows like Gilligan’s Island were popular. My dad said that people he knew were coming home in body bags and nobody wanted to dwell on deep issues more than they had to. People wanted to forget about those things in their free time, at least long enough to enjoy their lives a bit. It seems like, in these situations, suffering is not a thing that occasionally interrupts “normal” life but that “normal” life is a thing that occasionally interrupts suffering.

Vodka on Friday

Another kind of suffering really struck me while I was working with a group of at-risk youth in a low income neighborhood in Marburg. We rented out a floor above the local grocery store and hung out, playing sports, talking about life, their struggles, and about “what God wants”. We just saw the guys on Fridays, so it is hard to say exactly what their family life was like, but everything I learned about them during that year screamed “neglect”. One of the guys busted out a window of our building, and when we called his parents to discuss his behavior, she said:

You know, sometimes the school calls and complains about him. I just want to know why it’s my problem.

If they are neglected at home because their parents are deadbeats, they are neglected by society because many of them are immigrants. I had to learn to be careful what I said and even what I wore. There is a lot of tension about status, something that they may not have because the other students think of them as outsiders, and little jokes back and forth occasionally missed their target and caused outbursts.

One of these neglected youth explained to the leader of my group that he regularly sits at home, alone in his room, and drinks vodka until he passes out. The kid is fourteen. Another of the guys in the group said he watches several hours of pornography a day. The suffering of these people is a bit different than what we mentioned above. They are young and actively seek out happiness, and I believe they are convinced that it is out there, just beyond their grasp. Each of them seems to feel like they are missing some big party that everybody else is in on. A party where everyone you meet wants to have sex with you.

Most people can’t live with that kind of disparity very long, and eventually, some of them choose not to. Suicide is really dramatic, but it is not as if I don’t understand the motivation. Life is much more difficult if you are convinced that somewhere, someplace, there are a bunch of happy people. They are happier than you are now, and maybe happier than you will ever be. So you jump off the top of a parking garage, like someone did my freshman year. Or you hang yourself from a tree in front of a busy dormitory, like someone did last year. You might conclude, as some of them apparently do, that the way to end neglect is to end the neglected.

Playing the Wrong Hand

Now, to be honest, as I read through the last two stories, I ask myself, “How common are these experiences going to be to the average person?” Abject poverty in India and suicidal impulses of estranged youth might be too spectacular for us to relate to. We are the strong, who learn to “pick ourselves up by our bootstraps, to pursue our goals, and make the best of our lives.” That is a very cheerful way to look at things, but of course, this is exactly where the great 21^st century tragedy begins. What choice should we make? And how do we live with ourselves when we make the wrong one?

During my time in Vienna at a language school, I learned about their basic education system. You have to declare your major the day you are born and your minor before the end of the first week. And you have to be specific because there are about a thousand different combinations of schools you can go to. Some 18 year olds spend time in a lower school system and finally get their act together, only to see that their shot at college has passed them by. And some people who are in college realize that they have already invested too much time in one subject, which they may not really enjoy, to change to a field that they are passionate about.

Austria may have institutionalized the dilemma, but everyone I know experiences the same thing at one time or another. And the kind of despair it causes is much more common and much more intelligible to us than anything mentioned already. The chance for happiness was there. You just picked the wrong path. “Why did I become a doctor? I wanted to be an economist.” Or, “Why didn’t we have kids? We could have.” Or maybe, “Why didn’t I marry her when I had the chance? She was great.” Now it is gone and you “have nothing but all the time in the world to think about it.”

I used to listen to country music when I was younger, I think just because I lived in Mississippi. It’s not exactly my favorite now, but I will always remember a song called “What Might Have Been” that seemed to come on my radio at night just before I went to sleep. Even when I was a kid, it struck me as a devastating bit of prose.

I try not to think about what might have been,

Because that was then, and we have taken different roads.

We can’t go back again, and there’s no use giving in,

And there’s no way to know what might have been.

The Mountaintop

Not everybody picks the “wrong” thing. Some make it to the destination they set for themselves. I have a friend in Chicago, a very successful lawyer, who lives in a fabulous house in a fabulous neighborhood in the North Shore’s most fabulously wealthy suburb. We sat on his back porch one night, talking about banking law and torts and lots of other things I am clueless about. We talked about my semester and all the pressure of graduate studies. Then he started reminiscing about his law school experience and the way he had envisioned his future back then. He had always wanted to study law and worked his whole life ferociously to get into law school, to pass the bar, to work his way up through the firm, to get rich, to buy the big house in the quiet area, which would be “good for the kids”, and on and on and on. Then he got there. He made it.

I imagine some of the world’s most “successful” people know a type of hopelessness totally foreign to others. They have picked their goal and they’ve “been to the mountaintop”, but can’t escape the sobering question, “is this it?” Alexander wept because “there were no more worlds to conquer”, and we think of that as a very romantic scene, but I think Solomon saw past the rhetoric to the truly devastating epiphany, that conquering is overrated. In his own words, he said:

I tried to find meaning by building huge homes for myself and by planting beautiful vineyards. I made gardens and parks. I built reservoirs to collect the water to irrigate my many groves. I bought slaves, both men and women, and others were born into my household. I owned great herds and flocks, more than any of the kings who lived in Jerusalem before me. I collected great sums of silver and gold. I hired wonderful singers, both men and women, and had many beautiful concubines. I had everything a man could desire. But as I looked at everything I had worked so hard to accomplish, it was all so meaningless. It was like chasing the wind. There was nothing really worthwhile anywhere.

Like I said earlier, this is a type of suffering that only a few have an opportunity to experience, but it is uniquely frustrating. The grand buzzkill does not come until we reach our very own Promised Land, find that it is indeed all that we were promised, and that what we were promised is disappointing.[i] But here is the catch. One of the requirements for making it to that Promised Land is sacrificing everything else, so when we get there and don’t like it, we don’t really have anything to turn back to. In a sense, this is the suffering of those who have been duped. It is a very ironic type of suffering. And yet its irony and intensity pale in comparison to the suffering of the last group, the “robbed”.

Homecoming Visit

Most of us avoid abject poverty and find a way to get through the very unpleasant years of junior high. Most of us are semi-content with our jobs, and few of us get so fabulously rich that we are forced to give up on hedonism as a way to live. Most people will avoid the worst case scenario versions of everything that I experienced above. And yet, I am just as convinced, based on what I have seen, that you will never escape, on one level or another, the last type of suffering I want to mention. Because it is so widespread, this chapter would be really incomplete without it. Let me tell you how someone I really respect experienced it in his life.

As far as I can tell, Brett is one of those people it would be hard to hate. There may be certain aspects of his personality to dislike, but when you look at the selfless way he lives his life, the sacrificial decisions he has made for others, the way he treats his family, and the way he loves life, it’s hard to make a big fuss about that other stuff. After spending two decades of his life doing aid work in South America, he came back to the U.S. so that his kids could go to college. It took a while for Brett and his wife to get back into the swing of things here after having been in a different culture for so long, but eventually they made that transition. And it was good that they did, because their kids really made use of all that life had offered them living abroad once they got to college. They were all really bright and dedicated, having been raised in a setting which didn’t have as much mindless entertainment and distraction.

I remember hearing Brett talk about his daughter, who had become a very accomplished cellist. College was just a springboard for her, and apparently she wound up going off to a conservatory and doing an extended international tour with a group she met there. After over a year of touring, not to mention all the time away at college, Brett and his wife finally got their daughter back home for a while. They threw a big homecoming party for her, and he said he beamed the whole day about having his beautiful wife on one side of him at the table and his beautiful daughter on the other side. A lot of folks turned out for the party, and having been away for so long, it was all a bit overwhelming for his daughter. She got a headache and decided to go lie down. The headache was more serious than they realized, and she died, at the party, seven minutes later of a massive brain aneurism.

Conclusion

I asked earlier whether the choice to do “whatever God wants” is a coping method. It stings a bit when people make that suggestion because it insults my intelligence and independence. But I am able to look past that, now that I have seen these different cases, to see something very apparent. People who think they need no coping are simply living in an illusion. Real life will cure them of those illusions, and if you are patient, you will be able to watch it happen right before your eyes. These are sad times, but they are important times, because in those moments, pretenses and battle cries don’t amount to anything. All we have then are the tears that blur our vision and that unpleasant sensation which results from a combination of shock and agony.

Some grown adults will conclude that they are educated enough, or realistic enough, or medicated enough to be the exception here. They will call their ability to touch a hot stove bare-handed a “strength” and my use of an oven mitt a “weakness”. This is as childish as their reaction when the world does eventually come crashing down. I realized that several days ago when an acquaintance, a beautiful and talented young woman, who would be the first to tell me to stop “coping”, was robbed. She screamed, “I hope that (insert explicative) piece of (insert explicative) will go to hell (something she clearly doesn’t believe in)”. In her zeal to be eclectic, cultured, well-read, metropolitan, on-top-of-things, and free-spirited, she forgot to be ready for the bad guys and the sad days that delight in mocking our strength.

The question is not “will you cope”. You will either cope or die, because the pain is real enough. The question is “how will you cope?” or, maybe more to the point, “what will you cope with?” I only began to see a difference in my answer when I asked myself that question, after experiencing all the stories above. The difference is that the “what” is a “who”. When you are unable to distract yourself from reality, unable to glaze over the mistakes you have made, unable to act content with the way things are, and unable to believe that this is paradise, God is a refuge from the storm.

I took a walk several minutes ago, while working on this chapter, and realized that someday, I will look on these words and say, “Ah, the ramblings of a kid, who had not yet truly experienced the depths of pain about which he was writing.” But I know this today. Attempts to deal with the suffering that comes our way using blissful ignorance, vodka and porn, a go-get-them materialism, or a blanket optimism are attempts to build a house on the sand. There is only one rock. And “he who builds his house on it is wise”.

This is pretty heavy stuff. Hopefully, it was intelligible. Let’s shift gears a bit now and talk about the relationship between “desire” and “strawberry smoothies”.

[i] See Lewis

Newsletter No. 8

2008-03-28T19:10:00.000-07:00

It would be a mistake to think that the greatest difference between this life and the next one will be the world we live in. The world will be different but I am convinced, having now experienced LASIK surgery, that the major change will be in the way we perceive it and everything else. As a result of a 10 minute surgical procedure, I cannot make myself see things blurry anymore. The difference was so immediate and startling that I began to wish I could have another short procedure, after which I would sit up, unable to look at people with jealousy or hate. I wish I could go under the laser and have them zap out my ability to feel pride or lust.

And then I thought, “Well, they wouldn’t necessarily have to stop with the negative things.” Take gratitude, for example. The surgery was terrific, but the kind of “speechless, let-me-sit-down” gratitude I had to my parents (who paid) on the day of surgery has already begun to fade. As a Christian, I feel like I should always be filled with thanksgiving, so the search has begun for some new thing to be grateful for. But what would it be like if I was still actively as grateful, in this moment, for every good thing which has ever been done for me? Still elated about my surgery, about my first car, and about the Ghostbusters “proton-pack” that I got for Christmas 17 years ago? What if those things were layered on top of each other and I was able to remain in that compounding joy forever? You might say, “It would be heaven.” And for that to be possible, nothing about the course of my life or the world I live in would have to change. I would simply have to be transformed in the way I think and perceive things. All that to say, my surgery was a foretaste of total regeneration and of the type of life I expect to live eternally when God LASIKs my fallen soul.

This is the type of analogy I love to use in sermons to help bring Scripture’s truth and promises into focus. I have had plenty of opportunities this semester in my preaching courses to do just that. In the Fall, I took a class called Preaching Old Testament Narrative, taught by a great local pastor named Steve Mathewson, who, incidentally, wrote a book called Preaching Old Testament Narrative that all the seminaries use now. It was very informative, and he and I struck up a bit of a friendship. As a part of that, I mentioned an idea to him about preaching straight through the Bible in a year, and he is planning on trying it in church. I was surprised to find an article he wrote about it on the front page of Christianitytoday.com several weeks ago. When I pulled up the article, to my total shock, the first line read, “Last week, Ben, a student in my preaching class at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School…”! Click her to read that article.

At the moment, I am taking Evangelistic Preaching and have spent a great amount of time thinking about how one would reinvent evangelistic preaching for our day. If you are looking for a way to strike up a conversation with me, this would definitely be the topic to pick. My sermon in several weeks will be preached from Genesis 3, talking about the historical issues and implications of this passage, and my target audience is a group of agnostic young adults. The class is stretching me all over the place and I have especially enjoyed getting to know the professor, Dr. David Larsen, an 80 years young gentleman who is quick on his feet and has written an 800 page history of preaching.

I am taking my preaching, and everything else, on the road this summer to Leipzig, Germany, for a ten-week long, local church internship. So far as I can tell, my time will be spent attending youth group meetings, visiting nursing home patients, preaching, traveling to other East German churches, and generally soaking up every detail I can about the life and culture of that corner of the country. My next few newsletters, then, will be reports from Leipzig. I hope you all have a great summer and that I am able to see the photos and hear the stories that come out of the next few months. Please keep me in your prayers as I preach, travel, and enjoy the terrific fruits of God’s blessing. Let every moment of your life be a moment of God’s story.

Ben

Judges 21:23

My Itinerary

May 9-May 23 In Portageville, working hard to complete several chapters in my book.

May 24 My sister is getting married!

May 26-August 2 Internship in Leipzig, Germany

I will be traveling throughout Eastern Germany with my mentor during the internship to different local churches and will be sure to report on that more fully after it happens.

August 3-5 Visiting friends in Gummersbach

August 5 Meeting in Witten

August 6 Visiting friends in Bielefeld

August 7 Visiting friends in Marburg?

August 8 Flying home to Memphis

August 9-26 - It will be interesting to see just exactly what I get around to during this period of time.

August 27 Fall classes begin

Book I Chapter V

2008-03-05T10:51:00.001-08:00

Difficulties

Wrestling with the "happiness" question that this book is about has piqued my interest in several topics lately, especially history, and it has been fascinating for me to step into the lives of so many people who also try to live according to "whatever God wants". A story that recently got my attention was about a guy who was living in South Africa during the Apartheid years, that time during which people were banned from going to the beach because they weren't white and would often be persecuted by being "necklaced", having a flaming tire put on their neck to burn them alive.

At the time, some of the communists there fighting the government were becoming disillusioned with their own ideology and started looking for an alternative. To make a long story short, they got a preacher to come tell them about Jesus, a guy who also thought people should do whatever God wants.

One night, he was smuggled into an underground Communist cell of young people fighting apartheid. "Tell us about the gospel of Jesus Christ," they asked, half hoping for an alternative to the violent communist strategy they were embracing.

Graham gave a clear, powerful presentation of the gospel, showing how personal faith in Christ wonderfully transforms persons and creates one new body of believers where there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, rich nor poor, black nor white.

The youth were fascinated. One seventeen-year-old exclaimed, "That is wonderful! Show me where I can see that happening." Graham's face fell as he sadly responded that he could not think of anywhere South African Christians were truly living out the message of the gospel. "Then the whole thing is a piece of shit," the youth angrily retorted. Within a month he left the country to join the armed struggle against apartheid—eventually giving his life for his beliefs.

I’ll tell you the one of the hardest parts of the answer “Whatever God wants.” Sometimes people tell me I’m full of shit for telling them how great it is to follow God, even though I don’t always do it myself. I am totally convinced that it is the road to take, so when I don’t take it myself, it’s hard to know what to tell people. “I’m sorry?” I sometimes feel like such a failure because I realize that something dumb I did might have turned a person off to following God. And I don’t know what to do with myself for being so inconsistent.

John Piper once said the most wonderful day of his life was the day he realized that the thing which would make God the happiest is the very same thing that would make him (the individual) the happiest. But neither I nor John Piper seem to do that thing, that thing which is in our best interest, all the time. This is the difficulty. It’s really a type of madness.

And it doesn’t really have anything to do with God. If we say that trying to live for “whatever God wants” is bogus because no one seems able to do it, then we would have to say “trying to cure cancer” is a waste of time because no one seems able to do it. I am not ready to throw out the first statement for the same reason I am not ready to throw out the second. No, the issue at hand is more a difficulty in me, and it is a difficulty that will confront anyone who tries to live this way. If confessing my own personal hypocrisy was all that needed to be done, I would end here and you could congratulate yourself for finishing a chapter so quickly. But it's more complicated than that. Let me explain.

The Grand Illusion

Writers have to be careful not to disclose too much information about their personal lives because that can make things hard for them later on. But since you are the only person reading this, let me make a confession: in all my travels, there have been several times when I have had to put my brakes to the test with an attractive woman for whom I had only one kind of interest.

After singing for a group of folks one evening, a young French girl took me aside because she wanted me to know that I sang like a Greek god (I was not aware the Greek gods sang). Another girl went to some lengths to make herself available after a little gig I played in Germany. And I can remember, with crystal clarity, a conversation I had late one night, in a park in Vienna, with a beautiful Polish girl, in which she asked me whether I was usually able to resist the type of temptations that traveling presents to young single men.

Now, I have always been a good boy, I pay taxes on what little I make, and I am committed to doing not “whatever I want” but “whatever God wants.” Nevertheless, there are days now and there were times then when I thought to myself, “Wow, it would have been nice to take one of those women up on their offers. Sure, it would not have been what God wanted, but oh, to live a little, for one day to live for my own interests!” Even though these thoughts come to my mind, this type of talk is what I call “The Grand Illusion.” It is the madness I mentioned a minute ago.

When I take a vacation from all the work it is to do “whatever God wants” , I end up wishing for a life (or actually living a life) that I know would not make me happy for any length of time. To be able to have these types of Don Juan experiences, I would either have to become the type of person who is comfortable manipulating others into something they don’t want to do or the type of person who is comfortable convincing people that I am interested in them when I really just want something.

Getting what you want, when it’s not what God wants, will require you to make alterations to your personality that are hard to undo and that are definitely not in your best interests. And these are just the abstractions. I could have got crushed emotionally, got a disease, had a child. If I read my very own book, I will see that one night stands are not going to lead me to any kind of lasting happiness. But, of course, it’s hard to think this way at 11 p.m. when she’s sitting there in a summer dress smiling at you.

I know a lot more about a life of trying to want and do “whatever God wants” now than I did when I started. But maybe you have noticed: there are lots of questions that spring up along the way. “Who is God? What does He want and why does He want that? How do we find out what His “will” is? How can we be sure when there are so many religions? What if that will seems crazy?What do we get out of this all?” But those issues notwithstanding, I can tell you from experience, the difficult questions you will have of Him will pale in comparison to the difficulty you have in trying to live the life that He created you to live.

It is hard to know what to start with in a book like this, and answering philosophical and theological questions like those are usually the first place people go, but when the authors of those books put down their pens, they stand up and find the type of paradox I have just described staring them in the face. I took the example of sex just because it is juicy. But I promise you that in the stupid, small things in life and in the major decisions you face, even when you are able to clearly see what God wants and how it is obviously in your best interest, an arrogant voice inside of you will whisper, “What does God know?” So we take our nightmare vacations away from his will and either mess up our lives or miss the joy inherent in our lives because we are fantasizing about how great it would be to mess it all up. Then we have the talk.

Ben: Look, God. Life’s a bit screwed up at the moment. What’s going on? Are you still on the job?

God: Ben, for the life of me, I do not know. I mean, I know that life’s screwed up; but I don’t know why you’re stupid enough to take advice from everybody but me as to how to fix it, or how to live your life in the times when things seem to be going okay.

Or maybe this talk.

Ben: God, I’m down here towing the line but not exactly loving it.

God: Well, you’ve everywhere but in this moment. If you wished that you had done this or that in the past and that you knew better than me on that one, why didn’t you just do it? I mean, you didn’t have a good time then because you held yourself back, and you’re missing all that I’m doing in your life now because you don’t believe I know what I’m doing or that I have your best interest at heart. Maybe you should decide whether you know best for you and be on with your life without me or decide that I know what’s best for you and stop putting me under the microscope.

If you ever do have such a talk with God, you will experience the most unsettling feeling immediately afterward. You will taste the kind of bittersweet emotion that a scolded child experiences the instant they realize that there must be some incomprehensible yet good reason behind their parents’ decision to scold them, even though that reason contradicts their every want and desire. And you will be forced to face the conclusion that you were wrong.

“Ben, do you always do ‘whatever God wants’?” No, but I wish I did. And when I don’t, I usually spend time that day letting God know I realize it and asking him to help me see things His way. This path is difficult because it is hard to live out and it is more difficult because it requires us to see how we are wrong and how God is right. If you are like me, nothing is more contrary to your nature than stomaching that realization. But I continue down the path because I can’t help seeing that God is looking out for my best interests better than I am. And because I have seen what can happen when a person who is totally dependent on God’s will lets it permeate every aspect of his life. On the off change that you’ve never heard the story of that person, let me tell you about him. He’s a good object lesson.

Grüße aus Chicago No. 7

2008-01-25T22:25:00.000-08:00

Einige Wochen her erzählte mir ein Professor, "eine 'Midlife Crisis' passiert, wenn ein Mann zu viele Jahre lang immer 'ja' gesagt hat als er 'nein' hätte sagen sollen. Seine Ziele sind aus seinem Blick verloren, und wenn er die vergangenen Jahre betrachtet, sieht er eine Spur unverbundenen und untergeordneten Aufgaben. Er schafft es nicht zu verstehen, wie seine ganze Geschäftigkeit nichts ergeben hat, und wird von dieser Disparität überwältigt." Es fällt mir nicht schwer, über die Wichtigkeit meiner Prioritäten fest überzeugt zu bleiben, solange solche gottesfürchtige Leute um mich das betonen. Ich fange jetzt an, aber, eben als meine Prioritäten für die Zukunft klarer als je zuvor werden, die ergändzende Realität zu erkennen: die Gegenwart.

Ich habe während des Studiums nur wenig Zeit für Musik, aber ich schreibe seit einigen Wochen ein neues Lied. In der ersten Strophe vom Lied, singt ein junger Mann, der alt sein will. Er ist ledig aber möchte heiraten und bereitet sich in vielen Hinsichten vor während er gleichzeitig sehnt bei der Arbeit zu sein. In der zweiten Strophe ist er ein Mann, geheiratet aber jetzt bereit, Kinder zu bekommen, endlich bei der Arbeit aber frustriert, dass es ihm dabei nicht besser geht, und überall geärgert über das Hindernis, das seine Familie zur Erfüllung seiner personlichen Ziele präsentiert. In späteren Strophen ist er ein bitterer Mann, der das Ende 'der besten und produktivsten Jahre seines Lebens' trauert.

Es wäre lächerlich, wenn ich die Produktivität, die dieser Saison meines Lebens innenwohnend ist, verschwenden würde, einfach denn ich möchte jetzt schon in der nächsten Phase sein. Viele Projekte und Möglichkeiten legen auf dem Tisch, unerledigt, und wie bescheuert wäre es, eben als ich eine Beziehung aktiv aussuche, die Zeit die Gott mir für die Projekte gegeben hat zu vergeuden. Das Dilemma aber ist folgendermaßen: Wird man überzeugt von der dringenden Wichtigkeit der Zukunft oder der unermesslichen Einzigkeit der Gegenwart, dann wird er oft entweder komplett auf der Zukunft fixieren (Singlesein als der größte Fluch) oder Götze der Gegenwart machen (Singlesein als das größte Segen). Bitte den Herrn für mich, dass er mir hilft bei diesem Thema aufs Messers Schneide zu stehen.

Ich ging vor kurzem mit Freunden in die Innenstadt um Salsa Tanzen zu gehen, und unterwegs wurden wir fast Teil eines schrecklichen 4 Auto Unfalls, der mit großer Geschwindigkeit auf Chicago's verkehrsstärksten Autobahn etwa 15 Meter vor uns passierte. Wir sind zur Unfallstelle gelaufen und haben die, die nur wenig verletzt waren, geholfen während wir auf die Polizei und Ambulanzen warteten. Sie war eine unwirkliche Erfahrung. Seit dem Abend haben Freunde aus der ganzen Welt mich angerufen und erzählten wie Freunde und Bekannte von ihnen gestorben sind, oft als sie noch jung und im Frühling vom Leben waren. Also ich denke sehr viel neulich über unsere Sterblichkeit u.a. über die Zentralität der Aufersteheung. Ich kann den Herrn nur preisen, dass er mein Leben bis zum heutigen Tag behütet hat.

Und als wäre das nicht genug, schenkt er mir Sehkraft: ich erlebe (richtiges Wort?) bald LASIK Augechiurgie, und werde nachher besser als normalle Sehkraft haben. Zur Zeit muss ich den Wecker neben meinem Bett sogar aufheben und direkt vor meinen Augen bringen um die Zeit lesen zu können.

Das Studium läuft gut und ich merke jetzt wie hilfreich und lohnenswert die Stunden beim Sprachlernen sind. Am 7 Februar predige ich vom Richterbuch und würde gerne eure Gebete an dem Tag haben. Ich leite noch eine Kleingruppe von Jungs in der ersten Stufe und baue da die Arbeit auf: ab Sonntag begleitet mich einen Highschooler, den ich trainiere und der mir aushelft; ich versuche eine kurze Sammlung biblischer Geschichten zu machen, die Eltern dreimal in der Woche, 5-7 Minuten lang als Gutenachtgeschichten gebrauchen können; ich treffe mit Leitern von Kinderarbeitprogrammen bei Gemeinden überall in Chicago, und verbringe viel Zeit im Gespräch mit meinem Mentor über das Ziel der Kinderarbeit überhaupt. Meine Forschung zum Thema Spracherrungenschaft beschäftigt mich auch sehr viel in dieser Zeit. Ich nahm neulich eine Lektüre auf, in der ich das Hauptkonzept meiner Methode erkläre. Möchtest du mal etwas darüber hören, dann schreib mir und ich schicke dir den Link dafür.

Einer von euch bekam neulich den Führerschein, einige haben neue Jobs, und ein paar treffen bald Entscheidungen, die das ganze Leben ändern werden. Das weiß ich, weil ihr mir geschrieben habt und über eure Leben erzählt. Ich bete noch mit den Gebetsbechern, weiß aber manchmal nicht worum ich den Herrn für euch bitten soll. Also ich hoffe es geht euch allen gut und dass ich mal von euch hören. Lebe jeden Moment als ein Moment Gottes Story.

Ben
Richter 21:23

(Das Bild oben von meinem guten Freund Dave Niblack - www.davidniblack.com)

Newsletter No. 7

2008-01-25T10:34:00.000-08:00

Several weeks ago, one of my preaching instructors told us, "a midlife crisis happens when a man has spent too many years of his life saying 'yes' when he should have said 'no'. He has lost sight of his goals and when he looks on his past, he sees a trail of menial and unrelated tasks. He is unable to see how all his busyness has added up to anything and is overcome by the disconnect." It is hard not to have conviction about your priorities when you hear things like that from such godly men. But ironically, as my priorities for the future come into focus more now than ever, I'm also dealing starting to deal with the opposing reality: the present moment.

School doesn't give me much time for music, but I have been working on a song for several weeks about redeeming my time. In the first verse, I sing as a guy who is young but wants to be old, who is single but wants to be married, who is in training but wants to be out on the field. In the second verse I am a man, married but ready for children, working but ready for a breakthrough in my efforts, and generally annoyed by how marital status has made it difficult to realize all of my goals. Later verses recount my thoughts as an old man who is distraught that now his most productive years are behind him.

Overall, work on the song has shown me how ironic it would be to waste the productivity inherent in this season of my life because I'm bitter about being stuck in the moment. I would hate to waste the time I have now as a single, even as I am actively seeking a relationship, and not complete the projects that God has laid on my heart. The dilemma is that usually, becoming convinced of either of these two ideas (importance of living for the future or uniqueness of this moment) leads to either fixation on the future or idolatry of the present moment (singleness as "the greatest curse" vs. singleness as "the greatest blessing"). So please pray that God will help me walk on the knife's edge between the two.

Several weeks ago, friends and I, traveling downtown to go salsa dancing for the evening, were nearly involved in a four car accident at high speed on the expressway. We ran up to the scene immediately afterwards to help any injured and call the police. It was very surreal. Since that evening, several friends have called me to talk about the deaths of their friends and acquaintances. My mind has been focused on our mortality and on the importance of the resurrection for several weeks, so I think my main praise of the newsletter is that I am alive. As if life were not enough, I'm getting sight. On February 28th, I'll be singing, "I once was blind, but now I see." I'm getting LASIK surgery done and will thereafter never have to pull my alarm clock up to my face to see what time it is. Praise the Lord.

School is going well and I am finally seeing some fruit from my language studies. I preach on February 7th from Judges. The class has been very helpful and I would appreciate your prayers on that day! I'm still working with 1st grade guys at church and am branching out: bringing in a high school guy to help me, trying to design a small collection of biblical narratives for parents to use as bed time stories 3x a week, meeting with kid's ministry leaders all over Chicago, and talking with my mentor this semester about the purpose of kid's ministry in general. My Language Acquistion research is going very well, and I recorded a lecture explaining my method over Christmas. If you're interested in hearing what several language teachers have told me is "great" and "has never been done before", let me know and I'll get you a copy of the lecture.

One of you got a drivers' licenses this past month, several got new jobs, and one or two are making life-changing decisions. I know this because you emailed me and told me. I still work through my prayer jars, but sometimes don't know what to pray for. Hope this letter finds you doing well and that I hear from you. Live every moment as a moment of God's story.

Ben
Judges 21:23

(photo above by my good friend Dave Niblack at davidniblack.com)

Selfcasting

2007-11-30T10:49:00.001-08:00

I recently wrote a paper for a class here at Trinity called "Selfcasting". In the introduction, I explain the premise by saying:

For a variety of reasons, people are recording large amounts of information about themselves with the explicit and sometimes sole intention of publishing it. They “mash-up” this material on the internet into a kind of full-service programming, complete with news (status updates, which are like headlines tickers), travel entertainment (photo albums), the arts (our own music or our personal preferences), social commentary (blog op-ed’s), specials (videos from trips to Wal-Mart), and, of course, advertisements of all kinds, which can be anywhere and consist of anything. This process of capturing, arranging, and publishing the material affects the lives of both the people creating and those consuming, and if the truth be told, few people are simply one or the other anymore.

Click here to read the article:

Part I

Part II

Part III

Selfcasting: Part III

2007-11-30T10:45:00.000-08:00

The World In Front of the Trend

Personal Transformation

If a person selfcasts as widely and prolifically as is possible, a great deal of their time will be spent in the work and a great deal of their life will be on display as a result. It is inevitable that this has an effect on them, and those effects are as wide-ranging as are the things being selfcast.

On one hand, selfcasters are often transformed in very positive ways. Many bloggers report that the fruits of their efforts and their publicity are improved grammar and a better sense for composition in general. One has said, “It’s raised my self-esteem…I’m really shy in real life”.[1] Those who profile themselves with tools like MySpace and Facebook may see gaps in their own interests which lead them to diversify their lives. People may even note how careless they are with their hygiene and health, by seeing themselves portrayed in photos (posted by others) in which they look bad, and consequently resolve to take better care of themselves.

On the other hand, some people may be led to spend all their time manipulating their online “self”. It is easier to digitally selfcast oneself as a person following Christ than to be a person following Christ. And it is very tempting, even for the casual selfcaster, to diversify one’s corpus and raise popularity by advertising in inappropriate ways. This is essentially the age old dilemma of “what to wear to school” but without anyone censoring that attire when one gets there. If nothing else, the habit of selfcasting one’s way into the limelight is not a good one. An amateur musician who recently made it into professional recording through selfcasting recalled all his toil on the MySpace network, saying: “It has never felt comfortable, but shameless self-promotion is part of being in this business”.[2] If we are not careful, our whole lives become that “shameless promotion”.

Community Observation

With all our focus on the selfcasters themselves, we cannot forget that someone is reading it all. My studies and travels generally keep me separated from my parents, and as I selfcast my thoughts, pictures, videos, songs, and other bits of media online, my parents are able to keep up with me in ways that would have been impossible in the past. Parents who have to go through this separation must certainly see redeeming characteristics in the trend. As my folks follow my online “corpus”, they are able to affirm and build me up. Earlier I critiqued the trend for replacing personal contact between veritable neighbors. But it is appropriate, I think, that in this section I praise the trend for helping long distance relationships of every kind stay strong.

The word “relationships” raises one last issue of difficulty, most ably explained with a true story. A friend of mine, studying at a university in a different part of the country, has become obsessed with a girl, a true selfcaster, who he sees regularly, but with whom he has little real contact. His dilemma is that he knows much too much about her. He has read page after page of blog entry, seen picture after picture of vacation photos, and monitored a number of other elements of her “selfcast corpus”, but now when they speak, he is made awkward by the information. His goal now is for her to tell him in conversation all he already knows about her, because otherwise, the information is more of a hindrance to his efforts than a help.

In this way, selfcasting threatens to tear our culture apart. What does a person do, in this culture which understands that friendship should lead to dating, when he or she learns enough about a stranger, who lies outside of their normal social circles, to conclude that a date would be worthwhile, if they have not beforehand already laid a foundation of friendship? The answer is not as simple (nor unimportant) as it might seem.

Responding to the World In Front Of the Trend

People who spend any amount of time selfcasting often begin to think about their experiences as “selfcastable”. My friend might see a video or photo opportunity now in a way he would not have before. Another might come up with art projects simply to have new material for an online site. Note the parallel to our lives as witnesses: Every moment is somehow a part of God’s plan. At any time, there is something more to be done for advancing his kingdom message. It might be appropriate to close by meditating a bit on that last thought.

The God Who Selfcasts

Some of the most memorable verses of Scripture lead me to think that an element of the gospel, the good news, is that God has chosen to selfcast himself among us. He has done things and continues to do things in history for the explicit and sole intention of informing us who He is. Scripture explains that the “heavens declare the glory of God”, and records that the Prophets spoke his words for Him. We refer to Scripture itself as “God’s Word”. It is a text which God uses to communicate to us the most essential elements of his plan and of his character

But in addition to the many elements in God’s corpus of works, the writer of Hebrews adds that, at the coming of Jesus, we were privileged to see “the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of his nature.” No reason occurs to me for why God might need to do this. It is for our benefit alone. “The Word became flesh and took up residence among us. We observed his glory. No one has ever seen God…[but] the One who is at the Father’s side has revealed him.” Jesus had a ministry of manifestation, selfcasting God at every corner.

I am encouraged and stimulated by the idea that selfcasting, as I have presented it, might offer us one more way to manifest God at every corner. And I am incredibly more encouraged when I contemplate how diligent and loving God has been and continues to be to selfcast Himself, through his Spirit, daily into my life. Of course, God is always selfcasting, but we are often too busy to notice. What an irony that we might be so busy selfcasting ourselves that we miss what God wants to do in our lives. As you may have noticed, this parallel raises many questions. Hopefully it has brought you to see the phenomenon in a “thicker” way. And if, by chance, you want to know more about my thoughts on this topic, do be sure to check out my blog.

[1] McDonnell, Sharon. Dear Digital Diary: Oops! New York: New York Times, 2005, accessed on 18 November 2007; available from http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/05/cyber/articles/30diary.html

[2] Tucker, Ken. “MySpace Generation.” Billboard 119, no. 17 (April 28, 2007): 9.

Selfcasting: Part II

2007-11-30T10:43:00.000-08:00

The World Of The Trend

Besides writing for high school publications, my first sizable publishing experience was completely self-driven. In January 1994, I checked out the world wide web, the coolest thing I'd ever seen on computers. I immediately took my stories, poems, reviews, netsurfing impressions and put them all online. Soon, I had my own magazine, with a daily readership in the thousands.[1]

The trend of “selfcasting” is really just the combination of two things common to every society into one new and unprecedented phenomenon. Those two things are 1) recording things about oneself in journals, diaries, photo albums, and personal memoirs and 2) making the community aware of one’s presence and identity, otherwise known as “getting your name out there” or “becoming your own person”.

In the first instance, selfcasting may just be an improvement on an already good thing. One man at my church remarked to me that he found the whole phenomenon very encouraging. He would love to be able to look back now on blogs that he might have written to recall his thoughts from any given day in his past. Many have tried to take up journaling without success, but note that blogs keep the pressure on to keep writing in a way that journals do not. And the phenomenon is not only affecting individuals and their journaling habits but also the way groups share common stories and memories. Whereas years ago, people could only recount a funny story, now they can publish a video of that amusing moment, shared by friends and captured by a cell phone camera, on the internet for the whole world to see.

In the second instance, it should not be surprising that people try to make their “self” known to others. My father has told me many times about his decision to play football in high school, not because he was so taken with the game, but because he wanted to show that he could to a family member. It was a way to prove something about his character. In a similar way, I feel that selfcasting is truly an assertive “getting myself out there” or “becoming my own person” kind of activity. It can showcase our courage or accomplishments or wit through the different information and media we decide to publish. The nature of the phenomenon is not passive, like being well-kept so as to avoid a bad reputation, but active, like taking part in a school sport or extracurricular activity to build a respectable reputation for oneself.

So we could sum up the phenomenon by saying it is “recording to make oneself known”. Selfcasting is truly distinct insofar as it is the wedding of two human pastimes, 1) recording things about oneself and 2) making a name for oneself, into a new art altogether. As an art, there are certain tools involved, and the next step in unpacking the trend is unpacking those tools.

The Tools

Online applications like MySpace and Flickr are the tools that help us selfcast our lives.[2] These tools are being created in response to felt needs, and so they become instant hits when they appear. In light of this and what we know from the “World Behind the Trend”, a picture develops: we are being given tools to build things we have never hitherto conceived of building by people who have taken time to study us and our living patterns. It is as if they awaken a desire in us to build something by handing us hammers and nails.

What are these tools? The following is a brief listing of the many available tools, explained in each case on their own terms as found on the respective websites.

Blip.tv	The world is changing as it becomes easier for people to produce great content. We focus on shows — the kind of stuff you might find on television but don't.
SpinXpress	SpinXpress is used by independent global media producers to create videos, music compilations, and other collaborative media projects.
Facebook	Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you.
Flickr	almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world - has two main goals: 1. We want to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them. 2. We want to enable new ways of organizing photos.
Myspace	MySpace is an online community that lets you meet your friends' friends. Create a community on MySpace and you can share photos, journals and interests with your growing network of mutual friends! See who knows who, or how you are connected. Find out if you really are six people away from Kevin Bacon.
Youtube	Broadcast Yourself.
Digg	Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg — we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online.
Upcoming	Upcoming is a community for discovering and sharing events. It can help you find stuff to do, discover what your friends are doing, or let you keep private events online for your own reference.
NowPublic	At NowPublic, we have a very simple definition of news: "News is new information on current events." In our experience that's what people look for when they're looking for news - whether they're buying a paper or searching the web. Your news will likely fit into one of three kinds of story: 1) Your eyewitness account 2) New information: bits of information you have collected, arranged, tied together and put into a context in relation to a current event; 3) Commentary: your advice or analysis directly related to a current event.
Pandora	Pandora At Pandora, we have a single mission: To play music you'll love - and nothing else. (Ben: Then you can share your custom channels elsewhere to show your good taste.)

Many pages could be and (have elsewhere been) spent studying each of these tools in their own right, but for our purposes it is more important to see how they are used together.

The Techniques

The sum of the artwork made, the product of digital selfcasting, is what I have begun to call a personal corpus, or “selfcast corpus”, and the key to understanding the world of this trend is understanding how the raw data of our experiences finds its way and fits into that corpus. One piece of information can be selfcast using several different “techniques”, and the technique is, in the end, as important for the final effect as the content itself. Let us first take a look at each one individually and then observe the way that the same experience, thought, or piece of information could be conveyed in a selfcast using each of the different techniques.

Serialing

Many tools allow selfcasters to produce strings of information in which their experiences, thoughts, ideas, and tastes are made into a DNA of sorts, a chain of information that would never be the same between two people. I call this technique “serialing”, as it gives us a kind of unique serial number . A casual glance through the examples below should show that serializing information is a powerful way of communicating a great deal about oneself in a small space. These strings of data were compiled completely at random from “profiles” (of strangers) posted on one of selfcasting’s premier tools, Facebook.

Male ▪ Puts a link to a video about a man who shot his wife for giving him a warm beer ▪ Single ▪ Member of a group called “People with tattoos that are much more fun to see naked” ▪ Has a built in movie rating program on his profile and has rated 57 movies ▪ Went to see a concert last week with Jonathan McKee of Conn college

Female ▪ Ozark, MO ▪ Engaged to Dustin Kellogg ▪ Just moved to the west side of Springfield ▪ Kitten named Amaya eats “poop” ▪ Is a connoisseur of country music ▪ Hates scary movies ▪ Is studying Language pathology ▪ Will be attending a conference in Massachusetts with Laura Foster.

Male ▪ Very Liberal ▪ Interested in music by “me, myself, and I, the greatest rap / rock / country/ folk/ R&B/ techno/ gospel/ world beat/ classical artist ever” ▪ Says he “does not smoke crack” ▪ Belongs to groups “Green anarchy” and “International Hug Patrol”

Female ▪ Single ▪ Watches “House” ▪ In an explicative filled quote, relates how she thinks one day, God will decide to wipe people off the face of the earth because they are *******” ▪ Studies nursing ▪ Was recently in a car accident and was mildly injured ▪ Is very excited about her new truck, a 2006 F-150 4x4 Quad Cab Triton ▪ Lives in Blair-Shannon dormitory on the fourth floor

Expression

Despite obvious appearances, blogging isn’t really about writing at all; that’s just the end point of the process, the outcome that occurs more or less naturally if everything else has been done right…it is about engaging with the content and with the authors of what you have read – reflecting, criticizing, questioning, reacting…[3]

Much of what a selfcaster does in a personal corpus is express himself. No longer does a person have to be signed by a major label to produce music, and no longer does one need a major newspapers’ name to write for thousands. Rolling Stone reports that “YouTube has become the new open mike, and it’s flooded with more acoustic guitars and harmonica tracks than the sidewalks of Greenwich Village in 1962.”[4] Lisa Hunter reports that, “It’s official: the once snooty art world has gone online.”[5] The explosion of blogging about any and every topic has resulted in a massive increase in the amount of public opinion being aired on computer screens everywhere, with the world of textual expression itself now being called the “blogosphere”.

Inside the world of this trend, some critics say that selfcasting is what happens when a generation of people waste away their days publishing videos and blog articles about themselves ad nauseum[6]. One might say they are “expressing themselves to death”. In the awareness of that critique, I find it interesting that the selfcasting subculture is coexistent with another subculture, which operates based on exactly the opposite premise, namely “working oneself to death”. While some Americans are only interested in their interests and in pondering their positions, others are only interested in work and their own worldly advancement. To some extent, the eclecticism of selfcasting may be a reaction to the cultural disinterest of restless materialism, but whatever the case, the verdict must be that we are a culture of extremes.

So for better or for worse, selfcasting has made room for lots of new voices to be heard. But as we rejoice at the resurgence of the arts, the pressing question is, “what are the motives behind all the statements being made?” As a songwriter, I can personally speak of the freedom which digital selfcasting brings to me as one content to be a non-professional. It seems like selfcasting would spell liberation for me, that only my drive to make “pure music” would fuel me. But strangely it is not so. My output as a songwriter has increased, but with the publicity that my newfound expression brings, there is a tendency to let my audience dictate the approach and content. That corruption of “expression” is part of the third technique used in selfcasting.

Advertisement

In a recent issue of the publication Advertising Age, William Arruda has written an article called, “How to Build the ‘Brand Called You’ in an Online Era”. Arruda says that the “notion of ‘Me Inc.’ is not new. What is new is the way you build your personal brand…To achieve the highest level of professional success and fulfillment today, you must augment your real-world brand-building activities with online personal branding”. He continues by explaining the five critical steps toward achieving the goal of a personal brand:

Be Virtually Visible: it’s a requirement for you to build and continuously manage your online identity.

Determine your Google quotient: Being googled is the new-millennium version of the reference check…Google yourself, and go to careerdistinction.com to calculate your results.

Know Yourself to Grow your Brand: Articulate your unique promise of value.

Build Your Brand in Bits and Bytes: To craft the right web identity for your brand, maintain a blog, create a professional website, use online networking sites, publish online articles and participate in web-based communities. Use these vehicles wisely to cultivate a web presence that ensures you’ll show up the search results you intend.

Be Constant: Even when you’ve reached digital distinction, the nirvana in the world of online identity, remember that your Google results can change as fast as the weather in New England. So regularly monitor your Online ID.[7]

To some extent, this advertising just tries to highlight a person’s better side. The problem, as already mentioned, is that this technique tends to affect everything which is selfcast. A person may advertise himself in the context of a serial by adding in fallacious data which makes him look more well-rounded or culturally astute. A person may advertise himself in the context of expression by only blogging about experiences in which he is the hero, or by posting photos in which he is seen mingling with socially desirable peers. I specifically chose not to treat these three techniques as “genres” or “texts” themselves since a great deal of advertising can happen in spaces normally reserved for serialing and expression.

Of course, aside from the simple spin-doctoring and product placement involved in tweaking the other two techniques, selfcasting can also be done along purely advertising-driven lines using tools like HotorNot.com. This tool lets people put a number of lurid photos of themselves online and invites thousands of strangers to rate their “hotness” on a scale of 1-10.

Once a selfcaster has assembled a personal corpus, the only work left is to ensure that the corpus is well-rounded and that readers can jump from one section of that corpus to the next. Some term this “social media optimization”, and for true selfcasters, it is simply a part of the art.

Responding to “The World of the Trend”

Looking at Trend more closely

To the extent that selfcasting is just a graduated form of having one’s school picture and spelling tests hung up on the refrigerator door, there is nothing that Christians should fear in the phenomenon itself. The trend highlights the need people have to be known by others and to somehow prove themselves. A lot of rhetoric about egocentrism at this point would only miss the point that Christians have 1) eschewed the time-consuming community in which others can be known in the real world and 2) never really come up with the type of rites of passage that many young people need to feel established as men and women. Is it any surprise that they have retreated to the web to accomplish things that often their parents and local churches were unable to coach them through?

Tools

Christians have always asked questions like, “Should we participate in the pre-existing ‘secular’ activity or make our own evangelical parody?” Other than the danger of spending extraordinarily too much time tinkering with these internet applications, there is nothing in the structure of most of them that would prevent a Christian from using them in a good way. Some people have gone the route of selfcasting extractionism, such as Dittytalk.com, which describes itself as “a free online Christian community, a resource and a place of fellowship that is safe, clean and up to date with current Internet trends such as blogging, sharing music and photos, playing computer games and conversing with people around the world through forums, e-mail and journaling.” But it seems like, especially for evangelicals, we should set our sights on using these tools and their online communities wisely rather than making our own enclaves for doing the same thing. Some suggest compromise: Christianmyspacecodes.com advertises that, “if you are in need of fixing up your MySpace profile with godly graphics, this is the place to be.”

Techniques

In many ways, selfcasting, specifically serialing and expression, are answers to Christian prayers. They are a chance to shed light on every aspect of our lives, the aspects which have been gloriously redeemed by God and the aspects which showcase our falleness and need for grace, in a way instantly accessible to stand-offish observers. One friend of mine, a semi-professional photographer, has documented his extensive missions work with world-class photography. Another friend, though experiencing what amounts to the total reduction of all her worldly comforts, has been blogging recently about her gratitude to God for finally helping her understand what it means to be dependent. Others raise non-Christian curiosities by listing the books they are reading or linking up their own tailor-made Christian radio stations to their profiles. These things do not reduce the need for one person to explain the gospel to another, but the transparency which they foster do make the whole process easier.

Advertisement

While doing my research I came upon a picture[8], which was the main image used to identify the person, a Christian acquaintance, on his Facebook profile. With one glance at it, the snare of advertising in Christian selfcasts is laid on the table. He was in a position of prayer, without a shirt on, in a darkness which, I suppose, was intended to highlight his muscular physique. What is to be inferred from it? That his holiness is sexy? Or that his sexiness is holy? This was not the only picture of its kind that he had stored in his account.

Advertising is something that always threatens to invade the other things we do while selfcasting. The temptation is tremendous to use God, for example, to enhance one’s image (here literally). If Scripture is any indicator of what God thinks about people trying to use Him for their own ends, I would venture to say it is very dangerous. Whether it was pondered for this significance or not, the photo sets the standard for what Christians of all people dare not do in their selfcasting. This brings us to our final section.

Read Part III

[1] Hall, Justin. Publishing Empowerment. 1995, accessed 13 November 2007; available from

http://www.links.net/vita/speak/ndn/pubpower.html.

[2] Let the tens of millions of users and the hundreds of millions of hours that Americans spend using them every week be evidence enough that, in studying these “tools”, we are not talking about fads and gadgets touching a few people but, at the very least, fads and gadgets which touch much of the society and in a somewhat profound way.

[3] Stephen Downes. “Educational Blogging.” EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 39, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 2004): 14–26.

[4] Nicole Frehsee and Kevin O’Donnell, “The Youtube Folk Revival,” Rolling Stone, 18 October 2007, 71.

[5] Lisa Hunter, “The Art of the Internet,” Money 36, no. 10 (October 2007): 137-140.

[6] “Mad About You”. The American Spectator 40, no. 1 (February 2007): 38-39.

[7] William Arruda, “How to Build the Brand Called You in an Online Era,” Advertising Age 78,

no. 27 (July 2007): 28.

[8] I have not included the image in the online version of this paper on the chance that the person might see themselves and be convicted :)

Selfcasting: Part I

2007-11-30T10:34:00.000-08:00

When Time magazine named “You” Person of the Year for 2006, they justified their decision. “[You] worked like crazy. You made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. You blogged about your candidates losing…wrote songs about getting dumped…and camcordered bombing runs.”[1] In that same magazine, in an article entitled “But Enough About You”, Brian Williams came to the conclusion that “Americans have decided the most important person in their lives is…them, and our culture is now built upon that idea…The implied message is that if it has to do with you or your life, it’s important enough to tell someone. Publish it. Record it.”[2]

The reality behind these observations is that for a variety of reasons, people are recording large amounts of information about themselves with the explicit and sometimes sole intention of publishing it. They “mash-up” this material on the internet into a kind of full-service programming, complete with news (status updates, which are like headlines tickers), travel entertainment (photo albums), the arts (our own music or our personal preferences), social commentary (blog op-ed’s), specials (videos from trips to Wal-Mart), and, of course, advertisements of all kinds, which can be anywhere and consist of anything. This process of capturing, arranging, and publishing the material affects the lives of both the people creating and those consuming, and if the truth be told, few people are simply one or the other anymore.

Normal people have today like never before tools in their hands with which they can do all the things professional broadcasters and journalists have done in the past. As these things go, some of the expert “citizen journalists” may rise to the top and eventually find their way into professional broadcasting, covering world events on television and in national news publications, or writing for sitcoms and large-scale entertainment media. But few people make it so far, and as one blogger has concluded about the future of these non-professionals, “instead of covering the news, many will be covering what is most important to them– themselves. Selfcasting, if you will.”[3]

The phenomenon is the product of intersecting developments in both technology and socio-economics, and the result is that people are viewing and displaying themselves and their daily experiences differently. Selfcasting is epoch-making not because it is a new way of thinking or living but because it is a new way of organizing thoughts and experiences themselves, whatever those thoughts or experiences may be. It is a culture of and strategy designed for producing, gathering, and making collages of texts. We have become our own paparazzi.

Aside from all the intriguing observations that can be made about selfcasting from a distance, as uninterested spectators, we should recognize that questions like “What are we selfcasting?”, “How should we selfcast?” and “Is it wise for Christians to selfcast at all?” are becoming increasingly pressing. Christians are being swept up into the trend like anyone else, and at some point we have to wonder what the true seed and fruits of selfcasting are. Is the trend a technologically-enabled ego trip? Is it just a new form of the time-honored and God-ordained past-time of knowing and being known by others? What is the result of doing it ourselves and should we encourage others’ efforts by looking at all the things which they have selfcast?

In order to answer these questions and lay bare the phenomenon for all it is, I will be breaking it down into sections, first examining and observing the “world behind the trend”, then the “world of the trend”, and later the “world in front of the trend”. This means we will be looking at the background for the movement, the phenomenon as it is occurring now, and the way that that phenomenon is affecting those selfcasting and those receiving the selfcast. As we move through the material, we will take a few lines to think through the issues relevant to Christians. How does the trend fit into our lives as believers, or does it fit in at all? In any case, before we can talk about it, it would help to talk about them: the selfcasters and their times.

The World Behind the Text

Most of the people who spend their every free moment selfcasting are students and young workers. This is not to say there are no kindergartners or grandmothers selfcasting, but on the whole, one can expect to find the great majority of “programming” coming from people 15 to 30 years of age. Younger people have not had the experiences needed to fill up the web with their interesting and sexy lives, and older people are too busy keeping those lives themselves on track to sit down and edit them for someone else’s entertainment.

By focusing in on the right age groups, we know where to look in order to understand the times of the trend-setters: the last two decades. And because the United States is the principal staging ground for the emerging trend of selfcasting[4], it is worth our time to note several things about the period of eighties and nineties in the U.S. which may have led to this development.

Technology

The first noteworthy development in the background of the selfcasting phenomenon is the digital revolution. I remember receiving my first camera as a 2^nd grader and quickly shooting up all 24 exposures in the matter of an hour, but no child alive today will ever experience the same thing. Technology has done away with film altogether. We can store all we want to. This technological development alone has so changed the way people live that it deserves a brief mention; let me zoom in on photography as it is a microcosm of the greater reality.

Consider the reason for taking a photo in the first place: to capture a moment that one might want to briefly relive via the photo at a later time. Because of the proliferation of digital cameras and the availability of endless memory, however, the whole nature of family and vacation photography seems to be changing. People are captive to an innate sense that they need to take a picture of something at a time when they are not particularly interested in remembering the moment later. The picture, far from being a reminder of a great experience, can become in essence the receipt of an otherwise pleasant time spoiled by duty.[5]

One photographer studying the effect of the digital revolution noted that he has taken 36% more pictures every year since switching to digital photography, and added that, based on his calculations, on a daily basis, 3,846,200 photos are taken Disney World every day. He goes on to lament the sad state of his efforts to hold on to his mountain of family memories. He employs four computers which routinely back each other up.[6]

This adult photographer serves as a perfect example of how differently parents and children are using computers, at least at this point in time[7], and provides a good segway into discussion of another important technological revolution. Owen Gibson reports that “a third of all young people have launched their own blog or website…Rather than using the internet as their parents do – as an information source, to shop or to read newspapers online – most young people are using it to communicate with one another.”[8] A previous generation put paper letters and the postage system in danger with telephones, and now the current one has put phone calls and face-to-face meetings in danger with the internet. This shift towards an existence not only making use of but rather dependent on the internet for communication in general has certainly played a role in the development of selfcasting. The existence of the trend itself is evidence that the Internet has become one of the most logical places to make one’s voice (and face) known.[9]

Socio-Economics

Several other long-term developments, which almost seem too obvious to mention, and which are certainly outside the scope of the writer’s expertise, nevertheless need to be noted because of their influence on the rise of digital selfcasting. Not one hundred years ago, the United States experienced a catastrophic depression and even saw outbreaks of famine, a word which many school children today have probably never heard before. In contrast, many members of the selfcast generation[10], children of the 1980’s and 1990’s, have come of age in a time of fermented wealth, having neither experienced true want nor knowing people who have.

The 1980’s were, as author Tom Wolfe dubbed, “the splurge generation.” The catch-phrase “you can have it all!” was tagged at the end of more than a few TV and radio commercials. Binge buying or spending and credit card mania became a way of life in the U.S. [11]

Whether or not one is ready to say that we are “wealthier” than in decades past, certainly we can settle on saying that self-interested spending, and therefore perceived wealth, has risen dramatically.[12] More qualified writers can be trusted to determine the appropriate cause and effect of the issue, but this perceived wealth has become co-existent with if not causal (or even resultant) of a brash individualism. Even speaking of the previous generation, Joannie Fischer says, “The 70 million baby boomers soon to come of age would be dubbed the ‘me generation’ for indulging in an obsessive self-interest”.[13]

Certainly the nation has always exhibited an element of individualism[14], but when coupled with the trend towards higher wealth, or at least higher borrowing, the power and staying effect on generations of selfcasters begins to manifest itself everywhere, for our purposes most interestingly in the new trend of suburban sprawl. Note that putting great wealth into the hands of individualists means that, as those people sense the desire to live off by themselves, where circumstances are most comfortable to them, they will be able to do just that. During college, I knew students who opted to live 30 miles away from campus, in virtually undeveloped parts of our sprawling suburban town, because “the apartments are so big and new”.

When the United States first came into being, most people had never even heard the word individualism. "Our fathers only knew about egoism," said Tocqueville, who helped coin the term to capture the new way of life in the fledgling nation. Not until the mid-1800s did the pursuit of individual fulfillment come to connote a retreat from the group.[15]

Community in our society has become like the volleyball companion “Wilson” in Tom Hanks’ Castaway. As the ball floats away from the raft, our wealth and comfort, we are more ready, and many would say more reasonable[16], to hold on to this “raft” of sorts than to go chasing after some communal utopia. Sociologically, what this means is that people spend more time holed up by themselves, away from community, and that the process of person-to-person selfcasting, what has been commonly called “developing and maintaining regular friendships”, is going the way of the Apple II.

Sheltered by their wealth, the rich have always been free to flout convention. When they do, they set a bad example, but they probably harm themselves more than society as a whole.[17]

Intersection of Technology and Sociology in Selfcasting

If it is thought-provoking to outline the effect of these shifts on their own, it is mind-boggling to see how such shifts combine to produce this uniquely 21^st century development. For example, individualism leads people to want their picture out there on the cover or their story on everyone’s minds. And the digital and internet revolutions, as we will see more fully in the “World of the Trend”, have given us ways to log the hours it takes to get that picture or that story out there. Furthermore, because so many people are taking part in all of this, the bar has been set fairly high. The nature of an individualistic society dictates that one has to work harder at establishing his place, and to some extent, selfcasting only ratchets up the competition. Not only supermodels but now also high school beauty queens get their pictures plastered everywhere. The two eating disorders my family has suffered and survived through represent only one front of an ever-increasing battle, partially intensified through selfcasting.

So armed with that technology and often without the community of yesteryear, we spend more time selfcasting online than in real life. In checking my theories, I found that the people who make online selfcasting possible are distinctly aware of this reality and in fact use it as their guiding light. Shawn Gold, senior vice president of marketing and content for MySpace, has said that he takes a “sociological approach to content. Understand their core needs for identification and expression, and then address those needs…Marketers should offer tools that facilitate identity production.”[18]

Responding to “The World Behind the Trend”

As a Christian reflecting on the World Behind the Trend, I am unable to find a major problem in the development of digital cameras and fiber optic cable. Christians are not at fault for allowing some slide that led to these innovations. We can make as much use of them as anyone else. I do believe, however, that it might be time to pause, amidst all our picture-taking in particular, to think long and hard about our hermeneutic of the second commandment, and ask ourselves whether we are not taking our memory-making activities too far. On a different note, Christian parents who have accommodated each child, in the child’s own room, with the best television and computer their credit cards can provide should recognize the great disservice they have done to their children and family life in general, if for nothing else than for so allowing their time to be burned to ashes and their attention spans reduced to nothing.

As for the socio-economic situation mentioned above, both the church and its members will be found guilty of fleeing to the newest suburbs, often leaving the old community and even church building behind (instead of just planting a new church there), and in general for giving up on geography. I lament our lack of ingenuity in addressing the unique challenges that urban sprawl introduces and also our readiness to streamline churches using new technology. As we have said goodbye to the places people live and organized churches for maximum efficiency, we sometimes render them incapable of facilitating Christian “identity production”. Congregants are pulled great distances from their communities, and as a result, time-consuming service projects and inner-church fellowship are often virtually impossible. Would-be preachers are turned away in favor of satellite videos and would-be choir members are turned away in favor of professional choir singers. Consequently, many such people have taken their preaching and singing online, although now preaching a different message to a different tune.

Read Part II

[1] Lev Grossman, “Time’s Person of the Year: YOU,” Time, 25 December 2006, 42-58.

[2] Williams, Brian. But Enough About You. Time, accessed on 13 November 2007; available from _______

[3] Neom Lichtenstein, Ilya. Selfcasting [online blog]. Accessed on 15 November 2007; available

from http://www.neomeme.net/2007/06/30/selfcasting/.

[4] I make this claim, not to say that other nations are not joining the trend quickly, but in light of the trend for the applications and technology of digital selfcasting to be first developed and first field-tested here in the U.S., before receiving the appropriate suffixes (.co.uk, .de, etc.)

[5] At worst, it can become one more proof that someone has fulfilled the qualifications needed to become one of those “cultured people”, quite apart from their actual engagement with the people or place captured in the photo.

[6] Thingelstad, Jamie. Digital Photography Storage Explosion. Accessed on 12 November 2007;

available from http://www.thingelstad.com/2005/11/digital-photography-storage-explosion/.

[7] In 10 years, this paragraph will almost certainly be obsolete.

[8] Gibson, Owen. “Young Blog Their Way to a Publishing Revolution.” The Guardian. 7 October 2005.

[9] Savings At Lowest Rate Since Depression: Americans Spent Everything They Made Last Year

— And Then Some. Washington: CBS News, accessed 27 November 2007; available

from http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/02/01/business/main2422489.shtml

[10] Williams, But Enough About You.

[11] Pettine, Eric. How Long Will America Be Singing the Same Old Song? American Chronicle: accessed on 13 November 2007. Available from http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=16491

[12] “Savings at Lowest Rate Since Depression”, CBS News.

[13] Joannie Fischer, “Those Rugged Individuals,” U.S. News & World Report, 28 June 2004, 42-45.

[14] “No ideal may be held more sacred in America, or be more coveted by others, than the principle of individual freedom. Given the chance to pursue the heart's desires, our utopian vision claims, each of us has the ability--and the right--to make our dreams come true. This extraordinary individualism has prevailed as the core doctrine of the New World through four centuries, bringing with it an unrelenting pressure to prove one's self. The self-made man has been America's durable icon, whether personified by the prairie homesteader or the high-tech entrepreneur.” Fischer.

[15] Fischer, Those Rugged Individuals, italics mine.

[16] Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. London: Plume, 1999.

[17]Tom Bethell, “Our Permanent Revolution,” The American Spectator 40, no. 2 (March 2007): 54-56.

[18] Kuchinskas, Susan. Ad Trends and Setters. San Francisco: Ecommerce, 2006, accessed 17 November 2007; available from http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3602506

Gruesse Aus Chicago No. 6

2007-11-16T21:19:00.000-08:00

Ich habe nie vorher in meinem Leben so intensiv gereist wie ich das in diesem Sommer tat. Die Deutsche Bahn war für etwa 7 Wochen mein bester Freund, und ich kann kaum messen was für eine Wirkung der Besuch bei euch insgesamt auf mich gewirkt hat. Ab und zu fühlte ich wie ein Mann ständig unterwegs. Ich saß interessanterweise eines Tages der Reise gegenüber von dem Leiter einer bekannten Organisation am Frühstücktisch, und hörte ihm zu, während er erzählte wie das ist, wirklich ein Leben unterwegs zu leiten. Der müsste für die Arbeit praktisch im Auto wohnen. Meine Frage an ihm war einfach: „Wie behältst du eine gesündliche Beziehung mit deiner Familie, wenn du so oft unterwegs bist?“ Er beantwortete: „Wir rufen uns doch an“...

Er fuhr dann fort: „Liebt man eine Person, dann will er alle wichtige Erfahrungen mit ihr teilen. Das ist die Natur der Liebe. Macht er das nicht, erlaubt er die Zeit zwischen Gespräche zu wachsen, dann verlieren sie eventuell die Erfahrungen für immer. Man kann nicht nach zwei Wochen jedes Gefühl aufgraben. Er kann sich nicht an jedem Einsicht oder Gedanke erinnern, um darüber mit der Partnerin zu denken oder zu freuen. Und durch diesen Prozess entsteht, langsam und ruhig, eine Mauer. Nie länger herrscht ein „Miterleben“. Also ich rufe an. Und ich rufe noch einmal an. Ich rufe an, bis wir alles erzählt haben was passiert ist. Sonst stirbt die Beziehung aus.“

Die Stelle meiner Beziehungen mit Freunden in Deutschland ist sehr ähnlich, wenn nicht ganz so dramatisch! Ich war komplett erstaunt wie leicht es war, Freundschaften, sogar alte Gespräche, noch mal anzufangen, als wären es zwei Wochen statt zwei Jahre seit dem letzten Besuch gewesen. Aber ich spüre trotzdem genau das Phänomen, das dieser man mir beschrieb. Daher dieser Brief. Manche von euch kennen mich seit langem, und andere sind ganz neue Bekannten. Eure Namen stehen trotzdem alle auf Zetteln, die in einem Becher neben meinem Bett liegen. Ich bete jeden Abend für einige und hoffe daher, dass dieser Brief, den ich ungefähr jede sechs Wochen ausschicke, eine Verbindung für uns sein wird. Ich hoffe auch von euch über die Hauptthemen des Lebens zu hören und eine Chance zu haben, für euch zu beten.

Es ist schon seit einem Jahr für mich eine Tradition, eine englische Ausgabe dieses Briefs zu schicken. Aber ich verschone euch von einer Zusammenfassung meiner Aktivitäten seit August, und möchte mich lieber mit einer Beichte verabschieden.

Im wesentlichen heißt es: Manche Aspekte der deutschen Kultur gefallen mir nicht. Mein erstes Jahr im Land bot genügende Zeit an, diese Aspekte gut kennenzulernen, und nach einer gewissen Zeit wurde es ziemlich einfach, meine Kritik zur Sprache zu bringen. Und obwohl ich das Jahr in Marburg verbrachte, ich hätte die in Hamburg oder Freiburg oder irgendeinem anderen Burg ganz bestimmt finden können.

Nichts soll dabei überraschend sein, und würde einen deutschen Freund irgendeine Länge in den Vereinigten Staaten verbringen, ohne einen Fleck in unserer schönen Kultur zu finden, dann müsste ich dem Schluß kommen, dass der Freund blind war. Doch eine erfrischende Überraschung wartete auf mich in diesem Sommer, nämlich in der Tat, dass ich während der 7 Wochen von den Stärken der deutschen Kultur, wessen entsprechende Schwäche ich beim ersten Aufenthalt begegnete, aufgeschnitten wurde ("romanced" - Hoffentlich ist das verstaendlich!)

Es war vielleicht mein erstes Stück von Schwarzwalder Speck, ebenso mehr die Realisierung, dass ihr ein angenehmes Mittepunkt zwischen den reinen Kollektivismus Indiens und den reinen Individualismus Amerikas repräsentiert. Auf jeden Fall, die Zeit hat meinen Blick vollkommen geändert, und ich fühlte etwas betrübt nach Hause zu sein. Ich halte das für gut als ich hoffe, mehr Zeit bei euch in der Zukunft zu verbringen.

Das heißt ich möchte euch dafür danken, dass ihr mir Unterkunft und Gespräch boten, dass ihr mich mit euch herumgeschleppt habt, dass ihr mir geholfen habt, diese Stärke der Kultur wirklich zum ersten Mal zu erblicken, und dass ihr teilweise selbst die Entdeckung wart.

Ich erzähle normalerweise mehr von meinen gegenwärtigen Erfahrungen und Konzernen, aber wollte dieses Mal den Brief selbst vorstellen und die Gedanken vom Sommer mitteilen. Ich warte dann bis zum nächsten Mal um mehr dazu zu sagen, aber möchte nicht so lang warten müssen, von euch zu hören und zu wissen wie ich für euch beten soll. Das Leben läuft an beiden Seiten des Ozeans schnell, aber ich hoffe ich werde von den größten Themen und wichtigsten Entscheidungen eures Lebens etwas erfahren können. Ich finde es schade, einen Zettel vom Becher auszuholen, ohne zu wissen wie ich Fürbitte sagen soll. Freue mich drauf, von euch zu hören. Lass jede Minute eures Lebens eine Minute Gottes Story sein.

Ben

Richter 21:23

Uebrigens, viel mehr von den vergangenen Monaten steht in den englischen Rundbriefen, falls ihr euch dafuer so brennend interessiert, dass ihr auf keinen Fall sechs Wochen mehr warten koennt ;)

Newsletter No. 6

2007-11-02T16:47:00.000-07:00

Writing newsletters is not all that different from producing Hollywood movies. You want everyone to read your newsletter and you know how much pressure there is to catch them with a spectacular first sentence or two. In any case, after reading through my last few newsletters, I realize I have given myself over to a bit of sensationalism. The temptation to pitch my life as some kind of action-filled thriller is usually irresistible, and the work is made easier because I live so far away from most of you, who might otherwise see how mundane my days can be. Anyway, it is God's story, not mine, so please keep me accountable to that fact.

Now, in the spirit of contradicting myself, let me just mention two highlights from the last few weeks. I have mentioned already my newfound passion for preaching, and since Newsletter No. 5, God has really given me opportunities to indulge myself in all Trinity has to offer in that department. Today was the last meeting of my intensive "modular" course with Crawford Loritts, a very well respected preacher from Atlanta. The class was called "Preaching for Transformation," and was small enough that I got to spend lots of time on the side just shooting the breeze with him.

As if that was not enough, Dr. Scharf, the head of the pastoral theology department, asked me and my good friend Dave to give formal responses to a series of lectures on preaching being delivered by a guy coming to Trinity this week. He is international director of the "Proclamation Trust", a group which promotes and supports the training of preachers worldwide. Needless to say, I am very excited and very honored about that. I have read the lecture notes already and it should be terrific.

As for the day-to-day, the biggest news pertains to the study-social life balance. My strategy last year was not all that genius. It consisted of long hours in my room with very little social activity and lots of speculation about the great social lives which other people must certainly be leading somewhere. This semester I have come to my senses and spend much more time in the library, which is the true social nerve center of the campus. While I have not begun to confuse the library for paradise, I am at least thankful that my social life is out of rehab and walking on its own once again because of the connections I make there. On top of that, several old friendships have really matured, and my student formation group has been a blessing this semester. Of course, none of this is to dissuade you from praying that I might add yet another close friend to my social circle some day soon...

Lots of people seem to wonder what on earth a person studies in seminary, so in conclusion let me mention two really unique papers I am writing to give you a glimpse into the program.

The first is for a class called "Culture Hermeneutics", which essentially means, "interpreting culture". My paper is on "personal databasing/publishing", the trend that people are recording lots of things about their lives just to show to others. People record their thoughts on blogs, post a video of a routine trip to Wal-mart on Youtube, come back from a day in Disneyland with 200 pictures, and serial their travel history and music preferences as a type of personal DNA on facebook. We are trying to store and publish every experiential aspect of our lives. The paper does not seek to "criticize" the phenomenon but to understand what is happening, what the participants understand themselves to be doing, their possible motives, and how this all affects the way the gospel is understood and spread in the culture.

The second paper is about the effect of Germany's past, especially the person of Adolf Hitler (the "Leader"), on German views of leadership. My main focus will be the effect on local church leadership structures. There is a lot to unpack and many people are understandably reactionary. It promises to be a worthwhile and fascinating study for me, as one with a strong bias on the subject. So maybe that gives you a better idea of what I do, even if those are two of the more sensational papers to be written.

In addition to writing papers, at seminary we tend to think and talk a lot about prayer. And while I do not want to show my whole hand, I must say I am decidedly in favor of it. I didn't hear from many folks the last time a newsletter went out, so I guess I will just start contacting you guys directly. In any case, I do hope you are all doing well and want to at least keep up with the major ebbs and flows in your lives so I can be praying for God to give you wisdom for those big decisions. Look forward to catching up! Live every moment of your life as a moment of God's story.

Ben

Judges 21:23

Book I Chapter II

2007-10-08T11:51:00.001-07:00

I Heard it Through the Grapevine

I’m sitting in a train in Europe, coasting through the Swiss Alps with my folks, trying to take in the ridiculous view. It’s too bad that my finances don’t allow me to do this more often because the scenery is much more inspiring here than at my normal writing getaway. My favorite place to write, other than the Swiss Alps, is the Subway sandwich shop on National Ave. in Springfield, but there the only view I have is of the people coming in and out of St. John’s hospital.

My headphones are blaring “Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Greatest Hits”, and I’m listening to the second verse of I Heard it Through the Grapevine, which is probably their most famous song. It has brought to mind something my friend Isa from Kansas told me when we started talking about how to pick a path to that “eternal happiness” of chapter 1. He said he wanted to hear what my answer has meant practically in my personal life. Isa is tired of hearing about this stuff through the grapevine. I guess I’ll just start from the beginning.

Pumping Iron and Feeling Stupid

My hometown Portageville is about as typical a place as you will ever find on Interstate 55. There are something like four thousand people in the metro area and, as you can probably imagine, there’s not just a whole lot to do there. But everybody finds something.

Growing up I had a good friend named Mike Fisher. We always used to call him Fish, and I never figured out if he liked the nickname or not. Mike and I were both sick with the “Iron Bug”. For those of you who have never suffered from this peculiar affliction, the Iron Bug is what happens when a young man, or anyone really, starts spending an unordinary amount of time in a weight room trying to get bigger and stronger. I had an especially acute case of the bug and put on around 55 pounds between my sophomore year of high school and graduation. When I got my first driver’s license I weighed around 150, and when I graduated I was close to 205.

All in all, it was a fun ride, but eventually my relationship with the gym became a bit obsessive. It wasn’t the time spent or the bodyweight gained that was disturbing. There were plenty of positives things about the experience, and, if you’ll allow me the chance to brag, I could squat around 400 pounds. But life became an anti-social quest to have a picture-perfect physique. My training came before everyone and everything, as my parents would be ready to inform you. Thankfully my obsession with the mirror has faded into the past. Since then I have lost lots of weight. I still exercise, but mostly with bodyweight exercises like pull-ups and Hindu squats.

It’s all in my rearview mirror now, but this switch did not happen over night. College gave me a lot more to do than high school did, so during my first year I started really reducing the amount of time I was in the gym. Everything was just so busy, and it was a real hassle navigating through the traffic in my college town to get over to Ozark Fitness. But I remember with crystal clarity one day during my first year or two in college when I did make it over to the gym to do a little working out, all in an effort to stay on top of things.

Now lots of guys make a hobby of hanging out at the gym, and everybody has a different reason or goal that brings them there. Some people just do it to get the blood flowing. Other people like to fill out a bit so that their clothes fit them better. But when a person decides they really want to grow into a bodybuilder or into a serious power-lifter, they have to make the decision to squat. Squatting is a really taxing exercise during which you put a bunch of weight on your shoulders, squat down until you are parallel with the floor, and then stand up again. If you work hard at exercises like squats, your body responds by producing more growth hormone, and when that happens you start getting big quick. In any case, that day in question, when I made it over to the gym after being away for some time, my eyes were on the prize. So I headed straight to the squat rack with a little attitude as I envisioned being back at the old gym with Alice in Chains blaring on the stereo.

In strength training as in running, taking extended periods off is not really to your advantage. Workouts had been few and far between, so I expected to have lost some strength. I decided to start out with 300 pounds to do some warm-up, and the plan was to work up to 350 for two reps. To my great surprise, 300 pounds felt like 3000 pounds, and I nearly dropped the bar on the first rep, only to be helped up by a guy who was standing at the next station.

It must have been a ridiculous sight to the other folks there that day, and in my mind I could hear them thinking, “Just another rookie teenager”. I wanted to tell them all, “Hey, I’m Ben Stevens, the kid who put on so much weight and got so strong. I’m that guy who worked out every day at 5 in the morning.” But they didn’t care. They just kept pumping. It wasn’t until a year or two later that it was finally possible for me to distance myself from the mindset that says, “People will like you and girls find you attractive only if you have 17” arms and can you can squat hundreds of pounds.” I never got back into lifting, in the same way, after that semester.

My assumption, walking into the gym that day, was that my ability to lift all that weight earlier would make it easy for me to do so again, as if it were simply a skill-based exercise. “I’ll just lift 300 pounds with my natural talent.” My body was quick to show me the error of my thinking.

Life for me has been like this example in lots of ways. Growing up, school and academics were success stories. So during high school, it felt like I was jumping from one triumph to another. We all experience that once in a while. There are times when humility is the most elusive of all virtues and others when it breaks down the door. College was essentially a shift from the former to the latter. At the beginning of my studies, while I was still savoring the victory I had had in transforming my body, I started seriously wondering if the religion of my childhood was based on truth or not. This faith dilemma and all the thinking I did during that time may be what shaped me into the analytical person I am today. Whatever the case, as my slide from king of the gym began, I also had to deal with an uncertainty about how I should even look at reality.

It was extremely frustrating for me to be dumbfounded by such important but also seemingly unanswerable questions. And none of the tricks or talents I had were especially useful to me for solving those problems. I expected them to be, but then “3000 pounds” of God put me in my place. In reality, it was ridiculous to assume that my grades in Calculus and my ability to do pull-ups would make it simple to psychoanalyze and cubbyhole the creator of the universe, but that is the way I thought nonetheless. We all do it. I suppose we all fail too. So if you are thinking about living for “whatever God wants”, then the next thing you should do is think about is letting go. God won’t fit your categories and you will probably find that trying to follow him will be unlike anything you have ever done. But I think that’s a good thing.

As of today, Amazon.com can sell you 215, 229 different books that have something to do with happiness, but when put to the test of eternity, are they worth pursuing? You could add my book to that pile if I were suggesting you should do "whatever Ben wants", because that will not get you anywhere special. But that is not what I am suggesting.

I have to confess that some days, I feel like the places "whatever God wants" puts me are strange. The street signs and road markers don’t look familiar, and years ago, I remember thinking about all the back-tracking that would have to be done if I had been going the wrong way the whole time. To make matters worse, the nature of the answer means you will be constantly stopping to ask for directions, which makes it hard to keep up the illusion that you know the way. So this answer is a different road. But I’m trying to get to a different place, and it would be absurd to try to get to a different place by traveling the same road. Before I realized that, none of this made any sense.

Intellectual revelations like that were helpful and put me on track, but it’s the impact those things have when they show up in my daily life which convince me I’m not cruising in the wrong direction. Maybe an example would help.

My Journal

One day last summer, while I was working a job in the same building where my dad has his office, I strolled in to see him and found a really nice leather journal on his desk. He was using it to write down notes about one of his experiments. My dad is a soil fertility scientist. I mentioned to him that I really liked the journal, and later that summer, right before leaving for my time in the Sudan, he gave me one just like it.

I never realized how much was on my mind until he gave me that journal and I stopped to write it all down. My experience has been that writing in a journal is a really good way to see if your ideas make any sense. The flower power generation is proof enough of that. Hippies would be tripping out, write something down, and think, “Dude, this is going to change the world.” The next day, when the trip was over, they would look at the paper and see that their great epiphany was, “Bananas would be cooler if they were blue.” When you write down some of the ideas you think are really great and think them through, you realize half of them are nonsense. At that point the journal serves to help you sort out the few coherent thoughts you do have.

As already mentioned, one summer I had a not little faith crisis, during which time I stopped believing in all the “whatever God wants” talk. This happened not long after the weight lifting episode. It was the summer after my freshman year, and I sat in a tiny blue house on Walnut Street, with no air-conditioner to save me from the sweltering heat, reading book after book on philosophy and the nature of truth. My routine was: go to work at 10:30 a.m. for the lunch shift, walk home at 2:00, read some, work the night shift, and then read myself to sleep. If I hadn’t committed all I was thinking to paper, I would probably have lost my mind. It threatened to happen anyway.

That poor leather journal is now filled with scribbling and sketches about plans for everything imaginable. I want to learn six languages and write books on a number of subjects. I want to open a café and spend time in Pakistan. Pages and pages are devoted to developing the idea of “universal semantics”. But the other day I realized my whole life, if you listen to my journal, is centered on hopes that some day my accomplishments will add up to something and that then I will be justified in thinking well of myself. For whatever reason, I am trying to prove my value to everyone. Oh yeah, my books will be about God and helping others and lots of good things. But if I don’t sell x number of copies and change everyone’s life by what I write then I’ll think I am a failure.

I am not the only one who lives with that kind of pressure. One friend in college in Springfield is an unbelievably talented musician, but he takes no joy from all the things he writes. He may be great, but if others don’t recognize it, he feels like his practice and performance are wasted. No one knows his name. Think about it: if you told someone you were a musician, the first question they would ask is, "Oh yeah, what is the name of your album." People can't just be artists anymore. I have another good friend who is battling anorexia. She has top grades, aces tests, and has her pick of colleges, but doesn’t think she is pretty. There is nothing she cannot do in the classroom, but if no one tells her she is beautiful, no grade can keep her from feeling like a failure.

What ridiculous lives we lead. I am not saying I shouldn’t work hard to write good books, or that he shouldn’t make great music, or that she shouldn’t be in shape, but that we shouldn't stake our whole identities on such fickle things. I want to be successful, and hope his songs touch people, and hope she can be beautiful, but what if we can’t be? Or worse yet, what if we can be so only for a little while?

The music heroes my friend idolizes look great on camera, and after watching some performance at Live Aid, during which they perform an amazing solo for thousands of loving fans, it is easy to wonder, “What can I do that compares with that? Who am I in comparison with them? Oh to be at such peace with myself as they must be.” So we beat ourselves up for being insignificant people and work our day jobs depressed about the life we are missing. It’s not until twenty years later when we are watching VH1’s Behind the Music that we learn some of those folks we idolized were doing heroin the whole time to relieve them from the same kind of depression we were experiencing. Some of them considered blowing off their heads, and a few famous examples actually did so. It does not seem to me that fame alone, however good the music behind it, is enough to sustain anyone. And we could say the same thing about beauty. Your modeling career will last until you are twenty-seven. Will you make it to 87 by endlessly reliving the enthusiasm of a decade of your life? I had to travel a bit more and write a great deal more to come to the end of this thought.

Traveling Around Europe

Universities in Germany break for two months during the winter. This gives students time to write major papers for their classes, and some people apparently have a lot to during that time. I only had one paper to write and made the executive decision to postpone writing it until the last possible second. With all the free time that that gave me, I saw some more of the world.

After we got back from Switzerland, my folks left and I headed westward towards France to visit several friends. While there I went to Normandy and saw where the Allied Forces attacked the coast in World War II. My tour group passed through Omaha Beach and stood, most of us with chills, at the spot where soldiers from my country were gunned down by the hundred before finally taking the beach. Their sacrifices paid off. Hitler was stopped and now the very same shoreline is a tourist spot where kids make sand castles in the summer. My tour guide said, "I wonder if the soldiers could have pictured such a thing as the doors swung open on those landing craft and they were pelted with thousands of rounds of machine gun fire.”

Just up the hill a bit was the American Cemetery. My past had brought me through a handful of different cemeteries for family funerals, so the concept was nothing new, but I took a picture of this one, the only cemetery I have ever visited in which most of the deceased died on the same day.

We took some time walking through the graves, just taking stock of all that these strangers had done for us. Maybe this all sounds cliché. Everyone probably has this experience. But then I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. As mentioned above, I had been working through all the baggage of a "make a name for yourself" attitude towards life, and in the midst of that time of inner reflection, walking through the cemetery at Normandy, I came upon a very sobering grave. It read simply:

Here Rests in Honored Glory

A Comrade In Arms

Known But to God

The man lying in that grave, whoever he was, left his town and job years ago, traveled across the ocean, and on a horrible day in June 1944 fell victim, like everyone else around him, to the bullets of Nazi artillery. There were no flowers at his grave, and I don't imagine there ever will be. Even if the family that survives him wanted to bring some, they wouldn't know where to find him. Mark Twain once said, "Men mourn you for an hour and forget you for eternity."

When the last person reads this book, and my friend writes his last song, and when that young lady is old and has lost her youth, we will also be "known but to God." No more glory on stage, no more praise on magazine covers, no more good reviews in the newspaper. It may very well be that we never get that glory or praise or good reviews in the first place. That would be okay. Let time roll on and let people continue their vain struggle to be a twinkle in the eye of a faceless history. I don’t feel like I have to get caught up in that trap. It’s not what God wants.

Some people may be thinking, “Well, that is very enlightened thinking, Ben”, but Karl Marx hated Christianity for statements like these. He thought people would be put to sleep and ignore the problems and oppressions that face them if they let their thoughts drift off into the fantasy land where “God” supposedly dwells. I have to identify a bit with that he is saying. We should care about the world we live in and about the plight of people here. That brings us back to the preface and the chance before you. You are still standing at the gates of eternal bliss with God at your beck and call. Do you want to change your answer from “undecided” to “cure cancer and I will live out the rest of eternity happy”?

This is where the dilemma is so great. Even when we get out of the trap of a self-serving life (“give me a harem of women and I will be happy”), we are faced with a difficult question. You saved the world from cancer or AIDS. This is great in and of itself. But what have you saved them for? So they can go on living a life that many people choose to end themselves anyway? Karl Marx may have intended on liberating the entire human race from the bondage of poverty and class oppression, but my question is, “to what end?” I am not calling into question the good intentions that such people have, but at the end of the day we have to return to the vicious question I asked in the preface. “You have been cured of cancer and have been liberated from the class structure. So what would you like?” If we try to answer this question for humanity, we are trying to play God.

“But surely we deserve a little slack here. I mean, we are finally thinking about others and suddenly we are bad people because we are ‘playing God’?” It is a difficult balance. If anyone in the last century has had to ponder this situation, it must have been Mother Theresa, who is now the poster child for selfless living in our age. Although I have not read much, the stories I have heard about her are striking, and more than those stories the greater picture of how she thought. Surprisingly enough, Mother Theresa did not try to save the world. She knew that was not her work. At the same time, she did not see herself as just some nice gal who was trying to “make someone smile in an otherwise meaningless world.” In fact she once said, “I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world.” There was great purpose in her work, and she laid herself out in sacrificial love, but it was not because that was what “Mother Theresa wanted” but because it was what God wanted.

Personally, I have yielded my life to “whatever God wants” because I think He knows what will bring me happiness and because I think He knows better than me and much more faithful in His efforts to bring happiness to other people. I know it sounds simplistic, and if it were just some coffee table philosophy then it would be. But with his “pencils”, God is writing a story bigger than I understand and doing “whatever God wants” gives me a part in that fascinating drama.

So, let me get back to my friend Isa and his desire to know about this answer in the context of real life, which prompted me to write this chapter in the first place. I think the main reason people don’t buy this answer is that they think “what God wants is for me to be nice”. They think this answer means, “be moral”. Let’s just say, from my personal experience with Him, God wants something very extraordinary, and nearly 3000 years ago, the prophet Habakkuk even recorded God as having said, “I am doing something in your own day, something you wouldn’t believe even if someone told you about it.”

Some time has passed since then, and we know what some of those things are. We will get around to discussing the plot of that great story at some point, but there are still some things about this answer, some things I struggle with, that I think you should know about first.

2007-10-08T11:22:00.000-07:00

Book I: Paradise Reloaded

Introduction

Is That Your Final Answer?

I Heard It Through the Grapevine

Vodka on Friday

Take Out the Paper and the Trash

Difficulties

Free at Last

The Glasses We Wear

Drop the Hammer

Book II: After Tomorrow

Tongue Fuzz

I’m Over It

Super Life Philosophy

More than a Feeling

Chopin in the Dark

Your Bubble and Mine

All the Way from France

Book III: Once Upon a Time

Before the Beginning

The World We’ve Forgotten

God Am I

My Favorite Nightmare

Shadow No More

On Pins and Needles

Splice Me In

Book IV: The Puzzle and the Pieces

TBA (It will be worth the wait!)

Tunes

2007-10-08T11:09:00.001-07:00

"Blue Sky Days" is what I have been calling the collection of songs I have written over the last several years. Since picking up my guitar, and especially since working on my singing, I have wanted to have a handful of songs to enjoy myself and to share with others. The last year has produced a number of tunes, and maybe for the first time ever I am proud of both the sounds and the way they sound recorded (actually the hardest part)

There have always been excuses: "Oh, well, this is a rough track, but I'm going to polish it up!" Now I am comfortable with my songs and with their recorded sound, and this is very liberating for me.

In any case, four of those songs are posted on my myspace.com, and several new ones are on the way. Life is busy, so it's hard to say when and if this phantom "Blue Sky Days" album will exist anytime soon, but I am nonetheless happy to report that, for the first time that I can remember, I am enjoying the whole process, independent of any pressure to do it for someone else. I am posting this just in case you might not have seen elsewhere that I have such a project.

By the way, I would love to write a song with somebody. That would be a whole new experience. Any takers?

Again, for some samples, go to www.myspace.com/blueskydays