"A child is one who accepts even the most extravagant gifts, even the gift of love, not on the basis of believing that he deserves it and not in spite of the fact that he knows he does not, but simply because it is given.. . ..and surely this is a hard saying. After we have given so much of our lives to the task of trying to understand, after we have been so continually anxious lest our faith wither and bear no fruit, then it is a real shock to be told that it is only by not trying that we become, that it is only by not resisting evil that we defeat it, that it is only by losing our lives that we save them. Yet if on the one hand we are shocked by this, on the other to know ourselves at all is to know the truth of it.. . .It is just when we realize that it is impossible by any effort of our own to make ourselves children and thus to enter the kingdom of Heaven that we become children. We are children, perhaps, at the very moment we know that it is as children that God loves us--not because we have deserved his love and not in spite of our undeserving; not because we try and not because we recognize the futility of our trying; but simply because he has chosen to love us. We are children because he is our father; and all our efforts, fruitful and fruitless, to do good, to speak truth, to understand, are the efforts of children who, for all their precocity, are children still in that before we loved him, he loved us, as children, through Jesus Christ our Lord."

-----Frederick Buechner, "Become Like Children," from "The Magnificent Defeat"

On To Bethlehem

so i'm at this wheel it's three am
waiting for the caffeine to come around
and life rears it's ugly head again
they say your radio's cool and retail's way down

and i'd like to say i'm faithful
to the task at hand
speaking gospel to a handful
and others with their list of demands

it's cold this year and i'm late on my dues
it's cold in here ah but that's nothing new
my heart's electric with your love again
so it's on to bethlehem

you might surmise that i ran there
but i really only crept
lead me to the place where love runs wild
and then it dogs your every step

you know how fickle my heart is
prone to wonder my Lord
yeah we talk but it's at arms length
always got one eye on the door

God wraps Himself up in human skin
for those who want to touch
and God let them drive the nails in
for those of us who know way too much

You come bearing all our burdens
and take Your lovers for a ride
but we stay holed up in our cages
fashioned by our own design

so tell me what is your secret
what's on your blister soul
what is that one little secret
you know the one that has taken its toll

'cause daddy's banging on your gate again
yeah he won't leave you alone
got a whole lot of dry warm rooms
and the finest of homes

it's cold this year and i'm late on my dues
it's cold in here ah but that's nothing new
my heart's electric with your love again
so it's on to bethlehem

-----Bill Mallonee

I'm not normally a big fan of Henri, and I would change his phrase, "trust that good things will happen" to "trust that God's perfect plan will be carried out in my life, and that His will, though inscrutable, is ultimately good". But on the whole, I like what he's saying here.

"Just imagine what Mary was actually saying in the words, 'I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let what you have said be done to me' (Luke 1:38). She was saying, 'I don't know what this all means, but I trust that good things will happen.' She trusted so deeply that her waiting was open to all possibilities. And she did not want to control them. She believed that when she listened carefully, she could trust what was going to happen. To wait open-endedly is an enormously radical attitude toward life. So is to trust that something will happen to us that is far beyond our own imaginings. So, too, is giving up control over our future and letting God define our life, trusting that God molds us according to God's love and not according to our fear. The spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, trusting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination, fantasy, or prediction. That, indeed, is a very radical stance toward life in a world preoccupied with control."

-----Henri Nouwen, "A Spirituality of Waiting: Being Alert to God's Presence in Our Lives," Weavings, January 1987

"I am old and full of tears, and I see that you also begin to feel the sorrow that is born with us. Abandon hope: do not abandon desire. Feel no wonder that these glimpses of your Island so easily confuse themselves with viler things, and are so easily blasphemed. Above all, never try to keep them, never try to revisit the same place or time wherein the vision was accorded to you. You will pay the penalty of all who would bind down to one place or time within our country that which our country cannot contain. Have you not heard from the Stewards of the sin of idolatry, and how in their old chronicles, the manna turned to worms if any tried to hoard it? Be not greedy, be not passionate; you will but crush dead on your own breast with hot, rough hands the thing you loved. But if ever you incline to doubt that the thing you long for is something real, remember what your own experience has taught you. Think that it is a feeling, and at once the feeling has no value. Stand sentinel at your own mind, watching for that feeling, and you will find--what shall I say--a flutter in the heart, an image in the head, a sob in the throat: and was that your desire? You know that it was not, and that no feeling whatever will appease you, that feeling, refine it as you will, is but one more spurious claimant--spurious as the gross lusts of which the giant speaks. Let us conclude then that what you desire is no state of yourself at all, but something, for that very reason, Other and Outer. And knowing this you will find tolerable the truth that you cannot attain it. That the thing should be, is so great a good that when you remember "it is" you will forget to be sorry that you can never have it. Nay, anything that you could have would be so much less than this that its fruition would be immeasurably below the mere hunger for this. Wanting is better than having. The glory of any world wherein you can live is in the end appearance: but then, as one of my sons has said, that leaves the world more glorious yet."

-----C.S. Lewis, Father Wisdom's discourse from "Pilgrim's Regress"

SCIENTISTS

The beauty of nature is supect.
Oh yes, the splendor of flowers.
Science is concerned to deprive us of illusions.
Though why it is eager to do so is unclear.
The battles among genes, traits that secure success, gains and losses.
My God, what language these people speak
In their white coats. Charles Darwin
At least had pangs of conscience
Making public a theory that was, as he said, devilish.
And they? It was, after all, their idea:
To segregate rats in separate cages.
To segregate humans, write off as genetic loss
Some of their own species and poison them.
"The pride of the peacock is the glory of God,"
Wrote William Blake. There was a time
When disinterested beauty by its sheer superabundance
Gratified our eyes. What have they left us?
Only the accountancy of a capitalist enterprise.

-----Czeslaw Milosz, from "Second Space"

This is the best poem I've read in some time:

A BRIEF FOR THE DEFENSE
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

-----Jack Gilbert

"The wish to be independent in everything is false pride. Even what we owe to others belongs to ourselves and is a part of our own lives, and any attempt to calculate what we have 'earned' for ourselves and what we owe to other people is certainly not Christian, and is , moreover, a futile undertaking. It's through what he himself is, plus what he receives, that a man becomes a complete entity."

"My thoughts and feelings seem to be getting more and more like those of the Old Testament, and in recent months I have been reading the Old Testament much more than the New. It is only when one knows the unutterability of the name of God that one can utter the name of Jesus Christ; it is only when one loves life and the earth so much that without them everything seems to be over that one may believe in the resurrection and the new world; it is only when God's wrath and vengeance are hanging as grim realities over the heads of one's enemies that something of what it means to love and forgive them can touch our hearts."

"I've been thinking again over what I wrote to you recently about our own fear. I think that here, under the guise of honesty, something is being passed off as 'natural' that is at bottom a symptom of sin; it is really quite analogous to talking openly about sexual matters. After all, 'truthfulness' does not mean uncovering everything that exists. God himself made clothes for men; and that means that in statu corruptionis many things in human life ought to remain covered, and that evil, even though it cannot be eradicated, ought at least to be concealed. Exposure is cynical, and although the cynic prides himself on his exceptional honesty, or claims to want truth at all costs, he misses the crucial fact that since the fall there must be reticence and secrecy."

"I often wonder who I really am--the man who goes on squirming under these ghastly experiences in wretchedness that cries to heaven, or the man who scourges himself and pretends to others (and even to himself) that he is placid, cheerful, composed, and in control of himself, and allows people to admire him for it (i.e. for playing the part--or is it not playing a part?) What does one's attitude mean, anyway? In short, I know less than ever about myself, and I'm no longer attaching any importance to it. I've had more than enough psychology, and I'm less and less inclined to analyze the state of my soul.. ..There is something more at stake than self-knowledge."

"'Falsehood' is the destruction of, and hostility to, reality as it is in God; anyone who tells the truth cynically is lying."

"It's remarkable how little I miss going to church. I wonder why."

-----Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Letters and Papers from Prison"

In honor of today's elections, here's a little something I wrote when I was 9 years old. (All punctuation and spelling reprinted as it was originally written. This little gem garnered a grade of C.)

MY SPEECH FOR PRESIDENT
Fellow citezens of "United States" I Chris Stratton Promis that Kids do not have to go to school. And then they will be able to learn every thing with a speacile divice called a school programmer. Then I will give you a Motor-Cycle for each family and then I'm going to put any ome to "DEATH" who comits a sireous crime. I will sentence anyone who Kills Animals to Five years in prision without a reason. That is what this Country needs a Man like me.

I'm running the 1st Annual OC Marathon on December 5th, 2004. I'm fundraising for Olive Crest, an Abused Children charity. Please Contribute if you can.

“We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.”

-----W.H. Auden

"Men are ruled, at this minute by the clock, by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern." - The New Name, Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays, 1917

"I have formed a very clear conception of patriotism. I have generally found it thrust into the foreground by some fellow who has something to hide in the background. I have seen a great deal of patriotism; and I have generally found it the last refuge of the scoundrel." - The Judgement of Dr. Johnson, Act III

-----G.K. Chesterton

In my 13 years as a registered voter, I've never been more troubled by a Presidential election. I've spent the last year and a half pouring over just about everything I can get my hands on to try and get to the bottom of why the present administration has done what it's done. . . and more importantly to make a determination as to whether those actions were in the best interest of the country or not. As an independent voter, a follower of Christ and someone that believes less government is ultimately better government, I did not come to the following conclusion lightly: the conclusion is this, come November 2, 2004, I'm casting my vote for John Kerry.

What follows is my shotgun logic for voting against Bush. In the coming weeks preceding the election, I invite your comments. I don't think we've had an election quite as important to the future direction of our country in at least half a century. The differences between the visions of these two candidates couldn't be more stark or have more far reaching implications for the next 50-100 years in our nation's life. We have some tough questions to ask ourselves about who we are and what we want to be in the new global century.

So here goes:

1) President Bush is an overly ambitious politician that appears incapable of expressing or feeling wholesome doubt about the policies he sets. Worse than that, I've read story after story that he's consulting advisors less and less on big decisions. When asked if he talked to his Father about the presidency or the war he said, "I ask my heavenly father," which seems to have become a dangerous way of saying, "I don't need to talk to anyone, God endorses what I do." He has increasingly isolated himself, refused the counsel of others, acted in a cavalier manner and then attempted to endorse that as good leadership. Worse yet, he uses God as his excuse for not engaging in any of those activities that we expect from our leaders. Even now that the cat is totally out of the bag about the run up to war in Iraq and the failures that have followed trying to win the peace, Bush still refuses to admit his failures or to change course. His reasoning, "I don't want to show weakness to our enemies." Instead he just keeps plugging along shouting that more certainty and resolve is what we need for his bad decisions. Anyone that's followed what's gone on can't help but resonate with Kerry's charge in the first debate: "You can be certain, but you can also be certainly wrong."

2) I have fundamental differences of opinion with Bush about how the US should act within a global economy. Bush seems to be stuck in the cold war mode of thinking: He wants nationalism first, war, threat of force and armament against nations, the viral expansion of freedom through conquest; in other words, "empire" in the traditional sense (whether overt or not). But I think a global economy demands a great deal more cooperation, diplomacy and sacrifice on our part. (Not to mention that, but it's clear that future terrorists resent having their families blown up). Don't let Bush scare you into thinking that this means we'll somehow have to seek approval from other nations to defend ourselves. It's simply not true. Who would do that? Bush continues to spurn international treaties, international governing bodies, international courts, international environmental laws and on and on. What does he think causes terrorism in the first place, and how does he think going to war and not planning for peace will solve the problem rather than exacerbate it?

3) John Kerry has the right plan for executing a war on terror and he has the diplomatic skill and toughness to carry it out in a way that doesn't exchange our goodwill for more terrorists. Anyone that doubts his fortitude needs to watch the speech he gave to congress at 27 years old after coming back from Vietnam. It was so persuasive and forceful that Nixon and Colson started a smear campaign against him and called him "another Kennedy." For those of you willing to take time to hear what he has to say, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised to find out that his plans are just as forceful as President Bush's with the added bonus that they are much more far reaching and progressive. Kerry understands that the war on terror is more than states clashing. He knows that poverty and fair trade and diplomacy are all intimately tied to America's perception around the globe. I believe he will try to do much more to eradicate the root causes of terrorism than George Bush.

Here are a litany of quotations from respectable people that you should read which I think bolster my larger points:

This first one comes from one of Bush's aides. Couple this with the neo-conservative plan for America that was developed in the 90's by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others and you've got a damn spooky ideology. Did you know you're country was being run by guys that talk like this?:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore, ' he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left just to study what we do."

This comes from Jim Wallis, president of Sojourners, a non-Partisan Christian publication:
"When I was first with Bush in Austin, what I saw was a self-help Methodist, very open, seeking," Wallis says now. "What I started to see at this point was the man that would emerge over the next year---a messianic American Calvinist. He doesn't want to hear from anyone who doubts him.. . . .Faith can cut in so many ways. If you're penitent and not triumphal, it can move us to repentance and accountability and help us reach for something higher than ourselves. That can be a powerful thing, a thing that moves us beyond politics as usual, like Martin Luther King Jr. did. But when it's designed to certify our righteousness--that can be a dangerous thing. Then it pushes self-criticism aside. There's no reflection. Where people often get lost is on this point. Real faith, you see, leads us to deeper reflections and not--not ever--to the thing we as humans so very much want." And what is that? "Easy certainty."

What Kerry has to say about doing things differently:
"No President, through all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America. But if and when you do it you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons."

Bush claims he's making us safer by warring in Iraq:
"In the meantime, Iran and North Korea, Iraq's original partners in Bush's 'axis of evil,' have heard the President's message differently, and have advanced their nuclear programs significantly since the American takeover of Baghdad; the North Korean state news agency has cited Iraq as an example of what can happen to countries that can't defend themselves with nukes."

John Kerry again:
"I want to restore America's reputation as a country that listens, is sensitive, brings people to our side, is the seeker of peace, not war, and that uses our high moral ground and high-level values to augment us in the war on terror, not diminish us."

"The war on terror is not a clash of civilizations, it is a clash of civilization against chaos, of the best hopes of humanity against dogmatic fears of progress and the future."

Senator Bob Kerry, 9/11 panel member:
"We've got to do something to acknowledge the gulf that exists between the dispossessed Arab world and us, because it's huge. We don't have enough money, we don't have enough parents who are willing to give up their sons and daughters, to win this with our armed forces. We don't have the bodies to do it. So if you don't have a real agenda of hope that's as hard-headed and tough as your military and law-enforcement agenda, we're not going to win this thing."

Colin Powell:
"The war on terror is intimately tied up in the war on poverty."


Closing Thought by Ron Suskind:
"Can the unfinished American experiment in self-governance--sputtering on the watery fuel of illusion and assertion---deal with something as nuanced as the subtleties of one man's faith? What, after all, is the nature of the particular conversation the President feels he has with God---a colloquy upon which the world now precariously trusts?"


What if Bush is more King Saul than King David?

"In the end, there are basically two attitudes that we can adopt to life. We can see it as meaningless, something which has no real purpose. In this case, the most that we can hope for is to make the best of it while we can, trying to help others less fortunate than ourselves and distract ourselves from the fact that it is all pointless. Or we can see life as a glorious gift, something that is good in itself--yet points to something even more wonderful that is yet to come. Even in this life, hints of the promised future break in, allowing us to anticipate what lies ahead."

--Alistar McGrath

Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it,
Mount of Thy redeeming love.

Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Here by Thy great help I’ve come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed His precious blood.

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

Friends, all kidding about alien working girls aside, please take 30 seconds of your day today to use World Vision's petition generator to send a note asking the Pres and members of Congress to fully fund Bush's AIDS bill. This is the easiest letter you'll ever send. . .just go to the link and fill in your info and then let it autopopulate who you want to send it to. It literally takes 30 seconds. There are 25 million orphans in the balance. Let the love of Christ compell you.

AIDS Letter

How to tell if your Prostitute is an Alien

Wisdom from Ken Schmidt, Harley Davidson's marketing chief that engineered the turn-around of the company in the mid-80's and speaker at this year's Ingram Micro National Sales meeting:

--"Make a different noise."
--"Don't be rational."
--"When everybody's saying the same thing, no one is listening."
--"Make people feel good about themselves, give them something to belong to."
--"When what we see matches what we've been lead to believe, we believe even stronger."
--"World class product is not enough to compete with."
--"I'd rather have my sister in a whorehouse than my brother on a Honda."


This guy, best chapel speaker EVER!

"If this fails, you must fall back on a subtler misdirection of his intention. Whenever they are attending to the Enemy (God) Himself we (Demons) are defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so. The simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him towards themselves. Keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by the action of their own wills. When they meant to ask Him for charity, let them, instead, start trying to manufacture charitable feelings for themselves and not notice that this is what they are doing. When they meant to pray for courage, let them really be trying to feel brave. When they say they are praying for forgiveness, let them be trying to feel forgiven. Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling; and never let them suspect how much success or failure of that kind depends on whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at the moment."

-----C.S. Lewis, "The Screwtape Letters", letter IV

"We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us."

-----C.S. Lewis, from "Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer"

In honor of U2's release of the relatively unimpressive new single, "Vertigo", here are a couple lines from the song:

"And though your soul it can't be bought, your mind can wander."

"Your love is teaching me how to kneel."