How they make chocolate chips

Nathaniel, through careful observation of the finished product, told me how they make chocolate chips. They pour the slobbery chocolate out of the chocolate machine onto the pan. Then they put the pan in the oven and wait and wait and wait until they get hard and then they send them to the grocery store.

And some times they can make any kind they want like a bunny, an egg, or a snowflake. And Mary chocolate (who looks like mary, of course), and Easter egg chocolate, and train chocolate.

So now you know

Which Comes First?

I'm testing a theory. Perhaps you can weigh in on it. My theory is that fear causes hatred and hatred causes fear. Don't know which comes first or if it always comes in the same order. I'm theorizing that they're both part of the same circle and which comes first depends on which part of the circle you jump into. I've been on this quest for at least a year to notice how many times in a day I am given or give a message meant to cause fear. Whether it's a news story, an advertisement, a story from a friend about some study she's just read, a piece of health information, a religious message, or a reason I give my kids for doing what I say, there's a lot of fear based messages flying around. In my opinion, this is something to stand against where ever possible, especially when the message of fear is being used in a religious context to try to motivate people to straighten up. So here's where my theory comes in. Do these messages of fear actually end up causing hatred of something or someone (or self) or the intended changed behavior? It's an old addage that people fear what they don't understand. Does this mean that if we don't understand someone or something we will end up hating them as well? Could this be a key to making war obsolete? How far could this go?

"...but we are not given a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and self-dicipline" 2 Timothy 1:7

On Capitalism and Greed

Ok, so it seems everyone is talking about Capitalism and Greed these days. Actually, i think it's just my sister and Greg Boyd, but that's almost everyone anyway.

Here's the problem. Capitalism is what makes all the economic world go 'round but at the same time it feeds on human greed. what to do? what to do?

I'm not sure of course what the right answer might be, but I was thinking, maybe we could keep the whole capitalist engine running if the stuff we were buying (that we don't need) was being bought to give to people who did need it. Of course human nature being what it is, the engine wouldn't run nearly so well if people were only buying what they needed and people are just not as motivated by philanthropy as by greed so consumer spending would still go down and everything would come to a screeching halt.

Maybe the answer is more in the state of our hearts and how much life we get from our stuff or from the act of getting stuff. Do we feel down and so we go and buy something to feel better? Do we ask ourselves anything beyond do I want it and can I fit it on my credit card?

Maybe the tendency toward greed that is the problem with capitalism is our 'cross to bear' the way other systems have their own problems. And we should at the very least not get all arrogant about what a great system we have and think everyone else should do it too.

This is one of the questions I've always had about "made in the USA" campaigns. If we only buy stuff made by americans, what happens to all the developing world workers who loose their jobs when the demand disappears for their products. They may be making less money than americans would make but if it's a good job in their country, why work against that?

It's all a big fat I DON'T KNOW

Sen. Chambers Sounds Suspiciously like Job

I just read that Nebraska Senator Ernie Chambers has filed a law suit against God.

here's
the article

If you read the article from the local TV Station, and you should because it's rather humorous reading; you'll see that he says he's making a point about frivilous law suits. So far, I think his point is a bit lost, but that aside, I'm wondering if the good senator has read the book of Job, where Job says he wants to take God to court and how God answers him.

I'll be watching to see how this turns out.

The other dimension

There's a tree in my yard that, in my feeble attempts to be a gardener, drives me crazy. From where I stand (that is, above ground) it actually looks like 2 big trees and about a zillion baby trees that all together cover about a 50 square foot space in the yard. It drives me crazy because all those baby trees want to pop up through my garden. Now this is not a case of a tree throwing out seeds and planting it's offspring, it's actually all one tree... underground. Down there, there is only one root system and from that comes all these trees that look separate from above ground.

In western culture, we're conditioned to see ourselves and each other like the tree from above ground -- all separate individual trees. Other cultures, more ancient cultures, have a better understanding of each other, like the tree from underground; an understanding that the group is an organism in itself, not simply a collection of individuals.

At church right now we're doing a series on worship and specifically the acts of corporate worship we engage in on a regular basis. There's something about a group of people all acting in unison, of one heart, mind, and body, that adds another dimension to our individual selves. This other dimension is to a large extent underestimated and undervalued in our culture of individuals, but for me, as I learn to see it and experience it, I am learning more about what life is about. There's so much more there than I can see from above ground. There's this whole other dimension there, in true community, that make life so much more full.

I'm not saying this is rocket science or anything, just a thought that strikes me… for what it’s worth…

The Doughnut Shop Song

Nathaniel and Livvie just learned a new song that I learned way back during my summer of Camp Oakland. Here they are demonstrating their great singing talents.

enjoy

THAT what I'm talkin' about!

A few weeks ago, the pastor at my church was included in a 3 day CNN special called God's Warriors. I don't have cable so I didn't see the program, but here is the segment that Greg was on. I love this guy!! By the way, the segment was called "The Heretic"

What does it mean to be human?

Probably one of the most basic and common questions of life is “What does it mean to be human?” At least, it’s a question I ask frequently and depending on where I’m at in life, I’ve had many different answers. For some reason, I have a tendency to want to “boil things down” and figure out what the essence of things are. If you’re not into that sort of thing, this will seem pretty pointless and you’ll probably think I’m up a tree. I might be, but I like this particular tree at the moment, so I’m going to hang out for a while up here and see how the world looks different.

I’m currently of the opinion that at our very core, what it means to be human is to have free will; the ability to make choices and experience the consequences. This seems to be true according to experience and the tradition of my faith. To me, it doesn’t make any sense to say something like “I have no choice.” That’s like saying, “I’m not a person.” Perhaps, at the moment of saying it, one doesn’t feel much like a person. It explains why slavery in any form is so dehumanizing. It strips people of choice. This idea seems to hold true when we look at child development, too. As a child grows, it’s their ability to make choices that shows their level of mental development. It’s the job of those raising the child to try to teach him or her how to make wise choices.

Freedom of choice is also the only way to be able to love. No one can force someone to love and love isn’t love unless it’s freely given. (Everybody knows this. It’s even in the rules of the genie in the lamp that he can’t make anyone fall in love.) This is why I believe God gave us free will. It’s one of those things that comes with being made in God’s image. If God can love, God wants people to be able to love and the only way to allow for that is to grant free will. Therefore, because I love, I believe I have free will.

I also believe that most of the choices we make might not look so much like choices because we make them subconsciously or automatically. I would argue that they are still choices and that they reveal who we truly are in our innermost being. This is why attempts by people to change who they are by focusing on outward behavior so often meets with complete failure. It’s our inner beings that need transforming and that will translate to transformed behavior. Our inner beings are only transformed, I believe, through the work of God, which we invite and cooperate with. This inviting and cooperating with God is, in itself, a choice and in that sense, in the words of Albus Dumbledore, “It is our choices that make us who we are.”

Where are we going and are we there yet?

This is an essay I originally posted about a year ago and then after a while I took it down because it was feeling stale to me. This morning I had a lot of thoughts running through my head and was about to start a new post when I realized I had already said all this before. So I decided to just repost the original essay (although, I might edit it here and there)

Disclaimer: None of these ideas are original or unique. They pretty much all come from a combination of the teachings of Dallas Willard, Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, and more recently, Greg Boyd. That being said, if any of this makes you mad or sounds like heresy, don’t blame these guys, I could very likely have misunderstood them. On the other hand, if you want to read more expansion on any of this, may I suggest reading any of their books.

I’ve been doing some thinking, reading, listening, and learning that are all pointing to a question and then that question has sent me into much more thinking, reading, listening and learning. I’ve posed the question to a few people in a very non-scientific survey to see what other people were thinking on this and I’ve gotten some expected and unexpected responses. Here’s the question: Looking at the whole of human history, is the whole story going downhill, going uphill (as in getting better), or staying the same?

Some said definitely downhill, a few said uphill, I think one person said the average was staying the same because some aspects of humanity had improved while others had declined. My suspicion is that if I continued to ask people this question, there would be far more down hill or staying the same answers than uphill. My answer to my own question is that I believe that the whole of the story of humanity is on an ultimate uphill trajectory; that this is God’s plan for the world; that God intends to redeem the world and turn it ultimately into the creation intended from the beginning of the story. Some days, this is more a matter of faith than a matter of actually witnessing the evidence of such a claim. I think this question, and what one believes as the answer, is crucial to how one lives one’s life and specifically how one lives their faith.

If I believe the world is generally going downhill or at best staying the same, the whole point of life becomes how can I survive this world, escape it to a better place some day, and maybe, how many people can I bring with me? But if I believe the whole story is moving toward redemption, rebirth, recreation, then the point of my life becomes how can I help bring this about? In case you’re getting squirmy that I’m talking about us all hunkering down and fighting tooth and nail against the evils of the world to somehow fix all the problems in the world by our own strength and cleverness, let me assure you that I believe the redemption of the world will be done by God through Jesus. But I want to clarify what I mean when I say redemption of the world. That’s a phrase that gets tossed about a lot in Christian circles and I don’t think we all mean the same thing by it. I don’t mean a complete destruction of the world to be replace en mass by God (like an exchange policy at Target for a broken toy). I don’t mean the individual redemptions of all the individual people of the world but in another place from here (the sinking ship idea, but where everyone gets into a life boat). What I do mean is that the world, this world we live in, all of creation including all the people, will be recreated because everyone chooses to have God recreate them and all of the evil in the world is wiped out because every person is living in the Kingdom of God on this earth and the ultimate culmination of all of that is a new Earth and the Kingdom of God existing everywhere and in everyone.

OK, that was a pretty loaded statement. Let me try to unpack at least some of it. First of all, the kingdom of God as Jesus describes it throughout the gospels is not so much a place as a realm – wherever it is that God’s will is reality. It is not a future-only reality but a present reality that is now available to everyone. The most dominant message I see when I read the gospels is this: Kingdom of God is available! That’s what Jesus came to announce. That’s what “at hand” means – it is here, available, as close to you as the air you breathe. All you have to do, according to Jesus, to gain access to such a kingdom is to put your faith in Him. More on that in a minute – first more about what this Kingdom is. If there is a Kingdom of God where what God wants to happen, happens, there is also a kingdom of Satan, where what Satan wants to happen, happens, and then of course there are the 6 billion kingdoms of people, where to one extent or another what each of us wants to happen, happens. We have the choice at every moment to align our own little kingdoms with God’s or to do it our own way, or in more dramatic cases, to align with Satan. I believe the redemption of the world will be here when all people choose always to live in God’s kingdom. It will be a redemption, then, not just of individual lives, although that will certainly also be true, but of the systems of life and humanity also aligning with God’s kingdom. Where the marginalized are no longer, where the oppressed are no longer, where everyone is loved and has enough, where the resources of the earth are everlasting because good stewardship has allowed them to become self-perpetuating. Where the very Earth itself is healed and brought back into balance and health (or one could just call it "life") that we crave for our own bodies.

If the redemption of the world begins with people learning to live in the Kingdom of God, it would be most helpful to know how one gains access to this kingdom. As I said before, Jesus says it is available and that we can enter it (learn to live in it) by putting our faith in Him. So what does that mean to put my faith in a person? I think we can use our whole life to completely understand and put this into practice, but at least one part of this is to believe that what Jesus said is true. What he said about himself being God’s son, what he said about how to make life work, what he said about the characteristics of a person who is living in the Kingdom of God. And then, if I believe all that to be true, to act on it – to do what he said I should do, to make life work, to become transformed into the kind of person who lives naturally in the Kingdom of God. Of course any changes in my life are going to come up out of changes in my inner being, and those kind of changes are not going to happen because I simply will them to happen but because God wills them to happen and I cooperate by training to affect those changes in my inner being. It starts with knowing and understanding what Jesus was talking about when he describes life in the Kingdom of God, and then with knowing and understanding the way into said kingdom as Jesus spent his entire ministry teaching his apprentices to do.

I believe the most important part of what makes us human is our God-given ability and right of free choice. So when everyone in the world freely chooses to cooperate with God in their own inner transformation into a Kingdom person, then the world, as we know it now, will no longer exist but a pure, redeemed version of it, the one God has planned from the beginning, will take it’s place and that will truly be a beautiful thing.

What is a coward?

I’m babysitting my friend’s daughter today who is three years old. She, along with my 2 kids, are running around yelling “Show your face, coward!”. I asked them what they were doing and they informed me they were hunting snakes and that the snakes had cowards in them. “Oh,” I said, “what’s a coward?” First my friend’s daughter says she doesn’t know and then she says, “It’s kinda like a potato but it’s not.”

Who knew?

What's In A Name

Every year around Easter, all the main weekly news rags run a cover story about Jesus. It’s usually interesting to see what they write each year, but what I think is more interesting is reading the letters to the editor the following week. I remember one letter a few years back in which the writer described himself as a “non-Christian follower of Jesus.” At the time I thought, “Now there’s a contradiction if ever I heard one.”

And maybe it is. From a literal perspective.

But one of the great things about language is how it tells a story about the people who speak it at any given time in history. A word can start out meaning one thing and over time it’s meaning changes, sometimes to the point where the original meaning is completely lost. Most of the time it doesn’t really matter what a word meant when it was first coined. Language is about communicating and what is communicated when a word is spoken is what really matters.

The word Christian literally means “Little Christ”. It means “a follower of Jesus” So how could someone be a “non-Christian follower of Jesus”? And why would someone want to identify themselves that way? I think we can understand this by looking at what the word Christian means today to the proverbial man-on-the-street. If a person can follow Jesus and not be a Christian, than the word Christian must NOT mean “follower of Jesus” anymore. Not to everyone. Of course, it can mean one thing to one person and other thing to another person. I think that’s what we have to understand.

It’s telling, really. It says the Christians of today have lost the essence of Jesus in the way they live their lives. Our lives, overall, apparently don’t look like Jesus. And people wonder why churches are closing all over the country. And yet if you look at the churches that are thriving, at least some of them are doing so by bringing the Way of Jesus back to the front. A Way that includes living generously, with love, healing, and reconciliation between people and with God. Jesus is just as attractive to people today as he was 2000 years ago. It’s his named followers that aren’t necessarily so. It’s something, with God’s help, we should be working to change.