Brian and Emily, 4 years and counting

Today is a very special day for me and Brian, today we celebrate four years of being together. If you know us, you may be thinking: idiots, they got married in December of 2007! Can’t they count? But this anniversary (not of when we got married but of when we first committed to each other) is far sweeter in our eyes. By the time we got married, our commitment wasn’t awkward, naive or unsure anymore. It was confident and certain, which has its own merits. But the commitment we made four years ago today, wasn’t as easy. Certainty makes things easy, and commitment to marriage has much more certainty surrounding it. The two stupid and awkward people who committed to each other four years ago had no certainty, only decision (faith, that is…). 

Peter Rollins said in How (Not) to Speak of God, “Doubt provides the context out of which real decision occurs and real love is tested, for love will say ‘yes’ regardless of uncertainty. A love that requires contracts and absolutes in order to act is no love at all.” 

Now, I don’t believe that this devalues our marriage vows in the least, but, instead, I believe it seeks to place at the starting point of our union, not the commitment that was born of confidence, but the one born of faith. This may also turn out to be true of the more difficult renewal of commitment that will take place later in our marriage (when confidence in December of 2007 is even harder to sustain). It will require faith, which, as Rollins says, makes real love possible. 

It’s the same way I feel about falling in love with Jesus, or my “conversion” experience. When was it? Was it when I got my pass into heaven at age 7, when I prayed “the prayer”? Or was it a few years prior when I took my first sweet steps of faith towards him? Or was it at age 13 when I actually started digging into the scriptures for myself? Was at age 16 when I had a major crisis of faith and God reached down from the heavens to rescue me from my adolescence? Or could it have been five years ago when I was so confused and depressed that I wanted to die, and God saved me from that, and I felt as if I was starting all over again, even perhaps understanding grace for the first time? It seems weird, looking back on all these starting points, to give preeminence to “the prayer,” just because it gave me the certainty of heaven. Before I knew of my reward, my little feet were taking faith steps toward God. Something was already beginning before I said “the prayer,” something born of faith, not certainty about a reward. And after I knew of my reward, and had the certainty of heaven, my love for God was tested time and again, but the certainty of heaven couldn’t save it, only childlike steps of faith. 

So, in both the union between me and Brian and between me and God, the real glue, the crux, the starting point, isn’t certainty, but faith.

I don’t go to church…

… I am the church.

Local Police Blotter

The following is this past Friday and Saturday’s police blotter for Durango: 

Friday

4:39 p.m. A woman was yelling obscenities at a child in a car seat in the library parking lot in the 1900 block of East Third Avenue.

5:28 p.m. Two kids were playing with matches in a yard in the 2400 block of Arroyo Drive.

6:38 p.m. A male in the 1100 block of Three Springs Boulevard called 911, muttered something unintelligible about a fire and hung up.

8:45 p.m. A woman in the 500 block of Animas View Drive called 911 to complain that her boyfriend’s 21‑year‑old son splashed water in her face, and hung up.

8:58 p.m. A male with a black mohawk and a black jacket was wondering around the 3000 block of West Second Avenue telling people he’d just been assaulted.

10:12 p.m. A caller was concerned about a fire on the rim of Animas Mountain and thought the wind was picking up.

11:04 p.m. An intoxicated male with a black Mohawk and a black jacket was trespassing in the 3100 block of Main Avenue.

11:49 p.m. A woman complained that her neighbors were drinking and being loud in the 700 block of Animas View Drive. One person had ripped off her glasses.

Saturday

12:28 a.m. Two females were drinking and arguing in the 1200 block of Florida Road.

1:25 a.m. Eight males were fighting in front of a restaurant in the 600 block of Camino del Rio.

3:14 a.m. An intoxicated woman was assaulting a man in Denny’s in the 600 block of Camino del Rio.

4:14 a.m. A caller complained that someone was knocking on his door and leaving before he could see who it was in the 100 block of Camino del Rio.

5:53 a.m. Two underage males were drunk and shoplifting cookies from a store in the 900 block of Camino del Rio. One of the subjects was last seen wearing a blanket and jeans heading east on Ninth Street.

10:19 a.m. A caller reported that another driver had gotten out of his vehicle, threatened to fight him and poked him in the chest in the 3400 block of Main Avenue.

Friday

6:26 p.m. A man called to report that his ex‑girlfriend had his laptop and was threatening to throw it into the river in the 300 block of Horizon Drive.

Fort Lewis College

Friday

3:57 a.m. A woman called campus police from the intersection of east Seventh Street and East Fifth Avenue requesting a ride to Denny’s to see her cousin.

Most items in this column are taken from logs of calls made to authorities. Their accuracy may not have been verified by an official investigation.

I thought some of these were hilarious, and wanted to share them. 

 

Why so few “wheelies” in the pulpit?

I saw this excellent cartoon on asbojesus a little while ago (check out the link, there’s a lot of good stuff on there) and got to thinking about why we see so few wheelchair users in the pulpit (or even deaf or blind pulpiteers, for that matter). I’ve become convinced that this is because we see them as essentially weak, whether or not this is accurate. And weakness is not something we value in our leaders. Leaders who appear weak can’t make us feel safe. We want Captain America. Self-sufficient. Heroic. Basically, we don’t want our spiritual leaders to need God much at all, instead, we want them to BE God. Well, Jesus IS God and he didn’t “consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking on the very form of a slave” (paraphrase from Philippians 2), so why don’t we value leaders who do the same?

While people who recognize their need for God would be much better leaders (whether or not they are wheelchair users), we seem to prefer the strong, charismatic, god-like front man who shows no weakness. Somehow, that makes us feel safe. And when he preaches sermons about relying on God, but in appearance, demonstrates no real need to, we fail to notice how little he really has to offer, at least in personal experience, though he may have much to offer in terms of eloquence, style and the like. 

Along this line of thought, I’ve been wondering why most of the great modern heroes of the faith are not men who will be remembered for their great love, humility, service or generosity to the poor (the most essentially Christ-like characteristics), but rather men who have made very logically sound theological arguments. Because let’s be honest, Calvin and Luther aren’t exactly remembered for their incredible generosity or Christ-like tenderness. They are known more for their theological contributions (which I acknowledge were truly great). But what does this say about Christianity, if our greatest heroes aren’t necessarily our heroes because of being so much like Jesus, and our spiritual leaders are chosen more on the basis of their seeming lack of need for God rather than their visible dependance on him?

It’s a BOY!

This is our son, Lennox.

Jesus in the Wilderness

This is the story of the temptation of Jesus told through a series cartoons. It really opened up my eyes. Hope you enjoy it.

Courage

The themes of courage and cowardice have been floating around in my head ever since we saw the movie Valkyrie over the Christmas holiday. The movie centered on some high ups in Hitler’s army who tried to take him down, at great risk to themselves. Edit: It must be noted that the version of this story portrayed in the film is likely more fiction than reality, but from a purely “story” perspective it still has immense value in the way that it affected me. End edit. What struck me the most about these men, especially their leader, Von Stauffenberg, was that they didn’t fight the injustice of Hitler’s regime because it was doing some direct harm to them, but because it was doing harm to others. While it makes sense for those who don’t benefit from the status quo to resist it, how strange for men who could have been so successful in Hitler’s Germany (most who were from royal, wealthy families… not to mention Aryan) to risk everything. I mean it makes sense for the peasants to revolt, when they are the ones who are poor and hungry and oppressed by a cruel king. But when the kings own men turn against him for his cruelty towards the peasants, even though they themselves are not poor or hungry or oppressed, well, there’s just something more unusual about that. These men chose to do something courageous when they didn’t have to, in the same way that whites who fought alongside blacks during the civil rights era chose to act justly when they could have looked away, and in the same way that men who fought alongside women for women to gain equal rights made the same choice.

After watching this movie, I couldn’t stop thinking about what makes some people act bravely and what makes others look the other way, and be cowards. A recent conversation with Brian about the story of the cowardly lion in the Wizard of Oz helped me see that people choose to be cowards because they feel that they can be. They have options. The cowardly lion only stopped being a coward when he felt he had no other option but to be brave. Remember in the movie? Only when his being tough was the only way to save Dorothy, whom he loved so much, did he truly shed his cowardice. He could no longer afford to not be brave. The consequences were too detrimental to him.

And I think that’s true of real life too. When we feel we are out of options, we are forced to be brave. That’s why the peasants always revolt. They are out of options. And how often do we hear stories of people having performed all kinds of daring feats when their lives or the lives of their loved ones are in peril? When you’re out of options, you are more willing to take risks.

So, how then do you explain Hitler’s men, or the whites that fought with blacks, or the men who fought for women’s rights? They don’t seem optionless, do they? They could have just carried on with their regular lives and been mostly unaffected by whatever harm was being done to others. So why did they act bravely?

I think it has to do with loyalties, with where people’s loyalties lie. See, the more loyalties one has, the more options one has in moments of critical decisions. For instance, if someone is loyal to wealth, to a good reputation, to more basic things like life and physical well being, and then also to more selfless things like justice and mercy, and that person finds themselves witnessing an injustice, they have many more loyalties to consider than just their loyalty to justice. Surely, they want to stop the injustice, but if getting involved means being disloyal to wealth or reputation or even to ones life, well, then the injustice might just go ignored.

I think people who are able to act bravely, as if their options have run out, when there is no immediate apparent danger to them or theirs, are able to do so because they have so limited their loyalties to a higher plain (to what is good, true, or just), that no other alternative will do.

That’s how we can take courage in following God, too. We can limit our loyalties. We can’t follow God as courageously if we have multiple competing loyalties, than if we were loyal only to God. Because then, when we have to make a decision between doing something that God wants us to do and doing something else (or doing nothing), if our only concern were pleasing God, and not, say, remaining loyal to tradition, being liked, or anything else, our choices would become much more simple. God wants something? Okay, I’ll do it. Not, “Well what will people in the church say?” or “Does this break with tradition?” Our only loyalty is to God.

Then there is the question of how we can even know what God wants in the first place… And I think we let ourselves off the hook a lot because of the apparent difficulty of answering this question. But does the question really matter, when we aren’t even loyal to what we think would please God, regardless of whether or not we can know for sure what that is. Whatever it is he likes, is that even our main concern? Is it our first priority? No. And that, I believe, is the main issue (not, “Can we know the truth?” but, “If you could, would you do anything about it?”). I heard that Tony Campolo once asked a group of Southern Baptists the question: “Why do all you fundamentalist keep arguing so much about the inherency of the Bible, when you’re not going to do what it says anyway?” Consider the following quote from A.W. Tozer, he doesn’t seem to think it’s that hard to know the truth, just to do it (because of our other competing loyalties):

“The New Testament contains full instructions, not only about what we are to believe but what we are to do and how we are to go about doing it. Any deviation from those instructions is a denial of the Lordship of Christ. I say the answer is simple, but it is not easy for it requires that we obey God rather than man, and that brings down the wrath of the religious majority. It is not a question of knowing what to do; we can easily learn that from the Scriptures. It is a question of whether or not we have the courage to do it.”

What he is suggesting is that other concerns or loyalties, other than simply our loyalty to God, are what make our choices so difficult and complex. Our options become simple when our loyalties become limited. So don’t act like you don’t know what God wants you to do just because you are afraid to do it. If you know the right thing to do, then limit yourself to doing only that. It will make life’s choices way simpler, but it will make life’s results way more interesting.

 

I love Jesus, but I drink a little.

This will bring you joy, I promise…

The Gender of Blogs

Got linked by a post from TSK to a pretty questionable (not dirty, just questionable) website that tries to guess the gender of different blog writers (questionable because the criteria is unclear, but the results are funny all the same). Proud to say (I think) that our blog is gender neutral (but the site would guess female by 55%, which means that by default we are 45% male), which makes sense since I (a woman) blog the lives of a male and female pair. Obviously it would lean female, but I’m proud that I can represent the two of our genders. Or is the Brian part of it irrelevant, and I’m just masculine in the way I blog? But what is masculine blogging? What are their criteria for masculine and feminine period? What are mine? What are yours?

The results of this site are really funny with male blogs leaning female and female blogs leaning male, so what does that say? Mark Driscoll’s blog was only 83% male, while the blog of Emerging Women was 90% male. Does this mean that gender stereotypes aren’t accurate, since based on these stereotypes, blogs are labeled with an incorrect gender? If that’s the case, these stereotypes should be tossed out. What use are they if they are wrong? Obviously, the bloggers of Emerging Women are female, so they can’t be 90% male. So, whatever attributes we think make males male and therefore make these women 90% male can’t necessarily be attributes that make males male, because these females aren’t male and they have these attributes too. Or is writing/blogging a gender ambiguous medium that doesn’t follow the same gender rules that other parts of life find useful, therefore, causing the funny results on this website? Any thoughts?

Creamy, Bacon and Green Onion Potato Soup with Goat Cheese

Great original recipe, if I may say so myself. I’ve really been loving anything potato since I’ve been pregnant, and this soup hits the spot (also, with bacon, you can’t go wrong). 

Ingredients:

-1 package cooked and crumbled bacon

-1 five pound bag of Yukon gold potatoes

-1 bundle of fresh green onions (about 8 or 10 stems), chopped

-1 3.5 ounce package of goat cheese

-2 cups heavy cream

-3/4 stick of butter

-1 tablespoon minced garlic

-Salt and pepper to taste

Directions: Cut the potatoes (peeling left on) into 3/4 inch cubes, place in a large pot and cover with water (about 1 inch over the potatoes), begin to season with salt at this stage. Put on high heat and bring to a boil. Let the potatoes boil (stirring so as to not let them stick) until they start to fall apart when slightly pushed. Then, add the bacon, cream, butter, garlic, goat cheese, three additional cups of water, and more salt and pepper. Once the potatoes have really started to fall apart and the soup starts to become creamy (though there should still be chunks of undesolved potatoes in the soup), add the green onion. Then, season more with salt and pepper if needed, let cool and serve with oyster crackers. Serves 10 approximately, tastes dang good.