Digital Wilderness

A couple passages from Donald Miller’s newest book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.

It’s interesting that in the Bible, in the book of Ecclesiastes, the only practical advice given about living a meaningful life is to find a job you like, enjoy your marriage, and obey God. It’s as though God is saying, Write a good story, take somebody with you, and let me help.

I was interviewing my friend Susan Isaacs after her book Angry Conversations with God came out…Because so much of her book talks about relational needs, relational fulfillment and unfulfillment, one of the questions asked was whether she believed there was one true love for every person.

Susan essentially said no. And she said that with her husband sitting right there in the audience. She said she and her husband believed they were a cherished prize for each other, and they would probably drive any other people mad. But then she said something I thought was wise. She said she had married a guy, and he was just a guy. He wasn’t going to make all her problems go away, because he was just a guy. And that free her to really love him as a guy, not as an ultimate problem solver. And because her husband believed she was just a girl, he was free to really love her too. Neither needed the other to make everything okay. They were simply content to have good company through life’s conflicts.

C.S. Lewis, in The Great Divorce, writes:

Human beings can’t make one another really happy for long…You cannot love a fellow creature fully till you love God. Sometimes this conversion can be done while the instinctive love is still gratified. But there was, it seems, no chance of that in your case. The instinct was uncontrolled and fierce and monomaniac. The only remedy was to take away its object. It was a case for surgery. When that first kind of love was thwarted, then there was just a chance that in the loneliness, in the silence, something else might begin to grow.

No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.

I was searching through the blog looking for something and ran across this old post from Feb 2005 – Book Meme. It was interesting and fun reading the responses last time, so thought I’d post it again. Let’s see what you all have this time around!

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that “cool” or “intellectual” book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

Be sure to follow the rules – no cheating!

How exciting is this! A friend of mine from waaay back in the day wrote a book and got published!

Emy Hancock and I grew up, for a few years at least, in the same church. Her dad was the pastor of my childhood church, Latonia Baptist, but her family moved to central KY around the second or third grade and I didn’t see her again for many years.

Our paths crossed again in 1995, when we were both part of GSP at NKU. Unfortunately, we lost touch after GSP, though I’ve heard mention of her a few times since those days. And there’s good reason why!

Since then, she’s been crowned Miss Massachusetts (1998) and competed in the Miss America pageant, graduated from Harvard, earned a law degree from Georgetown, become an environmental lawyer, gotten married, had a child and now she’s published. It would be a gross understatement to say she’s been busy and quite successful!

Now the point of the post – to spread word of her book:
Trespassers Will Be Baptized: The Unordained Memoir of a Preacher’s Daughter.

Amazon Product Description

Growing up Southern and Baptist in Eastern Kentucky, Elizabeth Hancock’s world revolved around Sunday School, foreign missions projects, revival meetings and of course, the Kentucky Wildcats, who “glorified God through their goal-shattering, soul-shattering play.” Hancock chronicles her childhood misadventures with sardonic wit, detailing her and her sister Meg’s mischievous – if harmless – abuses of power (stealing Guess jeans from the Africa donation box, or hawking backyard swimming pool baptisms during her neighborhood’s annual yard sale) and lovingly recalling the wisdom imparted by her long-suffering parents as they ministered to their unruly flock.

Kirkus Reviews

Humorously irreverent look at life as the eldest daughter of a Southern Baptist preacher whose philosophy, he once told her, “rests largely on the principle that all God’s glorious, perfect children are also dumb as dirt.” That pious but realistic comment framed Hancock’s childhood attempts to understand the church people around her as well as her own special role as the PK (preacher’s kid) in 1980s Kentucky. Her experiences will ring true for anyone long involved in a church, as she sardonically tells of busybodies and holier-than-thou congregants while keeping the main focus on the sincere believers who were her true beacon, none more so than her parents and sister. A large portion of the memoir pokes fun at the silly and often maddening people found in any congregation, prompting many a good laugh. But [the author] goes deeper, delving into her own spiritual journey. [Her] experiences are the true crucible of anyone’s faith, and they certainly shaped Hancock. The reader comes away hoping that this rueful autobiographer will tap more of her memories in the future. Expressive and thoroughly entertaining.

Congratulations, Emy, on your book and having a baby!

My friend Jen, who I met at GSP, is also published – Causation, Psychology, and Law.

And here’s yet another interesting connection from GSP. My roommate was Andy Beshear. You may have heard of his dad, Steve – the governor of Kentucky.

Well, I’m on the Harry Potter band wagon now. It took me a while to get around to it (and you may remember me writing a post about it a couple years ago), but now I’m in the Potter-verse. Over the past week, I’ve read the first book, made it half way through the second and saw movies 2-4… I got caught up just in time to see the new movie – Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – on Wednesday. They’re not bad – definitely not Lord of the Rings, though!

Coming recommended from my friend James, I decided to read Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. It was an okay book, a little slow at times, but still a good read.

One of the major themes of the book involves The Way of the Pilgrim and The Jesus Prayer –

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner.

Towards the end, there was a passage that jumped out at me so I thought I’d share it. To set up the scene, Franny is suffering “a spiritual and existential breakdown,” becoming “disenchanted with the selfishness and inauthenticity she perceives all around her,” and after reading The Way of the Pilgrim, is trying to reach spiritual enlightenment by praying unceasingly. Zooey, her brother, has come to talk with her. Here, he questions her motives for reciting the “Jesus Prayer” (bolding my own).

The part that stumps me, really stumps me, is that I can’t see why anybody-unless he was a child, or an angel, or a lucky simpleton like the pilgrim-would even want to say the prayer to a Jesus who was the least bit different from the way he looks and sounds in the New Testament. My God! He’s only the most intelligent man in the Bible, that’s all! Who isn’t he head and shoulders over? Who? Both Testaments are full of pundits, prophets, disciples, favorite sons, Solomons, Isaiahs, Davids, Pauls- but, my God, who beside Jesus really knew which end was up? Nobody. Not Moses. Don’t tell me Moses. He was a nice man, and he kept in beautiful touch with his God, and all that-but that’s exactly the point. He had to keep in touch. Jesus realized there is no separation from God… Oh, my God, what a mind!…Who else, for example, would have kept his mouth shut when Pilate asked for an explanation? Not Solomon. Don’t say Solomon. Solomon would have had a few pithy words for the occasion. I’m not sure Socrates wouldn’t have, for that matter. Crito, or somebody, would have managed to pull him aside just long enough to get a couple of well-chosen words for the record. But most of all, above everything, who in the Bible besides Jesus knew-knew-that we’re carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we’re all too…stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look? You have to be a son of God to know that kind of stuff. Why don’t you think of these things? I mean it, Franny, I’m being serious. When you don’t see Jesus for exactly what he was you miss the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. If you don’t understand Jesus, you can’t understand his prayer-you don’t get the prayer at all, you just get some kind of organized cant. Jesus was a supreme adept, by God, on a terribly important mission. This was no St. Francis, with enough time to knock out a few canticles, or to preach to the birds, or to do any of the other endearing things so close to Franny Glass’s heart. I’m being serious now…How can you miss seeing that? If God had wanted somebody with St. Francis’s consistently winning personality for the job in the New Testament, he’d've picked him, you can be sure. As it was, he picked the best, the smartest, the most loving, the least sentimental, the most unimitative master he could possibly have picked. And when you miss seeing that, I swear to you, you’re missing the whole point of the Jesus prayer. The Jesus Prayer has one aim, and one aim only. To endow the person who says it with Christ-Consciousness. Not to set up some little cozy, holier-than-thou trysting place with some sticky, adorable divine personage who’ll take you in his arms and relieve you of all your duties and make all your nasty Weltschmerzen and Professor Tuppers go away and never come back. And by God, if you have intelligence enough to see that-and you do-and yet you refuse to see it, then you’re misusing the prayer, you’re using it to ask for a world full of dolls and saints and no Professor Tuppers.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell was an okay book, not as great as I was anticipating it do be. It started slow, but picked up about a hundred pages in. There were some interesting points made throughout the book, interesting insights into the way certain things caught fire and snowballed from a seemingly insignificant thing to a huge deal, while others never got off the launch pad. Not sure how practical these insights are into the average life, but still interesting.

One of the points made by the author deals with the Power of Context. Consider this example from the book:

Consider the following brain teaser. Suppose I give you four cards [each] labeled with [one of] the letters A and D [on one side] and [one of] the numerals 3 and 6 [on the other side]. The rule of the game is that a card with a vowel on it always has an even number on the other side. Which of the cards would you have to turn over to prove this rule to be true?

The answer is two: the A card and the three card. The overwhelming majority of people given this test, though, don’t get it right. They tend to answer just the A card, or the A and the six…

But now let me pose another question. Suppose four people are drinking in a bar. One is drinking Coke. One is sixteen. One is drinking beer and one is twenty-five. Given the rule that no one under twenty-one is allowed to drink beer, which of those people’s IDs do we have to check to make sure the law is being observed? Now the answer is easy…the beer drinker and the-sixteen year-old.

[They] are exactly the same puzzle…[with the latter] framed in a way that makes it about people instead of about numbers, and as human beings, we are a lot more sophisticated about each other than we are about the abstract world.

This was one of the few passages in the book that jumped out at me, made me go hmmm. This could, in fact, be applied to everyday life. If you’re struggling with making a point to a co-worker, client, etc. or if you’re trying to spread an idea, invention, point of view with little success, try changing the context of your message. Put it into terms that the receiver of your message can better understand.

Hmmm, isn’t that what word problems in math class were meant to do? How many people actually liked those word problems better than the straight-up math problems?

Here’s a new tidbit that may interest some of you:

Unfinished Tolkien work to be published in 2007

An unfinished tale by J.R.R. Tolkien has been edited by his son into a completed work and will be released next spring, the U.S. and British publishers announced Monday.

Christopher Tolkien has spent the past 30 years working on “The Children of Hurin,” an epic tale his father began in 1918 and later abandoned. Excerpts of “The Children of Hurin,” which includes the elves and dwarves of Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” and other works, have been published before.

“It has seemed to me for a long time that there was a good case for presenting my father’s long version of the legend of the ‘Children of Hurin’ as an independent work, between its own covers,” Christopher Tolkien said in a statement.

Quote from: In the Meantime: The Practice of Proactive Waiting by Rob Brendle.

Over the past several years, I have come to believe that the sincerely meant and dramatically expressed petitions of my early adulthood were entirely off the mark. In fact, it’s clear to me now that my pleas for God to use me were nonsensical, and here’s why. Passionately pleading for God to use us is like passionately pleading for fire to be hot or for water to be wet. God by his very nature uses people. Yet we have cultivated for ourselves an unwritten theology that we must persuade God to use us to accomplish his plans. It’s as if he were determined to use angels or seraphim or the perpetually bowing elders to build his kingdwom, and we try to convince him with our passion and our logic and our sheer resolve to let us do it instead. So we imagine that we twist his arm until he cries uncle and finally says, ” Oh all right. Go ahead and do some work for my kingdom if you must.” Friend, understand that serving God to advance his kingdom’s dominion on the earth is not something we have to beg him to do; it’s something He has already chosen us for. It is hard-wired into our very being to respond affirmatively to this choice of His. His call on our lives – the very call we have believed and cherished – confirms it.

Honestly, for me, it’s not about asking God to use me for His kingdom as it is convincing myself that *I* want to be used *by* Him. I’m comfortable where I am in life (for the most part) not really thinking about how God is using me and how He will use me in the future. I just chug along with day-to-day life, trying to be a positive example and live a good life. God’s using me wherever I am, even though I’m not asking to be used, yet I can fill Him tugging at my heart to go above and beyond where I am right now. He’s trying to get me to pay attention, trying to get me to expand my horizons and realize that there’s so much more out there. In those seemingly rare times when I do talk to God about using me, I’m really talking to myself, trying to get myself ready to be used, trying to get myself ready to go where I’m not comfortable.

God makes use of what He has. But am I letting Him make use of all that I have?

Here’s an article from Guardian Unlimited concerning “Which book should every adult read before they die?”

It was published over 40 years ago and its American author has lived as a virtual recluse ever since, but according to Britain’s librarians, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird is the book that everyone should read.

The Pulitzer prize-winning classic has topped a World Book Day poll conducted by the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), in which librarians around the country were asked the question, “Which book should every adult read before they die?” The book, which has been a staple of schoolroom reading lists for many years, also came second in another poll released today on our favourite happy endings. It explores issues of race and class in 1930s deep south America, through the dramatic court case of a black man charged with the rape of white girl.

Here’s the full list of books. I’ve bolded the ones that I’ve read. I’ve got some work to do, it seems. How many have you read?

1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
2. The Bible (Yes, I have read it all)
3. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
4. 1984 by George Orwell
5. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
6. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
7. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
8. All Quite on the Western Front by E M Remarque
9. His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
10. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
11. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
12. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
13. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
14. Tess of the D’urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
15. Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
16. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
17. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
18. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
19. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
20. The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
21. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
22. The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
23. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
24. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
25. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
26. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
27. Middlemarch by George Eliot
28. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
29. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
30. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

Via The J-Walk Blog