Posted by keithly »
2 Comments »Ugh… in the last post I said I’d write a post at least once a week, and immediately failed to write for what, three weeks? I’m terrible. In my defense, these past weeks I’ve still been dealing with car and apartment problems, though I think they’re coming to an end.
Aside from those things, I’ve been thinking a lot about sacrifice, sacrifice and intensity. A couple weeks ago on Sunday morning, Tom Jacobs, who sits on Gateway’s oversight board, spoke about sacrifice. Pastor Paul and his dad Bob had just returned from Haiti, where they met with local church leaders about sending down a group from Gateway. Paul spoke briefly about a missionary couple who’d spent fifteen years there, fifteen years of working and blessing the people of Haiti. Now because of the earthquake, they’re having to expand their home into a sort of hostel for mission teams from the US. All those years of giving far more than most of us ever will, and they’re giving more. That’s sacrifice.
I’ll be honest: the word sacrifice has a negative connotation to me. I immediately think of burnt offerings and the old Jewish sacrificial system. From an early age I saw the burning of grain and slaughtering of animals on altars as merely wasteful. Doesn’t God say later on that he has no interest in burnt offerings? Like most people who bother to consider it, I have difficulty reconciling the severity of God in parts of the Old Testament with the love and grace emphasized in the New Testament. I’m not going to delve further into that here, but I do understand Jesus is the perfect sacrifice that forever ended the old system. Yet we are called to be more like Jesus, and thus more self-sacrificial.
The heart of Tom’s message on Sunday was this: “Every blessing we experience is the result of someone else’s sacrifice. If we really want to follow Jesus, we have to rediscover a life of sacrifice, so that other people can experience blessing.” I forget about the blessing part of the balance. Certainly, I’ve had many blessings in life that I can specifically trace to my parents’ or grandparents’ sacrifices– all the college savings, even my dad taking the time to help me find a car. Sacrifice shouldn’t mean giving up something good just to prove you don’t need it, but because you need something greater. We should be able to give cheerfully, at least some of the time, because even though it might hurt a little to think about all the money that’s going to your church instead of a nicer house you know it’s the greater good, for yourself and others. Pretty basic, but I need to be reminded. Frequently.
Posted by keithly »
Add Comment »Well, it’s 10:30 at night, and I’m finally writing another post. “Finally.” That seems to be one of the words of the month, along with “accident.” In the past month, my:
- car started sputtering again, a month after it was fixed
- car was then rear-ended (see below for details)
- bedroom wall began to disintegrate and mold from leaks in the exterior/foundation
- work became a lot more hectic
Spoon at 80/35
I did have some fun, though. Over the 4th I helped with the Gateway Church booth at the 80/35 Music Festival in downtown Des Moines. A church member made several stencils of things like the Des Moines skyline and a microphone, and we spraypainted them over pages from an old dictionary. A few people asked if they were pages from the Bible! At first I thought “C’mon, people, wouldn’t that be just a tad sacrilegious?” but I suppose if the stenciled image fit with the passage, it could make sense…. As churches go we’re relatively edgy, but not THAT edgy. I was fairly out of my element, but it was good for me. Several of us won free tickets so I ended up seeing Spoon in concert, a band I’d never heard before and haven’t listened to since. They were decent, I guess, but didn’t excite me too much. I walked home smelling of several kinds of smoke, mostly BBQ, which was appropriate for that weekend. [Read more →]
Posted by keithly »
1 Comment »Last night my friend Paul took me down to Wildwood Hills Ranch to design t-shirts with some of the LiT girls (Leaders in Training). This summer’s theme is “Branded” and how the world brands people with negative labels, and learning to see through those to the person made in the image of God. Each of us drew something symbolic of God’s gifts to us on our shirts. I tried to draw a compass plant, but it ended up looking more like a thistle with yellow flowers.
Paul made this photo collage
It was great to finally visit the Ranch after hearing so much about it. Paul has been involved since its inception about ten years ago, so he seemed to know everyone. I wish I’d gone to a camp or worked at one when I was younger, but alas, I was a farm kid and thus was supposed to work during the summer. I plan to go back in a couple weeks to work with some of the boys LiT’s. Thanks, Paul!
Posted by keithly »
Add Comment »The following is a statement I read at the memorial service for my friend Joel, who took his own life in January.
I honestly can’t remember when I met Joel, though I know it was in one of Dr. Ray’s philosophy classes. I don’t even remember what I thought of him at first, which is strange because Joel was the sort of guy who makes an impression. The only excuse I can offer is that in higher level philosophy classes, to be eccentric is to be normal.
Over time I realized I ought to get to know him and Luke Baehr better, but it wasn’t until after I graduated and my college social circle evaporated that I was desperate enough to reach out. I was still in Pella and Joel of course was in Knoxville, so we met at Smokey Row and talked.
Joel, Keith, Luke
Joel encouraged me to attend a Bible study he was going to in Des Moines with Luke, and I went once that fall after graduation. It was pretty intense and overwhelming for me at the time, so it was a few months before I went back. At Joel’s insistence I did keep going to Thursday night dinners at the girls’ house on 29th Street, which ultimately led to me fully joining the group, and practically every good thing that’s happened to me since. During those first awkward months Joel encouraged me and reminded me of Woody Allen’s line that “80% of success is showing up.” He said he was praying for me, that he cared about me and enjoyed my presence. He was such a blessing in my life.
Despite this, I found Joel difficult to get to know and hard to understand. He told me more than once he felt like people didn’t want him around at social events, and that on such occasions he was playing a role, and just trying not to bring everyone down. Yet he was such an intelligent conversationalist and appeared to thrive around people. I considered him an extrovert.
Joel was impossible to categorize, and I think he mistook for antipathy what was merely discomfort and uncertainty in those who were meeting him for the first time.
At some point he told me he’d accepted that he was just a melancholic person, and I took this to mean he’d made some sort of peace with himself. This reminded me of another man who had applied that word to himself, Samuel Johnson. From then on I compared the two of them in mind, and I tried to interest Joel in him, sending him articles and quotations, especially Johnson’s advice for dealing with depression: “If you’re idle, don’t be alone; if you’re alone, don’t be idle.” I had hoped Johnson would show him a way he could successfully cope with his troubles, that he would see that despite everything he was still made in the image of God, “fearfully and wonderfully made” as the psalmist says.
Though Joel didn’t have Johnson’s genius, he didn’t share all of his afflictions either. I won’t bore you with all the points of comparison between the two, but it suffices to say that in spite of Johnson’s lofty literary achievements (he wrote the first English dictionary) he’s now remembered as a brilliant conversationalist who was ever charitable and encouraging to his friends, so much that more than one of them wrote biographies and memoirs of the man. I believe it will be the same for Joel, not because we will necessarily write biographies, but that the sympathy, generosity, and companionship he gave us will continue to bear fruit in our lives.
Posted by keithly »
Add Comment »Last week I began the process of extricating my identity from Facebook. Zuckerberg et al’s decision to forcibly open my profile information drove me to either accept their radical, self-serving values about privacy and identity or remove my information. As it becomes clear that Facebook looks at its users as a resource to be mined of personal information, high-profile technorati like Cory Doctorow and danah boyd are abandoning Facebook and writing excoriating blog posts. Only time will tell if the the hoi polloi will follow, but from the number of Google searches for “delete Facebook account” it appears “the chickens are restless.”
It turns out that removing my information doesn’t actually delete it from Facebook: no, they will keep it in their database until I completely delete my profile. I’ve quit all my groups and what used to be called “pages,” and will no longer post anything to my wall. I saved all the old messages I care about via good ol’ copy and paste; the more recent ones are sent to me as emails so I have them already.
I’m uncertain what to do about my wall posts and photos. Stretching back 5 years, they record a history (a selective one to be sure) but are nonetheless real glimpses into my life. Senior year of college and inside jokes posted back and forth between classes give way to friends moving away and leaving sparse notes on their new surroundings. Some people disappear while new faces keep popping up. I’ve tentatively decided to copy and paste the entire thing to a file on my computer. The photos are more likely to stay, though perhaps not all of them. Many record cross country or track meets, Christmas parties, and other gatherings that are part of a collective story, not just my own. To remove these photos would ignore the stakes so many others have in them.
Statute of Ramses II, Luxor Temple, Egypt
I feel sorry for Zuckerberg and his crew. Hooked on Facebook I may be, but their creation dominates their lives much more than it does mine. Likewise I pity Steve Jobs, a man who seems lost in his own virtual reality, defending his technological fiefdom from his citadel at One Infinite Loop, lashing out at random critics and gossip blogs in weird personal emails. I see the same basic forces at work in the Apple “openness” and Facebook “privacy” flaps: control (fundamentally, power) and wealth. What pro-business advocates like to call “growth” usually boils down to a pursuit of these two things. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness power and wealth. Is that really the American way? No, it’s the way we all tend to go, given the opportunity: what Christian theologians call “original sin.” It’s a hard doctrine to swallow, but it points us to deeper happiness when realize we’re not good enough to make it on our own– we need someone to save us. (Rumor has it Jesus is that someone.) Though the powers Facebook and other tech companies now wield are in many ways unprecedented, the fundamental motivations of humanity are the same as ever.
That which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which it may be said,
“See, this is new”?
It has already been in ancient times before us. – Ecclesiates 1:9-10
Posted by keithly »
Add Comment »I just finished reading Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World. I’ve known of the book for a couple years but never quite got around to reading it, likely because I knew it would challenge me. After the Haitian earthquake about a month ago, I remembered the book, decided I must read it, and then Barnes & Noble had it on sale. So here I am.
In the early 1980′s, Dr. Farmer visited Haiti and decided to dedicate his life to helping the Haitian poor. He founded his own hospital and community health system in Cange, one of the poorest towns in the poorest regions of Haiti, the most impoverished country in the western hemisphere. This enterprise, Zanmi Lasante (Partners in Health, or PIH) is now active in several other countries worldwide, and Farmer pioneered more successful approaches to controlling TB, HIV, and other infectious diseases in third-world countries.
[Read more →]
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Add Comment »Nicholar Carr, my favorite information technology skeptic, has written a great post on privacy with respect to the Gmail security breach and Facebook’s “enhanced” privacy options:
For a public figure to say “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place” is, at the most practical of levels, incredibly rash. You’re essentially extending an open invitation to reporters to publish anything about your life that they can uncover. (Ask Gary Hart.) The statement also paints Schmidt as a hypocrite. In 2005, he threw a legendary hissy fit when CNET’s Elinor Mills, in an article about privacy, published some details about his residence, his finances, and his politics that she had uncovered through Google searches. Google infamously cut off all contact with CNET for a couple of months. Schmidt didn’t seem so casual about the value of privacy when his own was at stake.
The China-based cyber attack, which apparently came to Google’s attention just a few days after the CNBC interview, makes Schmidt’s remarks about privacy and deferring to “the authorities” seem not just foolhardy but reprehensible. When the news reached Schmidt that some Gmail accounts had been compromised, perhaps endangering Chinese dissidents, did he shrug his shoulders and say, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”? Did he say that Gmail customers need to understand that sometimes “the authorities” will have access to their messages? Judging by Google’s reaction to the attack, it takes the privacy of its own networks extremely seriously – as well it should. The next time Schmidt is asked about privacy, he should remember that.
I’ve long been aware that Google and Facebook’s best interests do not entirely align with my own, but I was most intrigued by his concept of the “personal Green Zone”:
If you exist within a personal Green Zone of private jets, fenced off hideaways, and firewalls maintained by the country’s best law firms and PR agencies, it’s hardly a surprise that you’d eventually come to see privacy more as a privilege than a right.
When people like Schmidt insinuate that privacy doesn’t exist I think they’re arguing in good faith, because in their personal experience this is surely true. A high profile, celebrity CEO is going to have a tough time maintaining much privacy. It comes with the territory. Someone in his shoes can’t even answer his own doorbell for fear of being kidnapped or mugged. (This almost happened to Warren Buffett’s wife.)
Privacy is indeed a luxury, whether or not it ought to be. I once worked at company where every year the president/owner threw a nice holiday party at the local country club for the entire company. Toward the end of the evening he would give a blathering speech about how “it was a very good year” and then call each employee forward to shake his hand and give him a bonus check. Reading the addresses on the envelopes, he’d invariably butcher the names of the Southeast Asians who worked in the factory. “Fu- WONG En-GOO-yen…” No one would get up, so he’d read the next name. “Moo-WOY TRAIN… hmm, same address… they must be brothers!” Though he was a certified loon, it puts these IT tycoons’ remarks in perspective. They’re hardly aware of how the poor live, and they build their lives around avoiding as many people as possible who aren’t of their own economic class. Hollywood elites and Paris Hilton excepted, many of the richest people are also the most “private.” Products and services aimed at the rich are usually marketed as exclusive or private.
I understand privacy in Aristotelian terms, as a mean between the extremes of The Truman Show and The Invisible Man. We all have a natural need for some level of privacy, but one the most obvious ways wealth divides people is by fostering excessive privacy. Given the opportunity most people seek to shelter themselves from the pains of this world, but it’s easy to go to far and insulate ourselves with indifference to the point of obliviousness, as these corporate leaders demonstrate.
Posted by keithly »
Add Comment »Here are a few notes on Matthew Chapter 15 that I would’ve brought up at Bible study if I were able to attend tonight.
Clean and Unclean
The Mishnah (the written version of the “tradition of the elders” mentioned here) records debates on the problem of people swearing their property to God by declaring it qorban in order to avoid paying debts, and eventually the rabbis decided this was unlawful. But in Jesus’s time it amounted to a loophole in the law, and was apparently abused to avoid responsibility. This is also consistent with Jesus’s teaching on swearing oaths in Mt 5:37.
From what I can tell, scholars are divided on whether Jesus “declared all foods clean,” as the parallel passage in Mark states. Given the conflict over this issue in the early church, this apparently straightforward interpretation seems doubtful. This passage is not in Luke, and Acts 10:9-23 seems to suggest it was only made clear by Peter’s vision. Matthew leaves out Mark’s parenthetical statement, and includes the additional section about the Pharisees being “blind guides.” It looks like Matthew understands this as a lesson in the way exterior forms and practices of religion can become blind guides. At Immersion Thursday night, Justin referenced this passage and pointed out that today, we act like Pharisees we think “How come your disciples don’t go to church on Sunday/ dress up for church/ serve communion like we do/ etc.
The Faith of the Canaanite Woman
On the surface, this story looks embarrassing. Why would Jesus ignore and humiliate this poor woman before finally healing her daughter?
First of all, it would’ve been unseemly for Jesus, a Jewish teacher, to speak to any woman in public, let alone a Gentile woman. His disciples tacitly acknowledge this when they ask him to send her away. Instead, he decides to show them what their cultural attitudes look like when fully expressed. His first response, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel” is technically true. During his ministry he spent most of his time in Galilee and Judea reaching out to the Jews, but Jesus was also in the act of expanding the definition of “Israel” to include all who follow Him. The woman persists, saying “Lord, help me.” In response Jesus suggests she and other Gentiles are little dogs (the Greek is diminutive). A dog in the Middle East then and now was not a pet, but a filthy street animal only slightly less unclean than a pig. This is an insult, but it would’ve been a prejudice shared by most Jews. Even then she persists, playfully suggesting “even little dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” At that, Jesus, who at first “spoke not a word” says “Woman, you have great faith!” (“Woman” would’ve been a respectful form of address.) “Your requested is granted.”
Instead of the woman, it is the disciples who are humiliated here. It seems likely Jesus chose for this incident to parallel Elijah’s encounter with the widow from Zarephath of Sidon in 1 Kings 17:17-24. There Elijah’s heals the woman’s son after stretches out over him three times and cries out for God to heal him. This makes doubly clear that God’s love and grace is for all people, not just the Jews.
Posted by keithly »
2 Comments »This week flew by. I hardly remember most of it, but I’ll try.
- Monday: Recovered from Thanksgiving. Not a productive day. Paid the bills, though.
- Tuesday: Recovered from recovering. Wrote a lot of code at work; was actually productive. Had a good lunch conversation with Paul; looking forward to small groups of all sorts. Saw a Ferrari in front of the restaurant. Nice warm weather.
- Wednesday: Realized I was out of food, except for spaghetti and cereal. Spent some time in Dahl’s. Spent too much time adding info to a new (but much needed) OS X app. Slept poorly.
- Thursday: Went to my parents’ for supper, took power drill, brought back pumpkin pie and work clothes for Saturday. Went to bed early.
- Friday: Wrestled computer at work, put out other fires. Signed up for decent internet access (the free wi-fi at my complex is as slow as dialup, and insecure in so many ways I try not to think about it). Played with NetBeans and PHP a little, started redesigning blog— for real. Discovered that Illinois by Sufjan Stevens is the greatest album of the decade (according to Paste). Glad I finally heard it this year— you know, before the decade ended.
- Saturday: Worked on a couple Habitat houses. Moved some home appliances, caulked up the wazoo. See below.
I broke out the long underwear for my church’s Habitat for Humanity workday. I thought we were supposed to be at the site by 8 am, so I found myself in the peculiar situation of being the first person at the Temple for Performing Arts (where we met to carpool, and where the church meets on Sunday). After moving a some home appliances from one house to the other, I spent the rest of the day caulking pillars on the porches. Being a “detail-oriented” person (picky perfectionist) I was the right person for the job. I became intimately familiar with every seam and crevice on those pillars, and will probably dream of caulking tonight. Despite how that might sound, it was a fun event and something like being on Extreme Home Makeover, since we had over 30 people on site. I also enjoyed the lunch croissandwiches and chocolate chip cookies which were made by other church members. And I have to mention the “gourmet” snack chips (I didn’t know chips could be gourmet).
When I was a kid I played soccer every spring and fall, After a Saturday morning game I’d return home and lay down on my bed, still wearing my uniform, and feel tired, warm, and satisfied. Then I’d peel off my matted socks and sticky shin guards and take a shower. Well, after I got home around 4:15 I lay down on my bed— and fell asleep, sans shower. I didn’t bring a camera, but here are a few photos that have already surfaced on Twitter:
Looking forward to church tomorrow. That’s not something I could say until the past couple months.
Posted by keithly »
Add Comment »A few weeks ago I came across a provocative statement on the blog of a couple of my fellow churchgoers regarding Romans 13:1-6 and the founding of our nation.
America was founded on blatant disrespect for the word of God. Check out Romans 13 and read what the first verses say. Was the revolutionary war righteous? Well… not if we take this seriously. Your call.
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