Thirty years.

It was at church this morning, before we were called upon to pray for one another, that one of our pastors got up and began talking briefly about when he became a Christian. “It was 30 years ago when I first came to Christ,” he said.

Holy crap, I suddenly realized, me too.

I was four years old in 1975. I don’t remember exactly when all this happened, but in my memory it was colder than usual, so sometime in the winter. We were living in Hayward at the time, and Mom had recently recommitted herself to Jesus. (She usually refers to this time as when she first became a Christian, although she had followed Jesus ever since she was little. But it wasn’t until she was 25 that she actually began to understand him. I don’t know that understanding is necessary for salvation. Repentance, maybe, but not understanding.)

So, as a newly-committed follower, she realized it was necessary to share her faith. She tried Dad, who wasn’t receptive. Then God directed her to me.

“He’s too young,” she protested, “he won't understand.”

As I said, I doubt understanding is part of it. But God kept directing her to me. So she sat me down and explained to me, as best as one could to a brighter-than-average four-year-old, that Jesus loved me and wanted to save me.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll ask him into my heart.”

But Mom was worried she might have pressured me a little too much on this salvation business, and asked me to think about it for a little while. It had to be something I really wanted to do, not just something that I was going to do to make Mom happy. Most Fundamentalists would have a conniption at the very idea of putting off a faith decision, but I agree that following Jesus is not something to enter into lightly.

I put it off for a few days. Then I came back to Mom and said, “Remember what we were talking about? I still want to do it.” And I did.

Campus Days crap.

Yesterday and today were Campus Days. This is when church youth leaders from all over California and Nevada come to Bethany University, with their high school students in tow, to show them the school. Many of the church youth leaders went to school here, and they feel it wouldn’t hurt their kids to go here too. So they come.

They take a two-day tour of the campus, visit some professors, spend the night in what passes for dorms, observe what passes for entertainment, eat what passes for food (my Lord, what were they thinking? You can’t serve stuffed turkey and salad and expect high schoolers to be impressed. Barbecue, you fools, barbecue!) and attend what passes for chapel.

Parents frequently attend as well because they want to feel good about the school their children might attend. And once they discover that Bethany University is a college with the atmosphere of an insulated Christian camp, they’ll love it. “Wow,” they’ll say, “it’s like living in a bubble. Perfect!” And there y’are. They’re sold.

As you might tell, I’m not impressed by Campus Days.

I went to the equivalent, at Biola University in southern California, when I was in high school. I’ll write about that.

The funny sounds coming from next door.

You know how I have a tendency to not refer to people by name? Well, screw that. I’m naming names in this instance.

I live next door to Fermin Cabral. Every so often he indulges in a little practice that he’s doing right now: He puts on make-out music and sings along to it. Here I am, in my room, trying to read my bible and think about Jesus, and I have to listen to him beg for nooky.

(Okay, I’m not currently reading my bible, but sometimes I am, and he’s still at it.)

I lived next door to him last year too, so yes, I had to put up with it all last year. At times it’ll be gospel music, and I have no trouble with that. Other times it’ll be Stevie Wonder, and as a fan I’m solidly of the opinion that nobody but Stevie should sing his own music, because everyone else just screws it up. (American Idol contestants especially.) But the other songs, which I call begging-for-nooky songs (’cause that’s what they do)—I don’t listen to that sort of music anyway, just because it strikes me as desperate, in a Spike-Lee-playing-Mars-Blackmon way. But Ferm likes it, and sings it, and… oh thank you Lord, he just stopped.

Some of it might have to do with the fact gospel (well, not white gospel) and R&B have been virtually the same music ever since Ray Charles started secularizing gospel to sell records. And that too much recent gospel music have taken the begging-for-nooky formula and turned it into begging-for-Jesus. Scary.

Anti-Bethany-social.

I was feeling… well, not anti-social yesterday. More like anti-Bethany-social. I wanted to hang out with rational adults. But sometimes you just can’t find that on campus. Some days the Bethany kids are just determined to act like goofy adolescents. And I am just not in the bloody mood for that. (I could provide examples, but I don’t need to fuel the school gossips.)

Someone made the mistake of asking me why she never sees me on campus, outside of church functions. Well… it’s because whenever I see her at non-church functions, she’s acting like a goofy kid. So I avoid her. This is actually because I don’t want to develop a bad attitude about her, which will inevitably happen if I did spend any time with her. But of course I can’t tell her that. (Fortunately if she ever reads this, she’s probably just dense enough to not recognize I’m writing about her.)

Yet oddly enough, today I went into town, and got into a goofy conversation with some junior highers who were getting out of school and at a local coffeeshop. Which is just strange. Why can I put up with goofy behavior from actual children, yet I can't put up with it from college students?

Maybe I expect too much from the college students.

Boys are from Mars. Girls are from Venus.

Yeah, men and women are different. So is everyone.

John Gray wrote a book some years ago called Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, in which he used the metaphor of men and women being from entirely different planets to state something ridiculously simple: Men and women are different.

Society has been so focused on equality—on the idea that women can do the same things that men can, that women are just as good as men, et cetera, ad nauseam—that we appear to have forgotten that men and women are different. They think differently, they act differently, and of course the plumbing works different ways.

Well, duh. Yet sometimes all you need to do to create a marketing bonanza is to create a very simple thing that catches on, then sell a bunch of spin-offs to go along with it. So now we have his book, various book-inspired calendars, day planners, secular devotionals, board and video games, and even an obnoxious TV show.

People on the Bethany University campus are currently attempting to use Gray’s premise to point out that men and women are different. Again, duh. But what’s worse is that, on this campus, we aren’t dealing with men and women. Most of the time, we are dealing with boys and girls, neither of whom are mature enough to date, but think they are because they’ve managed to live for a certain number of years. I’ve ranted on this before.

And what’s also worse is that Gray’s metaphor isn’t comprehensive enough. It’s not just that men and women are different. Everyone is different. Two men aren’t going to think exactly the same way about anything, much less women; and trying to say, “All men think this way” is to make the same mistake John Elderidge did in his piece-of-crap book Wild at Heart. And, from my experience, let me tell you that it’s definitely true that no two women are alike.

The sad fact is that the reason why people have unsuccessful relationships is because they’ve never yet had a healthy one. So my advice to all of them is: Work on your relationship with Jesus first, before you screw up another relationship with anyone else. If that relationship is working, everything else will fall into place. Because Jesus is the only completely healthy person in the universe. True, he has the inconvenience of being invisible most of the time; but sometimes that’s actually a convenience. (As you get to know him, you’ll realize why this is.)

In the meanwhile, it’s interesting to read the comments Bethany students have been scrawling all over a swath of butcher paper in the café. They’ve been encouraged to leave comments about the opposite sex. So most of the boys’ comments are about girls being too difficult, and the girls’ comments are about boys being too immature. I would say these responses reflect the fact that they’re all still children.

Someday they may grow out of it… one would hope.

Gmail is cool.

I like it, anyway.

The guys whose podcasts I listen to have been gushing about Gmail, which is Google’s new email service. Since I don’t tend to gush about my email services, I figured I should find out what all the hoo-ha was about and went to Gmail’s website.

And to my great annoyance, I found they won’t let people sign up for it.

It’s still in beta. That’s nerdspeak for “We haven’t got all the bugs out of it, so we’ll let you play with it as-is, and you find all the bugs for us.” This way they can release a buggy first version, and people don’t scream their heads off about how buggy it is—it’s in beta so of course it’s buggy. Beta’s a great way of getting away with posting half-done crap on the internet. Google just keeps things in beta for years, just so whenever people complain, they can use it as an excuse: “We’re really sorry it caused your hard drive to burst into flames, but you know it’s still in beta, right?”

So because Gmail is in beta, they don’t want 10 million users clogging their system, so you can’t sign up for it. Instead, you have to find someone who already has a Gmail account, and beg them to invite you to use it. Gmail is invitation-only. Existing users are allowed to invite 16 others to use it, and that’s all.

Well, it isn’t hard to find people with spare invitations. In fact, the person who invited me had more than 90 invitations she could offer. (How’d she get so many? I didn’t ask. Obviously you can just create 16 more Gmail accounts for yourself, which would give you 272 more invitations, so there y’are.) She wanted me to ask in haiku, so I figured that was reasonable and dashed off a 17-syllable request, and now I have Gmail.

If you want an invitation from me, sorry; I’ve already invited my family. I got a big family.

So what’s the big deal? Well first of all, you can search for things in your email, which makes it a lot easier to find old stuff. Second, Google bunches email by “conversations,” so you can keep track of your mail and its replies and re-replies and so forth. Third, Google gives you 2.5 gigabytes of storage space, which definitely comes in useful; I spend way too much time deleting bigger-than-average files because I’m always in danger of maxing out my storage space. (I even found some hacker software that’ll let you tap that storage space like a hard drive.) And last, its sorting system is a lot more practical than sticking stuff in folders.

So I like it. So far. It’s still in beta, after all.

Evangelism at my church.

Church at Sojourners this morning. I would hyperlink to them, but they never update their website. I know this because I’m in charge of their website—or at least my job title says I am. Except I’m not. You can’t be in charge of something if you’re never given the passwords to the server. But I’ll save that rant for another time.

The sermon this morning was on evangelism. Brian, our pastor, has been speaking a lot on evangelism lately. Mainly because Sojourners consists mostly of Bethany University students. And if it’s going to have any viable future, it can’t consist mostly of students. Students come and go with every new semester. They have “home churches” in their hometowns they have more allegiance to. And most of their focus while in college is, well, college. Thus you can’t base any long-term stuff on college students.

And I say this, ironically enough, as the church’s small groups leader (and tech guy; I have lots of titles) who also happens to be a student. Come May 2006, I’ll graduate, God willing, and then what happens? I don’t want to leave Sojourners in the lurch, but there’s absolutely no guarantee that I’ll still be living in the Santa Cruz area after that point. My family will likely want me to move back to Vacaville. But I have no idea where I’ll get hired to teach—anywhere in California, I suppose—so if I’m being realistic, part of my job is to find my replacement. (Heck, if we’re all being realistic, the church is supposed to replace itself every generation or so. I know this puts a lot of older leaders into great fear, considering the fresh young idiots who will be doing the same things they did back when they were fresh young idiots. But it’ll do fine without us, so long as Jesus is still around.)

So Brian talked about evangelism, and about how our usual expectations in evangelism involve the dramatic instant conversion—someone whose life is crap, who turns to Jesus, gets “saved,” and turns completely around. Except that isn’t ordinarily the case. Most people come to Jesus through a lifelong process of recognizing they need to follow him… then then don’t, then something happens where they follow him a little more, then a little less, then a little more, and so on. We might call them wishy-washy, but such people do make up the bulk of the church. I’m one of them. And that being the case, why do we spend so much time in evangelism aiming for the dramatic cases?

There’s all types of ways to evangelize, which I know full well. My usual way is through service; I’m not a door-to-door guy, and I think apologetics only good for convincing Christians they already made the right decision. Not for convincing others Christianity is true. (The stats back me up on this; very few people come to Jesus for anything other than emotional reasons. That too is another rant.) Some prefer street preaching, tract-passing (always a great way to annoy people on Halloween night), or interpersonal contact—which was Jesus’s method, which we don’t try enough.

Brian encouraged us to pray about which way we might evangelize. “The only problem,” I told him afterward, “is that people will now probably avoid praying, because they know what God’s gonna tell them.”

Of course there’s another problem: The listeners were mainly college students. They have no interest in the long-term growth of Sojourners because they’ll be leaving; and thanks to midterms they’ll be “too busy” to start. They’re already “too busy” to show up for worship practice…

Obviously I have way too many side rants that I want to get out of my system. Better stop now.

Stadion?

You would think that, due to the complete lack of interest in this thing last year, they wouldn’t try having a “Stadion” again. But the fliers are up again.

Stadion (Greek for “arena”) is a game. It’s supposedly a giant race, with various games along the route. You pay $10 to participate, with the winners receiving cash prizes. Supposedly it will inspire people to work together, produce teamwork, blah blah blah….

Since no one’s actually done one of these before, and isn’t entirely sure what it is—let alone what it takes to win—and, for that matter, didn’t participate in it when it didn’t cost $10 to enter—it hardly makes sense to charge $10 to do it. But sometimes you can’t dissuade organizers when they’re convinced their idea is a good one.

Aw, who knows. It might actually get participants this year.

Not me though. I’d rather spend $10 on a jazz CD than on the opportunity to be out of breath, frustrated with myself, and annoyed that someone else is winning the cash prizes.

Missing the wedding.

My aunt is getting married this weekend, and I have a Saturday class.

So that sucks. Not the class; the class is a good one. But because it meets only three times a month, attendance is a huge chunk of the grade, missing classes creates huge setbacks, and all the stuff discussed in it is hugely practical, I can’t afford to miss it. Add to that my church responsibilities and I’m stuck on campus.

Well, on the upside, they’re going to play country music at the wedding, and force my sister to sing one of the songs. But that’s just a few minutes out of the whole ceremony; I suppose I can keep my food down during that time.

Except I can’t go. Dangit.

The 𝘋𝘪𝘢𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘶𝘦. (𝘋𝘪𝘢𝘭𝘰𝘨? 𝘋𝘪𝘢𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘶𝘦?)

The first issue of the student newspaper came out this week. It’s called the Dialogue. It might also be called the Dialog; they spelled it both ways on the cover. Its spelling varies, depending on the editor. I used to be its editor long ago.

It really didn’t contain news. Most of the stuff in it, we knew already. They interviewed an RD, wrote up a piece on the death of Chief Justice Rhenquist, mentioned that the school offers another Masters in Psychology, discussed hurricane relief—old news, but typical fare for student newspapers. They also ran out of news, so they filled two pages with yearbook-style candid photographs.

I don’t expect much out of student newspapers. (And, after working for professional newspapers, I really don’t expect much out of them either.) But I think those in charge should first begin by asking themselves, “What sort of service can we provide the school with our newspaper?” And if they seriously thought about that—and didn’t limit their answers to typical school newspaper behavior—I think they might become something a lot more valuable than a few minutes’ distraction over dinner.

Not 𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 Left Behind movie!

The third in a series of movies about how God’s supposedly gonna play magnifying-glass-and-anthill with the unrepentant.

And yet they’ve made a third one. This one isn’t even from one of the books, either; it’s an entirely made-up one supposedly based on book 2, Tribulation Force, which was supposed to be the basis for the last steaming pile of corn-infested poo they made (which I was forced to watch with my junior high students as part of their chapel).

Expect the Christians to win at the end, even though that’s not how ">Darbyist premillenial dispensationalism is supposed to work. I have enough problems with that particular branch of lousy End-Times theology, but if you’re gonna base a movie on it, you should at least be consistent with it. But no. The filmmakers go along with it only until they reach the ending, which has to be happy, so they chuck it and there’s some kind of minor victory involved in which the forces of good-but-stupid succeed somewhat.

Christianity Today bothered to interview the clueless director, Peter Lalonde, and I call him clueless because he has no idea why his previous movies did poorly. Listen to the excuses:

• He actually thinks the bad reviews of his previous two movies were because of the message. “We pretty much knew that mainstream critics were going to hammer us just because of the message,” Lalonde said. Then why do most of the reviews complain about the one-dimensional characters, poor writing, lousy special effects, and bad acting? James Bearardinelli wrote the review I agree the most with; but you can also find less-than-enthusiastic reviews in Rotten Tomatoes, where it has a 16% rating.
• He thinks if people could have done a better job, why didn’t they pony up the dough to get the rights? Well, if you’ve ever read these novels, you’d realize there’s not a lot to work with.
• He thinks the first movie did poorly (making $4.2 million) because it had been pre-released on video. “We were asking theaters to do something they had never done before,” he said, “We were asking them to play a movie that was already out on video.” Obviously he’s forgotten about George Lucas, whose re-release of the first three Star Wars movies didn’t do too shabby. But there’s a big difference: Poor writing aside, Lucas can make good movies.

Instead of distributing his new piece of crap to the theaters—who, considering previous ticket sales, likely won’t bother unless they’re owned by Christians—Lalonde is distributing this movie to churches, who will inflict it upon their unsuspecting congregations. Sadly, it ought to do well. Not because it’ll be any good, but because Christians are overwhelmingly forgiving about their entertainment when it’s produced by well-meaning Christian producers. That’s why PAX-TV stays on the air in spite of all the junk it produces. (Or re-runs.) We don’t hold Christian movie producers to higher standards; we’re just happy they’re working. So of course they’re gonna make garbage.

And I could expand this into Christian pop, Christian fiction, Christian magazines… but I’ll be ranting too long.

Unpodcasting.

Sunday afternoon I was reading Mark and thinking to myself, “Hey, don’t I need to do a podcast this week?”

Nah. I got nothing.

Yes, I can produce three rants an hour, but I don’t really have anything I feel like regurgitating into a podcast. Once I rant about it here on the weblog, it’s out of my system. This kinda shows when you listen to the podcast; I’m not anywhere near as annoyed as when I’m first pounding the entries out. It sounds like I’m reading. (Which, half the time, I am, because I’m just regurgitating stuff off this site.) Well, that’s just boring. I don’t want to make a boring show. The novelty wore off. So I’m gonna stop making ’em.

I may start it up again if I think of a new premise for a show, but right now I got nothing. So, to all three listeners: You’re just gonna have to read this weblog. Deal with it.

Conformity in the emergent church.

Here’s a mind-blower for some:

As you know, I consider myself to be a postmodern Christian. And I live in the suburbs of Santa Cruz. One of the nationally-recognized leaders of the “emerging church conversation”—a growing movement of postmodern Christians to understand how the church should function in this generation—is Dan Kimball, pastor of Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz.

Yet I don’t go to his church, because I find it boring and shallow.

People are horrified whenever I say this. (Especially people who love Vintage Faith Church and find it fascinating and deep.) What, they wonder, is wrong with me?

For those of you who don’t get it, follow my logic: Postmoderns don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all faith. Yet you act as if Vintage Faith is the one-size-fits-all church for all postmoderns.

I’ve been to several churches like Vintage Faith. My family currently attends one. Years ago I had the opportunity to decide to join that church. In the end, I decided not to. It reminded me too much of my high school youth group.

When I was in high school, the Gen X church movement was just beginning. You see, senior pastors had given their youth pastors a lot of leeway in the manner in which they had church, and as a result the youth church was way different from the adult church.

While the adults were slowly making the transition from hymns to choruses (and from organs to synthesizers), the youth had already made the leap to electric guitars and drums. While the adults were used to slow, careful, sometimes boring exegesis, the youth were treated to dynamic multimedia presentations that juxtaposed pop culture with scripture so as to make it relevant to the world they were enmeshed in. Within the very same church building, two very different congregations were being developed.

Division was inevitable. As soon as the youth became adults, they demanded that the adults worship the same way that they were used to. The adults would have none of it. So the youth began their own churches, and now they can have all the rock ’n roll and multimedia they want.

Because “Generation X” is now in its thirties, they have to call it something different or they'll lose the youth. So, call them what they’re doing; which is, supposedly, trying to emerge from the insulated, self-isolated Christian subculture. Call them “emergent.” That sounds young and vibrant and certainly not thirtysomething.

Ultimately, the emergent church is what was going to happen when the youth leaders took over the church. Anyone could have seen it coming. But here’s something I find fascinating: In order to reach the youth of right now, the youth leaders of today have to be more relevant. More out-there. More engaging of the culture. More everything. It’s gonna create a really interesting cultural shift in the church in 10 years. I’m curious to see what form it’ll take.

But I, like I said, am a postmodern. I don’t care about trends so much as I care about God working out a relationship with every individual that is unique to that person, and in that way the person can work towards their potential in God.

Now, that could involve rock ’n roll worship, and maybe multimedia. I have no issue with either. Where I do have an issue is all the fools who think rock ’n roll and multimedia automatically make you postmodern.

They have completely missed the point. How on earth are people going to be unique if they all look alike? Is an authentic postmodern church one where everyone sings the same songs? Prays the same way? Dresses alike? Looks alike? No! God created everyone to be different. Absolute conformity is what hell looks like.

I have to give Vintage Faith props for encouraging people to express their creativity, but the trouble I’ve always had is that I see so little true creativity. Going through labyrinths and the Stations of the Cross, while novel to many Protestants, is simply the recycling of ancient modes of spirituality that could be meaningful to people, but not when they’ve been homogenized so that the masses can try them out. The art all looks the same; the music all sounds the same. And when that happens, sad to say, you know that the movement is dying.

Part of the reason I haven’t joined the same church as my family (though I do visit it when I visit them, mainly out of laziness) is because, sad to say, conformity is encouraged. They worship leaders are actually going for a certain “sound” in their music, so that they all sound alike. I hope my sister’s efforts in starting a choir shake that up a lot; I really do. The more they sound alike, the less they sound like heaven.

Christian fish.

Send your neighbors a message that your theology is way off course.

The Christian fish symbol has lately become a really good example of what Jesus meant when he said, “Don’t give holy things to dogs, and don’t toss your pearls to pigs. Otherwise they’ll crush them with their feet, then turn and knock you over.” [Mt 7.8]

I remember when people first started sticking the fish on their cars. It wasn’t necessarily a bad idea; publicly identifying yourself as a Christian might force you to behave yourself—especially while driving—when you remember who you’re representing. Ah, if only it had worked that way…

Eventually someone had got the bright idea to put feet on the fish and stick the word “Darwin” in it. Now, mocking a religion is never a good idea, even if you don’t believe in it. A lot of Darwinists feel they can justify this behavior because a lot of them grew up in the church and were put off by the hypocrites. Some went to the pastors with questions and were advised to “pray about it and read your bible” instead of being taken seriously. Others were driven away by intolerant church leaders, and decided to reject it altogether. Supposedly if you’ve personally rejected something, it’s okay to make fun of it. Hence ex-husband jokes.

In the case of the Darwin fish, some of us found it amusing and some of us found it offensive. This would have been the perfect opportunity for Christians to demonstrate Jesus’s teachings by turning the other cheek. But since when do Christians actually do anything the Lord tells us to?

Tweaking lyrics.

Sometimes a poorly written song gets in the way of worship.

I ranted last year about how worship leaders should feel free to change lyrics until they’re appropriate. I was at the time talking about theological reasons, but the song “Hungry” has always annoyed me for aesthetic ones.

The song, written by Kathryn Scott and since performed and bundled on lots and lots of Vineyard worship stuff, has become very popular because of its sentiment: Hungering and thirsting for Jesus, coming to and waiting on him, falling on knees and submitting, etc. If you change “Jesus” to “baby” it also works as a pop song. I have no real trouble with the content.

The problem is that, as a former grammar teacher, the song violates one of the most basic rules of metric poetry. When you write those types of poems, you arrange the word stress so it creates a natural rhythm. I’ll use an example.

︶	´	︶	´	︶	´	︶	´
I	wan-	der’d	lone-	ly	as	a	cloud
That	floats	on	high	o’er	vales	and	hills,
When	all	at	once	I	saw	a	crowd,
A	host	of	gold-	en	daff-	o-	dills…

Wordsworth is hardly my favorite poet, but you see the point. Every other syllable is stressed so that it has a rhythm. The poet (unless not writing a metric poem) has to be good enough with the language to arrange the words so that the reader will automatically recognize a pattern—our brains are good at that—and start reading in cadence.

In music, we’d call this a beat. You can get away with more in music, because the music forces a rhythm on the singers and listeners. But if the rhythm of the words don’t match the rhythm of the music, you have what we call discordance.

For some, like me, discordance is offputting. It gets in the way of the enjoyment and the worship. It’s not a matter of doing, as many have kindly suggested, to “shut up and get over it; we’re doing this song and nobody cares about your aesthetics.” If you’re one of those old fogeys who grew up on hymns and musical standards, this shows a lack of class, taste, and care about your audience.

For me, it only shows a lack of education… or wanting these words in the song so much the “rules” should be ignored, even though these “rules” are not there to frustrate writers, but to facilitate harmony. It’s a form of ego, which has no business in any form of worship.

Now, I can’t presume that Scott is an egomaniac. I am, but that’s another issue. She just wrote a song, the lyrics resonated with a lot of people, the tune didn’t exactly match rhythms, and now we sing it in church. But there’s no reason why, with a little tweaking, we can’t fix the rhythm in the only place that needs it: the chorus.

As I did:

♫ I’m falling on my knees

♫ I’m off’ring all of me

♫ Lord Jesus you are all this heart lives for

It still ends with a preposition, but that’s another rant.

Relevance.

Are you relevant?

I had a half-hour to kill, and nothing kills it like digging through a Christian blogring full of people who consider themselves to be “relevant” Christians.

I’ve ranted before, though about emergent Christians, about how relevant does not mean “steeped in the wider culture,” or even “able to speak to the wider culture.” It means actually speaking to the wider culture. Actually meeting them where they are, like God does; like Jesus did when he hung out with the publicans, sinners, and whores, and freaked out the respectable Pharisees when He did it. Proper Jews don’t hang out with such people. Still don’t.

So I was curious to see if they fit my definition—if they’re actually relevant.

No huge surprise; most of them are members of the blogring because they read Relevant magazine. Should I have been surprised? If I had poked around the Architectural Digest blogring I suppose I would find a lot of their subscribers. I also wouldn’t expect all of them to be architects, though most of them likely studied architecture in school and really find a well-designed building to be aesthetically pleasing. Likewise I shouldn't expect people in the “Relevant” blogring to have done anything more with this culture than studied it from afar and be pleased when someone [else] effectively reaches it for Jesus.

Otherwise they’re all talk. As are most Christians. As am I lately, sad to say; but most of the reason I want to teach in the public schools is because I will be “relevant”—in the correct sense—there. More so than I am in Christian schools.

Here at Bethany University, I am surrounded by Christians and hypocrites, and I can’t do a thing with them. I have nothing to contribute to them. This is not because I literally have nothing; you readers know I can rant nonstop about topic after topic. It’s because the Christians don’t need me; they’re off obeying their Lord. And the hypocrites don’t need to hear me rant any more; all they’ll do with it is nod and say, “Yes, indeed, amen, someone [else] should do something.” And when they gripe about the church, they don’t do it with any sort of attack plan to reform it, as I do; they do it because it’s easier to gripe than to act.

No, I’m not relevant on a Christian campus. I am only relevant if I am off it, ministering. It’s too damned safe around here.

So I ask again: Are you relevant?

Or are you deluding yourself, as I sometimes do, into thinking that interacting with other Christians is doing them any real good?

Or are you likewise thinking that your interaction with non-Christians, in which you never demonstrate Jesus to them, is doing them any good?

Podcasting.

Since I started ranting about iTunes, I may as well rant about podcasting.

I got into it over the summer, when I was in Vacaville and only had access to dial-up. You really can’t subscribe to any podcasts with any kind of frequency over dial-up. Downloading a simple 34MB podcast took two hours. If you listen to four or five shows a day, as I do, you’re going to spend 10 hours a day (or overnight) downloading. That’s just not right.

“Four or five shows a day?” you may be saying. “Where do you find time?” I play ’em in the background, just like radio. Only I wind up listening to the music… rather than groan in exasperation, “They played this song a half hour ago, and it’s not any good anyway…” and tolerate it or ignore it until it passes. Entertainment should not annoy.

When I first started listening, I thought, “Hm, let’s see if there are any good ones out there,” and started poking around. There aren’t many. I find myself now listening to music shows, with the exception of Adam Curry's show, only because as a professional DJ he actually knows how to talk properly on radio. (Now podcasts.) The rest of them babble.

Even I babble, which is why my own show is gravitating more towards music, sound effects, and general silliness. Hey, if I won't listen to it, why should I expect others to? Not that many do…

Amusing comic strip: America’s god.

Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterston, 10/8/1994.

iTunes weirdness.

I use iTunes a lot.

I listen to a lot of music; lately a lot of them have been coming from podcasts because I’ve all but given up on radio. Radio is still good for news and right-wing demagoguery, but it sucks for music. I finally had enough of it this summer when my formerly favorite radio station (out of San Francisco, which I could never pull in from Santa Cruz) changed its format from listener contributions to top-20 hits… from the nineties, the decade when Rush Limbaugh destroyed radio.

I’ll side-rant on that for a moment. Limbaugh frequently claims he saved AM radio. Before his national show hit the airwaves, nobody was bothering to listen to it anymore. Radio talk shows consisted of various local hosts—either right-wing nutjobs or left-wing nutjobs—who spent more time trying to find out what callers thought. Limbaugh never cared about what his callers thought; his show is about what he thinks. It’s a simple idea—but really, no one else was doing it at the time, and certainly not at a national level, and not with a conservative.

But Limbaugh’s ratings made the station owners realize: What really did they need local talent for? Why customize everything for the local listeners when it was cheaper and easier to homogenize everything for the masses, and spread it over a network? And this attitude spread to the rest of radio, and verily radio began to suck. Hard.

So if I’m going to listen to music, it’ll be through iTunes. Or my iPod, which requires iTunes. If I’m at my computer, I plug my iPod into iTunes and listen to it through my computer. It’s nice.

Now between all the uploading and downloading between the thousands of songs and hundreds of podcasts I listen to (and the one that I make), there's also the school’s network. This allows anyone else on the network—who has iTunes—to see what I have there. (They can’t see onto the iPod, which is where I keep all the good stuff.) They can listen to all the podcasts and podsafe music I download.

…And they can also gum up the works.

Every once in a while, I get a new CD to add to my collection, and want to rip the thing so I can listen to it on my iPod. So I pop it into the computer, and iTunes becomes inaccessible. It’s still there; it’s still playing; but I can’t get it to do anything. Every time I move the cursor over it I get the Mac OS spinning beachball. So I hit force-quit… and the program tells me that I have listeners. There are people listening to my iTunes. That’s why it's not functioning properly. God bless ’em for caring, but they’re monkeying with my computer.

So lately I’ve just been unplugging the ethernet cable. Then iTunes magically begins to work again, I get my stuff done, and plug the computer back in. And somewhere out there on the network, some poor schmuck is annoyed because I went offline in the middle of the good part of the song.

Can’t be helped. It’s my computer, dangit, and sometimes I need it back.

Update 10/12/2005. And now with the new iTunes 6 I just downloaded, it’s acting stranger. But the new downloadable videos are cool. I just downloaded that Fatboy Slim video where Christopher Walken dances all over the hotel. That’s always fun to watch… just wish it wasn’t so jerky on my iBook.

Under the weather.

Last night was no fun. Stomach flu.

I usually don’t get sick. My immune system is pretty good; plus nothing bolsters it like working with kids, who when it gets right down to it are little germ magnets. They’re not immune, catch everything, and pass it around to their friends and their teachers. It’s rare that I come down with anything other than the occasional cold. But last night, I just couldn’t keep anything down. (And relax, that's all the gory detail I’ll go into.)

So I was lying in bed, trying to sleep, begging God to make me well enough by tomorrow morning (which he did) and worrying my roommate that he might catch whatever I have.

“There’s nothing you can take to make you any better?” he said. “How about NyQuil?”

I swore I’d never have NyQuil again about nine years ago. At the time, I was an undergrad at Bethany College and some advertising firm had made and distributed these “campus survival kits,” consisting of various personal grooming articles that students may or may not need. It included trial-size versions of deodorant, soap, shampoo, shaving foam, a razor, chewing gum, and NyQuil.

Many students in our pharmaceutically-enhanced society discovered if they ever had any kind of ache or pain at night, NyQuil would knock ’em out completely. Some of them became NyQuil addicts. “You gonna use that bottle of NyQuil?” became a commonly-heard question in the halls and the café. Because if you weren’t, someone would take it off your hands and put it to not-as-recommended use.

That year I had a pretty obnoxious cold, and as I was trying to sleep I kept waking myself up with a coughing fit. NyQuil was, of course, recommended. I’d never tried it before—Mom doesn’t approve of cold medicines, since most of them had alcohol as their active ingredient, and getting children drunk is no way to cure a cold—but I inspected the bottle and it was only 10 proof. Down the hatch.

As I waited for it to take effect, I could actually feel my brain melting. I couldn’t speak complete sentences. I was using the wrong word for everything. And when I finally woke up in the morning, I had a most savage hangover.

I’m not doing that again.

My roommate also suggested Alka-Seltzer, which he’s a big fan of, but aspirin wasn’t going to do the trick either. “There’s no point in taking something that won’t stay down,” I said, “because it’ll just come back up again in 20 minutes. No. The only thing that’s gonna do anything to this is prayer. So the next time you’re in the lobby, could you ask the guys to pray for me?”

He told the guys in the lobby. Now, among most other Christians, they’d drop what they were doing, come to the room, lay hands on the sick person, and pray loudly to Jesus (saying his name frequently so as to get his attention) that they rebuke this illness. Then, once they felt they’d done their duty, they'd say some platitudes like “feel better, man” and leave.

But the guys in the lobby aren’t Christians. They’re footballaters. (Which rhymes with idolaters.) The game couldn’t be interrupted for anything, much less a puking hallmate. If they did bother to pray, they did it briefly during a commercial break, but not a one of them has come to me since and asked about how I was feeling. They didn’t care. The game was on.

So after an uneasy night, and not really enough sleep, I felt well enough in the morning to go to church and fulfill my responsibilities; and then I came back to my hall and took a giant nap. I feel mostly okay now.

The footballaters are busy occupying the lounge, so I guess I’m not watching 60 Minutes tonight. Oh well.

Dating, and why I’m not.

I’m busy.

Okay, that’s not the answer some people would want to hear. And by “some people” I mean Mom and some of my married female friends. They want to see me married someday, and figure a Christian college provides me with the perfect dating pool. I joke, “Misery loves company,” and go on with doing what I’m doing.

But joking aside, there are no prospects here anyway.

I date women. I don’t date girls. The difference between the two—same as the difference between men and boys—is maturity level. You don’t get maturity by turning 18, going to college, or making a few adult-like decisions. You get it by accepting the full responsibility for the things you’re in charge of, including the things you neither started nor caused. Using that definition, we may have very few adults in our society, but that’s the one I’m going with.

There are lots of boys and girls on this campus. The school actually delays their maturity by taking responsibility for them, in the form of Resident Advisers and Resident Directors and other faculty. Thus Bethany University resembles a giant summer camp, and it’s no wonder the seniors don’t wish to leave. I have zero interest in girls. They remind me too much of the junior high school students I used to teach. (Some of them are the same age as the first junior high school students I ever taught. Ewww.)

One of the factors (which actually works in my favor) is that girls don’t ask anyone out, because they don’t have the guts to, and even claim the bible prohibits it. But that’s another rant.

I should point out here that I’m no prize anyway; I still have a lot of selfish behaviors that I’m trying to remove, and anyone who dates me would have to be very patient with them. And one of these selfish behaviors is that school and work are priorities right now. Like I said, I’m busy.

I bring this up because a married woman of my acquaintance—like I said, misery loves company—offered to “hook me up” with someone. I don’t care to be “hooked up” by people, especially people that really don’t know me all that well. In most cases such people are actually consolidating friends: Instead of having to make time for two individual people, they bunch their friends together into couples. Never mind the fact that the couples may not get along well—or, in the case of a blind date I once went on, might really dislike one another—it’s a time-saver!

“I’m not looking to start dating right now,” I said, “but then again, when I first started dating my last girlfriend, I wasn’t looking then either. I’m not going to say absolutely no. But I’m not looking.”

“So that’s a yellow light,” she said, “not a green one.”

“Okay, call it that,” I said. “Just don’t go picking people because ‘she’s a friend and he’s a friend and they could be our friends together.’ Or ‘she’s lonely and he’s single and he’ll cheer her up.’ Or….” I may rant about the others another time. Right now I’m annoyed with them.

The problem is that even a “yellow light” gets my mother’s hopes up, and she starts thinking of more grandchildren, and the only real way to balance out her mania is to tell her I won’t get married until after she dies. Which is cruel, but sometimes you gotta be cruel to be kind.

Christian capitalization.

In case you don’t know “the rules” for capitalizing everything that’s sacred, here ya go.

Yeah, I know; I’m in the habit of capitalizing pronouns that refer to God. It’s an old habit. It’s not that I absolutely have to—or that anyone has to—I just started doing it long long ago and never stopped.

A rather stupid habit I’ve seen among Christians is that many of them don’t capitalize Satan. Which is a proper name, but this is their way of getting back at it for all the times that people don’t capitalize God. Even though “God” is not a proper name; Yahweh is, or Jesus is. I capitalize God for the same reasons I capitalize His pronouns. Otherwise I would put “God” in lowercase just like I put “human.”

Some time ago I read The Holy Observer’s tongue-in-cheek guidelines for capitalization, which bear reprinting:

As every Christian knows, it is vitally important to respect God’s Holiness in all we do. That includes the way we write! Few areas of Christian life have become as stagnant as Christian Capitalization. It’s a simple act of devotion and worship to a Holy God. Or is it? Sometimes it’s hard to know what to capitalize, especially in these days of disrespect for the Almighty. Nowadays, even some (apostate) Bible translations are failing the capitalization test. How can an everyday Christian know what to capitalize and what to leave lowercase? THO can help sort out this confusing but critical matter. So whether you’re a seasoned veteran of the faith, or a beginner in need of a crash course in capitals, the THO Guide to Christian Capitalization can help you!

1. Capitalize all personal pronouns (“He” and “His,” for example). This is the most basic rule of Christian capitalization. Almost every Christian knows enough to capitalize these pronouns, but some shameful people neglect it, and we are sorry to report that they may be taking their cue from their own BIBLE!
2. Capitalize other, less common pronouns. These include relative pronouns such as “Who” and “Which” as well as any other pronoun that might refer to God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit. Remember, if a word refers to God, it must be capitalized!
3. Capitalize titles that refer to Him, like Holy Father, Most Holy One, Bread of Life, and The Almighty. That way, people know you’re talking about God, not some pagan deity.
4. Words that describe God’s attributes should be capitalized. This includes His Name, His Face, His Hands, and other such descriptors, as well as His Holiness, Goodness, Justice, etc.
5. Just to be sure, capitalize words on either side of the Word God; This shows how His holiness spreads to all that surrounds Him.
6. Make sure not to capitalize proper names of the evil one. Just as Christians must show reverence for God’s name, we must show disapproval and lack of respect for the devil. Don’t do him the service of capitalizing the word “satan.” This rule goes for hell, too.
7. When writing about Jesus Christ, you may sometimes want to capitalize all letters of HIS Name for added emphasis.
8. As a general rule, when in doubt, Capitalize! Writing about God is serious business, and it would be better to capitalize a word that does not refer to God than to miss out on blessings by not capitalizing.

There you have it! With a little practice, anyone can be a Holier writer. May God bless you as you continue to seek His Holy Face.

And the Christian Mishnah continues to develop….

The bus strike.

Santa Cruz bus drivers have been on strike for the past week, which I have found particularly annoying since that's pretty much the only way I get around, other than walking. I’ve certainly been doing a lot of walking lately.

The issue is that they want the Metro agency to pay for more of their medical insurance. They make $24.80 an hour—sadly, better than I made teaching—and they're getting a $4 per hour raise by 2008, and they can’t take that extra $160 per week and put it into medical? So obviously I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the drivers.

The idea of a strike against a publicly-funded agency is stupid. Strikes are meant to cause employers to lose money, thus motivating them to make a deal with the striking workers. Who’s the employer in this case? A publicly-funded agency. A board of trustees that are elected or appointed to run it. They’re not losing any money by the strike. They lose nothing but prestige—and there’s not a lot of prestige involved in running a bus system anyway. You wanna increase pay and benefits for a public-agency job? Use your union to get a law passed! Going on strike doesn't hurt the employers; it only hurts the people served.

In this case, it’s the poor: those of us who don't have cars and can’t afford ’em. Bus drivers have long had nothing but contempt for the poor. Notice the way they treat the poor when they get on the bus. Don’t have enough money? “Get off.” Don’t know where you're headed? “That’s not my problem.” Don’t speak English? “This is America. Speak English.” Two out of three of them are some of the most obnoxious, unhappy people on earth, who don’t care if they do a sloppy job because the union keeps them from getting fired. And exactly why should I have to suffer from their lousy career choices?

To be fair, one out of three bus drivers are great people. They’re courteous, they drive safely, they’re on time, they’re pleasant conversationalists. The rest of the drivers drag ’em down by being just the opposite.

So in the meanwhile, I have to walk everywhere, which I can live with… for now. But not much longer. Hopefully the governor will order the strikers back to work soon, because the Metro board can easily outwait ’em, and that’ll take too long.

The N-word update.

Yes I did get around to talking with one of the bigger offenders around here who likes to say the N-word a lot. I ranted about this before and nobody has yet taken me up on the taking a pipe upside their heads, so I decided to say something about it.

The guy in question, whom I’ll call O, insisted this was a different circumstance. He wasn’t saying n---er; he was saying n---a. Apparently when you change the ending it makes it okay; one is a racial slur and the other is something you call your buds.

Which is a load of crap, I responded.

“Yeah, but it’s the context,” O said. In the right context, it’s okay to use the N-word.

“So in the right context,” I said, “it’s okay to say certain words. Does that include the F-word? So if I’m hanging with my buddies, I can call them ‘you crazy f---ers.’ Or that cat Shaft, who’s a bad motherf---er.”

O had to quickly shush me before I said the F-word again. (It’s a word I hardly ever say, but I was going for shock value at that moment.)

He finally turned to the cultural argument. “Where I grew up,” he said, “we could say that word with one another and it meant something other than what you’re thinking.” He pointed out that for this reason only white people complained about the N-word. Which has not been my experience; I have heard many a black teacher shout at her black students about how they’re demeaning themselves whenever they use that word. But two can play that game.

“Where I grew up,” I said, “it never meant anything good. When relatives of mine said it—and I demanded they stop—they weren’t talking about their friends. They were trying to put people down.”

Finally, O just agreed to not say the N-word around me. Which I suppose I’ll have to be okay with.

I tried to leave him with the idea that his language will only wind up offending others inadvertently. But I really don’t think O cared. He was just trying to get me off his back before I went up the chain of authority… where he’d be ordered to cut it out instead of having a peer let him slide a bit.

O isn’t the only one. I'm gonna have to work on the others one at a time. It is, as I’ve said before, sad that a white guy has to do this. But someone has to do this.

Amusing site of the day.

Presenting: "Cows in Shining Armor." It’s a twelve-month calendar, part of a Chick-Fil-A promotion, featuring cows in ancient and medieval outfits. It’s just stupid enough to be funny. I found the scene from Braveheart particularly amusing.

PETA members might like it… except that it’s produced by a company that sells delicious breaded, fried, dismembered birds.

“Everybody’s on Myspace.”

Or so the rumor goes.

Probably everyone is. I don't know. I have a Myspace page that I put together several months ago out of idle curiosity. I never publicized it, and never visited. I did visit it yesterday, just to see if anyone’s found it. The only “friend” I have on it is some schmuck I’ve never met who “wants to help me customize my Myspace page.”

How about that—Myspace automatically gives you a “starter friend” in case you wind up being a giant loser. I already ranted about who I consider friends.

Christians pray to the devil too much.

Why do we address the devil in our worship?

I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion Christians pray to the devil more often than Satanists.

I don’t mean what the anti-Mormons mean by that. They claim when Mormons pray to God they’re actually praying to “the Mormon God” which is a demon playing God. I don’t know what scriptural basis they have for this idea, but the logical conclusion of this teaching is anyone with less-than-orthodox beliefs will wind up crying out to demons when they’re trying to get in contact with God. Therefore the Oneness Pentecostals, or the people who use grape juice for communion, aren’t actually praying to Yahweh but “the Oneness God” or “the Grape Juice God.” Sounds like a load of crap to me.

Side rant aside, I’m talking about the more common practice of interrupting a regular prayer in this way:

“…and Lord God, we just come before you, Lord God, to ask for strength, Lord God, to ask for victory, Lord God, to ask for power, Lord God, against the devil when he comes against us. And we declare to you, Satan…”

Thus a plea to God is interrupted with a prayer to Satan.

More specifically, an invocation to Satan. No foolin’. See, I think Christians forget it isn’t omnipresent. God, who fills the universe, will naturally be everywhere we are when we need to talk to him, but Satan is an angel and therefore limited to one place and point in time.

I suspect Satan’s busy someplace in Washington DC, trying to accuse North Korea of various things in order to get President Bush to invade, and some praying fool in Santa Cruz interrupts it in that process because he’s actually offering it a prayer. So, where we normally wouldn’t be fighting the devil, we are now…

Okay, that’s a worst-case scenario, but does anyone but me see the stupidity in praying to the devil? Especially when, simply following the laws of statistics, it’s not even involved. There’s a whole wide world to tempt, and Satan can only work on one human at a time. If it’s really efficient, maybe a hundred or so. The rest are being tempted by other demons… or their temptations are on autopilot, because they give in so easily that there’s no point in demons being involved at all. Addicts, for instance; whether to drugs or gossip.

Whenever opposition appears against the Christians—whether it’s something apparently significant, like a church plant, or something apparently insignificant, like one’s ability to study for a midterm—people automatically blame the devil, and a lot of foolish Christians actually petition it to stop. What business do we have ordering the devil around anyway? You don’t make the devil run by telling it to go away. You make it run by submitting to God, and by resisting. [Jm 4.7] Christians don’t resist; we ask God to bind the devil and put a hedge of protection around us. And then we wonder why we’re so plagued with temptation. We’ve never built up any resistance!

And half the time it might be God coming against us because we’re selfish or greedy, but we’ve got some stupid idea that any opposition must be coming from the devil. That’s why James tells us to submit to God. That’s the context of James 4.1, 3: “Where do wars come from? What causes fights among you all? Isn’t it from defending your hedonism to the other Christians? You want what you don’t—and can’t—have… You ask and don’t get because you ask for evil things which you waste on your hedonism.” That’s why we submit to God.

Discern first who’s opposing us, then pray rightly: either, “Help me resist temptation” or “I apologize for going against you.” But don’t bother with “Bind the devil.” The devil isn’t getting bound until the End. [Rv 20.2] Pray for binding because you want God’s plan of history to unfold, but don’t expect it early.

Stupid Internet Survey: What’s my religious philosophy?

What’s Your Religious Philosophy?

You scored as Mystical Communion Model.

You are a Self-Discoverer. You’re not religious, but you’ve created your own kind of spirituality. Introspective and thoughtful, you tend to look inward for the divine. You are distrusting of all forms of organized religion. You especially dislike religious gurus and leaders, who you feel are charlatans.

What’s Your Religious Philosophy?
created with BlogThings.

So this quiz was utter crap.

See, the reason I don’t usually post these bloody things anymore is because they’re written by idiots. You can see this by my answers.

1. What best describes how you feel about belief in God / religion?

❎ You think it is impossible to tell whether God exists or not. No. Not when he talks to me.

❎ You feel that sincere belief will lead you to God. No. I could be sincere yet wrong.

✅ You think beliefs are no more than wishes or dreams. Yes. Sadly, most of the time, this is true. Everyone’s beliefs are, ultimately, based on what they hope is true. Even pessimists.

2. You think belief is blind and only the blind believe.

No. Some of us believe because our eyes are wide open and we’re no longer able to close them.

3. You think God:

✅ Will reward you in heaven for your deeds on earth. Yes. But I think another answer is more true.

❎ Was created by man, in our image. No. But certainly our beliefs about him are warped by comparing him to humans.

✅ Is unknowable. Yes. Which is why he has to descend to our level.

✅ Can only be known by actually meeting God. Yes. And I liked this answer best, so I picked it. And since the quiz-writer gave me only one option, this results in an incomplete result. Which you knew already.

4. What’s the closest to truth?

✅ Your soul will survive death. True. But not the most true.

✅ There is no convincing reason why there should be a God. True, in that there’s no reason why there should be a God. But that has nothing to do with why he exists. There’s no reason why there should be a K.W. Leslie, for that matter.

✅ There are simple scientific explanations for the universe. True. Those we’ve discovered have been pretty simple; there’s no reason to expect that future discoveries will be overly complex.

✅ Anything you discover about the divine will be firsthand. MOST true. Not just semantically—because if it’s not firsthand, it’s not your discovery; it’s someone else’s—but because it never sinks into us properly unless it’s something God shows us himself.

5. What viewpoint are you most likely to take issue with?

❎ You can’t enjoy the world without knowing God. You can’t enjoy it with knowing God either. Once you know God, you won’t enjoy the world because it’s so messed up that it grieves him—and you too. Of course, there are also good things in life that you’ll supremely enjoy, and more so once you know God. (I could go either way on this one.)

❎ All religions have equal amounts of truth and corruption. Definitely no issue. Some would say Christianity stands out because it’s the most true, but I would say for this very reason Christianity suffers from more corruption. Just look at all the heretical Christian sects out there. Insisting “They aren’t really Christian” doesn’t properly deal with the issue.

❎ God is omnipotent. No issue. Considering what he’s got me out of, his almightiness is rather obvious.

✅ Spiritual or religious leaders can help you get closer to God. Okay, there I take issue. Religious leaders can be helpful, but most of the time they get in the way because we depend on them when we’re supposed to be depending directly on God.

6. You are most interested in:

✅ Keeping an open mind on the subject of God. Not MOST intrested. But of course yes. Only an idiot thinks he knows it all about God.

✅ Philosophy (as opposed to religion). Still not MOST interested. But curious; I want to know what others think.

❎ Exploring who you are and where you have come from. No; I did that already. I’m still trying to fix what I’ve found.

✅ Serving God’s purpose while you are on earth. Yes.

And my result was that dumbass conclusion, based on the fact that I didn’t just produce knee-jerk Christian reactions to everything.

I am religious. I have not created my own kind of spirituality; I’ve adopted that of others, following the leading of my Rabbi. Okay, I’m introspective and thoughtful, but I don’t look inward for the divine, because he’s not me. I’m not distrusting of organized religion; I believe in a healthy skepticism, and disorganized religion is hardly an alternative. I don’t dislike gurus and leaders, and don’t feel they’re charlatans (though some are, and others are hypocrites); but as a Christian we have only one Rabbi, the Messiah, and we should remember that.

So there.

Camping, part deux.

I had to run some errands Friday. They take longer when you have to walk everywhere. Ever since the Santa Cruz County bus drivers went on strike last week (which I’ll rant about another time) I’ve had to get around by foot, which isn’t so bad when you have the patience to walk everywhere. But at some point I’m gonna need to get out of town, so they’d better get their strike resolved soon.

Okay, so Friday evening after dinner, I packed up my tent, sleeping bag, folding chair, extra bedding, junk food and several books, and trekked down to the Redwood Bowl, our campus’s miniature outdoor amphitheater. From there, I went down the creek bed a short ways, and pitched the tent. Then I thought better of it. I don’t really how how far the school’s property extends into the woods, and I don’t want to trespass into the neighbors’ property. Plus, you never know how trigger-happy those neighbors might be. In California, we have an odd combination of tree-huggers and militia freaks in the woods, and I don’t necessarily want to wind up like Ned Beatty’s character in Deliverance, so I decided it would be safer to move my tent back onto known campus property.

I sorta wimped out in that I parked my tent on the Redwood Bowl’s concrete stage. It wasn’t really roughing it, but then again, how much are we really roughing it when we go to state and national parks? They have the campsite pre-cleared for the tourists; the boundary lines are neatly marked; the flat areas are landscaped for pitching one’s tent; for crying out loud, I’m sleeping in a tent, not in a bedroll by the fire. Frankly, I’m pretty spoiled by the conveniences of modern camping technology.

It was still humid from Friday, and not cold enough to sleep… and, of all stupid things, I had forgotten a flashlight. So I left the tent there and hiked back to my dorm. While I waited for the temperature to drop, I watched a DVD on my computer, then said goodbye to the guys in my hall and went back down to the tent, and went to sleep.

At 4 a.m. the deer woke me up. I know; a lot of city people tend to think of deer as cute little animals. This is what happens when your only experience of deer comes from movies like The Yearling and Bambi. But if you’ve ever lived where deer live, as I did for two years, you learn really quickly that deer are destructive, nasty, foul pests. And the ones that live near humans no longer have any fear of them. But these did; I poked my head out of the tent and they scampered off. Stupid deer. At least they make up for their annoyance by being tasty.

The squirrels finally awoke me around 10 a.m. Man, are they loud if they don’t think humans are around.

So I changed clothes, ate some breakfast and coffee (I had brought a thermal bottle), unfolded my chair, and read a critique of high school history textbooks called Lies My Teacher Told Me. It’s about stuff that's never mentioned in the texts—fr’instance, acts of genocide against the Indians and blacks—the downplaying of racism (and, oddly, anti-racism), the tendency of textbook publishers to push patriotism and pro-American myths rather than actual history and sociology (which is why they’re seldom critical of the government, push voting and government involvement rather than nonviolent social action as agents of change), etc. If you know American history, you know all this stuff already. It’s still aggravating, though. The whitewashing of history, combined with nostalgia for a sheltered, artificial, TV-saturated childhood, is a major reason why people believe that “things were better back then” when they were actually much worse; that civilization is disintegrating into chaos when it’s actually improving; and why so many people are suckers for Left Behind style End Times scenarios. But that’s another rant.

Reading content aside, ’twas a nice and peaceful day. I did this until about 2 or so… when the tour group came by.

The faculty went on a retreat this weekend. Therefore I wasn’t expecting any tour groups to show up; I figured that tour groups would be scheduled for when faculty was around, so that someone from the administration could “talk up” the school a little. Apparently I figured wrong, for they were a little surprised to find me there. Our campus security officer came by soon afterward and pointed out that the next time I want to pull a little stunt like this, I need to clear it with the Student Life office.

I suppose that’s reasonable. My motives were to camp out for a night and get my camping bug out of my system. Others would have a less-than-wholesome motivation to go camping… say, a couple who couldn’t afford a room for the night off campus, or a friend who wasn’t allowed an overnight stay in the dorms. Or some people who have no sense of decency; you don’t want a tour group to discover pantsless Bethany students hanging out, as it were, in semi-public areas.

Anyway… I did have peace and quiet up until that point. So it was mostly good. No, I didn’t see any mountain lions. But next time I get the camping bug, I will likely do it off campus.