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world_conquest
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Name: Seth
Country: United States
State: North Carolina
Metro: Chapel Hill
Birthday: 10/11/1986
Gender: Male
Interests: Writing, Basketball, Fencing, Reading, Knife throwing (or virtually anything with a sharp pointy end!), Sparring, Combining dangerous liquids, Latin (Haha, you scoffers out there - Cogito, Ergo I Fence!) Poetry. And... I would like to conquer a small country by the age of 23. Llamas!
Expertise: Nothing in particular. I'm a pretty well rounded person. I guess I'm good at stuff that requires creativity. Unless its Tuesday. Don't ask me to be creative on Tuesday.
Occupation: Student
Industry: World Domination
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
AIM:  RapierWit713
Member Since:
9/6/2005
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| New Blog time! Turn in the old, pick up the new and shiny. I finally found a site that is nice and simple and aesthetic without a thousand ads. I had seen Blogspot before, but didn't jump on it... Wordpress has more options though, so I like it. Please subscribe!
http://rapierwit713.wordpress.com/
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| Little in this post is, in fact, true.
Sound the bell, I'm Charon's stevedore. Here at the port of online journaling to unload. What's the cargo? My thoughts for the last few days.
No, I'm not comparing my mind to Hades... although...
I really actually don't feel like talking about anything that I'm really thinking about. Not for any unfortunate reason - actually, the last bit's been real good. My step-dad's just been promoted to full Colonel, and now I have a Lt. Col. hat - all you civvies take orders from me now! My exams are going passably, haha pun dangit Steve. I've gotten to hang out with a ton of people before heading out to break, and last year, I'll tell ya, I'll tell ya now son, I didn't really have too many people to say goodbye to. I had one really important person  and that was good too, but my smiley face in the midst of my sentence belies my actual feelings and is really an elaborate computer-generated deception, as so many smilies are. As this entire post is.
If I decide to perjure myself, that's up to me, there's nothing you can do about it, eh?
Please forgive me, I don't mean anything I say.
Because what is really solid, hm? What holds our reality together? Don't give me sunday school answers now, try harder than that. Vague and moralizing answers are far more dangerous than any lie, for lies, if they are built within a workable paradigm of logic, can be refuted by truth. Vague and moralizing answers make you feel guilty about thinking for a deep answer. If you answer "The Bible" off the top of your head, you're just hurting yourself. If you answer incorrectly, and say "Mahatma Ghandi", then at least you have a reason. If you lie, at least you're within some paradigm of reasoning for wanting to lie. If you say "The Bible", and have a thought out reason, then well done, you pass the Are All Christians Self-Deluded? test. Until the next question? Who's qualified to give this exam... not me.
Vague and moralizing sunday school answers are almost as dangerous as making the Bible say what you want.
Attitude is the most important thing. If you can do anything with style then you've got it. Hold the Bible together with the duct-tape of your passion for Christ and the feel-good flair of your worship, maybe then the binding won't crack, the pages won't all fall out. If you don't put your spin on it, the human element, then it's just abstract theology, yes?
The most interesting sentences are the ones that are neither true or false, like that last one. Please don't take me seriously, because I'm taking you seriously.
I, like the Romantic poets of old, as Byron, Shelley, Keats and all those other egocentric opium-jacked purveyors of poesy, am more liar than truth teller. It's a secret, don't tell myself. I doesn't know.
What if women became pregnant when a couple truly loved one another, instead of when they lusted for one another? Would we have more or less unplanned pregnancies? This has nothing to do with you. Oh, but it does.
I talked to a Major General today. I told him I was a Drama/English major. For one of the very few times since I've picked this course, I was embarrassed to say it. Why? I know why I'm doing it, that I've made the right choice. Do you suppose I might have felt inferiority of some kind? If so... surprise to me.
None of this was true.
I also entertained the idea of permanently blinding myself for about forty-five minutes this morning at one o' clock - as I sat in the complete dark in my bathtub at my mother's house. I turned off the lights, sank into the water, and wondered what it would be like. This might be a psychological problem, had it actually happened. Don't be confused, because it didn't.
Thank you for your time. I'll see you tomorrow.
~Austin~
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| I hope God doesn't leave me out of what He's doing here. I hope that desire doesn't make me see Him where He's not. I hope I don't fall in love with my own voice. I hope God is praised by mouths that never have praised Him before, and I get to be a part of seeing it happen. I want to see deeper transformation of people, and I want to see people realize that God's power is primarily manifested by that transformation. I need to shut up, speak out, love and watch, think and let go, and it's really so confusing. If I'm pursuing God to my best, without self-deceit, I expect Him to deal well with me.
Can I be encouraged and apprehensive simultaneously? Can I be critical and unconvinced yet warm and outgoing? Can I use so many parallel sentences that no one will ever read my blog again? I think so.
I am fairly certain that I'm seeing clearly, but my own paradigm must be under harshest consideration. I wish this weren't happening the week before exams. I don't have any time to write and think. I can see God continuing His redemptive, reconciling and life-spreading work though, so I'm really happy with that. I just hope we don't base too much on the unsubstantial whipped-cream aspects of our experience and leave the real power behind.
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| I've been thinking about some of the ways we're different from God. Not like: "I sin, God's perfect" -- that's obvious. More like an intrinsic design thing, what makes God a different sort of being than we are? What barriers do we have as humans that keep us from godhood - in short, why are we not gods ourselves?
The first thing that comes to mind is humanity's propensity for puns that are actually pun-themed. There's nothing as verbally offensive as a pun based on the use of puns. "That's awfully 'punny'. I thought you'd like that joke - you looked like a 'pun-dit'. You like my comedic timing? - I do try to be 'pun-ctual'. Aghrh. Close second is armpit hair. These things keep us from godhood.
One thing that makes us not-gods is our temporal nature. We experience time linearly, we are only in one moment at a time. And if you believe, like me and C.S. Lewis, that God exists outside of time, experiencing all existence simultaneously, then you have to believe also that God has no past. He has no history. Everything, to Him, is an eternal Present. This is also a huge reason/result of God's unchangeable nature. A Person who is in all times can never change His character. This was only amended one time - when Christ came, He put Himself into the timeline, and became a temporal being. He began to exist, and have a past, and a future.
We go through time, and we experience more of life, and we build up experiences and memories... we're like cheese-cloth run through a scummy pond sometimes - green and dripping with the algae and mold and mosquito eggs we pick up. In part, who we are is really based on who we've been. What are our present-tense minds but a matrix of natural abilities, life experiences, and accumulated personal jokes? Sometimes we don't even realize the stuff we've picked up. The scum we sift from the pond isn't just stuff that can be picked off - it becomes part of the cloth. This is a terrible metaphor, and I'm putting it to death now. Die... sqsh... gargle...
All this to say, I am somebody who very much lives in the present moment. I don't do a whole lot of backtracking through life, I don't do much analysis of who I have been, what I've been through. So sometimes I don't recognize what things have made me who I am now, because they affected me so long ago and I don't realize them anymore. Like someone whose left leg is shorter than their right, they soon learn to compensate, and their entire body motion is molded to their particular difficulty, and soon they don't even realize that their right foot scrapes the pavement every step.
What the crap is wrong with my metaphors today, I don't know. Sorry. I'm just saying that we adjust, and we cope, and eventually we don't realize how we move anymore, it's just the way we do things.
My parent's divorce was so much easier than a lot of the things kids have to go through. It was a horrible time in my life, possibly the most so, but my parents never physically hurt me, and they can still speak to each other, and I know they both love me, and I love them both. That's a lot more than many kids from damaged homes can say, and I praise God for it - He protected me and Josh. I never thought I carried any particular baggage from it, if anything, it was something that really made me examine my faith in a personal way, instead of depending on what my parents said. So that's good. But I've been surprised a couple times by coping mechanisms that I never thought I developed. Someone says something and I realize: Oh, huh, I really am still limping from that divorce, and now I'm using a rather freakish crutch.
I really don't want to recognize this - I want to be able to say that I didn't receive any critical harm from the breakup, that it didn't maim me in any way. Half because I don't want to seem like somebody with a lot of baggage and personal issues to work through, one quarter because I don't want to be the person that's like "oh, my difficult past is the cause of all my present troubles..." and one quarter because I love my parents a lot and don't want to issue any blame to them that isn't necessary. But I can't help but recognize this, and if I don't realize and deal with it, it's just going to stick with me.
The thing that I've identified this time is a bit more ingrained than other things I've dealt with in this arena. I'm not exactly sure how to start to dig it out. But I've been praying about the symptom all semester - now that I've inadvertently recognized the source, maybe it will be easier to bring to God. It's crazy - this was a really serious revelation - so many of the things I've done, the problems with relationships I've had with other guys - especially my male friends with strong leadership attributes - make so much more sense now. I've been doing a lot of projecting of need onto people who aren't supposed to carry it. Which is crazy because one of my driving needs in relationships has always been self-sufficiency - I didn't/don't want to be the person who was dependent. I wish I'd realized this back in high school, I'd have saved myself and my best friend lots of unnecessary relationship uncertainty and discomfort and just been able to go for it and have fun.
I am not self-sufficient. I need a father. I need to be guided, loved, raised, taught the best fun things about life, taken to basketball games and concerts, shown how to ride bikes and skateboard and dance and love women. My dad here on earth is a great friend, a complex and interesting man, and a hilarious person - but he is not someone who I can project my need for a father onto. Neither are/were my guy friends, who have received the greater damage by my inconsistent need-then-flee-then-wish-they'd-call psychosis. Neither are Pastor Bob, or Pastor Gus, or Dave Kelly, or whatever other strong adult male I've unconsciously demanded this of. I even realized I was considering Alex Kirk this way - before I'd even met him! I'm screwed up with this.
Psalm 27 says "Though my father and my mother forsake me, the Lord will lift me up." I don't feel like my father and my mother have forsaken me, no -- but I have been hurt by things we've had to go through together. And I've hurt other people because of it. Now I've got to start meeting my need for a Father in the only one who can truly be my Father. Then I've got to re-think my relationships - I can't depend on any friend to be father, I've got to be their brothers - not breast-feeding - but leaning, as friends should do, and propping up in equal measure. It means a lot more carefree go-for-it-itude and a lot less "oh no do they think I'm boring and awkward". If they do think I'm uninteresting, we'll find other people to be around, and that's for the best.
It's difficult for me to admit to a present weakness, easy for me to admit to a past one. I hate to be the beggar. But how can I fail to admit that's what I am? I am no Casanova - I'm a relationally challenged, needy, hopeful, often anxious, peer-addicted, peer-fearing, friend-fleeing, awkward and uncoordinated man. A lot of this is tied up in egocentrism and pride, of course.
Here's my plan: Thanksgiving. Go home. Think. Praise God. Rest in God. Do some homework. Come back to school. Have tons of fun. Be anxious for nothing. Know my Father. Love and enjoy my friends. Most of that will come from being more concerned about them than I am about myself and how they think about me.
My posts take a long time for a linear life-form to get through...
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| Let me tell you about how cool God is - He loves to be sneaky and set us up with awesome surprise conversations that really encourage you and show you how He is romancing you. This week has possibly been one of the most challenging for me in terms of spending personal time with God - but three specific times this week, God's put me in situations where there were other believers to encourage me maybe slap me around a little and remind me that God *wants* me.
But He doesn't want to give us just a concept of Him, just a reading of His words. He *is* the Word, which has a lot more life and reality in it. If our faith has no bloody, naked relationships, no manifest reality, no poignant peace and satisfaction, no supernatural life change, no romance - if there's not something worthy of a ballad, if it has no freedom - then our faith doesn't mingle with our reality. We're living a Venn diagram of Real Life and Faith with no overlap. We can't afford to satisfy ourself with having an acceptable theological paradigm. That's why 1John talks about: "...which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life."
"And we are writing these things that our joy may be complete." | | |
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