Dragonfly wings, Part 1

I have to repeat a metaphor, and you will not blame me once you behold the absolute beauty of the dragonfly's wing design in this video below.

Be cautioned: graphic dragonfly intercourse does indeed occur. I hope you aren't offended by the way God made dragonfly babies happen.

https://youtu.be/wFAR3WggSRk

Where is God in this creature he made?

There's a little mishle, of course, a little proverb, that Yeshua tells. Remember when he says to consider the birds, and we talked about considering the tarantula? (That was in our last book)

I'd like to remind you of an older Mishle, Mishle 6:6-8, which says to "consider the aunt, you sluggard!"

Um, actually, not your aunt. Although you should consider her feelings once in a while, at this moment I would like you to turn your attention to the ANT, the tiny colony-dwelling patriot who has inspired many a terrible pun.

As the tarantula teaches us to be restful, we know the ant for its hardworking consistency and teamwork. As a corollary, I would say the dragonfly is known for SEIZING LIFE BY THE BIG ONES AND NOT LETTING GO! (You did see the ferocity of the video, yes?) If you meditate for a while on that kind of ferocity, what can you grab? Do you love and need the divine as much as some near-brainless little stab-beast craves its food? If not, isn't that a bit embarrassing, considering how much more you need and understand the Source of all good things?

The Tiny Bird

If you can, I’d recommend you go check out this Youtube video.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-iFgDK_D5s&index=39&list=WL

Essentially, this gentleman rescues animals. It appears that he spends his entire free time rescuing animals, in fact, or that it’s his job, because he gets a call from someone who found a tiny birds’ nest in their lawn chairs.

The man finds a tiny pair of eggs, no bigger than the end of your fingernail, in that nest. He turns these eggs faithfully three times a day.


As someone who tried to hatch quail eggs, and then lizard eggs that my leopard geckos laid, I can tell you that kind of dedication is hard! There’s this moment when the man holds the tiny eggs up to the light of his cell phone—


And one of them’s totally empty.


He describes a sense of hope and fear that there might be an embryo in it. Just the panic of knowing this new baby could die! And that hope of seeing that life. When he shines the light on the second egg, and you see the two umbilical veins (that’s what they are in humans, I don’t know in birds), just flashing and pulsing against the translucent shell—

You just have to hold your breath with him. That tiny tiny tiny life.

I feel like that when I see the early term embryos in my patients on ultrasound. That’s your baby. That’s your tiny tiny tiny baby.


Things are more precious for being small. There’s a video with millions of views online of a beautiful model train carved in the graphite lead of a pencil, and we ooh and aaaah over that craftsmanship—are we too stupid to ooh and aah over the craftsmanship of a tiny person, far more complicated and difficult to do by hand?

Is that why the Universe and its God are so big, and we are so tiny in comparison? The tiny blue planet, with its tiny tiny tiny people, carved by the tip of a paperclip into a graphite pen by the giant fingers shown ever so much more powerful by his delicate touch?

I digress.


After turning the eggs faithfully three times a day for several days, one of the babies hatches, and the gentleman must feed the baby every ten minutes! He arrives ten minutes late for one feeding, and the baby gets all gooey and limp and doesn’t move and open that big old mouth the way it did before. This thing hangs on to life by a minute-by-minute thread.

He has to feed it on the tip of a paperclip.

Just watching that feeding scene is so incredibly stressful. Oh--oh—the bug keeps falling off! His giant mits, no, his fingertips dwarf the baby’s entire body. The bald thing can’t even keep its head up on that little stick-neck—a stick-neck like the size of the letter “I” on my screen! It keeps missing the food, and he keeps missing its mouth…agh!

So just take a moment with me to see more than we see. Just marvel at the wonder of such a tiny animal—and its parents, perfectly equipped to feed it every ten minutes with just the right barfed up nutrient sludge so it ISN'T crazy hard and clumsy!

And then the wonder that there exist these creatures called humans that would care to spend every ten minutes feeding something that isn't their DNA, with no obvious evolutionary benefit to their direct seed (although I would imagine that compassion has a large-scale evolutionary benefit for the planet as a whole)--just--it's just awesome!

It makes me freaking impressed with God, with the intense attention to detail in this Universe. "If even a sparrow falls to the ground, your Heavenly Father knows it...and are you not worth much more than sparrows?"

Granted, this wasn’t a mind-blowingly original prometheus study. I just hope that taking a moment to meditate with me brings you a bit of joy. If it doesn’t, I want to invite you to try to set up an aquaponics system. For real. That, or try to keep alive a baby bird—do something with nature that forces you to see not the individual, but the system. You see, when you blindly look at an individual organism (without truly studying the microbiology behind it, and then the chemistry and physics behind that) you miss the entire point of the organism. If the bird parents didn’t know how to feed the baby—something reptiles don’t do well—it would die before moving on to the next level of natural selection. Setting up a self-sustaining system, like an aquaponics system, takes an incredible amount of foresight, of care, of attention, and once you’ve done that (and failed a couple times) you see the connections between these things in an entirely new way. Pantheists are right, you know, in that we are all connected. We aren’t all God anymore than my aquaponics system is all me, but it is intricately interconnected to me, to itself, to my neighborhood, even (the high nitrates in my stupid city water killing my fish certainly prove that). I don’t know how to make this clear. I don’t know how to show the miracle of our every day breathing, of the every day nitrate cycle, of the carbon cycle, of the very natural process of cellular respiration interconnected with the macro systems of ecology—we take this all for granted so much until we try to create it ourselves!


Create it yourself. Build a universe. Set up a complicated aquarium. Fail once or twice, and get frustrated, and then in that moment, sit yourself down on the ground, and repeat:


"If even a sparrow falls to the ground, your Heavenly Father knows it...and are you not worth much more than sparrows?"


That is the core of the Prometheus Studies. The wonder of Prometheus, the ancient god before Zeus, and the grand cold ancient Universe that needs nothing to do with you—and then this strange fact that Prometheus would care to bring you fire.




Happy studies, my friend. I hope that as you open your eyes and close this book, the whole world becomes your love letter from the divine.

The Pain of Being God

The pain of being God.

It terrifies me, at 4:37 AM. I wake up crying because I gave up so much for them that I will never get back, because I wanted that love so badly in my loneliness, because they are still in my dreams and I will never have them again, because I loved somebody more than they loved me and received rejection, and God says, "now you know what it is like."

I'm scared by the picture I see.

He loves every single one of you, every single one of us, much, much more than we love Him. That ache of inequality will never be filled by billions of people loving Him, because He will always have the ache of those He lost. His love, from the beginning, formed your details and created all the pleasure you have ever experienced. Every moment of serendipity and goodness, he carefully wove for you through a complex genetic and physics-based scheme of history.

You will never, ever love him back that much.

The guy who wrote the book "A Lament for a Son", the book I read to understand Jonathan's death while I was hospitalized last month, says that through the pain of his son's death he sees "a much more disturbing picture," the picture of God deciding, instead of magically erasing pain, to hang bloodied and beaten and naked on a rough wooden torture stake. To engage in our suffering.

One of my friends from high school, another one I loved more than loved me, used to call God a masochist.

It's deeper than that, though.

"Who, for the joy set before Him, endured the cross..."

He knows a joy that motivates him through all eternity. (For, that moment is eternal for him--he is outside of time, so as Lewis says, "all times are the present" to him. He is always on the cross, and always in glory) It's a joy greater than you or I will ever know, so he engages in suffering greater than you or I will ever know in order to achieve that.

Because, as it says in the Count of Monte Christo, you cannot know how to feel joy until you deeply feel pain.

Oh, the joy of being God...

"I fill up in my body what is lacking of the sufferings of Christ." One of the most confusing things Paul ever wrote.

He enters into our suffering to be bound together with us in substance. "The firstborn must suffer" Hebrews says, so that we have a High Priest who can comfort us and understand our suffering, and, if you read Hebrews again, for a deeper, more mystical reason. The Lament guy puts it somewhat like, "By coming down to relieve our suffering, he relieves some of his" and then something like when we suffer, aching (because all aching is just a longing for the heaven we know is RIGHT--blessed are those who mourn, he says!)...

"When we suffer, we are relieving the suffering of God."

By living, and suffering, we take on some of his suffering.

Maybe that's why he made so many of us.

I am comforted, in my sorrow, by this purpose given to my ache. To know, in a tiny way, what it is like to have unrequited AGAPE-style love (I emphasize this for I know some of you Christians will take this some weird erotic way, as you are wont to do)...

To know in a tiny way, unrequited love, is to relieve a tiny bit of his suffering from unrequited love.

Oh Father, let me cause you less pain. Or don't, and let me then cause you more joy? Maybe this Paradox is why "those forgiven much, love much"--why he spurns the righteous Pharisees and seeks out sinners, who will hurt him the most.

Because then he can have the most Fatherly joy in their feeble attempts to love him back.

Oh, the terror and beauty of this God I love.

Meditation on the Cat/Cow/Child's Pose Yoga Flow, from a Christian/Messianic/Follower of the Way perspective

I recently learned the flow from child's pose to cow to cat Yoga stretch positions, and because we are called to take every thought captive for Christ I meditated on these three positions this morning--you can find them online if you're curious about them--and came up with this worship.

Is there a meaning behind the poses, for myself? 

The "Child's Pose" seems so Biblical, since it's a prostrate form almost of worship, and Yeshua (Jesus) said that people like little children inherit the kingdom of heaven. You could meditate for hours on becoming the child Yeshua wants, and whether it's trust, innocence, or freedom he's asking for, or you could just do the pose and ask God to make you like the child he wants.

For the cat, I found there is no cat except a lion in the Hebrew scriptures, since Judea was outside of its geographic range at the time, so to me I thought of the Cat as the roof of the Temple, or a young lion. "The lions roar and seek their food from God..." (Tehillim/Psalm 104) Even here, at the apex of power, there's a full reliance on Hashem. This domed pose could represent glory (Temple roof) and vitality and self-defense, since it is a position of cat protection, and cats are known for their survival and preservation.

The cow is such an easy one, such a useful animal, sustaining people, and it's one of the ceremonially clean animals Noah took on his ark in sevens instead of twos. 

With the correct order of the flowing child's pose/cat/cow, to me, my meditations come out to this order to life: 

worship (child's pose), 

service (cow), 

power (lion or cat or temple). 

That seems to me to be a lovely order in which to live the heart. Since we know everything in life is somehow a little bit cyclical, it makes sense that these continue to cycle in to each other: when we are powerful, we thank God and worship, which inspires us to do service for others, which gives us power...this is really the root of the philosophy of Karma, isn't it? 

Of course with mercy, and grace, this formula becomes more complicated, just as Einstein's theories included Newton's but expanded them, just as the Brit Chadasha (NT) expands our understanding of the Torah (OT), but I think this is a beautiful place to start. You cannot have mercy without an understanding of justice, of the right and wrong flow...of what some call Karma.

Take every thought captive, God.

Meditation on the Cow

Why is it that the children of Israel kept turning aside from the living Elohim to worship...cows? From Aharon at the foot of Mt. Sinai, to the sin of Jeroboam, there's a long history of cows serving as a temptation to the people of Israel, to the great displeasure of Hashem (G-d).

Why is that? What is it about a cow? Why would we, as Israel, keep trying to worship cows?

Several thoughts.

We know a red heifer, and indeed any unblemished cow, mattered a lot for sacrifice under God's provisions for spiritual reconciliation between people and the Divine. These things were important, because "remission of sins is only possible with the shedding of blood." Hebrews tells us that the sacrifice of bulls and rams provided a temporary relief from sin and separation from God. Because of their temporary nature, those sacrifices had to happen again and again until the Messiah finally came, when he could die once and for all. The cow was only a shadow of the final sacrifice, a part of ritual designed to mimic, not replace relationship with God. Could the cow-worship have foreshadowed our human desire to always seek ritual over relationship? Our spiritual autism, as it were...

I notice that of the idols in the Old Testament, we never saw a lamb. It's cows, poles (considered phallic by their worshippers), alters, dudes, but not lambs. Why is that? Strength, are we looking for something with strength, which causes us to reject the gentle, meek Messiah when he finally shows up?

Another thought: in Hinduism, the cow is not worshipped, but revered for its gentle nature, its strength, and the milk/butter it provides (according to the Internet...in Hinduism's past, in ritual that echoes Judaism, bulls were sacrificed, but over the evolution of the religion that practice fell away). As I'm meditating on the cow, this seems to be a lead: the cow represents earthly provision that we can control. 

Think about it. Every year human society controls and slaughters hundreds of thousands of these animals, and they don't start an uprising or anything. They provide food, milk, and today, and to a greater extent back during Israel's pastoral period, they're a symbol of wealth. They're dumb and easily controlled.

And now you can see why we worshipped the cow at the foot of Sinai. We still worship the cow today, every time we choose wealth over the lamb's kindness and self sacrifice, every time we decide we want to control our future, instead of letting the lion lead us. Every time we choose ritual over relationship with the Messiah.

Oh Lord, save your Israel from idolatry to the cow. Help us put the cow in her proper place, as a gift to you...not as our escape from you.

Reading inspired by Shemot 32 (Exodus 32)

A Quick Share: Meditations on the Almond Tree and the Olive Tree

Beautiful meditation on the Almond Tree and the Olive Tree linked here.

I would go a step further and say these plants demonstrate the symbiosis between Judaism and Gentile/Goy faith: the Almond Tree, first to bloom, is Israel, the first nation to awaken in the winter while other trees slumber; the Olive Tree is mentioned in the Brit Chadashah in Romans 11:11-31, and is the union between Israel and those who are grafted in to her later through the work of the Messiah.

It is when the almond tree blooms that you know to prune the olive tree, it is through the blooms of Judaism and the Torah that we know how to create and care for the olive tree as we graft in the new branches.

As the almond tree of the menorah upholds the olive oil, so there is no fuel, no light, no salvation outside of the Judaic path; Jewish thought is the base of all the world's light, and the Jewish history upholds and culminates in the suffering prayer that bursts into flame in the olive grove of Matthias 26 and Lucas 22. The almond tree in the Torah grew from Aaron's dead staff, resurrected, like the resurrected light of the world...(Tu B'Shevat, and Numbers 17:8; Hebrews 9:4; Yeremiyah or Jeremiah 1:11)

I don't know, I like thinking about these things.

Live Your Life Like a Video Game

Talking about video games with my Mom really made me consider how we misuse the past.

You know that game Robot Unicorn that was popular a year or two ago? Or that game Extreme Pamplona? They're flash games in the style of 2d platformers, where you run forward trying to escape or chase things. If you miss an obstacle or a jump in Robot Unicorn you die in a splash of unicorn blood. In Extreme Pamplona they're not quite that harsh, but you know what both games have in common? You never retrace your steps. If you missed it, you missed it. If you made it, you don't spend a whole bunch of time saying, “man, that sucked that they had an obstacle there.”

Actually when you play any fast-paced video game you don't spend your time on the past. That guy trying to snipe you from over the hill? You don't sit there whining that he shot at you—you go take him out! If you take the time to stand there and feel sad and text your bff about it you're giving away a free headshot, and who does that? And if you lose a majorly important unit early on in your Starcraft match, you're either going to switch your strategy elsewhere or GG and hop into the next match. You're not going to sit there and just watch for the next ten minutes while the Zerg swarm devours you.

In video games, you live in the present and face the task at hand. Period.

Maybe I need to live life more like I play video games. It's not “no regrets”--Mamma Mia, Mario and I totally regret losing that fire-flower. But we can't stop to worry about it. That girl who rejected you? That job offer you missed out on? That really dumb thing you said to your boss on the way out of the bathroom on Friday? Sorry. It'll affect the game.

But it shouldn't affect the player.

“But real life isn't a video game, Jen.”

It is in the way that matters. You know what? The designers didn't make an impossible game. Their game might challenge you, frustrate you, and even hurt your feelings or frighten you, but in the end they made a game to excite, entertain, and—if it's an indie designer—maybe even inspire you. They get value out of giving you value, and you know that when you approach the game. You trust that. One might even say that if you finish a challenging game, it's your inherent faith in the designer that drives you on—you know the game's beatable, even if it's a new game and none of your friends have beaten it. In fact, you have so much faith that you don't even think twice about it! You just play! So, while you may occasionally curse the designer for that particularly unsolvable RPG dungeon, you're not going to take your hands away from the keyboard to sit there moaning in front of the computer screen about giant ant that just killed Ness for the billionth time. Nah, you know what you do then?

You go to google and you pull out a walk-through and you cheat.

In real life, God designed the levels. And they are really, really hard, because he knows you're worth your salt as a gamer. (Dude, he even calls you salt in the book of Matthew.) But they're beatable. They've been beaten before.

“There is nothing new under the sun,” says Ecclesiastes: When you're at your wit's end, you've got walkthroughs. I'm not just talking about the Bible—it absolutely is a fantastic strategy guide—I'm talking about Jesus walking through the game with you just like that insane college kid with the squeaky voice you watch on youtube. The Bible promises that every single temptation or trial you've gone through he actually gets. “Tempted in every way as we are...” it says. “No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man,” it says. “Do not be surprised when all kinds of trials face you,” it says, “for in this way they persecuted the prophets before you.” The book of Hebrews spends a whole bunch of chapters explaining how Jesus gathered his XP so he can help you get yours. And unlike that squeaky youtuber you follow, Jesus knows who you are, and he cares whether or not you win.

So maybe today, try living life like it's a video game. Don't stop. Don't obsess. Don't do that unforgiving bitterness thing.

Just play.

Poseidon...and My Prometheus

Mighty Poseidon, rising above the waves, trident flashing in the lightning and muscles rippling in silhouette against the red sky--the Greeks told of three brothers, Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon who divvied up creation, and this Water-God almost has a moral "middle" position, since Hades/death is traditionally bad and Zeus is good. Of course, you should know that Zeus is not good--he's a human-hating rapist jerkwad--but that's besides the point. The point, right now, is the story of the water-bending master, saved at birth by his mother from becoming the devouring delight of Cronus.

Cronus wanted to eat Poseidon, but Rhea, his mother, swapped him out for a colt and hid him among a flock of sheep. Cronus ate the colt, thinking she'd given birth to it, and Poseidon survived to become the Earth-shaker and Tsunami-maker of the Greek pantheon. As an adult, Poseidon spent most of his life punishing mortals who'd either cheated him (like the king of Troy, who got a multi-headed sea monster in return for refusing to pay Poseidon for the walls the god built) or simply ignored him (like the Athenians, who chose Athena as their patron god instead of Poseidon, who in return flooded them). When he wasn't punishing people, he was sleeping with his male or female lovers.

Yet despite Poseidon's sordid story, there's something so charming, thrilling, terrifying about the sea that the ancient Greeks flocked to worship and honor its patron god. A man-shaped being who can calm the sea--

Wait, I've heard this before. But my man-shaped being who calms the sea doesn't just take the shape of a man--he is a man. He, too, has many lovers, but lovers of his soul, bonded at heart and united with him in faith. He, too, was saved from the ravages of time (Cron means time), for his body never saw decay, and at birth all the best-laid plans of men couldn't kill him--but instead of sacrificing a colt to save him among the sheep, his mother saw him lay down his life as a sacrificial lamb to save the world.

This is my Jesus, who calms the sea. When he stands, hands outstretched, to order about the sea--the scariest part of all Jewish history, the terrible dark force of water and Leviathans and nature so frightening that Revelation comforts Jews by saying "there will be no more sea" in the new heaven and new earth--when my mild-mannered lover orders the sea he is protecting his people. His is gentle power, gentle fingers, the rippling muscles of a carpenter in silhouette against the stormy sky while the disciples panic in the boat besides him. "A bruised reed he will not break"--he is like the Ying in Daoist ideology, the gentle river that bends around the mountain, submits meekly, washes feet, and yet conquers the world and wears away rock. My sea-god is kind, and what Poseidon's tale teaches me, by example, is the sublime attraction and power of my Messiah's gentleness and, if I will follow in his footsteps, my own.

Teach me, Jesus, to calm the winds and waves with love like you do.

Vector Physics and Self-Determination

You know the whole "don't make plans because God's gonna change them" thing? I hate it when people say that to my dreams or when they excuse their past inability to try with a "God closed that door." All they're really saying is that fate and destiny is inevitable, so we really shouldn't try to rock the boat, and our failures aren't our own responsibilities.

Well earthlings, I am here to rock the boat.

Gladys Aylward had merely heard about China, but she spent all her time slaving to earn enough to get there. She didn't believe God was "changing" the plan for her or "closing a door" when she found herself in Russia with no train forward. And thousands of orphans were glad she didn't. Can you imagine if she had been a modern American Christian? "I wanted to be a missionary to China, but God closed that door." Amy Carmicheal broke British Law in India and went through closed temple doors to kidnap the young temple slaves. Unloved orphans received homes and young girls were saved from the unspeakable. I'm sure they were glad Amy didn't give a rat's tail about 'closed doors.'

Sometimes God does close doors. But not getting into a certain school, not having money or transportation, your family saying 'no,' where a mission organization wants you, violence, what your church says, what your government says--all these things are not closed doors. Breaking a promise or throwing away a dream for an inconvenience or a calling--which for most Christians is just a feeling that you'll like something else better--is not God's closed door. It's weakness. Break down that door, soldiers!*

Let me illustrate with a common vector physics problem.

This is a river                         

__D_*\*/*____________ _B_/\_boatman's house__________Z_

<--------------   <------------ The river's got a strong current (Vector C)

____________________A<--->_this is the boatman's boat________

                         
      The boatman wants to get to his house. Which way should he go?

You may think he should aim straight for his house.  But physicists will often ask their students to calculate by vectors. And when you add the Vector line from AB together with Vector C, and you find the line that's Vector AD. The boatman would end up at Point D! That's not his house! There are spikey things there!

That's how it is often if we follow the most obvious (and easiest) plan. We end up somewhere entirely wrong. And sometimes that's what God wanted, and he'll make us drag our boat up the river bank back to point B to teach us something important along the way. But say I want to get to point B, and I trust God to get me there in the end--'cuz he gave me the desire to get there! I will keep my eye on point B, even though God asks me to aim for point Z, and the current and my effort will together bring me to point B. God will never tell me just to put my boat on the river and float off into oblivion while people suffer on the riverbanks. Either way, I will get to point B.

Read the promises of Revelations 2:17, 2:25-29, 3:5, 3:11-13, and 3:21. They speak about the one who overcomes, who conquers. This isn't someone who just holds on to their faith, enduring while God tosses them along the rivers of life. This is someone who prays, like Jabez, that God will "expand my territory" 1 Chronicles 4:9-10. Yes, Jabez wants to be kept from pain, but not because he's sitting around waiting for fulfillment of his "calling." He wants protection from pain 'cuz he's goin' out there to cause some!**

So please, people, stop telling us that God might change our plans, that we shouldn't want so badly to marry a certain person or do mission work in a certain place. God knows what he's doing with our dreams and he doesn't need your help: you're honestly just being like the dream killer in the movie Tooth Fairy, and it's really annoying. Tell me instead to love God with such an enduring passion that I will give anything and everything for his kingdom. Tell me to overcome my pride, my financial obstacles, my stubbornness--whatever might stop me from goin' up in flames for his cause. You either feed this fire, or step aside to watch the fireworks. You don't cast doubt on a phoenix.

*When your action will harm someone else--for example, if your mission to China will sacrifice healthcare for your handicapped child--then we can talk about closed doors. But even then, remember that David Livingstone buried two wives and several children on his mission to save Africans from slave traders. If the person affected by your choice is willing and able to sacrifice, then so, too, should you. If not--then sure, you may have a closed door. Then again, William Carey had a wife who went insane because she couldn't handle his mission work in India. He stayed in India anyway, translated the Bible to several languages, and began the movement ending the practice of sati, or widow burning. Was it worth it? He thought so. Women saved from sati thought so. "Whoever does not hate his father and mother for my sake is not worthy of me," Jesus said, not to say that we ought to hate our families, but to say that our love for Him should so far exceed anything else that all other emotions seem base in comparison. A calling should not revolve around what we like or don't like. It should revolve around meeting other peoples' need.

**Please understand this sentence in light of "for our battle is not against flesh and blood..."

Medical Science in Space: Your Joy in God and Muscular Atrophy

When astronauts go into space for a long time, they often come back weakened, and they need months of therapy to regain normal muscle function. This is called the Trepp effect, and it usually means the strength of muscle contraction's as little as half of that muscle's previous strength.

What do astronauts have to do with our beloved Prometheus?

There's a lovely quote by C.S. Lewis,

“A perfect man would never act from sense of duty; he'd always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love (of God and of other people), like a crutch, which is a substitute for a leg. Most of us need the crutch at times; but of course it's idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs (our own loves, tastes, habits, etc.) can do the journey on their own!”¹

He's right of course. But it follows that if we decide to use the crutch all the time, even though we could walk, the leg we're not using will eventually undergo the Trepp effect, just like those astronauts. If we always rely on our sense of duty to do the right thing, eventually we'll find it very, very difficult to love anyone.

So what then? Should we just do the wrong thing until we feel like doing the right thing? Sin, that grace may abound? In one of his letters, Paul answers no. He says the fundamental thing is that we've been set free, not to sin, but to grace. Set free from sin, so the glory won't go to abounding sin on the planet, but to abounding love. How are we free?

Because of fire. Because there's a Spirit of fire, brought by our dear Prometheus, to whom all our meditations must return.

We must pray more earnestly for fire to arrive, that we may burn our crutches and walk in the light.

1Excerpt from letter to Joan, July 18, 1857, in C.S. Lewis: Letters to Children, de. Lyle W. Dorsett and Marjorie Lamp Mead (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 276, quoted in John Piper's When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy

How God is like your hypothalamus, revised (why we do and don't suffer)

Someone asked on fb the other day,

"What's so horrible about the possibility of a world without God?" To me, this query is only the aroma, the light fragrance of the deeper question: "what is God?" What attributes of this being make his absence a tragedy? For the God of the Bible does not linger out in space with super-god-powered binoculars, a cosmic voyeur, a scientist observing the experiment he established. He's not even up on a high mountain, like Mount Olympus, coming down every few years to rap a taste with the mortals. He's a lot more like your hypothalamus.

Did you know that your neurons are actually always sending pain signals up to your brain? You aren't writhing in constant agony right now only because your hypothalamus blocks them out. You're completely oblivious to everything except the comparatively rare, more extreme signals your hypothalamus lets through. The God of the Bible (specifically the Holy Spirit of John 16 and 2 Thessalonians 2) is like that: without him, we wallow in the evil we create, drowning in our own terrible decisions and in the pain of the things other people do to us. Not only is he the source of all happiness--without him, we would experience the consequences of everything we and others do to this planet and to each other, but "in his great mercy he has given us life." Hell is what happens when he takes his hand away, and lets us feel the entirety of a world without him (a world in utter sin and destruction). Hell is the removal of our spiritual hypothalamus.

What happens when your hypothalamus, or something else in the pain-train doesn't work, and you don't experience any pain at all? Something like this girl's disorder--you harm yourself over and over and have no idea you're doing it. We often consider suffering in the world as the root problem, but actually, it's the symptom, the warning pangs of the much deeper, spiritual problems that are eating us like a fungus, multiplying like a cancer, day by day within our souls. The mother of the little girl in the link says she wishes nothing more than that her little girl would feel pain, not because she hates her child, but because she loves her and wants her to keep herself safe. When God allows suffering, he allows it for the same reasons your hypothalamus allows it, and for the same reason that mother wishes her daughter knew suffering: so that you avoid harming yourself. God sometimes allows us to suffer the consequences of our sin so that we learn not to destroy ourselves and others by doing evil or stupid things--other times, he shows us generalized, non-specific suffering to make us consider the results of sin in creation, so that we might learn to defend ourselves from it (Luke 13:1-5). God does not allow earthquakes and tornados so we can say, "haha, you're suffering, you must be an especially bad sinner" but so we can protect ourselves from doing evil, for while suffering in the world exists because of sin, not all suffering results directly from sin. (John 9:1-3) Your hypothalamus also allows you to feel pain for things that are not directly unhealthy; likewise, especially for Christians, suffering's often that burn in your muscles as you're getting stronger, those growth itches in your legs that you have at night as you're getting bigger--symptoms of your immortal soul outgrowing this little world we live in. God allows Christians to suffer sometimes that they might become who they were meant to be (James 1:2-4): the humble "gods" of Psalm 2, the glorious overcomers of Revelation 1-7.

"If we let Him - for we can prevent Him, if we choose - He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful; but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said." --C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity


It's a wonderful thing to have a hypothalamus. It's an even greater thing to have the One who made it.

Mario and God--what they have to do with each other

It's been a while, hasn't it?

It feels quite pleasant to write about this again. For a variety of reasons. Not the least of which is all the other writing I've focused on.

In the last level of the newest Super Mario Brothers for the Wii, just before you fight the very large and imposing Bowser, you hop into this chamber of slowly sinking lava. You stand on this platform that sinks faster than the lava does, dragging you down in the goopy orange that makes Mario shout "oh no" and Luigi yell "ow ow ow" before sealing your fate in failure. Just before your platform sinks into the lava, a new platform appears. The lava keeps sinking and you keep moving down the chamber that way, trying to find a new platform before your current one sinks into the fire. (It reminds me of a scene I wrote in a book, actually.)

I realized midway the key to the level was faith. If you wanted to live, you had to jump in the air towards the area still covered with lava, believing that the game creators had put a platform there that would emerge from the orange death-trap before you landed in it. It became easy to guess where they'd put the platforms just based on the distance between previous platforms, but you never actually know where you'll land until you land.

God has treated me like those game creators treat us lately. It's lava, and I have no idea where to land. But I knew that the game creators didn't make an impossible game. There had to be another platform in that chamber SOMEWHERE, and I sure as the lake of fire couldn't keep standing on the same platform, so I had to jump.

I guess I just have to trust that God didn't make an impossible game, and that as I step forward into craziness, there's going to be a place to land.

I'll try to remember that next time I'm on a sinking platform in a chamber of lava.

Excerpts from a Trip Beyond the Equator

"This place feels like such a home to me. Every little thing, from our bus (tetanus waiting to happen) to my moisture enhanced bedroom (the brick holds in water really really really well...way too well) to the night sky chock full of stars I´ve never seen before somehow just welcomes me. The people are so real here--the world is awfully dark, and to hear the stories people have about their lives is to cry inside (one of my friends here was very surprised to find that both of my parents attend church...that´s not normal here), but God is working in the church here, and that is absolutely amazing. I really would like to live here as a permanent missionary after medical school.
Now to the pictureless picture. The team went to visit Iguazu falls, the biggest waterfall volume-wise in South America, and I did not want to go. Thank God my parents encouraged me to tag along. We went and looked down into this huge Sarlaac pit of water just pouring into it by the tons, thundering so hard that a huge white mist arose to be seen from at least a mile away. We went and stood practically underneath one of the falls, and I got soaked just by the cloud that rises from the impact of the water hitting itself on the bottom. Being there I almost felt I was going to collapse with wonder...on the way back I couldn´t speak, or even really think. On the little train away from the falls we girls rode in the back, and they asked me what I was thinking. I started crying. This was and is quite embarrassing, but I am sharing it because I want to let you know what the waterfall asked me.
If this massive, immense, majestic, powerful, simply awesome moving formation came from the hand of God...and if compared to Him it is as nothing...than what is He? We are told so much about who He is, but compared to the reality it´s so obvious that we know absolutely NOTHING of His Holiness, His Power, His worthiness to be feared above all things, and so loved! And what of me? What of His relationship with me? If just the MIST of the waterfall could soak me, what of just the slightest nearness to God? As I write this I wish you could see how hard it is for me to find words, because this is so much more than I can possibly express. There is absolutely nothing that I can give a God like that. If I tossed a cup of water into the fall, it would make more so little difference...how much less can I add anything to God!!! I have nothing to give!
Except my heart. My heart is everything that I am, all my life, all my soul, my strength, the way I move when I´m working, the steps I take when I´m dancing, the vibrations in the air when I´m singing, even how I sleep...To me, it seems like it would just be His due. To me, the miracle is that He would accept it as the most precious gift in the world.
I feel like a thousand gazillion tons of water shattered everything I ever thought I knew yesterday. I want this more, so much more...I want to know and serve the God of the waterfall, here, and now!
And THAT is what I need you to pray for.
Much much love,
... "

Endothermic God, Part 3--what about us?

Just one more note about our perpetual motion God.

He is endothermic because He allows us to give back to Him.  We praise him, we do good for him, "ascribing honor, glory, and power."  We cannot possibly increase his energy level, but we feed into him anyway.  God admits throughout the bible that His heart is gladdened by his people.  Somehow, we add happiness to him.

Yet that very accepting--the very endothermicness of taking from us--throbs with exothermic action.  As our frigid little bodies draw near to him, giving him the tiny lack of heat that we are, our actions of love warm our own hearts by nearness to him.  "God loves a cheerful giver"--in our giving, we receive love and blessing.  Even God's stooping, bending down to accept our love only comes down to another exothermic giving of himself to us.

And yet through all this giving, he keeps on growing in energy.  Some mystical way, we feed into him, and his blessing moves through us back to him.  "From him" comes blessing, through us, back "to him"--all things work this way.  He blesses himself through us, enriching himself, increasing in energy, and in some mystical way, we commune.  God's exothermic nature spills over into us and we heat the people around us, and they catch on fire and heat towards God, and that nearness heats them, and it becomes an ever growing river of fire, of energy...

And onward into eternity we go.

Hot, Hot, Endothermic Deity 2

(*In case you have forgotten--I have simplified the definitions of endothermic and exothermic here.)

A while ago, I claimed that God is exothermic.  "Oh, no," you say. "The Title said..."  Well, yes, it did.  It said endothermic, even though I wrote an exothermic blog post.  Why?

Well, is God endothermic?  An endothermic reaction ends with more energy than it began with.  It brings heat into itself, from its surroundings, and leaves a highly potent system.  Many synthesis reactions are endothermic.  It often takes energy to push things together.  Because endothermic reactions have to take on energy, we say they are "energetically unfavorable:" They usually don't happen all by themselves unless they cause some extra special increase in disorder.

God is not endothermic in that way.  He does not need outside intervention to make the magic happen.  The Bible calls him a consuming fire, highly reactive, highly heat-giving, highly "energetically favorable," new every morning.  An exotherm.

Yet God does not lose energy like an exotherm.  He draws into himself.  He consistently becomes more and more potent, never burning out, never running out of anything--not uniqueness, not energy, not perfection--but rather improving always.  Can he improve upon perfection?  In the Bible, yes, for God is "perfect in Holiness."  Perfect in "differentness." When he promises that we will become perfect, because He is perfect, he still promises that he will remain different than us.  He will be ever more perfect than we.  He will always increase in energy and creativity, coming up with new ways to bless us, new mercies.  Hebrews even says that Jesus, the already perfect man, was perfected through his death on the cross, though he had no defects before; he did not need to die on the cross to become somehow worthy.  Yet in both Revelation and Isaiah we see that this death makes Christ all the more worthy of praise--even though he was already infinitely worthy before!  Like an endothermic reaction, His internal energy and his bright glory always ends up higher than it began, and He is more powerful, beautiful, helpful, good, and world-changing each moment. 

So God is the only being consistently improving without sucking something from his environment.  He is a consuming fire--he continually consumes, increases, takes into himself--yet he needs nothing to keep his fire going.  He is the exotherm giving heat to his endothermic, increasing-in-energy self, the only perpetual motion machine.  "From him and to him are all things": from that exothermic superstore flows all our heat, all our energy, physical and spiritual, and to the endothermic improvement he grows.

A note for getting back on track

One special thing about the God of the Bible: he is a being of opposites, not via inconsistency, but via the limited nature of the human language.  Our adjectives—terrible, beautiful—and ideas—justice, mercy, love, holiness—are all too limiting.  When you get to know him, he no longer looks contradictory or fracture, like a mural of traits soldered together into a convoluted ceramic idol.  He looks like a person.

I don’t prefer the poetry of Walt Whitman, but this sentence he wrote, while utter crap, hints at what I am trying to say, not about small, twisted, limited humans trying to justify their inconsistencies, but about the Lord of Hosts, the God of Multitudes.  “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

So I do not, with these contrasting pictures from I draw from nature, want to say, “God is impossible to know with reason” or “God is distant and horribly, complicatedly full of oxymorons.” I am not a follower of Emmanuel Kant.

I am a follower of Jesus Christ.  He said, “You shall know the Truth.” You shall know!  We can know. And we can know Him, and through Him, the beautiful paradox of the Most High God.  “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”

And the Father inspired David to say, long ago, that “the firmament declares the glory of God.” The world, flawed as we have made it, still sings through all our white noise.  Our reason, science, pets, history, food—it all says something about Him.  It all says complex stuff.  For God stands at juxtapositions.

And—I want to find him there.  Guided by the HandBook that tells me what he looks like, I want to push through the jungle of reality and see the glimpse of his coattail that Moses saw.  Without the Handbook, how could I identify him?  But without the world around me—well, I would be missing out to have a beautifully illustrated bird guide on my shelf, and never use it to go out bird-watching.

That’s what we’re doing.  Bird-watching.  God-watching.  Because we are Juxtapositors, and our Master stands in the Paradox,  so that’s where we go.  Into the Juxtapositions!

Hot, Hot Endothermic Deity Part 1

Real quick, sorry I forgot to post something last week!  Anyway, today is Chemistry day here at Prometheus Studies, and I want to tell you about the Master of Paradoxes as endothermic and exothermic!

So endothermic and exothermic are chemically opposite phenomena that make beautiful analogies to how God works.  For those of you who don't know, something is endothermic when it absorbs heat and exothermic when it gives off heat--endo for "in" kind of, and exo for "out."  I always remember exo because of exoskeleton, which is the outside part of a bug, but that's probably not the easiest way for you to remember it.  However you remember it, things that are exothermic give off heat, and end up becoming colder than they were.  If you touch them, they feel hot, because the heat they are giving off is being absorbed by your hand.  So when something feels hot, it's exothermic and losing heat (becoming colder) as you take the heat away with your hand.  The opposite is true of endothermic--it absorbs heat, and feels cold because as IT is getting hotter, YOU are getting colder because it's stealing your heat like the mean little temperature vampire that it is mwahahahaha

As you can see I'm a bit on the excited side today. 

Anyway, so God is infinitely exothermic and infinitely endothermic.  He is exothermic because he gives off heat and light and energy, always at his own expense, to support and supply all the rest of us.  To us, he feels hot, sometimes threateningly so, or comfortably warm, because he is a violent and dangerous giver.  An explosion is an exothermic thing--he is like that.  A hand-warmer is another exothermic thing, and he is like that, too.  Whether in violent ways that blow us away, or in gentle every day kindness, God is an exothermic giver. 

But can God really become colder, like exothermic reactions are doing as they lose and give off heat?  As in, while we take what He has, does He experience loss?  Well, I would say yes, because when Jesus was walking around on earth, he was always losing.  He lost comfort, friendship, pleasure, and even life on his exothermic mission to give.  That's in fact the whole mystery of Jesus--that an infinitely warm God could become cold and dead as He poured Himself out for His people. 

This ties back to the whole point of this blog.  Fire, which Prometheus brings to man in the Greek legend, is a result of an exothermic "oxidation reaction" between oxygen and something else (usually an organic polymer like cellulose in wood) burning to create carbon dioxide and water.  It's the giving of heat as heat is taken out of the chemicals themselves.  Prometheus was exothermic just like the reaction--as he gave fire to man, he experienced loss of all the "heat" that makes existence wonderful as he suffered alone, a failure out on a cold mountain top cursed by the gods.  The Abundant Source of Fire finds himself cold, although we feel him as warm and giving, and the Abundant Source of Life finds himself dead.

I really appreciate that my dear Exothermic One did that for me.

All Gen Chem knowledge.  Next week, in Part 2, we'll talk about how God is endothermic.

God as the BOX DESTROYER: Understanding God as Anisotropy

Bones, those voiceless hunks of wet calcium buried in the ooze and flesh we call our bodies, could talk about God in many ways.  They could sing to you about the One who "upholds the Universe by the Word of his Power" like bones uphold our bodies, or that our lives without him are ultimately foundationless, or that from Him comes life just as the red blood cells we need come from their birthplace in the bone marrow...they are metaphors for a lot of things.  But I'd make the case that a little bit of bone biomechanics weaves an analogy about God that perhaps you and I wouldn't have thought of otherwise.

In order to understand how pieces of our bodies respond to stresses or how they align or how to create replacement tissues or how tissues heal, biomechanical engineers have to use mathematical models. One way to model tissues in our bodies is as "hookean elastic solids." Generally, this means that the elasticity, the way the solid shears, and the ratio of stretching in two directions follow certain mathematical rules. All you really need to know about this model right now is that these three properties are the same in any direction.  If you pull on the hookean elastic solid the same way in any direction, it will be just as elastic.  If you twist it, it will always shear the same way no matter where in the material you shear it.  When you pull it, Poisson's Ratio, the ratio between the amount one part stretches when another part shrinks, always remains the same in any direction. This is called isotropy.

Bone isn't like that.  As an "orthotropic elastic solid," it's anisotropic and has different, but constant, properties in different directions; in order to bear the most load with the least waste of material and the best containment of soft bone marrow, bone is layered, and made of cells called osteons lined up in only one way. It bears more load in the direction that it needs to bear load, and isn't so forceful against load in other directions.  Elasticity, Shear Modulus (the way we describe behavior when you twist it), and Poisson's Ratio (that ratio I mentioned earlier) are different in every direction. This means that every time you calculate how the bone will behave, you have to take into account the direction it is loading in and the new properties for that direction.  We can still predict how bone will behave, and bone is still reliable mathematically, it's just not as simple as we'd like.  The equation has like ten more variables and takes three times as long to solve, but it's still a good equation.

God is like that.  When we try to understand his behavior in our lives or in the Bible, we need to take into account his different-ness, and stop treating him like he has to be isotropic. In different times of history--like different places on the bone--God behaves differently, with different amounts of force, mercy, and justice, not because he is unreliable, but because that way he can best support His Body and the Body of Christ, with the least loss.  Sometimes, we think him excessively violent. Sometimes we think him unfair.  But it's not like he's throwing away morality any more than the bone throws away reliability.  He simply has a much more complex job in history than we do. Just as bone shouldn't become isotropic just to fit our analysis (good Lord that would destroy your body), God should not have to submit himself to our rules about morality or who he can and cannot kill or whether or not he showed himself physically to us then and doesn't now or WHATEVER.

Many of you have heard the slogan "don't put God in a box." Quite frankly, something that infinite would require a large, large box, and God does not let himself be boxed. So the slogan really ought to be, "don't even try to put God in a box," because when you try, you merely break the box.  People sometimes get mad when God breaks their boxes, especially with the way he breaks some serious modern boxes in the Old Testament.  In our nice little moralities or pleasures or what have you, when God breaks our sets of rules he has committed sacrilege against our beliefs of right and wrong.  God has committed blasphemy against what we really worship.

And you better bet he's going to do it as much as he can until he's broken every box in the Universe. Some boxes he welds back together, others he melts down. Yet ultimately, God makes the boxes in this Universe, not you and me.

All scientific information in this post from BME 2220, my Biomechanics class at UVA.

Lift up your eyes to the heavens,
   and look at the earth beneath;
^(L) for the heavens vanish like smoke,
   the earth will wear out like a garment,
   and they who dwell in it will die in like manner;^[b]
(M) but my salvation will be forever,
   and my righteousness will never be dismayed.

Isaiah 51

Just reiterating the point of this blog--that we can see metaphors of something eternal in the finite world in which we live.

God is Gen and Eval

I normally write only about things that I know about, but I had a tiny little thought last night that I wanted to share with you about the beautiful Being I blab about here.

So, linguistics.  Despite common misunderstanding, linguists do not necessarily know a bunch of different languages, but rather understand how language in general works.  How do we learn language, how can we use it, why does grammar turn out this way, what languages are related--those are the kinds of questions linguists ask.  One of the really cool things a linguist can theoretically do is predict possible words in a language based on a limited knowledge of the sounds and morphemes, or units of meaning, in that language.

Linguists do that with something called "optimality theory." I don't really understand it at all, to tell you the truth, but I understand these two things--first, there's a huge pool of possible words called Gen.  Gen basically says "oh, look, all these options!" and shoots a gazillion ideas at you, without any limits.  To find out what real words in the language are, linguists use Eval.  Eval creates a set of constraints on the possibilities from Gen, saying "uh, no, that won't work in this language because of this or that".  The possible morpheme combinations come out of Eval, and linguists use a weird hand rule to select which one most probably forms a real word in the desired language.

I was thinking about God the other day, and I got really excited about this silly little idea of mine.  So, God is Gen, right?  He's limitless, and there are no boundaries on Him, no rules, and infinite possibilities.  But He's also eval.  He created matter, and matter, unlike energy, has definite boundaries and rules. The moment He created matter, He created boundaries and constraints: spiritual boundaries, physical boundaries, etc.  He Himself holds those things together, so He himself is Eval. 

This is weird!  God is Gen, and God is Eval.  God is limitless, but God chooses to restrict Himself for the sake of a functioning universe.  He creates goodness and right and wrong and pushes all His limitless possibilities through those constraints to come up with the Optimal Universe--the best story that could ever be told, and the most glorious History.  For That really is his purpose--That gloriousness, all congealing around Him and Us.  He knows how every little person or ant or wind would affect anything else, and He puts all the possible universes through His Great Big Heart of Eval and comes out with Optimality.

Are you able to believe that?  Can you trust that this God of paradoxes, this great Master of Opposites Who Is Both Gen and Eval, knows how to bring forth great and wonderful things from the possibilities that you or I might prefer instead?  I'm not able to believe that in a functional way, but I still think it's pretty cool to think about.