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.