Christmas and Consumerism or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Giving

It is pretty easy these days to mock the excesses of Christmas. The stores opening on Thanksgiving, five year-olds asking for iPhones, the Best Buy commercial where an aunt gives her nieces tablets (seriously? I am from a fairly wealthy family, but I don't recall ever getting anything from an aunt nor would I expect anything), and the way the birth of Jesus is tied into people going into debt. The critiques write themselves and are so, so boring. Yes, we get it anti-consumerists, you don't want to buy things for people. Could you please just quiet down about it? Left hand and right hand not knowing each other, Pharisees praying loudly and all that.

I used to fall into the critic crowd (though I always lustily accepted whatever my parents got for me) and then I had kids. Kids make you go bananas about giving. There is nothing better in the world than giving your kids a gift. I do it all of the time. I'll see some little knick-knack that no one alive really needs and get it for Owen because I love to give him stuff. We bought him a Strider bike for Christmas and I kept it at work so he wouldn't see it before the big day. For the past two weeks I have walked past that thing multiple times every day and broken out into a mile-wide grin. I can't wait to give it to him. This morning I was at the farm store getting some chicken feed for our girls and bought him four little animal toys because they had giraffes and he loves giraffes. And then I got him a horse, too, because he has a rocking horse upstairs that he likes to ride while I ride next to him on the rocking chair (we ride to the duck pond to feed the ducks and go fishing). His horse is named Lucky, and my rocking chair is named Lightning. He told me last night that instead of flying to Hawaii we should ride horses. "A fine, strong black horse," he told me. Who am I to disagree?

My parents get this better than anyone. They don't sit around fretting about the creeping consumerism of Christmas--they just give and give and give. If you want to break out of the secularizing impulse of our American incarnation of the holiday you don't do it by refraining  from giving. We are celebrating in this season the greatest gift of all time and all of our gifts are mere whispers, dull, petty imitations of that great gift God gave us in his Son, but we give them anyway to remind ourselves of that great gift. 

I am not trying to sanctify all giving that is done in the name of Christmas. Some is probably irresponsible. I don't advocate debt. Some is done with ulterior motives. But to me the extravagant giving is better than the self-righteous refraining that some seem to want to put in its place. Our Father has dealt with us extravagantly after all. And his generosity outstrips anything we could ever come close to matching. My answer to the consumerist conundrum, then, is to give more and give with a view to our profligately gifting God. 

Merry Christmas! Drink some eggnog.    

Violence and the Old Testament

As part of my Advent readings this year, I have read most of the Old Testament law. If Christ comes to enact a new covenant I want to better understand the old covenant. The Old Testament is such a strange--in the sense of foreign--set of documents to me that I often feel while reading that I am treading on ground best left undisturbed. There is so much of it I don't get, in the same way I don't get the Letter to the Hebrews--the culture is alien to me.

Given this cultural alienation it can be easy to condemn much of the book for its harshness. The violence in the Old Testament, God-endorsed and otherwise, is staggering. Along these lines Mark Twain once quipped that it was not the parts of the Bible he didn't understand that bothered him, but those parts that he did. Every time I read the Old Testament I become sympathetic to the Manichees and their dualism.

But the Manichees were heretics and the God who set Israel to clear the Holy Land of its inhabitants is the God who shows steadfast love to thousands and who sent Jesus to die on the cross to make atonement for our sins. If you lose the Old Testament, you lose Jesus. If God is not a God of wrath then there is nothing to be saved from. If God is not a God of grace than we are not saved. If God is not a covenantal God than we can have no assurance in our salvation. 

Anyway, I was reading one of those difficult passages in Deuteronomy this morning that makes our modern sensibilities shudder:

"If your brother, the son of your mother, or your son or your daughter or the wife you embrace or your friend who is as your own soul entices you secretly, saying, 'Let us go and serve other gods,' which neither you nor your fathers have known, some of the gods of the peoples who are around you, whether near you or far off from you, from the one end of the earth to the other, you shall not yield to him or listen to him, nor shall your eye pity him, nor shall you spare him, nor shall you conceal him. But you shall kill him. Your hand shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterward the hand of all people." (13.6-9)

There are many such commandments in the Old Testament and in the historical books we see examples of people acting on these commands. It makes Jesus's famous words that whoever doesn't hate his mother or his father or his sister of his brother seem benign. It also makes the Bibles I had as a kid, with their cutesy pictures of serene animals and smiling Hebrews, seem far too saccharine for such R-rated material.* As I was puzzling over this issue over my morning orange juice I felt I must be missing something. And of course I was.

Right before chapter 13 begins with its kill all blasphemers commands, the Lord gives Moses a word about the people they are going to dispossess:

"When the Lord your God cuts off before you the nations whom you go in to dispossess, and you dispossess them and dwell in their land, take care that you be not ensnared to follow them, after they have been destroyed before you, and that you do not inquire about their gods, saying, 'How did these nations serve their gods?--that I may also do the same.' You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way for every abominable thing that the Lord hates they have done for their gods, for they even burn their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods." (12.29-31)

There are certain sins the Lord detests more than others. I don't feel it is a stretch to say this. All sin is sin, but there is a qualitative difference between speaking a harsh word to your child and throwing your child into a fire. And in setting out a people peculiar to Himself, God could not allow that type of evil to remain in the land. How could you leave any remnant of that about? For if you don't destroy it utterly it will rear its head again.**

I think we have a tendency to sit at a distance from this culture and this time period and smooth over the differences between these competing faiths. We are not talking about the difference today between a practicing Jew and a practicing Hindu or a practicing Buddhist and a practicing Christian. We are talking about a people claimed by the Creator God, Yahweh, and people who sacrificed their children to Moloch. The differences are more than stark and the danger of returning to that type of brutalizing faith was an ever present reality for God's fledgling people. If he was to fulfill his purposes for Israel, that simply could not be allowed to happen.

In John Milton's stunningly weird and weirdly stunning Christmas poem, "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," he pictures the infant Christ banishing the old gods of the world, ranging from the more benign (the nymphs and Thamuz) to the more insidious (Moloch, Dagon), from the new world he inaugurates. And in doing so, the infant Christ is bringing to completion the work began in the Promised Land by the people of God so long before him. But, as Christ inaugurates a new and better covenant, so the promise to worshipers of foreign gods is better. Now rather than dying for their gods, their gods have died, and the walls between them and the true God have been removed. So while I can appreciate what the old covenant was doing, I must say that I am immensely thankful to be living under the new. 

* In reading kids' Bibles to Owen I always am tempted to finish the story. For example, kids' Bibles seem to cut off the David and Goliath story after David flings the rock. Yea! He hit a guy in a head with a rock because he trusted God. The End. Violent, sure. But they leave out the part where David goes over to the not-yet-dead Philistine and picks up his giant sword and cuts his head off and holds it up for the armies of God to see. Master Caravaggio, take it away. I mean this with all reverence, that is a completely badass scene, but one I have yet to see depicted on felt-board or glistening card-stock pages.

** It should also be noted that it is not as if the Jews went on an unprecedented rampage through Palestine. It was not for nothing that the land of the Assyrians was called "The Land Bathed in Blood." Some cultures were spared, some individuals were converted to the faith. But there were certain peoples that could not be left to spread their disease to the people of God.

The Horrors of Homeschooling

I came across this lengthy article in Prospect by Kathryn Joyce profiling children who had been raised in fundamentalist home-schooling homes and escaped out of the miasma of Parental Control. I tend to chuckle, despite myself, when I read articles like this. Not that there aren't terrible homeschooling situations. Undoubtedly there are. And I feel real compassion for children who are raised to believe that any dissent from there parents is a sure route to hell. That is vicious and mean doctrine and should be spoken out against. In that sense, I have no problem with an article talking about some of these awful scenarios in which fundamentalist kids were raised. When this becomes problematic is when the anecdotal stories of abuse are slap-dashly used to represent the logical outcome of any homeschooling by Christians.

You can see this tendency in scare paragraphs ("scareagraphs"?) like the following: 

"What many lawmakers and parents failed to recognize were the extremist roots of fundamentalist homeschooling. The movement’s other patriarch was R.J. Rushdoony, founder of the radical theology of Christian Reconstructionism, which aims to turn the United States into an Old Testament theocracy, complete with stonings for children who strike their parents. Rushdoony, who argued that democracy was “heresy” and Southern slavery was “benevolent,” was too extreme for most conservative Christians, but he inspired a generation of religious-right leaders including Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. He also provided expert testimony in early cases brought by the HSLDA. Rushdoony saw homeschooling as not just providing the biblical model for education but also a way to bleed the secular state dry."

Now I have never heard of Rushdoony, and maybe he is the rat bastard he is made out to be in this clearly objective paragraph, but really all this paragraph seems to be saying is "one douchebag favored homeschooling." He was too extreme for most conservative Christians, but he nonetheless "influenced" James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. How? you might ask. Doesn't matter. Dobson, Falwell, and Robertson! You just have to recite the names of conservative bogeymen and let that do the arguing for you.

I imagine most of you know that my wife was homeschooled through junior high and went to public high school. I don't know if her parents have ever heard of Rushdoony, and they would surely be surprised by the notion of democracy as "heresy" but none of that matters--they were Christians and homeschoolers, ergo bad people who suppressed their children.

The whole article is about as well-researched as a term paper one of my old freshman writing students turned into me at K-State. There are stats about how many people give money to the Homeschooling Defense fund, but none that might give any indication about the percentages of homeschooling students who are disgruntled and felt the need to escape the Fundamentalist Philistinism of their parents. Joyce relies on horrifying anecdotes. A homeschooled teen was killed by her parents and they had a popular homeschooling book on the shelf. Although the book does not explicitly tell parents to kill their kids it is clearly implied. Spanking is a gateway drug to murder, after all.  

But anecdotes don't prove much, really. My wife and her seven siblings seemed to enjoy the experience of being homeschooled and most will probably homeschool their own kids (as we might well do ourselves). My wife's dad is one of her heroes, and her mom her example of servanthood and love. Should I use their anecdotes to cancel out an opposing one?

You can feel Joyce's frustration when she writes things like this: "Homeschooling now exists in a virtual legal void; parents have near-total authority over what their children learn and how they are disciplined." For shame, America! Letting parents teach their children and discipline them. Discipline is so medieval. Or this: "The amendment [in Pennsylvania] would enshrine in the Constitution parents’ 'fundamental right' to direct their child’s upbringing however they see fit, free of state interference." I think we used to call this being a family. And I think that is Joyce's most elemental problem with homeschooling: the state does not have complete control, but parents. It is a short road from that belief to advocating for children to being taken out of their home because any conservative parenting constitutes abuse. 

There are problems aplenty with parenting in our nation, but I am going to go out on a limb here and say that most of the problems are not emanating from the occasional over-zealousness of Christian parents. Clara helps moms deliver babies nearly every day with stories that would put to shame the sob stories of kids who weren't allowed to watch The Simpsons (incidentally, starting at an appropriate age, The Simpsons will form an integral part of our children's education; everything I needed to know about pop culture and America I learned from The Simpsons). She had a patient recently, eight months pregnant who is so addicted to alcohol that she drank hand-sanitizer while in the hospital to get a fix. How is life going to go for that kid? She has had numerous moms who were on meth and continued to use while pregnant. Others, less overtly extreme, just seem as if they do not care about their children at all. Often there is no father around. And I would imagine that these cases are relatively more common than an abusive homeschooling parent. But those cases don't rile up the target audience of Prospect to the same level of fear as that of the Christian Fundamentalist. Plus, they are only anecdotes as well. Most moms are drug-free, non-alcoholics, who will love their kids and try hard to raise them well. 

It is a complex world. Do abuses of homeschooling mean we should outlaw homeschooling? What about teachers who abuse children? Should we outlaw teachers? Does encouraging your daughter to value motherhood and children equate to naked patriarchal subjugation? What about just not giving a shit about your kids? Which is worse? Joyce doesn't want to answer complex questions. For her, it is not a complex issue. These disparate anecdotes are evidence enough, and her confirmation bias tells her everything she already knew.

Seven Days that Divide the World: Language, Scripture, and Science

This is the third post in a series. See the following links for parts one and two:

Introduction

Part One

In this post I will try to be a bit more charitable than I was in the last post on the subject. I understand what Lennox was doing in setting the stage for the debate at hand, but it seemed to insinuate a false equivalency between the two issues which I found misleading. And I overreacted, because I really don't like that sort of thing. Anyway, onto the next chapter.

Lennox begins chapter two with a brief section on language and how we ought to read all books, but especially the Bible. In short, the first question you ask is what the author was intending to communicate. Then, you ought to look to the most natural understanding of a passage. If something is poetry you ought to read the words poetically; if a work is historical then you should expect straightforward historical renderings. He also cautions us in reading texts from foreign cultures (such as the culture that produced Genesis), as if the natural meaning that we derive from a text is also the natural meaning that culture would derive. Sometimes there can be more than one natural meaning for a word. In Genesis, the word "earth" refers both to our planet as a whole and to the dry land mass, both of which are plenty accurate uses of the word earth. 

Also, literal understanding will not always work. Any person practicing common English today knows this one unassailable fact: whenever someone uses the word "literally" you can almost guarantee that whatever they say ought not to be taken literally. When I go for a fast run (in those halcyon days pre-Achilles injury) I would tell Owen I was flying, but of course I was only jumping from one foot to the other down a dirt road at a vigorous pace. Jesus tells us he is the door and the bread of life, but let us not attempt to walk through him or eat him. You get the point. We use metaphor all the time to convey a literal meaning. Language is confusing. But it makes sense to start with the most natural sense, and if that doesn't make sense then progress to the next level of meaning (metaphorical or otherwise). 

From this linguistic introduction, Lennox moves us into a discussion of how the Bible and science relate to one another. The Bible, obviously, does not speak to us in advanced scientific language. Calvin wrote in his commentary on Genesis: "Nothing is here treated but the visible form of the world. He who would learn astronomy and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere." And this is intentional on the part of God, Lennox argues. Scientific understanding is constantly changing. If God inspired Moses to write Genesis in twenty-second century scientific terms no one would understand it (and people in the twenty-fifth century would complain about all of the errors it contained). Calvin wrote that "the Holy Spirit would rather speak childishly than unintelligibly to the humble and unlearned."

Furthermore, Augusine warned against tying our doctrine too closely a scientific interpretation in his work On the Literal Meaning of Genesis:

"Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics [knowledge of the earth and heavens]; and we should all take means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and then laugh it to scorn. . . If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe these books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason."

Stone cold, Gus. But salient. I am all for fighting for the right interpretation of Scripture and willing to endure ridicule for defending clear Christian doctrine, but if something has been proven false and we cling to it for its own sake then we are going to look silly to a lot of people and dilute the gospel message.

Lennox here suggests separating the matters that are core to the Christian faith from those that are less central and allow for variation in opinion. Beyond that, we also need to be prepared, he suggests, to distinguish between what Scripture actually says and what we think it means. As it relates to his fixed earth example, once Christians made peace with a metaphorical interpretation of the pillars of the earth they were still able to take comfort in the metaphorical meaning. The earth might not be literally fixed in place, but it is fixed in God's affections and stable by his Son who upholds creation with his own power (metaphorically of course).

The incident of the fixed earth (and this I agree is a good principle) teaches us to be humble and be prepared to distinguish between what the Bible says and what we think it says (or wish it says). We shouldn't tie our interpretation of Scripture to the science du jour, but neither should we avoid science altogether and abdicate that ground. Finding a balance is difficult, but so, contra our Prosperity brethren, is everything else in the Christian life.

The Hammer of God

I just finished an extraordinary novel by Bo Giertz, a Swedish Lutheran pastor from the mid-twentieth century. The book is called The Hammer of God and is actually a collection of three novellas, all somewhat related to the other. Each short story is about young pastors recently entered into parish ministry and the challenges, revelations, temptations, and victories they experience. The first is set in 1820, the second in 1880, and the third in 1940-1. The pattern is fairly easy to discern, right around 60 years in between each story.

This is straight up theological fiction, much in the manner of Marilynne Robinson and her incredible Gilead novels (there is a third on the way!). It is difficult in these books to draw a line between story and theology, and it is clear that one was not intended.

The three stories are parallel in a number of ways. As I have said, each focuses on a young pastor freshly out of seminary in their first ministry assignment, and the challenges they face as they learn what it is to shepherd God's people. Each is something of a religious liberal, spouting the "new ideas" of their time. Each receives an awakening through witnessing the death of a traditional believer, or a conversation with an elder, or through reading the Word of God seriously for the first time. After the awakening each emphasizes strict obedience to Christ and is dismissive of their elder pastors as libertines (for having a bit of brandy at night, or some such minor infraction) and basically make the new believer error of imagining themselves to have discovered Christianity. Thus they fall into self-righteousness. They are then guided by these elder pastors into the grace of Jesus as superior to the works-based Christianity they preach. 

As I started the third novella earlier this week I was a little frustrated. Not this again, I thought. Liberal pastor, awakening, struggle with legalism, finding grace with the aid of a wiser older pastor. But then it occurred to me that Giertz's point in writing three such stories from contextually different vantage points is to emphasize the eternal nature of this battle and this progression for young, university-educated ministers. When new converts become really excited about Christianity they often become very legalistic. They judge everyone who has a drink or watches an R-rated movie (two pastimes I prefer to combine), and they mistake their ignorant zeal for true faith. What needs to happen is almost a second conversion. Away from works to the great grace of Jesus Christ. And from there you live righteously to glorify your savior, not to satisfy your own sense of religious duty. 

What is more, in a culture that deifies youth and youthful pursuits and zeal, it is these seasoned pastors who have often experienced the same cycle in their own faith who guide these young ministers into true, grace-based faith in Jesus. What young people need is not necessarily more zeal, but much, much more wisdom. And wisdom only comes with gray hairs. Giertz, a young man himself when he wrote this book, keeps this in view.

Though it is never explicitly mentioned, the title of the book comes from the prophet Jeremiah: "Is not my word like fire," declares the Lord, "and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?" (23.29). And indeed each pastor chronicled in this book must confront the Word of God, both what it says about salvation and how they will choose to read it. The last story focuses on a young pastor who had believed that Scripture must be read historically. What he meant by this was for himself unclear and it caused certain of his parishioners to chuck any doctrine they found unpalatable on the premise that it was merely historically arbitrary and no longer required of believers (sound familiar?). He is rebuked in this belief at a church service for "readers," congregants who read the Bible and take its commands seriously, after the man he has invited to speak, a new convert, talks about how everyone must be guided by the light of conscience rather than God's Word. After he speaks and they sing a hymn, an older pastor from a neighboring parish gets up to speak and these are his words. I found them wholly beautiful, and they make a fitting epitaph for my review of this book:

"The stone foundation of the human heart and the Rock of Atonement on Golgotha are the two mountains on which a man's destiny is determined. If he remains on the stone foundation of his natural state, he is lost. Only one way leads from the stony foundation to the Rock of Atonement, a firm stone bridge built once and for all. It is the Word. Just as only the divine word can convict man of sin and lay bare the soul to its rocky base, so nothing but the Word can reveal the truth about the Redeemer. The external Word is as inescapably necessary for the gospel as it is for the law. No one who is awakened in earnest would ever be able to believe in the forgiveness of his sins, if God had not built a bridge leading to the Rock of Atonement. The supports on which it rests are baptism, the Lord's Supper, and absolution; the arches are wrought by the Holy Word with its message of redemption. On that bridge a sinner can pass from the stony ground that condemns to the Rock of Salvation. But should a single one of the arches be allowed to fall, then is man condemned to remain eternally under the law's condemnation, either as a despairing sinner or as a self-righteous Pharisee."

Seven Days That Divide the World: To Everything Turn, Turn, Turn

Lennox begins his book with an historical anecdote concerning another doctrine that was jettisoned by the church when scientific gains showed it to be demonstrably false: the immovability of the earth and its centrality in the cosmos.

Aristotle believed in a fixed earth that was also eternal. When Aristotle was Christianized by Aquinas in the thirteenth century, Aquinas deemphasized the eternality of the earth as inconsistent with Genesis which taught that the earth had a beginning, but had no problem retaining the fixed earth idea. After all, there were Scriptures that seemed to support that notion:

Tremble before him, all the earth; yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved. (1 Chronicles 16:30)

Yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved. (Psalm 93:1)

He set the earth on its foundation, so that it should never be moved. (Psalm 104:5)

For the pillars of the earth are the Lord's, and on them he has set the world. (1 Samuel 2:8)

Lennox notes that the Bible also seems to indicate that the sun moved around the earth:

In them he has sent a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy. Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat. (Psalm 19:4-6)

The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. (Ecclesiastes 1:5)

So when Copernicus proposed a heliocentric view of the cosmos this was startling and called into question by both Protestants and Catholics. Martin Luther railed against the idea in his Table Talk. Calvin, likewise, rejected the notion.

About 80 years later, Galileo published Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, a work validating the heliocentric theory and earning the ire of both Aristotelian philosphers and Christians as well as becoming the prototype of the church-is-anti-science nonsense. Though the "mistreatment" of Galileo is often overhyped (his imprisonment was in the estates of his wealthy supporters and he was never tortured), nevertheless the case does represent a black eye in the Science vs Religion smackdown, especially seeing as how none of us, even committed Christians, remain these days as fixed-earthers. Lennox's closing question is to ask Christians to consider that if we have abdicated our fixed-earth belief because of compromise and thereby made Scripture subservient to science?

While I understand his point here, and anecdotes are fun, they don't exactly make for good policy. Say you know someone who defended a home robbery attempt with their firearm, then you are all like "rah rah guns save lives." Or say you know someone whose five-year old found the family gun and shot his sister, and then you are all like "guns are evil!" Neither position is really validated by your test case. 

It strikes me as the same in this instance. Sure, the Church gave up on the fixed-earthedness of an overly literal reading of obviously poetic passages, but we are asked to give up something more by accepting an old earth governed by Darwinian forces. I mean, we have all been moving-earthers our whole lives, but I still talk about the sun coming up and no ardent scientist has ever said, "Hey you blankety-blank, don't you know that the sun is fixed and we are spinning around it at 67,000 miles per hour in an elliptical pattern that means it is dark when you get out of work in the winter and some places in Alaska don't see the sun for a whole month? What are you, anti-science?"

In other words, science these days isn't telling us, as Galileo did, that we simply misunderstand something about the way God created the world. Science today is telling us that there is no God and something about primordial ooze and that if you believe in God you are just as stupid as someone believing in a flying spaghetti monster (which would be dope, if it was real). The stakes are a bit different, as what is being called into question is more severe. 

I know Lennox knows this, and perhaps I am being uncharitable here, but anecdotes frustrate me. I understand his broader point--the Church should be willing to change when it is definitively proven to be wrong in its understanding of something and has done so in the past--and I will withhold further judgment until I know what Lennox suggests we replace a straightforward understanding of Genesis with, but if you are ever writing a book, please don't start with an interesting story that is at best tangentially related to the one you are attempting to tell. I read this book one time that started that way, and it didn't turn out well.

Nicholas and Alexandra

I just finished reading Nicholas and Alexandra, Robert Massie's telling of the end of the Romanov dynasty and the rise of Bolshevism and Soviet communism in Russia. It is a fascinating story, truly compelling and multi-faceted. Massie captures the tragedy, ironies, and historical particularities of that moment so well. For a 600 page history book it read like a novel.

I will give a short rundown of the basics. Nicholas, heir to the throne, is suddenly made Tsar when his father, Alexander III, dies unexpectedly. He hastily marries Alix of the German house of Hesse who becomes Tsaritsa. Nicholas is not as strong-willed as his father, but is a competent manager and loyal Russian patriot. The Tsar and his wife have four daughters before having a son and heir, the Tsarevich Alexis who is diagnosed at a young age with hemophilia.

Nicholas is a loving father, but in over his head when it comes to leading a nation through tumultuous times. He had little training, his father thinking that there would be more time to instruct his son in the way of leadership. His wife is a religious mystic, driven mad by her son's disease. She is attended to by Gregory Rasputin, a peasant monk who has a number of uncanny visions and prophecies which wind up coming to fruition. Alexandra becomes devoted to Rasputin and when Nicholas goes to the Eastern front to lead the Russian army in World War I, Alexandra becomes the de facto leader of Russia. Rasputin, by this time firmly established in the household, pulls the strings of ministerial appointments in the government and causes great unrest among the ruling class. Nicholas, too uxorious for his own good, defaults to his wife in a number of disastrous policies. Alexandra is so focused on her hemophiliac son becoming the supreme autocrat of Russia that she refuses to allow any small reforms in the governing structure of Russia, increasing hostilities towards the royal family especially as the war drags on.

Attempting to free the Romanovs from the taint of Rasputin, a number of monarchist gentry stage the murder of Rasputin. It is bungled, but ultimately successful, but by this point the damage is done. Too many people are too upset with the Tsar who reluctantly abdicates his throne. Fearing the breakup of his family, he does not abdicate to his son, the heir, but to his younger, dissolute brother. Hoping to wait out the war in Russia and then retire to England, the royal family is imprisoned in their palace outside of St. Petersburg (Petrograd at the time). When the provisional government falls to the Bolsheviks, they are removed to Siberia. As the white army encroaches on the head city of Soviet Siberia the entire Romanov family, even the dog, is taken to the basement of their prison and executed in gruesome fashion. They are then chopped up into small pieces, burned with fire, melted with sulphuric acid and dropped into an abandoned mine shaft.

One drum that I continually beat is the difficulty of speaking monolithically about history. Reading over my short summary I am struck by how simple that rendering is for something that is anything but simple. Too often we want to impose an easy narrative on past events that makes them readily discernible to us, despite their often infinite complexity. Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, has been portrayed popularly as an impotent man who ceded power to his arrogant wife and through pusillanimity allowed the autocracy and monarchy to be wrenched away from Russia. By the revolutionaries he was bloody Nicholas, the tyrant who entered World War I in a perverse attempt to kill off Russia's revolutionary workers in bloody battle, the very symbol of proletariat suppression.

An irony of the case is that if Nicholas had been the bloodthirsty tyrant the Bolsheviks made him out to be, he would have tamped out their small flame in a number of days. As it was, he was merely an ardent patriot who abdicated in a doomed attempt to save his beloved Russia. He was feckless in a certain sense and unprepared for the wave of hostility that came upon the monarchy in his time. He deferred to his wife too often and should have been willing to make more concessions to popular government. His cousin, King George V of England, willingly saw the powers of the monarchy decrease in his nation and finished his life happily as more of a figurehead than an autocrat.

As for the Empress Alexandra, she was undoubtedly driven mad to a certain degree by the illness of her son. She was a loyal Russian though, and not the German spy of the anti-monarchical propaganda. As for her relationship with Rasputin, it is only fair to say that she had a different religious constitution than most people. A number of Rasputin's prophecies were eerily fulfilled, and though the man himself was a deviant and manipulator, he steadfastly showed to Alexandra his holy side. It is easy to see how she was duped; where some would see mere coincidence she saw miracles of God. Where some saw a lecherous opportunist, she saw the holy man who saved her son.

The first time Clara saw me reading the book she asked me why I was reading it. I told her it was because I love Russia. She said, "I think you just love reading." Which is so true. The reason I love reading is because it unsettles me. It is no secret that I love and admire John Milton, the English poet. Milton, living during the English Civil War, wrote defenses for the revolutionaries who had killed the English king, Charles I. Not in a battle, but through the charade of a show trial. Maybe the case is entirely different and Charles was the tyrant Milton and others made him out to be. Maybe his death was justified. But then again maybe not. At the very least it was more complex than it seemed in Milton's propaganda tracts. The Charles I know is Milton's Charles. How different would Nicholas seem to me if all that I read was Lenin's account of his life? Maybe I should read something a bit less biased about Charles.

As any earnest college freshman will tell you, History is written by the victors, yada yada, that is mostly true. But what is even truer is that history is written by people--people with limited knowledge, biases, and flawed reasoning, about people with limited knowledge, biases, and flawed reasoning and the things they do that often show very little logic and no arc of progression. Yet it is fascinating all the same, and often illuminating. Nicholas and Alexandra and the entire Romanov family are tragic figures of a tragic era, a tragedy made all the more palpable by the horrors of Leninism and Stalinism that followed their demise. Could it have been different? Sure. Was it? Nope. Historical what-ifs are a fun parlor game, but what happened in Russia happened. And while we will never fully grasp all the factors at work that brought everything to bear on that proud people, we can acknowledge that event in its complexity and humanity. Long live Holy Russia.

Seven Days that Divide the World, Part One

The question of the origins of our earth and the people, creatures, and plants populating it remains as relevant today as ever. What are we, as Christians, to think about all of this? Can we stomach a 4.5 billion year old earth and 16 billion year old cosmos? Does Biblical fidelity require that we take the Bible literally (or literalistically) in its seven day account and withstand the mockery of modern scientists? Can we stake out some middle ground between the two? A sort of god-in-the-gaps theistic evolution or Old Earth cosmology combined with a special creation of Adam and Eve in the garden?

For years I have been noncommittal on this issue. I went to a church in college where the pastor had majored in the physical sciences as an undergrad and was well-known locally as a defender of the Young Earth movement. His enthusiasm never quite wore off on me, but he conveyed the issue as monumentally important and indeed elemental to our Christian faith. He often used Jesus' words in the Gospel of John--"If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe me, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things" (3.12)--as a sort of prooftext for this idea that the physical claims of the Bible bear great weight concerning the truth of the metaphysical claims. 

So this was my major input for a significant developmental period of my life, one in which I furthermore did everything within my power to escape science altogether. Holla at a business major. But I could never quite escape the feeling that maybe the Bible didn't need to be read that way, and as much as I respected and still do respect my college pastor I could never quite believe that the world's scientists (even a good number of the Christian ones!) were in a secret cabal dedicated to defeating a literalistic interpretation of Genesis 1. So I did what any lazy person does: kicked the can down the road. 

But lately that tactic has been unsatisfying. It might have something to do with having kids now and the prospect of having these questions addressed to me, not in some abstract way, but by an adorable little blond-haired, blue-eyed boy who is deeply inquisitive about this world and looks to me as the Explainer. And I don't want to be a liar to my son and daughter. 

I was talking about this recently with a friend who is in a similar position. Neither of us wants to teach our kids comfortable, well-intentioned lies, but neither do we want to be needlessly unfaithful to Scripture. If Young Earth is true, in the face of the overwhelming testimony of the scientific community, I don't want to be too cowardly to teach that to my kids. On the other hand, I don't want to teach them Young Earth Creationism because I am too cowardly to square with scientific truth. He and I both sort of feel as if we will never be fully settled on this issue. And so his question to me was how, practically, do we teach it to our kids. And we settled, unsatisfyingly but probably prudently, on teaching the confusion. Teaching our kids that it is OK to not know everything for sure, and that Scripture was not given to us as a universal compendium of knowledge. 

But I still wanted to know more, and I wanted to know where to turn for answers to this question. I remember an old episode of the Simpsons where there is some debate between Creationists and evolutionists and the evolutionist is a Harvard PhD and the Christian debater has a degree in Truthology from Christian University. It might be a caricature, but that is how this debate feels too often. I don't believe that anyone--secular or religious--comes to science without preconceived notions of what they might find or what they wish to believe, but it often seems as if Christians start with Genesis as if it were a science textbook and proceed accordingly. As admirable as dedication to Scripture is, it can lead down some wrong roads and end in needless reductionistic/antagonistic thinking when it is read incorrectly.

And you can buy a book that will tell you just about anything. I remember being in a lecture once with my Renaissance lit professor and a student spouted out some nonsense, I forget even what it was now. The professor asked him where he had come up with such a ludicrous notion. He said with confidence that he had read it in a book. My professor lifted his thespian's brow and said, "Well, you need to read better books."

Which is to say, I am hopeful that I have found a better book on this subject. I am reading Seven Days that Divide the World by the Oxford mathematician and philosopher of science John C. Lennox. It is a popular level book intended for an audience such as myself and hopefully like you: a Christian who is inquisitive about these issues and wonders how it might be possible to reconcile the claims of science with the doctrine of Creation. And I therefore intend to do something that I haven't done in quite some time: read a book slowly and blog my way through it. I hope to learn something by slowing down and hopefully this can be beneficial for you all as well. So join me, if you so desire. We may not lay these questions to rest (what, after all, would be the fun in that?), but I hope our understanding is increased as well as our charity for the "other side," whomever that might be for you in this debate.

On that note, as I close I want to say that while it is easy and common for our broader culture to mock the views of Young Earth Creationists, I find it abhorrent when other believers do so. As I have moved away personally from Young Earth views I have often asked myself what I might be losing out on by heeding the scientific discoveries of the past two centuries (and longer), and it has made me understand the tight-fistedness with which Young Earth believers hold on to their beliefs and sympathize with them (the loss feels real). And I want to profess humility on this issue: I am not a scientist nor will I ever be mistaken for one. I have never even watched The Big Bang Theory. Do I believe that God could have created the world in six literal days, resting on the seventh? 100%, absolutely yes. Do I believe that is what science tells us? Increasingly no. Do I believe that is the mandatory interpretation of the beginning of Genesis? Again, increasingly no. There. Cards. Table. Meet.

More to come.

The Shining, or The Only Thing I Fear is Fear Itself

I don't like scary movies. At all. I never have. I never will. I am intransigent on this score. I remember as a kid--I couldn't have been more than five--being at my Grandpa Leon's house, a man with a bit of a laissez-faire attitude toward what was appropriate for children to watch, and refusing to watch Pet Cemetery with him and my three year-old brother. Tyler, so far as I can remember, was undisturbed. (For those of you who know him this might explain some of his viewing habits and preferences.) I sat in the kitchen coloring pictures with my grandma. I have only seen a handful of honest-to-God scary movies since then. And I have hated them all. 

(It should be noted here briefly that for some reason the zombie genre is exempt from this intense dislike. There is something so implausible about a zombie outbreak that is not shared by, say, Hostel that refuses to allow it too far into my head. Zombie movies to me aren't even scary, so much as gross action movies.)

As such, I have also studiously avoided horror fiction as a genre. I have read Frankenstein and Dracula, but that is about as scary as reading has ever got for me. But for some reason I was looking for something new to read on the Kindle and I searched for Stephen King novels. The Shining was the first hit and it was something like $4, which for 400 pages and many hours of entertainment seemed like a bargain. For some reason, in my mind King has always been a hack writer. Perhaps it has something to do with this clip from an old Family Guy (yes, dear God, I used to watch Family Guy). Or maybe it is because I spent a chunk of one unfortunate afternoon watching The Langoliers. But this was really well-written stuff. And for much of the time, absolutely terrifying.

Was there an episode of Friends where Joey is reading The Shining and he gets so scared that he puts it in the freezer? (Oh, and, yes, dear God, I used to watch Friends.) That is how I felt for a good chunk of this book. "Get this thing away from me. Oh wait, what happens next?" Weird things happened while I was reading the book as well. For example, the family is snowed into the hotel on the 7th of November. The day I read that was the seventh of November. Jack makes his last phone call before the winter sets in to the manager of the hotel who winters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I had just read the scene at my lunch break at work and we got a phone call from a Florida area code. There was no one on the other end of the line. I Googled the area code. 305. Serving residents of the Florida coast from Miami up to Fort Lauderdale. I couldn't read it by myself at night. I held Clara tight, and kissed my babies with vigor. In many ways it was even scarier than the film version. 

For me it has everything to do with pacing. Now again, I am no connoisseur of horror movies, but I understand that where the scariest films get a lot of their mileage is the pacing. You have to build to that big moment of fright, whether a gruesome death, or a scared jump/scream-inducing thing, or a big reveal. That is why sound is such a crucial element to scary movies. All film has to do that. And all film fails to do that as well as a book simply because pacing doesn't translate as well to the medium of the film as it does in the book. When you have a 100 minute long film, you can only spend so many minutes building up the tension around a scene. When you have a 400 page book that takes the better part of 15 hours to read, you can go slow as hell.

And that is just what King does, time and time again in this book. For me the scariest scene was when little Danny was in room 217 and the naked ghost woman comes out of the tub and puts her hands around his throat (cut scene). That sentence I just wrote takes about ten seconds to read and isn't that scary. The scene in the book took several minutes. Several terrifying minutes. When the visualization is all in your head sometimes it becomes more acute; your brain is not passive and has to do more work and is therefore more attuned to what is going on. As her hands curled around his neck I could feel pressure on my own. My heart was racing, my eyes flying down the page to try to catch the resolution or the next thing or anything to break the tension of that lingering moment. 

I hated it, and I loved it. It was very weird. Maybe that is how everyone feels about scary movies and I am just sort of getting a glimpse. Not that I want to dwell in that world any longer. My Netflix queue remains bereft of horror movies. My Kindle is unadorned with further scary books. I want the scary stuff to always scare me on those rare moments I indulge whatever reptilian part of our brain digs that stuff. I don't want to become comfortable with it or desensitized to its effects. I regard the capacity to be a 30 year-old man reduced to that five year-old at the kitchen table with grandma as a net positive in my life. 

Speaking of which, that sounds like a good start to a horror movie. A grown man becomes child-like when confronted by fear, taking solace in the memories of coloring pictures idly at his grandmother's table to escape his Philistine relatives, only it is revealed that the pictures he drew were far more lurid and grotesque than anything in the movies he avoided and the sweet innocent boy was nothing of the sort. Reveal: the man is actual in an insane asylum, having murdered his family with an ice pick and a blowtorch after seeing a dead dog in a cemetery (I still have no idea what that movie is about, clearly), and though his doctors think he is rehabilitated he is getting the urge to kill again. And maybe he can read minds. I don't know yet. And maybe that dead dog talks to him somehow. Or all dead dogs can. I don't know. See Spot Kill, Halloween 2016. You're welcome, America.

Running Log: October 27 - November 9

Well, it happened. It had to at some point, I guess. I have my first running injury. On the first day of this time period, the 27th of October, I took a 10 mile pre-church run. It was freezing cold and given my earlier bad luck with my running tights, I was running in shorts only. My legs felt like leaden weights they were so numb. But I was running fine, accomplishing what I set out to do. With about two or three miles left I started to feel a nagging pain down around my ankle. I figured it wouldn't be a big deal and anyway I needed to get home so I ran it out. Later that day it hurt even worse, right at the Achilles tendon. And it doesn't take a physical therapist to tell someone what a sore Achilles signifies: Achilles tendinosis, a degeneration of the tendon caused by a variety of contributing factors, many of which I am profoundly guilty.

So for the past two weeks my running has been minimal. I took six whole days off immediately after feeling the pain. Since then I have run every other day, never farther than four miles. It is absolutely miserable. To feel as if you are finally getting somewhere and then to have to go back to square one is a terrible feeling. I really need to learn to enjoy lifting weights of riding a bike or something, because my mild depression over not being able to run has led to poor food choices. 

My only consolation is that I am still far enough out from spring races that as long as I recover fairly well from this I should still be able to compete in the spring. I was ahead of pace as far as training goes and my one recurrent problem in running has been peaking before the big races I am training for. Maybe this is my body's way of trying to keep me in line.

If nothing else, there is also a spiritual lesson to be gleaned from this, one that is no less true for its proverbiality: Our bodies break down and fail, and where I need to invest most is not in my physical accomplishments but my spiritual well-being and ambitions. A good lesson, always timely, always necessary.

To a few more weeks of slowly run and slowly accumulated miles.  

Hemingway & Style

My parents were in Paris a few weeks ago and I asked them to stop at Shakespeare & Company, the famous English book store on the Left Bank. I had been to the location in New York and wanted a book from the Paris location as well. My mom bought me a new copy of The Sun Also Rises, plus a collection of Shakespeare's sonnets and narrative poems. Well done, mom.

I went through a Hemingway phase when I first got into literature six years ago in El Paso. I read The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and every story in the Collected Short Stories in about a six month time-frame. Which is a lot of Hemingway. And he connected with 23 year-old Toby in a far different way than he did the 29 year-old Toby who just reread The Sun Also Rises. When I was younger it was easier to see the adventure to the tales: the bull-fighting, the war-time ambulance-driving, the freedom-fighting, the romance of the abundant wine in the Spanish or French cafes, and to gloss over the despair running through every book. These were the works, after all, of a man who committed suicide, a man in anguish over the loss of religion and the comfort it brings. I still enjoy reading Hemingway, but it didn't consume me the way it did the first time around when I stayed up late at night to read through his corpus. 

Since that first flurry of reading I have read some criticism of Hemingway, criticism that seems to focus on his prose first, those short declarative sentences he is famous for writing. Here is an example:

“The fiesta was really started. It kept up day and night for seven days. The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up, the noise went on. The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta. Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences. It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta. All during the fiesta you had the feeling, even when it was quiet, that you had to shout out any remark to make it heard. It was the same feeling about any action. It was a fiesta and it went on for seven days.” (p 142)

I choose this paragraph, though it could really be almost any other, as quintessentially Hemingway. Hemingway catches a lot of flack for his terse sentence structure. And it can be funny, especially when read out loud. Corey Stoll, playing Papa in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, nailed the cadence of his speech quite well, as well as the bravado. But there is something arresting about it at the same time.

For one, it is easy to follow. Some authors seem to consider inscrutability as a hallmark of good prose, but Hemingway went for intelligibility. For another, it lays bare the events being described. You might not care to know how many pesetas Jake Barnes paid each night for a hotel room, but you will know and you will know that he thought it too much to pay. So much so that he decided to make up the difference by binging on the complementary house wine. In the excerpt above, Hemingway builds up nicely from the length and atmosphere of the fiesta of Pamplona to the effect it has on the speech and actions of the characters. The seven day party disbands the group, might destroy a marriage, ends in drunkenness and fisticuffs and regret. At the beginning of the paragraph a seven day fiesta sounds like a hell of a time. By the end, you just want the thing to be over already. Enough of the shouting.

Yet another attraction to me of the style is the almost poetic nature it can take. I chose the above excerpt for that very reason. The cadence you fall into while reading that paragraph sounds very much like a poem, unrhymed of course and with more than a hint of Homeric influence. One of my favorite poems of all time is Psalm 8, which begins and ends “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.” We go on a journey in the meantime and when the line is repeated at the end it has new emphasis. Hemingway’s style can provide the same effect as that of the Psalmist, though to a different degree of course. And it can be quite lovely.

So give Papa a break, critics. His style may not be widespread and might have lost our to complex word webs, but he was a way better writer than you are and he understood what he was doing. And he was very good at what he did. And true and brave.

Running Log: October 20th - October 26th

This week in training. . . 

October 20th:

No running. There were certain areas of my body that bore the brunt of my efforts on the long run the day before which required a day of tender care before returning to the road.

October 21st:

5 miles, 40 minutes: Back from the day off to the let the chafing heal. The human body is really something: Saturday I felt like death and had to waddle around for the rest of the day. Sunday I felt mostly fine. Monday I felt terrific. The legs were a little stiff but I opened up at the end.

October 22nd: 

4 miles, 30 minutes: Ran fast today. Mostly unplanned. I run at 5:30 and it is very dark and very unusual to see another person. But this morning I rounded the corner on to another street and there on the other side of the wide road was another runner who had been running straight. And he was running fast. So I beared down a little more than normal to put some distance between us. I felt great. The weather has turned back to gorgeous fall days. It was in the 40s when I ran this morning. Absolutely perfect running weather. I have always said that my favorite conditions require running in shorts, a t-shirt, and with gloves on my hands. I have had two of those days in a row now.

October 23rd:

5.5-6 miles, 45ish minutes: Boy, it will be nice when I have more accurate metrics on these runs. But part of me is convinced that going sans technology is a good thing for my running right now. I am not running to a distance or speed which is probably safer when you are building a base. In any event, today felt good again. Nothing new to report.

October 24th:

No run. Planned day off. My instinct is to run every day, but I need to pace myself. Plus, I got to sleep in until 6. Scandalous. 

October 25th:

4 miles, 32 minutes: Clara worked today which means I need to finish my run by 6:15 so I can shower before she leaves. Cold, crisp morning. Cold and uncomfortable for the first ten minutes or so but then the body adjusted nicely. Saw a gaggle of runners from the university doing some morning easy running. Some mornings the accountability of a partner would be nice. Ran fine, just not much pop.

October 26th:

4 miles running, 10 miles biking: Clara worked today which pushed off my long run for the week to Sunday. I went to the Y with the kids in the morning and tried to run on a treadmill. I forgot how terrible they are. Just awful. I would rather run in the coldest cold than on a treadmill. I ran four miles and then rode a stationary bike. I just can't bring myself to lift weights. People talk about running being boring, but all that weightlifters do is pick something up and put it right back down where they got it. I cranked up the resistance on the bike and let the quads burn.

Weekly Total: 22.5 miles

Ghosts Trying to Hold the World

Any parent in the world will easily relate to the following:

"Parents in love with their kids are all amnesiacs, trying to remember, trying to cherish moments, ghosts trying to hold the world. Being mortals, having a finite mind when surrounded by joy that is perpetually rolling back into the rear view is like always having something important on the tips of our tongues, something on the tips of our fingers, always slipping away, always ducking our embrace.

No matter how many pictures we take, no matter how many scrapbooks we make, no matter how many moments we invade with a rolling camera, we will die. We will vanish. We cannot grab and hold. We cannot smuggle things out with us through death. . .

But this shouldn’t inspire melancholy; it should only tinge the sweet with the bitter. Don’t resent the moments simply because they cannot be frozen. Taste them. Savor them. Give thanks for that daily bread. Manna doesn’t keep overnight. More will come in the morning."

N.D. Wilson, Death by Living (107)

I constantly find myself trying to capture moments with Owen and Eleanor. Trying to remember the first time they did this or that thing (the feeling is more intense with Owen since he is older and therefore more active). Yesterday in the afternoon I was putting my shoes on to go out to the backyard and play with him. He already had his shoes on so he ran out back without me. I was watching through the open back door and he took off running after our chickens who had escaped their enclosure. When we first moved into this house and took over care of the chickens he loved to chase them across the yard. He had this sort of manic glee in his laugh as he chased them up and down the yard. It was cute, but not good. Poor girls get flustered easily. I was about to holler at him to stop when I realized what he was doing. He wasn’t chasing them arbitrarily for some sort of sadistic pleasure; he was putting them back in their enclosure. Just like daddy does. He had his arms out to try and corral them and ran down each one and forced them back to the fenced-in area. He shut the gate and grabbed the brick that we prop against it to keep it shut. By the time I got outside the job was done and he was standing proudly asking to play football. He wanted us to have the yard to ourselves.

Even as I write this story, with the event barely 24 hours past I know I am missing things. I know I have lost some of the special grace of that moment. The way he moved, the way the sun slanted into our yard, the look of accomplishment, that perfect running stride.

Those moments proliferate when you are a parent. And you can’t keep hold of them. But you are constantly moving forward into a new moment. This morning he came downstairs and roared at me like a lion (a ferocious lion) because that scares me. Then he said “Hi, beautiful” to his sister and bent over and kissed her. 

"When the dew fell upon the camp in the night, the manna fell with it." 

His mercies are new every morning.

Running Log: October 13th-October 19th

I thought this would be a good idea as far as accountability goes. I feel like for the first time since we left El Paso my running is getting to a place where not only am I not ashamed of how I am running, but it has also regained some centrality to my life. To be a good runner you have to think of yourself as a runner. Otherwise you are just someone trying to keep the love handles at bay. So I thought I would post a weekly training schedule, including some brief thoughts on how I ran and what I can improve on moving forward. All of my distances are estimated at this point. Christmas money will bring a new GPS watch and more accurate data.

So, here it goes:

October 13th

No run today, though an eight hour car ride with two small children is an endurance event in its own right. We were in Fort Collins for a friend's wedding and the weekend included almost no exercise, save for the shock to my heart of the first (two or so) Rio margaritas in many years.

October 14th

5 miles, 40 minutes: Back at it on a Monday morning. So strange to be running in such pitch blackness all of the time. Felt rested and fresh after a weekend off. Springy stride, good even pace.

October 15th

4-1/2 miles, 35 minutes: No bathroom break, an anomaly in my early morning runs, allowed me to stretch out a bit farther away from the house. Beautiful weather.

October 16th

No run. Mama worked and I lost the willpower to get out of my comfortable bed at 5 a.m.

October 17th

5 miles, 40 minutes: Cold, cold, cold. First day wearing running tights. Tears in my eyes from the cold. And it wasn't even that cold. It is going to be a long winter.

October 18th

No run. Planned day off to rest for the Saturday long run.

October 19th

2-1/2 hours. 18-19 miles. This was easily the longest run I have done since the 50k I did in May of 2010 which, for those keeping track, was a long damn time ago. In short, I felt fantastic. I left the house at 7 and ran in the dark for nearly an hour until the sun came up. When it did I was several miles east of town and turned south down a dirt road. The sun was rising to my left and to my right was the full moon. It was perfect. Ecstatic. One of those running moments where you don't feel like you are running. I was just running and smiling and singing. Praising God and soaking in the beauty.

Which, unfortunately, didn't last forever. The following paragraph will relate in some anatomical detail the perils of long distance running. Proceed with caution. I haven't worn running tights very often and never for a long run. In El Paso I rarely ran before work because I didn't come home to kids so I would just go after work and it would be warm enough to wear shorts because, desert. On long run weekends it might be cold when I started, but it would be in the 60s by the time I finished. So I just had cold legs for the first hour or so and was comfortable the rest of the time. This past Saturday it was sub-freezing when I started (we got our first snow on Friday) and wouldn't warm up much as I trucked on. So I wore tights, which, again, I had never done for longer than 5 or 6 miles. Being a novice to tights I neglected to wear underwear beneath them, thinking that the elastic would work fine. Fifteen miles later it felt as if someone had taken sandpaper to my nether region. I was about to cry. I stopped on the side of the road in some trees and removed my tights and ran commando with my high school gym shorts the rest of the way. Which didn't help a great deal. The damage had been done. I ran until I was about a mile from home and then walked the rest of the way in awkward duck fashion.

But instead of dwelling on the negative, I will say that despite the third degree burns on my special parts this was the best run I have had in years. I felt great. Even when the injury was apparent I was still smiling. It felt so great to be out there. Before I about curled up in a ball on the trail I was thinking of extending my run to three hours. I never have done that in the past--made a long run longer. A wonderful feeling.

Weekly Totals: 33.5 miles, 265 minutes

Praying With Owen

Every night after we have finished getting Owen ready for bed I hold him and both mom and I sing a song to him and then I pray before we put him into bed. The songs are generally some old hymn. I used to think that he probably wasn’t retaining much of what we sang to him, but then one night I stopped while singing a line from “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” and he finished it for me. Since then I like to pause in my singing to hear him chime in. And then we pray.

It is interesting praying with a two year old because he has no idea about who or what God is except that which we have given him through the stories we read him, the songs we sing him, and the way we pray when we tuck him at night. It is a sobering thought. And given how much he picks up on the words we use and the way we use them, it really means that I can’t just do this by rote unless I want him to think that is what prayer is. (Cute sidenote: whenever he hurts himself Clara has taught him to pray for God to heal his pain. So he will bonk his head and come up to me crying “God heal it.” God may heal it, but daddy still has to kiss it.)

We always pray and thank God for everything good he has given us and ask him to help us acknowledge all of the blessings that we routinely overlook. We ask him to bless Ellie and help us figure her out and help her to grow up big and strong; we thank him for mommy and how hard she works for us and how patient she is with Owen and Ellie and how much she loves us; we thank him for daddy’s job and ask him that he would guide daddy on what we should do in the future.

But the crux of my prayer is when I pray for him. I want him to know what my desires are for his life. What I consider to be important to his future and his happiness. I begin by thanking God profusely for the chance to be the father of this little boy, for what a joy and grace he is to me, and just how fun it is to play with him and read with him and eat popcorn and watch football with him. And then I pray that God would save him and pour out his grace upon Owen’s life and that my boy would grow up to give glory to God and treasure God in all things. When I pray for his character I pray that God would make him strong and humble (he used to laugh whenever I said the word humble and repeat it), someone who is soft-hearted but firm in his convictions, someone who lives a life of love for the people around him, and lays his life down for his friends and gives them life by his sacrifice.

I pray other things on other nights, but those are the things that are always there. That is what I want for my son. That is my vision for his life. And as I have prayed those things night after night for the past several months, it has become clear to me that when I am praying for my son I am praying for myself. I don’t mean this in a self-centered way. I very much am praying for Owen at night. What I do mean is that in order for these prayers to come true I need to model a lot of this stuff for my son. If I want him to be strong and humble, then I need to show him what a strong and humble man looks like. If I want him to have a soft-heart but firm convictions I need to orient my life in the same way. That is what I mean when I say that when I am praying for my son I am praying for myself. I am asking that God would make me that way so I can show it to him, not because it will save him, but that God may use my example to call Owen from darkness into light and from death to life.

Parenting is hard regardless of how you do it; praying those types of prayers for your kids only ups the ante as far as I am concerned. I am the most influential person in my son’s life and the question I confront every day is how I will use that influence. And by God’s grace it will be doing my part to help my requests to God become the reality of my son’s life.