We All have Stories

Not sure how all of this fits together, or if it does, but here it is anyway …

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It’s a curious thing, this business of living. We go through each day in a whirl, triaging the things that need to be done until we fall in bed at night with most of our list still waiting for us. We focus on the individual minutes, and sometimes there are so many things staring us in the face that we barely realize we’re stringing those individual minutes into a life that means something. We look up and a week has passed, a month, another month, and we’re not sure where it went or how we’re any different now than when it started.

 

That’s why we have to be purposeful in our moments — because they are what make up our lives. We can’t have a grand plan for our lives and then live as if that plan doesn’t exist each day. The plan is in the details.

 

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In those moments, we’re living our stories. We all have them, whether we think we do or not. Many people tend to think they’re not interesting, that they have nothing to offer, that they don’t have a story.

 

I beg to differ. And here’s why:

 

Imago Dei. The image of God. It’s in all of us, and it expresses itself in a multitude of ways. None of us are boring, none of us are ordinary, none of us are the same. We all have stories.

 

Especially as Christians. We are the stars that Abraham saw flung across the sky. We are his descendants in Christ, and God has purposes for his glory that transcend each one of us, but that use us to display that glory.

 

Walk into a church, any church — say, our church — and point someone out. If we don’t know their story, we can find out. It’s there, you just have to dig sometimes. You never know what you’re going to find when you peel back the layers.

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Here is a young mother who lost her baby boy at 37 weeks. She’s displaying grace and courage and salvation in the face of heartbreaking loss, and we’re all better for it. That’s her story for now. She will have others.

 

Here is a young man, engaged to be married, waiting for his fiancee’s visa to come through so they can begin their life together. It’s just a piece of paper, but it’s an important piece. With it comes happiness. Without it, there is longing.

 

Here is one of the most cheerful men you’ve ever met. He runs a plumbing and heating company and provides jobs for guys who need them — he’s like a one-man employment agency. He gets his hands dirty, he’ll answer your random plumbing questions and he does it all with a smile. And then he likes to preach the glory of God on the weekends.

 

Here is a mom with three little boys. Here’s another one with four little girls. And they’re not alone. Dozens of young families are training, growing, struggling, living, reaching for the ideal of what they think they’re supposed to be. And it’s hard. Sometimes desperately so. But ask any of them and they’ll tell you it’s worth it, that these small, eternal lives with runny noses, dirty diapers and constant questions are motivation enough.

 

Here is a pastor with a brilliant mind and a booming voice. He could be off in an ivory tower, but he’s here, using his heart of compassion to drum theology in the lives of young men so they can turn it into practical application in the lives of their future church members. And for fun, he coaches soccer. From eschatology to how to spread the field, he’s got you covered.

 

Here is an older couple with silver hair. They’re retired, but far from useless. They’re experts at providing rides for people who need it in the service of God’s kingdom. And he hiked the entired Appalachian Trail — who knew? He’s got a journal in enormous three-ring binders to prove it.

 

Here is a family — several families, in fact — who have moved from various states to pursue God’s call in their lives. They’ve sold houses, taken their kids out of school, packed up all their belongings into a truck and then unpacked them in an unfamiliar house. They’re out of their comfort zones, but they’re following God.

 

Here is a young father. He works hard by day and does graphic design — for websites, books, billboards — by night, usually late. And he’s good, really good. He should be paid for doing this full-time. Maybe someday. His wife just spent three weeks in a medical clinic in another state, learning to manage the pain and fatigue brought on by a disease. This after several surgeries to fix a different physical problem. And that after their newborn son endured surgery after surgery of his own so he could, you know, breathe. And they endure each day, each trial with hope.

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There are many more stories to tell. Some are inspiring, some are incredibly hard. We all have stories, and they all point to God and his gospel. We live, work, move and breathe only by his grace. We talk, we celebrate, we dream, we grieve with hope, we press on because of Him.

 

What’s your story?

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Crossword Puzzle Trickery

All kinds of goodness in today’s entry in the Writer’s Alamanac:

It’s the birthday of the world’s only academically accredited enigmatologist, Will Shortz, (books by this author) born on an Arabian horse farm in Crawfordsville, Indiana (1952). He’s the current crossword editor of The New York Times, the puzzle master of NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, and the author or editor of dozens of books.

Shortz sold his first puzzle to a magazine when he was 14 years old, and within a couple years, he was a regular contributor to puzzle publications. In college, he designed his own degree program in enigmatology, which he describes: “Literally, it’s the study of riddles, but at Indiana I defined it as the study of puzzles.” He drew himself up an undergraduate curriculum of classes in English, math, philosophy, journalism, and linguistics, and wrote a thesis on the history of American word puzzles before 1860. He went to law school, thinking he’d work for 10 years and earn a bunch of money so that he could pursue his avocation of puzzlemaking.

But after graduating from law school, he skipped out on taking the bar exam and went straight into enigmatology, earning a living by creating puzzles for publications like Penny Press and Games magazines. In 1993, he became the crossword puzzle editor for The New York Times, only the fourth person to hold that position in the newspaper’s history. He has made some changes to the Times puzzle page in his 16 years of editorship: The crossword puzzles now have constructor bylines (before the contributors weren’t acknowledged), and the puzzles contain more references to contemporary pop culture (stuff like rock and roll and what’s on television). Puzzles also now have more tricks and ambiguities, he said. He has also “increased the slope of difficult further,” as he claims, between the daily puzzles so that Mondays are slightly easier than before he took over — while Friday and Saturday crosswords are even harder than they used to be. He said that the idea is “to have something for everyone, both beginners and veterans.”

His all-time favorite crossword clue is “It might turn into a different story,” with the answer “SPIRALSTAIRCASE.”

His favorite crossword puzzle is the one that was printed on Election Day 1996, designed by Jeremiah Farrell. The puzzle had two different correct solutions with the same set of clues. The clue whose answer formed one of the middle rows across read, “Lead story in tomorrow’s newspaper.” The answer seemed to be CLINTON ELECTED, but Jeremiah Farrell had carefully constructed ambiguity in all of the crossing clues, so that the answer to that middle-across clue could also be “BOB DOLE ELECTED.” Either answer worked perfectly in the puzzle.

The first downward crossing clue, for instance, was “Black Halloween animal.” Either “bat” or “cat” would be correct, with the C for the start of CLINTON or the B for the start of BOB DOLE. Will Shortz later said, “It was the most amazing crossword I’ve ever seen. As soon as it appeared, my telephone started ringing. Most people said, “How dare you presume that Clinton will win!” And the people who filled in BOB DOLE thought we’d made a whopper of a mistake!”

More than 30 years ago (in 1978), Shortz founded the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, an event he still directs. Will Shortz and the Tournament were the subjects of a 2006 documentary by Patrick Creadon, called Wordplay. The film also featured a string of prominent puzzle-solvers, like Bill Clinton, Ken Burns, Jon Stewart, and the Indigo Girls.

When asked why people are so drawn to puzzles, Shortz said, “We’re faced with puzzles every day in life. What’s the fastest way to run some errands? What’s the lowest price we can get on home repair? Most problems we’re faced with, we just do the best we can — we muddle through. We never know if it’s the best solution or not. With a human-made puzzle, when you answer the challenge, you know you have a perfect solution. It’s satisfying.”

Here are a couple of the many brain-teasers that Will Shortz has come up with:

1) What part of the body can be spelled by rearranging the letters of the word “ELATION”?
2) Change one letter of the word SHUFFLE to make something to eat.

1) Answer: Toenail

2) Answer: Soufflé

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The Rundown

–From the “this doesn’t pass the common sense test” department:

Plaxico Burress carries a gun into a nightclub, accidentally shoots himself and is sentenced to two years in jail.

Dante Stallworth kills a man while driving drunk and serves 24 days of a 30-day prison sentence.

Yeah.

–Whole Foods’ CEO John Mackey wrote an editorial last week criticizing President Obama’s health care plan and offering a few alternative (and conservative!) suggestions. His customers are now in a uproar — they can’t believe that the CEO of a business frequented by many liberals would publically support a conservative position. They’re talking about boycotts, never shopping there again, etc.

Really? You’re going to abandon your shopping habits — just like that — because of the policy position of a guy you probably couldn’t even name last week?

 –The U.S. Census Bureau just announced that in the 2010 census, they will not count Mormon missionaries serving overseas. They will, however, be counting military and federal employees on duty across the world.

They say that it’s difficult to get accurate counts of Americans abroad, but I’m sure the Mormon church has pretty good records of who is serving where. I’m not even Mormon, but this doesn’t seem quite right.

Don’t know about missionaries from other denominations. The SBC has a bunch of missionaries serving across the world. Probably shouldn’t count them either. They’re not actually in town when the count is down, so we’ll just cross them off the list.

–I’m glad men like this are teaching future pastors and missionaries, even if those missionaries don’t count.

–Speaking of the census, why hire fraudulent groups like ACORN to do it? We’ve already got an organized system of visiting every address in America every day. It’s called the United States Post Office.

Surely we can adapt the USPS to meet the needs of the census. Brilliant idea. (First heard it from Glenn Beck, I think. Side note: my old boss’ name is Beck Glenn.) But again, makes too much sense to ever happen …

–Funny blog post and video about two kids whose parents bought a backyard pool at K-Mart that turned out to be not quite as advertised … classic stuff.

 

Pitino

I liked Rick Pitino. Great coach, great style of play, motivational leader.

But apparently not a good role model. I would have sent my son to play for him. Not anymore, not on the heels of the revelation that he got drunk one night at a restaurant six years ago and had sex with a woman he had just met. She later became pregnant and he gave her money for “health insurance” — when he knew she was going to get an abortion.

This is not a man I want my son to be around. He says things like, “If you tell the truth, the problem becomes part of the past. If you lie, it become part of your future.” Which is true, as far as it goes, but the only reason he’s talking about it now is that he got caught. Otherwise, he would have continued lying about it.

The president of U of L and the AD should send him packing. Immediately. There is a clause in Pitino’s contract that allows him to be fired for moral depravity. Um, yeah, this qualifies.

But they’ll stand behind him, say they support him and we need to move forward, blah blah blah. Why? Because he wins games. If his record last year had been 5-31 instead of 31-5, he’d already be gone.

One other note. Where does he find his assistants and how much are they paid? One of them stuck around (to keep watch?) while Pitino was having sex after hours in the restaurant. Another let Pitino and Karen Sypher meet secretly at his condo so Pitino could pay her off. And then he later married her. Yeah.

Pitino was a great coach at Kentucky. He has done well at U of L. He’d have been on the list of my favorite coaches. And sure, he can find forgiveness. But he doesn’t need to be coaching young men.

The honorable way out would have been to meet with his team, tell them what he’d done, ask their forgiveness, resign and go home to work full-time on repairing his marriage and family. He could afford it.

I Wrote a Book

So I should probably let you know that I wrote a book. Two, in fact. Here they are:

                      

Here’s how it happened: sometime in the fall of 2007 (I think), I was looking for freelance writing jobs online. Happened across an ad for someone to write biographies of biblical figures. Figured I could do that — turns out, they agreed, and the books were published a couple of months ago.

The two books are part of a series called “Money at Its Best: Millionaires of the Old Testament.” They’re done by an educational publishing company in Pennsylvania called Mason Crest Publishers.  Here’s what their website says about the series:

The purpose of the series Money at its Best: Millionaires of the Bible is to examine the lives of key figures from Biblical history, showing how these people blended their faith in God with their wealth or privileged positions in order to make a difference in the lives of others. Each book in this series weaves stories from the Bible with legends (for) a plausible account of the subject’s life. These portraits are fleshed out by 35 to 60 full-color illustrations, including pictures of or folk tales, other scriptural sources, and modern archaeological research to create artifacts and paintings of religious scenes from Rembrandt, Michaelangelo, and other great artists. Each book includes resources for further study, as well as a detailed index.

The complete series includes 12 books — other figures include Abraham and Sarah, Daniel, David, Esther, Job, Moses, Noah, Sampson and Solomon. They’re aimed at middle school-level readers and higher.

Each book took two or three months to write. Lots of research, lots of late nights, lots of patience from my wife. Learned a ton. Loved being immersed in the lives of God’s chosen people, who weren’t all they were cracked up to be — just like us. Stumbled upon a cool name for my blog (the story can come later). Loved doing it, can’t wait to do it again.

The publishers did a great job making the books look good. Lots of cool design and graphics.

So there ya go. A couple of books with my name on them. Who’d a thunk it? Not that I have any particular ability on my own — as the song says, “Thy mercy, my God, is the theme of my song.”

If you want to see them on a real website to make sure I’m not just pulling your leg, check here and here. They’re also on Amazon — here and here. There’s no danger of them cracking the best seller list. Jacob has no ranking, while Joseph is rocketing up Amazon’s list at #8,059,841.

–End of self-promotion. You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.–

How to Make Golf Exciting

Since the U.S. Open is in a rain delay, here’s how to make it more exciting on television: put basketball announcers in the broadcast booth. You gotta go watch this — it’s hilarious (sorry, can’t get the embed to work):

How to Make Golf Exciting

Pulitzer Prizes

From today’s Writer’s Almanac:

It was on this day in 1917 that the first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded. Here are some things you might not have known about Pulitzer Prizes:

1. They’re announced each year in April and then awarded at Columbia University in May, during a luncheon at the campus library.
2. Each Pulitzer Prize winner receives a $10,000 award and a certificate, except in the Public Service category, where the winner is given a gold medal. Only a newspaper, not an individual, can receive the Public Service prize for journalism.
3. There are 21 Pulitzer categories. Two-thirds of the prizes (14) revolve around journalism. There are six for letters and drama (fiction, drama, history, biography, poetry, and general nonfiction), and there is one prize given for music.
4. The Pulitzer Prize for fiction used to be called the Pulitzer Prize for the novel. The name was changed in 1948.
5. Poet Robert Frost won the Pulitzer Prize four times. Playwright Eugene O’Neill also won four Pulitzer Prizes.
6. The Pulitzer Prize is a very American award. Only U.S. citizens are eligible for the non-journalism Prizes. The exception to this is in the history category: a non-American can win the Pulitzer Prize if he or she wrote a book about the history of the United States. Foreign journalists can win Pulitzers if they write for a newspaper published in the United States.
7. The New York Times holds the all-time record for number of Pulitzer Prizes received. The paper has collectively won 101 Pulitzers.
8. Newspapers generally nominate themselves for Pulitzer Prizes. The fee for each entry is $50, and the material that the newspaper wants the prize board to consider must be accompanied by an entry form. An entry has to fit into one of the 21 categories; it can’t be submitted on the grounds that it is just generally good. To be eligible, a paper must be published in the U.S. at least weekly.
9. In 2009, for the first time, online-only news organizations were eligible for the Pulitzer. Before, it was restricted to print publications.
10. Decisions about prize winners are made by the Pulitzer board in secret. Afterward, the board does not publicly discuss or defend its decisions.

Sowell on Sotamayor

Thomas Sowell has been writing about the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. He has an incisive way of cutting through the clutter and media spin and making you think about the heart of the issues. A couple of quotes:

It is one of the signs of our times that so many in the media are focusing on the life story of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court of the United States.

You might think that this was some kind of popularity contest, instead of a weighty decision about someone whose impact on the fundamental law of the nation will extend for decades after Barack Obama has come and gone.

Much is being made of the fact that Sonia Sotomayor had to struggle to rise in the world. But stop and think.

If you were going to have open heart surgery, would you want to be operated on by a surgeon who was chosen because he had to struggle to get where he is or by the best surgeon you could find– even if he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had every advantage that money and social position could offer?

And this:

The clever people in the media and elsewhere are saying that “inevitably” one’s background influences how one feels about issues. Even if that were true, judges are not supposed to decide cases based on their personal feelings.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that he “loathed” many of the people in whose favor he voted on the Supreme Court. Obviously, he had feelings. But he also had the good sense and integrity to rule on the basis of the law, not his feelings.

Laws are made for the benefit of the citizens, not for the self-indulgences of judges. Making excuses for such self-indulgences and calling them “inevitable” is part of the cleverness that has eroded the rule of law and undermined respect for the law …

It would be considered a disgrace if an umpire in a baseball game let his “empathy” determine whether a pitch was called a ball or strike. Surely we should accept nothing less from a judge.

You can read all of his columns here. Highly recommended.

Twitter and Worship

As the popularity of Twitter explodes, people are using it everywhere — including during worship, often with the encouragement of their pastors.

While Twitter is cool (you can follow me here) when used correctly, that doesn’t include during worship. I can’t explain it any better than Josh Harris did, with agreement and expansion from John Piper. From Piper:

… we think you should use Twitter before and after corporate worship to say what you take in and take out. But when you are in corporate worship, Worship! There is a difference between communion with God and commenting on communion with God.

Don’t tweet while having sex. Don’t tweet while praying with the dying. Don’t tweet when your wife is telling you about the kids. There’s a season for everything. Multitasking only makes sense when none of the tasks requires heart-engaged, loving attention.

… let’s pursue God with all our might and focus during corporate worship. Then tell the world what God did. If it’s God’s power, it can wait an hour.

Amen.

Jesus According to Dan Brown

Angels and Demons, in movie theaters now, is the latest movie based on Dan Brown’s books. The first, of course, was The DaVinci Code, which was, to put it mildly, fairly popular.

Angels and Demons is in the same vein as the first book, focusing on a dark secret within the Catholic church that symbologist Robert Langdon desperately tries to uncover as he races through a series of thrilling events. It’s captivating reading, sweeping you up into fascinating history and hidden conspiracies.

It’s also seductively wrong, as Ross Douthat writes in today’s New York Times. He nails the problem with the book and with religion today:

In the Brownian worldview, all religions — even Roman Catholicism — have the potential to be wonderful, so long as we can get over the idea that any one of them might be particularly true. It’s a message perfectly tailored for 21st-century America, where the most important religious trend is neither swelling unbelief nor rising fundamentalism, but the emergence of a generalized “religiousness” detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition.

Yep. Religion is great, as long as it doesn’t have to do with sin and blood and righteousness. The same do-it-yourself mentality that works well on home repairs isn’t so effective when it comes to your eternal fate:

polls … reveal the growth of do-it-yourself spirituality, with traditional religion’s dogmas and moral requirements shorn away. The same trend is at work within organized faiths as well, where both liberal and conservative believers often encounter a God who’s too busy validating their particular version of the American Dream to raise a peep about, say, how much money they’re making or how many times they’ve been married.

Here’s the crux of the issue — a 21st century Jesus who fits neatly into your life, or the Jesus portrayed in the Gospel accounts:

These are Dan Brown’s kind of readers. Piggybacking on the fascination with lost gospels and alternative Christianities, he serves up a Jesus who’s a thoroughly modern sort of messiah — sexy, worldly, and Goddess-worshiping, with a wife and kids, a house in the Galilean suburbs, and no delusions about his own divinity.

But the success of this message — which also shows up in the work of Brown’s many thriller-writing imitators — can’t be separated from its dishonesty. The “secret” history of Christendom that unspools in “The Da Vinci Code” is false from start to finish. The lost gospels are real enough, but they neither confirm the portrait of Christ that Brown is peddling — they’re far, far weirder than that — nor provide a persuasive alternative to the New Testament account.

Money quote:

The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — jealous, demanding, apocalyptic — may not be congenial to contemporary sensibilities, but he’s the only historically-plausible Jesus there is.

For millions of readers, Brown’s novels have helped smooth over the tension between ancient Christianity and modern American faith. But the tension endures. You can have Jesus or Dan Brown. But you can’t have both.