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Where I’ve Been – Travel Brain
46 cities in 11 countriesAsiaSouth Korea: SeoulThailand: BangkokThailand: Chiang MaiEuropeBelgium: BrusselsFrance: Le HavreFrance: NiceFrance: ParisGermany: BerlinGermany: DresdenGermany: ErlangenGermany: Frankfurt am MainGermany: HardheimGermany: MarktheidenfeldGermany: MunichGermany: NurnbergGermany: TauberbischofsheimGermany: WertheimHoly See (Vatican City): Vatican CityItaly: RomeItaly: VeniceLuxembourg: LuxembourgNetherlands: AmsterdamUnited Kingdom: LondonNorth AmericaUnited States: Ann ArborUnited States: AnnistonUnited States: AustinUnited States: CelinaUnited States: CherokeeUnited States: ClevelandUnited States: ColumbusUnited States: GettysburgUnited States: JasperUnited States: MandanUnited States: MetairieUnited States: MiamiUnited States: NashvilleUnited States: New OrleansUnited States: Oil CityUnited States: PittsburghUnited States: RedmondUnited States: RestonUnited States: San FranciscoUnited States: San JoseUnited States: SeattleUnited States: ShermanUnited States: Washington
Irony Overload
So I saw this link earlier today, and was a bit skeptical. Wouldn’t you be? Come on. “Jackboot to the throat?” Really? Are we back to “jackbooted thugs” again? Then the next part: “FDA claims citizens have no right of access to certain foods.” That certainly made me sit up and think. It’s an interesting claim. Let’s see what there is to it. Read more
Of Christians and Mathematics
I received this tweeted response to my last post:
halm: @bobmueller ah, so either I am not a Christian, or you haven’t mastered arithmetic.
@halm is my brother, and his comment indicates that I probably need to better explain myself.
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Closing a Church
The church we used to attend is closing this week. I know it’s not a surprise to anyone who attended that church. Regular attendance a year ago was in the 20s, and 9 of them had the same last name I do. When we left last fall to answer my wife’s call to another local Nazarene congregation, I worried that New Life would close soon.
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Chester
What is it that drives us to anthropomorphize our pets? I suppose to some degree it’s human nature. We’ve been doing it for thousands of years, really. Many of Aesop’s fables revolved around talking animals. Most recently, think of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, or even Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit.
I wonder about that today because of a decision my wife and I made today. Read more
Expanding My Horizons
Now that I’ve finished a first draft on my first novel, I’m working on outlining the second. As the first passes around to a few readers, and the plot develops in the second, I’ve become concerned about the track I seem to be following. Don’t Stop Believin’ wanders through the adult entertainment industry – exotic dancing. Sad Girl is heading down an even darker path: human trafficking. Are these really topics that belong in Christian fiction, I asked myself, several times. Am I really glorifying God?
I posed a version of that question to my friend/editor Joy, and she pointed me to several authors: Brandilyn Collins, Dee Henderson, Terri Blackstock, among others. I’ve read a few of Dee’s works, and just finished Terri’s Cape Refuge (and liked it a lot). Dee’s O’Malley series involves a violent stalker. Cape Refuge opens with a double murder. Collins writes Christian suspense. Can I do this?
Brandilyn had a great post the other day about a great fan letter, which in turn linked to a not-so-great fan letter, and that one was the one that really moved me. It was especially heartening to get an encouraging comment from Brandilyn on Facebook.
So I’ve been reading Brandilyn’s blog on a regular basis lately, and today there was a link to Mike Duran’s excellent blog, Decomposing. He’s got some great posts about some topics I’ve really been struggling with, so I’ve got some reading to do. Between his and Brandilyn’s blog, and the AFCW reading lists (social issues and author comparison, I’ve got a lot of reading to do.
Decisions, Decisions
I’ve been trying to outline my latest book. I want to develop “The Sad Girl” into a full-length novel, because I think it will be a good story. But it’s taken a very dark turn at the moment. I’m not above writing a dark story about an ugly topic, but at the moment, I haven’t found a Christian aspect to the story.
Don’t Stop Believin has a strong religious story arc, despite the adult entertainment background. One of the main characters learns about God’s love for her, and then make some difficult decisions about how to deal with the changes salvation brings into her life. Even if a Christian publisher won’t accept it as-is, I think it could be re-written without too much difficulty into an acceptable story.
I haven’t found that angle yet for Sad Girl yet. But I have some time ago determined that I’m not going to write a book that doesn’t glorify God in some way so I need to pay attention to that as I continue the outlining process. I’m still learning about the main character, named Danny Cumberland, and his girlfriend Teresa Chadwick, so maybe there are some things they haven’t told me about themselves yet. I hope so. It’s disconcerting to think about putting so much effort into a story that I won’t be able to write.
Of Icons and Idols
Researchers in Jerusalem announced that they’ve found a burial shroud that almost certainly dates to the early 1st century AD, during the time when Jesus walked the earth. It’s significant because it provides some idea of how the body died (probably TB), but more importantly because of the weave of the cloth. It’s a much simpler weave than is found in the Shroud of Turin, the cloth thought to be the burial shroud for Jesus’ body between the Crucifixion and Resurrection.
For some, that brings doubt not about the Shroud of Turin, but about the new discovery. I am certain that some will think that because of the differences between the clothes, they will think that the newly found shroud is fake, because they “know” the Shroud of Turin is Jesus’ burial shroud.
This announcement comes just two months after an Italian professor of organic chemistry made it known that he had produced an almost identical copy of the Shroud of Turin, using various pigments and common painting techniques. Professor Luigi Garlaschelli says now that he has the process down, he thinks he could create another reproduction in about a week.
In my younger years, I felt sure that the Shroud of Turin really was what people believe it is. It made sense to me that whatever Godly energy that radiated from Jesus when He was resurrected could have left an afterimage on the cloth that surrounded him at the time. As science worked more on the Shroud, I held to my faith. Surely God would have left some physical evidence of one of the most important events in the history of Christianity.
As I’ve aged (matured?) though, I’ve begun to have doubts about the Shroud, as well as the many other religious relics attributed to Jesus Christ. That is not to say I’ve doubted the existence or the deity of Jesus. But I doubt that we will ever find any object that can categorically and convincingly be tied to Jesus’ time on earth. I honestly and truly believe that we’re never going to find the real tomb of Jesus, or anything relating to the Crucifixion or Resurrection.
Why? God commands against idols, and He knows how we as humans would idolize the sites, and the objects. Witness the thousands of years of bitter controversy about the Shroud. Much of the New Testament is about faith, and faith doesn’t need objects, but rather experiences. Faith is defined as “confidence or trust in a person or thing,” or “belief that is not based on proof.” This latter definition is the more important one, I think. Having physical proof of Jesus’ presence on earth would negate the need for faith. Jesus told Thomas after the Resurrection, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:24-29 NIV).
If Jesus said this to Thomas, would He make it easier for us to believe by seeing?
Ghosts of Christmas Past
December funerals can pretty much suck. You’ve lost someone in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and that can throw a heavy weight into the holidays. It’s hard to share the Christmas cheer when you’re grieving. You can feel guilty about being down, so then you seclude yourself from folks, which is the last thing you should do at that time. Then when Christmas rolls around next year, you get fresh reminders of your loss; it’s next to impossible to forget that death, because it’s tied to a big annual event that millions of people across the world celebrate.
I know what December funerals are like. My mother died December 21, 1998. I had about 20 months prior to that date gotten saved, converting from a non-practicing Lutheran to an evangelical Protestant denomination (Church of the Nazarene). My father was Lutheran; my mother was, I think, Presbyterian. Religion wasn’t that big of a thing in our family, although my dad had always required us to go to church. I had been baptized as an infant, and gone through confirmation. But nothing ever clicked for me.
Dad had died in 1994. My mom had health issues of one kind or another, leading her to be hospitalized in mid-December for venous bypass to help save her legs from the ravages of advanced and out-of-control diabetes. It was only moderately successful, and as she was recovering, she suffered a stroke.
She was dying that Monday.
I had driven from Columbus to Marietta the day before after a rambling phone call from the ICU nurse about how my mom was “decompensating,” and frantic calls to my brother in Oregon. My wife stayed in Columbus with our two small children.
One of the things most evangelical churches teach is that if you present the Gospel to someone, and ask them to make a commitment of their life to Christ, and they refuse, they’re condemning themselves to Hell. The thinking is that they’ve refused salvation. My mom was not overly religious, and at the time, I felt that I needed to “get her saved,” as I understood things. But I didn’t want to have a salvation talk with her, for fear she would refuse the commitment at the end. She had been confused over why I wanted to be baptized again as a born-again Christian, even though I had been baptized as a baby in the Lutheran church. We didn’t see eye-to-eye on matters of religion.
So I had hemmed and hawed about it, and now it was too late. My brother and I, along with the parish nurse and the visitation pastor from the local Lutheran Church were in the ICU room watching my mother die. The pastor was at the foot of the bed. My brother was on the right side, and the nurse was next to him. I was on the left side. I was bawling my eyes out, convinced that my own fear and weakness had kept my mother from hearing the salvation message that I thought I had a duty to tell her.
It was not long after nine PM, and I was holding her hand, and telling her I loved her, and that I was sorry. And at that moment, just before she died, I felt a hand on my shoulder, as though someone had come up beside me on my left side, and put their arm around me. And a quiet or “still, small” voice said to me, “It’s OK. She’s with me now.” Perhaps a minute later, her heart stopped.
Could I have imagined it? Could I have created that experience out of an intense desire to know that I would see her again in heaven? I suppose.
Could it have been Satan, taunting me? I doubt it. I believe in Satan, just as I believe in God, and the resurrection of Christ. You can’t logically believe in God, and not believe in Satan; you can’t have good without not-good, or evil. But it’s not Satan’s style to say something like that. He’d have been screaming “She’s mine now, you fool! You failed!”
I am convinced though that what I experienced that night in a lonely ICU room was a loving, merciful, compassionate God tending to His child in the best way He could. I didn’t want my mom to die. I miss her and my dad terribly. But her body was worn out. Yes, He could have healed her, just as Christ healed so many. But physically touching me was much more miraculous than anything he could have done for her. My God, the Creator of the universe, the Great I Am, presented Himself to someone who was hurting and alone one night. How can I doubt a God like that?
So that is what I choose to remember in December. I could focus on the loss, and how my mother won’t be around to see her grandchildren grow up, and how they won’t have as many loving grandparents in their lives. I could focus on the anguish of watching her lie in a bed, her body refusing to give up. But instead, I choose to focus on the way my God showed His love for me. Isn’t that the better way to deal with Christmas ghosts?
Home Bible Study Groups Banned in San Diego?
I’ll start with a link to the original Fox story that got my attention. That led me to a Google News search, and a pair of WorldNetDaily articles and with a little more information.
Pastor David Jones and his wife life on a cul-de-sac. Last month, they were met by a county official who asked them a series of questions about their Tuesday night bible study, such as “Do you say ‘Amen?’ or ‘Do you sing?’” They were then told that their weekly bible study with about 15 people violated land use guidelines, and they had to “stop religious assembly or apply for a major use permit.”
MUPs seem to be designed for churches and other large concerns, as they require traffic and environmental studies, etc. to make sure the land is used properly. They’re expensive, too, and the Jones’ face escalating fines for each violation if they don’t stop their “religious assembly.”
So where’s the line between home bible study and church? My church has about 23 people there on a given Sunday morning; 9 are named Mueller. 5 are named Johnson. It’s just about 4-5 families and couples. Are we a congregation at the church building? What if we meet at a home for bible study?
I think obviously the county stepped in it by singling out “religious assembly” in the complaint. Had they said the couple was violating some ordinance about parking, or occupancy, they might be on better ground, but this seems to be a clear First Amendment violation. I’d be really interested to see the county’s guidelines about major use permits, and who needs them and when. I’d also be curious about their regs concerning churches, and how those regs mesh with the . I’d also be interested to know if the county is going to start cracking down on other weekly events held at homes, like cookouts, or football parties.
They’ll be home for Christmas
Because Santa drives a minivan.
4 Marines were stranded in San Francisco, trying to get home for Christmas. Old enough to serve our country. Old enough to drink a beer, even. But not old enough to rent a car.
God Bless Them All!
Raven’s Beak on Flickr
