Lofland bLOG

Currently Listening to The Fountain by Kronos Quartet, Mogwai

Christianity has been reduced to a set of rules, or, at best, a “way of life.”

Look, don’t people realize that a belief in God, and in an ability to know Him is wild and crazy stuff? How about a God who became flesh, as a baby!

Watch Space Odyssey 2001, the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy and The Fountain, all in a marathon run. You should be shocked, awed, amazed, thrilled, impassioned, thoroughly weirded out and tired.

That is Christianity! A wild story beyond human imagination, that is true. Magnificence, power, powerful ideas, powerful feelings and mighty deeds. A story that spans the ages from before time to beyond human comprehension.

HEY! Christianity is NOT about the Republican Party. It is NOT about a list of rules or a “life style.” It is NOT a culture. It is Christ, it is the man, the God, the mystery.

Yes, all of this leads to actions, but when I say actions, I mean this: When you wake up in the morning, and open your eyes, you should look out into the future, out past the end of the your nose, past the end of the day, past the end of the year, past the end of your life, past the end of your self, past the end of the ages of this sphere, past the end of time, and then keep looking out. Then base your actions on what you see there.

When you stub your toe on the chair in the morning, that does not affect what you see there. However, when you hug your wife close to you and tell her that you love her, that does. When you lift up your child in your arms and hold her close to yourself, that does. When you eat and when you drink, that does not, but when you smile, that does.

When you look around you then, do you see all of the dust? The dust sifting out of your life? The dust in your driveway, the dust on your desk, the dust that surrounds you?

Look through all of that swirling dust that creates a dark cloud, and you will see the people, the eternal souls that are still there, lingering past the edge of time. They are real, and they matter. The people, and the thoughts and ideas that move between them are all that transcends the mountains of dust that we live among.

Yes, some of the dust is useful, and even important, but only is as much as it affects that which transcends. We must transcend, we must both continue forth into eternity, and we must affect that eternity into which we transcend. Otherwise all is futile, and nihilism becomes the only sane answer to life.

Posted 12/27/2006 12:52 PM

1 Comment:

No wonder I like you. I love the way you think.
Posted 12/28/2006 9:40 AM by ThoughtForFood

Export your key as an OpenSSH (password pretected) key file
Put a copy of the pub key in a file with the same name . pub (ie Mykey.OpenSSH.key.pub)

keyring /filename
source ~.keychain/USERID-sh
ssh host

should work!

offlineimap from feed: http://mail.pdaxrom.org/contrib/rgrep/
edit ‘which offlineimap’ and replace:
#!/usr/bin/env python2.3
with:
#!/usr/bin/env python
mv /usr/lib/python2.3/offlineimap/ /usr/lib/python2.4/
In the end I toasted most of this and copied the files from the latest distro from http://quux.org/devel/offlineimap/
You need to backup these files:
/usr/bin/offlineimap
/usr/lib/python2.4/lib/offlineimap/

Either back those up and reuse them, or just pull them again from the distro.
Remember to:
edit ‘which offlineimap’ and replace:
#!/usr/bin/env python2.3
with:
#!/usr/bin/env python

. . . but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. (or violets?)

We saw The Fountain tonight. I really enjoyed it.

Now I have to admit, I liked, and still like, 2001 Space Odyssey, and they are very similar. Honestly, I like things that are strange.

However, aside from just generally enjoying the oddness, I really liked the story.

Now, if you tell me you couldn’t follow the story line, then please never debate theology with me, you are obviously not up to the mental challenge.

That said, I really think it was a great story with a good moral. I would sum it up this way:

There is no eternal life without first passing through death, and Eternal life starts now.

The man in the story was continually trying to find eternal life without dying. He was, quite honestly, afraid of death. He wanted to pass into eternity without dying. That, my friend, just isn’t an option. When we understand better, and have faith, then we will not fear death, but instead, see it as the next step toward life eternal. It isn’t an easy step, but most great steps in life are not.

Secondly, the man was always putting off spending time with his wife, so that he could, well, spend more time with her. He ignored her so that he could find a cure for her cancer, so that she would live forever (or at least longer, though eventually his quest led him to seek not just a cure for cancer, but a cure for death). He needed to begin his eternal life by spending every last minute of his mortal life with his wife before she passed into the next life.

He was looking for eternal life to be something that would start in the future, but it starts right now, this very second.

I like it, and I think it is a keeper. I could use it to witness to others, and actually, I think it even ministered to me and changed me a little. I was telling God on my way to work today that I do have fears. I am afraid of people, and I am afraid of death. Watching this movie helped me to internalize and actually feel that I not only do not need to fear death, but that it is actually quite useless to fear it.

Oh, and now whenever I read John 12:24, I will always remember him dropping the tree seed into the ground over his wife’s grave. That was one of my favorite scenes in the movie.
Posted 12/12/2006 9:41 PM

2 Comments:

thanks alot man. well I decided to go with red again. just because of the door pannel thing. man I didnt know you sold the stang, buy hey thats cool because miatas are alot of fun just dont wreck it cause that wont be fun. oh yea and you, your wife, and your child were awsome on sunday just thought id let ya know. later
chris
Posted 12/19/2006 12:22 AM by mynameischrisandimbored

i missed you guys… thought maybe i just didn’t see you. i’ll have to come by and tell y’all about the wedding. and show pics.
did you get a miata?
Posted 12/23/2006 1:35 PM by midwifebethany

showrev -p

I never posted the last thing I wrote because I thought I would either be labeled a heretic or given up for insane. So I’ll just post about something else for a change.

I like change, I like it a lot. I get bored easily with the status quo, and I like to mix things up when they get stagnate. I am also very nostalgic and sentimental though.

So when my Nike’s started to completely fall apart after many years of good service, I had mixed emotions. It sounded fun to seek out and buy a new pair of “athletic shoes,” but my Nike’s had some history.

During my time in Indy, I managed to come to a place of having no athletic shoes. I just didn’t get out enough. When I was in Chicago, I realized that I really had nothing to “play” in. So when I returned home “for good” I was aware that I had been without any shoes other than deck shoes and dress shoes for a few years.

One evening I was out with a good friend of mine, and she said that she needed shoes, and that there was a sale going on. She said I should buy shoes too. I was kind of hesitant. I hadn’t planned on buying shoes then, and it seemed like a lot of money. However, she was right, I did need them, and she could help me pick them out, which I was grateful for.

So we both bought shoes together. It was fun, and I had a pair of Nike’s.

That was about five years ago! My how life changes and stays the same. I wore those shoes day after day after day and even repaired them a few times to keep them going. I wore them all over the country, and for all sorts of activities. I got married, bought a house, had three children, and found a new church.

My friendship changed too. We went different ways, developed our own lives and saw less of each other. Then our lives diverged more and I rarely saw her. I always considered her a friend though. Then the last time I saw her, she did not want to see me. That was a real shock to me. I probably missed something really important somewhere, but I was very surprised.

Have you ever lost a friend before? I mean, had someone that was your friend not want to be your friend anymore? Maybe it is common, but I honestly haven’t had a huge number of friends, and I’ve never lost one that way before. I’ve lost contact due to physical distance. But to be in the same room with someone who used to be my friend, and now doesn’t want to see me anymore is very hard. I don’t know whose fault it was. Probably mine.

So I didn’t really want to leave behind my shoes, but I had to. I didn’t really want to leave behind a friendship, but maybe that isn’t my choice to make either. Maybe we wear out friendships sometimes too? (I did not say friends wear out, just the friendship.) Or maybe, just like shoes, I can damage a friendship unwittingly by misuse, even if I wasn’t aware of it until too late. Fortunately, I can pray for my friends, which I do. I don’t pray for my shoes.

My new shoes are nice, but they don’t have any happy memories attached to them. Happy memories are probably the coolest feature of all.