File this under: #Shutupandwrite
She doesn’t appear to be keep up her blog, but Karisha Prescott does have this post on why you (generally speaking) won’t ever finish that novel you keep talking about, aside from the money you still owe the Don. You don’t make time to write. You don’t work to improve your writing. You over-edit what you have written, and you can’t take feedback.
I want to watch Brazil, but I don’t think my sweet wife will want to see it with me. I’d like to see Blade Runner again too, since I’m sure I didn’t understand it as a kid. The WebUrbanist has a list of “Nightmare & Dream Designs” for cities.
Kevin Ryan talks innovation and technology in this post on AdAge.com, particularly targeting Google’s new Instant Search–have you seen it? If you’re looking for one the major websites/companies that usually top your search list, now you won’t have to wait three seconds. Ryan opines:
For most people, search is just search
My favorite scrap with my wife co-starred a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue. In the middle of a partial light to medium domestic storm, she poured herself the last two fingers of a liter bottle. A bottle, mind you, that I had carried back from China many years ago.
I instantly forgot what we were quibbling about. As she finished the last drop, it occurred to me: In a distracted environment, my wife’s understanding of Johnny Blue was that of any other bottle of Scotch. For me, however, a bottle of the Blue lasts about five to seven years and only makes an appearance on or around my birthday.
To my wife, Scotch is Scotch and it all tastes like recycled tires. To the consuming public, search is search and the issues we face are unique to us. Do-it-all devices and features are engineered to deliver a unique customer experience by offering everything, allowing consumers pick what they like. It’s a nice idea that really doesn’t apply to search.
12 Steps to Identifying Your Functional Saviors On this point, John Calvin wrote in The Institutes:
Every individual mind being a kind of labyrinth, it is not wonderful, not only that each nation has adopted a variety of fictions, but that almost every man has had his own god. To the darkness of ignorance have been added presumption and wantonness, and hence there is scarcely an individual to be found without some idol or phantom as a substitute for Deity. Like water gushing forth from a large and copious spring, immense crowds of gods have issued from the human mind, every man giving himself full license, and 60devising some peculiar form of divinity, to meet his own views.
Literary agent Elisabeth Weed answers questions on what she sees as an agent. “Much of this business is based off of personal relationships that have been built over time over lunch,” she says.
Lars is not in Norway at the moment, and if you look closely at this image of Nusfjord, Norway . . . you still won’t see him. Now would be a great time to buy his latest book as a vote in favor of seeing another such book come to press.
Amazon.com’s top sellers in fiction at the moment are Stieg Larsson’s novels–all of them, I think–Jonathan Franzen’s latest called Freedom, and something from unknown author Nicholas Sparks. What? You’ve heard of Sparks? Is he any good? (No offense, Mr. Sparks. May I give your shoes another shine?)
In case you haven’t been reading this blog, dear friend, and you have just been blessed to find it (the.best.day.in.your.life!), here’s a brief summary of what we’ve been talking about.
Alex Rose writes about the strength of the English language and problems when people reject their language heritage in favor of this growing, global tongue. “Indeed, English is a veritable cabinet of wonders, a palimpsest of criss-crossing lexical histories, no less than a modern linguistic juggernaut,” he writes, noting a book by Robert McCrum called Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language
The second half of Rose’s article talks about the fears some have of losing knowledge and culture when small languages are lost. Languages reveal how men can think and organize the world around them. Some times the obscure words reveal an intimate relationship with a part of nature English speakers do not have. Rose notes, “The Kayapo people, for instance, have developed 85 different words for ‘bee,’ each specifying minute differences in flight patterns, mating rituals, habitat, nest structures, and quality of wax.”
On this part, I want to criticize materialists or naturalists for rejecting divine revelation as a source of real knowledge. If the world is all we have and we are the only ones who can glean anything from it, then I preserving cultures, languages, and everything else makes some sense. The article quotes Noam Chomsky on this: “by studying the properties of natural languages, their structure, organization, and use, we may hope to learn something about human nature; something significant, if it is true that human cognitive capacity is the truly distinctive and most remarkable characteristic of the species.” I can see that, if mankind is but one of many species. If we are just a remarkably unique animals, top of our food chain as it were, then we should seek out linguistic info like this in order to understand ourselves as much as possible.
But we are men, male and female, created in the image of God Almighty, who made heaven and earth for his glory and our enjoyment. The Kayapo people may have a cool thing going in naming bees, but the Bible will reveal far more about humanity than their language ever will.
Following the attacks on New York and Washington D.C. and the failed attack that ended in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, many Americans darkened the doors of our churches, some for the first time in years. Now, as far as I am aware, church attendance has returned to pre-September 11 levels. Maybe it returned to those levels in 2002, I’m not sure.
This morning, I heard a good message from an Army general about the state of the world today, specifically related to radical Islam, and what Christians can do about it, if anything. He briefly mentioned that he wished more Americans would go to church in light of the Barna survey stating 84% of us claim to be Christians. But I suggest that many have gone to American churches and found no reason to return. What they found was self-referential moralism and messages on God helping those who help themselves or on love without morality being the path to true peace. Hope from the Creator of the world and Redeemer of the forgiven they did not find. They can get the self-help on their own.
A self-referential faith will not offer lasting hope. It will not understand how men can do evil things, and when faced with rage, addiction, adultery, and greed, it will offer only platitudes or rejection. It will not believe in the supernatural enemy we face, the Morgoth/Sauron-type character who stalks the earth looking for those who will believe his lies, those who will look inward and blame others for their pain or disappointment.
I fear this is the message many churches communicate in and out of the pulpit, even churches in which there are many genuine believers. They have missed the life-transforming gospel by focusing on their own efforts to better themselves and the world (thus the affection many have for political success). In doing so, they will tell non-believers that God will not accept them until they clean themselves up. They say they don’t care how broken or sinful they are, they had better present themselves as clean in church or God won’t accept them. Of course, God the Father, who knows everything from begin to end, will not reject the sick or the broken, the abusive or the abused. He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins when we repent of them, even when we repeatedly repent of them.
I wish it were true that 84% of Americans were genuine believers, but I’m afraid they claim that label out of mere cultural comfort, and if these are the ones going to 60-70% of American churches, I don’t worry that many people stopped after the fear of the attacks diminished. Perhaps there were a couple rescuers inside those frames meant at one time to reflect the glory of a greater kingdom, but maybe they had left too, tired of finding people who were unwilling to be saved.
The gospel is what our churches are meant to preach. It is not merely a pass for the bad stuff we do or a term for our 12 step self-help guide; it is divine liberation from the crushing bonds of sin and a new life of service on the Lord’s estate. The Lord asks us to believe who he claims to be in the Bible and live accordingly, grieving past failure, embracing future grace.
Connection Point, April 2010 Edition from CBMC on Vimeo.
What are you expecting today? Are you expecting God to move? This month, CBMC President Lee Truax introduces us to Jerry Molnar of New York, NY. Jerry was a businessman who cared for nothing but money before the Lord transformed him. In the 80s, he took an office high in the towers at the World Trade Center. His dramatic testimony is something to see and share with others.
