Mild Mannered Alter Ego

Dar

2005-09-23T08:38:00.000-05:00

I went to a Dar Williams concert at Harvard last night. It was pretty sweet.

A band named "Girly Man" opened for her. I enjoyed them a lot too. There was three of them and one thing that was cool was that they didn't appear to have a clear leader. They all lead for at least one song. They were quite well-received by the audience. There songs were fun and diverse, but I don't a full enough command of musical lingo to describe them better than that.

Dar opened with a really great cover of Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb (and I found out today that on the album she team's up with Ani DiFranco for that song so I'd really like to hear that). All her songs were great. Her voice is amazing and her lyrics are thoughtful and bold yet simple and direct. She also told some stories about how she used to live in Cambridge after college. ahh, good ol' Cambridge.

This experience made me realize that musicians are incredibly brave people. Obviously, they get on stage in front of large crowds knowing that they are being evaluated for their performance, appearance and stage presence, but there's more than that I think. They're also publicly expressing what often seem to be very vulnerable emotions. Actually, it seems to go beyond just expressing emotion; they're tapping into these feelings right there on stage and living these emotions for consumption by the rest of us.

But I think there's still more than that. Good musicians have the ability to draw the audience into that same emotional space. They create an opportunity for the performer and viewer to connect by sharing the same emotional journey for a time. Yet, by being so vulnerable, accessible and inviting they are also risking profound rejection.

I'm not a musician so all of this is just speculation from an outsider. But I'm an interested outsider so I'd love to hear from some of you musicians out there. Am I on to something with this stuff?

An Illuminating Excavation Attempt

2005-05-09T08:56:00.000-05:00

This is a recounting of the dream I had while on our camping trip. I was sleeping in a tent in scandalously close proximity to my friend Andrew. I think he is to thank, in part, for me having this dream. He's a dream expert of sorts and I think just being next to him caused some of his special dream skills to rub off on me.

I don't very often remember my dreams and if I do it's for a time of about 20 seconds, max. However, this dream seemed to be quite clear in my memory for hours. It feels like it's utterly rich in symbolism and just teeming with significance. So here it is:

I was on some sort of excavation expedition. The setting sorta reminded me of the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. So it was sort of a jungley-hilly sort of place. I was young. It's hard to say how young but younger than I am now -- maybe college-aged.

The other main character was an older man (late forties maybe). He was the one in charge. I think I was sort of his apprentice. He was very a learned, knowledgeable, professorial type of guy. The intellectual, let's-get-down-to-business type.

There was a clearing where our primary excavation effort was taking place. We were digging up the side of a grassy-green hill. (Picture a modest hill with a round crater dug out of it sort of diagonally). Standing in the center of the crater was a dead man. He was standing right up against the earthy wall of the crater with his back to us. He was naked and his body had been somehow preserved -- it had not decayed at all. I never saw his face, but he was an average-sized guy who looked strong with well-defined muscle tone.

I follow the older guy over to the dead man. He takes a knife and carves out a piece of flesh from the man's back. His cutting is precise and skillful, he knows exactly what he's doing and is very intentional about it. After he's finished cutting, he hands the sliver of flesh to me. It's my job to take it away and perform some kind of analysis on it. We are looking for something that we (mostly the older man) believe will be found in the body of this dead man so we are dissecting him in order to find it. I can't say for sure it's an actual physical item or some sort of knowledge.

Before I take the piece of tissue away, I see the man take his knife and carefully make one tick mark in the back of the man's neck. I leave with my first specimen to do whatever and then I come back to receive the next chunk of flesh. Each time the man records our progress my making another tick mark in the back of the dead man's neck. This process is repeated over and over again many times.

After many of these cycles, I look at the back of the dead man's neck and it is full of tick marks (sets of four with a slash through them to denote five). There is a huge crater that has been carved out of the dead man's back, one piece at a time. There is some sense of frustration that we have had to dig this deep and have still not found what we're looking for. Soon, we have worked our way all the way from the man's back to his front and there's only a thin layer preventing there being a hole right through him (I don't remember there being any organs).

The older guy is deeply concerned and cannot believe that we are stymied. It has never occurred to him that that which we seek would not be inside this man. There is confusion over how to proceed or even if we can proceed.

So that was it. It was pretty trippy. All the things written in bold are symbols that I've been able to interpret. I'd like to thank my friends Andrew Weigel, Andrew Snekvik, and Chad Johns for helping me to figure out what this dream meant (dream interpretation can take you far in life). The meaning is a little too personal to write here, but ask me about it and I will gladly fill you in.

Having figured all this out, it feels like this was one the clearest examples I've had in my life of God speaking to me through a dream. It was a pretty neat experience.

Adventures in Backpacking

2005-05-08T14:47:00.000-05:00

This weekend I got to go backpacking with some friends. It was me and my friends Andrew, Alissa, Lynn, Laura and Lyzz. It was pretty fun. I don't think any of us had been backpacking before so we were all amateurs. Since we didn't really know what we were doing we decided we had better only do a one-night trip.

Our plan was to leave Boston at 1:30 and hopefully be on the trail by 4:30 so we could get to the campsite before dark. Well, after a last minute run to REI and realizing that we couldn't fit nearly as much crap into the number of backpacks that we were planning to take it was past 2:30. We hit the road with me and Andrew in my car and the girls in Lynn's car.

It turns out that there are some crazy people out on the highways these days. While the girls were driving on the Pike, they were passed by two kooks in a car that were directing some fire-and-brimstone, rapture-warning fanatical propaganda at them. In fact, here's a copy of the sign they saw in the passing car.

We got a little lost trying to find exactly where the trailhead was but we eventually found it... or so we thought. The trail we were looking for was in Connecticut on the Appalachian trail. We found a trail head and started hiking. By this time it was only an hour before it would start getting dark. We hiked for about 45 minutes before we realized that we were heading South when the trail we wanted heads North. So we picked up the wrong trailhead. This meant that our chances of reaching the campsite which was 5-6 miles from the road were bleak (and even if we had found the right trail I don't think we would have made it).

So we decided to just plop down and camp on the trail that we were on. Luckily we were right next to a great campsite. By the time we set up the tents it was getting pretty dark so we got started on Dinner. Andrew brought an impressively compact camping stove called the "pocket rocket." We cooked some hot dogs and veggie dogs and then we roasted marshmallows. You can learn a lot about somebody's personality from the way they roast marshmallows.

After dinner, the girls embarked on what seemed to be a very long, involved, and complex urination expedition. We could hear them giggling wildly from the campsite. Then me and Andrew took the backpack with all our food to hang it in a tree some distance from the campsite. This is supposed to prevent bears and "roaccons" (vicious, nasty beasts) from tearing apart your tent and attacking you just to get to your food. This provided some challenge, but it was readily met with our respective skills.

Then it was bed time. The guys tent was a rather cozy two person tent. Luckily Andrew and I are good friends (and now we're even better friends :). The girls had a large 4-person tent. I think I fell asleep pretty quickly despite have a large sharp rock undneath me. Then I had one of the most memorable and meaningful dreams I've had in years, maybe ever. That dream will be recounted in a later blog entry.

In the morning, we made oatmeal for breakfast. Then I bet Laura ten dollars that she wouldn't eat a (very small) millipede. Not only did she eat it, but she chewed it. Her reaction was worth ten bucks.

We packed up the campsite and then hiked back to the cars (we had to go buy it anyway to find the right trailhead). Then we put all the camping gear back in the cars and set out to find the trail we wanted carrying just day packs. We walked along the highway for a long time but couldn't find the trail. After a while, we gave up, walked back to the cars and then drove until we found the trail. Then the real hiking finally began. It was very pretty.

We saw some interesting sites along the way. For a good part of the hike we were along a large river. Eventually we came to a wide section of the river filled with large flat rocks. We spent a while hopping around all these rocks and then I saw an irresistable opportunity. It was a great "Wild at Heart" moment (alluding to the awesome book by John Eldredge).

I found two big rocks seperated by a fairly sizable distance with the river gushing in between them. I instantly wanted to see if I could make the jump across. It was just far enough that I had serious doubts about my ability to make it, but not too far that it was out of the question. How could I pass this up? In the movies, you always see the protaganist in a situation where he has to jump from one building to another and he has that moment of pause but then goes for it and (usually) makes it. This was like the exact same thing except the consequence of failure isn't death, but the stakes are still pretty high.

So I backed up to the edge of the rock (it was just big enough to allow two strides of a running start), took a deep breath and went for it. The toes of my hiking boots just managed to hit the edge of the rock and I was able to catch my balance on the rock. SUCCESS!! It was a pretty awesome feeling so I think I jumped up and down a couple of times waving my arms in victory. A few people even managed to witness it.

We stayed in the area a bit longer and I made a few other rock-hops (though none as monumental) and so did some others. By the time we were leaving the area, I had just gotten cocky. So when I came to those same two rocks, I arrogantly set out to make the reverse jump. Well as you can probably guess I came up short. My feet landed in the water and my right shin hit the rock pretty hard. Thankfully, I didn't lose my balance and my feet were only in the water a couple seconds before I could hop onto the rock.

It hurt a lot so had to spend a minute or two walking back and forth saying "oww." The pain subsided a bit and I figured I was ok because walking didn't make it hurt more and it didn't feel like anything was broken. At first, I didn't bother looking at it, but then I notice blood starting to seep through my pants so I figured I should give it a look.

The cut wasn't particularly bloody nor particularly deep but the swelling was... dare I say grotesque. It looked like there was half of a tennisball inside my leg. Luckily, Andrew brought a first-aid kit and nurse-in-training Lyzz was on the scene. She cleaned with some stuff that felt like clorox and then bandaged it up and I was good to go.

Other notable events of the hike included Laura's determination to go swimming. Even though she spent the entire trip trying to convince the rest of us that we wanted go too, she was the only one who was brave enough in the end. The rest of us were game for watching the display of shivering though.

I think that was pretty much it. We headed back to beantown not too long after that. All of us except for Lynn (who drove home to Connecticut) piled into my car for the return trip which was nice and cozy. I'm writting this blog entry more than a month later and pre-dating it so I may have left out some of the details that were actually interesting.

Also, the swelling on my shin stuck around for a couple weeks and really freaked out my physical therapist who was irresistably drawn to squeezing it to push the fluid around inside my leg (it was really freaky, you could hear the fluid moving around). OK, now I can blog the dream I had.

What then shall I do?*

2005-04-25T09:55:00.000-05:00

I got baptized this Saturday. It was a pretty cool experience.

I was baptized as a baby, but I decided that I wanted to be baptized again because I didn't have any ownership or memory of that first experience.

A lot of my friends showed up to watch which meant a lot to me. I got to share a little bit of the story that brought me to the point of baptism. I've included it here for anyone who wants to read it.

I only had a few minutes to speak and my story is long so I had to leave out most of the details, but if your curious about it, just ask me and I will fill you in. Oh, and I'm hoping to have pictures up soon.

I’ve never been a very emotional person. I think I decided that emotions were unsafe at a young age. So I focused on what I could achieve. A constant stream of impressive achievements got me lots of affirmation and built my ego. I figured if I could get enough of those two things then happiness was guaranteed.

I worked hard and even achieved some pretty lofty goals, but satisfaction was always short-lived since there was always some new ivory-tower goal to give myself to, all the while keeping a cap on my emotions.

I had nearly perfected the illusion of the life I thought I wanted when things started to crumble. Suddenly I was bitter and angry all the time. I assumed an attitude of utter self-centeredness to ensure that I could continue to achieve my goals. I began to systematically sabotage all the relationships that were really important to me.

Soon all the towers of achievement I had built up for myself were torn down and I was miserable and very alone. I couldn’t think of a reason for why I should be alive.

There was no way out that I could see. Then I received a postcard in the mail. It was a postcard for the Vineyard. To be honest, I was really suspicious of it, but I was desperate so I decided to check it out. During the service, I was thinking to myself “what a weird way to do church.” But everyone seemed to be so genuinely happy. At the end of service a pitch was made for small groups. At that moment, I knew in my heart that that’s what I needed. I signed up to be in a small group and committed to myself that I would go every week.

That was two and a half years ago and my life is utterly different now. I had know idea that when I came to that first service that the people I was meeting were my new family. They eagerly took me in, cared for me with extravagant love and help me put my life back together.

I also met a man named Jesus. He helped me to see that I had been living my life in a prison. I was bound by so many chains that freedom seemed impossible. I didn’t even have the courage to try. But he was unflinching. He was determined to break every chain, one by one. He would stop at nothing – he would literally stop at nothing to break each one. There was nothing he wouldn’t do, there was no sacrafice he wouldn’t make, and there was nothing he wouldn’t endure to make sure I was truly free.

And I want to be honest with you. There are still some chains. Jesus still has work to do in me so it’s a good thing he’ still alive. You’re looking at one sheep who gets lost pretty often. But each time I do Jesus, my shepherd, leaves his flock to come and find me and bring me back.

* The title of this post is a clever allusion to a Biblical account that gives an amazing image of what would make someone want to get baptized. It's from Acts 2.

Unclehood

2005-04-20T09:38:00.000-05:00

I just got back from seeing my sister and her husband and my Mom in Texas. I went because my sister just had her first baby! I'm an uncle now!

His name is Matthew. His hobbies include eating, sleeping, and pooping -- oh and screaming really loud at night! :)

He's sorta funny looking right now, but we think it's just a phase. His skin is a little big for his body at the moment. sometimes his face gets all scrunched up and he opens one eye and does a really awesome Popeye impression.

Here's some pictures of uncle and nephew, united at last:

You can see that I'm giving him a subconcious lesson in the value of cool t-shirts!

If you look carefully at the picture where he has the yellow shirt, you can see that it's a crew shirt! I also bought him a Texas hat.

It's all about enjoying all of the perks of the 'miracle of life' with none of the responsibilities.

Fast-track to living bread.

2005-04-04T14:18:00.000-05:00

So last week I did a little experiment. I chose to purposefully not eat during the week and drink only water. Now why would somebody do this? Well I had a couple of reasons.

Jesus makes the weird statement (one of many): "I am the bread of life." He goes on to say that following him means to eat his body and drink his blood. I had been thinking about what on earth this meant. Was he serious? Was he being literal? Is it a metaphor of some kind?

I'm not a theologian (and don't want to be) but I thought about it and here's my best stab at what he meant. We eat and drink for nourishment. Our bodies need to digest food in order to replenish energy stores so we can walk around and think and watch movies. But humans are made up of more than just a body, we also have a spirit. So I think Jesus was being serious and he was being literal. He was saying that he can be food for our spirit.

OK, but does that actually mean anything in the real world? If I'm "feeding my spirit", is that just some intellectual/emotional thing that takes place in my head that I could have made up anyway? Well this is where my experiment came in.

If I'm not taking in any physical food and only spiritual food then maybe I can actually see the effects of focusing in on the spiritual. It seems like that's a way to make it more real.

Plus, Jesus says (along with the rest of the Bible) that there's all this spiritual power in fasting. So during this time I was also asking God to help a bunch of people experience all the same great things I've experienced.

Well I'm very happy to report that it was a really awesome experience! I never really felt that hungry which seemed pretty miraculous to me. In previous attempts to do stuff like this, I would normally be ravenously hungry, but not this time. Not only was I not starving, I actually felt really good. I think Wednesday was the best day, especially during and after small group.

The other interesting thing is that I actually felt like I was getting fed. I felt like the time I spent talking to God by myself and with others was my food and that it was actually sustaining me.

The experience was so powerful and encouraging that I'm planning to try and develop a lifestyle that includes more fasting.

Good books lately

2005-03-04T14:52:00.000-05:00

I've found myself reading a lot of really interesting things recently (all at the same time).

First off, I've been going through this riveting study guide on the life of Moses. Turns out Moses was just a normal dude who, through much persuasion, decided to say yes to the life that God had for him.

Then, every week has held several hours of reading for my Perspectives class. We read from many different authors and that keeps it varied and interesting. The reading has been really interesting and it's sure helped me to get a better grasp on the overall story of the entire Bible. Rather than seeing it as a collection of loosely-related, disjointed, and out of date theological essays, I've started to get a clearer sense of the big picture. It's neat to see how into stories and storytelling God is.

Which brings me to the book I just finished reading, Epic: The Story that God is Telling and the Role That is Yours to Play, by John Eldredge. This book's really awesome. The idea is that God is and always has been telling one story. It's the story we love to hear and long to be a part of.

The interesting thing is that all these different readings have turned out to be closely related. The also tie in closely with a talk (Be the Hero of Your Own Life! 02/13/2005) my pastor gave a few weeks ago. The idea is that people love stories and this is true of all cultures throughout history. We love to hear them, we love to tell them and we also have a longing to be in them. What about stories is so captivating to us? Can this universal affinity for stories tell us anything about the way we tick?

It turns out that there is one type of story structure that has seemed to pop up in every culture in history: the hero myth. It's almost as if this flavor of story has been hard-wired into our mental taste buds. There's something irresistable about a great hero/heroine story.

Looking at all the different incarnations of hero stories, we start to notice a few common elements (turns out some people [including J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis] have thought about this stuff very carefully):

Ordinary World - the hero starts out in typical mundane circumstances
Call to Adventure - out of the blue, something unbelievable interupts the ordinary world and calls the hero out into a larger adventure that is already underway.
Refusal of the Call - at first the hero does not feel up to the task
Mentorship - an older, wiser character serves to call out and train the hero
A few other stages which ultimately lead the hero to kicking some major bad-guy butt and winning the affections of a rather attractive life partner.

It's easy to see all the elements of this pattern if you think about characters like Luke Skywalker from Starwars or Neo from the Matrix. Perhaps, humanity is so entranced by the hero myth because we all secretly want to be the hero (I know I do). Or perhaps it goes even deeper and we all resonate with the hero myth because we were designed to be the hero of our own lives. Incidentally, the Moses study guide mentioned above, examines the story of Moses on these terms -- very cool.

I like 'em real thick and red-lettered

2005-03-03T16:16:00.000-05:00

Oh dear blog, how I have neglected you...

Anyway, I came across this little bit of awesomeness other day. You have got to check this out:

http://www.compfused.com/directlink/615/

Me and some friends want to do this to some more videos, let me know if you can think of any good songs to use.

Even white preachers got to shout...

Porn Nation

2005-02-18T10:13:00.000-05:00

Last night The River, went to a presentation called "Porn Nation - The Naked Truth." The speaker, Michael Leahy, combined his own story with MTV-style video clips to discuss the effects of pornography and living in a highly-sexualized society on college students.

It was a pretty interesting presentation. He explained a phenomenon which he called "sex syndrome." Sex syndrome refers to the condition of many Americans who are not fully sexually addicted but exhibit compulsive sexual habits or thought patterns.

Porn Nation was featured on ABC's 20/20 over the summer and Leahy is now visiting large college campuses all over the country. You can read more about his program at www.pornnation.org.

If he's not coming to a university near you, I found his talks here under "Spring 2005".

bootylicious weed-smokin'

2005-02-14T09:44:00.000-05:00

I've been kind of busy and haven't written in a while.

There's so much going on I don't know where to start.

But in the meantime, you have to check this out: http://www.gizoogle.com

If you find my blog boring (or any website boring) just go to gizoogle and enter "http://adamreynolds.blogspot.com" when it asks for a URL.

I entered the River website (http://www.riverboston.org) and laughed until there were tears streaming down my face.

props to Snoop and the gizoogle posse

After all these years...

2005-01-31T13:43:00.000-05:00

I am at work at MIT. I was just in the men's room. I was washing my hands on my way out. In walks Tim the Beaver accompanied by two students (one of whom is female). All three of them walked into the handicap stall and then shut the door.

Spend enough time in the halls at MIT and you see stuff like this. After all these years, I don't know why I was surprised.

A Dream in progress

2005-01-26T23:02:00.000-05:00

I've still been thinking about Finding Neverland. I'm planning to write an in-depth review of it, sometime soon (I may need to see it a third time to tie everything together).

In the meantime, I was looking through my journal and realized I'd already written about this (I also found an unpaid parking ticket from September :). Here's and edited-for-blog version of my December 22 journal which I wrote on a plane to Dallas.

I was thinking today that the process of "growing up" in our society is a process of us trying to act like grown ups (ie mimicking the sophistication, power and freedom we see in grown ups as kids), getting emotionally and spiritually wounded until we are bitter, jaded and disillusioned with what it means to be alive. We assume a sort of broken, illegitimate maturity based on avoidance of pain and suffering, emotional barriers and other manifestations of a "false self".

Terrific. Is there a bright side to this? and why am I so convinced it has something to do with superheros?

Well, who didn't want to grow up to be a superhero? Who didn't have great dreams of being super and helping people and saving the world? Yet we regard these aspirations as childish, fanciful and silly. What happens to these wonderful dreams? It seems like they get destroyed in the growing-up process I
described.

But if our hearts were truly free, wouldn't we still nurture and thrive on these kinds of dreams? And could we not have real expectations of seeing them fulfilled? If the Bible is actually true and Jesus is the kind of God he says he is, shouldn't we have expecations at least that big and at least that fantastic?

Come to think of it, you could view the entire New Testament as a sort of Superhero Training Manual...

Word!

This was a fun conversation to have in my head. It gave me an idea for having the small group I lead next year be a "Superhero Training Small Group." That would be wicked fun.

Whirlwind Weekend

2005-01-23T21:39:00.000-05:00

What a weekend.

Friday was a day of unexpected sadness. There was period of about 3 straight hours where I couldn't stop crying.

Thank God that we had cluster (cluster is a small group for small group leaders) on Saturday. My friends were so helpful and so supportive. Their prayers helped to actually feel real comfort from God. Their words of encouragement also helped me to feel that my present experience of sadness was perfectly valid and I felt a lot of freedom for that.

Honestly, I don't know what I would do without so many loving friends to help me get through life. Without their support I don't think it would be safe to feel all these emotions and deal with all these issues and I would be forced to just stuff them down and repress them until they explode or stagnate or something.

By the time cluster was over, the ominous snow storm had arrived in Boston. It was a doozey. I don't know the official stats, but it dumped about 3 feet of snow overnight. Uhhhhggg. Since we all knew we were going to be snowed in, a bunch of us decided to hang out at Laura and Lyzz's place and spend the night there. We had a good time. We watched Duplex and Stuck on You both of which I enjoyed.

We had a very productive midnight planning session where came up with some awesome River activities for the next couple months. We also had a series of really deep, really interesting discussions about race, relationships and sex, homosexuality and gay marriage and whether there's any hope to see real healing and reconciliation to take place in these divisive issues. We beleive there is hope.

We slept in, woke up late and made banana pancakes for breakfast. After eating we played Nintendo (NES) and then had our own little church worship service (real church was cancelled on account of the snow). It was super fun.

Then we spent an hour or two shoveling out my car and a couple other cars and the sidewalk. Then we came in for some hot cocoa and then rushed off to catch a 5:00 showing of Finding Neverland which is extraordinarily excellent. I saw it before when it first came out and gained much out of seeing it again.

Then I came home and had to put in a couple more hours of shoveling to make a parking spot for me in the parking lot. Luckily Jon Lii and Steve Kannan were available to help me.

Several of the colleges in the area are close tomorrow, but MIT will be open so I do have to go to work. If it's gonna snow like this I wish it would at least do so during the week instead of the weekend.

Much sadness today :(

2005-01-22T01:50:00.000-05:00

Party crasher

2005-01-21T10:27:00.000-05:00

I was having breakfast with Jeremy today. We were talking about God and free will. I said that God loves to do awesome stuff in people's lives, but he doesn't seem to show up nearly as often if we aren't open and inviting to receiving him.

Then Jeremy said something really powerful: "Yeah I wouldn't want to go to a party where everyone hated me."

It struck me immediately that this is exactly what Jesus did when he came to Earth. Wow, I was stunned. I also thought about how intentional Jesus was in staying true to his purpose in spite of the shame and hate that was heaped on him. It brought to mind images from The Passion of The Christ that were pretty powerful.

You can count on Disney

2005-01-20T23:03:00.000-05:00

Tonight was "Dinner and a Movie" night at The River. We watched Lilo and Stitch and it was awesome. It was even better than the first time I saw it.

The movie has a lot of good stuff to say about family, but what I found to be even more interesting was it's commentary on the search for meaning and purpose in life. Stitch was created as the ultimate agent of destruction -- that's the reason behind his existence. When he finds himself in a situation where there is nothing to destroy, he is at a loss and he sinks into despair.

Stitch's predicament actually gets worse before it gets better -- he is introduced to the concept of relationship. Relationship is a good thing, but for Stitch it only deepens his misery because learning about relationship makes him realize that he is alone (mostly because he doesn't know how to relate).

Poor Stitch; he's suffering because his two deepest and most fundamental needs -- the need for a sense of purpose and the need for relationship -- are unmet and he doesn't have the means to meet them. This makes Stitch a great every-man character. I think everyone shares these core needs for purpose and relationship and we all have to come to terms with the fact that we cannot meet these needs on our own.

Fear not though. As are all Disney movies, this one is true to life in the fact that there is always Hope. Things turn around for Stitch at one crucial moment. When Lilo is taken away from him he makes two life-changing realizations: 1) that he does indeed have both purpose and relationship and 2) these two things are inseparably and almost seamlessly linked.

Without realizing it, Stitch became part of a community. This plugged him into the most central and most powerful type of relationship: the unconditional and sacrificial love that is family. So being a part of the fam clearly gives him relationship, but I think it also gives him a deep sense of purpose and meaning. He now has something to live for -- a reason for being alive. This is easy to see when Lilo's safety is put in jeopardy. Stitch is instantly mobilized to do absolutely whatever it takes to save her -- he's acting out of a sense of purpose and he is unstoppable (he's also aided by the fact that he has some pretty sweet skills... like picking his nose with his tongue and doing Elvis impersonations).

To me, the really good news is that I have it better than stitch. We're alike in that we were both created with a purpose. Unfortunately for him, his purpose was destruction. It turns out that this purpose doesn't jive so well with relationship and community. So he had to be re-oriented so that his purpose was in line with his need to give and receive love. Luckily for me, my Creator wasn't a crazy mad scientist with derranged motives and he designed a built-in harmony between the desire for meaning and the desire for love. There is purpose in my relationships and relationship in my purpose. What a flippin sweet deal.

[As an aside:] In my opinion, it's also not insignifcant that Lilo is shown praying before Stitch arrives. She prays to get a friend who won't leave her and asks for the "nicest angel you have." Stitch then comes right out of the sky or "the heavens" if you will. Just goes to show you how powerful prayer can be. Crazy things can happen when you pray.

Perspective --> Vision --> Purpose

2005-01-19T01:17:00.000-05:00

Tonight was the first night of the class I'm taking: Perspectives on the World Christian Movement. The first session was really interesting and now I'm looking forward to the rest of it even more. I have no idea how I'm going to have time for this, but I figure it's worth a shot.

Anyway, Perspectives is a 15 week course on Frontier Missions. Long-term missionary work has been becoming increasingly more interesting to me lately. I have no idea if I would ever do it, but I'm fascinated by the concept and it's really fun to learn about.

The Alpha Course also started tonight and friend Jeremy is taking that. It works out great because they're both at the same place and I can give him a ride.

The beep doesn't help me

2005-01-18T10:50:00.000-05:00

On Sunday, I left my ATM card in the ATM machine again. I've done this a substantial number of times -- I would estimate at least seven, but wouldn't be surprised if it's as high as ten.

Whenever I tell people about this, they always ask me how this can happen when the machine beeps at you when you don't take your card. The beep doesn't help me. The machine is beeping the whole time I'm standing in front of it. Every time I press a button it beeps. Every time a new screen comes up it beeps. Every time it asks me a new question (English or Spanish? Would you like to make another transaction?) it beeps. I can't be bothered with paying attention to all those beeps -- my brain wasn't built that way.

The power of laughter

2005-01-17T00:22:00.000-05:00

This was a fascinating incident and I don't think it was insignificant.

I was sitting on a bench with my friend Paul in Central Square. [A bit of background on Central Square important to this story: Central Square is in Cambridge right in between MIT and Harvard. Let's just say that there is darkness in Central Square even when the sun is shining.] We were having a discussion about how one can achieve his purpose in life. Paul is from Ghana and he is great to be around. Our conversation was peppered with frequent bouts of loud laughter from both of us. During one of these outbursts a woman was walking by us and she started laughing with us.

She said, "Hahaha! You're laughing and I'm laughing too! It's good that you're laughing -- you don't see very many people laughing around here."

Us [smiling widely]: "Uhh... we like to laugh."

Her: "That's good, cuz all you ever see around here is angry, depressed, sad people who look down at the ground and grumble. We need more laughter around here... maybe we'll start to see more JOY around this place!"

Me [struck by her statement's relevance to what's important to me]: "I think we will."

She then proceeded to inform us about her Polish-American-Norwegian ancestry and wish a u a good day. We wished her the same.

Amazing to think that one could be witnessing the early stages of a region's demeanor changing from grimness to Joy.

Fleeting poetry

2005-01-14T13:17:00.000-05:00

I beleive that poetry and music empower the soul to achieve more accurate and more relevant expressions of its experience. I have never been much of a poet, but I have certainly felt the need (and do feel the need) for this type of expression. And I have certainly appreciated and been captivated by such expressions created by others.

Right now I feel frustrated and a little mad at myself because the other day I had some small fragment of poetry in my head, but it never even occurred to me to write it down. And now I can't bring it back to mind. Perhaps it will return.

Mayor of Catan

2005-01-14T11:31:00.000-05:00

We had a game night last night at The River. I played a game of Settlers of Catan -- it seems to be a pretty awesome game. It was only my second time to play it and I think it takes a little bit of time to appreciate the subtlety of the interplay between strategy, luck and negotiating.

I'm somehow managed to win (proving that luck is a factor) even in company of gaming buffs such as John Robinson and Andrew Snekvik.

A dream deferred

2005-01-12T08:54:00.000-05:00

It's amazing how hard it can be to make the transition from being asleep to being awake in the morning when you have to realize and come to terms with the fact that your dreams were just dreams and that they're not real.

And you would think that going through this process hundreds and hundreds of times would teach your heart that it shouldn't so quickly latch onto a particular dream as reality. You would think your heart would learn.

What's in it for me

2005-01-11T22:50:00.000-05:00

What an awesome small group we had tonight! I can't even say why -- it just felt like a normal average small group meeting, but now I feel great (before all I felt was anger). It's so weird and amazing that a few people can get together for a couple hours to talk about life and then the creator of the universe shows up and makes it life-changing. I suppose that's what you should expect of a God who's all about love and so ridiculously faithful, but sometimes I still feel flabbergasted to experience it.

Sometimes I'm almost tempted to feel a little bit bad when I get the feeling that I get more out of the group as the leader than the rest of the people do, but then I happily remember that's why I lead in the first place -- for what's in it for me.

And it's sorta funny how you can think to yourself, "oh what a great day today was," when it was just the end that felt great.

blog misgivings

2005-01-10T19:50:00.000-05:00

So as you can see I started a blog. I've been thinking about doing this for a while. But I feel sorta wishy-washy about it. Do I really want this blog? As exciting as my life is, I can't really imagine anyone will be that interested in reading it.

On the one hand, I've been trying to get into the habit of journaling for a while now. What I'd write in a blog is way different than what I'd write in a journal, but this could help me become more regular about writing about my life. Also, sometimes it feels like so much happens in my life that I should write it down or else I'll just forget it all. I'm sure someone will want to write a book (or a comic book!) someday and this will probably come in handy then. Plus it's a much easier way to continue the "Boring Day-to-Day" web log that I started on my website, but couldn't maintain.

On the other hand, there's no way that I have time to maintain this thing. Besides, if there is someone who's actually interested in reading this, how much do I want that person to know about my life without me knowing that they know it? And then there's the obvious problem of being able to deal with all the fan mail. I also learned about this from my website -- people will stumble on your stuff in the most random of ways and then email you.

So I'm not sure if I'll actually keep this up. But it could come in handy for particular occaisions. Like Sunday just felt like a day that should be recorded.

A day designed

2005-01-10T14:16:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was an interesting day. I suppose it was like most Sundays.

I woke up and read about Jacob in the Old Testament. Turns out his name means "deceiver." He's a very sneaky guy. He tricks his older brother Easu out of both his birthright and his blessing which is a very big deal. And this is Jacob who later becomes Israel, the the Father of the Israelites, God's chosen people -- very crazy. It's pretty amazing how God chooses to work and reveal himself.

On a side note, reading Genesis has given me some serious questions about what's up with all the polygamy in the OT. The Bible is such fascinating book and a fascinating way for God to speak to us.

Then I went to church. I saw David Lee and Fen and met David's sister Hannah. I didn't get to talk to Hannah that much, but it would be interesting to get to know her just based on the fact that she grew up with David Lee. David was telling me about some new subway ministry program he heard about where you have a few people pretend to argue on the subway as way to preach the Gospel. He wants to try it this summer.

Then I met a girl named Ketura. It's interesting to have a life where I meet new friends practically every week. And I just never know. Some of them will turn out to be long-term friends and some of them will be very short-term. Most of them, on average, seem to end up being friends for a period of time roughly in between a season and a semester. Anyhow, it was interesting to meet Ketura because the previous day I had come across the name Ketura in the Bible. Ketura was Abraham's second wife (again with Genesis and again with the polygamy). I mentioned this to her and she seemed impressed that I knew that random piece of Bible trivia, but it was really just dumb luck.

The sermon was about experiencing God's love (vs. just knowing about it) and it was very good -- and the worship was good as usual. After church, we (we is a term I'll use often without defining explicitly each time. I'll try to explain it later) went to lunch at Finagle a Bagle by Park Street. They gave me a free apple with my sandwich, which I appreciated, but didn't eat very much of. I can't remember very much about lunch except that it was cool to get to know Ketura and her friend Peter.

After lunch we (already a different we) went to the Boston Common theater (via starbucks) to watch Million Dollar Baby which I was very excited to see. It was really great. It made me cry. I was sitting next to Tiffanie (who generously shared her Twizzlers) and she started to cry too -- then she noticed that I was crying and that made her cry more for some reason I can't articulate. How weird and wonderful emotions are.

On the way back from the movie, we (again slightly different) started to have a really interesting discussion about the value of life and circumstances that might put that in question. We were talking about suicide and pulling the plug but our conversation turned out to be surprising applicable to another topic we encountered later.

We left the theater and I went to pick up Paul and we headed back to church for a member's meeting. The meeting (as usual) started off with some really good worship (nearly an hour!). Following that was a really interesting conversation (our church is all about conversations) about abortion. I don't think this is the kind of discussion you'd expect to hear about abortion in most churches -- especially "evangelical" churches. Lot's of interesting perspectives that I don't have time to get into, but I would love to dialog about if anyone's interested.

But thank God it was more than just intellectually interesting, it was also emotionally powerful and spiritually helpful. And I think it's safe to say that morality was mostly absent from the whole meeting (in a good way -- ask me if you don't know what I mean!). Most of the women were crying from what I could tell and I started to cry some too. That was the second or maybe even the third time I was crying that day -- yay for a soft heart! Anyway, there seemed to be lots of healthy grieving up in that heezy.

But it was completely fascinating how relevant the abortion discussion was to our previous discussion about our previous discussion on the value of life. Hearing Dave's thoughts on abortion really challenged what I had been thinking about assisted suicide and I told Lynn and Amanda that I thought the points I had been making before were flawed (I suppose in the sense that they were somewhat Godless...). Lynn shared an exciting realization that she has experienced much growth in the area of being able to share and defend her opinion (esp. in churchy circles). Neat to see people grow.

After an exciting game of juice-bottle soccer in the lobby, we started to discuss food. We decided to go to the South Street Diner. I was pretty excited because I'd never been there and I like 50's style diner's especially if they feel authentic. So we drove downtown to find it. It was awesome! I can't wait to go back. I ordered Chocolate Fantasy French Toast and a Chocolate Peanutbutter and Banana Frappe (after some skillful persuasion by our waiter).

Lyzz and I had an adventurous search for an ATM in the downtown/chinatown area, but we were eventually successful. Then I got to hear about Amanda's job working with people who are homeless. I can't remember the organization, but she basically goes out into the street and tries to help homeless people by encouraging them to get sober and putting them in touch with various resources for housing, jobs, sobriety, etc. It sounds like awesome, heartbreaking work. Then we all had a great discussion about good ways to love people who are homeless on an individual basis. Very inspiring.

We all had a great meal at the SSD and really enjoyed our waiter. We decided we wanted to leave him a rather generous tip, and in this crowd, a ridiculously generous tip is already assumed. I don't want to put down numbers, but let's just say that the tip well exceeded the bill. It was awesome, this is our idea of fun.

I drove Andrew and Alissa home and then went home myself. I got ready for bed and it was a little after midnight. I was frustrated because I have been meaning to call my friend Chad, who's still back home in Ohio, for some time now, but keep running out of time. I was thinking it would have to be put off yet another day, but then I remembered that Chad's a reliable night owl and so I just called him anyway. We had a good catch-up talk since we haven't talked since before the holidays.

Then I went to sleep.

Not really sure what more you could ask for in a day.