Several weeks ago on the way out of Spiderman 2, I told my brother-in-law that the only movie left this summer that I really wanted to see was Shyamalan's The Village. When he asked what it was about, I paused a moment and then simply said, "Fear."
I was wrong.
The Village is not simply about fear. It is about sorrow, isolation and the resulting choices and fears needed to ward off the one and maintain the other. Like all of Shyamalan's films, The Village moves slowly, but like all good films, the audience is surprised at how quickly the time has passed when the movie has ended. The language and dialog are often stiff, but that is not because of stiff acting. The actors are excellent. The slow akwardness of the speaking echoes and enhances the trapped emotions and archaic culture of the characters.
I read one review that claimed The Village is more anti-Bush than Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911. I suppose one could read that into the film, but I think rather that the reviewer was reflecting his or her own feelings rather than reading those of the movie. The Village is deeply reflective and as such brings to light the way that fear has molded each of our lives. For that other reviewer, fear and isolation are a political cause or situation. For my part, I read much of my religious past in the movie. A shocking amount, truthfully. But rather than provoke to anger, as many films or stories may do, The Village causes me to think. What can I do? How can I change things? What is being done to promote or lessen needless fear?
Sorrow leads to isolation. Isolation is best maintained through fear. Fear is a consuming evil.
What are you afraid of?
I'm getting ready to move to Seattle again. I haven't gotten physically ready yet, but for me, mental preparation tends to be the more consuming. I tried moving out there back in March of 2003 and lasted four months before my money ran out. This time, I have less money as I head west. But it's where I really want to be.
In partial preparation for my trip, yesterday we dropped off my old Power Macintosh 7100/66av computer at Office Depot in Madison. I had checked eBay to see if any of my equipment was worth selling. From what I saw, my ten-year old computer model and monitor were not selling for $5.00 or less. Not having a lot of time to try to sell the equipment, I decided that I had better go with the free recycling while I could (available at any Office Depot until Labor Day). Having four pieces to get rid of and being allowed only one piece per person per day, Mom and I each took one piece into the two stores in Madison, thus relieving my sister's old room of a good pile of boxes.
While driving around town to do some shopping, I noticed a Video Game X-Change store. I had a decent pile of video games from my youth that I decided I really should get rid of, so I stopped in to ask if they bought older systems and games. They said yes but wouldn't give a price range. So last night I checked out all my old Nintendo and Super Nintendo games and equipment to be certain everything is in working order.
There are some great memories in those little plastic cartridges. A large part of me wants to keep most of them. The most positive memories came from Dragon Warrior for the Nintendo and Super Mario Cart for my Super Nintendo. I spent hours and days as the mythical hero Erdrick in Dragon Warrior, feeling like a hero when in reality I was anything but. And Dad and I used to play Super Mario Cart almost every evening. Mom said that he would play it after I went to bed. The game is still loads of fun, and I'm pleased to say that I'm still pretty decent at it. But it's going to be more difficult to give up because of who I played it with.
But knowing my penchant for distractions, particularly video games, I know that it's best for me to sell them all. It's just hard to give up your childhood.
I'm no fan of either Michael Moore or Bill O'Reilley, and I didn't catch their on-air "debate," so I don't know what the tone of either was. However, from the transcript, Mr. Moore definitely demonstrated a stronger and more conservative understanding of the concept of "lying" than his politically conservative counterpart.
or
Advantages to Living on Main Street
Watertown has plenty of flaws, which I'm always quick to point out in my head. However, there are certain advantages to living in a small, blue-collar town.
One of the primary advantages, at least from a cleaning point of view, is that people other than the garbage men will come and pick up your trash. They won't take really nasty trash or plain old garbage, but if there's something you need to get rid of, no matter how large, just set it on the curb and wait an hour or two.
While cleaning out the basement, we decided to get rid of various still-useable items. I set them out in sequence, sort of as an experiment to how quickly things would disappear. This afternoon we got rid of
1) a five gallon aquarium
2) a small parakeet cage with one cover
3) a large parakeet cage
4) two bags of charcoal with two containers of lighter fluid
5) three folding lawn chairs (these took the longest to go)
and
6) an old lawnmower with a bagging attachment.
After the success of the other items, I put the lawnmower out on a whim, just to see if it would go. I really figured I'd be hauling it back into the garage tonight but was thrilled to discover it had disappeared only a half-hour or so after I set it on the curb.
Now I hope that the real garbage men will take the rest of our varied bags and boxes. I especially hope they'll take the old, nasty cupboard. Why we've had the former kitchen cupboard in the basement for 15 years or more, I don't particularly care to know.
My mom has been having problems with a drain in the basement. It seems that when she washes clothes, the drain backs up and begins to spill across the floor. The "flooding" has never gotten very far--maybe a foot from the drain itself. But it's still an inconvenience and could become a bigger problem. That, along with a fussy toilet, led her to call a plumber last week.
Well, on Friday morning, the day the plumber was to come, the salt for our water softener arrived. The workman carried three bags into the basement and emptied them into the tank. A short while later, Mom went down to check on the laundry and discovered a new flood, not from the drain, but from the water softener. We took off the lid, and the tank appeared to be full of mud. The flooding seemed to have stopped and hadn't gotten into anything important, so I told her that I'd call the company later in the day, once the plumber had come.
I kept checking on the softener throughout the day, and the water seemed to be receeding or drying up. In the early afternoon I checked on it again and noticed some instructions on the softener's tank. From reading that, I thought that the tank's timer was off (it said noon instead of 2:00), so I reset the time. The machine started going through its cycle, and I watched it for a few minutes to make sure that the water wasn't spreading again before heading upstairs. I continued to check on it periodically but didn't notice any problems.
The plumber arrived in the late afternoon. After fixing the toilet, we went downstairs to look at the drain. I turned the corner, and lo and behold, water had spread all across the floor. Thankfully, the plumber knew how to turn off the water softener and kill its cycle. I went to look for rags while he dealt with the floor drain (on the opposite side of the room, of course, with no water near it). After a few tests, he determined that the clog was in a main pipe running underneath the basement floor and said he would have to come back next week with a machine to clear the pipe. He also said that I needed to call the softener company right away.
However--and this is where he's already achieved beatification in my book--before leaving he said that due to the size of his machine, we would have to get rid of a large section of boxes in the middle of the basement. I've been bugging my mom for one week short of a year to let me throw out our amazing basement belongings overflow.
Last night, one week before I'm planning to leave town, it began.
Around 7:30 we went downstairs and started cleaning out flooded things (which mold at an amazing rate) and unflooded boxes. The garbagemen are going to think that we're moving. As we went through the boxes, we pulled out some great memories and had some terrific laughs--one so hard that Mom had to run to the bathroom and I almost had an asthma attack. We set aside a few boxes to keep, a few things to go to a local charity, and a large box of items to go to our local college's costume department. We stopped around 10:30, a little more than halfway through the pile, because I was getting really sleepy and couldn't continue my job of garbage hauler very well. Hopefully we'll finish that section up this afternoon.
So here's to the the venerable Bergin Bros. plumbing company, flooding drains and overflowing water softeners--all divine entities providing impetus and purpose for a change long desired, a challenge well-met, and a job well-begun.
Several weeks ago I awoke during the night to a high-pitched sound. I thought maybe the wiring in my old digital alarm clock had finally malfunctioned, but when I turned over, the sound was still in my right ear, though that ear was now firmly against a pillow.
Last night I awoke to what I thought was a mosquito but again discovered that the sound was inside my right ear. It sounds a lot like morse code and makes it terribly difficult to fall sleep again. I could still hear it a bit when I got up this morning and checked the pitch against my keyboard. It's an F#, which could explain why most of my songs lately have been in G. Of course, being most comfortable and capable playing in G on my guitar could explain that, too.
Here's an interesting article from Derek Webb concerning the difference of gifting among believers.
Last night I had to sleep with a fan on for the first time this summer. Our low was about 80, which is remarkably high for Wisconsin, at least this year. Summer appears to have become fat and lazy, although the weather page says we're in for some storms and a cooling off later today or tonight.
Before Not Even a Hint, I had never read any book by Joshua Harris, nor was I inclined to do so. All I knew of him was that he wrote encouraging "courtship" instead of dating, and seeing that a large church relatively close to my hometown had been negatively obsessed with courtship, I wanted nothing to do with the business, whether attempted from a biblical perspective or not. Because of my negative association, the term itself jars me and makes me uncomfortable.
However, some of my friends had said that Josh's books weren't too bad, so when the opportunity arose to receive a copy of his newest book (which had nothing to do with courtship) in exchange for an online review, I figured it wouldn't hurt.
As I said, Not Even a Hint has nothing to do with courtship. Its subtitle, Guarding Your Heart Against Lust, gives away the purpose of the book, a purpose it achieves fairly well. Joshua defines lust as "craving sexually what God has forbidden" (pg. 18), thus limiting his immediate scope to sexual lust. However, the principles and ideas are broadly biblical enough to apply them to other forms of greed and coveteousness as well. In a time when much writing or preaching on the topic of lust seems to center on law and guilt, Harris's work provides a good blend of law and grace. While not toying around affirming people in their sin, he does not merely shout, "You're wicked! You're wicked! You're wicked!" but offers and abundance of encouragement and hope for those desiring and willing to change. Also, he is markedly realistic, understanding and discussing the principle of sowing and reaping. He does not lead the reader on with twelve easy steps for immediate deliverance but openly admits there is no secret to overcoming sin: it is a work of God working his goodness through his people.
Coming from the background I do, I feel the need to make sure that people understand the concepts of grace in overcoming sin. Joshua is plain about this and opens the book with a discussion on it. If you do not understand this concept in your heart, re-read the first three chapters until you do. If you get it the first time, great. If it takes ten times, that's still great. It's easy to give mental assent or to think, I already know this, and skim the opening. But if you do not understand the true source of your power to change, the power and gifting of God himself through Jesus, I'm afraid the rest of the book will do nothing more than confirm you in acts of selfish holiness, fighting to change in order to make God happy with you and to present yourself as a good person rather than changing through his strength because he is "happy" with you.
That said, the book does offer plenty of practical advice concerning things you may need to avoid without drawing hard and fast lines, knowing that different people will struggle in different areas and through exposure to different triggers. And rather than trying to hide those weaknesses, Joshua encourages full self-awareness, truly attempting to understand individual weaknesses in order to custom-tailor a battle plan against sin.
The book is very frank in discussing sexuality, though it is not crude or explicit, and recognizes and deals with temptations for both genders. The Victorian in me occasionally thought, "Ooo . . . kids [teenagers] shouldn't read that. Hmm--maybe my mom shouldn't read this." However, shortly after each of those kinds of thoughts I would reaffirm that people at all stages of life need to read this kind of book, whether they think they are struggling with lust or not. For young people, even those just becoming sexually aware, a solid understanding and discussion of Not Even a Hint could help them avoid both sin and erroneous thinking about sex due to current cultural influences. (It could in some respects be a basis for a Christian philosophy of sex ed, perhaps a biblical counter to the public school courses.) Were I to have sons, I would like to read this book with them while in they are growing through their early teens, explaining what Harris is talking about and why it's important to understand these things and establish healthy thought and behavior patterns while young. For older people the book may be a challenge to weed out potentially sinful influences and thought patterns that they've allowed to creep into their lives over the years, although its openess may occasionally shock traditional Christian sensibilities.
If I have one disagreement with the book, it would be in the Scripture memorization plan. In chapter nine, Harris encourages readers to memorize a series of verses concerning either sex or purity. Some of them I applaud as excellent choices. But personally, I would encourage memorizing verses completely off-topic when trying to fight sexual lust. During some of my own struggles, I thought that what I needed to do was to fight my sin with verses opposed to my sin. So when I was tempted, I would try to think about those passages again and again. However, there were two problems with this approach, at least for me. The first is that I was attacking the problem with Law, and Law is meant to point out and increase guilt, not to offer strength or a solution. Paul says that the Law makes us aware of sin. So I would find myself despairing, knowing the evil I was doing or about to do but equally knowledgeable of my inability to fight it in my own strength.
The second problem is that of the psychological negative. One cannot forget or reject something by thinking about that thing. It took some time, but eventually I realized that trying to avoid sexual thoughts by repeating Bible verses on sex and sexual temptation simply retained the thoughts in my mind. In order to truly reject a sinful thought (or any thought for that matter), one must consume his mind with a completely different subject. In my case, I found it much more useful to memorize passages about the glory of God and Jesus and the promises of Scripture toward the believer. By doing so, I would forget the temptation and encourage or uplift myself at the same time. Therefore, while it is certainly needful to be familiar with and even memorize Scripture concerning sex and sexual temptation, it seems to me that the passages on purity and the promises and persons of God would be much more effective in battling a sinful thought life.
Overall, Not Even a Hint is an excellent book. Joshua has given us a solid treatise on Christian sexuality and the fight against lust. Additionally, his biblical instruction and recommendations can apply to a broad variety of topics in the fight against sin. The reading is easy, though the thoughts and subject matter may be challenging at times. I would recommend the book for all ages from the early to mid-teens on up.
Not Even a Hint: Guarding Your Heart Against Lust
by Joshua Harris, 2003
Multnomah Publishers, Inc.
P.O. Box 1720 Sisters, OR 97759
ISBN: 1-59052-147-1
For more about Joshua Harris, please visit http://www.joshharris.com.
To buy the book, please visit The Discerning Reader or Amazon.com.
July 17, 2004 8:15pm
A long and hard day's work behind,
Full of saws, branches and hatchets,
I finish my meal and feel the need
For a well-earned rest. But in my mind
I hear leaves rustle: the blackberry patch.
I'm late. Five days have passed instead of two.
Mowing the grounds again this morning I had seen,
To my shame, berries drying on the vine.
"I'm going berry picking," I say, hoping
For company, but head outside alone.
Upon my arrival, a hidden bird sings
A blue hiss, wishing me to leave.
I think back, "There's plenty here for you to share
Beyond my feeble reach--and more I'm sure
I cannot see for you to feast upon."
Tonight I stretch farther over the fence
And pay the price that brambles demand, a scratching
Patchwork pierced across my hand, a legacy
Of itching pricks. I lick my fingers
Stained with berry blood--or maybe mine.
Half an hour later I head inside
Having hunted through the thorns for every
Ripe and hidden fruit within reach.
The five day wait has served me well: instead
Of half a pint, tonight I've gleaned a whole.
I've been wanting to keep up with my "For Sunday" entries since I got back from China, but it seems like either something's come up or I haven't had internet access each Sunday so far.
So without further ado, here's what I wanted to post last Sunday.
Beggar's Psalm
When enemies surround me with their threats to kill
When your table's spread before me but I won't sit still
When I chip my cup
And spill the oil
Of your blessing
When I leave the paths of righteousness for my name's sake
When I muddy quiet waters and I do my best to break
Your rod and staff of comfort
If I take the valley way
And seek death's face
Are you the one who leads me
Are you the one who keeps me through the night
You alone are here when I'm alone
Will you make the shadow
Make the shadow bright
When your goodness, love and mercy seem to follow me
But I just stop up my ears, and I refuse to see
When I walk in pride
And set aside
Your grace
Are you the one who leads me
Are you the one who keeps me through the night
You alone are here when I'm alone
Will you make the shadow
Make the shadow bright
So when the grass is greener on the other side
And streams of living water just don't seem to satisfy
What time I run away
You bring me home
With truth and mercy as my guide
'Cause
You're the one who leads me
You're the one who keeps me through the night
You alone are here when I'm alone
You make the shadow
Make the shadow bright
The last two messages from Mars Hill's series on I John have been really hard hitting. They're only three messages into the book so far, so if you haven't been following along, you could still catch up pretty easily.
I've been having network troubles recently. I spent the last week at my sisters, and although I had time to do some blogging, her connection was unstable and kept disconnecting me, despite the fact it was a cable modem. From what I could tell, the modem itself was at fault: I kept getting a USB disconnection/connection message from Windows 2000. When the network was stable, my blog wouldn't rebuild for some reason.
Our home connection is generally much better. It wasn't working last night when I wanted to post the "Tonight I Am Glad" poem and send a few e-mails, but everything appears to be fine this morning.
Tonight, tonight I am glad
I did not take the time
To trim the long and thorny vines
That all too often give me grief
When mowing the two-acre back.
For today as I made my rounds
I found among the vines
A crowd of great black berries,
Some prepared to bear and dark as night,
Some pearl white, not yet of age.
A spinster spider stood as keeper;
Her price was not too high--
No more than half a dozen pricks
Of thorn to pick a half a pint,
Apart from what I ate in my labor.
Two days hence I have a plan
To go again to the spider's parlor
And woo a few more sweet young fruit
From home and vine to take their place
(And meet their end) in mine.
When we arrived at my sister's on Monday, Mom and I were greeted with a printed out plan for the week (kind of a family joke b/c Mark loves to have a plan). Thus far, we haven't followed it too well.
Mark and I were scheduled to see Spiderman 2 on Monday night, but supper ran into the start of the early show, and ice cream at the Village ran into the start of the late show. Tuesday went mostly according to plan, with Mom and Suz getting to do some shopping. We were going to go to Jacksonville instead of Savannah on Wednesday, but we switched to Valdosta late Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. We were then supposed to go to Savannah today, but we've apparently had to cancel that trip because Anna, my three-year-old niece, has a fever. So I'm guessing that we'll be at home today. Since Anna's sick, Suz went to work this morning, probably hoping that she can switch her day off that was supposed to be today for tomorrow.
And I still have not eaten at a Waffle House.
I drove my mom down to my sister's at St. Simons Island, Georgia. We spent the weekend of the Fourth in Greenville, SC, with my aunts and cousins and came down here yesterday. I think we'll be going to the beach shortly.