Putting the "Rat" Back in "Pack Rat"

(Today's Music: Fall In Line by Seven Places)

Scattered throughout the house - in closets, in the attic, littering the garage floor and usurping vehicle storage - are "reminders" of our children when they were younger. Of course, the kids are only 6 and 3 now, so the collection has only begun, I'm sure. We have bibs, but they're "special" bibs. We have "special" jeans and oodles of "special" frilly dresses. For the love of Pete, we even have "special" onesies with poop stains! The ultimate, of course, is the christening gown - in a frame on the wall. I don't even want to think about what that has been through.

*shudder*

These are precious, priceless, irreplaceable items, or so my wife tells me. My wife tells me that these things are dear to her heart and make her happy. Then, when they have been buried amongst the other "treasures" for a few months and my wife discovers them again, she cries. They aren't tears of joy. They are tears of sadness and regret that the kids have grown past these things.

Hmmm...so let me get this straight...

These items that occasionally phoenix themselves into view every so often that have no practical value that will never be used again that make you sob in depressed anxiety are precious and irreplaceable and make you happy???

Huh.

So I just have one question. Why do I get nothing but scorn when I insist that the holes in this pair of underwear are meaningful? Why do I get flinty looks when I insist that those sneakers are fine and have plenty of life even though the soles flap on the bottom and are only attached for about an inch at the heel?

OK, that was two questions.

But why is it sweet and wonderful for you to keep old nasty clothes and insensitive and disgusting when I do it? Why am I the pack rat while you get to be the pack angel?

"You wouldn't understand. Now throw those disgusting things away or I will when I do laundry."



*sigh*

Yes dear.

Redeeming the Declaration of Independence

(Todays' Music: Falling by Radial Angel)

So I went and did it, didn't I? I poo-pooed all over the (unfortunately) most sacred text in the United States, the Declaration of Independence. I spat on the flag. I flipped the bird to all those soldiers and public servants for the last 240 years who have fought and died to give me the freedom I use to belittle them.

*sigh* It looks that way, doesn't it?

But let's move to Part 2 of the point. K?

I talked over what I posted yesterday with my brilliant wife last night. And she challenged me to come up with a better way to set up a country. She reminded me of what the founding fathers were trying to do and the message they were sending to those bloody Brits when they wrote the Declaration. And when we got done talking, I came to understand how it works. It started to dawn on me how this country has become such a great place to live.

It wasn't about them.

Who "them"? The founding fathers "them". It was about Josiah Smith the tobacco farmer. It was about Miles Jones the cobbler. Later it was about Paddy O'Reilly the plantation worker. And about Stan Klosky the meat-packing worker. Made up names, of course, but you get the point. The "rights" identified by the Declaration of Independence are guides to the rights of others.

The Declaration of Independence breaks down when Bob Johnson holds them up and says, "These are my rights!" Those rights (gifts), like our lives of faith in the Father through Christ Jesus, aren't about us as individuals. To point to them and say "My rights!" is to abuse them. They are examples of the way Jesus treated others. And so, they are examples of how each of us should think about everybody except ourselves. Let me expand.

Life. The greatest gift given to us by the Lord. Certainly Jesus was all about life. The beauty of the lives of our children. Eternal life in heaven. Jesus even identified Himself as the Life. But when it was all on the line, it wasn't about His life. It was about ours. He could have saved His life and been no less the Messiah for it, except His Father asked for more. Jesus treated us all as if we had the right to live, as long as we were willing to recognize our place and our service to the Father.

Liberty. Jesus sure seemed like a free spirit, didn't he? All of my images of Jesus were of a man who wouldn't have been particularly out of place at Woodstock. But the irony of it all is that His freedom, His liberty came because of a slavery so profound that we can't even comprehend it. He was a complete willing slave to the Will of the Father. And in doing so, he used his freedom to guarantee the freedom from sin we all now have. Nothing binds us, tortures us, and controls us like sin. But in slavery to Christ, we have freedom. Now use that to free others. It's not about my freedom. God wants my life to be about your freedom, because I love Him and I love you. That's what the founding fathers did. They made personal sacrifices, their lives when necessary, to free those around them that they loved. That's what all of those proud, heroic soldiers and public servants have done for the last 240 years - sacrificed for the freedom of others. And that's what it's really about. That's why freedom isn't free. That is the story of the United States. That is Christ.

Pursuit of Happiness? Hmmm...I may have to mess with this one a little. The greatest lie I have ever heard told amongst Christians is this: God's greatest desire is for you to be happy.

Nope.

God's greatest desire is for you to be holy. Does God, then, rejoice in your suffering? No, but you should. In order for you to bear fruit, you need to be weeded and pruned on occasion. In order for you to become like Jesus, for you to become like the Father, you need to grow. And in case you never noticed, you never grow with happiness. You never gain with pleasure. Growth comes only through struggle. Maturation requires pain. And satisfaction comes only with the risk of devastation.

Ask any parent.

If you are aligned with God and His Will, then His Will becomes your will. Then, in holiness, you will find the only true happiness instead of this perfumed fecal matter the world sells you as happiness. So, I suppose working toward others' pursuit of happiness (and your own) is valid, as long as it's true happiness.

"This is my commandment: Love one another as I have loved you."
There it is. This is how Jesus has loved us. By working toward our life, our liberty, and our pursuit of eternal happiness - all at the cost of His own. So this is how we live now, by working toward these goals for others, at the cost of our own. This is Christian America. This is the real United States.

Fair. Deserve. Rights.

(Today's Music: Cornerstone by Day of Fire)

I subscribe to a number of Internet user forums as a way to connect to other people and to feed my continuing Internet addiction. I get a lot of growling from people about my sig. I don't mind because it's a challenging statement. It goes something like this:

There is no "fair". There is no "deserves". There are no "rights". There is choice and there is Grace. Everything else is just an excuse to live a life of sin.

Cynical? Maybe, but I don't think so. We spend so much time coming up with reasons why it's not our fault. We depend on someone else to establish excuses for our inability to abide by the most important rule: to love the Lord God with all our heart, all our mind, all our soul, and all our strength.

Are there absolutes? Yes. Dare I say, "Hell, yes." Hell is one of them. God is another. Orange is a third. Justice is not - at least not earthly justice. Therefore, there is no "fair" because fair implies an objective justice, which only exists with the Father. "It's not fair" is a subjective statement which really means "It doesn't comply with my personal views that are heavily tainted by self-interest."

"Deserves" is no better. I go back to my favorite movie line ever. Clint Eastwood, at the end of Unforgiven, sums it up beautifully as the Gene Hackman character lays dying on the dirty saloon floor - "Deserves got nothin to do with it." Do you know what we deserve? Death. Hell. Eternal torment. That's it. Nothing else. We don't deserve forgiveness. It amazes me how Christians have taken all these years of Biblical teaching and have turned it in their minds into "I deserve God's forgiveness." Because God's forgiveness is freely given if we are willing to confess and repent, we believe that it's our due. So we sin with the expectation of forgiveness when it's over.

Newsflash - you aren't forgiven.

When you sin with the plan to ask forgiveness for it later, then do so without conviction you have accomplished nothing except to further delude yourself that God is subject your overinflated ego. You are not forgiven unless you are really sorry. Chew on that for a minute because it's just become words. If you are not really truly ashamed and deeply regretful that you just flipped that crazy driver off, you are not forgiven. Christianity is not that easy. The message is simple enough: Be like Jesus. The execution is much more complicated. Every time you aren't like Jesus, you sin. For every sin you deserve to die. Without repentance (we won't go down the confession to another person road today), every sin still merits death. I'll leave the "deserves" topic with that for now.

And finally to our last and favorite crutch - "rights". Bad news, people. The Declaration of Independence does not hold equal weight with the Bible. I'll bet that really makes you mad. Too bad. The Heavenly Father did not write the U.S. D.O.I. It is not divinely inspired Scripture.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

Horse-hockey.

I'll give you the first part. All people are created equal in the eyes of God.

The rest is a lie. These are not rights. These are gifts. They are gifts given to us by God that are given entirely out of His love and mercy. We do not deserve any of these things. We deserve death. Okay, I'll waffle a little on the Life thing. I still stand by it being a gift, not a right, but I believe that Life is the most precious of gifts and that life given by God is not the province of men to take away. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness? No way. These are the words on paper that we cling to when we want to love ourselves instead of God. Liberty is about us. Pursuit of happiness is about us. When we cling to the things about us, we are not loving God with our whole hearts, minds, souls, and strength. We are loving Him after we've taken care of ourselves. It's a lie. It's a lie that has been falsely allowed to become Gospel because we want it to be true. Truth, however, is another of those absolutes that has nothing to do with what we want.

Like orange. Wondered when I would explain that, didn't you? It doesn't matter who you are, what you think, or even if you're color blind. Red and yellow still make orange. A demonstration in front of the White House won't change that. Lobbying and filing a case in front of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (which will challenge anything) won't change that. Having a "right" to believe that red and yellow make green won't change that. You can wallow and splash in your rights all you want, but you ... will ... be ... wrong. We don't challenge orange (well, DesCartes might, but he was wrong about a lot of other things too) because we accept it. Yet we challenge other things that God has told us are true:
"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me."
"And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love."
"Thou shalt not kill."
"This is my commandment: Love one another as I have loved you."
"Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the Church."

These are as fundamental and unassailable as "Red and yellow make orange" but we don't like it, so we rationalize it away as restricting our "rights".

Enough for today. I'm sure you're as tired of reading this as I am of writing it.

Distractions

What is this sickness of the Internet that draws us in like moths to light? I actually had to resist posting another entry in this stupid blog yesterday because I wasn't willing to admit that I'm that addicted to the Internet. Yet here I am blogging on a Saturday while my wife and kids play together.

Somewhere inside is a deep, clawing need to be distracted. No matter what I'm doing, I feel the need to be distracted. I think it's another of those signs that it's time for me to get on my knees and pray. God in my life is a powerful focus mechanism. Plenty of prayer, Scripture study, and the constant mental conversations with God that mark the pious, holy people all bring a sense of purpose, direction, and especially focus. So, when I spend all day at work looking for ways to be distracted from my work or when I spend a day at home doing something meaningless then it's a sure sign that I have drifted. Again.

Don't see it? Look around.

The world around you is obsessed with distraction. The Korean youth has turned it into a lifelong passion with online gaming houses and murders for virtual weapons. We men latch onto the internet porn as a way to distract ourselves from our marriages and our families. Wives are work. Internet porn is a distraction that provides instant gratification. Our wives, meanwhile, latch onto more "acceptable" things - romance novels, keeping the children mindlessly busy by enrolling them in a thousand activities a month. The women run themselves into the ground with a million niggling details while the men hide in the office with their virtual smut and punch the clown.

What are you doing here?

Get on your knees and get your life back.

What the hairy heck am I doing here?

(Intrigued? Email me: tromos@mail.com)

I don't know what I'm doing here. I'm supposed to be working. It's a downright miracle that I'm able to get to this site at all through my corporate firewall.

It's all Google's fault. I was trying to look up information on a Christian rock group from Indiana called Grace On Demand and ended up looking at the blog of some user here named XOC. I got sucked into reading through his blog and found myself having way too much in common with this guy (age and world perspective, if nothing else). He claims to be part of the "last true minority: God-Fearing, Gun-Owning, White, American Males" I got a chuckle out of that. Granted I don't own a gun, but only because my wife won't let me. Not that I would shoot anyone with it. To me a fundamental truth of Christianity is respect for life. All life. Born and unborn. Innocent and guilty.

But I'm not here to launch into a monologue on abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment ... today. Maybe some other time.

So here's my life in a nutshell:
- It's all about Him.
- It's not about me.
- Christian rock has come a long way in the last 15 years and I regularly indulge myself in Christ-focused music that doesn't lull me to sleep or make me gag: Skillet, Kutless, 12 Stones, Day of Fire, Relient K, Seventh Day Slumber, Falling Up, Seven Places, Radial Angel, Subseven, Dakona, Spoken, Disciple, and many others. Now why won't any of these bands come to north-central Indiana??!?!
- Thank God for RadioU.com and cmradio.net.
- Fatherhood is the toughest thing I've ever done. It continues to challenge me every day. God didn't make me an instinctively great father, but He expects me to do it anyway.
- Is anyone still using Apple computers? Why?
- Linux and the open source community are worthwhile ventures and worthy of pursuit - in academia. Like it or not, the real world uses Microsoft so step off that self-righteous open-source-will-save-the-world platform before an airplane takes your head off.
- Geeks rule. But if you have reprogrammed your handheld and your cell phone to run the latest distro of gentoo or you think it's only a matter of time before Opera topples Internet Explorer, then you need to find some real skin-and-bones friends and get a life.
- Star Trek is better than Star Wars.
- Car manufacturers need to stop building the dashboards so far toward the driver. Of the 2005 model cars, trucks, and SUVs made by all of the major auto manufacturers, I fit in less than a dozen models.
- People shorter than 5'10" have no right to sit in the Emergency Exit row of an aircraft - especially if the flight includes someone over 6'4" who is crammed in a regular seat. I already stated I'd never shoot anyone, but these people sure tempt me.
- The Wheel of Time PC game is the greatest FPS ever. Too bad Infogrames screwed the developers and Atari continues to screw the user community.

Wow. I think I've used up all of my blog topics for the next month. How stupid was that?