Not So Famous…

Marriages fail for all kinds of reasons, I know.  It’s not all attributed to the attitudes of the parties going into the arrangement.  I am not writing this article with a certain couple in mind or anything of that sort. This is just in reference to something I heard this morning.

I like to listen to the Bob and Tom Show in the morning on the way in to work. It helps pass the time when driving, and they have some excellent guests on there. However, one of the many things I don’t like is their attitude toward marriage.

On this show, it’s common to hear Kristi or Chick talk about how many marriages they have gone through in their lives.  I originally felt bad for them until I heard many of their views on how marriage works.  Furthermore, they often talk down to guests who indicate that they are going to get married.  These people believe that it’s best to conceal as much as possible from their spouses.  They say things like the cell phone has ruined relationships because it allowed the wife to find out where the husband is, etc.

How about this: Don’t screw around on your wife.  Don’t have a mistress.  Change your behavior, or DON’T FREAKIN’ GET MARRIED!  With attitudes like this, is it any wonder that people’s marriages fail?  One comedian suggested that when newlyweds are asked to perform chores or run an errand, they should take as much time as possible because when the first errand is performed, that’s the amount of time you have to do that errand FOREVER.  How about just doing the errand, doing whatever else you planned to do, and then go home and tell your wife what you were doing???  If they suspect you of cheating on them, maybe you’re concealing everything from them, and they have every right to be suspicious!  Or MAYBE, you married someone who was jealous from the very beginning, in which case you made your bed, now lie in it.

People who are considering getting married, here are some success tips.

1. Honesty – If you can’t be honest with your future spouse, don’t get married.  You’re setting yourself up for a life of problems, and a likely divorce. Better to use your brain before getting married than to deal with the problems after you’re married.
2. Fidelity – Don’t friggin’ cheat on your wife.  I’m a guy, I know what the temptations are.  It’s not a given that everyone cheats on their wife. Just don’t freakin’ do it.  Set up guidelines: Don’t be alone with members of the opposite sex; don’t spend more after-work hours with your co-workers than you do with your spouse; Don’t have close friendships with members of the opposite sex. These types of things provide more temptation than they’re worth, and at the very least, they provide reasons for jealousy, which is dangerous even if it’s somewhat unfounded.
3. Petty Jealousy = Bad – For crying out loud, find someone who knows that you love them, and then remain faithful. It’s not worth an entire lifetime of doubt and arguments. (I got called on the carpet for this, so I’ve edited it, and will further qualify my statement) Here’s what I’m talking about here: I mentioned remaining faithful, and I want to say that this needs to be a GIVEN…for both sides. Men, you are not to have close friendships with women…end of story.  I have relationships with my group of friends, and many of those people are couples. But I would never consider going out with a friend’s wife for a drink.  This is just a BAD idea.  Women, your close friends are NOT to be guys.  Growing up, you had friends of the opposite sex, yes…at one time, you wore diapers and crapped your pants too.  You grow up.  Now, given the fidelity of both partners, there is no room for petty jealousy, because there is now no cause. A man looks a a woman walking down the street…he notices that she is pretty.  NOT a cause for jealousy!  A woman talks about a movie star or a waiter, and says, “he’s cute!”  NOT a cause for jealousy.  That, my friends, is petty jealousy!

   Furthermore, all causes for actual jealousy should have been taken care of LONG before the marriage happened.  Guidelines should be set out that say what I’ve said above. If your significant other has a close friend of the opposite sex, and refuses to end the friendship, then it sounds to me like you need to think VERY carefully about marrying this person.  There should be no cause for real jealousy in a relationship, and any petty jealousy is, in and of itself, a cause for worry.  Assuming, of course, YOU are being faithful, and following the guidelines.

Like I said before, use your brain before getting married.  Don’t get married thinking you can change someone later…you can’t.  They don’t want you to, and if you try, they’ll resent you.  There’s all kinds of self-help books that explain how to fix a broken marriage, and perhaps some of them work.  However, isn’t it worth the time and effort to do the work beforehand and put a little thought into the person you’re choosing to spend the rest of your life with?

Maybe you’ve already made what you feel is a mistake…I’m sorry.  Maybe you came into the knowledge of the mistake later down the road.  I don’t know what to tell you.  I’m not a therapist, relational or otherwise.  The stuff before marriage is far easier to talk about than the problems after.  I can say that the best thing you can do is get your church involved.  Sit down and meet with the elders. But don’t delay.  If you’ve hit rocky points in the marriage, then there are obviously problems you can’t work out yourselves.  Get goldy people involved to begin some accountability and help those lines of communication flow. Attempt to genuinely understand why your spouse does what they are doing…why they think what they think. Get someone involved who cares about the marriage, but is impartial to each member.  It’s not easy, though.  Be prepared to work at it.  Be prepared to be uncomfortable. Be prepared to experience some pain.  And most importantly, be prepared to be wrong.  There aren’t 1-sided problems.  You did something to bring some of this on, and be prepared to have that shown to you.

Most importantly, read your Bible and pray…I’d be happy to pray for you.  Drop a line and ask.

It seems like I’m always having to remind someone of that fact.  All too often, that someone has been me.  ;)  I forget this too.  But here’s something to think about:

I don’t know what situation you’re going through…doesn’t matter, really.  No matter what the situation, the title of this blog is always true.  God isn’t sitting there, anxious over whether He’ll win the “conflict” between Him and Satan.  He is sovereign, and His will, holy and perfect, will be done.  Does He love to see His creation suffering under the consequences of Adam’s sin??  Of course not, but God will be glorified in everything that happens under the sun.

What does that mean to the Christian?  To the Christian with the correct perspective, that should be a comfort.  God will be glorified in the situation you’re going through.  God is there, providentially shaping matters so that He will be glorified.  And that is what we, as Christians, should want.

To the non-Christian?  Well, basically this whole thing should scare the crap out of you…sorry.

“What is it about re-reading old books that is so appealing?” ask those people who do not like to repeat anything?  “How can you stand to watch a movie you’ve already seen before?” they exclaim with much confusion. For they, themselves, would never condescend to re-read something they have read many times over.

I cannot answer you. I could point to my childhood and remember that new books weren’t always easy to obtain.  (Mind you, my parents encouraged my addictive behavior whenever they could, but that is not to say they always could.) I could tell you that I had to re-read old books or risk going into withdrawal.  How many times did I read the Children’s Classics version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and wonder at the desperation of a man who would try out his own volatile creation on himself? How many times did I read the Return of the Twelves and exclaim with glee when Butter Crashey marched with his compatriots all over the house of Max, the Jinn?  How often did I read Bunnicula and become creeped out at the white vegetables, drained of their juices? So many books…so many stories…I devoured them all. However, I must point out that I have friends who had access to far more books than I, and they too exhibit this addictive behavior wherein they re-read books over and over again.

Ultimately, I suppose, it comes down to my love of familiarity. I knew these books.  I knew the stories contained within. Returning to the warmth of that familiarity was like sitting around with old friends, telling stories. Laughing uproariously at stories that were funny because they were good stories, whether or not you knew what would happen. In every retelling of a good story I heard something new…I picked up on currents that I had not understood or grasped at the time. Each time the story unfolded, I was again grasped with suspense when the villain looked like he had the upper hand, and each time the protagonist prevailed, I breathed a sigh of relief.

My books were my thread of stability in a world that was anything but stable.  When I was hanging out with the wrong crowd, getting involved in things I shouldn’t have been getting involved in, I always came home; not to my dwelling place, though I did live there. Rather, home was where I could sit with my old friends, the books, who did not change, or if they did, they acquired marks of familiarity that could reunite me with pieces of my life. The dog-eared page that reminded me of my mother insisting that I do my summer chores before I sat around all day reading (bookmarks were never to be found when you needed them). The bent cover that reminded me of my father tickling me until I flung the book across the room to better defend myself against the dreaded Tickle Monster.  And yes, even the occasional ripped and taped-back-together page that reminded me of my sister, who really knew how to antagonize me by torturing my beloved friends, the books.

As I sit and think about all the enjoyment I had in reading my books growing up, I am gripped by the certainty that the why’s and the wherefores do not really matter. Why did I read my books over and over? Because I loved to do so. It gave me joy. In a world where the occurrences of joy are so  few and unpredictable, why not retreat to the world of literature, where I could fence alongside the Three Musketeers? Why not turn again to the pages of another world, where I could study to be a wizard with Randal? (before Harry Potter…much before.) Why not escape into the predictable enjoyment of reading books?

Why not, indeed?

The Bible specifically condemns witchcraft, and I do not dispute that, of course.  But here’s something that I find interesting.

I would like to talk about Quantum Mechanics/Physics.  Specifically, photons are interesting things.  First off, a photon has been proven to be a wave…and a particle.  What???  That peculiarity aside, photons appear to display characteristics of waves and particles depending upon the experiment used.

One of those experiments involves shooting a single photon at once at a sheet of photographic paper.  You get a dot representing where the photon hit the paper.  Pretty simple.  However, if you put a wall between the photon shooter and the photographic paper, you get no dots.  Also very simple.  Here’s the thing.  Put a vertical slit in the wall, shoot a bunch of photons, like from a flashlight, and you get a scattered pattern that resembles the slit.  Put two vertical slits in the wall, shoot a flashlight at it, and you get an alternating pattern of light and dark stripes.  (I forget whether it’s 3 or 5)…essentially, you get light bars with darkness between them where no photon hits. This is explained by wave interference.  The light interferes so that there are certain spots where NO photons hit the paper.  None….not even one.  With wave theory, this is easily explained.  This is where it gets weird.

If you do the single-photon experiment with the 1 slit, you still get the single bar of light…this is to be expected.  Do the single-photon experiment with 2 slits, and you STILL get the sections of the paper where NO photon hits.  WHAT!?!?!?  There are no other photons to interfere, but somehow, the photon knows that the second slit has been uncovered and knows where it’s supposed to go.  Furthermore, the single bar in the initial experiment falls where there is only darkness when you add the slit.

Photons can’t know anything, and yet a single photon with no other photons around for it to bounce off of appears to behave with foreknowledge that it shouldn’t have.  With the second slit uncovered, a single photon behaves as though it knows the second slit is there and it behaves as though it’s interfering with other photons that aren’t even there. 

Now, the various “explanations” given by scientists are not really satisfactory, I know:
1) The photons really ARE aware. (…and frankly, they resent our experiements to discern their nature as much as we would resent the notion that God is testing His own hypotheses concerning how we behave when inflicted with suffering on this earth.)
2) The photons really ARE interfering with other photons…in other parallel dimensions. Whoa…weird.

I know, these “explanations” really aren’t explanations at all, but that’s all we as a human race can come up with.  But this gets me to thinking:

What if ESP isn’t at all communing with evil spirits, but becoming aware on a quantum level of the world around us in a way which we have not been aware, much like the photon appears to be aware that a slit has been uncovered in an experiment?  Perhaps something happens in the human mind that we are able to view possible parallel dimensions, understanding the most likely outcomes based on the input on a quantum level that most people cannot perceive.  Before quantum theory and mechanics were theorized, such poppycock as what Einstein observed would have made someone a laughingstock, and yet without the theories that Einstein and others proposed, we wouldn’t have much of what we have today!

Post your comments.  But remember, I’m not saying that ESP or any kind of telekinesis is a good thing.  I’m saying it’s interesting to think about.  What do you think?

Living in California is definitely interesting. Not a whole lot of places like California, really.  This is not to say that I ENJOY living here…that would be stretching the truth in ways I’m not really prepared to do.  But there are a lot of things in good ol’ Cali that are unique to this Left Coast state.

I work in IT…you can find jobs like that anywhere, of course.  Computers are taking over our lives to an extent that only the most visionary saw coming a few decades ago. However, in my job, I must support offices in diverse locations.  Not that many of you know where this stuff is, but I’m based out of Newman, and yet I’ve got offices in Stockton, Hollister, and Sonora, among others.  Stockton is a medium town, somewhat bigger than Modesto, but far smaller than L.A.  Sonora is definitely a small mountain town. Another diverse location is the Hayward office…hence my title.

Those of you who have never driven in Bay Area traffic really should experience it sometime.  It’s not something you’ll enjoy, but you will commiserate.  Perhaps some of you who have not experienced Road Rage for yourselves will understand what all the news stories are about when you drive rush traffic in the Bay Area.  Go to San Jose….or Lord forbid, San Francisco. 

Those of you who think you can just remain patient, and nuts to everyone who thinks they need to turn into a raving maniac when driving the Altamont pass have probably never driven it at peak hours.  In order to stay alive on these freeways, you have to drive like you want to get somewhere…you need to be a little posessed, I think.  The reason for this is not because you can’t use the roads between Modesto and San Francisco without going stark raving mad, but because the people around you are going to inevitably do incredibly stupid things, and you will nearly die several times before getting to where you’re going.

Try going under the speed limit and then see how many people nearly touch your bumper before passing you at extremely high velocities.  Nascar drivers would clench their cheeks a bit if they saw someone coming up on them as fast as some of these people are going! Try passing a semi at the speed limit, using your blinker, and merging at what most people would consider a safe speed.  The dude behind you who feels like driving 95 miles per hour in a 70 zone is his right, and anyone in his way can just go to hell. (Oh, and if you’ve forgotten how to get there, he’ll be happy to send you on your way if you happen to get in his way!)  Man, that guy won’t notice what you’re doing.  You could have 75% of your car in the lane to your left, with your blinker on, and he’d still claim he never saw you.  The scary thing is that he’s probably telling the truth!!!

Anyway, I was driving into work this morning, planning out my Friday when I get the dreaded call from the Hayward Office.

“Chris, it’s Tina in Hayward.”  I got a little sinking feeling in my stomach. “My computer won’t turn on.  It says something about config\system is corrupt or does not exist.” Sinking feeling confirmed.

“Ok, Tina.  I’m going to get to the main office here in a few minutes.  I’m going to confirm the solution to this problem, and then I’ll probably be…” (shudder) “…heading into Hayward to take care of this for you.  I’ll call you when I get in so you know when to expect me.”

WOOT!  I was hoping to spend my entire day in the Bay Area.  My only hope is that I get on the road by 1pm.  I’ve fixed her computer and am now running Windows updates.  The clock is ticking, and muc hlike Cinderella, I’ve got a deadline.  You don’t even want to see what I turn into when the clock strikes 1pm, and I’m not on the road yet….

…A shaky mess.  :)

I touched upon what I would like to talk about in the New Members class this last weekend, but I said something that struck a chord with me, and I’d like to tap it out a little bit.  See where I go.

We were discussing the Natural Man vs. the Regenerate Man.  For those who don’t know, the Natural Man is man without the Holy Spirit, or the non-Christian…Regenerate Man is man who has been born again…Christian Man.  Now, of course, I must interject that while I am using the masculine pronoun of “man”, I do, in fact, mean mankind.

Pastor had asked how two people could look at the same passage in Scripture and come up with multiple interpretations.  There are a couple possibilities here:

1. God and His Word is Flawed – God wants man to be confused. He really never intended to give us much in the way of answers with His Word.  He only wanted us to be asking more questions. – I don’t believe this possibility for a second.  We can see aspects of His nature from nature, and from nature, I can see that the God of the Bible is an orderly, logical God.  He does not thrive on chaos.  So I reject the possibility that He gave us the Scriptures merely to confuse us.
2. Man and his interpretation of the Word of God is flawed – Man fights against a sin nature. We war with the flesh.  The things of the flesh are diametrically opposed to the things of God, and the flesh wants us to ignore the Word entirely.  If it can’t get that, it wants us to wrest the Scriptures to our own destruction. – I am more inclined to agree with this view, as man is fallible…God is not.  It’s a simple choice between the two, really.

So, the discussion was talking about this war of the members, as Paul describes it. I had said something about natural man and how the natural man wants to twist and warp the Word of God so it can either mean what he wants it to mean, or else mean something so completely different from what God wanted it to mean that it’s not even resembling the original passage.

However, Pastor brought up a good point.  He noticed my use of the words “natural man”, and asked me if the regenerate man still had this desire to twist the Word of God.  I mentioned that Paul discusses this in Romans 7:14-24.

“For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin. For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good. Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”

So, yes. Regenerate Man also has this desire, though it is a war with the Christian.  For the non-Christian, there may be a small war with their conscience…or tradition…or a fear of getting caught, but it’s nothing like what it is for the Christian.  While we are justified, and we are more and more sanctified each day, we still must fight against our natural inclinations.

This has really been brought to my mind the past few days, for some reason. I’ve been analyzing the thoughts that come to my mind of late, and I am ashamed.  For all that Christ has done for me, for all that I have a regenerate spirit, for all that I am a new creation, much of what my mind seems to want to dwell on is much akin to what I thought about when I was an unrepentant sinner.  Sure, I don’t DO all the things I’m thinking of, but what difference is it? Christ talked about the war being lost in the mind.  If someone thinks about murdering their brother, they might as well have done so for all the good that their physical abstaining from the act did them.  They are still guilty of the sin, unless they have been forgiven their sins.

With regards to those who, like me, have been forgiven their sins, doesn’t Christ deserve better than the filthiness that consumes your thoughts?  Doesn’t He deserve better than to have His children acting as through they were not indwelt by the Holy Spirit?  Shouldn’t we have the desire to do that which is good?  I find my desire to do that which is not good to be a far stronger pull than the desire to be at church.  Pastor talked much about how Sunday is a day of rest.  We should meditate on His Word…that should be our focus for the day.  What is your focus on Sundays? Do you spend the day trying to gratify your own pleasures?  Do you read the Word and pray together with your family? Maybe you do, and if so, that is awesome.  If you feel like it, post a comment on this blog that tells how your family spends the day on Sundays.  Let us know how you spend the day searching out what the Lord has told you through His Word.

I can say one thing: I need to do better.  Pray for me, won’t you? :)

It’s not that I don’t have the inclination to write anymore…I do. It’s just that at my new job, the firewall strips outgoing HTTP packets in such a way so as to prevent me from writing in my blog. Since I am IT at my job, I could fix it so that I could write again, but I don’t really need the distraction.  :)

Been drinking the new batch of homebrew, and I’ve been rather pleased with the results.  In addition, a friend of mine tried it whose opinion I thoroughly trust, and he really liked it. A very smoky flavor, and not a whole lot of bitterness.  I was surprised, as the amoung of hops I used indicated that it would have more bitterness than last year’s Scotch Ale.  Well, one of these days I’ll brew a Pale Ale or something.  We’ll see how the hoppiness in the homebrew tastes.  :)

Kimmy and I are becoming members at the church we’ve been attending for a couple years.  We’re very happy with the caliber of preaching and the extent to which glory is given to God at this church.  Everyone who has been to this church with us agrees…whether they like the style of worship or preaching or not, they can’t argue that this church does not give all the glory to God.

I suppose that’s all that’s happening.  I’ve been wanting to write a little more creatively, so I might bang something out here soon.