As I have been pondering the events of the last few weeks here in my own home church and processing the pain and the confusion I have come to ponder on what it means to lament. Dictionary.com defines a lament as: 1) To fell or express sorrow or regret for, 2) to mourn for or over. The Bible is full of examples of both kinds of lament. The first definition is a lament in a reactionary sense. One such example is in 2 Samuel 12 vs. 1-13. David’s sin with Bathsheba had been found out and Nathan was ferreting out all the details. David than expressed regret and said “I have sinned against the Lord” (vs. 13)

So often our lament is like that of David. We sin and we sin, we wrestle with it and we try to get rid of it. What happens though is that God eventually does get his hands on us and presses us to repentance. The second type of lament, to mourn for or over is much less common, but I believe it needs to be practiced more, and that God has called His people to his purpose and that we must lament and grow.

When Job was being oppressed, he and his friends lamented. (Job 3: 11-13) As best as Job could tell he had done nothing to bring this calamity onto his family. He was your average God fearing man. When everything that the Lord allowed to happen took place he lamented and mourned not because he had done anything wrong, but because God had removed his hand of blessing. We, as a church body, need to make sure that we are mourning like Job and not like David. It is easy to internalize the sins of our leader and make them our own, but we can not. God is calling us higher and higher, not into the depths.

As a body of believers it is time to put on the sacloth, it is time to pour dust over our heads, and to mourn and lament collectively as a body. Friends need to reach out to friends, fathers to sons, pastors to the flock and so on.

Here is the great news that we all need to hear straight from the book of Lamentations:

22 Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed,for his compassions never fail.23 They are new every morning;great is your faithfulness.24 I say to myself, "The LORD is my portion; therefore I will wait for him."25 The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him,to the one who seeks him;

Let us make sure that as we lament, that we are seeking the Lord in his dwelling place. We can not become self consumed and focus on our own sin and anger. It is now that we as a church must lament in a way that finds Jesus. If we lament and mourn together we will find greater strength and humility and blessings, just as Job did after he lamented.

Ever since Greg Stier spoke at the National Youth Workers Convention, I've been thinking about something he said. He read the story of Elijah on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 19), about how the prophets of Baal prayed and begged their god for hours and hours for a single spark of fire on their alter. When none came, they prayed even more earnestly, even mutilating their own bodies in desperation, but still there was no answer from Baal. Finally at the end of the day it was Elijah's turn. He calmly prepared the sacrifice, drenched everything with water and simply prayed,

"O LORD, God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command. Answer me, O LORD, answer me, so these people will know that you, O LORD, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again." (1 Kings 18:36-37)

The idea in scripture is that God IMMEDIATELY answered his prayer by sending down fire from heaven that not only burned the sacrificed bull, but also consumed the entire alter, stones, water and everything! WOW!!

Man, I pray like a wuss!

• When I pray I like to remain somewhat reserved and not pray for things that are too radical so I don't unnecessarily get my hopes up.

• I like to pray for things I feel like I can still keep some kind of control over in case I need to help God out.

• I like to pray with 50/50 faith: "Maybe God will answer, maybe He won't. Who knows? Let's see what happens."

In comparison, I observe a couple things about Elijah.

• He risked his life to be in public. He was a wanted man for being a prophet of God (1 Kings 18:9-14). There was a death wish on his head, so for him to come out from hiding was a very bold and risky action.

• He obeyed God with such confidence that he was willing to put his neck and God's reputation on the line.

• Because of his obedience, he could boldly pray according to the will of God.

• He had no control over the outcome of his prayer or his obedience to God. For all he knew, God would use this situation to prove something else or nothing at all. He had great faith to proceed.

Here's the number one thing I learn from Elijah's example: Maybe I don't always experience the power of God in my life because I rarely give Him the opportunity to do so.

I go to James 5:16 in the New Testament, a verse I memorized for the community aspect of praying for each other. However, I often overlook the second half that says, "The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective." If I want to have a prayer life that is "powerful and effective," apparently the key ingredient to the recipe is righteousness. The obvious question I then ask myself is, "What is righteousness?" and "Do I have it?"

The Message puts it this way: "The prayer of a person living right with God is something powerful to be reckoned with."

That's what I want, to be like Elijah and live right with God. I want my prayer life to be something that's powerful to be reckoned with. I want to live a life for Him that's bold, risky, confident, obedient and is right smack in the middle of His will.

Whew! Easier said than done.

I just finished reading the statement That They May Have Life which is a very impressive, and timely statement that come from Evangelicals and Catholics Together. It was published in the October edition of First Things It is a statement of joint values between Evangelicals and Catholics. I love it for two reasons:

1) More people need to know that Evangelicals and Catholics all come from the same ingrained belief that life is valuable. We disagree on some points (birth control), but we all should gain value and synergy from sharing in our efforts to save lives.

2) It reminds people that being pro life is not just about abortion. Euthanasia, Embryo harvesting etcetera are also very real, very important battles for the value of life. I encourage you to Read the whole article. My favorite quotes from the statement are:

"To be Christian is to be associated with a historical movement bearing public witness to universal moral truths"

"In our common humanity, we share a God given capacity to reason, to argue, to deliberate, to persuade, and to discover moral truths regarding questions related to the right ordering of our life together."

Please take some time to comment and to see who all has signed onto this statement. It is a who's who list of the Evangelical and Catholic Community.

Happy Sukkot from Every Square Inch!

In John 1 we hear these words:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning..... The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. - John 1:1-2, 14

The Festival of Sukkot is occuring now and is a time in which the Jews remembered the time spent wandering in the desert. As they wandered in the desert for 40 years, they were provided for by God. During this festival of "booths" the Jewish people go into the fields and like in a booth representative of the tents that their ancestors lived in during those 40 years in the desert.

Jesus, in the same way, came to earth, took on our flesh and pitch his tent or lived in a booth among us. He was the Word, the Logos, very God of very God. He chose to humble himself and dwell with us.

As we enter the Fall harvest season, let us remember the Festival of Booths or Sukkot when the Jewish people would live in their fields and remember the time spent in the desert. We can at the same time remember the God-man who came and pitched his tent among us.

Soli Deo Gloria,

Carl
Administrator, Every Square Inch

By Corban Addison Klug

On the east end of Île de la Cité in the heart of what is arguably the most beautiful city in the world lies one of the most famous Gothic landmarks of Old Europe—the Cathedral Notre Dame de Paris. With its grand and intricately wrought flying buttresses, lofty bell towers, vaulted spires, and petaled rose windows, the cathedral is a monument to premodern architectural ingenuity and to the ascendant faith of its progenitors. Surrounding the cathedral in every direction are the bustling twenty-first century accoutrements of France’s cosmopolitan capital—boulevards, hotels, residential apartment buildings, museums and cafés; yet standing at the cathedral’s midsection along the quiet banks of a divided Seine, it is easy enough to imagine a scene from eight hundred years ago, when the last generation of builders gathered together with the resonant excitement of children to worship the God of their fathers and to celebrate the cathedral’s long-awaited completion.

Three weeks ago, on the first Sunday in August, my wife and I walked from our small hotel in Paris’ Opera District across to the Left Bank of the Seine and down to Île de la Cité to attend an evening chamber choir service at the cathedral. Although by upbringing we are Protestant, by choice we are among those who bless God for the revolution of Spirit-inspired ecumenism that slowly but surely is eroding the walls that men, beset by pride and fear, have erected to divide the Church. We made the Cathedral Notre Dame our destination that evening because, even on vacation, we wished to honor God and keep the Sabbath. That the cathedral is a Catholic house of worship did not give us pause. Nor did the fact that many modern Catholics would, if they discovered our Protestant heritage, exclude us from their fellowship as a result of our “heresy.” In deciding to worship at the Cathedral Notre Dame, we meant both to acknowledge that the Spirit of God is still alive in the Catholic Church and to contribute in our small way to the ultimate harmony of souls swept up in the ageless and cosmic work of redemption being accomplished in history by Jesus Christ.

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This post is an adaptation of an article written by Dr. Robert Clinton entitled "Uses And Values of Reflective Journaling". It is not on-line or I would link to it. Since blogging is a form of journaling, I substituted the word "blogging" for "journaling". For you Unix folks, just imagine : 1,$s/journaling/blogging/g I used the article with his permission.

Clinton's article applies to journaling in a written journal such as a diary. Blogging has had a much shorter half life than journaling ... however, if blogging hangs around for a long time (and I hope it will), then bloggers will realize similar benefits from their blogging.

"Reflective blogging" is a new term. I use it to mean posting on a blog with reflective (i.e contemplative ) posts. In other words, posts which reveal how and what a blogger is thinking about God, life, truth etc. These posts are often spawned by interacting with God's thoughts through reading His word. There are some reflective type faith bloggers out there, but most of the rock stars of the faith blogosphere spend their time linking, trackbacking and reacting to each other's posts about the controvery du jour. This criticism, btw, is self-directed too.

The b'sphere could use more reflective blogging, in my opinion – especially by godly men and women who have walked in union life with Christ for some time. We could all benefit from their insight into life.

Here are Clinton's "Five Uses Of Reflective Blogging"

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It was five years ago but I can still remember the musty smell of the sheets when I woke up that morning. It was 9:15 a.m. and the phone was ringing. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and looked out the paned-glass window at the early autumn sky, cornflower blue and alive with sunlight. I picked up the phone and heard my father’s voice. He did not mince words. “They’ve flown planes into the World Trade Center. The towers are burning.” My mind took a minute to engage before I felt the first kiss of dread. “Who?” I finally asked. “Terrorists maybe. No one knows yet.” I looked at the floor and shook my head in disbelief. “When did it happen?” My father replied: “The first plane hit around 8:40 a.m. They thought it was an accident. The second hit just a few minutes ago. It wasn’t an accident.” I swallowed hard. “There must be ten thousand people in those buildings at this hour.” My father was silent for a long moment. “I know.” Standing up, I said to him, “I have to go find a television. I’ll call you later.”

I threw some clothes on, got in my car, and headed toward the Law School. It was my first semester at the University of Virginia School of Law, only the fourth week of classes, and I was still in the process of getting to know my classmates. But there was a guy from my first-year section—Craig was his name—whose apartment I had been to before. He had a television. Craig answered the door on the first knock. The television was on behind him. The Twin Towers were aflame and hemorrhaging oily black smoke. I entered his apartment in a daze. I took a seat on his couch and he said little to me except: “All I want to know is where I can enlist.” The footage of the second plane crashing into the South Tower played with the nauseating regularity of a broken record. The wan light of the television made the monumental explosion look surreal. The announcers talked of people jumping from eighty stories up in the North Tower to escape the flaming jet fuel. Cameras all over New York City captured the smoke streaming eastward on a stiff wind. The news came in that the Pentagon had been hit and that a fourth plane had been hijacked. A little later they told us the fourth plane had gone down in a field in Pennsylvania. There were no survivors. They speculated that the plane had been targeting the White House or the Capitol building in D.C.

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Happy Labor Day from Every Square Inch!

Soli Deo Gloria,

Carl
Administrator, Every Square Inch

One of the most hotly contested and most prognosticated subjects of our time is about the nature of God. Even among varying Christian religions the view of God and His nature changes quite a bit. Some religions rely on legalistic interpretation of God and His promise of justice and of dealing with those who transgress His laws. Others lean more toward the view of God as merciful and gracious, loving of all no matter what circumstance. In the end, both are correct. God is a God of justice and He is also a God of peace and forgiveness. Part of being an apologist for Christianity is being able to correctly articulate what God is, and more importantly, what God is not. We will take a very brief look at the nature of God in this paper. It is partially based on Chapter 4 titled The Nature of God in Handbook of Christian Apologetics by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli.

God is the source of all existence. He is alone in that He is the sole creator of all things. All things work to the Glory of God. God is the source of His own existence. You and I in our finite bodies need to be created to come into this world. We need a mother and a father to come together as one and create us. God is not temporally limited in that manner. He draws on himself for His own existence. If God was dependent on something or someone else for his existence he would not be the Almighty God. He would be the product of something else, and that something else would be greater than Him, and therefore more worthy of our adoration, praise and worship. It would also beg the question “If there is a being that created God, who created the being that created God?” It is an endless loop of guessing and not ever knowing.

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Hello, Everyone. We are new to ESI and look forward to joining in the tapestry of conversation being woven on this site.

Over a year ago, Brian invited us to contribute to ESI when we were enjoying some seriously yummy Thai food with Sondra in Charlottesville. (Thanks for your patience, Brian!) About a month ago, we all found ourselves eating at the same table again (this time enjoying South African food), and the time seemed right for us to finally join in the fun here at ESI.

You can learn more about us in our bio, but to make a long story short, we are very much into the interaction between Culture and the Faith. We both come from a Presbyterian background but are now attending an Anglican church where we enjoy the historically orthodox theology, the sung liturgy, and the deep sense of sacramentality.

One of our deepest passions is the unity of the Church across all of her members from Rome to the little, funky, Southern-gothic church down in the holler where they handle snakes and have fried chicken on the grounds every Sunday. As such, we pray that the Lord will use us as sinews in the Body of Christ to help bind His people together in His love.

Peace,

John and Petra Harvey

One cannot go visit a zoo or aquarium anymore without being inundated by certain political messages. A particular message that was repeated to my husband and I throughout our recent visit to San Diego (which included both the Zoo and the Wild Animal Park) was, "Poaching is bad."

Variations on this theme were repeated to us constantly. We were often informed that such-and-such an animal was endangered and that there were "less than 1000" left in "The Wild."

Annihilating a Species is Bad
Though I believe that humans have the right to kill animals and eat them and use other parts of them to make tools or clothing, I also believe it is inappropriate to annihilate a species.

We Americans tend to romanticize tribal cultures as some sort of simpler, "back-to-nature" sort of existence. But all cultures are not created equal. It is my conviction that a culture is "good" to the extent that it reflects God's vision for society. Each culture will have details where they vary (musical styles, dress, overall personality, etc.), but God has given instructions to which each culture is obligated to conform.

When one studies Genesis, especially the first four chapters, one sees that God did not begin history with what we typically think of as a tribal culture. The description was more one of gardening/farming than anything else. It was not until after the Deluge (during which God chose a family to preserve not only humanity but animal life as well) that man was specifically given meat to eat. At that time, God put the fear of man into the animals (Genesis 9:2-5). I presume that putting fear into the animals was a way of making sure that man did not obliterate them. It is, after all, quite simple to butcher a domesticated animal.

As early as Genesis 4 is the idea of a man having a flock mentioned. When one puts together the idea of tending a flock of sheep with the gardening and cultivation of the land mentioned in the prior three chapters of the book, the picture is one of sustainable food sources.

Man is not called to be a locust upon the earth, consuming whatever is before him and leaving a path of destruction behind. And yet, this is precisely the lifestyle of some tribal cultures (including some past Native American cultures). The tribes hunt until there are no more animals to eat. They migrate and "gather" food much in the way an elephant does (an elephant herd, we learned, can destroy an entire forest in a short amount of time)--until there is nothing left.

The Problem of Africa
It is hard to isolate the various problems of Africa, because many of them stem from a refusal to bow the knee to the Creator. The area of poaching is just such a problem. The poachers see potential value in the animals--their skins, their tusks, their meat (for food known as Bushmeat). But they do not follow the Creator's guide. They often do not cultivate the ground and tend a herd. They kill and kill until the animal population drops into what many call the "endangered" level.

So then the governments, often pressured by Americans, steps in to "save the animals." And we were astounded by the "most effective" way this has been done. We were told this by a tour guide, and I am assuming this is true. Some African governments hire poachers, arm them, and pay them to kill other poachers. That's right. Africa has chosen not to elevate man back to his position of steward of the land and life, but rather turn him on himself. And now there is a situation where a dead poacher is more valuable than a dead animal.

Problem solved, in the opinion of Africa. And the San Diego Zoological Society seems to also accept this solution. After all, they exist not to put creation back together again, but to preserve animals in the name of preserving animals. So, San Diego breeds endangered animals, ships them back to Africa, repopulates the land with fresh meat, and gets comfortable with the idea that the animals won't be killed, but the hunters will be.

And it is believed all is right with the world, when it is in fact turned upon its very head!

"But I tell you that men will have to give account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken." Matthew 12:36

As a father of a very busy soon to be 5 year old, the thought of not having a television around is enough to make me want to scream and holler until they lock me up in the looney bin. I think it is time though. Here is a few random observations on my own behavior after watching television:

1) After watching an episode of The George Lopez Show recently I found myself at Safeway talking to the store clerk. The clerk was Latino, and my speech pattern towards him was so demeaning...and just like the way George Lopez talks on his show. To me it is ignorant and uneducated sounding. Unfortunately, it is also funny and it sucks millions of Americans to the television every night.

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Despite the extraordinary cinematic advances of our time, fantasy will never achieve the status of reality, for the two are immiscible substances. But fantasy has its gifts and its genius. The power of fantasy lies in its ability to recast the truths of the Real in the veiled form of allegory and by that to tell a story already told a thousand times with sparkling freshness, to awaken deaf ears to the sounds of forgotten music, to remind the mind of its passion for fascination and the heart of its need for hope. Such is the birthright of the superhero and the singular cause of his fame. One need not even ask what it is about a man whose eyes are all-seeing, whose skin is soft yet impervious to bullets, whose ears hear the cries of a billion hurting souls, whose strong arms bind up the wounds of the broken, and whose kindness is boundless and freely given, that so captures our imagination. The cry of the human heart is to believe in such a man, to touch the hem of his cape, to immortalize his memory in a photograph and forever tell others of the time you stood by his side.

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In a few days we will celebrate the freedom that we enjoy and remember those who sacrificed so that we may have our freedom. In a world that is still filled with those people who would like to take away the freedom that we have, I am grateful for the sacrifice that was made on my behalf.

Everytime I remember the sacrifice that was made by those men and women who gave their lives in defense of our nation, I am reminded of the ultimate sacrifice that was made Jesus.

Jesus told his disciples:

"This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. - John 15:12-15 (ESV)

He gave up his life for his friends. Jesus paid the ultimate price. His faithfulness to His friends spoke deeply about the love that the Father shows us. It is through Jesus that we have freedom! True freedom!

The Truth, Jesus, has set you free! You are free indeed!

Soli Deo Gloria,

Carl
Administrator, Every Square Inch

Shalom from Israel!

We have just completed our first two days of the journey here. I am studying with Ray Vander Laan from That the World May Know Ministry. We are walking in the footsteps of our Rabbi Jesus by following Ray to various locations with connections in the story of the Bible.

Among all the areas we visited today was Gath which enters the story of David and Goliath. We discussed the need for community and how David found himself with community behind him at some points and nowhere near him at others. This was juxtaposed with the story of Samson which we explored from the perspective on Samson's tendency to be a loner.

God has blessed us greatly with weather that is cooler than expected. It is still around 100 degrees Farenheit but we have been enjoying some breezes which bring much needed refreshment in the heat.

If you would like to view more pictures from our trip, please visit our photo page.

UPDATE: Five people on our trip from Riverside Community Church are doing a much better job than I could hope to do of updating on the daily activity of our trip.

Why Contemplating Eternity Causes Random Black Outs and Major Panic Attacks in Those Who Ask the Question!

Ecclesiastes 3:11 "He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

Arthur Stace was an ordinary vagabond. He liked his women, his beer and his lifestyle of freedom from authority and the "normal" life afforded to others. His life as a nomad was spent satisfying no one but himself. Then one day the Lord came knocking and asked him a simple question; "Where will you be in eternity?"

This one question so perplexed him, so made his life miserable, that he gave his life to Christ. He then took to the streets with a simple piece of chalk that wrote only one word..."eternity".

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Carl’s profound revelation for the day is (insert drum roll here) Love is a 4 letter word. That is right, in case you can not count, love is a 4 letter word, and it is spelled T. I. M. E.It is a simple pneumonic really, one that is easy enough to remember. Here is my definition of time.

Teach.

A verse familiar to most parents is Proverbs 22:6 “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” We are taught this verse so many different times in our life as parents that we should get the T-shirt that says “been there, heard that” next time our pastor uses this verse. It occurred to me recently that this verse must be important because we hear it so much. Maybe I should remember to teach my child at every moment I can. That does not mean I have to make every part of life a parable to share, but let my life reflect the parables of Jesus. This leads me to I.

Integrity

Proverbs 20:7 tells us “The just man walketh in his integrity: his children are blessed after him.” Doing what I say I am going to do, honoring my family in all that I do and dealing fairly with those around me in business, and in church, is a sign of my integrity. My child, although only four years old, is a sponge that soaks up everything I do and uses it to develop his own character. I recently heard the commander in charge of detention in Guantanamo Bay Cuba on television saying that he could defend what has (or has not) happened there to the media, to his superiors, and others. But the worst segment of the population he had to deal with was the regular phone calls from his children asking “Just what is it that you are doing down there?”

Model

Actions speak volumes more than our words. We are an action oriented society. If you want me to learn it, then do it first. Then I will choose to follow or not. Jesus was the ultimate model. He followed the will of his Father all the way to the cross. It is not promised to be easy all the time. We see Jesus in the garden before His arrest not only asking, but pleading with His Father to let this cup pass before him. We must prayerfully, and with the up most humility, check and cross check our lives to make sure that we are modeling the life of Christ to our children. If we are not, we are going to be judged and found lacking because we do not take our job seriously.

Enjoy

I regularly hear that God does not want us to feel or to be overly emotional. This is a very conservative view, and a very incorrect view. Php 2:13 tells us “For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” God takes pleasure in His creation, in His children and he enjoys them. God enjoyed the company of David when he was a shepherd in the wilderness. We are told that God inhabits the praises of His people. How cool is it to consider that God not only tolerates us and responds to us only because He promised He would, He enjoys us and us living in His pleasure. This is a great model for parents and children. We should not just tolerate our children; we should embrace them in pleasure. When I am with my son it is an excuse to take the tie off, put on the Birkenstocks and go to the park and play like there is no tomorrow. This reassures my son that I love him and that I want to spend time with him and that I enjoy hearing from him.

If you are still reading this, would you take a moment and write to me at Carl@thoughtsofagyrovague.com and tell me how you spend time with you child? How do you make sure to reaffirm and build up your child? Tell me anything about it, and let me know if I can pray for your family as well.

Imagine this scenario:

You are booked on a full flight to LA, coach class, of course, window seat. The middle seat next to you remains vacant right up to departure. At the last moment, in comes a twenty-something young fellow to claim his seat. You notice he is carrying an odd looking bundle. Once seated, he proceeds to unwrap his python (emotional support pet, that is). Horrified, you say, "Isn't there a law against this?" Actually, thanks to a 2003 ruling by the Department of Transportation, scenes like this happen regularly. I used the snake for shock effect, but airlines report accommodating (in the passenger cabin) dogs, of course, but also cats, monkeys, miniature horses, goats, and yes, even an emotional support duck.

Here is an excerpt summarizing the 2003 ruling:

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Well, tomorrow is primary day, and after much consideration, I believe that fact merits a posting for today. If I wait until tomorrow, I'll have waited too long! I think the best way to approach this post is to start by quoting one of our Founding Fathers:

Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may treasure the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost. (John Adams)

This is the sort of politics I can appreciate! This is not a vote based on polls or trying to guess who can win. This is honestly analyzing the candidate or the bills (I would suggest Scripture as the litmus test) and then voting accordingly, regardless of the consequences.

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For several months now I have been praying for the gifts of the spirit to be present in my life and the life of my family. I pray through them regularly, but today God pressed in on me and asked me "What do you really know about the gifts of the spirit?" It has prompted me to look at each gift of the spirit a little deeper. Over the next 9 weeks (there are 9 gifts as noted in Galatians 5:22) I will dig into one of the gifts and share what God has shown me in regards to each gift.

Romans 8:5 tells us "Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires." I want to explore the first fruit of the spirit which is love.

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As we launch into the month of June here at Every Square Inch let this sign be a reminder to enjoy the life we have been given and celebrate God in all His glory inside and out.

Soli Deo Gloria,

Carl
Administrator, Every Square Inch

"For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain."

Pastor Dunnington preached an entire sermon on that one verse. Correction. On the first half of that verse.

I have always read that verse in terms of the second half -- the "to die is gain" part. I never saw this verse as an affirmation of union life.

What is union life?

Paul uses the term frequently in his writing. How often? He uses the phrase in Christ 74 times, in Jesus six times and in him eight times in his various writings.

What does it mean to be united with Christ?

Dr. Robert Clinton1 defines it:

Union life is a phrase which refers both to the fact of the spirtual reality for a believer joined in spirit with the resurrected Spirit of Christ and the process of that union being lived out with Holy Spirit power so that the person is not dominated by sin in his/her life.

Reformed types like to use a fancy theological term for it. Sanctification.

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There is a saying recorded in the Mishnah, a collection of sayings from ancient sages, that says, “May you be covered in your Rabbi’s dust and may you thirstily drink his words.” This paints a beautiful word picture of how closely a disciple wanted to follow his rabbi—so closely that he would be covered in the dust of his rabbi. In September of 2005, I experienced what it meant to be covered in the dust of the rabbi as I traveled with Ray Vander Laan, founder of That the World May Know Ministries, and a group of 49 other people to Israel and Turkey to study the Bible, or as we referred to it, the “Text,” in its cultural, geographic and historic context. As we traveled throughout the Galilee where Jesus called His disciples and later went to Turkey, where many of His disciples were sent, we entered the world of Jesus and the Text.

As Jesus entered the world of first-century Palestine, He was at the right place and the right time to partake in a very particular practice that had originally developed in Babylon during captivity. What was this? The rabbinical schools and more particularly rabbis who had disciples. It was in this world that Jesus chose His disciples and called them to follow Him.

What did it mean to be a disciple? Often in Western culture we think of a disciple as synonymous with a student. In other words, we think of a disciple as someone who knows what the rabbi knows. This is part of it but doesn’t tell the whole story. A disciple is someone who wants to be, in his walk with God, what the rabbi is. Sure, the disciple and the rabbi may have different personalities or a different taste in this or that, but the disciple has a fiery passion within his soul to be, in His walk with God, who the rabbi is.

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I have written elsewhere that purpose is the holy grail of human existence. I reaffirm that sentiment here. The desire for meaning, for a teleology of life, is an incurable condition in the human heart, its quest a journey that no man or woman can resist. Even those poor, sodden souls who labor in the abstract of rhetoric to deny and declaim the existence of the divine pursue in the shadows of practice an earthly proxy of transcendence. It is irrelevant whether their appetite be for the ecstasy of sensuality, for the status of invincibility, for the acclaim of the cognoscenti, for the glamour of wealth, for the glory of fame, for the caress of a lover, or for the affections of family and friends; in every case it is the irresistible call of meaning that drives them insatiably onward into the deepest caves of darkness and upward to the very pinnacles of creation. Without pausing to recognize the irony, man in abject rebellion against eternity proves its existence by pining ever more desperately for its substitute.

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The above comic is just an illustration of a question I have been thinking lately while putting this blog together. Are we, as a society, loosing the art of oral persuasion? I have come to ask the question more and more as I have closer contact with people from all different walks of life, in all different countries. I am astounded at the amount of personification a simple telephone conversation can convey.

I know someone reading this is going to say that it is unfair to judge a person just by the way that they talk. But is it really? We all have heard that the first impression is the worst one to have to change. Linguistics is an art form, and it is one art form I am afraid we are loosing. I have a few reasons to think why:

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Our wonderful free market economy brings with it an unhealthy insatiability. We need only to look at the lessons from those who have “made it” to bring us up short.

Dr. Avner Offer, professor of economic history at Oxford University has spent the last 20 years studying quality of life questions and has recently written a book called The Challenge of Affluence. In his book, Offer tracks the downside of wealth. Rather than bringing contentment, it seems to foster false expectations, stress, and anxiety. The drive to achieve financial goals creates permanently raised expectations, so that the wealthy forget how to enjoy the simpler things in life. They become acclimated to the “wow factor” with the closed deal or the newest acquisition. Gorging on the fruit of success, many of us forget to savour the taste. Our lives are lived in a vortex of goals and maximum achievement where anxiety and impatience rule.

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May the month of May bring you thoughts of Joy and Peace as God renews our soil, or hearts and our minds. From my family to yours, I truly hope that the month of May brings you closer to Christ then you have ever been.

In Him, through Him, and for Him

Carl
Administrator, Every Square Inch

I have so much to say, but I don't know where to start. I’ve written down so many verses and quotes and thoughts over the past few days. and I wanted to sit down and make them into some organized idea that I could present to you, hoping to pull off for another week the illusion that the things in this world of Africa don't eat away at my brain and my heart. here I am, exposing the growing reality that I don't know what to do with Africa.

I just finished a book called "Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa." Keith B. Richburg was the US Bureau Chief for the Washington Post during some of Africa’s most recently formative years: during the Rwandan genocide, various ongoing conflicts in Somalia, the Congo, Uganda, Liberia, and Zaire. This man, a African American from Detroit, came to Africa expecting to connect to some ancestral bond awaiting him on this soil, only to find that Africa alluded him, rejected him, devalued his work and sacrifice, and left him feeling thankful for the results of slavery which landed him In America, rather than at the base of a waterfall with many other African bodies who had been thrown into the river. He continually says, "In Africa, you don't count the bodies."

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Editor's Note:

So sorry this one was delayed. We had some server problems not to long ago and this one got lost in the malay. It is still worthy of reflection on King Jesus though.

An Ode to Joy in Anticipation of Easter

When I survey the cross upon which you bled and died, I cannot but fall to my face in shame. For a god to tabernacle in flesh amidst his wayward creation is a marvelous mystery; for that same god to embrace death to save his creation is an unsearchable antimony. Yet you have done it; you have walked in our midst and loved us with your tears, with the dolorous supremacy of your suffering. You have cast your eyes (were they blue, green, brown, or somewhere in between?) upon our ignominy; you have seen the pain of our despair; you have touched the effluence of our diseases; you have known the depth of our wounds. You have felt the sting of our reflexive hate, our small-minded arrogance, our rancid indifference, our propensity for doubt, our pathetic simplicity, our voluble hypocrisy, our self-deception and foolishness. You have experienced the pompous and self-serving justice meted out by those we honor as wise. You have seen the destiny we design for the meek, the poor, the peacemakers, for those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. You have seen how stained are our hands with the blood of innocents, how soiled are our faces with soot from the fires of our idolatry, how cluttered are our hearts with cherished artifacts of greed, pride and lust. We do not deserve you. We are darkness; you are light. We are unsightly; you are majestic.

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As a Covenant College student in the 1980s, we were all required to read H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture (1951). It was (and perhaps still is) the standard textbook to read when studying culture.

It was my first exposure to the issue of thinking Christianly about culture. I wrestled with the question, how exactly are we supposed to engage culture?

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A title like this might raise expectations about receiving advice on preparing a gourmet meal. Sorry, but you have the wrong author and this is the wrong venue for that.

Actually, we are addressing the value of the simple, but long forgotten, ritual of family dinners. Do you remember how it was with “Father Knows Best” and “Leave it to Beaver”? I personally have fond memories of family meals as one of five siblings on our small family farm. The main obstacle to the family meal was when Daylight Savings Time rolled around and we could spend another hour of daylight in the field. What has happened to the idyllic family gathered around the evening meal in the twenty first century? In a word- busyness! Most of you reading this have mixed feelings about this daily discipline. Many of you relish memories of your childhood where Mom, Dad, and the kids gathered around the table at the end of the day and everyone had their opportunity to talk about their particular stories. On the other hand, as overwhelmingly busy parents now, you are balancing after-school activities, work, church meetings, and a myriad of other commitments that make it so difficult to pull off this important family meeting time consistently. The tyranny of the urgent rules and these “life molding” important events suffer at the hands of the urgent events which cry out louder, but offer much less in the way of growing godly, communicative kids and reinforcing the family unit.

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Ah, glorious April! Is there a touch of the Transcendent in the carpets of daffodils and singing of the birds? Do we have glimpses of God’s glory as the mountains produce hundreds of shades of green and the trees awaken to their new season of growth?

Yes, and yet… how the Transcendent gets trashed by the mundane in April! Is there ever a month so packed with activities that there isn’t time to breathe? I remember when I was a college student I bemoaned the presence of final exams and other closing of the year madness in a month when I just wanted to smell the roses. Someday, I reasoned, after those degrees were completed, I could enjoy the month for what it should be- an exercise in worship.

Not so. It just gets worse. Every good cause has a banquet, a retreat, a “walk”, or a picnic in April. Sunday- that wonderful Sabbath of rest and delight in the Lord- becomes clogged with extra luncheons, closing productions, and omnipresent meetings. Somehow worship becomes squeezed into a plethora of other activities. We get too busy to meditate, pray, or study God’s Word. People begin dropping out of their Bible studies and prayer groups in order to meet the demands of their garden, their lawn, and their tax forms.
Wise people say that in times like this we are too busy not to pray. How do we say ‘no’ to good things? How do we order our days that the priority of ‘God first’ is maintained?

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Happy April Fools Day from Every Square Inch!

Every year I attempt to think of a funny April Fool's joke to play on someone. Some years I am successful at thinking of something to do and other times I just let the day slide by without pulling any pranks or jokes on anyone. Even when I do think of a prank to pull it is seen at best as not very funny and at worst a cruel and inhumane thing to do.

My two most famous April Fool's jokes were played on my mother. My mother is a very excitable individual so it is often times very easy to obtain a reaction to unexpected news. So it was on both of these occasions.

The first of the occasions occurred in 2001. I had been dating a girl since high school and when April Fool's day came around, my father and I plotted to play a joke on my mother. We began by getting our story straight and then making the telephone call. I called home from college mid-day on April Fool's day. My mother answered.

Mom: Hello

Brian: Hey, Mom! I got some big news for you.

Mom: What is it? Did you do well on a test?

Brian: No, that isn't the news. I am engaged!

Mom: Really? When did this happen?

Brian: This morning.

Mom: Umm. Did you think about this? When is the wedding date?

Brian: Well, we haven't set a date yet. I had given it a lot of thought.

Mom: Ok. Have you told your father?

Brian: No. You are the first one I have told.

Mom: Well... That's great news. I gotta go. I will talk to you soon.

As my mother hangs up, my dad e-mails me. I send him an e-mail back telling him that I have sold it. She is believing it. Just as I e-mail he e-mails back saying she called him. He acts surprised but acts serious and she is convinced that it is the real deal. Just as my mom is about to hang up she tells my dad that she will have to call everyone and tell them the good news.

This is when my dad and I agree that it has gone far enough. He e-mails and tells me to call her immediately and announce the April Fool's joke. It was a big surprise to her and she was amazed that we pulled it off.

What is the point of this story about April Fool's? Often we take things lightly and fool or joke with one another. This is fine when it comes some things but I know of one thing that is definitely not an April Fool's joke: Christ's Kingdom! Jesus, through his death and resurrection, has entered triumphally as King. He reigns, sovereign, over all the earth and we hail him as King.

When it comes to hailing Jesus as King, there is no fooling around. I may act like the Court Jester in other matters but when I am in the true King's court I am the humble servant. As we think about or maybe partake in April Fool's day, may we remember who the true King is and our role not as fools but rather worshippers and servants of the King.

Soli Deo Gloria,

Brian
Founder, Every Square Inch

Today, March 31st, marks the 1 year anniversary of the death of Terry Schiavo. I actually hate to call it an anniversary because the term is usually used to denote something that is joyful. This was not a joyful day. This day was a tragedy, one that we have repeated many times since. One only has to look at little Haleight Poutre the 11 year-old in Massachusetts who was almost left to die by the "caretakers" of the state. She is alive now because of nothing less than a miracle. We cannot say the same for Terry.

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To live is Christ, to die is gain
Should any love of flesh remain?

Once dead, now live, my spirit slept
‘Til Christ on high, His blood He wept
For wrathful weight of Father Just
Pressed hard on Him who knew no lust.

Hung as did the desert snake
Did He, the Lamb, both bleed and quake
For wretched heart and sin-stained land
Abandon, abandoned, abandoned Man.

Judgment full and fully spent!
Dead and raised His earthly tent:
The Father Good, the Spirit mine
His death, my life now intertwined.

To live is Christ, to die is gain
Should any love of flesh remain?

Vessel shamed, yet mended true
In my soul, blood runs blue;
Royal priest and Kingdom bound:
“Journey forth to Heaven’s ground."

“Yet on the earth My Kingdom still
Sojourns with thee; obey My will.
In the world a stranger be
And make thine life My homily.”

To live is Christ, to die is gain
Should any love of flesh remain?
From care and fear for Him alone
Mortify, mortify thine fleshly home.

Can sun exposure cause skin cancer? Absolutely. However, appropriate sunlight actually prevents cancer. Exposure to the sun provides many benefits such as promoting the formation of vitamin D. (Dr. Joseph Mercola)

I don't put sunscreen on my kids. At least, not with any regularity. I think I put it on them twice a year, for the 4th of July and Labor Day, both of which involve celebrations where the children will be out in the sun longer than they are accustomed. I tend to avoid talking about sunscreen with other mothers because there are a lot of opinions about it and I prefer not to cause a stir.

Oh, but I do love to think about things, and so, in honor of the warm sun that is outside my window after a week or more of rain (yes, we basked in its glory without sunblock for a good thirty minutes yesterday afternoon--gasp!), I thought I'd analyze sunblock a bit, just for fun.

I must give the disclaimer that though I have recently read some research that supports me in my aversion to sunscreen, it was not research that originally influenced this behavior.

Sunscreen, and the excessive societal pressure to use it, bothers me a bit because it contradicts what God said about His own creation. On the fourth day of creation, God made the great lights, with the greater light (the sun) to rule over the day. He saw that it was good.

And it is amazing to see this play out within creation as we learn more about how things work. God created man, and when man worked in the garden (in the sun) the sunlight interacted with his skin to produce Vitamin D3. Vitamin D3 is not the same as what you find in fortified milk and cereals (that is D2, a synthetic vitamin, much harder to break down into a usable form).

When Vitamin D3 is broken down and transformed by the liver and then the kidneys it becomes 25-hydroxyvitamin D. And this fancy word symbolizes much that is good: natural protection again cancer (especially female cancers), depression, fatigue, infertility, osteoporosis, some autoimmune disorders, multiple sclerosis, and the list goes on.

When God says something is good, He means it! Now this doesn't mean we should spend excessive amounts of time in the direct sunlight. (Sometimes I think sunscreen was invented as an attempt to avoid the consequences of two behaviors: immodesty and excess.)

And we do know a man who is allergic to the sun, and so the sun doesn't seem to be good for him. But a person being allergic to peanuts doesn't mean that peanuts are actually bad, and the fact that our friend gets a rash from the sun doesn't make the sun bad, either. Sunlight is a good thing.

It is always interesting to me that we can glorify God in literally every square inch of our lives. Sometimes it is as simple as rejecting society's assumption that something is inherently bad when Scripture explicitly says it is good.

My husband is a worship leader who leads worship on a regular basis at First Baptist Church of Doylestown’s youth ministry, Rooftop Revolution. This has led to interesting conversations on what true worship really is. We believe a successful ministry should be measured in the evidence of worship as a lifestyle seen pouring out in the body of Christ. You ask, “What does ‘worship as a lifestyle’ mean?”

We’ve come to realize that humans are by nature, worshippers. The problem is, we worship relationships, fashion, technology, material things - instead of the true God- without even realizing it. Songs worship the beauty of a woman, award shows are made to praise people for what they do best, and advertisements demand the latest and greatest gadget on the market. Our culture worships the world and man but Christians were made to be countercultural and worship God the creator. Christians have learned to compartmentalize worship and have been fooled into thinking that worship is only what happens when we gather together and sing songs in church. But if we were made for worship, wouldn’t it be a waste to only worship God on a Sunday through song?

A wise person once said, “Unless it is sin, everything we do and say must and should be worship to God.” Therefore, a Christian’s spiritual act of worship can and must include all areas of life; the sports, movies, conversations, hobbies, and acts of service we engage in. The question is not, do we worship? The question is do we worship God? Do we give God credit in all things? Do we point to Him in everything that we do – lifting up His name and giving glory to Him and Him alone? I believe this is the purpose of the Christian life and what it means to live life as a spiritual act of worship to God.

God's call for radical transformation to occur on YOUR life.

While bouncing around this morning on some of my favorite Christian blog spots I heard God talking to me in a unique way. He spoke loud and clear when he said, "Carl, do you know that most of my people, my followers, are Oppressed, Depressed or Repressed?" God has a clear calling for his children to rise above the repression of totalitarian regimes, to follow the call of God and to quit living a life in conformity with the patterns of this world. A verse that is familiar to the church is Romans 12:2 which states "And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect".

OPPRESSION

I am not going to shoot a lot of statistics here as to how much of the Christian church is being oppressed today. I find a lot of the statistics that are commonly available are usually politically motivated in nature. I am not writing this to discuss politics, I am writing this to provide insight and vision for the church today. I write as a person who has walked a mile in the shoes of young men in India who are persecuted for the faith they have received. I write as a person who has stood in the midst of the orphanages of Ukraine and seen the faces of children who are hopeless, who feel that they are abandoned by society, and ultimately by God. A child who grows up feeling hopeless, helpless and unable to do anything but be an orphan is yes indeed, oppressed.

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Is it out of date for the 21st century or does it remain a vital parental tool?

Imagine this scenario. A father smacks his two-year old in the grocery store. Before he even gets to the checkout counter a policeman arrives. Mom is called to take the child home and Dad heads downtown in cuffs, charged with child abuse. The charges are based on a new law banning any form of physical discipline of children. A bit far out? Think again. The country in which I currently reside, has just such a bill being drawn up by its Department of Social Services. The bill is in response to the rising rate of child abuse. If the proposed legislation passes, South Africa will be the first country in Africa to outlaw corporal punishment.

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I confess that I am addicted to blogging. I know some would see it as anti-social, others see it as a fad, but I hope it is hear to stay. I enjoy blogs just like this one which help me broaden my horizons and get in touch with people who I might not otherwise get to know.

I have been spending a great deal of time on blogs of people who are confessing Christians. The subjects are varied, the topics are interesting, and the ensuing conversations are great. But I have seen a recent rise in the usage of language that is less than glorifying to God. It was subtle at first, then a little more, and a little more. All of a sudden it is all over the place.

As Christians we are called to a higher standard. We must answer the calling of our faith. In the book of Philippians the Apostle Paul states “I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” (Php 3:14 av) Part of answering the higher calling of our faith is not living conformed to the standards of this world. We must conform to the standard of God. Again we are implored by the Apostle Paul “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” (Ro 12:2 av)

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On February 18, 2006, Darrow Miller, director of Food for the Hungry, was the plenary speaker at Trinity Church in Charlottesville. The Missions’ Conference topic was “The Problem of Poverty.” Full of preconceived notions, I attended his talk about Africa. I expected to hear all about the “Dark Continent” and the need to send more money and more missionaries. I was surprised and intrigued by what he had to say.

He affirmed that the continent is the world’s poorest. The indices of Poverty (infant mortality, HIV, life expectancy, debt, corruption, human suffering) are startling. The average life expectancy of an African is 51 (28.6 if you live in Sierra Leone). Thousands are dying daily of AIDS. In countries ranked highest in human suffering, 24 out of 30 are in Africa. And so the sorry tale continues...

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Greetings from Every Square Inch!

Every year, as Winter fades and Spring arrives, I am reminded of the spiritual picture that God provides me with. With each spring I am reminded of this new life that I have in Christ. This partaking in the new creation with Christ is a beautiful picture. Today, if you are in Christ, you are a new creation! The old things have passed away. Behold! New things have come! (II Corinthians 5:17)

This is exciting news. The creation that God made and said was very good was made through and for Jesus. It is in this role as Creator that Jesus is able to recreate or bring restoration and reconciliation to the fallenness around us.

It is in Jesus that death, the fallenness around us, has truly lost its sting. Today we hail Christ as King of the new creation. Come live in us, Jesus, and allow us, through your power, to walk after you. We desire to partake in this ministry of reconciliation that you are about, even now!

As the snow melts and the trees begin to show their buds, may you be reminded of the winter that is ending. The frozen grip that death has on the world is melting away and new life has begun. We can be part of that new life if we choose by God's grace to follow Jesus. He will lead us to streams of living water and life everlasting.

Soli Deo Gloria,

Brian
Founder, Every Square Inch

Lately I’ve been thinking about how emotion-driven American society has become. I suppose the seeds were sown in the 1960s when “If I feels good, do it!” became the catch phrase of a generation. I remember how one of my college professors tried-in vain-to stem this tide by repeatedly lecturing us to say “I think X is true.” Rather than “I feel X is true.” Then there was Obi Wan telling Luke to “Trust your feelings.” And of course, who hasn’t been told that they need to get in touch with their feelings? The problem is, emotions are almost always a shaky basis for decision making.

An instrument rated pilot knows about this quite well. When darkness or clouds obscure the horizon the pilot knows he must rely on his instruments-not his feelings- to guide him to his destination. You see, the inner ear does a great job of maintaining one’s balance only as long as there are visual cues to Up and Down. More than one pilot has flown serenely through the night only to find the moon below him. A pilot who trusts his feelings over his instruments usually winds up dead.

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A Cautionary Tale of Mind over Heart in the Pursuit of Faith

As anyone close to me would attest, I am by nature an intellectual. By that I mean that due to some, perhaps unfortunate, genetic proclivities over which I have little or no control, I am a connoisseur of lofty theories, a lover of logic and learning, a collector of rare and arcane knowledge, the sort of person to whom pedantry is not pejorative but honorific. Whatever the venue and subject at issue, I take delight in the responsive music of polemics and the tête-à-tête of rarefied argument. I thrill at the rhythm of eloquence and relish the chance, however my wife may deem it inappropriate, to deploy uncommon polysyllabic words and phrases such as “jeremiad” and “joie de vivre” in rhetoric and conversation. As a dyed-in-the-wool bibliophile, I am kindred to Erasmus who spent his income on books and bought food with his change. To me a new perspective concerning an old problem is as savory as the aroma of fine wine and the gift of unexpected profundity as much a cause for merriment as a seascape splashed with the soft colors of a setting sun. Like every fallen pursuit, however, my ceaseless fascination with all things erudite and wise has been, in practice, at least as hazardous to my spiritual health as it has been liberating to my insatiable curiosity; for, no matter how I try to ignore it or justify it, the poison of idolatry ever beckons from the tree of knowledge, and the faith to which I am called—a faith destined to inherit the Kingdom—is not the faith of a sage but of a child.

I must confess that, as prideful men are prone to do, I once fancied myself immune to the gilded lures of intellectual hubris. But, of course, it was arrogance itself that blinded my eyes to the perils of trusting implicitly the guidance of contemplation. It was pride that, by a gradual and time-worn deception, corrupted the innocence of my wonder at the beauty and mystery of Creation and dressed me, ever more elaborately, in the pompous robes of the Pharisee. In retrospect, nowhere was my intellectual pride more distilled, yet more invisible to me, than in my relationship to theology. As soon as my brain forged the cognitive machinery to think abstractly, I bid farewell to the simplicity of my childhood faith and embarked upon my own personal journey to formulate a systematic and comprehensive understanding of the God of my fathers. I devoured theological tomes by the shelf-load and devoted endless hours to the cause of mastering arguments in support of my views and synthesizing counterarguments to refute all contrary positions. As the years passed, my faith increased in complexity until the desert tents of its antiquarian heritage were surrounded and ultimately consumed by a sprawling metropolis of interdependent and symbiotic philosophical propositions whose livelihood could not be sustained without a tireless refreshment of reading and thought. The books of Scripture became for me a patchwork compendium of “proof” texts that favored my theological persuasions and “difficult” texts that required further, and often contorted, explanations to satisfy my lust for exhaustive logical coherence. Gone were the days when I read the biblical writings devotionally in order to delight in and relate to God; in those days I read them intellectually to support my particular view of Him.

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One of the questions I have been asking myself in my daily walk with God lately has been “Why are my prayers seemingly not being heard?” I know that God has reasons for not answering prayers in the way that I would ask Him to, but I decided to dig in a little bit, and God answered my question.

We are given a command in the Psalms to “Enter into his gates with thanksgiving,
and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.” (Psalm 100:4)

Something that I realized in my life is that my thankfulness to God is anemic at best. I realized that I came back from the slums of India last year so on fire, and so thankful to God that I had been so blessed, but life started to get in the way again and I forgot to nurture the gratitude towards God. We are shown in the book of Romans what can happen when we forget to be thankful. “Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.” (Romans 1:21) A darkened heart is not what I want to be accused of having.

I talked to a few people to see what they thank God for in their daily prayer life. I could not believe what I heard. Most people were not taking time in their prayer life to thank God. They did as I did, they entered into the prayer with a small laundry list of requests, a few prayers for my friends, and family and authorities in my life; and that was it. God has provided His son Jesus Christ to atone for our sins. As if that is not enough to be thankful for, what about your family, friends, health, safety, religious freedom... the list is endless.

When we are thankful truly and deeply with God we will find peace. The Bible says “And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to that which also ye are called in one body; and be ye thankful.” (Colossians 3:15)

The book of Psalms mentions the word thanks 19 times. That is just one word. Many of the words that David used were in thankfulness. David was considered a friend of God. I want to be considered a friend of God. I will give him more thanks. I must change my paradigm to remember God in all things.

How many of us feel we can truly thank God, even in the worst circumstances of life? That is the goal to aim at; to thank God in all things, in all circumstances, in all places. Thankfulness does not have to be a big production. You do not have to pray as the Pharisees did loudly and often. Just remember to spice up your prayer life by being thankful for that which God has done. I suggest starting out each prayer with what you are thankful for. That is what “entering into the gates with thanksgiving” means to me.

Repent for the Kingdom for God is here!

As we hiked out into the desert on that hot September day, we did not know where we were going. We were like the Israelites wandering but for us it had only been 40 minutes not 40 years. As we continued to walk, we heard the rush of the water. It was a violent yet soothing sound in the hot desert.

When we arrived at the water's edge, our Rabbi, RVL stepped in. He wait for everyone to gather at the edge of the water and began proclaiming the Kingdom.

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I had written about this trend back on 8/01/05, but more as it related to couples choosing pets rather than children. Obviously there are other reasons. Experts say that wherever education, greater opportunities for women, and market economies spread, fertility rates plummet. Europe is facing serious problems as their birthrate has been in a freefall for the past fifty years. To avoid economic disaster, more and more immigrants are brought in, mostly from Islamic cultures. Given their higher birthrates, Europe will likely be predominantly Islamic by 2100.

America is barely maintaining a replacement rate. The statistics are not encouraging. Growing numbers of American couples are electing to have child-free relationships. Current Census Bureau figures show that about 18 percent of women age 40 to 44 do not have a child. The percentage has risen since 1976, when the bureau found that 10 percent of American woman in that age group reported not having a child. Some experts predict the number of married couples without children could go up 50 percent by the end of the decade. So do we have cause to be concerned as we watch this trend of childlessness? I want to make two observations- one relating to the biblical injunction to be fruitful and the second a little known statistic that might have our liberal friends worried. I credit much of the thought on this second observation to a Dallas Morning News columnist, Rod Dreher.

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Like me, you undoubtedly know Christians who have publicly disclosed their faith, only to later disgrace themselves with some foolish word or deed. Perhaps that person was you. It certainly has been me from time to time.

I suspect the world and the devil derive much pleasure from watching Christians play the lead role of hypocrite. An off-color remark, an evil gaze, a cruel deed, a lazy hand – all these are commonplace and tolerable among non-Christians. But when perpetrated by a known Christian, the world stops, stares and scorns the fallen witness of a shamed follower of Christ.

In their Jesus Freak album, the band DC Talk begins the song “What If I Stumble” with the following statement:

“The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips then walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.”

Indeed, a religion whose God is allegedly holy yet whose followers are clearly unholy will not readily appeal to pagan observers. But what an unbelieving world will find believable is a Christian whose lifestyle corresponds to the message he speaks and the God he serves. The reason: Consistency is key to persuasion.

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The question I have been pondering lately is, "How do truth and love relate?" This led me to the famous passage on "love," I Corinthians 13.

At first glance, it's difficult to see how love and truth relate in this passage. "Love is patient; love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs." (I. Cor. 13:4-5.) Doesn't this tell us to ingore the truth sometimes for the sake of love? I can think of many wrongs that have been done to me over the years, often by friends and family, some of which continue to have lasting consequences. In a few cases, the perpetrator has never acknowledged the harm he or she did. The "truth" is that there is, in a sense, a "record" of these wrongs written into my life, whether I like it or not. Anyone who has lived more than a few years in this broken world could say the same.

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I watch with both fascination and frustration the ongoing saga pitting Intelligent Design against Darwinism. The Darwinists circle their wagons at any threat to their position, and the rhetoric continues. Emotions flare in this issue, because of course a much deeper issue is at stake… the conflict of worldviews – the battle for the hearts and minds of human beings.

Unfortunately, many Christians who jump into the fray have already capitulated to the definition of science that has been promulgated since the time of Darwin… the idea that ‘science’ is naturalism and by definition, anything that presupposes a Designer could not qualify as science. Or they accept the naturalistic secular view of science and try to force a fit with biblical truth. Biblical truth seems to be what is modified and in turn made meaningless. They passively (or actively) accept the division of science and religion. They allow ‘religion’ to be placed into the sphere of ideas and values, far from the sphere of ‘science,’ which deals with facts and testable data. Ideas and values, the story goes, are of lower repute than ‘facts,’ … and thus the lie continues and Christianity is relegated to Sunday School classes and private belief.

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I saw the racing epic "Grand Prix" in 1966, and ever since I've wanted to be a race car driver. However, Reality and Responsibilities interfered-so I've settled for driving high performance cars really fast. Not on the street, mind you- but on various road courses. What we Car Geeks call "High Performance Driving Events". The Track Bug bit me so hard that I now instruct other drivers. I enjoy instructing and I usually get a couple of hours of free track time as part of the package. I eventually noticed that many of my fellow instructors were also fooling around with motorcycles, so I just HAD to add an old Triumph bike to my garage. Being dumb but not stupid, I also signed up for a Beginning Riders Course. I soon discovered that several high performance driving methods also apply to bikes.

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Blessings from Every Square Inch!

This month we have the privelege here in America to remember some of our great leaders in our nation's history. Specifically we honor Presidents on President's day. Some of these men include George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln.

Leaders come in all shapes and sizes. From the Text, we read of leader with God's choosing. Many of these leaders had some major mistakes (think Saul, David, Solomon, etc.) but they also followed God for a time. Could this also be said of our leaders today? Many are following God but many who have followed God have tripped up.

How do we respond to failures in leadership or even failure in the lives of our leaders that have been following God? I propose we respond in the same way that we would for our fellow brothers and sisters. We must come along side these leaders and help restore them. This is an example of discipleship in action. Men and women like you and I, citizens in the Kingdom of God, must come along side and say, "Imitate me as I imitate Jesus."

Pray for our leaders today. Pray that they would seek the Kingdom of God. Pray for God's Spirit to fill them and empower them that they may obey God.

Soli Deo Gloria,

Brian
Founder, Every Square Inch

Though there have been beneficial changes from the feminist revolution, I am afraid it may be victimizing our children. I have been watching my own profession (veterinary medicine), as it feminizes. Some current classes at veterinary schools in the US have as high as 90% females. Last year, the gender balance nationwide for graduate veterinarians tipped in favor of women. One is prone to say it is better for the profession because women are more compassionate and nurturing. I would agree they probably are better veterinarians in many aspects.

In my capacity as Professional Outreach Director for Christian Veterinary Mission the last 5 years, I have traveled across the nation networking and recruiting for our organization. In case after case, I found myself interacting with disillusioned, married women professionals whose conscience cries, "Be a Mom!", but whose profession says, "Be the best you can be, motherhood is no hindrance to your practice!" In most cases, they find themselves the primary wage earner. I continue to hear of pragmatic approaches to parenting, with the most common being the stay-at-home Dad.

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Have you ever sat and wondered when God is going to lead you into the fulfillment of your God ordained calling? Have you been tempted to break out of your cubicle, tell the boss what you really think, and embark on your “life’s true calling”? If you answered yes or even maybe to any of the above questions, then I have the book for you. It is called In the Meantime, the Practice of Proactive Waiting” and it is by my friend and Pastor Rob Brendle.

In this book, Rob Brendle gives us a humorous look into the inner workings of his mind, and into his past. I can assure you that we all have something to relate to when it comes to Pastor Brendle and his life. Interwoven into this amusing, and sometimes tear jerking story, is the life of David. From David the shepherd boy, who one day out of no where was anointed King, to the warrior poet spending years hiding in the wilderness. Rob Brendle mines the scriptures for those subtle pieces of wisdom that unless we are truly looking for, we will miss completely.

This book will teach you how to embrace the stage of life that you are in and how maybe; just maybe, it could be part of the ultimate plan God has for you. Pastor Brendle takes the time to show the intricacies that exist between our daily walk with God, and our “big picture” calling. He provides many examples of when biblical characters “manhandle the plan” and God’s blessing decrease or stop entirely. By utilizing these examples he builds a case for wandering in the wilderness, and instead of praying “Lord, release me from the wilderness” praying “Lord, teach me what I must learn in the wilderness and your will be done”

This humorous, and all too timely of a book will challenge you to change the paradigm of your thinking towards God, life, and your calling. If you are reading this saying “I do not know my calling” do not worry, Pastor Rob can help you there to.

I challenge you to read this book. It is not a deeply theological book, it is not dauntingly lengthy (218 pages), but if you listen to the wisdom of the book I guarantee your life will change, your relationships will deepen and your mind will be freed from the ‘you will never be good enough” lie that Satan just loves to throw our way.

In the Meantime : The Practice of Proactive Waiting by Rob Brendle

Just before we ate Christmas dinner, my frail 85-year-old grandpa shared a few words before praying over the food. He said, “This will probably be the last time the entire family is together.” What? Is he planning on dying this year!? I thought as my wife and I stared at each other in disbelief. “The next time will be at John’s wedding,” he continued, which was a joke because my cousin John has no dating prospects at the moment. We laughed, prayed and began to eat.

What my grandpa said – or rather did – gave me pause. He made a profound confession concerning the finality of his life, but instead of letting us dwell upon that serious thought, he diminished its import with humor. As far as I know, no one addressed the subject with him again.

Humor is like anesthesia. It dulls the senses to what is actually happening to you. When a person has surgery, he receives anesthesia to limit his sense of pain caused by the surgical knife. Or when a person has a headache, he takes Tylenol, not to remove the cause of the pain but to cover it up. The ache is still there, but he is unaware of it.

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This is my first post as a proud member of Every Square Inch.

I'm not one for New Years' resolutions. I think this is because I know myself too well. I'm an obsessive-compulsive sort of guy who dives all-guns into something until something else catches my attention. I know that if I resolve to do something now, I might pursue it for a month or so, but I'll soon lose enthusiasm. I don't want to cheapen my "resolve" by spending it on things I'm not really resolved to do.

I've also lived through too many uncertain circumstances recently to place much value on my own resolve. A few years ago, I was a partner in a major law firm. Through a series of events I never would have predicted or wanted, I left that prestigious job to become a lowly college professor -- a job I love, but a job that is dramatically different than what I did as a practicing lawyer. Within the past year, my otherwise healthy little boy began having seizures, and his speech has not developed much beyond babbling. Just two months ago, I was the principal worship leader in a service with over 600 people. Last month, the music director resigned, the ministry was thrown into chaos, and my own role in the ministry has dwindled to almost nothing.

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[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]

How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe

The Signs of Creation and the Necessity of Christ

As the Sign of the Heavens teaches perhaps more poignantly than any other, the Most High God, upon whom all men must believe to be saved, most assuredly did not leave the nations scattered across the earth and beyond the range of Scripture’s testimony without a profound and enduring witness to his Light. The lessons taught by the eight Signs of Creation are multifarious and luminescent.

First, the Sign of Beauty teaches that goodness is ever-present, objectively attractive, and always resilient. Though its fragile face may be disfigured by the beastly hands of man, the goodness of Beauty possesses absolute supremacy over deformity and ugliness except in the heart that consciously denies its right to rule.

Second, the Sign of Order instructs that immutable laws govern the cosmos with the grace of an iron fist, conveying to man the capacity to pursue the greatness of culture through art, science, mathematics, literature, and music and bringing to naught the dissolute aspirations of those who would flaunt their freedom in a manner contrary to Nature.

Third, the Sign of Consciousness teaches that the mind of man, by which he knows and reasons, could not have arisen from the slime of primitive earth without the genetic interposition of an original Mind, external to the cosmos, for knowledge and reason necessarily supervene the raw cosmological events of the natural world and require second-order channels by which free thought may be expressed contrary to the deterministic structure of natural law.

Fourth, the Sign of Conscience teaches man that he is subject to a moral order by which actions are, and ought to be, universally judged. Conscience, moreover, convicts the heart of man when he transgresses that moral order and inspires society to create systems of justice by which it may punish particularly egregious and destructive transgressions. Yet, too, Conscience, operating in tandem with Consciousness, instructs man that all such gestures at comprehensive justice are necessarily imperfect and remedially incomplete. Thus, Conscience cries out for a final Judgment where all wrongs will be redressed and righteousness rewarded.

Fifth, the Sign of Death and Rebirth instructs man in the beauty of process, that is, ordered change, and gestures at God’s participation in such change, at least insofar as He interacts with and intercedes in the play of Creation. Moreover, the Sign of Death and Rebirth, as expressed through the experiences of the dying, teaches man that he is a spiritual creature and that death, though ultimate in one sense, is in another sense merely a gateway to a different form of existence, which existence, given Near Death Experiences and the insistence of Conscience, must follow the pattern of reward and judgment, not the purely recapitulative path of reincarnation.

Sixth, the Sign of Love teaches that there is transcendent purpose in man’s existence and that such purpose is inextricably interrelated to the cause of relational affection expressed in feeling and faithfulness. Moreover, as the acquisition of requited Love is man’s greatest desire, Love commands a pursuit of satisfaction that, however blessed in the interim, is ultimately destined to fail, if nothing else of the disease of finitude. Thus, the man upon whom tragedy falls may either curse Love for its parsimony or believe in and seek its eternal and unfailing source.

Seventh, the Sign of Lament validates sorrow and anger as right and proper responses to the remorseless ravaging of Beauty and Love by the claws of crime and chance. Then, in the grace of consolation, Lament purges the broken heart of the poison of despair and replaces it with the unconquerable desire to live, to flourish, if nothing else to honor those who have perished. In purveying such a gift of temporal hope, moreover, the Sign of Lament teaches the ascendant heart to believe in its eternal counterpart—the restoration of all things.

Eighth and finally, the Sign of the Heavens depicts with elegant intelligibility the existence of an age-old conflict between good and evil which has engulfed the world. The Sign of the Heavens then blessedly prophesies that the forces of good will one day triumph ultimately and conclusively over the rebellious hordes of evil and thereafter banish the face of darkness from the Kingdom of Light.

Taken together, the eight Signs of Creation declare to man in a language accessible to every tribe and nation the world over a veritable smorgasbord of cornerstone truths about Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Consummation whose likenesses are both revealed and significantly expanded in the pages of Scripture. The astute reader will notice, however, that two elements of the Christian gospel are completely missing from the testimony of the Signs—a divine promise of mercy to the repentant heart and the Name of the Redeemer whose kingdom of Light will vanquish the rebellion of darkness at the end of all things. Here I must answer the ultimate objection I noted earlier: Even assuming that a man who has never before heard the Name of Yahweh or been exposed to the Biblical writings may reach out to God by way of the Signs and embrace a living faith in His goodness and beauty, how can such a one be saved apart from the gracious ministrations of Christ? In its essence my response is simple: One cannot. No man will pass through the flames of Judgment who is not covered by the atoning blood of Christ. Nevertheless, I maintain that the path to salvation by way of faith in the God of the Signs remains open. The real issue before us, therefore, is not whether the salvific work of Christ is requisite for the perfection of salvation (it is) but whether knowledge of Christ’s Name, per se, is the sole means by which a man or woman of faith may accept the supreme gift of divine absolution made available by Christ’s work. For the following reasons, I believe it is not.

Although the thought is not natural to us, it is nevertheless true that the concept of salvation apart from immediate knowledge of the Son of God is not unbiblical, only antiquated. Abraham is considered the father of faith, yet he never saw the face of Christ (at least not obviously) nor heard the New Testament message. He believed what God told him in a dream and such faith was credited to him as righteousness (Rom. 4:9). The same may be said of all the Old Testament heroes who by faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and shut the mouths of lions (Heb 11:1ff). The exploits of men such as Enoch, Moses, David, Jeremiah and Daniel, and of women such as Rahab, Sarah, Esther and Ruth roll of our tongues when playing Bible trivia, but rarely do we pause to contemplate the startling fact that none of them knew the name of the Messiah whose day they longed to see. As the writer of Hebrews put it, “[t]hese were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised (Heb. 11:39).”

Given such biblical precedent, it simply cannot be argued that extra-Christian faith is necessarily insufficient to defer the wrath of God. To hold otherwise would unjustifiably exclude from the New Creation every person who delighted in the love of God prior to the Day of Pentecost and the instantiation of the Church Age. No, grace has been a constant feature of God’s relationship to man across all historical epochs and stages of progressive revelation. Having said that, the author of Hebrews makes absolutely clear that it is Christ alone who is the lynchpin of God’s entire redemptive enterprise, without whose offices as Lamb of God and Light of the World man would remain in the bleak darkness of his sins. It is Christ and no other Savior who walks upon the waves where the currents of righteousness, justice, mercy and love converge and declares the captives free. Whatever the ancients might have gathered about him from the hints and impressions visible in their native world, Jesus is unquestionably the archetypal subject, the sine qua non, of God’s revelation to man. It matters not, in an eternal sense, therefore, whether Methuselah possessed the Law of Moses, whether Rebekah understood Paul’s gospel, or whether Elisha saw the risen Christ; it matters only that their debt and ours has been paid by the very same blood of the very same Lamb before whose throne all of us will bow on the Day of his appearing.

Once one grasps this truth, one need only contemplate again the substance of faith imparted by the Signs of Creation to appreciate its potential for redemptive sufficiency in the eyes of God. The God of the Signs is not merely an amorphous “Creator God” who wound up the universe like a child’s top, released it with a certain amount of kinetic and potential energy, and then abandoned it to its own devices. The God of the Signs is a deity whose specific attributes merit man’s worship and teach his heart to believe. Consider: The God of the Signs is a God of transcendent glory, for the illimitable majesty of Beauty is his handiwork. The God of the Signs is consummately benevolent and patient with the waywardness of man, for the resplendence of Beauty is imparted to the righteous and wicked alike and sustained without price. The God of the Signs is a God of Order whose peaceful touch restrains the reign of chaos, who fixed limits for the sea and set its doors and bars in place, saying, “This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt (Job 38:11).” The God of the Signs is a God of surpassing wisdom whose work is intelligible to the mind of man but whose sovereign Genius is beyond searching out.

The God of the Signs is a God from whose righteous hand dangles the master keys to the moral order, whose judgment is always near to the Conscience of man, and whose capacity for unlimited justice, and concomitant restoration, is desperately awaited by all who understand, intimately, the sorrows of social, jurisprudential and rehabilitative imperfection that leaden the world’s gilded promises of utopia. The God of the Signs, moreover, is a God whose imprint of Light is never still yet always constant, like the sky whose face knows countless expressions yet whose horizon never changes shape. The God of the Signs is a God of now and forever, a God who breathed into man a temporal life that metamorphoses with the seasons and a longing for eternity that will be satisfied, whether by judgment or reward. The God of the Signs is a God who delights in that special unity of souls which is born of relational diversity, who created man to desire the kind of love that can only be fulfilled in the sacrifice of commitment, and who is himself the only Lover whose kindnesses never fail. The God of the Signs is a God whose image is expressed, on the one hand, by human sorrow in the face of tragedy and rage at the madness of evil and, on the other, by the gentle rhythms of consolation and comfort and the sonorous refrains of hope. Finally, the God of the Signs is a God of victory, who promises ultimately to defeat the Scorpions, Snakes, and Dragons of darkness by a Lion-like Warrior whose glimmering archer’s bow is drawn and whose arrow of light will one day be loosed to bring an end to the reign of death and chaos.

My ultimate thesis, dear reader, is this: Take off the mask by which Creation shadows his face and the God of the Signs is none other than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Jesus. It follows, therefore, that the man who believes in such a God, whether in accordance with the testimony of Scripture or through the illustrations of the created order, is a man who, by operation of the munificent grace of Christ, will be counted among the righteous and granted entrance into the Kingdom. Again, I grant that, given the rampant idolatry and depravity that has plagued the post-Fall world, the number of men and women saved by the path of the Signs may turn out to be few. Yet I firmly believe that when the roll is called up yonder all who once dismissed as hopelessly “heathen” and “godless” the billions throughout history (and to this very day) born into cultures devoid of Scripture’s Light will be confounded by the extraordinary ambit of the redeeming love of Jesus Christ. Such a conclusion, I believe, is both logically required by the first two chapters of Romans and Paul’s apologetic in the seventeenth chapter of Acts and entirely consonant with the character of a God who is “slow to anger and abounding in love (Exo. 34:6)” and who “desires all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2:4).” Accepting the witness of the Signs requires no concession to a universalism devoid of judgment; it merely ratifies the dignity of Old Covenant faith and extends its redemptive potential beyond the confines of Israel to the whole world for whose sins Christ died. As Galileo sagaciously supposed, the God of the Heavens, who in love purposed the creation and redemption of man, revealed himself in two Books, Scripture and Creation. Blessed is the man who knows and believes the wisdom of both; but for one who knows not the former, praise be to the Most High God that there yet remains a path of Light by which his face may be seen.

[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]

How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe

By the Sign of the Heavens I mean not to refer to the strange and wonderful phenomena modern astronomers are constantly discovering in the seemingly depthless celestial sphere (i.e. quasars, black holes, cosmic background radiation, etc.). Such phenomena, I assert, are marks of Beauty and Order, which deliver their own missional testimony. I refer instead to the message of the constellations inscribed like a patchwork quilt upon the obsidian canvas of the night sky. I read once that one of the most enduring mysteries of the ancient world is the origin of the stories attached to the figures emblazoned in white fire upon the face of the Heavens. The author of that statement traced the roots of the Zodiac to ancient Egypt, Sumeria, Chaldea, and Persia but failed to divine a source for the stories that, when compared, appeared to him inexplicably similar. In this essay, I do not intend to suggest an explanation for such parallel narratives. Rather I wish to reflect upon the lessons taught by the simple order of the stars as they appear to the naked eye. This approach should make sense to the reader attuned to my overarching point about the redemptive potential of the Book of Creation, since it is only when the order of the Heavens is stripped of all traditions of human interpretation that it may become a sign, per se, pointing the heart softened by the gentle ministry of the Spirit to ultimate truth about reality.

Having studied the constellations extensively in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, I am continuously astounded by the simplicity, clarity, and univocal nature of the message they declare. In four resplendent scenes readily visible to the stargazing eye, the Heavens tell the story of a universe mired in a cosmic conflict, which conflict must end with the final defeat of evil by the unconquerable force of good. First, there is the scene of Orion and Lepus, the Warrior and the Snake. (For ease of reference, I will use the constellations’ Latin names). During winter in the Northern Hemisphere, Orion glistens brilliantly, his shoulders, feet, belt and sword unmistakable against the black canopy of sky. Beneath his feet, one of which is the beautiful first magnitude star Rigel, lies a less brilliant figure that the Romans construed as a hare but the much earlier Egyptians and Persians imagined to be a coiled serpent. (As I see it, Lepus looks like a snake.) The image is starkly defined and its meaning obvious to every nation, language, and people group: Though an Enemy haunts the original splendor of the cosmos, he is smaller and weaker than the Warrior of Glory who stands above him with lightened foot raised eternally to crush his rebellious head. How curious that such is the precise promise contained in the third chapter of Genesis. To the serpent God said: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”

The second and third celestial scenes of cosmic conflict are much like the first, though both scenes are of a compound, and especially evocative, nature. In the second scene, the four constellations of Hercules (the Mighty Man), Draco (the Dragon), Ursa Major and Ursa Minor (the Big and Little Dippers), when considered in unison, clearly depict a man (Hercules) standing upon the head of a great serpent, or dragon (Draco), upon whose sinuous body is poured out a lesser and a greater cup (Ursas Minor and Major) the contents of which, given the context, are most sensibly interpreted to contain divine wrath. In the third scene, the constellations of Ophiucus, Serpens, Corona, and Leo depict a huge man grasping the body of a monstrous snake (both Ophiucus and Serpens are constellations of estimable size) whose head is at once straining to grasp a clearly articulated crown (Corona) and poised beneath the brilliant and descending foot of a maned lion (Leo). (Note that the star at Leo’s foot is named Regulus—meaning “regal” or “kingly”—and has a luminosity of the first magnitude). It is possible, of course, for one to question the capacity of an observer unversed in the ancient narrative of the constellations to discern and articulate such complex scenes as I have done. I would argue, however, that the sort of observer I am hypothesizing in this essay (i.e. one who, despite the burdens of a sinful heart and culture, is enthralled by the transcendent message of the Signs and longs genuinely to know the truth about the world into which he was born) would not only watch the stars with regularity but would examine them throughout his life and ponder at length their elaborate configurations. Such an observer, I believe, would make out among the starry host the very scenes I have set forth and divine from them their obvious meaning: (a) that the world is torn by strife because an evil being has sought to usurp a celestial crown, (b) that the machinations of that evil being are being resisted by someone mightier than he, and (c) that the end of such evil being will come as swiftly as the ravaging paw of a noble lion.

The fourth and final scene of cosmic conflict stitched upon the blanket of the night sky (but only fully visible south of the Tropic of Cancer) is the scene of Sagittarius and Scorpio, the Archer and the Scorpion. As any astronomically minded traveler will tell you, the southern sky (particularly toward the south celestial pole) is more sparsely adorned than its northern counterpart, but those stars that do appear are, on the whole, exceedingly magnificent. The interplay of Sagittarius and Scorpio is an ideal example of such majesty. I have never seen Sagittarius and Scorpio more clearly than when I had occasion to visit the island of Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, five hundred miles south of Tahiti and almost exactly at the latitude of the Tropic of Capricorn. Near midnight the almost artistically rendered figure of Scorpio stretched across a third of the Heavens, while its glowing heart, the red star Antares, rested at the very zenith of the sky. Of all the constellations, I believe Scorpio is the most clearly articulated. His pincers, bright and almost symmetrical, connect at the head of a serpentine trunk which extends downward through Antares to a hook-like tail, studded with an obvious stinger. Yet the beauty of Scorpio’s figure inheres not only in the sharpness of its image but in its supernal accompaniment—the figure of Sagittarius. As I looked up at the sky that night on the white sands of one of Rarotonga’s tropical beaches, Sagittarius stood to the east of Scorpio, his trapezoidal body taut and poised and his archer’s bow aimed unerringly at Antares, the scorpion’s poisonous heart. In all the Heavens, there is no more profound depiction of the inevitable triumph of good over evil than this. Though the virile malevolence of Scorpio is grandly described, one cannot doubt that the arrow of Sagittarius, when loosed at last, will destroy such evil once and for all.

Next time: The Signs of Creation and the Necessity of Christ

[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]

How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe

The seventh sign of cosmic wisdom evident in the Book of Creation (and the mournful counterpart to the Signs of Beauty and Love) is the Sign of Lament. Where Love is the universal patron of meaning and essential human satisfaction, Lament stalks the graveyard of Love’s shattered hopes and collects the tear-stained fragments of Beauty’s torn garments. The eternally tragic face of Lament may be observed in the weeping of a mother holding the lifeless body of her stillborn infant. Its elegy is sung by the family sifting through the rubble of a home devastated by wildfire or ripped apart by cyclonic winds. The tortured countenance of Lament transfixes us in the televised wailing of a crowd surveying the blood-splattered carnage of school-bound children dismembered by a bus bomb. Lament is that convulsive verbal flooding that occurs when the dark river of sorrow overflows its private banks and finds ready publicity in piercing and terrible sound. No matter the language a man speaks, the groans that, by some mysterious emotive volcanism, emanate from his broken heart when he gazes for the first time into the sightless eyes of his dead wife require no translation; all persons, irrespective of race, creed, age and education, understand with pristine clarity the absolute propriety of his sorrow.

Such is, in fact, the first lesson taught by the Sign of Lament—that grief, and its compatriot, anger, are entirely proper responses to the desecration of Beauty and Love by the jaws of violence and chance. With surgical precision, Lament opens the wound of the world to the bone, exposing as a sham the glib pretense and pseudo-optimistic dissimulation that man fabricates to hide the cancer at the heart of his fallen experience. Where society flees the scene of torment like rats from water, Lament embraces the unquestionable righteousness of pain in the face of grievous and inexplicable wrong. Lament screams over a pool of innocent blood that not only are the hands of man stained by wickedness but, more, that the very ground beneath his feet is cursed by some primordial imperfection. Lament weeps over the ravaging of life and zealously proclaims that all is not as it should be; that time was not intended to mark the process of decay and dying; that ocean breezes and waves upon the sea were not meant to ravage coastal villages by hurricane and tsunami; that man was not intended to victimize his fellow man, abuse his women or torment his children. Lament teaches the heart lanced by sorrow the indelible lesson that sorrow is eminently justified. Indeed, the instruction of Lament is so visible in the face of Creation that even Nature itself is observed to “groan” in the wake of disturbances in original harmony. How else but in the language of pain can one describe the tortured sound of cracking tree limbs in the vicious winds of a tornado? How else can one understand the scurrying fright of animals prior to a severe thunderstorm or the stark and utter desolation of once fertile fields scarred by blight or drought? What Paul wrote in the eighth chapter of Romans the Sign of Lament confirms, namely that “the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.”

Yet, too, the Sign of Lament knows a less abrasive presence. Like a gentle salve, Lament teaches the broken heart a way to survive its own pain. In compelling man to deride the senseless chaos and driving him to his knees, Lament forces the heart into a catharsis of grief by which it may honor all it has lost yet acquire fresh purpose for a continued existence. Thus, more than embodying that unique paroxysm of pain evoked by the sudden appearance of natural and human evil, Lament marks out the wilderness path by which the heart beset by tragedy may rise again from the ashes to hope anew in the sweet mercies of Beauty and Love. In purveying such hope, moreover, the Sign of Lament not only reinforces the absolute dignity of living but also adumbrates the prospect of ultimate divine restoration. For if a human being is scandalized by the interloping reign of disorder and madness, would not also the One by whose creative Genius the cosmos was beneficently designed lament the disarray of depravity into which the world has fallen and wish to apply, in redemptive fashion, that same Genius to emancipate Creation from its slavery to strife? Such is a postulate even more pressing than the proverbial grief-stricken question “Why?” For liberation, not mere explanation, is the answer the wounded heart truly seeks.

Of course, in similar fashion to the reckoning foreshadowed by the Sign of Conscience, the Sign of Lament does not logically require the divine gift of cosmic redemption. Nevertheless, the Sign of Lament does stir the soul of man to yearn for final deliverance from the malignant reign of melancholy, the omnipresent perils of disaster, and humankind’s longstanding addictions to callousness, injustice and perversion. As it turns out, however, the Book of Creation does not leave such yearning without a reasonable ground for expectation. For, where, beneath the illumination of the first seven Signs, the idea of restoration is merely aspirational, its practical promise is revealed by the Light of the eighth and last Sign, the Sign of the Heavens.

Next time: The Sign of the Heavens

[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]

How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe

The sixth sign latent in the pages of the Book of Creation is the Sign of Love. The Sign of Love is in many respects the Sign of Beauty expressed within the context of human relationships. Nevertheless, Love is in no sense coextensive with Beauty, for Beauty is understood primarily by observation of the world outside the confines of one’s own consciousness and Love by emotive experience of that consciousness mingled with and desirous of that of another. Expressed visually, the Sign of Love is what you see staring back at you at the altar on your wedding day. It is the glow that illumines the face of a little girl when she glimpses her father across a crowded room. Love is the force that shapes the countenances of lovers into curious facsimiles of one another after fifty years of marriage. Love is the conviction that compels a young husband to remain faithful to his frail, bedridden wife for five seemingly interminable years before her debilitating condition begins to improve. Love is the impetus that compels a soldier in the prime of his life to shield a comrade from the shrapnel of an exploding grenade with the vulnerable flesh of his own body. Far more substantial than saccharine sentiment, lustful infatuation, or unadorned duty, Love, in its purest form, is utterly personal, intimate, virtuous and profoundly supererogatory, the very weightiest of all elements in the human experience. Consequently, like gold to a potentate, Love is most precious to the soul of man. Indeed, as is suggested by the continuous avalanche of songs composed, poems written, movies produced and books penned on the subject, Love is the most sought-after commodity in human existence. Moreover, Love, like water, is absolutely indispensable to human survival. As any sociologist who has studied orphaned children will explain, babies starved of human contact in their earliest days can physically deteriorate and even die. That same principle of affective malnourishment, I would assert, applies to men and women of all ages: A paucity of Love shortens the length of one’s days. Love, therefore, is no mere prize to be won nor ornament to be collected. Its presence or absence is a matter of life and death.

Given Love’s undisputed preeminence in the hierarchy of human needs and desires, what lessons does its sign teach us about the nature of our world? Principally, I believe, the Sign of Love instructs the open heart, otherwise impressed with the wonders of Creation, that there is a guiding purpose to human existence and that such purpose, however mysterious it may be in its fullness, is inextricably intertwined with the pursuit of relational affection. Love’s unchallenged magnetism shines light upon the craggy path toward ultimate human satisfaction, and its call echoes upon the mountains and bids us come to yonder glory. Like the Sign of Conscience, however, the Sign of Love illuminates certain fundamental limitations in man’s capacity for final fulfillment within the context of terrestrial relationships. No matter how deeply a husband may care for his beloved wife, and no matter how genuinely that love is reciprocated, such love cannot constitute the wellspring of life, for, however redoubtable its fibers within the relationship, it is, quite perversely, wrecked with ease by the fallen hands of sin and tragedy. Human love, therefore, is either a cruel joke played upon the longing heart by a vicious world (the cynical, naturalist view) or an elaborate, yet penultimate, sign pointing to something more transcendent and lasting that, with Beauty, Order and Consciousness, exists originally and consummately beyond the realm of sight. That Love, although instinctual, also possesses and thrives upon a current of freedom, unburdened by the pressures of Order, exposes the fatal flaw in the naturalist’s system. For freedom, as a metaphysical entity, cannot exist in a universe populated exclusively, and most basically, by events and occasions governed by autocratic natural law. Only in a cosmos created by a Mind that is perfectly free and externally undetermined can Love, which binds Beauty to Consciousness in a glorious labyrinth of souls, express itself in freedom. Such logic, of course, does not prevent a naturalist from arguing that Love is essentially deterministic and thus illusory. But such an absurd polemic crushes beneath the weight of centuries of accumulated experiential wisdom, just like the proposition that the stars were flung into space and given their light by a random quirk of physics.

Next time: The Sign of Lament

[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]

How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe

In addition to the signs of Beauty, Order, Consciousness, and Conscience, which declare by the impressions of logic and experience the original goodness of the created order, the rationality and necessary justice of God, and the paradoxical resplendence and fallenness of man, the Book of Creation also contains an extensive discursive on the realities of death, resurrection, and the afterlife, which I shall call the Sign of Death and Rebirth. As any student of Nature will attest, images of death and rebirth are redolent in the natural world. In time’s grand orchestra, the brilliance of day trembles at the approach of night’s deep darkness; yet such darkness is always eventually pierced by the warming glow of dawn. The seasons, too, bespeak this transition. As the tale of life is told in the regimented language of cultivation, the fragrant, freshness of spring rains prime the soil for the limpid growth of summer’s crop, which crop, come early autumn, is harvested both in preparation for winter’s dearth and in hopeful expectation of another spring. The same tale is told in the freer wilderness tongue, though rendered somewhat differently: In the fecund moisture of spring, the leaves of the forest bud and bloom, their green the color of newborn life; in the storms and heat of summer, such leaves expand and darken as they are aged by water and sun; in the cool breezes of autumn, their chlorophyllic life, having sustained them through half the year, drains slowly from their veins, sparking that last, flaming display of variegated glory before the restless foliage falls to the earth, leaving limb and branch to stand beneath cold, gray skies, wrapped in the bleak cloak of a winter. Then, after a period of quiescence and sleep, winter, too, passes by, and the light of the Sun, once frigid and distant, strengthens and warms until the thawing ground gives birth again to the living wonders of a new year.

The inexorable progress of birth, life, death, and rebirth in nature teach three overarching lessons: First, the Sign of Death and Rebirth instructs the thoughtful observer that ordered existence need not be static to be lovely; indeed, that movement and dynamic change, rather than larcenously opposing the longevity of present beauty actually ripen the glory of the world and participate in its essential goodness. Second, taken together with the Sign of Order, the Sign of Death and Rebirth declares that there is something especially harmonious about change when penned within the fences of an overarching and undergirding structure of metaphysical continuity. Thus, the Sign of Death and Rebirth exalts ordered, purposeful variation, or variation grounded in eternal soil. Third, when the lesson of dynamic beauty is juxtaposed with the lesson of an original Genius taught by the Sign of Consciousness, it can be seen that the Sign of Death and Rebirth adumbrates something of the divine life of the Creator, namely that he who spoke such cycles into being and envisioned the beauty of bounded change must value such change, indeed, must in some sense participate in such change, not, perhaps, in his essential nature (though change on such a level is certainly not precluded), but rather in his interaction with the Creation. The Signs of Death and Rebirth and Consciousness, of course, do not teach that the divine is in any sense capricious; rather only that if Beauty and Order, per se, have their origin in his generative Mind, then so must the particular beauty of process, of ordered change. How interesting it is, therefore, that the God of Genesis is depicted in relationship with man, walking with him in the Garden and participating in the constant metamorphosis of his existence. Moreover, how profoundly curious that Christian theologians studying the New Testament and particularly the writings of the Apostle John have long professed the doctrine of divine perichoresis in which the Father, Son and Spirit are envisaged not in the rigid stasis of Neo-Platonic unity but rather in the perpetual dance of ordered interrelationship, of call and response, of love given, received, and shared.

Beyond the lessons that arise from the cycles of nature, the Sign of Death and Rebirth also delivers a lesson of especial poignancy in the aging narrative of man himself. Recent studies on the process of dying have documented what ancient cultures and many modern end-of-life physicians have long appreciated—that the ordinary process of human dying encompasses far more than the final judgment of physical decay, that it is, in fact, an inescapably spiritual transformation. Given widespread and cross-cultural anecdotal evidence of so-called Near-Death Experiences, it is obvious that dying persons are generally granted something of a portal of transcendent sight between this world and another world altogether different from our own. What each dying person “sees” in the midst of such an experience is unique, but all generally receive a vivid, real-time foretaste of something approaching heavenly bliss or eternal damnation. While many critics denounce Near-Death Experiences as a sort of hallucinogenic accompaniment to the process of dying, such experiences, in truth, constitute only one element of the uniquely human Sign of Death and Rebirth. How many people who have observed the passing of a loved one have later testified, using whatever words their spiritual vocabulary could offer, that the departure of that person from the land of the living, when at last it happened, was in some sense palpable to the soul, as if the tangible flame of the person’s presence had been extinguished? Moreover, how many people on their deathbed, whether historically religious or irreligious, request spiritual counsel from a pastor or priest? In this latter respect, the portal to the hereafter is, for the dying, its own sign of God’s superintendence in the life of man and man’s duty of obeisance to God. For the living, on the other hand, the experience of the dying is another rehearsal of the pattern written into Creation, and it teaches the same lesson, though more explicitly, than day and night and the passage of the seasons—the lesson that death, though final in one sense, does not lead to total extinction of life but only to some kind of transition, the likes of which cannot be described (apart from the special revelation of Scripture), only anticipated with trepidation and penitence.

One might wonder why the lesson taught by the Sign of Death and Rebirth is not the reincarnational nature of human existence but rather the lesson of fear and trembling at the unknown beyond the divide. The obvious response is that the experience of the dying fundamentally undermines the premise of reincarnation and buttresses that of judgment and reward. That is, no Near-Death Experience of which I am aware has granted the enlightened soul a vision of future life as a rabbit, a deer, or an altogether different human being. But such a response is incomplete, for the Sign of Death and Rebirth is only one sign among seven at least that tell the story of God and man in the symbols and internal reason of Creation. Consequently, when pared with the Sign of Conscience, the Sign of Death and Rebirth testifies that the end of a man who has knowingly defied his conscience and embraced depravity ought to be ultimate judgment, not mere recycled existence somewhere in Creation. For even if a reincarnated soul’s status in the created order is diminished (e.g. from a man to a roach) as a result of misbehavior in his prior life, that soul nevertheless continues to abide in the physical context of divine blessing and never suffers the ignominy of ultimate divine censure. Finally, the concept of reincarnational judgment undermines the expectation of ultimate, cosmic remediation which arises from the teaching of Beauty, Order and Conscience. Under a paradigm of reincarnational judgment, the status quo is merely reordered; there is no New Creation, no restoration of all things. On the other hand, when the pattern of judgment is conceived as wrath and reward, there is room for a final reckoning in which history’s savage violence and mindless cruelty will be abolished and their tyranny replaced with a benign and righteous ordering of societal authorities under which true life, in all of its incidents and appearances, may flourish forevermore.

Next time: The Sign of Love

[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]

How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe

Thus far I have argued that the Signs of Beauty, Order and Consciousness, visible to all men in the Book of Creation, gesture at four divine truths delineated in more detail by the Book of Scripture: the essential, original goodness of the created order; the inescapable objectivity of the manner in which such goodness is defined; the absolute governance of order over chaos; and the existence of a Mind that instantiated such goodness and order. The fourth Sign of Creation, the Sign of Conscience, takes this cornucopia of fairly lofty propositions and transforms it into an edict whose import is profoundly personal. For clarity’s sake, I begin with a definition: Conscience is that restraining element of human psychology that a Doberman lacks when loosed to ravage an intruder. Its instinctive temperance is what separates the terrorizing designs of the perfectly ordinary lion from the average human who, if granted opportunity for reflection, thinks twice before pulling the trigger on another human, even an enemy. Much like the reason inherent in Consciousness, the burden of Conscience is a unique feature of the human experience. Yet Conscience is not merely reason, for where for the directive inherent in reason is the discovery of truth, the directive inherent in Conscience is the discernment of right behavior. Conscience is like an internal compass aligned to the magnetic field of divine wisdom that surrounds and intersects the created order. Although the magnetic force of wisdom that guides Conscience is generally weak when compared with the destructive force of sin allied with human freedom, Conscience declares, nevertheless, that, as Jay Budziszewski puts it, there are some things we simply can’t not know.

This is the principal and most elementary lesson taught by the Sign of Conscience, one that, while denied intellectually by men and women seeking to justify their own dissolute deportment, is practically assumed by all persons in ordering their human relationships. At the most severe level, there is no room for argument. No matter the exigencies of the moment, it is never right to torture a baby, rape a woman, or murder a mother and her unborn child. At a more commonplace level, it is simply inexcusable for a husband to cheat on his wife with another woman, for a thief to steal what is clearly the rightful property of another, for a drunken father to verbally abuse his child, for a judge to take bribes, for an attorney actively to assist his client in concealing evidence of a crime, or for a marketing agent to defraud the public by disseminating lies about a product to generate business. The basic truth imparted by Conscience is that there is a right order to human behavior that exists apart from man, just as there is a right order to mathematics and music which cannot be contravened without resulting contradictions and cacophony.

From this primate recognition of moral law, the second lesson of Conscience inexorably follows. At the same time that Conscience prescribes nonnegotiable boundaries upon the proper range of human behavior, it convicts the heart of man when he transgresses such boundaries. As Paul wrote of men outside the Jewish race and unschooled in Scripture (precisely those persons for whom the Signs of Creation are the only possible path to God), “when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written upon their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them (Rom. 2:15).” Thus, the Sign of Conscience, more than merely setting forth an objective limit upon human propriety, actually compels guilt over wrongdoing and pleads for the provision of some form of external atonement, two elements present, however bizarrely manifested, in every ancient religion of which I am aware.

Finally, beyond offering insight into the moral order and evoking remorse in the face of transgression, the Sign of Conscience, acting in concert with the Signs of Beauty and Order, adumbrates, with a delicate brush, the necessity of coming divine Judgment. The logic is this: If the Sign of Beauty describes that which is worthy and good, as a matter of natural design, and the Sign of Order demonstrates that such good is meant to be preserved, then any act which disfigures Beauty and undermines Order must be reversed if the ideal balance of Beauty and Order are to be restored. Now, to be clear, there is nothing in the Sign of Conscience that, by some metaphysical necessity, requires that all grievances of Beauty and Order be redressed by divine judgment. However, Conscience does insist, and quite zealously, that justice ought to be meted out when Beauty and Order are violated so as (a) to punish the evildoer and (b) to return the world to its proper harmony. As such, systems of human justice, which seek to uphold some standard of Beauty and restore a semblance of Order to a community torn by strife and violence, are the organic and inevitable outgrowth of Conscience.

Nevertheless, as all thinking persons recognize, every judicial system, even if governed by persons of unimpeachable rectitude and transcendent compassion, is by its very nature limited in the remedies it can offer society’s victims. A murdered man cannot be revived by a jury verdict or the swipe of a gavel. A child’s innocence cannot be reconstructed by the act of putting his molester behind bars. The marital wreckage created by wanton and adulterous lust cannot be unwritten by societal censure or an act of human vengeance. Thus, Conscience in its highest, most developed sense, cries out to Heaven for a final reckoning, a day upon which acts of goodness will be recompensed and acts of evil judged with finality. How fascinating that this is the very point Paul makes in the second chapter of Romans immediately before elucidating the notion of Gentile conscience: “[God] will render to each one according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury. There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. For God shows no partiality (Rom. 2:6-11).”

Next time: The Sign of Death and Rebirth

[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]

How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe

Men given to philosophical inquiry have long posed the seminal cosmological question: Why does what is exist at all? In other words, why not nothing? Answers have generally fallen into two camps—the theological and the mystical. Either a Prime Mover (read “God”), at some point in the distant past, spontaneous caused the generation of matter ex nihilo, or the cosmos, existing in some form of material “eternity” without beginning or end, merely possesses self-creative potential of undefined origin. I have no desire here to argue systematically for the former view. Rather I wish to suggest that the Sign of Consciousness, even more than the Sign of Order, lays waste to the latter perspective, for Consciousness insists on asking a second question of the thinker, to wit: Even if the supposed “brute fact” of the physical world is assumed, how did such a world give rise to a creature capable of contemplating cosmogenesis, who can know and aspire to know about the essence of all things? This second question does not, of course, erase the profound, and precedent, difficulty proposed to the philosophical naturalist by the Sign of Order, namely the combined theoretical and empirical challenge of hypothesizing abiogenesis apart from the controlling effects of law (whether in the incipient nanoseconds of the Big Bang or in the sterilized environs of a modern laboratory). However, as the stumbling block proposed by Consciousness is a matter of pure, unadulterated logic, its mountainous bulk cannot be circumvented by an appeal to present scientific ignorance and the inevitable illumination of future discovery.

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[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]

How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe

The Sign of Order

The second Sign of Creation, the Sign of Order, is closely related to the Sign of Beauty. Order is that mysterious force which unites the universe in patterns, in accordance with fixed and immutable rules. It is not merely that which constitutes the physical building blocks of reality; it is what metaphysically grounds such building blocks and enchains the surging tempest of material and incorporeal chaos within closely defined boundaries. Without the appearance of Order in the form of grammar, syntax, and usage, this sentence could not be written. Apart from Order’s governing presence in logic, the reasoning essential to law, philosophy and theology would constitute mere posturing. Devoid of Order’s commanding statute in the natural world, not only would the rigorous pursuit of science be rendered superfluous but the densely structured cosmos about which man has liked to think would dissolve into atavistic white noise. Order is what ensures the theorems and equations of mathematics, from the most basic single-variable algebra to the most complex partial differential equations, always function in a consistent manner no matter the mind applied to work their controls. Order, moreover, is what separates the convivial strains of a Stradivarius in the hands of a skilled violinist from the dissonant, clanging madness of an exchange of machine gun fire. As with Beauty, the Sign of Order is ubiquitous in Creation. Denied its ministrations for even one moment in time, we would not last long enough to anticipate the end of our existence.

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[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]

How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe

Consider first the Sign of Beauty. Beauty requires no description beyond experience, for it is all around us, in as many shapes, sizes, colors, and incarnations as the imagination can fathom, from the moment we awake in the morning until the moment our consciousness submits to the tide of sleep at night. It speaks to us in the voices of children discovering a field of wildflowers. It resonates in the incomparable music of Bach, Pachelbel, Handel and Mozart. It shimmers in the smile of a beautiful woman. It whispers to us in the sound of a mountain stream. It sails with us upon the trackless deep toward a sapphire horizon. It sleeps beside us in the peace and intimate comfort of marriage. It moves in the joints of our fingers and toes and crowns the intricacy of our minds. It swirls with falling maple leaves in a crisp autumn wind. It watches over our shoulder at the birth of a child. It strikes our ears with the roar of a hometown crowd (if you are a sports fan) or with the reading of Tennyson, Wordsworth and Longfellow. Such are only highlights; the exhaustive list is endless. Beauty is the constant companion of every man, woman and child alive, no matter their circumstances. Even in the darkest hours it stalks us with its Light (for even at Auschwitz, as the crematoriums operated to exterminate a race, the sun still rose amid pastel-infused glory). Beauty is an irrepressible force in Creation. Though its individual manifestations may be fleeting, limited, and subject to disfigurement by the bludgeons of violence, cruelty, and despair, Beauty in its grand totality simply will not release us to the autocratic oppression of ugliness unless we choose to cast our eyes upon the Prince of Darkness and submit to his chains.

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[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]

How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe

The eminent scientist Galileo Galilei once observed that God had written two books about himself, the Bible and the Creation. Galileo’s steadfast belief that divine truth had been written into the fabric of the created order compelled him to study the physical world as it was, or at least as it appeared to be to his thoughtful eye and analytic mind, apart from the Aristotelian a prioris which, in his day, masqueraded as scientific wisdom in the halls of the medieval Church. In retrospect, our culture, shaped as it is so profoundly by the tides of Enlightenment thought, hails Galileo as a paragon of scholastic virtue, a hero in the ongoing battle between science and faith; yet, in a manner uncomfortably analogous to that adopted by the Vatican, modern man persists in ignoring the shining wisdom inherent in Galileo’s epistemology. For, in proposing the existence of not one but two divine texts—the first literary, the second living—Galileo had no intention of disparaging either; rather, he wished to exalt both as equally valid, and entirely compatible, sources of divine revelation. In Galileo’s view, God had revealed himself discernibly both in the Word of his Prophets and the Work of his hands. Thus, Galileo was convinced that the empirical labor of the scientist had no quibble with the diligent exegesis of the theologian, for both the scientist and the theologian were ultimately students of the Light imparted to man by the same gracious God.

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Somehow it seems inane to set one’s self up for failure by jumping through the New Year’s Resolutions hoop: lose 10 pounds, clean closets, learn to speak Spanish, never lose temper, etc. In addition, the focus in on the self, the wrong place to be. So, how should a Christian view a new year?

This year for me seems different, and should be. Two friends in my church have recently learned of the aggressive cancer consuming their cells that will insure (humanly speaking) that they will not live to see the end of 2006. Another friend didn’t make it through the last year- he had no idea on the first of January 2005 that he wouldn’t live to see 2006. Events like this do keep us from taking the gift of life for granted.

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As the New Year begins to come around again I have embarked on the painful introspection and self assessment that comes with setting a New Years Resolution. The following 10 character traits of a knight (1) pose some character traits that are worth a little introspection and contemplation. If one of these traits does not leave a person feeling at least a tinge of inadequacy, they probably need to spend a little more time defrosting their heart by the fire. Any time you read the word knight, insert your name instead. It will make it a little more real.

1. Prowess: To seek excellence in all endeavors expected of a knight, martial and otherwise, seeking strength to be used in the service of justice, rather than in personal aggrandizement.

2. Justice: Seek always the path of right, unencumbered by bias or personal interest. If the right you see rings true with others, and you seek it out without bending to the temptation for expediency, then you will earn renown beyond measure.

3. Loyalty: Be known for unwavering commitment to the people and ideals you choose to live by. There are many places where compromise is expected; loyalty is not amongst them.

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Happy New Year from Every Square Inch!

That time is upon us once again. The beginning of a New Year when we resolve to make changes in our lives during the coming year. How many of us fail within the first month or so to accomplish what we set out to accomplish?

A perfect example of this can be seen at the gym that I go to. Every year between January and March the gym is packed. So pack that many "regulars" change their scheduled workouts to avoid the crowds. I have overheard them talking about the phenomenon of these New Year's fitness freaks.

I must count myself in the "fitness freak" camp. Every year I also resolve to go to the gym more frequently in the same way that I renew my commitment to other areas of my life. More often than not I fail in every area before Spring arrives but that does not keep me from trying and it certainly hasn't stopped me from resolving to do better in each of those areas during the next year.

As we renew our commitments in all areas of our life, let us remember the commitment that Jesus calls us to:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might.

As this New Year begins, I am renewing my commitment to love God with all my heart, soul and might. I am renewing in the way of Jesus when he dedicated his own head, heart, hands and feet in mikveh.

May God enable me to live passionately during the next year!

Soli Deo Gloria,

Brian
Founder, Every Square Inch