If a lock loses its ability to lock, what can make it lock again?

The title is a play on Matthew 6:13 - if a salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?

As some of you may know, I've made a commitment for the next year to drop the subject of dating and girls out of my mind. Instead I would take all that time I was wasting and instead delve into the Word, specifically Jesus's words (Sermon on the Mount, Upper Room Discourse, parables, etc). I see it like me taking the whole issue, locking it up in a lockbox in the back of my mind, to be left alone for a year - after which opening that lockbox seeing if the idea still remains alive or is dead.

But what good is a lockbox if it refuses to stay locked? And yet is it really rational to say that because it keeps on popping open that I should take it as a sign to just give in? Am I falling into the "all or nothing" trap?

In the end, the issue is almost always wrestled back into the lockbox and slammed shut, at least until the next poke snaps the lock open again. And I will continue to wrestle the issue back into that lockbox with the help of the power of God (without which I could do nothing). No longer will I give into temptations simply because I think that I will inevitably fall into them at some point and time anyway - therefore might as well do it now. I will not fall into that line of thinking... but will stand firm to this conviction.



There also remains 12 days until I write my LSAT.


LORD help me... for I am weak.



On a lighter note: The Ducks currently lead the Senators 2 - 0. Poetic justice will be.... sweep sweep sweep sweep!

How I hate the Senators >_>

The Roller Coaster

I can't believe I haven't written in 11 days. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? If I write for therepeutic reasons, does this mean for the past 11 days I've just been bottling things up inside or does it merely mean that nothing of significance occurred such that I required psychologically therepeutic measures? Regardless, this first paragraph has little to do with the title of the blog.

The roller coaster that I ride the most often is a strange one. I continue to ride it, week after week, and yet I don't even really enjoy doing it. It's some sort of strange compulsion that draws me onto the wild ride that it always takes me on. In fact, it almost feels like I never get off. It's like the one time that a friend of mine (Peter Foltin) and I sat on Wild Beast for three runs straight. That was intense and I'm not sure something I'd like to repeat ever again in my life >_<

But then again, does it feel like I never get off because I never DO get off? Is it really a compulsion that draws me in, or is it just etched into the inner programming of who I am to endure this jolting, headpounding, heartrending, gutwrenching, innardtwisting ride for the rest of my life? Is there nothing that makes the tracks smoother and more stable, makes the ups and downs more steady, stable, and less volatile? Do I want to know?

Have I, in fact, grown addicted to the highs of volatile ups and downs - despite the fact that I currently lament this most cursed thing? How often do we as people actually begin to secretly enjoy the feeling of feeling sorry for ourselves and having others prop us up instead of trusting in and depending on the LORD our God, the only one who can provide the true answer to the problems we face?

Also... why is it that the last two paragraphs have been nothing but questions? The answer to that one at least, I know - ever since I started RSS feeding this blog onto Facebook, the possibilities for people to stumble upon these words have become suddenly so much greater, and it has taught me that I need to be more guarded in what i say. perhaps this is a good thing. Self-control, after all, is not a vice, but a virtue - a virtue that is most excellently found in the best of men (and women).

Or perhaps I am now just rambling and attempting to crystallize my thought patterns into some sort of coherent shape and form. Though this makes the most sense, what is pouring out makes much less sense - leading me to wonder how much sense my inital statement of making sense actually makes. How many people read that last sentence and then had to read it again? I know I did.

It is now 1:44 am. The night grows middle aged. I sit here, not knowing what to write.

It is now 1:45 am. Suddenly, thoughts of the LSAT flood my mind. The colourful markers on the white sheets of paper that i have plastered various areas of the house with jump into my mind as I consider all the work still left ahead of me. This test is the biggest I will have ever written in my life (besides maybe the CCAT).

It is now 1:46 am. I tire of this useless exercise of writing down the thoughts that occur to me each minute that passes. It even makes me wonder if I am not just wasting my time. I resolve to go to bed. After all, I do need to go to church by 12 tomorrow.

It is now 1:47 am. I will now retire. Though, if you have stuck out this entire post to this point, it makes me wonder if you were not wasting your time as well. I'm sure there were more productive things you could have been doing. Like sleeping. Or doing your homework.

It is now 1:48 am. But still, if you HAVE read this far, it flatters me. You like what I have to write that much? Really... it does flatter me.

It is now 1:49 am. Really now. I'm finished this time.

Spiderman 3

I saw it on Monday.

Either one of two things happened. Everyone that told me it was terrible was wrong, or they so lowered my expectations that I enjoyed it. *shrug*

Randomly... best line of the movie was when Peter Parker's landlord was attempting to give him relational advice. "You're good women, I'm good man." *shrug* >_>

But what I really liked about the movie was, as Brad pointed out to me last summer with the previous two Spiderman movies, was the deep spiritual connotations within the overall message. Though I think the creators meant it in a more humanistic sense, the line about how nothing is decided and that we are our choices was, I found, particularly striking. Since many of you that will read this may not have seen the movie, I'm not going to go into any particulars; but the general principle of the matter I drew from it is that before we become Christians, we have two choices - we can choose to fulfill our created purpose and renew our relationship with God, or we can walk away from that (Calvinism/Armenianism debate aside). Once we become Christ followers, then we can choose to be obedient and show that we have truly been transformed, or we can be disobedient and go through the testing flames and come out as one just escaping from the fire with nothing but our lives at the end. On our end and in our perspective, none of that is decided. The choice is ours whether we live our life to the fullest and come to the end of life saying, "Praise be to the LORD for the full life that I have had the glorious blessing to live out" or whether we come to the final moment, straining to go back, begging for one more chance as we lament "Oh LORD, how I have wasted it... the precious life you gave to me."

The choice is before us, those of us whom are still young with our whole lives ahead of us. Let us live life to the fullest, desiring the enjoyment and therefore glorification of God above life's blessings and gifts, and ultimately, desiring him above life itself - and being an example to others around us of the joy that such a life brings. But at the same time, let us be weary of making the terms happiness and joy interchangeable, for though we may not always be happy by the worldly definition, let us be forever content and joyful in Christ, the only one that can completely fulfill the deepest desire of our heart.

My strength comes from the LORD, may He be praised forever

There once was a boy who one could charecterize as nothing but an abrasive, overachieving nerd. This was an odd charecteristic in that most nerds tended to congregate with themselves, sit in their corner, talk about their video game characters/Magic cards/schoolwork. But despite all this boys faults, he was a hard worker. If he didn't understand something, he stayed up until 3:00 in the morning working it out. When a project was coming due, he would work at it for hours on end, and make sure that it came out just right. Certainly he did his share of procrastinating, but it never really got quite so bad that it would seriously affect the quality of his work. This boy graduated from high school with a 90 average, got into every university that he applied to and, was certain about where he wanted to go.

He entered into his first year of university with all the habits of high school drilled in and with the fear of the difficulty of university driving him to work even harder at maintaining an average that would get him into law school. It was easy for him. In fact he breezed through his first year, achieving A+ in all but 3 of his courses, in which he scored As.

The boy should have realized that he got his high marks because he worked so hard. Instead he thought to himself, "Man that was easy." The following summer, however, was not so easy. Having committed to running a business that summer, he was facing a loss of 8000 dollars if he didn't do something and didn't do it fast. After pulling 16 hour days for two months and pulling the business out of the crash dive it was trending to take and turning a profit of 6000 dollars at the end of the summer, he should have felt good. Instead, he came out of that summer, $6000 richer but having acquired several nasty habits - nothing so morally terrible or physically harmful... instead habits that were bound and determined to take potshots at his academic career. And potshots they did take. Though they did not utterly destroy his record in the following year, much energy was spent in attempting to pull out of those habits (very time consuming ones) and to devote to his studies, and one course that took the brunt of the damage cost him two scholarships.

Third year came around and he was still trying to fight the habits that he had picked up that summer. The only difference between this year and the first two years however was that it was suddenly hard to get As. Procrastinated papers were suddenly not generating the quality that they used to (or at least weren't good enough to fool the TAs.) For the first time, he suddenly felt like his effort was not good enough. And though this should have motivated him to work harder, it had the opposite effect of leading him to almost give up. The only thing that kept him going was the fact that he needed to keep his marks up if he was to achieve the goal of law school, which seemed to get further and further away with each B paper that he received back from his courses.

As the third year wrapped to a close and he got back his first mark from the course to see the second B of the year on his transcript, he felt the waves of resigned defeat begin to rally at his doorstep. But something within the boy had changed. It seemed that somewhere along those past three years, the boy had slowly been maturing, tranforming, into the semblance of a man. A hard resolve instead rose up that he would not succumb to despair but would move forward, would rediscover the work ethic that had formerly existed and do what was needed to get into law school. The resolve was supported by the need, the desire to glorify God by maximizing the gift of academic ability that he had been granted.

***********************************

It stops here. The laziness. The defeat. I am not going to be steamrolled by my emotions, instead, by the power of God, I will coral those emotions and throw them right back at the forces that try to bring me down. I have not the strength to do such things, I know this now. Instead I will stand firm in my faith in God through Christ Jesus and do my best. I will do my best to make sure that my best comes out in my academic work; I will put all the strength that I have been given into discipling the men with which the LORD has entrusted me for this short time to also became disciplers of men; and through all this, I will honour God, I will desire Him above the gifts and blessings of life, and I will desire Him above life itself.

I will not waste my life but will live it to the full glory of God the Father, our only hope and strength, our provider of all things.

Praise be to the only one who is worthy of praise, our God and our LORD, forever and ever..... AMEN

Mmm... music

So a friend of mine introduced me to a site called Project Playlist the other day. I was listening to some random person's playlist and reveling in some of the stuff that they had on their playlist (they brought back old memories... remembering the first time I heard "The Bad Touch" by the Bloodhound Gang, remembering that in grade 7 and 8 I always put down "Blue" by Eiffel 65 and "mambo number 5" as song requests for the dances that I never went to ;) )

Then I decided to make a playlist of my own. I think it's pretty representative of the huge slice of music that I enjoy. I don't have very discriminating tastes, I enjoy most kinds of music so they're all over the board. From System of a Down, to Sum 41, to David Crowder/Hillsongs/Chris Tomlin, to Rammstein, to Cascada. Yes >_> It's... yes >_>

Well it's here if you want to check it out... and if you know any good songs let me know so that I can add them to this playlist.

Subway musicians

As I was coming home today from Robarts, I heard some amazing jazz/blues resonating around the station. I'm the type that tries to pay attention to subway musicians as much as possible - so I looked around for the band (I honestly thought it was more than one guy). Instead, it was one dude playing an eight string guitar. The bottom five strings were your standard EADGBE strings - but the top three strings were bass strings. The guy was playing guitar and bass... AT THE SAME TIME! He also had his foot in a tambourine and was tapping it to create some percussion sounds. I was very impressed. So much so that I actually just stood there as a train pulled in and let it pass, because I just had to finish listening to the song.

I also bought the CD he had in his guitar case. Good stuff - sits in the background SO well.

But the other thing I was observing as I let the train come and go was the rest of the people just walking past this guy playing one of the most interesting instruments I've seen and playing it pretty well as far as I could tell. It reminded me of an article I read about Joshua Bell playing his 3.5 million dollar Strad in front of a subway station in Washington D.C. I have to be honest, before I read that article, I had no idea who Joshua Bell was. But all the masses of people walking past this guy playing some pretty good jazz blues without even stopping to turn their heads made me wonder. I mean, some people don't like jazz... I can buy that (though I don't understand). But the whole time I was standing there, nobody even slowed down to listen. Everyone was just single mindedly focused on getting where they were going. Ok, maybe some people were late... I can buy that too. But still...........

By the way, the musicians name is Jason Crawford.

A bright day in Israel

The crowds streamed up the side of the mountain, hearing rumours that the teacher was about to speak again. Never mind that it was the hottest time of day, or that nobody had remembered to bring any food along for the midday meal... the great renowned teacher that had been rocking the whole country was about to speak. Nobody wanted to miss it as they all tried to get as close as possible to hear what he would say. As he began to speak, a complete hush fell over the crowd as they began to hang on to every word.

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven...."

***************************************************************

That's how I imagine what must have happened on that day that Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount. Such a picture that is evoked by the simple words "Now when he saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down."

Today I went on my first "date" with Jesus. Dove right into the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) with an iced mocha latte in hand and even though I think I've read it about 8 times, and heard sermons preached on it 10 times more than that, it never quite hit me like it did today. After reading through it once, I focused in on v. 13-16 (because the Beatitudes are a little beyond me). What stood out to me the most is how much this relates to the book that I'm reading right now (Don't Waste Your Life by John Piper.) For in v. 16, it says "In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven."

I want to emphasize a part of that passage. "In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven." For the first time, I noticed the that in the verse. What is the significance of this simple word introducing the essential clause "they may see your good deeds" you might ask? After all... it's just a word.

But the that in v. 16 makes an important distinction, one that too many of us forget in this North American society of individualistic achievement. We are not the light of the world because of our good deeds. We are the light of the world that casts light ON our good deeds that point to the Father in heaven who is most worthy of praise. The lamp does not exist to draw attention to itself but to illuminate that which surrounds it so that men may see what is going on around them. We are the spiritual lights to the world, shining that men may see the glory of God that is Christ crucified for us in us and all around us. We "shine like stars in the universe" not because of anything we have done but because we "hold out the word of life" that comes from God through his Son Jesus Christ. (See Philippians 2:14-16)

If this sort of revelation is indicative of what the next year is going to be like... well I don't even know what to think about that. All I can say is....

May His name be praised forever and ever... AMEN.

Reflections of the past

Today I sat down to write in my journal. As I was flipping through it, I was amused at one thing that I wrote in particular. I quote:

"Get this, it's a CD... and you can copy CDs onto tape! Isn't that cool?"

I now think about that and wonder why I would have ever WANTED to copy my CDs onto a tape..... this was written in March of 2000.... man was I way behind the times >_>

But that's not the reason that I sat down to write this. I flipped through, and then came across the first empty page. I looked at the entry before... and it was April 29, 2000. I was stunned. I couldn't believe that I hadn't written in my journal in over seven years. It led me to think about what had actually happened in my life over the past seven years... and it was very interesting to reflect on. Sobering in one sense in that I'm not sure I could say I did much to impact eternity, but amazing in another to see how far I have come from that young age of 14.

I began writing about these reflections because I figured it was necessary... the real reason for writing in the journal would have to wait. After thinking about what I had learned, and writing a few pages, I turned the page to continue writing... and lo and behold... it turns out that those two empty pages were just that... two empty pages... two pages that i had inexplicably skipped as I was writing about my life. So sandwhiched in between the April 29, 2000 entry and the June 1, 2000 (I don't actually write in my journal much ok >_>) is an entry from May 7, 2007.

The reason I blog about this however is not to just say that this occurred. I got to thinking about all the things that I realized I had learned about myself that I had forgotten that I had learned about myself (it's always fun writing such convoluted sentences like that.). I wonder if everyone were to do this at some point and just think back to the past ten years of their life (for me... that's half my life >_> Makes me feel young again to think that :D) what they would realize about themselves that they had forgotten and what they would understand about themselves after looking at past experiences with the wisdom of their current years.

I will end with the quote that I finished off on my journal entry.

"I will ground my self-worth in my identity with Christ. I will value my life by what I do for Christ and what God thinks of me and not who I know (other than our Father through Christ Jesus) or what people think of me. May the LORD be praised forever."

Things to be thankful for

I should be sleeping, so I'm going to make this brief.

I am truly thankful for late night walks, for cellphones, for friends who care, for wisdom born of experience, for life, for random thoughts, and ABSOLUTELY most of all for the God that is glorified through all these things as they are worked out in my life for the strengthening of the hope in the glory of God that rests within me which leads the magnification of God's glory exuding from within me. Truly, the LORD is to be praised for all things.

He is to be praised in times of jubilant joy.
He is to be praised in times of downtrodden depression.
He is to be praised in times of exhilarating excitement.
He is to be praised in times of silent seclusion; in times of fantastic fellowship.

(Sorry for the alliteration... I was writing the other day and was getting frustrated because I was unable to recreate the picture in my mind with words. And though a picture is worth a thousand words... it's just as much worth the time and energy to put those thousand words down on to a piece of paper - or conversely into tiny little bits and bytes that are a Microsoft Office document - in order that others may exercise their imaginations, however extensive or non-existant it may be, and be able to share in the images and roiling thoughts within one's mind. Hopefully, the goal of the author is to impart some truth or personal experience such that it does not seem like the airing of dirty laundry, but a truth or experience that everyone can identify with and feel the soul behind the story. Presumably, a well written story should contain a part of the writer himself; it is this part of the writer trapped within the story that is what makes the story truly alive.)

Wow that was a long aside. I feel like I'm going back to my roots of random ramblings.

There is more to be written, less to be made known. With that cryptic statement, I leave thee to thy devices.

I want to write something

And no I don't mean a blog. That's what I'm doing right now. I want to write a story... some sort of fiction that is lovingly crafted and shaped such that imaginative people can read and can paint mental pictures of rich scenery and can envision the lives of the characters within the story... how they interact with people, how they love them, how they hate them.... how they think, how they feel.

So now instead of talking about writing something.. .I'm going to go write something. Who knows... maybe I'll even finish it this time.