Category / Personal Stuffs

by Kevin

My Favorite Not-so-classic Christmas Song

I’m not 100% sure on the difference between Classic and NonClassic Christmas songs, but I know that O Come O Come Emmanuel is a Classic and I Celebrate The Day is not.  Nevertheless, it is one of my favorite Christmas songs.

Not much to stay about this song upfront, it is by Relient K and it is essentially a stream of thoughts concerning the first Christmas.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsPFNY4Z5t0&w=420&h=315]

The song isn’t very deep, but I think it gets two things across;

  1. Many of the things that happened that first Christmas are a giant mystery.  I also wonder sometimes when Jesus knew of the gravity of what his birth meant.  Was it something He found out as He grew up?  Was something intrinsically within Him?  Or did He have a fully developed mine capable of understanding it all the moment His eyes opened?  I don’t know, these are things that seem like they can’t make any sense when something is fully God and man.  But what really matters is that Jesus was born.  And that is big news.  So big it changed this world forever.
  2. This is the reason we celebrate Christmas.  We celebrate the day that Jesus was born because it was the start of something.  It was the start of what Israel was begging for back in Assyria.

Emmanuel had come.  He had finally come!  And with Him here, since He had come as it was promised, we know what comes next.  Jesus’ birth was the beginning of our salvation.  Easter is where it all goes down, but Christmas is where it all started.  So I celebrate that day.

by Kevin

My Favorite Classic Christmas Song

It is that time of year again, Christmas music time!  I’m quite particular about listening to Christmas music throughout the year.  Every now and then I’ll listen to a Christmas song if it comes up on iTunes, but the closer it gets to December the more likely I am to skip it because it isn’t time yet.  As we all know, the correct time it is acceptable for Christmas music to start playing is anytime after Thanksgiving, and I always hold out until then.  I usually listen throughout December, past Christmas, and on till about the 7th of January.  There isn’t really another season with its own theme music(the recent attempt at a thanksgiving song doesn’t count), and all of the songs just make this time of year that little bit more special.

My favorite classic Christmas song is one by the name of O Come O Come Emmanuel.  A brief history: the song is translated from an older Ecclesiastical Latin text called Veni, veni, Emmanuel, written sometime between the 8th and 12th century, which was based upon the prophecy in Isaiah 7:14.

14Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel(meaning God with us).

At this time, the nation of Israel was currently held captive by Assyria(I think) wondering how they could have come to this.  God’s chosen people had been beaten and overtaken.  This is not how it was supposed to be.  How will Israel escape its current setting and how can it possible get better?  It really is a depressing time, which I think sets the mood for the song.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Docmt1_MZVo?rel=0]

Its fairly short, the lyrics follow a very simple and similar structure, its a bit repetitive at times, but it is a song full of longing.

Israel knows of the existence of what they yearn for, but He is nowhere to be found.  They, and we, are in an agony that currently nothing on earth can satisfy.  Every verse is literally the begging for something greater to come and end their suffering; free us from being enslaved, lead us to the age to come, come back to us Lord.  The song never arrives to the time when Emmanuel does come.  Israel doesn’t get saved before the music ends.  Instead the verses all end with the hope that God will be with us someday and we are to rejoice in that.

Perhaps that is why I like it, because at its core it isn’t necessarily a Christmas song.  It is a song about us in the present day, still struggling in the same places as Israel way back in the Old Testament.

Today we are awaiting the very same Jesus to come and redeem us.

by Kevin

How Should We Deal With Loud and Hurtful People?

Has Christianity effectively been ruined for others by Christians not following many of Christ’s teachings them(our)selves but brutally attacking others for doing the same?  I understand that there are many Christians who don’t do this, and that’s great.  But I think the problem is that the Christians that do purposely seek attention while doing it(in their mind they think it is a good thing…I guess).  Should we be seeking attention and disown these actions in response?

I feel like our actions/speech should be much harsher for Christians doing that rather than for some random person breaking Christ’s example they might not even adhere to.

by Kevin

Love is for Others

A while ago someone married to a paraplegic for 16 years was doing an AskMeAnything on reddit and got asked the question “How’s the sex life?” No doubt the person who asked was trying to be humorous, but the man gave an answer anyway.

Somehow I knew this was going to be the first question…I’m not gonna lie. Sex is one of the big issues. I wish I was a better man, and could simply ignore that side of myself, but I’m not. I get as frustrated as anyone else, and working through that is difficult.

What followed was one of the best interactions I have seen concerning the difference of what real love is and what many people think of it is, someone else followed up and pressed the issue further;

Have you ever considered or had a discussion with your wife about making the physical aspect of your relationship open? You both have needs, and I respect your patience and efforts to be a good husband. However, I feel that on a level of need you may benefit from having an agreement with your wife about a sexually open relationship while maintaining an otherwise monogamous one.

This suggestion hurts my soul every time I read it. I do not know if this person genuinely believed this idea was a good one or he was just wondering out loud what the man thought about it. What it really says, is “love should be about you getting everything you want and if you are missing anything then you should go get it elsewhere.” Sure, redefine the way a relationship works to fulfill your needs. You deserve it. You’re entitled to it.

The married man answered;

I’ve had others ask this question before, but lets be serious here.

My wife already deals with feelings of inadequacy because of the things she can’t provide for me physically. She knows I love her anyway, but she can’t help feeling like she’s somehow less than a “real” wife.

Were I to go elsewhere for sex, romping around with some able-bodied lady, even if it was done with her knowledge and nominal permission, any sense of security that she has in me, in us, would be gone. That kind of damage is irreparable.

An “open relationship” would signify only that my physical needs are more important than her emotional ones. And that just isn’t true.

Beautiful.

Yes I know, sex is not love. I think that love is greater than sex, but they are connected in ways and I think that is another way of looking at what is being misrepresented here. When this man opens himself to questions about his marriage and someone asks him about sex, he doesn’t try to disconnect the two like the second questioner does because the married man knows they are intertwined. He knows asking him “How’s the sex life?” is in part asking him “How’s the marriage life?”. I doubt his answer would probably be any different if the question was changed. The man understands that to go outside of his marriage for sex, or for anything, would render his marriage pointless. Whatever benefits he would receive from outside his marriage are worth nothing to him if his marriage or wife suffers.

I believe that our biggest need is love, but love is a funny thing because in order to do it correctly one must put another’s needs before their own. That is so hard to do sometimes. Being a selfish 22-year-old, my innate desire is not to put another’s wants or needs before my own. My brain says that the most efficient way to enjoy the benefits of life is to have all my needs met without doing any work. But because I love her, I make any of her needs more important than all of mine.  Well, I try to.  I fail a lot, but that is another story.  The point is we cannot fulfill our own need for love, we must love something beyond ourselves if we want it to be real.

One last person made a snide comment;

So it’s essentially a one-way deal, where she gets here psychological needs met, and you don’t. Got it. But then, I guess you made that decision when you got married. Oh well.

The man responded;

Not really, no. It is called love. It is letting the needs of someone else supersced your own. I’m rather sorry you feel the way you do. You’re missing out in the long run.

by Kevin

Easter 2012

For this year’s Easter post I’ll leave you with a quotation from a recent book I read.

The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it…). They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.

― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

My previous Easter posts if you’re interested.

by Kevin

What is Sacred?

I saw this on the Colbert show a couple days ago.  I thought the Harvard professor’s ideas were interesting.  I also thought it was interesting seeing Colbert talk about his faith, almost breaking character for a bit. If you didn’t know he is a Sunday school teacher.  Oh, what I would give to sit in on a Bible lesson from Colbert…

Sean Dorrance Kelly-Sean Dorrance Kelly believes that we’ve lost the notion of what’s sacred in our existence (06:48)

I don’t think that it means you can’t literally EVER laugh at something or it loses the sacredness(?). But laughing as in ridiculing it for being what it is. Laughing at something funny/ironic is different than ridiculing something to destroy its image.  I think there is a middle ground here, satire is a genius way of getting a point across.  And I love to laugh at satire.

by Kevin

Easter Redux

Easter has always baffled me. Not why we celebrate it, but how it happened. I know God resurrected, but that means that God had to die. God died. Now that is weird to think about. The Being that created everything died. Was there no God for three days? How does that work!?

This God-Man or Man-God…this Thing that is the Supernatural mixed with the natural…this Thing that is the Deity infused with flesh broke the rules of this world. It broke the rules of our world by entering and later broke the rules of our curse-death.

Adam/Eve cursed us all from that bite. You can’t really blame them though, how can you comprehend the impact of something that you have never experienced on an entire race? They didn’t know what death or sin were. But they caused it, and it has been our curse that has separated us from God. But God had a plan, to break this curse. How it happened, like I said, I don’t fully understand. It has some logic to it. To sin means death, and someone has to pay for that sin. So logically, if one who hasn’t done anything wants to atone for that sin, they can. But how can God atone for sin? God is perfect. God can’t die. God can’t have anything to do with sin.

Maybe that’s what broke the curse of death. It tried to claim something it couldn’t. Death had been afflicting humans one by one, so God placed Himself within a human and death couldn’t handle it. Jesus wasn’t an applicable parameter for death to take. It choked. Death broke. God finally upset the curse that satan tricked Adam into placing upon us. Now there is a way out of death, through Jesus, and Him alone.

He broke this curse, this cycle. He has beaten our captor. He has reclaimed us.

God brought us the cure-His one and only Son.

Is it wrong that I am so proud of that analogy of God breaking death’s parameters?  It is very computer sciencey, death being a function that accepts a MortalBeing as a parameter and when you try giving it an ImmortalGod that implements MortalBeing it breaks and throws OmgWhatJustHappenedException. It makes sense to me.

Death Broke, which means that sin is no longer an issue for us.  Sin no longer being an issue for us allows God to interact with us as He intended.  Our relationship with God finally being restored we can gather our self-worth not through our intelligence, not through how much money we make, and not through how attractive we are but through our intrinsic value of being solely created/fulfilled by God.  Since we can view ourselves as worth so much more than what this world can give us, we can see others in the same light, we can fix our relationships with other people; we must love others if we know they are a creation like us. Because of these three relationships being restored through Christ, our relationship with God, our relationship with ourselves, our relationship with each other, we can begin to do God’s work in this world and prepare for Christ’s return to finally restore the rest of His creation. I mean, if He has done an amazing job on the first three what makes you think he won’t make good on his promise for the fourth?

I can’t wait to experience the hike to the Bridge to Nowhere in a perfect, curse free creation–as God intended it to be experienced.

by Kevin

An excerpt

“We love life. All life, but especially sentient life forms, like Homo sapiens. Your species. This is a very beautiful planet. A priceless work of art.”

Suddenly, without warning, the Ellimist did it again. He opened space.  We were no longer standing in the Yeerk pool. We were no longer underground at all. We were underwater. Deep underwater. But the water did not seem to touch my skin. And when I breathed, there was air. Still, I felt fear tingle the back of my neck.  Suspended in the water, but dry. The Ellimist could no longer be seen. We were floating above a coral reef. And everything was moving again.  All around us, fish swam by in swift-darting schools. Fish in every color and shape, reflecting the dappled sunlight from above. Sharks prowled. Stingrays seemed to fly. Squid pulsated. Crabs scuttled across fabulous extrusions of coral. Tuna as big as sheep drifted past. Swift, grinning dolphins raced by in pursuit of their next meal.

LOVELY.

The Ellimist’s voice once more seemed to grow from deep within my own heart.

LOVELY.

And then, as quickly as we had been plunged into the ocean, we were drifting above the waving golden grass of the African savannah. A pride of lions lazed in the sun below us, looking sleepily content. Wildebeest and gazelles and impalas grazed, then broke into wild, springing, bouncing races that forced you to smile at the sheer energy of it all.  There were hyenas, rhinos, elephants, giraffes, cheetahs, baboons, zebras. Hawks and eagles and buzzards wheeled overhead.

LOOK AT IT.

Then, in an instant, deep jungle. A lithe jaguar prowled while monkeys chattered in the tree canopy above. Snakes as long as a person slithered across tree branches. The air reeked of the heavy perfume of a million flowers. We heard the sounds of frogs, insects, monkeys, and wild, screaming birds.

IN ALL THE UNIVERSE, NO GREATER BEAUTY. IN A THOUSAND, THOUSAND WORLDS, NO GREATER ART THAN THIS.

Then the Ellimist showed us the human race. We flew, invisible, through the steel-and-glass canyons of New York City.  We drifted above villages at the edges of jungle rivers. We watched a rock concert in Rio de Janeiro, and a political meeting in Seoul, and a soccer game in Durban, and an open-air market in the Philippines.

HUMANS. CRUDE. PRIMITIVE. BUT CAPABLE OF UNDERSTANDING.

Suddenly, all the movement stopped. We were staring at a picture. A painting. I’d seen the painting somewhere before.

It was a wild swirl of color. A painting of purple flowers. Irises, I think, although I’m no big expert on flowers. The artist had seen the beauty of those flowers and captured some small bit of it on canvas.

CAPABLE OF UNDERSTANDING.

The beauty of our world amazes me. Even more amazing I think, and so does the Ellimist it seems, is that we have been endowed with the ability to understand the beauty/glory of it all.

by Kevin

Humiliation

hu·mil·i·ty –noun
the quality or condition of being humble

hu·mil·i·ate –verb
to cause (a person) a painful loss of pride, self-respect, or dignity

While (to) humiliate is looked at as such a negative word, its root, humility, is a positive quality. In order to receive humility expect to be humiliated. I had never seen this connection until tonight while reading Colossians at Pierced. The next time you pray for humility be prepared to receive it how it is given. In order for God to grant you humility, he effectively humiliates you.

EDIT://More thoughts on humility

The cross, a very painful way to die. A real point of the cross was complete humiliation of the victim. As the accusers watched Jesus get crucified, they must have thought they had won. But through this, God beat Satan and brought his ultimate downfall, through being humiliated (if you believe in all that). The desire of the arrogant is to be strong and beat your opponent into submission, but Jesus effectively countered this by simply being humble. It is something I don’t think that those with a thirst for power at costs can understand. It baffles them, which in turn humiliates them. It is almost a compounded humiliation for them, getting humiliated by their own humiliation.