The Dark Knight.

I had been thinking a lot about Batman. That was the case, though admittedly it seems a tad odd at first, for which I have no response. During my time of sloth in the summer, I have spent many hours watching movies new and old. I have finally watched some classics many friends have told me for years I just had to see.
Strangely, the movies which struck me as most moving and which spurred on the most thought from me were the Batman films of new. Christopher Nolan is a man I would have at the supposed “intellectual dinner table” that teachers have spoken about through out high school.
Batman’s story itself is one riddled with sorrow and redemption; redemption for a people that do not deserve saving. Watching your parents die evokes much in a young boy, and it can turn to frightening results if not cared for. Luckily, young Bruce Wayne has dear old Alfred, who insists on doing right for him.
Batman stumbles about his life, and finally realizes he must do good for the world. Why? I’m not sure if he knows. Perhaps it is some innate desire within him. Either way, the reason he fascinates me so is that he does right in all cases, whether in the shadows or in plain sight. Though in his city he is seen as a monster by some, and hero by others, he ignores their critiques and continues to strive for a new world; one that he will fight for in vain.
As stated before in my previous post, a man fights for good against all odds, and never stops. He knows he cannot win. It is as in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Charge of The Light Brigade. Six hundred men, destined for both glory and death, charge onward “Into the jaws of death, Into the mouth of Hell,” into a great demise. They fought for a victory they could not have.
Batman holds a code of ethics I strongly desire for myself some day. As with the light brigade, he forges onward, exploring a land not dreamed of by anyone else. Those few who share his dream instead explore cowardice, and watch as their world crumbles. Batman will die before surrender, a way of life desired by few.
“But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are,”
1 Corinthians 1:27-28

Fight the Good Fight

Often times I wonder why we fight battles we know we can never win. In Les Miserables, the students clearly are outmatched. And not the kind of outmatched like a football game in which they could fight hard enough and pull out a narrow victory. Neigh, they will die. It is strictly impossible for them to win. 
So why do they fight? 

John Lennon, a known non-fighter, did not fight wars, or poverty. He did not strive to eliminate death or evil. However, he did devote his life to the fight for peace, and about this he said "You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die."
He knew the costs of his war, yet he fought. Sometimes, you fight to lose, because without the will to win, you have nothing. 

e. e. cummings said "To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting." 
We choose to strive for our goals, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Because we can never succeed fully, we fight day by day. Our lives will be a great battle, and every day we will be outmatched. But do we give up hope? 
If we surrender and choose to ignore the war, we allow it to crush us, and we truly have nothing. 
1 Timothy 6:12 "Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life, whereunto thou art also called, and hast professed a good profession before many witnesses." 
Our fight is unlike the fight for peace, the students' fight against the French government in Les Mis, and the fight to be yourself. 
As Christians, our war on earth is bleak and seems hopeless, but we do not give up because in the end, we will have victory. 

"Behold, He is coming with the clouds, and all eyes will see Him, even those who pierced Him." 
Revelation 1:7 

Cheers & God bless, 
Austin

Children of God

My last post was about the beauty and innocence of a child, and how we lose such unblemished faith. When I think of childlike faith, I picture a boy standing in a field, staring up to the stars and waiting, waiting and wishing, for a shooting star to float by. It is so rare, but he wants it, and he knows with all of himself that it exists, and that it will come.
If you are reading this, you probably know that I went on the Brasil mission trip this year. One of the key things I learned there was the power of a definite and bold relationship with my God. Now that I am home, it has taken me a good month to re-learn such knowledge, which I so quickly forgot.
We learn in Senior Bible class that religion says “I obey, therefore am accepted.” And that the gospel says “I am accepted by God and Jesus’ sacrifice, therefore I obey.” We obey God not because we need something from Him, but because we love him in a deep eternal way that we could never find nor fathom on the earth.
Why does a child obey his parents?
Out of fear when he is young, because he does not understand why he obeys. Upon growing, he comes to know and love his parents. They gave him life and love, and he obeys because he wishes to reciprocate that love.
(I am aware this is not always the case; bear with me)
Therefore, God pushes us to mirror this relationship that we are to have with our parents.
However, there is one thing forgotten in our Christian upbringing; something that makes a mockery of our last shred of pride and sense of self. We forget (myself included) that God chose us. Before a man can truly seek God, God must seek out the man’s heart. As Tozer says in Pursuit of God, “God takes from us every vestige of credit for the act of coming.”
We now see that our gifts, bodies, and minds all come from the living God, but here we see that even the assumption that we came to Him ourselves is not entirely true. We are in no way perfect or beautiful, but through His eyes we are made both.
A childlike relationship with God gives us the humility, confidence, and peace to willingly love others and share in our brothers’ and sisters’ joys and downfalls.

Psalms 63:8 says “My soul followeth hard after thee: thy right hand upholdeth me.”

Not only does this mean that He keeps us from falling into the shattered earth’s false embrace, but it also means that we follow Him while we are already in His hands. We are never alone in our servitude. I so easily find myself forgetting this; that I am always with God. We Christians get so caught up in our religion that God slips away from us. He stares down upon us, calling back to Him, but we cannot see Him.
God is personable and must be known and gathered as any relationship. We do not meet the love of our lives by one encounter of “hello” as we pass them by. Our spouses become such by constant friendship and love, and why shouldn’t God?
Tozer also says “It is a solemn thing, and no small scandal in the Kingdom, to see God’s children starving while actually seated at the Father’s table.” We are directly in front of God, but we do not yearn for Him, and fail to understand that we can in fact come to know Him.
Moses knew God directly; he saw Him in visions, in the burning bush, in pillars of cloud, and on top of mountains. But still, he yearned for God. He prayed to God, “I beseech thee, show me thy glory” (Ex. 33:18). He prays that God will continue to show His might and beauty to Him, though He was closer to Him than so many before him.
To sum up, God is with us always, and it is in His embrace that we may find our ultimate comfort. The ability to love like Jesus cannot come from any but Jesus.

Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love;

Cheers and God bless,
Austin

Beautiful Naivety

I sit at the top of my attic stairs at the moment, listening to peaceful music like Death Cab & Joe Purdy, and Death Cab mutters a line, that says "Love is watching someone die, who'se going to watch you die?" I thoroughly enjoyed that line, and thought it deserved some dissecting. But not tonight. I have not prepared myself well enough for a post on the definition of love, and I'm pretty sure there are a ton of books already about that.

Tonight's post is about innocence & frailty, and why being a kid is where it's at. I read this book over Christmas break, a secular fictional book, that coincidentally paralleled the Christian story, and I thought I'd write on it. In the book, a five year old named Jack is trapped with his mother in one Room, their whole lives. He however loves the room, and doesn't understand why his all-knowing, constantly loving, mother would ever want to leave this 'paradise' he calls home. The real truth is that she was kidnapped and he was born there, but that doesn't tie into this at all. If you haven't read the book, I will ruin it for you tonight.

See, in the book they escape, and suddenly Jack's life twists upside down. He doesn't understand everything around him like he did in his one room, his mother is distant and can't always tell him the answers, and he must constantly get medicine to become accustomed to the absurd amount of germs in the air new to his body. This terrible twisting of the fate reflects the story of all of us at some point in our lives. We 'escape' from the all-knowing comfort of God's warmth, and suddenly we can't handle everything around us. No one is there to help us, and we don't know why. The difference is that while Jack couldn't return to his old life, we can return to our God.

More than anything, this is about innocence, as I said. Picasso, the acclaimed artistic genius, said "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist when we grow up."

This extremely to the point quote slapped me in the mental face this morning, and my mind started working.
Matthew 18 says “Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. 5 And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”
And so it is my opinion that we all start out with eyes aglow, staring up at the store window, wondering what the shiny bicycle is. Eventually, knowledge takes the place of imagination, and we know; it’s just a boring two-wheeled vehicle, nowhere near as fast as my Mazda.
As we grow, we learn, and soon our minds are full of useless & important facts, and the child in our hearts disappears, replaced by an adult, wary and exhausted. If you pictured the supposed ‘perfect Christian,’ would he be tired and worried, with a frown on his face, life in routine, or would he be standing tall, with a big smile and eyes straight forward? I think the latter is the answer, and I think those characteristics stem from the child inside.

To recount this semi-short and almost incomplete post: John Locke may have been correct, to an extent. We all may be evil, but we do begin our lives with a sort of ‘Tabula Rasa,’ as he said; a clean slate. As we grow, we become more knowledgeable, stronger, and more evil. We (myself included) begin to think we are powerful, and our egos grow or even shrink, to the point of unhealthy behavior. Losing our childhood faith leads to the moving away from truth, the moving away from our Father. We even found a new word for someone who ‘trusts too much,’ calling them naive. The point of this is: perhaps naivety isn’t such a bad thing.

Food for thought; God bless,
Austin

Necessity of Solitude

There’s a line in my CRP, This Side of Paradise, in which Amory Blaine’s mother says to him, “No one person is necessary to you or me.” This is the protagonist’s mother, at the beginning of the book, telling her young child an important reminder for the future. She is simply reminding him, in nine words, that he can thrive just as easily with no one by his side.

The statement is ironic, because through out the first chapter, Amory’s mother never leaves his side. In their immense wealth, she does all she can to make sure he is perfectly healthy and happy. When he is sick, there are multiple doctors always by his side. So it is almost comical to hear her say that no one is necessary.

The word necessary has always bothered me. In humor, people always say things like “that wasn’t necessary,” or ask “Was that necessary?” and my response in my head is always “No, but is anything?”
My thoughts were reflected by Beatrice’s words in the book. But I came to realize that when we say necessary there is an implied “to” after the word; money is necessary to live, books are necessary to read.

So what is Beatrice Blaine trying to really say? That “no one person is necessary to live”? I guess so, because in Amory’s life, he discovers that his solitude is all he possesses, as he cries out as the novel ends “I know myself…but that is all.”

Amory loses love, friends, and all of his wealth through out the novel. His life is not over, but his purpose has seemingly been dissolved. No one is necessary for his survival, but they must somehow be necessary, as he is now miserable, right?

Loneliness is a powerful foe. There is little to do to drive it away. Sure, a person by himself or herself may call a friend or something to that effect, but in the end they are still alone. We as Christians are called to embrace loneliness, I believe.

My mission statement (one that I am terrible at putting to action) is that I influence as many as I can with just my attitude. As I’ve said before, through 1 John 4:16, it is our Christian calling to show love through our actions, rather than just preach verses and hope to convert. Therefore, when I think of solitude, I realize it is one of the key schisms in my religion. We are called to love but told we will be alone? That doesn’t seem to make sense.

In Ecclesiastes 1:3-4, Solomon writes “What benefit to people get from all the effort which they expend on earth? A generation comes and a generation goes, but the earth remains the same through the ages.”

Here, Solomon preaches disaster, and in reading this I wonder our meaning and purpose. We are definitely called to be alone on this earth at times, because God will always be with us. Sometimes this feeling of ultimate futility stems from us attempting to fight through the loneliness without our God on our team. He is our coach, and leader. We can’t play without our coach.

He even says “Then they will hand you over to be persecuted and will kill you. You will be hated by all the nations because of my name.” (Matthew 24:9) stating in plain bold words that we will be alone, and it will be for Him. We may struggle and hurt, we may lose hope, but we can find our strength in the fact that no matter how dark the space is around us, no matter how much pain we go through, God is still holding us up.

In the (fantastically twisted) movie Donnie Darko, a seemingly crazy old woman named Roberta Sparrow, or “Grandma Death” as the town calls her, approaches Donnie, whispering unknown words in his ear.
Later, Donnie tells his therapist about this occurrence.

Doctor: “Well what did she say to you?”
Donnie: “She said that every living creature dies alone.”
Doctor: “How did that make you feel?”
Donnie: “It reminded me of my dog Callie. She died when I was eight. She crawled underneath the porch.”
Doctor: “To die?”
Donnie: “To be alone.”

This almost meaningless chat in the movie struck me as powerful, as I understood that internal struggle is universally lonely in that moment. The dog, feeling its strength going away, fled from the ones who cared for it, to be alone as it died. We constantly flee from the world when we are in pain. When people ask “Are you okay?” we respond with “I’m fine.” And put on a smile.

It’s alright to be in good spirit in the bad times, and it’s good to seclude yourself sometimes, just don’t try and succeed through those times without your God. I’ve tried, and you probably have too. It doesn’t work too often.

Cheers, & God bless,
Austin

Christmas, You Are My Everest

Three Questions I ask tonight:

Why do we do all of this?
What is happening to the holiday season in America?
What is Christmas; why is it universally joyful?


Stay with me, my messages tonight are initially bleak, but hopefully will become a lot better as you read.

First Question: Why do we do all of this?

When I ask 'all of this', I mean all of this struggle and stress for one day of the year that celebrates something so seemingly average; the birth of a child. Gifts are given, Santa comes, children are smiling. What does any of that have to do with a little baby being born? There are no words I can say to remind anyone of how powerful that child is. The most powerful being in the universe transformed himself into the most innocent, most vulnerable, and arguably the most beautiful thing in the world. As an amateur writer I have always searched for the schisms in literature, and this is one of the grandest ones.

It's really intense and glorious in fact; a little child, perhaps screaming in discomfort, coming down to love all of us. How many men, how many prophecies were fulfilled in this baby? It's almost comical, the little baby who saved us all.

I don't understand why Santa is a thing, and I couldn't tell you why we put a live tree in our home to die, but I do know that we should be celebrating. Our gifts should be given and remembered to be symbols of love for each other, as I've stressed in other posts on love; it is the greatest thing we can do for one another is to love them.

So; why do we do all of this? Austin's answer: to portray the love God showed for us through a baby to those we love & who love us; and to sing and celebrate. To be merry.

Second Question: What is happening to the holiday season in America?

The Christmas tree is a Holiday Tree, commercials do not say Christmas, and signs are constantly placing the word Holiday in their ads. It's crazy, in 1950 Frank Sinatra was singing about Christmas everywhere. Christmas was the bomb until a couple of years ago. I am perplexed and frustrated by this sudden change of pace.

How can people go out and buy toys to put under their holiday trees? What are the toys there for?

So; What is happening in America? Austin's answer: As a whole, Christians are no longer the majority, therefore as not to insult any newer religions in America, we have moved away from the Christ in Christmas.

Third Question: What is Christmas; why is it universally joyful?

I was driving today in the worst driving weather possible. It was cold, rainy, and windy. These three altogether created a high sense of discomfort, however I was in the cheeriest mood. All of a sudden it struck me; I was on a strange Christmas high, and I was happy to be spending the day with members of my family. I was full of warmth during this dreary Christmas Eve.

So I asked myself; why is Christmas universally joyful? Even if half the time it involves putting on a face to appease happy family members, it is still a warm time full of love and laughter. Just a while ago, my family sat around and sang acapella Christmas carols, and it was so delightful and odd to me.

There really is some strange magic around the season, take away the commercialism, the presents, the stress. There is nothing like walking down the stairs to see that glowing Christmas tree, or sitting by the fire with loved ones.

I decided today that I really do love Christmas, in all of its frustration.

So; What is Christmas & why is it joyful? Austin's answer: A time of fellowship, strange joy, and perhaps unaccustomed comfort; but I couldn't tell you why its joyful.

What brings you joy during the Christmas season?

Cheers, God bless, & Merry Christmas,

Austin

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,
"Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!"
Luke 2:13-14

Floating Beauties

Before I begin, let's take a minute to reflect on how intensely beautiful that picture is. There are a lot of crazy creatures out there, like the Narwhal & the Sea Cucumber, but the jellyfish is one of the weirdest.

The ocean in itself is a massive mystery. We, as humans, however much we strive, will never be able to uncover all of it's strange depths.

Jellyfish are incredibly unique animals. There are too many types to count. There are almost microscopic ones in Australia that can either kill or paralyze with just one sting. There are massive ones called Man-O-Wars, that have 200 foot long tentacles, and there's even one that, through use of unique cells, never technically die.

Needless to say, there are a lot of them. And they are oddly similar to humans.

Why you ask? Here are some key characteristics of each:
-sting or harm everything they come in contact with.
-attempt control of direction, but are ultimately controlled by that which holds them.
-notorious wanderers
-travel in groups but are alone.

We, like the jellyfish, are natural born killers. We destroy the trust of our friends, we absentmindedly break bonds, hurt others. When we are born, we are the scum of this earth, even in our beautiful design.

Psalm 51:5 says "Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,
and in sin did my mother conceive me."
From birth we are evil. However good of a person you may be, you are still not good enough.

We are controlled by our God, our 'ocean'. He holds us, he directs our movements, and he puts us through tests. We will be tossed and turned through waves. We are helpless; "We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed;"
2 Corinthians 4:8-9

We live in our solitude, whether we like it or not. We can spend time with others, in large groups, maybe having a lot of fun. But we are alone, and without the mercy of our large and mysterious God, we are nothing but a tiny jellyfish in the sea, struggling to stay afloat.

"You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." Matthew 5:48

What creatures jellyfish are.

Cheers, God bless,
& Merry Christmas.

Austin