So I just got word that an old friend from high school and college killed himself last week.

Obviously, my heart goes out to his family. I didn’t really know anyone that knew my friend and didn’t like him. He was absolutely brilliant, but he was so kind that you would never know it unless you got him near a computer. Then you would realize that his brain functioned on a different plane – he was *that* good as a programmer and thinker.

What I can’t help but think about right now is how much I hate death. I absolutely hate it.

Whether I am mourning and grieving along with everyone else, I am ministering to the family and friends of the deceased and officiating a funeral, or even if I am just doing the music for a memorial service, I am always struck by how much I hate death.

It was never really meant to be this way. Death is a curse on humanity. Granted, it is a deserved curse… but it is a curse nonetheless.

My fear is that, in our attempt to alleviate the pain we feel when someone we know dies, we try to explain death away. “It’s natural – just a part of life” or “God took them home” or “God wanted them in heaven with him” or some other nonsense. The Christianized versions of these statements aren’t actually Christian. Did you know that? The concept that God brings people up to him in heaven and that is where they reside forever doesn’t come from the New Testament. It comes from Plato and Socrates.

The Christian response to death, and my response to my friends death, is that I hate it. A lot. I feel sad and angry.

Now, that isn’t the end of the story, of course. Just like when Jesus died, that isn’t the end of the story. It’s odd that we call Good Friday good, when in fact it was a dark day for humanity. In and of itself, there really isn’t anything good about it.

But then Sunday comes, and there is Resurrection. New life. Physical life. The literal reversal of death itself.

That, my friends, is death redeemed. What is powerful about Christian spirituality is that I can call a bad thing bad. Death is bad.

But God redeems, just like he did on Sunday…

Over the past three years, I have noticed that people like to make excuses for suffering in their lives. They are usually similar, like “well it’s hard, but it will work out for the best,” or “I just have to stay positive.” We even have our Christianized excuse: “God will work good out of it.” However, the vacuous look in peoples’ eyes as they share something horrendously painful, while excusing or explaining it away, tells me that a dreamily-positive response is not always helpful. It seems that the substance has almost been sucked out of this important area of someone’s life.

I don’t intend to give you a brilliant psychological/therapeutic remedy for pain in our lives. Your best bet would be to talk to the ‘resident counselor’ for that. There is, however, an important part of our spirituality that speaks to struggle in our lives, and even though it is somewhat subversive to how our culture tells us to think during the dark times of life, I have found that it is always well appreciated.

Suffering is suffering. Struggle is struggle. Pain is pain. Ignoring it will not make it go away, and positive thinking by itself will not change the fact that we hurt. Be honest about it. As I began to get used to life as a cancer patient, I found a lot of strength is saying “terrible” to someone who asked how I was doing. It felt good because it was the reality of the situation, and it usually frightened the person that asked. An honest, raw answer is not very common in polite conversation.

But but but….

There is more to the story. The power in Christian spirituality that I hinted at above does not come from us moping around all the time telling people how terrible life is. That kind of brutalizing view of life is all too common around us, and it never represents the full picture. Neither does our faith have us pretending that everything is “peachy.” Sentimentalized living is a fairly empty existence. Instead, the Christian life is all about Redemption. Our God redeems. As I struggled with cancer and the depression that came with it, I noticed that a byproduct developed: a strong relationship with part of my family with whom I had not generally interacted during my adult life. And until insurance and related issues were resolved, the manufacturer of the chemo drug that saved my life shipped it to us for free. At $3000 a month, that was a significant help! In other words, God redeemed a tremendously difficult time in my life, because that is what He does.

I love explaining this to people, because the idea of redemption is so attractive. During the dark times in life, honesty and the hope of redemption reaches out to people in powerful ways. Outreach is all about living, after all…

NTReader – A freeware app to aid in translating the New Testament.

It features:

• Tischendorf’s 8th edition Greek New Testament (with Morph Tags)
• Strong’s database
• Intuitive parsing for passage lookup
• Copy functioning for the Greek Text (great for reports and research), using Mac native Unicode.
• Lightweight (approx 2.5mb download)
• Minimalist UI
• Automatic Updates.

I wouldn’t believe it either. The infamous update bug that plagues Illustrator CS3 (read about it here) seems to have been fixed by the latest leopard update. To be honest, I haven’t the foggiest clue as to why or how, but I do know that after I rebooted, the Adobe Updater showed up.

I figured, ‘eh, why not,’ assuming it would just crash when it got to Illustrator. But as I was getting back to working on some photos, I noticed the absence of the crash notice.

I checked, and it worked. I was astonished. 

But wait, that was only updated to 13.0.1. The latest is 13.0.2.

Since I was getting adventurous and hopeful – off I went to try and update again. I waited, hoped, did my sacrifices, etc…. Worked like a charm.

It runs/launches much faster, too. Did this work for anyone else? Does anyone have an explanation?

This is a reaction to Bad-Astronomers’ post on faith and science.

I do not intend to prove you wrong. But there are other points of view – not particularly antagonistic to science – that are rarely heard.

I don’t think we have to split faith and science dualistically. When splitting like this takes place, the result is immediate polarization, and any attempt at communication breaks down into shaking fingers furiously at one another. Then, all anyone can do is shake harder…or make a fist and shake it, because that’ll show ‘em.

[Science is] a method, a way of finding this knowledge. Observe, hypothesize, predict, observe, revise. (emphasis mine)

Defining science as a method is well put. It amazes me how rarely people understand that concept, and in an ideal situation, anyone trumpeting under the banner of science would first have to submit to this method. Granted, I do not like talking about science totally in this way, merely because “submitting to the method” reminds me of some freaky cult – which isn’t science. Engineering, maybe, but not science.

Baseless insults to engineers aside, there stand at least two huge barriers in the way of finally putting an issue like this to rest. From the way I see things, the first problem is in the fact that both sides’ uppity-ness has little to do with the conclusions made and more so in the assumptions about the other party’s assumptions. (what an obnoxious sentence)

If a person has grown up in a spiritual culture that makes a big deal about the Earth being flat, and then a scientist comes along and points out that it is, indeed, round, that person’s entire life becomes shattered. So when Chuck Darwin started spending too much time looking at finches and comes to some astonishing ideas that result in even more astonishing conclusions, does that force any implications on others in a non-scientific realm?

Maybe – or maybe not – but the immediate knee-jerk by everyone opposing C-Dawg might indicate that they merely assumed an imposed-conclusion about their spirituality. Plus, if those who aren’t scientists feel threatened and want to respond to science-based claims with their own science, do they violate their existential integrity in doing so? I say yes. Scientists can say that humanity descended from purple boogers shot from the nose of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but to what degree would that effect the notions of spiritual revelation? And if I decide that it does effect my religion, am I still religious by attacking back with more science?

There’s the rub.

The second of the huge barriers I mentioned is the strange polarization that has come to plague our intellectual realm. The one point on which scientists and creationists seem to agree is that we must choose one or the other.

Why?

Why not both/and?

Scientists might say that using both/and violates the methods on which their work rests. Theologians (conservative Christian, typically) often say that without a literal 6-day creation, then systematic theology states that “faith in Jesus” suddenly reduces to vanity.

I think the problem is that I can at least understand what both sides are saying. Spiritually, I have gained more out of life than I would have thought possible (though that is not necessarily the goal), and yet my fingers tap-tap-tap on the keyboard of my MacBook Pro – a pinnacle of science (fan-boyism aside).

Westerners love the comfort of either/or.

Tension that comes from both/and can be unsettling.

But somehow I think that the both/and tension might be the best way to go…

I was prepping a Macbook for deployment, when I realized that something didn’t seem right. It took me a few minutes to actually see it, as I am very slightly dyslexic:

It works just fine, of course….

The last 4 were taken by a friend of a friend at Pepperdine University. The others were taken by a family with whom I grew up. Obviously, the fires were way too close for comfort. Considering I have many friends and most of my family out there, the more awareness, the better…