A Poem I Like, But Can't Quite Decipher Yet

This is a poem by a guy named Christian Wiman. I got it here. I love the flow of the verse, and its circular continuity and searching wistfulness. I don't think the guy is a Christian, for those who may be wondering. I'm interested to see what you poetry fans make of the meaning.

Every Riven Thing

God goes, belonging to every riven thing he's made
sing his being simply by being
the thing it is:
stone and tree and sky,
man who sees and sings and wonders why

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he's made,
means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
trying to will himself into the stillness where

God goes belonging. To every riven thing he's made
there is given one shade
shaped exactly to the thing itself:
under the tree a darker tree;
under the man the only man to see

God goes belonging to every riven thing. He's made
the things that bring him near,
made the mind that makes him go.
A part of what man knows,
apart from what man knows,

God goes belonging to every riven thing he's made.

This is a poem from Mr. Wiman's newest book of poetry, titled Every Riven Thing.

EDIT: Wow. Read this article by the same author. It gives quite an interesting insight into his thought process.

ANOTHER EDIT: Double wow. Read this essay as well. GOOD writer, this guy.

Disclaimer: If anyone with rights to this poem arrived here via search engine and objects to my posting, please let me know and I'll delete the text and just leave the link. I'm definitely not claiming any rights or permission to post this, and I'm not making any money on it since I have like five readers total. I just liked the poem and wanted to share.

Election Season is Over!!! ...and Couch Potatotude.

We have a home phone, but mostly because we want a number to be able to fill in to forms and give to businesses that we never want to talk to. We don't have caller ID, we don't have long distance, and we don't have an answering machine on it (actually, we DO have an answering machine built in to the phone, but we leave it turned off). We got on the national "no-call" list when it first became a reality (one example of a time when our beloved elected officials got something right!). So most of the time, we only get calls on the home phone from our phone company, from Cindy's mom, and from each other. We figure the people we want to talk to mostly have our cell phone numbers. (Yes, Cindy's mom does have our cell phone numbers too - what kind of awful people do you think we are?!?)

But unfortunately, during election season, political campaign calls are not covered under the no-call umbrella. Our phone (like yours, probably) has been ringing at all hours. The large majority of these, of course, have been recorded messages. These frustrate me, but not too badly - it's easy and somewhat satisfying to angrily hang up on a recording. Shouting at the recording prior to hanging up is also a therapeutic option, and one which doesn't bother the conscience like shouting at a live person.

Among others, we got calls from the Animal Legal Defense Fund, some veterans' group or other, numerous PAC's, Ike Skelton, Vicky Hartzler, the Missouri Republican Party, some dubiously-named Missouri group claiming Tea Party allegiance, and Sarah Palin. We hung up on all of them except a timid-sounding young person politely taking a survey, to whom I granted "five to seven minutes of [my] time."

Last night before and during dinner we received three separate "get out the vote" calls. After dinner I decided to go to the office while Cindy went to her Bible study, so that I could be a couch potato (desk-chair potato?) in peace.

Today, it's over. No more phone calls! Woo!

I realize that our election season was MUCH less annoying than most people's, simply because we don't really listen to the radio (except NPR and Christian non-profit stations), and we don't have TV. So we were blessedly free of the onslaught of annoying campaign ads!

Let me clarify the "we don't have TV" statement. While we don't have cable or satellite, and can't get any broadcast channels at home, don't start getting all impressed at our self-control and minimalistic, spartan lifestyle. We have discovered that the shows we want to watch can be seen on Hulu. Or if we REALLY like them, we can buy the episodes on iTunes or Amazon, or even buy the DVD's. The cost of a few seasons on DVD per year is MUCH less than the cost of cable or satellite. (In similar vein, consider this Wired bit comparing costs of internet TV vs. cable/satellite.) Yeah, we want to seem all self-controlled and spartan, but the truth is we watch quite a bit of TV - especially for people with no ability to watch live TV.

I know many people would say that we'd be much better off if we didn't watch TV shows at all. For most of my growing-up years, the only viewing screen in our house was on the old TRS-80 desktop computer. (And later the HP DOS-based PC with a thumping 40MB hard drive! And for those of you born in the 90's or later, they didn't even have a color monitor!!!) I certainly didn't suffer as a result of being deprived of TV as a child. I'm a prolific speed-reader today, and I attribute this to the fact that as a hyper, ADD child, I didn't have TV, so I read books for my entertainment and imaginative escapes.

But I'm not so sure being a TV teetotaler is as much a character-builder as some say. Obviously there's a lot of junk on TV. But there are also some well-written shows with good plot lines and great humor. Occasionally there is even the positive portrayal of virtue and the realistic depiction of the consequences of evil.

So I think a certain amount of TV watching is okay - even healthy!

Okay, now I've philosophized about it enough. To be honest, I just like me some good TV sometimes. And here are the current favorites occupying my Hulu.com queue:

Chuck (totally unlikely plot, but great characters and so much fun.)
The Good Guys (funniest cop show on TV)
Castle (murder mysteries with humor and good characters... and Nathan Fillion of Firefly)
No Ordinary Family (new superhero show - like a live-action The Incredibles, but a bit more angsty)
The Office (obviously)
Psych (the funniest buddy comedy on TV, plus Sherlock-Holmes-like sleuthing abilities)

What are your favorites? Any obvious ones I'm missing?

Return to Blogging, and an odd story

I just want to let everyone know that I plan to blog on a semi-regular basis again. (Disclaimer: Semi-regular may mean anything from daily to annually.)

Now for an odd story.

I was in Nevada today (Nevada, MO, for those unacquainted with the geography in these parts - NOT the state of Nevada) because I drove Cindy over this afternoon to teach her evening class at Cottey College. Usually she takes the car and I just stay at work late.

After I dropped her off at the college, I went to the one coffee house that is currently open in Nevada, AJ's Coffee Rush. There was a sign in the window saying that they had moved to the Daylight Donuts building a few blocks away, so I drove there. The signs just said "AJ's Daylight Donuts - Now Open." I assumed that meant I could still get a cup of coffee at least, and sit in peace for a while. I went inside, and found what at first appeared to be an empty place. There were some paint buckets stacked in the corner and evidence of recent painting, so I wondered if they were actually closed, and the painters had just stepped out for a bit without locking the door. But the espresso machine had lights on, and there was brewed coffee gently steaming in the Bunn carafe. There were also doughnuts still on display in the glass case behind the doughnut counter.

Then I glanced around and noticed a laptop sitting open on one of the tables. Then to my surprise and bemusement I saw that there was a young gentleman lying on the bench beside this laptop, deep in dreamland. I had made a decent amount of noise when I entered, ringing the bells hanging on the door and scooting a chair out loudly to see if it would summon someone from the back room behind the counter. I had to assume that here on this bench was the sole employee on duty. I hung around for about ten minutes, and when nothing happened, I left. I could easily have grabbed several free doughnuts, some coffee cake, and a to-go cup of coffee.

I'm still not absolutely certain that the place was officially open. I've always had good service in their old location, and I didn't recognize the snoozing fellow as one of the employees I'd seen previously.

My Other Colorado Adventure

Last week, Cindy and I went on vacation to Colorado. We climbed Mt. Democrat. We stayed in an awesome bed-and-breakfast. We clambered and explored in Eleven Mile Canyon. We hung out with Cindy's brother Kevin and his wife Jessie, and Cindy's high-school friend Kristy and husband Ryan. It was a great week in which we occasionally wore jackets while our mid-western friends and family sweltered in temperatures topping 100.

I hesitated at first, however, to share this other story, but I have decided it's too good to miss.

Our story begins late last Sunday evening. We pulled up in front of Kevin and Jessie's house in Colorado Springs, where we were staying. It was late at night and we were both tired. I parked by the side of the road, with Cindy's passenger door directly over a drainage grate. (In hindsight, this should probably have been avoided.) Cindy gathered a large armful of various items that needed to go inside the house, and opened her door. Her phone was held loosely under one finger. When she moved to get out of the car - alas! - the phone slipped from her fingers, and she watched in horror as it fell neatly between the bars of the drainage grate and out of sight into the sewers below. She was understandably distraught - not, you understand, because she is one of these loathsome, execrable girls who experience withdrawal symptoms if prevented from texting for over ten minutes. No, her dismay was rather due to the fact that she's nowhere close to a renewal of contract, and there is no insurance on the phone; so we were looking at paying full retail price for a replacement phone. If you have ever been faced with a broken or lost phone, you know that these so-called "full retail prices" are set by servants of Sauron just after undergoing a root canal.

So, I grabbed a flashlight and checked out the drainage grate. To my dismay, the phone was far below in a large drainage tunnel about fifteen feet in diameter. It was lying on moist concrete out of the small stream of water, but it was definitely out of reach. The drainage grate was concreted into the street and wouldn't budge. Kevin came out and helped me take stock of things. There was a manhole in the middle of the street. We reasoned that this manhole might connect to the tunnel twenty feet away, so we got a crowbar and lifted the lid. Unfortunately, the ladder of the manhole just led down to a tiny drainage tube that undoubtedly led to the tunnel we sought, but was inaccessible to anyone larger than a marmot.

At this point, we gave up and went to bed.

On Monday morning, I went to the Verizon store, and was essentially told, "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." The full retail price in question was $399. And no, they don't package it in a solid gold box for that price. I left the store thinking vague thoughts of Ebay or armed robbery.

When I got back to the house, I looked through the grate again and saw the phone lying there forlornly, the battery cover off to one side. I noted the direction of the water's flow, started looking at the lay of the land and absently got into my car and drove around the block to find the next drainage grate downstream. It was equally inaccessible. I kept circling, headed gradually downhill. About a half mile down the hill, there was a creek with high concreted retaining walls on both sides. I strolled up and down, looking for the tunnel. This I found after some searching. I clambered down the muddy wall with the aid of a random tree that was growing nearby.

Then I approached the mouth of the tunnel. My phone has an LED camera flash on it that can be used as a flashlight, so I turned it on and looked uneasily into the inky depths of the tunnel's concrete-and-corrugated-steel maw. I checked the sky - just some distant wispy clouds with nothing really threatening-looking as far as flash floods - and started walking. In my ears were echoing the dire warnings of my parents about drainage tunnels. I ignored them and kept walking. I counted my paces from the entrance. The tunnel made a slight bend about fifty paces in, and then all daylight was gone. I started picturing scenes from several movies. I kept walking upstream and counting paces, reasoning that I would recognize the look of the tunnel under where our car was parked from my careful examinations on the surface. The tunnel never divided, and the various bends seemed to coincide with my surface explorations, so I kept walking. Occasionally there would be glimpses of daylight from a drainage pipe coming in from the sides. After 800 paces (which I estimate at about a third of a mile), I came to a place where striped sunlight was streaming straight down onto a cell phone. I picked it up and examined it. It didn't seem damaged, and it hadn't been lying in the water. I pressed the power button and got nothing, but I remembered that the battery had been low the night before. So I turned and headed back downstream. I didn't bother counting paces this time, since the tunnel had never divided and I reasoned that all I had to do was go downstream. After walking for some time, I started regretting my decision not to count paces - the blackness started creeping up behind me a bit and I heard lots of critters scuttling in the darkness. My weak little camera-flash beam showed me about ten or fifteen feet of tunnel behind me - just enough to help indistinct shapes look scarier. But to my relief, a few minutes later I rounded the final bend and saw daylight ahead. Then all I had to do was climb back up the wall, come out on the sidewalk, and nod politely to a bemused jogger who happened along at that moment.

I drove back to the house, and presented the phone to Cindy with a flourish. With trepidation, we plugged the phone into its charger. It booted up and worked perfectly. At this moment, I experienced one of those moments of manly triumph that one experiences sometimes. I felt like a HERO OF NORSE LEGEND.

Now I know this was a rather stupid thing to do. I know I'm setting a bad example for any foolish minors who might be reading this. But for $400 (or even the $200-250 it would have cost to buy a used replacement phone on Ebay), I would probably do it again... after carefully checking the weather report.

MainStreet Worship

In the last post, I talked about this new worship service we're starting. (Read that post to get caught up if you need to... Done? Okay, let's continue.)

One very important question to me in approaching this project was, what can we do to make the experience less of a concert/lecture feel and more like something you actually get into? (Especially since a theater naturally lends itself to concert/lecture just by its architecture...) My friend Dwain, who I believe would consider himself agnostic as far as religious belief, once attended one of our services and wrote up a very valuable critique of it from his perspective. One of his observations was an astute question on preaching: "Wouldn’t it be more productive to enter into a dialogue with the community?" That question has stuck with me, because I agree. (Obviously we try to do exactly that in small-group settings, and that's one reason we believe in small groups so strongly. We also try - with varying degrees of success - to promote a small-group culture where honest questions are welcomed and not greeted with fear and loathing.)

We had several ideas as to how to accomplish this goal of making the teaching more interactive. First, though, we had to realize that going all-out and riding the leading edge of church innovation probably wouldn't work in small-town Missouri. With some exceptions, the fashions, language, and lifestyle of our town stays about two or three years behind what's going on even in nearby Kansas City, not to mention on the coasts. Very few people in this town are probably ready to come to a worship service where the venue is covered in modern art and the scent of incense fills the air and they're handed a piece of art charcoal and told to express their feelings on the atonement by creating spontaneously on a long roll of parchment.

One idea we've seen elsewhere that we really like is to enable questions and feedback by putting a text-messaging code on the screen that people can text questions to. Then the speaker or a panel can respond to those questions at the end. The problem with this service is that it costs around $50-80 per month. We think it's cool, but we're sorta running this thing on a shoestring budget right now. Also, some of the staff have wondered out loud (and probably justifiably) if getting people started texting during the service is actually going to end up being counterproductive to what we're trying to do.

So we've ended up with a fairly easy-going atmosphere, occasional random elements added to the service like Q&A sessions, people who come and tell their story, drama, video, and other things. We're looking for ideas that are creative, without being so weird that people in this town run screaming in terror.

Your thoughts? What have you seen elsewhere that seemed to work well?

EDIT: Also, this week's theme (as part of the "God, I Have Questions!" series) is "Is Hell Real?" We want to present this not as a scare tactic, but as accurately diagnosing the danger... Kind of a "No one has to go to hell - you have to reject Jesus' forgiveness to do that. But if we believe it's real, shouldn't we be honest about trying to make sure people don't go there? Even though it is an inconvenient truth?" (Pardon me for that last...)

Ideas for something interactive or different to communicate this without screaming and such? (And no, I don't want to do a "human video" that starts with a pretty teenage girl who gets attacked by demons who make her drink and then the Jesus character comes in and beats up the demons and saves the pretty girl.)

Filling the Hours

There's a line from Oceans Eleven that I love. Daniel Ocean, played by George Clooney, is talking about assembling the team for a heist. He comments on the "Mormon twins," saying, "I got the sense they're having trouble filling the hours." This is followed by a scene showing the twins racing a monster truck against a remote-controlled miniature version of the same truck and arguing like ten-year-olds.

This week, Cindy and I don't have every waking hour spoken for, finally. This after several weeks in which "filling the hours" didn't require much in the way of effort at all. In the weeks leading up to Easter, we were heavily involved in several major projects.

The first was our church's Easter play, in which Cindy plays one of the two main narrator characters - Pontius Pilate's wife - and I play one Jesus of Nazareth (you may have heard of him). The rehearsals and set/tech work took the amount of time that these things always do.

The second major project was our church's new worship service. For several years, there have been two Sunday morning worship services - one at 8:30 am, and one at 10:45 am, with Sunday School classes between the two from 9:45 to 10:35. These two services are virtually identical in style and schedule. Last week, on the Sunday after Easter, we added a third Sunday morning worship service, running from 10:00 am to 11:10-ish. This new service is a different feel. The music is a different style (more guitar-driven and without an orchestra), the flow is different (the order of things shaken up often), and the look is entirely different. In fact, the venue is different. It's the Opera House Theater, a historic building in downtown El Dorado Springs that was completely refurbished a few years ago and is now a super-sweet movie theater with chandeliers and gold ceiling and lots of awesomeness. We worked out a deal with the theater owners that allowed us cheap rent in exchange for some cleaning and promises of being very very careful not to burn the place down or otherwise steal/kill/destroy. The approach is casual, and aimed at a target demographic of people who think cool old buildings and gold ceilings are neato. It's called MainStreet Worship.

So anyway, this required a TON of work and lots of prayer sessions, both personal and corporate, in which we had no difficulty whatever admitting our inadequacy for the task. All the groundwork leading up to the new service put a big load on the church staff. For example, Sunday school classes had to be analyzed, and in some cases moved to a new 11:15-noon time slot. If you've ever been around American Bible-belt evangelical churches, you know what a huge deal it is to change that. Also, the same message would be preached three times, by the same man, but the second of the three times would be in a different venue and different atmosphere. So the schedule is the main difficulty - Pastor Joe finishes teaching in the first service at 9:45, and has fifteen minutes to get to the theater for the start of the worship service there. No sweat. But then, depending on the way the MainStreet service is scheduled, he's sometimes finishing up there around 11:00 or 11:10. That means he rolls in to the 10:45 service about the time the music/announcements are wrapping up, and he's got to be ready to start speaking again, just minutes after finishing the message the second time. Fortunately the theater is just a bit over two miles from the church's Park Street location, and El Dorado Springs doesn't really struggle with traffic jams, so the commute is rarely a problem.

And then there were questions. What do we do for childcare at this new location? Should we recruit some "core members" for this new service? Can we change the aesthetic of the theater for worship in some simple, portable, yet powerful ways? How can we avoid just falling into the same old ruts in a new location?

So we kicked it off last week. And yesterday was the second one. I loved it. I hope the people who don't currently attend church who have come the last two Sundays liked it too. Most seemed to (but of course in this small town I'd be one of the last to hear any negative feedback, because negative feedback comes in round-about ways in this culture).

Then Saturday night, Cindy was one of the main sponsors for prom. She got drafted into that job a few years ago through no fault of her own, and stays in the job because she won't take my advice and do shoddy work to get out of being re-elected. She has to beg and plead and cajole to get enough helpers from the Junior Class (the official producers of the event) to get all the decoration/planning done. I hate prom. But since she has to be there, I help. And I watch all the worst parts of my memories of high school played out in front of me. And I see teenagers I care about getting way too much in the vein of a Britney Spears music video for my taste. (I'm going to be a very overprotective father, I'm afraid. I suspect my children will not be fans of me when they're teenagers.)

So three weekends in a row were the Easter play, MainStreet Worship's first iteration, and prom. We haven't had trouble filling the hours.

More on MainStreet worship in the next post. I hope you read that one and give me your feedback.

Sleep Talkin Man

Okay, so I just discovered this thanks to Kevin Allred. This is one of the funniest things I've seen in a while, but BE WARNED - his sleep-talking language is definitely obscene at times.

http://sleeptalkinman.blogspot.com/