Writing From the Edge

Writing From the Edge Has Moved

2009-07-06T15:14:00.003-07:00

I have moved my blog to Wordpress. Please visit Writing from the Edge 2 for current blog posts:

www.karenhancock.wordpress.com

Of course, you can always stay here and explore my older posts, too, which began back in 2006 and continue through May of 2009.

~~~

It Worked!

2009-06-29T15:43:00.002-07:00

Well, my transfer of my Feedblitz subscribers to the blog at Wordpress was successful so I am now officially blogging over at Wordpress.

www.karenhancock.wordpress.com

I don't think I'll be writing any more here, so please visit me at the above address and change your bookmarks to the new place. I'm working on getting the subscribe box for Feedblitz put in over at the WP blog. Thanks for following the blog!

Karen

Hope and Change

2009-06-27T18:31:00.002-07:00

Well, tonight I finally found the answer I was looking for regarding how to change blogging platforms without losing my feedblitz email subscribers. At least I think I have.

So the CHANGE is coming soon. Probably tomorrow. And I HOPE that, as the instructions say, those of you who get this blog through your email via Feedblitz will continue to get it uninterrupted, so that you will not even notice I've switched platforms.

This assumes that I actually understand all the stuff I've been reading but we shall see. I am going to wait to give this post a chance to get off from Blogger tonight. Then tomorrow I will make the necessary administrative changes and do a post from Wordpress to see if it's actually working, which Feedblitz subscribers should receive on Monday. If you don't, let me know through my email or you can go over to www.karenhancock.wordpress.com and leave me a comment, since the comments there are activated.

Thanks and let's HOPE this works!

Dinking Around With Wordpress

2009-06-24T21:56:00.002-07:00

Today I spent the afternoon dinking around over at Wordpress, trying out various themes, seeing if I could upload my header photo. Wordpress is cool in that it has so many options for themes. Maybe too many, because I don't want to spend months on this. And there is much for me to figure out and do.

But anyway, I've got the beginnings. If you are interested in seeing my very much under construction new blog and website you can go to www.karenhancock.wordpress.com and have a look. I have uploaded the header photo, played with the color of the text, made a start on the About page. I've also been over to Feedblitz to see about transferring the old blog's subscribers to the new one. I think I'll have to open a new account for the new blog and then import the existing subscribers. Or do I export them from the old account? Still need to do more reading.

Also, I'm almost caught up on my reader letters now and good thing since responses on The Enclave are starting to come in. They continue to be good. More than good, actually, and from the things people are seeing in the story and getting out of it I know that God really was at work in it. I might share some of those tomorrow.

His Plan, Not Mine. Again.

2009-06-23T19:16:00.006-07:00

Well, I missed posting yesterday because... well, I'm not sure. Just wasn't moved with anything to say. Or maybe I used up all my words writing emails to various people. I was tired after the weekend and even though it seems that I shouldn't be, I find a pattern in Mondays where I struggle to do the things "I should do."

Actually I have so many things I "should" do, I could not possibly get them all done. I think I'd hoped for a few more weeks to clean my house before the urgency of The Enclave's release hit me. Now it seems almost to have passed me by. And I haven't done the video trailer, haven't created the author page at Amazon, haven't redesigned my website and blog, though I am pretty sure I'm going to be moving the blog to Wordpress and moving/redoing my website there. There are some other technical details I have to resolve, too, but I'm closer to doing that now as well. Soon I will have only to execute. I'm thinking perhaps next week.

Then there are doctor's appointments -- mine and my mothers. And various errands and reader mail which I still haven't caught up on, though I'm getting closer on that as well.

Then today in mid morning I caught myself doing the weird, tense, things-are-bad-and-wrong thing and sat down to figure out what exactly I was feeling. Turns out it was anxiety and condemnation. Again. Because, again, I had somehow started focusing on all the things I thought I had to do, plus the things I wanted to do, a list, as I said, far too long to ever complete. Knowing it unconsciously, I became tense and anxious, condemning myself because I wasn't working enough. Getting enough done.

Weird how subtly it sneaks in and the next thing you know you're in this weird place. I needed to recall that it's God's plan that matters, not mine, that there's always time to do the will of God, and that if I'm confused about what I shoudl be doing, since I have so many options, perhaps I should stop and ask Him what He wants me to do.

Peace returned. And then tonight in the basics class the pastor-in-training reminded us... the Christian life is about falling on our faces and getting up again, over and over and over. But it doesn't matter how many times we fail, only that we get up and keep on going. He talked, too, of how when faced with a problem or overwhelming circumstances we so easily revert to human viewpoint and start focusing on how we're going to solve the thing, rather than recalling that the problems aren't ours, but God's. So that was a nice affirmation of earlier conclusions.

And look! Now I even have a blog post. Not a long one, but a post, nevertheless.

Cool.

~~~

Good and Evil

2009-06-21T16:59:00.003-07:00

Here's the continuation I promised on Friday of the thoughts prompted by my reading of Dean Koontz's One Door Away From Heaven, which hinge on the nature of good and evil. This question, this examination, this setting together for contrast of good and evil is something Koontz does often.

Unfortunately, the more I've come to understand about God's word, the more I see Koontz doesn't know what he's talking about. Thus it's no surprise that he's a best-selling author with 40 some books to his credit and a vast following of fans. And if he doesn't understand the difference between good and evil, he's certainly not alone. It is not in Satan's interest for people to understand and he works hard through his army of fallen angel-minions to see that they don't. One of his methods is to make people think the whole dichotomy doesn't exist -- there really isn't "evil" per se. It's just a perception. There really aren't demons and a devil, that's comic book stuff. (It's interesting to note that he never really goes for the argument that there isn't good, though perhaps with the rise of postmodernism he's moving in that direction -- but that's another subject).

One of the things I don't think people realize about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden was that the good was not divine good. This was not the difference between Satan's evil and God's goodness. Adam and the woman already knew about God's goodness. What they didn't know about was Satan's evil and his form of goodness.

Another thing I think many don't realize is that Satan and his followers really don't, as Koontz in his One Door Away from Heaven described, "seek only to serve entropy. They love chaos, destruction, death." Satan isn't trying to do away with God, he's trying to take God's place. He wants the power, he wants the worship, he wants to do good.

"I will ascend to heaven. I will raise my throne above the stars of God (other angels), I will sit on the mount of assembly in the recesses of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High." (Is 14:13,14)

The Most High is not into destruction and death and entropy. The most High is into creation and order and stability.

Theologian Lewis Sperry Chafer remarked in his Major Bible Themes,

"Satan is not aiming to promote sin in the world. He did not purpose to be a fiend, but rather to be "like the most High"; he is not aiming to destroy so much as he is to construct and to realize his own ambition for authority over this world-system with its culture, morality, and religion (2 Co 11:13-15). The impression that Satan is the direct cause of sin is not true because human sin is said to come directly from the fallen human heart (Gen 6:5; Mk 7:18-23; James 1:13-16)

It's this good on the part of people that Satan most wants to promote -- good performed by people, or human good. That's the knowledge that the woman gained: the idea of doing her own thing for good. Even Satan's invitation to her was to do a good thing: "Eat that fruit and it will make you wise. You will be as smart as God, and that would surely be a good thing. You could converse with Him better, know better what He wants from you, understand Him better. Be His friend better."

When she brought the fruit to the man, there's cause to think she might well have believed she was helping him out, for Paul tells Timothy she was "quite deceived." And if she'd realized she was naked, why didn't she hide from the man and cover herself with leaves before approaching him? Why did she bring him the fruit? Why only after he had eaten did they realize they were naked and go looking for leaves to cover themselves?

Human good, creature credit is what powers most religions. It's what powered the unbelieving Pharisees in Jesus' day and prevented them from seeing the truth of who He was. It is way worse than sin. Sin was dealt with on the cross. Human good blinds. Human good feels good to those who perform it. It feels right and keeps people from the truth, from freedom, from really knowing God.

Just like Cain bringing all that produce, the work of his hands, they think their good works will please God. Cain probably expected God to tell him he'd gone above and beyond, bringing an better offering than Abel's. He totally didn't get the point of the slain lamb as a picture of the offering God himself would eventually make to pay the penalty for man's sin. He didn't understand that he was depraved and that nothing he would ever do could come close to the perfect righteousness of God. He thought he could by his own actions please God.

Believers do this as well. Paul warns the Galatians about it: having come to Christ by faith, will you then be perfected by the flesh? Your own efforts? Your own good works? He warns the Corinthians of the ministers whom Satan sends out among the brethren to teach others how to be righteous. They look good. They look spiritual. They seem right. And they are not.

All of which is why the theme in Koontz's book so annoyed me. Here it is as he stated it:

"None of us can save himself; we are the instruments of one another's salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light."

He did mention God in the book. In fact, it was by the savior-angel character's bonding with a dog that the character could perceive God. If this character touched a dog while it was sleeping, he would experience the peace and joy of knowing God as the Playful Presence perceived by dogs all the time. Moreover he could teach people to do the same and by this "save the world," because in perceiving the Playful Presence they would experience joy and peace and would know they were unconditionally loved.

Jesus was mentioned in only one conversation and that mockingly. When one of the heroines is trying to get a PI to help her, she is quite pushy and he remarks at one point,

"You ought to sell Jesus door-to-door. The whole world would be saved by Tuesday."

Later in that same conversation, she says, again echoing the book's theme,

"Sometimes a person's life can change for the better in one moment of grace, like a miracle almost. Someone so special can come along, all unexpected, and pivot you in a new direction, change you forever. You ever had that experience, Mr. Farrel?"

He grimaced. "You ARE peddling Jesus door-to-door."

So weird, so close to truth. Yes, your life does change for the better in one moment of grace, and it is a miracle when you believe in Christ and are made new, given eternal life right then and there. He, Jesus Christ, is the one so special who comes along and can pivot you in a new direction, change you forever... It seems amazing the words uttered by this character can be so close to the truth and yet, be derailed by focusing on the wrong object.

But this is what Satan's cosmic system and deception is all about. A little bit of truth, maybe even a LOT of truth, and a little bit of lie, and it's all distorted.

So that's why this wonderfully written book annoyed me. Because the author used truth to cloak a dreadful lie, because he even used it to slight the Lord. Instead of seeking God through his Word, through believing in Christ we are advised to find a sleeping dog. This sounds absurd as I set it down, but because Koontz is so good at what he does, it is not nearly so laughable in the story. And truth distorted by one little lie, the whole cloaked in a wonderfully appealing cloak of "rightness", has always been Satan's best work for deceiving people.

"And the great dragon was thrown down, the serpent of old who is called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world..." ~ Rev 12:9

~~~

One Door Away From Heaven

2009-06-19T10:59:00.004-07:00

I said Wednesday I would blog on my thoughts about One Door Away From Heaven by Dean Koontz, one of the two books he graciously autographed to me. Because he did autograph it, I felt that I should only have good things to say about it. And mostly I do. But there was an element -- the theme -- that greatly annoyed me. In fact I was all ready to write about that and then went to Amazon to check out what other reviewers had to say and...

That was most beneficial, both in instructing me not to take those reviews at all seriously (some people do not seem to actually know how to read, given the things they see or don't see in a book) and in getting me to take another look at my reaction, which overall was far more positive than that of the people grousing at Amazon. (The teacher of English was especially out to lunch, giving the book one star, railing at it for its horrible writing and its terrible use of metaphor. And even transcribing one of his horrible sentences, which was -- Heaven forbid! -- 84 words long! Horrors! How can this be?! She would have given his work an F were he in her class.)

What's funny about this is that he doesn't have a lot of respect for English teachers and their effects on those with a talent for creative writing, and he devotes a fair amount of discussion to this in his How to Write Best-selling Fiction. In his opinion they don't have the first idea what writing fiction is about and generally will squelch and derail any creative impulses on the part of their students should they happen to manifest.

It's also funny because I seem to recall from one of William Faulkner's novels a sentence that went on unobstructed for over a page, but none of my English teachers were calling him a horrible writer for doing this. So not only does Koontz not have the corner on long sentences, his being maligned for it is inconsistent with what English teachers accept from someone else, now dead and held as a Great Writer.

Finally, it's funny because in HTWBSF, Koontz also discusses his penchant for experimenting with form and technique to get the best effect for what he is trying to convey in a book. That's why he chose to use the present tense for one of his points of view in this story (which appalled the teacher) (though it's not the first book by any means where he's done it) and why he chose to create a sentence 84 words long. I believe he was in that sentence trying to convey a smoothness of chaotic motion. The words and their form mimic the image he is communicating and I think he did a good job.

So, having read some of the reviews, instead of complaining about the theme, I end up defending him! LOL.

Despite my complaint, I did not find this book boring at all, nor did I find the writing tiresome, or the metaphors overdone. I enjoyed most of them. For example (relating to a brewing storm):

As dark as iron in places, the sky at last grew heavy enough to press an anxious breath from the still afternoon. The pleasantly warm day began to cool. All around Micky, trees shivered and whispered to the wind.

Birds like black arrows, singly and in volleys, returned to their quivers in the pine branches, with flap and flutter, vanishing among the layered boughs: a reliable prediction that the storm would soon break.

Here's another one:

The first bolt of lightning, thrown open with a crash, had not unlocked the rain. The longer part of a minute passed before another bolt, brighter than the first, slammed out of the hasp of the heavens and opened a door in the storm.

Scattered drops of rain, as fat as grapes, snapped into the oiled lane that served the many campsites, striking with such force that sprays of smaller droplets bounced a foot high from each point of impact.

I also liked the characters, and unlike some (was it that teacher again?) did not find them unbelievable at all (especially since I am now reading Hollywood Interrupted, which examines the behind-the-scenes lives and culture of the elites of the entertainment industry; some of those people are VERY much like Koontz's villains here). I'm always amazed at how he creates likable, believable, flawed but very quirky -- and thus interesting -- characters. They can have somewhat lengthy conversations that remain amusing and interesting and just pull you easily through them.

His openings are always immediately gripping. Here's One Door's:

The world is full of broken people. Splints, casts, miracle drugs, and time can't mend fractured hearts, wounded minds, torn spirits.

Currently, sunshine was Micky Bellsong's medication of choice, and southern California in late August was an apothecary with a deep supply of this prescription.

Another metaphor there, which I also enjoyed. That first line is also part of the book's theme, which concerns what actually will heal those broken people. Of course, as a believer in Jesus Christ, I know the answer. I know the man, the One True Healer. It's only through believing in Him that anyone can be "healed."

This was not Koontz's answer however, which is hardly surprising. And because it is not, as you have probably guessed, that is partly what annoyed me. The other part of what annoyed me is that he presented his faulty solution so darned well. It seems so good, so nice, so "true" from the human perspective. The words, the story, the characters all work together to make you feel so good about it, when it is a lie. In fact, it is the worst kind of lie and the worst kind of evil. For how great is your darkness when you believe you are in the light?

I find it ironic that the Publisher's Weekly review of this book, which was on the whole favorable, concluded with this statement:

"For all that, the novel is surprisingly focused on its inspirational message "we are the instruments of one another's salvation and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light" and conveys it with such conviction that only the most critical will demur."

So that makes me one of the minority "most critical," but yes, I do indeed demur ("to object mildly to something") (what is it about PW that I keep having to look up the words they use in their reviews?) Except I don't object mildly. I strongly and strenuously object. In fact, it makes me want to gag. But I'll save that for my next post.

~~~

Me and Dean Koontz

2009-06-17T19:53:00.003-07:00

As I mentioned in a post back in 2007, the only published author I ever wrote a fan letter to was Dean Koontz. I may have told bits and pieces of this story over time, but today I'll put it all together. I can't recall when I first read his book Watchers. It was probably a good twenty-five years ago. I loved it. I was amazed by it. I immediately began reading others of his books, including his Writer's Digest book, How to Write Best-Selling Fiction, now out of print. (Or maybe I read that first, seeing as my Berkeley edition of Watchers is dated 1988, whereas my Writer's Digest edition of HTW Best-selling Fiction is 1981) Anyway, my copy of the latter is highlighted and worn. It became my central text on learning to write, and his books my illustrations.

Later, I used several of his openings as comparisons with my own (an unpublished opening for The Light of Eidon), in a process I describe in an article on my website entitled "Mentoring without Meeting." I pulled out the first paragraphs and set them side by side, examining and comparing each sentence to see what his did in comparison to mine did. I learned a lot from that and I've now
read at least 32 of his books.

Thus, when The Light of Eidon came out, I marshaled my courage and sent him a copy of it along with a letter explaining my indebtedness to him and my appreciation for his work. I figured he surely didn't have time to look at reader mail, let alone read the published book of some fan, but you never know and possibly one of those staff members might read Eidon, even if Koontz did not. I have no idea if he read it -- mostly likely not -- but a month or so later I received a box from him, containing two hardcover books autographed to me (see the pic above for one example) from him and Trixie, his dog, since I'd mentioned myself as a longtime dog lover.

There was also a wonderful personal letter from Mr. Koontz, along with the form letter that usually goes out and a copy of his newsletter, Useless News which was quite funny as well as being enlightening and encouraging. (I'm still on the mailing list, just as the newsletter warned: "...you're on our mailing list , and there's nowhere to hide." So I'm doomed forever to receive Useless News! Fortunately I enjoy them immensely.) I was overwhelmed with his graciousness and his generosity.

The first of the books that he sent me was From the Corner of His Eye (2000), which I finally got around to reading in June of 2007 and blogged about in the same post I mentioned above.

The second was One Door Away From Heaven (2001), which I finally read last week and will blog about tomorrow. As I mentioned the other day, my thoughts about it, on balance were not positive, but that's not because of anything regarding the writing, the characters, the plot (I read it in less than a week, after all, and it's a 607 page book) but rather because my theological/doctrinal viewpoint clashed strongly with the viewpoint he was putting forth in the book. A clash that many in the world would probably find surprising...

But more on that tomorrow...

~~~

Reorganization?

2009-06-16T18:48:00.003-07:00

Well, the Lord seems to be leading me to move my blog to another hosting service, and to consolidate my website along with it. I know I have to redesign the website, and in fact have been thinking about that for several years. Unfortunately, that's about as far as my thinking went on it -- one more project to add to my to-do list.

But now, things seem to be happening. I spent many hours today perusing Wordpress, and tomorrow may look into Typepad, which someone recommended as another option. Plus I've finally gotten access to my actual name as a domain name: karenhancock.com. Every time I went to see if it was available, it was only to find that someone else had gotten to it before me, the most recent being some sort of used bookselling company. But then a reader and occasional correspondent happened to notice when it came up for renewal and snagged it. Now that I have it, I have to figure out how I'm going to use it. All that computer stuff with domain name servers and email servers and so forth. It's been almost ten years since I worked my way through all that. And now there is feedblitz to consider and my old website address which is also my email address...

I was starting to get overwhelmed about it. In fact, I spent a couple of days avoiding the whole thing because it seemed like such a huge, impossible task. But then, today I recalled -- this is the Lord's problem, not mine. Also, responses are coming in to The Enclave and they are good! Beyond good, actually. So, remembering how overwhelmed and confused and uncertain I was during the writing of that, and how I had to trust God to see it done, I can now do the same thing with this new project of mine. Something on the Wordpress beginner's site echoed this in a reassuring way: yes, there's a lot of material, but just take it slowly (step by step) and you'll get it figured out.

Updating Mundanity

2009-06-15T20:53:00.004-07:00

Having read Matt Labosh's article about Facebook, I decided to give one of its functions a try here on my blog, just to see what it would be like. This would be a combination of FB and Twitter I guess... A running update that will keep readers, um, up to date, on all the thrilling events of my life...

9:40am Karen is typing at her computer about how she is typing at her computer for a silly post on the minutia of what she is doing...

9:50am Karen is waiting, quite a loong time, for her very slow computer to show her the save window.. tick tock, tick tock... It's up and she is now saving her post...

10:30am Karen is again waiting for her very slow computer to open the um... well, she's been waiting so long, she's forgotten what she's waiting for it to open... ah. The email...

10:40am Karen is so frustrated with waiting for her very slow computer to do ANYTHING, she is deleting the temporary files and cookies and going out to turn off the sprinkler.

1:08pm Karen just finished reading Dean Koontz's One Door Away from Heaven and writing up her thoughts about it, which on balance were not positive. To make matters, worse, the book is autographed specifically to her! She feels like an ingrate.

2:22pm Karen is figuring out the postage to mail a copy of Arena to someone and checking her email.

3:39pm Karen is again checking her email and turning to that earlier task of figuring the postage after being distracted by reading news-sites and political blogs. She is not sure how this rather lengthy distraction occurred.

5:27pm Karen is updating her website to show The Enclave as her latest release instead of Return of the Guardian-King. She is amazed to find her ancient FTP program works on Vista.

6:40pm Karen is tired of noting the "mind-numblingly dull" things she is doing and is going to stop. After which she will fix dinner, eat it, then walk Quigley around the park.

~~~

Down with Facebook!

2009-06-14T17:20:00.004-07:00

Recently, yet another acquaintance recommended I join Facebook, reminding me that there is a Facebook page for Arena (while other friends recently suggested I could do a page for The Enclave, as well). I considered it. Then in processing my mail the other day I noted on a flyer urging me to resubscribe to the political magazine The Weekly Standard (only $1 an issue!) was a cover which pictured a man sitting at his workstation, a deluge of junk and garbage pouring out of his computer onto his desk and lap. The accompanying caption was "Down with Facebook!"

I wondered if since it was obviously not a new cover, the article might be available online. It was:

Down with Facebook!
What nobody bothers to mention about the social-networking site is that it's really dull--mind-numbingly dull.

Written by Weekly Standard editor Matt Labash back in March of 09 (03/16/2009, Volume 014, Issue 25), I found it quite amusing. It starts like this:

Look at the outer shell--the parachute pants, the piano-key tie, the fake tuxedo T-shirt--and you might mistake me for a slave to fashion. Do not be deceived. Early adoption isn't my thing. I much prefer late adoption, that moment when the trend-worshipping sheeple who have early-adopted drive the unsustainable way of life I so stubbornly cling to ever so close to the edge of obsolescence, that I've no choice but to follow. This explains why I bought cassette tapes until 1999, why I wouldn't purchase a DVD player until Blockbuster cashiered their VHS stock. Toothpaste? I use it now that it's clear it's here to stay.
So I'm not inflexible. But there is one promise I've made to myself. And that is that no matter how long I live, no matter how much pressure is exerted, no matter how socially isolated I become, I will never, ever join Facebook, the omnipresent online social-networking site that like so many things that have menaced our country (the Unabomber, Love Story, David Gergen) came to us from Harvard but has now worked its insidious hooks into every crevice of society.

He goes on to chronicle his wife's experiences with Facebook and how it changed her, and has some interesting observations on the phenomenon. I think I agree with most of them. And I was amazed at how much I parallel his description of himself: "I procrastinate, shirk responsibilities, and spend much time peppering a fairly wide circle of friends with an incessant barrage of individually tailored emails, many of them lengthy.(as opposed to the abbreviated, promiscuously generic, group-blog like messages left on Facebook)." You can read the rest of the article Here.

Like Mr. Labash, I'm not a joiner. Like the Amish he mentioned, I don't have a cellphone. And I just took a lot of my cassette tapes off to the used book and music store, a couple of years after I'd gotten rid of my last tape player. We do still have VHS tapes, though, and a machine that plays both VHS and DVD.

People say I should get on to market. But frankly I'm just not sure I want to interact with that many people. I remember reading about a theoretical limiting number of people with which one can maintain stable social relationships -- Dunbar's number. This is the size of a group where you know everyone, and they all relate to each other. It's posited as being around 150. After that the group tends to split and more formal rules and norms must be established to keep it stable.

Is it really possible to 600 or 800 or a 1000 "friends"? Of course, if it's about marketing, they aren't really friends, more like contacts, potential readers... I don't know. It might not be a bad thing, but I see no reason to think I would be any different than Mr. Labash's wife in my ability to resist the lure of constant Facebook checking and poking. I've already gone through the constant Amazon numbers/reviews checking, the constant email checking, the constant blog comment checking and reading... why would this be any different?

No, I think for now I'll continue to hold firm and refrain from joining. And when I do, if I ever do, it will no doubt be just as the whole thing is starting to fold...

~~~

It's Shipping!

2009-06-12T14:21:00.002-07:00

I heard from a reader that Amazon has begun shipping the pre-orders of The Enclave. So it's now officially out. Probably not in regular bookstores yet, but available.

Guess I'd better change the title of the widget in the sidebar from "Coming Soon" to "My Latest Release." And I'd better get my website updated as well...

~~~

What You Think

2009-06-11T21:13:00.003-07:00

I had something of an epiphany today relative to the notion that our happiness really dis about what we think and that we really do have the power to think correctly. It was triggered by my consideration of this quote from one of my pastor's lessons, delivered years ago but saved into one of my little books of quotes:

"The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts. So guard the type of thoughts you allow in. Let you mind dwell on whatever is honorable, right, pure, lovely, of good repute, virtuous, worthy of praise."

For some reason I've always thought that list pertained to people, to the honorableness of their actions, the purity of their words, to good things in the world. Maybe because when I was first introduced to this verse no one told me otherwise and what else would a worldly minded person think? Or maybe they did tell me and since it didn't mean a whole lot, I forgot. The trouble with that view was that by trying to focus on the good things in people and in the world, I was almost always dragged away from that line of thinking and back to the not-so-good things.

Today I realized: it's talked about principles of God's word, about Jesus, about God's plan and essence, about who He's made me to be and the 40 things He gave me at salvation. Those are the things I'm supposed to be thinking about. Not, as Pastor McLaughlin suggested,

"whatever is a lie, whatever makes you angry or jealous or fearful or resentful or discouraged or miserable."

Which is what we generally tend to think, even when we know we shouldn't. But by focusing on the right and pure and honor and virtue in God... that He's perfect, that His plan is perfect, that Jesus is seated at His right hand, that He's made me a priest and I can go to Him whenever I want...

I think that in particular is something we take for granted. In the age of Israel, people just couldn't go to God whenever they wanted. Though sometimes God came to them, like with Gideon, usually they had to go to the priest and ask him to talk to God for them. Or if God had said anything to the priest that the person needed to know. Or they had to confess their sins to him and ask him to sacrifice an animal for them.

We don't have to do that and I know that I, for one, do not accord this nearly as much awe and appreciation as I should. We live in a time when priests aren't particularly lauded. I have never even known one, at least so far as the world is concerned. So being a priest doesn't have the significance it must have had to the early Jewish Christians. But if you just sit and consider that as a believer in Jesus Christ you have the right and freedom to go directly to God yourself, in your thoughts and confess your sins, or ask for your needs, or just talk to Him... that's really pretty mind-boggling.

And certainly a much better subject for contemplating that what some person is like or doing, or has done...

~~~

It's Beginning...

2009-06-10T18:34:00.004-07:00

Last week I received my hot off the press copy of The Enclave. That was something of a thrill and a bemusement. It's finally book. After all that... it's finally done and in print. After all those months when it seemed as if I would never reach the end. Cool.

This last Monday, I got my box of author's copies, and on Tuesday, I got the first word back from one of my "influencers" who had just received her copy. She could hardly wait to start reading it. Today came more emails from those who had gotten their books. More excitement and enthusiasm. And all the while I can't help but wonder if all their anticipation will be rewarded with a satisfying reading experience? I have no idea one way or the other.

My dear friend Kelli says she cannot foresee being disappointed. Others have offered similar assurances. I can only sit back and wait to see what the Lord has done in all this. And what He will continue to do, though whatever it is, I know it will be for my highest and best.

Cycle of Civilizaton

2009-06-04T21:07:00.002-07:00

My former pastor, now retired, Col R.B. Thieme, Jr., preached a sermon on Jan 20, 1993 wherein he related the following story:

Clarence Manion, the dean of the Notre Dame law school from 1941-1952, boarded a plane sometime during the early 1950's. One of the passengers recognized him and went over and sat down next to him. Dean Manion was doing some work but he had to put it all away as this man began asking questions. He told Professor Manion that he was one of the greatest thinkers in our country at that time. He wanted to talk with the professor about the unfortunate condition of our country. So Dean Manion listened patiently, conversed with him, and began making notes while the man was speaking.

As the plan landed he got up, shook hands with the man, who again told Dean Manion what a wonderful privilege it was to talk with a man of his caliber of mentality. Dean Manion smiled, thanked him and handed him a slip of paper on which he had written these words:

Man begins his existence in bondage,
and rises from bondage through spiritual faith,
from spiritual faith to courage,
from courage to liberty,
from liberty to abundance,
from abundance to selfishness,
from selfishness to complacency,
from complacency to apathy,
from apathy to dependency,
from dependency back into bondage.

This is the cycle of civilization. The only hope of breaking this cycle is the believer who gives his attention to the Word of God. (Proverbs 16:20)

(Taken from the booklet In Whom Do You Trust? by R.B. Thieme, Jr, a transcription of the January 20, 1993 sermon)

Movie Night: The Lives of Others

2009-06-03T20:41:00.005-07:00

The Lives of Others -- "Before the Fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany's Secret Police Listened to Your Secrets"

I picked this movie a couple of weeks ago for our movie night because Rush Limbaugh recently recommended it as something for everyone to see, especially younger people (but not too young since it's rated R) If you've reached a certain age you remember all the stuff about communism/socialism, the movies, the stories, the books that were around during the Cold War. But today's young people, apparently, don't have anything like that so they don't really have a good sense of what it would be like to live under socialism. That's why Rush recommended the film.

It's a German film, in German with subtitles. Mostly I don't like subtitles, because they're distracting, but in this movie they worked okay for me. The Lives of Others won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film in 2006 (so you'll have to look for it in the foreign films section of your local Blockbuster). It's about living in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin wall. It's about how the people are watched all the time and monitored and how if you don't toe the party line, they will ruin you. It was very well done.

Internet Movie Database summarizes the plot thus: "In the early 1980s, the successful dramatist Georg Dreyman and his longtime companion Christa-Maria Sieland, a popular actress, are big intellectual stars in the socialist state, although they secretly don't always think loyal to the party line. One day, the Minister of Culture becomes interested in Christa, so the secret service agent Wiesler is instructed to observe and sound out the couple, but their life fascinates him more and more..." Except it was really Georg the Minister of Culture wanted observed, in hopes of finding something incriminating so he could have Christa to himself. And part of the reason their life fascinates Wiesler is because his own is so dry and sterile.

I liked it quite a bit. It was very thought provoking. In some ways it reminded me of Equilibrium (Christian Bale), but without the action -- though that lack did not make it any less engrossing. It shares with Equilibrium the theme of one of the enforcers coming to see the evil of the system he's supposed to enforce and the value of freedom. In fact, one of the movie's claims is that Socialist East Germany had the second highest suicide rate in Europe the year the government decided to stop counting suicides. I don't know if that's true or not, but it wouldn't surprise me.

The film reminded me that people are sinners and sinners who have ultimate power are going to abuse it. It reminded me of how awful it would be live under such a system, precisely at a time when it seems with each passing day our country draws closer and closer to doing just that. A recent commentary in Pravda, which offers Russian news and analysis, observed, "the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people." The writer has some interesting, if crudely expressed, ideas on why, including a dumbed-down educational system, self-absorption and loss of religious standards.

One additional reason I've recently been given cause to consider (in Bible class, actually) is the fact that some people don't really want freedom. They prefer being told what to do, because then they don't have to worry about failing. They have security and that's all they want. To eat and drink and watch their TV or movies or play their games. And that seems like enough.

But of course it's not.

~~~

Expectations

2009-06-02T19:38:00.002-07:00

I just finished answering an email from a reader who enjoyed the GK books so much she's read them four times. Nevertheless, she felt a fifth book is in order. She's not the only one to write me with this request. (In fact the next one in my queue is also asking if there's a fifth book).

So, is a fifth book in order? And if it is, why hasn't God allowed me to write it? Because He hasn't. No question about that. When I submitted the proposal for The Enclave, if it had been rejected, I might have gone on with the GK series, but since it wasn't and I had a contract for it, that was the direction I was led to go. And I have yet another standalone to write for them as it stands.

If you've been reading this blog for awhile, you may recall that I dealt with this question back in July of 2007, as I answered various questions I'd received from readers and reviewers. (You can find it here. Just scroll down to "A Sequel, Time and Word Count" which is the final entry in that series.

Rereading those posts myself, I found the words oddly echoing concepts God is showing me right now: How you have these expectations of what a book should be about and how it should end, what kind of confrontations should occur, etc, and if they don't, if certain questions that were raised in your mind are not answered right out, then you are discomfited. Dissatisfied. Not exactly what a writer has in mind for a reader's reaction to her story...

Ideally everyone would be tremendously satisfied with the journey she's taken them on and eager for more. Which, in my case, seems to have been the case. Many of the readers professed to have loved the books and were indeed eager for more -- more details regarding elements that were really side issues, not the main thrust of the story. I've been there, myself, getting hung up on some issue in a tale that wasn't adequately resolved in my view, and because of that not enjoying the story as much as I think I would if things were the way I thought they should be. (One of the reasons I started writing my own stories!)

It occurs to me as I'm writing this to wonder how often we do this in our lives -- not with respect to stories, but with respect to our personal story? We think we know how it should progress in what are, basically, side issues, we get all fixated on them, and when they don't go as we expected or wanted or hoped, we are disappointed. Disgruntled. Think that things need a "rewrite."

God's been doing that a lot with me lately. Showing me how I'm off on the side issues and have lost track of what matters. And what matters is His word. His grace. His truth.

That we are here at His pleasure, by His grace, bought with a price. That every day is a gift from Him that we are to treasure. Yes, it might be filled with mundanity (if that's not a word, it should be) but so what? Mundanity can be enjoyed. You could be living in a war zone where a bomb could come flying through your window at any moment! You could be having to sneak around, fearing the Nazi's or communists might come bursting through your door at any moment to search your house, find your Bible and haul you off to prison. Mundanity is a time of rest, of being able to turn our thoughts to God, and who He is and all He's provided. A time to enjoy everything He's placed around us.

Or maybe things aren't "going right." That's really an arrogant, whiny viewpoint when you get right down to it. That's your view, not God's because He's made the plan and it's perfect so by definition none of it can be going wrong. No, wait, there is one thing that can go wrong and that's our attitude in it... that previously mentioned arrogant, whiny perspective that we (or at least I) so often fall into. Worse than that is the take over mentality. The lust to control things -- my environment, my time, the things I'm going to do. I devise my agenda, even when it's what I think God is directing me to do and then I run with that.

And God, in His humor, slides in little tripwires to slow me down and wake me up. It's not my will, it's His. I don't have a clue what any particular day in my life is going to look like and even though there is a plan, of sorts, flexibility and the acknowledgement that God is in control of the details, not me, seems to be more and more the operating priority for my days. Whatever is happening today, whether mundanity or tripwires, it's God's perfect plan for my life. And that's where the focus has to be.

~~~~

Devaluing Diversity

2009-06-01T16:04:00.004-07:00

One recent morning as I sat at the breakfast table eating half a sticky bun and drinking my coffee, my eye was caught by a pen my husband had picked up at his work, which was lying on the table. "Valuing Diversity" was printed on its side in bold purple letters. Not too far from it a cube of notepaper, also picked up at work, read "Diversity: Building an Inclusive Culture."

It got me thinking. Those ideas are everywhere, not just on pens and posters and message cubes, but spilling from the tongues of people. I've been scolded on more than a few occasions for giving the impression that I'd like everyone to think like me. That's bad, I've been told, both directly and indirectly. Very BAD. I, rebuked and dismayed, rarely stood up to the indictment, but slunk away, feeling chastised, suitably bad, and at the same time uneasy.

Because I think deep down I've always thought maybe it's not really all that bad, and especially not deviant. It's not bad to want people to agree with you. We are social creatures, made to interact and we have a certain need for people to affirm our likes and dislikes, to share our passions and interests. The reality, of course is that we all have free will and we're created with different personalities and not everyone is going to agree. The biggest divider of all, though, is our volition with respect to spiritual things and our old sin natures. And in matters spiritual, the Bible explicitly says that we are to seek to have the same mind. Not as each other, but as Christ.

What think ye of Christ? Whose son is He? That's one area where we cannot possibly be remiss in wanting everyone to think like we do about Him. The alternative is to be cast into outer darkness and spend eternity in torment.

Once you've decided that He's the son of God who died for your sins, other questions arise. What is the Christian way of life about? What is our relationship with God about? Us or Him? Us serving Him, or Him working in us, blessing us and in so doing, bringing glory to Himself.

These are core issues that govern where your priorities are, how you view life in general, your relationship with God, what you're supposed to be doing, etc. We can't make everyone agree, and aren't supposed to, since God has granted each of us the freedom to think like Him, or think like someone else (and there's really only one someone who is the source of all the faulty, false thinking that is independent of God's and that's Satan). But we're going to have a hard time walking together and encouraging each other, if we're walking on different paths.

If I believe the Christian way of life is to be walked by means of grace, that God is already pleased with me in Christ as much as He ever will be, how can I embrace and value an opinion that says we have to work hard to please Him? If I believe that the key to the Christian way of life is to stay alert to my spiritual state, rebound when I sin and make my top priority the perception and application of His word, how can I encourage or even walk with another who thinks Bible study is onerous, a waste of time, refuses to submit to a pastor and just wants to give their opinion of what they think Bible says today? As Amos says, "How can two walk together except they be agreed (about the direction they're going to go)? They can't.

We are told to "Have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus," and we're also told to avoid those who come to you with a different doctrine. The Jews were told not to intermarry with the Canaanite women, not to follow their religious practices and where disciplined when they did so. In fact, the Jews were told to kill and drive out the Canaanites when they first entered the land, not create an "inclusive culture". You either converted to Judaism or you went somewhere else.

Things are different now, which is what Dispensations is all about -- the recognition of the differences in how we relate to God and how He deals with us. Much of what was overt in the Old Testament is invisible in the Church age. Everything is more subtle now. The overt conflicts in the OT are equated with mental and spiritual conflicts in the New. Hating is the same as murder. Lusting is the same as adultery. We don't offer sacrifices to golden cows. But we very definitely offer the sacrifice of our time, treasure, talent and thoughts to idols. Idols like physical health and beauty, worldly success, wealth, the good opinions of others, making sure everyone is getting along.

Israel was a picture of the Church age believer's soul and as it was warned as a nation not to mix with the Canaanites, we are warned not to mix with those who serve the world. God is the one who set up the nations and the cultures and the languages as a means of dividing us. He did it on purpose because He knew that was the best way to ensure our freedom. Our natural lack of inclusivity, our natural suspicion of those who are different, isn't necessarily a bad thing, but a good thing, keeping us from the one world unity that Satan is working for.

Now, that is being eroded. Technology has brought us closer to one another than ever before. We can see things on the other side of the world as they happen. We can travel to foreign lands and have foreign people coming to our land. And we have this vaunted concept of "Valuing Diversity."

Even in America, which has long stood as a place of freedom, where the people govern themselves, where you have the freedom to believe whatever you wish without worry of being killed, harassed, etc. We were always "American" a melting pot of common ideas and goals and freedoms, not a collection of disparate enclaves each with their own culture, language, beliefs, etc. But now that's changing, and there are strong, loud voices in favor of valuing all those differences, even though historically those very differences have consistently ripped apart all the nations that incorporate them. But to say otherwise is regarded as evil. Bad. A cause of war and prejudice, and it's true that those abuses have arisen from it.

But at the same time, what is arising from the culture of inclusivity? There can be no absolute truth. God's views, God's ways are no longer allowed to be followed as the right way. We must allow all sorts of things as legal and governmentally sanctioned that He considers abominations. Ironically, it reduces our freedoms, rather than increases it. It increases pain and suffering. Because God blesses those who follow His laws for nations and life. And He curses those who do not.

~~~

Movie Night: Taken

2009-05-28T21:35:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, when it first came out on DVD, we saw the Liam Neeson action film, Taken. I really liked it! I liked it so much I watched it twice. It's the story of a father trying to recover his daughter when she goes abroad with a friend and is kidnapped in Paris. Or, as Imdb summarizes, a former spy tries to save his estranged daughter.

He's initially portrayed as a somewhat down and out middle-aged dad, the cast off husband and father replaced by this "successful" rich guy who can provide wife and daughter everything. Then little by little you learn about his spy activities and the fact that he was/is very good at them. I love that kind of storyline. Beyond that, the plot is fairly straightforward as these things go, you just don't know the details of where things are going to go. Some reviews complained it was predictable or had plot holes, but I didn't really notice and probably don't care, either.

What I liked, especially, is that Neeson's Bryan Mills seemed to be more Bond than Bond was in Quantum of Solace. Maybe it's just because I cut my teeth on Sean Connery, and almost all the others have seemed like imposters (well, except for Pierce Brosnan). What I loved about Connery's Bond was the way he always seemed to be one step ahead of his adversaries. He thought things out, he noticed things, he prepared. And he was very good at what he did. So you're sitting there thinking, "Oh no! This is terrible. How will he ever deal with this?" Only to find out he had it all in hand.

That's the way Bryan Mills was.

I also couldn't help thinking that the movie was a great metaphor for God and His children. The lengths He'll go to save us... and I don't mean just initial salvation, but to deliver us from our own stupid decisions. The focus, the determination, the fact that overall the daughter really doesn't appreciate Him -- she says she does, but it's clearly superficial. She has no understanding of who he is really, and yet he comes through for her. In fact, in the end

*** SPOILER!***

*

*

*

In the end she marvels,"You came for me." And he says, "I said I would."

And isn't that how it is for us waaay too many times? We get all worried and concerned and anxious and then He always comes through. And we're amazed. And then, not long after... it's back to our worldly toys and focus. But it doesn't change His love. Or His faithfulness.

~~~

The Hunt for Bin Laden

2009-05-25T19:29:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, I finally finished Robin Moore's The Hunt for Bin Laden -- Task Force Dagger (2003), which I bought in hard cover not long after it came out because it not only looked interesting (I'd read a review) but because I thought it might be a fun source of light research for The Enclave. Moore, "the first and only civilian ever allowed to go through the grueling Special Forces qualification course at Fort Bragg" is the author of The Green Berets.

The book covers the first engagement in American's War on Terror: the special forces twelve-man teams that infiltrated into different strategic areas of Afghanistan shortly after Sept 11, 2001 and aided the Northern Alliance in its battle against the Taliban. Sixty-two days later, with the liberation of Kabul, the campaign was over and won. A group of only a few hundred men had decisively defeated an enemy force of one hundred thousand. The book takes you right into the heat of battle, from the eyes of the Green Berets who fought it, and shares the successes and the foibles of their effort.

Unfortunately, it was only as I was looking up the Amazon url for this review that I discovered some of it was made up. Not by Robin Moore, but by one of his sources, Jack Idema (refered to in the book sometimes as the mysterious Jack and others as Keith Idema) who apparently did extensive editing on the ms Moore and his co-writer produced. This Jack claimed to be a Green Beret, and while he was apparently accepted into the program, he ended up being kicked out. There are all sorts of one-star reviews at Amazon, decrying the book, including one which claimed Moore has since disavowed the book. Not wanting to rely solely on Amazon reviewers, I investigated further...

Wikipedia confirms the controversy and also that Moore has disavowed the book. Citing Robert Young Pelton's book, Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror, the article states, "Though [the Special Forces soldiers] never met or talked to Idema, and despite the fact that almost ten members had carefully detailed their actions to Moore at K2, the first chapter puts forth an account of the team's infill into Afghanistan that the men tell me has been entirely fabricated."

Nor was it just Moore he snookered. Apparently he spent a good deal of time conning a lot of people in the press as the Wikipedia article documents, including Dan Rather (that probably wasn't all that hard). Idema was convicted in 2004 of running a private Afghan prison and torturing Afghani's, but even before that he had a long history of crime.

That'll teach me to buy a book and take years to get around to reading it. Now I'm wondering if any of it is valid.

Probably some of it is, at least on the general level. One of the things that I was most struck by was how the SF guys would get into position on the ground and then call in the air support -- bombers, fighters, gunships, etc -- is probably ... Since I have a few friends who work on various weapons systems (as does my hubby) it was cool to see how it all works in action.

However, this revelation does explain the sometimes almost incoherent writing, and the weird episodes with "Jack". Though I'm told that Jack rewrote the manuscript in order to give himself a greater role, he failed in that attempt. The parts that centered on him seemed out of left field, having nothing to do with the rest of what was going on. He's the incredible young recruit who loved Moore's ballad The Green Beret and read the book which led him into becoming a Green Beret himself. Later, as "Keith Idema," he appears as the "retired" Green Beret savior of the National Geographic documentary maker Gary Scurka (with whom he'd actually entered the country); still later, he's the legendary superspy/soldier/advisor to the NA in Afghanistan... "Are there many men who call themselves Jack?" Moore supposedly muses, "Or is there only one incredible guy?" There's even an Epilog, all about Jack, which is really out of left field. I read it wondering, "Who is this guy? Why are you telling me about him sitting around in this bar lamenting the loss of the war and ruminating on how great he is? I don't recall him doing anything to speak off in the rest of the narrative..."

So, it's too bad. Lies infiltrate truth and the whole is tainted. After the controversy, publisher Random House quietly let it go out of print and the whole book died into obscurity. But it's also an excellent illustration of how the cosmic system works. Satan loves to take the truths of God and infiltrate them with lies. Just a few and then you don't know what is true and what is not, or you've gotten pointed off in the wrong direction, operating on assumptions that are false, while they seem true...

There are some other books to read about the war, and I may, but right now I still have some books on my shelf. But maybe I'd better check their Amazon entries before I start reading...

Fallen, Not Forgotten

2009-05-23T11:32:00.000-07:00

The song leader at Grace Bible Church has for some years sung a song for occasions like Memorial Day that I absolutely love. It always brings tears to my eyes, so I thought it would be a good one to put up this year. I went looking and found a YouTube video performed by the writer of the song, Ray Boltz. It's embedded below (for Feedblitz subscribers, you'll have to go to the website to access it. Just click on the title of this this post "Fallen, Not Forgotten" or "Writing from the Edge") Here are the Lyrics:

Fallen Not Forgotten
Words by Ray Boltz

He stood beside his daddy
And watched the solders marching by
It was Veteran's Day and he wondered
Why there were tears in daddy's eyes
Later they laid flowers
Beside a monument of stone
He said, My daddy went to fight
And didn't make it home

CHORUS:
Fallen, not forgotten
He was a hero
He stood so tall
And forever, we will remember
With honor and glory,
He gave his all

They left behind their families
And the towns where they were born
For the rice paddies of Vietnam
And the sands of Desert Storm
They were soldiers in Korea
And World War One
And World War Two
They paid the price
Some gave their lives
And they fought for me and you

Fallen, not forgotten
They were the heroes
Who stood so tall
And forever, we will remember
With honor and glory,
They gave their all

Now freedom is a blessing
But freedom has a price
And we must remember those
Who paid it with their lives

Remember the
Fallen, not forgotten
They were the heroes
Who stood so tall
And forever, we will remember
With honor and glory,
They gave their all

[Repeat]

1998 Shepherd Boy MusicASCAP (adm. by Word, Inc., a division of Word Music) and Weedom

If this isn't working, try this link.

Biblical Literalism

2009-05-21T21:31:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia defines Biblical literalism as

"the interpretation or translation of the explicit and primary sense of words in the Bible. A literal, Biblical interpretation is associated with the fundamentalist and evangelical hermeneutical approach to Scripture, and is used by most conservative Christians today. The essence of this approach focuses upon the author's intent as the primary meaning of the text. Literal interpretation does place emphasis upon the referential aspect of the words or terms in the text. It does not, however, mean a complete denial of literary aspects, genre, or figures of speech within the text (e.g., parable, allegory, simile, or metaphor). Also literalism does not necessarily lead to total and complete agreement upon one single interpretation for any given passage."

"...Sociologists also use the term in reference to conservative Christian beliefs which include not just literalism but also inerrancy."

Yup. That's what I believe and how I approach the Bible. In fact, I don't know why you would approach it any other way. Either it's the Word of God to us and meant to be taken seriously, or it's not. And if it's not, why waste your time with it?

The Wikipedia article also says that,

"Often the term Biblical literalism is used as a pejorative to describe or ridicule the interpretative approaches of fundamentalist or evangelical Christians."

Which I didn't know. I do know that when I was writing The Enclave, particularly when I was in Reinhardt's viewpoint, I kept thinking how in literature the voices of particular groups of people are prized. The voice of a person growing up poor and black. The voice of an Asian immigrant. The voice of a Muslim, of a Jew, of an immigrant Irishman. These are prized. Why not the voice of a Christian who takes the Bible seriously and literally and builds his life upon it, then? Isn't that another, different voice? Well, it may be different, but I'm pretty sure it's not prized.

Given who runs this world today, and forms the general world view of our culture, that's no surprise. Even in Jesus's day, He warned us:

"If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you." John 15:18,19

That final line of the PW review says, "Visionary fiction is a narrow niche, and the Christian biblical literalism driving key action in the plot won’t do much to enlarge the audience."

In other words, don't say what you really think and what you really believe if you want to have any readers. Well, then, maybe I won't have any, because what would be the point of writing at all if I didn't proclaim God's Truth as I understand and believe it? What would be the point of writing if I sought to hide my light under a bushel for fear of turning someone off? If you write about God, about Jesus, about the Truth, you are going to turn someone off. Guaranteed.

We are told as writers to write what we know, what we're passionate about, what we believe to be true, to write from our experience and from our own souls. To set down what we really think and stop trying to hide it, stop trying to beat around the bush for fear of being criticized or of offending someone. I agree with that. But I also know that if you do that, you may pay a price. A number of writers have. Salman Rushdie comes to mind. Solzhenitsyn. Watchman Nee. They paid a lot heftier of a price than just failing to build their readership (and for that I can give thanks that I live in America!). Still, I have to go back to why I'm doing this at all, and it's because God's called me to do it. Come what may.

~~~

The Enclave - A Review

2009-05-20T20:59:00.000-07:00

The Enclave received its first review on Monday, from Publisher's Weekly. This is a big deal, I guess. I'm not exactly sure why, because I don't think many readers read Publisher's Weekly, or PW as it's known. But I guess booksellers do and reviewers and such, so if your book gets reviewed -- well or poorly -- it's regarded as a good thing. Arena's mostly favorable review in PW prompted Bethany House to ask if I had any more books in the works and led to them buying the Legends of the Guardian King series before Arena itself had ever even released to the general public.

The Enclave's review, alas, was mostly negative, as you can see:

The Enclave Karen Hancock. Bethany House, $14.99 paper (400p) ISBN 978-0-7642-0328-2

Hancock has cleaned up at the Christy Awards for excellence in Christian fiction with four previous visionary novels (most recently, Shadow over Kiriath), but this one falls short. Researcher Lacey McHenry has a lowly position at the cutting edge Kendall-Jakes Longevity Institute, where a peculiar intruder sets off a complex chain of events that draws together McHenry and researcher Cameron Reinhardt— a man with a powder keg of a past—as the two try to solve the riddles that keep cropping up in their workplace. Hancock has a plot so complicated that a lot of elements are unsatisfactorily resolved or are simple red herrings: Lacey’s abusive ex-husband, a host of intriguing but underdeveloped secondary characters, military action in Afghanistan that is part of Reinhardt’s past. Narrative energy instead goes to didacticism: Reinhardt, an evangelical Christian, argues with his fellow scientists about evolution in an episode that’s more polemic than dramatic. Visionary fiction is a narrow niche, and the Christian biblical literalism driving key action in the plot won’t do much to enlarge the audience. (July)"

I had to look up "didacticism" and "polemic." Though I had a general idea what they meant, I wasn't sure in the specific. Didacticism means "the instructional quality of something, such as a piece of writing," which I'm not sure is a bad thing, really. Not that I ever sit down intending to instruct my readers. I mostly try to express the thoughts of my characters as they come to me...

Polemic means "containing or expressing passionate and strongly worded argument against or in favor of somebody or something." Its usage in the review I found simply odd, since the only people who were fired up in that relatively brief scene between Reinhardt and his fellow scientists, were the fellow scientists. Reinhardt was nervous and distracted... So I'm not sure where that comment is coming from.

But then the PW reviewer of Arena worried that the book's "many rapes" and "occasional stomach turning descriptions" (one, which was provided there in the review) were going to put off Christian readers. It took me some time to figure out they meant the rapes of secondary characters which happened offstage, far from the protagonist in place and time...

I hesitated in posting this. What if it makes readers of my blog leery of reading the book? At the same time, I'm kind of amazed at how much it's not bothering me. It has, however, prompted a couple of lines of thought, which I'll pursue tomorrow and next week.

That last line about "the Christian biblical literalism driving key action in the plot" not building the audience for visionary fiction (or, assumedly, for The Enclave) was of particular interest, especially after I looked up "Biblical Literalism." But more on that tomorrow.

~~~

Quote of Note: Admiration and Liars

2009-05-18T21:22:00.000-07:00

"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth." ~H.L. Mencken

~~~

Islam -- war, peace and deceit

2009-05-17T19:02:00.000-07:00

As I was writing the last post on torture, specifically the part about how the (3) detainees who were waterboarded were told beforehand that they would not be drowned yet still gave up valuable information about planned terrorist attacks, it occurred to me that maybe they did so because they didn't believe their interrogators. That is, they didn't believe the part about not being killed.

The reason I thought this is because back in March I'd read an article by Raymond Ibrahim at Victor Davis Hanson's Private Papers entitled War and Peace — and Deceit — in Islam. In 2001/2002 my pastor did a series on Islam, quoting liberally from the Koran so I was aware of the passages allowing Muslims to lie to Christians and Jews if need be (Sura 4:29) and breaking a treaty with Infidels if the situation warrants. Dr. Ibrahim's article expounded on this subject, adding greater insight into just how much lying is interwoven into their worldview and their politics. Using not only the words of Allah (Koran) and the Prophet (the Hadith) he also consults Islam's greatest theologians (the ulema) for their assessment.

All of this revolves around the doctrine of taqiyya. Ibrahim cites the "authoritative Arabic text, Al-Taqiyya fi Al-Islam:

"Taqiyya [deception] is of fundamental importance in Islam. Practically every Islamic sect agrees to it and practices it. We can go so far as to say that the practice of taqiyya is mainstream in Islam, and that those few sects not practicing it diverge from the mainstream. … Taqiyya is very prevalent in Islamic politics, especially in the modern era,"

The Koran forbids a Muslim making friends with Christians or Jews, unless if he is in a position of weakness or minority, in which case it's okay to pretend to be friends, just as long as he continues to harbor animosity in his heart.

Muhammad, who is regarded by his followers as the most perfect human of all and worthy of emulation, lied when it served him. And, in fact, Ibrahim says,

"it bears mentioning that the entire sequence of Koranic revelations is a testimony to taqiyya; and since Allah is believed to be the revealer of these verses, he ultimately is seen as the perpetrator of deceit — which is not surprising since Allah himself is described in the Koran as the best "deceiver" or "schemer" (3:54, 8:30, 10:21)."

Which I think gives a great clue as to "Allah's" true identity:

John 8:44 "You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies"

It's a longish article, substantial portions of which were part of Mr. Ibrahim's written testimony to Congress this last February (2009). I found it easy to read and compelling, because it made me realize that the Muslim mind and the western mind -- particularly the western Christian mind -- are radically different. How can you ever enter into a treaty with a people whose god instructs them to lie to you if you're an Infidel, and whose central goal is not simply to live their lives and worship as they choose, but to fight all non-Muslims until everyone in the world either converts or submits to Islam? (Sura 8:39, 9:5, 9:29)

Here's the link again: War and Peace — and Deceit — in Islam . Read it!

~~

Torture

2009-05-14T19:57:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry, but I'm having a hard time taking this whole torture kerfluffle seriously. Slapping someone's face? Putting them in a small space with an insect? (and interrogators weren't even allowed to make them think it was a stinging insect). The attention grasp? Simulating drowning after telling the terrorist prisoner that they aren't going to actually be drowned? Please. Anyone who's watched 24 knows what torture is.

House Speaker Pelosi admits to having been briefed that waterboarding was a technique that was used, and had been approved by the "Bush (Boo! Hiss! Yowl! Shriek!) Administration" lawyers, but said she didn't know anyone had actually used it! Um... so why did she think they were briefing her, then? Why did she think they wanted her to know they were approved in doing this to gain important intelligence about upcoming plots from high level terrorists? She was the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and she doesn't know what's going on with the interrogations? (I wrote this post last week, and it's come out now from the CIA briefers that they told her specifically her about procedures that had already been used on Abu Zubaydah...And she's still denying it...)

In reading The Hunt for Bin Laden yesterday, I happened to come across a definition of actual torture. (leave aside the beheadings and all that which the Taliban were perpetrating on the Afghani's) After several successful campaigns wherein the Taliban fighters had surrendered in the thousands, they were being held in a place called Qala-i-Jagi or "Fortress of War." Robin Moore, the author, describes it as something that "could have been a huge castle and its defenses transplanted from central Europe...surrounded by mud-brick walls up to ten meters thick, [with] moats, ramparts and walls almost twenty feet high with parapets across the top."

Two undercover CIA operatives were sorting through the various "detainees," many of whom unbeknownst to the operatives had been able to smuggle weapons into their prison situation on account of the fact that the Northern Alliance victors did not like to touch their enemies and thus didn't search them very well. They also expected them to follow the cultural protocol of not fighting back once they'd given up. But the al Quaida terrorists held allegiance to a standard that superseded local cultural norms and there was an uprising. One of the CIA guys, Mike Spann, was captured.

Moore describes his death thus:

Spann's body would bear out the worst of the rumors -- he had been captured alive and tortured by the AQ. Both of his legs had been broken below the knees in a typical al-Qaida torture method. What was not reported was that he had been alive for quite some time after. Two bullets had been placed in the small of his back, on either side of his spine. A final bullet, which killed him, had been inflicted some time later, in the back of his neck, probably as he knelt down with his hands tied behind his back.

That was al-Qaida. Power Line blog posted a link to a Times Online article about a video of an Abu Dhabi Prince (one of 22 royal princes) shown

"mercilessly and repeatedly beating a man with a cattle prod and a nailed board, burning his genitals and driving his Mercedes over him several times."

He did this because he thought the man had cheated him in a grain deal.

People who would do these sorts of things can only be laughing at us for our handwringing over the benign activities we've engaged in to extract valuable information from vicious, violent men. Ann Coulter's two columns, here and here, discuss our "terrible" deeds in amusing detail. As PowerLine blogger John Hinderaker concluded in his post on the Abu Dhabi prince,

"These are the people Barack Obama thinks will be impressed by his repudiation of one of the most effective terrorism-fighting tactics used by the Bush administration. I think, rather, that they'll conclude he's a fool."

~~~

Lost

2009-05-13T22:10:00.001-07:00

Well, I was going to post something coherent, but I've just finished watching the season finale to Lost and my brain feels a bit like the final screen: white and blank. As my husband said, like all the season finales we once again have no idea what happened. Where they all blown up? Or was it another time shift?

I vote for a time shift. I want Daniel Faraday back! I want Juliette and Sawyer together... I'm loving all the ambiguity, the elements that parallel divine decrees, the talk of destiny, the way everyone is so woven into each others' lives in ways they don't even begin to understand. The relationship between Jack and his dad, whose name is Christian... is that accidental? I don't think so. I love whatever's going on with Jacob and that other guy... the beach guy, whoever he is. And how Jacob went about more or less sowing corruption. Except for the time when he brought Locke back to life... or did he? I love what they're doing with Ben. And Locke!

And I especially love that next season is the last and everyone knows it and it's part of the plan...

This is the Last Evolution Post

2009-05-12T21:20:00.000-07:00

For awhile at least. Really. I mean it this time. I don't care what comes up to entice me to go on, I am done with this subject.

But... I keep feeling led to post this one last bit of reflection relative to the whole evolution thing. It's something I wrote after reading Fossil Hunter, but wasn't going to put up, seeing as I'd already put up enough. But then... I found this article in the Washington Post by Kathleen Parker on An Evolution for Evangelicals.

It tells about Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian, home-schooled until the sixth grade and the physician-geneticist in charge of the Human Genome Project for the NIH. Though later in the article he is also said to have been an atheist, believing only what science could prove, so I would guess he was one of those to leave the home school environment only to be shocked to discover that the world is far older than they were taught, encounter the theory of evolution and lose his faith. Subsequent wrestling with various life questions brought him back to God, his "mission" now to let people know that one can believe in science and God, but that belief in God doesn't preclude believing in evolution. "[h]aving earned a PhD and a medical degree, Collins is nonetheless a scientist with little patience for those who insist that evolution is just a theory that one may take or leave. Most human genes, he points out, are similar to genes in other mammals, "which indicates a common ancestry."

I would note 1) he's a physician/geneticist, not a paleontologist.

And 2) the fact that human genes are similar to genes in other mammals doesn't necessarily indicate a common ancestry. Mammals are similar. We have hair, four limbs, skin, warm blood, produce live births, feed our young with breast milk... why wouldn't the information for those characteristics be similar? The similarity of genetics between forms is no different than the similarity of observable physical (phenotypical) characteristics. Neither prove anything about ancestry.

But enough of Collins. He was only the prod that got me thinking about the whole thought process involved here... to wit:

You have a collection of items, creatures. They may be radically different. A modern whale, say, and also a “putative” or alleged ancestor, the pakicetid, which was a carnivorous land animal. You have only the skeletons to work with. If the task is to determine the order in which they are related, then it seems to me that you have to already have the idea in place that these all “evolved” not the other way around.

But what if they aren’t related? What if they didn’t lead one to another? Then you are going to be looking at them and seeing similarities and reach a false conclusion.

Instead of seeing the incredible variety of God’s creation, instead of seeing the amazing design involved, instead of seeing how each organism has its own unique habitat and ecology, you instead see only what you are trying to see.

Furthermore, you want this to be true for many reasons: everyone around you that you respect say that it’s true; you will be impugned and cast out if you don’t agree; the force of all these people over a couple hundred years having looked at the data and agreeing that it’s true must make it so; you desire to look intelligent, not like an ignoramus; you need for grant money if you are to continue working; you see no reasonable alternative; you have no desire to really believe what God’s word says over what the world and man’s reason says… Therefore, you insist upon evaluating the data from the accepted, preconceived standpoint.

Even if the data doesn’t really support it. Pakicetids are believed to be the ancestors of modern whales based on three things unique to whales: 1) peculiarities in the positioning of the ear bones in the skulls, 2) the folding in a bone in the middle ear, and 3) the arrangement of cusps on the molar teeth. (Wikipedia)

“The current theory is that modern whales evolved from archaic whales such as the basilosaurids which in turn evolved from something like the amphibious ambulocetids, which themselves evolved from something like the land-dwelling pakicetids.” (Wikipedia) (But look at the language used in that sentence: “such as,” “something like,” “which themselves evolved from something like.” Could it be more hypothetical?)

These are based on I don’t know how many finds in particular locations … dated by the geologic or radio carbon metric…. on, of course, the assumptions that carbon has always decayed at the same rate as it does today.

So first you assume that the dating method that arrives at an age of billions of years is accurate, though no one has any way of proving that it is. No way of confirming it, watching it real time. No way of knowing if things were very different than they are now, but assuming they were not.

Then you assume that these creatures lead one to the other because they occur in different strata that are assigned to particular dates and if one is earlier than the other then you fill in the blanks of how the earlier changed into the later, using computers modeling a gradual line of genetic change based on rate of mutation. [They use computer models to predict global warming, too…]

Even though the fossil record shows no intermediaries, but rather sudden explosions of new organisms. Never mind about that, they say. The intermediaries just didn’t leave any fossils. But they were there. Believe us. We are experts…We are Scientists and Scientists know.

So everyone dutifully assumes these all lead one to the other and they just have to figure out what order they’re in. So they strive and scrape and bend and ignore the actual evidence to come up with “supposed” evolutionary patterns that “prove” it’s true.

How can a “supposed” anything prove something?

Because people want it to, because other people say loudly, forcibly and frequently that it does and denigrate any that say otherwise. In Expelled, Richard Dawkins said, “Anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution is either stupid, ignorant or insane.” (There. Now he doesn’t have to grapple with the actual issues because he’s destroyed the credibility of those who advance them by calling them names.) Lots of different scientists throw different scientific talk and jargon at the subject of evolution, that are actually irrelevant if you consider it, calling their beliefs “objective” while any other viewpoint is not. Especially one that includes God in the picture.

I so clearly see the great Deceiver in all this. The arrogance of man in it… It’s a grand deceit. Masterful, really, getting people all involved in did God really say that He created things in seven days? That seems a bit ridiculous. Given what we know, and we are so wise. We are clever. God just doesn’t want us to think that, because He’s afraid we’ll get to the truth and the truth is, He doesn’t exist. Or He does, but He can’t make himself clear in His word.

Movie Night: Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

2009-05-10T21:17:00.000-07:00

Well, I thought my evolution posts were completed, but apparently not. I've been wanting to see Ben Stein's Expelled:No Intelligence Allowed ever since I heard about it. (It's plugged on the back of Fossil Hunter). This is a documentary in which the comedian Ben Stein investigates the closed mindedness of academia with regard to the proposition that there was an Intelligent Designer behind the workings of nature. It started when he learned of respected scientists in academia losing their jobs and their careers because they happened to mention Intelligent Design in the course of a slide show, an article, or a paper. Not promoting it per se, just entertaining the idea.

Darwin Forbid that anyone should do such a thing! Everyone knows that, as evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says in the movie, anyone who don't believe in evolution is either stupid, ignorant or insane. The case is closed. There is no debate because there's nothing to debate.

It was fascinating to see and hear some of the people I've read quotes from, like Dawkins, to see their close-mindedness, their absolute confidence in the correctness of their opinion even when it is ridiculous. Pressed to provide an explanation for how life came to be Dawkins skittered about, hemmed and hawed and settled on the possibility of panspermia -- that is, that aliens brought it here. Which, of course, just pushes the question back to how did the aliens acquire life. "And this," Stein asked, "you find more reasonable than the possibility of an intelligent designer?"

And he did. Although I think at one point in his floundering around, he came around to half agreeing that there probably was an intelligent designer, even as he denied there was. His agenda was obvious. He read from his most recent book The God Delusion, a description of the God of the Old Testament that was worthy of Satan himself. How he was incapable of seeing the very great mercy and grace of God toward his constantly rebellious people is ... evidence of the truth of 2Co 4:3,4 "And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God."

It's a very interesting movie and they make it entertaining by interspersing old movie footage of relevant actions into the interviewing. It also draws a correlation between Darwinism and the Nazi's which has a number of critics all hot and bothered. In addition to the fact that it not only proposes an alternative to evolution but dares to accuse the evolutionists in academia of not allowing debate on the matter...

"A shameful antievolution film tries to blame Darwin for the Holocaust," says a reviewer for Scientific American.

An entire website devoted to disparaging the movie called Expelled Exposed says that Ben Stein flunks and that he doesn't tell you that Intelligent Design is really creationism and therefore not science. (I think there might be such a thing as Creationism Derangement Syndrome, because apparently all you have to do is assign someone the label of Creationist and they cease to matter.)

Human Events uses the release of the movie to raise the question of whether Intelligent Design is really a scientific theory.

Michael Shermer, a renowned skeptic and one of the interviewees for the film, addressed this accusation in an article in Scientific American, stating "Anyone who thinks that scientists do not question Darwinism has never been to an evolutionary conference. ... It is perfectly okay to question Darwinism (or any other ism in science), as long as there is a way to test your challenge. Intelligent Design creationists, by contrast, have no interest in doing science at all." (And once again, they don't have to engage with the ideas because they can just say the ID creationists aren't doing science. And the evolutionists are???)

The Wikipedia entry seems to have been written by the same crowd, with the overview of the article listing such sub-sections as:

Promotion of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution

Claims that intelligent design advocates are persecuted

Portrayal of science as atheistic (It didn't -- there were plenty of dedicated scientists who were not atheists -- but it did show direct evidence of how Darwinism supposedly led some people to lose their faith)

Claims that Nazism was inspired by acceptance of evolution

The "Expelled" (with quotation marks so you'll know they weren't really... except they were)

Claims that film producers misled interviewees

Copyright controversies

Etc.

Unlike the Wiki entry on Evolution where there are no criticisms or alternative ideas noted, on this entry it's almost all criticism. Why am I not surprised?

Here's the trailer.

Evolution Posts Wrap Up

2009-05-07T22:25:00.000-07:00

Well, finally I've come to the end of the words that reading Fossil Hunter inspired in me. It's been an interesting journey.

In the course of looking up sources and answering some email questions, I learned that it's not that the Young Earth creationists (those who believe that there was no sin before Adam and the earth and heavens were created, rather than renovated, in the six days of Genesis) don't know about the Gap between verse 1 and verse 2, it's that they don't agree with it.

In fact, someone sent me a link to a guy giving a presentation on Young Earth creationism who early on in his talk just threw the Gap "theory" out the window as both "unscriptural and unscientific." Having spent the morning going through all the scriptures in support of the notion of a Gap of time between "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" and "And the earth was formless and void" and thus more convinced than ever that it is the only thing that makes sense of the different verses, I was not impressed. And even annoyed. I didn't like his tone either. And hey, I don't have a lot of time so I decided to turn him off right then. Maybe I'll listen later, because apparently he does have some interesting things to say.

Curiosity sent me Googling him, and then the Gap Theory, the latter quite interesting. For one, I had no idea that us Gap Theorists' main reason for supporting it is because science says the earth is old and we are trying to make the Bible fit with what science said. I also didn't know that it was, in the 19th and early 20th centuries a very common interpretation of Genesis and prehistoric events. Even more interesting was the fact that the Wikipedia article cited Donald Barnhouse, C.I. Scofield and Lewis Sperry Chafer as its chief proponents -- all of whom were also proponents of Dispensations.

But then those two subjects do intersect quite closely. Anyway, from there I went on to Answers in Genesis, a website that purports to explain beginnings and is very disparaging of the Gap theory. I read a bit of that, but found their objections to be based on faulty premise after faulty premise that eventually I just gave up on that as well. When someone starts out with their very first objection and you don't agree with the first sentence they write... you're in trouble.

Anyway, I might do a blog post or two on it, if the Lord leads in that direction. But not tonight...

It's been a busy week. I've taken my mother to doctor's appointments for three mornings straight. And I've been focusing on getting home tasks done as a priority -- back to using Flylady's system, more or less. Mending things, cleaning out the refrigerator, taking my wedding ring to get the prongs put back in place so I can wear it again, starting back up at the Y, washing mini blinds and trimming the edges of the grass...

I've been reading another book, too: The Hunt for Bin Laden by Robin Moore. This one's nonfiction, about the the invasion of Afghanistan right after 911. That's been very interesting.

So tomorrow our three-day weekend begins. Hope yours is a good one! And Happy Mother's Day to all my readers who are Moms!

The painting is mine...
~~~

Quote of Note: Evolution Postscript

2009-05-06T21:12:00.000-07:00

"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.

"For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.

"For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.

"Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen." ~~~ Rom 1:18-25

~~~~~

The Result of the Theory of Evolution

2009-05-05T21:29:00.000-07:00

My final thought in this series of posts on evolution is to step back and ask what has the theory of evolution resulted in? The greater worship and appreciation of God? I don't think so.

John B. Olson's Fossil Hunter, the book that started all these posts, begins one of its sections with a quote from Darwin himself in his The Origin of Species:

"I see no good reason why the views given here in this volume should shock the religious feelings of anyone. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man -- namely the law of the attraction of gravity -- was also attacked by Leibnitz, "as subversive of natural, and inferentially, of revealed religion." A celebrated author and divine has written to me that "he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws."

Well, that is one full statement that provokes considerable objections in my thinking. First of all, the fact that someone attacked a true law as being subversive of religion doesn't make everything attacked as subversive true. So it's a specious argument.

Second, it is not by any means just as noble to think that God created "a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms" as that He provided everything at an instant. The former goes against not only His character and general policy, but the whole reason we're here at all -- which isn't to "self-develop". In fact, we are totally and completely incapable of developing anything in ourselves that is worth anything long term. The entire statement betrays an ignorance of who God is and how He deals with us. God doesn't give us a little and tell us to go out and figure out the rest. We're depraved. We're a mess. We're hopeless and helpless without Him.

"So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs but on God who has mercy. " Ro 9:16

He is the one who will fulfill His will, not us. All we're called to do is learn who He is, then trust and obey Him.

Darwin's statement shows a break from the mindset of grace and the need for salvation to something closer to religion. (Religion being defined for this discussion as man by his own efforts seeking to do something to earn salvation or blessing from God. Jesus did it all. For by grace you have been saved through faith and that not of yourselves lest any man should boast.) The whole idea that God left His creation to develop itself on its own contradicts who He is. Transcendent, omnipresent, omnipotent, sovereign, all knowing, aware of the smallest thing that happens... the sparrow that falls to the earth, the number of hairs on our heads. He's holding everything together right now, knowingly.

The very core of Darwn's theory goes against the notion that He has provided everything needed for His creatures, and continues to do so (though what we think is needed and what He knows is needed might be two different things). In other words, it violates the grace of God.

More than that -- worse than that -- it's given people the supposed freedom to finally put God out of the picture. With a purely materialistic explanation for how everything came to be, they no longer have to consider Him, not even to give Him lip service. And once that happened, God was pushed further and further out of public life and culture.

Science has produced many wonderful things to make our lives better and more comfortable. It offers areas for careers that are quite lucrative. But to partake in those you must believe in evolution. Or at least not openly disbelieve. It's a given. On college campuses it is taught as fact and the opposing view is not allowed. The data, such as there is, are manipulated to support it, and the whole idea of free inquiry and pursuit of the truth has been corrupted by it.

Evolution tells us that we are here on our own. That we need to evolve. That we can do it, we can make the world a better place. Heaven on earth. No more death, no more war, no more disease... the seeds of that all lie in its self-help template. Evolution is about creatures getting the credit for their existence, for their shape and form. Or, put another way, in evolution the focus is on the creatures. On how they developed, how they responded to the environment, adapted, evolved "to form other and needful forms...to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws."

Creation focuses on the Creator. He's greater than we are. He made us and everything in the material world and we don't really know how He did it. But we are going to worship Him because He made us and provided this place for us and sustains us every single day. More than that, He sent His son to die for us so that whoever believes in Him should have eternal life with Him forever.

There are no voids in anything God does. The only void lies with us, in our evil, ignorant thinking and our sick, deceitful heads, thinking we can be like God, knowing good and evil...

~~~

Evolution isn't Science

2009-05-04T21:08:00.000-07:00

Evolution isn't science.

It might be philosophy, which, according to Wikipedia, is "the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, law, justice, validity, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions (such as mysticism or mythology) by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned argument."

Or it might be religion, which dictionary.com describes as "a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs."

On further thought, I think it's more religion than philosophy since it specifically purports to answer the cause, nature and purpose of the universe.

In any case, it is not science, which is, again according to Wikipedia, a system of acquiring knowledge based on scientific method, and the organized body of knowledge gained through such research. "To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses."

In other words, you gather some data through first hand observation, consider it and devise a hypothesis to explain something about what is observed -- how it works, what causes the reaction, etc. Then you conduct controlled experiments to test the hypothesis and arrive at a conclusion. Should you conclude that HCL + NAOH will always equal salt (NaCL) and water (H2O) others should be able to perform the same experiment and produce the same results, independently verifying the experiment and the conclusion.

Evolution is none of this. No one has ever observed a progression wherein a fish's offspring eventually became frogs. We haven't even observed viruses mutating into anything other than another virus, and we surely haven't been able to cause any of that.

So the definition of science that I was given in school, doesn't apply to evolution and according to its proponents, that's fine. They admit it. According to evolutionists Gould and Eldredge,

"The general preference that so many of us hold for gradualism is a metaphysical stance embedded in the modern history of Western cultures: it is not a high-order empirical observation, induced from the objective study of nature.’[‘Punctuated Equilibria: The Tempo and Mode of Evolution Reconsidered,’ in Paleobiology 3 (1977), 145.]

Gould adds,

But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective “scientific method”, with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology." [‘In the Mind of the Beholder,’ Natural History (February 1994), 103:14.]

The fact that the fossil record does not support the theory combined with the fact that the evolutionary process has never been observed nor replicated, means that the theory of evolution can legitimately be regarded as nothing but an unproved theory. Yet in all aspects of our culture it is presented as fact. All sorts of scientific words are associated with it, all sorts of speculations about what might have happened in terms of genes and populations and so forth... there are computer models of gene mutations that purport to predict how many years of incremental change stand between one organism and the other. And yet... it's all a house of cards.

One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Karl Popper, had it right when he wrote in his autobiography, Unended Quest,

‘I have come to the conclusion that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme—a possible framework for testable scientific theories … This is of course the reason why Darwinism has been almost universally accepted. Its theory of adaptation was the first nontheistic one that was convincing; and theism was worse than an open admission of failure, for it created the impression that no ultimate explanation has been reached.’

Tomorrow: the results of the Theory

~~~

The Record isn't There

2009-05-03T19:10:00.000-07:00

My biggest shock in investigating the theory of evolution was learning that the fossil record I'd always been told supports evolution does not exist...

Phillip Johnson, in his book, Darwin on Trial, quotes from a well-regarded American textbook on Introductory Biology in the 1980s:

"Can more extensive evolutionary change, macroevolution, be explained as an outcome of these microevolutionary shifts? Did birds really arise from reptiles by an accumulation of gene substitutions of the kind illustrated by the raspberry eye-color gene? The answer is that it is entirely plausible, and no one has come up with a better explanation... The fossil record suggests that macroevolution is indeed gradual, paced at a rate that leads to the conclusion that it is based on hundreds or thousands of gene substitutions no different in kind from the ones examined in our case studies."

Except, says Johnson, "that last sentence is false and has long been known to paleontologists to be false."

A casual perusal of the Wikipedia entry on evolution produces only three instances where the fossil record is even discussed:

"The study of evolutionary biology began in the mid-nineteenth century, when studies of the fossil record and the diversity of living organisms convinced most scientists that species changed over time."
"Speciation events are important in the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which accounts for the pattern in the fossil record of short "bursts" of evolution interspersed with relatively long periods of stasis, where species remain relatively unchanged...
"...the periods of stasis in the fossil record correspond to the parental population, and the organisms undergoing speciation and rapid evolution are found in small populations or geographically restricted habitats, and therefore rarely being preserved as fossils..."

[This last basically says that the fossil record does NOT support the earlier statement that the "fossil record" convinced most scientists that species changed over time. If only the organisms that haven't changed are preserved, not those which are evolving, there is no support in the record, so it couldn't have been the record that convinced them!]

[I would also like to note that in every other Wiki page I've checked in the course of writing these posts, even on the Gap Theory, there's always been a sub-heading on "Criticisms". There was no such category for evolution.]

But that's only a Wikipedia article. What about the paleontologists, those scientists who are expert in the study of the fossil record and who have been diligently seeking every -- any -- instance of fossil remains that will support their theory of evolution? After all, Darwin himself stressed the fact that if his theory were true, the number of transitional inntermediaries would be "inconceivable." He was confident that the more paleontologists dug, the more intermediary fossils they would discover.

Stephen Jay Gould (prominent American paleontologist and evolutionary biologist who taught at Harvard and worked at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and a proponent of the alternative evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium) said in his Natural History article, 'Evolution's Erratic Pace,':

‘The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. . . . [T]o preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.'

Likewise, Niles Eldredge, paleontologist and Chief Curator at The American Museum Of Natural History, said in his book, The Myths of Human Evolution (1982):

"Darwin's prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted. The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical conservatism. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record."

In Reinventing Darwin (1995), Eldredge said,

"Simple extrapolation does not work. I found that out back in the 1960s as I tried in vain to document examples of the kind of slow, steady directional change we all thought ought to be there, ever since Darwin told us that natural selection should leave precisely such a telltale signal as we collect our fossils up cliff faces. I found instead, that once species appear in the fossil record, they tend not to change much at all. Species remain imperturbably, implacably resistant to chance as a matter of course." (p.3)

"Stasis is now abundantly well documented as the preeminent paleontological pattern in the evolutionary history of species."(p.77)

"No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. It seems never to happen. Assiduous collecting off cliff faces yields zigzags, minor oscillations, and the very occasional slight accumulation of change -- over millions of years, at a rate too slow to really account for all the prodigious change that has occurred in evolutionary history. When we do see the introduction of evolutionary novelty, it usually shows up with a bang and often with no firm evidence that the organisms did not evolve elsewhere! Evolution cannot forever be going on someplace else. Yet that's how the fossil record has struck many a forlorn paleontologist looking to learn something about evolution."(p.95)

Gould and Eldredge proposed an alternative theory of punctuated equilibrium, where evolution consists of long periods of stability in organism phenotype punctuated by rare explosions of new and startling collections of organisms or "evolutionary branches." This is in contrast to Darwin's idea of gradual change and attempts to reconcile the actual record.

Whether embracing punctuated equilibrium or the gradual change of Darwinism, proponents dismiss the fossil record's lack of evidence as "a result of migrational events." Or else they attribute it to the fact that all the changing organisms were on the fringe of the population center and thus were never preserved in fossilized form. I think they must be too invested in defending the theory to hear how silly that explanation sounds.

And how completely unscientific this entire evolution business is.

More on that tomorrow.

The quotes from Gould and Eldredge used here are from Stephen E. Jones's quotes database on evolution which can be found here:
http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones/cequotes.html

The page of this database I specifically used is http://bevets.com/equotese.htm

This page has a mind-boggling number of quotes from all manner of sources -- Einstein, Louis Agassiz, Darwin, Dawkins, Dennett... If you're interested in what these people had to say about evolution and science in general I encourage you to check it out. It's amazing.

~~~

The Secret Things

2009-04-30T16:08:00.000-07:00

The fronticepiece for Part Four of Fossil Hunter quotes from Job 40: 1-5

Then the LORD said to Job,"Will the faultfinder contend with the Almighty? Let him who reproves God answer it." Then Job answered the LORD and said, "Behold, I am insignificant; what can I reply to You? I lay my hand on my mouth. Once I have spoken, and I will not answer; Even twice, and I will add nothing more."

Author Olson follows up this notion in his epilogue by reminding us that "the study of science shouldn't make us more arrogant; it should make us more humble. When it comes to the details of creation, we could all take a lesson from Job. Sometimes the best, most profound answer is to say that we don't know and put our hands over our mouths. Some things really are too wonderful for us to understand."

I couldn't agree more.

Deuteronomy 29:29 says "The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever, that we may observe all the words of this law."

Some things just are not given to us to know. The future, for example. No matter how we strain and strive and struggle to predict, we just flat don't know the future. (Except as we believe pertinent promises of God)

Likewise, details of the past, and particularly of creation, are not given to us to know. Genesis 1:1 simply states, "In the beginning God created the Heavens and the earth." Given the magnitude of that accomplishment, that is an awfully spare account. God clearly didn't see it as something whose details we need to know. (Most likely we wouldn't be able to understand them anyway.)

God's word tells us that angels exist and that they pre-existed us. Clues scattered throughout the scriptures tell us they had some kind of history involving rebellion and reconciliation, but most of the details of that history have not been given to us.

We don't even know if the physical laws that govern the earth now were the same as what governed the earth in the distant past. Since the physical laws are actually God's laws and are maintained by Him in accordance with His will, it is possible there were different laws in times past. Angels are, after all, very different creatures from us, at least as we are right now, and would require a completely different environment.

How do we know if the rates of isotope decay have been consistently the same over 4 billion years? That light has always traveled at the same rate of speed? We don't know. And we have no way of determining the answer since we can't go back in time and measure things. Yet much of scientific thought today assumes all is now as it has pretty much always been.

The Scripture tells us that God alone is immutable, not His laws for the operation of the universe. He can break them (a miracle) or change them when He wills. In fact, He will change them at the end of human history.

Obviously finding out what those laws are and how they work has resulted in many wonderful improvements in our way of life. But trying to go back into the past when no man even lived and determine the details of what happened, and even more difficult, how and why, is overreaching into areas that don't concern us and is supposing that we can be like God, knowing all that He knows. Those matters are closed to us. He's told us what we need to know about such things: He made everything, and He restored the earth in six days so He could place man there to show something of His own glory to the angels and to men.

What happened to the dinosaurs, all the details of the prehistoric world, how exactly the angels fell and were restored is basically irrelevant. What a person thinks of Christ and of His word is crucial.

Next week: The fossil record that "proves" evolution is true.

~~~

Day 2 - 6: The Renovation Continues

2009-04-29T18:49:00.000-07:00

On the second day God made the atmosphere ("made" is the verb asah, which means to fashion, to make -- out of something that's already there) and divided the waters around it, the water below and the water vapor (clouds) above.

On the third day He told the the waters to gather into one place and the dry land appear ("one place" gives rise to the speculation that the land might have been one mass, the original single continent some have speculated once existed, which could have subsequently been split apart during the flood of Noah. Either way, the Bible doesn't say).

Also on the third day God said, "Let the earth sprout vegetation... plants sprouting from the earth, producing seed after their own kind." After their own kind clearly indicates that they were not evolving into different forms, but each seed producing a new plant just like the old one. "And it was so" means instantaneously. So the plants were adults. Did they have an appearance of age as some claim? Well, they could. One of the oft used methods of dating archaeological finds is through tree rings, which are larger or smaller, lighter or darker depending on the conditions under which they grew each year. In really good conditions the rings are fat; in poorer conditions, they are thin. God could have made the trees with multiple rings, or just one large ring, to which more rings would be added in subsequent years. The Bible doesn't say. Only that they are mature plants ready to reproduce after their own kind.

On the fourth day, He made the sun and the moon as light bearers and also the stars. Previous to this time, God Himself furnished the light that shone upon the earth. The Hebrew word for "light" in verse 14 is maor, which is different from the word used in verse 3, or. Or refers to light itself, whereas maor refers to lightbearers -- sun, moon, stars, planets, etc.. Since these had already been created instantly in verse 1, but had been darkened as a result of the angelic rebellion and subsequent judgment of the fallen angels, the reference in vs 14 is to the restoration of their lights.

It is worth noting that even though many of them were millions of light years away, God made their light instantly visible on the earth, which messes up the evolutionists' speculation that since Andromeda is two million lights years from earth, the universe must be at least that old. (Although how they arrive at that age for something that far away is also something based on a number of assumptions we really can't verify)

On the fifth day, He created the animals, again, all of them after their kind. No evolving from a fish into a salamander into a lizard... and the verb here is bara again, not that He created them out of nothing as with the universe in vs 1, but to emphasize this was God's creative power at work and negating the idea that the earth somehow made its own animals through the evolutionary process from the plants already on its surface.

On the sixth day, God made (asah) man -- body, personality -- and created (bara) him -- soul. He did this only after He'd provided a home for him, complete in every detail, an action that clearly manifests God's character and love for those He creates.

Finally, on the seventh day, He rested. There is such spiritual significance here... God did all the work. God provided everything. God put the man in the place He had prepared for him. He did everything needful in the six days and nothing needed to change into something else, nothing needed to be improved or perfected. It was all perfect and complete. Thus He rested, not because He was tired, but because He had provided everything man would need and He wanted us to know that. Wanted us to remember that. This whole story sets the precedent for our lives: God does the work. We receive the blessing.

If that was God's policy when man and woman were perfect, how much more so now when we are not? After all, He created us knowing we would fall, even intending it, from the standpoint that He meant to use it to bring about something better than simple perfection. He has provided salvation through His son, and for those who believe in Him He has provided everything we need to live with Him forever. A fact He wants us to rest in every single day.

Tomorrow: Some things we're just not given to know.

~~~ Photo is from my friend Debbie from Kansas of a cloud formation called a gust front which she photographed near her home. I think it looks very "primordial"!

Days or Ages?

2009-04-28T13:41:00.000-07:00

As I said yesterday, I believe that a gap of time existed between Gen 1:1 and 1:2, during which time the angels (which Job 38:4ff indicate were created before the material universe and definitely before man) followed Satan in his rebellion to be independent from God and in fact, take over His throne. Subsequent to this God offered them a form of salvation and reconciliation, which two thirds of them accepted. The remainder were then tried, found guilty and sentenced to the Lake of Fire, a sentence which has not yet been executed. Why? The logical conclusion is so they can appeal it.

That's an overview of what I believe, and all of it is supported by scripture, but not my subject now. The reason I bring it up is that this sequence allows for the earth to be of much greater age than if measured from Adam and Eve. We also do not know how long Adam lived with the woman in the garden in perfection. It could have been three years, thirty years or three thousand years. Scripture doesn't say.

From this view, then, Genesis 1 is a description not of God's original creation of the earth, but its renovation after having been ruined as a result of the angelic conflict. At this point He not only had to restore it, but make it suitable for a smaller, weaker creature to live in.

Some, like Fossil Hunter's Katie James, take the six days of Genesis One to mean ages rather than literal days, but I think even in the English it is pretty clearly laid out as occurring in six 24-hour intervals.

Gen 1:4 God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. And God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day."

Even in the English, if He wanted to tell us it was a single day, could He have written it any more clearly? Well, I suppose He could have added, "Yes, I mean a real day, morning and evening, one revolution of the earth, not an age or a millenium." Still sometimes in Scripture the word day does refer to something other than a 24-hour period, longer or shorter.

Thankfully, the Hebrew makes it crystal clear. A literal translation of the last part reads: "then it became dusk and then it became morning, day one."

Not only does this construction convey the fact that the earth is now revolving on its axis to produce one complete solar day, but whenever the word yom, "day," occurs in the Old Testament with a numeral, this grammatical construction always describes a 24-hour day.

Also, a reading of Ex 20:8-11 confirms this refers to a literal 24-hour day, since that is the context for the reference in verse 11 to God's work in Genesis. After telling the Jews they can work six days but the seventh is a sabbath of the Lord, they are reminded in vs 11 that "For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them..."

So, it's days, not ages and on the first one, He returned the light and set the earth in motion, revolving on its axis.

Tomorrow... the rest of the days.

Old Earth Creationist?

2009-04-27T16:03:00.000-07:00

In Fossil Hunter, the various "sides" of the evolution debate are depicted as being old earth or young earth. Old earthers, of course, accept the natural record and the view of "science" that the earth is billions of years old and has reached its present state over a long period of successive changes. It is a view allegedly supported by the natural record. Young earthers claim that the earth was created in the six days of Genesis 1, and that many of the means of dating it much older than the few thousands of years since then, are suspect in terms of accuracy.

Fossil Hunter's Christian protagonist, Katie James, believes that the earth is old, that things evolved but that God directed them. This can be called directed or theistic evolution.

As I have previously blogged here, I believe that a gap of time exists between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2

Gen 1:1 In the beginning God created (out of nothing) the heavens and the earth...

The verb for created is bara, which means to create absolutely. It is used in the Bible exclusively with God as the subject and means "to create or to bring into existence by divine commnand." Twice it's used specifically to create out of nothing (the universe and the human soul).

Col 1:16 echoes this in, "For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth... all things have been created by Him and for Him..."

Again the verb forms indicate this creative act was instantaneous.

God is perfect and everything He does is perfect (Deut 32:4). He has purpose and meaning in all that He does. So the heavens and earth that He created must have been perfectly formed and useful from the get-go in Genesis 1:1.

But then Gen 1:2 says, And (or But) the earth was (or had become) formless and void.

In the Hebrew formless and void is tohu wa bohu which means "waste, desolation, a disorderly muddle."

If God's works are perfect, how could He have created the universe as a disorderly muddle?

Is 45:18 says He did not: For thus says the LORD, who created (bara) the heavens (He is the God who formed the earth and made it, He established it and did not create it a waste place, but formed it to be inhabited)...

"Waste place" is the Hebrew tohu tohu, which means really, really empty, meaningless, vain, useless

So clearly between verses 1 and 2 of Genesis 1, something happened. What?

Well, as I said in that blog I did last year, this same term "formless and void" (tohu wa bohu) occurs only one other time in the scriptures, where Jeremiah describes his vision of the past:

Jer 4:23-26 I looked on the earth, and behold, it was formless and void; And to the heavens, and they had no light. (and of course the earth in Gen 1:2 has no light)

I looked on the mountains, and behold, they were quaking, And all the hills moved to and fro. I looked, and behold, there was no man, (no men indicates pre-human history)

And all the birds of the heavens had fled. I looked, and behold, the fruitful land was a wilderness, And all its cities (angelic cities, not human) were pulled down
Before the LORD, before His fierce anger.

What could have made the Lord so angry that He pulled down angelic cites, laid waste to the earth and made the heavens dark? The logical conclusion is that it was Satan's rebellion referenced in Is 14, Ez 28, and Rev 12)

Is 24:1-3 seems to echo this: Behold, the LORD lays the earth waste, devastates it, distorts its surface and scatters its inhabitants. And the people will be like the priest, the servant like his master, the maid like her mistress, the buyer like the seller, the lender like the borrower, the creditor like the debtor. (that is, all are equally destroyed; no one can hide or survive) The earth will be completely laid waste and completely despoiled, for the LORD has spoken this word.

The earth will be completely laid waste... At what other time in history has the entire earth been laid completely waste with no light and no life? The only time that is mentioned is Genesis 1:2.

Also note that in Genesis 1:3 the first thing God said was, "Let there be light"; and there was light -- indicating there was no light in the formless and void earth of verse two, also referenced in Jer 4:23 ("the heavens will be dark")

The Hebrew for "moving over" the surface of the waters carries the connotation of brooding like a hen on her eggs -- ie, providing heat. I John tells us that God is light and in Him is no darkness, so obviously this act in verse 3 is not the beginning of light, but the return of it. The earth must have been flooded and frozen...

In addition, the use of the word "deep" (tehom or abyss) is frequently used throughout scripture in association with the judgment of angels. Both "darkness" and "deep" convey sinister events throughout the word; darkness especially connotes evil and spiritual darkness.

All of this and more have convinced me that the earth was here long before God made man, and could in prehistoric/angelic times have had different sorts of flora and fauna such as we've discovered in fossils. Personally, I think the huge plants and dinosaurs make a good fit for an angelic Garden of Eden (referenced in Ezekiel 28:13 in the description of Satan who had possessed the King of Tyre). It seems logical to me that the creatures on the earth could have changed in conjunction with the angelic fall in a way similar to the earth's fall along with Adam and the woman, so that the prehistoric animals of the angelic times changed from plant eaters to flesh eaters, as well -- though the Bible says nothing about this. Still it's fun to speculate)

How long all this was in existence I have no idea. I do think it's a show of hubris on the part of creatures who can't even leave the planet and live at most a century to go about claiming with absolute certainty that anything is a billion years old. Maybe it is, but to be certain about something so astronomically beyond all our ability to measure or validate seems ridiculous.

On the other hand, I don't think the Bible precludes an earth that is older than six thousand years, either. To me the six day account in Genesis seems pretty clearly an account of the restoration or renovation of the formerly trashed earth for its new occupants.

More on that tomorrow.

~~~

Take God at His Word

2009-04-26T15:28:00.000-07:00

In my last post I talked about the way that evolution figured into my salvation experience, and mentioned that I made the conscious decision to trust the claims of God's Word that He had created everything rather than the claims of man that things had evolved.

Katie James, the Christian heroine of Fossil Hunter, (the book I mentioned last week as having precipitated all these thoughts of mine on evolution) encounters a similar position when discussing the matter with her father, a Baptist pastor. He tells her "eventually you're going to have to learn to take God at his word. We're called to walk by faith, not by sight," and that God said He created the earth in six days so that's what she should believe.

She responds by saying that she'll take her cues from the passage and goes on about Genesis being written with obvious structure (the first three days he made the containers and the second three he filled them -- I'm not sure how that supports her position, though), how it's very poetic and full of puns, the example being Adam's name, which straight from the Hebrew means man of the earth... ie, he was made of earth. (Since this what the Bible says God used and what science agrees constitutes man's physical body, i.e., the elements of the earth, I don't see how that's really a pun either. Names have a lot of meaning in the word of God and must be examined with the expectation of gaining information about the thing so named.) She also says the six days could be literal days or geologic ages and that the passage doesn't make it clear, so she's going to pick the long view.

This brings up, of course, the matter of what the word of God actually says and obviously people disagree on that. Should Genesis 1 be taken literally or should it be taken figuratively? And what exactly does "day" mean there?
Ironically, I find part of the answer couched in a couple lines of dialogue that follow not too far on the above.

Katie's father says he's reading a book that "blows your 4-billion-year-old earth out of the water," and goes on to cite the radiometric dating technique as an example of age measurement systems not being accurate. Before he can finish his sentence, she interrupts to demand, "Is the author a geologist? Has he spent his whole career working on radiometric dating?"

To which I would have responded... "If that is to be your standard, then how can you, Katie James, paleontologist, presume to interpret what Genesis 1 says and how it should be taken? Do you have the gift of pastor-teacher? Have you been properly trained in the Greek and Hebrew, the history of the time of writing, the categorical study of comparing scripture with scripture? Do you know what the First Mention principle is? How about the difference between a qal stem and a piel stem? Have you spent your career studying and teaching the word of God on a daily basis?"

Why should science be put forth as a discipline that must be believed because the people in it are "experts" whereas these same people feel they are fully qualified to interpret the word of God based on their own ideas? It's no different. Even more ironically, shortly before she made this statement, she was talking about how complex God is, how difficult He is for us to comprehend. So difficult He can't do it "without using metaphors. So why do we think we could even begin to understand how he created the universe?"

If He is so difficult to understand, why would you think any old person could just pick up His word, which is His mind, and understand it? Why would you believe the dicipline of paleontology requires years of study and expertise to understand, but the word of God does not?

Every true scientific discipline you can think of -- neurology, physics, biochemistry, genetics -- is nothing more than the examination of how God's things and laws work. It's basically the discovery and study of His design in all the multifarious areas in which He has designed things. Why should His word not then be taken with just as much seriousness as any other discipline? Why should those studies of how God designed the material world to work require a technical language, a systematic approach and years of study to master, but God's word not?

Well, I happen to believe that it should. And when I first said I would take God at His word, I had confidence that it made sense and that a detailed and consistent study of it would produce answers. Now, having spent a lot of time learning what it says from the prepared pastor-teachers God has assigned to me, I find that my confidence was not misplaced.

Tomorrow: Old Earth Creationist...
~~~

Guest Blogging at Valerie's

2009-04-23T15:30:00.001-07:00

Wow, two posts in one day! Amazing.

I just wanted to announce that I did a guest post on nonstopping for Valerie Comer's Little Worlds Blog. Valerie's a writer with an interest in speculative fiction who I met through the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog tour . She is doing a series on the muse, and nonstopping is one way to connect with it. If you're interested, I invite you to check it out!

~~

Evolution and Me

2009-04-23T14:23:00.000-07:00

Continuing my line of posts sparked by the debate on evolution in the novel Fossil Hunter...

I first encountered the theory of evolution in the sixth grade, when I did a report on what was at the time deemed the missing link between reptiles and mammals, Cynognathus. (Picture at right is from Wikipedia) Now they only call it a mammal-like reptile (rather than a "missing link").

As a sixth-grader, I thought the notion of things evolving was a brilliant idea. It made perfect sense, and I could not imagine how anyone could believe otherwise. I was actually quite excited about it. It's one of my stronger memories of the sixth grade. (okay, is this proof I'm some kind of science nerd?)

All through high school I continued in this vein. I delighted in biology and worked as the high school biology teacher's aid for a couple of years. I also did volunteer work at a local junior museum amidst a group of fellow tree-hugging, nature-loving environmentalists. Evolution was never questioned. There was no "theory" about it. So far as I was concerned it was accepted fact.

In college I went on to pursue a Bachelor's degree in the double major of Biology and Wildlife Biology. My junior year we had to buy and read the Bible for my class in Humanities. We read the books of John and Job, of all things. I had no clue what they were talking about. It was all gibberish to me. And yet... there was something about the book as a whole that drew me, intrigued me, pulled me into looking further.

I argued ceaselessly with the middle-aged, Christian man who worked in the same office as I did at the Steward Observatory, doing illustration and maps for the publications of the astronomers there. I kept bringing up evolution, asking questions he couldn't answer. I even spent some time trying to align the idea of evolution with the Genesis account and felt quite self-congratulatory and intelligent when I discovered that God had blown it -- he'd made the plants before he made the sun. Ha! How ridiculous. Obviously you have to have the sun before the plants can live. Ha! (I guess I didn't note that He said "Let there be light" before He did any of the rest of it.)

Anyway, I kept pestering this poor man, who finally invited me to his home where I could meet with a friend of his who might be able to better answer my questions. As I've mentioned in the bio on my website, I clearly recall leaving my house the evening of the meeting, thinking smugly that the friend's answers would change nothing. No one could prove which side was right -- evolution or creation -- because no one could go back and see. I find that thought intriguing now, since I stand by it. Evolution is as unprovable as creation. Both must be taken on faith.

In the meeting we didn't talk of evolution at all that I recall, because the Holy Spirit knew that was not the issue. I remember asking a lot of questions, as the man with the answers sent me to scripture after scripture that supposedly answered them. I recall that none of it really made much sense to me, though I nodded and said "Oh, yes, I see..."

Then somehow Jesus came into the conversation (imagine that!) and the next thing I knew, I was overwhelmed with the desire to know Him. I didn't really understand much about sin -- I hadn't committed any of the blatant ones: I didn't drink or smoke or swear, didn't lie or steal or cheat, hadn't slept with my boyfriend or done drugs, I respected authority, was polite and hard-working, got excellent grades... I was goody two shoes. I didn't know then that fear is a sin. As is guilt, complaining, criticizing, anger, judging, self-righteousness, arrogance... No matter, if God said I was a sinner, I would admit it -- I wasn't perfect by a long shot -- and believed that Jesus had died for me on the cross.

Suddenly the scriptures began to make sense, at least in a rudimentary way. I was starving, dying of thirst, couldn't get enough of it. Starting with Lewis Sperry Chafer's Major Bible Themes under the tutelage of the man with the answers who'd led me to the Lord, I began to learn the core doctrines of the faith in the college Sunday school class at the church and also in a private Bible study on Monday nights. We asked questions, memorized verses for the basic doctrines, and learned a lot of theology. I ate it up.

Sometime after that, as I ran around telling everyone about my salvation and how this wonderfully exciting thing had happened to me, one of my old friends from the college hiking club, also a Biology major, asked me how I reconciled the theory of evolution with the Bible's claim that God created everything. By that time I had decided that if I was going to serve God, then His word better be the primary source of my beliefs, and anything man drummed up would have to come second. Into this category went evolution. The Bible said God created the heavens and the earth and that's what I would believe. I might not understand all the details of that, or how evolution fit into it (if, in fact, it did at all), but for the time being that was where I would stand.

Besides, in the big picture evolution didn't really matter. What mattered was "What do you think of the Christ? Whose son is he?" I was confident that in time I would be able to answer my friend's question, and I believe now that I have a come a long way toward doing that, at least for myself.

If you want to label me (that seems to be the thing that everyone wants to do in this debate, put people in categories -- maybe it's a biologist thing) I am an old earth creationist and I believe that the Gap theory is the most logical explanation of the various relevant Scriptures -- in addition to accomodating some of the observations made of the natural record. In the next few posts I hope to set down some of the reasons why I've come to that conclusion.

Fossil Hunter

2009-04-22T18:03:00.000-07:00

It's been a year since I've read a book. Actually more than a year if you're talking about a book I've actually been able to finish. Last June, I started reading Fossil Hunter by John B. Olson, a book which was released a year ago April. Before I could finish it, though, I got the editor's response on The Enclave and had to stop reading to focus on the rewrite... which, as anyone who reads this blog knows, took me a LOT longer than I'd anticipated.

But, having finished that last week, one of the first things I did was pick up Fossil Hunter again. It had been so long, I had to start over, which was fine since I'd pretty much forgotten what I'd read previously. This time I was able to sit down and much read it more or less straight through. What a pleasure to be able to do that! What a difference it makes in the coherence of a story!

From the back cover :

In the desolate Iraqi desert, a lone shepherd stumbles across a whale fossil. Initial analysis indicates that it could be a new species -- a discovery that might shed light on the evolution debate.

Paleontologist Dr. Katie James is asked to lead an expedition to recover the rest of the fossil before her archrival, Nick Murad, can find it first.

But while she's there, Katie also uncovers the unexpected -- a human fossil so controversial she's forced to collaborate with Nick to analyze the find before it can be destroyed by a fundamentalist faction of the Iraqi government. Their initial results fly in the face of current scientific theory, and it seems the whole world turns against them,including those they thought they could trust.
Then the fossil disappears, sending Nick and Katie on a chase that could cost them their reputations, their careers -- even their lives.

I enjoyed it! It was an easy read, and I think I like stories about groveling around in the desert. Dirt, heat, thirst... fossils... And of course the debate regarding evolution versus intelligent design versus creationism has long been a subject of high interest for me.

And while I don't agree with the evolutionary stance of his protagonist ("directed evolution" is the term, I think) the various discussions he presented were quite thought provoking. So much so that I've decided to do a few posts out of the wealth of thoughts I wrote down. (Okay, and because The Enclave also deals with this debate, albeit peripherally.) Tomorrow I'll post about my background with regard to evolution, and next week I'll set down some of the observations, agreements and objections I had while reading. At least... that's the plan...

~~

Bees

2009-04-21T21:02:00.000-07:00

Last week, right as I was finishing up the galleys, the neighbor came over to ask if we had a bunch of dead bees in the yard. No, we had no dead bees that I knew of. I went out and looked, but no dead bees. She, however, had a bunch of them on the ground near the fence that separates our properties. We looked at the bees, most of them dead, some dying, and speculated what might have happened. Maybe they'd gotten into poison...

Afterward I went in and called my husband at work. He called a friend who knew about bees, and from him learned that the temperature the night before -- in the low 40s as I recall -- was cold enough to kill bees when they are swarming. No doubt there was a swarm, and when they stopped for the night, balling up in a tree somewhere, the outside layer of bees had perished in the cold and fallen to the ground.

Well, that was interesting. If it was so, then maybe the swarm was still there, because at the time it was still pretty cold. So I went out for another look. There were only a few bees buzzing around, but nothing obvious... Wait. What was that dark blob way up there on one of the pine tree's branches? I peered at it, walked around trying to find a better vantage, thinking it looked an awful lot like wood or some sort of deformed growth of pine cones. Could it be the swarm? It looked completely solid. And nothing was moving. Suddenly I thought of the camera. I could use the telephoto to get a better look at it. So I did. And it was the swarm:

At left is the mass of bees. It was about the size of a basketball. It stayed just like this until about 3 pm when the bees began to stir. About that point the neighbor freaked because this was right above her back patio. Even though I told her I didn't think the bees would hurt anyone (they don't sting when they are swarming, only when they have a hive to guard) and that we could just wait for them to move on she wasn't interested in waiting. She called some bee removal people, who came a few hours later and dispatched them.

I thought it was weird of me to be sad that the bees died. But...obviously there were many bees around or they wouldn't be swarming and the likelihood was great that having been stressed by the cold they would look for a permanent home very close to where they'd swarmed. Like in our yard. All our bees in Arizona are Africanized now, and so you don't want them setting up house on your property, especially not in a place close to the neighbor's door or patio, so I couldn't feel that badly about their demise. As I said that was about a week ago.

Then, late yesterday, the neighbor called to tell me the bees were back. So I went out again, and this time the swarm was making its way into one of the tires in a stack of three we have out in a side yard. A carpet of bees covered portions of the tread of the tire and was moving slowly upward through the crack between where two tires were stacked. Others buzzed wildly about the area. Exactly what we were told to beware of...

Well, my husband took care of them after dark. He said even when he took the tire away, they didn't fly much, didn't try to sting, just bunched together. He thinks they might have been remnants of the earlier swarm. Could be, since there weren't nearly as many.

But... weird.

~~~

Marley and Me

2009-04-19T18:48:00.001-07:00

We watched Marley and Me last Friday. It was very funny and very close to home in many ways. I think Quigley might give Marley a run for his money on World's Worst Dog, though he's calmed down a lot in recent months. And the only reason Quigley didn't do all the things Marley did was that we never gave him the chance. He is our seventh dog, after all, and Marley was the Grogans's first. We'd be pretty pathetic if we'd learned nothing in all those years of raising dogs.

We'd never let Quigley sit in the front seat of the car with us for one, and never open the window while he was doing it for another. He'd be out an open window at the first opportunity... or at least the first time he spied a dog on the side of the road. And putting him in the garage during a thunderstorm while we go away? I think not. Big enough mistake to leave him in the house while we went out to dinner. At least now he's learned how to be in the crate peaceably, and that's been a huge help. He likes it in there, and goes in on his own accord almost every afternoon.

Another similiarity is that one of our dogs -- Grumpy, the big black and tan/bloodhound cross the dog in Light of Eidon was based on -- also suffered from gastric torsion and almost had to be put down because of it. He was young enough they could do the surgery to turn his stomach back over, but while he was on the operating table, the emergency vet came and told us that the stomach could turn back over again the very next day and it would be better if we just put him to sleep then. Fortunately our vet called the emergency room at that moment and told them she'd recently learned a new technique whereby the stomach could be permanently attached to the side of the abdominal wall to keep it from turning over again. So they sewed him up and within a month she did the surgery and we never had another problem with it. He ended up dying of cancer at 12, I think.

And yes, we've been through the loss of way too many dogs, not to cry streams of crocodile tears at the movie's end. It's funny how my attitude toward that grieving has changed over the years. It's no longer a bad thing to be avoided at all costs, but something deep and significant. The pain is there but so is the appreciation. You grieve precisely because the animal has meant so much to you, has become so interwoven in your life... has been such a tremendous blessing and companion over so many years and in so many small and constant ways -- happy, funny, pleasurable and sometimes intensely annoying. But still, dogs truly do enrich a person's life.
Marley and Me was a tribute to that. It's a funny story, but it's also the story of a dog's life, how he changes his owners, how he shares in so many of their really important life moments, the way he drove them nuts, but was there when the tough times came as well, his unquenchable exuberance for life... I loved the scene toward the end, when Grogan finally lets him off the leash at the beach and he just revels in his freedom, the water, the other dogs. They filmed it really well.

And it made us realize Quigley's not quite as unusual as he seems. My husband is always saying he doesn't think Quig's all dog, so that was another close-to-home part because Grogan said he didn't think Marley was all dog either. Or maybe not even a dog at all, but something entirely different. He actually ate a phone, and lived. Which Quigley has not done.

Yet.

~~~

To Live in Him

2009-04-17T15:06:00.000-07:00

It's Friday. I spent Tuesday resting, Wednesday and Thursday morning working on those Media Interview questions and answers, in case some print or broadcast journalist might want to interview me. Ahem (even after all this time, that still makes me want to laugh.) Anyway, I tried to make them a little more, um, interesting than in the past. I put in stuff about science as religion, evolution, Nephilim, and the person who asked for the Q&A's was happy.

I also heard from my editor by phone on Thursday -- she was working on the galleys which she'd received Wednesday, along with the proofreader's input (there were two that I know of) and expected to have the whole thing sent off to the typesetters by quitting time yesterday (Thursday). So. It's really and truly out of my hair.

And from the proofreaders, we have the first two responses from people who have read the whole manuscript straight through and for the first time. The first said she loved the story, the second said, "Another great Karen Hancock story." I'm thrilled. Delighted.

Despite all the times it was so hopeless and blank, all the deadline extensions, I trusted God to see it done and He did it. It seems to still be on schedule for the July release and for the end cap merchandising plan they have for it. So, all is well.

Of course He did it in the nick of time. I think He likes doing things that way. I think He likes drama and stories, likes bringing things to the screaming edge because it's more exciting that way. We have to trust Him. The angels get to wonder what's going to happen. And well, we are part of a a theatron (I Co 4:9) a spectacle to the world, both to angels and to men. So it only makes sense He'd be good at the story-telling and drama part.

I liked the lessons we got last night, not exactly on that but relating. How when everything seems to be going wrong, and I have no idea what God's doing in my life, when nothing makes sense, it's then that I have the opportunity to trust in His character and nature. Trust in the fact that He's sovereign and all His decisions and choices for my life are perfect. The things He's allowed and is doing, are the right things for me.

And the key is, that's as far as I need to go. I don't need to figure out how they are right. In time, I can be confident I'll see that. I don't need to try to figure out what He is doing, or even what He wants me to learn. Because what He really wants me to learn is to focus on Him. To see and trust Him. Which is to say believe and live in, think in what and who He says He is. That's all. That's it. To live in who He is.

Sovereign. Righteous. Just. Wise. Full of Grace.

Full of compasson.

Full of mercy. Toward me.

Because if I'm truly seeing Him and living/thinking in who He is, I won't care about any of the other things. I'll know He has everything in hand and whatever I receive from my loving Father, it is ultimately grace and blessing .

~~~

It's Off!

2009-04-13T22:11:00.000-07:00

Today, at 2:43pm I sent off the completed galleys of The Enclave to Bethany House. Now I really am done with it. Hooray! Hallelujah! The book that seemed as if it would never get finished is finished.

It would be nice to just kick back and take a day or two to do nothing but... I have to clean my house for one, and work on media interview questions and answers for another. 7 to 10 of them. Due Wednesday. I know I'm supposed to think of questions that will generate answers that provide interesting aspects about the book to readers/listeners so they can decide if they might like to read it. But...for some reason I have a hard time with that.

There are some writers who, when finished with a book think -- and say -- it's the best book they've ever written. There are others, like me, who have no clue. If anything, every book I write seems like the worst book I've ever written. I don't trust those feelings because I know they're inaccurate, but at this point all I can think of are the things that seem wrong, or not good enough, or that people are going to laugh at or be bored by...

Just goes to show how utterly unreliable emotions are. It will take me some time to see just what has been done, but we are on such a time line, I'm not sure I'll have enough distance to really evaluate for months. I seem to remember too much too easily, so it takes a long time for some writing of mine to "cool" enough I can't recall all the options and all the supposed problems.

Right now, I'm just tired. And hoping to sleep in tomorrow.

~~~

Rest?

2009-04-12T21:41:00.000-07:00

Did I say something about rest in my last post? "Now I can rest?" [Insert long riff of hysterical laughter here] That was almost exactly three weeks ago. The day after posting the last entry, I did rest. And also prepared to travel to Oregon on the next day (Thursday) for the Oregon Bible Conference in Salem, Oregon.

Thursday we were up early and off to Portland by air, then Salem by land. Lots of rainy weather, a trip to the beach, a feast of fellowshipping and talking with royal family, and some amazing, life changing doctrinal teaching about the Christian Stand when it comes to relationships. I got answers and validation for things I'd been uncertainly applying over the last few years... More on that later.

After five days of all kinds of stimulating, encouraging and substantive conversations about the Christian life and application of doctrine, as well as getting to spend about three hours a day concentrating on the teaching of God's word, we returned home. Tuesday, Mar 31, I was wasted. A shell. All my words used up. I did get the laundry done. And started juicing and zesting lemons to freeze before they all go bad.

Thursday, April 2, I was beginning to get back to normal. That evening, at 7pm, the galleys of The Enclave were delivered to my door. The book turned out to be about 500 pages long, and they gave me 10 days to go through it. Which is why there have been no blog posts since March 24. Everything since the trip has been consumed in working through the galleys.

Galleys are like page proofs of what the book will look like in final form, only on separate 8 1/2 x 11 pages. It's my last chance to make any changes, and in this case was my first chance to actually read through the entire book from start to finish and see what was there. I'm pretty pleased with it.

I opened this post with a picture of the entire stack. Here's what one of the pages looks like:

This one has some of my corrections on it, and shows the little post-it tabs I use to mark places that need extra thinking.

In order to get them back by the deadline they gave me, I'd have to pack the whole thing up tomorrow morning and send it off. Alas...

Does this sound at all familiar? Here I am again, not done, not able to make the deadline. In this case, I pretty much have to get it there by Thursday, so I may upgrade the return postage envelope from second day air to overnight or something. Actually I have the whole thing done except for a series of flashbacks that I've scattered throughout the story. There are some inconsistencies and contradictions in them that I need to deal with, and some of those pesky questions that drive me bats that must be answered.

But after all this time, I figure I will be a pretty big idiot if I haven't learned to just trust the Lord to do what He's going to do in His timing. It would be awfully nice though if things could clarify tomorrow and I could get this thing out of my house before Wednesday! Especially since I am soooo very close to being completely finished.

~~

Now I Can Rest

2009-03-24T21:02:00.001-07:00

Today I finished up the last of the questions and problems my editor had for the last five chapters, and when I turned the last rewrite in, and received her positive response, that was the first time I really felt like I was done. (Yes, that is the complete manuscript in the oversized notebook above. 51 chapters, single-sided, double-spaced manuscript pages.)

She seemed to be pleased with it and asked what I thought. I have no idea. But when I consider the fact that I have yet to read the whole thing through at one time, and that each scene or chapter was interrupted by three days of trying to figure out what comes next, what of all the options I had that I was going to use, choosing some of those options and writing a scene, then changing my mind and writing different options, finally getting something that seemed to go right, and then repeating the process all over again... well, it doesn't surprise me that I'm not really sure what is there.

I know that I was excited about the ending that developed. Not one I'd planned or even expected. (Actually there, was no plan, if you'll recall... I was taking things one day at a time, waiting for the Lord to show me.

It's a little longer than they wanted. Here's another shot of it. I think if I had been seriously considering the 120,000 words Bethany House would have been happier with, I shouldn't have proposed the story be told from three different viewpoints. Maybe for the next book (I still have one more contracted) I'll try just one pov (point of view) character and see if I can keep it closer to that word count.

And then tonight, Bible class was all about the Sabbath, resting after six days of work in the age of Israel, and resting moment by moment in the age of the Church. It seemed weirdly appropriate.

I've Turned it In

2009-03-20T15:22:00.000-07:00

Hooray! Yesterday (Thursday) at 2:53pm I sent Bethany House my last installment (chapters 47 - 51) of the final draft of The Enclave. I'm done! It ended up being 51 chapters long, but many of them are short chapters. (Still, I know it was much longer than BHP wanted).

I cannot believe how challenging it was to write this. Challenging in itself, but also challenging to my faith and my peace of mind. Every new chapter, every new scene, it seemed, would begin with a dark stage, a couple of unrelated elements, and sometimes a general idea of where things needed to be at the end, but not always. As one of my journal entries says, "I have a shoe, a stone and a spoon. Now how do I fit all those together?"

Because that's how it started, there was almost always a day or two worth of waiting at the outset, where I just could not get anything to happen. No matter what I did. After awhile I realized that sitting around waiting is kind of boring... Well, I could've gone off and done other things, but I don't believe that's what I was supposed to do, because that inevitably leads to me getting too distracted and distanced from the work. I don't routinely get ideas in the midst of doing something else. I just think of more things to do besides write.

Anyway, it's been a long march of every day having to completely trust the Lord for whatever He was going to provide. When I got to the blank spots, it would be, "What should I do here?" and then, "What specifically should I do with myself... sit? nonstop? outline? do housework?" And the answers were always different. There was a never a pattern that consistently produced the scene, the dialogue, the words. Sometimes a nonstop would do it. Other times, I'd be working on a birthday card and then sometime later, with no real awareness of it happening, I'd be in writing. Sometimes it would just be a matter of reading the rough sketches I'd set down. Or writing down questions about the material on index cards and noting whatever options as answers came to me. Or lying in bed staring at the ceiling.

Whatever it was, it wasn't consistent and I began to understand that God was indeed releasing the story in His time and in His ways. We've been learning in class about not making rules, not trying to come up with our little formula for the Christian life and then running off to execute it, but to stay in a moment by moment, intimate and real reliance on the Lord's direction. And to accept whatever He portioned out with peace and contentment.

That was really a challenge. Especially at the end. I would look at the material I had left and think, "Oh, yeah, now I see where we're going. I should be able to do this in a couple of days. And then I'd tell my editor. And as soon as I went to do it, there'd be that silent, empty stage again. Another day of doing nothing. Even yesterday. I'd thought last Friday that I'd have everything done by Sunday night the 15th. Then spent the weekend stuck. That broke and I thought okay, I'll still get it done by Tuesday. Then Wednesday. Then Thursday morning. I'll get it sent in early Thursday morning... then by 10am, then noon... at the very latest 1pm. Every time I came up with a time I wanted it to get done by, there'd be something else I needed to do, or something else I couldn't figure out, and there I'd be. Whatever I'd written just falling off a cliff and no idea what to do next.

I asked Him for those times. Asked Him to let me be finished by 10 and noon and so forth. And He said no. I kept trying to control it, kept setting deadlines for myself, then feeling tense because I knew on some level I wasn't going to make them, then confronted the fact that once again I had to relax in His timing and really trust Him to deliver. Whether I agreed with that timing or not.

The way I could tell that I wasn't doing that was that I would begin to feel tense. My thinking seemed fine, but emotionally I would start to slowly and subtly get out of whack. Then I wouldn't want to write, and would have to step back and look at what I was doing, and confess that and once again remind myself that He works all things together to those who love God, and that He will accomplish all His will, and He's faithful... I really started to learn the value of focusing not on the details of the problem but on Him. Focus on the problem, what it is, what needs to be done, how it can be solved... tension. Focus on Him, and forget about all that... peace.

So it's done. And now I can sorta have my life back for a couple of weeks (the galleys, I hear, will be coming the first week in April) maybe read a book, watch a movie, clean my house, wash my car, play with Quigley (who's become a fantastic dog, by the way, but more on him in a later post)... try to answer my terribly backed up reader mail. Rest. Two weeks will go by in a flash.

But then so will the two weeks after I get the galleys...

Hooray! I'm done!

Another Enclave

2009-03-08T20:35:00.000-07:00

A reader just emailed to ask if I had heard of a book called Enclave by Kit Reed. No. Not at all. So I googled it.

It's put out by Tor, released February 3 of this year. As in last month.

Jeff VanderMeer of the Amazon blog Omnivoracious, says, "Called 'One of our brightest cultural commentators' by Publishers Weekly, Kit Reed has a new novel out called Enclave. Others include Thinner Than Thou, which won an ALA Alex award. Often anthologized, her short stories appear in venues ranging from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov's SF and Omni to The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review and The Norton Anthology of American Literature. A Guggenheim fellow and the first American recipient of a five-year literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation, she is Resident Writer at Wesleyan University."

According to the Publisher's Weekly review, the book is about an ex marine who plans "to make millions while protecting children from the self-destructing modern world. He turns an old Mediterranean monastery into a combined impenetrable fortress and school, and enrolls 100 filthy-rich children," most of whom are trouble makers. Isolated from the rest of the world, they are "fed only canned news stories about wars and natural disasters." And then things go wrong...

Vaguely similar to my book, which is called The Enclave (as opposed to just Enclave), both of which involve a society closed off from the world. Which I suppose is inevitable given the shared title and the fact that enclave means, well, "a distinct territorial, cultural, or social unit enclosed within or as if within foreign territory ". (thanks to Merriam-Webster for that definition)

What's cool is that since I have had all these deadline problems, The Enclave isn't going to release until July, so I think that's a good thing. Plus being part of the Christian Book Publishing industry as opposed to the secular literary/science fiction/fantasy industry (-- Oops. I mean, "general market" literary/sf... industry) sets them apart as well. But still, what a strange thing to discover in the final week of finishing up the book (or at least I hope it's the final week) that another with almost the same title has just been released...

Another Update

2009-03-07T09:21:00.000-07:00

Well, now that I've no doubt lost most of the people who used to read my blog, back when I was actually posting something to read, it looks like I might (stress on the future, uncertain verb form there) be getting back to things pretty soon.

Last Wednesday I turned in chapters 35 - 43 of The Enclave just as my editor was finishing up her line edit on chapters 1 - 34. I have about six or seven (maybe eight... we'll see) to go. I would really, really, really, like to get them done by next Wednesday, but that is probably wishful thinking. And, as I've said before, every time I set down some predicted Time of Completion. It's wrong. Remember that quote of Douglas Adams's I put up awhile back...?

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

Well, I feel like I'm on a airplane the way the whooshing as become so constant.

Still, the end is in sight. I think.

And now, back to work.

~~~

No, No and No

2009-02-19T20:57:00.000-07:00

Well, I see again that I have let my blog posting languish. This is partly out of embarrassment, partly out of mental exhaustion.

No, I did not turn in the manuscript on the February 9, deadline, now some 10 days ago (really? Can it really already be 10 days? Alas...)

No, I did not turn in the 38 chapters of manuscript on the adjusted deadline of February 11. I turned in 34.

I did, however, assure my editor that I was confident that I would finish the manuscript by Mar 1. Ha. I am a slow learner. God has a plan here, and I don't have a clue what it is, but it sure doesn't seem to be "Help Karen meet her deadline." (I think it's something more along the lines of "Give Karen the opportunity to trust Me no matter what happens.") The very day after I turned in the 34 chapters, I went into blank mind mode. I could call it writer's block, but I don't think it is. Any more than the first 8 months of a pregnancy are "mother's block." Or maybe "baby's block". When the oranges are tiny and green early in the season is that "orange tree block"? No it's just a normal function of growth.

I have learned that in the cycle of cell division, by far the longest period of time is spent resting. Or at least, not dividing. Instead it is preparing to divide as it carries out its normal cellular functions, growing in size, reading its DNA, doing whatever it's supposed to be doing in the body. The time it actually spends in division is very brief.

So it is with me. In the creative process, I do spend more time thinking or even just being blank and trying to think than I do writing. Two days of nothing, trying to write, trying to think, trying to make something come, put two thoughts together, find the next portion... getting nowhere, getting distracted, getting frustrated and anxious when it starts to go on too long (although how I would know what "too long" is, is beyond me.). And then after all that, the next thing I know I find myself writing something, words are coming together to make sentences, I start seeing how the various elements can fit, this one here, that one there, this other one next... Sometimes within an hour it's all come out. But I can't force it. I have to wait for it.

So that's the process, and I'm getting used to it, and I know that I don't know what God's plan for my life looks like and that I have to accept His timing without complaint, frustration, anxiety... But...I wasn't expecting to have any more of those periods when I turned in the 34 chapters. So it was quite dismaying to promptly run into a 3-day incubation period. Then, having resolved that, to run into a 2 day incubation...

Right now, a week and a day after turning in the first portion of the manuscript I've got two chapters done and three close to done. And looking at what I have left, which is chaotic and incoherent (the living-color results of what happens when I just sit down and force myself to write) I suspect there are going to be a few more simmer periods before all that is done.

So, No, I no longer have confidence I will finish this thing by Mar 1. I have given up trying to predict. It will be done when God has decreed it to be done, and that's all I can do.

~~~

Milton Friedman -- Greed

2009-02-08T19:32:00.001-07:00

Wow! Two posts in one day. Things are really getting strange here at Writing from The Edge...

But I wanted this to have its own post. I love what economist Milton Freidman has to say about Greed when it comes to politics and economics. (Is that Phil Donahue? He looks familiar but it's been so long, I'm not sure)

~~~

God's Sense of Humor?

2009-02-08T18:51:00.001-07:00

This Wednesday I'm supposed to turn in to my editor all the chapters of The Enclave that I will have finished by that time. Last Thursday I told her I expected to have 38 chapters finished because I was very nearly there at that time. The very next day, as always happens when I make any sort of prediction with this book, I started working on chapter 31 -33, which are extremely mushy chapters and, as is also usual in this situation, found myself frozen and blank. Lost. Confused. Completely overwhelmed with puzzle pieces and ideas... all day.

Saturday our waterbed sprung a leak, but I refused to take ownership of that problem and left it to my husband to solve. Which he did. I continued to be frozen, lost in index cards, whiteboard circle-and-spoke outlines, scene and sequel models... and trying to keep my mind in the present and stay out of the future. Trying to fight my way through the jungle.

Today, after a wonderful Sunday morning lesson on how God puts us in difficult situations of suffering in order to break the power of the old man, (the flesh) in our lives, I came home and continued to be blank. I am waiting for God to enable me, to release the story; I'm praying for His help. And growing restive with His timing. But that, too, is part of breaking the power of the old man.

It's not our timing, it's His, and we have to be willing to fully trust Him even when it seems all wrong. Even when people tell you, you've got it all wrong and He's really trying to tell you that you've blown it by writing the wrong thing in the wrong way, and that's why there's all this delay... It's your fault. Your responsibility. Not His. And you need to do better!

But what about, "So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy." Ro 4:16

Or "For it is God who is at work in you both to will and to execute for His good pleasure." Phil 2:13

Or "For the Lord God helps me, therefore I am not disgraced; therefore I have set my face like flint and I know that I shall not be ashamed."

Or "He makes all things meaningful in His time."

Or "'My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,' declares the Lord. 'For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts...'"

"Cease striving and know that I am God... I will cry to God most High; to God who accomplishes all things for me.

"If there is any man who respects the Lord, He shall be shown the path he should choose..."

"Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow, we shall go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.' Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow..."

So I claimed all those. And then, sometime after 5pm, the hopeless muddle began to organize itself. Where before I would consider the material and nothing would happen (or at least nothing that led anywhere), now words formed into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs, and they kept on like that, as step by step I moved through ch 31.

Which, when I account for the chapters I've split but not renumbered, is actually ch 34. I might be able to make it through 32 and 33 (i.e., 35 and 36) and maybe even 34 (37) by Wednesday. But not 38. And I can't help wondering if that might just be part of God's sense of humor...

~~

What's This?

2009-01-30T20:51:00.001-07:00

A blog post! Where has the time gone? Well... starting late January 15 our 2009 Arizona Bible Conference unofficially began. It lasted until late Sunday, January 18th and was the best conference I've had yet. I was amazed by the way God orchestrated things, from the teaching, to the living examples of that teaching, to the challenges people wrestled with both from the teaching and from each other, to the interactions between them. It was truly like a living organism, the way people fell and rose again, and came and went, bringing challenge, inspiration, nourishment and encouragement, and carrying away the waste materials of old, wrong thinking, pain, bondage, condemnation and failure.

God told me through the classes and through nearly every person I spoke with that I have to stop trying to do things, stop trying to take control with this book. He will do it. He told me that I cannot make the deadline an idol to which I sacrifice my life and time and peace (and really, my relationship with Him) in hopes of satisfying it and not bringing its wrath down upon my head.

He told me that Jesus was late to the wedding at Cana, and when the people came to tell him about Jairus's daughter who was dying, he dawdled and thus missed His deadline, which was a true deadline: the girl died before He got there. Ah, but He's in the business of resurrecting the dead, and missing that deadline was part of the plan.

The lessons have continued since, and I have fought them. At least until the last few days. This all sounds so trite and superficial in light of what has happened. But for the longest time I have been so confused. How do I relax and let Him do it (speaking specifically of writing this book) and yet do the work? When I relax, I always think I get too relaxed and wander off into distraction. When I try to work, I get too wrapped up in it and start to try to take control.

There are many aspects involved in this whole situation. One of them is the fact that our sin nature doesn't just produce sin, it produces good. Good that is disgusting to God (as Isaiah 64:6 reminds us -- all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment). The trouble is, it doesn't seem disgusting to us. It seems good to the natural mind. It seems right. And sensible and professional.

And that's been part of my problem with this whole book and deadline thing. What God has been working on in me (not me working, I've given up) is not my sins and weaknesses, though they come out, but my strengths. My tendency toward human good. I want to fix things. I want to make that application. I see that I'm not supposed to care about the deadline or whatever, and now I want to make myself not care. I see that I'm supposed to do my work heartily and now I want to make myself do it (even though I may not be sure what "heartily" means and may not even stop to think I might not know -- or, maybe, can't know?). So part of what I've concluded in the last few weeks is that I just can't do it. Which is really ironic, given how many times I've told other people that we can't change ourselves. Oh, but I want to. So badly, do I want to.

I want the Life beyond Dreams. I want to be a winner. I don't want to be ashamed in heaven. I want to do what I'm supposed to do and to obey. And what I'm grappling with is the reality of how the old self can take those perfectly good and legitimate desires and warp them. Seize them for itself and go running off on a plan to make them happen. And it doesn't seem wrong or wicked at all. It seems very right and good and even doctrinal. Which, as I said, is often how human good seems to the natural mind.

The laughable thing about it all is that it's not very long before I've fallen into frustration, dismay, anger, anxiety, guilt, condemnation, etc, because I can't execute my plans. I told the Lord, "I don't know how to just let go and still do the work. I don't know how to wait and still be ready. If I start trying to make sure I'm taking every thought captive and sort out what doctrine to apply I end up tying myself in knots."

And He told me I don't need to know. He'll do it. I just need to relax.

He reminded me of One Day at a Time and Stay out of the Future. What I must consciously do is STOP thinking about anything related to the future. Focus on today. Focus on the work I'm doing today. Not the work I have yet to do, or the work I will do tomorrow, only the work I have to do today. And of that, really, only the next thing. Whatever is the next thing -- the next chapter, the next scene, the next paragraph. That's all I need to do right now. When that is, done, then I will focus on the next thing.

He reminded me to believe Him when He says He will be good to those who wait for Him, to the person who diligently seeks Him. (Lam 3:25) To rest in His Hands. The book is His production, not mine. When someone else is in charge of an operation, you don't have to think about the big picture, you only have to think about the task you've been assigned in it.

He reminded me that even if everything seems like it's wrong, it's not. Everything is actually right, because it's exactly as He has chosen it to be in eternity past, for His glory and the blessing and benefit of His creatures. Like me. Whatever happens, whatever comes in that looks like a disaster, a hindrance, a delay... it's okay. He's got it all in hand. He's decreed it to be.

He reminded me that when I'm confused or lost or tired, I can come to Him for answers, guidance and renewal. This may seem like a "DUH" point, but I lose sight of it sometimes when I'm deep in the mire of paragraphs and lines of dialogue and bits of scene setting and elements of world building that all need to be integrated somehow in a way that makes sense, moves the plot, is internally consistent, doesn't use too many words, and sounds good. I was formerly getting frustrated and overwhelmed and backing off. I still do that, but now, after a break, I go back and ask Him to show me. He has been.

As a result I now have, in finished form, the first 29 chapters of The Enclave. I don't know how many chapters there are going to be. Maybe 40. Maybe more. I told my editor that I didn't think I would finish it all by the 9th but that it would not be too long after it. Maybe a week. Maybe two. We're playing it by ear. And things are finally starting to get clearer. Not flow, necessarily, but it's gathering shape and substance and clarity, which in itself is motivating. It's hard to keep pushing yourself through a sea of mush...

Anyway, that's kind of where I've been for the last couple of weeks. And oddly, I've had no words for the blog. I wasn't even intending to write this one, but suddenly the Spirit moved. And here it is. How about that?

~~~

Interesting Items in the News

2009-01-13T20:41:00.000-07:00

This weekend, in between my battles with chapter 25, I gleaned the following interesting news items from the Internet:

From Pravda.ru :

Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age
According to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science, data sources indicate the 10,000 year warming trend we've been experiencing is approaching its end and the earth will be gripped in an ice age for the next 100,000 years.

Record snow in Wisconsin steals spotlight from frigid temps
The average December temperature in Wisconsin was 15.8 degrees, which makes it the 10th coldest December in the city since weather records were kept starting in the 1880s, said officials from the National Weather Service in Green Bay.

Other cold related headlines this weekend :

Chicago socked by Snow - Over 8 inches at O'Hare

Snowblast set for Gotham

Snow on Palm Trees in Marseilles France

Snow continues to trap thousands at Madrid Airport

Life at -78 degrees in Alaska

And they're predicting unusually cold weather for the Jan 20 inauguration in DC -- temps around 30 with potential for icy rain...

But wait... aren't we supposed to be worrying about... Global warming? How can all this be happening if the world is getting warmer? Oh, that's right. All these frigid temps and snowfall are actually a sign it's getting warmer. Right.

On a related note (sort of) there was also a report on Fox News this weekend about the potential for a massive solar storm that could take place soon. According to this article the sun is on an 11 year cycle with respect to its activity levels. It's in a lull now, but the next peak is expected to be strong.

In 1989, the sun unleashed a tempest that knocked out power to all of Quebec, Canada. And in 2003, "a remarkable rampage included 10 major solar flares over a two-week period, knocking out two Earth-orbiting satellites and crippling an instrument aboard a Mars orbiter.

In 1859 an especially powerful storm shorted telegraph wires in the US and Europe causing widespread fires.

Were a widespread, powerful magnetic storm similar to the one in 1859 to occur today, it could knock out most of the US power grid with potentially catastrophic social and economic disruptions.

When is this peak predicted to occur? (all you Raptards out there, listen up) 2012. LOL

Back to work!

~~

Little Things

2009-01-12T21:58:00.001-07:00

In the email from my friend Mary that I posted yesterday, she expressed concern about sharing her doubts and struggles -- because they were embarrassing. What I've found is that often it turns out not to be embarrassing at all because the person we're sharing with turns out to be going through the same sorts of things. Externally different, maybe, but internally the same. It's really encouraging to be able to compare notes, make application, bounce ideas off each other when we're both struggling with the same things. But you'll never know it if you don't open up.

When Mary said she feared that if she complained or expressed what she was going through, it would seem insignificant, I could relate. I have the same fears, the same thoughts. Here is this huge battle going on in my soul, that I can't seem to win, and I think of people on the outside looking in thinking it is nothing. And it probably is.

But I'm coming to believe that the things we tend to dismiss as nothing are often the most damaging areas of battle. Because the battle IS primarily one of thoughts. And personally I've always thought that it's the small struggles that are the ones that matter. The place where the battle is won. The big things, what are you going to do? The house is lost, the health is gone, the child is dead. You have little choice but to accept it...It's big and obvious Suffering. People understand and offer sympathy. But the little things are hidden, constant, not regarded as "anything" and can take us down so fast, so efficiently half the time we don't even know what's happened.

I think it's significant that we're warned in 2 Ti 2:4 not to get entangled in the everyday affairs or details of life. In Luke 16:10 we're told that the one who is faithful in the little things, will be faithful in the big things.

Little things, little thoughts, the stupid, petty things that get us out of fellowship. Someone's remark, you drop the box of eggs on the floor and they break, someone tracks mud in, the neighbor throws junk metal over the fence, you said something stupid to someone and now you feel guilty, there's dust on the piano, you're not getting everything done you "need" to... stupid, petty, little details. Yet that's where the battles are fought and won. Or lost. Though of course all it takes is rebound and now you've won.

I've found for myself that sometimes some of the little things, little thoughts, inconsequential matters really, are so little and inconsequential I don't even consider the fact that they might have gotten me out of fellowship. I'm not on guard against them. It doesn't even dawn on me to beware. They're small like a mosquito, yet like a malaria carrying mosquito they can make you very sick and cause a lot of problems.

Lately I've become more aware of when I start getting tense, and instead of going on to the various elaborations of tension, I stop and try to figure out what's happened, what small thing has just intruded to steal my peace. It's been a fruitful practice I think, because then I can confess it and put the correct thinking in its place.

~~~

A Trembling Puddle

2009-01-11T15:02:00.000-07:00

After last Thursday's blog post ("Perplexed...") I received a response that same night from a dear friend who is also marching along under Pastor McLaughlin's ministry out of Grace Bible Church in Somerset, MA. I thought her response was a great elaboration on the post itself, and expressed a lot of things I have felt or experienced. Because the concepts being taught right now are new and so against what we've always believed, I think it's edifying to "discuss" them in this way. So with her permission, I'm posting her words here today in the belief that other readers will find them as edifying and enriching as I did:

"I loved your blog tonight. Having listened to the same class, what you said about how it affected and encouraged you made great sense. I thought about you during class. It was a great lesson, one that makes me think about things differently than I'm used to.

"I almost hate to email lately, everything I go through is so embarrassing. It all seems like I'm chronicling failures, embarrassing doubts and fears. Yet, if I never talk about it then I wouldn't get to say what the Lord is showing me and I wouldn't have anything to talk about but the weather.

"Tonight's lesson makes me think that what I'm experiencing is part of God's love for me. He makes me face all the dark rooms in my soul that I'm trying to hide. A few years into doctrine I felt SO confident, I understood so many new things, I felt strong and assured. Now a few years later, I don't feel quite so confident in the same way. I had learned a lot of great things but not much had been tested. I didn't have to find out what I really think under pressure. Now, I'm usually shocked and dismayed to find out that I say I believe one thing but under pressure I don't really.

"I love what Pastor John said yesterday "Don't torment yourself because you don't FEEL like you've been trusting Him". I'm still here even if I'm not all I want to be. This is who I am. He's letting me see the instability of all my ways. I'm hoping that one day the confidence I'll have will be really and truly in Him and not false confidence. I thought that if I knew what I believed and why I believed what I believed and I had all the answers I wouldn't be insecure with people anymore or insecure within myself even and for a time I felt like that was accomplished. Well, that hasn't turned out to be true! lol.

"That wasn't the only reason why I wanted doctrine but it was high on the list. Doctrine as a system was going to solve all my problems without and within. Then I find that instead of better, I'm worse off than ever! All the old problems I've ever faced come screaming back into my life and I'm supposed to be handling it all exquisitely with the doctrine in my soul (that's what I want to happen) but I don't, usually the doctrine I've learned is the last thing I get to. I try what I've always tried and only after I'm a heap of rubble the Lord comes in and brings the doctrine I should have been thinking back to me.

"Then I go through the guilt and condemnation. Why can't I think right? Why don't I believe what I've learned? etc... I rebound a lot. I want to run everywhere for help except to Him. I want to be happy and He gives me sorrow. I want to be comforted and He wants me to be patient. I want to come out looking good and He doesn't care about that at all! I want to be strong and He is perfectly content if I'm just a trembling puddle on the floor. Sometimes I feel like I'm fighting with Him. He isn't doing what I want. Instead He's doing all this painful stuff that I can't even complain about because it would sound insignificant.

"So in tonight's lesson I learn that this is God loving me and it's sort of baffling. It wasn't MY idea of love. As a parent I sort of get it though. When I'm really loving my kids, it doesn't look all sweet and rosy. I've got a wooden spoon in my hand and I'm correcting. Still, I don't feel abandoned or hopeless or despairing. I'm often comforted by Him and He sends me lots of lessons that speak to my issues. He's always reminding me to rebound and He is correcting my thinking all the time. I know I'm loved. I suppose that by itself is worth it all."

Amen to all of that, Mary. Thanks for sharing. I am edified every time I reread your words and am reminded anew that God's thoughts are not our thoughts, His ways not our ways, and probably everything we thought the Christian way of life was supposed to be is not it at all. At least that's what He seems to be showing us lately. And it was cool the way Pastor, in his Friday night message, affirmed and amplified a lot of the thoughts you shared.

Perplexed...

2009-01-08T21:29:00.000-07:00

...but not despairing.

Well, according my schedule based on time I have left to finish The Enclave, I needed to get three chapters completed a week. Last week I did indeed do three chapters. Unfortunately one of them I hadn't counted in my assessment of what I had left to do, so I really got only two chapters done.

This week, I ran into a series of severe time inconsistencies in the narrative I had no idea were there and set about fixing them. That's led to yet another recasting of events in chapters 15, 21 and 25. And to perhaps changing quite a bit of what's going to happen in ch 29, which is where I left off with the other plotline in this book of two parallel plots/worlds last week.

So. I don't think I'm going to meet my goal this week either. (What a shock! LOL) But that's okay because some very cool stuff has been happening spiritually. The last two messages (tonight and last night) from GBC were amazingly on target with what I was experiencing. Or, considering how often that happens, maybe not so amazing, but I guess it's not a bad thing to be continually surprised and delighted when God makes it so very clear He knows exactly what's going on not just in my life but in my head, and answers me.

Anyway, today I was thinking that it must really be my fault that I've had such problems progressing through this book. I just must be failing to exercise the proper self-discipline. I need to be more disciplined. As I was concluding this, I remembered there was a quote on the matter somewhere in one of my little books I gather such things. I went searching for it, but couldn't find it. Oh well, I must not have needed to read it.

Four hours later the message from the pulpit tonight said the exact opposite. It's not a lack on my part. It's God putting me into a situation where I'm not comfortable, where I'm not being successful, where I'm perplexed (and the definition of that word was so right on target it blew me away: "not to know what to do, not to know what to decide, not to have enough resources, to be embarrassed!").

God's the one who's releasing this story, and I've always known that. He's not doing it as fast as I'd like because it's a distressing situation. It's a pressure situation, a perplexing situation and those are the situations where He is really able to show us His love for us. It doesn't make sense from human perspective, because we don't show love for each other that way. But He knows what's best and the only way we're going to learn certain things, and the only way sometimes we're going to see His hand in a way that will really make an impression. That's usually a pressure situation. The one I'm involved in right now demands that I just keep going back to him again and again.

Today I likened the experience to chasing madly after a rabbit over hill and dale, down one street, then another and suddenly the rabbit leaps through a wall and disappears and you, chasing it, crash hard into the same wall and fall stunned in the street. That is literally about how fast a thought line, a plot line, a flow of words and thoughts can dry up on me. I'm following a promising sequence along, and suddenly hit a dead end. What would I do if I'd really slammed into a wall and lay there in the street, no idea whatsoever where the rabbit is now or what to do about it? I'd go to the Lord. What do I do now?

So I did. And a little later something else developed... I don't think I have quite managed to express what I'm trying to. I think I must still be processing it all.

But it was cool to be told this wasn't my fault. That everything that's involved in this situation is by His decree for my blessing and His glory.

"We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body... " 2 Co 4:8-10

And now, I shall go and ponder this further.

Blockbuster or Bust

2009-01-06T19:39:00.000-07:00

The other day I came across an interesting article on the Wall Street Journal Online called Blockbuster or Bust Why struggling publishers will keep placing outrageous bids on new books

It talks about how even in our difficult economic times publishers still make it a practice to put big, big bucks on books they hope will turn out to be blockbusters, and how the entire system actually runs in such a way as to discourage anything else. They also rely on the big sellers to support the other books on their lists. One company cites the fact that 80% of its sales and an even larger share of its profits came from just 20% of its titles in 2006.

As an example the article cited publisher Grand Central, which in 2007 allegedly paid $1.25 million to buy the rights to Vicki Myron's "Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched The World," a nonfiction book about an abandoned kitten found in the returned-book slot of an Iowa public library. Why did they choose this book for all that money? The selling point is that it's like the recent blockbuster, Marley and Me (a recently released movie, which I have yet to see but intend to; not sure Marley has anything on Quigley, actually).

I've always been somewhat annoyed when marketers, agents, editors, and assorted publishing advice givers want me to tell what other books on the market are like mine, because for a long time I didn't know of any. I would say well The Enclave is like Sigmund Brouwer's Double Helix because it's got genetics in it. But Enclave isn't anything like Double Helix. Or, the Legends of the Guardian King series is like Lord of the Rings. But different. (Which is like saying chocolate chip cookies are like brownies, but different, in my opinion). The LOTR tie was the route marketers took, for better or for worse with Legends of the Guardian King. There really wasn't anything else out there. And after reading the article, I understand a little more why they do it.

Here's an excerpt:

"Media companies' hit-focused marketing did not emerge in a vacuum. It reflects how consumers make choices. The truth is that consumers prefer blockbusters. Because they are inherently social, people find value in reading the same books and watching the same movies that others do. This is true even in today's markets where, thanks to the Internet, buyers have easy access to millions and millions of titles. Compounding this tendency is the fact that media products are what economists call "experience goods": that is, shoppers have trouble evaluating them before having consumed or experienced them. Unable to judge a book by its cover, readers look for cues as to its suitability for them, and find it very useful to hear that "Dewey" is "a 'Marley & Me' for cat lovers." In much the same way that potential publishers do, readers value resemblances to past favorites.

I think I must be different than most readers, and maybe my trouble finding books that are like mine to offer marketers as sales tools originates in my relationship with reading. First of all, I'm more likely NOT to read a book that's a blockbuster because so many of them have been disappointments.

Second, when I look at the stories and books I've loved, I don't see a lot of resemblance to each other among them: Watership Down, Lord of the Rings, Horatio Hornblower, The Farseer Trilogy, Watchers, Miles Vorkosigan, Captain Blood, Jurassic Park, Without Remorse, The Scarlet Pimpernel... In fact, I tend not to like books that are like my favorites and try them with trepidation and the expectation that they will not measure up. I adore Forester's Hornblower series, own almost every one of them (I have 9 of the 11 books in the series, plan to eventually buy the other two), and have read many of them multiple times. I couldn't make it through the first chapter of Patrick O'Brien's sea stories, even though they're supposed to be similar. They're not, not to my way of thinking. I didn't even like the movie, and that was with Russell Crowe in it. (Which was admittedly the best part of it... Okay, I like the sea and the ship stuff, but the whole rest of the story was not my cup of tea.)

I loved Watership Down. But Redwall is in the pile with the O'Brien Books. Lord of the Rings has a ton of ripoffs and I'll admit I did like The Sword of Shannara when I read it as a young adult because it was simpler and shorter and easier to read. That opinion has not survived the years, however, and has, in fact, reversed. LOTR has a lot more depth and substance and now Shannara just seems...like a rip off. There are multitudes of Clancy and Koontz clones, too, but I haven't been able to generate interest in any of them.

Well, I always knew I was not in the mainstream. Because there is one main similarity between 60% of the titles I listed above just off the top of my head and that's the science fiction/fantasy/action element. Which right there puts you out of the mainstream.

You can read the full article HERE.

~~~

Yet Another Extension

2009-01-05T19:10:00.000-07:00

A week ago Monday, on Dec 29, I chanced to look at a calendar, which I had consciously not been doing, and realized there was no way apart from a miracle that I was going to finish The Enclave by Jan 15. So I emailed my editor to see if she was in the office. She was. I explained that no matter what I tried, I couldn't get things to flow any faster than about 2 chapters a week, and sometimes 3. I figured I had loosely 18 chapters worth of material left to go through. At my past and present rate of progress, that would take me 9 more weeks. I could just bull my way through, I said, and let it be bad, illogical, inconsistent, etc. At least then it would be done and maybe no one but me would notice.

She said she wanted it to be the best story it could be and so has given me yet another extension for this book that will not end. Or maybe it's just that from the beginning I underestimated the amount of time I'd need to write it. Because I've been writing for 30 years, and during all that time 2 chapters a week is probably a good average rate for me. Anyway, bottom line she gave me 6 weeks because that worked out well for the schedule. It's now due February 9 and if I make that, it should slide right into their plans for a summer release.

And if I don't? Then I guess God has another plan.

~~

Patience

2009-01-04T20:15:00.000-07:00

Part of living in the freedom that Christ died for me to have is learning to enjoy my writing process instead of stressing out about it. I've been learning this for a long time, and stressing out about it longer. Over and over, again and again. I am a slow learner. But then, there are many forces arrayed against my learning this lesson, and, as I'm discovering, no lesson, no substantial and lasting change is made except by baby steps.

Which is kind of what this post is going to be about, but from a different angle. As I was faced with a stuck point last week in chapter 21 (formerly 16) (I'm now working through Enclave's second major plot thread, which means I had to go back to the beginning and pick up those chapters I'd skipped on my previous run through) I found myself doing all the usual things I do when stuck. When I considered the material I saw only that there were problems -- lots of them -- and that much was going to have to be rewritten, but I had no idea how, in what way, or anything. My mind was blank and dead. Worse, it kept flitting around, distracted by everything, thinking of all manner of other things I could be doing. hmmm. I think I've described this before. I pulled down my Overcoming Writing Blocks book, and read that exact description for being blocked.

Except, for the first time I realized I wasn't really "blocked." When you consider the principle that waiting is the main state of living, and the open doors are few, then really I'm not blocked, I'm just waiting. Waiting is, as I think I've said before, also the main state of writing. Most of the time I'm not writing. I'm either thinking and researching, or I'm... dinking around, flitting from thing to thing, wanting to do anything but write and then condemning myself for it and getting more and more impatient with myself.

But... if waiting is the main part of writing, if the long-established pattern is that there will be this time when my mind is blank and the stage is empty and nothing seems to be happening, why can't I just accept that? And not as a bad thing, as part of it. Like accepting sleep. We have to sleep. If we don't, strange things happen at best and at worst we get sick or go insane. I actually enjoy sleep. I don't begrudge it. I embrace it.

So... why not embrace these empty times? Just part of the process.

Good idea, I thought. I'll go do a nonstop. As I was writing the nonstop, which was sheer blither, it suddenly occurred to me to look up patience on the Internet. I don't think that suggestion originated from me, because what I found has been... well it remains to be seen if this is a key, but it seems like it.

This definition showed up on a website called Coping.org: "Patience is the ability to sit back and wait for an expected outcome without experiencing anxiety, tension, or frustraton."

Whoa! That's Faith Rest in a nutshell.

Patience is the ability to sit back (as in take your hands and nose out of the work and just observe) and wait for an expected outcome... An expected outcome. As in, God is going to come through and show me where I'm to go with this portion of the story in His time. It will come. I've been through this countless times before and it always comes, so why, why, why should I get all flustered and bothered by it? It's part of the process. Like cells after they divide, they have to rest. There is no activity. They rest for most of the cell division period and then they divide again.

Patience is the ability to sit back and wait for an expected outcome without experiencing anxiety, tension or frustration. So if Iam experiencing anxiety, tension or frustration, well then I am not focused on the fact that there is an expected outcome, which will occur and that that occurance doesn't really depend on me.

It depends on God. Who is all powerful, faithful, who loves me beyond my capacity to understand or really appreciate, who has already chosen every thing that is to happen in my life for my benefit and blessing and often pleasure.

If I'll just do things His way and stop worrying about the future, stop bothering about the past and stop getting all caught up in my timetable but remember that I'm His servant, on His timetable and He will release the story in His time and in His way and not mine. His plan is about Him bringing glory to Himself through us, and it will go forward, unfolding as He has decreed and all my little breaks in concentration and flitting about will do nothing to stop that plan. He knows I'm a silly, stupid, sheep, easily distracted, easily frightened by shadows, pieces of paper and other inconsequential things. And He can handle it in spite of all that.

Freedom!!!!

To Live in Freedom

2009-01-01T21:24:00.001-07:00

Happy New Year 2009!

Wow, the years just seem to go faster and faster. I can't believe it's already 2009, which I'm pretty sure is I said when we started 2008. I have thought, periodically about posting some end of the year reflections. I thought of posting Christmas thoughts too, because I had some thoughts about Mary that I'd never considered before. The moment is past but... maybe I'll just share those thoughts anyway...

In the course of listening to the Christmas story over the holidays, I was struck with the manner in which God the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary so that only she knew the truth. No one else knew for sure. God did not send the angel to her family or her town. Not even to Joseph, though He did give him the dream later. Now do you really think anyone believed she'd gotten pregnant by God and was carrying the promised Messiah? Especially since God had been silent with Israel for the last 400 years and now this complete nobody of a girl from a hillbilly town was carrying the son of God in her womb? Who would believe that? Translate that to your sister, daughter, cousin or friend. And God did not tell anyone else what was going on. He made her look like an unwed mother. Like a fornicator. And He didn't do anything to make it appear any different for at least thirty years.

Why? She was a spiritual girl. She was loved God. She was making good decisions, and yet... she would not have appeared in any way to be virtuous to those around her. People would have ostracized her for her supposed sin and immorality, would have judged her, talked about her behind her back, and Joseph, too, because nobody else got the angel message. Yet here she was, in all her apparent "immorality," an integral part of the greatest spiritual event ever to happen in all of time. God becoming a man. And look how it was presented to the world.

God's ways are not our ways. His thoughts are not our thoughts. Pastor
Bob has been saying lately that with God, everything is opposite the way it is for man.

That has application for us. We think it's important to appear respectable. God obviously does not. Not only was a shadow of impropriety cast over Mary for years, Jesus had it even worse. He was crucified, stark naked on a Roman cross beside the city gates as a common criminal. For all sorts of people to walk by and gawk at.

Mary was condemned by people for doing something she didn't do, because that was the only way they could see the situation. Jesus was condemned by many also for doing things he didn't do, because that was the only way they could evaluate the facts they had. In neither instance did the observers have all the facts.

How often do we condemn ourselves for things we have failed to do, or did poorly, and yet we don't have all the facts either. Or, if we do, we're not thinking about them right then. Facts like as believers in Christ we are perfectly righteous and that's how God sees us, that we are not to be concerned with what others think, or what they do, only with the thoughts of the one who has saved us. In fact, we're not even to be too concerned with what we think about what we did. We're to be concerned with what HE did.

God doesn't want us to be occupied with our sins and failures. Nor does He want us to be occupied with how to be better. He wants us occupied with His son. With all that He has done for us.

I took Quigley on a walk around the park today and reflected on some of the things God was doing just there... I was healthy and so was Quigley, it was a beautiful day, the scenery was wonderful, there were no worries of being bombed or finding myself in the middle of a gunfight between opposing armies/sects/gangs. Quigley's learning to be a fairly decent walking companion... those are just the outward things.

More are the doctrines and truths that He's providing. Fantastic things that I see are life changing. Rooting out all the old ways that are going in the opposite direction from God's direction, and setting a new course for me. Or rather, showing me the course He's always had me on. Jesus died to make me free. I am called to live in that freedom.

And that would be my New Year's Resolution, if I made resolutions. To live in the freedom that Christ has called me to, that He died for me to have.

Censoring Global Warming

2008-12-22T09:32:00.000-07:00

Dec 18, on CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, CNN Meteorologist Chad Myers said:

“You know, to think that we could affect weather all that much is pretty arrogant.Mother Nature is so big, the world is so big, the oceans are so big – I think we’re going to die from a lack of fresh water or we’re going to die from ocean acidification before we die from global warming, for sure.”

Meyers is the 2nd CNN meterologist to challenge the indea that global warming is a result of human activity. In 2007 Rob Marciano said that Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth had inaccuracies and that he didn't think global warming caused Katrina. He got such flak for it, he recanted the next day. Hmmm.

You can read the full article here. In it you'll find links to another equally interesting report from the Business and Media Institute on how reporting on Global Warming has been censored in the media. No big surprise there, for those who've been paying attention, but BMI took a look at the numbers, noting both how many times the MSM reported from the side that Global Warming is universally agreed to be true, versus how many times they reported a dissenting view. The ratio is horrendously lopsided (only 20% of stories even suggested there might be differing views on this issue.)

It's also lopsided with regard to their so-called experts and interviewees. For every 13 proponents, there was one skeptic on average. And among proponents, only 15% were actually scientists. The other 85% were politicians, celebrities, journalists or unidentified people on the street. You can read that report summary here: Global Warming Censored

~~~

Failure

2008-12-18T21:54:00.000-07:00

"Some of the very best lessons that God has to teach us are often missed because they come in the back door of our lives. They are sprung on us and we are not ready to take them in the particular package in which God delivers them, and it's easy to miss them. However, when we learn to wait upon the Lord and His timing, then we will begin to see things from the divine perspective. For example, FAILURE. That's one of the back door experiences in life because we are so success-oriented. It is our interpretation that every failure represents a waste of time, or a setback. When in reality, failure might very well be the avenue to teach us that special lesson which could never be learned without it: waiting upon God."

~From Tree of Lifes for 2000...

The last time I read this lesson, I applied it to large failures -- failure to sell the book, stay in print, acquire readers (none of which, I realize now, I have any control over). But this time I'm seeing it on a small scale: a daily occurrence in my life. That's what's been going on for some time with writing. I measure success by writing something that I will keep -- good, solid, material. Anything else is a degree of failure. I'm not producing! Me. I. But shift it on to Him: I'm to be waiting on His timing, not my own. And every day there is a failure it reminds me I have to go back to Him.

If the book was just writing itself, flowing onto the page smoothly, I'd not be learning a thing.

Waiting

2008-12-16T21:16:00.000-07:00

Remember that in a period of waiting, when the door is closed, that doesn't mean you're out of the will of God, it means you're right in the will of God. The open door is the exception in life, and the rest is filled with red lights. Our problem is often not our weakness, but our competence. Our professional expertise, our brains; we are highly capable, we don't really need Him... [Except He'll make sure we eventually see that we most certainly do need him.]

We're to wait in stability and confidence. Silently.

Waiting on God is resting, not worrying.

--From Tree of Lifes for 2000, Robert R. McLaughlin, p82

Reading these concepts I can see the purpose in what I'm experiencing. The approach of the deadline makes those waiting periods that occur in the midst of the rewriting process harder. There is always the temptation to look into the future and try to put it all together, to see how much work there is and how I'm going to do it all -- delusional for sure, since I really don't know at this point. (I'm actually thinking that I'm not going to have to go through all the events that I set down in my first draft, that things are going to be cut out and consolidated, but right now, I don't know which ones)

But in waiting under these conditions, and doing it confidently and in rest, I would truly be giving it to him. I can trust Him to handle it all in accordance with His plan, not mine. Trust Him to move me to work when it's time and relax while I wait. If I was waiting for someone to arrive at the house, I would consciously dink around with unimportant tasks so that when the time comes and the arrive I could drop it all and be ready to visit with them...

Some of the things I turn to during the blank, waiting periods really are no different from the dinking around one might do while waiting for a guest to arrive.

-----

Let Him Do It

2008-12-14T17:25:00.000-07:00

Today I thought I'd set down some recent thoughts I've been grappling with, spawned as much from our daily Bible classes as from what I'm dealing with in my life.

It's a little bit confusing. Or seems so. I know I'm to live in peace and relaxation in the Lord. He has won the victory already, and in Him so have I. His burden is easy, His load is light. I am not called to torture myself with guilt and fear. I'm not supposed to be occupied with my performance, neither how bad it is, nor what to do about it/how to improve it. I'm already holy in His eyes and am to live one day at a time, focused on Him.

But when I get stuck in the writing, as I have been repeatedly of late, instead of waiting patiently for Him to move in me, I get antsy and restless and anxious. As I'm flitting around from thing to thing (reading email, or Drudge, vacuuming, writing in my journal) the anxiety and condemnation mount.

"You have no self discipline! Get to work! Your time is running out! Here's a vision of the disaster that awaits you!"

Now the anxiety swells into panic as I contemplate the vision... This is NOT living in the Royal Family Honor Code. This is sinning. Guilt and panic are not conviction. They are sins, spawned by arrogance. There is now NO condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. Cease striving and know that I am God. He will do all He has assigned me to do. When I am afraid I will trust in Him. Stand still and see the deliverance of the Lord.

Condemnation and panic are how the world motivates. They are how I in my old nature have long motivated myself. They are in fact, my flesh's most powerful and oft-used motivators, so when I hit the lulls when my mind is not actively engaged with production, when I hit the blank spaces, that's when the flesh begins to seek control.

But I think, since God has said He is the one doing the work here, since He knows the whole story and could enable me to write it all at once, any time He wishes, but has not ... I think perhaps it is so I will back off this function of me trying to control my output and really just have to trust Him. Accept fully that I might miss the new deadline and trust Him to handle that.

Stop trying to predict or control what will happen and let His plan unfold and let Him take care of you. He loves you. He is for you. He really could give you the story in one complete download, or step by step with no gaps, no closed door periods. But He's not doing that, and you have to stop trying to blame yourself and trying to get yourself to do something. Stop looking to yourself and some improvement of your performance to solve the problem. You KNOW that's wrong. Relax and let Him parcel it out in HIS timing. Our lessons have repeatedly been about us stepping aside, that it's His work, not ours...

You must concentrate on recalling those concepts and believing them.

~~~

650 Dissent on Global Warming

2008-12-10T21:14:00.000-07:00

Wow. Today I discovered an article on the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Press Blog titled, UN Blowback: More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims

The subtitle is "Study: Half of warming due to Sun! –Sea Levels Fail to Rise? - Warming Fears in 'Dustbin of History' "

You can imagine how pleased I was to find this! It's coming out of Poznak, Poland where the UN global warming conference is going on and which "is about to face a serious challenge from over 650 dissenting scientists from around the globe who are criticizing the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore. Set for release this week, a newly updated U.S. Senate Minority Report features the dissenting voices of over 650 international scientists, many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN."

650 international scientists now claim there is no man-made global warming. That number is 12 times the 52 scientists who authored the UN's 2007 Summary for Policy makers.

Here are some quotes:

“I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion.” - Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.

“Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly….As a scientist I remain skeptical.” - Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology and formerly of NASA who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called “among the most preeminent scientists of the last 100 years.”

Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” - UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.

“It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” - U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.

“Gore prompted me to start delving into the science again and I quickly found myself solidly in the skeptic camp…Climate models can at best be useful for explaining climate changes after the fact.” - Meteorologist Hajo Smit of Holland, who reversed his belief in man-made warming to become a skeptic, is a former member of the Dutch UN IPCC committee.

“Many [scientists] are now searching for a way to back out quietly (from promoting warming fears), without having their professional careers ruined.” - Atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh.

I especially like this one, because it says exactly what I believe, that is that Global warming is a hoax, created and sustained for the purpose of gaining control of a large group of people:

“Creating an ideology pegged to carbon dioxide is a dangerous nonsense…The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control, a pretext for major businesses and political battle. It became an ideology, which is concerning.” - Environmental Scientist Professor Delgado Domingos of Portugal, the founder of the Numerical Weather Forecast group, has more than 150 published articles.

In fact, I read another article about how for the first time in all of our history is is finally possible to actually have a one world government and that global concerns like the energy crisis and stopping global warming may just be the forces that will overcome our natural inclination toward national identities to bring about this one world order...

Other reports excerpted and linked to:

Sea Level rise 'has stumbled since 2005'

Recent worldwide land warming NOT a result of increasing greenhouse gases

2008 will be the coolest year of the decade..

And here we have President-elect Obama and the Democrats promising all this green activity and "change," our government looking at forcing the auto industry to make green cars -- should they actually be able to get their hands on those businesses and nationalize them -- so we can "save" the world. It's jaw-dropping. Wonder what will happen next!

(I can't believe the media would not report on this, but just now I did a quick scan of MSNBC and saw nothing about it. Of course the full report has not yet been released, but this, to me is huge news....

Having found nothing on the main page of MSNBC I clicked on weather and discovered the main article was "Warming Seas cited as World's Reefs Degrade". Hmmm

Then I went to CNN and they at least had an article on the Poznak climate talks with these "story highlights:"

"Climate experts hopeful politicians will agree a clear strategy at U.N. talks in Poznan."

"CEO The Climate Group: "We are moving towards a robust global framework"

"Global Climate Network urge leaders to focus on rolling out technology and finance"

So it sounds like they're full steam ahead over at CNN...Well, maybe tomorrow there will be something)

If you want to read the entire article on the 650 dissenters at the U.S. Senate Committee for Environment and Public Works, it is HERE.

~~~

The Grinding Wheel -- Part 2

2008-12-07T21:20:00.000-07:00

Wheel of Pain photo from the Conan the Barbarian

I got several responses to my blog of last Tuesday, the one with the nonstop, from kind readers offering comfort, encouragement, counsel and prayer. Thank you. I do appreciate your concern, your words and your prayers.

However, I felt quite foolish in realizing I'd created in some a sense of undue concern because I'd failed to communicate the fact that the crisis had been largely resolved by the time I got to the end of the nonstop. Or rather my thinking had been adjusted.

That's probably a shortcoming of the nonstop form, where you just set the timer and write whatever comes to mind for the designated period of time. Since I often start nonstops precisely because I'm stuck and frustrated or feeling like I can't write, it's common that the beginning of them is the ranty, gripey outpouring that appeared in Tuesday's blog. It's in the process of setting all that stuff down, that I see the lies for what they are, and inevitably get around to thinking truth instead. Sometimes that change doesn't always make it clearly to the page, because once the light has gone on and the struggle has ended, the pressure to keep writing goes away. (Or the timer went off... )

Since I had traveled through my frustration and despair to the metaphor of the grinding wheel and found that concept helpful, it seemed to me others might benefit from reading of my progression, moving from sinful, frustrated, self-absorbed, doubting thoughts, to the solution to any problem, which is always to remember who we are in Him, and get our eyes back on him. I also believed He was nudging me to post it, even though, raw and disjointed as it was, I wasn't sure anyone would even want to read it.

The crying jag did not come because I felt bad, though I see now that that was not remotely clear in the nonstop. It was more an expression of a deep and powerful emotion closer to appreciation than anything. The way God just breaks into the middle of your thinking and says the most increadible things. The fact He's there hearing it all, knowing exactly what silly path his child has taken for the moment and then exactly what it takes to get her back under His wings.

The point where the Lord said to me, "That is what made Conan strong" was what it took for me then. And I was amazed at how He had taken the bitter, frustrated direction of my thoughts (it's hard work and I'm walking around in circles) and in a second transformed the entire metaphor into something wonderful. Something encouraging, but something true. He showed me the truth of the situation, when I was looking at it through lie-tinted glasses. That blew my mind.

To be specific: the grinding wheel involves hard work, pain, and the perception of purposelessness, all of which are made more intense when you think you shouldn't be in it. But when you back up and realize that you have been put into it deliberately by God for His glory and your growth, that He in his perfection has chosen this very thing for you in all its specific detail, then you realize there is purpose. And wanting above all else to be conformed to His image, no matter what it takes, then the grinding wheel becomes not only acceptable but a thing of strange beauty.

That's what I was hoping to convey in that last post...

~~~

The Grinding Wheel

2008-12-02T22:10:00.000-07:00

Nonstop from earlier today:

I’m out of fellowship. I don’t know why. I think it’s because… I don’t know. I’m feeling very small and insignificant. Things are hard. The book is hard. It’s not going right. I think about the criticisms sure to come, the fact people just aren’t going to like it because it’s not what they are expecting.
They like those short stupid books I don’t like. So I’m not going to write one of those short stupid, nondoctrinal books that I don’t like. I’m going to write a book that’s not short, but still stupid and hardly any doctrine because I don’t know what I’m doing. This is frustrating. Is it because I’m not writing what I care about? No. Because I had this same problem with …

It was reading that article by Koontz yesterday! Now I’m down in the… no there’s tons of stuff besides that. The hope has fled. The book sucks. I can’t get it to be better than sucky. So I don’t want to do anything.

Father I need help. What do I think about? You called me to do this. You are, in fact, doing it through me. Then let me see something. Let me see...

I got distracted and now I’ve used up my time playing with my keyboard and I can’t type and…

Where was I? God has assigned me this task. To write this book. He will do it through me. I can only do the best that I can do and if it seems terribly lame, oh well. It’s got to be what He wants because He chose me and assigned me to do this.

Thinking about what others are going to think is totally wrong. Caring what people think of what I’m doing is wrong. And that’s what I’ve been doing here. Caring what people think. Thoughts of critics of Koontz come in. I don’t feel safe. I fear the criticism and … yet…. Of course. It’s in man’s nature to be critical and to find fault. You have been told that you are foolish to care what people think. You have to capture those thoughts.

Father, I need a clear path. Jesus… you didn’t care. You didn’t entrust yourself to them. How? What’s the line of thought I need here?

Feel bad because you're worried about what people think? Name that. I’ve been told not to do that. I’ve been told to care what God thinks. And what does God think? That I’ve already won it all. I already have everything in Him. He is seated at the right hand of God, master and ruler of the universe and I am in Him. So… why do I care what a grasshopper thinks? Which is pretty much what we all are compared to God.

The master of the universe, the creator of everything loved me so much He sent his son to die for me, so I could have everything, so I would not have to concern myself with what people think. For me to do so anyway… is gross.

Yes, the battle is intense. Sometimes I’m right in there. Sometimes I can see it clearly. I can see the reality of the word, the substance of the truth. But other times... I doubt.

What did Scott say about my work? NEVER DOUBT YOUR GIFT!!!!!!

And here you turn right around a week later and you’re doubting it. Totally. You think you’re all done, all washed up. That nothing is going to happen. That everything is going to crumble into nothing. RotGK is going to go Out of Print, and then the rest of it is a waste and… no one cares, no one likes it, it’s so hard, it’s not making any sense, I can’t even see the importance of it.

All I seem to hear in my head now is that it’s irrelevant. Why am I messing with Nephilim? The book should be about mystery doctrine! I’m not getting any good spiritual stuff in it at all, because the … because I can’t… because…

I think that’s what’s bugging me the most. There’s no spiritual value here. It’s hard. It seems wrong. It’s frustrating. I don’t know why. Why is it so hard? Shouldn’t it be easy? Lord you said you’d do it, so why aren’t you? Or if you are… could you give me a glimpse or something? If you want me to keep slogging in what seems to be a circle of going nowhere. Hard, hard work that’s just going to be eaten up, taken away. I’m just a slave in one of those pushing wheels. Where you go round and round and it grinds the wheat or whatever it does. I’m thinking of Conan the Barbarian in that wheel of pain thing. And…

And the Lord says, “But that is what made Conan strong.”

[Silence. Wonder. Amazement.]

Then I had a big crying-jag meltdown. Because I don’t feel strong. I feel like all I’m doing is blowing it. I’m doubting. I can’t make application. I can’t make myself work. The time shortens. I’m failing constantly. What I want to do, I’m not; what I don’t want to do, I am.

There is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. My yoke is easy, My burden is light. Why are you condemning yourself all the time? Why are you finding fault with the work and yourself all the time?

Didn’t your pastor just say, hasn’t he said repeatedly, "Stop focusing on your performance and what you’re doing? Stop trying to do better and focus on HIM. Stop looking at the problem. Look at HIM. The solution. What He did." He died so I would not have to live in bondage and condemnation. There is now no condemnation. Who is he who brings a charge against God's elect? Who is he who condemns? God is the one who justifies. Why are you condemning, when God has pronounced you justified and righteous?

No one really understands what you're going through. Well, God, yes, but not ... And look what happened to you this weekend. All the stuff that went on, the problems, the difficulties. The mishaps. You serve and wipe yourself out, are all beaten and battered and sore from standing and Quigley, and all that… and there is this… deadline. This task. This thing…

Ah. Yes. Don’t think of that. When you are at the grinding wheel you are just moving around in a circle. It’s hard, you can’t stop, but there’s not a lot of distraction.

So correct thoughts here are… I am already one hundred percent accepted in Christ. God sees me as perfect, as righteous, as justified, I’m living with Him forever. He sent his son to die for me – so I can live in freedom and peace and humility NOW. It’s arrogance that thinks you should do better.

Grindstone. You can’t see what you’re doing. You are putting out all this effort and the wheat is being ground, but you can’t see it. You don’t know what’s happening. And then the flour is taken away. And you don’t know what happens to it. It’s used to make all sorts of different things, that feed people, nourish them, make them happy, satisfied, build them up, give them strength…

But even that doesn't matter. My job is to focus on Him. To do this task with my eyes fixed firmly on Him. Maybe I am walking around and around in a circle. But I have to trust that this is where He’s put me, and that He will make something beautiful out of it in His time. He will do it.

I know I can’t see if the book is any good at this stage. I’m way too familiar with it. So just stop anguishing about it all and keep pushing forward, around and around and around... Til it's done.

The Black Swan

2008-12-01T21:53:00.000-07:00

"Before the discovery of Australia, people in the Old World were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence. The sighting of the first black swan might have been an interesting surprise for a few ornithologists (and others extremely concerned with the coloring of birds), but that is not where the significance of the story lies. It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single black bird."

~Opening paragraph, Prologue, from the book The Black Swan (The Impact of the Highly Improbable) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2007)

I love this encapsulation of human viewpoint. Of life by sight. It's unreliable. Everything we think is true, by sight, by what others tell us, even by what science tells us, is unreliable. It can be changed by a single observation or experience.

Not so the Word of God. Our lessons of late, as I mentioned, have focused on challenging us to live in the truths of what the Word of God says we are: spiritual royalty, in union with the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, possessors of everything He possesses. God is for us, so who can be against us. At salvation God made us new creatures and crucified the old man on the Cross with Christ. We have His perfect righteousness. God sees us as perfectly righteous right now, and He is perfectly satisfied with us Right Now because of what His son did on the Cross.

We don't have to overcome sins and failures, merely rebound them. They're already judged, already removed. It just doesn't always seem like it. None of what we are in Christ "seems like it" while we are living in this fallen world. But our position in Christ, the reality of His word and of His promises, are the only really reliable things we have. We must learn to live in those and not in the kind of knowledge that can be nullified with a single new piece of information...

~~~

Progress Report

2008-11-30T16:22:00.000-07:00

Yes, I'm still blogging. Though it may be sporadic for the month of December since I will be working hard to finish The Enclave by the beginning of January. I've already decided to postpone our annual Christmas trip to California until February (since there's really no way I could work at the level I'll need to be then from a hotel room). I am not thinking about all I have to do, or how it's going to be done. I am relying totally on the Lord to see it done. (The alternative is mindless panic, stress, guilt, sin, frustration. Did I mention panic??)

"For it is God who is at work at you both to will (proper motivation) and to execute for His good pleasure.

I will cry to God most High; to God who accomplishes all things for me.

Faithful is He who has called you and He will also bring it to pass."

I'm taking him at his word, claiming these promises utterly.

Classes lately have been all about not being occupied with sins and failures, not trying to do better and fix ourselves, but to fix our eyes upon Jesus, who is seated at the right hand of the Father, and the fact that we are seated there with Him, positionally. When you claim this fact and look down at it all as finished, that does change things.

The other thing to focus on is doing His will, not mine. I'm not going to worry about whether I'm failing to be diligent or self-disciplined. That's God's problem, because those are fruits of the Spirit not the fruits of Karen.

Staying home from the conference as great and I am more certain than ever that's what I was to do. This last holiday, Thanksgiving, though, I did not work a lick, beyond a random hour here or there to consider the next sequence, which for awhile seemed hopelessly wrong without alternative. (I am currently working on chapter 25, which in the "first" draft was chapter 19).

Thanksgiving day also completely wiped me out. I was a zombie on Friday, and really sore on Saturday, especially in my hip joints (possibly from being pulled to the ground in the attempt to restrain Quigley the night before). That made it hard to sit and concentrate. There were myriads of other distractions as well, since my son was staying with us (ie, in my writing room). Granted he was not in the writing room all that much of the time, but just having him here, and all the other things going on made it hard to focus. Plus it's hard to focus when you're a zombie.

Tomorrow (Monday) I have only to go across town to pick up my replacement sunglasses clip, which was ordered a month and half ago, I think, got lost in the cracks and came in last week. That could work into a good time of thinking. We'll see.

As soon as I finish this blog post I'm going to turn my attention to The Enclave, and maybe do something easy like put in changes on an earlier chapter. We still have dinner and Quigley walking to do, too. Oh, and ironing...

~~~

How Obama Got Elected

2008-11-20T21:17:00.000-07:00

Hey! I'm actually focusing on writing. It's still slow going, but a lot of stuff is happening in the places where I am. If that makes any sense.

So. Short blog posts or, in this case, a video are the order of the day. I first saw this a couple of days ago. Some say it's about "stupid" Obama voters, but I think it's more a picture of the influence of the media, the state of our culture today, and something of an indictment on our public educational system, which I don't think stresses the importance of knowing what's going on, how government works, etc., nearly enough.

It's part of a project by John Ziegler to produce a documentary called How Obama Got Elected. On election day 12 Obama voters were interviewed after they left the polls for the purpose of learning how media impacted their knowledge. They were chosen, says the website, "for their apparent intelligence/verbal abilities and willingness to express their opinions to a large audience." Ziegler also commissioned a Zogby telephone poll of 512 Obama voters using the same questions (you can read more about those results on the website.) In most cases the questions were multiple choice among the 4 presidential and vice-presidential candidates.

The video, below, is about 9 minutes long, but quite fascinating. (Feedblitz subscribers: I think you'll have to click on the blog post title to take you to the blog itself to view the video)

What's especially striking to me today, is, as important as the presidential election is, even more important is knowing who God is, and I suspect if a similar sort of poll were conducted involving basic questions regarding God's essence and nature the results would be even worse. And for the same reason, which is that mostly people are involved in themselves and the small details of their own lives, content to accept without question information that affirms their pre-existing ideas, and not terribly interested in investigating information that doesn't.

~~~

The New Star Trek Movie

2008-11-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

I remember (this will surely date me) when the original Star Trek TV show came out. My friends and I had seen the trailers for weeks, read the articles in TV Guide and the newspaper and could not wait. I believe I was in the seventh or eighth grade (I could go research and figure it out exactly but I'm not going to take the time; this isn't a legal deposition, after all).

I was already a big fan of science fiction and fantasy. For years I'd watched those weird movies on Saturday afternoon which today are mocked and ridiculed on things like Mystery Science Theater. The Giant Behemoth. Godzilla. Frankenstein. Dracula. The Blob. It Came from Outer Space. The Creature from Black Lagoon. All in black and white and cornball as can be. The special effects were ridiculous. The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits were better, but they worked more on suggestion and less on actual special effects.

But as we had nothing else to compare them to, they worked. Books, of course were better and I was already a voracious reader of Andre Norton, Heinlein, Asimov...

The night of Star Trek's premiere, one of my friends hosted a special Star Trek party, and we all went over and watched it. In color. When it was over, everyone just sat where they were. Awed. That was SO COOL!!

I loved Spock. I think we all did. I loved Kirk in a kind of amused and tolerating way. McCoy for some reason was my favorite. I couldn't stand Nurse Whatsherface (with the crush on Spock and the basket hairdo) or Chekov, but Sulu was cool. That first season was just awesome. I audio taped the episodes and played them back repeatedly "watching" the show again through my ears alone. I memorized a lot of lines. ("Captain! Lt Sulu is on deck 4 attacking crewmen with a sword!").

The second season was good too, but then it began to get silly. I only watched the final season off and on and was put off every time I did. The movies resurrected to some degree the original tone and quality and I enjoyed all of them. The characters were by then old friends.

Maybe that's why The Next Generation just never clicked with me. (Or maybe because I'm of the Last Generation...) I liked Pikard and Data, but everyone else drove me up the wall, particularly Capt. Riker. I liked the third series, the one with the woman captain, even less. So I approach the notion of a new movie, with new actors playing my old favorites, telling the story of their youths before the Enterprise with some trepidation.

Today I found the trailer they've just put online. And... it looks pretty good! Simon Pegg as Scotty, though? He'll probably be fun, but ... And the guy they got to play a young Spock looks pretty... baby-faced, I guess and one thing I never thought of Spock as being was baby-faced, not even when he was a baby. And the young Kirk, is, well, not Kirk but... A sexy romance between Kirk and Uhura? That doesn't seem right... But I admit those are the usual sorts of objections from ancient fans like myself -- we only like old things! LOL. Maybe. Because despite all that, I'm intrigued.

Anyway, here it is, for those of you interested in this sort of thing.

The Daily Mail Online article ("Star Trek gets a sexy makeover in new film with love scenes, motorbikes and hunky stars") with still pictures and a bigger sized video if you scroll down is here. I don't know how long it will be up.

Just the video, but much smaller, is here.

Enjoy!

~~~

A Private Retreat

2008-11-17T21:46:00.001-07:00

Well. I was supposed to go to the San Francisco Bible Conference last week, scheduled to leave Thursday and return today (Monday). I had my plane ticket, my hotel reservations, and had even gotten my suitcase out in preparation for packing. But Enclave had not been going well, and distractions just weren't ending. We had a birthday celebration for my mother on Tuesday night, during which Thanksgiving and Christmas were discussed. Maybe that triggered it.

Or maybe the Lord just used it. I don't know. Whatever the case, I was awakened at 4:15am Wednesday morning by a hot flash (not unusual) and was flooded with the sense that I should not go. That I needed to stay home and concentrate on the book.

Lately the Lord had been dealing with me on the matter of taking this part of His calling on my life more seriously. If you've been reading this blog for any lenght of time you may have noticed that I've been struggling to apply some of the principles I've been learning -- most notably the concept of rest. I have never been sure how to rest and at the same time do the work. Most problematic of course was that horrid deadline. Should I completely ignore it and just live my life like a normal person, doing whatever came up, writing as I could and let the Lord handle it? Well that was one way to maintain rest.

Sort of.

But over the last few weeks I think I was being shown something else. Not that I need the deadline, but that I have an unusual calling, one that seems to require solitude, and much time for contemplation. The sheer number of things that had crowded into my mind compromised my ability to concentrate on the word. And maybe I should be taking that work more seriously. Not to the point where I obsessed about the deadline, but where I started choosing for it over other things.

So there I was Wednesday morning, faced with the sudden conviction that I should stay home. Yes, it's a good thing to go to the conference and fellowship with the other attendees, to build them up, to encourage the pastor(s). I've done any number of them. I'd sacrificed time to work on the book just last August for one. Maybe it was time now to sacrifice time at the conference (for I absolutely love going to them) for the sake of the book.

It was one of those choices where both seem right, but you can only choose one. In the the end, talking it over with a friend, she pointed out that I was only seeking to do what God wanted me to do. Whatever I decided he would bless it, because the motivation was right.

I had already decided that I would go and work on the plane and in between lessons... so the whole idea of fellowshipping was already curtailed in my thinking. To go, to have to spend Wednesday preparing, then Thursday traveling... and how could I gather my material properly to work on it somewhere totally outside my comfort zone, as one of the pastors taught over the weekend? Not just out of my comfort zone, but on an old laptop I never use, with a different program, a flat keyboard, no printer. I wouldn't have my files, my papers...

So I decided to stay home, looking at it as a matter of caring for my own vineyard, which is a concept we've been repeatedly exposed to of late in our Bible classes. I canceled my flight (I love Southwest -- didn't lose any of the money, and have it for the next conference I need to fly to. Maybe Florida???) and my hotel reservations. Except for the one friend I talked it over with, and one other, I kept my decision secret, deciding to act as if I was out of town, still get the lessons, but beyond that devote all my time to writing.

Wow. That level of concentrated focus really made a difference. What I thought I would work on, I didn't. What I did, was very difficult. I became enmeshed in a dilemma of which of several scenes to put in what order, and what day should I start them on. Should I begin the narrative on Monday and just do a summary til I got to Wednesday, or should I start on WEdnesday. Should I start with Cam? Or Lacey?

In the end I had to go back to chapters 19 and 20 and redo the endings on them, putting in material I was trying to stuff into 22 and 23. It's made 19 and 20 much stronger. A lot of things emerged over the weekend, time which I had mostly to myself, since my husband had other activities that kept him away most of the days. I really started learning how to listen to the Lord.

It's been so cool to be blank and just go to Him and say what should I do? Then I listen and He tells me. It's step by step. Moment by moment. I am not thinking about the deadline at all. I've given it over to Him. Again. I've also given over myself to Him, too, since I have been so utterly incompetent at managing myself. He'll have to do it. The cool thing is, he's eternal and omniscient so in His perfect plan He's already factored in all my screw ups.

So this marks the end of my little "retreat" but it's been very enlightening and I think I will be doing a lot more guarding of both my time and my mind in the days to come.

Good Man, Bad Rap

2008-11-09T17:21:00.000-07:00

I've for the most part left politics behind, now, but have just a couple more things that I found of interest which I'd like to share over the next couple of days.

The first is an article in the Washington Post by Staffwriter Dan Eggen, that appeared on Sunday, November 2, 2008. Yes, the Sunday before the election. I saw the headline on Drudge and it caught my eye immediately because it echoes how I feel. It's called, 'My Heart and My Values Didn't Change' -- In Bush, Loyalists See a Good and Steadfast Man Who Has Gotten a Bad Rap

It starts:

On a cold, gray morning a week before Election Day, President Bush briefly emerged from the White House for an unannounced visit to the headquarters of the Republican National Committee in Southeast Washington.

Outside the RNC building, Bush continued to face record-low approval ratings and a presidential campaign focused on his failings. But inside an overflowing conference room, he was greeted with roaring applause as he urged his fellow Republicans to keep pushing for the finish line.

"His general message was to thank the staff for everything we've been doing and encourage us to keep working hard all the way through Election Day," said one person who attended the closed event. "It was upbeat and very exciting."

In Whom Do You Trust?

2008-11-06T22:34:00.000-07:00

When the results came out on election night, I was pretty bummed.

I was appalled that our people had come to the point they had elected a man who could not get the security clearance to serve as his own bodyguard, nor even to do my husband's job;

a man that our enemies wanted us to elect, and are now dancing in the streets and slaughtering animals in celebration over;

a man who said he wants to bankrupt the coal industry with global warming carbon emission fines and cause our energy prices to skyrocket;

a Marxist who thinks if you don't want to redistribute the wealth you are "selfish," and who in all likelihood shares the view of Congressman Jim Moran (D-Va) who regards as "simplistic" the notion "that people who have wealth are entitled to keep it," and thinks it's obvious that wealth should be redistributed (LINK);

who plans to do away with our "unproven missile defense systems," take away our guns, and establish a civilian security force that is as strong, powerful and well-funded as our military.

Who promises sweeping and fundamental change -- for one of the most prosperous, powerful, successful nations on the planet, a nation full of active sin natures, yes, but still the best in our lifetime.

How could this be? I didn't understand. Why would people want any of that? Why couldn't they see the truth? Yes, they have elevated Barack Obama to messianic status... but why?

One woman was excited because now "I don't have to worry about putting gas in my tank any more. I don't have to worry about paying my mortgage. Obama's going to take care of that."

Others were enraptured. Ecstatic. "We're going to have change! We have hope again for better lives, a better experience, freedom after the torture and nightmare of the last eight years! We're going to have happiness, finally."

How could they believe all that?

Yesterday morning I picked up a little booklet I had lying around, the transcript of a sermon given by my former pastor, Col. R.B.Thieme, Jr, the day after Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993. It spoke directly to the issue and is called "In Whom Do You Trust?":

"There was quite a cross-section of people from this country attending the (Clinton) inauguration. Almost without exception, everyone interviewed expressed similar ideas. Some were eloquent, some spoke with hesitation, some with a measure of confusion, but they all centered eventually on one word -- hope. Their hope was not the biblical hope of confidence in the Lord and in the Word of God...

"In effect, their hope was based on unrealistic expectations -- a new face in the White House, a new administration, a political change. To the people who were interviewed, political change meant something better for them. Hope was the word they used. They were depending upon government -- a government that has failed to fulfill its functions and obligations and has the greatest indebtedness in human history. They were depending on Congress, on a president, on people...They thought the government either owed them a living or that change would bring something they wanted -- happiness. A better environment was just around the corner. ...

"Never have I seen...so many people from all walks of life who had such tremendous needs. Because they cannot define their needs in terms of values (from the Word of God), they are looking for a man to solve their problems. They are looking for government to do something for them. They are looking at people to wave a magic wand and give them what they want to make them happy."

It's eerie how accurately those words describe what we have seen from those who have elected Obama in the past few days. They want change. They have hope. They can do it. They can change the world and find happiness and peace and tranquility.

But it's all a lie. A delusion. I know it is, because the Bible says it is:

Thus says the Lord, "Cursed is the person who puts his confidence in man and makes people his strength, so that his heart turns away from the Lord, for he shall be like a tumbleweed in the desert and he will not see prosperity (the word can also be translated 'good' or 'values') when it comes; for he shall live in parched places."

Dried up places. Places of no hope, places where you are always searching, never finding, always learning, never coming to a knowledge of the truth, always craving, never satisfied. Those are the places of the world, which offers much, and delivers nothing.

"Happy is the man who trusts in the LORD and whose trust is in the Lord; therefore the Lord is is confidence. He shall be like a tree planted by the water and by a stream; he will send out roots. Therefore he does not fear when the heat comes, for his leaves are always green."

Jeremiah 17:5-8

Upon reading those words and the remainder of that sermon, my sense of anger and outrage drained away, replaced by something closer to sympathy. They are blind. Deceived and deceiving. They have rejected the only source of happiness -- God and His word -- and like Solomon in Ecclesiastes are running about searching for something to fill the hole in their hearts that only God can fill.

And until they stop and realize there's nothing there and turn back... they are doomed to repeat the cycle. Desiring change, achieving hope, disappointed when the man, the government, the project they pinned that hope on...doesn't deliver. Dispirited, depressed,angry, frustrated, they lash out with hatred, until the next cipher comes along and they can latch onto him -- or her -- and convince themselves that this person will finally do what all the others didn't. This one will finally make them happy.

Except he won't. Guaranteed.

~~~

In the Last Days

2008-11-05T08:52:00.000-07:00

"But realize this, that in the last days, perilous times will come. For men shall be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconciliable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God;

"holding to a form of godliness though they have denied its power (the filling of the Holy Spirit; knowledge of doctrine); avoid such men as these...

"And indeed, all who desire to live godly WILL be persecuted. But evil men and imposters will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being decieved.

"You, however, continue in the things you have learned and become convinced of, knowing from whom you have learned them; and that from childhood, you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to deliverance through faith which is in Christ Jesus.

"All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be adequate (mature, capable) equipped for every good work."

~2 Timothy 3:1-3; 12-17

~~~

Baraka

2008-11-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

I find Barack Hussein Obama's name to be of interest.

First, because of the obvious: Hussein evokes recall of Saddam Hussein, while Obama is but a letter away from Osama, Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden being two of our country's greatest recent enemies.

And Barack? That's the most interesting of all. It's a diminutive of Baraka, which is the Arab word for blessing, understandably very close to Berachah (roughly the same pronunciation), which is the Hebrew word for blessing. (And the name of the first doctrinal church I was a part of.)

Baraka is also the Kiswahili word for blessing, according to this article in Wikipedia. Kiswahili (or Swahili, to the rest of us) derives about 35% of its vocabulary from Arabic.

But back to Islam, whose Koran clearly instructs followers to kill both Christians and Jews whenever they can.

In Islam, baraka is said to be the "divine blessing that is normally associated with holy men or women," and can be transferred from one person to another. Or from an object or place to a person. Baraka hangs out at local shrines, but the strongest baraka is found in Mecca, at the Ka'ba. (That's the curtained, boxlike structure that Muslims march around when they do their pilgrimages at the time of hajj). There's a black stone outside its door that also has great baraka.

Interestingly, though we associate the Ka'ba with Islam, it is not, in fact, an Islamic creation, but predated the arrival of Muhammed by centuries. During those pre Islamic times the site was reverred as a place of worshipping demon gods of the sun, moon and stars. Since demons hang out around such centers of worship, and transfer themselves to the bodies of those people who invite them to do so (not always with conscious intent; another subject) I find this notion of "Baraka" to be very interesting, indeed...

Click HERE for source for information on "baraka."

~~~

Al Qaeda Web Video

2008-10-30T12:19:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry...but the political scene just keeps turning up these bits that are so fascinating to me, they turn into blog posts.

Like this piece that appeared in Reuters today, reporting that al Qaeda wants Republicans and Bush to be "humiliated." Some guy named Libi put up a web video stating as much. (Interesting that it wasn't some guy named Osama) I know al Qaeda has long hated Bush, and thought him the Great Satan; I didn't realize the rest of us Republicans were included until now.

Here's the first part of the piece:

An al Qaeda leader has called for President George W. Bush and the Republicans to be "humiliated," without endorsing any party in the upcoming U.S. presidential election, according to a video posted on the Internet.

"O God, humiliate Bush and his party, O Lord of the Worlds, degrade and defy him," Abu Yahya al-Libi said at the end of sermon marking the Muslim feast of Eid al-Fitr, in a video posted on the Internet.

Libi, one of the top al Qaeda commanders believed to be living in Afghanistan or Pakistan, called for God's wrath to be brought against Bush equating him with past tyrants in history.

To read more (unless they take it down before you read this), click here.

Guidelines, not a Schedule

2008-10-29T20:47:00.000-07:00

Hmm. What happened? How did I manage to "forget" to blog three days in a row?

My husband has been out of town for a few days, and last Friday I felt like maybe I should make a schedule. Not a schedule, really, more of an assessment. The problem with making a "schedule" in the past has been that after I make it, I turn it into a god. An idol -- it becomes my master. I have to obey it. If I don't, wrath and disaster will descend... etc, etc.

But what if they were just guidelines? And more than that, what if I do miss the deadline? Am I going to drop dead? Will the book tank because of that? Where does God fit in this picture? Well, He doesn't. I've not used a schedule for months now, because I haven't been able to figure out how to do it without getting all anxious and frantic. And also maybe because I hadn't reached a point where it would be remotely accurate.

I might have turned a corner. Or maybe it's been the Lord's guidance that led me to do it. I did ask Him if I should, and the notion remained. It was something I wanted to do. Maybe it really was time.

So on Friday I took the number of chapters I have left, plus 5, and plotted them onto the number of days I have left. If I complete roughly a chapter a day, I should reach the end by Nov 30, which was my deadline. I know that I will not do what my schedule has outlined, but that's okay. I can still use it. It's a goal, a guideline, I'll do my best to follow it and if I get too far off, I will make a revised schedule.

Right after I had decided to make this thing my editor called to say she was coming to town this week and we could go to lunch. I jokingly noted the coincidence that I'd just been thinking about calling her for more time, and here she called me! Right away she said that if I thought I might need another month, she'd speak to the powers that be before she left and... I have December now. That means The Enclave will not release until summer, but really that's not looking like such a terrible disaster. A disaster would be to publish what I have right now...

And anyway, as one of my friends said, "Is continuing to be published something you believe you have to maintain? If you lost all your contracts, do you believe that the Lord wouldn't give you a new one if He wants your books published? Are you afraid that you can blow this deal? Because I don't believe that if getting your books published is from the Lord that it's even possible to blow it."

I think she's right. After all, He's able to "equip me in every good thing to do His will, working in me that which is pelasing in His sight..." And wants to. It's a verse which has been repeated often in class over the last week.

So. I have some guidelines, I have a new deadline, one for the first time I actually think I can achieve, AND things have finally started to move somewhat consistently. Since my husband was gone, I could concentrate more on writing and completed chapters 16, 17 and 18 and today worked on 19 and began to think about 20. Which is a big reason why I forgot to blog.

Oh, yes, and I've, um, been reading news sites maybe more than usual with all that's been going on...

Lunch with my editor was wonderful. The weather was perfect. We ate outside on the patio of Tohono Chul, drank apricot tea and talked. Turns out editors really do get it that writing is not like picking peas or making pots. You can't necessarily force it. And when we can't make the deadline, they can handle it. In fact, I'm not the only writer who's having unusual trouble getting her book to move.

Other tidbits of interest:

Light of Eidon is actually still selling quite nicely.

There's a remote possibility that BHP might repackage the Guardian King books in new covers....

And female faces on the covers of books sell better than male faces do.

Or so I'm told.

~~~

Interview with the Palin's - NOT

2008-10-23T20:04:00.000-07:00

Hey, it's election time. Politics is beating at the doors and windows. You can't turn on the TV without being told to vote for this one or don't vote for that one. Nor can you drive down the street without being reminded that some people are for Obama and (around our neighborhood) very few for McCain/Palin. So I guess I can be excused for putting up a few posts on the subject ...

Except that everything seems to be going wrong. Neither of my last two posts, the one Tuesday on Barak Obama as Messiah, and the one Wednesday on Biden's warning that if Obama wins he'll be tested, went out through Feedblitz. I didn't get either of them in my Inbox, and neither did one of my friends. Though of course it's always possible we were the exceptions, rather than the rule.

Then tonight, when I went to post the bit I'd already written about excerpts from the People Magazine interview with the Palin's, Todd and Sarah, which I'd enjoyed, I discovered that it had been really excerpt-ized and they didn't even have the pictures that had been half the fun.

I'd really liked the things she said. I like them both, actually. And while some people say that with politicians you can't believe anything they say, there are some politicians that say things I can't stand, totally disagree with, find abhorrent and evil -- especially when they say them as if these are great and good ideas or policies -- and others who say things that I totally support and affirm. So whatever lies behind, at least I can support the surface.

Anyway, I wanted to share it, but now it's gone, and the only place I could find it was here, on People's site where it was broken down into ten pages of teeny snippets surrounded on all sides by ads, other links, pictures of other people, other stories... very distracting and annoying. And no pictures.

To make matters worse, when I tried to see if someone else had posted it, I only found the blogs of snippy liberals making fun of it. It's a "puff" piece, heaven forbid. "Can you believe she actually thinks she's intellectual? Ha! She couldn't even name one magazine or newspaper she read!" (She named the book she was reading, and probabaly had she named anything else the blogger wouldn't have heard of it anyway) "She says she's only bubble-headed when she acts like Tina Fey.Ha!" Their arrogance and condescension really is amazing.

In fact, so amazing that instead of the People interview, I'm going to link to another article I read recently in, of all places, the Boston Globe. It's on The Dangers of Liberal Bias by Joan Chevalier. It expresses a lot of what I just discovered.

---
Enclave update: I went back to ch 14 today, and reworked and reworked and reworked it, trying to get Cam's motivations right. Why does it all have to emerge sooooo slowly? But I've got it half done. Now just have to finish up the last scene to make it fit with the new stuff. Then I can hopefully get on with ch 17, which is what sent me back to 14 in the first place.

~~~

He Will Be Tested

2008-10-22T19:41:00.000-07:00

You've probably heard by now that Democrat Vice Presidential nominee Joe Biden said at a Seattle fundraiser last Sunday that, should they win the election, in the first six months of his term, Barak Obama will be tested by "a major international challenge." Could that be... terrorists?

"Mark my words, within the next -- first six months of this administration, if we win, they're going to -- we're going to face a major international challenge, 'cause they're going to want to test him, just like they did John Kennedy, they're going to want to test him, and they're going to find out this guy's got steel in his spine.

"He's gonna need help. The kind of help he's gonna need, he's gonna need you," Biden said, speaking to potential donors. "We're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community to stand with him 'cause it's not going to be apparent initially, it's not going to be apparent that we're right."

Wow. Of course, it's all over the Internet. McCain pounced upon it, Biden's been removed from campaigning for a few days...I have two thoughts about it -- yeah, I already figured we're going to be hit should Obama win. That's just logical. He's already said he'll sit down and talk to our enemies. He opposed the Iraq war. He opposed the surge. He opposed everything except talking. I don't really think our enemies -- terrorists, Iran, communist thugs from China, North Korea, and, more and more, Russia -- are going to be remotely swayed by talking. They operate more on a "taking" basis -- them taking shots at us, then taking over. Islam is hardly a peaceful religion. Their Koran instructs them to kill the Infidel. Which we are.

In fact, all our new presidents have been challenged. Here's a quote from Rush Limbaugh the other day that sums up the challenges and the results:

"Al-Qaeda has a history of testing all of our new leaders. At the World Trade Center, 1993; Al-Qaeda tested Clinton. We failed. Mogadishu 1994, Al-Qaeda tested Clinton. We failed. Khobar Towers, 1996; Al-Qaeda tested Clinton. We failed. The Kenya-Tanzania embassy bombings, Al-Qaeda tested us. We failed. The 2000 bombing USS Cole, Al-Qaeda tested Clinton. We failed. On 9/11, Al-Qaeda tested Bush; we passed. We haven't been hit since. March 11th, '04, the Madrid bombings; Al-Qaeda tested Spain. Spain failed. August 2008, Al-Qaeda tested Canadian Steven Harper, killed Canadians. He announced a pullout from Afghanistan in 2011; Canadians failed. August 2008, Al-Qaeda tested Sarkozy by killing 11 French paratroopers. Sarkozy passed and said he wouldn't surrender in Afghanistan."

So yeah, if Obama wins, we're going to be hit. It's less likely we will be if McCain wins, because he's already perceived to be like Bush. I don't think he'd take any guff, and they probably know it. Which is why they've endorsed Obama.

My second thought is that if we actually have enough people in this country to elect someone like Obama, who so represents the opposite of every one of the laws of divine establishment (freedom, marriage, family, nationalism), who will most likely turn on Israel, and who actually allows his followers to make those disgusting Messiah comparisons... we are heading into apostacy, if not already there. Which is something the Bible says will happen in the end times.

If the Rapture is indeed coming very soon, and the Tribulation right behind it, then God in His grace will do everything He can to warn and persuade people of their need for salvation so they can avoid the latter, which is said to be the most terrible time to be alive on the earth. Another hit like 911 will do just that.

"In the last days, difficult times will come. Men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy..." It will even extend to the church, where people will "hold to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power." How much of that is already in place?

~~~

False Messiah

2008-10-21T20:46:00.000-07:00

I'm starting into Ch 17 today, and it's the slow going phase again. I got in my four hours of concentration, but no more, really (maybe a little less, if I were able to accurately account for all the hours.) But today after I did my stints I spent some time on the Internet and turned up a couple of interesting sites about people who are promoting the idea that Obama is the Messiah. Now I've heard Rush refer to him jokingly as such for some time, and was aware of the over-the-top orgasmic type reactions some of Obama's supporters were having toward him early this year, but I didn't realize that they actually call him Messiah.

World Net Daily ran a piece last week primarily on a February 24, 2008 speech given by Louis Farrakhan, the current leader of the Nation of Islam (which is apparently repudiated by the "real" muslims as not really being muslim. But that's another post). It's title? Farrakhan on Obama: The Messiah is absolutely speaking

"You are the instruments that God is going to use to bring about universal change, and that is why Barack has captured the youth. And he has involved young people in a political process that they didn't care anything about. That's a sign. When the Messiah speaks, the youth will hear, and the Messiah is absolutely speaking."

Apparently the man Nation of Islam followers refer to as "the Savior," Fard Muhammad, had a black father and a white mother, just as Obama did. Which somehow makes Obama a savior, too.

"Would God allow Barack to be president of a country that has been so racist, so evil in its treatment of Hispanics, native Americans, blacks?" Farrakhan asked. "Would God do something like that? Yeah. Of course he would. That's to show you that the stone that the builders rejected has become the headstone of the corner. This is a sign to you. It's the time of our rise. It's the time that we should take our place. The future is all about you."

The article also references a blog called "Is Barack Obama the Messiah?" which is rather stunning. It's subtitled with a quote from an Obama speech given in Lebanon, New Hampshire on January 7, 2008.

"... a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany ... and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Obama" - Barack Obama

It also has a really creepy beatific poster of Obama with a halo of light rays streaming away from his head, with the words "The Dream" underneath his portrait.

If you scroll down a bit, there's a picture of Obama, the man who is so concerned about the little guys and "spreading the wealth" at a fundraiser (he's raised more than half a billion dollars -- no typo, half a billion -- which is more than any other candidate in the country's history) at the HOME of Steven and Judy Gluckstern... which is quite a home... where he appears to be descending on a lighted stair from on high... The title of this post is "The Transfiguration."

The next post says "I'm Asking You to Believe..." and then a picture of graffiti saying, "Obama is God."

It goes on from there. "He is the Alpha and the Omega," and there's the video of the creepy youth brigade chanting/marching/dancing in unison to him. Next comes the creepy video of the "precious children singing to our leader." Then a photo of a scene at Obama Campaign HQ where workers are grasshopper-ized by a humongous picture of Obama's face on the wall, rather like those gargantuan portraits of Lenin and Mao looming over crowds of followers. I was shocked to see it, but then realized that since Obama is closely aligned with avowed communists, why be surprised?

There are quotes alongside the text from various celebrities such as Halle Barry, Gary Hart, Deepak Chopra, Toni Morrison, and Chris Matthews. Here's one I find especially intriguing from Ezra Klein (who is a writer for the liberal American Prospect) (though I had to Google his name to find that out):

"Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. . . . He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh . . . Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves."

So... his finest speeches don't excite, inspire or inform... but they elevate? What is that supposed to mean? The words mean nothing, but something else is at work? And that stuff about him not being the Word made flesh, but the word triumphing over the flesh? What does that mean? How is he triumphing over the flesh? I'm not sure he even knows what the flesh is.

It's an interesting, but creepy site and I couldn't figure out if it's supposed to be a joke, a parody of Christian beliefs or genuine adulation. Though why there would be so much use of familiar words and phrases that specifically refer to Jesus Christ being used by people who mostly don't believe in him, is befuddling.

But back to the original article at World Net Daily, which also quotes a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, Mark Morford, who says,

"Bill Clinton, with all his effortless, winking charm, didn't have what Obama has, which is a sort of powerful luminosity, a unique high-vibration integrity," Gladnick says. "Dismiss it all you like, but I've heard from far too many enormously smart, wise, spiritually attuned people who've been intuitively blown away by Obama's presence - not speeches, not policies, but sheer presence -"

Hmmm. That's pretty creepy too. Almost makes you think Obama might be demon-possessed... But more than anything it speaks to the matter of end times. This sort of fake Messiah thing is telling. I don't think Obama is the Anti-Christ (since as far as I know he's not a Jew) but the word does say that in the last times there will be false Christs and false prophets galore. And advises:

"Then, if anyone says to you, 'Behold here is the Christ,' or 'There He is,' do not believe him." Mt 24:23

~~~

Chutes and Ladders

2008-10-20T21:28:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday I woke up down in the dumps, filled with a sense of futility, frustration, apathy. I didn't know why. This has been happening relatively often over the last few months. I go to bed fine, and wake up depressed. Once I get up and get working it tends to go away, but sometimes when I get ready to start writing, it comes back...

As I lay there asking God why I was feeling this way and what was wrong, He drew my attention to the dreams I have been having. I don't often remember my dreams, but lately I had been, and they were all the same: I was trying to go somewhere and/or do something and being hindered, pulled away, obstructed, distracted. I never managed to get to where I was going or do what I was trying to do before I woke up.

There are many things in my life I would like to change and cannot, and some of that is probably reflected in the dreams. I read about a dream study once that suggested we have several different types of dreams that can determine our mood when we wake up. In one type, we wrestle with a problem and finally solve it. In that case we wake up feeling good. In another type, we just cycle through the same situation (which may or may not bear resemblence to our conscious problems), never solving it. In which case we wake up feeling down.

Well, the latter seemed to apply to me. Obviously I wasn't having dreams of any kind of resolution. But I thought I had handled the frustrations and obstacles that were so often cropping up to hinder my day. Why, then, was I still having the dreams that go nowhere, and waking up depressed?

The Holy Spirit suggested to me that dreams come out of the subconscious, and thus, somewhere in my subconscious I had this viewpoint that there should be no obstacles or hindrances in life. That those were all "wrongs" that needed to be made right. A "right" life was one that had no problems, obstacles or hindrances.

Well, I knew right off that was ridiculous, especially for a Christian. The Bible teaches the exact opposite. We are going to suffer, it's been appointed to us to suffer for His name's sake. We do it for our growth, blessing, perfection, and to bring glory to God.

At that point I was reminded of the children's game Chutes and Ladders. The chutes are designed to be there. You are supposed to go down them. Yes, it's a setback, but without them, the game would be boring. The problem is that when I played Chutes and Ladders, my focus was so strongly on the goal of winning, that the chutes were not fun parts of the game. They didn't seem to me even to be necessary parts of the game, but rather great threats that had to be avoided. It was a "terrible" thing if you happened to land on a square that sent you sliding back down to another row.

I had the same underlying approach to life. I wasn't really seeing the obstacles and hindrances and frustrations as an integral part of the plan. Instead, they were "wrong," something outside the plan that needed to be avoided or "fixed." But we know that all things work for good to those who love God. All things. We're constantly being delivered over to death for His sake.

The obstacles are not things that keep us from getting anywhere, they are the things that actually take us where God is trying to take us. To conform us to His image. We should embrace them, not look at them as things designed to keep us back, or down, even though they might be implemented by the Kingdom of Darkness for this purpose, or though the people sent by that same kingdom might have this desire. Regardless, it's God who's allowed it. Not to keep us down, but to conform us to the image of His Son, and to bring us to new life.

I barely had time to jot down the above notes about this new understanding, before I had to go about my day. But I was more relaxed, throughout and The Enclave was (and is) really starting to move.

That evening (Thursday) I had the ordeal of preparing for the colonoscopy then the procedure itself on Friday, which left me loopy and very tired so I had no time to write my thoughts out. I even missed my usual Friday night message and didn't listen to it until Saturday. But when I did...

Wow.

You know those pictures where someone opens a door and a violent wind and light rushes out at them, almost knocking them over? That's what it was like. It addressed the very things I'd started thinking about on Thursday, and tens of other questions and issues I'd been struggling with over the last few weeks and months. An amazing message. I took 8 double-sided sheets of paper worth of notes, stopping the recording every few seconds to get the whole thought noted. Then I went back and highlighted the "really good" parts. That was nearly the entire eight pages.

The link is here, if you want to hear it. In the upper right corner are options to watch it as video, download the video, listen to audio with class notes, or download the audio. It's 90 minutes long (there's a 10 minute break in the middle which you can let run or fast forward through). I know there's been a lot of groundwork laid for this material over the last few months so it probably won't have the impact for everyone the way it did for me, but I was just... set free.

~~~

Marketing Questionnaire

2008-10-19T16:56:00.001-07:00

Well, the colonscopy went very well. I have a normal colon, complete with pictures. The preparation for the colonscopy is something I am glad I will not have to repeat for ten years, by which time, I suspect that procedure will not be something I'll ever need to bother with again.

Got in some good work on Saturday. I'm now to ch 16 and for the first time ideas are starting to flow. Today I had to work on a Marketing and Publicity Questionnaire for the Bethany House M&P Department to use in selling my book.

I've had to trust the Lord to guide me on this. As may be obvious to consistent readers of this blog and my books, concise and pithy summations are not my forte. Here are some of the questions:

1. Why did you write this book?

2. How did you develop the initial story idea/plot line for this book?

3. Did you encounter any interesting challenges while writing/researching for this book? Please explain if so.

4. Did the book involve special research? Please explain if so.

5. What is the underlying theme/message of the book? Is this what you set out to write?

6. What is the take-away message you want readers to receive after reading your book?

7. Almost every author puts a little of themselves into their stories—what did you put of yourself into this one? (personality traits, life events/jobs, settings, characters based on people you know, likes/dislikes, etc.)

There are twenty of them in all. As I was pasting them in here, I thought... hmmm. Maybe my blog readers would also be interested in the answers I gave. Perhaps I should use these as blog posts...

I'll have to think about that. I already have my post for tomorrow written, however, so it won't be till after that.

~~

Modern Medicine

2008-10-16T22:30:00.000-07:00

Tonight I am preparing my colon for a colonoscopy tomorrow (my first). What fun. Not. But I can't help thinking what a strange world we live in, that we will deliberately drink a solution designed to give us diarrhea.

I guess there've been worse things in the past -- trepanning, blood-letting, leeches...

I have to drink it in two sessions, one today (at 5pm) and another tomorrow, when I have to get up at 4:50am to do it. I comfort myself with the reminder that long before this time tomorrow, I'll be done with the whole thing.

Despite the weirdness of being on a liquid diet all day, it was a good one. I am very slowly learning just how it is I'm to trust the Lord, in all areas, and relax. Just let Him take my hand and guide me and when some giant rears up to threaten me, not to run away but stand there, letting all the confusing, conflicting thoughts swirl around me until finally they fall away and He shows me which one I need to focus on. I've wanted to know which one too soon, I think. Anyway, I've finished chapter 14 and am on to 16 (skipping 15 for now to attend to when I work through the other plotline/pov)

So it's off to bed. More or less.

~~

The Hound

2008-10-15T20:11:00.001-07:00

Life the hound
Equivocal
Comes at a bound
Either to rend me
Or to befriend me.

I cannot tell
The hound's intent
Till he has sprung
At my bare hand
With teeth or tongue.

Meanwhile I stand
And wait the event

~Robert Francis

A Splinter and Other Things

2008-10-14T20:38:00.000-07:00

I made my 4 hour goal of (mostly) 100% concentration on writing. Considering I pretty much had the whole day to do it, that's fairly pathetic, but I did it. Despite the fact that things went awry at the start. I had chores left over from yesterday to do, which included mopping and vacuuming. Before I did those, I noted that the porch connecting the back door to the back yard needed sweeping. In the process of doing that, I picked up a rough wooden block in order to move the door mat and a splinter slid into the middle finger of my left hand.

So then I had to get it out. By myself. It was teeny. I had to have a magnifying glass to see it, but I had to hold the magnifying glass in the same hand I was digging the splinter out of, and still see it. This was a challenge. I wrapped the handle in a towel, which helped to position it, but the splinter was in there pretty deep. Pretty soon I had a small, bloody excavation, but the splinter was still in there. Then I found a spot of sun by the window and brought my little operation over to the window sil. Not exactly comfortable.

After a long time (15 minutes?) I began to think I wasn't going to be able to do this alone. So I went to the Lord. I can't do this alone, Father. I need some help. I don't want to wait all day for Stu to come home, so could you please do something now?

I went back to my spot of light on the window sil, and shortly discovered it was fading. But a new spot appeared on top of some file boxes. Much more comfortable. Brighter. Within minutes I had the thing out. So. Some could say I would have gotten it out anyway, but I know I had help. In fact, I'm sure of it. I'm suspecting my guardian angel of having a hand in it, because the splinter was really tiny, really in deep, my hands were clumsy, I could hardly see and somehow, it just came out.

After that I did do the mopping and vacuuming, but left the bathroom for another day. By then it was 9:30 and I still hadn't eaten. I thought I would work while eating. And did. Sort of. Until I decided I needed to write in my journal.

Long story short, I didn't start until 10:17 and worked until 12:20. Then I did another stint from 2 to 4. Sort of. I think I did some Internet reading during that last bit. It was hard today. My brain didn't want to work. When I was getting ready to begin, the resistance was great: "It's too hard, I don't know what to do, I can't even think about it without getting a headache, I'll never get it done on time, I have to go faster, I don't have the vaguest idea how to fix anything... I just want to run away."

But I didn't. I told myself the old standby -- just read the chapter. You don't have to change anything. So I did. I changed some things, moved some things around, left some really awkward confusing spots because I didn't know how to fix them but I did work. Not fast enough. Or rather, I don't feel like I made as much progress asI would have liked, or as I "should" have (except only God really knows how much that is). But I'm going to be happy that I did work through it, and take comfort in the "Progress not Perfection" slogan of Flylady.com. I definitely made some progress. Now I'd better quit and go to bed so maybe tomorrow my brain will be clearer and sharper than it was today (Today was better than Monday, but I was still pretty foggy).

~~~

Not a Wasted Day

2008-10-13T21:35:00.000-07:00

Well, tonight I'm even more tired than I was last night. I wrote the beginnings of a post this morning, but now I lack the mental clarity to edit it sufficiently to have it make sense.

Actually, I was tired most of the day, which is probably partly why my first day of trying for 4 hours of 100% concentration on writing was a total bust. I didn't even get in my former goal of two. Things did not go "right" this morning.

I had some spiritual issues to deal with. Also, Quigley started chewing on various fence boards which are in a pile in the back yard, some of which had nails and screws in them, so I had to take those out. (The boards are to stay there in the pile -- it's not my pile). In the process of taking the nails and screws out, I broke my hammer. :-( Had to find a new one.

I did a bit of dusting. Then decided that it was time to get to work (about 9:30) and I'd just let the other stuff go. But I couldn't get to work, was all out of sorts and had to address the spiritual issues, because what good is the work if I'm out of fellowship? It took me awhile to figure out what was going on.

Simply put, I had my eyes on the things of this world, rather than the things above. And since I didn't like the particular things I was contemplating and concentrating on, well, I was reacting to them. Which means sinning. Resentment, complaining, self pity, fault finding... arrogance... fear... Confessed them all, and recalled to mind that whatever my circumstances, ultimately they are the way they are because God has chosen them for me, decided in eternity past to place me in them and everything about them ultimately comes from His hand. Thus they provide an opportunity to bring glory to Him by acknowledging that fact and living as if it is true. If they are wearisome, frustrating and difficult, so be it. They're from God and I will accept them. Embrace them even, as an opportunity which is only available on Earth in time.

By the time I worked through that, I was hungry. While I ate lunch though, I went through my notes for Chapter 14. But then I got really tired. My brain felt scrambled. When I tried to think of what I was doing no thought led to any other logical thought. I went to take a nap. One thing led to another and that was the end of my writing for the day.

No matter. Tomorrow is a new day and I will try again. Four hours. I think I'll set 10 o'clock as my start time, and work til 12. Then try 2 to 4.

~~~

Autumn Memories

2008-10-12T22:07:00.000-07:00

Where did the weekend go? I spent the day, after church anyway, finishing up my autumn cards and now I'm tired. So that makes it a great time to put up a picture of fall. This is one of my watercolors, done from a picture of my son on a camping trip to the White Mountains. Every year in October we would take my mother, sister, Adam's friend Ben and our dog/s and head up to Northern Arizona for 4 days of camping and to enjoy the aspen.

This picture was taken when we were still going to the Double Cienega area, near Hannagan's Meadow. The moutains were ablaze with the yellow aspen. We used to hike through groves of aspen where the leaves would fall around us like rain and turn the light all yellow. It was magical.

Which is no doubt why there's a scene in The Shadow Within that came directly from those experiences. On p 261, where Carissa is on her way south from Highmount Holding, her party has stopped at Owl Creek to drink and refill their waterbags. As she is standing beside the stream, Elayne assures her that Eidon will make them a way, despite the dangers they face.

At that, a puff of wind coursed down the rocky streambed, rustling the evergreens and showering them in fluttering gold leaves shaken loose from the aspen on the riverbank behind them. The world turned briefly golden, and for the first time in days Carissa felt that sense of promise she'd known so briefly back in Highmount, as sure and compelling as it had been that night...

I always look back on those times at this season. The blue sky, the chill air, the campfire. The cattle in the fields, the elk bugling in the night. One time, Bear's first in fact, it snowed and we had to stay in a motel. Another time the snow was so bad we kept driving to the next town and the next town to find a place to stay indoors and ended up driving a giant loop around the state and home again within a day.

We won't be taking any of those trips this year, I'm afraid. I have a book to finish! And today the Lord informed me that it's time to rev up my rate of working. I am going to try to go from two hours of 100% concentration/sacred time to four hours. This morning, for the very first time since I started writing this book, I woke up thinking about it. That's an excellent sign that things are starting -- finally! -- to percolate.

~~~

Heaven Forbid! Bibles in Barnes & Noble

2008-10-09T18:36:00.000-07:00

I was in the Barnes and Noble today, looking for a new journal and as I was examining the various offerings I overheard one of the clerks say to another, "Boy, some of my customers are really going to get upset about these."

Curious, I looked over at what he was doing -- hanging up new bookmarks with a large, decorative cross on them, these amidst the fluffy white puppies, cute kittens, nature offerings and various bookish and avant garde designs. Hmm. Did he really mean what I thought he did? Did people really come into the Barnes and Noble and complain that they are selling cross bookmarks?

I stayed around in the adjacent aisle even though I'd already determined it didn't have what I wanted and continued to eavesdrop.

The other clerk came over to see what the first one was talking about and offered a story of his own. Apparently elsewhere in the store they had some teen study bibles displayed on an endcap that had set customers off, as well. They didn't think those bibles should be there at all, but especially not in the nonfiction section. If anyplace,they should go in the fiction section.

"Well, I think they have a case, sort of," said the first clerk.

From there the conversation continued but I couldn't follow it -- the first clerk said something about why the bibles were on the end cap, and added the fact that some people (not sure who) couldn't see the sign that said 'study Bibles.' I'm not sure what effect their seeing that would have had on the situation, largely because I'm not sure what situation he was referring to.

Was it the one where people looking for the bibles couldn't see the sign and so couldn't find the bibles, thus necessitating the end cap which offended the other people who apparently don't think bibles should be sold in a secular book store?

Or the one where people objecting to the bibles couldn't see the sign and so didn't know that they were study bibles and as such really did belong in the nonfiction section.

What was of greatest interest to me was that it was an issue at all. I was astonished to learn that people actually go into a general book store and complain about the sorts of books it sells. Of course I could see complaining about pornography, so maybe I shouldn't be so astonished. It all depends on your scale of values. And sadly more and more people in this country seem to be holding to a scale of values that not only excludes the Bible, but actively opposes its principles.

This was recently illustrated for me by a "much forwarded" email of an editorial piece on Sarah Palin written by Indian spiritualist Deepak Chopra. In it he took many of my values and turned them around as being evil. Small town values = "petty, small minded parochialism"; family values = "code for walling out anyone who makes a claim for social justice"; patriotism = "the usual fallback in a failed war."

Oh, yeah and Sarah Palin is the evil shadow of Barak Obama.

Wow. If you want to read this editorial, it's here. Not that I recommend it, since in my opinion Deepak Chopra is heavily influenced by and promoting doctrines of demons. But I think there are many who apparently adhere to the viewpoint, so from that angle it is interesting.

~~~

Link: Elitism

2008-10-08T20:18:00.000-07:00

I promised another essay today, again from Victor Davis Hanson, this one on elitism. This one was published on PajamasMedia.com Sept 28, 2008. It's called Culture wars and the campaign. What I liked about it is that it answered some questions for me, one of the main ones being why do people who claim to like "women who do things", despise Sarah Palin?

People -- liberals, to be sure -- that I thought would surely appreciate her, instead find her "scary" and bumbling, clueless and absolutely inept. That completely befuddled me. In fact, one blog I was reading, by a person who I could somewhat relate to in other areas, railed on to the degree that I realized not only was Palin anathema, but so was I. But why? The writer did not say, beyond hurling derogatory adjectives and adverbs. It made no sense until I read this essay by Hanson.

So, here is the beginning of Culture wars and the campaign by Victor Davis Hanson:

You are a damn elite, not me!

That sums up the current political debate — whether we look at charges that John McCain has so many houses he can’t remember any longer the actual number of them; or that poor Barack Obama is depressed at the soaring price of arugula; or that Fightin’ Joe Biden once bootstrapped himself up at ten in Scranton; or that moose-hunting Sarah snowmachines as naturally as Barack Obama trips over himself in a bowling lane.

A nation of wood-cutters

In short, we remain log-cabin America, formed as the frontier antithesis of Europe. Apparently, we are determined, at least in mind, to stay that way — rightly or wrongly sneering at both natural Francophile John Kerry’s spandex, and also poor forced and uncomfortable duck-hunting John Kerry, decked out in camouflage, and looking as uncomfortable with a dead duck as Mike Dukakis in a tank helmet. We don’t like snooty elitists, and don’t give them a break when they clumsily try at election time in the eleventh hour to morph into one of the people.

A state of mind

So what is elitism? And who is an elitist?

Read more here.

~~~~

Hair Clip Kibble

2008-10-07T18:36:00.000-07:00

Quigley ate one of my hair clips on Sunday night. It's about 2 1/2" long with about seven tines on a side. I found part of the tabs that you use to squeeze it open, the spring and a few tines. I guess he thought it was kibble.

I am sorry to say, that even after all my practice slamming things on the Lord my first reaction was not good. Later though, I got around to realizing there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. If some tine were going to perforate his intestine, well that was in God's hands. I think it was God the Holy Spirit who brought to mind pictures of the droppings of some of our former dogs that had rocks in them. If rocks could pass through, the small pieces of plastic probably could. So why think about it and torture myself with worry? How about I pretend it never happened and just go on?

Anyway, so far, he seems to be fine. He was very ... um... active today. Very pushy, willful, playful, intense. He barked at the dog next door until I had to bring him in. Later he barked at the neighbors behind us who have recently moved in and started some sort of landscaping improvement project (they're cutting down the jungle of weeds in the yard). He's also got half a dozen excavation projects going here and there. And the wind kept blowing weird things into the yard or onto the ground, which of course he found and had to eat. I have no idea why he was so ... mischievous. Maybe it was the wind...

Last weekend was a three day weekend for my husband. The Mondays after 3-days I'm always especially tired. We also had our monthly communion and pot luck on Sunday. I'm usually tired after those, too. Together I figured I'd crash yesterday, but I did pretty well. The crash came today. I crash weirdly. Instead of dozing off or collapsing into a nap as would seem logical, I just want to putter, don't want to get down to work, want to drift from activity to activity...

I did manage to get in my two hours of work (though I was hoping for more) (actually I think it probably was more. Maybe three hours). I'm on chapter 13 now, and in a tinkering phase. This is where I look at the section that needs fixing, have no idea what to do. Add a few things, take some things out, move other things around, put some of the things I took out back. Take out some of the things I added. Print it all up and put it in a folder for tomorrow. When I'll do more or less the same thing.

The progress is slow, incremental, spiraling. I think someone called it noodling. You go from complete chaos and "wrongness" to a gradual improving of the scene or sequence, one small area at a time. I keep getting ideas for things I've already written, too, so I have to go back to take care of those.

We took Quigley for his three mile walk, and though I started out wondering if I'd have to be carried back, I think it actually woke me up. I've just finished dinner. Now it's time to stretch and go to bed!

Tomorrow... an article about elitism.

~~~~

Link: America's Nervous Breakdown

2008-10-06T15:55:00.000-07:00

To go back to my evidences that we are indeed in the Dispensational end times (that's specifically the end times of the Church age and the seven years of Tribulation which follow the Church age's completion and can be construed to make up the end of the age of Israel with the second coming of Jesus Christ as their Deliverer), I direct your attention to this excellent essay by farmer/military historian Victor Davis Hanson, who is also Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor emeritus at California University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. It's from his commentary page and is called America's Nervous Breakdown--And the World's.

Here's how it begins:

Ancient thinkers from Thucydides to Cicero insisted that money was the real source of military power and national influence. We've been reminded of that classical wisdom these last three weeks.In a manner not seen since the Great Depression, Wall Street went into panic mode from too many bad debts. The symbolic pillars of American monetary strength for years — AIG, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Shearson-Lehman and Washington Mutual — in a matter of hours either went broke, were absorbed or were reconstituted. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapsed like the house of cards that they were.

Even though the U.S. government rushed to restore trust, hundreds of billions of dollars in paper assets simply vanished. Friends and enemies abroad were unsure whether the irregular American heartbeat was a major coronary or a mere cardiac murmur. How strong really was the world's greatest economy? Was this panic the tab for years of borrowing abroad for out-of-control consumer spending? Had America finally gone too far enriching dictators by buying energy that it either could not or would not produce itself? Had the chickens of lavishing rewards on Wall Street and Washington speculators rather than Main Street producers finally come home to roost?

You can read more here. It's longish, but worth it for the conclusions he draws.

~~~~~~

He Doesn't Realize He's Only a Dog

2008-10-01T21:58:00.000-07:00

Yes, Quigley is finally all better. He got us up Friday morning at 3 am, again, with squirting stools, again, and my husband decided we should take him to the vet. Since I had to take my mother to see her radiation oncologist that same day, I knew the only way I was going to fulfill that obligation and get the dog seen, was if the Lord worked it out. So I gave it to him (after some silly, angsty ruminations at 3:30 in the morning) and at 8am called the clinic. After describing the situation to the receptionist, she said they would have to get him in that day.

"Can you be here by 9am?"

"Awesome!"

So we saw the vet and I took my mother to her doctor's appointment. At the vet, I learned that Quigley weighs at least 73 pounds and is not yet done growing. He's going to get bigger, broader and stronger.

Swell.

I also learned that he is a very unusual dog with unusually dominant traits. As in, maybe we should work with a trainer. (I'm thinking, yes, we need to run him through an obedience class... or rather, I do, and I don't have the time right now. I have a book to finish!!) (And trigger finger which means no gripping strength in my right hand). He is a handful, she confirmed.

Indeed. When we arrived, after weighing him, they brought us to a large room with a bench in one corner and counter with computer on it in another and nothing else in the room. The walls had chest high wainscoting on them, and above that were various framed pictures. There was also a little dog's-hind-end hook by the door where you could hang leashes on the upraised tail. Well, after smelling the entire floor thoroughly, Quigley decided he needed to examine the artwork, up on his hind legs to get a closer look at every one of the photos and especially the dog bottom hook. When the animal technican came in, of course she was rudely mobbed. When the vet came in a similar interaction ensued.

Sigh. I felt like a helpless mom with a total brat. Of course that's what I have. And ADHD doggy who just gets completely out of control when he gets excited. He's not that bad at home with us, but he's still a pain with other people.

So, while I felt a bit embarrassed by my overbearing pooch, I also felt vindicated. He is weird, he is difficult, he is very strong, very intense... I'm not making it up! (Stu says he doesn't realize he's only a dog!)

Even better, they discovered that whatever had caused the original diarrhea, mostly likely something weird he'd eaten, that was no longer a problem but he did have a secondary infection caused by the diarrhea itself. She gave us a tube of Fast Balance-GI for dogs and horses. I was to give him two doses a day for two days. By Friday night we were already seeing some improvement. By Sunday night he was completely normal.

She told me I didn't need to do all that rice and chicken stuff. Hallelujah! No more cooking rice! No more cleaning dishes, and going to the store for more rice and more chicken. No more wondering if I should be feeding him more chicken, or more rice, or more kibble. Was I causing this problem? No. It was an overgrowth of normal intestinal bacteria. For which he's still taking pills, but beyond that, all has returned to normal.

So that's over for now. But I want to see if I can get some of the Fast Balance stuff to have on hand for the next time. I'm sure there'll be a next time. Quigley is incredibly indiscrete when it comes to his dining choices.

I've also made some very decent progress on The Enclave. Not so much in pages/chapters (though I am currently working on ch 12) as in conception, characterization and plot coming together to make something I'm actually starting to like. Of course, I finally started praying that the Lord would either give me something to like in the story, or show me what's there that I can like. It's nice to finally be getting a bit excited about it.

I've been holding more or less to my two hours of sacred time, though when I overslept this morning, that messed me up a bit. More from the standpoint of me telling myself it didn't matter if I started late because I got up late. Except that after I let myself get away with that, I wasn't very happy and realized that I wouldn't do that with a doctor's appointment, so why was I doing that with this. What didn't I understand about "sacred" time? But you have to go through these things to really get them cemented and I like this plan.

Speaking of, I'd best get to bed so I don't oversleep again.

~~~~~

Plans for America's Demise?

2008-09-30T19:20:00.000-07:00

Here's the video I promised.

It's a cut of Senator Obama outlining his plans for our "defense" interspersed with relevant video clips from various news sources of events that have occurred over the last year, the whole of it set to dramatic music.

What struck me even more than Obama's plans, were all the forces that are still working to upgrade their military capabilities, and their unrelenting animosity toward us and toward Israel. Which, of course the Bible has predicted both in the specific with regard to Israel, and in the general, with regard to nations that promote freedom and Christianity. If you were of the world the world would love you. But you are not of the world and so it hates you.

The ironic thing is that, hated and disdained as we are in the world, those of other nations are still happy to take our money and aid, and we still have hordes of them trying to come here to live in our "horrible" country!

Some people might find this video disturbing and even frightening. I don't. I know that God will protect us, as He has all along. As long as the Christians in this country continue to follow His will and plan, growing in grace and knowledge and that as a nation we stand firm on the principles of divine establishment and the protection of Israel, He will continue to do so. If we fail to do that as a nation, and the majority of Christians sink into apostacy, as is foretold in 2nd Timothy, then we will see more episodes of "crisis evangelism" similar to what happened on 911. Whatever happens, though, He will always protect the remnant of His people who remain faithful.

P.S. Quigley is all better. More tomorrow.

~~~

Signs of the Times

2008-09-29T19:45:00.000-07:00

Though the Rapture is imminent (can happen at any time) Jesus himself spoke of signs of the times we should be aware of as members of the church, signs that will precede His return.

I should note here that there are actually two returns of Christ. The first is when He'll come in the air to gather up the church age saints (who alone will see Him) and return with them to heaven. The second is a bodily, feet on the ground return to Jerusalem when everyone will see Him as He arrives to deliver Israel from the enemy nations that have gathered to destroy it. Nations like the European Union, Russia, China, and the Arab states like Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc.

Since there are only seven years between the first return (or rapture) and the second, the signs of the times can be applied in some measure to both, since we can assume that many of those signs will occur on a lesser basis prior to the beginning of the seven years.

Here are some of those signs:

Israel's rebirth as a nation (Mat 24:32,33)

A decline in morality (2 Ti 3:1-4)

An increase in violence, ethnic wars, hot wars, cold wars (Mt 24:6-8)

An increase in famines, earthquakes, natural disasters (Mt 24: 6 - 8)

An explosion of travel, knowledge and education (Dan 12:4)

An explosion of cults and the occult (Mt 24:5)

The movement toward a one world government (Dan 7 - 12)

An increase in the apostacy of the church (2 Th 2:3)

There are more, but just these few I think are indicative that we are indeed in the end times. I've set all this down because I found a video I want to share that I think has more impact if you view it from the the standpoint of dispensations and these signs of the times.

By the way, the US does not figure in prophecy at all, most likely because, despite all our faults, a large number of us are believers in Christ who will disappear in the Rapture. Probably a lot of us are soldiers, sailors, police and even political leaders, the loss of which will have a dire effect on the nation's ability to protect itself, both against enemies within and without.

Besides, the United States was founded by Christians as a nation designed to protect the freedom to worship Christ in accordance with one's beliefs in what the Bible said. The other freedoms came along with that one. From our inception we have been what is called a client nation to God, maintaining the freedom to worship whatever god or creed one chooses, the freedom to speak, the freedom to evangelize. We send out more missionaries than any other nation on the globe. We provide more aid to the poor and suffering than any other nation, too. We've provided a haven for the Jews, and have defended Israel as a nation. We are in a sense the ultimate church age nation. When the church is removed, I believe the United States will for all intents and purposes cease to exist.

And that video? I'll post it tomorrow.

~~~~

A Quick Tour of Dispensations

2008-09-28T17:18:00.000-07:00

I think I've mentioned before on the blog that I hold to the dispensational interpretation of the scriptures. In a nutshell that means I believe that human history as recorded in the Bible can be looked at in terms of different time periods or ages, during which God had different policies of interaction with men, particularly those who were saved.

That there have indeed been different ways in which man was to relate to God seems obvious. While salvation has always been the same (believe in the messiah and you shall be saved), the methods of serving God and learning about Him and interacting with Him as believers, have not.

In the age of the patriarchs (Adam to Moses), the male head of the family served as priest for that family, interceded with God on their behalf, carried out the required sacrifices, and taught them the things they needed to know about God. There was no written scripture. God communicated through visions, dreams, angels and the stars.

With the coming of the Law and the nation of Israel, the patriarchal priesthood changed to the Levitical priesthood, where a line of (male) priests descended from Aaron took over the job of representing the nation and individuals to God, carrying out the required sacrifices (which were much more elaborate and numerous) and, along with the prophets, teaching the people about God. Moses penned the first written word of God in the Torah, which was added to throughout the period of the Jews to form the Old Testament.

Most scholars delineate the next period as that when our Lord was on the earth in human form, beginning with His birth and ending with His resurrection and the subsequent beginning of the church age on the Day of Pentecost. The priesthood had been completely corrupted by that time. Though the Pharisees, scribes and priests knew the Bible backwards and forwards, somehow they were unable to correlate all the obvious scriptures and prophecies that pointed to Jesus of Nazareth as their Messiah, and instead crucified Him, unwittingly fulfilling the very prophecies they had ignored.

With the coming of the church age, things changed dramatically. Not only is the Law no longer in effect, but now the priesthood resides in each person who believes in Jesus -- male, female, Jew, Gentile, slave, free. All the sacrifices from the OT Law are set aside because they were all shadows (teaching aids) of what Jesus had just completed on the cross. We no longer need to offer a sacrifice, merely confess our sins and in so doing cite the completed work of Christ on the Cross on our behalf.

The Apostles added the final section of written scripture to the canon with the New Testament, producing new revelation directly from God in the form of "mystery" doctrine. The church age, which was inserted into the age of Israel, and of which we are a part today, will conclude with the miraculous rapture, where all church age believers (the dead first, then those who are alive) are taken up to meet the Lord in the air. (I Th 4:16, 17)

At that point begins the seven year period of the Tribulation, which also comprises the final days of the age of Israel as computed by Daniel. It is said to be the worst period of time to be alive on the earth and if it were not cut short by the Lord's return would see the total destruction of mankind.

Why am I suddenly going on about dispensations? Because I found a video today I want to share, and I think it has more impact if you think of it from the standpoint of Dispensations. And the signs of the times...

But more on that tomorrow.

~~~

Not My Plan

2008-09-25T20:53:00.000-07:00

Today was a Not My Plan day. That is to say, my plans were not fulfilled.

Except...if I stand back and really look at it, they were. I got my morning routine done, I did my Thursday trip to the grocery store, I made rice and fed Quigley (multiple times) and he seems to be feeling very energetic. I had a great call from a friend and we got to have a stimulating conversation about doctrine. I got in my two hours of writing, and my hour of Bible class. I even got to go over my notes from the last two classes before today's.

But... I had three scenes in chapter 10 and had planned initially to take out all but the last one. Then somehow it seemed the second one might work there after all, but I would handle it by narrative summary. Except then it didn't want to be a summary and ended up being a confrontation with dialogue. Well, that's not terrible. I still had the first scene gone so that was good. All I had to do was write a summary of that. Maybe a paragraph. Cam was distracted, after all. He wouldn't be paying attention anyway...

Except the other characters didn't see it that way. They wouldn't LET him be distracted. Not only did they keep getting his attention, they kept doing it in very threatening ways. So, at the end of the day, the first scene which I definitely thought would not be in the chapter, is in the chapter. Partly as narrative summary and partly as actual dialogue. So now I have two scenes I wasn't planning and the third, which has to be there, yet to rewrite. Does any of this work?

I have no idea. But here's the thing, I actually got a lot of stuff done, and on some level it was my plan. Just because it wasn't my plan in the specific details is a pretty silly reason to feel like things went awry.

The other thing that didn't go as I hoped is Quigley, who this evening, showed us that he still has very runny stools, but at least they're yellow now. I'm starting to sneak in a bit of kibble with his rice. Maybe that's why it's runny. Or not. Who knows? I have to stop thinking about it.

I have to get some sleep (Q got me up at 6am to go out and I never went back to sleep). I've been dragging all day.

~~~