But then there assumptions that have a more costly result. When you and your teammate assume that the other is going to catch the fly ball, you could lose the game. Perhaps you and another drive make an assumption that the other is going to get out of the way and an accident occurs. At work, if no definitive statement is made about who is to carry out a task then all involved will think that the other is doing it. Or in the tragedy of Kitty Genovese everyone assumes that someone else will do the right thing. Or infinitely increasing in the depth of tragedy, what happens to someone who assumes that scientists and public opinion are correct enough that Jesus is not the answer?

Let us not assume! Especially when it comes to the important things. Else we are complicit in the outcome, whatever that might be.

While I enjoy the games, I do not always enjoy the people that play the games. I mean what is up with people that take games too seriously? Games are fun, and I will play as hard as I can. But it is never appealing when things get out of hand.

In particular there are some games that I cannot stand playing with other people because they tend to get much too involved in them. Settlers of Catan is one of those games. Since so much of the game is the relationships between the players in the game, it is extremely susceptible to antagonism, back-stabbing, and bitterness. All lovely attributes. It is an excellent game if you want to see the ugly in people, that’s for sure. People cannot help but reveal themselves a little bit when it gets competitive.

I will always remember a friend that I knew who was willing to give up a game (in that case basketball) because he was enticed to behave badly while playing. He thought that there were more important things in the world, namely his Christianity, so he gave it up. Admirable and encountered far too little nowadays.

too_long = 730 # days, which is 2 years

while you.engaged == False:
    # What state are you in?
    if you.dating == False:
        days_dating = 0
        if you.find('PERSON')
            you.dating = True
            other_person = person_of_opposite_sex()
    else:
        days_dating += 1

    # Date day, hooray!
    if you.have('DATE'):

        # Here's the juice
        if dating.purpose == 'MARRIAGE':
            result = you.go('DATE', 'INTERESTING', other_person)
            if days_dating >= too_long:
                you.dating = False
        else:
            result = you.go('DATE', 'BORING', other_person)

        # Process the result of the date
        if result == 'WELL':
            pass # Just keep on going on those dates!
        elif result == 'ENGAGED':
            you.engaged = True
        else:
            you.dating = False

    # Every other day of your (obviously) interesting life
    else:
        you.go('WORK')
        you.go('HOME')

you.go('WEDDING')
other_person.go('WEDDING')
you.married = True

other_person.married = True
you.celebrate()
other_person.celebrate()

README

Here’s some help for understanding this snippet of Python programming code. While you are unmarried, you are either dating someone or you are not. If you’re not dating and happen to find someone that you want to date, then lucky you! The next categorization is you are either actively pursuing marriage or you are not. If you are, I think that you should want to go on interesting dates.

Life isn’t dinner and a movie. Life is crazy and uncertain. It’s hard and difficult. Don’t you want to see how the person that you might spend the rest of your life with reacts? When they’re fording a river, do they get angry and upset with you? When you’re lost in the wilderness, do they get upset and frustrated? When you get frustrated with them, do they snap back? Find the worst in the person. Look for it as hard as you possibly can. Because if you can handle the worst, then you can definitely handle the best.

If you aren’t as actively pursuing marriage then enjoy your dinner and movie.

And if you’re not dating then good luck with being on your own and all of the issues entailed in CT’s The Case For Early Marriage.

Take meat for example. While there are vegans who abolish all animal products from their life, there are still a great number of people that do not. They are happy to go to a chop house and order a nice big steak. Many people that I know would opt for a simmering and perfectly cooked as a last meal. How many of them would be shocked to see the cow butchered to produce said steak? I know that it would be quite a sight to behold myself. But many people who would eat a well-cooked steak in a heartbeat would turn away equally fast from seeing how that steak came to be. And yet, that is all part of the process. It is no less true than the steak that sits in front of them in a fancy restaurant.

Moving a step in the more offensive category, what about abortion? Depending on whose statistics you believe, there is probably about half of the population that thinks that abortion is just fine and dandy. And how many of those people do you think would be willing to see what actually happens during an abortion? Just ask groups like Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust, a Christian pro-life activism group that aims to educate high school and college students, about what they encounter when they go out. With their huge graphic displays, they offend people because it brings to light things that they don’t want to see. I have read articles about them getting into heated shouting matches and even getting arrested. Arrested for free speech?! In our enlightened society?!

People who are pro-abortion like to think of themselves as pro-choice. They’re about the ability to choose something. That’s freedom! But when things start to ge a little more real than that, I am sure that they will be some of the first to avert their eyes. They will get heated because they will have to face the reality, which is ugly to them.

People love their nice packaged lives. They enjoy that everything is so nice and prepared for them. Abstractions are so much easier than the real thing. Get a grip people, there’s definitely more to things than what you want.

I looked at a number of very worthy charities before I decided that I wanted to be a part of Team World Vision.

From their website:

World Vision is a Christian humanitarian charity organization dedicated to working with children, families, and their communities worldwide to reach their full potential by tackling the causes of poverty and injustice.

If you are interested in joining with me to donate to a worthy cause, please visit my fundraising page:

Derek’s fundraising page

It is easy and natural for people to only believe something if they can see the flaw in it. Else they will think that something is amiss (e.g., a machine made the product and you are trying to pass it off as your own work). Most of the time this is spot-on. People are imperfect. Everyone knows this. Why else would we need Jesus? Still it’s rather amusing to note that while people can assume that perfection in other people is acceptable, perfection is a piece of handiwork is odd.

Sing on it Nat King Cole (Mona Lisa).

A little while back I saw a van in and around Los Angeles, CA with the slogan: God’s way is the best way

The van was for a company that cleaned carpets named Best Way Carpet Clean. In addition to the above slogan, they also had some fish stickers on their van. Oh and there was a website listed on the van, but it seemed to be out of commission when I tried to access it.

In any case, what is the real motivation for them to put that on their van? Seems to me that it is either because they hope:

1. It will get them business because people are Christian and they’ll trust another Christian
2. Non-Christians will think that Christians are more trustworthy so they’ll be hired

Whatever the reason, it seems to me that unless they made a special deal with God to miraculously clean carpets for them, it doesn’t have too much of a place in that environment. Not on their work van. As it is, it just seems like a ploy to get more business and hence make more money.

Lesson is: be a Christian anywhere (even as a rapper), but don’t do it out of incorrect motives. Even if we can’t figure it out, someone already knows when you have false intentions (where that someone is God).

In and of itself, music is innocuous. It is the words, lyrics, and association that we attach to these series of notes that give them their meaning. That brings me to the point where I wonder at the derision of specific genres of music. While I’m not a fan of every type of music (hardcore rock comes to mind), I do wonder sometimes at the motivation that people have for judgment.

Over the years, I’ve often heard both Christians and non-Christians deride so-called Christian rap (aka Gospel Rap, Holy Hip Hop, and so on and so on). Basically it’s music that identifies itself as hip hop with lyrics that could in someway be identified as Christian. It seems that people mock it because they think that the combination of a culture of sex, drugs, and money that is often associated with the hip hop culture cannot be combined with what they perceive as stodgy, conservative Christianity. Since they cannot go hand in hand, it’s worthy of derision.

And yet I can pretty readily admit that I listen to and enjoy some of the music in this genre. While I’m most definitely a fan of a wide variety of music (classic pop, r&b, show tunes, alternative, trance, and more), some of my favorite artists might very well be clumped into this group.

Why I enjoy Christian rap:

1. Like-mindedness – While a lot of the groups and artists that I listen to don’t constantly mention the name of Jesus Christ, I enjoy listening to them because I know that we come from the same place. We’re more alike than different because we are more fundamentally similar than to someone who does not share the faith.
2. Lyrics – Hardly anybody on the radio even has interesting lyrics. It’s the same old game of sex, money, and women. Soulja boy? Hardly stimulating.
3. Creativity – So granted, I don’t listen to a lot of underground secular rappers. But in my experience it seems that Christian groups that I listen to are much more wiling to try new things than the factory-pressed tracks heard on the radio.
4. Keeping It Real – This might seem extremely strange in a genre that many people think of as utterly fake, but I think that they’re being more real when they create their works. They’re using their entire being, from their background in the ‘hood all of the way to their conversion because of Christ. They’re not trying to hide these things, and I can respect that.

So I don’t enjoy ever single Christian rapper that I listen to. Far from it. But the same is true across the board for all musical genres. Personally I enjoy those Christian rappers that like to talk about life, just like how I like to talk about life here on this blog. But that is my own taste.

Even though it’s been popular in society to mock the Jesus that I believe in (Jesus is my homeboy anyone?), I won’t be party to it. I rather wonder why people act that way. Is it because (in the case of Christians) they’re insecure about being so in-your-face about the faith? Or perhaps it’s because (in the case of non-Christians) they haven’t experienced the same change?

Whatever it is, I might not ever know.

If you want to check out some free songs:
List of free (and legal) Christian hip hop mp3s

Some of my favorites are:

• 4th Avenue Jones (which have disbanded)
• L.A. Symphony
• Pigeon John (formerly of L.A. Symphony)
• Grits

While some think that fellowship and community are important, it seems to me that there is a distinctly positive association with being able to think and act of one’s own accord. In the workplace, this is obviously true because any employer would want someone who can figure out what’s wrong and solve something on their own without their manager’s every guiding instruction. But even outside of the workplace people like to see people who will help without being asked, not have to be told what to do every step of the way, and can come up with new ideas on their own.

Perhaps in this Randian society where man is elevated to the heroic nature that he is, we have gone even further such that our value system has become more sharply focused. That is, instead of praising society, we praise the individual.

As a Christian, though, I shouldn’t have such a high regard for the things that each of us can do on our own. I should feel indebted.

Christianity, at its roots, holds the message that we have something that we have done zero work for. The work that Jesus Christ did on the cross has made my sin null and void. And that is a wonderful thing! So while I can still appreciate independence in action, I need to always remember that ultimately I cannot hold it against others when they do not. For what do I hold over them? Nothing. I should forgive my debts, for I am forgiven mine.

What is profanity really? Apparently there are 5 types of swearing (according to Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature which I found a reference to in the Wikipedia article on profanity):

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Found Drama

1. Dysphemistic – Opposite of euphemism. Force listener to think about negative thing
2. Abusive – Abuse, intimidate, or insult others
3. Idiomatic – Refer to (but do not explicitly mention) something in order to arouse interest, be macho/cool, or express to peers that the setting is informal.
4. Emphatic – Emphasize what is being said (pretty self-explanatory)
5. Cathartic – Rid oneself of negative feelings by outwardly expressing it

I can see how all of these are accurate descriptions for how profanity is used. It’s very interesting to study profanity and how it comes about. How it is sociological in a sense because profanity in our language is different from profanity in other languages (even taking into account translation). That’s not the issue.

The issue is that profanity comes out of your mouth much more than you’d like to admit. I feel your pain, it comes out of mine more than I’d like to admit, too.

In fact, I’ve told people before that I do not cuss. And I’m absolutely correct in a strict sense of the term. I don’t use those words that society has impressed upon me as being profane. In fact, I don’t feel like I need to use profanity in order to express myself. I do feel the same emotions that my cursing brothers feel. (Okay I don’t actually have blood brothers, but I mean it in the mankind term.) And yet I don’t see that it’s too necessary. Am I aghast when I hear it? Not extremely so. Well I’m not with those from whom I expect nothing better. Some people are held to a higher standard, but I digress.

So I don’t cuss. But the thing is that I’ll cuss in spirit. I’ll use nice versions like “darn”, “crap”, and “shoot” instead of the usual fare. But does that make it any better? No, I’m beginning to think that it does not matter much at all. Even though the words are different and less offensive to the ear according to society, the usage shows that my mouth is still overflowing with what is in my heart. And I can see that all is not right in that region of my chest. I’m not as loving or as good as I profess.

Ah if only the distance between my head and my heart weren’t so far.