Ordinary Visionary

Thanksgiving Pictures Up

Place settings, originally uploaded by olanky1.

I managed to take a few pictures during the Thanksgiving party at my house... Check them out over at flickr!

National Lampoons Thanksgiving

IMG_1954, originally uploaded by jennjana.

Tonight was probably my most memorable Thanksgiving to date: my first Thanksgiving in my house, complete with a fire in the oven and a dozen hungry guests! But seriously the food was amazing and the fellowship was even better. I am so thankful for my friends, who not only helped me cook all day (and some last night) but also didn't leave me with a pile of dirty dishes (and believe me there were MANY dirty dishes!)

So as I toddle off to bed, finally, after 1am Black Friday, I am thankful for these things... First of all this week. I have been nearly giddy since last Friday. I have such a peace about where things are headed in my life even when everything seems uncertain. I am thankful for now rather than worrying over what is to come. I am thankful that my friends are so phenomenal. Really I don't know where they came from but each of them are exactly what I've needed for a long time. I am thankful that my family is healthy and happy. I am thankful for patience. I am thankful my house didn't burn down today!!

Happy Thanksgiving. And happy Black Friday!

wisdom vs. knowledge

Talking to a sort of friend this afternoon, he asked me what the difference was between wisdom and knowledge. I assume that he had an answer of his own, but he likes to get input from people before he gives a message (he's a youth director)…

When did there ever become a question as to the difference between wisdom and knowledge? Are the lines so blurred that they begin to look like the same thing? Suddenly the guy with the PhD is the first person to come into our minds when we think of someone who has wisdom?

That's a terrifying thought, that in order to gain wisdom you have to pay for an education and take some tests and it will be instilled in you. Somehow through four years spent in cement-walled rooms nodding off during lectures, you get a piece of paper that implies wisdom? Nonsense.

Knowledge and wisdom are, I would argue, inseparably linked, but they are not the same thing. Computers can store nearly unlimited "knowledge" (facts, pictures, literature, etc). But ask a computer to give you wisdom about the gear in your life and you'll only get a regurgitation of knowledge. Your name is Jamie. You are a Computer Science major at UCF. You are taking Artificial Intelligence this semester. You graduate in 26 days. But… I wanted to know what I should be doing with my life after graduation! That wasn't helpful at all!

Wisdom is not a simple restatement of facts. It's facts with a purpose, facts with both a forward direction and a history, facts set into motion.

I likened it to this (and I'm planning my first Thanksgiving dinner so forgive me if I'm a little excited about food): Knowledge is stuff in a pantry. Canned pumpkin. Sugar. Vanilla extract. Wisdom is knowing how to combine those foods into something delicious. You can have all the vanilla extract in the world but unless you have some way to use it with a purpose, there's no way anybody's coming to your next dinner party.

So where should we go to find wisdom? I tend to start with people. There are people in my life who are living examples of Truth — of Christ's love, of the application of scripture — and those are the ones I will (or rather, should) go to first when I am seeking wisdom. People whose lives are pointed in a trajectory toward Truth. They are the only ones who can steer me right. I won't necessarily just listen to their words; I'll listen to their life.

Then I thought about it a minute longer and realized that I should be seeking wisdom not just from people living in the Truth (although that's essential too), but also from the source of the Truth itself. From God through prayer and from the written Word.

It's so trivial, so elementary. Yet we forget. We forget because the pattern of success in our society includes an education and a decent salary. We forget because often the people living in the Truth are not people we want to party with all the time. Maybe.

Here's my final thought for the night. In the end I don't want to assume that I have wisdom because I have a Bachelor of Science degree. Wisdom doesn't stop at a piece of paper hanging in a frame on a wall. Wisdom doesn't stop at all. It is not a point in space, but a moving projectile, a vector with a beginning but no end, pointed toward the Truth that is Christ. If my life looks like that, then count me among those with some wisdom. If not, perhaps you have the wisdom to impart that can point me in the right direction.

status in the city

worship // status in the city, originally uploaded by olanky1.

The community of believers I am a part of took church to the heart of Orlando tonight. What an amazing place we live in to be able to worship our God without walls around us or a ceiling over us. Uninhibited, we sang, we prayed, and we listened to a message that was a good reminder of the point of it all. Pictures are at flickr. Hopefully the message will be on the podcast later this week. Peace.

Stranger Than Fiction

Ever since I was a kid I've had an occasional narrator in my head. When I'm feeling particularly mundane I have the habit of spicing up activities like walking along a sidewalk or heating up a TV dinner by doing them to the tune of a string of words in the background.¹

She continued writing her blog entry, racing the cursor to type faster than it could blink. If only she could push it a little faster, she thought, she might set some kind of record for the longest a cursor had ever gone without blinking. Words appeared on the screen almost faster than they entered her mind, but she dared herself to leave them there, unedited, for the excitement of where they'd take her next.

And so on.

So the movie I saw tonight was particularly wonderful, not only because the story in itself was an almost unthinkable work of both literature and film (as explained to me by my fellow moviegoer on the way out of the theater), but because the narrator used exactly the kind of words (albeit more eloquent most of the time) that I use in my own ongoing narration.

Go see Stranger Than Fiction. You're welcome.

¹ Okay, so I've never told anyone that before. I don't think I have, anyway. It's just a quirk. Nothing to be scared of. But now you know what might be really going on when I look deep in thought. I might just be saying, "And she sat there, looking deep in thought but in reality only imagining how perfectly a pair of chirping crickets would fit on the soundtrack for this particular scene." :-)

Sin Entropy

Status was so good for my mind last night. It got me thinking on this tangent about identity crisis and whether I can look anywhere in the Bible and find a mirror image of myself. Who is this person I have been and who am I becoming? Am I moving from disorder and chaos to order and simplicity or is it the other way around? Why would I choose the bondage of living outside the Way and the Truth when it's spelled out so clearly right there in front of me?

God created man to be essentially simple. No clothes, no women, no real room for gluttony or covetousness or any of that baggage. Just man and his habitat, a beautiful garden with only one sin he could possibly commit. And it was good.

Then God sees that Adam is getting bored of doing life by himself every day and decides to fashion a homegirl from one of his ribs. They're naked and hanging out in a garden — the perfect honeymoon — and life is good.

Enter sneaky snake. Eve thinks the idea of having knowledge sounds like a good deal and Adam gets on board with it and there we have it: The fall of man. (Gee, that was quick.) Life was so simple and the choice to disobey God, fearing that He was holding out on them, ushered in immeasurable chaos.

By the second generation already there was murder, and multiplied complexity on down through the generations. We are perpetually moving from order to disorder, living lives that look nothing like the life mapped out for us in Scripture for the sake of being unique, free, or whatever other new age word you want to slap on it.

But that's paradox, as AJ so accurately put it last night. If you look at the commands God has laid down in Scripture, you don't find bondage. You find freedom. It's paradoxical but no less true. God designed all things — love, sex, community, our bodies, everything — with a purpose. He's the ultimate architect of creation, and the way he teaches us to live in that creation and use the gifts he has given the world is the simple truth. Simple, unadulterated truth.

But we can't live with that, can we? We want to classify sin according to weights that make our sin look small and Susie's look off the charts in comparison. We want to bend scripture to fit the context of our lives, instead of letting it define the context of our lives.

We have this thing inside of us — some call it the sinful nature, but I think it's bigger than that — that makes us want to do things on our own. Rewrite the way of doing things. Because we somehow know more than the Father, who designed all things for a purpose.

I guarantee you there is no way more simple than His Way. But I don't mean to imply the way of simplicity is anywhere close to easy. If it was so easy, I'd be living it out perfectly myself. And I'm not.

In fact, it is so against my nature to choose His way that the struggle is often too great to bear. Jesus knew this, saying, "men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed." (See John 3:19-21). The way of the light is the 'simple' way, but it's far from the easy way.

Look at the timeline of sin… Entering the world through something as simple as a bite of fruit, sin now takes much more wretched forms, always increasing in complexity as we continue insisting on living in ways that are incongruent with the plan given to us by our Creator.

Order ⇒ disorder. Sin entropy.

My mission is to live my life pushing against the tide of the entropy of sin. The second law of thermodynamics has no authority in my life. Unlike the version of this law we see played out in nature, we have the capacity through the grace of God to push against the tide and disallow sin entropy in our lives.

A commitment to live life within the commands set forth in scripture is a commitment to simplicity, slowly giving more and more of my life over to God to be used in accordance with His will instead of my own. Far from legalism, it's acceptance of the gifts God has planned for me in this life. And that is freedom.