MoreThanMine

I have arrived safely in Alaska. It is beautiful up here.

And now, some photographs.

Flying into Alaska was georgeous. I sat next to a kindly woman from Anchorage who informed me that, for our viewing pleasure, this flight featured a sunset and a sunrise–in the same few hours. In this photo, the sun has set, though only a little way, below the horizon.

11:34pm. It is bright as daylight outside.

Flying over Alaska.

The sun has risen.

And is now beginning to set again.

This photo shows two things. The first thing, almost exactly center, is a Grizzly Bear and two cubs. The second thing is that I need to buy a longer lens for my camera. Pronto.

Two very young Great Horned Owls. Their mother is off finding food.

Teklanika River. So cool.

(more photos to come. stay tuned.)

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After just shy of 50 hours on a train, I have decided that maybe pictures will tell the story better than words.  (I’ll use a few words anyhow, I suppose.) 

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EIV News weather man Nate Berends moves west.

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3 Many peoples will come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
to the house of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us his ways,
so that we may walk in his paths.”
The law will go out from Zion,
the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.

4 He will judge between the nations
and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war anymore.

5 Come, O house of Jacob,
let us walk in the light of the LORD.

Isaiah 2:3-5 (NIV)

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Where can we find the intersection of faith and science? (And what do those question marks on the diagram below reperesent?)

Draw your own conclusions on this one (The full essay is here.):

Excerpt:

In the 21st century? Science and technology has to face many difficulties. The planet is full. We will be 10 to 12 billion in 2050. Can we have 10, 12 billion people live in normal life and not deteriorate completely the planet? The natural resources are decreasing, there will be no more oil and coal and gas and no more uranium in a rather short time.

It is often said that science and technology are the remedy. I think we have to say something else. Science and technology are necessary but not sufficient. It is clear that science and technology may as well keep on deteriorating or may be used to improve the situation.

The main thing required is something that is not scientific but emergence of the planetary consciousness, the planetary conscience; a will to stop the deterioration. For this we need a strong political will on a planetary scale.

So I think science is fundamental, we need science, we need technology but more than that we need the real conscious will to say we have to do something to answer the question “Is complexity viable?” No one knows the answer. It depends on what we do, it is our responsibility to do something in order to make the answer “yes.”

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I show you inside, and we find our seats within The Shed—that’s what they call the main worship space, I say. Facing the middle, we’re sitting pretty near where the men’s socks used to be, maybe.

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At the onset of this project, I had hoped to illuminate the connection between the declining condition of Christian education within the context of the Sunday school, and the emerging church. Not surprisingly, however, there exists very little information that directly discusses the intersection of the emerging church’s upward growth and the Sunday school’s decline. I did, however, notice a few very significant and pertinent connections between the two movements.

Most notably, the emphasis and necessity of community-centric involvement is strikingly evident in both movements. Within the selected articles found below, there is deep and recurrent evidence that the ideal emergent church will be centered in very tangible ways around community—the greatest majority of research suggests that Sunday school, in an ideal setting is much the same.

With that said, the emerging church demonstrates, if yet only hypothetically, great potential for the re-imagining of congregational, community-oriented education. This will not be significantly observable, however, until the emerging movement becomes more cohesive in its definition, practice, and membership. Once the emerging movement has begun to address its most critically decisive issues—particularly the role of traditional practice in the face of post-modern influence—there is great potential and opportunity for truly transformational educational structures.

These are things that are today only alluded to. Time will offer the ultimate say on the extent to which emerging congregations can rescue the institution of Sunday school and community education. If there is any hope for a re-visioning and renewal of Christian education in the context of the church, the possibility of the impetus coming from the emerging church is as likely—if not moreso—as any other source.

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I discovered a park yesterday.

Discovery Park, in fact.

(yes… you can click the pictues… there’s more where those came from.)

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This morning I hiked up to the top of Queen Anne and went to church at Bethany Presbyterian for the first time. All throughout the service, there was a man sitting next to me, scribbling furiously in a notebook. His handwriting was fast, without regard for form or accuracy. He was writing what appeared to be coming to the top of his mind.

I would later discover that his name is Jason, and a few of those pages he was scribbling were for me.

This bring me to a question. Do prophets exist in today’s world? I completely believe that they do! To think that God is not still using people to speak truth into the lives of others just doesn’t make sense to me. And so all arguement about whether Jason is a prophet or not can be ignored right now–but the question is indeed a good one.

After the service, Jason shared with me a cliff-notes version of the full letter that he gave to me. A good deal of what he said to me was pretty spot on. And this could be for one of two reasons.

The Oedepus Effect–i.e. self fulfilling prophesey–states that, more or less, a situation becomes as real as you expect it to be. To this extent, did some part of me want to believe Jason’s words to be truth, such that I would find and even stretch reality to provide paralells in my own experience? There surely must be some psychological rule about this.

Therefore, I am forced to conclude either the aforementioned fact, or that Jason was indeed placed in my life (assumedly by God), in order to share with me words of importance.

In other words, he’s either nuts, or a man of God. Are there really any other options?

Click below to see the whole letter. Read it if you wish. And if you know me at all, I’d be very interested to hear your reaction to this event.

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Mark had written several articles for secular magazines and had been interviewed a few times on the radio and had gotten this reputation as a pastor who said cusswords. It is true that Mark said alot of cusswords. I don’t know why he did it. He hadn’t become a Christian until he was in college, so maybe he didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to say cusswords and be a pastor.

(Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz)

I read this book and excerpt nearly two years ago and I unwittingly sat through an entire service of Mark, The Cussing Pastor, without making the connection. Miller actually speaks quite well of Mark, and says that his church represented the first time in years that a church made him feel like he could breathe, but this wasn’t my experience.

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