What Do You Want To Do When You Grow Up?

"What do you want to do when you grow up?" The question is asked to every child. My 10-year old self would have answered without hesitation. "I want to fly fighter planes."

Now, I'm 32, I fly fighters, and my answer is uncertain. I simply don't know "what" I want to do when I grow up. As I prepare for the next transition (that being one to a civilian life), the apparent relevancy of the question increases. In fact, the true question of "what" actually deviates slightly from the root question. What is my element? Where are my aptitudes and abilities best suited to serve others? Does this intersect with my passions? Perhaps most of all (my wife can relate here), will it allow me to balance my priorities, family and lifestyle?

Perhaps you can relate. The answer, it seems, ought to come from a self-awareness of what activities we are naturally suited to, and which ones we can hone to prepare ourselves for a new job. It relates closely to what one might consider their vocation, or calling in life, and is completely unique because of our individual identities and where we live in time and place. Academics like Ken Robinson would say that finding our individual element is essential to achieving a balanced life. I wonder, who actually truly finds their element? Who can find it and stay in it for the duration of their life? I assert that it is difficult to answer the question of "what" our element is, without an understanding of "how" to do that job, and "why" we do it in the first place. The "why", it seems, is much more important, and must be grounded in a larger purpose for our existence.

From a faith-based perspective, the question of "what" we are to do for a living is less clear than "how" and "why" we work. This purpose has been explored and given more satisfactory answers by much smarter individuals than myself, long before the time and place we dwell in today. The Westminister Shorter Catechism, in the 17th century, explored the question, "What is man's chief end?" and determined the answer "to glorify God and enjoy him forever". Without digging too far into the theological meaning of this assertion (and all of the possible outcomes), let us simplify this to say the following: as a follower of Christ, my ultimate goal is first to glorify God by fearing, obeying, and knowing Him. Second, my ultimate goal is to enjoy Him, by experiencing joy and peace in the abundant life which comes from doing the first. In practice, that means "what" job I pursue is not nearly so important as "how" I pursue endeavors, and "why" I pursue it in the first place.

If I know the abstract "why" (to glorify and enjoy God), then the practical "how" stems from it. Colossians 3:17 says, "and whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him." (ESV) If one's true motivation for work is to glorify God, then we begin to act in a way consistent with the principle. It's a simple but powerful truth. When my identity is not found in what I do, but rather why I do it, and specifically "who" I am abiding in, there is a radical internal change in "how" I act day to day. 2 Timothy 2:15 agrees, "Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth" (ESV) Colossians 3:23 concurs, "Whatever you do, work heartily, as to the Lord and not to men". When we work in a way that exhibits a fear and obedience to God, and a desire to know him, a natural diligence springs from it.

These changes in "why" and "how" have very practical application to the workplace today. The follower of Christ ought to act with great diligence, justice, ethical and moral decision making, service to others, and a heartiness that results in joy and peace and abundant life. Our work ought to stand out.

So, then, we arrive at our conclusion. "Why" and "how" are of significantly greater importance than "what" work we do. Let's look at Colossians 3:23 again: "WHATEVER you do..." It is admonishing and encouraging us that "what" doesn't matter. We can rest in the peace of knowing that we are always in our "element" when we rest in God's sovereignty, and trust that he will lead us to the answer of "what" we do in His own time.

Sicario Trailer - First Impressions

In a word, this preview is intense. Trailer editing is practically an art these days, and Sicario covers the essentials: cinematography that depicts a taut series of resonant imagery (were those bodies in the wall?), familiar actors (Edge of Tomorrow's badass heroine Emily Blunt, for example) delivering suspenseful dialogue ("Spotter vehicle, left lane"..."Get your weapon out"), a score which propels the experience like an afterburner takeoff, and carefully depicted action to thrill the viewer. Filmmakers are given two minutes to enrapture the audience and create a coherent story in a preview, and this trailer achieves it to great effect for me.

Directed by Denis Villeneuve (Prisoner, Enemy), who is slated to helm Blade Runner 2, Sicario promises to be a high-tension, character-based thriller, centered on themes basic to the human experience: that there is creational good in the world, that something has gone very wrong along the way, and that this brokenness exists in each of us (spoiler alert: it's called sin). We are entangled and surrounded by it's nature; as Sicario's tagline states, "In this war, there are no borders between right and wrong". It is inevitable that no victory which can be achieved of our own will, and I predict that, "providing a measure of order that we could control" (as Josh Brolin's character states) will not work out very well.

Fortunately, this picture of the human experience is only a partial one. The gospel worldview teaches us that redemption and ultimate freedom from our bondage to sin is found in Jesus Christ, who has ransomed himself to set the captives free. Whether Sicario points the way has yet to be determined, but there is hope and not despair to be found in it's story for the follower of Christ.

Bros

Someone who knows me, picks up where we left off.

Laughing and looking for the bright spots.

There in the heartache, earning their worth,

There when we marry, bury, and birth.

We go to the mountains, and search for ourselves

Wonder at the future and the time we have left.

Little to explain as curiosity grows

Always complain about what we’ve chose

Cannot contain these best man bros.

A man with a brother is a man blessed.

15 Thoughts I Have Watching Every Game of Thrones Episode Ever

15. These opening credits last FOREVER. Good thing they are awesome...well, were awesome, 4 seasons ago.

14. Man, that Cersei is a real *****. All of the Lannisters need to die off ASAP.

13. I guess Jaime's Lannister's OK. He gets a bad rap, mostly. Don't kill him off.

12. Oh and Tyrion too. Somehow a dwarf getting drunk and delivering witty reparte is still funny. If this is a Game of Thrones, I hope he wins it.

11. Who's that guy again? 

10. Why is that dude important?

9. You know nothing, Jon Snow.

8. Wildlings and Northerners, can't you all just get along?

7. CAN'T EVERYONE JUST GET ALONG?

6. Okay, if they're not going to get along, lets get to the epic battles already.

5. Like with dragons. Man it would be awesome to see these dragons doing something.

4. Dear Arya & Sansa, your character development leaves something to be desired.

3. Man those Littlefinger/Varys guys are so sleazy.

2. Where's ____? Why isn't he/she in the story? Oh, that's right, they're dead already.

1. HODOR.

Spiritual Art of Penance: for Evangelicals

Penance for Evangelicals. Just as a note, I also posted this baby on my other blogspot: theologywhiplash.blogspot.com

I became aware of the idea of “penance” when I was studying for my 4 year degree. I was in a religion course that made good Evangelicals, like me, aware of other theological systems in Christianity. The idea of penance was almost laughable to me then; I thought of it as trying to earn forgiveness for sins. Every good Evangelical knows that is a stain upon the gospel. Jesus doesn’t require our good works in order to forgive us. Think “Thief on the cross.”

I was very unaware of how little I knew or understood, much less appreciated, theological reflection. I knew the right answers, and they came quick and easy. Such is the life of an inexperienced 19 year old. I thought penance was an old and stupid idea for people who weren’t satisfied with the Gospel truth that Jesus died for all sin, once and for all, and invites all humanity into a relationship with Him; forgiving all sins for those who accept it.

Little did I know, one day I would be pastoring a church. And when you pastor a church, certain truths are not so easy to dismiss or glaze over. To tell the truth, I now firmly believe in penance as a regular spiritual practice for those who have accepted the Gospel.

So what is penance? Is it really trying to earn salvation?

No. Actually, penance has less to do with earning what God is offering to us, and more to do with us accepting what is already there. In its proper place, penance allows us to stop wrestling with our sin, and start wrestling with our forgiveness. It usually is a task given to us by an ecclesial authority, formal or informal. It could be anything from saying prayers, or fasting, or a pilgrimage, or even completing some manual labor that benefits others. The tasks are supposed to be helpful, but mostly they are supposed to give us time to meditate on—and work out—this incredibly great forgiveness and life in Christ that we have been given.

A vignette of penance in the modern evangelical church.

A guy I know and love struggles with sexual addiction. I can tell you that any addiction, but sexual addiction in particular, is a seriously difficult problem to deal with on a spiritual level.

The problem with sexual stuff.

Part of the problem is the root of past sin. My buddy was sexually exploited as a child, and so the normative sexual appetites a man can expect have been broken. He has never experienced sexual normalcy. This is not his own failing. Sin has a way of victimizing people, whether we admit it or not. Furthermore, our culture (more than our churches, in my opinion) makes sexuality a shameful thing; by exploiting its intrigue to sell stuff. Our churches say “sex cements” (and they mean that it’s proper place is to bond people and lives together in the sacredness of marriage), but our culture says, “sex sells.”

My buddy had been thrown into a world where he had been sold… yes… but he had been unwillingly and unwittingly cemented to deep shame and reproach. The work of being set free by Jesus Christ is just that: work. And while I do believe we should shy away from any boasting that salvation can be earned; I think we, the evangelical church, have forgotten to work that salvation out.

And so, sadly, my buddy got virtually no help from his Christian community. Pastors seemed to only have one line, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you shall be saved.” His response was always, “I believe! But this sin is killing me!” The pastor could offer no other help. And when my buddy’s sin problem became an embarrassment to the church, he stopped receiving even that one line. Pastors seemed to say to him, “If one time forgiveness doesn’t work, you got to change. If you can’t change, then you need better help than I can give. Here’s the number to a good counselor that I know.” No offense to all my friends in the world of counseling and psycho-analytics; but I think we pastors have forgotten an age old pastoral tradition: penance.

So I invited my buddy on a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage is simple, you just walk with each other all day, for days on end. I asked each participant (Wait. No. no. Let’s call them “pilgrims,” shall we?) to identify spiritual goals that God was inviting them too. The goals were different for each pilgrim. One wanted to find God’s peace, another wanted to find spiritual strength, a non-Christian came to see what Christians were like while walking together, and of course, one man wanted to be set free from his sexual addiction.

And so we started each day with a meditation on Psalm 1, and Genesis 15. Then we walked, and walked and walked. We ended each day with a small fire, and another meditation. Then we’d get up and do it again. We prayed that every mile would get us closer to grasping God’s work in our lives, ever step a victorious step in sanctification, and every mountain an opportunity to struggle towards God.

I spent time with each pilgrim, as time allowed, praying for them, and talking through whatever God was doing in their lives.

“Rev. Shivers just went up my spine. Maybe God is going to set me free. Maybe this trip is going to allow me to finally lay down this burden.” My buddy said to me.

“Well, let’s walk it out. And pray.”

If the story ended with me telling you that the pilgrimage was a great one-time cure for my buddy, and that convinced you to try it out; you would be missing the whole point of this article.

The miraculous healing we wanted is not what God gave. Penance is never about manipulating God into doing what we want. But penance, in and of itself, is a grace that God gives to us to work out our salvation. That pilgrimage, for all intents and purposes, is the temporal answer to our struggle with God’s great salvation: Christians walking with each other, praying for each other, encouraging each other, and trusting God to do the work.

As such, the evangelical model of penance promotes the very antidote that Jesus established for serious, addictive, soul-crushing sin: A Christian community that continually (and oftentimes physically) brings one another to the Great Regenerator of Humanity—Jesus Christ.

This is how we get better. We walk it out with one another. The spiritual discipline of penance demands that the evangelical response to sin is not only, “That’s between you and God. Pray this prayer and you should be good.” But also, “Welcome to the inheritance of the saints! You belong here, and your struggle with sin does not disqualify you. We want to be reconciled to God, which while we still walk this Earth, is a never ending process we help each other with.”

Conclusion: The Girl On The Train, and Goodness vs. Greatness

Fast, furious, and as devoid of spoilers as I can manage: though it hung up slightly for me in the middle, and the strength of its characters waned just slightly (the "kidnapping" scene specifically), The Girl on the Train turned out to be a fun ride with a few good twists along the way. The parallels to Gillian Flynn are merited, not undesirably. On "Palmer's Scale of 1-10", I'd give it a solid 6 - better than the average novel, but short of greatness. Some will disagree with me here: it is, in fact, well written, with finely crafted story elements, honed structure, and satisfying in the heroic journeys of its characters. 

I wouldn't argue with that rebuttal. It is on par with other first novels by several authors I enjoy - Peter Heller's Dog Stars, Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore, Ernest Cline's Ready Player One, and Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding, for example. My argument is only that it lacked a certain quality to elevate it from simply "entertaining" to some transcendent form of reading, which few books actually achieve. 

I theorize that it's hard to get a sense of the greatness in a book until I read more from an author. It takes time with them, and developing a relationship of sorts to understand their experience and worldview. Perhaps they need a period of getting comfortable in writing before they achieve it. Let's use David Mitchell as an example. Cloud Atlas is perhaps his finest novel, made deeper and richer through reading his first novels, and the ones which follow it, even when they don't achieve a similar greatness (or maybe, especially because of it). Why? Because I have more context for David Mitchell. I begin to understand how he got to Cloud Atlas, and where it has taken him since.

There's a line in Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood, which the protagonist states firmly that he will not read any author which has not been dead for 20 years. It is a curious statement which stands out from the rest of the narrative. There is no expressed conclusion to draw from it, and certainly Murakami was not endorsing the opinion by voicing it (he wants us to read his books today, not in 20 years). Nevertheless, I've thought a lot about that quote. The quote is really about selecting books to read that have been set apart by time, truth and authenticity: meaningful contact with readers across the dimension of time, how much the human experience rings true, and to what degree the author projects his own thoughts and feelings into it. By conclusion, he is making a statement as to what defines greatness in a book, and also making a qualitative judgment that we cannot determine it while the author is still living. 

No publisher wants to sell that book from a living author which will not be popular yet for many years. I have read a lot about the publishing market being over-saturated. There are still plenty of digital-era readers out there, but there are also a lot of books. Because there are a lot of books, authors must write with the broadest appeal possible so that their publishers make money, and the authors can continue to write. Only reputed authors have much freedom with their material, and then with a pseudonym if deemed too divergent. If Oprah endorses that book, or a blockbuster trilogy (or maybe quadrilogy!) is based on their series, the author has really hit it big, and achieved a different sort of "greatness", a financial one. So an aspiring writer is incentivized to write in such a way if they want a chance at achieving popular greatness. Experience tells us that said author need not even write great books, or even good ones (I'm looking at you, Divergence, Mockingbird, and Twilight). Good screenwriting/acting/directing/CGI can overcome bad books to make good movies for the sake of selling more of them. 

For better or worse, this is the world we live in. Writers must write, and publishers must publish accordingly, to minimize risks and make money. Cloud Atlas, in this sense, is an obscure Wachowski film that failed to make much money. The Girl on the Train should be viewed as a product of our time: it is a good book which has achieved commercial (and perhaps momentary) greatness. Dreamworks has already acquired the rights to film it. And it is a good enough story that I would watch the film, as well as read more of Hawkins. Underneath it all, however, is a lingering feeling that there is greatness waiting still for the one who would boldly write transcendent truth with authenticity.

A First Impression of The Girl on the Train

I'm a sucker for unreliable narrators. Yes, they're a bit of a liability, knowing that through the words on the page, they are subverting my thoughts and emotions for some future use, yet I read/watch on, either to be thrilled or disapppointed at the end: thrilled for the truth about human experience they reveal (ex. Memento, The Great Gatsby, The Blind Assassin), or disappointment for failing to expose it, by lack of resolution (The Catcher in the Rye) or the author's abuse of the technique. Unfortunately, most works fall into the latter category.

The Girl on the Train, a first novel by Paula Hawkins, is unique in that it has not just one but two unreliable narrators, Rachel and Megan, young women whose lives are apparently separate but will become increasingly similar, intertwined and complicated as the plot goes on. I am partially finished (23%, with 2.5 hours of reading to go, according to my Kindle), but pleased so far with the author's execution in its characters and literary technique (Editing note: I am told that there will be a third narrator, more on this to follow in my final review).

The two narrators, Rachel and Megan, are both unreliable in the sense that they are flawed and broken people, grappling with the consequences of their questionable judgments and decisions, carried out in their everyday actions. Rachel is a despondent alcoholic and jobless divorcee who (according to her) commutes on the train to London daily as part of an elaborate ruse to show her flatmate she is still employed. Her inebriated thoughts are laid bare for the reader in the mornings and evenings, as she passes by her old neighborhood, the home of her ex-husband (now remarried and with a child), and the home of a younger couple, who she names "Jess" and "Jason". Rachel is a sort of outside observer, seeing their lives unfold through glimpses in their window, fleeting moments at a time. Rachel imagines this as the life she could have had, experiencing pleasure at their joyful moments and simultaneous shame and guilt for failing to achieve this in her own life.

"Jess", as it turns out, is actually Megan, and her life is revealed to be somewhat different than Rachel imagines it. Megan is emotionally unsettled by her past, unhappy with her present marriage to "Jason" (Scott), and soon starts an extramarital affair with her psychologist. Her story, while more anchored in reality, still leaves the reader suspicious of what is about to come.

Scene One is set; insert Rachel's chance discovery of "Jess" kissing another man, one binge-fueled night Rachel cannot remember, a missing Megan, and we have ourselves a story. Hawkins has established an intriguing mystery that truly engages the reader with just the right amount of the right words to reveal what is happening, and we get the impression that every single sentence has been carefully crafted, to great effect in the reader's mind. It is carefully balanced between achieving intrigue by not telling the reader, and enough revelation of character and plot to keep the reader interested. While it deals with explicit material, it does not do so in an explicit way. The reading experience is not altogether different than how I felt reading Gone Girl, and I suppose that many will compare Hawkins to Gillian Flynn's works.

There is foreshadowing, metaphor, theme, and symbolism in abundance that I have not observed here, but I will reserve these judgments for when I have finished the book and had more time to digest what Hawkins has presented to us. Suffice it to say, however, that it is a pleasurable reading experience thus far, and I am interested to see how these characters grapple with the consequences of their choices, and what twists the plot takes. At this point, I'm along for the ride.