do you know what day it is?

It was a free day to take broken appliances to the dump.
My dad and I spent most of the morning working on all that shenanigans, and at about 1:30 it was decided that we were hungry. He asked what I was feelin, but it was unnecessary because the answer is always the same: gyros. And it was silently understood that there is, of course, only one place in Ames to get gyros.
So to Pammel Grocery we went.
My dad (who, in case you didn't know, knows EVERYONE in story county) is good friends with the man who owns the store. Who happens to be a Muslim.
We chatted for a little while, ordered our food and sat down. He brought us our salad and went back to the kitchen. As he brought out our gyros, I caught the glint of tears in his eyes. Before heading back to the kitchen, he said, "Mark, you are an honorable man-- you have an amazing heart, to come into my store today..." and then he walked away.
I didn't understand, and from the look on my dad's face, he didn't either, at least not at first. We were silent for a moment and my dad said quietly, "It didn't occur to me how meaningful it would be for him to have a white, christian American come into his store today, for the first time in years, on September 11th, and treat him like the friend I consider him to be." Neither of us had even thought about what day it was; we just had spent a day working hard together and decided it would be nice to eat out.. and gyros sounded pretty tasty.

He came back when we were almost finished with our food, pulling up a chair and sitting down, saying, "I have a story I want to tell you."
Within the first sentences of our three-hour long conversation, I wished I had some means of recording his words. He spoke of the heart of a person, the nature of love, the relationship between God and creation. The story was from the Quran. He went on bunny trails, discussing the symbolic meaning of each turn of events in this story about Moses. He spoke of current events, ancient events, philosophy, personal experiences, scripture from the Quran, the bible, the Torah... But there were such misinterpretations about the trinity, about Christ and his purpose, about covenants. We discussed and listened and shared. It was beautiful, and the whole time my thoughts danced between what amazing faith this man had, how much I wanted him to understand the actual implications of what Jesus Christ did, and how sad I was that his words, while they were being grasped and cherished in that moment, would be lost in time and the vault of my own memory forever. He had an amazingly poetic way of saying things, and despite the fact that his English was not amazing, his mind truly was.

He had read the bible three times in it's entirety. His reason for this was that, "so many people are trying to convert me, and I want to understand...everything."

In the words of my dad, we spent three hours wandering through the forest, beating around the bush. At 4, he resolved that he needed to get back to work, but wanted desperately to continue our conversation. As soon as we got to the car, I wrote down the words that were spoken in the moments before we left:

My dad said, "At the end of all of this, there is something you will have to decide for yourself. Do you need redemption, did Jesus die for you, and could you accept that amount of grace?"
He responded with a metaphor, saying there was no way it could be that simple. "If you were going to die from cancer, Grace, and I promised you that I would find the cure for cancer within a year... Would you believe me? Would you have enough faith in me to depend on me completely, not getting any other treatment for it?"
"No," I said pretty blatantly, "because I don't trust you." And at my dad's laughter, added, "at least not in the same way that I trust God. You're right; it isn't simple... Because that amount of faith can't be simple. We want inherently to earn our way to heaven, to do it on our own, but it's impossible: we need redemption by some other means. And the means... No, there's absolutely no way we can deserve what Christ did for us, but he offers it freely. And to accept that and have raw faith... It's not simple. But we do it every day."

And that's where we left it.

...self-therapy.

A week ago I cut off THIRTEEN inches of hair.
AAH!
I haven't had short hair since third grade.
... I feel light-headed.
aha. ha. hah.


But it's been a week and I still feel ghost-like wisps of long hair falling around my shoulders, down my back, brushing my arms. My neck is constantly cold. I want to twirl my locks of wavy, long brown hairs around my fingers and throw them over my shoulder.


But they are in a bag, in an envelope, in a post office or a mail truck somewhere, rubber bands tied around them. Destined to be made into a wig...They're no longer a part of me.


Do I sound sad? I feel like I'm mourning or something. But I'm not actually upset. I like my new cut; I know I'll miss my hair, but it can always grow back... It grows really fast, too. And besides...
It was time for a change:


Let all that hair bless somebody else for a while.

Ohhhhh... THAT'S what shirt I'm wearing!

all creation sings your name

Psalm 63:4
I will praise you as long as I live,
and in your name I will lift up my hands.

Lifelight was a huge blessing.
I'm so humbled by all the work put into this thing.
This thing made free to the public,
allowing people to come from all around
for a weekend in South Dakota
to just praise God, together.

The Gaze of Ra

"Ancient Greek Tradition has Prometheus stealing fire from heaven, fire used to light the path toward civilization. You can see the sun this way, if you wish, as Prometheus riding his horse into space and time, a lantern in his hand, held out toward the planets, a bit of it spilt into the belly of a furnace, forging steel, the steel splintering off to spark and die away on a blacksmith shop floor, little smidgens of fading heaven, little cosmic mysteries, plucked from the sparkling hair of God.

In Egypt the sun was the eye of a god: the sun god Ra, in the evening, closed his eyes and opened them again in the morning, thus the light by which we work and see and have our being is the gaze of a god...

In the Hebrew tradition, which splintered off into the Christian tradition, which is how I was raised, light is a metaphor. God makes a cosmos out of nothingness, a molecular composition, of which He is not and never has been, as any thing is limiting, and God has no limits. In this way, He isn't, and yet is. The poetic imagery is rather beautiful, stating that all we see and feel and touch, the hardness of dense atoms, the softness of a breeze (atoms perhaps loose as if in play) is the breath of God. And into this being, into this existence, God first creates light. This light is not to be confused with the sun and moon and stars, as they are not created until later. He simply creates light, a non substance that is like a particle and like a wave, but perhaps neither, just some kind of traveling energy. A kind of magnetic wave.

Light, then, becomes a fitting metaphor for a nonbeing who is. God, if like light, travels at the speed of light, and because space and time are mingled with speed, the speed of light is the magic, exact number that allows a kind of escape from time. Scientists have played with atomic clocks, matched exactly, setting one in a plane to fly around the world, and another motionless, waiting for the return of its partner. When they reunite, the one that traveled rests milliseconds behind the one fixed. The faster you move, physicists have found, the less you experience time. And if you move at the speed of light, you will never age; you are outside of time; you are an eternal creature.

But before you strap on your running shoes, you should know scientists warn us that with speed, matter increases in density, so an attempt at the speed of light will have you imploded by the time you hit Wichita, your atoms as dense as bowling balls. And to make matters worse, your density increases on a curve; the faster you go, the greater the density, and though you can get close to the speed of light, matter and that magic speed can never meet; the faster you go, the steeper the trajectory on the graph. You and I, made from molecules, cannot travel at the speed of light and cannot escape time, at least not with a body.

Consider the complexity of light in light of the Hebrew metaphor: we don't see light; we see what it touches. It is more or less invisible, made from nothing, just purposed and focused energy, infinite in its power (it will never tire if fired into a vacuum, going on forever). How fitting, then, for God to create an existence, then a metaphor, as if to say, here is something entirely unlike you, outside of time, infinite in its power and thrust: here is something you can experience but cannot understand. Throughout the remainder of the Bible, then, God calls Himself light. The perfection of the Hebrew metaphor is eerie, especially considering Eratosthenes wouldn't play with sticks and shadows for several thousand years, discovering Ra was, in fact, never closing his eyes."


Oh Donald Miller... Even while reading Through Painted Deserts for the fourth time, you are a breath of fresh air.

We serve an awesome God.