When I Look at the World

Gift

2011-12-25T17:17:00.000-08:00

A short one for a significant day.

Many of my friends took a task to write a blog titled "One Thing." The idea was to identify the one thing that drives you as a person, the one thing that takes priority over all other things. The question is interesting. What is the one thing that will keep you going when everything else falls apart?

Today reminds me of my own life and that, regardless of whether or not I have realized it or not, there is one reason I live, One Thing that keeps me going.

And that one thing is the Truth.

From the ignorance of being a child, to bitter moral depravity, to the rabbit trail I find myself on, I have always, in some way or another, wanted the Truth. The Truth about life, the Truth about myself, the Truth about existence. My ultimate fear is not finding the Truth to be inconvenient, but being fooled into the lie. When I finally go, I hope for nothing more than to be known as someone who lived the Truth, no matter how uncomfortable it was.

So what does this say about the nature of Truth? In the world we live in, the Truth is a naughty word and an improper abdication of the right of everyone to determine their own independence. But my question will always be, what effect does this have on the truth? Does your level of comfort with an idea change its veracity in any way? Can any hair change its color by your will alone?

The more I live, the more I start to realize that my emotions do not and never will have any impact on this terrible, amazing thing called the Truth, which makes the search for it all the more paramount for the existence of every human being: as I have said thousands of times, I believe more than anything that more than any responsibility that mankind holds, the responsibility to the Truth is the most important.

Today, I'm reflecting on the Truth that I find. That the Truth itself became flesh. That the Truth did not come with power, but with humility. Was not born in a palace, but in a trough. Accompanied not by celestial armies, but by farm animals. Exalted not by noblemen, but by shepherds. The friend of fishermen, prostitutes, tax collectors, and foreigners. Blesser of the meek, healer of the broken. The Truth knew all, yet broke not a reed; saw all but uplifted the unworthy. The One who saw us all for the filth we were, yet submitted to death; dying for its redemption, and rising for its invalidation.

Today, more than any other day, we celebrate the glorious Truth that undermines everything we know about power structures, that flips the world upside down in a terrifying and unbelievable way. A way that makes rulers shake and mobilize the lowest of people to hope and love. If we accept this to be true, than nothing is what it seems, and there truly is hope in the gutter, and love for the unloved. It changes the nature of existence in a way that leaves many uncomfortable, but cannot leave anyone unchanged.

If we accept that God can come as a baby in a manger, can we ever be the same?

Today, we celebrate gifts, and I want nothing more than to live for the most important gift of all, regardless of its consequences: the Truth.

The painful, glorious Truth. And the Truth will set you free.

Merry Christmas.

~Jared

Lolly Pop Jesus

2011-11-05T06:28:00.000-07:00

This is a short post on something that continues to confuse me.

This is the story of "lolly pop Jesus."

Once upon a time, Jesus came to earth.

2000 years later, people start to read Jesus's teachings, life, and works through the Gospels but come to an interesting conclusion: "He was a good teacher, but he couldn't have been Divine."

Ok, then it seems to me you are facing a problem here. Even the earliest Gospels record Jesus as making claims to divinity: "Son of Man," "God's One and Only Son," "I and the Father are One" "I am the Way the Truth and the Life." He does not, as most Jewish teachers of the day did, speak in meager terms, but called it "My Father" "My Kingdom" which is no doubt why the Gospel records many times in which the Jews pick up rocks to stone him and finally send him to Pontious Pilate to be crucified for heresy. Aside from that, most outside historical sources affirm that he was crucified for heresy and made such claims, many calling him a "sorcerer." So how exactly do you address this?

"No, you see all that divine stuff was added in by later people who wanted to see him as God. Really, Jesus was just a teacher."

Ok, now youve got another problem, and the most important one: you've made the bizarre and unbased assumption that all of the Gospels were originally a bunch of humble statements with no claims to divinity when, all the sudden, a bunch of scheming apostles come along and write in a bunch of Jesus saying divine stuff despite the fact that A) the Gospels name specific witnesses that would have been alive to testify against them and B) the Gospels make the apostles look like the dumbest people on planet earth, yet they didnt think of changing them to make themselves look good and C) the apostles changed their own fate from being simple followers of a Jewish teacher to cultic apostles that would all get brutally murdered later. If the apostles did write these things in, they must have actually been the dumbest people on earth.

Despite the holes in that argument, the main problem is this: you've asserted that the Gospels have been tampered with and changed, so now you have destroyed the credibility of the same sources where you get Jesus's teachings. If the Gospels were so obviously tampered with as youve asserted, then by no means can you say with any certainty that Jesus said "blessed are the poor in spirit" or "turn the other cheek." For all you know, these are also just random additions by apostles, and possibly not even the same person (welcome to the Multiple Jesus hypothesis). As it stands, there is no point praising Jesus's teachings and at the same time negating their authenticity. At this point, Jesus's good teachings are no better than a feel good quote on an Urban Outfitters handbag, cited "anonymous" or would be better at home in a random quotebook of Hebrew proverbs than in any sort of organized biography.

Not only do I think this thought process is fraught with errors, but also just plain intellectually dishonest. What historian would ever think its ok to ignore some of the things Plato said because you found some of it offensive? What fervent atheist philosopher would be ok with you taking offensive passages out of Bertrand Russel's "Why I'm not a Christian"? Is not picking what you want and discarding the rest intellectually dishonest and disrespectful of history? So why does this differ with Jesus?

Funny enough, even after 60 years, the old Lord Liar Lunatic argument still readily applies here: people are always looking for the middle way with Jesus, a way to soften him up and make him more cuddly and cute and instead of the guy on the street corner who's claiming divinity and talking about hell; but the fact is Jesus is who He was, and denying that doesnt make you open minded, rather just makes you the fool who wants to look all day at the landscape he painted instead of going outside.

And this is the story of the lolly pop Jesus: a prophet that fits in your pocket, good for five minutes of enjoyment, and can be thrown in the trash can later.

That is all.

~Jared

The Command of the Open Hand

2011-11-01T15:23:00.000-07:00

This is a blog mostly inspired by this blog post from a good friend about giving; something that should shock and challenge us, but fails to.

"Give generously to him and do so without a grudging heart; then because of this the LORD your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you put your hand to. There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore, I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land" - Deuteronomy 15

"And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful." - Luke 6

Giving is always a sort of tongue in cheek subject in the States: something we know is important, but doesnt ever seem to register too much.

One of my friends here in Chile is a Haitian man who I bizarrely befriended on the street one day (apparently out of all the people he would try to start a conversation with, I was the only one who turned around and responded). Ivers has been in the country a little over a month now, and works at a bakery making a small amount of money. One day, I saw him on the metro and said hi to him, noticing he's drinking a box of chocolate milk. Without hesitating, he sees me, leads me back to a random snack stand and buys me a chocolate milk as well and then walks off. This sort of thing, as an American, usually just leaves me flabbergasted.

Another friend of mine, Heyner from Peru, walked with me one day to go get an ice cream cone and bought mine without any hesitation. I try to be polite and throw out a "oh no really you shouldnt" or "I'll pay you back" but its usually in vain, and just provokes some weird looks from any of my friends. To them its normal to buy things for friends and in the end for them an ice cream cone or a chocolate milk is a small and expected cost to pay when you're with a friend.

Conversely, Im used to experiencing something like last night when I was in Valparaiso with some gringo friends. As the check comes forward, all joyful conversation comes to a stop and we discuss business; "how much per person?" "whats 5600 divided by four?" "how much is that with tip?" "All put in this much, and you'll just owe me" "how much do I owe you again?" The check dances around from person to person, as the amount that each person pays must be a carefully, crafted sum that neither cheats nor overly benefits anyone. Once the check and the money given are carefully scrutinized by all parties involved, a satisfactory conclusion is reached and everyone can leave comfortable.

Its such a funny thing, isnt it? I see myself so needlessly close handed for no other reason than that it is the way that my culture has raised me. I try so very hard to fight against this, but my Americanness cant help but calculate the cost of everything, make sure I pay back everyone the exact penny I owe, and find non-chalant ways to remind people they owe me money.

Yet, my friends from other cultures seem to live in a way that is so effortlessly open handed about money, even when they give in need: both the friends I mentioned gave not out of their excess, but out of their poverty. Charity out of necessity becomes much more than just the object itself, but rather a symbol of friendship and of love. It reminds me of one movie, called Ushpizin about one Israeli Jew who hosts two escaped convicts at his house. They abuse his hospitality constantly through the movie, yet he continues to serve them out of his poverty. Those who have been in Arabic cultures know that it is extremely hospitable, possibly more than any other culture in the world.

Yet interesting how one ancient Middle Eastern text, the Torah, says very explicitly that God commands people to be open handed. What we treat as a suggestion, a post-script, a good idea when the time is right, is, according to Deuteronomy, a mandate as strong as any other. When Christ shows up on the scene, the idea is reiterated with the idea that you should not only love your enemy, but also lend them your things and never expect anything back. I would hazard to guess that even for a Middle Eastern culture this would have seemed crazy, and for Americans its just plain ludicrous.

In fact, do an experiment for yourselves: show any God-fearing Christian that Bible verse and watch how the excuses will pour forth! They will no doubt squirm and say "yeah, but," frantically reach for the book of Proverbs, hoping there's going to be some verse in there that says "thou shalt make wise decisions with your money and not give it to people who dont deserve it," and finish their justification by saying "well thats just not wise!" And God wants us to be wise right?

The fact is, no one is comfortable with this verse: I've never heard a sermon on this verse, never see it held up at football games, and never see anyone write it as a Facebook status to get any likes from the youth pastor (because everyone is on facebook, dont you know). There is something so ruthlessly brutal about the suggestion of lending to the evil that brings up every justification in existence to be able to shove it into a corner and never speak of it again. Arab or American, Peruvian or Haitian, no one likes to see their money go to waste and no one is ready to be taken advantage of. The command of the open hand, if actually followed, implicates a shift in one's life and philosophy that few have the stomach for.

But lets think about this, I mean really think about why Jesus might have said this. What are the results of living a life that follows the command to be open handed and lend to the evil? My take:

1. It invokes a serious change in how people begin to see you. When you do something so brutally against everything the human race seems to be chasing after, there is no way that people cannot notice you, and no way that people can continue to equate you with any other person or culture. You are no longer defined by your own cultural precepts, but by Christ alone. It is no coincidence that Christ follows up this command with the promise of a new title: "you will be children of the Most High."

2. If you truly follow the command of the open hand, it is impossible to be attached to any sort of material thing. Can you truly have your work schedule depend forever on a rented car? Base your life around a rented apartment that you must someday give up? When we truly realize the command, nothing becomes your own, rather a good to be passed to someone else; we stop thinking of how long we can hold on to something and start thinking of how we can pass it on. Nothing, as Deuteronomy suggests, can any longer be held closed in your hand, but you must be able to let go of anything at any given moment. Still many will say this is unwise and will lead to poverty (and those looking for a justifying Proverb will only find 23:5 - "Cast but a glance at riches, and they are gone"), but what does the author say? "Because of this the LORD your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you put your hand to."

3. The last, as my friends have shown me, is that when you learn to be open handed, wealth abdicates its lofty position and friends and relationships receive the due importance that Christ really stresses. My grandfather is in the habit of stressing this, in a peculiar sort of way; we, his grandkids, loved to tell him hippy aspirations of living in poverty, but he would always look at us, smirk to himself, and declare the wisdom of Christ that too few people quote these days: "Make friends with unrighteous mammon!" This verse I think hits home for alot of people in my generation who backlash from materialism and want to vow to poverty, cursing the result of greed rather than greed itself. Wealth is useful, just not for the uses that we would like to think. In the end, the wealth we receive is made to passed on to someone else, and only when we do this do we really see what material wealth was meant to be in the first place.

I can scarcely imagine what the world would be like if Christians (myself included) begun to really take this seriously. So how can we implement this? What are the practical steps we can take to begin living this way?

In my opinion, it seems to me one key is getting it in our heads as a command. This is not a suggestion, Jesus isnt saying "oh gee wouldnt that be swell" and Moses isnt a passive-agressive mother sighing to you saying "oh dear, well I'd rather you listen..." This is a command, just as serious as any other.

And last, Im thinking its like getting to Carnegie Hall: "Practice, practice, practice." One ice cream cone, one box of chocolate milk at a time.

If youve read this far, then surely you wouldnt mine giving your own two cents in the issue. What are practical steps we can take in getting there? How should our view of homeless people, beggars, and the people we hate change? Comment button is below. Just sayin.

~Jared

The Eye of the Needle (Why I am an Abolitionist)

2011-10-16T12:11:00.000-07:00

"Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.' When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, 'Who then can be saved?' Jesus looked at them and said, 'With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.'" - Matthew 19

"Friends of Goodwill, be dissatisfied with your work until every handicapped and unfortunate person in your community has an opportunity to develop to his fullest usefulness and enjoy a maximum of abundant living." - Edgar James Helms, Founder of Goodwill

This post is dedicated as a letter, specifically to my friends and future friends in Washington DC, Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship. My hopes that the mere words I type into the web can somehow spread from here to others, and tell why the issue of Modern Slavery is important to me.

Dear Friends,

As people of the 21st century, and most notably as people at AU, you are no doubt bombarded by thousands of ways to be charitable. In a globalized world, there are now more than a million countries, projects, schemes, and funds that you can devote your time and finances too, whether its people peddling bracelets on the quad or human rights films in the Tavern. As the issue of modern slavery just appears as one in a million, you may ask why this issue deserves your attention and effort.

As far as I am concerned, I would hardly be any person to lecture anyone about optimistic change the world schemes. I have been a hardened cynic most my life when it comes to those who spout goals of ending poverty, achieving world peace, and ending world hunger ("but arent they going to just get hungry 4 hours later?). Even as a Nietzsche totting agnostic until the follower of Christ I find myself to be today, I have never been a dreamer of that sort. I always thought it impossible, until freshman year.

"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle"

I saw a film about sex trafficking in the Phillipine Islands two months into college, put on by some people from Chi Alpha. I remember very clearly all the images on the screen, of 12 year old girls with sunken eyes and desperation dancing in every word of their speech, of the slums stretching for miles and miles and the dimly lit street corners littered with little girls soliciting every car that rolled by. The images stuck in my head for days, and Im not sure they've ever left me.

For many people, this is where the story ends. The images are disgusting, the reality is ugly, but for most it will fade back with the rest of the images we've been bombarded with of pot bellied children in Africa and never find their way to resurface. The issue of sex trafficking has been a huge issue for many years, the fact of slaves has existed since the dawn of humanity itself. What makes any of us think that it can ever be stopped?

"they were greatly astonished and asked, 'Who then can be saved?'"

Many of us will shove this issue back in our mind, choosing to live in blissful ignorance of something so horrible because, as human beings, we hate the fact that it has no clear cut solution. We want a snap ending, not an indefinite problem. But we were not called to ignorance, but rather truth; and all of us have a duty to respect it, no matter how ugly it is.

However, the story doesnt end here; believing in Christ, whether I like it or not, makes me an idealist, even an optimist. Despite my cynicism I firmly believe, with all my heart, that we can see an end to human trafficking within our lifetimes, and this is why:

1. Slavery was stopped once, it can be stopped again.
When one British man dared to challenge the status quo and demand an end to the Atlantic slave trade, there was no good reason for anyone to believe him. Slavery has existed nearly as early as humanity can remember, and anyone demanding an end to such a time honored practice might as well have been demanding an end to hunting and gathering: its simply something mankind has done for survival, and will likely always do. As one historian put it, the question is not why did slavery continue, but why did it end. Despite everything against him, William Wilberforce, driven recklessly by his own Christian idealism, dared to demand what no one else thought possible and, shockingly enough, brought one of the most decisive steps against slavery in the history of mankind. In our world today, we not only must finish what Wilberforce started, but also confront the oldest profession in the world. It wont be easy and may even seem impossible, but we have a reckless duty to try; without Wilberforce's reckless duty, who knows where slavery would be today.

2. This is a backyard problem.
Unlike many charitable causes, this is as much an American problem as it is a Filipino or Cambodian problem. You dont need to go to a foreign country to see the horrors of slavery and sex trafficking: simply look in your own backyard. The United States Justice department recently recorded nearly 17,000 people being trafficked into the states a year. 10,000 of our population are forced laborers that we know of, and the number is probably much higher. Atlanta, Washington DC, and New York all rank as cities with high levels of human trafficking activity. Its happens in our cities, it happens in our restaurants, on our very streets. This is not someone else's problem, this is our problem.

3. Awareness Matters.
Its a known fact that in America the most popular charitable causes are the ones that require the least amount of commitment; also known as "raising awareness" and waiting for the problem to go away by itself (see: Stuff White People Like). However, human trafficking is one of the few causes where awareness is one of the principal challenges and the principal way of defeating it. If human trafficking really happens in the house next to you or in the back alley of your route home, then one of the principal ways of bringing people to justice is simply to be aware of it and report what you see. Many people in forced labor or prostitution are waiting for just one person who is concerned enough to call the police. As simple as it sounds, awareness is no easy task as most people have trouble coming to terms with the fact that it happens in such a civilized country. Therefore, the challenge begins with yourself: educate yourself, educate the people around you. This is in no way the ultimate solution, but its the most practical step that people can take to clamping down on the problem.

For me, these are the three most convincing reasons why human trafficking, out of all the causes we are bombarded with, deserves your support and attention. As a generation of millenials, we are in a unique position that no generation has ever been in before to effect change. As Mordecai says to Esther: "who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?" The only question is, will you be part of the solution? What legacy can we leave to our children: a legacy of ignorance, or a legacy of reckless duty to truth?

So my advice is this, similar to the advice that the founder of Goodwill gave:

Do not be content.

Do not be content with what is happening in our own cities
Do not be content with what is happening in far away nations
Do not be content with the millions suffering
Do not be content with apathetic empathy

And above all, do not be content with only trusting man for the solution; trust the One who gave you the idealism and the spark, trust the One who gives a truth to fight for, and trust the One who can do more than we can ever ask or imagine.

"Jesus looked at them and said, 'With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.'"

~Jared

The Age of Inundation

2011-10-04T11:18:00.000-07:00

"When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place. So, what we view our role as, is giving people that power." - Mark Zuckerburg

“Over the course of the last generation or two, a variety of technological, economic and social changes have rendered obsolete the stuff of American social capital.” - Robert Putnam

Im sick in bed today, without much hope of doing anything else rather than express my opinions from a computer. Regardless, trends in social networking and social capital have always interested me, and I feel that the recent changes in Facebook, an incredibly powerful company in this day and age, start to really reveal what it is people desire in both social networking and in social capital in general.

First of all, we should ask what is social capital. Social capital, as defined by Collins English Dictionary, is "the network of social connections that exist between people, ... which enable and encourage mutually advantageous social cooperation." Simply put, social capital is any and every way that people interact and build relationships with each other. Social capital is anything from playing cards with neighbors to lending someone money, and the capital that we build is theoretically used just like any economic capital is used. Its incredibly simple, despite any sort of technical jargon you add to it, but its role in development and poverty studies has only recently been realized and really respected. Today, we actually begin to look at social capital as something as incredibly necessary as any sort of basic good.

Leaving theory behind, the real question is what role social networking is playing in social capital. Well, it sort of depends on who you ask. Robert Putnam, a distinguished political scientists, wrote a whole book titled "Bowling Alone" to argue that social capital is on a steep decline in the United States and that technical advancements in social interaction through the internet is partly to blame. Though he doesnt explicitly mention Facebook in the book (from what I can remember. been a very long time since Ive read it), one can only imagine what he would say about thousands of college students and young professionals maintaining nominal relationships through their computers and doing less of actual social interaction. For people of our generation and age group, more and more social interactions are taking place online instead of in person, and this is perhaps worrying to some people (including myself) but also supported by others who view it as augmenting social capital, not destroying it. So which is it?

Electronic savior?

One thing is for sure, Zuckerburg is pretty sure of his own position. The young billionaire, along with owning one of the most successful social websites in history, sets himself up as a starry eyed idealist who, rather than lining his pockets, seeks to revolutionize humanity and our methods of communication. "The thing that we are trying to do at facebook, is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently," he says.

For Zuckerburg, at least this is what he claims, Facebook is a revolutionary idea that gives the voice to the voiceless, mobilizing the world and making people more open minded about sharing information. And with this claim, who could really be the one to criticize him? By blabbing on about democratic ideals of representation and transparency, Zuckerburg hides behind a wall of good intentions that assures all critics and naysayers that Facebook could not possibly be up to no good, but only has your best interests in mind. Thus, when Facebook roles out new changes that open your information to new people in ways you didnt think possible, how are you going to be the one that protests to transparency and representation?

Despite Zuckerburg's lofty ideals, being in charge of a social networking site means that he is still accountable to the people that use his service. He can only give them what they truly want and, if they dont like it, they are free to leave. But if Google + has taught us anything, people are cemented to Facebook for the very same reason that people criticize it: a compromise of your privacy.

Behind the lofty ideals of its creator, Facebook is un-sexual voyuerism, from its beginnings as "Facemash" to the giant database it is today. When someone logs on Facebook, they are given the opportunity to scan thousands of people's preferences, pictures, and lives without anybody knowing that their watching. The same inkling that sends thousands to movies to watch stories play out from a safe position and urges literally millions to watch porn on the internet is, at its basis, the same inkling that keeps people Facebook stalking for hours at a time. Scanning people's lives from the comfort of your computer takes out the risk of social interaction, since you can gather information with no risks and, this is the best part, they literally have no way of knowing that you're doing it. People can now know more about you than you will ever know, yet this innocent voyeurism isnt seen to be strange, because it is voluntary and widespread. As Zuckerburg remarked once, people are sharing more and more information about themselves than they ever have before, and dont even seem to mind it. In fact, trends show they are encouraging it! Zuckerburg, in the end, doesnt claim to be in any sort of wrong with lowering privacy because, in the end, its what Facebook is based off and what people will always be seeking.

So how does this affect social capital? In the end, and in my opinion, what we see is a dispersing effect, not an augmenting effect. Facebook, though originally only intended to reflect the relationships that you already have in real life, has become a way of making friends in of itself. So, one could argue, how is this any difference from having friends over e-mail, or even over letters? Since Facebook has such a wealth of information about preferences, beliefs, and to some extent personality traits, it can partly satisfy needs for social capital in a way that nothing before it has been able to do. By constantly feeding you information through your newsfeed, Facebook gives the user a feeling of being nominally connected to thousands of people which nearly eliminates the need for close connections. Obviously, you could argue that Facebook is what you make of it, and that the people who want to maintain thousands of nominal connections will and those who want fewer, closer connections will keep them. However, the changes in Facebook show that Zuckerburg and his team are not neutral in the matter: they know people want to see more and more information, become deeper voyeurists in a way, and will therefore make sure this happens by feeding people as much information as possible and to cement them into using their service.

Should we be panicking? Too soon to tell. Maybe the trend will begin reversing and people will want their privacy back, but whats clear is that this generation is enchanted by sensory overload. All internet services in one way or another seek to inundate the user with information since its more available than it has ever been in the history of the world. How this will affect how we interact with each other will be sort of interesting I think.

I have too much of a headache from sickness to continue this thought.

~Jared

The Alien

2011-09-29T05:05:00.000-07:00

"When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked.... In other words, I don’t improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable." - John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

"You and the alien shall be the same before the LORD." - Numbers 15

I have just hit the halfway mark here in this land called Chile, and the experience mirrors my last ex-pat experience in one very important way: I've done very little noticing of the actual people and more noticing of the immigrant population. Lately I've been starting to wonder why that actually is.

Just recently, I met a Colombian girl in one of my classes who was studying abroad here in Santiago. After class, we discussed some of our culture shock and observations of Chileans. It was pretty similar to what a Peruvian friend of mine said. I'm no person to lump countries together, but I had always thought I had the monopoly on culture shock for being an American, yet even a next door neighbor doesnt know what to do when he steps on through the threshold Whether Nicaraguans in Costa Rica, Mexicans in Georgia, Ethiopians in DC, or Peruvians in Chile, the familiar loneliness of migrant living is a pain that's completely universal. Yet its a pain that many are so willing to jump into out of necessity that it becomes a universal phenomenon at the same time.

In La Paz I did a lot of walking. Unlike Santiago, La Paz always had something happening you couldnt quite ignore; whether the calling cadences of bus caller leaning out van windows or the seasoned voice of an old Aymara woman singing to flutes and guitars. All my life I had dreamed about what Bolivia would be like, over time constructing a carefully drawn fantasy cradled in the Andes mountains. When I arrived, this image was gloriously shattered by a real and very complicated reality of what Bolivia actually is: not a flimsy fantasy, but a real, breathing, living entity of epic proportions with its own tastes, fears, and passions. Its own rumba de vida that wasnt going to be like anything else in the world. In the end this is much frightening and complicating than any mental image could construct, but more gloriously overwhelming than any fantasy could ever capture.

Walking through poor neighborhoods turning to rich neighborhoods turning back to poor, the sheer immensity of La Paz always took me by surprise. My epiphany of being in La Paz was that I remembered what I really cared about in life:

The very fact that every single one of those small little houses was inhabited by someone, and its possible they need your help.
In a world where self help books flood shelves and people linger over the topic of "learning to love myself," I wanted to truly love my neighbor, whether I'm poor or rich, crying or laughing, and maybe even teach people to do the same.
To foster connections between communities that would not simply give them a few extra dollars in their pocket, rather to provide a lifetime of support to the "poor and the alien" that would challenge people to realize the love of Christ as a tangible reality, not a fleeting scheme of conquest.
To see the Church realize its real potential in this world as the one who cares for the downtrodden and does the work no one else in this world will do, and does it in a way that's helpfully informed by economic thought and development theory. (Microloaning in churches? Why not?)
And finally, that I may never be calloused to the reality of suffering on earth. Summed up, to cry when the world laughs, and to love when the world hates.

The second realization is that immigrants are very much at the center of this for me, precisely because they are such a universal reality in the world; for this reason the Torah talks so specifically about caring for both the poor and the alien. In all senses of the word, the Israelites were aliens in their land, and were always encouraged to treat the aliens they met with the same fairness. For this reason they are "the same" before the LORD.

Unfortunately, this is not the reality and being an immigrant is perhaps one of the hardest struggles in our globalized world; immigrating is becoming much easier to do but not any easier to handle. As the world becomes flatter, often times attitudes become cemented, and whether or not borders are closed, the worst part is that hearts are being closed. Please dont confuse this for a political statement. Open border or closed border, loving the poor alien is still a great challenge for most the world, and I think its key we think about this, regardless of your view about illegal aliens.

This is what I'm thinking about lately, though I have the feeling its only sketching the surface of a much bigger issue; one that will not be solved any time soon, but one that requires the thoughts and considerations of everyone taking the title of "Christian" and anyone who claims to practice the teachings of Jesus Christ.

This is a long process, but I think I'll have to find joy in the process of figuring out what this issue is really going to mean. I know very little now and, as a friend of mine once said, "maybe someday I'll think about the rest."

~Jared

John Steinbeck on Church and Hell

2011-09-26T18:40:00.000-07:00

From Travels with Charley In Search of America, a good read if you a couple hundred pages to kill sometimes

"I took my seat in the rear of the spotless, polished place of worship. The prayers were to the point, direction the attention of the Almighty to certain weaknesses and undivine tendencies I know to be mine and could only suppose were shared by others gathered there.

The service did my heart and I hope my soul some good. It had been long since I had heard such an approach. It is our practice now, at least in the large cities, to find from our psychiatric priesthood that our sins aren't really sins at all but accidents that are set in motion by forces beyond our control. There was no such nonsense in the church. The minister, a man of iron with tool-steel eyes and a delivery like a pneumatic drill, opened up with prayer and reassured us that we were a pretty sorry lot. And he was right. We didn't amount to much to start with, and due to our own tawdry efforts we had been slipping ever since.

Then, having softened us up, he went into a glorious sermon, a fire-and-brimstone sermon. Having proved that we, or perhaps only I, were no damn good, he painted with cool certainty what was likely to happen to us if we didn't make some basic reorganizations for which he didn't hold out much hope. He spoke of hell as an expert, not the mush-mush hell of these soft days, but a well-stoked, white-hot hell served by technicians of the first order. This reverend brought it to a point where we could understand it, a good hard coal fire, plenty of draft, and a squad of open-hearth devils who put their hearts into their work, and their work was me.

I began to feel good all over. For some years now God has been a pal to us, practicing togetherness, and that causes the same emptiness a father does playing softball with his son. But this Vermont God cared enough about me to go to a lot of trouble kicking the hell out of me. He put my sins in a new perspective. Whereas they had been small and mean and nasty and best forgotten, this minister gave them some size and bloom and dignity. I hadnt been thinking very well of myself for some years, but if my sins had this dimension there was some pride left. I wasn't a naughty child but a first rate sinner, and I was going to catch it.

I felt so revived in spirit that I put five dollars in the plate, and afterward, in front of the church, shook hands warmly with the minister and as many of the congregation as I could. It gave me a lovely sense of evil-doing that lasted clear through till Tuesday... All across the country I went to church on Sundays, a different denomination every week, but nowhere did I find the quality of that Vermont preacher. He forged a religion to last, not predigested obsolescence."

~Jared

A Year Older, A Year Younger

2011-09-05T19:40:00.000-07:00

random story that may or may not need be told. trying to get better at non-fiction.

On the cusp of a rainy Saturday night, the streets of suburban Santiago were drenched and cold, like a stray city dog. You could hear the cars whimpering through the puddles, the bright window lights shivering up and down the cozy block, and the drops shattering in noisy protest against tin roofs in the damp twilight. From the outside of every house, it seemed the whole street was listening to the clatter in hushed expectation, yet with subdued disappointment. The whole world was holed up, some never intending to leave.

Inside of one house, I was at a birthday party. Despite the sound of it, take every nostalgic image of balloons and cake out of your mind; imagine instead a twenty year old gringo in the middle of six middle aged Chileans sulking around one flickering television set in a cozy den. The news spewed forth tragedies and the adults sat around, making sparse commentaries in the din of the TV and reclining on couches in a way that preached professionalism and apathy all at the same time.

I was too young for these people. That became clear early on in the night, but surprisingly not so clear over the phone when I was invited earlier that day. I had heard plenty of other Americans getting invited to random birthday parties and thought that I should try and not be rude and decline. After exiting the metro stop and waiting for the twenty-seven year old birthday girl to pick me up, I briefly wondered why I was going but quickly gave up. When you're huddling under a bus stop hang over in cold freezing rain in the middle of foreign suburbia, the why becomes very unhelpful.

After some more comments and some awkward hellos, the six middle aged Chileans and I adjourned to the table and began to eat dinner. The food was delicious and the meat tender, and the group became more lively. A thirty-year old man with light hair and a calm demeanor at my side began chatting with me about what I was doing in Chile, and I explained I was an economics major and somewhat haphazardly let slip that I was dedicating my life to helping the poor. He mulled over this fact a bit while chewing a piece of meat as a married couple shuffled into the room and sat down next to me at the end of the table. As we began scraping the last bits of corn into our mouths, the man next to me asked me how people are going to get out of poverty. I responded as best as I knew with some garbled answer about attitudes and resources, while he nodded like one nods to a kid with a great imagination. He turned to his plate, pondering my response like a less than satisfactory piece of modern art. I might has well have been in diapers.

As plates were collected by the birthday girl's mom, who I affectionately called "abuelita," tea, coffee, and mugs were passed around to everyone and the short matriarch meekly took a stool from the kitchen and sat down at the table. As the whole table lit up with talk of adult things, I politely refused tea on account of my insomnia. The wild eyed man who had sat down to my left looked slyly and at me and commented "I guess only old people drink tea, huh?" The end of the table settled into chuckling while I nodded along.

Soon, the everyone at the table began talking about the country side, a foreign concept for most people in Santiago. "I prefer to be where the people are," the wild eyed man said proudly. "I would go crazy out there with nothing but countryside."

Suddenly, the matriarch of the household began to lift her eyes and speak in a slow, seasoned tone of voice. As she spoke, awed silence descended on the whole table.

"I remember living in the countryside. Everything was very spread out, and your neighbor might lie miles in another direction and information ran slow. In fact, I remember during the earthquake, it was hard to hear about how everyone was doing, because no one had televisions and very few radios. Might have to travel a while till you came to a place that had one. You know that main plaza west of the center of the city? I remember there was one television there, and the whole world gathered around it. That was how we got information. That's how it was."

She sipped her coffee, while all seven of the guests sat in reverent silence, pondering a thing beyond their pondering.

"I suppose nowadays we carry TV's in our pockets," I said. The whole table nodded along, eyes grasping their dinner plates.

"Now," abuela said. "Who wants cake?"

We sang happy birthday and ate the delicious cake. Despite the fact that one person was getting older, everyone felt just a little bit younger.

~Jared

Rain

2011-09-01T18:55:00.000-07:00

I saw those clouds start to creep
Behind the cordillera on a cold windy street
Their fumes bask the city in dusky gray
And the buildings shiver with the threat of rain
the Mapocho was swelling, steady and slow
While I stand small and humble below

In my room I have all to which my life has lead
My Bible, Steinbeck, a desk and bed.
On a borrowed guitar, melodies float and fade
In the hushing dance of the midnight rain
And the family I live with is joining the tune
Their chores throwing light on the window of my room

As the midnight struck, I still lay awake
With thinking of days for memories sake.
the patter of raindrops carried it away
The past is dead, or so they say.

I live like the stranger in this southern cone
Yet the tin roof clatter is my welcoming home
No thought of wine nor precept of yeast
Could deafen the silence in the very least
Though the rays of the day can awaken my sorrow,
The hush of the rain always hopes for tomorrow.

~Jared

Beyond

2011-08-11T18:59:00.000-07:00

I am beyond this body, beyond this doubt
beyond the sickening sway of fear and misery
because no night of mine is stronger
than the one that silences the cursing mind
the sensation of the clock echoing through voids
to the churning of your stomach, the beating of your heart

I am beyond rhyme or reason, beyond rationed thought
beyond the food people claim me to be
beyond blind dismissal of encounters with truth
though my heart revolts inside a hollow frame
never a sound, just a broken heart
in the face of all I've been promised

I am beyond simple death, only sketching real life
on the skirts of what I'm told is worth every tear
so I forge the chains of carnal desire all through the sun
and release myself to the embrace of infinite midnight
I'll pray once more tonight, when the cup of sorrow spills
beyond this bed, I'm no more, no less

        Than a soul in service
        A soul at rest.

~Jared

Clara

2011-07-30T20:54:00.000-07:00

Unearthed a random poem I wrote months ago

Clara

No joy of mine will last in the drop of the cup
The slip of my step, the blink of my light
But hers is what weaves through the dark and the heat
Of that burning Mexican night

The fool of her mornings
The joke of her nights
The butt of her laughs
All of them I
And all the oppression
Of my year long fight
Melts in the heat
Of a Mexican night

Old man on the corner of the dusty road
Crying for salvation in the twilight heat
With the God of my parents, the God of my friends
The God of my intellect, but not of loose ends
To have some peace, I can hear him cry
To the sound of the Mexican night

"You're a waste of breath,"
   My soul tends to cry
   Through the hollow spirit
   And coddled mind
   But she's still smiling
   Even if I cry
   Clara still dances
   In the Mexican night

And the heat is a reflection
Of the souls of its people
Like a cry in the wilderness of reason
We tend to not tremble, even when we should
Tend to laugh when we should cry
The God of my life says "a time for everything"
And after the sun sets, the tension builds
And falls in the heat of the Mexican night

Am I doomed to despair?
Am I the dust on her feet?
       Yet Clara laughed softly
       On that Mexican night

~Jared

Digging Blue (12th Grade Poetry)

2011-07-15T12:29:00.000-07:00

Poem I wrote when I was 17 that I found whilst cleaning out my room.

Blue, a point of view
When nobody is broken except you
Above it all, this life is small,
and the past is still blue

Blue, its always me
They call me out but Blue I see
Who's a friend? It all depends
If all you see if blue

Blue perhaps its you
Don't dig in deep cause you're blue too
I run apart, till a next year start
But here all is blue.

Blue, I might descend
And suffer things that none can mend
When its you I spurn, perhaps you'll learn
Don't dig when I'm blue.

Also, another random 4 line 4 stanza poem I scribbled on the next page:

Rending
Ticking
Whispering
Dying

Strands break
Bell rings
Opened eyes
Man dies

There is hurt
There is time
There is truth
There is life

Hurt is Freedom
Time is Eternal
Truth is Hidden
Life is Death

Still trying to figure out what I was going for there.

~Jared

A Truly Decent Proposal

2011-06-27T10:27:00.000-07:00

This is the first time I have gone away from short story writing to write about politics in a very long time. Lets see if I'm a bit rusty.

I feel that I need to express my opinion on this trending issue, despite its inherent controversy, because a) it has become increasingly important in our country and it will no doubt be something my kids will read about in the history books, so its incredibly important how we react to this issue. b) Its an issue that is currently tearing apart many of my brothers and sisters in the Faith all across the country. Let's be honest, many of us are wondering whether we will be on the wrong side of history on this issue. The result being that we either see our fellow Christians as too permissive or as too stringent.

Anyways, on to gay marriage.

Before I say anything about my political beliefs, I have to address my own personal convictions about homosexuality in general. When I was about 17, I changed from being an agnostic to believing that Jesus Christ was the the Messiah, and so I put my trust in the things that He says. Far from being blind faith, I accept my own humanity and fallibility, and must accept the fact that God, if he truly is the God of the universe, must know better than I do (His ways are not my ways, as the Good Book says). Therefore, I accept the authority and veracity of the Bible.

From my reading and study, I cannot agree with the view of some of my fellow Christians that homosexuality is permitted. In my view, the Bible is quite clear that homosexuality is a deviation from the way that God originally made us to be, and the methods that other Christians have used to prove otherwise are, in my opinion, highly suspect. I must be intellectually honest with my self and accept that I believe in the Bible, and the Bible says that God (not me, you, or the government) defines marriage as between a man and a woman.

This does not mean, however, that I hate homosexuals. Even if I were to view them as my enemies, my Savior calls me to love my enemies! I love my LGBT friends to death and will continue to pray for them and serve them in anyway I can, but I must respectfully disagree with their lifestyle, just as they respectfully disagree with my own views. I would encourage them to identify themselves in Christ alone, and not in who they have sex with.

This is where I feel the church has completely failed the LGBT community countless times, in that they have treated them like hopeless outcasts and not sought to receive them with open arms in the same love that our Savior greets us with. On behalf of the church, I wish I could apologize to all LGBT's for how the church has treated them. We are far from perfect, and the church has a lot to learn. However, Christ has not given up on me, despite the countless times I let him down, therefore I have no right to give up on the church, even with its flaws.

With that out of the way, I want to explain what my political views on gay marriage have been for a decent amount of time. In fact, they are pretty well summed up in this New York Times op-ed piece: "A Decent Proposal"

As so aptly put by Ron Paul (who never ceases to disappoint me), it's pretty simple: “Get the government out of it."

The government made a mistake in the very first place by even usurping the authority of declaring what marriage is and isn't. As this article so aptly puts it, expecting the government to be able to grant something like marriage would be akin to expecting the state to "serve communion or baptize." Marriage, after all, is a religious concept, not a legal one. In the eyes of the law, there is no marriage but only civilly bound individuals who share rights to property and other possessions. Marriage in some parts of Africa is like this, in that it is strictly legal and does not necessarily involve sex or affection.

Now, if the government were to say, back off from the term marriage and reduce everything to civil unions, this would both give homosexuals the rights they desire and not tarnish anyone's religious beliefs (on a side note, why do you never hear about Islamic beliefs against homosexuality?). Anyone can therefore by manacled to whoever they please and then take the additional step of legitimizing it through their respected religious institution.

For those of you who are Believers and think that I am flushing society down the crapper by thinking gay marriage should be allowed, a few things:

1. Gay marriage will be legalized. Get used to it.

According to polls, 70% of people between the ages of 18 and 34 believe it should be legalized. Its even higher among those in highschool. Regardless of your beliefs in gay marriage, it will inevitably become legal throughout the entire country, probably within the next 10 years.

2. The US is not a Christian nation, and therefore cannot be expected to advocate our beliefs.

In fact, its a popular and now well debunked myth that the US was ever a Christian nation to begin with. The vast majority of our founding fathers were free masons and deists who held more fielty to the principles of the Enlightenment than they did the Bible (see Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin). Though it is accurate to say that the Enlightenment ideals are heavily influenced by Christian thought, it is inaccurate to say our country was founded on Christian thinkers. We are a nation founded not on Christian law, but on democracy, which allows for the people themselves to define what is law. By living in a democracy, we knowingly allow the possibility of contrary opinions and therefore laws that are contrary to our beliefs. This is not to say that Christians should not fight for their own opinions and for their rights in society, since this is the essence of democracy. However, it is foolish to act like we have a sense of entitlement above other citizens because we hold the belief that the government should advocate our beliefs above someone else's. The government is by the people; if the people change, so will the government.

3. The Christian life is one of persecution, not of domination.

One of my reasons for not supporting banning gay marriage is that those who want to make it illegal, whether you call them the religious right, GOP, or whatever, are clearly not fighting for Christian morality, but solely for political gain. Lets face it, the GOP doesnt care about what we think is wrong or right. What they do care about is that Christians make up a large majority of their voter base, and therefore will use gay marriage as their means of gaining political power. The minute it becomes inconvenient to them and the tide of gay marriage support overwhelms them, they will dump it because it no longer benefits them. That aside, Christ has never promised that we will be powerful and rule over society, in fact he promised the exact opposite! Though the Jews desired domination of the Romans, Christ promises that they will be hated for believing in him and what followed his Resurrection was intense persecution. Just because we have the blessing of living in a country where we do not experience persecution, lets not forget that Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world. Our laments of legalized gay marriage no doubt look sort of pitiful to those Christians in the East who are being jailed and killed because of Christ. In summary, suck it up.

This sums up how I feel about gay marriage. Questions? Comments?

~Jared

Part 2: Bridge to Humanity

2011-06-22T12:58:00.000-07:00

Today is Monday.

I take my coffee with no sugar and a little milk, so that the cup has the dull, rusty brown without being black. Its dull out. All grey, little rain, no sun.

There were a lot of things to think about then, but I had to take some time to read. Especially Foreign Policy magazine. All those articles about fantastic places with fantastic problems; those fantastic dictators with fantastic speeches and fantastic suits, waving their hands against the establishment. My favorite was always Gaddafi, if you're even allowed to have a favorite. It was mostly because he always wore crazy stuff. Imagine, you’re getting bombed by NATO and there's rebellion on your coat tails and all you can think about is fashion statements.

I think that was the first time I saw her. She was across the room, dressed in a black pencil skirt and white button up shirt talking to the barista and laughing about most everything. That's the way she is, you know. Just seems to smile her way through life, no matter the circumstance. There was this one time I told about how some people in Africa are allowed to marry their cousins and she just smiled at me and said "that's interesting." I told her I could tell she didn't care, and she just laughed. She's like that. Always made me feel like the wittiest person on earth.

That Monday in the cafe was a little slow and there were just a couple people silently puttering about and sulking into their mugs and books, and there she was, laughing and smiling. As she turned to leave, I remember we had eye contact. It was like two seconds long, but it seemed like forever and she gave me the smile of recognition. Its the kind that's lightning quick, almost like a facial spasm, and it just lets you know you're not invisible. I gave one back and she stepped into the rainy streets of the District and walked away. She really was beautiful.

Putin tried to sing "Blueberry Hill" once on TV. Cant even imagine.

Today is Wednesday

Today I'm taking it with no milk, but a little more sugar than normal. Its kind of sunny out.

I was reading this really arduous book about witchcraft in South Africa when she came in. I can't even remember what the book was saying about witchcraft in South Africa, but it seemed really insistent on proving some sort of point and changing the way I thought about South Africa or witchcraft. If only I could find out what it was really saying, or maybe why it insisted on saying it. I'd always like to be the kind of person that knew a lot about things like witchcraft and South Africa, maybe just so I could spout off a random opinion about it if it ever came up in conversation. The person may not even care about what I said, but now he sees I have an opinion on something important. That's how you win. It's all about the opinions.

"Excuse me, are you done reading that?"

Just like that, there she was, standing right in front of my table. She was dressed more casual than the first time, wearing jeans and a sort of ratty looking thrift store gray sweater. Anyone else wearing it would have been a joke, but she was beautiful and beautiful people get away with everything. All about the confidence, as they say.

"Um, no I still have a couple chapters left, sorry."

Her dark eyes squinted as she laughed. "I meant the Foreign Policy. Are you done with it?"

"Oh! Yeah, I'm done with it, sorry." I offered some laughter.

"Well, maybe I should just come back in a few days and I can get the book from you too," she said smiling. "What is it about anyways?"

"This book?" I looked at the cover and thought for a second before remembering. "Oh right, its about nothing."

She smiled quizzically at me. "Its about nothing?"

"Yep." I held my ground.

Her eyes drifted to the book cover. "It says 'Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy' on the front."

"Yes, it does."

"But it's not about that?"

"No, its about nothing."

She considered my words, her face a little sadder now. "All that ink and nothing to say? That's a shame..." she sighed because it really was a shame. "So why read it then?"
"Well, it seems very insistent."

"On what?"

"On saying what it wants to say."

"Which is nothing?"

"Yes," I said as I sipped my coffee. "But," I continued, "the fact that he's so insistent might make it something, and no longer nothing. That is, if he's insistent enough."

She sat down across from me and put her elbows on the table, speaking in grave inquiry. "So if you push anything hard enough, the nothing becomes a something?"

"Sure, because no idea can be nothing if you've been made to think about it. The minute you've given it any credence, you have in some fragile way validated its existence, whether it be serious thought or half-ass consideration. Even if I reject an idea, like, say, South Africa, my necessity to reject its existence means I have already given it the credit of existence. You cant reject nothing, because there would be nothing to reject. But once I reject or accept the nothing, its now a something."

I could have sworn she would get up and leave after that existentialist treatise, but she stayed seated and looked like she was actually enjoying talking to me. Her head turned to one side and rested on her hand. She looked intently at me, locks of her dark curly hair lightly falling on her face.

"So what you're saying is that South Africa and witchcraft haven't quite jumped out from the realm of nothing quite yet?"

I laughed at that. "No, but I guess we'll see. Do you read FP alot?"

"Yeah, at least when I can. There are so many fascinating things going on in the world, I cant help but want to know. Like maybe if Argentina changed their monetary policy, or South Africa has sunken out of existence."

I laughed along with her, wondering if she might remember me the rest of her life as "the guy who didn't believe in South Africa."

"Don't tell anyone, but I actually always underline and circle stuff in the magazines here," she said slyly, her eyes lighting up. You would have thought she had just admitted to shoplifting. "I wonder if they ever notice."

"Oh, that's you? You have good taste in articles. I like how you always circle the ones about dictators. I kind of like dictators. I mean, I'm interested in them, I guess I should say."

"Me too! Especially the things that Gaddafi wears." I agreed and we laughed about dictators for a couple of minutes, eventually going on to other things and drinking a couple more cups of coffee.

"I guess it's nice that someone appreciates my random mark ups. Hey! I don't even know your name!"

And that's how it was. It was nothing, and then it was something. Maybe from a half-ass consideration on her part, but to be honest I was a little in love. She really was beautiful.

Today is Saturday

I take my afternoon coffee with a lot of milk and two sugars. It's really nice out today, a clear blue sky.

"Their cousins?"

"Their cousins," I confirmed.

She gazed into the sunlit street, sipping her coffee. She then turned back to me, smiling as always.

"But see, they can only marry certain cousins," I pushed on. "They're called 'cross cousins' and you determine them by seeing whether they're related through the mother or father...and if their gender is the opposite...or maybe its the same...I don't know, something like that."

Her hair was tied back and she looked really beautiful nodding at my rantings. "That's interesting," she said innocently.

I let out a sigh. "Alright, I can tell you're just humoring me and don't care about African cousin marriage. What do you want to talk about?"

She laughed happily and blushed since I read her disapproval so well. She always liked to think of herself as someone who could fake interest.

She shifted in her seat and sipped more coffee, looking at me questioningly.

"Tell me why you drink so much coffee."

I was a little startled. No one had ever asked me.

"It's safer than crack and cheaper than Prozac," I declared, holding my coffee cup as an example. I put it down, smiling sheepishly.

"I've always had a problem with happiness and such, one that no one else could ever understand." I paused, looking for better words. "Coffee is my equalizer, you could say. The enemy of despair. Makes me a little bit easier to understand, for both parties involved. It makes me... relateable."

Her face began to drop at my words. "You don't think you're relateable?"

"I know I'm not," I insisted. "Life has done a fine job of draining every drop of optimism from me. At least for now."

I sipped a bit more and chose my next words carefully.

"This coffee is I feel my bridge to humanity. For these few little moments in this coffee shop, I get to sit with the rest of human kind and read, drink coffee, feel happy, talk to people, and see what the normal life is like. Feel the grass on the other side, I guess. I wouldn't be talking to you if it weren't for this stuff, right?"

As I looked back at her, she was gazing at me, but her eyes looked a little glassy. As the sun began to peek out from a cloud, she looked at the floor and began rolling up the sleeves of her gray sweater.

"Nothing is normal," she said after a few moments. She was smiling, but it had a touch of tragedy.

That was the first and last time that I held her hand. I tried to smile, and her smile became deeper and more authentic as a result; always doing the things I couldn't.

"Coffee next weekend?"

There were two deep scars up both her dark forearms. She really was beautiful.

Today is Sunday

I take my coffee black. Just like the night sky.

It had been two weeks since I held her hand. We had other conversations, other cups of coffee, but eventually she told me about the guy she started seeing a week ago. Like many random loves, it started out as nothing and, through careful insistence, became something. I think he worked in her office or something, and one day this guy just sort of walks up to her and asks her about such and such memo to such and such boss and then finds a way to slip in that well worn technique of the ambivalent romantic:

"You want to get a cup of coffee or something?"

Now pay attention, because each part of this question is very, very important and integral to the whole.

"You want" seems innocent enough, but its very strategic, you see. The word "want" immediately brings forth the concept of desire and urge. Yes, what do I want in life? Do I want a cup of coffee? Do I want true love? Do I want to buy a toy poodle to fulfill my need for children? What does my heart truly desire? If even a twinge of romantic desire exists in the person, the "you want" is sure to unearth it.

Now the "cup of coffee" is a very important medium of romantic expression, precisely because of its innocence. Most people would quake at the idea of a whole meal or movie with someone, but you wouldn’t refuse to drink a beverage with someone, would you? I could just as easily ask if you want go drink a glass of water with me, but at the same time the coffee is immensely important. Why? Because two people at a coffee shop can elicit a myriad of interpretations. Are they business partners discussing important contracts? Are they co-writing a screenplay? Are they cousins? No one will ever know. And if worst comes to worse, the casual air of a coffee shop can allow for a quick and subtle retreat if your ambivalent romance goes sour.

Lastly, we arrive at the seemingly unimportant suffix "or something." The importance of "or something" lies in its ability to say nothing and everything at the same time. If I tack on a "something," I am handing you endless possibilities to be shaped by your love, indifference, or disgust for my proposition. "Something" stretches itself to mean from "you can walk me out of the building" to "let's go to my house and make passionate love" and everything between, so there is no way that you can be threatened by my offer. In the context of this question, it's the ultimate safety and the ultimate innuendo all at the same time.

They got coffee that afternoon with all sorts of innocent pleasantries. She kept telling me he was the love of her life, but I get the idea he was so sure. Through it all, I smiled. I nodded.

That night, I sat and sulked into a mug and read a book of Emily Dickinson poems. Did you know she got dumped about three times? Then she locked herself in a cabin, away from all of humanity, and wrote some of the best poetry known to mankind. It makes me reconsider my own view of life, that I should be joining human civilization. Was the real key to burn the bridge?

"Would you watch my stuff?"

Some gangly looking hipster in a v-neck was going to the toilet. Yeah, sure, I said. I wondered, how many people in the history of "watch my stuff" have ever just plain taken off with it?

After he got back, I told him my thought about watching stuff. He was actually a pretty cool guy, and we had a decent conversation. Although it got a bit weird near the end. I had never even heard of "dubstep."

In these moments, I had finally learned the wisdom that she had tried to teach me all those times: just smile and nod.

Today is Friday

I take my coffee with milk, but just a little sugar. I've learned to appreciate it this way.

It was a very beautiful afternoon. After getting my coffee, I sat down next to a stack of magazines and began looking for a Foreign Policy. I wanted to read about some fantastic problems, or maybe some fantastic solutions. I'm not quite as cynical as I used to be, if you can believe it. Life hasn't quite drained my optimism yet; nothing that a cup of liquid optimism can’t solve.

It was kind of crowded that day I think, or maybe it wasn't. All I remember is that there were tons of fascinating looking people there. Two middle aged men with baseball caps were playing the loudest game of chess I had ever seen in the corner, and one old lady sat behind one of the men and poked his ribs every time he said a curse word. On the other side of the place, three nannies were loudly chatting with each other, somehow simultaneously shoving food into the mouths of three wailing blue-eyed babies. Near the door, a man in a cardigan sat typing on his apple laptop and insisting to every passerby that he was working on something very important, and yes it’s a secret. And finally, in the corner, I saw a couple, casually drinking coffee and pretending they didn't enjoy each other’s company. I don’t remember much else, but I remember that it was glorious.

After about five minutes, I found a copy of Foreign Policy. Just as I was about to open it, I saw her passing by out the window. She looked a lot happier. As she saw me, she suddenly started pointing at the magazine, telling me to open it.

Every single article about dictators was circled and underlined. Putin's picture had a mustache.

I gave her a thumbs up, and she just smiled back at me. She really was beautiful.

~Jared

City of Dogs

2011-03-17T13:54:00.000-07:00

Daniel missed, but just by a little bit. The pebble fell short of his target, an indifferent, black dog with white spots sprawled out in the middle of the road in the hot sun. As the pebble fell, the spotted dog briefly raised his head and considered the pebble. Then he considered Daniel, the stout Mexican man silhouetted against his Mayan hut in the shade of the papaya trees. He briefly considered getting up to move, but found sleep the better prospect and immediately dozed off.

Daniel cursed to himself, and straightened his back, shifting his position on the rock right outside the gate. It was a hot day, and he put aside some special time for himself to sit outside his house on the side of the gravel street to watch the people trod by, watch the sun crawl across the sky.

Today he was distracted though, cause he just really wanted to hit this dog.

In a lot of ways, Tunkás, like many Mayan villages, has gone to the dogs. It was just crawling with them. Those mangy, flea ridden, emaciated animals. Weaving their way through chairs, yards, gardens and huts, sniffing, scratching, laying in the middle of the road. Licking the crumbs of your dinner and rooting through the leftovers in the street. They come in big and small, black, white, brown, red, male, female, fat, and skinny. There are loners who lumber around on their own, tongues hanging in the heat, or maybe the gangs of three or four that sneak around the town like a couple of kids skipping school.

Yucatecos have been kicking them in the faces for ages, throwing them into the street to build their houses and feed their families. The village has grown around them, children filling the streets and the smell of tortillas piercing the jungle air. Yet, despite the many strikes to the ribs and brooms to the face, the dogs are here, even if in they are confined to the streets. They hold that special place in a relationship that's abusive, yet strangely symbiotic.

His eyes narrowed as he gazed at the spotted dog in the street.

"You think you're better than me, don't you?" he growled.

The spotted dog did nothing to deny this accusation, but instead kicked his leg in the dust. A tubby, brown dog was politely pooping in the road right behind him.

Daniel spat in the street and scratched his bare stomach, quietly boiling over in resentment. He wondered what the spotted dog was dreaming about. Whatever they were, he was jealous of them.

"I oughta smack you for lying in the street like that, gettin' in people's way," Daniel shouted. "You're nothing but a stupid animal! What have you got to show for it?"

A cackle erupted from the swinging hammock in the hut behind him. An old, toothless woman, sprawled in her hammock, was swinging to the rhythm of the radio with a wide grin on her face.

"Shut it, vieja!" he shouted back.

The woman shrugged, and cackled a little softer.

Daniel scratched his stomach again, this time less as habit and more as a thoughtful gesture. It was about the middle of the day, and the heat poured down from the heavens like rain. It was too hot to take a walk, too hot to mend the fence, too hot to check the garden. Nothing to do but sit in the shaded road side and consider the foot traffic, consider life. On any other day, he would have made conversation with his neighbors that were passing by at that moment, but he only had one priority on his mind that afternoon. He picked up another pebble, and aimed for the spotted dog once again.

As he aimed, Luis, the old neighbor down the street, strolled up to Daniel, kicking his worn out sandals in the dirt and making clouds as he walked. Standing next to Daniel, Luis looked at the dozing dog for a few seconds before turning back to Daniel, who weighed the pebble in his hand and held it up to his eye, looking for a perfect shot.

"Ma'alob' k’íin," said Luis.

"Good day? There's nothing good about today," said Daniel.

At this, he took his shot and nailed a turkey in the yard across the road. The turkey shrieked in protest and shuffled off to the other side of the yard.

"Not even close," Daniel muttered. Another curse, another spit, another cackle from inside the hut.

"Where are my manners? Señora!" Luis said with the grace of gentleman. "B'ix a bèel?"

"I'm not too good," the woman yelled back. "I'm sick."

"What do you have?"

"Old age!" she yelled back. She cackled again, though with less enthusiasm.

Luis sighed in agreement. "'Life is nothing, everything ends, and only God makes man happy,' as they say," he mused, wondering if he believed what he was saying. He stared off down the road, eyes glazed by cataracts, at two ladies at the panaderia fighting over the last piece of bread. His face was worn, but well chiseled by his Mayan heritage. He had the stone face you might imagine in a carving on the side of a temple, and a growling voice that spoke eons in every syllable. His thin shirt hung loosely on his skinny body, but his hands were strong and callused, carved from rocks. He placed a boulder hand on Daniel's shoulder.

"You hear about the man from the city?" he asked.

"Yeah, I saw him walking around," said Daniel. "What was he sayin?"

"Oh, the usual," said Luis. "Talkin' politics, talkin' bout our homes, talkin' bout our children and future. He talked about the voting booth, our salvation. Turns out the only ticket to heaven is an x on a ballot, not a prayer to God. Makes me think that maybe one day when we get to heaven we won't find any pearly gates, but we'll find one big bureaucracy. Angels with rolled up sleeves, cherubim with picket signs. A whole new set of speeches, signs, and people telling us they know our pain. A whole new set of sympathy, a whole new set of sucking up to do."

Daniel shrugged.

"It's fine. It's all were used too," Luis admitted. "Although they say its better across the border. You know, you've been there right?"

Daniel considered his memories and scratched his stomach, as if he was brushing away years of his life. "That was years ago," he muttered. "When the Dream was alive. Turns out, its terrible in Los Angeles too. After paying my cousin for the trip, I ended up in a dingy apartment with a bunch of other guys. Wasnt even enough room to think to myself or hardly relieve yourself in peace. I went to work everyday by sitting on the side of the road waiting for a job, and at night I got to back to being a caged animal. They call it the Dream, but its the same nightmare we've always known, only over there the politicians are pasty white and you work through the afternoon. No wonder so many of our friends have died over there."

Luis and Daniel inclined their heads in respect for the dead. After a few moments, Daniel began to speak again, slower and more deliberately than before.

"That's not the life for me. Many of them over there would rather die on the job than have to die with dignity, maybe kick this life with their heads on a desk and their hands bleeding. I say, better to die on my own dusty street with dignity than to die in a foreign land as some filthy animal for the sake of someone's Dream. You wouldnt even have family to bury you over there. Instead of wasting your life, I say take to the streets, make your home out of everyone's way. Then find a woman who can feed you when you're hungry and stays out of your way."

As Daniel spoke, a middle aged woman began walking down the street. She was holding the hands of both her children, kicking away dogs as she went. As she passed, she looked at Daniel with a mixed expression of pain and resentment, the wrinkles extenuating every grieving thought etched in her face. Daniel avoided her gaze and began searching for more pebbles in the dust, but her soft gaze continued. Years before, she was his wife, the one who would call him in from the street, fix his food, raise his children. Now, she went to an empty home with her two small children, with hardly a bite to eat. Despite Daniel's pitiful appearance, she never forgot what he looked like the day he returned from the States, eyes blazing with passion, arm around another woman. He looked alive then, but still in a pitiful way. It was the look of an excited beast that thought of nothing better than humping anything that moved. Now it was just her and the kids, and Daniel continued in the dust, being called into dinner by his new wife, mending her fences, and putting up with the cackles of his mother in law. As the memories hung in the air like the dust of the street, the woman Daniel loved directed her gaze back to the road, kicking the tubby, brown dog in the ribs as she passed him.

The tubby, brown dog, tongue hanging out, wandered off down the road, less from hurt and more from boredom. A couple of other dogs nearby began to slowly follow him. As the dogs slowly wandered down the road, a man in a suit paraded in the background with several other Yucatecos following him. As he passed, words like "freedom" "good wage" and "your future" drifted on the wind. Luis let out a long sigh, said his graceful goodbyes, and slowly began to wander after the man in the suit.

Within a few minutes, the trains of dogs and people had gone to another part of the village, and only Daniel remained. Picking up another pebble, he threw it at the sleeping dog and nailed it straight in the head. The dog cried out in pain, and quickly ran off down the street. Daniel, laughed wildly, eyes glowing with passion and head thrown back in glee. The barks of the village dogs rose up on the afternoon air, laughing right along with him.

~Jared

Part 1: The Prophet

2011-02-18T10:56:00.000-08:00

Ive been doing alot of poetry lately on this blog, but I'm going to try and change it up with a short story I wrote. Its going to be part of a bigger series where I want to write stories that explore the different views and feelings toward the main theme, coffee. this is the first installment of the "coffee chronicles."

"Jet fuel, java juice, cup of joe, cup of dirt!"

"One sugar, two sugar, black, white!"

"From its bold and daring aroma right down to the smooth sensation as it slides down your throat, this is the answer, friends! In a sock or in your mom's kitchen, the panacea of all creation! The bittersweet vomit of angels in heaven, the Promethean flame of the whole of human invention!!"

With that last point, he banged his fist on the flimsy table in emphasis, which made all the chess pieces rattle out of their squares and crash over like bowling pins. I hadn't even started that game. I hadn't even started this conversation.

"Karl Marx is wrong," he said frankly. "The coffee bean, friend! It is the 'history of all hitherto existing society'! Nothing so potent and influential has ever been plucked out of the ground, so lovingly grinded and caressed into that sweet smelling powder, so brutally smashed into those glossy bright packages to be shipped around the world for all to enjoy. It is the fuel of industry, the means by which we build our demented society and brilliantly burgeoning buildings of radiating steel and good intentions. The muse of wild eyed artists and maniac bankers who build and destroy everything, just so we can build it again and AGAIN!"

He leaned back in his chair, eagerly savoring the taste of his words and taking another sip from that all too familiar paper cup and sleeve. His plaid shirt sleeves were splitting at the seams, and his baseball cap barely contained his full head of hair, which made his locks shoot out in all directions. Like some ancient sun god, giving him the strange aura of a forgotten race, the last of his kind. There was nearly nothing to differentiate him from any common homeless lunatic, except the paper sack full of library books at his feet and his So-ho black framed glasses. His scathing green eyes seemed like they were peering into my soul and asking "yes, and?" Like he was hanging on the end of your every sentence. The class of university professor that eccentric coffee shops like this one tend to attract.

Though not usually on a Saturday night.

"So, where did you say -"

"THE MONKEYS!" he yelled triumphantly. Eyes were wide as saucers.

Strike one.

"What do you think the first thing they did when they hopped out of the trees, eh? The first thing they did before inventing the whole of human civilization? Think they picked up some bones and maimed a bunch of tapers? NO SIR! They went to a bush, plucked out a coffee bean, crushed it to powder, and passed boiling water through it until that black gold came pouring forth like the fountain of youth! Coffee, friend! One simple drink, and your blood comes pumping through your veins like never before. You can conquer the world! One sip, look! He's invented the wheel! Next sip, he's built an entire city. Another sip and he's built an empire. Before the bottom of the cup, he's painting the Mona Lisa and writing books on existentialist philosophy. All thanks to what...?"

He stared expectantly, almost daring me to ask. The answer came bursting forth like water from a dam, saliva and all.

"COFFEE!"

I accepted my fate. I put my textbook down slowly and took the bait.

"you like coffee?"

His answer come spitting forth with precipitation at every word.

"Like?!" He sputtered and gasped at my proposition, like a car thats out of fuel.

"Like, friend?! My delicious comrade, coffee is not something you simply 'like'!" he said with disdain. "Coffee is not like your little buddy Jason down the street that you 'like' to play with on a lazy saturday afternoon. Coffee is not like the fun little walks you 'like' to take on Sunday mornings when the neighbors are too hung over to shout at you!"

"FAR BE IT!"

Another pound. Another small earthquake. He flicked at a piece of dirt while he considered his next words

"No, we're not simpletons anymore, junior," he acknowledged. "No longer a bunch of country folk that can be content in the old ways, the neighborly chats, the strolls down the block, and the white picket fences. Instead, we chose to leave it in the dust and head for the cities, the frantic wall streets, the roaring subway cars. The firm assurance that every moment would be unlike any other moment you could experience, and that every next second holds the next page in the book, the next note in the symphony. The brilliant, cacophonous symphony of human progress."

Tipping the coffee cup to his lips, he drained it. I briefly considered the notion of bolting for the door but saw that it was blocked by a wild eyed hipster getting reception in the doorway. I attempted to get a word in, but his seamless monologue allowed no space for interpretation. Strike two.

"The journalists, the businessmen, the politicians, the bankers, the professors, the students; all of them typing and trudging through the twilight to the better future. They're sacrificing their families, their homes, their sanity, all for the chance to move humanity forward! The crowning principle of urban achievement!"

He considered his plastic coffee cup with a wide eyed grin.

"And THIS is what makes all of this madness possible! Without coffee, we were slave to the sabbaths, the siestas, the afternoon naps. We dozed off in our easy chairs and never got anything done, but we're done with that now. Coffee will keep us through the afternoon, past the evening, and into the dark hours of night. Coffee will cradle us in our manic dreams of eternal splendor, will guide us to space and beyond, past the stars and into infinity, till we join the frenzied dance of existence beyond the infinite. The end to wretched leisure, the beginning of... EVERYTHING."

With glazed eyes, he slowly rose from his chair and raised his cup to all the others in that coffee shop; or perhaps it was to all coffee shops. As he rose, his knee bumped the small, circular table and sent the chess set crashing to the floor and sent my own coffee right into his lap. He stood, like a starry eyed prophet, laughing wildly, bathed in caffeinated glory and prophesying the wonders of his muse.

Strike three.

Moments later I was out of the coffee shop, away from the chess sets, cups, hipsters, and crazed prophets. I spent the rest of that night studying in my room, looking at the stars. Every now and again, I still think about that coffee shop, just nestled in the bosom of industrial paradise, guiding all its children to home and beyond.

I think it's a Starbucks now.

~Jared

Interesting Quote

2011-02-03T10:59:00.000-08:00

"...activists who ignore the latest international fashion risk being outstripped by their more norm-savvy counterparts. Since international attention can make or break an organization, the ability to skillfully deploy rights language may be crucial to a group’s continued survival. the global diffusion of human rights, in other words, is produced both by Southern demands for justice and by northern supplies of funds, attention, and legitimacy."

- Emilie M. Hafner-Burton and James Ron, "Seeing Double: Human Rights Impact through Qualitative and Quantitative Eyes"

I dream, I sleep

2010-10-31T08:12:00.000-07:00

inspired by Vivaldi and imagining the unimaginable

I dream and I sleep
to a brand new age
a glorious twilight
of humanity's reasons
and for the dawn of life,
not the sleep of death
in the dreams our fleeting thoughts

I dream and I sleep
for my ransomed pride
that couldn't take another step
on the cold ground of self prison
and curses the grave of hatred
daring to take those first steps
of the stranger in the foreign land

I dream and I sleep
for an unspeakable joy
in daring reality of open windows
and winds making shades of victory's cry
not for a brighter dusk, but for a better dawn
justified by a past well paved
and a present well spent

I dream and I sleep
after this day is put to rest
and my worries dance on the midnight hands of the clock
dancing to the fast approach of the first light

I will never understand

~Jared

Spanish Grimmace (The New Year)

2010-10-11T13:04:00.000-07:00

Not much to say

Only that independence is not all its cracked up to be. If you cant be dependent on a good friend, you wont be able to be dependent on any one thing at all.

My life is so much more confusing than I want to be. I've become twice as disillusioned, twice as confused, twice the child I was before. Maybe I'm just fortunate life hasnt lost the childhood wonder yet.

and now for something completely different

this a poem I found in my notebook that has finally found light. I think I wrote this in Granada, Spain, which is and will always be a changing point for the course of my life. A small one, but a point none the less.

According to my scribbles, its called "Spanish Grimace," and its got nothing to do with nothin.

I play the fool again

Up and down the Spanish coast

And the flamenco night life never dies

But tired, clever eyes

Tell me its time for home.

And I've been wandering the modern brick streets

With a drink and something to eat

and a mind full of parables lulling me soft and slow

I'm so much more tired and bent

And wind off the battlements

Carries me slow, to the home I dont know

Home I might never see

Pour me the last of the bottle

And dont try to drink to tomorrow

Drink for a present that swirls in the glass

And for a smoke that broods in the room

in the flickering din of futbol and glasses half full

I'll start to think that this first year

Could be the start to things that I'll hold dear

And I wade through the day to survive

In the night of the new year.

As I start to slowly count down

In the grimmace of this crazed Spanish town

And a mind full of parables lulling me soft and slow

And I was hoping that no one could see

That its smile and wave was only for me

And there with a sigh I welcomed the new year.

~Jared

Death, or Heaven's River

2010-10-04T17:31:00.000-07:00

"All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?" So I saw that there is nothing better for a man than to enjoy his work, because that is his lot. For who can bring him to see what will happen after him? - The Teacher

Been thinking a bit about death.

Recently, I had a person close to my family pass away very unexpectedly. Though I didnt know him as well as I do alot of my family members, he was one of the first people even remotely close to me to pass away and the suddenness of his death really caught me off guard. To quote Calvin and Hobbes, you always imagine these sort of things happening to someone else, but you're someone else to everybody else.

I remember in high school when shootings would happen in other high schools or in our hometown, theres was always an atmosphere of uncertainty hanging about everyone's head for the next week. Among the feverish pace of carefree high school life, suddenly everyone was faced with the proposition of death. Its a frightening idea, but such a natural one at the same time. In such an affluent society, its interesting to see how we react to death. We've spent millions of dollars to find ways to soften it, delay it, or even try to stop it; anything but face the actual reality. When we have taken away hunger, disease, and all the usual killers, we end up just waiting for the inevitable grip of old age, kind of like rats that race through a maze only to find out they've hit a dead end and there was never a way out to begin with. When we have erased everything avoidable, all were left with is the inevitable

Particularly with American culture I think the thing that scares us the most is that death is something we have no control over. Because we've over used words like "liberty" or "freedom" we dont like to be forced into anything we dont want to be doing (similar to how we deal with pain). We're just a good ol culture of control freaks.

Worst of all, like The Teacher says, death is something you can only experience once. No one will come back from the grave, dust off their shoulders, and say "well, that wasnt so bad." I struggle with uncertainty alot, but I wonder if that is how death is just supposed to be. Its the great equalizer of all mankind. As a Hebrew king once said, "As for men, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals." Yet, our ways of dealing with death can make all the difference. I have heard many people in my life talk about how they had no fear of death (including one family friend that resented being resuscitated at the end of her life) and I've heard others that are absolutely terrified of death. For some, it is the end; for others a beginning.

In South America, the ancient Incas believed that when people died they became stars in the sky. They called the milky way Mayu, which in Quechua translates roughly as "Heaven's River." Essentially, the Incas thought that death was the simple crossing over to a new existence, as natural as crossing a river to a new home. I really like this idea. Though we all live in uncertainty, not knowing whether we could very well die tomorrow, Death at the same time is a beautiful thing: an undiscovered country, perhaps the border between finite and infinite. I wonder if the Incas looked up at the sky in amazement, wondering what was lying beyond the stretch of starry blackness over head.

For now, there isnt much to do. maybe I'll try living before I cross the river.

~Jared

The Pachacuti

2010-09-26T15:03:00.000-07:00

(random poem I scribbled in my Latin America class, based on an ancient people's idea of a perpetual cycle of genesis and apocalypse)

I hear the cry of the martyrs rising

To the unquenchable sound of a rushing flood

That threatens to swallow our impassioned sighs

And shake the reigns of unbridled rage.

And the names they take of those murdering mystics

Echo through the halls of pacifistic sympathy

Turning its sacred pillars to dust once again.

I hear the cry of the rabid masses,

Of armed suburbanites and good intentions

With weapons of chemical dust, of pills and propaganda

And western clocks to count the hours till doom's day.

Marching, crying, cheering, cursing they come,

Feverish from the ills of trampled ideals

Breathing fire to set the ancient culture ablaze.

I hear the cry of the downtrodden

As they run from the burning wreckage

Of their father's house, and the ashes of poverty

Only to wander fatefully into the empathy march

Of the compassionate warriors of the violent age

Now I can see them sinking slowly to death and beyond

Their screams muffled by the march of their murdering saviors.

I hear the cry of their victory

And like a pack of wolves over rotten meat

The victors bark and snarl over the sacred rod

Of authority over all men under the sun.

And at last they can sleep, with the revolution won

The poor of us unchanged in the silent dawn of the perpetual cycle

while the earth revolves on the whim of another revolution.

The days are evil, at least thats I'm told.

I hear those violent days beneath the earth, as they sleep to bring

that blood red sunset to our hopes and dreams

"Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and tyrant and I declare him my enemy."

~Jared

Pacifism, War, and the Land Between

2010-09-20T14:57:00.000-07:00

We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression. - Chuck Palahniuk

For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. - Paul the Apostle

In my history class, we talked about World War I, one of the most remarkable wars in that most people are still very confused about why it happened, but are confident there must have been a pretty good reason for us killing so many people. In honor of our hazing reasoning, we and the whole world made copious amounts of propaganda extolling the honor of fighting for your country in whatever war it decides. In the end, the whole world plunged itself into a war started essentially by one country hating another.

Walking out of class, I started to think about what everyone was thinking when they all went to war. Certainly many of them had hesitations about going to war, but in the end everyone went, simply because a bunch of people with lots of money made some pictures and films that at the time seemed real convincing. A war started by one guy getting killed, and several bloodthirsty world leaders looking for an excuse to start blowing each other up. The funniest thing is that thinking about it at all, I did not have as much motivation to start a peace protest.

But obviously, thats the wrong thing to think. Society has taught me better than that. its taught me that violence is never the answer.

Wait, has it?

Its kind of hard to tell with the heroes I've been given, because for every non-violent Mahatma Ghandi I've been given to emulate, I'm also given a screaming, blood covered, William Wallace charging with a giant sword in his hand. For every serene Mother Teresa im supposed to aspire to be like, I also get a Simon Bolivar or a Joan of Arc, heroes that we honor, but for whom violence was clearly the answer. In western life, we like to kid ourselves into thinking the only people we really honor are timid, peaceful revolutionaries who would never hurt a fly. But we really cant kid ourselves with that double standard anymore. For every Martin Luther King, there is a Malcolm X. For every George Washington, a Guy Fawkes.

So now my question is quite simple: what really distinguishes the victorious war heroes from the simple murderers and common terrorists? Is it success? Is it ideology? Was Guy Fawkes a terrorist because he had wrong ideas? Was John Brown a murderer because he didn't succeed? What is it in human nature that wants to sternly look down on violence and glorify it at the same time? Why do we hate destruction, but crave it at the same time?

Going back to World War I, I can see why people became terrorists and blew up buildings. The simple fact was that they didn't want to fight for whatever their governments decided it was good to fight for. Rather, they knew they wanted to kill and destroy, just not the same things that the world leaders wanted to kill. Still, they knew that something inside them was screaming for destruction, sometimes for lofty ideologies, other times simply to shock the world into a greater understanding of what life really means ("Only when we've lost everything are we free to do anything" -Chuck Palahniuk).

Its a scary thing to think that Tylor Durden is making more sense to me every day. I'm a fan of turning the other cheek as anyone, but what do we do when we see real evil, and I mean real pure dagnasty evil being played out before us? Are we really just supposed to sit there and let someone else suffer? Which one is the greater sin? We can rant about pacifism all we want, but we cant ignore the fact that Ghandi and his non violent protesting couldnt have stopped Hitler. People like that wont stop until someone kills them. but who's going to be the one that does it, and will he be a hero or a terrorist? Is there a land between pacifism and war?

So, if any of you have read this far, I actually want some real responses this time. Instead of just me ranting the whole time, I want to actually foster some discussion about this topic, since I am far from figuring it out, and I'd like to see what you guys think.

Is there such thing as justified war, or justified murder?
Why do we love people who are non-violent while at the same time loving those who are violent?
Will there ever really be world peace, or will we always have a need to make war?
Could anarchical acts of destruction really wake people up to the reality of life and death?

talk amongst ya selves

~Jared

Academia Sighs as the World Goes to Hell

2010-08-30T18:53:00.000-07:00

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

-T.S. Elliot

they firmly believe that all of the world’s problems can be solved through “awareness.” Meaning the process of making other people aware of problems, and then magically someone else like the government will fix it.

-Christian Lander

On sunday, I went to church and the guest speaker was the president of International Justice Mission, an organization that does work against sex trafficking and other cases of slavery all across the world. As most non-profit workers do, he told a rousing sermon. Stories were told, pictures were shown, tears were shed, and shouts of passion rose up in the audience as he recounted the stories of the downtrodden, successful or unsuccessful.

By the end of the service, the musicians were on stage, leading the whole congregation in a chorus to the Almighty: "I will go! I will go!" Their words echoed in my head, but they felt more like a dirge. As the people shuffled out of the room to their lives, the painful fact become apparent: statistically, about 95% of the room just told a brazen lie.

Unfortunately for us, the privileged middle children of human history, detached from wars and suffering and lulled to apathy by the static of the television, most of us will go back to our lives in monoliths of human invention, totally unaware of the horror going on around us. We can hardly be blamed, can we? The bitter sweet taste of prosperity is that it will ultimately make all humans numb and ignorant to the great injustices of our time, while at the same time making us unable to bear the slightest bit of pain or suffering. In a book by Dr. Paul Brand, a famous leprosy doctor, he ranked the people of the United States as having one of the lowest pain tolerances and thresholds in the whole world. Instead of being able to take pain in stride and as a natural part of life, Americans avoid pain at all costs, even to the point of theorizing that pain is so terrible that God could not exist.

As Tyler Durden said, "you'll never believe what people will do to avoid a fight."

In my current situation, the most painful reminder of our numbness is the university. We sit in great big stone buildings and learn about saving the world, and somehow get it into our heads that all problems will be solved in giant General Assembly chambers, or in the basements of faculty office buildings, or big think tanks, or, as a white guy once said, simple "awareness." The sufferings of people become pawns in the hands of white men in suits, or strongly lettered words on the sign of a disgruntled university students, just dying to make a difference. Not a tear will be shed for any of them, no more than anyone is going to cry over a math problem with no solution. And when we finally see them face to face, its likely that we will think we already know the solution to their problems, even before they do. Academia will sigh sympathetically while the world goes to hell.

I will not be so arrogant to suggest that I am at some sort of higher understanding, and that I will not be among the sighers when the masses are suffering. Only I want to reflect how maybe our society, both academia and all other parts, have become numbed by prosperity into never feeling pain, and perhaps never being able to empathize. When is the last time you've seen someone cry over a news report of a shooting? Or seen someone be stirred by a sermon and, like the parable characters of old, will sell all he has to find the truth? When will we make the connection between the problems we study and the emotions that should accompany them?

Right now, I guess all I can do is cry. It doesnt do any good, because tomorrow I will wake up, and ill still be spending 50,000 to spectate the horrifying things happening around the world, and not have the resources to do anything about it. Am I part of the problem? Are we all part of the problem?

Maybe someday it will be worth it. At least I hope so

~Jared

Why We Suffer, Why We Love

2010-04-18T09:37:00.000-07:00

"It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul." - C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Its not hard to see that I am obsessed with the words of C.S. Lewis, especially those in the book "The Problem of Pain." I guess this book appeals to me so much because its the one question that I dealt with the most as an agnostic, and I feel is still the question that most people deal with: "Why suffering?" "How could there be a God (or anything truly good) in a world so screwed up?" It was questions like these that made Billy Graham's friend Charles Templeton, once an evangelist, come to be an agnostic and reject the idea of God altogether. "It just became crystal clear to me that it is not possible for an intelligent person to believe that there is a deity who loves."

Beyond the theological implications of the question of why suffering exists, we look at suffering as the worst thing that could happen to someone, as the ultimate failure of humanity. This weekend, I think I saw a face of the issue that I feel like we often ignore.

It all started with a mountain. At midnight.

While my friends were no doubt getting drunk at parties and clubs, friday night I was sitting in a car, driving through backwoods Virginia, heading to Old Rag Mountain in the Blue Ridge Mts. At midnight, four friends and I headed up the mountain, using headlamps and flashlights to navigate the trail. After about three hours of talking, coughing, laughing, climbing over boulders and meeting a dog named "JR," we reached the top of the mountain, and waited for the sun to rise.

Waiting for the sunrise is, of course, too simplistic sounding to give it the real credit it deserved. Since the sun wasnt going to rise until 6:30, we got the bright idea that we could sleep on the top until the sun came up. However, as most people know, there's wind at the top of a mountain. Alot of it. So it ended up that all five of us, huddled together against a giant boulder, spent the entire night shivering next to each other, having half-coherent conversation about the metaphysics of being cold (as well as Third Eye Blind, Lemmings, hurt knees, and other things), and occasionally screaming in pain when the wind would whip across the mountain. Theres no doubt in my mind that we suffered that night.

Needless to say, the sun eventually came up like it was supposed to (funny how often we forget) and we continued screaming, and ran around the top, trying to take in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains while suppressing how truly cold we were. We eventually climbed back down the mountain, and got back to civilization. We all remember how cold we were at the top of the mountain, but we all remember how it was worth it (and, as one of my friends said, how we became closer than we probably ever will be again).

The AU people arrived at campus, and I hit my bed at about noon, and fell asleep. Fast forward eight hours. I'm waking up, throwing on my Relay For Life t-shirt, and rushing to Bender Arena with four other people (only two of which ended up staying past the opening ceremonies).

I've never been to Relay For Life, though I am perfectly acquainted with cancer. A year ago, my sister was diagnosed with it, and started an almost year long battle filled with chemotherapy, visits to the hospital, and watching my sister Jessica, one of the strongest people I know, slowly seem to fade away from me, as she got deeper and deeper into chemo. When the news broke, I was living in Costa Rica, an entire ocean away. I remember feeling worthless, inadequate, and completely helpless to even help my family that was so far away. As a result, I sunk into an emotional coma, which caused so many problems in my friendships, and one that I only recently have felt myself coming out of. The summer came, and I spent most my time at home, doing dishes for my mom, babysitting for my sister Sarah playing guitar for Jess, just whatever I could do to feel like I was doing something. Outside of the house, no one quite knew how to deal what I was going through, but with my family, we all understood. We suffered together, and rejoiced together when we finally saw the cancer start to fade, and Jess start to come back to us.

All of these memories came back to me Saturday night, sitting in Relay For Life, listening to people tell their experiences with cancer, and honoring the relatives they lost. Luckily, I got to keep my sister, but I could still relate to people when they talked about the constant worry and the forced optimism that the experience forces upon you. While walking laps in memory of survivors and the lives that were taken, I began to quietly cry to myself, and thank God that my sister had more time to spend on earth. As I looked up, I saw something truly beautiful.

As everyone walked, people joined hands, people embraced each other, and me and my two floormates walked together, remembering the terrible thing, the ultimate failure of humanity, that was uniting all of us in that moment. The same terrible thing that made me and four people huddle together on the top of a mountain, and bond through an unforgettable adventure. The same terrible thing that brought my family closer together than we had been in years, and made slight acquaintances we hadnt talked to in years come to our house to cook dinner for us, or come visit my sister with a couple words of encouragement. The tears we cried, whether from sadness or the mountain wind hitting us in the face, made us something that the comfortable times could not: real people, experiencing what it truly means to be human and to love.

As a doubter by nature, I wont ever say that I have everything figured out. I wont ever say that I truly understand why we suffer, but I have to wonder. Everyone is asking if the human race can live with suffering. I'm starting to ask if the human race can truly live without it.

To close, I will, again, leave you with the words of my favorite writer, who said more than I ever could.

"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."

~Jared

Stuck in the Middle

2010-03-25T08:37:00.000-07:00

Not so long ago, I used to be a very politically charged person.

Well, let me qualify, because I think there is a difference between politically charged and obsessed. I used to obsessed about politics, and about submitting to some kind of political ideology that would hopefully define me as a person. This was the reason I wanted to come to D.C. I wanted to get a journalism degree so I could hound people in the Capital and fully immerse myself in the rough and tumble world of U.S. politics. In a way, being political was probably supposed to define me, or something.

These days, whether its by apathy or a greater perspective, I cant bring myself to care less about any sort of political ideology or party affiliation. I think as politics became less important to me I started caring less about having to call myself anything. Right now, I call myself a moderate, and the results of it really interest me.

The thing I find most interesting about being a moderate is that you either cause gentle cooperation from both sides or intense hatred, and there doesn't seem to be any sort of middle ground. Though both sides can agree with you, it also means both sides disagree with you. So, tentatively, as a Democrat, you only have to defend yourself against Republicans, but a moderate gets to defend himself against everyone.

Why is there such a disincentive in our society to be in the middle? As a society, we have invented alot of pejorative terms for people who are in the middle: wishy washy, waffler, lukewarm, half-ass. As humans, I think we tend to want to see things in black and white, because, lets face it, things like politics are alot easier to deal with if you have one giant rubric that you judge everything from. The harder path is to see the middle ground in political conflicts and be able to put yourself out there in saying that both sides are true and false at the same time.

I, personally, wouldn't apply this to all things (though many do), because I believe in universal truth. I believe there is good and evil, which is why I want to qualify myself and say that I think there are some things that no one should be in the middle about. I dont think its good to be a "moderate" about sex trafficking, slavery, fascism, or (to be controversial. hehe.) something like abortion. These are issues that demand action, and therefore demand a firm resolve in your thinking about them. I once heard it explained that people have two hands, one is open and the other is firmly closed. Each hand represents the beliefs you have, and in the open hand you have the beliefs you're willing to let go, and in the firm hand the beliefs you aren't.

I guess my main beef with politics is that, furthering the analogy, people seem to put the most insignificant things in their closed hands, and are unwilling to compromise. For instance, conservative bug me because they cant seem to ever accept that maybe health care reform isnt such a bad idea, and that paying some extra taxs isnt so terrible. Liberals annoy me because they cant seem to ever accept that Keynsian spending programs are not a cure all, and never truly further any free-market reforms like Tort Reform.

So whats the solution? I leave you with a simple saying, what my pastor told me long ago:

"Govern from the middle."

~Jared

Joy and All of His Friends

2010-03-17T06:02:00.000-07:00

"When we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy." - The C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

(I usually dont discuss religion or spirituality here, but whatever. its my blog anyways)

Got back from Spain last night. Quite honestly, the whole experience was amazing, but I sometimes wonder if it all really happened. Waking up on the return flight to Madrid, I half-imagined that the whole thing was just a dream I had. I dreamed the people, the place, and the lessons I learned. Waking up, I descend back into the bowels of everyday life, which never seems to lack depression, pain, and defeat.

Dream or no dream, I feel the most content knowing that I learned things there. My expectations going there were mostly that I was going to speak Spanish alot, but surprisingly every time I opened my mouth I felt like my speech was impeded, almost as if I wasnt supposed to be speaking, but just observing. My arrogance wasnt enough that the Hound of Heaven wasnt pursuing me still. and he caught me this time, because Joy exists.

In college, I have suffered from some of the most intense depression of my life. There have been days at American where I didnt feel like getting up again, where I wanted freedom from the endless waves of despair and misery that would come over my life. For me, happiness is a foreign concept, but joy is the most foreign.

Praise God, I have hope these days, and I can muddle through the crazy depression of college with my sanity intact. I learned what David meant when he said "I wake again, because the LORD sustains me." In the past, I often prayed for death everytime I went to sleep. Praise God, I start seeing every day, every sunrise, as a miracle, since every day is another day I'm alive. Its a perspective that keeps me alive and full of hope, but it doesnt necessarily involve having joy in your life. Sometimes it impedes it. Still, I purge away happiness and Joy from my life. I dont understand it, and most of all I dont feel I deserve it. I didnt even know what it could look like

In Spain, I actually saw what it looked like, and I saw that it was attainable. I met people who had it, but even had it in such a way that it was contagious, like it was a thing that couldnt be content with staying on one person, but busied itself with spreading to any person it came in contact with. After 7 months of on and off depression, I have gotten used to heaviness of heart, but on the wall of a dead Moorish castle, looking at all of Granada, I felt it lift. For the first time in a long time, I laughed for no reason it all.

Now, I still live in the basement of McDowell, and I still experience depression, but I see the little things alot clearer now. I'm getting the bravery to smile on a sunny day, or laugh at the simple things in life. For me, having joy is learning to walk, learning to breath, and maybe the hardest thing I have to do. But these days I'm becoming ok with the idea of having it in my life, and pursuing it. Its out there, and thats reason enough.

~Jared

Wisdom From Calvin

2010-03-05T08:54:00.000-08:00

Saw this on a buddy's facebook, had to post it.

"I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them. I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!"

I read this so many times as a kid, but college taught me how true it really was.

Right on, Calvin

~Jared

My Shameful Identity

2010-02-28T20:15:00.000-08:00

At the esteemed University of American, we tend to get obsessed with having an "ethnic identity." Much like the days when my generation used to pain for hours over a cool sounding AIM screen name, my fellow students often go to extreme lengths to have a non-white people group they can identify themselves with, just to have a cooler story than that girl who taught English in Nepal over the summer (if you think you know who I'm talking about, keep in mind there are several hundred girls that match this exact description on our campus, and probably wear Buddhist prayer beads to show how cultural they are). It gets so ridiculous that I often hear third or fourth generation wasps define themselves as "scottish-americans" just to avoid that terrible word "Caucasian" or (God forbid) "white." These days, admitting you're white is practically admitting that you personally peed on a Native American's land and then proceeded to invade a small Asian country.

Unfortunately for me, there is no getting around the fact that I am, dare I say it, 100% white (aside from the scrap of Cherokee that my relatives successfully covered up). Even worse, the word I use to identify myself is "southerner," a word that continues to conjure images of hooded, Bible beating rednecks who watch "Song of the South" and think of the good old days in the minds of alot of people. But I tried, dear friends. I searched my genealogy and looked for a cool 64th to identify with and brag about in class, but in the end I've faced the truth. I am a southerner, and I am tired of feeling embarrassed to admit it.

The reality is that Southern culture is so much more than what people make it out to be. Living in the south all my life, I know that I live in a culture that has deep roots in a lot of beautiful things, and many of my fellow southerners will agree that it offers something that Northern culture cannot offer. For instance, in the South we're not afraid to make conversation with complete strangers. It still wigs me out how unfriendly people can be in the North. Also, we're not afraid to invite people over that we don't know, even feed them. We'll even stand on the porch and wave at you as you drive off in your cars. I would even go as far to say that we respect our elders a lot more than people in the North care too. Southerners sort of have an unspoken rule that anyone more than 5 years older than you is a sir or ma'am, which usually gets a strange reaction from a lot of people. Finally, this is a little ethnocentric, but "you all" and "yous guys" are the most awkward things I have ever heard come out of anyone's mouth. Common, ya'll.

But no one cares to see this anymore. Instead, our region becomes the whipping boy of the nation, the butt of every joke about anyone seen as backwards or uneducated (For the record, we don't eat squirrels in the South. We prefer possum). Understandably, I realize that to some extent we've reaped what we've sown. We held on to slavery, we held on to racism, and, worst of all, we tried to pass it off as culture. However, at the end of the day, this shameful identity is the only thing I can really claim for my own, so I prefer to forget the past and the racist blood that runs through my very veins and hold on to the beautiful things that we can still offer our country (fried okra anyone?).

As a closing note, here's a portrait of the cousin of my direct relative, dear old John Calhoun. He was a pro-slavery advocate, and it often causes a pit in my stomach to think I share an ancestry with someone who advocated the civilized genocide of human dignity. Often times I make it my personal mission to spite him.

But then again, hard to take a man seriously when he looks like a muppet.

~Jared

Give us an inch, and we tear the world apart

2010-02-25T09:51:00.000-08:00

It’s been about ten years since I last stepped foot into the Air and Space Museum. The museum had not changed too much, but I certainly had. Now, I am older, more aware, and more out of place. Most everyone there was a tourist, who totted their kids along the museum, while the kids’ eyes gazed in wonder at all the planes around them. It’s strange to think I was in there shoes at some point.

I’m sure that when I was a lot younger, I saw the giant model planes just as they did, but now, ten years later, the first thing I saw was the bombs strapped to the bottom. I would also bet that when I was younger I saw the big rockets, but only now did I notice the nuclear warheads that they were carrying. Did the Smithsonian purposefully make the instruments of war look so fun and educational? Is this the reason we blew up dolls with firecrackers on our driveways?

When I was young enough not to notice bombs and warheads, I used to get sage advice from my mom, one of which was "give a person an inch, they'll take it a mile." In the Smithsonian, they show old grainy photographs of the Wright plane, perhaps the most important innovation in flight. This happened in 1903. Next to it, there was a picture of the very same model, only this plane had a gun attached to it, and the photo was taken in 1909. In less than ten years, the military had transformed an innovation into a weapon. In another part of the museum, rockets that launched satellites into space were displayed. Sitting right next to it was a polaris missile. Again, a less than ten year span between discovery and destruction.

Science has given mankind amazing power, but what have we done with our power? Most of the time, we’ve looked for ways to use it to kill the people we hate. Sometimes, hate and war is a bigger driving force towards invention than scientific inquiry. Some of the greatest discoveries in rocket technology have come about when hateful men sought for ways to destroy their enemies across the ocean. Innovations in breathing apparatuses came about to allow early pilots to breathe while on bombing raids. Technology gives us the inch, and when it gives us the inch we take it the mile. We then see what its really like to tear the world apart.

Walking out of the museum, I kept thinking about the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, particularly the scene where the monkey discovers how to use the very first tool, a bone, and the first thing he uses it for is to kill a tapir (what tapirs were doing in Africa remains a mystery to this day. I plan to ask Zombie Kubrick that some day). In midst of cheesy costumes and several tapir maulings that would make any PETA activist cry, Arthur C. Clarke knew what he was talking about. The twisting of invention to satiate man’s desire to kill. It still happens, just with different monkeys and different bones.

~Jared

What a person I am

2009-07-06T22:21:00.000-07:00

Its 1:30 am and I feel very personal right now, mostly because im running out of time.

In two days, im going to American University, to the city that will likely be my home for the next 5+ years of my life, and to do my best impression of someone that likes meeting new people, or new people in general. Someone told me I needed to open up to the people there. That sounds strange considering I can barely open up to people ive known for a year. What a person I am.

Considering the prospective future I find myself on the brink of, I am facing some of the worst parts of my personality, notably my knack for wanting to shove people I love as far away from me as possible. The fact that I care about them makes me want to shove them away, and the fact that they might care about me scares me to death. Why would I rather shove them away then love them more than I ever have? What a shitty person I am.

I can't type another word. it would only be more useless self loathing tripe. all I really want to say is that i'm sorry. i wish I wasnt like this, but you know by now, Ive never been an easy person.

sorry.

~Jared

Faith Like A Child

2008-11-16T12:52:00.001-08:00

Sorry for everyone that has been waiting for a new blog entry. Here it is.
I was in Los Guido today, as I am every single Saturday, doing the kids service in the morning. There are two boys in particular that I have been seeing every Saturday that I have gotten to hang out with a lot, and it always surprises me how much kids will attach to people that just love them. I’ve been to children’s homes and among different groups of street kids in Mexico and I experience the same thing. Some kids just seem like they are dying to be loved.
There was one boy I remember in particular from the children’s home I went to in Mexico. Most of the kids in these children’s homes are sent there because they are orphans or their parents can’t take care of them, or even because some of them have been sexually abused. One boy there was there because his mother couldn’t take care of him, and his mother had busied herself with having a boyfriend. In the end, his mother had come up to him and told him “I don’t love you.” After that he attempted suicide two times. Luckily he found help, or help found him, in time. Some are just dying to be loved.
Today, I saw something amazing. At the park where we were meeting, I saw the boy I had been hanging out with accept the sacrifice Christ made and alter his own destiny. Many would tell me that hes been pressured by the circumstances of his child hood, or peer pressured, but there is something I will never be able to explain in the way a child looks when he prays. Its faith and sincerity that can put any adult to shame. I love it. I want to see that every single day.

~Jared

My new love for country and soccer

2008-10-11T05:41:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday I went to my first futbol game ever. I can say with all certainty that I am a changed man now. I’ve never been into watching sports, but watching a live futbol game is like nothing you have ever experienced. It is three times better than any sport we have in the United States. People have wondered why I, as a member of the male species, don’t enjoy watching sports. Well, turns out I was just in the wrong country.

In Costa Rica, we have two futbol teams that really matter: La Liga and Saprissa. In the villa, most all the staff are fans of Saprissa, so many people joke that if you want to succeed in the GAP program, go for Saprissa. On Thursday, I saw them play D.C. United and they tied 2-2 :(. It was kind of dangerous being a gringo and being there, but luckily I was wearing my insurance.

Other things, spanish class is a little boring, its done good to go over basics again. Yesterday I had to try and explain direct object pronouns to the class. I will never be a teacher.

The church I have been assigned to us is a place called Los Guidos, which is one of the barrios (poor areas) of San Jose. Most of the people the live there are nicaraguans who are illegal, and build their houses in this giant hole because the government cant bulldoze them there. Its very much like the situation we have in Los Estados Unidos, and many of the ticos (Costa Ricans) are very unwelcoming to them, because some of them dont work and they are all illegal (sound familiar?)

I am amazed by the pastor of my church there, Pastor Gabriel. When we were driving through Los Guidos, one of the poorest places in San Jose where everything seemed most desolate, he turned to me and all he said was "Es tierra santa" (its holy earth). I wish I had the heart this man had for the poor places of the earth. He was telling me that he and his wife prayed that God would send them to the place that no one else wanted to go, and they wound up in Los Guidos. Its amazing.

Today ill be there all day, doing the childrens meeting in the morning and going to youth group at night (which usually doesnt happen because its so dangerous at night in Los Guidos).

I will leave you with some u2 lyrics, of which I have been listening to as of late. They really speak to my heart.

"And love is not the easy thing
The only baggage that you can bring...
And love is not the easy thing...
The only baggage you can bring
Is all that you can't leave behind

And if the darkness is to keep us apart
And if the daylight feels like it's a long way off
And if your glass heart should crack
And for a second you turn back
Oh no, be strong

Walk on, walk on
What you got they can't steal it
No they can't even feel it
Walk on, walk on...
Stay safe tonight

And I know it aches
And your heart it breaks
And you can only take so much
Walk on, walk on"

~Jared

2008-09-16T18:32:00.000-07:00

It was rainy today. It is most days here. Although today was different. Today I think I finally got perspective.

It came today in Bible class. Today we were talking about the theory of dispensations, a way of sort of dividing the Bible into differing ways that God has treated mankind. Making the Bible a sort of story book.

I came to this place, Costa Rica, to find rest, to find a fresh start, a solace from all my troubles. Unfortunately, it hasn’t quite been that. I’ve found opportunities, and I’ve also found dead ends. I’ve found healing, and I’ve found heartbreak. I’ve found friends, and I’ve lost friends. I’ve been found by some, lost by others. I’ve never felt more alone, and I’ve never felt so alive.

But is this how the story ends? Does my story end with the dispensation of loss, the dispensation of change? Certainly not.

As I looked at the rain falling outside the classroom, I became aware of a story that has long been going on, and has yet to come to a conclusion. The biggest love story in history. A story of innocence, of loss, of tears, of break up, of heart break, of sacrifice, and of a love that never fails. The story that is being spun, and played by thousands of characters over all eternity.

And if that story hasn’t ended, then it doesn’t seem like mine will either. Ive had to re evaluate my priorities, and now I realize my story is just beginning. Despite the hard times in my life right now, I can hear in the back of my head, an utterance of heaven:

“Little did he know…”

Oh, little do I know. But of the little I do know, I know one thing. Theres much to be done before my part in the story comes to a close, until my happily ever after finally comes.

Until the last chapter, I forever remain

~Jared

Estoy Aqui

2008-09-10T08:11:00.000-07:00

Just arrived in Costa Rica yesterday. Internet time is limited, so I have to make this blog quick. Ordinarily I write them out ahead of time, but I havnt had much time this morning, so this must suffice.

So far, the weather is amazing. Its about mid 70s to low 80s here, and its surprisingly clear so I have an awesome view of the mountains surrounding San Jose. Although I think we're expecting rain later this afternoon. The day is still young. I will have to post pictures of it later.

Today, we're supposed to do more orientation as well as walk around the city a bit. I dont start classes until next tuesday, so Im very glad I have a little time to get adjusted to the culture before I settle into a routine.

Right now, the monumental task ahead of me is finding a music store to buy my guitar. If some of you didnt know, it became to expensive to bring mine down here so I decided on buying one here and keeping it down here. I am going through a few music withdrawls, so hopefully I will survive until then.

In the meantime, please feel free to e-mail me. I would love to hear from you guys. jaredphutchins@gmail.com

~Jared

The Breaking Down of Flesh and Blood

2008-08-26T17:00:00.000-07:00

The Olympics being on TV for the past few weeks has gotten me thinking about a few things. Namely, it has me thinking about an aspect of mankind that I have been extremely detached from, being mostly unconcerned with both playing sports and watching them.

However, as bored as I am watching the Super Bowel and wondering when they'll stop throwing the piece of leather around and get to the halftime music, I cant help but get riled up when watching my school's volleyball game. Its a part of myself I'm not very in touch with, but it comes out nonetheless.

But why? What is it about sports that can tweak us emotionally?

Then I start thinking about war. Its the same thing in a lot of ways. There are two teams, often both of them are trying to achieve a similar objective, and the clashing of these two teams often causes a split between people. You have some rooting for one team, another rooting for the other team, both want to see their team succeed. It gets both sides emotionally involved with the outcome.

Bot obviously there has to be a difference, right? War often has values driving it, whereas sports if for the simple enjoyment of competition. So, in a way, maybe you could say sports is what you would get if you took all the ideologies out of it, leaving just the thrill of battle and victory. The concept of competitive sports comes from our simple desire to battle.

But where is our desire to battle directed? Against other people? I don't think so. We're not really fighting against each other. What always interested me was the many armistices that happened on Christmas during World War I. Those times always made me think of a football game, where there is fierce competition between the players during game time, but are completely okay with going out for a drink with the other team after the games over. After all, its just a game, right? No reason they cant be friends. I wonder if alot of soldiers have the same outlook towards war. War is just a game they have to play, and when its over they still share their humanity.

So what is our battle against? It would have to be something that isn't human, since we have nothing against humans at their core. How could we? We're the same as them. Its as Paul said: our battle isn't against flesh and blood.

Rather, its against ideologies, the basis of war to begin with. Yet why is it in our battle against ideologies, we kill other humans? Are we really defeating these ideologies? Would the ideology of Islam be dead if every Muslim had been killed? Would Christianity die if every Christian was dead? Would Atheism be gone from this earth if we simply killed all Atheists? There is clearly more to an ideology than the earthly form it takes, and so ideologies cannot be defeated by a simple destruction of its earthly representatives. It has to be defeated in the spiritual realm. Only then can the slaves of an ideology be set free instead of killed.

War is the ultimate curse of mankind. A sort of self imposed suicide. We, mankind, all being equal beings, are cursed with the nature of killing our brothers instead of targeting the ideologies that control them. I believe one author referred to it as "breaking the web of lies." As soldiers in the history long battle of evil, we shouldnt be fooled into thinking our battle is against flesh and blood, but rather against the spiritual strongholds that exist within a certain ideology. Only then can we set the captives free instead of killing them.

Thats all.

~Jared

One More Day

2008-06-27T21:40:00.000-07:00

one more day to get it right
one more day to stop my right
oh Lord, let me survive this night
one more day

one more day to find a way
one more day to finally say
the words to make your spirit stay
one more day

one more day to stop it all
one more day to break my fall
is all this darkness worth it all?
one more day

one more day is too much to ask
one more day is too hard a task
but tomorrow night I'll finally relax
after one more day

one more day I'm full of fear
if you're out there, I'm still here
Never leave my side. Its clear.
I need one more day.

Just one more day

~Jared

Wounded Stag, Lamb for the Slaughter

2008-06-13T14:54:00.000-07:00

I know what I saw.
It is in my mind as well.
Did you see it too?

A wounded stag, a misfit to all
Who cautiously crawled through
Such a frightened world
Where books are buried in sand dunes
And the people that drove by to see
This majestic beast, the people that made
His suffering an amusement, shouting still:
Are you hurt?
No Answer
Are you away from home?
No Answer. A stare from its eyes, silent as the wind,
as forceful as the waves in the surf
Shouting still.
go home
where is your god now?
why has he forsaken you?
go home
stay home
And it still limped on, begging for hope in a newly dead world
Our savior made a break for the last that he knew
Could I be what the stag is?
Hope so pure, pain untainted, knowledge beyond all.

The last thing I saw was when it ran for the ocean
such an abyss that no man can enter, and no man will.
and only the deepest dwell where the waves had swallowed it.
I hope it returns.

I know what I saw.
And I wave farewell to the shore.
No science will explain why the ocean roared
When I followed the stag into the sea.

~Jared

Time: The All Powerful Master, Servant, and Deciever

2008-05-18T06:05:00.000-07:00

Ive had a few people tell me that they want to read the essay I wrote for my Senior project, so rather than sending it to a bunch of people Ive just decided to post it for the whole world to see. Basically, I had to choose a topic which I had to look up in different works of literature. My topic was perception of time.

Time is something we experience every single day, whether it is someone asking you if you will be “on time” for an event or watching time “fly by.” We are so familiar with it, but do we really know what it is? As St. Augustine wrote in his work Confessions, “Who can even in thought comprehend it, so as to utter a word about it? But what in discourse do we mention more familiarly and knowingly than time?” (Augustine 93; ch. XI, sec. 17) From this realization, Augustine comes to the most vital and simple question: “What then is time?” This question has survived long past Augustine’s time, and has been considered by thinkers, writers, poets, and even musicians. Throughout history, three different perceptions have come about: time is absolute, time is relative, and time is irrelevant.

“This thing all things devours”

Arguably one of the most prevalent views of time in both philosophical thought and literary writing is the view of time as an absolute force, an all powerful master that controls mankind, a “bloody tyrant” (Shakespeare ln. 2) that destroys all things. From the writings of the early Marcus Aurelius to the lyric writing of musicians such as Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, mankind for years has seen time as an inevitable flow, both affecting all things in its path and refusing to change, despite mankind’s attempts at changing it.

“Motion and changes are continually renewing the world, just as the uninterrupted course of time is always renewing the infinite duration of ages,” writes Marcus Aurelius in his book Meditations (Aurelius 275; bk. VI, sec. 15). Aurelius’s predecessors, thinkers like Aristotle and Plato, almost always saw time as the measurement of motion (Aristotle 298) (Plato 450). Humans alone defined what time was by observing motion. To Aurelius, however, time was not just the observation of change. Instead, time was an “uninterrupted course,” flowing through history. Time was not a perception of humans, but rather a force on its own.

Although Aurelius mentions the renewing nature of the force of time, many writers in later centuries found a much crueler side to the force of time. William Shakespeare in “Sonnet 12” writes:

"And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow/ And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand/ Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand (Shakespeare 12-14).Rather than renewing, Shakespeare paints time as the grim reaper, mowing down all good things like beauty and youth with his scythe. Another poet and writer, J.R.R. Tolkein, paints time in a similar light in his fantasy novel The Hobbit. One riddle told in the book speaks of “this thing [that] all things devours.” It “slays king, ruins town, and beats high mountain down” (Tolkein 73). The answer to the riddle was, of course, time, a force that devours all things in its path. Centuries later, in the 1960’s, songwriters like Roger Waters still spoke of time’s forcefulness and man’s helplessness to escape its wrath. In their song “Time,” Pink Floyd sang:

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but its sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in the relative way, but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death (Pink).

Though we may “run and run to catch up with the sun,” time still passes and brings death to man. From the writings of these poets and authors, time became, in their minds, an indestructible force, devouring the beauty of Shakespeare’s lover and beating down the mountains of Middle Earth.
In fact, time not only became indestructible, but also unchangeable. On the off chance that anyone knew the future, writers maintained that they could not change what will happen because the force of time is unstoppable. This illusion of free will is one of the major themes in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter House-Five, a novel about a time traveling World War II veteran. In the book, the main character, Billy Pilgrim, is kidnapped by aliens called Tralfamadorians, who see past, present, and future all at once, rather than from the present time (Vonnegut 27). During his capture, Billy finds out that the universe is destroyed in the future by the pressing of a button on a test engine for a flying saucer. Since the aliens have this foreknowledge, Billy asks them why they do not attempt to stop it from happening. They simply respond that “he has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way” (Vonnegut 117). To the aliens, the destruction of the universe is inevitable simply because time dictates that it will happen. Since it cannot be changed, it always will happen, despite what anyone does to stop it.

Another example of the view that time can never be changed is in a short story titled “Time Telephone” by Adam Roberts. In the story, scientists find a way to communicate with the past through phone lines. Taking advantage of the technology, people begin warning people in the past of deaths of loved ones and giving tips on stock to invest. However, as Roberts writes, time remains unchanged by their efforts: “Although people warned loved-ones of imminent death and told them which stock to buy, the loved ones still died, and nobody found themselves suddenly rich because their earlier selves had invested more wisely. None of that happened” (Roberts). Despite man’s attempts at changing the past, time was unchanged. Time still devoured. Time still renewed. In the minds of a Roman emperor or a modernist American novelist, time was the all-powerful unchanging force of the universe.

“The Emperor hoped to recreate the beginning of time and called himself The First”

Despite the view of unchanging time being the most popular view for many centuries, the 20^th century gave birth to an altogether different mode of thought: post-modernism. The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literacy and Cultural Criticism states that a post-modernist is one who “accepts, whether indifferently or with celebration, the indeterminacy of meaning and the decenteredness of existence” (Childers 235). In the same way that post-modernism found indeterminacy in the meaning of existence, it also found indeterminacy in the meaning of time. With the rise of modern thought, time was no longer thought of as a master, but rather a servant. Authors and thinkers began to think of time as relative, and, under this new viewpoint, began to define time for themselves.

In the beginning of the 20^th century, a man named Albert Einstein came up with the theory that would redefine time as relative. In his theory of relativity, Einstein theorized gravitational time dilation, a theory that states that time passes slower in areas of higher gravitational potential (Einstein). This theory has been since validated by many experiments with clocks at higher altitude. The theory did much more than just revolutionize the science field, however. With time itself being redefined as relative, writers and thinkers began to see things much differently. Gone was the notion that time could not be changed. With time as a relative factor, time was a servant to man, not the other way around.

This thought process did not begin in the 20^th century, however. William James in 1890 wrote this about time in his book Principles of Psychology: “Awareness of change is thus the condition on which our perception of time's flow depends” (James 406; ch. XV). Rather than making time its own force, William James theorized that the flow of time is based on human awareness of changes happening, a reference to the thought process of Plato and Aristotle. Thus, time is man’s attempt at explaining changes, and might be different from person to person, much like writer Washington Irving wrote of his character Rip Van Winkle: “for the whole twenty years had been to him but as one night” (Irving 55).

As the thought of relative time crept into the 20^th century, many authors put aside the traditional view of time and redefined time for themselves. One example of man trying to redefine the nature of time is in the short story “No Particular Night or Morning” by Ray Bradbury. The story takes place in a rocket that is flying in the middle of space. Onboard, there is an astronaut named Hitchcock, who, in order to forget memories of his troubled childhood, adopts a unique perspective of time. Time, in his mind, only exists in the present, and the things in the past are dead and unimportant. “I won’t shape what I do tomorrow by some lousy thing I did yesterday,” he comments. “I was never young. Whoever I was then is dead” (Bradbury 168). In order to destroy the memory of his problematic childhood and his parents that he despised, Hitchcock views time as it most conveniences him.

In fact, man’s convenience is most often the driving force for attempts at redefining time. In his essay “The Wall and the Books,” Jorge Luis Borges discusses Emperor Shih Huang Ti of China, who, while building the Great Wall, also burned all the books that had been written about history before him. “Perhaps the Emperor hoped to recreate the beginning of time and called himself The First, in order to be truly the first, and he named himself Huang Ti in order to be in some way Huang Ti, the legendary emperor who invented writing and the compass,” he writes (Borges 67). By destroying all previous knowledge and making himself the first, Shih Huang Ti was attempting to control time and make it serve him. If his people did read books of emperors before him and were reminded of other times, time would work against him. So, in order to define time in his own convenience, he made himself the first by burning all the books before him. As far as the Emperor was concerned, time could be defined however he thought fit.
Ever since a German scientist first launched humanity into the age of relativity, the thinkers and writers of the 20^th century suddenly found freedom. No longer were they subject to the theory that time was their master. Now, they were the masters. Time was enslaved to their perception of it, and time could no longer hold the power to destroy. Time was theirs.

“Time goes by, and man perceives it not.”

Although these two conflicting views of relative time and absolute time have been the prevailing theories, another view point still exists. Rather than using the physical world to perceive time, this view uses the supernatural world and the idea of eternity to perceive what time is. By taking into account the idea that there is an eternal God and that we will live in eternity, time can be summed up in one single word: irrelevant. In the scope of eternity, time is just man’s narrow view of his circumstances and is irrelevant to our existence.

One area of study in which this view is most prevalent is in theology. Thomas Aquinas, a famous theologian, discusses the meaning of eternity and time in his book Summa Theologica. In question ten, he theorizes that time measures the succession of movement, putting it in categories of before and after. However, since eternity has no beginning and no end, there is no before or after to measure. “As therefore the idea of time consists in the numbering of before and after in movement; so likewise in the apprehension of the uniformity of what is outside of movement, consists the idea of eternity,” says Aquinas (Aquinas 41; q. X, art. 1, obj. 6). Since eternity is immutable, human perception of time becomes completely irrelevant. Other teachings in Christianity support this view. In his second epistle, Peter reminds believers that “with the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day” (The Holy Bible, 2 Peter 3:8). In the perspective of eternity, measurements like days and years have little meaning.

Another work that deals with eternity from a theological perspective is The Divine Comedy, a fictional journey that the Italian poet Dante Alighieri takes through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. In his journey, Dante meets a myriad of characters from history, including Helen of Troy, Julius Caesar, and Pope Nicholas III. In Hell, many characters that have lived before Dante’s time call out to him, asking him to tell their friends and families of their fate. Being in eternity, the denizens of Hell have no sense of the present time in which Dante comes from. “Of your world in its present state, we have no evidence,” one soul says (Dante 14; “Inferno,” Canto X, ln. 96-97). “Therefore, when a thing is heard or seen which may hold the soul intently turned to it, the time goes by, and the man perceives it not,” Dante writes of Purgatory. (Dante 57; “Purgatory,” Canto IV, ln. 11). Since Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven are the three eternities that all people in history are assigned to, time no longer has any meaning, yet the inhabitants are still deceived by their previous notion of time.

Kurt Vonnegut also illustrates how a human’s notion of time can be decieving in his novel Slaughter House-Five. As mentioned previously, the alien race of Tralfamadorians in the book see time in its entirety and not in just the present (Vonnegut 27). Since the main character Billy can only see one moment at a time via the present, the Tralfamadorians say that he is grossly deceived (Vonnegut 115). Since the Tralfamadorians see time in its entirety, time as Billy sees it becomes irrelevant. Time to them never changes, so there is no longer a past, present, or future. Everything is how it was, is, and will be, and it will never change. Therefore, any notions of time in terms of future, present and past are completely irrelevant.

While many thinkers thought in terms of future, present and past, some theologians and writers chose to think outside the finite world and into eternity. What they found was that time was the ultimate façade. The absolute time and the relative time of so many thinkers and writers was to them a mere speck in the eye of eternity.

Thinkers and writers have pondered and written many theories of time, but time itself has passed them by. Now, over two thousand years since time passed Plato by, we are still stuck with the vital question that St. Augustine posed: “What then is time?” Is it an immutable, unchanging force like Shakespeare thought? Is it a pliable servant as Einstein theorized? Or is it the biggest façade of human existence like the denizens of The Divine Comedy realized? Or, could time be something beyond our own understanding? Could it be something that even Albert Einstein could not compute, something Thomas Aquinas could not imagine, and something Kurt Vonnegut could not understand? The day may come when time’s true nature is revealed to mankind. Until then, thinkers and writers must continue to seek it. After all, time is a terrible thing to waste.

~Jared

Rewriting the Storybook

2008-05-08T18:47:00.000-07:00

http://jaredph.blogspot.com/2008/02/dismal-times.html

Its a funny thing. This post was a mere two weeks before I fell into atheism and experienced the worst time period of my life. How was it that I almost knew it was going to happen, even by just looking at the weather? Does God work in strange prophetic ways?

Yet how was it that I almost had foreknowledge of a storm yet I was powerless to avoid it? Powerless to get out of it? Powerless to fight back the inevitable darkness clothing me? If we did know things that would happen to us in the future, would we be able to stop them, or will Time just run its course anyways?

Its like a story that you've read a billion times. You wish that the sad parts could be changed, but it cant. In that respect, seeing your own future is just like reading your own storybook. Your the character and you follow the plot, but the plot will never change. It was, is, and always will be following the same path until those actions become cemented in the past, never to change again.

Does free will even exist? Or is it just an illusion created by our desire to change the inevitable? What control do we really have over what happens to us?

And will the storybook end up as a comedy or a tragedy?

~Jared

An Inconvienient Truth

2008-04-22T14:04:00.000-07:00

I'd like to take this time that I would usually blog about materialism or immigrants and address an issue facing us all. I am, of course, talking about gnomes.

For centuries, gnomes all over the United States have been facing persecution from advocates of anti-gnomenism. As most people know, the great potatoe famine sent many gnomes over to ellis island, hoping to start a new life. However, their lives only got worse.

With the rise of industrialism, businesses began taking advantage of cheap immigrant labor, and gnomes were just one of the minorities used as cheap labor. Although their life was hard, the many years of working in coal mines and paving streets would not prepare them the utter life of misery they would endure with the rise of one of the most popular appliances: drying machines.

Because of their small size, gnomes were yanked from their homes, their families, everything they knew to work the many drying machines that were sold all over the country. They attempted to form a labor union to fight their imprisonment, but their cries fell on deaf ears. The gnomes were sad. Sadness turned to anger, which turned to acts of crime, namely stealing the socks that show up in their metalic prisons so as to make mankind suffer for their heinous crimes.

But be warned, the gnomes will not be passive for long. It wont be long until the gnomes turn violent in revolution, burning articles of clothing and wreaking havoc on suburban households. For the sake of all that is suburban, we embrace our gnome brothers in tolerance and equality, while embracing gnome-sound practices into our daily lives.

Do not wait, bretheren. Do not wait until they start taking more than our socks. Do not wait until the dryer machines stop working. Act now.

Until the gnomelution,

~Jared

2008-04-21T18:15:00.000-07:00

Take me home. Yaweh, take me home.

When I Look At the World

2008-04-17T19:42:00.000-07:00

I want to discuss some things, but I dont think I will be able to do that until I get some things off my chest.

Its truly a disheartening time when this is all you can see on the news:

Across Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger
FOOD SHORTAGE ALARM AS PRICE OF RICE SOARS
Hunger in Haiti increasing rapidly
Where children are quite literally dying for a drink

I hope these are all articles that you might read and consider, since they deal with one of the most alarming things that is happening currently: the simple need for food. People all around the globe are suffering so much from the rising food prices, its making so many of them angry. Heres one quote from a Haitian quoted in a NYtimes article:

“They look at me and say, ‘Papa, I’m hungry,’ and I have to look away. It’s humiliating and it makes you angry.”

Most of these articles dont even mention the fact that most of these people are unemployed, and even people in our country are without jobs.

How screwed up a society we must live in for this not to be a concern to most people? I know alot of people rant about this, but the simplest of people can pick up a newspaper and look at what we have become: we know more about the lives of celebrities than about the state of the poor in our own city. Newspapers scrap real news for news about ex-American Idol stars. Everything is entertainment. Times Square in New York City is a great example of the state of our country. Flashing lights, advertisements, sound bites, video bites. Its a technicolor nightmare.

I guess thats one of the things I appreciate most about Jesus and how he came to Earth. He brought everyone back to the basics. He didnt tell everyone they needed to get steady jobs to be financially secure. He simply said, "Dont worry about what you will eat or wear tommorow. The LORD always provides." In fact, Jesus was more in favor of everyone selling their things and giving to the poor rather than being financially secure. All of the apostles left their steady jobs to follow Jesus. Its harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom than a camel through the eye of the needle.

Honestly, if God really called you to sell ALL of your possessions you have today, would you do it? Dont give a Christianee answer, but think about it honestly. Would you really? ALL of your things? All of your money? Your house? The roof over your head? I'm not sure how I would even react to that.

I guess the roundabout point I'm trying to make is that we live in a culture that is so geared towards being well off financially and having insurance, but is always being concerned about money really what Jesus taught? Is it even what the Bible teaches? I heard one pastor say that having insurance was unGodly because it takes God out of the picture, making you put your trust in man instead. I might not be as radical as that, but I think he has a good point.

In the meantime, I originally started to write this post because I wanted to incite discussion amongst people with some questions I've been pondering lately. Please post your responses either via Facebook or Blogger.

1. Ultimately, will the world get better or get worse?

2. What is the most effective way to care for the poor? Will giving poor and third world countries money and provisions really help them in the long run?

3. Where do dreams come from? Why do we dream?

hope to get some awesome responses!

~Jared

You have encountered writers block! Do you:

2008-04-01T20:01:00.000-07:00

a. cry and sob
b. write something rediculous
c. attempt to squeeze something out
d. run away

I was really hoping I was going to write something meaningful and powerful today. I wrote a poem today, which I guess completely sucked up all my blogging power. I must remember to monitor my inspiration more closely.

A limerick. yes, that sounds good.

I once met a kid who had said
that the the people in the world were all dead
I thought that he lied,
till I looked outside
and realized he was kind of right, in a weird, symbolic sort of way.

~Jared

From the Mall to the Goodwill

2008-03-18T20:22:00.000-07:00

I've never known what it is, but malls scare me. Everything is always so white, and you can never find anything in there that you ACTUALLY need. Its almost like it is just one giant insane asylum for society, minus the padded walls.

To me, its a giant collection of everything I hate about our culture: flashy billboards, people soliciting you constantly, and advertising constantly reminding you of how you dont match up to the world's standards. Alot of you might say "Geez, man. Its just a mall." You may be right, since I tend to be a bit of a radical. However, there is something that doesnt sit well in my stomach when walking into a giant glittering collosuss of materialism, and its not just the cheap chinese food they serve there (what can I say? I'm a sucker for sesame chicken).

Strangely enough, the only place that I feel comftorable shopping at now is Goodwill. In reality, the whole place is one giant garbage dump for the middle class, whether its the old Barry Manilow records they are selling for a dollar or that strange man with the excess nose hair and strange accent that no one in the community is willing to talk to (I know a particular man who fits this description). The craziest thing is that I somehow feel so much more comftorable shopping among the maze of XXL shirts with the random people of my community than shopping among overpriced clothes with people who dont even know who they are. It makes me feel so much more at home.

I didnt know why this was, until I actually researched what Goodwill does. I was suprised to find out alot of this stuff, so I thought I might share it with you guys.

A quote from their website:

"Goodwill was founded in 1902 in Boston by Rev. Edgar J. Helms, a Methodist minister and early social innovator. Helms collected used household goods and clothing in wealthier areas of the city, then trained and hired those who were poor to mend and repair the used goods. The goods were then resold or were given to the people who repaired them. The system worked, and the Goodwill philosophy of "a hand up, not a hand out" was born.

We are North America’s leading nonprofit provider of education, training, and career services for people with disadvantages, such as welfare dependency, homelessness, and lack of education or work experience, as well as those with physical, mental and emotional disabilities. Last year, local Goodwills collectively provided employment and training services to more than 930,775 individuals."

The first thing that came to my mind was this: AMAZING. For the longest time, I thought it was just a store that sold crap no one wanted, but now I see how much more it is. I pray to God fervently that someday I would do something as worthwhile as this, because it is very much what is on my heart for the poor.

All I want to be able to do is help them, and no I dont mean throwing aid money at them and hoping their problems go away. That is exactly where our government has gone wrong. We have some sort of idea that giving money to the poor to spend should be the panacea to all their problems. Thats not what they need. They need people like Rev. Helms, who are willing to work themselves to death just so that people less fortunate than us could experience what all of us take for granted. A quote from him that I liked:

"Friends of Goodwill, be dissatisfied with your work until every handicapped and unfortunate person in your community has an opportunity to develop to his fullest usefulness and enjoy a maximum of abundant living."

Amazing man. If I could have one thing in my life, it would be to do something as influential and lasting as he did.

~Jared

no subject

2008-03-02T18:46:00.000-08:00

what does that even mean anyways? its almost like that line defines what the entire message/post is going to be about, yet usually they're lying. Nevertheless, I find it quite appropriate in this circumstance...

Well, I finally got my phone interview with Score. From what I could tell, I think I did pretty well. I feel pretty positive about it, but only the first of week of April will be the defining point.

Am I a drummer? I guess time will tell that too...

btw: verse I have been thinking about- Ephesians 3:15-21

~Jared

Dismal Times

2008-02-26T17:13:00.000-08:00

I have seen tempests, when the scolding winds
Have rived the knotty oaks, and I have seen
The ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam,
To be exalted with the threatening clouds:
But never till to-night, never till now,
Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.

And yesterday the bird of night did sit
Even at noon-day upon the market-place,
Hooting and shrieking. When these prodigies
Do so conjointly meet, let not men say '
These are their reasons; they are natural;'
For, I believe, they are portentous things
Unto the climate that they point upon.

Julius Caesar, Act I Scene III

As you can tell, ive had Shakespeare on the mind recently. Mostly because of the weather of late. Maybe its not like this in the other parts of Georgia, but I havnt even seen the sun today. Instead, there were just innumerable gray clouds rolling over, almost as if the wind on their backs would swallow time itself. Its been kind of crazy, and it really has started to remind me of Shakespeare. Whenever there was a storm in Shakespeare, you know some crazy stuff was about to go down.

As weird as it sounds, its made me very uncertain all day. This morning, I woke up to a thunder storm raging outside, and I almost feared for my life. I wish I knew what was going on, but if God indicates anything with weather, dismal times are ahead.

In fact, the weather itself is a pretty good description of my life right now. All is chaos, and nothing that seemed certain is even certain anymore. I more and more feel myself drifting away from this place, almost as much as this whole place seems to be drifting away from me. Of course, its still a very long time before I actually "go" anywhere, but things are already being put into place. Just like how everything starts to fall in to place by the second act. The question is, by the time I get to the final scene, will it be a comedy or a tragedy? (my vote is on the latter)

I always knew leaving home would be hard, but I dont think I ever thought it would be like this. The closer and closer the time comes for me to leave, the harder everything gets. The more storms rush in. The more people drift away. The more reality seems to slip away from me.

I think these next few months will be a trial by fire. It will be interesting to see who I come out as. I dont even think I will recognize myself.

All I know is rhat right now, what i'm praying is this:

LET IT RAIN

~Jared

(Part 5) A Dirge Unto Itself/(Part 6) Empty Room Revisited

2008-02-20T21:51:00.000-08:00

Can you tell me, what is it you said before the lights went out?

Its the middle of the night, and here I am again. On my knees, begging for forgiveness that you wouldn't judge me too harshly for the things I've done. My red eyes strain from my self inflicted insomnia. Plunged in eternal dark, seeing the three of them laughing at me.

Whispered to me, and made me realize

Life is just a dirge unto itself.

What can you tell me teacher?

Does it all matter? Is it all meaningless? Please don't tell me that everything ive done in this world is all for naught. That it would be as fleeting as the setting sun and as fragile as the wind that blows to the South. That the entire world will just fall back on itself and leave me stranded between Heaven and Hell. I would rather go down fast then slowly sink in the vanity of it all.

Tell me it isnt. Dont make me realize.

Life is just a dirge unto itself.

Please don't let me fade from your view. Don't lose me in the waves of my misfortunes. The waters' deathly hold is all too familiar. It grasps my indifference with a loving hand, and pulls me down to the water below. Would you accept something so dear to me that is nothing to you? The blood that won't pay what can't be bought?

Please tell me. Make me realize.

Life is not a dirge unto itself

Dirty room...
Dirty mind...
Dirty things cropped up inside
It rolled back, as daylight covered dark
A speck in the eye of eternity thence has gone

An empty room...
A clean mind...
Silence takes to three great fading voices
The earth has rolled back, my name it called
I saw the day shoot through my empty room

for the first time, I think I might have called it home

~Jared

Insomnia

2008-02-17T21:37:00.000-08:00

I can't sleep...

What even causes insomnia? Whenever I get insomnia, my mind starts running a million miles per minute, inventing crazy stories and adventures. Almost like dreaming, except wide awake. What does it all mean? Does it mean anything at all? The only things that come to my mind are questions, trying to explain the workings of my own mind.

Theres been so much death around me recently. Nobody I have personally known has died, but I know a lot of people who have friends that have died. Not to mention the fact that Valentines Day just passed, the day of the largest number of suicides and a recent school shooting. Where has the world gone? Where are we going? Where am I going?

Sometimes I feel like I want to be Jack Kerouac and drive across the country. Actually, I think I would like to drive across Mexico, from border to border. Just take three years of my life to not worry about a job or anything else, and just travel. See for myself the world I am haunted by everyday and want to be a part of, hitting my head against the wall until the day that I finally get to get to the other side. If I do, I'm sure it will make an awesome book.

I would be really afraid that I would live a boring life if I didn't know that God knew I loved adventure. I remember the days me and my siblings would read Peter Pan, dreaming and pretending to have adventures in the backyard. I think theres still a part of the little kid in me.

The playa haters today say that nobody gets to be an astronaut when they grow up, and you have to be realistic. I hate it when people say that. How on earth do you know if God's going to place you in the United States or make you an astronaut or send you to some Amazon tribe that doesnt speak your language? Thats the whole adventure in itself. Just following Christ and seeing where you end up. And then when it comes time to leave the earth, you can finally see that life was not nearly as confusing as you thought it was. You'd finally see that everything in your life had a meaning, and that God finally brought the whole adventure of your life full circle. To dust you came, to dust you return.

Ordinarily, I would try and bring this post to full circle, but I'm too tired to try.

You can figure the ending out for yourself...

~Jared

Cleaning Man

2008-02-10T15:56:00.000-08:00

Thats what I became Saturday.

I was pretty bummed about it. My favorite spot to be in at work is working on boards, since I get to practice Spanish and not have to deal with stupid customers. Unfortunately, Saturday I was assigned to the exact opposite. Hearing conversations in English and having to mingle with the public while cleaning tables and asking people if they need refills. Bah.

I always found something weird about people who clean for a job. Especially the ones in China. All the cleaning people there had large, wide-brimmed, straw hats that covered their faces completely. Despite the fact that they cross the paths of tourists millions of times in a day, they never notice anybody, and nobody ever notices them. They are, in all practical meanings of the word, invisible. Its almost as if they don't even have souls or something. It really kind of creeps me out.

While not in the same magnitude, I experienced something very similar to that working in the dining room. Despite the fact that my presence is very real, people seem to just shut me out of their minds. I can swerve around them all the time to get a certain spot on the floor where a kid muddied his shoes, but they still might never even acknowledge my existence. I felt a lot like the cleaning people in China.

What is it about some people that we just shut them out of our minds? With cleaning people, most people would argue that it is kind of awkward to see someone cleaning (after all, what do you say to them? Enjoy minimum wage?). Sometimes we don't like to see other people doing work we could be doing ourselves, so we just pretend they don't exist. But do we only do it with cleaning people? Are there other people that we want to pretend arn't there?

Personally speaking (being the introvert that I am) I alot of times want to make myself dissapear. So, taking in the whole of humanity, it means that there is a whole sect of people in the world that are invisible, simply because people dont want to see them and they don't want to be seen.

I can see why alot of postal workers go insane. Being an ignored public servant and having everybody act like you do not exist can tax on your self-esteem and sanity. I can't imagine having to do it as my life career.

The moral of this story: People who clean have a hard job and get completely ignored, and they would all really appreciate it if you acknowledged their existence every once in a while. It might save you if they decide to come into work armed.

~Jared

A Speck in the Eye of Eternity

2008-02-02T18:02:00.000-08:00

the title sounds epic, no?

Anyways, work sucked today. On many levels of which I dont feel like getting into right now. Although, for some reason all of that doesnt seem to matter, because when I got out of my car and looked up, all I saw were stars. Unusually enough, my thoughts were not "Oh, God is big," but rather "Oh, my life is insignificant." For the same reason, almost every thing I do (like working) seems extremely worthless. Like I am, as Solomon says, "grasping for the wind." I guess theres a reason Ecclesiastes is my favorite book of the Bible.

Solomon also said that there is no greater joy than for a man to enjoy his work. On this point I'm not so strong. Sometimes I'm wondering why I even have a job, but then I remembered the important word: money. Everything in this world seems to be about money. If you're not making the big bucks, then you're destitute and shunned by society. I wonder if Solomon had that in mind when he wrote Ecclesiastes.

In fact, I think that is one of the things that bothers me most about the world. Why is it there always has to be such a wall of seperation between people who have money and those who dont? Why is it your whole life has to be committed to being "well off" and wealthy?

I hate poverty. I hate how it dehumanizes people in both the eyes of themselves and of other people. I can never explain it, but something about seeing it makes me sick to my stomach. No matter how many times ive seen it, it never becomes "normal" to me.

I remember seeing the poverty in Tijuana. It was probobly the first time I had seen poverty that widespread, and it sickens me almost every day to think about it. People were living in conditions that I never even thought "livable" (whatever that means)

But you know what the craziest thing is? I envy them. Crossing the border as an emotionally unstable person that couldn't give a crap for anyone, I envied those I saw. They had something that I didnt have. They were happy. They cared for their families. They didnt care that they were'nt "well off," they just thanked God for the things they had.

I also remember one person I met at home ministry. It was an old man. A widow. He lived all alone, without children, in a small deserted shack, and as worse off as he was, he told us he still trusted God. You think YOUR faith has been tested?

I dont think I can bear to live with alot of money. It doesnt seem to give anyone pleasure. All people do is run off and do something stupid with it, and then die. I would rather be poor and happy than rich and miserable. I hate being constricted by the "American Dream." Its not my dream. Its someone elses.

This post has gone in circles, and I dont think I know where its gone. I have so many things I want to change, I just dont know how. But, I guess in all fairness I should tie it back to the title. Everything I do seems like a speck in the eye of eternity. Nothing. something that will be flicked out. Yet I know God can change things, even if I cant.

I just got to throw down my net.

~Jared

Beyond the Infinite

2008-01-28T19:23:00.000-08:00

For some reason, this scene is an accurate description of my life right now:

I feel like I'm just hurtling through space, never sure of where I'm going. Not sure whats going to be on the other side. Just without the sickingly flashing lights.

Lets just hope I dont come out looking like this:

~Jared

I'm On My Way

2008-01-20T14:33:00.000-08:00

Well, it is official. Next year, I am going to Costa Rica. After much prayer (and prayers from others) God has finally shown me, out of all the other projects, where to go. And it feels good to finally know I'm on my way.

Now comes filling out applications and praying that I get accepted into the college I want. I haven't heard back from any of them yet, unfortunately, but I guess it takes faith to know that God will put me in the right place.

I guess that is the defining thing in my life right now: faith. Recently I've discovered that faith takes a lot of sacrifice. While praying about whether I was supposed to go with Score International (the program I'm going with), all I could think of were a billion problems and doubts I had about going, and tons of reasons I shouldn't go. Despite all the reasons I shouldn't go, God kept giving me one single verse: Matthew 4:22, which reads as follows.

"and immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him."

For some reason, it reminds me of something my ex-youth leader Daniel Gilland once said about counting the cost. That sometimes following God requires more of you than you are initially willing to give. Following God sometimes requires leaving people you won't ever see again, leaving the places you love, or, in my case, leaving Georgia and living 10 months in a foreign country that doesn't speak my language. At the same time, i'm also reminded of what the Apostles had to do to follow Jesus. Essentially, they subjected themselves to a life of ridicule, and, for most of them, martyrdom. My predicament is a little smaller in that respect.

All I know right now is that I am on my way out of here. It makes me kind of sad, but at the same time it really doesn't. I've been in a sort of pensive mood lately because of it. There is constantly a discrepancy between me wanting to run away to some country and never be seen again and me wanting to live a somewhat typical life in the United States (only to a degree though. See two posts prior for an explanation). I'm constantly wondering where I belong: in the field, or in the forest. As I have said to some people, reevaluating the line between sanity and calling.

I don't know the answer yet. All I know right now is that I'm on my way.

~Jared

I Fought Facebook and Facebook Won

2008-01-17T08:39:00.000-08:00

Well, they finnally got me. For those of you who did not know already, Facebook has been warning me for several months that they were going to kick me off Facebook because I didnt go to the school I said I did, since my school isnt even listed. To stick it to the man, I wrote a letter.

Dear Facebook,

You kicked me off yesterday because I did not get identified by a fellow student at the high school I said I attended, despite that I have been friends with someone who was already in that network. You have been threatening to kick me off at the end of the month, which was nearly six months ago, but it seems that "terminate conniving non-student" was at the bottom of your to-do list. Indeed, you are correct in assuming that I am not part of the network I chose, and let me tell you why I decided to commit this heinous crime.

I joined the high school network closest to me because the school I currently attend, Fideles Christian School, is not on your school list. Despite my and fellow students' attempts at entering our school name into your enormous bureaucracy of a website in hopes that we might get a network of our own, you have ignored us for more than six months. Since you have shattered our hopes of recognition, you have forced me and so many other unrepresented students to go into a life of crime, maliciously joining networks that we do not actually belong to.

Heinous as our crime is, I want to suggest a compromise: If I get enough people at my small school that are already on Facebook to sign a petition, you give us our own network. Its simple isnt it? Nothing that a multi-million dollar corporation cannot take care of.

But be warned, Facebook. If you continue to squash our rights as students, you will become something that all grassroots corporations fear: THE MAN. A company that ignores the voice of the people and kills our rights. Now you dont want to be the MAN do you?

Anyways, please take time out of your extremely busy schedules to consider my proposal, in the spirit of democracy.

Sincerely,

Jared Hutchins

Well, I guess we'll have to wait and see how that sits with them. In the meantime, it looks apparent that I will probably never be on Facebook again, so this blog site is my only solace for blogging. Now I am truly a rebel.

Viva la revolucion.

~Jared

Thought of the Day

2008-01-08T15:22:00.000-08:00

At school, one of the parents drove up in their car with a small, annoying, barking, rat.

I mean, forget deporting the immigrants. If anything needs to go back to Mexico its these things:

~Jared

The Game of Life

2008-01-07T14:09:00.000-08:00

In this post, I am going to address probobly my greatest fear in life (no, its not heights even though they do make me nervous)

You ready?

Here it is.

I'm not sure how many people have played the Game of Life, but it's a board game where you have a spinner and move around the board, doing things like getting a job, getting married, having kids, and getting a raise. In most cases, the Game of Life is the typical suburban lifestyle: you go to college, get a job, get married, have kids, and then you retire and die.

I played this game alot when I was a kid and I remember always getting really angry because of the stop signs. In the game, you could spin around the board until you hit a stop sign. Even though you might have only moved one space and you spinned a 10, you have to stop and do what the sign said. The stop signs always say things like get a job, get married, or buy a house, and you had to do what it said, regardless of your feelings about it. Being a typical 7 year old boy, I always got really angry when I had to stop and get married (since girls are yucky).

That wasnt even the worst part. The end of the game bothered me the most. On the way, you got a job and made money. At the end, you have to count up your money and see which retirement home you get to go into: the pitiful log cabin or the giant mansion. It's then that you realize that all the game was about was money. It didnt matter that you had kids or a wife. All they did was cost you money. Money you could have used to get into the giant mansion.

Now, that game scares me. I am often terrified that my life will be like that. Just a one way road to retirement and death, with a few stop signs along the way, forcing me to live some idiot's idea of "life." Then, you would look back and realize what you lived wasnt life at all. It was just a pointless existence based on getting money and being forced into jobs, marriages, and houses you never wanted. What kind of twisted person could call that "life?"

Probobly the same twisted person that wants to brainwash you into a suburban lifestyle. It even says it on the box. "Hi! We're a stereotypical consumer whore family! Now go get a house in the suburbs and have two kids so you can waste your life being a cubicle slave!" What family even looks that happy while playing a board game? I dont know about anyone else, but playing board games with my siblings usually meant that one of us was going to be telling on someone by the time we were through.

I guess what i'm getting at is that our culture needs a better definition of "life." I am terrified of living the game of life, but so many of us are living it because we think that's all we have. A wise man once said "If you're awesome, be awesome." Our whole world needs to stop thinking in the mold that society has said we should live in. We need to start realizing our full potential as God's children. I dont think that God have every wanted our lives to be limited to houses, jobs, and getting married. To quote an annoyingly popular song, "We were meant to live for so much more, but we lost ourselves."

One last thing to add. If you ever see me, twenty years from now, living in the suburbs with a wife and two kids playing stupid board games,

Please punch me in the stomach

~Jared

Vote for Huckabee and Buy a Bowflex!

2007-12-25T18:44:00.000-08:00

Have you ever run into one of those things that you see and just HAVE to post?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjYv2YW6azE

Regardless of whether I vote for the man, I have to applaud him. He knows how to campaign to the South

~Jared

the trouble with Christmas songs.

2007-12-23T11:45:00.000-08:00

Most of you might already know that I have always had trouble with Christmas songs, namely the fact that they never make sense to me. We hear them all the time, but have we ever actually LISTENED to what they say? Heres a few prime examples of one we never take notice of:

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

alot of you have heard me rail against this one, so I wont go into too much detail. Basically, the biggest problem I have with this song is the fact that it mentions so many nice, holiday things until BAM! Scary ghost stories comes out of nowhere! I dont know what crazy household the writer lived in, but Ive never heard of a Christmas tradition that begins with "caroling out in the snow" and ending with "scary ghost stories." Am I the only one who finds that strange?

We Wish You a Merry Christmas

the biggest problem I have with this one is the false caring involved. The song begins with happy feelings of giving, wishing you a merry Christmas and a happy new year. However, little do you realize that their greedy lust for "figgy pudding" is right around the corner. Soon into the song, you realize that they never were wishing you a merry Christmas, they were just buttering you up so they can get their pudding. Why cant they just be greedy to begin with instead of pretending to be nice so they can get food? The little twerps.

Here Comes Santa Clause

This is another song I have had a problem with for many years. Mostly the lyric I have trouble with is "Lets give thanks to the Lord above cause Santa Clause is coming to town." Now lets really think about this hard. Belief in Santa most always entails belief in some form of magic, which is the reason he makes animals fly and gives 6 billion people presents in a mere 8 hour period. So, since this song is giving thanks to God, it would be assumed that they are talking about the Christian God of the Bible. Well, in the Bible, any "magic" other than a miracle by God would be black magic or demonic. So, if you couple both the beliefs of magic sleighs and God, like in the song, then you get Santa, the sorcerer of the North. Now why on earth would you thank God for Santa the sorcerer coming to your town? Wouldnt you instead be running away? If a fur clad magician with reindeer were coming to my town, I would be getting in the bomb shelter.

Away In a Manger

I dont exactly have as big a problem with this one, but there is still something small I cant exactly accept in this song. We we're singing it in church today, and I realized that one of the lyrics was the following:

The cattle are lowing
The poor Baby wakes
But little Lord Jesus
No crying He makes

Alright, anyone who has had or lived with a baby can see what is wrong with this stanza right here. One of the basic tenets of theology about Jesus was that he was fully God and fully man. In the same respect, he was fully God and fully baby. And this is the way God made babies: THEY CRY. ALOT. Especially when there born in a cold barn and then plopped down into some hay.

Thats all.

~Jared

I Follow _________

2007-12-13T14:48:00.000-08:00

This video was very interesting. Not really the whole video itself, but the beginning part.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVU3e6t0kfk&feature=related

In case you didnt know, John Cleese is talking about the Monty Python movie "Life of Brian," which was set in the time of Jesus and openly mocked the divinity of Jesus and organized religion. At its opening in New York, a bunch of churches had come by to protest the movie. Seeing the mayhem, Eric Idle, according to this video, quipped "at least we've brought them all back together again."

Lately, I have been sitting in my class while we carry on tearing each other apart over issues of doctrine and such. Now dont get me wrong, there will always be a place for theological discussion, but it seems to me that it does nothing but tear Christians apart these days.

Take my school for example. We are a "Christian" school, that is we believe in basic Christian doctrine. However, I can almost guarantee that you can come up to almost any of the students here and ask them what religion they belong to and the words "Christian" would not even exit their mouthes. Instead, you would hear something like Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, Pentacostal, or Reformed. Call me old fashioned, but what ever happened to calling yourself a Christian? Arnt we supposed to identify ourselves by Christ himself, rather than an earthly church?

Reminds me of 1 Corinthians, which is a book I have been reading recently.

10I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought. 11My brothers, some from Chloe's household have informed me that there are quarrels among you. 12What I mean is this: One of you says, "I follow Paul"; another, "I follow Apollos"; another, "I follow Cephas^[a]"; still another, "I follow Christ."

13Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized into^[b] the name of Paul? 14I am thankful that I did not baptize any of you except Crispus and Gaius, 15so no one can say that you were baptized into my name. 16(Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I don't remember if I baptized anyone else.) 17For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.

I realize that its impossible for EVERYONE to be united in their beliefs, but I am so sick and tired of denominational walls in my school, where it is most apparent. My church is non-denominational, and I could probobly come up to alot of people and get some people that are Calvinist and some who are Armenian, but this doesnt divide us. We should debate these things, but we should never let us divide us. Just as Paul says, let there be "no divisions among you."

Are we forgetting the things that are really important? Like loving your neighbor? Maybe its time for us to stop following Calvin, Wesley, and Armenian and follow Christ, to be a Christ-ian

Thats all the ranting for today.

~Jared

And Now For Something Completely Different...

2007-12-11T14:11:00.000-08:00

Why is it I can never decide what I want to post on anymore? First it was xanga, then myspace, then Facebook, now its back to this washed up blog ive had for so long. My initial reason for abandoning this blog is because no one reads it, but, true to the poem mentioned last post, "screw it all, ill do it anyways"

So here I am, back to writing on the blog that no one will read about topics that dont matter.

I cant fix the former, but I can the latter.

An interesting thing came up in Lit class today. Aside from the usual Calvinist vs. Armenianist steel cage match that goes on between the class, we came to a topic of conversation: God's love. Most of the people in the room were of the opinion that God does not love unconditionaly, otherwise he would not be sending people to Hell. It was strange for me to be told this when I have been told all my life that "God so loved the world" and loves everyone, even if they do end up going to Hell, so it sent me for a bit of a loop. Does God love some and hate others? If you read the Old Testament it would seem so, but then again wasnt it Jesus that ate with all the sinners? And we are supposed to emulate Jesus, it would make since that we would love even the sinners, despite their shortcomings while at the same time encouraging them to go in the right direction. However, if God doesnt love everyone, than it seems like we have to earn his love and it isnt something freely given to us. If God completely hates sinners, than, givin our fallen state, he has hated us from the beginning. In my opinion, this seems to go completely against the nature of God.

usually I would ask you, the reader's opinion on this, but it seems futile since none of you will read it and therefore the reader is non existent.

And now for something completely different. More and more people seem to come to me with problems, but I dont really mind. In the end, I dont trust in my own words but just leave it to God, because he knows what to say and I dont. I wonder everyday what my calling is, but I hope that someday its right here:

Speaking of which, I still need to raise money for going there over Spring Break. Unfortunately, getting into my job is alot slower due to school delays and I havnt made the money yet. But im trusting in Jehovah Jireh.

Nothing else to say now. I now have to call my boss to inquire why I havnt been trained yet.

~Jared

Im Baaaaack

2007-05-21T07:16:00.001-07:00

I realize, I have pretty much ignored this whole blog site, but I think I might start updating again, due to the fact that I like it better than xanga. Of course, half the people won't read it anyways for the very same reason.

Changes have been happening. In order to mark these changes, I cut off all my hair.

Yes, I understand some of you are probobly very shocked and would wonder why I would do something like that to hair that everybody loves. Well, its really a long story. All I can say right now is that I feel that there are changes happening in my life, and I wanted to do something to reflect that.

Aside from the deeper meaning, it just feels better on my head.

Schools about wrapped up. Just two more finals and im home free.

Now to go study for the latter.

but first, heres a poem I wrote last night. Ill probobly put it to song soon enough, but it is rather angry. More angry than what I usually write.

Screw It All

They say that I'm a poet
that can't sing worth a spit
that I am good at lyrics
but vocals never fit
but they can't shut me up
cause I have things to say
Screw them all
I'll sing it anyway

They say I'm good at piano
but not so at guitar
that I should be content with keys
rely on what they are
But there are chords still on these frets
that I have yet to play
Screw them all
I'll play it anyway

They say I can't play music
because it doesn't make money
that I should get a job I hate
and move someplace sunny
But my God and my music
are my only joy today
Screw them all
I'll play it anyway

They say that I can kick and punch
but can't play sports at all
and i'm only a black belt
because I suck at baseball
My martial arts training
Won't stop at what they say
Screw them all
I'll do it anyway

I'll probobly add more to it later. feel free to feel awkward around me the next time you see me

~Jared

Une autre révolution ?

2006-04-21T16:14:00.000-07:00

Alright, I know us American's love to rag on the French for their cowardice, however I will try and resist my gut reaction to despise the French (which in turn I inherited from my Dad) and let the facts speak for themselves.

NY Times: Chirac Will Rescind Labor Law That Caused French Riots

So here's the basic gist of this information. In response to all the riots that were caused over the new French labor law, President Chirac, instead of standing strong, gives in and relinquishes the law. Now lets look at the base of the riots.

The rioting was basically formed over a law, a law that would make it so French employees between the ages of 24 and 18 could be fired easier, which is actually hard to do in France. However, what not a lot of people look at, (including the French people) is that under this law it would also make it easier to hire young French workers as well, which is a problem because France has a high unemployment rate. So now all the French students oppose the law because they hate that, as The Week put it, "they might actually be fired for poor performance." So now we have all the French people coming out of their cafes and wineries and protesting a law that was intended to help them.

Now for the most ludicrous part of this story. So what does Chirac do in response to the riots? Does he hold out and pass the law anyways, holding strong to his belief that it would do more good than harm? No, he instead puts up his little white flag and says "my bad" and drops the law so he can appease everybody. If this wasnt bad enough, the French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin sacrifices his administration's last shreds of dignity by explaining that they were withdrawing the law out of safety for the protestors.

Although this is indeed rediculous, it is to be expected from a society who hardly fought the Nazis when they invaded their country, and did almost nothing when their own people rebelled against them in the French Revolution. However, they still cant go one year without having to complain or protest about something.

In conclusion, here's a political cartoon that I think summed it up pretty well

Ok, well I guess that was sort of me showing you the facts and interpreting them myself, but oh well.

my next topic will be the social medium and structure of secondary school life (a.k.a, how to survive in Highshool), unless people reading my blog would rather me post about my personal life instead. you be the judge.

~Jared

Meanwhile in Jared Land.......

2006-04-13T16:09:00.000-07:00

times have not been so good. Right now I am hacking up my lungs every few seconds (a.k.a everytime I breathe), I have a horrible nose that has to blown every 5 minutes, and I have chills all over my body. In summary, I am feeling pretty sucky right now.

Today I stayed home from half of school, and came back at lunchtime because I was so dead tired from tossing and turning the night before. and because I wasnt there, I have to make up all the stuff I missed.

On a brighter note, I got my permit Wednesday, and ive been driving a decent amount. Not on real roads mind you, but just around the neighborhood. Driving is fun, but challenging and you have to be alert the entire time your behind the wheel. go figure..

Also, on Tuesday, Fideles had a talent show to which Sam, Zach and I participated in by playing "Tuesday's Gone" by Skynyrd. We did ok, but our song was a little out of place, since the girl before us was singing "Colors of the Wind." Oh well. heres some of the other highlights:

Awesome hip hop dancing kid
Tap dancing madness
about one bajillion piano pieces
A kid playing Suzuki on the violin (I do not have fond memories of Suzuki...)
Lightsaber fighting
weird Miming (I can see why silent humor never caught on)
A skit from some Russian guy named Checkov (not the one from Star Trek)
Maza's 2nd
A wacked up version of little red riding hood (featuring a jedi, the little mermaid, tarzan, and a.. dinosaur?)
Good Riddance, according to Sam, Scott and James.

Thats all. Now time for some HW

The Ninja says peace out

~Jared

PS: ive heard of not paying bills, but this is pretty rediculous

Myspace vs. Xanga

2006-04-09T05:45:00.000-07:00

alright, theres been a huge contreversy for many years about which is better. Myspace, or Xanga. Well I have investigated both these sites (www.myspace.com/im_a_communist) (www.xanga.com/aqsol_100_percent) and I have finnaly gathered enough information to determine their pros and cons. Alright, here goes

Myspace

Pros

Alot of features, like mail messaging and other stuff,and not just blogging and connecting.
good for connecting friends
A very good way to get published. For instance, I noticed they have a lot of sites from bands, so you can check them out and you can also publish videos alot easier. not too shabby. Xanga was a horror trying to post videos.
I always liked the long profiles that you could put up on your site i.e. more detailed (which is not always a good thing)

Cons

Never in my life have I seen my porno ads then myspace. I had to close the screen in disgust many times.
SLOOOOOOOOWW! perhaps due to the fact the whole freaking site is bigger than google.
Confusing as heck. I takes my thirty seconds each time to find the button I need with all the different little ads and popups with dozens of features
Popularity contest. Although you may be "connecting" with people, it really just comes down to whoever has more comments or friends.
Horrible atmosphere. Several young girls have been raped over myspace, partly because myspace is so bent towards dating and finding love on the net (as evidence by the dating service ads). So even though its connecting friends, it often connects them in a disguisting sort of way (i.e. dating, online relationships, and sometimes rape)
More perverts. Although Myspace supposedly has a "no porn" policy, I have seen several risque and/or perverted things on that site that really shouldnt be tolerated.

Xanga

Pros

Weblog acction! is more bent towards people that want to blog about stuff and post pictures on posts.
More Community like. Xanga feels more like you can connect with your friends, and always know whats going on in their life when you subscribe to them and comment on their posts. Myspace just didnt has as much to comment on and felt more like a dating site.
SIMPLICITY!!! Not very confusing, and could be used by just about anybody. Also a lot easy to customize your site.
I always liked the ideas of blogrings, and connecting people with their certain interests. I dont know if Myspace has a feature like this.
Relitvaly clean. 95% of the sites ive seen usually do not have any horribly perverted material. This might be because Xanga has people that patrol sites to make sure your not a xanga perv.

Cons

Alot of ads that were a bit risque. they used to have alot more, buit luckily they took them down.
The system of comments seems to get out of hand. Like in myspace, sometimes it can just get down to whoever has more comments.
Xanga also has a "no porn" policy, but I have seen this rule violated, but usually the site gets taken off the web soon after.
No filtering. Pretty much anybody can subscribe to you, and it can get slightly annoying when random people give you "props." Myspace fixed it with having them become your friend first (although that got annoying too)

Well, thats my opinion with Myspace and Xanga. Everyone please give any comments or opinions.

On the home front, I was still able to play Saturday, but my wrist was continually hurting and is right now. Its gotten a little better....

Today at church, Me, Sam, and Anna performed our skit for the church. Everyone seemed to like it a lot, and some people said we allmost made them cry (?). Great job Sam and Anna!

Spring Break is almost over sadley, and my guitar has not come in and wont be coming in till summer. once agian, it works out in a crazy sort of way. I guess tommorow its back to school.

Peace out

~Jared

Unavailible Americans?

2006-04-08T08:44:00.000-07:00

this article was sort of interesting

Bush blames Democrats for stalled immigration reform

One quote from President Bush kind of confused me:

Bush reiterated on Saturday that a guest-worker provision would not amount to amnesty but instead would "create a legal way to match willing foreign workers with willing American employers to fill jobs that no American is available to do".

Now apparently old Bushy was using the wrong choice of words, and this quote would be fine if he changed "available" to "willing." Obviously, there are plenty of people that are "availible" to fill jobs, but most of them are too lazy to do these jobs anyways, and instead live off wealfare and suck money from the government. However, if Americans are willing to do jobs like these is another problem. Unfortunately, living off wealfare and social security has made alot of americans lazy, and now we wont even do the jobs in our country, making a bunch of illegal immagrants have to fill the void instead. If Americans actually did the jobs in our country and didnt think they should have to be spoon fed by the government, maybe we wouldnt have an immagration problem.

Ok, thats all the blogging for today

Coming up next: Myspace vs. Xanga

~Jared

Movin' Out

2006-04-07T10:41:00.000-07:00

Alright, I think ive decided to blog on this thing from now on. So anyone who wants to read about me, go here. Im fed up with xanga and myspace, and now im getting a real blog.

On a side note, my wrist still hurts from tendonidess, but its getting alot better. I may be able to play music again!

On another side note, my guitar still hasnt come in. Apprarently, its all delayed because theres a music festival in Germany so all the distributors packed up their merchandise. I guess it works out in a crazy sort of way, because now my wrist is hurt so I wouldnt be able to play it anyways.

~Jared

Edit: Found out the model of my guitar is back ordered, and I wont get it for another 4-8 weeks. bummer.....

Trying it out izzle

2006-04-07T09:07:00.000-07:00

just trying out this blogger site. not bad so far. could start posting soon.....

When I Look at the World

Gift

Lolly Pop Jesus

The Command of the Open Hand

The Eye of the Needle (Why I am an Abolitionist)

The Age of Inundation

The Alien

John Steinbeck on Church and Hell

A Year Older, A Year Younger

Rain

Beyond

Clara

Digging Blue (12th Grade Poetry)

A Truly Decent Proposal

Part 2: Bridge to Humanity

City of Dogs

Part 1: The Prophet

Interesting Quote

I dream, I sleep

Spanish Grimmace (The New Year)

Death, or Heaven's River

The Pachacuti

Pacifism, War, and the Land Between

Academia Sighs as the World Goes to Hell

Why We Suffer, Why We Love

Stuck in the Middle

Joy and All of His Friends

Wisdom From Calvin

My Shameful Identity

Give us an inch, and we tear the world apart

What a person I am

Faith Like A Child

My new love for country and soccer

Estoy Aqui

The Breaking Down of Flesh and Blood

One More Day

Wounded Stag, Lamb for the Slaughter

Time: The All Powerful Master, Servant, and Deciever

Rewriting the Storybook

An Inconvienient Truth

When I Look At the World

You have encountered writers block! Do you:

From the Mall to the Goodwill

no subject

Dismal Times

(Part 5) A Dirge Unto Itself/(Part 6) Empty Room Revisited

Insomnia

Cleaning Man

A Speck in the Eye of Eternity

Beyond the Infinite

I'm On My Way

I Fought Facebook and Facebook Won

Thought of the Day

The Game of Life

Vote for Huckabee and Buy a Bowflex!

the trouble with Christmas songs.

The cattle are lowingThe poor Baby wakesBut little Lord JesusNo crying He makes

I Follow _________

And Now For Something Completely Different...

Im Baaaaack

Une autre révolution ?

Meanwhile in Jared Land.......

Myspace vs. Xanga

Unavailible Americans?

Movin' Out

Trying it out izzle

The cattle are lowing
The poor Baby wakes
But little Lord Jesus
No crying He makes