The beginning of the end...

I am entering my last week in Cambodia. I suppose I should take this time to pause and reflect on all I've learned. My life has changed in so many ways that I couldn't see at the beginning. I guess God did know what He was doing after all.

So I'm leaving, and because of some things that happened (that are teaching me how to forgive), my dad is selling the house and moving to Cambodia. Which essentially means that I'll be completely on my own. Well, perhaps not completely, but I'll have to hold down a job and school and pay for food, gas, insurance, etc. At first I was terrified. And in some ways I'm still scared that I won't be able to handle it on my own. But in other ways I'm looking forward to the challenge.
So here's to handling life with only Jesus and I.

Cheers!
C

Do you, don't you want me to love you?

Here is a mis-mash of some of my favorite quotes of the moment:

Part of one of my favorite songs because it's mellow and soulful and beautiful and beautifully utilizes the violin. Song by Goo Goo Dolls. Acoustic #3
"Your voice is small and fading/as you hide in here unknown/and your mother loves your father/cuz she's got nowhere to go/ and she wonders where these dreams go/cuz the world got in her way/ what's the point in ever trying/no one's listening anyway."

A big chunk from Juno:
"I never realize how much I like being home till I've been somewhere really different for a while."

Juno: "I just need to know that it's possible that two people can stay happy together forever."
Juno's dad: "Well it's not easy, that's for sure, and I know I don't have the best track record in the world, but I've been with your stepmother for 10 years now and I'm proud to say we're very happy. Look, in my opinion, the best thing you can do is find a person who loves you for exactly who you are. Good mood, bad mood. Ugly, pretty. Handsome, what have you. The right person's still gonna think the sun shines out your ass. That's the kind of person worth sticking with."

"Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists."
Blaise Pascal


In searching for the above Pascal quote, I stumbled upon an absolutely fabulous article, which I will post here in it's entirety. I know it's long, but tis worth the read!

Christianity for Pragmatists

"I'm not interested in the theory - just show me how its works!" The dictionary defines pragmatism as "a philosophic method that makes practical consequences the test of truth."

At the end of the 1990s, pragmatism is the prevailing spirit among people. We have had enough of tradition and dogmatic ideas. We are just interested in being practical and getting things fixed. So away with "ideological baggage" in politics and education and everything. "Just make life work."

Being purely practical about life is not a bad platform from which Christians can lead people to consider the claims of the Lord Jesus Christ.

God is a bore

Pragmatic people want life to be good but the Christian faith is derided in our secular society. We can think of some of the cutting comments earlier in the century of someone like the US essayist H. L. Mencken, 'the sage of Baltimore.' "A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to people who will never get there." Or again, "The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore." Christianity is looked upon by our friends as some kind of life in a straight-jacket, totally lacking in pezaz.

Mental health

One of the major influences in leading our peers down this road was Sigmund Freud and his ideas about mental health and psychoanalysis. His thrust was explicitly atheistic, attacking religious belief relentlessly. In his 1927 book The Future of an Illusion he described faith as a form of mental disorder, a "universal obsessional neurosis" rooted in "infantile" patterns of thought. It was an aberration which we needed to grow out of. It is not the way to make life good.

We see this thought is popularized on our TV screens almost weekly. More or less every Christian is portrayed as either crazy, hypocritical or a "silly vicar."

Not all psychoanalysts were as militantly against God as Freud, but much of "folk psychology" followed his path. "Religion" and "morality" were the enemy, especially as the century reached the freedom ethos of the 1960s. And psychoanalysis did not just oppose faith but at that time sought to be almost a substitute for it. It captured public imagination with its talk of childhood sexuality and the need to overcome repression. It saw itself as scientific and by the 1970s had almost achieved the status of the 5th estate, alongside things like the media and the judiciary. It was seen to be chic and complexly interesting to be going "for therapy." But one of its great messages was "stay away from religion if you don't want to get screwed up."

U - turn

But the last 30 years have not been so kind to the psychoanalytic vision. Many of Freud's ideas have been found to be fallacious and a lot of people were coming to the conclusion that they were spending a great deal of money on therapists and not getting any better. "A psychiatrist is called a shrink because that's what he does to your wallet."

It would be unfair to tar all psychiatry with the same brush. Some is good and necessary. But the interesting point is that popular psychology has moved on and it has taken an unexpectedly new direction. An important sign of change came in 1978 with the publication of a significant book, M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth. Whether or not we can go along with everything in that book is not the point. The point is that in the book Peck openly criticized his psychiatric colleagues for rubbishing religion. The book must have struck a chord with ordinary people because it remained on the best-seller list for 10 years. Later Peck wrote another book, People of the Lie, which attacked the amoral approach to life so beloved by earlier psychiatrists. It argued powerfully that there is such a thing a evil which has to be taken seriously.

The benefits of faith

Recent years have seen the emergence of research findings which appear to show far from "screwing people up," and being a "neurosis," religious belief is one of the most consistent correlates to mental health and happiness.

That is not to say that Christians never suffer from depression, nor that there is no such thing as a religious mania, but it is to say that on average mental problems occur less frequently in those with faith, and when problems do occur there is a much greater chance of full recovery.

"Several studies (from the US) have found that high levels of religious commitment correlate to lower levels of depression, lower levels of stress and a greater ability to cope with stress." Last September the newspapers in Britain gave quite a lot of space to the research of Professor Michael Argyle of Oxford, which showed that "going to church each week induces feelings of calmness, social cohesion, joy and transcendence, while decreasing feelings of bloody-mindedness." The Professor himself was quoted as saying, "Those who attend church regularly are much happier than non-believers."

At the same time evidence has been growing from researchers of a powerful relationship between immoral conduct and unhappiness. Here is a quote from The New Harvard Guide to Psychiatry 1988: "Many who have worked closely with adolescents over the past decade have realized that the new sexual freedom has by no means led to greater pleasures, freedom and openess. Clinical experience has shown that the new permissiveness has often led to empty relationships, feelings of self-contempt and worthlessness."

So when our TV and film dramas so often seem to portray Christians as cranks and fools, just don't be taken in so easily.

Pascal's thought experiment

All this leads to a new twist in the age old debate between believers and non-believers at the pragmatic level.

Back in the 17th century the mathematician and philosopher Blaize Pascal was responding to a new generation of secular ideas and atheists. He offered an interesting argument concerning religious belief. He conceived the issue as a bet or a wager. His reasoning went something like this: The Bible teaches that God gives eternal life, forgiveness and heaven to believers in Christ, while those who reject Christ are choosing to go to hell. Pascal conceded that there it is difficult for reason alone to be sure whether the Bible's claim is true or not. But we may consider our life as a gamble (one that by the very nature of things you can't avoid). If we bet against God and the Bible proves to be true we will be lost in hell forever. If we bet for God and follow Christ, and the Bible turns out to be wrong, we lose nothing, for we cease to exist at death like everyone else - we have lost nothing. So said Pascal, it makes more sense to believe.

The crowning irony

Of course, the touchy issue here concerns what those who opt for faith must sacrifice in this life in order to follow Christ. The Bible speaks of struggling against sin and pursuing self-control. The atheist and agnostic have always said that this is too big a price to pay. That would say it excludes us from so much fun - "the pleasures of sin." But the point is this. The recent research in psychology makes it clear that in the long run this is not true. The morally unrestrained life turns out to be a miserable life. Far from making life work, at the pragmatic level, immorality wrecks lives.

The crowning irony seems to be that even if the atheist were right and there was only our existence on earth then the committed Christian is still better off for (apart from religious persecution, which we as yet do not suffer in the West) the Christian leads a happier, more stable and fulfilled life.

There is obviously much more that needs to be said but the statistics appear to show that we can turn to our generation of pragmatists and say, "Do you want your life to work ? Then come to Christ."

http://www.chertseystreet.org.uk/library/pragmatist.htm

So what started out rather melancholy ended rather well.
I know this post is ridiculously random. A lot of things are going on in my life right now and I'm not quite sure how to organize my thoughts in a way that makes sense and is readable. The quotes were an attempt, the long one an accident. Welcome to my Helter Skelter life.


C

Heebie Jeebies

Well, see, it happened like this:
I'm making brownies because my family is having lunch with another family tomorrow, and we're bringing brownies. And fruit. Well our tiny stuffy kitchen is not a happy place to be with the stove on, so I got the brownies in the oven and got my sweaty self in the shower. Towards the end of my shower, I was rinsing out my poufy body wash thing under the faucet when I noticed something dark and long wiggling about 3 centimeters from my hand. It was a centipede. He and I battled it out with the hose/shower head for a couple of minutes. I think he drowned, if indeed centipedes can drown. The point is I won. So I got out of the shower and was going for my towel when a cockroach decided to make his appearance from behind the toilet. This was not one of those small, cute cockroaches that occasionally infest homes in America. Those are less than an inch long. This one was about 3 inches long. At least 2 and a half. Fortunately, I keep a can of Raid outside my bathroom door, just for such occasions. Stop laughing. You think I'm kidding, don't you? I'm not. I scored a direct hit and saw the beginnings of his slow decent into death before I shut the bathroom door. Then, safely wrapped in my towel, I ventured out to check the brownies. I left the can of Raid in my room. Stupid. There was another cockroach on the hat tree next to my head as I came out of my bedroom. I darted back into my room to get the raid. Cockroach 2: Down for the count.
I then proceeded to douse the rest of my room, just in case. In the process I noticed a gecko hiding in wait for a line of ants to venture close enough for his next meal. I like geckos. They don't have antennae and are therefore somehow less creepy than the other three things I killed in the general vicinity of my bedroom in the last 5 minutes. I left him to his feast.
I am currently suffering from a severe case of the heebie jeebies, and it may be a while before I actually fall asleep.
In closing, here are two things I never thought I'd say:
Neurological poison ROCKS!
and
I'm with Mr. Monk, it's a jungle out there!

Surviving like Richard Hatch,

C