Breaking Bread v.2

Leah and I took a rest in Portland this weekend, hitting the Stumptown Coffee Roasters and Powell's City of Books adjacent to the Pearl District. We woke Monday morning and took off on foot looking for a great place for breakfast.

Some say the increased use of the word "bistro" is suggesting too much, and that the true attitude of the bistro can only be delivered in Paris. Nonsense.

We pulled up at the Everett Street Bistro in the heart of the Pearl District with our appetites in high gear, which is good, because the fare is plentiful and yummy.

Patrons are wedged in pretty tight, but the white paint, tall windows, and high ceilings lend to the place an openness that makes the close tables bearable. Plus, there's a hint of Europe in sitting near enough to the neighboring table to hear an entire conversation.

Our waiter, J.C., embodied the Bohemian atmosphere of the place, complete with tattoos, black-rimmed glasses, and not-really blonde hair. He came swashbuckling up to our table.

"How we doin'?" he inquired, expectantly.

"Good, man, how are you today?" I shot back. Leah and I smiled at him.

"Workin'," he said, smiling back and moving his head on his neck like a pigeon. "Workin' and twerkin'."

"Cool." I finished. It was going to be an interesting experience, even if the food sucked. Which it patently did not.

We ordered coffee, which comes from Sleepy Monk Coffee Roasters in Cannon Beach, Oregon.

Leah just looked at me. "Twerking?" she said, with the end upturned like a question. I widened my eyes and shrugged, which is all I could really do. Come to find out, the urban slang term twerking is like shaking your butt while you're dancing. It has it's origin in the word "footwork." Get it? Twerk.

Anyway, while J.C. was shaking his butt bringing us coffee refills, we enjoyed a brunch-type-thing of corned beef hash (for me) and a beautiful looking ham and cheese and egg pannini (for Leah).

We'll be going back. Wanna come with?

Listening

Lately I've been listening to:

• Foo Fighters, Echoes, Silence, Patience, and Grace


• Elliott Smith, From a Basement On a Hill


• Arcade Fire, Funeral


• Jack Johnson, Sleep Through the Static


• Crowded House, Time On Earth


• Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stadium Ardcadium


• Derek Webb, I See Things Upside Down


• The Shins, Wincing the Night Away


• Calexico, Garden Ruin


• Pat Metheny, Day Trip


• Herbie Hancock, River: The Joni Letters


• Brad Mehldau, House On Hill

Aural History

I've been listening to music since I was a little guy. I was probably five years old when I got my first plastic little record player that played the 45 rpm records you could buy for less than a dollar. I'd sit in my bedroon for hours and listen to my stack of songs over and over again. Later I got my music from the radio through a silver Motorola the size of one of those old chalkboard erasers. On warm summer evenings, safe on my pastoral country farm in central Illinois, I could stay up late enough for the multitude of radio signals to fall silent, making way for the juggernaut WLS-AM from Chicago. The music from another world, tinny and thin, but thick with magic and promise. Later, as a teenager, I moved to that big city of the big shoulders and found the magic going deeper with FM album rock stations and no commercials, like now there were fewer people peering in.

Listening to music is like smelling flowers. Or maybe more accurately, it's like looking at flowers up close, detecting the texture of each leaf and bud, peering into the blooms to discover new worlds of detail. Music is like so much of nature, which seems at first to be random, but when you look up close, down deep, you find that everything God created works together in some knit-together way. Music is knit like this – and it's like math, random yet orderly, turbulent yet predictable.

One more thing that it is: it's a gift God gave us to express something inside us that is otherwise inexpressible, yet it's a powerful force that tells us something, too. Inexplicably, lyrics written by a stranger, when they're wrapped in sound waves, might become our own story, one we can access even if we are a thousand light-years removed from the truth of it. Only God has the power to connect us all in such powerful ways.

A Good Year

This was a good year for movies. We try to get out to see all the big blockbusters, plus the smaller films we think will intrigue us, move us, or take us away to another place.

Here are the 10 movies, released in 2007, that I liked best:

1. No Country For Old Men

This engaging story stuck in me like no other ever has. I started the book, then broke to see the movie at around Chapter 4, then read the rest of the book. Joel and Ethan Coen, the ingenious brothers who wrote the screenplay and directed the picture, stayed remarkably close to author Cormac McCarthy's narrative. Even the dialogue was spot on across most of the movie. It feels as real as any movie can.

2. There Will Be Blood

Daniel Day-Lewis becomes Daniel Plainview in a way I've never felt an actor do, weaving in chilling behavior that captivates.

3. Ratatouille

Anyone can cook! Leah and I could watch this one every evening, snuggled on the couch together.

4. Atonement

Vast. And vastly entertaining filmmaking. I'd love a new ending, though.

5. Into the Wild

Powerful story about the life of a young man searching for ... something. Sean Penn puts the compelling story on celluloid, but Emile Hirsch lays down a heart-wrenching performance – the hardest-to-watch film I've seen all year. The lump in my throat still hurts when I listen to Eddie Vedder's soundtrack.

6. Gone Baby Gone

A harsh, violent, ugly story; well-told by director and Ben Affleck. Based on a book by Dennis Lehane. Story-telling doesn't get more raw than this. If you haven't been there, don't go.

7. Hot Fuzz

Unabashed, irreverent, unlikely, and fun.

8. The Bourne Ultimatum

Nobody kicks bad-guys' butts like Jason Bourne. Wait. Who are the bad guys?

9. Disturbia

The title is a play on the word "suburbia," in which too much time on one's hands can be a bad thing. It's a good, old-fashioned teenage thriller, that's a lot of fun. Leah and I had a great date night watching this one.

10. Juno

A charming tale with a slightly sordid side. A kind of a modern-day Say Anything, but not quite as smart.


The ones that got away: (I have a lot of catching up to do.)

The Kite Runner
American Gangster
Hitman
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
August Rush
We Own the Night
Away From Her
Lars and the Real Girl
Across the Universe
The Darjeeling Limited
Michael Clayton
In the Valley of Elah
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
The Divign Bell and the Butterfly

Dispatches from the Real World v.1

I found fascinating this article about the proliferation of Internet pornography use. The piece, by Naomi Wolf, was featured about three years ago in the New York Magazine.

As we in Christian circles battle the blatant sexual offense of pornography, even as it encroaches right through the doors of our churches and homes, it's nice to see those at large within society – outside Christian circles – take a stand against it. There is a beautiful depiction of the relationship between an Orthodox Jewish couple near the end of the article that makes the piece well worth reading.

To Pray

I'm encountering a fresh, new opportunity of prayer. I meet with a group of guys who have helped me figure how to ensure prayer and scripture become, and remain, a disciplined part of my life.

A pastor recently said he keeps a list of people for whom he prays each week. Just a few words from his heart based on his own perception of their needs before God.

"Well," I ask myself, "How does he know their needs if he doesn't ask?"

"Duh." I replied.

So ask.

For myself, I have been praying Nehemiah's prayer, found in the first chapter of that book. A task for me now is to consider what I will pray for others: my wife, my son, my brothers and sisters, my neighbors.

Prayer from the heart, off the cuff, is good. But there is something deeply satisfying about searching scripture for the prayers our people lifted up long ago, as a sacrifice to a Living God.

They worked then. So they ought to work now.

Hi. I'm Nice.

Are Christian guys supposed to be "nice?" Our projection of true "niceness" occurs when we die to ourselves and put Jesus, our friends, and our neighbors first, which is what Jesus teaches is the way to actually follow him.

We can be "nice" and still be strong, daring, courageous, and adventurous – all of which are masculine attributes. My wife says I'm the most "sexy" to her when I'm painting the house or biking or playing softball. Pastor James MacDonald from Harvest Bible Chapel in Illinois, says the true Biblical meaning of "meek" is "strength restrained."

If that is definition is accurate, the question follows: What good is the restraint if there's no evidence of the strength to put behind it?

Related to Christ: What good would Jesus be if he were nice to us, but had no power to do anything but be nice? What good would his death on the cross be if he had stayed dead? Christ, alive, then, makes the Christian guy a man who is nice and all, but also stronger than any other.

Create Your Story

One gift I believe God gave to everyone, as evidenced by our being made in His image, is to create.

We are given this life to create something from. The raw materials are present, to include the people God puts in our way; but also the strength, talent, and dreams of a man. The process of that creating we do, which is far more important than the result, becomes our story.

As we create a life from these raw materials God gives us, we each decide – whether based on Biblical principles or something else - what it is that constitutes success or right action. For some, success is characterized by patient, peaceful biding; for others it's a driven, determined action.

I believe a common thread of that success for everyone, however, must be a feeling of courage and contentment – a sense of our conscience being pleased or at peace with our story, even in the face of hardship.

If patient, peaceful biding brings a sense of courage and contentment, then that's probably God approving the story line. If driven, determined action brings a sense of courage and contentment, then that's probably God approving the story line, too.

I know my cute little exhortation doesn't apply universally, because there's always apathy and laziness, or avarice and pride, all of which have the effect of make people feel like they really are content with sitting around or driving people nuts or whatever.

I guess the key is to know the difference.

That Saturday Evening

My wife knelt in front of me, taking my hands in hers and looking into my eyes.

“I feel like there’s always been this ‘thing’ between us,” she said. “I don’t know what it is, it’s just this weird feeling.” Oh great, I thought, suspecting exactly where her concerns were coming from.

“Tonight I’m going to ask you to tell me everything about you,” she said. “I really want you to tell me everything. So think about it. I’m going to be a big girl. I’m not going to be upset.”

Right.

That Saturday Evening now marks a most important point in time for me. It’s the night I told my wife about the sex I had with other women while she and I were engaged to be married. And about the pornography use that had occurred during our marriage. She had no idea about my infidelities, with the exception of a couple of telephone and internet porn incidents I had tried to explain away. That Saturday Evening God began a new work in me. My secrets were out, and the compartments in which I kept them – dark, ugly, lonely places – became filled with the light of Christ Himself.

I had begun the critical, manifold steps to true repentance: admit everything, deny yourself, turn toward Christ, never go back. It truly takes all four of these elements to receive God’s grace. I’m a forty-one year old follower of Christ and a “regular attender” at Mars Hill Church looking forward to membership, fellowship, and service.

I’ve been a church lay-leader and close advisor to more than one pastor over the past seven years. I read, study, and indeed understand God’s Holy Scriptures. I’ve sat through countless sermons, read books by renowned theologians, joined Bible studies and led them – I’ve even taught kids’ church and worked in the nursery with my lovely wife. On the surface, my life had been all peace and beauty and strength – a sturdily crafted box, richly dorned and ornately designed for your admiration. If you had turned the small handle on the side, you would have heard the melodious tune it played. How wonderful it was!

But inside was different. Inside was the evidence of a life under siege: scorched earth, scarred walls, polluted environs. Turn that handle enough times and the unhappy jack on the inside threatened to pop out, his face twisted with fear, his eyes dark with depression. I had been afflicted for most of my life – since I was a teenager – by a desire to look at naked bodies engaged in sexual acts. Through two marriages and a shaky, fakey walk through God’s kingdom, I had hidden this sexual addiction deep inside so that no one would know about it but me. I have deceived my friends, my pastors, and my wife. The intensity of the shame I have experienced during my struggle is eclipsed only by the intensity of the desire that burned for it to remain in secret. Which led to lie after lie after lie.

My wife is grown up from a little girl who had dreams: dreams of an intimate life with a faithful husband, dreams of living in a beautiful story, dreams of a house full of giggling children. Her dreams were a sweet, small flower that I crushed under the jack-booted foot of secrecy, shame, and sin. After I told my wife about the lies and the secret behavior, I felt like I had pushed her in front of a moving train. We lived for weeks in that place between the push and the impact. Eventually the train hit her. But Jesus Christ, in His infinite mercy, picked her up and even now heals her.

Despite the admission of my secret sexual sin being the most difficult trial I’ve ever undertaken, it had to be revealed. Despite the fact it deeply injured my wife and nearly killed our marriage, it had to be revealed. For on the other side of the task lay pain, but also progress; fear, but eventually faint hope, then more progress. On the other side of the task lay the only hope for a crippled walk with Christ and marriage co-founded by a liar.

Today, because God is so incredibly merciful, I am out of the box. Like a great physician, He cleans the wounds, applies His healing balm, dresses them. I am on the road to healing and recovery. Mercifully, so too is my wife. She stands next to me despite tremendous pain, feeling alienated by this man whom she loves but does not know. Her strength is profound, her forgiveness in place.

The revelation of my sin to the world has been the key to my repentance and salvation. Telling my secret was the step God has been waiting for as I flopped and floundered through the Kingdom, not even sure I would ever be healed. God cannot work in the heart of anyone who thinks his secret is more important than spilling his guts to God and everyone else (often referred to as walking in truth). The true intimacy with God that comes from knowing about Him, and acknowledging that He knows all of you, is beyond the grasp of anyone with a secret sin.

Soon after That Saturday Evening, my wife and I contacted a Mars Hill pastor and discussed our severe plight. He helped us find the right road to recovery. Thursdays I meet with other Mars Hill men in a group called For Men Only, comprised of guys who have all struggled like me, more or less. We’re utterly transparent with each other. Because we understand. My wife is happier every day; and she’s getting to know a whole new man. God’s man. A man who really understands Christ, comprehends the Holy Spirit’s leading, and is totally on board with God’s sovereign plan.

An anointed preacher recently said that regarding our salvation we should ask: “What has God saved me from?” If God has not saved you from something, then you don’t have anything from which to repent. This true repentance is a key element of God’s saving grace – and it cannot come without exposing your own sin, turning your back on it completely, and striding confidently away.

Note: "That Saturday Night" occurred in November 2005. This story of it apeared in VoxPop, the newsletter of Mars Hill Church, Seattle, in June 2006.

Unwitting Prophet (Ghost Story)

Occasionally an artist captures the complications and details of my life so completely that I'm floored by it. It's no wonder. God invented the concept of story, then placed us all in His. As I thank God for music and story I begin to more clearly see His role in all things.

For my part, I am a ghost, living one day, dead the next. Reborn, I leave a ghost of myself living out a haunting history. Only Leah and I could understand, each from our own perspective, how Sting's Ghost Story illuminates our lives. But it is nonetheless a tale of love, regret, discovery of new life and regenerated love – a story that parallels our own.

Sting couldn't have known this story would resonate with me so deeply when he wrote it. Not all the lyrics necessarily apply, but some fit so remarkably that I can see God. The flawlessness of all Sting's arrangements, and the accomplishment of his band's delivery, always makes listening a joy.

Sting takes up no less than 88 111 places in my iTunes library. This song is Track 9 from Brand New Day, a 1999 release.

Ghost Story

I watch the Western sky
The sun is sinking
The geese are flying South
It sets me thinking

I did not miss you much
I did not suffer
What did not kill me
Just made me tougher

I feel the winter come
His icy sinews
Now in the fire light
The case continues

Another night in court
The same old trial
The same old questions asked
The same denial

The shadows closely run
Like jury members
I look for answers in
The fire's embers

Why was I missing then
That whole December
I give my usual line:
I don't remember

Another winter comes
His icy fingers creep
Into these bones of mine
These memories never sleep

And all these differences
A cloak I borrow
We kept our distances
Why should it follow I must have loved you

What is the force that binds the stars
I wore this mask to hide my scars
What is the power that pulls the tide
I never could find a place to hide

What moves the Earth around the sun
What could I do but run and run and run
Afraid to love, afraid to fail
A mast without a sail

The moon's a fingernail and slowly sinking
Another day begins and now I'm thinking
That this indifference was my invention
When everything I did sought your attention

You were my compass star
You were my measure
You were a pirate's map
A buried treasure

If this was all correct
The last thing I'd expect
The prosecution rests
It's time that I confess: I must have loved you

Breaking Bread v.1

Yesterday afternoon I got to Fremont early, so I had time to grab a nice meal. I walked down Fremont Avenue in the steady summer rain to a little Sicilian bistro called Pontevecchio. I was the only one in the place, save one employee and the owner/chef, Michele Zacco.

"Are you here for happy hour?" Michele inquired.

"No," I replied. "Actually I was hoping to get an early dinner."

With that he stammered a little, not really willing to get the kitchen going just yet.

"How about a late lunch?" I hurried.

"OK," he agreed.

I ordered pennette with Bolognese, declined a glass of red wine, and settled into my Bible study and the futbol game between Urugauy and Serbia-Montenegro on cable.

Michele was helpful to narrate some of the Spanish-language game for me, and, more importantly, serve up some of the most delicious Bolognese ever, and four small pieces of Italian bread arranged neatly in a little wicker basket.

Pontevecchio is closed on Sundays. "Sundays is for religion and my children," Michele explained. "If I didn't do that I would never see my children."

Pontevecchio is at 710 North 34th Street in Seattle's Fremont district. I recommend the pennette with Bolognese and a glass of whatever red wine Michele suggests.

Psalm 23

The struggle for purity rages in a scary place. In your own heart. In your own impression of yourself.

The world revolves around the popular culture of the day, and most people are motivated by whatever lustful pleasures they can get from the gluttony of daily living. They have no concept of the peace of God that pervades one's heart, mind, and soul in the pursuit of purity.

So you put yourself out there where everyone can see you, saying this makes you lust or that is immoral, and people look at you like you've got three heads. It hurts when people reject you for your beliefs – or think you're a square or a geek or whatever. It hurts to stand up against what so many people think is cool. After all, you're already busy fighting back your own urges – who needs to be thought of as an outcast with big ideas about moral issues?

Look in the mirror when you answer that question, and consider the alternative.

First keep the peace within yourself, then you can also bring peace to others.

Thomas à Kempis, 1380 - 1471

But we have an ally in Jesus, who possesses endless power. When you step up to the task God put before you, you tap into that power. When you cringe away, preferring the fickle, fake intimacy of the damned, you turn your back on the Holy Spirit, the gift from God that establishes peace within us – peace we can share with a hurt, confused, dying world.

Psalm 23 tells us Jesus will lead us in paths of righteousness. Green pastures. Quiet waters. A feast before your enemies.

Surely goodness and love will follow you all the days of your life, and you will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Intimacy ...

(… in which God allows us to choose to receive all that He is.)

Intimacy is like water. Like air. We need it to survive. The problem is that we flawed humans have a hard time discerning what exactly true intimacy is.

Is it sex? Is it cuddling? Is it friendship? Some combination of those? Why do the words we use to communicate relational themes fail to do justice to what intimacy is?

Because without God we can't have true intimacy – we can only have sex or friendship or some emotional closeness or commitment. Intimacy without God is not intimacy, it's something else.

In Christ, God: (1) shares with us all that He is, and (2) gives us an example of our emotional and spiritual selves. The picture of God's intended relationship between Himself and man (1+2) is clear in His Word. God and His creation. Wholeness.

Now, He does not demand that we give ourselves to Him. Rather, He has revealed all to us in His Word and gives us the freedom to choose. This revelation can bring us to the place in which we decide to trust Him.

When we draw near to God, trusting in Him completely -- that is, giving ourselves fully to Him emotionally and spiritually and inviting Him in – we experience all that He is to us. We experience true emotional and spiritual intimacy. We experience wholeness.

In our culture today, we speak of intimacy as if it were as simple as being physically or emotionally close to someone. But true intimacy, as God designed it to exist between humans, can only be obtained by combining (1) the nature of God in His example, with (2) choosing to give ourselves fully. (1+2)

Translate that concept into marriage. If God is absent, the equation cannot be proved. If choice is absent, the equation cannot be proved. So if a man hides his true self – that is, he keeps secrets or lives by lies – then he cannot access the nature of God. Thus the equation above cannot be proved.

If a woman gives herself to a man who has something to hide, then her choice to love is based not on knowing, but on a lie – true intimacy cannot be obtained because the equation is false.

In God's design, true intimacy comes first between God and man, then again between a man and his wife in the marriage relationship. In either case it cannot come without the full disclosure of the full self – heart and mind and body and soul – to another.