I agree with Chuck...

There was a guy I knew in high school. He was quiet, mostly, and reserved. His name was Chuck. He was the opposite of me: he spoke after he'd thoroughly thought things through. He was measured and articulate. In short, he was both smart and wise. Again, the opposite of me.

And so the running joke in our history class was, "I agree with Chuck."

I find myself doing that a lot with a guy named Jim Wallis, who is an evangelical preacher devoted to important social issues of the day, but devoted in phrasing the issues in a more thoughtful way than most rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth, you-agree-with-me-or-you're-a-spawn-of-Satan Christians who seem to get all the play in the national media.

Recently, I came across this interview with Jim Wallis, done by Christianity Today.

Wallis' point about the pre-natal test to determine if a baby has Down's Syndrome struck a particular chord with me since a colleague of mine recently had a daughter who was born with Down Syndrome. If it's true that even the most staunchly conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said in a rare interview with 60 minutes that there isn't a constitutional mandate for outlawing abortion, then who will change this "throw-away culture" that's been created. Ideally, Christians.

I don't know if you'll agree with everything that Wallis says, but his thoughts are Biblical, thoughtful and presented diplomatically.

Worth a read.

Slightly Weird Photos

A picture of my son who, upon waking up in the morning to find his four-day old balloon bouquet looking quite decrepit, turned to me while playing with it and said, "Look. All the balloons now have nipples."

So they do, son. So they do.

Wait. How do you know the word "nipple?"

****



At my son's third birthday party, his grandmother gave him a giant, eerily lifelike stuffed mountain lion. Justus liked to wrestle with it, prompting his grandmother to take this slightly weird picture of him posing shirtless with a mountain lion.

"It almost looks like he's posing," I said to Nicole, after seeing it. "Like he's in a magazine cover shoot."

"That'd be a really creepy magazine," Nicole replied.

Not the *best* day

Lando escaped from the Sarlaac Pit in Return of the Jedi but but met his fate when my three-year old flushed him today. Not sure what's worse - being digested slowly over a thousand years or having your watery grave be a toilet.

So I'm not whining, just commenting on the comically awful day I've had. A brief list of things that went wrong today.

• 1. Jaelle woke up at 6:12 a.m. I got up with her.
  
  
• 2. While playing basketball at the gym, I kind of tweaked my knee getting a board. It kind of hurts. I've never had a knee injury and I don't want to start now. They scare me.
  
  
• 3. Justus found one of my Star Wars action figures that I used to have when I was a kid. He then decided to flush Lando Calrissian down the toilet in the guest bathroom. So. I have to call a plumber.
  
  
• 4. Upset with my son (and unsure whether he knew he was doing something wrong) I put him in time out. Only I didn't want him to play with the toys in his room, so I put him in our room. While he was in there, he proceeded to use a ball point pen to draw all over the seat of our brand new La-Z-Boy recliner.
  
  
• 5. We discovered that Justus' shoes were too small, so we took him to the mall to Stride Rite to get a new pair of shoes. It cost $35 dollars for a pair of tiny shoes. What?
  
  
• 6. Because it was late in the day, and Justus was tired, he threw a tantrum in the mall because he didn't want to leave the play area.
  
  
• 7. On the way out of the mall, going up the escalator, while kicking and flailing, he kicked me square in the...sensitive man area.
  
  
• 8. Then he bit me on the shoulder. Hard. Like teeth marks hard.

So it's been a tough day filled with lots of discipline.

Pinched Fingers

The staff went out for lunch today, and Nicole and the kids came along. As we were leaving the restaurant, my son, Justus was following some people outside, and I yelled after him, "Justus. Hold on, buddy."

He turned and put his hand on the door to wait for me, and the door closed on his little fingers. In a bust of speed normally reserved for NFL defensive backs, I shot to the door to open it, but not before the damage had been done.

He began crying, and not in that whiny "I want more chips" or "I wanted to watch more Elmo" kind of way. His fingers hurt.

If you've ever heard your kid cry in pain, then you know what I'm talking about.

But here's the weird thing. Instantly, I began to blame people. I blamed my friends who went out the door, which caused Justus to want to follow them. I blamed Nicole for asking me to throw away some trash while she got baby Jaelle, because those seconds prevented me from being closer to Justus. I blame Justus for not listening to me (even though he did. He stopped.) Looking at it, of course, I was being completely unreasonable.

I wonder why, when things go wrong, I get so angry? And I wonder why I blame.

Gotta work on that.

When Your Holy Text Isn't...

The man above is a "sofer" or Jewish scribe. To become a sofer, a Jewish person must master the art of Hebrew calligraphy, document restoration, and the many rules and traditions governing the writing and restoring of a Torah. Because Jews believe the Torah to be the very words of Yahweh, this job is not taken lightly.

*steaming mad*

I read this article today in Christianity Today. It isn't helpful - at all.

If you didn't read it, let me paraphrase it for you. It basically says, "You know that story about Jesus catching the woman in adultery and then saving her life by saying, 'Let he who is without sin cast the first stone'? You know that story? Yeah, well, it's not in early manuscripts of the New Testament, so we're pretty sure it's not real."

What?

The problem is, this is one of my favorite stories about Jesus. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Jesus is faced with a tough decision: if he doesn’t condemn the woman, then he’s saying that the moral law (from God) isn’t valid and adultery is okay. But if he does condemn her, then he’s a real jerk, because the last time I checked, it takes two to tango and the man from this situation is nowhere to be found. How can Jesus survive this test? His response is like something out of a movie.

Kill her. Go ahead. And whoever is without sin, go ahead and cast the first stone.

I love the details of the story. The text says, “At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there.” The older ones left first – isn’t that always the way. The older folks – the ones who were seasoned enough with life to understand they’d been handed their theological lunch.

So with one sentence (one sentence!) Jesus protects the woman from self-righteous, judgmental Pharisees, and yet with the kind of all-encompassing love Jesus is famous for, tells her, “I saved your life. Now go and stop this lifestyle and live like you were meant to? Okay?”

Love, I have learned recently, is about two things: an unfailing, unflinching love and real and articulated boundaries. One affirms the person, the other protects their character. This story is a perfect, genius story that show Jesus embodying both values, simultaneously.

And yet, one scholar, Dallas Theological seminary professor Daniel Wallace said this:

"A person hearing these words should recognize that they have no authority as authentic words of Jesus," he said. Christians who are reading the story, he said, should give it the same authority as any other unsubstantiated early Christian teaching about Jesus.

And this follow-up article from J.I. Packer (J.I. Packer, for Pete’s Sake) isn’t helpful either.

He writes:

Text criticism serves inerrancy; they are friends. Inerrancy treasures the meaning of each writer's words, while text criticism checks that we have each writer's words pure and intact. Both these wisdoms are needed if we are to benefit fully from the written Word of God.

But this is confusing for average Joes like me. What happens if you have a deep, unflinching love for a person based on stories that now you’re being told simply are not true. Stories that made your heart open up. Stories that ring true to the very depths of your soul. What if you’re told, suddenly, by guys 2000 years later - oh , you know what, that story was a lie. It was made up. Never happened.

I’m sorry – what? What is this? It’s in the Bible, but it’s not inspired? What does inerrancy mean, then?

The article goes on to say:

Biblical scholars do agree on two things: The Bible story should be set apart with a note, and Christians should be cautious when reading the passage for their personal devotions.

Look, I’m not textual criticism student. I have to use an archaeological study Bible to make sense of the context. But since when does the fact that some manuscripts have the story, and some don’t mean that it’s not really part of the Bible? I mean, didn’t all the Gospels start off as oral stories? This one got written down later, but was included all the way up to the 9th century, and suddenly, it’s not really Jesus?

After the article, someone wrote this comment, saying:

It strikes me sadly characteristic that some Christians are only finding textual criticism pertinent when it means no longer being obliged to obey the commandment "do not judge."

Maybe that’s what going on. I just don’t see how any scholar can say, with complete confidence “You know what – this book actually ISN’T the words of God – well, at least this part.”

What about the Westminster Catechism - and our confidence that God actually protected the content of this book, to ensure that it got into our hands? Is that made-up too?

As someone who takes the Bible seriously, this is really rather unsettling.

Where's a Camera Phone When You Need One?!

So I'm driving on Highway 87 southbound and I see a strange sight: it was full-size, extended cab green Ford F-150 work truck, the kind with large, knobby mud tires and stainless steel tool cabinets installed in the back. It looked a little like one of these, only bigger:



Not out of the ordinary, except that written all over this truck (on the windows, on the tailgate, on the doors) were the words:

Just Married...to Jesus

There were other things written on the car, such as "Jesus is Lord" and in some places, just plain "Jesus." I sped up to see who was driving, and it was a large Latino guy with sunglasses on and a backwards sharks hat.

?

What is the story behind this? I am dying to know. I was talking to my friend Katie on the phone, and Justus was asleep, so I felt like I really didn't have any witnesses to this.

It was at this point that I wish I knew how to operate my phone's camera phone while driving and not put myself and other unsuspecting drivers in imminent danger.

*sigh*

Overheard in the Tieche Household

Quote 1:
JUSTUS:
(looking at baby sister one morning)
Baby Jaelle - you're my best husband.

NICOLE:
That sentence is wrong on so many levels.

Quote 2:
JUSTUS:
(running with balloon)
Pop, pop, pop.

ME:
(citing a famous line from a Pringles commercial)
You know, Justus. Once you pop, you can't stop.

JUSTUS:
(earnestly looking at me)
Why?

Quote 3:
JUSTUS:
I have a good joke.

ME:
Okay! Let me hear it.

JUSTUS:
You start. Say knock knock.

ME:
Knock knock.

JUSTUS:
Who's there?

ME:
Umm.

Quote 4:
JUSTUS:
I want to eat a banana.

ME:
(holding baby Jaelle and feeding her a bottle)
Okay.

JUSTUS:
I can't peel it.

ME:
I'll peel it for you.
(wiggling fingers on his free hand underneath Jaelle)
Put the banana in this hand.

JUSTUS:
What?

ME:
(again, wiggling fingers on his free hand)
Put the banana in this hand.

JUSTUS:
(confused)
Put the banana in the sand? That wouldn't taste good, Daddy.

We Now Have the Technology to Make Serpentor*

Show above, Serpentor, the cloned arch-enemy of G.I. Joe. Long since thought only to be the stuff of cartoons from circa 1987, I received this disturbing news sent to me by my main man Jon Fortt.

Somewhere, Cobra Commander is laughing maniacally.

*Footnote for those over 35: Serpentor was the arch-enemy of G.I. Joe and was created through a breakthrough in cloning research by Dr. Mindbender from the DNA extracted from the unearthed remains of the most ruthless and effective military leaders in history, including: Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Attila the Hun, Philip II of Macedon, Alexander the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Vlad the Impaler, Hannibal, Genghis Khan, and Rasputin.

Lessons from Indiana Jones and 1 Samuel

The Ark of the Covenant, as shown in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, which should win the award for Best Use of Nazi Face-Melting in Cinematic History (so far).

One of my favorite movies of all time is Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. It is, quite simply, a fantastic story. It was rated as the 66th best film of all time, according to American Film Institute. And is there a better lead character than Indiana Jones?


*random note*
My wife personally knows the guy who plays Indiana Jones at the Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular^TM at DisneyWorld^.TM His name is Kevin.^TM

In case you haven't watched it recently, the premise of the first film is that Indy is attempting to thwart a bunch of Nazis from discovering the Ark of the Covenant.

Why do the Nazis want the Ark? Well, in the story, the Nazis assumed that any army carrying the Ark of the Covenant in front of it would automatically win any battle, which is dubious theology and even worse history.

First of all, the Ark was a curse to any army (except, of course, the Israelites). I was just reading 1 Samuel last night, and I remembered this passage, when the Philistines beat the Israelite army, thereby securing the Ark.

1 After the Philistines had captured the ark of God, they took it from Ebenezer to Ashdod. 2 Then they carried the ark into Dagon's temple and set it beside Dagon. 3 When the people of Ashdod rose early the next day, there was Dagon, fallen on his face on the ground before the ark of the LORD! They took Dagon and put him back in his place. 4 But the following morning when they rose, there was Dagon, fallen on his face on the ground before the ark of the LORD! His head and hands had been broken off and were lying on the threshold; only his body remained. 5 That is why to this day neither the priests of Dagon nor any others who enter Dagon's temple at Ashdod step on the threshold.

6 The LORD's hand was heavy upon the people of Ashdod and its vicinity; he brought devastation upon them and afflicted them with tumors. 7 When the men of Ashdod saw what was happening, they said, "The ark of the god of Israel must not stay here with us, because his hand is heavy upon us and upon Dagon our god."

This passages shows several things, of course.

1. Not every army that carries the Ark will win.
2. God is not a Genie who is confined to some magic vessel to do the bidding of mankind.

And that's kind of the message you get in not only Indiana Jones (fictitious) but also in 1 Samuel (not fictitious). There's this real sense in reading the narrative in 1 Samuel that you really shouldn't mess with God, and if you are foolish enough to think that you make the rules, then good luck, and watch out for instantaneous death.

The problem, of course, is that that we *think* that we can mess with God and get away with it because the punishment is not instant and is not severe. God rarely throws down thunderbolts anymore. So we think, "Oh, there isn't a God." or "I am more powerful than God because I can break the rules and do what I want."

But whatever happened to this sentiment:



Remember this scene, toward the end of the movie? The Nazis are about to open the Ark, and Indy tells Marion to close her eyes, and not to look. The idea is that God is too powerful, too strong, too mystical, too holy for a mere mortal to be around.

This is the sense you get by reading 1 Samuel. That God is not to be trifled with. Like Dad. He'll spank your butt. Don't think you can throw blackberries at dad while he's roto-tilling the garden and then run away and hide in your tree house because he'll track your ass down and spank it 'til it hurts because you can't pull that stuff. Not on Dad.

In C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe the Beavers are describing the great lion, Aslan, to the children.

“Ooh!” said Susan, “I’d thought he was a man. Is he – quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”

“That you will, dearie, and no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver; “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”

“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King I tell you.”

Here's what I came away with reading 1 Samuel: we're just lucky that Love is Patient, and that God is love. We're just lucky we're all not getting tumors and getting bitten by rats. We're just lucky God is Love.

Because if God wasn't, our faces would be getting melted off.

Justus: Growing Up in an Inter-faith Home

It must be difficult to have parents whose backgrounds and beliefs are so different.

My Old Friend Troy

Shown here, an illustration done by my college pal Troy Cummings, who is not only the most gifted artists I've ever met, but one of the most ardent connoisseurs of all things gummi. You can check out his (artistic) work at www.trox5.com.

Question: Who is the coolest person you have ever met?

One of the coolest people I’ve ever met was a guy I met when I was a freshman in college. His name was Troy Cummings, and he was the graphics designer at our college newspaper where I worked as a lowly news reporter my first semester of school. He wasn’t cool like James Dean, with an aura of mystique. And he wasn’t cool like Brad Pitt is cool, with tailored leather jackets gripping his perfect torso. He was just...cool. Everybody loved to be around him. I never heard anyone on campus exhibit anything but glowing adoration when it came to Troy. He had higher approval ratings than Santa.

To this day, I still can’t figure out what it was about Troy that was so undeniably magnetic. I think part of it was that he had boundless enthusiasm. He was like Tigger on uppers. Rooms that were quiet when Troy entered soon had laughter echoing in them. It was like he came in and just started dumping paint on everything, radically changing the color and hues of whatever room he was in. Metaphorically, I mean. Because if someone did that literally, that'd be a big giant mess.

Another part of it was that Troy was unbelievably happy. Around Troy, even if you were having a miserable day, you felt like things were going to look up. With Troy, you felt like although he could have been friends with anyone, but the coolest part was that he was hanging out with you. It was like being in a room with a Rock Star, and finding out that he’s laughing at your jokes. Troy had, more than anyone I’d ever met in my life, an environment shifting personality.

I just found Troy on Facebook, and I was reminded why I liked him so much. For his favorite quote, Troy put:

You can now take the wipes you love for cleaning and disinfecting from your countertops to unexpected surfaces like your bathroom mirror.
- CLOROX™

Under religious views, he put: Table manners.

That's just funny.

NCAA April Madness: Why I Love Sports

Mario Chalmers of Kansas hits this three-pointer with 2.1 ticks on the clock to send the NCAA Men's Championship into overtime. Insert joke about Toto here.
(Click here for a bigger pic of this screaming shot. Click here for video highlights of the end of this insane game.

What. A. Game.

Seriously. If you ever had doubts about the purity of the sport, you need look no further than March Madness. Look at this graph, showing the game's score, minute-by-minute.


That's ridiculous. Rah. Dict. U-lous. I happened to watch Sunday's Suns/Mavericks game - a game which had real playoff implications for both teams, and the level of intensity in play was the difference between throwing a bullet and shooting it.


Couple of interesting story lines here for me:

• What Goes Around Comes Around - And not just for Justin Timberlake:
  Five years ago, Kansas lost the national title to Syracuse (led by super-frosh Carmelo Anthony) because of dismal foul-shooting. Now, half a decade later, they win a championship for precisely the same reason. What is that? Basketball karma?



• Bad Habits Will Catch Up To You:
  For weeks leading up to this tournament, sports writers and basketball purists pointed out that no team has ever won the NCAA Tourney shooting as poorly from the free-throw line as Memphis does. Stats don't lie: Memphis was shooting 59.2% - which is simply abysmal. After watching the Tigers' second-round game against Mississippi State on Easter Sunday (in which Memphis shot an astounding 46%, letting a vastly inferior MSU team get WAY too close for comfort) I thought to myself, "If they get in a close game, they are going to lose." Calipari disagreed, telling reporters:

  The free throws we need to make, we’ll make,” Calipari said. “I’ve got absolutely no issues. There are three, four other issues I worry about. It’s not free-throw shooting.”

  
  Famous last words, eh? Fundamentals, people. Fundamentals.


• The Game Isn't Over Until It's Over:
  Down nine with a little more than 2 minutes left, I thought Kansas was done. But then Memphis got sloppy. First Tiger Big Man Joey Dorsey commits his fifth foul 30-feet away from the basket, pushing the Tigers over the foul-limit and sending Sherron Collins to the line - he hit them both and no time elapsed off the clock. Then Memphis has a bad inbounds pass, which was stolen and Kansas passed the ball out to Sherron Collins who calmly drilled a trey. At that point, I told Nicole, "This is a game again." I was right. Five points in nine seconds. Of course, Kansas almost gave the game over by not rebounding off a missed free throw with 18 seconds lefts in the game, and Chalmer's shot was clearly guided by the hand of God Himself - but still, you play hard until the end and you never know what might happen.