2018: Year of Connection and Creativity

2017 has been a good year for me, Mindy, the blog, the dogs, the cat, and most other entities in my immediate circle. The other day, Mindy and I made a list of things we had accomplished in 2017, and it made us grateful for the ways we've grown together and individually. The three life updates I posted highlight some of the advancements I've made this year, and hopefully Mindy will write a guest post soon highlighting her personal progress. The one area I chose not to pursue was getting up at 5AM-- it just made me too tired in the afternoon to function. 6AM has been working a lot better, and I've still been able to find chunks of time for deep work on my off days.

But the most meaningful areas of growth are less tangible, the kinds of things that are hard to blog about. I'm pretty sure I've recently grown in my listen ability, humility, servanthood, and my connection with Mindy, but those are also areas we highlighted as major focuses for 2018. In fact, we made a list of six "Ways to Be in 2018" we wanted to focus on, and those areas were on the list. Which brings me to the first focus of 2018: connection.

To make it practical, we made a list of about 20 microadventures we want to make happen in 2018. Some are day trips, others should just take a couple hours. This was actually Mindy's idea, and nothing better fits with the goals of this blog than these kinds of activities. So, soon I will be inaugurating the series "Microadventures with Mindy" here on the blog-- and also on my new Youtube channel, "Mountain Survivalism!" It will be relationally connecting to not just do these little adventures, but document them together, and focus on cultivating the qualities listed above while doing so.

Which brings me to my other big picture ideas for 2018: creativity.

Now that I'm in my 30's, I've realized that my neurons aren't getting any more plastic, and they've gotta be regularly whipped out of their passivity if I'm going to keep myself from becoming a fuddy-duddy. Though there are little ways to be creative at work, I see much more possibility in the projects I can highlight on this blog and my new vlog... like the microadventures I mentioned above. So even though I've intentionally moved away from monthly goals over the last couple years...

 I'm bringing them back!

I'm just as unlikely to finish them now as I was in 2015, but aiming high and seeing what happens is what this blog is all about, so who cares? Thinking about all the latent possibilities over the next year just gets me excited. So today, I came up with 12 fairly SMART goals for the year, and tried to integrate them in a logical way with the trips Mindy and I have planned, which I include below in parentheses.

January (into February): Reach Level 2 in the Krav Maga self-defense course (See family in Roanoke Rapids and friends in Raleigh)

February (into March): Write a 1-day course on obstetrics, prenatal care, and neonatal resuscitation I will be teaching for Equip International's Missionary Medicine Intensive course 4 times per year starting in March (2-day marriage conference in Charlotte)

March: Focus on cultivating my marriage and applying concepts from the marriage conference (Camp in Uwharrie National Forest)

April-May: Design and build the library, build a barrel composter, help Mindy build the chicken coop (3-day weekend with college friends, kayak trip #1)

June: Work on my kayaking skills (Kayak trip #2, camp in Elkmont, TN)

July: Start growing oyster mushrooms, experiment with new dishes in the kitchen using home-grown produce (Goble family beach trip)

August: Morning meditation, practicing presence, positivity (Camping trip near Brevard, kayak trip #3)

September: Build a plyo box, lifting platform, and prowler (Trip with Mindy's family)

October: Do the ketogenic diet. It's time. (Backpacking trip with college friends)

November: We may be having puppy grandchildren around this time. If not, I'm sure something will have come up. (Travel to see Mindy's family in Oklahoma and maybe Colorado and Wichita)

December: Do Christmas here and plan for 2019. No trips (hopefully)!

So there you have it.

I've also really enjoyed doing book reviews this year, and hope to pick up my pace now that things around the house and with the dogs aren't quite so busy. I'm actually finishing up 6 books right now, so there will be a rash of reviews once I make the time to get those out. Hopefully I'll be able to really engage with the material.

 Other posts that I hope will become series include "La Piscina" (stuff about the pool / swimming, for those of you who don't speak Spanish) "GST" (Gymnastic Strength Training), "Survival Skills," and "The Farmstead." I'll may write brief posts here with links to videos on my vlog, but we'll see how it works out. My first idea? "Survival Skills: Cold-water Immersion." Stay tuned!

So at the verge of our arbitrary distinction between one elliptical journey around the sun and the next, I bid a grateful adieu to four seasons of growth, change, and new beginnings, and bonjour to yet another gracious opportunity to grow deeper roots, thicker skin, and denser foliage than ever before so that more people in this world can benefit from the fruit and the shade of my growings. I hope the same goes for you-- that you bloom where you're planted. Happy new beginnings!

Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, Part 1

I heard about this book via The Deconstructionists podcasts, and was really impressed at what the author Brian Zahnd had to say about God and the Bible, and how highly the show’s hosts spoke of this book. And it has not disappointed. In fact, this book is blowing my mind so much, I couldn’t fit my summary of it into one post. So here’s part 1!

Ch 1: Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God

In Jonathan Edwards’ classic sermon, God is depicted as a sadistic juvenile hanging spiders over a fire. Is this true? Sure, we can cobble together disparate Bible verses to create this monstrous deity. But is it true? Or is the picture the prophet paints in Jeremiah 31:20 true: “Oh, Ephraim is my dear, dear son, my child in whom I take pleasure! Every time I mention his name, my heart bursts in longing for him! Everything in me cries out for him, softly and tenderly I wait for him.” This is the question Brian Zahnd asks and answers in Chapter 1.

The key to understanding the nature of God is to remember that Jesus Christ is the perfect representation of God. The writer of Hebrews starts his book by saying, “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son… He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being.” Keeping that in mind, Zahnd delves into issues surrounding the wrath of God.

A critical concept Zahnd leads with is that the Old Testament is more a theological debate than a systematic theology text. Proverbs says if you fear God and do what is right, good things will happen to you. But Job says that’s not always the whole story. The priests and Levites say God requires animal sacrifice, but David says, “sacrifice and offering you do not desire… Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required,” and Hosea claims that God does not require sacrifice but mercy. Eventually Jesus will weigh in and affirm the position of Hosea. The Bible begins with a primitive assumption that God requires ritual sacrifice but eventually moves away from that position, which exemplifies the progression of revelation we find over the course of the Bible.

We see a similar dynamic in play with the idea of God’s wrath that Jonathan Edwards waxed poetic about. Psalm 2:12 says God’s wrath “is quickly kindled,” but elsewhere in the Old Testament He is described as “slow to anger.” Again, Jesus settles the dispute. This is where we come up against the challenge of using metaphors in describing the supremely transcendent. The wrath of God is a metaphor we use to describe the very real consequences suffer from trying to go through life against the grain of love. It is "divine consent to our own self-destructive defiance.” God no more literally loses his temper than he literally sleeps, even though the Bible says “the Lord awoke as from a sleep” in Psalm 78:65.

Psalm 7 hints at this understanding of the wrath of God. It starts, “God is a righteous judge, and a God who has indignation every day. If one does not repent, God will whet his sword; he has bent and strung his bow; he has prepared his deadly weapons, making his arrows fiery shafts.” These verses make it sound like God directly visits retribution upon sinners with personal indignation. But it continues, “See how they conceive evil, and are pregnant with mischief, and bring forth lies. They make a pit, digging it out, and fall into the hole that they have made. Their mischief returns upon their own heads, and on their own heads their violence descends."

So God is not mad at you— never was, and never will be. So what does it mean to fear God? It means to have the wisdom of not acting against the grain of love. The writer of Hebrews reminds us that “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”And no doubt it is, for in the hands of God, there is no place to hide. We will no longer be able to live in the disguise of our lies. And that can be a terrifying thing. As can the monsters of war, violence, greed, exploitation, genocide, oppression, and racism. But God is not a monster, and his hands are nail-pierced hands of love that reach out to every doubter and sufferer, inviting each one to come taste and see that He is good.

Ch 2: Closing the Book on Vengeance

In this chapter, Zahnd tackles the thorny issues of how God’s appears to condone genocide. Unless we simply choose to ignore the issue, this conundrum forces us to choose one of three options: 1) Question the morality of God. Perhaps God is, at times, monstrous. 2) Question the immutability of God. Maybe God does change over time. 3) Question how we read Scripture.

Zahnd opts for number 3, then launches into a very accessible discussion of hermeneutics. He compares the Bible to how John portrays John the Baptist: sent by God, inspired by God, witnessing about God, but not God. “He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.” Essentially, the Old Testament is the inspired telling of the story of Israel coming to know their God. Along the way, some unavoidable assumptions were made— namely, the Yahweh is vengeful and requires blood sacrifice. In addition, because Israel experienced great injustice at the hands of its more powerful neighbors, the crucible of suffering that forged a theology of justice “also produced then slag of vengeance theology.” He then explains the consequences of adopting a view of God in line with options 1 or 2 by giving explaining how the English colonists used the Old Testament to justify the genocide of Native Americans. Point taken. 

Isaiah 61:1-2 typifies this theme. “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God.” The Hebrew longing for justice and restoration was accompanied by a desire for revenge and retaliation. But retaliatory vengeance is not the only lens in the Old Testament for viewing Gentiles. In 1 Kings 17 we find the story of the (Gentile) widow of Zarepath, whom Elijah is sent to and who receives the miracle of a flour barrel that is never empty and a jar of oil that never runs out. Further, in 2 Kings 5, Elisha heals Naaman of leprosy— the very general of the dreaded Syrian army!

To go back to the theme from chapter 1, it is Jesus who perfectly shows us God. And how did Jesus interpret the Old Testament? In Luke 4, we are told that when Jesus returns to his hometown of Nazareth at the beginning of his ministry, he enters the synagogue and reads the very same passage from Isaiah quoted above. But he rolls up the scroll before the last line. And lest we think that this is an oversight or meaningless, he follows by telling the crowd in the synagogue, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land, yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” Jesus is announcing the arrival of the Lord’s favor, but is emphasizing that it is for everybody, even for Sidonians and Syrians, even for Israel’s enemies! Jesus takes the implicit subtexts of mercy and makes them his explicit primary text. And as soon as he makes this clear, the crowd tried to throw him off a cliff.

Zahnd concludes, “Does this mean there’s no divine judgment? Of course not. Certainly there is divine judgment, but it is a judgment based on God’s love and commitment to restoration… Jesus has closed the book on... lust for vengeance… Clinging to our lust for vengeance, we lose Jesus. But if we can say amen to Jesus closing the book on vengeance, then Jesus will remain with us to teach us the more excellent way of love."

Ch.3 Jesus is what God has to say

Continuing with this theme, Zahnd pulls out several related ideas in this chapter. His central discussion concerns the implications of the Transfiguration. Jesus was unequivocally revealed to be superior to Moses and Elijah (emblematic of the Old Testament), and Peter’s mistake of putting them on equal footing is addressed in no uncertain terms. This revelation confirms Jesus’ authority to supersede the Old Testament when he says, “You have heard it said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” This high view of Christ is also set forth directly in 2 Peter 1, where the writer references the Transfiguration, and Christ's supremacy over the prophets who came before.

Following this discussion, Zahnd gives examples of directly contradictory passages in the OT such as “Thou shalt not kill,” and “there is a time to kill,” or passages for or against mercy. And (getting practical), he notes various historical figures (including an obligatory Hitler reference) who have used OT passages to justify clearly un-Christlike behavior. He uses these examples to again highlight the movement in the Bible away from the violence that was normative in the Bronze Age to "God’s peaceable society where swords become plowshares and spears become pruning hooks."

This makes me mention a major value of Zahnd’s writing, which is his powerful, pithy statements. When he writes, “I’m a Christian, not a Biblicist. The Bible is subordinate to Christ,” everything in me says, “YES!” The Bible is sacred Scripture, but the more you study it, the harder it is to reconcile all the disparate things you encounter if you are reading it as systematic theology. Quoting John Dominic Crossan, he writes, “Christ does not read the Bible, the New Testament, or the Gospel. He is the norm of the Bible, the criterion of the New Testament, the incarnation of the Gospel. That is how we Christians decide between a violent and a nonviolent God in the Bible, New Testament, or Gospel. The person, not the book, and the life, not the text, are decisive and constitutive for us.” Though I could not agree more, this Christocentric orientation will no doubt be difficult for many people who are accustomed to a simplistic view of the Bible to get past. Anticipating their objections, Zahnd goes on to say, “this is not a low view of Scripture but a high view of Christ.”

To top off the chapter, Zahnd throws in a poem of his own making, which may help some people grasp his perspective better. The conclusion is especially quotable:

It’s a STORY, I tell you!

And if you allow the story to seep into your life,

So that THE STORY begins to weave into your story, 

That’s when, at last, you’re reading the Bible right.

Reflecting on the first three chapters, it’s becoming clear that the implications of Zahnd’s thesis will be centered around issues of violence such as hell, atonement theories, war, and the death penalty— all of which happen to be issues which I’ve wrestled with over the last few years. And flipping through the next couple of chapters, it does appear that that is where he’s headed. So let the controversy heat up, and the discussion continue!  

Wintertime Update

It's been six months since my last life update-- which means it's time my vast blogosphere audience how a few select personal development projects have been going. Here you go!


1) Music

Ever since I was in medical school, I've kept lists of music, movies, and books that people recommend to me. I've been slowly chipping away at the book list over the past year, but the music and movie lists have been woefully neglected for years. This summer, I reached the tipping point of boredom with my same old music, so I decided to level up. My approach was to sign up for the free 3-month trial of Apple Music, then switch to the nearly-free Amazon Music trial for another three moths of unlimited music downloads. Though it took me 4 months, I worked my way through all 80-ish artists on my list, and downloaded over 1000 songs. More importantly, I've discovered new artists in genres I already enjoyed and expanded into genres like jazz fusion, samba and bossa nova, classical, and indie singer-songwriters. Though the list continues to grow, some of my favorite artists from the last few months are:

- Gungor (the trio of albums "One Wild Life")
- Yo-Yo Ma
- Astrud Gilberto
- Jenny Lewis
- Avicii
- Plej
- Bon Iver
- Snarky Puppy
- Derek Webb (new album "Fingers Crossed")

Though my explorations have recently slowed, I'm excited about continuing to discover new mid-expanding jams. Next up in this area would be to get back into playing music myself. I'm thinking 2019 will be the time for that, but we'll see.


2) Swimming

Sometime this summer, my back started bothering me more, resulting in a change of focus from weightlifting and gymnastic strength training to swimming, massage, and physical therapy. I'm happy to say that my back feels 90% better, and that I'm starting to refocus on gymnastic strength training. But in the interim, I've made huge gains in my swimming ability, cutting my mile swim time down from 43:00 to about 38:00 in just a few months. Counterintuitively, the key to making these gains was to not make improvement a goal. In fact, I barely even recorded my times for the first few months. My one and only aim was to get in the pool once a week. If that happened, it was a win. Only after several months of relative consistency in the pool did I start challenging myself to hit certain times. By that time, it was easy to get to the pool, because I had started enjoying it. In fact, I have been achieving a more meditative state while swimming than in any other activity right now. After all, gliding through water in a rhythmic fashion is the original, primal "flow state."

Another big factor was a tip I picked up from Tim Ferriss a couple years ago on swimming technique. The basic idea is to give one small kick for each stroke, just a little flick to help turn your body from one side to the other. This massively decreases the energy used up by the legs, and results in drastically less fatigue. The next time you're in the pool, try it out!


3) Relationships

After nearly a year in Boone without a sense of belonging, Mindy and I found a great small group through the Crossroads service at Boone United Methodist Church. In a stroke of providence, our first visit to the church happened to be the day of the first small group meeting. We've really enjoyed getting to know the other couples in the group, most of whom are also relatively new to Boone and relatively newly married. A few of us guys have also started meeting for lunch periodically to get to know each other better. Our relationships with some other local couples have also continued to grow, and we're excited to see that continue.

I've also been able to keep up with a few college friends better now that I'm back in the Southeast. Back in October, I was able to join my old buds Kevin Lloyd and Jacob Hall for a backpacking trip through Dolly Sods, West Virginia, which was totally amazing. And I've been able to see Ben Carr, Sam Cox, Andrew Shank, Lee Robeson, and Brett Hoffecker recently, which has been life-giving. If you're reading this and I haven't seen you lately, hopefully we'll fix that soon!


As we head into 2018, I've started ruminating on the big picture for the new year. I'll put up something soon along those lines!