"The Light"

This is a great short film, that was the opener to the Resolved 2011 conference. I thought it was a really creative way of putting Scripture in a fresh medium, really drawing out the beauty of the opening verses of the book of John. Check it out!

Resolved 2011 - "The Light" from FlyFeNniX on Vimeo.

"Surprised by Joy"

Better World Books gave me the opportunity to write a guest blog post for them, on C.S. Lewis's Surprised by Joy. Check it out here. Feel free to comment, either here or on the BWB page!

On the Arts:

"If you want to work on your art, work on your life."

~ ANTON CHEKHOV

Thanks to "Advice to Writers" for tweeting this quote.

Style of music?

The following post is from my other blog about church music and worship.

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The following quotes are from an article on the 9Marks website, entitled "How important is the style of music a church sings?" Go check the whole thing out here - it gives some good perspective on what's really important about church music.

[More important than style] are the truth of the words being sung. Since a church sings music in order to worship God, our songs should function like a musical confession of faith. Those confessions of faith should contain substantial truth about God, or else we’ll hardly be worshiping at all.

Style is passing... It’s only worth paying attention to insofar as different styles may do a better or worse job of helping people properly conform their hearts to the truths being sung.

In short, what we sing is far more important than how we sing it.

The kicker is this: hopefully we can be selfLESS, and prefer our fellow saints as we choose songs and sing them in certain styles, rather than being selfISH, choosing and playing songs based on what we prefer. Or, being selfish by wanting certain songs in certain styles, and being bitter when we don't get to sing them. Singing on a Sunday morning is a corporate opportunity to encourage and admonish each other. So lets do that this Sunday!

Guidelines.

Another teaching year finishes this week, and I'm trying to think hard about what I'll read over the summer. I haven't settled on a concrete list yet, but here are some guidelines I've been thinking through, to hopefully make my summer reading as rich as possible.

1. We only have a relatively short amount of time to use well or waste in this life. So I'm going to try to read important things, that I know will be beneficial. I also want to read things I enjoy, and/or work by authors I like. I'm realizing more and more that real, honest-to-goodness reading happens with the stuff that interests and excites us. This is the stuff that we won't regret having read (most likely anyway).

2. I want to write more in the near future, so a couple books on how to write well will be in order. A re-reading of The Elements of Style may be a worthy choice, among others.

3. I'm sure I'll end up picking away at more books than I should probably have going at one time. But I'm trying to convince myself that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Multiple perspectives, multiple subjects, multiple voices. However, one does have to be careful not to lose track of the content of the books one has going.

A hearty "three cheers" for summer.

Tim Keller on "Good News"

I'm reading King's Cross by Tim Keller, and thanking God for every chapter. It's one of the better books I've read in a while, and is really an encouragement for my faith.

Keller says the following about the Gospel being "good news." Praise God for pastors and theologians who speak like this:

Gospel means "news that brings joy." This word had currency when Mark used it, but it wasn't religious currency. It meant history-making, life-shaping news, as opposed to just daily news [...] A gospel was news of some event that changed things in a meaningful way [...] When Greece was invaded by Persia and the Greeks won the great battles of Marathon and Solnus, they sent heralds (or evangelists) who proclaimed the good news to the cities: "We have fought for you, we have won, and now you're no longer slaves; you're free."

[T]he gospel is not about choosing to follow advice, it's about being called to follow a King. Not just someone with the power and authority to tell you what needs to be done - but someone with the power and authority to do what needs to be done, and then to offer it to you as good news.

Why read C.S. Lewis?

I really need to post more about C.S. Lewis, seeing as he's my favorite author and all. I just finished my first read ever of his Space Trilogy, and I came out of it with more great passages of Lewis to mull over and enjoy.

One of the things I appreciate most about Lewis' writing is that you are confronted with the same themes over and over again throughout his stories, essays, letters, or most anything else. This isn't boring - it's part of the beauty of his work. Lewis' worldview simply affected every compartment of his life, which fleshed out in his writing as well. One of his major themes (and a reason I like Tolkien so much too because you encounter it with him), is the astounding reality of the spiritual life. Lewis, when converted, became, by the sovereign grace of God, more alive and awake to reality than he had ever been; for Lewis, his new birth as a Christian brought with it a spiritual sight to see more of life, and to make more sense of life than he ever could up to that point. And he wrote about it, weaving this theme (among others) into just about everything.

In That Hideous Strength (the last book in the trilogy), we encounter this spiritual "awakening," or the awakening to true reality in the character of Jane Studdock. She could be considered the protagonist of the book (or one of them anyway), and is a character who grew up from childhood with a limited awareness and sensitivity to spiritual things. Then, she meets the Director and begins to be drawn into a reality that she was blind and deaf to up to this point. Here's one of the great passages where Lewis draws us into Jane's experience - forgive the length, but it's all necessary and quite good:

If it had ever occurred to [Jane] to question whether all these things might be the reality behind what she had been taught at school as "religion," she had put the thought aside. The distance between these alarming and operative realities and the memory, say, of fat Mrs. Dimble saying her prayers, was too wide. The things belonged, for her, to different worlds. On the one hand, terror of dreams, rapture of obedience, the tingling light and sound from under the Director's door, and the great struggle against an imminent danger; on the other, the smell of pews, horrible lithographs of the Saviour (apparently seven feet high, with the face of a consumptive girl), the embarrassment of confirmation classes, the nervous affability of clergymen. But this time, if it was really to be death, the thought would not be put aside. [R]eally, it now appeared that almost anything might be true. The world had already turned out to be so very unlike what she had expected. The old ring-fence had been smashed completely. One might be in for anything. Maleldil (a name for God in the trilogy) might be, quite simply and crudely, God. There might be a life after death: a Heaven: a Hell. The thought glowed in her mind for a second like a spark that has fallen on shavings, and then a second later, like those shavings, her whole mind was in a blaze...

And that's why I read Lewis. He rouses me awake.