Thanks to the current economic state of things, I no longer get free music. I am much saddened by this, but that's not my point. My point is that without Ruckus, I must turn to other sources for my musical delight. I actually downloaded Limewire and got maybe two songs off it, but then deleted for fear I would get caught up and my laptop confiscated and tragedy upon tragedy would ensue. So I sucked it up and went and bought CDs of the music that I felt like I wanted the most. I already had all my Relient K (whom I highly recommend) but I realized that I had no David Crowder* Band. Well, what to do, what to do? I bough three CDs, threw a hissy fit because I couldn't find the RENT soundtrack and proceeded to put a ton of music on my computer and MP3 player.
I also rediscoered the wonder of my CD player at home. I think it is glorious and reminds me of forgotten days' wholesome musical goodness. I was playing proudly my new CDs as I cleaned out my fish tank and I was stopped by the lyrics of a song. 'Here is our king. Here is our Love. Here is our God who's come to bring us back to Him. He is the One. He is Jesus.'
Well, nothing new there. As I was reminded by one of my Carolina not born and bred friends, I was raised in the Bible belt (kinda the upper end of the belt... more like the Bible waistline of the country) and so I know of this Jesus you speak of, this Man who is God who dies to redeem us. Honestly, the way my relationship with Him has been recently, you could replace half of that with blahs. Jesus blah Man blah blah blah died blah blah us. I know of Him, I even know a little but about Him and He knows that I've claimed a lot to know Him personally. He also knows when I lie. That's the thing about the Almighty and All-knowing God. He knows. Creepy.
Of course, He can't just let that go, now can He? He won't let me be apart from Him and still claim Him. He's crazy jealous of me, like He is of anyone who's human, and He won't have me leaving Him for this world. He loves me too much. However, He also loves me too much to make me come back to Him. "True love never forces." So we've been in this little battle since, oh, I don't know, November, and I've been miserable because He doesn't need me and why should I be anywhere if I'm not needed and He didn't stop this and He didn't stop that and Creation was all wrong and He could have made it differently because He's God and He could have made any universe, any one at all, and made it without pain and suffering and abused children and starving people and silly hurt stupid college girls who picked something that was way over their heads and are now left abandoned to the tidal waves and gale force winds of life. Breathe in. Breathe out.
I've been rereading The Shack (which I highly recommend) because the back cover said that the book reads like a prayer 'of the best kind' and my prayer life has been wanting, tell me you. If I can't talk to my Make I might as well read about Him. Maybe then I can make our Hist character. I also know that The Shack is wonderful medicine for a hurting soul. For a doubting mind, no heart attached, I recommend Mere Christianity. Oh, it'll find your heart, but it takes your mind for a spin first. The Shack, though, The Shack rips out my heart and rakes up the debris to burn later. I get so very very very angry at the answers it gave because they were not what I wanted to hear and they ignored the points I came up with and they never stopped my stupid and useless pain and doubt. As with CS Lewis, I would have to put down the book (OK, I threw it) every time I felt convicted, which was getting to be pretty often about the time that I read that "Religion is about having the right answers..." (Also, religion does not equal a relationship) "... [t]here are a lot of smart people who are able to say a lot of the right things from their brains because they've been told what the right answers are but they don't really know me at all.'
I feel like the Grandfather in The Princess Bride right now. "She does not get eaten by the sharks at this time." This is not the point in my life when my great fear of the Scripture where Christ says, 'Go away from me! I never knew you!' comes true and I must run far away from my God. No, this is the point in my life when I stare angrily, guiltily at the floor because I realize that the heart He grew in me over the past four summers was hidden away at the last of them and replaced by the mind I felt more rightly mine. After all, I knew He had given me the heart but I felt like I owned the mind. I didn't know that my mind was the part of me that was making my life so miserable. I depend on my brain. When it fails, I fail and I was miserable.
So after I sated in anger at the flood and felt like my guilty head was too heavy to raise, I bent over, picked up my book and read some more. It took me a couple of lines to figure out that I wasn't on the same page because Jesus was talking, not whoever was talking before. "Why didn't you tell me sooner?" the main character asked. 'Don't believe we didn't try,' Jesus replied. This made me quite angry again. He's gotten especially goof at answering my questions before I ask them. Why didn't You fix this before now, save me from all my recent self-inflicted misery? I ask. 'We tried,' He says. "True love never forces." This is the time in my life when I laugh a little bitterly, close the book and look up at what has, for so long, been an empty ceiling. It's wonderful to have Him back, even though it's not going to stay this easy. We have a lot to talk about. But He's back! Here is my King. Here is my Love.
But wait a second. I'm not so touchy-feely. That's the bit about the lyrics that caught my mind in the first place. I'm happy to love Jesus, I think, and goodness knows I'm forever thankful for His grace, but Him loving me back? No, sir, no thank you, I'd much rather stand over here and just work for You, if that's alright. You have Your almighty space, I'll keep to my bubble. 'Cept it doesn't work that way. He lives in you, not just through you. You might be his hands and his feet but you're also His body. His life is yours or rather, your is His. Creepy.
Or maybe not. What else do you expect from the God of the Universe who throws open the screen door on the porch to pick you up and swing you around in the biggest hug you've ever had, yelling your name out of a love that the world can hear?
Here is our King. Here is our Love. Here is our God who's come to bring us back to Him.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
21 cm
Hope can see heaven through the thickest clouds.- Thomas Benton Brooks
If you haven't seen the video 'Indescribable,' I highly recommend it. Louie Giglio uses astronomy pictures of the amazing, indescribable universe that our God has created to help us see how big God is and how small we truly are. He also uses an audio clip of a pulsar taken using a radio telescope, which is even dearer to me now because I spent a week using a 40-ft radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. The universe is crying out in ways I've barely begun to explore. Noe, while the audio can be more impressive, you can make images or map regions in the sky based on their emission of waves at the frequency you're observing at, which was one of the projects of my week participating in ERIRA (Educational Research in Radio Astronomy, don't ask me to pronounce it).
I actually got to make a whole observation by myself while everyone else was on a hike. I was observing the Crab Nebula and the region of space around it. I can show everyone my strip chart, a physical recording of the data I took. On it you can clearly see the Crab Nebula as a large couple of spikes near the beginning and later the moon which spikes off the chart. If you look at the chart between the two bigger events you can see small spikes that make the data look like the top of Batman's masks, which made me think of camp (though I never quite understood why we picked Batman to be our superhero... anyway...) and in the middle of m data you can see a bunch of messed up data when the weed-eaters came by and I had to put that to a stop. I think it was right over a supernova remnant too, sadly.
The point of this sojourn into the world of radio telescope data is that I was by myself, turning a knob back and forth to make the telescope do sweeps of the sky to get a map of this region for three hours. Three hours of turning the knob, doing something for a few minutes before the computer with the nice green screen and red letters beeped at me to tell me to turn the telescope around. When you're there with a group of people, you converse and get to know them better and it's a fun time, except when you're sleep deprived. When you're by yourself, it can get tediuous and since I really hadn't taken a second to do it before, I brought my devotional with me. I opened it to the last time I read something (I was a few days behind- days tend to get a little confused when you sleep at the wrong time, I think) and the next day's devotion was just on the other page. I turn my eyes to the other page and the quote at the top of this note is a little side qoute listed right under the scripture that goes along with the message. And it just floored me. Professor Reichart kept on saying the whole week that this is what the universe would look like if you had 'radio eyes' which I thought was lame at the time. There are enough good things to see here, with the eyes we have. Why would we need radio eyes? The greathing about radio astronomy is that you can see things that other people can't. If a star explodes behind a dust lane, you don't see it in the visual, the wavelength is too short and it's blocked by the dust. But it still emits in the radio end of the spectrum and radio waves pass through the dust. Using a radio telescope allows you to see through the clouds in space to something that's giving off marvelous light.
So when God put that quote in front of me, that "[h]ope can see heaven through the thickest clouds," I kinda wanted to jump up and down and dance for Him and I wouldn't have expected me to. I hate the word 'hope.' I hate the idea of hope. Hope is the thing that trusting people have, the quality that allows them to put their trust, their whole heart into something with the idea that their trust will be rewarded, that they won't have hoped for no reason. Hope is a characteristic of the naive and I strive to be anything but naive. So I hated hope, especially since hope is what broke my heart last year and hope is what's tearing at it now. But my Lord had just placed it in front of me, so I figured I'd better have another look at it, in light of what I was doing right then. How did we, astronomically and scientifically, see through the clouds? We looked at the universe in a different way, at a different wavelength. We built different telescopes. We had 'radio eyes.' How can I see past the things that distract me here, the things that scream the injustice of the world and the things that rip out my heart? How do I see past the child whose father won't see her for the wonderful, truly amazing person she is, who won't even calim her? How do I see past the girl who is still in a group home, waiting to be adopted even though she's the sweetest, kindest child you've ever met? How do I even begin to get past the lives destroyed by war, for whatever reason? Hoe do I see past my selfishness, my pain, the things that make me want to run from my Lord insto of to Him? These things that tear me up, that break the heart of my Father, how do I see past them? How do you hope when you know that there are children out there two steps away from joining a gang, who are pulled down by everything the world has to throw at them, who have no safe or love-filled home? How do you hope for them, to see past the clouds that block out heaven?
Hope isn't what I've made it out to be. It's not some mystical trait or some mysterious feeling. It's a different way of looking at the world. It's seeing the world in light of the goodness still to come. It's changing your eyes so you can go through the clouds (they're not going to magically leave, that's not what Christ has promised us), so you can see through to the marvelous, glorious light that waits for us. Hope is knowing that there is going to be a better day, even if it's not tomorrow or the next day or the next day. One day my God is going to make things just and fair on that day my Savior is going to rain grace down again on me and take me back home. you just have to have hope, to see the Universe a little different (OK, a lot different). When we can see heaven, we can work to make this messed up, fallen world more like heaven, no matter how hopeless this place is. I'm going to hope for tomorrow because I can see what I hope for, I can see that the kingdom that's going to replace this one is worth working, striving, dying for now.
If you haven't seen the video 'Indescribable,' I highly recommend it. Louie Giglio uses astronomy pictures of the amazing, indescribable universe that our God has created to help us see how big God is and how small we truly are. He also uses an audio clip of a pulsar taken using a radio telescope, which is even dearer to me now because I spent a week using a 40-ft radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. The universe is crying out in ways I've barely begun to explore. Noe, while the audio can be more impressive, you can make images or map regions in the sky based on their emission of waves at the frequency you're observing at, which was one of the projects of my week participating in ERIRA (Educational Research in Radio Astronomy, don't ask me to pronounce it).
I actually got to make a whole observation by myself while everyone else was on a hike. I was observing the Crab Nebula and the region of space around it. I can show everyone my strip chart, a physical recording of the data I took. On it you can clearly see the Crab Nebula as a large couple of spikes near the beginning and later the moon which spikes off the chart. If you look at the chart between the two bigger events you can see small spikes that make the data look like the top of Batman's masks, which made me think of camp (though I never quite understood why we picked Batman to be our superhero... anyway...) and in the middle of m data you can see a bunch of messed up data when the weed-eaters came by and I had to put that to a stop. I think it was right over a supernova remnant too, sadly.
The point of this sojourn into the world of radio telescope data is that I was by myself, turning a knob back and forth to make the telescope do sweeps of the sky to get a map of this region for three hours. Three hours of turning the knob, doing something for a few minutes before the computer with the nice green screen and red letters beeped at me to tell me to turn the telescope around. When you're there with a group of people, you converse and get to know them better and it's a fun time, except when you're sleep deprived. When you're by yourself, it can get tediuous and since I really hadn't taken a second to do it before, I brought my devotional with me. I opened it to the last time I read something (I was a few days behind- days tend to get a little confused when you sleep at the wrong time, I think) and the next day's devotion was just on the other page. I turn my eyes to the other page and the quote at the top of this note is a little side qoute listed right under the scripture that goes along with the message. And it just floored me. Professor Reichart kept on saying the whole week that this is what the universe would look like if you had 'radio eyes' which I thought was lame at the time. There are enough good things to see here, with the eyes we have. Why would we need radio eyes? The greathing about radio astronomy is that you can see things that other people can't. If a star explodes behind a dust lane, you don't see it in the visual, the wavelength is too short and it's blocked by the dust. But it still emits in the radio end of the spectrum and radio waves pass through the dust. Using a radio telescope allows you to see through the clouds in space to something that's giving off marvelous light.
So when God put that quote in front of me, that "[h]ope can see heaven through the thickest clouds," I kinda wanted to jump up and down and dance for Him and I wouldn't have expected me to. I hate the word 'hope.' I hate the idea of hope. Hope is the thing that trusting people have, the quality that allows them to put their trust, their whole heart into something with the idea that their trust will be rewarded, that they won't have hoped for no reason. Hope is a characteristic of the naive and I strive to be anything but naive. So I hated hope, especially since hope is what broke my heart last year and hope is what's tearing at it now. But my Lord had just placed it in front of me, so I figured I'd better have another look at it, in light of what I was doing right then. How did we, astronomically and scientifically, see through the clouds? We looked at the universe in a different way, at a different wavelength. We built different telescopes. We had 'radio eyes.' How can I see past the things that distract me here, the things that scream the injustice of the world and the things that rip out my heart? How do I see past the child whose father won't see her for the wonderful, truly amazing person she is, who won't even calim her? How do I see past the girl who is still in a group home, waiting to be adopted even though she's the sweetest, kindest child you've ever met? How do I even begin to get past the lives destroyed by war, for whatever reason? Hoe do I see past my selfishness, my pain, the things that make me want to run from my Lord insto of to Him? These things that tear me up, that break the heart of my Father, how do I see past them? How do you hope when you know that there are children out there two steps away from joining a gang, who are pulled down by everything the world has to throw at them, who have no safe or love-filled home? How do you hope for them, to see past the clouds that block out heaven?
Hope isn't what I've made it out to be. It's not some mystical trait or some mysterious feeling. It's a different way of looking at the world. It's seeing the world in light of the goodness still to come. It's changing your eyes so you can go through the clouds (they're not going to magically leave, that's not what Christ has promised us), so you can see through to the marvelous, glorious light that waits for us. Hope is knowing that there is going to be a better day, even if it's not tomorrow or the next day or the next day. One day my God is going to make things just and fair on that day my Savior is going to rain grace down again on me and take me back home. you just have to have hope, to see the Universe a little different (OK, a lot different). When we can see heaven, we can work to make this messed up, fallen world more like heaven, no matter how hopeless this place is. I'm going to hope for tomorrow because I can see what I hope for, I can see that the kingdom that's going to replace this one is worth working, striving, dying for now.
Work in Progress
I couldn't decide what I should put as a kind of 'definition of me' post. I wanted to use something I've already written, but nothing really seemed to fit. Since America is a free country, I figured I'd put two things up, as evidence of the work in progress that is my life. The first one, the next post- 21 cm- was me at the end of this past summer. The next one- Here- was me a week or two ago. The current me is a bit of a combination of the both of them. But really, I just wanted to put something up to make the space not so sad and lonely. The end.
Explanations
If you have to ask, you'll never know.
Does that make anyone else just the slightest bit annoyed? Yes, I have to ask. I don't have a habit of asking pointless questions. Get off your high horse, leave your presumptuous attitude behind and just answer my question. That response just leaves me with the suspicion that the responder doesn't really have an answer- or if he does, he'd rather not share it because he is bent on remaining mysterious and interesting. Either way, I'm still left more annoyed after I ask than I was before with my curiosity.
The only reason I start out my new blog with that statement and subsequent paragraph of unnecessary anger is because I intend to use that phrase to explain what I'm doing here. Ugh, I'm so not a blogger. I hate creative writing, your heart and soul forced to hide between words for the world to see and criticize. And English apparently isn't my forte, as I've pretty much failed at speaking, much less setting my ideas down in well formed and coherent paragraphs. So, really, I have no purpose being here, writing things and then posting them onto some place on the interwebs for the universe to observe. It's a bit very much not me. But, then again, here I am. I serve no real purpose here. 'So why are you here?' you may ask. 'Why would you, a physics major and astronomy lover, title your blog with something as down to earth as blackberries and blackbirds?' you could continue. And as our conversation grows, you might ask questions about life, the universe and everything, which I'll do my best to answer. You might could ask about Everything and sometimes I'll have a great answer that applies to everyone else, but if you ever ask about me, I'll probably just smile.
Well, if you have to ask, you'll never know.
So here's me. Enjoy. I intend to post things on my favorite subjects, which means you'll get a lot of me and God, some astronomy (not necessarily unrelated to the first), some music (which always reminds me of the first two) and some really funny things (ponder the platapus). I'm guessing that it's only going to be people that know me reading this, so if I make a reference to something you didn't know about me, bug me, I'll explain. I go to Carolina, I worked at Camp Joy in Hildebran for the past 4 summers and God has been wrenching my heart and life around Him, much to my confusion, joy and dismay. Reading this is probably like picking up in medias res or watching a master artist as he paints. I'm a work in progress. Thank goodness for progress.
Does that make anyone else just the slightest bit annoyed? Yes, I have to ask. I don't have a habit of asking pointless questions. Get off your high horse, leave your presumptuous attitude behind and just answer my question. That response just leaves me with the suspicion that the responder doesn't really have an answer- or if he does, he'd rather not share it because he is bent on remaining mysterious and interesting. Either way, I'm still left more annoyed after I ask than I was before with my curiosity.
The only reason I start out my new blog with that statement and subsequent paragraph of unnecessary anger is because I intend to use that phrase to explain what I'm doing here. Ugh, I'm so not a blogger. I hate creative writing, your heart and soul forced to hide between words for the world to see and criticize. And English apparently isn't my forte, as I've pretty much failed at speaking, much less setting my ideas down in well formed and coherent paragraphs. So, really, I have no purpose being here, writing things and then posting them onto some place on the interwebs for the universe to observe. It's a bit very much not me. But, then again, here I am. I serve no real purpose here. 'So why are you here?' you may ask. 'Why would you, a physics major and astronomy lover, title your blog with something as down to earth as blackberries and blackbirds?' you could continue. And as our conversation grows, you might ask questions about life, the universe and everything, which I'll do my best to answer. You might could ask about Everything and sometimes I'll have a great answer that applies to everyone else, but if you ever ask about me, I'll probably just smile.
Well, if you have to ask, you'll never know.
So here's me. Enjoy. I intend to post things on my favorite subjects, which means you'll get a lot of me and God, some astronomy (not necessarily unrelated to the first), some music (which always reminds me of the first two) and some really funny things (ponder the platapus). I'm guessing that it's only going to be people that know me reading this, so if I make a reference to something you didn't know about me, bug me, I'll explain. I go to Carolina, I worked at Camp Joy in Hildebran for the past 4 summers and God has been wrenching my heart and life around Him, much to my confusion, joy and dismay. Reading this is probably like picking up in medias res or watching a master artist as he paints. I'm a work in progress. Thank goodness for progress.
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