What does this mean, exactly? And why is it appealing to me?

The context in which this just came up is the mood of the game we're working on at https://poindextergamco.com. I tend toward dark and heavy, and the other guy tends toward light and self-deprecating. We both agree that a mixture would be best.

What does it mean to take oneself seriously? Solemnity about oneself? An inability to see the absurdity that's inherent in all of us? A lack of grace toward that absurdity?

Surely, perceiving ourselves with clear vision, as Christ does, is the only valid perspective. And surely it's a mixture of darkness and light, seriousness and absurdity, justice and grace, death and, ultimately, life (who always has the last word). We should both see ourselves as we are and also, in accepting Christ's valuation, members of a narrative that ends in redemption and freedom and joy.

So when creating something, to take oneself not seriously is to dive deep into sin and death and to come out as clean and free as Christ. Easy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt35Tdj3hoI&list=RD9o4CA36CdJA&index=4

Switchfoot's great. And one comment on this video is "they deserve so much more."

So much more what? I assume they mean success.

But that term hides so much meaning. At its core, it seems to mean the end toward which we labor. But we also fill "success" up with what we consider valuable.

In our culture—at least in my own estimation—it typically means fame and/or fortune. We also pack it with our own brands of success, like being competent or being loved by others. I'm guessing the video's comment means specifically recognition (awards, accolade, sales, reputation, whatever), which is just fame's little brother.

Recognition's value can be thrown out immediately. As one of my professors said, we divest ourselves of all glory and honor and power because all of those things belong to Christ. Or, in other words, the pursuit/acceptance of recognition is theft.

Intending any other unwholesome end can be thrown out just as easily.

But what about other intended ends? Is it bad to be loved? Is it bad to be competent? Of course not. I'd argue at least these two are value neutral, and there are many others. And though its scope is quite narrow, there are actual good intentions, like intending to protect orphans and widows (and to keep this post from getting into the weeds of motivation, let us assume the protector has no personal stake in their protection).

But isn't dependence on success its own problem?

How much of Scripture concerns assenting when our plans go awry? James 4:13-17 and Proverbs 16:9 are quick references. But isn't just about every passage about how humankind intends one thing while God intends another? How arrogant to think our ends supercede God's!

So what's the answer? Settle for failure? Never intend anything? Surely not.

Isn't it impossible to escape intention? Intending to settle for failure is intending an end. Intending no end is intending an end. And apathy leading to wandering isn't any better—even getting a glass of orange juice is its own end.

The answer is humility. Hold success with an open hand. Intend good—not unwholesome ends. And when you attain it, credit the sovereing God (1 Sam. 17:45-47). And when you fail, credit the sovereign God (Gen. 50:20). And know that in both cases, his ends are always good and holy and perfect.

I usually forget that my strengths are not in hard skills, per se. I write, but I am not a writer. I make things with wood, and I do a little coding, but I am no carpenter or programmer. And I think it's so hard to remember because 1) hard skills like writing and coding are easier to identify and 2) because of that, our culture is more aware of them.

According to my giftedness assessment, my primary drive is to develop novel, interesting concepts and then make them real. I do so comprehensively and with as much polish and profundity as I can conceive. And they're typically at the tip of my understanding, so they're always learning experiences—both in the deeper elements of what it means to be human and in skill. But the novelty, in particular, means that I tend to jump between hard skills. The moniker they give it is "realize the concept." I'm a skill-dabbling realize-the-concept guy.

For me, hard skills are vehicles. When they can get me to a realized concept, I use them. When they can't, they sit in the yard until rust eats their innards. (The difficulty is when some new concept comes up that needs that old car, I have to get it running again. Oh, if only there were more hours in the day, more days in the year, more weekends in each month, and more concepts that drew my attention during all that extra time!)

You can probably tell I'm mostly trying to feel better about not being a great musician, despite having spent 10 years of my youth playing music.

But I suppose that's not all fair. It's good to know what you're bad at, and it's good to know what you're good at—your "motivated abilities," the abilities you are motivated into, as the giftedness assessment calls them. I can be good enough in the hard skills I need to complete some new project, but my real strength is in developing the concept and then making it real and as real and authentic and comprehensive and impactful as I can.

Since moving to the current website, sharing my additions to social media has been more difficult. Not that anyone really follows me, and not that I have much taste for social media's inherent character, but it's better than writing in the dark.

I plan to experiment with a couple services to automate posts. For new items that aren't blog posts, I'll probably have to create blog posts listing them (at least for now).

There's also always my recent items page: https://wheredeathdelightstodie.com/recent

Who enjoys fragility? Who delights in death's prickles? But death is in us, and seeking its remedy is the enterprise of every man. And yet with each honest word, we expose our soft underbellies. Someone takes that stab, and then death prickles.

And who of us lacks all taste of belly? We are wolves. We condemn and we dominate and we ostracize in our pursuit of safety. And we develop our defenses.

But in the image of our creator, we were created to relate. Relationship is connection. Connection is living. And if we're either severing or being severed, how can we?

And because connection requires honesty, and honesty requires vulnerability, if our connections will remain, not only must we ackowledge our counterparts' vulnerability, you must allow them to do the same with ours.

So, a healthy relationship requires two things: 1) grace and 2) dependence on another's grace. We must abstain from belly-tasting, and we must risk our bellies being tasted.

I feel more and more distant from from my theological training. Someone mentions reformed and dispensational, and I don't feel like I recall enough to keep up. Someone mentions a propechy of Isaiah's, and I can't recall its context--whether he was a prophet to the northern or southern kingdom and when. I've read many, many books and have written numerous papers on all this stuff!

This is an attempt to redeem the loss. Hopefully it's all true and not just me trying to make myself feel better. Though if it is true, I'm no doubt still trying to make myself feel better.*

1. Dr. Hannah, one of the wonderful professors at DTS, told us that we would forget 95% of the things they taught us. Much more important is learning a) how to think and b) where to find information. I do believe I learned how to think, and I do believe I know where to find information.

2. Lack of use. It's been seven years since I graduated, and there's no Greek in IT. But on top of that, the past few years have been growth by way of failure (or perceived failure). I have not been disciplined in conventional spiritual disciplines. I have not had a strong place in a local body of believers. I spend my days fixing computers--not researching the Scriptures or thinking what some new world God created might be like. My time is much different now than what it was during and just after DTS.

3. The Dunning-Kruger effect. The more you know in some field, the less you think you know, and vice versa. Undergraduates think they know everything, and experts feel like they know nothing. If DTS did it's job, I should feel like I know nothing. That said, I do see evidence of having forgotten much. But perhaps it's not as much as I'm thinking.

4. Age. I am getting older. Do I need to say any more than what everyone already knows?

5. Fear. I am afraid of being unintelligent or of being perceived by others as unintelligent. Any item that suggests my incapability twists my perception of any real capability. (The opposite is also true.)

6. And that leads into this. In my flesh, one of the ways I attempt to remedy my death is to feel knowledgable, skilled, capable, and ultimately, ideal. As a believer, I naturally want to be an "ideal" one--"ideal" being defined according to whatever pseudo-Christian and American cultural values I have adopted. If God wants to teach me the truth of my dependence, how would he do it but by denying me the things I put in his place? That is, wouldn't he show me that I am knowledge-less, incapable, and far from ideal? Such could be the case here, and if I were looking at this with faith, I would see it as such.

Incidentally, the ideal believer is the one that Christ loves. That's it. And as we know, "For God so loved the world..."

That's all for now.

*In reality, even if it is a tragic loss, and it's all my fault, I am still wholly dependent on the grace of God through Christ--just as I would be if I lost nothing and had then built on it, rather than being whatever meager man I have become, and instead becoming a theological giant.

Getting praise makes me giddy. And then I start craving it and fearing not getting it. It starts taking over my motivation for creatition. Some of it may have to do with how much praise I received as a kid, but I think it's perhaps just my brand of remedy-our-own-death--those things we pursue instead of God that either deaden the pain or attempt to fix whatever dead parts we recognize within ourselves.

Jeremy mentioned that he's had several years experience working on collaborative creative projects (most of mine are either alone or else according to some teacher's/boss's mandate). And he has found that you end up with the best results when all members of the team feel a sense of ownership and have a say. That of course means not only having our own way but also moving out of the way of others.

That sounds an awful lot like godliness, or love. One might even take it a step further and say that the relationships, themselves, are the thing. The relationships and the collaborative work. Anything that gets in the way of those gets in the way of those things worth working for. And focusing on one's own praise certainly does that.

That's not to say that praise shouldn't gratify. It should. But as soon as we elevate it beyond its encouraging and salving role, it only hurts us.

Serve the other person. Serve the work.

I have forgotten much from the intensity of seminary and the quiet years after. I lament the loss, and I can’t help but feel that my current career speeds the process. I do not feel like the theological thinker I was while working on my creative writing after seminary. But hopefully it’s just a widow’s mite in the the Spirit’s development of my endurance.

In any case, one idea that was brought back to me recently is how creating something beautiful necessarily glorifies God. Among what seems like many other things, I believed this and forgot it.

Madeleine L’Engle comes to mind with her cosmos from chaos concept. God, as creator, takes from the waters of chaos and fashions the earth. Such are all creative acts, and in their likeness to the Creator, they honor him. As L'Engle says, there is no “Christian” art. But there is good art—cosmos from chaos art—and good art is inherently Christian. Even when it doesn’t do so consicously or even willingly, good art imitates the creator. Tolkien called it subcreation.

Good art, then, is art that fashions cosmos from chaos.

What about beauty? Is good art necessary beautiful? Are beauty and goodness the same thing? Or perhaps do they just correlate so closely that you can’t have one without the other? What is beauty?

I don’t have an answer to that yet. Hopefully I will remember to spend the time thinking about it later on.

All the pieces I mentioned are now posted. More will arrive as they’re written.

But to help you get around, a quick tour. In the menu at the top, you’ll find all my non-writing creations in the Other Projects section. And in the Writing section, you’ll find the following categories:

1. Collection - I’d like to develop a collection of pieces that explore the theology of the inhabitants of a world I’ve dabbled in for about a decade.

I’m still here.

I’m not where I want to be, not where at the end of DTS I thought I would be, and not where my fear thinks I should be, but I’m where God has me. Life and its lessons continue, and the lessons of the moment are mediocrity and dependence.

And after several years of word-by-word labor, withholding my works from friends in hopes of distributing it to strangers, the bell rang and I approached the mob of commercial publishing.