I want us to be a camping family – big time.  But the first step to get little kids camping is to do it inside first.  We got the tent up in our playroom.  Now we need to actually spend the night out there.  We’ll roast marshmallows in the fireplace and sing nutty old songs.  The A/C and running water is nice.  Real nice.  And no blood suckers.

This photograph was selected for the post because it was taken around the time that Bryan originally wrote it.  Please continue to be in prayer for Christy, Hannah, Logan, and Noah, Bryan’s beloved wife and 3 beautiful children whom he loved very, very much…and find ways to help them now and in the future.

I asked God for health, that I might do greater things; I was given infirmity, that I might do better things.

I asked for riches, that I might be happy; I was given poverty, that I might be wise.

I asked for power, that I might have the praise of men; I was given weakness, that I might feel the need of God.

I asked for all things, that I might enjoy life; I was given life, that I might enjoy all things.

I got nothing that I asked for but everything I had hoped for.

Almost despite myself, my unspoken prayers were answered. I am among men, most richly blessed.

- Unknown Civil War soldier

There are 2 types of fear:
1. Fear: a healthy response to danger, which drives us to fight or flight, and then is gone.
2. Anxiety: a lingering, generalized, undefined sense of fear which paralyzes us.

If fear is a thunderstorm, anxiety is a constant, cold drizzle: the first produces green growth, the second mildew. Fear can be good for us – it gets us out of danger! – but anxiety makes us agitated, nervous and upset. Constant anxiety can permanently turn on our autonomic nervous system, which is only meant to respond to crises, and so lead to all kinds of health issues.

 
What causes this second, debilitating kind of fear is not a threat to life or safety, but a threat to our identity: when something that makes us feel in control is threatened or taken away. In Psalm 3 David faces both kinds of fear: the physical threat from Absalom’s armies, and the threat to his identity as the beloved, honored, upright king of his people.

But how do we escape from this second, debilitating kind of fear? 4 ways:

1. Follow your thread.
David describes God as a “shield around me” (Ps 3:1): a full-body shield which curves around the body, meant not for hand-to-hand combat but for following your commander into situations of extreme danger. If you turn and run, the shield won’t protect you. It’s only useful when you’re heading into danger. Obedience takes us not away from fear, but through and beyond our fear.

2. Relocate your glory.
David says, literally, “but you are my glory” (Ps 3:3). He says “but…” because something else has become his glory: he has built his emotional and psychological identity on something other than God. When we put our worth and security in something finite, out there in time and space, we are always vulnerable. So we need to relocate our glory: not in our talents or our role, or others’ opinion of us, but in God’s approval.

3. See the substitute.
But how do we know we have God’s approval? David says that God hears him because of his “holy hill”, the temple (Ps 3:4), the symbol of our Savior Jesus. Our significance doesn’t come from what we have achieved or what we have, but from Jesus, the one who was cut off from God so we don’t have to be.

4. Remember the people.
The opposite of fear is not an absence of fear, but love (1 Jn 4:18 cf Ps 3:8). Fear is self-centered, love is other-centered. You can’t deal with fear by yourself: you have to get your mind off yourself by serving others in love.

So here’s the solution to fear:

• Go forward in obedience, whatever the cost
• Seek identity in God alone
• Look to the cross, where your significance comes from
• Forget yourself in love for others

Amen!

This blog based on: http://jeaninallhonesty.blogspot.com/2010/06/tim-keller-praying-your-fears.html

Tom Skinner, an African American minister from inner-city New York, in a 1970 sermon concluded by comparing Jesus to Barabbas.  Barabbas was also a revolutionary. He said “The Roman system stinks, it’s militaristic, it’s oppressive.” And Jesus would have agreed. The difference between Jesus and Barabbas was in their solution. Barabbas wanted change within the system. Jesus wanted to change the system entirely.

So why release Barabbas instead of Jesus?

“Very simple: if you let Barabbas go, you can always stop him. The most Barabbas will do is go out, round up another bunch of guerrillas and start another riot. And you will always stop him by rolling your tanks into his neighborhood, bringing out the National Guard and putting his riot down. Find out where he is keeping his ammunition. Raid his apartment without a search warrant and shoot him while he is still asleep. You can stop Barabbas.

But how do you stop Jesus? They took and nailed him to a cross. But they did not realize that, in nailing Jesus to the cross, they were putting up on that cross the sinful nature of all humanity. As Christ was nailed to the cross, it was more than just a political radical dying; He was God’s answer to the human dilemma. On that cross Christ was bearing in His own body my sin, and He was proclaiming my liberation on that cross. And on that cross He shed his blood to cleanse me of all my sin, to set me free. They took and buried Him, rolled a stone over His grave, wiped their hands and said, ‘That is one radical who will never disturb us again. We have gotten rid of him. We will never hear any more of his words of revolution.’

Three days later Jesus Christ pulled off one of the greatest political coups of all time: He got up out of the grave. When He arose from the dead, the Bible now calls him the Second Man, the New Man, the Leader of a new creation. A Christ who has come to overthrow the existing order and to establish a new order that is not built on man.

Keep in mind, my friend, with all your militancy and radicalism, that all the systems of men are doomed to destruction. All the systems of men will crumble and, finally, only God’s kingdom and His righteousness will prevail. You will never be radical until you become part of that new order and then go into a world that’s enslaved, a world that’s filled with hunger and poverty and racism and all those things of the work of the devil.

Proclaim liberation to the captives, preach sight to the blind, set at liberty them that are bruised, go into the world and tell men who are bound mentally, spiritually and physically, “The liberator has come!”

Amen.

But we stopped dreaming.  As a people.  As a nation.  And this spiritual atrophy is one of the leading factors, in my opinion, of why so many young men today especially are lost.  We are built to go, as CS Lewis put it, “Further up and further in.”  And there’s no better place to do this than the stars.  The further we go up to the heavens, the further we go into that place in our hearts where God’s creativity, wonder and brilliance intersect.  Neil deGrasse Tyson highlights this well:

General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) was an outstanding figure in the events during and after the Second World War.  He had his issues.  But he could rock a corncob pipe like no one else. In early 1942, when leading outnumbered United States forces in the Philippines, General MacArthur prayed this prayer for his son Arthur many times during his morning devotions.  I pray the same for  mine:

“Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid; one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory.

Build me a son whose wishbone will not be where his backbone should be; a son who will know Thee and that to know himself is the foundation stone of knowledge.

Lead him, I pray, not in the path of ease and comfort, but under the stress and spur of difficulties and challenge. Here let him learn to stand up in the storm; here let him learn compassion for those who fail.

Build me a son whose heart will be clean, whose goal will be high; a son who will master himself before he seeks to master other men; one who will learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; one who will reach into the future, yet never forget the past.

And after all these things are his, add, I pray, enough of a sense of humor, so that he may always be serious, yet never take himself too seriously. Give him humility, so that he may always remember the simplicity of greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.”

A condensed version of a blog written by my man David Mullen:

An Outline of Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life by Douglas Wilson.

Chapter 1: A Veritable Russian Doll of Writing Tips

Know something about the world, and by this I mean the world outside of books. This might require joining the Marines, or working on an oil rig, or as a hashslinger at a truck stop in Kentucky. Know what things smell like out there.

1. Real life duties should be preferred over real life tourism.

2. Authenticity in writing will only arise from authenticity in living.

3. Always remember that your writing will have a message.

4. Use your conversations to hone your writing voice, and not the other way around.

5. When you are out and about, you are watching the gaudy show called life and are trying to learn from it.

6. Live an actual life out there, a full life, the kind that will generate a surplus of stories.

7. Enjoy yourself.

Chapter 2: Read Until Your Brain Creaks

Read. Read constantly. Read the kind of stuff you wish you could write. Read until your brain creaks. Tolkien said that his ideas sprang up from the leaf mold of his mind. These are the trees where the leaves come from.

1. The first thing is that writers should be voracious readers.

2. Read widely.

3. Read like a reader and not like someone cramming for a test.

4. Read like a lover of books and not like someone who wants to be seen as knowledgeable, or well-read, or scholarly.

5. Pace yourself in your reading

6. As a general pattern, read quality literature, and go “slumming” occasionally to remind yourself what quality is and why quality matters.

7. Read widely enough that you are not provincial, but not so widely that you become some sort of deracinated cosmopolitan.

Chapter 3: Word Fussers and Who-whomers

Read mechanical helps. By this I mean dictionaries, etymological histories, books of anecdotes, dictionaries of foreign phrases, books of quotations, books on how to write dialog, and so on. The plot will usually fail to grip, so just read a page a day. If you think it makes you out to be too much of a word-dork, then don’t tell anybody about it.

1. Read boring books on writing mechanics.

2. Collect and read dictionaries.

3. Read books of complaint about the decline of our language by the word fussers and who-whomers, and read the hilarious refutations of those word fussers by word libertines.

4. Read etymological histories, histories of idioms and phrases, and dictionaries of word roots.

5. Read books and manuals that help you gain mastery of your word processing program, whatever that is.

6. Read books of quotations and anecdotes.

7. Read wordcraft books.

Chapter 4: Born for the Clerihew

Stretch before your routines. If you want to write short stories, try to write Italian sonnets. If you want to write a novel, write a few essays. If you want to write opinion pieces for the Washington Post, then limber up with haiku.

1. This helps to keep the content vibrant.

2. If you are in a position to do so, which usually means that you are young enough, make sure to get a thorough and broad liberal arts education.

3. You may discover that your wordsmithing gift was centered in the wrong spot.

4. Trying your hand at different forms helps to fend off flattery.

5. The gift of language is one of the most versatile tools imaginable.

6. Allusion is lovely, and experience with other forms brings the ability to use that device persuasively.

7. I have long said that good teaching consists of loving the subject you are teaching in the presence of students whom you also love.

Chapter 5: The Memoirs of Old Walnut Heart

Be at peace with being lousy for a while. Chesterton once said that anything worth doing was worth doing badly. He was right. Only an insufferable egoist expects to be brilliant first time out.

1.  Practice.

2. If a striking expression hits you, don’t hold back because you are writing an email to your sister.

3. Make sure you don’t have a faulty and deterministic view of talent.

4. If you are good with practice runs, if you are okay with not being as good as you are going to be, if you see the need for playing in the minors, then it should follow that you are emotionally prepared for negative feedback.

5. Speaking of criticism, your enemies will sometimes be more accurate, more perceptive, and more to the point than your mom.

6. Openness to criticism is not the same thing as that faux-humility that prepares to inflict itself on everybody with absolutely no reason to do so.

7. Remember that relative competence cannot be universal, and that this applies to your critics, reviewers, editors, and publishing houses as much as to you.

Chapter 6: Ancient Roman Toddlers

Learn other languages, preferably languages that are upstream from ours. This would include Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon. The brain is not a shoebox that “gets full,” but is rather a muscle that expands its capacity with increased use. The more you know the more you can know. The more you can do with words, the more you can do. As it turns out.

1. God approves of translation, and by this I am referring to the process of translation.

2. Learning languages is a very good way to learn your language, even if you don’t go on to speak fluently whatever language it was you thought you were learning.

3. Learning different languages helps a writer get a firm grasp of grammar in the abstract.

4. At the same time, be judicious and thoughtful in what you transfer from one language to another.

5. All this is being recommended as an aid to English.

6. One key to good writing is to have a wide-ranging vocabulary.

7. This certainly involves extra work, but it doesn’t take up extra room.

Chapter 7: Uncommon Commonplaces

Keep a commonplace book. Write down any notable phrases that occur to you, or that you have come across. If it is one that you have found in another writer, and it is striking, then quote it, as the fellow said, or modify it to make it yours. If Chandler said that a guy had a cleft chin you could hide a marble in, that should come in useful sometime. If Wodehouse said somebody had an accent you could turn handsprings on, then he might have been talking about Jennifer Nettles of Sugarland. Tinker with stuff. Get your fingerprints on it.

1. The writer’s life is a scavenger’s life.

2. It is dishonest to take the wit and wisdom of others and represent it as your own.

3. These concerns have led to the saying that if you steal from one person, it’s plagiarism, but if you steal from many, it’s research.

4. Having a commonplace book does not mean that you will use everything in your commonplace book.

5. Don’t be afraid to learn from your own typos.

6. Don’t shy away from a striking phrase, even if it has been promoted into a cliché.

7. When you collect phrases, points, metaphors, and what-not in this way, you are, as Cicero used to put it, loaded for bear.