I pray that you would cleanse my heart this morning from the failures of yesterday, and that you would restore me to a close fellowship with you. Help me to honor you in all of my decisions today, and grant me victory over the struggles that I return to time after time.

Lord, where my heart is hard this morning, I pray that you would soften it so that I can be shaped by you. Where my heart is shallow, I pray that you would help me grow deeper roots so that I won’t give up when things look like they’re falling apart. And where my heart is crowded, I pray that you would show me how to clear out space for you, so that our relationship doesn’t get lost in the clutter.

Father, grant me a heart today that will be sensitive to the leading of your Holy Spirit, and that will be fruitful for you. I want to hear your voice and understand it. Strengthen me to follow you wherever you lead.

I pray these things in the name of your son, Jesus.

Amen.

Jason summarizes three of the points (among others) as:

1. Lion chasers thrive in the toughest circumstances because they know that impossible odds set the stage for amazing miracles.
2. The reality is that nothing is too difficult for God.
3. God is always working behind the scenes, engineering our circumstances and setting us up for success.

In looking at #1 and #2, my first and most honest response is, sure, God can do anything, but will He? I think we recognize impossible odds as impossible precisely because they’re borne out the vast majority of the time. And amazing miracles are amazing precisely because they happen so infrequently. Most people diagnosed with terminal cancer pray for a miraculous healing. And most of them don’t receive it. Sure, going to heaven to be with God is “the ultimate healing”, but that’s not what they’re asking for in the middle of the struggle, is it?

Point #3 argues that God is always setting us up to succeed. But success in God’s divine plan rarely seems to parallel success as we naturally think of it. In fact, it often looks an awful lot like failure. Some of the most successful followers of Christ in history were regularly beaten and imprisoned. They suffered from poverty, hunger, disability, and disease. They lived their lives in apparent futility and were ultimately executed in various horrible ways by various despots. God didn’t shut the lions mouths. He didn’t deliver them from the furnaces. At least not in ways that the world could appreciate. They surrendered themselves to God, and they got tortured and killed.

Can I accept that? Can I completely trust in and surrender myself to a God who may have that sort of success planned for me? For my wife? For my children? A small voice in the back of my head says, no thanks, I can take better care of myself.

Accepting the offer of salvation is easy. Accepting the call to destruction is hard. Common sense tells me that if I chase enough lions, I’ll eventually get mauled and eaten. I’m trying to invest myself in God’s definition of success as opposed to the world’s, but it’s an ongoing struggle. I want to be able to say yes to Him, not just with my mouth, but with my whole heart.

Prayers appreciated.

I’m partnering with Jed to promote the first annual Give Something Away day (this Saturday, December 1st). You can read the list of suggested rules on his blog.

If you decide to participate, let one of us know what you got rid of. And while you’re clearing out some extra room in the closet or the garage, why not also clear out some extra room in your heart for the greatest gift ever given? I know I could do with a bit less clutter both inside and out. Let’s get started on the winter cleaning!

Honorable mentions go to Balloons Over Reno and Rotting Apple.

There’s something beautiful and poignant about these videos that’s hard to pin down (okay, beautiful with the exception of the “rotting stuff” category, which seems to have its own whole sub-community on YouTube). It’s more than just looking at things in a different way. It gets me thinking about big picture stuff, like the passage of time, and life, and the approach of death, and where we find Meaning and Purpose along the way.

Maybe these videos remind me that it’s all going faster than I think. That my life is just a drop or two in the stream of history. Whatever it is, they inspire me to make the most of the time that I have by simply loving the people that God has placed in my life. Investing in those relationships in whatever way the day calls for, with an eye toward eternity. What else is there that’s really worth the time?

                             BONDS
                Dr. Hasslein, when you asked the
                Male Ape where he came from, he
                answered: 'From your future'.
                Do you believe that?

                             HASSLEIN
                Absolutely. It is the only
                explanation.

                             BONDS
                But the-explanation itself needs
                explaining. Doctor, you've written
                learned dissertations on the Nature
                of Time. Could you explain, in
                terms that will be understood by
                less knowledgeable viewers, how a
                person or persons could travel from
                Time Future to Time Past -- or,
                indeed, vice versa?

                             HASSLEIN
                Time can only fully be understood
                by an observer with the godlike gift
                of infinite regression.

                             BONDS
                       (wincing)
                Could you please explain infinite
                regression?

48    INT. CONTROL ROOM

                             DIRECTOR
                       (to Technician)
                Roll the film.

CUT TO:
49    TIGHT SHOT - A LANDSCAPE PAINTING

      We shall later see that it is only the central part of
      a much larger painting, as we PULL BACK (when
      indicated), during:

                             HASSLEIN'S VOICE
                       (O. S.)
                Here is the painting of a landscape.
                But the artist who painted it says,
                - Something is missing. What is it?
                It is I myself who was a part of the
                landscape I painted.' So he mentally
                takes a step backward -- or
                'regresses' -- and paints...

                       (PULL BACK)

                ...a picture of the artist painting
                a picture of the landscape. And
                still something is missing. And that
                something is still his real self
                painting the second picture. So he
                'regresses' further and paints a
                third...

                       (PULL BACK)

                ...a picture of the artist painting a
                picture of the artist painting the
                landscape. And because something is
                still missing, he paints a fourth and
                fifth picture...

                       (BIG, SLOW, PULL BACK)

                ...until he has painted a picture of
                the artist painting a picture of the
                artist painting a picture of the
                artist painting a picture of the
                artist painting the landscape.

CUT BACK TO:
50    MASTER SCENE

                             BONDS
                       (blinking)
                It's enough to drive you mad.

                             HASSLEIN
                       (very seriously)
                Yes.

                             BONDS
                So infinite regression is--

                             HASSLEIN
                --The moment when our artist,
                having regressed to the point of
                infinity, himself becomes a part
                of the picture he has painted and
                is both the Observer and the observed.

Even Bonds has begun to sweat.

                             BONDS
                What, in that peculiar condition,
                would he observe if he were observing
                Time?

                             HASSLEIN

                He would perceive that Time is like
                a freeway with an infinite number of
                'lanes' -- all leading from the past
                into the future. But not into the
                same future. A driver in Lane 'A'
                may crash, while a driver in Lane 'B'
                survives. It follows that a driver,
                by changing lanes, can change his
                future.

Lovin’ it. So, here’s to changing lanes.

If you’re into freaky hybrids of funk, lounge, breakbeat, jazz, and downtempo, you can check out Quantic’s album The 5th Exotic at Quantic.org.

This may come as something of a shock to those readers who had no idea that the sprawling metropolis in British Columbia, Canada, had any competition at all.

But yes, there is a second Vancouver. A lesser Vancouver, if you will. A Vancouver that lives in every sense — including physically (in relative geographic terms) — in the shadow of the other. Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of it. I doubt that I would ever have heard of it myself if I didn’t live there.

The lesser Vancouver I speak of is found in the state of Washington, USA. It lives right on the southern border of the state and, in many ways, is really a suburb of it’s larger neighbor, the city of Portland, Oregon. (You can tell that you’re the suburb of a larger neighbor when your local news channels are really their local news channels. This can be frustrating during the election season when all the ads, and subsequently the election results, are for another state.)

In terms of population, the greater Vancouver is close to six times the size of the lesser. By the 2005 census numbers, Vancouver BC had a metropolitan area population of 2,208,300; Vancouver WA doesn’t technically have its own metro area (it’s part of the Portland metro area), but if you attribute the entire population of Clark county toward its total you get 403,766. A bit generous maybe, but it gives a sense of the scale.

At any rate, you can see that the lesser Vancouver is no slouch in terms of population, but it seems to have come up pretty dry in terms of global mindshare. It may have a sixth of the residents, but it certainly doesn’t receive near a sixth of the attention of its larger competitor. At the time of this writing, if you type in “Vancouver” at Google maps or Wikipedia you go directly to results for Vancouver BC. There are no intermediary disambiguation pages. They know that they can safely assume you mean the Vancouver in Canada.

And why not? Consider that one of these two Vancouvers is going to host the 2010 winter olympics. One of these two Vancouvers is currently home to an NHL hockey team, and formerly home to an NBA basketball team. One of these two Vancouvers ranks as the third most populated metro area in its country. In case you have to ask… no, we’re not talking about Vancouver WA here.

In the business world, if two companies had the same name, and one of those companies received virtually all of the media attention and traffic, the other company would wise up and change its name. But in the world of municipalities — at least in the case of Vancouver vs. Vancouver — this will never happen. Why? Because Vancouver WA has one thing on Vancouver BC. It’s the type of thing that people find very hard to let go of. The same type of thing which explains, against all logic, why Delaware goes on pretending that it’s a real and meaningful State, when it’s less than one third the size of the Seattle metropolitan area. You see, Vancouver WA was there first. It’s the “oldest permanent non-native settlement in the Pacific Northwest”, founded in 1825, and incorporated in 1857 — 29 years before the incorporation of Vancouver BC.

As any kid knows, you don’t give up something that you had first. Not ever.

And so, those of us that live here, in the lesser of two Vancouvers, will go on explaining to people that we live in the USA, rather than Canada. We’ll go on pretending that the confusion doesn’t bother us, that it really doesn’t matter, and that we don’t have even the slightest hint of an inferiority complex. We’ll go on, not even willing to think about a name change that might result in greater clarity.

Because we were here first.

And the name is ours, eh.

I look down at him, smile, and say, “Great, did you like it?”

“Yeah,” he says, “now I want to watch the bonus features.”

Uh huh. The bonus features. See, Levi is only four years old, and this stuff is already in his blood. It’s little moments like this one that I think give us some insight into the texture of generational shifts in our culture.

Sure, we as adults are comfortable users of DVD’s, and we enjoy all the conveniences that they offer, but we remember a time in the not-so-distant past when home video meant VHS tapes and strict linear progression through media (some of us even remember the time before that… when there was no such thing as commercial home video). Not so with my son Levi. DVD’s are the way movies have always been. Someday when he’s older and he hears about VHS tapes he’ll probably chuckle, the same way I did when I first heard about 8-track casettes.

It’s not that this changing of media formats means all that much in the greater scheme of the cosmos, but when you put it together with hundreds of other tangible little elements of the daily experience, you begin to see, in the accretion of all these things, the raw materials for a paradigm shift. Contributions to a new cultural vocabulary.

As my children and their peers grow older I want to be a good enough student of their cultural context that I can continue to understand, at least in part, the perspective that they’re seeing things from, and be able to communicate with them in the ways that they find most instinctively meaningful. There are some important things that I want to share with them. Ideas about life, and God, and the universe that I want to come across as clearly as possible.

And I happen to know of some nice bonus features that they might be interested in too.

Anyway, I was down in Oceanside visiting my cousin Shepard who was due to ship out for Army basic training in a couple weeks. We had just bought a hot dog for a homeless man who was hanging around outside a Wienerschnitzel, and we were headed to a little comic book shop that Shepard knew about. That’s when we saw her.

My instincts said she was an Entangler. You know: someone with an agenda… they’re looking to sell you something, or recruit you for something, and they’re willing to pursue it in the most direct and aggressive of ways. There are little tells that usually give an Entangler away: the locked-in eye contact; the artificial smile; the gathering up of breath for the spiel. I only had four days to spend with Shepard and I didn’t want to spend half of a day arguing with some kooky stranger on a street corner. She stepped towards me with the crafty look of a salesman and said, “Can I ask you a question?”

Uncharacteristically for me, I smiled, said “No,” and just blew past her. And that was the end of it.

And that was probably the best way to handle it. But this morning I was thinking that if I could go back it might be fun to handle it like this…

Yeah… so that concludes our little Walter Mitty fantasy for today.