Jeff Wofford

Book Business

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Sat, 03 May 2008 15:18:00 +0000

Christian book publisher Thomas Nelson laid off a tenth of their work force this week. Their president and CEO, Mike Hyatt, has been blogging about the decision. His candor and openness are quite refreshing—not to mention educational for aspiring authors like me. He gives us an glimpse into the tough inner world of book publishing.

The words "tough" and "book" don't belong in the same sentence. It's like putting Shirley Temple into a film about Jack the Ripper. As I read through Mike's posts, I realize that part of my anxiety about getting published comes from this tension. How do we marry the creative and practical sides of writing and selling books?

I might ask the question this way. Are books really about this:

Or are they really about this:

Of course the answer is that they're about both. You can't keep making books unless you make a profit. Yet nobody who chooses a career in publishing chooses it purely for the money—other industries will make you wealthier quicker. As Mike says, "It is partly about the money. Otherwise, we won't stay in business. But that is certainly not what gets us up in the morning."

So we don't want to say that the "good" side of publishing is the creative/intellectual side while the "bad" side of publishing is the practical/financial side. The two sides have to stick together. Divorce is not an option. You can't have one without the other.

Yet, from an emotional standpoint, when I imagine being a published author, it's not the money that gets me excited. It's the readers. It's the bookstores. It's the physical presence of the book itself.

Yesterday morning I spent 45 seconds sniffing C. H. Dodd's The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, which was published in 1932. The yellow pages are browning at the edges like an old daguerreotype. Dodd's commentary is fierce, but it smells sweet—literally, like a summer meadow.

My dad published a few books when I was a kid. I remember him bringing the galleys home—oversize pages with fine, typeset lettering—a sort of prototype for the book. Looking at them was like sneaking a glimpse into a secret world. They would be marked up in blue by a copy editor, who even noted things like indentions and headings and the location of page numbers—things no ordinary reader would ever know someone had fussed over. I hear publishers don't use galleys anymore. They've been cut adrift and left to bob in the wake of digital technology. Pity.

I love books, and I love reading—not just doing it, but imagining it done—the long, united centuries of paper and print and the people who have loved them. When I write a paragraph, I don't think about its market value. I think about its meaning, its function, its structure, its beauty or lack thereof.

But I know that to get published I must sometimes take off my wire-rim spectacles and don safety goggles, or even a helmet, and charge once more into the fray, and let slip the dogs of market analysis and pitch meetings and niggling contract terms. I have to make the beautiful sell.

It's tough straddling the worlds of books and business—one foot on land, the other on sea. You have no choice but to serve both logos and mammon.

Subconjunctival Posterboy

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:52:00 +0000

I am now the number one reference returned by Google for an image search on "subconjunctival hematoma". Go me!

Warning: The link above is not for the squeamish. I'm not kidding.

Writing Off Broadway

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 02:43:00 +0000

Writing is terrifying. It shouldn't be, but it is. I've got no kind of public, yet I can't stop wondering what people will think. I'm on no kind of stage, yet I've got stage fright. I'm already embarrassed about mistakes I haven't even written yet. Consequently, often when I sit down to write, I end up surfing the web—the modern symptom of writer's block.

I've tried various strategies for tricking myself into actually writing. One of my favorites is to dictate the first draft. I get myself driving on an unhurried freeway. I ask myself a question and pretend to be interested. Then I simply talk out my answer, capturing the results with a digital recorder. When I get home, I transcribe the recording, then edit with a crowbar and hacksaw. I've had pretty good results with this technique, believe it or not. Best of all, it gets me writing and I don't even feel it. It's like putting cough syrup in your kid's ice cream.

Yesterday I discovered another weapon in the war against writer's block. I call it the Planning Document-Draft Document Bait and Switch. PDDDBS, for short.

I found it by accident. I was working on a chapter for a book. I had created a blank document with the proper formatting (Times New Roman, 11 point font, nifty headers and footers) to act as fertile ground for the chapter. I then created—as a diversion from actually writing—a second document. This one was formatted in an "informal" way, with a sans-serif font and colorful headings. I would use it for planning and note taking.

Rather than switching back to the main document, I lingered in the planning phase a little while. I planned and thought and researched and took notes for half an hour. It helped, actually. It helped me understand the chapter I was about to write. In a flush of confidence, I saved the planning document and switched over to the "real" one. As I did so, I felt the footlights on the edge of stage blaze to life.

The cursor kept winking at me, like a vengeful prompter. I heard the deafening silence of the audience. And I crawled away to hide in my planning document.

That's when I discovered it: The PDDDBS Technique.

Underneath all the planning I created a new section called "How To Start?" Then I started.

Suddenly, I realized, I was writing, but I wasn't nervous.

I was all alone.

Nobody was looking.

I wasn't "writing," I was just "trying out ideas."

Best of all, the words appeared in a chummy sans-serif font. Even the style of the page told me I was home, out from under the spotlight.

I wrote a page or two. Then I read it, and it was okay. I copied it over to the real document. There was a smattering of applause from the audience, and it was enough to keep me writing through the end of the chapter.

Translation Sensation

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 22:07:00 +0000

I have just translated my first Hebrew passage and it has made me absolutely giddy. I'm embarrassed to admit that an academic exercise could fill me with such delight, but there it is. Up until this point, I've parsed individual words and translated single sentences. Today was first time I translated a whole block of the original Hebrew scripture.

The passage is Jonah 1:1–5, which we're studying in my second-semester Hebrew course at Dallas Theological Seminary. Part of what makes the translation such a pleasure is the story itself. Jonah has an amazing, vexing personality. His adventure is engrossing, profound, helpful, and hilarious, all at the same time.

Translating from the Hebrew brings color to each word. I discover that the word we translate "to sleep deeply" (1:5) can simply mean "to snore." I begin to see connections I hadn't noticed before. Jonah is an underachiever. Both God and the ship captain have to tell him to "get up!" People keep throwing things: God throws a wind upon the sea, prompting the sailors to throw their stuff overboard. Later, they'll cast lots, and then of course they'll chuck Jonah.

The star of the show is kind of a lovable nut. What is more comical—and yet disturbingly believable—than a prophet who thinks he can escape from God? What kind of weird mix of faith and rebellion would enable someone to sleep through the perfect storm?

But Jonah is more than a slapstick crank, and much more than a children's book character. The tension that drives him is one that drives me. On the one hand, he wants to serve people and bring them closer to God. On the other hand, he thinks God is too good for those people—and by implication, so is he. It's easy to hold contempt for those you're sent to serve. So when God speaks to Jonah, I try to keep my ears open.

After nine months of studying Hebrew, memorizing 400+ vocab words, learning Qal verbs and Piels and Hiphils and Hophals and myriad Weak verbs, it's a relief to finally apply that knowledge. I feel like a man who has been studying a map so long he can barely focus his eyes, until one day he is dropped off in a foreign city and discovers that he already knows how to get around.

New Game: Coffee Shop

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:08:00 +0000

I've just released a new flash game: Coffee Shop, available at ArmorGames.com. This summer I partnered with Daniel McNeely, who owns and runs ArmorGames.com, to release Phit. We had so much fun we decided to do it again, and Coffee Shop is the result. James Dalby's art and Chris Branscome's music really bring it to life. Enjoy.

Evergreen

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 15:41:00 +0000

In Texas, where I live, autumn comes through about one time in seven. Occasionally we'll get a beautiful, bright fall where the trees turn all sorts of colors before gracefully scattering their leaves. Usually the trees turn brown and drop their leaves overnight in a lump. I want to tell you a story about what happened one of those years when none of the trees wanted to put on a show, except one of them—and that one was an evergreen.

It was a cedar, in fact, and it stood in a forest of all kinds: oaks, walnuts, pears, hackberries, maples, willows, and pecans. Now cedars, as you know, never lose their leaves. They stay green all year round. But this particular cedar loved nothing better than to see the colors of fall. All through the scorching heat of summer she dreamed of a day when the north wind would bring frosty air down from the Rockies. Then the sun would shine bright from a clear, blue sky onto a festival of yellows and ambers, oranges and auburns, vermilions and russets and reds. She would shake out the dust from her limbs and breathe in the sweet air and feast her eyes on the colors all around her.

This particular autumn began as they all do, with a sudden sweep of cool air followed by three days of storms. The little cedar felt refreshed and happy. She rubbed her leaves in anticipation. But after a week or two, she began to notice that the other trees were only turning brown.

She went to the oaks and said, "Great oaks, autumn has come, yet you haven't turned beautiful colors. Why are you only turning brown?"

"Ah, little cedar," the oaks answered, "we haven't had enough rain. We need water to turn lovely colors, but our roots are dry and our mouths are parched and all we can do is turn brown."

The little cedar felt very sad for the oaks. Then she went to the pecans and said, "Mighty pecans, autumn has come, yet you haven't turned beautiful colors. Why are you only turning brown?"

"My goodness, little cedar," the pecans answered, "it's hardly worth it, is it? I mean, we do all that work to make a little splash of color, then all our leaves fall off as soon as a puff of wind comes along. Why go to all the trouble?"

The little cedar felt rather angry at the pecans. Then she went to the maples and said, "Beautiful maples, autumn has come, yet you haven't turned beautiful colors. Why are you only turning brown?"

"Well, little cedar," the maples answered, and they smiled condescendingly, "it's not exactly fashionable anymore, I dare say. Bright colors are well out this year—haven't you heard? Browns are so much more understated, don't you think—so much more sophisticated. We wouldn't be caught dead in the bright oranges and reds we wore last year." And they droned on like this for some time.

The little cedar felt bewildered by the maples. As the sun set, she sensed a frosty bite in the air that told her winter would soon arrive. Then all the trees would lose their leaves, and she would have to wait a whole year for the chance to see them turn again. The little cedar looked up to the budding stars and said, "Please, please let me see lovely autumn leaves before winter comes." And she fell asleep with tears dripping down her branches.

She awoke the next morning to the sounds of gasps and whispers. She looked around. The sky was blue, the air was crisp, and the forest buzzed with excitement. Yet everywhere she looked, the little cedar saw only brown, dry trees, and she wondered what had captured everyone's attention. Then she realized that what they were all looking at…was her.

She looked down at her limbs and saw that her own leaves had changed from dark green to all the colors of autumn: yellows and ambers, oranges and auburns, vermilions and russets and reds.

She shook with joy. She was very beautiful, and she reveled in the breeze and the sunlight. The whole forest admired her—even the maples—and she gloried in her colors for the rest of the autumn.

The Cassandra Coin

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 06:00:00 +0000

I propose the formation of a National Mint for the production of a new kind of currency: the Cassandra Coin. Don't misunderstand: this is not a new kind of dollar. In fact, the Cassandra Coin has no monetary value. Its value lies in its ability to grant power to individuals who know what's best but nobody listens to them. Here's how it works.

Let's say you make an insightful prediction—for instance, that your company's investment in rubber tree tea will eventually prove unprofitable, or that your CFO with the gambling habit will be indicted for embezzlement in the next six months. Of course, everyone around you ignores your prediction, and in the old days you would have no recourse but to watch your organization pirouette into flames.

In the new system I am proposing, you have another option. First, you write down your prediction and send a copy to the Prophecy Copyright Bureau. The Bureau registers your signature, notes the date of submission, and safeguards your prophetic document. Then, when your prediction comes true, you present the registered prophecy to the organization to which it applied. That organization is bound by law to immediately and publicly present you with a framed (but easily accessible) Cassandra Coin.

What good is it? Initially, its chief value is bragging rights. Perhaps it hangs on your cubical wall for a month or two, mute testimony to your smug (though empty) self-satisfaction. Yet it does not remain there, because the Cassandra Coin is far more than a mere symbol. The glory of the Cassandra Coin lies in the power it grants you, its bearer.

Legally, throughout the nation, the Cassandra Coin gives you the right to exchange it for immediate—albeit temporary—dictatorial authority. That's right. Any company, any organization must honor this rule, that wherever you are, whenever you choose, you may exchange the Cassandra Coin for the right to make a single high-level decision. The organization is bound to carry out your wish no matter how outlandish it may seem. Your invocation of the Cassandra Coin buys the right to enact a single, crucial decision: by fiat, without consultation, no questions asked.

And what could be more sensible? After all, your ownership of the Coin certifies that at least one of your prior insights went unheeded. You expressed your concerns for the good of the group, as a responsible employee, as a conscientious citizen. Yet they laughed at you, called you a naysayer, marginalized you, and beat you down. Then you watched helplessly as those in power sent your organization careening into the ground. What could be more equitable or fair than that you would be granted the opportunity to prevent a similar disaster?

The Cassandra Coin embodies that idea and makes it a concrete reality. It grants you the authority to do what you were denied in the past: to steer your leaders away from horrific blunders.

Note that a crucial feature of the Cassandra Coin is its transferability from place to place. When predictions go unheeded, destruction often follows. This means that the prophet who foresaw destruction often ends up in a new organization. When the new organization heads down a dangerous path, the prophet has even less power than before, with even less seniority and reputation. The Cassandra Coin counteracts this effect by empowering its bearer nationwide. The death of your former company no longer means the death of the respect you deserve for predicting it.

The Cassandra Coin I'm proposing offers many benefits. The benefit to you is that it frees you from the torture of endlessly foreseeing catastrophes you are helpless to prevent. The benefit to your organization is that they receive a timely, wise intervention from a person who has—with certifiable accuracy—foretold doom in the past. The benefit to our nation is healthier, more successful, less error-prone businesses, administrations, and institutions. Overbearing, overpaid, hubris-filled leaders everywhere will now be subject to immediate—if momentary—correction at their most critical moments, by exactly those people most qualified to accurately adjust the course.

To Print or To Post?

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 20:15:00 +0000

On Wednesday I wrote the article friends have told me to write for years. It tells how I suffered from depression between the ages of eleven and thirty-one, and the miraculous way I came out of it. I know a lot of people who struggle with depression, though not a lot of them talk about it openly. I know very few people—in fact, I can't think of any offhand—who have gone from deep depression to zero depression as I have. So I believe my story has value. I want people to read it. I want as many people as can be helped by it to read it.

You could be reading it right now, except that I haven't posted it here. Why not?

Answer: I don't know why not. Frankly, I'm wavering between the worlds of print and online publication. Come, waver with me a spell.

Print

Print publication has several advantages over online. If I publish my article in a magazine, for instance, they might pay me. Now with an article on depression, payment seems like a piddling issue—rather mercenary, really. If I were writing about trends in men's haberdashery over the past 50 years I would expect to be compensated. But writing an article about depression is a giving thing, a healing thing. I'm not above taking money for my work, but if money were the only obstacle it would be no obstacle at all.

Generally speaking, print magazines pay and websites don't (or do only through indirect means—more on that later). All other things being equal, payment is an advantage of print.

Clout is another big advantage. If you tell someone, "I just had an article published in Relevant magazine," they know you've achieved something special. If you tell someone, "I just posted an article on my blog," they say, "So'd my mother." Online "magazines"—with a few exceptions—don't fare much better than blogs in the Great Chain of Clout that society tacitly upholds. I've had a few articles on Relevant's site that didn't appear in the magazine. Appearing on their site is worth something, but not as much as appearing in the paper version. Print is your respectable older uncle—he's getting a bit past it, but he's got moneybags and he still talks the best game in town.

Print magazines and newspapers will continue to diminish in the face of online competition. Books, however, will remain unthreatened by their online variations for a long time. I want to publish books, and that means I have to impress book publishers. So I care about where my articles appear.

Circulation can be an advantage of print. Many magazines have tens or even hundreds of thousands of readers. Though not every reader is guaranteed to read every article, if you get an article into a magazine, you've got a shot at thousands of eyes. In my own experience, blog posts rarely receive as many as 1,000 readers. So all but the most popular blogs reach fewer people than magazines do.

I can't ignore print. The promise of payment, clout, and circulation make me want to keep trying to get my articles into magazines. But there's more to this story than meets the eye.

The Few, The Proud

Magazines sound great until you realize how few there are. Last spring I took a class in journalism. Our first assignment was to identify potential markets for our work. I had always believed there were hundreds of magazines that might publish my writing on Christian topics. In truth, there are somewhere between two and six.

That's because the vast majority of magazines are highly specialized. If I was a Seventh Day Adventist I could shoot for the Seventh Day Adventist magazine, but I'm not so I can't. If I was interested in writing sermons for busy pastors to copy and pass off as original to their hapless congregations, I could target one of several magazines that specialize in this racket, but I'm not so I won't. If I were a graduate of any of a number of universities or seminaries, I could get published in their magazines, but I'm not so I can't. If you take a list of all the Christian periodicals in existence, then scratch out the ones that are exclusive to certain group memberships, that feature highly specialized kinds of writing, that have very small circulations, or that are just plain weird, the resulting list consists of about ten magazines. But then each of these are specialized as well. I could write for Today's Christian Woman—I could! An article on depression, for instance—but normally my thoughts don't significantly cross paths with TCW's editors. Christianity Today is not highly specialized, but good luck getting published there. The CT editors have to actually watch you being circumcised in order to consider you for publication. By a certified freemason. It's in the masthead.

So for me that leaves Relevant—which is right down my alley, actually—New Man, Discipleship Journal, and uh... well, those.

If my mission in life were to see my articles in top-tier magazines, I would find a way. I would figure out what lower-tier magazines want and write that. Then once I had accumulated some under-clout I would cash it in to get the attention of top-tier magazines, figure out what they want and write that.

Here's the rub: I don't care. I am not a journalist. I am not even a writer. I'm a person who lives and thinks and stares and studies and teaches and thinks some more. My words are the polished poop of those activities. If I see a compatibility between what a magazine wants and what I like to think about, I'm happy to find a compromise there and write something suitable for the magazine. But I can't find the motivation to climb the writerly ladder, churning out whatever is needed in a broad area of interest just to see my articles in print every few months. I like to set my own agenda for what I think and write about.

My desire to follow my own muse in writing combined with the small and specialized world of print magazine publishing means I'll only get published rarely, if at all. There are simply too many constraints. Thus the appeal of the online world, where constraints are all but missing.

Democratic News Aggregation

If I decided to publish my article on depression online, it would take me about ten minutes. That's quite a bit faster than the several months it typically takes with a print publication. I would post it to my blog, then advertise it via reddit and Digg. Even if the article was absolute rubbish, I could bank on at least twenty visitors reading it in the first hour. If those visitors liked it they would upvote/digg it, ensuring its propagation to more visitors. Potentially, tens of thousands of visitors could catch wind of the glory of my article and, within the space of a few hours, flood my site to read it.

The impact of democratic news aggregation services (like reddit and Digg) on publishing is nothing short of revolutionary. I've been with the web since NCSA Mosaic; I've seen lots of nifty fads come and go; I am not one to wax lyrical on the Power of the Internet. But democratic news aggregation (DNA) is really something special. The word "Gutenberg" wants to slip in here, but I'll avoid the cliche. Point is: DNA fundamentally improves the way idea-producers move their ideas to idea-consumers.

In the past, when an idea-producer (for instance, a writer of an article like myself) wanted to get his idea out into the world, he had to go through one of a relative few idea brokers: newspapers, magazines, book publishers, TV networks, record labels, art dealers, film studios, game publishers. These idea brokers did everything. They screened out "unsuitable" ideas (though their idea of "unsuitable" might not match yours). They picked out the "best" ideas. They packaged them up with other ideas as well as paid advertising, then marketed and sold the package to consumers.

This isn't such a bad system—after all, the world lived with it for 500 years—but it certainly had its problems. It put a great deal of power in the hands of a few to decide what the public should and shouldn't see. But speaking more sympathetically, it left brokers with an incredibly difficult job. In a world where thousands of great ideas are spawned every day amid millions of inferior siblings, idea brokers had to constantly pick through the muck to find the stars. I'm told book editors go through hundreds of book proposals per week, yet only publish a few a year. Record company A&R reps comb through dozens of CDs a day, most of them ear-splitting rubbish.

So consumers lost because idea brokers often made bad—sometimes pernicious—decisions. Idea brokers lost because they were constantly awash with crap. And idea-producers lost because they discovered they were Legion—each of them a single, tiny, humiliated voice among millions.

The arrival of sites like reddit and Digg announced the death—or at least the gradual marginalization—of this system. It's the old strategy of dumping the middleman. Actually, in this case the middlemen didn't entirely disappear. Rather, they were replaced by software that distributes the task of sorting through muck to hundreds of willing consumers, effectively promoting them to micro-editors. Now it's not the magazine editor that decides what gets published, but an ad-hoc focus group of readers momentarily formed to evaluate articles. If they like an article, the software shows it to a wider group, and so on and on. If they don't like it, it dies on the vine.

There are major societal advantages to this system (though risks as well—subject for another post, I think). When voters are the media, they can no longer complain about media bias. But as an idea producer I benefit from this system as well. Before DNA services came along, when I posted a blog article I could only hope that a search engine found it and popularized it. This almost never happened, at least to me. Now I can submit my articles to DNA services and receive an instant, fair assessment of the article's appeal to ordinary readers. If people like it, they come. The more people like it, the more come.

The Joy of DNA

Back in March I posted an article on Paul's use of the word skubala in his letter to the Philippians. I sent it to reddit on a whim, and within hours it had received over 200 votes and 20,000 visits. Reddit readers tend to be atheist Bible-bashers and they liked hearing that the Bible contains the word "shit." Many of them also liked the deeper message about legalism and grace. They upvoted and left comments. The article found its public.

How else would that article have gained a readership? A Christian magazine editor would have roasted me on a stake rather than published it. A secular editor simply wouldn't have cared. But readers wanted the article, and reddit helped them find it. That's the promise of DNA services in a nutshell.

When my article on skubala went large, I enjoyed some of the benefits of print. Twenty-thousand readers is good circulation, even by print standards. I gained a little advertising revenue, which meant I got paid (though very little). But there were other benefits that print couldn't have offered.

When visitors read my article they came to me. That meant I could watch their traffic patterns and statistics. My site, not a magazine, gained their praise: if they bookmarked my article, they bookmarked me. They read other articles I'd written. I was the publisher; I was the host; I gained direct contact with readers.

Best of all, visitors could comment on my article, giving me instant feedback on how it struck them, what they thought and liked and hated. With a print article I might get a few letters to the editor over the course of several months. With my blog post I got scores of comments in a matter of hours. For anyone who cares about how his writing impacts readers, comments are priceless, and print really can't compete in this area.

How Cool is Democracy?

None of my subsequent posts have done nearly as well as my article on skubala. In the last couple of months my articles have received between 60 and 400 views each.

I value those individuals who do read my site. But honestly, when you've had 20,000 visitors in a single day, 400 a month is a bit of a letdown. This is the downside to DNA services: they're too damned fair. You only get mind-blowing numbers of visitors when you blow visitors' minds.

That's OK. I'm not asking for people to read my stuff against their will. I expect myself to write well in order to be read. But there is a problem with DNA services that is interesting, and it's part of the reason I haven't completely dismissed print.

The problem with democratic news aggregation services is that they are democratic, and democracy sometimes sucks. Take reddit for instance. Although reddit is democratic, the "society" of reddit—the body of voters registered with the service—is highly idiosyncratic. Reddit users tend to be left-wing, technical, and anti-Christian. Articles with a rightward (or even centrist) slant tend to get hammered. Articles about Christianity tend to do badly (unless they're ridiculing it). The trick with my skubala article, though I didn't intend for it to come across this way, was that the article seemed at first glance to bash Christianity, but actually had a strongly Christian message.

I write about Christianity quite a bit, and what I've found is that the democracy of reddit, as well as Digg, doesn't care to read about Christianity. Articles on Christian topics generally do badly on DNA sites. If Christians use reddit and Digg, they don't use them to find Christian material.

My particular niche is Christianity, but anyone writing about niche topics will do poorly on DNA sites. The greatest writer in the world on the topic of quilting will never get a hearing on reddit even if thousands of reddit users love quilting. It's what you learned in Civics class: majority rules, minority rights. With DNA services, the majority rules. But there is no court system, no defense for the niche. The minority is crushed.

"So," you think, "why don't Christians, quilters, and other freaks open their own reddit/Digg-like sites to help them find good articles?"

Well, it turns out there are two such sites for Christians: GospelShout and blogs4god. I have two problems with these sites. First, although I often write about Christianity, I rarely write specifically for Christians. When I post to a Christian-only site, it feels like self-ghettoization of the worst kind, hiding my work from non-Christians and lite-Christians who would enjoy the work but would never visit such places.

Second, these sites are beyond lame. A front page story on Digg often receives more than 1,000 votes. Front page stories on GospelShout typically have three—you heard me—three votes. Blogs4god does slightly better, with leading stories gaining as many as six or seven votes. These sites get little traffic.

Welcome to My Pain

I began this article by inviting you to waver with me over the question of whether to send my article on depression to print magazines or to post it to my blog. Here's another data point: I actually sent the article to an editor at New Man on Thursday. He said he loved it, but turned it down because it was written from a first person rather than third person perspective. It's not in the style of his magazine. Hey, that's fine; I value stylistic consistency.

There's one other magazine that it would be great for: Relevant. Except that I've sent quite a few good ideas to Relevant over the last several months, and though I've published a few pieces through their online arm, their print arm has never even replied to my queries. Maybe they'd reply this time. In a month. Or three. Or when we see each other in heaven. Or I could just post the article and send it to the DNAs in minutes. I reckon it could get some traction on reddit, maybe. Unless it's deemed too spiritual. In which case it will stagnate on my site, blessing the occasional lonely wanderer who happens to run across it via a Google search for "depression miracle dark.crystal".

What do you think? Any advice? I'm all ears.

John Reed: Pastors' Pastor

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 15:47:00 +0000

The Jot & Tittle (DTS's student newspaper) published this profile of Dr. John Reed in its summer edition. Here it is for your online viewing convenience.

John Reed hesitated as he stared into the mirror—somehow, he had forgotten how to shave. He dressed, then wandered into the living room. His daughter Beth phoned, but he couldn't put a sentence together. Sensing something was wrong, Beth raced home and took him to the emergency room. Then a seizure gripped him—Reed, 80 years of age, was in real danger. "I was on the edge. It had to be a matter of hours," he recalls. The surgeons operated on his brain, finding and repairing a ruptured vessel that had pressurized his brain cavity with blood.

Two weeks later, he greets me at the door of the house he has shared for thirty years with his wife Erris. He shakes my hand and leads me to a chair. I watch, surprised, as he lifts a nearby table and lamp and shifts them out of the way, then sits in the chair opposite. It's hard to believe this man came near to death so recently. His recovery seems miraculous.

Hundreds of friends around the world—many of them pastors—prayed for him in the days following his seizure. You may never have heard of John Reed, but you've heard of some of the pastors he trained: Joe Stowell, Timothy Warren, Ramesh Richard, Tony Evans, David Jeremiah—the list goes on. "No one knows the name 'John Reed,'" says former student Greg Jenks, "but when his daughter Becky died a few years ago, attending the funeral was a Who's Who of evangelical ministry."

Reed worked as a professor in the Pastoral Ministries department at Dallas Theological Seminary from 1970 to 1993, spending much of that time as chairman. Now he leads the Doctor of Ministry program, continuing to train both new and experienced ministers.

Dr. Tony Evans, who now pastors the 7,500-member Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship, says Reed had a profound influence during his years in seminary. "Dr. Reed was the first person to welcome us when we came to DTS in 1972," he says. The seminary had only admitted three African American students up to that point, and Reed gave Evans a much-needed sense of belonging. "He was a great encouragement," says Evans. "He added heart to a lot of the truth I was learning."

Jenks describes Reed as a pastors' pastor. "John is known for his insight as a mentor and encourager. He has the uncanny ability to know what's going on in your life without having to ask. He knows how to bring you along without being too direct."

Derrick Jeter, whom Reed mentored in the early '90s and who now works at Insight for Living, agrees. "He was the proverbial iron fist in a velvet glove—he gave tough and pointed criticism but in a way that made you want to accept his critique," he says. "I always think when I talk with Dr. Reed, this must have been what it was like speak with Jesus."

Reed's success as a pastor of pastors has made him one of the most influential and beloved figures in evangelical ministry. Perhaps his speedy recovery is due, in part, to the many Christian leaders who, in the weeks following his seizure, let God know they can't afford to lose him.

Confronting Limitations

I ask Reed how he got started in ministry. His answer: "When I was young, I was very shy. People made me uncomfortable. But when I was 18, I experienced a call to ministry. It came about one winter, sawing lumber. My dad was a very quiet person. We would go to the woods in the morning and he would say, 'Good morning,' and at the end of the day he'd say, 'Let's go to the barn.' We didn't talk. It left me with a lot of time to think. And as I thought, I felt a compulsion to ministry."

But Reed faced a serious barrier: stage fright. Whenever he got in front of an audience, his knees shook and his whole body trembled. He decided to face up to this limitation and conquer it, so he looked for opportunities to get in front of audiences. At Cedarville College he got a job introducing and closing a TV program called Chalk Talk. "We never did any retakes. And after two years, I was totally relaxed and free in front of a camera. I'll look in the big blue eye anytime."

He also worked to develop his preaching skills. In churches where he spoke, he asked individuals from the congregation for feedback. One of the things they told him was that he needed to smile more. "I had to learn to express joy through my preaching," he says. He became a student in rhetoric, eventually earning his doctorate in communication.

This once-shy boy shepherded churches in Indiana, Ohio, and Texas for 37 years, ending up as senior pastor of Sherman Bible Church, which flourished under his leadership. Then he shifted into the role of seminary professor, helping to train new generations of pastors and preachers.

His love for the pastoral office is infectious. "I could listen to sermons day after day and week after week. I love working with people, bringing them on, encouraging them. I've been professor and I've been pastor, so I know them both. But the power is in the pastor of the Lord's church. That's where the influence is."

Overcoming Inferiority

Reed's battle with stage fright was only the first in his campaign to overcome his limitations. Despite his easy, confident exterior, a sense of inferiority has haunted much of his life. When he came to Dallas Seminary in 1970, Reed found himself alone, isolated, and intimidated by fellow professors who had graduated from the seminary and knew the original languages intimately. "I'd see S. Lewis Johnson and Bruce Waltke come into chapel with their Greek and Hebrew Bibles bound together, then get up and preach straight out of the original languages! I felt unworthy."

In his early years at Dallas he slipped into depression. "One Saturday night, I was driving home, picking out a bridge abutment to drive my station wagon into, and I realized I was suicidal. I told Erris, and it scared her. There weren't any counselors then—no chaplain—and I had nobody to talk to because I didn't know who I could trust." He realized he had to analyze his situation and find a way out of the darkness.

Then it hit him. The seminary had hired him to train pastors, not to expound the ancient languages. He was good at what he loved to do, just as other professors were good at what they loved to do. Their expertise complemented rather than overshadowed his.

Though the crisis passed, he continued to feel inferior. "The faculty would meet every Thursday afternoon for one or two hours. I was so frightened of those people, and I'd just sit there. If I ever said anything in that meeting, I would have prayed about it, thought about it, written it down—and I got a reputation for being wise." Reed laughs. "I've never told them that I was intimidated, not wise."

Have these feelings of inferiority ever disappeared? "It never goes away. It never, never goes away. It's usually my first impulse—all I know now is how to check it. I am inferior, I just don't want anybody to know it."

Close to the Edge

I ask him about the seizure, his brush with death. "I had to lie on my back for three and a half days and let the rest of the blood drain out. It was a horrible experience. There was no pain—just the restraint: I can't sit up, I have to lie just like this." He stiffens to show the discomfort.

When did he realize he had come close to dying? "When my doctor said, 'You were pretty close to the edge, John.' I was shocked. I thought, 'Boy I sure have left things a mess.'"

Is he afraid of dying? "I'm ready to go. I don't have any problem with it. My daughter died in 2002 of brain tumors. I thought about her when I was lying on my back. No, I don't fear death at all, but it was premature for me.

"I'm okay. I'm not depressed. I'm a happy person. I enjoy life. My father lived to ninety-nine and a half, so I'm targeting one hundred and ten."

A Pastors' Pastor

Reed looks forward to writing Civil War novels after retiring from seminary. But I have a hard time believing he will ever fully abandon his passion for cultivating Christian pastors. As Derrick Jeter says, "He is one of the few men I would consider a great soul—loving his Lord and his students more than himself, committed to training excellent preachers of the gospel for the glory of God." Since hearing God's call in the stillness of a winter forest, he has fought through his limitations to become the finest of pastors' pastors. Training fellow shepherds is deep in his soul.

Now he leans forward and fixes me with his eye. "What's God calling you to?" he asks, then leans back in his chair. Before I can answer, he sets the hook: "Or does God still talk to people? Do they get quiet long enough to hear Him?"

Good Game

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 14:48:00 +0000

Relevant published my article How Video Games Taught Me about God this week on their online portal. It appeared there in an abbreviated and sanitized form. For the full, raw, uncut version, read on.

Let's make a game. Let's you and I sit down together and invent our very own video game. Then we'll show it to our friends, put it up on a website, and people all over the world will play it.

What sort of game should we make? Should we design a strategy game, a puzzle game, a role-playing game, a massively multiplayer game—yeah, how about a massively multiplayer game? Let's make something that will bring people together and help them connect.

What should we put in our game? What features can we think up that promote relationships between players?

First we need a way for people to talk. We'll add a chat window so players can type messages to each other. But relationships take more than words. Let's allow players to choose their faces and expressions. That way they can express their personalities and emotions: solitary or sociable, grumpy or jolly.

Now players can communicate, but they need more to do than stare at each other and talk. They need activities. Let's make it so they can build things: statues, houses, machines—anything. Each player will start with a few parts that they can stick together—bricks, wheels, motors, axles, windows, gears. They can combine their parts with other players' to build bigger and better things than a player working alone could ever make. A single player could build a unicycle, but a couple of players could build a bike, and a team of players could build a bus. This sounds good—our design begins to take shape.

Will Wright, the brilliant designer of Sim City, The Sims, and Spore, defines a game as "a series of interesting decisions." Our design already meets his definition. By giving players building blocks and letting them put them together in a variety of combinations, we've envisioned a world that rewards ingenuity. Some players will team up to build artwork—replica of the Statue of Liberty, anyone?—others to build functional things like shopping carts and bulldozers, others to build instruments of destruction like battering rams and catapults, and others to run markets for rare parts or handy devices. I imagine a noisy, exciting, talkative world full of players making, using, and trading things. We have ourselves the core of a good game.

You and I have just done what I do for a living. I develop video games. I helped make Ultima Online, Brothers in Arms, Halo PC, and Phit. If you haven't played one of my games, ask your nephew—he probably has.

Christians often ask me why I—a Christian—would work in a godless, immoral, child-corrupting industry like game development. Not wishing to disappoint, I give them the usual excuses: to shine light in the darkness, to fight the corruption from within, to bring the gospel to geeks and artists. The real answer is more complicated. For me, making games is an exercise in experimental theology.

We Create Worlds

When I started my career twelve years ago I worked for Origin Systems, developer of Ultima Online. Origin's slogan boldly asserted, "We Create Worlds." We loved that slogan; it captures the power and allure of making games. In a very real way, game makers fashion worlds like little gods would.

The word "game"—with its offhand, childish overtones—fails to capture what games really are: virtual worlds. Game designers create vivid, living places. You can visit them, explore them, even live in them. Not long after we released Ultima Online in 1997, we discovered that many players spent upwards of 12 hours a day, every day, inside the game world. We heard of divorces caused by players' gaming addictions. We had created a world that appealed to many players more than the real world did.

The Good Game

As I design games, I keep rediscovering how God's world resembles a well-designed game. Sound ridiculous? J. R. R. Tolkien, that greatest of modern mythologists, once described God as the ultimate Myth-Maker. God, he said, authored the True Myth. Like any myth, the True Myth has plot, events, characters, heroes, and villains. Yet it lives and breathes: you and I dwell in its pages. In much the same way, the real world resembles a game. It is the Good Game, designed and programmed by the ultimate Designer.

How does the real world resemble a game? A game poses challenges, leading players into interesting decisions. Likewise, the real world confronts us with choices and responds to our decisions. Video games have instruction manuals and strategy guides to help players excel. Likewise, God has provided us with the Scriptures to teach us the objectives, rules, and hints (and even some of the cheat codes) to help us excel in the Good Game. The mastermind behind Ultima Online, Richard Garriott, entered his own game as a player named "Lord British." Similarly, the mastermind behind the Good Game entered as a player named Jesus Christ.

A Series of Interesting Decisions

As Game Designer, God has total control over every element of his Game. If he says the sun will shine, it shines. If he says players should blink every few seconds, they blink. If he wants to teleport a player named Philip, Philip goes zipping through space. But in a game—unlike a book or movie—players should have some control. Their choices matter. Much of the skill of game design lies in crafting rules that limit what players can do while granting them freedom. The Nintendo character Mario can jump high, but only so high. He has power within limitations. We see the same principle in God's Game. He grants us, his players, control within the boundaries he defines.

Because players have freedom to do what they want, game designers influence players in indirect ways. A good designer suggests what players should do, rather than forcing them. For instance, many games flash the health bar when your health gets low. This warns you of danger but leaves you free to ignore it: you can carry on picking up bonus points if you choose to take the risk. In God's Game, hunger has a similar effect. By requiring us to eat, God wakes us up and gets us focused on the world around us. We choose when and what to eat, but God's Challenge of Hunger puts the choice in front of us. Without hunger, we would spend our lives yawning and daydreaming—why bother getting out of bed? Hunger lets us know from the opening moments of the Game—from our first seconds of life—that we have something at stake, that we have to play to win.

We all know the rule that nobody lives forever. Death horrifies us, yet serves a good purpose: it tells us we cannot win God's Game through material gain. With one, simple rule, God makes clear that health and wealth fall short as the currency of success—even the healthiest and wealthiest players die and decay. Incredibly, many players ignore this basic, undeniable truth. Jesus' parable of the rich fool who toils for wealth only to lose it with his life illustrates what happens when we forget the Challenge of Death (Luke 12:16–21).

The Challenge of Sex

More than any other game element, the Challenge of Sex advances God's desire to teach players how to love. Yet our distorted views of sex blind us to the genius of its design.

Game designers will tell you that if you want players to work together, you have to entice them. Players prefer to work alone unless cooperation pays off. To promote cooperation, designers give players complementary abilities. In a role-playing game, for instance, archers excel in long-range fighting but succumb to close-range attacks, whereas swordsmen excel in close-range fighting but succumb to long-range attacks. To survive in the widest variety of fights, archers and swordsmen wisely team up. By designing each type of player with strengths and weaknesses, designers encourage players to join forces.

God's strategy for cultivating relationship follows a similar principle. He begins by making half his players male and the other half female—two complementary types. He rewards physical contact between these types with orgasm—the greatest immediate pleasure his creation has to offer. This gives an immediate incentive for every player to connect with a player of the opposite sex. On its own, the thrill of orgasm fails to ensure relationship, but it does get players focused on each other—a move in the right direction.

Next, God attaches the process of childbearing to the sex act. Producing children offers another of the greatest rewards in the Game, and both males and females naturally want children. God designs children to need protection and training, a difficult challenge for parents. This challenge brings players into real connection with their mates: players who want the best for their children must commit to work together with their mate, communicate about their children's needs, and agree on difficult choices for nearly twenty years. A couple pursuing these challenges moves toward true relationship.

Yet men and women differ so greatly, not only physically, but in appetites, outlook, and psychology. God designed this challenge too—not to frustrate our relationships, but to perfect them. The tension between men and women rests on a key imbalance. While both a man and a woman can enjoy the sex act, the woman carries the baby.
Pregnancy—the very thought of it—gives the woman a different perspective from the man. For her, a single moment of closeness can transform her body and change her life. She needs help raising a baby and wants a man who will stick with her. This need for commitment leaves her yearning for deep personal connection before, during, and after sex. The man, with less at stake, takes a more immediate approach. Instinctively he knows he can enjoy a woman, then leave her, so he needs less emotional connection. Yet he benefits just as she does from raising healthy children. Both the man and the woman enjoy the benefits of children and consistent sex only if they commit to a life-long partner. They have similar goals but dissimilar outlooks. Through the design of our bodies, God has posed a challenge that guides us toward marriage and deep relationship.

We often respond to this design with resentment rather than joy. Men complain about reticent wives, women complain about overeager husbands, and the "battle of the sexes" rages on. But God never poses a puzzle we can't solve (1 Corinthians 10:13). He has created us to win at the game of love (Genesis 2:18–24). When we trust him, we see that God gives us these challenges to teach us intimacy. Because men and women look at sex differently, we fully enjoy the benefits only when we commit, communicate, compromise, and—ultimately—love one another. Like the best game designers, God keeps us engaged with wonderful rewards that help us press through the hardest lessons. We choose whether to keep on striving for success or to give up hope. But we must remember that God's Game Manual gives two key instructions: "Love the Lord your God" and "Love your neighbor." If we truly want to win God's Game, marriage provides the best training.

The Grand Design

The great Calvinist creed known as the Westminster Confession states the ultimate objective for players of God's Game: "To glorify God and enjoy him forever." God draws us, his players, toward that objective through hunger, which reminds us we have something at stake; death, which reminds us that victory lies apart from material gain; and sex, which challenges us to work out the puzzle of true love. They represent just three of the many features he designed to grow us and help us succeed. When we look at his world as a Game, we discover a beautiful design full of subtlety and wisdom, crafted for our growth and enjoyment.

The Long Dark Night of the Dead Living

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 22:05:00 +0000

In the churches I've been involved with over the last twenty years, I've seen a kind of mass deflation. It's not the churches that have gotten smaller, it's the people. Churchgoers attend less regularly. They give money less consistently. A smaller and smaller core serve a larger and larger clientèle of punters. When I meet people on Sunday mornings, many seem furtive and desperate. They avoid eye contact. They talk in generalities and stick to safe topics—"Awful hot out there," "Rangers seem to be picking up this year." They love Jesus, apparently, but won't talk about him. Sometimes I feel like I've landed in a spiritual horror movie where it's the good guys who have become the zombies, The Night of the Dead Living.

I see Christians struggling to explain what puts the "Good" in Good News. We each remember some poignant moment when we "accepted Jesus," "got saved," and our lives began to turn around. But for many of us, somewhere along the way, our lives stopped turning around. We stopped drinking but not smoking. We stopped sleeping around but not looking at porn. We stopped cussing around the office but not around the kids. We gave up greed but can't get out of debt. We learned how to love, but still got divorced. Where, we ask, is the abundant life that Jesus promised?

So now we drift in and out of our churches, hoping against hope that someone will have some answers. We sing worship songs we've long since stop feeling. We rub shoulders with brothers and sisters but the love of most has grown cold. Pastor's got lots of nice things to say, but they don't amount to the crowbar we need to pry our lives back into shape.

In the last ten years, a string of writers has diagnosed the church's problems and offered solutions for how to fix it. George Barna produces a wealth of data exposing the heart rate and blood pressure of a sickly North American Christendom and advances his own prescription for how to heal it. Brian McLaren and others have founded the emergent movement trying to get the church back in step with a rapidly changing culture. I've just been reading Reggie McNeal's The Present Future: Six Tough Questions for the Church, which exposes the moral and practical failure of the megachurch movement and pushes a "missional" approach. Some friends of ours are starting a family-based church that upholds the nuclear family as the center of God's work on earth. Christian pundits have advanced 101 suggestions for what is wrong with the church and how to fix it. My heart is drawn to these writers and ideas because I'm aching—really aching—about the condition of the church and yearn to see it revived.

But I don't believe that anyone has uncovered God's official new way for doing church—not Barna, not McLaren, not McNeal, not nobody. And I don't think we'll uncover what God has in store until we give ourselves the time to become truly empty.

Emptiness. That's my contribution to the discussion. Emptiness.

Solutionism

It's amazing how few people even realize something is wrong with the church. Those who do realize it often don't understand their own thoughts and feelings—"Why am I so unhappy on Sunday mornings?" "Why don't my Christian relationships seem as open as they used to?" "Why doesn't anyone else see what I'm seeing?" And when we tell others what we're feeling, we're often rebuffed.

A few years ago I pointed out to my then-pastor that our local church had become a revolving door where visitors left as quickly as they arrived. I suggested what we needed was not more churchgoers, but deeper churchgoers. His goal was to pastor a megachurch, and he wanted to crank up the appeal of Sunday morning music and sermons in order to draw in the masses. So he didn't appreciate it when I pointed out that finer showmanship on Sunday morning would only promote a thinner, shallower, less committed congregation, not a deeper one. Evidently something about this suggestion tweaked him because he reacted aggressively, accusing me of arrogance (a tactic he used many times against the many people who questioned him over the years that followed). His hostility shocked me, but since then I've seen it again and again. The last people to accept that the church is in trouble are the people who have the most to gain—or think they do—by carrying on with business as usual.

The result of this hostility is that we who question the health of the church quickly find ourselves alone and misunderstood. Our isolation opens us to many temptations: defensiveness, divisiveness, insensitivity, and—indeed—arrogance. I'm not saying Brian McLaren is arrogant and self-absorbed, but have you seen his book, A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished CHRISTIAN? You don't get that way—the way I'm not saying he is—without fighting for change alone and unsupported for a lot of years. When people do begin to agree with you, you feel vindicated and relieved—jubilant, even. You feel ready to find a solution and fix the problem—stat.

Loving a wounded church hurts. It hurts to see the church hurting. The hurt can draw us into desperation. So when we see a chance to help the church, our temptation is to jump at the solution without too much discernment. "Corporate model? Emergent? Missional? Family-based? Pick whatever buzzword you got and give it to me," we say. "Anything would be better than this."

But of course: no. Many things would be worse than this. And when we uphold solution X as God's New Way of Doing Church, we subscribe to something much worse: we love the solution rather than God or the church.

This is the catch with the umpteen new models for How Church Should Be. They are all about The Problem and The Solution. But there is no one problem and there is no one solution—there is only Jesus and his Bride struggling to love one another. When we forget that, we fall into solutionism and worship the fix rather than the Lord who gives it.

Say I'm a disenchanted middle-aged pastor. I've been reading church health books and going to conferences for years, struggling to grow my church and see it shine with spiritual vibrancy. Sometimes I see growth, yet our vibrancy continues to dim. Or a growth spurt occurs, but then diminishes as our members siphon off into the megachurch down the road. Finally, starving to see real ministry happen, I crack, declaring, "This is not how church was meant to be!"

I wander lost and alone, but finally come across a writer who says what I've been thinking all along. I'm not alone! I discover that just the sort of decay I've seen has happened in churches around North America. My writer-guru and I agree: the church is sick and needs healing. But what do we do about it?

It's at this point we make our mistake. We immediately search for The Fix—the New Way of Doing Church—and in our desperation quickly find it. When we do this, we skip a step, the all-important step of Emptiness.

Emptiness

When God takes someone from one place to another, he often brings them through a time of emptiness. This happened with my wife and I when our marriage was on the rocks. Our old way of relating to each other—the childish, selfish way we had practiced since dating—collapsed into resentment and bile. We desperately needed to learn how to love each other as God intended. Yet he let us wallow for a while in brokenness. After we had despaired of each other and turned our tearful eyes upon him, he didn't immediately give us bright feelings of delight and service for each other. He let us wallow, not out of cruelty, but in order to let our old ways fully drain from us. Only when we had become truly empty did he begin to build up the new ways.

Emptiness is part of transition. We see it in Christ's forty days in the desert, his time of preparation for ministry. We see it after the Exodus in the desert wanderings as the sands of Egypt fell away and God prepared Israel for the Promised Land. We see it in Job's despair, in Paul's years in Arabia, in John's isolation on Patmos.

God does not like to put his treasures into cluttered vessels. He likes to clean out his vessels—slowly, thoroughly—before depositing his treasures into them. It makes good sense for him to do this—the vessels would not gain by being stuffed with jumbled oddities, and his treasures deserve a fitting home. Yet it's very painful for us. When we give up our old ways—old habits, old ambitions, old securities—we're filled with longing for the new ways. Yet it's at that moment that God "deprives" us (so we think), and we begin our wait—the long dark night of the soul.

Jesus didn't burst from the tomb the moment he was placed into it. Between the crucifixion and the resurrection is the long silence of Jesus' death. What incredible terror and doubt the disciples must have gone through! But their emptiness no doubt had a purpose: to prepare them for the changes to come. Likewise, the Holy Spirit didn't come at the moment Jesus ascended. There is emptiness between the Ascension and Pentecost.

So it is with the church now in its dark and stumbling days. We're praying for rescue, for revival, for God to show us where he wants the Bride of Christ to go. But this transition is too big for an easy answer or one-size-fits-all solution. No doubt God is calling his church to be culturally relevant, missional, and family-oriented. But why stop there? Mightn't God call us to rediscover worship, or prayer, or spiritual gifts? Perhaps his "new direction" for the church will involve rampant persecution or widespread poverty in a collapsing global economy. I don't believe we'll experience God's revival until we empty ourselves of all expectation, of all solutionism.

Witnesses

It's funny, because the one model of church that everyone admires—the first church as illustrated in Acts 2—is the one model nobody is quite willing to follow. We all want to break bread in our homes and eat together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. But who wants to go to church every day? Who wants to form a commune in which we all sell our SUVs and pool our incomes? How do we really feel about our apostles freaking us out with miraculous signs on a weekly basis?

We admire the Acts 2 church, yet fail to emulate it, because it represents a reality we're too afraid to embrace: the reality of people who have truly been changed by Jesus. Christ calls us to be witnesses to who he is and what he has done. Being a witness is easy: you see something, you say you saw it. The problem many Christians have is that we haven't really witnessed Christ doing much. We've read about him but haven't experienced him. So we don't have much to say, and our Good News comes across to non-Christians (and ourselves) as neither new nor especially good.

We can talk about revival, but until we can talk about what Christ has done for us, what business do we have fixing his church? We don't need a new model for church. When we let Christ change our lives so deeply that we can't stop talking about it, we'll be living the new model. Then revival will come, and we won't be able to stop it.

Articles in Kindred Spirit and The Jot & Tittle

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 15:30:00 +0000

I've had a few print articles published this summer that I want to tell you about.

"Anchored in Deep Waters" is the article I co-authored with Eva Bleeker on the ongoing Katrina recovery effort, published in Kindred Spirit.

The seminary student newspaper Jot & Tittle published my profile on DTS professor John Reed a few weeks ago. On the back cover of the same issue is my cartoon, "A Seminarian's Guide to How to Hold Your Face on Campus." The Jot & Tittle is available only in print, but I'll post these items here when I can.

An Alternative Epilogue to Harry Potter [contains no spoilers]

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 15:56:00 +0000

A high, cold voice whispered in the gloom: a voice of shivers, a voice to raise the dead. "Come here," it said to something that lurked unseen in the room. "Come close to me, my pet. Tell me where you have been—what you have seen and done this night."

As if in response, a sinuous form emerged through the shadows. Silently it approached the owner of the voice, then climbed up to rest near his shoulder. Lord Voldemort's slitted eyes regarded those of the animal. As always, his eyes showed cruelty and purpose—yet now they also harbored something like fondness. He scratched the creature's chin with his long, sharp fingernails, and in moments a gentle purring emerged from the animal's soft throat.

"Nothing to report, Delilah?" said Lord Voldemort, his thin grey lips curved in a twisted grin. His gaze penetrated that of the small cat at his shoulder. It bent its chin into his palm, arched its back, and rubbed against his skeletal wrist, purring loudly. "Nothing to say, as usual. Stupid creature," he said, but the softness of his gaze belied an uncharacteristic lack of malice. "You are half the conversational partner Nagini was." His expression turned sour. "How I miss her," he said, gazing into the darkness. "But she shall be avenged. Yes, sorely avenged."

A figure appeared in the doorway opposite the place where Lord Voldemort sat. "Good morning," it called cheerfully, then moved swiftly through the room. Lord Voldemort glowered at the intruder as she passed, his eyes widening in threat. She was a teenage girl dressed in Muggle clothing, with a pale complexion, handsome features, and long, dark hair. She gazed back at him with a placid, slightly defiant expression, and walked through to the kitchen. "The Dark Lord hasn't had his coffee yet today, I see," she said. Voldemort's eyes widened even more, then he let out a snort of disgust and sprawled back on the throne. "Such insolence," he snarled, turning again to Delilah and continuing to scratch her chin. "At least you do not openly defy me." At that moment she turned her tail toward his face. He sniffled and spat out a mouthful of fur.

All at once another creature emerged from the door and raced toward Voldemort with blinding speed. Almost before he could respond, it burst into the air and landed on his chest with a deafening squeal. "Daddy!" it screamed, clinging to the front of Lord Voldemort's robes. "Give us a cuddle," the creature said, laying its head on his smooth, gray face. She was small and sprightly, the size of a house elf, and wore a bright yellow dress and a bow to match. Lord Voldemort's lip curled in an expression of bemusement and revulsion, but his hands slowly enfolded the girl's narrow back. "Good morning," the Dark Lord grunted. She popped up, put a finger to his nose—which was little more than a pair of slits—and stuck out her lip in a truculent expression. "You haven't forgotten your promise, have you?" Voldemort looked confused for a moment, then remembered something and turned his head away. "No, I haven't forgotten," he said, sinking lower in his chair. The small girl climbed down from his knees and ran toward the kitchen. "Good!" she said, and tossed her golden hair as she looked back at him. "I knew you wouldn't. I knew you'd keep your promise."

"You little liar," said the older girl. "You fretted all night. ‘Daddy won't forget will he?' ‘I just know he'll forget.' ‘He never keeps his promises.' Little whiner. I barely slept a wink."

"You're the liar," said the smaller one, taking a bowl from the cupboard. "I knew he'd remember. How could he forget? You're just jealous."

"Jealous of what?"

"Jealous ‘cause you know he loves me best," said the little one, smiling smugly.

The older girl's reply was cut off by Voldemort. "Silence!" he hissed, sitting forward in his chair. The kitten, startled, leapt down. Voldemort growled for a moment before calming himself. "Your squabbling annoys me," he said at last. "Tabitha, fetch me my coffee."

"Get it yourself," said the older girl, not bothering to look at him. Lord Voldemort's pupils grew large as he watched her pour milk into her cereal. His lip trembled, and his right hand twitched as if grasping for some object it dearly missed. At last Voldemort fell back once more, covering his eyes.

A small dog skittered into the room. It panted its way over to Voldemort and placed its paws on his leg. Then it spied the cat licking itself nearby, barked sharply and gave chase. Voldemort gave no sign of having seen the dog, but re-adjusted his robe—which resembled a velvet smoking-jacket—and crossed his legs. The cat soon climbed where the dog could not reach, and the dog lay down beneath it. The only sound was the occasional clink of spoons from the kitchen.

After a few minutes, a short, middle-aged woman came into the room, her head to one side as she fiddled with an earring. "Good morning, honey," she said to Lord Voldemort, then paused and looked him from head to toe. "Why aren't you dressed?"

"I only just arose," he replied.

She rolled her eyes. "Another late night, I guess?" she asked, and began collecting mismatched shoes from the floor.

Lord Voldemort grimaced and looked at the ceiling. "Violet, you have no idea the importance of this research in which—"

She interrupted. "Yeah, well we need to get a move on. Your suit's in the laundry room. I pressed it last night."

"Slytherin's Beard! I abhor these Muggle clothes you insist on donning—" Voldemort began.

"Don't curse, dear. If you want to look like some kind of hippy you can wear whatever nightclothes strike your fancy. But if you want to look respectable, I'd suggest you—"

Lord Voldemort's voice emerged at a shrill pitch. "You dare speak so to the Dark Lord? I have killed children for less offense than I have borne this morning in my own castle."

Violet looked taken aback, then cocked an eyebrow and said, "This is no castle, Your Deviousness. News Flash: We live in a terraced house in Islington. And you need to get ready now or we're going to be late."

"The Death Eaters would never have spoken so to me," said Voldemort, slumping his shoulders and staring into his lap.

"Your Death Eaters all bit the dust, as I recall, and your various other toadying lackeys moved on to greener pastures. We're the best you've got now, Your Worship, and the best you've ever had, some might say. Anyway, stop sulking and go shave your head. We have to be out the door in ten minutes."

Lord Voldemort continued to fume as Violet hurried the girls off to finish brushing their teeth. After a few moments, she reemerged carrying a small baby. "This one's done the dirty," she said, placing the child into his unwilling hands. "Why don't you hoover it up with your little wand thingy—makes a quick job of it. And get a move on!"

Lord Voldemort slowly lowered the baby onto its back, drew his wand and placed it on the floor while he fetched a fresh diaper and wipes. By the time he returned, the baby had picked up the wand and was using it to shoot small flowers across the room. Voldemort smiled as he began changing its diaper. "That's my boy," he said, admiring the spell. "Not a filthy Muggle like the rest of them. You'll be a true wizard like your old man, won't you?"

He wiggled the baby's nose, and its giggles erupted in a volley of daisies and dandelions. Voldemort laughed as well—a cruel, mirthless sound, like bricks being rubbed together—then let out a long sigh. "How did I ever get myself into this—mess?" he asked the baby, who responded by dimpling his cheeks.

"By saying, ‘I do'," said Violet, reemerging from the hallway. "Or don't you remember—the candles, the cake, the vicar with the hip flask?" Voldemort looked up at her and saw her expression soften. She knelt beside them and helped clasp the little overalls. "Strongest magic ever made—isn't that what you said?" she asked.

"‘Till death do us part'," Voldemort said, looking into her eyes, his expression unreadable. "‘Let no man put asunder'. What madness overtook me?"

"I think we both know the answer to that," said Violet, lifting the baby and standing up. "Come on, we need to go! You can put your suit on in the back seat."

Voldemort stared blankly for a moment, then rose and followed her toward the door. Violet turned. "Come on, girls!" she called, then looked urgently at Voldemort. "You haven't forgotten you're taking Jenny to the fun fair after church, have you?"

"Church?!" Lord Voldemort spat.

"Yes. Church. That place we go on Sundays?"

"Sunday?!"

"Are you daft? If you wouldn't stay up till all hours you might have enough brain left over to remember what day it is. You do remember that pastor asked you to say the opening prayer this morning?"

Voldemort stopped, looked to the sky for a moment, then let his face fall into his hands. His voice, when it came, was a gurgling wail like the sound of a drowning banshee. "Oh God!" he cried.

"That's the spirit," said Violet, and strode off to unlock the car. The baby over her shoulder swished the wand back and forth a few times, then babbled something indistinct. With a flash of sparks, a small viper sprang from the end of the wand and landed at Voldemort's feet. He regarded it for a moment as it writhed over his patent leather wingtips, then picked it up and looked it eye-to-eye. It hissed menacingly, baring its fangs, then lashed out in a futile attempt to bite his face. The Dark Lord's bitter expression lifted as a gleam came into his eye. "Perhaps all is not yet lost," he murmured. Looking quickly up and down the street, he placed the snake in his pocket and drifted down toward the car.

The Boy Who Wouldn't Cry Wolf, Part I

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 19:26:00 +0000

Once there was a shepherd boy who tended the village flock. The villagers had charged him with grazing the sheep, guiding them, and protecting them from harm. They kept the sheep for clothing and food, and relied on the boy to keep close watch.

One day as the boy's mind emerged from a delicious daydream, he heard one of the flock bleat wildly for a moment, then go silent. He looked for the source of the outburst but saw nothing. Later, when he counted the flock, the number came up short. He decided he must have miscounted—his abacus was missing a bead.

The next evening when the boy numbered the sheep, he realized that two were missing. He looked all over but found only a tangle of blood and wool where the flock had last been grazing. He felt alarmed at first, but when he brought the flock into the village, he told no one about what had happened.

The next afternoon he saw a black shape racing among the sheep and heard terrified cries pass through them. He dismissed the shape as a bird or badger, but later when he counted the sheep, another five were gone.

That night the man who tended the barn asked the boy about the flock. "It looks one or two short," the man said. "Are you sure they're all there?" The boy gave a toothy, uncertain nod before going into the house.

The next evening, as the boy played his flute to the sunset, he noticed an odd silence coming from the flock behind him. When he had finished his song, he looked back hesitantly, then quickly turned away, not wanting to believe his eyes. After a few shuddering moments he looked again at the flock.

Half of the sheep were missing. Half of those that remained lie groveling on the ground or stumbling aimlessly from place to place. As for the rest—at first the boy couldn't understand what was wrong with them. They seemed to be standing up and lying down at the same time. Their wool had turned black and white. They sat eerily still, and breathed either not at all or with rapid heaving gasps. Occasionally one of them shook violently, then became still again. They seemed to have two sets of eyes.

It was then that the boy grasped what he was seeing. The black-and-white sheep were not sheep alone, but wolves and sheep clutched together in a cruel embrace. Each sheep had the jaws of a wolf clamped onto its neck. More than a dozen wolves were scattered among the flock, their eyes shifting furtively, their lips peeled back in a guilty grin, each quietly crushing the life from its victim.

The boy snapped to his feet with his voice clenched in his throat and his flute dangling from his fingers. He hesitated, unable to take his eyes from the horror in front of him. He knew he had to get help, but fear stayed him: fear of what the villagers would do when they found out; fear that the wolves might let go of the lambs and turn their hungry eyes upon him.

I wish I could tell you what happens next, but I can't because it hasn't happened yet. As of July 21, 2007, that was the last we had heard of the Boy Who Wouldn't Cry Wolf.

Jesus Saves, but How?

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 16:27:00 +0000

Christianity Today posted an article this week about a split between three evangelical groups in Britain. The split ends a 14-year partnership responsible for the largest annual British evangelical gathering. The reason for the split: disagreement about exactly how Jesus saves.

Three parties are involved—Spring Harvest, Keswick Ministries, and the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF). The Spring Harvest conference—the gathering they put on each year—brings together 55,000 Christians including a great many youth. Now its future is uncertain.

What makes this a particularly sad split is its cause: the doctrine of atonement. Atonement is the question of how Jesus' death and resurrection brings about salvation. It is a terrible subject to pick a fight over, for more reasons than one.

The question at the heart of the doctrine of atonement intrigues Christians of all stripes. We all believe that Jesus saves us, but how exactly does he do it? Some people think about it this way. Although God was angry at us for our sins, Jesus drew that anger upon himself and satisfied it when he died. We are saved from punishment because Jesus has experienced the punishment we had earned. We call this idea the "penal substitution" theory of atonement. God had good reasons for feeling angry with us, and that anger had to go somewhere—so Jesus took it into himself.

The Lamb of God

The penal substitution theory has its upsides and downsides. On the upside, the Bible says that something like this took place. Jesus is described as a sacrificial lamb that takes away the sin of the world, and if we look at the idea of sacrificial lambs in the Old Testament, we see that they were thought of us substitutes right back to Abraham and the Passover—dying in place of human beings to take away their sins. Paul says, in a profound and beautiful statement, "God made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we would become the righteousness of God." (2 Corinthians 5:21, NET)

But the penal substitution theory has problems too. First, it explains nothing about how we opt into or out of Jesus' sacrifice. If Jesus absorbed God's anger, why would God still send some people to hell? It's as if Jesus absorbed God's anger conditionally, so that each of us has the chance to "sign up" for forgiveness or not. Well, most Christians believe that, but it doesn't really explain much. There's nothing quite like it in normal human law. How can God's anger be satisfied—but only on a per-person basis?

Christus Victor

The other theory of atonement at the heart of the Spring Harvest split is Christus Victor, otherwise known as the ransom theory. According to the ransom theory, Satan "bought" humanity when we sinned. Atonement means that Jesus bought us back with his blood. We had sold ourselves to Satan, but Jesus ransomed us.

Jesus himself said that he came "to give his life as a ransom for many" (Matthew 20:28), so the ransom theory rings true. But like the penal substitution theory, it gives an incomplete picture. Did Satan really enter into a bargain with Jesus, trading souls for blood? The Bible doesn't tell this story, and we're left to speculate. And again, how is it that Jesus paid for some people but not for others?

It's tempting to hammer out all the upsides and downsides to both theories, to debate their strengths and weaknesses, and to dredge the Scriptures for supporting evidence until one theory defeats the other in hand-to-hand combat and strides forth as the victor. The trouble is that life isn't that simple—God isn't that simple—what Jesus did on the cross isn't that simple.

Christianity's Dark Secret

I'm about to utter the dark secret of Christianity, the Fact that Dare Not Speak Its Name, the truth we are embarrassed to admit. Here it is. Christians believe that Jesus died for our sins, but we haven't the foggiest how it actually works. The gospel we package up and sell each week is something we only dimly grasp ourselves. We have a few theories—images really, mere metaphors—but we haven't got a clue how Jesus' blood dealt with sin. We know that in some cosmic way, Jesus' death plus our belief makes us pure in God's eyes. But as for the mechanics of that transformation—the technicalities of divine jurisprudence—we are out in the cold. We have only the dimmest glimmer of insight.

It's sad that Christian organizations would split over this question. How can you split over something you don't understand? Why part ways over a mystery?

The Mystery of Salvation

In the Christianity Today article, J. I. Packer is paraphrased as saying, "Penal substitution, Christus Victor, and other Scriptural views of atonement work together to present a fully orbed picture of Christ's work." In other words, picking a theory of atonement is not an either-or thing. Christ did something profound when he died for our sins. His death worked on many planes, in many ways—some of which we can begin to understand, others of which we cannot. Anyone who has read or seen The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe has glimpsed the richness of atonement. Did Aslan die as a substitution for Edmund's sin? Yes. Did he negotiate a ransom payment to buy Edmund back from the witch? Yes. Did he fulfill the cosmic law concerning traitors? Yes. Did he transcend the cosmic law to fulfill the divine, creative law? Yes. C. S. Lewis understood that atonement is multifaceted. It cannot be boiled down to a party political statement, a theological soundbite.

Fundamentally, whatever other consequences it may have had, Christ's death was an interaction between Father and Son. In some mysterious way, the Father and the Son conspired together—and yet strangely in opposition with each other—to make sinful people utterly sinless. How can we understand what words they exchanged, what commodities changed hands, what legal precedences were invoked? Their negotiations, whether by whispers or shouts, are out of our earshot. We cannot comprehend the magnitude or method of what they did. So why would we argue about the mechanics of grace?

Who or What?

It's this word "faith" again. In recent years, Christians have got it into their heads that saving faith has to do with what you believe. It never did. It has to do with who you believe. Who do you think is trustworthy? Who will you bank on? Who will you invest in, spend your time with, imitate? "...That whoever believes in him will not perish..." Believes in his existence? No. Believes in the correct nature of his atonement? No. Believes in him—trusts him. Reckons he can get the job done. Dallas Willard suggests the word "confidence" instead of "faith": Do we have confidence in Jesus?

That's not to say confidence doesn't involve doctrine. Jesus can't get the job done unless he is fully man and fully God, and that's a doctrinal statement. But in the Bible, faith is not fundamentally about logical propositions—it's about who we decide to follow.

Salvation, then, is not about the technicalities of atonement, but about the Person who gives it to us. There is no point in arguing about the mechanics of grace; the only thing to do is to receive it. This is one gift horse whose mouth is best left unexamined.

So when I come before the throne of God and he asks me why he should let me into his kingdom, I don't plan to give him a treatise on Christus Victor or the penal substitution of atonement. I'm planning to say, "I don't know how it all works, but I trust Jesus to have made my way." It's like they say in business: It's not about what you know—it's about who you know.

Around 8 Times

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 15:58:00 +0000

My son's new autobiography, Around 8 Times, is now available through lulu.com. Previewers report the following emotions during and after reading it:

Delight

Amazement

Amusement

Bemusement

Disturbance

Denial

Acceptance

Bottom line: this book will make you laugh.

All proceeds go to Liam himself. He plans to use them to buy a Wii.

Dedicated Web Server Needed

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 18:43:00 +0000

Last Thursday I announced my new game, Phit, which the web community received with incredible acclaim. I'm happy about that. But the load on my server has made my site unreliable (it often fails to come up when you visit it) and my service provider is threatening they may have to "take action" if my site keeps being so popular.

What I need is a dedicated server to host my site. The cheapest dedicated server I could find is $40/month. That's more than I can afford. Do you know of anyone who might be willing to donate a dedicated server to host my site? If so, please contact me.

Listening to the voices in your head

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 19:03:00 +0000

I went to the emergency room on Sunday night. Ever since the kids came along I've been dreading having to take them there, but it turned out I was the one to get hurt first. I nearly put out my eye while doing a harmless bit of car repair. Here's how it happened.

Two of the door handles on our 2002 Toyota Sienna had broken. It's cause our kids have superpowers and don't know how to control them yet—a common problem amongst larval superheroes. I couldn't repair the sliding door myself, but I found a site outlining how to fix the rear door handle better than new. I'm not mechanically inclined, but I reckoned I could do what the site described. And it would save me the $130 the repair man would charge.

First I removed the inner part of the rear door and removed the broken latch. The latch was plastic—no wonder it had broken. Now all I had to do was drill a hole down through the latch into the lever that had broken off it, then screw the two back together. This would make the latch even stronger than it originally was: metal is stronger than plastic, you know.

Drilling through the parts went well until I realized I couldn't get the drill bit back out of the part. The bit was stuck so tight that the drill couldn't keep a hold on it. I tried prising it out in several ways; I even drilled a second hole right alongside the first, but the bit still would not budge.

I decided that what I needed was a tighter grip on the drill bit. So I clamped it with a pair of pliers and clamped the pliers in a vise. Then I rocked the part back and forth, trying to twist it off the bit.

With the inclusion of the pliers and vise I had involved quite a bit of force into this endeavor and realized the chance of something slipping, flipping, or cracking was non-zero. I said a little prayer that the handle wouldn't crack—I really hated to have to pay the repair man to replace it. Then I remembered my friend Chris, who had his eye nearly blown away a few months back in a freak accident, and I heard a little voice saying the same sort of thing could happen to me. "But of course it won't," I replied. "Nothing like that has ever happened to me. I'm the least accident-prone person I know." Still, I felt uneasy, and pushed my glasses closer up toward my face. I've worn glasses since I was a kid and they've saved me from many a flying chip, splinter, and pebble. But as I touched them I noticed they don't give the coverage my early-'80s serving platters did.

Even worse, they weren't even in a position to block whatever shrapnel might emerge from my twisting contraption. I'm needing bifocals, frankly, and what that means—for you young folk—is that I can't focus on something if it's between six and twelve inches from my face. I can look under my glasses at something if it's closer than six inches; I can look through my glasses at something if it's farther than twelve inches; but in the middle distance neither my eye nor my lenses give me focus.

I suddenly realized I was looking at this twisting contraption under my glasses, about six inches from my eye. So I moved it away to arms length. But I needed to see whether the drill bit was turning, so before I knew it I had moved in close again.

Now this is the moment when the drill bit should have wrenched free from the handle effortlessly, and I should have grinned at it triumphantly and carried on with my work. Instead, there was a sharp "ping" sound, and suddenly I was staggering back from the work table, the vision in my right eye was blurry and—holy cow—pink, and I've just shot out my eye.

It didn't hurt. It felt like a little dust had got in there. But when I pulled my hand back down and saw my fingers were covered in blood, I knew I had bigger problems than dust.

This is just going to keep getting worse, so stop reading now if you've had enough forensics.

I felt quite calm as I went into the house. My first thought was that the kids not see me. My second thought was that I could now joke with Chris about going to new lengths to identify with his troubles. My third thought was that I should get someone to take me to the emergency room. The order of those thoughts will tell you a great deal about my character.

I moved through the house to the bathroom and surveyed the damage. The good news: my left eye was perfectly fine. The bad news: my right eye looked like the horror section at the video store. I was literally crying blood. Some of the more enterprising droplets had stolen into my tear ducts and now emerged furtively from my right nostril. The white of my eye was flowing pink like a decorative waterfall at a Japanese garden. A thin sheet of tissue about the size of a fingernail emerged like an anemone and wavered every time I blinked.

I leaned under the faucet and rinsed. When I got up, there was a little tab of tissue left in the sink. I thought: "I've got a pretty good chance of losing this eye." I prayed that I wouldn't—that I'd come out of this unscathed.

Not wishing to cause alarm, I called to my wife in the most nonchalant, "Honey we're out of toilet paper," voice I could muster, and pondered what to do next. Usually I have a hard time planning a trip to the bathroom, but it took me no time to decide how to get to the hospital. Driving myself was out of the question. I couldn't ask my wife because someone had to stay with the kids. My parents were entertaining company. So I called up my nephew James. My wife came in as I reached him, and I told him to be on standby. Then I showed her what had happened. She gasped, looked more closely, gasped again, then went to the bed to wrestle with the temptation to faint while I asked James to drive me.

We were at the hospital for three hours—not bad at all for an emergency room visit. I spent most of the time resting on the bed, reading a good book and enjoying myself. I felt completely calm—no anxiety at all. The nurse found my heart rate and blood pressure to be normal. This will sound trite to some, but I knew from long experience that God would do right by me. I could live without one eye—there are worse things to lose. And I figured he would answer my prayer with a "yes." He usually does. Usually.

The doctor put weird drops in my eye and looked into it with a blue light. Then he gave me the diagnosis: subconjunctival hematoma.

The eye, it turns out, is a complicated thing. The white of the eye is a mass of tissue kept at a constant pressure by an elaborate pumping mechanism or something. Then you have the cornea, which is the clear "dome" over the iris—the colored part of the eye. What I didn't know was that the eye is enclosed in a kind of clear skin called the conjunctiva. What happened with me is that a little piece of the drill bit bounced off my cheek, making a small mark, and ricocheted across the surface of my eye making a long, but not terribly deep, scratch. It tore the conjunctiva and cut a little way into the white, then came out again. If it had stayed embedded, I would have been in agony—not to mention the unpleasantness of removing it. If it had struck a few millimeters to the right, I would now be blind, or facing endless surgeries, or both.

It merely broke a couple of vessels in the white of my eye, and this flooded the space between the white and the conjunctiva with blood. Thus the diagnosis: subconjunctival hematoma.

The injury did not damage my cornea. It did not affect my vision. It didn't mess with the sensitive pressure in my eye. All told, I got off easy. I needed a tetanus shot, antibiotic eye drops, and some saline solution. If I say, "Praise God," will you see what I mean? When God had warned me about my eye, I hadn't listened. But when I asked him to make it work out all right, he did listen.

I paid $100 for the privilege of using the emergency room, plus $35 for a check-up three days later. So much for saving money. The next day I braved working on the handle again, and found it was still unbroken. The drill bit had snapped off right where it exited the handle. I decided to leave it in there—more steel reinforcement. Then I finished fixing the van, and the rear door works better than ever.

My eye was dry and uncomfortable for a couple of days. Now it's fine. The only long-term effect is that I look like a demon-possessed thug. Even this downside has its advantages. I win a lot more arguments, for instance.

I learned three things from my experience.

Wear safety goggles.
There's a reason repair men charge the big bucks to fix things. Let them.
If a little voice inside your head says, "Maybe this isn't such a good idea," believe it.

Phit released

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 14:07:00 +0000

I released a new game—Phit—this week, and it quickly rose to the number 3 spot on Digg. I had more than twenty thousand visitors in the space of a few hours, and my server went down. It's back up now, as you can see.

In other news, I finally put my music up on mp3.com. Now maybe a record company will contact me and make me the new Elvis.

Book Review: The Great Omission by Dallas Willard

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 19:38:00 +0000

My review of Dallas Willard's The Great Omission has just appeared on Relevant magazine online.

Bringing the Server Home

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 17:45:00 +0000

The web is faster than the applications installed on my local computer. It takes Excel 15 seconds just to open a blank spreadsheet. Yet I can bring up a blank Google spreadsheet in less than a second. Windows Search takes minutes just to search a subfolder on my hard disk, yet Google can search billions of pages in milliseconds. (Google Desktop search has helped to close that gap, thankfully.) I get more done, faster, through web apps than through local apps. They just work faster.

And that's a shame, because here at my fingertips I have $2000 worth of Dell XPS laptop goodness. I have a dual-core CPU, a few gigs of RAM, and a hard disk dedicated to serving me. Yet they serve me worse than sites thousands of miles away who see me as one anonymous visitor among millions. I'm beginning to wonder why I bother spending money on applications and nifty hardware when Firefox and a cheap computer would serve most of my needs.

It seems there's a lost opportunity here for those who make personal computers and software. They've dropped the ball, and Web 2.0 services have recovered it—now they're sprinting for a touchdown. But I don't think it's too late for personal computers to be more than windows to the web. Personal computers are, after all, personal. They are typically dedicated to a single user or a small set of users. They are local—that must be worth something in terms of speed, efficiency, and user-knowledge. Why do they work more slowly than the web?

The hard disk has a lot to do with it. When I ask my computer to open a spreadsheet, it runs a tangled obstacle course of file accesses to give me what I want. It has to find the spreadsheet file, open it, figure out it's a spreadsheet file, and decide what application is meant to open that kind of file. It then has to find the application executable file, open it, find out what other data files and DLLs the file relies on, and open them. It has to create new processes and windows, allocate new memory, load and process bitmaps for buttons and so forth—it has a lot to do.

Every one of these file seeks and accesses takes time. Computer CPUs and RAM have gotten very fast, but hard disks still run on geologic time. So every time I ask my computer to do something new—something that involves new files and applications—I enter the microcomputer equivalent of the long dark night of the soul.

What I've just described is actually the worst-case situation. If Windows has no idea I'm about to open a spreadsheet program, then it has to go through all this file-opening rigamorole. More recent versions of Windows avoid some of the slowness by caching the programs and files that I use frequently. If I open Excel, use it for a while, then close it again, Windows doesn't fully close it, but keeps it near at hand in case I ask for it again. After I've used a program once, I can usually open it much faster the second and third times.

Still, it's rarely fast enough. It may take 5 seconds rather than 15 to open Excel, but 1 second to click a link to an online spreadsheet and open it. How in the world are internet servers still faster than my computer?

Specialization is the keyword here. When I ask Google Docs to give me a new spreadsheet, it says, "You know, it's funny you should ask because I was just thinking about that. I was just thinking about spreadsheets and how I might best serve you with one. Here you go." Google Docs spends all its time thinking about how to give me a spreadsheet, so when I ask, it's ready.

When I ask my computer to give me a new spreadsheet, it says, "Huh? Tetris? What? Oh, you're changing the subject. Wait, what did you say? Spreadsheet? I can't remember what that is... Oh! Yeah, I can give you one of those. I've got one lying around here someplace, somewhere under this pile of documents and applications. Give me a sec'..." My computer is a generalist, not a specialist. It can do for me anything that a computer can do—play a game, write a document, edit pictures, crunch numbers—and that's a useful quality. I tell my computer where to go, it goes there. But not instantly. It has to pack for the journey.

A web site, on the other hand, cannot do anything or go anywhere. A web site, typically, is dedicated to doing one thing, doing it well, doing it en masse, and doing it—hopefully—fast. Lulu makes books. Blogger manages blogs. YouTube serves video. Each of them performs its specialization competitively with other specialists, and that competition quickly makes them skillful, useful, and quick.

If switching between websites took a long time, the web would be much like my computer. I would work on a spreadsheet for a while, then wait while switching to a gaming site. The web is not like that. In fact, with tabbed browsing I can switch instantly between totally distinct specializations. I can go from blogging to reading an article to playing a game in less than a second. Through the web I get the specialization of individual sites coupled with the diversity of the mass of all sites. Even the personal computer's trump card—generality—is outdone by the web.

Personal computer applications do provide some advantages over the web. They can keep working despite network outages. All things remaining equal (like, in the absence of trojans), they offer greater privacy and security. And after all, there is this vast, untapped "X" factor: a personal computer should be able to know its user better than anyone. It can learn which words he tends to misspell and fix them automatically (or coach him, if he asks for it). It can know he tends to log on at 9 AM and browse the news. It can be ready for him to play Counter-Strike next Friday night, just as he usually does. Web sites personalize their services to a certain extent, but that's not their natural advantage. Personal computers should work harder to understand their users and anticipate their needs, because that is their natural advantage. They can dedicate gigabytes and whole CPUs to the problem; websites cannot.

Still, no matter how much my computer studies me and attempts to cater to my every whim (which, by the way, it will never be all that good at, because people are complex, unpredictable, and hard to understand—even by other people, much less a computer), if it can't open a spreadsheet quickly, it is going to lose to the web.

Here's a proposed solution. Why not make personal computers more like the web? If dedicated servers are so effective at serving files and applications quickly, why not make each personal computer like a collection of servers?

Instead of having one large, fast hard disk, put several smaller, perhaps slower ones into each personal computer. Likewise, include multiple, separate banks of RAM, separate buses, and separate cores. (To a certain extent, hardware is already going this direction.) Now, for each commonly-used application, have the OS dedicate a single HD/RAM/CPU sub-computer to that application. In effect, set up a server inside the computer specifically for serving Excel, for instance. Now when I ask to open a spreadsheet, the Excel sub-computer says, "Right away, sir! In fact we've already cached the last forty spreadsheets you opened, the three spreadsheets that arrived in the mail this morning, two new spreadsheets we downloaded from your favorite websites, and all your favorite templates in case you're thinking of making a new spreadsheet." Excel would own a sub-computer, Word another, Counter-Strike another, Firefox another. All the applications you use the most would operate continuously on their own local servers, anticipating your needs, ready to spring to your aid the moment you ask them, positively slavering to pander to your every whim.

What about applications you use less often? Well, they can share sub-computers easily enough. Indeed, the OS can analyze which programs you tend to use together as opposed to those you tend to use separately, and group separate programs onto common sub-computers since they're less likely to be requested simultaneously.

Maybe hardware and OS producers are already planning something like this. I sure hope so. I use tabbed browsing for so much of my work now that I'm thinking of remapping Alt-Tab to toggle between browser tabs instead of applications.