letters from barabbas

The fundamental problem with the study of microeconomics is this: Even if I were to determine the decision that best maximizes utility under a given set of circumstances, the phenomenal embarrassment at having sacrificed my intuition to calculus would decrease my happiness by at least 75 utils.

Tour day while in Rio was interesting for me.
I felt better about being such a grouch all day once I remembered how much I hated touring. I don't know why, exactly, but there's something that always depresses me about focusing on the places that are set aside specifically to focus on. The view from Christ Redeemer was breathtaking all the same, so the nausea of the train ride up the mountain backwards was quickly dispelled by the brisk smoggy breeze. I took some shots of the city from above, trying to see it the way Jesus must. He Himself looked very intimidating, 28 meters tall and more glowering peevishly at the tourists at his feet than gazing lovingly upon the city. I don't suppose it's easy to make a detailed face in a giant soapstone sculpture, but I'd expected more. This looked an awful lot like the cheap plastic idols they were selling for a hundred reais in the gift shop underneath his giant sandals.

All week long as we had seen it from across the bay and debated whether we would have time to go up the mountain, I was filled with excitement at the prospect: it would be such a spiritual experience! But I felt more emotion at Mt. Rushmore, for God's sake. Why? I blame myself. I could have sought the Light a bit more earnestly. I could have put away the camera and prayed.
But.
I just hated moving with the group all day. The white, monoglot group flanked by two patient Brazilian brothers, Celio and Tony. I wanted to melt away into the streets, talk to the girl selling the earrings instead of the girl trying them on, experience the city from the inside out. Tour stops are like living room furniture, which exists solely to satisfy the curiosity of those who wish to--but never will--be welcome in the kitchen.

This is why I feel compelled to live abroad. Not to "travel" but to emigrate. To implant myself into another society. To understand not just its monuments but its symbols, to learn not just its language but its mythology. To not just perform a service, but to serve. To not just show love but to love.
This can't be done in one month, or even in one year. It'll take time, and probably a couple of miracles. But it's my heart's desire.
For this year, anyhow.

I recently remet a girl I keep running into (college is full of people like that). When we asked simultaneously, "How have you been?" I was surprised she didn't reflect my patent answer (good, good) but said, "Allergic to everything! I just found out I'm allergic to wheat, egg whites, everything." The details were sketchy. I'm not sure if she's just recently developed these allergies, or if they have only just now pinned them down as the cause for her perpetual hives. I'm assuming the former, though I didn't know you could spontaneously develop an allergy like that.

As we spoke more, though, I got the strong impression that she hadn't really "just developed" the allergies naturally, but that they were an outgrowth of something more significant in her life. You may not agree with me, but I believe that oftentimes our ailments are less physiological than they are spiritual. If sex is the embodiment of spiritual love, then why couldn't allergies be the embodiment of spiritual rejection? Your body detects something harmless--nourishing, even--and overreacts, sends out all its defenses to ward off something that only wanted to help. Our immunities, like our cynicism, are designed to protect us; but when they are damaged or malformed, they target the wrong things. She who had a bad reaction to wheat germ might first have had a bad reaction to friendship. Self-preservation rejects any trace of the offending substance, even if the offence was just a fluke.

I was prompted think about my own life, and the influx of Grace that's been rocking my world this past year. And how much I've embraced it but how much it has hurt. Like chemotherapy, I suppose. And maybe that's why this week has been so violently regressive. My spirit just can't take any more of this substance called grace. It's starting to reject it.
The flesh in me smarts at things like unconditional forgiveness, indelible grace. They seem foolish, dangerous. I'd like to make my own way, provide my own salvation. That's what we're all trying to do, one way or another, don't you think?

Confession: I'm failing miserably.

Some people's throats will swell shut when they catch a whif of peanut butter from across the room. Others' hearts will skip a beat when they sense the promise of Life Abundant.
Both leave you helplessly gasping for breath.
The only difference is: you can find alternate sources of protein.
There is only one fount of forgiveness and grace, only one Way to Truth and to Life.

Of course, it never seems to do much good. Your newly realized self--I don't say "new self" because I'm firmly convinced the self is newer every day--is shocked to see the buildings are the same as you left them. Your friends, though new themselves, are nonetheless new within old circumstances, as are you, and you resign yourself to reality. You settle for an average of newness and oldness, something different but only slightly so, in ways you'd least expected.

You don't actually pierce through the layer of clouds into the normal atmosphere. Rather, you simply enter the fog of everyday life.

This is why conferences and getaways and things of that nature are so disappointing. We are looking for miracles. And they come--more readily than we could ever imagine. We just don't know how to see them. Or see beyond them.

As the plane lifts above the globe, the weight of the world is lifted from my ears and the clouds obscure my understanding of the terrain I've been walking through. I sip my shiny ginger ale from a tiny plastic cup and my life becomes perfectly clear.

It always seems like I need to travel somewhere to reach my next epiphany. But it isn't that I'm not evolving right here in Auburn, in my every day. I'm just too blind to see the change unless I look at myself from another angle. Or someone shows me who I am. The hours in the stratosphere are time enough to marvel at the new length of my hair, the subtle changes in my walk, my posture, my smile. Time enough to breathe recycled air and realize I don't have asthma, never have, and the gasping sounds I've been making were a bit melodramatic.

Of course, as soon as we pierce the clouds and I regain my bearings, atmospheric pressure returns (leaving my ears feeling groggy and annoyed) and I feel the thump of tires on the runway jolt confusion back into my brain.
I don't drink ginger ale unless I'm flying. It doesn't have the same effect. But I have notebooks full of scrawls of struggle and regeneration. I can't begrudge them their wonder, their hope, their naiveté. I can't deny I wrote them, and I can't deny they're true.

Ascension always brings clarity. Traveling feels so right because it's what we're doing all the time--even when we're not. We're climbing mountains, passing through the valley of the shadow of death, bridging gaps between two hearts, running from the truth, hiding out in deserts until the shadow passes over. It feels right to travel because we always are.

We're traveling miles in the abstract every day.
We just have to act it out in the literal world in order to really grasp it.
Is everything that way?

more pictures

Sometimes, God, I feel like I’m living in a bone grinding mill
And every time I hear the sound I can barely stand still.
It’s a thing I can’t quite make out sometimes but it seems to keep getting louder-
One more body from the valley of the dry bones getting ground up into powder
Against Your holy will


Oh, God, it hurts so bad to love anybody down here
Oh, that’s right, You know so well
One thorny crown, three nails, and a spear

--waterdeep

This is an essay I had published in The Auburn Circle last year. The Circle is the university's general interest magazine, it's really cool and I was super excited to be included in it. This is for those of you who didn't get to read it in print.


I read an essay for world history that claimed the development of the written word during the urban revolution caused a shift from an auditory to a visual society. In today’s world of hyper-communication via the Internet and television, this principle has flourished. From fine art to paparazzi, formal events to casual outings, photography permeates every aspect of our culture. When treated responsibly, this captivity of instants is the perfect preservation of our history: a personal fossil record, if you will. When used carelessly, however, it begins to pose a problem.

We hold onto our lives’ defining moments by stamping sensations into our minds and building memories around them. But the memory is more than a mental image—it’s an event that’s been processed to produce a truth about life. These days everyone has a camera, and we’re often content to let Kodak make the images for us. I fear we may be losing the skill that the invention was meant to supplement. It’s become more about the image than the event, as if we might someday require proof that our lives really happened. But our recollections only blur together in page after page of hasty snapshots void of any personal revelation. This is why holiday gatherings with my family are always interrupted just as the fun is really starting. Warm conversation and contented smiles give way to “Say cheese” incantations and fidgety, plastered grins. The memory doesn’t match the image, and those portraits come back seeming stale and contrived, giving the whole occasion a false appearance of tedium and disinterest.

When my roommate and I sat down at the computer last year to research the best route for our trip that summer, I was participating with a skepticism that reminded me of a teenager smugly ignoring his younger sibling’s latest scheme. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go. I just never expected to have any real adventures in my lifetime. I had conditioned myself to confine my experiences to the inside of my cranium, never expecting to actually live life…you know, like, within the actual space-time continuum. But when it became clear that this was more than just another youthful daydream, one of my chief concerns involved the acquisition of a good camera with which to document this living of life I was planning for the summer. While John was content to carry along a handful of disposable cameras, I excavated my parents’ old Canon from its flaking leather case and taught myself the basic functions, snapping candids of friends and flowers and furniture.
For three thousand miles I abducted scenery and wildlife into my little black box. Stone presidents and prairie landscapes were jammed indiscriminately into tiny parcels and stored for later review. It was a desperate attempt to document what I knew to be a one-time experience. When we got to Yellowstone ten days into our expedition, I was a picture-taking machine. I eagerly encapsulated intricate lichens and stately firs, endearing little prairie dogs and intimidating bison, canyons and cascades and mudpots and hot springs. Yellowstone is an amazing place—everyone’s a photographer within its boundaries.

We didn’t make it to Old Faithful until the end of our second day in the park. I must admit I was less than excited about it. Maybe I was just depleted after two weeks of being constantly on the move, with 3,000 miles of asphalt behind me and 3,000 more ahead. There’s only so much wonder one pair of eyes can behold in a lifetime, and I wasn’t rationing mine out very wisely. I trudged sullenly past the lodge and visitor center, following the signs with total indifference. When John called out from ahead that the next eruption was expected to occur within ten minutes, I perked up and started walking faster. I began to run when I saw the steam, camera clunking heavily against my chest, but I stopped short a hundred yards from the viewing platform when the first big column began to unfurl. I raised my camera to my eye only once, matter-of-factly clicking the shutter with little attention to centering and lighting. I knew instinctively that this was something bigger than film.
It was a rare moment of clarity. For the brief duration of the eruption, I wasn’t vying for the perfect shot or brewing up some elaborate dissertation on the experience: it was simple, silent awe. This plume of shimmering white emerging from the wasteland was an image I’d always longed for—I’ll never again struggle to imagine how it might have looked to the Israelites when God appeared in the wilderness as a pillar of clouds. The torrent subsided quickly, and I turned around to join the tide of excited tourists which carried me to its logical breaking point: the gift shop. I have never been more pleased to fork over eight bucks for a cheeseburger. I was famished! Living takes a lot out of a guy.

My second day back home I ran to the one-hour photo center to claim the trophies I had stored away in those little black canisters. Apparently, though, I’m not the camera whiz I’d thought I was: of the six rolls I had used, only one-and-a-half actually turned out. But God works in mysterious ways, and I think He wanted to clear my mind of all the hype that surrounded the trip and force me to reflect on the important things I had learned. I tried my hardest to preserve the experience with pictures, but of the forty prints I got back, only five or six actually do justice to the emotions I was feeling at the moment of the film’s exposure. I’ve since learned that a camera is not a substitute for good old-fashioned living. It is only a tool, harnessed by wisdom, good for summoning the power of a moment that has slipped into memory. We need that defining moment to provide the narrative that will breathe purpose into the image.

I’m not a photographer, so I can’t evaluate this little snapshot’s technical quality. But I do have good eyes for searching out the beauty in even the plainest things, and something really strikes me about it: something in the posture of the onlookers and the glowing boardwalk beneath them, something in the sheen of the waterspout against the mellow backdrop of the sky. I can just hear the distant sputtering, that singular stench is stinging at the back of my throat, and the silent wonder that’s surrounding those tourists threatens to consume me as well.
We all know the old cliché. A picture is worth a thousand words. But really, for most of us, that’s only true for a few rare gems out of dozens of disposable 35mm’s dropped in a bin at Wal-Mart. This is one of mine.

Wear it out.


If you've spent at least a week with me within the past five years, you have seen me wear this shirt. Charity, one of my most cherished friends, mailed me this shirt from Hawaii after she had moved away. I have loved it as Joseph's many-colored coat ever since, regardless of the holes in the back from too much bleach and the stains in the pit that no amount of bleach could ever renew. This shirt has seen it all.
The manual labor in Brazil was more fun than any I've ever known. We were digging a flat area to lay cement for the construction of a garage for the ministry's new bus. I worked harder than I knew I could, having a blast just not having to worry about how strong or weak I might seem. In the same way that my spirit was free to be itself that week and commune with God because my mind had let down its reflexive barriers, my body was able to do its thing without constant griping from my piercing inferiority complex. Once it started to rain--a cool, soft, refreshing tropical shower--I (shirt included) got astonishingly dirty.
While I came clean in five minutes under a cold shower, the shirt proved far less resilient. I tried my best to wash it by hand in the sink at the mission, only proving further how little I really know my own strength. You'll notice that the B in "Best" is completely missing. The shirt was a goner. Muddy and shredded, I took a final picture before tossing it in the trash.

I can honestly say don't I regret it. How could such a pathetic packrat like me say that and mean it? Didn't I throw away a piece of my soul when I took it off the clothesline?
Well, but I wore it with all my heart: one of my few possessions I didn't patronize and overprotect, I actually treated it with respect for what it was and what we could do together. It's an amazing feeling, though you're probably thinking I'm very silly. Try it, though. Take something you love and actively cherish it by letting it live up to its full potential. And then, once it has known its purpose, let it rest in peace.

Her parents came over tonight, and we all sat around the living room joking about relationships, joking about her dad's new dentures, joking about her. Calla Maria played an hour of videotape from last summer, most of it an interview with Jessi about relationships and beauty and self-image. In all the disruption of life, I had forgotten how good it's been to live, and how much I appreciate these people who have knitted me into their tapestries. It was tough to hug her neck goodbye, but we're all so excited that she's going to NEW ZEALAND for a whole semester, we can put our feelings aside for her sake, right?

The week before I left for Brazil, John asked me what were my expectations, with the assumption that if I didn’t specify any then I couldn’t reap their potential benefits. I shrugged and kept on eating, with the assumption that my expectations would be broad, inaccurate, based upon past experience, and pointless. And anyway, I honestly didn’t know of any to specify. But an hour before landing, looking out the window at the Amazon River winding through verdant wilds, I thought resolutely and unexpectedly, “I expect this trip to be a reference point for the rest of my future.” It is odd how the mind and the will may remain separate until an emotion fuses them together.

What to say of Rio de Janeiro? We worked with evangelist Rick Bonfim throughout the Rio area, traveling with him to churches and praying for people at the altar after he preached. We also helped with various improvements at the mission in Niteroi. He spent a lot of time teaching us how to pray for people and how to listen to the Holy Spirit, and he spent a lot of time ministering to us personally. Short term, I got a lot more out of the trip than I put in. Long term, the things I received will empower me to pour myself out abundantly.
How to explain what I’ve experienced?


I have alluded occasionally on this blog to my struggles to move beyond mind processes and rational thinking into walking in the Spirit and my confusion about gender and masculinity, but in my journals and private conversations these two problems have consumed the bulk of my emotional resources for a very long time. It is amazing how much light has been shed on these things in the past year, and the breakthrough I experienced in two short weeks was astounding.
There in the makeshift office where each team member met with the leadership team privately for healing prayer, He spoke deeply to me. Where wounds of past rejection had taught me to hide behind impenetrable defenses from both God and man, withdrawing into a sharply honed cycle of analysis, self-absorption and resentment, fifteen minutes of the Holy Spirit pouring on my head was enough to reverse much of the damage.

It’s called ectopia cordis. Something went wrong in my development, I became a product of psychology, too much soul and not enough spirit. Walking around with a hole in my chest, how could I breathe life into empty spaces when the sucking wound in my lungs wouldn’t even let me catch my breath? Calla Maria was right—I couldn’t give that shit to anyone.
But He penetrated, somehow, deep inside of me, and was even so good as to patch up the hole. The tears that floated to the surface were replaced by holy winds, cleansing water—fuller and deeper and surer than ever. My puny spirit, so long smothered by a tyrannically analytical mind, was refreshed by the Comforter Himself, allowed to step out in faith and find himself in holy communion. And I saw myself in Technicolor, a reservoir for wellsprings of life, no longer gulping approval in desperate hope of filling the void, finally full enough to spill something out.
But is that all there was to it? I confess I am reluctant to lay claim to wholeness this quickly.

I’ll wait to ring the bells awhile,
till all the light and color
have stayed the whole of spring,
until I believe it.
And if, and if I count on you,
oh do not fly away.
I dare not count on you,
it is too early to say.
-the innocence mission

But it isn’t too early-—and that in itself is terrifying to me.

Therefore, brethren, having boldness to enter the Holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He consecrated for us, through the veil, that is, His flesh, and having a High Priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful.
Hebrews 10:19-23 NKJV


It is strange to feel so much different, having crossed the equator only twice.