Let's say we converted the US national debt into chickens, and then somehow convinced these chickens to get in a line, beak to tail (remember, this is a hypothetical situation). Eleven trillion chickens in a line would probably cause space-time to bend and tear by nature of their sheer shock value. This would allow the line of chickens to defy the laws of physics, stretching out into empty space without losing their lives and / or chicken... ness.
Obviously this line of space-time defying chickens would be long. Very long. It would, in fact, be twenty four times the distance from the earth to the sun. This would place them somewhere between Uranus and Neptune.
12 inches was used as the standard length of a chicken. The minimum distance from the Earth to Neptune is about 18 astronomical units, so you can say the chickens are nine or ten inches and the stuff I said would still be right.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Another Rant
I just read a story on CNN international that made my blood boil. Why on earth are we allied with Israel? Our support for them is one of the main reasons that the Islamic world hates us, and with good reason!
I never heard a peep about this kind of stuff when I was living in the US. There were stories of fighting and suicide bombings, but never these kinds of atrocities. Why do we support Israel? Can anyone give me one good reason?
I have realized something about the conservative / liberal media fight. The US media (conservative, liberal and otherwise) tells it's audience what it wants to hear. Most conservatives I know want to have something to yell (which is unhealthy) at and most liberals I know want a future where we care for all the cute furry things (which is kindergarten environmentalism). Neither of them are hearing about half the stuff that goes on in the world. When I get back to the US I'm going to change the settings on all the news websites I visit to "international".
I never heard a peep about this kind of stuff when I was living in the US. There were stories of fighting and suicide bombings, but never these kinds of atrocities. Why do we support Israel? Can anyone give me one good reason?
I have realized something about the conservative / liberal media fight. The US media (conservative, liberal and otherwise) tells it's audience what it wants to hear. Most conservatives I know want to have something to yell (which is unhealthy) at and most liberals I know want a future where we care for all the cute furry things (which is kindergarten environmentalism). Neither of them are hearing about half the stuff that goes on in the world. When I get back to the US I'm going to change the settings on all the news websites I visit to "international".
Sunday, March 22, 2009
SPEAK ENGLISH YOU IGNORANT FOREIGNER!
It really bugs me when Americans complain about signs and automated messages in two languages. I'm not saying that English isn't the "language of the land", or that people shouldn't make an effort to learn the language when they move to a new place. I'm just saying that a language is a hard thing to learn, and it's nice to be able to get around while you are learning it.
Also, people should be grateful for the opportunity to learn a new language. Besides being a good way of communicating and learning about the world, learning a new language improves general memory, provides some protection against dementia in the elderly, and can be helpful in the case of a stroke or brain lesion.
As regards the bit about brain lesions, bilingual people who have lost the ability to speak or understand one language due to a neural lesion sometimes have fewer problems with the other because it is stored in a different physical location. There's some debate about how much of an effect being bilingual has, but there were a few examples I read that show it is indeed helpful, even if only occasionally.
Anyway.
That rant was because of a youtube video I saw on how people who come to America should learn English, so the rest of us don't have to deal with signs or automated messages in a foreign language. A cynical person would say that English IS a foreign language to the vast majority of Americans, but I'm not a cynical person.
Am I?
Anyway, still on the topic of languages.
In Ulaanbaatar a taxi is any car that stops when you hold out your hand. This is a lovely system, because it means you meet a lot of interesting people and never have to wait long for a taxi.
Yesterday I decided to go to Zaisan for the afternoon... by myself. I asked several people to go with me, but they declined for a variety of reasons. Some said it was too cold, some said they wanted to stay and watch a movie, and some merely stared off into space muttering about "the chosen one" as as they rocked gently back and forth smoking weed and listening to Yani.
I mean....
So I went by myself. I crossed the street and quickly flagged a taxi. The driver asked me where I was going, and I told him. Some drivers try to start up a conversation, but this man wasn't one of them. He was completely silent as we drove across the city, except for his soft humming.
Then, in the middle of an intersection, the car died. It didn't sputter, it just died. The driver tried to start it up again. It sputtered like a teenager being told to get up at six AM, then died. Turning to me, he gave an embarrassed grin and asked if I could help him push. After we had pushed the car out of the intersection and to the side of the road he told me the car was out of gas.
Mongolian drivers NEVER have more than a gallon of gas in their tanks. To keep people from siphoning their gas they simply leave their tanks as close to empty as possible. When the tanks are that close to empty it is very hard to read the gas gauge, so a lot of them simply drive around until the car starts to sputter, then turn into a gas station and put in another half gallon. There is one obvious problem with this: cars are constantly dying between gas stations and causing traffic jams.
I sighed, paid the driver for the distance he had taken me, and flagged another "taxi".
Two cars stopped almost instantly, and I got into the one that happened to be closest. Getting in, I directed the driver to Zaisan. He turned around and handed me a pencil and a pad of paper, tapping on the paper to indicate I should write it down. "Zaisan?" I said again, hopefully. "I can't write" I said in Mongolian. He shook his head and pointed to his ear.
ah.
I wrote it down, spelling it Заисан, which was probably wrong. He looked at the paper, puzzled. I pointed in the direction of Zaisan, continuing to blabber on in broken Mongolian out of habit. He smiled and nodded.
"Thi, Dan" he said, pronouncing each syllable distinctly and carefully, but none the less incorrectly. He then proceeded to drive me to Zaisan.
In Ulaanbaatar there are few cars that aren't scared and battered. Most cars have their bumpers covered in dents and paint streaks. This is partly because most of the country has learned to drive quite recently, and also because the roads were designed for much lighter, much slower traffic. At the moment the main rule of the road is "avoid death". Smaller cars get out of the way of larger cars, and interesting horns have been invented due to the fact that normal horns are losing their effect from overuse.
I was somewhat nervous as the deaf taxi driver pulled out into the traffic, realizing that he couldn't hear any of the horns directed at him. My fears were soon allayed as I realized he checked his mirrors about every five to ten seconds. Normally, a trip across the city involves several near death experiences, but not in this car. As I watched him it dawned on me that he was keeping track of every single car in the sea of traffic, and I was awed.
Zaisan was fun, if somewhat cold. I flew paper airplanes on the updrafts climbing the slopes of the hills, and some of them stayed in the air for about 30 seconds. Here are some more pictures. Click on them to see them full size.
People have been getting more serious about Buddhism recently. Under communism it was discouraged, but now Mongolian Buddhists are actively trying to discover what it means to be Buddhist, including some valiant attempts at vegetarianism.
Anything that includes the Russian hammer and cycle has got to be cool, especially when there are kids climbing on it.
HIPPIES WERE HERE!
(no, the dream catcher is not traditional)
This will look cool once it finally turns green.
I think that the smoke has an almost dreamlike quality when the sun shines through it at this angle. Maybe I've been here too long.
On the way back I found a place where the ice had melted, leaving the impression of ice crystals in the mud.
Also, people should be grateful for the opportunity to learn a new language. Besides being a good way of communicating and learning about the world, learning a new language improves general memory, provides some protection against dementia in the elderly, and can be helpful in the case of a stroke or brain lesion.
As regards the bit about brain lesions, bilingual people who have lost the ability to speak or understand one language due to a neural lesion sometimes have fewer problems with the other because it is stored in a different physical location. There's some debate about how much of an effect being bilingual has, but there were a few examples I read that show it is indeed helpful, even if only occasionally.
Anyway.
That rant was because of a youtube video I saw on how people who come to America should learn English, so the rest of us don't have to deal with signs or automated messages in a foreign language. A cynical person would say that English IS a foreign language to the vast majority of Americans, but I'm not a cynical person.
Am I?
Anyway, still on the topic of languages.
In Ulaanbaatar a taxi is any car that stops when you hold out your hand. This is a lovely system, because it means you meet a lot of interesting people and never have to wait long for a taxi.
Yesterday I decided to go to Zaisan for the afternoon... by myself. I asked several people to go with me, but they declined for a variety of reasons. Some said it was too cold, some said they wanted to stay and watch a movie, and some merely stared off into space muttering about "the chosen one" as as they rocked gently back and forth smoking weed and listening to Yani.
I mean....
So I went by myself. I crossed the street and quickly flagged a taxi. The driver asked me where I was going, and I told him. Some drivers try to start up a conversation, but this man wasn't one of them. He was completely silent as we drove across the city, except for his soft humming.
Then, in the middle of an intersection, the car died. It didn't sputter, it just died. The driver tried to start it up again. It sputtered like a teenager being told to get up at six AM, then died. Turning to me, he gave an embarrassed grin and asked if I could help him push. After we had pushed the car out of the intersection and to the side of the road he told me the car was out of gas.
Mongolian drivers NEVER have more than a gallon of gas in their tanks. To keep people from siphoning their gas they simply leave their tanks as close to empty as possible. When the tanks are that close to empty it is very hard to read the gas gauge, so a lot of them simply drive around until the car starts to sputter, then turn into a gas station and put in another half gallon. There is one obvious problem with this: cars are constantly dying between gas stations and causing traffic jams.
I sighed, paid the driver for the distance he had taken me, and flagged another "taxi".
Two cars stopped almost instantly, and I got into the one that happened to be closest. Getting in, I directed the driver to Zaisan. He turned around and handed me a pencil and a pad of paper, tapping on the paper to indicate I should write it down. "Zaisan?" I said again, hopefully. "I can't write" I said in Mongolian. He shook his head and pointed to his ear.
ah.
I wrote it down, spelling it Заисан, which was probably wrong. He looked at the paper, puzzled. I pointed in the direction of Zaisan, continuing to blabber on in broken Mongolian out of habit. He smiled and nodded.
"Thi, Dan" he said, pronouncing each syllable distinctly and carefully, but none the less incorrectly. He then proceeded to drive me to Zaisan.
In Ulaanbaatar there are few cars that aren't scared and battered. Most cars have their bumpers covered in dents and paint streaks. This is partly because most of the country has learned to drive quite recently, and also because the roads were designed for much lighter, much slower traffic. At the moment the main rule of the road is "avoid death". Smaller cars get out of the way of larger cars, and interesting horns have been invented due to the fact that normal horns are losing their effect from overuse.
I was somewhat nervous as the deaf taxi driver pulled out into the traffic, realizing that he couldn't hear any of the horns directed at him. My fears were soon allayed as I realized he checked his mirrors about every five to ten seconds. Normally, a trip across the city involves several near death experiences, but not in this car. As I watched him it dawned on me that he was keeping track of every single car in the sea of traffic, and I was awed.
Zaisan was fun, if somewhat cold. I flew paper airplanes on the updrafts climbing the slopes of the hills, and some of them stayed in the air for about 30 seconds. Here are some more pictures. Click on them to see them full size.
People have been getting more serious about Buddhism recently. Under communism it was discouraged, but now Mongolian Buddhists are actively trying to discover what it means to be Buddhist, including some valiant attempts at vegetarianism. 
Anything that includes the Russian hammer and cycle has got to be cool, especially when there are kids climbing on it.
HIPPIES WERE HERE!(no, the dream catcher is not traditional)
This will look cool once it finally turns green.
I think that the smoke has an almost dreamlike quality when the sun shines through it at this angle. Maybe I've been here too long.
On the way back I found a place where the ice had melted, leaving the impression of ice crystals in the mud.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Seventy Percent
There is a certain stereotype which most Americans hold in regard to Russia. They think that Russia tends to build things that are cold and gray, with a blockish and industrial look. They think that Russian products, business, foreign policy, and even culture are not known for their use of a graceful, gentle touch, but rather for a certain heavy handed forcefulness.
I don't plan to dispel that stereotype with this blog post. I may even take pleasure in spreading it a bit.
Yesterday we made a cake for one of the church members, who was having a birthday. Gerethle and I needed to go to the market to get some things (many things) which the recipe called for, including vanilla (which I had never seen here) and buttermilk (which I had never seen here).
Surprisingly, we succeeded in getting the vanilla. I bought a bottle of expired Mexican vanillin with traces of vanilla extract for an arm and a leg ($5). The other things were, unfortunately, simply not to be had.
We did get the other things we needed though. In addition to Mongolian eggs and butter we got Russian condensed milk, Indonesian shredded coconut, American flour, Indian sugar, German chocolate and whipped cream from some eastern-european country who's language I can't identify. It is easy to tell where things are from here, because the packages are usually labeled in the language of their country of origin. Mongolians are experts at going through life without understanding half the stuff they read (like, for instance, all the popup messages and warnings on computers, but that's another topic).
We got home and assembled the spoils of our conquest on the kitchen table. I looked over the recipe, and wondered why on earth I had chosen it. It was for a terribly complicated German chocolate cake involving things that needed to be melted, things that needed to be stirred, things that needed to be separated in unnatural ways... and whipped egg whites.
Gerethle said we should double the recipe, so we did. I began giving instructions to her and the other church members gathered there, spending half my time with a pen and paper as I went from English to Metric and then doubled everything. They were unfamiliar with the basic style of American recipes, and I had to explain that a "cup" meant neither a "heaping cup" nor "a cup with however much you want to put in", but rather a "cup" neatly leveled with a finger or knife edge.
As they watched various bowls of things being mixed, some of them looked at me in slight consternation. "Have you ever made a cake before?" they asked.
"Yes, of course, several" I said. I deliberately left out the fact that by "several" I meant "three", and that all of them had been about ten years before.
Halfway through the recipe, when the kitchen was in full disarray with every horizontal surface covered in bowls, we came to "two cups buttermilk". Since the recipe used baking soda instead of baking powder I assumed the buttermilk was needed to change the pH of the cake (when science majors bake this is how we think). I looked up "buttermilk substitute" on the internet and found that it is quite easy to make. Simply add a tablespoon of vinegar to a cup of milk, and you have buttermilk substitute.
I went to the school kitchen and got some Russian vinegar. The Mongolians looked at me wide eyed with disbelief as I carefully measured a full tablespoon of vinegar and put it into the milk. "Have you ever made a cake before?" they asked again. "Yes, I have" I said. Again.
The milk instantly curdled, smelling strongly of vinegar. I dumped the milk into the correct bowl (the one with the chocolate, egg yolks, vanilla and butter) then did it again.
I began to get a feeling that this may have been a mistake. The kitchen filled with the smell of vinegar, which was odd. A drop of vinegar had dropped on Gerethle's skin, and she immediately ran to the sink, holding her hand under the water as if she had burned it. This too was odd. I picked up the bottle, scanning the Russian words for anything I could understand. Then I saw it.
70% acetic acid.
Wow. Wow wow wow wow wow. 70% acetic acid will burn your skin (or, if you prefer, dissolve rocks). Almost all American vinegar is five percent or less. I tasted the bowl of cake batter that I had poured the two tablespoons of vinegar into. It tasted like salt and vinegar chips, only with chocolate and egg yolks.
The Mongolians insisted that we continue, saying it would be interesting (and not wanting to waste the $10 worth of stuff in that bowl). Sighing, I told them to toss it out. It was hopeless.
After a few more mistakes involving mental English to Metric conversions we finally succeeded in making a very nice cake. Only six people showed up for the "birthday party" (meaning six people showed up to sit around and eat cake), but it was fun.
Still, I fail to understand the Russian mindset on food products. SEVENTY PERCENT?! Are we talking about something for salad dressing, or are we talking about something used to dissolve the corpses of people killed by the mafia? Maybe they just want to make sure that anyone can dissolve corpses if they really need to.
I don't plan to dispel that stereotype with this blog post. I may even take pleasure in spreading it a bit.
Yesterday we made a cake for one of the church members, who was having a birthday. Gerethle and I needed to go to the market to get some things (many things) which the recipe called for, including vanilla (which I had never seen here) and buttermilk (which I had never seen here).
Surprisingly, we succeeded in getting the vanilla. I bought a bottle of expired Mexican vanillin with traces of vanilla extract for an arm and a leg ($5). The other things were, unfortunately, simply not to be had.
We did get the other things we needed though. In addition to Mongolian eggs and butter we got Russian condensed milk, Indonesian shredded coconut, American flour, Indian sugar, German chocolate and whipped cream from some eastern-european country who's language I can't identify. It is easy to tell where things are from here, because the packages are usually labeled in the language of their country of origin. Mongolians are experts at going through life without understanding half the stuff they read (like, for instance, all the popup messages and warnings on computers, but that's another topic).
We got home and assembled the spoils of our conquest on the kitchen table. I looked over the recipe, and wondered why on earth I had chosen it. It was for a terribly complicated German chocolate cake involving things that needed to be melted, things that needed to be stirred, things that needed to be separated in unnatural ways... and whipped egg whites.
Gerethle said we should double the recipe, so we did. I began giving instructions to her and the other church members gathered there, spending half my time with a pen and paper as I went from English to Metric and then doubled everything. They were unfamiliar with the basic style of American recipes, and I had to explain that a "cup" meant neither a "heaping cup" nor "a cup with however much you want to put in", but rather a "cup" neatly leveled with a finger or knife edge.
As they watched various bowls of things being mixed, some of them looked at me in slight consternation. "Have you ever made a cake before?" they asked.
"Yes, of course, several" I said. I deliberately left out the fact that by "several" I meant "three", and that all of them had been about ten years before.
Halfway through the recipe, when the kitchen was in full disarray with every horizontal surface covered in bowls, we came to "two cups buttermilk". Since the recipe used baking soda instead of baking powder I assumed the buttermilk was needed to change the pH of the cake (when science majors bake this is how we think). I looked up "buttermilk substitute" on the internet and found that it is quite easy to make. Simply add a tablespoon of vinegar to a cup of milk, and you have buttermilk substitute.
I went to the school kitchen and got some Russian vinegar. The Mongolians looked at me wide eyed with disbelief as I carefully measured a full tablespoon of vinegar and put it into the milk. "Have you ever made a cake before?" they asked again. "Yes, I have" I said. Again.
The milk instantly curdled, smelling strongly of vinegar. I dumped the milk into the correct bowl (the one with the chocolate, egg yolks, vanilla and butter) then did it again.
I began to get a feeling that this may have been a mistake. The kitchen filled with the smell of vinegar, which was odd. A drop of vinegar had dropped on Gerethle's skin, and she immediately ran to the sink, holding her hand under the water as if she had burned it. This too was odd. I picked up the bottle, scanning the Russian words for anything I could understand. Then I saw it.
70% acetic acid.
Wow. Wow wow wow wow wow. 70% acetic acid will burn your skin (or, if you prefer, dissolve rocks). Almost all American vinegar is five percent or less. I tasted the bowl of cake batter that I had poured the two tablespoons of vinegar into. It tasted like salt and vinegar chips, only with chocolate and egg yolks.
The Mongolians insisted that we continue, saying it would be interesting (and not wanting to waste the $10 worth of stuff in that bowl). Sighing, I told them to toss it out. It was hopeless.
After a few more mistakes involving mental English to Metric conversions we finally succeeded in making a very nice cake. Only six people showed up for the "birthday party" (meaning six people showed up to sit around and eat cake), but it was fun.
Still, I fail to understand the Russian mindset on food products. SEVENTY PERCENT?! Are we talking about something for salad dressing, or are we talking about something used to dissolve the corpses of people killed by the mafia? Maybe they just want to make sure that anyone can dissolve corpses if they really need to.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Friday, March 6, 2009
Sermon on Home
I promised to post some of my other sermons but never did. However, I am going to post this one.
-ctrl v-
Your house is the place where you live. If you ask me “Where is your house” I will say “my apartment is on the third floor of SDA”. However, there is a big difference between a house and a home. Your home is the place you go back to, the place you are from.
Two weeks ago I met Noel (new teacher) and Carle (ADRA worker). After church we were talking and Noel asked me “Where are you from?”
I really don’t like that question, because I’m never sure how to answer it. I asked her “Do you mean ‘where were you born’, ‘where were you last’, ‘where have you lived longest’, or ‘where do your parents live’, because there’s a different answer for each of those things”. I really don’t know where my home is. I doubt I will have a home until I get married and have a family, then my home will be with them.
I have asked my students where their homes were. Many have said that they live with relatives here in the city, but their homes are somewhere else.
Why do we need two definitions for house and home?
What makes a home?
The dictionary includes this in its list of definitions:
(this is the only definition in the dictionary that is different from “house”)
a. An environment offering security and happiness.
b. A valued place regarded as a refuge or place of origin.
A house can be a prison if it does not offer security and happiness. I hear about a lot of people who run away from home, but I don’t think anyone ever runs away from home. Some people leave a nice home because they think it is a bad home, and that the world outside is better. They usually learn they were wrong quite quickly. Other people leave a bad home. A bad home is no home at all, because it lacks love, security and happiness. No one runs away from security and happiness. Some people leave security and happiness so that they can have excitement and adventure, but that’s not running away from something, that’s running towards something.
America has a big problem with divorce, many of my friends dread going to their “home” because of the arguments they will find there. Many more don’t go home. Sometimes they go to their father’s house, and sometimes they go to their mother’s house, but they don’t think of either as home. “Home” is something that they lost a long time ago, something they may never have again.
Home is part of who you are. The further you are from home the stranger things are, and the stranger you appear to everyone around you. A home tells you how to see the world. When you see something new you compare it to things you already know. When you hear a new idea you compare it to other ideas you have heard. If you have no home; no way of deciding what you think of things, then all you will see is confusion.
It seems strange to me that so many people have this problem. Why should there be a difference between where we live and “home”? Animals don’t seem to have this problem. Granted, I can’t ask them how they feel about things like that. I’ve tried asking the marmots, but they always run away from me, and even if I catch them their English isn’t very good, so it’s hard to get any useful information out of them.
Marmots aside, what makes a “home” for people?
You might say that home is where there are people who know you, but that’s true of a lot of places that aren’t home. Students at a university often make more friends than they do at any other time in their lives, but not many of them think of the university as “home”.
You might say that home is where your family is, but a home is more than a family. If a family does not have love then it is only some people who live in the same house and happen to be related to each other.
You might say that home is where you have lived for a long time, but that isn’t true either. When I was very little my mother would leave me with an old Cuban woman who would babysit me while she was at work. This woman had lived and worked in America for several decades, but her house was still decorated to remind her of Cuba, because Cuba was her home, not America.
All these things tell me that home is more than just a place, and not every place can be home. In fact, no place will ever be a perfect home. Every home will have problems. There will be times when it feels more like a home, and other times when it feels less like a home.
How can we say that one home is more like a “real” home than another? If we say that then we must have an idea in our mind of what a perfect home is, something that we are comparing each place to. Our minds must have an idea of the “perfect” home, and places where we live are either more like home or less like home depending on how they compare to that idea.
Most animals also have an idea of a perfect home. My parent’s house has a small river running in front of it. In the river there are beavers. Beavers build dams to hold the water back, creating a pond. In this pond they build a house made of sticks and mud. Inside the house they are safe from the coyotes, bears and bobcats that would love to eat them. To build a dam the beavers need a stream or a small river. If the river is too big then they can’t build a dam across it. If the land is too flat then the water goes around the dam as soon as the beavers build it, which not only ruins the place for the beavers but also floods roads and makes the farmers angry. If the river is too fast then the beavers can’t build the dam in the first place. Also, it place needs to have a lot of the trees that beavers like to eat.
In other words, beavers need the same kinds of things that we need. They need food, they need the right kind of river, and they need a place where they and their family will be safe. Beavers don’t always build a dam and a house. Sometimes they will just dig a hole in a river bank to live in for a while. Sometimes people find beavers miles away from the nearest river. However, this is not the beaver’s home. If a beaver is miles away from the water that means it is searching for a new river. If a beaver digs a hole in the riverbank it isn’t thinking of settling down and raising a family, it is just passing through.
All of our homes here on earth are holes in the riverbank; things that we build to sleep in for the night. The good ones, the ones that seem most like home, are the ones that resemble our true home, which is not in this world. You can tell this world is not our home, because the world simply doesn’t work the way it should.
The economy is unfair. If you don’t work you will starve, but if you DO work you might starve anyway. A dishonest man will probably become richer than an honest man, especially if he is dishonest in a way that isn’t illegal yet.
War is unfair. It doesn’t matter who is right and who is wrong, all that matters is who has the bigger gun.
The environment is unfair. If I pollute a river it doesn’t affect me, it affects the people downstream. If my country pollutes the air your country suffers, but mine might be just fine.
There is more to it than just “who to blame” though, the world doesn’t work the way it should because there if it did there wouldn’t be greed, war and pollution in the first place. Human beings were not designed to like sin, this is one of the reasons why sin kills us.
So, if we are in a country that is not our home, a country full of death that can never be our home, we must find our home and go back to it.
Phil 3:20-21
But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. 21 He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself.
We are in a country that is not our home, and it is a dangerous country. Just before Jesus was arrested and put to death he prayed for the believers, because he knew he would be leaving them in a place that was not their home: a dark, dangerous place full of enemies.
John 17:14-19
14I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. 15My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. 16They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. 17Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. 18As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. 19For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified.
The earth is a terrible place. It is full of impossible situations, suffering, hunger and hatred. The entire earth is decaying, slowly crumbling from the long years of sin: years spent in rebellion against its creator.
When I say this a lot of people get up and ask me “how can you be so pessimistic and depressing? The world is a wonderful place if you just learn to be happy! Look at the beautiful sun outside, see all the people who love you! Sing a happy song and stop being so negative about things.”
I’m not talking about those things though. The earth is still a terrible place. Perhaps you yourself aren’t sad right now, but you are not the world. The world is crippled by sin, ruined by greed and hatred.
The world is falling apart because it is separated from God. The Bible says that it is “groaning”. All the nice things on earth, the loving people, the beautiful days, green grass and flowers, are the faint image of our true home. They are light shining through the windows of our home, which seems to be separated from us by an absolutely impossible distance.
In the story of the prodigal son, the son takes his inheritance from his father early and leaves. By doing this he was saying “I wish you were dead, all I want is your money”. He didn’t show either love or decent respect for his father. He took the money and went to a foreign country, where he spent it on “wild living”. Soon his money was all gone, and to make matters worse there was a famine in the country. He got a job feeding pigs, and he was so hungry that he wanted to eat the pigs’ food.
As he was hungrily looking at the pig’s food he came to his senses.
Luke 15:17-24
17"When he came to his senses, he said, 'How many of my father's hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! 18I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. 19I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men.' 20So he got up and went to his father.
"But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
21"The son said to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.'
22"But the father said to his servants, 'Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. 23Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let's have a feast and celebrate. 24For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.' So they began to celebrate.
The further we are from God, the further we are from home. The things that make a home; love, understanding, security, trust, comfort, warmth and good food, are things that God meant for us to enjoy and things that he wants to give us. Granted, we may not always enjoy warmth and good food when we are working for God, but that is because working for God means working in the world. In either case, without God we can never truly enjoy any of them. We may spend our inheritance on fast living like the prodigal son did, but we will never know the comfort of home.
Some day God will take us to our true home. When he does that, no matter how far you travel or how much you see you will always be at home, because you will be in God’s heavenly kingdom.
Revelation 21
3And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."
Things to fit in: comment on how the world doesn’t work the way it should.
-ctrl v-
Your house is the place where you live. If you ask me “Where is your house” I will say “my apartment is on the third floor of SDA”. However, there is a big difference between a house and a home. Your home is the place you go back to, the place you are from.
Two weeks ago I met Noel (new teacher) and Carle (ADRA worker). After church we were talking and Noel asked me “Where are you from?”
I really don’t like that question, because I’m never sure how to answer it. I asked her “Do you mean ‘where were you born’, ‘where were you last’, ‘where have you lived longest’, or ‘where do your parents live’, because there’s a different answer for each of those things”. I really don’t know where my home is. I doubt I will have a home until I get married and have a family, then my home will be with them.
I have asked my students where their homes were. Many have said that they live with relatives here in the city, but their homes are somewhere else.
Why do we need two definitions for house and home?
What makes a home?
The dictionary includes this in its list of definitions:
(this is the only definition in the dictionary that is different from “house”)
a. An environment offering security and happiness.
b. A valued place regarded as a refuge or place of origin.
A house can be a prison if it does not offer security and happiness. I hear about a lot of people who run away from home, but I don’t think anyone ever runs away from home. Some people leave a nice home because they think it is a bad home, and that the world outside is better. They usually learn they were wrong quite quickly. Other people leave a bad home. A bad home is no home at all, because it lacks love, security and happiness. No one runs away from security and happiness. Some people leave security and happiness so that they can have excitement and adventure, but that’s not running away from something, that’s running towards something.
America has a big problem with divorce, many of my friends dread going to their “home” because of the arguments they will find there. Many more don’t go home. Sometimes they go to their father’s house, and sometimes they go to their mother’s house, but they don’t think of either as home. “Home” is something that they lost a long time ago, something they may never have again.
Home is part of who you are. The further you are from home the stranger things are, and the stranger you appear to everyone around you. A home tells you how to see the world. When you see something new you compare it to things you already know. When you hear a new idea you compare it to other ideas you have heard. If you have no home; no way of deciding what you think of things, then all you will see is confusion.
It seems strange to me that so many people have this problem. Why should there be a difference between where we live and “home”? Animals don’t seem to have this problem. Granted, I can’t ask them how they feel about things like that. I’ve tried asking the marmots, but they always run away from me, and even if I catch them their English isn’t very good, so it’s hard to get any useful information out of them.
Marmots aside, what makes a “home” for people?
You might say that home is where there are people who know you, but that’s true of a lot of places that aren’t home. Students at a university often make more friends than they do at any other time in their lives, but not many of them think of the university as “home”.
You might say that home is where your family is, but a home is more than a family. If a family does not have love then it is only some people who live in the same house and happen to be related to each other.
You might say that home is where you have lived for a long time, but that isn’t true either. When I was very little my mother would leave me with an old Cuban woman who would babysit me while she was at work. This woman had lived and worked in America for several decades, but her house was still decorated to remind her of Cuba, because Cuba was her home, not America.
All these things tell me that home is more than just a place, and not every place can be home. In fact, no place will ever be a perfect home. Every home will have problems. There will be times when it feels more like a home, and other times when it feels less like a home.
How can we say that one home is more like a “real” home than another? If we say that then we must have an idea in our mind of what a perfect home is, something that we are comparing each place to. Our minds must have an idea of the “perfect” home, and places where we live are either more like home or less like home depending on how they compare to that idea.
Most animals also have an idea of a perfect home. My parent’s house has a small river running in front of it. In the river there are beavers. Beavers build dams to hold the water back, creating a pond. In this pond they build a house made of sticks and mud. Inside the house they are safe from the coyotes, bears and bobcats that would love to eat them. To build a dam the beavers need a stream or a small river. If the river is too big then they can’t build a dam across it. If the land is too flat then the water goes around the dam as soon as the beavers build it, which not only ruins the place for the beavers but also floods roads and makes the farmers angry. If the river is too fast then the beavers can’t build the dam in the first place. Also, it place needs to have a lot of the trees that beavers like to eat.
In other words, beavers need the same kinds of things that we need. They need food, they need the right kind of river, and they need a place where they and their family will be safe. Beavers don’t always build a dam and a house. Sometimes they will just dig a hole in a river bank to live in for a while. Sometimes people find beavers miles away from the nearest river. However, this is not the beaver’s home. If a beaver is miles away from the water that means it is searching for a new river. If a beaver digs a hole in the riverbank it isn’t thinking of settling down and raising a family, it is just passing through.
All of our homes here on earth are holes in the riverbank; things that we build to sleep in for the night. The good ones, the ones that seem most like home, are the ones that resemble our true home, which is not in this world. You can tell this world is not our home, because the world simply doesn’t work the way it should.
The economy is unfair. If you don’t work you will starve, but if you DO work you might starve anyway. A dishonest man will probably become richer than an honest man, especially if he is dishonest in a way that isn’t illegal yet.
War is unfair. It doesn’t matter who is right and who is wrong, all that matters is who has the bigger gun.
The environment is unfair. If I pollute a river it doesn’t affect me, it affects the people downstream. If my country pollutes the air your country suffers, but mine might be just fine.
There is more to it than just “who to blame” though, the world doesn’t work the way it should because there if it did there wouldn’t be greed, war and pollution in the first place. Human beings were not designed to like sin, this is one of the reasons why sin kills us.
So, if we are in a country that is not our home, a country full of death that can never be our home, we must find our home and go back to it.
Phil 3:20-21
But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. 21 He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself.
We are in a country that is not our home, and it is a dangerous country. Just before Jesus was arrested and put to death he prayed for the believers, because he knew he would be leaving them in a place that was not their home: a dark, dangerous place full of enemies.
John 17:14-19
14I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. 15My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. 16They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. 17Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. 18As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. 19For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified.
The earth is a terrible place. It is full of impossible situations, suffering, hunger and hatred. The entire earth is decaying, slowly crumbling from the long years of sin: years spent in rebellion against its creator.
When I say this a lot of people get up and ask me “how can you be so pessimistic and depressing? The world is a wonderful place if you just learn to be happy! Look at the beautiful sun outside, see all the people who love you! Sing a happy song and stop being so negative about things.”
I’m not talking about those things though. The earth is still a terrible place. Perhaps you yourself aren’t sad right now, but you are not the world. The world is crippled by sin, ruined by greed and hatred.
The world is falling apart because it is separated from God. The Bible says that it is “groaning”. All the nice things on earth, the loving people, the beautiful days, green grass and flowers, are the faint image of our true home. They are light shining through the windows of our home, which seems to be separated from us by an absolutely impossible distance.
In the story of the prodigal son, the son takes his inheritance from his father early and leaves. By doing this he was saying “I wish you were dead, all I want is your money”. He didn’t show either love or decent respect for his father. He took the money and went to a foreign country, where he spent it on “wild living”. Soon his money was all gone, and to make matters worse there was a famine in the country. He got a job feeding pigs, and he was so hungry that he wanted to eat the pigs’ food.
As he was hungrily looking at the pig’s food he came to his senses.
Luke 15:17-24
17"When he came to his senses, he said, 'How many of my father's hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! 18I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. 19I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men.' 20So he got up and went to his father.
"But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
21"The son said to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.'
22"But the father said to his servants, 'Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. 23Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let's have a feast and celebrate. 24For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.' So they began to celebrate.
The further we are from God, the further we are from home. The things that make a home; love, understanding, security, trust, comfort, warmth and good food, are things that God meant for us to enjoy and things that he wants to give us. Granted, we may not always enjoy warmth and good food when we are working for God, but that is because working for God means working in the world. In either case, without God we can never truly enjoy any of them. We may spend our inheritance on fast living like the prodigal son did, but we will never know the comfort of home.
Some day God will take us to our true home. When he does that, no matter how far you travel or how much you see you will always be at home, because you will be in God’s heavenly kingdom.
Revelation 21
3And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."
Things to fit in: comment on how the world doesn’t work the way it should.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
