Where did you eat lunch today?

My dad was in town this weekend for a visit. Kate and I showed him around the city yesterday. And today he and I headed out into the wilderness (We left Kate behind so we wouldn't be attacked by bees). We hiked in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness area. This is where we stopped for lunch. A little over 4000 feet up, we are looking out over Lake Olallie. The mountains are still covered in snow, so most of our hike was walking on top of 4-7 feet of it. It was a beautiful day and I will never forget this lunch break.

When Messiah Comes...

Yahweh! Have you forgotten us?
Are you blind? Do you not see what is happening?
Our land has been taken, our homes have been destroyed.
The sustenance of your earth is sold for profiit by the rich.
Our enemies pursuit has left us exhausted.
We become their whores in order to recieve their food.
Joy is a stranger, dance has been forgotten.
The wine has run out, the bread has gone stale.

But Yahweh, we thought you did not change?
We thought your rule was unending?
We must have been mistaken.
For you have forgotten us; you have abandoned us.
We demand restoration, we demand the return of your joy.
When will you come?*

*My own paraphrase of Lamentations 5 in response to some tragic news from a friend.

Nasty Cold, Home Movies, and Resurrection

So I am on day six of an extremely nasty cold. I went to the doctor yesterday and received some antibiotics, so hopefully I will be able to engage the world again in a few more days. So in my incapacitated state I have had the opportunity to watch a few movies: Blood Diamond, Children of Men and Stranger Than Fiction. All great movies, and I highly recommend them.

Tomorrow is Easter, the day of our Lord's resurrection. Being that I have been on my couch all week, I have not been able to participate in any Holy Week activities, nor will I make it to service tomorrow.

With that said, I have found the theme of death and resurrection quite apparent in these three movies that I have watched. In each of these films the main character is confronted with the futility of life.

In Blood Diamond, we are taught the phrase TIA, This is Africa. War, death, evil, and horrific suffering are just the way it is, so like Leonardo's character we should just try and get what we can, no matter what we destroy in the process.

In Children of Men, the people of the world can no longer bare children. Infertility is a metaphor to the human race giving up hope and accepting our doomed fate that life is going to come to a horrific end and there is nothing we can do about it.

Stranger Than Fiction, a lighter story for sure, dives into the same themes. Harold Crick lives a mundane and fruitless life. Throughout the story though, he begins to break out of his cyclical patterns of futility by embracing the life that he has.

Each of these stories end with the main characters loosing their lives (in reality or metaphorically), so that they and the people around them can find life.

War in Africa, the devouring appetite of global capitalism, or the monotony of the nine to five work week can and often do convince us of the futility of everything. And yet we continue to tell stories of resurrection, of new birth, of life. We repeat them with the hope, that in the re-telling of these stories of life, we will know and experience resurrection even in the midst of our daily tastes of death.

Christ the Lord is Risen.