The blog is dead. Long live the blog.

The first thing you should know is: this post has been sitting in a Word document for a couple of weeks now.

The second thing you should know is: I wrote the above note at the same time I wrote this post because I knew I wouldn’t be able to let this go easily.

And lastly:

In the fall of 2004 I was twenty-three years old. I was a recent college graduate unable to find a real job, supporting myself primarily with the meager funds I made playing music, and, shamefully, by accepting the occasional C-note from my dad.

And I’m pretty sure I was depressed.

Now, I don’t mean depressed as in “sad.” I’m pretty sure it was the real deal, a full-blown existential crisis. At least it had most of the symptoms: Long periods of solitude and introspection that always ended with me concluding that I was a useless waste of space. Moping. Moodiness. Bitterness. Bitchiness. Irrationality. Being short-tempered and rude to my friends and family. Basically the only depression-related symptoms I didn’t show were promiscuity and drug/alcohol abuse.

Aside from being a musician (which I pretty much already was), the only thing in the world I wanted to be was a writer. This was not a new revelation. I had wanted that since I was a kid. Throughout elementary school I kept notebooks filled with stories. When my third grade teacher gave us blank hardbacks to write and illustrate our own books, I wrote two--one for the assignment, and a sequel. Mrs. Knight’s English class my senior year of high school settled it for me--both the class itself and her parting words to me on my last day of school: “I want a copy of your first book.”

I can say now what I didn’t dare say five years ago: I pursued an English degree so that I could be a writer. However, I had to learn what I already knew--degrees don’t make writers. It’s not a job you just go apply for. The summer after graduating from college beat this realization into me. By the fall of that year, I found myself in a very weird place, with scattered pages and piles of writing, no goals for the future, and only the vaguest of hopes that I would end up doing something besides fabricating errands and driving loops around town just to be out of the house.

All of that taken into account, the series of events and attitudes that lead to the creation of this blog were:

desire to write; desire to have that writing read; depression/anxiety; new laptop as a college graduation gift; high-speed Internet connection at the rent house I moved into with my two friends/bandmates; the discovery of a free weblog service

So I signed up and Several Things was born. I found it cathartic to not only vent in writing, but to publish that writing on the Internet where other people could (potentially) read it. I had things to say and I wanted people to read and respond to them. I wrote about everything that crossed my mind--rants, pleas, essays, stories, poems; most of it nonsense, and most of it sickeningly solipsistic. As sad as it sounds, during a time when I was at my loneliest and angriest, writing on this blog made me feel like I was a part of the world.

But a lot has changed in five years, and I don’t feel that way anymore.

I enjoy reading blogs, but I have noticed that, aside from the rare exception, successful blogs are written by people in public positions where others want to hear what they have to say--pastors, theologians, editors, agents, established writers, musicians, etc. Their blogs are widely read because there is an existing demand for that particular blogger’s insight, opinion, and expertise. In addition, their blogs are focused, providing information or commentary on one topic or field of interest.

Of course I have no fan base, and my blog has never had any focus or real purpose other than to serve as a public journal of sorts. In fact, it pains me to read some of the older content. I’m embarrassed not just that it’s on the Internet, but that it ever came out of my mouth in the first place. This is especially true of some of my religious ponderings from back in the day when I embodied the cliché of the pompous, generally pissed twenty-something, ripping everybody a new one without a clue as to what my own convictions were. I suppose it could be argued that writing such things helped me work through problems by articulating what was on my mind, which I guess it did, but that brings me to my next problem: Writing in order to help yourself think is one thing; doing it in public is another.

This blog has benefited me personally in a number of ways. It has served as a scrapbook of sorts over the last five years. Etched into each post is my state of mind and soul at the time it was written. Since the blog gave me an ostensibly legitimate reason to write, I have often used it to flesh out my thinking on theology, family, social issues, and other things that are important to me. It has even been the origin of a handful of essays that were published at Relevant Magazine’s website, or as columns in the Richland Beacon.

I have kept this blog because I love to write, but lately as social media has gained ground in its takeover of the human soul, and its outlets have turned from tools of communication to soapboxes for self-exaltation and promotion, I have found that bearing my brain up here for whomever to see has been more troubling than cathartic. I feel like the guy in class who nobody likes, always eager to share his asinine opinion on every topic. The last thing I want to be is one more voice in a chorus of whiners, or one more shout in an angry mob. Nor do I want to be seen as self-important and self-promoting.

After pondering all of the above problems and tensions, I have kept coming back to one solution, a cure-all for both the narcissism that causes me to put stuff up here, and my bad feelings about no one reading it: Kill the blog.

It is time to hang it up.

I won’t be taking the site down, only abstaining from it. I may chime in from time to time with the occasional baby episode (which I intend to keep writing regardless), and I will continue to keep the Matt Chandler Resources page up to date. As for writing in general, I’m going to put my time and energy into other things. If I feel the occasional need to vent I’ll just keep it in the journal and remember that I’ve been writing for my own benefit this whole time anyway.

Goodbye.

2666: The Collective Unconscious

I am kind of following the online group read of Roberto Bolaño’s massive novel, 2666, which began last week and goes through May. I say "kind of following" because in just two weeks we welcome Lona Blaire to the family, and I have no intention of trying to stay on schedule reading the novel after that point, but do intend to keep reading and to try and follow the blogs as much as possible. I have been interested in this book since the English translation was published in 2008. I bought a copy last year, but was seriously hung over after reading Infinite Jest and Underworld, so I am just now getting around to it.

In the material I’ve read from the blogs so far, what stands out to me is the similarity in reaction to the novel’s first 51 pages among all of the commentators. The same things are standing out to everyone, the same things are striking everyone as peculiar, and even the same extra-textual connections are being made.

What is interesting about this is that when you notice these things as an individual reader, your initial reaction is to question the author’s intentions. For example, I have been having a hard time distinguishing two of the main characters thus far, Pelletier and Espinoza. I go and read the blogs, and lo--everyone is having a hard time keeping them separated. (And that’s just one broad example; there are several others that are only of interest to readers of the novel, and I want to try and make a larger point here.)

One conclusion must be, then, that when a body of readers shares the exact same initial reaction to a text, the author has written with the intention of getting that reaction. And how is it that an author can insure this reaction? I frankly have no idea, but I believe that it depends on the individual writer and the individual book.

Another conclusion is that while we all operate under the general assumption that we are autonomous individuals, distinguished from one another by our personal histories and experiences, education, religious convictions and political affiliations, tastes in art and literature, and so forth, we all respond in the same way to stimuli--and not base, physical stimuli (as in, e.g., it’s a universal truth that if you hit someone on the knee with a hammer they are going to yell out and clutch their knee in pain), but intellectual stimuli-- because of the one thing that we all have in common: popular culture.

Why else would an isolated dream sequence in the pages of a novel by a Chilean author immediately bring, not only to my (American) mind, but the mind of other (mostly American) readers whom I don’t know and have never met, a particular scene out of a David Lynch movie (Mulholland Drive)? When we come to a text, we bring with us our personal body of knowledge that allows us to understand what is being written. This is true of every kind of novel (e.g., Twilight became popular in part because everyone already understands what a vampire is, and can understand the risk in being romantically involved with one). But what we don’t often consider is that our personal body of knowledge has come from the larger body of knowledge available in our culture. We all know the same basic stuff--some of us just know more about particular things than others--and we all process information from the same general worldview.

Authors rely on this collective knowledge base for their works to make sense. In the case of the opening pages of 2666, Bolaño relies on a general understanding of European geography and language. He relies on a general understanding of the complexity of both plutonic and romantic relationships (in the friendship between Pelletier and Espinoza, and the bizarre couplings of first Liz Norton and Pelletier, and then Norton and Espinoza); he doesn’t have to explain why that whole thing is awkward. Finally, Bolaño not only relies on the collective knowledge base, but also on a general consistency in the very way people will read the book--what they will understand when, connections they will make at certain points in the book, references they will and won’t pick up on, etc.

This is by no means a method particular to this one writer or this one book. I’m only using it as an example because of the physical evidence in blog postings and comments. In the end, it is both comforting and a little discouraging. It is comforting to know that we are not alone in our thoughts. It is discouraging to know that we are not original, and that our reactions are easily controlled by the words of an author.

A moon shoot or a power grab?

“We have to educate our way to a better economy.”
--U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan

It looks like everyone is chiming in with reservations about the state’s involvement in the national Race to the Top program to reform education. As with everything else related to the public education system, Race to the Top is replete with vague language and intentions as broadly stated as “Making progress toward rigorous college- and career-ready standards and high-quality assessments that are valid and reliable for all students….”

Race to the Top offers schools a piece of the government’s pie. The program is a part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (AKA the Stimulus). And while it is being presented as free money that school systems can use to better themselves, there is a lot of reservation on the part of some to accept it. Most seem to understand that nothing is free. Especially not government loans.

Below I linked to an article and a video of Education Secretary Arne Duncan going on about his hopes and dreams for American education. I want to you to pay attention to what he says and understand that he is not talking about educating children. He is talking about institutionalizing them.

In other interviews (which can be found on YouTube) he points to the societal shift in America, where both husband and wife are working, where there is a large number of single mothers, and where a student getting home from school at 3:00 and “eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich” is a thing of the past. His suggestion is apparently to take advantage of this by keeping kids in school longer--12 hours a day, 11 months a year. Just what exactly he plans to do with them for the 12 hours they’re there is vague at best, but seems to involve extracurricular activities (which are generally already available to most students), and…no one knows what else. Essentially, his plan sounds like free government daycare. They’ll gladly raise your kids for you and mold them into the kind of workforce that can save this country’s economy.

Anyone with a minute’s experience in the classroom knows exactly how well a 12-hour school day would go. It would be horrific. During my last year teaching, the school I worked at went only four days a week, but for 8 hours a day. By the end of fifth period the students were checked out. A body of bored, restless students breeds misbehavior and is counterproductive to educating them. Sitting in class for that long would not benefit even the most patient and intelligent adult. Secretary Duncan is operating on the foolish assumption that more is better, and he is ignoring a key component in education: human nature.

What it boils down to is this: The government wants to repair the economy. They rightly understand that in order to do this, we have to provide educational and professional opportunities to our children. However, they are using the bailout as an opportunity not just to promote education, but to get their thumb into local schools’ business by putting them in debt to the federal government. The “goals” of Race to the Top are not new or groundbreaking. They’re exactly the same as most states’ goals, and are as common sense as the knowledge that keeping kids in school for 12 hours a day, 11 months a year is tantamount to child abuse.

I wouldn’t normally be so vitriolic about this, but having a child who will be in school in the next few years has changed my perspective a lot. I have reconsidered many of the opinions I held as a school teacher. If my daughter was going to be made to be in school for 12 hours a day 11 months a year, she just wouldn’t be there. I value her too much.

And for the record, I don't sympathize with the teachers’ unions. They are the ones primarily speaking out against Race to the Top, but I believe they’re against it for the wrong reasons. These unions are parasitic organizations that feed on the fear and insecurity of teachers. Sure, teachers are underpaid. Sure, they put in too many hours. Sure, there are too many unrealistic expectations put on them. But that’s the nature of the job. Teaching is hard, but the unions take advantage of this and never have the schools’ best interest in mind.

See: "Education Reform's Moon Shoot" at the Washington Post.

When considering Haiti...

As we here in America can do little more than sit slack-jawed at the magnitude of the tragedy in Haiti, the culture has already been dealing with the question of God’s role in all this. It’s been asked in the media in a variety of ways, from the more blunt “Does God hate Haiti?” to the more diplomatic “What was God thinking?”

I believe that there are a couple of things that we as believers should keep in mind when it comes to God’s involvement in this tragedy.


1. The world is broken.

In Romans 8:18-22, Paul says:

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.

We often default to thinking about sin only as a list of don’ts. We forget that as an effect of the Fall, sin is our very nature (Eph. 2:1-3; Rom. 5:12-14). In addition, God did not create the world in a state of brokenness, but in a state of perfection. When man fell, creation fell with him, and both our and the Earth’s only hope of salvation is in Christ. This is what the consummation will be--his making right all things and making creation whole again.

Until that time there are earthquakes. There are hurricanes. There are tsunamis. And people die. We die in a myriad of ways, often by one another’s hands. This is a part of that brokenness. The same state of sin that causes genocide also causes faults in the earth to shift and topple cities.

I am not offering comfort about this fact--no one can. But it is something that we must remember, and we must remember to own the sin. The people of Haiti did not commit some specific sin that caused God’s judgment to fall on them. They are a part of a broken world where terrible things happen. We must remember this because without viewing the world in the context of the Fall, it is easy to blame God when tragedy strikes. Without taking the effects of sin into account, all of the death and destruction in the world seems like an arbitrary movement of God’s hand to strike some people down and protect others.


2. Death is not a concept.

Even those of us who have dealt with death firsthand tend to think about it only as something that happens to other people. In our hearts, we rarely really consider the fact that we are one day going to die. In addition, we put too much trust in the temporal things that we construct to preserve our lives. No one wakes up on a given day and anticipates the very ground under their feet betraying them and killing them with the house that they count on to protect them.

Within a matter of seconds, a hundred thousand or more people were killed. More are dying every day from the after-effects. Haiti serves as a reminder to all of us that life is fragile. What we do with this truth is ultimately up to each of us, but recognizing how quickly any of us could be destroyed should humble us before the God who holds our lives together in every beat of our heart and breath of our lungs.


3. God does all things, and is good in all things.

Isaiah 46:8-11:

“Remember this and stand firm,
recall it to mind, you transgressors,
remember the former things of old;
for I am God, and there is no other;
I am God, and there is none like me,
declaring the end from the beginning
and from ancient times things not yet done,
saying, ‘My counsel shall stand,
and I will accomplish all my purpose,’
calling a bird of prey from the east,
the man of my counsel from a far country.
I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass;
I have purposed, and I will do it.”

We have to remember first that nothing escapes God’s grasp. He was not caught off guard by what happened last Tuesday. He was not surprised, and he is not scrambling in a panic to figure out how to fix it. He knows exactly what is happening and exactly how he plans to use it for his good.

When bad things happen, we tend to want to either give God all the glory and all the blame, or to imagine that he has meticulously planned out all of the good things that happen in the world, and simply “allowed” all the bad. Both of these approaches are only half-right. God does all things (Amos 3:6 says, “Is a trumpet blown in a city, and the people are not afraid? Does disaster come to a city, unless the Lord has done it?”). What we cannot understand is that God has a reason for all that happens. Nothing, no matter how tragic or evil it may be, happens without purpose. The hard part, of course, is really believing this, especially in the midst of so deep a tragedy. We have to remind ourselves, and ask God to remind us, that just because we can’t see the reasons doesn’t mean there are none.

The last thing I want to do is speak out of turn on matters like this. I freely admit that I have no concept of the suffering taking place in Haiti right now. All I know to do is to pray for the people there--both the citizens and those who have flown in to help in giving aid--and to pray that through this, God’s goodness would become evident to us all.

On Biblical Literacy

David Nienhuis, a professor at Seattle Pacific University, has an interesting article in the latest Modern Reformation on the lack of biblical literacy among evangelicals.

The two paragraphs I've quoted below sum up the problem among younger evangelicals, and touches on a problem with youth and education in general.

There are, no doubt, many reasons for the current predicament. In general we spend far less time reading anything at all in this culture, much less dense and demanding books like the Bible. Not long ago I met with a student who was struggling in one of my courses. When I asked her what she thought the trouble was, she replied, in a tone suggesting ever so slightly that the fault was mine, "Reading a lot is not a part of my learning style." She went on to inform me that students today learned more by "watching videos, listening to music, and talking to one another." She spoke of the great growth she experienced in youth group (where she no doubt spent a lot of time watching videos, listening to music, and talking with people), but her ignorance of the Bible clearly betrayed the fact that the Christian formation she experienced in her faith community afforded her little to no training in the actual reading of Scripture.

Indeed, a good bit of the blame for the existing crisis has to fall at the feet of historic American evangelicalism itself. In his book Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--and Doesn't, Stephen Prothero has drawn our attention to various religious shifts that took place as a result of the evangelistic Second Great Awakening that shook American culture in the first half of the nineteenth century, key characteristics of which continue to typify contemporary evangelical attitudes. For instance, there was a shift from learning to feeling, as revivalists of the period emphasized a heartfelt and unmediated experience of Jesus himself over religious education. While this strategy resulted in increased conversions and the creation of numerous popular nondenominational voluntary associations, it also had the effect of requiring Christians to agree to disagree when it came to doctrinal matters. There was a corresponding shift from the Bible to Jesus, as more and more Christians came to believe that the key test of Christian faithfulness was not the affirmation of a creed or catechism, or knowledge of the biblical text, but the capacity to claim an emotional relationship with what Prothero calls "an astonishingly malleable Jesus--an American Jesus buffeted here and there by the shifting winds of the nation's social and cultural preoccupations."

Read the article here.

Episode 23: Photo Op

At Joni’s doctor visit last Wednesday, the nurse did a 4-D ultrasound on Lona and gave us a few pictures. The girl is chunky, and looks just like her sister. She was 5lbs, 9oz as of the time of these pictures. She’s probably around 6lbs by now.

She’s coming four weeks from today.

Speaking the Truth in Love

I had the pleasure of hearing Voddie Baucham preach on a handful of occasions back in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. The time I remember most was in 2001 when some friends and I visited one night of the Student Life camp being held at Louisiana Tech. While I can’t remember exactly what Mr. Baucham was preaching on that night, I do remember knowing in my heart and my bones that he had brought it. The preaching was biblical, relentless, serious, him pacing the stage, his booming voice filling up (and shutting up) a room of 2,000+ teenagers without telling a single joke.

A couple years ago, I was looking for some online reading and his name turned up. I read his blog, listened to some of his sermons, and thanks to the passage of a few years, some profound changes in my personal theology, marriage, and the birth of our first baby, I had a better context to fit his preaching and ministry into. I find him to be a strong preacher, a highly principled man, and committed to being consistently, relentlessly, biblical in all areas of his life.

I have taken up reading his blog again lately, going back and looking at the archives, and I have found myself impressed (and convicted) by the things I’ve read. Mr. Baucham holds a number of views on things like theology, family, and church, that, while biblical, are drastically different from most of his fellow evangelicals, and his colleagues (if that’s the right word) in the SBC. Thus, he tends to be controversial. I don’t personally find his views controversial. I think they are extreme, and I mean that in a good way. He has a knack for pointing out things that seem revolutionary on the surface, but should be glaringly obvious to anyone trying to live consistently as a Christian. And what separates him from the herd of others who tout “extreme” views on things only for the sake of controversy and in hopes of gaining a following for themselves is that he lives out what he preaches, even when it costs him popularity.

He is unapologetically Reformed in his theology. He is committed to raising and educating his children in a biblical way (he is, in his words, “radically anti-government education”) rightly identifying the fact that to teach is to pass on a worldview and to learn is to absorb someone else’s worldview. And his church (Grace Family Baptist, near Houston) is known for being a part of what is called the Family Integrated Church movement.

Baucham himself points out that there is no consistent model for the FIC, and that every church that takes on the label of “family integrated” does it somewhat differently, but the idea, in short, is that there is no aged-based segregation in the church. This means no youth group, college group, young marrieds, etc. (Please understand that this is a generalized explanation of the concept, and that some in the FIC movement have taken the idea to bizarre and cultish extremes. Read a brief explanation of Baucham's views here and here.) There are other churches, that while avoiding the Family Integrated label, eschew program-based ministry in favor of doing things like home groups (rather than Sunday school), and integrate the younger people into the larger church body rather than segregating them as a separate body with a different pastor.

Truth is, most people have never given a second thought to something as seemingly innocuous as youth ministry, and would be shocked to know that youth ministry as it currently exists in the American evangelical church is not only absent from the Bible, but is generally unbiblical in the way it is conducted, and tends to discourage discipleship and spiritual growth rather than strengthen them. Personally, having witnessed firsthand for over a decade the stagnancy and general ineffectiveness of youth groups, I find the concept of an age-integrated church fascinating.

All that aside, I suggest you spend some time reading through Voddie Baucham's blog, and let yourself be challenged.

Voddie Baucham on the supremacy of Christ