Just in! You can now download the sermon I preached in chapel last month (on Mary and Martha) as an MP3 file here. Just right-click the link and select "save as." It's a 17 MB file, so it'll take a while if you're still using dial-up. Thanks to Dann (the best friend EVER) for hosting it for me.

Oh, yeah, I forgot. You may remember that I broke my glasses over Christmas Break. Well, I replaced them a couple of months ago.

When I looked in the mirror, I was shocked and surprised at how good they looked.

But then I got used to them.

In the fall of 2004, I was asked to speak to some students here about why I read. I saved my notes and intended to put them up on my blog -- oh, a year and a half ago, I guess. The notes have been sitting on my desk, as well as taking up an entry on my To-Do list, so, in a mad fit of productivity, I worked the notes into an entry:

Why I Read

When I was a child, I used to cry because I just knew I would never learn to read. Everybody else in my family could read – my mother, father, older sister, aunts and uncles, etc. I was the only one who couldn’t. I would look at the words on the page and get upset, because it was all so complicated and I really wanted to know what was said, but I couldn’t. I’d even stare at (pictureless) books, pretending to read, I wanted to read so badly. My father eventually taught me to read, before I ever got to preschool, but the desire was in me from the first.

When I was five, some men in our church took us young boys camping. Around the campfire, one man read the first chapter of C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. As I gazed into the fire, I could see the images of the story forming in the wisps of smoke. He ended after the first chapter, and I knew, as soon as I learned to read, I’d have to finish it. The Chronicles of Narnia had a profound impact on my life – so much so, that they were the only fiction books I took with me to college. From the Chronicles I learned longing – for Aslan, for Aslan’s country. Lewis brought home the reality of heaven and the tangibility of true desire in a way my mind could understand, in a way that was intuitively grasped by my spirit.

I also remember getting up early on Saturday mornings and going into my older sister’s room. I crawled in bed with her and she would read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time to me. I was introduced to Great Ideas – the possibilities of other dimensions (which made the idea of Heaven that much easier to grasp), the power of Love, and the importance of great philosphers and sages as “lights for us to see by.”

Later on, I followed this book up with the two sequels, and learned from A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet about the significance of small things, especially small decisions. My worldview was shaped and molded, and in retrospect, I realize the perspective was a biblical one.

Certainly I read other books as a child, but these are the ones that stuck with me, that touched something inside me and let me know I had been touched by something Important. These books raised questions – questions that did not seem to occur to the kids around me, questions that bothered me, in a good way, for years. I learned to think about things worth thinking about – things unrelated to math class, lunch boxes, and yellow school buses; I was learning to live free from the walls of the classroom. Against the shallow superficiality of 80s cartoon TV, I had been Awakened to a life lived deep.

For that is what good literature is about – being sensitive to the important things. Not just about being profound (although that may enter in), but about paying attention. Many Christians have sold their birthright – they’ve been given a glimpse of fundamental reality, and they use it solely as a means of feeling secure! Now that you have the Key, how can you NOT want to run around and unlock every door? How can you NOT want to penetrate the mysteries of love and honor and duty and death, everything that makes life worth living and death worth dying? How can you shut your eyes and refuse to contemplate the effects of sin – betrayal and heartache, hatred and loss? We’ve paid the price by eating the apple; now we’re accountable for the knowledge of good and evil.

Christ is the Answer to every question, but He is a different Answer for every question you ask. Only by asking the Questions can you reveal His full sufficiency.

I've had a chance to watch a number of movies lately.

Worth Multiple Viewings:

Grizzly Man: Tim Treadwell was an ecological activist who lived among the grizzly bears in Alaska for something like 15 seasons. During the last few seasons, he took along a video camera for a documentary he was making. Unfortunately, he was killed and eaten by the bears he tried to protect before he could finish filming. A noted documentary producer took his footage and turned it into a documentary about Treadwell himself. Treadwell was a character who defied easy categorization . . . I’ll just leave it at that and say, “You need to watch this.” It’s brilliant.

V for Vendetta: Pretty much everybody who enjoyed the graphic novel this is based on hated the movie. That’s reasonable. Once you see what it could have been, you don’t enjoy what it is. I didn’t read the novel, and I enjoyed the film. It raises many issues – especially dealing with terrorism and freedom – that I think need multiple viewings to really sort through.

Worth Watching Once:

Howl’s Moving Castle: A beautiful and interesting piece about a young girl who is cursed by a witch with old age. She has to live by her wits and take a job as a housemaid in a wizard’s magical castle while she tries to break the curse. Unfortunately, about 2/3 of the way through, it stops making any sense whatsoever. (Others tell me this is about the point the movie stops following the book it’s based on.)

Mirrormask: Like Howl’s Moving Castle, in that it’s beautiful, but becomes somewhat confusing towards the end. A teenage daughter of circus performers is sucked into the magical world of her drawings, and must find a way to awaken the White Queen before the minions of the Black Queen capture her.

Not Worth Watching:

Doom: Wretched dreck. Has once sequence – a five-minute first-person-shooter sequence – that’s worth watching. It would be considered innovative, except it was first pioneered OVER FIFTEEN YEARS AGO in videogames. About time Hollywood picked up on it.

I seem to be in the company of the famous.

The first season of SpikeTV's The Ultimate Fighter reality show starred my martial arts instructor, Forrest Griffin. He eventually won the grand prize (six-figure fighting contract) and became the poster-child of Mixed Martial Arts.

This is the third season of The Ultimate Fighter, and I just discovered that my other instructor Rory Singer (Forrest's friend) is on the show. Here's hoping you take it, champ.

In other news, a martial-arts buddy of mine (and the son of one of my colleagues here on campus) is the stunt double for Matthew McConaughey in his upcoming move We Are . . . Marshall.

Who's next for fame and fortune?

I finally finished my taxes. I hate doing taxes. Normally, I just do the 1040EZ form, which is pretty simple, but this time, I couldn't. You see, I had been paid $50 to proctor a test on Saturday for one of those standardized testing companies. Since I wasn't an employee, they just gave me a $50 check. When tax time rolled around, I received a form 1099-MISC. Now, if you receive a form 1099-MISC, you can't file the 1040EZ form, you have to file the massive 1040 form. This was an incredible headache, because it kept saying, "Insert deduction from Schedule 89z1 here." I'd think, "What is Schedule 89z1? I'd better check, just to make sure." So I'd go to the IRS website and look for Schedule 89z1. Once I finally found it, I discovered it was a special relief incentive for chicken farmers in Alaska that also produced pickles in the off-season, or whatever.

When it was over, I discovered I owed the federal government $130, and $5.91 to the state of Georgia.

My best friend called, so I whined to him for a few minutes.

"Look, Mark, let me put this in perspective for you," he said. "My taxes were so complicated I had to buy TurboTax to do them. And when it was over, I owed $3,224."

Well, I guess $136 isn't going to beggar me. It still hurts, though.

But $3,224 . . . yeesh.

This Monday through Wednesday, the students at our college are doing a concentrated outreach into the community. By engaging in servant evangelism, they hope to spread God's love in a way that breaks down barriers and meets people's needs. This was the students' idea; they thought it up last fall and have been organizing it ever since.

They have an intercession team that's been praying every week for the last, oh, I-don't-know-how-many weeks for the outreach. A couple of weeks ago, they decided to join with the 24/7 prayer group that I'm helping lead to do a concentrated week of 24-hour prayer. To do this, we've signed up three local churches to help us and decorated a room in the Missions building to use for prayer. Prayer started at 12 am Saturday morning, and is scheduled to continue until this Friday at 11:59 pm.

About 60-80% of the one-hour prayer slots are covered by students, with more being covered by local church members. I don't think we have complete 24-hour prayer, but it's pretty close, considering we only had the idea two weeks ago. The idea is that the prayer will support and undergird the outreach that the students are doing -- but also that the prayer will lead DIRECTLY to breakthrough. As I repeatedly tell people, prayer isn't just preparation for the work of the ministry, it is the work of the ministry!

Last night I took some boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts to each of the apartments in my unit. I introduced myself, offered to pray for them, and invited them to my church. The unit right below mine was opened by a young man with a red mohawk. He only cracked the door to take the donuts, then answered in monosyllables before he shut the door. A few minutes later, he came up and knocked on the door to my apartment. "My wife wanted to know what church it was that you go to again?" In short, he thinks he'll be coming the week after Easter. Keep Tim and Amanda in prayer.

YAY!