Act II

Friday, January 27, 2017

Where is YOUR "bliss"?

On Fridays, I teach private music students at home, which allows me recovery time from an already sedentary job M-Th teaching our alternative school. The advantage/disadvantage of my condition: my bosses found a low-activity job that uses my skills to the maximum without exhausting me. It's the only reason I can still call myself a classroom teacher. But once a week, I get to utilize my music education knowledge again: I teach every band and orchestra instruments, piano, guitar, bass, banjo, whatever they bring to play. I even have a young man to whom I'm teaching composition. Versatility has its merits.

Additionally, one of my private students is struggling in his academic subjects, so occasionally I work with him on those as well; certainly I keep up with how he's managing in his classes. Today, he told me about a book he's reading, entitled The Geography of Bliss. It's by a man named Eric Weiner, formerly of NPR, and the premise of the book is that he went exploring the world "looking for happiness" - that is, researching the places that were considered the happiest places on earth: Iceland, Denmark, Bhutan, etc. They had different emphases - one values tolerance above all else; another emphasized inner tranquility, another staying out of each other's way.

And I found myself twitching.

Oh, I've no doubt Mr. Weiner means well, and even my student took the entire search with a grain of salt. But if you're a Christian as I am, you already know where I'm going to go with this, don't you?

Isn't our happiness, our joy, our bliss, supposed to come from having the Holy Spirit within us?

This young man's a Christian, after a sort (almost all youngsters are still searching for what that word really means for them, my children included). But it felt like my duty to clarify that concept to him, and perhaps some of you may need to hear it one more time as well.

There are two sides of the coin in the universe: there's what the world offers, and there's what the Holy Trinity offers. Christ Himself said in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 6:24), “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money." We can either try to be satiated with the things that only money can provide - cars, houses, foods, even sex and companionship - or we can be fulfilled by the Holy Spirit within us, that perpetual joy which should reside in every Christian.

In my life, especially in recent years since my salvation, my temporal happiness has been strained to and beyond the breaking point. I've suffered through the illness, deterioration, and death of my beloved wife and soul mate, Melissa; my own illness and deterioration (not yet death, although at the New Year it looked bleak for a few days), the financial burden that comes with severe illnesses in this country (even before the quest to eliminate affordable health care by this Congress), and a number of other issues not worth bringing up to make the point. And yet, even when my day-to-day happiness might have been affected by these events, there was always still this joy within my soul that says, "I am the child of the living God, beloved and cared for regardless of anything else. How can the problems of this world affect me, when this is not my true home?

Paul said in Philippians 1 that he would in truth prefer to die than live, if it were up to him, because this was only a business trip he was on:

"Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account."

No Christian should ever fear death. For us, it's simply a bus ticket directly home, do not pass GO, do not collect any worldly money. We are here on a business trip, to help the God we worship gather more people to His Side before we die. For that, "to remain in the flesh is more necessary" - otherwise, why would God have left us on earth? Wouldn't it be more reasonable once we're saved to simply take us up to Heaven?

Maybe. But that's why we remain: to recruit for Him. What a wonderful job! So, be filled with joy, because we've got the best job in the world: salespeople for the perfect getaway! Our pay is infinite, although delayed, and the fringe benefits are to DIE for!

The Turing Test and the Cross Examination

Have you ever heard of the Turing Test?

Alan Turing, whom the 2014 movie The Imitation Game was made about (I think it was Eddie Redmayne playing him), was a genius mathematician, a genius cryptologist, and a prescient in the field of artificial intelligence, far ahead of his time.

He predicted that one day we would develop a machine that could think like a human, and he proposed the Turing Test as a means for determining whether a machine had reached that point or not. Essentially, the test is that you have a human and the machine each behind a barrier, and a third person has five minutes or so to ask either "being" any questions they can think of, with the goal being the determination of which one is the machine and which is the human being. The answers are all provided in written form, so you can't use vocal inflections as a gauge, but otherwise that's the deal. Every test that has appeared to be successful so far has always proved to be a fake.

In my latest book, Day 0001: The Singularity and the Six-Day War, I set the scenario in the future twenty years, to the year 2037, the seventieth anniversary of the Six-Day War, and I've replaced the Turing Test with what I call the Medvedev Exam, a series of 23 tests that encompass intelligent behavior outside of the realm of humans (the premise is that dolphins and aliens should also be able to pass, where they probably wouldn't pass the Turing Test). But the concept of the test is now ingrained in our society with respect to AI, or artificial intelligence, since Turing's method of evaluation arrived sixty years ago.

As Christians, we should fail our version of the "Turing Test". Call ours the "Cross Examination", if you will.

When someone meets you for the first time, they should be able to tell that you're a Christian, without hearing you specifically extol the virtues of Jesus Christ. If they can't tell that there's something about you that's different from the average 'heathen' on the street? Maybe there ISN'T anything different. Maybe you're not much of a Christian after all.

Try it for yourself. Test your friends and neighbors. Without telling them what you're looking for, engage them in a conversation. Make it natural, about whatever you might discuss on any normal day. Do they demonstrate their Christianity in their manner, in their speech, and in their behavior? Do you notice they say or behave differently than a "normal" person might? Before the "God bless you, friend!" comes up in conversation, were you able to tell that they were a disciple of the living Christ?

And then, test yourself. When YOU greet people, is there something significantly different about YOU? Hard to tell from the inside, I know...but just the mere act of trying to behave that way, being conscious of the fact that you carry the Lord of the Universe around within your soul everywhere you walk, should help you pass the "Cross Examination" among both acquaintances and strangers.

And THAT'S THE POINT! We are to be lights on a table, the city on the hill, the salt of the earth. Jesus specifically ordered us to be different from the world, so that the lost souls looking for the answer would see the joy that is within us, and ask what we have that gives us that joy. And THAT is our cue to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ. You don't have to throw it against every wall you see and pray that it sticks - if you're faithful, and you're faith-filled, God will give you the opportunities to spread His message of love and acceptance.

I've watched Him giving me more opportunities of late - as I've tried to dive into becoming more completely His doulos, His "slave", He has been providing me chances to show my Christianity, to provide help for folks with car trouble, to give alms to the needy, to serve as Jesus served. And I highly suspect that the more faithful I am to Him in this, the more opportunities He will bless me with, and the more He will bless my life in general.

I'm trying to pass the Cross-Examination. And you should, too.

Thursday, January 26, 2017

Visual Poetry

JESUS JESUS JESUS JESUS JESUS JESUS JESUS JESUS JESUS JESUS JESUS JESUS JESUS JESUS