Cleaning up after the oxen

Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean,
but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox.

Proverbs 14:4, ESV

Every now and then, a verse that you've probably read hundreds of times before just jumps out and grabs your attention. That's always a fun experience, and since I started re-reading the Bible in a new translation, I find it happening more and more. Besides, did the author really just make a point based on ox manure? I think so.

Having cleaned a few horse corrals before, I am no stranger to shoveling manure. Cleaning up after the farm animals was doubtless one of the less pleasant chores for the pre-industrial farmer. It makes sense, then, that the simplest way to get rid of the chore would be to get rid of the oxen themselves. I imagine an empty stable is much easier to keep clean.

Normally, I'm an advocate of this kind of minimalism. In this day and age, our homes and closets and garages and storage facilities are packed with stuff that we think we need. How much time and energy do we spend maintaining a lifestyle that's just not worth it?

But in this case we see something else: sometimes a desirable outcome comes with some unpleasant requirements. And not only that, but the abundant crops come once a year, while cleaning the stables is a daily chore.

Pick some desirable outcome in your life. It's not too difficult to imagine that there may be some unpleasant chores to be dealt with along the way. I suppose the question then becomes, how much do you want the abundant harvest?

Yes, I am moving. Here's why.

Now listen, you who say, Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money. Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that.

James 4:13–15

Soon I will be boarding a flight to Seattle with some clothes, my computer, and my french horn. I've been pretty quiet through all the deliberation and planning, so, naturally, I've had a lot of people asking me why as word trickles out.

This month marks my twenty-fifth birthday. It marks my second year out of college, and my first full year in business for myself. I've long desired to live somewhere new and on my own for a while, and now seems the perfect time to give that a try.

Why Seattle? Perhaps living somewhere other than sunny desert chaparral has a certain appeal to a native of San Diego. The green, rainy Pacific Northwest certainly has a beauty all its own. But I am sure precipitation loses its novelty after a while, and there are other reasons to go north.

I have already had the chance to visit Seattle twice. The first was a quick five-day visit, and the second was a longer six-week trip to Portland and Seattle. I loved both my times there, and was delighted to make some good business relationships, ministry contacts, and, of course, new friendships.

One of my near-term goals is to become a world-class software developer and business leader. One specific reason I am excited about moving to Seattle is the promise of more exposure to a variety of different projects and clients. I have some opportunities there that will offer me greater responsibilities and more opportunities to develop my project management skills. I'm also excited to network with the fantastic technical community present in Seattle.

A long-term project of mine, Beautiful Feet International, is focused on networking missionaries with missions agencies and doing missions right. There is an excellent non-profit community in the Northwest, with which I am eager to expand my contacts. I already have some contacts with the likes of World Vision, and my friend and future roommate actually work for a mission-sending agency based in Seattle.

Not only am I moving to a new area in the world, but what is looking to be a relatively isolated part of a very large city. I'm fully expecting to have an isolated couple of months. I have mixed feelings about that, of course, but hope to utilize that time to quiet myself and listen more and more closely to the still small voice of God. I'll also be working to hone my personal productivity, establish a more balanced lifestyle, and contribute more to the community directly around me. This, in addition to the above few paragraphs, forms the core of my request for prayer from those of you who care and feel called to the task.

There are probably some who find this news to be rather abrupt. I must apologize to those of you who were left in the dark during my planning. In my defense I would cite James 4:13-16, and my tendency to base my actions on others' opinions without following through when push comes to shove. A big move like this required a lot of careful prayer and deliberation to make sure that I am following a plan that's bigger than my own whims.

Finally, I am having a going-away party on Saturday the 19th. Please do let me know if you'd like to come so I can make arrangements for that. If you have an account on Facebook you can poke around for an event I created for that and RSVP on the guest list. Also, I do anticipate coming back to San Diego at least once every few months, possibly for a week at a time, to catch up with friends, family and clients.

To close, here's a few ways for you to keep track of me while I'm out and about in this world:

• http://nick.zadrozny.com/ is a day-to-day blog with random musings and various technical tidbits.
• Blogspot hosts a different kind of blog with my longer, more in-depth personal writings.
• Facebook has many of my contact details and is basically my online social hub.
• Facebook and Flickr host my photos. I'm trying to take one a day this year, so that should be fun to watch.
• Dopplr is where I publish my comings and goings.

Thanks for reading this far, and above all I hope we will all have opportunities in the future to learn from and love each other.

One of those days—On spontaneous heaviness of heart

Do you ever have one of those days where your heart is heavy and you have no clue why?

For one, it's a great day in a great week. You are being actively challenged in life, and rising to the occasion. Your relationships are good, or, at least, to be expected. Your old habits may present themselves now and then, but you are resisting, or receiving God's grace and pushing forward.

In the zone. Not bored, not depressed, not hurting, not anxious. Joyful, even. Peaceful, even. In a way. And yet, a heavy heart.

So you take it to God. Spend some extra time praying and meditating on his word. Opening the lines of communication and talking to God, asking questions, even as you go about your day. Share your heart with a few trusted friends, the usual wise counselors, ask some questions and answer many in return.

And yet still nothing. A few possible candidates identified. Maybe you're processing something in the past, mulling over something yet approaching. Maybe you're empathizing with some friend or distant family member. Yet nothing really hits the epiphany, so you commit that stuff to the Lord in faith and move on. Heavy still.

Ever have one of those days?

I'm having one today. I just can't put my finger on it. God's not telling me, or I'm just not hearing him, so I guess all I can really do is persist. Take another tactic and write it out. And just wait, share, listen.

Friends, if you have anything burdening your heart, please feel free to share with me. I'd love to lift you up in prayer while I'm in this place.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will.

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

Romans 8:22-28

Staying Sane

If I could sum up the last three weeks in a single mantra, it would be "one day at a time." It's been a challenge staying sane these three weeks.

Three weeks happens to be the amount of time since I returned from the Great Northwest to the Sunny Southwest. This is something that I could attribute to any number of reasons, which all had a more or less immediate impact on me upon my return.

For one, I've experienced a separation from a number of excellent friendships that I had been building over the course of the previous six weeks (and some over the course of the preceding three months or more). Some of these friendships were even the sort that I started to develop a keen interest in continuing to invest. Add to this a scattering of some of my San Diego friends and roommates, and a lingering reluctance to dive back into my usual communities and commitments. And on top of all this, a gargantuan workload that is stretching me to my professional limits and slowly eating up all of my time.

Disconnection.

I don't share any of this for the sake of complaining. In some ways, I revel in the tension and the challenge. I know that God does not present me with anything that he doesn't intend to pull me through, and, indeed, "he gives life as we overcome," as Oswald says. But the point remains that I have found myself stretched quite considerably.

The other half of this story, the one that is a bit less easy to gloss with spiritualistic optimism, is that I have been confronted with some things that I'd rather not be dealing with. Old habits and old temptations that I would love to have left behind years ago. Bits and pieces of tiny things in my everyday life that try my patience. Friendships and relationships — personal and professional — that test my commitment or leave me wanting more.

Dissatisfaction.

I started reading a new book tonight. Sex God, by Rob Bell. It's about a lot more than just sex, which is part of the point of the book. It's about the all-encompassing spirituality of life, about the bigger picture of what sexuality is all about. About what it means to be, at our core, sexual beings, and how that all goes wrong. So far I've got nothing but good things to say; it's been a refreshing set of reminders and realignments.

Finishing the fourth chapter is what made me really set the book down and reflect. There, right in front of me, was an explanation for these last three weeks. The topic was lust, and not simply of the pornographic variety that we all connote with the word. It was a look at sinful craving that goes back to the roots.

When Adam and Eve took and ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, it was more than a simple gastronomical event. It was an act of rebellion. They first had to notice and desire the fruit. What's more, they desired the promise—the lie—of what the fruit would give them. Their desire was rooted in dissatisfaction with what they had already been blessed with from the beginning: paradise.

Their dissatisfaction drove a desire, which led to a fixation, which led to a choice. Such choices often lead to desensitization, to depression or anger, to further disconnectedness. All of which serve to drive continued dissatisfaction. This is starting to sound like a familiar cycle, no? Lust.

Which brings me back to my bedroom floor, setting down a book, reflecting. Reflecting on the ways in which I am finding myself increasingly disconnected, on the dissatisfactions these disconnections are driving. Reflecting on the fixations cropping up in my head and the deeper needs which they are purporting to fill. Identifying the lies that need to be resisted and the points that need to be taken in faith.

If I am to stay sane in seasons like this, I need to be enlightened in my understanding of lust. A few steps are required to combat it.

1. Start with some gratitude. Why am I dissatisfied when God has already blessed me with so much in the first place? God tells his people all throughout his word to remember his goodness and his deeds, and I would be well advised to do the same. Psalm 77 is a perennial favorite and a great place to start a pen-on-paper list of my own.
   
2. Identify the fixations and the lies behind them. My usual, almost comfortable, struggles and obsessions are more likely to be driving me into despair and further disconnection. Are isolating myself into time-wasters like web browsing and watching television shows online really doing anything about loneliness and boredom? Is this something good that is being hijacked?
   
3. Channel my energy into positive, worthwhile pursuits that really do meet those unmet needs. Disconnected from God? How about we go for a walk and have a chat. Disconnected from my own body? How about exercise and some physical therapy on that knee. Stifled and bored? Rediscover art and creativity in drawing exercises, researching video production, or writing articles on this blog. Disconnected from friends? Keep work limited to sane hours, make the most of passing conversations or opportunities to serve, get people together for dinner more often, and challenge Travis and the Smalls to a Halo 3 tournament this weekend :)
   

I find it interesting that the word "lust" which we take for simple desire or pleasure is apparently the Greek word epithumia, whose etymology basically means "in the mind." How much of that cycle of sinful desire and bad decisions and despair is driven in our mind? So much of that is fueled by moments of distraction and fantasy, when we're living somewhere in our head other than right here, right now.

Curious that the way to stay sane under stress and break out of negative cycles is to "live for today," and to channel our energies into the excellent opportunities and passions we have all around us every day.

On freedom and health

I saw a link to an article with a questionable claim. Pornography is vital to freedom? It's a "standard-bearer for civilisation?"

Then so is rampant obesity.

I hold the position that the existence of pornography is more accurately an indicator of our unhealthy and overstimulated appetite for sex. Like eating, sex is natural, necessary, and enjoyable. However, pornography is like junk food, and a diet of junk will certainly increase your capacity for it while serving to dull your appetite for the good stuff.

The relative luxuries of modern life, the moral relativism of postmodern secular humanism, and, yes, the technological wonders of contraception release sex from its merely physical constraints. Sex no longer has much of an opportunity cost in terms of time spent surviving. Nor does sex carry an explicit cost of another child to raise, another mouth to feed. Sex is indeed free to be celebrated.

But are we going to celebrate it like the college freshman who binges on Kool-Aid and Cocoa Pebbles because mother never let him eat any? Say hello to stomach aches, Pepto Bismol, and the freshman fifteen. Our bodies were designed for a healthy diet and physical activity, not lethargy and junk.

At least we can be thankful that our diets only impact our own health, and that our bodies have some capacity for junk. To that end, I can also be thankful that my capacity for food is at least limited by the size of my stomach. And, really, that's the live and let live way to look at it, right? If only the consequences of pornography were so well contained.

I read (and bookmarked) a great article on the New York Magazine: The Porn Myth, by Naomi Wolf. It's worth a read, and I think she does a brilliant job laying out the societal, purely secular and extremely dangerous consequences of pornography in our society.

The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as "porn-worthy." Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.

For how can a real woman—with pores and her own breasts and even sexual needs of her own—possibly compete with a cybervision of perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who comes, so to speak, utterly submissive and tailored to the consumer’s least specification?

Is pornography really freedom? Or is it indulgence in a morally immature attitude of total selfishness and instant gratification? Is it celebration of sexuality? Or is it societal- and self-destruction?

I submit that pornography is enslavement.

Pornography distorts a man's appetite until he is no longer interested in the real thing. He is cheated out of the best kind of sexual relationship there is: a real one, with a real person, with real commitment and real demands. I'm willing to bet that philosophical arguments, moral relativism and psychological rationalization don't hold a candle to this kind of relationship. And yet we trade the good for the cheap easy and in doing so sabotage ourselves from ever enjoying the good.

Conversely, pornography holds women to impossible standards, as Ms Wolf explains so well. Who can compete with super-idealized imagery that is always available and perfectly compliant? Who wants to compete with that? Where's the freedom to be yourself and express your own needs and desires? How about when those needs and desires transcend intercourse to things like romance, love, commitment, and security? Animated pixels make no such demands.

Don't misunderstand me, I am not advocating moderation here. Pornography is not merely useless like junk food, it is poisonous. Toxic in any quantity. There is a reason for that which I ground very thoroughly in Christianity, but but this post is overlong already.

In the end, I may concede that the toleration of pornography is some indication of freedom in a society. But is the existence existence and "celebration" of pornography an indication of a healthy society? No. Society aside, think of your own health: is it really worth cheating yourself out of what's best? Certainly not.

Quite a rant here, and probably still a bit rough around the edges. I welcome comments of any kind. Or just offer up rants of your own.

Fruit of the Light

Here are two helpful questions when you find yourself in a murky and ambiguous situation.

1. What is Right?
2. What pleases the Lord?

For example, I have two work projects that are to the point of costing me time and detracting from my other commitments. For whatever reason, they simply have gone wrong and the sooner I can be done with them the better. Unfortunately there is no easy out.

I asked myself this morning: what is the right thing to do?

For one project, what's right is easy: fulfill my end of the commitment, tie things off and hope for the best. Easy. For the other that's not so clear: there is no contract, no payment or compensation, and a history of considerable delays that have brought me to a radically different work situation than when I first agreed to the project. In this case, it seems right to simply end the ambiguity by donating my current code and suggesting the client take some time to regroup.

Well, hang on a second, let's take this a step further. Ephesians 5:8-10 tells me to live as a child of the light and "find out what pleases the Lord." So what would please the Lord here?

I am forced to re-evaluate the first project. Simply fulfilling my end of the contract here is not quite enough. I should still be giving my best effort and most graceful management of the project—that means no cut-and-run allowed. Accelerate things a bit, sure. Focus more tightly on the agreed-upon scope, and actively try to wrap things up, but don't just deliver and disappear. Okay, be graceful, duly noted.

My latter project becomes more clear as well: just finish it. Yes, it is impacting my other commitments, and I may have a legitimate out, but commit the project to the Lord and trust in him to take care of the details. At the very least give them something usable before you donate the code and suggest re-negotiation on extra functionality.

So I learn, again, that sometimes asking what is "right" or "justifiable" is not always what is "best." It is an excellent place to start—a good prop, if you will, to pull ourselves to our feet. But in order to truly walk we ought to be focusing our decisions not inward, not outward, but upward.

Proverbs 14:12, 16:25 both tell us, "There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death." Too often when I look for what is right I am caught looking for my rights. Perhaps a useful prop, a crutch, a good place to start. But ultimately what is right is simply a subset of love, and is certainly not its substitute in and of itself.

"For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord." Ephesians 5:8-10

The Golden Rule is useless by itself

I found my way to an article a little with "practical tips" for living your life according to the Golden Rule: Love your neighbor as yourself. A secular article, mind you, but nice enough.

There are some objections in the comments that might make one pause. If you have bad desires, and don’t mind being treated in ways that others would very much mind, then it’s not so good! Or even, the golden rule allows others to impose their rules and morals on you without consulting you at all.

Perhaps. But, then, one ought not forget that the Golden Rule is second to another: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength. When you take God out of the equation, or put him anywhere but first, your understanding and execution of love will always be fundamentally flawed.

Only insomuch as you love God will you be able to love anyone else. (And only when we realize and accept God's unconditional love and mercy toward us will we be able to love him in the first place.)