I love the fall. The sound and smell of leaves after a frost — the sun shining colorfully through the trees. And a wonderful breeze with just enough force to tousle your hair and just enough chilliness to make you appreciate your jacket. But I like fall for more than just the weather. After the initial frenzy of getting ready for school, life starts to have a pleasant, reassuring order to it. It’s a cozy, peaceful time that gives you a chance to look back over the summer, and to plan for a new chapter in one’s life.

Similarly (though to a slightly lesser extent), I feel the same way about the end of January. To me, it’s Christmas’ autumn. All of the holiday stress and joy and pain and magical beauty has passed. School has started back up again, and the semester hasn’t gotten busy yet. Despite all the fog and cold and dreariness outside, this time of year offers a pleasant little pocket of time to curl up in a warm blanket, pour yourself some hot cider and reflect on the holiday season and the new year.

Christmas at the McClurg’s house was a little different this year. There wasn’t the mountain of presents under the tree that we have enjoyed in more affluent times. We didn’t attend any Christmas parties or make any awesome ginger-bread houses like we have in the past. But, when I look beyond the trappings, I think that this year was the best Christmas ever for our family!

Be not mistaken! The presents were AMAZING: I got an awesome four-leaf clover kit, a star trek voyager t-shirt and a star trek engineer’s uniform (which I am totally wearing to school next week) from Micah.  Jedidiah introduced me to the supremely trippy Judee Sill via one of her albums.  Dad got me some awesome Ken Medema music, and Mom gave me some Kla$$ik Ka$h.  I was pretty sure that Moriah wouldn’t be able to top the hilarious gifts she got us last year (including but not limited to a giant pen and a WOODEN EGG). But she totally did. She picked out two presents for each of person in the family that were completely unique to us, and gave them to someone else. We were allowed to trade afterwards, of course, but it was pretty amusing to see Micah trying to pretend that she liked the kitchen knives and video games and Jedidiah feigning an interest in birdseed and a girl’s vest.

But, as awesome as the presents were, they weren’t my favorite part of Christmas by any means.  I loved how we came together as a family.  This holiday season has been far from easy or comfortable, but I’m amazed at how much closer we have gotten to each other.  Sure, we still fight almost as much as we used to — but, we talk a whole lot more.  At meal times, I’m still sometimes glad that our silverware is quite dull — but, at least there is an atmosphere in which we are all comfortable sharing what is going on in our lives and mind.  I love how we can talk about spiritual things without feeling awkward or getting into a close-minded argument.  I guess when times are rough, you realize not only that you need your loved ones, but that they need you.

So, I don’t know what the upcoming semester has in store for my life.  But, whether this “autumn” hearkens the arrival of pleasant times or storms — whether the new year is good, bad, or indifferent, I’m thanking God that I get to live it with my family.

I’m tired of not being caring. I’m sick of my inability to understand. I really want to be the kind of person who is empathetic and keeps on showing unconditional love, but somehow my actions always seem to communicate the exact opposite. I’m pretty annoyed at myself for making people believe that a relationship with them has a lesser priority to me than running my big mouth. I want to do better. But, you know what? I’m still not very good at being smart with what I say.

I’m tired of “helping” people who don’t need my help. I guess when I really think about it, I know my assistance often does more damage than good. Heck, look what I’ve done with my life, folks! But, it’s still pretty difficult to see problems in the world that I’m not able to do anything about.

It makes me mad when I come across like I’m some kind of nice guy who just has all this bad stuff happen to me. It’s not true. I can help it. It makes me want to sock me in the nose. I know other people have problems; but, — for heaven’s sake! — so do I! And, it’s nobody’s fault but my own if I really am so insecure about my own worth that I feel the need to put down other people for putting others down. If I’m going to call myself a Christian, I don’t have any choice but to try not to feel like a hopeless failure as a friend. But, man! Why do I have to make it so hard?

But, even so… I’m TOTALLY looking forward to Christmas tomorrow. And, it’s going to take a lot more than my own hard-headed/hearted-ness to ruin OUR family’s holidays. So, all you Grinches and Scrooges out there (including that most unpleasant side of me!) that think you can take OUR Christmas spirit, prepare to drown in a torrent of carols, take a candy-cane in the eye, or otherwise go up in some other awesome blaze of peace and good-will!

So, I was playing around with some of php’s imaging functions, and I thought it might be fun to see what an image representation of text would look like.  The raw results?  NOT very interesting or impressive.  But, I found that it does look kind of cool when you adjust the contrast and lighting.  I know there’s a way to do it in php — but PhotoShop was quicker for now.  Maybe I’ll work on automating the process later.  Anyway, without any further ado, here’s the modified full text of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” encoded on a 323×323 grid of 4 pixels per square.  The RGB values for each pixel was chosen by sampling the ASCII value of the current character and the next two characters in the text.  Reminds you of something stormy, anyway…

Why is it
That
Hate only hurts from the ones that you love –
And trust is shade for the whole,
Venting the worst of our passion above
The once fertile ground of a soul?

Someday
This
Striving will cease from the face of the earth –
We’ll all learn to love in deed,
Truth, and peace — in soberness and mirth.
Our zeal will bring forth a seed.

And time will heal all the wounds
Of those who are left to heal.

Told not by an idiot — but by the incomprehensible Author of the Universe.  But that still doesn’t mean it makes any sense.

I’ve never understood how people who take the name of Christ — the very definition of love — think nothing of holding on to disrespect and resentment toward others.  Inexplicably, these Christians nurse their own hurt and mull over their own pain as if doing so somehow justifies their complete disregard of the primary tenant of true Christianity.  According to the Bible, God’s children are given a supernatural power that enables them to love (not just to tolerate or serve or be “nice” to, but to actually love — in truth) each other and those who have not yet come to know God.

If you’ve asked the Lord to live within you and take control of your life, you have the strength (via the power of God) to let go of resentment and bitterness; and also to treat your fellow creatures with respect and honor.  As an real Christian, you have the power to love — regardless of the hurt and pain that life has dealt to you.  If you didn’t have this unconditional ability, the life God expects His sons and daughters to live would be utterly ludicrous.

So, if you’re going to claim the Bible as your standard, believe it — all of it – and live it out in practice.  Otherwise, you must come to grips with the fact that you hold to an entirely different worldview.

You have to make a choice one way or the other — to be an Actual Christian who is fully committed to loving God and others (with no conditions or exceptions) – or to not have anything to do with Christ.  There is no middle ground.

At this point, if you’re not crystal clear on what I mean by “actual Christianity”, I highly recommend that you read the tiny book of 1 John (about a 10 minute read) for the precise definition of what it is to have a genuine relationship with God.

So, lately, I’ve been doing some excessive studying — especially in the areas of electromagnetism and physics.  Click below to see the unfortunate results:

If you dare…

The title lyric is from a song by one of my favorite hippies — whose music has been a constant source of inspiration through the years.

So, here’s what happened to me recently.  I’ll let you draw from it what you will.

For several weeks, I had been attempting to accomplish something that was very important to me.  I had asked the Lord for His help, and was attempting to live according to His will.  Yet, for all my effort, nothing (and I do mean nothing) seemed to be working out right.

For whatever reason, the very God who I was attempting to draw near to seemed insistent on frustrating my plans.  In all three portions of my Bible reading (OT, Poetry, NT), I encountered passage after passage proclaiming God’s inexorable wrath and judgment on his own people for their rebellion against Him.  Sermons I heard on the radio and from the pulpit left me feeling like an unruly, undeserving, and unwanted child.  After all, in the eyes of my perfect and majestic Father, how could I be anything more than a mere nuisance and an embarrassment?

And then, once I had reached that point — the point of being painfully aware of my own lowness in comparison to God’s greatness — once I had nothing left of my own strength to rely on, and could only look up helplessly and cry out like the blind, the lepers, and the sinners of Jesus’ day “Lord, have mercy on me!”,  then, slowly but surely, the “clouds” in my life began to lift.  Or, more accurately, God pulled me up through them.

There are still several major difficulties in my life.  But, I’ve begun to attribute them to the works of the Evil One rather than the judgment of God.  I hope that I’ve learned my lesson about putting the Lord in his rightful place — now it’s Satan’s turn to be on the receiving end of God’s corrective power.  Check the last verse of my Bible reading for today:

God’s prophet, speaking to the minions of the Devil, in Ezekiel 13:22-23

Because with lies you have made the heart of the righteous sad, whom I have not made sad; and you have strengthened the hands of the wicked, so that he does not turn from his wicked way to save his life.  Therefore you shall no longer envision futility nor practice divination; for I will deliver My people out of your hand, and you shall know that I am the Lord.

Have you ever been annoyed?  With me?  Me too.  But, what I want to talk about today is something that annoys me about other people.  I call it the bouncy ball effect.

For those of you who don’t know, most basic “things” in nature (like pressure, heat, fluid currents, friction, etc) can be explained by thinking of matter as being made up of little rubber bouncy balls with different shapes, sizes, and bounciness levels — constantly whizzing around, or jiggle-joggling in heaps.  I suppose you’re thinking that sounds pretty inoffensive, huh.  Maybe even sort of whimsical and pleasant?

Do NOT be fooled.  Those little bouncy balls are TOTALLY frustrating, when you compare what they could accomplish in theory with what they actually do in real life.  For instance:  The molecules that make up the air you’re breathing right now are zooming around at about 6,000 mph.  If you could get them to make up their minds, and quit changing directions 1.5 billion times every second, a single lungful could knock down a wall without any extra effort!  But sadly, those speedy air molecules, for all their potential, will never make such a decision.  In fact, if left to themselves, these indecisive molecules will never travel more than a few micrometers from where they are right now — their most noticeable achievement being that that the room will remain room temperature.  :-(

Believe it or not, it’s EVEN MORE frustrating to me when I see people doing the same thing.  There seem to be people who have been given brains, talent, and good looks — people who could literally do anything they wanted to with their lives — that are frittering away their lives because they refuse to choose a clear direction.  There is SO MUCH ineffective action in the world already; and it is almost maddening when I see great people who begin a great work only to immediately change their minds and attempt to accomplish something completely different.  It’s not so much the choices themselves that annoy me. It’s the knowledge that the very act of drastically changing directions will dwindle one’s resources and energies to almost nothing.

So, if you’ve started to climb a mountain, and half-way up, you realize that it’s not the exact mountain you REALLY wanted to climb, just go ahead and climb to the top.  The view will be much better from there then from going straight back down to the valley!

So, here’s what my readers have suggested that I add to this site:

More contests.

More frequent updates.

More academic posts with pictures.

Depending on your viewpoint, the following post may fulfill or break all of the above requirements. It’s entitled:

"A Poem I Wrote While in Chicago"

Church of the Iron Door
      Bolted fast against the poor --
      Your walls are high,
   Of polished stone --
       And only ivy can ascend
   To the shining stained-glass thrones
   Which seat saints and gods alone.

A pleasantly shaded path --
      Flowers gated lest the wrath
      Of trampling feet
   Or plucking hold
      Steal away their sacred scent
   And a cross -- more rugged than old
   Is riveted lest thieves so bold
      Should try
         To carry it
            Away.

So, here’s the beef, folks.  Check out the following actual traffic data for this blog:

Pretty pathetic, huh?  We here at Josiahland.com sure think so.  And, so we’ve decided that it’s time for something new and exciting with the site.  But, what that something is, we want YOU to decide. For each qualifying submission, we’re GIVING AWAY one of our awesome custom Twist Tie Animals (See example to the right).  Let me tell you folks, these things will TOTALLY make your life WAY BETTER IN EVERY WAY.

To qualify, a comment must be posted on this post before next Sunday (August 23rd).  If you’d like a specific animal, please include that information.

IMPORTANT:

If you would like to receive the actual twist-tie animal via mail (as opposed to a link to a digital photo), please provide me with the following information:

1. Your mailing address.
2. A comment suggesting something new and exciting to add to or change about Josiahland.com.  This must be something that is actually possible for a time-pressed college student like myself to implement.