Gummby has only got 7000 words to go has made it! Go Matt!

It isn’t hard to write, at least not for me, when I actually have something to write about. Last year I had an agenda and a couple of nifty plot vehicles (one of which was scientifically demolished recently for me), but no characters and not much story. A story started to emerge, but it wasn’t really a novel, that’s for sure.

This year I had a man who had to keep it together even though everything (and I mean everything) was falling apart around him and he’s pretty much delusional and paranoid by the end of it all.

Hoping to be done with a first draft by the end of the month; then comes the awful editing process. But I’ve already got another idea for a book and I’m not sure I want to wait until NaNo next year.

I hope they get their database problems resolved soon… but the first few days are always dreadful.

After six months of Atkins, my triglycerides are 86, my HDL is 45, and my LDL is 84.

Yes, my LDL went up, but this doesn’t take particle size or density into account. (See Taubes’ interview at LLVLC for more information.)

So, just so you know, Dr. Atkins the cardiologist may have been on to something. The one index that isn’t now in a very low-risk category is HDL, but that’s inching closer to it.

John McCarthy

I liked this poster.

“We know what the Bush-McCain philosophy looks like,” Obama said. “It’s a philosophy that says we should give more and more to millionaires and billionaires and hope that it trickles down.”

There’s something funny about this, and I hear it all over the place when people criticize what was popularly referred to as “trickle-down economics.” It’s this idea that people with a lot of money just keep it.

I mean, really keep it, a la Scrooge McDuck. Picture huge vaults full of gold coins and bullion, and they swim in them all day, and then warm their toes at a fire made up of stacks of $50 bills at night.

The question is, then, what do the rich do with their money? The fact is, they invest it. They don’t stuff it in their mattresses. They buy stock and invest capital, and prop up businesses that need the money and promise to make them more.

Those businesses aren’t Scrooge McDucks either. They spend that money, on employees (that’s us, non-rich people), on goods and services which they require to do business (that’s more business, which employs us again), and so forth. Maybe they line their own nest egg… by investing.

The one way in which liberals might be able to make a case for money actually somehow leaving circulation in all of this would be to argue that a large percentage of the rich people invest in a large percentage of businesses that are (a) overseas, or (b) outsource a large percentage of their work or other provisioning overseas.

Let’s not let the smarter-than-thou types convince us that the rich need to be forced to invest in the poor — by and large the ones who can’t or don’t make money for them, i.e. the financial losers — via cartoon stereotypes. Money moves mercurially, when the climate is right for it to do so.

Hilarious:

Beautifully true:

In the early 1940s, Darlene Deibler was a young, newly married missionary to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). However, when the Japanese invaded and took over, Westerners were imprisoned (à la Empire of the Sun), Darlene was separated from her husband, and the two were never to see each other ever again.

Here’s her story:

The beatings, the starvation and the solitary confinement never broke her.

“I never cried in front of them,” said Darlene Deibler Rose of her Japanese captors in World War II. “But as soon as everyone went away, I cried buckets.”

Mrs. Rose, 84, who moved to Chattanooga this year with her husband, Jerry, served as a missionary in New Guinea. She was there with the Christian Missionary Alliance from 1938 to 1942, and again after the war in what is now Papua New Guinea, from 1949 to 1978.

In between, she was imprisoned for three years on the island of Celebes, now Sulawesi.

In 1988, she told the story of her captivity in the book Evidence Not Seen.

[...]

Mission work was close to the heart of then-Mrs. Deibler when she arrived in what was called the Dutch East Indies on her first wedding anniversary, Aug. 18, 1938. Her husband, the Rev. C. Russell Deibler, already had served in New Guinea, and his wife had wanted to be a missionary since she was a child.

Their time with the people of New Guinea was happy and satisfying until March 1942, Mrs. Rose said, when the Imperial Japanese Army arrived on the island and made them prisoners. Eventually, the young couple was separated, never to see each other again.

Over the next three years, Mrs. Rose was confined to various camps and eventually held in solitary confinement when the Kempetai, the Japanese secret police, learned she was American, she said.

Her year of confinement in a one-room building with high, barred windows was the most trying, she said, but she found ways to bear it.

“The Lord had laid it on my heart to memorize Scripture,” Mrs. Rose said, “and I knew I needed exercise, so I would walk around the room quietly saying Scripture and singing hymns.”

On a particularly low day, she said, she heard a hymn from her childhood being sung outside her window. She shimmied up a pipe in her cell and held onto the bars of the window until the song stopped.

“I still don’t know what it was,” Mrs. Rose said, “but I got on my knees and told God, ‘It’s all right that I’m here.’” [See below for a more detailed account.]

She had to eat her small daily dish of rice without utensils, she said, and she lost so much weight she was no more than “skin and bones.” When it was possible, Mrs. Rose said, the students in the Bible school where she had taught would add things to her rice to give her protein. They secured jobs near her in an effort to help.

“One day there was a nice, long worm in there,” she said. “I just said, ‘OK, Lord, here goes.’”

Mrs. Rose was once given 92 small bananas, surreptitiously furnished by one of her captors, whom she knew only as Mr. Yamaji and whom she had led to Christ, she said.

“I didn’t eat them all at once,” she said, “and didn’t eat the last one until the day we were freed.”

The two dresses she was allowed to take into captivity never wore out, despite their constant use, Mrs. Rose said. And she had to use them in other ways, she said, such as to remove the blood of mosquitoes she had killed on the cell walls. Her captors saw the blood, told her to remove it and ordered her not to kill any more mosquitoes.

Eventually, she contracted malaria, dysentery and beriberi — all at the same time, she said. Through it all, including beatings that caused her permanently to lose her hair, Mrs. Rose said she was retained her faith.

“I have no regrets,” she said. “It was a way to know God in a deeper way. He was always there.”

Neither does she hold any animosity for her captors. She believes many of them had remorse, even when they were beating her.

“I don’t hate the Japanese,” she said. “With Mr. Yamaji, I could see it in him. I could see his tears.”

When Mrs. Rose was freed by the Japanese, she was told of her husband’s death, but learned he had led many others to a knowledge of Christ while in captivity. With that knowledge and her love of the native New Guinea people, she eventually decided to return to the islands.

When she did, it was with second husband Jerry Rose, who, like her first husband, felt a calling to serve the country. There they taught, preached, dispensed medicine, delivered babies, graded an airstrip and did whatever else they saw as necessary to serve.

“Fools rush in where others dare not go,” Mr. Rose said. “Through it all, though, we were very conscious of the prayers back home.”

(From the Chattanooga Times Free Press, Monday, November 19, 2001.)

And here’s the more detailed account of the childhood hymn Darlene heard while imprisoned:

“The name of the Lord is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe.” (Proverbs 18:10)

There is nothing that will plunge a person into despair more quickly than to suppose what could happen. This was another example of the worries of tomorrow that never come, robbing us of the joys of today. Poignant sadness, overwhelming me for the hurt of others, released the tears from my own widowhood. I was alone and I had time to weep, but with the tears came healing. In my moment of terrible aloneness and sorrow for a world of people so devastated by war, I heard someone with a beautiful, clear voice singing “Precious Name, Oh, How Sweet” outside my cell, but he was singing in Indonesian: “Precious is Your name, a shelter that is secure!” My heart burst with bright hope! The “time to weep” was past; it was a “time to laugh.”

“O Lord,” I cried, “forgive me. It isn’t a game of ’suppose.’ I live in the sure knowledge that ‘the name of the Lord is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe.’ The name of Jesus, Your precious name, is my strong tower of defense against the enemy of despair. It is my shelter that is secure; I enter in and am safe.”

But who was the singer? How could he know I needed that song at that moment? Of course he couldn’t know, but he loved God, that is sure. I had to see him.

I scrambled up to the transom. My eyes probed the late afternoon light — no one by my door, no one in the courtyard other than the guard and night watchman. They were talking, and I knew they were totally unaware of the singing! Listening to this hymn of hope and assurance coming from I knew not where, great awe filled my heart. Quietly I slipped to the floor and bathed my soul in the presence of my God.

If you’d like more more information about Darlene Deibler Rose, you’ll want to make sure to check out her website. Also, Pastor John Dubler has written a biography with a couple of photos as well. And, of course, there’s her book, Evidence Not Seen: A Woman’s Miraculous Faith in the Jungles of World War II.

Other books along the same lines are Ernest Gordon’s To End All Wars, which has been turned into a movie, and Esther Kim’s If I Perish.

Finally, here’s Darlene in her own words:

Technology will save us

First, make it easy to write. Always have something handy. In this day and age you can get a workable laptop used for less than $500; it’s not the latest and greatest but you could get something good enough and cheap enough that you could even afford to get a decent battery. Even better, as far as technology saving us, I can highly recommend the AlphaSmart NEO. I absolutely love mine, and right now they’re less than $220, I hear. I don’t think most PDAs will work well enough for this; the average person needs a full keyboard to generate word count. If worse comes to worse then pencil and paper will do, but you will have to account for the time to retype all of it; Good old NaNo doesn’t care one lick about non-digital representations of language. In the end it’s all about automated word count.

Second, as far as your real word processor, make it something that works for you, not against you. Lots of people are loving WriteRoom and things like that; the best cross-platform free gratis implementation of this idea, as far as I am aware, is JDarkRoom. Emacs is almost a bad choice for me in this case, because I am too easily distracted by all the things I can do under the hood, and I end up tinkering rather than plowing the text. But I can do a full-screen no-menus org-mode frame and be OK. Org-mode is good as well because I can have an outline of characters, plot, etc. and link it in pretty quickly, or consult it and then get it out of the way before I decide I also want to check my email, or Twitter feed, or whatever while I’m stopped. More on distractions in a moment.

Having said that about your text editor, I also highly recommend offsite backups, and Google Docs works as well for this as anything. I cut and pasted all my text into Google Docs twice a day (or whenever I generated something like another thousand words of text). It has revision control so you can fall back. It’s someplace else, so you could lose your laptop or NEO or whatever and still be in good shape. Use something else if you prefer; a lot of people hate Google, and some have good reasons and some don’t. But make sure you are at least emailing your documents, on a twice-daily basis, to some online email account somewhere which you can’t lose. If you fear for that one, add another one. It will be worth it for the peace of mind, especially if you’re a paranoid backup guy like I am (sometimes). Email them to a friend who won’t read them as a last resort.

Seven habits of high word-count generators

Gosh, I hate titles like that, don’t you?

1. Don’t consult the plot outline more than once or twice a day.
2. Keep the names of characters and places on a 3×5 card or in a window you can pull forward whenever you need it.
3. Don’t fear to spend some time daydreaming about what your character would do in this or that situation, even if it’s irrelevant. If you find yourself playing out dialogue or internal monologue, though, then start typing! Mark it in your text editor with something like “:ASIDE:” or something that will get your attention when you’re editing in a month or a year, so you can pull it out and massage it someplace else.
4. If you know that your plot is taking a hard turn that you didn’t anticipate, roll with it. Just keep writing. Let the wave carry you. If it is really killing you that you’re diverging from your outline, then make a deal with yourself that, the first moment you get bored of writing, you will come back and review and see if this is a plot development that you like or not. It is worth fifteen minutes or even (once or twice in November) an hour or two to brainstorm about how you’re going to fix a derailed plot, if it generates good words.
5. Leave your mistakes in, even the thousand-word bad plot mistakes that you may have discovered in our last “habit.” If you clear 50,000 words early then you can excise this mistake and replace it. Sometimes (more often than I care to admit), you will find that you come back to the mistake in six months and it’s more compelling than the stuff you planned to write.
6. If you’re a schedule-oriented person, who gets things done by the clock, then you need to set aside time for this. If you’re not, then don’t suddenly decide that you’re going to change how you live your life, and do NaNoWriMo this year. It won’t work, and you’ll end up (a) not changing how you live, and (b) not getting out the word count. Make a decision now: either you’re going to become personally organized this month, or you’re going to write a novel. You don’t get to do both. I envy those of you who have already gotten things organized; you’re ahead of us. But the rest of you should wait until December or January to break out the Day-Planners and Franklin-Covey memorabilia. So, if you’re not the scheduling type, then it is all the more important that you decide to carry your laptop, NEO, or notebook with you wherever you go. Keep it in the car if you can’t take it into work (November, for most of us in the US, is a cold month, so it probably won’t melt out there, but for most of us it won’t freeze either). But carry a memo pad in your pocket or some 3×5s for continued note-taking.
7. Use your downtime, when you can’t write, to plan. Save your plot development and character thoughts for times when you can’t whale (wail?) on the keyboard.

One more thing for this category that isn’t a habit so much as a tip: don’t obsess over whether you’re on track for the month. I did over 10,000 words on the last day, 30 November, last year. I plan to do better this year, but I won’t freak out if I don’t. You may miss a day or two; that’s OK, if you just write and don’t worry you can do a few 2K-3K days and cover for a multitude (OK, maybe not a multitude) of off-days.

NaNo as art class

I want to give you the tip that helped me the most when I was about to give up. Here it comes.

When I was in high school, we had an art class in which we had to draw somebody lying on the floor, but we could neither (a) pick up our pencils once we had put the point to the paper; it all had to be one continuous line, nor (b) look at our papers at all. The guy on the floor (it was Dan Lorenz, for the couple of you who would know him) had a face that was far from nondescript; you didn’t mistake him for other people (I’m not saying he was especially handsome or ugly, but he had strong features, like his father). I had never been able to either draw a face or caricature one effectively, but when I was finished with this exercise, I looked at my paper, and I said, “wow, it’s Dan.” And it was. I showed people who weren’t in the class, and they knew it was him, too.

You see, I captured the essence of his face, because I didn’t take time to think about the structure of his face (oval, two eyes, nose, mouth, chin, ears, etc.), but because I was forced by the constraints of the exercise and the time allotted (less than three minutes, I’m sure) to just draw what I saw — that is, what I really saw, not how my brain interpreted it.

I believe that the key for a lot of people to writing better fiction — really great fiction that brings characters and plots to life — is to write what you are imagining, not what you think people want to read, or what you think you want to read. It’s the difference between a photograph and a Monet for some of you. For others it’s the difference between a kid’s drawing and a photograph. Whatever it is for you, I am calling on those of you who get caught up in the details to chuck ‘em, for the month. Or dwell on the details and chuck the framework. Whatever, just leave behind the thing that holds you back from word count.

Remove the interpretive grid, and let your text editor deal with the raw content of your imagination. Nobody needs to see this, and if you think you can create art, then give yourself a chance to birth it directly. You can edit it before you inflict it on us, but you might find yourself editing less, or differently, after you’ve written it down, and after you see it on paper or on the screen, than you would have edited it in your head as you recorded it the first time.

Don’t keep us from seeing the next Faulkner because you wanted to be Fitzgerald but you failed at it.

I am shocked. Shocked!

OK, one more thing, and this is for Christians (and those who are curious about our take on art):

If you really do remove the filters and the grids and write what’s in your mind, then it is going to be ugly sometimes. Sometimes it will be ugly because it isn’t fully formed in your mind; that’s OK, you can edit it, or decide that that was what you really wanted in the first place.

But sometimes it’s ugly because we are fallen creatures in a fallen world. Our hearts are wicked places and we dare not walk through them alone sometimes. But you will examine some of the darker parts of yours, if you really write what’s there. Art is a process of self-examination for the artist. Some people make a lot of money doing that sort of thing. But Christians really have to go through the wringer when they pour their hearts out on paper…

…and they see blasphemy. Covetousness. Lust. Pride. Idolatry. Things that don’t belong in someone whose life is “hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3).

You will learn more about yourself than you wanted to know. But let me encourage you to keep writing. Keep the word count up. If the process of writing this becomes a process of dredging up the old man so you can put him off, well, that’s sanctification. When the month is over, you can delete the awful thing, or you can turn mourning into joy and finish the novel with victory. That’s your choice. But let me just beg you to keep writing and hang on to those words for a little while. Don’t hang on to sin, and don’t neglect repentance if you find yourself writing things that demonstrate that you don’t have the mind of Christ. The Christian life comes first. If you put NaNo above Jesus then you need to guard yourself from that idol, brother or sister.

But if what you are writing reflects the world in which you live, well, it does. I’m not Mr. “Art for Art’s Sake” anymore, although I used to be. But there is evil, and sin, and suffering in the world. People whose eyes aren’t fixed on Jesus think that they will be fulfilled by money, sex, power, or just making themselves happy in whatever way they can. It is not wrong to write about that, although it can be wrong to write in such a way that you invite temptation into the hearts of your readers. That’s why there aren’t Christian porn flicks. But real sinners use language that does not glorify God. They desire things that do not glorify God, and sometimes what they desire must be described. Yes, we walk a fine line sometimes. But remember that what you write is between you and God, but what you release to the public is between you, God, the body of Christ, and the lost world. Don’t confuse these responsibilities! God knows what is in your heart. You can be ashamed of the sins of your heart and mind, without pretending to hide them from God.

Christians who are doing NaNo can use this as a tool for their sanctification. This happened to me last year, and it’s why nobody — not another soul — has seen my book from last year. It gave me fodder for a lot of sanctification.

Be encouraged. Write what comes from the heart, and rejoice that a merciful God knows what’s there and loves us in, through, and because of Jesus Christ.

Wow, this was over 2100 words, just writing this. Too bad I can’t count it for next month!

But thanks be to God that “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38-39)! No one and no thing — not even ourselves if we are truly his — can snatch us away from our precious Lord who is the Shepherd and Guardian of our souls.

All this said and understood, even so, the devil, the world, and our own flesh will stop at nothing to make us useless (even unfruitful if it were possible for believers to bear no fruit) in the cause of Christ, in advancing the kingdom of God in the hearts and lives of people, so that Christ’s name would be sullied to the greatest extent possible. It does not glorify or magnify the name of Christ when Christians do not live for Christ. When Christians are living in sin, or at least living the sort of joyless, defeated, and even fearful lives which Martyn Lloyd-Jones describes in his excellent Spiritual Depression (a must-read).

And yet this is precisely what happens in some cases: true believers are so assailed by the devil with doubts and condemnations, so weighed down by the trials of this world, or so ensnared by the desires of their own flesh that they are no longer in the fight or battle but have been taken out of commission alongside other wounded soldiers.

To put it another way, the unholy trinity of the devil, the world, and our own flesh, with all their outrageous slings and arrows, will either cause the Christian to cling more closely and firmly to Christ or cause his grip on Christ to slacken and weaken. The trials and tribulations of this life will either bring us nearer and dearer to Christ, or they will drive us farther and further away from him, such that all we can do amidst the stormy winds and crashing ocean waves which threaten to drown us is to simply cry, “Save us, Lord; we are perishing!” (Matt. 8:25). Of course, thank God that even if we are faithless, he remains faithful (2 Tim. 2:13), that even if our grip on Christ loosens, Christ’s grip on us never loosens. Even if we can do no more than cry for his help as the turbulent waves overwhelm us, Christ will always come to our rescue. He who loves us and gave himself for us would never, no, never let us sink into the depths, forever lost. Still, this said, there are only two roads open before us as Christians, in our experience, in this life: that Christ more keenly and more sharply comes into glorious focus in our vision and the eye of our faith, or Christ is darkened before us as the onslaughts from the devil, the world, or our own flesh loom over us forebodingly.

With these dangerous realities surrounding us and pressing in upon us, we need to have the attitude and commitment that we will not give up but we will endure in Christ to the end. We need to have a battlefield mentality, to live like a soldier, and to press on, come what may. This isn’t all doom and gloom, not by any means, for there’s much joy and strength in the midst of even the greatest pains and hardships because of intimacy with Christ; but, nonetheless, cultivating such a mindset is an absolutely critical aspect of the Christian life since it prepares us for the task at hand.

What’s more, that’s also why God warns us throughout his Word to endure to the end. To conquer and overcome, as Christ admonishes the churches to do in places like Rev. 2-3. To fight the good fight of faith, and to finish the race (2 Tim. 4:7). To run with endurance the race that is set before us, as Hebrews exhorts us. To “watch yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly like a trap . . . But stay awake at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that are going to take place, and to stand before the Son of Man” (Luke 21:34-36). To never give up or give in. But to always fix our eyes on Jesus Christ, the author and finisher of our faith (Heb. 12:1-2), so that we might grow stronger and stronger in grace by his grace.

So, although it is true that it’s “through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22), let us do our utmost by God’s Spirit working in us to enter the kingdom with our faith growing from strength to strength in Christ rather than with our faith merely the same as when we first began. We may have true and genuine faith, yes, but faith as a mustard seed and no more, wherein Christ might rightly say to us, “O you of little faith” (Matt. 8:26). Let our faith not be little from first to last but let it grow from strength to strength as it is watered by God’s Spirit and fed by God’s Word, as these work within us by God’s grace. We can never desire to know and love Christ too much.

Let us be like the soldier Paul describes in Eph. 6: “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm.” I want to say a word or two here. In times past, as a young believer, I thought that simply “to stand firm” against the devil, the world, and my own flesh was nothing at all. Easily accomplished, I smugly said to myself. In fact, I even thought, what? Really? To stand firm in the midst of battle — and that’s it? Pshaw! Surely I can do far more for Christ than merely “stand firm”! Surely I can run against a troop and leap over a wall for the Lord (2 Sam. 22:30)! But these days, as I grow and mature in Christ, and in years, I see what wisdom and truth and indeed strength there is in these words: “and having done all, to stand firm.” Truly, I am humbly grateful that the Lord strengthens us to stand firm in him and for him. Let us desire to stand firm in Christ.

Likewise, let it be said of us as it was said of Moses in Deut. 34:7, that although “Moses was 120 years old when he died,” nevertheless, “his eye was undimmed, and his vigor unabated.”

And as it was said of Caleb, one of my biblical heroes of the faith: “And now, behold, I am this day eighty-five years old. I am still as strong today as I was in the day that Moses sent me; my strength now is as my strength was then, for war and for going and coming” (Josh. 14:10-11).

And, finally, as it was said of Abraham, our father in the faith: “He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised” (Rom. 4:19-21).

So, Christian, gird up your loins! Cling to Christ, trust his Word, pray to him to strengthen you by his grace ever more, every day, not letting one day go to waste in seeking the Lord and his face but always redeeming the time and making the most of every opportunity to strengthen your faith in Christ, and your relationship with Christ. Hold fast the confession of your hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. Do not forsake the assembling of yourselves together, but encourage one another, as you see the Day approaching (Heb. 10:23, 25). And thus grow from strength to strength in Christ.

I ask you, dear Christian, where were you one year ago? What was your relationship with the Lord like one year ago? Has it grown or shrunk? There’s no status quo — to keep things as they are is, sadly, to shrink.

Speaking for myself, I know precisely where I was one year ago. I thank him and him alone, who has brought me safely thus far to where I am; who has brought me nearer to himself; who has spoken tenderly to me (Hos. 2:14); who has given me strength, even his strength; who has been my rock; and who has been my Ebenezer (1 Sam. 7:12). Although I am not the man I want to be, without Christ, I would certainly not be the man I am — thank God.

Therefore, let us — you and I — be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might, growing from strength to strength, and from grace to grace, by his grace. Let each successive year better sharpen our skill in wielding and fighting with the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, for his glory and our joy. In this way, the devil, the world, and our own flesh will tremble and fall beneath Christ, who has already vanquished his foes and led his people in victory.

As the apostle John says in 1 John 2:14, “I write to you, young men, because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one.” Let us therefore eagerly desire to have the word of Christ richly dwell within us, so that we would be strong men and women in the Lord.

Pursuant to this goal, let us joyfully obey the words of Psa. 105:4, “Seek the Lord and his strength; seek his presence continually!” That’s the main way to grow and strengthen our faith in Christ. Let us seek the Lord. Let us seek his strength. Let us seek his presence — continually. His strength shall be given to us as we seek his presence continually. Is it not so? Do we as his people not have firsthand knowledge of this very fact, when we seek and find him in his Word and in prayer? When we ask and seek for the good gift of his Holy Spirit, will not our heavenly Father graciously grant us his Spirit so that we might have sweet communion and fellowship with the blessed Triune God (Luke 11:13)? Are we not often strengthened in faith after we feed upon his Word in our devotional times? Yes, we are — and, yes, we can say we do know him! Just as we do not merely rationally know that God is good and no more, as a person who has never tasted honey might rationally know that honey is sweet without experiencing its sweetness, in a similar manner we have tasted and seen that God is good. And we can boast that we understand and know God himself (Jer. 9:24). How glorious is our privilege (and how great is our responsibility), that we can say we know the Creator of the entire Universe!

In closing, we praise him who is our rock, who is our strength and our shield, and who strengthens us so that we would strengthen others, defend others, protect others, and provide for others, as he has graciously done for us. May the good news of Jesus Christ triumph in the hearts of men, women, and children everywhere, growing from strength to strength, first in our own lives, so that it might affect the lives of others, and in the end may the earth be filled with the knowledge of the Lord our God as the waters cover the sea.

Again I say: “Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love” (1 Cor. 16:13-14).

Soli Deo gloria.

I need help figuring out better faces, multiline font-lock support, and something weird in customization, but beyond that, this is pretty neat. Oh, and documentation would probably be a good thing, too.

Update: customization fixed, documentation added.

Update 2: better faces added, but still can’t figure out multiline font-lock.

Then he [Jesus] returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. And they brought to him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment, and they begged him to lay his hand on him. And taking him aside from the crowd privately, he put his fingers into his ears, and after spitting touched his tongue. And looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, ‘Ephphatha,’ that is, ‘Be opened. And his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. And Jesus charged them to tell no one. But the more he charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. And they were astonished beyond measure, saying, ‘He has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.’

My pastor preached on the healing of the deaf man in Mark 7:31-37 last Sunday. It was a most grace-filled sermon, pointing us not to the sermon or the preacher but to our beloved Lord and Savior Jesus Christ himself! So I thought I’d share my brief albeit inadequate notes on this sermon with everyone.

Despite their inadequacy, however, my hope and prayer is that the Lord might be gracious to us and by his Spirit open our eyes to his Word. May the Lord take us away from this world and all its distractions and allurements, and take us into the “prayer closet,” that is, take us unto himself in private, personal communion and fellowship, so that we might experience his sweet grace and love for us. Oh, how he loves to love us! May we humbly acknowledge our child-like dependency upon our Heavenly Father and come to him, gratefully sitting before his feet and eagerly listening to his words just as Martha’s sister Mary sat before Christ’s feet and listened to him. As Christ himself said to Martha, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:41-42). May Christ grant us a Mary-like faith to humbly, gratefully, and eagerly listen to his wonderful words of life, so that we might know our Savior’s unfailing love for us!

Turn you eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in his wonderful face;
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of his glory and grace.

May we find our all in all in Christ and Christ alone!

Then he [Jesus] returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis.

The region of the Decapolis was a predominantly Gentile or non-Jewish region in Israel. Decapolis is Latin for “ten cities” (literally). These were ten cities which shared a common Greco-Roman culture as opposed to a Jewish culture in the midst of Israel.

At first glance, we might think it odd that Jesus would choose to preach and minister in the region of the Decapolis. After all, most of his ministry was to Jews. Yet, just as Christ ministered to the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4), and just as he ministered to the Syrophoenician woman in the passage immediately prior to ours (Mark 7:24-30) — including saying what on the face of it might appear to be harsh words to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs [i.e. Gentiles like this woman]” — and just as Christ told parables such as the one of the good Samaritan, we see another pattern emerging in our Lord’s ministry: although salvation is from the Jews, salvation is not only to the Jews but also Gentiles. God means to include all peoples in his plan of salvation and redemption in Jesus Christ! Let us thus rejoice that we who were once “Gentiles in the flesh, called ‘the uncircumcision’ by what is called the circumcision . . . separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:11-12) can now thank our gracious God for granting us the free gift of eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord: “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Eph. 2:13)! What a glorious God we have who had planned all this from the very beginning, who had planned and purposed to save even us Gentiles whose ancestors did not know a single thing about God but likely worshiped woodland elves and nymphs and tree spirits and other false gods, and who brought it all about in Christ Jesus for our good and his glory! What an awesome plan of salvation to ransom a holy and chosen people for himself from every tribe and language and people and nation by the blood of Christ!

I should also point out that there’s something else odd about our Lord heading into the Decapolis region. What’s additionally odd is that this was not the first time Christ had ministered there. If we turn back a couple of chapters to