Remember Speechwriters LLC

...apparently they're back! New EP in March. Here's a video I found on YouTube, embedded with love for my friends from Claremont.

5 Things about Chicago

When I was eight I asked my dad which city was the most polluted. He told me that it was probably LA. I didn't believe him--"What about Chicago," I said, "that places seems dirty." My dad told me about the Chicago winds and how they blow pollution out of the city, but I remained skeptical.

I never had high expectations for Chicago, which is probably a good thing. As has been the case with all John Krasinski movies, high expectations often lead to disappointment. But low expectations can lead to surprises (see Grape Nuts, they seem gross but are, in truth, amazing).

I have been in Chicago for two days, headed back tonight, and being here has not been like my first bowl of Grape Nuts, but it has been pretty good. Here are five surprising/interesting/nice things about Chicago:

1. Mid-west hospitality. Cold and confused, I walked off the train and onto the streets of downtown Chicago at 9 pm Thursday night. Within two minutes of looking confused two beautiful people (a guy and girl) stopped to ask me if I needed help. I said yes, and they spent a few minutes standing in the cold explaining how transit works in Chicago. And they seemed genuinely happy to do it. I have had a number of interactions like this over the past few days. It seems like Chicago people are nice.

2. Transit. I didn't get the whole taxi/train/bus thing at first, but I have gotten the hang of it and have discovered that one could live in Chicago without a car. Praise the Lord.

3. The Neighborhoods. Chicago has interesting neighborhoods. Like LA neighborhoods they have serious problems (racial/economic segregation, poor schools, aging infrastructure), and like LA neighborhoods they have history and culture and (some) sense of community. I like Hyde Park in particular, home to the University of Chicago and this guy named Barry Obama.

4. Food and tea. From what I can tell its cheaper than in LA--better Italian, worse Mexican. And there's this great chain called Argo Tea. If you're from Portland, think Coffee People but with tea and before they got bought out by Starbucks. If you're from LA, think Starbucks, but a little bit better in every way.

5. Friendly homeless people. I have no idea why--if I were homeless in Chicago, I would be miserable because of the cold. But I have had some great interactions with homeless people while here in Chicago. They have been friendly, talkative, and understanding--not overly aggressive. Lord, what are you doing in Chicago?

That said, it hasn't gotten above 30 degrees since I've been here, and some of the architecture is really ugly. But I like Chicago. If Pasadena and Portland are 9's, Las Vegas is a 1, and LA is a 6, then I would give Chicago a 7 (an 8 if the weather was better).

a basement, a shrewd manager, a conversion

I joined a Bible study in the basement of my dorm during my first semester at Pomona College. But I'm not entirely sure why. I guess I was spiritually interested. I was involved in a lot of different activities as a freshman, and Bible study seemed like a good addition.

My church in Portland had been a liberal Presbyterian church. We didn't study the Bible much, and there were a lot of members who didn't believe in Christ's unique ability to save. Nonetheless, I was a spiritually confident freshman, and I came to Bible study assuming that I knew everything about Jesus and the Bible. I was, of course, wrong in my assumption. The Bible and this group slowly opened my eyes to a number of my misconceptions about Christ and spirituality.

My Bible study leader's name was Amber. My first impression of her was her height--she was pretty short (well, I mean, she was...); my next impression was her demeanor--she was quiet, a history major who liked to study (I think she's getting a PhD. now, studying the history of the Holocaust). We met in her tiny dorm room in the basement, and we studied the parables of Jesus. Amber started us out on the well known parables: the Good Samaritan, the Talents. She did a great job of pulling out the nuance and mystery of what Jesus was saying, and I began to appreciate the depth of each parable. Jesus' teachings had begun to scratch at my heart.

After a few weeks we came to the Parable of the Shrewd Manager (Luke 16:1-15, click here for the passage). I read the passage, and the group began to discuss. Amber, in her quiet but forceful way, would not let us settle for a simple explanation of the text. No, Jesus was not saying that we should cheat and connive like the Manager, and no, He also wasn't saying that the Manager was just a jerk--Jesus had a deeper lesson for our group and for me.

I was utterly confused. That night was my first experience of being confounded by the Bible (I think not understanding the Bible can be a good thing). I remember that night was the first time I prayed: "Jesus, what the heck are you trying to say?"

Slowly, He made himself clear. Jesus was addressing the idea of stewardship. We gain wealth, possessions, and power in this life, and there are many different ways to spend these resources. Jesus says, "Use them for the one thing that will not pass away!" When this teaching sunk in, I was left humbled. Jesus was saying something profound through this passage, and I had missed it entirely. In his own meek way, Jesus showed me that my SAT scores and hot grades meant very little when trying to understand the Kingdom of God. His wisdom is different than the kind of knowledge I was learning in school. I could be brilliant and still miss the point.

That night God converted my mind. He convinced me that the Bible is mysterious but true and that I can trust what is written there. It would take another seven months to convert my heart (that's another story), but this study in Amber's dorm room was crucial to God's victory in my life.

Thank you Jesus for your mysterious wisdom. Thank you Amber for not letting me settle.

Why is Saint Augustine so brilliant?

(A couple of weeks ago a wrote a post discussing the source of Malcolm Gladwell's brilliance. This post does the same but for Saint Augustine.)

I picked up Saint Augustine's Confessions just before Christmas for some vacation reading. Augustine is a doctor of the faith, incredibly influential in shaping Christian theology, so I thought that I should read one of his works. The politics major in me wanted to read City of God, but when I saw how long it was, I thought better of it. Confessions seemed more manageable.

I was primed for an intellectual marathon, but what I found in his Confessions was a readable and relevant description of one man's relationship with God. He discussed the Manichees and Platonism a bit (which I didn't really get), but as a whole, the book had a greater impact on my heart than my head.

Augustine knew God well. When I first began reading, I had to put the book down every few pages because I felt humbled in light of his description of Christ and the Father. He understood much about God that I am barely beginning to grasp. He emphasized one point that was especially poignant for me.

He writes, "If physical objects give you pleasure, praise God for them and return love to their Maker lest, in the things that please you, you displease him. If souls please you, they are being loved in God; for they are also mutable and acquire stability by being established in him..." Augustine gives thanks to God for each blessing in his life: nature, friends, family, opportunities, and more. If a contemporary Christian were to talk the way Augustine writes, I would probably label that person "hyper-spiritual" and a little out of touch with reality. But since Augustine is Augustine I am humbled and compelled to take him seriously.

The doctor gives thanks to God for the gift of intellect at length, providing an interesting counterpoint to Malcolm Gladwell's thoughts in Outliers. Augustine was probably a genius. By age twenty he could out-debate the best teachers in North Africa, so he moved to Italy only to find that he was a top intellect there as well. He writes, "You know, Lord my God, that quick thinking and capacity for acute analysis are your gift. But that did not move me to offer them in sacrifice to you. And so these qualities were not helpful but pernicious (deadly)."

Augustine skips over the terrestrial source of his intellectual ability--I get the sense that he doesn't really care if he's intelligent because of nature or because of nurture--and says that regardless of why he's smart, God is the source of his smart-ness.

I'm definitely not as smart or talented as Augustine or Malcolm Gladwell, so what does all this mean for me? More than anything, reading Augustine has inspired me to use the talents and gifts that I have been given to serve God. I think it is easy for me to get bummed because I don't have some of the flashier gifts to offer to God. Augustine is helping me see that what I have is what God wants--he just wants me to be me.