No Good Prayer...

More from my college friends' texts :)

"When you sigh, "if only my prayer were a true prayer," you must be cautioned, because this thought can contain the notion that the quality of your prayer gives it merit. Humble petitioners know that their prayers have no merit. If you believed that your prayers were "good" prayers, then they would be prayers of self-merit. You would then be trusting on your prayer offerings instead of God's gracious reception--trusting in your works instead of God's mercy. If you are waiting to approach God until you can offer "good" or "true" prayers, you are waiting in vain. Humility evaporates when it recognizes itself. The humble person recognizes his pride. A humble person does not see his own prayer as humble. Praying humbly is asking, "God be merciful." ... Pray for humbling grace, so that you might pray as a needy, unworthy supplicant to the great and holy God of the universe. Every cry of broken heart to God is a true prayer. These are the prayers that God delights to hear."

~ Joel Beeke, Developing A Healthy Prayer Life

Further reading: Donatism

~ Rak Chazak

Mini-Treatise: Emotions and How to Relate to Them

I find it helpful to see my emotions as something that happens to me, not "me." They are useful because:
* they are like indicator lights in a car, diagnostic tools that help you figure out what's right or wrong
* they sometimes give false readings, so you've got to use your brain to know when to ignore them or get them fixed
* sometimes they're not diagnostic at all, but rewarding. They make you feel good or bad, to reinforce doing/not doing a certain behavior you engaged in.

They are never your destiny. They don't tell you what you have to do--they have to be interpreted. You don't have to feel the way your emotions make you feel. You can uncouple your mind's participation in them by consciously choosing not to dwell on them. Engage in an activity that biochemically alters your physiology so that the emotions you're dealing with change. An easy example is if a guy is sexually aroused, a way to destroy that is to engage in vigorous exercise. It kills any feelings like that and clears the mind. It does the same with hunger, for that matter. If you're up late at night and feel depressed, go to sleep! It'll get your circadian rhythm back on track, and stressful build-up gets dealt with unconsciously while you sleep. Distracting your body by interrupting a natural process (or returning to one, if your emotions are due to biological instability) can keep certain moods at bay for a while so that you can make progress without their influence.

~ Rak Chazak

AWPATT Teaser: Seeing A Woman Cry Breaks My Heart (Why?)

Oddly, nearly every image on Google Image Search was of a single tear running down a cheek. 'Could be a side effect of American culture discouraging open displays of anguish, contrary to other cultures (compare television reports of grieving mothers/fathers from the homeland with, say, the Middle East or India). The below image is a good example of what I'm referring to in the AWPATT thought below. Someone visibly disturbed.

source: smosh.com

355 The image of a crying woman breaks my heart. I think faces are designed to become unattractive when contorted in wailing. The disruption of a beautiful face into a reddened, convoluted mess of scowls, shut/bloodshot eyes and change from openness to withdrawal indicates in a very alarming manner that something is terribly wrong. It nevertheless attracts attention. I think that males, though we tend to break things, have a paradoxical inner desire to want to fix things. When someone’s crying, I want to stop it. Not because it’s annoying, but because it grieves me that I’m not in such distress and they are, and my mind races wondering how I might be able to help relieve the agony the person is experiencing. Can you share your own happiness? Can you unlock it in the other person? Cause a change of perspective that resolves the problem that triggered the crying? Can you give comfort that assuages a person’s emotions and makes them feel good? A crying woman, like few other things, makes a man feel hopeless and worthless, because he desperately wants her to be happy and fulfilled, but perceives that he is helpless to do anything about the issue. I don’t suppose that I or any other man thinks that we/I have some superhero power to solve strangers’ problems. Rather, I think it’s a collective sense of guilt over the fact that we can’t rescue you with a snap of our fingers that makes us feel rotten. From a Christian theological perspective, it’s very true that even if I didn’t directly cause your pain, I nevertheless bear guilt for the fact that the world is broken by sin and some aspect of this brokenness/fallenness is what caused you hurt. A partaker in the sins of Adam, the world is rotten and the world makes women cry, in part because I’m a sinner. So my emotional response to a crying woman is rooted in something true—I am at fault, even if in a very obscure, distant way. Thankfully, Christ bore my sins on the Cross, and gives me hope because I know that for all the brokenness in the world today, I’m destined to live with Him in a restored perfect world one day. If I could convey this contentment and hopefulness to a young woman in pain, it would give me such gratitude to have played a small part in lifting her up from where she’s fallen. If man is the glory of God, and Christ demonstrated the perfect man’s life when He walked the earth in the flesh, then isn’t it the truth that men are at the core, imbued with a God-given desire to be a hero? It might take a different form in every man, but at base we want to fix the world or save the world or save just one person from something bad in the world, and I believe this is placed in us for His glory. Why do crying women break my heart? Because they touch on two truths at once: I, as a man, and a sinner, am the reason for why they hurt; and I, as a man, in the image of God, am instilled with an unrelenting passion to want to rescue the weak and helpless. (lest you interpret this as sexist, it’s a temporary statement. Someone devastated by anguish is both in a weak and helpless state, whether man or woman). May I not try to “fix her problems” by human cleverness, but use the Gospel to extend to her the means of rescue by which I also was rescued. I can’t stop your tears, but God can.

~ Rak Chazak

The Extrapolation Principle

 The Extrapolation Principle is the application of the idea that God is aware of everything, including human thoughts.

Consider: if you thought of something, then if it was the case that your idea is totally novel, such that God would not have thought of it, then your thoughts could catch God by surprise. He would be, in some sense, ignorant. We know this can't be true, because He is all-knowing.

This also means that, if you can think of a possible reason for why God might have done something, then, provided your thought process is logically sound and not in contradiction to some known Biblical truth, it is reasonable to believe that that thought would have entered into God's decision-making process, as a supporting reason for making the choices that He did.

That's basically it, for this post. I can't make it clearer with more words. But I figure I'll share an example of what I mean, that happens to be what I was thinking about when I formulated this thought.

~ ~ ~

I was contemplating marriage when I went to bed last night. I decided to explore it from a different aspect than is typical. The common ways of looking at human sexuality and relationship are from a procreative and theologically symbolic standpoint:

Procreative: God made male and female separate, as well as sexual reproduction and sexual desire, in order to establish a balance in the created order and to perpetuate humanity.

Theologically symbolic: God made male and female separate, that they may, when they come together in marriage, be a representation of the relationship that Christ has with His Church -- distinct centers of consciousness, but united in purpose (and as near to unity of essence as is possible), both serving the other.

But I figured, why not look at it from a contingency standpoint.

Premise: God is so great that when we recognize that we cannot have a perfect relationship with Him in this world, we will desire to leave it to be with Him. This means we won't care if we die. We'll be prone to recklessness or at least apathy with regard to protecting our earthly lives, since life with Him is far more to be desired than a lesser life on earth.

So God has the conundrum, of how to motivate the humans not to totally throw away their lives so they can pass through death into eternity. He's got to make some aspect of earthly living have enough of a fixation on the heart of men that they won't be tempted to give it up so easily. He needs to do something to make them individually invested in promoting His kingdom on earth, and not just focused on joining His kingdom in heaven.

What's a God to do?

The delights of heaven far surpass the delights on earth. So God might have thought, "I'll create something so delightful that men will hardly choose to die than miss the experience of it." And He created sexual pleasure.

The intimacy of the loving relationship between Father and Son, and Savior and Saint, far surpasses human relationships on earth. So God might have thought, "I'll create something so intimate, than which nothing else will come closer to resembling My relationship with those whom I love." And He made possible the marital union between man and wife.

And then, to ensure that mankind would not be so singlemindedly devoted to pursuit of this passion (recognizing, after all, that not all would be holy in their motivations) at the expense of all others, He connected human sexual intimacy to the generation of life itself, so that as long as people would desire that intimacy (which He made nearly inevitable), new people would be born and His desire that mankind would fill the earth would never be thwarted. Further, the presence of helpless children would serve as a modulating effect, on sinners and saints alike, making them more responsible and convicting them with a sense of duty, and thus providing a way that mankind would perpetuate itself even if it operated on the basest of human urges.

The fact that I thought this means that God knows that I would think it.
Since God is eternal, that means that He was aware of this thought 'before' He created mankind, before He made them male and female and created sex and sexual reproduction.
The Extrapolation Principle then means that, provided there's nothing ludicrously antiBiblical about this speculation, that it's quite possible that these notions constituted some of the multitudinous considerations that God would have processed in His divine mind when deciding how He was going to create the universe. It doesn't mean it was the primary reason (certainly not, by far), but it implies that He would have been aware of it, and the fact that He did what He did in the way that He did takes all possibilities into consideration.

So my conclusion, then, is that one of the supporting reasons for why God made marriage is so that His children would have something to root them in this world and keep them temporarily content with persisting in a shadow of eternity, until the future consummation. A sea-anchor, if you will.

It can't replace God for us. But it's the closest we have to being face-to-face with Him, our true love, between now and the day we're glorified and perfected in Him. And it's such an example of His kindness to us, that He would allow us to have this 'small slice of heaven', the better to know Him by, by intimately loving and being loved by another person.

Tell me that's not romantic.

~ Rak Chazak

Text Treatise: Thinking Big, Space Fantasies, and Groping for Infinity

Try to keep up :)

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I've tried to create super-hyper-operators**(see attribution at bottom of article)** to express numbers so large that they're meaningless in this universe, even as expressions of mass, information, energy, power, time, probability, volume etc. 

The  idea is  twofold: 1) to help me fantasize more scientifically accurately aabout imaginary alternate universes and 2) to help me appreciate how big infinity really is.  

You know that 10^10 is 1 with 10 zeroes after it. 10^10,000 would be 1 with 10,000 zeroes after it. 10^100 is known as a Googol. 10^10^100 is 1 with a Googol of zeroes after it, known as a Googolplex. In comparison, 10^10,000 is 10^10^4, so a googolplex would be 10^10^96 times greater. That's assuming that you add the second exponent if you multiply, I'm not sure if you would have to exponentify the numerator to multiply the exponent so as to add the second exponent. Which just shows you even more, how massive the number is.  

But then I tried inventing a new system for showing even larger numbers. 

The next thing I tried to do was create a symbol to represent the next level of hyper operation. I used an up arrow but the keypad doesn't have that. 10x10=10^2. 10x10x10=10^3, and so on, we all know. 10^10=10,000,000,000. 10^10^10= 10^10,000,000,000. A massive number. 1 followed by ten billion zeroes. In contrast, a googol is 1 followed by 100 zeroes. But 1 followed by 10^10 zeroes is still nothing compared to 1 followed by 10^100 zeroes, which is a googolplex. 

Now, 10^10=10>2. 10^10^10 = 10>3. 10^10^10^10 = 10>4.  10>2^2 is a googol (10^100, 10^10^2) and 10>3^2 is a googolplex (10^10^100, 10^10^10^2)

So my next big numeral to invent was 10>100 (or 10>(10^2), not to be confused with 10>10^2. The latter would have 10 "^"s with the 11th position being a ^2; the former would have 100 "^s" -- I'm doing my best to stay consistent with established mathematical symbolism). 

If I wrote 10>10>10 that would not be 10>1 followed by 10 zeroes (10>(10^10) would be that), it would be 10>10 raised to the tenth power successively 10 times, or 10 to the googolplex to the googolplex to the googolplex. MASSIVE, MASSIVE NUMBERS.   And then I pretended that I could comprehend the size of a universe where the average planet was 10>100 km in radius, supposed that I couldn't go any higher, and went to bed mentally exhausted. 

Texting Treatise: Different Responses to Temptation

Texting Treatise: Different Responses to Temptation

The first section contains the types of responses or non-responses to sin, where a person rejects the idea that they should be repentant about it.

Blindness

Lack of Awareness: unaware of what you are doing

Qualified Unawareness: aware of what you are doing, but think it is good. Unaware that it is sin

Incorrigibility

Apathy: aware it’s wrong but don’t care to change it

Minimization: aware it’s wrong but deny the severity of it

Defiance: aware of the wrongness and severity and willingly indulge it anyway without contrition

In this next section are different types of responses to sin that contain a measure of contrition (feeling sorry) or repentance (genuinely desiring to flee from or overcome the temptation). For the sake of making it seem more interesting, psychologically, I’ve arranged them in a potential ‘maturity scale’ that the hypothetical average sinner might progress through while dealing with recognized temptations to sin in their life.

Contrition

                Sub-set: Vain Heroics

Halfhearted Abstinence: an attempt to break from it, but not strong enough in conviction to persist. Likely followed by binging on the particular temptation (shopping, drinking, sexual activity, surfing channels/websites, abandoning healthy eating or exercise, etc) upon crashing

All or Nothing: can lead to longer sustained abstinence, but more often leads to more time in between attempts, because of the fear of failure. Successive failure leads to disillusionment with pure abstinence and leads to a variety of different attempts to deal with the issue:

                Sub-set: Allowances

Hesitation: failing with abstinence doesn’t immediately lead to abandoning that method, but can cause a person to rationalize not trying right now, while they’re waiting for the perfect moment to start. They tolerate giving in to the temptation because they tell themselves that they’re planning to try to abstain from it soon

Banking: sinning more in the short term to satisfy an imagined quota that your flesh desires, so that you can hope to have better success in your abstinence effort. This leads to an expectation of high indulgence, which produces a cycle of periodic abstinence followed by binging, which is worse than the initial ‘halfhearted abstinence’ program.

Putting it Out of Mind: not thinking about it, in the hopes that it was one’s focus on trying to deal with the temptation so strongly that led to the catastrophic failures in the past. When this inevitably fails, it is modified to

Tolerance: not keeping track, and letting yourself get away with indulgence in the hope that by not “banking” it, you’ll end up indulging in it less, and that by not trying to abstain all-or-nothing-wise, you won’t have a “crash.”

                Sub-set: Searching for Loopholes

Rhythm/Scheduling: when tolerance doesn’t end up diminishing your gratification of your sinful desires, and you catch yourself, you may try to “out-think” yourself, by intentionally planning to give in to the temptation at certain points, but insert periods of focused abstinence in between. It’s basically a modified “banking/all-or-nothing” approach with shorter periods of abstinence that make success more likely. When the periods are extended in the effort of “weaning” yourself off of a dependence on the indulgence, you reach the level of

Gradual Improvement: this can be reached with or without the “scheduling” stage; it’s basically an attempt to “play a long game” and start comfortably with a high tolerance for your indulgence, gradually decreasing how much of an allowance you’ll give yourself. This is basically a more intentional version of

Fatalism: aiming for less than perfection because you can’t get it. Whereas the “gradual improvement,” “scheduling” and “banking” approaches tolerate sin for the sake of trying to build some sort of spiritual immunity to it (doesn’t work, by the way), fatalism is the final resting place of many people (note that this scale does not have to be limited to Christians). They decide that they’ll accept a certain amount of giving in to temptation over a certain length of time, indefinitely, because they’ve decided that they’ll never have victory over it. Such thinking can lead a person from being contrite  to becoming incorrigible. However, some people may make a few further desperate steps to dealing with the issue of their temptation

The Sufficiency of Minimalism

Would you  be satisfied with a nearly deistic God? That's not saying He is, but considering how you'd react to a very minimally involved deity is an important thought exercise that can help you evaluate and strengthen your faith.

The Sufficiency of Minimalism

                What if God doesn’t intervene in earthly affairs? What if, after the conclusion of Acts, God neither acts through human nor supernatural agents of change, instead letting everything proceed according to physical laws and human decisions alone? What if every change in a person’s mind, from contrition to conversion to sanctification, is not the result of an active alteration of their mental substrate by the Holy Spirit, but merely a deterministic inevitability resulting from contemplating the truths of the Scriptures? What if God’s irresistible grace, as well as His sanctification, was accomplished not by an act of His in the present, but an act of His in the deep past, which continually effects salvation throughout all time, so that He is still the author of it all, despite no supernatural behavior on the individual or subatomic level?

                Would you still attribute every good thing to God? Would you still give Him the credit? Give Him the glory? Or would it cheapen your understanding of His goodness? Is your faith dependent on a belief in God supernaturally intervening to manipulate world events, subliminally, all of the time and everywhere? As if, perhaps, this is the only way that you can conceptualize Him being in control of everything, or deserving credit for the outcome? If your idea that God plays ‘cellular train conductor’ in people’s brains, or ‘atomic pool shark’ in the particles of earth and sky and sea, were challenged or undermined, would your faith fall apart? This is worth seriously considering.

                I’ll confess: my conception of God’s involvement does include the idea that He bumps this atom here, increasesthat action potential there, annihilates this positron here, raises the thermal energy of that molecule, breaks that peptide bond, induces magnetism in some metal somewhere, alters the velocity of some photon, pulls, shifts, breaks, combines, removes, replaces, diverts, and orchestrates an endless undetectable masterpiece of butterfly effects all over the world to minutely influence world events and accomplish personal and national histories without transgressing the boundary of personal autonomy that He intentionally limits Himself not to.

                But suppose this notion is incorrect? What if He doesn’t make a billion tiny interventions every second? What if He makes none? Or one every year, utilizing much more extended butterfly effects? Does my belief in God’s sovereignty and intimate care for human lives and world events rise and fall with this romantic view of Him as a maestro? No, it does not, and should not. It is my own idea, based on what I know about God’s power and wisdom, but my own idea, nonetheless. Him sovereignly ordaining everything that occurs does not need to mean that he flips a switch every time something happens. He could have planned it out a thousand years earlier, and being infinitely intelligent, perfectly predicted everything that would happen over that time period that led up to that moment. Or, He could have intervened the Planck-second immediately preceding. Whichever is the case, it changes nothing about the fact that it is entirely within His power to do either.

                In the interest of developing a satisfied faith in God, I’ve contemplated ideas like this from time to time, and considered that though God is probably very active—and must, on some level, be, because of His promise of the indwelling ministry of the Holy Spirit to believers—I should be able to find contentment with the possibility that He’s minimally involved in human affairs, and much more is due to chance and human agency than even I believe.

                When it comes to the bedrock of my faith, I know from the witness of history that He really did come in our likeness to die for our sins in our stead, so that justice could be served and I can be free from His wrath and reconciled to Him as a forgiven, redeemed and beloved son. That is ALL that is necessary to come to an unshakable faith in Him. Everything else is a splendid, wonderful continuation of His grace toward us, sanctifying us from now until the day of His return. But even without this, I have everything I need in order to be accountable to Him, to believe in Him, and to trustingly persevere to be obedient from this point on until the future consummation, even if, hypothetically, my faith received no further encouragement whatsoever, and life was one big struggle to resist despair from constant flaming arrows and assorted spiritual anguish.

                This is being content with as little as possible. When you are content with the least, you will be ever more grateful, the more you receive. The sufficiency of minimalism is not something that should characterize your faith—as resisting more than the essential doctrines of Christianity—but is something that should support your faith, being something in the back of your mind that tells you that no matter how your faith might be shaken as you go along, no matter how much it may be attacked, and how strong the temptation to despair, you know with full confidence that the core of your belief is stronger still, and no matter how wrong everything else you believe may be, no matter how effective the attempts to destroy your faith, nothing will ever be able to change the root facts of the Incarnation, Crucifixion, Death Burial and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and on this hinges everything else, so hold on to it no matter what!

                The most minimal truth is the most sufficient. Contentedness with this leads to a lifetime of confidence and overflowing gratefulness at whatever more you receive from God than this knowledge, to strengthen your faith. And when we’re in eternity, and God reveals to us just what the extent of His interaction with physical reality was, we’ll have an endless number of reasons to be awed, thankful and filled with an attitude of worship toward Him for everything He did that we never knew while we walked in the valley.

~ Rak Chazak 

Further reading (very interesting): The Expansion of Space--A Dark Science. Keeping in mind the link above to electron-positron (anti-electron) annihilation, these two excerpts stood out: 

Vacuum energy comes from the spontaneous emission of virtual particle/anti-particle pairs that appear momentarily from small quanta of energy from the vacuum, sort of a quantum foamy stuff, and then these particle pairs self-annihilate releasing the same quanta of energy back into the vacuum. Its energy density is non-zero, in fact, if you estimate it from electron/anti-electron pairs filling a volume on the scale of their Compton wavelength you get an energy density about 48 magnitudes higher than the estimated average mass density of the universe. From this it follows that the matter content of the universe is only a tiny fraction of the total energy, when compared to the vacuum energy. The particular choice of the wavelength one uses for the cut-off energy in the calculation of its energy density has led to a figure as high as 10,120 times the average mass density of the universe.

....

The quantum vacuum impedes the progress of photons through space to the speed, c, and hence it introduces the first “clock” and the forward arrow of time. Empty space would have meant unimpeded photons with infinite speed.

This last sentence is intriguing because of its relevance to Dr. Jason Lisle's Anisotropic Synchrony Convention, a model he lays out where the one-way speed of light is postulated to be infinite, in order to explain why we can observe distant starlight in a young universe. This might be worth devoting a whole article to, itself, some time. 

Not 1 Corinthians 13

A poetic text treatise.

Love: an earnest, sustained desire to pursue another person's best interest, at the expense of one's personal wants, convenience, comfort and enjoyment. An attitude demonstrated by action, not an emotion or expression of affection. Affection is a by-product of love, it is not love, though it is commonly called love. Love sacrifices the self for the sake of another's benefit. It esteems what others need as more important to attain than what you yourself want. Anything that defies this is not love, but selfishness disguised. Wanting what makes someone happy is not love, because what makes you or someone else happy is not always what is best for them. Love perseveres when there is no reward of happiness, no fulfillment of personal desires, and no recognition or thankfulness for the effort expended. Love is not exhausting, because it is its own reward, and putting it into action is its own sustenance.

~ Rak Chazak

Meta-Talking: Talking About Talking

The title says nearly all. I have long been aware that in a lot of my writing, I “think about thinking,” meaning that I not only discuss the content of thoughts I have, but the thought process itself, the better to introspect and analyze whether my reasoning is correct and appropriate. It helps me ensure to myself, or prove to others, that my conclusions and observations are truthful and beneficial. It’s also fascinating to peek under the hood and go beyond ideas into investigating the “why” behind those ideas. But until very recently, I didn’t consciously catch myself in the act of ‘talking about talking,’ while having a face to face conversation with someone else.

It took a casual conversation wherein which I was flirting occasionally with a young woman I ran into at the gym, for me to notice that I wasn’t merely talking to her, I was talking about how I talk, with her. And acknowledged it in the conversation. “Going out of the plane of conversation” is a fun thing to do, because it’s so unusual. It generally garners amused interest in the other person, from what I can tell. See, in an act of meta-talking, I tend to ask if I’m talking up too much time (not a typo), if they’d like to leave but are too polite to tell me, or if they’re actually interested. It’s socially incorrect. I love it. It’s one of the things that make me a bit unique. I might not have a musical talent or be a world-class athlete or have a modelesque appearance, but I’ve got a peculiar mind. What better thing to be the most “out-there” when I meet and get to know someone, since of all the aspects of my person, my mind is the most accurate definition you can point to to say, “this is who I am?” I have a deep desire to be known and understood by my wife. I’m thrilled to pieces to realize that the personality I’ve developed through the way I think and talk has made my uncharacteristically eccentric thoughts so prominent and inescapable, that I’m guaranteed to only one day wed the woman who can tolerate this social weirdness and interact with me on the same level. All others will be made uncomfortable, overwhelmed by the intensity, unable to understand what I’m saying, or just plain uninterested, for any of these reasons or just that it turns them off personally. What a great way to avoid getting involved with the wrong people.

I’m meta-talking right now.

There’s a quote I can’t remember the middle of, which goes something like this: “boring people talk about other people. Interesting people talk about ___ (events?). And inspiring people talk about ideas.” I make use of small talk about random trivia I might have on my mind, in beginning a conversation with a stranger or acquaintance, but I can’t sustain a conversation based only on that. I quickly move beyond the base facts and bring up theories, educating my listener with concepts they may not have heard of before, or heard explained in just the way I am then doing. I’d like to think that by lifting up their own consciousness out of the realm of people and things, into the realm of big ideas and the connections between the things we see, that I’m adding something to their experience instead of just taking up their time. I hope that I can give every person who listens to me something to think about, that will be beneficial to them. I don’t want to open my mouth otherwise, if I can’t do that. And I am hopeful, because testimonials from people I’ve had long conversations with tend to support the belief that I “really have something here” with how I talk, and talk about talking.

Alternative to Celebrating Birthdays

I had a short text epiphany I shared with a few of my friends yesterday. Not quite a 'treatise'; this'll be short:

"I was thinking about how people use their kids' birthdays as passwords and how that really isn't such a great idea for internet stuff, and as I pondered how to get around that, I relighted on my opinion that birthdays are not really that significant anyway (here and here): so I came to the interesting idea, rather than celebrating my children's birthdays, my wife and I would instead calculate our best guess as to the day of fertilization, and celebrate that week instead. I'm thinking of the symbolic significance of this, that it would attest to the fact that life begins at conception and only becomes revealed, if you will, upon birth. It's an excellent illustration of the relationship between justification and glorification in the New Birth: when we are saved, at first nothing noticeably significant happens. But inside us, enormous changes are occurring; and only at long last when we die or are caught up, will the dramatic revelation take place: others will now see what has already been ordained from the deep past. How we celebrate will teach our kids about the reality of salvation and how to be heavenly minded.

~ Rak Chazak

Intimacy in Heaven

I had a dream about Taylor Swift.  And it was lovely. Let me explain.

Article rambles about the presumably non-sexual nature of future relationships, touching on the subject of sex, by comparison, as necessary.

In the late fall, when I first ran into an old high school classmate who was pregnant, I remember her offering as a prayer request some relief from bad dreams. Apparently she too has active dreams, and something to do with hormonal surges while pregnant--or even perhaps spiritual attacks on account of being recently joined in Christian marriage--had been giving her very vivid, upsetting dreams. That stuck out to me, because I too have, on occasion, very vivid dreams. It is rare that I remember dreaming but can't quite describe what I dreamed about. More often, my brain will give me a detailed exposition or adventurous plot and as long as I remain lying prone when I wake up and recall it, I'm able to remember it afterwards. For some reason, sitting up makes it harder to remember what you were just dreaming and then *poof* off it goes into a memory black-hole and you lose the chance to recall it.

In the last year or two, I've had dreams where I was jumping 30 feet in the air, escaping a rampaging dinosaur; saving people from a burning building while an enormous walrus shot lazers at it; fighting the xenomorph from the Aliens franchise with explosive coloring pastels; catching an airplane's landing gear with one arm while holding my dog in the other, to escape a roiling sea of sharks; floating down the Nile and eventually waking up right before becoming crashed into by a wide-eyed hippo riding a tsunami a la Poseidon in this clip from the Odyssey....

And those are the good dreams. Immersive adventures, plenty of imaginary exercise and heroism.

Then there are the bad dreams. I felt a bit reassured when I heard that young woman talk about bad dreams, without going into details. From that, I got an anecdote to support my reasoning that the kinds of things I sometimes see in dreams are not necessarily reflective on my character, or thought process. I don't really have "night-mares," in terms of things that frighten me, anymore. If I wake up wanting to forget it happened, and relieved that nothing I saw was real, it's invariably because I've had extremely explicit dreams of a sexual nature. You see yourself doing certain things with certain people that you just wouldn't ever want to or consciously choose to, in real life. The upsetting part is the reconciliation--while asleep, trying to deal with the cognitive dissonance; coming to grips with the psychological aftermath of what you've committed. In the midst of the dream, I'm having a personal crisis and trying to stop freaking out about "what I've done." Waking up is a sweet relief when you recall that you actually never went against your conscience. Even so, I never remember getting a choice. In bad dreams like those, I'm always launched into the middle of it, where my deeds have been scripted and I don't even have the privilege of exercising refusal. It is absolutely cringe-worthy on every conceivable level.

That's why my dream about Taylor Swift was so refreshing. It was nothing like that.