Wake the Pharaohs

"This ain't a song, Mr Gallagher, It's a meditation, a moan, a mantra - with a grinding, tarmac-digging, mind-cutter of a melody. Know/grows/play/pain/rain/bone all hit the 9th note over changing chords, then I/play/live/die/I/breath/I/believe/you're/me/see all hammer the 6th above, also over shifting guitar harmonies. Every vowel sound is crushed into a nasal drone. Finally, 'ever' hits a 3rd and a 6th over a flattened seventh chord – this could wake the Pharaohs."

—Dominic King on "Live Forever" by Oasis

Three Umpires

There were three umpires. 

The first umpire said, "There are balls and there are strikes. I call them the way I see them."

The second umpire disagreed. "There are balls and there are strikes. I call them the way they are."

The third umpire disagreed with both of the first two. "There are balls and there are strikes, but they're nothing until I call them."

Which umpire would you want calling your game?

A Strange Day

Today was a strange day. I woke up early and went to breakfast with a friend. By the time I got home, I felt really low and spent most of the rest of the morning in bed. I was dreading a paper I had to write. I went to the grocery store. When I got back, I worked on my Church History script for a couple of hours. My SIM card came in the mail so now I have a phone. When I finally got to the paper around 3:00, I was shocked at how easy it was to finish. I sent in my rough draft and rewarded myself with Netflix. A friend wrote to say that he'll be working for TheosU (the website I'm filming a Church History course for) full time, a good sign because it means the company is expanding. After dinner, I read a chapter from Never Split the Difference to my mom. Now I'm listening to a podcast about the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. (You can listen to it here.) Hopkins was a poet I really appreciated in college. Here's his poem "God's Grandeur," which is one of my favorites:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Never Split the Difference

A few days ago, I went on a walk through my neighborhood and discovered that another house in the community has a "free library" box out front. Inside, I found a copy of Chris Voss' Never Split the Difference, a book on negotiating that I've been meaning to read for a couple of years. Voss was an FBI hostage negotiator for about 20 years and his book is full of riveting stories and simple techniques. 

The first technique Voss teaches is called "mirroring." It just means repeating the last one to three significant words someone has said. For example, if someone says, "Everyone's in town to see the big game today," you might reply with a question, "The big game?" and then let them elaborate. Mirroring tells people you're listening to them and it's a good way to build rapport.

The second technique I've learned so far is "labeling." This means paying close attention to the emotions you're picking up from someone and then stating them out loud in a non-judgmental way. For example, "it seems like you're a little worried about x" or "you sound pretty confident about y." Labeling diffuses negative emotions and reinforces positive ones. If you put out a label and then go silent for about 3-4 seconds, people will almost always reveal something about themselves you didn't already know. The information people reveal can be extremely useful.

What's most surprising about Voss' book is that although it's a book about high-stakes negotiating, at the end of the day it's really all about forging meaningful human connections quickly. It recognizes that people are far more driven by emotion than logic. If you get to the core of what's driving a person and identify with it, you can win their trust. Once they trust you, they're far more likely to "do business" with you. Whether you're negotiating with a hostage-taker, a business counterpart, or a 10-year-old who doesn't want to go to bed, you stand a better chance of getting what you want by genuinely listening and trying to put yourself in the other person's shoes.

The Little Things

I went to Wal-Mart on a whim the other night and picked up an electric tea kettle for $20. I’m in love with it. I had an electric kettle years ago, but it almost burned down my apartment because I kept forgetting to turn it off. This one cuts off automatically at exactly the right temperature. It also detaches from the heating element for easy cleaning. There's even a little gauge on the side that satisfies a desire I didn’t even know I had to know with metric precision exactly how much water I am brewing. I didn't know an appliance could make me so happy. Sometimes, it's the little things that get you through life.

Tearing the Roof Off

Have you ever been so discouraged that you found it impossible to believe good news when it came? In Exodus 6:9, Yahweh tells Moses to go announce his wonderful deeds to the Israelites. He was the God of their fathers, who had remembered his covenant with their fathers and he was going to do great and mighty deeds to lead them out of captivity into the Promised Land. Moses goes and tells them, but "they did not listen to Moses, because of their broken spirit and harsh slavery." (Exo. 6:9) They were so beaten down that they couldn't believe.

Here's what's encouraging about this passage, though. A few verses later, in verse 13, it says the LORD charged Moses and Aaron "to bring the people out of slavery." In other words, it didn't matter that they were too broken to believe. God was going to deliver them anyway. In fact, his people were already working on it.

If you are a believer in Jesus today with a "broken spirit," be encouraged today: that doesn't prevent God from saving you anyway. He's probably got people working for your good right now. The Bible says that Jesus is in heaven interceding for you. The Holy Spirit is inside you and intercedes for you. Sometimes, though, we're not even sure that they're real. In those moments, we need the church. There's a great story in the Gospels about four men who tore the roof off a house just to put their crippled friend in front of Jesus despite massive crowds. When we don't have the strength to get to Jesus, we need friends who will tear the roof in our prayer until we can believe for ourselves.

Who are your "tear-the-roof-off" friends? And if you're OK, who can you tear the roof off for?

Prayer

As a Christian minister, I'm not supposed to say this, but I'll say it anyway because it's true: I have a really hard time with prayer. It rarely feels like anyone is listening. 

I've been reading Stanley Grenz's beautiful book, Prayer: A Cry for the Kingdom, in which he highlights how central Jesus' relationship with the Father was. Jesus often withdrew from everything and everyone just to be alone with God. 

I don't have that kind of inner life. Instead, I have a voice inside my head that usually wants to tear me down. I usually prefer distracting myself to prayer so that I don't have to hear that voice.

I can think of a couple of moments in my life, though, when I felt like God was listening. Years ago, when I was at Bible college, my Dad had been kidnapped in Haiti. I was at an all-school prayer meeting and I think I heard God tell me, "He's not going to die. I have more for him to do." I know I felt a sense of peace. A couple of days after that, my Dad was released.

On another occasion, someone I knew was trying to do great harm to my reputation and to the Bible college where I work. I came home one day and asked the Haitian lady who cooked for us to pray for me and she prayed big, bold Haitian prayers as I wept. 

Later on, I fell asleep and I dreamed that I was in front of a government building. As I walked around to the back, I could see men in ski masks carrying boxes out and loading them into a big box truck. In the dream, I knew they were thieves and that if they saw me, they would kill me. Suddenly, they turned around and started walking toward me. I had nowhere else to go so I crawled into the shadow of the building and prayed that they wouldn't see me. They ran right by me, as though I had been made invisible. I woke up knowing that it would be alright and it was.

I don't know why God makes his presence so elusive or why prayer is so hard for me. But I'll keep praying, hoping that one day, I'll find the life that Jesus knew in the Father's presence.