Martin Luther King Jr

"Everybody can be great because anybody can serve...you only need a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

"Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the ugly as beautiful and the beautiful as ugly and to describe the true with the false and the false with the true." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

I deeply respect people who are willing to put their back against a wall and not back down from what they believe. Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther, Susan B. Anthony, Nelson Mandela, Winston Churchill, Jim and Elizabeth Elliot, Martin Luther King Jr -- all people I admire because of their great courage and strength of heart.

Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, Frederick Douglas, Medgar Evers, Elizabeth Jennings...all the great civil rights leaders walked down a path that was very much like Jesus. They fought against hatred and bigotry for the cause of justice, love and equality. Situational ethics came very much into play as the question of "Who do I obey -- God or government?" was very real. And many of them died for their cause.

Martin Luther King Jr is a great holiday. We as a nation do well to stop and remember what it is he fought and died for, which in a word, is freedom. There's no more Jesus-like concept than freedom. "It is for freedom Christ set us free." I think MLK would have been great friends with George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Benjamin Franklin. They were all revolutionaries -- and, it seems to me -- he was great friends with Jesus, the greatest Revolutionary of all time.

A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr is a fantastic book.

Troop Surge

I'm not happy about the president's speech on Wednesday night. I think this it is a very unwise move to completely ignore the Iraq Study Group's report as well as the greater portion of the American public (62% at last check). There's a fine line between strong leadership/public servanthood and maniacal stubbornness (maybe it's not that fine at all). I think President Bush is approaching that line.

There is an Old Testament principle that applies here, I think. When a king did not know what to do, he would call for chief counsel: a prophet. It was the prophet's job to go to the Lord on behalf of the king and return with the Word of the Lord for the given situation. When this would go down, the king had better obey the word that the prophet received for him. To not follow it was to invite defeat. I hope that is not what is happening with this situation -- not that the Iraq Study Group is prophetic or anything -- just that the principle seems present.

I read a great quote today: "Mountains appear more lofty and majestic the nearer they are approached. Great leaders resemble this quality not at all." -- Meyers S. Cooper

Thank you for listening to a bit of political rambling on my behalf. I picked this pic up on the Web. It cracked me up. Check out the TV listings on the major networks immediately following Wednesday night's speech.

Thoughts For The New Year

In my estimation, two words are key for this coming year, both personally and corporately as Cornerstone.

Birth.

Beauty.

This Sunday is Vision Sunday, lots more about Birth then.

So, on to Beauty.

I'm colorblind. Have been my whole life. It makes for interesting situations, particularly in the realm of personal fashion. I can see all the colors a normal person can, I just get them mixed up. I think my parents first learned of my "condition" when I was in the first grade. Color-by-number was not my forte. So I was given one of those colorblind dot tests. If you've never seen one, you can check it out here. I only see a 25. The rest are just dots.

Here's the point: because I'm colorblind, I used to think that beauty on a visual level was something that I could not really get or create. Other vantage points like music, writing, and building stuff were all OK, but never anything like painting, photography or drawing.

There's a fundamental flaw in that mode of thinking into which even non-colorblind people step. It is an assumption that beauty is about anything other than a deeper revelation of who God is and that how I interact with beauty has something to do with whether or not something is beautiful.

Don't get me wrong, beauty is subjective -- but also objective. It is both at the same time.

Beauty is objective because God is the source of beauty. Sin, death and Satan are objectively responsible for ugly. Everything God makes is beautiful, and much of God's beauty is as terrifying and/or dark as it is comforting and/or light. For example: an animal sacrifice system, the ocean, fire, the sun, a lion, wind, dirt, caves, boulders, mountains, a Lion (repetition intended), the human brain, the human body, or His Son being tortured and murdered.

Beauty is subjective because how we interact with it is filtered through the lens of our life narrative. How we were raised, what our key temptations are, personal senses of taste, abuse we have suffered, addictions formed, people we like or dislike -- all of these things can tell us something about a beauty experience we are having.

Here's the thing I love about beauty: I don't believe it can be repressed. I believe that beauty is rooted in the character of God and everything He has made and is making bears His stamp, especially people.

About three weeks ago, I went to see Damien Rice in concert. He's one of my favorite artists. Damien is the most honestly real artist I've ever heard. He sings about torturous situations in his life, in deeply emotional, often dark ways. Every concert he releases himself to be re-tortured again. It was one of the most intense, beautiful concert experiences I've ever had. After his last song, he came out for a three song encore -- and I swear, I felt like he was trying to take the audience to a dark, depressing place and leave us there because he sang three of the darkest songs he's ever written. But he couldn't do it. God's beautiful image in Damien Rice was so strong and so real, that there was only beauty. There obviously was not a full release of the beauty that could be there because there was no Jesus in him, but Jesus was definitely there. And it was beautiful.

So, that was a long way of getting to the point that I think Jesus has a lot of beauty for us to learn and experience in 2007. I am praying God will show us more deeply what it means to worship Him "in the beauty of His holiness".

The picture at the top is the most beautiful thing in my life.