Sustenance

sustenance

1.	means of sustaining life; nourishment.

2.	means of livelihood.

3.	the process of sustaining.

4.	the state of being sustained.

I think we, in the North-American culture, have a difficult time picturing God as our sustainer. I mean, for the most part we don't have an issue with viewing Christ as our Saviour, or Jesus as Lord and Master. That's simply ingrained theology from the time when we were prayed with next to our bedsides. God as Sustainer, however, has more difficulties.

I believe this is because we're really quite self-reliant in this post-Starbucks world. We no longer have any needs; we live in a world of our wants. Safeway, in all reality, is our sustainer. It is Save-On-More that provides for our physical nourishment, it is BC Hydro that accommodates our electrical necessities, and it is our paycheck that continues those services in our favour. My daily bread comes not from the Lord, but from minimum-wage's benevolent hand. Our mental stresses can be overcome with the power of positive thinking, and our emotional needs can be quelled, to the point of submission, by a variety of biologically and chemically manufactured prescriptions. In the quest to reduce human pain and suffering, our society has fabricated a world that no longer needs God.

I think that here, at CBC especially, we've idolized and idealized the idea of suffering. We learn about the heroes of church and Anabaptist history and we dream of having the faith to put our lives on the line for the praise of God's holy name. We believe that one day, when someone puts a gun to our head, we'll have the strength and courage to proclaim our faith to the nations. This, we think to ourselves, is truly suffering for the Christian faith. In a dream world of extreme situations, God exists in a seemingly desolate world. However, in the mundane Earth we currently reside in, God abandons us when we encounter the mildest of inconveniences. I think that we've forgotten that the martyrs first had to go through extreme physical and mental suffering before they were able to lay down their life. Surely they were held malnourished, beaten, and tortured for some time before their death. The knowledge of your family suffering because of your unwillingness to deny your faith, or being completely separated from your friends and fellow believes would be utter anguish. Dying is easy; suffering takes eyesight beyond the physical world in front of us.

I don't hold a theology of suffering. I don't believe that I have to be killed for my faith to be a real Christian. I do, however, recognize that the apostle Paul calls us to join with him in suffering for the faith. I have no problem with the fantastical impression of dying for my faith, in fact, I welcome Hollywood-esque moments into my life regularly. I do have a problem with suffering through broken relationships, stress, or the flu because of my faith. Surely, if God were real, he would have prevented these cumbersome annoyances from penetrating into my life of faith.

No. If I accept the theology of God as my sustainer, I will begin to recognize that God will get me through all things. He will give me the strength that I need for the day; or the moment that I am suffering and in pain. He will provide me with the encouragement to keep fighting, he will love me when I need to be loved. He will feed me when I need to be fed, and give me rest when I am too tired to go on. He will light my path only when it is too dark for me to see for myself. When I believe these things to be true, my relationship with God shifts from the stagnant binary to a wholesome organic where I am given just what I need, not what I desire.

The Left Behind Series

For my Timothy and Titus class, I have to present to the class a false teaching that has affected my Christian thought and behavior. So this is what I ended up coming up with, and what I shall present to the class tomorrow. I wish I had something with more substance, but seriously, my theology has always been perfect! Tough life, this is...

It was difficult for me to come up with a specific false teaching that I could look back upon and say with certainty that it was this instance in which I was duped into misguided theology. Part of this is because of the similarities between my church's theology and the theology of CBC, and the other part is a combination forgetfulness and forgiveness, I'm sure. So it ended up being an outside source that altered my theology. This perpetrators in this instance are Time LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, authors of the infamous “Left Behind” series. I know that their theology has probably affected a number of you, but I get to go first.

For those of you that don't know, the Left Behind series is a fictional account of “the last days” which is based on the premise of the Rapture, a theory in which Christians are “taken” or “caught up” from Earth to Heaven. In the series, the bodies of believers simply disappear, leaving behind clothes, jewelry, dental fillings, and so on. This concept has only been around in the church within the last 200 years. So reading this, as a preteen and young teenager, I fully believed this work of fiction to be based on probable events. This was firstly because it was in my church library, and secondly because the authors referenced certain sections of text, namely Revelations, which seemed to align with the fictional events that were taking place. While I knew and understood the literature to be a fictional account, it promoted a theology different from the one portrayed in the Bible.

I specifically remember a time when I desired for the rapture to occur and to not be taken up into the heavens so that I might be able to be one of the Tribulation Force Elite, like on the newest video game released in the series, Left Behind: Eternal Forces. I wanted to be like Buck or Ray and fight in the clearly divided world of Christian versus non-Christian. I kept waiting for the end of the world so that I could start beginning to act like a real Christian. I stopped reading the series when I realized just how poorly they were written, and how bored I was becoming with the characters.

It was actually here, at CBC during my first year of college, with John Vooys, when I realized that there were perhaps other interpretations to the book of Revelations. From there and through classes like Church History, I've been able to see a variety of possibilities for a biblical interpretation of the last days, some of which are more biblical than others. Like the false teachers from Ephesus, the authors of the Left Behind series actually believe their theology, as according to statements that they've made on their website. However, I've come to accept a theology where these are, already, the last days, and now is the time in which I should be acting like a “real Christian”.

Comment, if you can, before I present on this so that I might take your suggestions.

Cold to Joy

I've always grown up assuming that I'm a pessimist, perhaps a modern day Cassandra. I'm a critical sarcastic cynic that presumes the worst in people and events. Yet, for some reason, recently I haven't really minded getting sick.

I mean, it's not that I enjoy waking up at night with snot running out onto my pillow, or that I like it when I can't talk for the amount of phlegm in my throat. I don't take pleasure in spending a day with dirty Kleenex in my pocket, coughing at my girlfriend (woot!) or wincing every time I eat something. But sometimes, I don't really mind.

I mean, there's so much good about being sick. First of all, there's the obvious pity that is lavished upon they that are diseased. While I don't normally prefer to be pitied, when such circumstances are above your control, you might as well appreciate it. Along with pity comes others willingness to take on tasks that you normally would've been more than able to do yourself - like make dinner, walk to the grocery store, or wipe your ass. Now, there's always someone willing to do that for you, because, well, you're sick.

Beyond the pity, when you engage in sickly behavior you suddenly have an excuse for anything you do that would normally be unforgivable. It's like a blank cheque for human interaction. If you get bored with the conversation, you can sneeze or wipe snot from your nose. If you are caught feigning interest you can simply say that hey, you're sick and it's hard to concentrate. You no longer have to attend class for fear of infecting others (you're clearly being selfless here), and you can "forget" to do things because you were distracted by the overwhelming pain surrounding and impounding your entire body.

Also, when you're sick you can drink lots of tea, which is always good.

The Sickness

My mind does weird things when I'm sick. I think it has something to do with the temperature of my overall body and how it's so much higher than it ought to be for normal healthy human standards. So when I sleep at night, I have crazy dreams, that don't necessarily stop when I wake up.

Last night, among other things, I dreamed that I was playing a game that I used to play a lot, Counter-Strike, except I actually was the first person character. I was winning, absolutely destroying the competition time and time again, to the point where one guy on the other team took a particular disliking to me and decided to hunt me down every round. He never got me though, and I kept stealing his gun from him. Then my brother in law was on the other team and I kept shooting him and trying to stab his head but he wouldn't die.

When I woke up I wasn't sure if I was still playing or not; or if I had to go pee or not; or if I wanted to get out of bed at all.

The scariest thing was deciding that no, I wasn't going to get out of bed and then finding myself wandering around the living room for no particular purpose, not at all remembering getting out of bed.

I also dreamed of playing my bass and of Lori, and I prayed a lot though I don't remember why or what.

I do remember sitting on the toilet at one point, fully aware that this was one of the worst nights in my life, perhaps second to that time I puked 13 times, though for some reason that ended up being fun near the end.

Being sick sucks. I had to cancel on playing bass for chapel today, had to call in a favor from a friend to take my place, have to wait and see if I'm going to class (probably not), have to wait for my dad to show up though he's supposed to be here 30 minutes ago, makes me wonder if the buzzer is not working again, etc.

I don't know why I'm writing this or what I've writing, my head hurts. G'night.

Aha! This Blog Is Mine!

Blogger.com finally allowed me to switch from the Beta version of blogspot to the full real deal blogspot. I have subsequently updated my template, making it ever so pretty. I will be adding more and more to this blog as I find time to procrastinate in the coming days.

This blog is a blog about my blog, as opposed to a blog about my life, so I will not be using the label "life" for this blog. Hrm, perhaps the label for this blog will be "blog", so that if one wishes to see the "BTS" (behind the scenes) of blog.alan.schram, they could search for it using the label which I will have conveniently provided them.

Of course, it makes me wonder why I spend so much time concerned about readers that may or may not exist, when in reality I post so infrequently and about such rubbish that I actually get bored writing some blogs. I can hardly assume people find pleasure in dragging their lifeless souls through this mess.

Regardless, this has been posted and labeled. Let the blogging begin. Again.

It's Not That I've Stopped Thinking...

...it's just that I'm too busy sitting on the beach in Hawaii to worry about posting a new blog.

Don't worry, fateful reader (whoo!), I will be back when I have time to sit around, think, and write. For now, I'm going to stare at my sunburnt nose in the mirror and grin to myself.

Anyone else go swimming on New Years Day?