An interesting mail run today. I got a GameCube game I ordered on Friday. Wasn’t expecting that so quickly. I got a check from the government. I found out that I had done my taxes wrong in 2005 and 2006 and so I submitted a 1040X to amend them and the check is from one of those years. Yipee! Free money. And then there was a large envelope from the IRS that I set aside till after dinner.

Glad I did. I got audited. I don’t make that much money but that doesn’t mean you won’t be audited. When I first read the report, I knew exactly what they did wrong. So I sat down to correct them on what I knew could be an easy mistake. Two of my children have social security numbers that are very close and I thought they mixed them up. Then I stopped. If that was the case, the fact that they were auditing 2006 didn’t make sense. So I looked it over again. Then I pulled my records from 2004 to 2007 and took another look. Yep, I did indeed make a mistake. But I’m not content to pay $1,760 or so so I went over the numbers they offered. After some work, I did get the amount I owe for my mistake down by more than half. So I filed an appeal and we’ll see what happens.

So the lesson of this story is to keep your tax records! I have them filed nicely for the last three years and somewhat sloppy for the previous ones. You can bet I am going to keep them straight from now on. So don’t think you don’t make enough to get audited and don’t think that that unruly pile of papers isn’t important. It is. When you’re done, put them all in an envelope. And if you do your taxes electronically like I do, print out hard copies.

Now, go do all that right now before you forget it. Go on. Git.

“Take your stinking paws off me you damned dirty ape!” Ah, Heston in one of his best moments. I remember seeing the Planet of the Apes when it first came out and I loved it. Hey, I was like 7, ok? Even the remake was pretty good. But I think the 1968 ‘worked’ because, like many classics, it played on a fear or concern that society is dealing with at the time. For Planet of the Apes, I think it was evolution that we were wrestling with. Yes, it had been around for quite a while but by the late ’60s it was pretty widely accepted and at least subconsciously we were dealing with what it meant. I could unpack that some more but it isn’t my point so I’m going to press on.

Naturalism is the driving force behind Darwinian evolution. The idea is that the universe is ‘closed’ that is there is no supernatural explanation for anything. Period. Random chance produced genetic diversity which lead to the rise of human beings. That means that we’re descended for a long string of lesser animal forms. That means that we’re related to apes. As a matter of fact, the only real difference between us and them is that we stood erect and learned to use tools and to speak. In other words, we got smart and they didn’t.

But, naturalism postulates, if evolution is on-going, might not our ape cousins catch up? This was the premise of Planet of the Apes. Humans messed up and ruined their society and therefore stalled their evolution. Apes were give a lot of time to catch up, and they did! In fact, they overtook us and they rule the planet now.

So that is a bit of hokey science fiction, but I think it makes an important point. Science is silently telling us that if apes and monkeys start using tools, they’re a step closer to us. It would seem to prove their point that human beings aren’t really that special. So when you see something like an orangutan apparently using a stick to fish or a chimp using a stick to get a termite dinner, it is supposed to show that we’re not really that smart after all.

But the whole thing really should make Christians reflect on what it means to be made in God’s image. Care needs to be taken here to make sure that we’re not letting naturalism define these kinds of things for us. When you consider what the Bible says about the imagio dei, you find that it give very little definition to the term but spends the few passages that touch on it showing us what it means practically. So what exactly does it mean that we’re created in God’s image? We’re not sure but from Genesis 2:7 there seems to be a spiritual aspect to it. We’re made from the same dirt that the animals come from (Gen 1:24) but unlike those animals, God breathed life into Adam’s nostrils. There may be and probably are other ways we’re like God and animals aren’t but the Bible isn’t abundantly clear on those. Chimps wielding sticks is no threat to our unique position in creation. This is an example of when scripture can clarify issues in life, even when it remains unspecific on a certain topic.

I like Mark Driscoll. He sort of represents to me all the good things about the Emerging Church. He also bugs me at times. This sermon demonstrates what I love and dislike about him and his ministry. It is a sermon on the Emerging Church and he begins by defining some terms. But that is the entire problem with Emerging/Emergent Church language: it is all new and undefined! So Mark starts out defining what a “traditional” church is. Again, another undefined term that Mark defines according to his understanding. Is it accurate? Well, I suppose it accurately explains Mark’s understanding but I’m not sure that “traditional churches” were that monolithic. Mark say that about “gen X” later in the sermon.

Post-modern Christianity shouldn’t be identical to post-modernism. It should express the truth of Christ risen from the dead in a way that post-modern thinkers can come to believe.To be fair, Mark is just trying to size up the situation for his congregation. He admits that he’s not sure what a lot of the stuff he lists is all about and that he grew up Roman Catholic. Okay, that’s cool. But one of the things that aggravates the Emergent and “traditional” conversation is just this kind of stereotyping. Brian McClaren is a champion at doing that. Read his book Generous Orthodoxy and you’ll find tons of examples.

So the whole Emerging/Emergent Church thing seems to largely be a reaction to a stereotype rather than a reaction against the real church as it is/was. Driscoll rightly criticizes the Emergent folk for throwing out too much in order to not be like “them” whoever “them” is/was. Post-modern Christianity shouldn’t be identical to post-modernism. It should express the truth of Christ risen from the dead in a way that post-modern thinkers can come to believe.

So here’s my takeaway. Instead of coming up with new names for new movements in the Western church, how about if we just try to be the church in our Western culture? Isn’t there room for churches that use pipe organs and churches that use electric guitars? Doesn’t our culture look like that? Provided we keep our doctrine straight, isn’t there room for churches where guys wear short-sleeved shirts with ties and other churches where they wear t-shirts and jeans? We don’t need to stereotype and then criticize “them” in order to form “us”. That isn’t very often true and even less is it helpful to us or them or the people we want to see come to know Jesus.

Favorite quote from the sermon: “You can’t debate anymore; people’s feelings get hurt and then they blog.”

I came across this case mod. I’m not usually into case mods, seems like too much work. But my Powerbook died the same death as this guy’s and he brought it back. I might need a second desktop in the future so this is sounding like a real option to me.  I think I would make mine look more like a Mac Mini rather than perforated metal sides. I guess it would be a Mac Maxi or something. :) I like the cheap acrylic case. That’s pretty neat.

Ted Olsen wrote a thought provoking piece on blogging in CT. Here’s the nub:

[M]any bloggers still feel like they have to have their own site to be “contributing to the conversation.” The blogosphere, which was supposed to be a great democratizer, has made us all perennial candidates, demanding that we weight in on every news item, not matter how mundane or oveexposed. (The blog world risks becoming one giant midrash on The New York Times’s front page.)

And he’s right. I have read on other blogs how to make a great blog and I thoroughly disagree with them. The advice really tells how to get a lot of comments on your blog and maybe even a lot of links, but that isn’t want makes a blog great. Olsen explained that to do a blog “right” means to live the blog. He says of good Christian blogs, “it’s not necessarily the quality of their blogs that matter. It’s matching their quality with frequency.”

All of this is true, but once again, does that make it a good blog? Not to me. Forget frequency of posts; a well used, well populated RSS aggregate reader levels that playing field. And check the regularity of posts and the quantity of comments on this blog. According to those criteria, this is a poor blog. Yet I keep blogging.

Time to wax philosophical for a moment on blogging. I’ve done it before but I wasn’t as careful with my words and made it sound like commercial blogs were bad. So let me give it another shot.

Blogging has quickly changed complexion. And I think it was inevitable. When blogging began everyone rushed to it. And the quality of blog posts was essentially this:

Mon the 2nd – OMG, I haven’t posted in like so long. Sorry. I’ll try to post more often. Swear.

Mon the 9th – Wow, wear did that weak go? Sorry, I’ll update soon. Theirs been alot going on and I really have to tell you about it. I’ll post tomorrow.

Thu the 12th – So I saw Fantastic Four on Tuesday with a bunch of friends (except Danny, who was a total jerk at the movie) and it so totally rocked! The special effects were excellent and the action was nonstop. Great movie go see it. You won’t be disappointed promise.

Tue 17th – I am so sad today :,-( I’ll tell you about it later.

Two months later – Oh yea, I have a blog. Sorry. Since I’m back in school, I’m going to post all the time.

And that was about it. I saw tons of those kinds of things. Corner Gas did a good spoof on blogging. After a while, more serious people got in to blogging, you know, the kind who can spell. And blogging looked like it was going to be a new social arena. Then about two or three years ago, I noticed that it became popular to stop blogging. Some of my favorite people who blogged, quit. There was a group who pressed on for a while and they, largely, have either slowed down or are taking a break. There remains a group of high quality bloggers and a handful of team blogs that remain great.

Okay, so what makes a blog great in my opinion? Well, content for sure. That is why I like professional blogs and visit them. But those are almost like specialized news outlets for me. The blog blogs to me are the personal ones. Not that divulge a bunch of personal information but ones when you read them you feel like you know the person. Those are even better if you do know the person. With those, I don’t care about frequency of posts. What counts there is some good writing, some interesting discussion and that human touch.

Wow, that April Fool’s joke turned out much better than I anticipated! What really blew me away (and is still bothering me a bit) is that it was even plausible to my friends. No one emailed me and said “Nuh ah!” I’m apparently a better liar than I thought.

Thanks for all your kind words but Desiring God is not producing a monthly magazine and they surely aren’t desperate enough to ask some no name blogger to write for them. This story is too Cinderella to be real.

Yesterday when I got home from work I picked up the mail. As I sorted through it, I saw a letter from Desiring God Ministries. No big deal, since I’m a supporter I get regular updates from them all the time. I chucked it and the bills on my desk. I’d take care of the whole stack after dinner. First of the month is bill time. It is also budget time so I didn’t get to the DGM letter before bed time. I threw it in my bag figuring I’d read it on the way in to work in the morning and I could also pray for whatever was in the letter.

So I got on the train this morning and I opened the letter. It wasn’t like the normal bulk mailers I get from DGM. This was a letter from Jon Bloom, the Executive Director of DGM and it sounded personal. It turns out that DGM is going to start a monthly magazine. Jon explained it as “somewhere between Modern Reformation and Books & Culture with John’s [Piper] emphasis on God’s glory” seasoning the articles. He also mentioned that DA Carson would be one of the managing editors. Carson wants a magazine like Christianity Today as it was when Carl F. H. Henry edited it.

Anyway, after explaining the new magazine, Jon explained that someone provided him a link to an article on my blog! How cool is that? Jon read the article and like it and he said that he spent a hour or so looking around and reading more. He likes my writing style and my perspective and he asked if I could submit some more samples of my writing. They want me to write for Desiring God Magazine! Well, they might want me to depending on the samples of my work I submit. Jon gave me his phone number and wants me to call him soon so we can talk. He said he didn’t email me since he didn’t want me to think his email was some kind of April Fool’s prank or something.