Besides XKCD, another comic strip that I have begun to appreciate is Indexed: modern life captured through charts, graphs, and Venn diagrams. Some require a few seconds of your brainpower.
“Is A wise, or something else?”
Sometimes she just illustrates timeless truths.
“It will get easier. Really, it will.”
Jessica Hagy is a genius. Watch for her book out on Penguin in February.
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
A flash of a smile in an otherwise chilling article:
New Jersey’s hardcore — mostly urban — gang population has almost doubled since 2001, from 9,000 to 17,000. But in the last few years, even nontraditional gang areas in the Northeast like Westchester County, Long Island and Princeton, New Jersey, have started having gang problems. There are tens of thousands of wannabe gangsters in New Jersey alone, Hampton says. Police call them “wangsters.” Mostly, they traffic in what they think is cool about gangs, the sort of young white men of means and options who go to upscale Manhattan private schools and wear baggy pants and talk ghetto.
–Peter Landesman, “L.A. Gangs: Nine Miles and Spreading”, LA Weekly, December 12, 2007
Poor Charlie Brown. A single ornament and his Christmas tree collapses. “I killed it! Augghh! Everything I touch gets ruined!”
Is this what the Christian life is meant to look like?
Walter Brueggemann has pointed out that the God of the prophet Jeremiah grants His covenant to His people without reason or explanation. It is not preceded by invitation. And so it goes: “I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” If only it felt that easy.
We romanticize this process but in doing so forget that it is a process. It doesn’t simply conclude 5 minutes later with Linus and Lucy singing a rousing “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing”. The permanence is not to be taken lightly. After all, tattoos hurt. Firebrands hurt.
Maybe the discomfort is a not a sign of injury but rather a marker of overcoming.
God, by invading our hearts, has written the capacity for faithfulness and commitment into our souls. We will become God’s people, and perhaps someday we will do out of love and intuition what we try to do today out of duty — but that will involve a certain death of the self, a radical shifting of allegiances, and I wonder if we shouldn’t expect some grind this side of the eschaton.
William Cavanaugh has written compellingly that the Christian life is about “practicing heaven now, on earth, even if it gets you killed. It’s not about making our way to Christ in some far-off eschaton; Christ is the way”.
Posts
