"We've Moved"

I said to some crickets.

I purchased this URL, so now I will have the whole internets at my command!
So you can read more about Christian Thinking and Writing, Money, Board Games, and Baldness at the new blog location.

Man Stabs Wife With Word-Sword

Matthew 26:52 Then Jesus said to him, "Put your sword away! All who use a sword will be killed by a sword.
My wife and I have been planning to buy a house for the last six months or so, and we have been doing our best to save up for the 3.5% down payment we need for an FHA loan. It should be easy. Since the price range we are looking at is around 100,000, we only need 3500 dollars, but we were counting on a tax refund that was relatively close to what we received last year ($1500), but when my aunt did a cursory glance at our taxes, we were looking at owing 2000$, not receiving 1500. When I told this to my wife, she was upset. Now, she was upset only briefly, and with good reason—two reasons actually. First, she was upset because I had made some ancillary income from an ebay business, and I owed taxes on it. Secondly, she was upset because I had made a mistake on my w4, and claimed her as a dependent even though she has a job. This would have been acceptable if I would have paid in the extra 85$ a month that the government recommended I take out from my check to make sure that we didn't underpay, but I didn't do that, thinking that my withholdings would be high enough. So when I told my wife that we might owe as much as $2000, you can imagine that she was not happy. And I felt bad about it, bad that I didn't withhold enough from my check, and bad that we were going to have to pay taxes on money that we had already spent. So I spent some time looking for deductions, and my wife and I were able to take off some for business expenses, as well as relocation expenses, all of which greatly reduced the taxes we owed. The funny thing, though, was that during the process, we uncovered some more income that we had to claim from a grant my wife received in 2008. Normally the grant would have been offset by the deduction of tuition expenses, but my wife graduated in 08 and paid all of her tuition fees at the end of 07. Now, I had no intention of going home and using this knowledge as a weapon, to be honest, I didn't even know I was carrying a weapon but when I came home, she said something to that put me on the defensive, and out came the sword!I shoved it all the way up to the hilt into her side, and when she complained of the pain, I wiggled it around a bit and said, “You made me feel bad about my taxes!” as if this justified me trying to hurt her with the knowledge of her unpaid taxes. It is sort of funny, now, but to be honest, I learned a lesson from it.You have to actively guard your heart against any kind of grudge, and you need to willfully choose to go into situations where you feel accused, or where you are accused, as Christ did before his accusers, quietly, without the need to defend yourself, silent as a lamb before its shearers. If there is some new “weapon” that you are given through a circumstance or some fresh knowledge, you need deliberately drop it at your feet and offer it to the Lord. If you don't proactively deal with it, you are going to bludgeon someone to death while scarcely even recognizing that you are holding a cudgel. But if you prepare your heart before hand, you will be ready to keep the weapon at your side, though you will still be tempted to pull it out. You will know what will happen if you bring it out--Death--and you will choose to let it rest, beating it into a plowshare, and using it to cultivate the relationship for life instead of shedding blood for death. If you aren't prepared before hand, you (if you are anything like me) will reflexively try to defend yourself, and then a few minutes later you will be asking Jesus to heal the ear you just lopped off of you figurative marital body. Trust me, I speak from experience.

My wife forgave me, though, and its not because I paid off her taxes, since after all of our deductions we ended up with a 600$ refund between state and federal. GO DEDUCTIONS! Woot!

God bless you, and Thanks to my wife for reading this :P

A psalm to the Lord

How long must I suffer, oh God?

How long will you keep the joy of salvation far from me?

I proclaim your goodness to my attackers; I pray for the hand that strikes me and stirs itself up in wrath against me. I do not attack back wrongfully, oh God. Nor do I seek revenge or desire your hand against them. I seek justice all of the days of my life, and I am merciful so that I might receive mercy.

Why do you come at a whim God, scarcely when I call out to you, but more often when I am not looking for you at all?

Why have you asked me to put aside good things, the things that have brought me joy throughout my life? I do not seek to lift them above you God, nor is it my desire to make gods of them, little worthless idols made by the hands of men. For I have worshiped at the feet of idols before , oh Lord, and I have turned from my wickedness back to the living God.

Why are your promises so far off? Is it just an illusion, Lord? They seem to me the distance of the sky, and you have not given me wings Lord, though I have often desired to take flight like the jay's outside my window.

But you are the living God, the one who made the heavens and the earth by the Word. And though it pains me Lord when the peace of your Spirit is far from me, I press on Lord, because I have nowhere else to go and desire nothing but you.

Games and Jesus

Since I was a little kid, I have always loved games. Board games, card games, video games, anything that I could focus on, strategize, plot and plan out a path to victory. For a large portion of my life games defined who I was. They were not just something that I did to pass the time, they were how I derived meaning, pleasure, and purpose in my life. My sense of self-worth and identity were extracted through winning games. When I would sit down and play, I was not just sitting down for an hour of pleasure or leisure, I was sitting down to prove that my life had meaning. 

With stakes that high, where my very sense of well-being, of happiness and contentment were on the line in every game I played, you would be right to guess that I was competitive. I played to win--cut-throat, and hostile, doing every legal thing within the game to ensure my victory and the defeat of my opponent. This way of playing never used to bother me. It used to seem acceptable, like a normal mindset of one who desired to win. But the more that I submitted myself to Christ and his teachings, the more this attitude bothered me. The more I saw how selfish and wrong it was that I couldn't care less about any one or anything in those moments other than winning. 

The game that I was playing at the time (and still am playing occasionally) was Settlers of Catan. There is enough strategy and constant action in Settlers to make it a fun, exciting board game, and it quickly became a favorite. At first, like every game I had ever played before it, I played to win, which meant I played to make others lose. I did not cheat or break the rules, but I did every dirty, hostile thing that the game allowed in order to secure my victory. If I noticed you were going toward a certain location on the board and I could cut you off by building a couple of roads in your path, I would. If I had a monopoly card which allowed me to draw all of a certain resource, I sometimes would trade you those resources first, and then monopolize them. If I needed a Brick, and I knew that you had one, and you wouldn't trade it to me, I would use the knight card to move the robber onto one of your hexes and try to steal the brick from you.  These are things that I would never do in my real life or personal affairs, but within the context of the game, I did them freely. But what started happening was that I would win, and feel unhappy. The need that I was trying to meet was somehow lost when I achieved that victory in a way which I felt did not glorify Christ.  I also started to notice that if I had a fun time in the process of playing a game, engaging with people, talking to them during the game, enjoying their company, it didn't matter to me if I won or lost. I enjoyed the process more than the outcome, and I had that satisfied, happy feeling after those games, even when I lost. 

This got me thinking about why I was playing the games in the first place, and it basically ended up starting a war within myself. The war being that I did not want to bring harm to others, but I felt this intense desire to win, to exert myself over others in competition. 

I struggled for a time with this, sometimes submitting to the kinder, gentler way of playing, other times playing to win, until eventually I decided to just play the game as kindly as possible. To never cut someone off, to never rob them with the robber, to play in the friendliest way that I could, and people noticed. They started to ask me questions about why I was playing that way, why I was moving the robber to an empty hexagon or even putting it on myself instead of putting it on other people, and I was able to share the gospel with them when they asked, and to tell them that I got tired of feeling bad when I won by playing aggressively, when I played for the throat. 

Two times I was able to share the gospel with people because of how I played. And it was very satisfying, and brought me a lot of joy. I even won several games playing like that, where I did not do one single hostile act in the entire game. But the war wasn't over inside of me, and sometimes I just wanted to sit down and play to win. I wanted to conquer others and win the game, not play softly to share the gospel with them. This was a frustrating thing for me to discover within myself, and I wish I could tell you that I remained content to just play softly in order to share the gospel, but after a few more games, I begin to feel yoked by my conscience. And I became frustrated because my desire to win was competing with my desire to be kind to others. 

I played a game of Settlers last night, and I said to myself before hand, "I want to play to win." I warned the other players in advance that I was going to be playing aggressively, and I did, right from the start, immediately making an enemy in the game.  But the player I had been attacking early on began to say some of the things that she was feeling, that I was picking on her and playing mean spiritedly,  and I felt terrible during the game, so terrible that I stopped playing aggressively mid-game and apologized to her. I moved the robber off of her hex into the dessert, and I left her (and the other players ) alone for the rest of the game. I felt guilty about my actions, disappointed in myself once again that I had let my own selfish desires override another persons feelings.  

Ecclesiastes 4:4 (New American Standard)

And I have seen that every labor and every skill which is done is the result of rivalry between a man and his neighbor. This too is vanity and striving after wind. 

I'll Trade you Nine Cokes for Two Chickens

Okay, I know what you are thinking: "Who in their right mind would give up nine cokes for 2 chickens!" Well, the answer is, I would. Or rather, I am in the process of giving up nine cokes for 2 chickens, although I have only so far given up four by my somewhat-uncertain count. 9 Cokes at 1.25-- the amount I am charged by the vending machine strategically placed in my apartment complex's laundry mat-- equals a whopping 11.25 , which is enough to purchase 2 chickens on the Gospel for Asia website (www.gfa.org). Those two chickens will lay between 200 and 300 eggs in a years time, and they will continually impact the recipients for the entire lifespan of the birds, far outliving the fun and jitters of 9 bottles of teeth-rotting, high-fructose- corn-syrup-laden Coke. But, perhaps I am getting ahead of myself (as well as using too many dashes). Perhaps I should share a little bit more about my idea and how I came to put it into practice.

For the past two years, my wife and myself have not passed out Christmas presents with an exception made for our nieces and nephews. We instead made donations to charitable organizations (Smile Train in 2007, and Gospel for Asia in 2008) on behalf of those who would normally receive some sort of useless nicknack as a token of our love and affection. The idea being that we would impact the world positively with resources that would instead be wasted on things that our family did not need. The idea was met with very little resistance from my wife's family and we all agreed not to exchange gifts, which was great, because between her brother and her three sisters and all of their spouses and children, it was burdensome and difficult to buy something for everyone. My family, on the other hand, accepted that we would not give them gifts, but they insisted on still buying gifts for my wife and myself. So, while I handed my family a card saying I purchased two chickens on your behalf, my sister handed me a bag with a fedora, and my mom handed me 2 boxes, one with a sweater and a turtle neck, and the other containing a Kit-Cat clock, the caricature of which is staring at me from the confines of its box that sits atop my bookshelf. But I am glad to have these things. The clothes and the hat have already had some use, and someday I will probably even muster enough courage to open the Kit-Cat clock and set it to motion on a wall in my office. 

This year, however, I was thinking that I would like to do something more, that I would like to make a sacrifice that really impacted my life in a way. Purchasing the chickens on behalf of my family made a small dent in my paycheck, but for the most part, my life was largely unchanged by the purchases. I wanted to make a sacrifice, so I decided to start by abstaining from soda and spending the money that I would have spent on Coke instead on a pair of chickens from Gospel for Asia. 

Initially, the idea was to make a small sacrifice so that I could prove, both to myself and others, that we can positively impact the lives of other individuals through small changes in our own lives. I had decided  that I would continue my life as normal, that is, do whatever I would normally do on any given day, but if I would be in a situation where I would normally purchase a coke (with a meal, or when I walk past a vending machine), I would instead log the occurrence and the amount I would have spent on a Coke, and that money would be donated through Gospel for Asia. I had planned on doing this for something like twenty days, although I don't remember exactly, because it was supposed to end on Christmas day. Part of what I liked about the idea was its accessibility. It didn't really demand too much of me, and I assumed that it would be a good first step toward more aggressive lifestyle change, but I also knew that if I could not discipline myself in this small thing, then there was no way that I would be able to do more radical changes in lifestyle, such as giving up eating at restaurants, always packing my lunch for work, riding a bicycle and donating the money I would have spent on gasoline, you get the idea. 

I wish I could tell you that right off the bat I stuck to the idea and completely abstained from drinking soda until Christmas, but the truth of it is, I broke down on the third day. I had gone without once at a restaurant, and another time at home when I passed the vending machine, but by the third day at work I bought a fountain drink (1.79) with my lunch.  But I am a new man, and I have resolved to complete the task at hand, and I have been steady at it for five days now, due largely to the nagging of my tyrannical conscience (trust me, its a cruel taskmaster and ill formed, and I am doing my best to renew and reform it according to God's word), as well as taking on a different approach to the problem. I set a smaller goal.  Seven days to be exact. For seven days I would donate any money that I would normally have spent on soda during that time, which comes to roughly 10.00 of the 11.00 it takes to buy two chickens from Gospel for Asia. I am currently at five days, and I know that I will finish the task. 

I challenge anyone who is willing to consider doing something similar to my week without Coke. Go without it, give it up, sacrifice something, even if it is a small thing, for your brothers and sisters in need. We are all called to live sacrificially, but if we cannot succeed in making small sacrifices, how will we ever succeed in the larger ones? 

We must start somewhere, or we will never see change in ourselves or the world.

Tea is better for you anyway.

Yours in Christ,

Michael 

Care Giving Contest Entry

About a month back, I came across a flyer for a writing contest inside an industrial-sized box of diapers at my work. I decided to enter the contest, which had a theme of, "What Makes Caregiving Rewarding." It has passed the date that they were going to announce winners, and no one called my phone or sent me an email, so I am going to post it here. I hope someone finds it enjoyable. 

Michael

My Reward

For the past five years my wife and I have moved up and down the state of California— up to the northern coastline and old growth redwoods of Humboldt County where my wife studied for her master's degree, and down to the heartland of the state in the San Joaquin Valley to be near our families—and never have I had trouble finding work as a caregiver. When I was twenty-two, a fourth-year community college student taking his first job as a caregiver, I couldn't believe that there was actually a job where I would tend to all of the bodily needs of individuals, work the worst shifts you could imagine (“Yes I'd love to do another split graveyard shift, thanks!”), get spit on and chased by frying-pan-wielding, potted-meat throwing people, and make minimum wage. I signed up thinking that it was temporary, thinking that I would transfer to a university and get my degree in English, and then wipe my hands of the messy business of caregiving. But it didn't work out that way, not because I didn't finish college—I received my B.A. in English in June of 2006—it wasn't that at all. The problem was that I found I actually liked doing it. But it was more than that; it was good work, honest work, and the most rewarding thing I had ever done in my life.

I am a caregiver in an adult crisis home for people with developmental delays , and as a Christian, I see my placement there as an opportunity to test my faith. I get to try and walk out some of Christ's teachings—to love my neighbor as myself, to bless those who curse me and try to hit me with canned food. Love is an action, the cooking and the cleaning, the bathing and the shaving, the wiping and the changing of diapers are not done because I feel like doing it. They are willfully and purposely done to show my care for those in need of my assistance, to provide them with as much love and honor and dignity as I can. When love is acted out in this way, especially towards those who are sometimes hostile toward that love, I am able to grasp more fully God's love for me. It is in their hostility toward my care that I recognize the hostility I have often had toward the One who cares for me. God's love, like the love I am trying to apply as a caregiver, is not theoretical; it is practically applied to my life in my daily breath and bread. It is love that sustains me, love that keeps my heart beating, and keeps providing for my needs regardless (and often in spite) of my attitude toward it.

After a particularly hard time at work a few months ago, when I had been assaulted several times in the span of a few days and witnessed a young man I cared for get wheeled out of the house on a gurney after a prolonged violent episode in which the police were involved, I began to wonder if I was really cut out for caregiving. All I seemed to be making were the smallest of advances, and those were made only in the face of tremendous struggle. It was at that time when I read about a woman who was caring for her father who was suffering from late-stage Alzheimer's. In the article, the woman said that, as a caregiver, you needed to remember that you are in a marathon, not a sprint. This helped me to remember that it was wrong for me to look for gigantic leaps and bounds of progress as a measure of my success and the meaningfulness of my caregiving. My successes were small and incremental, slowly and daily providing a safer, higher quality of life for those in my care.

There is something rewarding and humbling about being able to serve people in this way, especially when you love them long enough to see those small changes in them. Over time, they begin to trust you, begin to see you not as an adversary but as a helper, a friend. They recognize your love, and they stop using the contents of the pantry as ammunition to hurl at you, stop balling their fists every time you walk past them in the hallway. They start to laugh with you, smiling the big unabashed smiles of those who never learned to be inhibited or to hide their feelings. When this happens, you sense the triumph of love, you sense its changing power, and you begin to understand and be grateful that your labor bears such a a great reward.

The Launch Post

Welcome to the first post of my blog, No Cure for Baldness. This blog is not about baldness, although,you might find me complaining about my dwindling follicle count from time to time (perhaps even with disturbing photos of my ever-expanding forehead), but I actually am more interested in writing about Christianity, and trying to put some words onto the faith that I am living out daily. In voicing these thoughts and musings, I seek to include others in what has been an often solitary journey of the mind and spirit. I hope that through sharing the things I am currently studying in the Bible, anything I have been thinking or praying about, as well as some of my own musings and ramblings about life in general, I am able to provide myself with an outlet for my own talents in a way that can encourage, enlighten, entertain, and edify others, as well as myself. I also hope that through writing this blog that I will have more motivation to continue in my own writing both on and offline. This is an attempt to share myself with others, to lose my life and myself so both might be found.
Please enjoy what you find here in the future, and I look forward to any correspondence.

Sincerely,
Michael Elkins