Well?

As a reader of this blog (is there anyone left out there?) would you mind subscribing to my other location @ www.micahandnatalie.com/micah? I am considering obliterating this location. Any thoughts?

Another Day at the Office

People must live somewhere. Most live in houses. Most of those houses have walls. Most of those walls need to look good. So I have a job. Yes, I am your friendly, neighborhood drywall guy. I go to work. I sand. I spray. I wonder if we are in a recession. Just another day at the office.

The joy is when I come home, which is why I leave for work. Take tonight for example. While I try to type with one hand around Nathan, who is standing on my lap (at nine weeks), Natalie is giggling almost uncontrollably due to something Patrick MacManus wrote in The Bear In The Attic. We are working at some freezer-burned vanilla icecream, garnished with chocolate chips, while I consider whether or not this would go well with what remains of dinner’s Merlot.

Speaking of dinner, it was fantastic. Natalie put mushrooms on my side of the pizza. (Guys, give your wives earrings, good things happen.) Life’s sweetest pleasures sometimes come in a bunch of small parcels.

365 Short Days, One Long Year

It all started with a cup of coffee with her dad. That was a year and seven months ago. Who knew what all would come of it. In the last twelve months Natalie and I have experienced: our first kiss, a car accident, home remodeling, financial ups and downs, livestock successes and failures, lots of good wine, food shared with good friends, and the birth of our first son. It has been a good year, and I look forward to many, many more.

True Story

I was drifting precariously between wakefulness and sleep. The dark tugged at my eyelids heavily. Thump. “Did you hear that?” I asked. Natalie knows the strange house sounds better than I do. “Do you know what it was?” She didn’t. She did have concerning theories about windows opening. They made me wish I was still asleep. Sleep… Yes… No… Yes… We had been what seemed like hours getting Nathan to sleep. It was my turn. I tried to listen for more sounds. Any hints that I should really be concerned. Not that it makes a difference, I would have to go check things out. But I should wake up first.
The sound of glass breaking is very singular and unique. It is instant and sharp, and yet it lingers on the air. In my groggy state I couldn’t decipher exactly where the shatter happened, but there was no question what it was, glass. Pane glass. The transition from mostly asleep to adrenaline pumped and ready to tear the arms off of whatever it was I was sure was going to come through the bedroom door was instant. It was faster than instant. I shouted, no, bellowed, hoping through some instinct to scare the demon-driven monster away. The dog, outside was barking frantically. His deep, protective bark. I scramble through my drawer for the gun. It wasn’t there. But Natalie assures me it is. She turns on the light, I find the gun, and my AAA powered LED penlight. It was about as likely to penetrate the dark as a pocket knife is to conquer the Amazonian jungle. But I delved in undaunted. I had no choice.

There is something about having others to protect that makes you brave. I made my way from room to room checking the doors and windows. Down the stairs. I was breathing hard. No glass anywhere. The dog was still barking like mad. Maybe I missed something upstairs. My family was still upstairs. I scrambled up the stairs.

Walmart sells these rolls of padded double-sided sticky-tape. You use them to attach things to the wall. Things like mirror tiles. Said mirror tiles look particularly attractive when placed appropriately in small spaces, like our upstairs bath. I didn’t notice a warranty of any type on the packaging when I bought the tape, but I kind of expected it to last a while. But, failing that, I was left with one question. Why, out of 1440 minutes in a day, did it have to fail in the middle of the night?

The blue light of my LED flashlight cast eerie reflections on the bathroom wall off of the hundreds of glass-mirror shards on the tile floor. On the wall, one of the middle mirror-tiles was missing, leaving a gap. The relief washed over me slowly, though my heart was still pumping. The dog continued lapping around the house bellowing. Natalie came up. I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. I hugged her. We both had the same thought at the same time. All the noise, the glass breaking, the yelling, the shuffling and thumping, surely Nathan would have woken, after all the time trying to get him asleep. We looked in the bedroom, and there he lay, sleeping peacefully, as if he knew everything was alright the whole time.

Providential Poetry

Every morning I wake up, as my wife would say, early. She is an aficionado of sleep. But some mornings it is all I can do to keep from pulling her out of bed, pressing her face against the window, and exclaiming with more enthusiasm than a five year old on fruit loops, "Look, look, it did it again!" For there in the morning horizon, despite every impossibility, is the bright burning orb, the sun.

What are the odds, in all the universe, that this ball we live in, as it rotates around the sun, wouldn't get slightly off its axis, or a couple inches too close? Imagine, if that happened, and something as simple happened as all the spiders in the world dying. Then fly and mosquito populations skyrocket unhampered, disease runs rampant through not only cities, but the country. The food supply is destroyed. But that is the least of our worries, for why would the world only miss by a few inches?

What reason do we have, other than it hasn't happened yet, to believe the earth won't go careening one of these days into outer space, bouncing off the other planets like a pinball? This is the divine providence of a loving, personal God, that despite infinite and impossible odds, the universe is held in order. The sun, as it were , rises. The moon holds the tides and releases them. The gas in our cars continues to combust. Food continues to nourish, and our bodies continue to process it. Why? Because the cells all are working together? No, because God is daily, moment by moment, breathing the command that it be so.

I think this is the essence of poetry and beauty. The world, despite all inclinations to go wrong, goes right. We could end up anywhere, yet here we are, where we are supposed to be.

The Church: Growing and Eating and Growing

It has been a busy time. And happy. As many know, my son, Nathan Laurence, was born two weeks ago. This has opened my world up in an explosion of joy, love, responsibility, and fear. As my pastor said this morning, this is not something I can get out of. Essentially, I'm stuck. I have now found myself face to face with the reality of the need for sanctification and Christ-likeness. Laying down my life is no longer an option in a real tangible way. Either I bring home a paycheck, or I am a murderer.

But at the same time, I have been blessed by God in a way more tangible than ever before. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has extended His covenant to a people not His own. He called a people who were His enemies and made them His part of His church, His people. He made us part of the glorious lineage of Heaven, as a good friend of mine put it. He extended the covenant, with covenant curses and covenant blessings, to us. Nathan is a covenant blessing. Nathan is in the covenant. This cause for celebration, and sober consideration.

So we will be celebrating. Nathan will be baptized this week, and after the baptism we will feast. We will feast mainly on pork. This pork is from a pig whose entire existence has been for this purpose, to feed the people of God as we celebrate the entrance of a new covenant member into the church of Christ.

It is just this sort of celebration that I feel is a large part of what it means to be the church. It is living life before the face of God in gratitude and joy. It is by celebrating the blessings of God, and considering them wisely, that we will cause the nations of the earth to bend the knee to Christ. It is by working together, laughing together, and working together that we will fix the economy, the abortion rate, and the drug problems of our culture.

We want to fix the culture so that the world will know the joy that is eating at the Table of the Lamb. We want the world to eat with us at the heavenly table. We convince them, not by politics or changing the law, but by eating rightly before them. We want the world to sit outside our windows wondering what the fuss is about, why we are so happy in the Lord's house with the Lord's people. And we want to invite them in.

Nathan Laurence

Nathan Laurence arrived at 2:38 Sunday morning. He was 8 lbs. 3 oz. and 21 inches long. Mother and son and recovering and doing well.

Go Green

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Real Beautiful Bodies

I can't help but think that our world, in its full scale fleshly materialism, is in the clutches of gnosticism. The whole world is obsessed with bodies. We want six pack abs, bulging biceps, and fuller busts. We associate beauty with a robotic, utilitarian, youthful type of body. You know, buns of steel. When we are forty-five, we regret that we no longer look twenty. Some still try. The body has a tendency to mature, and that involves stretching, bulging, and sagging. That is the reality of it. But we are obsessed with perfect bodies. Ones that are tight, hard, and don't wear out. That's not reality, it gnostic. It denies the fundamental physical reality of being a physical being in a fallen world.

This gnostic view of the body denies life. It is a view that says the primary purpose of the body is to give life to itself. But we know that to live we must lay aside our own life. This is easy for me to say as a guy. I don't see the effects of this as quickly. Laying aside my life physically may actually make me look stronger, tighter, and all of that. When I work, because I do work, my body for a time will improve. But what about my wife? What happens when she embraces the purpose of the body God has given her, and lays aside her life to give life? For starters, she gives life. Life grows inside of her. And then she starts to grow and change, and the world looks at her and says, 'eww'. She is uncomfortable often, and by accepting pregnancy she has accepted changes in her body that may never go away. Many in the world, and in the church, look at that kind of sacrifice and cannot fathom why she would do such a thing. It is because only by laying down our lives can we live, and she will not only live, but will have given life to another.

But it is not that she has accepted the idea of looking ugly to give life. Far from it! She has accepted a different idea of beauty. Hers is a more mature beauty. It is a beauty that in twenty years will not look like a girl's, but will look like the beauty of a woman who has given life to the covenant children of God. We will both one day be old and wrinkly. I hope we can look back through the years not regretting that we have lost our youth, but rejoicing that we have given it. I hope that we will look at the past not as somewhere we wish we could be still, but as somewhere that was a step to where we are going. Where we are going is a real world of real redeemed bodies. Mature ones that are more beautiful than any we can imagine here.

Go back in your hole, little groundhog guy.

Would God roll in a whole storm just to make me rest and recover from a cold? Winter finally decided to come around, for the last four possible weeks. And now everyone is ready for it to be over. Save the ice for July. Give us the sniffly nose when we should be mowing lawns. I suppose there is a time for everything. Without dark we wouldn't know light, without hunger we wouldn't know satisfaction, and without cold we wouldn't know the bitter piercing pain in our little toes, I mean warmth. It is nice to curl up on the couch with a warm, beautiful, pregnant woman (who you are married to), with a good book and a cozy, gas powered fire, and glowing ceramic logs. Ahh... the good things in life.

How One Lonely Typewriter Became a Productive Member of Society

I had had an itch to write for a time. There was that burn inside to express things, but not to merely express then; to tell them as stories. I tried the modern man's method, the computer, but it was useless. There were too many distractions. Email to check, blogs to read, no end of other things that could be done without ever leaving the comfort of my seat. No, the computer wasn't for me. So I tried to write by long-0hand. It was better, but it took too long to get each thought on the page. Finally the idea struck me, what I needed was a typewriter.
A typewriter would be perfect. It would never crash, I wouldn't have to save my work every five minutes, and the only virus protection it would need would be Lysol. A typewriter was the perfect solution. Typewriters are prettier than computers, more elegant that is, and much more encouraging. What computer ever salved your pride by dinging positively at the end of every line to signify progress?
Yes, a typewriter was the thing for me. But where to acquire an outdated, obsolete, retro beast? I decided the thing must to do must be to keep my eyes open, and be patient. Eventually, I found an ad for not, one, but two free typewriters. . I jumped all over it. I contacted the number in the ad, and arranged for them to be placed outside the person's doorstep. I showed up at the appointed time. Notypewriters , and no one home. I made my way back to my own home, call the number again, and set up a time to try again. My continued endeavors were met, initially with success. The nice lady handed me the typewriters, free of charge. "Do you know anything about typewriter repair?" she asked. Well, said I, I am fairly handy.
Ha! Handy. Handy fixes plumbing and changes the oil. Typewriters, it turns out, are precision pieces of machinery. There's not much fooling around inside a typewriter. There are millions of little levers springs, and do-hickies. Edison figured out electricity, but these contraptions would have given him coniption fits.
I jus did not have the time to solve all the puzzles of one of these fine, precision instruments. If I could fix one of these, it would be my civic duty to open a business offering my services to all the other starving, eccentric maniacs out there. No, I had other, more profitable, things to do. Or so I thought.
It has been said that God has a sense of humor. As it turns out, I very possibly may have been the brunt of one of His jokes. It looked like an ice storm to me. One couldn't go outside for two days straight without slipping and ending sunny side up. So, with nothing else to do, and a yearning for a working typewriter, I approached the machine of the two I was less fond of with a screwdriver and a set of pliers.
Getting it apart was easy enough. A few screws here, a spring there, it was open. So far so good, it seemed. All the parts were carefully organized, as I removed them, on a cookie sheet. With any luck, I hoped, the dog wouldn't charge through and upset them.
Once apart I began looking at the thing carefully, applying all of the limited knowledge I had acquired over the past few days, assessing the symptoms. Eventually I narrowed it down to one cog that was not turning freely. One cog, which I could see and access from outside before disassembling the whole machine. I decided a little oil should do the trick, and then on to re-assembling it all.
Little did I know, the fun was about to begin. First, as I held a certain assembly, it fell apart. Little balls and washers rolled onto the carpet, like treasure looking for a pack-rat.
The reconstruction process was a long, exhausting one. For hours I assessed and compared parts, probing my memory of where they had come from, what their job was, and how they were supposed to do when placed in their proper location. Eventually I got it back together, the original problem solved. Only, then I had five more problems, each twice as frustrating. One particular assembly of springs and levers would not go back into position correctly no matter what I did. It would have been helpful if I had noticed before ruthlessly disassembling it like an oaf in a butcher shop, how it had sat. But I did not. Somehow I had assumed that it would just go back the way it had been before. It would not. Finally, after much frustration, I gave up, promising to come back later. I set the contraption down, and the assembly slid back into its place.
Finally I put the whole thing back together and typed out a sample sheet. All the keys worked, the carriage progressed nicely, the bell even worked. The only problem was that the keys didn't print in nice even rows. When I typed across the keyboard (qwerty) the letters ascended in nice little staircases, so that the q, a, and z were at the bottom, and the p, l, and m were nearly a full line higher. When typing words and sentences, the effect was very random. The words gave the impression of a roller coaster, or the back-roads of any given county in the Ozarks. I was baffled and beat. I had a working model of a third grade boy's dream typewriter. I put it up at last, discouraged.
I sat down with a book to relax and read. I succeeded in relaxing. As I drifted off to sleep, I very dimly though about the problem with the typewriter. Suddenly, like a bolt of lightning in a blue sky, I realized what the problem was, and, as soon as I woke up, I made one small adjustment that fixed the machine's Jacob's Ladder complex. I am now the proud owner of a working 1970's teal Smith-Corona Corsair Deluxe.

The original of this post was composed on a Smith-Corona typewriter.

The Son of God Goes Forth to War

by Reginald Heber


The Son of God goes forth to war,
A kingly crown to gain;
His blood red banner streams afar!
Who follows in His train?
Who best can drink His cup of woe,
Triumphant over pain,
Who patient bears his cross below,
He follows in His train.

The martyr first, whose eagle eye
Could pierce beyond the grave;
Who saw his Master in the sky,
And called on Him to save.
Like Him with pardon on His tongue,
In midst of mortal pain,
He prayed for them that did the wrong!
Who follows in His train?

A glorious band, the chosen few
On whom the Spirit came,
Twelve valiant saints, their hope they knew,
And macked the cross and flame.
They met the tyrant’s brandished steel,
The lions gory mane;
They bowed their necks the death to feel:
Who follows in their train?

A noble army, men and boys,
The matron and the maid,
Around the Savior’s throne rejoice
In robes of light arrayed.
They climbed the steep ascent of heav’n,
Through peril, toil, and pain;
O God, to us may grace be giv’n
To follow in their train.

This year, the first.

St. Augustine deals very interestingly with time in his Confessions. The past doesn’t exist, neither does the future, but the present does. But what is the present but a transfer of the future to the past. So there must be a present of the past, and present of the present, and present of the future. Regardless, we live in time, as God has seen fit to create a world that proceeds from one end to the other. In that time we have cycles of time. Minutes become hours, hours days, days weeks, weeks months, months years, and years one after another. This year, which is proceeding last, causes me to look back and remember the last, which has been significant. A year ago marks when she said yes. She promised to be joined to me, in flesh and mind. She is now my wife, and a wonderful wife at that. She finishes me, helps me, and adds to me. She is bearing the sign of God’s blessing to me. She is Natalie, my wife, and I love her.

New Format

I am going to try a new blog format. That is, hosting my own. This will generally be much sharper. I don't know how it will affect subscriptions (you can RSS to it).I may still post here for a while, but I will be trying to move to the other full time. The address is www.micahandnatalie.com/micah. Enjoy.

Happy Happy

Need I say more?

God Moves In a Mysterious Way
by William Cowper

God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea
And rides upon the storm.

Deep in unfathomable mines
Of never failing skill
He treasures up His bright designs
And works His sovereign will.

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take;
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy and shall break
In blessings on your head.

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
But trust Him for His grace,
Behind a frowning povidence
He hides a smiling face.

His purposes will ripen fast,
Unfolding every hour;
The bud may have a bitter taste,
But sweet will be the flower.

Blind unbelief is sure to err
And scan His work in vain;
God is His own interpreter,
And He will make it plain.

Cupboards, Keys, and Evil Witch-Queens in Full Audio

I found a great new way to enjoy a good book. Just finished 100 Cupboards by ND Wilson (known by some as the strange son of that heretic Doug Wilson). Great book. It's riveting, full of plot twists, action, character, and an evil witch queen. It is definitely the type of book you would pick up and not put back down until you can finish it. But I couldn't do that. You see, I was reading it aloud to my lovely wife. I could only read so much before my voice would begin to go. Two chapters was about my limit. I couldn't read on silently, because my dinner was on the line, and I tend to be ticklish. So I would read a section and put it down. Then I would spend the rest of the next day dying to know what happened. One night I stopped reading, and couldn't sleep because of all the little things going bump in the night (...so the book has a slight suspense to it, we're all human). It was great. I highly recommend this approach to reading a good book. Especially the wife to read it to. That part's great.

Pragmatism Concerns

I came down rather hard on Ron Paul in my last post. Does that mean I'm going to vote for Huckabee? Absolutely not. The only reason to vote for people like Huckabee, or any major candidate, is that they are the best people with the most likely chance to succeed. That's called pragmatism, and it doesn't work. We all want to save our country, so, using pragmatism, knowing we won't get 'our guy' in, we vote for guys like Bush. Sure, he won't come down on killing babies and innocent Iraqis, but he won't hook us up with the UN right away. Peroutka didn't have a chance, and we didn't want another scandal, so we all voted Republican. We'll fix the government bit by bit, and that way fix the country bit by bit. But God doesn't work that way.

We have all bought into the social religion of political America. No, we may not get food stamps, but we want the government to hand us our redemption. We want Uncle Sam and Big Brother to fill the voids in our souls. But it won't happen. Instead, we will all vote for who we vote for, and then, after we die, we will be called to answer for those decisions. Did we support men who killed innocent children, women, husbands? No, we can't be held responsible for their actions, but we are responsible for wanting them as our leaders, for whatever reason. We must vote, not for the best who is most likely to succeed, but for the man who shows signs of walking the most humbly and circumspectly before the Lord God, his Creator.

Our God saves through mysterious ways. Through death we are saved to life. Through water we are called into the Church. Through bread and wine we are made one with our Savior. Through repentance nations are saved. Our Lord has the power to sway a vote, so vote with a clean conscience, and trust Him to give justice and mercy where He sees fit. We will not be saved through politics, or any one political rule, but by every Christian person bowing the knee to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in the here and now over this, His world. Every family walking before Him, in humility. Every Church casting off the weight of the secularism that ties it down. But, since we cannot repent of another man's sins, we must start where can, at home.

Primary Concerns

Today is the the last day of the year. It is also the first first big day in the primary presidential elections. The Iowa Caucus. Of course there's a big hullabulloo about Obama and Clinton and Edwards. But around here we're all interested in Huckabee and Paul. Especially Paul. Not the apostle. Ron. There's never been a candidate like him. He knows all about why and how this country was founded, and where it should be going. He has the right answers to all the political questions. He's not corrupt. The list goes on. Of course supporters can justify his verbal slip-up that intimated the proposed canonization of the Constitution. But so what? What does it matter if this man gets in to office? Is he really the 'Hope for America"? I say not. Why? Because there is only one hope for America, there is only one Hope, period.

Why is there such a movement in the conservative Christian world for Ron Paul. It can only be because we hope to see this world turned over to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. But can that happen through politics or politicians, Christian or no? Can Ron Paul, through his pietism, recover the strong Christian heritage of our country? Can he bring down the ratings HBO gets on its raunchy shows? Can he stop teen pregnancies and abortions? AIDs? No, there is only One who can do that, just as there is only one way to the Father, Jesus Christ.

Our nation must repent of it rampant sin. It must acknowledge the present judgement of God. We must take personal responsibility for our sins. Fathers must turn their hearts to their Children. The church must repent of its bold-faced secularism. Politics must be reclaimed for Christ, but only as a result of a nation reclaimed for Christ. Ron Paul is not the hope of America. Until he realizes that he could be the worst candidate up for the presidential office right now.