However, I found his arguments for what makes the books so flawed to be seriously… flawed.

Warning: if you have not read the books or seen the movie yet, the below will contain spoilers.  Don’t read any further unless you don’t mind them.

Are Heroes Always Consistent in their Morality?

He makes several successive points about the decisions that are made by the characters and what results from their action.  In the first quick point, he talks about Katniss’s decision to sacrifice herself for her sister.  He says the nobility of the decision is completely undermined by her subsequent actions to survive and “play by the rules”.  To this I say (and I will say it again later because he returns to this argument) it is ridiculous to confine the hero to a narrow moral viewpoint and demand absolute consistency to it.  I would argue he fails to understand human nature if he thinks that leaders must be absolutely consistent in their ethics and morality in order to inspire.  This is especially true in light of the setting of the books, which I will expand on below.  The truth is nobody is absolutely consistent – except Christ.  We all make mistakes, we all find ourselves compromising our own ideals sometimes.  That is true humanity.

I will concede that more effective leaders are able to portray a consistency of morality and ethics that inspires, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have failures.  He also fails to recognize the similarity between the Hunger Games and “reality television”.  This means what we read in the book is not what the rest of Panem perceives about Katniss.  The producers and directors of the “show” carefully plan the footage and edit it to present the “characters” they wish to portray that create the most entertainment value.  That is the basis behind the entire “love story” plot.  Nobody in the Hunger Games had ever played that hand before, which is what allowed Peeta and Katniss to survive.

His second point is that by justifying Katniss’s murderous actions with the victim card, Collins (the author) she makes her catalyst for revolution a monster.  He then postulates that human nature should dictate that a revolutionary catalyst should have a consistency of character that would not have allowed her to comply with the “game” at any point.

She should be rising above the game and defending herself (and everyone else) from the Hunger Games. Instead, she kills her fellow victims. Sure, if someone is in the act of trying to murder you, shoot them through the throat. But dropping tracker jackers on sleeping kids? Negativo. Why is she playing this game by the rules at all? The Hunger Games are the real enemy.

Wilson wants to rewrite the books but his version makes even less sense than Collins’.  He is expecting a teenage girl who has lived under oppression all her life, who is not well educated, who has no sense of history to somehow have developed into a person with the strength of character to nobly object to and fight the sinister system from the very beginning of the books.  He expects Katniss to play the game like Gale would have.  Gale is older than Katniss and has already formed convictions.  Katniss from the beginning of the book clearly does not share that same level of conviction.  She is not that hero Wilson wants her to be.  She struggles finding the backbone to resist.  She doesn’t know who to trust, doesn’t believe that Haymitch or Cinna or anyone else is truly on her side.  She doesn’t know what it’s going to take to survive.  She knows the games are the real enemy, that Snow is the real enemy, but has no idea how to begin to affect change.  The Trackerjackers?  A group of tributes have her treed and are going to kill her as soon as she runs down if she doesn’t starve to death first.  It was her only option, other than dying.  How could she have creatively gotten out of that jam?  An inspiring speech that causes her attackers to magically lay down their arms and weep at their own complicity in this charade of a game?  Yeah, that sounds realistic.

He especially spins the question by postulating, what if it were not a “to the death” competition, but a rape competition?  Would we be a sympathetic to Katniss then, if she complied with any number of rapes before winning?  This comparison is not in my mind an indictment of Collins’ system of reason as much as it is an indictment of what we in our culture will consider entertainment, and what moral rules we will allow to be relaxed in the name of entertainment.  We as a society have decided that it is possible to be morally ambiguous with regards to “Thou shalt not kill”, but not with sexual crimes.  Somehow, killing people is less immoral than raping people.  This is the zeitgeist’s view, not the Biblical one.  And that is why his thought experiment doesn’t really hold water.

His last argument is basically contending that nobody would be inspired by Katniss in real life, because she shows no consistency of character and her ultimate act of defiance is not a rebellious one but an unadmirable move to suicide, and incitement to suicide.  This would not inspire anyone, he contends.  Again, I return to the argument I explained at first: the view that Panem saw of Katniss was not what we saw from her 2nd person narrative.  When the climax of the book is reached, there was no other act that she could take that would have sparked what was to follow.  Let’s say for a minute that the book was plotted as Wilson thinks it should have been: Katniss carved her locator beacon out of her own arm, then proceeded to instead of killing tributes, subduing them (with blunt arrows maybe?) and carving their own locator beacons out. The story would have been over long before the climax because the producers (and Snow presumably) would have had her killed by a “natural disaster” like the fire, or engineered her demise at the hands of another tribute immediately upon her rebelling by disabling the tracker.  And yes, they could have because they not only had the trackers but also strategically placed cameras everywhere to film the whole thing.  So she gets herself killed almost immediately, and nobody in Panem ever gets to see her rebellion against the system because the producers simply edit out any footage of her rebellion.

The whole point of the book was that there may have been many acts of rebellion in the games in the past but nobody ever found out because the Capitol controlled the production.  The only way Katniss could have become a catalyst for rebellion was to survive to the end, playing the game at least in part, then setting up a double bind that cannot be disguised by editing.  The catalyst that set off the rebellion wasn’t really Katniss (except in a proximal sense) but the weakness that the Capitol showed in the face of her machinations.  The districts were already primed for rebellion.  The districts used her just as Snow was using her for a demonstration of control.  That is another level of story to be discussed another time.  She was not a Che Guevara, a George Washington, an Evita, a Winston Churchill.  That’s the point.  She was just an excuse for them – a convenient symbol.  They had no need for her to be truly heroic, like Maximus in Gladiator.  They could tailor the perception of her to their needs instead of relying on the objective external view of her actions which could not have been controlled.  The only ones who saw those views of her were the producers of the Games themselves, and they were already complicit.  Mostly.

There are flaws to these books, but the human motivations of the characters aren’t one of them.

“All things are lawful,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful,” but not all things build up.
(1 Corinthians 10:23 ESV)

Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.
(Romans 12:9 ESV)

…but test everything; hold fast what is good.
(1 Thessalonians 5:21 ESV)

I must admit: I am offended.  I am offended by the tendency of too many Christians to simply refuse to engage with anything in the world for fear of contaminating themselves with the world.  I am offended by the idea that we should throw into the trashbin anything that we suspect might maybe be a little bit offensive, uncomfortable, or controversial.  Is this the spirit of the age – to be so terrified by everything that our first instinct is to duck and cover?

I could take this in so many directions but the one that has my goat this morning is books.  I just finished reading “The Hunger Games“.  Now frankly, it is not the finest literature ever produced, but it is worth the read in my opinion for two reasons.  First, the books engage a number of cultural realities that presently have far-reaching influence over Christians and non-Christians.  Second, the books (and the new movie) are incredibly popular, especially amongst young people.  What is so grabbing their imaginations and keeping them interested?  Should we not investigate such icons as a basic responsibility of a parent, or at least someone who at some levels “is my brother’s keeper”?

Some say no.  One vociferously opposed such an idea.  One told a friend of mine that it was wrong to read the Hunger Games.  Why?  Because it has violence in it.  I’ll give the benefit of the doubt and I’ll assume she meant the books feature children killing children.

Which is, on its face, logical.  If the book were centred around children maliciously seeking to kill each other for simple, selfish reasons, like for example the Reena Virk slaying, I’d absolutely be first in line to condemn the books.  Children exposed to the glorification of such monstrous activities would be the last thing I would be in favour of.  But the truth is, anyone who has read the books can tell you, without spoiling the story, that at no stage, at no level do the books glorify violence.  In fact, the books speak the opposite message – that the cultural glorification of violence in fact has real consequences, social and emotional.

This isn’t the first time that I have seen such offhanded dismissal of popular books.  About 5 years ago the Twilight books were reaching a crescendo of popularity.  Around that same time my wife’s sister, who was a young teen, came to stay with us.  In the interests of getting to know her and her interests better, I decided to read the Twilight books she was in possession of.  I was told by a well-meaning friend of mine that “nobody who aspires to be a pastor should be reading such evil books”.  After reading them myself, I came to the conclusion that they were not books I would recommend to anyone – but not for the reasons my well-meaning friend thought.  The way the books view unhealthy obsession with romantic relationships and the tolerance of evil are definitely huge black marks against them.  The material that he was concerned with – supernatural werewolves and vampires drive the entire plot of the books – was simply window dressing to a story that embraces and encourages young women to completely throw off all authority and embrace fickle emotion and depression.  In 99% of young women, this behaviour leads to a completely destructive life-path.  In the books it leads to sunshine, joy and supernatural power.  Needless to say, bad message.

But I would never have arrived at the real reasons to object to the books if I had simply refused to sully my eyes with them.  And I would have been foregoing the opportunity to have real dialogue with a lot of people who want to talk about books and stories because they are popular.  If we simply shut our minds off and form a little subculture, are we any better than cloistered monks?  Are we any more effective at communicating the love of Jesus to a world that desperately needs Him than say the Amish?  Is that what Jesus wants?

What particularly bothers me about this whole mess is that such simplistic “baby out with the bathwater” thinking is really the height of hypocrisy to the world beyond our cross-laden buildings.  To the rest of the world it is simply ridiculous that we should be up in arms about a book like the Hunger Games “glorifying violence amongst children” when the book that we revere, the Bible, features incest, idolatry, child sacrifice, rape, adultery, genocide and a host of other monstrous acts – sometimes religiously driven.  If we simplistically wash our hands of literature, then we should expect the rest of the world to simplistically wash their hands of the Bible.

And we wonder why we aren’t heard.

In a nutshell, Mark Sission contends that our bodies are made to support and process the diet that cavemen essentially had – the paleolithic hunter-gatherer is what we were all designed to live life optimally as.  Therefore, our diet will allow our bodies “maximum gene expression” only if we eat the kinds of foods that they would have.  Additionally, patterns of life and exercise should also approximate what those people did, to live life in the way evolution has shaped us to most optimally live.

I have been on the diet for 5 days now, got around to buying the 21 Day Challenge only today though…  and honestly I can really notice the difference in the way my body is responding to food.  There is definitely a sorting out process going on as I try to understand the body signals I am getting.  I haven’t felt “stuffed” after any meal, and even after a big meal, I feel full but not bloated like I would after a buffet feast or turkey dinner before.  I don’t feel exhausted after eating, I feel energized.  I have also lost about 4 pounds so far, while consuming a lot of water and liquids.  I don’t expect this rapid loss will continue though – I think it is just a part of the adaptation that my body is going through, not dealing with large amounts of sugars and starches.

But I wanted to write this piece to wrestle with the odd dichotomy that is presented as a person who holds to a young earth creationist viewpoint, and reading about and implementing a strategy for life that is, as Mark Sisson intended, all about evolutionary principles, survival of the fittest and so on.

The thing is, it is not necessary to hold to the theory of evolution to totally respect the direction and value of what Mark is teaching.  It is just as easily understood in a creationist framework:

1. God made Man
2. God designed Man to consume food in a certain way that allows Man to survive and thrive in a paleolithic environment.
3. God designed Man to live a pattern of life by the natural rhythms of the earth that God placed Man on – rising and laying down with the sun, hunting and gathering food naturally occurring in the environment that Man resides in.
4. Mankind has developed culture and society in directions that are contrary to the way Man was designed (it’s called sin).  Hence we see declining health in most of mankind.

All these understandings equally explain Mark’s findings and justify Mark’s teaching without requiring a person to hold evolution as the origin story of choice.  There is even more that figures into it, but at its base, I don’t have a problem with the foundation of his scientific findings because they are all equally plausible assuming a creator.

It has been remarkably easy to adhere to too… skipping the baked potato with your steak and adding a salad isn’t the end of the world…

Lyndan is dressed and ready to go.  He isn’t 100% but really, the only reason to stay was to have daily visits from physio and other therapies – we have a medication to help control his nausea and his sight and balance are advancing regularly.  He was just bored and worried wondering why he had to stay.

An idiosyncrasy of mine is taking an absorb amount of introspection to realize what emotions I am feeling.  I know I have them but usually it takes some effort to figure out what they are.  I am realizing, as I have been cleaning my room in the Ronald McDonald House, that I have been carrying a lot of worry and burden while being here.  I have felt like myself, but really, until now, I didn’t realize how heavy it was, now that it’s lifted.  I was telling myself that I was actually in some ways enjoying being absent from all responsibilities, but the truth was there was a lot of weight on my shoulders that I couldn’t feel until now.

Heading home, I am excited.  I am excited to be able to get back to my church, my neighbourhood, and giving myself away again.  I mentioned before how I actually felt selfish having everyone come around us in incredible ways, giving and supporting us in this time, especially because as a pastor I felt like it was my job to be helping, not be helped.  There’s a lesson in here somewhere, and I think it’s the same lesson I have been teaching everyone else about real community and relationships – a lesson that I perhaps had not yet taught to myself.

So, lesson learned – carrying the load of worry and care that I have been, I needed more help than I thought.

And now, to drive home…

I have heard of people in busy jobs, lives that become ill, and are forced, for health reasons, to take a break – to step out of their routines for a time controlled by the process of healing.  I think part of the reason God made us like He did was to force this upon us.  When we are overworked or overstressed, our body tends to break down easier, forcing us to slow the pace.  In this case, it was not my pace of life, or stress, or anything we had done.  It just was.  Thankfully, we have an amazing community of friends and family that have stepped into the situation and made it possible for Cheryl and I to simply “disconnect” (though the rate of Facebook communication has stepped up considerably as we try to keep everyone informed about how Lyndan is doing).  We are so very grateful for the rest of our boys being cared for at home, for my responsibilities as pastor being lifted by my associate Bart and other leaders in Grasslands Church.

This disconnect has opened up so much time.  Time for things that get swept away by the urgent or the routine.  I have been able to finish a book – “Your Secret Name” by Kary Oberbrunner.  I am glad I did – it was a very good book and I will be mulling over what I took away from it for some time (expect a blog post at some point).  I have also had time to write towards my next message – it’s not often that I am afforded 3 weeks’ lead time for the next time I speak.  I have even had time to wrestle with some subjects that I would like to speak on but need further development before moving forward.

And also, it has given me time to blog.  Which I really do like but often feel too busy to do these days – as you can tell by the frequency of my posts here, on our church planting blog, Planting on Faith and even on the Grasslands Church Blog.

On the subject of busyness, my associate, Bart has been encouraging me to read “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey, and while it was written more than a couple decades ago, it really is timeless in its ideas and pointing out not only the general idea of how to move towards doing what we want to do well, but also with specific, applicable things we can do to find that zone.  I am not the most organized person in the world but I am certainly convinced that I would like to do more with the time I am given – and the only way that is going to happen is if I implement more structure into my life.  “You lack DISCIPLINE!” I can hear Ahnuld’s voice ringing in my ears when I begin to get that rush of adrenaline from a looming deadline.  There is something about the way German speakers pronounce the word “lack” that adds extra weight to the word.

Lastly, I am finally getting to chop through a book that I have wanted to read since Tim Challies first wrote it – “The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment”.  The topic is almost unwritten on but so critical for Christians to understand in this day and age where too many supposed God-followers are content with their Bible reading limited to their pastor’s powerpoint slides and their thinking on the intersection of Christ and Culture as a couple of streets in Mexico City.  I find much of my job as pastor so far has been doing the interpretation of culture for people, but I am convinced that my calling as pastor is to teach people to interpret culture through Christ themselves.  Hence, I had better get reading.

Without further ado, back to my Kindle app!

One foundational truth was taught to me a long time ago.  This foundational truth has the potential to guard your marriage against a host of forces that would pull it apart.  It is a truth that is hardly ever mentioned in romance books, movies and stories – in fact it is almost antithetical to the typical Hollywood love story.   I don’t know how I learned it, I don’t recall any of my family expressly teaching it to me (although as I look around at the remarkable – in many ways bizarre success rate of marriages in my extended family, somebody must have been teaching something somewhere).  It has been the bedrock of my marriage, and informed me from the very start what I am going to have to do to get and stay married.

It is this statement: love is a choice.

If you build your marriage around this reality, if you AND your spouse both believe it and act like it’s true, I am convinced that marital happiness is not only much more within your grasp, but the odds of divorce drop precipitously.

A fantastic daily marriage tip is offered by The Generous Husband.   He started today with a piece, which I will quote here:

Because love is a choice, I can’t “fall out of love”. If I “don’t love you the way I used to” that means I chose to make a change – it’s on me. I don’t love her less when I am tried, stressed, or grumpy. I don’t love her more when she does what I want, or less she does not.

The ramifications of this are endless.  But I want to highlight one big one here.  One of the biggest reasons most of us marry is for security.  Don’t deny it.  At some level you wanted security.  You wanted to know you were loved with a love that isn’t just passing.  You wanted to have someone in your life who was going to be there for you when nobody else would be.  You wanted To be able to trust someone to always be there, to always have your best interests at heart.

If you think that love is a feeling, you will NEVER have that security that your crave.

Neither will your spouse.

So my advice to you today is change your mind on love.  Recognize that you must make love a choice, and make that choice every day, or you will not have even a fraction of the marriage you want or desire.

God made a choice to love humanity, and sacrifice everything for us (John 3:16).  He modelled the choice of love and instructed us to do the same.  He commands us to love our neighbour (Matthew 22:37-40), for husbands to love their wives (Ephesians 5:25).  If love was a feeling then those commands are nonsensical.  You can’t command someone to have a feeling.  If you are a Christian, the Bible clearly teaches that love is a choice.  But even if you aren’t, this truth has the potential to unlock so much goodness in your marriage that, in my opinion, you’d be a fool to believe anything else.

Turned out to be unnecessary as a second MRI determined what we needed to know: it was not a tumour but a blood vessel overgrowth called a cavernoma. Good news right?  Kind of. Not a cancer, but the location of the bleed is right. In. The. Middle. Of. His. Brain. Basically the reason he has been having symptoms is whencthe malformed blood vessels break,  pressure gets put on parts of his brain that are pretty critical to his life. And if it were not operable (which thankfully it is) then he woud be a ticking time bomb until he had a catastrophic bleed that kills him.

Still, the neurosurgeon explained that the surgery will be so complex that there huge numbers of things that could present as complications from temporary physical effects to permanent damage. Thankfully not to his higher brain functions,  but little things like, swallowing, breathing, sight, mobility.

So while we are thrilled that he won’t require things like chemotherapy or radiation, he is not out of the woods yet. We are left for 2 weeks with a boy who can’t see anything to his right and can barely stand up on his own. We have no idea if this will be his new normal or there is yet hope that he can return to the active,  strong boy who was almost taller than his 11 year old brother and loved riding his bike.

And he gets brain surgery for his birthday… It’s a gift to us but I don’t know if he will enjoy it that much.

Life just got placed on hold. Was gearing up for my first message in 2 weeks and then an odd thing happens. Our second oldest, Lyndan starts having this funny thing happen to his eye. Then he starts getting really dizzy.

We take him into emergency and 4 hours +  an MRI later,  and we are told he has a brain tumour. 8 hours later it still seems like it’s all made up.

We still know little.  We don’t know if it is operable or not. We don’t know if it is cancerous or not. We only know we are driving to Calgary this morning to get him admitted to Alberta Children’s Hospital. We do know two things though.

1. A lot of people are praying for us right now.  Like a lot. And that is comforting. I pray that God uses this nasty thing to reawaken some people’s faith and draws people closer to Him even as they think about us.

2.  God is getting our attention. I hate that it takes awful circumstances to do that, but it is this kind of time that brings into sharp focus what we really believe. And I know with certainty that God is with us. “draw close to Him and He will draw close to you, ” James wrote. We need Him more than ever.

God has brought me to my knees twice in my life. The first time was when Lyndan was 3 and he went into shock from what we think was either an intususseption (?)  or a temporarily blocked intestine from a swallowed dime. It doesn’t matter what it was – when you come home from work to see an ambulance on your lawn and your 3 year old being wheeled out on a gurney,  you get on your knees. And God performed a miracle that day. By the time Lyndan reached the hospital,  they could find no sign of whatever it was that the paramedics were certain he was in serious condition with.

The second time was last night.

I am wondering if we shouldn’t have named Lyndan more Biblically. I think his name would have been “getting my attention”. Because God certainly has used him for that.

Now,  God, how about another miracle?

So the plan is to give something up to remind myself of dependence on God and make a small sacrifice to my comfort to remember the greatest sacrifice ever made, that I benefit from every day. I am specifically choosing to give up something that costs money so that I can then give what I would have spent on myself to those who need it more. I figure I spend around $2-4 on salty junk food a day (actually if I was honest it’s probably usually less on average but I’ll go with it) so I am setting aside $4 per day for the 40 days of Lent.

Don't you just want to hug a sheep?

That gives me $160 – and to buy a sheep for a World Vision child is $150! So that’s my goal – to buy a sheep in honour of the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world on Easter Sunday.

I want to invite my friends along on this Lenten challenge – leave behind a daily treat for 40 days and buy a sheep with me to benefit World Vision children. Together we can give a flock of sheep! What do you say? Let’s give a flock together!

But not when it comes to prayer.  There are some online, but not as many options for apps.

I have been looking for a good prayer manager app since I got a smartphone – my old Motorola Milestone – now almost 3 years.  I’ve graduated to a Samsung Galaxy S2 (and loving it). Haven’t found one yet.

Oh sure, there are tons of Islamic prayer times apps.  There are even a few prayer apps that allow you to mark them down, and check them off as they are answered. But not the robust tools that I can envision off the top of my head.

Because confession time: I suck at remembering to pray.  I work at it all the time but I’d love to have some help.

If you’re an app dev, here’s my wish list:

1. checkbox “todo” lists for prayers, a way to mark them “done” or “not done” (answered or unanswered)
2. multiple lists for different purposes – church prayers, small group prayers, ministry prayers, prayers for community/government – not static categories, but customizable as I am sure everyone would group them differently
3. the ability to schedule prayer times or days for each list and have them sent to you or have the app automatically open to the scheduled list
4. the reminders to pray keep coming until the item is marked “answered”
5. the ability to share prayer requests with other users or even email requests to people who don’t use the app, with an incorporated link to let the download the app
6. (getting really crazy now) the ability to create a shared prayer list for ministry teams or small groups that is updatable by anyone in the list

Who’s up for the challenge?  Any app developers want to make some money off Christians?  I’d pay at least a couple bucks for this if it had all these features.  Make sure you make an iOS and Android version please.