Vox Lucens

I read a terrific quote today, one that really struck a chord:

“Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.” –Henry Miller

I think what he is claiming is that if you have to compare life to a composer’s work, it is a John Cage, not a JS Bach. If you tune 12 radios to random stations, or if you just sit and listen to the ambience for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, you have the reality of life.

My first response was to sigh and agree. Life is, indeed, full of moving parts that seem to have no bearing on each other. It can be full of blinding flashes of light that seem to do nothing to illuminate the general darkness. It can be vast, foreign, unknown, and unattainable. It can be like this:

This picture, probably my favorite picture ever, always makes me stop. What a universe. Talk about vast, foreign, unknown, and unattainable. Talk about blinding flashes of light amidst the general darkness. And talk about moving parts that seem to have no bearing on each other.

But don’t talk about chaos. Is it possible to have an ordered system more dramatic than this? Is it possible to have an unattainable vastness more perfectly blended by the forces that hold it all together? The same gravity that gives us a chance to live an ordered life on this planet orders the vastness that is so far beyond our comprehension.

And the same God that decreed the order of gravity can be relied on to provide order in the vast moving parts of life. Despite the complexity, the vastness, the confusion of it all, He orders it all.

So put away your randomly tuned radios, and turn on a fugue by Bach. Every unique, individual voice, singing apart from all of the others, is bound together by a common theme, the counterpoint of the master.

And welcome. Welcome to the Fugue of Life. Welcome to the confusion of this world, held together by the counterpoint of our Master. Now that you’re here, join me in praising Him for holding it all in the palm of His hand.

Life is whirling so fast that I’m not at all sure whether I fit the “mouse” or “man” category better, but that certainly doesn’t stop plans from changing! I found out today that the DOS has limited the meeting that I referred to before, so the representatives from Christian Freedom International will be going.

I’m certainly disappointed about this development, but I would ask that you continue to keep the meeting in your prayers. It could still mean the difference between success and failure in what we are trying to accomplish–the difference between a Christian home and an unknown home for potentially dozens of children of martyrs, the difference between being scattered and being in a community, even potentially the difference between staying in poverty in a refugee camp or being given the opportunity to come to the United States.

Thanks for interceding for them.

Hi Friends–

What a week it has been. I’m so exhausted that everything seems like a blur–and I still have to go make a Remember presentation tonight and study until my eyelids stage a coup…and then, once I sleep them into submission, study all day tomorrow. And that doesn’t say anything about the to-do list that is the length of my arm, still staring at me with foreboding from my desk.

I’m accustomed to asking for your prayers on behalf of the persecuted church, but tonight it has hit me just how much I need them. Never has that need been more clear than right now. So please don’t stop praying for our persecuted brothers and sisters, but I would sincerely ask that you include me in your intercessions.

It is at this stage, the bottom of a mental rut the size of the Marianas Trench, that I have the distinct displeasure of stepping back and listening to the sounds my brain is making. Last night it went like this: “aldoxkxokemviebveiehgdfevklv” and so forth. Well, I couldn’t swear that was it exactly, but it’s a pretty good phonetic reproduction.

This morning, knowing I had to write a huge brief among other sort of monumental tasks, I was hoping to make slightly more articulate sounds. That didn’t work until I had my coffee, but to my great chagrin after the coffee the result was worse. The sound my brain was making can be likened to the third-worst poetry in the universe. Though I could only reiterate the first line this morning, I give you the whole thing here:

Oh freddled gruntbuggly, thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.
Groop I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes,
And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will rend thee in the goblerwarts with my blurglecruncheon, see if I don’t.

And now, a day into that general theory of life, the universe, and everything, I understand completely the reaction duly noted in Douglas Adam’s history of the galaxy.

And into the space-time vortex that calls me off to my next engagement, I give you the sound my brain is making now:

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

By way of a slightly more meaningful update, and because I would ask for your prayers for it, our meeting with the Assistant Secretary of State is scheduled for April 4. I’ll be giving you further updates as that time draws nearer…

I’ve told a number of you about the issues that are coming to a head in Thai refugee camps, but things are moving far faster than I expected.

To give you a bit of a background, the Thai military government (ruling as a result of the coup of a couple of months ago) likes the refugee camps even less than the previous government did. The upshot of this hostility, and the lobbying of various private organizations, is that it appears that thousands of refugees in a number of different camps are going to be resettled.

“Resettlement” is really nothing more than the opportunity of a lifetime for these people–it is a ticket to the United States or Canada, a chance to leave the utter desolation of the refugee camps and make a life for themselves. Though little is ever certain when this much bureacracy is involved, it appears that around 16,000 people in the Mae La camp alone will be given this opportunity.

Even more exciting for me, one third of the children in our orphanage are on that list. They will be part of the US’s unique Unaccompanied Refugee Minor program, which takes refugee children without close relatives and places them through the foster care systems of various states.

And there starts my work, and my prayer requests. We have a couple of goals over the next couple of months. First, of course, we would like to get all of our children on the URM resettlement list. Second, just bringing them over here would be useless, in the eternal sense, if we do not make sure they are placed in families that will encourage them to keep the faith.

And I am in way over my head. I’ve worked with bureacracy before, but there’s so much red tape on this situation that it looks like a tomato-colored mummy. I’ve written memos before, but I’ve never written anything for the Assistant Secretary of State–I don’t even know where to start.

If you would be kind enough, I would covet your prayers for me, Remember and the other organizations working on this, and the kids we’re working to help. We’re meeting with Ellen Sauerbrey at DOS in a couple of weeks; please pray for that meeting, and that her authority would “grease the rails” in our pursuits. And pray that the tangle of red tape would unravel just enough to allow us to bless these children both in this life and the next.

My first real acquaintance with the word “geek” came many years ago, when I made the mistake of endowing it in an epithetical fashion upon my sister, in the hearing of my father. I was made to discover, as punishment, what a “geek” really is, and to my immense delight the technical definition is, “a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake.”

Wow.

In that vein, friends, I desire not to sheepishly poke my head around the technological corner. Nay, I desire to open the door fully, indeed, to blow it off of its hinges and stride boldly through. I desire to tame the beast, to enslave it to my will, and to profit by its chains. I have therefore bitten the head off of this technological chicken, and can quite possibly be accurately called a “geek” hereafter.

I registered this domain name with two purposes. First, I wanted to get it before my namesake(s) did–if I should run for office someday, I want to have a decent domain name ready for my campaigning. But second, and more important, I wanted to see if I could pull this off. You get to be the judge of my success, I’m afraid, but so far I’ve been amazed at how much can be done with so little investment.

Now that it is working, though, my goals have changed. In the final analysis, I hope to use my little scheming personal challenges to profit others, too. Transferring my personal blog to this forum is the first of many projects scheming in my overtasked, underfunded brain. Stay tuned…

So please, take a look around. There may not be much to see yet, but I am planning on changing that, and I would love your feedback as I try to do so. And as always, you are welcome to throw flowers, tomatoes, and/or knives at my various attempts at humor, inspiration, elucidation, and whatever else may jump into my head and out through my keyboard.

If you want a historical perspective on my previous technological experiments, you are still welcome to visit my Xanga.