Wunderbar It Is

Not long after we were expelled from Eden, everyone in the world had one common language and speech.  As people moved eastward, they gathered together and considered, "Let us work together and build a city, one with a tower that climbs to the heavens so that we may make a name for ourselves."  And together they made bricks and mortar and built a tower, a great high tower so as to make a name for themselves.  

And God looked from the heavens and saw the budding steeple of their cathedral.  He saw their efforts to reach the heavens, that their common language had made them proud.  He saw that they could make a great name for themselves, yea, great and godless too.  And he saw that once they could accomplish these things they would no longer try to know him for they would believe that the earth was their own.  

So God confounded their language and separated them by tongue, tribe, and nation, and they could no longer understand each other or hope to reach heaven before eternity was theirs.  And it was called Babel in that place for there was much confusion.

Au Revoir.  Auf Wiedersehen, friends...Ailinon.

Many cultures share this story with the Jews, but as expected, everyone seems to tell it in their own way. Central Americans, for instance, believe that Xelhua, one of the world’s seven giants tried to build a pyramid in order to reach heaven, but the gods destroyed it and the builders could no longer speak to one another.  Herodotus places the story not in Babel but in Marduk, where there are known remnants of a once great ziggurat.  The Qur’an lays the scene in the Egypt of Moses.  

They are the same story, spoken through different tongues:  pride always goeth before a fall and no matter how great we think we are, we will always be leveled in favor of a greater glory. We build our tawdry towers and time and time again, we watch them tumble down while we are left alone, wide-eyed and tongue-tied, to remember that we are dust.  

Then the Lord stoops down and makes us great.

 Many years after the Tower of Babel, the followers of Jesus stood awed, side by side in Jerusalem, watching a man who had risen from the dead ascend to heaven on a cloud.  Jesus’ disciples recalled His words and believed at last, that they would “receive power when the Holy Spirit comes…and…be witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

 Yes, they prayed; let it be so.  Help us to speak and teach us what to say.  Come, Lord Jesus, come.  

As they were praying, a great holy wind came and shook that place, and “tongues of fire" alighted upon each one of them.  And those who knew Jesus were filled with His Spirit and glorified Him in languages that they could not before.  And all were amazed for everyone there, from any tongue, tribe or nation, could hear the Gospel spoken in their own words.

In this redemptive Pentecost, the punishment of Babel is reversed; the diversity of language and culture is now a palimpsest of re-written history, a gift for the good of proclamation.  Through Jesus, the veil is torn, communication re-opened.  In Jesus, we who are many become one body, not Gentile or Jew but Gentile and Jew.  The Hebrews can tell Romans of Jesus and His mighty deeds; the Pygmies and Eskimos, the French and the Welsh, all are offered the same message in different tongues.  

 Allelujah!  Alabar!

Now we can offer the great Name to each other, yea great, and Godly, too.  

This is our blessing and our curse, the fall of the Tower of Babel, another demonstration of God’s wrath intertwined with His mercy.  Here we are to this very day, we assorted, eclectic, and sundry citizens of earth, scattered and curious at the base of our tower.  It is true that we have been exiled from our great high city, from the gods we try to build with bricks.  It is true that our skyscrapers are no match for Mount Chimborazo, that our submarines fold in the depths of the seas.  And once again we’ve nothing to do but blink at the Milky Way and exclaim at our limits: 

“Wonderful!” “Vidunderlig!” “Wunderbar!”

And wunderbar it is.  We are born wearing fig leaves; we are swaddled in darkness.  Yet we are offered understanding and light in abundance.  We who tried to reach heaven by the work of our hands are promised that in the last days, the God who topples our towers will replace our dumbness with a “spirit of unity...so that with one heart and one mouth” we will glorify Him.  

And the great holy city we longed for will be here.

On Why the Genealogy is More Interesting than NASCAR

I was in a meeting today with my boss, Joe, and my colleague, Zack, discussing important church beeswax, when all of a sudden, something snapped and everyone but me wanted to show off his knowledge of NASCAR.



We live in the south where stock cars are king, and Joe and Zack have made it a spiritual discipline to know the name, car, sponsor, and number of every driver. So, seeing as the Daytona 500 is rapidly approaching, our meeting turned into a riveting round of the "Name a Number and I'll tell you the NASCAR Driver, Car, and Sponsor" game. 



Joe answered a lot of trivia correctly after only a few squabbles with Zack (who has an iPhone and therefore knows everything), so to speed things along, I finally just asked him how many drivers he knew altogether.

A lot, he said.

And how many people listed in the genealogy of Matthew did he know? I asked. Not as many. Why not? It's not as interesting, Zack said.



I couldn't agree less. 

But I'm an anomaly. Why would anyone actually want to read the genealogy? It's boring, isn't it?  On and on and on it goes. There aren't any red letters or commandments to attract us to it. No miracles in the genealogy, no parables, no "you've heard of the old way but I tell you a new way."

Not at first glance anyway.



So we stumble through the list if we have to and pay no attention really until we get to names we know. Even then, though our ears might perk up, those names, the ones we know, hold no significance because they are bookmarked in between Jehoshaphat and Zerubablahblahblah, names that no respectable preggo actually considers anymore (like Agnes and Enid) and by the time we get to Jacob or Joseph, we're just dying to get to the next of Matthew – the Christmas story – everyone's favorite. Who doesn't love the old yarn about the starry starry silent night, the friendly ox, the twinkly-eyed magi, the baby who would rock the world?



When you think about what's coming next in the story, well, it's hard to think of the genealogy as anything of vital importance or intrigue. Sure it's in there; it has to be in there. Always has been. But it seems a little archaic, don't you think? Let's skip to the next bit, okay? The bit about stockings and snowflakes and silver bells, silver bells.



But there's a catch, you see, when we skip to the next bit. The catch is that the end doesn't make much sense without the beginning. It's kind of like Led Zeppelin’s "Stairway to Heaven," the genealogy is. At first it might be tedious. It sounds like the same thing over and over again.  It goes on and on and on for four and six and then eight minutes and you wish they would just get to the good part already. But if you fast-forward to the last minute and eighteen seconds of "Stairway to Heaven," which is when Robert Plant goes nuts, or read verse 1:16 only, when Matthew announces the whole reason for the long list of branches on Jesus' family tree, if you skip past it all and just listen to the climactic part, you don't ever really understand the good part, do you? You have to climb up Robert Plant's long, twisty story to dance around at the top for the best minute and eighteen seconds ever. You have to walk through Matthew's Hall of Records and Vital Documents to hear Jacob's name called, and then Joseph's, and then Mary's, and finally, that clincher, that reason for all of their being, to hear the name Jesus.



And here we learn it's not just why we read the genealogy that's important, but who we read in the genealogy that's important. Every name in the genealogy was chosen to be part of that genealogy, chosen by one who knows every name ever, the one who could have excluded the poor and impoverished for the sake of the rich and royal. But didn't.



The names in the genealogy, like all Jewish names, are packed with meaning, stories of their own. And we have to read through the whole bloody mess of it, the parts where Abraham almost kills his only son and Jacob steals his brother's blessing, where Rahab the prostitute saves the men of God, where David sleeps with Uriah's wife and kills him to cover it, the part where I do all these things in my heart every day, it all has to happen first, before the part where the virgin teenager gives birth to the son of God makes any sense at all. Truly, we have to wander through a little desert to find the burning bush or the Promised Land. But it's so worth it.


There's a twist. The story we expect is not the story we get.

In the genealogy, we see a scurvy crew made into kings. We see Rahab adorned in royal ribbons. We see David, Uriah, Bathsheba, and Solomon sharing an umbrella on a rainy day.  The genealogy is the Gospel in a nutshell, our story at its best and worst, sin and redemption at the height of their power. Here all the unlikelies, Jews and Gentiles, saints and sinners, shepherds and kings are adopted into the family of God.



And we too are invited, no matter how unlikely, unruly, unholy, unclean, to dine with him at the table of tables. At this table, all name tags are welcome and ready or not, here they come: the cowboys and Indians, the princes and paupers, the Capulets and Montegues. And we too are offered water turned wine at the great round table.

 We are Cornelius.  We are ten lepers. The old way drove us to the edge of camp with the other untouchables. The new way invites us in on the arm of the guest of honor, himself an unlikely, God and man.

And we're not just on His arm. We are his arm, his foot, his finger, his very eyelashes. This family tree is not just a list of branches but a list of body parts. To forget about it is to forget our medical records on a trip to the doctor.  When we look at this list, these stories, each other, we see nothing less than Emmanuel, God with us.

 The genealogy is, every verse, red letter. It's a commandment, parable, and miracle, the curtain torn in two. It fulfills all the prophecies before we even get to the salad course, the first testament in a bread bowl. It's the genealogy that leads us from the old way to the new, the thesis statement that opens the Gospels, the character guide, the index, a family history for the God of the universe. The genealogy is, in so many words, so many unpronounceable Hebrew words, the "once upon a time" in the greatest story ever told.

 Welcome, friends, to the Holiest of Holies.  Christ, the Savior is born.    

Summertime and the Livin's Easy, Part Deux

We hope y'all like your tea sweet and your chicken fried. Cuz you're about to get a fresh glass of iced Georgia goodness from our wraparound porch to yours.

To catch you up on our summer so far, I'll make like a true Southern Belle and talk about the weather. And my, oh my, the weather. Over the past two months, we've all but melted in the heat of the noonday sun and also the heat of the midnight moon. We've celebrated rainy days with indoor picnics, walked in the park (twice), and danced under the starlit sky.

We watched the new Batman thriller on a dark (k)night and finally lost interest in Lost (ok, just Brynn did that. Aaron has yet to find interest in it). We watched "High School Musical" One and Two (Extended Versions) over kettle corn and sour patch kids and other healthy snacks. Oh, and in case you wanted to know, I learned from my high school girls why "High School Musical" is so good. Cuz Zac Efron. Just in case you had wanted to know. That's why.

Our athleticism has been thriving: we got a TV and a couch just in time for the Olympics. Last week, we met the CEO of the Braves, either because we are so important to the world of baseball or because we were eating lunch at the same cafe as him one time. You decide.* More than once, Aaron has been called a "Yankee" by southerners and we have always responded with perfect clarity that though Aaron is from the North, he is NOT and will never be a Yankee. He is a Red Sox, if anything.

I spent a glorious week dodging chiggers and ticks at Hard Labor Creek State Park with our high school students, learning to line dance and talk country and jump into a boiling hot lake that gives you a nice coat of dirt just in case you were cold. Which you weren't. My favorite night of the week was game night. For goodness' sake, I have never seen so much chaos in all my years. Our kids were swinging from the rafters. Literally - we played a game called "Swing from the Rafters." To put it into perspective for you, the night was way more turbulent than my old youth group's bouts of "Guess the Font" ("American Typewriter Condensed!") and a little less turbulent than say, the perfect storm. But just a little.

We went white water rafting, visited White Water water park (don't go; it's dirty), did the laundry (one time), made new friends out of old ones, joined a book study and a Bible study, visited Six Flags (again), chose our life's verse (the Seven Woes), and traveled to the aquarium and back.

We invented the word Moolalah, which means (noun) "an impressive sum of money." Try and use it in a sentence today.

We took a group of ten-year-olds on a mission trip to downtown Atlanta. Aaron was invited to a "shromp bile" in N'awlins while I, I played Advanced Freeze Tag with 7-year-olds on Skid Row in Los Angeles. You might have played it**. It's the kind of Freeze Tag where 7-year-olds make up and change all the rules at any time, especially after they've just been tagged. LOVE that game…

We've eaten delicious hamburgers shaped like Texas, Texasburgers shaped like ham (I made that second one up), shrimp and grits, and all the Varsity onion rings we could carry (which was six). I've baked dainties for tea parties, gobbled several Krispy Kremes, and enjoyed the hottest hot wings this side of Ol' Mis. Or just pretended to. Either way. Fiery little suckers, those.

We've learned the Jonas brothers' favorite bubble gum flavors and promptly forgotten them. We've discovered that the oldest Jonas brother is twenty - which means, according to my gaggle of high school girls, that he's way too old to date. Way. And too famous and rich. I added those last two. Now here's the curiosity: Zac Efron - also twenty. BUT, according to the gaggle, not too old to date. It just doesn't make any sense. I guess the ancient Chinese proverb rings true:

可憐设法有道理在高中心臟的迷宮房間外面的傻瓜，特别是關於Zac Efron的那些事态的

or

"Pity the fool who tries to make sense out of the labyrinthine chambers of the high school heart, especially in those matters concerning Zac Efron."

If translated into English, then back into Chinese, then back into English again, the proverb reads: "Tries to make sense pitifully in outside the high school heart's labyrinth room fool, specially about Zac Efron these situations." I like the bit about "tries to make sense pitifully." It reminds me of something.

We saw Independence Day fireworks with millionaires and billionaires at Buckhead's ritzy Lenox Mall. We learned that the 6th best firework show in the country takes place in Atlanta. Buckhead is ranked #6A. We're guessing it's because of all that Buckhead Moolalah.

We've floated down the Chattahoochee in inner tubes – traveling at one mph for five blessed hours if it was one. We stopped saying the "T"s in Atlanta (now we just say "Alana"), got new cell phones and lost them (again, just Brynn), and became responsible adults by foregoing the adorable vintage heels I really really wanted in favor of toilet paper and light bulbs - SO excited about that. We were given a slab of raw venison as a gift, which is kind of like a gift a cat might give you and definitely the #6A best gift we have ever received.

Last week, we befriended our neighbors, which was easy because some of our friends just moved into the neighborhood. So I guess we actually beneighbored our friends.

We still have not eaten a peach.

Dinah, our flopsy topsky kittentail, has been busy too. She has tirelessly tried to establish contact with the fireflies through the window, all of whom seem rather indifferent to her efforts. Though unsuccessful with the fireflies, she was able to befriend the basil plant (who died soon thereafter), and made her peace with the new couches (which were TERRIFYING before she discovered that they are very soft to sleep on). Even so, she has tired of the old nap-eat-nap routine and has become a small-time pirate, single-handedly stealing all of our milk caps one by one. We don't know where she hides them and she'll never tell. Perhaps she's fashioning them into rudimentary eye patches.

Oh, Dinah. Indeed we will miss her when she finally departs for the high seas with her swashbuckling barge, a few choice fireflies, and all the milk caps.

And you. We miss you, too. As Zac Efron sings in "High School Musical" Two, you are the music in us. Na Na Na Na. We'd love to host you sometime here in Alana. Just hop over on a midnight train to Georgia. Or a noonday one – doesn't matter. It'll be hot either way.

Thank you, friends, for continuing to support and encourage us as we begin this exciting new chapter! And until we hear from you, we'll just keep singin' that old sweet song. We've got Georgia on our minds.

*It's the second one.
**With Aaron's cousin, Nikolai

Summertime and the Livin's Easy, Part One

Welp, we've been in Atlanta for about a week and a half now. Oh, didn't you hear? We moved to Atlanta to work at Peachtree Presbyterian Church and let me tell you, it's been a whirlwind - almost like a tornado, you might say.

Since we southerners like to impress each other, we will now impress you with a list of everything we did during our first week in Georgia. So grab a rocking chair and a mint julep, y'all, and prepare to be blown away. I apologize that this will be a little long-winded but hey, life is slower (and stickier) down here. What's your rush?

We moved into our condo fresh off the plane last Thursday. Almost immediately, we unpacked a hundred and fifty boxes and painted a huge shelf country red. We still have quite a few boxes left and a lot more furniture to buy. We're using Craig's List like a treasure map but with or without it, we've already gotten lost in midtown.

In our first week, we sat at our shared desk for a total of thirty minutes. Between the two of us, we went to Six Flags, the zoo, and a Braves game (Atlanta lost). We learned to drive a minibus. We got in a water balloon fight, bounced in a bounce house, served sandwiches at a homeless shelter, and enjoyed a delicious pancake breakfast. We followed a Rod Stewart look-alike in worship, helped with Vacation Bible School, memorized the names of 300 kids (ok, I made that one up - but we've met almost as many), and brushed our teeth every morning and night. We drank lots of Caribou coffee, sweat off half our body weight while reading by the pool, joined the gym, and licked our chops at the local Pig n' Chik. We unintentionally used the word "y'all" in a sentence. We went to the movies with fifty students and were yelled at by an ornery bus driver with eight cats at home. We watched twelve episodes of Lost (ok, just Brynn did that. Don't judge me - we have to wait a whole 7 months for the next season of 24). And we finally found our coffee pot right when we were starting to form a search party.

We went out running on the street where Elton John, Ludacris, and the governor of Georgia live. Or driving. Or whatever. It's just a block up. We lost count of all the BMW's we've seen cruise past our place, the teenagers with i-Phones, and the beautiful moms who while away the hours under big magnolia blossoms, gossiping over sweet tea and sugar cookies.

We shared meals with new friends. We've made more than we can count with all ten fingers - which means we've already made at least nine more than last year.

Since we've been here, we've heard the word "milestone" rhyme with "gallstone" and "men" pronounced with two syllables. The "rebel flag" was mentioned to me casually last night. We saw a guy riding on the highway in the back of a pick-up and a few days ago, Aaron actually heard someone exclaim, "Why Thomas, you look hot as coffee!" We think Atlanta is a little like Moscow, a little like Oxford, and a lot more southern then we remembered.

We have not eaten a peach.

Dinah's been busy, too. If you haven't met our kitten yet, she is a firecracker, even if she is sometimes a sleepy, cuddly firecracker. Dinah's smattering of accomplishments includes attacking and building forts out of at least thirty moving boxes and rearranging all of the packing tissues around the floor. She has also eaten and uneaten one rubber band. Thankfully, she has finally learned to sleep with us without soiling herself (and our bed). We think she just doesn't want to be alone - in the dark - with the boxes. Dinah's all talk.

Next week, I'll be gone with the wind up to Camp Rutledge (held in nowheresville at Hard Labor Creek State Camp) with the High Schoolers, a camp I've been told by many a church-goer (always with a raised brow and a smile) is like no other. Apparently, it is Peachtree at its best and worst and I will be the hottest and happiest I've ever been. And afterwards, the tiredest.

Yesterday, Aaron drove up to Camp Ducktown in Tennessee with the Middle Schoolers - a much cooler camp with white water rafting and cell phone reception. And I'm staying here in our condo this week, unpacking books and goblets and pot holders, glad for Dinah's company because I'm kind of scared after watching all that Lost.

Next month, we're going on domestic mission trips to Los Angeles (go figure), N'awlins, and inner city Atlanta. Aaron will be helping to launch an adventure ministry in the next few months and I will be doing everything I can to write and play music and other things good for my soul.

See? I ain't just whistlin' Dixie when I say we've already experienced one of them famous Georgia tornadoes. But seriously - we get paid for all this!?

We were told that this is the "crunchest" (busiest) time of year for our ministry and life will get slower very quickly. However, if you contact us in the next month and a half and we're a little slow on the response, we're sorry. We might be on a mission trip, getting to know a student, unpacking, or taking a nap (probably that last one). But until we hear from you, we'll just be singin' that old sweet song. We've got Georgia on our minds.