[+/-] Amazing Grace

There was once a young man who demanded his inheritance from his father and then moved to a distant land and squandered it on parties and prostitutes. He became so poor that he could no longer feed himself, and the only job he could find was feeding pigs, for which he was payed so little that even the pig slop looked good to him.

He soon realized what a fool he'd been and remembered his father, who was a kind man and generous to his workers. He wondered if he should return home. Of course he would not ask his father to accept him as his son, but perhaps he would have mercy on him and hire him to work in his fields. But whenever he thought of his father he was filled with shame and fear, and could not bring himself to go home.

Then one day as he was sitting in the mud with the pigs he saw his father approaching. Fear and guilt gripped him, and he could not meet his father's eye. But his father bent down in the mud and touched him.

"My son, why have you not come home?"

The son looked up, sorrowfully. "I was afraid. I was ashamed. I didn't think you'd want to see me again."

"You were wrong. Every day I've stood at my window and waited for you to come home. Even though you despised me, shamed me, turned your back on me, I have always been your father, and I have always loved you and longed to forgive you. If you had come home I would have run out to meet you. I would have given you a new robe and a ring, and I would have embraced you and kissed you and celebrated your coming with a feast. We would have rejoiced together as if you were dead and had come back to life!"

The son looked at his father in wonder. "You would do that for me? Even now you would forgive me for all I've done?"

The father shook his head. "No, I said I would have forgiven you, but I will not forgive you now. Since your birth, and despite all your faults and failures I have loved you, but my love has ended. All these years you could have returned to me - even yesterday I would have embraced you as a son - but not today. I've come to tell you that on this day I disown you and I withdraw my forgiveness and my love. I am no longer your father; you are no longer my son. Do what you will - beg, starve, die in the streets. I care less for you than for these pigs, even less than for the slop you feed them or the mud you're sitting in. Whatever remorse you may now feel, however much you may long for my forgiveness, until the day you die you will never again speak with me or enter my presence."

And the father turned his back on the one who was once his son, and left him in the mud with the pigs.


I have a great difficulty believing that God's forgiveness expires when we die. If it's true that God's love and compassion and mercy are vastly greater than (or even comparable to) those of any human, it's inconceivable to me that he would eternally banish those who die before repenting.

"Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed."

"Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands."

[+/-] Good Things I've Read Recently

This is an interesting perspective on fasting and Lent. For the record, I believe there's value in giving things up and I think it's good that people in my very un-Catholic circle aren't afraid to adopt this tradition. But I like that even in Old Testament Judaism these rituals are secondary.

This is what I think about knowledge of God from personal/religious experience. Thanks to Bruce for articulating it.

Real Live Preacher questions the validity of the "slippery slope" argument here.

[+/-] New Features

"Jacob, you're blog is great. It's so thought-provoking, so well written and relevant. I'd love to read it all the time but I just don't get around to checking too frequently, and you're not the most consistent poster. Can you make it easier for me to read?"

Heck yes I can. The keen-eyed among you may have noticed that the "Archives" box in my sidebar has been renamed "Archives, Etc.". This in itself something to get excited about, but the changes don't stop there! Inside said box I've added a google searcher-thing, an email subscription feature, and a drop-down menu for my monthly archives, along with a pretty bloglines button. All to make life easier for my beloved readers. Let me explain why these things are good.

If you're a devout reader of many blogs, bloglines is still the only way to go. If you want to keep tabs on dozens of blogs (some of which are updated daily, others semi-annually) without regularly checking each one, bloglines will do this for you. It'll tell you who has new posts and let you read them all in one place. It's beautiful.

If you only read this blog and you'd like to read consistently but you don't want to/forget to check frequently for new posts, Feedblitz is your friend. Provide your email address and get Twenty Feet delivered hot and fresh to your inbox whenever I get around to writing something.

If you want to read about specific subjects or find an old post you really liked (I'm probably just talking to myself now) you can google search this blog from the sidebar too. Results are a bit sketchy, I think mostly because I recently switched domain names. But I'm working on that.

If for some reason you want to browse through my monthly archives, you can still do so through the nifty little drop down menu. It's just that they no longer take up half the sidebar.

If you're envious of my new toys and want to add them to your own blog, let me know and I'll tell you how. Or if you're at all good with code you could just check out freshblog, where you can find all these hacks and more!

And if you don't care about any of this, I hope to publish something more meaningful within a couple days.

[+/-] It's been a while

Hey.

How ya been?

I was just thinking of you the other day. I thought maybe it's time I talked to you again.

It's strange to think of you being present here, as if I might catch a glimpse of you if I turn my head fast enough. It gives me the sense that you're playing with me, the way a father plays with a small child - outsmarting him, teasing him, nimbly avoiding his uncoordinated efforts to find or grasp. I wonder why kids like that. I suppose the difference is that they know it's just a game. It ends so quickly, and then they touch again. Maybe we'll touch some day.

Be with the ones I love - you know their names. Give them strength in hard times. Give them direction and hope. Teach them to love, and teach me to love them. Let me be a blessing to them, if I can.

Keep me honest. Keep me humble. Keep me gentle. Help me see the garbage in my heart, and help me deal with it.

Don't ever let me forget you, even when I don't believe in you. Let me remember where I've come from, wherever I end up.

Are you listening? I believe you are, somehow. But I don't really know you, so I may be mistaken. If you've been tuning me out, listen to me now. I have something I need to say to you:

Don't you ever let me go.

[+/-] Greater Things Than These

Something that was said in the communion service at my church last week got me thinking. Someone mentioned the passage in Matthew 25 in which Jesus separates the "sheep" from the "goats". Whenever I hear this passage, I think of a similar one in Matthew 7 which seems to say the opposite.

The first passage says that whether we go to heaven or hell depends on how we treated "the least of these". (Absolute heresy, I know. I can't believe we read this in church.) The second seems to say that doing great thing on earth isn't enough to get us to heaven. What matters is whether we are known by Jesus, which is somehow related to doing the will of God, whatever that means. (How could doing miracles and driving out demons not be the will of God?)

After I puzzled about this for a while, it reminded me of 1 Corinthians 13. (Most things do, it seems.) The Love Chapter, as it's called, begins by saying that all the big flashy stuff that we admire - speaking in tongues, prophesy, knowledge and understanding, great faith, miraculous power, sacrificial giving and martyrdom - are utterly worthless without love.

I know this passage well and I love it, and I'm also quite familiar with the "Lord, Lord" passage, but their message is still shocking and counter-intuitive to me. If you could perform miracles, foretell the future or cast out demons in Jesus' name, I'd think highly of you. I'd want you to be my pastor. I'd support your ministry, read your books, quote you and imitate you and praise you to my friends. If you could do this stuff I'd be your disciple and hang on your every word, because you'd have to be incredibly close to God to wield power like that. Right?

Not according to Matthew. In his book Jesus is disgusted with many of whom I would be in awe. These are prophets, miracle-workers and exorcists, and Jesus called them evil-doers and opposers of God's will. But those known to Jesus, his sheep, are workers too - servants of the hungry, the thirsty and the sick, of strangers, beggars and crooks. Why is one group accepted and the other damned?

Both the sheep of Chapter 25 and the evildoers of Chapter 7 were apparently judged according to what they did. Both did things we would approve and admire, and yet one group is welcomed and the other banished. The only way I can make sense of this is that the hell-bound of Chapter 7 got caught up in the flashy stuff and missed the real point. I have no idea how these evildoers had such privileged access to God's power, but it seems that they completely misused it.

Obviously there's nothing wrong with doing the miraculous, after all, Jesus did many miracles during his ministry. But it seems that he thought the compassionate part of his ministry - talking with Samaritans, touching lepers, eating with prostitutes and crooks - was the more important part. Jesus knew that displays of supernatural power stick in our minds ("Jesus - wasn't he the guy who walked on water and raised that dead girl and fed thousands with a handful of bread and fish?") but maybe he thought his displays of extraordinary compassion were the highlights of his ministry.

I've always been pretty skeptical about Jesus' claim that his followers would do "even greater things than these". Sure, the apostles did some cool stuff - healing cripples and whatnot - but that all petered out pretty quickly. I don't know of a single Christian in the last 19 centuries who could hold a candle to Jesus in terms of signs and wonders. But now I wonder if Jesus might have counted feeding millions of hungry kids around the world as greater than feeding five thousand, even though we don't use his miraculous methods. Maybe Jesus' plan to change the world doesn't involve superheroes of faith who move mountains and put the legions of darkness to flight, just a bunch of unremarkable people who do what they can to help the needy.

And maybe it's not the great speakers and healers and the leaders of successful ministries that we should look to for spiritual insight. Maybe it's the ones who are serving soup to bums and hanging out in nursing homes who best understand the heart of God.