Wonderings of a Wanderer

So here I sit. Our first full day in our new home is coming to a close. Thanks, Aaron and Clay for coming out and helping us move, and Bush for trying to switch his work schedule around so that he could come out, also. (We missed you, man). The rest of you missed out on free beer. The fridge is pretty stocked, though, so you are still welcome to come over for free beer. Ruth even got cream soda in case you don’t like beer, or in her case, can’t like beer.

It’s kinda weird. I’ve never lived downtown anywhere before, with the exception of my stint in college, which was spent living in a dorm. So far, though, things are good. It’s quieter here at night than I would have imagined, and we met some of our neighbors last night. They’re pretty cool; he’s a drummer and they have a 6 month old newborn. They’re another young couple, and we are looking forward to getting to know them better.

The best part about living downtown is that our rabbit ears get better reception. It’s almost like having cable; switching from channel to channel and not having to adjust the antennas to get a clear picture. It’s crystal clear! We used to live by the airport, so we rarely got much reception, and when we did one of us would have to hang one leg out the door and hold the antenna in our mouth, while drinking a glass of water and juggling bowling pins, while the other one watched the T.V. We feel rich.

Our cat is also enjoying herself. She is an outside cat, so we weren’t sure how well she would do in the big city. Apparently there are a ton of outside/leash-free animals around here, so she has already made some new friends, and a couple of enemies. I guess she has to learn how to live in the city also. She likes all the squirrels, though.

Ruth has the kitchen set up like she wanted and I have got the studio almost set up. There are still a few more things to get rid of, however. Mainly in the studio, as there is only so much storage space. That will happen in time. Other than that, not much else to write about. I am mainly writing this because Worm complained that I hadn’t written anything new (unless he was talking about the subject matter of the song). Ruth and I are both tired, and have had little time to think about much other than this whole moving thing lately. I am looking forward to getting more settled in here and having time to post on a few other things.

I have been really wanting to write a bit about my thoughts with the recent Mother Teresa news. It turns out that she spent the later half of her life in constant spiritual turmoil, dealing with extreme doubts of her salvation and a constant realization of how faithless she was. Dang, if Mother Teresa can battle these things, then I feel a bit more confidant with my struggles. I guess as you get closer and closer to a light, the ugly things that were once shrouded in darkness get exposed. Ever noticed how pollution free a downtown intersection may look at night? Try going through the same intersection in the middle of the day and you can see all the cigarette butts and McDonalds wrappers in the median…

I’m tired, though, so it’s bedtime.

One more thing to you other bloggers out there…I have just scrolled through your blogs just long enough to see that you are writing some cool stuff. Sorry I have been participating in conversations, and hopefully I will have more time for that next week…

I wrote this song after this past tour, after listening to John Piper’s entire sermon series on the book of Romans. I was pretty confused, because he led me to ask a bunch of questions that I wasn’t qualified to answer for myself, but I did anyway. I ended up way out in left field, completely lost in my own understanding of the doctrine of election. As you know, I have since come to better understanding about it all. However, I utilized my confusion to try and squeeze out a song. Here is my best attempt. It’s not really mixed all that well (the kick drum distorts a tad). I finished tracking on Wednesday, and since Friday is when I get most of the traffic on my blog, I was in a hurry to get it posted. I will have a better mix in a few days, but wanted to go ahead and get it posted. It sounds best through headphones, since laptop speakers have little bass, and again, I didn’t really mix or master it. Hey, what do you expect? I’m a merch guy!

We are moving into our new home next Tuesday, August 28th. We have to have everything out of this house Monday night, so that the buyer can come through on Tuesday morning for one final walk through. I already have most everything packed, and am going to finish in the next couple of days, save a couple of things I can’t move on my own i.e. a sofa, love seat, refrigerator, box springs, and a mattress.

I hear you saying, “Eric, where do I come in? Can I help?” Well, I’m glad you asked!

We need a couple of folks with trucks and maybe a trailer or two who are willing to help us out. My friend, Clay is trying to get one trailer, and he has a big ole’ truck. I am fairly sure that it all won’t fit in his trailer and so I am wondering if anyone out there in bloggerland would want to help out. The only catch is that we have no place to put all the stuff until after we close on our new house Tuesday at 11:00, God willing.

So basically, we need folks to help us load up our stuff Monday night, (if you want, we can wait until it cools off) keep it in their trailer or truck on Monday night, and help us unload Tuesday around noon. Then drink beer.

I will pick up a case of Yazoo, so there will be plenty of beer, of if you have another request feel free to let me know.

I know this is a big request, especially with the overnight storage and all, but any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

I know that the subject of illegal immigration in America has run it’s course on this blog, so I will not try to rehash that with you. However, it turns out that we aren’t the only ones dealing with this issue. What would you do if you were an Israeli citizen? Would you offer the refugees amnesty?

I copied this from the CNN website. I am not sure how to properly source it, but hopefully the disclosure will suffice.

JERUSALEM (CNN) — Israel on Sunday rejected 50 Africans — most of them reportedly from Sudan’s Darfur region — who had illegally entered the country from Egypt, a government official said.

The move angered many Israeli lawmakers and human rights advocates because of reports that some Sudanese refugees are being killed or mistreated by authorities in Egypt.

Israel has been struggling with how to cope with an increasing number of Africans, including some from Darfur, who enter the country through Israel’s southern border with Egypt.

According to Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, the refugees were arrested Friday evening as they tried to cross from Egypt into Israel. They were held at a military base in southern Israel before being driven back to Egypt on Sunday, the newspaper reported.

The nationalities of the 50 sent back Sunday were not released, but the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, citing figures from the Israeli military, said nearly all of them had escaped the genocide in Darfur.

Speaking to CNN, Israeli government spokesman David Baker described them as “economic refugees from Africa.”

Baker told The Associated Press that Darfurians would not be immune from Israel’s ban on unauthorized immigrants.

Israeli law denies asylum to anyone from an enemy state, AP reports. Sudan’s Muslim government is hostile to Israel and has no diplomatic ties with the Jewish state.

Eytan Schwartz, an advocate for Darfur refugees in Israel, told AP that about 400 have entered Israel in recent years. Baker said they would be allowed to live in Israel, and that the ban applied to new arrivals.

Dozens of Israeli lawmakers recently signed a petition urging the government not to deport Sudanese refugees.

Arab militias supported by Sudan’s government have committed numerous human rights atrocities, U.N. officials say, including the slaughter and gang rape of civilians, destruction of water sources, looting and burning of buildings and crops.

Earlier this month, Israel’s Channel 10 interviewed Israeli soldiers who said they had witnessed Egyptian security officers executing several Darfur refugees.

According to Channel 10, their testimonies were backed up by Israeli military security cameras that showed Egyptian soldiers shooting and killing several asylum-seekers.

Channel 10 did not air the video.

According to Haaretz, one of the asylum-seekers “jumped on the wire fence in an attempt to make it over to the Israeli side, but was reportedly dragged back and bludgeoned to death by the Egyptians.”

Responding to the report, Human Rights Watch called on Egypt to investigate the reported deaths.

There has been no public response from the Egyptian government.

An Israeli government official told Reuters that Israel had received “Egyptian commitments” that refugees from Darfur would not be returned to Sudan.

Since the beginning of the year, nearly 3,000 Africans have crossed from Egypt into Israel — nearly half of them from Sudan, many traveling on foot.

Many Sudanese refugees end up in Israeli prisons waiting for the government to decide what to do with them. Israeli volunteers — outraged at the incarcerations — have helped many Sudanese find work in Israel’s agricultural communities and temporarily live in family homes across Israel.

“This whole issue of people crossing over from Sinai, people from Africa, to come to Israel is a new issue,” Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said. “And it’s taken a while to get the government to respond correctly.”

I mentioned a few posts ago, that since I have come to grips with the doctrine of election, I have begun to see many things that I have always heard and read, in a new light. I don’t know who Horatius Bonar is (maybe I should), but we sang one of his songs last week in church, and I thought I would share the words with you. Who would have thought that someone living in 1861 would be able to put so eloquently into words what has been going on in my heart? I couldn’t sing the words to this song, as I was fighting back tears the entire time, but I was reading along. The words and phrases are the kinds of things I have heard all my life, but after wrestling with God (I guess that is what it is called) about this doctrine for so many years, and teetering on the edge of apathy to the point of nearly walking away from it altogether, these words have come alive to me.

Not What My Hands Have Done

Lyrics by Horatius Bonar, 1861

Not what my hands have done
Can save my guilty soul;
Not what my toiling flesh has borne
Can make my spirit whole.
Not what I feel or do
Can give me peace with God;
Not all my prayers and sighs and tears
Can bear my awful load.

Thy work alone, O Christ,
Can ease this weight of sin;
Thy blood alone, O lamb of God,
Can give me peace within.
Thy love to me, O God,
Not mine, O Lord, to thee,
Can rid me of this dark unrest,
And set my spirit free.

Thy grace alone, O God,
To me can pardon speak;
Thy pow’r alone, O Son of God,
Can this sore bondage break.
No other work, save thine,
No other blood will do;
No strength save that which is divine,
Can bear me safely through.

I bless the Christ of God;
I rest on love divine;
And with unfalt’ring lip and heart,
I call this Saviour mine.
His cross dispels each doubt;
I bury in his tomb
Each thought of unbelief and fear,
Each ling’ring shade of gloom.

I praise the God of grace;
I trust his truth and might;
He calls me his, I call him mine,
My God, my joy, my light.
‘Tis he who saveth me,
And freely pardon gives;
I love because he loveth me,
I live because he lives.

Here’s one for the geeks. (That means you, Worm).

There has been yet another breakthrough in my journey of “getting better.” In case you haven’t noticed from most of my posts, I am generally a morose individual. For the past few years, I have battled feelings of anxiety, occasional depression, and general feelings of hopelessness. I have also had poor sleeping habits, which usually involves going to bed about 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning, and sleeping until most folks are having a mid to late morning snack, thus I get as little sunlight as possible (save for the times when I am on tour, or if I have something that requires my consciousness when the rest of the world gets up). My favorite hours of existence occur long after the rest of the world is fast asleep. I do my best writing, recording, reading, and thinking late at night, and I purposely avoid sunlight. It’s not that I am a lazy, lay around the house kind of guy, I am just a night owl. However, if it is raining outside, I usually get up early enough to enjoy the overcast, gloomy day.

Until today, I have never known what to attribute my anxiety/depression to other than some not yet diagnosed personality/chemical issue in my head.

Apparently, there is a direct correlation between the amount of sunlight you get and how you feel. As most people know, folks that live in Northern Alaska fight these same hopeless feelings, due to the fact that spend a good portion of their time in complete darkness. Without sunlight, your body doesn’t get enough Vitamin D to maintain healthy levels of a chemical called serotonin (which your body needs in order to maintain a sense of stability in your moods and perspectives). Thus, by avoiding the sun as much as possible, I deny my body the amount of Vitamin D to function properly, and that leads to depression and anxiety. That’s interesting. To me. Not to you. Sorry for writing about this.

Also, the amount of serotonin in your body affects how you deal with addiction. Anyone got a light?

This website had this to say about it all: “Besides being involved in the process of addiction, low serotonin levels are believed to be the reason for many cases of mild to moderate depression which can lead to symptoms like anxiety, apathy, fear, feelings of worthlessness, insomnia and fatigue.”

This explains the fact that since I have been going to bed around 9 or 10, and getting up around 7:30 or 8, I have been feeling really good. These past couple of weeks, I have been forced to get up early; there have been many things to take care of on our house switch, so I have been getting up and taking Ruth to work (we share a car). Who would have thought that one of the things keeping me up at night was the fact that I was staying awake only at night. Hmmm…

Now the bad news… “Early to bed and early to rise is a bad rule for anyone who wishes to become acquainted with our most prominent and influential people,” said George Ade. I wonder how many great songs, books, and poems have been written late at night. I wonder how many scientific breakthroughs have occurred while burning both ends of the line? How many theological epiphanies have happened while burning the midnight oil? Tonight I will stay up! I will see if this serotonin thing really is all it’s cracked up to be. Will I wake up, tomorrow, feeling hopeless or anxious again? It will be interesting to see just how much this is really affecting me. We’ll see…

This is what someone who drops out of college calls a science experiment. This is a perfect time to figure out that I can only function normally if I sleep all night and stay awake all day…This way, I can go ahead and expect not to function normally once Brennan is here. Whoopee!

(This is a long post. Please read it, and pay attention. Not so much for you, but for me. I would like to hear feedback. It has taken many years for this to become clear to me, though it may already be quite clear for you. I am going to let this post sit up here for a few days and I hope that you will offer your thoughts. It may seem boring, or even elementary to you, but this topic has literally been keeping me awake for about 4 years now…I think that peace is coming.)

I have been wondering for quite some time now, how you can know who is among the elect. I had mentioned in a previous post that William Cowper drove himself mad trying to battle through the doctrine of election. He knew that he loved Christ, but couldn’t shake the belief that he wasn’t among the elect. I have been in the same boat recently, and likewise, have almost driven myself mad. It’s a sucky thing to think about. I came to this thought like this:

How do you know who is among the elect?
You will know a tree by it’s fruit.
Well, it doesn’t seem that I bear much fruit (though many of my friends have tried, to no avail, to tell me otherwise).
So, if I am not bearing fruit, even though I think that I love Christ, is there a chance that I am not elect?
If I am not elect, and everything has been predetermined, then there is no turning back time so that I may have the chance to be elected from the start…

That sucks.

That is a brief picture of what is going through my mind, though I know how elementary and “sterile” it sounds. There is a bit more to it, but for the sake of brevity, I will leave it at that.

I met with my pastor, Craig Brown, last week, and presented him with these concerns. His response was that no one can tell who is among the elect. Although you can know a tree by its fruit, we always show our best sides, so of course many people will think that I am bearing fruit. However, these people do not know what goes through my mind behind the scenes. They do not know what motivates me to do good things. They do not know how many deeds that I do just so that others will think I am a nice, intelligent, and selfless guy. Those that know me best often times get more than a brief glimpse of the real me, and they tend to agree more with the argument that, no, I am not bearing much fruit. They are justified in this observation.

As for me trying to bear fruit (which seems to be, in a nutshell, the problem that the Jews had with Christ. They continued to try to live up to the old law, to basically earn salvation). Though I haven’t been trying to live up to the old law, I have been trying to live up to the new law, which is supposed to be written on my heart. I see myself failing, day in and day out, and never being able to live up to the new law. So does this mean that its not written on my heart? (And if that’s the case, then I am damned, as everything has been predetermined). According to Craig, it means the exact opposite. The fact that I feel the need to live up to the new law shows that it most certainly is written on my heart. Otherwise, I would feel no need to live up to it. That’s a good thing. At least now I know that the law is written on my heart.

So, what about the fact that I fail to live up to the law? Basically, Craig said I need to get out of the damn driver’s seat. No wonder my car keeps coming off the road. As the old Christian t-shirt reads, “Trust Jesus.” Christ does, in fact, expect more failure from me than I expect from myself. He is not shocked when I fall. He made me. He knows what I am capable of (both good and bad). According to Craig, the big puzzle piece that I am missing is that I am not trusting in Christ in many things. The two big things are (1) I am not trusting Jesus to save me. I am trusting in myself to save myself. As a control freak, this news came as no surprise to me. I hate being in situations I can’t control. I need to get over that. (2) I am not trusting in Jesus to help me do good, and to sin less. I am trusting in my own strength to carry me through, though that never works. When I sin, I need to stop and thank Christ for His forgiveness, and ask and expect that He will work in me, to continue to transform my heart. The fruit will eventually flow out that; Him working through me. Christ doing good, in me by me submitting to Him and trusting only in Him, not me. The fruit will come. My tree will bear fruit, though it will not be me bearing fruit. It’s a relief to know that I not expected to live up to the new law. I am just expected to be submissive and trust that Christ will accomplish the good works that He started in me. I think this is my best attempt at putting into words what I walked away from our conversation with. It seems as I am typing this, that several scriptures are going through my head; scriptures that I have heard and read my entire life that now are coming alive and making more sense than ever before. Maybe I am on the right track now.

I have often heard John Piper describe the doctrine of election as beautiful, and I am beginning to see it that way. The amazing is starting to come back into grace for me. It’s a relief. It’s out of my hands. I can’t control it…That’s a good thing.

Man, you guys have got me excited…I want so much to tell you about the talk that I had with my pastor today, but it will have to wait a bit more. I would really like to have time to sit and articulate what all I learned, and I do not have that time tonight. I am also looking forward to the insights that you guys have on this topic. I have talked with a couple of you at great lengths on this topic, so maybe it’s time for a roundtable of comments. I head back on the road tomorrow night, for one show, so that will give me chance to sort through what he told me. Don’t get too excited, though, because although I am jazzed about what I learned, it may seem rather elementary to the rest of you. Either way, the discussion should be good, and maybe we will learn from each other. I am very thankful to have a pastor that takes the time to walk me through the deeper, yet basic elements of our faith. Moving will give us the opportunity to spend time with other folks in the church that can teach us even more.

As for the house, we got a contract on a new one tonight! Here are the pictures of it. It is really small, which is what we wanted, but really cool, and still dramatically cheaper than our current house. It even has a guest house (that’s about 1/2 the size of the main house)! That will be the studio/hang out place when we have company over. Its a great location, not far from the main road that runs through East Nashville, yet it still has a big backyard (big enough for a garden)! We are very excited, and as long as everything goes according to schedule, then God willing, we will close on both our current house, and the new house on August 31…God willing.

It’s been a long and very busy week already! We got a contract on our house on Monday (it went on the market on Friday). We put a bid on a house tonight. A really awesome house. Really, really awesome house. I will try and do a better post tomorrow. Maybe we will know if our bid has been accepted by tomorrow afternoon.

Also, I have a meeting with my pastor tomorrow around lunch. I will let you know how that goes. I know that many of you have heard this question posted by me in recent weeks, but here, in a nutshell, is what I am going to be talking to him about…

I believe in the doctrine of election, as does our church.

So, how do you know who is among the elect?

Most folks seem to answer that with, “You will know a tree by its fruit.”

Even Paul himself said, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.”

Though he did not say this, it would seem reasonable to believe that if you were to ask Paul at this very moment in his life, he would have said that he bears little fruit.

If you ask me at this very moment, I also would say that I am bearing little fruit.

I know that I love Christ, but my actions and thoughts (my fruit) do not reflect it.

Now what? Does this mean that I am not among the elect? How do you know if your heart has been hardened, or if a hardened heart can be a temporary, and reversible thing? Or have I spent too much time rolling these questions around in my head, until I am somewhere out in left field and not even thinking straight anymore…