Angels' Underwear???

I remember, as a little kid, having to memorize Hebrews 13:2 for my weekly memory verse. Given that I was too young to read, this had to be accomplished by reiterating what the teacher recited. She read:

Forget not to shew love unto strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.

I can remember asking what it meant to entertain angels' underwear and being a bit peeved when she laughed at me.

Chad and I wrote the book to try to remind ourselves and anyone else who reads it that there is a spiritual realm, inhabited by angels and demons, who are waging a war. Here in the physical realm, it is all too easy to forget this fact. We are so busy trying to manage our affairs, make a buck, get ahead, get to the gym, get bent, whatever... that everything else fades to myth, mystery or misrepresentation.

The last few weeks have been that way for me. We have been hustling to get our company up and running and EVERYTHING has gone wrong- broken generator, espresso machine, water pump, etc., etc., etc.

During times of stress it is easy to push aside the knowledge that there is a bigger context to our struggles. I nonchalantly pray that God will bless me and then push him aside for the day to get to the real work.

But today he tapped me on the shoulder and reminded me that he and his angels are there- and they have my back.

As we were closing up this morning, I took some of our leftover pastries and cups of hot coffee (a very nice Brazilian blend) over to a few homeless men who were hanging out nearby. After returning to our little mobile cafe, a large African American man approached our window and asked in a very serious voice if we were giving away free food and coffee to the homeless.

For a second I thought that perhaps there was some law against feeding the homeless, but I decided to be honest and admit that we were guilty as charged. He smiled and asked if I had $50. Thinking that he needed change, I retrieved a couple of twenties and a ten, asking if he needed any smaller bills. He smiled and handed me a hundred dollar bill and told me to keep the rest. I protested, but he insisted, saying that doing good should and will be rewarded. He told us his name was Mike and walked away (after I forced him to take a copy of the book).

I am still stunned by this episode. The $50 will not make up for the thousands that our run of misfortune has cost us, but it does something much better. It reminds me that God and his angels are there- and they have my back! It also reminds me that success is not measured in the amount of money that you make, or the number of books that you sell. It is in how well you allow God's blessing to flow through you to the world that you occupy. Mike- you are an inspiration!

By the way- if you are looking for a cute picture of a little angel in swaddling clothes- avoid using the search term: angels in underwear. :)

The Dragon

Central to our series is the figure of Helel. In Tail of the Dragon, he is a secondary character, but remains the driving force of all action in the book. He is a highly charismatic, beautiful, intelligent and proud arella who causes those around him to bend to his will or resist him.

He is modeled on our conception of Lucifer, the angel that, in monotheistic tradition, fell from heaven after leading a rebellion. It is this story, the tale of the created challenging his creator, that led us to undertake this book.

This story is so fascinating to me. How is it possible that God created a being that he had to realize would lead a rebellion? How is it possible that a created being became the foil for his own creator? How could a being, with no conception or evidence of evil, go on to become the author of the Dark Ages, the holocaust, cancer, suicide bombings and Fox News?

Our understanding of Satan is a very Christian one. In Jewish tradition it is less clear that he was a definitive being. The term Satan and ha-Satan (meaning accuser or the accuser) seem to be used interchangeably, indicating that it is either a specific being or a set of characteristics (antagonist, accuser, he who opposes Yahweh, etc.). In the Koran, Satan is a being who is cast out of heaven for failing to bow down to Adam at Allah's behest. He tempts Adam to sin and is cast out of heaven with the human patriarch. He is told that his punishment will be delayed until the day of judgement. But the New Testament indicates that Satan is the angel known as Lucifer, who was cast from heaven, tempted Eve in the garden, and now seeks to destroy mankind. It indicates that he has dominion over the earth and that he will be judged at the second coming and condemned to hell fire.

This Christian version of Satan is our character Helel.

In the second book, By Demons be Driven (currently undergoing first edits), Helel becomes a much more visible character. This allows us to explore some of the earlier questions that I mentioned.

We take a somewhat dualistic approach to the question of sin. In our books, Helel is always clearly a created being who perverts good things in an attempt to undermine God's authority. He is not, however, the author of sin. He is not even the first being to rebel against God. The prologue to the first book actually begins with an episode from a previous rebellion, which becomes a model for Helel's own insurgency.

In books two and three the idea of chaos becomes more and more important. We take the stance that there is a destructive force that Helel taps into and gains some mastery over. However, he is merely a created being who harnesses something that is a force, rather than a being. It is this force of destruction which is the real opposite of God. Helel merely taps into this force to further his cause.

And by the last book, Oceans of Fire, chaos becomes a character in its own right.

God's Equations

I once read a book detailing the history of Albert Einstein’s famous general theory of relativity. It was the work of his life. His attempt was to develop a theory that would be useful to cosmologists in mapping space and time. He wanted to develop a model of the universe that would explain the data of mathematicians and astronomers.

In reading this book, “God’s Equations,” I was struck by a quotation in which Einstein said that through an understanding of math and science, we could get closer to knowing God. Most mathematicians and scientists have long forgotten this point, that their work and the work of theologians is one and the same- reaching out for the one unifying principal of the universe-God.

Very few people in history, in fact very few scientists, have ever fully understood the complexity of Einstein’s theory. Those who have understood it have been overwhelmed by the beauty and harmony of the formula. I don’t understand the formula. I barely can grasp a layman’s description of the formula, but I do understand the awe that scientists have felt in studying the formula.

Several years ago Chad and I went on a trip to Europe. We spent a few days in the Swiss Alps in the little town of Gimmelwald, which is as close to heaven as I have ever been. We hiked up majestic mountains drinking ice cold glacier water straight from the streams. We walked through giant fields of wildflowers serenaded by the clank of cowbells. It is a place of harmony, unspoiled by pollution, overpopulation, waste, development, and all the other scars upon the land. You can see the immense glaciers which melt throughout the summer, you see the rock that these glaciers have ground into fine mineral rich dust, you see the fields nourished by these glaciers, the cows feeding on those fields, fertilizing those fields, the locals taking only what they need. You see a world in harmony and balance, the way that I believe God intended the world to be. I remember the awe that I felt in seeing that world.

Today, I awoke at 5 a.m. I drove to the Inner Harbor through the slums that surround Johns Hopkins. I drove down dark streets strewn with trash. In the predawn darkness, the homeless were already milling about, begging, scrounging, stealing. The bus stops were occupied by those who depend on others to deliver them to their minimum wage jobs. 

As I drove through the cold, dark streets of the city, I thought about that trip. I have been to heaven and I have seen hell. I know there is a God because I have watched the beauty of a waterfall cascading down a sheer mountain cliff in Switzerland. I know there is a devil because I have seen a man reduced to living in a pile of trash on the steps of city hall, his only hope clutched inside a brown paper bag.

God developed certain rules for governing the universe. Objects in motion will stay in motion, unless acted on by an outside force. Gravity exists and exerts its will. A pretty girl will always get better service at a hardware store.

We can choose to understand the equations that govern the universe and realize that they make our lives better or we can ignore them. We are given that choice. We can choose to see rules as a hindrance to our freedom, or a means to maintain a balanced and healthy life.

God created the world and it was good. He told us to be good stewards of that gift. But we, particularly in America, have ignored that mandate. We have subtracted without adding and we shake our hands at the sky asking why it has gone to hell.

We tolerate a world where so much is controlled by so few. We pollute and destroy without thought of tomorrow. We spend as if there will be no tomorrow, no buyer's remorse.

One of God's most basic equations is this- for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction (otherwise known as Newton's Law of Motion). The apostle Paul said it this way, 'you shall reap what you sow.' 

Our book attempts to demonstrate this concept. We see, primarily through the character Gadreel, that action without forethought does not preclude consequence. Jumping without looking doesn't make the rocks below disappear. Gravity will pull you down whether you choose to acknowledge its presence. It's in the equations.

Pops, Larry and Me

The great thing about authoring a blog is that I can deviate off subject whenever I want. To quote Cartman, 'I do what I want.' So, today I am posting a short story that I wrote several years ago. It is a fictional story that I wrote to honor one of the most influential people in my life- my grandfather. It goes something like this:

A Fish Story…of Pops, Larry, and Me

I stood on the bank looking down as the water slid by, uninterested. Where was it going? I knew that on this day it would pass by dozens of guys like me. Tomorrow it would be miles from here and some new river would have crept in and unobtrusively taken its place.

Next year it might get the chance to do its part in forming the ‘Eighth Wonder of the World,’ or drive a Thai peasant from her hut, or maybe find itself imprisoned in a concrete cage and tortured with chemicals.

But for now it just rolled on by not paying a lick of attention to me with my stupid expression and tattered pole.

My bobber fought to join it on the journey. It, like everything else, didn’t want to have anything to do with me. Suspended below was a worm that was not having a good day. He had probably spent the morning minding his own business and now couldn’t quite understand why life was so unfair.

So far his torture hadn’t attracted the audience I was hoping for. He was a gamer, passionately going through the routine, but it was hot and no one else seemed to care.

I had learned in biology class that the scientific name for earthworms is lumbricus terrestris. I still don’t know why that matters or why I need to learn about the geography of Southeast Asia. There are so many things that I don’t want to know. That worm probably felt the same way.

Enough said. It would soon be over for him.

Larry was a wily one. I had never seen him, but I could picture him anyway. Pops had touched him once, before I was born. Every June, when I came back for my annual visit to my grandparents place, Pops would always tell me that he had seen Larry over in the hole “just the other day.”

Pop loved to describe Larry’s gaping jaw, scarred from previous battles. He told me that the old fish had really lived and understood.

“Life is an education,” he would say. “Every day we are learning or we are dying. I guess that Larry still has things to learn.”

But this year there had been no sign of Larry. Maybe he had finally learned it all. Or maybe he just got bored and quite fighting the river. Perhaps he had kicked back and was floating past all those fisherman, smiling a big fish smile because he knew they were there. Maybe he had decided it was time to fulfill his lifelong dream of swimming through a hut in Thailand.

No. He was still there; watching me. He was probably wondering where Pops was. Why hadn’t Pop celebrated the end of the latest ice age by marching along the bank peering, searching, challenging?

But Larry couldn’t know. The war was over, and Larry had won. Mom said that Pop was with Jesus, but I had seen the wooden box lowered into the ground.

After today, Larry wouldn’t have to worry about me either. Every year I counted down the days until my mom would load up her station wagon and drive me the four hours to Pop and Gammy’s summer home. As we drove through the gates that announced our arrival, the anxiety that had built throughout the school year would leave me in an instant. Like that gasp of air that hits your lungs after surfacing from a deep dive, I would instantly feel alive and free. But this would be the last time.

Sure the house would be here, but I knew it would never be the same. I knew that, after today, Larry was rid of me. Truth be told, I doubt that I ever caused him any real concern. Pops, on the other hand, was what my English teacher would have called a worthy protagonist.

I closed my eyes against the tears that welled and could hear the familiar preface, “The first time I saw Larry he laughed at me.” Every year he told me the story before we ever ventured down to the river, and every year I would give the same reply.

“Pops, fish can’t smile.”

But Pops would patiently explain that there is a language deeper than words that all of God’s creatures understand. He would tell how Larry had challenged him, and he had no choice but to pursue.

And one year Pops had caught up.

“It was a perfect mountain afternoon. Not a cloud in the sky, and the air was so clean and bright you could taste it,” he would say.

“I was staring at the water when a long shadow caught my eye. A passing cloud I thought. Then my pole jerked ferociously and I knew what the shadow really was.”

For the better part of an hour, the two combatants waged war, joined by an almost invisible connection. But even the bravest of warriors wears down. Every creature has its limits.

That day Larry reached his. When the moment came, all the fight left his shimmering body. He followed along helpless…acceptant.

A pair of leathery hands lifted him into the horrifying and suffocating brightness. And then, inexplicably he felt himself falling.

Pops told me that as he pulled Larry from the water and held him up to look him in the eyes, an unexpected crack of late summertime thunder caused him to start and the giant fish had tumbled from his grasp.

Pops always smiled when he told me this, and I suspected that he was happy that Larry had gotten away. It seemed that it had been enough to wear the big fish into submission, to pull him from the water and look into his black eyes.

We continued to pursue Larry, year after year, but maybe Pops hadn’t really cared about catching him. As he had gotten older he seemed to focus less on Larry and more on me. In a way Larry became a silent participant in our comfortable triumvirate.

Over the last few years, Pops had seemed to wilt before my eyes. We still went to the hole and sat and talked, but he seemed increasingly distracted. He drifted off for minutes as if he was actually some place far away and had inadvertently forgotten to bring his body along.

Getting up and down off the logs that we used as fishing perches became increasingly difficult, and I saw the pain that the effort caused him. Last year had been the toughest. Our last fishing expedition was cut short. Pops had gotten cold. It seemed really odd, even to a dummy like me, since it was eighty degrees in the shade.

Before we headed back up the hill to the house, he told me that he loved me (which had strangely frightened me) and began talking about the river. He said that although we call the river by a specific name, that was just for convenience.

“The name is really a marker of time, not the river. The river is actually many rivers, and none. It is a part of a whole and it never stays, but also never leaves.”

“It is OK,” he said. “That is just the way things are.”

I could still see the intensity of his eyes as he said those words to me. I didn’t really understand what he said, that last time. But somehow I knew that he was right. It was OK. As I pulled in my line, I pictured Larry swimming around in that thatched hut, and I smiled.