This is generally a non-political blog, but I stumbled across this great blog by three Iraqi brothers, all professionals (a doctor and two dentists) who see the American liberation of Iraq as...well, the liberation of Iraq! Iraq The Model presents a different view of Iraq than you get from the American media, one filtered through the eyes of those born and bred in Baghdad. The troops we have there believe in what we are doing, but it's refreshing to hear there are actually Iraqis who do as well!

In Thursday's entry on this blog, I complained about nobody reading my blog. I intended to say I hoped John Walkenbach (of the J-Walk Blog, one of my favorites) would pick up an item from my blog, but it was very late and I was tired so for some reason I said Jay Walkenbush instead of John Walkenbach. So, John noticed alright. As he puts it in his blog, “One good way to get noticed by me is to misspell my last name and get the first name wrong.”. Oooops. Entirely unintentional, but it did get me a blog entry in full accordance with the Law of Unintended Consequences, “...often cited but rarely defined, is that actions of people—and especially of government—always have effects that are unanticipated or ‘unintended’.” [The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics]

Great. I strive for fame and get noticed for a goof-up. Oh well, as John hoped, it did get me some readers; we'll see if any stick around. The power of the Law of Unintended Consequences is, after all, gargantuan.

I've always been a fan of surf music: I have just about every Beach Boys album in existance, and a lot of other surf music both before and after the Boys. In doing some research for my surf theology piece, I stumbled across a great album, Jesus Christ Surferstar. The album is all of Jesus Christ Superstar as performed by a variety of surf bands, and on CD Baby, you can preview the first 16 songs. Very cool; it really works and these bands really worked hard to make this a great album.

Christian theology is often crouched in symbols, because theology is a tough subject and by expressing these concepts in symbols we can make it comprehensible. My favorite among my sermons is called “Summertime, and the Livin' is Easy”; it equates living in God's grace as summertime. In it I said:

...Now the one problem with summer is that it ends. The leaves fall, the wind howls, the snow comes and we are once again plunged into the icy grip of winter. But the summertime of the resurrected life is an endless summer. In Bruce Brown's 1964 movie, The Endless Summer, two surfers circle the globe in a quest for the perfect wave. As Robert and Mike, Brown's surfing duo, travel the globe they find great surfing, and they finally find the object of their quest in South Africa. But they are no more responsible for the perfect wave than we are for God's grace; just as we do with grace, they find the wave and accept it...

From this concept in my sermon springs “surf theology”. Surf theology is simple and I think it's very clear. In surf theology, those of us seeking God's grace are surfers. God's grace, which results from the sacrifice of his Son Jesus Christ, is the waves; always there, always moving, always ready for the surfers. What allows us to accept God's grace? Faith. Faith is the surfboard. Our faith carries us on the waves, and we can always kick out and catch the next wave. If we lose our faith, we can drown, because the sea under the waves is the world, constantly ready to pull us down in undertows and riptides. Riding the waves of God's grace lifts us above the world. Sometimes we wipe out, slip off the board and get plunged under the water, but we can haul in on the leash and climb back on the board (in Methodist theology, the leash is prevenient grace). Finally, one day we will ride the wave all the way into the shore, and we will be on the beach in the eternal sunshine of the presence of God.

OK, it's a stretch, and it's full of holes and logical inconsistancies, but it accomplishes the purpose: impart theological concepts in an understandable symbolic manner.

Simplicity itself: God's grace is a wave. Faith is a surfboard. Heaven is a beach. Catch the wave.

I was getting my youngest into bed tonight (books, prayers, etc.) when my eldest comes in and says: “Hey Dad, I fixed the computer!” What did he do? He pushed in the power switch while simultaneously ejecting both of the CD-ROM drives. Why? Heck, he doesn't know, but I explained to Andrew that he had taken the first step in the road to true mastery of PC repair--trying inexplicable actions based on some gut feeling and having them work. I wish I had been logging every time I have effected a repair of a system by doing something inexplicable and having it work. Then when folks ask me what I did, I tend to just smile and tell 'em “I just scared it and now it works...” I chalk it up to the human ability to employ intuition, no matter how weird that intuition may be.

Later this evening I was showing Andrew a couple of sites nominated in the J-Walk blog as the ugliest Web pages in the world as we both sat working on PCs in the basement computer corner. One of them is a site for Afghan Hounds (it really is an ugly site and the scary thing is that these folks do Web design as a sideline!) and he made some comment to the effect that 'the dogs make afghans?'. Well, I immediately got this mental image of afghan hounds sitting around with crochet hooks in their front paws...and I could not stop laughing. I just about fell out of my chair. I guess you had to be there. And I guess that's why we're sending that boy off to college.