I should not be awake...

It is nearly 4:30 in the morning. I should not be awake...I shouldn't have been awake 2 or 3 hours ago...I probably shouldn't have been awake 4 hours ago.

Oh well. Here I am.

I've been toying with the ideas of deliberately increasing my rate of posting....both because I could, and because it seems that a "blog" as it is, is apparently updated nearly daily..I've got an SLT friend that updates almost every day with what's basically a devotional he writes....I update weekly with the most random thoughts I've got at the moment.

Perhaps that's exactly why I shouldn't post more often...how much more useless could I make this, than to make more of it? A weeks worth of stuff becomes a fairly inane post quickly in my hands.... day's time will render it completely ridiculous...I think.


Anyway....16 percent now.

I'm steadily getting one percent/week for awhile. Hopefully this week, in it's more than half left state, will render it quite a bit more than 1% higher than it was Monday. It's getting close to the August 1st date I have been communicating...and I'm not at all close to 80%...but I know God is still faithful and miracles do happen. Even if I miss August 1st, the world will not end. I'm actually pretty close to 20 percent...it's just a matter of seeing things come in and seeing how much they end up being.

Anyway....

I could probably ramble about Fund Raising for awhile, when really, all it comes down to is the work of the Lord....as in, the work He's doing.

Today, well, yesterday...Tuesday, let's just say...was a good, strange, ultimately influential day. And it has a cool date....7/21.

I'm not even sure what to say of it...I slept til noon, failed at printing things, and God did the rest and it turned into a great day. That's the thing about God (and me) a lot of the time....it's easy to think that God's going to move when you do as much as you can...and a lot of the time, that is true...it's why we plan, it's why fundraising is more than praying and waiting for miracles...it's why it's not unChristian to invest money or put things away for retirement...etc. Anyway, what I'm saying, is that God will sometimes (often, it seems, in my case) take train wrecks of situations (like today could have been....) and makes them into something real...something beautiful.

I've had strange dreams for nearly a week now....almost nightmares, but maybe not...I don't know...not nightmares, but definitely dreams of things I wouldn't want to happen in real life.

Like, for instance, I'm going to a wedding this weekend, and I'm really looking forward to it...but I had a dream that I got so lost on my way there that I gave up and went to Wooster instead and there was a different wedding going on on campus that wasn't the wedding I was headed too until the very end of the dream....

just strange stuff....

And I somehow recognized someone by a pillow they were carrying before I saw them (this was in the dream...well, maybe a different dream...sometime last night)....and I've never seen that person's pillow, ever. But that was a good dream...just weird, once more.

I don't doubt that dreams can be used by God. Actually, I'm pretty sure they can't not be. Of course, there are dreams that aren't anything...but a dream is nothing if not some kind of impression of what's in your head in some strange smattering of something...if it's not that, then it's definitely from God. So it's either a weird, interesting but ultimately pointless impression of something in your head or a message from the Lord. Or God using the former as the latter. Anyway, who can say for sure what is what? I think that's between you and God, because if you don't want to believe that, God's probably not going to make you, because he's not at all constrained to dreams when it comes to communicating to us...nor is he constrained to "words from the Lord" in pentecostal churches (in all of their forms..) nor, even, to the Bible. One thing about the world, one thing about God...it's that he's going to do what he's going to do...it's just how it is, and he knows how we'll react. I can't explain what that means on every level...no one can and that's kind of the point. All it really means, and all it will ever really mean, in the end, is that without his love, we're nowhere, and without faith, we're getting there quickly.

Facebook hasn't let me login all night. Most of the time, that wouldn't matter...but when you're up til 5, it kind of can...

Heroes is a wonderful show, especially if you like Watchmen and Midnight's Children...you get both of them at once!

Actually, that could be taken sarcastically....I really do like Heroes, and I really really love Midnight's Children....Watchmen is great too (albeit hopelessly overrated and so deep it's shallow).

And once more, I have no idea why I actually think anyone will read the things I write...maybe it's like watching for shooting stars....there's a great chance you won't see one, but there's a chance you could too...so you try. There's always a chance I could have written something worth reading, something interesting....not a great chance, but at least a chance.

And that's why I shouldn't update everyday...even if only because I can't start a paragraph without "and."

I enjoy how I've abandoned all true topics as far as unity in a single post is concerned....but even so, it does feel weird just launching into things sometimes.

I also enjoy that I can enjoy disunity, which proves that we're more conditioned to look for it than that it's something we innately long for somewhere deep inside....even so, I know that is a tight rope to walk because I do think we innately long for God in the deepest of ways. But I don't think we construct God out of necessity as we seem to want to construct or construe unity. The truth is, there isn't any truth we can depend upon save for that revealed by God...and I don't see what's so wrong with saying that. There isn't anything. I could rephrase it though, and in the wrong company, begin a war....I could say "There is no reliable, Objective truth save for that which God reveals" And maybe that doesn't sound bad...but the fact that culture, politics, morals, reality as we perceive it are barred from objectivity in that model....at least they ought to be. The best theologians should say that the root of all sin is selfishness, self-centeredness, arrogance, pride...something along those lines. It's saying we know better, can do better, can be something great, apart from under the proper Lordship of God. As such, we've got to realize that everything we think we know that God hasn't specifically revealed ought to be thought of as seen through a glass darkly....sure, I can reasonably say that certain facts must be true....the fact that I am 21, my name is Zack, and I am up at 4:52 a.m. right now....those are reasonably true...but they are ultimately relative...relative to the world in which they are taking place...I am Zack because my parents arbitrarily picked that name...I am up at 4:52 because someone decided that that was the right time to offset taking into account the movement of the earth/sunrise/whatever....that's "late" because my culture says it's late...I am 21 under the relative gregorian calendar of the Earth....truthfully, I can construct myself as a series of nothing but relativities, even when that means decentering "core" pieces of truth. That's why it's so important to acknowledge that we as humans can't know anything as objective, unrelative truth unless it's an instance of revealed knowledge from the Lord...He doesn't change and he exists apart from us...and he actually knows everything. He is relative to nothing because He was before everything else. This isn't quite full-on pluralism/relativism....my argument is that objective truth exists, but as humans, we're incapable of knowing or verifying any of it....really, that's Biblical if you think about it. The leap into nothing comes when you remove God, and that has always been the case. There's nothing different but the cutting of arrogance from our concept of knowledge. That's a good thing. Embrace the post-modern.

I should sleep. I don't know if I will. But I'll lay down, I'll read...we'll see what happens.

-Zack
"Alleluia, alleluia, we are on our way"
-David Crowder