"Being confident of God's provision"

Oh, my. I laughed out loud when I saw this today. I filled out my RSVP for new student orientation today. Check out the check boxes where I've circled in red:


I quickly sent that screenshot off to Sharon the Creeper* and Slai asking them for witty captions. (Sorry, DEB - hadn't meant to leave you out!)

Slai wrote:

they should reword it as "i am looking for" and you can check as many as you want.

"i am looking for a child"? skeetttchyyyy

Sharon the Creeper wrote:

i don't have a caption, but my dad's caption is: "being confident in God's provision" or "trusting in God's provision"

lisa, i'll give you 50 cents if you check that box.

So I reworked it. If I hadn't already turned it in, this is what I would have sent:


And even if God didn't provide a spouse by then, at least I'd be 5o cents richer.

Thanks, Pastor TQ! Sharon, you don't know how lucky you are to have a pastor for a dad - I have not a doubt that you are always to be inspired, not discouraged, when filling out such forms. (FYI, I stole from Mr. Bennet the rhythm of that last sentence; Vol III, Ch. 55. Thanks, E. Reese! Slash, maybe there's another quote I'm thinking of.)

So, I guess I've now got a month and three days to find a spouse-to-be. Anna and I were talking about how I could start a Google Form inquiring of all potentials on certain topics:

• Beverage of choice: Coffee? tea? herbal tea? (That was for you, Soofie.)
• Food: quantity or quality? I mean, it's important that a guy can appreciate quality food - I couldn't have it otherwise. But everyone needs help clearing leftovers (i.e., when you go into Trash Can Mode), and every once in a while it's necessary to hit up something a little less than gourmet. So we came up with the perfect balance: Trash Can With Taste.
  

Okay, that's all for tonight, folks. The planned Gmail tip will come later, but in the meantime I hope you'll tickle yourselves crazy making all kinds of great Google Forms for your friends. Or your potential spouses-to-be.



* I feel that in order to write about my friends, they need to have nicknames, like Donald Miller's friend Tony the Beat Poet. Right now, only two of my friends have such names: Sharon the Creeper and Josh the Pen Pal. (Sharon, you can be Sharon the PK if you really want.) So I suppose if you want a shout-out in the blog (David, I know you need to catch up in the contest), then you best be sending me your submissions. So, post a comment and sign off with your nickname.

Why I love Gmail labels

As much as I am worried that Google is turning into Big Brother, I love Gmail labels.

The obvious reason is that it's so often the case that one email falls into more than one category. (A testimonial from Google's 2007 April Fools' Hoax, Gmail Paper, brings this to life.) This email is both from Mom, and is a recipe. If I file it in two places, it's twice as easy to find it.

On a deeper level, I appreciate the concept of labels/tags/keywords over folders (to use computer terminology), because it is very much consistent with who I am: the queen of escaping categorization. ("But you pray like a Calvinist!" my friends will argue.) My ideology is very much a both/and sort of thinking (HT: Milton Wu). I am both theologically conservative and liberal; I am serious, yet fun-loving and goofy; I prefer being both scheduled and spontaneous; I majored in both the sciences and the humanities. (Does "I love cooking / I love eating" count, too?)

In fact, one of my favorite parts of chemistry was quantum mechanics and the wave-particle duality. (Which is also, incidentally, what makes Jesus' statement, "I am the light of the world" even more cool, to me: his duality, though, is found in his complete divinity and complete manhood. Are my connections too crazy? Am I a nut? Both Yes and No, right?) I love Niels Bohr's suggestion that anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not fully understood it. So too it is with many theological "truths" - God's sovereignty and man's responsibility? Okay, I won't get into that right now (though I might enjoy a conversation with any of you about it), but it's true: it's mind-blowing and all, and that's precisely why I love it. "How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress!" (also Bohr).

I also love the story of the blind men and the elephant; different angles can give us different ideas/perspectives of a unified whole.

And an excellent and helpful analogy from a book I'm reading called Psychology: Through the Eyes of Faith (Myers and Jeeves). In their chapter entitled "Are we determined or free?" they offer this as their closing (emphasis, mine):

So both the absolute determinist and the one who believes in God's utter sovereignty (perhaps the same person) are left baffled. To limit natural and divine powers makes little sense and only opens the door for pride in self and a judgmental attitude toward others. Yet somehow human accountability must be affirmed. Faced with this paradox of faith, we can take comfort in remembering that we cannot expect to comprehend fully the wisdom and justice of a being whose cognitive state is infinitely beyond our own. Our situation is like that of someone stranded in a deep well with two ropes dangling down. If we grab either one alone we sink still deeper into the well. Only when we hold both ropes at once can be climb out, because at the top, beyond where we can see, they come together around a pull. Grabbing only the rope of determinism or of human responsibility plunges us to the bottom of a well. So instead we grab both ropes, without yet understanding how they come together. In doing so, we may also be comforted that in science as in religion, a confused acceptance of irreconcilable principles is sometimes more honest than a tidy oversimplified theory that ignores half the evidence.