Abandoning Books Without Guilt

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City of God by Augustine

The scene of my greatest book abandonment. 525 pages read, only 566 to go.

There was a time when I tried really, really hard to finish reading any book that I began. I had two motivations:

  1. It felt like a failure if I couldn’t get through to the end.
  2. I also felt an obligation to the author. After all, if I had written a book, I’d want everyone to finish the whole thing, right?

I’m not sure when, but several years ago, this guilt went away. I read a great deal, but I probably drop almost as many books as I finish. There are a few reasons why I quit reading a book.

The book loses my interest. This is most common with novels. Last month, with great sorrow, I returned to the library a novel I really, really wanted to like. A new novel by one of my favorite writers, I had even tried to pitch a review of it to couple of publications. Now, I’m glad that neither of those pitches worked out. I gave the novel a good shot, but 100 pages in, I still didn’t care one bit for the characters or their problems.

Sometimes, a book loses my interest so thoroughly that I actually forget I was reading it, set it down somewhere, and simply never pick it up again. This happened with a novel I had taken to Urbana 12 with me. A few weeks after I returned home, I looked in the backpack I had taken with me and discovered the book. Strangely enough, I had found the book enjoyable enough while I was reading it, but if it had left so little impact on my brain, I didn’t see much point in picking it up again.

I realize the book isn’t worth my time. I mentioned this thought to my wife once, and she felt it was a terribly unfair thing to say. But it’s true! There are far more books worth reading than I will ever have time to read, so why should I waste my time on books that are poorly written, poorly conceived, or flat out wrong? Of course, I do waste my time on plenty of books exactly like that. Some of them just strike me as more of a waste than others.

The flip side of this is that I get so excited about another book that it overwhelms any desire to finish the book I’m currently reading. Since I’m generally reading several books at the same time, I usually don’t realize that I’m abandoning the book. It’s more like it gets bumped from the rotation. A week or two or three goes by, the book gets returned to the shelf, and it’s quietly dropped.

It’s not the book — it’s me. The book isn’t always at fault. Sometimes, I’m not ready for the book. It might be over my head, and I need to do some preliminary reading to work up to the book’s level. Occasionally, a book goes to an emotional place that I’m not willing to follow, as with my greatest abandonment to date, Augustine’s City of God. Over 500 pages in (which was still only about halfway through), I had to put the book aside. At the time, I was struggling with mild depression, and Augustine began a long, unvarnished meditation on death that I simply couldn’t handle. So I set the book aside, hoping to return to it one day.

What are your thoughts? Do you try to finish every book you start?

The Inhumanity of Unmanned Drones

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Let me begin with a disclaimer. I have never been in the military, and I have never been in a “kill or be killed” situation. That, however, is a trait I share with our last three presidents[1], so maybe my lack of combat experience doesn’t totally disqualify me from offering an opinion on this matter.

The use of unmanned drones to kill our enemies in war greatly concerns me, because it places such an enormous distance between combatants. There have been technological advantages in warfare for thousands of years — chariots, stirrups, the English long bow, firearms, and so on — but it wasn’t until the 20th century that one side could be removed from the battlefield and still cause enormous damage. Unmanned drones take this separation to a new level, with several dramatic consequences.

  • They reduce the human cost of waging war to zero. An unmanned drone can be piloted hundreds or thousands of miles away from the combat zone. A drone pilot can engage the enemy at no risk to his own safety. Isn’t this a good thing, though? No — the decision to go to war and kill other human beings ought to be something with enough risk to make it an option of last resort.
  • Without personal risk, the decision to wage war becomes deceptively easy. The discovery of Richard III’s body reminds us that, once upon a time, heads of state personally led their troops into battle. The cost of a foolish decision or poor preparation was often the monarch’s own life. We’ve come a long way from those day. With unmanned drones, presidents and prime ministers can send “troops” into battle without even the worry of seeing their citizens killed or wounded.
  • The human costs of war are disproportionately borne by one side of the battle. We find the accounts of war against women and infants in the Bible hard to stomach — and rightfully so. I don’t think we’re supposed to take pleasure in these measures. Today, however, we have the capability to wage the same kind of total devastation, without our soldiers even being present for the carnage.

Early in George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, Ned Stark sentences a deserter to death and carries out the execution himself, beheading the man with his own sword. He even has his sons watch the execution, to drive home the brutal nature of his duty. In contrast, the king, Robert Baratheon, employs a full time executioner and usually does not even attend the executions he orders. We are meant to understand that one man understands the value of human life and the heavy cost of taking it, while the other treats his power over life and death casually and dishonorably. One of these men is a barbarian, and it’s not the one who wields the sword.

What do you think about unmanned drones in combat? If you disagree with me, let me know why.

  1. True, George W. Bush served in the Texas Air National Guard, but he never faced combat or even the risk of combat. Jimmy Carter was discharged from the Navy in 1953, which means it has now been 60 years since a future president was in active military service.  ↩

Worship: Stand Out By Being Traditional

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[Update: Wow – thanks for all the shares and likes, everyone! If you enjoy this post, check out my new blog, No Small Actors. It’s dedicated to helping people find meaning in their daily work.]

Stand Out by Being Traditional

My friend Jeff Gissing recently wrote about why contemporary worship is not the answer for churches trying to revitalize their congregations. In fact, I would say that, if your church wants to stand out, try offering traditional worship. A church that takes its tradition seriously, that seeks creativity and freshness within its tradition rather than breaking from it, is going to stand out as different from all of the churches that are trying to look, sound, and worship in conformity with the latest trends.

Contemporary Worship Is Nothing New

There was a time — 10 years ago? 20? — when offering a “contemporary” worship service would make a church stand out from all the others. This simply isn’t the case any more. In the broader evangelical context, contemporary worship has won the worship wars. If you want contemporary worship, there are a dozen churches in your community that already offer it.

If your church is thinking about changing to a contemporary worship style or adding a contemporary service, what will you offer that’s different from the dozen churches already doing the same thing? If someone is searching for a church based on its contemporary worship, why would they choose your service over the one down the street? If they’re choosing a church based on contemporary music, can you compete with the megachurch that meets in the old mall, with the worship team of professional musicians and the best sound equipment that money can buy?

Living Tradition

When my wife and I were looking for a new church, we had a few things we were looking for:

  • Solid evangelical theology
  • A healthy community where we could serve and our kids could find friends
  • Traditional liturgy

It was extremely difficult to find churches near us that worshipped using a traditional liturgy. We love our new church — which is good, because it was the only church we could find that offered all three items!

Too often, “traditional” worship is a synonym for “old and tired” worship. I know a church that has been singing the same rotation of hymns for over 30 years, using the same pianist, who plays every hymn at the exact same tempo in the exact same style. (I think it would be called “Southern camp meeting.”) This is not “traditional” worship — this is dead worship!

“Traditional” does not mean “old.” It means that you are part of a tradition, which includes a history of styles, conventions, and content, but which should also make room for new works of art and new variations within the tradition. If a tradition does not make room for creativity, it’s an archive, not a tradition.

Ideas for Traditional Worship

If you are seeking revitalization in your church, what does your existing worship tradition offer? If it feels tired, try asking yourself a few simple questions:

  • Are we doing justice to the music? Is the music being played with a high level of skill and preparation? With the appropriate style and energy? If we’re just going through the motions, should we take a step back and examine our motivation?
  • Can we return to the tradition’s roots? For example, if the song was a Southern camp meeting song, what if we returned to traditional instruments and harmony for the song? What gave the tradition energy and life when it was new? Are there great songs that we have forgotten about that haven’t been sung in our church for decades?
  • What can we contribute to the tradition? Could we write a new verse to a traditional hymn? Write a new arrangement? Play the song on contemporary instruments? It might be as simple as discovering a new combination of songs that complement each other.

You might discover that the “old” tradition can still offer new life.

Photo credit: Laurelville Mennonite Church, via Flickr

The Parent as Dungeon Master: Our RPG Parenting Experiment

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RPG Character Sheet

Lydia the Dwarf Wizard, our 9-year-old daughter’s “real life RPG” character

Maybe I’m the only parent who has this problem, but our children hate doing chores. And they sometimes fight with each other. And each of them has several bad habits that we want them to stop. Stop me if this sounds familiar.

Last Christmas, my wife Elizabeth gave me this awesome book called Geek Dad by Ken Denmead. Based on his blog of the same name, the book offers (as the subtitle says) “awesomely geeky projects and activities for dads and kids to share.” A few examples:

  • LED fireflies
  • High-altitude video cameras
  • Eletronic origami

One of the chapters — “Parenting and Role Playing Games” — describes a Dungeons & Dragons-like system for getting kids to help out around the house and reward them for their successes. I mentioned it the other day to Elizabeth as something that might be fun to try, not really intending to put it place anytime soon. Our older daughter, however, overheard me and immediately fell in love with the idea. She could not stop talking about the idea of becoming a Dwarf Wizard, and she asked me several times a day when we start the game. So, on Friday during the kids’ snow day, we officially launched the Hickerson RPG. Continue reading →

Job Farming

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The usual metaphor is job hunting, but I have been thinking lately how much finding a new job is like that other basic human work: farming.

Here are a few things I’ve noticed.

Planting: You have to till the soil and sow your seeds.

Agriculture

Should we use the term job “farming” instead of job hunting? (Photo credit: thegreenpages)

If we wanted to extend the metaphor into a full analogy, the “soil” would be your network of contacts and resources, while your “seeds” would be the applications, resumes, proposals, etc., that (you hope) will eventually grow into work. You have to sow these widely, but you also have to sow in the right places and prepare the soil ahead of time.

Unlike farming, of course, you never quite know what you’ll reap from your efforts. Missionaries often talk about “sowing the seed widely,” which means sharing the Gospel with as many people as you can, without predetermining who you think will respond and who won’t. There’s an element to this in the job search, though it’s also important to make sure you’re planting the right seeds in the right soil.

Preparing: You have to keep your tools sharp.

While farming has seasons, it doesn’t really have an “off” season. The same is true with the job search. Just because you’re still searching for the perfect job doesn’t mean you can rest on your laurels (or lack thereof). You have to keep your job skills sharp so that you’ll be ready when the opportunity comes.

For example, here are a few things I’m doing to keep my tools sharp:

  • Writing for the Emerging Scholars Blog. 
  • Taking web development and design courses from Treehouse.
  • Working on some freelance and personal writing projects.

These aren’t just exercises, either. Last month, I spoke at Urbana 12, InterVarsity’s triennial student conference. This reminding me how much I enjoy speaking — and that I’m pretty good at it. This, in turn, has shaped the direction of job search in the new year.

Persevering: You need to learn how to wait well — and hope for favorable conditions.

As with actual farming, the eventual harvest is only partly under your control. Drought, flood, locusts, and such can destroy your hard work, but (more optimistically) good weather and the right conditions can make your effort far more productive than you ever expected. Unlike actual farming, however, you don’t know how long your season of waiting will be, which means that guarding against discouragement and complacency are crucial. All of this makes your planting and preparing even more important.

What do you think of this comparison? Do you have a better metaphor that you prefer?