The Ebenezer

Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer,  saying, "Thus far has the LORD helped us." (I Samuel 7:12)

One of my boys and I spent a lot of time today attempting to place a new stone atop our Ebenezer. It is the largest  stone yet in the construction, I'm guessing approaching 1,000 pounds. Here's the rest of the story:

There was a time when things weren't as good for my family as they are now. I had worked for the same company for over 6 years when they sold to a competitor, putting me out of work. For the next few years, I found myself underemployed in a major way. I worked as a carpenter. I worked as an assistant director of a non-profit, faith-based ministry. I worked again as a carpenter. We were never unfed. We never were without a roof over our head. However, it wasn't easy to persevere. We were subjected to the humility of going to the food pantry at our church. We were often unable to pay bills when they were due. This often puts you in the unenviable position of having to apologize and ask for the forbearance of your creditors. It was a dark time, often lonely, as our friends were unaware of what we were really going through. The ones that were aware were often unable to respond in meaningful ways. This was usually because they had been protected from such times in their own lives and they secretly assumed that it was something I had done, or more likely something I wasn't doing, that had caused our circumstances.

After traveling this unlit corridor for too many years, I eventually rounded a corner and saw light creeping from under a door. I can now look back on these years, remembering the times as bittersweet--unpleasant, yet not without benefit.

Trials and tribulations teach us what we cannot learn otherwise. There are at least two major lessons I learned in the Dark Times. One is the importance of contentment. Being satisfied where we are and with what we have is an underrated, under-practiced discipline. Not having a choice in your circumstances distills the general notion of contentment into real contentment. You are either content or your are unhappy all the time. The second lesson I learned was true thankfulness. Being thankful for the small things isn't hard either when those small things aren't so small. Giving thanks in all things, including those difficult efforts at being thankful for the hard times, is another thing that Christians talk about yet don't often fully understand.

During this time, I prayed that when we exited that dark hallway, we would be mindful of our friends in like circumstances and would offer whatever assistance we could, without judgment or criticism. I've not been able to do this on the level I'd hoped, but we continue to do what we can for our friends in their own dark times. I also feel it is an obligation that I primarily owe to our friends and family. This is the network of support that God created for such times. If you aren't there to meet these needs in those closest to you, who will?

After our exit, I built an Ebenezer behind our house. What is an Ebenezer, you ask? In this case, it is a pile of large stones I gathered from my property and organized in a conspicuous place. When you look out the back door, there it is--you can't miss it.  It is to serve as a reminder to myself primarily, and to my family also, that God's faithful hand has brought us to where we are. I wanted to remember His faithfulness and I wanted the opportunity to point to that monument and tell others of His goodness. I don't do it as often as I should, but that speaks poorly of my faithfulness, not His.

Give thanks, my friends, because God is good, all the time.

The Destruction of Our Planet

Most of you are familiar with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It concerns entropy, or general decay. It has been paraphrased in the statement, “Things run down.” It can also be stated in egghead terms, using words and concepts that I cannot begin to understand, yet the concept touches all of our live in a myriad of ways. Entropy is what prevents perpetual motion. Entropy prevents complete efficiency in the usage of all forms of energy. In other words, any process which converts matter to energy—even at the most efficient levels—experiences some energy loss. Entropy cannot be stopped, cannot be controlled, and cannot be affected beyond a certain point.

Yet we humans think we are invincible, beyond the reach of this basic law of physics. We think the planet can be saved by limiting carbon emissions, a notion which I think is flawed at its core (sorry, Al Gore).  We think that world peace is possible, yet we ignore the fact that the entirety of human history has not experienced a time when this was even momentarily true. How naïve. How arrogant.

Saving a snaildarter here or recycling a Coke can there will not slow down the eventual destruction of our planet. Our planet was created with its eventual destruction in mind. In the words of John MacArthur, “If you think we’re damaging our planet, wait until you see what God does to it.” Our planet will be destroyed, and it will most likely be before the polar icecaps melt or before the hole in the ozone level is mended or before Al Gore gets his next Nobel Prize.

Our sinfulness is responsible for the earth’s destruction. Frankly, I look forward to Earth’s obliteration for no other reason than it will prove the ultimate vindication of God, the Creator. I can almost hear God saying, “I brought you into this universe, Earth, and I can take you out of it!” 

So I leave you with this: given the eventual demise of this big blue marble, our energies would seem better spent making peace with our Creator instead of making love to Mother Nature. Whose side would you rather be on anyway:  Al Gore or Almighty God?

The Wedding Shoot: Part II

 Since writing "The Wedding Shoot", other events have unfolded.

(DISCLAIMER/COP-OUT:  From the beginning, I felt I was overextending my skills to shoot this wedding. This was, after all, a full-sized, real wedding. But my friend, the groom, asked me if I would be the official photographer, and I assumed he was taking into account the risks and my constraints, so I agreed to do the wedding.)

After my friend returned from his honeymoon, I gave him a couple of CDs containing the images instead of printing proofs, as this was the preferred proofing medium. Within a day or two, my friend, acting as the middle man between wife and photographer, came to me with a complaint. He noted that there was one photo missing: one of just the bride and groom. The moment he mentioned it, I immediately knew that no such photo existed. I didn't remember taking one, nor seeing it as I proofed the exposures. In the crazy chaos that existed in the post-ceremony formal shoot, I had overlooked that one exposure, a fairly critical one, yet overlooked none the less. I had bride/groom posing with every other person or group of persons in the wedding party in every possible configuration, but none of just him and her.

At that point, I told him there was really only two choices, unless time travel suddenly became a reality. One, deal with the absence of the photo, or two, let me "find" the "missing" photo (i.e., exercise my master Photoshop skills). He chose the latter.

I told him that any subterfuge concerning the "found" image would be his; I would trust him to take the image and use it in the best way possible. The "found" image actually turned out OK, but I remained guarded about her reception of it.

I haven't heard yet what she thought, but I'm thinking all will be OK. I prefer the truth be know, but it's out of my hands right now.

The Love of Low-Down

A life-long love of low frequencies has brought me much enjoyment in a variety of ways. I've always had a penchant for the bass guitar. This fondness has stayed with me for the better part of the last 33 years, believe it or not. Just think of it: I've loved the bass guitar longer than most of you have been alive.

Within my life, the 5-string bass has been developed/invented and grown in popularity. In the earlier part of my life, the 5-string would have been impractical. There was little or no sound equipment that could render its tones well, as the tonal range of the time was somewhat narrower. The open B on the 5-string vibrates at 30.87 hz, whereas the open E, 4th string on this and most other bass guitars, vibrates at 41.20 hz. The frequency response of older stereo/hi-fi systems would have most likely rendered anything as low as 30.87 as distortion, or at least the stereo equipment I used would have. Audiophiles of the time may have had better experiences.

The human ear can distinguish sounds generally in the 20hz-20khz range, so the 5-string is well within that range, but does tend toward the lower limits. Sounds below 20hz are called infrasound.

Infrasound is a cool phenomenon. Sounds in the upper infrasound range most often cannot be heard, but can often  be felt. Since they are unheard, the sound waves that are felt are sometimes attributed to other things, very often to supernatural events, believe it or not. Infrasound can create feelings of unease, nervousness, fear or awe in the unsuspecting. Infrasound has been used in some film soundtracks to create such feelings intentionally. Infrasound can also have physiological effects, too, in some cases causing breathing difficulty or digestive problems. Then there is also the fabled "brown note", which is supposedly a frequency which creates a resonance that can cause a person to have an involuntary bowel movement. Recent research has more or less proven the "brown note" notion to be mythical, not factual.

Low frequencies can do a number on a fellow, though, even within the hearable spectrum. I was at a concert once, on the floor not too far from the stage. The bass player of this particular band would play a particular note on this one song over several measures. This note created a resonance in this venue that was transferred to my insides. The feeling, one of a very noticeable pressure on my guts, was super freaky weird. Yet I still didn't experience the feeling that my body was out of control. Thankfully.

A love of lower frequencies does not make me a universal appreciator, though. When some bozo pulls up next to me at a stoplight, and his subwoofers are pumping unwelcome sound waves out of his car and into mine, I am inspired to perform violent acts, not to appreciate his offering. In the old days, people my age would try to do this but would only succeed in creating an unbearably loud noise with their stereos, almost all of it grossly distorted. Technical advances in stereo design have both blessings and curses, I suppose.

For a while, I had in my possession a Rickenbacker 4003 bass guitar, a Mesa Boogie Buster 200 watt amp, and a Mesa Boogie Diesel 2-10 speaker cabinet. When a friend of mine would come over and we would be playing, I noticed that when I played an F (first fret on the E-string), even at normal volumes, it would create a resonance in the room that would cause things to shake and fall off of shelves. It was awesome.

To me, the best application of the bass in music is this: it must be heard and felt.

 

The Wedding Shoot

A couple of weeks ago tonight, I was hard at work photographing a friend's wedding. I mentioned this in an earlier post, and it has finally come and gone. I'm thankful. Here are my reflections:

1. It wasn't truly my first wedding. I shot another wedding about 18 years ago. It was also for someone I  worked with at the time, but was held at a dude ranch and had a very non-traditional format. Guests sat on hay bales and the altar was the porch of a dog-run cabin. I shot the entire wedding on 35mm film using my Nikon FM-2 and a cheap, aftermarket flash. All my efforts ended up as for naught, as the couple has been divorced now for quite a few years. Also, what the friend paid me to shoot the wedding I spent on processing and gave it back to him as a wedding gift. Net proceeds: less than zero. I kept none of the images from that wedding, and I now regret it.
2. This wedding was a shakedown cruise for my rig, as I had never used it in this high-demand capacity. I have two flashes, a Stroboframe flash bracket and a bagful of rechargable NiMH batteries. I thought I was set.
3. I learned that the biggest demand on a wedding shooter is flash power. Powering my flash with NiMH meant that I was always changing batteries. In some situations, I was overdriving my flash to compensate for longer shots, creating more demand on my NiMHs. At the reception, I found a convenient place to plug in my 15-minute charger and I visited it frequently.
4. Experience is indeed the best teacher for the wedding photographer. I'll be prepared to do a better job on my next wedding (assuming there is one) than I did on this one, and so on and so on...
5. Autofocus was my worst enemy. I am still learning the intricacies of autofocus on a high-tech digital SLR, so I made a few mistakes, thankfully none terribly serious. Most common: when taking a picture of two people standing together, make sure the focal point is not the background between them. Amongst my table shots, I took a couple of  pix with a perfectly focused background and two fuzzy people in the fore.
6. Be ready for a marathon. I arrived at the church at 4pm and left the reception at close to 11pm. For virtually the whole time, I was carrying my rig, which had become an awful burden by the evening's end.
   
7. Don't be afraid to be creative. Some of my favorite shots involved spur-of-the-moment ideas I had.
   
8. Don't be afraid to get in the way. My presence as the wedding photographer was fairly important, so I got over the notion that I would bother someone or get in someone's way. "Excuse me. Excuse me..."
9. Out of around 450 exposures, I culled out around 100, turning over around 350 to the couple. Out of that 350, there were a few that I didn't much like, but felt they were important and left them in.
   
10. My friend and his wife are very understanding about the challenges I experienced. Thankfully, I don't think their expectations are super high, otherwise they would have hired someone else. Hopefully, they will be happy with the results. I'll at least give them a good price to pay for the experience, which was good.

When Congspeak Goes Wrong

It's no strange thing for the workplace to have its own peculiar jargon, words used in professional conversation that the layman may not understand. It makes communication snappy and precise and keeps outsiders in the dark. At my POE, we have jargon, too. But we've also developed a way of speaking which is more peculiar and not necessarily industry related or jargonesque. I call it Congspeak.

Mr. Cong is a man on staff, part time, who does the work of a porter, i.e., sweeping, taking out the trash, polishing things here and there. He is a Vietnamese national, now an American citizen. Rumors around work are that he left Saigon from the roof of the American embassy, leaving his family behind because his life was in peril. If that is true, he later retrieved them, reuniting all eventually in the good ole U. S. of A.. Another rumor, less likely true, is that he has a cleft in his skull, under the hairline, caused by a Communist-wielded machete. Both of these rumors link to another rumor that, while in Vietnam, he was in the employ of the C.I.A..

Mr. Cong is a gentleman in the truest sense. Polite, well-mannered and considerate. He's also very short, which has given rise to tales of him having to shop for clothes in the boys department. His grasp of the English language has not been absolutely firm. His usage is usually somewhat broken, as he often employs speech without the benefit of articles, conjunctions and other parts of speech deemed necessary for normal, unbroken English. He communicates just fine, only without the spit and polish most of us employ.

When I first started working here, another co-worker, Mark, would speak to Mr. Cong by mimicking his broken pattern of speech. Mr. Cong takes no offense. He is, as I've said, a gentleman, and it would be beneath him to take offense at such silliness.

Over the years of listening to Mark talk to Mr. Cong, I and others picked up the speech pattern, using it frequently to communicate to each other. The intent has never been to poke fun at Mr. Cong, and thankfully he has never misconstrued that intent. The reason we have and continue to use Congspeak is purely for its entertainment value. However, the usage, or in this case, the overusage of Congspeak has not been without consequences.

Early in my tenure, after I had become more accustomed to understanding and speaking the dialect, I found it hard to turn off. I would find myself using Congspeak to non-speakers, often generating curious glances and furrowed brows. When I caught myself engaging in Congspeak with non-speakers, I would get a little embarrassed and switch back over to normal English, hopefully not letting on that I had just done something truly weird. It was strange. Congspeak had wormed its way into my brain and wouldn't leave!

The process of using the dialect involves normal speech that deletes articles, conjunctions and other parts of speech that smooth the edges off of the words that trip from our tongues. For example, the question, "Are you going to the store?" would be rendered, "You go to store?".  Another problem occurs when the speaker gets too excessive in the words he omits and cuts out essential meaning from his communication. Take the above sentence, drop one more word, and you have: "You go to?". Without the benefit of the word "store" or the assistance of some type of context to fill in the gaps, it's gibberish. Well, Congspeak is essentially a dialect without rules, often translated on the fly, so those things happen. Often, the listener just asks for clarification by saying, "What in the heck did you just say?" or "Was I supposed to understand that?"  These questions are often peppered with expletives, depending on the mood or the moment.

Extreme Congspeak occurs when the speaker drops all parts of speech save one or two words, usually either a noun, a verb or one of each. A more complicated sentence may be rendered by adding an adverb or adjective to this two-worded thought. An understanding of context is absolutely necessary in making sense of this austere form of speaking. What began as an entertaining form of speaking with broken English has been transformed into a guessing game, with the listener attempting to divine the speaker's intent. The speaker, in employing Extreme Congspeak to a complex thought, often speaks in a halting, gapped fashion, as he is thinking of which words he can afford to omit and which ones he must hang onto.

I still find myself slipping into Congspeak in the presence of the undiscerning, but I'm getting better. The others I work with have their own problems with Congspeak, often the excessive usage of Extreme Congspeak. Curiously enough, this habitual dialect has clung to us for most of the last 10 years I've been working here. Those of us who were using Congspeak early on have infected others. Some of these others have chronic issues with Congspeak, often lapsing into unintelligible moments of seeming random words, having no order or discernable meaning.

It's good that this is mostly in the confines of our workplace. Those who don't understand might think we're nutso.

Not-So-Amazing Grace

There is a version--a "revision"--of "Amazing Grace" floating around out there which takes part of the first verse, "...that saved a wretch like me...",  and replaces it with "...that saved and set me free...". I've heard the same revisionism on CDs recorded by supposedly reputable vocalists, I've heard it rendered that way in churches (thankfully not in my denomination), and I've heard it employed by people who think they do God's work a service by correcting John Newton's "mistake".

This literally nauseates me, and I disagree on a number of levels. Here are a few:

1. Where does anyone get the gall to think they have the right to revise the words of this great man of God. Rather than deprive themselves of the opportunity to sing these words, wrought from the heart of a man who truly knew what grace was, these people choose to deface this work with their own sub-standard sentiments. People: move on to another song that better suits your weak, ineffectual commitment to the gospel and leave this one alone.
   
2. Anyone who thinks this an improvement over the original neither knows the meaning of grace nor has experienced it. Newton knew. He had experienced it firsthand. The "amazing grace" of his God and his Savior really had set him free. For those who have experienced God's saving grace, this verse is an anthem, a song of victory, not a condemnation or a put-down. We are wretches, and our only remedy is God's grace. John Newton himself said, at the age of 82, "My memory is nearly gone, but I remember two things, that I am a great sinner, and that Christ is a great Saviour."
3. I believe that this revisionism stems from a low view of sin. People would rather worship a God of their own making, not the God as revealed in Scripture, who is holy and therefore cannot tolerate sin. People want to think that they're not that bad, just a little so. They try and reason their way into God's favor, thinking that weighing their deeds in a scale and having the scale tip in the direction of the good in their lives is all it will take to please Him. There will be no reasoning before God's throne. No one will stand justified before Him on the merit of his own deeds, no matter how heavily the scales tip in their favor. God's holiness is absolute and unwavering. Man's sinfulness is also absolute (Romans 3:23). The sad and unfortunate truth is that people who take a low view of sin, both in their own lives and in the lives of others, think that they and others can come to God on their own terms. This delusion will follow many to their destruction. 

I heard a lady recently tell the story of how her late father hated this hymn. She proudly quoted him as saying, "I'm no wretch." Sir, you were wrong, but I guess you realize that now, don't you?