How do you communicate the gospel?

In a recent article, Ed Stetzer shared some thoughts from a class he taught at Re:Train. Stetzer had cohorts during his class define the gospel, and here is one of the results:

Our glorious God created everything we know. We, his creation, rebelled seeking our own glory and deserving the full wrath of God. The gospel is the good news that Jesus lived the life we should have lived to the glory of the Father. He died in our place, for all our sinful, false worship. Through Jesus, by the power of the Spirit, we live a new life to His glory. As we behold the glory of Jesus we are transformed to look more like Him, united in the Church as His body through which his kingdom is advanced making all things new.

- Worship Cohort

See anything missing? They hit a bunch of key aspects of the gospel: God, glory, Jesus, sin, death, the Spirit, new life, the kingdom. But amidst all this they miss the most important thing: resurrection! According to their gospel we, by the power of the Spirit, live new lives through Jesus, who is dead in their gospel. How do we have life through a dead guy?

This may seem like semantic nit-picking, but I don’t think so. To ignore and leave out the resurrection from our gospel communicating is to leave out the very truth that St. Paul deemed the crux of our hope.

Gospel Outlines

Another interesting aspect of the article is the apparent dichotomy between a God-Man-Christ-Response and a Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration presentation of the gospel. Both are helpful in partially presenting the gospel, but both fall short in that they leave out much of the Old Testament narrative and the story of Israel. Gospel presentations, though inherently abbreviations, that leave out such huge portions of scripture should be viewed as suspect.

Here is my short attempt to present an alternative to the two aforementioned presentations:

God’s Creation

God’s story begins with God. This may seem obvious, but we often ignore what is right in front of us and then easily forget it. God is the beginning, the author, and the central character of the story. But who is this God? God is the faithful and loving creator. He is the greatest thing or person there ever was. He existed before there was anything else, and he wanted to share his greatness (the Bible calls this glory) with others.

The first chapter of the story opens with God creating a kingdom. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). God forms his world and then fills it with light, sky, water, plants, animals, and the most important part of his creation–us. He created us to enjoy being with him in his good creation. “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Genesis 1:31).

God’s Rejection

But conflict quickly enters the story.

The first man and woman that God made reject the good plan he has for them.  Instead of enjoying life with God and how he designed things, they choose to do things their own way (the Bible calls this sin). They reject God and choose to live for their own glory and greatness instead of God’s. This choice to abandon God corrupts humanity and the rest of creation. Sin spreads like a cancer deep into the hearts of humans and brings death into the world. We see the effects of this all around us: death, disease, violence, injustice, and more.

What is worse is that this cancer of sin is buried deep inside of each one of us as well. It is woven into the fabric of our hearts. Each of us, in our own way, rejects God and we live for our own glory. God could have easily destroyed humankind for their rebellion against him, but, as we will see in the next chapter, he has a plan to fix this problem.

Because of the spreading rejection of God, the world spirals out of control. “The Lord (God) saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time” (Genesis 6:5). But a central theme throughout God’s story is hope. When things look bad, he promises that there is still hope, and he places the hope of fixing the world on to a group of people that he chooses.

God’s People

God chooses a man called Abraham and gives him a great promise. “I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Genesis 15:2-3). God gives Abraham children and is faithful to Abraham’s future generations. The rest of the Old Testament follows the story of God and his people, Israel. It is filled with God’s fatherly love and faithfulness to his people, his children, as he protects and provides for them. But they, like generations before them, are rebellious. They continually reject God and his plan to show his glory by blessing the world through them. What the story needs is a faithful Israelite, a true son of God.

God’s Son

There is hope at last! This chapter is the climax of the story. The first three chapters, the entire Old Testament, have been building toward this. This is how God is going to ultimately fix this world and the sin problem deep inside each one of us. God sends his son, Jesus, to save Israel and the rest of the world. Jesus lives to show how great God is and to reverse the brokenness of the world and the sin problem in us. Jesus heals the sick, raises the dead, and confronts sin in the hearts of God’s people. God is on the move to fix things, and Jesus is the center of all this.

Those that are threatened by this kill him. But more than that, in his death Jesus is the sacrifice for the sin and rebellion in the world. He takes the punishment from God that each of us deserve, which satisfies God’s anger because of our rejection of him. But God shows his faithfulness and love even more. God raises Jesus from the dead, demonstrating that Jesus was in fact God’s Son and his death was effective in paying the price for sin. God conquers and reverses the power of death in this resurrection. The world is now very different.

God’s New Creation

The story does not end there. God does an amazing thing in Jesus, but he we are still here! The rest of the New Testament tells the story of God’s new people, the church, spreading the message of who Jesus is and what he has done. Jesus is God’s solution to fix the world, and he has done this through his life, death, and resurrection.

God promised long ago that he was going to fix things, to make a new creation. God’s people expected this to happen at the end of time, but God has fast-forwarded this into the present with Jesus. Jesus is the beginning of the new creation. This may be hard to understand, but it is how the New Testament talks about the world we now live in. The future world that God has in store for us is breaking in to this world here and now through Jesus. He conquered sin and death and has the power of eternal life. Because of this he is the King, or Lord, of everything. In the beginning of the book of Acts, he ascends to heaven to rule the world from the throne of God.

Introduction

To gain a biblical view of capital punishment we must resist the temptation to turn scripture into a repository of timeless truths from which we can pluck applicable portions as needed. American history particularly signals this danger with the topic at hand.[1] Much of the popular theological debate surrounding capital punishment relies too heavily on a variety of overly simplistic, anachronistic, and muddled proof-texts. This harms the church and its ability to thoughtfully engage with complicated issues. Instead, we must see ourselves in the grand story of God as he renews his fallen creation and live out that reality by looking back to the story thus far and in anticipation of the end of the story ahead.[2] By tracing capital punishment as it unfolds in the Old Testament and sees fulfillment in Jesus and the Spirit in the New Testament, abolition will surface as the only appropriate Christian response to capital punishment.[3]

Setting the Story in Motion

The story begins with God and his good creation. Death has not entered the scene yet, but looms just over the horizon. God and his people, dwelling together in God’s chosen place, this is the great opening of the story that we must always begin with. The story takes a turn for the worse as humanity turns from God. But God does not end the story there with full judgment. Though punishment comes quickly for humanity’s offense, God demonstrates the coupling of his grace and justice early on in the story. Humanity surely deserves complete obliteration, but God holds back complete judgment. The promise of death to those who eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Gen. 2:17 is not fully realized yet. Death has come in human separation from God and the resulting exile, but he withholds death’s full power.

This theme continues with Cain and Abel as the first murder in the story unfolds. Cain’s murder of his brother Abel certainly leaves him deserving immediate death, but God does not unleash the full deserved punishment on him. The punishment for the crime does not, however, land lightly. Cain cries out to God, “My punishment is greater than I can bear…and whoever finds me will kill me,” (Gen 4:13-14). God marks Cain for his own protection and sends him away from his presence. This unfolding of the story amplifies the previous chapter; God’s people reject him and punishment quickly follows–exile–but its full extent is graciously withheld. Instead, the deserved punishment of death reduces to exile.[4]

The Start of the Story, Again

God’s gracious withholding of judgment does not last long. Soon man’s evil prompts God to wipe clean the known earth with the flood. Through his chosen survivor, Noah, God makes new promises that expand from the creation mandates. Echoes of Gen. 1 ring with new sounds, but among these the chiastic command to return the shedding of man’s blood upon those who shed man’s blood rests between the reverberations of “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 9:1,7). This pre-Mosaic prohibitive warning sounds as the clarion call of those who support an enduring mandate for capital punishment, and thus stands as the first murky course to navigate.

Gen. 9:6 towers as the most potent of the retentionists OT arguments, for if this text establishes the punishment of death for murderers, and if this endures through Jesus’ fulfillment of the law, then abolitionists have little ground to stand upon. H. Wayne House puts forth the most clear argument for a retentionist position based on Gen. 9:6.[5] House argues that this text is both legislatively universal in scope and prescriptive in nature. Later in the same volume, co-author John Howard Yoder counters that this text is not legislation, but rather wisdom.[6] The first problem with House is treatment of covenant language. Portions of OT literature such as these, even if they are still binding through today, must be read as stipulations of a covenant agreement, not as a treatise of jurisprudence.[7] Commentators also remain divided on the precise intent of this verse.[8] Such uncertainty should caution us from relying too heavily this verse as a proof-text, regardless of the conclusion. Though this is the first time God speaks directly concerning capital punishment, we will see later that it is clearly not the last.

Justice and the Covenant Community

Though Gen. 9:6 opens the OT’s dealing with capital punishment, the remaining OT texts concerning the issue come through the Mosaic legislation. Much of the debate focuses on the mandates contained in the Mosaic law. Though that path remains well-worn and worth traversing, we will spend much of our time examining how the covenant community integrated such mandates into the life of the community. Such an approach should not end in, “now go and do likewise,” but will hopefully prove useful for seeing continuity from creation to the new creation in God’s story.

The first recorded use of capital punishment within the covenant community occurs in Lev. 24. The son of an Israelite woman blasphemes the Name and curses as he fought with a man of Israel. The people bring him to Moses, “and they put him in custody, till the will of the Lord should be clear to them.” (v.12). The Lord speaks to Moses, commanding him to tell the people to stone the blasphemer, and ,“thus the people of Israel did as the Lord commanded Moses.” (v.23). For a people that had received the Mosaic law with an abundance of warnings of death for various transgressions, they seem reticent to quickly enforce justice.

A similar scene unfolds in Num. 15:32-36. The witnesses of a Sabbath-breaker bring him to Moses, Aaron, and the rest of the congregation. They keep the man in custody because it was not clear what they should do. The Lord then speaks and they bring the man outside the camp and stone him. Again the story repeats, Moses and the people take no action until receiving a word from the Lord.

A different story plays out in 1 Kings 21:1-16 with the stoning of Naboth. The people know no hesitation in dealing justice as Naboth finds himself the target of false charges. King Ahab desires Naboth’s vineyard but his offers of purchase receive complete rejection by Naboth. Pouting turns to conniving as Ahab and his wife Jezebel conspire to bring false charges against Naboth in the presence of the people. The root of the entire proceedings stems from the greed of Ahab rather than a zeal for true justice.

The next scene of God’s people stoning one of their own comes in Joshua 7:1-26 with the sin of Achan. The Lord declares to Joshua that Israel has sinned by taking some of the “devoted things” that they were commanded not to take from the victory at Jericho. Careful to administer justice on behalf of the Lord, Joshua elicits a confession from Achan. Joshua metes out justice fairly, even in light of Achan’s true confession, which stands in sharp contrast to the false charges brought against Naboth. Joshua sends his messengers, confirming Achan’s admittance of guilt, and then gathers the people and stones Achan.

Two notes must be made at this juncture regarding these examples. First, where justice is administered rightly, the people do not act until receiving a word from the Lord. Caution and reticence prominently stand with proper justice. Ahab and Jezebel’s justice defy this standard with their acting apart from God’s command. Second, a pattern of pronouncement, exile, and then execution emerges.

Though the main focus must rest on the examples of justice meted out by death in the OT, a brief look must be had at a handful of examples where capital punishment is permissible, though absent. The story of Cain and Abel was noted as the first recorded murder and the first opting for life over death where death surely is the justly deserved outcome. But Cain does not stand alone as a prominent character in the story who is shown mercy. Moses slays an Egyptian, but God does not punish him. Repeating the fate of Cain, God sends Moses into exile, a continuing theme for God’s people.[9] David has Uriah killed in battle, but again, God does not punish him with death. These examples provide shocking displays of God’s mercy poured out on those who clearly deserved his judgment.

From Exile to Resurrection

Capital punishment unequivocally took place in the OT. To sweep away such precedent with the general notion that a inarticulate tone of forgiveness and mercy ring throughout the NT does violence to God’s word. To give proper credence to the united message of both testaments we must see the sweeping storyline of scripture and where capital punishment flows along in the currents of biblical history. We have traced this flow throughout the OT, but we must now look to see the course charted through the NT.

Much attention in the aforementioned debate centers on isolated scenes in Jesus’ ministry and Paul’s words in Rom. 13.[10] Often a blurry picture emerges of the continuity between testaments from both abolitionists and retentionists. By tracing contours of the OT covenant community’s embodiment of God’s justice through the ministry of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, a sharper and more colorful picture emerges of God’s vision for capital punishment.

Though the OT scenes noted above point forward to the true image of capital punishment in the death of Jesus. We cannot allow a rally cry of, “Jesus fulfills the law,” to hastily brush aside the OT. Nor can we allow the OT to become the prodigal’s older brother to the NT.

We have already noted the various interpretive options for Gen. 9:6, and, as they often do, the words and actions of Jesus shed light on an otherwise dimly muddled scene. Jesus’ betrayal in Matt. 26 in particular shines forth with multiple angles. The location of this scene must be seen as a link to both Gen. 1 and 9. As noted above, Adam and Noah receive parallel communication with the Lord, but with Noah’s new flood-free earth acting as the new garden for God’s people. Just as Adam faced a time of testing in Eden and failed, Jesus faced his own time of testing in Gethsemane but proved faithful. And as Noah received a declaration regarding life and death from the Lord in Gen. 9:6, Jesus gives his own declaration in Matt. 26:52, and it is to this that we turn our attention.

The proverbial nature of Jesus’ words in Matt. 26:52 so closely parallel those in Gen. 9:6 that the latter must be heard as resonating the same proverbial melody, but now with subtle and fresh overtones. First, both texts form a chiasm:

Gen. 9:6

Whoever sheds blood

Of man

By man

His blood be shed

Matt. 26:52

All who

Take the sword

By the sword

Will perish

Jesus clearly does not use this as a timeless truth to be upheld by courts of law. Rather, he intends to stifle any violent notions held by his disciples. Life and peace will advance his kingdom, not death and violence. Jesus will not allow any hint of Caesar’s kingdom to invade his own, though he offers himself up to the worst that Caesar can do. This is the key to link Noah to Jesus. Noah was the new Adam, saved over and against the rebellious humanity of his day. Jesus is now the last Adam, the one who saves his people by subjecting himself to the rebellious rulers of his day.

If Jesus intended to uphold Gen. 9:6, as the retentionists see him doing, there would be no need for Jesus to reprove his bloodthirsty disciple. Surely Jesus’ lifeblood holds the most value of any human as he most clearly images the Lord, and his disciple must have acted rightly in seeing his master’s life threatened. The disciple could very well have justified his action based on Gen. 9:6. But Jesus startles us as he halts such behavior by recalling this pre-Mosaic mandate, surely a dissonant chord to the ears of his disciples. Jesus shows himself here to be the new Adam and the new Noah. Just as God chartered his new humanity in Gen. 9, Jesus charters the new and final humanity in these shocking scenes.

Just as Jesus fulfills pre-Mosaic mandates, we see the three Mosaic examples noted above reach their fulfillment in Jesus as well. A detailed analysis of these fulfillments would benefit us greatly, but space does not allow for such liberty, and as such a brief flyby will suffice. Num. 15:32-36 told the story of a man put to death for gathering sticks in a field on the Sabbath. Luke 6 finds Jesus with his disciples in a field as they plucked and ate heads of grain. Jesus here fulfills the role of Moses as the one who speaks for God. The people of Israel put the Sabbath-breaker in custody since they did not know what to do, and did not act until God spoke through Moses. Jesus brings immediate certainty that life characterizes his kingdom. His reference to David affirms his authority to speak on such matters. He does not just speak on behalf of the king, he is the king, the new David.

The next fulfillment comes through Mark 14 as Jesus himself, not his disciples, becomes the target of Mosaic justice. Lev. 24:10-23 unfolded the punishment dealt for blasphemy clearly. Again, after waiting for clarity from God, the people of Israel punish the guilty with stoning for blasphemy. Just as in Lev. 24, the accusation of blasphemy follows a fight. Only here, as we have seen, the accused–Jesus–refused to fight then and now. Just as the blasphemer was brought out of the camp to be punished, Jesus was brought out to receive the true punishment.

Though appearing on some levels to be a faint picture of Mosaic justice, the story of Naboth shows a fulfillment of the ultimate miscarriage of justice. The rulers of Israel at the time, Ahab and Jezebel, found a man standing in the way of their self-serving vision of God’s kingdom. For their own selfish purposes they had men bring false charges against Naboth, resulting in his stoning outside the city. This story too sees its fulfillment in Jesus, the man standing in the way of the present rulers of Israel and their vision for God’s kingdom. He readily accepts the illegitimate verdict and bears the punishment outside the city. The death of Jesus marks out the last example of the enforcement of the death penalty by God’s people.

The Resurrection and the Spirit

The last of Jesus’ fulfillments comes in his resurrection. Jesus faces the ultimate penalty on the cross, and he defeats the ultimate enemy–death–through his resurrection. This is where Israel’s entire story sees its fulfillment, its return from exile. Adam and Eve turn from God and are exiled from Eden. Cain slays his brother and is exiled east of Eden. Moses kills the Egyptian and is exiled to Midian. Continually the people of Israel sin and are sent into exile, and even when in their land in the NT, there is still a sense of exile, as Ceasar–not God–seems to rule them. Resurrection becomes the greatest victory for Israel and their representative Jesus. All of the defeats dealt to enemies in the OT pale in comparison to the defeat of death in the resurrection.[11] But one last transgression must be dealt with after such a great victory.

The Holy Spirit acted against Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 following the victory of the resurrection, which resonates a frightening echo of Joshua and the people of Israel punishing Achan amidst celebration and victory in Joshua 7. Parallels abound in this story, and this last fulfillment serves as the final verdict for examples of capital punishment in scripture. The death penalty, once enforced by the hands of men, is now enforced by the Spirit himself. The authority to use death as a penalty now rests solely in the hands of the one who defeated the power death.

Conclusion

Considering the contour and shape of God’s story of justice fulfilled in the person and work of Jesus and the coming of the Spirit, Christians must live in light of that reality by vigorously opposing capital punishment in all its forms. In spite of the injustice of his crucifixion and through the power of his resurrection, Jesus is the only man to defeat death, and therefore the only person with authority to brandish death as a weapon of justice. For us to attempt to wield such a power amounts to scoffing at his cross and spitting on his grave. Let us anticipate the new heavens and the new earth in the final chapter of the story, where justice and life will reign in the place of chaos and death.

[2] N.T. Wright, How Can The Bible Be Authoritative?, The Laing Lecture 1989, and the Griffith Thomas Lecture 1989.  Originally published in Vox Evangelica, 1991, 21, 7–32.

[3] The scope of this paper does not allow for wading through the economic, sociological, psychological, practical, and other factors in the capital punishment debate, especially as found in America. A sharp focus on the biblical theological debate will be the extent of any in-depth engagement.

[4] Contra Lloyd R. Bailey, Capital punishment. Abingdon Press, 1987. Bailey sees this scene as a straining of man’s relationship with God to its limit, not a prescription for how to treat murderers. He continues, “Beware of extracting rules for moral behavior from events in a narrative! For moral guidance, we should turn to materials that are instructional in form (e.g., the Ten Commandments, or the Sermon on the Mount),” 40. I agree with Bailey in his contextual settling of the Cain and Abel story in the midst of the story from God’s creation to his call of Abraham. But, I do not heed his warning as much as he would like. Caution should be taken as we proceed, but we will benefit greatly to not simply look to the instructional portions of scripture, but also to how the community in which they were written embodies those instructions and how God inserts himself into those stories.

[5] H. Wayne House and John Howard Yoder. The death penalty debate. Word Pub., 1991, 35-47. Also see Baker, William H. On capital punishment. Moody Press, 1985. Baker argues that authority given to the state to enforce the death penalty is implied in this passage and that a command is given here, not simply permission. 30-37.

[6] House and Yoder, 119-123. This is rather simplified and unfortunately brief summation of the opposing views.

[7] Walton, John H. Ancient Near Eastern thought and the Old Testament. Baker Academic, 2006, 293. He continues, “These commands of Yahweh were obligatory, as were the stipulations of the covenant, but that does not make them the legislation of a legal system. Legislation probably worked in Israel similarly to how it worked in the ancient Near East. The difference would be that the covenant and the stipulations framed the cognitive environment of Israel and therefore would have penetrated the legislative process, whatever it looked like.” 297.

[8] Claus Westermann. Genesis 1-11. Fortress Press, 1994, 466-469.

[9] Gardner C. Hanks, Against the death penalty. Herald Press, 1997, 27-28. I also owe much of my early thinking about the general shape and flow of the OT examples of capital punishment to Hanks, see 25-40. Unfortunately he does not develop the theme any further, as the rest of the book, though useful, deals predominantly with secular arguments. Also Hanks, Capital punishment and the Bible. Herald Press, 2002, 232.

[10] Rom. 13 sits prominently on both sides of the debate. Unfortunately it falls outside the purvey of this paper due to scope and space, but it deserves at least a brief mention. Both abolitionists and retentionists can hold their particular view and interpret Rom. 13 a variety of ways, as Paul makes no specific mention of capital punishment. One can vehemently oppose the death penalty and still be subject to a government that utilizes it. One can also wholeheartedly support the death penalty and peaceably live under an authority that prohibits its use.

[11] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God. Fortress Press, 2003, 121-128.

A gospel leaning only on the cross only leaves forgiven corpses.

A gospel of only the cross is like foreclosing on your house, someone steps in and pays it off for you, but then demolishes the house, leaving you homeless. No more debt, but no more home either.

A gospel with the cross and the resurrection is like someone stepping in to take your debt, promising he will completely fix your house and make it even more amazing than it ever was, but he also lets you move back in while he fixes it up. You owe him everything and can’t help but to join him and tell your friends.

This gospel God announced beforehand in sacred scriptures through his prophets. It is about his Son: on the human level he was born of David’s stock, but on the level of the spirit–the Holy Spirit–he was declared Son of God by a mighty act in that he rose from the dead: it is about Jesus Christ our Lord. Through him I received the privilege of a commission in his name to lead to faith and obedience men in all nations.

Paul’s letter to those in Rome who were loved by God and called to be saints, 1:2-5.

*Note: “Ain’t” is a local colloquialism often used as a contraction for laborious phrases such as “is not”.

So far I have frequented two superb coffee shops in town. One is adjacent to a bakery. This bakery sells an assortment of fun products such as a maple bar with a thick piece of bacon on it (pictured above). I’m wondering if I can convince them to make a bear claw with a sausage patty baked inside.

One fine young gentleman who works at said coffee shop is pictured here participating in a latte art competition I was invited to this past week. I had no idea such a thing existed.

The results were quite impressive.

In less than one week I managed to discover the best thrift store in town thanks to the help of a new friend. The tally so far? 4 books, one beanie, two pairs of gloves (I’m still not used to the cold), old-school editions of Risk!, Monopoly, and Clue, an Eddie Bauer gore-tex jacket (I’m not used to the rain either), new (to me) running shoes, and a copy of the Star Wars Christmas Album on cassette tape (pictured above)! Apparently the cassette tape version is quite rare and worth well over $100. (Kids: if mom tells you to stop shopping at thrift stores, you should probably obey her, but be sure to give money to your friends so they can buy you stuff.) It may be worth some money, but from what I listened to so far, it sucks.

I woke up Wednesday morning to find this fun surprise. Running tally? Kentucky 1, Chris 0.

Criminals out here got nothin’ on our boys back in California. They exploded the whole area around the CD player and still couldn’t get it out. Booyah! Kentucky 1, Chris 1.

But they did make off with my two Rich Mullins CDs and Sufjan Stevens Christmas Box Set. Crap! Kentucky 2, Chris 1.

Good news is that Louisville has good Middle Eastern food and good coffee. I forgot what the drink is called, but it had caffeine, honey, cinnamon and other fun things. Kentucky 2, Chris 2. We’ll see how this battle continues.

More to come, but so far so good here. Except it’s cold. And I have no blubber.

The third day of driving started out a bit colder than the others (down to 15°F) in Wichita as the penultimate destination (Iowa) drew closer.

This leg proved a fair bit milder than the previous day of snow and ice.

Nice open roads were standard fare.

This seedy character (the large man tipping his hat, not the flag) was about the worst thing encountered on this drive.

A few hours later we arrived at the home of our dear friends the Santamarias. They live in a sweet house in Cedar Rapids. Probably the coolest thing is that they have a laundry chute. The closest I’ve come to one of those has been watching Home Alone.

Inside their house were these strange little people.

One of them even attacked me. Fortunately I fended him off and lived to tell about it.

I will stay here in Iowa for a few days and drive the last few hours to Kentucky probably on Monday or Tuesday.

New Mexico tried its best this morning to derail the trip with snowy roads and icy conditions so much so that Odysseus may have thought that I angered Khionê the night before (that’s for you, Adam). But, rest assured, all is well.

All is well except for the cleanliness of my car’s exterior. No, I did not run over a lot of chocolate ice cream. Those are mudsicles.

“How could that have happened?” you may ask. This is how. Driving, stopping, and driving some more through a steady stream of snow for a few hours will do it. Note: descending down a spiraling highway off-ramp caked with snow with no tire chains is about 10 minutes of no fun.

You know what else is no fun? Picnic areas. As you drive down a lonely highway full of snow, you may desire a place to take a quick “rest” break. Thus the wonder of the “Rest Area”. But picnic areas are no such wonders. Some genius decided to build a few of these along the I-40 in Texas, but didn’t feel like including any restrooms. No toilets, no urinals, not even a squatty. Just a quiet place (because no one has a picnic in the middle of Texas when it is below 30 degrees out) for truckers to park and take a nap.

But Oklahoma came to the rescue! Stopping at a gas station that John Wayne probably used (top picture) also reaped the great bounty of a sweet meal at a place called “Restaurant”. I didn’t bother to ask what it was really called but that’s what the big sign had written on it.

I was going to order the country fried steak, but they were out. So I settled for BBQ beef. It came with pinto beans, potato salad, Texas toast, and fried okra. The coffee tasted like it was brewed with grody gym socks and old toilet water, so it was utterly fantastic (but not as good as Silver Dollar’s).

Speaking of toilet water, the men’s room had two showers in it. Apparently people out here don’t know how to eat and instead of simply wiping their hands clean they need to shower off after a meal. If that is you, then this is the place to eat!

Driving through the deserts of California, Arizona, and New Mexico (pictured above) is not the most fun thing to do. Especially 11 hours of it. But there were a few things worth a gander.

Like this contraption. You never know what you are going to find in gas station bathrooms in the middle of nowhere. It is comforting to know, however, that the truckers who frequent the I-40 in New Mexico probably smell quite nice. I need to get me one of these.

I had the great joy of stopping by Flagstaff, Arizona and having lunch with a couple friends. I was told the avocado burger was the way to go, and it was. You might not be able to tell, but this burger was big. We’re talkin’ government stimulus package big. Also, I believe the homemade buns were lightly brushed with some sort of garlicky buttery substance and then grilled a bit. Fantastic.

This was the aftermath.

Who knows what tomorrow has in store as Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas shall all be traversed with impunity.

It’s official. I am moving to Kentucky.

In about a month I will throw a few things in my car and drive across a good portion of the land of the free and the home of the brave to the wild and untamed land known as the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

For  the uninformed, the great Commonwealth of Kentucky (or, the Bluegrass State, henceforth referred to as the BS) is home to the highest per capita number of deer and turkey in the United States. We’ll see what I can do about that. The official dance of the state is clogging.

I am transferring to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY to finish my master’s degree, and will likely spend at least the next three to five years there in the BS.

If this is news to you, dear reader, and are disappointed that I did not inform you of this via personal verbal exchange, or at the very least through some sort of antiquated physical written document, then I am sorry. I did not intend to leave anyone in the proverbial dark.

In all sincerity, I am going to miss California. But even more-so, I am going to miss the people that I have in California. I hope to spend time with all of you before I leave.

Has he not already poured out immeasurable grace upon us who were lazy, stupid, greedy, sick, undeserving, ignorant, worthless, destitute, poor, and all the while taking advantage of the free handout of common grace?

Apparently my life was more important to Jesus than his own. But do I believe that the lives of others are more important than my own?