BlakeAtwood.com

..in a real, honest-to-goodness, book no less: Religion and Technology in the 21st Century: Faith in the E-world. That link should take you to the page where I’m quoted while highlighting my name. The quote’s from an article I did way back in 2001 for Suite101, The Internet Church?.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. I posted to a message board around that time as well, and the post made it into Making Sense of Church.

Some day I won’t even have to write a book; I’ll just compile my greatest hits.

Brought to you by Outer Banks Carolina Designs Realty. For that time you’re in Carolina, looking for a rental place. Happens to me all the time.

I began writing my story a few days ago. It’s a vain attempt, in both meanings of the term, to recall my life thus far. Age brings some sense of discernment as to past events. It’s helpful and sometimes cathartic, to relive painful moments only to realize that they were necessary. I’m going year by year, attempting to remember events, people, stories…It’s amazing how much I’ve forgotten. Or, conversely, how much I remember after stewing on a time period or subject. It’s also turning into a bit of a research project, as questions arise as to the timing of events, or someone’s name, or a motivation for action. Sometimes I guess. What’s more fun, since this is a personal project likely to never see the light of day in someone else’s hands, is commenting on a person or event. This is where it gets more therapeutic than anything else. I recommend the practice to everyone. It’s surely cheaper than actual therapy.

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The ABC’s of a Church Website: D-F is now online. It’s the second part of a multi-part series of tips for church websites. It’s especially helpful if you’re using Wordpress as your CMS.

My review of El Charrito, a local Mexican restaurant, is now online at the Eating Fred, Texas blog. You should read it, if not for the witticisms ever inherent in my writing, then for the movie trailer that I link to towards the end of the piece.

For background, Fred, Texas is an actual place. The proprietor of the Eating Fred blog wrote a trilogy of fictional books using the place as his main setting. He decided to set up a blog about restaurants with a few caveats: you must like the food and the place must not be a chain. I’ll be doing a few more reviews in the coming months.

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Editors have to see what most of us don’t. There may be a gem of a good idea hidden beneath a mountain of prose. Or, there may be mellifluous words that are all sound and no fury. Either way, it’s the editor’s job to point the errant writer to the path of writeousness. (Yes, I know. I can hear the groans from here). The Evil Editor (actual identity unknown) exists to help those that can’t help themselves. He or she serves up four options for your reading pleasure:

1. Face-Lifts: Query letters for possible books are submitted to the site, posted as-is, then edited and commented upon by the Evil Editor. Often hilarious, but also helpful
1. Guess the Plot: The EE offers the titles to queried works. Readers write 25 word possible plot summaries. Quite hilarious, and fun to try.
2. New Beginnings: Authors send the first 150 words of their book to the site. Readers add what they think might comes next.
3. The Next Line: Like New Beginnings, but it’s usually an excerpt with a lot of dialogue. Readers add the next few lines.
4. Q&A: Ask the EE a question. Hope for an answer. Pray for your self-confidence.

What’s nice about the site is its wit as well as its value. There’s a method to the madness here, and it will actually help you become a better writer. At the very least, it may give you some good ideas for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

[via the Wunderfool]

[with a nod to advertising pens]

The saddest thing about growing up is the inevitable distances that slowly, surely, methodically, and daily creep into our lives. High school graduation marks a departure of joy and uncertainty, especially for those that move away. The sadness of leaving is there, but it’s muted by the expectant anxiety of new places, new people, and new experiences. You don’t realize how much you miss the people you grew up with until much later in life, and by that time, everyone has kids, or a job, or anything else that takes the place of the innocence and time-lessness of being a kid.

Leaving college is better, but worse. Some people remain in town. Others hang around for a few years until they find their calling. The sorrow of absence is dulled by the slow trickle of the friends still close by…until the day when the trickle stops, because no one’s left to leave. You’re the one left behind, only it’s not the rapture, it’s just growing up.

Sure, you keep in touch - there’s email, myspace, facebook, IM, cellphones - I’ve even heard of these things called letters. But it’s not the same. It can never be the same.

I wish I could go back and tell myself to enjoy that time more, to fully realize how much I took these people for granted, to tell myself that someday, despite all the teacher’s warnings, I would miss those days…

The saddest thing about growing up is realizing how far you’ve come, how far you still have to go, and whether or not the distance from who you were to who you are is impossible to retrace.

I have far too many pieces of unfinished writings floating about on my computer. I’ve decided to put them online for anyone’s viewing pleasure, and it also helps me feel better about not writing as much as I would like. I think reading these items from my past will spur me on to better things, because I remember writing because I loved it, and because I thought I was good at it - and then I let life get in the way. To life I say, “Leave Me Alone, I Just Want to Write.”

Now that I’ve got that out of my system, here’s the first of some items From the Vault. This is a finished piece, a paper for a college class no less (Movies & Cultures, a most excellent class with a most excellent professor, Dr. David Gaines). Our task was to write a paper on “The Movie That _____ My ______,” where we, obviously, filled in the blank.

I just reread this paper, and thought there were more than a couple of phrases I liked, and was even surprised that I could have written anything like that. So I’d like to share. It’s a little long, especially for blogging, but what do I care?

The Movie That Clears My Pathway
by Blake Atwood
Movies & Cultures
Gaines
December 5, 2000

To this day I have no idea why a twelve year old boy and a few of his friends would pay seven dollars per person to watch a two hour drama about an aging Oxford don and author who meets a younger woman who loves his books, marries the woman to obtain her legal English citizenship, then falls in love with the woman, but only to lose her in the end to cancer. The movie I have just pitifully described is Shadowlands, the true to life story of Christian author C.S. (“Jack”) Lewis’ May-December romance with Joy Gresham. In retrospect, I think the only reason we went is because we all knew a little of Lewis’ writing and our parents approved of the movie. What I most remember about this movie was that one scene in particular made me cry, as much as my twelve-year-old stereotypical façade of emotionless masculinity desired to hide that fact from everyone around me.

During my first viewing, as I was merely a boy myself, all of my empathy went toward Joy’s young son Douglas. The scene that bedewed my eyes occurs after Douglas’ mother has died. Douglas and Jack are sitting on a bed in an attic and Jack has yet to speak to Douglas since his mother’s passing. Douglas sobs, “I sure would like to see her again.” Jack replies, “Me too,” and they both begin to weep. I began to weep. This scene may have been the first time I recall where what I felt overrode what I knew. In other words, I knew this was only a movie (though based on a true story), yet I felt the boy’s pain. That experience was my first empathetic moment of connection with a ‘fictional’ movie character.

During my second viewing of Shadowlands, I see more of myself in Jack than in the boy. In Jack I see a reflection of who I was, who I am, and what I may yet become. My second viewing called me back to the first time I had seen the movie. Waiting eight years between viewings does that – I believe this is what we call nostalgia. My first viewing was as part of a dating group. In other words, each guy had a certain girl to sit by, or so I recall. During my most recent viewing, I continually noticed Jack’s prepubescent-like state of awkwardness while he is first getting to know Joy. He quickly fixes his hair when her back is turned. He rubs his hands together and fidgets with a corkscrew when he wants to ask her something incredibly important, something akin to “Uh. Me Jack like you. You like Jack?” Watching Anthony Hopkins act as an old man with youthful inhibitions took me back to my own first few years of dating. I suddenly realized that not only did I act that way, but I continue to act that way. Certain women do tend to sever the brain from the mouth, leaving only various functions of the involuntary nervous system in working order. And so, with my second viewing I empathize with Jack.

I have heard it said that the longest trip some people will ever take is only a two-foot journey. Persons traveling this road are entwined in the tangles of their minds, locked in the cages of their brains, or caught within the confines of their craniums. The road they travel is the road between the mind and the heart. As I began to look more closely at this movie, and Jack in particular, I saw the road I am currently traveling and a clearing of the pathway. For example, Jack constructed a world unto himself, a cottage of comfort and content. Surrounding himself with books and knowledge, words, ideas, and professors, Jack lived a safe life. An especially pertinent dialogue evidences this fact. Joy questions Jack, “Reading is safe isn’t it? Books aren’t about to hurt you?” I fall into this category, staying safe with intangibles. Jack replies, “Why should one want to be hurt?” Joy’s sharpness cuts, “That’s when we learn.”

Moving solely in the labyrinth of his mind, Jack knows and espouses so much about life but knows so little about living. How I would love to write someday as Lewis once did, to possess the mind that Lewis once had – but oh how I would not want to be adorned with the grayness of wisdom only to learn I had never truly lived! One of the repeated phrases in the movie is a true quote from the real Lewis. “Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” “Pain” is an easy word to speak until it manifests itself in experience (or until it is shouted through the megaphone), and experiences are easy to evade if one lives confined within one’s mind. One American woman, sneaking through the perimeter wires surrounding Lewis’ heart, annihilates his world of intangibles. As she leads, so begins the journey from Lewis’ head to his heart.

The truest realities are often unrecognizable because we refuse to believe they are true. They are so extra-ordinary that we become blinded by everyday banality to their true beauty. We do not stop to smell the roses along the pathway. So we pass reality by and strive to thrive on the hopes and dreams and loves and losses of others, often through friends, books, television, or movies. Vicarious living is no living at all. It is more parasitism than anything else, yet this defines Jack’s relationship with his books and his learning, his safety net of thoughts. Another repeated quote within the movie is this: “We read to know we’re not alone.” Jack, near the end, questions, “Do we love (others) to know we’re not alone?” Here we see Jack beginning to press his nose to the rose.

In a touching scene in which Joy and Jack are outside for one of their last times together, Joy tells Jack that “The happiness now is part of the pain then. That’s the deal.” Jack does not understand what she means until she has passed away. Joyless Jack suddenly sees what he had missed all along. The experience gives a depth of meaning to “happiness” and “pain” no words could describe. In a scene I may be forcing too much meaning upon, the bed-ridden Joy dies in Jack’s study surrounded by his books. Their love has finally uprooted his world of knowledge; this world is replanted within the reality of experience and both grow in harmony, nourishing each other (or as I presume, since the real C.S. Lewis wrote numerous books even after his wife’s death, including Surprised By Joy, the book responsible for most of this movie). In the last statement of the movie, we hear Jack’s concession. “The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.” Now he understands “Pain” through experience, and not merely “pain” through words and definitions. So ends Jack’s journey, but only to begin again. For the road from the head to the heart is a road eternally traveled.

I have yet to experience true, deep, lasting love, and according to the movie’s main theme, I have yet to experience lasting pain (a la Bob Dylan in ‘Not Dark Yet’ - “Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain”). Still I know what the words mean, and have some vague notion of what they appear to be from what I have read in books or have seen in media. But I cannot truly know these intangibles until I have experienced for myself the tremendous love accompanied by its antithetical pain this movie so beautifully depicts. This movie clears my pathway precisely because it shows who I am - a student content with books and knowledge and thoughts and ideas. This movie clears my pathway because it shows who I may become – an aged professor more worried about the connection of thoughts in my head than the relationships with people in my life. This movie clears my pathway because it shows me who I could become – a wise man in love with an intelligent woman, experiencing life first-hand, viewing the world’s reality through suffering and through love, from one end of the spectrum to the other, recognizing that life can be described in so many words and yet still be meaningless without the experiences that give conviction to one’s words.

The journey from the head to the heart begins as circumstances force movement, either toward emotion and experience or thought and vicariousness. Jack concludes, “I was given a choice as a boy, and as a man. The boy chose safety; the man chose suffering.” Will you pass by the roses because they have thorns, or the woman because she has mortality? Or will you pick them up despite the risks and take them with you down the road to life-truly-lived? It’s a question I will ask myself for years to come.

PFJ: Playing for Jesus

On the whole, this article is a good thing. Whenever someone is willing to talk about their faith in front of hundreds of people, it’s a good thing, right? But what if the faith they talk about perpetuates a harmful stereotype of Christianity, namely, that Jesus loves a winner.

The author cites several well-known athletes who ‘give props’ to God for their success. The story is even book-ended by a baseball player giving his testimony at the beginning and then hitting two home runs at the end. The lesson? Trust in Jesus. Hit home runs.

What would Job have thought?

Though I have no qualms about Jesus blessing us with good things in this life, I have major qualms about equating God to Santa Claus as giver of all good things.

See Job 1:21.

And, after re-reading the closing sentence about the home runs that begins with “There was no shame that night..,” I’m even more incensed. Would there have been shame had the baseball player struck out every time and his team lost by 20 runs? No. See Romans 8:1.

In the good and in the bad, Jesus loves.

I wonder if I’ll exist long after I’m gone.

Sometimes I’ll do searches looking for what websites link to the website I’m involved in. To wit, I was checking what sites link to tnova.org, my church’s page, and found this old…gem:

http://sudrumguy.freeservers.com/

This is one of my old homepages, and the funniest thing about it is that, when I had the site, it was free, and there was a small banner ad at the top of the screen. Now when you look at it, there are banner ads everywhere. It’s a little humorous, and it makes me glad I can pay for my own site now. So enjoy. There’s some good stuff there that I’ll have to copy to my new site soon.

I wrote this a few months ago for another website, but didn’t think it would work there, so, to appease my inner critic that hates when some writings never see the light of day, or the glow of a computer screen, here it is:

How the Three Piece Classic Rock Trio Affects Web Design

I’ve played drums in churches for 10 years. I’m only 25. Although I should be a lot better than I am now, I’m not bad. Most people, if they’re not impressed with my playing, appreciate what I do. There are those that are impressed, and that always makes me laugh because I know hundreds of drummers quite more accomplished than myself.

If you’ve ever heard a new drummer practice, it’s an experience you wouldn’t want to repeat. It’s mildly controlled, endless noise. Excruciating comes to mind. New drummers are the worst, because they want to do the things they hear on CDs. They want to emulate drummers that have been playing for years. So, to make up for their lack of experience, they try to play more notes, as loud and as fast as possible. I speak from experience on this point.

Although “church drumming” for worship services is somewhat different than drumming for bands, there remains one hard and fast rule of the drummer. He is not the important one, but he is necessary. He is the backbone, and, unless given freedom to do so by the rest of the band, he should remain on his drum throne keeping time instead of playing lots of notes really loudly.

I learned this lesson early, and often played too simply, restraining my creativity because I didn’t want to affect the mood of the room. Then I learned how simple drumming, coupled with precise dynamic control, and merged with an underlying sense of the room’s atmosphere, could become my creative outlet. I became a better drummer, but, moreover, I became a better band member.

Enough about me. Web design is just like drumming, only with less broken sticks and fewer hot chicks. (I married a hot chick, so we’ll just say it’s true). Web design is a creative outlet with one purpose in mind: communication. A song communicates to the heart; a site communicates to the mind. Both require knowledge of the audience in order to reach them in the most effective way.

Much has been said about web design shifting from less complex and less visually schizophrenic to a more clean and efficient look.

Web designers are the drummers in the three piece classic rock trio. You are not the important one (your church or your clients are), but you are necessary. As many have said before, your casual internet user should be able to go to your site and have it “just work.” Pieces of flair mean nothing if content isn’t accessible, straightforward, or easily found.

Don’t try to emulate everything you see on websites you appreciate, but do try to emulate one or two ideas or visuals you would like on your site. Make a list of items you’d like to be on your site, then work through that list at your own pace, making sure you have a good understanding of what you are doing, and, possibly most importantly, why you are doing it. Your church has a reason for existence; so should your website.

I’m starting to write for a website not my own. It’s called betachurch and it’s about the church and technology and the uses or lack of use thereof. It’s at:

http://www.betachurch.org

I don’t have anything up there yet, but I believe I will soon. I’ll also be promoting betachurch a lot, so please don’t hate me for it. Just like Life cereal: “Try it. You’ll like it.”

It’s my plan to do weekly articles. They’re just the right size for easy digestability, and the range of topic is pretty wide open, as long it concerns the church and technology. Any suggestions? Leave a comment.

Also, the betachurch site is getting a redesign sometime, hopefully soon, although I do like it now, but I’ve seen a mockup of the new site, and it looks pretty cool too.

So, yeah. I’m writing again, with a deadline of sorts.

It makes my fingers happy.