R.P. Nettelhorst's Blog, page 119

Hacker’s Apprentice

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Sometimes when you write something, it doesn’t quite work. And sometimes, you can’t immediately figure out what you can do to fix it. I have a novel which had the working title Hapax. I hated the title, but I felt like I needed something to attach my mind to it. The title is a shortened form of the Latin phrase, hapax legomenon, which is used to refer to the sole occurance of a word in a given text. In biblical studies, it gets used a lot in the Hebrew Bible; there are actually a whole slew of words that only show up once in the whole Bible (which makes them hard to be certain about their meaning). It tangentially applied to the book’s story. In any case, I wrote the first draft and struggled with the middle through the end of the thing and frankly, it just didn’t work or make much sense. So the book has been languishing on my hard drive for a long time and I’ve wondered if I would ever figure out how to fix it or what to do with it (besides ignoring it or erasing it to reclaim the hard drive space).

But over the last few days, and especially today, I figured out what needs to be done to make the story actually come together and work. I spent much of Thursday working on it, rewriting and changing. Ultimately I’m going to have to trash significant parts of it, or at least radically change them–and then add some stuff. A bunch of stuff. But the story should actually be good then, or so I hope. Here’s the opening chapter, new title and all:

Hacker’s Apprentice

Chapter One

Shoving his hands in his pockets, he shambled away. His breath left great puffs of steam in the air, as snowflakes swirled. The air was cold and harsh against his lungs. He didn’t know which bothered him more, the fact that he couldn’t afford a meal at a simple fast food restaurant, or that he was alone and had no hope of the sort of life he could witness through that window.

His feet shuffled, kicking at the slush; his toes were cold and wet, and they hurt. He’d need to get to the mission soon or he might get sick or have frostbite. His nose hurt too, and so did his cheeks.

He swallowed hard, fighting back a sudden urge to cry, and stumbled more quickly toward the corner. The light was red; he punched the button and waited for it to change.

“Cold enough for you?”

He jumped, startled by the voice.

“What?” he looked around, expecting to find two people involved in a conversation; instead, all he saw was a single face, dark brown eyes gazing serenely at him. He looked behind him, but no one was there. “Did you say something?” Then added quickly, “I’m sorry.” He punched the button again.

“Nasty weather; way too cold. I don’t like the cold.” The voice was cheerful.

“You’re talking to me?” he asked.

“Um, yeah. Not talking to myself, at least I hope not.” The mouth below the brown eyes twisted up into a delightful smile, revealing perfect, straight white teeth. He let his eyes wander from that smile, up to the nose, then over to the ears, mostly hidden by thick dark hair. The woman to whom all these things were a part, was absolutely stunning. Even when he was working in the library and still had a real life, he would never imagine she might actually be talking to him. Now, in his homeless condition, it made even less sense.

“Yeah, it’s really cold. My feet are frozen, my nose is frozen. I can’t get warm.”

“I feel that way, too. A hot cup of coffee would sure help just now, eh?”

“What I wouldn’t give for that…” he muttered, mostly to himself.

“You headed for that Del Taco?” she asked, chin indicating a fast food place on the other side of the street.

The light finally turned green.

“Uh, I…” he began.

“I’m kind of hungry too,” she said. “How about you?”

“What?” he stared at her.

“My treat.” Her eyes were merry, and her mouth was still smiling.

He just stared at her eyes; they were the most lovely eyes he had ever seen in his life, and surely he was dreaming. He was a homeless bum, and no one paid any attention to guys like him. Certainly not someone with eyes like that.

But she walked with him across the street, and opened the door to let him into the restaurant. And she pointed at the menu, and asked him what he wanted and she cheerfully ordered two large steak burritos and the biggest cup of coffee that they offered, which included free refills. That was the best thing about fast food places; if you could just get the money together, they would give you free refills for as long as you stayed in the building. Of course, you had to be careful not to overstay; he’d found that after much more than an hour, he started getting dirty looks from the employees. No one had tossed him out of a place yet, but he had never pushed his luck. Like if he visited the library. He stayed in the back, and he avoided any of the employees and always stayed awake; the library was warm, and he could read, and that could make a day go by pretty well. And no one bothered him. Even the staff that might remember him from before, when he had worked there—they didn’t bother him. They never said ‘hi’, either; maybe they didn’t recognize him anymore, not with the beard and the bad clothes, and the bad smell, and besides, they might be embarrassed, not know what to say. What did you say to an ex-collegue, anyhow? What could you talk about? What wouldn’t make him unhappy or upset him? He knew what ran through their minds. It’s what would run through his mind if the tables were turned.

He sat down in a booth, cradling the cup of coffee between his hands as if it were a delicate bauble of infinite worth. He brought it slowly to his lips and let the heat sink down his throat and into the middle of his body. It radiated outward. Even his toes seemed less chilled now.

“Here you go,” said the woman with the pretty brown eyes, setting the tray of food on the table, and then sliding in next to him.

Next to him? He slid away, toward the far corner of the booth, startled beyond words.

“I can’t tell you how hungry and cold I was,” she said. “I’m so glad I ran into you.” She was still smiling, hands busy lifting the food from the tray, distributing her plate of nachos and his burritos as if they were the oldest and best of friends. She pulled the lid off her own cup of coffee and made a satisfied sigh after a long drink.

“What could be better, eh?”

“Um, yeah…” Pealing off the top of the paper wrapper on his burrito, he took a bite, half expecting to find it laced with glass or poison, but instead, it was both hot and exactly what a burrito was supposed to be. “This was very kind of you,” he managed, swallowing first before speaking.

“You looked like you needed a friend,” she said simply. “I saw how you were staring into that McDonalds.” She paused. “But I like Del Taco better.” As if that explained everything. “My name’s Alyssa White.” She held out her hand. “What’s yours?”

He gripped her hand automatically and gave it a perfunctory shake. But she didn’t release her hand right away; instead, she squeezed it gently and then let his hand go slowly.

“People call me Mudge,” he finally managed.

“I didn’t ask what people called you. What’s your name?” Her eyes bored into him with an intensity that only added to his discomfort and confusion.

“Drew Mudgeford,” he said reluctantly. It made him uncomfortable to use his own name, as if he were no longer worthy of it. But once it left his mouth, it was as if a cork had popped. Words began pouring out, making their way around the bites of his food and sips from his coffee. Mudge couldn’t stop; the words just gushed, an embarrassing torrent, revealing his soul.

When he finally ran out of words, he felt his face reddening in embarrassment. That wasn’t the sort of stuff to tell a stranger, especially not a beautiful stranger. But a homeless bum who hadn’t bathed in a week, wearing the same unwashed clothes for days and days was not exactly the sort of person who was ever going to get lucky, so what did it matter if he was a bore on top of everything else?

“You’ve had a difficult time of it; but I suspect you won’t be down forever.”

“I used to think that,” mumbled Mudge, finishing the last of his by now cold burrito; he’d been so busy talking that he’d forgotten to eat.

“It’s only reasonable that you’d be discouraged.”

He nodded. She smiled at him and stood up, wiping her mouth with a napkin. “Don’t give up hope.” And she patted him on the shoulder, gathered up her trash, and left the restaurant. He felt the chill as a gust of wind swirled in through the momentarily opened door.

He looked down into his coffee cup and tried to figure out how much more time he could spend in the restaurant before they’d chase him out. Probably he could get one more refill. He stood slowly and hobbled toward the counter.

* * *

Mudge stared down at the thin and watery soup, barely warmed above the temperature of his skin and wondered that he should be so thankful for so little; hours had passed since his unexpectedly good lunch.

“Met a pretty woman today,” he murmured, spooning the broth into his mouth.

“What was that, Mudge?” Lacky looked up from his bowl and frowned at him.

“Oh, nothing,” said Mudge. Lacky grumbled to himself and went back to slurping his soup.

The Palmdale Rescue Mission was an old, ramshackle structure, older than anyone could say. The gray stone walls were flaked here and there with green and gold mildew. The air had the sour, musty resonance of an always-wet basement. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have suspected the building of being a converted dungeon. Iron grates covered the dirty windows that poked through the wall near the ceiling, which hung perhaps a dozen feet above his head. Fluorescent tubes glowed and flickered, blackened ends murmuring antiquity. Mudge wasn’t the only one sucking on the dregs; obviously the Rescue Mission itself could stand a little rescuing.

But who bothered to give money to support the failures of society when one could take the same cash and buy oneself new clothes or a new car or a new bit of electronic stupefaction?

Lacky burped suddenly, a low, bass rumble that reverberated against the stones. Lacky was old, too, perhaps not such an antique as the Rescue Mission, but definitely an object whose time had long since passed him by. Perhaps, if Lacky had been a car, he might have been considered a classic. As a human being, however, he was simply old.

And who said humanity’s values weren’t skewed?

“Excuse yourself,” commented Mudge.

Lacky barely grunted in response.

And Mudge? He glanced around the room. Sure enough, he was the youngest one there, by at least a factor of two. His hair was long and unkempt, but unlike those slurping so noisily around him, at least it was all still on top of his head and none of it had yet turned gray—not that the stress of the last few months hadn’t probably shortened the time before it would start turning gray. He still had all his teeth, too; even if he was lucky now to brush them once a week.

The last of his soup disappeared into his mouth and he swallowed with a loud gulp. He wiped his mouth with one sleeve of his jacket, barely noticing the crust there from the countless times before that he had so wiped. No one would ever mistake him for anything other than what he was: a homeless bum.

It hadn’t always been that way. Last year—had it really been a year now? He blinked, wondering how it could be so long. He shook his head. Back then he had been an assistant librarian at the central library, and he had slept in a nice little two room apartment not but a block away. He’d eaten three good meals a day, then, and he’d had hot showers every day and every day he’d brushed his teeth twice.

But one day Mayor Bowman decided that the city government had to cut back on expenses, and the library had been his first attack. Mudge had been let go, along with a half dozen other assistants. Overnight, his life had turned to mush. No money, so he couldn’t afford a place to live; no money, so he couldn’t afford any food, and no money, so now he hung out at the Rescue Mission and slept on the floor when there was room.

He’d have gotten another job, if he could have, but there didn’t seem to be any that would take him; and now, if he showed up at a job interview dressed like he was, smelling like he did—what chance did he have?

It would seem as if he had joined the ranks of the permanently unemployed and unemployable. Mudge vaguely wondered how long before he turned to crime…

“You ever seen a wizard?” The question came out of nowhere. Lacky was staring at him with his piercing black eyes, a note of intensity that Mudge couldn’t remember seeing on his face before.

“What did you say?”

“You heard me.”

“What the hell you talking about?”

“You heard me.”

“Of course I’ve never seen a wizard. Except in Disney cartoons.”

“I seen one.”

“You don’t say?” No one could accuse Lacky of having all his oars in the water at any one time. He’d probably take it as an insult, even. But this seemed a bit extreme, even for him.

“You don’t believe me.”

“Lacky, I don’t believe you’re lying to me. Despite everything, you’re not a liar.”

“Thank you. And you’re not a crook.”

“I mean, I’m sure you believe…”

“What would you call a fellow who spoke a handful of words and made a car appear.”

“A doorman—calling for a taxi.”

“Not like that.” Lacky was starting to get irritated. Mudge decided he’d better back off. He’d never seen Lacky irritated before, and considering how much booze he still had in him this morning, it was probably best not to rile him. Mudge suspected Lacky would be a mean drunk.

“So you saw a guy snap his fingers and a car just appeared out of thin air.”

“He didn’t snap his fingers, he talked, and it showed up.”

“What did he say?”

“I’m not going to tell you.”

Mudge lifted a lone eyebrow. “That’s useful.”

“No, I think the priest would get mad if I put a car in his building. How would he get it out? I just know how to make a car appear, not how to make it disappear.”

“You can make a car appear out of thin air? I thought you said this guy…”

“You’re not listening to me, are you? You thinking I’m nuts and stupid. I know how you are, always looking down on me and everyone else even though you’re no better than the rest of us, even if you have been to college. You’re homeless and on the streets and that make you same as me.”

“But you said.”

“You know what I said. I seen this guy make a car appear. I heard what he said. Now, if I say them same words, I make a car appear, too.” Lacky made a face. “You fool, ain’t you heard nothing I said?”

Mudge swallowed hard. His bowl was empty, and so was his coffee cup. He’d really rather go get another cup of coffee than listen to Lacky’s delusions. But he couldn’t help himself, he stayed right where he was, and even said something that wasn’t a put down: “So you can make a car appear?”

“Yep, already did it.”

“Where is it?”

“Right out front. Had a full tank of gas, too, which was real convenient.”

“What kind of car…”

“Oh, didn’t I say? It’s a 57 Chevy. Black. Real fine looking automobile, man. Real fine.” He paused. “Only kind of car I can make. Seem to be able to pop them out any time I please, as often as I please. Made twenty of them, actually. All exactly alike, down to the keys and the mileage.”

Mudge just stared.

“Thought you might like one. After I’m done eating, I can show you.”

* * *

Mudge encouraged Lacky to finish up quickly. Not that he really believed him, but—he was curious what it was that Lacky thought he was doing. Mudge had always had a fondness for psychology and he wondered how delusions worked and how a fellow might respond when confronted with the fact that his delusion wasn’t real. So, okay, Mudge was a bit of a sadist, at least when it came to Lacky. Why he hung around him all the time, he couldn’t fathom. They had nothing in common, and the man rarely made even as much sense as he was making now. It was rather surprising to find out that he recognized a classic automobile when he imagined one.

“I know you’re just humoring me, man,” said Lacky as they crunched down the front steps of the Rescue Mission. Last night’s dusting of snow covered the blackened iciness of last week’s partly melted blizzard. “You think I’m drunk, and you’re looking forward to laughing at me and telling me I’m just a dumb drunk what don’t know nothing and can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality.” He puffed. “I know big words, too, stinking jerkwad!”

Lacky pointed at the street. “See, there’s my car.”

Sure enough, there was a black 57 Chevy parked at the curb. That didn’t really surprize Mudge a whole lot. Probably Lacky had regained consciousness this morning next to that car and concocted the story in his alcohol-soaked brain.

“License number on all of them was the same, too. Yours no doubt will be, too.” He paused, then hummed. “Let me think; do I remember?” He paused, then grinned. “I got it, now:

“Brandywein-Gander-noph slash two:

“Open macro 376 and 371

“Execute operand 32-01235.”

It sounded like gibberish, for the most part—just random numbers and words that vaguely resembled English. Mudge was about to ask Lacky how he could remember all that when he noticed that there was a second black 57 Chevy parked at the curb.

Mudge blinked, rubbed his eyes, and then just stared.

“You believe me now, doubting Thomas?”

Mudge swallowed. “Uh…no.” He shook his head. He wasn’t drunk. He was stone cold sober. Obviously he just hadn’t been paying close attention that there were two 57 Chevy’s at the curb. It must have been there all along. He was tired, after all, and sleeping in the street, you just don’t get the rest you really need…

“Think it was there all along, don’t you. You’re not so different from me. What did I tell you? We think alike. All of us on the street, we think alike. So, watch again.”

Lacky repeated the phrase he’d uttered before. Suddenly Mudge became aware of a third 57 Chevy.

“This is crazy,” he managed to sputter.

“I agree. And I admit: first thing I thought was that I was crazy—and so did the punks I gave the keys to all those cars to. But they’re real enough. I drove that one over here, slept in it last night all warm and toasty.”

Mudge gaped at the three cars. Each one was perfect, and, like Lacky had said, they appeared indistinguishable, at least at first glance. Mudge slowly approached the nearest one and peared through the side window. He could see the keys dangling from the ignition. A peek in the other new car revealed the same keys. The liscence plates were identical California plates, three letters and three numbers—but one digit different.

“Who’re these cars registered to?”

Lacky gaped like he’d just been asked the annual rainfall in Timbucktu. Mudge swallowed hard, then opened the door on the first car and peered into the glove box. The registration printout and the pink slip were both in there. Not the safest state of affairs, but…he looked at the name.

“Your last name is Lack?”

Lacky nodded.

“Elwood Lack, III is you?”

“What, you thought my parents named me Lacky? I don’t believe yours named you Mudge.”

“Thank you, but…”

“I think that when you make the car, somehow they’re personalized to you.” He paused.

“The license plates aren’t all the same.”

“They’re not?” For the first time in awhile, Lacky seemed genuinely startled.

“Nope. There’s one number difference between them.”

Lacky ran from car to car, ducking down and staring at the license plates, then running back and looking again. “Well how about that; I hadn’t noticed. I thought they were all the same. Well good, I’m not so worried then. I figured the DMV would get mighty confused…”

“They might still; how many homeless folks own twenty-two cars?”

“Got a point there.” He paused. “But this is good news. We could sell these, make some money, maybe…” A light went on and his whole face lit up. “We don’t got to live on the street no more.”

“We?”

“You think I’d leave my best friend out of this?”

“Only friend.”

“Don’t be cruel.”

Mudge looked back at the registration on the car, then stared at it after a double take. “You know anything about this address?” he asked.

“What address.”

“On the registration.”

“Huh?”

“I don’t recognize it. It’s not the address for the Rescue Mission.”

“I hadn’t thought about that…” Lacky grabbed the registration from Mudge’s fingers. “This is over the other side of town.”

“You ever been there?”

“I wasn’t born homeless, no more than you, fancy pants. I been around.”

* * *

Palmdale was one of those places where the name it had been given didn’t make much sense. Not only were there no palms, but there were no dales, either, assuming that a dale was some sort of river valley. Palmdale was tucked away on a flat plain that stretched for a fifty miles. Mountains ringed the horizon, and Palmdale itself was situated at the base of one ridgeline. But the area hardly seemed the valley it was described as. Conifers were the only trees, watered by heavy annual rain and even heavier snow during the bitterly cold winters. He’d heard that in times past Palmdale had been virtually a desert, but that must have been a hundred years or more in the past. Now it was just mostly cold and wet.

The streets were filled with slush, which added even more stress to the already worrisome prospect of Lacky driving. Mudge still wasn’t convinced that his friend was sober, let alone that after only God knew how many years of homelessness, the man still remembered how to drive—if he’d ever known. Despite his protestations, the homeless life seemed to fit the man way too comfortably. If he’d ever had a job and lived a real life, Mudge would have been surprised.

They wound down crowded, dark streets, heavy buildings lifting barren walls against the sky; scraggly trees here and there scrambled to live among the concrete and brick; gray windows with gray curtains stared vacantly from the barriers. Scarcely visible above, the sky was gray still; another storm was probably on its way. In winter, they seemed to come almost without pause; only in summer would they catch a glimpse of blue, and even then, it was an event to be remarked on.

Newer cars surrounded them, stopping and going, wheezing through the intersections. Hardly any pedestrians showed themselves on the sidewalks; all in all, it seemed like a typical weekday. For a moment he felt confused, appalled, then finally remembered: it was Tuesday.

Not that the day of the week really mattered a hell of a lot at the moment. But it was still nice to know.

The current street took them to the overpass and the onramp to the freeway. Lacky got a gleam in his eye as he turned the wheel and pressed down on the accelerator. The engine roared and Mudge gripped the edges of his seat a little tighter.

Five minutes later, they slipped down an offramp, rounded a curb, and Lacky pointed. “There, that’s Acorn.”

Mudge shrugged.

“Nice houses, eh?”

Again, Mudge shrugged.

“You’re a strange man, you know that?” Lacky gave him a funny look. “Its number….” he pulled out the registration and stared at the number, then rattled it off to Mudge. “Do you see it?”

“Where, what?…”

“House numbers…on the curbs…there!” Lacky shouted, then yanked the wheel sharply to the right.

Mudge yelped as the car jerked sideways. Lacky pulled against the curb and pressed the break, stopping the car with a lurch. He set the brake and shut off the motor.

“Where’d you learn to drive?” Mudge finally sputtered.

“Drivers ed.”

“You took drivers ed?”

“Didn’t say I passed with an A.”

Mudge shuddered, but decided not to press any more closely. Sometimes not knowing was the preferrable policy.

“Well, let’s go check it out.”

“What do you mean check it out?”

Lacky gave him a funny look. “Why’d you think we came here? Just for the drive? There’s an extra key on this key ring, and it doesn’t look like a trunk key.”

“What are you saying?”

“I think this is my house.”

“That’s crazy.”

“No crazier than having a car pop out of thin air.”

Mudge couldn’t think of a good response to that.

“This has to belong to someone…”

“Yeah, me.” Lacky opened the car door and stepped out, before Mudge could say anything else. Mudge hurriedly fumbled with the doorknob, then gasped as a gust of cold air slammed into his face. As he stepped out, a cloud of mist swirled around his head, momentarily clouding his vision. Lacky was already walking up the front steps.

The house had two stories and it looked new; the roof was buried in a blanket of white; icecycles dangled from the edges. White stucko covered the walls, and black windows, dark drapes drawn, were silent watchers of their approach.

Mudge huffed and puffed, blowing steam as he scurried to catch up.

“You can’t just walk up to a house like this.”

“It’s my house and I can do anything I want.”

“You’re crazy.”

Lacky didn’t say anything else. He just walked right up to the front door and jammed the key into the keyhole. With a twist of his wrist, he was inside.

“Lacky!” cried Mudge, panicked.

Lacky closed the door.

Mudge cursed.

So he rang the doorbell. At least it would alert whoever owned the house that there was a stranger around.

Several seconds passed. Mudge rang the doorbell a second time, only to have the door swing open even as he was pressing.

He jumped back, terrified. But it was only Lacky.

“Come on, man, get out of that house before you get in trouble!” exclaimed Mudge.

“It’s my house. Look.” He waved an envelope at Mudge.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Whose name is on this?”

Mudge took it from Lacky’s hand and stared at it. It bore the same name as the car registration, followed by the current property’s address. Mudge didn’t know what to say.

“See, I told you so,” was Lacky’s response. He turned his back and disappeared into the house. Mudge followed close behind.

The interior showed a basic disregard for style or even taste. The yellow carpet clashed with the blue walls, as much as the blue walls clashed with anything remotely resembling pleasant. The furniture was mostly red, with an occassional green pillow tossed in just for the jarring impact.

A fireplace on one side of the room was covered with purple tiles, while a stack of unread newspapers lay piled on the coffee table, a chrome and glass monstrosity that couldn’t ever have really been called attractive.

Lacky stood in the middle of the room and spread his arms. “It’s everything I ever imagined,” he grinned. Mudge suddenly faced the reality that the house was Lacky’s. No one else would be caught dead in it. In fact, Mudge wondered if the decor might actually be toxic…

“Is the rest of the house as bad as…uh, like this?”

“I haven’t checked upstairs, but I’ll bet that the kitchen is gorgeous!”

Mudge shuddered at the possibility. “I suppose the refrigerator is full of fresh food, and the shelves are loaded.”

“You know, I hadn’t checked…”

Despite his instincts, Mudge flopped down on the nearest chair, an overstuffed red-leather monster that mostly swallowed him. What it lacked in appearance it made up for in comfort. Mudge closed his eyes and tried to sort it all out, giving up in a moment. How could one ever make sense of any of this? It couldn’t be real. Things like this were impossible, and despite everything, he knew the difference between fantasy and reality. How had he gotten himself caught up in Lacky’s delusions?

He was dreaming or in a coma in some hospital. That was the only way to explain it. Unless he’d died and this was heaven.

Though surely heaven had better style than this.

Hell?

Too cold, though some had been arguing of late that certain affairs perhaps indicated a freezing over of the notoriously warm abode of the evil dead.

No, if he were dead, surely he’d remember dying. As traumatic as death surely was, the chances of forgetting the incident seemed incredible…

But if it weren’t a dream, or a delusion, or death, then what was it? Where was the explanation for what was happening? Some sicko’s perverted practical joke? Some hidden camera show, where people would all at once jump out and laugh at the poor idiot bums?

Mudge kept his eyes firmly shut. Maybe if he kept them shut long enough, it would all go away and reality would return. Maybe when he opened them he’d be back in the rescue mission, or sitting on a curb somewhere sharing a bottle…

But he could still feel the soft leather beneath him. And then there was the clatter of Lacky returning to the living room.

“Look at this,” he chortled. “Twinkies!” Mudge was jarred back to looking by something soft smashing against his chest. He opened his eyes to see an individually wrapped snack food lying atop him.

“This just can’t be happening,” he mumbled, even as his fingers began tearing at the plastic wrapper.

* * *

Mudge awakened slowly, the images of his dream playing themselves out against the insides of his eyelids. He was in a soft, clean and warm bed, smooth sheets and not a rough wool blanket up against his skin.

And then he opened his eyes and realized the dream was real; it hadn’t all disappeared in the night. The white walls and ceiling he had drifted off to were still there. The air around him was comfortable rather than freezing, and he thought he could catch a whiff of coffee brewing somewhere downstairs. He glanced to his left and saw the glowing numerals of the alarm clock. Six thirty. Early, but he felt completely rested.

If he was insane, Mudge had decided sometime after his supper of steak and mashed potatoes last night, then he wanted to stay insane. The questions could wait till another time, another place, another reality. He could live in the here and now make-believe if it stayed this nice.

And outside of the bad decor, it was nice. Too nice. The sort of nice that had to end and become a disaster soon. He just couldn’t shake the feeling that he was living in the eye of a hurricane and the trailing edge had to be bearing down on him even now.

He wandered downstairs. Lacky was sitting at the dining room table, still wearing his dirty old jeans and brown shirt. He grinned at Mudge. “How you feeling, man?” he asked, looking up from his newspaper.

“Great,” he admitted. “I still can’t really believe…”

“I’m just going to enjoy this for however long it lasts. Might not be too long. I don’t have a job, after all, so how can I keep paying a mortgage and electricity, eh? We’ll both be on the street soon enough.”

“So you didn’t find a wallet or a bank book upstairs.”

Lacky looked up from the paper again. “You know, I didn’t think to look.”

“Who knows,” added Mudge, “Maybe you even have a job, now.”

Lacky gave him a funny, almost terrified look. “But I wouldn’t know where to go, what to do…I’d be late for sure and…and…I’m going to get fired…”

Mudge shook his head. “I wouldn’t worry.”

Lacky relaxed. “Yeah, maybe you’re right.” Lacky let out a sigh. “They’d probably call first if I didn’t show up. And then I could ask my secretary for directions…”

“So you have a secretary now?”

“Why not?”

Mudge rolled his eyes.

“I’ll bet she’s a cute young thing, wearing a miniskirt all the time and…”

“Threatening to turn you in for sexual harrassment.”

“Her ass is what I meant,” he chortled.

“That’s an old joke—and I’m not convinced it was ever funny.”

“You know, you’re an old woman.”

“And you’re a sexist pig.”

“And proud of it,” he turned the page in his newspaper and snapped it firmly.

Give a man a car and a house, thought Mudge, and before you know it, he’s a complete jerk.

Of course, if that’s what it takes to have a house and a car, then Mudge wouldn’t mind being a jerk, too. He finally broached what had been sitting on his mind since he’d fallen asleep last night.

“Lacky, do you suppose you could teach me…” he began.

Lacky peered over the top of his paper, a suspicious quirkiness to his gaze. “Teach you what? How to get a car? I already give you one.”

“I want a house, too.”

“It goes with the car.”

“No, your house goes with your car, and the car you gave me, the registration is still in your name, and the address is this address. I want you to teach me the words. So I can do it myself.”

“You think you’re up to that much responsibility.”

“Drop dead.”

Lacky grinned, then pushed a slip of paper at Mudge. “I wrote it all down last night. Figured you’d want it sooner or later. Even if you don’t really believe it.”

Mudge took the sheet, an ordinary sheet torn from a notebook, with the bluish lines that he remembered from his years in college—and high school before that. He scanned the lines, and they seemed familiar, almost…

“Just make sure you do it outside,” said Lacky. “Don’t want no silly car in my living room.”

Fingering the paper, Mudge left the kitchen and walked through the front door. It was a cold and miserable day once again. Several inches of snow had fallen in the night and even now, flakes were swirling from the sky. Visibility was low; Lacky’s footprints, from where he had wandered out to find the morning’s paper, were even now starting to fill back in. Mudge couldn’t help but wonder how he had managed to find the paper at all—or why he had even bothered to look. Up until yesterday, he hadn’t even been certain the man could read, let alone that Lacky would give a damn about what was going on in the world around him.

How long had it been since Mudge had read the paper? Did he even know who the Secretary General was? Mudge hadn’t been on the streets that long. And elections were still a couple years off. It was still the same loser back in New York.

Mudge looked at the snow covered 57 Chevy in the driveway, then looked down at the paper. What the hell.

“Brandywein-Gander-noph slash two:

“Open macro 376 and 371

“Execute operand 32-01235,” he muttered.

To his shock, a black 57 Chevy suddenly appeared at the curb. It was snow free, and looked as if it had just driven off a showroom floor. The falling snow quickly began to dust it.

Mudge whistled, then staggered across the lawn and pulled open the driver’s door. He took the keys from the ignition, then pulled the registration from the glove box.

“Drew Mudgeford,” was written across the top of the page. Beneath it, was a familiar address: his apartment that he’d been evicted from. So much for a fancy new house.

So did that mean?… Mudge looked back at the house behind him. Lacky had fallen a long way, if this was how he used to live, before…

Mudge shut his eyes, feeling the world spin. This was Lacky’s old house; no wonder the clothes fit him so well, and no wonder he knew how to get here. But…it still didn’t explain how…nothing explained how. Not the cars, not the house, not the words on the paper. Why the old addresses, why a return to the way things were simply by calling on the gods or whatever to create black 57 Chevrolets?

He slipped the keys into his pocket and slunk back into the house.

* * *

“Truisms seem to go right over your head,” Lacky was gabbing at him, between bites of his lunch. It seemed that about all the man was doing now was eating.

“You mean about looking a gift horse in the mouth?”

“Exactly. Why you worry about it all? Just accept it and be glad however long it lasts. Hey man, nothing’s forever, but if you always live in tomorrow you don’t never enjoy nothing today. You warm right now? You got food? You comfortable? Then why you grousing about what might happen. You don’t know tomorrow and fearing what might be just keeps you from enjoying what is.”

“You just don’t get it, do you?”

Lacky was shaking his head and chuckling.

“It’s no wonder you’re on the street; you never planned, never anticipated…”

“And all your worrying did so much for you, I see.”

Mudge sputtered.

“I don’t have the college education you have, but I did graduate from high school. Surprised? You never have asked about me or my life, you know. All the time I’ve known you, you done nothing but talk about yourself and your education and how you got screwed by the mayor’s cutbacks to the libraries. But you never asked me nothing about myself, just jabbered on and on. Well, I’m not the dumb fuck you take me for. I was a programmer. That’s right. I was a wizard, a code monkey. Worked for Aspect, you know, the game company? I made good money, steady work. But my wife and daughter, they died in a car wreck because a fucking drunk got behind the wheel of his car and killed them. Ironic, isn’t it? A moron gets drunk and kills my family, and what do I do? I start drinking and next thing you know I’m just a fucking drunk too without nothing and nobody.” He paused. “At least up till yesterday I didn’t have a car, so at least I couldn’t kill nobody.” He paused, looked down at his hands. “But you know something? I haven’t had a drink since I made that car appear, and I haven’t really missed it. Now isn’t that strange?”

Mudge scratched his head.

“Maybe I should get a job,” he muttered. “I was good at it, and I still got it, I know all the languages…” He looked around. “You know, the demons don’t seem to be living here no more.”

“This was your house.”

“You figured that out, did you? Your car you made got your old address on the registration, too, I suppose?”

Mudge nodded.

“Think we’re being given a chance to redeem ourselves, set things right again?”

“Like something out of a tear-jerky made for TV melodrama?”

“Yeah, like Twilight Zone…”

Mudge shook his head. “You’re a real work of art, you know that?”

Lacky just grinned.

The doorbell ringing made them both jump. Mudge spat at Lacky. “See, what’d I tell you. There are the cops and they’re going to arrest us now.”

“For what?”

Mudge sputtered. “Grand theft auto, breaking and entering…we’ll be spending the rest of our days in jail and it’s all your fault.”

“Really now?” Lacky grinned and stood up. “Let’s go greet our doom at the door, then, why don’t we?”

Mudge wanted to find the back door and escape, but, like a dumb animal in the slaughterhouse, he followed docily behind Lacky.

No wonder he was a homeless failure.

The man at the door did not look like a police officer. In fact, he didn’t look like anything more than a salesman: middle-aged, dark hair, dark suit and tie, very conservative with no facial hair. Mudge stared at him, startled. Where were the police?

“Hmmm…” said the man at the door. “You’re not what I would have expected.”

“Can I help you?” asked Lacky, taking the initiative.

“I’d rather not have to listen to you talk,” said the man at the door, waving his arm in a strange way and then rattling off a serious of what seemed to be nonsense syllables.

Mudge suddenly found himself unable to move a muscle; it was like that time he’d awakened and found his whole body paralized for a few seconds, a rare occurance that he’d learned could be explained by the fact that when you slept, your body disconnected itself from your brain to some extent so that you wouldn’t hurt yourself when you dreamed. But this wasn’t a dream, though it had certain similarities.

The stranger strolled past them into the house. Mudge could hear him stomping around behind, making grunting noises and snuffling in an affected and disgusted sort of manner, as if what he saw fulfilled his limited expectations.

“You know, you’re lucky you didn’t hurt anyone,” said the stranger, returning to where Mudge and Lacky could see him. “Do you have any idea what a foolish thing you did?”

Of course, neither Lacky nor Mudge could respond, their muscles being frozen into immobility. It took the stranger a moment to remember that. “Oh yeah,” he mumbled, then louder: “Backus landis forthwith; reverse back loose it now; forthwith.”

As suddenly as it had come upon them, the paralysis vanished.

“What is the meaning of this?” sputtered Lacky as soon as his mouth was free to flap.

“I should ask you the same question,” said the stranger, jabbing his finger at Lacky. He opened his jacket pocket and pulled out a small notebook. “Elwood Lack, III, forty-nine, electrician, and currently unemployed and homeless. You spend most of your time at the Palmdale Rescue Mission. There are twenty-four black 57 Chevrolets floating about in the city, four of which were involved in criminal activity in the last ten hours.” A pause. “Hense, my presence here.”

“Now wait a minute. I ain’t done nothing criminal…” began Lacky.

“I’m not accusing you, Mr. Lack. But your actions contributed to the delinquincy of others, and their deliquincy, and the police inquiries have brought things to our attention. What did you think you were doing, anyway, making twenty-four copies of the same exact car? What do you need with so many cars, even if they were all different? And how did you expect to pay the registration on all of them?” He sighed. “Not to worry; your excess has been corrected.” He paused to chew on his lower lip. “Now you sir,” he turned and looked at Mudge. “You are a puzzle. Who are you and what is your business with Mr. Lack?”

“He’s my friend,” said Lacky. “And he has a 57 Chevy, too.”

“Does he now? And how would he have gotten one? You gave him one of yours?”

“Okay, so he has two. But the other one, he got the same way I got mine.”

The stranger blanched. “You, too?”

Mudge nodded.

“This is very irregular, then. The situation is much worse than we feared.” He sucked a deep breath through his nose and let it out slowly. “This will not be so easy to rectify. What’s your name?”

“His name is Mudge—uh, Drew Mudgeworth.”

The stranger persed his lips, then whipped out his phone and poked at it. “You were a librarian?” he asked after a moment.

Mudge nodded.

“Hmmm…”

“What, hmmm?”

“Huh? Oh. Well, there’s nothing else to do about it then.”

“What’s your name?” asked Lacky, suddenly.

“What?” The stranger looked startled again. “That’s really of no importance.” He paused.

“So then I can just call you Dickweed?”

The stranger swallowed, a slight flash of annoyance coloring his face. “That’s enough of that. First, we must return things to the way they were—except for the four cars that the police have impounded. Nothing we can do about that.” He shook his head. “Not good, but not completely a problem. You know, if Balzac had only been more careful, you wouldn’t have to go through all of this.”

“Balzac?” asked Lacky.

“Whom you learned this handy little phrase from. Not that he’ll get in any sort of trouble.” The stranger tapped on his phone and looked dissatisfied; in fact, his face seemed to relax into a dissatisfied shape naturally. Then he cleared his throat.

“Brandywein-Gander-noph slash two:

“Open macro 376 and 371

“Unexecute operand 32-01235 (minus 87, 89, 93 and 53).”

The house twisted once around them, then flashed, as if someone had taken a picture. Instantly, the walls, the floor, the furniture in all its gloirous tackiness was gone. In its place, normal off-white walls, gray carpet and rather attractive modern furnishings appeared. Also, and perhaps most disturbingly, a woman in her mid-fifties was suddenly about three feet from all of them. Her eyes went wide, followed by her mouth, which released a shocking scream.

“Oh shit,” said the stranger.

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On Writing

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Writers get questions. “How do you come up with your ideas?” is the classic. And my answer? I don’t really know. Except perhaps the simple fact that I’m always looking for them.

I think everyone has stray thoughts that could form the basis of something creative; but such nuggets are too often swallowed by the tyranny of the day: the need to get the children to school, to file that report, to take out the trash. But if you’re a writer, when one of the stray thoughts arrives on your driveway like the morning paper, instead of driving over it on my way to the grocery, I snatch it up and commit it to a computer file. Out of the hundreds of ideas I have, only a handful prove useful, of course. But at least none are forgotten.

Most people panic when the teacher asks them to write a one page essay. They have an aneurism when facing a ten page term paper in college. So, they naturally wonder, “how do you manage to write something that fills six hundred pages, even if it is double-spaced?”

Consider the problem of trying to eat a cow. Cows are enormous. And yet, most of us have probably eaten at least one cow in our lives. How did we do it? One hamburger at a time.

So writing a novel is just like eating a cow. I do not get up in the morning and sit at my computer and keep typing until I’ve reached that six hundred page mark without stopping. Rather, I set myself a more manageable goal of ten pages per day. If I work five days a week, then I can turn out about two hundred pages a month. In three months, the first draft will be done.

The phrase “first draft” expresses another key to actually writing anything. Some people that I went to school with would struggle over each sentence in their term paper, each paragraph, rewriting and reworking it as they went until they got it just right. They were lucky to have the paper done in time.

I don’t work that way. Instead, I just let the words fall on the page, however they happen to fall. I consciously choose not to worry about whether it sounds good or not. This is a psychological mind game I play with myself: I explain to the perfectionist in my head that it doesn’t matter if it is horrible right now. It is of no importance if the sentences are misshapen or if the story currently makes as much sense as the lyrics of a song from the sixties. So what if I can’t remember the name of this character? Just pick any name out of the air and move on: put words on the page. Don’t stop. You can worry about making it sound okay later, when you’re all done. When you finish the first draft, I patiently tell the worrywart in my brain, you can go back and cut out the lame dialogue, the hackneyed phrases, the poorly constructed descriptions. Then you can recheck that fact.

What this peculiar mind game I play with myself allows me to do is to relax, to eliminate the stress, to undo the bondage, and to actually write. Then, during the rewriting, I smooth out sentences, correct spelling, and make sure that the characters keep their same names all the way through, along with fixing the other continuity issues. Creating the first draft, I only get to see the book in ten page snippets, each snippet separated by a night of sleep. In the rewriting, I’m able to see it finally as a whole, and make sure it flows well.

The strangest aspect of the writing, however, is the weird fact that although I have a good idea of where the story is going, and even though I’ve laid it all out in my head how I’m going to get to the end of the story, writing the book sometimes is not that much different than it will be for the reader who reads it later.

For instance, in my current rewrite of the novel that I just sold, the editor wanted me to take the flashbacks and make them linear. Given that there is a gap in time between the events referenced in the flashbacks and what’s going on in the rest of the story, I was faced with building a bridge. So I laid out a series of eighteen plot points in between and then set to work. I had definite ideas of what the characters would do and what they would say. But then a funny thing happened: the characters took control of the story and some of the things I thought they’d be busy with, they weren’t. They did other things instead.

How can that be? Are not the characters simply made up things over which I have complete control? How can figments of my imagination start telling me what they want to do and start living their lives as if they are independent of me? Almost sounds psychotic.

But that’s the beauty of successful character creation: they must become alive. If they don’t, you’ve failed. It may sound crazy, but that’s what happens in the books and stories and movies where the character is someone you remember more than the explosions and special effects. Think about Captain Kirk in Star Trek. Or Scotty. Or Dr. McCoy. Think about your friends and family. All of them have character traits that you learn about as you watch them. And you know, based on their past actions, how they will behave in the future, in any given situation. Any character in a novel has to become alive like that, and once they do, the author loses a certain amount of control: he no longer can make them do just anything at all; they can only do what is part of their nature—the nature he created for them. And then you have to adjust your plot to fit them, rather than the other way around.

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Nostalgia

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I’m told that there is this thing called nostalgia; it is an emotion of longing for the past, of remembering happier times before today, when all seemed right with the world, when the future was bright and endless. It is the feeling that people sometimes get as they remember their time in high school, or college, or an endless summer as a child, playing in green fields, collecting pollywogs from a pond or creek, building a tree house, drinking lemonade on a muggy afternoon late in July.

I know that such a thing as nostalgia exists, but I’m unsure that I’ve experienced it personally. Perhaps, as I get older, a tipping point will come when I start looking back and remembering and thinking about it more than the present and tomorrow. But for now, I find myself mostly living today, wondering about tomorrow and planning for next week. I spend practically no time mulling over yesterday. And I never look back over my shoulder and sigh wistfully, misty-eyed, through gauzy, rose tinting.

Perhaps my failure at nostalgia comes from the way I look at life, which tends toward the coldly realistic. In recalling the past, I recall not just the happy moments; I recall them fully. If I take the time, as I am just now, to consider a moment in my past, it appears to me as little different in texture than the present moment.

In college I spent two wonderful summers in Israel. I worked on a kibbutz and got to travel about the country. But I recall not just seeing the foreign land, gazing in awe at the Sea of Galilee, standing in the ruins of the ancient synagogue in Capernaum where Jesus taught or peering into the empty tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. I don’t just remember walking on top of the city walls near Mt. Zion late at night.

Instead, I feel the exhaustion of never having enough sleep. I re-experience the embarrassment of getting lost in a banana field one morning so that I couldn’t find my way back to the tractor in time for my break. I recall the blistering heat, and the sunburns. I relive the long rides in hot stuffy buses without air conditioning. I hear the high-pitched whine of mosquitos and once again experience the horror of coming upon a banana spider as big as my head, hanging between two trees. I shiver anew in the cold showers in rusty, broken down communal huts and reuse restrooms in a public park that consisted of a lime encrusted hole in the ground instead of a toilet. I remember eating the same meal, two times a day, seven days a week for a whole summer: lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, hard boiled eggs, bread and plain yogurt. I recall being pelted with stones by angry Palestinians in Ramallah while being hustled back into our bus by our Uzi-toting Israeli friends.

The same thing happens as I recall a summer on my grandparents’ farm. I remember the green fields filled with sweet smelling mint plants, the dampness of the tall grasses, the chitterings of the seven-year locusts and the cold babbling creek filled with crawdads and pollywogs. I remember picking up fossils embedded in crumbling limestone near the bridge that ran over the creek.

But I also recall worrying because my father was in Vietnam for the second time and how he wouldn’t be coming home for another seven months. I remember being bored as the night wore on and I sat in my grandparents’ living room and my mom and great aunt and my grandparents talked endlessly into the night.

With every bit of my past—which I must make an effort to dredge up since I spend no time ever thinking about it unless someone asks me—I see it in all its fullness. Life is never really rose-colored. It has, instead, the same feel, the same texture, the same reality as the present. I sit here before my computer while my youngest daughter works on her independent study school work. Occasionally I answer her questions. I can, if I put my mind to it, think back to her as an infant, and with that comes not just the cherubically snoozing pale baby, but also the diaper changes in the middle of the night, the feedings at three in the morning, and of never being able to get enough sleep. I remember the nearly weekly visits from social workers, since when she was an infant, she was still just our foster child—we had yet to adopt her. And I can remember all the good times and all the bad times and how each day and each week had its share of joys and heartaches.

Jesus told his disciples one day, “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (Matthew 6:34). The author of Ecclesiastes wrote, “Do not say, ‘Why were the old days better than these?’ For it is not wise to ask such questions.”(Ecclesiastes 7:10). Nostalgia for the past is little different than worry about the future. And just about as accurate or fruitful.

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Queries

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Before I got published, I only knew one meaning for queries: a one page letter that a writer sends to a book publisher or agent, describing a book and asking if the publisher or agent might be interested. That sort of query is, in essence, a sales pitch. I often pictured myself like Bob Cratchit, the father of Tiny Tim, hat in hand approaching Ebenezer Scrooge and on bended knee begging for a lump of coal.

Of course, in reality, publishers are not scrooges. But they are businesses. When they look at an offered book, be it fiction or non-fiction, the big question on their minds is a very simple one: will it sell.

“Is it good,” may pop into their heads at some point, but that does not necessarily have anything to do with the money question. Great literature does not necessarily sell well. Compare the ratings of America’s Top Model with Masterpiece Theatre. If you’re a business, your goal is making money. So which do you think a business would pick if it had to choose?

Therefore, if you want to make it as a writer, find something that is commercially viable. You can do the great literary work of art that makes reviewers swoon later, after you’ve made money for your publisher. Only when you can sell anything just because your name is on the cover can you afford to do art.

But hat in hand begging is not the only meaning of the word “query.” There is another meaning, a scary meaning that published authors dread. After you’ve sold your book to a publisher, and your editor tells you how wonderful it is, and after they’ve sent you money, then along will come a dreadful word: “but.”

Whether you’ve done a work of fiction, or a work of non-fiction, the editor will pass your manuscript around her office—and in the case of some works, around the country and across oceans. This also happens even for books that the publisher came to you, hat in hand, and queried you to write.

These people who read what you’ve written, who are not your editor, especially these people who are outside experts—will comment on your work, ask questions, demand verification, and point out all the flaws in your beautiful, utterly perfect baby…um book.

A few years ago, after I had submitted the completed manuscript of The Bible’s Most Fascinating People, I received back a stack of such queries from my editor in London. Reader’s Digest in New York had hired a theologian to go over my book and her comments and questions had now come back to my editor in London. So my London editor was now passing them on to me. These queries added up to twenty-seven typed pages. They had arrived on my editor’s desk mostly as handwritten notes. So my poor editor had carefully and thoughtfully typed them up for me. The bulk of that page count was the consequence of the theologian quoting me and then commenting, or asking a question.

My editor told me, “it doesn’t look too bad.”

I heard: “Oh, what a cute baby.” Long pause. “Did you notice it had an ugly wart on her nose?”

Okay, maybe it wasn’t really so harsh. In fact, the bulk of the queries were regarding issues of spelling, or terms to use, or the occasional typo. Sometimes she had questions along the lines of, “are you sure that’s what the Bible says?” Or, “have you considered this other way of looking at things?” And then sometimes she thought it would be good to give a reference.

Of the hundred Bible characters that make up my book, less than half had generated any comments from the outside expert hired by Reader’s Digest, and so it took me only a pair of eight hour days and skipped meals to respond to all the issues and email them back to my editor in London. Her take on the queries was “I always find queries like this a bit frustrating, and am tempted to answer, ‘No, I just made it up for the fun of it’ when faced with a query like ‘True?’ over and over again. But then sometimes inaccuracies are caught that way, so you have to bite your tongue.”

I was pleased to learn that I wasn’t alone in feeling annoyed with some of the queries. My editor in London was pleased with my responses, which she then forwarded to Reader’s Digest in New York. Three weeks would pass before I’d have to face any queries again.

And they did come, and I once again spent time fixing them; one requested change–in a single sentence–by the Reader’s Digest “expert” was nonsensical and my editor and I spent most of a day figuring out how to say what I wanted to say, while satisfying the so-called “expert.” We were ultimately successful.

After all the queries were satisfied, the galley proofs of the book were printed in China: the actual printed, but unbound, pages of the book. Reader’s Digest in New York then received them from my editor in London, and I also got a set as well (which I still have on a shelf in my office). Our task at that point was to pour over them carefully, mostly checking for typos. Proofreading of that sort is not a whole lot of fun, either, but instead of doing plastic surgery on your baby, at that point it’s mostly just checking to see that her clothes are not on backward and that her hands and face are clean—and perhaps dealing with that odd smell coming from her backside.

A few months after that, the book was printed, distributed and in January, 2008, appeared on bookstore shelves. It was subsequently published in 13 languages, including 2 Dutch editions–and it was reissued in 2012 in English.

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Israel

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I always find it odd when I read about how “aggressive” the state of Israel is. Let’s see: Israel is a country that is barely the size of New Jersey, surrounded by much larger nations who constantly condemn it and have as their stated policy its obliteration (As a clear example, perhaps the interested reader should pick up some of Nassar’s speeches from the 1950’s and 1960’s). So obviously Israel is aggressive if it dares to react when invaded by these countries. And a country in such a situation is going to want to fight wars with its larger, and at least on paper, better armed neighbors? It stretches credulity, I’m afraid.

The Palestinian authorities claim to desire peace, yet make inflammatory speeches (rarely reported in the English language presses), teach Antisemitism in their schools, on their television programs, and on their radios and do nothing to prevent terrorist incidents. Mein Kampf is a perennial bestseller and every conspiracy theory denegrating Jews is believed and propogated. Odd sort of peace, where one side keeps on shooting, keeps on hating, and then cries foul if the other side dares to react.

In this country, if we were to limit where a specific ethnic group was allowed to buy or build houses, we’d call it discriminatory. But in Israel, it is a threat to peace if a Jew decides to live next door to a Palestinian? Guess letting those sorts into the neighborhood really lowers the property values…

If the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel is so evil and the cause of all the problems in the Middle East, then why was the occupation of those same territories by Egypt and Jordan for thirty years (1948-1967) not a similar evil? And if the PLO (the Palestinian Liberation Organization) were really interested in creating a “Palestinian state” in those regions, then why, when it was founded in 1964 (3 years before Israel won the West Bank, Gaza and Sinai in a war begun by its Arab neighbors), did it only direct its attacks against Jewish targets rather than the Egyptian and Jordanian occupiers? I also don’t recall any UN pronouncements against Jordan or Egypt for their “illegal” and “oppressive” occupation in those years 1948=1967, either.

If Israel didn’t want peace, why was it so happy to give back the Sinai peninsula to Egypt in exchange for a peace treaty and normalized diplomatic relations — especially when one considers that the only oil wells Israel had access to were in that peninsula?

I’m puzzled when I see otherwise reasonable people buying into the propaganda of a group responsible for terrorist acts. Personally, I tend to be very skeptical of the pronouncements of those who have no moral qualms about killing innocent civilians.

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Random Ramblings on Hermeneutics: On Cultural Differences Between the Bible and Modern America

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Emphasis on rambling. Also, these are simply preliminary thoughts. Stuff to consider when thinking about biblical interpretation.

Some examples of cultural differences between the Bible and Modern America:

1. Monarchy

2. Cities of Refuge for those guilty of killing someone to flee to; avenger of blood hunting them down to kill them in vengeance.

3. Polygamy/Concubines (see Exodus 21)

4. Slavery (See Exodus 21)

5. Leverite Marriage

6. No punishment by imprisonment prescribed in the Law

7. Sacrifices for Sin

What else? (suggestions for consideration: Sabbath, Tithe, hair styles, clothing styles, Nazarite vow, kosher laws, primogeniture)

1. What barriers to understanding do our differences in culture create?

2. How do we decide when something in the Bible is culturally limited, and is not to be taken as prescriptive for us today?

When Jesus tells Peter to go catch a fish, pull a coin out of the fish’s mouth, and to pay the temple tax with it, (Mat. 17:24-27) why do we take that as limited to a specific person and a specific time and place, and do not attempt to universalize it; but when we see Paul write to Timothy that he “does not permit a woman to teach” do we take that as a universal commandment?

Or what about those who take the relationship of slave and master in Paul’s writings and attempt to apply it to employer/employee relationships. Is this valid?

How, practically, are we to apply Paul’s words “All Scripture is God-breathed and is profitable for doctrine, reproof, instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work”? Does this passage require an understanding of all the laws that were prescriptive for Israel or the first century church being prescriptive for us today? And if not, how do we decide what is prescriptive? That is, how do we know that murder is forever and always forbidden while we can happily eat pork and ignore the Sabbath? Or why do we forbid polygamy or slavery today when it was permitted in ancient Israel?

Can we really see American “family values” in the Bible? Or are we really just trying to read our cultural norms (or even a specific, 1950’s stereotype) into the ancient text?

Basic Hermeneutical Principle:

All the data relevant to the topic (general and special revelation) must be addressed. Any interpretation of a given passage must make sense of all the data. Any interpretation of a given passage which results in a contradiction is wrong somewhere — either the particular passage is being misinterpreted, or the other passages are being misinterpreted. Only when harmony is achieved between all relevant passages can an interpretation potentially be correct.

Illustration:

“Spare the rod and spoil the child.” – such a phrase does not appear in the Bible. What does appear is as follows:

Proverbs 13: 24 – He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him.

Proverbs 22:15 – Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline will drive it far from him.

Proverbs 23:13-14 – Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you punish him with the rod, he will not die. Punish him with the rod and save his soul from death.

Proverbs 29:15 – The rod of correction imparts wisdom, but a child left to himself disgraces his mother.

Thus I must spank my children — use corporal punishment.

Question: Do you use a big old stick on your children?

No! Those who believe in corporal punishment use:

a. hand

b. wooden spoon

c. switch

d. strap

But the passage talks about using a rod, which is a apparently a big old stick.

Thus:

Even those who use corporal punishment are taking the passage metaphorically, which is arguably the point: i.e., “rod”, as in Psalm 23, “Thy rod and they staff, they comfort me” is a metaphor for “discipline.” So, the passages in Proverbs may be properly understood to speak to the issue that children must be disciplined. How that is best to be accomplished is debatable, but I would suggest that these passages do not require corporal punishment, unless you want to insist on a literal interpretation, in which case you’d better be taking a “rod” to the backs of your kids from here on out.

Consider, too, that Proverbs is poetry, and the likelihood of metaphor grows that much stronger.

Working Considerations

The solution to this basic hermeneutic conundrum should be:

1. Simple. A complex, difficult to understand solution is going to be neither satisfying nor a solution at all. God intended to communicate, not confuse (one of our basic presuppositions)

2. Consistent. The solution must be universally applicable, and should never result in absurdity.

3. Not a tool for special pleading. That is, it should not be developed to explain away a command that we would prefer not to have to obey, or that we find objectionable.

4. Thus, it should not be subjective. It should eliminate the charge that we are willy-nilly picking the commandments we want to obey (thou shalt not murder) and ignoring those we don’t want to obey (thou shalt keep the Sabbath).

Proposals

One proposal that has some merit is that those commandments reinterpreted or “fulfilled” by the New Testament are no longer applicable.

This is somewhat of an oversimplification, and we must be careful that we are not guilty of violating the spirit or intent of Jesus’ words that “not one jot or tittle of the law” would pass away. Whatever we do with the NT’s handling of the OT, we must not assume that it is “explaining away” or “undoing” or “invalidating” the commandments of the OT. A simplistic approach (and the most commonly used approach) creates contradictions and tends to be inconsistent in its application — that is, tithing is encouraged in the Church, even though it would seem unlikely to be a legal requirement, based on the normal Christian understanding of the Israelite laws.

Circumcision we reject as a requirement for Christians, taking the words of Paul in various places as proof against it. Yet, in practice, we see Paul circumcising Timothy (Acts 16) right after his brouhaha over the very issue of circumcision! What are we to make of this?

Plus, if we read the OT regulations regarding circumcision, which predate the law, no less (consider the support of tithing often is based on its prelaw status), we find little apparent wiggle room. Moses’ son was nearly killed by God for not being circumcised (again, prior to the law being given). So how are we to reconcile Paul’s words, and the actions of the early church, with such explicit OT statements?

Does this have anything to say to us about a method for handling the rest of the OT in relation to the Church?

And what NT “commandments” are relevant to the church? Is the Jerusalem Council’s letter the norm, and nothing more — why didn’t it list murder or stealing as prohibitions, for instance? Or speak of the status of women or homosexuality?

Where exactly do we start? What is foundational?

1. Love God, love people. What Jesus says about the theme of the Old Testament (and I believe, of the Bible and God’s workings with humanity in general) are expressed quite clearly in Matthew 22:34-40:

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:

“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (cf. Galatians 5:14, Romans 13:9-10, Luke 10:25-28ff, Mark 12:28-34)

This seems to sum up God’s intentions and commandments. Just as physics seeks a Theory of Everything for General Revelation, in Special Revelation I would argue that the Theory of Everything — what it all boils down to — are these two commands, which, are essentially one (cf. Paul’s comment in Galatians 5:14 and Romans 13:9-10).

a. Love must be carefully defined, therefore. It must be understood in its two-sided nature, both affiirmative and inhibitive; that is, as both warm and harsh. In Deuternomy 28-31, the two sides are presented: blessing for obedience, cursings for disobedience — but both reactions are the consequence of love, as in the disciplining of one’s own children. It is also seen in Psalm 136, where the perception of God’s love as positive or negative was dependent upon the observer’s relationship to God. The Israelites, for instance, saw the death of the first born in the tenth plague in Egypt as a loving act; surely the Egyptians had a different attitude.

2. Do the demonstration, the living of these two commandments change depending on circumstances?

The answer must be affirmative. Three examples come quickly to mind:

a. Greet one another with a holy kiss? (see Rom. 16:16, 1 Cor. 16:20, 2 Cor. 13:12, 1 Thess. 5:26) Not in the US you don’t. To keep this command (repeated in the New Testament), we greet others warmly, not necessarily by giving them a peck.

b. Washing Feet? (cf. John 13:14) We don’t have this custom any more, since there is no need for it. So how to keep this command? Various ways — for instance getting someone a cup of coffee, getting them something to eat or drink, etc., when they visit.

c. Worship in the Temple. Demonstration of our love of God is not the same today as it was when there was a temple. Jesus himself saw this coming when he was speaking to the Samaratin woman at the well. He told her that a time would come when people would no longer worship God in the temple, but rather simply in spirit and in truth. (John 4:21-24). A change, thus, in how the first of the ten commandments is practiced.

3. What is the purpose and context of the commandments that are given?

Why keep the Sabbath? What was its purpose? Are the Seventh-Day Adventists right? Is going to church on Sunday the mark of the beast? After all, isn’t this one of the ten commandments? How can we ignore one of the ten commandments! Will we start murdering people next? Why this one commandment and not the others?

Simply because it isn’t mentioned? The NT doesn’t say anything about beastiality, child sacrifice, or marrying our sisters, either, and yet we don’t think those practices are okay now, do we? How come? The list of commands found only in the OT that we still practice is relatively long. And what of the other of the ten commandments not mentioned in the NT: misusing the name of the LORD? Can we start doing that now? Simply arguing that if it is or isn’t reiterated in the New Testament that it is normative is insufficient.

The Sabbath, according to Jesus, is for us, not us for the Sabbath. Taking a day off is good for you. Romans 14 must be brought to bear on the issue.

What of the guy who was killed because he picked up sticks on Saturday? He was being rebellious, one would argue.

How about tithing? Why tithe? What was its purpose? To provide for the temple and support the priests. Modern context is similar: the pastors and administration of the church’s property requires that its members provide for it. The same thing is seen in the NT, even though a specific amount is not given as a requirement.

To make it possible to love God and love people is the ultimate purpose — the commands beyond the first two explain in practical terms how loving God and people is accomplished. If you love someone, you’re not likely to kill them or steal from them or turn them into an adulterer.

Moreover, the context needs to be taken into account. We recognize that we are not physically with Jesus now, and so his command to Peter to catch a fish and pay the temple tax with the money he takes from the poor creature’s mouth is obviously localized. But, we do translate the specific command to the general principle that we should live by faith and that we should do what God tells us to do.

Thus, perhaps, when Paul is prohibiting teaching by women, we should take it more as a general prohibition on teaching being done by those unqualified, than as a general rule regarding the place of women, since women of Paul’s day were generally uneducated and thus ill equipped to take on a public teaching role.

(What of the use of the woman being duped by the serpent that Paul uses to illustrate his point? Just that, it illustrates the point: that the women of Paul’s day, like Adam’s wife, were naive and easily lead astray. Would this be the case with all women? And how does a prohibition on teaching by all women reconcile with the examples of women teaching in the Bible (Pricilla) or even serving as prophets (Huldah, the four daughters of Philip [Acts 21:8-9]). Remember the fundamental principle: an interpretation that is correct must not create contradiction. If it creates a contradiction, you know its wrong. Only those interpretations that do not lead to a contradiction can be correct (this does not mean, of course, that just a lack of contradiction means the interpretation is correct; it might still be wrong).

4. So, has culture shifted in ways that require a shift in the practical outworkings of a given command?

Obviously, and a good example can be illustrated with the command in John 13 to wash one another’s feet. Some churches actually have such foot washing ceremonies, and while there is nothing objectionable in that, I believe the point of the command has been missed. That is, Jesus was speaking more metaphorically, giving a universal commandment: submission to one another (an expression of love and devotion). The cultural outworking of that command changes based on the culture: in first century, the washing of feet was a demeaning task, and thus served his purposes well. Today, a different metaphore would be wanted. What might be a modern equivalent? Several come to mind:

a. serving food at a meal

b. cleaning up afterward

c. parking the car for guests

d. setting up chairs, and tables, taking them down, general clean up

To insist on taking a first century cultural act and to literalize it in the present I believe is unwarranted and misses Jesus’ actual point.

Therefore

The question to be asked about any command, is the same as that to be asked about anything in the Bible. What did it mean in its context? Understand it thoroughly.

Then, what is the current context? Is it equivalent? Are there equivalent contexts. If not, is there something similar? Can it be translated to something like the modern setting?

What of slavery, polygamy, etc.? — where modern standards seem more than biblical? Are we guilty of being more holy than God? We point out that the Bible doesn’t prohibit drinking alcohol, so does that mean that those who don’t drink alcohol are like those who don’t practice slavery or polygamy?

The difference is that slavery and polygamy are social and societal, unlike drinking, which is a matter of individual conscience.

Slavery in the OT was either:

a. indentured servitude — i.e., limited to a particular period of time, and entered into voluntarily

b. permanent bond servant — but again, entered into voluntarily

These are not the same as the slavery that one saw in the United States prior to the Civil War, which was both permanent and involuntary.

Although polygamy is not generally prohibited, it is regulated and it is prohibited to those in “leadership” positions in the church — both elders and deacons are charged with only having a single wife. From a practical point of view, it is useful to notice that monogamy was the norm in Jewish society, with polygamy being limited principally to the rich, and more principally to the king. The expression in Genesis of a husband and wife being one flesh also seems to presuppose monogamous relationships, and from the general revelatory standpoint, monogamy is the most common arrangement among human societies, with polygamy being a somewhat unusual variant.

That polygamy is illegal in modern western societies makes the issue moot for discussion, as is slavery, which is also prohibited.

Summary

1. Love God, love people.

2. Does the demonstration of these two commandments change, depending on circumstances?

3. What is the purpose and context of the commandments that are given?

4. Has culture shifted in ways that require a shift in the practical outworkings of a given command?

It is necessary that we do something along these lines; there is no temple, thus there is no practical way to perform much of the ceremonial law. The New Testament provides the basic process.

The concept of cultural shift and the changes it can create in the practical understanding and practice of commandments may be disturbing, but we already do it without thought. The OT, prior to the law, enjoins circumcision and requires that all those who are not circumcized be cut off. Yet Paul, in the NT, argues that Gentiles should not be circumcised. How do we move from a clear do to an equally clear do not. To simply say that the NT supercedes the OT is to ignore the underlying question of how. It is still an apparent contradiction.

The only solution is to recognize the cultural shift, to ask for the purpose of circumcision, and how that purpose is universalized now in the indwelling Holy Spirit — i.e., the OT concept of the need to be “circumsized in the heart”.

The same thing occurs as we think about the temple and its related rituals. Why don’t we do any of them? Regardless of any theological or theoretical considerations, there is the simple practical reality that there is no temple, there has not been a temple for nearly 2000 years, and there are also no priests and no way of identifying who the priests should be. Again, a significant cultural shift, that result in practical differences in keeping the commandments of God.

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How to Write a Novel

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The first thing to understand about novel writing is that autobiography does not sell. Unless you’re an ex-president or otherwise famous, people beyond your family and friends are unlikely to be all that interested in your story, no matter how fascinating you might imagine it to be. After years of experience, publishers have learned that most autobiographies simply don’t sell very well.

Still, your novel can actually be adapted from your life’s story. You simply need to transform it into a story concept that is interesting. Writing what you know is good advice. But increase the level of conflict and action. Put your story into a time and place that are out of the ordinary.

And create a plot. There are only a handful of plots that exist. In fact, most can be broken down to what the mythologist Joseph Campbell called “the Hero’s Journey” or the monomyth. In his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell writes, “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Campbell describes seventeen stages along the way of this myth or story format. If you watch movies or read novels, you’ll find that they generally follow this basic pattern that Joseph Campbell noticed. The first Star Wars movie is a very good example of this, since Lucas consciously adapted Campbell’s format. But you’ll generally find the pattern exists in everything from romance to mysteries to westerns. So study some movies or books and pay attention to the structure. Analyze how the story was told and how the whole thing works. Remember, too, that your primary goal in novel writing is to entertain your audience: make them want to keep turning the pages.

After you’ve come up with a story idea—usually a “what if” scenario—and after you’ve plotted the basic structure of the story—then you need to come up with your characters. You’ll need conflict, so you’ll want good guys and bad guys. They can be conflicted and complicated if you’d like—the more depth the better—but there need to be clearly defined “sides.”

Be sparing in your descriptions. Avoid an overuse of adverbs and adjectives (that is, avoid words that end with “ly”, such as “really” or “badly” or “lovingly.” Let your verbs and nouns do most of the heavy lifting. Keep your sentences active, rather than passive. “Sherman punched Joe in the face.” is much more interesting than “Joe was punched.” Remember, you’re writing a novel, not a bureaucrat’s explanation of why he needs funding this year. Passive voice should be used very sparingly.

Begin the story in the middle of the action. Don’t begin with just one character—have at least two. Don’t begin with the character in bed or taking a shower–or doing any sort of wool-gathering. Avoid the “information dump” where you think you need to tell the reader everything you imagine they need to know in order to understand the story. Comprehending the story, getting to know the characters should be more like real life. Walk into the room and discover a fight going on: you don’t know why they’re fighting or who the good guys or bad guys are. As the story unfolds, you’ll find out. Don’t give it away up front. Keep the reader a bit off-kilter, like your first day on a new job.

Watch your point of view. Decide whether you want to write in first person-–that is “I was walking across the street and then I saw her.” Or third person, “He was walking across the street when he saw her.” And then, once you’ve decided on a point of view, stick to it. If it is first person, remember that unless you’re God, you don’t know anything more than you can see or hear around you. If you’re writing third person, don’t jump from one character to another. Stick to one character’s point of view through the entire scene or chapter.

Make certain that the characters are distinguishable from one another. They shouldn’t all sound just like you. Imagine you’re an actor. You’re not playing yourself. If the characters come alive in your mind, become individuals, like your friends, and you recognize them by how they act, what they are interested in, by their mannerisms and quirks, then you’ve done your job right. You may find, in fact, that the characters actually take on a life of their own and gain a certain amount of autonomy. That is, you realize that given their nature, they must sometimes behave differently from your initial expectation for them back when you first planned the novel.

Finally, you must actually begin to write. Find a time and place to write every day that fits your schedule and then discipline yourself to do it. Never go back and rework any of the pages you wrote until after you have finished writing the entire novel. This is very important. Let me say it again: do not rewrite anything until you finish the whole book. Don’t look at what you’ve done; just keep pressing ahead.

Remember too: (this is a mind game I play with myself) so what if you think what you’ve written is bad? You can fix it all after you’ve finished the book. You can always rewrite…later on. For now, just write. Don’t stop. Don’t worry about how bad it is. Maybe it is all horrible. Don’t stop. Just fill up the page with words. Keep on pounding away (you’ll discover, when you’re done, that it isn’t really as bad as you imagine.) And one other thing. Don’t wait for inspiration. Ditch diggers don’t wait to be inspired. Surgeons don’t wait for the muse. This is a job. Just do it. Some days it will flow, some days it won’t. In the end, it all sounds the same. Writing is a job; it is a craft. Treat it as such.

If you write even one page a day, after a year you’ll have a completed first draft, which will be just the right length for an average novel: about 90,000 words (365 double spaced pages). At that point–and only at that point–you may begin the process of rewriting. Keep rewriting until you are fully satisfied with it. Read it out loud to yourself and listen to it. Does it sound right? If not, fix it. Find a friend who will read it and give you honest feedback. Make more changes. Maybe inflict your creation on multiple friends who you know will tell you what’s wrong with it. You don’t want pats on the back. You want cold hard reality. Develop a thick skin and don’t fall in love with your own words. That thick skin will serve you well. You will get rejected by agents, editors, and even after you finally sell your masterpiece, you’ll find some readers will give you one and two star reviews on Amazon. The more pain you get now, the more calluses you build on your heart now, the better you’ll be able to survive your actual career as a writer. If you think people will praise you, fawn over you, and be impressed that you’ve published: buy a clue now. No one will care, any more than they care about anyone else’s career path. Get used to rejection; get used to making little money. You write because you like writing, because you have to write. Not because you’re looking for praise, money and affection.

When you’ve finished, get a copy of Writer’s Market from your library or bookstore and follow the advice there for proper format for your manuscript, for how to write query letters to agents or editors, and use the book to find the agents or editors who might be interested in the sort of book you’ve created. And as you’re shopping that book around, start work on your next novel. Then be persistent—and don’t give up! The only writers who fail are the ones who give up.

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Hobbies

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As I grew up I collected several hobbies. Some involved actual collecting. I collected rocks and fossils. Later, I came to be interested in collecting coins and stamps, and then I started playing with model trains and rockets. I love astronomy and I own a good telescope. My love of reading has never left me and now I read, on average, at least one book a week, usually more, on top of daily reading of two newspapers, news on the web, and monthly, a handful of magazines.

In college, and then during my graduate work, model trains and rockets were not the sorts of things I could find the time to pursue—let alone find room for in a dorm (especially the model railroad layout). Marriage and children that followed also got in the way of finding the extra time or income for trains or rockets. Stamps and coins disappeared into boxes in my closet.

Every Christmas my roommate from college still gives me the yearly proof sets issued by the US Mint of the coins they produced for that year. But otherwise, I have not done anything with my coin collection in years. Through college and my graduate years, my roommate and I would visit the post office regularly to get blocks of each new stamp that was issued. For awhile, I received first day covers of each stamp when it came out. But it’s been at least twenty years, perhaps more, since I’ve actively collected.

It is not that my interest in stamps or coins has waned, necessarily. It is, instead, that other things took priority: things like paying a mortgage and taking care of my children. They had homework, soccer practice, girl scouts, and the like.

A couple of years ago my daughters were shocked when they discovered that I had a stamp collection and a coin collection. They spent hours looking at them.

As to model rockets, the last time I launched one was when my middle daughter had to launch a rocket for her astronomy class last year. I helped her build one and that then got me involved in building a couple more rockets. For my birthday this year my wife bought me another model rocket kit. I have yet to put it together, however.

Every so often I start to think about video games. I enjoy video games, and yet it has been years since I’ve played any of them for more than five minutes. There was a time when I would spend several hours a week playing games like Doom or Duke Nuke’m. I managed to finish the game of Myst. During my graduate work at UCLA I was an early adopter of computers and spent endless hours playing text adventures such as Suspended, Zork, Station Fall, and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Later, I actually programmed a couple of text adventures for a contest offered by Q-Link (the Commodore-specific forerunner of AOL). I managed to win both second and third place.

For awhile I had trouble figuring out why the various hobbies and things that I have derived so much pleasure from have fallen by the wayside over the years, like leaves falling from a tree in autumn. Even television receives less than five hours a week of my time each week now; that’s much more than I watched during college and grad school.

But as I started analyzing my days, I discovered pretty quickly what the problem is.

Obviously, I work during the day, like everyone else. In my case, spending eight hours, five days a week in front of my computer writing and rewriting. I have a weekly newspaper column to put out. I teach classes in the evenings sometimes (Hebrew, Bible, Theology). Work takes the largest chunk of time outside of sleeping. Obviously, when I was younger, work didn’t take up nearly so much time. Then I also spend time each day helping my youngest daughter with her school work: she’s on directed study due to her mental health issues.

Then I started factoring in the hours I devote to driving my children to various activities, the time that my wife wants to spend with me, such as occasionally going out for an evening, and it no longer is so odd that I have so little time left for hobbies. Reading remains the single non-work activity that I love the most and so the limited free time I have gets swallowed by that first of all. Since very few hours are left after reading, my other hobbies receive short shrift.

Life is just that way. We prioritize and manage the few hours we are granted each day, often without even thinking about them. But occasionally, it is useful to stop and reconsider what we’re doing and decide if maybe some reshuffling of priorities might not be a bad thing.

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God: Harsh Disciplinarian or Permissive Parent?

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For the second time in as many years, I was tasked with preaching this year’s Palm Sunday service. I chose as my sermon title “God: Harsh Disciplinarian or Permissive Parent?” I suggested that mercy matters more to God than judgment, which should surprise no one. Consider our own thinking. As teenagers, if we came home past curfew and our parents caught us, what did we do? We told mom and dad that it would never happen again, it was an accident. We begged for mercy.

But if someone eats some of our food that we stored in the break room at work, what do we want? We want to see some punishment. We want justice!

In examining the Bible, it seems to me that God mostly treats people the way we hoped our parents would treat us, not how we’d treat someone who ate our last cupcake.

In the treaty God made with his people Israel, he told them that he was not giving them the Promised Land because of their righteousness, but because he loved them (Deuteronomy 9:4-6). It’s rather similar to what Paul later writes to a church in Rome, when he reminds them that God loves us and sent his son to die for our sins while we were still sinners and still his enemy. (Romans 5:6-11)

Therefore it is not so surprising that God regularly warns his people of punishment, and then is likely to forgive them and not punish them at all. For instance, in Exodus 33:1-3, after the golden calf incident, God told the Israelites that they would have to go to the Promised Land by themselves, without him. But by Exodus 33:15-17, Moses begged and so God agreeed to go along with them after all.

Each week I teach an adult Sunday school class; currently we are studying the book of Judges. We’ve very quickly discovered that the Israelites kept repeating the same bad behavior over and over. At least twelve times the Israelites worshipped idols, God sent trouble, they begged for help, God sent a rescuer, and when the rescuer died, they reverted to worshipping idols all over again. They kept doing the same bad thing. And it didn’t stop during the time of the Judges. They kept at it, year after year, decade after decade, century after century.

When kings like David and Solomon came along, did they change their ways? No. In fact, David’s wife worshiped idols (1 Samuel 19:13) and later, so did Solomon (1 Kings 11:4-8), and later still, so did most of the kings, queens, and people of Judah and Israel.

So what did God do about it?

What most of us do with our children: God just yelled at them–by means of prophets. He sent prophet after prophet warning them that he would bring judgment if they didn’t stop worshipping idols. This continued for about nine hundred years, until God finally had the Babylonians haul them into captivity starting in 605 BC. They remained in captivity only seventy years, and then went back home.

To put this into perspective, this would be like yelling at your teenager from the time she was 13 until she was 15 and a half—and then grounding her for a week.

Mostly, this is how God handles his people throughout the Bible. Once in a great while, God drops brimstone. Ananias and Sapphira lied to their church and they dropped dead (Acts 5). But most of the time, people lie and nothing much happens to them at all. Except they keep getting re-elected.

Frankly, God usually just lets people get away with murder. Quite literally.

Moses killed an Egyptian. Did God see to it that justice was served and that he got the death penalty or at least life in prison? No. He spent forty years tending sheep and then came back and rescued the Israelites from Egypt.

Jephthah (one of the Judges from our Sunday School studies) sacrificed his daughter as a burnt offering because of a foolish vow (Judges 11). Did God kill him? Nope, he made Jephtha successful and established him as a leader in Israel. In the New Testament he is listed as an example of a great man of faith (see Hebrews 11:32).

David committed adultery with Bathsheba and then murdered her husband. Did God see to it that David was executed as the law of Moses required? Nope. David remained the king of Israel. And the second son that he had with that hussy Bathsheba was Solomon –who became the next king.

How many crimes have been committed this past year, just in California? Did God strike even one miscreant with lightning? Did he lift a finger to prevent their misbehavior? Where was God when the Nazis slaughtered 6 million of his people in gas chambers?

And look at you! Those awful, unfriendly words and gestures you shared with that driver who cut you off on your way to work. Even now, some of you are fantasizing about eating a whole Costco cake even though you’re on Weight Watchers. And how many guys just “accidentally” stumble upon certain pictures on the internet? Fifteen times. Every day. And I’m sure most women are just thinking about how much they love their husbands while they watch that periodically shirtless actor in the TV series Chicago Fire.

But, perhaps surprisingly, you are still breathing and going about your daily business. No brimstone has fallen on your head. You probably had a nice weekend.

What’s it all mean? It means that God is not a harsh disciplinarian. Quite the opposite. God loves us. He thinks our freedom trumps making us behave.

In Genesis 3 God gave Adam and Eve the freedom to make the wrong choice with the forbidden fruit. All of human history: every war, every murder, every act of genocide, all the lies, abuse, slavery, and more—flowed from that bad decision.

But God thinks that was a price worth paying for freedom. And think about it this way: there is very little crime in Saudi Arabia, where they kill and maim people for the most mild of offenses. So everyone is well behaved. You can leave your doors unlocked and you purse unattended. But tell me, where would you rather live? Here, or there? Dictatorship or democracy? Do you want mercy—or do you want justice?

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Life’s Choices

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Life is what happens while you’re trying to figure out what to do with it. After completing my graduate work in Semitic languages at UCLA I took a teaching position at the small private institution where I had done my undergraduate work.

My first two years they only gave me a part time teaching schedule so that the school would not have to pay me benefits or much of a salary: three hundred a month versus fifteen hundred. Full time faculty taught twelve units. They had me teach eleven. Of course occasionally they had me teach more, as when they had me substitute for a month without pay for one particular professor’s class. He happened to be the president of the institution and asked me to do it for him as a personal favor. I figured it might benefit my career if I helped him out.

My third year there, the college finally broke down and gave me a full time position. How come? My third year there was the year that a new president began running the place. His philosophy was radically different from that of the previous president and all the other members of the particular department I taught in, the Bible department, had promptly left the school. So they needed someone to teach those classes; they also made me the acting head of the department.

Not that this seemed to mean anything. Within a month of the beginning of my first semester, they fired my secretary, leaving me without one for the remainder of the year. And then, later during the year, they decided to reorganize the entire department and managed to eliminate all the classes that I taught (upper division language, history and theology courses). So, my first full time teaching year as a college professor was also my last year. Not that it came as much of a surprise, given the early departure of my secretary, of course.

I was, to say the least, a bit annoyed by having been treated this way (especially when I found out that the “full time salary” they had given me was actually the salary they normally paid the janitors). I could not help wondering if I had been making the right choices in my life. Three years earlier, I had been offered a full time position at a different institution. But this college which had mistreated me had been my alma-matre. I knew everyone there. I had given them my word already. It seemed a perfect fit. And I had mistakenly assumed that they would treat me fairly. In my unemployed hindsight, it seemed obvious I had made a poor choice.

My wife and I wound up both being unemployed for about nine months. She’d been teaching elementary school at a private institution and had decided not to sign a new contract. It had been, to put it bluntly, a very bad place to work and had paid her even less than I had been making at my alma-matre.

We managed to survive, somehow, while we both hunted for new positions. While I hunted, I decided to try my hand at writing. The writing went well, but the hunting proved fruitless. But come autumn, my wife managed to land a position with a public school some forty miles away. The upshot of it all was that her new salary was now more than what our combined salaries had been at the two private schools at which we’d been teaching.

We moved, and I continued to write since our financial situation had become stable again. And a handful of years later, with the backing of the local church we had joined when we moved north, I decided to start a college. In the more than twenty years since I founded the new college, in addition to administrative duties, I have taught the same variety of courses that I had taught before, and I also managed to get a lot of writing done and ultimately, to get professionally published. In fact, the way I was “discovered” was by way of the school I’d started, Quartz Hill School of Theology. An editor in London saw my work there and asked me to write a book for them. It was published in 2008 by Reader’s Digest Books in the English speaking world, and was subsequently published in 13 languages. There have been 2 Dutch editions, and it was recently reissued in English (in 2012) by Chartwell Books.

Certainly this turn of events, from being unemployed, to the writing, to the establishment of a new theological institution, to become a professional writer was not in my head when I decided to take up a position teaching at my old undergraduate institution. And certainly many events along the way didn’t seem like good things. None of the choices I’ve made have ever made me much money (though had I intended to make a lot of money I don’t suppose I would have chosen to major in dead Semitic languages as a graduate student at UCLA). But perhaps, in the long run, the choices I’ve made were okay after all. We simply can never predict what our life might ultimately bring us, especially while we’re still living it.

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