"180" Movie - A Living Waters Ministry Production

"Where was the World? Where was everyone?"

There will be a time when a book's appalling words and chilling facts describe a world too ready to be embraced. A time when individuals will stand alone calling out, "Where is the world? Where is everyone?" As a lonely star in a cold winter's night their voices will find no warmth. The silence will bring no comfort. Until the world has changed and time begin again, they will only find despair. But those times are not our times and those words are not our words.

Today is the time where men and women are fighting against the appalling words and chilling facts too ready to be embraced. Every day they are standing against the American Holocaust and fighting against the deaths of over 53 million of America's children. Will you let them stand alone? Will you let your hopes become regrets? Will you be left calling out, "Where was I?"

If you have a moment please take the time to watch this video.

A Midnight Caller

My first full length poem. I hope you enjoy.

A Midnight Caller

I walk every night to the street-lit corner

hoping and dreaming the return of my lover

My hand turned out, my face turned queer

I skip and dance because I have found her here

But tonight the stars are not glowing and yellow

The night is cold and brisk and quite mellow

A man, A man approaches in the midnight hour

Death is known as the midnight caller

In the night as I wait

I can watch every step he take

Alone in the street-lit corner

I know, here comes my lover

He greets me with a smile and extends out his hand

I know it is time, I know what he wants – tonight we see a far-away land

We ride in a carriage down a cobblestone way

Death sits and he stares as God told me to stay.

The street-lit corner has passed and gone

For now death and I have left for yester's dawn

The carriage has stopped, and death has not spoken

He extends out his hand and delivers a token

Outside the carriage I see my friends at play - warm with glee

But death's carriage door will not open, I am forced to watch those who are free.

I see myself outside at play

I see my friends, my mother, my father, my family in the day

My youthful memories begins to glide and vapor

The door of my heart begins to taper

I shake and fight, I know what is next

Death smiles and laughs he knows it's my turned to be vexed.

The carriage carried us into the darkness beyond

I shake and quiver, knowing we will go on

The night is still dark save for a street-lit corner

The carriage stops for a moment near a murmur

This was the house of me and my lover

The moment has come that I wished to cover

I began to cry and weep for all the regrets I lived to keep

Then Death, glaring and smiling, held out his hand and began to speak

At first he spoke low and piercing

Then his voice rose and split my soul, he was cursing

Death enchanted,

“You were brought a wife

Gleaming and glow

To love and cherish

over the moonlit snow

Every night she waited til the stars struck hours

Sleeping before her Charming was in her towers

Always alone to the end

Always dreaming for an amend”

I never stopped crying until he finished his last word

I wanted it to stop, I tried any way, I wanted something but what I heard.

He pulled me out of the carriage with hands as old as iron

He brought me into my lovers bedroom to see my wife's heart burn

I tried to hold her and I tried to speak

But time had run out, and death for us all, for now I couldn't be meek.

Death seized me by my skull

He called and brooded into me a lull

“You ask your crime?

T'is Ignorance

And the wish for time”

Then he threw back my head and let it fall

The darkness became darker and I felt the death of all

The carriage began again, traveling down the cobblestone way

I would not have known, but because Death told me a place we were to stay.

Again we stopped, but I didn't look out the iron of the door

I knew whatever it was, I wasn't prepared for what was in store

I layed and I waited hoping death wouldn't seize me again

but I awoke to the dawn, the sun over the horizon, a day to begin

I stepped out of the carriage whose door was open wide

I was happy to see everything, the sky, the earth, it was an overwhelming tide

Looking around I knew where I was – it was all over

My life was no more, but so was my hoping and dreaming and street-lit corner

My wife was there with tears no more

I seized her and felt as if I would let go nevermore

She smiled and asked if I had received a token

Wondering if Death was near me and had spoken

I had forgotten death and the carriage

I felt for the token and pulled it out with all my courage

I read it once and have always felt rotton

For those who are yet alive, I write the words so they won't be forgotten

“Imagine if you would have spent a little time

Imagine eternity with reminisce of joyous chime”

Focus, Focus, Green

Focus, Focus, Green

“What are you doing?!?! You forgot?” I vividly remember my football coach yelling at us in his picture enhancing words, “You don't forget what's important... Do you forget to wipe after using the restroom? Walk around stinky?,” he paused to point, “No, you do what's important. Make your football job important.”* Life is the same way. You can't do or remember everything. You have to prioritize, choose which cards to hold and which to discard. The quicker you do it the better because your competing against time - he hasn't lost yet.

In my accelerated college course the first thing I took was a course on memory. It was an audio course taught by a man whose name I have misplaced, but I do know he had a funny voice that was feinted – like speaking with your nose plugged – and achieved a few awards for his ability. One of his lessons showed that the mind remembers the objects you focus on. The lesson went something like this:

Look around the room. Find everything that is the color green. Keep looking, find all of them, every single one of them. Look at your clothing, look at the ceiling, look everywhere. Now close your eyes. Your mind should be black and void. Now slowly visualize all of those items. Do you see them now? Keeping visualizing them one by one. Are they all in your head? Do you see them all? Keep your eyes closed and tell me how many red objects are in the room. Sound unfair? Can't remember any red objects? It isn't unfair – you only remembered what you focused on.

The course continued on explaining and teaching me how the mind more willingly remembers pictures over text. Need to remember a license plate? Assign a picture for each character. Say the license plate is 4QRW421H. That might be long for remembering a sequence of random numbers and letters, but there is a way to make it easier, less random. Picture (Four) (Q)ueens (R)unning (W)ildly (for) (twenty-one) (h)ours. Maybe they are getting tired and slowing down, or drank too much coffee and still going strong – why would they be running for twenty-one hours? Make it into a story. Conversely, to make another example, you could say Four Quilts are Ripping William into four-hundred and twenty-one pieces of human-burgers - the more dastardly the easier to remember. But the entire idea of the course was to find the things worth remembering, focusing on those things, and sticking them into your memory – a license plate is important to remember if you are at the DMV.

As Christians we are fortunate to have the Bible with commandments and histories that converges on God's will. So why aren't Christians perfect? We have God's will spelled out for us – literally in most cases. Sweeping aside sin and its intrusion, by far and wide the single reason is focusing on the wrong things - I did not say bad things.

Most confusing is that there is a difference between wrong things and bad things. There are many good things in our lives and many bad ideas, but focusing on good things in the wrong place should be equally avoided. Working hard is almost proverbial, it is the quote of every failed husband. Working diligently is proverbial. Working without sacrificing your family. Loving your family without sacrificing God. Everything is balanced on a slim edge of time and eternity.

Time sits unnervingly. He hasn't moved and never sleeps, tapping away on the table he is counting your remaining life. Breaking down under the glare of time, I get lost in the frantics of deadlines, wants, places to go, remembering, forgetting, while everything around me seems to be falling apart. Sometimes I fix that by working extra hard to complete my “To-Do” list. I feel better at night to have a list of accomplishments thanking me. But Time is still the victor. I focus on “To-Do” lists for the wrong reasons. I become economical and extricate all the “fluff.” Instead of posing for my little sister so she can draw a picture of me, I am in my room, door closed, trying to finish up a job. Instead of coaching my little brother's football team, I am trying to catch up on my reading. I focus on the wrong things because I have the wrong reasons.

To defeat time you must focus on the one who can break it: God, who was before and will be after. God provided Ten commandments, but, in comical fashion, Christ understood we couldn't remember that – He stated two: Love our neighbors as our self and love our God with all of our hearts, with all of our soul, and with all of our mind. Our family is our closest neighbor, not the job to make us feel better. Working hard was never something God commanded us to do, He commanded us to work hard for Him. When we focus on God, we focus on the right things in the right place. Time can only claim victory when we focus on things constrained by time. But when focused on God and family we grab Time by the neck and place it in the right place – not tapping away our life, but collecting moments that will last forever.

I started off college learning how to learn. When we live our life we must begin by learning how to live. We need to focus on what is important and remember. Don't be looking for green when you know we are asking for red. If you don't know what color to look for, look for which color to look for. Spend time focusing on what is right. So next time, when you use the restroom take your Bible with you.... As I said, the more dastardly the easier to remember.

*No, that is not a word-for-word quote of my high school football coach. You wouldn't know it, but he was an English teacher. On the football field he religiously held a few choice words that I omitted or replaced.

The Count of Monte Cristo: A Book Review

The Count of Monte Cristo
A Novel by Alexander Dumas

“...All human wisdom is contained in these two words: Wait and Hope.”

          A man may walk into the halls of Chateau d'If, but out of her chains a man never returns. A sailor by trade, a captain by gain, fortune has spoken differently to the virtuous. In the shadow of trust his betrothed is seized by his friends, his rank stripped by the ones he loves, and his weary father cast aside to the harshness of his son's betrayal. In the darkness of Chateau d'If he finds the enchantments of vengeance and a lord willing to teach him its ways. Here are the chronicles of Edmond Dantes, the Count of Monte Cristo.

          Traveling through the toils that assail the human soul, the reader is confused and dazzled by the complexities of ancient society. The book begins at the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, Napoleon banished to the island of Elba, and a betrayal of a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the central story doesn't begin until the entrance of a mysterious figure into the Parisian aristocracy; A man with God-like powers, one who holds the caprices of life and death, and guides the providence of heaven. The Count of Monte Cristo is warmly received and the story begins: find and punish those who plundered his heart.

          The daunting question is, “who can contain the cup of retribution?” Some books have stood against generations of criticism because valour has been championed, but this book has stood because vengeance is eternal. The reader is not merely shown how a shard of fervor can ravage a man, but how vehemence, wholly in the grasp of the anguished, can break the soul of society. Can a man seek revenge without ravaging himself? That is the story you must read to the end to find out.

          But don't believe you will finish it quickly. The unabridged edition, which I recommend, is not for the feint of mind. Weighting at over five pounds, the book is over twelve-hundred pages and mounts a vocabulary that will require an excellent dictionary. Don't let that deter you, there is an exception and with patience comes a reward. In a brilliant fashion the presumptuous consequences of a long book – forgetting characters, unable to recollect specific events, complex story lines, and simply the terrifying look of a book larger than any encyclopedia – is played to an advantage. Have you ever been left to yourself when, suddenly, you remember something of sentimental value? Whether it is sad or comforting there is a special feeling of excitement in remembering. Like so, Alexander Dumas guides his reader through a lost memory. Always looking to the past, the reader will be intrigued at how much of the book is forgotten only to be remembered in the splitting pages to come. No one is left with a book – perhaps it wasn't written to be so - they are left with an experience of a long forgotten memory.

          I was left with a small dirt-grinned piece of glass reflecting the tarnishes of life and shimmering with a sparkle of happiness. The French aristocracy and their liveliness, the intimate feelings of barons and baronesses, and the transformation of the entire story. One seeks vengeance and one finds the answer. There is a price for every choice we make, but the difficulty is finding out that you never knew the final cost. There isn't anything to disregard about this story, it is a masterpiece.

          However, before I leave this book on my shelf, there is one more thing I would like to say. There is something special I was told. Too often people prostrate themselves on a lonely island watching their hopes dip below the horizon. You may become one of those people when you try to finish this book, you may be one of those people already; not knowing if good will come, if good will ever come. To those people there is a word of encouragement... Wait and Hope.

Writing is Like.......

An essay to remind myself how to write

Everyone remembers the first time their mother asks them to iron their clothes. Unwillingly, you erect the creaky board, flatten your clothing on the slender surface, and with one hand wield your iron. The grudging task involves taking your material and smoothing every wrinkle, pressing every seam, and striving to keep every fiber unburned. In other words, iron clothes is like writing.

At first, the writing process is daunting and confusing. You begin to write your first draft in a breeze. Every sentence seems to leap like an Augustinian revelation and every analogy flows with antiquated wisdom. Then the revelation unfolds and the folly proceeds. You reread your work and your writing is spontaneous, incoherent, and of ogresque quality. The conglomeration of letters, sentences, and paragraphs ends with the reader managing to crawl away – never to return. Every wrinkle is left visible, every seam is found unpressed, and the smoke from your paper is clouting the room.

My first lessons in writing was a manhunt to find a proper board - and nothing can be more frustrating. You spend entire days editing and re-editing the same work. Your sentences are too long or too short, they are vague and unintelligible, and you don't know how to fix them. With your sentences floating belly-up, your paragraphs aren't swimming any better. With a secession of convoluted thoughts, there's no epic view to a final draft. You are lost on a misty mountain. So, the first step to ironing your clothes is to find a concrete surface that isn't going to move; by understanding the English language. Learn your mechanics, learn your sentence structures, learn how to punctuate, learn how organize your work, and, above all, learn patience. This even means throwing away your mothers ironing board – or perhaps saving it for another day - you'll be rewarded in the end for doing it.

Then, you must trust your material. Too many times your half way finished when you decide to throw another pair of shorts on to the ironing board. You exchange pairs with a feint hope that the errors will fix themselves. Talent and ability will never remedy the problem. Writing is about doing and redoing until the task is finished. The first copy will be rough. The second copy will be rough. The third copy will be rough. Every copy will be rough until you have corrected and re-corrected a thousand times. Each time you correct again, every moment you spend after wanting to quit, is the skill required for you to smooth the wrinkles of your writing. You need to trust you material, stop changing, and finish what you've started.

And, lastly, the most elusive of the writing virtues is a good voice. You can write, write, and write, but if you don't have a voice no one will hear you – and most certainly no one will want to. Grab a book written by a favorite author and read aloud. Hear your voice rise and fall, hear the pitch and stress of the author's words, and pause and begin again at the signs of punctuation. To become better at ironing, you need to hear the sound of the steam. Is it the sound of a gentle rain, bubbling of skin under hot oil, or the blast of a train at full tilt? You are the writer, so choose; your voice will only expand or contract to describe what you already hear.

The difficulty in writing is “beginning and finishing your work.” Work until you fail, and keep working until you have succeeded. Don't worry about failing, and don't shudder at the sight of your mother's ironing board. Those are the lessons that will guide you to becoming what you were designed to do. So plug in your iron, wait until the ready light turns on, and start writing.

The First Writing Class

A Lesson in Short Story Writing


My teacher entered the class. With her back facing me, she began to write a list of disjointed words. For several minutes she continued in her mysterious fashion.

When she turned to face the class, she told us to write. Write anything. Write about a word on the board, write anything that comes to mind. Again and again she repeated herself. Then my teacher tottered to her chair and, sitting down, asked what we were waiting for.

I began to write, but I didn't know where to begin. Words flurried about my head, lost in the abyss of my own creation. Expressions attempted to draw a conclusion upon my paper. I was paralyzed by the vastness of my teachers challenged. I was told to write about anything, to me I was told to write about everything.

When I looked upon the word beauty, the snow capped Himalayas and the crystal waters of the south pacific seized my mind. When I began to write the word power, every conqueror stole the battle for my soul. When I looked through the spaces of my fingers, towards that ever expanding list of words, I could see the word fear. I thought of every male who trembles before his creator and every mothers desolation when she catches the last moments of her child. Every word meant more than one thing, and I was challenged to write it.

I closed my eyes and began to write. First it was black, then, slowly, like a new dawn, light shone across the horizon. Trees began to grown and animals filled the void. Voices called me by name and the winds held my hand. The feeling must have been like the day Adam was created: to behold the beauty of the world all at once.

Time seemed to stop for a moment, then all was over. I walked to my teacher and handed her my papers – I was the first one done.

She looked at me suspiciously, and then, my fear came true. She began to read. I watched as her disappointed face slowly became neutral, and finally a smile. She looked at me and said, “You have learned how to write.” I laughed and replied, “No, I have learned how to love.”

A Soldier's Honour

An essay defining true Honour

        Honour unguided, like a dream, is easily broken. Shattered among the ground, the shards of honour have created the most vile of mankind, the individuals deceived by the satisfaction of mere authority. By replacing virtue as the guide to honour, destruction and evil fills the empty void and throws mankind into the oblivion of a single, deceptive belief: that an individual acts as the possessor of honour, when instead, one has forsaken her long ago. However, men are not only the devices of tyranny, but also the shining hope of freedom. Over the years, honour has been entrusted to the knights, the watchmen, and the soldiers who have paid the greatest price to protect the ones they love. G.K. Chesterton understood the soldier's honour as a commitment to the virtues of love, hope, and obedience, when he stated, “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”¹ Though unguided honour has ravaged the history of civilization, honour that is guided by the virtues of love, hope, and obedience, has defined the true concept of honour that all have come to respect.
        History has testified to the horrors committed in the name of honour. Perhaps the most infamous acts performed under the guise of honour were the ones described by General Eisenhower at Ohdruf's Concentration camp in Normandy; “... [It was] beyond the American mind to comprehend.... I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world.”² Eisenhower ordered every high ranking official in the local area to immediately witness the grotesque mutilations that America was fighting to end. The execrable events that marked Hitler's ending were not the events that marked his beginning. Hitler did not rise to power upon fear and atrocity, but he rose upon the love and loyalty of the German people.
      The Führer did not merely promise wealth, power, and dignity, but he also fulfilled his promises faithfully. Six years after Hitler assumed office, the bankrupt, ill, and indecisive Weihmer Republic became the rich, flourishing, and commanding Third Reich. But what Germany neither saw nor took heed to understand was what Hitler's promises were guided by; as described in the Mein Kampf³, Adolf's passions were guided by the lust for domination and the desire for revenge. Germany's transformation was surely delivered, but not by the honour the German people believed in. The German people believed in an honour that was defined by virtue, but desired national honour so passionately that an entire nation was willing to risk life, liberty, and country for anything that resembled true honour.   
        Few have endured and have been guided by the virtues of true honour. A knight's accomplishments are not recognized by actions, promises, or fulfillment alone but by the guidance of love, hope, and obedience. The first and greatest virtue is love. Love is the all-encompassing virtue that withstands all the troubles of life: “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things - true love never fails”⁴. The second is hope. “Hope is faith holding out its hand in the dark”⁵: it is the light of God being seen when all lights go out. Through the darkest of times and through the perilous of moments, the virtue of hope continually assures the watchman of what is true when nothing is to be seen. And the last quality of honour is obedience. Obedience is the act of walking down the path less traveled not because one wishes, but because one must. The collection of virtues defining honour is demonstrated by the choices an individual makes; one chooses either to uphold the virtues of honour through all the toils of life or to abandon honour when she is most needed. Unlike the sunshine patriot, the bearer of honour is not defined by what he wishes, but by what he is given, and by what he accomplishes.
      Though historically the knight in shining armour has been the epiphany of the nobility of honour, the definition of honour has also been described by the ancient philosophers and completed by the Christian belief. Aristotle believed, “Every art and every investigation, and similarly every action and pursuit, is considered to aim at some good. Hence the Good has been rightly defined as 'that at which all things aim'.”⁶ Aristotle described that all of mankind travels down the road of life to find happiness and, in so doing, directs all actions towards objects of goodness. And from the path of goodness mankind immortalizes the men and woman who reach the pinnacle of goodness – which is honour. The German people believed in Hitler not because of the concentration camps, but because he was able to renew Germany.        
        The Nazi regime rebuilt destroyed cities, fed the famished citizens, and carried the burden of the people. With so much good, how did Hitler's honour end with such atrocities? Honour ended with evil because the ancient philosophers could not define the standard of goodness, therefore the path to honour was the path that each person believed to be right – all paths lead to honour. Without a standard to guide honour, honour became as morally good as described by the people who benefited by her riches and as morally evil as described by the people who were destroyed by her deception. Honour was a dead end, a poor collection of good thoughts, until Christianity asserted a standard to goodness that the ancient philosophers could not conjecture.

      The virtues of honour are completed by the doctrines of the Christian faith by defining the virtues of love, hope, and obedience with the standard and purity of God's goodness. The prophet Micah stated, “ He hath shewed thee, O man, what [is] good; and what doth the LORD require of thee. But to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”⁷ Through the Ten Commandments and the prophets, mankind was shown God's expectancy, provided the standard of goodness, and shown why honour was treasured above all other virtues. Honour stands alone unlike any virtue because honour is defined by something beyond mankind – defined by God – because honour is the virtue that saved mankind. The strife for true honour has been the story of every civilization and the glory of every belief.     
        In Paradise Lost, Milton portrays the acts of honour in the elegance of poems and valiance of legends. The Biblical story of creation and the fall of mankind depicts the struggles and the importance between the bonds of male and female; between a man and a wife; between a knight and his love; and between life and death. As Adam held the forbidden fruit in his hand, he chose the ultimate sacrifice for the one he loved. Looking at Eve, Adam proclaimed, “If death consort with thee, death is to me as life.... Our state cannot be severed. We are one, One Flesh. To lose thee were to lose myself.”⁸ Adam ate the fruit, his body died, and his soul separated from his creator. In the love for his wife, in the hope for the things to come, and in the obedience to one bond, Adam perished with Eve. Adam's choice was the only choice for Eve to be saved from death.    
        For thousands of years after the death of Adam, the race of man fell; but love, hope, and obedience endured. The sacrifice committed by Adam was a great sacrifice, and the cost was dear, for again, “darkness fell upon the face of the deep”^9. And in darkness, mankind awaited another sacrifice. Ten Thousand years later, God, in all His glory, came to fulfill that honourable sacrifice. As the Bible speaks about the church being the Bride of Christ, so did Christ endure the sacrifice for the sin of His wife. Upon the cross, Christ bore the shame that Adam carried before his Creator long ago in the garden. Christ tasted the fruit of his creation, His body died, and His spirit was separated from His Father. In the love for His Bride, in the hope for the few to be saved, and in the obedience to God, Christ died and rose from the grave. Virtue prevailed so that two may be together again. Honour is defined by sacrificial love, impelling hope, and determined obedience.        
        Unguided honour has been the demise to every good intention, but the fulfillment of every good deed is the pleasures of true honour. The love of every knight, the keeper of every watchman, and the duty of every soldier is to understand true honour.“To love is to risk not being loved in return. To hope is to risk pain. To try is to risk failure, but risk must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.”¹⁰ To risk everything is to gain honour – the greatest of virtues.

1. G.K. Chesterton, Chesterton Society, www.chesterton.org (accessed 04/13/2011), ILN, 1/14/11

2. General Dwight Eisenhower, Eisenhower Memorial, http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/stories/death-camps.htm (accessed 04/13/2011)

3. Mein Kampf ( My Struggle) by Adolf Hitler, Published by Eher Verlag (accessed 04/13/2011)

4. Holy Bible, King James Version, 1 Cor. 13:4-8 [Paraphrased]

5. George Iles, Think Exist, http://thinkexist.com/quotation/hope_is_faith_holding_out_its_hand_in_the_dark/206715.html (accessed 04/13/2011)

6. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1, Chapter 1, The Object of Life, pg. 1

7. Holy Bible,King James Version, Micah 6:8

8. Paradise Lost by John Milton , Book IX, pg. 285, Lines 953 – 959 (accessed 04/13/2011)

9. Holy Bible, King James Version, Genesis 1:2

10. Bill Bixy, Think Exist, http://thinkexist.com/quotation/to_love_is_to_risk_not_being_loved_in_return-to/9949.html (accessed 04/13/2011)