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What I learned in Denver

“Don’t look back ‘cause you know what you might see.” – Oasis, D’you know what I mean?

Allow me a moment to be sentimental and reflective, I’m less than 72 hours from leaving a city that has challenged everything I thought I knew about myself. I’m not even sure how to put my time here into words, my soul has aged so much the last eight and a half months that sometimes it feels more like eight and a half years. Other times things have happened so fast that it feels like a dream, those moments that you savor. The ones you play back in your mind over and over just because you have to remind yourself they were real and you don’t ever want to forget that and the rush that came with them.

Things like:

Your first night in your own apartment on your own 1000 miles from everyone you know.

Helping a friend film a movie all over the city.

Staying up 38 hours just because you don’t want the night to end.

Drinking coffee, lots and lots of coffee. Not because you like it, but because you love the people on the other side of the table.

Watching Brad get out of a parking ticket.

Parallel parking on a hill.

Poker nights with the guys.

The drive to and from the Men’s Advance. (As well as the event it’s self.)

The crisp cutting chill of the morning air as you watch the sun rise over Garden of the Gods.

The joy of having Spanish class cancelled by snow.

Helping Katelin hunt for a phone.

Learning you’re capable of doing more than you thought.

Understanding that being mature doesn’t mean you’ll ever stop being a kid at heart.

Friday mornings with Owen at the office.

Going site seeing with the Denver 2011 church planting team.

Spending New Years with people you didn’t even know the year before and loving every minute of it.

Wearing a wig and dress for history class.

Going to bed exhausted but thrilled about the idea of getting up in the morning.

Moving furniture with Brad, multiple times.

The site of the Front Range covered in fresh snow.

Getting signatures to start a student group.

Standing at Red Rocks and looking out over the entire city.

Being on 17th Street facing the TIAA-CREF building, my favorite view in the entire city.

Riding through downtown on the back of Mau’s scooter.

Riding RTD.

First Friday’s in the Santa Fe art district.

Driving to and from Colorado Springs at least once a week.

Every Sunday I spent at High View.

All these things impacted who I am, and left a permanent mark on my soul. I can’t explain how or to what extent, mostly because even I don’t know the full answer to that question, but I know they did and I know I’m a better person for it.

World Peace and Sin

I had an interesting conversation about war and world peace with a friend of mine the other day that made me realize that how you view the human condition has a lot to do with what you think people are capable of both morally and socially.

My friend, who I’ll refer to as “Bob”, basically had two suggestions as to how war should be eradicated or at the very least, kept to a minimum. The first thing Bob brought up was that with so many countries possessing nuclear weapons that instead of fighting wars countries should go straight to the negotiating table since they know that there’s a possibility that their entire nation could be whipped out. His second idea was that if you made it so that war was no longer profitable it would be less likely to happen and if it did it would end quicker. To ensure that war isn’t profitable Bob suggested that everyone in the warring countries have their salaries reduced to the lowest pay grade in their countries military.

While I’m all for world peace I do have a theological problem with it, namely, sin. I know sin is not a popular idea in today’s culture but it is THE problem, it always has been and will continue to be until Jesus comes back. Pride and self-centeredness were the original sin (Gen. 3) and can still be found at the root of all other sin, in this case war. Because I believe in sin and the effect it has on the entire world I don’t believe you can ever find a formula that will usher in world peace no matter how badly I may want it. I’ll use Bob’s two suggestions to show how sin makes world peace unattainable.

The idea that you can somehow make war unprofitable is highly unlikely. War will always generate money, even if you do somehow manage to enforce a salary cap on an entire nation people will find a way around it. Because our own comfort and security is what we most value we will find ways to enhance it, in this case through some backwater way of gaining extra money. This is also the kind of environment that organized crime and the black market thrive in. Anytime you outlaw or limit the availability of an item, or in this case people’s ability to buy them, an illegal form of obtaining them will emerge it’s a simple matter of supply and demand. (Prohibition anyone?) This means that by implementing a law you thought would improve the human state you’ve actually made it worse and caused people to delve deeper into the baser desires of the human soul.

The reason people will never sit down at a table and negotiate is because both sides are only concerned about getting what they want, not about what the other side wants. Say, for example, one country wants to invade the other one so it can have access to the other countries natural resources free of charge. There is no way you can successfully negotiate that situation so that everyone comes away happy, one side thinks that they should be given something that isn’t theirs and the other side thinks they should keep what is rightfully theirs. This almost always leads to some form of armed conflict with one side trying to take what they want and the other side endeavoring to hold on to it.

More and more though wars are fought over ideology and less over physical territory, which leads to a real problem if you believe that people should believe whatever works for them because you can’t say that either side is wrong or right. Both sides are standing up for what they believe in, which is what their belief system teaches them to do which makes them both right if you believe you should do “whatever works for you”. Without an absolute right and wrong it becomes impossible to call war a bad thing, really the only people who have a right to call war evil are the ones with a moral code that has a clear standard of right and wrong.

As Christians we believe that the morale code laid out in the Bible is the only one capable of producing the right heart attitude to properly view our world. The world we live in is torn and shattered by the curse of sin (Rom. 8:20-24) and the only one who can restore it to sinless perfection is Jesus. For those of us who believe this we should be leading the way towards finding humane peaceful ways of resolving conflict, not because we think world peace is an achievable goal in this lifetime, but because we believe in the one who will one day come forever destroying sin and thus bring world peace.