“[Call] and Augustus had discussed the question of leadership many times. ‘It ain’t complicated,’ Augustus maintained. 'Most men doubt their own abilities. You don’t. It’s no wonder they want to keep you around. It keeps them from having to worry about failure all the time.’

'They ain’t failures, most of them,’ Call pointed out. 'They can do perfectly well for themselves.’

Augustus chuckled. 'You work too hard,’ he said. 'It puts most men to shame. They figure out they can’t keep up, and it’s just a step or two from that feeling that they can’t do nothing much unless you’re around to get them started.’”

-Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

(via wesleyhill)

Hemingway wrote this about catching a fish, but I think it’s probably about loving my wife.

(via andrewmcclain)

Five years ago, when I became a man, it struck me as an interesting exercise to keep a record of every book I read and every movie I watched from my 18th birthday* onward. I don’t know how the idea occurred to me. I had followed my big brother’s lead in keeping movie ticket stubs for most of high school, and that meticulosity had paid off when it helped me win an argument with a girlfriend about who got to pick the movies we went to see. Mostly, I think I just saw the adulthood pivot of the 18th birthday* as significant enough to merit the construction of some kind of monument, and a monument to all the major ideas and stories I consumed as a man seemed as good as any.

Along the way, I also experimented with tracking my attendance at plays and concerts, or my completion of seasons of TV shows. These spurs were all dead-ends, though. I just ended up being uninterested in the results, and I went to too few performances to get in the habit of recording that data consistently.

In the five years since I turned 18, I have finished 146 books and watched 205 movies. This means that, on average, I finish one book every 12.5 days and I watch a movie every 9 days. The only year that I read more books than I watched movies was 2010, which I credit to the “52 in 52” challenge.

2009 (Jul 15 - Dec 31)

• 19 books. The year of classics: the Iliad, the Odyssey, Plato’s Republic, and the Bible. 
  
• 44 movies.

2010

• 52 books. In 2010, my sisters and I participated in the “52 in 52” challenge, reading a book each week of the year.
  
• 31 movies.

2011

• 26 books. In 2011, I completed my own “4 in 4” challenge, reading a book of over 1000 pages for each season of the year. My four books were Boneby Jeff Smith, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, and The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins.
  
• 29 movies. I also watched ten seasons of TV in 2011—during study abroad, I read a lot of books, but I also OD’d on screen time.

2012

• 19 books. In 2012, I intended to complete a somewhat ill-defined “12 in 12” challenge, but a brutal January in which I finished no books put that plan to rest with alacrity.
  
• 39 movies.

2013

• 19 books. In 2013, I started using a spreadsheet instead of a word document, and I started tracking start and completion dates of books, along with page counts. The average book in 2013 was 281 pages and took me 44 days to read from start to finish.
  
• 48 movies.

2014 (Jan 1 - Jul 15)

• 11 books. The average book in 2014 was 268 pages and took me 30 days to read from start to finish.
  
• 14 movies. Marriage has shifted me away from movie-watching and toward TV series.

My takeaway from all these data is that reading can easily fall through the cracks if I don’t have intentional challenges to keep me on pace with it. As I finish up 2014, my goal is to fix my ratio for the first time since 2010: I want to read more books than I watch movies. Fortunately, I’m not that far behind!

*Strictly speaking, it was on my 19th birthday that I turned 18 years old, since on my first birthday I was a newborn of zero years old. Fighting this semantic crusade has never seemed worthwhile enough to alter my own speech and composition, but it’s my 24th birthday dangit and I’m going to point it out.

Today, the second Sunday of Lent, is a stormy and cold day in Tulsa, Oklahoma. NPR even gave a nod to our state’s thunderstorms on Morning Edition while predicting a blast of wintery weather for the mid-Atlantic states. Dreary weather be damned, spring is coming—the correspondent was insistent on this fact. There will be 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness on Thursday, and there’s nothing that a few (more) inches of snow can do about that. Aslan is on the move.

Even though I rail against Daylight Saving Time, it too contributes to that building excitement that winter will die and we will all eventually thaw out. I may feel like a zombie at the pre-dawn 6:00 AM alarm clock, but I can go for a run after school with sunlight aplenty for my hungry, winter-whitened skin. Little buds are popping up on the branches of trees. There is a scent of something other than freezer burn on the air. And so the pagan, sun-worshipping homunculus inside of me gets extraordinarily hungry for vitamin D that is obtained by means other than oral ingestion at the bedside table every morning.

And this is where I think that Christianity (or at least, her calendar) must have the slightest bias in favor of the global north, because up here the theological celebration of resurrection and new life coincides with the deliverance that spring offers from winter’s clutches. My doctrinally orthodox head sings in harmony with my primal, sun-starved heart, and the resultant chorus enthrones Easter as the queen of all holidays in my affections.

And as I wait expectantly for the celebration of the Resurrection, my soteriology undergoes a temporary scramble of priorities. Although I, as a Theologically Circumspect and Proper Reformed Evangelical Protestant, hold to penal substitutionary atonement (in brief: Jesus becomes a juridical sacrifice and receives the sentence and punishment we deserve so that we criminals can be declared not guilty in God’s heavenly courtroom) as my primary understanding of Christ’s work on the cross, Easter the past few years has pushed other theories of the atonement to the forefront of my thinking. Around Easter, my soul is quickened by thoughts of Christus Victor and Jesus my Ransom.

The ransom theory of the atonement is probably most familiar to English-speaking Evangelicals through the allegory of the Stone Table in C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In that story, young Edmund has, through his own folly, become the legal captive of the White Witch, and his release is only secured by Aslan offering himself as a ransom in the boy’s place. Ransom theory imagines us, not as the accused criminals of God’s courtroom so much as the enslaved property of sin/death/Satan—the only ransom that will be accepted for us hostages is the even greater prize of Jesus himself. In Mark 10 and Matthew 20, Jesus lays the foundation for this idea, saying that the Son of Man came to serve and “to give his life as a ransom for many.” In 1 Timothy, Paul reiterates that Jesus gave his life “as a ransom for all.”

Christus Victor, as an understanding of the atonement, is a little different, but it pairs well with ransom theory. The Latin phrase communicates the idea as Jesus the warrior with the two-edged sword coming out of his mouth, the triumphant King who slays our sin, destroys death, and annihilates the devil and his armies. This is Aslan whose roar scatters the forces of the White Witch after cracking the Stone Table and returning to life. Christus Victor is he whose might “breaks the pow'r of cancelled sin” and “sets the prisoner free.”

The one hymn that I think every member of my family most associates with Easter is “Up From The Grave He Arose”; during homeschool mid-morning Bible class, we would crouch down and murmur the somber verses in a hushed sotto voce only to spring up and bellow “UP FROM THE GRAVE HE AROSE” each time the chorus came around. The lines that follow that one are very much Christus Victor:

Up from the grave he arose,
With a mighty triumph o'er his foes!
He arose the victor of the dark domain,
And he lives forever with his saints to reign!
He arose!
He arose!
Hallelujah, Christ arose!

The other major influence on my Easter atonement sentiments comes from my affinity for the maybe-but-probably-not-Biblical idea of the “Harrowing of Hell,” the notion that in between his crucifixion and his resurrection, Jesus descended into hell, kicked some —, and took some names. “Therefore it says, ‘When he ascended on high he led a host of captives, and gave gifts to men.' In saying, 'He ascended,’ what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth?” (Ephesians 4:8-9). I was so taken with this idea at fourteen that I wrote a poem about it, and if the doodles that I draw in my Field Notes during sermons are any indication, the way that I still imagine (stick-figure) Jesus is wearing a crown and wielding a sword, maybe kicking down the door of a dungeon where, “Long my imprison’d spirit lay, fast bound in sin and nature’s night.”

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!
Behold, your king is coming to you;
righteous and having salvation is he,
humble and mounted on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim
and the war horse from Jerusalem;
and the battle bow shall be cut off,
and he shall speak peace to the nations;
his rule shall be from sea to sea,
and from the River to the ends of the earth.

As for you also, because of he blood of my covenant with you,
I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit.
Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope;
today I declare that I will restore to you double.

Zechariah 9:9-12

Aslan is on the move.

The King is coming.

A year ago she said, “WHAT?!? YES!”

A year ago today was the last time I visited Grandma Criss before she died. I was back in Little Rock, ostensibly for a recruiting trip aimed at potential TU students, but principally because I was solicitous to see Grandma as much as I could before her failing health finally resigned. Making the visit more pressing was a small item of jewelry ensconced in my pocket, a white gold band inset with a diamond. A year ago today, I got to tell Grandma that a year ago tomorrow I was going to ask that nice girl who had visited at Christmas to be my wife.

Grandma relished telling the story of the time that she gave me her gold PT Cruiser for my 16th birthday (gold, because dirt and dust would be less noticeable and she’d have to wash it less, she would shrewdly confide). “It was the only time I ever saw him speechless!” the story always went, her delivery a perfect, twinkly-eyed crow. Well, the time I showed Grandma that little diamond ring was the only time I ever saw HER speechless, I could now retort. But that day, true to form, her silence didn’t last too long.

Grandma was a great giver of advice, and meritoriously so, as an eventual nonagenarian. She was a great giver of many things (see, for example, my aforementioned birthday speechlessness), but telling stories and giving advice were her first and favorite ways to show you love. In out final face-to-face conversation, I know we talked at length about love, marriage, and family. I don’t remember everything she said: that weekend is a blur of good memories. But I remember the last thing she said, and I remember talking with Katie about it at Grandma’s funeral three weeks later. “Be good to each other,” she told me. I trust we have. She was always so good to us.