Sure Mercies of David

I came across this phrase (the "sure mercies of David") while reading Isaiah 55.  It ends verse 3, which also talks of hearing God, approaching him and making a covenant with him.  Isaiah lived and wrote approximately eight centuries before Christ.  That puts him, in the Christian timeline, about 200 years after David.  Isaiah had to know the full story of David, both its highs and lows, so my interest is in understanding what Isaiah means by this short and simple statement.
Isaiah finishes his thought of David (as far as I can tell) in verse 4, "Behold I have given [David] for a witness to the people, a leader and commander to the people."  Clearly David was a dynamic figure.  You can structure his life in three acts.  The first act, as a shepard and soldier, brought development and increased reliance on the Lord
His second act, or reign as King of Isreal, is referred to as, "the most brilliant of Isrealitish history."  He transcended previous Kings, moving the kingdom beyond Judah to include Jerusalem and as far as the Euphrates river.  He united the tribes into one nation, secured undisputed possession of the country and ruled a strict theocracy.  This time was later seen as a golden age and possible type for the future millenial reign of the Savior.
The third act is the declining final 20 years of David's life.  This begins with a spectacular downfall involving infidelity and murder and leads to years of humble searching for forgiveness.  A certain degree of redemption did come, but not fully; scripture tells us the murder of Uriah is not yet pardoned.  Modern revelation (D&C 132: 39) indicates that as a result of David's sin of murder, his redemption will come near the end of God's children (or the end of Christ's millenial reign).
Back to the "sure mercies of David" statement.  Which is only mentioned in one other scripture.  In Acts 13, 34; the statement is connected with a description of Christ's resurrection and his taking on incorruption.  Reading verses 32 to 39 distinguishes clearly the nature of David as he compares to Christ (the two being compared quite often, with one of Christ's distinguishing characteristics being his lineage through David).
I mentioned earlier the three stages of David's life, the first two being synonomous with Christ's life (adding grace for grace in his early life and reigning in righteousness).  The two characters diverge in David's third act, Christ finishes his mission without corruption, atoning for mankind's sins and resurrecting triumphantly.  David falls from grace and struggles mightily for redemption, relying fully at that point on Christ's mercy to save him.
All who come to an understanding of God and Christ and make covenants with them will follow a similar road to David.  Our experience can differ from David's by avoiding the gravity of his fall and enduring in righteousness.  The "sure mercy of David" is both a blessing and an expectation.  When David confesses his sin to Nathan in Second Samuel 12 he's told, "thou shalt not die."  This is true for David as a result of his sin and for all of us.  Each son or daughter of God is given a prolonged mortal existence to refine ourselves and is given a ressurected body, starting with ressurection of the just at Christ's second coming.  Our place in this ressurection and the glory to which we are ressurected depends on our desire and action in keeping God's commandments, our application of Christ's atonement to repent of sin when we fall short and our continued approximation to God through spirit and blood to become individuals who think, act and live as he would.  The "sure mercy of David" is living forever with a perfect, immortal body in a state of glory.  However, our opportunity (and expectation) goes well beyond what David chose to receive.  We shouldn't settle for the minimum level of Glory, but work to find ourselves first in line and partakers of "all the Father hath" in the Celestial Kingdom.    

An Intense Focus

We were instructed by our Stake President tonight to develop an intense drive for and focus on important things in our lives.  I have many specifics I find important, but the question I asked myself, "how would I categorize and prioritize those?"  In the interest of time and need for sleep on a Sunday evening, let me just note some categories and quick thoughts on each:

1. Family: This is an obvious choice for the primary focus area.  First comes an intense effort to serve Chelsea and our future family, followed by may parents, siblings, inlaws and extended family.  My relationship with my Heavenly Father plays into this as well, as does my relationship to Christ and all of my spiritual brothers and sisters.  Love of fellow man must be the central and primary focus point.

2. Economy: On a micro level, this relates to my employment, my financial position (debt and assets) and my place as a wise producer and consumer.  But I also have greater responsibility to learn, teach and advocate wise principles of contribution, production, investment, etc.  Also my defense of free market capitalism and the right of human beings to prosper, trade and deal honestly with one another.

3. Society: This represents my stance on social issues of concern; protection of human life, families, democracy, justice and a limited government that provides for the common good with balance and well managed social programs.  My overall concept of a healthy social framework focuses on charitable empowerment.  Human beings are only served when given opportunities to expand their potential.

4. Ecology: This does not need to be at odds with 2. and 3.  Proper care for the environment should be a concern of all citizens.  Although I may not politicize the issue and result to scare tactics, I must act and teach conservation, cleanliness, protection of water, land and air resources, etc.  I need to advocate technologies in fuel and reusable materials that better life while conserving the delicate balance that sustains life, provides enjoyment and testifies of the grandeur and creative power of God.

I'll likely write more about this in the future.  I just had the itch to get some thoughts down while fresh in the head.

JSW

The Long Way

You decide to organize a tennis tournament and invite 50 players to attend.  The tournament will be single elimination and you need to decide how many matches to schedule in order to select a final winner.  You could do a simple bracket with 25 matches in the first round, 12 in the second, etc.  Or have 18 matches in the first round and have the winning players meet the remaining 14 unmatched players in a second round and so on.

If I were given this problem I would likely take plenty of time and piles of scratch paper to find my number.  But it's not that hard.  The number of matches equals the number of required losers; with only one winner, that number is 49.  It's right there.

A man walks a mile home from work.  At the exact time he leaves his work, his dog leaves his home and walks to meet him.  When the dog reaches the man, the dog turns around and runs home.  When he reaches home he turns again and runs back to meet the man, repeating this cycle until the man arrives at his door.  The man walks at three miles per hour and the dog at 12 miles per hour.  What is the total distance the dog walks?

This problem looks to be straight off the GMAT.  It gives me a stress cramp simply considering it.  Again I would whip out the scratch paper and pile on complexity of thought and calculations to solve it.  But in the end, both the man and the dog are constantly walking, the dog at four times the speed of the man.  Fixed time + fixed multiple of speed = fixed multiple of distance.  Man walks one mile and dog walks four times this, or four miles.  Simple, out in the open, under our noses.

How does a person think like this?  What are they seeing that I'm not seeing?

I'm waiting to reunite with a book my fiance Chelsea gave me for Christmas.  I don't even remember the title, but I'm itching to dive back into a concept that has stuck to me like glue.  Most of us are bad visual artists not because of poor visual perception, but because of over-perception.  We draw what we think we should see, not what is truly in front of us.  Great art students break these perception biases by sketching things from perspectives and angles they have never before considered.  Why?  Because they need a clean slate, a blank canvas.  They need input, not analysis.  They need to report the news, not provide an opinion.

Don't get me wrong, opinion has its place as well, just ask Picasso.  But in many matters (from accurately sketching a human skeleton to understanding the complexities of a human condition) we must first and foremost accept an inflow of pure reality.  Learn the rules and we can more comfortably break them.  Disregarding the rules in lieu of our own perspective is usually about as successful as jumping off a cliff with only a cape and expecting to reason our way out of gravity before we hit the ground.

And accepting reality is hard work.  We cloud our minds with complexity and live by pre-conceived notions.  What is wrong with this?  For one thing, our notions are based on a fixed system of outcomes.  We can only expect in experience what we can conceptualize.  George Sorros (who I disagree with on most subjects, but agree in this instance) feels no anxiety toward death because he can't conceptualize it.  The one thing he knows for sure is death's reality will differ from his expectations.  In theory he's right.  It is impossible to correctly expect something a person knows nothing about.  Any concern or worry is totally unfounded and therefore a waste of time.  Death is a bridge only to be crossed when we come to it.

And most experience is, to a lesser but similar degree, much the same.  Nothing can be fully anticipated and expected.  The only consistent systems are natural systems.  Place intelligence in the mix and you get uncertainty.  Our Heavenly Father demonstrated that concept early in time by giving his spirit children (organized intelligences) the option to choose a mortal development path.  He lost a third of them before they even made it here.  Many of the rest have been average to pretty poor eggs.  Mankind has required a global flood to cleanse our house; mostly we've done a good job self cleansing and I don't expect we'll change our ways any time soon.

Was this a better outcome than God expected?  A worse outcome?  From what I know of God, it's probably right in line with expectations.  The interesting thought is this?  If he's all powerful, why didn't he just create us a bit better than we are and save himself the disappointment?  The answer to that question is one of the diamonds of restored theology and is simply this: You don't create human intelligence.  You organize it and you let it go, but it has a mind of its own.

If I have any central point, it's this.  We can't put stakes in the ground to mark fixed patterns in the human experience.  They work about as well as trails of bread crumbs dropped near flocks of seagulls.  The goal should rather be what I investigated when I began this entry.  Efficiency of thought.  Utility of action.  The well oiled machine built through trial and error (experience) to keenly and accurately identify changes in the terrain and quickly adjust to meet them.  Evolution, growth, change, adaptation.  This is why we are intelligent in the first place.  Not to follow nature, but to experience it and through experience overcome.  Throw out the rule book.  Expect to go outside a few standard deviations.  Wherever you now find yourself, nobody's been before.  Take good notes and drink in reality. 

JSW

I'm not a very good writer

You'll remember that I talked a bit about this in my previous post.  It's been a few weeks, a few false starts and no new posts.  Some blog eh?  This is no way for a blog to function.  And building up a pile of unpublished, half baked stabs at greatness isn't strengthening my craft.

I think the issue is one of trying too hard.  We each have a natural flow of language, a natural vocabulary, etc.  This is our cleanest and truest form of communication.  But like our noses or our feet we're not always proud of what we naturally have to offer.  In my writing, I try to be someone else.  I push the wit, the long sentences and the big words.  It doesn't work; who am I kidding.  Thumbing back through pieces I wrote at an age when I should know better, I'm not always proud of what I read.

So I'm practicing, I'm sharing thoughts in my own language, on my own terms.  I'm trying to find a comfortable voice.  I have a lot to say, much of which I feel is well reasoned.  I just need to find a comfortable way to say it.

That is the nature of practice.  Perfectionists (I place myself in their ranks) hate practice because it necessitates trial and error.  It's the error part we don't like; we're risk adverse.  We, like Charlie Brown, prefer to shoot the arrow and draw the target around it.  Sure things, can't misses, safe bets.

So we play at the level of comfortable success or we hide our talents.  That's no way to live.

Be warned, you will read some very mediocre material on this blog.  It can be better.  Someday I hope it will be better.  But for now please accept my works in progress because I am one myself.

JSW

Inaugural

In beginning something of this magnitude (with similar aspirations I'm sure to tens of thousands of other bloggers) I could sit and stew over each word; hoping against hope to write something of profound influence.  Or, as I'm doing, I could write whatever comes to mind and dedicate myself to quickly posting more titles, pushing this one further and further into the blog ether.

At the end of the day I don't expect anything of earth-shattering consequence to appear on this blog, at least anytime soon.  As was explained to me in one of the many "books about writing books" I've read, there are three classes of writers in the world (1) those who can't write; or who can't write anything that isn't painful for someone to read (2) the truly gifted great writers; or those who create true and lasting art - I could name names, but I think we all know who I'm talking about - and (3) most of the rest of us.  Those of us in the sprawling bourgeois of writers can improve our writing by reading and practicing our craft, but we can never achieve Tolstoyian or Steinbeckian spark of Zeus much the way very few human beings master the art of the three-quarter facelock bulldog maneuver (also known as the Cutter) reserved only for the most professional of professional wrestlers - here again I could name names, but won't.

I'm here to share my thoughts about life, using my life as a template.  It's the only template I have.  I had planned to name this blog "Synecdoche" which in Greek (which I won't pretend to speak) is spelled synekdoche and means "simultaneous understanding."  It's a figure of speech for a part of something representing the whole or the whole of something representing its part.  We use it all the time, but don't realize it.  Saying "faces in a crowd" really means "people in a crowd", but the synecdoche "faces" makes the statement more cryptic and poetic.  Why am I sharing this?

I first came across the word in the title of a movie by Charlie Kaufman called Synecdoche New York.  Note: I've never seen this movie.  The movie stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as a theatre director who receives a MacArthur Fellowship and tries to develop his magnum opus in a giant warehouse in Manhattan's theatre district.  His play is a celebration of the mundane world of New York, trying to approximate real life down to its most intricate details.  Over time he constructs a miniature version of the city in the warehouse and pushes harder and harder for this synecdoche to become reality.  The moral of the story: you can't get there.  Your synecdoche can never become the real thing.  There is no true microcosm.  No synecdoche that hits the nail squarely on the head.  Life is too complex and too often "you just had to be there."

But we try, and that's fine.  Our poetry, movies, music and blogs are good efforts that can be didactic and, at worst, entertaining.  But these are not the real thing.  These are supermarket samples of true experience.  The best advice from this blogger: if you like the fish sticks, buy a box and microwave them yourself at home.

I love the following quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (which I will likely talk much more about in future posts).  I grew to love the book long before I ever read it.  I was blessed to have a Mormon mission companion who kept most of its concepts well organized in his head (true A-list Intellectual) and shared them with me as we walked from place to place.

The main character, on a motorcycle with his son, notes:

"All the time we are aware of millions of things around us - these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road - aware of these things, but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see.  We could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable to think.  From this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it.  We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it.  We divide the sand into parts.  This and that.  Here and there.  Black and white.  Now and then.  The discrimination is the division of the conscious universe into parts."

This is blogging in its purest form; trying to make some sense of our handfuls of sand - our consciousness.  Like Wallace Stevens trying to understand thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird.  But what is beautiful and amazing (although never a complete depiction of the reality, only a synecdoche) is the diversity of view.  No two people have ever scooped an identical hand of sand.  Each handful is different, each grain is different and how we chop up, segment and play with the sand is also different. 

So as impossible as it may be for us to fully share our consciousness with the world, those who do deserve an A for effort.  And that's why I'm here - I'm making an effort.