There’s a play on his name, as lupus is the Latin word for “wolf,” and Lupin is a werewolf. Werewolves are not exactly pleasant, and the surprising thing is that Lupin is one of the good guys. This is one of the ways that Rowling has given us stories that are true to life.

In the Potter stories, if you get bitten by a werewolf, the bite infects you and can make you a werewolf. Remus Lupin’s father had offended an awful villain of a werewolf, and that werewolf sought revenge by biting Remus when he was a child.

Remus did not want to be a werewolf. Abused by an adult, he became a danger to himself and others. He was cut off from society. He suffered terribly, and he had no control over his affliction. At the full moon, whether he wanted to be transformed into a werewolf or not, he lost control of himself and became something dangerous.

Have you ever met anyone who has experienced something like this? Or has this been your own experience? Something tragic, awful, happened during childhood, and its painful repercussions seem all but inescapable?

J. K. Rowling tells a story in which there’s hope for people who have been abused as children, abused in ways that threaten to make them monsters as adults. Rowling’s story helps us to sympathize with people we might not otherwise understand, people we might otherwise fear. Lupin tells his personal history in book 3, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I saw Rowling interviewed, and she commented on how much Lupin means to her.

Remus relates how it seemed impossible that he would get to study at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, until a headmaster came to the school who believed in giving people second chances, believed in trusting people, believed in the power of love. Albus Dumbledore allowed Remus Lupin into Hogwarts, and he devised a way for Lupin to be protected—from himself and others—when his monthly transformation took place. Dumbledore thought carefully about the situation, about Lupin’s affliction and needs, and he took steps to make sure that Lupin would not destroy others or himself when he became a werewolf.

Lupin goes on to relate how as the years of his schooling passed, his “three great friends” did something for him that made his painful transformations “not only bearable, but the best times” of his life.

What could his friends have done for him?

First, when his friends learned his secret, they didn’t reject him. From there, his friends began to explore ways to care for him, ways to enter into his experience, ways to be in his life in his moment of need, to walk with him through the trial.

Lupin’s friends worked for three years to perfect the complex magic necessary to transform themselves into animals that would not be hurt by a werewolf. They did that so they could keep Lupin company, so they could protect him from himself, so they could keep him from hurting others, and they did it because they were his friends.

Lupin says, “Under their influence, I became less dangerous. My body was still wolfish, but my mind seemed to become less so while I was with them.”

Do you know children who have been sexually abused? Did that happen to you as a child? Do you know children who have been exposed to pornography? Were you?

Consider what Rowling teaches through this powerful story. There is hope for people who have experienced things they wish had not happened, and there are steps that can and should be taken in such cases.

Notice how Dumbledore let Lupin into school, but he acknowledged that because of what had happened to Lupin, he had to take measures to restrain Lupin when he became a werewolf, measures that would protect Lupin himself and other children.

What boundaries are necessary because of what has happened in your life, or in the life of someone you love?

If you find yourself experiencing a transformation at the full moon—that is to say, if there things that happen, or that you see or hear, that cause you to experience impulses that are beyond your rationality, beyond your control—are you acknowledging your need for help in those situations?

Do you find yourself risking everything that matters most in the world to pursue some desire that most of the time you don’t want to gratify at all? Dumbledore built a place where Lupin could go to be safe at the full moon. What kind of place do you need?

Notice also that Lupin had friends who loved him—friends who knew the awful reality of his condition, friends who knew the worst about him and loved him anyway, friends who thought carefully and persistently about how to help him, friends who went to extraordinary lengths to stand by their brother who was in need.

Oh to have such friends. Oh to be such a friend.

We all need second chances. We all need boundaries. And we need one another.

There’s something better than having Albus Dumbledore as your headmaster and great classmates like Lupin’s three great friends: belonging to Jesus and being part of his church. Rowling has given us a picture of the human condition in an unlikely place. She has shown us that sometimes even the good guys turn into werewolves. The good guys, however, know what their problems are, take steps to address those problems, and they know they can’t make it alone.

If you haven’t read the Harry Potter stories, trust me, Rowling’s narrative is much more powerful than this little reflection on it. Consider this my encouragement for you to read what I think will prove to be the publishing event of the century (get them here). These books are the third most read books in the world.

More importantly, if you’re not a member of a church where Jesus shepherds his people through the preaching of the word, it’s better than Hogwarts. If you don’t have friends who will listen to you and think about your plight and be creative about how to help you, the church is better than magicians who can turn themselves into animals. And the great redemption Christ has accomplished is the substance of which the Potter stories are but a shadow.

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This post originally appeared at Christianity.com

Some time back we watched some video with the kids, probably a BBC thing on the world or something of the sort, and I noted down some stats on what ants accomplish–these were ants in Africa, I think, but I don’t remember their exact location or what kind of ants they were. Their accomplishments are impressive:

• The ant “megalopolis” was built of the equivalent of 10 tons of cement.
• The ant megalopolis covered 50 square meters.
• Forty tons of soil was moved in the construction project.
• Each load carried by an ant weighed 4 times as much as the worker carrying the load.

UPDATE: Patrick Schreiner has the video:

Well spoken, Solomon.

So as I read the Bible, I use a mechanical pencil, a set of colored pens, colored pencils, and occasionally a highlighter to note things. As I’ve done this over the years, I’ve developed a color code for key ideas that breaks down like this:

Orange = references to God’s glory or name

Green = references to earlier Scripture, whether quotations or otherwise

Purple = references to royalty/kingship/the coming Messiah

Red = anything notable, but particularly the actions the Lord himself does

Blue = references to faith, believing, piety, etc.

Pink = knowing or fearing God/the Lord

Yellow (colored pencil) = anything notable, repeated words in the passage, etc.

Brown (colored pencil) = references to times or dates

Mechanical Pencil = notes in the margin, underlines, connecting lines, etc.

Those are the constants. Some colors vary from book to book, but these are pretty standard throughout. For instance, I recently re-read Proverbs all at one sitting with the intention of noting everything the book says about raising children. I marked all those references with a lime green color, and all the references to the “path” of the righteous or to the “ways” of a man with an aqua green color. And since Proverbs has a few unique “headings” (1:1; 10:1; 22:17; 24:23; 25:1; 30:1; 31:1) I used a highlighter to mark those. Bible pages tend to be thin, so I try to keep a highlighter that is almost used up to try to cut down on the bleed-through affect.

So here’s a shot of a passage before I studied it and marked it up. I was preaching through Jeremiah, and the marked passage in the column on the far left ends at Jeremiah 25:14, which was where my last sermon on Jeremiah ended. I took this photo right before I began to study Jeremiah 25:15–38, which was the next sermon in the series on Jeremiah. This passage begins at the bottom of the far left column and continues through the two columns in the middle. I had already underlined Jeremiah 26:1 in brown colored pencil because it has a statement about when Jeremiah got this word, and the green colored pencil is there because of the reference to the way the word came from the Lord.

As I worked through the passage, I underlined all the places where Jeremiah has something like “Thus says the Lord” in green colored pencil (see 25:15, 27, 29, 31, 32).

Then as I read and re-read the passage, I noticed that in both 25:16 and 27 Jeremiah is told to command the nations to “drink . . . because of the sword that I [Yahweh] am sending among you,” so I underlined the matching phrases in the two verses with an aqua green colored pencil.

Cities and nations are listed out in Jeremiah 25:18–26, with some comments on each. So I underlined each city or nation mentioned in yellow colored pencil.

Jerusalem was to be a city that reflected Yahweh’s glory, from which his glory radiated outward, so I underlined the reference in Jeremiah 25:29 to “the city that is called by my name” in orange pen.

In Jeremiah 25:30 the Lord twice roars like a lion, and I’ve circled those in mechanical pencil, drawing a line from that verse to 25:38, where similar imagery is used, and noting that Yahweh also roars like a lion in Amos 1:2, Joel 3:16, and Hosea 5:14.

I have also noted the next to Jeremiah 25:33 places where Jeremiah says similar things at 16:4 and 8:2.

Then in Jeremiah 25:34–36 there are several references to the “shepherds” who are the “lords of the flock,” and these are underlined in jade green colored pencil. The two calls for these wicked leaders of Israel to “wail” are underlined with a mechanical pencil, with a line connecting them. Here’s a photo of the page I’ve been describing:

I’ve marked up several copies of the Bible this way, and when I teach I want to have a copy of the Bible in front of me that has everything that I will have a faint memory of clearly marked so that I can find it (relatively) quickly when I’m asked a question, and I know I read something about that around Luke 12. I flip to Luke 12, and I can usually find what it was I had in mind because I usually remember, however faintly, what I’ve marked.

If I want an uninfluenced, fresh reading of the text, I can read a Bible that I haven’t marked up. But if I want to layer reading upon reading and go deeper this time than last, it helps me to read a copy that will have my previous study notes in it.

I recommend reading large chunks of Bible all at one sitting, whole books if possible, thoroughly marking them up as you go. Doing this book after book helps us see the interconnectedness of individual books and the thick intertextuality of each book of the Bible with all the others. Obviously you don’t have to do it exactly the way I do, but perhaps my method will spur your own thinking and you can adapt it to suit your own study.

Mark well what you read, and may the Word of Christ dwell in you richly (Col 3:16).

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This post originally appeared at Christianity.com.

Still, this book has great value. Here’s why:

Even though I haven’t adapted these techniques in my attempts to memorize Bible and poetry, I learned from and was motivated by this book. Reading about the “mental athletes” who compete in these memory competitions was extremely motivating. Josh Foer writes of his friend Ed Cooke,

Ed, I had already discovered, was always memorizing something. He had long ago learned the bulk of Paradise Lost by heart (at the rate of two hundred lines per hour, he told me), and had been slowly slogging his way through Shakespeare. “My philosophy of life is that a heroic person should be able to withstand about ten years in solitary confinement without getting terribly annoyed,” he said (109).

Thanks for the kick in the pants to get going!

With that, Moonwalking with Einstein is really well written. If a memory competition is like a roomful of people taking the SAT, as the author says, how exciting would you expect it be to read about how a journalist went to one of those, researched the brain and memory, trained for the competition, which he won the following year? Interesting maybe, but not exactly the stuff of “The Dark Knight Rises.” How many non-fiction books do you start and never finish? This was an easy book to finish. Foer spins a funny, insightful, page-turner packed with interesting anecdotes.

If your eyes are peeled for sermon illustrations or creative stimulation for other kinds of speaking and writing, this book brims with material. You’ll read about:

• a man who once changed all four tires of a car with no tools
• how your brain has some 100 billion neurons, each capable of five to ten thousand synaptic connections with other neurons
• how the brain is really good at spaces and images
• how “It’s thought that sleep plays a critical role in [the] process of consolidating our memories and drawing meaning out of them” (83)
• how only three in ten trainees qualify to become London cabbies
• the difficulty of discerning the difference between male and female hatchling chicks
• that it takes 10,000 hours of training to become an expert
• that what separates an expert is the ability to engage in deliberate practice that addresses weaknesses through constant and immediate feedback, focus on technique, and setting goals for improvement (how you practice is more important than the amount of time you practice)
• how chess masters see chess boards as “chunks” of information (see on “chunking” below)
• what Petrarch said of what he had memorized, “I have thoroughly absorbed these writings, implanting them not only in my memory but in my marrow” (110).
• what was said of Augustine: that he was “so steeped in the Psalms that they, as much as Latin itself, comprised the principle language in which he wrote” (110).
• how “Song is the ultimate structuring device for language” (128).

and much more . . .

I enjoyed this book, I’m grateful for the motivation, and I appreciated the factoids. But my two big takeaways–what I’m most grateful for–have to do with how memory shapes who we are and the intersection of memory and creativity.

Our memories shape who we are and how we interpret the world. This is a massive point for understanding how the Bible is meant to shape our understanding of God, salvation, the world, and ourselves. This, I think, is what Israel’s feasts were intended to accomplish: building a schema like the ones the chess masters use to interpret the chess board so they intuitively respond/react to it.

Foer writes of memory, “experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience” (7). One technique for remembering is called “chunking.” It involves the way that we group bits of information into “chunks” that reinterpret the tidbits we perceive in light of what we already know. Foer illustrates this with a string of numbers that would be difficult to memorize as stand-alone digits:

120741091101

But if we “chunk” these numbers they’re easy to recognize and remember:

12/07/41 and 09/11/01.

On this basis, Foer notes, “what we already know determines what we’re able to learn.” And with this, he observes, “This . . . is what all experts do: They use their memories to see the world differently” (62). Along these lines, “We don’t remember isolated facts; we remember things in context.” Chess experts recognize entire chess boards at a glance because they have “a richer vocabulary of chunks to recognize” (65). Here Foer says something profound about these chess masters, something that Christians should think about when it comes to the interpretation of the world: “The experts are interpreting the present board in term[s] of their massive knowledge of past ones. The lower ranked players are seeing the board as something new” (66).

This, I contend, is the goal of biblical theology. We want to learn the context of all the Bible’s statements, remember them in the broader story and know its patterns, then interpret our own experience against the schematic patterns we have learned from the Bible. Foer writes, “Whether we realize it or not, we are all like those chess masters . . . , interpreting the present in light of what we’ve learned in the past, and letting our previous experiences shape not only how we perceive our world, but also the moves we end up making in it” (67). Related to this, Foer comments on why most people remember little to nothing about their lives until the age of three or four: “As infants, we . . . lack schema for interpreting the world and relating the present to the past” (84). Foer later writes, “Memory is how we transmit virtues and values, and partake of a shared culture” (208).

This quote is for Denny Burk, the rest of you can listen in: “Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches” (209). Velcro, bro.

On the profound connection between memory and creativity, consider Josh Foer’s quotation and summary of the thoughts of Tony Buzan:

“In our gross misunderstanding of the function of memory, we thought that memory was operated primarily by rote. In other words, you rammed it in until your head was stuffed with facts. What was not realized is that memory is primarily an imaginative process. In fact, learning, memory, and creativity are the same fundamental process directed with a different focus,” says Buzan. “The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.” If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you’ll be at coming up with new ideas. As Buzan likes to point out, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the Muses (203).

Foer concludes with reflections on what all his memory training taught him:

What I had really trained my brain to do, as much as memorize, was to be more mindful, and to pay attention to the world around me. Remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice (268).

He also notes how memory shapes who we are:

How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. . . . Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character (269–70).

Foer is, to my knowledge, not a Christian, but this comment on gradually altering habits on the basis of what we know and remember sounds like sanctification. Those networks of memory can be re-shaped by our Spirit-empowered efforts. What do you remember? What are you putting into your memory? Fill it with Scripture and the high thoughts of the best writers.

My oldest son’s 9 year old basketball team played in the championship game at Southeast Christian Church today, and with a great team effort we came home with the victory.

Our watchwords were Defense, Dedication, Discipline, and everyone on the team learned the definition of discipline: doing what you’re supposed to do, when you’re supposed to do it, to the best of your ability, every time. Everyone responsible for everyone else. Bloodhounds for rebounds. We didn’t buy a ticket, so we’re not standing around watching. Leave it all on the floor, baby, go hard or go home.

Praise be to God, we came home with an 8–2 season and a victory in the championship game of the tournament.

There were some teams in the league that came to be identified by the best player on the team. “So-and-so’s team” was the way everybody identified them. That wasn’t said about our team, though we had several very good players.

These Bulldogs worked hard on defense, helped each other, stayed in position, rebounded, and ran a good offense that got the whole team involved.

Great season Bulldogs!

PROPERTY PRAYER – There were many nights where the men’s ministry consisted of monthly gatherings on the corner of Branch Crossing and Alden Bridge to pray.  I remember hot nights with lots of mosquitoes, and a group of guys asking God to move so that we could leave that old YMCA and build a campus on these 5 acres filled with woods.  I think many felt like we were hoping against hope, all we could see were tall trees and low funds, and the people driving by in the middle of the night must have thought we were nuts.  But God proved once again He does hear and answer prayer.

MACY’S PARKING LOT  – It was your ordinary Sunday in 2008 that turned extraordinary with one phone call.  Suzanne and I were going to the mall when I got a call from Roger Yancey explaining that someone had anonymously donated $700,000 to TCAAB to help build our new campus (see above prayer).  For a church whose annual budget at the time was south of $200,000 this was BIG news.  I remember running from the Macy’s parking lot where I took the call, all the way in to the store where I found Suzanne and started crying.  God is good.

The whole thing – 10 Years of God Memories

What happens to us?

How is it that a genuine Christian can sin, and so often, sometimes so flagrantly?

In Hebrews 5:2 we read of how people are “ignorant and wayward,” of how we are all “beset with weakness.” One of the first steps to overcoming ignorance, waywardness, and weakness is recognizing it for what it is.

I had a dream the other night that brought this home to me.

We recently celebrated “father’s day” here in the US (June 17, 2012), and the dream I had was probably connected to the fact that I didn’t feel I had done enough to communicate to my dad how grateful I am for him.

In the dream I was in the office at Southern Seminary where the faculty have mailboxes. I was talking with a student as I poked my head into that office to see if there was any mail in my box. I noticed on top of my box a glass jar full of change that my wife had wanted out of the house, so I took it up to the school. Not wanting it in my office, I had stuck it on top of my box.

Seeing the change now, I thought to myself that I could buy a coke with it.

I stuck my hand in and counted out what I thought were four quarters.

But when I looked at them, I realized what I held in my hand, and my heart smote me.

These were old coins, and valuable. Silver dollars, Susan B. Anthonys, pre-1963 quarters, none of which, now that I realized what they were, I wanted to throw away on a can of coke. These were coins that my father had collected, coins that he had looked for, found, kept, and passed on to me.

Suddenly the old coins I held in my hand—in the dream there was a silver dollar from 1903, there were coins with designs on them that have long since passed out of circulation, coins that clearly came from this country but that were so old they had become exotic—suddenly these coins in my hand were much more than merely pieces of change. They had become mementos. Mementos of my father. Gifts he had given to me.

The gifts evoked memories of my Pappaw, my dad’s dad, sitting on the couch, almost lying down really, with a stack of coins on his chest, rubbing the quarters together until their faces were smooth. They reminded me of times when I was the ages my own sons are now, 8, 6, 4, times when my dad and my sister Dayna and I would sit at the table or sprawl on the floor and sort coins. The Gifts I held in my hand made me think of recent days when my dad has done the same thing, sort coins, with my sons, only now he wears reading glasses to see the dates and designs.

Those memories showed themselves to be linked in a vital way to my whole relationship with my dad: all the ground balls and free throws and conversations in the car. All the ways he shaped me and loved me and cared for me. All the time he spent with me, the mound of moments we have enjoyed together.

There I was in my dream, holding those coins in my hand. They had become priceless to me because of what they signified, and I was horrified that I had almost thrown them away on a cola that wouldn’t have been good for me anyway.

This is how our ignorant, wayward, and weak hearts find their way to sin. We forget the gifts our God and Father has given us. We become unmindful of what his mercy means to us. We neglect the mementos, the testimonies, the stories and songs of the Scriptures.

And all too often we are prepared to cash in our relationship with the living God for filth, filth that would ruin our lives and destroy everything precious and sacred to us. We are ignorant, wayward, and weak enough to throw away the world to come in exchange for a syrupy mixture of caffeine, sugar, and fizzy water, or worse, far worse: shameful things not to be named. God help us get hearts of wisdom.

“Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and turn away from evil. It will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones”
 -Prov 3:7-8.

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Originally posted at Christianity.com

Sydney Carton went to a far better rest than he had ever known. Jane Eyre heard the voice of her old master. Alexei helped his brother Dmitri escape. Raskolnikov found grace with Sonya. Jean Valjean became a father to Cosette. Bilbo found the ring. Frodo carried it to Mount Doom. The man and the boy carried the fire on the road. Jeeves saved the day, repeatedly, as Bertie’s keeper. Harry faced down Voldemort, laying down his life for his friends.

These events that take place in great stories only make sense in the context of the wider narrative in which they’re set. In the novels, these events are powerful, thought provoking, moving, beautiful. But if you haven’t read the stories and don’t know the context, they mean very little.

Jesus accomplished an exodus in Jerusalem. He came as the lamb of God. He called himself the bridegroom. He spoke of his death in terms of the tearing down of the temple. When he died on the cross, dead people came out of their graves.

Like the events in the novels, these things about Jesus make sense when read against the back-story that gives them meaning. It can be hard to see the big story of the Bible because the narrative thread is harder to pick up than it is in most novels.

When I first started reading the Bible, it puzzled me that though this book was the one inspired by God, it seemed to me that other books were so much easier (and seemingly more fun) to read. Those other books seemed so much easier to understand. Often those other books were putting life’s big questions right on the surface. Reading other books was like picking low-hanging fruit. Reading the Bible was like searching for diamonds in a desert.

The problem was not with the Bible. The problem was with me and my expectations. For all the fun and ease I found in stories, I couldn’t find answers. I couldn’t find Truth.

If our fingers learn to feel the Bible’s narrative thread, we can follow that thread through the desert to the diamonds. We will feel the power and beauty of the descriptions of Jesus in the Gospels because the notes they sound will resonate in music our ears have learned to hear. The imagery will communicate rather than confuse. We will come away thinking the biblical authors were not only inspired but of subtly brilliant, no more thinking other writers tell better tales. We will come to see that the best of the world’s writers have merely sought to capture something of the shimmer on the Bible’s pages.

This is what biblical theology is for: to take you to Truth, to lead you all the way to God.

If you understand biblical theology, you won’t think that Homer, Virgil, Dickens, and Hugo were better storytellers than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. You won’t think the Gospels rough and rude. You’ll see how they’re carefully crafted, structurally sound, climactic presentations of a story far more significant than any novelist invented.

If you come to understand biblical theology, the Bible will explain not merely what God has done in Christ but the whole world and its fullness, including but not limited to the world’s great works of literature. Better: you will learn the insight of the men of Issachar, who understood the times and knew what Israel should do.

Best: if you come to understand biblical theology, it will be because you will have come to know God. You will understand what the Spirit inspired the biblical authors to write, and if the Lord has truly made you a biblical theologian, you will see how your life fits in the Bible’s big story, the true story of the world. You will have learned the interpretive perspective of the biblical authors, embraced it, and begun to apply it to your own life.

Becoming a biblical theologian is an epic task worthy of every human being. It goes beyond the mere reading of books on the topic, though that will aid those who join this quest. It requires a lifelong study of the Scriptures for the glory of the Father in the power of the Spirit by faith in the Son.

Are you ready to begin your journey? This is an adventure that will take you into the real world, the world of the Bible. And my prayer is that once you’ve been there, you’ll never want to be anywhere else. Count the cost. Bring your Bible. Join me for THINK|13.

This post also appeared today on the College Park Church Blog.

What can we do? Confiscation is very appealing, but usually a bit extreme.

1. We can use parental controls and accountability software.
2. We can forbid phones in bedrooms, at study desks, and at meal times.
3. I now insist on all phones (including my own) be kept in one central place when in the house and
4. I limit the number of times they can be checked in an evening.
5. We’re also starting a phone fast on Sundays.
6. And let there be consequences for misuse or overuse, yes, even confiscation at times.
7. But perhaps the best thing we can do is to talk to our kids about these ten positive reasons for making this wonderful technology a servant rather than a master. It might be the best career move they make. If they master their cell-phone they will stand out in their generation in so many positive ways.

These are good ideas. What would you add or adjust?

Don’t be naive. The devil is prowling around like a roaring lion. If you don’t protect yourself and your family, who will?

“The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it” (Prov 22:3; 27:12).