Breakfast

I love breakfast. It is my favorite meal in the world, because it sets off your day and its easy to cook. I cooked some breakfast today for some people in the house and it was so fun. Some people didn't want to eat but I made them anyway to make myself feel better about myself. (Its weird how we do that no?) 

Breakfast is so cool because it is simple. Everyone is too groggy to worry about what is going on so they'll eat anything, so anything tastes good. Also, it symbolizes a new day. When I am cooking breakfast I feel like there are not that many problems in the world because there is always a whole day ahead. I feel like any pains can be turned to victory stories because of the time ahead. 

Everyone should eat breakfast. Especially when they are in a small country town with a big family and random people too.

Carpenter

I will get up in a couple hours and go build houses. They call me a carpenter for now. I really like that. 

My family flew to the Dominican Republic today from Chicago. 

I worked out.

I saw the sun.

I smiled

I saw a movie about death which made me think a lot.

Wesley and my sister are in love...

Life continues on as I know it

Prince Albert, Saskatchewan

If you have never heard of this town then you haven't lived. Pretty much the final town before the never-ending nothingness that is northern Canada. Population 34,000. We drove for six hours across continuous prairies reading "war and peace." (no joke) 

We were attending the funeral of Wes' friend's mom, if that makes sense. He is a young kid and lost his mother, it was incredibly sad. Wes' friend Aaron was so fun to be with. We hung out before the funeral for a couple days and talked about life. He is a Christian and so devout. He loves Jesus more than anything and that hope really helped him through the pain of losing his mom. 

Aaron's family were incredible. They were living with their uncle, his wife and four kids while their mom struggled with cancer. His family has six also, so that was twelve people in one small house. The couple of days that Wes and I were there, they welcomed us as part of the family. Even though they had just lost their mother, they didn't know me, and they were so busy, they welcomed us as though we were family. Not even because they felt they had too, they genuinely wanted to get to know us and serve us the best they could. I could not believe it. 

I was thinking, how many people could actually tolerate living with their family in close proximity for long periods of time like that? And still welcome others with open, sincere arms? What a testimony of a faith that is put into action I thought. I am so grateful for Aaron and his family, and the lessons of compassion, tolerance, and values that they taught me by the way they live while I was there.

Congratulations Rachel and Wesley Proch!

Something Beautiful happened... And I saw it with my eyes... Rachel and Wesley got married to one another.

I was pretty stoked for them. It was perhaps the craziest month of my life. 50 gringos from all over the northern part of the continent coming to this little island in the Caribbean. I was exhausted after the wedding. 

I learned some things: Family and friends may be the most amazing existences in the universe, life must consist of more peace than we are used to in the USA, and I have two really hot sisters, only one of which is still single. (So I will have to work hard to keep her that way.)

The Neural Buddhists By DAVID BROOKS

• The Neural Buddhists
  
  
  By DAVID BROOKS
  Published: May 13, 2008
  In 1996, Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant essay called “Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died,” in which he captured the militant materialism of some modern scientists.
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  To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are “hard-wired” to do this or that. Religion is an accident.
  In this materialist view, people perceive God’s existence because their brains have evolved to confabulate belief systems. You put a magnetic helmet around their heads and they will begin to think they are having a spiritual epiphany. If they suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy, they will show signs of hyperreligiosity, an overexcitement of the brain tissue that leads sufferers to believe they are conversing with God.
  Wolfe understood the central assertion contained in this kind of thinking: Everything is material and “the soul is dead.” He anticipated the way the genetic and neuroscience revolutions would affect public debate. They would kick off another fundamental argument over whether God exists.
  Lo and behold, over the past decade, a new group of assertive atheists has done battle with defenders of faith. The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or merely adds to our appreciation of the entity that created it.
  The atheism debate is a textbook example of how a scientific revolution can change public culture. Just as “The Origin of Species reshaped social thinking, just as Einstein’s theory of relativity affected art, so the revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see the world.
  And yet my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.
  Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.
  Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.
  Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real.
  This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.
  If you survey the literature (and I’d recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion.
  First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.
  In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.
  In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.

La Juventud

It seems everyone wants to "be young again." Adults talk about the "good old days" and how "when I was young." What a gift youth really is, the mistakes we make and the adventures that we seek. 

I am realizing that I am a youth. (Even though technically I'm more of an adult.) I live some really interesting adventures, everyday is a new challenge, adventure, or mistake. This special time of my life is something to be treasured and I should tell about it. I am not only writing about my life, but about the age or epoc in which I am trapped, my youth. This point through which all people cross as part of the human condition, a point that some ignore and some extend.

I went to the doctor yesterday in the big city about an hour away, Santiago. I picked up this military man that was hitchhiking to work. He told me how great the military parties are. When I got to the doctor I had to wait so long to see him. I'm sitting here with all these people waiting to get in and see the doctor. I waited on and off for about 5 hours, mostly just watching people. There were rich and poor in the hospital. One lady with her kids yelling at the nurses, two guys following these two girls flirting around the hospital, and doctors busily treating the patients.  I walked across the street to the mall which is mostly upper class to eat something. I love these times when I can just watch people, the young guys flirting with the KFC girl, the two rich business men having a meeting, and the two real plastic girls buying new jewelry. 

We will all die at some point, we all have the same appetites, and we all need one another. We should start embracing our youth more and more I believe.

This question has been plaguing my mind for the last couple of days and it almost seems impossible to answer unless it possess some kind of paradoxical truth. Something I am inclined to believe. The question is this:

How can one stand for truth and virtue while living a life full of mercy, grace, and forgiveness?

I saw that the famous pastor Bill Hybels calls himself a progressive now on the back of Jim Wallis' new book "the great awakening." No progressive stand for a much more relative approach to truth. Progressives are all about everyone being equal and that no one is better than anyone else. This really does away with absolute truth, which seems like a necessary belief for a pastor. I am generalizing to keep the blog short, but it seems that many modern day christians have found a way to answer my big question like Shane Claiborne, Jim Wallis, and now Bill Hybles, or have they?

This is the question going through my head and I will let everyone know when I find the answer, cuz then all the world's problems will pretty much be done away with.

-Joshua