The Local Yarn

∞ · Thu Jul 5, 2007

What does it mean to know God and to be changed by him? The work of God in the heart of his child is a very real experience. It is like open-heart surgery without an anesthetic — it can be felt, it is often very painful, but it is also for my good. I don’t just believe it. I know it.

“I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath.”
Lamentations 3

“I went out full, and the LORD hath brought me home again empty: why then call ye me Naomi (‘my delight’), seeing the LORD hath testified against me, and the Almighty hath afflicted me?”
Ruth 1

“I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth.”
Psalm 34

“The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.”
Zephaniah 3

Emotional pain is destructive for the spiritually dead; but for the child of God it is a sign of life. Our first instincts are to forget, to erase the memories of pain and the memories that led up to pain. But the child of God knows that all things come from God’s hand, for our good, and find that God gives the power not only to endure, but to rejoice.

Look upon Jesus,
the one who started
and will complete
our faith;
who, because of the joy that was set before him
loved,
endured rejection and death at their hands,
looking past the pain of shame
and is now at the right hand of the throne of God.

Think about Him
Who endured your rejection
And loves you still
And you will be able to bear it.
Hebrews 11

GOD WRITES FINAL CHAPTERS
Everything he writes is for my good.

∞ · Tue Jul 3, 2007

my stomach hurts

∞ · Thu May 3, 2007

I have been told that my offer on the house across the street has been accepted! Now to tear it down.

This is probably one of those days I’ll look back on twenty years from now and think, man, if only I’d known. It still looks like a pretty good idea from here, though.

∞ · Thu Apr 19, 2007 · 3 Notes

This is a graph of an eighty-year life. Each slice represents one year.

The slices’ sizes are weighted by what percentage that year represents of the whole lifespan to that point. At age one, the first year represents 100% of your whole life, so it is given a width of one hundred. Your second year is given a width of fifty, since it represents 50% of your life at age two.

By the time you get to age 21 and look back on the last year, you find that year 20 represents only 4.8% of your life. Furthermore, because each additional year represents a smaller relative portion of your life, three quarters of your life is already over. This is why time seems to go by more quickly as you get older.

In an attempt to offset the depressing nature of this visualization, I have added an unscientific representation of your potential cumulative effect on humanity, good or bad, as your life progresses. This is purely a function of your increasing ability to affect other people in (1) more areas of life and (2) within ever-widening physical bounds as time goes on, combined with the generational effects of your influence on others’ contact with people in their lifetimes.

—JD

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice, there is.” — Chuck Reid

Continue reading…

∞ · Tue Apr 17, 2007

Today’s topic is: Aspiration. To aspire means to strive towards some higher state; but to aspirate means merely to breathe; that is, simply to allow the flow of air.

The connection is obvious: the higher one goes, the freer the air – at least, in our hopes. We hope that when we achieve that lofty station to which we aspire, that we shall breathe easier, that we will have leisure to cease from reactionary effort, to recline and survey our surroundings for a great distance all around.

The illusion is that we can certainly achieve this state of luxurious breathe-easiness by hard-breathing effort. The reality is that we may never become what we aspire to; but the identical result is much nearer at hand: while we aspire, we aspirate, and thus take the elevator rather than the stairs. Do not aspire to improve so that, victorious, you may breathe easy: but, breathe easy, that you may be victorious.

—JD

“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.”
— Henri Bergson (1859-1941)

∞ · Mon Apr 16, 2007

I have learned the hard way, never to put footnotes on a poem.

∞ · Tue Feb 27, 2007

∞ · Fri Feb 16, 2007

Early this month, Opa died, one week after having a major stroke (his second). He is survived by fifty-one direct descendants and their spouses, and most of them gathered here at our home to honor his memory. We have not had this many of us together in a long time.

As people began arriving in Minneapolis, temperatures dropped into their lowest for the winter. For more than sixty hours the air was not warmer than 0° Fahrenheit, and the day of the funeral the windchill was -40°.

Friday evening after the funeral, we gathered at the Mennonite church he built here in New Hope, and a lot of us had a hard time keeping it together as we shared stories of Opa and the wild wonderful life he had that left such a such an incredible huge stamp on our family.

It will not happen soon. But spring can come now.

∞ · Thu Jan 11, 2007 · 1 Notes

My brother picked up the board game Dread Pirate on Boxing Day. The game components themselves are perfect for a pirate game: metal doubloons, an old map printed on cloth for a board, nice wooden die, &c.

The widely-noted problem with Dread Pirate is that the play is just not that interesting. You have three basic ways to get ahead – fighting other ships, raiding ports, and trading – and all three involve nothing more than a roll-to-see-who’s-higher.

Still, putting it nicely, this board game has a lot of potential. So, to make things more interesting, I’ve cooked up some alternate rules, titled Dread Pirate: The Black Spot Rules. They are available for PDF download here:

http://jdueck.net/perelandra/blackspotrules.pdf

The rules currently affect only the fighting and raiding aspects of gameplay. In designing these rules, my goals were:

• To add room for additional strategies in gameplay
• To increase the level of realism in battles and raids to something a little more satisfying
• To require as few new components as possible, and to retain the level of old-world tactility set by the original pieces.

The result is a system of ship upgrades and a new battle format that goes a long way towards improving the strategy/luck balance of the game, and needs only a chess board and pieces in addition to the game itself.

As far as I know, this is the only serious attempt that has been made at an improvement on this game. If there are similar efforts out there already, I have been unable to locate them in my five minutes of searching.

Improvements Needed

At this point, I am very much interested in receiving input from people who would like to improve on these rules. I am not a board game expert or even a very frequent player of many different board games, so I feel as though the problem calls for more experience being brought to bear than I have at my disposal. So I have published this as a draft meant to be improved-upon. See the Final Thoughts section at the very end.

Continue reading…

∞ · Thu Jan 11, 2007

To what shall I compare the Kingdom of Heaven in America?

It is like a man that walked in a field, and came to a certain hill. And he lifted up his eyes, and the clouds parted, and he beheld God in the clouds, seeming a long way off. And as the man stood, he saw that God watched him, and raised up his fist to smite him. So he stood in the road, transfixed and amazed as the white hot fist of God rushed closer at him to crush him. And in the last moment, Jesus Christ, running to the top of the hill, violently shoved him aside and screamed as the fist of God from heaven crushed him into a bloody mass. And Jesus Christ died, slaughtered and immolated by God’s valuation of man.

And the man, seeing the blow that was meant for him, went his way, saying, See what great worth I have! God loves me just the way I am!