First Post
Hello! Welcome to my website. This is my first post. Let me introduce myself and briefly tell you a little about what I envision this site to be. My name is David Kendall, and I am a 25-year old single male working at a bank in Knoxville, Tennessee. I am also a thinker always seeking the space and inspiration to think deeply about life and spirituality, people and ideas, what's happening and what could be happening. The desire for this site is to have a place where I can record personal observations in a journal-type style, with the added benefit of being able to put those thoughts out there for those who wish to read them. My biggest inspirations for writing come from seeing things, be it in the Bible, or in my experiences, or as a news story or in film, and in my response, to let the excitement of the thought carry me to new places of understanding and appreciation or places I like to revisit.
In the past, I have been deeply inspired by writers. That inspiration sprang to life when I read The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien for the first time. I was just in elementary school then, and it was primarily that particular story that gripped me. But over time, I begin to have a keener and keener interest in writing itself and the writers' styles of communication. Since then, writers like Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare, and Tolkien (in the Lord of the Rings) have brought the desire up to a fever pitch. Those writings awakened yearnings to see and express ideas in beautiful and truthful ways. I am someone who is imitational by nature. I observe. I pick up behaviors, ways of doing things, ways of thinking very readily and quickly. And I immediately want to begin the process of taking those thoughts, processing them, and transmitting them in a way that points to the original idea but also tries to further sum up, further organize, further elaborate on, further dissect. Often to see it to the nth degree, as you can see in my to-be-published posts on LOTR (that's the Lord of the Rings). I am someone who "cries aloud for understanding", as it says in the 3rd chapter of The Book of Proverbs in the Bible.
I have also been deeply impacted by the writers of the gospels and epistles in the New Testament of the Bible. Of course spiritually the impact is huge, and that is why I search there. I am blessed to call myself and be a follower of Jesus Christ, one of God's children by faith, and a part of His glorious Kingdom and holy church. But in that search to know God and understand life, I have also been amazed at the men behind the writings themselves: what they could say and why they could say it. Luke's gospel and his later letter called "Acts" are amazing in their clarity and understanding. Luke says in his first letter (the gospel) that he wished to put together an "orderly account" so that his reader, Theophilus, could "know the certainty of the things [he was] taught" (Luke 1:3-4 in the NIV). And it's not just that he records great stuff of Jesus' life, it's also that he makes a spiritually ordered presentation of it. I'm amazed at that; it shows the glory of God which is a man fully alive, as St. Iraeneus said. He must have been an incredible, robust man to have been able to do that. So I'm inspired by writers more than writing. And with Acts what Luke does (did you know that Luke was a physician?! Not a scribe. I guess with what the world knew about medicine, he had time to practice other skills, you think?) - what he did is chronicle what Jesus continued to do and teach, having told us in the first of that letter that in his first letter (the gospel) he had talked about what Jesus "began to do and teach". That inspires me in making this blog too, because I want to be a chronicler of the Kingdom. One thing I have to do is get closer to the action of the Kingdom, as Luke was. So while I will be sharing about my thoughts, my hope is that God would put me in position and in the right heartset to be able to see and be a part of what the Kingdom is doing.
John, in his gospel, does something wonderful with recording an encounter Jesus had, something He did and said, and then putting it so that you see where the people who believe were (spiritually speaking) and where the people who didn't believe put themselves. It's really quite amazing; it's like a psychological assessment right there, in the spiritual realm. I don't try to do that, but there is something amazing there too.
I said that I was imitational. But true life is not imitational, but incarnational. Imitating can get your body and mind in the right realm, but it by necessity comes up short. I've observed that an idea has to become apart of you in some way before you really have it or know it. Incarnational then is that attribute of what is or the description of what has happened in you. It takes it being done in you and through you to really be able to testify to it. That is what I was attempting to say about Luke, that he couldn't write his gospel (in my mind) without the incarnational reality being there. You can get all the facts right, but facts alone do not describe a reality. I want to say a witty phrase that somes it all up, but what I am trying to get it at, Morpheus says this way to Neo, "You're going to see, just as I did, that there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path." (That's from The Matrix). It is all the difference in the world between those two places. So my prayer to God is that increasingly in my life I would live, with "live" meaning the incarnational sense. And to do that means I am going to have to get near the Person who alone can live it out in me. And that's Jesus.
Ok that's a lot for one post. Let me say one warning and that is because I feel that something I do will be unsatisfying to people: that I tend to take my responses to Scripture and preach them. Most of the time, I think I am preaching it to myself; don't let the pronoun and verb usage make you think otherwise. Once again, I hope to be what I not yet am and I ask God to come live out His wonderful incarnation in me. You can be told a million times that you have to not try to tell people what to do, but until you have been there and seen it, it is like telling you to make something move only by your mind. I want to get to that country that is the Kingdom of God. I don't want to just see it from the outside. I want to live there. That's my hope. So let me move from spectating to living, as many times as it takes.
See you next post.
In the past, I have been deeply inspired by writers. That inspiration sprang to life when I read The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien for the first time. I was just in elementary school then, and it was primarily that particular story that gripped me. But over time, I begin to have a keener and keener interest in writing itself and the writers' styles of communication. Since then, writers like Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare, and Tolkien (in the Lord of the Rings) have brought the desire up to a fever pitch. Those writings awakened yearnings to see and express ideas in beautiful and truthful ways. I am someone who is imitational by nature. I observe. I pick up behaviors, ways of doing things, ways of thinking very readily and quickly. And I immediately want to begin the process of taking those thoughts, processing them, and transmitting them in a way that points to the original idea but also tries to further sum up, further organize, further elaborate on, further dissect. Often to see it to the nth degree, as you can see in my to-be-published posts on LOTR (that's the Lord of the Rings). I am someone who "cries aloud for understanding", as it says in the 3rd chapter of The Book of Proverbs in the Bible.
I have also been deeply impacted by the writers of the gospels and epistles in the New Testament of the Bible. Of course spiritually the impact is huge, and that is why I search there. I am blessed to call myself and be a follower of Jesus Christ, one of God's children by faith, and a part of His glorious Kingdom and holy church. But in that search to know God and understand life, I have also been amazed at the men behind the writings themselves: what they could say and why they could say it. Luke's gospel and his later letter called "Acts" are amazing in their clarity and understanding. Luke says in his first letter (the gospel) that he wished to put together an "orderly account" so that his reader, Theophilus, could "know the certainty of the things [he was] taught" (Luke 1:3-4 in the NIV). And it's not just that he records great stuff of Jesus' life, it's also that he makes a spiritually ordered presentation of it. I'm amazed at that; it shows the glory of God which is a man fully alive, as St. Iraeneus said. He must have been an incredible, robust man to have been able to do that. So I'm inspired by writers more than writing. And with Acts what Luke does (did you know that Luke was a physician?! Not a scribe. I guess with what the world knew about medicine, he had time to practice other skills, you think?) - what he did is chronicle what Jesus continued to do and teach, having told us in the first of that letter that in his first letter (the gospel) he had talked about what Jesus "began to do and teach". That inspires me in making this blog too, because I want to be a chronicler of the Kingdom. One thing I have to do is get closer to the action of the Kingdom, as Luke was. So while I will be sharing about my thoughts, my hope is that God would put me in position and in the right heartset to be able to see and be a part of what the Kingdom is doing.
John, in his gospel, does something wonderful with recording an encounter Jesus had, something He did and said, and then putting it so that you see where the people who believe were (spiritually speaking) and where the people who didn't believe put themselves. It's really quite amazing; it's like a psychological assessment right there, in the spiritual realm. I don't try to do that, but there is something amazing there too.
I said that I was imitational. But true life is not imitational, but incarnational. Imitating can get your body and mind in the right realm, but it by necessity comes up short. I've observed that an idea has to become apart of you in some way before you really have it or know it. Incarnational then is that attribute of what is or the description of what has happened in you. It takes it being done in you and through you to really be able to testify to it. That is what I was attempting to say about Luke, that he couldn't write his gospel (in my mind) without the incarnational reality being there. You can get all the facts right, but facts alone do not describe a reality. I want to say a witty phrase that somes it all up, but what I am trying to get it at, Morpheus says this way to Neo, "You're going to see, just as I did, that there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path." (That's from The Matrix). It is all the difference in the world between those two places. So my prayer to God is that increasingly in my life I would live, with "live" meaning the incarnational sense. And to do that means I am going to have to get near the Person who alone can live it out in me. And that's Jesus.
Ok that's a lot for one post. Let me say one warning and that is because I feel that something I do will be unsatisfying to people: that I tend to take my responses to Scripture and preach them. Most of the time, I think I am preaching it to myself; don't let the pronoun and verb usage make you think otherwise. Once again, I hope to be what I not yet am and I ask God to come live out His wonderful incarnation in me. You can be told a million times that you have to not try to tell people what to do, but until you have been there and seen it, it is like telling you to make something move only by your mind. I want to get to that country that is the Kingdom of God. I don't want to just see it from the outside. I want to live there. That's my hope. So let me move from spectating to living, as many times as it takes.
See you next post.
posted by David at 6:00 PM
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