Making Things

In what critics will soon be calling "a stunning return to form," I hope to resume using Imperfect Reflections as more than an extension of my blogs over at EO. Among other things, I'm thinking about doing a sort of "Mackenzie Uncensored" in which I can write the posts I wish I could write over at EO, but can't because "calling someone a douchebag is unprofessional," and "long, rambling intros are unnecessary" and "it really seems like you just kinda went off on a tangent here." Did I, James? Did I really?

My posts here will not be as pointed nor coherent as what goes to EO. But I'm alright with that. This is for me and whoever else wants to read what goes through my amazing head, mostly unfiltered.

I recently began working on a stained glass lampshade, using a kit that my dad bought me for my birthday/Christmas. Now, before I say anything else, I want to answer the question you're all asking yourselves right now:

Do I think that the fact that I can make stained glass makes me, in some small but meaningful way, better than someone who doesn't know how to make stained glass? Of course I do. Obviously. That's just how it is. But that's not the point.

The point is, I like making things. I've always liked making things. It 's why I used to spend hours playing with Legos, why I crafted a castle complete with lava-spewing dragon in Minecraft for no other reason than lava castle, that's why! It's why I really enjoyed painting miniatures with my friends in college (and sometimes for my friends, because they were lazy, Nathan).

I really enjoy taking a jumble of pieces and putting them together into a cohesive thing, whether it's mining stone and bucketing lava in Minecraft, building a lego spaceship complete with laser turrets mounted on turntables, or assembling stained glass. I even really enjoyed putting together my new desk and computer. I love making things.

And I inherited this love, almost entirely, from my dad.

If you've met my dad, you understand this already. If you haven't, let me break it down for you.

It'd be impossible, in this brief space, to adequately convey to you the absolutely absurd love my dad has for making things. I can't remember a time when he didn't love it, or when he wasn't good at it. From my earliest memory, my parent's house and his mother's house have been full of his creations. My parent's house contains four or five full stained-glass windows that would sell for hundreds of dollars: the result of a mere hobby. They have hanging in the house a carved, painted angel blowing a trumpet, assembled on a whim. Their front yard is dominated by a fountain assembled from rocks and an old satellite dish hand-gathered by our family. He eschews forms and pattern books, instead calling forth amazing, beautiful designs from his bald, often-hatted head. I count myself exceedingly lucky to have inherited a small portion of his amazing skill.

My dad illustrates, more than anyone else I know, the fact that being made in the image of God means being makers of things. My dad calls forth a butterfly out of shards of glass, summons an angel out of scrap-wood, and in doing so he emulates the One who crafted him out of dust. I marvel at the beautiful complexity of my dad's stained glass, and the illustrated skill of the one who crafted it, and in doing so I am reminded that the one who crafts is much more complex than his creation, and that he in turn was created by the Supreme Craftsman. And as my dad's passion and skill are evident in his stained glass, so God's passion and skill are evident in him.

So... thanks, dad. Thanks for sharing with me your love of making things. Hopefully mom can show this to you, since God apparently compensated for this incredible gift by guaranteeing you would never be able to reliably call up a particular web page.

Ramblings after Camping

So, we went camping this past week at Shaver Lake. Now, you probably don’t know this, but when we go camping, we go camping. It takes us a full day to pack. RV? Check. 50 pounds of bacon? Check. 5 economy size bottles of syrup? Check. Full size refrigerator? Check. Yes. Full size refrigerator. We don’t mess around. But I digress.

I don’t really even know what this post is about, really. I don’t know that what I want to say has any importance whatsoever. But I’m gonna say it anyway. That’s what having a blog is all about, right?

So, we go camping. When we go camping, we usually go to a different place every day. Some of these are new places—others are places we go to every year. One of these places is called Dinky Creek. Don’t laugh at the name. It’s an awesome place, really rocky, and most years the smooth rock on the riverbed forms natural waterslides. Every year, when we go there, I go exploring upstream by myself, jumping from rock to rock when I can, walking along the river when I can’t. It’s always a pretty cool experience, because I never see anybody else once I’ve been going upstream for about 5 minutes. It’s just me jumping from rock to rock and running along the bank. This year was a little different. I don’t know why, maybe it’s because I’ve been re-reading The Lord of the Rings, but as I was jumping and running and walking along the stream, I found myself kind of murmuring/humming bits and pieces of Tom Bombadil’s songs. And I did feel like Tom Bombadil. I don’t know why. But just now, I realized what I want to say in this post. It’s very simple, but it’s something I think about frequently. And it relates to Tom Bombadil.

Who is Tomb Bombadil? He is master. He is the lord over the land. He appreciates and loves nature (see him carrying water lilies for Goldberry), but he also controls nature, by force if necessary (see him subduing Old Man Willow). As I was writing the previous paragraphs, I was thinking about Tom Bombadil skipping along his path, singing his nonsensical, joyful song, and I was thinking of how I felt, running and jumping along the river, and I thought… nature is fallen. But sometimes Nature remembers when it was unfallen and pure and good, meant for us to enjoy and nurture, and also to rule. I thought of Tom Bombadil, and I thought of Adam, before the fall, and then I thought of us. We are fallen, as is Nature (although I sometimes think nature is not quite so fallen as we are). And here’s something else I just realized—it is our fault that nature is fallen.

When Adam sinned, he not only cursed himself, but creation as well. In Genesis, God tells Adam, “Cursed is the ground because of you.” The earth did not originally bring forth thorns and thistles, scratching our skin and choking our plants—these are results of the fall, of our own sin. But just as creation was cursed because of the first Adam, it will be redeemed by the second Adam—Christ.

I was researching for this note, and I stumbled upon Romans 8. I’ve read it before, but I cannot believe that I didn’t remember this part, it’s so crazy-awesome. Check this out: “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” Romans 8:19-21. Creation is not just a completely inanimate…thing here. I can’t think of the right words to say what I want to say, but… Creation itself is eagerly awaiting the day when it is set free from it’s bonds of death and decay. When we are renewed, so will creation be renewed. We will once again be the pure stewards of a pure creation. And I don’t think it’s that unlikely that, on the new earth, and under the new heavens, we might run beside clear streams, under green trees, and hear creation itself praising its creator.

Nature- Objectively Beautiful

So, a couple weeks ago, over Easter break, I realized something–it's spring. I realized this when I got home to find my yard absolutely filled with roses and irises and other various flowers (my dad loves gardening). And this sight reminded me that even though our world is fallen, there is still something in nature that remembers when God looked on what he had created and called it good.

In today's culture of relativity, the concepts of objective truth or objective beauty are often disregarded as outdated and naive. What is true to one person, the world says, may not be true for another person. What is beautiful to some can, just as correctly, be called ugly by others. As Christians, we have to recognize that this idea of relativism is false. I am not writing today to address the obvious existence of objective truth. But I am writing to say that nature, Creation, is objectively beautiful–it is not something that has anything to do with relativity or opinion.

If you look at a garden, or a hill-side covered with flowers, or snow-capped mountains off in the distance, or the night sky and the stars in the heavens, it is not up to you to determine whether these things are beautiful or not. The Grand Canyon does not rely on people to view it for it to be grand. The stars are beautiful even without people to declare them so. When God created the world, he declared that it was good before there were even any people on it. We are told that the stars sang with the angels while our world was made, before we ourselves existed.

The sheer arrogance of humanity, who assume that we are the ones who decide what is true and beautiful! Beauty has nothing to do with our personal preferences, with what is or is not pleasing to look at with our fallen eyes. The heavens declare the glory of God, the psalmist tells us, and they would go on declaring even if we were not here. If you look at the night sky and decide that you are unimpressed, that the stars in the heavens are only so-so, then you are wrong. If you claim that you have the right to deny nature's beauty, you are wrong. Straight up wrong.