Don't Waste Your Life

We've been working on getting our new Memorial Day video, For Freedom up on our site and out to our various distributors. So, I've got Memorial Day on my mind. Meanwhile, my small group is studying through a John Piper book called Don't Waste Your Life (great read, highly recommended). This morning I picked up the book to read and God did one of those things that He's so good at. He brought the things in my life, on my heart, and in my mind together in a powerful way.We're in Chapter 7 of Don't Waste Your Life. The Chapter is called, Living to Prove He is More Precious Than Life. The chapter kicks off like this:

To make others glad in God with an everlasting gladness, our lives must show that he is more precious than life. "Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you." (Psalm 63:3)

In the chapter, Piper talks about what he calls a "wartime lifestyle." He illustrates how what we do with our time, our money, and even our very lives is what shows others that "he is more precious than life." He goes on to explain that during WWII, even the people at home here in the States made great personal sacrifices for the war effort. One of the mottos of that era was, "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without." In his explanation of a "wartime lifestyle," Piper exhorts us to remember we're in the midst of a great battle and the stakes are very high. Given the fact that, in times when our nation has been at war, people were capable of rising to great levels of sacrifice, how much more should we, as Christians, rise up and sacrifice for the cause of Christ (which he calls "the greatest cause in the world). To illustrate the sacrifices people are willing to make, he pulls from the book Flags of our Fathers, which Clint Eastwood recently made into a film. Flags of our Fathers is about the WWII battle for the small Pacific island of Iwo Jima.

Iwo Jima was home to one of the bloodiest battles in our nation's history. 21,000 Japanese soldiers died in the battle, but our Marines suffered 26,000 casualties in the process. This was the only battle in the Pacific where the invaders incurred higher casualties than the defenders. The Marines spent forty-three months fighting in WWII, and yet, in one month of fighting at Iwo Jima, one third of their total casualties occurred. Many of those Marines who fought so bravely there are buried in the Pacific. It's here where I'll pick it up directly from the book, Flags of our Fathers:

Thousands of families would not have the solace of a body to bid farewell: just the abstract information that the Marine had "died in the performance of his duty" and was buried in a plot, aligned in a row with numbers on his grave. Mike lay in Plot 3, Row 5, Grave 694; Harlon in Plot 4, Row 6, Grave 912; Franklin in Plot 8, Row 7, Grave 2189.

When I think of Mike, Harlon, and Franklin there, I think of the message someone had chiseled outside the cemetery.

When you go home
Tell them for us and say
For your tomorrow We gave our today

Those were the lines that really hit me. How powerful, to live in the reality that we are engaged in a spiritual war, a war for the souls of all mankind. That we hold in our hands and in our hearts the spiritual antidote that can transform the lives of all the men and women living on this planet. We all long to be a part of something. To know and to have and to live for something bigger than ourselves. To find something worth not just living for, but worth dying for. And we Christians are blessed to have found the fulfillment of those longings, of that desire in our relationship with Christ. How powerful to be able to say to them, in the end, "For your tomorrow, we gave our today."

The Cutting Edge

We had a reader send us a request for more posts/information on the how to of editing. How do you edit? That's a really big question. The answer is simple and complicated all at the same time.

Editing in film or video is sequencing images or clips into a timeline. Choosing to place one moving clip after another in a certain order. In the end, editing is story telling. I had an editing professor who said the editor is the person who tells the joke. Someone thinks up the joke. Someone writes it. Someone records and/or captures it. And then the editor decides how it should be told.

One of the most eye opening assignments I had in film school was to edit together a scene from raw footage of the TV show Highlander. Anyone remember that show? Adrian Paul as Duncan MacLeod? Anyone? It wasn't a very good show, but I'm getting way off point. Everyone in the class was given the same raw footage to work with. We all spent a couple of weeks working on our cuts. And then we watched them together. Same footage. Totally different scenes. Everyone in the class told a totally different joke.

And so... You can learn how to push the right buttons, how this software works and that software works. And you can debate the merits of Final Cut Pro vs. Avid vs. Premiere. But before you get into any of that, if you want to be an editor, you need to study and think and watch and decide how you want to tell your jokes. Anyone can learn how to cut images into a sequence, but it takes a lifetime to learn where to place those cuts in order to have the impact you want. Every frame counts. Every moment matters. Where should you cut?

There's an excellent documentary about editing called "The Cutting Edge - The Magic of Movie Editing." It's a feature length documentary about the art and craft of film editing. You can order a DVD copy through Amazon. It was recently available online through Google video but it seems it's been taken down. I'll let you know if I find it somewhere. I also highly recommend Walter Murch's book "In the Blink of an Eye," also available through Amazon and other fine book stores. In the Blink of an Eye is the best book I've ever read about the philosophy or thought process that goes in to editing. Walter Murch is a long time editor for Francis Ford Coppola and edited, among other things, The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. More recently, he was the editor on Cold Mountain, one of the first big budget features to be cut entirely with Final Cut Pro.

We'll post more on editing in the near future (something more hands on and practical :).

Living As An Ordinary Radical

Here's a great story that has inspired me. I just finished a book called The Irresistible Revolution: living as an ordinary radical. It's a book by a guy named Shane Claiborne who is part of a group in Philadelphia called The Simple Way. I've got to be honest, this book made me really uncomfortable. It is a book that raises the ugly issues of poverty, inequality, and warfare. But it's never about throwing the issues in your face so you feel guilty or bad or defeated. Instead, it seeks to bring these issues to light so we might have the courage to imagine a world where they no longer exist. It's about what it really means to follow Christ fully and completely, written by a guy who is doing his best to do just that.

At times, while reading the book, I wanted to dismiss Shane as a hippie idealist, as an over zealous activist, as some kind of left-wing nut... but I couldn't. God wouldn't let me off the hook that easy. Shane lives in voluntary poverty in inner city Philadelphia at a house where he holds all things in common with his community. It's a hospitality house, where the door is always open to anyone with any need. In college, Shane followed Christ to India, where he worked with Mother Teresa and ended up living, serving and loving his neighbors in a leper colony. Recently, Shane was led by the Spirit to journey to Iraq, where he worshiped, encouraged and communed with the Christians living there (while the bombs were falling!). This is a guy who puts his proverbial money where his mouth is. He is a voice calling us out of the complacency that so easily infects us in this American life. Shane may be a little crazy, but he's crazy for all the right reasons. And I know he's crazy about Jesus.

Here's what Rob Bell (NOOMA, Velvet Elvis, Mars Hill) says about Shane:

Be warned, my friends: Shane is a poet, a friend, a brother - but underneath it all, he's a prophet with a fire in his belly and a story to back it up. If you listen - or in this case, read - you will not be the same.

AMEN!

Made to Stick
(www.madetostick.com)




I just picked up a copy of a book called Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath. Has anyone out there read it? Here's an excerpt from the jacket:

Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions. Inside, the brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that “stick” and explain sure-fire methods for making ideas stickier, such as violating schemas, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating “curiosity gaps.”

The book warns against something the authors call the Curse of Knowledge. Here's how the authors explain the Curse of Knowledge in an interview they did on Guy Kawasaki's blog:

And that brings us to the villain of our book: The Curse of Knowledge. Lots of research in economics and psychology shows that when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become lousy communicators. Think of a lawyer who can’t give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a legal question. His vast knowledge and experience renders him unable to fathom how little you know. So when he talks to you, he talks in abstractions that you can’t follow. And we’re all like the lawyer in our own domain of expertise.

I haven't read that far into the book yet, but I know that in the area of evangelism and in how we do church, this Curse of Knowledge thing has a ring of truth to it. I'm all for any tool that can help us better communicate the good news to people who haven't yet heard it or clarify it to people who have heard it but don't yet understand it. I could definitely use help in better communicating some of my ideas, like clearly communicating what we're all about here at eleven72, and why we do what we do.

If you've read the book, please let us know what you thought. If you have any good book recommendations, please let us know what they are. And I'll go ahead and read the book and let you know if it sticks :).