“What is the meaning of life?” I’m no scholar, or philosopher that’s for sure but I think I have found the answer. Before you continue reading, make sure you are ready to grasp this, because it is huge. Okay, are you ready? The meaning of life is, now are you sure you are prepared, because if not now’s the time to close the book. You’re still reading, that must mean you are. Are you sitting down? Because what I am about to say has the potential to cause shortness of breath and in rare cases hospitalization. The meaning of life is, drum role please, to live. Are you completely flabbergasted? Are you tearing up the pages of your Philosophy 101 text book wondering why you wasted four years of university when all you had to do was read my book? Now, just in case you missed the answer, I’ll save you the trouble of back reading. The meaning of life is to live.

Dictionary.com defines life as “The interval of time between birth and death”, (although as a hardcore pro-lifer (another reason why I am writing a book on life) I would further define life as “The interval of time between conception and death”) and defines live as “To continue to have life”. Yes it is that simple. We are conceived and then we die, everything else in between is life. The interval of time between our conception and our death is when we are living and thus the meaning of life is to live.

I have a special friend, Dominic, he is eighteen months. He knows the meaning of life well. He falls asleep when he is tired. He wakes up when he has had enough rest. He will let you know if he needs something and not hold back in pride. He eats when he is hungry and he stops eating when he is full. He comforts you when you’re sad and furthers your happiest day with joy. He sleeps again and then the next day does it all over again. Dominic knows the meaning of life. The meaning of life is to live.

Next, let’s take a look at what Jesus says life is about.

I came that they may have [life] and enjoy life and have it in abundance (to the full, till it overflows). John 10:10b Amp.

I have come so that they can have life. I want them to have it in the fullest possible way. John 10:10b NIRV

Let’s expand that verse a bit. First who is Jesus talking about? If we go up to the beginning of the chapter we are told He is talking about His sheep, you and me. He came so that we would have life, so that our neighbours would have life, so that the drug addict on the streets would have life, and so that the young girl whose wrists are slashed would have life. He came so that the dead can live. This life thing He came to give is even better then it sounds. The Greek word for life is ‘Zoë’ meaning: life, alive, came to life, belonged, receive living, among others which I will spend more time on in a later chapter. He not only came so we could have life, or in the Greek, so that we could be alive or so that we could belong but also so we would enjoy living (and I mean really enjoy living) and that we would reap the full benefits of life.

I’m not a big fan of the Message translation (a personal thing, I don’t have any solid reason for this) but I love how the Message puts this verse “I came so they would have a real and eternal life, more and better life then they could ever dream of”. Take a moment right now to imagine your perfect life. Where are you living? Think of the setting – a cozy cottage in the woods perhaps, is it a beautiful summers day, are you living in a community with friends always around. What people are present? Maybe someone you love is currently very sick and you are imagining them healed and pain-free. What are you doing? Tell me about your family and friends in this picture. Now think for a bit on how great that life looks, soak it up. Looks pretty good eh? Get this, the life Jesus has for you is better then that! Now that’s good news.

Well I do have some further life issues to copy and paste from this so called book I'm writing, but today was too good not to blog about.

Three years ago I was in The War College session Martyrs.
http://www.thewarcollege.com/

And since then some of us have stayed, some have left and other have come back. Currently there are 8 local Martyrs here in Vancouver, we represent 4 corps and all our squads. This morning seven of us got together to have a mini spontaneous reunion. It was beautiful.

There is some sort of unexplainable bond between session mates. If you want to experience it for yourself I think there are a couple spots left in the Conquerors Session starting next September. Apply today at http://www.thewarcollege.com/.

It began with sharing a meal followed by calling most of our international session mates and leaders. We didn't have every bodies numbers unfortunately, but know that you were in our thoughts. And I just want to point everyone out to Travis Roberts voice mail message - "Sorry I couldn't answer your call I'm too busy tearing hell's throne to pieces and winning the world for Jesus". So rad, I just may righteously steal that someday.

After we called everyone we could we did some classic "dusting off" War College style prayer. This was good prayer. It wasn't like that forced kind you do when you are in a group setting, it was a beautiful, unforced time.

We plan on doing another one of these in the New Year. We'll prepare it a bit more.
Martyrs - HELP ME UP.
Grace,
Nicole

This is classic.

Genocide #4
War.

I am writing this section, unintentionally, on a very appropriate day. Today is Remembrance Day, a day in history when the fighting in WWI ceased. Yet, today war is still an active genocide killing thousands of people. As of yesterday (2007-11-10) a total of 367,755 human beings have died in the war on Iraq alone. 300,000 of those lives being Israeli civilians and the remaining 67,755 are made up from soldiers, journalists, contractors and police. Some sources suggest that this number is highly underestimated as they say the civilian death total is closer to 600,000 which would bring the death total up to 667,755. Sick. It is absolutely sick that for every one solider that dies, 9.8 innocent lives are lost as a “casualty of war”.
(Stats taken from http://usliberals.about.com/od/homelandsecurit1/a/IraqNumbers.htm)

The chaos of war is reflected in the semantic history of the word ‘war’. “War” can be traced back to the Indo-European root wers-, "to confuse, mix up." In the Germanic family of the Indo-European languages, this root gave rise to several words having to do with confusion or mixture of various kinds.

I’m re-reading a great book a great guy I know wrote “Be A Hero” By Wesley Campbell and Stephen Court. The chapter I find myself constantly re-reading is a chapter entitled “Seven Deadly Sins” where Campbell and Court identify seven different sins against humanity. The sixth one is “War-Affected Children.” The opening line of this chapter is

“At the turn of the 20th century, 90 percent of war casualties were male soldiers. At the turn of the 21st century, 90 percent of war casualties are children, the majority of whom are women and children.”

The dictionary definition of war is: a conflict carried on by force of arms, between nations or parties with in a nation; warfare by land, sea or air. Not one part of that definition sounds life-giving to me. Most of my research brought me to war crimes related to children. Below is a snippet from www.freethechildren.org on the injustice within this injustice.

In as many as 50 countries across the globe, children are caught up in armed conflicts – not only as bystanders, but as deliberate targets. In times of war children are subjected to barbaric acts of physical, physiological and sexual cruelty.

The best way to protect the innocent lives lost due to war is simple. Don’t start war in the first place. Stop the war and innocent lives will stop ceasing. Now remember, this is an anti-death book. And yes my heart is always bias towards innocent lives…but one of my main points I’m trying to get across is that our hearts should always biased to those dying – innocent or not. So, to further that statement – stop war and lives will stop ceasing.

I know there is a big debate in the Christian world, (or for that matter a big debate in society as a whole), on whether war is always wrong or if it is a form of defensive justice. I just don’t see it though. I don’t see how we, who claim to follow Jesus, can say killing people is okay, ever, defensive justice or not. Jesus does not once talk about murder being okay, but he talks a lot about love, grace and forgiveness. Jesus did not come to bring death – that is the thief’s job. Jesus came to give life. War does not give birth to life, it gives birth to death, and therefore Jesus did not come to bring war, and if Jesus didn’t come to do it, I don’t want to be involved anyway.

Zoë in her organic form isn’t at fullness until life is brought to those who are dying. War is genocide and thousands are dying. I ask the question again, how can we life? How can we bring others to life? A couple months ago some of my friends stayed up all night doing a peace vigil. I had to work an overnight shift (much like I’m doing right now) so I couldn’t go, but here are some bits and pieces from an email we got.

Hey everyone,

Here's what is going down Sunday night, if you're up for it.

So on Sunday, at 8pm, there will be a gathering for anyone who wants to join in at the War Room, where we will get some information and hopefully be stirred up about the situation of war in our world (there are currently 42 wars or military conflicts going on around the world right now, according to globalsecurity.org, most of the victims being civilians.)

We will watch one or two informative movies, pray over specific situations around the globe, do some art work and write some letters to Christians under persecution.

Then we will take a walk. A long walk. To the Burrard Street bridge and over it, stopping at the Peace memorial on the other side. There we will set up camp and keep a prayer vigil all night.

We are taking this walk not as an act of publicity, but as one of solidarity for the thousands of children in war-torn areas of Africa who have to walk miles very night and morning to escape capture by the rebel militias. These militias kidnap children and force them to become soldiers (or sex slaves if they are female) and commit atrocities against other children and adults. So the children walk to the cities for relative safety every night and back home to work or school the next morning.

Please consider joining with us. I'm aware it is a sacrifice of sleep, but it's not even really that much, and could really be a significant time of drawing us together in prayer and in some measure of solidarity with those who are suffering.

So there are a few good pointers on things we can do. Pray, write letters, and educate ourselves. The powerful part for me is always the part about joining in solidarity.

As a lover of Tim Hortin’s coffee it saddens me to say this, but do not buy your coffee from Timmy Ho’s, a percentage of their profits support war. Besides it’s not fair trade anyways – but that’s a whole different genocide. Oh, and please don’t join the military. Choose life.

I just googled “How can I stop war” and came up with a surprising amount of helpful sites, most I didn’t know of. One site, www.stopwar.ca, has monthly local meetings all over Canada where anyone can sit in on. These meetings are all about organizing anti-war actions. Sounds fun, I might go check out the next one. This section is getting pretty long so I’ll leave it up to you to find creative ways to live. Basically educate yourself and ask the Father to show you his heart. That’s what I did. About two years ago I was pretty apathetic and ignorant on the whole war thing. It wasn’t until I read up on it and began to pray that my heart changed.

Always choose life.

Genocide #3

Capital Punishment, aka The Death Sentence can be a harder justice issue to accept for some I believe. The first two are fighting for the lives of the innocent, which in itself I think most people, morally, would or at least could agree with. Fighting for lives for those on death row is a bit harder to accept because they are guilty of a crime. Jesus is not in favour of death though, and is not in favour of the death sentence. He interrupted a public execution when he said “He who is without sin among you, let him throw the first stone at her” (John 8:7). As I read the New Testament, I don’t see anywhere that killing people regardless of guilt or innocence is just but I do see a lot about redemption and forgiveness. The word “capital” in capital punishment refers to a persons head which I could spend a lot of time diving into but I will allow you to do that on your own. Right now I want to just spend time giving you facts on capital punishment and even show you some injustice within this injustice.

In the United States, about 13,000 people have been legally executed since colonial times and by the 1930’s up to 150 people were executed yearly. American public approval of the death penalty is currently about 70%. Public support is essentially the same in Canada, even though we have abandoned it. The homicide rate in Canada has been gradually dropping since we stopped executions, and the homicide rate in states with the death sentence is almost double then those without it (which by stats alone makes me wonder why it is still used). In 2005 DNA testing proved that 14 inmates waiting on death row were proven innocent. There are currently eight different ways, worldwide, to kill those sentenced to death: beheading, electric chair, firing squad, the guillotine, hanging, lethal injection, poisen gas, and stoneing. Very few of these are quick and painless ways to die.

As I was researching this, I was surprised at the injustice involved in this. The vast majority of those executed are poor; 90% can not afford a lawyer and have to rely on a court-appointed lawyer. Fifteen percent of the three thousand American men and women on Death Row suffer from mental retardation. The following is a true event of such a thing.

Tony Chambers, a black man who has been convicted of raping and murdering an 11 year-old girl in 1990. Although DNA evidence has proven that he is not the perpetrator, he confessed to the crime and will probably be executed shortly. The only thing remarkable about the case is that it took police 11 hours to extract a confession from Tony. His IQ is in the 50's and he has a mental age of six. (Normal intelligence is a 100) It should have taken only a few hours for a competent police force to extract a confession of any crime from murder to bank robbery from a person with an IQ at that level. (taken from www.religioustolerance.org)

So then, how can we give life when it comes to Capital Punishment? Well, I suppose if you are from the States, or any other country that still endorses the death sentence, and are ever called upon for jury duty always choose life. In some cases that may cause for a hung jury in which case a new trial will be declared - but always choose life.