more j.j. abrams: flow chart.

yesterday i posted my new favorite quote by j.j. abrams: "mystery is a better road to imagination than knowledge." my buddy, luke, commented on the importance of truth in that equation, and the more i think about it, the more i find it essential to the formula. sure, imagination is the force behind the abrams quote, but the overall point of it all is not simply imagination - the point is to discover the truth behind the mystery.

so during our all church staff meeting today i began to sketch out a flow chart of the abrams quote with "truth" added into the mix. my paper turned out looking super jumbled and sloppy and difficult to follow, so i made a quick less-confusing version quickly on my computer just now (i used a section of my desktop as the background for the chart - yep, hedges - perfectly mysterious).


i figure, if truth is the point, then knowledge doesn't necessarily get us there. we can only arrive at true knowledge if we know for a fact that the knowledge we have is truth. so we must start with mystery. we must start with the questions in order to fully arrive at the results.

my immediate response, then, is that in order to discover the truth behind a mystery, it is more beneficial to start with mystery than to begin with knowledge.

but what i also found interesting in the development of this flow chart was the importance of the process we go through between imagination and truth. that long downward arrow is essentially where all of life happens. we decide where we're going, what we're believing, who we're following, where we belong: basically how we perceive the world. this all happens within that stretch of arrow.

the quest for truth is found in mystery and imagination - not in knowledge.

anyway. those are my thoughts, but i'd like to hear yours. any changes you'd like to make to the chart? disagreements? things you really like? let me know.

-ap.

henry nouwen.

"the great illusion of leadership is that someone can be led out of the desert by someone who's never been there."

erwin mcmanus.

“When interacting with unbelievers, we’re not, in a sense, trying to ‘close the sale.’ We’re trying to make meaningful friendships. Because the gospel is transmitted in the most healthy way through genuine care and concern.”
Erwin McManus

robert m. franklin

"Well-paying low-skill jobs in the manufacturing sector were disappearing and in their place came low-skill, low-paying jobs in the service sector, often many miles outside the city. And increasingly, the better jobs required education and technical skills that were virtually out of reach for most of the urban poor. America has ceased to be a place of opportunity, upward mobility, and personal improvement."

- Robert M. Franklin, Crisis in the Village: Restoring Hope in African American Communities (emphasis mine)

-ap

the paris plan.

"Barack wants to focus on new technologies to cut foreign-oil dependency, and McCain wants offshore drilling. Well, why don’t we do a hybrid of both candidates’ ideas? We can do limited offshore drilling with strict environmental oversight, while creating tax incentives to get Detroit making hybrid and electric cars. That way, the offshore drilling carries us until the new technologies kick in, which will then create new jobs and energy independence. Energy crisis solved."

-Paris Hilton

that's hot.

i think we're probably closer to electric cars than we are to off-shore oil though. which means that we're spending extra money on two methods to create energy independence. that doesn't mean i don't support her idea still.

here's what i wish was added though: nuclear power plants. mccain mentioned them last night in his RNC speech, and that excited me. i guess in a moneyless world having all three of these things sounds great, but hello taxes. it's doubtful we'd be able to do all three at once - which would lead me to support nuclear plants and electric vehicles, but not off-shore drilling.

otherwise the RNC came across rather hokey and uncomfortable for me. mostly due to the few fanatic Republicans at the convention who come across somewhat similar to Phelps picketers. okay, maybe not that extreme, but almost that weird. but not nearly as weird as the woman that led the DNC Roll Call. she's gotta be a half-troll.

-ap.