William Petruzzo

Dear LOST,

With all the time we’ve been spending together over the past few weeks, my past behavior has really been on my mind. I used to think you were kind of a drama queen. Like, you always needed all the attention and any time any little thing went wrong it was like the world was ending. But I see now that I was wrong.

I can remember when you first showed about five years ago and all my friends wanted to spend all their time with you. They all thought you were so cool. I didn’t have any good reason to, but I refused to get to know you. I guess maybe I was just jealous. Secretly I was angry that everyone thought you were so cool. And, to tell you the truth, I even wished I’d met you when you first showed up, but it was too late. I resented you for that.

But ever since we’ve been spending time together, I see why everyone loved you so much. Your fun, exciting, dramatic, funny, mysterious. You’re the whole package. What more could I possibly want?

I know you’re not perfect. Sometimes Jack can really be annoying and I’m pretty much constantly wishing someone would hit Sawyer over the head with something. But you know what? None of that matters. Because we’re together now. The past is behind us, and I can only look foreword to hundreds more special moments we’ll surely share together.

So LOST, I’m sorry that I was selfish and judgmental. Thank you for forgiving me and lets never fight again.

With love,
William

PS – Please try to keep scratched DVD’s to a minimum. I don’t want it ruining any of our special moments.

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Occasionally, the idea the life is a one-shot deal freaks me out. Essentially, no ones going to make it. In a totally naturalistic sense, no one is winning cause everyone’s gonna die. I suppose they’re the same thoughts Solomon was pondering when he penned Ecclesiastes.

People say life is about making mistakes. But that seems stupid, even for a non-Christian. The idea of mistakes implies a standard of correctness. If the standard of correctness were determined by a person’s intention in doing whatever it was they set out to do, then they’re whole life could be evaluated based on their success of that thing. As far as right and wrong are concerned, black and white would just be gray. But as far as success and failure are concerned, there couldn’t be sharper contrast.

But I think that’s what gets me.

No one is getting a second chance at this thing. Yet, everyone (including myself) really seems to embrace the idea that it doesn’t need to be done right. As if we’ll do it better the second time around. That seems to be a pretty big logic gap. It’s not like this is really a learning experience. What good is knowledge if it can’t ever be used?

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“The whole matter of making choices is very complex. Most of the time our choices are not limited to two. We have a whole network of desire factors that work within us. Often they are in conflict; rarely are they at a consistent level of intensity. Some days I have an intense desire to serve Christ and obey God. At other times I am listless in my faith and not very zealous to obey God. But one thing remains constant: I always make my choices according to the strongest inclination I have at the moment of decision. For example, if my desire to obey God were always greater than my desire to sin, I would never sin. When I sin, on the other hand, it is because I want to sin more than I want to obey God. Nobody forces me though many may entice and encourage me to sin. It is precisely because I sin according to my desires that God holds me responsible for my actions.”

RC Sproul
Reason to Believe

I couldn’t have said it better myself. So I won’t try. Makes me think of Romans 7. Makes me think of how frustrating it is to be stuck a human being.

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At church this morning, one of the pastors was wrapping up the service. We’d taken communion, so he was bringing attention back to remembering Christ’s sufferings. He said, “in the midst of our sufferings, we can tend to forget Christ’s sufferings.”

Ironic, because those are the times that it’s most critical for us to remember.

Perhaps it’s the weakness of our faith, or maybe it’s because the culture we live in doesn’t often serve us with truly great sufferings. The suffering most of us encounter is only enough to disrupt our faith, but not always enough to stir us to trust God. Of course, suffering is relative to the person experiencing it, the fact still remains: In an objective analysis, Americans don’t have to suffer much.

I suspect this is why our suffering sometimes fails to stir up our faith, wherein other people, in other places it does.

Just a thought. I wonder how we go about seeing that change?

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I came across more words from Jonathan Edwards The Religious Affections that seem oddly poignant for the young church in our age.

“As there is no true religion where there is nothing else than affection, so there is no true religion where there is no religious affection. As, on the one hand, there must be light in the understanding as well as an affected fervent heart; where there is heat without light there can be nothing divine or heavenly in that heart: so on the other hand where there is a kind of light without heat, a head stored with notions and speculations, with a cold and unaffected heart, there can be nothing divine in that light, that knowledge is no true spiritual knowledge of divine things. If the great things of religion are rightly understood they will affect the heart.”

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I recently designed my new website for my photography. It wasn’t just coming up with a design, it was implementing that design in a pretty complicated piece of PHP software. When I started, I didn’t really so much know what I was doing. There was a lot of the coding that I didn’t know how to do. Occasionally, I’d realize that I’d made a big mess. A big frustrating mess.

That happened three or four times. Each time, I’d pour tons of hours into the work before realizing I’d made some pretty big mistakes that were best solved by scrapping everything. So that’s what I’d do.

Each time I started over, I had a slightly better idea of where I was going. And, each time I started over, all the frustration and difficulty associated with my work would instantly dissipate, the moment I decided to scrap it. I would enjoy working from the ground up, building on new skills I’d learned from the last failed attempt.

I suppose that it’s sort of the epitome of "pick yourself up and try again”.

Unfortunately, life doesn’t work like that. And I find that the most difficult times in life are when you realize that you’ve learned a lot, but you can’t go back and put your knowledge to use.

I suppose that it’s part of providence, but like many things, I don’t understand it.

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The familiar verse, James 1:2-3, reads:

“Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.”

It’s hard to remember that for Christians, affliction is not God’s disfavor, but his favor. God changes, builds and refines us. One such way is through our trials and difficulties. It’s easy to see in retrospect, but difficult to embrace in the moment.

To that end I think, Thomas Watson wrote this:

“To know that nothing hurts the godly, is a matter of comfort; but to be assured that all things which fall out shall co-operate for their good, that their crosses shall be turned into blessings, that showers of affliction water the withering root of their grace and make it flourish more; this may fill their hearts with joy till they run over.”

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“Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”

CS Lewis is right. Sadness has a way of snowballing. It’s in perpetual motion. The very feeling of depression is in itself depressing.

But I think that true delight in God is supposed to be the same way. Jesus is enjoyable. The most enjoyable. But as we enjoy him, we are also meant to enjoy that we get to do so, so that our enjoyment snowballs.

It’s a shame our tendency is to put a stop to that snowball and not so often the other.

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Shocker, right? But I never really considered how important it was that we don’t live Luther’s life. The great reformer and had a tremendous faith and courage, but it was nothing like our faith and courage. Not to suggest that it was necessarily better or worse. Just different.

I read a quote from Dr. Heiko Obermann in Albert Mohler’s new book Atheism Remix. Obermann was a historian of the late Medieval and early Reformation eras and he had this to say:

“I can see that you do not understand what I am saying to you. What I am saying to you is that you do not live life as Martin Luther lived life. You do not wake up in the morning as he did, nor do you go to bed at night as he did. You need to understand something about changed conditions of belief. Do you not understand that in the time of Martin Luther, almost every single human being in European civilization woke up afraid that he would die before nightfall? Eternal destiny was a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute thought. Every night, as the late Medieval or early Reformation human beings closed his eyes, he feared that he would wake up either in heaven or in hell. You do not live with that fear. And that means your understanding of these things is very different from Martin Luther’s. That’s why he threw ink pots at the Devil, and you close your notebook and sleep well at night.”

Modern people, even Christians, are conditioned, on some level, to embrace doubt. Somewhere in the back of everyone’s mind rests the possibility, the plausibility that maybe, just maybe, we’ve got it wrong. It’s culturally ingrained in most everyone, whether we like it or not.

As much as I love classic theologians and preachers and have a deep respect and admiration for them, a sizeable portion of their words lack a very important sense if relatability. They can’t take modern culture’s doubt into account, because in no way did they share it.

Thank God for the enduring relatability of His Word.

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As promised a few days ago, I’ve posted a selection of my photo coverage from The Call in Washington DC. It can be found on my professional website, along with an introduction to the album.

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