i am brian

Geto Boys - Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta
5:09

Sufjan Stevens - Rake
2:48

Thievery Corporation - Lebanese Blonde
4:47

Via Audio - From Clouds
3:35

Tapes n Tapes - Cowbell
2:35

Relient k - Come Right Out and Say It
3:00

A Tribe Called Quest - Can I Kick It?
4:12

Various - Simon and Garfunkel - Mrs. Robinson
3:50

Strong Bad - Brianrietta
0:52

Throw Me The Statue - About To Walk
3:18

Every once in a while NPR suprises me with some great stuff.

I notice it more and more as the days go on this pointing toward the great struggle of humanity trying to find completeness in something other than God. The movies paint it, TV shows paint it, indie and mainstream music paints it and NPR paints it.

Listen Now

I remember looking into the moon and seeing the face of the very first girl I had a crush on. Her name was Katie and I thought she was “the one”. I was in 3rd grade. I wrote a letter to her; from her secret admirer it said. When everyone in class heard about the letter from Katie’s friend they all thought it was from Howard, he was kind of a trouble maker. Poor Howard, he got harassed pretty hard and there was no way I was going to speak up.

I remember Katie even sat by me in class. Eventually she asked to be moved because “I cut paper to much”. Apparently as a 9 year old I was pretty artsy crafty.

I have no idea why or how I remember all this but it all came back to me lately as I have been exploring love, and my relationships with people. I am much older and I don’t imagine girl’s faces in the moon anymore. I am no longer a childish romantic but I am coming to realize that love grows in youthful innocence. Even when “older” people meet that significant other they feel youthful.

One of my favorite pieces of Jewish literature, the Proverbs, says “Let your fountain be blessed, And rejoice in the wife of thy youth.” One famous Jewish person - Jesus, says that until we come to him as little children we can’t enter a relationship with him. I realize that to love is a choice not a feeling. More than a choice it is a trust of your heart to the hands of another. As we get older we try to hold onto more, control more, define more, examine, identify more.

I want to logically deduce everything to mathematical formulas. I want to scientifically reduce everything in the crucible in my head to something my limited intelligence can grasp. The thing I realize is would an infinite being, God, or his representative on earth, Jesus, be a person that makes sense to me. I am so glad Jesus didn’t hide when his love was exposed. I am so glad his message to us isn’t anonymous, from a secret admirer.

The love of Jesus, of God is undefinable, unmeasurable and impossible to grasp. I like love, I love love. I fear and respect love and want little and more and all of it. Love is scary.

Brian in real life.

Clive Staple Lewis is a good friend of mine.

As I begin to understand Jesus I begin to understand myself. I love feeling the warmth of the love of Christ like a cat on a window. I hate that along with warmth this light exposes who I am. As I see Jesus more as the lover of my soul I see myself as the dirty whore which I am. Iwould go on about how miserable a condition my soul is in - if it weren’t for a talk with a friend earlier this week. He had a hard time enjoying the warmth and wanted to focus on how terrible and ill equipped he was in reflecting that warmth. I think this is something a lot of Jesus lovers struggle with. We take our eyes off of Jesus to our selves. We think we can somehow pick the plank out of our eye (in my case, so I can pick somebody else’s plank) and therefore see Jesus better. No bingo here.

I think what I am learning is how to love myself. Not in some momentary pleasure way but the the way Jesus loves me. I am learning to love my soul not the pleasures derived with the body. I desperately want to show Jesus’ love to others but I have to learn (trying to learn) that showing can only be reflecting. We are not flashlights which need to be recharged. We are more like the moon who has nothing but the light from the sun.
That’s all, Brian

Two awesome talks by Don Miller.

The Gospel of Jesus, More Like Marriage, Less Like Formula

Download Here

Donald Miller - Thirteen Shifts on a Paradigm

Download Here

Bang, bang, bang. The door and everyone in the home shuddered. After the shouting and screaming echoed from the street the people in the home knew whom it was. They had heard from the other Christians how Paul and some of the other pharisees passionately hunted the followers of “The Way”. Since the death and resurrection of Jesus, early christians were unmercifully abused by the Jewish Religious Elite. These pharisees were responsible for crucifixion of Jesus solely based on Jesus’ claim as “Son of God”. Because these early Christian claimed to follow Jesus. The Pharisees including Paul thought it was their righteous duty to disband this quickly growing off shoot of Judaism.

Eventually the history of the early church was written in a book simply entitled Acts; and the first of many persecutions recorded included a man by the name of Paul. Paul was first referenced as holding the cloaks of the pharisees bashing in the head of the first Christian martyr, in an act called stoning. Perhaps they didn’t want blood on their outer garments. Later Paul is referred to as a bounty hunter of sorts. Acts reads “… Paul was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.” (RSV, Acts 8:3) Paul would even go as far as entering his own Jewish religious centers, the synagogues, and remove anyone who believed in Jesus; imprisoning them and beating them. After Paul had chased some Christians from Jerusalem he requested papers to chase these Jesus followers to a city named Damascus. It was on this journey to Damascus that Paul ran into the very person whom he was chasing; Jesus Christ himself.

Paul does not give us the opportunity to call him an educated religious fanatic. Instead we find a well educated Roman citizen with two Jewish parents. He grew up with a traditional Greco-Roman education and believed to have had a complete rhetorical education (Watson). Because of his string Jewish heritage, Paul’s education was founded on the study of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Torah. Most likely by the time he was a teenager he had the entire Torah memorized. Furthering his Hebrew studies he moved to Jerusalem, the Hebrew capital, and was taught by a very well known and well respected Hebrew law teachers. When it came to his religiosity he was incredibly serious. It was Paul’s passion in defending his faith and pursuit for the truth that led to his persecution of the early Christians and his eventual conversion.

Numerous times in numerous letters Paul himself writes about his experience on the Damascus road. He writes about seeing Jesus in a bright light and hearing His voice. Whether his accounts are literal or symbolic there is absolutely no doubt regarding the reality of his changed life. It’s from this experience that Paul understands who Jesus really was. Jesus was not a magician, or great prophet, which he never claimed to be, but the son of God. Paul had realized the messiah foretold of in the Torah he had poured his life into studying was in fact Jesus Christ.

We find this radically changed life painted out in his letters to the early Christian churches. It is in these writings that we have “…genuine letters, written to meet the actual wants of living men; giving immediate answers to real questions…” (Conybeare, XV). Paul writes about his days in the super religious culture. How he worked hard to satisfy the law in order to be right with God. In his letter to the Christians in Rome, Paul writes “But in our time something new has been added. What Moses and the prophets witnessed to all those years has happened. The God-setting-things-right that we read about has become Jesus-setting-things-right for us. And not only for us, but for everyone who believes in him. There is no difference between us and them in this. Since we’ve compiled this long and sorry record as sinners (both us and them) and proved that we are utterly incapable of living the glorious lives God wills for us, God did it for us. Out of sheer generosity he put us in right standing with himself. A pure gift. He got us out of the mess we’re in and restored us to where he always wanted us to be. And he did it by means of Jesus Christ.” (The Message, Romans 3:21-24). Paul’s letters make it perfectly clear he had not traded one religion for another but that his view of the world and his view of God had changed.

The following are my latest projects for my Computer Graphics II class and my Typograhy class.

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The following are a few samples from the book from my Visual Arts Foundation Class.

Let me know what you think…

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