justindetmers.com

First of all, thank you.

You’ve taken Sparty hoops to a new level; you’ve done it with fundamentals, team defense, and rebounding … not by getting 4 Blue-Chippers each year (that’s why UNC will never impress me) that turn into lottery picks.

I want you to stay, but I think you’re going to leave and I’m okay with that.

I won’t be a jealous fan, I’ve already been spoiled by 6 conference championships, 6 trips to the Final Four, and that 2000 title. You’ve done the green a solid.

Let’s be honest, the Cleveland job is about as good of an offer as someone can get; (possibly) coaching LeBron, coaching a great team, being paid much more, a chance to have success at the highest level, and being done with the immaturity of the 20-year-olds in East Lansing … is pretty enticing.

But because next year’s team will have good shot at winning another title and the NBA will probably always want you, weigh the options and know that I’ve got your back either way.

- Justin

Accurate Interpretation hinges … on recognizing the genres used in the Bible to communicate God’s revelation.

Ronald Griese & Brent Sandy, Cracking Old Testament Codes

Let me peel off some armor and get just a bit vulnerable, being a father is changing me.

As a new dad, I’m getting new eyes. I realize that my old view of God as a Father was beta and bland. What I have always believed to be true is now becoming much more dynamic, encompassing, and real.

This heightened awareness is like the difference between someone claiming to know that water is wet vs. experientially knowing water by jumping into the cold and powerful waters of Lake Michigan. Unlike merely affirming a proposition or two, being immersed in the lake will instantly intrude all of your senses and make you chilled and short of breath…

God is our Father. Not an abusive, impossible to please, poor communicating fool. He is not the folly that we see all too often, He is the best of what it can mean to be dad.

He’s a wise and patient counselor. He’s a powerful and protective leader. He’s righteous and appropriately intimidating. He doesn’t worry about being unpopular – He’s got a spine. He provides and delivers on everything. A consuming fire … basically a cosmic BA, if you will.

And even though He’s the Lion, He’s also the Lamb.

The text says we should call Him “Abba,” which is sort of like affectionately saying “my dear daddy.” A thick Biblical understanding of the term calls to mind the pure and gentle, intimate and relational, fond and tender, familiar and confident, and gracious love between parent and child.

SO, I find myself: (more…)

Sometimes I find myself being jealous of 16th century explorers and/or Bear Grylls.

I don’t know what it is exactly, but when a few guys can break away, catch their own food, and stand toe-to-toe with the elements and inhabitants of the forest, an awesomeness is created that can only be rivaled by March Madness or the birth of a healthy child.

Thus, I will soon be temporarily unplugged from society, headed to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to what “they” say is Michigan’s most remote piece of state land. With a few comrades, I will hike with not much more than my pack into Craig Lake State Park … a place with wolves, bears, moose, cougars, and ravenous ground squirrels.

Can’t wait for the sounds of the woods and the smell of a campfire made of dry white pine.

… I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. All of us who are mature should take such a view of things …

- St. Paul

The goal of reading the Bible is not what it means to you but what it meant in its original setting (as best we can determine). When we determine what it meant we are on the valid road to determining what it means in our current setting.

Gary T. Meadors, Th.D

In the Problem of Pain (one of my all time favorite books), C.S. Lewis addresses how the Bible often uses the analogies of various relationships between man & beast to help us make sense of the relationship between God & man. Reading the quotation below, I can’t help but smirk as I picture the dynamic between my dogs and myself. I quickly recognize that because of my love for them and my far greater understanding, they don’t realize what is really going on most of the time. They can’t quite grasp that I’m trying to train them (to be something they don’t want to be) for their own good & because  that is my will – and I’m their boss-man.

Another type is the love of a man for a beast – a relation constantly used in Scripture to symbolize the relation between God and men; “we are his people and the sheep of his pasture”. This is in some ways a better analogy …because the inferior party is sentient, and yet unmistakably inferior: but it is less good in so far as man has not made the beast and does not fully understand it. Its great merit lies in the fact that the association of (say) man and dog is primarily for the man’s sake: he tames the dog primarily that he may love it, not that it may love him, and that it may serve him, not that he may serve it. Yet at the same time, the dog’s interests are not sacrificed to the man’s. The one end (that he may love it) cannot be fully attained unless it also, in its fashion, serves it. Now just because the dog is by human standards one of the best” of irrational creatures, and a proper object for a man to love – of course, with that degree and kind of love which is proper to such an object, and not with silly anthropomorphic exaggerations – man interferes with the dog and makes it more lovable than it was in mere nature. In its state of nature it has a smell, and habits, which frustrate man’s love: he washes it, house-trains it, teaches it not to steal, and is so enabled to love it completely. (more…)

Check it:

Think about this implications of this graph…

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,
Let this blest assurance control,
That Christ has regarded my helpless estate,
And hath shed His own blood for my soul.

My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!

For me, be it Christ, be it Christ hence to live:
If Jordan above me shall roll,
No pang shall be mine, for in death as in life
Thou wilt whisper Thy peace to my soul.

But, Lord, ’tis for Thee, for Thy coming we wait,
The sky, not the grave, is our goal;
Oh, trump of the angel! Oh, voice of the Lord!
Blessed hope, blessed rest of my soul!

And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight,
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll;
The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend,
Even so, it is well with my soul.

Horatio G. Spafford, 1873

FOOD, INC.: Movie Trailer – Funny blooper videos are here