"Surely the people are grass."

I pity the archaeologists of the future.

In the known history of the human race before the late 20th century, it has normally been the case that the chronicles and memorials of that have been written down so that our deeds might not be forgotten and our mistakes not repeated have been lost to fire, decay, or the negligence of scribes and monks who thought the latest tabloids (or the ancient or medieval equivalents) were more worth saving. We therefore reconstruct the history of the ancient word based on grocery lists. We mustn't be too hard on the monks and scribes though; if not for them, we wouldn't have anything to go on. But perhaps the archaeologists of the future will have the opposite problem. In antiquity, most people were illiterate, and writing was much more of an ordeal. Today though, literacy rates are quite high in the developed world, and not only is paper cheap, but any old fool can generate online what would have once been mountains of text. Assuming the internet doesn't fall victim to moth and rust (by no means a certain assumption), future archaeologists will have to sift through all of this crap, most of which they will find utterly trivial.

And yet, trivial or not, I feel perfectly content to add my own text to the digital landfill. In the past, I have kept a theology blog, which I have enjoyed doing. But I don't update it very often, because frankly, I just can't think of that many interesting things to say about theology, and when I do think of them, I'm rarely near my computer. So this blog is an attempt to share my thoughts with the world more regularly, and on a wider range of topics. There will no doubt be plenty of religious banter (after all, the blog takes is name from a Bible verse), but also expect a bit of travel commentary (I'm in Germany at the moment), the occasional political musing (Obama '08!), and whatever else strikes my fancy.

We are a race of animals that never tires of telling stories about ourselves. We listen eagerly to the great feats of old and repeat what we have heard, sometimes improving the story a bit. But the people in our stories don't know that they're in them. They are simply living their lives, doing what they must do to fend off starvation, or sometimes to save the world. Most of the story doesn't make it into the books or the epics. Think of every day Odysseus spent on the sea without incident, or every day Harry, Ron, and Hermione don't find a clue about a horcrux. In the Bible, the vast majority of the history of the human race is told in genealogies. We only know names, if that. And yet, this is the history of the human race, and it was in this history that the Word of God became incarnate. Thus, all of our daily struggles are both trivial and of the utmost importance. We are like grasshoppers to God, and yet God bears our flesh. Whatever blades of grass I take to examining in this blog, they will be examined with this tension in mind: that it is both trivial and of the utmost importance.

And if you are an archaeologist reading this as an artifact of the early 21st century, I'm very sorry. Welcome to my blog.