You know that when a baby is born they can't see for a while.

They see shapes and colors and movement, but have no way of putting together that this is separate from that, that this is closer, that this face belongs to a person.

Same with hearing.

I was thinking about that this week because my wife and I are about to have our second child.

Their entire existence has been in the water of the one who creates them, grows them, that this world we call real is totally foreign to them.

Just a note, maybe this is a commentary on the spiritual world. We gain our world eyes but in doing so lose our spirit eyes.

Play with a rattle and a baby's building block.

We know the world first through touch and feel and sound. We are led to believe these things are real, are to be prioritized.

Eventually we learn that we must share. We're not very good at it.

We were speaking of matters of the soul and she was talking about feeling angry on a soul level, and then apologizing for the response it created in her.

We talked about how unreasonable it is to expect our souls to have the same maturity as our emotions, when we are so new to their existence.

When we think of our bodies we pat our chest.

When we think of our emotions we touch our head.

This is how foreign our soul is to us....where do we touch to indicate its place in us?

I tell you this because my soul has been offended.

Andy Rooney last week on 60 minutes suggested that we stop trying to find blame in ourselves for what these boys did and accept that these kids did bad things and that its not a reflection on us at all.

Mark 5:1-20 Geresene demoniac.

Jesus steps out of a boat and this man with demons comes running up.

Demons. Chains. Outcast.

Demons talking. We are legion.

Healed. Pigs rush screaming over the cliff and into the water.

People of the city come out and ask Jesus to leave. "You're asking us to examine our lives in ways that might be threatening to how we want to lead them."

Andy Rooney -- 60 minutes.

We do this when we refuse to look at our own behaviors.
We do this when we assume that problems others are having are not related to our successes.

People of the city come out and ask Jesus to leave. They choose their source of income and security than relate to Jesus.

St Augustine advised Christians, "Don't speak of evil as though it is far from you."

Something to think about. You?

One boy's parents are Lutheran and Jewish. Raised in faith.

Say the sader at table each meal.

They said, "This is a side of our son we don't know."

What is your secret side?

Our existence is like a three legged stool. Body, emotions, soul. The order we know them.

The order we trust them.

The invitation Jesus offers us is to reverse them.

Put spirit before emotion before body.

Lead into prayer.

1 Peter is written to a relatively new church community in Asia Minor.

Community and commitment are the two chief challenges facing the new, struggling church here in 1 Peter.

Chapter 2 begins with a list of vices -- things that get in the way of community and commitment. May be some of the attitudes these faith communities had recently encountered

- either from the larger non-Christian society or even from those within their churches.

Like a litany of bad attitudes - ones that true Christians would never imitate.

And somewhat surprisingly, the text does not follow up with a corresponding list of virtues.

Instead, 1 Peter depends on an image to convey the best attitude novice Christians could possibly adopt - the image of an innocent, trusting infant.

The author introduces this image in 1:3 by speaking about the believers' "new birth into a living hope." As "newborn infants," brand-new members of the Christian community of faith, each believer should have a natural longing for "pure spiritual milk."

In the Hippolytus' Apostolic Tradition, newly baptized Christians were served not only the bread and wine of the Eucharist meal but a cup of milk mixed with honey, symbolizing the newborn status of the believer.

But 1 Peter does not linger on this image of infants in the faith suckling on spiritual milk. Instead, he moves to yet another image - "living stones."

Some scholars have tried to reduce the lunacy of this image by suggesting that "living stones" refers to unhewn or uncut stones - stones still in their original state, waiting to be cut and conformed and transformed so we can be used by God.

But if we pay attention, and I think that might be a good idea, we notice that as Peter continues to use this and other "stone" images, it seems evident that the uncut, unshaped nature of such a reference is meant to be emphasized, not smoothed over.

And certainly not something to be fixed later.

It is our individuality that is offered in construction of our community that is quite important.

We are not to all be the same shape, the same size, the same behavior, the same stock.

Peter seems to be offering that as "living stones," we are building blocks in God's great construction project as God builds up.

For these Christians struggling to live out the faith in Asia Minor, the image of being part of such a secure house, a spiritual home, was especially important.

Christians, formed together into a close-knit community through the spiritual power of the "living stone," undergo a miraculous transformation. In verse 9, 1 Peter reveals that while they may yet feel like "newborn infants" (v.2), these fledgling believers are nonetheless "a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people."

Just as God is the architect building up the stone walls of their "spiritual house" in verse 5, God is also the one responsible for this transformation into chosenness. Only God's call brings these new Christians "out of darkness" and "into God's marvelous light."

Only God's activity makes these newborn babes in the faith "God's people" (v.10).

As followers of Christ we are described as "aliens and exiles," persons who are in the world but not of the world (John 17:14).

We are to consider our real existence to be on the kingdom of God.

When we settle into this world and adopt its values as our own, there is the very real risk that we will reach a peak of earthly pleasure but then die on our journey to their spiritual homeland.

To guard against this danger, Christians must have die to the world and avoid being conformed to the world (Romans 12:2).

On the theme of energy expenditure... Sometimes we go all out on things that don't really matter, as Martha did when Jesus visited her home (Luke 10:38-42), and then miss the most important things.

Right now, the Khumbu Glacier on the southwest face of Mount Everest in Nepal is teeming with activity. It's the site of the Everest Base Camp at 17,500 feet, and expeditions from all over the world have gathered to make an assault on the world's highest piece of real estate.

It's climbing season. This is the month when, if the summit of Everest is going to be achieved, it needs to be done.

Although in Nepal, it is now dark, in the very early hours of the morning, you can be certain that at this precise moment, climbers are stirring from their tents at

Camp One,  19,500 feet; Camp Two,  21,300 feet; Camp Three,  24,000 feet; Camp Four,  26,000 feet.

A typical attempt on the summit will begin around midnight from Camp Four.

Even now, climbers are getting into several layers of underclothing, overshirts and windproof and goose-down jackets, slapping on crampons with two-inch steel spikes on the soles and toes, packing their gear, stowing bottled gas, and grabbing ice axe, climbing rope, caribiners, pitons, hammers and related items.

It is also the third anniversary of the most disastrous climbing season on record. On May 10-11, 1996, a fast-moving storm caught climbers who pushed for the summit against every convention of mountaineering wisdom, but who were unable to make it down to safety.

When the climbing season was over, Andy Harris, Doug Hansen, Rob Hall, Yasuko Namba, Scott Fischer, Ngawang Topche Sherpa, Chen Yu-Nan, Bruce Herrod and Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa had perished on the mountain.

This season of climbing has been captured by the IMAX camera crew, and was also recorded by Jon Krakauer in his riveting, best-selling book, Into Thin Air, a personal account of the Mount Everest disaster of 1996.

Krakauer was part of a guided ascent of the mountain that turned tragic when a rogue storm blew in without warning while several teams were still high on the peak.

Some made the top, but only because they pushed on past the turnaround deadline of 2 p.m. If the summit was not reached by then, climbers were to turn around and descend to camp.

Yet, inexplicably, some climbers pushed on to the summit, not arriving until as late as 4:30 p.m., and then were hit by 70-knot winds and blinding snow on their descent.

A freezing Krakauer, who had reached the summit before the deadline, collapsed in his tent, hallucinating from exhaustion and hypoxia, but he turned out to be one of the lucky ones

- when the storm passed, five of his fellow climbers would be dead, and the sixth so horribly frostbitten that his right hand would have to be amputated.

"Later," writes Krakauer, "people would ask why, if the weather had begun to deteriorate, had climbers on the upper mountain not heeded the signs?

Why did veteran Himalayan guides keep moving upward, ushering a gaggle of relatively inexperienced amateurs - each of whom had paid as much as $65,000 to be taken safely up Everest - into an apparent death trap?"

Krakauer goes on to say that "over the previous month, Rob [Rob Hall, leader of Krakauer's expedition] had lectured us repeatedly about the importance of having a predetermined turnaround time on our summit day - in our case it would probably be 1 p.m. or 2 p.m. at the very latest - and abiding by it no matter how close we were to the top.

'With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill,' Hall observed. 'The trick is to get back down alive.'" (Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air [New York: Anchor Books, 1997], 5, 190).

Ironically, and tragically, Hall apparently broke his own rules and paid the ultimate price.

What a feeling! To risk it all and win! Exuberance! Joy! Having gone for the gusto and snatched it with authority!

And why? Because it's there! That's the answer; that's the rationale.

I need no pause, nor reflection. I need no distance of perspective nor depth of analysis.
I need neither projection nor introspection. It's there - I climbed it.
Been there, done that. Risked it all and won.
Went for the gusto - grabbed it and took home the trophy, brought home the bacon.

Meet the challenge before you.
Live so powerfully in the moment that daring becomes the measure of depth, and conquering provides the calibration of character.

"You only go around once in life, and therefore you'd better go for all the gusto you can."

That's the philosophy, that's the prospect.

Yet, even with all the planning and preparation, the years of experience climbing in super high-altitude conditions, even these mountaineers were not immune to summit fever.

So much of the challenge of life presents itself to us in terms of immediacy.

Live for the day; carpe diem.

And yet the Scriptures teach a far different reality - live for eternity,

"All flesh is like grass, and all its glory like the flower. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord endures forever" (1 Peter 1:24-25).

How tempted we are to live for the present glory and miss the promise of eternity.

The temptation is real because of our frailty, our insecurity.

Peter knows, and Peter's God knows, our insecure frames.

Why else would the sacred writings declare that our identity is in being born of "imperishable seed"? What other reason bids the apostolic affirmation that in the midst of this world's rejection, the people of God are being "built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood"? (2:5).

We try to paint noble self portraits through deeds of self inflated importance masquerading as the ordinary challenges of life.

We want to believe the press clippings of our self-projection that tell the tales of social conquest and personal achievement.

The text declares that our basic tendencies toward fulfilling our personal prerogatives - our personal passions to go for the present power and grab for the glorious gusto - are the fever, the summit fever of a disease raging against the soul, the inner being, the essential you.

"Because it's there" is not enough; indeed it's deceit of the highest order and sin of the first magnitude.

We climb the mountain before us, believing that in the climbing there is satisfaction, even joy! We discover that the conquest only breeds the desire for more - plays into a game of never-ending challenges that never let us rest. How can we rest?

We have willingly infected ourselves with summit fever of the soul.

This fever never lets up. It afflicts us in the streets and in the suites.

We can catch it in foothills and in ghettos.

It is a symptom of the rich and the poor, male and female, city and suburb, town and country, farm and factory, office and arena, boardroom and classroom.

• You've seen it in the manager who is so wed to his work that he neglects his family. You know many retired workaholics who have lamented, "I wish I'd spent more time with my family." You know few if any who say, "I wish I'd spent more time at work."
• You've seen it in the ministers who are so driven to please everybody, often as a way of feeling good about themselves, that they burn themselves out and pastor on automatic pilot.
• You've seen it in the woman who has allowed society to trick her into thinking her life is incomplete, not without Christ, but without a man ("When are you going to get married?" says the well-meaning church member) and rushes to fulfill herself through an unsatisfying relationship.
• You've seen it through the young man who believes his manhood is quantified in his sperm count, and "because it's there" refers to the female before him.

I can't recognize the symptoms of my diminished capacity to think and reason.

I don't see the consequence.

In grabbing the thing immediately before me, I succumb to the temptation to believe the Polaroid.

I've got the Polaroid, but God's got the video.

I have the flash picture, but God has the big picture.

My pause button only gives me the instant - God has the whole movie, from intro to The End, from "In the beginning," to "come to the water." There is a consequence - there is a price.

How tempting it is to abandon spiritual principles for a momentary desire, only to find ourselves dying on the way down. "Because it's there" is never enough of a reason to live.

"Because He lives" is always the reason to live. Remember that it is not we who go for the gusto, but that in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the Gusto comes after us and possesses us.

We do not seek the ultimate, but the Ultimate seeks us.

We do not pursue the summit, but the Summit pursues us.

We do not look to the conquest for our victory, but the Conqueror gives the victory to us.

It is God - Father, Son and Holy Gusto - who secures our identity and conquers our mountains.

Not "Because it's there" but "Because He lives."