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Never felt the need to explain my name until today. The fact is, I have used it for several years, on various forums, because I thought it was pretty obscure. Then, I was reading a thread here, where someone indicated that googling your username could bring up a link to any post you had ever made... So I thought I would try that. Didn't find any of my post because I never got past the first couple of pages of results where I discovered that "skub" is, apparently, not an obscure reference that is meaningful only to me and a few of my friends from 20 years ago. I discovered that there are those who are "pro-skub" and those who are "anti-skub", and that, according to some, "Skub is not an actual object. It is a symbol for anything that could ignite a heated argument. Its nonexistence serves to emphasize the futility of such arguments." http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/skub

So, now I find myself feeling culturally clueless AND misunderstood.

So - the origin of my username...

While I was at Dallas Seminary, getting my Masters, I was in a small group. The point of the group was to make sure we developed spiritually while we were gaining intellectual knowledge about the faith. One of the guys in the group thought we needed a name, and suggested "skubs", a word taken from the Greek word, "skubalon". This Greek word is only used one time in the New Testament, in Philippians 3:8, where Paul says that he considers all of the things that had previously brought him significance as "skubala" that he might gain Christ. The word is translated a couple of different ways in the various translations - either along the lines of "rubbish, garbage", or along the lines of "dung". He made the argument that Paul's humility thus expressed was worthy of emulating, and that we should adopt it as our group identity. In all honesty, I expect that neither his motives for suggesting it, nor our motives for adopting it, were quite that simple.

As I learned to study Greek, I took the opportunity to study the meaning of the word for myself, and came to the conclusion that the best translation was in the vein of "dung", but that, if we were going to be true to Paul's literal words, the actual translation would be more crude than that. Forum rules prevent me from spelling it out, but it seems to me that, if Paul were speaking to us in our culturally equivalent terms today, he would have used the common phrase that describes that what comes out of the north end of a south-bound bull. (For those interested in reading a defense of this line of thinking, you can read one here - http://bible.org/article/brief-word-stu ... vbalonfont)

So, in my opinion, the term has a certain edginess to it. But for me there is more to it than that, because the issue of the translation of this word exemplifies one of the challenges that threatens the faith of those who seek to follow Christ. I believe that God guided the writers of Scripture in their choice of words, all the way down to tense and number (Jesus makes an argument based on present tense vs. past tense; Paul makes an argument based on singular vs. plural). So, I believe that God guided Paul in his choice of the word "skubalon". For us to mute the impact of that word because it offends our sensibilities is to place our agenda above God's, and is a perpetuation of the mindset that got us into this mess in the first place. The only solution to this mess is God's solution, communicated through God's words. My reason for being on this planet is to faithfully communicate those words, in their full impact. As a result, who I am, and what I do and say, is often at odds with the sensibilities of what might be considered normal Christian culture. For me, "skub" captures that essence.

Thanks for letting me explain,
skub