UNRAVELING REALITY

http://www.realityunwound.com forever

2008-11-18T05:10:00.008-06:00

(See my new blog at www.realityunwound.com)

Jim Morrison said it, This is the End.* It's a dark, brooding, melancholy sort of tune that was frankly out of touch with reality. He apparently didn't take into account that, well, it really wasn't the end.

Morrison died a rock-star death 4 years later, but even in that it takes a Shirley McClaine brand of arrogance to think that just because it's the end for you it's the end for everyone (incidentally, on the day Jim Morrison died, Paolo Montero was born, here's to new beginnings!).

So today's end of realityunwound.blogspot.com is the formal, official and final move to www.realityunwound.com. It's been 963 days since my first post here. There have been great gaps between posts, there have been short but intense flurries of posts, and there have been lingering moments of consistency. I've written about daylight savings time, the a multi-post discussion on the religion in culture , living a missional life, our response to the fall of church leaders, and most recently the election.

Why move? Tough to say really. It may be the desire to feel like I'm finally growing up, and for some reason buying a domain feels like settling into a house I own. Maybe I want to see if my voice resonates way with a different audience, and ownership feels like credibility. I don't know why, but I know I want to focus more on how belief interacts with the day to day happenings in the world... things like politics, culture, the family. Hopefully it's mostly because I'm trying to make it less about the world as it relates to me, and more about how I can better relate to the world for redemptive purposes.

So my sincerest thanks for reading, I'm honestly humbled that you stop by. Please don't stop. More than that, will you engage even more? I want to hear from you. I want to hear when the things in my brain don't match with reality. I need to hear real people say things like, "in a perfect world that works, but..." or better yet, "Your conservative ideology fails to take into account..." My hope for my new corner of the web is that together, we can forge ahead and create real solutions to real problems. I have great faith in people, especially people who listen for the still small voice leading through the wilderness. Don't lurk. Let me know you're there. Challenge my thinking, don't let me get sloppy. Most of all, let's be a generation that makes a positive impact and leaves a positive footprint.

If what I write is worth reading, tell someone else. If what I write is trite and banal, tell me. Most of all, and in every situation...

Feel the love, be the ball.

Special shout out - Newcom's, I changed the background just for you. May the remnants of our past be forever be readable!

*Note: The song, "This is the End" is most likely about the end of a relationship with his girlfriend, not the end of the world. But it made for a less interesting post that way.

http://www.realityunwound.com

2008-11-15T08:16:00.003-06:00

Well, the transition is beginning. I made a new post at my new site... www.realityunwound.com. Just know that it is still VERY much under construction. You may think, "wow, hyper-minimalism. Interesting." That's not the case. My good friend Daniel from Grow Development and his wife Amanda from The Mom Crowd are helping me get launched. They are waiting on me, so it's all my fault for its sparse appearance. It will change. I promise.

I'll be posting here less and less, and over there more and more. So bookmark www.realityunwound.com and stop by. Make suggestions, leave comments, poke fun... whatever it takes! Oh, and tell a friend.

Five o'clock thoughts

2008-11-13T17:13:00.003-06:00

It's been a long week, and here I am, a mish-mash of thoughts and blinking synapses. Here are a few of the things rattling around in my brain.

Toby Keith feels my pain - I don't' often think of Toby Keith, but I love the song, "I ain't as good as I once was, but I'm as good once as I ever was." It's not that it's got hooks, but it's a song that makes me look forward to getting older, but not in a sappy, nostalgic, "holy crap I'm going to die what is my legacy going to be," kind of way. Thanks for that Toby.
I'm building a website - Actually, I'm doing very very little of it. The guy whose helping me out mostly is this guy who does this for a living. He' very good, and I'm very grateful. You can go see what I've got going at www.realityunwound.com. It's still taking shape, but my hope is that it'll be an informative place where people will come and read things that they might not ordinarily read, and care about things in a new way. See what happens. Stop by often. Leave lots of comments. Tell everyone you know.
I care about political things - This last election wrecked me. It kills me to see something as huge, expansive, and nationally significant as one of the two major political parties in the United States have an absolute, complete, and total lack of leadership. You've probably noticed a turn in the topics of the posts here recently. I want to hear what you think, even if you think you don't care.
Joel Runyon cares - This summer, Joel Runyon stayed at our house for a week and it was great. He's a neat guy. I had a post up awhile back about what you'd like to see more of. Joel, because he cares, badgered me about the results. Well, participation was underwhelming, but the results were that 80% of you (that means 4) wanted to hear my random thoughts, and 20% of you (that means 1) wanted to know what I was listening to. That means 80% of you care about my random thoughts. I feel special. I think that means that only 5 people read my blog, which means that maybe I shouldn't have spent money on a website... wow, hindsight is a mutha.
I feel happy, oh so happy - Seriously. Life is good. I have a great family, I love what I do, the future looks bright, and God is good. Who could as for anything more?

So that's that. Five o'clock thoughts on a Thursday afternoon. If you're out there lurking, and you haven't dropped a line, I'd love to hear from you. Sooner than later I'm probably going to be switching over to www.realityunwound.com so stop by. Drop me a line. Share your thoughts. Tell someone else. Spread the word. Feel the love. Be the ball.

Don't do it!

2008-11-11T12:37:00.004-06:00

President Bush met with President Elect Obama yesterday. Drudge Reports that Bush is pissed about Obama's people leaking the contents of the conversation. What would you expect?

But the information leak isn't the issue. The New York Times says this...

The struggling auto industry was thrust into the middle of a political standoff between the White House and Democrats on Monday as President-elect Barack Obama urged President Bush in a meeting at the White House to support immediate emergency aid. Mr. Bush indicated at the meeting that he might support some aid and a broader economic stimulus package if Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats dropped their opposition to a free-trade agreement with Colombia...

Bad idea Mr. President. Don't do it! Pres. Bush doesn't want to look petty, small, or like he's standing in the way of progress so he has to dance lightly. However, Barry has only one concern here... It starts with "B" end with "A" and in the middle is "arackobam".

Here's how this breaks down as I see it.

Barry is asking Bush to allocate some of the "bailout package" to help the Auto industry (it was originally to be used for the financial industry only). Obama says the auto industry is vital to the health and prosperity of the United States and immediate action must be taken.

First, the auto industry is immensely important and something needs to be done. However, throwing money at it is not the answer. What's happens when the taxpayers foot the bill for billions of dollars, and nothing changes? Have you noticed how well the stock market has responded to the bailout? Have you noticed how confidence has returned to all the banks and now they're lending freely? Have you noticed how the impending doom of our economy could be averted if we would be patriots and sign this bailout package TODAY because tomorrow would be too late? Yeah. Well what if the auto industry responds in the same way? Then what? Well, two things...

Government owns our car manufacturing. So what? Governments are not created to be entrepreneurial, creative, or on the edge. They are created to be stable. If we are going to compete on a global market, we have to innovate. not simply be stable.
We foot the bill for a sub-standard and hopelessly stuck auto industry. That's right. Our tax dollars go to support an industry that can't support itself because it creates inferior products (because of #1 above). Because it will forever be substandard, it will forever be at the teat of an ever expanding government.

So here's the political happenings. If Bush signs this Auto Industry bail out and it continues to flounder (and it will, just like everything else), then that will be one more "final verdict on 8 years of failed policies in the Bush administration." The Pelosi-Reed coalition (of which Barry is a Jr. member) claims victory and points to the failure of conservatism. If the bailout works (and it won't, just like nothing else has) then Obama claims savioresque leadership by swooping in at the last minute and exercising leadership over the simple minded ex-President. By giving in to Barry's requests, it's a lose-lose.

It's time for President Bush to punt. I hate to say it, but I think it's that time. Immediately ask his party what they want to do, and follow their lead. Call Rep. Boehner, Sen. McConnell, and as many conservative minds as he can gather. Call Newt, Michael Steele, Huckabee, and any other right leaning mind he can find.

We tried the bailout, much to the chagrin of tax payers across the land. We crossed a line by making American Express a bank. It's time to stop. Draw a line in the sand Mr. President. Politically it's risky, but we must make the democrats and the newly elected President take full responsibility for each of their ideas. If it works, then we all win. If it doesn't work, then we still all win because we will be able to clearly see from whence the trouble has come. Stand up, and take a bow on your way out. Give your party an opportunity to fight for much of what has been lost over the last 8 years.

*NOTE: There's change coming. Tell your friends. Realityunwound.blogspot.com is moving.

(photo was on the front page of Drudge Report)

The voice of one crying in the wilderness...

2008-11-09T19:13:00.005-06:00

There's been quite a bit of clothes tearing, hand wringing, and soul searching going on inside the confines of the Republican party. For the most part it's well deserved. It seems though that Sarah Palin is finally finding a supporting voice in the media, and even from within her own party, while the remnants of the Republican leadership wrestles with how to go forward in the much bluer halls of congress and the senate.

I know many people who pray, pray often, and pray hard are still reeling. They see no hope, no potential for anything even remotely positive to come out of what will hopefully only be the next four years.

I don't go that far. I most definitely wish Obama wasn't my President-elect, but I can't say that I would have been politically thrilled beyond all measure if John McCain would have won (I wanted Huckabee from the start, but would have settled for Romney, and finally taken McCain after Fred Thompson).

The thing I take comfort in is that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Fears of a democratic congress run amok. Many envisioned a Guevara-beret clad puppet president sprinting hard toward the left to appease a dictatorial and elitist Democratic power structure. However, it seems that already the centrists in the party are standing up to be heard.

Throw into the mix what Scott Rasmussen (President of Rasmussen reports and polling) seems to think about Obama's mandate and I find solace. What comforts me most is that there is a vocal and credible contingent that, like me, sees this election not as an indication that the general populace has shifted far to the ideological left. Rather, our belief is that this election is more of a rejection of President Bush and his policies than an open embrace of a Reid-Pelosi-Obama liberalism.

In this strange amalgam of national emotion -fear, worry and dread at one pole contrasted with nearly messianic visions of redemption and restoration at the other - the extremists are still in the minority.

That's comfort for both Republicans and Democrats.

Most comforting is that even the majority of Democrats are closer to Joe Lieberman than they are to Plastic Pelosi and Scary Reid. Those that would hijack the left and make us all into card carrying socialists are no more a true reflection of the voice of the people than those on the right that would hole up in a compound with guns and a backwoods religion bearing little resemblance to what most of us would recognize or ascribe to.

So the hope for a conservative reassertion is not only alive, but I believe it's stronger than ever. In a rejection of the leftist conservatism of George Bush, the flames are fanned for a revival of true conservatism. Hold fast, stay firm, keep praying.

Most of all, talk to people and find out where they are at. Know what you believe, why you believe it, and keep talking about it with grace and compassion. Start now talking now about the things that you agree with President-elect Obama about (the power of tax-cuts as the way to a reinvigorated economy, for example). If we only talk about how we're against Obama, we'll only seem like bitter losers. Let's relentlessly cast vision that the parts of what's working for the Obama campaign are conservative principles. Build bridges, take back the truth. There will be a time to talk publicly and openly about the change that's coming. For now, let's just talk about what works. Let's talk about what we see that's good, and right. In that way, we will once again be the party of hope and change.

Hope Springs Eternal: when you're dead, it's easier to see your roots

2008-11-05T09:08:00.003-06:00

McCain was soundly trounced by Barack Obama last night. In a moment of vulnerability, I called every single battleground incorrectly. I didn't figure McCain would win Pennsylvania, but I couldn't imagine him losing Virginia, I thought he'd squeak out Ohio, and I thought Florida would stay red as well.

I was wrong.

So this morning I'm disappointed. I think we're in for a long, hard road, but Barack Obama is my president, and I will do everything in my power to help America be a great place under his leadership.

I take a few things away from last night, however that can be really great down the road..

Barack Obama ran as a centrist - He didn't run largely on the radical left platform of Nose-Job Pelosi and Scary Reid. He won by supporting the second amendment and tax cuts. Those are the things Americans said they care about. As voters we need to carefully watch how he responds, especially in the first 100 days. He is still our President, accountable to the voters. The HOPE: if he has integrity, this will be at worst a Clintonesque administration. More liberal than I like, but not as liberal as it could be.

Republicans have been in the Wilderness - The link is to a great article at the Washington Post. Closely related to Obama's centrist campaign is the reality that this election was, as Obama has regularly stated, a final verdict on the Bush years. The HOPE: Bush was barely a republican president. Under him, Government swelled, spending skyrocketed, and the basic tenets of historical conservatism were blatantly and boldly violated. I still don't believe America has rejected true conservatism. I don't believe they've seen it since 1990 or so.

We can begin building again - My interpretation of last night is that the clearest mandate of all was for Republicans. It's time to go back and dance again with the one who brung us! It's time for a new leadership in the conservative movement, a new vision of the Republican party. The HOPE: there should be little questioning or bickering about what we should do with the old way. Last night was the death knell for Bush conservatism. Let's tip our hats and move forward.

We're in for a long ride, and I am going to pray for President Obama as often as I can. I'm challenged and I issue a few challenges:

Get Informed - Information is out there. Stay informed, know who your congressmen and senators are. Know what they stand for. Think through the implications.
Engage in the conversation - Conservative politics can't be mere idealogues, hashing out nuances of an overblown fiscal policy blah blah blah. It has to be about real solutions to the real problems real people are facing. Find out what they are. Offer them a solution.
Be Gracious - Be above the fray. I don't like what happened in America yesterday. But I understand it. I have to play my part in building bridges. I can not compromise, and I can not stand alone.

So let our response to this election be the full support of our country. America has spoken, loud and clear. If we don't like what they said, our choices are to rage and rail and further demonstrate how out of touch and fragile we are. Or, we can accept what has come our way, bear up under the burden with grace, and win again the battles over values and ideas.

We can do it. It starts today. Let's go.

Part 3: Love the One You're With - shrinking the political divide by being who you are

2008-11-02T20:47:00.007-06:00

Tomorrow, half the country will celebrate the change that we've all been waiting for.

Tomorrow, half the country will feel that we've irreversibly turned a corner toward doomsday.

It's bothersome that any personal schisms I may experience over this election will be only a microcosm of the divide in this country. Red states and blue states barely speak the same language, much less read from the same page.

The American dream has always been freedom from and freedom to. This was a place, formed and founded by dissenters. I fear we stand on the verge of a dark and deep precipice of divide where dissent is treason, and to the Blues, the Red's are always "the other guy."

I believe ever increasingly that politics matter a great deal. I am also wholeheartedly convinced that a real and robust faith speaks directly, clearly and precisely to the core of the conditions that define the political agenda at any given time...

Social issues aren't simply about some sort of human widgets. Social issues deal with actual people actually formed in the image of God. I can't be neutral on abortion because God is intimately involved in every single step of the creative process... even in utero.
Welfare doesn't work because we're not supposed to be dependent on any system or structure, but rather on God alone. It's not just about making sure that the poor have sustenance, it's about making sure that ALL people have a purpose and an opportunity to thrive
Fiscal policy isn't just about getting rich or being poor. It's about stewardship, so I have to ask what the best use of the money God has given me is. If I have the choice to invest money in a cause or a purpose that compels me, or giving it to a government (through higher taxes and wealth redistribution) that has never ever handled its money as well as I have (that's why communism hasn't ever worked), I want the freedom to invest it (give it) myself.

The current divide in our country is such a big deal precisely because my faith compels me to feel a a personal responsibility to do whatever I can to shrink the real and perceived gap between the two sides.

As a believer, I have a mandate to "be one [with others], even as the Father and I are one." (Jesus said that). I don't believe the unity we are called to can come primarily by political means, although I believe there are political implications. I believe it is my job as a believer to begin bridging that gap.

That doesn't mean slashing and burning my ideas and principles in the name of bipartisanship. It doesn't mean making good liberals into good conservatives by making a good conservatives into good left-center moderates.

That is, in all regards, a worthless shift.

It can't mean moral compromise because that denies the existence of real answers. It does mean a return to statesmanship and humility. It means reaching above and beyond ideological tags and searching for and promoting real solutions to peoples real problems. It means leaving the national platform and walking the streets. Most of all, I think it means seeing that "the Democrats," are as real people living in the same economic climate as me, faced with losing the same jobs, and the same crashing retirement system.

There are solutions, and I believe conservative solutions are the better solutions. What I as a conservative may not have is a broad base of trust. We don't have a widespread belief from society that we are working toward the greater good, not just our own good.

As a believer, that is my clarion call. As an American, that is my clarion call. One nation, under God compels me to seek unity (not compromise). The United States of America wasn't created to live in the midst of a wide and growing political split.

So between now and the 2010 midterm elections, what if the conservative base took to the streets and began talking to people who are different from us, sharing ideas and solutions. What if the Republican party became known as the party that walked the neighborhoods talking to the people and taking the initiative to share with them why big government isn't the answer?

That what I'm supposed to be doing anyway. I don't have to be something different to be an agent of healing in this land. I just need to be more of what I'm supposed to be.

Campbell Brown tells the truth

2008-10-29T11:40:00.004-05:00

Robert Earl Keene sings a song called, "Little Things." From his vantage point of beleaguered spouse, he quips to his beloved that, "it's the little things that piss me off."

At the end of the day, those truly are the things that drive me from ambivalent spectators to impassioned activists. In most of life, the great big huge happenings don't come that often or catch us that much off guard. It's the little, day to day happenings that make people crazy.

Case in point. Here's a link to a video of Campbell Brown talking about Obama and his broken promise to accept public campaign funds. It's well known, well documented, and undeniable that Obama is hands down winning the cash war in this election cycle. He's broken all kinds of fund raising records. So what's the big deal?

Campbell does a great job of spelling out the issues. Check out the video. Obama claims he did it because the system is broken. Regardless, it's the system that honorable John McCain has stuck to, even when it's cost him.

So here's the real rub. It's not about campaign finance and what probably is a broken system. It's about integrity. Lewinsky-gate wasn't (primarily) about Slick Willy getting his in the Oval Office. It was about the reality that a man who would lie to his wife about something like this, would lie to the American people. It's not about sex or money, it's about integrity and honor.

I wonder what else a man who lied about something as important as funding a campaign would lie about? Is there a chance that he'd lie about his fiscal policy? I wonder if he would ever lie about any of his associations, about his plans for the war, about the depth of his liberalism?

He might not, but nothing has indicated he wouldn't.

The fact that he lied when it served him to do so indicates that he would do it again under the same circumstances. How much of Obama's ever shrinking lead in the polls is attributed to an absolute saturation of the airwaves with his propaganda? If he wins this election, you could easily make the point that he bought the election with questionable campaign donations. So with broken promises and untraceable donations, he is somehow fit to lead this nation to a better and more reputable place in the global community? I don't get it. It seems to me that the best thing dirty money can get you is a bad name.

See the Campbell Brown piece here... http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/28/campbell.brown.obama/index.html

P.S. Kudos to CNN for putting this out there. Perhaps the Clinton News Network is under reform! Keep tellin' it like it is Campbell!

Part 2: Remember Phoenix - finding hope in a potential democratic landslide

2008-10-27T09:42:00.004-05:00

So my last post was cathartic. It was good to ruminate over where I've come and see how the circle seems to have closed, only the person I am is not the person I was, and for that I'm grateful.

After I finished writing though, I sensed that tightness in my gut again. It's that sense that sneaks in every four years about mid-September. Because I believe that political figures cast a long shadow over the land and have great power to do great good (or conversely, great harm) I begin to fret and even fear over numbers that are sure to rain down late into the evening on November 4.

One side is predicting a landslide on the order of Ronald Reagan's trouncing of Walter Mondale in 1984. With an unprecedented cash advantage (which, incidentally Barack Obama promised not to use in the name of fairness) Barack Obama is making his presence felt in places no democratic candidate has gone before. The Democratic nominee would have you believe places like West Virginia and Indiana are in play once again.

On the other side, you have the Republican party calling foul and bias against the media, and assuring those who care that the race isn't over. In my mind's eye I imagine John McCain on November 5 hoisting a newspaper that says "Obama Defeats McCain" while the ticker tape fills the celebratory Republican air.

I don't know what to make of the polls, and my position is that it's probably not as bad as they say, but it still might not be close enough to matter. So what's a resuscitated conservative with a head and a heart in the game supposed to do in dicey political times like these?

Well, first of all, I can't overstate my belief that God alone is my provider, and if the tax burden became 99%, I have been promised that God would provide for my needs. So I cling to that and try to let that inform my position as much as possible.

I do believe, however, that even in the case of a total Democratic trouncing (they gain the White House and a super-majority in both houses of congress) my hope isn't gone. I believe there will be irreversible or nearly irreversible changes and decisions made (Supreme Court justices, new entitlements, etc), but I believe that out of the ashes a new conservative movement will rise.

I think the Republican party has been conflicted since about 1990. In the exceedingly long shadow of Ronald Reagan, the first President Bush let the hearts of the people slip away amid indecisiveness in Iraq. The Clinton years stand in stark contrast to the moral and economical rise of the Reagan years.

However, it's in the corners of those Clinton years that I find my basis for hope. During the years of Clinton's presidency, Newt Gingrich authored and introduced the Contract With America which was a true conservative movement. It wasn't perfect at all. (I think its tragic flaw was its close alignment with Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition). Again, I don't believe government will ever be perfect. The reason the Contract with America was a great thing was that it intended 2 things 1) Balance the Budget and 2) limit government. Those are great things.

The reality as I see it is that even if McCain should win, he isn't the future of the Republican Party. Truth be know, I think the future of the party is in people like Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, Tim Pawlenty, and Michelle Bachmann. Now, you'll likely never see any glowing reports or talk about any of these. I expect a revival of the "Fairness Doctrine" which will for all intents and purposes completely silence the last vestiges of conservative media. The airwaves will be left to people like Keith Slobberman, Chris "Igor" Matthews, and Andrea "someone wake up my face" Mitchell. So what you'll begin to see is a grassroots revival of conservatism completely under the radar. You think the polls are lopsided this election cycle...

Just a side note of this: I think one of the major mistakes McCain made during this election was focusing on his ability to "reach across the aisle." You never hear Nanci Pelosi or Harry Reid talking about wanting to reach across the aisle. They talk about wanting to remove the aisle altogether. They don't want to work with Republicans, they want to eradicate them. Please hear me well, talking politically, I don't believe we are dealing with a centrist government. Every "moderate" conservative that McCain was supposed to bring into the fold has gone the other way (see Colin Powell). So stop doing that.

Next: Part 3: Love the One You're With - shrinking the political divide by being who you are.

Part 1: The Season I Find Myself In - back again for the first time

2008-10-23T09:33:00.006-05:00

"To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven..."

Ecclesiastes 3, The Byrds

Things cycle. Fall becomes winter which turns to spring which inevitably rolls into Summer and soon enough we're back into Fall again. To rage against that machine is, as the writer of Ecclesiastes would say... meaningless.

We prepare for and even look forward to the changing seasons. My wife loves the beach, so summer always looms hopefully on the horizon. I would rather peel my own skin than sweat, so my heart skips when fall cools and darkens the evening skies.

But the other cycles of life I accept less willingly. For instance, I am extremely energetic (generally) between 7:00 and 11:00 A.M. After lunch I tend to wax philosophical and generally fail to be good use to anyone. Still, I ignore the cycles and fail to plan my schedule accordingly.

I'm finding myself in another cycle of sorts. Before I went to college, my ambition was to study political science, go to law school and throw my hat into the political arena. I was angry, belligerent, and had it all figured out (I was 18 at the time, and every 18 year old knows everything). In college I realized that there were, in fact, things I didn't know. I met people who were very different from me, and still very intelligent and good hearted. I wrestled with issues of systemic evil... poverty, illness, even the environment. I responded in typical fashion, by totally rejecting everything I previously believed. I identified "the right" from where I come with all of my own closed mindedness, so in light of all the ways I had been wrong, surely the problem was with the ideology, not with me.

Fast forward 15 years to today. I still wrestle with questions about systemic evils. But now my perspective has changed. I work at a place that touches the poor every single day. I am part of a place that meets social evil where it lives, and addresses it head on. That's impacted my political perspective because I see the success that comes when average, ordinary, normal people like me get our hands dirty. I meet people that "the government" never could. Not only that, but I don't just hand out money, but I hear and offer hope & solutions for their real needs...

Relationships

Purpose

Hope

Government can't provide those things. On paper, socialism and government welfare type programs work. In real life, they fail miserably because the people who administer the programs (run the government) will fail and fall just like the rest of us (incidentally, that's why I'm still frustrated over the recent "Bail Out package" and think it creates more problems than it solves).

So the cycle has swung back to the right for me. The difference between me then and now is that I see those on the left differently. I believe leaders on the left genuinely want to answer the same questions I do (poverty, greed, etc). I don't think all of them (although some of them probably) are evil hearted people who want to wreck the country. The difference I think is simply in our methodology. I want to empower every person to make a difference and think the government ruins what it touches... so by all means leave the people alone!

Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's an insignificant difference. I think it's a major, game changing, generation impacting difference. I believe that taxing entrepreneurship (raising taxes on even big business) will stifle creativity and punish the American Spirit (who do you think puts the most money into the economy? The rich. It may sound unfair, but it's reality. The best thing for America is for EVERYONE to work hard and become rich). I believe "spreading the wealth around" is just about the worst idea I've ever heard, and I believe that it only fosters the entitlement mentality rampant in the welfare class. The answer isn't to give them something that they haven't earned, the answer is to give them hope that they were created for something larger and teach them that they can earn and participate.

What I can offer that government never can, is a hand up. I can stand beside someone and talk with them, and refuse to leave them when the manifest ignorance or intolerance or just plain laziness. The government can give money, but that only fosters dependence. The American dream isn't that we would forever be suckling at the teat of big government. The American dream is that we would be able to first be independent, then interdependent.

My hope for the right isn't that I believe conservative politics is the answer. I believe Christ is the answer. I believe that God working through His Church is the answer, because the Church has the ability to meet needs at every level... sustenance AND significance, life AND liberty, hope now AND a future tomorrow. When the government takes it upon itself to "meet needs" the people will stop turning to the Church, because government asks nothing of them.

Part 2 to come: Remember Phoenix - finding hope in a potential democratic landslide

I <3 H.D.T.

2008-10-11T08:50:00.006-05:00

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation..."

Back when I considered myself a philosophy honk, and even today I guess, I loved Thoreau's straight to the point, no holds barred, bone penetrating analysis on the lives of most men. I was in college at the time, and as most people at that phase in life, I knew everything... except myself. I remember even then having this quiet rage, this quiet but powerfully bubbling drive for something that wasn't yet. More frustrating still was the awareness that the intensity of desire didn't equate to an intensity of forward motion. I had vague dreams, ambiguous desires, and sharp if undefined hungers for things that seemed important.

I chased things that seemed like they might scratch the itch... I traveled around the country, I took Solomon's quest for meaning in Ecclesiastes (everything under the sun) and arrived at pretty much the same conclusion he did (vanity, vanity). For all my motion, desire, and soul heat, I was pretty much where I had been before. Mostly I was raging against the machine that was me. All that was left was Thoreau's penetrating analysis of my life... quiet desperation.

I wish I could say that since I started following Christ it had all changed. I wish I could say that now my desperation is fully satiated if constantly renewed. I wish I could say my life was a loud and constant roar of intention and purpose, fueled and driven by the fullness of the Godhead's passion.

But that's not how it goes, it would seem.

My desperation today is aimed in a different direction. It's admittedly made up of some of the same basic fabric, and it's often no less quiet and hot. I still hunger for significance, if today I realize I need to follow a different path. I still long to make a living with words and ideas, although the tone and subject of those words is different. Even more disturbingly, as I am now in my 30's, I have to admit that my quiet desperation still doesn't often enough manifest itself in the kinds of actions that would allow me to possibly realize some of the meat of those quiet desperation's (*Note: I also am now in constant realization that many of the drives I have may not be worth pursuing. Significance as I define it may be no more in the works for me than a polka-dotted hair do*)

But Thoreau left another nugget in Walden. "I went to the woods to live deliberately."

Thoreau spent significant time in the woods. Alone. Quiet. Intentionally seeking out the things that would fill in and fill out the purpose he felt pushed toward. The beauty and the drama of that statement compels me. I don't think Thoreau had it all right. I don't think his equation would lead him to the place where he ultimately wanted to be. But he put himself in the best position to discover that for himself.

I'm convinced that moving beyond a life of quiet desperation comes in living deliberately. I woke up this morning and had a choice. I could either mindlessly drift with Jackson's movie on TV (The Little Mermaid... he loves Sebastian the Jamaican crab) or I could turn my mind to try and understand my responses yesterday, the things God seemed to be whispering to me, and the things God was doing in the world around me. I can wake up tomorrow and jump into the day and deal with whatever comes or I can spend time nurturing those Holy Discontent things and setting a course of action. My action will probably often be misdirected and way off track... but it will have been deliberate, and it will allow me to learn, pray, and recalibrate.

God save me from a life of quiet desperation. God keep me from dousing the flames that would heat the boiler of passion you placed in me. God, rescue me from the drift of life where every moment appears about as insignificant as the last. Most of all, God deliver me from futility, so that I might realize even a piece of the holy, latent potential in the world around.

Sick bellies and Holy moments

2008-10-05T11:34:00.005-05:00

Friday night, Jack threw up. Then he threw up again.

It didn't seem wise to keep the little belly-geyser around the 6 day old baby. No need to infect a newborn. So I went to my parents until the whole thing blew over. My hope was that in the morning he would wake up and be fine and I'd be home by evening (24 hours past his last "episode").

But he threw up yesterday morning again. All day I nursed him back, small sips of liquid for 4 hours, followed by slightly larger sips for 4 hours, still no food though. He seemed to feel better all day and went to bed at night, sleeping sweetly in the guest bed at my parents house.

This morning he threw up again. Dangit.

So I'm 36 hours away from my wife and new born daughter, and I miss them both terribly. Right now Jack is asleep on the couch behind me, and I'm praying the crackers and Gatorade I've been working into him stay down. I'm praying that he feels better, that he gets back to being his same old self. I'm praying that I get to go back home, hug & kiss my wife, and hold my baby.

It's in the midst of all this that I made a decision yesterday morning...

For we know that God causes all things to work together for good for those who love him...

Romans 8:28

For I know the plans I have for you... plans to give you hope and a future.

Jeremiah 29:11

I decided that I was going to believe that this wasn't a cosmic blip or a disappearance of the God's providence. I decided I was going to respond as if this very situation (missing my family, hurting for my beautiful sick little man, being away from home at such a vulnerable time, not being able to support my recently de-pregnanted wife) WAS the providence of God. God wasn't waiting until everyone was healthy to bless me, he wanted to bless me right now, in spite of it. In fact, I think he wanted me to see the illness and separation as a blessing.

It's a tough to fully latch on to the mindset that whatever seemingly negative situation I'm in isn't something that I have to "get through" any more than the good situations are. God is present, real, and unchanged in both of them. His hands aren't bound in the "bad times" and somehow unleashed in the "good times." The sick moments aren't moments where Satan is winning. Satan doesn't get to win. God wins.

He always wins.

So James' challenge to, "Consider it pure joy, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything," resonates only when I remember, or believe, that He's not gone. He's here. He's working. His intentions for me are exactly the same as they were the other day when Jack was running around like a crazy man (and I was praying that he would calm down. Now that he's calm, I just want him to be more active! I'm so fickle).

So I'm grateful for this time. I learned how to find God in the fabric of a potentially frustrating and bothersome situation. I had a chance to see that perseverance is precious, and faith is worth more than gold. I had a chance to hold my otherwise squirmy and dodgy son close to me. I kissed his head and wiped his tears and as steadily as I could, I reassured him that it would all be OK. "Daddy's here Jack, you don't have to worry."

And as those words fall into his sickly-eager little ear, they fall into mine and they allow me to speak with a confidence and a hope that I think I understand in a different way than I did before.

A few thoughts a few days out -or- Thoughts that come from sleep deprivation

2008-09-30T11:41:00.004-05:00

(photo courtesy of Breanna Powers)

Last night was our first night back at home. Reagan is quite a contrast with Jack. One (not Jack) slept all night and needed to be woken up for feeding. The other (not Reagan) was up kicking and screaming all night long. Here are a few things I've realized...

Having a child is the best prescription for gratitude. I was sitting in the hospital room the other night, eating Natalie's bland stroganoff and soft cauliflower (I bought her something else... I wasn't stealing baby-momma's food!) and I was almost in tears. It wasn't the food that made it happen, for some reason at that moment it all came home that I am an amazingly blessed man.

Having a child is the best prescription for humility. Never before have I been so aware of what a small player I am in this whole game of life. That little baby girl grew, and came togther... she was knit together in the womb (Ps. 139). We serve an amazing God who does amazing things and bestows amazing blessings on us for no reason other than he wants to.

My son is awesome. I am so proud of the little man Jack is. Rather than being jealous or territorial, he loves his baby "Regie" (like Reggie with a hard G).

My God is good. He is very big, and he's all over the place. Today was a great day. I'm as tired as I've been since... well, the last time... but there's an understanding that I have a Father who is pleased to give me good things.

So thanks for the prayers. Keep them coming. I'm sure there will be more analysis and all that to come, but for now, that's all I have to say about that.

The first pictures

2008-09-27T21:32:00.007-05:00

Well, here are the first round of photo's courtesy of his own personal photo entourage (Reagan will come to know her as Ammi, or grandma). For more pics of Reagan and others, visit her gallery at pbase. Here's the 1st round...

My little cherub

Eyes Wide Open (I don't think her eyes look that light)

Her mentor and her guardian: Cousin Abby and Poppy

The happy but weary mom & dad with the newest Powers

Well there are lots more of these to come. This is really just the beginning... in more ways than we can probably even realize.

September 27, 2008

2008-09-27T13:55:00.002-05:00

Reagan Elizabeth Powers made her way into the world in the natural way.

21 1/4 inches long

8 lbs 12 oz.

Beautiful.

Mom is resting well, basking in the glow of the joyous thing God has made in and through her.

Pictures to come sooner than later. Thanks for your prayers. Please keep 'em up.

A Day Remembered

2008-09-20T15:51:00.008-05:00

May 8, 2008 - Rocky Mountain National Park

Lower Copeland Falls. I have never felt so much like a visitor. This amazing place sounds like the rushing voice of God. The aspens, pines, and spruce trees stand and applaud the majesty of the Creator. Father has, just this moment, sent slow flurries to kiss the back of the neck. "The Earth is the Lords, and the fullness thereof. Thank You.

Upper Copeland Falls. Every place is more powerful and mighty than the last, and every reminder of God's power quiets my soul. he is God. God of Creation, take my breath away. Beyond the power, every thing about these mountains reminds me that my strength is fleeting and limited and, like these rivers and mountains, there is a mighty power source close at hand. Only to realize and live in it!

Calypso Cascades. As I write this, there is a heavy snow falling. The entire landscape is under 2 feed of snow. The Lord whispers, "My voice is all around you. Can you hear me in the rush of water? In the wind through the pines? He is here.

The day I wrote those in my little back pack travel journal was one of those days that I knew would remain crisp in my brain forever. It was our second day there and we ended up in the Wild Basin. We passed only a single car on the way in, and they still hadn't opened the summer trail head because of the snow. There was a true sense of being alone in the wild. I remember being nearly overwhelmed by the enormity and immensity of the whole thing. There's nothing that makes me feel smaller, more humble, more aware of the grandeur and might of God than the mountains. As we hiked, it became clear that this was going to be a day that I needed to capture and remember.

Only today did I finally get the pictures from that trip into my computer. It's always good to stop and remember those times and those places where you've encountered God. That was most definitely one of those days.

Vice Potential

2008-09-19T14:09:00.003-05:00

Politically speaking, it's always been fairly difficult for me to imagine the role of the Vice President. I always assumed it went something like this...

Look good and represent the head honcho well in elections, and do his angry bidding for him.

Be the head of the Senate.

Wait to become the real President.

Now I know that's a gross underestimation and misrepresentation of the true facts. The reality is that in the past 20 years, Vice Presidents have not had much good luck. George H.W. Bush (Reagan's VP) served 1 term before losing to "Slick Willie" in '92. Slick Willie, probably the most skilled politician of our generation failed to be able to seat his VP (Algore) who lost to George W. Bush's Vice Henchman, er, Vice President wasn't ever considered to even be in the running. So it hasn't been a good season to be a Vice President.

And today I read in The Telegraph about Joe Biden's (Obama's 1st mate) bad luck with the Catholic Church. A few things that I took away.

Don't jack with the Catholic Church. Seriously, I remember hearing Nancy Pelosi and her abortion statements, and I remember thinking how foolish they were. She basically forced the Catholic church to publicly correct her. When Biden followed suit, it defied logic.

That's not how they wanted to force the issue. It's important to draw clear distinctions between the candidates and force what would amount to a moral imperative. You want people to say and feel the conviction... "that stance on that issue compels me to vote this way." It's the classical liberal/conservative question... what's the best way to handle issues, stoke the fremarket and deregulate (conservative) or oversee and regulate (liberal). However, it seems unwise to make the division on things of faith. I still believe that for many people, faith trumps political issues. Even for athiests, their faith stance compels them to vote. For Biden to basically force the Catholic Church to denounce him puts faithful Catholics in an interesting place.

Where ever you go, there you are. I remember when he was announced as VP. Oh, the joy in conservative talk radio land! Biden has a well documented history of putting his foot in his mouth at the most public and inopportune times. He can't help being himself, only now he's doing it in the spotlight of a monumental election.

My guess, Biden isn't long for this world. I predict that he is either going to experience some sort of family tragedy, or for some reason or other have to disappear from the race, sadly and regretfully, but necessarily none the less. Under such circumstances, it only makes sense that the new Democratic Vice Presidential nominee would be... Billary Rodherson Clinton.

Can it happen? Legally, I don't even know if it can. She was quite publically NOT vetted. Would she have to go through the DNC some how? I don't know. Would it work? Personally, I don't think it would. I think it would smack of political maneuvering in a campaign that has staked itself to the rhetoric of change and doing things in a new way.

Interesting times. Interesting race. Interesting people.

The Favorite Season Is...

2008-09-16T16:05:00.002-05:00

The favoritest season of them all...

FALL!!

That means there are a lot of happy people right about now.

Keep your money away from the moths...

2008-09-15T17:32:00.004-05:00

The Dow Jones index dropped 500 points today. Every channel I turn to on the TV is talking about panic, recession, depression, financial ruin...

How can something like this happen in America, to a place like Lehman Brothers and AIG?

Well, it would appear that even the most stable things in the world are unstable. Even in America, even to the richest of the rich, things like this can happen. In this life, the mighty will fall.

That's why Jesus urged those who listened to Him to keep their treasures in the Kingdom of Heaven, away from things in this life like economic depression and recession. That sounds like pretty good advice today. The marvelous secret Jesus showed us... the Kingdom of Heaven is all around us. It's at hand. It's here. Now!

Investments in banks and economies are always subject to ruin. Investments in people, in lives, in stories will produce returns for eternity. People are the safest, surest investment out there because the relationships you invest in will not only pay off now, but they will pay off down the road, all the way into eternity.

I met with a group of small group leaders in my living room yesterday. Over cheap, pick-up pizza, with the sweet sound of curly headed, blue eyed children playing and running in the back ground we discussed just such investments. One couple is getting ready to release a leader they have walked with and helped train over the past weeks and months. That's an eternal return on investment. Every person those new leaders impact will be a direct credit to the eternal account of both leaders. Another of the groups has had to deal with some space issues. Creatively and almost in beautifully stubborn fashion, they fought the urge to turn inward. Another leader faced a hard confrontational issue and worked through it rather than running from it.

These two situations are a stark contrast to me. I see the pictures streaming in from Wall Street, dejection, fear, discouragement, doubt. I sit in a living room with young leaders carrying the added burden of helping people discover spiritual maturity as they walk toward it themselves, voices bouncing with hope, eyes glimmering with resolve.

I've never been so encouraged and so hopeful about every investment in the Kingdom. Every investment in another person is an investment that Wall Street can't match. I've never had such clarity about the choice of what I'm going to devote my extra hours to. I've never been more excited about little things like lunch meetings where mutual investment is the order of the day.

God, let me invest more time in people, and less time in the dollars and cents that will never add up to enough. Keep me focused on the people that you love. Teach me what it means to seek your Kingdom first. You said that if I'd do that, then I'd have what I need. Thank you for that.

Sorry 'boutcher luck Lehman's Bros. I've got some investment tips you should look into!

The un-audacity of living the dream

2008-09-11T12:26:00.003-05:00

I re-read my first ever blog. 2 years later, the group that spawned my thoughts has morphed and grown to where my role is basically a supporting one. It's a totally different entity than I could ever have imagined, better in most ways.

It's a funny thing though, the passage of time and the reality of perception. I think if you had told me 2 years ago that I wouldn't be attending the gathering, that there would be another guy who was heading it up and giving it direction, that it would look the way it does... honestly think I would have been disappointed, or at least bothered, maybe even ticked.

But what did I know back then? I knew what I wanted, I knew my heart to see something happen, and I think those were good things. I don't think I was sinful in desiring that group to grow and flourish. I just didn't have all the information at the time. My peception of best back then, and the reality of best right now are barely comparable.

The principle I keep running into is best summed up by the great poet and theologian Billy Joel, "The good ole days weren't always good and tomorrow ain't as bad as it see-ee-eems." If I pause long enough to let that truth do it's work, it should drive humility deep into my core. My dreams and ambitions and hopes and prospects keep waking me up to face the day. They give me something to look forward to. They allow me to dance hopefully and rage wildly into the night. They're important...

But they're best held loosely.

I wouldn't trade one thing about my life, knowing what I knew then and knowing what I know now. I wouldn't do it differently. I'm grateful that God, the one I was listening for on that day, is in control. He knows best. Even better me. If you can believe it. It's a hard lesson to learn. If anything seems to be truly rooted in my own best interest, it's my dreams. They seem so shiny and bright, so tantalizing and sweet. Honest reflection gently convinces me, however, both of the necesity of large dreams, and the humility of letting them age well. It seems when I do that, they are always becoming what they were intended to be... images and reminders of God's sovereign goodness and provision for me.

Quenching a drought

2008-09-10T16:12:00.002-05:00

I dry up easily when it comes to the blog-o-sphere. I've commented on it before and I'll probably comment on it again since I'm commenting on it here. I think I've discovered the reason.

I'm an incredibly selfish blogger. I want to put out the goods, but I rarely take time to take in the goods. That's a great model for producing incredibly selfish and shallow stuff.

So it's been a grueling 2 weeks emotionally and mentally, and today was no different, so I decided to take a 10 minute mental holiday, and what I ended up with was a 10 minute excursion into inspiration land.

It all started with my lovely and talented wife, Natalie. She always inspires me. Most recently because she's pregnant, and I'm no professional but it seems like it would be REALLY hard to have another person growing inside of you. None the less, she's been a trooper and the picture of grace. Hopefully the time is almost up.

From there I went to my brother's page. I've long contended that he's the funniest guy I've ever personally known. His blog only cemented his position, as well as provided some wonderful thought fodder about big bangs, body odor, french people, and cosmological physics. Not necessarily in that order.

From that point on it was pretty much one amazing thing after another. First I found Lauren's Blog, Brittany's Blog, Ryan's Blog, Bre's Blog (not my sis-in-law who's pretty cool her self), Joel's Blog and David's Blog. I was challenged, and forced to ask myself...

"Jason, why you so dang SHALLOW and why don't you love JESUS?"

Seriously, when Paul challenged Timothy not to let anyone look down on him because he was young, but to set an example to the believers... that's a challenge these students take seriously. I really needed that. I needed to see that the bar is set high and that there are people, people much younger, but much mo bettah than I am, reaching for the highest goal.

My hats off and my heart goes out to all of you who unknowingly challenged me today. Thank you. That's what the Body of Christ is all about. Keep on keepin' on.

Processing Politics in an Election Year

2008-09-09T15:51:00.006-05:00

I'm in a tough place... I'm a pastor and a Christian, given a responsibility to reach out and help people be reconciled to God who loves them and calls them. I'm also an American, given the freedom and privilege to elect those that I believe will govern this great nation toward prosperity.

As a Christian, I find in the scriptures that Jesus was decidedly not a political Messiah, much to the chagrin and dismay of many of his followers. He had lots of opportunities to be a political Messiah. During his tempting in the desert, he could have worshipped Satan and been given the whole of creation. He could have been born to a Caesar and risen to power that way. In meeting with Pilate or Herod He could have either compelled them to follow Him or called down one of His legion of angels to overthrow them. Instead, he makes cryptic remarks to Pilate about truth and He says nothing to Herod. To the Pharisees trying to set him up, he only says, "Give to Caesar what is Caesars..." I fundamentally believe that the key to a changed government is a changed heart. The best way to ensure that we're governed fairly is to make sure that every person on earth is a radical disciple of Jesus.

On the other, much of the tone of political discourse bothers me. There's a lot of banter back and forth about whose right and whose wrong. I've actually heard people say that they don't believe someone from one party or the other could possibly be a Christian. That seems totally out of character for a people who Jesus prayed would be united... one, even as He and the Father are one.

So I wrote and re-wrote this entry about a thousand times trying to get it right, trying to walk the line between realizing that the government Jesus came to set up wasn't based on any elections (it's a radical theocracy scripturally referred to as the Kingdom of God), and realizing that all authority on earth comes from Him and He's given me a role to play. I need to play it.

So here's where I'm at. I believe both candidates are doing what they believe is best for the country. I believe both Barak Obama & John McCain think that their ideas and ideologies are what is needed to move this country forward. I also believe that whatever the outcome on November 5, my ultimate allegiance is not here. So as I cast my vote, and even engage in boisterous discourse between now and then, I'm compelled to remember that the person on the other side of the aisle isn't just a Democrat, they are a person who Jesus loves and wants to spend eternity with. Starting now. I want to see them as someone who cares passionately about the environment and personal freedom, even if I disagree with how they go about assuring and protecting those. As a reconciler (first), if my political convictions cause me to drive away someone from "the other" party... or even to simply SEE THEM primarily as someone from the other party," I've missed it. If I am right, politically, and I destroy a bridge to future conversations about ultimately important things... eternal things... then being right has never been so wrong.

The golden rule says to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I want people to see me not as a Republican (Libertarian Republican is probably closer to the truth). I want them to see me as Jason, Natalie's husband, Jack & Reagan's dad, Astros fan, and ultimately and most gratefully... child of God. If I'm going to do that, I have to stop "seeing" them as Democrat, liberal, whatever.

So if you're voting Republican this year, join me in setting the pace in affirming the person in our political conversations. See the humanity and Image of God in the person across the aisle. If you're voting Democrat this year, I love you anyway, and hope you feel the same. I hope I'm able to convey that I know you're more than a political affiliation. More than that, I hope I'm able to go to sleep at night actually knowing that you're more than a political affiliation.

Now I know why they don't talk about Politics in polite company.

Bullet Points & Changing Seasons: or two for the price of 1/3.

2008-09-05T14:58:00.007-05:00

It was cool outside today...relatively, of course. The soft breeze whispered through the tasseled oaks keeping the shade-worthy day from becoming a here's-a-cloth-to-dab-your-forehead kind of day. I like those days. Let fall arrive. I feel like I come alive in autumn. It's got me thinking...

I'm totally energized by the RNC. Sarah Palin gave what may be THE political speech of a generation. There are good ideas and hope flying around the twin cities for the first time in a long time. I didn't start out as a McCain guy, and I still don't think he's as conservative as I like... but I trust him, and I believe he wants what's best for the country.

Every time election season comes around, I dream about being a speech writer. My good friend Daniel Espinoza said the same thing while we were watching Palin deliver the goods. A dear lady in our church told me the other day, "you know, Tony Snow was only 31 when started working for Bush 41." I asked her if she knew anyone in the upcoming administration that I could get in touch with. She didn't. It's all good. I've got a pretty good gig.

We're less than a month away from Baby #2. The votes were in, and it looks like we're going to name her Reagan Elizabeth Powers. Thank you for your votes. I'm sure she'll appreciate all your input in the years to come.

I'm listening to "Subterranean Homesick Blues" on iTunes. I love Bob Dylan. If we had a boy, I was pushing to name him Dylan.

Natalie didn't want to name our boy Dylan.

I'm slowly starting to recognize the gentle rhythms of life. This week has been through the roof nuts, but the weeks before were slow, even boring (aside from the recurring bout of bubonic plague we had to deal with). I felt guilty during those times, rather than capturing them and using them to refresh, recharge, and be ready for this season of activity. As my life grows and fills out, those are the things that I'm increasingly drawn to think about.

Life happens. I believe the Cosmos were created with order, reflecting the One who breathed them into being. The more I step back, the more I'll recognize the rhythms and accept them, whatever they may be.

I read about St. Francis, walking through the woods, breaking into song at the life and wonder that was crushing in on him, threatening to swallow him whole. I'd like to be in the moment enough to be dazzled at the wonder of the Kingdom at Hand.

It's amazing what a change in scenery can accomplish. If only the Astro's would make the playoffs... then life would be great.

It's was all about the fantasy...

2008-08-30T17:44:00.003-05:00

I'm currently sitting in my parents living room with my brother and Billy Carroll. All 3 of us have our laptops open, pouring over the latest projections, picks, pans, and injury reports.

It's fantasy football time baby.

Last year I got off to a screaming start, drafted the best receiver in the league and then dropped him 2 days before week on after reading a bogus injury report (Randy Moss' hammy was not, indeed, strained). I still managed to finish second in the league.

This year the tensions are just as high. So many questions? Is Peyton's knee REALLY healed? Will Adrian Peterson hold up to being the Viking's number one running back all season? Should I take a tight end in the 3rd round, or wait until the 5th? These are the really important things that one must consider.

So in 13 minutes, the game is on. Are you ready for some football?

Mom's Favorite

2008-08-28T11:56:00.000-05:00

I can't stop laughing. I know I shouldn't, but I can't help it.

And the hits just kept on coming...

2008-08-25T14:05:00.003-05:00

Poor Natalie hasn't been out of bed all day. Last night at 1:00 (that A.M. for you morning people like me) she woke up not feeling well at all. She need Pepcid, stat. Like a fireman springing at the rescue bell, I lept to the call of duty.

It was actually less leaping and more dragging. I wish I was better and more supportive at stuff like that, but I was groggy and probably pretty cranky. At the bottom of my heart I was glad for the opportunity to do something for her. I felt for her, but the strange commiseration of walking through a difficult time together can draw forth frustration as well as solidarity. I wanted this whole season to be over, and I certainly didn't want chapter 18 of our recent saga to begin in her at 1:00 in the morning!

Still, this morning she wasn't well. As if being pregnant isn't hard enough (not that I'd understand, of course) she now is pregnant AND sick in her stomach. If I wasn't laughing I'd be crying, and if I wasn't crying I'd be laughing.

It's times like this though that bring a person's world view into crystal clarity. It highlights how quickly I am reduced to doubt. It reveals whether I try to stifle those doubts or search for an answer that is acceptable. It uncovers whether or not I am able to walk the tight-wire of accepting suffering and pain on earth AND the goodness and sovereignty of God. Most of all, maybe it indicates how quickly I am able to get outside of myself, beyond the here and now, and realize that there is a greater cosmic picture than I regularly walk in.

I think about my friends who are, or are becoming, foster parents and how they are going to rescue a child who right now may not have access to medicine, but sadder still doesn't have access to a parent who is able or willing to procure the medicine. The greater cosmic reality is that I'm a pretty lucky guy. It doesn't diminish the stress of the past few weeks. I don't think God works that way. I think my fears and doubts and struggles are real. I just think that when they are viewed and processed well, they have the unique ability to either drive me further into myself and closer to self-destruction, or they can draw me out of myself and open my eyes to both my blessings and the sufferings around me.

I think I'm finally able, for the most part, to be thankful for the amazing run of circumstances in the past few weeks. Not all the situations are fully resolved. I'd still like to sell my van to sock a few extra bucks away for when baby Reagan comes. I'd still like to have my family well. But the greater reality is, again, that God is here. He's working and fixing, and He knows my name well enough to bring me through even this in a way that really brings glory to Him.

That's a great thought.

Bullets & Projectiles

2008-08-21T09:24:00.003-05:00

I used to read many more blogs than I do now, and back then, I always loved people who were expert users of the bullet point. It seemed like a style that would work well for me since I'm sort of all over the map in my brain. The problem is that I write A LOT, so 10 page bullet points don't accomplish the same thing. None the less, here's my attempt at the bulletted blog post...

In reading Natalie's documentation of the past 10 days, I remember being drawn to the thought that God is here with me. When Jack is sick, God is here with us. We're not alone. It's much less scary when you're not alone.

Friday night will be just me and Jack. No firm details yet, but I feel certain that it will involve beef and fire. Probably Television. And a sippy cup. For Jack.

We're going to have a baby in 5 weeks. It will want to live with us for approximately 18 years. It will also want to eat food and wear clothes. I will be primarily responsible for providing such accoutrements.

My ear infection is all better. Antibiotics are good stuff.

Alright. That's all I've got. By way of confession, I'm disappointed with the way my first bullet point blog worked out. Perhaps better luck next time.

Otitis externa...

2008-08-18T13:28:00.007-05:00

Or, more commonly, outer ear infection.

See, I have this thing. I think Q-tipping is just about the best thing in the universe. Just after a steaming hot shower, get out and swab the ear canal... glorious.

Turns out that it's bad for you (how could something SO right, turn out to be SO wrong?). All that ear wax serves a purpose... it keeps the water from gathering and infecting. So, two months ago I could feel it coming on for about a week. Each day, quietly, steadily, little by little the hot fire poker of aural death made its way to what must be an extremely important place, to be so sensitive.

Antibiotic drops and a benzocane drop should do the trick.

The problem... I only did the antibiotic for 2 days instead of 5.

Fastforward to last Friday, the familar warm heating pressure shows up. Quietly at first, only letting me know it was around. In response I picked up the neglected antibiotic and started my regimen again. I was too late. This morning it was as if steaming Kamikaze pilots of doom flew one by one into my tender little ear canals and exploded microbombs of ear death in the side of my face.

The doctor was little help. "You have an ear infection. Usually babies get those."

"What are you saying doc? Are you calling me a baby? I'll take you down right here and now if I have to."

But alas, it seems that there's no insta-cure for the ear infection. So what did I learn?

That which feels the best is not always the best. The implications and applications are endlessly endless.

Medicine knows what it's talking about. When it says 5 days, use it for 5 days.

Ear infections suck. That's all I have to say about that.

So I'm going to tough it out and pray that the antibiotics work fast. I'm hoping and praying that I'll handle this with grace and dignity. Most of all, I'm hoping this never happens again.

Dear God...

2008-08-14T11:41:00.004-05:00

How are you doing? This has been a pretty tough week. I don't think I've really handled all my stuff very well. I'm sorry about that. You know my freak out tendency is pretty high, and it seems like I've lived there for about a month-and-a-half now.

I keep coming back to the sovereignty thing, and generally it's a help. Too many times I don't get there quick enough, though. Like today when Jack got sick and had to go to the doctor. Eventually I remembered that you love him too, and you're the only one who can really take care of him. Then there's the money piece. All that stuff really had to hit at once? Couldn't it have been spread out a little bit? Or not happened at all? Especially that one. We did everything right, we turned the machine in and still had to pay for it. Isn't that injustice?

But you're God. And right now I need to see you that way. I need to believe that you're bigger than doctors diagnoses or financial projections. You're even bigger than that bottom line on my bank statement. You'e Immanuel, God with us. You're very near, very close, and you care about me. You want me to hear your voice. You want me to know that you're involved. I get locked up in thinking that always means you want me to know exactly what you're doing. Right now I guess you just want me to know you're doing something, and be OK with that.

I need you to promise me that it'll all be alright. That doesn't mean it has to be just like I want it or like I envision it, but I need to know from you that it'll be alright. Whatever that means, it will be alright, won't it?

I'm sorry it took me so long to get here. Help me get here sooner. You're doing a good job. I'm grateful. Forgive me when I'm not. Oh, and can you please open up Jackson's airways? He's such a trooper. Let him know you're with him too.

I love you. I don't do it very well sometimes, but I love you. Thank you for taking care of me. Thank you for letting me be a spoiled kid sometimes.

For you Jesus,

Amen

It's Up to YOU!

2008-08-12T12:26:00.002-05:00

In less than 2 months, we'll have another baby.

That baby will need a name.

Nat & I have come up with a couple of names that we like, and we've decided to give YOU, the voting public, the right to choose. You'll notice the poll to the right. Vote for the name that you like by September 15th and the winning name will stick.

You can be a part of history. Get out and rock the vote. Send everyone you know. Get the word out.

God said to me...

2008-08-11T12:50:00.003-05:00

There was a day when I was much more ready, willing, and able to say, "God Spoke." Part of my new found hesitancy comes because I would read in the Bible about people who "spoke" for God when God didn't really speak at all. That's not God's favorite thing in the world.

Not to mention, there have been times when I've really felt like I heard God speak something, only to have it not happen. I hate that because it further reveals that the difference between God and I is really quite large. He graciously comes to be near to us, but on my best day it's an art rather than a science.

I have the opportunity to take a trip to the other side of the world, and I really want to hear God's voice. First, I don't want to miss something outstanding simply because I'm nervous or afraid. On the other hand, I don't want to travel half way around the world and leave a new wife and baby at home simply because I want to travel around the world.

So how do I discern between the voice of the Lord and the sounds of my own inner workings. A wise and trusted friend asked the question, "How has God spoken to you in the past?" That's a wonderful question, which leads into many of the same doubts that I mentioned earlier.

This is where I wish i had done a better job at cultivating the habit of humility. That's what I feel is most needed right now. My gut feels like I'm pressing, striving, borderline freaking out with the need and the desire to come to a decision. Humility says, "God's in control and He'll get me to where I need to go." Un-humility (pride, in biblical parlance) says that I have to figure it out. So here's my game plan.

Pray - That means me. I've been praying about it for awhile, but not in the focused way that I need to. It's been a passing thought, rather than a time of sitting and asking the Lord to give me His wisdom.

Be prayed for - I've asked a couple of people (and now I ask you) to pray for me. I don't know what they're praying, or how they're praying, but I trust that they love me and they are praying. That is such an encouragement to me, and makes me think that no matter what happens, it's all good.

Worship - At some point between now and tomorrow evening when I want to make my final decision, I'm going to take a walk and just enjoy what God has done all around me. I'm going to spend some time confessing the areas where I've turned away from God, and then I'm going to celebrate the grace He's poured out to me. I'm going to listen to some Chris Tomlin & Dave Crowder and enjoy the sounds of souls singing to the heavens.

I'm going ot make a decision, and in faith I'm going to believe that I've made the right one. I believe that God is good, so if I (in faith) make the "wrong" decision, God in His sovereignty will make that known.

So pray for me. Pray that the greatest miracle of all - participation in the leading of God - will happen to me. But whatever happens, as I pray am prayed for and worship... it'll all be good.

Monday God

2008-08-04T09:33:00.009-05:00

It's the first Monday of the month, and I sat down this morning and jumped right in.

I did the same thing last month...

and the month before...

and before...

It's not that I don't think about the future, I think about it a lot. I just don't make plans around it. The Future arouses hope and fear alternately, and I will react to it for a day, but I haven't been very disciplined about harnessing the power of hope and dismantling the power of fear as it pertains to the future.

So when I sat down today, I found frustration at the unknown slinking it's way into my brain. How can I plan for tomorrow when I don't know what's coming today? How can I look forward and be prepared? Frustration gives way to discouragement, which gives way to fear, which gives way to hopelessness...

But I'm not a victim!

Then I remembered that I have a foundational belief that God is timeless. It's a tricky theological conundrum that's hard to wrap your brain around, but easy to see the implications.

God knows tomorrow. He's already there.

When I was younger (yesterday) I used to beg Him to tell me the future. "What are my kids going to look like? When will you give me the big check to pay off my student loans?" I was mildly perturbed when He wouldn't answer me. It seemed selfish that He would hog all that wonderful information and not share it with me. I promised not to do anything to change the future and thereby thwart his sovereignty, I just wanted to be able to plan. In my heart of hearts, I assured Him, I was ultimately altruistic and I wouldn't do anything like bet on the world series or pick the long shot at the Kentucky Derby, I just wanted to know what was coming so I could plan for it and not be surprised by the little hiccups along the way. I don't think it's too much to ask.

He didn't tell me who is going to win the Superbowl. Dangit.

As my faith grew up, I realized that there's not much fun in telling the future. As I watch my son grow, I have experienced the great thrill of watching him discover. When Jack sees something new, his eyes pop with wonder and his mouth stretches with glee. It's the greatest thing ever.

I forget that God is Father. He enjoys seeing me discover today. He also enjoys comforting me when I cry, when I scream out at the injustice in the world (mostly as it pertains to me), and when I crumble in a heap on the floor. He's there. He knew I would be there too.

He was there waiting for me the whole time.

So I want to make 1st Monday different. I want to sit quietly enough to acknowledge the fact that God can already see August 31st, and all the days before it. I'm probably still going to ask Him to tell me the future, but I'll be able to smile when He doesn't. I want to hear His ideas about what's coming. He may not tell me specifics, but I think he'll help me find a good path. He'll tell me whether I need to push forward or lay back, whether I need to have the hard conversation or just sit quietly. I think He can help me plan. I think He wants to help me plan. That's how Jesus could say to His disciples, "There's another place we have to go," when He seemed to be cresting the wave of popularity.

So rather than sitting & projecting my hopes onto the uncertain future, I'm going to spend some time this morning listening to what Father thinks is important. Believe it or don't, it takes a lot of faith to believe that God really cares about the nit picky details of my job. With all the stuff going on in the middle east, and the Olympics in China, and the fragile economy, it feels somewhat selfish to think that God would be invested in who I have lunch with this week or whether or not I go visit a small group next week.

But my God is pretty big. He's bigger than I give Him credit for. And I hear that He's very fond of me. ;-)

God was going 20 mph.

2008-01-03T13:11:00.000-06:00

Nat and I were house sitting awhile back when I realized my shoes were at my house. Hopping in the car, expecting to jaunt home and back in plenty of time, I ran into suburban expansion. 30 minutes, 1 1/2 miles, and frazzled nerves later, I arrive at my house.

The reason: 2 elementary schools and 4 school zones. I shook my fist at inconvenience and begged God to let me move deep into the woods. Then I sensed a sweet whisper, "But who will tell all these people I love them?"

All of a sudden, the people who were slowing me up went from being obstructions, to families in need of hope. Instead of noticing traffic, I noticed young people who I could get to know and share with. I knew I couldn't leave. This was my community. I was wrecked.

But real community is messy. When people get into each other's lives, it chafes like cheap toilet paper because I have issues, baggage, hang ups, and "idiosyncrasies." So do you.

Real community is knowing the difference between "one of my moods" and something wrong and loving me through both of them (even when they both happen a lot). It's calling me on my moods, bearing my burden, and letting me bear yours. It's rubbing me the wrong way, and it's saving my life.

But it's most definitely not just "getting together."

And the greatest petri dish for growing community...

Frequent, spontaneous contact.

The more we're around each other, the more likely we'll become a community. It's not just about affinity when we realize something greater is going on and submit to the process. By having dinner together and shopping together and our kids play together and being willing to be real and commit to caring even when and especially when we disagree or are different... we're nurturing the raw materials of real community.

The challenge for me was to see the people right around me as my community too. It goes from meeting people at church to meeting people in my world. What if God wants me to reach out to the neighbor lady, or the couple across the street? What if He wants me to show her He loves her and that God and church is about imperfect, broken people learning to live and love God and each other inspite of our "idiosyncrasies?"

Lynn McCord asked, "What now?" That's up to you. Here are somethings I'm going to try...

1) Rally with those already around me. Does anyone from your church live near you? 5 couples who attend my church live within 1/2 mile of my house. Let's get together soon and get to know each other better.

2) Slay the dragon of individualism. I really don't need more "me" time. It's really no hassle to have someone to my house for dinner (if they don't expect spic-n-span). It's not the company I pull back from anyway, it's letting them see me and speak into my life when I need it. Point blank: to be who God wants me to be, I need other people. The Marlboro man died ruggedly alone.

3) Make the best of what's around. I'm going to walk around my neighborhood at least once a week and pray that I see what I need to see. What is that? I don't know. Maybe someone I can talk to. That's out of my comfort zone (see #2 above). But God loves them. I know it, and they may not. Whoever I meet, I'm going to take that as from God and look for ways to build a relationship with them, see what God's doing in their life, and let them see what God's doing in mine.

The key word in my life is PROACTIVE. After 31 years, the world hasn't beat down my door. I guess God wants me to get out and try to make a difference somewhere.

But I'm wearing a smock for when it starts to get messy!

Being the Church... and going to one too.

2007-11-20T08:53:00.000-06:00

There's a guy I know who moved his whole family to New York for the express purpose of living intentional missional lives. He was a denominational leader in the denomination that my church is a part of, and he tells about how he and his wife just started feeling called to go live in New York city. It's really an amazing story, and you can check out what he's doing here.

In an e-mail exchange, he made reference to "being the church while attending one (sometimes)" and I really liked that. At River City, I'm unapologetically the "small group zealot." It really worked out that I get to go do that every day and get paid for it, because it's what I'd gladly do for nothing (but don't tell my boss). I was far away from God and the church when I discovered community and I realized the power it has - power to destroy if it's focused on something essentially life taking, power to restore if it's focused on something live giving - but power none the less.

The reason I liked his comments about being the church while going to one (which he may or may not have borrowed from George Barna's book Revolution) is because it fundamentally taps into a conviction that I haven't necessarily communicated as well as I wish. The "mechanism" for community at River City Community Church is small groups. The primary way people find their way into a small group is through attending a River City worship gathering or event... I wonder what would change if the direction of those arrows were reversed... what if a primary way people discovered a River City worship gathering was through a small group?

That's what really captures my imagination and makes my palms sweat...

There are about 50 Life Groups (intentional discipleship small group) at RCCC.

There are about 20 Activity Groups (less frequent, event related gatherings)

There are atleast as many Service Groups (ministry specific communities).

There are probably close to 700 people in groups at RCCC (guestimate).

Each person in each group lives in a neighborhood.

Each neighborhood represented is filled with people whose lives are falling apart or are simply wrestling with the reality of insignificance. There are those who are going through divorces, having affairs, abusing their children, and countless other activities that simply fall short of the abundance that God wants to offer.

What if 700 people got freaked out about their neighborhoods? Not the scared, go into isolation type of freaked out, but the standing on a hilltop weeping for the hurts below type of freaked out. What if small groups decided that it was intolerable that the people around them would live without the type of life-giving community while they gathered within ear-shot?

Bill Hybels wrote a book called Holy Discontent. It's not the kind of book that's going to bend your brain, but it is the kind of book that should inspire you to get off the couch and do something. The thing I realized as I read this book is that my Holy Discontent is two-fold, 1)people living in isolation, and 2) people who aren't living in isolation not caring about people who are.

So that's my rant for today. Go check out Jeff & Christina Getz's site, go pick up Barna's book or Hybel's book or better still, find a group of people that you can gather with on a regular basis who will make you better and who will ask you to make them better. When you find those people, pray for God to expand it, then go looking for who He's sending and invite them. When you do that, Church stops being a place and starts being a living breathing life giving thing, infused with the power and life of God Himself. Who could say no to that?

A River Ran Through It

2007-07-08T16:33:00.000-05:00

The urban gave way to the pine forest at a spot called the grotto. In the distance the 10:00 mass echoed through the thickett. Just across the street, invisible from even the nearest edge were laundromat's and coffee shops and liquor stores vying for the time and attention of passers by and drivers through.

The grotto didn't cry out, unless you were listening for the silent spot among the roar. All along the path, the stations of the cross juxtaposed the sorrow and the joy that marked the life of Christ, going all the way back to his Annunciation. It was hard to imagine much sorrow walking through the Grotto.

There is a section there called "The Peace Garden," with a river/brook and several ponds intended to remind visitors of the waters of baptism, the sacred waters that cleanse us and symbolize the hope of forgiveness. So close to a flow like the Colombia River, I also thought of the one out of whom Christ would make flow Rivers of Living Water.

It was one of those moments with the air of eternity. The colors seemed more vivid, the air more crisp, the scents more alive than in other places. I've been lucky enough to encounter a few of those moments. Once when I was 12 in Washington D.C. Another in the Austrian Alps, and then today, sitting on a hewn wooden bench in the Peace Garden.

"...when Peace like a river attendeth my way... it is well with my soul..."

A rose (city) by any other name...

2007-07-07T15:57:00.000-05:00

I flew into Portland yesterday on my expectations, it seems. I have been looking forward to this trip for a long time. In many ways I think it seemed like the payoff for all my years of pining away for the Pacific Northwest. It's almost like the final redemption of the story my life was in before. I don't think I could have handled leaving Portland 8 years ago. For every co-dependent needy reason you can think of, if I had come here and had to leave it would have been devastating.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not looking forward to leaving. I'm a big believer in "place" and "space" and "location" and there have been enough places and spaces and locations that just felt right the first time I encountereed them. I believe some heart places may even be intrinsic, drawing us from the heart even before we've ever been there. When we finally get to those places, it feels like a visit to a place from our early childhood. There almost seem to be memories in places we've never been and a familiarity on streets we've never walked.

I wonder if Heaven will be like that. I wonder if when we get there, it will seem like we've finally come back to the place we always should have been. I think heaven for me is going to be in one of the mountainous places, close to the ocean and pinned behind a mountain range so the moisture doesn't dissipate and the place stays green and temperate year round. I definitely think heaven will be like that.

Bullets don't kill people, puma's kill people. Always watch out for pumas.

2007-07-02T14:33:00.000-05:00

There is a point of no-return for my blogging. I go so long without saying anything, that I get locked up trying to say everything that I haven't said since the last post. I'm such a brain-twisted animal, but I know who I am and I sleep good at night, so that's alright.

So here's the readers digest version, bullet pointed for easy reading (I'm in this for you!), of where I've been. Comment as you like, tell me what you think, help me stay on task. When you respond, it keeps me thinking. This is a symbiotic relationship here. You..... complete....... me. I know you're touched.

I've been sick for over a week now. Nothing makes you appreciate health like sickness. Today I feel much better, and I think I'm going to stop by Whole Foods or Sun Harvest and check into the all natural supplementation. I've realized a few things... 1) I eat like crap all the time. 2) I NEVER take any sort of vitamin ever, under any circumstances. 3) I don't exercise. Well, I exercise slightly more often than I take vitamins. But only slightly. and 4) I don't go to bed early enough. All of that is a concoction for unhealth. Throw into the mix that I am now 6 months into my three oh's and I'm starting to think that it really may be time to start taking care of this old tent.

Natalie and I are going to Portland on Friday. I've never been to the Pacific Northwest, but I've always wanted to. I've got this sneaking suspicion that somewhere up there may just be where my hearts home is. Natalie's worried that I won't come back. I assure here that I'm 74% positive that I'm going to come back to Texas atleast long enough to get all my things. It's funny that I have such a love for a place I've never been before. It's the remnant of the hippie ethic still living and breathing in my soul. Someone I know who used to be in Portland once said, "you can only look at pretty trees for so long." I'm not so sure.

Life is good. I've been pretty aware lately of all the really cool things that are in my life. I think I have a tendency to be somewhat pessimistic. Maybe cynical is a better word. I have to admit lately though, I just have this sense that whatever comes, whatever happens, however it all shakes out, I've got it pretty good and I'm really thankful to God for what He's done and given me. I need to live in light of that and make it more of a habit to remember more often. Remembering is a discipline, but it's important. Vital even, to being the right kind of person.

Friendships make the world go 'round. Not literally. That's centrifugal force (centripedal? any Physicists out there?). But along with the life is good thing, I realize that I've been given a great hands when it comes to the friends in my life. I don't get to see all of them as often as I should, but I appreciate that there's never a begrudging guilt trip or manipulation game when our paths finally do cross. We just pick up where we left off. My friends challenge me to dream big dreams, have big thoughts, and just generally want to be a big person... but the good kind of big. Not the fat kind of big that I'm increasingly finding a propensity toward. It wasn't always like this. Again, I attribute it to the three oh's.

Here's an Interesting Christmas Idea. Go here and see what you think. I learned about it from reading this blog from a guy whose a pastor at the church who started this last year. What do you think? What would the implications be if ten's of thousands of Christians across America undertook a project like this (at the site, click on the "read more" link at the bottom, and that will open up a window which will then have a link to a .pdf file that gives more details and vision)? What would the implications be for YOU if you undertook something like this? Who would understand? Who wouldn't? How would they respond? How does that make you feel?

Overall, things are good. Thanks for being a part of what's going on in my life, even if we've never met and you just stumbled upon this blog for the first time today. I hope you've enjoyed your stay, and I hope you come back again. Find a way to get involved. Make a difference. Be engaged.

Beauty close by

2007-05-09T10:40:00.000-05:00

Driving to my parents house from the west, you have to drive by this piece of property, probably 100 acres of undeveloped "ranch land." I put the quotes because I've never really seen more than 10 or 15 cows, and most of the property is in a flood plain. I don't know how useable it is for grazing or raising cows or sheep or other livestock, but that 100 acre plot is one of my favorite places in the world.

When my parents built their house in their suburban neighborhood 7 years ago, it was on the growing edge of northeast San Antonio. It was well within the city, accessible to major freeways and all of that, but still separate enough to feel like you weren't in the middle of town. Since then, the area has exploded with shopping centers and gas stations and more track housing than ought to be legal. Except for those 100 acres.

One corner of the property in particular will probably always be one of those memory sweet spots that lives forever in my mind. It's on a gentle rise, so it fills the horizon as you drive past it. Every spring the landscape progresses from blues to yellows to whites with little spots and speckles of reds and orange when the wildflowers bloom in succession. It seems like a piece of Montana, transplanted close by so that I can either stoke my longing for the wilderness or at least continue to believe that I'm a mountain man in my heart.

I'm grateful for the little reminders that even as things drive forward and grow skyward, there is still hope for open spaces and natural beauty. Someday the owner of that property will pass on, and that wonderful piece of property will pass into the hands of someone else. I hope they love it as much as I do. Or I hope that I have enough money to buy 100 acres of woods in the middle of suburban San Antonio.

Speaking the Truth in Love: rightness to the core

2007-05-08T21:28:00.000-05:00

When Paul tells his Ephesian listeners that it's time to move from spiritual infancy to spiritual adulthood, he challenges them to the highest level of "rightness."

"Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ." Ephesians 4:15

By speaking the truth in love, we grow up. By not speaking the truth in love, we don't grow up. It's easy for me to see the truth. I'm just wired that way. I can smell the crap a mile away and cut through it quickly. I struggle with the love part. Not the friendship or the respect, but the kind of love that softens the sharpness of tone that the truth can sometimes wield. The truth hurts because usually the time someone needs to hear truth the most is when they're living blindly oblivious to it.

After our small group tonight I had to have a hard conversation with a couple that I've known for almost 2 years. The guy called the church one day and got me on the phone and we talked for over an hour about the hard times he was facing. He and his fiancee at the time came to our group a few weeks later and they've been faithful ever since. They're married now and have a hard marriage. They both bring baggage from previous marriages and hard life issues, and they have a hard time unpacking it.

Before I went to group, I prayed that God would guide my words tonight. We were talking about the role of men and women in marriage, and the couple's baggage was there in the room again, and I felt like I should address it with them. It was a hard conversation before it ever began. How do you gently reveal blindspots? How do you help someone see something that's glaring to everyone else, but blissfully dark to them?

So we went outside and had the conversation in private. I talked with Natalie afterward and I think that what I said to them was truth.

I'm not sure that what I said to them was said with love.

I believe in hard conversations. I think the Church is weakened when we shy away from helping others see the things that are killing them. But tonight I realized, again, why the love part is so important. Without love, words are clanging cymbals; obnoxious noise and meaningless syllables strung together. My friends may have heard truthful words tonight, but I don't know that those words will ever find their place. Love makes the hard truth land gently, so it grows.

Truth is easy to spot, and pointing it out is a cheap gift. Speaking the truth in love is the measure of maturity because it means that the truth spoken is for the benefit of the other party, not simply for the benefit of being right. On some level, my heart was and is to see my friends have a better marriage than they can imagine. But I fear that the truth destroyed tonight, rather than building up.

Personally, this is a lesson hard learned. I've made this mistake before, even recently to much the same result as this time. Culturally, I think this is a balance that I want the Church to wrestle with more publicly and honestly. Like I said before, I think the Church needs to have the hard conversations with the culture, and I think we need to have the hard conversations with ourselves. But the greatest command is not to tell truth. The greatest command is to love. The lines are blurry, because love expects the best and has an obligation to the loved one to help them realize the best. But I've seen the truth spoken in love, and I've seen the miraculous results it brings.

I hope I have the opportunity to make it up to my friends. I hope I have the opportunity to speak love into their lives. I hope that as they see that love, they hear the truth as well.

It's wet again: When the north moves down and the west moves over

2007-03-30T14:24:00.000-05:00

For the time being, while our offices are under construction, my desk is situated next to an ancient looking white bordered window carved into a red wall. My new office won't have an outside window (or any window at all) so I'm soaking in all the sights and sounds I can while I've got it.

My window looks out over the deck of River City's youth building. Surrounded by oaks and laurels and mulch filled beds of greens and colors bordering the asphalt slab filled to capacity on Sunday's by cars and bikes and scuttling feet, my perspective affords me a view of the corner of the patio cover and the trees beyond. On a day like today, when the downpours range from non-existent to torrential I realize how much I enjoy grey days.

I've always thought that I'd love to live in the Pacific Northwest. Several years ago I was within days of moving up to live with several friends who had relocated there. I couldn't scrounge up the airfare/gas money to get there, and soon enough I abandoned the thought. It all worked out perfectly. Had I moved there, I would have missed all the things that have rolled my way since then. I don't think of it as an opportunity lost, I think of it more like a road not taken.

So when the grey days roll down I start to wonder if I could have taken the Northwestern greyness. Whenever a few rain days are strung together I wait to see if the blues roll in. They never do. I just don't mind the rain. Honestly I wish it would rain more often.

Part of me wonders recently if the moments spent looking out the window and thinking of places far away is the rearing up of the wanderer in me. I've never been in a state of homeostasis for this long. It seems I've got restlessness in the deepest parts of me. Maybe it's (relative) youth, maybe it's laziness, or maybe it's something different that defies labels. It just seems that when I sit still for too long, I start to twitch.

So here's to rainy days and being where you are at the present moment. Billy Joel says, "the good ol' days weren't always good and tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems." In between both of the hypothetical yesterday's and tomorrow's is right now. It's all you've got. Make it sweet.

A Toast to Being Poured Out: the optimism of half emptiness

2007-03-26T17:27:00.000-05:00

I started reading Augustines Confessions. Mostly because it's a classic and I think there's great value in reading books that have been continually published for 1500 years. As much as I"m intrigued and excited at the prospect of tackling a book like this, I fear that there's part of me that's hoping this will be the silver bullet that slays the dragon of emptiness. But all the while there's this sneaking knowledge that there's no shortcut to true fullness. You can't hurry it. Sometimes when I'm in a hurry to make a bottle for Jackson (usually in the wee hours of the morning) I turn the faucet on full blast and let the water jet into the bottle. Typically what I find when I pull the bottle away is that it's mostly just bubbles, and I have to go back for a second round. The bottle's not full because I didn't let it fill properly.

Those are the little lessons in life that will sneak by if you're not watching for them. I think it's the very process of learning how to slow down and see them that makes fullness happen. I won't be filled instantlyby reading a book, by saying the right prayer, or by doing the good deeds that pop into my head. I can only hope to be filled bit by bit as I learn to take life as it comes. And it comes slowly, and it fills slowly.

The other thing about being filled, is that I'm not starting from empty. I think if I were simply an empty vessel, I'd recognize the little increases and be satisfied. I think more frustrating is the process of unfilling, because that can't be done hastily either. I've got 30 years of habits and reactions to contend with, each one needing to systematically and intentionally unlearned. My frustrations aren't so much that I can't pray for 5 hours at a time or fast for weeks on end, my frustration is that I can't control my temper or manage my money as well as I'd like. The unlearning is the hardest part.

Jesus said that people don't pour new wine into old bottles because the old bottles would break and you'd lose all the wine (He said wineskins, but I don't have any wineskins). You have to get a new bottle for the new wine. This new life that He has for me can't just be superimposed on my old lifestyle. The venerable Chris Coggins used to say "if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got."

So I raise my glass to the process of unlearning. May we enjoy the moments as our empty glasses become full again.

For one or both of us? You be the judge. Or I will. If that's alright with you.

2006-12-15T16:02:00.000-06:00

Start. Stop. Start. Stop. Great enthusiasm. Great apathy. Blog after blog after blog. Silence. It's the continuing saga of a would-be writer, I guess. I used to always say that I wanted to write a book. I had a very wise and slightly cynical friend of mine tell me emphatically that I didn't, in fact, want to write a book but rather to have written a book. Good call. It's like playing the guitar or getting in shape. I probably don't really desire to do either of those things, but I sure would like to be on the other end of the process of having done them.

But there's a lot in life that's like that. I don't want to work on my marriage, I want to have a great one. I don't want to feed the dog, but I sure do want the dog to be healthy and active. It's a trade off of sorts, although in the long run, probably not much of one.

It's a well worn cliche that life is a journey and the journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step and if you shoot for nothing you'll eventually hit it and all kinds of other "here and there" sayings that are locked and lost into our psyche. When I used to go see Phish all over the country, the travel was as much a part of the experience as anything. I remember driving across the country to the southern tip of Florida for the millenium. 12 folks in an RV for 10 days. Good times had as we sailed across the southern states taking in the scenes and drinking in the milestones... New Orleans, the mighty Mississip, the everglades... all regal in their splendor, and still only a stop on the way. The destination, had I been beamed from here to there, would have been great, but getting there and getting back are as intricately woven into the fabric of the experience as the experience itself.

Like I said, well worn and much travelled roads talking about the necessity of enjoying the road. But I started thinking about the inconsistency in my blogging. I haven't been motivated by them much. In fact, often times I read the blogs of my well spoken, well thought out friends and wish after wish that I could come up with such wonderful ideas and present them so clearly.

Jealousy is an ugly thing, and a dish best served to someone else.

And at the end of my pity party I came to realize that I've been going about this thing all wrong. The things I like best about the blogs of my friends, even the friends that I haven't met, is that it seems like I know them better through what they write. Their little posts and not so little posts and even their lengthy monologues seem real and authentic, like something out of a Garrison Keilor story where you know the characters and sense their personhood before you know their names or their story. The bloggers I love the best are the ones whose thoughts and words flow out of the core of who they are.

I guess I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I'm often self-conscious about writing who I am and what I think about things. It just seems that I feel I have to write for someone else. I don't know why I think that, but I do. So I wondered how my voice (my blog voice that is) would sound different if I wrote like no one was ever going to read it. Someone who knows me well mentioned to me one time that if they only knew me through my blog, they would imagine me much differently than I actually am... or atleast they would imagine me much differently than they currently know me. Especially on issues regarding the Church and faith, they said that the "me" that they know from walking around and talking around is much different from the "me" that is sometimes represented.

Perhaps it's the ease of not having to look at someone face to face, or the safety of my laptop screen between the rest of the world and myself, but I find that's often the case. I'm a bold son of a gun on the instant messenger, I promise you that. But it's funny that they said the same thing about the apostle Paul. I've often remarked about how similar he and I are. Then again, not really.

So anyway, by way of the bullet point, a few clarifications that I feel are in order...

I love the Church. Seriously, it's the best thing going. I think that too often I spend too much time raising questions about the "establishment" and not enough time celebrating the really good parts about it. For the sake of truthful representation, for every Ted Haggard piece I post, I need to post a piece about the Church being the truly restorative and wonderful thing that it is.
I think that globally, per capita, Christians are the most generous, caring, and gracious demographic (so we're just a demographic now?) on the planet. When I think about the AIDS pandemic (it's the right word, but I don't like it. I just had to say that) in Africa, I think (without having any stats) that most of the hospitals and aid comes in one way or another from a Christ-follower with a passion. I think of orphanages, hosptials, engineers, farmers, and a whole host of other functions that Christians fill when they could be doing something else.
I think Christians should do better. The hard part about that sentence is that I don't intend it as a comparison. I don't mean "Christians should do better than [insert demographic label here]" because for the most part, I think Christians do better. What I mean, generally speaking, is that there are still hurts, wounds, and tears out there. It's not that we don't do anything, it's that there's still more to do. I begin by looking in the mirror. Honestly, what keeps me from doing more? In one instance, I could do more financially, except that I am afraid that if I give more, I won't have enough for me. Christ said that wouldn't be the case (Matt 6). This is a real conviction for me, and I think that too often I spend time on this conviction without mentioning the first two convictions.

Every faith step I take leads me to another. That's the journey metaphor. If life is a journey, then it doesn't end. When I stop taking steps, then I stop being on a journey and start being at a destination. That's why I say the Church can do more. Bill Hybels often says that the Church is the hope of the world. I couldn't agree more. As far as Christians go, I'm fat and lazy. The only reason I say that is because when I close my eyes and dream, I know that I'm not yet where I should be or even where I could be. When I realize that, I'm not defeated or deflated, I'm motivated. I hear the voice of Father calling me forward again. It's uncomfortable and the more of "me" that I find, the more I realize that I want more of Christ.

So I'm grateful to be a part of something so amazing. It takes my breath away every time I hear about someone taking a first step or another step in faith. It takes my breath away because I can't think of one single time in my life where I've heard someone take a step of faith that cost them something and come back saying it wasn't worth it. Instead, I hear them talk about the abundance they found in their lack, the strength they found in their weakness, and sufficiency of grace.

Father, thank you for your Church. Thank you that you have given me a place. Who am I that you would consider me? Father, let your name find every ounce of glory that it is worth. Let your people move ever onward under your guidance and leadership. Let your Kingdom come, on earth as it is in Heaven. Amen.

Haggard Evangelicals

2006-11-06T09:03:00.000-06:00

Another church leader has fallen. Ted Haggard, President of the National Association of Evangelicals, confessed to having sex with a male prostitute and to using methamphetamine while doing it. My thoughts are probably incongruous, sometimes contradictory, and change from minute to minute but here are a few right off the top of my head.

CRAP!! There will undoubtedly be a strong backlash against Haggard, and I think there probably should be. I hate the impending black eye and any rash generalizations that will follow, lumping all "born again's" with Haggard and his association.
Character always leads. I'll bet there was a time when Ted Haggard was an honest, God fearing husband who was doing his best to passionately follow God. There were probably little character issues that he had either dismissed completely or just never took the time to fully crucify. But the pressures of the rise to prominence will tend to squeeze those little character flaws until they become wild fires out of control. A person's character is who he is, so when the person at the top has areas that he hasn't let God touch, those areas will inevitably lead.
Isn't it ironic? Ted Haggard had relations with a male prostitute. I can't think of a group of people in the world who are harsher toward homosexuals than evangelical Christians (at least the public voices of evangelicalism like Pat Robertson, Ted Haggard, et. al. Generally speaking of course). I say ironic, some will say hypocritical. Both are probably right.
Respond like Christ. At this moment, I don't feel very kindly toward Ted Haggard. I feel like he's made the job of advancing the cause of Christ more difficult. But the job of the Church is to be a restorative agent in the world. That means Ted Haggard too. As much as it chides me at this moment, Ted Haggard needs the loving discipline that only the church can offer. I mean discipline in the true biblical sense... not punishment, but training for righteousness. There should be consequences, but we as Christians (evangelical or otherwise) have a responsibility not to crucify Haggard again. If we don't deal with our own propensity toward hate and judgment, we run the risk of landing right where Haggard did. Be careful when you think you stand, lest you fall. We shouldn't defend what he's done, or defend ourselves from public opinion. I think defensiveness has given "us" into a lot of problems. We should quit defending our rights, take up a towel and serve the least of these. Right now that means Ted Haggard. I don't in any way recommend letting him off the hook. I recommend restoration (see 1 Corinthians 5:1-5; 2 Corinthians 2:3-11).
Love Wins. The wake of this story will probably be far and wide. Ted Haggard's actions have relegated him to a notable list of fallen Church leaders with names like Swaggart, Bakker, and King David. But in the end, love wins. We have an opportunity to show the entire world the redemptive power of love. We can love Haggard without condoning what he's done.
Less talk, more action. Personally, I think that as the Church we need to do a lot less talking on the political/public/news junkett scene and a lot more secret loving. 1 Peter 2 reminds us that we are to live such good lives among the people that when they say something bad about us, our lives will be testimonies to Christ's power (paraphrase). Let's not talk so much. Let's not spend so much time telling people what we are for (or more often what we are against) and more time just being for those things.

At the end of this whole thing, I pray that the Church will be moved to silence. They're not listening to what we say, they're watching what we do. We need to apologize and take responsibility for this but then we need to just start doing the things we're supposed to do. Less condemnation, more loving and calling people to follow us to true wholeness in Christ.

Today, I'll cringe a bit if I have to answer the question about whether or not I'm an "evangelical." My response probably won't be much different today than it would have been a few weeks ago, but there will be the looming question in my mind about whether or not I'm being pigeon holed. But such is life as a follower of Jesus. Some will misunderstand and others won't care. But the lesson I hope I take away from this whole thing is that I don't want to defend anyone, least of all myself, with words. I want my life to be an example, so that people who want to pigeon hole evangelicals will have a harder time doing it because of the kind of life I lead. Then I want to boldly and unapologetically call Christians to do the same. We can play a part in making sure nothing like this happens again, if we will ruthlessly deal with those "little" things that become consuming drives, and if we challenge those in our lives (not the general masses, but those who have given me the right to speak into their lives) to live the same way.

I'll be praying for Ted Haggard today. I hope you will too.

Moving right along...

2006-10-25T23:08:00.000-05:00

I have to be careful. I began my last blog with a physics formula, so I had to do a heart check for self-seriousitis. I knew it first because I'm a language guy not a physicist... and I had to go digging to find the momentum formula. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't posturing.

More than anything I'm wrestling with the "so what" of my monologues on inertia and momentum. Always wrestling with the tendency to live in my own little brain-dom, I occasionally have to come down to earth and figure out what the freak I'm talking about and how it relates to the real world.

I think I'm getting a grip on this one. We have to keep moving. I know that sounds simplistic or boring or whatever... in fact I can hardly believe that's the best I came up with... but I think it's the secret to life. Keep going. But don't just keep moving, keep moving well. Whatever little thing that you feel was a God-honoring thing today, do more of that tomorrow. But don't do it like it's some formulaic "rubbing of the bottle so the geenie shows up," do it because what made you recognize that you had a God moment was God. That means that He found a way to communicate something, and you found a way to pick it up and actually take a step in the right direction.

The implications of that are bigger than I've ever really wrestled with I think. Because if I had wrestled with it, I think I would have much more momentum. I'm still pretty caught up in seeing the grand ME, and attributing most of what happens in the universe in some way to me or mine. George Harrison said, "All I can hear I, Me, Mine..."

But tucked away in a phone call or an encouraging e-mail or a wave to someone in the store is something that's outside of myself beacause it's not about myself. Those moments are the stuff of momentum. Instead I rush off to do my next thing my way and forget to savor the scent of God in the chance meeting or the hand lent to a stranger.

Unfortunately, too many times the idea of momentum in my life comes down to sin management. To be a better Christian I must stop being a sinner. Man. That's a tall order. But what if the mouth speaks out of the overflow of the heart, and what if my heart will be where my treasure is so what if I start giving of what's most important (ME) to someone or something else and watch my heart and my mouth follow? If I start putting some of my valuable time and energy into others, we'll soon see if my life won't follow suit, won't we? What if rather than simply focusing on tearing down the flesh that keeps me from the Spirit, I spend more time trying to build up all those spiritual moments where God rages in me and I sense for a moment the reality of eternity and the opportunity I have to run for it... and the mandate to run well.

The good southern baptist legalist in me want to clarify and say that I'm not being soft on sin (I guess I just did) but right now I don't think I want to say that. My every struggle with sin lets me know that no matter how hard I want to be, I'm soft. Sin beats me too often. So maybe I'm not the guy who needs to fight sin because too often I don't do a very good job of it. Maybe instead I need to spend time and buy lunch for the Guy in me thats bigger than my sin and let Him fight for me.

Momentum is motion. If you can't gain freedom by trying to stop something, then gain freedom through momentum. Go do something. Keep moving. Walk on. Go make a disciple, and try to show them how it's done by doing it yourself. What an expriement that would be, eh?

Momentum in Spiritual Formation: The prospect of someday

2006-10-24T16:23:00.000-05:00

P = mv

Momentum equals mass times velocity.

Spiritual formation begins with halting my trajectory toward destruction. If following Christ is motion based on my new identity in Christ, we must first stop moving in the direction defined by my old identity in myself. Basically, stop doing the things I have always done. The problem is that at the moment I start following Christ, I've been moving in a direction, and the law of inertia tells me that I'll continue moving in that direction until something stops me. I think recognition of my direction is a major part. When I begin to recognize the thoughts and attitudes that keep me moving in a direction away from Christ, I can begin to halt the spiritual inertia that keeps me from being the raging Christ follower that I so desperately long to be.

So let's assume for a second that I've stopped my spiritual inertia that was leading me toward trouble (big assumption). Simply stopping is no good, because (as I said before) I'm still left among the rubble and ruin that my old life created. Not to mention that I'm still in a state of bad inertia, because I'm simply not moving. Following Christ implies motion, or a new sort of inertia.

So let's further assume that I've begun the journey of following Christ well. I've recognized the faulty thought patterns that have led to faulty behaviors and I'm sputtering down the road toward "the healthy Christian life." (I don't like that phrase, it sounds too trite and canned, but go with me). This is the kind of spiritual inertia frequently referred to as "the camp high." Back from a mission trip or a retreat, and I'm ready to lay down my life for the movement. My life, marriage, family, home, work, and thought life is going to be different. Or is it?

Where the camp high (or any emotional response) leaves us wanting is that it fails to sustain itself. The friction of life and responsibility slows progress until it's first stopped, and then picks up the road where it left off.

This is where momentum comes in. Momentum is what you get when mass is moving in a direction. It's momentum that makes our initial spiritual inertia so difficult to break. The silver lining is that spiritual momentum in a God-ward direction can be equally as difficult to break.

Mass. Size, substance, weight, density... All the components of the substance of what we are. I think of people with spiritual mass as "deep" people. They always have an interesting take on what God is doing. They're unshaken by the circumstances and situations in life. There's a calm about their demeanor, because the weight (rock) they are tethered too isn't easily moved. It's big. It's got mass.

Velocity. Speed in a given direction. Speed is important. Like Ricky Bobby, "I wanna go fast!" Have you ever known someone who always seems to have a fresh insight from God? Speedy spiritualists seem to be hyper-tuned to God around them. They're receptive to God whispers, so they can move fast and seem to be ahead of the curve. Direction may be the key term here. I've known frantic people who are always chasing something, and never chasing the same thing two days in a row. People with spiritual direction know where they're going and they're able to walk toward it most days in an intentional and direct path.

Momentum. It's not enough to simply get started. It's important to get the whole thing moving somewhere worth going. The camp high becomes a spiritual thing to marvel at when it continues beyond the ecstasy of the experience and into the reality of every day. As they move, the substance of what they are picks up speed toward their destination. Spiritual momentum is a beautiful thing, because it looks like a life in order.

The parable of the sower speaks to momentum, and frankly it drives me crazy sometimes. I hate to see the seeds in my life fall on rocky soil or among the thorns. I'm tangled up in life and not able to break free to run forward with all that I am toward a God ready and waiting to receive me. I build momentum when I begin the tedious work of digging out my reservoir. The spiritual disciplines that I love to hate help me find the stillness and silence that I need to recognize God's voice. I gain spiritual girth when I replace the flab of self with the muscle of my identification with Christ. I pick up speed as the decisions and habits become ingrained and instinctive. My direction remains firm as the weight of who I am becoming moves faster and faster.

When it's so difficult to build momentum in ourselves, how do we call those around us to do what we've not done well? I think about my small group. Most of them are relatively fresh in their journey, and they frequenly find great fits of energy squelched by an energy bill that's larger than they expected or a particularly bad day with their kids. We talk of faithfulness and continuing the path toward where they are going, reassuring them that the stuff of life is building a depth and a faith that can sustain them. But what do we put in their hands? What girth can we impart to them to help them carry forward, even if it's simply rumblin' bumblin' stumblin' forward. How do communities of like minded people become transformed by new momentum?

Orginizationally speaking, that's really hard to do. Relationally speaking, there is hope. I have to be willing to lean in and lend whatever measley girth to the process. I'll get dirty when I do that, because many times the problems aren't mine and the journey is one that I specifically and decidedly wouldn't have chosen. The Church is never more alive than at these times. The paradigm that crashes the whole thing to the ground is the framework of individualism. The fact that I see the problems of others as the problems of "others" means that I'll always be limited to whatever weight or velocity I can muster. But the context of lives lived together on purpose pours a heavenly light into the shadows of difficulty that I always wrestle with. Maybe the first inertia I have to set out to break is the movement of individualism. Two is greater than one. In a friendship, the mass is automatically doubled. Momentum builds. And you can't program it. You have to choose it. We as the Church have to go there first, and grab as many others as we can possibly get our mits on. Those are the important decisions, and they are every decision. Spiritual momentum is made up of the mundane and commonplace choices that I make. To bring or not to bring... that is the question

Inertia and Spiritual formation: What I am is not what I will be

2006-10-15T10:03:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking a lot about inertia lately. Inertia says that an object in motion will continue in motion until acted upon by an outside force. Objects at rest will do the same. As a spiritual principle... I'll continue to do what I've always done unless something stops me. I don't have to look very far to see this reality. My habits, thoughts, and reactions are the same as they used to be, and will remain so until something changes them. My defeats come from inertia. Forward motion is only stopped by a greater force in an opposite direction. Faith says that the outside force is God through the Holy Spirit. There is a new motion in Christ. There is not simply new motion - some sort of pauper in prince's clothing thing - I am a new thing all together. But this new thing is bearing old fruit because I forgot to get started in the right direction. There's the same old inertia moving this brand new thing.

Side note: I think that's why mission is such a vital part of spiritual formation. Paul writes that you who have used your hands to steal should use your hands to build. That's redemption. That's opposite inertia.

Side note 2: That's why disciplines work. They are inertia breakers. Silence stops the noise and lets you hear the voices that compel you. Solitude removes the external pressures so that God's internal pressure can move you forward. On and on through the disciplines. They help stop what is steaming ahead and create the surface area in my life for God to stop the motion.

We aren't simply physical beings. We are animated by our souls. Our souls are known as they manifest themselves through our thoughts, which manifest themselves in action (see Dallas Willards Renovation of the Heart for a more thorough discussion of the soul). As our thoughts are altered, so will our lives be altered. The first place inertia must be addressed is in the mind. Be transformed by the renewing of the mind. Let your new life be manifested by a new way of thinking.

As a human, I'm prone to addictions and compulsions of all kinds. I am always looking for new ways to tether myself to something. These are the substances of my intertia... the things that keep me moving in a direction. Consider inertia in such areas as my cynicism. The reason I continue in a cynical frame of mind is because when I see an opportunity to scoff, my mind dwells on it until it becomes as "real" as my hands or feet. What started in my brain finds its fulfillment only after I've given permission to it in my thoughts. I've lingered with the thought because that's what I've always done. Inertia. It's also why the scripture tells us to think on things that are right, pure, noble, and true. Those things are intertia breakers. They're also outside of the scope of my powers. They are totally God. The power in me that is able to break my destructive inertia is the presence of God. God not only stops my forward motion, He erases the tracks in the sand. Where I am is a product of where I've been, but it no longer has to be the trajectory that defines where I am going.

How, then, do I become less cynical (for instance)? Well, first off I have to stop moving in the direction of cynicism. Practically, that means staying away from places, things, and people that reinforce that. It also means not going to the place in me where "the cynic" calls home and makes his base of operations. Don't linger in the place of temptation because the slightest move begins or continues inertia (that's a discussion of momentum... another topic of relevance I think). That stops inertia, but it leaves me in the place I am, and that's no good. Where I am is among the wreckage I've created by going to that place. Reminders are everwhere, and they have already proven big enough to get me moving the wrong way again. So I can't just stop inertia, I must reverse it.

That's when discipleship happens. When I stop following the drives of my old self, I can begin following Christ. Practically that means replacing the parts that drove me to be cynical with the things that drive me to Christ. The foibles of the foolish or requests made with tearful emotional pleas are opportunities for cynicism, but if I replace those with a move to prayer, then I'm on the road to breaking inertia. Over time inertia will begin moving the other way. To continue on and pick up speed in this new direction moves us into the realm of momentum, which is perhaps the next discipleship principle.

As for now, I'm setting about the process of breaking inertia. Thomas Merton prayed, "Justify my soul, O God, but also from your fountains fill my will with Fire. Shine in my mind, although perhaps this means "be darkness to my experience," but occupy my heart with your tremendous life. Let my eyes see nothing in the world but your glory, and let my hands touch nothing that is not for your service. Let my tongue taste no bread that does not strengthen me to praise your great mercy. I will hear your voice and I will hear all harmonies you have created, singing your hymns. Sheeps wool and cotton from the field shall warm me enough that I may live in your service; I will give the rest to your poor. Let me use all things for one sole reason: to find my joy in giving you glory." amen.

The Pure in heart...

2006-09-14T18:25:00.000-05:00

Babies are amazing. My little guy is an education every day of my life. He's a good sleeper, but when he wakes up, he lets us know by doing this little whimper thing. It's not really a cry, but it's definitely not a coo. So he's whimpering to let us know that he's awake and that we need to come peel the diaper off of him and plug him into the bottle so he gets what he needs, but in the middle of all of the angst of babyhood, without breaking the stride and rhythm of his whimper, this huge smile fills all the space between his eyes and his chin. Jackson doesn't just smile, he opens wide to let the joy gush out. It's quite the paradox, the smiling crying baby... but it's regular as clockwork.

Innocence is a beautiful thing. Jackson doesn't get hung up in having to be all one or all the other. The pain and excruciating suffering of sitting in poop with an empty stomach doesn't deter him from expressing the joy of seeing his beloved parents. The whimper lets you know there's still discomfort, but the smile lets you know that there's a perspective that he knows it's all going to be good.I'm an all or nothing kind of guy. When I'm sad... I'm freaking morose. When I'm happy... you can't peel me off the ceiling. Some people call it manic, but we'll let them have their quackish diagnoses. I think there's something to be said for feeling deeply, even if it's feeling deeply sad or deeply pensive or whatever. The only bad part comes when the depth of one feeling is allowed to push out the depth of all other feelings. Why can't sadness and joy coexist? Why can't we see the rainbow on the horizon in the midst of a storm... and why can't we rejoice in it?

The purity of Jackson's heart lets him see the goodness in the midst of whatever struggle or sadness he may be enduring at this particular moment. I think babies inherently see or know God. It's what the image of God looks like before it's marred by social climbing and addiction and fear. In big-people terms, the closest thing I can think of to call it is contentment. Paul said that he could do all things with Christ, and that (maybe most out of context quoted verse in scripture) comes in the midst of talking about being hungry and doing without.I take life too seriously. Or maybe I take myself too seriously. There are serious troubles in this world. There are problems that I can't turn away from, and wouldn't if I could. I love the image of the Kingdom of Light spreading through the darkness. You can't be a Kingdom bearer without looking at the darkness. But neither can you carry the Kingdom if you forget the light. This is where I get caught in cynicism and pessimism. This is where my art and my thoughts and my life start to be lived for other people. If my eye is dark, how great is the darkness within me. But if I can see light in the middle of diaper rash and hunger... then I can see the light everywhere.

Oh, God! What glory there is in your diversity. Father, give me the grace to embrace sadness in the hope of comfort. Help me to embrace darkness with the promise of light. In a world where darkness creeps up from all sides, always threatening to smother hope and faith and love clear my heart of conflicting values and ambitions. Lord let me see you everywhere, and give me the grace to smile. Thank you for reminders of your involvement in our lives. Thank you that you haven't left us alone. Your wrath drives me to your love. Your kindness leads me to repentance. Be glorified Father.

Art & the Church -or- Intelligent design gone latent

2006-09-02T22:13:00.000-05:00

My wife and I always have the conversation about art and music. Typically inspired by the most recent episode of "Making the Band 47: These girls can sweat," one of the caked on girls in short shiny golden shorts says something like, "they just don't let me express my art." To which I snicker and guffaw and say something demeaning about their "art." Natalie chides me for my musical snobbery and closed-minded approach to all things lyrical and melodical.

Aside from the fact that I should generally be kinder and gentler with people on TV, the question is one worth considering... what is art? This has been an evolution in consciousness for me, because for whatever reason, God has given me a heart for the arts. For a long time I considered art... musically speaking... to require something risky or edgy and preferrably created on the spot. I followed Phish around and am still intrinsically moved by the jam band scene. I'm also an extreme jazz novice who can't get enough. I considered these expressions high musical art because of prevalence of the value of creation. At a Phish show, the songs themselves become frameworks for creation. Love it or hate it, the 20 minute "jams" are musical things that are created as you watch and as you listen. That's why a show is so special, because there haven't ever been two of them alike. Sometimes they fail, but sometimes there are moments of transcendence that closely mirror worship (that's another topic for another time).

That led to my first, and broader, definition of what art was. Art was something creative vs. something created (meaning manufactured). That fit nicely with my enjoyment of "the jam" and jazz. But I soon came to realize that there was a lot left out of that. For instance, I love Bob Dylan. I also love Matchbox 20's first 2 albums. More recently I've fallen in love with the music of Anna Nalick. These "pop" musicians defy my first attempt to classify or define art (side note: I realize the absurdity and stupidity of trying to classify something like art. In this sense, I use the words classify and define purely as a means to try and understand why some things definitely seem to be art, and some things definitely don't.). While there was definitely something creative about them, their songs were simple and easy. No modal vamps or tension/release jams.

These artists don't necessarily have improvisation as their hallmark. They are more vocally driven or lyrically driven (in the case of Dylan). That was Natalie's point in the MOTB conversation. A little closer to home, she uses herself as an example. For those who don't know, my wife has a voice like an angel. Seriously, it's one of the most amazing things that I've ever heard, but she doesn't play an instrument and hasn't (yet) written any songs. Which led me to my final (current is a better word) understanding.

For something to be art, it must move you spiritually or emotionally in your soul to a higher place. Art must lift you. It must create a feeling or a mood or an experience. It doesn't necessarily have to make things sunny and easy, but it needs to expand your consciousness in some way and, even if only momentarily, make you see the world differently.

I don't hesitate to call my wife an artist. She moves me when she leads worship. Dylan is an artist because he created his own music, but he tells a story with a conviction (listen to Blood on the Tracks or Blonde on Blonde). He makes you feel something. I listened to Anna Nalick's song "Breathe" literally 50 times in a row, and I could write a post on the deeper meaning of the song. In the case of Making of the Band, the girls had pipes, but there wasn't anything that made me want to live, be, feel, or understand differently. When I hear Matt Singleton talk about hip-hop, I'm hearing a soul that has been challenged by art (for evidence, check this out). Again, the specifics of this are infinitely and eternally open to debate. What moves you and lifts you up is indefinable on global context (maybe), but you get what I'm talking about.

Which brings me to the topic of the Church. Where have all the artists gone? I realize in my last few posts that I've probably been a little bit dogmatic about the Church. I've probably done some finger pointing and wagging, and for that I apologize. I dont' want to leave out names like Dave Crowder, Rob Bell, Erwin McManus, Donald Miller, Kyle Lake, and a whole host of names that I don't yet know but hope to someday stumble upon. But the fact remains, statistically speaking, the Church has largely failed to capture the imagination of the public at large. Could this be due in part to the failure of the Body to produce something so large and beautiful that it has to be wrestled to the ground in sweat and tears, only to be left with a sore hip and a tearful admission that it's bigger than I am.

The saddest part about all of this is that the first glimpse of God we get is of a creative being who is moved by the splendor of His own creation. Isaiah was brought to his knees by the revelation of God. Ezekiel fell to the ground at the mystery of the vision of God. John the Revelator finds himself time and again conveying images of creation caught up in worship at the splendor of its King.

I don't often enough recognize my own failure to be moved by the Artist. So I ask again, where are the artists in the Church? More pointedly, I ask myself, where is the artist in me? Where am I playing my part in channeling the Creator so people will see and be moved, taste and see that He is good. When I listen to Klove, I'm bothered by what's passed off as art. I don't deny that I'm a music snob, not easily impressed. But it burns me to hear another Christian band that sounds just like a cheap knock off of something in the mainstream culture. I honestly think Crowder can be counted among the handful of Christian musical artists. I would put U2 in the same category (digression: I think that U2 has had as much influence in popular music today as anyone in history. The only possible exception I can think of is the Beatles. Possibly.). I think that's why I'm increasingly having to admit my fondness of such Christian hate gatherers as Eminem. While decidedly not Christan, his passion is absolutely contagious. He makes me remember that I'm a being capable of feeling and passion and intensity.

In large part, I guess, this is an indictment of myself. I have failed to capture the essence of creativity that's in me. I had a chance today to write something for use in our weekend services. It may have been the most authentic worship I've offered in a long long time. I just don't do it enough. Those expressions get pushed to the back burner in favor of systems and structures. I don't have any problem with the systems and structures. None at all. Honestly. The fault lies within me. I am the one created in the image of God, and all that I do should bear that likeness. Art isn't confined to painting or singing or dancing. Life is art, because in every moment there is potential to lift and be lifted. To move and be moved. To create and be created again.

For the Church to be what it was intended to be, its life giving Spirit demands that we return to the artistic. God Himself requires that we settle for nothing less than honest expression, in whatever form it takes - from a Bible study class to a poem to an elders meeting - of the biggness of our God.

The Church is waiting for her artists to arise. Let us all come awake.

Part 5 - What then shall we say?

2006-08-31T11:20:00.000-05:00

If one of the major parts of our translation of Christ and faith to a world that doesn't understand is owning it ourselves, what do we do when we don't own it? More precisely, if I have to wait until I have a perfect (or even nearly perfect) practical understanding of grace or salvation or hearing from God or meditation before I say anything about it, then when will any of us ever say anything at all? Partner that question with the reality that we have been commissioned by Christ to go make disciples, and that Paul implies that people can't become disciples unless they hear the truth and we potentially have a real pickle.

So what then shall we say?

I think we'll all be better off if we START by saying that we don't have half the stuff figured out that we think we do. Our first conversation could start with the phrase, "I'm not an expert, but here's what's happened to me..." and then we're sharing what we do know for certain... our experiences, our stories, the hope that we've found in real life situations. When our discussions begin with our stories, at that point we become experts. And not just experts, but experts in the things that really matter. I don't believe anyone is truly converted by arguments. You may change their mind for a short while, but in the long run you have failed to capture their hearts. Jesus didn't woo Peter, Andrew, James, or John with a theological construct for the Kingdom, He captured them with a vision of a bigger catch. You may not like my theology and we may not agree on one single bit of it, but when I sit down and share with you honestly what I've experienced of God in my life, you may not understand it and you may even have a different explanation for it, but it's my story. If you trust me and you believe I'm a person of integrity and sound mind, you will have to wrestle with my story and square it up with the person that you know me to be.

Again, it comes down to the person that I am. I don't expect someone's translation to be perfect. I expect it to be authentic, meaning that I expect it to be honest and born out of a true experience. I don't want to know what you believe about God, I want to know who God is to you. That's translation that can't be argued with. It can be rejected, but it can't be argued with.

So back again to the point of articulating or translating that which we're not experts in (sorry for the digression). I guess the answer is simple. Don't pretend to know more than you know. Offer what you understand, or what you've read, or what you've heard... but don't offer it dogmatically. Because whatever the words you're saying, when you speak without love... you're not translating Christ... no matter the words you say. Say what you know, share your convictions with conviction, challenge, stretch, and face up to people. But remember that the truest translation of what you believe doesn't come out of your mouth. It comes out of your life. Then, when all the discussion is done (or better yet, before it even gets started) go get coffee together or go get a meal together or go hit golf balls together. Before you talk about eternal security or open theism, talk about their family or their job or their bowling score. Then they won't be a dialectical adversary, they will be a real person with a real context and a real story. Then they'll feel the comfort to ask you what sanctification means... and you'll feel comfortable telling them that your'e not really sure. You'll feel comfortable because they're you're friend. And friends can be open and transparent and real with eachother. And that's the truest, realest, most faithful translation of the Godhead that I could imagine.

But don't stop speaking and cop it out to not understanding. Go get understanding. If you don't know God well enough to speak about Him, they by all means find someone who does and stick with them. Not so that you can pick up the lingo, but so that you can be in a place with someone who has experienced Him. When you touch Him and taste Him and feel Him all over you... then you will have something to speak of. When He has met you in your darkness... you will speak of the light with conviction. When He has mended your brokenness... then your discussion of wholeness has authority. But you won't need to wield that authority, because you'll understand both the brokenness and the wholeness... and your life will have found perfect and complete redemption. Then the Kingdom will be within you.

So here's to long conversations and faithful interpretations in life. May your life speak more loudly and more clearly than any words you ever utter. May your speech and your life point faithfully and truly at the One you hope to find. May your steps be your own, and may they tread new ground. May your risks pay off... if not always in success, in a great story eagerly shared. May the circle of ones you love be forever expanding. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May He make His face to shine upon you. Feel the Love

Part 4 - Your actions are speaking so loudly, I can't hear what you're saying

2006-08-30T12:37:00.000-05:00

Translation means making sense of words that I understand for others who don't understand. Generally we speak of translation as going from one language to another. In learning to "speak" Christian to a world that doesn't understand it, the highest principle of translation is pointing to Christ and giving our words a context that makes their meaning totally understandable.

The problem is that I know not of what I speak.

Honestly, "Christianese" has become such a part of our Christian subculture that when we talk about grace, forgiveness, hearing the Lord, salvation, holiness... we're talking about what we don't really understand. By "really understand" I mean practically understand. That's why we don't make much sense to the world around us. We're talking about things we don't know.

I'm a language guy. If I were to go sit in a doctoral level math class of some sort, I would be able to take notes and pick up some words. I could probably then go to a dictionary somewhere and find definitions of those words and know their meanings. But it would take about 11 seconds in conversation for someone to realize that I don't know what in the world I'm talking about.

That's where we as Christians lose our credibility. Have you ever been in a conversation with someone who is trying to use words they don't really know? They'll toss in a nice $5 word, but they use it in an awkward way? Or when you talk to someone about baseball and they say something that let's you know they're really stretching? What's your first thought? You may not write them off or dismiss them totally, but you certainly wonder why it is that they're going out on a limb to sound like they know what they obviously don't.

There's no greater thing that needs faithful translation that issues of faith. There are no more important words that we could convey than grace, community, salvation, hope. The problem is that we've talked and even shouted these words with such reckless fury without making sure that we know what we're talking about. If we want to be faithful translators of grace... we must first be people of grace.

But none of that will become possible until I'm willing to first own up to the fact that there's a disconnect in what I say and what I am. Until my life is integrated, and salvation means that I've truly been saved from the things that are killing me, when I talk about it to someone else, they won't get it. The stories of people who have tried God and found Him wanting is an indictment not on God, but on my failure to embrace Him fully. I quote Galatians 2:20 about being crucified with Christ before going to the cross. So those outside the Church misunderstand what God asks of us.

We gather in communities which are scripturally mandated to bear one anothers burdens, and we divide along understandings of gifts and inspiration and the fate of those whose lives fail to bear fruit, and we point at the other camps and call them wrong. Then we "witness" to people about God's desire to bring them into families and place them in community when they see our communities as weekday programs where we gather with people who dress the same and talk the same and make the same income as we do. We talk about the mission in the context of weekend trips that make us feel like we've played our part in the game, but we don't turn off our phones so that we don't miss the opportunity to take another step on the ladder ever upward.

I'm also always aware of the plank in my own eye. It's funny that my job... and by that I mean my source of income... is to build communities for the sake of spiritual formation. Yet I am feeling the pangs of brokenness because I know not of what I speak.

I think I need to stop talking about translating for a minute... and starting understanding the things that I'm hoping to convey. Maybe then I won't have to say anything. I believe in the Church. More precisely, I believe in the Spirit which quickens the Church. I don't hope for perfection in the Body, because then I couldn't be a part of it. But I do hope for integrity. I hope for the gentle gradual clensing of the cultural muck and grime that I've picked up as part of a global organization that's sometimes political and sometimes ethical but always portraying something about the God that's called me out of where I was and into something beautiful.

My mandate to translate is as strong today as it was on the day that God captured me. But it has to begin by embodying the message that won my heart. On the day that God woke me up, I didn't need to hear about Grace. I was in the middle of it. May my translation begin by first taking up the towel and washing the feet of those around me.

Chapter 5 - Then should we be silent?

Part 3 -

2006-08-24T19:19:00.000-05:00

What do we do when two different people come to the table with conflicting translations of the same idea or word? Is there an objective test to determine which translation is the best available?

First of all, the word "objective" is a bit scary, especially when it's dealing with language. Language is an art. It's not easily quantifiable. It's fluid, in motion, changing, dancing, evolving. That's why Shakespeare can be such a daunting task... the words he said aren't the words we would say.

So when it comes to defining words and ideas for the purpose of translation there's no getting around the dilemma of occasionally deciding between two or more conflicting and even contradictory definitions or responses to a certain word or idea. So how do we choose?

...Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them... Matthew 7:20

Jesus equates the legitimacy of false prophet's message with fruit, saying that a good tree can't bear bad fruit and vice versa. For purposes of translation, the measure of a words worth, relevance, importance should be the fruit that the idea or concept will bear when applied. When talking about words or ideas that relate to God the translation that produces the best fruit (result, situation) for the greatest number of people for the greatest amount of time should be accepted as the best translation for a word or idea.

Therefore the greatest definition of grace is not the definition which allows me the freedom to chose my own destruction through my actions, but the definition which takes into consideration the self-destructive choices that I make, and turns those choices into positive results... or good fruit.

The words that we use have immediate implications for every life because before they ever have the opportunity to be translated, they must first be rooted in something "real." If we LIVE a definition that falls short of Christ, we portray a broken and faulty image of the one we follow. The consequence for those outside the church are dire, but the consequences for we who hold those definitions are possibly more dire, because we will face the charge of not being good stewards of what we have been given... a faithful portrayal of Truth in the person of Christ and a Divine Helper in the Holy Spirit.

The point is... what we say matters very much, especially in matters of faith and practice.

As the Church we have been entrusted with the Hope of the world. We have been given the keys to the Kingdom, and we have a resonsibility and a charge to take those keys an unlock every door that stands in the way of people getting to Christ. Paul asks the question, "how will they believe if they do not hear?" The rhetorical answer is that they won't. We're always saying something and what we are saying affects what people are believing. We're always communicating. We believe something about Christ and grace and truth and life, and what we believe is manifested every day of our lives. Christ came and translated God for us in images and stories that fit His time and His culture. His goal was to make God accessible to us. If He didn't speak the language of the people He was trying to reach, His mission would have been a failure. But His message wasn't limited to the words, "greater love has no man than laying his life down for his friends," His message was the fulfillment of that love. In a sense, the words He said were signposts so we would recognize the God He was trying to show us.

I've taken a long time to say that it doesn't matter if we have the most dictionary faithful verbal definition of Christ and the Church and matters of faith if our lives are devoid of the context to process them. The important work of translating what we say (salvation, grace, hope, sanctification, prayer, etc.) is meaningless futility if we don't live the Truth at a level beyond what we say. It must first be in us, before it will ever be intelligible coming from us.

So what are the words that you say that don't have meaning or context in your life, and what translation does that give for the passers by in your life?

Part 4 - Culturally speaking...

Part 2 - Flesh Speaks

2006-08-19T10:11:00.000-05:00

Language is a great tool to help us share the things that mean something to us. Words give us the freedom to express life, love, hope, and myriad other emotions and experiences that fill our lives.

But language isn't perfect. It comes up short. The crazy thing is that it comes up short in different places for different people. Take for instance the word "stewardship." It's not an uncommon word. I'd guess that a good number of high school seniors would have atleast heard the word before. But you may not have the same understanding of "stewardship" that I have. The first time I heard the word, it was related to a fund raising campaign to build a church. Stuffy men we knew from church wanted to help us be good stewards of the money God had given us by helping them to build a fancy new building and parking lot. Never mind the fact that my father had been out of work for a year and we were... struggling. So my first taste of stewardship wasn't a tasty one.

And each of us could tell a story like that whether in the church or out of it, words get mis-shapen and misused and all along the way, beautiful ideas and thoughts crumple and wrinkle from misuse.

That's a sad thing, simply for language sake. But when we're talking about eternal things, it's even more sad because those things really matter.

Grace
Peace
Hope
Love

Each of those words means something, and they probably mean something different to you than they do to me. Atleast in their shades of meaning. These words have eternal implications, so how do I handle them? How can I talk about grace to you if you have no context, no understanding, maybe even no real exposure to the idea of grace as I understand it.

...And the word became fl esh, and dwelt among us... John 1:14

It's important, I thnk, to understand that all ideas and concepts originate with God. I believe that everything has its beginning and finds its fulfillment in God, so Grace & Peace and all the others are His ideas. Even words like hate, darkness, prejudice, and despair are ultimately defined by God or His absence in a place. In order for any of us to even have a hope of getting it, we had to get it from him.

You think it's tough to communicate with someone from a foreign country... try communicating from the divine to the fallen. But God, in His wisdom and love found a way to communicate... to translate if you will, what He was (Grace, Love, Truth, Purity). He put on flesh and moved into the neighborhood (John 1:14 Msg).

Scriptures talk about Christ... image of the invisible God, the exact representation of His being... so many other things that point us to the fact that who Christ was is crucial to our understanding who God is. Christ is the translation.

I think the important thing for me now is that the best way for me to communicate grace to someone who may not understand it... or may think they understand it, but understand differently from me... is to live it. To give it flesh and dwell in places where it can be reckoned with.

That's where the Church has lost a lot of credibility. We talked about love and the poor, but we didn't do anything. Let us first be gracious, then preach grace. Let us first be forgiving, then preach forgiveness. Let us first live with the hope of forever, then talk about hope. Most of all, let us first hunger and thirst after righteousness... then and only then will our lives cause others to hunger and thirst as well.

I'm still wrestling with this idea of translation. So far I think 1) it's not enough to say words to people who may not understand or have any idea what I'm talking about. That's not polite, and it's most certainly not effective. 2) A concept modeled is a concept translated... partly.

Which raises the question... probably for Part 3... if a concept modeled is a concept translated, what happens when two different people act two different ways and both call it the same thing... which is right? Which one has the better translation?

Part One - the words we say and the words we don't

2006-08-17T12:58:00.000-05:00

The doctrinal statement for my church and my denomination state that the word of God is divinely inspired and that the original manuscripts as they were originally writen by the original authors (called autographs) are infallible in all matters that they address. It's interesting that they have to stipulate that the autographs are inspired and infallible. Why the distinction?

Translation.

I'm not the person to give a history of how the scripture has been preserved down through the ages, but it's really an amazing thing to read and understand. From meticulous monks huddled over parchment counting letters and syllables, with seemingly ridiculous rules about ends of lines and ends of pages, and all of that... it's a remarkable thing. It gives me a lot of confidence in reading the Bible that I'm reading what was intended to be written.

But it's not the same. Words don't translate well. The well-worn biblical example of the English word love can be translated by several different greek words with different shades and implications... all of which make a difference. It doesn't render the scripture unreadable or incomprehensible, it simply removes some of the shades of the original language.

That's why language is so important. No bones about it... I'm a language freak. I think language is this amazing gift from God. But like any other gift, it's a stewardship. We have to use it wisely. Another side benefit of my love for language is that I have a very real understanding that language is imperfect. Words aren't enough to convey all the meaning. That's why so much gets all jacked up in e- mails. Language requires a life to give it context. So in effect, we can't be separated from our words, we're all language. We're all speaking, all the time, even when we're not saying anything.

But do the words we say and the lives we lead speak clearly, or do we get lost in translation? This is never more important than when it comes to issues of faith. Matt Singleton asked the question of me, and it forced me to think about it and really take a look at it. The problem is that I grew up in a church culture, so most of the time I'm not even 100% aware of when I use the words that may not be understood.

This is just the beginning. Everything is still loose ends right now. But I want to delve into this more deeply in my brain. I also want to hear all of your thoughts on this issue. When has language (verbal and non-verbal) gotten in the way of understanding God? Think hard, reach deep, let it fly.

Wrecked...

2006-08-12T13:38:00.000-05:00

Have you ever played with a microscope. You know how you have to turn the coarse adjustment knob until the thing under the lens gets somewhat visible, and then there's the fine adjustment knob to bring things into crystal clarity? Yeah. Sometimes life is like that.

Left to its own devices, over long enough time without being touched or tweaked... just out of sheer neglect, I think microscopes will go out of focus. You don't have to do anything, it just happens. In fact, it's the NOT doing anything that makes it happen.

I look back on my past few posts, not so much with shame or guilt, but with sadness and regret because those are days that I won't ever get back. Ever again. They are gone. They no longer exist, they are written on the winds of time. I won't say they were wasted, because they delivered me to this point.

This is a point of Coarse adjustment for me. The reason I was frustrated, angry, disillusioned, grouchy... I had sin in my life. There was a time when I would have wanted to soft sell it or make it more palatable or whatever, but not today. Today, in a moment of clarity, I realize all that the stupid, selfish, ridiculous sins in my life have cost me.

They have cost me opportunity. Business people understand opportunity costs. I don't think Christians do enough.

I spent the last 3 days at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit. Say what you will about Willow Creek and the machine and the campus and the seeker sensitive and the church lite and the whatever it is that you may choose to say... my life is in clearer focus now than it was 3 days ago.

The fine adjustments are coming. I know it. I feel it. I believe it. I'm waiting for it. But here's the things, very rough, that I walked away with.

1. He knows me. Don't skip past this, because I did and it is important. Jesus is more than your savior, He's more than your leader, He's more than a cosmic guide. He knows you. Intimitely.

2. People are all that matter. That's it. Not my program, job, spiritual gift, anything else if it doesn't point to, edify, and make people better.

3. People are best when they know God.

That's all. Even as I read it, it doesn't seem earth shattering. Except that the implications for what I do with my minutes hinges on how well I center my life around those truths and others like them.

If I give my life to building His Kingdom, then my minutes and my life will mean something. If I give it to anything else. It is a wasted moment that I will never get back.

The Kingdom of God is within me.

The Kingdom of God within me finds its best, most beautiful, most glorious, most God honoring manifestation when it is given completely, totally, sacrificially, and wholly to those who don't know Him.

I am wrecked for the way that I've ordered my life around the other things.

God forgive me for my wasted moments. Give me the grace to stand above the sin that has held me down. Give me your eyes for the people who don't know you yet. Let me live in the constant and complete awareness that where I am... you are there. And you know me.

2006-08-03T17:33:00.000-05:00

Alright... so my last post may have been a bit reactionary and whiny. It was morning and I"m not a morning person. So I don't want to diminish some of the ideas, but maybe looking back I wish I was a little bit less whimpery.

Still the idea is one that I can't get away from. Looking back over the past few months, it's been there... God is not defined by my definitions. God is. Steven Curtis Chapman said God is God and I am not. There's a lot of truth in that little statment. But it's a lifetime of learning it.

I guess now that I'm several hours removed from the frustration, I see that the discovery of God is in the wrestling of Jacob, and it's in the facing of the scary man outside of Jericho. Without facing that guy, we never get to see God.

It's the different facets of God (if that's a good word for this). We meditate on the 23 Psalm and love to get the pastoral image of Father, making me to lie down in green pastures. The God who ordered Saul to slay every one of the Amalekites including animals, women, and children is not a God that I constantly seek out in my quiet times.

But it's the same God. I can't choose which God I follow. I have to take Him or leave Him. It's the taking that's tough. Because the comfort that comes in the nestling arms of my very big Father finds fulfillment and ultimate realization in the fiery eyed God who seeks out and destroys those things that try to kill me. As God loves me and holds me, He is violently opposed to what would steal, kill, and destroy me.

"The wages of sin is death."

Yeppers. Those things that kill me are in me, and they are me. That's why sometimes I feel like an object of wrath. That's why I'm so uncomfortable with the blazen eyes of the Lord of Hosts. Because those eyes are fixed at the things in me that are killing me and rotting me from the inside.

Honestly, I hate sin. I hate what it does to me, I hate the inherent distance that it brings my relationship with Father, and I hate that it's all over me and so many times I feel powerless to change the things I hate most. It's an ugly thing.

It's easy for me to focus on topics of conversation and teaching like advancing the Kingdom. It's difficult to realize that the Kingdom is within me. What areas of my life is the Kingdom advancing in me? It's easy for me to focus on a mission of salvation, of bringing light into dark places. It's difficult to face the dark places in me. What areas of my life are increasingly being changed by the light?

I see the effects of sin in my life all the time. I see it in the way I relate to my wife, my coworkers, my favorite people in the world. I smell the stench of death in people at my church whose marriages are being ripped apart by abuse - physical, emotional, and substance. But the hesitancy to face up to that in my own life translates neatly into my hesitancy to face up to that in those who have allowed me to have some small role of influence in their lives. I fear legalism. I fear the label of hypocrite. I fear that they'll turn in anger and ask me what right I have to look into their lives when my own life bears the scars.

But more than anything, I think, I fear dying spiritually because I was scared to face those things in me. I fear seeing people live lives of meaningless fritter because I never held their hand as they walked away from death. I fear living a life where no one points out the marks of decay in my own life, and helps carry me away from the grave yard.

Jacob wrestled with an angel, earned a limp, and became the father of a people. Joshua met a warrior who he feared, and led a triumphant band of warriors into the promised land. There's power in the battle. Fight on.

GRRRRRRRRRROWL

2006-08-03T09:36:00.000-05:00

I have moments where I want to just throw things in frustration. I hesitate to say the word anger because that word has implications that my self-control fruit is less than developed and certainly a week or two short of ripeness... but I guess the fruit never lies.

You know the story where Jacob wrestles with the angel and gets his hip broken and ends up limping for the rest of his life? I wonder what was going on in his brain during the wrestling match? I wonder if there was a moment when he didn't think he was going to make it. I wonder how it started. Did the angel just walk up, tap him on the shoulder, and sucker punch him? Was it a giant bear hug tackle from behind?

What about the time when Joshua was standing outside the Jericho walls and this fearsome guy comes and stands by him. Joshua freaks out because the guy is obviously intimidating and scary, probably 6'5" about 260, wearing the full battle gear with a scowl on his face. Joshua's the one with the faith right? He and his partner Caleb brought back the grapes on a staff 40 years earlier and told the whole tribe of Israel that they could take the land. Then all of a sudden here's this guy who might make him reconsider. Joshua asks the question... "tell me sir, are you with us or are you with them?"

I hate it that I'm not able to reconcile in my brain that the guy I'm wrestling with carries a blessing, or the scary dude standing over my shoulder is really an angel in the army of the God that I'm trying to follow. It bothers me that I don't recognize the places and the ways that He shows up. It bothers me that sometimes all I want is a blessing and instead I get a wrestling match. When I feel like I'm doing the thing that God wants me to do, the only people I seem to see are the dudes whose armor is thicker than mine, whose muscles are more well developed than mine, and whose glare is more convincing than mine.

I have this sense that the Kingdom of God is supposed to be the most powerful force on the planet, but my own flesh and bawdy desires regularly wrestle it to the ground and pin it for a 3 count. The disciples wanted Jesus to restore the Kingdom of Israel. They wanted him to set up a literal throne in a literal place with the help of literal angels. They wanted a show of power, force, might. They wanted demonstration. They got Christ, and Him crucified. I don't know how to talk about that. I don't know how to make that the guiding principle in my life. I don't know how to find comfort in a God who wrestles with His chosen ones, leaving them limping.

Joshua didn't recognize God at Jericho, but the walls still fell. When Jacob woke up after his stairway dream, he said, "Surely the Lord was in this place and I didn't know it." Atleast I'm not the only one. Sometimes it feels like a party game to find God in all the cute little places in the world. Sometimes I just have to admit that I just don't recognize the landscape.

Part of me looks at these times and finds frustration that God doesn't work in the formulaic ways that I want Him too. That would be an easier list to keep, and an easier way for me to trudge forward on my own. The other part of me has the heartfelt conviction that I don't want a God who always meets my expectations. I don't want to be God, because I could never surprise me in the ways that He does. I could never find endless ways to turn wrestling matches into blessings, and holy fear into a Kingdom conquest. Perhaps it time that I take my messiah fantasies to the cross and just listen. That would be a nice change of pace.

Life at the bottom - or - the reality of deity as discovered in the trenches

2006-07-23T12:01:00.000-05:00

Avalanches begin slowly, a slight downward shift, perhaps in a single snowflake. But it presses and nudges the flakes immediately around it, until they too are in motion. Almost imperceptibly then, mountains crumble into the plain and the landscape is changed.

So it is with me and spirituality. Great motions of realization are often precipitated by barely perceptible nudges against the hidden parts of me. I haven't written here much, mostly because it didn't seem like I had much to say. I don't want to get locked into always having to have "spiritually" minded posts, but I'm firmly convinced that God is everywhere, so every moment has the potential of revealing the face of our God.

But sometimes the face of God is obscured, covered, hidden, out of sight. It's hard to tell in those moments whether He's hiding or the night is just too black around me or perhaps my eyes have been deceiving me the whole time and the God that I thought I had discovered was not the God who really stood crouching in the shadows.

Here's the doozy for me. I go on for weeks at a time, pretending that things are as they have seemed. I'm the ostrich with my head in the sand, sure that if I continue along in what I've seen and heard before then God will stay the same and be the same and I'll still have Him all figured out. For weeks I'll ignore this nudge in my spirit that says, "you're not seeing Me." I continue on with the trappings of worship or study or connection that used to be filled with life and hope, but are ever waning and losing their ability to move me Godward. But I hold on and grip them as if they were all that was left, all the while God is moving forward into something else.

I also notice that in those times where I'm stuck and God is not, I notice in others first what God eventually ends up showing me. This time is was an authenticity issue. I would sit in church and wonder, "is this real? Are these people 'getting it' or is this a Pavlovian example of conditioned response?"

Today that came home. Am I real, or am I a dog slobbering at the ringing of the bell? In a lot of ways I'm still struggling to reconcile what I'm coming to see and believe with what I was taught to see and believe. There seems to be this widening chasm between where I was and where I am, and it scares the hell out of me to consider the ramifications of that. What I think I've been trying to do was just talk as if I had it figured out, and pretend that I knew what I believed. But that doesn't work.

But even as the chasm expands, I find that my tendency to cast away the past as irrelevant or unimportant isn't healthy or good. It's also interesting to note that I'm much more comfortable with my 'secular' past than I am with my ecclesiastical history.

It feels like the valley. The past few weeks have been hell. Not sure of where I am or who I am or what I'm doing, I sunk in my spirit. Yesterday was a boiling point where I cried out.

God answered

The explanation of how and where and why God met me probably wouldn't make much of an impression on you. I think it's actually a very mundane thing in reality. But in His infinite grace and wisdom, He found a way to connect with me and let me know that even though I'd walked off the path, He knew what I loved, and wanted to share. That was very important. So now I begin/continue this experiment in authenticity. It seems there's another layer of stuff that needs to be peeled away.

In... or Out?

2006-07-19T14:17:00.000-05:00

It's been awhile. It's good to be back.

Things are great. Jackson is sleeping much more recently, which means that mom and dad are too. I still feel like crap, but I think it's clearing up so hopefully we're on the mend.

College group is going really well. We're starting to move past the "I dont' want to say anything in front of these people" phase and into the "I hear what you're saying, but..." phase which really excites me. We're slowly dancing through the Sermon on the Mount, and we've had some great discussions. This week we talked about Jesus saying that unless we have a better righteousness we can't be in the Kingdom. What we came to was that Jesus is the better righteousness... we need HIM!! (Yay Jesus).

What I love is that alot of these students don't just hear the words, they go home and wrestle with what it means. One of the things I tried to point out was that if all of our righteousness is insufficient apart from Jesus, we must be very careful about judging anyone elses righteousness. Instead, we should make our aim to spread love recklessly and fervently as long as we both shall live.

This amazing young lady (Jackie... Hi Jackie) who I'm sad to think about leaving really started to wrestle with the implications of this. What about truth? What about people who believe differently than I do? Whose right? Does it make a difference?

When I read her blog I was encouraged to see how this amazing young woman wrestles with truth, because it matters to her. It's also encouraging to know that she not only wants to know the truth, but she's got her eye on the mission. She brought a guy who she's been friend with for a long time. He's grown up outside the Church and has some real, honest questions. He came and I think he enjoyed it. We certainly enjoyed having him. He's a super sharp guy with a razor wit, a great sense of humor, and a comfortable presence. I hope he comes back.

Alright, so that's all I've got. I think I got out of the practice of this... either that or the heat coupled with a head full of sputum has made my thought process less than linear. Whatever the case... here's to life!

An Epic On the Nature of Man: Readers digest version

2006-07-10T08:52:00.000-05:00

It seems like nobody blogs anymore. It's summer time. I understand. I don't feel like blogging today much either. I'm sick. Everything is sore. I think I have a fever. I want to go to sleep. Until we meet again...

Go... or the fast way to get there

2006-07-07T17:20:00.000-05:00

Here's a revelation for those of you who don't know me, an perhaps the greatest "duh" statement in the history of the spoken word for those who do... I'm an extremely undisciplined person. Really (I mean really in the sense of "truly" and in the sense of "degree").

The sad reality, the absolute truth, and the undeniable fact in the whole matter is that without discipline... I am worthless. Of course of course, I'm somebody to God... He loved me enough to die for me and all that good stuff. Those are all truths that I stake my life on. But it's like my little man Jackson. I love him more than anything in the universe and there's nothing that can change that. But if he's 16 years old and hasnt' disciplined himself to walk or talk or feed himself, it'll be nothing short of mind numbingly sad. Discipline is what makes us able to grow, go deeper, find richness in life that is just below the surface... and way below the surface.

There's this war in my brain though. Part of me wants to think that discipline is the killer of joy and fun. It's like Silas in the Davinci Code - somehow God wants me to feel tremendous amounts of excruciating pain. It's good for me. Builds character.

But on the other side of my brain I realize that training and discipline is good. I used to be a college baseball player. It was hard work. I used to wake up at 5:00 in the morning to run miles after countless miles. Then I'd go to class, only to return to the west Texas sun in the afternoon to run more miles. The goal was to get on the field in crunch time, and it wasn't that the miles run made me more appealing to the coach, or made him like me better... it was that because of the miles I had run, I was in condition to get the job done. The discipline of exercise and fitness allowed me to do what I wanted to do.

One more analogy... A river without banks is a pond. If there are no banks, eventually the water will find it's own level and quit flowing. It becomes stagnant. But when you channel water in a direction, it becomes this amazing force of nature that is literally as unstoppable as any natural thing. The banks give the river its power. Discipline(s) allow me to build "banks" in my life to channel as much of God as He allows me to see and discover. Without discipline, my God experience will be and continue to be one big stagnant pond. It's water alright, but it sure isn't changing the landscape any.

So it is with discipline, or the lack of it in my life. I've spent a good deal of my journey with God waiting for the next mountaintop, or trying to suck every last minute out of it. What I've found is that the mountaintops get shorter and further between. Lately it's felt like the mountain around the Dead Sea...

So tomorrow I'm beginning a fast of Soft Drinks. Namely, no caffeinated, carbonated, or artificially sweetened beverage will not enter my gullet. If I don't die first, I'm sure this will be a great exercise.

My desire is to find God in the crucifixion of my flesh. Paul said, "I have been crucified... and the life I live in the body I live in Christ Jesus." I can quote that verse - name it and claim it and all that - but it's not true for me. It was true for Paul, and in a substitutionary sort of way it's true... but it's not really true. The life I live in the body actually resembles Christ very little sometimes. So this isn't some effort to curry favor with the Big Guy or earn some brownie points through self-mortification. My goal is to strip away something that I rely on, and hopefully to hear God in the absence of me. I read a John Piper book about fasting, and I'll probably read it again (I don't know if I love to hate John Piper or I hate to love him... it's one or the other). So tonight I'm probalby going to go on a soft drink binge... tomorrow I'll be the one with the sugar/aspartame hangover and about 4:00 I'll have the screaming headache that won't go away. We'll see how it goes.

Postmodernism & Willow Creek

2006-07-05T12:07:00.001-05:00

I had a great opportunity to get into a coversation on another blog about Postmodernism in the church. While there were only a few voices at the time, there were some pretty good thoughts put out there. I realized was that there's some misinformation out there about what PM is and what it means to the church... so this isn't by any means an educated rant, it's just a few thoughts that I've picked up and put together. I'd love to hear your thoughts...

First... the term postmodernism is more descriptive of an entire generation of thought & philosophy that's presenting itself. It relates to the Church primarily as the Church takes up the call to reach the generations of people who are growing up with a postmodern mindset (note: a similar shift happened during the enlightenment. Copious amounts of new information caused people to change the way they saw the church, God, and their world. Also, the word "post" is neutral, and simply means after. So this new frame of reference is simply the mindset that is taking shape after the "modern" period. Modern doesn't mean "now.")

So, with postmodern children, teens, and others coming into their own, the church must respond. That's where the term "Emerging Church" comes in handy. This new "postmodern" church is emerging out of the modern church and all that it stood for. Again, post doesn't mean bad any more than a Post Script (P.S.) means that everything that came before it was bad. It simply means that there is something else. So I prefer the term "Emerging Church" with an understanding that my frame of reference and mindset is "postmodern," or somewhere on the scale between thoroughly modern and thoroughly postmodern.

This can all sound like a lot of mumbo jumbo, but there are some very real practical differences. For instance, I would say that the period in church history directly preceeding this one (and indeed, still going in in many ways. There's always going to be overlap) would be characterized by the "seeker sensitive mega-church." Churches like Saddleback, Willow Creek, Northpoint, etc. became intensely focused on mobilizing Christians to reach the lost. There was and is amazing fruit from these churches and indeed this whole mindset. One of the hilights of my year is going to Willow's Leadership Summit. But I digress. These seeker sensitive churches aimed at making worship and God more accessible. They tried to talk more in the language of every man, and create experiences that every man was used to. Their values were excellence, growth, multiplication, etc. The goal of making God accessible was and is a good one. However when people started to think and process life differently, te way to reach "every man" changed.

Results of that goal were that some things that might be deemed offensive were removed. Crosses, a lot of talk about sin, many of the historic traditions, etc. The idea seemed to be finding people who had found the church irrelevant at an earlier time and bringing it home to them again. As people re-discovered church, and realized that it didn't have to be pipe-organs and red carpets, they found their way back to church, and hopefully God in the end.

The Emerging church (leaders like Brian McLaren, Dan Kimball, Chris Seay, Leonard Sweet, Kyle Lake, et al) began to see, however, that there was a group of people who were turned off by this, or atleast not attracted to it. They were starting to see a demographic that wanted, needed, and was crying out for a thoroughly spiritual experience. This group was already spiritually minded, seeking answers in spiritual places... eastern mysticism, new age philosophy, wicca, etc. So maybe the answer wasn't to remove all these symbols and ideas of Christianity, but maybe the answer was to bring back the ancient symbols and traditions, and let them find meaning for a new generation that was hungry for a truly spiritual experience. The "Worship Service" moved from 4 songs and an upbeat message to a "Worship Gathering" where the bible discussion, worship music, tangible worship experiences were interwoven and community driven throughout. It became much less linear and much more organic.

There is no such thing as a model for the Emerging Church, because the goal is a gathering that finds God in ways authentic to the people who are gathering. I can't be just like UBC in Waco, because I live in San Antonio. But there is a tie that binds, and this is where some people (I think) get antsy. One of the great (misinformed, I believe) criticisms of the Emerging Church is that it doesn't stand for anything, it relegates truth to relativity, and it's soft on the concept of sin. My experience is anything but. However, what I have seen that really excites me about the emerging church, is that it openly and freely admits that we are all struggling to make it. It's far less likely (in a perfect emerging church, that is) that a pastor or leader or emerging christian will point fingers and dispense "The" prescription to make it all better. Instead, the response would be to say, "hey, we're all struggling with something so I don't have any right to judge or criticize you because I wouldn't want you to do that to me. The things that you're doing are going to cause problems in your life, and God wants you to be able to get past those problems, and He wants me to help in any way that I can. So why don't you and I get together regularly and build a relationship so that we can help each other get where we need to go." The value is relationship, and group discipleship. Beloging before believing.

Alright, now the problem with this is that I've tried to reduce an entire philosophical genre to a blog. It doesn't work that way. There are lots of things that I haven't touched on, and probably lots of things that I've misquoted or gotten wrong. So, I ask for grace, and I ask you to share your thoughts. Thank you for reading, and thank you for being a part of the conversation. If you're interested in more reading on the topic, check out The Emerging Church and Emerging Worship by Dan Kimball, A New Kind of Christian and Adventures in Missing the Point (w/ Tony Campolo) by Brian McLaren, Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell, or An Unstoppable Force. There are also lots of good blogs on the topic, some that I recommend are A Generous Orthodoxy, and The Ooze. These are by no means it, but check them out and they'll atleast be a beginning. I can't wait to hear your thoughts.

Of baby cribs, holy altars, and sacred moments

2006-07-04T22:02:00.000-05:00

I'm still getting used to this fatherhood thing. It's an amazing opportunity to be schooled in selflessness. Sometimes, however, if you listen just right you can hear the whisper of eternity in those teachable moments.

Tonight was a tough night for the little guy. He's very easily overstimulated, which always results in hours of crazy, mind bending crying. He gets so wound up that he freaks out. Not that big of a deal really, except that it's time for him to go to bed and he won't. Another thing about babies. They have this sucking reflex. Something about sucking really soothes them... hence the pacifier. The unfortunate thing is that they have HORRIBLE binky control. The thing they need the most is the thing they're most unable to handle. They cry for what seems like forever when the thing falls out. As soon as it goes back, they're fine, but 10 seconds later the thing comes rocketing out of their mouth... lather, rinse, repeat.

So last night I decide that I'm just going to spend some time with the little guy as he goes through the routine. He's cranky and a bit gassy (that's my boy!) but when he's got his passy, he's good to go. So I lay him in the crib, his face is away from me and I just watch. It was probalby 30 minutes or so that I was there, and it ended up being the neatest, most meaningful worship service I"ve had in a long time.

With his face away, we go through the aforementioned process of sucking and spitting the pacifier on the bed. He can't see me (I'm behind him), but every time it comes flying out, I pick it up and put it back in. In those moments, I sensed God tapping me on the shoulder.... "What do you notice here?" I didn't get it for a bit, but in the end, as best as I can tell, I got it... or atleast something. Little Jackson thinks that his binky is the most important thing in his world. When it goes away, life ceases to be comfortable. All the while, just out of sight, there I sat, ready to help and replace the binky if I could. There's no magic in the binky (metaphorically speaking). The power to soothe is in the one who is able to put the binky back.

I wonder what my pacifiers are. I wonder how many times I've sat sucking (figuratively, of course) at what I thought was salvation while the hand of Father was behind me all the time. In that moment I was humbled by Father's love. I was humbled by His grace. Rather than ripping so many of my comfort toys, He just continues to walk with me, comfort me, lead me, teach me. It's not always comfortable, and He's not always immediate in the way that He deals with me, just like I'm not with Jackson. But that doesn't indicate anything about my love for the little guy. I know that in the end, being without binky for 10 minutes isn't going to kill him, and it's probably a good idea to see if he can start to soothe himself without it.

God got bigger for me last night. He met me at the crib side, and showed me a glimpse of how He loves me. He reminded me that I was created for eternity, not just for instant gratification. There's really something to this whole "God is everywhere" thing.

Back from the wild wood...

2006-07-02T16:04:00.000-05:00

A week at camp is a beautiful thing. Being a camp speaker is even better. I have two hours a day with responsibility, the rest of the time I get to hang out, play, relax, meditate,whatever it is that moves me most. This camp was a great time for me. It was the youth group that I used to lead, and there were a few that were under my leadership, but most of them were new. I have to say, it is an amazing group of kids. I'm of the mind that God is a gentleman, so most times when He shows up in a big way, it's because people are receptive to Him. Well, this is a very receptive group.

But it was a neat journey for me too. I was looking for God in a new way too. The idea that I've been coming to is that I need to learn to see God everywhere (that was the theme of the camp, strangely enough). So as I prepared, and as I escaped, I started to see God in lots of places. Too many to recount as a matter of fact. But I want to transcribe a section from my last journal entry at camp.

"Tomorrow I head back and dive into the world as I left it. My e-mail will overflow. There will undoubtedly be situations that have come up or will come up. I don't know what's on my horizon at work or at home. Even now as I write that I realize that I've never really admitted that to myself and let it sink in. That's a different perspective. It's out of my hands and out of my control. There's a bit of fear, a bit of trying to rationalize it away, but I can't and I don't want to. I can only play the hand that's dealt, and pretending it isn't coming or pretending it's other than it is doesn't change it. That forces me to God. God is everywhere. God is right now. I read a great line in my surprise me book, 'The surprise me thing is like taking a walk in a storm. It's a quest for potential. It's an intentional wondering. Wondering how the rain will impact us even as we're stepping into it. Wondering what we will find out there. Wondering who we'll find out there. It's stepping out of our comfort zone into the contact zone. It's stepping into the direct line-of-fire with life.' By playing it safe, I'll never get wet. But I'll never know the joy of dancing in the rain either. Father help me see life ahead of me."

The thoughts leading up to that were similar to a thought in The Story We Find Ourselves In that didn't crystallize before. Neo talks about seeing life from the perspective of The Future pushing The Past out of the way. Or something like that. I realize that I'm a bit of a reactor. Rather than dancing with what comes at me, I tend to be slightly backward focused, and then respond to things as they enter my peripheral vision. By that time it's already too late... the future is upon us. I like that. I'm not afraid of wondering what's coming ahead, but I want to wonder that as I step out into the storm.

"Life is like a box of chocolates." Forrest Gump

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's off to camp I go...

2006-06-23T14:57:00.000-05:00

Monday morning I leave for camp. This is a new experience for me. This year I'm speaking and I've never done that at a camp before. I'm excited because I really don't have to focus on anything except connecting with the kids and sharing what I think God wants me to share. I'm looking forward to it as a real recharge time. I don't have a lot (any) real requirements of me other than to speak and lead or help with a breakout time. What I require of myself is to figure out where these kids are at, and hopefully help build a bridge from where they are to where God is.

The theme is "Outside the Box: God is everywhere" and the camp verse is Romans 1:20. The more I go, and especially lately, this is what it all comes down to. When I feel far from God or just disconnected, it's because there are spaces in my life that I haven't let Him into. At some point there was a moment that I didn't invite Him to come change, and I missed Him.

I have spiritual ADD.

The thing is, what an amazing trait of God... that He would let Himself be missed. God is more humble than I am. There's something to ponder. So I feel like I'm going to camp this year on top of my game. When I was a youth worker, the weeks leading up to camp were so hectic, that I was frazzled when I got there. This year, I feel like God's been revealing Himself, I'm starting to see Him in places and ways I never have before. Despite having a new little boy, I feel rested and refreshed. I honestly think it's a credit to the whole Isaiah 40:30-31 thing.

So when you read this, when you think of me this week, pray that God will use me. Pray that I don't get in the way of myself, and pray that in some way, something that comes out of my mouth connects with these kids.

Thanks God for this opportunity.

What did you expect?

2006-06-20T09:11:00.000-05:00

Jesus and John the Baptist. First cousins, united in mission, purpose, and calling. One was the forerunner. One was the One. In the end, John fell headless into eternity. Jesus hung, died, and woke. In our college gathering, we've been looking at John the Baptist: Barbarian. Shamelessly pilfered from Erwin McManus, it's the clearest picture of what my heart beats for me... and for this amazing group of potential radicals that gather on Monday evenings.

One particular story I love, and am disturbed by. John asks Jesus, "Are you the One?" Jesus response is, "you go tell John all that you see here. Also tell him that those who don't lose faith because of what I do will be blessed." Translated: I'm not coming to get you John. This is your path, and you must walk it. Of course from outside of history, knowing that Jesus was on a death march of His own makes it a bit easier almost to read some understanding, maybe even pity in Jesus' voice. At the very least, a knowing familial sadness that things aren't working out like John wanted them to.

Then Jesus turns around to the masses and does something beautiful. In a rhetorically stunning teaching/barrage of questions, Jesus eulogizes John with pride (good pride), compassion, excitement, and clarification of exactly who and what John is and was. "Among tohse born of women, there has not arisen anyone greater than John. Not Moses or David or Isaiah or Jeremiah. Just John.

But Jesus frames the conversation with the question... "What did you go out to the desert to see?"

That' s the question I think we all have to come to with Jesus. What, exactly, did we go running after. I think I knew when I started. My "experience" was dramatic and, in my context, Road to Damascus-ish. In the moment of my beginning, Jesus made no other promise or claim except that He was the Way. It was enough.

Along the way, though, I picked up on things and added things to the point where I can get disappointed with this Rescuer. I'm like the people of "this generation"

"It is like children sitting in the market places, who call out ot hte other children and say,

'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;

we sang a dirge and you did not mourn...'"

Jesus doesn't dance. He won't be deterred from what He's doing. He only gives me the option of following and being a part. The question of what I went out to see is worth sitting with for awhile. If I get that question wrong, the implications are far reaching. The reality is that the revolution of grace marches on. In my quiet nights, when I remember well, I know what I went out to see. It's only in the cloudy moments of disillusionment, when Jesus doesn't dance for me that I lose my perspective.

I love that I follow a man who isn't swayed by my whimpers and moans. I love that I follow a man who doesn't let me stay too long in my pissing and moaning, but continually calls me forward. With an amount of grace that I can't begin to imagine... He calls me forward.

What did you expect?

Uncivilized

2006-06-13T09:08:00.000-05:00

Last night in our college gathering, we wrestled with the idea that Jesus didn't die to make us nice people. Not that He doesn't care how we treat others (quite the contrary actually) but that Christ's death was more about rescuing us from ourselves and infusing our lives with meaning and purpose than it was about making us good American citizens.

My challenge was to look for ways to show people that God loves them, and to do it anonymously. Our gathering is called Underground because our goal isn't to build a huge gathering with lots of people talking about what God could do... it's to be a group of people who are living in hope of the promise that God's Kingdom will endure and to give our hearts and our lives to build that.

I hope to see lots of comments and posts on here of how these amazing, called out students find God in the ordinary moments of life. My prayer is that God will burst out of the boxes and confines that we've built for Him, and explode into our every moments. Here's to life lived on purpose, with passion and conviction. Here's to our very big God.

Knowing & Doing: Making sense of life, death, and consequences. Or not

2006-06-12T09:16:00.000-05:00

So is the experience the only thing that matters?

I would say... yes and no. I believe that most recently in history, experience was sacrificed on the altar of reason. We don't need to necessarily experience it, it's enough to just believe it. I've got the right info in my head, so if it doesn't always show up in my life, that's alright... because I believe right.

But what happens when we make reason (or belief) the most important thing (more important than experience) is that whoever shouts the loudest, talks best, or is most convincing, can alter reality. When we base everything on what we "think," then we're in trouble, because I think differently today than I did yesterday. So simple "belief in", or "reasoning to" something can't be supreme.

But, if we make our experience our God, that leads to the worst kind of irresponsible pleasure-seeking-at-any-cost. If experience is most important, then whatever feels the best, IS the best. If my boss pisses me off, then I'm outta here. Unfortunately my wife and family are the victim because they're the ones who live in the house my job pays for. So simply chasing around what feels best can't be supreme either. What's the deelio?

Like I said earlier, I'm a big fan of experience, but what I'm a big fan of is "QUALITY" experience. I'm a big fan of making an educated step toward the very best experience possible. For me, that means choosing the thing that will yield the best possible results for the most possible people for the longest possible time. I used to follow Phish around the country. I had a blast. At the same time I was failing out of college. It was a trade off. At the time, I traded the "experience" of school for the "experience" of Phish. The problem was I didn't take into consideration the quality of my life as a result of each decision.

By choosing Phish, I was choosing to extend my college career. I was choosing to take out more student loans. In effect, I was choosing to saddle my lovely wife with $60,000 in debt before I even met her. Now I'm grateful for the Phish shows I saw. Honestly, I wouldn't trade them for anything. I learned a lot from my experiences there. But the reality is that my experiences cost me something that I desperately wish I COULD get back. I'll be wishing I could get those loans back for the next 10 years or so. Again, the best for the most people for the longest time.

What happens when you consciously decide what experiences you are going to subject yourself to is that you take as much control of your life as a person can have. If you rush headlong into whatever experience pops up, or whatever feels best now, then you're a victim of whatever consequences those decisions throw your way. But if you choose wisely, you still will have consequences for your decisions, but they become badges of honor, because you decided what, when, where, and how.

It's easy to see that we've killed "Experience." Equally sad would be to kill "Knowledge," in the same way. Better would be to Learn to make the "Knowledge" and "Experience" work together. Grab both. You choose. Life is coming one way or the other. You can choose where you go.

Yin ~ Yang. Carpe Diem.

Here's to you Jimi Hendrix

2006-06-10T18:01:00.000-05:00

I've really wanted to start writing lately. I think I'd like to write the story of my time on the road (I couldn't call it On The Road though, that name's already been taken). You learn so much during times like that, when your whole life centers around something like a band and being at a place... it's very experience-centered, which is cool. I think experience is highly underrated, and should be sought out far more than it currently is.

I think what makes that time in my life so cool is that it was probably the very first time that I stopped just thinking about experiencing things and started to take steps to do it. There's a difference between "knowing about" experiences and "being experienced."
Jimi Hendrix had an album... Are You Experienced? The idea is that we've all got some knowledge of things that happen in other places or at other times, but we're not all experienced.

I'm an all or nothing type of guy. Literally years before I went and saw Phish for the first time, I thought, read, talked about them, I collected their music and on and on and on... I could have told you 1000 things that you didn't know that would have made you think I was a raving maniac... but I wasn't experienced.

Then I went to Austin in 1999, and Houston, and Big Cypress, Alpine Valley and on and on and on... I was experienced. All the knowing and the knowledge in the world couldn't have given me what I only got from being there first hand.

So maybe I'll call my book What Jimi Hendrix Taught Me About Life except that it will have very little to do with Jimi Hendrix... actually nothing at all.

Note to self... work on the title.

No rest for the weary

2006-06-08T08:26:00.000-05:00

Metaphor is deep. Metaphor conveys meaning in layers, so cursory glances reveal truth and extensive meditation reveal still more truth. Sometimes, though, metaphor frustrates and creates longing because the reality (rather than simple knowledge) of the intended meaning is elusive.

One of my favorite passages in the bible centers around David. I love stories about David. He seems tangible to me. I love his passion and his on-again-off-again excitement/enthusiasm/belief/reliance on God. I love that the ageless God told Samuel that he was going to anoint a man after His own heart while David was still a boy. I love that David surrounded himself with a ragged group of outcasts who became his mighty men of valor -warriors of the highest skill and magnitude. I love that David was the kind of guy who the down and out were drawn to and followed. I love that David was courageous enough to step into the ring with giants, and humble enough to be dissuaded from killing a man by a contrite woman's offering. I'm encouraged by Old Testament typology, because David gives me a handle to wrestle with the humanity of Christ. Not in his egregious sins, but in his loyalty, his passion, his heart...

One day David was contemplating how he could serve the Lord. The young king David filled his days with dreams of how he could do something for this God who had set him apart and called him out.

"I know," effuses our boyish monarch, "I'll build him a house!!" For the Lord of heaven had chosen to dwell in a tent. The creator of stars and galaxies, the dreamer-maker of Leviathan and the majestic cedars of Lebanon had condescended to live among His people in a purple tent so that He could be near them and hear them when they cried in the night. The guileless David, innocent and pure before God, somehow understood that such a great majesty deserved a home, a true, beautiful, elaborate home. An edifice that would speak of the grandeur and glory of the God who was among His chosen ones. But alas, David could not be that man. For he was a man who had spilled blood. A home and a temple for the God of the ages couldn't be built by a man with destruction in His past. (aside: this bothered me for awhile. Especially as a young man, David did God's bidding. He killed the enemies of God at God's behest. It seemed a cruel twist of fate that God would somehow hold this against David. As we find out, God makes it up to him.)

Through a trusted friend and God listener, God passes the word on to David, "I have been with you wherever you have gone, and I have destroyed all your enemies. Now I will make your name famous throughout the earth..." God honored David.

David responds in what seems like the only appropriate way, glorious in its authentic simplicity. Samuel simply notes that "David sat before the Lord..."

In light of what God was doing, in the presence of God's denial of David's dream and implantation of one far greater, David sat. He took a posture of rest and adulation.

I've never really understood the idea of resting in the Lord. I don't know how to rest and move at the same time. I don't know how to be on a mission, and hide in the shadow of His wings, yet I'm confronted with just that charge. My constant tendency is to be on the go, figuring that I'll get what I need as long as I'm heading the right direction... so sitting before the Lord is a luxury that I haven't often enough afforded myself.

But with a new baby who doesn't sleep much... I'm captured by this metaphor of rest. I have dreams for my little man. I dream that he will someday be like Samuel when the scripture says, "The Lord was with Samuel as he grew up, and he let none of his words fall to the ground." There's not much that I can do to further that purpose right now. Jackson's still more at the puke on my hand as I burp him phase. But in the morning hours, when my heart hurts with the lack of sleep... I find myself being drawn to the stories of people sitting before the Lord.

I'd like to sit with the rest metaphor for awhile. I need to spend a little bit of time in the shadow of the wings of the Almighty.

"Resting in your presence, is all I really long for... and I, want to be more like you."

- Rita Springer, "Resting"

Surprising Surprises

2006-06-07T11:12:00.000-05:00

Alright, I have to admit... when I started this whole "surprise me" bit, I expected something totally different than what I'm getting. I expected every sunset to be a tapestry of pastels where the houses and development would disappear and the horizon would be clear and beautiful into infinity. I expected the blue jays to whistle amazing grace outside my window and be random $100 checks in my mailbox every other day just because God is so cool and sweet and wants to bless me... SURPRISE!!

Boy, am I stupid sometimes.

Of course, in the midst of this journey has been the best surprise I can imagine. My son Jackson came, and my life is different forever. But that's the segue to the greater surprise... I'm not really that different at all. In fact, where ever I go, there I am. That's what sucks about the surprise.

The greatest surprise for me so far (I'm calling this day 4, but mostly because for the previous 10 days I've been totally oblivious to everything but the baby. I'm holding to the theological position that my 30 day surprise me experiment doesn't have to be 30 literal days. Maybe 30 epochs. You understand I'm sure) has been how graciously and relentlesly God pursues this holiness thing. Today I'm surprised that it's not just the physical holiness of doing all the right things, but emotional spiritual holiness as well.

A great indication of how this is borne out is through this new college gathering that's starting to gain a head of steam. Monday we had our first gathering of the summer at a coffee house. There were 16 students there and I was amazed at their hunger. I borrowed heavily from Kyle Lakes telling of the story of Cornelius and Peter. My point (different from Kyle's) was that both Cornelius and Peter were doing the things that they did (Cornelius was being the devout gentile, Peter was being the kosher Jew) but the hilight of the story was God's infusion and reworking of those things. Cornelius' piety wasn't important and Peter's diet wasn't important, what was important was the way God infused himself into those things and reworked them. My challenge to them to step back and evaluate their "things" and when the last time God infused Himself into those things. If they've been infusion-less for a little while, perhaps (probably) the problem isn't with God.

The surprise came in the hours since. I've got this gnawing sense that I'm heading the right direction, but that I'm trying to lead these kids to a place I haven't gone. It's been easy to talk about paradigms and experiments and radical God-lives. I've also been blessed with a certain amount of charisma, so I can make those discussions exciting and challenging and people may leave ready to take on the world.

But how many of my own faulty, outdated, even archaic God-ideas are gathering dust unchallenged on the shelves of my brain. Truth be told, my theology is too much theory. I need a God-infusion too. The sense that I get is that God won't "let" me be the carrier of this message if I'm not fully immersed in it.

So I'm realizing that surprises require more of me that I expected. God wants to show up in my life, but He doesn't want to show up and leave things as they are. Surprisingly enough, these dawnings in my brain are the most exciting spiritual musings I've had in a long time. These are God-infused moments for me. The implications are exciting. As I walk through these ideas with these amazingly passionate, talented, enthusiastic kids... it's truly a journey together. God's given me a chance to truly be a part of a community of people who are walking with me... right along side of me. That's surprising in its comfort.

Thank you for not just being a God of appeasement. Thank you for not glossing over the uncomfortable things. I need a lot of help, because some of the stuff that's surfacing is hard to look at. There are things that I can't imagine you would want any part of. That's scary because I think that if you don't want those things, then you won't want the package they come in. Help me be honest with you, and give you the things that even I don't want. Let me not miss your call to holiness, just because I'd rather think about your grace & mercy.

What can I say?

2006-06-02T16:56:00.000-05:00

I love language. It excites me to think of new ways to say old things and I love it when old ways of saying things are the most clear, concise... the best. So there aren't many times when words elude me. Occasionally there are times when I say it does, but then I typically follow it up with explanations and... well, words.

This time is different. Every time I hold my son, something happens to me and my brain just shuts off. There aren't words, there aren't evaluations, there aren't even thoughts, there is just him. This little miracle. And even as I read that (he's a miracle) it sounds so trite and overused, which makes me wonder (in the state I'm in) if that might be one of those old sayings that is most concise and clear.

So I won't try and tell you how I've felt. What I do want to do is put down some of the ways this whole experience has started to impact my faith. There was a lot of really ugly stuff that came out in the process of my little man being born. I questioned things like why we should pray if the most urgent prayers of the day and moment (in the midst of a grueling 37 hour labor and a very long sleepless night) go unanswered. I wondered what I was supposed to do when what seemed like a hopeless situation truly did get worse, and I didn't have any of the "peace that passes understanding" that was supposed to abide when I'm not anxious and I ask God.

I didn't get answers to those questions. There was a moment - at about 3:57 in the morning after 9 hours of sleep in the last 4 days when the baby is not crying but screaming like his ass was on fire - when I felt like God was enjoying my misery. I thought of God as the cosmic drill seargent, only caring about how He can whip me into shape and make me a good soldier.

He never answered those questions for me. He didn't swoop down and wrap me in His cosmic arms and quote Jeremiah 29:11 into my ear and tell me that all things were going to be beautiful. He continually put me into situations where my son was crying, screaming, peeing, yelling, eating, and doing every single one of the things that I desperately didn't want him to do at the time. And I had to be there to hold him, clean him, feed him, comfort him, console him, and try to get him to sleep. And with bleary eyes in my mother-in-law's house (we're staying for awhile to get adjusted to being parents) I just held this little spastic person who will grow up to make choices and somehow, for better or worse, leave his mark on the world. I love him so much... the speechless kind of love that even now brings tears to my eyes... The kind of love that doesn't make rational sense and makes me not want to make sense ever again... the kind of love that finds me in a hospital room pleading with God not to let me make any mistakes with someone so wonderful and pure. I love this kid absolutely more than I ever knew I could feel or do anything. Up to this point in my life, Jackson David is the sum total of all the good that's come from me.

And at this very moment I am nothing more to him than a diaper changer. I am a bottle holding, binky replacing, blanket wrapping, butt wiping force of nature that is more blurry shape than anything else. He has no way to comprehend that I love him. He doesn't even have a way to comprehend anything but whether or not he's in a messy diaper. I want him to look at me and know, "my dad loves me and he'd do anything for me." But he doesn't think that. No where near that and he won't for many many many years to come. When I have to change his diaper and he screams bloody murder because he's cold... all he wants is to be covered up, and he knows I'm the blurry guy whose not letting him be warm.

So I realized that I want God to be my problem solving, crisis ending dream guy who swoops in and saves the day. When one of those things happens, I shout of his love. But when they don't, I question. The reality seems to be, God's up there with his hand under my chin, trying to burp this convulsing little heap of a man whose barely a week old on the eternal calendar. I can't comprehend that kind of thing. But every once in awhile I get a glimpse of it.

So I sit in my mother-in-laws bedroom typing away. My little man is covered up in a receiving blanket in this little baby papasan chair trying to sleep as dad pecks away. My prayer is that someday he'll have the ability to understand why I have done the sometimes crazy things I do... because I love him.

God still does things I don't like. But I guess that's his prerogative. I wasn't given the option of running the universe. More than anything it bothers me that I'm still so immature in my faith. It bothers me that I still so easily equate physical comfort and well being with God's blessing (especially in light of reading the blog about the trip to Africa). But it helps me to think of Him up there, desperately wanting me to get it. Desperately wanting me to see that there's love wrapped everywhere. The problem isn't with His presentation. The problem is with my perception.

God, more times than not I don't get it. I hate that feeling when I rant and rave and toss accusations at you, and then come back a day later sheepishly having to admit that you were right all along and you knew what you were doing. Thank you for knowing what you are doing. Forgive me for those times when I speak foolishly. Thank you for my son. Thank you for letting me see you in Him. God, there aren't words. In the days and weeks and years to come, may I find more moments where words aren't enough to convey what I want to say to you. Thank you for your grace. Take care of this little guy. Take care of his baby too.

Holy... Crap

2006-05-31T21:32:00.000-05:00

May 28, 2006... my wife gave birth to Jackson David Powers. He was 7lbs. 8 oz, 19 1/2 inches long and beautiful as a little baby can be. Dont' get me wrong, he was still wrinkly and goopy and all of that but still... no matter what happens, this little man will carry on my name. It's unbelievable. I'll let my wife tell the story and show the pictures here. Suffice it to say... like the Crowder song says... "I need words..." It's an unbelievable thing. Not only that, but literally as Natalie and I are in the delivery room wating for the little guy to make an appearance, I get word that my sister in law's (brother's wife) water broke. Her doctor told her to wait until we (Nat and I) were done and then to come on in. Carson Reed Powers (cousin to Jackson David Powers) was born across town 14 hours later. That's something pretty amazing.

Now, since that beautiful moment I think I've slept for a total of 7 hours. Not to mention that my wife was in labor for 37 hours. You heard it right... 37 hours with contractions no longer that 15 minutes apart... many time 2 and 3. She's my new hero. So... suffice it to say with the sleep deprivation and this amazingly wonderful giddy new man that lives in my house, I'm bound to have a thing or two to say... but not now. Not enough time. It's feeding time. God bless you all. I pray that for you, today is a treasure such as you've never found before. Thank you God!

Recapturing the Useful -or- I thought the Lotus was a car

2006-05-26T08:34:00.000-05:00

I can cover my day 2 surprise experience in a few words... I forgot about it most of the day. It broke my heart to get in my car at the end of the day and go... Holy crap, I forgot about the surprise. There was more to it than that, but I want to talk about something else. That's the beauty of it being my blog. I'm the boss of it, and I can do what I want.

Matt Singleton made mention of yesterday's comment about me being a buddhist, and he commented on how much of the practice and even philosophy of eastern mystics can be useful for Christians. When I first started following God, for the 3 to 4 years prior to that I had been a practicing buddhist. It all started with a book (The Tao of Pooh) and led to a much deeper and fuller practice of Taoism, Buddhism, Zen, and a whole smattering of them all (eastern folks generally seem much less interested in categorizing which practice you fall into. They all inform and relate to one another anyway). So for several years I would sit and meditate. They call it "practice," but the word is different from the way we might expect it to be. For the buddhist, practice is just being or sitting. I don't know that they'd be so interested in "practice makes perfect." They would even say that if you're thinking about progressing, or getting there, you're missing the point all together. The point isn't to get there. The point is always to be here. As soon as you truly learn to be here, then you will have gotten there. It can all sound very confusing, but the reality of it is that a GREAT DEAL of my experience of faith with Christ finds parallels in eastern practices and faiths. Read the Tao te Ching and tell me which parts of it don't sound like they could be teachings of Christ (disclaimer for those who need one... the reason I eventually got away from buddhism etc is because I felt and experienced that the primary premise is faulty. Their goal is to strip away all desires so that what's inherently good in me can come out. My frustration came because as long and as much as I tried, there weren't many things that were truly good or noble. Call it depravity or whatever, I just found myself ACTING better or more calm and centered, but the same old things were raging in me. See Romans 7 for a better explanation). So the allure for me to eastern philosophy was how RIGHT most of it sounded. Ultimately however, I found that buddhism and it's most noble family of traditions fell short. For me it didn't go far enough.

So, when I started following Christ, all of a sudden I've got a problem... what do I do with the last 3 years of my life? What about all those moments that were real? What about all the things that I had read and practiced and experienced that were true and real? There were times when I would sit and meditate that lifted me. There were times that I got it. Did I now have to dismiss all of those things and call them all bad and start all over? I couldn't do that. The same way that I left the Church in the first place... because I didn't see enough of the stuff they were talking about, I couldn't with integrity dismiss the things that seemed real.

That's where one of the teachings of Rob Bell hit me square in the face. He said, "All truth is God's truth, no matter where you find it." It was like a light went on in my head. Of course there are large and freeing portions of truth in buddhism. Truth is truth, no matter where it may hide. When I wrestled with that and came to terms with it, I was so relieved to find that I didn't have to hide or cover up my past experiences. On the contrary, they became something beautiful and formative and rich that God used to woo me back to Himself. I regularly say (and several people in my church family aren't quite sure what to make of it) that my years as a buddhist have made me a much better Christian.

To take the practice of meditation by itself... it's something that the scripture all but pleads with us to do... and every time I even say the word in Christian contexts, it demands explanation. People want me to assure them that we're not becoming buddhist or new age. But my time as a buddhist gave me practice with just sitting and paying attention to what I'm thinking. Buddhist meditation taught me that just because a thought pops into my head doesn't mean it has to come out of my mouth... if I "watch" a thought long enough, don't label it or call it my own, just watch it... eventually it will pass away and another one will come. You want to see the fruit of the spirit called self-control? Sit down for one hour (self-control in and of itself) and every time a thought passes into your head, refuse to label or even identify it. Just watch it. Don't act on it or even claim it as your own. Then watch how your ideas about ideas change over time. You're free from being a slave to the things in your head! It's amazing.

So, that's the long way of saying that if we ignore the things from other parts of the world, or the things that other traditions can teach us, we're missing it. Truth isn't a commodity. Truth is a person, and He's the one that I want to follow, no matter where He goes. I'm grateful for my years as a buddhist. I learned a lot, I grew a lot, and I still try to employ much of what I discovered along that path. I'm also grateful for the chance to remember that today. That's a good surprise. Thanks God. Thanks Matt.

Day 1: The surprise is INSIDE you

2006-05-25T08:12:00.000-05:00

It seems that there will be parallel surprises as I go through this... the surprise experiment as it's lived out in my life, but also the surprise that comes from realizations reading the book as I walk through this experiment. I'm reading the story for the day I'm living, which is one day ahead of the story I'm blogging... clear as mud.

My story yesterday is surprising in its "unsurprising-ness," so to speak. As I lay my little head down to sleep last night, I realized how capable I am of paying attention and taking note of my thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and moods in the moment as they arise. Around lunch time, we got word that one of the guys who plays guitar on our worship team may have lung cancer. This guy is an amazing ball of energy and life. He used to be part of the touring band with Hank Jr. and a whole slew of other guys who you'd be really impressed to hear. Needless to say he lived a hard, fast, life, and within the last two years let God find him. This guy (Greg) is a true example of the power of Christ in a life. The guy has walked away from nearly every vice you can imagine a hard-livin professional musician can have (not just the drinking and drugging, but all the attendant emotional/psychological baggage as well). He just recently got married and started his new life over again with a passionate faith. Then... BOOOM. The big C-word.

Immediately I heard the infamous question that doesnt' have an answer "Why?" I heard him ask the same question. How can it be that only now, in light of the amazing changes in his life, he gets this prognosis? It's a tough question, and it's one that I don't have an answer for. It reminded me of a Phillip Yancey book (Disappointment with God) where Yancey asks, "The question becomes not, 'is God good,' but 'what good is He?'" That's a powerful question to ask. In terms of this experiment though, I was surprised to notice how quickly I noticed the question rising. It took me back to my old Buddhist days when the whole idea was to "notice the thoughts that come into your head, don't claim them, judge them, grab them, or hold them, just notice them."

The shocking/disturbing thing about that realization is that if I can see them welling up and see them rising in me... then I have the ability to curb them and not act on the ones that I don't like. That doesn't make me feel very good, because there were a few emotions yesterday that I don't like the way they came out. If I can see them rising, and I choose not to curb them... that's a surprising thing with surprising implications.

Surprisingly enough (pun probably intended) I woke this morning with a good feeling about a lot of what showed up yesterday. Ordinarily I wouldn't have felt so good about such a lack of self-control and evidence of such inner-yuck, but I really have a feeling that seeing that stuff may be the greatest surprise of all. It's a powerful thing to come to terms with your own depravity. Fortunately I know that at the point of my greatest depravity, I find Christ's grace most sweet.

I was going to write about what I got from the book, but it would take too much space and probably would be anti-climactic. Suffice it to say for now that God surprises will show up in surprising places. I did like what Esau said (to paraphrase), "in the cosmic game of hide-and-seek, what if it's not God whose hiding, but us?"

So we begin from here. Surprise me, God.

Surprise me. Day 0

2006-05-24T08:43:00.000-05:00

My lovely wife... she's sweeter than I have any right to be involved with. She told me last week that she got me a present. I'm horribly impatient, so I kept badgering her about what it was, but she's a vault. So yesterday I show up at work and there's a padded envelope in my inbox. Inside are 2 books. Dave Crowder's Praise Habit, and Terry Esau's Surprise Me. That's one of the differences between she and me. She's thoughtful, and realizes not only that the quickest way to my heart is through a book, but she knows that Amazon.com has the keys to my heart on file in my wishlist.

So today I started Surprise Me. I'm going to do the experiment. It couldn't come at a better time for me. Academically I'm convinced of the truth, but evidence of the gi-normous chasm between my brain and my heart, the reality of my life right now indicates that God is less interested in surprise, and more interested in mindless rote and endless fatigue. This book and this experiment seem like a good way to challenge that assumption.

So I begin. Today is day 1... entry zero. Tomorrow, entry 1, will chronicle today's events. I like it that way, it gives me time to reflect and hopefully take it all in. Like Esau (the author, not Jacob's brother), I come in with a bit of a timid heart. As it is right now, the unproven promises of God are easy enough to put out there. I've never PROVEN them false, so surely they must be true. What if at the end of 30 days I have no new insights, no new stories to tell, and absolutely nothing God-wise to speak of? Well, the encouragement then is that I will have atleast proven that God doesn't want to be involved in my life, and I can get on with the business of life in light of that truth.

But I'm at the point where I have to do something. I am not the kind of guy who can go through the motions very well. I only have 2 speeds -- 100 miles/minute to the left, or 100 miles/minute to the right. I don't have stop and I don't have slow. Not that there aren't times of slowing down and meditating, but the point is that I am a horrible company man. I don't just listen to music, I put my education and my future in jeopardy so I can follow Phish around the country for a year... you get the idea.

So I'm at that point in my faith where I feel like I've truly swung on a lot of the ropes that "lead to God" and I don't want to be on a rope anymore. I want God. I don't put any of the blame on Him. I'm a realist enough to know that I haven't tried God and found Him wanting, I haven't nearly tried enough.

So that's where this experiment comes in. Not that it's my attempt to find where God is. On the contrary, I'm just wanting to open my eyes to see what He tells me is true (see Romans 1:20). I just had a conversation with a guy whose been on a really tough road lately. A lot... the vast majority even... of it is of his own doing. Bad situations brought on by a succession of bad choices, but I look at him now, and people have reached out and helped. He doesn't really see it, but it's there none the less. I don't see God that way too many times. I feel like God's looking for a chance to squash me... rather than seeing how God continually reaches out to people, even when they don't pretend to make so much as a nod in His direction.

So here goes. Surprise me, God.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
-- Robert Frost

Hurry up and wait

2006-05-18T12:36:00.000-05:00

So I guess there's really something to that whole "due date" thing that the doctor tells you. I guess the whole "full term gestational period" crap that you read about has some bearing in reality. Well let me just tell you... nobody asked me!!

Just kidding... sort of. Nat and I are both ready for the little guy to make an appearance. All you real parents at home are chuckling, thinking, "sure ya are." What I mean is that I'm ready for my wife not to be pregnant any more. It sucks for her. She hurts, everything she eats causes issues... it's just not a good thing. But the due date is Saturday, and the doctor felt pretty confident that this week would be the week.

But it's got me thinking about the whole process. I used to wonder why we can't just have a 6 week gestational period... like cats, or giraffes or something. But nearing the end of our prescribed 40 weeks has once again revealed that God knows more than I do and I should trust Him when He sets up the universe. Here's the beauty of the process as I've come to understand it...

From day of discovery to end of morning sickness - this period, lasting anywhere from 3 weeks to 3 full months, hits home the reality that life will never ever again be the same. It's almost like shock treatment for the parents to be. It works on the mother because she asks, "Why is my body revolting?" That which she's trusted and slaved over is now presenting itself as her arch enemy. For the guy, it works because there's not a damn thing we can do about it. It is what it is. By the end of the 3 months (which ended as quickly as it started) we both knew that we were on a collision course with forever, and we were going to be changed people in the process.
From end of morning sickness to about 20 weeks (roughly 6 or 7 weeks) - this is the period where you realize that life has changed, and you're still not completly certain that the morning sickness is gone for good. It's like this tentative waiting stage. But she's starting to feel better, therefore the man feels better because order has been restored to the home. By this time for the guy, it's not really a baby yet, it's just a little bean on the sonogram that tore up your life for 3 months. This phase is so important because it forces me to come to terms with the fact that I'm really beginning to love something that I can't see and that has to this point brought no tangible gain to my life. It's the beginning of the self-less dynamic of father hood.
Week 20 Sonogram - It's a boy. I could my baby's junk, and from this moment forward, I began the process of understanding that it's not just a baby... it's my son.
Week 20 through week 38 - This period of decreasing blissfulness begins with unadulterated joy and high hopes and ends roughly where morning sickness left off. Along the way are the milestones of feeling the baby move, watching the belly grow, watching momma grow into and then out of maternity clothes, setting up the nursery, registering, having showers. For me, there was a dawning awareness that my wife was an intimate part in the most amzing thing in the history of the universe. Inside the body of my wife, God was knitting. Every day that realization took on new and different shapes. There's still no conception of the realities and responsibilities of fatherhood, it's just the wonder of seeing a baby being made.
Week 38 through delivery - This final stage is so important primarily because it gets the mother to the place where she says, "I don't care how bad labor hurts... I want this freaking thing out of me!!" My response has been of course to nurture my wife lovingly and lavishly, but also I start to connect with the reality that this little man is going to live in my house and need me to help him become a man. But with the lack of sleep and poor momma ready to pop... whatever it takes to make momma happy... let's get it on.

So here I am. Ready for that little man to come. I have no idea what I'm going to do when he gets here, but I know that every morning I wake up without a kid... I'm bummed. And so is mom. Even the process of trying to write down the process is baffling. There truly are no words to convey what it's been. The excitement, pain, and fear all at the same time. That's the process of being a Father for me. I wonder how similar God's experience was in the beginning?

Stream of unconsciousness

2006-05-11T14:04:00.000-05:00

It's been too long since I've posted...

It's an amazing day in San Antonio. After yesterday's 96 degrees and 96% humidity, today's 85 with 14% humidity is just perfect.

The college gathering rolls on... we're actually taking a few weeks off in hope that Natalie will throw the pup (I don't think that's the official medical word for it, but it gets the point across. I love you baby). We'll reconvene again on June 7. We're going to have it at a place called "The Daily Grind" coffee bar. It's a good place to meet, it's got a mellow feel and there are beverages and goodies to munch on, good overstuffed couches, tables, and space to spread out and talk if needs be. I'm excited, mostly because it's an ambience that we don't have to put a lot of time and energy into right now. Also having it away from the church will hopefully give us some opportunities to hang out with some folks who are outside of the church.

It looks like we're going to call ourselves "Underground." The idea is that I don't want to be known for our media campaigns and advertising schemes. I don't want to be the next hot thing that all the Church kids in San Antonio come to be a part of. I want to be a place that comes together to learn and challenge each other to be different and make a difference.

On another note... I'm having a freaking baby. Well, not so much me as Natalie, but the end result will be that in very few days a little baby man is coming to live at my house for 18+ years. Boy, talk about drama. Raising a man who loves God and serves humanity is a tall order for a guy who mostly remembers to put on clean shorts and comb his hair and usually doesn't remember to shave. It's all a part of the divine sense of humor.

Started reading The DaVinci Code. Holy Crap. I can't put it down. Seriously, Dan Brown is the man. I think everyone should read it. Christians especially. Put down Joel Osteen, pick up the DaVinci Code, and together take a big, long, well deserves sigh. There. That's all better isn't it? It probably won't go down as one of the classic's. I mean it's not Pride & Prejudice, but it certainly moves quick and keeps you coming back for more.

As I wind down, I'm nodding acknowledgement to the yin-yang in my life. There are seasons of great mental activity where I can think and reason and be sharp. Then there are seasons like this, where it's all quiet in my head... and that's a good thing.

Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, "The LORD is my portion; therefore I will wait for him." The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD. Lamentations 3:22-26

Part 2 - Trust Talk: disintegration of the misunderstanding gene

2006-04-27T12:27:00.000-05:00

So we all bring these biases to the table, and they're like our blood type or DNA configuration. We're vaguely aware of them, but we don't really know where they came from or even the stuff of which they are made (other than nucleotides... of course... I think).

Last night I sat down with my loved one and tried to pick apart the thickett of biases that cause me to be what I am, her to be what she is, and both to make wrong assumptions about the other. Fortunately she affords more grace than I could think of asking for, and she lets me brood and think out loud before anything makes any sense to anyone.

First I should clarify that if my approach at disintegrating the misunderstanding gene(biases) focuses on any "other" out there, my attempts are misguided and futile at best. I have control over exactly one set of misunderstanding genes (biases) and that is plenty. My hope in deconstructing these misunderstandings is to better know how I represent to the world (for a great insight and instance of the misunderstanding gene, check out this guest post on Matt Singleton's blog).

Last night my wonderfully insightful wife led me to realize that an almost otherworldly trust is the key to making an honest attempt at understanding or even seeing my biases. Since my blindspots are by definition spots (place) that are blind (unable to be seen) I need someone else who can see to point them out to me.

For instance, when my wife and I are talking and she brings up something that a) bores me, b) frustrates/angers me, c) goes over my head... my first reaction may be to roll my eyes. This eye roll may be completely and totally without intention and even without me knowing it. The eye roll is caused by my reaction... either a defense mechanism against inferiority or pride about my time, or whatever. My reaction comes from a (possibly, possibly not) subconscious bias toward what my wife is saying. She, responding to the manifestation of my misunderstanding gene, manifests her own... "Why are you rolling your eyes at me?!?" she says tersely.

Stop camera.

Enter trust. My response SHOULD be, "this person that I love and trust is sensing something. I trust that she's not trying to hurt me or simply trying to win, so which of my blindspots is she seeing." Because of trust, we can begin the process of taking this whole thing apart and finding out why I responded the way I did. Through this gentle, but intentional process, future misunderstandings can hopefully be avoided and misunderstanding gene is one step closer to extinction.

The implications for me with my wife are one thing... but I think about the implications in my life otherwise. One of my biases is to be cynical and critical. I tend to see the world too many times through sideways glances. But what if I trusted that God was big enough to use anyone who crossed my path to sharpen me... like muslims, or buddhists, or mean people, or liberals? What if my 1st response was ALWAYS a response of trust... not in them, but in God?

This is hard to even process because I know that there are people out there who will try to use, manipulate, take advantage of, and otherwise destroy me and mine (that's what John 10:10 says). But it's in the face of those objections things like Matthew 5 begin to stand out. What if I find God more in those situations where I've been abused than I ever would without it? What if my understanding of God is stunted because I've never trusted God enough to do the right thing, or the BEST thing even if I might be taken advantage of in the process?

Father, I'm grateful that you can redeem even mistrust and misunderstanding. Help me to trust you in a way that doesn't make sense to anyone but you. Father, help me to be one of the reckless ones, who believes that everyone's voice can lead to beautiful things in your hands. Help me to listen more, speak less, and always seek to understand first. Thanks God.

Part 1 - remisunderstaning

2006-04-26T18:27:00.000-05:00

(note: I didn't intend to do a multi-part post... it just sorta happened that way. And since Matt did it, I might as well too...)

Does it ever seem like you have the same conversations with someone over and over again? It's not like you intend to do it, but when you're talking with someone and a certain topic comes up, the conversation always seems to turn out the same way. There are these little built in filters and biases that seem to come up again and again, no matter how hard we try and no matter how hard we wish they wouldn't, and no matter how much we promise and swear that we'll be different next time... we never are.

This becomes especially important to me as I get closer to the birth of my first child. Part of God's covenant promises to His people is that the sins will be visited on generation after generation, in the same way that blessings will be visited. I'm not one to see God keeping a score card and promising to visit His wrath on innocent children because of the schmucks that we are, but I'm starting to see that these filters become part of the DNA that we pass on to the future generations.

There's a poverty mentality, there's an entitlement mentality, there's a victim mentality, there's a "gotta get mine" mentality, and seemingly innocent and otherwise wise and gracious people seem to show up with these blind spots that color their whole lives. How do we go about addressing things that are as deep, personal, and seemingly unchosen as our blod type?

The implications for this are everywhere... I think of the things I picked up from my parents that are now vital parts of who I am. I'm an incurable Astro's fan, for instance (it's not as bad as being a Cubs fan). I didn't choose it, but I also can't un-choose it without great cost and sacrifice.

In the great game of getting along and moving forward, these biases and unconscious tendencies make communication difficult. I will unwittingly pass along my ideas of who God is and what He wants from me to those I talk to. It's not so clear cut as what I say, it's as much about how I say it. I think understanding the reasons that we misunderstand, or even understanding THAT we misunderstand is a step in a direction. But it's a daunting task, calling for the greatest humility and grace, to sit at the proverbial table with others who we feel need to hear our message but who may not even be able to hear what we have to say in the way that we want to say it.

Belonging Preceeds Believing

2006-04-23T14:33:00.002-05:00

Before Jesus indoctrinated... He invited. Before He gave his disciples the sermon on the mount, He went to a party with them. Before He sent them out to heal the sick, cast out demons and raise the dead, He paired them up. Jesus made sure that no one in His new Kingdom would be alone.

This morning I was teaching a class at church, and 2 sets of parents talked about their 20 something children walking away from the faith. I resonated with them, because when I was 20 something, I walked away too. The general idea for the class was Solomon's hopelessness in Ecclesiastes 1 and Christ's gift of hope from Matthew 20.

The parents cried as they read Ecclesiastes, because they said that it sounded just like what their kids would say. I encouraged them to take heart that the scripture was validating their experience, and encouraged them to keep reading the story, because even Solomon finds a better answer under the sun.

But we ended early and I had a chance to talk pretty pointedly with these parents and one of the elders in our church who happened to hang around. This is really exciting for me, because I truly believe that the emerging church/postmodern mindset isn't just a fabrication, but it's a reality that will inreasingly be borne out in the generations to come. Today I had the chance to represent these postmoderm minded kids to their thoroughly modern parents, and I may not have ever felt as blessed to be used by God.

I wrote on the white board the phrase, "Belonging preceeds Believing." I asked them to take the phrase apart and see what they thought. Each of the people in the class was a mature believer who had been in the church for their whole lives. The elder has raised 3 of the most amazing children I've ever known, and is one of the most humble, godly people I know.

My skin tingled as I watched lightbulbs come on in these people. This was their kids, this was where they were. It didn't take long to piece together the puzzle of pretty sharp, observant kids standing back and watching their friends become overchurched. As kids who were thinkers, they realized that the message they were hearing wasn't being fleshed out. They felt, and feel, that the problem was with the message... so they got rid of it in search of something better. Rather than dismissing the belonging, they dismissed the belief.

It was amazing to watch these grown men and women wrestle with this. "But where does knowledge fit into this whole equation? It's the Truth that sets us free?" and on and on it went in defense of attacking unbelief with information. They weren't antagonistic at all, not in the least, they just hadn't ever thought about it from this angle. At the end of the discussion, one of the parents named Mark came up to me and said, "you know, I believe what you said about belonging preceeding believing. It just wasn't that way when I was growing up."

I think Mark walked out of the class understanding something about his kid that he didn't understand before. He and I spent a little bit of time talking about what that might mean in his relationship with his kid and how it might all play out. I didn't give him any answers where none were due, but I told him that it worked out in my case.

Today my philosophy took form and became real to someone else. Just by my nature, my tendency will always be to remain in the philosophical and theoretical. I will coast by on autopilot while I think about how to do what I'm doing. But today the stuff that I put into my head and mull over hopefully built a bridge for someone else to cross over to their kid. What a cool thing to see. What a cool thing to be a part of.

2006-04-23T10:07:00.000-05:00

The craziest thing... since I've started blogging (lo these seven entries), I've become acutely aware of long spaces between entries. Do I not have anything to say? Am I slowing down mentally? Am I just a sluggard? You know what Proverbs says about sluggards... crap, I'm headed that way!!

But maybe not. Maybe it's all good and I'm just hanging out. We'll never know for sure I guess.

Crosses & Conversations

2006-04-14T08:39:00.000-05:00

I read Matthew 10 today and Christ's call to follow seems especially poignant on Good Friday. From calling Peter & John from a fishing boat, to calling the rich young ruler from the trappings of weath, the idea of following takes on a new and special significance in the light of Easter.

So in Matthew 10, Jesus is sending out His disciples. It's a glorious day, can you imagine? When I get 14 seconds of training and experience, I feel like I'm ready to fly the plane. So the 12 must be chomping at the bit, ready to do what they were born and called to do!! Especially after hearing Jesus' opening words...

"... go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you're going, preach that the Kingdom of Heaven is near, it's here, it's at hand! When you need to, heal those that are sick. Raise those that are dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. Freely you've received, freely give."

Even the following verses about not taking anything extra don't seem so bad in light of the commissioning service they just received. I can almost hear Peter, "Now that's what I'm talking about!" Jesus goes on to talk about going into towns and leaving a blessing, and wiping the dust off of the feet for any town that won't receive them. James and John, the "Sons of Thunder" must've cast furtive glances, "if I can raise the dead, can you imagine what I'm going to do to a town that won't accept me? I'll do more that wipe the dust..."

In my vulnerable moments, these are the things that I feel like I signed on for. Too many times my prayers are that God would use me for these kinds of things. Lord, if you want to heal the sick, I'm willing to do that. It doesn't sound nearly so transparently self-serving when I'm surrounding it in the highest of prayerful language.

But then the conversation turns a bit, "Behold, I send you out as sheep among the wolves... the men will hand you over to the courts and scourge you in the synagogues. When you go before Kings and governors, don't worry about it, you'll know what to say, but by that time you'll be hated by all because of me. And only those who stick with it to the end will be saved..."

Wait a minute Jesus... this is hard core... then He says the ultimate, "He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he who does not walk with me into the gas chamber is not worthy of me..."

The reality of the cost of discipleship hit me this morning. Dietrich Bonhoeffer talks about cheap grace and costly grace. Cheap grace (the grace we give ourselves) is like me after hearing the first part of Jesus' speech... the mock humility willing to bear the burden of greatness. Costly grace on the other hand, is the grace that only comes from taking up the instrument that will put all of our un-God nature to death. That grace cost Christ everything. The scary part is that too many times, the cost of discipleship doesn't hit me. Too many times I'm an "organizational" christian.

The exciting thing for me right now is that I'm not scared away by the call or the cost. It doesn't make sense, because most time when it comes to stuff like this, I'm a snivelling weenie, but there's something in me that realizes the call of Christ to follow is worth it. It doesn't mean I understand it all, or that I understand any of it. But that Spirit in me that cries "Abba" realizes that the call of Christ is more worth it than all of the other stuff that lures me away combined.

Thank you, Lord for Easter. Thank you, Lord that you went to the cross, and thank you Lord that you didn't stay there. The only one who was truly capable of knowing the cost, and you counted it worth it. Father, I don't understand all of it, or even much of it, but I pray that the space in me that realizes you're worth leaving it all for, I pray that space would grow. I pray that space would consume me. Jesus, you amaze me. Thank you for today. Thank you for Sunday. Thank you for you.

Eternal Significance

2006-04-08T15:18:00.000-05:00

One of the coolest things for me to sit and think about is the web of relationships that I've had a chance to be a part of. I often sit and think about how cool it is that I know someone who knows someone who knows someone... you know, 6 degrees of separation.

This is especially interesting when I hear or come across something that impacts my life. It's tough to say in a moment which things will truly change my life, but it's not tough to know which things change my day... and changed days always have potential to change my life.

In particular I began listening to a sermon series called "Revangelism." Kyle Lake was a guy who has touched my life, and I never met him. I remember being shocked and stunned upon hearing about his tragic death. I was surprised at how much grief I had over a guy who I never met. Part of my grief stemmed from the understanding of the role he played in the movement of the Church. I'm always fascinated by people who are on the cutting edge of anything.

Most of my heartache, however, came because of my web of relationships. I know a disproportionate (for a guy who hasn't been in college for 6 years and lives in San Antonio)number of peple who go to Baylor and who are and were directly impacted by Kyle's life. It's almost as if I could see the fingerprints all over the people that I loved and respected. Then today, driving in my car with Kyle coming through my iPod talking about Dave in an operating room, I realized that his ministry and legacy continues. Through a life lived on purpose, I am today being challenged to think about the way I engage my culture with the Message.

Technology has allowed Kyle's voice to reach my ears and touch my heart, but I've been moved by the story of St. Francis and the advice of Brother Lawrence. I've been comforted by St. John of the Cross... over and over and over in my life I find my perspective and worldview shaped by voices from the past, both recent and distant.

I'm thankful that certain voices age like wine, and their tales and heart beat through their words and across space. I think nothing less should be the goal for followers of Christ. For those who have been offered a life of abundance, when we grab it, realize it, and begin to live in it... it's the abundance that flows down and trickles into the lives we pass on the way.

God of wha?

2006-04-07T10:22:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite songs is the Crowder duo of "I need words/God of Wrath." Tangentially, that's a major reason I love Crowder... he's willing to delve into areas of theology that many people fear to tread. Well done sir... thank you.

More to my point though, I love the song because of the reality of the two messages right next to each other...

I need words...
I need language...
I need a voice...
I need a song to sing you, that I've yet to find.
I need you...
To be here now

Utter dependance. The voice of humility cries helpless in the midst of all the things that would push and pull us and demand our attention. In the face of God, we must sing and speak and worship, or just fall silent, but the reality is that any song I could come up with is empty without His words... larger than sky and life and the longing inside of me.

God of wrath
God of love
God of Earth
God above
God of hope
God of peace...
All I am for you...

And still, as we strive to reach, touch, and worship the One... the first thing we must sometimes come to terms with is that He is, from time to time, a God of Wrath. That doesn't compromise His character or His love or Peace or Hope... in fact it harmonizes with it, creating something beautiful and deeper that my language could express. It's in the face of His wrath that my words fall most painfully short... because I am at once in the face of a wrath that I could never contend with... and at the same time held in the strong arm of one who saves completely.

This morning, I need words. An 18 year old boy whose parents go to my church, wrapped his truck around a tree and died. I know things like this happen. My theology will hold that because of the fallenness of man and the brokenness of the world, good people die and young people die and parents must bury their children, even though it seems to rage against the very fabric of fairness. I had to talk to that mother this morning, and all I could pray was, "God, I don't have words to say that will make sense. God, I fear being trite and canned. I fear that I'll try to diminish the reality of pain because my broken perspective thinks that it will somehow diminish you."

God, my view of you is too small. The richness of who you are becomes more colorful in the face of tragedy, because I find that you are bigger than even tragedy. Father, save me from ever being trite. Save me from ever trying to rescue someone from what you're leading them through. I don't understand, so I need words.

Thank you, Mr. Crowder for speaking the dangerous truth about our very large Creator. May He forever smile upon you... His faithful bard.

2006-04-06T07:44:00.000-05:00

In our college gathering last night, a brand new theological concept was uncovered for me by an 18 year old young man. We're at the point in our evolution (didn't mean to use evolution in a church context) where we're hammering out the ideas and values that will hopefully give structure and direction to where God is leading us. I've been amazed at the process, and I really believe that God's doing a cool thing. See my 1st blog for all the specifics of that...

So last night we're going through the first part of Acts 2. The one where the apostles speak in tongues. It was fun to watch the 4 baptist kids squirm when I told them we were going to talk about the gift of tongues. They were soon off the hook. But the conversation turned to how God used these apostles to speak in the tongues of the listeners. God is a God who wants to be heard, and He doesn't make it difficult... even to the point of miraculously giving your language to someone else if needs be. We used that as a jumping off point to go to 1 Corinthians 9, "I have become all things to all people so that I may by all means save some." We wrestled with that a great deal. College students who grew up deep in the teeth of churches and have seen a great many things, heard a great many things, and in many ways been absolutely steeped in the traditions, beliefs, and practices of the church truly wrestled.

Their fears were well grounded... do we compromise? Do we become like people so that we can turn them into us? Doesn't that make the one's we're emulating like little projects? Who wants to be a project? The conversation was beautiful. Then, this young man in the corner spoke up, "I don't think it means I have to be a crack addict or a prostitute, but I think it means that I need to be accessible to those people."

It's such a simple word, but it's rich with implication. The concept weighed on me all night and even into this morning. Above all things, Jesus was accessible. Above all things, Jesus (the accessible one) made God accessible. That is what made the Pharisees so infuriated, a man who claimed to be holy and righteous... accessible to prostitutes, thieves, the dregs of society. Not only accessible, but available as well. The God who Isaiah saw as High and Exalted made Himself accessible to every man in Jerusalem during Pentecost. They didn't have to find their way to Him, He made His story accessible to them. Beautiful.

In my quieter moments, I wrestle with this. I don't have a hard time believing Christ's divinity. That's the kind of God I want. It's His humanness that shakes me up. It's His accessibility. His flesh means that I can't explain away my faults and foibles. If Jesus had stayed in heaven and shouted through a megaphone, "clean up your act bubba!!" I could have cried "UNFAIR!!" Instead, He came and said, "Come to me if your weary and burdened. I'll give you rest."

The rub of it all, is that those moments of realization are when I need His accessibility the most. When I see Him as most holy, most perfect, most different from me in every way, that's when He comes and seems closest. It's a paradox that I don't understand. It's a mystery that my brain doesn't wrap around, but it's just like my humble God to reveal Himself to an 18 year old kid who tries his hardest to know and understand Him. And it's just like His grace, to use that young man to make Himself further accessible to me.

May today be a day for you, of unhindered accessibility with the Almighty.

Benjamin Franklin's revenge

2006-04-02T07:32:00.000-05:00

"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."

Damn you Mr. Franklin!! While not ironic in the Alanis Morissette-ian sense, it certainly was a dreadful coincidence and run of bad luck that yesterday was the day that I had to sit down and write Uncle Sam a $1 check for my taxes, and almost as if to recompense an insult... my crabby uncle in the striped suit and stovepipe hat stole an hour from me as I slept. The cursed midnight thief! The inevitable hour of my demise draws ever closer, and all I get is one hour gone! If something happens to me before October, I'm going to be pissed. (I guess this is not directly Ben Franklin's fault, but submitted for your approval... he pops off with the death and taxes thing, he happens to be one of the fathers of American government, and the government is responsible for daylight savings time... conincidence? You decide.)

Be here now.

It's Nobody's Fault but mine...

2006-03-31T10:30:00.000-06:00

Dreary drips from the overhang on a gloomy grey March morning. The mood in my head matches the mood in the sky and the trees drip their acknowledgement. I love the chill and I even like the grey except when it starts to leak into my mood. Of course, that's nobody's fault but my own.

Widespread Panic sings a song called 'Nobody's Fault.' It's a great song, I've heard it done lots of different ways, but my favorite is when they do it on this old resonator guitar, so it sounds like a record out of the 1930's, real slow and mellow-like..."If I don't pray, and my soul gets lost... it's nobody's fault but mine."

Taking responsibility for what happens in life is one of those things that doesn't come naturally or easy. Abuse would be one exception, but most of the stuff that comes into my life is stuff that I need to take responsibility for and own all by myself. I was thinking about this yesterday in my quiet time. I was reading about priorities, and I realized that most of the reason I feel like I drift is because I've not been intentional about what I do. Sounds simple right?

Not so much.

I get mad at God when my spirit feels dry and my character isn't what it should be. It's not God's fault, it's my fault. The reality isn't that I've desperately tried God and found Him lacking, the truth is that I've never fully tried God.

I want God to be a neat accessory to my life, like a shiny watch or a sweet looking belt. But that's not the deal. He gives me the right to take Him or leave Him, but I don't get to choose the terms. It's like getting a pet snake, and then getting mad and disillusioned with the snake when he doesn't jump on my lap and watch TV with me like a puppy dog. The snake is only being a snake, and if I wanted a puppy, then I should have gotten a puppy. It's my responsibility.

So the dryness, the fatigue, the sadness in my Spirit about God not being the God that I wanted Him to be... that's not God's fault, that's mine. That's a hard lesson to learn. The reality is that there are promises that He makes... a life of abundance, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentelness, self control and all of those things. But He doesn't promise them to me no matter what. He promises them to me if I follow Him. The challenge for me is to give up my hard-core desire for instant gratification and follow Him. Again, it's my responsibility.

C.S. Lewis says that the problem isn't that we've tried God and found Him wanting, it's that we've trifled with lesser pleasures and never given Him a chance (paraphrase). Every decision is a decision to draw near or to pull away from Him. If I pull away, it's not His fault for not keeping up His end of the bargain. Such is life.

Carpe Diem.

Start

2006-03-30T17:33:00.000-06:00

First blog ever... unless you count myspace (myspace.com/staringatthewalls) and livejournal (phisherofmen) which I obviously don't, because I just called this my first blog ever. You see how it goes then?

On the subject of starting, last night I had the great privilege of playing a part in starting a college gathering... My lovely wife and I in a room with 4 college students who want to see God do something in a way that they've never seen before. What a rush, just to be in that kind of environment.

The crazy part for me was the starting part. I've never started something from scratch like that. I've been sort of... an interceptor... if you will. I usually come in after the foundation has been laid, but before there's an unwieldy mega-structure to contend with. So this was new ground for me and I have to admit that I found myself in an interesting place where my natural tendencies (call it... personality) crashed into some things that I've called beliefs... even convictions.

My personality is to be a mover. I don't have any problem swooping in, and helping people get where they want to be, or helping them figure out where they want to be. My tendency is to have a plan and execute it. Call it leadership, call it pushy, call it whatever. It is what it is.

My belief and conviction is that the Church is the living Body of Christ on Earth. My conviction is that when it comes to Church and the people who compose it, there's another leader who is the Way.

Leonard Sweet wrote a book on leadership in the post-modern matrix (honestly, I'm not a big fan of Sweet's writing. His ideas are great, I just don't do well with his style. It seems a bit forced. But, here I am using his ideas... what a tangled web we weave). Sweet wants to shift the leadership metaphor from "visioning" to "listening." To be a leader in the church of a post-modern generation means to fully grasp and apply the reality that the Church is not "MY" anything, but it is instead the manifestation of Christ to the world. The paradigm isn't seeing what no one else sees, but hearing the voice that says, "I am over here. Follow me."

The "leadership" paradigm shift hit me hard last night. I walked in with some ideas about what it might look like, but I had no context for even being in something like I feel God calling me to, much less helping lay the foundation for it. So I walked into the room with 5 other people who I believe hear from God, we opened the book of Acts and we listened to God speak.

We all walked out amazed, then we went to Taco Cabana (where we didn't encounter pineapple salsa, Matt Singleton will be proud to know). I was maybe the most amazed, because what I saw caused my personality and my conviction to move closer to harmony.

The reality that I faced, if I'm heading up, leading, and creating something it will never be greater than I. Regardless of where you feel I fall on the greatness scale (somewhere between "poopy" and "kidney stones"), it is definitely somewhere short of eternal and transcendant. So anything I create by the force of my personality or character will necessarily fall short. However, if leading means listening and following the One who is Eternally Transcendant... then something truly magical may yet emerge.

So as I woofed my tortillas and queso, I was content, because I still didn't have to run the universe, and I felt like I had the chance to ride shotgun for awhile with the Guy who was. Not bad for an evening with friends.