down with the bell

i’m not much of a protester. i do stand up for what i believe in and even try to make my views known to the powers that be on those matters – i write letters, send emails, and more on pretty much anything that cheapens human life (i.e death penalty, abortion, certain types of research, etc.) yet, i’m not the type of person who goes out looking for the next organization to boycott or next protest to be a part of.

with that said, i think i’ve run across an organization that i will begin to boycott until they begin to value humanity more. the business is taco bell. the reason i’m starting to boycott them is the coallaition of immokalee workers. the coalition of immokalee workers (ciw) is the organization that represents the tomato pickers for taco bell. the ciw is looking for a 1 penny raise from taco bell – they are still making the 1980 rate for picking tomatoes. that’s absurd! it wouldn’t cost taco bell much, if anything, to give this small raise.

in scripture the book of amos is all about justice. justice does not just mean the administration of law. no in the book of justice we find out that GOD defines justice as treating fairly those who have less power than you. justice means to protect the weak. therefore, i have to respond to taco bell. i’m not very powerful. i don’t have a mighty voice that corporations will listen to and be swayed by. all i have is a family, a ministry, a my own pigheadedness. but i will use what i have. i won’t eat at taco bell and my family has agreed to do the same thing. the only other thing i have is leadership within our youth ministry and using that i will not bring my teens to eat at a taco bell again until the ciw gets a raise. i have emailed taco bell and told them this.

even if it isn’t enough to make them change their minds right now, i will still not give my money or encourage my teens to give their money to an unjust company.

protect the weak!

still waiting

some of you are probably wondering whether i have received the apple powerbook yet (see the entry on september 28th for an explanation of the powerbook). sadly, i have to report that even though i only order the laptop two full days ago it still has not yet arrived. right now the status for shipment of the powerbook is listed as october 6, 2004. of course, the micro$oft office for mac software bundle that i also purchased from apple.com shipped yesterday. so one part of the order has been shipped and the other part is still being processed. i’ll keep you updated because i know that some of you may have trouble sleeping until i receive the powerbook. yet rest assured it will come soon.

pounding

last night, september 29th, was our “pounding” for our two newlywed couples – jessica & matt and alan & rebecca. a pounding is an early american tradition of getting newlyweds started with their houses. everybody who comes to the “pounding” brings a pound of household necessities – flour, sugar, toliet paper, etc. the idea behind this is that you help them out with the necessities and then they can spend their actual money on other things.

the most difficult part of the whole thing was keeping people from mistakenly telling alan, rebeccea, jessica, or matt. we’ve been setting this thing up for about three weeks – announcing it when neither alan nor jessica or their spouses were around. this means that around 150 people knew about this thing (not including parents which would have made it even more). ever time i announced the “pounding” i tried to stress that we had to keep this on the “down low.” afterall, “lose lips sink ships.” i was sure that someone was going to make a mistake and mentioned to the wrong person. last night finally came and i truly believe that they were surprised. i could not believe that we were able to convince that many people to keep their mouths shut for 2 1/2 weeks.

just for the fun of it i would like to list what some of our teens thought “necessities” were (remember you are supposed to bring things to the “pounding” that are necessary for daily living):

  • a pint of charcoal lighter fluid
  • 18 rolls of toliet paper
  • a 1 gallon can of van camp’s beans
  • exactly one pound of tabasco sauce
  • 8 boxes of macaroni & cheese
  • more romin noodles than you can shake a stick at

love / hate relationship

i love wednesdays – i hate wednesday nights.

i love wednesdays and preparing for our youth worship service, the view. i love the constant work of getting everything ready. it’s a constant rush to make sure that everything is set for when we start the service. computer work has to be done, programs have to be printed, sound system equipment has to be put up and tested. there is always something else to do. i never have to wonder on wednesdays what i’m going to do next because there is always something else to do. even though we plan many parts of the service weeks ahead of time there is always something else that needs to be done.

i hate wednesday night because it’s over and now i begin to wonder. did GOD speak tonight, did i get in the way, did the kids “get it”, did i “get it, where we prepared enough? wednesday nights are when the questions begin to pour into my head. u start feeling pretty insecure concerning what we’ve done. i begin to ask why more people didn’t say something about the service or why so many people did say something. i start to wonder and there don’t seem to be any immediate answers to the questions that keep running through my head. the answers won’t come until later in the week.

i kind of wish that i could always just keep preparing for the view and never actually finish it. then i wouldn’t have to go through wednesday nights.

waiting

no apple powerbook as of yet. i only ordered it yesterday so it really shouldn’t be here yet, but i figured i would tell you any how. i didn’t want any one waiting with baited breathe. of course, you might have to hold your breathe for awhile because right now it is not even listed as being shipped until october 6th, which means i won’t get it until around the 8th or 9th.

nothing else to really report today. i did think that tonight’s view, our youth worship service, was quite cool.

start a revolution

the new church budget year is about to begin (friday, october 1st) and this means that i can buy a new laptop. i used to have a laptop that was 4 1/2 years old. it’s was a compaq presario 1200-xl119 and it really worked fine. i would still be using it if it wasn’t for the fact that the power plug-in broke. i tried to have it fix but when they told me it was going to cost $650 i decided it might be time for a new computer. it’s amazing to me that i can buy this small little part for about $10 to $15 but it costs $600 to have it put in. it’s a great, big, stupid world.

the problem with buying a new laptop is that our ministry has now entered the video age. because of this i have to consider video editing when i look at a laptop. this changes the standards for the laptops that i consider. now after a great deal of research i have finally ordered one. it’s an apple powerbook:

  • 15″ screen
  • 1.33 ghz cpu
  • 512 meg ram
  • 64 meg ati radeon video
  • 80 gig hard drive.
  • dvd/cd-rw

since i order an apple i did of course also purchase finalcut express 2. i am very excited about getting my hands on this. this is going to offer me mny more features than pinnacle studio 9 does and i was able to get it for only $99.

right now it should arrive in baton rouge on friday, october 8, 2004. of course, i leave for the national youth worker convention on the 7th so i’ll probably miss it.

metamorphosis

it’s finally happened! about 30 minutes ago i bought an apple powerbook – 15″ screen, 1.33 ghz cpu, 512 meg ram, 64 meg ati video, 80 gig hard drive.

let the “change” begin. apparently after buying a mac i’m supposed to change from the person i am now into an “apple user.” you see everyone i know that has an apple is … shall we say … “different.”

  • they treat their macs different from the way that pc owners do.
  • they talk about their macs in manners that aren’t quite the same as pc owners do.
  • they compute in ways that just aren’t the same as pc owners do.

they walk to the beat of a different cpu and it shows in their lives.

i’m not sure why this happens. maybe it’s the computer equivalent of “short-man’s syndrome.” maybe it’s the fact that windows basically ripped off the mac’s ideas and then made them more popular. maybe it is that the mac really is a better computer than the pc’s are. i don’t really know.

what i do know is that i do not want to become a stereo-type. i wanted a mac because it was going to be best for the needs i have. i did not want to buy into a certain lifestyle. from what i understand it’s going to be hard to keep form developing the “apple user” personality. i’m going to fight against.

ralph waldo emerson once said the following regarding possessions – if i own a cow, the cow owns me.

thankfully he was talking about cows and not apples, so hopefully i should be okay.

being genuine

let me be transparent for a moment – i hate the word transparent, i’m fed up with people saying that they are being real, and i think i’ll puke the next time someone tells me that they are genuine. current catch phrases that’s all they are. they’re the words that are current right now and ministers, speakers, and other various youth worker wannabes say them so they will sound good. but to me they’re basically just words with very little meaning behind them.

the reason i think this is because i actually do have a theory on being “real” – kind of ironic isn’t it. my theory is this – we are most real when we admit how fake we are. we are all pretty much a bunch of posers. i screw up regularly and i want to keep those screw ups as well hidden as possible. even though possibly the best thing that could happen to me would be for you to know each of my sins so that i would no longer have to pretend, that’s not what i want to happen. i want to hide my sin and keep on pretending like i’m perfect. i am one very fake person. in fact, i am so fake that when i begin to become “transparent” i am usually thinking in the back of my mind about how secure in myself i am to let people see my weaknesses. i’m not secure. i’m pathetic.

the good news for me is that i’m not alone. i’m surrounded by pathetic people. people who desperately want to be “real” but don’t know how to because we are so completely fake. in my heart i want to live the life of the velveteen rabbit but in my mind i don’t want to go through all the pain and anguish of getting rid of all the layers of fakeness within my life. what if under all those layers of “fakeness” i find out there’s nothing real in the center – the equivalent of a fake onion, simply made up of layers.

thankfully JESUS loves fake people if only we recognize that we are fake. hypocrites don’t realize that they are posers, hypocrites think that they are “real”. JESUS loves fake people who understand how “unreal” they are. one day JESUS will take all of us “posers” and make us real.

i’m not trying to offer up a cheap, little, sunday-school answer here. i’m not trying to just cover a very difficult problem with the simply phrase “but JESUS will take care of things in the end.” i know life has difficult problems and the answers to these problems aren’t easy. it’s just that there’s not another answer to the problem of how fake we are. if JESUS doesn’t love us as a group of wannabes then we are all basically out of luck. there’s nothing else we can do about it. none of us are real enough to find an answer to our fakitivity (my wife’s word). either JESUS loves us in spite of our fakeness and helps us to become real or we’re doomed to live and die in a world that only pretends to be genuine

so let me be as transparent as i can be – there is nothing transparent about me. i am so fake that i even trick myself into believing that i’m being real. yet there is still hope for me. that hope is found in the only ONE WHO is real.

am i as clear as mud?

the breastplate

tradition has it that st. patrick began his morning everyday by praying the same prayer. it was a prayer for protection and a proclamation of his intent to follow CHRIST throughout that day. i think it is a butt-kicking prayer.

i arise today
through a mighty strength, the invocation of the TRINITY,
through the belief in the threeness,
through confession of the oneness
of the CREATOR of creation.

i arise today
through the strength of CHRIST’s birth with HIS baptism,
through the strength of HIS crucifixion with HIS burial,
through the strength of HIS resurrection with HIS ascension,
through the strength of HIS descent for the judgment of doom.

i arise today
through the strength of the love of cherubim,
in obedience of angels,
in the service of archangels,
in hope of resurrection to meet with reward,
in prayers of patriarchs,
in predictions of prophets,
in preaching of apostles,
in faith of confessors,
in innocence of holy virgins,
in deeds of righteous men.

i arise today
through the strength of heaven:
light of sun,
radiance of moon,
splendor of fire,
speed of lightning,
swiftness of wind,
depth of sea,
stability of earth,
firmness of rock.

i arise today
through GOD’s strength to pilot me:
GOD’s might to uphold me,
GOD’s wisdom to guide me,
GOD’s eye to look before me,
GOD’s ear to hear me,
GOD’s word to speak for me,
GOD’s hand to guard me,
GOD’s way to lie before me,
GOD’s shield to protect me,
GOD’s host to save me
from snares of devils,
from temptations of vices,
from everyone who shall wish me ill,
afar and anear,
alone and in multitude.

i summon today all these powers between me and those evils,
against every cruel merciless power that may oppose my body and soul,
against incantations of false prophets,
against black laws of pagandom
against false laws of heretics,
against craft of idolatry,
against spells of witches and smiths and wizards,
against every knowledge that corrupts man’s body and soul.

CHRIST to shield me today
against poison, against burning,
against drowning, against wounding,
so that there may come to me abundance of reward.
CHRIST with me, CHRIST before me, CHRIST behind me,
CHRIST in me, CHRIST beneath me, CHRIST above me,
CHRIST on my right, CHRIST on my left,
CHRIST when i lie down, CHRIST when i sit down, CHRIST when i arise,
CHRIST in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
CHRIST in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
CHRIST in every eye that sees me,
CHRIST in every ear that hears me.

i arise today
through a mighty strength, the invocation of the TRINITY,
through belief in the threeness,
through confession of the oneness,
of the CREATOR of creation.