Month: September 2004

i am now officially old. this is true because today i bought a “micro-trimmer“. the micro-trimmer is one of those devices used for shaving hair in hard to reach places. i had to buy one of these “miracle” devices to groom the forest of hair that now grows within my nostrils. the hair within my nose has simply grown to dense to stay within the confines of my nose. therefore, it now tries to grow outside the confines of my noise and is viciously poking out into the open air. i guess that is good in some way. it probably indicates that my nose is well fertilized or something similar. i guess i should be proud of my growth of nostril hair. the problem is that these hairs often grow so long that it sometimes appears as if i have brown tusks coming out of my face. i don’t want to be known as the elephant youth pastor.

when it was only a single tusk or two i would pluck these overgrown hairs out. this was by no means an enjoyable experience. who could imagine that such a relatively small hair (small for scalp hair but monstrous for nose hair) could produce such an amazing amount of pain upon it’s removal. removing one of these beasts was like trying to pull out your tongue with a pair of tweezers. i could restand this pain when it was only a couple and merely took a few minutes. if i tried to pluck out all the extended nose hairs now it would take a full day and i would need psychotherapy afterwards to deal with the post-traumatic shock of all the pain it produced.

that is why i finally decided to give in and purchase a nose hair trimmer. i bought it this afternoon and immediately used it with fear and trepidation. i was frightened stiff. after all, what if the “micro-trimmer” wasn’t up to the task of harvesting and thinning out my forest of nostril hair? what if the micro-trimmer became tangled within the growth within my nose? i knew that was not going to be a pretty sight. yet i kept seeing pictures in my mind of the tusks growing from my nostrils. i knew that if i didn’t do something about it one day i would be running away from people screaming “i am not an animal … i am a human being.” i just couldn’t go there. so i started that sucker up and plunged it into my right nostril.

i’m proud to report that all went well (except for a tremendous amount of nose tickling) and the terrell nose hair forest has been thinned out.

we did another announcement video last night for the view. click here to see it.

now here’s the rant.

i’m fed up with youth ministers thinking it is cool to trash on the church. it seems like right now it is hip to be disenfranchised with the church. i hear people talk more and more about how they are fed up with the institutional church but not with CHRIST. this then leads to youth ministers complaining about how the church is so broken. i end up finding this in the blogs of allot of younger youth ministers (not that i’m very old – i’m only 36 and have only been doing this since 1989). it seems to me that their posts are basically saying “if only all the church members were as well rounded as i am then it would work right.” their vast experience of two churchs and four years of youth ministry has taught them how screwed up the church is and now they have decided to try and write about it like mike yaconelli. they write in their blogs as the “old sage” about how messed up working in and with the church is and how they have to go accomplish “real ministry” in other ways. they constantly grip about how much they have lost by working in and with the church (and never reflect on how much they have gained). every time i read a 24 year old writing this crap i laugh myself silly.

so i have only one thing to say … “GET OVER IT!”

the church is screwed up! everybody knows that. it’s full of bitter, mean, vengeful, backstabbing, adulterous, stupid, sinning, gossiping, fallen people (of which i am definitely one). these people will hurt and lash out at the very ministers who are trying to help and shepherd them. every CHRISTian should know that the church is full of screwed up people merely by the fact that they are allowed into the community. we are a community of the screwed up.

yet, the church is also the bride of CHRIST and HE is passionately in love with HIS bride. JESUS has chosen to work in and through really screwed up people like we have in the church and sometimes that sucks. but that’s who JESUS has chosen to love and use and therefore because of my love for HIM and my sense of call from HIM i choose to work with and in HIS bride. being a minister means working with and loving difficult people (rob bell refers to them as “human sandpaper”). that’s simply apart of the job. it’s fine and dandy (i like that phrase) to vent every now and then but goodness don’t set your personality around doing that all the time. you’re talking about the bride of CHRIST after all. amazing things happen within the bride of CHRIST and ministers get paid (sometimes at least :)) to have a front row seat for much of it. what could be better than that. we get to see CHRIST forgive and renew the bitter, mean, vengeful, backstabbing, adulterous, stupid, sinning, gossiping, fallen people within HIS. sometimes HE has to forgive and renew us allot of times before we understand how new HE has made us and before we see how much HE loves us.

kind of ironic that i just vented about people venting. 🙂

btw, don’t get me wrong about yaconelli, i loved him. he was a much needed voice within the body of CHRIST. it’s just that it bugs me when “young en’s” try to sound like yac. he had earned the right to speak like that. he had been through years of ministry and hardship and he was definitely still very much in love with the bride of CHRIST. it merely seems stupid to me for 20-somethings to try and talk like that. wait until you’ve “earned (your) spurs” through more than 4 years of ministry before you try to talk like a 30 year veteran. i’m not there yet and thus i’m still learning how this whole thing works.