Month: December 2004

i just ran across ben bell’s CHRISTmas card for his church’s congregation and i think it is amazing. in my opinion it really conveys what CHRISTmas must have been like. mary would have been view by the powerful people of her time as just another insignificant statistic and an indicator of why the hebrew race was below them. they would not have viewed her pregnancy as anything of importance. they would not have cared at all what was happening with her, joseph, or her unborn child.

you know that joseph and mary would have had to have been scared to death and confused by GOD’s plan. of course, the incarnation freaks all of us out so it should have done the same thing to the first two humans to experience. “GOD with us” is a scary concept. “GOD for us” would be so much easier for us to handle. then we would just have a power that was helping us do the things we wanted to do. “GOD with us”, the incarnation, means relating with GOD, HE becomes a part of our lives and we become a part of HIS.

the incarnation scares the crap out of me. truthfully GOD scares the crap out of me. HE is so completely “other” and mysterious. HE is someone that i can not define and i can not control. yet, i am constantly drawn to HIS “otherness”. i long to be engulfed by HIS mystery and experience the fear that “otherness” produces. this is why HE is the answer to life.

as i told you yesterday i have taken some vacation time in order to finish some work around the house – specifically finishing our kitchen. thus far i have

• painted three ceiling (more touch up than full coverage)
• taken the kitchen cabinets apart
• sanded the kitchen cabinets
• primed the kitchen cabinets
• put the first coat of paint on the kitchen cabinets (but not the doors yet)
• cut out spots in two doors for punched tin to go into

by the time all of this ends i am going to need a vacation from my vacation.

i have discovered one thing already while doing all of this work. what i have discovered is that the part of the cabinet that will be most difficult to paint will also be the part that is most easily seen if you miss it. i have never actually noticed the baseboard of my cabinets. they have never semedn that important to me before. when i was priming the cabinets today i decided that since it is so difficult to get to the baseboards of the cabinet (they drop back 2 1/2 inches behind the actual cabinets) i would just give them just a basic no frills priming job. after i finished priming the cabinets i stopped to eat some lunch. of course, it was right in the middle of my meal while i was walking into the kitchen to get something to drink that i noticed these blaring missed spots shouting out at me “hey look at us! you did a lousy job on us!” it was the baseboard glaring at me, making me feel guilty for a poor job. so, i had to go back and prime the baseboards again. nobody will ever notice these thigns but if i had left them alone everyone would have commented on the crudy job i did on the baseboards.

i hate sanding. the main reason i hate it right now is because today i sanded one half of the cabinets in our kitchen to prepare them for being painted tomorrow. i have taken off tuesday through thursday of this week to do work around the house. i’ve been painting the ceilings and working on the kitchen to finish it. of course, in order to do the fun stuff like painting you have to first do the miserable stuff like sanding the things you are about to paint. the whole process would be so much more fun if i could just paint the whole thing and never do any prep work.

now i could pretend to have a spiritual reason or moral for this little rant against prep work. i could tell you that you usually need to put time into doing the hard stuff before the good things you want to happen will occur. or i could mentioned that sometimes we need a good scraping from GOD to get us really clean. or i could come up with some other statement to make the above rant seem like it had a real purpose but that would be untrue. the real reason i wrote the paragraph above is because I HATE SANDING!

for some unknown reason my church has been linked to a fair number of violent acts over the past three years. we have several church members who have suffered from or been the victims of murder recently. over the past three years one of my teen’s father (who was separated from the family) killed her two half-sisters and is now on death row in another state, then one of our church members and the mom of one of my youth was killed by a local serial killer, and then tonight the body of a teen church member was found murdered after being missing for three months. the teen and his family are church members though he was never involved within the youth ministry. my pastor and i went out to the church members’ house tonight just to let them know that we care and will be there for them.

being at the home of parents who just found out that child was murdered is an experience that nobody really tells you about at seminary. i never had a professor at southwestern seminary tell me how to handle circumstances like this. not knowing what else to do my pastor and i just went to the house and stayed for a little while. we really didn’t have any great words to say but there aren’t really any words that would make this situation better. when we got there we found out that members form the church had already been making contact with the family and letting them know of our care and concern – it’s nice to see the church work the way it is supposed to.

i hate that our members have to suffer through this things. yet, i love that our church is responding as the church is supposed to.

in february, alan l, came on board with the youth ministry as the assistant youth minister. when he started one of the things i wanted to happen was for us to swap off speaking at the view every other month. before alan arrived i had been speaking consistently with a few other people every now and then. now i’m speaking one month and then listening to alan the next month.

at first, i didn’t really like this.

after years of preferring small groups (small groups have feedback and interaction while large groups don’t) i’ve finally gotten to the place in ministry where i enjoy speaking in front of larger groups. so, at first the thought of speaking for a month and then listening for a month wasn’t that thrilling. i felt like it threw my groove off.

that was before i went to the national youth workers’ convention and heard rob bell do his critical concerns course (8 hours of conference) on having “a revolutionary voice”. during the conference he talked about letting messages and ideas “ruminate” in your head for awhile. i’ve tried to do this before by having my messages planed out for a while. yet, i have never done this anywhere near as well as rob bell. he said he never speaks about anything unless it has been bouncing around in his head for 3 to 6 months. the advantage of this is that GOD starts to provide teachable moments and ideas during this period of “rumination”. these things then relate to your messages and add freshness and depth to them.

this “rumination” is what has changed my mind concerning speaking every other month. during my off month i have the time to simply listen to GOD concerning what HE wants me to speak about during the next month. i’ve planned out by prayer what i will be speaking on through november of 2005. everything i read, watch, listen to, and experience has the possibility of becoming something that GOD can deliver the message through. having the extra month gives me the time to figure out how to communicate what needs to be said. i throughly believe that my messages are getting much better simply because of the fact that i have the time to let them simmer a little while.

i am very thankful for this system now.

i kind of think that this might be a good system for churches. have two main speakers and have them swap off months or message series. in order to do this you would have to have two people who were very secure in their positions and humble. it would have to be two people who would not end up in a sense competing against each other. i know a few ministers and unfortunately i think it would be hard to find allot of people who would fit in this system..

it’s been a very weird day of ministry that i can’t type about right now. maybe one day i will be able to discuss it. who knows. what i do know is that i have finally learned that it is best to simply shut up when you don’t know what else to say. i couldn’t comprehend what in the world to say today and i merely kept my mouth shut. turns out that the person who was talking to me took my quietness for good counseling technique and continued to spill their guts to me. after it was all through i still didn’t know what to say and the person who had been talking to me told me that they really appreciated that i had given them my complete attention and had really listened.

of course, i didn’t really listen. i was too busy trying to figure out what in the world to say.