Month: March 2005

i’m usually not the largest fan of b.c. (i just don’t think it’s very funny) BUT i thought this comic was way too true. i mean why talk about the divorce and pornography that are within our churches when we could just talk about homosexuality? it’s so much “safer” to just focus on the homosexuals and you get so many more “amens” during those messages. or why not talk about how america has fallen because there is no prayer in schools rather than preaching about we followers of CHRIST being involved in social injustice and not making any difference in the world around us?

in his book blue like jazz donald miller talks about a time that he and some friends set up a booth on reeds college and asked forgiveness of the students that were there. maybe we should started asking forgiveness of the the world for so easily “preaching” about their “sins” and never mentioning our own.

montana, my basset hound, hates straws. i learned this the hard way. awhile back i was drinking through a straw and montana saw it. the mere sight threw her into a rampage and she walked over and head butted the bottom of my cup. of course, she made the whole thing look like an accident but i know the real true – montana hates straws and thus she attacked. thankfully the straw made it through the attack. unfortunately, montana’s attack rammed the straw into the the inside of my top lip. thus i now had a cut on the inside of my front lip. if you know anything about cuts in the mouth then you know that a cut in the mouth can turn into one of the worse injuries a human can receive … a canker sore. that’s what happened too. i now have a monstrous canker sore on the inside of my top lip. it’s right on my two front teeth and it’s killing me. i hate canker sores.

when i was in college i once had a canker sore that was really killing me. i complained about it and a friend told me that he had a sure fire way to cure a canker sore. according to my friend all you had to do to get rid of a canker sore was pack the sore with table salt. he said that the salt “burned out” the bacteria that caused the canker sore. so that night i packed the sore with table salt. this was not one of the prouder moments in my life because packing a canker sore with table salt is not a very smart idea. it was the worse pain i have ever experienced and the sore was actually bigger in the morning. i told my friend about it not working and all he did was laugh. he laughed really hard over the whole thing. i don’t think i ever talked to that friend again.

baptists withdraw invitation

i haven’t read everything that mclaren has written so i can’t speak authoritatively on this incident in particular but i do have a good bit of history with southern baptist and therefore can attest that often we have “knee jerk” reactions and respond accordingly. according to the article mclaren was uninvited to the convention because of the statement that “there could be buddhist … (or) jewish or hindu followers of JESUS.” to the kentucky baptists this apparently smacked of “universalism” and therefore mclaren had to be excluded. if i understood mclaren’s point correctly when he made that statement in his book he was saying that it didn’t matter what you called yourself rather it was the belief you had and the practice of that belief that matters. in other words if you come out of a hindu background and still practice much of the culture associated with hinduism but you followed the way of CHRIST (faith in HIM as LORD and walked with HIM) then you were a followers of CHRIST and all good. it personally sounded very much like don richardson’s comments in “eternity in their hearts.”

of course, my kentuckian brethren didn’t take the time to actually discuss the statement with mclaren and find out what was meant. nope they had a “knee jerk” reaction and pulled him from the program. i love “true” baptist belief (meaning not automatically conservative evangelical right wing belief) but i hate the way we often practice it.

i love dilbert.

steve at ragamuffin ramblings decided to retell the story of john 4:1-42 and he did an amazing job with it. you can read his full post here. it’s a retelling of the “woman at the well” and it really floors me. he changed the samaritan woman into a homosexual guy and then told the story from that situation. it does a great job of pointing our how “shocking” the gospel is.

here are a few pictures of the minor prophet worship stations we had set up during the view:

habakkuk

zephaniah

nahum