tapestry haircut

the audio quality sucks but this video is the beginning of me cutting off jesse’s hair for the message on amos 2:6-16 at tapestry last night. jesse was a beast for letting me do this. his hair was so thick that my normal cavalier approach to things accidentally inflicted pain on him. i wasn’t able to finish his haircut during the message but i did finish it during the last two songs of the night. my favorite moment is at the end of the video when jesse says that his hair is so thick because he conditions daily.

here’s what it looked like afterward.

the finished haircut

how the bible should be for us

i once heard someone say that when we read the bible we should have a hard hat on because when we read it our lives should turn into construction zones. there is also a story that shane claiborne tells of being thrown into jail and a police officer telling him that he should be careful in reading his bible because it is a dangerous book. well at least it should be. i’m not sure it always is in my life.

the faith, stories and teachings found in scripture have lead people to take amazing leaps to faith. still it seems that so often we treat it as a nice little book that has comfortable sayings in it. don’t get me wrong. there is comfort to be found in the ONE of WHOM the bible speaks. yet there is a vast difference between receiving comfort and being comfortable. comfort you need when times are though and struggles are going on. comfort helps you to continue. being comfortable implies no need to move or change. comfortable can be a great thing in relationships (we should be able to be comfortable in GOD’s love – hebrews 4:16) but it can be a lousy thing in living out faith.

i love the lyrics of rich mullins. one of his last songs was “surely GOD is with us.” in that song he makes the following statement concerning how people may have reacted to JESUS when HE was walking on earth:

who’s that MAN who says HE’s a preacher?
well, HE must be, HE’s disturbing all our peace

wouldn’t life be exciting if all of us who claim to be followers of JESUS lived that lyric out in our faith and in the way we approached the bible? i think it would be cool if i was constantly have my peace disturbed by the words of my LORD. it might not make me very comfortable but i think it would probably lead to many others receiving comfort.

SIDE NOTE – this post was just supposed to be about the fact that i like the above sign. it’s on by florian.b on flickr. i was just going to say that i like the photo. as most of you probably know i can be a little long winded. ht neatorama.