I mispell things!
i may have just hit a new low.
i just finished using a dog shedding blade to scratch my back. i couldn’t find anything else that would reach and scratch the itch properly. and i tried. i rubbed against door frames, used a mop handle, tried to get the dogs to scratch it, etc. i am not ashamed to admit that the shedding blade was wonderful.
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.
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.
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awhile back i read this article at lifehacker (which you should add to your rss reader right now). basically it recommended sending broken beyond warranty stuff back to the manufacture instead of just throwing it away. if it’s just small stuff it won’t cost you much and there is apparently a pretty decent chance that you will get something back. so i’m trying this out today. i bought the above usb hub for one of our computers about 7 months ago. the other day it decided to stop working. the warranty was only 3 months but surely it should have lasted longer. so i’m sending it back to kikkerland to see if they will stand behind their product or not.
we’ll see what happens.
this is the amount of blood that i poured into that last post. i picked a very small scab while typing and it decided to prove its worth. before it stopped it had filled up both sides of this napkin with blood.
i am fascinated by ernest shackleton and his failed attempt to cross antarctica. i’ve read several books and watched several documentaries on the trials of the endurance crew but until this week i had not read much concerning the ross sea party (on the aurora, the supply ship for the second half of the journey across antarctica). in this book i was reminded that while shakelton was considering crew members for the two ships he divided their names into three drawers labeled “mad,” “hopeless,” and “possible.”
how true is that? don’t you have to be a little mad or hopeless to be a part of a great adventure into the dangerous unknown? don’t you have to to be a little mad or hopeless to take a “leap to faith” that is serious enough that real harm is faced if it doesn’t turn out? most of us are simply too sane to take such leaps. that’s probably why we don’t see GOD do truly incredible things very often.
instead of taking real serious “leaps to faith” we try to describe slight and tame acts of faith as though they are gigantic. there is no real risk in them. no harm comes if they fail. the church continues, our prestige isn’t harmed, there is no great struggle that happens as result of the failed attempt because the leaps that we usually take just aren’t very great. shackelton’s and the ross sea party’s journeys were life and death. usually we followers of CHRIST are merely trying to jump a very small puddle while pretending that it is the atlantic ocean we are trying to span.
nope, most of the time we followers of CHRIST are very rarely “mad” or “hopeless” and therefore we rarely face the real opportunity of being put into the “possible” drawer when it comes to things that are truly amazing works of the kingdom of GOD. the amazing works of the kingdom of GOD involve real risk. the kingdoms of our churches do things that don’t require “mad” or “hopeless” people because usually there is very little real risk involved in those tasks. i believe that the stories of scripture reflect that GOD is always looking for the the “mad” and “hopeless” because they are the only ones crazy enough to attempt the things that are a part of HIS kingdom. those stories, and the modern day continuance of them, are cool because they are risky.
may all of us who call ourselves followers of JESUS become a little more “mad” and “hopeless” in taking risks with and for HIS kingdom.
SIDE NOTE – the above image is from a series of watercolor paintings inspired by shackleton’s journey. you can see the rest of them at samantha scherer’s website
i love improv everywhere. i’m not sure giving random people high fives as they go up an escalatorr is their best work but it still made me smile.
this is probably not a big deal for most of you but it brings a smile to my boys and my faces each day.
one of the cool things concerning where we live is that while we are in a suburban area our backyard is connected to 20 to 30 acres of pine forest. there is a great deal of wildlife in those woods. we regularly see white tail deer a 100’ or so away from our house but they never seem to get any closer. that is until they found the corn that i put out for our squirrels (of which we have a large number of very fat, clumsy, and curious ones). now they have started coming into our backyard every afternoon around 4 p.m. it’s always easy to tell when they are there because montana, our oldest basset hound, goes crazy. in fact, noah has started calling her “deer alarm” instead of montana because you can pretty much instantly tell when the deer arrive based on the tone of montana’s barking.
i have always loved watching deer. i was never much of a hunter (fishing is so much better because you can release the fish) but i have at least been deer hunting a few times in my life. when i would be in a tree stand and see deer i would always have a very hard time pulling the trigger because they are just so beautiful. in fact, i was only ever able to pull the trigger once.
tomorrow is darwin day (the 200th birthday of charles darwin). for some people, on both sides of the fence, this is a huge thing. for some darwinism proves that there is no GOD, while for others evolution is a messed up theory that no true believer in CHRIST could ever accept. i believe both sides are wrong. for truth in advertising purposes i will let everyone know that i hold to an age/day view of creation. i don’t know the exact processes through which life came about on earth. yet when i see elegance and beauty in nature i’m not usually very concerned about about the exact procedure through which life came about. instead, when i see things in nature that make my “heart smile” (a saying stolen from a few of pam and i’s friends) i am more concerned about the “why” of life. why is life here? why are their moments of joy that seem to shout of something larger? why does beauty ring true? “how” questions are fine but i tend to think that the “why” questions are often the most important.
when i watch the deer that come and visit our backyard (a.k.a steal our squirrel corn) i am simply reminded that there is a great GOD of beauty and truth WHO loves HIS creation and wants to be in a loving relationship with all parts of it. however GOD created all that is HE did it for us to know, love, and enjoy HIM. I hope you do.
i’m posting this for any other church planters who realize they don’t know how to do this stuff. i spent the day trying to get an ein so that tapestry can start the process of getting a checking account. about half this morning was spent going through the online process for acquiring a number. the problem with this was that it requires a physical address. tapestry doesn’t have a physical address – part of the reason for this is because we don’t want the burden and focus removing aspects of a building. the online version requires a physical address. know that we’re not the first church to ever do this i knew there had to be a way so i searched all over the website. i found nothing.
so the second line of attack was to try my bank. i love the workers at our bank (associated bank). they are always very helpful. a fellow kiwanis is the manager of our local bank and i thought she might could help. she said she new exactly what to do because they did the all the time for local small businesses. we hit the same problem. after an hour and a half of trying we all decided to try again later.
the third line of attack was to call the ein phone number. i prefer to do things online whenever possible. i usually find that calling a government bureaucracy just ends up with me being lead through the same website info by someone who doesn’t care. i was wrong with the ein phone line. the representative i spoke with was nice and extremely helpful. 13 minutes and 53 seconds after the i initiated the phone call tapestry had its ein/tax id number.
who would have thought that i would be singing the praises of the irs?
wonder of wonders!
anyhow if you are planting a church, especially one without a physical address, just call the irs phone line for ein’s (1-800-829-4933) and skip the website.