I mispell things!
someone stole kinetic church’s trailer with 75% of their equipment. they’ve posted stuff all over the internet and on bulletin boards to get the thieves to see the above video. quite a cool response.
here’s a link to one of the billboards they produced to get the theif’s attention.
this was not a fun day in regards to my interaction with certain industries’ user friendliness. first, i spent a decent part of my morning visiting a new vet (oh how i miss our vet in baton rouge). our oldest cat has high blood pressure and our oldest dog needed some vaccinations. it wasn’t a very cool visit. the pain didn’t come from either one of the pets being sick, but instead the pain came from the dealing with a vet tech whose job is apparently to try and “up sale” everybody you walks in the door. i actually spent more time talking with the tech trying to sell me additional and more expensive services, than i did with the vet explaining how my pets are doing. the vet tech wanted me to get a more expensive heart worm test than the one that is usually done. why? because it picks up an additional disease. when i asked what the treatment would be if one of my dogs was found with the disease her response was that the vast majority of time they don’t do anything. why would i want to get a test that would show me something that we then aren’t going to do anything about? when i asked for a prescription script for my dogs’ heartworm medicine she tried to convince me out of that because the drug companies warranty doesn’t work when the drugs are bought online. i told her that every real product produced had < ahref="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_warranty#Fitness_for_a_particular_purpose">an implied warranty of fitness for a particular purpose and that’s all i would need. that’s when she responded with “well we’ll price match their price.” great, why didn’t you tell me that sooner rather than just trying to scare me with a lame treat? anyhow, it wasn’t a fun trip to the vet.
in the afternoon had my second non-user friendly experience. the coolant crossover hose on my mazda sprung a leak. the cross over house is a 5″ long hose that connects two metal fitting that are approximately 1″ apart from each other. it’s not a big deal to replace other than it was placed in a position that is nigh impossible to reach. since, i know that about half of a car’s design is making sure that a good number of it’s parts will have to be replaced at appropriate times you would think that cars would be a little easier for the non mechanic to work on. of course, the goal is for non-mechanics not to be able to work on the cars. instead, they want everyone to have to come in and pay for a dealer mechanic to replace the 5″ hose and other various parts. maintenance on our vehicles is a great source of income only if people aren’t able to work on their cars by themselves. so the car manufactures make the cars impossible to work on. it drives me nuts.
anyhow, these two experiences got me to thinking (in addition to just getting me mad). i wonder how often within church we inadvertently try to force people to have to rely on us? i would look at the vet and the car manufacture as allies if i felt like they were trying to help me rather than just get me to have to depend upon them more and more. shouldn’t the church work on helping people to live out the faith outside the walls of the church? it seems like we sometimes teaching people that our job is to provide the worship opportunities and their job is just to come to them. shouldn’t we be teaching people how to worship not only in the church but to worship in all of life? shouldn’t we be teaching people how to serve within our communities and neighborhoods instead of just how to serve within the church? sometimes it seems like we are teaching people that we’ll provide the mission trips and then they can serve.
we should be helping people to live out the faith when their within the church building and even more importantly outside of it. i believe the term for this is holistic – faith in JESUS effects everything we do and are. the church should be a sending and training area. we should be helping people to be dependent upon JESUS rather than more and more dependent upon an institution. then we would be people’s allies in their walk with CHRIST.
we have great neighbors. we had great neighbors in baton rouge and we were afraid when we moved to the point area that we might lose that and have neighbors that we didn’t really connect with. thankfully that didn’t happen. while no one can ever replace the wonderful neighbors we had in baton rouge it’s nice to know that we have wonderful friends in our new home too.
we just finished eat steaks and talking for a very long time with a couple of our neighbors. it was a wonderful evening.
SIDE NOTE – i listen to a great seminar on missiology from ed stetzer today. he brought up an interesting point of the main question that CHRISTianity attempts to ask the world … “if you were to die tonight do you know for sure where you would spend eternity.” he made a good point in pointing out that this question has been the main question that CHRISTians have tried to ask and answer for non-CHRISTians for the past 30 years while the big questions that people have been searching for answers for have changed. i wonder what the “big” questions are around all of us. if we don’t know the questions it is very difficult for us to show how JESUS can be the answer.
the discussion of faith within desperate housewives just got better. of course, we’re flipping channels because there are other parts happening that we don’t really want to watch and definitely don’t want our kids watching. yet the scenes of the two characters discussing faith are so good that i may have to download the episode and use it for discussion sunday night at tapestry’s launch team meeting.
i have never seen an episode of desperate housewives before. i know it’s pretty popular bu it just hasn’t been on my list of shows to watch. so i was greatly surprised when pam and i were flipping through the channels and we ran across a television conversation on someone going to church. i didn’t realize until the end of the scene that it was desperate housewives.
apparently one character had gone to another character’s church and accidentally caused a little embarrassment. the character who has visited the church was preparing to go to another church service that evening and was excited about it. she was preparing more questions. that’s when the the hosting character said “church isn’t a place for questions, it’s a place for answers. that’s why we don’t ask the pastor questions during his sermon.” the visitor responded with “but what if i need a place where i can ask questions?” i’m not really sure how the host character responded because pam started shouting “THEN YOU NEED TO COME TO TAPESTRY!”
of course, i would agree with my wife and we are presently watching the end of the episode to see what happens. i would never have thought that i would be excited about watching desperate housewives. i probably should turn in my man card.
thanks to penza i had the opportunity to interview another person concerning his views on the church and what he would like to see a church do within the point area. i am very thankful for the people who are kind enough to answer my annoying questions and let me pick their brains.
slowly but surely these interviews are helping us to launch tapestry.
i had another community interview with a friend of mike’s (launch team member). i am loving hearing what various members of the community think about the church in general and what they would specifically feel drawn too or at the very least be cool with. i’ll post my notes from the interview in the google docs file later today.
my run for the day
distance – 20 miles
time – 3:39:18
pace – 10:58/mile
weather – 62
my wonderful wife spotted this article. it’s about a group of teens who threw a root beer party. the keg (which was root beer) was noticed and the cops were called. since the cops had arrived at a party of what appeared to be underage drinkers (though it wasn’t) their duty required that they breathalyze ever teen there. this ended up equaling 89 “0.0” readings on the breathalyzer.
this whole incident came about because of some teens being kicked off of the school cheer leading squad. the girls that were kicked off where seen in some facebook photos with red solo cups in their hands. the school administration had no proof of any alcohol being in the cups but in their minds those cups equaled underage drinking and that was enough to remove the girls from being cheer leaders. please don’t assume i’m naive. i know a lot of teens drink and i know that many times those red solo cups are actually full of liquor. yet they’re not always full of anything wrong. i also support 24/7 conduct policies for extracurricular high school activities. i think it’s perfectly appropriate to hold a kid to a higher level of conduct based on him/her being in the band, on a sports team, in student government, etc. yet i think that the administration should always have to have proof when they decided that a teen has done something against the rules. they can’t just make guesses based on broad generalizations and then punish people based on those assumptions. well anyways, the root beer kegger came about when a student decided that he was going to prove to the school administration that just because something looks like it may be against the rules doesn’t actually mean that it is. thus there was a party of teens doing things that looked like they could be breaking the 24/7 policy but actually were in full compliance with it.
of course, i believe it’s even more important that we don’t jump to assumptions, and actions based on those assumptions, within the church. it seems like some people within the bride of CHRIST want to make assumptions concerning the state of someone’s soul or beliefs based on things that they may associated with “sinful” activity or erroneous belief. in fact, sometimes it seems that some people within the church are more concerned with how you say your beliefs than they are with whether or not what you believe is true. there’s a great line in a waterdeep song that goes “not so much about the truth as whether you said it right.” i think that line does a great job of summing up the situation i’m talking about. it seems like we sometimes get so concerned about someone doing something “wrong” that we jump to conclusions to protect the church from heretics.
the problem is that sometimes those assumptions are completely wrong. a root beer kegger proved that.
SIDE NOTE – these are just thoughts mom. nobody has come after me for anything i’ve done or said. i’m a little upset about that because all the apostles were chased around by the religious people for the lives they lead. the apsotles’ faith in JESUS, and the life that resulted form it, ticked off the religious people of that time. i figure if i’m really following JESUS i too should be ticking off a least a few religious people. but don’t worry mom. it’s not happening yet.
HE is risen indeed!
asbojesus continues to do a great job of explaining things. if you haven’t gone over and seen his cartoons you really ought to.
