Category: personal

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

i love taking care of the technical aspects of a worship service. i really enjoying trying to push the envelope of what we are presently doing. i tried doing a little of that during our discipleNOW. i stole an idea from the 2005 national youth workers’ convention and shot two images side by side on a super large screen. this enabled us to shot lyrics on one 9′ wide section of the screen and highway video vibe movies on the other 9′ section of the screen. we could then swap sides between video and lyrics at will. we also had the ability to shot half of an image from each projector and create an 18′ wide image all the way across the screen. i thought it was a cool backdrop.

of course, that’s the problem too. i love doing this stuff but i’m not the one who needs to be doing it. i have to start training and developing a tech team that can take these tasks over, set the up, and run them during an event. i have to find people who care about these things as much as i do. that’s the real issue. i have to find people who are convinced that the technical aspects of a worship service are incredibly important. i need people who are passionate about using technology to help people worship. it scares me to give up control of this but it has to be done because i need to be spending time with kids rather than making sure a cable is hooked up properly.

i recently found this at “cat’s cradle and i had to post it because it is amazing. i get so jealous of people who think like this. i love her outlook on grace. i’m not sure about you but i’ve been a couple of the people listed below and i have definitely worried about JESUS saying the things listed below (even though I know in my head that HE wouldn’t).

What Jesus Didn’t Say….

… to the woman at the well. “Well, first you have to make a full confession of everything you’ve done and then we’ll talk. ”

… to the woman with the hemorrhage. “Don’t touch me. You’ll get me all dirty and contaminated.”

… to the Canaanite woman. “I don’t care what you say, the gentiles are still dogs and dogs should be kept outside, not under the table.”

… to the thief on the cross. “Since you were a thief, it’s okay. I’ll square it with Dad. Now if you’d been a homosexual it would be a totally different story.”

… to the 5,000. “Ok, here’s lunch, but first I have a sermon to give here and then the boys will be passing out commitment cards for you to sign. No signature, no lunch.”

… to Peter, floundering in the water. “Pete, Pete, Pete. Hasn’t anybody taught you how to swim?”

… to Mary, meeting him on the road just after Lazarus’ death. ” Well, everybody dies sometime, and I had some very important business to attend to. I just couldn’t fit a visit into my schedule before now.”

… to Martha, bustling about the kitchen and fussing about Mary’s sitting down on the job. “Mary, get your lazy butt up and go act like a normal woman. Shame on you for forgetting your place like that!”

… to the rich young man. “Hey, salvation may be free but it ain’t cheap. But I would like some sort of commitment from you — 10% or so would work. You can see the guy who takes care of the purse, Judas.”

… to the scribes and Pharisees who were trying to trap him. “I’m behind you, fellas. Those rules are there to be obeyed to the letter, and if you can make a little profit off them, so much the better.”

… to the people on the mount, “Listen. I’m telling you to love your neighbor, but make sure he isn’t *one of them*, if you know what i mean.”

… to the crowd, “Do unto others before they do unto you.”

… to Mary, his mother, at a party, “Bug off, Ma. If these lazy jerks can’t plan adequately for this, why should I pull their irons out of the fire for them?”

Of course, he didn’t say any of this. That, I believe, is why we have the gospels, the “good news” not “the good news — and the bad news.”

these are the initial thoughts on the discipleNOW that we had this past weekend:

• our host homes and leaders were great this year. i heard very positive experiences during the weekend. i do think that next year we will use the concept of an event blog at a much earlier date to encourage even more idea swapping. this year’s blog seemed to help some in communicating with the leaders and thus doing it even earlier should help even more.
• andy neely (the youth minister at springhill baptist church in mobile, alabama) was great. he did a wonderful job of communicating.
• ten shekel shirt was great. they did a superb job of leading us in worship and i throughly enjoyed hanging out with them. lamont (the lead singer) and austin (the drummer) are both very passionate about social justice issues – especially modern day slavery in southeast asia and eastern europe.
• we got rid of the polaroid scavenger hunt that we had done in the past and instead went to a wild goose chase on l.s.u’s campus. it went very well. the kids were completely worn out and we may need to shorten it just a little next year.
• i need to work on improving the student center sound system. we had to borrow some equipment from the ring and the stuff we borrowed was junk we should have had already. in the future i will add a 31 band graphic equalizer (i’m considering the behring FBQ3102 and the dbx 231) a compressor or two (i’m looking at the behringer mdx 2600 and the dbx 266xl), and a few other sound system nic nacs.