Kethuvim

Well, it finally happened. The boy was finally born...all 8 pounds, 11 ounces of him. To say that he's the cutest baby ever born is, of course, an understatement. Don't believe me, check it out for yourself:

See? I told you so. That's a great picture, but not as good as this one:

I think he likes his car seat. He's just masking his real emotions.

Anyway, he's the cutest. I'll be blogging fairly frequently in the next few days. This whole experience has caused me to think a lot about what God thinks of us. I'll share my thoughts.

Seriously, has it been like two years that my wife has been pregnant? Does she have the gestational cycle of an elephant? If you can't tell, we are still sans-baby and still heavily fetus in this whole birthing process. And if you can't tell, my patience is wearing a bit thin.

I'm past the point of being nervous about being a dad and I'm to the point where I'm wondering if I will, in fact, be a dad sometime before Armageddon (not the Ben Affleck "Armageddon", the biblical one).

Speaking of Ben Affleck, I can't stand him. Let's be honest, he's played one good role in his entire life and that was as O'Banion on Dazed and Confused. Speaking of Dazed and Confused...

My wife is due a week from today. We went to the doctor this morning and we are scheduled to go in next Monday to induce her labor if she hasn't gone into labor on her own before that. In the Doc's words, however, he said, "I don't think you're going to make it until Monday." Of course, he say this while he's "examining" her. I'm going to write to Webster's Dictionary and make an urgent appeal to change the definition of the word "disturbing" to mean this: (1)watching a male gynocologist examine your wife's nether-regions while hearing him say words like "ripe" and "cervix" in the same sentence.

All awkwardness aside, the fact that I am going to be a father in a week or less seems a bit odd. In the eternity that my wife has been pregnant (and an eternity it has been), I've known that I'm going to be a dad, but when you see the light at the end of the tunnel (which apparently my son is seeing right now as well) reality sets in. Butts to be wiped, bottles to be made, puke to clean up...that sort of thing. The cool thing is that despite my apprehension, I couldn't be more excited. On the way home from the doctor today, I was daydreaming about what it will be like to hold him, kiss him, play ball with him when he gets older, watch him as he goes out on his first date, gets his heart broken for the first time, etc. Everything I saw on the way home seemed to be more beautiful. I started noticing things with new eyes for some reason. Maybe there's God in all of that. When you create a human being out of a sense of love, you can't help but love that creation with everything you have. This causes you to find beauty in places where you never saw it. It causes you to see beauty in everything and everyone, or at least it should. Maybe this is how God sees everything. His love causes him to find beauty in even the most mundane and ordinary things. All of the mundane and ordinary things...like us.

I have a quote from Mother Teresa on my wall that says this, "We are not called to be successful but to be faithful."

What would this country be like if churches understood this? Would there be less haggling over budgets? Would there be fewer megachurches and fewer people going to bed hungry at night? Would there be smaller auditoriums and more people with homes? Would the bickering stop over music styles and songs? Would people stop looking out for number one and start looking out for everyone else?

I'm so tired of the Church (notice the capital "C") striving for success. It's all ego-driven no matter how much the Church talks about wanting to reach people. The fact is that preachers (for the most part) want a successful church because it feels good. It makes them feel like they are a success in this world. It puts them on a plane with the successful business man living the American dream. It gives them something to brag about at their Bible College homecoming (Don't believe me? Go to a Bible College homecoming sometime and see how long it takes for a conversation between two ministers to turn to this, "Where are you now?" "Oh, I see, how many people do you have?").

The problem is that God defines success differently than we do. His measure of success is in how faithful his people are, not how many there are. I think that when God looks at a church, he's not looking for masses of people, he's looking for people that are going to be true followers. Just look at Jesus, by the world's standards, he was highly unsuccessful. He really only had 12 close followers, one of which sold him out for money. I doubt Jesus would be asked to speak at too many ministry conventions, and he probably wouldn't be approached by too many publishing companies either. But Jesus was faithful ("Not my will, but yours be done."). What would our world look like if we understood this? Who knows. We can either just sit and wonder, or we can start a revolution and find out for ourselves.

I'm preaching this Sunday at church. I've been preparing this message in my mind for awhile and the more I delve into the subject, the more I realize it is endless. I'll be talking about brokenness and the flip side, wholeness. I was chewing on this subject a little bit today and I came to realize that everything we do is motivated by a sense of brokenness and a search to be whole. Every addiction (addiction to anything, not just the biggies like drugs and stuff) is based on being broken. We may not spell it out this way, but I think we all long for something bigger, something of substance. Some may call it happiness, joy, or whatever. If you're like me it is spoken of this way: Please tell me that there is more to life than this. In other words, we all long to be whole, so we run after all sorts of crap in order to make us whole. The problem is that it is all temporary smoke and mirrors that covers up all of our junk for a short time, there's never any long-term resolution. The band Waterdeep puts it this way in their song "If You Want to Get Free":

I'm so often deterred from my actual intent
By distractions in a cellophane wrap
And the cruel voice that taunts me when I open them up
To find just one more box full of crap

All marketing is based on this brokenness. Think about it, ads are designed to convince us that we need a certain product and we can't live without it. In other words, your life will complete when you purchase ___________. Don't believe me? Look at the cell phone industry. I can't tell you how many people I have heard say, "I don't know what I did before I had my cell phone" or "I just couldn't live without my cell phone." It's all bullcrap. You can live without one, you've just bought the lie that you can't.

Jesus had a lot to say about this kind of thing. As I was studying, I came across this passage where he says, "I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have trouble. But take heart, I have overcome the world." The word "peace" in Hebrew is "shalom" and doesn't mean just the absence of conflict. The word "shalom" is loaded with meaning and it speaks of a wholeness that comes from God. When you say "shalom" to someone (I doubt many of us do, but...you know...just in case you ever do) you are saying to them, "May the wholeness of God rest upon you." Given this meaning, Jesus' words here take on a whole lot of meaning. True shalom (wholeness, completeness) is only found in following the teachings of Jesus. Everything else is an illusion that will lead to more brokenness. This world is broken and fractured, this means that as we live in this world, we will find brokenness as well. Jesus can put the pieces back together, in fact that what he really wants to do. He's overcome the world, he won. By clinging to him, we win also, and can find wholeness in the midst of a broken and shattered world.

I'm tired of trying to be super-pastor to everyone. I'm tired of being told that good Christians are Republicans. I'm tired of ignoring the poor, but I don't even know where to start helping. I'm tired of my nice house. I'm tired of all my crap that I own. I'm tired of the Church acting as if the Kingdom of God is something futuristic for when we die, and not something ever-present. I'm tired of talking a good game and walking a crappy one.

I'm tired of church. Church isn't supposed to be this difficult. Why do we need meetings to discuss outreach opportunities, why can't we just go out and be with people? Why do we need committees lined up to direct the Church, why can't we just follow Jesus in our community? Why do we strive for more and more people in church, when Jesus makes it clear that very few will find the narrow way? I'm tired of talking about budgets, as if God lives by a budget. I'm tired of talking about buildings as if that is what makes a church a church. I'm tired of future planning. I'm tired of worrying about upsetting people, when I know that the man I follow ticked a lot of people off. I'm tired of what we pass as "worship." I'm tired of Christians, including myself, who talk about devotion to God and yet exhibit something completely different in their lives.

I'm tired, not mad, just tired.

...that makes me wish I wasn't a Christian. Actually, I take that back, there's nothing Christian about this. There's so much wrong with this news report, I'm not sure where to start.

http://video.msn.com/v/us/v.htm?g=27fa6bf5-ff81-4cb2-9cb2-edf98780915e&t=m23&f=15/64video&p=

I think I missed Jesus' teaching about his followers making sure that they are a major market force in the nation's economy. Lord have mercy on us, Christ have mercy on us, Lord have mercy on us.

"...that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead."

Those are Paul's words in Philippians. I've been thinking about it this morning. Apparently Paul is saying is that the resurrection is something that we have to attain. My questions are then, what does this mean? and how do we do it?

Any thoughts?

I was studying Philippians this morning and came across Paul speaking of preaching the gospel. He says that some people preach the gospel out of envy and rivalry, and some preach it out of good will. He then says that as long as the gospel is being preached, he rejoices. I hate this passage, it seems wrong. I've been wrestling with it all morning.

Here's my problem with it: if we preach the gospel out of a sense of rivalry with others, is that realy the gospel at all? Richard Foster says, "We cannot preach the good news and be bad news...what we are offering the world is life as it was intended to be." I agree wholeheartedly with that statement. The gospel is about God saying to us, "I have a better way for you to live, my shalom is available to everyone, including you." If we're offering life as it was intended to be, how can we preach that selfishly? If we preach selfishly, we're not offering people anything different than the rest of the world. We're saying that the world is about us. We're saying that we'll look out for number one and everyone else can take a hike. How is that different than the corporate world? This all seems inconsistent. Any thoughts?

Modern Christianity tells us that there is a secular world and a sacred, or spiritual, world; as if God created two separate entities. This is why we have "Christian" bookstores (which are terrible), "Christian" radio stations (which suck), and "Christian" television stations (no words to accurately describe how awful these are). We, as Christian, have sectioned ourselves off from the rest of society in order to not be polluted by the unending Hedonism of the outside world. The problem with this is that the Bible states very clearly that "The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it" (Psalm 24:1). This means that God owns it all.

The Bible never makes a distinction between sacred and secular. In fact, Paul tells us that "All things are yours" (1 Corinthians 3:21). This means that everything is ours for the taking. If it's true, it's God's. This means that if I find truth in a Pink Floyd song, it's mine, God co-opts it for his Kingdom. This happens a couple of times in Scripture. Paul tells the men in Athens that the temple to "an unknown God" is actually speaking of Yahweh. He then says in the book of Titus, "as your poets have said." Paul would have had to have known the writings of the "pagan" poets in order to use their writings for God's glory.

I'm currently reading "New Seeds of Contemplation" by Thomas Merton (which, incidently, rocks my face off). Merton says this about everything God has created being holy, "There is no evil in anything created by God, nor can anything of his become an obstacle to our union with him." I think that's pretty self-explanatory. He also says this:

"When we are one with God's love, we own all things in him. They are ours to offer him in Christ his Son. For all things belong to the sons of of God and we are Christ's and Christ is God's. Resting in his glory above all pleasure and pain, joy or sorrow, and every other good or evil, we love in all things his will rather than the things themselves, and that is the way we make creation a sacrifice in praise to God."

What all of this means is that stuff, in and of itself, cannot be evil. It is made evil by our own devices. But the beauty is that we can take anything in God's created realm and make it holy and beautiful unto God. It's time for the Church to stop retreating from culture, but to dive into it and redeem it.

In a book called Christianity Rediscovered, the author Vincent Donovan talks about experiences he had with the Masai tribe in Africa. He was talking to one of the village elders one day and they started talking about lions. This is how the author recounts the story.

The Masai greatly admire the hunting skills of the lion. So much so, that they use the imagery of a lion hunting its prey as a metaphor for their search for God. The lion picks up the scent of its prey and then commits its total energy to hunt it down and catch it. All its power and agility is used in this pursuit. Once it has caught it, it wraps itself around it and envelops it. This is the way the lion hunts, and this is the way the Masai had traditionally thought they must search for God. The Masai leader then said, "You told us of the High God," he continued, "how we must search for him, even leave our land and our people to find him. But we have not done this. We have not left our land. We have not searched for him. He has searched for us. He has searched us out and found us. All the time we think we are the lion. In the end, the lion is God."

Could it be that this is the reason why the Bible speaks often of God and Jesus as a lion? Is it possible that God pursues us long before we pursue him? The story of the Lost Son lends some credibility to this. When the son returns, the father sees him a long way off and pursues him. He doesn't wait for him to come back and apologize, he runs after him, no questions asked. It seems that the Church would do well to understand this point. That God is seeking after his people and that we need to be letting people know this. We always wait for people to come in our doors and assume that they are the ones seeking God. What would happen if the Church started proclaming the good news that God is seeking his people and is after them as a lion is searching for its prey? What would happen if we proclaimed that there's a searching father who desperately longs to envelop his children in love? What would happen if we got off our butts and pursued people in love as God pursues them, instead of waiting for them to show up at church?

This video is from the show King of the Hill. The clip is about church shopping and it's both hilarious and incredibly sad because of the truth it conveys. Enjoy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtI2pa2m5cg

I'm currently reading a book by Steve Chalke called, "The Lost Message of Jesus." I was reading this morning and I came across this statement as he was writing about Jesus' parables of the lost son, lost sheep, and lost coin. If you know nothing of those stories, it speaks of people who have lost something of value to them, and will stop at nothing to find it again, feigning everything else in pursuit of their loss. Chalke says this of the parable of the lost son:

"It is often said that there is a God-shaped hole in our hearts. It would not be unreasonable to suggest that Jesus, by telling this story of the son who breaks his father's heart, is declaring that there is a people-shaped hole in the heart of God."

I'll let that sink in and say no more.

...oft gang agley. Oh, I'm sorry, you're not Irish, I meant to say, "often go awry." I'm not a mouse, I'm a man, but I share a bit of comraderie with my fellow mouse in that my best laid plans more than often go awry (Incidentally, the plans of my mouse friend in my garage definitely went awry when he decided to consume an entire box of D-con in an hour). What are my plans you ask (you're probably not asking that, you're more likely asking, "Why am I wasting my time reading this ridiculous article?")?

As my wife's tummy has grown in her pregnancy, I have grown around the midsection considerably. I call it "sympathy fat" but I have yet to see it recognized by a reputable medical journal. My love handles are more like love leviathans. Every morning when I get dressed, I put on my pants and they wheeze like a fat asthmatic kid. In between wheezes, they say things like, "Hey fatty, need a little help here" and "Have another ho-ho, Chubbs." My plans are to lose two inches in my waste before next summer when I will travel to Haiti to do some mission work. I've made resolutions like this in the past and, like my mouse friend, my plans have gone terribly awry. Of course, my plans haven't resulted in me being glued to the garage floor by my own dried blood like him, but, you know...

Anyway, I'll be in Haiti in June, so the temperature will be somewhere near 150 degrees with 300% humidity. That being the case, I'm going to need to shed a few pounds and be in decent shape in order to avoid collapsing from my fatness and out-of-shapeness. At the very least the Haitians can just call me "White Devil" and not "Chubby White Devil." Chances are pretty good, however, that I will be the same size, or bigger, by next June. Ah, the best laid plans...

Last night, my pregnant wife and I attended a 2.5 hour breastfeeding class. To be honest, I wasn't looking forward to it, but actually learned quite a bit and was glad I attended. Here are a few observations from the evening.

1. There may not be anything more awkward than watching a video full of boobs with your wife. We watched a forty minute video on breastfeeding technique and whatnot. I saw more boob than Hugh Hefner on a Viagra bender. There was nothing sexual about the video, but it didn't lessen the awkwardness nonetheless. You're watching the video, trying to glean some information from it while giving your wife the, "I swear it doesn't mean anything to me honey" look. The video could not end quick enough.

2. The "lactation consultant" used the word "teat" last night. I was probably the only one in the room convulsing in repressed laughter, but I don't care, I embrace my childishness. Not to mention the fact that the word "teat" is one of the funniest words in the English vernacular.

3. My job as a husband and father is to be a sort of breastfeeding cheerleader for my wife. I will be purchasing a skirt and pompoms and a copy of Toni Basil's "Hey Mickey" before the kid is here. I will also be developing a new cheer of "Go kid, go kid, latch, latch, latch."

All in all, I'm now fully prepared for breastfeeding. At least I'm ready to cheer my wife on. We have about two and half months left...or this side of forever until the kid is born. I'm not sure I'm ready to be a dad, but I'm excited about it nonetheless.

I thought I would give you an update from Fetusville. We had another doctor's visit yesterday and everything seems to be going well to this point. The boy is growing at a normal rate (except for the groin region, where I am sure he is an absolute albatross).

The best part of our visit yesterday was the fact that my wife had to drink this bottle of orange liquid for her glucose test. The best way to describe this stuff is orange-tinted sugar. She had to drink it in the span of five minutes or less in order for the test to be effective. So we broke out our old bong and she tipped it back with no problem. I'm sure the boy enjoyed the temporary sugar rush as his fragile system was bombarded with the equivilent of five Snicker's bars and a gallon of really strong Kool-Aid. If he comes out with three heads and a gimpy arm, we'll know the source of the mutation.

We have about 11 to 12 weeks left (or thirty five years, which is what it seems like) until our bundle of joy arrives and our lives as we know it end. We're looking forward to it all, except for the inevitable "Hey mom and dad, I'm crying because I pooped all up my back, and somehow in my hair" moments of parenting. Oh well, you take the gutter balls along with strikes I guess.

So I received something in the mail today for a youth event here in our community. It's being put on by a couple of churches and their youth groups. They're having a speaker come in and some local Christian band is doing a concert. Anyway, the flyer had a statement that sent my crap detector into overdrive. It said, "Come to something that is out of the world" (editor's note: italics used for emphasis).

Never mind the lame attempt at a quippy play on words, the message is what bothers me. Since when are we as Christians supposed to retreat from the world? The message of this flyer is clear; this event is for Christians, non-believers need not show up. I am so incredibly tired of this type of crap, I could just scream. Let me show you a passage from the Apostle Paul that applies pretty well here.

"I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people--not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world."

What part of this passage do we not understand as Christians? Oh wait, the entire second part, that's it. Paul is telling us that we cannot retreat from the world. In fact, his tone seems to suggest he would have thought it ridiculous to do so. My problem with this event is the same problem I have with Christian radio stations, Christian book stores, and Christian television. It all sends a message to non-believers that it belongs to us and no one else.

I don't understand how we can talk so much about the Great Commission, and yet we can suck so badly at fulfilling it. Jesus tells us to "Go and make disciples of all nations..." The interesting thing is that the Greek for "go" is actually better translated, "as you are going." In other words Jesus is saying, "Hey, while you're out there in the world, make disciples." We can't do that if we're constantly removing ourselves from the world in order to huddle with one another in our "sanctuaries." It's no wonder why the American Church is completely ineffective.

So lent ended on Sunday. I gave up sweets for lent and it was hard, but I survived. I figured that if Jesus could be nailed to a cross, I could give up sweets for 50 days.

If I'm not mistaken, the point of lent is to sacrifice something that controls you in order to focus on God. Also, I think a by-product of lent is to try and work on an area of life that needs work. So I decided that my love handles are large enough and if they get any bigger, I'm going to look like a Christmas tree with small top, large middle, and small lower end. During lent I made a mental list of all the sweets I was going to eat when lent ended. First on my list was a Cadbury Egg. Other items included brownie with ice cream, chocolate milk, and anything emanating from the entire flippin' Willy Wonka factory.

On Sunday, my pastor handed me a Cadbury Egg at church. I proceeded to wolf it down like Augustus Gloop on a chocolate bender. I enjoyed the frothy goodness of sugar and fat until it mixed with the acid in my stomach. Keep in mind, the only other thing in my stomach was communion, which doesn't amount to a whole lot from a volume standpoint. At that point my stomach was saying something to the effect of, "I hate you, you stupid (insert long string of expletives)." I was pretty sure I was going to barf somewhere mid-sermon. At that point, I realized that my body was sending a clear warning that I was probably going to have pace myself on the whole sweets thing. At this point, I've done pretty well in that area, but it's taking everything in me to not shove my entire carmel-filled chocolate bunny into my mouth at once. I just figure my pants are tight enough and I'm not buying a bigger size to accomadate my girth.

My hope drifts away as I see the last wisp of smoke disappear. You said you were the light, yet all I see is darkness. You promised the world, yet all I see is a closed tomb. The candle of my hopes and dreams has been extinguished and I'm left with nothing but a burned wick. Where did it go wrong, O Light of the World? How is it that the fire from the house of David can lose its fuel? Who has the power to extinguish God's own flame? You must have been a farce. To be the light emanating from God's own light would mean that your flame is eternal. Obviously your fire was of a different sort. A much more carnal sort. You seemed so convincing, not like the others from the past who made the same claims as you. You seemed to speak with authority, but now I know that you were just a better public speaker, more persuasive in your speech than the rest. You used smoke and mirrors and spoke in enigmatic parables. We thought you were brilliant, now we know that you were nothing more than a slight of hand artist with good people skills.

So what's left? What do I do now? I guess I'll go hide with the rest until all of this blows over. Sometimes when the light goes out and darkness prevails, the best thing to do is hide.

The more I study the Bible, the more I realize that how no words are wasted in it. In the creation story, we read of God entering into a chaotic atmosphere (the Hebrew tohu vavohu) and bringing order to it. By bringing order to the chaos, God set up a great many systems and patterns to the world. Patterns such as, erosion, adaptation, growth, life, and death. It's the last three that I want to deal chiefly with.

If you look throughout all of creation, there is a continuity to all of it. No creature, including humans, is exempt from the natural order of things. It's almost planting time in Indiana, which means that farmers will soon plant millions of seeds in the ground an inch deep and then let nature take its course. These seeds will be "born," grow, and then die. I'm having a son, my first child, in a few months. That child will be born, grow, and then, God willing at an old age, die. The same goes for me, my wife, my family, and everyone else on the planet. We can't escape this.

This all sounds so morbid and negative, but it isnt, it's just the way God created us and everything around us. In the words of Donald Miller, "we are all just getting born, just growing up, just dying off." There's something beautiful to think about how connected to nature we really are. God made everything beautiful, but that beauty has to fade and disappear in order to give way to new beauty. I'll watch the soybeans grow in a few months, become full and green and beautiful, and then wither and die. But in a year or so, the beauty will return.

Jesus wasn't exempt from this either. He was born, lived the most beautiful life in history, then died. However, he completed the cycle by returning to beauty for eternity when he walked out of his grave. I love the fact that everything in the universe is so connected, including God being connected to it all as well.

I recently got back from a trip to West Virginia. I spent a great deal of time hiking and just taking in the beauty of nature. I came across this tree on one of my hikes and it reminded me of...well...me. I haven't been myself for about a year. Ministry has the ability to ruin a minister's spiritual life pretty quickly. I know that sounds weird, but until you've been a minister, you can't know what I mean, so I won't try to explain it.

This trip was what I needed. It gave me a chance to get away from all of the crap of life and focus on creation and the God who created it. It's amazing what happens when you take the time to get away from distractions. Anyway, when I saw this tree it made me think of what my life feels like at times. This tree is just a gigantic jumbled mess. It has numerous vines hanging on it, which go a hundred different directions. If you're a minister, you know exactly what I mean. We're almost constantly pulled in a million different directions until we don't know which end is up.

I know all of this sounds negative, but let me finish. I realized after thinking about it for some time that all of the stuff hanging on it actually lends more beauty to the tree. Without all of the vines hanging on it, it would just be a normal tree. It never would have caught me eye and made me want to photograph it. I think the real challenge of life is to find beauty in all of our mess. The key to this is to constantly remember that we are never without the Beautiful One. His beauty meets our mess and makes something unique and wonderful. I learned this past week in West Virginia that when we take time to listen, God responds and shows how beautiful he really is. Hey God, I've missed you, I'm glad to be back.

I took this picture on a cold, foggy morning in West Virginia. It's totally creepy. All it needs to complete the creepiness is two identical twin girls saying, "Come play with us, forever and ever and ever."

I was studying Isaiah today, which by the way is one of the best books in the Bible, and I came across a passage that seemed to jump of the page. Isaiah 63:8-9 says this:

For he said, "Surely they are my people, children who will not deal falsely." And he became their Savior. In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them; in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old.

We talk all the time about the fact that we serve a personal God, but do we really know what that means? Are our minds capable of grasping the idea of a being big enough to create the universe, yet small enough to care about being personal with his creatures? What does it mean for God to be personal? In order to answer that last question, we have to look at what it means for us to have a personal relationship with other people. We have to spend time with them, we have to exhibit great care toward them, we have to pour our lives into them. If this is what it means for us to have a personal relationship with someone, then it follows that the same things apply to God having a relationship with his creation. However, it seems that just spending time with someone and caring about them, doesn't necessarily mean we have a personal relationship with them. So what completes a relationship with someone and moves it from being an acquaintance to a loving relationship?

I think the answer lies in the bold print of our passage. It says that in all of Israel's afflictions, God was afflicted. To love someone completely and have an intimate relationship with them means that we are afflicted when they are afflicted. The passage says that when we hurt, God hurts also. We don't serve an impersonal God who sits back and just watched stuff happen. He's actively involved with us, even to the point of taking our hurts on himself. The Bible refers to God at times as the God of Comfort, I never really understood the breadth of that statement until I understood that when I am hurting, there is a Creator that is hurting as well.

"Don't worry about a thing, 'cause every little thing's gonna be alright."

I can't tell you how often I listen to this song by Bob Marley, and I can't tell you how often I need to hear it. I'm a worrier by nature and I need to hear the "three little birds" saying this to me. It seems to ring with something Jesus said once,

"Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."

The fact is that worry leads to nothing but increased blood pressure and a massive coronary. Let Jesus' message (and Bob's) wash over you. Do you have financial problems? Understand that God is faithful. Having family problems? Don't worry about a thing, every little thing is gonna be alright. Been sold out by friends or betrayed? Don't worry about it, because God will never leave you or forsake you.

Let the three little birds and Jesus speak to your heart as you struggle for the faith to get you through your problems.

So my wife and I have started a new tradition on Sunday nights. We watch C-Span. I wish I was kidding, but seriously, we watch C-Span. On Sunday nights they have a half-hour segment of the British House of Commons weekly Prime Minister grilling. If you've never seen it, believe me when I tell you that your life is woefully incomplete. It is comedy in its highest form. It's like watching a bar fight in which no punches are thrown, and where the participants use sharp language and dripping sarcasm to knock the other person to the ground.

The proceedings go something like this: any member of Parliament can get up and ask a question of the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister then has to get up and answer the question posed to him. In between are random shouts of "hear-hear" if people agree and "AAhhoofdsdfksfcfksjdkflj" if they don't. The beautiful thing about it is that the questions are generally posed in a fairly sarcastic form. Last night, one of the Parliament members accused the Prime Minister of not being able to read. The Prime Minister then got up and referred to the man as "the right honorable gentleman" which in British-speak means, "gay cowboy" or something like that.

If you've never watched the House of Commons, do it. It's like watching a circus, sans midgets and other creepy carny folk. Plus, it's nice to see a government where policy makers are held accountable for the things they say.

In most churches, I've heard sermons preached about living life on the mountaintop and living life in the valley. What about living life somewhere in the middle? I've never seen a book written about that or a sermon preached on it. Are we just supposed to know how to live life when things aren't great, but they aren't that bad? I'm feeling mediocre right now. I'm not great, but I'm not bad either. I feel like I'm living in an earthly purgatory. I'm sort of waiting for either an ascent or a descent, and in the meantime doing nothing more than surviving through habit and routine.

How do we find God in these times of life? It's easy to find God when you're really up, and it's even fairly easy to find God when you've hit bottom, but it seems more difficult in the middle. What's the answer? Do I go skydiving or play chicken with an oncoming train to break the monotony? Do I find a mountain and sit on it while composing John Denver-ish poetry about how I see God in the trees? There are no easy answers and I'm not sure the Bible is black and white on the issue either (yes, I'm suggesting that the Bible isn't black and white). I know I should pray more and read my Bible more, I've heard those answers since I was a kid; but what about when you don't really feel like doing that? Man I wish Joel Osteen would write a book that would give me the answers. Of course, he never lives in the middle because he's constantly in God's favor.

Seriously, I'm not great at reading ultrasound pictures or anything, but I can definitely see the ghostly face of my son. I've come to the conclusion that it looks similar to the Shroud of Turin. I wanted to ask the ultrasound tech, "What is the post-crucifixion, pre-resurrected Christ doing in my wife's womb?" I didn't think she would get it or find the humor in it like I do.

Everything is healthy, although I'm a little concerned about the size of his naughty bits. Seriously, you can't see them in this picture, but it took three different angles for us to see them. Let the locker room laughing begin...sorry son.

We got to see his jaw moving up and down during the ultrasound. I like to think he was saying something like, "Hey guess what, I'm trying to sleep, leave me alone." He didn't stop moving the whole time. If this is any indication of things to come, I need to start learning how to live on 30 minutes of sleep a day.

I still think he looks like my wife. We're excited that yet another homely, frumpy, Polley male is entering the world. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see him emerge from the womb looking like GrizzlyAdams with a full back and chest of hair. Ladies and Gentlemen, behold the next great musical innovator (a real musical innovator, not just someone who thinks they are...like Kanye West).

Last night was the 78th Annual Academy Awards, or as I like to call them, the 78th Annual Crippling Boredom Awards. Holy crap this is a boring show. The only redeeming quality this year, during the 15 minutes I watched of the thing, was John Stewart, who is an absolute master of dripping sarcasm.

The Academy Awards are a time every year for a bunch of rich celebrities to get together and stroke each other's egos and have someone pat them on the back and tell them "good job," and hand them a new mantle sculpture. Apparently millions of dollars per picture doesn't stroke the ego enough anymore.

There are many things I hate about awards shows, especially this award show. First, there's the meat-market known as the red carpet where people watching on TV can live vicariously through their favorite star by yelling at the screen, "I love what Charlize is wearing this year." It's as if the stars honestly care what Betty Ann Provost from Sheboygan, Wisconsin thinks of their outfits. Along with this red-carpet fun, you get the leathery Joan Rivers and her equally leathery daughter commenting on what everyone is wearing. Thanks for your opinion ladies, here's a quarter for your next face-lift.

Then there's the acceptance speeches. It gets so old hearing everyone say the same thing. "Thank you to the Academy (whoever the crap that is), and thank you to (insert the names of everyone you have ever met in your entire life, including Ira the Deli owner, who's Pastrami on Rye was the inspiration you needed to go on when you wanted to give up hope on humanity)." "Oh, and thanks to my husband/wife/life partner for sitting at home pining away while I spent the better part of three years neglecting you and kids so that I could win this award."

Finally, you know there is something wrong with the world when Joachin Phoenix doesn't win crap for his incredible portrayal of Johnny Cash, and a band called "Three-Six Mafia" wins an award for a song about a pimp. Hey Johnny, if you're up there listening, I apologize on the part of humanity for that injustice.

The thing that kills me are the people that hang on everything that happens at these awards, as if their very existence depends on whether or not "Capote" wins an award. Aaaahhhh...I feel better.

I was flipping through channels again last night (I really need to stop doing that) and came across my favorite aforementioned religious channel. Every Sunday night, the chapel service from Pensacola Christian College (Our motto: "Jesus never smiled so neither do we") airs on Lesea broadcasting. I happened to catch the service just as the preacher got up to speak. He gets up and he gives the usual guilt trip deal to the students. You know what I mean, "This may be your last day on earth, you may never have another chance to accept Jesus blah, blah, blah." I've heard this kind of crap so much that it doesn't even make me mad anymore. However, what he said next did make me mad. "If you have accepted Jesus before, but have hardened your heart to him, the same warning goes to you. If your heart is hardened (is that a clinical problem by the way?) you may make it through the next week without incident, but you may miss God's final call to you."

I let that last statement sink in and listened to his follow up on it. Let me tell you what he meant by that. He was suggesting that God has a limited number of times that he "calls" you (hopefully not collect, because I'm not accepting the charges). If you don't accept any of these "calls" to you, then God basically gives up and moves on to the next person. I was sitting there, jaw on the floor with expletives running through my head at an alarming rate, thinking "Has this guy ever heard of Jesus?"

I'm not sure how you can read a story like the parable of the lost son and say something like he said. In that story, I see a God who pursues those who abandon him. I don't see a Father that says, "You disowned me too many times, I give up." I don't find this idea anywhere in scripture. I have so much I could say pertaining to all of this, but I want to know what everyone thinks.

So I was perusing my 15 channels the other night and I came across, what I believe to be the most humerous channel on television, Lesea broadcasting. If you know nothing of Lesea broadcasting, it could be best described as the lesbian step-sister of TBN (Editor's note: I have no idea what that means, but it sounded funny). Anyway, the other night a man by the name of Mike Murdoch, or as he's known by the Mafia, "Mikey Hair-dye", was on and he was, of course, speaking of prosperity. I say "of course" because that's all he ever talks about. He said something interesting during his diatribe that piqued my interest a bit. He said, "Don't let anyone tell you that you can't have nice things. Anyone that says that you have to do without is an idiot."

I've mentioned before that I have a pretty finely-tuned crap detector. After that statement, it was going off so loudly that my neighbor came over in sponge rollers asking me to shut my "pretty little mouth." Upon hearing Mikey say those things, my first thought was, "You know, he's right, the Bible never said anything about having to do without...oh wait...no...I seem to remember Jesus saying something to the effect of, 'deny yourself.'" To be honest with you, I think it's ok to have nice things at times, as long as those things don't become your god. However, he was advocating that whatever our heart desires is ours as long as we send in our "seed money" so that God will bless us.

When Jesus said, "deny yourself, take up your cross daily and follow me," he was saying that if we follow him, we no longer live our lives by our wants and desires. Our life is not our own. Our life is to be lived by what God wants for us, not what we want for us. I'm tired of hearing these prosperity guys talking about the spiritual life like it has everything to do with us. With their "theology" God is nothing more than a high-yield mutual fund where you put a certain amount of money in, and he multiplies it so that you can have a vacation home in Colorado.

What does this say about our brothers and sisters around the world who are striving to live for God, and as such, are being imprisoned, killed, or live in extreme poverty? By Mikey's line of thought, they are doing something wrong. They're not "planting their seeds" in the right area, so God isn't blessing them. America is the only place where you will hear this message preached. Let's face it, these teachings are nothing more than using the Bible to justify extravagant living. It's a copout so that these guys won't have to deny themselves.

I believe I wrote briefly about the point that you can't manufacture community in a church, it just happens as a special grace from God. I believe I also spoke about how churches continue to try and manufacture community and it usually turns into nothing more than a 6-month trainwreck.

Well, I got a catalog in the mail today from Group Publishing, whose company slogan should be "The company that cheese built." Their stuff is, for the most part, complete and utter crap. I was thumbing through the endless pages of mindless curriculum and I came across an add for a curriculum and on the top of the page, I found the emblazoned 56-point font words, "Build Commuity in Your Church." My bullcrap detector about knocked me out of my chair as soon as I finished reading that phrase. But wait, there's more. Under that gigantic farcical statement was this three-point add on: Welcome New Members, Enhance Your Small Groups, Easy and Effective Outreach. As if that wasn't enough, in Ron Popeil style I tell you, "But wait, there's more." This curriculum is apparently "Stuffed with 13 weeks of tasty, life-changing experiences." I'll have to be honest with you when I say that I have no desire to know what it means to have a tasty, life-changing experience. Apparently along with Bible study, you spend a half-hour marinating a Jesus-shaped chicken and then expound on what the Holy Spirit smells like.

I'll have to tell you that my experience with most curriculum has done nothing for my life other than making me want to take my own. How can a curriculum foster community? It can't. As I said in a previous post, real community takes time and grace; it takes people who are willing to lay down their lives for one another. It can't be accomplished when people come together in the hopes of having a "tasty, life-changing experience."

What does it cost to have real community in your church? Not your life, just 70 bucks...and, oh yeah, your soul.

"Take a census of all the congregation of the people of Israel, by clans, by fathers' houses, according to the number of names, every male, head by head."

God instructs the leaders of Israel at the beginning of the book of Numbers to take a census of their people. When we think census, we think about strange people in ties showing up at our doorstep every few years to count how many people live in the United States. All we think about is the numbers they are looking for. However, what is a census? In a census, they ask many questions to try and gauge things like income, number of children, and that sort of thing. They don't just come to the house and count how many people live in the US.

By asking the Israelites to take a census of their people, is it possible that God was asking them for more than just numbers of people? By asking questions of their fellow Israelites, they were finding out more about their countrymen.

As a minister, I know quite a bit about some people in my congregation. I know the good, the bad, and the ugly about some of the people. This has only happened because I have invested my time in them to get to know them. I'm a part of a small group, and we have become very close. We've been meeting for three years now and, in that time, we have learned a lot about one another. We know each others' good points, as well as bad points. We know each others' struggles and triumphs.

It seems to me that true community can only happen if we are willing to take a census of those around us. We can only have real community when we invest in the lives of others. It takes time, it takes commitment to one another, and it takes honesty to make it happen. You can't force real community. Too often churches try to force community, and what comes out is a half-baked version of community where no one knows anything about anyone past the surface. Real community flows out of love and a desire to get to know your brothers and sisters. Real community is a grace from God, you can't force it, it just has to come from him.

Take a census of your brothers and sisters. Invest your life into them because you love them. You'll never have joy in the Church without it.

One of the things that has bothered me about The Church for a long time is that it seems to be anemic when it comes to community. When I read the account of the early Church in the book of Acts I always end up sighing and say something like, "I want to be a part of that." Apparently a lot of other people in that day wanted to be a part of it as well, because the text in Acts says that The Church added to its number daily. It says that the people of the early Church had everything in common and no one claimed that anything else was his own. They ate together, prayed together, worshipped together; they truly had community. However, it seems to me that today's "Church" looks more like this: we come together, sit together, shake hands for two minutes, exhange small talk, half-sing a few songs, listen to a sermon that we don't comprehend, and then go to our respective homes and repeat the process a week later. That couldn't be further from real community.

Acts says that the people enjoyed fellowship. The word "fellowship" has lost pretty much all of its meaning today. When we say fellowship, we immediately conjure up images of pot-lucks and ice cream socials, youth group trips and chili suppers. The sad truth is that these things have nothing to do with fellowship. These should just be by-products of fellowship, not fellowship itself. The Greek word for fellowship actually means "brotherhood." To have real fellowship within the church, we have to be a brotherhood. This means that we live "all for one and one for all." The New Testament writers knew what they were doing when referring to their fellow believers as "brother" and "sister." These weren't just words they decided to use, it was the truth. They lived in community even with all of their faults, bumps, bruises, scars, and crap. They didn't all get along, but they were admonished to love one another anyway as Christ loves the Church. That's so beautiful, there's nothing more beautiful than two enemies who make a conscious choice to love one another even in disagreement. They decide to be brothers even though they disagree. But what does all of this mean for us in the 21st century? In a couple of days, we'll explore what it might mean to have real brotherhood within the Church today.

In Exodus 27:20-21, God instructs the Israelites to put a light in the tent of meeting and that the light is to be lit with "clear oil of beaten olives." If you know anything about cooking, you know that extra virgin olive oil is the first pressing of the olives and yields a greenish- yellow oil. The more pressings the olives go through, the clearer the product becomes. God tells the Israelites that they are to use only clear oil for lighting the lamp in the tent of meeting? Why clear oil? Why not the first and finest pressing of the olives? Lawrence Kushner states this as the reason.

It's because you just can't get the real clear and pure stuff until they pound the hell out of it (or you). We have a classic rabbinic teaching drawn from Psalm 51:19: "The offering to God is a contrite spirit..." The rabbis teach that the ultimate sacrifice is our smug expectation that we can do it alone, that we are in control of our own destiny. Suffering reminds us that we are not and, in so doing, purifies us. Anguish is simply a necessary precondition for the purification of the fuel required for the Tabernacle.

Suffering and anguish are all that can lead us to life and purity. The olives must endure a pounding of immense proportions in order to render their purest oil. We must endure much through trial and suffering in order to grow and be pure. Here's to allowing God to "pound the hell out of" us; pound out all of the impurities and all of the junk to render us pure and holy.

Mandy and I went to the doctor yesterday and all seems to be well with our human larva. It apparently doesn't appreciate the microphone thingy the doctor uses to hear the heartbeat, because it moves everytime she hits the right spot. I'm assuming it is perfectly content in its sack-o-fluid and doesn't want to be disturbed while it's reading, pondering existential quandries, or wondering why it is growing a third arm or has two butts.

In about a month, we'll find out the identity of the aforementioned larva. We were reading somewhere that they now have ultrasounds in 2-D, 3-D, or 4-D. I understand 2-D and 3-D, but what in the world is 4-D? Do they show you, not only the baby, but a vast other universe inside my wife's womb? I can just hear the doctor now, "Ok, there's the baby...there's its twang, it's a boy...and here's the constellation 'Uterine 5'." It should be an interesting doctor visit to say the least. All I know is that if William Shatner is dwelling within my wife's uterus somewhere, I'm not going to be happy.

I was sitting at home watching a show on TV that doesn't suck, when a commercial for one that does suck came on. It was a commercial for the new Survivor show. I think it takes place in Panama (or at least a Hollywood set that looks like Panama) or something. The new "twist" (please notice the quotes) is something called "Exile Island." Apparently one "castaway" at a time will have to stay on this island alone (which is due punishment for them agreeing to be on such a mind-numbingly crappy show in the first place), and try to survive. The commercial was hilarious because as it was describing this new facet to the game, it said something like, "On this island, they can find the key to winning the game...IF THEY SURVIVE!" This obviously begs the question, "Survive what?" Can they survive not being eaten by the camera crew, production team, and the team of medical doctors on the other side of the island? I'm sure the show would just let someone die off on screen.

Here's the reason I hate this show. These people aren't surviving anything. All it means is that the winner is the one who can go the longest eating worm larvae and rat pelvis or something. Who cares? Millions of people around the world have to endure that everyday and no one gives a crap. This has to be the most anti-climactic and boring show on television. There's no drama whatsoever. No one is going to die in this show, everyone will survive. If they want to do this show right, they need to drop 10 frumpy ignorant white supremacists in the middle of Compton, California with nothing more than their beer guts, and the clothes on their back and see how long they last. The last one standing wins...until he gets shot in the face. This format would solve a couple of problems. One, the name "Survivor" would actually mean something, and two, it would get rid of 10 morons. Maybe I should write to the network and make the suggestion.

I came across this prayer in a book titled, "The Book of Jesus." It is a collection of writings by numerous authors concerning Jesus. I think this would be a good prayer to incorporate daily. What do you think?

"O God, who has proven your love for all humanity by sending us Jesus Christ our Lord, and has illuminated our human life by the radiance of his presence, I give you thanks for this your greatest gift.
For my Lord's days upon the earth:
For the record of his deeds of love:
For the words he spoke for my guidance and help:
For his obedience unto death:
For his triumph over death:
For the presence of his Spirit within me now:
I thank you, O God.
Grant that the remembrance of the blessed Life that once was lived out on this common earth under these ordinary skies may remain with me in all the tasks and duties of this day. Let me remember--
His eagerness, not to be ministered unto, but to minister:
His symphathy with suffering of every kind:
His bravery in the face of his own suffering:
His meekness of bearing, so that, when reviled, he reviled not again:
His steadiness of purpose in keeping to his appointed task:
His simplicity:
His self-discipline:
His serenity of spirit:
His complete reliance upon you, his Father in heaven.
And in each of these ways give me grace to follow in his footsteps.
Amen.

I swear that I'm not obsessed with suffering. I don't like it anymore that anyone else, but for some reason, I keep happening onto these different passages concerning suffering. I can't get away from them. I come across them in the Bible, I come across them in other readings, I can't help it. I guess these passages stand out to me so much, because they fly in the face of the American Prosperity Gospel that is so prevelant today. Actually, most American Christians are raised on this type of thought and theology. It isn't all as overt and satanic as Joel Osteen's message or anything, but it's there nonetheless. For example, none of my preachers growing up ever claimed that God wanted you to be rich and powerful, but they still taught that, overall, God wanted you to be happy. So I grew up thinking that God wanted all to be happiness, and when something didn't make me happy, it was Satan's fault.

I've been studying Isaiah for quite awhile, and he touches upon this idea many times. I came across one I couldn't ignore this morning. These words I'm about to show you come from the King Hezekiah. He had been struck with an illness and then healed by God, and his words here are commenting on his situation.

"But what can I say? He [God] has spoken to me, and he himself has done this. I will walk humbly all my years because of this anguish of my soul. Lord, by such things men live; and my spirit finds life in them too. You restored me to health and let me live. Suely is was for my benefit that I suffered such anguish. In your love you kept me from the pit of destruction; you have put all my sins behind your back."

I wonder how these prosperity guys handle a passage like this. My guess is that they skip right over it because there's no way to refute Hezekiah's words and change them to mean something else. They sure as crap don't preach a passage like this. Hezekiah not only says that God was directly responsible for his suffering, but he say that "by such things men live." He is essentially saying that we cannot be whole and alive without suffering and anguish. He then has the audacity to blame God for his anguish then turn around and talk about God's love. This is just beyond fascinating to me, because it goes against our natural human reactions to adversity. Our first reaction is to blame God for his absence and then say things like, "God has a plan in all of this," although we know when we say it that we're full of crap. We never think of God sending suffering our way as his way of loving us. We feel punished. Yet Hezekiah (and it seems everyone else in the Bible) see it as a loving Father desiring growth from his people. I could go on forever with this stuff, but I want to hear what you all (3 of you) have to say.

I was studying in "Five Cities of Refuge" again this morning and came across something I had never thought about. To be honest, it made me feel a little bit better about something that has bugged me about God for a long time. The passage of study was the "Akedah" or "Binding of Isaac." This is the story where God inexplicably tests Abraham and tells him to go and sacrifice his son on Mt. Moriah. Just as an aside, "Moriah" in Hebrew means "awe-ful."

This story has always bugged me. Why couldn't God choose a test for Abraham that didn't include the near-slaughtering of his child? Why not have him walk to the nearest watering hole and tell him to walk across it? Why not tell him to spit a loogie in the air and tell him to make it, by faith, levitate in the air? I've never understood it until I studied this morning.

Abraham is standing on a mountain with a knife raised in the air, ready to drive it through Isaac, when a messenger of the Lord stops him. In order to understand the full depth of what is going on here, you have to look at all of the other cultures around at that time. Every other culture had "gods" that required infant or child sacrifice to appease them. God had to do this to show Abraham that he was a different god. He was the true God because he was so merciful and wasn't going to require this horrific act of his people. Sacrifice animals, not people.

For me, this helps me to see more of God's true nature. He isn't sick, he's merciful. I understand that he sent his only Son to be a sacrifice for the universe, but Jesus had the choice to go to the cross. He was human and could have backed out, but he didn't, so the argument that God sending his only Son to die being proof of God's sickness is irrelevant here.

This study this morning just reinforced my love for God and his mercy. Hopefully it does the same for yours.

I'm currently picking my way through a fine book by the title "Five Cities of Refuge." It's written by two Jewish guys, Lawrence Kushner and David Mamet. It's basically comprised of their reflections on weekly Torah readings. I'm using them as a supplement to my daily study. I was reading this morning about the Creation account of God's rest. I always assumed that God created everything in six days, got tired (if the Almighty can in fact tire), and rested from his labors. However, the Jewish understanding of this passage is that the creation and the rest are inseparable parts of the creation. Kushner says this, "We bless God's work, and ours, by quitting. The work and the rest, together make the world. They are inseparable."

Another interesting thought has to do with the name of God. God's most intimate name is yod-hey-vav-hey in the Hebrew. We know it as Yahweh. The sixth day of creation ends with these words, "...and there was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day." I won't try to explain this next point, I'll let the text of the book speak for itself.

"The Hebrew for "the sixth day" is yom haShishi. The first letter respectively of each word is yod and hey, which, when joined with the first letter respectively of 'And they (the heavens and the earth) were finished...' is vav and hey, together spelling yod, hey, vav, and hey, the ineffable Name, the Name of the One who brings into being all that is, the Name of God. At last the sweat and the sigh inseparable."

Our time has to be spent with the sweat and the sigh. Without both elements, God's work is incomplete, making us incomplete. People don't rest anymore. When we cease to rest, we do a dishonor to God's creative work by stating through our actions that the Sabbath rest isn't really a part of life. Take a break. You will not be whole without it.

I like darkness. I don't know why. Light is actually much better, but for some reason I am drawn to it. Darkness is scary, everything bad in life is associated with darkness, but for some reason I can't get away from it. Jesus says he's the light, and as such, his followers are to live in the light as well. He has a good point, but at this point in my life, I still choose darkness more than light. I wonder why?

Why is it that so many of us "light-bearing" followers of Jesus shun the light and dwell in the darkness. Why is it so freakin' hard to live constantly in the light? Could it be that we are born with a propensity for darkness? Think about it. Do you have to teach a child how to be bad? Heck no, they manage that just fine by themselves. You do, however, have to teach them how to be good. If we born into light, we wouldn't have to be taught how to be good. I think it's Adam and Eve's fault. God laid a choice in front of them. Choose light, or choose darkness. They, of course, chose darkness and the rest is history. I think something cosmic happened at that point. I think the very fabric of God's creation changed. From that point on, we would still have the same choice to make, but it would be much harder to choose light.

So I think that the reason it is so hard to be good and to choose light and follow Jesus is because it goes against the very fiber of our beings. There is something in us (call it the Devil or whatever) that bends us toward darkness. Paul called it the "sinful nature." There is no way outside of God to be good. There is no way, outside of God's grace, to continually choose light. It has to be from him, because he is the light. May we trust in that light and follow it forever.

I stumbled upon a really great bookstore yesterday in our mall that sells a ton of really old hardback books. I happened upon a great book by Kahlil Gibran entitled, "Jesus, the Son of Man." It was written in 1928 and it tells the story of Jesus from the viewpoint of a bunch of people surrounding Jesus. It shows how each of these people may have viewed Jesus. I started reading it today, and I was instantly intrigued. I read the Mary Magdalene chapter today and I was fairly moved by it.

As the Bible states , Mary Magdalene was a "woman of ill repute." In other words, a prositute and slut. Her chapter in this book speaks of her first encounter with Jesus. Before I recount the scene from the book, I want to give you some context. She has already seen Jesus from afar and spoken with him some, and she is now trying to lure Jesus into her house.

And I said, "I beg you to come into my house." And it was all that was sod in me, and all that was sky in me calling unto Him.
Then he looked at me, and the noontide of His eyes was upon me, and He said, "You have many lovers, and yet I alone love you. Other men love themselves in your nearness. I love you in your self. Other men see a beauty in you that shall fade away sooner than their own years. But I see in you a beauty that shall not fade away, and in the autumn of your days that beauty shall not be afraid to gaze at itself in the mirror, and it shall not be offended.
"I alone love the unseen in you."

I have a couple of observations about this passage. First, it gave me the chills to think about Jesus' words and the fact that he utters the same words to us. We're all prostitutes, we all have other lovers besides Jesus, and yet, he is the only one who loves us as we really are. He's the only one that loves the unseen in us. Second, does anyone else wish they could see everybody through the same lens as Jesus? I noticed myself people-watching at the mall yesterday and I became shamingly aware of how quick I am to pass judgment on those I see. I make judgment calls based on the outside "seen" things in a person. How ridiculous. We're called to be like Jesus, and part of that is to see people as he sees them. I suck at it, do you?

There's been a great deal of debate over the lat couple of weeks pertaining to many "mega-churches" cancelling their Sunday services on Christmas. I think I'll weigh in on the issue with the full knowledge that no one gives a crap what I think anyway. Here goes.

I've done a great deal of thinking about this, and I've tried to look at it from both points of argument and I've come to the conclusion that cancelling Christmas service makes about as much sense as me being employed at a modeling agency. I understand that "mega-churches" require a lot of people to run their average service, I totally understand. My question is then, why can't you scale down your service and just have a sripped-down approach to worship without giant bands, Sunday school, dramas, and all the other superflous bullcrap that goes along with your normal Sunday? Why can't people just show up and worship God together, even if the attendence is 1/3 of what it normally is? My feeling is that, as a church, you worship with whoever decides that Jesus is important enough in their lives to show up to church, and if people want to stay home instead, so be it.

I know that these churches are having multiple services leading up to Christmas day, which is fine. However, somewhere during the last 2000 years of the Church, someone thought that the birth of Jesus was importnat enough to set aside a special day each year to celebrate it. Why wouldn't people want to worship together on this day? Personally, I'm looking forward to being with my brothers and sisters on Christmas day to worship together. I'm looking forward to singing, "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" together and all of the other songs pertaining to this special day.

The greatest argument that I've heard from these churches who are cancelling is that Christmas is a family day. I'll certinaly be doing family things on Christmas day as are most people. My question in return is, what better way for a family to spend Christmas together than acknowledging the birth of our Savior? What can be more family oriented than that? The truth of the matter is that this whole argument is just a sympton of a greatly diseased North American Church.

For most American "Christians," Jesus is just something else that you do. So when Jesus gets in the way of our family time, we just cast him aside as another inconvenience to our plans. "I just don't have time for church with our Christmas schedule." "I just can't fit church into today, because we have to go to Aunt Mabel's house, and then go to Grandma and Grandpa Jones' house." The fact is that most people want Jesus in their lives until following him becomes inconvenient. "Give me Jesus, just don't let him get in the way."

I think presents can wait until a little later in the day this Sunday. After all, God's gift of his Son might just trump your new Ipod.

I'm still studying Isaiah. In fact, I'm pretty sure that God keeps adding new chapters every day. I'm on chapter 134; I thought there only used to be like 6o some chapters. Anyway, in 26:3, I came across a great passage.

"You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in you."

"Steadfast" is a poor translation, because no one even knows what the crap it means. The Hebrew word is samak and it means, "confident." So the passage basically says that God grants perfect peace to those whose minds are confident. Confident in what? Confident in our God. Confident that he is good, and that he provides. Confident that he is loving.

Think about the correlation between confidence in God and having peace. What in the world could bother you if you have complete trust and confidence in God? What a sense of peace that would be!

A couple of things come to mind with this passage. First are the words of Paul, "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, bring your requests before God. And the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." In other words, stop freaking out about stuff and give it to God. Easier said than done, I fully realize. However, if we had confidence and trust in God, this would be easy, then we would have peace that surpasses all understanding.

The other thing that comes to mind is this quote from Thomas Merton. It's so good, that it deserves a bigger font.

"For perfect hope is achieved on the brink of despair, when instead of falling off the edge, we find ourselves walking on the air."

Will you all now join in one big rousing "freakin' a"? Thank you. Now moving on, how many of us in tough times find ourselves falling off the edge instead of floating on air? I know I do most times. All of these things are connected. Faith, trust, confidence, and hope. It's all intertwined and it all leads to peace.

May God grant you peace in any circumstance.

No...I didn't say that St. Augustine was on something, I said that he was on to something. Anyway, at the ministry conference I recently attended in Nashville, I had the privilege of taking in a great seminar with Tony Campolo. In it he used a quote from St. Augustine which said, "The Church is a whore, and she is my mother."

I have a tendency to be a little skeptical of the Church and, yes, negative about the Church at times. I think that it is a natural part of being a minister. I don't know of many ministers that aren't cynical about the Church because we've all experienced the same stuff. We've heard guys who call themselves "leaders" suggest and say things in meetings that aren't even remotely biblical. We've seen the Church sell out to the very things that Jesus couldn't stand. We've been verbally attacked by people who don't think we have feelings. We've heard people call themselves by the name of Jesus and then turn around and spit on his memory by the things they do and say. We have every right to be cynical.

However, this quote has haunted me since I heard it. I can't get it out of my head. Every time I start griping about the Church, this quote pops into my head in an almost phantasmic way. It whispers to me things like, "The Church has been worse off than it is now." "You may be mad at the Church, but that's the body of Christ you're mad at." I can't shake it.

This quote, to me, basically means that the Church is always going to be a mess because it is made of fallible human beings. Even if I demanded its perfection, which I (subconsciously) do at times, I'm just as messy as everyone else. I certainly don't have it all together. This means that I injure Christ by what I do just as much as other people. I seem to remember Jesus saying something like, "Why worry about the speck in someone else's eye, when you have a plank in your own?"

The fact is that the Church is a whore. The Church continually runs after other lovers that can't give what our bridegroom can give to us. However, this whore is my mother, and it is my duty to love her as Jesus loves her.

Something sruck me today as I was studying. It wasn't a particularly revelatory moment or anything, just something I found interesting. In Isaiah 21:11-12, I read this,

"Watchman, what is left of the night? Watchman, what is left of the night?" The watchman replies, "Morning is coming, but also the night."

Morning is coming, but also the night. That seems to be a fairly enigmatic statement, yet one that drips with truth if you really let it soak in. That's how life works isn't it? Everything is bright and sunny, and yet, evening and darkness is inevitable. Every bit of daylight must be balanced equally with the same amount of darkness. When God created everything, his recipe read, " one part light, one part darkness." If you look at the creation story, at the end of every "day" it reads this, "And there was evening, and there was morning..." It seems that from the beginning, God wanted to get the point across that there had to be equal parts light and darkness for the universe to function as it should.

In the verse from Isaiah the watchman lets everyone know that morning was here, but darkness loomed in the distance. This would seem a good warning for us to all heed. Maybe when we're going through crap and times of night and darkness, it would help for us to realize that this is how the world is. It isn't that God delights in our suffering, maybe our suffering is just part of the created order of the universe. For every light, there must be darkness as a counterbalance.

Perhaps what we really need isn't another Joel Osteen self-help book to show us how to always be happy, maybe we should embrace the darkness (doesn't mean we have to necessarily enjoy it) as God's natural creative work in us to bring us to the perfection he desires from his creation. May we embrace our times of darkness as necessary parts of life, and may God say of us, "and it was good."

I woke up this morning ina slight panic. Panicked about what, you ask? I had these thoughts of, "I have no freaking idea how to be a father." Don't get me wrong, I'm totally stoked about being a dad, but how in the world do you parent in such a way that you don't end up on the Maury Povich show listening to your kid blame all of the world's problems on you? Not everyone with a problem child is a bad parent (at least I don't think so). I don't know of many parents who really want to raise a drug addict or a porn star. I look at some of the kids at the junior high and high school and think, "Good Lord, if my child is like that, I will kill them." How do I keep my child from being completely sucked into the world without sheltering them to the point that they can't cope with anything? How do I keep a daughter (if I have one) from ending up on Maury with her three boyfriends waiting for a paternity test to find out who the father is? How do I keep a son (see parenthetical statement on daughter) from being a sex-crazed maniac with a tatoo of a woman's rack on his arm?

I know that the easy answer is, "Look at God, he's the ultimate father," but last time I checked, I didn't create the freakin' universe either. I understand unconditional love, I just suck at it. I think I need a heaping helping of God's grace to get me through this one.

I never thought a fuzzy blob on an ultrasound could be so cute. This is baby Polley. He/she is 8 weeks old and the size of a blueberry. The important thing is that he/she is healthy and doing well right now. Please pray for continued health for baby Polley and mommy. I personally think he/she looks like Mandy, but has my eye sockets.

Over thanksgiving I went to my in-laws. This isn't the real story though. At some point we passed a church in their area and I saw a sign that made me do a double-take. They had a sign out front that was adverstising their coming Christmas dinner theater. The name of the dinner theater? Extreme Christmas. No wait...X-treme Christmas. After I finished laughing, I thought, "What exactly is extreme (x-treme) about the Christmas story?" Then I thought, "Didn't the "X-treme" marketing thing end like 10 years ago?" Apparently not.

I started perusing the Christmas story in the Bible and I didn't find the part where the baby Jesus burst from the womb on a snowboard holding a Mountain Dew. Perhaps I missed it. Wasn't the first beatitude "Blessed are the gnarly, for they will inherit the surf"? Anyway, I really wish I could get tickets to this dinner theater to watch the angels and wise men doing 360s and fakies. Good stuff.

In Isaiah 11, we read of the Branch from Jesse. This is a prophecy of the coming Mashiach (for those of you Hebrew speaking types), or Messiah (if you prefer to stick to English). At the tail end of verse three it says this about this man who is to come:

"He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears."

As Christians, we believe that this passage obviously speaks of Jesus. If we're going to agree that the point of being a disciple of a rabbi is to be like the rabbi, then I believe we need to pay serious heed to this statement in Isaiah. It says that Jesus did not judge by what he sees or hears about someone. This means that Jesus used some other way to make his calls about someone's character. Jesus looked at the heart of a person to determine who they really were. See his statements to the religious leaders when he calls them dirty cups, whitewashed tombs, etc. He basically told them that on the outside they looked great and together, but on the inside they were filled with death.

Does anyone else suck as badly at this deal as I do? I think it's human nature to see someone and immediatey make a judgment call on their personality. To be like Jesus in this area takes a tremendous effort of our wills with the nudging of the Holy Spirit. It takes a constant prayer of, "Lord, let me see people as you do."

I want to be the type of person that doesn't judge by what I see or hear about a person. I want to be a person that can see past all of the superficial crap in a person, and see their heart. I guess I want to be like Jesus, but I know I have so far to go.

I was listening to The Wall by Pink Floyd tonight because, well, it's awesome, and I got to thinking about the implications of the famous line "all in all you're just another brick in the wall." I'm a big believer that all truth is God's truth and that God co-opts little bits of truth from the world and makes them his own. Look at Paul's words to the men of Athens in the book of Acts, look at Paul's words to Titus, "as the pagan poets say..." Anyway, back to Pink Floyd.

I got to thinking about this phrase. I decided that you can look at this line in a couple of different ways. There may be more ways to look at it, but my limited cerebral capacity can only handle so much. You can look at this line from a negative viewpoint (which, incidently, is probably the way it was written) or a positive viewpoint. Let's look at the negative first (that way we can end on a happy fun note, because we know that Jesus hates sorrow right?).

On the negative, the line, "all in all you're just another brick in the wall" means that, at the end of the day, everything is hopeless because you're nothing special. You're no prize, no one is. We all share the same fate as being just bricks in the wall of life. What's the point in striving for anything if you're just another brick in the wall? What's the point in thinking you can make a difference in the world if everything is pointless? It's an almost nihilistic viewpoint of life ("We believe in nussing. Yeah, nussing Lebowski"). About two of you will get that joke.

Now for the positive. You can look at this from a Kingdom of God point of view. By the way, save the comments concerning my overstating the song and it's meaning; remember the God co-opting truth thing. We may be bricks in the wall, but bricks in God's wall. We're all a small part of something infinitely larger than we are. A wall that has no beginning and no end. A wall that goes on forever. As bricks in this wall, we are created with the ability to do great things. It's more of a teamwork thing. We can all, as bricks, do what we can to build the wall of God's Kingdom. Just a thought. Totally random, but it made sense to me, so back off.

Howdy everyone (read: "all four of you"). I just returned from Nashville with 25% of my reading audience. We went to the Youth Specialties convention and "learned more about youth ministry" (read: "watched a great deal of football"). It was a good convention I suppose. There were 7500 youth ministers there, which meant that we had to hold the main sessions in the Gaylord Entertainment Center (I'll let you stop laughing before I go on)...which is where the Nashville Predators play hockey. My brother and I noticed something quite funny during the main sessions. Did I say "funny"? I meant "damning."

They sold concessions at the main sessions. I'm not just talking about Testamints and Jesus-flavored fruit drinks, I'm talking about popcorn, hot dogs, and the such. So we're standing there "worshipping God" while the guy next to us is masticating a tube of faux meat on a bun. I asked myself, "Self, what would a non-Christian think if they came in and someone was singing to Jesus while cramming their gullet full of popcorn?" Has our consumerism become such a problem that making ourselves more obese can't be put aside for an hour or so of worship? I was slightly perturbed, because if you were an outsider looking in, you would think it was just another concert. I'm pretty sure if we were living in the Old Testament times, the entire arena would have collapsed on us all. Thank you Lord for your mercy and patience. Any thoughts?

"Out of the adundance of the heart, the mouth speaks." - Jesus

Isn't it amazing how words that were spoken by Jesus so long ago still apply today? It's obvious that Pat Robertson's heart is filled with hatred and war, because this is the type of language he uses. Jesus' statement is pretty straight-forward; if you speak hate, you're filled with hate, if you speak love, your heart is full of love. The buck doesn't stop with Pat Robertson though. It isn't really about Pat Robertson at all, it's about us. God will deal with Pat Robertson in whatever way sees fit. But, in turn, he'll deal with us in the same way.

It's easy for us to sit back and throw stones, but what are we doing to change the perception? Whether we realize it or not, whether we like it or not, guys like Pat Robertson are the mouth pieces for "Christianity." They are the loudest and most vocal, therefore, they are the ones who shape people's opinion of Christ and his Church. Obviously with statements like Robertson's, people's opinion of Jesus and Christianity is marred and not necessarily positive. So what are we doing differently? It's easy to sit back, piss and moan about this guy, and wish curses upon him, but are we throwing our voice out there (however small it may be) to change the way people see Jesus? Are we feeding the poor? Are we loving unconditionally, even our enemies? Are spreading peace wherever we go? If not, then we're in the same boat.

These are some things I've been thinking about...man, I hate it when the Spirit convicts me.

Televangelist warns of evolution doomsday

WASHINGTON - Conservative Christian televangelist Pat Robertson told citizens of a Pennsylvania town that they had rejected God by voting their school board out of office for supporting “intelligent design” and warned them Thursday not to be surprised if disaster struck.

Robertson, a former Republican presidential candidate and founder of the influential conservative Christian Broadcasting Network and Christian Coalition, has a long record of similar apocalyptic warnings and provocative statements.

Last summer, he hit the headlines by calling for the assassination of leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, one of President Bush’s most vocal international critics.

“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected him from your city,” Robertson said on his daily television show broadcast from Virginia, “The 700 Club.”

“And don’t wonder why he hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for his help because he might not be there,” he said.

The 700 Club claims a daily audience of around 1 million. It is also broadcast around the world, translated into more than 70 languages. (People for the American Way provided a video file of the 700 Club statement.)

In voting Tuesday, all eight school board members up for re-election in Dover, Pa., lost their seats after trying to introduce “intelligent design” to high-school science students as an alternative to the theory of evolution.

Adherents of intelligent design argue that certain forms in nature are so complex that they are best seen as the handiwork of a designer rather than the result of natural selection. Opponents say it is the latest attempt by conservatives to introduce religion into the school science curriculum.

The Dover case sparked a trial in federal court that gained nationwide attention after the school board was sued by parents backed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The board ordered schools to read students a short statement in biology classes informing them that the theory of evolution is not established fact and that gaps exist in it.

The statement mentioned intelligent design as an alternate theory and referred students to a book that explained the theory further. A decision in the case is expected before the end of the year.

In 1998, Robertson warned the city of Orlando, Fla., that it risked hurricanes, earthquakes and terrorist bombs after it allowed homosexual organizations to put up rainbow flags in support of sexual diversity. (End article)

This guy has to be stopped. How did the peaceful message of Jesus get turned into a threat-based, hate-filled message. I hate the fact that God loves Pat Robertson too. He is the type of person that Jesus had no tolerance for. I love drug dealers more than I do Pat Robertson. He has done more damage to Christ in his 110 years of being on TV than anyone else. The church has to unite and put an end to this guy's television career.

Holy crap, I'm in the process of applying for a passport to go to Africa...and I'm failing miserably! Since 9-11, apparently our "government" has decided that they will make it just a fraction under impossible to aquire a passport. I'm printing off the application as I type this and I'm hoping it will be done printing in three hours. I didn't have to fill out this much stuff when I bought my house. On top of the application, you have to bring in approximately 300 documents proving that you're alive and not a terrorist. Because we all know that if you weren't born in the United States, you are, without a doubt, a terrorist/communist/fascist/anarchist. I'm guessing that before Bush is out of office, we will probably have to undergo a rectal scan in order to obtain a passport.

I think on line 37 I have to provide the date of my last bowel movement, as well as a sample in a petri dish. On line 1,230, I have to provide a test tube full of my mother's afterbirth in order for them to test it for American patriotism. Once this is all completed, I will hopefully be declared an American citizen worthy of traveling to some less free country.

The best part of the application is I have to provide two "recent" photos of myself. This is quite interesting. If I didn't think I would spend the rest of my life eating stale bread at Guantanamo Bay while a soldier hooks up electrodes to my nipples, I think it would be hilarious to submit a picture of myself holding a grenade with a t-shirt on that says, "slaughter the infidels." I laugh just thinking about it.

Anyway, wish me luck as I try to prove that I'm patriotic enough to want to leave the country for two weeks in February.

I'm tired of hearing about the end times. I'm tired of people pointing to wars, riots, tornadoes, and record hurricanes and saying without any sort of reservation, "We are living in the end times." The fact is that we might be, but we may not be either. Everyone is so freaking busy plotting Jesus' next move, that they forget to try and take someone with them when he actually does come. Here's my opinion, who cares when he comes back, just be ready.

Jesus himself bascially says that the day and the hour is unknown, even to him. There's another story in the beginning of Acts that I think is fairly telling in all of this. In Acts 1, some of Jesus' followers ask him, "Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?" Jesus' response is, "As long as you really want me to and accurately predict it." Just kidding, his actual response is this:

"It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."

Let me give you the New Polley Version of these verses, "It's none of your freaking business, go do something about helping the world; go tell people about me."

Let's face it, the only reason preachers keep preaching that we're living in the end times, is that they figure they can scare a few more people into warming the pews in their church. I hate that crap. It drives me crazy. Jesus never scared anyone into believing that he was their Savior, why do we feel like we have to do it? If a church feels like they have to scare people into Jesus, then frankly, that church sucks. Plain and simple. They have nothing to offer people, so they try and freak them out enough, that they'll "come to Jesus." And the hits just keep on rolling...

I was reading in 1 John today and read a great passage. "Anyone who claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did." How great is that? How many people in churches are actually doing it? Am I?
The point of being a disciple of a rabbi was to live as the rabbi lived. We've exchanged this for "teach what the rabbi teaches" and "soak up as much information about the rabbi as possible." This passge is telling us to simply live as the rabbi lived. Walk as he walked. Respond to people as he responded to people. There's a great ancient rabbinical statement that said, "May you be covered in the dust from your rabbi's feet." In other words, cling as closely as you can to him. This is what John is getting at. How would our churches, communities, country, and world be different if Christians took this seriously? How would things be different if ministers took this seriously? Ouch.