Well, I've been busy lately, but I thought, if you're looking for some other great material to read while I'm in limbo, I'd pass along a couple of the sites I read. I find them both stimulating and entirely hilarious. Here's one of them:
The Ongoing Adventures of ASBO Jesus. For those of you who - like me - have zero idea what ASBO is, here's his definition:btw. for the non british among you… an ‘asbo’ is an ‘anti-social behaviour order’… the courts here award them to people who are deemed to be constant trouble in their neighbourhoods… presumably according to their neighbours!"Great stuff, the ASBO. I put an example up at the top here too.
Another one I like to check is "Stuff Christians Like." Very similar to "Stuff White People Like," except that this one hones in on Christian sub-culture and hits it pretty square. It's been hilarious to read honestly. Really refreshing to see someone thinks we do some things wrong and doesn't mind having a laugh about it. Stuff white people like just hits everything in white people world, and makes fun of us for it. Also a GREAT read.
On a bit more serious note, here's something I found interesting. This website called "Dear-God.net." Setup by the same people that run "the cool hunter" it's basically an online prayer experiment. It looks at "God" in the broad "God/god/chi/whatever energy is running the room & world" sense, so if you're expecting people to pray to Jesus, you'll be let down. It's not always to Jesus, or the Christian God. Regardless, it's quite the amazing commentary on our world, and the things that are on the minds of people around the world.
I guess I write this mostly because I wanted a break. Please indulge me and forgive my ranting. Life has been bumpy as of late, and while the heaviness I feel is good in some ways, in other ways it is not good. Maybe I'll blog about that later, but for now, I needed a breather, and thought I'd point out some fun brain food to you all.
I leave you with this little bit of fun. I found this on Marko's website, and was amazed that this qualifies as on the job training for someone. Pardon the one s-word in here, it's still insane.
When I went to the Robbie Seay concert last Sunday night, I learned of another opportunity coming up this weekend that I thought I'd pass along. I'm way excited to see what this thing ends up looking like. And I don't just say that because I'm a friend & fan of bridgeway. As a guy who loves art and loves Jesus, I am really intrigued by what this could end up looking like. Here's the poster too.
I added some pics of the show from Sunday too. Robbie is such a cool guy. I'll apologize for the lousiness of the pictures. I didn't bring a camera, but thought I'd try to get a few shots of the night on my phone, hence the poor quality. You can't expect much out of a 1.3MP camera. Nothing like this guy's shots at least. But his camera,computer, & photo editing setup is probably worth more than my car.
I plan on going after youth gets out. It will completely be worth going. I'll probably miss a little bit of the opening parts of the night, as youth usually goes til 7:00. But I'll be there in time for Robbie for sure, and hopefully for Joel too. He's a great guy.
Doors to the show open at 7:00, it costs $8 to get in. That is a steal on the quality of the show. It will be a great night. Hope to see you there.
Okay, so apparently there is a vote going on in oklahoma for the official oklahoma state rock song. I'm having nightmares that it's going to be some crap by vince gill. PLEASE GO VOTE! http://www.oklahomarocksong.org/ if you want a 150% biased opinion, go vote for flaming lips. p.s. if mercy me wins, and "i can only imagine" becomes our official state song, i'm moving. texas, washington (despite all the flak i'd take in seattle), oregon, maine, i don't care. if that song wins, i'm getting the heck out of town. i'll probably do the same thing if hinder wins too. PLEASE GO VOTE FOR SOMEONE!
Okay, so a couple of weeks ago, my buddy Steve & I hear that there is this crazy guy on campus up at school, so of course we have to go and see him. His picture is here, just go you can get an idea of what we walked into. The special part of it is that his board flipped around to say different things, but you get the basic gist from what is on there now. Basically, the idea that "God is angry with us every day."
Now, he said his story was that God called him to what he called "confrontational preaching." Basically, his thing was that God told him to go to college campuses and tell everyone why they're going to hell. It was really encouraging.
He was pretty much into telling everyone why they're wrong. I know that sounds like a blanket statement, but that's really how it was. He talked to a Catholic, and was only too happy to point out that he had been raised Catholic, but fortunately god had redeemed him of his sinful ways, because praying to Mary was the fast lane to hell. What surprised me was that there were people actually trying to have an honest conversation with him. If anything was a positive in this whole thing, it was that. No one really listened to him, but the Christians that were there were having an intelligent discussion about it. Probably the only positive to the day. But, in the grand scheme of it all, even the good discussion happening, it was getting drowned out by all the other people complaining about his presence on campus.
There were a couple of people that would just be antagonistic for the sake of being antagonistic, one guy said he was there to "watch this guy get his butt kicked" which never happened. Still others were there to pass out cigarettes because mr. sign guy was shouting about the sin of smoking among everything else. Oh, and being greek is like buddying up with Satan himself apparently. While the whole greek thing wasn't my speed, I know lots of people who did go greek, and they don't look anything like Satan. In fact, a lot of them remind me a lot of what I think Jesus would look like.
In the end, I had to leave, because the whole thing just got to be too much for me. I get pretty mad when this kind of thing comes along. These guys are all about themselves, and making sure everyone knows how holy they are, and how unholy everyone else is. It completely misses the point. So, I kindly thanked him for making my job harder, which I'm pretty sure he didn't hear. I tried to join the constructive conversations, but they were mostly with people I didn't know. Steve told me later that he went up and asked to have a discussion about the whole thing of this guy's hostility, and he looked Steve in the eye and said "I don't have time for you," and went back to shouting.
Why these guys come along and make those of us trying to actually point people to Jesus look like morons frustrates me to no end. Kind of like this group too.
So, one of my buddies recently did a post on the NFL picks, and with everyone talking football, I though I'd talk a little futbol too. Of course, my futbol is not necessarily everyone else's football. . .
I'm personally really sold on the F.A. Premier, which for all you local types, means English soccer. I know, I've got zero loyalty to america, right? Well, here's why I don't care about football. It's all about the money, and there isn't excitement like there is in some real futbol. Here's what I mean: pull up a video on youtube about a NFL game, and it will generally be something like this:
Not bad per se, but the crowd only gets excited when something big happens. You've seen it happen before, if a game is a shutout, the crowd goes home at halftime, and that's only because they paid good money to watch a game. If it was cheap, they'd leave even earlier.
Now, here's a FA game:
And all that cheering is happening at the END of the game, when most people would have gone home already. A crowd at a NFL game has nothing on a crowd at a soccer game in the UK. Plain & simple.
And this year is crazy, which is another thing I like about it. Case in point: Up until a month ago, the #1 team was completely unstoppable basically. They were playing great and hardly ever losing, being way up in the points for the leader board. (quick lesson on leader boards: in FA, you get 3 points for a win, 1 point for a tie, and 0 points for a loss. so if you have a lot of points, you are doing really good) So, Arsenal, the power that be for the year, is just dominating the heck out of people, until about a month ago, when they lost 1 game, and tied 2, and now they're #3 in the rankings. I love that the game can change so quickly just like that. It's so great. Makes it so much more exciting. And really, most people outside the U.S. call soccer "the beautiful game," and it's pretty phenomenal really. It's a great thing to watch and be part of. Great stuff to watch. Oh, and yes, I'm already counting the days to the next World Cup if you're wondering. 798 days and counting. . .
So, remember that time I was going to try to be a more consistent blogger? whoops! oh well. such is life. at this point, I'm at least still coming back to blog, which is better than other things I've tried and not been good at. Little things like maintaining a day planner. I used to always buy one in high school, planning on staying on top of things, and then I'd drop the ball about 2 weeks into it, then I'd give up and quit using it until "final paper/final test" season at school.
It's been a busy few weeks. If I'd known 27 was going to be this crazy and difficult, I probably would've tried to stay 26 this year. 27 so far has been more difficult than it should be. And, I can't really blame age for it, as that has nothing to do with it. It's just been a hard few weeks. We've had a lot of mellow drama around us thanks to our health insurance company, talking about rates and owing them money for their paperwork errors, stuff like that. This was complicated by the fact that we had to deal with this while I'm getting ready to leave for a week to go to Tulsa, Oklahoma and take 15 students/adults on a mission trip. It's crazy stuff, and can easily stress one out. But it's pretty much straightened out now. We owe a crap-ton of back money for things we want, and I hope they learn their lesson and quit screwing up other people's paperwork.
The thing that is most frustrating about this whole thing, is, for me at least, that about 98% of our money problems seem to stem from my moving into youth ministry as a career and not a volunteer opportunity. It sure makes staying in youth ministry hard to do. Cliche I know, but when Courtney & I both work, we do okay with money. It's having a baby and wanting US to raise our kids, and not some random daycare worker that makes staying in youth ministry tough. I want to, because I feel like I'm doing something good here and all, but this kind of stuff spreads us awfully thin, especially if something big (like 18 months of back insurance corrections) comes up. Frankly, it makes faith stuff hard in general. It's funny - bad word choice, maybe weird - how fragile faith can be really. On the one hand, I suppose it's terribly cliche, but on the other, it's really hard to trust that God is looking out for us when we are consistently finding our financial security dying about once a year. Having a baby on the way makes it all that much harder too frankly. Grace, love, peace, all good things, and all easy to trust in, but faith and trust are really tough as of late. And maybe in some weird way God is trying to get our attention and hold on to him all the tighter, and in that way learn to trust him. I don't have this figured out at all, and who knows if/when I will?
I vent about this mostly because 1: i need to get it out of my system so I can think about something else for now. 2: because I'm curious how everyone else handles this kind of stuff. On the one hand, I wonder if I should go find a job that pays well, and fight and scrape to make lots of money since things look more bleak every day as far as money and the U.S. is concerned. (which btw, I think the news is making way too big a deal out of) Then I could be a volunteer and afford to do lots of stuff. Maybe my life would have more impact if I lived that way. On the other hand, maybe that's not the way life is supposed to work out. Who knows? I'm sure this is nothing new to anyone really, but since it's my first kid, and my first career I've had that I cared about keeping, it's weird to look at the whole thing and try to reconcile it all and see if it all pans out in a way I'd want it to.
At the same time, I keep thinking about a guy I heard talk about being married once, and he said "if you want to serve Jesus, stay single. If you want to learn how to BE like Jesus, get married." and it leaves me wondering about that too. Not whether or not I should be married, I LOVE being married, and I love my wife. But maybe this is the whole point of it all: maybe for me to appreciate the things Jesus did, and the sacrifices He made, maybe I have to give up youth ministry to really GET what giving up something looks like. I can still serve Jesus, Church, and youth all without working in a church.
Who knows what I'll do really. In some ways, I feel tied to my job a lot, in other ways, leaving ministry to do a "normal job" is somewhat freeing. I can just work and see God outside the church easier, and be Jesus outside the church without the "where do you work again?" stigma that attaches to pastors.
In a totally unrelated end, here's something fun for you. I wish our local sportscasters had this much fun with the news:
