Thanksweek

I hope that you all have lots and lots of fun the next couple days. I will be family doing the whole "quality time" thing. It is the real kick off to the holiday season. So, instead of being all serious, which I have been it seems for the last few posts, I am going to try and brings a little levity to the reading with some funny and fun links.

Star Trek is one of the movies that I am very much looking forward to getting to enjoy next year. The choice of JJ Abrams seems to have been pretty smart. If you haven't seen the trailer, here that is. Even if you have seen it, its pretty awesome and worth watching a couple times. Plus, it gives you the framework from which the next couple clips are taken. The first is just funny, Star Trek 90210. The next one takes the same idea, but instead uses one of what used to be my favorite shows, Smallville.

I don't know why, but this list of wacky signs just makes me laugh. Maybe its the whole, "Not Allowed to Pregnant". I think that some of them were translated and that is what makes it funny.

Since I brought the whole chimp on a Segway thing (this time with music), I thought it was only fitting to bring another clip of the same chimp. This time, its in a track and field competition. Yes, chimps equal funny (or is it Japanese television?).

We, my wife and I, love the show How I Met Your Mother. Last weeks episode, had a great conversation with two of the characters, ala Dr. Seuss. Don't miss the beginning where the guys console Ted by asking if he wants to take revenge by a unique method. Just to spread the goodness that is HIMYM, here is the "Robin Sparkles" videos, Let's Go to the Mall and Sandcastles in the Sand.

As with most Japanese game shows, cats with technology always makes me laugh. Thus, watching a Cat on a Roomba, very funny.

Since I am putting a bunch of YouTube links, I thought it fitting to include this one. Its a little older, but still pretty funny from the Onion.

Finally, I give you something to kick off the Christmas season, if you promise not to watch it until Friday. I am a big MxPx fan. I know that the straight laced demeanor that I normally display fits right in with the idea of punk music, but I have listened to them for about 10 years now. Their Christmas song is one of my favorites. So, here is that video.

Have a great weekend and Thanksgiving!!!

Joash Sunday

I had never heard of the whole "Joash chest" thing until I came to my current church. I didn't really know what to expect with it either. The biblical story is recounted in 2 Kings 12: 1-16 and thus I give you the link if you want to check it out. I don't know if I had even read that before I started at this church. Yesterday was our Joash Sunday, and it also coincided with The Lord's Supper. Both events are very special and very powerful. But, combining them made it an amazing service.

First, I am constantly amazed by God's use of music to evoke our hearts. I am thankful that Drew is willing to listen to God's direction when leading the congregation. God's truths are flowing through the words we sing and soaking into our minds. We are invited not just to sing them, but to think on them and allow them to be our praise. Of course, I love music period. I don't listen as much as I used to, but it still stirs up great emotions and feelings inside of me. Then again, I think thats part of being human. A song can evoke a memory. The songs chosen at a wedding are almost always something personal to the bride and groom. Its because they mean something. When we sing at church, we are to think about the words we speak and let the memory of God's faithfulness wash over us.

Thats what was going on with me yesterday. I thought of my life and how I am so thankful to be able to sing words of love and adoration to God. It really kicked off my heart's desire to give anything that I could give back. And I don't mean just monetarily. God desires so much more than my money, He desires me. That is beyond humbling. But it also empowering. It gives me reason to pray not just some form prayer, but a prayer that lays out all that I think, even though He knows it, and all that I desire, even though He knows that too, in order to leave myself bare before Him so that I can give Him all of me.

Second, we did the whole Joash thing, where we gave whatever we felt led to give. For me and my wife, it wasn't much, but it was more than we were able to last year, which was nothing. However the gift isn't really what I wanted to talk about. During this part of the service, our pastor invited people to just go up and give their gift as the praise team sang and played. He also encouraged us to love on one another. I think that this might have been the most joyful giving session that I have ever experienced. I am not saying that when I tithe I don't do it joyfully. I am just saying that the added enjoyment of hugs and words of encouragement were very welcomed. It made it more about the people you were with than about tithing. I know that its probably impractical to do this every Sunday and eventually it would lose its charm, but for a kick off for a season of thanks, it was very good.

Then we did the Lord's Supper. I always enjoy doing this at this church. I was raised very Baptist where you were quiet and somber during the Lord's Supper. Even at the end when they would say, and they left joyfully singing or whatever, it didn't seem that way. Thats why I enjoy it here. We joyfully sing during. As things are being passed out, we are singing about how thankful we are to Jesus and praising God for His gift. I am sure that a lot of other churches do this, but this is really my first experience with a joyful Lord's Supper every time.

This week is a week of Thanksgiving, its celebrated on Thursday in case you didn't realize. I get to have 2 days off, which is nice. It also means that I might not be back on here to post anything. I did want to end this with a thought from a book that I am reading. Its called Waiter Rant, and thats the blog the guy writes. Its just his observations as a waiter and the stories that he encounters. However, there is one that I have been thinking of since he told it. I won't go into all the details, but it was basically about an incident where he was questioning the humanity of some people. He starts reflecting on our selfishness as a society. That we often are caught up in our own world and forget to look at others around us or at the very least have any compassion for their own trials. As a Christian, thats supposed to be our first priority. Even Jesus states that he wasn't here to do his will but the Father's will and thats about service others. Its a convicting thought. Its a challenging thought. But its one that has to be revisited from time to time. We need to be reminded that its not about what I want from God, but what God wants to do through me, if I allow Him to. And thats going to take the form of serving others.

I have no clue how to really end this because mainly I am stuck thinking about that last part myself. I have no resolution to speak of besides that He is working on it.

I can't, but You can

I have finally finished Stanley's book, Louder than Words, and it was better than I thought it would be. To be a little confessional, I started it once before but wasn't completely sold on reading it. I sort of muddled through about 70 pages of it and then sat it aside to tackle something more "flashy", I guess. It was for Desire that I kept harping on for a while here. But, I decided that I wasn't going to try and read anything else before I finished this book. It was better than I expected. It did start slower than I though but that was because Stanley was slowly building a foundation to set his idea on.

I am not going to go into the whole book, but mainly am focusing on where Stanley suggests that we start with this idea of changing our life to a life of character. To start on this journey, you have to realize that if you try and do it by yourself that you will fail. Depending on your resolve, you might last longer than others, but you are relying on yourself rather than God. One of the more poignant things that Stanley hits on is the idea that when we accept the gift of salvation, we have to realize that it is totally God's power to save us, nothing that we do. The question then is why do we think that we can then change our daily life without God? Instead, we focus on doing good things. The problem is that Paul in Romans doesn't say to be transformed by rededicating your life, nor by making promises to God, or feeling extra sorry, or praying really long prayers, or filing out a card and joining a church. These are the things that we try and do. Instead it says, "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. (Romans 12:2 NKJV)"

The renewing is a process that produces character like God. This verse tells us that our transformation does not hinge on the depth of our commitment alone. Our commitment may wane back and forth. There are times in our life when we know that all that we want to do is follow whatever God has for us, but there are times that we aren't as eager to even talk to God, let alone find out what He wants us to do. Christianity is not an event but a process. Through renewal the wisdom and truth of God become the foundation of our thinking and eventually our behavior.

Stanley breaks it down to two approaches, the religious and the relational. The religious approach is very attractive because in our minds it makes sense. The bible calls the whole "earn your way" faith as walking according to the flesh. You are doing what feels right to you. What feels right to you changes from day to day, but God doesn't change. Thus, we look at the relational approach. Our life as a Christian is about our relationship. Everything that God does is in order to draw you into His love. Thus, God never intended for us to shift out of the "I can't, You can" way of thinking that was intricate for us to accept salvation. That is supposed to be the perspective that we maintain throughout our Christian experience. We don't have the power to save ourselves, nor do we have the power to save ourselves from our daily encounters with the power of sin.

Now I think its pretty obvious that most of that above isn't from me. Its me borrowing heavily from Stanley to get the idea across. But, I said all that to get to this point. Once you realize that you can't do it alone, Stanley offers a "baby step". I decided to start here myself. When I am doing my morning reading and praying, I envision what I think will go on during the day. Its not that hard, most of us have days that are very predictable. We know where we will or won't be tempted. As you see the areas that you struggle in, pray to God "I can't; You can". I like this idea. We claim the dependency that we have for God even before it starts. This whole Christian life thing is not God saving us and then setting us about to try our best. Thats why He gave us part of Himself to help direct our paths. Why wouldn't we use it?

This was just one of the areas that I am starting in. There are others about using scriptural truth to combat lies that come up in our daily lives. I will be working on that as well, but this is the first "baby step".

Control

One of the things that got brought up last week in our bible study was the idea of control. I didn't spend a lot of time with them talking about it, but thought it was an interesting topic for me to let my mind wander with over here. The exercise started when Stanley was talking about the times that God tells us "no" to something we ask. This may mean when you are suffering with an illness that you aren't healed, if you are in need of a job, you don't get it immediately, etc. It might not make sense to us, but we have to believe that God will still provide. That we have to surrender our control over the situation and allow God to work through it. The automatic response is for us to get upset and claim that we don't want to serve a God that lets young fathers die, or doesn't give us a job to work and provide money for our family. Both are valid complaints, but Stanley than offered the option for us to work it out. He asked that you go home and write out what type of God you want. The next thing that he said sort of made me stop. Stanley said, that what we "want" is for us to be God or at the very least to have God think like we do. Just think about that for a moment, we have our ideas of what is right and wrong and we want to have God agree with us.

But thankfully we don't have a God who thinks like we do. We instead have a God who can empathize with our hurts and fears and loves us so much that He freely gives us His grace (the power to endure) to get through those times that don't make sense to us. We have a Lord who loves us so much that He desires us to call him father and have that intimate of a relationship with Him. The thing that it all made me start thinking about is that in order to do that we have to give up a lot of control, or at least or illusion of control. We have this strong desire to work everything out ourselves. We think that if we can just do this or just do that, everything will work out. This isn't to say that we sit around and just wait for God to do everything, but we allow Him to do what He needs to do and understand that if we don't understand, thats ok as well.

As I have been reading Proverbs, I have noticed lately that Solomon has included at least one verse over the past couple chapters that deals with God's path or plan for our lives. My favorite of these is this one, Proverbs 20:24, "The Lord directs our steps, so why try to understand everything along the way?" We have this desire to try and understand why God would do something. I personally have asked God "Why" when I knew that even understanding why wouldn't have made it any better. Instead of asking why, I should have been looking for His comfort, His grace.

Stephen Johnson on a couple Wednesday nights ago was talking about a personal experience that he had where God was healing him. Each time that Johnson tried to figure out what was going on, God stopped and told him to just experience it. Of course, being a human, this was done many times during the course of the night. However, the thing that I take for this is that sometimes we have to just sit back and let God work. We have to understand that we might not understand. This goes against everything that we see in this world. Often, we get caught up in trying to control our situations and our realities, when we know that there is very little that we can actually control. So instead of worrying, instead of beating our fists and getting angry, my thoughts are that we should focus on the one who can control everything. We might not understand, but if we try to understand, we might miss the healing.

Character

I started and then stopped a book by Andy Stanley called "Louder than Words". Its about real character and God's definition, not our own. That can be sort of hard to take, since we all claim to know what character is or at least what we want it to be. However, the whole giving up of control and listening to what God says we should do is a bit different.

I just started rereading this book and it really is a "stop and analyze yourself" type experience. We, or at least I, have the tendency to try and rationalize my actions. If I spoke out of anger, well it was because I was upset. I was upset because of what some one else did. What that other person did was unnecessary or in some way belittled me and thus I am justified. Thats how my mind works through those things. It doesn't stop and say, what did I do? That isn't the question to me, its more about what some one else did. Thats the first step, in my exercise, about trying to be a person of character. See, we are called to live a life that is different. God wants people to look at us and see there is a difference than the way that everyone else reacts. If that means that we have to humble ourselves and take responsibility when we don't feel like we are, thats ok. Its not the end of the world.

Here is the personal example. Monday I was doing the mail at work, which is a job that I am asked to do from time to time. I used to get upset when I had to do it, but that was petty and a couple things have happened and I am enjoying it more than I used to. So, I am getting past the anger over being asked to do a job that technically isn't mine. Well, on Monday, I get completely done with the mail when some one calls and says that I didn't pick up their mail and that I would have to get it and take it across to another location. It wasn't unreasonable, and I should have done it. Instead, I decided to get mad and tell them that I had never picked up their mail when I had done the mail in the past and that they should ask some one else to take it to the other location. I look bad in this situation and rightfully so. The past couple days it has been in my mind both because I knew that I had done wrong and that I allowed myself to get upset over nothing. I could only do one thing today, apologize. So, first thing this morning, I went up to the office that I missed and apologized for missing their mail and the way that I handled the situation. She said that it wasn't anything and didn't think anything of it. However, to me this was a question of how I wanted to live my life. Do I want to be the person who gets upset or do I want to be the person who admits their mistakes?

I don't tell that story for praise, because I could have easily avoided that by taking 10 minutes and walking the mail across the building. Instead, I am learning. And as often is the case when we are learning, we make the wrong decisions and have to do things the hard way. Thankfully, nothing really all that bad happened due to my decision. And I am hopeful that the next time that I am confronted with the same situation or a similar one, I will act like I should, like a person following God's character.

Lying

I promise that this post isn't going to just be a bunch of untruths that I string together. It mainly is going to be about things that I am seeing during my reading. I had mentioned the whole idea of watching our words brought up by Jacobs in his book, but didn't dive too much into that. But, it did spark a part of me to take notice of those verses while reading Proverbs.

In a recent passage, verse 12, I counted that lying or watching our words is mentioned about 7 times in the 28 verses. So, about 25% of the time in this one chapter, God makes mention of how important our words are. I don't think that I am overstating it when I say that our words matter. If we take just the verses that deal with lying, of the 7 verses, about half, 3 maybe 4 (verse 6), are out right condemning verses. This just speaks to me about what I say and what I should say.

I was telling my email study partner that I often have an urge to tell a lie. And most of the time its for no reason whatsoever. I just get these thoughts that it would be more fun, I guess, to withhold the truth rather than just tell what actually happened. Is it from a desire to make me seem more interesting? Is it just an impulse that my worldly self wants me to act on? Its a real struggle that goes on in my head. I would like to say that all the time I recognize this and choose the right path, but thats not true. See, even in typing out this about lies, I am tempted to lie. Its a never-ending cycle.

This really makes me focus on what I say. The idea that my mind is in constant battle with my words and with the truthfulness of them in question, I have to be diligent to choose carefully. I wish that I did that more. The problem, of course, is that I am lazy. I don't mean that as a condemnation on my lifestyle, I mean that as a fact that I am not as disciplined as I would want. To take the time and watch carefully everything that you say, that takes effort. Most of the time, I think that we don't want to put forth that much energy. I might be alone on this and thats ok, because mainly I am being confessional here.

Thankfully, our salvation does not hinge on being diligent to watch our words or even to keep up our desire to be mindful of things we say. During our bible study on Faith, there was a part that talks about how faith isn't a formula. Well, I think that can be expanded to our whole Christian experience. Its not a formula where we have to act or do a certain thing. Its an experience. Its a changing, growing relationship. We may not do everything perfectly, but because of God's love for us and our love for God, we try. I also think to a O.C. Supertones song that I used to love. The lyric is, "God I failed, but at least you know I tried." That was from their first album, which was released back in 1996. Over the years, that has stuck with me. The reason being, I get the reassurance from God that while I might not always get things right, that I should keep trying because He is so worth the effort.

Buddy Studying

I might have hit on this topic at least once before, but I am going to really delve into what my mind has been processing in the past couple days. This was all started by the book that I recently finished The Year Living Biblically. Yeah, I messed up the title the last time that I wrote about it. I hope that if you were looking for it, that this didn't hinder you. But the idea was about religion and the importance of actually experiencing it with others. I believe that he, AJ Jacobs, said that its "not something that you do alone". I am sort of modifying that in a way that I have found true and saying that its something that you don't do SOLELY alone.

I approach this with a couple examples. The first is my primary study that I am doing right now. I am doing an email study with a friend, where we email our thoughts, what we feel God is telling us, and just basically anything that we feel we should share. If you don't have some one who you can meet regularly, I highly recommend this. And even if you can see some one on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, I still might do this for the in between time. The reason is because it makes you accountable to some one. If you don't read or you aren't sharing, you feel like you are letting the other down. While its not something to guilt you into studying, it helps keep you motivated. I believe that I have made that exact point before. We are lazy. If left up to our own desires, we probably wouldn't read all that much. Its part discipline and part desire when you are studying a passage or book. If you have no feedback or no real interaction, you are quicker to become discouraged and wonder why you are doing it. I guess I think of it as a road trip. Short little road trips alone can be quite fun. But, when you are on a long, cross-country type thing, you get lonely if you don't have any interaction. You get sleepy, you lose focus and have less of a desire to enjoy the journey. When you have some one else or other people, you can talk about the things that you notice along the way. You can interact with others about what they see, but you might have missed. It becomes less a task and more of an adventure. As a guy, the whole idea of a adventure appeals to me more.

The reason that I say that its not something that you do solely on you own is because there are times when you do need to take a break from others and reflect on what you have read or what you are being told. There are things that you learn that are completely for you and not for anyone else. You might share them with others, but you also might just let them strengthen you in times or need. Also, we are all called to experience a close personal relationship with God. Something that is very intimate and has to be explored by ourselves at times. The good thing is that most of the time we get so enthused or amazed by what we experience, we share those things and others are encouraged or challenged (in a good way).

Alright, I realize that this is all a bit easy to understand. However, when I read that idea in the book, I just sort of felt the need to get my thoughts out about it. It might never really change how others experience or do a study. I might even just be repeating myself from previous posts.

While I have enjoyed the book, I was taken back by the author's assertion at the end. I guess I didn't fully expect him to surrender to God and all that, but I sort of hoped he would. There were a couple times that it seemed that he was willing, but he never could rationalize it. I think that was the problem. He came to the "experiment" with an idea that he was going to do these rules and see what happened. But he never fully allowed himself to think that what he is reading or thinking could be true. He was always a skeptic. While I definitely don't agree with his conclusion or with a lot of his assumptions, I definitely recommend reading it. As I have mentioned before, it challenged me in areas that I hadn't thought of before. It left an impression.