Last month while Crystal and I were browsing the outlet stores in Lincoln City I came across one of the books high on my Amazon wish list, The Shack by William P. Young. I first heard about it through listening to one of Mark Driscoll's sermons (those that are close to me know that I absolutely love listening to Driscoll's preaching and believe it to be a big part of the renovation in my walk with God). He said in one of his sermons that if you haven't read the book yet, don't. So the next day I added it to my Amazon wish list. Since then, I have heard quite a bit of buzz surrounding the book and couldn't resist the purchase once I had the book in my hands. I finished the book over a month ago and I still can't get it out of my head so I figured I would write about it on here. This is seemingly becoming my outlet for getting stuff out of my head.
If you haven't read it, I will try not to spoil any of it (as hard as that will be), but essentially it is a fictional book (at least my copy says fiction for the genre on the back cover) about a guy named Mack who goes to a shack in the middle of nowhere and meets God in three distinct persons. God as an African American woman and an older man (he apears differently at different times in the story) referred to as Papa, the Holy Spirit as a woman named Sarayu, and Jesus as what else but a Middle Eastern carpenter. So, Mack is at the shack and he has a conversation with God as the three different people. That is it, end of the story.
I suppose there is a little more to it but not really. Mack lost his youngest daughter previously and the shack is where she was murdered by a serial killer. Along with that there is a little back story how Mack left home when he was in his early teens to get away from his father who was an abusive alcoholic. Mack, in his conversation with God, begins to trust God and see God as Papa, a name he previously could never call God by. He comes to the understanding that it is not God that has placed the bad things in the world but essentially the fall of man has brought sin into this world and from that sin is the reason that bad things happen. God tries to use those things for his glory but it is never his intention that his children should suffer the pain of the bad things that plague our world. Most importantly Mack begins to understand what it means to forgive. To forgive his dad for the abuse he suffered as a child and to forgive the guy that killed his daughter.
Pondering the thought on why bad things happen, It is beautiful to think that God doesn't really want bad things to happen to any of us and that any bad thing that does happen is the result of us sinning. If that is the case we can't really blame anyone for our lives many tragedies but I have to admit I don't find this very fulfilling. I am also not truly convinced this is the case. Why do bad things happen? It is a question that has been pursued for ages and I don't think a definite answer will be wrought anytime soon.
Getting back to the book, if you have read this far and haven't read the book you are probably wondering what the big deal is. You may even be thinking it doesn't even sound like a story worth reading but what is it that has stirred the hearts of so many? People that really enjoyed it are passing it along to everyone they can and then there are those that are willing to fall on a sword over the detrimental theological blasphemy proclaimed within the pages of the book?
The book is a fictional book and I understand the concern that Driscoll and others have about the way Mr. Young portrays the Trinity. However, I have to question your motivation for reading the book, or any book for that matter, if you are reading a book to understand theology. If you want to answer the question about who God is, I think you are looking in the wrong place. If you want to understand anything about God you need to be in the Bible because that is the only authority on such topic and anything that you read authored by someone other than God should be read with a certain level of skepticism and discernment.
I personally place Mr. Young's fictional work in a genre akin to the work of CS Lewis or Tolkien. It is easy for me to see why people have a much harder time with this book because there is a lacking abundance of mythical creatures such as the Centaurs conversing with lions or Orcs battling Hobbits (however on that note I do think I personally know some people that would qualify as Hobbits and am not entirely convinced they are indeed a mythical race). Having classified the book as such I don't feel the urge to wrestle with the questions and declarations of the book being heretical. I do question whether Driscoll did in fact actually read the whole book because having finished it myself I don't think that his criticisms of the book are valid. It would be easy to see how he could come to his conclusions if he was reading it simply to pull some criticisms out of the book but having read it for what it is I don't see how you can come to the same conclusions.
I personally just can't get the story out of my head and I keep asking myself why? The only conclusion I can come to is that people want it to be real. We don't want this to be a work of fiction. We want to know that Mack is real and that his story is true. Yes, it is a tragedy what happened to his daughter, but the fact that he can find forgiveness in the monster that caused him all that pain is nothing short of a miracle in itself. If that guy can be forgiven then surely my wrongs aren't that extreme and I can be forgiven. We want to believe we can have a conversation with God like Mack does and we can find the joy he as afforded for the pains in his life. Most importantly that God can be as real to us as he is to Mack and that he can be our Papa.
The truth of the matter is that God is all of those things we want him to be and if we could just get ourselves out of the way for half a second, we would see him as such. My personal discovery is that I have this little idol factory atop my shoulders and its continually manufacturing these idols that make me blind. Each day it's money, success, materials, family, friends, relationships, security, love, drugs, alcohol, sex and for me the list goes on and on. As soon as I bury one of them the factory is quick to produce a replica or something entirely different. In the moments when I can shut the factory down my heart begins to take over and all of the sudden God becomes all of those things I am yearning for him to be. I realize in worship of him he actually becomes more.
If I could just shut down that factory...
As we were driving home from the beach last month we rediscovered Shaded Red's version of When God Ran (http://www.myspace.com/shadedredwhengodran). It is a beautiful song about the story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15) and God's love for us. We had just come from the beach where the waves crash into the sand and all the iniquities end up washed away and wiped clean without hesitation (a real life etch and sketch). I am continually messing up and everyday I feel like I find myself running back into the arms of God. Running to me, God grabs me in this giant bear hug and says, my son, I've missed you and I love you. Once again the iniquities are washed away and I can start over again. Finding the forgiveness in those arms is only thing that saves me from the constant barrage of atrocities I seemingly create for myself.
One side note I find intriguing about Shaded Red, in the late 90's they were in a tragic car accident that took the life of their drummer. I personally don't think that they were ever really the same after that accident. So why does God choose to do the things that he does, or does he really even choose any of it in the first place?
Alas, I must stop here and I have to apologize for another the long post. I understand if you didn't get this far. Before writing this I downloaded Coldplay's Viva La Vida, ran two miles, showered, and proceeded to drink two cups of coffee. All of which, in hindsight, was probably not the best combination. Now I need to get up in a couple of hours so I better be off but before I go I raise my last sip of coffee to my pursuit of shutting down that idol factory permanently...
T~
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Monday, June 30, 2008
Our Little Big Man
We were getting ready for bath time one night when Brayden surprised us by coming out of the bathroom wearing my basketball shoes.
I play before work a couple times a week and don't always do a good job putting my shoes away when I get home (I really do try to make it all the way to the closet but sometimes it is difficult to make it the last ten feet of long journey). Needless to say this was one of those days when I only made it to the bathroom floor with the shoes and Brayden thought it would be fun to see how well he filled daddy's size thirteens with his feet.
I must admit that he is somewhat obsessed with basketball and we play quite often on his little hoop in the house (he also occasionally dunks on the hoop outside with Daddy's ball). When either of us misses he always proclaims "Ahh Misss!" This is amusing when just him and I are playing but often we stop for a couple of minutes to watch pickup games after swimming class at the YMCA and he makes this same statement anytime someone misses a shot. To the rounding middle-aged 6 foot bricklayer that once played basketball in high school, I apologize on behalf of my son.
I mentioned to Crystal, one day soon enough he probably won't have any trouble filling those shoes...
I play before work a couple times a week and don't always do a good job putting my shoes away when I get home (I really do try to make it all the way to the closet but sometimes it is difficult to make it the last ten feet of long journey). Needless to say this was one of those days when I only made it to the bathroom floor with the shoes and Brayden thought it would be fun to see how well he filled daddy's size thirteens with his feet.I must admit that he is somewhat obsessed with basketball and we play quite often on his little hoop in the house (he also occasionally dunks on the hoop outside with Daddy's ball). When either of us misses he always proclaims "Ahh Misss!" This is amusing when just him and I are playing but often we stop for a couple of minutes to watch pickup games after swimming class at the YMCA and he makes this same statement anytime someone misses a shot. To the rounding middle-aged 6 foot bricklayer that once played basketball in high school, I apologize on behalf of my son.
I mentioned to Crystal, one day soon enough he probably won't have any trouble filling those shoes...
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Building Campaigns...
I don’t really know how to approach this topic… I am struggling with this so much and I really do not know where my angst has come from. My heart has been so heavy since leaving church a couple of weeks ago and it has affected my attitude in a multitude of ways. As my wife can attest I haven’t been the most fun lately and not that this is the reason or any kind of excuse but the internal struggle going on within me certainly has affected other parts of my life.
Our church recently went through a building campaign to build a new church building for our neighboring campus a few miles down the road (we have been renting an elementary school to meet in on Sundays for quite some time) and to modify our existing building with new children and youth areas, a gym, and some other small changes. Last week was the big reveal of how much money people have pledged to give above and beyond regular giving over the next three years. But before I get there I should go to the service that has been weighing down my heart.
A couple of weeks ago we had Commitment Sunday where everyone was supposed to turn in their pledge cards and following the service there was a catered brunch for all in attendance as a means of celebration for turning in your pledge. I thought it might just be me but, as I was talking to my wife, she had talked to one of our friends about the service and she felt some of the same things as I had. So I thought I needed to go back and listen to the message again and maybe dig into it a little bit. I would like to say that everything was resolved by just listening to the message again and I didn’t have my coffee yet the morning while first hearing to the message. As would be suggested by the enormous amount of text below, I wasn’t able to resolve my issues by listening to it again.
In reflection, I think this has been building within me for some time and weighing me down more and more deeply. I don’t know how to find release and the burden is getting tougher to bear but maybe through writing down some of my thoughts I will feel a little better… I apologize for the length and random tangents but this post is more for me than anything else.
As our church approached this building campaign I wasn’t sure how I felt about it in general because on a deeper level I just feel that there is so much more we could do to minister to the people around us and it is not like we are bursting at the seems to outgrow the building we are in. When we get to the point were we are having church all day and the services are all standing room only then I might think its time to think about building a bigger building but at that point you would think that the volume of people in attendance would fund the building without much effort. Making the need for a campaign a non-event. I also think that if it is really God’s will for a new building then he will provide the means by which to achieve it without much of a forthright effort. I understand there are a lot of problems with thinking about it this way but never the less from a high level perspective this is sort of how I think about things and going into the campaign I didn’t have a big soft spot in my heart for it. I expressed my concerns to Crystal and we both set off to pray about it while at the same time being asked to be a part of the leadership team on the campaign. While I could have easily fulfilled the task that was requested of us for the campaign I just didn’t feel like my heart was in the right place and I didn’t want to be hypocritical in convincing people to support something that I wasn’t sure I supported. I am sorry to say I declined the request to be a part of the leadership team and continued praying.
One thing that I had been struggling with for quite some time prior to the campaign was how to define the proper level of sacrifice for living as a Christian in our culture. Both financially and physically what am I called to do? I have tithed 10% of my wages to my church from the time that I started working at sixteen and really never thought twice about it because I believe that this is what God has called us to. I know that all I have is really Gods anyways and giving 10% isn’t really a burden. To be honest, my family has never seen that ten percent and thus don’t really know what it would be like to live with it. Living without it isn’t really much of a sacrifice because we just assume it isn’t there and have built our whole life around it not being there. On top of that we sponsor a child in Guatemala on monthly basis and give to several other charities, organizations, and special mission events throughout the year. I guess if you were to add everything up it is much more than 10% but as I continue to develop my own beliefs I don’t think that there is a set percentage God wants us to give to him.
However, I will say that there have been several times we have overspent our allowance and made dumb decisions with the money we had but God has been faithful beyond all measure. I remember specific times we had bills due and didn’t know where the money would come from to pay them and a check would show up in the mailbox saying that they had incorrectly charged us on our mortgage and sent us a thousand dollars. On more than one occasion things like this have happened and it is no doubt Gods way of showing us if we are faithful, he will take care of us. My wife and I have come a very long way in stewarding our finances and I am very happy with our life. The American way is always bigger and better and more and more and in my heart I really don’t desire any thing else. Sure I see a nice car on the freeway and I say to myself that is nice or we drive past a nice house and I say wow that is nice but in my heart, between me and God, if I really felt him calling me and Jesus stood before me today as in Matthew 19:21 I truly believe I would do just as he said and drop it all. If it were truly of God, I know Crystal would trust me, she would follow me and without looking back we would take the kids and go wherever he wanted us to.
I find money to be a funny thing. It is the source of so many problems for so many people and yet it remains the definition of happiness for people. In much of our pre-marriage counseling we were told that one of the main things we would fight about would be money. Crystal and I found this to be very true and I would say that many of our conflicts have arisen from the use of our money and blaming each other for our spending habits. I am sure that many of you have been there where you don’t know how you are going to pay for something you rightly do or don’t need to pay for and thinking about it constantly you are on edge. It affects your relationship with your spouse and other areas of your life. It is like these chains get wrapped around you and you are this slippery slope, the more you struggle the further you begin to slide down the slope and despite your best tries you can’t get out of the chains to free yourself. Before you know it things are sliding way beyond your control. Then there are those times when we get a running start and dive headfirst down the slope but I suppose that is a different problem all in itself.
So if this is the cause of so much of tension within marriages and life in general do you think that God has called us to live on the fine edge where we are constantly worrying how things are going to work out? I wonder then do I just not have enough faith in God to take care of me? I have been given answers both ways to this questions by people I really trust and look up to…
I was recently reading in Acts 5 how it is talking about all the believers sharing all of their possessions. Living together and sharing what they had such that there weren’t any needy people among them. This part I think is pretty cool but starting in Chapter 5 we meet a man named Ananias and his wife. They set out to sell a piece of land and donate the money but before donating the money they decide to keep some of it for themselves. At first it doesn’t really seem like that big of a deal but as I kept reading I saw that Peter shows and says that they lied to the Holy Spirit and they both die. Ok, so maybe what they did was bad. They made a bigger sacrifice than most people I know today would by selling the land and donating any part of it. As I studied it a little more what I found was that their sin was in saying they were going to give it all to God and then in secret they withheld some of what they sold it for. The lie was the sin and it was meant to point out that God knows all and it is all Gods in the first place anyways so it doesn’t matter for you to keep it. My human nature tells me that what they did doesn’t seem to warrant the consequences. I need to spend some more time with this one thinking about it…
Sorry for the background but this is what I came into the service with bouncing around in my mind. So, coming back to the sermon on Commitment Sunday a few weeks ago, some of the things I came away with through words and actions were: 1. How much money our church raises in this campaign will determine how effective we will be at ministering to people and with enough money we will be able to build the right tools to minister to people. 2. Commitment is voluntary but if I wasn’t committing something I wasn’t committed to our church or to the vision of ministering to the lost people of our community. 3. No message of giving would be complete without a reminder of Romans 12:1, to offer my body as a living sacrifice. (what is it that Paul was trying to say there anyways? I will have to study this a little more) 4. Coming forward and placing my offering in the bucket at the foot of a cross and in front of everyone else to see how committed I am is a worship experience and even if I already pledged some level of commitment I need to come in front of everyone else and put my card in the bucket. 5. I can not give partially and should not doubt that this is Gods plan or as in Numbers those with doubting, pride, calloused hearts did not receive the promise. After reading this further I basically concluded that God killed the people for their grumbling in the desert. 6. Because God loves us and died for us this is our way of worshiping and honoring him. Love always leads to giving, thus writing down my commitment amount on the card is worshiping God.
Reflecting on that, wow there sure is a lot to unpack in the message of that Sunday and I am sure I missed things as well as misinterpreted things but I have replayed it in my head and listened a couple of times. There are certainly some things that have strong biblical ties and I think I would agree on the outside with a lot of the things there. As Crystal can attest, I am usually pretty easily convinced most of the time so why can’t I convince my heart that this is what God wants from me?
Moving forward a couple more weeks, our church revealed that it had raised more than $4 million dollars through the campaign, which I have to admit is very impressive. We will be able to build the new building with our sister campus and stop renting the elementary school on Sunday and get started on some renovations to our other current building. I think the cause is noble and I pray many people are reached for years to come. One question that will not get out of my head is from the Reveal Study that Willow Creek is in right now. If someone came to you and said here is a million dollars (or in this case, $4 million), take it and use it the best way you can to reach as many people that you can for Christ. What would you do? (If you have thoughts on this, leave it in a comment below) To be honest I wouldn’t even know where to begin…
There are so many different directions to go within my own community and if I pause to think about what I can do in the world as a community it is astounding! I started reading a new book and I am just barely into it but it is ripping my heart apart. “The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of Our Time” I don’t know what I will think when I am finished but some of the things he is sharing in the beginning about the African tragedy occurring right now can not help but bring tears to my eyes when I really stop and think about it. It is one thing to see pictures or read about of what is going on in so many parts of Africa and other places today. But when you stop and really think about it, 15,000 Africans die every day. Assume in the dense parts of the city there are 7,500 people per square mile and two square miles of people die each day. That is entire city blocks that are full of life today and tomorrow they are vacant. It would take less than a month and a half and the entire population of Seattle would be gone.
The tragedy of the world around us is that in our culture if we don’t have to look at it we don’t have to think about it. I heard this analogy of a small baby, if you place the rattle directly in front of the baby their complete attention becomes focused on it but as soon as you remove it from the babies sight they no longer even think about it. Can you imagine what it would be like to watch TV and every commercial was about the nightmare going on all around us that we could actually do something about.
Yesterday 8,000 children died of Malaria. Many of these children could have been saved for as little as 20 cents per child. A heart breaking price to place on the life of a little kid as precious to someone as my own two are to me. If the $4 million dollars were used for this one cause at 20 cents per child you could save 20 million children’s lives. Even further not another one of these children would have to die for the next 2,500 days or 7 years. I think that when things get put into perspective like that it just moves ministering to people to a whole different level. You are not just ministering to people you are saving their lives.
I am not saying that this is where our church should have put the money or anything like that at all. It just seems that there are some pressing things in this world that need our attention. If we are one church and we were able to raise $4 million dollars in a couple of weeks. Imagine what we could do with the church down the street and the one down the street from that one and on and on. I was talking to a guy at my work recently and found out that his church, that is in this same area, is also in the midst of planning a building campaign for their church. Talking with our parents recently Crystal and I discovered that their church (within walking distance of our church) is in the midst of planning a building campaign. Then in talking with Crystal’s sister, their church too is in the middle of a building campaign. Four churches within a twenty minute radius of each other and all building?
It just seems that the whole thing goes right along with the stereotype of the American culture of materialism. If we only had this then we could do that. The truth is God doesn't need any of it to reach his people... I personally didn't become a Christian because of the music Christians sing or the sports that they play or the way they look or any of that... I don’t live my life as a Christian because of any of that either. The realization that I was made to worship Christ and he alone is the only thing that will fill the depths of my soul. That is the message the people need to hear. They need to feel the real love that we can have for each other as people. It is really just all about Jesus and nothing more, nothing less.
So after saying all that I am not sure where this leaves me but with a heavy heart and anxiously continuing to pray and seek Gods will. I keep praying for him to soften my heart but I haven’t made very much progress on that prayer in the past few months. Everything I hear about the region that I live in is that the number of Christians is not actually growing but shrinking. Despite all of the building campaigns, it doesn’t seem like it is the lack of church buildings as a reason why we aren’t getting through to our culture. I can go into almost any community and find a number of different church buildings of all shapes, sizes, and denominations. On top of that I haven’t heard any testimonies of people actively seeking Christ leaving their church because the building isn’t the right size, shape, or color. Something is missing. Something is not quite right. Something has to change…
Thanks for letting me share something on my heart,
T~
On a slightly different subject, I am hoping my son will poop in the toilet soon. Crystal and I have decided Monday is the day we will begin potty training with an all or nothing approach. I am hoping for an all in the toilet approach personally…
Our church recently went through a building campaign to build a new church building for our neighboring campus a few miles down the road (we have been renting an elementary school to meet in on Sundays for quite some time) and to modify our existing building with new children and youth areas, a gym, and some other small changes. Last week was the big reveal of how much money people have pledged to give above and beyond regular giving over the next three years. But before I get there I should go to the service that has been weighing down my heart.
A couple of weeks ago we had Commitment Sunday where everyone was supposed to turn in their pledge cards and following the service there was a catered brunch for all in attendance as a means of celebration for turning in your pledge. I thought it might just be me but, as I was talking to my wife, she had talked to one of our friends about the service and she felt some of the same things as I had. So I thought I needed to go back and listen to the message again and maybe dig into it a little bit. I would like to say that everything was resolved by just listening to the message again and I didn’t have my coffee yet the morning while first hearing to the message. As would be suggested by the enormous amount of text below, I wasn’t able to resolve my issues by listening to it again.
In reflection, I think this has been building within me for some time and weighing me down more and more deeply. I don’t know how to find release and the burden is getting tougher to bear but maybe through writing down some of my thoughts I will feel a little better… I apologize for the length and random tangents but this post is more for me than anything else.
As our church approached this building campaign I wasn’t sure how I felt about it in general because on a deeper level I just feel that there is so much more we could do to minister to the people around us and it is not like we are bursting at the seems to outgrow the building we are in. When we get to the point were we are having church all day and the services are all standing room only then I might think its time to think about building a bigger building but at that point you would think that the volume of people in attendance would fund the building without much effort. Making the need for a campaign a non-event. I also think that if it is really God’s will for a new building then he will provide the means by which to achieve it without much of a forthright effort. I understand there are a lot of problems with thinking about it this way but never the less from a high level perspective this is sort of how I think about things and going into the campaign I didn’t have a big soft spot in my heart for it. I expressed my concerns to Crystal and we both set off to pray about it while at the same time being asked to be a part of the leadership team on the campaign. While I could have easily fulfilled the task that was requested of us for the campaign I just didn’t feel like my heart was in the right place and I didn’t want to be hypocritical in convincing people to support something that I wasn’t sure I supported. I am sorry to say I declined the request to be a part of the leadership team and continued praying.
One thing that I had been struggling with for quite some time prior to the campaign was how to define the proper level of sacrifice for living as a Christian in our culture. Both financially and physically what am I called to do? I have tithed 10% of my wages to my church from the time that I started working at sixteen and really never thought twice about it because I believe that this is what God has called us to. I know that all I have is really Gods anyways and giving 10% isn’t really a burden. To be honest, my family has never seen that ten percent and thus don’t really know what it would be like to live with it. Living without it isn’t really much of a sacrifice because we just assume it isn’t there and have built our whole life around it not being there. On top of that we sponsor a child in Guatemala on monthly basis and give to several other charities, organizations, and special mission events throughout the year. I guess if you were to add everything up it is much more than 10% but as I continue to develop my own beliefs I don’t think that there is a set percentage God wants us to give to him.
However, I will say that there have been several times we have overspent our allowance and made dumb decisions with the money we had but God has been faithful beyond all measure. I remember specific times we had bills due and didn’t know where the money would come from to pay them and a check would show up in the mailbox saying that they had incorrectly charged us on our mortgage and sent us a thousand dollars. On more than one occasion things like this have happened and it is no doubt Gods way of showing us if we are faithful, he will take care of us. My wife and I have come a very long way in stewarding our finances and I am very happy with our life. The American way is always bigger and better and more and more and in my heart I really don’t desire any thing else. Sure I see a nice car on the freeway and I say to myself that is nice or we drive past a nice house and I say wow that is nice but in my heart, between me and God, if I really felt him calling me and Jesus stood before me today as in Matthew 19:21 I truly believe I would do just as he said and drop it all. If it were truly of God, I know Crystal would trust me, she would follow me and without looking back we would take the kids and go wherever he wanted us to.
I find money to be a funny thing. It is the source of so many problems for so many people and yet it remains the definition of happiness for people. In much of our pre-marriage counseling we were told that one of the main things we would fight about would be money. Crystal and I found this to be very true and I would say that many of our conflicts have arisen from the use of our money and blaming each other for our spending habits. I am sure that many of you have been there where you don’t know how you are going to pay for something you rightly do or don’t need to pay for and thinking about it constantly you are on edge. It affects your relationship with your spouse and other areas of your life. It is like these chains get wrapped around you and you are this slippery slope, the more you struggle the further you begin to slide down the slope and despite your best tries you can’t get out of the chains to free yourself. Before you know it things are sliding way beyond your control. Then there are those times when we get a running start and dive headfirst down the slope but I suppose that is a different problem all in itself.
So if this is the cause of so much of tension within marriages and life in general do you think that God has called us to live on the fine edge where we are constantly worrying how things are going to work out? I wonder then do I just not have enough faith in God to take care of me? I have been given answers both ways to this questions by people I really trust and look up to…
I was recently reading in Acts 5 how it is talking about all the believers sharing all of their possessions. Living together and sharing what they had such that there weren’t any needy people among them. This part I think is pretty cool but starting in Chapter 5 we meet a man named Ananias and his wife. They set out to sell a piece of land and donate the money but before donating the money they decide to keep some of it for themselves. At first it doesn’t really seem like that big of a deal but as I kept reading I saw that Peter shows and says that they lied to the Holy Spirit and they both die. Ok, so maybe what they did was bad. They made a bigger sacrifice than most people I know today would by selling the land and donating any part of it. As I studied it a little more what I found was that their sin was in saying they were going to give it all to God and then in secret they withheld some of what they sold it for. The lie was the sin and it was meant to point out that God knows all and it is all Gods in the first place anyways so it doesn’t matter for you to keep it. My human nature tells me that what they did doesn’t seem to warrant the consequences. I need to spend some more time with this one thinking about it…
Sorry for the background but this is what I came into the service with bouncing around in my mind. So, coming back to the sermon on Commitment Sunday a few weeks ago, some of the things I came away with through words and actions were: 1. How much money our church raises in this campaign will determine how effective we will be at ministering to people and with enough money we will be able to build the right tools to minister to people. 2. Commitment is voluntary but if I wasn’t committing something I wasn’t committed to our church or to the vision of ministering to the lost people of our community. 3. No message of giving would be complete without a reminder of Romans 12:1, to offer my body as a living sacrifice. (what is it that Paul was trying to say there anyways? I will have to study this a little more) 4. Coming forward and placing my offering in the bucket at the foot of a cross and in front of everyone else to see how committed I am is a worship experience and even if I already pledged some level of commitment I need to come in front of everyone else and put my card in the bucket. 5. I can not give partially and should not doubt that this is Gods plan or as in Numbers those with doubting, pride, calloused hearts did not receive the promise. After reading this further I basically concluded that God killed the people for their grumbling in the desert. 6. Because God loves us and died for us this is our way of worshiping and honoring him. Love always leads to giving, thus writing down my commitment amount on the card is worshiping God.
Reflecting on that, wow there sure is a lot to unpack in the message of that Sunday and I am sure I missed things as well as misinterpreted things but I have replayed it in my head and listened a couple of times. There are certainly some things that have strong biblical ties and I think I would agree on the outside with a lot of the things there. As Crystal can attest, I am usually pretty easily convinced most of the time so why can’t I convince my heart that this is what God wants from me?
Moving forward a couple more weeks, our church revealed that it had raised more than $4 million dollars through the campaign, which I have to admit is very impressive. We will be able to build the new building with our sister campus and stop renting the elementary school on Sunday and get started on some renovations to our other current building. I think the cause is noble and I pray many people are reached for years to come. One question that will not get out of my head is from the Reveal Study that Willow Creek is in right now. If someone came to you and said here is a million dollars (or in this case, $4 million), take it and use it the best way you can to reach as many people that you can for Christ. What would you do? (If you have thoughts on this, leave it in a comment below) To be honest I wouldn’t even know where to begin…
There are so many different directions to go within my own community and if I pause to think about what I can do in the world as a community it is astounding! I started reading a new book and I am just barely into it but it is ripping my heart apart. “The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of Our Time” I don’t know what I will think when I am finished but some of the things he is sharing in the beginning about the African tragedy occurring right now can not help but bring tears to my eyes when I really stop and think about it. It is one thing to see pictures or read about of what is going on in so many parts of Africa and other places today. But when you stop and really think about it, 15,000 Africans die every day. Assume in the dense parts of the city there are 7,500 people per square mile and two square miles of people die each day. That is entire city blocks that are full of life today and tomorrow they are vacant. It would take less than a month and a half and the entire population of Seattle would be gone.
The tragedy of the world around us is that in our culture if we don’t have to look at it we don’t have to think about it. I heard this analogy of a small baby, if you place the rattle directly in front of the baby their complete attention becomes focused on it but as soon as you remove it from the babies sight they no longer even think about it. Can you imagine what it would be like to watch TV and every commercial was about the nightmare going on all around us that we could actually do something about.
Yesterday 8,000 children died of Malaria. Many of these children could have been saved for as little as 20 cents per child. A heart breaking price to place on the life of a little kid as precious to someone as my own two are to me. If the $4 million dollars were used for this one cause at 20 cents per child you could save 20 million children’s lives. Even further not another one of these children would have to die for the next 2,500 days or 7 years. I think that when things get put into perspective like that it just moves ministering to people to a whole different level. You are not just ministering to people you are saving their lives.
I am not saying that this is where our church should have put the money or anything like that at all. It just seems that there are some pressing things in this world that need our attention. If we are one church and we were able to raise $4 million dollars in a couple of weeks. Imagine what we could do with the church down the street and the one down the street from that one and on and on. I was talking to a guy at my work recently and found out that his church, that is in this same area, is also in the midst of planning a building campaign for their church. Talking with our parents recently Crystal and I discovered that their church (within walking distance of our church) is in the midst of planning a building campaign. Then in talking with Crystal’s sister, their church too is in the middle of a building campaign. Four churches within a twenty minute radius of each other and all building?
It just seems that the whole thing goes right along with the stereotype of the American culture of materialism. If we only had this then we could do that. The truth is God doesn't need any of it to reach his people... I personally didn't become a Christian because of the music Christians sing or the sports that they play or the way they look or any of that... I don’t live my life as a Christian because of any of that either. The realization that I was made to worship Christ and he alone is the only thing that will fill the depths of my soul. That is the message the people need to hear. They need to feel the real love that we can have for each other as people. It is really just all about Jesus and nothing more, nothing less.
So after saying all that I am not sure where this leaves me but with a heavy heart and anxiously continuing to pray and seek Gods will. I keep praying for him to soften my heart but I haven’t made very much progress on that prayer in the past few months. Everything I hear about the region that I live in is that the number of Christians is not actually growing but shrinking. Despite all of the building campaigns, it doesn’t seem like it is the lack of church buildings as a reason why we aren’t getting through to our culture. I can go into almost any community and find a number of different church buildings of all shapes, sizes, and denominations. On top of that I haven’t heard any testimonies of people actively seeking Christ leaving their church because the building isn’t the right size, shape, or color. Something is missing. Something is not quite right. Something has to change…
Thanks for letting me share something on my heart,
T~
On a slightly different subject, I am hoping my son will poop in the toilet soon. Crystal and I have decided Monday is the day we will begin potty training with an all or nothing approach. I am hoping for an all in the toilet approach personally…
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Clam Hunting for the Electrical Engineering Nerd Within
So as my wife mentioned in her blog, we went out to our families cabin on Anderson Island Saturday. It was a great time with friends and family and the weather... wow! Anytime you can spend some time on the beach in Washington and it is in the 70's there isn't much room for complaining. I think that the kids (Brayden, his buddy Cooper, and Peyton in the front pack) had a good time and after awhile it became apparent that Brayden took it up as his own personal mission to throw every rock in the water (I think he would still be there throwing if we would have let him stay). After a leisure walk along the stone covered beach we discovered giant spiders, dead crabs, cool shells, and a squirting beach... I knew that the random squirts of water were clams and I decided I would try to catch one.
I decided I would try to stalk a clam and try my luck at catching one (yes I have a shellfish license so I was technically legally allowed to harvest clams and the beach we were on is open year round). I carefully walked up to where some clams were hanging out and waited for one nearby to give up its location by squirting a jet of water out of the ground. There it was, within a step of me, so I inched ever closer to his domain and as the most opportune of moments approached I began to dig with such ferocity as I have only previously seen Emma (my chocolat
e lab) dig up a freshly reseeded patch of missing grass in my backyard. I caught him by surprise and was able to grab his neck, the battle had begun and I yelled to Jeremy to come over fast and help me dig this behemoth of the deep from his lair. I lost track of time and our hands went numb from the cool crisp tidal waters but we eventually basked in the sunshine, claiming victory we hoisted our treasure for all to see.
I was quite taken at the size of our little friend and severely debated keeping him for a pot of clam chowder (I am sure he would have been sufficient for a whole pot). My logic got the better of me because I had not researched the toxins on the beach before our adventure and was not comfortable keeping our catch without such information. Having been the prey of bad shellfish, previously in my life, I am ok not reliving that experience. We put our clam back in his home and covered him back up and walked back down the beach toward the cars.
There was another group of people digging clams (pshh... they were using shovels) and my curiosity got the better of me so I had to see the extent of their catch. All the clams in their bucket were about half the size of the one we caught. After bragging about our catch they ogled at us with disbelief so Jeremy and I decided to run back down the beach (like baywatch without David Hasselhoff's short red shorts or Pamela Andersons upper body... although I guess that doesn't leave much) and grab our little friend. They were obviously more comfortable than I about keeping the clams so we parted ways with our dear friend once and for all. Rejoining our families (including my now sand covered son) we retreated back to the safety of the cabin to bathe, relax, and feast on chicken, potatoes, and homemade bread topped with cinnamon honey.
On a side note, upon returning home my curiosity again got the better of me (not that I had intended to return to the beach anytime soon for digging clams because my hands could probably not take that kind repeated abuse). I looked up the beach on the department of health's website but I could not recover specific information about the beach we were on. However, the one just around the corner (a couple minute walk away) was closed due to high levels of toxins so in hindsight it was probably a good decision not to consume the clam.
Of other matters, this weekend also afforded me the time to dig into a new book. I finished one last week so that means I should try to start reading two new ones (I only have about six books going right now...) I wish I could stop this but I think I am becoming addicted to books. Half of my wish list for Christmas was composed of books (I have to proclaim that my awesome wife got me every one on the list). I truly think I might have something wrong with me and my wishlist on amazon continues to exponentially expand (is there a recovery group to deal with this issue?) I am reading Becoming a Contagious Christian by Bill Hybel's, which so far I am far more captivated with than I expected to be and I just might read it all the way to the end. :)
On page 76 I discovered the best quote ever; "The wire is you and me; the current is God. We have the power to let the current pass through us, use us, and produce the light of the world - Jesus." Ok, so it isn't as inspirational to you as me, but you have to remember the context that I am an electrical engineer and spent four years studying electricity and all of its many properties. Additionally I recently spent many hours studying my rear end off to get my Professional Engineering License in the state of Washington (an eight hour test I am glad I will never have to take again). So in thinking about it a little more, since V=IR (that would be voltage equals current times resistance, for the rest of you), God's current is supernaturally strong and my resistance seems to be infinite so together that means we should be able to shock the world with all that is Jesus.
More musings and adventures shall come in my subsequent posts but for my first one I think this is adequate...
I decided I would try to stalk a clam and try my luck at catching one (yes I have a shellfish license so I was technically legally allowed to harvest clams and the beach we were on is open year round). I carefully walked up to where some clams were hanging out and waited for one nearby to give up its location by squirting a jet of water out of the ground. There it was, within a step of me, so I inched ever closer to his domain and as the most opportune of moments approached I began to dig with such ferocity as I have only previously seen Emma (my chocolat
e lab) dig up a freshly reseeded patch of missing grass in my backyard. I caught him by surprise and was able to grab his neck, the battle had begun and I yelled to Jeremy to come over fast and help me dig this behemoth of the deep from his lair. I lost track of time and our hands went numb from the cool crisp tidal waters but we eventually basked in the sunshine, claiming victory we hoisted our treasure for all to see.
I was quite taken at the size of our little friend and severely debated keeping him for a pot of clam chowder (I am sure he would have been sufficient for a whole pot). My logic got the better of me because I had not researched the toxins on the beach before our adventure and was not comfortable keeping our catch without such information. Having been the prey of bad shellfish, previously in my life, I am ok not reliving that experience. We put our clam back in his home and covered him back up and walked back down the beach toward the cars.
There was another group of people digging clams (pshh... they were using shovels) and my curiosity got the better of me so I had to see the extent of their catch. All the clams in their bucket were about half the size of the one we caught. After bragging about our catch they ogled at us with disbelief so Jeremy and I decided to run back down the beach (like baywatch without David Hasselhoff's short red shorts or Pamela Andersons upper body... although I guess that doesn't leave much) and grab our little friend. They were obviously more comfortable than I about keeping the clams so we parted ways with our dear friend once and for all. Rejoining our families (including my now sand covered son) we retreated back to the safety of the cabin to bathe, relax, and feast on chicken, potatoes, and homemade bread topped with cinnamon honey.
On a side note, upon returning home my curiosity again got the better of me (not that I had intended to return to the beach anytime soon for digging clams because my hands could probably not take that kind repeated abuse). I looked up the beach on the department of health's website but I could not recover specific information about the beach we were on. However, the one just around the corner (a couple minute walk away) was closed due to high levels of toxins so in hindsight it was probably a good decision not to consume the clam.Of other matters, this weekend also afforded me the time to dig into a new book. I finished one last week so that means I should try to start reading two new ones (I only have about six books going right now...) I wish I could stop this but I think I am becoming addicted to books. Half of my wish list for Christmas was composed of books (I have to proclaim that my awesome wife got me every one on the list). I truly think I might have something wrong with me and my wishlist on amazon continues to exponentially expand (is there a recovery group to deal with this issue?) I am reading Becoming a Contagious Christian by Bill Hybel's, which so far I am far more captivated with than I expected to be and I just might read it all the way to the end. :)
On page 76 I discovered the best quote ever; "The wire is you and me; the current is God. We have the power to let the current pass through us, use us, and produce the light of the world - Jesus." Ok, so it isn't as inspirational to you as me, but you have to remember the context that I am an electrical engineer and spent four years studying electricity and all of its many properties. Additionally I recently spent many hours studying my rear end off to get my Professional Engineering License in the state of Washington (an eight hour test I am glad I will never have to take again). So in thinking about it a little more, since V=IR (that would be voltage equals current times resistance, for the rest of you), God's current is supernaturally strong and my resistance seems to be infinite so together that means we should be able to shock the world with all that is Jesus.
More musings and adventures shall come in my subsequent posts but for my first one I think this is adequate...
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