I have a friend who hosted Thanksgiving dinner at his house last week.  After the dinner when his and her entire family sat sprawled out on their couches and chairs, half-heartedly peering at the ‘good-for-nothing’ football games that take up airwave space on T-giving, his wife got the idea to take this opportunity and pick names for the upcoming Christmas swap.  So my friend rounded up the names of everyone present (pun intended) and they all joyfully picked a name of the family member to whom they will be giving a gift.

After the cheery fun of picking the names had commenced, my friends wife walked sheepishly over to him and said, “Honey, I just thought of something.”  “Yes?” He answered inquisitively.  “I already bought all the gifts for everyone in our family.”

After much thought, they came up with a solution:  They would give their family members they had picked the gifts they had purchased for them, and they would sell the other gifts to the people who had picked the recipients of the gift they had purchased.  That way they wouldn’t really have to pay for everyone’s gifts, which is the reason for the swap in the first place, and the other people wouldn’t have to sacrifice to go out amidst the hustle ad bustle of the shopping world and get a gift for their pick.

Aaaaaahhhh the joy of Christmas and the spirit of giving.

The people who get things done for God are people who take risks.  I believe He actually created the world to be this way, and our selfish nature fights against that by putting comfort first.  And when comfort gets put first, the irony is the world becomes more broken, more empty almost, and it takes more sacrifice to rebuild that once whole, then broken world.

What do you need to risk that you would rather keep?

Carie and I spent the last week in Indiana with my parents, celebrating Thanksgiving and really having some quality time with my family.  While I had a great time hanging with my family, I was only able to be online once during our 5 day tenure in Eastern Indy.  This meant no blogging and no connecting with my newest family.  Sure it’s easier for those not involved to scoff and say that in the old days, relationships were about people, but I’m not so sure that online community is devoid of being “about people.”

Since I’ve started blogging, facebooking, and tweeting (in that order, by the way) in 2007, I’ve enhanced several relationships that had fallen off the grid, met new people with whom I’ve formed community, and found more amazing resources for personal and professional growth that I ever would have if forced to do so using my own imagination.

So I guess you could say, “Yes, I had a great time with my family” and “Yes, I missed being here…

with you.”

The following is not really a quote from Congressman Kennedy, but a satirical  interpretation of recent events.

“Hi, I’m Patrick Kennedy, and I’d like to be even better than my late father, Edward – I’d like to be Henry VIII.

“So what I’ll do is reveal to news outlets a confidential letter from my priest, asking me not to take communion because of my stance on the topic of abortion.  And because I don’t agree with their request, and because I typically get whatever I want (what’s my last name?), I’m going to do what’s best for everyone and reveal something personal between the church and I in an effort to make them look bad and to make me look like a victim.

“If I was a real man, I would take a step for what I really believe in, which seems to be very little based on my abuse of confidential information, and leave the church I disagree with, allowing them to have their rules and authority that they have as leaders.  But that would look bad for the voters, which is why I practice faith in the first place.  In fact, it’s why I do everything I do – the voters.  A backbone?  Why that’s for lesser men and women who have character and make decisions out of the values they hold.  Me?  I kind of just go with the flow, as long as the flow agrees with me, and of course votes for me.

“In the end, this will be just another black eye on the church.  Which is no big deal because no one votes for the church leaders, and they have thick skin.  They can suck it up.  But the good news is…

“I’m in the news again!”

Which one of these are turkeys at Fellowship Church?

Now that’s a good helping of turkey to start off your Thanksgiving!
And to the others I am thankful for their huge helping of teamwork at Fellowship!

Because I told you so or because I’m the boss or because I’m bigger than you no longer works as a viable option to telling other people why they should do things that you want them to do.  This is true not only in relationships, but also in the realm of spirituality.

“Why is that kind of music bad for me?”  “Because it is!”

“Why can’t I make this decision that I think is best for my family?”  “Because you would be wrong.”  “Why?”  “Because.”

“Why should I go to church?”  “Because God wants you to, stupid!”

“Why should I give my money to a christian organization?”  “Because the Bible says it somewhere.”

“Why is this the right way?”  “Because we’ve always done it this way.”

That used to be the way, but no longer.  Now that will get you blacklisted from your relationships and exiled from getting any respect, but hey, you keep trying to force your opinion on others based on the fact that you’re the loudest or you’re the boss and see where that gets you.

And when you’re no longer the boss, and everyone ignores you, please remember this post.

I did the unthinkable last night and took Carie to see “New Moon” for date night.

As you may or may not know, date night is a non-negotiable time set aside with my wife Carie that is anchored into our week so that, no matter how busy we get, nothing may remove date night out of the way without the express written consent of both of us and another date night scheduled to replace the first one.

As the evening was planned, I assumed based on something Carie had mentioned to me that she had bought the tickets for a theater about a half hour away.  Because of this, I plotted out too much time before the movie since we only live about 5 minutes from the theater to which we were actually driving.  After a bit of a debate on who was right and who was wrong, we decided to show up early for the movie and wait around the lobby area if we couldn’t get in the door.  But we found out there was no need to wait, for the place was in pandemonium when we arrived.

I took the above picture about 50 minutes before the movie started, and as you can see, the line already spread the full length of one of the theater’s long hallways twice over.  Which led me to process the enormous popularity of the Twilight series.  Jeff had some really interesting things to say on the topic, and while I don’t share his enthusiasm against America’s current most popular book/movie series, I certainly see some of the faulty philosophies within the group of novels/movies.

And I wonder how a group of books about vampires and werewolves and the girl who is torn between the two can captivate the hearts of a monstrous demographic.  Is it the idea of unconditional romantic love that is exhibited by Bella and Edward as they clearly have some sort of strong love bond between them?  Both the writing and the filming do a fine job of showing their respective audiences this.  As you might have guessed, about 85% of the audience that night were female, which leads me to believe that this kind of unconditionality is something sought after by a generation of females who have been mislead, manipulated, and manhandled by a generation of males who have neglected their responsibility to protect and care for the women in their life.

Or maybe it’s the intense “I’ll be there for you no matter what” attitude displayed by both main characters.  Typically women get the “I’ll be there for you, until something better comes along” attitude from their men, which because of the way the earth is created and evolving at the same time, means they will stop looking for protection and care from real guys.  Then they will seek after the same type of relationships from a) books and entertainment where they can dream about that real guy or b) a human being who is not male, yet can give them that dependability that all humans desire from their love relationships.

The deeper problem of course, lies in our understanding that no matter who we place our trust in, they will fail us.  But this is no excuse for men and women of all ages and generations to not be people of character as they move into relationships that literally must include two people of character to succeed.  In short, don’t get into a romantic relationship until you are ready, or as a wise man once said in Scripture…

“Do not arouse or awaken love until the time is right.”

Ever since I first remember reading Romans 14, I have had difficulty using language, entertainment, and real estate as the means to create a sub culture for Christendom.  Christian coffeehouses, Christian music, and words that only Christians understand get used up to create this distance between the one who has trusted Christ, and the billions of other people in the world around us.

In fact, I think building a subculture of Christian stuff is probably one of the worst ideas in human history, outside of Nero burning down his own city, of course.

If one uses the Bible as her guide, what she notices is that God had his chosen people, the Israelites, to be a light in a dark world.  To show the rest of the world that there is a better way, when that way comes from the God who created everything.  And Israel did okay for a while.  Even King David, the most famous of all of Israel’s leaders (with apologies to Moses), messed up a time or three, yet he was still known as a man after God’s own heart.  So it wasn’t necessarily the sin that tore up Israel’s relationship with God, but there was something deeper than just their outward failure to comply to God’s laws.

So God showed forgiveness and mercy in a huge way over hundreds of years of them turning their back on Him.  But then eventually He sends the Messiah, Jesus Christ, into the world.  Why then?  So by that time, Israel’s religion had come to a different place, away from what was really intended.  They had come to believe that they were different then everyone else just because they were Israelites.  As we know today, no group of people is more special than another group of people just because of their race, gender, or religion.  What makes anyone different from anyone else always comes from inside us and never from outside of us.

Then Jesus ultimately dies a cruel death on a tree, and pays a price that I was not willing to pay, eventually rising again to life and to the Father.  But He came into a world not only to die, but also to show us how to be a light in a very dark world.  And then what do we do in response to this fabulous act of kindness?

We create segregated churches and keep stale churches alive longer than they should.  We eat our potlucks in the church mess hall and go on our weekend retreats.  We buy our books from Christian bookstores and learn the necessary 8 syllable words that no one understands unless they’ve gone through 20 years of Christian school like I did.  We listen to our Christian music and reprimand anyone who dares to listen to “secular music” (or regular music as I prefer to call it, just like what I call music with Christ at the center).  In reality, we block ourselves in so we’re not tainted by the rest of the world.  Then we say to said world that thinks were crazy (not because we’re being light, mind you, but because we’re not), “Come, be a part of my thing.”

And for the most part, their response is, “Hell no.”

But what if we told them that to surrender to God, you don’t need to be like me or do my thing, but you just have to…well, surrender to God, and put your faith in the person of Jesus Christ who paved a way for them to do that?  And sometimes that means you should stop doing things that take you away from that goal, and sometimes that means you should probably start doing some things that move you towards that goal, like getting involved in Christian community.

That community might include me, or it might not, but it certainly is not about me – of that I am certain.

And what if we made our churches agents of push rather than leeches of pull, sucking the life out of everything that walks into its dark doors?

Wow…that sort of thing would take humility, sacrifice, and a change of mind and heart.

Love it!

People and the way they connect and build one another up to become more like Christ.

This is the one reason why I love church.  Sure you have serving and teaching and organization and leadership and bearing one another’s burdens and music, and for some there might be other reasons why they love the church, but for me, that’s it.

Last night Carie and I finished another season connecting and building up (and being built up) a group of people who we have come to love as our family.  We mixed in there a few people who will be a part of our next season of community, and in the midst of all this, I’m reminded why I do what I do.  It will be another few weeks of awkward time getting to know a new group and having them get to know us.  No doubt there will be some lull in the conversation and an inability to decipher what someone is trying to say, but in the end, I’ll be back here in a year or two writing in this blog, on a natural high, telling you how I’ve come to love this new group of people.

We are expanding our influence, challenging one another to serve, love, and give more than we think, and moving to deeper levels of intimacy with the God who we serve and the Christ who makes it possible.

And in the process, we become different people