Hanging out with Mike and Roo after an 18 hour drive

The times I remember the most are the ones I had to get off my duff and have.

The time Carie told me she’d never ever date me, then two weeks later, after she had time to reconsider, I remember watching the sun set on a Friday night (August 29, 2003, if you were wondering) listening to the reasons why she changed her mind.

Or the time I drove to Massachusetts in 1997 on about 2 hours notice because I had 5 days of nothingness.  The trip took 18 hours of driving solo.  Then after hanging out with my friends Ruben and Mike for 2.5 days, I headed back 18 hours to Atlanta.  Oh yeah, and I had just arrived into Atlanta from Tucson, AZ (35 hour drive) that evening.

Or the time Dave and I decided to gank a newspaper machine from out front a dollar store.

Or watching a play I wrote and directed be performed on Easter 2001 here at Fellowship Church.

Or taking pictures with the family in Mexico that our team had built a small house for.

Or the time last Saturday when I stood inside of a crowd of people, mostly younger, and jumped up and down to a few hard core Christian bands for the first time in more than 5 years.  I kept thinking to myself, I’m too old to be here.  But after reading Donald Miller’s newest work of art, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, I realized I was just creating another memorable scene in my life.  The kind of scene that I will look back and and be happy that God put me on this earth to live out an incredible story of memorable scenes.  Not necessarily a story (on this earth anyway) with an incredible climax where all my problems go away and my life eventually resolves itself, but one of fulfillment through Jesus and…

a whole lot more memorable scenes.

I was listening to an interview this afternoon from one of my favorite writers, Donald Miller.  His new book comes out this fall called “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years”.  In the interview, Miller spoke of the importance of story and the study he’s done on the literature genre called story.  His insights were very interesting, but one of the most interesting things he said dealt with the main character in a story.  Your story.  My story.  It doesn’t matter.  He said that, in literature, the main character has to want something, or there’s no point in reading or participating in the story.  He also went on to imply – though he didn’t actually say this – that what the character wants says something about the character of the person, and how interesting the character is or isn’t going to be.  So I took a look at the things I want and the things I will do (or not do) to get what I want, and hopefully this will give me a good feel for what kind of story I make.
One of the things I want is to see my community transformed with the love of Christ.

What about you?

"Use my soap, and I'll throw you a Marty Party"

Donald Miller used to use this amazing illustration about the church feeding into darwinistic theology by teaching that “if you get right with Jesus, your life will then be better.”  He paralleled this by using dish soap advertisements.

Marketers would have us believe:  “If you buy our dish soap, everything will be great in your life.  You can have extremely clean hands.  The extremely gorgeous blonde on this commercial will want you, or you can look like her in her perfect suburban home.  Oh yeah, and by the way, your dishes will be really clean.”

This is what the church advertises when we say that if you meet Jesus, your life will be all good.

Then I think about my mom, who’s been in bed for the last 25+ years.  She certainly is not perfect, but everyday she prays for healing, and everyday she stays in bed, praying for everyone she knows, because her relationship with Jesus has never been better.

And I think about a friend of mine I met with recently who has gone through a whole life of mierda (I just cursed in spanish; Carie would be so proud).  He can’t even see God work anymore, but he’s served in church for years and has such a sacrificial giving heart.

It would be easy for me to get theological here and try to explain these things away by sharing all the sin in the lives of my mom and my friend  You know, sin reaps consequences and all that…but then again, I’ll leave that for the seminary boys club.  Then I think about Jesus, who was perfect in every way, yet he found himself hung on a tree, dying because of my sins – under a divine curse because of my broken communion with God.

So I guess this next Sunday morning when I preach about Jesus the week after I talked about sin, and two weeks after I talked about God, I can’t really say that “If you take Jesus, everything will be all great in your life.  You’ll be all free of sin, and someone that looks like me will want you, or you can look  and preach like me in my perfect little suburban church.  Oh yeah, and Jesus will make everything go right too.”  So what do I say?

I guess I will say that by accepting God’s precious gift of Christ, you are reconciled back to your creator because of the shed blood of Jesus.  And that’s a very ugly picture, in case you haven’t seen “The Passion of the Christ”.  And by being reconciled to Him, you’re able to work on making Him all you need.  Because before that whole first man and first woman eating the fruit thing…

That used to be good enough.