Lent

My Dad's side of the family is Catholic, so I grew up observing Lent. Each year my Dad would encourage my brother and I to give up something for Lent. I think that I gave up Skittles every year of Elementary School. We would even follow the rule that you cannot eat meat on Fridays, which meant that we usually ate cheese pizza instead of pepperoni. As I progressed through middle and high school, I became less consistent in my observance of Lent.

In college I remember observing it twice. One year I decided that I would give up pop. This is definitely a difficult challenge for someone who likes to drink Dr. Pepper on a daily basis. As that season of Lent progressed, I became less and less consistent in being faithful. After a week or so I decided that I would only drink Sprite because it was caffeine free. A couple weeks after that I began to drink diet soda. To be honest I do not remember if I was able to wait until Easter to drink a Dr. Pepper. The second time I remember giving up something for lent was when Megan and I decided to give up something together. In that particular year, we decided that we should give up kissing for Lent. While we had high ambitions, we struggled to hold up to the challenge. Let's just say Good Friday had a different meaning for us that year.

Even though I am no longer Catholic, I find myself feeling as though I should give something up every year. After spending time thinking about what I should give up this year, I decided to give up Facebook. My hope in doing this is that it will give me time to do other things. I think Facebook is a great tool, but often I find myself wasting a lot of time on it. So while it is probably a small sacrifice in the grand scheme of things, I hope that over the next 40 days I can invest more in God as well as relationships with others. I think that is what Lent is about. It's not just giving something up for the sake of doing it. It's about letting God come in and work in your life. It's about transformation and awareness.

I really want this Lent to be different. I want it to have meaning. I think that the reason that so many people feel disconnected from God is because we as a society are not very faithful in practicing spiritual disciplines. I want Easter this year to have greater significance than it has in the past. I hope that in this season we can all receive with great joy the power of the resurrection.

The Pomegranate Phone

A large number of my middle school students have an iphone. The other day I was thinking about if they become accustomed to that type of technology at this age, they will never be able to settle for anything less. Apple has successfuly created in 12 year olds the need to have a phone with an expensive data plan for the rest of their lives. Brilliant marketing.

The other crazy thing to think about is that at some point the iphone will seem uncool and outdated. As amazing as the iphone technology is, at some point it will no longer seem like a big deal. Check out the following link for the cool new phone. Could this be the future of cell phones? What's next?

http://www.pomegranatephone.com/

How Quickly the Months Go By...

It has been two months since my last post. The funny thing is that during this lapse I have actually thought about blogging multiple times. I am not so sure why I have waited this long to post, but I actually have several things that I want to write about. Hopefully I will post several times in the coming days.

Stay tuned for my thoughts on Reality TV, Spiritual Disciplines, and much much more!

Post Election Thoughts

I wanted to give a few of my post election thoughts. I think the thing that has saddened me the most about this year's election is the way that I have seen some people respond to the results. Tuesday night I was really disappointed as I saw some of the things my friends were putting up as their statuses on facebook. Here are just a few that I saw:

1. NAME is were all going to die because Obama will force us to marry into homosexuality

2. NAME isn't is weird how Obama and biden sounds ALOT lilke osama bin laddin?

3. Name is YES WE CAN!... let the antichrist lead us all to hell... (think im joking? read revalation).

There are definitely more, but I think these three prove my point. The negative statements continued to abound when I went to work the next day. As I saw the response of people who I know would call themselves Christians it left me wondering in what these individuals were placing their hope in.

As Christians, I believe, that we place our hope not in elected officials, but instead in Jesus Christ. John McCain or Barack Obama or George Bush or Hillary Clinton are not going to solve all of our problems. The way Jesus talked about the world changing is when individual Christians get off their butts and live out kingdom principles. It's not by electing people that agree with us. If we want change, we must be change.

A final caution I would give to anyone that wants to make statements of this nature is that they need to consider the words of Jesus. A pharisee came to Jesus and asked, "Teacher, what is the greatest commandment?" Jesus responded by saying "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength." He went on to say that the second was like it "Love your neighbor as yourself."

When comments of this nature are made an individual is not loving their neighbor as their selves. We Christians would do well to take this advice. John said that the world would know we are Christians by our love, not our evil, hateful, bigoted comments.

This post is probably a day or two late though because it seems as though a lot of the election hype has slown down and most people no longer care. This probably says even more about our commitment to things, but I will save that for another time.

Thinking About Church...

I've got church on my mind for several reasons today. We started a unit on church today in one of the classes that I teach. We all sat in a circle and I had the students share their thoughts. I asked them what do you like or not like about church. I also asked if they thought their churches reflected what Jesus's vision of church would be. I then asked them what do they wish church was like. Finally, we talked about if when they went to church it seemed like God was even there.
Here are a few things that they said that stood out:
-Several students felt that they feel like sermons are directed to people much older than them
-Several student felt as though they are judged by the older people in their congregation
-A couple of students mentioned that they think church should be more than just a Sunday morning thing. They felt that God would want them to be more of a community. One student even said a church should be like a big extended family.
-At least 10 student feel as though they go to church every week and leave without it ever seeming like God is even there.

We will continue to talk through these issues in class, but it was interesting to get their initial observations. I am hopeful that they will get a vision for being the people of God that is much more than an hour one morning a week.

Another reason that I am thinking about church is that tonight my church had our annual State of the Church Dinner. Sounds official, huh? It was interesting to here the staff's vision for where they think the church should go. There was a lot of emphasis on impacting the community which is great. I love how many opportunities our church gives for people to serve. Of course there was talk about money for new youth facilities. I find it hard to strike a balance between doing things to "attract" and "excite" people and also staying true to the mission of God. I hate when it seems as though it takes cool facilities and programs to get people through the doors.

All the talk of church also makes me wonder if I could/will ever work in a church. Part of me thinks I would enjoy it, but at the same time I think it would maybe drive me crazy. The church is a beautiful mess! I hope that we can continue to understand what it means to faithfully be the church in this time and place in history.

Handyman

Owning a home obviously comes with a lot of responsibility. Some of the responsibilities are a bit easier to handle than others. I have very little (ok not really any) handyman skills. I guess a lot of people learn how to do these types of things from their dads, but not me. My dad taught me how to make pizza but we skipped the lessons on changing tires, power tools, and other things of this nature.

Even though I don't have the handyman skills, I feel like I need to learn how to be able to do things around the house. I don't want to have to pay a butt load of money every time I need something little done. Over the past few days I have been trying to handle some plumbing issues at the house. I had a leaky shower faucet and what should have entailed replacing one washer ended up involving two busted valves and 7 trips to Home Depot and Robertson Plumbing in a 12 hour period.

I was finally able to take care of the issue today. There were certainly times over the past few days when I wished I would have hired someone else to come out and do it, but in the end I am glad I didn't. I got a deep sense of satisfaction from knowing that I had conquered the dripping shower head. I fixed it all by myself!

I think that often I am pretty hesitant to try new things. I generally do not like taking risks and avoid situations that I am not comfortable in. I saw this quote the other day by oil tycoon Boone Pickens he said, "Don't fall victim to what I call the ready-aim-aim-aim-aim syndrome. You must be willing to fire.” I think I generally stay in aim-aim-aim mood. It felt good that in this situation I just fired. I didn't do everything right, but I was able to learn as I went a long.

I'm ready to fire more often.

I'm back?

I say I am back with a question mark because I never know how long my blogging will last. Lately I have had the desire to do more writing, so that is why I have been lured back to the blog world.

A lot has happened in the past 10 months or so since my last post. This fall I started a Masters in Higher Education Administration at OSU Tulsa. For a long time I had been considering going to seminary, but as of late had not been very excited about it. I felt it was too big a commitment of time and money to do when I was not completely sure that pastoral ministry is what I am being called to do. I am excited to pursue this degree. After serving in various leadership positions at JBU, I always thought it would be great to work full-time on a college campus. The other good thing about the Higher Ed. degree is that I could use it to get a job at a seminary and take classes then. I am excited to see what happens. The other big thing is that Megan and I purchased a house. It's a great house that we both like a lot.

Hopefully I will have some posts of substance over the next few days. Welcome back blog world.