My company went through its first round of layoffs on Friday. About 10% of our workforce was laid off. Thank God I made it, but it does make a person think, especially since one of the people was the engineer across from me. It made me want to focus harder on getting out of debt. The American way is to spend spend spend so that you are living from pay check. That’s all well and good (actually it’s not but you can get by) until the downturn comes and you get laid off. Then all the sudden you have all these bills that you can’t possibly pay. So you’ve got two weeks to find a job or your bankrupt.
Community: what so many want and so few have. Why, in the church, is community so elusive? I’m sure there are many reasons, but I’ll list some of my own thoughts.
When thinking about the major components of a Protestant assembly, singing, preaching and mingling afterwards seemed most prevalent. When thinking about the importance of these in my own life it occurred to me that I didn’t need the church for singing and preaching. All the preaching I could ever listen to is already available for free on the internet. For the singing I can either go to the multitude of city prayer meetings throughout the week, worship along with a church through the internet or listen to my favorite worship songs on YouTube. The mingling, however, cannot be done on the internet, at least not in any deep sense. This is the one thing that keeps the Sunday morning meeting useful. The trouble is that this is the part of the meeting that is…well, not part of the meeting.
Last summer I went on a float trip with about fifty guys from my church and had a great time. I had great conversations with guys I had seen before but never talked to. In the year since I haven’t had a conversation with any of the people I met besides the usual “How are you?”, etc. Why is this? Because there is no vehicle in the church for this to happen. You could try to talk in the church meeting, but this is about the most uncomfortable place in the world to have a conversation with anyone who isn’t already a close friend.
To solve this problem I propose that churches start planning activities where nothing is planned. For example, next Sunday tell everyone to bring a picnic lunch and find somewhere close to the church to hang out and talk to people. No committees needed. No special push. Just people being friendly getting to know one another, which is what they want to do anyway. Planning just makes things unnatural and unlikely to happen. In Acts the church hung out every day. That can only be sustained if it is natural.
I propose that we stop all the Bible studies and small groups that propose to be about growing spiritually, but that people only go to because they want to meet people. In the end, few learn much and most of the relationships are shallow. How about community times where we just hang out naturally? Then really teach people the Bible in a separate setting. When I hang out with my Pentecostal friends all they want to talk about is Jesus and the Kingdom. They don’t need a Bible study or small group to do this in. And because they don’t go meetings like this, they aren’t being trained to switch off their spirituality when the meeting is over (“Hey why are you talking about that? Bible study hasn’t started yet”).
If we get this right then the elusive thing called discipleship can start to happen.
I have a passion for excellence but have no work ethic and so I’m always looking for quotes from overachievers to inspire me and point me in the right direction. Below is a quote from the chef of my favorite restaurant L2O in Chicago. He is one of the hardest workers I’m aware of – 16 hours a day 6 days a week. But it’s not only the hours but that he is able to maintain the highest standards while working that length of time. I actually don’t recommend working that hard, but I figure if he can do 16 hours of quality work at his passion maybe I can do 2 or 3. Anyway, I found the post below very helpful.
“In one way, focus is conceptually a point or view. But for a human being, focus is the idea of being able to remove what is around you and bring complete attention to what you are doing at the moment. I don’t think you are born with focus. You might be gifted with a talent for focus, but I think that is something you learn if you are interested in it.
Into a professional environment the personal focus, or the focus of the group, usually brings success and achievement to what you are doing. It is like a playing a sport. When you first start it is difficult to do for more than a short amount of time, but the more you exercise the better you become. Focus not only allows you to perform better, but it helps you to present yourself with more clarity, making it easier for others to understand you and better appreciate you. ”
Here’s my dream guitar, the Fender Jazzmaster. I never known anyone personally who plays this kind of guitar. Most people play Strats, Les Pauls, or Telecasters. But I have to be different and two of my favorite guitarists play Jazzmasters. Plus I thinks its beautiful. The funny thing about these is they aren’t used for Jazz. The guys I like use them to make etherial, swirling, shimmering kinds of sounds, which is what I want to make.
Next to the Bible and the book “The Final Quest” this teaching series has had the most impact on my life. I lent these cds to a friend of mine and told him not to listen to it while driving because I had run a couple of stop signs while listening to it in the car. He didn’t take me seriously and ran a stop sign himself.
I’d recommend listening to them in order, but 3 through 5 are my favorite.
For all you men out there, here are some tips that will hopefully help you with conquering your lustful impulses:
1. Turn off your tv. Don’t go to movies that star women you can’t deal with.
2. Don’t do double takes when you see attractive women in public. If it was a fat hairy guy would you look twice. No!
3. If you are struggling tell a friend and if that doesn’t curb it tell your wife.
4. Remember, women are people not objects.
5. If you feel the desire WALK AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER.
6. Ask God to help you.
7. Looking at women isn’t the same thing as looking at a beautiful painting. Don’t trick yourself into believing it is.
8. Take Solomon’s advise and enjoy your wife. Proverbs 5:19.
Did you guys know that there was such a thing as snail caviar? I sure didn’t. I was looking at this chefs blog from a restaurant I was thinking about trying and one of his posts was about the snail caviar they use.
Lately I’ve been studying probability. One thing that struck me was the formula that says that the chance of something happening is one minus the chance that it didn’t happen. It occurred to me that you could use this formula in a religious context. The chance that there is a creator is one minus the chance that the universe as we know it came into being on its own. For anyone who has studied science in any way knows that the likelihood of this occurring by chance is basically zero, say one in ten to the millionth power; the exact power doesn’t matter when you get that big. Since one minus zero is one we can say with almost complete mathematical certainty that the universe was created.
For those who might object to this reason by the evidence we have seen in support of Darwinian evolution in the last century I will offer an analogy. Imagine that a very intelligent looking person tells you three things: 2+2 = 4, you should look both ways before crossing the street, and the moon is made of mozzarella. Should we, because the first two things he told us are true, believe that the moon is made of cheese. I think not. Darwinian theory has three main tenets as well: survival of the fittest, common descent, and random mutation. Survival of the fittest isn’t contested by anyone to my knowledge. Common descent has gained credibility in recent decades due to DNA evidence suggesting humans and apes share unlikely DNA characteristics, for example the same broken DNA strands. This doesn’t make it true, but does make it more credible. In the trillions of cases that have been studied in the last one hundred and fifty years to find support of random mutation we haven’t seen anything more complex than a few amino acids moving around. The more we learn about the complexities of life the more unlikely it is that life occurred by random mutation. I won’t comment on whether the moon being made of mozzarella is more or less likely than random mutation to be true. What I will say is that based on current knowledge we can say with almost sure mathematical certainty that there is a creator.
Man I’m lazy. It’s been a month since I posted. At some point in my life I’m going to get a work ethic.
Anyway, here is a great video from my current favorite minister John Crowder. It is about the difference between working hard for God and receiving God’s grace to work through you. This is what I’m dealing with in my life right now. This is a lot different approach than my last post.
