I am sitting in the General Session this morning, typing this blog post as people all around me are standing, clapping, kneeling, raising hands and all kinds of stuff. Now don’t get me wrong, I love to stand and sing (my wife would probably not call it singing), clap, and all that stuff like the person next to me. What I don’t particularly like is when someone tells me to go putting my hands on someone else. Okay, so why do I not like it and why do I not like this so-called “spirituality”? Well, a couple reasons.
First, it is an emotional in-the-moment kind of false “spiritual high”. I am not saying that God doesn’t meet you there, but I AM saying that he doesn’t need singing and hand-raising to meet us, he wants holiness. He is the God that draws near, but he requires us to be holy. He makes us holy and it’s not when we’re raising our hands, singing. If people want to praise God that way, I have no issue with it. Just reflect as to why you do it.
Secondly, it creates an uncomfortable atmosphere for others. Now, I think most Christians that are not into the whole thing are going to just get over it and think that you are weird. Those that are used to it are just going to not even realize that not everyone else does this kind of thing. However, what about the non-believer who has never experienced this and has showed up to see what this is all about. What are they going to think? I know what I would think…. “they’re crazy! Why would I ever want to be doing this stupid stuff? These people freak me out. If I don’t do what they do, which I am not going to,because it is awkward for me, I’m am going to be judged and looked down to as ‘not spiritual’” Why do I say this? Because it is what I think. I just get over it, because I know better and am more accepting of other people’s culture. But what those who aren’t like me in that way?
Now, I know that some people are not going to agree and may take it personally. Please don’t, I am not attacking anyone. I would love your comments, just please don’t be inflammatory.
Anyway, I really have enjoyed the music here. Peder Eide has a really nice sound and some awesome music. He also has a great sense of humor. I can’t wait for the rest of the day!
As I am flying the plane to Summit VI, I am lucky enough to be flying on a flight with internet access and I get to post what I have been thinking about for a while. People all around me seem to be struggling in their marriages. This breaks my heart. I have heard the D word come up more times than I would like to think.
This past weekend, I was particularly disturbed by an advertisement I saw in the men’s room at one of the golf courses that I played this past weekend. The advertisement was a picture of a young woman dressed in golfing attire smashing a golf club over the head of her presumed husband. Tiger Woods thoughts entered my head. The caption was something like: “Things not turn out as you planned?” The advertisement was for a so-called family-law legal firm trying to sell their divorce services. Now wait… did things not turn out as I planned? They sure didn’t! The criteria for divorce is that things are not working out as planned? WHAT?
Things are not going to work out as you planned; they NEVER do. Now, I am not going to say that divorce is never the right option. What I am going to say is that it is seldom the right option. I by no means have the marriage thing down pat, but I’m not doing so bad, either. The advice I am going to give is not something that I have come up with on my own or something that I think is the end-all-be-all of marriage advice. I do think it holds a lot of water, though.
I hear a common complaint from both men and women about their spouses. I hear, “he just…..”, or “she just…”, or “my needs …”, or “I’m not happy”, and many other things like this. The common reason for the complaints is that the spouse is not holding up their end of the bargain. When you get married, you do not have a “treaty”, so to speak. Rather, we make promises and the only condition assigned to them is being alive. We do not say, “I will love and honor you as long as you make me happy.” No, we simply make promises. However, we set the expectation in our heads that the other person will satisfy some set of needs that we have. When they don’t, people think that all bets are off.
I am not trying to get on a soap box. What I am trying to say is that marriage requires something of us that is difficult. What happens when expectations aren’t being met is that you will often end up shutting down and your spouse ends up with the same exact complaint about you. Here in-lies the problem. This situation is an endless cycle of nobody ever being happy. My suggestion is that instead of focusing on what you are not getting, dedicate yourself to making your spouse happy. I know, this sounds crazy, but try it anyway. Do it not because you hope that they will return the happiness to you, but do it because you promised to love them. Genuinely pursue their happiness with a passion. If you wait for your spouse to make you happy, you are never going to be happy. Find happiness in making your spouse happy and see the difference that it makes in your marriage.
I turned on the news this morning as I was waiting for something on my computer to finish running. In that news broadcast, I saw a very short news article and I was reminded of something that I witnessed when I was a little kid that has disturbed me since. In New York City, there was a homeless man who helped a woman who was being attacked and ended up getting stabbed. He laid on the sidewalk for over an hour while 20 people walked by him. A couple people looked at him, turned him over, talked about it, and then left. Someone else took a picture on their cell phone. By the time the fire department showed up an hour and twenty minutes later, he had bled out and died. From Fox News:
What I was reminded of when I was young was a trip that my family took to the Big Apple around Christmas time. As we were on our bus, we had come to a stop. I looked out the window and saw a sight that I could not completely understand. However, the image still is haunting. A man was on the sidewalk, leaning against a fence. One hand was up holding on to the fence and the other was down at his side. A river of red ran from his wrist that was down, across the sidewalk, and into the street. Person after person walked by. Some stopped and kicked his feet to see if he was alive and then continued on their way. Nobody seemed to care.
The story that Jesus told two thousand years ago is still as relevant as it was back then. More people walk by, not wanting to concern themselves with the problems of other people, than those that will stop <by a disturbing margin>. It was the homeless person, the person that society looks down upon, that tried to help someone else. How sick is this culture that we live in?
Okay, I am going to be a bit more serious in this post for a change. There has been a significant amount of news and discussion around this family who took their adopted child and sent him on a plane with a one-way ticket back to Russia. People are so quick to judge this family and their action. Did they do the right thing? Absolutely not! I cannot condone what they did. However, who was providing them with the needed support?
We in the US are horrible at this thing called community. It is indeed true that it takes a community to raise a child. It is especially true when the child has been adopted and even MORE so if the child was not an infant when adopted. However, in the US, we are a “strong”, “independent” people that cannot show weakness or request help from others. This is just pure hogwash. We are no different than anyone else; we need other people. There are not enough people supporting adoptive parents. I know first hand that raising an adopted child that was not an infant when adopted is hard. It has been much harder than raising my biological children.
The Church needs to step in and support these families. If we as a Church do not step in and support these families with whatever it is that they need, meals, counseling, an ear, anything, then we are as much to blame for these kind of events as the family. We need to stop complaining and step up and make a change. We cannot simply hope that somebody else is going to take action. YOU must take the action and help. And if you need help helping, Melissa, myself, and several others are here to help you!
So, the topic of conversation yesterday was: is it appropriate to talk about your *** life in a blog post. Certainly most of us would agree that there are definitely certain aspects of what goes on in the bedroom, or wherever it happens to take place, that are certainly to be kept between husband and wife. However, I have a big problem with the fact that Christians don’t want to talk about ***. God sure talks about it; try reading His book sometime, I hear it’s a best seller!
So, I ask, why not be open about the husband/wife relationship? Perhaps if we did, the divorce rate among Christians would not be the same as the rest of the population. What if newly-weds or pre-weds (is that a word?) were given a realistic view of marriage before they had their expectations shattered because they were set by TV and movies (and the media at large)?
Don’t worry, you’ll never hear me talk about the *****, or ***, and definitely not ********.
As for my wife, she has decided to “respond” to my post. You men can tell her that *** is not a “perfect end to a perfect day” or “an ultimate fix to a crappy one”. Rather, it is just the end of the day . AND, contrary to her opinion, it is definitely a theology post!!!!
My parents came into town this weekend for the Cherry Blossom Festival down in DC yesterday. Unfortunately, as I am sure you could figure out from my post on Puking, my wife and youngest son (Ty) were unavailable to attend the festival. There were a ton of people down there. It was unfortunate because the festival would have been really cool. That is, if you could see anything. The day was rather interesting and I could’ve chosen about 10 different things to write about from yesterday. I may still do that, but I thought I would post on our dinner because I love the restaurant so much. The restaurant is bd’s Mongolian Barbeque. The place rocks! I have been going there for over 10 years now. Everyone that I bring there loves it!
The restaurant is a really cool idea, and I have been to other Mongolian BBQs before, but this one really Americanizes it (is that really a word?). The premise of this place is that you take a bowl, fill it with raw food (everything from beef, shrimp, pork and chicken to different style noodles to an assortment of vegetables), fill a little cup with a sauce (such as Teriyaki, peanut, Szechuan, etc…), add some spices if you want, and then bring it to someone to cook on a really large grill right before your very eyes! <Here’s where you say “ooooohhhhh”, “ahhhhhh”>. Oh yeah, then you eat it. Now, I am a moron for not taking a picture of the food bar. But, I did take one of the grill:
Unfortunately, the picture I took does not really do a great job of explaining what goes on. Go Patrick! What they do is take a lot of people’s food and cook each person’s food right next to each other and three guys walk around the grill (not sure how they don’t get cooked themselves being over the grill for so long) and use these long knives to cut up and cook your food, moving one to the next. The great part is that when you get your food at the end of it all, you sometimes get a surprize! What is that surprize, you may ask? Well, my daughter figured it out quite quickly, noticing a green pepper on her plate. <She didn’t choose peppers from the food bar>. Now, you are saying, but I am a vegetarian, what if someones meat gets mixed in with mine? I say to you, stop being a vegetarian and eat some meat for crying out loud, it is good for you! They, on the other hand, have some sympathy, if you tell them, and put up barriers between the food to help you out. If you have an allergy, they have a grill in the back that they will cook the food on, just let them know.
I always love the food and there is something for everyone, no matter what mood you’re in. I took a picture of my creation <I love cheese and throw a lot on, I’m weird like that>.
Oh, you get to go back for as many plates as you want and they won’t make you eat one that you made if you don’t like it. Isn’t that nice? Anyway, moving on, my son was not feeling too well, it seemed he was quite tired. His appetite was a bit off, so he just got noodles:
Which, may I add, he ate almost nothing of. To show you how much he ate, I doctored the picture above a little to let you play a game of “Find the Missing Food” to show how much he ate:
Yes, there is food missing. It was his birthday, so they gave him a free sundae, which I took a picture of and which he ate more of than the noodles:
If you can’t tell, my daughter loves being on front of the camera. Fortunately, PJ didn’t eat too much of his dinner, because my wife would’ve had a lot more work to do when we found out in the middle of the night that he too has the bug that she and Ty had/have. See yesterday’s post on Puking. Anyway, all the employee’s wear shirts with sayings on them that really fit my sense of humor. The sayings are also scattered around the restaurant on other things too. For instance, on my soda glass:
Okay, I’m wrapping up the post, I swear! I know it is getting long. I am sorry, please forgive me. The place has one down side, in my opinion (at least the DC location). The food is good, but it is the kind of food that can make you have to use a special room, if you catch my drift. And, as for the men, they have a special room on the main level, which is a one person special room, and another up a short flight of stairs which has two standing spots and one full-service throne. That makes a total of 2 useful places for men for a large number of people. Fortunately, it has not been an issue for me, but, I imagine someday it might be. Anyway, if you have one near you, take your kids there, they will LOVE IT!
In American society, we are bent on being entertained. It seems as if though we won’t do anything if it is not entertaining to us or in some way leads us to entertainment. It seems to be so much the case, that it has found its way into mainstream Christianity as the norm. I am not saying that there is not a place for it, but it seems to have proliferated to all aspects of the church. The church uses entertainment for all kinds of purposes. People don’t seem to want to go to church unless the “entertainment” factor is good. It is almost as if the measure of a church is how good the band is or how well the pastor preaches. In most Protestant churches, kids get seperated from their parents because the entertainment isn’t geared to them in the “main” service, so they are shuffled off to Sunday School. I dare someone to point to a Middle School or High School ministry that doesn’t have entertainment as a primary focus of reaching and keeping kids coming. This seems also to be one of the primary methods of evangelism <a big word for telling non-believers the Good News (gospel)>.
So, here’s my question. <drum roll please>. Are we okay with this? Is this the what Christianity is about? Is it about God entertaining us? Or, rather, is it about the holiness and awesomeness of God? Are we focusing on the right thing (i.e. what we get out of it)? What do you think?
Something that has struck me lately about this country and its culture are the two words liberty and independence. These are two words that have little to do with this culture and country. Let us start with the word liberty. Next week I’ll talk about independence.
Liberty
Our Pledge of Allegiance has the phrase “liberty and justice for all”. Do we truly have liberty? The answer is not a simple one, because it is both yes and no. I am not going to go off on the rant about the liberty to worship as I want (all though I could). Rather, I am more interested in how we do not have the liberty to do certain things that seem a little ridiculous. For instance, I do not have the liberty of putting a shed in my yard, even though it is quite big enough. I could go on and on about the things that I should be allowed to do if I so choose, yet someone (government or other ruling authority) says that I cannot. Unfortunately, people cannot self govern themselves, so we need laws in order to protect people from others.However, that’s where it should stop. Government should not be in the business of protecting us from ourselves. In addition, there needs to be very good cause for laws protecting us from each other. Stupid things like not allowing me to have a shed because people might see it is crossing the line.
. AND, contrary to her opinion, it is definitely a theology post!!!!
