the Word on the street

Harbinger of Soul

2009-06-03T14:12:00.005-05:00

Please join us at www.HarbingerofSoul.com

Thanks for reading and conversing on this site. Hope you enjoy the new one. I'm leaving selected archives up for now.

A note to people using Internet Explorer 6: My site is broken on your browser. If the site looks terrible (weird header, super dark text on a dark background), you're probably using IE6. I'm working on fixing this, but in the meantime, perhaps you could use this as an excuse to splurge on a shiny new browser, such as Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari, all of which are free and provide an infinitely better browsing experience. Might I suggest Firefox?

Top 25 Albums of 2008 (round two)

2008-12-16T00:27:00.008-06:00

Two-thousand eight didn't have the same pedigree of 2007 in its top 10 (only a couple of these albums are threats to my coveted top 50 of all time, unlike last year when at least six of the top ten are still in my monthly rotation), but there's a lot here worth hearing. As always, these are the 25 albums I enjoyed the most this year (not necessarily the best).

Update: I added a playlist at the end of the list so you can hear some of my favorites of 2008. I'll try to flesh it out on Tuesday. I also added a little bit to the #1 album comments.

25. Chad VanGaalen - Soft Airplane
24. Tokyo Police Club - Elephant Shell
23. Rue Royale - Rue Royale
22. Frightened Rabbit - The Midnight Organ Fight
21. Coldplay - Viva La Vida

Chad VG had me thinking top five for a few weeks, but I mellowed on Soft Airplane too quickly to chart it any higher. TPC didn't do anything new on their follow-up LP, but it was a lot of fun and I've played it consistently all year. Rue Royale's hummable, uplifting songwriting made it a road trip go-to album for my wife & I. Frightened Rabbit make rock songs to drive faster to, and "The Modern Leper" was one of this year's best. "Keep Yourself Warm" is also an amazing song, but its lyrics, while noble, are probably too inappropriate to recommend. I've been back and forth on the merit of Coldplay's latest album, but "Death & All His Friends" guaranteed it a top 25 spot.

20. Spiritualized - Songs in A&E
19. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah part one
18. TV on the Radio - Dear Science
17. Angil & the Hiddntracks - Oulipo Saliva
16. MGMT - Oracular Spectacular

Spiritualized tries a lot of styles, and succeeds nearly all the time. "Death Take Your Fiddle" always gets me. Erykah Badu's album is one of the very best of the year, although it takes some concentrated listening and therefore didn't end up in the rotation very often in 2008. If this were a top 25 best-of 2008, she'd be near the top. TV on the Radio found a nice sweet spot between experimental and pop on Dear Science, and I suspect I'll come back for more in 2009. Angil & the Hiddntracks made something so unique and quirky that I have to recommend it, even though most of you will hate it. It's weird, and the story behind it is more weird. Love it. MGMT created one of my top five songs of the year, "Time to Pretend", and that lands it at #16. There's other gems ("Electric Feel", "Kids"), but you can feel free to cherry pick it.

15. Adele - 19
14. Margot & the Nuclear So & So's - Not Animal
13. Beck - Modern Guilt
12. Port O'Brien - All We Could Do Was Sing
11. Portishead - Third

Adele knocked my socks off with a commanding voice and lots of pop goodness to sing over. There are at least eight killer tracks here. Margot's label-approved album lacked the cohesion of its band-approved counterpart (that's coming in a little bit), but I loved each of the songs that didn't overlap, and it's worth its price tag (I secretly with "Pages Written on a Wall" had snuck onto Animal! - it might be my favorite track on either of their 2008 albums). Buy Animal! and cherry pick the rest. Beck's collaboration with Dangermouse took a long time to grow on me, and its a testament to his past work that I stuck with it, but in the end I was able to dig into his dusty grooves. It's worth the effort. Port O'Brien's folk-rock from an Alaskan fishing boat was one of my early favorites. There are a few songs here that point to something special down the road. Portishead's Third was, despite the 10+ years since their last studio effort, worth the wait. "The Rip" is as perfect a song as I heard in 2008.

10. DeVotchKa - A Mad & Faithful Telling
9. Son Lux - At War with Walls & Mazes
8. Peter Broderick - Float
7. The Black Keys - Attack & Release
6. Wolf Parade - At Mount Zoomer

DeVotchKa's follow-up to How It Ends was amongst my most anticipated 2008 albums, and I was initially unimpressed. But their knock-out performance at Lollapalooza was enough reason to give it a second listen, and I'm glad I did. Son Lux is a late addition to the list. Its formula is tailor-made for me (spiritual lyrics, electronic beds, minimalist arrangements). Check out "Break". Peter Broderick's minimalist Float was part of my "classical ambient" binge, and it's extraordinarily beautiful. If you're looking for some music to breathe by, this is hopeful and stunning and gorgeous and plenty of other adjectives. Dangermouse expanded the Black Keys palette, but in the end the songwriting, crunch of the guitar, & the crash of the drums remained their best asset. Wolf Parade's sophomore effort is in many ways superior to their debut. Almost every song is epic, and it gets better and better with each listen. If you give it a spin, make sure to listen all the way through since many songs are arranged in several movements. Rock and roll at its finest.

5. The Kills - Midnight Boom

"Last Day of Magic" remains my favorite song of 2008, and the rest of Midnight Boom grew on me steadily all year. These are short, dirty old-school punk pop cuts, each with a unique swagger. They'll make you dance, they'll make you strut.

4. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago

I like music that makes me feel something. Bon Iver's music is haunting, longing and lovely. His falsetto is familiar and affected. And when he occasionally comes down from it, there's a power in his cry that's out-of-this-world. Check out "Skinny Love". It's perfect.

3. Apes & Androids - Blood Moon

Music doesn't have to make me feel something deep to make its way into my soul. Sometimes it can be ridiculously fun, over-the-top joy. Apes & Androids are wholly unique, wearing their influences on their sleeves, but turning them upside-down in the name of making you move. This is the soundtrack of me looking like a fool to the driver next to me as I sit in traffic. Check out "Nights of the Week" and download the whole thing on iTunes or on their site, where they independently released it.

2. Jacaszek - Treny

Jacaszek is not an easy listen. It's too minimalist to be background music, to sad to be something you just toss on. Treny is an ancient polish word for laments, and that's the broad theme here. Michal Jacaszek uses a violin, a cello, a soaring female voice, a piano, and some minimal atmospheric electronic elements to create his prayers. And while I use the word sad to label the prevalent mood, it's not entirely accurate. There's a sweet quality mixed in, hopelessly hopeful, and it sounds like it could move mountains. An album created for long autumn and winter walks with headphones, the sun setting or set, middle of the night prayers, days filled with longing, long road trips lost in thought, beautiful, hypnotic compositions that benefit from volume. This music moves me every time I hear it. It moves me to tears, it moves me to reflection, it stirs my soul. And on its final song, "Rytm To Niesmiertelnosc II" ("Rhythm is Immortality), it moves me towards joy. So, if you have the time and space to give Jacaszek a good listen, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

1. Margot & the Nuclear So & So's - Animal!

By the time this was released, I had already spent a year digesting it thanks to live tracks, demos, leaked songs, Daytrotter sessions and a couple concerts (I saw Margot live three times in less than 365 days). The follow-up to one of my all-time albums, The Dust of Retreat is a unique, highly stylized album filled with intimate moments and blistering rock-outs. It's film-noir lyrics and back alley music; Affected vocals and Die-Hard guitar riffs (see "A Children's Crusade on Acid": "Satan settle down, keep your trousers on / You can roam the globe but leave my wretched soul alone / I don't know you, and I don't owe you a thing / but the children lose their minds in such uncertain times"). The sounds they get out of that piano and that drum kit are marvelous (the unfortunately named third track is my favorite example of this). And I frankly I don't know how to talk about this Margot album without sinking into hyperbole.

They didn't get the respect I thought they would from the critics. It seems like this can largely be blamed on the weird circumstances of creating two albums, both published by a major label, but only one of which the band liked and one of which the label liked. Most critics reveiwed the less accomplished Not Animal (get it?) and ignored the more cohesive, more daring Animal!

Like Radiohead, they start with hummable, infectious melodies that are Gossip Girl-ready on their own. Then they mess them all up, adding movements, bringing in all of their eight+ musicians, and finding ways to turn the ideas upside down. They rarely stick with one idea for longer than a minute. Then it's often gone for good, or at least until you hit repeat (the middle section of "Mariel's Brazen Overture" tears the roof off the place, but it ends as suddenly as it begins: "Someone is bleeding the wall; the house is beginning to crumble... oh dear, The zebras are scaling the wall / the mice are beginning to scatter"). And the tracklisting brings out the best in each song, flowing from one idea to the next with grace and curiousity. Songs like "Junked Out German Motorcar" that are less accomplished on their own are given new weight based on where they fall in the concert. And it all climaxes with "As Tall As Cliffs", which they blissfully sing with all their might (If you need to start somewhere, start there). "As Tall As Cliffs" goes into other-worldly territory, taking everything to another level and compelling many happy listeners to hit repeat over and over and over and over again. This is the best 51 minutes of music created in 2008.

Update: I just realized that Animal! is now available on iTunes, and for $7.99 no less. You can get Animal! and cherry pick the other tracks from Not Animal for less than $15.

Best of 2008

Top 10 of 2007 (revisited)

2008-10-16T13:32:00.005-05:00

My favorite post to write each year is my top 25 albums. I spend far too much time thinking about it. Case-in-point, in addition to my running list throughout the year, I write my first draft sometime in early November. To get things started, I've traditionally thrown out a revisited top ten from the year before, to see which albums stuck with me another year, which albums would've benefited from another month or two of listening and, in general, just to waste time thinking about something inconsequential like music.

Since I have everything nicely backed up for me on my blog, I can look at past years to see how my tastes have changed (I've done these lists since I was in my early teens, back when Hootie & the Blowfish might have snuck into a top five). If I was picking right now, here's what 2005 & 2006 would look like:

2005:
1. Gimme Fiction by Spoon (1)
2. Apologies to the Queen Mary by Wolf Parade (2)
3. Illinois by Sufjan Stevens (not ranked)
4. The Mysterious Production of Eggs by Andrew Bird (4)
5. The Woods by Sleater-Kinney (6)

2006:
1. Dust of Retreat by Margot & the Nuclear So and So's (not ranked)
2. Jokes & Trials by Ned Collette (2)
3. The Eraser by Thom Yorke (16) this one really grew on me
4. Chulahoma by The Black Keys (1)
5. Fox Confessor Brings the Flood by Neko Case (not ranked)

Which brings us to 2007. In December it looked like this:
10. Untrue by Burial
9. Future Suture by Ned Collette
8. This Bliss by Pantha du Prince
7. Emerald City by John Vanderslice
6. The Reminder by Feist
5. Armchair Apocrypha by Andrew Bird
4. Design in Quick Rotation by Marco Mahler
3. In Rainbows by Radiohead (it had just come out)
2. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga by Spoon
1. Boxer by The National

And if I had to do it again today, it'd look like this:

10. We Belong to the Staggering Evening by The Ike Reilly Assasination (14)
9. Future Suture by Ned Collette (9)
8. The Reminder by Feist (6)
7. Design in Quick Rotation by Marco Mahler (4)
6. This Bliss by Pantha du Prince (8)
5. Curses by Future of the Left (not ranked)
4. Ga Ga Ga Ga by Spoon (2)
3. Boxer by The National (1)
2. Armchair Apocrypha by Andrew Bird (5)
1. In Rainbows by Radiohead (3)

In true obsessive spirit, I've got my preliminary top ten figured out for 2008. Wonder how much it will change in two months. And then in 14 months.

1,015 words on the Cubs

2008-10-02T10:15:00.006-05:00

I used to be a much bigger fan of baseball than I am now. There was a point where I could tell you almost every team's starting roster and where I watched almost literally every Cubs game.

I affectionately refer to this time in my life as "2003".

It was a perfect storm: I had the summer off between college and finding a big boy job, the Cubs were playing great, anchored by "the next Tom Seaver" and this other guy who once threw 20 strikeouts in a game as well as an up and comer with a short fuse named Zambrano. Throw in Sammy Sosa rounding out his 'beloved' years, Corey Patterson showing flashes of brilliance and an overestimated skipper coming off a world series appearance and we were set up for something special in October. Then, I actually moved to Chicago right before that something-special was to happen. I spent the first few weeks of October planted in Wrigleyville or watching games with my dad and Mike with the TV on mute and Ron & Pat on the radio.

Most of you know the rest of the story. After "the inning" imploded, all of Wrigley Field went silent and we collectively lost our will to will the team to a victory. We ended that series in a game seven that we lost before the first pitch. Everyone I was with (meaning hundreds of people) could barely get excited when someone would get a hit. We were all waiting for the other shoe to drop. And drop it did.

The next day, Chicago's demeanor went from jolly and a little bit insane to clinically depressed. It was awful. No one knew how to process it, so we all kept our heads down and tried not to think about it.

Fast forward to October 2007, when we had a team that looked pretty good on paper and we all talked ourselves into a run, even though I don't think anyone really expected them to make it out of the NLCS. Indeed, they were swept in the first round. I decided that I was done devoting too much time to baseball.

This summer, I took a new job and decided to fully devote myself to experiencing Chicago in the summer. This meant fewer Sunday afternoons on the couch watching the Cubs. We had tickets to the final home game, the day after they clinched, and I remember feeling a little disconnected from the team I just a year before was fully devoted to. So I spent the last week of the season watching games and cramming as much Cubs-love in as I could. Then...

Then we won playoff tickets. Seriously. Free of charge, box seats. I selfishley prayed we'd win them and we did. It was a little humbling (perhaps I should've spent that time praying for world peace, but here we are). This kicked me into another gear. I spent time daydreaming about sitting in Wrigley Field in October. Wrigley Field, where the "real fans" were priced out years ago. Wrigley Field, where 1908 happened and where 2003 happened. Wrigley Field, my mecca for so many years, but the mecca that was unattainable in October.

I recalled 1989 and 1998, Rick Sutcliffe, Greg Maddux, Ryne Sandberg, Mark Grace, Andre Dawson, random copies of Vineline strewn about my room, Topps Jerome Walton rookie cards, Cubs Conventions, Shawn Dunston, standing behind Don Zimmer on a televised interview, the autographed 1984 ball that my papa gave me that I swore was real, going to games with mom, dad and Steve, Harry Caray, Steve Stone & the Ron & Pat show. I remembered documentaries about 1908 and Ron Santo, Ernie Banks & Billy Williams. I painted pictures in my mind of my parent's back porch, decorated in Die Hard Cubs Fan paraphernalia, and watching games on my papa's knee in his wheelchair.

And I was back. I've watched enough and read enough this year to know that this was a team capable of doing something special in October. All year Chicago's (ill-advised) mantra was "It's Gonna Happen" and we clinched the division the earliest we had since 1932. On the 100-year anniversary of our last World Series, we're coming fully prepared.

Our lineup is formidable. We have perhaps the deepest bench in all of baseball. Our bullpen is capable of holding on to close games, and our starting pitching rotation is, when healthy, amongst the best in all of baseball. There are X factors to be sure (two of them being the afformentioned short fuse and 20k pitchers), but nothing to get too worked up about.

And so Cubtoberfest began.

But by the grand slam in the fifth inning, something tragic happened. The team didn't quit. The fans did. Wrigley Field was quiet, only getting excited for the biggest of moments. Did everyone collectively come to their senses and remember that history was not on our side? They gave away home field advantage. Collectively decided not to will their Cubbies to a rally. It was heartbreaking. And so we slumped our way to a game one loss. And the city was no longer abuzz.

What happened to "It's Gonna Happen"? Did everyone assume we were sweeping our way to the World Series? Does no one remember Sox-Yankees 2004?

Tonight my wife and I get to sit next to Soriano and Manny Ramirez. We get to be part of the crowd and I'm determined to will my Cubs to a victory. The worst thing we can do is repeat game 7 of 2003. We can't quit. I've talked myself into winning in five games (not sure we can take two in L.A.) and the Wrigley Field faithful are going to have to bring their 'A' game if it comes back here for a game 5. But first, tonight, we have a calling. We must play our role in the dream. We must not be quiet. The lineup tonight has Zambrano pitching, Soriano, Fukudome, Lee, Ramirez, Soto, Theriot, DeRosa, Edmonds/Reed and us.

The fans.

Let's give them back home field advantage.

photo - Bugsy

Autumn in Chicago

2008-09-24T21:09:00.006-05:00

Fall is my favorite season - being outside, smelling the air, gazing at leaves, eating the foods, all while wearing my comfy green hoodie and shorts or jeans (depending on the day). But before I know it, the winter will be here - so, it's time to get intentional. In addition to eating too many Honeycrisps (just enough?) and pumpkin-foods, here are the ten things I want to commit to doing this fall:

1. Sit in Winnemac Park for at least two hours every Monday it isn't raining. Read a book, write, pray, stare.

2. Visit the Osaka Japanese Gardens.

3. Go sculpture hunting in Lincoln Park.

4. Hang out in Wrigleyville during playoff games, especially games where we can clinch.

5. Go to Pilsen and marvel at the murals.

6. Bike Lake Shore Drive.

7. Go see Jack Kerouac's On the Road manuscript.

8. Ride the Sunday Parkways.

9. Only go out of my way to watch TV shows I'm already invested in (The Office, 30 Rock, How I Met Your Mother & Chuck, and later Lost & Friday Night Lights) with a couple others DVR'd for late night insomnia or rainy Mondays. Watch no new shows.

10. I'm leaving this one up to you. What should I make sure to add to my list? Daydream with me in the comments.

photo - Pavel Trebukov

Counting Stars (epilouge)

2008-08-25T12:55:00.003-05:00

I lament the lack of stars in the sky. But the stars are still there. I just can't see them.

There's a message in here somewhere...

It's a beautiful day outside, one of those I-can't-believe-this-is-August days, where the whole sky is available to be seen, the clouds augmenting it rather than hiding it. And most of the city is in an office building somewhere, unaware (or perhaps painfully aware) of what's available for them just outside their door. Once we've escaped to our homes, we'll sit in traffic or wait for trains, angry (however justifiably) about the traffic and the inevitably delayed trains, and arrive home for the last moments of daytime in a huff, either hurrying to the next thing or crashing on the couch. Once the sun has set (the walls of buildings around us making that very difficult to see), all of our technology will hide the glory of a nighttime sky. The only stars we'll see are airplanes. So we'll finish our day and fall asleep too late and rush to get out of the house in the morning. In Chicago, there is so much to do and so little time to do it in, it's plausible that we could go a whole lifetime in a routine where we never once encounter a moment with the physical universe that causes us to consider what's at the core of this world.

But... in spite of all that... or perhaps better said, in light of all that... God is still there.

We're very good at hiding the evidence, but He's there.

I wonder if this plays out in our daily lives? We make more time to watch TV than to be with God, who I for one have had what I believe to be actual two-sided conversations with. Is he always there, waiting for me to press the power button and give him a minute? Even if I can't see him. Even if I can't see him because of what I've created. Is he there? All the time?

photo - Don McCrady

Counting Stars (Africa 3)

2008-08-25T09:25:00.004-05:00

We spent the weekend far away from the city, on a beautiful Green Bay shoreline where counting stars was an exercise in futility. Saturday night, I submerged my eyes in hundreds of stars and literally (or figuratively, depending on your baseline) saw God's presence in the universe.

I recalled staring into space on an African safari, overwhelmed by what had to have been thousands of stars (my attempts to systematically count them broke down around 100). Our temporary home on the Masai Mara made sounds I'd never heard before, the only thing holding me back from a modest panic attack was a fence just tall enough to keep out anything that could jump. I soaked my ears in lions and cheetahs and monkeys (oh my), until I was inebriated in God's creation.

We spent an afternoon in Nairobi's national park, with a local commuter-turned-tour-guide showing us all the uninhibited wildlife - rhinoceros, ostrich & hippos highlighting the pre-dusk time. At dusk we encountered several giraffe snacking on a treetop and watching out for anything that was looking for its own exotic dining. I remember thinking that God was showing off. Turned out he was just getting started.

As we got ready to exit the park, the sun melting into the landscape serving as our alarm clock, we came to a crossroads. Down the street were three giraffe strolling with purpose. We turned the car off and quietly waited to see how close they would get to our car. The answer was so close we could have reached out and touched them. As they walked past our car, I started to cry. I'd never felt God's presence in such a powerful way before. They moseyed in front of our car and slowly made their way up the street (in Nairobi, the animals have the right of way). We started the car and headed out. The giraffe paid us no mind though, and paced us with their long, surprisingly graceful steps, letting us follow them for quite a long time.

And all of that wildlife was free to leave the park, to come back into the city. In one neighborhood we visited, we heard stories of Henry, the giraffe who daily visited to the point where, at the end of his life, Henry got a moving eulogy in the local paper.

And above us were those stars.

In Chicago, there is lots to see, but almost all of it is man-made. And at night, we can count the stars on one hand because of all the light. And even in small-town Wisconsin where the sky is full of stars, I have first-hand evidence that without all of the unnatural light, there would be thousands more. So, for all of my love for all of what people have done with what God has created in Chicago, I have a profound sense that if you are able to count stars, something is not as it should be.

I long for God's restoration on his creation. I long to see the world as God wants me to see it, full of animals and under a canopy of plasma. In those moments I find my deepest sense of rest and personal restoration. Under the sea in Mexico and in the Mara in Africa, I saw God. And I hope to see Him again soon.

giraffe photo: taken by my wife, without a zoom, from inside our car.
africa skyline photo: me, proving that in Africa, anyone can take an amazing photo

Everything In Its Right Place

2008-08-02T00:50:00.002-05:00

Day One of Lollapalooza... and I'm satisfied. Dehydrated, but satisfied nonetheless.

Radiohead was everything I wanted them to be. Despite the sweltering heat and sun beating down for several hours (my face is not satisfied to say the least), it was all worth it from my perfect viewpoint of the stage and a wonderful setlist that gave me no complaints, even if it was heavy on In Rainbows (they played literally all of it). Sure, i would've happily exchanged one of those for "Talk Show Host" but the odds of that were low to begin with, and I'm not sure I could choose which song to omit (okay, "House of Cards" it is). Anyway, it was beautiful.

I danced like I was out of my mind, made normal by the fact that I was simply mirroring Thom Yorke's goofy/awesome set of moves that might be best described as "interpretive belly dance" or "modified snoopy dance". I sang along silently (until the second encore, when everyone let rip on "2+2=5" and "Idioteque", the latter of which was my personal highlight). I was mesmerized by their light/video/color show and I have a new appreciation for "Dollars and Cents" and "The Gloaming".

The crowd was 75,000 large, and judging from the crowd feedback, we were all somewhere between completely scorched and completely reverent. At one point Thom commented on our collective quietness, which of course was met with a deafening roar from all of us who wanted to make sure we got that second encore. Maybe I'm a fanboy, but I'd like to think that our volume level between songs was one-part tired and two-parts savoring every note, waiting expectantly to see where they took us next.

Radiohead isn't your average 75,000-crowd band. Like my friend Matt said, it's a bit surprising that they grabbed a worldwide audience. The soaring melodies certainly put them on the mega-band stage, but they've mostly created music that a mainstream audience is willing to put the time in for, wading through layers of thoughtful, challenging work to get to the pop-center.

Anyway, other highlights included the fireworks show going on behind "Everything in Its Right Place" that bled into "Fake Plastic Trees". Apparently it was from Soldier Field, but I'm not clear on if it was Lollapalooza-centric.

I could go on and on (obviously), but that's good enough for now.

The rest of the day was also great - Bloc Party was good (not 6:00 good, but the Silent Alarm songs were fun to hear, even if they kind of all sound the same), Gogol Bordello was a pleasant surprise. I missed the Black Keys in the name of having a good spot for Radiohead. I don't regret that, but apparently they put on a killer show, as did the Raconteurs. Next time the Keys come through town, I'm in, I promise. Finally, the Kills were fun, but their live show doesn't really add anything to their sound.

Tomorrow looks like another (slightly-cooler) scorcher, so I need to pace myself, stay hydrated and stretch a lot. It's also my bouncing back and forth from the north-end to the south-end day. I begin with Margot & the Nuclear So and So's at 12:15, and I get DeVotchKa, Jamie Lidell, Broken Social Scene, Toadies & Rage Against the Machine, and hopefully a couple side stage surprises. It'll be easier though since I won't be worried about holding down my spot all day (and with the exception of Broken Social Scene & Margot, I mostly just want to catch a few songs from all of these sets). Good stuff.

Chicago: 99 Things (part one)

2008-06-04T10:16:00.002-05:00

DAVE'S ONGOING, MOSTLY-CRIBBED GUIDE TO SUMMER IN CHICAGO

The Tribune ran a list of 99 things to do in Chicago this summer. Some of them are Chicago-specific, others are easily adaptable to other parts of the world, so I took the liberty of splitting them up. The ones I'm committing to doing this summer are in bold. Anything catch your eye?

99 Things to do this summer: Chicago-specific

3. Treat yourself to an ice cream sundae at Gayety's, 3306 Ridge Rd., Lansing; the Brown Cow Ice Cream Parlor, 7347 W. Madison St., Forest Park; or Homer's Restaurant & Ice Cream Parlor, 1237 Green Bay Rd., Wilmette.

4. Play drums Sundays at the Point (Promontory Point) in Hyde Park.

5. Enjoy a day at 95th Street Beach.

7. Go to the batting cages at the Bunny Hutch in Lincolnwood as often as possible (www.nerfect.com/bunnyhutch/bh00.html).

8. Go to at least one SummerDance class and bust some crazy moves with abandon.

9. Play the ponies at Arlington Park racetrack (www.arlingtonpark.com).

11. Visit a different city neighborhood every weekend.

12. Do Saturday morning yoga (8 a.m.) at Millennium Park (June 7-Sept. 27; 312-742-1168).

13. Kayak on the Chicago River.

14. Discover 5 great snacks in a neighborhood, by foot with friends, instead of going to Taste of Chicago.

15. Run screaming through a cold sprinkler at a Chicago park.

16. Get box seats ($12) at a Kane County Cougars game (www.kccougars.com).

18. See a show at Theater on the Lake (June 11-Aug. 3; 312-742-7994).

21. Reinvigorate your wilted self on a sweltering afternoon with an intense Vietnamese iced coffee.

23. After a long hot day, get take-out of assorted Middle Eastern/Greek dips with plenty of crusty bread and eat them with a cold cote du rhone with a loved one. Soak your feet in a pan of cold water while eating and pretend you are on the Mediterranean.

26. Challenge a chess master at North Avenue Beach.

28. Go to Great America to check out the new Dark Knight coaster.

29. Eat a brochette of meat washed down with a Coco Rico from one of the trailers in Humboldt Park.

30. Get to Lake Michigan in time to sit and watch the sun rise. Bring a blanket and pillow if you like.

33. Eat a pot bin soo (shaved ice, malt, sweet red bean and fruit sundae) at a Korean cafe.
35. Take a martial arts class at Chase Park as part of the Chicago Park District's cheap, comprehensive and convenient programs (www.chicagoparkdistrict.com).

36. Eat an arroz con leche paleta (essentially rice pudding ice cream bar) from a passing vendor.

38. Arrive at Green City Market super early when it's still cool and you can find parking. Sip Intelligentsia coffee while you ponder the lovely meal you will make with your stash.

39. Go to the Drinking and Writing Festival June 14 at the Hopleaf (www.hopleaf.com).

40. See Cirque Shanghai at Navy Pier's Skyline Stage (June 4-Sept. 1; 312-902-1500).

41. Go to Wizard World (June 26-29) at Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont and see world premiere of "Batman: Gotham night." (www.wizardworld.com/chicago.html)

46. Get a freshly shaved piragua (shaved ice) from one of the piragua vendors in Humboldt Park.

47. Go to at least one movie in the Chicago Outdoor Film Fest in Grant Park (begins July 15; www.chicagooutdoorfilmfestival.us).

49. Spend a couple of hours on the beach beneath the Grosse Point Lighthouse in Evanston. Squint. Pretend you're on Nantucket.

50. Forget the sweltering heat and just groove your behind off to stellar live acts such as Girl Talk, CSS, Santogold, The National and, of course, Radiohead at Lollapalooza (Aug. 1-3).

51. Attend the first night of the Pitchfork Music Festival (June 18; www.pitchforkmusicfestival.com). See Public Enemy play "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back" in its entirety, in order, start to finish.

54. Enter the Muddy Buddy race Aug. 3 (www.muddybuddy.com).

55. Volunteer for a day on the Red Witch Tall Ship (www.redwitch.com). Consider a life at sea.

56. Get a freshly made lemonade from one of Chicago's South Side "steak and lemonade" joints.

59. Picnic by Lake Marmo at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle (www.mortonarb.org).

60. Shoot a round of golf on one of Chicago's terrific public courses. If you don't golf, bring a friend who does and carry the clubs while he/she plays.

63. Avoid cover bands at other block parties and instead see Ted Leo and the Pharmacists rock out the crowd (8:30 p.m. May 31) for just a $5 donation at the Do-Division Street Fest and Sidwalk Sale May 31-June 1.

65. Learn a few words or phrases of Japanese, like "That ball was definitely out!"

66. Eat a softshell crab. Good places to find 'em include Hugo's Frog Bar, Mario's, Prosecco, Catch 35 and Shaw's Crab House.

70. See "The Dark Knight" (July 18). Point to Chicago locations you recognize.

71. Have a Signature Sunset ice cream cone (made with merlot) at Bobtail Ice Cream (www.bobtailicecream.com).

72. Check out the Jeff Koons exhibit, running virtually the entire summer at the Museum of Contemporary Art (www.mcachicago.org).

74. Take a jewelry-making class at Lill Street Art Center on North Ravenswood (www.lillstreet.com).

75. Take an early morning stroll along North Pier, before the shops open. It's a completely different place then.

77. Attend the first-ever Taste of Oak Brook on July 3 at the polo fields, and stay for the evening's 4th of July fireworks display there.

78. Get some freshly squeezed sugar cane juice with lime from one of the vendors on Devon Avenue.

79. Decorate a square ($10-$50) at the Chalk Festival in Oz Park on June 7, then watch the pros create their superior chalk murals.

80. Make plans to see the Chicago Air & Water Show, Aug. 16-17.

81. Dig into some roast lamb at the Croatian Fest (Aug. 15 at Princeton Avenue and 28th Place). They're planning on roasting a whopping 75 whole ones for this street bash that also features a parade, music, dancing and games.

82. When the heat gets unbearable, slip into Johnny's Ice House and watch a hockey game (johnnysicehouse.com).

83. Check out Northerly Island for a concert (Al Green?) or a nature hike.

87. Catch Elvis Night and Fireworks at The Cell on Aug. 22 (Sox vs. Tampa Bay, whitesox.com).

89. Explore the delectable eats at the Taste of Randolph Street, June 20-22. Bonus: the fest's live music has been great in the past.

90. Take a drive up Sheridan Road. Start in Evanston. Don't stop 'til you hit Highland Park.

91. Definitely, Kiddieland, in Melrose Park (www.kiddieland.com).

93. Pack a picnic basket and grab some lakefront grass for Venetian Fest, July 26. Enjoy the festive boat parade and the spectacular evening fireworks.

94. Grab a mitt, head out to Wrigley Field and be a Waveland Avenue ballhawk for a day. (This works best if you pick a day when the Cubs are playing.)

96. See Garrison Keillor when he tapes a live show of "A Prairie Home Companion" at Ravinia.

98. Take off your shoes, walk through the Crown Fountain in Millennium Park on your way to or from work.

99. Grab a burek (a flaky treat full of minced meat) at Deta's Cafe in Rogers Park (773-973-1505). Sit on the curb out front.

photo - Luis Castro

Africa 2: Safety

2008-05-28T15:12:00.006-05:00

There are things I take for granted in America. Housing. Convenience stores in walking distance. Convenience in general. Clean drinking water. Paved roads. Electricity. If I were to move to a foreign country, like, say, Uganda or Kenya, and those staples of my life were absent, I'd like to think I would adjust.

But safety... safety would be tough. I don't take safety for granted here. I double-lock our doors and tread carefully in traditionally "bad" areas of the city even if I'm in a car. But in Africa, I felt unsafe as a present rather than passive way. There were lots of contributing factors of course - we were regaled with stories of missionaries being bound & held at gunpoint while their small children had to go around the house collecting their valuables. We were somewhat constantly reminded to know where our passports and wallets were at all times. There were big metal doors with big metal locks on them separating the living areas from the sleeping areas in both homes we stayed in. Most of the neighborhoods that we saw that weren't extremely poor were surrounded by gates, barbed wire, armed guards and more. Most people we talked to didn't think about if they would be robbed, but when.

After a few days of this thought occupying unfortunately gigantic spaces in my head, I brought it up with one of our hosts. How do you live like this? She said, in a simple, unpretentious voice...

"After awhile you realize that safety isn't the most important thing."

Of course, this thought quickly spun into every corner of my noggin.

What if I wasn't worried about getting sick? What if I didn't care if I died? What if financial security weren't the most important thing?

Would I live intentionally in one of those "bad" areas of Chicago? Would I devote all of my time to things not of this world?

It's not new information for most of you to hear that the non-Western world is less worried about stuff, or even that the westerners that go there become less attached to stuff pretty quickly (there's hope for us all yet), but it was an important piece of how the trip affected us. And that's what I think is worth talking about. The specific experiences in Africa were hardly mundane, but they also weren't turn-your-world-upside-down exciting. But the way they affected me has lasted.

There was a freedom from stuff over there that I envied. When we got home, I recharged my iPod and booted up my iBook and turned on the DVR and was happy to be reconnected to my stuff. But I was very aware of how my stuff owned me. I looked in our storage area at all of the things I had held onto for years and decided i could pare down and be less handcuffed to stuff. It was liberating putting things on Craigslist and making piles for the Salvation Army and the Harvest. But then I came to the stuff that I really like. The books, the DVDs, the toys... things that I am now aware of and have to sort out. I no longer get the luxury of ignorance. I stare at books I've never read and DVD's I haven't watched in years. What's important and what's not? If something is not important, does that mean I should trash it? Can I enjoy stuff? What would being free to enjoy things look like? What's reasonable? What's unreasonable?

So I wrote a manifesto. For myself. Maybe I'll post it someday. I looked at every corner of my life and decided that some things needed to change. I facilitate a conference each summer whose unofficial theme is "Not changing is not an option given to you by this program". I feel that way about my time in Africa. Confronted with how important all things security (physical, financial, et cetera), I had to make some decisions and stick with them. Luckily I had a lot of momentum to work with.

Next time: momentum. Or, what I learned from 19 Kenyan pastors and one Holy Spirit.

And then maybe we'll get to the giraffes. Oh the giraffes...

Africa 1: How It Starts

2008-05-14T10:07:00.004-05:00

People often pray for God to stretch them, to make them face their fears and to wake them up to a new life.

Those people are crazy. I'm one of them, so I can speak for us. We're crazy.

From the moment we arrived at O'Hare to the moment we left O'Hare, nearly every experience I had felt stretching. So for two weeks, I was completely out of my comfort zone. Hopefully you will understand then why I feel two ways about my first experience overseas. I'm trying to remember that feeling two ways about something doesn't disqualify you from fully feeling either (so... I'm still being stretched).

I want to start processing the trip, but I'm going to do it in parts. Today, I'm just going to cover our very first experiences in the country, but this isn't going to be a day-by-day thing so you can read with confidence that this isn't going to go on for weeks (Also, for once I get to use pictures that either Verity or I took during the trip. Africa makes it easy to be a good photographer for a couple weeks).

ARRIVING IN UGANDA
We landed in Nairobi, Kenya after 18 hours of flying (more on that later) for a quick overnight stay with friends, and then hopped on a plane to Kampala, Uganda early the next morning. The drive to the house was my first real out-of-country experience but it didn't really feel like we were on the other side of the world. Maybe because people spoke English well or because Coke billboards were littered along the roads, but it felt like America only... tweaked. For example, the roads were paved but without streetlamps. And we were stopped by police, but they had big (!) guns hanging menacingly around their necks. Or the home felt like any home in the States, but there was mosquito netting on the beds (which confirmed my fears about getting diseases in Africa, and I was now convinced that I was not going to come out on the other side fully intact).

The next morning we woke up from our Ambien-induced slumber feeling bright-eyed and ready to go. We got our passports stamped again and were off to Uganda, where we were whisked away to our home for the next week. We stayed with the Willisons, which was worth the trip in and of itself. Most of you know the Willisons better than I do, but let me say that as a married couple, as parents and as a family, they are truly wonderful people who I feel touched to have as role models.

The drive from the airport revealed something I was less prepared for because I spent all of my pre-trip time suffering the flight and not thinking about what Africa would actually be like: it was gorgeous. The lake, the greenery, the colors. Apparently we came a short while after the Queen of England had been there and so a lot of money had been poured into beautifying the city (...), so let me clarify that it was the God-made part of the land that got me. As we drove through we put on our mosquito repellent and took everything in. The people bustled down the street dressed in suits and dresses, like pictures of America in the 40's (only everyone wasn't white). The traffic was, not for a lack of a better term, INSANE. The roads were largely washed out and ... "bumpy" (later someone said to us, "It's nice that they put a road in that pothole, isn't it?"). Stores with a small room full of one item (DVDs, bananas & cell phones seemed to be a popular choice) lined the roads and shacks served as a bedroom for many families.

So one would assume that we were in a poor part of Kampala. While you wouldn't necessarily be wrong, we did learn that you can't use western values to judge the state of non-western cultures. We learned that life in Kampala is done outside and that housing for many local people is seen as merely a bedroom. So you could be very poor or fairly well-off and live in one of these shacks. I decided to throw away snap judgments for the rest of the trip.

We pulled up to the Willison's home where they live with their five children and six dogs (most of who are guard dogs) and opened the gate covered in barbed wire. Thus begins the next part of the story: safety.

Four Days in Vegas

2008-03-31T23:22:00.004-05:00

I've been sitting in the McCarran airport for more than ten hours. Dozens of names have been called that didn't rhyme with "Schmave Schmandell". The PA system have become one with the atmosphere - it's no longer surprising to hear a booming voice. It's a minor distraction, like sirens or trains in Chicago. In the airport I can find no healthy eating choices, except for a sports bar that was no longer serving food. I've drank more Pepsi and eaten more junk than in the last three days combined, which is amazing since I've been dining on buffets every third meal (I've made really healthy choices at said buffets and almost entirely stuck to water since Friday, however, making the former sentence possible). And the monotonous sounds of the slot machines will surely follow me like a phantom to Chicago.

I'm tired, I'm hungry, I'm ready to be home. Ah, Chicago. The greatest city on earth. I'm convinced of it. There's no place like home. But this post is about Vegas. And it's long because I want to pour my thoughts onto the page and see what comes of it. Because somewhere in there I think I happened upon a deep truth about God this weekend. So if you have a minute, let me tell you about my first (and hopefully only) trip to Las Vegas, Nevada.

I have officially experienced Vegas. The glamour. The glitz. The sleaze. Vegas - where women are treated like delivery pizza ("girls to your room in 20 minutes or less"). Vegas - where people walk down the street with open containers & drop hundreds of dollars in minutes for the thrill of it. Vegas - where an NCAA tournament weekend could probably have paid to provide fresh drinking water to the world. In cash. Vegas - where mothers and fathers bring their sons and daughters for a fun-filled family vacation. Wait, scratch that last part. I can't figure out why someone would bring their kids here. Heck, I can't figure out why someone would bring their selves here.

Vegas. Right now in the airport I'm sitting in front of 44 slot machines, most of which have been occupied throughout the day. They promise spins worth $2300 and jackpots of $644,789 and counting. I'm tempted to pull the lever on the Wheel of Fortune for the chance to win that $644K. I'd like to think we'd buy a home, put money away for the future and give generously to our church.

I walked the strip up & down at least six times during my three-day stay (now four with a full day in an airport). What I'm told are illegal aliens, men as young as ten years old and even women handed out pornographic fliers for hookers, the way a new hair salon might hand out coupons as you get off the El, the aforementioned '20 minutes or less' written boldly on their t-shirts. I watched husbands take the fliers and laugh about them with their wives. I wondered what the wife actually felt like saying about his source of amusement. On Saturday night we hung out at a sportsbook (where I daydream I could make my living if I lived in Vegas - 11 for 12 for the weekend, although i didn't have a cent on any of that), and a man with arms larger than my head casually came up to us, as if he'd known us for years and we proceeded to have the following conversation verbatim. It began innocently enough.

"What are you guys doing tonight?"

I don't know, going to bed maybe. Kinda tired.

"You like strip clubs?"

Ugh.

Vegas, baby, Vegas. It's worth noting that there were nice memories mixed in. On Friday my friend Jason treated me to dinner and we stared entranced at the Bellagio fountains for at least a half hour (if anything, this weekend made me want to watch the Ocean's Eleven films, the first of which was on TNT last night as I laid in bed suffering from a two-hour time difference that never worked out right). On Saturday, I got to have a nice dinner with a good friend named Pos, and we had such a great conversation. And the training event, what I was here for, went quite well. I got to meet a lot of great people we laughed a lot (there was ample fodder).

But, I am ready to go home. I feel toxic, as if someone spilled chemicals all over me for three straight days.

But here's what I want to say. On Sunday I was able to get out of Vegas for a little bit to see some spectacular works of God's hands. Canyons of every shape and size, each colored and cracked uniquely, as if the mountains were expressing their personalities the way we use clothes. I sat in my car with the rain hitting and talked to God. We talked about my life, my future, my marriage, my health. Well, mostly I talked. It wasn't until I was driving down the mountain that God collapsed on me like a ton of bricks. As I drove home, I slowly drove out of the storm and I saw at first just a hint of the sun. Then, I saw this giant white ball pouring down on God's creation. It was simply majestic. The clouds split in just the right way that the Sun's beams shone divinely on all of the land below.

And I thought, oh my, God, you are so much bigger than me that it hurts. You have crushed and will crush the lord of Las Vegas, but you long for the people on that Las Vegas strip, with all of their brokenness and the industries that profit from that brokenness, creating more and more brokenness. Perhaps nowhere in America do I wish we could just drop a big Jesus bomb that wrecks everyone in its path with the love and peace and grace and forgiveness of Christ.

When God ushers in a restored Earth, what will become of Las Vegas? Perhaps it won't be wiped off the face of the planet. Perhaps the buildings will be swept away, revealing the earth God created. Even now Vegas cannot escape the Sun's rays. It shines brightly overhead, sustaining it and bringing new life each season. It is not forsaken. So we must pray and help, however we can.

photo - cynnerz

On Potlucks, Small Towns & Diners That Serve Pork Tenderloins

2008-03-07T13:48:00.007-06:00

Growing up, local cuisine was often synonymous with potluck dinners: scalloped potatoes, Sloppy Joes, deviled eggs, some sort of meatball, some concoction of cool whip and fruit, Jell-O molds, underdeveloped lasagna, macaroni salad and other salads that never featured lettuce (but often featured mayonnaise), taco dip, three types of mashed potatoes, casseroles, fried chicken, little smokies, tater tots, and more dips and desserts than should ever be consumed (My mom, being the fabulous cook that she is, tended to make these types of dishes with a twist, often meaning they were the first dish gone on the buffet).

For all of the amazing food available in Chicago, "potluck cuisine" is hard to come by. So when, under completely crappy circumstances, we found ourselves in small-town Illinois this week and someone mentioned that there would be a potluck reception hosted by the ladies of the Methodist church, I was filled with joy and anticipation. It's my comfort food. It feeds my soul.

Sometimes I miss small towns. The town we were in was considerably smaller than the one I grew up in, but they had more in common than Burlington does with Chicago. I miss diners that serve pork tenderloin sandwiches (if anyone can tell me where to get a breaded pork tenderloin sandwich in Chicago, we'll go on me), more free time than you know what to do with, Target trips that take fifteen minutes, gravel roads under skies loaded with stars, playing Euchre under said stars, and celebrations where hodgepodges of people gather together and end up sitting in a circle laughing and enjoying their potluck cuisine.

I suppose all I want to say is that we should gather more often, hopefully under better circumstances. I count this week as a nice memory, one I'll cherish for some time to come. For those of you who were there, I enjoyed talking and laughing and crying with you. I hope we can do it again soon. If someone lends me a crockpot, I'll bring the Sloppy Joes.

photo - newyork808

Best Music of 2007: Songs

2007-12-26T11:12:00.001-06:00

I did my best to just choose one song for each artist, but as you'll see, in the end I just couldn't do it. Let me know what songs served as your 2007 soundtrack in the comments!

25. "Feels Good" by Rahsaan Patterson

24. "Explosions Were Heard" by Kinetic Stereokids | Stream

23. "Acceptable in the 80s" by Calvin Harris

22. "Fruehstueck" by Touane

21. "Happyfour Twenty" by Christ. | Video

20. "Myth Takes" by !!!

19. "The Minaret" by John Vanderslice | Link

18. "The Devil Never Sleeps" by Iron & Wine | Link

17. "No One's Gonna Love You" by Band of Horses

16. "Click Click Click Click" by Bishop Allen

15. "Air Aid" by Menomena

14. "Valerie" by Mark Ronson featuring Amy Winehouse

13. "You Are Never Alone" by SoCalled | Download

12. "Flathead" by The Fratellis

11. "The Past is a Grotesque Animal" by Of Montreal | Download

10. "D.A.N.C.E." by Justice | Download

9. "Orange Chinese Car" by Marco Mahler

8. "No Cars Go" by The Arcade Fire | Download

7. "I Feel It All" by Feist | Link

6. "All I Need" by Radiohead | Link

5. "Black Like Me" by Spoon

4. "When Your Mind's Made Up" by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová

3. "Catch Hell Blues" by The White Stripes

2. "When Irish Eyes Are Burning" by The Ike Reilly Assassination | Download

1. (tie) "Someone Great" by LCD Soundsystem

1. (tie) "All My Friends" also by LCD Soundsystem

Related: Best Albums

Fourth Sunday of Advent

2007-12-23T15:54:00.000-06:00

Merry Christmas to all...

Week One: Hope
Week Two: Peace
Week Three: Joy
Week Four: Love

So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. - John 13:34

"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? - Matthew 5:43-47

But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners - Romans 5:8

Jesus... If I start connecting dots... that's a tall order. So I pray for wisdom, for energy, for passion and compassion. Compel me to love others as you loved us. Help me to use my life in a way that allows others to live. We praise you for invading Satan's kingdom and reclaiming it for your own. We wait hopefully for your return and want to do as much as we can in the time being. We love you. Amen.

Best Music of 2007: Albums

2007-12-19T13:25:00.000-06:00

This is my favorite post to write every year. There's some slightly embarrassing proof that I've been doing this since Junior High. It's nice to have an outlet for it now. I really can't remember a better year for music in the past 15 years. I had a really hard time narrowing down what I thought was absolutely essential this year, and my top five is more or less interchangeable. If you see something you don't know, MySpace, HypeMachine, Elbo.ws and YouTube will probably have you covered. Check back later and I'll add some links to places where you can hear the albums or download a song or two. I'll post a top 25 songs list sometime soon as well. Happy listening!

25. !!! - Myth Takes
There are about five or six tracks on this album that make me want to get up off my chair and dance. And for those of you who know me, that's a high compliment. Only when I'm home alone of course. !!!, thanks for providing any peeping neighbors with hours of amusement.

24. Menomena - Friend & Foe
There are a ton of ideas infused in each song on Friend and Foe, and all of those elements add up to something creative and utterly fresh.

Download: "The Pelican" (via Pitchfork)

23. Jose Gonzalez - In Our Nature
Singer/songwriter isn't my genre of choice, but I really dug Jose's trips into simple, sometimes brooding beauty.

22. Free the Robots - Free the Robots EP
It's jazzy, funky, soulful and just plain fun.

21. Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová - Once Soundtrack
It's hard to hear this album apart from the movie, as it captures the street musician creates a raw anthem spilling over with creativity and passion, but I suspect that it works even if you haven't seen it. Do note that if you see Once, you're going to want to spend ten bucks to have the soundtrack immediately, so you might as well pick both of them up on your next Target run.

20. Thomas Fehlmann - Honigpumpe
This is electronica served just as I like it - minimal but warm. Fans of the genre should give it a listen.

19. Justice - t (cross)
I don't know how to sell this album any other way than this: "Do the D.A.N.C.E., 1, 2, 3, 4 fight. Stick to the B.E.A.T., get ready to ignite." Awesome. If these guys are Jesus-people, and everything about their titling tendencies point that direction, I'm hoping they get to DJ most of the parties in Heaven.

Download: "D.A.N.C.E." (via Pitchfork)

18. Rahsaan Patterson - Wines & Spirits
The best R&B album of the year. Each track has its own influences, but Rahsaan makes each one of them his own. If you like R&B even a little, seek it out.

17. The Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
There's not a bad track on here, and its best moments ("No Cars Go", "Keep the Car Running") hold their own with everything on Funeral, good enough for a top 20 spot.

Download: "No Cars Go" (via PopMatters)
Download: "Keep The Car Running" (via PopMatters)

16. Mavis Staples - We'll Never Turn Back
Mavis' record of contemporary spins on protest songs that she mastered back in the day (as the lead Staples sister) is moving, passionate and still capable of mobilizing people to change the world. This is also the best worship music I've heard this year.

15. Blu & Exile - Below the Heavens
One of the best rap albums I've heard in years. The beats and music are choice, his voice is confident and distinct without being over the top, and it rewards multiple listens. Oh, and it's a ton of fun. Like, Tribe fun. As with Rahsaan, if you like hip hop even a little bit, seek it out.

14. The Ike Reilly Assassination - We Belong to the Staggering Evening
It's no doubt indebted to a host of influences, but never once does it feel like Ike Reilly is ripping someone off. He and his band are having the time of their lives writing contemporary send-offs and the occasional protest song disguised in a shawl of irony. They're from Chicago but they deserve to be known throughout the country. What a blast.

Download: "When Irish Eyes Are Burning" (via PopMatters)

13. SoCalled - Ghettoblaster
His basic, unorthodox formula is to combine hip hop elements with Klezmer and Jewish cantor music. What makes this such a beautiful marriage is that he obviously loves and knows both of those pieces so intimately. It's the most original music I've heard this year. Listen to "You Are Never Alone" and proceed to purchase the album.

Download: "You Are Never Alone" (via PopMatters)

12. LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
55 minutes of pulse-thumping ecstasy, with "All My Friends" and "Someone Great" right in the middle, taking it to another place. LCD brings it.

11. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
It's at once deeply confessional and personal, and also completely over the top. They take on many personas (my favorite being Prince after a bad breakup) to tell their story. They get funky, they get intense, and on "The Past is a Grotesque Animal," they sink their claws into you and don't let go for almost 12 cathartic minutes.

Download: "The Past is a Grotesque Animal" (via Pitchfork)
Download: "Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse" (left click)

10. Burial - Untrue
It's atmospheric but not removed from this planet. This is music for walks in the rain in urban America. It's detached but somehow you get completely immersed. To wit, it beckons you to enter into its world, with its spiral staircases, its flying choirs and its cavernous tree houses, and then it gets under your skin and you want to stay there.

Download: "Ghost Hardware" (left click) (via IODA)

9. Ned Collette - Future Suture
When all was said and done, Ned created my favorite album of 2006, the one that I played the most this year, and one that continues to grow on me. This is another grower, more so than last time, but the songs eventually reveal a beauty where, once you see it, it's hard to turn away. Stick with it. It's rewarding.

8. Pantha du Prince - This Bliss
It's an electronic album that I imagine would play as well in a warehouse as your headphones, only it constantly morphs into new shapes and ideas instead of lingering in atmosphere where so many recent electronica albums linger ad nauseam. And by using the same musical palette for the entire album, he develops a musical language that goes deeper than most wordless albums can go, especially ones created on a computer. I get lost in this music.

7. John Vanderslice - Emerald City
The crunch of his guitar ("White Dove") is tempered by his simple harmonies, the compelling percussion ("The Minaret") and his general songwriting skills and wordcraft. I love this album more each time I hear it.

Download: "White Dove" (via Vanderslice's Official Site)

6. Feist - The Reminder
Sometimes when I'm listening to The Reminder, I forget that I'm not sitting in Leslie Feist's living room.

5. Andrew Bird - Armchair Apocrypha
Andrew Bird got more cohesive, but no less daring. He put the guitars at the forefront to give the album some broad connecting tissue, and cut down on the wordplay, but upped the passion and heat. Andrew and his partners in crime absolutley cook on this record. I've listened to this at least once a week for the better part of a year, and it kicks off five albums that could've been #1.

Download: "Heretics" (via PopMatters)

4. Marco Mahler - Design in Quick Rotation
I've had this on pretty steady repeat since I first heard it. Some might argue that since I first heard this in December, it doesn't deserve to be in the top five, but I actually think that if I had heard this six months ago it'd be even higher. This makes the winter a little warmer. The eleven tracks are diverse in just the right ways, all sharing a lullaby quality that is sure to stir you and warm your heart. I love the lyrics, I love the fingerplay, I love the small choices he makes to flesh out his music without sacrificing any of the intimacy. I'm captivated.

Download: "Design in Quick Rotation"

3. Radiohead - In Rainbows
If it looks like a gimmick and smells like a gimmick, make sure it's not Radiohead before you draw conclusions. In the midst of pricing innovations, web sites, webcasts, discboxes and general hype, it's nice to know that they are still making some of the most original and challenging music out there. And even though they're arguably getting more accessible in their old age, the quality of their music is at an ethereal high.

2. Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Critics like to use words to describe Spoon like 'economical' or 'efficient'. I think a better word is subtle. They leave space in their music for you to claim. It's your little cave where you can curl up and tap your feet happily. Spoon is one of my two favorite bands and this is the best introduction to them I can think of. So, if you haven't yet picked it up, allow me to recommend, without reservation, the absurdly titled (say it like machine gun fire) Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.

Download: "The Underdog" (via PopMatters)

1. The National - Boxer
You know that part of the day just before dawn when the sky is a gorgeous but ominous shade of blue? If you listen to "Ada" at that specific moment, you'll have a clear sense that everything is going to be okay. This is the soundtrack to late night drives, after work train rides and all of the pensive moments of our lives. Each song builds to the next, with Matt Berninger's baritone playing tour guide and Bryan Devendorf's drums taking every song to a higher level, to the point where even when he drops out of the picture entirely, you feel his presence, a phantom conductor leading you into the wee hours of the morning. In one of the best years of music that I can remember, nothing bested this. It's perfect.

Download: "Fake Empire" (via BeggarsGroup)

What'd I miss?

Related: Best Songs

Third Sunday of Advent

2007-12-16T16:22:00.000-06:00

Sunday night was amazing. Alas, I'm several days late on this one. Mary's song is so full of life and joy, and its many layers will no doubt inspire something different every time it is read. Be blessed...

Week One: Hope
Week Two: Peace
Week Three: Joy
Week Four: Love

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.
For He has regarded the lowly state of His maidservant;
For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.
For He who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is His name.
And His mercy is on those who fear Him from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with His arm;
He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He has sent away empty.
He has helped His servant Israel, in remembrance of His mercy,
as He spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his seed forever.”
Luke 1:46-55 (NKJV)

Second Sunday of Advent

2007-12-07T14:27:00.000-06:00

It's been quite a day, so I may come back and post some thoughts later, but for now, here are the scriptures I've been thinking about this week. I keep coming back to Isaiah 2:4. We get a picture of the last days, where people "beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks". I haven't been able to shake this question: What are my swords and spears, and how I could use all of the skills, energy and emotion I expend in a way that cultivates life?

Blessings to all of you.

Week One: Hope
Week Two: Peace
Week Three: Joy
Week Four: Love

In the last days the mountain of the LORD's temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and all nations will stream to it.
Many peoples will come and say, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths." The law will go out from Zion, the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.
Come, O house of Jacob, let us walk in the light of the LORD.
Isaiah 2:2-5 (NIV)
Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the LORD his God,
who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever; who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry.
The LORD sets the prisoners free; the LORD opens the eyes of the blind. The LORD lifts up those who are bowed down; the LORD loves the righteous. The LORD watches over the sojourners; he upholds the widow and the fatherless,
the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.
The LORD will reign forever, your God, O Zion, to all generations. Praise the LORD.
Psalm 146:5-10 (ESV)

Television

2007-12-05T09:29:00.000-06:00

Every time I sit down to write something on my blog, I have really good intentions of writing something of substance, but I almost always end up writing something, published or not, about music or television. I'm not sure I've ever actually posted about television, save for a year-end list once, but something I saw this morning made me want to devote some space to television. That link will come at the end.

I like episodic television. More than movies even. It's a writer's medium - unlike a movie where great directors can cover up a lousy script and the best actors can make a bad script worth watching, the shows that are remembered are generally well-written and written with devotion and passion (great casting and direction certainly can push a show into that all-time category). I love following characters through well-developed arcs and watching them grow and mature (or not mature). I love the mythology that some shows develop over time. And I love the cliffhangers, the game-changing reveals, and just everything that's unique to a story lovingly told over many years. The reason I wanted to be a filmmaker when I was younger - the moment it went from fun-little-kid dream to maybe-i-actually-want-to-do-this dream - was entirely due to a television series. And when I was writing scripts in high school and college, I was predominantly writing for television - following one set of characters over 20-80 hours or so.

For me the best shows all share two broad qualities, regardless of genre. First, you're compelled to watch every time there's a new episode - maybe because you are so excited to see what happens next, or because the laughs are so consistent. Second, you can watch the best shows over and over again - often catching something new, or just paying closer attention to the jokes now that you're not concerned about what happens next (The Office benefits from re-watching more than any other current show).

Now that we're in the NetFlix/Blockbuster Online era, it's somewhat more realistic to recommend television shows. So many of the best shows are at their best when you watch from the beginning, and that's more doable now (unfortunately, a bunch of the best shows have been on HBO and feel a need to be different than network shows - and most do it in, um, not-so creative ways). There are a host of shows that I've been borderline-addicted to over the years, but if I had to choose a top five favorites, it'd have to be a top six, and it would have to include:

6. Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Now that it's widely acclaimed as one of the most important shows of the modern era of television, I feel better about sharing this on my blog: I went out of my way every week to see this show. The story of a teenage girl just wanting to be a teenage girl but instead being drafted into this strange world where she is responsible for constantly saving the world, and her friends, as much for a sense of belonging as for devotion to their friend, come along for the ride. Season one is fun, but it really found its voice in season two. There are plenty of good stand-alone episodes, but the reason it was required viewing was the season-long story arcs, the development of the three main characters, and especially the way it was juxtaposing vampires and all things vampire-hunting with high school. A show about a vampire slayer shouldn't be one of the most important commentaries on growing up in America, but that's exactly what it ended up being.

5. The Sopranos - There were blips along the way (the entire fourth season and the 'first half' of the sixth season were mostly forgettable), but this show sustained an incredibly deep level of storytelling for almost a decade. The main characters demanded your sympathies and like all the good mafia movies, their world was glamorized, but the show's creator, David Chase, never let you forget how evil and warped their world truly was, and he regularly dismantled the characters and made you rethink your loyalties. It was beautifully orchestrated with a collection of maybe the finest acting ever to grace the small screen. This was a morality tale, and a complicated one at that. And if you were watching so you could see who got killed next, you were watching for the wrong reasons. Now that it's on A&E, you can watch it sans most of the vulgarity and debauchery, although, be warned, it's still a show about a violent and entitled mafia boss and his family.

4. My So-Called Life - The aforementioned show that made me want to be a screenwriter. When this show was first on, I taped them all and would play them until the tape wore out. It spoke to me. The characters were flawed. The ones we rooted for would make bad choices (and the occasional good ones). It was tragic, poignant, charming, and the characters were so real and complex, that when they canceled it after one season, there was a real sense of loss from the fans, because this show was helping people make sense of chaos. It was years ahead of its time, even though nothing has nailed high school as well as MSCL. Even if the exact circumstances looked nothing like your high school experience, surely you will recognize the emotions, which were never exploited, but instead were resonant and redeeming.

3. Arrested Development - It's been five years and we still quote this show several times each week. It just keeps getting better every time I watch it too. This is the type of show where they set up jokes early in season one that they would pay off late in season two, and it would make every episode in between take on a whole new life once they did. Every scene was so jam-packed with little gags, that after watching each episode at least a half-dozen times, I was still catching things for the first time. It was so skillfully crafted, the writing and acting was so brilliant, that I don't think any comedy will ever best it. I really don't know how to talk about this show without going into 'Chris Farley Show' territory where I say a quote and then collapse into hyperbole about how great said quote was. The price keeps going down at Amazon and Target, so there are less and less reasons for you to avoid it.

2. Lost - Prior to May, I wouldn't have been ready to put this on my all-time list. There was too much potential that they didn't know where they were going, or that they'd stretch it out for years and years. Then they announced that they're doing 48 more episodes over three seasons of 16 episodes and that's it. Now they get to cut the fat and tell the story they want to tell. When the show returned after a meandering first six episodes of season three, it became clear that they knew where they were going from day one. The show got this swagger that it wore well. After all of the moaning and complaining about the running in place, we were finally going somewhere. And then the season finale of season three happened and it changed everything and we were all utterly convinced that this is going to be worth devoting Wednesday nights to for the next several years. No show has rewarded the time you spend with it more than Lost. Clues are everywhere, and they all add up to something. There are probably a hundred reasonable theories on what will happen next. I'm emotionally invested in almost every character, and the shows two greatest strengths (Benjamin Linus & John Locke) appear to be on the verge of 48 mind-blowing episodes. Unfortunately the writer's strike might mean we only get eight episodes of Lost in 2008. That may drive me (and millions more) crazy. This is the show I'm most compelled to watch out of anything that I've ever seen. Wednesday evenings are an event.

1. The Wire - After the umpteenth "Greatest Show Ever" review, I hijacked a trial NetFlix membership and wailed on these DVDs. It's the unbelievable tale of the Baltimore crime scene - the police and the criminals and the politicians. It spends equal time with all three, creating this complex world where the good guys become bad guys and the bad guys occasionally become good guys. It's a show that always remains real, and never goes for the easy hook. And it's told (masterfully) like a novel. Often times an hour will go by and you'll wonder if anything just happened (not that you weren't enthralled at every turn, just that this is a different type of television show). The first ten episodes often exist for the final two or three (and going back to rewatch them is all the better because of it). In season four, it went to an even higher level when it went into the schools and followed four boys over the course of the year, and showed you exactly how the cycle keeps repeating.

This isn't a show where you wait in hope of a happy ending. The writers are former members of the press, the police force and the schools in Baltimore. They're telling a story that is based on the actual reality they experienced and are experiencing. They threw out the book of television clichés (which all of my other top six were guilty of at one point or another). I'm convinced that season four was the best twelve hours of television ever crafted, putting it right up there with the best movies and books and plays and every other work of fiction. Which creates high expectations for the fifth and final season - ten episodes starting in January. Which brings me back to the beginning - today they posted three shorts on Amazon.com that aren't precursors to season five, but do provide some background on some of the shows main characters - Prop Joe, McNulty & Bunk, and the greatest character the show has created, Omar. As a warning, it's an HBO show, and so there's some swearing in the shorts.

There was a teaser promo for season five they released a few months ago that, for all of the devotees of The Wire, had us at the edge of our seats constantly recounting how much time we had to wait for the premiere. That this simple and somewhat gloomy promo inspired me to verbally express my excitement while home alone in our living room should give you an idea of how great this show is. Amazon recently had a crazy-big Monday-after-Thanksgiving sale on every season so thanks to some birthday money, I'd be glad to host a viewing party for anyone who is interested. (If anyone has HBO and is a fan - we don't, so seeing the episodes will be tricky. Hence, I'm looking for a friend to watch them with - I'll buy the snacks).

So there you have it, hundreds of hours of entertainment recommended by yours truly.

First Sunday of Advent

2007-11-30T10:42:00.000-06:00

Each week of Advent, I want to post a couple verses related to that week's theme, along with the prayer that they stirred up for me. I'd love to hear what these passages stir up for you.

Week One: Hope
Week Two: Peace
Week Three: Joy
Week Four: Love

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Romans 8:18-25 (ESV)

And do this, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep; for now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Therefore let us cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light. Romans 13:11-12 (NKJV)

Jesus... I see groaning from all of your creation every day for justice, peace, love and hope. For freedom from corruption. For freedom from the works of darkness. I read about it and hear about it from every corner of the earth. And I myself groan, even when I find myself contributing to the corruption instead of the restoration.

I praise you for the hope you have created in those of us who wait eagerly for you to restore and reconcile everything. I praise you that there is a whole new energy and longing from your followers to join you in putting this world back together. I praise you for the good things that are happening in Chicago, in Iowa, in our country and in the world. I also acknowledge how much more there is to do. I pray that you will instill in us the urgency of your Kingdom. That you will awake us from our slumber and help us to turn from corruption, temptation and the works of darkness, and turn towards your light. I pray that we will do these things, and not just think these things.

I pray for more faith, more wisdom, more direction, more love, more patience and so much more hope. Hope for our world and hope for our lives. We love you. We believe you. We long for you. Amen.

The Sparrow

2007-11-15T11:19:00.000-06:00

There's something special happening at the Apollo Theater right here in Chicago, and it will continue to happen until the end of December. It's a play called The Sparrow that has received lots of glowing reviews from people who love the good things in life, and my wife bought two tickets as my birthday present. We were unprepared for how much we would love The Sparrow.

The story sounds dark - the only surviving member of a small town second grade class that suffered a fatal and tragic bus accident returns to town ten years later to graduate from high school. The drama comes primarily from her not knowing how to live in this town and the town not knowing how to accept her. But wait, there's something else you should know... Emily - that's the girl - has... well, she has powers. She can "make things happen" when she puts her mind to it.

The story is stirring and the acting is hyperbole-inducing. But what really made the show for us was two things:

1 - The writing is really beautiful. Everyone has their own voice, there's never a wasted scene. There are a dozen or so actors playing more than two dozen characters and every one of them is memorable. There are little moments that give the play heart, and there's a lot of humor. The humor really endeared me to these characters and when things got intense in the second act (as they often do) , the play really earned its emotional weight.

2 - I don't know enough about theater to call something 'groundbreaking', but this performance used the medium in a way I hadn't seen before. Emily's powers come to life in a real hearbeating way, but they do it on a budget of almost nothing. There are no special effects (save one maybe) and everything is done through lighting, sound, choreography, simple and effective props and especially motion. It has to be seen to be appreciated. It's simply dazzling and it is the main reason I would love to see the show again.

(2a - The music is pretty great as well)

So, if you live here, I think this is one of those must-see shows. It's a Chicago original and from what I've read, it seems like it won't always be a Chicago-only show. It's the original cast and everyone from the writers and directors to the stage managers seem to be putting their whole heart into it. If you have the opportunity, it's even worth a trip to Chicago. But hurry, it's here through the end of December, and the first two runs of the show completely sold out. Last night wasn't sold out so you may be able to get tickets, and friends, I'm convinced it's just about the best entertainment in Chicago right now.

What Would His Slogan Be?

2007-10-14T21:39:00.000-05:00

"If you want a good burger, you've got to try Rockwell's Neighborhood Grill. A good sandwich? Costello's for sure! And I love HarvesTime for fresh produce, meats and cheeses (try a Honeycrisp apple while you're there). Oh, and if you want some good healing and teaching, make sure to check out Jesus."

Who is Jesus? I'm not talking in society-wide terms. I just mean for me. For Dave Sandell. Who is Jesus? I have a close relationship with God. We talk. We spend time together. But Jesus...

About two months ago I was reflecting on the way others talk about Jesus - as their Savior. Their healer. Their friend and king. And those words didn't resonate with me. I slowly realized that to me, Jesus was a product. No different than Pepsi or Apple. One of my favorite products to be sure, but a product nonetheless. He was a character in a book. A more meaningful Harry Potter. He symbolized something beautiful and God-sized, but He wasn't real. He was a symbol. A concept. An idea.

Can I know him as more than that? When I die, can I meet him and get the feeling that, even as I bow down before him, on some level we're actually old friends meeting face-to-face at last? If I died today, that wouldn't be my experience.

I wanted to meet the real Jesus. I've met him before, but it had been so long that he had faded into my memory, summoned up whenever I need to invoke his name in prayer. So I made a simple change. I told God that for the month of September, I wouldn't be praying to him. Instead, I was going to direct my prayers towards Jesus. And friends, it's been pretty incredible. I don't know that I have words yet to describe this experience other than to say that it's October, and I've told God I'm going to take one more month because I'm enjoying this so much.

What have we talked about? Well, lately he's been showing me what it means to be poor in spirit...

More soon...

Will there be Autumn in Heaven?

2007-09-11T13:43:00.000-05:00

The seasons should be rearranged. No, wait, scratch that. Work schedules and life calendars should be rearranged. We should have a national mandate that all summer activities be moved to the months of September and October (and April and May), with some spillover into November. All summer long there were lots of things to do outdoors, and we even had half-day Fridays at the office, and I found myself longing to enjoy the fresh air... conditioning. Now, it's in the high 60s and I'm stuck inside at a desk until basically sundown. (Although, through the grace of God, and a nice promotion, I have an office with windows).

This weather raises all sorts of deeply profound theological questions, such as:

What will the weather in Heaven be like?

If it's always hot, like so many of my friends wish our weather was like, will I enjoy that, or will I be miserable?

What if it never snows?

What if, when I die, I never see snow again.

Will I be okay with that?

How does it work? Do I magically forget that I love crisp-cool weather and just not miss it?

Will it be a blind ignorance feeling, or a fully-aware acceptance?

Why create something as wonderful and stirringly divisive as the seasons if they're only temporary?

Are there ever days you feel like you just may like earth more than Heaven?

Was that heretical?

Feel free to post your thoughts. Happy autumn everyone!

Under the Sea

2007-09-05T10:19:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago, Verity & I went snorkeling in the ocean off of Calica, Mexico. It was one of the most profound experiences I've ever had. We saw beautiful coral, a flounder, hundreds of fish (that came right up to us - shoo, fish, shoo!) and even a sea turtle, which I'm told are very rare to see (I didn't take the picture featured here, but it did look similar).

As I hung out in creation, I had this beautiful paradoxical reaction:

I was overwhelmed with how small and insignificant I am. God made this earth some 4.5 billion years ago. Now, scuba diving and the rest are fairly recent inventions, especially relative to the age of the earth. As are the Discovery Chanel, documentary crews and IMAX theaters. So there's all of this earth and sea that God seems to have created solely for his pleasure. And it's gorgeous. I've been obsessed with programs like Planet Earth and The Blue Planet since we got back from snorkeling, and I'm amazed at what's out there, all created not for us to marvel at but just for God's pleasure - at least for the first 4.5 billion years. Compared to the earth, the solar system, the universe... I am just one guy sitting in a cubicle dreaming of the future. I am so preposterously insignificant that my words will never properly sum up just how insignificant I am.

And therein was the paradox. In this insignificance, I felt more empowered than ever before. First, the tasks at hand seemed smaller in scope, even when they were of the world-changing variety (or at least the Chicago-changing variety). Second, I had a new sense of this being God's world and me simply stepping into His plan, His creation, what He's doing. I can accomplish anything He sets before me. It wasn't until I was floating around in the ocean, trying not to swallow water through my snorkel, staring at a sea turtle that this truth really came alive for me. To steal a phrase from Mother Theresa, who am I but a pencil in God's hand?

Who's Creating Who?

2007-06-07T12:18:00.000-05:00

The way Anne Lamott writes doesn't make room for non-sequiturs to be non-sequiturs, since everything she writes is simultaneously flowing logically and sporadically careening from thought to thought. However, I'm about to use that term only to say that while "Bird by Bird" was the source of inspiration for this thought, the book has nothing to do with this thought (that being said, everyone who wants to be a better writer, no matter the medium, or anyone who just wants to sit down with an old friend and chat should pick it up).

A non-sequitur in Anne Lamott's "Bird by Bird" exposed how small my God was several months ago. I've since returned the book to the library, but perhaps I can paraphrase somewhat accurately: "When God believes all the same things you do, perhaps you've created God in our image instead of the other way around." (If anyone has the book and cares to correct the quote, post it in the comments). I've only been a Christian for a handful of years (more than 40 dog-years though!). I can't claim to have obsessed over each page of scripture. And even though I've listened to hundreds of sermons in that time, I hope that I've only scratched the surface of the glacier that is God. And yet, all my worldviews coincidentally align with his! The things about this world that irk me irk him! The people that drive me crazy drive him crazy!

I recognize now that I am, in fact, creating God in my image. I'm finding ways to justify all of my ill thoughts and cynical expressions by twisting something that may be true into something that aligns perfectly with what I want to be true. It may be that in some of those things I have taken on God's view of life, but I wouldn't know because I haven't truly explored what God believes about all of the things that affect my life - whether that is revealed in scripture, prayer, meditation, writing, or conversations with those who have journeyed with my God longer than i have. Perhaps, as a relatively young Christian, the areas where I am most comfortable with what I perceive God asking me to do reveal a sort of litmus test for where I haven't dug deep enough.

I think this is a flaw I share with the rest of the Jesus-following world. The Bible has a lot of challenging things to say, and yet I watch people (myself included) dismissing major chunks of scripture because another chunk may get messy.

I say we embrace the mess. It's easier for us to become like Jesus if we make Jesus into who we are. But that's not what it means to be a disciple. If I am to be a disciple of Jesus, to become who God created me to be, then I must confess that God is not stepping into my world, but inviting me to step into His.

Following the Crowd

2007-03-30T14:30:00.000-05:00

On Sunday, we remember Palm Sunday, Jesus' triumphant arrival on donkey-back into Jerusalem where He was praised and glorified by huge crowds of people. Then, next Friday we'll remember Good Friday where the same crowds called for Jesus' crucifixion.

Here's what happened between those days:

He cleared the Temple.
He healed the blind and the lame.
Children praised Him as Messiah.
He withered up an unfruitful fig tree.
He taught in the Temple.
He challenged the religious leaders.
He kept challenging them.
He really poked at them and got under their skin.
I mean, He really called them out.
The religious leaders plotted to kill Him and convinced the crowd that they were right.

There's more to it, but you get the gist. So the religious leaders were clearly threatened and acted accordingly. The crowds on the other hand, what was their excuse? Don Williams shed some light on this for me when he preached from Mark 10:

Then they came to Jericho. As Jesus and his disciples, together with a large crowd, were leaving the city, a blind man, Bartimaeus (that is, the Son of Timaeus), was sitting by the roadside begging. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!"
Many rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, "Son of David, have mercy on me!"
Jesus stopped and said, "Call him." So they called to the blind man, "Cheer up! On your feet! He's calling you." Throwing his cloak aside, he jumped to his feet and came to Jesus.
"What do you want me to do for you?" Jesus asked him.
The blind man said, "Rabbi, I want to see."
"Go," said Jesus, "your faith has healed you." Immediately he received his sight and followed Jesus along the road.

So first the crowd tells Bartimaues that he's not important enough for Jesus, and then when Jesus calls for him, they rebuke him for... I don't know, not jumping up fast enough, or still wailing out for Jesus. This crowd is...

Kind of like our crowd.

Our society does this too, right? It blows with the wind, following whatever is attractive and convenient.

This Palm Sunday, I want to take time to just reflect on why I so often get caught up in where the wind is blowing the crowd. Why I really want the crowd to like me, why the thought of not being in the in crowd is scary to me. I was never in the in crowd growing up, but come college and now, after college, I've tasted the in crowd, and it's hard to go back voluntarily. But Jesus is more important to me and Jesus who I claim I've turned my life over to.

A little less crowd and a little more Jesus would be good for me, not to mention the people I influence and pray for.

Download Don's heart-grabbing sermon on Mark 10 about Bartimaeus here.

"I'm just a guy who Jesus loves"

2007-03-29T11:06:00.000-05:00

"I'm just a guy who Jesus loves." - Mike Breaux, Willow Creek

What if it were as simple as that? How would our everyday troubles, our big picture goals, our trials and tribulations, joys and sorrows be informed and shaped by finding our identity there and there alone?

If at the center of everything was this knowledge that the core of our identity was as guys and girls that Jesus loved, it would change everything. Being a disciple, becoming a disciple, all of it would be different. Evangelism would be fun. Worship would be sweeter than ever. Can you imagine singing your guts out to your creator along with a choir of voices who all understood that their whole life begins each morning with a tight grasp on being loved by Jesus?

We'd have perspective. We'd have context. When hard stuff came, we'd start here and move from there. Even life's toughest moments could be met with a profoundly simple clarity. Praying for people, turning from sin, leading, following, work, being in community... all of the longing, the fears, those crushing moments that make you start to question everything, imagine if all of those moments simply started with a gentle reminder that we're just people that Jesus loves. Everything else is secondary to that.

There's the sum total of my Lenten reflections. Everything else that I thought I needed to think about lead there. And from there I can work back out with a different understanding of what it means.

Easter has implications for everyone, whether they've chosen to let Jesus into their deep places or not. Jesus died for everyone, and if He died for everyone because He loved us... that means He loves everyone.

Weight Loss For Pets

2007-03-12T23:20:00.000-05:00

A new drug is being introduced to fight obesity in our pets.

Obesity.

In pets.

Growing up, I had two schnauzers that I loved dearly, Maynard and Bernie (Maynard after jazz trumpeter and frequent aural stratosphere visitor Maynard Ferguson, and Bernie as a combination of Bert and Ernie, of Sesame Street of course). Now, my parents made the decisions about the dogs when it came to medicine, but if it were up to me I can't necessarily say outright that I would be unwilling to spend a ton of money keeping my dog alive for years. As fellow dog lovers will understand, they were close friends.

But when I hear about all the medications being prescribed to dogs and cats and the rest, including anti-depressants, I fear that we've taken that phrase "man's best friend" a bit too literally. And in light of the dog bakeries ("Barkeries," I'm told they're called), and the fact that the store for pets in the little shopping district near our house was packed on Saturday, I find myself with a question that I'd just like to ask out loud.

Is this trend a reflection of our society's affluence or our increasing isolation?

Treating your pets like family isn't a new concept. This is simply another example of the market filling a perceived need. But in an age where 25% of Americans have no confidant, I think it's worth noting that people want and are capable of deep, loving relationships. Maybe we've just fast-food-ed our way to having a dog actually be our closest friend. And regardless of your love for dogs, we must all admit that a dog isn't a substitute for real human intimacy and relationship.

Of course, the flipside is that we're one step closer to America's Next Top Dog Model. I'm not sure which topic is more urgent.

[Note: Photo is of neither Maynard nor Bernie, but he does make a compelling case for spending a ton of money on your pets.]

iSolation (3)

2007-03-11T22:19:00.000-05:00

Why are there thousands of blogs?
Why of those thousands of blogs do most of them consist of a recap of the author's life?
What need are blogs filling in people?

Celebrities who our society worships go through great trouble to keep their life private. Does hanging your life out for all to see give people a sense of being a celebrity?

The authors of blogs get to choose what information they share about their lives. Are we preempting others asking hard questions by controlling the direction of the conversation?

Online communities such as MySpace and Facebook connect you to hundreds or thousands of people just like you. So that you can exchange links and tally the number of people who want to know you. Is this our substitute for real community? What about the online gaming communities like World of Warcraft? Is it a place to play a game or a substitute for real community?

I spend lots of time on this blog recommending music. Am I just hoping that my opinion matters to someone?

I use it as a forum to talk about the things God is talking to me about and visa versa... but how much of it comes up in my real live friendships? Even something that seems noble to me - becoming a better writer and communicator, sharing what God is teaching me in hopes that it will help someone - is it actually just scratching an itch to matter? Assuming that said itch is God-give, is this blog satisfying that itch?

I look at the world around me and I see lots of alcohol and not a lot of meaningful conversations or memories you'll cherish when you're older. I see lots of casual sex but few committed relationships that challenge each other to grow and really know each other.

I can't decide if technology is enabling people to be a part of a global community, blogs helping people to be vulnerable in life-giving ways (and giving introverts a voice), or if we're just nursing a sea of surface-level friendships and taking an easy alternative to something hard like being vulnerable and real in the name of getting the world off our backs.

Is the Web 2.0 the community God had in mind?

Rob Bell Q+A

2007-03-10T11:16:00.000-06:00

It was rainy outside, it was cold inside and the room was a little dark. Nevertheless, it was a night filled with warmth, light and beauty. Rob made his last stop on his speaking tour to support the release of his new book, Sex God, here in Chicago at a little old school moviehouse called the Portage Theater, complete with working organ and overpriced popcorn. At the beginning of the Q&A session, Rob made it known that he didn't particularly want to talk about the book ("I don't want to talk about it, I wrote it" - a joke lost on most of the crowd). So instead, we had an hour-long 200+ person coffee date. The audience picked his brain and he poked at our hearts. The questions were a mix of theology (predestination, evangelism, making disciples of all nations, homosexuality, even tongues - all of which were met with challenging, often surprising and always genuine and heartfelt answers - and questions about how our church communities can be more like Mars Hill.

Here were some of the notes I took, verbatim:

Baptisms = Mikvah (sp?) - Pools of water on the mountain by the Temple. God is in Jerusalem. Ritual cleansing from Leviticus. But John the Baptist is baptising in the river way out in the sticks.

Church is a gift to the city - measure of a Church... if it left, would the city protest?

We are putting flesh on truth - truth incarnate.

We are to be a eucharist for others - bodies broken, blood poured out for each other. It's why you may be drained after serving, even though you're doing something life-giving - your body is being broken. You are being a eucharist for others.

Godly Man - Relationship with his creator. Centers his life on grace and love. I am a sacred creation, created to do something unique to help God restore the earth.

Tongues - Cessationalists - "There was a party and then God came out and said 'Alright, everyone out of the pool'". Dispensationalists - that was for then. It's not good to put boundaries on the divine. Seen too many things with his own eyes. Other extreme - if you don't speak in tongues, you're not a Christian... "Do you speak in tongues?"- creates a hierarchy, first and second class Christians. Also not good.

Live and move in the world in a way that people see love and hope. Your life is different. People will want to be around you.

There's lots more but I'm going to save some of it for upcoming posts.

The evening was capped with the viewing of a new Nooma video, "You", and he stuck around afterwards to sign books and shake hands. I don't usually get starstruck, but this was as close as I've ever been to that. Here's a guy I've listened to every week for almost three years, and including the archives, a person whose given me two books, four years worth of sermons (which iTunes tells me occupy 4.1 days worth of listening), videos and other assorted experiences. He is a person who has literally changed my life after every sermon. You know the icebreaker question - if you could have dinner with any person living or dead (except Jesus, because that makes for a boring question), who would it be? My answer would be Rob Bell. So despite recognizing that he's a person just like you and me, and that the last thing he wants to be is a celebrity, I was still surprisingly nervous to meet him. We shared a particularly meaningful exchange with (ask me about it if you want to know more) then my friend and I went to a local burger joint to unpack everything we learned and began to work through what it meant for our life.

More of his answers will trickle into the coming week's posts, but if you have specific questions, I can try to remember how he answered. Meet me in the comments.

Christianity in America (2)

2007-02-27T01:14:00.000-06:00

Round two.

There are two trends that I see in real life on a regular basis that hit a spot in my soul that goes "I don't feel so good..." First, I see on the internet, in the news and in my community that Christianity as a movement is despised. This is due to a number of factors. Our self-appointed spokespeople over the last six years aren't helping with their God-invoking rhetoric and actions that don't seem to line up with anything Jesus said (It's hard to make disciples of all nations when we're killing them instead so that we can enjoy our Grocery-Carrying-Hummers and Dog Bakeries in peace and safety).

And we have this political machine that villainizes the left and demonizes two not-so-black-and-white issues that are close to the hearts of millions of Americans. Regardless of your stance on those issues, I think we can, as mature adults, admit that no one should be surprised by people not wanting to be a part of what they perceive as a close-minded and hate-filled church. Our tactics haven't always come from a place of love, mercy and grace.

However, what bothers me more about the state of Christianity in America is that while we're actively hated as an institution, as individuals and local movements, we're often passively and casually dismissed with an "Oh, that's nice" attitude of those we're trying to reach.

My understanding is that our way of living is to be so counter-cultural that people will persecute us for our beliefs. I don't feel very persecuted though. I mostly feel ignored. And that bothers me.

What I don't want is for our Savior to be synonymous with hate and hypocrisy. What I do want is for the Gospel, words that are still radical today, to overwhelm the community I am a part of. So all I know to do in this conversation is to turn the light on me and ask:

How am I putting God's truth on display in my life?
How can I better live out this faith?
How can I, as one believer in a community of many believers, reclaim Jesus and be a movement for unquestionable good?

I feel like I'm saying things that not all of my friends agree with, so please, engage me in the comments. Do you see it a completely different way? I want your voice to be heard as well. I'm not here to debate but to talk about these things. The Body of Christ is supposed to be unified, but I feel split wide open by some of these topics, to the point where they feel taboo to even raise. But I think it's important to talk about this stuff. So, please, remember that we're called to love one another and then comment away.

Be blessed... be loved...

Christianity in America (1)

2007-02-26T00:11:00.000-06:00

As I've pondered the James Cameron announcement (see the last post), I've come to the conclusion that we've got to think about our role in this mess. If the Church concentrated on making the world more like Heaven, if our number one goal was to end hunger, create shelter, provide heat and clothing, and then move into realms like education, health care and then into even broader arenas like human rights and creating equality, I think the world wouldn't be interested in spending time disproving Christianity. I imagine they'd celebrate the work of God on display.

But in the past couple years we've seen Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion plastered all over Barnes and Noble. We've seen the author of The Da Vinci Code publicly stating that it is a work of fiction, and then at least thousands of people exploring if it was true or not. We've had Oprah's The Secret speaking to thousands of people looking to fill a void in their life that God wants to fill so badly. Just as we are seeing a waning interest in The Da Vinci Code, all of these things will soon be forgotten and Jesus will still be capturing the hearts, minds and imaginations of millions of people around the world. But I think to dismiss all of what's happening without critically examining our role in it would be to do the Church a disservice.

It seems like people are fed up with Christianity in America. How did we get this far? Certainly we are to expect persecution, but this doesn't feel (at least to me) like a kingdom's power being threatened. This feels like people with good intentions wanting to make the world a more tolerable, more peaceful place, and the way they've deemed most efficient to accomplishing that end is to disprove Christianity.

And when I read the Book of Acts, all I can think is... "Huh?"

We're supposed to be a movement of people making disciples of all nations. We're supposed to be preaching good news to the poor, restoring sight to the blind. You know, proclaiming and demonstrating the Kingdom of God. Instead, we're running multi-million-dollar building campaigns and getting in bed with political parties.

Case in point: The following story is from USA Today on November 28 of last year:

The president-elect of the Christian Coalition of America has declined the job, saying the organization wouldn't let him expand its agenda beyond opposing abortion and gay marriage.

The Rev. Joel Hunter, who was scheduled to take over the socially conservative group in January from Roberta Combs, said he had hoped to focus on issues such as poverty and the environment.

"These are issues that Jesus would want us to care about," said Hunter, a senior pastor at Northland Church in Longwood, Fla.

Hunter announced his decision not to take the job during an organization board meeting Nov. 21. A statement issued by the group said Hunter left because of "differences in philosophy and vision." Hunter said he was not asked to leave.

"They pretty much said, 'These issues are fine, but they're not our issues, that's not our base,"' Hunter said.

I find myself asking questions like "Are we being good stewards of the faith?" And, "God has clearly blessed America... have we used that blessing in a way that glorifies Him?" Let's keep talking about this. I welcome your feedback, whether you agree or disagree with me. More soon...

iSolation (2)

2007-02-22T11:43:00.000-06:00

This is my cop-out post. Rob Horning author of the Marginal Utility blog at PopMatters.com wrote an essay that's been marinading in my head for almost a year. The whole iSolation series was birthed in that essay. I've got tons of thoughts I want to get on paper and share with you, but every time I read his article, I can't figure out a way to say it better than him. So I'm going to share a piece of it today, and we can continue our discussion of the topic next week (we'll start with MySpace). It's a long essay, and I'm only posting half of it here. I might suggest that you copy and paste it into a document and print it out. It's long but it's worth your time. Read the whole essay at PopMatters.com.

Often during my subway trips I'll encounter someone who's wearing headphones and he — almost always a he — will be air drumming or dancing in his seat or mouthing the words or, in the most extreme cases, singing out loud… after a moment of thinking he's ridiculous, I'll start to develop a weird admiration for him. After all, here's someone who just doesn't care about looking like a fool; that's how passionate he is about the music he loves — which I generally imagine to be something like Rush or the Scorpions. This guy always seems entirely unembarrassed, comfortable in his skin with the reassurance of his favorite songs. He will generally have the satisfied look of someone who thinks he's been rather impressive. The onus is on those around him to be embarrassed for him, which is always an enormous waste of emotional energy.

In general, what this guy is doing is taking the prerogatives one normally has in the interior of one's own car — you can sing along to your radio and pretend you're the only person in the world inside your little bubble — and bringing it to public transportation. In fact, the gist of a lot of technology for personal use is to eliminate shared space and make every place private, one where you can control the environment. We travel through public space as though we are always in our own private car, even if we're only walking down the street with our hands-free Bluetooth earpiece in, jabbering away at 20 decibels about how we're not up to much, you know, just walking down the street.

Compare this guy with another person I sometimes see on the N train, only more often late at night. While the train is underground in Manhattan, she — typically a she, usually the same sort of woman who wears sunglasses even when the train's below ground — clutches her cell phone, gazing pensively at the screen, sometimes scrolling through information on the screen, who they know, who they've called. Perhaps they are contriving text messages to send, e.g., "on the train. bored." She seems to be using the phone as something to focus on. Maybe it helps with ignoring the creepy guys (like me, I guess) who might make eye contact with her, who will make her feel scrutinized and thus insecure.

A phone works better for this than a book, because a book reveals important information about oneself and almost invites conversation. ("What are you reading? Oh, I've read Da Vinci Code too. Can't wait for the movie. Have you read Digital Fortress?") A phone reveals next to nothing; a palm conceals it and its screen discloses details to the possessor alone. No one can ask you what you are doing, because the phone effectively sends the message that it's private, that you are checked out of the space you are in, and dreaming of being somewhere else.

As we come above ground in Queens, she'll immediately listen to messages or put in a call to someone she will likely be going home to in a matter of minutes, joining the collective murmuring of the inconsequential conversations that seem to take place on cell phones at every possible public moment. "Hey, I'm on the train." This comes across as an attempt to reject the world, or at least the reality of one's solitary presence in it, in favor of the illusion of constant companionship.

The phone, which makes it clear that one has people to contact in case of an emergency, people to summon for protection, works as a shield, as a seemingly concrete lifeline to safety, ready to pull you out of the unpleasant and possibly dangerous world of strangers. Extending the aura of privacy the phone generates, the familiar voice piping through the earpiece strengthens the cellular force field that obliterates the present space one actually occupies along with all the unpleasant or inconvenient people in it. Whereas the air drummer, in his flamboyance and his indifference to how he is perceived, sends the message, "You are not here", the cell-phone brandisher seems to send the message that "I'm not here".

These two figures typify the process by which public space is dissolved into a million private spaces delineated by headphones and cell phones and PDAs, under the presumption that it's both more convenient and safer to act as though the reality of shared public space was optional. True, it may be wrong to conflate the purgatorial way stations of public transportation with public space as it's usually idealized -- the N train is not a town square. And perhaps the behavior I've just described has an idealistic component to it in its refusal to recognize as public space any place that doesn't live up to the Platonic notion of it as a zone where people choose to come and linger and discuss contemporary issues: the mythic Habermasian coffeehouse where the bourgeois public sphere was born. But nevertheless, public transportation can still roughly serve as a laboratory where the effects technology is having on the way we conduct ourselves in public can be observed.

Though we typically use technology to blot out our surroundings, paradoxically enough, we often conduct this blotting out rather ostentatiously. For example, the air drummer, though he seems as if he has to have forgotten he is in public, is more likely actually searching for attention. What he explicitly refuses is not attention but interaction. (In this, he's like the cell-phone talker.) Generally, the entertainment we consume has habituated us to a division of the world into watchers and performers, a dichotomy that sheds notions of interaction, shared activity, communal action, all of which have been reconceived culturally as disruptive hassles. Both performing and watching have their perks: performers can be showered with attention and validation, no matter how banal their performance (c.f. the celebrity of reality-show participants); whereas spectators can hover godlike above the fray, lazily enjoying whatever spectacle they deign to notice among the many begging for their attention.

As a result, we find ourselves perpetually split between watching and doing; as a result we improvise ways to try to bridge the rift. The air drummer seeks spectators but presumably knows he has no real skill to warrant that attention, at least not on the subway. So he tries to garner our attention by taking his own spectatorship to the level of performance. He acts as though he's so convinced the music he's listening to is cool that it gives him a free pass to do whatever he wants, or what's more, the music he likes and the device he by which he listens to it are so cool that he must gesticulate wildly enough to call everyone's attention to how much he's able to enjoy it. That he looks like some kind of crazy mime to the rest of us who can't hear what he does is apparently immaterial. With so few ways to earn validation from peers or contribute to society, it's no surprise we have to resort to stunts like this.

Since we often regard our jobs as compulsory, something we'd love to shirk if we could (and an annoyance much like sharing public space), we can't seek social validation directly for what we spend much of our time doing. In the absence of any other socially validated work, taste and our ritual display of it must be considered as the only real meaningful social work we all perform. Because so much status resides in the signaling function of the consumer products we display, the most significant contribution we can make to the world around us is to build the prestige of brands. This is what it means to live in a consumer society. We can aspire to little more than being showroom dummies.

As Jürgen Habermas explains in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought) (MIT Press, 1991) public space went from being a realm of "rational-critical debate" to an arena of commercialized leisure. This destroys the possibility of a public identity independent of our private one: "Leisure behavior supplies the key to the floodlit privacy of the new sphere, to the externalization of what is declared to be the inner life." Our inner life is now the opposite of private; it consists of the collection of consumer and leisure choices we make in order to appear as something, as anything, in the devolved and oversaturated public sphere. Any expectations we have about being noticed outside the home are always in terms of our consumption choices, and typically these fleeting moments of notoriety are not on our own terms. We never know when someone will notice us, judge our clothes, our face, who we're with, how we're acting. The air drummer, at least, taking matters into his own hands, sought out his moment.

The rest of us instead tend to be defensive, like the cell-phone brandisher, trying to deflect attention, or meet some minimal standard so as to pass anonymously, while wondering at the same time how come no one notices us. The problem is the anonymity we aspire to for safety makes us in a larger sense disposable, interchangeable -- which is itself dangerous in a capitalist economy that's most profitable when it can treat individuals the same way, and give them no security or stability. (This is sometimes called "creative destruction".)

Thus, one of the cell phone's security-blanket functions, above and beyond giving us access to emergency services and friends is the psychological reminder that though we might seem lost in the crowd, we could at any moment be selected for attention in the form of our ringtone (which ideally we will have carefully selected to be au courant). The cell phone seems to provide a means by which we can control how and when we will be singled out and noticed, a comfort that conceals the fact that it is essentially a tracking device that allows our movements to be constantly surveilled. But rather than suspect the phone has undermined our privacy, we feel as though it has secured it, giving us a chance to carry our private worlds with us.

Ash Wednesday

2007-02-21T11:48:00.000-06:00

In some circles, the season of Lent is called "Bright Sadness". Over the next forty days, thousands of Christians around the world will spend time meditating on their mortality, their sin and their walk with God. My understanding is that the season was originally for new converts to prepare for their baptism on Easter Sunday, and later for the entire church to be a part of. Lent involved prayer, fasting and alms giving as penance for our sins.

Even as a a symbolic act, I don't think penance helps us draw nearer to our Creator, mostly because I think it gets peoples' wires crossed about what happened on the Cross. But I do see a great amount of power in the liturgy of Lent. So I'm entering into the next forty days as a season of contemplation on repentance and my place in the Kingdom of God. This will include more intentional times of prayer, fasting and alms giving. I expect it to be a deeply personal time between God and I, but I hope to share pieces of it on my blog throughout the season.

Today is Ash Wednesday, when many people will go to their respective churches and put ashes and oil on their heads, signifying repentance. They will hear a clergyman say "Remember, man, that you are dust and unto dust you shall return." In the past, I've rejected these practices for what I've perceived as negative consequences they create in people I care about. I'm still not completely satisfied with some of that, but this year I want to embrace Lent and harness the potential it have for drawing us deeper into a relationship with God.

For my friends at the Evanston Vineyard, remember that the sanctuary is open most of the day today, ending at nine this evening. It's a beautiful opportunity to have a quiet and familiar place for reflection and prayer as we enter into this season. And you can help out at The Harvest before or after your time. I hope to see you there!

Whiteboard Therapy: War Movies and Age-Old Questions

2007-02-20T11:33:00.000-06:00

As far as war movies go, Letters From Iwo Jima is amongst the best. Given the outcome of the battle, the audience is invited to see the movie through a different lens than most war movies. All of the main characters were well developed, and the ultimate message that "the enemy" is not the propaganda-fed monster void of morals, but in fact, people just like us, with mothers and homes and conflicted inner voices.

War movies always bring me back to the God-questions. The God of the Hebrew Scriptures commands the Israelites to completely destroy a group of people - including, explicitly, women and children - with alarming regularity. Given the sinful nature of the Israelites, the nation of people God triumphs as His own, it's hard for me to reconcile these acts with the God Jesus introduces us to. And of course, they're the same God, but my head swims in it and before too long I'm just barely treading water.

When Jesus says "Go and make disciples of all nations" it's hard to picture Him in David's shoes, wiping out entire nations with His sword. Of course, if I read Revelations, it's clear that the God of the Gospels and the God of the Hebrew Scriptures have something in common.

These types of questions take me in difficult directions, ones seemingly dangerous to my faith. Of course, I believe that it's necessary to struggle with those types of questions if you want your faith to hold up under the pressures of life. I know this much - I'm not looking for a way out. There's no answer that would make me feel that Jesus' Way isn't the best possible way to live my life. There's nothing in these questions that would make me reject my faith in God, simply because what I've seen with my eyes and heard with my ears is the ultimate trump card. And yet, there's a part of me that desperately wants to accept fully the God of the Israelites, so I will turn into the questions rather than ignoring them.

So, friends, how have you dealt with this age-old question? I assume no one has a satisfying answer or else it'd be one of the first things you were taught in Sunday school ("Welcome to Christianity, and when you get to Judges, keep this in mind..."), but I'm sure that at least a few of you have struggled with these questions and I want to learn from you experiences and wisdom. Comments are open to everyone.

The Street: Numbers

2007-02-16T13:32:00.000-06:00

Chicago's week was marked by bitter coldness, many inches of snow, wind in excess of 25 miles per hour, frozen pipes, not enough shelters and at least one homeless man reported dead from the cold. This seems like as good a time as any to introduce my Friday series.

I've been reading studies trying to get my head around the realities of my community. There's a lot of information out there and I don't want to overwhelm everyone, so we'll bite off a little bit at a time. I think education should lead to action, just as Bible study should lead to application and not just knowledge. Therefore, I hope to also feature ways we can help.

Today, let's just look at some numbers. I'd love to hear your reactions and any ways you know of helping make Chicago more like Heaven in the comments.

2005 Census Data (Poverty)
link: Heartland Alliance

Living in poverty: 573, 486
Rate of Chicago households receiving food assistance: 12.9%
Extreme poverty (annual income less than $8,045 for a family of three): 261,780 - 9.7%

2006 Chicago Coalition for the Homeless Study (Homelessness)
link: 2006 Study

73,656 homeless in Chicago
19,477 were served in shelter
54,179 living on the streets, doubled-up, in cars, in abandoned buildings or in some other location that was not a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence

21,078 homeless on a typical night in Chicago
4,654 were served in shelters and 16,424 did not access shelters

2005 Chicago Coalition for the Homeless - Lack of Affordable Housing
link: 2005 Report

National:

In the U.S., nearly a third of all households spend 30% or more of their income on housing, and 13% spend 50% or more
About 6.1 households live in overcrowded conditions
There is not a single jurisdiction in the country where a person working full time earning the prevailing minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment

Chicago:

In most Chicago communities in the 1990s, rents rose faster than incomes despite the fact that, on the whole, Chicago’s median income rose faster than rent.
Nearly one-third of Chicago renters were paying more than 35 percent of their income for housing in 2000; another 20 percent were paying more than half.
Compared to 10 other major U.S. cities, Chicago had the lowest percentage increase (8 percent) in rental units between 1970 and 2000, which is less than half of the next lowest ranking city, New York (19 percent).
The wait for Section 8 vouchers in Chicago is 84 months. The waiting list for housing choice vouchers has been closed in Chicago since 1997 and is not expected to open again until 2005 at the earliest.
In Chicago, only 10 percent of affordable-housing need is met.
Nearly half of Illinois residents earn $25,000 a year or less.
According to the 2001 Illinois self-sufficiency standard, a family of one adult and two children would need to earn $38,281 a year to pay for all their living expenses without any government assistance. (Living expenses include housing, childcare, food, transportation, healthcare, etc.)
According to a recent study conducted by local universities, 75 percent of the city’s working-poor families earned less than $13,001, the income required to support a one-person family above 150 percent of the poverty line.

We'll look at more next week.

iSolation (part one)

2007-02-15T13:50:00.000-06:00

Being alive is not meant to be a solo gig; God created people to be relational. Yet, as technology advances and becomes more integrated in the name of making our lives “better”, there are trends that move us away from community.

The iPod has made it socially celebrated that someone walks around with a pair of headphones on all day. I ride a train to and from work each day with the same group of people, and none of us have ever said a word besides "excuse me" to each other. We do everything we can to be quiet and look forward. Read a book, play on your computer, listen to your music.

People go to clubs where the music is too loud to promote conversations, and even in a group, everyone is isolated. Television and the internet are too often the bulk of our non-working lives, and even as we are more connected globally, our community vanishes. I don’t even have to leave my house to rent a movie anymore. Online, people join communities like Second Life or they play games like World of Warcraft, where communities become a series of playing pretend. That’s fine in doses, but for millions of Americans, it’s a primary means of connection. Food comes to us, delivery style. At my gym, each new treadmill has its own television – we don’t even have to watch TV together anymore.

Our personal universe gets more isolated. Cell phones allow you to take your world with you, enabling you to remain at the center of your universe at all times and isolating yourself from the world around you. There’s an add on TV now where you choose your top five friends for the sake of cheaper calling. Rarely do friendrankings add to a sense of brotherhood – ask anyone who has had to choose a wedding party. Scot McKnight raised concerns about jogging with headphones and not taking in the sounds of the world.

Technology does present new forms of community – online groups for anything under the sun, Facebook, MySpace, online dating, instant messaging with video, international and domestic long distance calling made cheap, and communities like Second Life.

But even here we move towards isolation. I read that today’s youth assume that their lives will be public anyway, so they take the first step and put themselves on a community like MySpace where they give everyone in the world access to their lives. It’s the spiritual cousin of being a celebrity – your life as a product for others to consume. But celebrities seem to be amongst the most isolated people on the planet, with so few relationships that revolve around their humanity and so many that revolve around their success.

Community isn’t just about companionship, it is also about being known. Not being known deeply is lonely.

If I go to work and sit in my cubicle all day, toss my headphones on, get on a train, go home, turn on my television and fall asleep, how many days in a row can I do that before I start to lose touch with an essential part of being alive?

Or if all of my friendships remain at a surface level, and I use my blog or profile as the way I let people in, am I known?

My iPod keeps me out of conversation with God, too. It's frigid right now, and the cold made it necessary to cover my ears with something more substantial than headphones. And as I walked to work in the freezing cold, I found myself in a meaningful and life-giving conversation with my Creator that fueled an entire day of goodness, insight and clarity. It occurred to me that this isn’t a daily experience for me, even though it could be. My choice.

So is technology creating isolation, or is technology simply meeting a consumer demand to be more isolated?

The implications run deep. More soon.

Whiteboard Therapy: Lazarus six

2007-02-13T11:25:00.000-06:00

Whiteboard Therapy: Wherein together we create an online Bible study in the comments section. All are welcome, no comment or question is too simple or too complex or even too out there. We can work out our faith together as a community, with permission to change your mind, erase and start over like a whiteboard.

"Lord, your dear friend is very sick."
I'm having trouble finishing up the Lazarus series. I've sat with the first sixteen verses for months now and I still have questions whose answers aren't revealing themselves. Help me put myself into this story and apply it to my own healing situations. Let's do part of it this week and finish up next week:

A man named Lazarus was sick. He lived in Bethany with his sisters, Mary and Martha. This is the Mary who later poured the expensive perfume on the Lord’s feet and wiped them with her hair. Her brother, Lazarus, was sick. So the two sisters sent a message to Jesus telling him, “Lord, your dear friend is very sick.”

But when Jesus heard about it he said, “Lazarus’s sickness will not end in death. No, it happened for the glory of God so that the Son of God will receive glory from this.” So although Jesus loved Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, he stayed where he was for the next two days. Finally, he said to his disciples, “Let’s go back to Judea.”
- John 11:1-7

Background Information:
I think the settings of the Lazarus story are important to understanding what happened. I'm not great with Bible geography, so if I get any of this wrong, please feel free to correct me in the comments.

At the beginning of John 12, Jesus has fled from Jerusalem and Bethany where the Pharisees tried to capture him again. These were places where Jesus has been putting His life in danger to announce the Kingdom. They flee to a place in Perea, probably Aenon, where Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist. This is a place of refuge for Jesus, for the whole town loves Him and John, and Jesus and His disciples get a chance to have a reprieve from the dangers they encountered elsewhere.

But Lazarus and his sisters are from Bethany, the scene of the Olivet Discourse (the Beatitudes, etc), a village two miles from Jerusalem. It is Jesus' final stop before entering Jerusalem, in the province of Judea, ultimately the scene of His Crucifixion. And from what I can tell its the last place Jesus was before fleeing to Perea.

Questions to get us started:
Why did Jesus choose to stay and let Lazarus die?
Or, the same question a different way: Why didn't Jesus choose to go and heal Lazarus immediately?
Is there something unique about this situation that makes it for God's glory to be revealed, or could it apply to many/most sicknesses, even today?
Since Jesus ultimately responds to the sisters' call, is Jesus refusing to work on someone else's timetable, and taking the time He and His disciples need to recharge instead of rushing to help? Does Jesus need to recharge? How does all of this tie into the life Jesus invites us into?
Where are we in this story?
What does the story tell us about Jesus?
Does anything in this story relate to our physical or emotional healing?
After Lazarus rose from the dead, he ate, or 'reclined' with Jesus. How do you think he felt about the whole situation? Depending on your answer, how does that reflect how you feel about the situation?

I'm sure you all have great answers and even better questions. I'll post any questions you ask up here, and the comments are open to anyone, anonymous or not.

Click here to comment.

Three Years (part two)

2007-02-06T16:17:00.000-06:00

Matthew 6:25-34:

“That is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life—whether you have enough food and drink, or enough clothes to wear. Isn’t life more than food, and your body more than clothing? Look at the birds. They don’t plant or harvest or store food in barns, for your heavenly Father feeds them. And aren’t you far more valuable to him than they are? Can all your worries add a single moment to your life?

“And why worry about your clothing? Look at the lilies of the field and how they grow. They don’t work or make their clothing, yet Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as beautifully as they are. And if God cares so wonderfully for wildflowers that are here today and thrown into the fire tomorrow, he will certainly care for you. Why do you have so little faith?

“So don’t worry about these things, saying, ‘What will we eat? What will we drink? What will we wear?’ These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers, but your heavenly Father already knows all your needs. Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.

“So don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

"Yeah, but you're Jesus"
I read this stuff and I can't help but think "That's easy for you to say - you only had three years to live!" and then I grumble about not being able to blow thousands of dollars on a 58-inch widescreen plasma TV without a guilty conscience. But as I've thought about that time span - three years - I realized that not only did Jesus live this way, but His disciples did too, only they didn't know their fate from day one. After His resurrection, they threw caution to the wind, commonly putting themselves in dangerous situations in order to spread the message of Jesus. According to Church history, all of the apostles but John died a martyr's death, often gruesome, and John only avoided this fate because when they boiled him in oil, he miraculously survived so they sent him into exile on the Island of Patmos where he had his Revelations).

I think that when you live as if you could die tomorrow, all of these things - clothes, food, money - they just sort of fade into the background. They're unnecessary because, like Jesus, your mission is defining your choices - demonstrate and proclaim the Kingdom of God and try to ensure the message will continue to spread after you're gone - and all of those things are sort of irrelevant to that aim.

I wonder if the message has become so neutered and the lifestyle so safe, that we simply aren't living the way the Apostles did, which forces me to ask the questions:

Should we be?
Is that what Jesus intended?
What does this have to do with the abundant life Jesus came to give?
What does a life devastated by the Gospel look like?

How do I live it in a neighborhood in Chicago?
This isn't a call to go put your life in harm's way, but instead a call to proclaim and demonstrate with abandon. To let Jesus be the Lord of your life in a meaningful way. To not just not worry about where your food and clothes will come from, but to have an entire lifestyle that makes those choices irrelevant. How can we simplify our lives? What small things could we do right now that would change our priorities? Maybe it's a simple as getting involved in The Harvest or the refugee ministries at the Evanston Vineyard, or the equivalent at your churches. Maybe it's working with kids who don't have a dad around, or giving up your Friday night so that a single Mom can have her's back. Or perhaps it's as simple as diving so deep into your community that your first instinct is "What can I sell, what can I give, how can I help so that we can keep this going?" Let's talk.

Three Years (part one)

2007-02-06T00:01:00.000-06:00

"A year from now you may wish you had started today." - Karen Lamb

Sometimes the timelessness of the Bible overshadows the time of the Bible. Jesus' public ministry was three years, which is actually kind of a long time. When I pick up the Bible and see how short the four gospels are, I can confuse their economy with the span of time they take place in. It feels like three months, not three years.

It's hard to get my hands around the idea that these things happened. It's somehow become easier to see them as stories that have meaning for my life today than as something that took place on this very earth, albeit 2000 years ago. But they happened and that stirs up all sorts of questions.

When Jesus turned water into wine for his friends' wedding, did He already feel the weight of what was coming three years later? If I were in His shoes, it seems like it'd be a far-off concept, not an approaching reality. What was the second year like? In that borderline heretical part of my mind, I think it might have been kind of tedious at times - like "Okay, let's get this thing going!"? But was it always thrilling? It sounds like it would be, but it also sounds like it happened in a few months time. What was the beginning of year three like? Was it starting to get more real? Had it always been real? Was there a new sense of urgency to His work?

Imagine how close you'd feel to a small group of people after three years of constant togetherness. Imagine how much you could get done if you set out with aims that you would judge all of your choices by: Demonstrate and proclaim the Kingdom and take your disciples deep enough that they'll continue the work.

In three years, Jesus set enough things in motion to change the world. I'm not Jesus, but I am invited to be crucified with Him. I'm invited to continue His work. What has that meant for my life?

What could I do in three years? Could I change Chicago? My neighborhood? My building? My office? A year from now, what will I wish I had done less of? What will I wish I had done more of? How does my place in God's story inform my choices? What could I do in three years if I took seriously God's call?

Whiteboard Therapy: Not Praying For Your Church

2007-01-30T16:00:00.000-06:00

Whiteboard Therapy: Wherein together we create an online Bible study in the comments section. All are welcome, no comment or question is too simple or too challenging. We can work out our faith together as a community, with permission to change your mind (or, erase any thought like a whiteboard).

Maybe the verse this week won't be as radical to other people as it is to me, but this really challenged me all week, and I want to unpack it together.

Samuel's Farewell Address

“As for me, I will certainly not sin against the Lord by ending my prayers for you. And I will continue to teach you what is good and right." - 1 Samuel 12:23

I've heard it said that "It's easy to pray for the things you love", which convicted me because I find myself praying for my wife and I and all too often ending it there. I think it's good for our souls and good for our church for all of its people to pray for it. That makes a lot of sense to me. But...

If we can take this as it is written, it appears that not praying for your community is actually a sin.

Some questions I want to think about:
Why would this be a sin?

How does not praying for our communities separate us from God?

Is it only a sin for Samuel to not pray for his people, because he was Israel's judge? Or is it a sin for anyone to not pray for the corporate community?

And, on a more subjective note, what things do you pray for that you wished everyone prayed for? I've recently started praying for my city's leaders and activist groups, the ministries going on outside my own church, and the people who are in poverty here. And it's filled my soul in a way I didn't see coming. What do you pray for that takes you outside of yourself?

Hope to see you in the comments!

Whiteboard Therapy: An Ebenezer

2007-01-26T07:45:00.000-06:00

Here's a very brief recap of the Whiteboard Therapy project:

I'd like to invite you to interpret scripture so that we can apply it to our lives. Let's "work out our faith" as a community. Each Thursday I'm going to put something up and make sure it doesn't leave the front page until the following Thursday. It's okay to be wrong and it's okay to be right. I want this to be a safe space to throw out ideas and dig in together. There are no thoughts too simple, no questions too basic. You can even just ask your own questions and I'll post them to the list of questions. Feel free to post as often as you'd like, and anyone can comment, not just Blogger users. For more information, read this.

1 Samuel 7:12 (NLT)
"Samuel then took a large stone and placed it between the towns of Mizpah and Jeshanah. He named it Ebenezer (which means “the stone of help”), for he said, “Up to this point the Lord has helped us!”"

Questions to get us started:
Why did Samuel raise the Ebenezer?
How do you think it helped the Israelites?
Would it ever be helpful if the Church could plant an Ebenezer?
Would it ever be helpful for you to plant an Ebenezer?
Are Church buildings, sculptures and statues like an Ebenezer?
Can an Ebenezer be in your mind, or is the physical reminder necessary?
What are some practical ways we can plant an Ebenezer today?

As always, there are no set answers I have for these questions. I want to discover what this means together, drawing on our knowledge, studies, experiences and relationship with God.

photo "Stone Balanced Tower" by Gilest

Whiteboard Therapy: Jephthah's Vow

2007-01-18T15:33:00.000-06:00

Here's a very brief recap of the Whiteboard Therapy project:

I'd like to invite you to interpret scripture so that we can apply it to our lives. Let's "work out our faith" together, as a community. Each Thursday I'm going to put something up and make sure it doesn't leave the front page until the following Thursday. It's okay to be wrong and it's okay to be right. I want this to be a safe space to throw out ideas and dig in together. There are no thoughts too simple, no questions too basic. You can even just ask your own questions. Feel free to post as often as you'd like, and anyone can comment, not just Blogger users. For more information, read this.

We're going to start off with a story in Judges that really caught me off guard. I've been wrestling with it for the last week and I really want to hear the thoughts of my brothers and sisters.

Background Information
Israel occupied the land conquered under Joshua, but they did not name a king to lead them. They were under continuous peril, but they turned again and again to other gods. When they understood their sins, they cried out to God, who heard them and appointed someone (a "judge") to lead them. This leader would win the battle and free the Israelites from their oppression, but they ultimately deteriorated again and again into moral and spiritual depravity.

One of these stories is of Jephthah, the illegitimate son of an upper class member of Gilead. His half-brothers cast him out of the land and he wandered for years, along with a band of misfits and rebels.

At one point, Israel became desperate for a leader and decided that whoever would lead them in victory over their enemies would be appointed ruler over all of Gilead. It is said that years of wandering deepened his faith and God's spirit came on him. He first tried a peaceful solution against his enemies, the Ammonites, but went into battle and was victorious. That's where we'll begin this week.

(Other notable scriptures pertaining to this passage are Leviticus 18:21, Deuteronomy 12:31, 2 Kings 3:27 and Numbers 30:2)

Judges 11:29-40 (NLT)

At that time the Spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah, and he went throughout the land of Gilead and Manasseh, including Mizpah in Gilead, and from there he led an army against the Ammonites. And Jephthah made a vow to the Lord. He said, “If you give me victory over the Ammonites, I will give to the Lord whatever comes out of my house to meet me when I return in triumph. I will sacrifice it as a burnt offering.”
So Jephthah led his army against the Ammonites, and the Lord gave him victory. He crushed the Ammonites, devastating about twenty towns from Aroer to an area near Minnith and as far away as Abel-keramim. In this way Israel defeated the Ammonites.
When Jephthah returned home to Mizpah, his daughter came out to meet him, playing on a tambourine and dancing for joy. She was his one and only child; he had no other sons or daughters. When he saw her, he tore his clothes in anguish. “Oh, my daughter!” he cried out. “You have completely destroyed me! You’ve brought disaster on me! For I have made a vow to the Lord, and I cannot take it back.”
And she said, “Father, if you have made a vow to the Lord, you must do to me what you have vowed, for the Lord has given you a great victory over your enemies, the Ammonites. But first let me do this one thing: Let me go up and roam in the hills and weep with my friends for two months, because I will die a virgin.”
“You may go,” Jephthah said. And he sent her away for two months. She and her friends went into the hills and wept because she would never have children. When she returned home, her father kept the vow he had made, and she died a virgin.
So it has become a custom in Israel for young Israelite women to go away for four days each year to lament the fate of Jephthah’s daughter.

Some starter questions:
What reflections do you have about this story?
What does this story tell us about God? What does it tell us about Jephthah?
If Jephthah had been cast out, why is he so excited to rule the town that cast him out?
Was his vow rash? Why did he make it?
What ways can we apply this story into our own lives?
His vow forced him to make a decision between two laws (Lev. 18:21 & Deut. 12:31 vs. Numbers 30:2). What are your thoughts about that?
How could the story of Abraham & Isaac inform this story?
Does this story tell us anything about Jesus' sacrifice?

Remember, I don't know the answers to these questions - I want to discover them together. If any of us come up with other good questions in the comments, I'll post them here. I'll post my own thoughts in the comments section soon.

Thanks for being a part of this discussion!

Mary (Lazarus five)

2007-01-16T23:59:00.000-06:00

Then [Martha] returned to Mary. She called Mary aside from the mourners and told her, “The Teacher is here and wants to see you.” So Mary immediately went to him. - John 11:28-29

Some Background Information
Here’s what we know about Mary. There are three stories in the Bible that are very similar, but each a little different. In Mark 14, Luke 7 and John 12, Jesus is eating in the home of someone (a sinful but cured Leper named Simon, a Pharisee named Simon, and Lazarus, brother of Mary, rose from the dead, namesake of this series). In each story, a version of this happens: A woman pours expensive perfume on Jesus. In each story, someone is upset that this has happened - in the first text it is several people in the room, in the second text, it is Simon the leper Pharisee (apparently), and in the third story it is Judas Iscariot that speaks out against what’s happened.

In the first story, people are outraged that she’s wasted such an expensive jar of perfume, which could have been sold and the money given to the poor. Jesus replies:

“Leave her alone. Why criticize her for doing such a good thing to me? You will always have the poor among you, and you can help them whenever you want to. But you will not always have me. She has done what she could and has anointed my body for burial ahead of time. I tell you the truth, wherever the Good News is preached throughout the world, this woman’s deed will be remembered and discussed.”

In the second story, “the woman knelt behind Jesus at his feet and she was weeping. Her tears fell on his feet and she wiped them off with her hair. Then she kept kissing his feet and putting perfume on them.” Simon the Pharisee, the host of the meal, doubts Jesus is a prophet, because he’s allowing a sinful woman to touch him. This of course becomes more interesting if the Simon here is the same Simon from the first story, the one who Jesus healed of leprosy. Anyway, Jesus replies:

“Simon,” he said to the Pharisee, “I have something to say to you.”

“Go ahead, Teacher,” Simon replied.

Then Jesus told him this story: “A man loaned money to two people—500 pieces of silver to one and 50 pieces to the other. But neither of them could repay him, so he kindly forgave them both, canceling their debts. Who do you suppose loved him more after that?”

Simon answered, “I suppose the one for whom he canceled the larger debt.”

“That’s right,” Jesus said. Then he turned to the woman and said to Simon, “Look at this woman kneeling here. When I entered your home, you didn’t offer me water to wash the dust from my feet, but she has washed them with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You didn’t greet me with a kiss, but from the time I first came in, she has not stopped kissing my feet. You neglected the courtesy of olive oil to anoint my head, but she has anointed my feet with rare perfume.

“I tell you, her sins—and they are many—have been forgiven, so she has shown me much love. But a person who is forgiven little shows only little love.” Then Jesus said to the woman, “Your sins are forgiven.”

The plot thickens.

In the third story, after they are finished eating in the house of Lazarus (where Martha once again served dinner, which we’ll get to in a second), Mary pours a jar of perfume on Jesus’ feet and wipes them with her hair. Judas (the apostle who betrayed Jesus) gets angry that she wasted an expensive jar (remind you of another story?). Jesus replied:

“Leave her alone. She did this in preparation for my burial. You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.”

I did some digging, and it seems as though scholars agree that this is the same woman in each story, our Mary. Remember also that Mary, in the book of Luke, sits at Jesus’ feet while Martha works and cooks. Jesus says that Mary has found the only thing worth being concerned about.

So what do we know about Mary? She’s a sinner whose been forgiven a multitude of sins. She displays a ton of emotion and passion. She’s dramatic. She understands Jesus to be her Lord and Savior, and she’s let that sink deep down into her soul. This is good to think about as we return to the Lazarus story.

Mary and Jesus

Jesus had stayed outside the village, at the place where Martha met him. When the people who were at the house consoling Mary saw her leave so hastily, they assumed she was going to Lazarus’s grave to weep. So they followed her there. When Mary arrived and saw Jesus, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if only you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

When Jesus saw her weeping and saw the other people wailing with her, a deep anger welled up within him, and he was deeply troubled. “Where have you put him?” he asked them. - John 11:30-34

Now, Mary chose not to go with Martha the first time, and I assume she knew where Martha was going. Martha has to come back and basically order her to go see Jesus. She’s been weeping, she’s torn up. Again Jesus makes her come to him.

What was that walk like? This is the other side of the same coin that is the Martha/Mary relationship. Where Martha tells Jesus she’s disappointed and then immediately qualifies that she still thinks his will is good, Mary doesn’t add the qualifier.

The crowd follows Mary, who left in a hurry, but they didn’t follow Martha. Given what we know about the two of them, this isn’t that surprising, as Mary would almost certainly be showing more emotion - her highs almost necessarily reveal her lows. And I feel like she lets Jesus have it. She, too, isn't fuzzy on what Jesus is capable of.

(Brief aside: You have no idea how badly I want to compare this to Connie-Michael scene in the Godfather after Michael’s had her husband killed. This is nothing like that, which I can't stress enough, but I imagine Mary feels a bit like Connie did. So if you know the reference, take what’s worthwhile there and throw the rest of the comparison away)

And Jesus responds to her in a much different way than Martha. With Martha, he gave her a chance to work through some stuff in her head. But Mary collapses and weeps, and the rest of the crowd starts to wail, and Jesus responds with a deep anger, which I’ve always understood as his response to the agony and grief caused by the fall, sin and death.

The Mary Side of Healing
When it comes to healing and relying on Jesus, there’s a Martha side to me and a Mary side to me. The Mary side of me understands that Jesus is so severely beautiful, that I can’t fathom why he doesn’t answer every prayer for healing that gets sent his way. There’s grieving and getting mad at God. When God doesn’t come through the way I wanted Him to, there’s a sense of betrayal. Like Mary falling at his feet, I experience this emotion blend with a sense of reverance. That’s a tough place to be. And I imagine that most Christians feel this at one point or another, although I bet almost none of us would admit to it, for fear of sounding doubtful of God’s goodness.

But as I read through the Bible, especially the Psalms, I recognize that God isn’t afraid of the hard questions. He seems willing to work in those questions some miraculous answers. He only asks that you ask those questions in front of Him.

I watch Jesus respond to that feeling by being angry and troubled, and it gives me hope that in our darkest moments, sometimes Jesus will say “Where have you put him?” and begin a story of redemption where before there was only pain.

Whiteboard Therapy

2007-01-11T19:26:00.000-06:00

I'd like it if everyone could read this whole post. You'll see why in a few minutes.

I call some of these posts 'whiteboard therapy'. Simply put, it means that I'm working through thoughts with the freedom to erase. I believe that to really let the Bible touch our deepest places, we must have permission to be wrong from time to time. I also believe that we need permission to be right (far less easy to swallow in our society).

To partake in whiteboard therapy, one must carefully and reverently tread in a land where the Word itself is sacred, but man's interpretation of the Word is not. This isn't to say that existing interpretations are wrong, just that I want to arrive at them for myself, so that I can own them and live them with greater fortification and conviction. You may be familiar with the term 'sacred cows', as in "we're starving to death, but we can't eat this cow because it is sacred." It's kind of like that. If I'm going to interpret the Word, I need permission to be wrong and permission to be right. If we're starving with pat answers and interpretations that have lost their meaning, we don't have to blindly follow. We can reclaim them, understand them more fully, and on that rare occasion, allow the Spirit to show us something completely new in the text.

"For where two or three gather together as my followers, I am there among them.” - Matthew 18:20 (NLT)

We also need a community to interpret with. I like group Bible study because there are people to watch out for each other and to make sure we aren't straying into un-Godly territory. I'd like this blog to be a place for that online. Currently there are about 100 unique users coming here each week, yet it's only once in awhile that anyone posts a comment. So I'm going to try something new, and hopefully it will catch on.

I'd like to invite you to interpret scripture so that we can apply it to our lives. Each Thursday I'm going to put something up and make sure it doesn't leave the front page until the following Thursday. It's okay to be wrong and it's okay to be right. I'd also like it if you wouldn't post anonymously, because I want this to be a safe space to throw out ideas and dig in together, and because I believe that Jesus wants to free us from having to hide who we are and what we think. However, if posting anonymously is the only way you feel comfortable posting, it's okay to do so.

So that's the plan. I'll post the first one this time next week. Let's pray:

Father, as we interpret your word here and in our lives, we ask for a special blessing. We pray that your Spirit will guide us and teach us. We pray that you will give us wisdom and knowledge so that we can understand these things for ourselves and live them more fully in our lives. May your glory burst forth both in your word and in the lives of those who meditate on it day and night. Amen.

Martha (Lazarus - four)

2007-01-09T14:00:00.000-06:00

In the Lazarus story, the women take center stage. Let’s look at Martha today, and then we’ll look at Mary later on. Setting the scene: Bethany is close to Jerusalem, so a big crowd has gathered to mourn with Mary and Martha over the death of their brother, which happened four days prior.

Martha and Jesus
Martha goes to meet Jesus outside of the village. Jesus doesn’t go to her, but instead asks her to walk to Him. I wonder what that walk must have been like for Martha. She is disappointed that God didn’t come through the way she wanted Him to. I imagine that stings for her in a deeper way since these are people who have shown love to Jesus since the day they met, and people who know what He is capable of. They know His heart is to cease suffering and pain, and they’ve watched Him perform miracles, they know He can heal and wants to heal.

She gets there and says: “Lord, if only you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask.”

That sounds like a distant relative of the backhanded compliment. She acknowledges what He was capable of doing but chose not to do, but it has not caused her faith to cease, and her understanding of who Jesus is allows her to find hope amongst deep loss and sadness. Of course, we find comfort in knowing that what Jesus asked for was for Lazarus to be rise from the dead.

When Jesus arrived at Bethany, he was told that Lazarus had already been in his grave for four days. Bethany was only a few miles down the road from Jerusalem, and many of the people had come to console Martha and Mary in their loss. When Martha got word that Jesus was coming, she went to meet him. But Mary stayed in the house. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if only you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask.”

Jesus told her, “Your brother will rise again.”

“Yes,” Martha said, “he will rise when everyone else rises, at the last day.”

Jesus told her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying. Everyone who lives in me and believes in me will never ever die. Do you believe this, Martha?”

“Yes, Lord,” she told him. “I have always believed you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who has come into the world from God.” (John 11:17-27 NLT)

Some Background Information
Here’s what we know about Martha: In the book of Luke, Jesus comes to a dinner with her and Mary, and she spends their time together cooking and working, while her sister Mary sits at Jesus' feet. "Doesn't it seem unfair that Mary sits while I cook?" she asks. Jesus tells her that she's focused on all of the details, but that there is only one thing worth being concerned about, something that Mary understands; something lasting that won't be taken away.

Martha spent that day doing and performing and trying to please everyone, rather than stopping and living in the moment, just being in Jesus’ presence. Sounds like someone who tries their whole life not to sin, but never talks to their Creator the way a child would talk to a parent. The Von Trapp God. Martha reminds me of someone who is ignoring the wonder and excitement of life, as well as the deep sorrow and grief that comes with it. She reminds me of someone who hasn't really given much thought as to how huge this man she calls Messiah is. I know people like that (sometimes I am people like that). They (we) don't question, don't think, don't read beyond the surface of the page. She's not the psalmist, questioning and yelling and crying and praising. What I've seen in my life is that if I let that numbness set in, as a defense maybe, it makes its way into every area of my life, until I reach a point where I either blow up or deflate.

On the flipside, Martha still believes Jesus is the Son of God. I think it takes great strength and fortitude to not toss your faith aside when it comes to a loved one dying, especially if you’ve relied on God and believed God and served God faithfully. Martha is someone whose own faith challenges mine.

The Martha Side of Healing
Jesus speaks something on two levels - metaphorical and literal - her brother would rise again - and Martha hears or understands only the metaphorical, future part of it (that certainly still happens today). Then Jesus responds to her in that Jesus-y way (where He answers a question she didn’t ask, or responds to a statement she didn’t make). I wonder what his purpose was with this statement. Was it to give Martha a chance to remind herself who He claimed to be? Was it to make sure that His eternal messages weren’t tossed aside given the hugeness of the miracle He would perform that day? Was He teaching Martha?

When it comes to healing and relying on Jesus, there is a Martha side of me and a Mary side of me (which I’ll go into next). The Martha side of me keeps pleasing, keeps ignoring, keeps moving. I need a Jesus who will ask me to walk to Him, a Jesus who will give me opportunities to think about what I believe. I need a Jesus who recognizes that what I’m doing, I do out of a desire to serve and love Him, even if there are more ideal ways for me to experience His love.

He meets us where we’re at. He knows what we need, even when it doesn’t seem like what we need. And when I see only eternal messages where there are also messages for here and now, it’s good for my soul to know that the here and now doesn’t need me to grasp the here and now in order for it to happen.

What does a Feeding Trough have to do with Christmas?

2006-12-22T14:00:00.000-06:00

What if every Christmas people got together and sung:

"Away in a feeding trough, no crib for a bed, the little Lord Jesus laid down His sweet head..."

(In vintage High School essay style) Webster's dictionary defines a manger as "a trough or open box in a stable designed to hold feed or fodder for livestock."

The angel appeared to Mary and told her that she would conceive and give birth to a son and that "He will be very great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David. And he will reign over Israel forever, his Kingdom will never end!" (Luke 1:30-33)

God humbled Himself and became human. He hung out with lepers and sinners and tax collectors, and it all started when He was born in a stable amongst farm animals, using a feeding trough as His bed.

And while they were there, the time came for her baby to be born. She gave birth to her first child, a son. She wrapped him snugly in strips of cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no lodging available for them. (Luke 2:6-8)

The Prince of Peace slept in a feeding trough on his first night on earth. The savior that billions of people for two thousand years have asked to rearrange their life was born in the lowliest, most humiliating standards of living.

This Christmas we will sing, pray, take communion and listen to a sermon; We will have fellowship, laugh, tell stories, maybe cry a little; We will exchange gifts, watch old movies, stuff our faces with ham and turkey and stuffing, and hang stockings on mantlepieces. And I hope that somewhere in there, I can make the time to reflect on what it means for my life that my Savior began His life in the humblest of settings, that He lived His life as a servant to all people, and that the Son of God brought peace not with a sword, but by dying on a cross.

This Christmas, when I sing, I want to sing as if God Himself were in the room. When I take communion, I want to eat as if God and His Church were sitting down for a meal. When I pray, I want to pray as it God is actually listening. When I listen to a sermon, I want to hear what God Himself is saying. I believe that all of those things are true this week and every week and every minute of every day. One of the reasons I believe them is because this story didn't begin the way other stories of redemption, prosperity and peace begin. It didn't begin with the highest and the mightiest calling down orders from their ivory tower; It began with God Himself coming and serving and going through everything we go through.

I want to see God in the fellowship, in the laughter, in the stories. I even want to search for God in the traditions and rituals we've created for this season (even in the turkey and stuffing if He's there).

And I want to think about the advent themes of joy, peace, hope and love through the eyes of a newborn Savior, born in a feeding trough and praised by shepherds.

Merry Christmas everyone, see you after the holidays!

Year-End Lists: Top 15 Albums

2006-12-21T15:47:00.000-06:00

Which brings us to my favorite list to think about, my favorite albums of the year.

Dave's Top 15 Albums of 2006

15. Ghostface Killah - Fishscale
Most of the rap music I heard this year drowned in misogyny, skits and boring beats and lyrics. Fishscale had the skits, it had its share of misogyny (the main reason I rarely listen to it, and why it's at the bottom), a title that announced it's lyrical starting point, but it's got beats and wordplay right up there with the best rap albums of the last five years.

14. Ray LaMontagne - Till the Sun Turns Black
~~If Nick Drake was a woman and he had a kid with Van Morrison~~ Ray LaMontagne reaches into the Van Morrison / Nick Drake bag of tricks and finds his own voice. This is my favorite album of the year for those introspective moments in life.

13. Beirut - Fulag Orkestar
I've heard it described as Balkan wedding marches, and that's accurate, but it doesn't capture the warm, vibrant and refreshing sounds led by New Mexico-to New York's Zach Condon. If I would've heard it earlier it might have been a top ten album.

12. Rodrigo y Gabriela - Rodrigo y Gabriela
This is your basic "Boy meets girl in a heavy metal band in Mexico, metal band breaks up, boy and girl discover mutual love of flamenco, folk, rock and Spanish music, boy and girl move to Europe, find growing buzz behind a mythical live show, find a producer that helps them get their live show sound in the studio, cut album, and watch said album debut at #1 in Ireland" story. Really fun, really exciting, creative music. This is the 2006 album I expect to grow on me the most in the coming years.

11. The Roots - Game Theory
The Roots parts have often been greater than their sum. The main draw has been hip hop with live instrumentation, and they are indeed one of the most talented bands working today. They have the ability to groove like Marvin Gaye, tear it up like Bad Brains and write songs that stick to the roof of your mouth like caramel. But their albums usually been all over the place - a handful of classic songs surrounded by a bloated amount of filler. And even the albums that are packed with classic songs and little filler never seemed to work as albums, merely as collections of songs.

With "Game Theory" all that has changed. The musicians remain at the top of their game, but this time they have something to say. The emcee Black Thought takes on the war, Katrina, white collar crime and more, the pace rarely lets up and the band delivers an album that flows perfectly (well, almost - that last track can be hard to get through) and is cohesive, a hallmark of my favorite albums. It's the Roots finally getting it right. Now if they'll add that trademark funk and soul back into their sound, maybe they could knock one out of the park.

10. TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain
I had an on-again off-again relationship with TV on the Radio this year. One week I thought the album was brilliant and played it constantly, the next I thought it was overrated, incoherent and I didn't bother. But from time to time a song would pop up on shuffle ("Hours", "Province" and "Wolf Like Me" being the usual suspects) that made me rethink my renunciation of the band and redeclare their greatness, iPod style. Lather, rinse, repeat. This sounds like nothing else out there today - something like a barbershop quartet trapped in a mudslide, pounding on drums and yelling for help - and once it gets under your skin, all you can do is give in and pay attention.

9. Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere
When my friends and I heard "Crazy" early this year, we all assumed it was going to be absolutely huge. We were right of course, and patted ourselves on the back as DangerMouse and Cee-Lo claimed the world's ear on behalf of geeks everywhere. But sometimes I wished "Crazy" wouldn't have been the most overplayed song of the year. St. Elsewhere is a creative and infectious album that I rarely listen to thanks to hearing "Crazy" over and over again. But it's still fantastic and sometime in March or April I'm sure it will once again be a staple in my listening rotation.

8. The DFA - Remixes Chapter One (and two)
The DFA (James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem and Tim Goldsworthy) made music meant for the dance floor accessible for the living room. Here, many of their numerous remixes from the last few years are collected in one place. Being a compilation, it probably doesn't belong on a proper list, but this was an album that I listened to over and over again for months. Even though each track has its own personality and were created without the intention of being an album, it somehow works as a cohesive album. Presumably to make more money, these were released as two separate discs, and I think the first one works better front to back. No matter what, it's worth checking out, whether your a rave guru or just a casual music fan with a car stereo.

7. Subtle - for hero: for fool
For my money, this was the best rap album of the year, featuring a man with an ~~odd~~ unique voice named Dose One. The band has performed together for years, and this current partnership is apparently going to yield a trilogy of albums. "For hero: for fool" is the second in this trilogy, and it works the way any middle feature should - it moves everything up a notch, it opens up tons of possibilities, it captures the strengths of the original, builds on them and adds new tricks that fit seamlessly with the old tricks. It's an album that requires multiple dedicated listens - each listen will unearth new depths of each song, and the album will slowly reveal itself as a modern day masterpiece.

6. Incubus - Light Grenades
For many years I've counted Incubus amongst my very favorite bands. I've loved every release, and Make Yourself is right up there with my all-time favorites. They've got my number - something they do, the way they write, the way they play, the way Brandon sings and others harmonize, hits my sweet spot. So I waited all year to see if this, finally, would be the seminal album the fanboys know Incubus is capable of making. They've got talent most casual fans don't know about, with roots in funk, rock, punk, soul and of course, power pop. Their live show is excellent, and they've all proven themselves to be capable improvisational musicians.

Light Grenades, then, is the next step in their ongoing evolution as a band. It's not the album I wanted it to be - too many cheesy lyrics, too many chances passed up, too much of Brandon O'Brien's loud, compressed, muddy sound. Most of it sounds tame and pleasant. Which is not to say it's bad - it's very very good mainstream pop that moonlights as power ballads. But this is a band that can pull off something no one else is pulling off. Witness the harmonies on "Pendulous Threads", the chest-slapping-as-percussion-instrument of "Paper Shoes", or DJ Killmore taking out his rage on a variety of pianos and jazz organs, most notably on "Rogues". Witness the best track At the Drive-In didn't make in the title track. Even the sloppy and unfinished pair of "Earth to Bella" tracks are as beautiful as ever.

But in the end, it's an uneven album with some truly uninspired lyrics, and a couple ideas that I think should've been fleshed out more ("Paper Shoes" is missing something, "Earth to Bella" uses the same lyric too many times, "Diamonds and Coal" shouldn't take the easy way out by substituting its chorus as a lyric just to fill the rhyme requirement). It's best moments point to a band that's capable of proving the nay-sayers wrong, and I'll be happily listening to it a year from now, at least in shuffle form.

5. Pearl Jam - Pearl Jam
If you liked Pearl Jam at any point in your life, pick this up and prepare to be taken back to the early 90s via the early-to-mid 70s. The lyrics are coherent and pointed, the arena-ready anthems are as good as ever, and everything comes together for a band that I was ready to put in the 'fond memories' pile. They've still got it.

4. Voxtrot - Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives EP / Your Biggest Fan (single)
It's not a proper album (they have two 5-song EPs and a 3-song single, but no full length yet), but for the price of a normal album you can own both of these mini-albums, so I'm coupling them together and charting them high.

Voxtrot is a musical ambush, with all weapons firing. Once the guitar, piano, bass and drums kick in, they never let up until the final track on Your Biggest Fan. It's that track, "Sway", that brings it this far up on my list of favorites. It sounds like it would've worked fine sped up, but they allow it to perculate slowly, adding instrumentation as they go along that's subtle, does what it came to do, and then makes room for the next violin or piano swell. It's beautiful and it points to a band that's capable of making one of the all-time great albums. Now if they'd just release a proper album for us.

3. Cold War Kids - Robbers & Cowards
This is "not a Christian band" that met at an evangelical Christian college and tells stories of sin, repentance and redemption. The music is part-garage rock, part-fallen gospel choir, that sounds like the soundtrack of a revival breaking out in a barroom. Nathan Willett provides the vocals and piano, and his squeal is of the love-it-or-hate-it variety. The band sounds like it's taking their numerous instruments and beating them up, creating music that's alive and vivid. It's mostly a collection of their three EPs ( although there's good stuff left off of the album from those same EPs) and it's all re-recorded to give it a meatier sound. That all stops it from sounding cohesive front to back, something I hope they can pull off on their next release. Until then, I'll happily turn this one up to eleven.

2. Ned Collette - Jokes & Trials
This came out of absolutely nowhere. I downloaded an MP3 from CokeMachineGlow, that was relatively buried in the site, that would quickly become my favorite track of the year. With some birthday money, I splurged and downloaded the album from his site. See, Ned's from Australia, and his album isn't available in America. Luckily, he's got the whole thing available for download (at a high bitrate, if that matters to you) for a little more than 15 bucks.

On the surface, Ned Collette is a folk singer. But each song takes on a life of its own and runs away from the folk label with weird electronic elements, random synthesizer solos, slide guitars that don't sound like country, Velvet Undergound-ish dirges, choir-like moments that sound like his friends got together and sang in a circle, and Ned's deliberate, perfect voice. The arrangements are already the work of a master, and since this is his solo debut, I'm hoping there's a long career ahead for him to explore and create music to sleep in to, fall in love to, drive in the rain to, relax to, write to, live to.

Which brings us to...

1. The Black Keys - Chulahoma EP
The Black Keys are Dan Auerbach on vocals and guitar, and Patrick Carney on Drums. They don't use overdubs, so Dan's playing bass here as well. The music sounds full and warm. There's a primal quality to it, music to hunt and gather to. It's the best rack of ribs you've ever eaten: ribs that are so tender and juicy, they fall off the bone and fall apart in your mouth, swimming in the best barbecue sauce summer can buy. It's raw and dirty, it's spit-shined, not polished. There's not a wasted note on the album, and for a half hour each note seems more substantial than the last - they're songs that will work their way into your head and work you over until you're a pile of cathartic joy.

Released back in May to finish up a record deal before they moved to a different label, I thought this would be a nice diversion until they released their next full length later in 2006. It's a short collection of Junior Kimbrough covers, a Mississippi Delta blues guitarist with a unique, trance-like style that's hard to imitate and clearly a hero of the Black Keys.

It's only six songs. Six blues songs performed by two people. It's under a half hour in length and it consists entirely of covers. But it was the album I played and enjoyed the most in 2006, one that I will mark as indispensable in my music collection.

Year-End Lists: Top 15 Songs

2006-12-19T13:35:00.000-06:00

Here are my top 15 songs of the year. Although these are numbered 1-15 to represent which was my most favorite (1), the whole thing works (pretty) well as a mix in the same order.

Where an official MP3 is available, I'll provide a link (MP3) that you can right-click/save. Otherwise I'll provide the last MP3 blog I saw it posted at. And since the internet is allowing us to actually hear most of these, I'm going to forgo the commentary. Edit: I changed the order of these slightly after I initially posted them. Am I being obsessive? You be the judge.

Dave's Top 15 Songs of 2006

15. "Cowbell" by Tapes 'n Tapes | MP3

14. "In the Round" by The Cardigans

13. "Lowlife" - Scanners | MP3

12. "Wolf Like Me" by TV on the Radio | Link

11. "Three More Days" by Ray LaMontagne | Link

10. "Crazy"- Gnarls Barkley

9. "Gravity's Rainbow" by The Klaxons | MP3

8. "The Fatalist" by Robbers on High Street | MP3

7. "Postcards from Italy" by Beirut (The first two minutes are good, but around 2:00 the song goes in a different direction and it's fantastic) | MP3

6. "Chicago" (Adult Contemporary Easy Listening Version) by Sufjan Stevens | Link

5. "Trouble" by Voxtrot | MP3

4. "Young Folks" by Peter Bjorn and John | MP3

3. "Ta Douleur" by Camille | MP3

2 . "We Used to Vacation" by Cold War Kids | Link

1. "The Laughter Across the Street" by Ned Collette (The last half of this song is out of this world) | MP3

"O Holy Night"

2006-12-11T12:43:00.000-06:00

My wife and I have been watching Studio 60 this season (which, now that it's stopped preaching at us every week and focused on the story and characters, is a really good show). Last week they had a Christmas episode which was beautifully done, especially the final scene, an extended musical scene featuring performers from the Tipitina's Foundation, an organization that's helping musicians affected by Katrina.

They played the most beautiful arrangement of a Christmas song I've ever heard, "O Holy Night," featuring:

Troy Andrews, Trumpet
Kirk Joseph, Sousaphone
Roderick Paulin, Saxophone
Frederick Shepherd, Saxophone
Stephen Walker, Trombone
Mervin "Kid Merv" Campbell, Trumpet
Bob French, Drums

It's available as a free download at www.nbc.com/studio60, or you can right click/save this link.

It's Christmastime in the City

2006-12-07T11:53:00.000-06:00

Someone asked me a couple weeks ago if I was in the Christmas spirit, and since it was still more than 60 degrees outside in late November, I wasn't feeling it. But now that our tree is up, the weather outside is frightful and we're well into December, I'm officially in the Christmas spirit.

This season is special for Jesus reasons, but it's also special for all the joy it musters up inside of me. Something about it makes me feel like a kid again. It gives us a taste of what the world would be right if everything was as it should be. I like making lists, so I made a top ten list of all the superficial reasons I love the Christmas season:

(10) Driving around and looking at all of the houses that have been magnificently illuminated (I'll admit that this was better in Iowa.)

(9) Massive Nativity scenes (Like the ones in front of Churches or random houses that you can see a mile away.)

(8) All the Christmas characters (Including, but not limited to: Santa, the elves, the Grinch, Rudolph, Frosty and anyone featured in the Rankin-Bass cartoons.)

(7) Candy canes (The original mint kind, not the weird multi-colored ones. Strangely, I don't like regular old mints all that much.)

(6) Bundling up and dropping change in the Bell Ringer's jars (This is my favorite time of the year to go to the grocery store. Everyone's in scarves, gloves, coats, sweaters, shirts, undershirts and some form of a hat or earmuffs, and it's still frigid, yet we're all willing to stand around in the cold rummaging through our many pockets for loose change.)

(5) Taking a nap by a Christmas tree (We put up a tree this year, and it brings a boderline-supernatural sense of peace to the room)

(4) Downtown Chicago (The Daley Center Christmas Tree, all the other hundreds of trees, the horns, the lions at the Art Institute, the Marshall Fields/Macy's windows, the skating rink at Millenium park, the street musicians playing Christmas songs, Magnificent Mile lights, FAO Schwartz, carriage rides and all the rest. There's no place like Chicago during the holidays.)

(3) "It's a Wonderful Life" (I've seen it enough now that I can enter in at any time and I'll be a puddle afterwards. How can Christmas be Christmas without:

"My mouth's bleeding, Burt! My mouth's bleeding! Zuzu's petals...Zuzu's petals!"

"Mr. Gower cabeled you need cash, stop. My office instructed to advance you up to twenty-five thousand dollars, stop. Hee Haw and Merry Christmas! Sam Wainwright."

"A toast to my big brother George: The richest man in town."

"Happy New Year to you... in jail."

"George Bailey, I'll love you 'til the day I die. "

"This is a very interesting situation! "

"He's making violent love to me, mother! "

"You speak for yourself, Miss B. "

"I wish they were rabbits."

"Every man on that transport died! Harry wasn't there to save them, because you weren't there to save Harry."

"Ah, youth is wasted on the wrong people."

Case in point: As I was typing these quotes up, the tears started coming. Other than Shawshank, no movie affects me the way this one does. I miss when this was on 24-7 for weeks at a time. Watching it on DVD just isn't the same.)

(2) Snow (In December, I love snow. It gives me good vibes, it brings up good memories, I don't mind walking in it, the cold, the ice or even the fact that our already-feeble amount of parking spots just got cut by a third. In January, I might have a different reaction, but Christmas isn't Christmas without snow.)

(1) Christmas music (Whether in my home, at the store or on WLIT, I love Christmas music. I'm partial to the crooners, the Vince Guaraldi Charlie Brown Christmas music and good jazz renditions of old standards - the John Coltrane variety, not the Kenny G variety. But really any Christmas music puts me in an instantly good mood.)

What are your favorite things about Christmas? Any favorite tunes we should hear, movies we should watch or other Christmas stuff that makes you feel like a kid again?

Clear Eyes

2006-11-30T10:00:00.000-06:00

I'm spending time unpacking Matthew 6:19-24 in preparation for a message/sermon/talk I'm giving at Loyola on Tuesday. Some of this came out of a study we did in our house group, so a tip of my hat to anyone who contributed thoughts that evening. By the way, if anyone has feedback - good or bad - I'd love to hear it in the comments or by e-mailing me.

"The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!" - Matthew 6:22-23

In short, this passage tells me that if I trust God, things will be clear, and if I don't, things will be blurry, even dark.

I've read that 'If your eyes are good' is a Jewish way of saying "if you are generous". When we are generous we become more like Jesus and we experience what it feels like to put our treasures into Heaven. Jesus says that if our eyes are good, our whole body will be full of light, but if our eyes are bad, our whole body will be full of darkness. Since we're in metaphor-land, I think it's safe to pull in the idea that God is light. Here's how I break down the other part:

If we have bad eyes, things get blurry; It's hard to see the road ahead. The times in my life that have felt the blurriest often involve money and security - when I have relied on a job, a paycheck, at-will employment, capitalism and a free market, things never seemed secure. I'd find myself asking questions like "Do I make enough money? Do I have enough money if I were to lose my job tomorrow? Am I saving enough?" In college, I'd ask "Is this the right major for me? Do I have enough contacts? Do I have any contacts? Is my resume lacking? What happens if I fail this class?" Now I ask questions like "What if we get pregnant? What about retirement? Am I saving enough to plant a church?"

Those questions, in and of themselves, are healthy, worthwhile questions. But you can see where the downward spiral begins. I've watched people (including myself) get into a hopeless place by letting these questions consume them. Letting those questions guide your life can lead to a black place. Some words I've heard people use in correlation are hopeless, confusing, darkness and depression.

If there is no light in us, if everything is black, that's a hard place to live. It's hard to see a way out when all we can see is looming debt and more stuff we don't have and less job security.

But if our eyes are good, we see clearly. When I've relied on God for my future, when I've listened and responded to Him, things have become clear. A feeling of security accompanies it, even in the face of overwhelming doubt and despair.

So Jesus says that if we are generous, our whole body will be filled with light. When I'm letting go of my money and trusting God, it becomes easier to trust Him in so many other areas. I experience the sense of peace and surrender that goes along with trusting God with that area of my life. It opens me up to scripture that tells me that God has a plan for me, that God will provide, that God will invite me into His story and give me meaning and fullness in ways that only my creator can.

Treasures

2006-11-29T14:44:00.000-06:00

I'm going to spend the next few days unpacking Matthew 6:19-24 in preparation for a message/sermon/talk I'm giving at Loyola on Tuesday on our calling. Some of this came out of a study we did in our house group, so a tip of my hat to anyone who contributed thoughts that evening.

"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." - Matthew 6:19-21

Since I don't know how to wire-transfer my money to Heaven, I want to explore the here and now applications of this passage. When I see Heaven in the Bible, I associate it with Heavenly things: God, Jesus, freedom, life and hope. And despite the whole earth being filled with God's glory, I see this world, earth, as a place that is not inherently free and not inherently filled with life and hope, at least not yet. So I don't think it's a stretch to substitute those thoughts here - store up for yourselves treasures in God, Jesus, freedom, life and hope, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in an steal.

What are our treasures? Money, to be certain, is a treasure we possess. I can put my money into Heaven on Earth, by giving generously and spending/saving wisely. But I don't think money is the only treasure we possess. If God provides my money, then my treasures are the things that God provides - my gifts, my talents, my energy, ability, creativity and my life. Who God made me to be is a treasure. If we reach back into the 'called' study, then my calling, the feast God is inviting me to, is my treasure.

Jesus is telling us to put the things we do, the way we act, what we are becoming into Heavenly things: Things that bring life, freedom and hope, things that show others who God is, things that make us more like Jesus. We should be willing to protect these things from thieves that steal.

So I need to ask myself some questions:

What things steal me away from becoming who God made me to be?

What things cause the way I want to live to decay and rust?

Am I willing to protect myself from these things?

"For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

When I've given my money away, I've watched my heart follow. When I've horded money for myself, I've watched my heart be filled with the need for more money, more stuff (I'll unpack that idea more fully in the next post). The same should follow then that if I fill my life with things that make me more like Jesus, things that put me in tune with my calling, my heart will follow.

What's Your List?

2006-11-22T10:45:00.000-06:00

A couple months back a wise woman I know named Theresa Decker (who also happens to be my mother-in-law) preached a message that is still swimming around in my heart. I was going to mold this into my own thoughts, but instead I think I just want to put her words out there for everyone to think about. So without further ado...

-------------------------------

"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? - Romans 8:35

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardships or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? That's a weird list until we read about what's happened in Paul's life:

Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my own countrymen, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false brothers. I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked. Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches. Who is weak, and I do not feel weak? Who is led into sin, and I do not inwardly burn? - 2 Corinthians 11:24-29

That was Paul's list. He's speaking out of what he knows.

Here's my list. What will separate me from the love of Christ? Will grief or loneliness or disappointment or failure or depression or illness or death? What is your list?

-------------------------------

Nothing will separate me from the love of Christ. It's hope that's been fortified. It's love that will not fail you. Will stress or anxiety or depression separate me from the love of Christ?

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. - Romans 8:37-39

And finally, for that I am thankful. See you next week!

linkage

2006-11-21T13:42:00.000-06:00

Good reading material, some short, some long.

In the best essay I've ever read on the topic, Stan Gundry talks about women in ministry: Women in Ministry: Can We Change? via JesusCreed.org

Scientists are studying why music gives us the chills at LiveScience.com

People can't accurately predict what will make them happy via The New Yorker

And if you've never read it, take some time to study what it meant to be a disciple in the first century by Ray VanderLaan at FollowTheRabbi.com

His Peace

2006-11-21T11:01:00.000-06:00

Here's my confession: Almost every time I preach or write something that is heard or read by others, I feel like I am auditioning to be a pastor. I feel like if I nail it, people will approve of God's giftings and calling on my life, and if I blow it, I will be seen as a fraud, unfit to plant a church and lead a community of believers. Even just now, I wrote "community of believers" three or four different ways to make sure that I didn't say it wrong and therefore disqualify myself in the eyes of all of you. I feel like if I am to follow Jesus, I need to be able to compete with the writers and preachers who I respect and the ones that America puts on the cover of magazines.

Here's another, more obvious confession: That's exhausting, unsustainable, and it has nothing to do with God's calling on my life.

"All this I have spoken while still with you. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid." - John 14:25-27

How does the world give its peace? From what I understand about the first-century, Casaer created peace by decimating countries and making them conform to his rule. Maybe Jesus is saying that his peace doesn't come by way of losing everything, or having to constantly be perfect.

Jesus gives us the Holy Spirit, revealing His words and empowering us to do His works. John Wimber, Vineyard founder, defined ministry as "meeting the needs of others using God's power." He calls us disciples and says that we are capable of doing everything He did, and even greater things than Him!

Jesus didn't seem to care what the powers that be thought of Him. He spread the message God told Him to spread. He obeyed God's commands even when there were more attractive options. He created miracles in a world that wasn't always receptive of Him creating miracles.

Jesus gives me peace. He gives me reprieve from driving myself crazy trying to guess what everyone thinks of me. He allows me to hear His life-giving voice. He gives me a clear path and purpose: to do His works and proclaim His kingdom. He gives me parameters on my life that allow me to experience life in the full, knowing all of the destructive paths I would wander down otherwise. He gives me permission to be myself and follow the calling on my life and let Him take care of all the rest.

And for that, I'm thankful.

Tomorrow: My list.

Conformed to the likeness

2006-11-20T11:02:00.000-06:00

For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. - Romans 8:29

God made me to be like Jesus, in mind, body and spirit. His will for my life isn't that I'm happy and secure, but that I am conformed to the likeness of His Son. He calls this life to the full. There is joy and peace and security in it that transcends what the world tells us gives joy and peace and security.

What does it mean to be more like Jesus? Jesus loved God and loved others. Jesus heard God's thoughts, spoke God's words and created God's works. Jesus set prisoners free and gave the blind sight, He released the oppressed and proclaimed the Kingdom of God.

He gives us the Holy Spirit, allows us to hear God's thoughts, understand and speak God's words and through them create God's works, whether that's miraculous healings or life-giving conversations, or anything else that brings Heaven to Earth.

Our church places a high value on the power of the Holy Spirit to move in people's lives in supernatural and natural ways. The Vineyard founder, John Wimber, described ministry as meeting the needs of others using God's power. Wimber, who seemingly spent his pastoral life soaked in the spirit of God, watching God move powerfully in people's lives said something else that I keep close to my heart:

"The test of spiritual maturity is not the ability to speak in tongues, prophesy, or memorize scripture. It is the ability to serve God and others through good works. It is in learning to love and serve the unlovely, the less fortunate, the downtrodden, that we fulfill our purpose on earth. But unless we know whom we are in Christ - blessed with all the resources of Heaven - we will always lack the power, love and victory to change the lives of others."

Tomorrow: Who we are in Christ.

November Playlist

2006-11-17T19:54:00.000-06:00

Is November half-over, or do we still have half of November to go?

Anyway, I forgot to post a playlist this month. The playlist is at iTunes, but if you're savvy enough (e.g. you know what Hype Machine is), you can find most of this on the mp3 blogs around the interweb. Here's the link.

Anyway, here's some highlights of what I was listening to in October and into November - in alphabetical order cause iTunes isn't letting me post them in a specific order.

1. Brightblack Morning Light - "All We Have Broken Shines" - Brightblack Morning Light
2. Can Joann - "Indecision's Way" - Hurt People Hurt People
3. The Cardigans - "In the Round" - Super Extra Gravity
4. Cold War Kids - "We Used to Vacation" - Robbers & Cowards
5. Fat Freddy's Drop - "Dark Days" - Based on a True Story
6. Feist - "When I Was a Young Girl" - Let It Die
7. Goldfrapp - "Slide In" (DFA Remix) - DFA Remixes Ch. 2
8. Interpol - "Say Hello to the Angels" - Turn on the Bright Lights
9. Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros - "Get Down Moses"- Streetcore
10. Pixeltan - "Get Up / Say What" - DFA Records Compilation #2 (Make sure not to get this on iTunes. You can find it used for cheap, and it includes a third disc that's even better than the first two. iTunes only has the first two.)
11. Ray Lamontagne - "Three More Days" - Till the Sun Turns Black
12. Robbers on High Street - "The Fatalist" - The Fatalist & Friends EP
13. Rodrigo y Gabriela - "Tamacun"- Rodrigo y Gabriela (this is going to be high on my year-end chart)
14. Scanners - "Lowlife" - Violence is Golden
15. Vetiver - "You May Be Blue" - To Find Me Gone
16. Voxtrot - "Trouble" - Your Biggest Fan EP
17. The Walkmen - "Wake Up" - Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Dead
18. Yo La Tengo - "Autumn Sweater" - I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One

There were a few tracks that iTunes doesn't have yet that I really wanted to turn you guys onto, so head over to the afformentioned Hype Machine and do a search for:

Ned Collette - "Laughter Across the Street" - Jokes & Trials - This is available at cokemachineglow.com and this album is one of my two or three favorite albums I've heard this year. I want to wake up to this song for the rest of my life. More at MySpace. This album is not yet available in the states, and to import it is going to cost around $25, but you can purchase the MP3s at a high bitrate for about $17. That's more than I'm usually willing to pay for an album, but this is worth it.

Peter Bjorn and John - "Young Folks" - Apparently this was on Grey's Anatomy at some point, but I don't watch that show and therefore may be behind the times. Anyway it's a fun track.

Cabins in the Forest - Additional Sillhouette - A band out of Africa, courtesy of The Muso

Plaid - "Ladyburst"
and Telograph - "Eye for an Eye"

Happy listening.

Birth-day

2006-11-15T08:38:00.000-06:00

It's been a while since I posted something of substance, for which I apologize. I'm working through the Lazarus stuff but there are pieces of the puzzle that are missing, and I'm waiting till they turn up before I post. So maybe I'll come back to that later (soon though) which would allow me to post some new thoughts. That's the plan then.

It was my birthday on Monday, and as I do every year I took stock of where I was and how I felt about that. For the first time in years, I felt pretty across-the-board good. I'm working through my stuff in healthy and sustainable ways, I'm happily married, I like my job, I'm good at my job, I'm happy with where I'm at in ministry (although I miss leading a house group, I've been given ample opportunities to practice the gifts I'm most excited about in teaching and facilitating elsewhere), I'm in a group where I feel supported, I have good friends, I'm rebuilding old friendships and I accomplished a lot of what I hoped to during this time last year.

During the next year I have many goals, which I'm not going to list here (I want to be transparent, but there's only so much the site visitors in Argentina need to know) and I'm looking forward to working towards them, and that's probably what I'm most excited about right now - I'm looking forward, but am happy with where I'm at.

Listening to: Interpol - Turn on the Bright Lights
Watching: "Battlestar Galactica" on DVD
Browsing: The Muso

Making My Peace with the Chicago Bulls (and) Why I Hate Professional Football

2006-11-05T23:11:00.001-06:00

My love of sports is somewhere between average fan and fanatic. I read a lot about the sports I like, I watch games when I can, I play some sort of fantasy sport for each of the three big sports in America. I even watched the World Cup and thought about making soccer a regular part of my sports diet.

However, since 2003, my unquenchable fire for the Cubs has come dangerously close to being quenched, to the point where I think I watched a sum total of about 12 innings of regular season baseball this summer. Granted that I was also planning a wedding and getting married for the bulk of that time, but that is a significant drop from watching close to every game in 2003. I assume I'll follow the Cubs more closely next season, but I wonder if I'll ever follow baseball with the fervor of my college and immediate post-college days.

My misery with the Cubs opened the way to spending more time learning about another sport, and to my surprise, basketball slowly but surely became my sport to obsess over. The only problem is, I don't have a team. I grew up in Iowa but my mom is a Chicago-native so I was at least a casual Bulls fan growing up, but I was borderline fanatic about Sir Charles Barkley. I enjoyed watching this (relatively) short, small, stocky dude get the best of all the massive centers playing the game. He was a jerk but it was fun to watch him go out there and show everyone that he was king. My interest in basketball wained after the Suns-Bulls finals where the Bulls pulled off a miracle finish to end the Charles Barkley MVP season with a whimper (and I still maintain that they fouled KJ on the last play, and maybe he would've missed the free throws, but it would've been nice to have had the chance). However, in the last two years I've watched more and more basketball and it's been refreshing to watch the team play, solid fundamentals and exciting young talent after the thug-era of me-first play and egos bigger than the stadiums they played in. After following every piece of news during the off-season and having enough information to have an opinion on almost every major player and team in the NBA, I'm safely calling myself a basketball fan again.

However, I don't have a favorite team, which is going to be necesary to actually care about what happens every season. There's only so far head-knowledge can carry you in competitive sports. It's fun enough to watch games and guys playing their hearts out during the smallest of games, but at the end of the day I need a team to follow and cheer for. I was at least a casual Bulls fan, but it was mostly residue from being a rabid Cubs fan and from spending lots of time in Chicago growing up. There was a period where B.J. Armstrong was playing with Jordan and Pippen, and everyone from Iowa (happily) became a Bulls fan to watch the Iowa grad share that stage. But since I actively rooted against the Bulls in the aforementioned Suns series, I feel like I'm a fraud if I start calling them 'My Team', especially given that they are a bandwagon favorite this season. But, since I live in Chicago now and I didn't growing up, I'm just going for it and hoping I can both celebrate a Bulls win and acknowledge that I didn't fully appreciate what happened in the 90's in Chicago basketball until recently. I have some level of regret from not getting swept away by the million-peat Bulls (my brother did, and his championship Bulls posters always made me jealous) and I still think KJ was fouled and deserved his free throws, but I'm ready to be sworn in as a card-carrying Bulls fan.

And then there's football. I hate football, but until tonight I couldn't figure out why. I love playing fantasy football, I like the talent, I'm even known to mark out the occasional evening to take in a football game. That doesn't sound like someone who hates football. So I've tried to figure out why I hate football. I originally thought it was because I didn't have a team. We were a baseball household growing up, and it was the Jordan era so our house naturally watched basketball, but no one showed much more than a passing interest in Bears football. But that didn't stop me from loving basketball, and since I just claimed the Bulls, I assumed I could do the same with the Bears.

Then I watched the second half of the Patriots-Colts game tonight and I realized why I hate football. It's not a new revelation for me, but it is different than what I would've guessed. I hate the announcers. I get annoyed with their obvious statements, I get fed up up when they take sides with one team depending on who is winning at the moment and then contradict what they said later on in same game (the best recent example of this was the Bears-Cardinals game) and I really can't stand that they never shut up. These guys talk for hours on end, sometimes about nothing. On radio that's helpful, necessary and even entertaining. On TV it's infuriating.

I'm sure few people agree with me, but I really think football would be a bigger part of my life if there was a channel where I could keep the sounds of the game, the crowd, even the players mic'd up for NBC's benefit, and mute the play-by-play team. I feel like they're trying to compete with the players in the game for who the people at home are tuning in to see. And I guess they should earn their (unreal) paychecks, but I wish they'd give it a break, at least when something was going on worth focusing on. The announcers may even be just as bad in other sports, but I don't notice it for one reason or another.

And it seems like the camera shows the announcers far more than they used to. I don't see this happening a lot in other sports. Show me the coaches, or the players or even the fans, but why do I need to see the faces of the voices that are ruining my enjoyment of America's new pastime?

It has nothing to do with football, yet because of it I can't enjoy a game. So that's why I hate football.

/rant

Livin Large for Ghana

2006-11-02T20:57:00.000-06:00

My wife's friend sent this to us and I hope you will all log on and vote for Dolce & Anna at USC. Check out the video for more information. Today, Friday, November 3, is the last day to vote!

One of our students at USC was picked by Chevy for a Reality-web promo to win a free car, but she is going to donate the entire cash value to the Adom Partnership in Ghana.

Dolce was so moved that she's decided to give the cash value (close to $30,000) to the school there if she wins. You can help by going to the website and voting for the USC team. (You can only vote once a day through Nov. 3). Here's the link.

They also made a video explaining what they're doing.

Peace to you,
Jon

P.S. Here's the Adom Partnership website if you want to know more.

Halloween

2006-10-31T10:40:00.000-06:00

Happy Birthday Steve!

(photos from ExtremePumpkins.com)

Spaghetti Post

2006-10-30T12:34:00.000-06:00

I'm in meetings for two days this week, so I might not have time to post anything of substance on my lunch break. However, I wanted to connect some people with some cool documents floating around the interweb.

Two are from Psychology Today. They were written years ago but I think they're relevant and fascinating reading:

"Why I Hate Beauty"
"A Nation of Wimps"

I listened to these remarks from Barack Obama's Call To Renewal address a couple months ago, but my buddy Justin found what I think is more or less a transcript of that address at Sojourners. This is Obama talking about faith & politics, and regardless of your political stance I think there are important thoughts in here. The address is still available on his podcast through iTunes, but if you like reading here is the written version:

"One Nation... Under God?"

While I'm here, for one reason or another I've seen four movies in the last three days:

The Break-Up: This was billed to me as an anti-romantic comedy, which led me to believe it was going to be a dark comedy. Then I realized it was Jennifer Aniston, who, while a good actress, hasn't pushed the limits of comedy lately, so I though maybe it's a romantic comedy disguised as an anti-romantic comedy. Turns out it is a sort of dark (dusk?) character study disguised as a romantic comedy disguised as an anti-romantic comedy. There are funny moments to be sure, and I didn't hate it, but it felt like I spent time and money to watch two people yell at each other and tear each other apart in an honest and lifelike way... which, to me, isn't exactly entertainment. Jason Bateman & Jon Favreau are pretty funny and I'm not sure how Vince & Jen ended up dating after filming this, so that's interesting enough, but I wouldn't recommend anyone renting this.

Over the Hedge: I like most of the CGI comedies coming out lately, even the non-Pixar ones, and this is one of the better ones. Lots of fun and creative characters and they make the cliches and predictable parts pretty exciting. I really enjoyed watching it, just a well-made movie.

Thank You For Smoking: I wasn't sure if I'd like this, and it gets a little dark, but I ended up really enjoying it. It's not something I need to watch over and over, but it's funny, poignant, well written and well acted. Worth seeing.

The Departed. If you don't like violence, just stay away. Otherwise I think this is as good a movie as Scorsese's made (he's one of my favorite story tellers and one of the bigger reasons why I wanted to be a filmmaker growing up). I just plain enjoyed the heck out of this movie. Well-paced, well-acted, great banter and dialogue, tons of twists, I didn't know what was going to happen next at any given point in the movie. This is right up there with Goodfellas for me, maybe even better. And to give you something to weigh it against, I pretty much like every Scorsese movie I've seen (which isn't all of them, but includes Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Gangs of New York, The Aviator and various others). Mark Whalberg and Alec Baldwin make every attempt to steal the show, but in the end, Leo DiCaprio is De Niro-esque, Matt Damon has a less meaty part but is great in it, and Jack Nicholson keeps his near-perfect streak alive. But again, really, really, really, really violent.

Back to meetings. Feel free to leave comments.

2005 Revisited

2006-10-26T11:17:00.000-05:00

I plan on posting my top ten albums of the year in late December, and I'm going to try to keep it to one post and not four or five like last year. One of the reasons is because while I do want to share some cool music that you may have missed, I'm realizing how fickle my tastes can be. I looked at my top ten list from last year and I only listen to three or four of those albums with any sort of regularity.

Here's what it looked like last year:

1 - Spoon - Gimme Fiction
2 - Wolf Parade - Apologies to the Queen Mary
3 - Beck - Guero
4 - Andrew Bird - The Mysterious Production of Eggs
5 - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - s/t
6 - Bloc Party - Silent Alarm
7 - Common - Be
8 - Robert Glasper - Canvas
9 - John Legend - Get Lifted
10 - MIA - Arular

And here's what it would look like if I posted it now, after at least a year of listening to these albums (last year's rank in parenthesis):

1 - Spoon - Gimme Fiction (1)
2 - Wolf Parade - Apologies to the Queen Mary (2)
3 - Andrew Bird - The Mysterious Production of Eggs (4)
4 - Broken Social Scene - s/t
5 - Kings of Leon - Aha Shake Heartbreak
6 - Sleater-Kinney - The Woods
7 - Edan - Beauty and the Beat
8 - The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema
9 - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - s/t (5)
10 - LCD Soundsystem - s/t

With the 2005 Hold Steady album (Separation Sunday) a close 11th. I haven't listened to any of the other six in the last six months, maybe not even this year for a couple of them. I still can't get enough of Spoon though, and Wolf Parade & Andrew Bird remain weekly or bi-weekly listens after a year of hearing them.

De-Stoned (Lazarus - three)

2006-10-25T14:06:00.000-05:00

"Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance. "Take away the stone," he said.

"But, Lord," said Martha, the sister of the dead man, "by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days." Then Jesus said, "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?"

So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, "Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me.""
- John 11:38-42 (NIV)

Moving the Stones

I've seen people struggle with their healing process for years, making headway little by little each month, and I've seen people miraculously healed of stuff they've struggled with for years in one prayer session. I don't know why God works in different ways, although I'm sure that we could make some useful observations fairly quickly (I'll leave those up to you). My own healing is coming in the little by little means.

I've been begging for God to break into my life in a Lazarus-type way for awhile now and I keep hearing things like "be patient." and "the Lord is moving." It's simultaneosly invigorating and maddening. When I get prayer now I expect to be a different person at the end, but that's not how God's worked in this process. However, he is moving.

When I watch Jesus at work raising Lazarus, I see different roles we play. Martha, the sister who out of love and deep grief wants to close this chapter in her life (we'll get to her later), Jesus, the miracle worker and the people he uses. This passage is one of my favorite examples of God using people to bring Heaven to Earth. Jesus does the healing, but he tells the others to move the stone.

Using a crude example, what would life be like for Lazarus if the stone wasn't moved? To be extreme, he would spend the rest of his living days inside a cave bound in linens. Due to its previous role as grave, I'm guessing the cave isn't stocked with water and food, and I read somewhere that not having enough light can drive a person literally crazy.

Last night my friends prayed for me and even though it wasn't the life-changing prayer I crave, I could feel them moving stones in my life, preparing the way for the Lord.

So in this story the other people are used to move the stones and to unbind the graveclothes. Not a bad job description as Christians, right?

overdub

2006-10-24T13:13:00.000-05:00

I'm trying out a new look, let me know what you think.

I'll be back to posting regularly soon - still collecting my thoughts and rethinking some things as a result of the conference this weekend. I'll leave you with three thoughts from Lance Pittluck's messages this weekend:

"Maturity is adjusting to reality."

"You can't attain the maturity you want without some sort of prayer life."

"...where prayer is our life and we do things in the midst of praying."

******************************

So I'm in a Blur mood and that means it's time to put together my all-time Blur playlist. This is heavily weighted towards Blur and 13, as those are my favorite Blur albums. Anyway, if you have a spare 18 bucks, you could theoretically download all of these on iTunes. Maybe a couple of you will have these albums and can share in the Tuesday Blur love.

the Blur on the street Playlist

1 - Trimm Trabb - 13
2 - Song 2 - Blur
3 - Pop Scene - Modern Life is Rubbish
4 - There's No Other Way - Leisure
5 - Caramel - 13
6 - Beetlebum - Blur
7 - Death of a Party - Blur
8 - Coffee & TV - 13
9 - Sweet Song - Think Tank
10 - No Distance Left to Run - 13
11 - Parklife - Parklife
12 - To the End - Parklife
13 - The Universal - The Great Escape
14 - Chemical World - Modern Life is Rubbish (make sure to stay for the last minute or so)
15 - This is a Low - Parklife
16 - Tender - 13
17 - Stange News from Another Star - Blur
18 - Mellow Song - 13

Bound (Lazarus - two)

2006-10-17T12:36:00.000-05:00

Graveclothes

John 11:43-44

He cried out with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come forth." The man who had died came forth, bound hand and foot with wrappings, and his face was wrapped around with a cloth. Jesus said to them, "Unbind him, and let him go." (NASB)

And the dead man came out, his hands and feet bound in graveclothes, his face wrapped in a headcloth. Jesus told them, “Unwrap him and let him go!" (NLT)

I tried to do a little research on burial clothes in first century Judaism, and I didn't come up with much. Here's what I know: when someone died they were wrapped head to foot in these heavy linens, and the linens were tucked into the body. I've seen that these linens were far too heavy to be lifted by someone who had lost some muscle mass, adding some new meaning to Jesus folding his grave clothes before he exited the tomb.

(The next couple sentences may be too graphic for some, feel free to skip to the next paragraph) So Lazarus has been dead for four days, which means rigor mortis has set in and subsided, at some point he was bound in these linens and covered with a shroud. After four days, his body structure has begun to collapse and decay is well under way.

Jesus apparently shouts (the New King James Version gives the impression that he cried out at the top of his lungs, which is worth noting for a later post) and Lazarus comes out of his tomb, still wrapped in his linens. He was apparently so weak and bound so tightly that Jesus told the others to take the grave clothes off of him so that he could go free.

Unbound

I feel bound. I feel like the things I need healing for have me wrapped up tightly and my system is unmoving. Today, in this story, I am Lazarus. And what I need is for Jesus to come crashing into my life and cry out "David, come out!"

Since this is one of those stories we all know by heart, sometimes the details get tweaked a bit. For instance, I thought the next line was Jesus telling Lazarus to take off his grave clothes and go free. It turns out that the people around him had to do that for him, that Jesus directed them to. And I imagine they were quite happy to help.

In the coming weeks I'll look at Jesus' part in this, but to keep it simple for today, let me share the lesson that shook my system: If you've been bound for a period of time, you may not be able to get the things that bound you off by yourself. Jesus can bring me back to life and he may provide others in my life to help me sort through it and shed the inner-wrappings so I can go free. Emotional healing isn't a one-stop-shop, but rather a process that leads to life. And sometimes I feel like if Jesus can provide the first move, I can handle it from there, but the truth is I need people to travel with, to help me out. To unbind me and let me go.

Over the next month I want to think about the healing process, about Jesus, about the others and about all sorts of crazy stuff we can learn from these 44 verses. I'm hoping that some of you will find truth and life from these words as well. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Thesis (Lazarus - one)

2006-10-16T15:05:00.000-05:00

"Lazarus, come out!"
I want to work through the story of Jesus raising Lazarus over the next month or so. This of course will be interspersed with random posts about whatever, but I'll try to post a few thoughts on this story every week.

About a month ago someone told me that Jesus is raising me like he raised Lazarus, and without overstating it, it cut right to the core of where I am and who I am. Since then I've spent many nights reading and re-reading this story. Normally I would pull out all the commentaries and learn what the people who've studied this story far longer than me have to say. And there's some of that going on, but I felt like I should spend more time thinking and praying and journaling about what this ancient text is saying that is making me feel so alive and well in the year 2006, and then temper, integrate and cultivate my thoughts with the thoughts of others later.

It occured to me at some point that there's a simple power in reading this story from finish to beginning, understanding it in reverse order. So that's how I'm going to blog about it. Because as each layer is added, it is important to understand two points about the end of the story and seeing how everything leads up to that.

First I want to just state it simply and then maybe later today I want to talk about some of the specifics about the end of this story and why it's speaking to me in such a powerful way.

Reading the Last Page First

When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!"
The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face.
Jesus said to them, "Take off the grave clothes and let him go."
- John 11:43-44

This is the end of the story you've probably read a hundred times. To say absolutley nothing new, Jesus raised a guy from the dead. So Lazarus was dead, Jesus shows up, says a few words and suddenly the guy is not dead. That's one powerful Rabbi.

And that's the hypothesis to begin what may become a lengthy reading on the first 44 verses of the eleventh chapter of the Gospel according to John, the disciple of Jesus. If this were a movie, this is the stylish opening scene where you see Jesus raising a guy from the dead and then how that happened is slowly revealed over the next two hours. Movies begin this way because part of the dramatic tension is created from wondering how we got from point A to point Z, or, from verse one to verse 44. In Memento, the opening scene is the end of the story and each subsequent scene is what happened just before that scene, and the next, what happened right before the second scene.

I'm opening this way because I think it's important to keep in mind throughout the story that in the end, Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. I think that fact makes everything that I'm about write much heavier and hopeful. Because, truth be told, the beginning of this story, when all the facts are on the table, has a bleak outlook for Lazarus, who, as I previously posted, was kicking back with Jesus enjoying a meal just a short while later.

Anyway, we'll get to all of that, hopefully sooner than later.

Two Random Notes

2006-10-12T10:50:00.000-05:00

Random note part one

October 7 - beautiful sunny day, reaches upwards of 80 degrees.
October 12 - snowing.

(fill in your own commentary here)

Random note part two

Michael Emerson plays "Henry Gale" or "Ben" (or "Benry Gale" as he's being called by the fans who read hundreds of posts about 40 minutes of television each week, apparently) on Lost, a show that I'm completely obsessed with. This character is my fourth favorite character, and potentially my second. Given the company that puts him with is a high complement - John Locke, Desmond Hume & Mr. Eko being the top three, in that order.

Anyway, I wanted to see if he'd starred in anything else after I read this interview at Blender, in which he says that Radiohead constantly surprises him and The Stooges rock his face off - and I shout "AMEN!" - and it turns out that he's from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, about an hour from my hometown. So he's got that going for him. Which is nice.

Okay, hopefully I'll have a new post about Lazarus up tonight. In the meantime, go rent seasons one and two of Lost and try to get caught up by Wednesday, okay?

October Playlist

2006-10-06T09:48:00.000-05:00

Not much time today, just wanted to mention that I posted my October playlist on iTunes. The link is over on the right column. This is just what I was listening to in September - most of these albums are older and much of it you've probably heard before.

iTunes continues to publish the list in alphabetical order, so I'll just leave it that way.

Ambulance LTD - "Primitive"
Athlete - "Modern Mafia"
Beck - "Bottle of Blues"
Beck - "Nausea"
The Black Keys - "Black Door"
Blur - "Trimm Trabb"
Constantines - "Nighttime/Anytime (It's Alright)"
Gorillaz - "Dare (DFA Remix)"
Grizzly Bear - "Little Brother"
The Hold Steady - "Stuck Between Stations"
John Mayer - "Vultures"
Nomo - "Nu Tones"
The Rapture - "Whoo! Alright, Yeah... Uh Huh"
Subtle - "The Mercury Craze"
TV on the Radio - "Hours"
The Whigs - "Violet Furs"

There were four songs this month that iTunes isn't offering that are worth seeking out.

Scanners - "Lowlife"
The Guillemots - "Redwings"
Sugababes - "Overload"
Tripping Daisy - "Waited a Light Year"

and I was going to include "Pass the Hatchet I Think I'm Goodkind" by Yo La Tengo, but it's long enough that they don't sell it as a single. Anyway, there's the list.

Real quick plug - on Tuesday, the full length Cold War Kids comes out. It's called Robbers and Cowards and it's one of my two or three favorite albums released so far in 2006. Highly recommended. If you want to take a one song sample, start with "Hang Me Up To Dry". I'll post some YouTube and other links on Monday. Happy listening!

Hope Part 3: Lazarus

2006-10-02T23:06:00.000-05:00

Have you ever seen one of those boxing matches where the guy in the yellow trunks is getting absolutely pummeled but somehow he's not getting knocked out? Somehow, maybe through a divine intervention of God Himself, he's holding on, staying up, even though his opponent has landed punch after punch and all the guy can do is not fall down?

That's kind of what life feels like a lot for me.

What's that guy's strategy exactly? At some point, he's going down right? Maybe it's to wait until his opponent gets tired. Or maybe it's just to stay up long enough to make it to the bell so he can have some dude pour water on him as he spits out his mouthpiece and hopes a tooth doesn't come with it.

But really, unless something miraculous happens, his opponent will eventually knock him out, or the fight will end and the judges will score it as a win for his opponent, who almost certainly landed more solid punches. What's that guy's hope?

Lazarus

Over the next month, I'm going to be writing primarily about Lazarus. In the eleventh and twelfth (how do you spell twelfth? spellcheck, that's how) chapters of John's Gospel, there is this miracle that actually happened on the same earth that you and I walk on where this guy named Lazarus dies and then Jesus comes and raises him from the dead. And all this crazy stuff happens from the beginning of the story to the end of the story involving Judea and grave clothes and odors, but today I want to focus on the end of the story. We'll get to the beginning eventually, maybe Memento-style. But tonight I just want to focus on the end. The part after Lazarus is raised from the dead.

John 12:1-2
Six days before the Passover, Jesus arrived at Bethany, where Lazarus lived, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. Here a dinner was given in Jesus' honor. Martha served, while Lazarus was among those reclining at the table with him.

This was a man who was dead, for four days, and who is now reclining at the table with Jesus.

Reclining at the table with Jesus.

That word reclined is transliterated as anakaimei, which means to lie at a table, eat together or dine. It comes from the word kaimei which means 'to lie', like an infant lies in his crib, or one buried lies in his final resting place or like a city quietly lies on a hill. It also means things that were set into place - like the baby by his mother, the buried by his loved ones or the city by its creator. The other half, ana, means 'in the midst' or 'among'. Reclining brings up images of sitting around and watching the football game with your friends, or coming home after a long day's work and sitting down for a moment of rest and relaxation.

So here's this guy who for four days was dead and now he's dining with Jesus. Or maybe we could say that now Jesus has sat him next to him. Maybe we could even say that this guy was now hanging out, enjoying his life.

We'll get pretty deep into the story of Lazarus over the next month, but for now let's return to the guy in the yellow trunks...

Hope

This pummeling feeling has been going on for years and years. I used to think my strategy was to just try to avoid getting knocked down. But now I realize that my strategy is actually to win the fight.

I don't know how to accuratley articulate this, but I am absolutely sure that I'm going to win this fight. I don't know how. I have no idea where I'm going to get the energy to come back and win this thing, but I know that it's not just a matter of holding out until my opponent is tired. I know that it's not just getting through the round so that I can have some of that life-giving water squirted about my head, neck and shoulders. I mean, there are days where that's true, but it's not the end of the story.

Sometimes I think God will tag himself in like a divine Hacksaw Jim Duggan and wallop my opponent with his 2x4. I don't know, maybe I'll actually somehow get the strength to land a punch or two. Frankly I don't care. But I have hope that I'll get there. Here's why:

The Cast of the Lazarus Story

The cast of the Lazarus story is sprawling. There's Lazarus, there's his mourning and believing sisters, there's the disciples, there's Jesus, there's even Judea, where Jesus was almost stoned.

During different times in my life I have been all of those things. Sometimes I'm all of those things in the same day. I'm Lazarus, whose only hope is Jesus. I'm the sisters, interceding for my friends, I'm the disciples - aloof but committed, I'm (kind of) Jesus, helping others find healing (I'm not Jesus, but you understand what I mean there), I'm Judea, bringing hell to earth instead of heaven.

Right now, I'm Lazarus. And Lazarus is raised from the dead and then he kicks back with a glass of water, a sloppy joe, some tater tots and a couple ears of corn with Jesus afterwards.

I have hope. Because Jesus is going to rescue me. I don't have hope that he will, I have hope because I know he will. It may seem like semantics, but it means something completely different to me.

And friends, he wants to rescue you too. Because, and this is why I'm going to spend the next month thinking and reflecting on this story, I think everyone who has ever lived has been Lazarus at some point in their life. And the Word on the street tells me that there's hope. God's Kingdom is here and the rules have changed. So get out your gloves and get back into the fight.

Still lots more ground to cover. Thanks for sticking with me. Be blessed... be loved...

the offseason

2006-10-02T14:41:00.000-05:00

Most of you won't care about this, but maybe I can connect with a couple of Cubs nuts. This year I came pretty close to being done with the Cubs. Just a disgusting year with injury after injury, young players not getting a fair chance, constant lineup changes, constant whining and complaining. This follows up a forgettable 2005 when I started the year thinking this was our year; a 2004 where I watched way too much baseball and prayed for things like "please keep Mark Prior healthy"; and 2003 where we came just a few outs from going to the world series in a heartbreaking pair of losses to end what seemed to be a magical season.

Anyway, this year I watched maybe a few innings here or there. I didn't go to any games. I didn't try to get tickets. I just barely cared (and mostly just for the purpose of winning my fantasy league - which I did, for the second time in three years - go me.) Granted, a lot of that was due to being engaged and getting married. But some of it was just... I don't know, I was out of energy.

So yesterday the President of the Cubs resigned/got fired and a new guy named John McDonough, the former vice-President of Marketing, was named interim President of the Chicago Cubs.

Here are some quotes from the press conference (pulled from the Cub Reporter):

"The greatest fan experience is winning. It's not about marketing. It's not about being creative it's not about bringing people into the ball park or the seventh inning stretch or any of these other things. It's all about winning. Winning is the greatest marketing idea of all time."

"Well, Realistically, you want to go into every season thinking you are going to win the World Series. Our goal is to win the World Series next year and the year after that. I think you have to be careful and realistic, but with the resources we're given and with the decisions that need to be made. I think that the Cubs will win the World Series, and I think the Cubs will win the World Series soon."

"We need to reward these people. These are the greatest fans in the history of sports. We have not won the World Series in 98 years. We have a terriffic General Manager in Jim Hendry. Jim will get all the resources that he needs. It's time to win."

I think I speak for all of Cubdom when I say: Boo-Yah! Bring on 2007!

Today, Dusty Baker was fired. Tomorrow, Subtle, Beck, the Hold Steady & DFA Remixes Chapter 2 hit the music store racks. It's a good week for the superficial part of life that I get a kick out of.

Oh, and not to kill the mood, but there should be a new post on hope tonight. And I'm gonna take it deeper than before. Gear up, it may get bumpy.

Hope Part 2: the Word in its context

2006-09-29T08:23:00.000-05:00

Here are some things I've hoped for in the past few years:
...the Cubs would win a world series
...my car would magically be fixed
...I'd get a $5,000 raise

You get the idea. None of those things have yet to come to fruition - the Cubs haven't won a series since 1908, my car has only once or twice magically fixed itself, and the same part mysteriously broke again soonthereafter, and my raises up to this point would not paint a graph of a $5,000 raise in one fell swoop.

But I hope for them nonetheless. Is that the same hope that Jesus is serving up like the lunchlady with the ladel full of walking tacos?

After all, it is said that this hope cannot fail us. And let me tell you, I'm fully prepared to live a long, healthy life and never see the Cubs win the world series.

In the apostle Paul's letter to the church in Rome, he says "...we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us."

I think it helps to put hope in its correct place. Hope is not something that God is providing. Hope is a natural byproduct of the glory of God. This is why when the Cubs lose every year, hope has failed me. Hope in and of itself can be based on something real or it can be based on something imaginary. The Cubs haven't won in almost a century, and between their injury-riddled roster and their less-than-stellar coaching for the past couple years, they haven't provided anything that results in hope. Still, I hope. You can make a similar pattern for the raise and for my car.

What God is providing is His Glory. That's something real, something that is present and accessible (although there's probably a need for someone to break down what that actually means). I have hope because I understand God's nature and character. I understand what God wants for this world and the people who live here. I have hope that there is something better avaiable and that God's Kingdom is here.

So that leads us to (what else?) more questions...

Is the hope provided by the glory of God the same hope that results from suffering?

How does suffering produce hope? Does suffering produce hope and perseverance produce hope? Or is it only the process of persevering through suffering and creating character that produces hope?

And what's happened when something I've hoped for, maybe even something that agrees with scripture, doesn't come to be?

I'll share some brief thoughts on those next. What questions do you have about hope?

Spaghetti Post

2006-09-26T09:05:00.000-05:00

If I'm going to keep this blog rolling, I'm going to have to supplement the big series with small posts in between. I call these "spaghetti posts," where I throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see if anything sticks. And away we go...

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My buddy Nick is traveling cross country for work and blogging about all of the mundane beauty of a cross-country trip for work, especially for a city boy. Check it out.

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The first five episodes of The State are available on iTunes now. It's not an ideal way to view them - although I think they finally increased the resolution. If nothing else, this may signal that the show is heading to DVD at some point. Awwwww yeaaaaah.

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Yesterday's Calvin & Hobbes reprint - childlike humor or scathing review of most of today's web sites, magazines and media?

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This week's Newsweek covers around the world. You can't make this stuff up:

That's enough for now.

Hope Part 1: the Word in the dictionary

2006-09-23T22:34:00.000-05:00

Let's reclaim a buzzword: Hope.

My faith has hope on the tip of its tongue at any given moment. The Bible, especially the letters, are peppered with this word hope. What is hope? And what is it that we're hoping for?

Abraham & Naomi
Two people from the Hebrew Scriptures give us an insightful window into the meaning of hope by the way they entered the process of hope. Abraham, the patriarch of Israel, and Naomi, the mother of Ruth. Both were relying on God for something similar. Abraham was told he'd be the father of an entire nation, but he and his wife were getting up in their years and were past the point where childbirth was possible. Naomi lost her husband and her two sons, and therefore her daughters-in-law lost their husbands. She assumed that she'd live the rest of her life alone.

But, as I've learned time and again, nothing is impossible for God.

In Romans 4:18-21, it says that against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations.

"Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead, since he was about a hundred years old, and that Sarah's womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised."

And God did indeed live up to His Word.

Naomi's story is pretty complicated. After her husband and two sons died, she prepared herself for her daughters-in-law to return to their original homes and find peace in the arms of new husbands. She thought she was beyond the years where she could find a husband, and resigned herself to a lifetime of loneliness. But her daughters decided to stay with her. Naomi responded:

"Return home, my daughters. Why would you come with me? Am I going to have any more sons, who could become your husbands? Return home, my daughters; I am too old to have another husband. Even if I thought there was still hope for meeven if I had a husband tonight and then gave birth to sons- would you wait until they grew up? Would you remain unmarried for them? No, my daughters. It is more bitter for me than for you, because the LORD's hand has gone out against me!"

Naomi gave up hope. She soon changes her name to Mara, which means 'bitter'. This story is far too complex to jump into here but suffice it to say that because of their status as daughters-in-law and because she would be in dire straits without a husband, the outlook is bleak.

But God has other plans. There is a man named Boaz who was a close relative of Naomi. Boaz married Ruth, one of Naomi's daughters, and qualified as a 'kinsman redeemer', which, according to the Torah, meant among other things that he had a duty to look after the needy and helpless members of a family. Ruth and Boaz saw Naomi into old age and a son was born who continued the line of heritage that would give birth to David, and therefore, Jesus.

Hopeless or Hopefull
Abraham and Naomi found themselves in situations where hope didn't seem like the logical place to live from. They responded to God's grace in their lives in opposite ways. Both were ultimately taken care of by God, which raises interesting questions about this word, hope.

Is hope something we feel like an emotion? Or is it just something that is and that we can grab onto or not?

If we let go of hope, how does it affect us in the long-run? What about the short-run?

Does our hoping or not hoping change anything about who God is and what He's doing?

Can hope fail us? What does it mean for hope to fail or succeed? What does hope mean and what good is it to me? In the words of The Shawshank Redemption, is hope a good thing or a dangerous thing?

I've found several definitions of hope. Hope is the expectation of good. Hope gives joy and pleasure, even if pain and anxiety show up in the process. Hope is a process. It's confidence in a future event, and not for a moment, but for all of the moments.

An interesting note to end the first entry in this series: Jesus never uses the word hope in his teachings. Instead, he says things like don't be anxious about the future, and that after his resurrection there will be renewed spiritual power available, enabling his disciples to do even greater works in the world than even he did. And he says that we can look forward to sharing in his own eternal glory.

Which, of course, points us to even more questions.

Next: suffering, perseverance, character & hope

September Plugs

2006-09-22T20:40:00.000-05:00

I've got a (hopefully) solid post on hope in the pipelines for later this evening or tomorrow morning. First, some plugs.

-Music-

Some of the release dates I had written down turned out to be wrong, and there's not much I'm interested in until October now. Instead, it's been a good week for scouring the internet for loose singles. Tracks by Sugababes, Sunset Rubdown, Scanners, the Whigs, Scanners, Grizzly Bear, the Rapture and a bunch of DFA remixes will make the October playlist if iTunes cooperates.

-TV-

I've got three shows I'm addicted to - The Office, Scrubs & Lost. This week The Office returned and Lost is coming up in a couple weeks. This season I find that there's a whole lot of shows that I want to watch, but I just don't have the time. So, if there's anything worth checking out, let me know. I watched Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and I really enjoyed it. I hope episode two is a little less self-aware and has a more coherent story, but I can see myself getting hooked. I also just received disc one of season one of The Wire in the mail, so I'll be checking that out and reporting back.

-Software-

Finally, I don't normally do this, but I was surprised by how many Mac users were hitting my site. I wanted to give you a quick list of software I find indispensable (or mostly so). Most of these are Mac-only and can be found at Version Tracker unless otherwise noted. I think almost all of these are free as well.

VLC - The king of the movie playing software for the Mac. I believe there's a Windows version as well.

Deerpark (Firefox) - For my money, you can't beat Firefox. Extensions, search engines, themes, and it's open source so there's pretty much an extension to do anything. I've got add-ons that make tabbed browsing night and day better than Safari, one-click del.icio.us tags, programs to block specific ads of my choosing, a lightweight RSS reader, a download status bar and much much more. Deerpark is specifically designed for Macintosh computers, and I've found it to be a bit faster and smoother than normal Firefox builds for the Mac. Click the link to get it.

Zulupad - a wiki-style textpad. Usually I'm happy with Microsoft Word (or AbiWord / OpenOffice if you want a perfectly-good and free version of Word) and TextEdit, but for writing sermons, meaty blogs, grants for work and other fun stuff, I think the linking features on Zulupad are fantastic. This is available for Windows too.

Adium - A customizable chat program that's simply way cooler than all of the other ones I've seen. Supports AIM, G-talk, Yahoo and everything else you can think of.

Appzapper - "The uninstall program Mac forgot to include."

Growl - I don't know how to describe Growl, but it makes using my computer even easier.

Macjanitor - because it's just a more efficient way to do all of the little things I forget to do, like repair permissions.

Monolingual - There's over a gig of languages that Mac installs on your computer. Since I only know english, I don't really see a need for them. Just make sure you don't delete english.

Service Scrubber - Under the Apple menu there's a section called "Services". It contains seemingly tons of tasks that I never use, so I just ignore it. The thing is, it's a pretty useful feature, and Service Scrubber can take care of the excess making it far easier to use.

Some people swear by Quicksilver, but I haven't spent the time to understand the program yet.

There's also a program called Midnight Inbox by Midnight Beep that's in a beta phase right now. It's not free like some of these other programs, but it's the best Getting Things Done (GTD) program I've ever seen. I don't use Kinkless Getting Things Done (kGTD) so I don't know how it compares, but so far so good.

And if you're not using a Mac, make the switch. You'll never regret it.

My Wedding

2006-09-15T23:00:00.000-05:00

I promised some people that I'd post pictures from the wedding. I'll keep the commentaries brief (there were so many great stories and moments, I won't attempt to capture them all here). Just an amazing, beautiful and sacred day.

We were married in a beautiful chapel surrounded by our friends and family. Our friend and mentor Keenan performed the ceremony. I was really nervous right up until the first bridesmaid walked down the aisle, at which point I started crying. I didn't really stop crying until the doors swung open and there stood my bride. She looked beautiful and literally took my breath away. At the sound of the audible exhale, my groomsmen immediately left their positions to watch my reactions as she walked up the aisle.

Worship was particularly sweet that day. The presence of God filled the room - and everyone felt it. One of my favorite parts of our wedding was that we didn't go through the motions - we injected meaning into every piece of the day - from communion to worship to vows to rings and more. Our friends Sus & Ellen performed the music, which was stunning, and we got wax all over the Evanston Vineyard's communion gear. We didn't mean to use the pastor's stuff, and we apologize for the wax fiasco. Thanks for not bringing it up.

I'm told I had a goofy smile on my face the entire day. What can I say, I was (and am) happy.
Verity's attendants - her sisters Patience and Faith, Esther, Meg, Bethany and Ryann. Now would be a good time to point out that my wife is the most beautiful woman in the entire world.
My attendants - (top) Josh, Joe and Gerhardt; (bottom) Justin, Hana & Mike. It's an undescribable experience having all of your closest friends in one room being there for you, celebrating, encouraging and sharing the beginning of your new life. I wonder if these six people, all of whom have unique paths into my life, will ever be in the same room at the same time again.
Our wedding party - we are so blessed to have so many amazing friends.
Her parents and my parents. On August 4 they were in that order but now...
The first dance. We danced to Stevie Wonder's "As". My wife is so cool.
Verity and her father tore it up on the dance floor.
The last dance of the evening. I remember feeling equal parts harmony, elation and exhaustion.

Thank you to everyone who celebrated with us. To those who weren't there, it sounds fake, but you were in our hearts that day.

We honeymooned on the central coast of Oregon, where we were jumping distance from a beach in our secluded cabin on a cliff that overlooked the ocean upon which the sun set each night. We saw a whale 15 feet from our boat, we went hiking to a waterfall and we ate enough shellfish to last a lifetime.

A few more notes before I go to bed. My buddy Nick blessed us with his exceptional DJ skills - as well as serving as an unknown coordinator and an emcee - and we played nothing but good music. And we even snuck the solo Thom-Yorke-on-a-piano version of Radiohead's "Fog" into the mix during dinnertime. Both Verity and I had two best men and two maids of honor. They and our fathers toasted us and I've rarely been so touched. Thanks for everything you all did that day. All of our friends and family humbly served us in so many different ways from February through August, and especially the week and day of the wedding. Thanks for being so gracious and loving. I wore a tux, met Verity at the altar, said I do, worshiped God, communioned with my wife and my Lord (and my friend), I exchanged heartfelt vows, we walked down an aisle, cut a cake, danced and saw old friends from around the country, and at the end of the evening I didn't have to drop off my date at her place ever again.

So that was my wedding in 700 words or less. Be blessed... be loved...

Welcome Rick Moranis Fans

2006-09-14T23:07:00.000-05:00

I love the internet. Earlier today I made a passive, ridiculous reference to Rick Moranis. I forget that people search for this stuff and it drives traffic to my site without any intention of that happening. Now, for someone to show up because I posted about TV on the Radio makes a lot of sense to me - they're hot right now and the blogosphere is generating a lot of that buzz. However, there have been at least three unique entries from people doing technorati searches for Rick Moranis. You know, cause his turn as the dad in Honey I Shrunk the Kids is one of the three or four cult-defining moments in acting history.

So, just to put a few more obscure or random words on the blog in hopes that passers-by will catch some Jesus-love, here's a list of other things we're bringing back like Justin Timberlake:

Milkmen
Far Side cartoons
Fender benders
Susan B Anthony coins
Bobby Fischer
Stove pipe top hats
Ted Knight
Logic
Trivial Pursuit Genus Editions
Teddy Ruxpin
Popples
And, just to drive up traffic, the Microsoft Zune and the Apple iPod. (Does the Zune seem like something we'll be hearing about on VH1's I Love the 00's while the iPod is still a viable brand? Zune Zune Zune!)

Anyway, welcome Dark Helmet & Louis Tully fans. Hope you find something worth reading here.

*In doing research for this post, I discovered that Michael O'Keefe, who played Danny Noonan in Caddyshack has had a film and television career that's actually not wretched. Plus, he was married to Bonnie Raitt for nine years and is an ordained Zen priest (albeit a divorced one). And he wrote the lyrics to a song that won Bonnie Raitt a grammy. Go Noonan!

**And by research, I mean that I looked up who played the judge in Caddyshack and clicked on Danny Noonan for fun.

Fall Music, Part Two

2006-09-14T17:14:00.000-05:00

September & October are hosts to the most potentially good music of the year. I want to lay out the next couple months in case there's some music here you may have overlooked otherwise. There's a ton getting released this week, so I'm going to do a three-parter instead of a two-parter. Last week saw releases from one of my guilty pleasure artists, Beyonce, a mellow and beautiful group called Grizzly Bear and another Rage Against the Machine meets Soundgarden and pops then fizzles outing from Audioslave. This week features not three, but sixteen noteable releases.

Out this week (Sept. 12)

Black Keys - Magic Potion - The Black Keys are one of my favorite bands. Their game is blues of the dirty and raw calibur. On Magic Potion, they take a quieter approach and somehow manage to sound more fierce and ready to wail than ever. Magic Potion doesn't have the fluency of an album like their other efforts, and its missing the transcendent moments that highlights each of their four other efforts but it will make your head bob and your waist wiggle.

Basement Jaxx - Crazy Itch Radio - I keep waiting for Basement Jaxx to finish the trifecta of Remedy and Rooty, but I think it's time to give up and enjoy their albums on their own terms. Crazy Itch Radio is mostly derivative of their other work, and I don't think it works on the casual level as well as those two albums. If nothing else, it's much better than Kish Kash, and it features vintage Basement Jaxx sure to please fans.

DJ Shadow - The Outsider - Two albums ago, DJ Shadow created one of the most important and influential albums of the 90s, and an album I'd squarely put in my top five of all time. As his follow up was also excellent, I've been anticipating this album for years. With inflated expectations comes the chance for an album to fall flat on its proverbial face and The Outsider is an incoherent mess. Josh Davis is doing his own thing now, making the music he likes instead of trying to live up to others expectations. In all seriousness, good for him. The first half is pretty much just good versions of hyphy and krunk music. I hate hyphy and krunk music. There are bright spots - he brings the funk for a couple tracks and the completely inappropriate "Backstage Girl" has a seriously dope beat. The rest kind of sounds like DJ Shadow made an album and let a bunch of crappy producers remix it. Some of the second half is interesting - he channels Radiohead and Coldplay and other sounds, but it's all over the place and mostly forgettable. Just skip it, there's far too much else out there worth hearing this year.

Magnolia Electric Company - Fading Trails - I don't know much about Magnolia Electric Company or its founder Jason Molina, but the tracks I've heard so far have hints of blues and Sunday afternoon pleasantries to spare.

Mars Volta - Amputechture - This is getting the typical love it or hate it reviews common for Mars Volta. Since Mars Volta features members of At the Drive-In, a band who opened my eyes to how boring music was becoming because of how fresh they were, I will always give them a chance. The only track I've heard was, on the surface, stale and generic. If I get the chance I'll go further, but only if its free and easy to hear. So MySpace here I come...

John Mayer - Continuum - As in "Your Body is a Wonderland" John Mayer. This is John getting his blues on, and it's really good. If you loved 'Try' and didn't like 'Inside Wants Out', or if you loved 'Inside Wants Out' and didn't like 'Try', or if you like good music, give it a chance. The man who now looks like Edward Scissorhands has made one of the year's strongest mainstream releases. Beautiful, melodic, surprising music that sounds like he's doing covers. He's not. There's a reason everyone from ?uestlove to Timbaland wants to work with him.

The Rapture - Pieces of the People We Love - The Rapture never really amounted to much for me. Some catchy hooks, some energetic anthems, but not a lot of staying power, but that may all change. This album features the same ear for hooks and the same energy, but it adds all around better song writing. If you like one song, you'll like them all. I recommend "Whoo! Alright! Yeah Uh Huh" as a starting point. I'll be featuring it on my October playlist.

Justin Timberlake - FutureSex / LoveSounds - I loved the first Timberlake album but I was bored after a few tracks on this one. "My Love" should be a huge hit and I won't get tired of hearing it ad naseum. Everything else is tired. And I've decided that if you use the word 'sex' in the first three tracks and feature it in your title, it's actual becoming something besides sexy Whatever that is. Trying too hard to begin with.

(On a brighter note, the first single, the one in which Justin brings the sexy back, has provided serious comedic fodder in the office this week. We've been discussing what we will be bringing back, with the stipulation that you can only bring something back that never left. So you can bring Rick Moranis back, but not John F. Kennedy. Today I'm bringing cursive back.)

TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain - I'll be waxing poetic about this album at the end of the year, since it will surely be in my top 10, if not top 5. It's the same unique brand of music only TV on the Radio and their vocalist Tunde Adebimpe can make, but its' tighter, fuller and more melodic than the first. I can't properly describe it, and 30 second samples won't do it justice. If you have ten bucks to spare, it's worth every penny. It's a band that not everyone will click with immediately, but give it some serious listening. You won't be disappointed.

Yo La Tengo - I Am Not Afraid of You And I Will Beat Your... - Okay, the title may offend some of the readers of this blog, although if you saw the band, you would get how tongue-in-cheek this was. Anyway, I haven't been able to hear this yet, but it's getting across-the-board raving reviews and I've heard three tracks off of it, all of which were completely different and all of which I loved. So this is high on my list to hear. Download a couple tracks here.

Also released this week: Mainstream candy by Barenaked Ladies, Everclear attempting a comeback, Mouse on Mars & The Album Leaf doing what they do, and albums from Xiu Xiu & Junior Boys that are getting good reviews. I'm not into any of those bands, but in case you are, there's new music for you to fall in love with.

Next: Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Beck, Decemberists, The Who and more

Comments are Good for my Soul

2006-09-12T12:00:00.000-05:00

So this is the new site. It's simple, I think it's easier to read, and I'm still sprucing it up a bit. It's close enough to finished that I feel okay about settling in. Please comment and let me know what you think.

It would be great if you could change your links, bookmarks and rss feeds to reflect the new site, especially if you have a link on your blog to my blog.

The title will stay the same - the Word on the street. The address is infinitley more clever and easier to remember than the old site (the main reason I moved over).

The address is word-processor.blogspot.com

That would theoretically make the new feed http://word-processor.blogspot.com/atom.xml although the subscribe function doesn't appear to be working. If your news reader searches for feeds, it will come up properly.

Welcome to my new digs! Be blessed... be loved...

Update: So I've got a header image that I'm pleased with, but it's apparently not playing well with Internet Explorer. Everything seems to be fine in Firefox and Safari, and it doesn't look too distracting in IE. I'll keep trying to fix it, but I'm staying put for now. I like my new home.

Fall Music, Part One

2006-09-11T10:37:00.000-05:00

In the next three months dozens of potentially great albums are hitting the stores. To help you sort it out, I’m going to post two pieces. Today’s is a look at what’s been in my head since the last music post I did, and the next will be a brief preview of more than 30 albums that have the potential to be great this fall.

Part One

I put together a playlist of what I've been listening to lately. If you have iTunes and you click on this link, it will ask you to open iTunes. From there, it will take you to the music store and directly to my playlist where you can listen to 30 second samples. With the exception of “Destination Vertical”, I simply chose one song that I thought reflected the album. I almost exclusively listen to full albums, so if you like one track, I highly recommend grabbing the full album.

I attempted to make this a coherent mix, which was next to impossible given the source material. Also, four of these songs are not yet available on iTunes. I’ll update the playlist as they become available. Beck is out on October 3, TV on the Radio and the new Black Keys album are out this week, and the Lily Allen album is available in the U.K. currently, but is inexplicably not coming to the States until late January 2007. If you like your pop music with a hint of irony and a whole lot of sass, Lily is a fine alternative to Paris, Christina and Jessica and worth seeking out if you have the means.

Here's the mix as it was originally outlined. For whatever reason, iTunes is displaying the list alphabetically according to the author.

1 - Cracker - "Something You Ain't Got" from Greenland (2006)
2 - Feist - "Mushaboo" from Let It Die (2005)
3 - Regina Spektor - "On the Radio" from Begin to Hope (2006)
4 - Beck - "Nausea" from The Information (2006)
5 - Camille - "Ta Doleur" from Le Fil (2006)
6 - Masha Qrella - "Destination Vertical" (2005) I haven't heard the album this comes from, but the song is one of my favorite finds so far this year.

7 - The Arcade Fire - "Neighborhood 1 (Tunnels)" from Funeral (2004) I first heard this last year, but as music does from time to time, this album has really clicked for me in the past two months. As many of my friends were turned off by the hype of the Arcade Fire when the album first came out, I'm putting here to implore you to give this album some real dedicated listening.

8 - The Black Keys - "Have Mercy on Me" from the Chulahoma EP (2006) Still the best music I've heard this year. If this 6-song set of Junior Kimbrough covers ends up being my favorite release of 2006, I won't be disappointed.

9 - The Black Keys - "Strange Desire" from Magic Potion (2006)
10 - Constantines - "Young Offenders" from The Constantines (2001) I've been digging both this album and their album Shine a Light from 2003. I think the latter is a better album, but "Young Offenders" is one of the coolest songs I've heard in years. They do more with one note than most bands do with far too many, and even make "Can I get a witness?" not cheesy. I hope to dive into their third album (released last year) sometime soon.

11 - The Roots - "Don't Feel Right" from Game Theory (2006)
12 - Ghostface Killah - "Kilo" from Fishscale (2006) Two hip hop albums that blow me away.

13 - TV on the Radio - "Hours" from Return to Cookie Mountain (2006) Their albums are worth the dedication it may take for this to get under your skin. TV on the Radio is at times more impressive than good, but once it clicks, this and Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes is right up there with anything else released in the last five years.

14 - Thom Yorke - "Harrowdown Hill" from The Eraser (2006) This album took awhile to grow on me, but it has and I'm convinced that Thom needs Radiohead and Radiohead needs Thom. I don't think that's profound or anything, but this was a nice diversion and now I'm ready for next year's Radiohead disc.

15 - Aimee Mann - "Red Vines" from Bachelor #2 (2000) My favorite album I've heard for the first time this year that wasn't released this year. Stunning music.

16 - The Ark - "This Piece of Poetry is Meant to Do Harm" from State of the Ark(2006)
17 - Lily Allen - "Everything's Just Wonderful" from Alright Still (2006)
18 - Basement Jaxx - "Lights Go Down" from Crazy Itch Radio (2006)
19 - Pearl Jam - "Army Reserve" from Pearl Jam (2006) I have an abandoned post started somewhere that went on for pages about how Vitalogy is probably the most important album in the soundtrack of my life, and how this album rivals even that masterpiece. Anyway, this will be in my top 5 for the year and I won't be alone.

And just for the record, if I were to put together a top ten list for the year that ended today it would include, in no particular order:

The Black Keys - Chulahoma EP
The Roots - Game Theory
Ghostface Killah - Fishscale
Pearl Jam - Pearl Jam
TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain
Regina Spektor - Begin to Hope
Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere
Thom Yorke - The Eraser
The Sounds - Dying to Say This to You
Various Artists - Tropicalia: A Brazilian Revolution in Sound

According to the News...

2006-09-05T12:15:00.000-05:00

We're back from our honeymoon and I'm looking forward to posting a couple pictures of the wedding day and the honeymoon for all to enjoy. To my pleasant surprise, I had a number of people come up to me to ask when I was going to start blogging again. Apparently they were giving me grace with the wedding to plan, but now it's time to get back on the horse. I don't have all the time in the world, but let me at least share something that's been on my heart this week.

Last week we went to lunch one day, and CNN or MSNBC or one of the news channels was playing on the television that was stationed just over my shoulder at the establishment we paid to clog our arteries. I was keeping tabs on what was considered news that day, so I say the following literally (with the exception of commercials). They spent 40 minutes on the anniversary of Katrina and 20 minutes on JonBenet Ramsey's not-actual killer.

I think it's important that we think about where we've come as a country since Katrina, and it is good to be aware of what's still happening in the aftermath of Katrina. What got me was this statistic rolling on the bottom of the screen:

2,600 U.S. soliders dead since war in Iraq began.

I feel like that is worthy of some talking-and-video time, and not just a quick one liner on the bottom of the screen. Made me wonder what else they were not reporting.

Last week the Census Bureau released their report on income and poverty. There was a rise in the median household income for the first time in six years. However, as some analysts have pointed out, wages seem to be decreasing relative to inflation, suggesting that the median income is only rising because more household members are working, many at minimum wage or close-to-minimum wage jobs.

The number of Americans living in poverty was mostly unchanged at 12.6 percent, but 6 percent earned less than half the poverty-line cutoff of $20,000. An analyst working with the New York Times said that this was the highest such percentage ever recorded.

The number of people without health insurance and the number of uninsured children rose slightly.

And the College Board reported the largest decline in SAT scores in 31 years.

That is relevant news that people should know about and news channels should be reporting. Anyway, now you know. And knowing is at least the beginning of the battle.

Good to be back. The next posts will be about music and love (not necessarily in that order), just wanted to get that off my chest first.

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As an addendum to my last post, I would recommend just a couple sources for news. I really made an attempt to find an unbiased, tell-it-like-it-is news source. The best I've found is this weekly magazine that's affordable that makes for excellent Metra and El-riding reading material. I read it cover to cover each week. Anyway, it's called The Week. While it sometimes leans a little left, it always provides a fair point of view from both sides of the political spectrum, and I appreciate that. It collects news from around the world, with a natural focus on the United States, including the straight-forward news, what different papers and magazines are saying about it in their analysis and even includes a small dose of celebrity and a good-sized dose of pop culture news each week as well.

They also have a free e-newsletter that gets delivered each Friday with highlights from the web site and the magazine. Truth be told, you can get almost everything on the web site, but I pay for the magazine because I can devour it over the course of a week, and I like holding it in my hands. For whatever reason, it makes me want to read it more.

And that's the moral here - find some way to stay just a little more connected that you find fun and easy. If you like reading on the web, there are tons of options. I don't. I almost always print out the articles I want to read or else I don't read them. I also don't like television news (mostly for the same reasons as the last post) and newspapers can be a bit thick for my tastes. I tried Time magazine for awhile, but it left a lot to be desired in my opinion. They tend to jump on the latest trends and fads and 'popular' opinions a bit too much for my taste.

Bethany pointed to the BBC news in her comment, and I used to do that one as well, but I found that I rarely clicked on my link, and that unless I set it as my homepage, I never read the thing.

So anyway, The Week gets my vote. If you have other sources of news that you like, I've found that comments are good for my soul.

be blessed... be loved...

Breaking Curfew

2006-06-05T00:40:00.000-05:00

Originally posted on June 5, 2006

If our government enforced a curfew for all citizens in the name of keeping us from experiencing freedom, there would be an old-school revolt, the kind our forefathers made over taxes on tea.

Yet, there is a curfew that many of us are under that we don't just look forward to, we actually self-police it! It's a curfew that starts surprisingly early - 7pm in the Midwest. It's a curfew ordered by NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox and the like. In exchange for not experiencing my own life, I am told to experience Howie Mandel's.

In the past the networks have lifted the curfew during the summer. But in recent years they have attempted to keep the curfew going all summer long. This summer is no exception. But there's good news - absolutley nothing that they will attempt to substitute for real life will be worth digesting.

I like a few shows as much as the next guy, but if I'm not careful it can get a little out of hand. And I want my life back. So this summer, I am resisting the curfew and pledging to live my life
and experience more of God's creation.

Go ahead: break curfew. Live your life. God gives you permission.
Remember, the Word on the street is "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly" (John 10:10), not: "I came that they may have life, right after these messages."

Joga Bonito (Play Beautiful)

2006-04-18T00:35:00.000-05:00

Originally posted on April 18, 2006

Regimented. Disciplined. Running the race.
After I got strep throat I broke several healthy routines I had going in my life.
Prayer. Running. Yoga.
This week I'm back on the horse. It's hard when you feel like you're starting from scratch.
Wake up earlier. Make the most of the time you are awake. Eat better. Breathe.
Tonight I'm speaking to a group of charismatic Catholics about power evangelism (at the invitation of a good friend - I'm not quite cool enough to get invited to do that on my own). Sweet. Next week I'm speaking at the Campus ministry I used to intern for. I miss those guys.
Study. Study. Study. Write. Practice.
This weekend I'm going to New York, seeing the Statue of Liberty and hanging out with good friends.
I'm more in love today than I was on the day I proposed. That's a good trend - more in love every day - that I hope continues for the rest of my life.
I'm learning the difference between transforming and letting God transform me. I'm reading Anne Lamott in all her unfiltered beauty. I'm watching Nike soccer ads (Ronaldinho - Joy) and wanting to plant churches as a result.
I'm preparing.
Regimented. Disciplined. Running the race.
Prayer. Study. Dreaming. Friends. Spreading a message of love and beauty and life.