Confessions of a Shiftless Mind

I was reading this book last night, which talked a bit about calling.  It got into what it takes to lead in a church, and one thing it did that I found especially thought provoking was look at the qualifications outlined in 1st Timothy 3:1-3.

The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money.

I like to think I am on the way or arrived at most of that.

• One wife - check.
• Sober-minded?  Well, I am pretty serious most of the time.
• Self-controlled?  Hmm.  Need to work on that.  I think I let myself wander into self-absorption more than I should.
• Respectable?  Well, you’d have to ask around but I think I am getting there.
• Hospitable?  I love having people over, but I think there is a missing ingredient there, in the sense that I don’t do enough to prepare my house to be open.  And I let “things” keep me busy.
• Able to teach - I am getting there I think.  The more I do it the more comfortable I feel in it.
• Not a drunkard - yes.  That is for sure two so far.
• Not violent but gentle - only one person has ever angered me to the point of violence.  It’s been a good ten years since that one occasion.
• Not quarrelsome - I used to be pretty argumentative, but I am slowly learning to rein that in.
• Not a lover of money - I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem with that, but even more so lately, I see money as a means to an end.  I think of what can be done with money, not the money itself.

But you know what gets me?  The above reproach bit.  I think it is a call for personal holiness.  Man, I just feel very inadequate in that field.  I don’t pray enough.  I don’t spend enough time in the Word.  I don’t let Phillippians 4:8 guide my thoughts nearly enough.  When I wander off on the internet into “gossip” sites (which are more and more passed off as “news” but that’s no excuse) and junk like that, I can feel it sap my vitality.  It’s actually beginning to physically affect me.  You’d think that would drive me away from it, but oh no.

I do realize that I can’t overcome this stuff on my own, that I need to enlist God in it.  But you know what?  The Bible says flee from sin.  I don’t do that enough.  It also says I actually have to ask for help from him.  That I don’t do enough of.  So it’s my own fault.

I think I’ll quote the Paulmeister.

“What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”

Like Paul, I know the answer.  Now if only I would actually take advantage of that rescue more regularly!

You may have noticed I added Twitter to my sidebar.  I had something in mind, and this may or may not have been it.  Other than random, short notes on daily stuff (which tends to be slightly more frequent than my major blog posting lately), I plan to post up first thing each morning the song in my head.  I don’t know if you have this experience, but every morning when I wake up there is always a song in my head.  It is rarely the same song and I have always wondered if the song has anything to do with what my day’s going to be like.  So I am going to start recording them and see what comes of it.

If you see a twitter that begins with SIMH that means it was the “Song In My Head” first thing this morning.

Just so you know.

Feel free to do yours - I think it would be a fascinating exercise.

But I am reposting it. Because it is random.

Rejected

Warning.  Some of the cartoons contained therein are a little disturbing,  Even if they are two color stick figures.  Might not be a good idea to watch with kids around.

Apparently, studying the etymology of the Chinese pictographic written language seems to indicate that.  The Chinese pictographic written language is one of the oldest written languages in the world.  If these findings are accurate, then all of a sudden it wasn’t the ancient Hebrews who reformulated myriad local traditions into the first monotheistic religion.

It was in fact they who have transmitted the first religion accurately - and all other cultures’s relgions represent copies that have been modified and corrupted into their present forms.

That is a big deal. And something to think about.

This wasn’t the first place I had heard about this information either.  Looks like a number of people are beginning to recognize these patterns.  I wonder how much these discoveries have to do with the explosion of Christianity in China?

I got into a discussion with a friend of mine about parenting, and how some people, even churchgoers, will set aside what Jesus teaches to do what is right in their own eyes.  It makes for horrible optics for those who don’t go to church, who expect more from the “Christians”.  But I contend, it is to the next generation that the damage really goes.  Whether we like it or not, we are role models, ambassadors for Jesus.  When we drop the ball, willingly, with excuses like “pain” in our lives, or “everyone is doing it”, we not only discredit the faith we claim to have, but we lay waste to our own credibility.  This is what I wrote to him.

It is easy to worry about what others are doing, but [I'll mention] one more bit of wisdom [that I learned] from that Jesus dude that people love to ignore when it’s inconvenient.  It’s you who are responsible for you.  Others are their own problem and you can’t control them.  If they’ve [children] got one parent to look to for moral guidance, it should be their father.  We’ve been given the job of shepherd of our family.  Even from a distance, that means something.  They will turn to you sooner or later with questions like, “I really like this boy/girl.  Can I go camping with them by ourselves?”  Hypocrisy hurts deeply both the one who speaks it and the one who hears it.

It aggravates me to no end that people set such low expectations for morality these days.  People actually think it is impossible not to have sex before marriage.  People think it is impossible to have self-control.  With God, all things are possible.  I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength.  There’s two verses in a row for you.

What I know is this: there were two things that allowed me to enter into marriage a virgin (and my wife was too).  One was God’s immense grace - he kept me from places and situations where I would have made the wrong choice so many times.  The other was my decision to follow him, seriously, when I was 16.  One verse back then meant a lot to me (and it wasn’t either of the ones above) - “present your body as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.  This is your spiritual act of worship.”  I knew that God wanted me to not share sex with anyone but my wife.  I brought a lot of other crap into the marriage, but past partners to compare her to was not one.  STDs weren’t either.

Most luckily was an absence of history - emotional ties to other women, or worse, children with other women that would divide my emotions and keep me from unity with my wife.  I want that for my kids.  I want to be able to say to them, you don’t have to have sex to be human.  You don’t have to sleep with someone to show them you love them.  You don’t need to “try someone out” to decide if they are worth marrying - they are worth marrying because of who they are not what they can do in the sack.  And most of all, I want to tell them that they don’t have to be like “everybody else” - because I wasn’t.  All of these things I am so glad I can tell them, but it was about the choices I made, not to just settle, or give in.  And those choices came from deciding that it was Jesus I was following, not the crowd, or the other kids in my youth group, or the other people in my church.

Church doesn’t work.  Jesus does.  When you give him a chance.

I’ll just add a bit more.  People are losing hope in this world.  They don’t believe that it is possible to love someone forever anymore.  They don’t believe it is possible to not have sex before marriage, or avoid adultery.  The mother-father-children model of family is falling apart because nobody believes it exists anymore.  But why not?  Who is telling these lies?  Where are all the families?  You are a light in the world, because Jesus is the light of the world.  Every time a marriage fractures, every time another young person buys into the “sowing oats” idea, that light dims.  We need to stand up in our communities, and be a voice that says, it doesn’t have to be this way.  This is the hope that Jesus offers - hope of restoration, hope of healing, hope of wholeness.

“He was on an altar, and he just enjoyed being here,” said employee Kristen Nestor, who supervises the store’s weekly crystal-reading classes. “He participated in our classes.

Nestor said she believes the skull is as old as 500 years.

“He likes to travel and things like that,” Nestor said. “He was here for about four months, just enjoying everyone who comes through here.”

It’s a CRYSTAL SKULL!  IT is not a HE!  IT is not SENTIENT!  IT doesn’t ENJOY ANYTHING!

Somehow I think I am justified in not taking their word that the object is 500 years old.  If these people can read a hunk of rock’s “mind”…

You may remember her as the blonde who used to do handstands and had a squeaky voice.  I was reading an interview with her and she told a story of one time when Al Franken caught her in the hallway and called her out for acting dumber than she really is.

Al Franken came up to me in the hallway alone and said, “I just want to tell you something. This really offends me but you act like an airhead all the time and you’re really smart. And it really bugs me.” It was like someone hit me in the face. Because I hate fake people and I always think I’m never fake. I said, “Well, my voice is weird and I can’t help that, but maybe I act giddy and happy and silly or something because I’m over-compensating for what I’m really thinking inside, that everyone here is going to hell and I’m supposed to tell them about Jesus.” And he looked at me, his face went red and he walked away.

Wow.

There is no escaping it - if you believe that Jesus died for your sins and you believe that the Bible is accurate as far as what it says (and by the way, it is - every time scholars have tried to hang a historical inaccuracy or fiction on it, the Bible has been proven right by archaeology), then you have to face the reality of hell.  Not Hell as a punishment (which is the commonly held perception), but hell as a separation from God, chosen by man.

It is a choice to go there.  Perhaps part of the problem with the idea of hell is that the firey caves that have been historically used to depict it are artistic ideas of how to render a concept that is completely beyond our experience as living humans.  There are two things we simply cannot imagine: heaven and hell.  The idea of eternity, perfection, and direct relationship with the creator of the universe is staggering.  But hell is just as foreign.  This is because again, contrary to popular perception, God is here on earth with us now.  God is omnipresent.  He sustains the universe constantly and acts continually.  The universe is not a clock that has been wound and runs on its own.  His presence as the Holy Spirit is what keeps so much selfishness and evil at bay in our every day lives that life is unimaginable without his presence.

Even in the most ghastly pit of cruelty and inhumanity that we have ever heard of or seen, God is still there, weeping for us.  More than that, he sustains life and even can create beauty in the midst of destruction.  I am reminded of a picture I saw of a forest fire’s scorched landscape, and the beautiful flowers that popped up, even weeks after the fire, dots of colour against charred soil and wood.  To fathom his complete absence is hard, but it will be even harder for those who do not come to know Jesus in life.  Because hell isn’t just eternal blackness.  Or even eternal pain.  Where does that pain come from?  I believe the pain and anguish that characterizes hell is of our own making - it has to be.  When a person goes to hell, he or she is eternally separated from everything forever.  But more, they are sent there, after having met Jesus, face to face.  So the pain comes from finally meeting, face to face, your creator, your sustainer, and your redeemer.  It comes from recognizing that God had been crying out to you to come to him your entire mortal life, but you ignored him, shunned him, or even actively fought against him.  Your pain comes from realizing that you have given away the chance to know a pure love unlike any other, and all you needed to do was say to him, “Yes, Jesus.  Not my will, but yours.”  The knowledge of how easy it really could have been, and the eternal reward you have forwarded, causes a torment that cannot be fathomed in a life where we fool ourselves into thinking we are merely finite bunches of atoms that came from oblivion and will return to oblivion once our body wears out.

So when she says she is acting like a flake to mask the pain of not knowing what to do to help people see everything they are throwing away and how small a price it is to buy eternal life with God, I identify.  I am seeing this more and more in myself - a frustration with not knowing what I can do to tell them.  It is hard to get to know people better and better, but having to deal with your heart attaching itself to someone who, once they are dead, you’ll never see them again.   It hurts.  What do you do with that?  But it should drive us to, as Peter teaches, “always be ready with an answer for the hope that is in you.”

I have talked about Drew Marshall’s radio show before.  I wish that it was available out here from our local Christian radio station, but there are two stumbling blocks from their end that I am aware of - 1.  they are out of the USA and Drew is a Canadian production; 2.  he is talk radio and the station we have is primarily music (and they aren’t willing to ditch “old school” Chuck Colson minutes and Adventures in Odyssey for something that is really relevant and meaningful to Christians trying to get their rubber on the road.

So apparently, Drew was one 100 Huntley Street recently.  I can’t believe I like him more than ever - he was so brutally honest and sharp I was blown away.  His interviewers I think were a bit too.  According to Drew’s site, 100 Huntley Street got so many complaints that they have no plans to have him back on, and they have pulled the video of the interview off their website.  I’ve got a good idea of who was complaining, and it was people who have completely lost sight of what it really means to be a Christian.

We need more Drew Marshalls.  We need more people with his passion and fire and discernment to wake up all these sleepy Christians (like myself!) from their stupor and do what God’s called them to do - reach out and change the world!

Watch his youtube clips.  Part 1 here and Part 2 here.  Must see TV.

Drew Marshall: (his words) “Finding people with Holy Hand Grenades up their butts and pulling the pin.”

Pastor Hacks - useful for a pastoral perspective on productivity.  Most pastors I know could use some help in this area.  Pastors are in general people people, and tend to lose track of details.

Lifehacker - personal productivity.  The mother of all productivity sites.

Cult of Sincerity - full-length youtube movie?  Watching.  Incidentally connected (their means of profiting from the film) is…

Amie Street - a website with downloadable music VERY affordably priced.  I found a Barenaked Ladies Children’s CD on it!  The songs are brilliant.  I will be downloading and exposing my children to barenaked ladies.

I hope that last sentence does not get my kids taken from me by social services.