A few weeks ago, someone did something a little whack to me. It wasn’t a lot of whack, just a little. A lot of whack is like the time in 9th grade when I shaved a Vanilla Ice style stripe into my eyebrow and told everyone that my friend Kerri did it and she confronted me in the cafeteria and I had to eat lunch in the library for the next few days out of sheer embarrassment. That was a lot of whack.

What happened to me recently was just a little whack and when it happened, I felt a little frustrated. Not a lot of frustrated, just a little. A lot of frustrated is like the time my pastor father got a call from the police station and he thought they were calling to ask him to buy some fundraising tickets to some sort of raffle but they were actually calling to inform him I’d been caught shoplifting and needed a ride home from the police station. That was a lot of frustrating.

What happened to me recently was just a little frustrating and I felt a little vengeful. Not a lot of vengeful, just a little. A lot of vengeful is like the time a retired pastor wrote my friend, who is also a pastor, a letter in which he explained how he was praying more fervently for anything than he ever had in his life that my friend would go blind because he was too arrogant. I wanted to do a month long serious on Stuff Christians Like called “Great reasons we give people not to become Christians.” That was a lot of vengeful.

This was just a little, but in the midst of being hurt that someone had done something whack to me, I realized something unexpected that I think is true:

An act of love is amplified exponentially when it is given in response to an act of hate.

Have you ever thought about that? Have you ever thought that the greatest time to send the loudest message of love is when someone has given you a message of hate?

It’s kind of counterintuitive, but it’s true. When someone hates you, when someone hurts you, when someone gossips about you or steals from you, they open up this deep chasm between the two of you. They dig a canyon’s worth of emotional distance, a gorge of separation that feels impossible to span.

Logic would tell you to step back from the edge of that gorge.

Rational thinking would tell you to move away from someone that is actively digging such a deep, painful expanse between where you stand and where they stand.

Reason would tell you that it’s probably impossible to ever cross that distance. That years and years must pass before you can even stand on the edge and stare off into the distance at someone far away from you.

But love isn’t bound by logic and ration and reason.

Love doesn’t play fair and neither does God.

He calls us to love our enemies. He calls us to love the people that are far away from us. He calls us to love the difficult and the sick and the jerks. (I’m not sure if the word “jerk” is in the Bible, but I’m trusting that the Message version has it at least once.)

And the weird thing, is that I think He calls us to do that is precisely because it’s the loudest way to show His love.

When you bridge a gap with love, when you step across a chasm that might have existed for decades in your family, you create a bridge that can be seen for miles and miles, generations and generations. Step out and love a close friend that’s bruised your feelings and you’ve created an overpass on a small creek. Jump out and love an enemy that’s deliberately and destructively tried to hurt everything you stand for, do you know what you do when you love that person? You create a connection that will put the Golden Gate Bridge to shame.

This is not easy. This is not simple. This is not something I am good at. I wanted to punch another dad in the face the other day at an Easter Egg hunt when his punk 5-year old pushed my daughter out of the way. But this is where I think God has me headed. And what an incredible opportunity we have when someone tells us that Christians are unloving or judgmental or hypocritical or a million other things that we’ve done to hurt people. We can bridge the gaps with compassion. We can bridge the gaps with surprising kindness. We can bridge the gaps with a love that doesn’t make sense.

Hope is heard loudest when it’s a response to hurt.

Comfort is heard loudest when it’s a response to pain.

Love is heard loudest when it’s a response to hate.

Let’s be loud.

Stop, just stop, it’s too late. I saw you. We were just told to turn to Nahum 2:4 by our pastor and out of the corner of my eye I saw you flip to the table of contents in your Bible.

Don’t, don’t try to explain yourself. I thought you loved God. I thought that when we weren’t at church together you were off somewhere reading your Bible, but clearly that was a mistake on my part. How long has this been going on, this, ugh, I don’t even like how the words feel in my mouth, this “using the table of contents to find books of the Bible?”

I felt like we had made so much progress. When we first met you had a Bible with those indents, those “dumb thumbs.” As in, “I’m dumb, I can’t find Titus, here is where I place my thumb.” But we got through that, we pushed through that and got you a grown up Bible without indents marking the different books.

And then today, today I catch you using the table of contents?

Who are you?

I don’t even know you any more.

Sure, you can find Psalms. Congratulations, you know where Psalms is. Everyone can find that book. It’s 60 pages long and in the middle. Yeah, that’s right, in addition to the location of the books of the Bible I know the length of each book.

Do you know what I did with my table of contents? I ripped it out and rolled it into a homemade shofar horn that I blow when it’s time for my family to come down and read our nightly Bible studies.

Go on, look up Nahum. It’s too late to save face now. You’ll find it on page 1466 and it’s only seven pages long. But what am I telling you for? You’ve probably confused Nahum with the Marvel comics anti-hero, Namor the Sub-Mariner, prince of Atlantis, grandson of the Atlantean Emperor Thakorr.

I’m so embarrassed for you.

“Is it weird to hear a pink bunny rabbit sing these depressing songs?”

As I’ve mentioned before, that’s what Adam Duritz, lead singer of the Counting Crows, asked me and 10,000 other people one night at a concert.

The show was held on Halloween night in Boston. The entire band was dressed up in costumes and Duritz had a full bunny outfit on. Pink fur, white belly, two long ears.

Just imagine a delightful little bunny singing these lyrics from the song, “Perfect Blue Buildings”"

Asleep in perfect blue buildings,
Beside the green apple sea,
Gonna get me a little oblivion, baby,
And try to keep myself away from me.

It was weird to hear a bunny sing that and at the time, I thought the lyrics were actually, “Gonna get me a little Bolivian baby.” I honestly assumed Duritz was making a wry comment on celebrity adoption habits and was saying that if he adopted a Bolivian baby, all his problems would go away. (If you’re a Bolivian baby and you’re reading this, first of all, congrats on being bilingual and reading at such a young age and second of all please know I have nothing against Bolivian babies. You are easily one of my favorite types of South American infants. Top 3. Seriously. Nothing but love from SCL.)

Duritz is a master of the mid song chit chat, but unfortunately, I can’t say the same thing for all worship leaders. Sometimes the prospect of an open mic and a captive audience proves too tempting to resist. Sometimes it’s hard to resist the urge to deliver a worship leader mini sermon. Although I’ve written about this phenomenon before, I failed to give you any real pointers on how to perfectly execute a worship leader mini sermon. (And clearly, as someone that’s never been a worship leader and whose one claim to musical fame is dressing up as Britney Spears for a youth group song parody, I am extremely qualified to impart this wisdom.)

Here are the three best techniques for worship leader mini sermons:

1. The Examples Method
I don’t know Steve Fee personally, but I know he’s a really talented worship leader and he can flow with examples like few people in the game. In this technique, you wait until you get to a slow part of the song and then elaborate on the message by listing out numerous examples of how it can be applied to our lives. I think it started with that song “In my life Lord be glorified.” Our church used to sing 37 verses of that. “In my church Lord. In my home Lord. In my school Lord. In my Arby’s Lord even though they’re suddenly trying to call their sandwiches burgers, be glorified.” Fortunately, folks like Fee have rescued the Examples Method and applied it in some cool ways. Here is a snippet of what Fee says on the Live Catalyst Reverb CD, which I can’t stop listening to:

“If we’re going to say glory to God it doesn’t mean just glory to God when I’m in front of people or glory to God when people are watching. It means glory to God with every word and every thought and every motive, every meditation. .. It’s as if we’re saying in every part of my life, in every corner, in every shadow of my life, glory to God, with every relationship, glory to God, with every motive, glory to God, with every word and thought, glory to God.”

There are 13 examples in that blurb and although that seems like a lot when read on a blog, in the context of a live song, with a worship leader that’s in the zone, this works.

2. The Dictionary Method
A lot of people will tell you that if you’re a worship leader and you want to dabble in the art of the mini sermon, you’re going to need to have at least three words you can break down into Hebrew. For my money though you only need one: Hallelujah. “It’s a Hebrew contraction Halleh and Yahweh, Halleh meaning to celebrate, to rave, to shine, to praise, to praise Yahweh.” At least that’s what a worship leader told me recently in a song. And best of all, he did what every great dictionary master does, he told me how many times the word appears in the Bible.

3. The Bible Method
Knowing the Bible as a worship leader isn’t a contest, but if it was, please know that Aaron Keyes would crush you. You might know a lot of Bible, you might be able to quote long passages and complex verses, but it doesn’t matter, Aaron Keyes knows more Bible than you do. I promise. At the Off the Blogs event, I was sitting in the crowd in awe at his ability to seamlessly wrap scripture into the worship experience. I was sitting next to Billy Graham and even he said, “Oh snap, that Aaron Keyes is a player.” And Aaron heard him from the stage and replied, “I’m not a player I just crush a lot.” I leaned over to my wife and said, “Did Aaron Keyes just quote Big Pun to Billy Graham?” The whole thing was insane. OK, it didn’t happen that exact way, but I swear if Billy Graham had come to Off the Blogs, even he would have been impressed with Aaron’s Bible knowledge.

Those are my three favorite methods for the worship leader mini sermon.

Did I miss any?

Has your worship leader ever given a mini sermon?

Are you a worship leader that can flow with a mini sermon?

I believe in the collective creative power of a community, in the idea that “we” are much more creative than “me.”

To that end, instead of writing a long description of what Easter is, I thought I would open it up to you. I think that together, through 10 comments or 100 comments or a 1,000 comments, we can create a much bigger canvas than we could alone.

I’ll go first with a few ways I would finish the sentence “Easter is ______”

Easter is why.

Easter is a day I feel like I’ve barely started to understand.

Easter is a question that can only be answered with “because He loves us.”

Your turn. Fill in the blank as many times as you’d like and use the comments to tell folks what Easter is to you.

Easter is _________.

A few weeks ago I asked you what was working on Stuff Christians Like and what was broken. A lot of folks responded and gave me some great feedback. Here is what I heard:

1. We need an easier way to find posts.
Amen, this site is impossible to navigate. I tagged the posts and created categories over on the right side of the page. They’re not perfect yet, but hopefully it’s a good start to being able to find an old post.

2. Make better use of widgets.
I need widgets to make it easy to share the content, as one reader mentioned “especially if I want to send one to someone else in ‘Christian love.’” I added the “Share” button at the bottom of each post. Granted, you might not want to digg or email everything on this site, but now if you want to digg the “Thinking You’re Naked” post or email your worship leader the “How Metrosexual is your Worship Leader” post it’s a lot easier.

3. No one wants intense debate commenting.
As Marni put it, “it gets icky quicky.” So for right now at least, I’m not going to add intense debate.

4. How about a search box?
Hopefully the tags and categories will help alleviate this, but there’s also a search box in the upper left corner of the page that searches Stuff Christians Like. Maybe I can find a widget at some point too.

5. Keep it simple.
Most people seemed to agree with this idea. This site is ugly and bare, but I like the stripped down approach because it forces me to put everything I can into the words since that’s all there is. I’d like to find a good designer to help me simplify it even further at some point and I’ll probably build a more professional looking jonacuff.com, but for now, plain and simple like a white t-shirt on blogger is the way I think we should go.

6. Give us a breather every now and then.
A handful of folks told me to take a break every now and then or to give them more time to digest the longer, Serious Wednesday posts. I think that’s a good idea and will try to do a better job of recognizing when a post and the conversation we have around it needs to carry over a day. Sometimes I need to put my ego on pause and get out of the way to let an idea and the conversation that follows breathe a little. (At the same time, don’t worry about me getting all serious all the serious time because the interwebs are already jam packed with plenty of serious writers and the satire is really fun.)

7. Respect the RSS feed.
I blew it on this one. I don’t do much with RSS feeds and didn’t realize the hassle I was creating by making posts within Stuff Christians Like that essentially said, “Go read 97 Seconds with God.” From here on out, I’ll try to do a better job of not filling your SCL RSS feed with things that aren’t SCL-related.

Thanks again for the feedback. If you feel like I missed anything, please let me know.

Side hugs, Razzle Dazzle and Widgets,

Jon

(Writing guest posts isn’t a competition but please know that if it was, Curtis would be melting his gold medal into a Promise Grill so fast your head would spin like a pair of rims. Whoa, double rap reference in one sentence. Pull it back Jon, pull it back. What can I say, Curtis has written a ton of guest posts and to tell you the truth, I hope he never stops because he is funny. And I’m a big fan of that.)

Wearing matching t-shirts at the beach.
It’s spring break season! That means nothing for me anymore, but it used to. We all have that friend, though, who’s still doing the spring break thing, bless his heart. No one has the guts to tell him he’s not 21 anymore.

That friend will probably be tagging along as a sponsor on your youth group’s Beach Outreach (or B.O.) spring break mission trip. “B.O.” is at least the theme of the middle schooler section of the bus.

My youth group went to Chicago one spring break for a mission trip. It snowed. Don’t do that. Hit up South Beach for the Lord…party in the city where the heat is on!

If you happen to be hanging ten on the beach sometime in April, here’s how to tell the church youth group from everyone else: matching t-shirts. Whether they do it for the sake of modesty, group unity, or both, you can bet your tankini that it’s a church youth group.

The t-shirt says something (probably in Español, por favor) like “No mas cerveza…Jesús apagará su sed”, which, in English, means “No more beer…Jesus will quench your thirst.” Sure they’re ready to talk to you about Jesus, but will they pee on your leg if a jellyfish stings you? That’s the sign of a real friend.

It’s a good thing those shirts are on, because the collective pastiness of this group could fill a glue factory, causing more than a few people to stumble (due to the blinding glare off of their epidermises…epedermii? epedermeese?). I’m not poking fun, I’m speaking from personal experience…I wear a t-shirt at the beach because otherwise it’s like staring directly at the sun through a telescope.

Let’s just say that if you see more than one set of footprints in the sand this spring break, those flip-flopped footprints are probably accompanied by youths wearing matching t-shirts. Before you curse them and call out some bears to maul them, think about their youth minister and all that paperwork he’d have to fill out at the hospital. The sad thing is, this trip counts as “vacation” for him.

(For more from Curtis, check out his blog justwallpaper.wordpress.com)

If you’re a Christian and someone mentions they’re studying the book of James, you have to go a little green in the face and say, “Ugh, James.” You have to commiserate with that person immediately and tell them that you’ll pray for them as they wander through that devastatingly difficult book. Once you’ve done that and said things like, “That book will mess you up,” you can move on to saying the other thing everyone says about James: “It’ll be interesting to see if you think James’ ‘faith without works is dead’ contradicts what Paul says in Romans.”

You might not have an answer for that yourself, but it’s good to at least say that, because you’ll look holy and mildly interested in the book of James.

Despite the bad rap it’s gotten, James isn’t so bad. It kind of reads like a New Testament version of Proverbs with loads of practical advice. It has beautiful reminders of God’s love like 1:17, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”

And James even sneaks some pretty hilarious stuff in there. For instance, in chapter two, the two people he references as examples of individuals of faith are Abraham and Rahab. One was the father of Israel and one was a prostitute. If he had written it as “Abraham and Moses” we all would have read that verse and thought, “Oh sure, those two guys are all-stars. They’re like the Michael Jordan and Larry Bird of the Old Testament.” But he didn’t. He covered such a wider perspective of life and what it means to be a Christian by saying, “I have two examples of amazing people for you: Abraham and a hooker.”

Plus, James taught me a lot about blogging. Some of my early posts took some cheap shots at people and took shortcuts to easy laughs at other people’s expense. Then I read James 4:11: “Brothers, do not slander one another. Anyone who speaks against his brother or judges him speaks against the law and judges it.” Yikes. I stopped the personal attacks.

And when people hate on the site, my first inclination is to quote Fabulous and say, “Naw, I ain’t had a brush with beef yet, some of ya’ll wake up hatin’ and ain’t brushed your teeth yet.” But then I remember James 5:9, “Don’t grumble against each other, brothers, or you will be judged.” Instead of jumping into a grumble fest and arguing in elaborate detail that I do not in fact suck, I move on by the hate mail, realizing that God is not a huge fan of grumbling. (I’m still working on this one.)

That willingness to get funky with his Old Testament hero selection and the blog advice is enough for me not to get queasy when I hear James mentioned. I’ll probably still pull out a courtesy cringe for you if you mention you’re going to be reading it, but inside I’ll be thinking, “You’re going to love that book.”

Am I alone in this, or are you afraid of the book of James too?

What book of the Bible still strikes terror into your heart at the mere mention?

A few weeks ago I invited folks to connect with me on Facebook. A bunch did and that is awesome. A few days after accepting everyone that friended me, a guy I didn’t know sent me an instant message that said something like, “Hey, did I see you crossing the street yesterday in Dunwoody?” I work in Dunwoody and after a little back and forth we figured out that he had indeed seen me.

This is where things get a little embarrassing for me.

In about 0.2 seconds, my head swelled up and I thought, “Whoa, someone recognized me. Not just someone, a fan. I’m so important. I’m getting recognized on the streets of the ATL. I should get Ludacris to lay down some tracks on my next jam. I’m not even sure what that means but it sounds right. I am such a super awesome famous Christian blogger.”

And so, intoxicated on my own awesomeness, I chatted the guy back and said something like, “That’s funny that you recognized me. I try to keep my photo off the blog because it’s not about me so you’re one of the first people that reads it and recognized me.” (I like how I worked in some false humility dropping that line about how I try to keep my photo off the site, which is true, but come on. Talk about being proud of being humble.)

He immediately responded:

“Oh, no. I know you from that men’s group you used to go to.”

Cue balloon burst. The men’s group he was referring to is for guys that have broken their lives. It’s a closed group with an intake process and name tags with first name and last name initial so mine just said, “Jon A.”

He wasn’t a fan. He wasn’t some avid reader of Stuff Christians Like. He was another broken guy like me, kindly reconnecting with an old friend. I felt dumb for a second, mad that I am still so ego driven. But then started laughing with God. I felt like in that moment He laughed as I got prideful of being recognized and reminded me, “Don’t worry about getting a big head. I’ve got this. We’re going to get to humility. I promise we will.” And then He laughed with me some more.

I need reminders like because in addition to my ego, I really want to do something big for God. I’ve written about this a million times before, but I want to start a massive ministry and travel the world and launch out on some colossal journey with God. And when I get stuck on that definition of life, when I get drunk on the idea that when God rolls, He rolls big, I forget something really important:

We serve a mustard seed God.

We serve a God that whispered to Elijah.

We serve a God that changed humanity with a baby.

We serve a big God that delights in doing small things we don’t understand.

We serve an exponential God.

I was reminded of how powerfully true this is the other day while talking with Jonathan Golden. He started Land of a Thousand Hills, a coffee ministry that equips Rwandan farmers with the tools they need to heal their country economically and the hope of the gospel. While telling me about the ministry in their small coffee house in Roswell, Georgia, he mentioned that when you buy a cup of coffee you can be part of a redemption story, you can be an answer to prayer from a Rwandan farmer who’s family was murdered by his neighbor, whose community was ravaged by genocide, whose village is so remote it’s untouched by most aid workers.

That changed how I saw the coffee beans that were sitting on the table. Each dusty brown bean was no longer just an anonymous piece of fruit off a plant. It was a connection to a farmer a million miles away. It was a thread stretching through lives and stories and dreams and oceans and hopes and hurts and hills and suburbs. And it was small, but it was significant.

I don’t know where you are with whatever God is asking you to lean into, but I hope you’ll do it even if it feels really small and invisible to the rest of the world. I hope you’ll forever retire the phrase, “This isn’t important” because we can’t possibly know what God has planned for the tiny things we do. I hope you’ll believe in the promise of a bean, in the power of a God that gave us the mustard seed, in the beauty of a God that weaves His story through simple decisions and housewives, water cooler conversations and missionaries and sometimes even cocky bloggers that try to think they’ve got paparazzi.

Because it’s His story. And even the small things are big in His hands.

Last October I had the chance to lead the devotionals at Dave Ramsey’s headquarters in Nashville. It was a blast. I opened up with Booty, God, Booty which is kind of my go to move to see if things are going to go well or if I need to be thankful I wore white Pumas and am nimble like a cat.

I found out today that I’m doing it again. On August 19th I’ll be headed back up there. I’d like to think I got invited back because of my hustle and flow the first time, but let’s be honest, Andy Stanley led devotionals last week at Ramsey’s headquarters. Thinking you can follow him is like thinking that PJ, the smelly kid you went to elementary school with, who did the Kid n’ Play dance from House Party in the talent show could follow Lil’ Wayne. (I just compared Andy Stanley to Lil’ Wayne. Christianity Today said it couldn’t be done. But I did it. I’m so proud of myself. I’ve got so many people to thank. Mom and dad for believing in me. Crazy Ricky for teaching me my dance moves …)

This is what happens when I write at night.

Bottom line, I’m coming back to Nashville and am really excited to see the Dave Ramsey staff again.

Razzle Dazzle,

Jon

Fine, I’ll say it: We Christians need to agree to a one sex joke maximum during our wedding ceremonies.

Seriously, let’s make that happen today.

I don’t know where this started, but I’d like to be part of the solution to stopping it even though it is a very uniquely Christian thing to do. Think about it, if the couple getting married already had sex then what they’re going to do on their honeymoon night might be very similar to what they might have done last Tuesday night. Big deal. There’s no point in joking about it. It would be like joking about me being awesome at breakdancing. Everyone already knows I do that all the time, so it wouldn’t be funny. But if you’ve got two virgins up on stage I fear that’s a joke opportunity that an increasing number of young ministers are unable to resist.

For example, I was at a beautiful wedding last winter and one of the people officiating the ceremony made about half a dozen sex jokes. The young couple squirmed and blushed while the crowd laughed nervously. The first joke was funny and appropriate. I mean if you’re doing a Christian wedding then theoretically joking about sex should kill in that setting. They’ve never had sex before and by talking about it you get to shock the crowd in a fun way. And so I welcomed the first joke and felt relieved that we had gotten that subject out of the way. In my head I thought, “Great, let’s move on to the unity candle, perhaps a three stranded ribbon that represents the man, the woman and God and then eat some cake.”

But this guy kept working the room blue. From “good lovin’” to “what you’re going to do later,” he was unstoppable. By the sixth sex joke I wanted to stand up in the aisle and shout, “We get it, they’re going to do it! Everyone, these two people right here are going to have sex!”

I didn’t though because my wife was there and she really hates when I yell things in the middle of weddings. But maybe today you and I can agree to a one sex joke maximum at Christian weddings.

Let’s change the world together.

We can do it.

I believe in us.

I do.

We built this city on rock and roll.