Alright, the results are in. I took the three most awesome comments on the Catalyst West Coast giveaway, from Josh, Josh Carter and Melina Hunt and then my wife picked them out of a hat.

The winner is … Melina Hunt!

Here is what she’s doing that’s creative this year:

We are attempting to turn from a largish congregation to smaller community gatherings. as a single, female college student, it’s kinda hard to get into my neighbors lives…but i’ve finally found my ticket.

free babysitting.

i’m not going to charge ever again. i’m going to go introduce myself to all my surrounding neighbors in a 5 block radius, give them my phone number, and encourage them to let me watch their little terrors for free…all for the sake of the gospel. i’m terrified..but confident God will do something great.

So big thanks to Catalyst for giving Stuff Christians Like a free ticket. And congrats Melina. Email me and I’ll make sure Catalyst gets your info. Also, please know that my wife wishes you lived in our neighborhood.

Jon

As I mentioned last week, I’m OK with using the phrase “Pot Lucks.” I’m sure the dictionary definition of luck is something like, “a word meaning lottery and gambling and all varieties of awfulness that make the Holy Spirit want to punch you,” but I just can’t bring myself to say “Pot Blessings.”

Luck is a more accurate description of the food you’ll find at church events, where everyone brings their own dish. They’re not all blessings. Some of them are gross. Upon tasting them your mouth does not think to itself, “I have just been blessed.” It might think, “Wow, I have just been cursed.” And now you’ve got a “Pot Cursing” on your hands, which seems like something a drunk crock pot would start doing if you bumped into it and spilled its drink at a nightclub.

My favorite part of a Pot Luck is the way that the grossest dish is so quickly identified. No one ever calls out the taste offender, but early on in the event, people start to recognize the outcast dish. Even after only a few people have gone through the food line, it becomes easier and easier to see which casserole will be the head engineer on the gross train tonight. It’s not that it won’t be touched or completely ignored. Most of the time, a tiny bit will be scooped out, indicating one of two things:

1. The first person through the line could not determine what was hidden under some gooey, potentially delicious layer of cheese and had to crack the outer hull of the casserole to determine that something funky was lurking within.

2. The first person actually tasted a tiny bit and moved on as fast as they could with as little as they could.

And since this is a Christian event, your heart breaks for this person. Don’t make eye contact with the dish. Love your neighbor by moving down the line. Or at most, give it a sympathy scoop, heaping extra onto your plate, and throw it away later when no one is looking. There’s nothing to see here, folks.

But what if it’s yours? What if you’re the owner of the dish? What if you brought it? Oh, the shame, the food-related shame you must be feeling right now. Fear not, I have a few ways you can lessen this daunting experience:

1. Stir it up
If fewer than seven people have gone through the line, there’s still a chance you can trick some people into thinking your dish is delicious. The best way is to take the Bob Marley approach and stir it up. Make it look like lots of people have been digging around in there, scooping out big helpings of awesome.

2. Distance yourself from the dish
If more than seven people have gone through the line, but less than 14, stirring won’t work. Instead, start to distance yourself from the dish by saying things like, “Oh look, someone brought Tuna Caper Strawberry Jam Surprise! I think I’ll try some.” In addition to getting another scoop out of your dish, you technically have not lied. Someone did bring that dish. It just happens that someone was you.

3. Leave a man behind
If everyone has gone through the line once and it’s obvious your dish is the shame-garnering meal, be prepared to do something the Marines would never do–leave a man behind. Don’t reclaim the dish. Leave it behind so that the stink of the shame doesn’t spill on you when it’s the end of the night and people are probably carrying out their empty dishes. Go ahead and say a whispered farewell to your dish if you need to because it’s about to enter the bowels of the church kitchen, never to be seen again. “I’ll miss you. You were such a good dish to me. I’m sorry I cooked that in you. That was so unfair to you. Don’t look at me that way. I’m sorry.” And then just get in your car and never look back.

I had a fourth, much more violent solution that involved turning over the table that all the food is sitting on so that every dish instantly becomes gross as it cascades upon the floor, but my wife felt that was too violent. I argued that this was exactly the same thing Jesus did when he cleared the temple with a whip, but apparently the word “casserole” does not appear in the New Testament. (I could have sworn it did.)

From here on out, every post I write is going to have the word “naked” in it.

I say that because last Wednesday, more people came to Stuff Christians Like than any other day in the history of the site and read “Thinking you’re naked.” Granted, that’s a “history” that includes a wee 379 days, but still, expect lots of uses of the word “naked” in the future.

The truth is, I’ve been pulling the reverse jinx as hard as I can with this site. The reverse jinx is when you say the opposite of what you hope will come true. For instance, when UNC basketball players shoot free throws, I will say out loud, “These guys always miss their free throws.” That way if they miss, I can say, “Told you so.” If they make them, I can act pleasantly surprised.

That is so dumb, but I’ve done the same thing with this site. Whenever people say, “That’s a great mission, God is doing some crazy things” I instantly say, “Nah, it’s just a hobby. It’s just a free blog on Google. There are 112 million blogs in the world, this is one more, it’s nothing. Stop.”

But the truth is that God is doing something with Stuff Christians Like and I think He wants me to admit that.

One of things that helped clarify this for me was a book called “The War of Art ” by Steven Pressfield. Here is something he wrote about the artist’s life.

The Artist’s Life

Are you a born writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end the question can only be answered by action.

Do it or don’t do it.

It may help to think of it this way. If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.

You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite the Almighty, who created you and only you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter farther along its path back to God.

Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution.

Give us what you’ve got.

It’s time for you and me to give the world what we’ve got. To nudge the human race one millimeter farther along its path back to God. I don’t know what that looks like for you, but for me, it means letting go of my fears of failure or success and leaning into God as hard as I can with this adventure.

The weird thing is, God is calling me toward satire. He’s balancing me on the fine line between reflecting on some of the tangles of Christianity and being madly, deeply in love with Christ. (And although I’m not 100% sure that God is calling me to use copious amounts of rap references, good grief I quoted ODB from the Wu-Tang Clan at the Off the Blogs event, I’m pretty sure He felt like Kris Kross’ version of “Jump Around” was slightly better than House of Pain’s version despite the fact that they wore their clothes backwards.)

I can’t do it without you. I don’t know what the “it” is yet, but I know it’s already much, much bigger than me. I hate asking people for things because what if they say no, but I’ve reached the end of what I am capable of. You have talents and gifts and ideas that you can add in ways I can’t even imagine. And maybe, God is telling you, “Give us what you’ve got.”

Because God is afoot. And He’s laughing and loving and whether you jump into the conversation at Stuff Christians Like or do something radically different, He’s asking us all the same question right now.

You in?

p.s. I tried as hard as I could to resist the temptation to make this reference, but doesn’t it feel like the song “Open the gates and seize the day,” from the movie Newsies should be playing in the background? I know for certain, Crutchy would be in.

Are you going to Catalyst West Coast? You should, because like all Catalyst events, it is going to be pretty insane. In addition to speakers like Guy Kawasaki and Erwin McManus, two of the funniest people alive, Tripp Crosby and Tyler Stanton, are co-hosting it with Jud Wilhite.

It’s April 22-24 out at Mariners Church in Orange County, California. I’ve gone to East Coast Catalyst the last two years and have loved it. I’m trying to go to this one but so far have not been able to convince Testamints to sponsor my travel and accommodations in exchange for me wearing a “Testamints, Minty Mouth Manna” t-shirt the whole time. (Apparently they heard that only 2 people came to my meet and greet last October and are seriously doubting my star power. Haters.)

I digress.

My friend Brad Lomenick at Catalyst gave me a free ticket to Catalyst West to giveaway on Stuff Christians Like. If you’re in the LA area or are willing to travel from wherever, post a comment about something creative you want to do this year. I’ll pick a winner on Tuesday, April 7. (For more info on Catalyst West, here’s the website www.catalystwestcoast.com)

So what are you going to do that’s creative this year?

(Sport fans in the US are about to enter the Bermuda Triangle of sports. The NFL season is over. College Football won’t start for a few months. College Basketball is about to wrap up. Baseball is just in Spring Training. Granted the NBA playoff season is 22 weeks long, but only the last week matters. This is the sports dead zone. Fortunately, for all you fans out there, Bryan Allain is back with his hilarious approach to sports and faith. It’s great and it’s a perfect example of why guest posts are so fun. Here’s Bryan:)

Last year at Prayers For Blowouts I ran a video featuring the Head of NFL Officiating, Mike Periera. In the clip Periera explained that any time a football player scores a touchdown and then goes down to the ground to celebrate, he WILL be assessed a 15-yard Unsportsmanlike Conduct penalty. The ONLY exception, according to Pereira, was if a player went down to the ground to pray. This would not be penalized, he said, because “…I do not want to be struck by lightning.”

(Before we get to Christian end zone celebrations, I’ve got to ask something: why is it that whenever someone does something blasphemous or wrong, people joke around about God striking them with lightning? I’ve blogged about this before, but when was that precedent ever set? As far as I know, God never used lighting to kill someone in the Bible. A Great Flood? Check. Giant hole in the ground? Sure. But lightning? Zeus maybe, but not Jehovah. On top of that, why are we so afraid of lightning strikes anyway? They only kill about 80 people a year in the U.S. whereas horse-related injuries kill over 200 people a year. Maybe next time someone does something wrong, instead of saying “watch out for the lightning bolt!” we should say, “Ride ‘em cowboy!”)

Anyway, back to the end zone celebrations. Going down to one knee to pray is good, but you’ve got to admit it’s a little played out at this point. This is 2009 people, it’s time to step it up! As always, I am here to help. What follows is a guide to help you craft and execute a memorable Christian end-zone celebration, separated into 5 Tiers of awesomeness from Rookie to Hall of Fame.

ROOKIE TIER
Making the Crucifix:
For some, too Catholic. For others, too coordinated. It’s like playing connect the dots on your upper torso. How does it go again? Mouth, sternum, left nip, right nip? Bonus points if you finish it off by kissing a cross necklace.

Pointing to the Sky:
This is a great way to give praise to God for your achievement, but it can get confusing. Are you pointing to God or are you dedicating the touchdown to a recently deceased loved one? Or maybe you’re a fanatical bird watcher and a peregrine falcon just flew over the stadium with an albino field mouse in its talons. Now that would be something worth looking at.

Going to the Ground to Pray:
I appreciate the gesture, but what type of prayers are actually being offered up after a score? I have trouble concentrating during prayer if there are birds chirping too loud outside my window and you’re telling me someone surrounded by 50,000 cheering fans and a bunch of teammates slapping his helmet is going to get past “Dear God…”? Color me skeptical.

NOTE: Many athletes will combine all 3 of these by praying on one knee, then doing the crucifix and pointing to the sky. While it’s a nice combo move for sure, it still doesn’t get you out of the Rookie Tier.

VETERAN TIER
Reenact a Famous Bible Story:
There are many Bible stories that can be effectively acted out in 15 seconds or less. Adam biting the apple, David dancing wildly before the Lord, or Saul being blinded on the road to Damascus would all make for great mini-theater in the end zone. Just stay away from anything in The Song of Solomon if you’d like to avoid a suspension.

Take Communion in the End Zone:
You’ll get penalized for using props in your celebration, but remembering the life and death of Jesus’ is worth a 15-yard penalty, right? Bonus points if you can drink the grape juice through your helmet without getting any on your uniform.

Slay Your Teammates in the Spirit:
You’ll need a few teammates to join in on the fun, but won’t it be worth it when the power of God drops them to the ground? Bonus points if you have cheerleaders stand behind the players to catch them and lay them gently on the ground. Extra bonus points if you get referees to lay modesty cloths over the slain players’ midsections.

ALL-STAR TIER
Make a Dove Descend on You:
Having a dove descend onto your helmet after scoring a touchdown? Awesome. Dealing with angry reporters in your post-game press conference who think you’re trying to claim you are the son of God? Not so much. Proceed with caution on this one.

Force the TV Announcers to Speak in Tongues:
How great would it be if, following your touchdown on Monday Night Football, Tony Kornheiser tried to crack a joke and it came out sounding like gibberish to the millions of people watching? Answer: pretty great. Just don’t try this one when John Madden is in the booth. Most listeners won’t be able to tell the difference between his normal diction and an angelic tongue.

MVP TIER
Perform Healing on Injured Teammate:
Why not take a page out of Benny Hinn’s playbook and pray for an injured teammate after finding the end zone? Bonus points if the teammate is in street clothes and immediately runs to the locker room to get his uniform on after God has healed him through your prayer. You’ve not only helped your team by scoring, but you’ve supplemented the depth chart as well. MVP, indeed.

Turn the Football into a Swine:
Turn the pigskin back into a pig and you’re not only showing off the power of God, you’re also making a confusing statement against macro-evolution. Bonus points if the pig reenacts Mark 5 by running out of the stadium and hurling itself into the nearest body of water.

HALL OF FAME TIER
Being taken away like Enoch:
In the ultimate form of an end zone celebration, let God whisk you away to heaven as he did with Enoch long ago. The downside: you’ll never score another touchdown. The upside: Hey, you went out on top! And you’re in heaven now, which means no more two-a-days at training camp.
—
Whether you’re a die hard sports fan or sports hater, I’m curious: what do you think about end zone celebrations? Do you like it when athletes act like they’ve been there before, or do you enjoy seeing the wacky stuff players can come up with to celebrate a score?
And if you’ve got a creative way for a Christian to celebrate scoring a touchdown that I missed, we’d love to hear it…

(as always, you can find more of Bryan’s writing at his personal blog, Ramblings and Such, and at his sports/faith blog, Prayers For Blowouts.)

If we’re Facebook friends, and we really should be, you might have noticed people started asking me if there was anything they could do in regards to the Acuff family house burning down. This was news to me.

On April Fool’s Day, some rapscallion wrote something online about my house catching on fire. In the middle of the day I started to get messages from people offering prayer and casseroles of hope. OK, no one technically offered me a casserole of hope, but that would have been nice too, although people eventually caught the joke and starting sending me funny things. When I saw the initial “God will get you through this” comments people were leaving on my wall, my very first thought was, “Is it possible our house burned down and my wife communicated that in a facebook status update instead of calling me?”

But fear not, our house did not burn down. We do have a hole in our playroom ceiling from where a plumber fixed a pipe leak and we have a purple plastic kid’s pool upside down in our backyard because a chipmunk died in it and either we find that no longer sanitary or perhaps it’s a memorial to a fallen woodland friend, but I’m not sure if either of those situations require a casserole.

Two weeks ago, at 5:00AM in Pop Century hotel room #7213, my 3 year old launched an epic meltdown that will probably be discussed by visitors to the greater Orlando area for years to come.

We deserved it. The day before we spent 15 years straight at Disney World with no nap and fed her sugar like a hummingbird to keep her going. The day before Disney we woke her up at 5:00AM and told her that we were going to Disney World instead of school, cue head explosion, and then drove 7 hours straight to Orlando. She was tired to say the least.

So when the meltdown erupted, which may or may not have involved a sleeping bag that had been tinkled on, (oh yeah she was sleeping on the floor to boot) I should have seen it coming. And I should have done a better job preparing my younger brother and his wife that a breakdown was imminent. They don’t have kids so they’re not used to screamo concerts so early in the morning. I felt really bad for him, which is certainly not an emotion I wrestled with much as an older brother when we were growing up.

When we were kids, we didn’t fist fight often, but concern for each other’s personal comfort was not high on the list of things we cared about. That was part of the reason Palm Sunday was such a blast. The rest of the year my parents were pretty dedicated to keeping sticks and any whip like implements out of our hands. But on Palm Sunday, we showed up at church and an usher essentially said, “Here you go, commence Palm branch fight.” I don’t know if those were his exact words but it’s been a long time so I’m a little fuzzy on the details.

And commence we did, whipping each other as hard as we could without catching dad’s eye from the pulpit since he preaching. The only problem was that the palms our church used were razor sharp. If you squeezed them too hard, they’d paper cut you. Like some sort of Samurai you had to hold the branch hard enough to elicit a flinch from your brother but tender enough that it did not wound you in the process.

Am I the only one that has this memory? Did you ever hit Sunday School classmates or siblings with the palm branches from Palm Sunday? Or was bringing them home and letting them dry out and disintegrate into a million pieces under your bed more your style? Or did you treat the palm branches as a historic symbol of the weeks leading up to a redemption that still rings true?

It was that last one wasn’t it? I’m embarrassed.

I don’t want to brag, but I’m pretty awesome at applying band-aids. And make no mistake, there is an art. Because if you go too quickly and unpeel them the wrong way, they stick to themselves and you end up with a wadded up useless mess instead of the Little Mermaid festooned bandage your daughter so desperately wants to apply to a boo boo that may in fact be 100% fictional.

Half of the injuries I treat at the Acuff house are invisible or simply wounds of sympathy. My oldest daughter will scrape her knee and my 3-year old, realizing the band aid box is open will say, “Yo dad, I’d like to get in on that too. What do you say we put one on, I don’t know, my ankle. Yeah, my ankle, let’s pretend that’s hurt.”

But sometimes the cuts are real, like the day my 5-year old got a scrape on her face playing in the front yard. I rushed in the house and returned with a princess bandage. As I bent down to apply it to her forehead, her eyes filled up with tears and she shrunk back from me.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t want to wear that band-aid.” She replied.

“Why? You have a cut, you need a band-aid.” I said.

“I’ll look silly.” She answered.

Other than her sister and her mom, there was no one else in the yard. None of her friends were over, cars were not streaming passed our house and watching us play, the world was pretty empty at that moment. But for the first time I can remember, she felt shame. She had discovered shame. Somewhere, some how, this little 5 year old had learned to be afraid of looking silly. If I was smarter, if I had been better prepared for the transition from little toddler to little girl, I might have asked her this:

“Who told you that you were silly?”

I didn’t though. That question didn’t bloom in my head until much later and I didn’t understand it until I saw God ask a similar question in Genesis 3:11. To me, this is one of the saddest and most profoundly beautiful verses in the entire Bible. Adam and Eve have fallen. The apple is a core. The snake has spoken. The dream appears crushed. As they hide from God under clothes they’ve hastily sewn together, He appears and asks them a simple question:

“Who told you that you were naked?”

There is hurt in God’s voice as He asks this question, but there is also a deep sadness, the sense of a father holding a daughter that has for the first time ever, wrapped herself in shame.

Who told you that you were not enough?

Who told you that I didn’t love you?

Who told you that there was something outside of me you needed?

Who told you that you were ugly?

Who told you that your dream was foolish?

Who told you that you would never have a child?

Who told you that you would never be a father?

Who told you that you weren’t a good mother?

Who told you that without a job you aren’t worth anything?

Who told you that you’ll never know love again?

Who told you that this was all there is?

Who told you that you were naked?

I don’t know when you discovered shame. I don’t know when you discovered that there were
people that might think you are silly or dumb or not a good writer or a husband or a friend. I don’t know what lies you’ve been told by other people or maybe even by yourself.

But in response to what you are hearing from everyone else, God is still asking the question, “Who told you that you were naked?”

And He’s still asking us that question because we are not.

In Christ we are not worthless.

In Christ we are not hopeless.

In Christ we are not dumb or ugly or forgotten.

In Christ we are not naked.

Isaiah 61:10 it says:
For he has clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of righteousness.

The world may try to tell you a thousand different things today. You might close this post and hear a million declarations of what you are or who you’ll always be, but know this.

As unbelievable as it sounds and as much as I never expected to type this sentence on this blog:

You are not naked.