This is how you rock it as a Metrosexual Worship Leader.

Last night, Becky rocked the Metrosexual Worship Leader look using pointers from this post. I think that is hilarious, especially the addition of the French Press. For more about what she did, click here.

Are you doing anything for Halloween?

Are you going trick or treating?

Will you go to a church alternative event like trunk or treat or a fall festival?

Or are you shot blocking this “holiday” all together?

(I’m dressing up as a GI Joe character at the request of some neighborhood youths and taking two princesses around in the hopes of filling bags with candy that isn’t those disgusting Mary Jane things.)

What are you doing for Halloween?

(I’ve been thinking for a while now about how to write a post about when we claim not to have some general spiritual gifts. I know there have been times in my own life where friends have said things like this to me, “I just can’t get into the Bible, I don’t think reading it is one of my spiritual gifts.” That seems a little silly to me, but I couldn’t figure out a good way to write about that topic. Until I received an unexpected guest post from a guy named Christopher Madin. He didn’t mean to send me a guest post, he just emailed me a funny story. But as soon as I read it I knew it needed to be shared on Stuff Christians Like. Without further ado, I give you brand new guest post…)

Not having the spiritual “gift of helps”

A couple years ago I got in a heated argument with a fairly well-known Christian author when he was guest speaking in our Sunday school class. He was talking about how we each have spiritual gifts, which is totally valid, but by way of example he happened to mention that you would never find him sweeping up the church because he didn’t have the “Gift of Helps.”

I have to admit that I kind of went after him on this in a way that, looking back, bordered on inappropriate. I pointed out that I didn’t see “helps” mentioned as a spiritual gift in any Bible I’ve read. I told him that it doesn’t take any particular spiritual gift to clean up or help out around the church – unlike prophesying or healing the sick, anyone can swing a broom.

I suggested that the idea of a gift of “Helps” was invented by people who were too lazy to pitch in and help out around the church. I asked him if he was seriously suggesting that he couldn’t put a chair away because he didn’t have that spiritual gift. “I see that those chairs need to be put away, and I’m just standing here. I wish I could help, I really do. If only God had blessed me with the Gift of Helps!”

That’s about when our college ministry pastor got up and closed things out for the day. I was such a jerk, I know, but what a load of nonsense.

Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever claimed not to have the spiritual gift of helps so that you could get out of doing something you didn’t want to do?

(For more great stuff from Chris Madin, check out his blog.)

(It finally happened. I wrote a post last year in which I bemoaned the fact that no one would paint a mural of the scene in the Bible where Elisha orders bears to kill a bunch of teenagers. Well, a really talented comic book artist, named Wes Moelbash, actually illustrated it. (The link to his site is now updated and correct, please go show Wes some love.) The post is below and the illustration is after the jump. Check it out.)

Refusing to paint my mural.

I think Bible story murals might be slowly dying. As much as we love them, I am starting to see them at less and less churches. The days of having Noah’s Ark painted on the walls of your area for kids is slowly giving way to more contemporary creative visual interpretations of the Bible. And I’m fine with that as long as someone will finally paint my idea for a mural. I am of course talking about the scene in 2 Kings when the prophet Elisha orders some bears to attack teenagers who called him bald.

Go ahead and reread that last sentence, it’s a weird one. But here’s what it says in 2 Kings 2:23-24:

From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some youths came out of the town and jeered at him. “Go on up, you baldhead!” they said. “Go on up, you baldhead!” He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths.

That story is insane and here’s how I envision the mural. Elisha is standing in the middle of all these angry, bald hating teenagers. He looks really enraged and the caption out of his mouth says, “Do you know where you are? You’re in the jungle baby! You’re gonna die!” And then in the corner of the mural are two huge bears with hockey sticks. I’m not sure why they have hockey sticks but it seems a little tougher to me.

That’s my idea, but so far churches are refusing to take me up on it.

Until today that is …

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I love a comeback story.

I love when someone who has fallen or stumbled picks themselves up and keeps going. I love when the underdog outreaches the distance we assumed they could reach. I love when the small nobody rises above a thousand obstacles and turns out to be a big somebody.

And I don’t think I am alone in that. This is why we all get excited about the “Cinderella Stories” during college basketball season, those teams from schools in the middle of nowhere that some how beat the giant school. It’s not nearly as exciting to see the team that should win, win. It’s not nearly as dramatic or interesting to see the seasoned professional hit the winning shot. That’s just what seasoned professionals do. The kid with the gruesome background who taught himself how to play basketball on a peach basket in his backyard? That’s a shot heard round the world.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, our desire to see comebacks. David and Goliath is the classic example of something being made out of nothing. But Youtube has opened up a whole new way to experience stories like this and I have a new favorite.

The back story is simple and chances are, you’ve already seen this wildly popular clip. Danyl, an unassuming teacher from the UK takes the stage to audition for a television show called the X-Factor. Dressed in simple clothes and with a nervousness that is palpable, he starts to sing in front of Simon Cowell, the American Idol judge. Watch this video …

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Whoa, full house today. Should have gotten to church earlier. I didn’t realize it was going to be so packed. And we would have been here on time if our kids weren’t employing the “Mydo” approach to all articles of clothing and demanding that I don’t help them get ready. Shirt? Mydo! And the head goes through the arm hole. Pants? Mydo! And both legs somehow get crammed into the same side of the pants. Shoes? Mydo! And they go on the wrong feet with the pinky toe poking outside of the boundary of the sandals.

But we’re here now at church and that’s all that matters. Hey, there are some seats in the middle of this row, I’ll just get the guy on the end to scoot in. I’ll just stand here next to him until he looks up and then I’ll ask him to scoot. I’m standing 6 inches away from him, he’s going to look up any second now.

I know you can see me guy. I’m not in your periphery vision right now, I am your periphery vision. I’m that close. Stop pretending I’m not here. I can’t believe this guy, he’s acting like I’m trying to cut in front of him in traffic and he’s giving me the blank stare ahead.

Maybe he won’t scoot, maybe he’s anti-scoot. I accept that, I do. He got here early, he staked out an aisle seat, he’s probably going to sprint out of here to some sort of buffet that has multiple forms of fried chicken. I can respect that. I can, but if you hate scooting, at least pay me the Christian courtesy of rotating your legs fifteen degrees so that I can walk by you to my seat.

Maybe the problem is that this guy doesn’t read Stuff Christians Like. Maybe that’s the real issue here, because if you did, kind sir, you would know the three rules of sitting at the end of the aisle …

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Recently, I saw a commercial for a new show on ABC called “V.” I immediately got excited because I thought someone finally had the courage to address a problem that is tearing the church asunder …

V-necks.

Unfortunately, my enthusiasm was misplaced as the show appears to be about aliens. Fine, ABC, chicken out. Address fictional issues. V-necks however, are fact. And they are terrifying.

If you’re reading this right now and you can feel a slight breeze on your sternum because you’ve rocking a deep v-neck, it might be too late for you. If you’re reading this and thinking, “What’s a v-neck?” there’s still hope for you my friend.

Having recently seen 19 million v-necks at the Catalyst Conference and found myself in stage three of Deep V-Neck Syndrome (DVS) I feel qualified to offer the following caution. Here is how DVS typically goes down:

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Great comments, post is closed. Thanks so much for sharing your charities. I will pull together a list of ten that we can all vote on. I’m actually going to give away 2 spots instead of 1 the response was so big. Keep an eye out for the vote soon.

From September 6 to October 6, more than 90,000 unique people visited Stuff Christians Like.

That’s roughly 180,000 eyeballs. (I used roughly because Google Analytics does not currently track number of pirate visits.)

So what right? Web traffic is a silly thing to talk about and ultimately a stupid thing to get obsessed about, and it’s all a reflection of how awesome God is not how awesome I am, but seeing that got me thinking about generosity.

That’s what reading a blog is, people sharing their ideas and their time and their lives with you. Readers of Stuff Christians Like are incredibly generous, so how can I be generous back?

Tossing out free buttons like my name was Johnny Appleseed is a start, but I have a different idea. I think we should pick a charity we all love and give them the biggest banner on Stuff Christians Like for free in November. I only have one big square banner on the left hand side, so essentially they’d be on every page of the site for a solid month.

What do you think? Are you a charity that could use some love? Do you support a charity we should all know about? Post a comment with a link to your charity until Tuesday, October 27th. I’ll pick ten and then post them for everyone to vote on. The charity with the most votes will be the featured sponsor of Stuff Christians Like for the month of November. For free.

Let’s chill this weekend and simply answer the question …

What charity or mission would you suggest for Stuff Christians Like?

My three year old daughter McRae and my six year old L.E. both asked if they could put the Stuff Christians Like buttons on the back of their school backpacks. I said “Sure,” until I realized that the “booty, God, booty” button might not go over well at the Methodist pre-school. I just figured McRae would not be able to explain the wry Christian satire and ultimate message of hope in Christ it represented to a teacher who saw a three year old wearing something that said “booty” on it. Twice. Fair enough.

But then it struck me that I too had done a pretty poor job of explaining where and what the phrase “booty, God, booty” meant. That post came out on April 3rd, 2008 and has been long forgotten under the onslaught of other posts. And lately folks who didn’t see the original post have been asking me, “What the heck is the booty thing?” Worse than that, I recently saw a post on someone’s blog that featured the booty logo and just slammed the whole thing as being directly related to the fall of Western society. (I am summarizing, but that was the gist.)

So here now, to clear up the questions and the confusion, is a remix of the original post that started the whole idea …

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This is going to come as a shock for many of you, but I wasn’t popular in high school.

I know, I know, given the unibrow, constant braces, and tap dancing lessons, you would think that I would have been homecoming king. But that wasn’t the case. I was a bit of a loser. And by “bit” I mean “big” and by “big” I mean “wicked big.”

I just wasn’t popular and although I’ve committed to raising my own kids as dorks, I was taken aback when my daughter confessed something the other night at dinner.

L.E. is in kindergarten. After three years at a small local church preschool program, she’s started her journey through the public education system. And last week at dinner she told us, “Mary told Janice that I was a big, fat loser.”

She just threw that sentence out on the kitchen table in between forced bites of vegetables. And it sat there for a second, with my wife and I not knowing quite what to do. With big blue eyes, L.E. looked back and forth at as, silently asking a loud question …

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What? Who is calling me this early? Which one of my friends is up right now and not engaged in a quiet time, like I am? Sweaty heathen. And they’re calling me?

I’m not answering the phone. I’m in the middle of a quiet time. Come on, stop calling. I see your number, I know your name, we’ll talk later. I’m in the middle of a quiet, reflective moment with God. I need a prayer closet. No forget that, I need a prayer bunker. Possibly somewhere under ground. Maybe a prayer lair that spits on fog from one of the fog machines they use in youth groups. Fine, I’ll pick up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Yeah, I’m just doing my quiet time right now. What are you doing?”

Pause.

“Oh you’re driving to work? Cool, well it’s been good talking to you. I’m going to get back to this quiet time. I’ll call you later. No, seriously, I want to hear about the divorce you’re going through but I’ll give you a call after I’m done reading God’s word. Yeah, I gotta go” …

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