If you follow me on Twitter @jonacuff, and really should because it’s a pretty delightful experience, you know that last Friday, Christian recording legend Michael W. Smith was on my flight to Denver. I was literally “going west young man” with Michael W. Smith.

He lives probably 6 minutes from me in Franklin, but I’ve never actually met him. I like to pretend I’m cool and not impressed by famous people, but I got really nervous when I saw him.

Because we were both on Southwest, I had a chance to sit in the row next to him. I actually asked an elderly woman on the aisle to stand up so that I could sit in the middle of the row across from him. She struggled to her feet, at which point I wussed out, told her to sit back down and took a seat two rows behind Michael W. Smith.

I had a copy of the Stuff Christians Like book in my bag and started to debate whether I should give it to him. I told the mom next to me what was going on and she started plotting too. Here are a few things that went through my head:

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I’m not sure where this phrase started. Although I have three friends who all individually swear they were the ones who created the hybrid word “chillaxing,” no one has claimed this phrase to the best of my knowledge.

Yet there it is, popping up like Canada Geese on golf courses. (Is there a more pretentious bird on the planet, by the way?) You can’t go on Facebook without seeing it. You can’t go on Twitter without it dancing across the screen. Friend after friend is using it. It’s practically social media punctuation at this point.

Just saying.

If you’ve never experienced it before, where do you live so that I can move there and experience this “Just saying-less utopia” you’ve discovered? I bet it’s in Colorado, seems like a lot of good stuff is in Colorado these days. But here’s how it works if you’ve never seen it wielded at the hand of a Christian:

One part snark + One part bitterness + Just saying = Complete forgiveness for whatever you’ve just said.

But here’s why I don’t like it. Here’s why I’ve thrown my social media weight in with the People Against Just Saying Coalition (PAJSC), a group I just invented. (It’s pronounced “Paj” like “Cas” from the first part of cashmere. The S and the C are silent.)

Reasons I’m against “Just saying”

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I’m going to lose readers on this one. Even as I start writing this post, I can hear metaphorical car doors slamming shut and tires peeling away from SCL into the vast blogosphere in search of better posts to read. But I have to make a confession, and I can’t hold it back any more.

It weirds me out a little when a guy refers to his wife as his “bride.”

Unless it’s your wedding day, telling me, “I need to go see my bride,” sounds a little strange to me. If it’s your big day and you’re about to go down the aisle, bride it up. Say bride all day long like it was your J.O.B. Go bride wild. I’ll even get in on the action and say things like, “Your bride looks beautiful today.” Or “It’s going to be amazing for you to see your bride walk down the aisle!” I’m 100% down for calling your wife “bride” on the day you get married.

The day after your wedding? I’m not so sure. Here’s why:

1. Ladies never do the equivalent.
I see guys on Twitter and Facebook talk about their brides all the time. A friend once said to me, “Please tell your bride thanks for sharing you with us this weekend when you came and spoke to our church.” But I have never, ever seen a lady call her man her “groom” after the wedding. I’ve never heard a girl say, “I need to get home to my groom. I’ve been really missing my groom.”

2. It feels a little medieval.
Whenever I hear someone say, “My bride and I have a really full weekend planned,” I instantly imagine, “Of course you do. Probably going to do some jousting, eat a giant turkey leg, maybe pull a sword from a stone. Big weekend planned. I’m not sure if you and your fair lady will have time for Bed Bath & Beyond this weekend.”

3. It feels a smidge too fancy.
It would feel way too formal if I was ever at a dinner party and someone I worked with said, “Hey Jon, come here, I’d like you to meet my bride.” My first thought would be, “Wait, am I at your wedding right now? She’s wearing shorts and flip flops, but I must be at your wedding if I’m meeting your bride.”

As I researched this idea, in my head mostly, I felt like there were two possible reasons to call your wife your bride. The first is that it’s biblical. Isn’t the church called “the bride of Christ?” It’s not called the “wife of Christ.” So using “bride” could be a throwback to the Bible. So maybe saying “bride” is like answering the question, “What Would Jesus Do?” He’d say bride. OK, I get that.

The other reason I could see you using this word is that your wife loves it. If my wife wanted me to call her my bride and that made her feel loved, the title of this post would be “People who don’t call their wives their ‘brides’ are stupid.” So maybe that’s why you do it.

Me personally? I call my wife “Brown Sugar” like D’Angelo suggested. But I’m hip hop.

What’s your take?

Do you call your wife your bride? Does your husband call you that?

What’s your opinion?

Sometimes, if I am reading the Bible too quickly, I have a Wile E. Coyote moment. Often when chasing the Road Runner, Wile E. would get so focused on what he was doing that he would run 15 feet off a cliff without realizing it. Then he would pause in mid air, look at the camera, then at his feet and plummet.

I feel that way sometimes while reading the Bible. I’ll get in a rhythm and start making progress. I’ll be cruising through Genesis and Exodus, moving along at a good clip, flying by the material, until out of nowhere I’ll pause, mid thought and say, “Wait, what???”

I’ll go back a few verses and realize that I breezed past something outrageous that at first glance I took as commonplace. Recognizing my error I’ll push pause, reread the verse and then fall off a theological cliff much like Wile E.

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(Over the years, Bryan Allain has written some fantastic guest posts on SCL. He’s one of my friends who I hope gets to publish a book someday because he’s a funny, smart honest writer. He’s also just started BlogRocket.com to help other bloggers blow their blogs up. Today he shares, a brilliant post about a song most of us know and love. Enjoy.)

Kissing Metaphors in Worship Music

If you’re not familiar with John Mark McMillan’s song “How He Loves,” first off tell me what it’s like to live in a cave. Do you pee in one corner of the cave, or do you go outside to do your business and risk being mauled by a jaguar with your pants down?

Either way, “How He Loves” is a popular song in churches right now, and one of the more memorable lines in the song goes something like this:

“So heaven meets earth like a sloppy, wet kiss.”

Now, you’re gonna be shocked to hear this (I hope you’re sitting down in the urine-free corner of your cave), but some artists and congregations aren’t comfortable throwing in imagery more commonly associated with a 7th grade make-out party into their worship songs.

As a result, another version of the song has been recorded that describes the heaven-earth collision as a slightly different lip lock:

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(My friend Tony Morgan always posts his best blogs from the year during the last days of December. I thought that was brilliant. So, for the next 6 days, that’s what we’re doing on Stuff Christians Like. Chances are there’s at least a few you never saw the first time and around and one of the top 6 is a guest post! Here we go with #6.)

There are only three types of Bible verses read at Christian weddings.

1. Proverbs 31 – Which paints the biblical picture of a wife.

2. 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 – Which paints the biblical picture of love.

3. Obscure 2:1-5– Which paints the biblical picture that your friends are “not going to go with the typical verses and instead picked a passage that no one in the history of mankind has ever read in a wedding.”

I’m a fan of all three, but recently realized that there are a lot of things I love about my wife that are not mentioned in Proverbs 31. I thought it might be fun to remix Proverbs 31, or “Message it” if you will.

Here are 5 ways I would remix the “Wife of Noble Character” description:

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Rejoice! For today our savior was born!

From our family to yours, have a wonderful Christmas day.

Jon, Jenny, L.E. & McRae.

It’s the day before Christmas! Can you believe that? This year felt like it was about 45 minutes long.

Last night, we went to our church’s Christmas Eve Eve service. Or as I call it “Christmas Eve Squared.”

What are your plans today?

Road trip?

Staying home?

What are you doing this Christmas Eve?

(It’s guest post Friday! Here’s one from Stephen & Shae Pepper. They write a blog for youth, YouthWorkinIt. You can follow them on Twitter @YouthWorkinIt. If you want to write a guest post for SCL, here’s how!) 

CCMdar – by Stephen & Shae Pepper

It’s the day before the day before Christmas. Chances are you’re about to go on a road trip to see some family.

Over the last couple of years, my wife and I have done two road trips from Virginia to California and back again. Not only is this a lot of miles, it’s also a lot of music. When you’re driving this far you have to change radio stations quite often, as the one you’re listening to goes out of range.

Through all this station-changing, we’ve developed a pretty good CCMdar. What’s a CCMdar? It’s a radar located where your ear connects to the brain, that helps you tell if it’s a Christian radio station while scanning through stations. In fact, we’ve honed our CCMdar so well that it only takes 2.71 seconds for us to identify if it’s a Christian radio station.

Want to know how to refine your own CCMdar skills? Here are some features that give away Christian radio stations: (more…)

“If you don’t make eye contact with any of the cars or motorbikes, they can’t hit you.”

That’s what I told my wife as I took my first step into the traffic in Hanoi, Vietnam.

There are no lines on the roads. No signals. No rhyme or reason to what’s going on. Vietnamese traffic flows like water. Big buses, tiny motorbikes, pedestrians carrying loads of lumber that look better suited to the World’s Strongest Man competition? They all just go.

And so I did. Right into the middle of the street, the cars and motorbikes peeling around me as if I were parting the Red Sea. Was it terrifying? Not at all. But there were frightening moments in Vietnam. Two actually.

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