Serious Wednesdays

590. Learning the same lesson over and over again.

god/ Serious Wednesdays July 29, 2009 • Comments

I got fired once, well twice if you count the “carnival incident” but you really shouldn’t count that one.

I was writing for an advertising agency. I didn’t understand what it was they wanted me to do and I had a bad attitude about that. So a few times a week, my bosses would pull me into a break room and explain the job to me. Then I’d go write something that was different than what they asked me to write. Then they’d pull me back into the break room. This cycle of instructions given, instructions poorly followed continued for a few weeks until finally I didn’t get pulled into the break room. I got pulled into a conference room.

There, the president fired me and told me something like, “I don’t think you’re supposed to be a writer. Have you ever thought about being a salesman instead?” And it was the right decision on their part. They had given me a series of tasks, explained them over and over again and I had blown it. I didn’t get what they needed me to do and when I didn’t enough times, they didn’t need me anymore.

Sometimes I worry that God might treat me the same way. Maybe He won’t out and out fire me as a Christian, but I fear that He must be getting tired of explaining the same things over and over to me again.

There are a handful of things that I think God is trying to tell me and I just can’t seem to understand them nearly as quickly as I think I should. Things that if I were a better Christian I would be able to figure out or see clearly.

Have you ever felt that way?

Continue Reading after the jump

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585. Thinking God will run out of welcome home banners.

god/ Serious Wednesdays July 22, 2009 • Comments

I met Michael Jordan one summer while he was golfing at a country club in Pinehurst, North Carolina. My uncle and his family lived on the golf course and I was spending a few weeks there before I started the eighth grade.

When word spread that Jordan and a gang of other important people were in the clubhouse that morning we all went down to get a closer look. This was before Jordan became human. Before the gambling and the baseball experiment and the tabloid fodder. Jordan was a god at the time and I had a Nike swoosh mark shaved into the back of my head to prove it. I told everyone in Pinehurst that summer that I had my haircut that way as a tribute to a friend in Boston that had been shot and killed for a pair of Air Jordans.

I’m not sure why I lied like that. None of that was true. Maybe I’m like Samson, razors bring out the worst in me, but Michael Jordan didn’t know any of that. Neither did Dean Smith the legendary coach of UNC or Dr. J, who were both with Jordan that day.

They all signed the back of my shirt with a big marker. Later that afternoon, with the autographed shirt safely tucked in a drawer, I went back down to the clubhouse. It had been 3 or 4 hours and I wanted to see if I could get Jordan’s autograph on a piece of paper I could frame.

The party had already finished golfing and all the fans had gone home. I saw Jordan walking to his car in the parking lot. I ran out after him as fast as my little seventh grade legs would carry me and said, “Excuse me Mr. Jordan, can I please have your autograph?”

He stopped in his tracks and turned, a golf bag resting high on shoulders that towered over me. With a look that froze opponents on basketball courts across the planet he said, “Didn’t I already sign you kid?”

Life is Limited
In the real world, in parking lots in Pinehurst, North Carolina, life is limited. Your hero turns to you and tells you that he’s not going to give you another autograph. Your hero tells you he remembers you and that you’re not getting a second signature, the only thing you want that day. That stupid summer, with a lopsided swoosh mark growing in the back of your head and a mouth full of lies.

Sometimes I think God is like that. Bothered by me, tired of my requests for His time, even if it’s just 3 seconds for Him to sign off on some prayer I’m saying or need I’m sure I can’t live without.

He’s on His way somewhere important after a round of golf with Moses and Elijah or Elisha whichever one plays. I’m chasing Him down in the parking lot. He turns with His big God golf clubs and He looks down at me. And He says in that massive voice of His “Didn’t I already forgive you kid?”

Forgiveness is the thing I ask for the most. In my head maybe I know that God’s forgiveness is eternal and inexhaustible but in my heart I feel like He’s going to run out of it. That He’s got a limited supply. And I’m burning them up, one by one, sin by sin.

The Day After the Party
I’ve read the story about the prodigal son more than anything else in the Bible. If you’ve messed up life like I have it’s a pretty good read. I think when you get arrested they should read that to you right after the Miranda rights. I think that’d be a nice way to take a little sting out of going to jail.

Part of the reason I’ve read that story so many times though is that I think there’s something missing. I feel like there’s some verse or passage that I must have skipped that makes the whole thing make sense. It seems too good to be true. The prodigal son takes his inheritance, blows it on fast living, ends up in a pig pen and then gets a party thrown for him when he returns home. I’ve always wondered what the day after the party was like:

The first rays of sunshine crept across the floor and landed on a pile of party favors being swept up by a servant. A welcome home banner was being taken down and across the house the sounds of morning reverberated.

In his old bedroom, the prodigal son rolls over and opens his eyes. He’d dreamt it so often, dreamt of this place so often, he didn’t believe it was real. Those nights in the dark, curled under a bush or beside the barn when his money was gone and his hope with it, he’d wondered if he’d ever know safety again. He sat up, surprised to find himself there, laughing at the memories of the night before. The feast, the party, the ridiculousness of it all. His family who celebrated his return as if his absence had increased their love for him, amplified it. None of it made any sense. There was a knock on the door. He had a door again, that was something he had missed.

The head of a servant peered in:

“Sir, your father is waiting for you in the kitchen.” This servant didn’t go to seminary either and didn’t seem that concerned that in Biblical times “kitchen” was definitely the wrong word to use in that context.

With a yawn and a scratch of his head the prodigal son got up. He put on his clothes and made his way to the kitchen. There, at a small table, sat his father.

“Sit down son.” He said, motioning to a chair across from him.

“Thank you for the party father. I never expected that and …”

“Son, we need to go over the list.” His father said, interrupting him.

“The list?”

“Yes” he replied, touching a large pile of blank paper with his hand. “We need to make a list of all the money you spent, all the mistakes you made and all the people you hurt. Then we need to figure out how you start repaying your debt.” The father said.

“I had a plan father. I had a plan when I was walking home but when I saw you running I didn’t think I’d need it. At the party I forget what my plan was.” The son said, with a voice of shame and sorrow that had taken but a brief hiatus during the previous night’s celebration.

“Well, you’ve got the rest of your life for it to come back to you.” The father said taking out a pen and writing “family inheritance” at the top of the list.

For most of my life this is how I would have written the second part of that story, the directors cut if you will, an alternative ending that was too harsh for the version they released in the Bible.
The father’s anxious sprint toward the lost son doesn’t make any sense. That’s not how life works. People pay for their mistakes. They don’t get a party for them. When you return home from wasting your inheritance on the world your father says “Didn’t I already bless you kid?” End of story.

Forgiveness
I don’t understand forgiveness and it’s always depressing to me when I read a book that tells me that’s the first step of the Christian walk, believing that God forgives you. If I can’t get past that first step than the rest of it, all the rest of it remains completely closed to me.

It’s not that I think I don’t need forgiveness. I just don’t understand how it’s possible. If I can’t earn it, than it’s out of my control and I’m powerless.

I remember the first time I ever knew how outrageous and insane real forgiveness was. I had gotten myself into some serious trouble at work. The kind of trouble that’s so big and ugly it makes you ashamed that there are people in your life close enough to you to get some of the trouble spilled on them. I wanted to push everyone away, to expel people from the planetary system that was me and just go float somewhere and die.

I called my wife on the phone and told her as much.

“I’m sorry you met me.” I said through angry, frightened tears. I was desperate for her to go, to pull away from me so I could inflict pain on only one person. The person I felt deserved it the most. Me.

“I love you!” She yelled through the phone.

“How can you say that? That doesn’t make any sense.” I responded.

“You don’t get to decide who I love. I love you. That’s my decision. You can’t take that away from me. I love you. I choose to love you.” She repeated words like these over and over again. She attacked me with love that day. And forgiveness I didn’t deserve. Forgiveness I couldn’t earn or make sense of.

I was overwhelmed that day. And I think that was such a thin sliver of what God’s forgiveness is like, how big and nonsensical His love is. I heard a minister once say that His forgiveness, God’s grace, is given wastefully. He pours it out on us in such abundance that it’s almost wasteful.

The Tenth Party
I have to confess that some days I still think there’s a list God will ask me to work through the day after He throws me that welcome home party. I have a hard time understanding how something can be true and illogical at the same time. And so much of God is that way.
But some days, when I least expect it, in ways I can’t control, I believe a different story about God’s forgiveness.

The first rays of sunshine creep across a dusty road and grate against the eyelids of the prodigal son trying to sleep uncomfortably on a bed of gravel. His teeth felt dirty, his mouth and hands stained with the red of cheap wine. A long scratch ran across his cheek, a shoe was angled beneath his head for a pillow. “How many times did this make?” he thought from the part inside him that still remembered returning home. He was doing so well, things were so happy but his never agains always seemed to fail him in the end. How long would he be gone this time?

Miles away, an concerned father stood by the front window of his house as a servant approached with a message.

“Sir, I checked his bedroom and the barn. His things are missing. He’s left again.”

“I know.” The father said with sad eyes.

And then with slow steps he walked to a large closet and motioned to the servant.

“Help me with this Welcome Home banner.” He said pulling one from a pile of a thousand.

“Today could be the day my child returns.”

(This was originally something I wrote for the prodigal Jon site.)

580. Sleeping with spiders.

Serious Wednesdays July 15, 2009 • Comments

Let’s be clear here, I’m not afraid of spiders, I’m just not a fan.

There’s a difference. Fear would have me on a chair in the living room if I saw a spider casually strolling across our television like some 8 legged harbinger of doom. And I don’t do that, regardless of what my wife might tell you.

It’s not that I find them terrifying, I just can’t get behind any creature that seems to delight in biting you. A bee will only sting you if provoked. A cockroach is content in the dark. A mouse saw that box of Frosted Mini Wheats you weren’t using and got opportunistic. A spider? A spider will bite you while you’re asleep.

What’s that all about? I get that when we’re both awake, all is fair in love and I’m going to squish you with a rolled up issue of Guideposts magazine. But while I’m sleeping? That’s just a thrill bite. That’s a crime of passion. That spider is biting me not out of necessity but out of love for the game. And that’s just not cool.

Knowing spiders get down like that is part of the reason it was so hard to sleep peacefully the first week I stayed in Costa Rica. I was there for about four weeks during my junior year of college. I was staying with a family that had carved out a small “bedroom” under the stairs. In addition to a blanket that covered a hole in the wall and a parrot that would yell Spanish names at 6AM every morning (Hectorrrrrrr!!!!), there was a tribe of spiders I shared the room with.

The wall directly behind my bed was exposed brick, hastily stacked together. There were two inch gaps between the jumbled bricks and in those gaps a squadron of arachnids had established quite a little society. (Based on their social interactions I would say they were in that pre-empire stage, where there’s one central city located by my pillow and smaller hamlets spread about my ankles.)

Every night I would come home, click the light on and watch them slowly back into the corners of the wall, slightly annoyed that I had disturbed their dark interactions. Then I would cover myself with bug spray, pretend that spiders were affected by bug spray, and then lay in bed, waiting to hear my hairy legged neighbors scamper back out of their hiding holes.

At first it was difficult to sleep with dozens of spiders, but like most things in life, I was able to get used to it. By the end of the trip you could have thrown 100 more spiders in that room and it wouldn’t have fazed me. To tell you the truth, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed. I was so full up on spiders that I had long passed my threshold. I had reached spider saturation. Whether there were 50 spiders in there or 200 spiders didn’t really make a difference.

I was proficient in spiders at that point, in the same way that I was proficient in Spanish, but apparently I’ve lost that numbness to the 8 legged bugs. The other night, while we were having dinner, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a spider crawl across the table toward my daughter. I yelled, or shrieked depending on who you ask, and swatted at it with a napkin.

And then, having protected my family from what was probably a Brown Recluse, Black Widow or simple house spider carrying eight mini switchblades, I started to wonder about that reaction. How could I sleep with 100 spiders but freak out when I saw one on the kitchen table? What happened to me?

What happened to me is the same thing that is happening to me with lust. Back in the day when I was neck deep in porn and sin, I had reached my threshold with lust. I was digesting so many vulgar images, ideas and content that I became immune to a lot of things. An article in GQ called “Cool Things that Hot Girls Wear” wouldn’t have fazed me because it was simply one more spider in a bed already jam packed with spiders. I wouldn’t have batted an eye because I was so desensitized. I was so numb and callus to all things lust that I wouldn’t have even noticed that as possibly something I shouldn’t look at.

But lately, as I’ve actively pursued a life with Christ and worked to eliminate the spiders from my life, I’ve started to notice little things again. Now, when something that years ago would have just been one more spider in a room crowded with spiders, enters my life, I notice it. Like that spider on the kitchen table, it feels out of context and big. It feels like something that doesn’t belong there. And whether that means ripping a cover off of Rolling Stone so I can still enjoy the record reviews without learning the inner workings of Lady GaGa’s mind or realizing I need to apologize to someone after I’ve gossiped, the little things are starting to matter.

I’m not perfect. I’m far, far, far, far from that. There are still areas in my life where I feel like God kicks over a whole nest of spiders I didn’t even know I had and we sit down to talk about it. But of the two ways to walk through life, clear headed and spider conscious or drunk on sin and sleeping with the spiders, I can tell you which one I prefer.

How about you? Are you at a point right now where you’re covered with spiders or are you noticing if a single spider tries to casually stroll across the kitchen table of your heart?

575. Refusing the gift of the desert road.

god/ Serious Wednesdays July 8, 2009 • Comments

When I’m nervous and meet new people, I tend to read them my resume.

Not literally, I don’t carry it around with me, but I usually find a way to rattle off interesting tidbits about myself.

I did this recently at the Orange Conference. When I went to the blogger lounge I felt kind of insecure and didn’t know what to do. Everyone had their laptop and business cards all over the tables and I had neither. I immediately thought, “Oh yeah, bloggers are supposed to carry laptops not Moleskine notebooks. I’m so dumb.” After a few minutes of standing there like someone that’s eating alone and has forgotten to bring the “don’t feel pity for me I’m reading a book” book, I walked to the Land of a Thousand Hills coffee stand.

I asked if my friend was working at the stand that day and the guys behind the counter said no and then kind of said in a kind way, “And you are?”

I immediately started blabbering about how I had a blog and I once told thousands of people about their coffee and it’s read in all these countries and I’m a special person and look at all my accomplishments, me, me, me, resume, resume, resume. Even as the words were coming out of my mouth I wanted to grab them back, but I couldn’t.

And I find myself doing this more lately as I struggle with the impatience of wanting to be an author and a speaker. The Stuff Christians Like book will come out in March 2010 and I’m speaking at a bunch of conferences this fall so I completely get the foolishness of this thought but it’s still there. It’s a completely dumb thought to have but usually in life it’s not the wise thoughts we have that do the most damage. It’s the dumb ones.

When I pray, when me and God wrestle, there’s a part of me that keeps saying, “How come I only get to spend such a fraction of my day on Stuff Christians Like? How come I feel like I’m bursting with ideas and I’m only getting to write about them an hour a day? How come I’m not a super fantastical mister important Christian writer person right this second God?”

In the midst of those questions, in the midst of being wildly impatient and selfish and arrogant and a million other words that mean “whack,” I feel like God reminded me of a simple question,

“Why do you keep refusing the gift of the desert road?”

That’s kind of a weird question, but it comes out of some verses I’ve written about before. In Exodus 13: 17-18, as the Israelites are leaving Egypt, the Bible says:

When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them on the road through the Philistine country, though that was shorter. For God said, “If they face war, they might change their minds and return to Egypt.” So God led the people around by the desert road toward the Red Sea. The Israelites went up out of Egypt armed for battle.

I love the simplicity of that. God knew that if the Israelites took the short way, if they took what probably seemed like the logical route, they’d face a war they weren’t ready for and would probably willingly return to slavery. So out of love, out a deep, big love for His people, he took them on the desert road.

As an Israelite, having spent decades doing hardcore physical labor and leading the kind of manual labor lifestyle that puts the P90X exercise program to shame, you’d have to be thinking, “What? I’m armed for battle! The desert road? Seriously? Look at this sword, I’ve got skillz! Let’s take the short way and give the Philistines two tickets to the gun show. Hey, I just compared my biceps to a weapon that is still centuries away from being invented, that’s odd.”

OK, maybe they wouldn’t have thought that last sentence, but I promise that they probably felt a little confused at why they were on the desert road and maybe at some point in your own life, you’ve felt that way too. Maybe you’ve felt ready for something and for some reason instead found yourself taking the long way around.

I don’t know what your “thing” is.

Maybe you want to fall in love and get married.

Maybe you’re at a job that doesn’t use your God-given talents and you feel desperate to get out.

Maybe you want to start a ministry.

Maybe you don’t know what your thing is, but you know it’s not what you’re doing right now.

Maybe you want to have kids.

Maybe you want to head out to the mission field overseas.

Your thing, your dream or goal or vision could be a million different things, and when it doesn’t happen, when it takes longer than we want, it’s so easy to get frustrated. To get disappointed, to think that the time delay is because maybe you’re not doing something right. Maybe God is mad at you. Maybe if you were a better Christian things would be happening faster and you wouldn’t be on a desert road.

But what if that’s not right?

What if God loves you too much to send you to war? What if He loves you too much to throw you into situations you’re not ready for?

What if that desert road is a gift?

I still struggle with the desert road concept. I’m not “done” with that idea. But my hope for you and my hope for me is that the next time I find myself on one I’ll pause long enough to ask God this simple question:

“I’m on a desert road, what war are you protecting me from right now because you love me so much?”

571. Using "we live in a fallen world" as an excuse not to do anything about it.

Church/ church culture/ Serious Wednesdays/ stuff christians say July 1, 2009 • Comments

We are developing faster, smarter ways to mess up our lives. Thirty years ago, the Internet didn’t exist and no one started off their testimony with the line, “Things were going well until I discovered Internet porn.” Now though, if I had a nickel for every time I heard that I would easily be a Christian Thousandaire and wouldn’t need to start my Stuff Christians Like scented candle line as a way to earn extra cake.

We can download, connect, and social network our lives into the pit in about 4 seconds. We don’t even need a computer to do it, we can be in a meeting on our iPhones having side conversations that are going to wreck our marriages and our lives. And when a friend asked me about this trend, about whether I thought the world was getting worse or better, I was quick to say worse. “We live in a fallen world” I said, and we keep going deeper into levels of fallenness. (See that? Fallenness isn’t even a word and I just flaunted it as if it were. For shame fallen world.)

But if I’m honest, then I have to confess that sometimes I use that as an excuse to not work for positive change. I toss out “fallen world” like some sort of stamp when I don’t want to make the effort to care about a certain cause, or become emotionally involved in a difficult situation.

Crime rate up? We live in a fallen world, there’s nothing you can do.

Hate your job? We live in a fallen world, there’s nothing you can do.

Canada Geese refusing to migrate back because they like the sweet, tender grass of your lawn and prefer your predator free neighborhood instead of the northern tundra, crossing the road at in opportune times regardless of traffic rules, hissing at you when you refuse to feed them salty cracker treats, and constantly reminding you that they are the most entitled bird in the world?
We live in a fallen world, there’s nothing we can do.

School systems crumbling? Recycling not working in your town? Healthcare problems?
We live in a fallen world, there’s nothing you can do.

Hopefully, you’re not like me. Hopefully you see that when God gave us His two greatest commands, love Him and love others as much as we love ourselves, He didn’t say, unless you live in a fallen world. There was no caveat that gave us the freedom to give less than love if the world we’re living in is less than perfect. If anything, a fallen world is a world that needs love the most.

The depths we sink to as a society force us to give even deeper love.

The darker things get, the stronger the need is for brightness.

That we live in a fallen world is not an excuse to give up or not try, it’s a motivation to try even harder. God placed us here, in this time period, because the world needs love like never before. My love, your love, our love. That we live in a fallen world shouldn’t prevent us from living out of God’s love. If anything, it should prove the need for us to be doing that.

And even though that last paragraph felt a little “benefit concerty,” I think it’s true, fallen world or not.

566. Discounting our small steps toward stupid.

Serious Wednesdays June 24, 2009 • Comments

A few weeks ago, I called one of my accountability partners and confessed that I’d been listening to techno music lately.

Whoa, Footloose’s John Lithgow, what’s wrong with techno music?

Nothing. There’s inherently nothing wrong with techno music or electronic music or drum and bass or a million other iterations of that genre of music.

And twelve years ago, when I was in college in Birmingham, Alabama I loved techno music.

If the question is, “Yeah but did you ever go to a rave and wear reflective pants?” The answer is “Yes.”

Did I spin and dance around with glowsticks in my hands? Yes.

Did I have futuristic sunglasses that looked like I might be driving a motorcycle from the year 2065 that can also travel up the side of walls? Yes.

We could play that game all day, but simply put, I jumped into rave culture with both feet, which meant that on some weekends, I took ecstasy from strangers, danced in a dark warehouse for eight hours and then crawled my way back outside into a sunshine that felt accusingly bright and painful.

Fast forward twelve years and life is different. I am different. Who I know God to be is different. But on a Tuesday afternoon a few weeks ago, I noticed that techno music had crept back into my life.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with techno, but for me, it’s the soundtrack of a period in my life that is pretty dark. And when I listen to a lot of techno, there’s a part of me that wants to “reminiscence” about that time. Despite the hurt and the pain and the emptiness that came from those moments, there’s still a part of me that likes to put rose colored glasses on.

And perhaps bigger than that, there’s still a part of me that wants to hide. When things get tough, when the pressures of trying to fulfill a lifelong goal like writing a book start to pile up a little, I still reflex to a degree into my old ways and try to hide. So for me, techno music becomes an escape. A chance to close out the world, close out my day and be surrounded by a steady, faceless, wordless beat.

For me, techno is a small step toward stupid.

Have you ever noticed those in your own life? This is the first time I saw techno that way. What usually happens is that I listen to a lot of techno. I start to pull away from friends and family. I get more secretive with how I’m spending my time. I make small bad decisions that grow into large bad decisions. And I start hiding deeper and deeper in the shiny objects I used to care so much about when I used to care about nothing.

Then a few months later, I crash. It all falls apart and with a great degree of surprise I proclaim, “How did I end up here? I never saw that coming.”

Meanwhile, all along, I was taking small steps toward stupid.

You know who else did that? The prodigal son.

For most of my life I just assumed that the son, upon getting all his inheritance from his father, immediately left the farm on a fast track to hookers and pig sty living. But that’s not what the Bible says. In fact, in Luke 15:13, the moment after he got his money is described this way:

“And not many days after the younger son gathered all together and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living.” (KJV)

I’ve written about this before because it blows me away. He didn’t leave instantly. You get the sense that he packed his stuff. He got his things together and prepared for the long journey deep into the heart of stupid. He took small steps.

I don’t know if you discount your small steps toward stupid, but if you do, if there are patterns you’re missing, I challenge you to think about them today. What are they? What are your small steps toward stupid? Techno is one of mine, but I’ll go first with a couple more of mine in the hope that they’ll spark some of your own.

Two more of my small steps toward stupid:

1. My weight
I don’t think I’ve talked about this before, but my weight fluctuates by about 30 pounds. That might not seem like a lot, but going from 135 pounds to 165 pounds is a fairly big shift. When things feel chaotic, I tend to control what I can and end up not eating enough and being skinny. After a period of that, I tend to let everything go and pendulum swing back the other direction and gain so much weight that the button of my pants could spring off and kill someone.

2. My quiet time
When I’m taking small steps toward stupid I tend to stretch the boundaries of what “quiet time with God” really means. For instance, last June and July I started to lie to myself and say, “Well since Stuff Christians Like is about God, writing it kind of counts as a quiet time.” That’s not true, but when I’m headed toward stupid, my quiet time tends to disappear.

Those are a few small steps toward stupid I take. Yours will be different. Gaining weight and listening to techno might mean nothing in your life but chances are, you have your own small steps toward stupid.

What are they?

And how can we all stop taking them?

562. Making God Almost All Powerful.

god/ Serious Wednesdays June 17, 2009 • Comments

I went ahead and figured out how powerful God is.

Considering that this is probably a question philosophers and theologians have struggled with for thousands of years, that’s pretty nice of me. Who knew one day a random blogger would figure it out and share it for free. What can I say? I’m a giver.

So here it is:

God is slightly less powerful than Mutton Hollow Chevy.

That’s it. That’s the answer. If you have some other things you need to go do or other blogs you want to read you can probably skip out right now, having been exposed to that little gem of knowledge. But if you’ve never heard of Mutton Hollow Chevy, who is slightly more powerful than God, allow me to explain.

When I started stuffchristianslike.net, I had to go with a .net address because someone already had .com. A small church themed online gift shop had that web address. They sold puzzles of Jesus and what not. I felt like .net was not nearly as cool as .com but oh well, that was what I had available.

Apparently they went out of business or sold their domain to someone else though because now, if you type the .com version of this site, you will be taken to Mutton Hollow Chevy, a small car dealer that specializes in 1955-1957 Chevy parts. I’m not sure why they registered a Stuff Christians Like URL. I guess the hope is that if you searched for wry Christian satire but instead found a Chevy dealer you might stay at their site and buy a 1957 Billet Hood Latch Support Bracket instead. (You know the one I’m talking about, it’s all Billet Hood Latches these days boys.)

I’d like to say that when I found out that, once again, someone from Mutton Hollow had scooped me, my first thought was “aw shucks!” But that would be a lie.

My first thought was more like this:

“I am so dumb! How could I let that happen? I am screwed. If I was smarter and more web savvy that wouldn’t have happened. That kind of nonsense would never happen to a real blogger. When my book comes out, people who don’t know this is a .net are going to accidentally type .com and never find me and I’ll never sell any books and never get a second book deal and will waste this opportunity that God has given me. It’s all over. It is all so freakin’ over.”

I know that probably sounds dumb, but it’s true. I felt sick to my stomach and kind of panicky and really ashamed of myself. And I’ve felt that way before about other things, but do you know what I don’t ever do? I don’t ever take thoughts like that to their natural conclusion. I don’t ever spend time reflecting on what that thought says about me and what it says about God.

This time I did.

And do you know what I found? If that thought is true. If Mutton Hollow Chevy has somehow sunk the Stuff Christians Like ship by reserving the .com version of this web address, if they’ve effectively limited the size of this ministry, if they’ve dashed the opportunity to reach people for the Lord, than Mutton Hollow Chevy is slightly more powerful than God.

Don’t get me wrong, He’s big and mighty and “Almost All Powerful.” He set Stuff Christians Like in motion, but in a late game changing move, Mutton Hollow Chevy showed up and limited even Him. He had plans that were pretty amazing, but unfortunately they involved me getting the .com address and since I don’t have that, God is limited too. The dreams He had just got a pair of Mutton Hollow-sized handcuffs put on them.

That’s ridiculous and I hope right now you are laughing both at the shallowness of my faith and my dedication to repeating the phrase “Mutton Hollow” which is delightful to say I don’t care who you are. But I promise you’ve done the same thing before in your own life.

At some point, you’ve had a fear you thought was more powerful than God.

You lost your job and worried that unemployment was more powerful than God.

You lost a boyfriend and worried that being alone was more powerful than God.

You got in credit debt and worried that Visa was more powerful than God.

Your dream did not turn out the right way and you thought the circumstances were more powerful than God.

It’s so easy to do this, but today, as new worries crop up, I’m trying to do things I little differently. With each new fear, I’m trying to stop long enough and ask myself a simple question:
“Is this more powerful than God?”

Is Mutton Hollow Chevy more powerful than God?

Is a possible layoff at work more powerful than God?

Is __________ more powerful than God?

So far, every answer has come back with a resounding no. I still worry. I’ll still walk through the hollow of the shadow of death from time to time, but with that question and a God that loves to answer it, I think I’m going to be alright.

And Mutton Hollow, please know that when you’re ready to give me that .com I, much like the band Journey, will be waiting right here for you with open arms.

How would you write this question today about your own life?

Finish this sentence:

Is _________ more powerful than God?

557. Creating tracts that look like money.

Serious Wednesdays June 10, 2009 • Comments

A few weeks ago, while walking in the parking lot at Wal-Mart, my daughters and I found two five dollar bills on the ground. My first thought was, “Nice, free money!” My second thought was, “Wait a second, this might be a Christian trick.”

That’s a weird thing to think when you find money on the ground, but before I picked it up, I tried to see from a distance if the money was real or not. My fear was that I would get my hopes up, grab it and then realize it was a salvation tract disguised as money.

That happened to me once and even as a Christian, I found it kind of traumatizing. And it’s not that I hate tracts. I think tracts can be a good thing. I don’t like that sometimes people, myself included, beat them up like some sort of Christian piñata, making fun of the people that hand them out. I think for some people, handing out tracts is an honest expression of worship. The truth is that there are probably people reading this site today that could easily say, “Someone giving me a tract on the street really meant a lot to me.”

But is there anyone that picks up what appears to be a ten dollar bill, flips it over, finds out it’s actually a message about the Bible and says, “Phew, I thought this was free money for a second. Let’s see what this John 3:16 is all about instead?”

I doubt it. The first reaction is probably anger. Followed by embarrassment for falling for a trick. Followed by throwing the tract away or bringing it home to show all your friends and family members how mean Christians are.

There are really only two ways to fix this problem. We can either stop creating tracts that are disguised as money or we can create an even worse tract so that when people do get the fake money tract they can at least say, “Wow, I don’t like this fake money but at least it’s not as bad as that other tract I hear is going around.”

I would like to pretend that this blog is powerful enough to make number one happen but let’s be honest, it isn’t. So instead, I think we should lean into option number two as hard as we can.

What would be worse than fake money? I thought long and hard about this because there’s already a fake parking ticket tract going around. Abraham Piper wrote about that a few months ago. After much consideration and a desire to be topical and relevant, I decided that the worse tract we could create right now is a fake pink slip. With as many layoffs happening and as many people finding their jobs “eliminated” or my favorite new term, “sunsetted,” I think a little tract that looks like you’re getting fired would be most horrible.

Imagine you come back from lunch and there’s a note on your keyboard. It’s pink, it’s official looking and across the top in a font that looks all serious it says, “Please pack your things and leave the keys to your desk in one of the drawers.” You open it up and inside it says …..I’m not sure.

That’s the challenge with writing a bad tract, you have to make a wild segue from “you’re fired” to “here’s Jesus.” Here are a few headlines I think we could use on our fake pink slip tract:

1. “You might not have been fired, but speaking of fire, imagine how hot hell might be.”

2. “You might still have a job, but did you know your real job is to worship the Lord?”

3. “Your job wasn’t eliminated, but you know that fear in your heart that you just felt when you thought it was? God wants to eliminate that.”

4. “Want a job you can never lose? Become a follower of Christ.”

5. “Who knows when you’ll get fired, but today you could be hired … for the Lord’s army that is.”

6. “Want to work for a Jewish carpenter?”

Those are horrible, but unfortunately not far off from what happens sometimes. Let’s stop trying to trick people into Jesus. I would love everyone that reads this blog to become a Christian and know the insane life transforming joy that I sincerely believe a relationship with Christ offers, but I have to trust that God is big and beautiful and powerful enough not to need me to help Him out by tricking people into His arms.

552. Judging pop culture as if we’re immune to its woes.

Serious Wednesdays June 3, 2009 • Comments

Last week I watched a little of the television show, “Jon & Kate plus 8.” They’re all over the tabloids right now so there’s no need to rehash in detail what’s going on, but if you’ve never seen the show, here’s a summary:

A few years ago, a young Christian couple with two kids had sextuplets. They invited TLC to tape their lives as they raised 8 kids, renewed their vows in a marriage special in Hawaii last season and last week addressed some painful marital issues that have become paparazzi fodder.

I wasn’t going to write about the whole situation. A million people already have and reality TV tends to be a great hiding place to avoid dealing with our own lives. But in watching the swirl of conversation online about Jon and Kate I realized two things I think are true regardless of if you’ve ever seen the show.

1. When we say, “They got what they deserved” we forget that we didn’t.
Did Jon and Kate introduce new risks and rewards into the structure of their family when they invited television cameras and millions of viewers into their home? Without a doubt. Does fame and celebrity come with consequences that are often toxic? Without a doubt. Did Jon and Kate get what they deserve? I don’t know. I’ve seen other Christians express this opinion but I don’t know Jon and Kate. I know me. And I didn’t get what I deserved. I got grace. I got forgiveness. I got Christ. I got rescued from the ruins of a life that seemed beyond redemption. I got a second chance and a 10th chance and a 300th chance. I didn’t get what I deserved. And when we say that someone, “Got what they deserved,” whether we’re talking about a reality TV couple, our relatives or our neighbors, we lose sight of grace, which is the undercurrent of our entire faith and a gift we do not deserve.

2. “That could never happen to me” is a dangerous sentence.
I don’t know the devil, but I have to assume that when he hears a Christian judgmentally proclaim, “That could never happen to me,” he does what I do when I hear the Black Eyed Peas song, “Boom, Boom, Pow,” and that is the robot. He absolutely loves when we say that. It’s not inherently a bad thought, it’s just that often when we say “That could never happen to me” we don’t take the time to answer the question, “Why?” Why wouldn’t that emotional affair you’re writing off as just “your flirtatious personality” multiply what’s already poisonous and turn into a physical affair? Why wouldn’t a week of late nights at the office turn into a month of late nights at the office turn into a year of late nights at the office turn into you knowing your kids as little as your dad knew you? Why wouldn’t a small compromise on your dream turn into a bigger compromise on your dream turn into you being an accountant when you’ve always felt called to paint? Life is littered with moms and dads, pastors and CEOs that believed in the fake comfort of “that could never happen to me” and woke up one day to find a surprisingly broken life on their doorsteps.

I don’t really want to analyze Jon and Kate today or discuss where things went wrong or pick apart things they said on the show. I don’t really even have a good wrap up that kind of ties things together. All I can really say is that we are not immune to the woes we see in pop culture.

You don’t need a million dollar house or flock of paparazzi to hurt yourself and your marriage. I didn’t anyway. At times, my marriage has been able to be wounded without the aid of a reality show. But whether you’re name is Jon and Kate Gosselin or Jon and Jenny Acuff, God loves love, and His ability to repair it will forever exceed our ability to deserve it.

547. Wishing being a Christian meant a pain free life.

prayer/ Serious Wednesdays May 27, 2009 • Comments

When dentists look in my mouth, they see ski boats and luxury sedans and the chance to finally take that month long tour with their family in Italy. I have what in the periodontal community is known as a “lottery month.” I’ve got fillings to be replaced, cavities from having braces three different times and a gold mine of potential wisdom teeth to remove.

And the day before I spoke at the Off the Blogs event in February, I even had an emergency root canal.

It started at four in the morning. Waves of pain began rocking me every forty minutes. The right side of my face would turn grey, one eye would go red and I would enter a small space in my head where my dying tooth would scream, “There is no pain in this dojo!” But there was pain in that dojo, oh there was. I went to work and tried to tough it out. I scheduled an appointment with a root canal specialist and then set my stop watch to 24 hours because that’s how long I had to make it.

By the time my appointment rolled around, I wanted to hug the dentist I was so happy to be there. I was moments away from freedom, I was on the edge of relief and I was ecstatic.

But it didn’t quite go the way I thought it would.

At minute 90 during the procedure I was still in agonizing pain. Apparently I have roller coaster roots that flip and turn inside my teeth. So the dentist couldn’t use just an electric tool to kill them. Instead he had to also use hand tools and slowly twist his way with some sort of long thin file into my teeth. Imagine someone spinning a titanium needle between their thumb and pointer finger back and forth deep inside your tooth for an hour and a half.

So I asked for more novacaine. Based on the pain I was in, I figured the dentist would say, “Sure, hook up this camelback hydration system and drink it through a straw. Have all you want.” Instead, he said:

“I can’t give you anymore. I’ve already reached the limit of what you can handle. If I give you anymore, your vision will blur.”

My first thought was, “For how long? I’m not reading a book right now. I’ll get a cab to take me home. Are you saying my vision will blur forever or just for a few days? I promise, I don’t need perfect vision for the rest of this week. Give me the novacaine.”

But he wouldn’t and so I sat there with increasing flows of electricity shooting through the nerve highway of my mouth. I thought I had reached the worst point until I felt a hygienist place something in my hand. “Did that really just happen?” I thought to myself? “Did a hygienist just place a ball in my hand to squeeze because it’s about to get even worse? What century am I in? I’m not getting a Pancho Villa bullet removed on a battlefied right now. A ball? Seriously? Is there not a strap of leather I can bite down on too? Just go ahead and give me a shot of bourbon while you’re at it and heat up an iron to cauterize the wound.”

The whole experience was extremely difficult, but within 24 hours after leaving the dentist’s office I felt better. I started to feel good again and realized that I was glad he hadn’t potentially risked my long term eyesight for the instant relief of my very temporary pain. I’d like to say that was the only time in my life I’ve willingly wanted to trade long term consequences for short term gains, but then that would be a lie.

I think God can rattle off 2 billion times when I’ve made the same request to Him. When something in my life has been painful and I’ve tried to find a shortcut out of it. When I couldn’t understand His long term plan for my life and said, “This is too much. Hit me with some God novacaine. I don’t care what kind of lesson you’re teaching me in this. I don’t care about refining. It hurts, let’s get this over with.”

I don’t think I’m the only one that’s done this and I wonder sometimes if that was what Joseph felt like when he got freed from the well. He must have been terrified when his brothers threw him down into that cistern in the desert. He must have thought he was dead, that he was in an inescapable pit. But then, for a brief moment he might have felt like freedom had arrived. His brothers were returning for him, they were lifting him out. He was free. He was rescued.

But in the blink of an eye, his pain went to a different place and he was sold into slavery.

Sometimes, the hardest moments in life are not the initial painful experiences we go through, but the times we think it’s over and it’s not. When we think we’ve escaped an illness but it returns. The times we finally got a job after being unemployed for a year but get laid off in the first month at our new one. The times we think we’ve reconciled with our husbands but things fall apart again.

I don’t know what’s going on in your life. Maybe things are great right now and you’re thinking “oh jeez Serious Wednesday.” That’s awesome that things are good right now, God certainly showers us with greatness. But maybe you just went from a great job to a no job kind of situation. Maybe you’re crying out for novacaine right now. I don’t know your specifics, but what I do know is that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

It’s not in some things, or in most things or in the things that make sense in the moment. It’s all things. And for the ones that hurt, for the moments that don’t make any sense whatsoever, we’re given a great reassurance in Romans 8:26.

“We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.”

I love that.

I love that when we don’t have the right words or the perfect words, the Spirit groans for us. That’s the prayer I pray during life’s root canal moments. I just ask the Spirit to “groan.” It’s not the most elaborate prayer. It’s not that fancy, and it would make perhaps the world’s shortest book. But when I’m in a corner and don’t know what to pray for because the pain doesn’t seem to line up with my plans, that’s all I say to the Holy Spirit. That’s my simple prayer request.

“Groan.”