Apomo

“What’s up, man:” Duder sat himself on the chair with a smile on his face. He told me my pipe smelled good.
“Thanks,” I said. I asked him his name, and he said his name was Jake. I shook his hand because I didn’t know what to do, really.
So, what is this? I’m supposed to tell you all of the juicy gossip I did at Ren Fayre, right?” Jake said.
“No.”
“Okay, then what? What’s the game?” he asked.
“Not really a game. More of a confession thing.”
“You want me to confess my sins, right?”
“No, that’s not what we’re doing, really.”
“What’s the deal, man? What’s with the monk outfit?”
“Well, we are, well, a group of Christians here on campus, you know.”
“I see. Strange place for Christians, but I’m listening.”
“Thanks, ” I told him. He was being very patient and gracious. “Anyway, there is this group of us, just a few of us who were thinking about the way Christians have sort of wronged people over time. You know, the Crusades, all that stuff…”
“Well, I doubt you personally were involved in any of that, man.”
“No, I wasn’t,” I told him. “But the thing is, we are followers of Jesus. We believe that He is God and all, and He represented certain ideas that we have sort of not done a good job at representing. He asked us to represent Him well, but it can be very hard,”
“I see,” Jake said.
“So there is this group of us on campus who wanted to confess to you.”
“You are confessing to me!” Jake said with a laugh.
“Yeah. We are confessing to you. I mean, I am confessing to you.”
“You’re serious.” His laugh turned to something of a straight face.
I told him I was. He looked at me and told me I didn’t have to. I told him I did, and I felt very strongly in that moment that I was supposed to tell Jake I was sorry for everything.
“What are you confessing?” he asked.
I shook my head and looked at the ground. “Everything,” I told him.
“Explain,” he said.
“There’s a lot. I will keep it short,” I started. “Jesus said to fee the poor and to heal the sick. I have never done very much about that. Jesus said to love those who persecute me. I tend to lash out, especially if I feel threatened, you know, if my ego gets threatened. Jesus did not mix His spirituality with politics. I grew up doing that. It got in the way of the central message of Christ. I know that was wrong, and I know that a lot of people will not listen to the words of Christ because people like me, who know Him, carry our own agendas into the conversation rather than just relaying the message Christ wanted to get across. There’s a lot more, you know.”
“It’s all right, man,” Jake said, very tenderly. His eyes were starting to water.
“Well,” I said, clearing my throat, “I am sorry for all of that.”
“I forgive you, ” Jake said. And he meant it.
“Thanks,” I told him.
He sat there and looked at the floor, then into the fire of a candle. “It’s really cool what you guys are doing,” he said. “A lot of people need to hear this.”
“Have we hurt a lot of people?” I asked him.
“You haven’t hurt me. I just think it isn’t very popular to be a Christian, you know. Especially at a place like this. I don’t think too many people have been hurt. Most people just have a strong reaction to what they see on television. All those well-dressed preachers supporting the Republicans.”
“That’s not the whole picture, ” I said. “That’s just on television. I have friends who are giving their lives to feed the poor and defend the defenseless. They are doing it for Christ.”
“You really believe in Jesus, don’t you?” he asked me.
“Yes, I think I do. Most often I do. I have doubts at times, but mostly I believe in Him. It’s like there is something in me that causess me to believe, and I can’t explain it.”
“You said earlier that there was a central message of Christ. I don’t really want to become a Christian, you know, but what is that message?”
“The message is that man sinned against God and God gave the world over to man, and that if somebody wanted to be rescued out of that , if somebody for instance finds it all very empty, that Christ will rescue them if they want; that if they ask forgiveness for being a part of that rebellion then God will forgive them.”
“What is the deal with the cross?” Jake asked.
“God says the wages of sin is death,” I told him. “And Jesus died so that none of us would have to. If we have faith in that then we are Christians.”
“That is why people wear crosses?” he asked.
“I guess. I think it is sort of fashionable. Some people believe that if they have a cross around their neck or tatooed on them or something, it has some sort of mystical power.”
“Do you believe that?” Jake asked.
“No,” I answered. I told him that I thought mystical power came through faith in Jesus.
“What do you believe about God?” I asked him.
“I don’t know. I guess I didn’t believe for a long time, you know. The science of it is so sketchy. I guess I believe in God though. I believe somebody is responsible for all this, this world we live in. It is all very confusing.”
“Jake, if you want to know God, you can. I am just saying if you ever want to call on Jesus, He will be there.”
“Thanks, man. I believe that you mean that.” His eyes were watering again. “This is cool what you guys are doing,” he repeated. “I’m going to tell my friends about this.”
“I don’t know whether to thank you for that or not,” I laughed. “I have to sit here and confess all my crap.”
He looked at me very seriously. “It’s worth it,” he said. He shook my hand, and when he left the booth there was somebody else ready to get in. I went on like that for a couple of hours. I talked to about thirty people, and Tony took confessions on a picnic table outside the booth. Many people wanted to hug when we were done. All of the people who visited the booth were grateful and gracious. I was being changed through the process. I went in with doubts and came out believing so strongly in Jesus I was ready to die and be with Him. I think that night was the beginning of change for a lot of us.
Iven started taking a group to a local homeless shelter to feed the poor, and he often had to turn students away because the van wouldn’t hold more than twenty or so. We held an event called Poverty Day where we asked students to live on less than three dollars a day to practice solidarity with the poor. More than once a hundred students participated. Penny spoke in Vollum Lounge on the topic of poverty in India, and more than seventy five students came. Before any of this, our biggest event had about ten people. We hosted an evening where we asked students to come and voice their hostility against Christians. We answered questions about what we believed and explained our love for people, for the hurting, and we apologized again for our own wrongs against humanity and asked forgiveness from the Reed community. We enjoyed the new friendships we received, and at one time had for different Bible studies on campus specifically for people who did not consider themselves Christians. We watched a lot of students take a second look at Christ. But mostly, we as Christians felt right with the people around us. Mostly we felt forgiven and grateful.

Sometime around two or three in the morning, the night we took confessions, I was walking off the campus with my monk robe under my arm, and when I got to the large oak trees on the outskirts of the front lawn, I turned and looked at the campus. It all looked so smart and old, and I could see the lights coming out of the Student Center, and I could hear the music thumping. There were kids making out on the lawn and chasing each other down the sidewalks. there was laughing and dancing and throwing up.
I felt very strongly that Jesus was relevant in this place. I felt very strongly that if He was not relevant here then He was not relevant anywhere. I felt very peaceful in that place and very sober. I felt very connected to God because I had confessed so much to so many people and had gotten so much off my chest and I had been forgiven by the people I had wronged with my indifference and judgmentalism. I was going to sit there for a little while, but it was cold and the grass was damp. I went home and fell asleep on the couch and the next morning made coffee and sat on the porch at Graceland and wondered whether the things that happened that night before had actually happened. I was out of the closet now. A Christian. So many years before I had made amends to God, but now I had made amends to the world. I was somebody who was willing to share my faith. It felt kind of cool, kind of different. It was very relieving.

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here’s another really long quote from miller’s book, ‘blue like jazz’. this is what i actually intended to copy on the last post but i got so excited about that other stuff i did that too. check this out…

“Each year at Reed [ultra-liberal college miller attended part-time] they have a festival call Ren Fayre. They shut down the campus so the students can party. Security keeps the authorities away, and everybody gets pretty drunk and high, and some people get naked. Friday night is mostly about getting drunk, and Saturday night is about getting high. The school brings in White Bird, a medical unit that specializes in treating bad drug trips. The students create special lounges with black lights and television screens to ehance kid’s mushroom trips.

Some of the Christians in our little group decided this was a pretty good place to come out of the closet, letting everybody know there were a few Christian on campus. Tony the Beat Poet and I were sitting around in my room one afternoon talking about what to do, how to explain who we were to a group of students who, in the past, had expressed hostility toward Christians. Like our friends, we felt like Ren Fayre was the best time to do this. I said we shoudl build a confession booth in the middle of the campus and paint a sign on it that said ‘Confess your sins.” I said it as a joke. But Tony thought it was brilliant. He sat there on my couch with his mind in the clouds, and he was scaring the crap out of me because, for a second, then for a minute, I actually believed he wanted to do it.

“Tony,” I said very gently.
“What?” he said, with a blank stare at the opposite wall.
“We are not doing to do this,” I told him. He moved his gaze down the wall and directly into my eyes. A smile came across his face.
“Oh, we are, Don. We certainly are. We are going to build a confession booth!”
We met in the Commons- Penny, Nadine, Mitch, Iven, Tony and I. Tony said I had an idea. They looked at me. I told them that Tony was lying and I didn’t have an idea at all. They looked at Tony. Tony gave me a dirty look and told me to tell them the idea. I told them I had a stupid idea that we couldn’t do without getting attacked. They leaned in. I told them that we should build a confession booth in the middle of campus and paint a sign on it that said “Confess your sins.” Penny put her hands over her mouth. Nadine smiled. Iven laughed. Mitch started drawing the designs for the booth on a napkin. Tony nodded his head. I wet my pants.
“They may very well burn it down,” Nadine said.
“I will build a trapdoor,” Mitch said with his finger in the air.
“I like it, Don,” Iven patted me on the back.
“I don’t want anything to do with it,” Penny said.
“Neither do I,” I told her.
“Okay, you guys.” Tony gathered everybody’s attention. “Here’s the catch.” He leaned in a little and collected his thoughts. “We are not actually going to accept confessions.” We all looked at him in confusion. He continued, “We are going to confess to them. We are going to confess that, as followers of Jesus, we have not been very loving; we have been bitter, and for that we are sorry. We will apologize for neglecting the poor and the lonely, we will ask them to forgive us, and we will tell them that in our selfishness, we have misrepresented Jesus on this campus. We will tell people who come into the booth that Jesus loves them.”

All of us sat there in silence because it was obvious that something beautiful and true had hit the table with a thud. We all thought it was a great idea, and we could see it in each other’s eyes. It would feel so good to apologize, to apologize for the Crusades, for Columbus adn the genocide he committed in the Bahamas in the name of God, apologize for the missionaries who landed in Mexico and came up through the West slaughtering Indians in the name of Christ. I wanted so desperately to say that none of this was Jesus, and I wanted so desperately to apologize for the many ways I had misrepresented the Lord. I could feel that I had betrayed the Lord by judging, by not being willing to love the people He had loved and only giving lip service to issues of human rights.

For much of my life I had been defending Christianity because I thought to admit that we had done any wrong was to discredit the religious system as a whole, but it isn’t a religious system, it is people following Christ; and the important thing to do, the right thing to do, was to apologize for getting in the way of Jesus.

Later I had a conversation with a very arrogant Reed professor in the parking lot in which he asked me what brought me to Reed. I told him I was auditing a class but was really there to interact with the few Christians who studied at Reed. The professor asked me if I was a Christian evangelist. He went on to compare my work to that of Captian Cook, who had attempted to bring Western values to indigenous people of Hawaii. He looked me in the eye and said the tribes had killed Cook.
He did not wish me a greater fate at Reed.
All the way home on my motorcycle I fumed and imagined beating the professor into a pulp right there in the parking lot. I could see his sly smile, his intellectual pride. Sure, Christians had done terrible things to humanity, but I hadn’t. I had never killed anybody at all. And those people weren’t following Jesus when they commited those crimes against humanity. They were goverment people, and government always uses God to manipulate the masses into following them.

Both Clinton and Bush claim to be followers of Jesus. Andybody who wants to get their way says that Jesus supports their view. But that isn’t Jesus’ fault. Tony had come to campus a few days earlier, a bit sad in the face. He had seen a bumper sticker on one of the cars in the parking lot that read “Too bad we can’t feed Christians to the lions anymore.”

I prayed about getting in the confession booth. I wondered whether I could apologize and mean it. I wondered whether I could humble myself to a culture that, to some degree, had wronged us. But I could see in Penny’s face, in Iven’s eyes, that this was what they wanted; they wanted to love these people, their friends, and it didn’t matter to them what it cost. They didn’t care hwo much they had been hurt, and they certainly had more scars than either Tony or I, and so we bought the wood and stored it in my garage, and Friday night we went to the Thesis parade and watched everybody get drunk and beat drums and dance in a spray of beer. Tony and I dressed like monks and smoked pipes and walked among the anarchy, becoming soaked in all the alcohol spewing from within the crowds. People would come up to us and ask what we were doing, and we told them that the next day we would be on campus to tak confessions. They looked at us in amazement, sometimes asking us whether we were serious. We told them to come and see us, that we were going to build a confession booth.

The next morning, while everybody was sleeping off their hangovers, Mitch, Toney, and I started building the thing. Mitch had the plans drawn out. The booth was huge, much bigger than I expected, almost like a shed complete with a slanted roof and two small sections inside, one for the monk and the other for the confessor. We built a half-high wall between the two rooms and installed a curtain so the confessor could easily get in and out. On our side we installed a door with a latch so nobody could come in and drag us away. Nadine painted “Confession Booth” in large letters on the outside of the booth.

As the campus started to gather energy, people walking along the sidewalk would ask what we were doing. They stood there looking at the booth in wonder. “What are we supposed to do?” they would ask. “Confess your sins,’ we told them. “To who?” they would say. “To God,” we would tell them. “There is no God,” they would explain. Some of them told us this was the boldest thing they had ever seen. All of them were kind, which surprised us.

I stood there outside the booth as a large blud mob started running across the campus, all of them, more than a hundred people, naked and painted in blue paint. They ran by the booth screaming and waving. I waved back. Naked people look funny when they are for-real naked, outside-a-magazine naked.

Saturday evning at Ren Fayre is alive and fun. The sun goes down over campus, and shortly after dark they shoot fireworks over the tennis courts. Students lay themselves out on a hill and laugh and point in bleary-eyed fascination. The highlight of the evening is a glowing opera that packs the amphitheater with students and friends. The opera is designed to enhance mushroom trips. The actors wear all black and carry colorful puppets and cutouts that come alive in the black light. Everybody oohs and aaahs.

The party goes till nearly dawn, so though it was late we started working the booth. We lit tiki torches and mounted them in the ground just outside the booth. Tony and Iven were saying I should go first, which I didn’t want to do, but I played bold and got in the booth. I sat on a bucket and watched the ceiling and the smoke from my pipe gather in the dark corners like ghosts. I could hear the reave happening in the student center across campus. I was picturing all the cool dancers, the girls in white shirts moving through the black light, the guys with the turntables in the loft, the big screen with the swirling images and all that energy coming out of the speakers, pounding through everybody’s bodies, getting everybody up and down, up and down, up and down. Nobody is going to confess anything, I thought. Who wants to stop dancing to confess their sins? And I realized that this was a bad idea, that none of this was God’s idea. Nobody was going to get angry, but nobody was going to care very much either.

There is nothing relevant about Christian spirituality, I kept thinking. God, if He is even here, has no voice in this place. Everybody wants to have a conversation about truth, but there isn’t any truth anymore. The only truth is what is cool, what is on television, what protest is going on on what block, and it doesn’t matter the issue; it only matters who is going to be there and will there be a party later and can any of us feel like we are relevant while we are at the party. And in the middle of it we are like Mormons on bikes. I sat there wondering whether any of this was true, whether Christian spirituality was even true at all. You never question the truth of something until you have to explain it to skeptic. I didn’t feel like explaining it very much. I didn’t fee like being in the booth or wearing that stupid monk outfit. I wanted to go to the rave. Everybody there was coo, and we were just religious.

I was going to tell Tony that I didn’t want to do it when he opened the curtain and said we had our first customer.”

continued on the next post…..

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ok, this post is going to be really long. but if you read it all the way through i think you’ll be happy you did.

i’m going to re-print here a long portion of a chapter from ‘blue like jazz’ by don miller. i just read it and it grabbed me in my heart. it’s so where i am. actually, i’m going to do two portions. one is short, the other is long. excellent stuff.

ready? ok, here goes. the first one is a paragraph from a chapter called ‘belief’….

‘A friend of mine, a young pastor who recently started a church, talks to me from time to time about the new face of church in America- about the postmodern church. He says the new church will be different from the old one, that we will be relevant to culture and the human struggle. I don’t think any church has ever been relevant to culture, to the human struggle, unless it believed in Jesus and the power of His gospel. If the supposed new church believes in trendy music and cool Web pages, then it is not relevant to culture either. It is just another tool of Satan to get people to be passionate about nothing.”

amen!

here’s the longer one…. it’s from the next chapter titled ‘confession - coming out of the closet’

“In a recent radio interview I was sternly asked by the host, wo did not consider himself a Christian, to defend Christianity. I told him that I couldn’t do it, and moreover, that I didn’t want to defend the term. He asked me if I was a Christian, and I told him yes. “Then why don’t you want to defind Christianity?” he asked, confused. I told him I no longer knew what the term meant. Of the hundreds of thousands of people listening to his show that day, some of them had terrible experiences with Christianity; they may have been yelled at by a teacher in a Christian schoo, abused by a minister, or browbeaten by a Christian parent. To them, the term Chrisitianity meant something that no Christian I know would defend. By fortifying the term, I am only making them more and more angry. I won’t do it. Stop ten people on the street and ask them what they think of when they hear the word Christianity, and they will give you ten different answers. How can I defend a term that means ten different things to ten different people? I told the radio show host that I would rather talk about Jesus and how I came to believe that Jesus exists and that he likes me. The host looked back at me with tears in his eyes. When we were done, he asked me if we could go get lunch together. He told me how much he didn’t like Christianity but how he had always wanted to believe Jesus was the Son of God.

For me, the beginning of sharing my faith with people began by throwing out Christianity and embracing Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system that can be experienced but not explained. Christianity, unlike Christian spirituality, was not a term that excited me. And I could not in good concious tell a friend about a faith that didn’t excite me. I couldn’t share something I wasn’t experiencing. And I wasn’t experiencing Christianity. It didn’t do anything for me at all. It felt like math, like a system of rights and wrongs and political beliefs, but it wasn’t mysterious; it wasn’t God reaching out of heaven to do wonderful things in my life. And if I would have shared Christianity with somebody, it would have felt mostly like I was trying to get somebody to agree with me rather than meet God. I could no longer share anything about Christianity, but I loved talking about Jesus and the spirituality that goes along with a relationship with Him.

Tony the Beat Poet [a friend of millers] says the church is like a wounded animal these days. He says we used to have power and influence, but now we don’t, and so many of our leaders are upset about this and acting like spoiled children, mad because they can’t have their way. They disguise their actions to look as though they are standing on principle, but it isn’t that, Tony says, it’s bitterness. They want to take their ball and go home because they have to sit the bench. Tony and I agreed that what God wants us to do is sit the bench in humility and turn the other cheek like Ghandi, like Jesus. We decided that the correct place to share our faith was from a place of humility, not from a desire for power.”

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i finally started reading don miller’s ‘blue like jazz’ yesterday. i really, really like him. i like his writing style and i like his crackpot since of humor. thanks to paralezoo for recommending him to me.

like miller, i grew up in a religious evironment that was decidedly republican in it’s politics. there were exceptions, but those were primarily black brothers who tended to be democrat. normally though, it was the republican party, republican politicians and agendas that were lauded from the pulpit and in private. generally speaking democrat’s were not viewed favorably.

so i’ve always been a knee jerk republican. when i was old enough to vote i registered as republican and have always voted a straight republican ticket, regardless of the issues. i was a rush limbaugh dittohead and when i had my own business i’d tune in to all the popular talking head shows while i worked. i remember once telling my brother that democrats are evil people. i feel pretty stupid about that remark now though. i’m still registered as a republican, but will probably switch to independent next time around. reason being is i suppose i’ve pretty much become a political agnostic. there are several reasons for this, and some of them mirror some of my frustrations with the church and ‘the ministry.’

first of all, i just don’t like politics of any sort. especially church politics. but, human politics are part of living in the world so i guess it’s an evil we have to work around in order to interact with fellow humans. truthfully, i’m not very good at politics and i’ve been hurt by it more than once. i tend to take things at face value too much and trust people intentions too much and forget that we all have personal hidden agendas and the majority of us are willing to sacrifice others to advance our positions. that’s why i hate politics, it’s selfish and mean most of the time.

also, i just think that biggest part of secular politics is about power and money. and that goes for both sides of the aisle. all political parties rape the constituency by using them for their own pleasure and gain. that’s a kind of rape isn’t it? not that there aren’t good people in government who are trying to help people; there are lots of those. not that government in some ways doesn’t benefit us; it does. i just think though that even with the best of intentions it is corrupted at its core by power and greed.

i wish i could vote on the issues rather than on a party or a particular politician because i find that i agree and disagree with various issues all parties use as planks on their platforms. i think republicans are right about some stuff, and democrats are right on others. i wish i could vote yes on the stuff i agree with and no and the stuff i disagree with and that there was some sort of government committee that had no say in the matter who would just make happen what we all agree the most on. but, when i vote i usually have to vote for stuff i disagree with in order to vote for the stuff i agree with more than i disagree with. i like the ballot iniative thing we have here in Cali where we can occasionally vote for specific issues regardless of political affiliation. that’s cool.

i’m turned off to politics too because like most institutions, churches included, those in charge rarely mean what they say, do what they promise, or have the best interest of the people in mind. too many pastors, like politicians, want to do what benefits people as long as it’s what they want to do and it also benefits them. it’s kind of like somebody who tells you to pick where you want to go out to eat w/them but then shoots down your first five suggestions until you suggest one they like, and then they’re all for it. how generous of them. i have yet to work for or sit under a pastor that genuinely, consistently, and actively put the interests of the people before his own personal ‘vision’, desires, or preferences.

plus, they tend to waste alot of money on stupid stuff. they’ve forgotten that government and the church exists to benefit the people, not the other way around. so much of regular people’s hard earned money is pissed away by politicians and preachers on pet projects that have more to do with personal gratification and job security that it does to help the constituency or fulfill the true mission of the institution. it sickens me. our city is in a budget crisis of sorts. i’ll bet that i could balance the budget by cutting the crap out of their departments within a couple of months if i were given carte blanche. and i’d be willing to bet a months pay that nobody would lose their job. but for some reason, it’s too difficult for them to do that because of their pet projects, pork. it’s amazing to me.

another reason i’ve become politically agnostic is because i don’t think that america is the reaganesque city on a hill. sure, we’re big, we’re powerful, we’re rich and all that. but we’re no bigger or more powerful or less vulnerable that a ton of other empires, governments, countries in history. it’s just our time in history to be a star. it’s our 15 minutes of fame in history. that doesn’t give us any special divine stamp of approval. plus, who are we to kid that we’re as altruistic and innocent of shedding innocent blood as we like to claim? as a nation, we’ve done some dirty stuff in our short history. that’s why so much of the world hate us. some of are allies are only such because they’re afraid of us and/or they want our money. who are we kidding? we’re nothing special in the larger scheme of things.

truthfully, i think that socialism/communism is more biblical than democracy. at least philosophically. when i was a kid i remember reading the book of acts about how they had all things in common and that sort of stuff and i thought to myself, ‘hey, that sounds kind of like communism!’ but then my other brain said ’sshhh. you can’t think that. it’s wrong.’ so i suppressed it. now, years later i still believe that sincere community is the bible way. the problem is that because of human nature democracy is a better system to weed out the crappy people than communism is, so i support democracy as the lesser of two evils. why do you think the founding fathers were so adamant about checks and balances? because they understood that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

the absolute best form of government is a theocracy. and someday, i think, we’ll have that again. but in the meantime, all other attempts at human government fall short due to our sinful nature. the kingdom of god advocates a communal approach to human interaction that’s based on love, selflessness, humility, forgiveness, cheerful giving, and unconditional acceptance. a tall order for us humans. so, we use a bandaid approach to managing human affairs and ours seems to be doing ok overall.

i guess i’m not so politically enthusiastic anymore because i just don’t see the point of it. it’s the same ol’ crap, no matter who’s in power. did america really change that much when clinton was in office? not really. did newt gingrich’s contract on america really change things that much? not really. it’s all pretty much the same now as it was then, just more expensive. the same camps are shooting flaming arrows at each other no matter whose guy flys in air force one. to me it has about as much significance as professional sports. it’s somewhat entertaining but it’s generally divorced from reality and who really cares who wins the superbowl anyway?

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hey, i was in the paper today. i was visiting my nearest wendy’s restaurant for lunch yesterday and a reporter from the local rag was there asking people their take on the finger in the chili fiasco. he interviewed me and here’s what he wrote…

“Brian ****, of Lodi, said he comes to Wendy’s regularly and those visits weren’t interrupted because of the chili finger incident.

When he first heard that a woman had found a finger in her chili, he thought it would be horrible if it was real, but thought that the whole thing sounded too much like a hoax.

“I was here the next day,” he said before placing an order for a taco salad with chili.

The one aspect of the story that still troubles [Brian] though, is how and from where the woman may have got the finger.”

haha. my 8 yr. old was tickled pink to see his dad’s name in the paper. too funny.

actually, this is the second time i’ve been in the local paper this year. i filled out a movie review at the theater when my son and i went to see ‘national treasure’. they picked my review out and printed it in the paper. i got two free movie tickets out of that deal which was cool.

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in my religious heritage there was always much talk about how as christians we are supposed to live ‘in’ the world but not be ‘of’ the world. that somehow we’re supposed to be separate, apart from the world. of course this is true, it’s in the bible. our interpretation of this generally focused on physical things we could do like how we looked, the music we listened to, going to church, not cussing, and stuff like that. some attention was given to the spiritual/philosophical differences we as christians have from those living a ‘worldly’ life, but mainly it was a narrow type of ‘holiness’ they were talking about limited in large part to outward appearances and behavior.

but, i think i’m starting to finally understand more clearly what is meant by that statement, to live ‘in’ the world but not be ‘of’ the world. it’s nothing new, but somehow this stuff is soaking in and i’m ‘getting it’. water can sculpt the hardest rock. the spirit of god is likened to water in scripture and it’s finally cut through the density of my head.

brian mclaren talks in his books ‘a new kind of christian’ and ‘the story we find ourselves in’ about how man operates at a level down here yet jesus/god transcended that level and even though he lived down here, he thought and based his actions and talks on a reality ‘up here’, and brian’s character would move his hand in a circular motion parallel to a table. jesus didn’t bother himself with the things that were important to the men of his day. he didn’t think like them. he didn’t respond to the same stimuli they did. his crank turned the opposite way. they thought ying, he thought yang. yet he moved and operated here on our plane, inviting us to live in his world within our world.

and he wasn’t just talking about the secular world. he was also talking about religion. he interacted with the religious and their institutions but he wasn’t tied to them. he operated within their economy but outside their paradigms. he lived in a different paradigm. it’s kind of like me and my kids. we live together but we live in different worlds. i can interact with them but i have bigger, deeper, more meaningful understandings of the dynamics of the real world than they do. take that another couple levels deeper and that’s where jesus lived. he interacts with us, but he sees, hears, and processes things way differently than we do. that’s the invitation he extends to us, that we come into his world and know him. he came here, partly, to prove to us that it’s possible to live in his world; otherwise, we’d think it a pipe dream, irrelevant, too good to be truth, unlivable. but he lived it, and he invites us to live it, through him.

his world is based on a whole different set of rules, principles, and philosophy. that’s the world he was trying to get us to live in. it’s a world of love. not necessarily the mushy, romantic, doves and rays of sunshine love. not just the love with halos and angelic choirs where nobody gets hurt and everybody is serene in some hippy sort of communal kind of way.

it’s the kind of love that gets dirty, that is unselfish, that gives, that humbles, that is grace giving, that is forgiving even in the midst of intense pain and severe betrayal, it’s the kind that takes undeserved punishment without retribution. it’s the kind of world where people esteem others before themselves, where we treat each other with respect and kindness and unconditional love, even when we don’t feel like it and the person is a jerk and stinks.

it’s the kind of world where houses and cars and fancy clothes, and name brands, and status symbols, and plasma tvs and vacation homes aren’t valuable. where what’s valuable is giving freely to others, loaning without expecting or demanding repayment and becoming less so that others can become more. it’s a world where we don’t seek endlessly for nonstop comfort, but we accept life as it comes and learn to live happily, contently even in poverty and suffering. it’s where we learn abound and learn to be abased. it’s a world where we aren’t struggling to get to the top of the heap (even religious ones), we’re not trying to get people to like us all the time, and we’re not basing our identity on what we do, or what we have, or who we’ve become, or what people think about us.

it’s a world where we understand that all that matter is that we’re loved by god and no matter anything else, we’re ok. it’s this kind of world that jesus lived in. there’s great peace and rest in that reality. i’m just beginning to see it and comprehend it. i’ve always understood this stuff intellectually, but it hadn’t become a thing of my heart.

ron miller talks about this alot in his book ’searching for god knows what’. he talks about how we all live with a lifeboat mentality, measuring our worth by others perceptions of us and our worth in society hoping that our creditials will allow us to stay in the lifeboat of society rather than become one of its outcasts. but jesus is outside the boat, telling us to walk on water (walk by the spirit?) and base our identity solely on him what he thinks of us. the rest of it is either window dressing or it’s dross. neither of which is worth anything.

i’ve read miller’s book twice now. the first time it was good. but the second time i really started to get it. maybe that’s why god has led me to disengage from church. i found too much of my identity there. i care too much about people’s opinions of me. i’m more tied to the church than tied to jesus. i know the church more than i know jesus. i serve the church more than i serve jesus. the church has become my rock instead of jesus. when i fall, i expect the church to save me instead of jesus. when i need advice i go to the church (via internet, books, seminars, sermons, etc…), not jesus. when i need a spiritual boost i go to church, not jesus. i know his book better than i know the author.

i think that’s why jesus told so many of his prospective disciples to leave everything behind and to follow him. they had to leave behind all their emotional, spiritual, intellectual, relational anchors and identities in order to have their paradigms ripped apart and reconstructed. i think of peter who left his nets, matthew who left his millions, and the young, rich dignitary who couldn’t leave his money.

i find that as i disconnect from everything, i’m left only with jesus. and my journey now is to learn about him, connect with him, and become totally his. truly, i’m here, outside the boat (i hope) learning to be led by the spirit, by faith (walk on water) and he’s revealing himself to me more fully more clearly without all the encumberances and noise of religious activity. maybe i can later reconnect with a religious environment to a certain extent when i’ve learned really to walk in his world while being in this world. at the moment i’m outside of all worlds, other than my family and work, and venturing into his world for the first time.

i think this is what happened to paul in arabia. on the damascus road he was hit square in the face with the futility of his religious existence. he realized he didn’t really know god. ‘lord, who are you?’ he cried. i’ll bet it was as much frustration speaking as it was reverence. i’ll bet he was dismayed, scared, and there was probably a ‘oh crap!’ edge to his voice. i’ll bet he realized at that moment that he had totally screwed up and that something in his religiousity was terribly wrong. maybe something like a woman would feel if she found out the guy she married was actually somebody else from another city with another family. ‘who ARE you?’ she’d want to know.

when paul had to go away for awhile he had to disconnect. he had to re-think. he had to connect to god through jesus for the first time. god had to take the vessel called paul, pound it down to a lump of clay and re-make a new man and then send him back into the religious world with a new message and a new era. that’s what’s going on with me. i’m not sure i’ll have a new message, but it’s defintely a new era and i’m becoming a new man.

as i went around carmel this weekend i began to get an inkling of this change in me. as i looked at all the opulence, the fancy cars, the multi-million dollar mansions, the hard bodies and the silicon/botox enhanced bodies, the fancy restaurants, etc…. i was struck not by the status symbols of human success but by the futility of it. it just didn’t pull me like before. i began to see the people strutting down the street looking like a million bucks of plastic surgery as if they were little children crying out for validation and attention. ‘look at me! look at me! aren’t i lovely? am i worth something to you?’. i felt sad for them in a loving way, not a condescending way. i think jesus felt this way too.

i saw men wearing the marks of stress and overwork and i wondered at the point of it. i appreciated the nice houses and the beautiful golf courses, but they didn’t pull at me. i saw terrible golfers struggling to fight the coastal winds at the spyglass golf course. i wondered if they paid $500 a head to be challenged by the course or if they were really paying for the feeling of importance they got by associating themselves with pebble beach and all the famous people that play there. know what i mean? i’d have flashes of it from time to time before, but this was different. it’s as if i’m starting to exist in this jesus world now and view our world through it’s paradigm instead of the other way around.

i found it a little ironic that the world’s most beautiful people build their most beautiful homes and drive their most beautiful cars in the places of god’s greatest beauty. it’s as if subconsciously we humans want to set our best against god’s best. yet, as i looked around this weekend god’s beauty and wealth far surpassed the rest. isn’t that the point of christ’s ministry? to show us the kingdom of god contrasted to the kingdom of earth and extend an invitation to his world?

i’ve struggled with the feeling that i know what to do, but it’s so difficult to actually live and to live it with joy and ease. i couldn’t reconcile my desire to do good with it’s difficulty, especially in light of jesus telling us his burden was light. i struggle with my flesh and my sinful impulses. but, as i’ve disconnected my values have changed. i no longer value, as much, the things that were important to me when i was connected and before i ventured more fully into jesus’ world.

it’s akin to growing up. when i was a kid having the coolest dr. j converse basketball shoes was an absolute must. i dreamed of them, i worked and saved for them. when i got them i cleaned them everyday and then put them back in the box everynight. i watched where i walked and i carefully fixed the shoe laces so they were flat and puffy looking. looking cool in my j’s was it man. it was the shizzle! but now, looking at that time from the outside in, i just laugh at it. fancy basketball shoes mean nothing to me. i couldn’t care less about them. but back then they were everything to me.

why? my values have changed. isn’t that what happens when we more deeply engage the kingdom of god to our lives? our values changed. what would have been so difficult to resist, or do, or not do is easy today. because we’ve changed. we’ve become more like christ. that’s the journey.

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to celebrate our birthdays my wife and i decided to take a couple days off and take the kids to the monterey penninsula. had a great time.

got there friday evening and was surprised by our room at the local hojo in pacific grove. it’s set in a residential neighborhood about three blocks from asilomar state beach. it’s an old apartment complex they’ve re-done into a small hotel. the ‘room’s were actually studio apartments complete with fire place, tv & dvd, full kitchen and a deck. cool!

we unloaded all our junk and went to http://www.carmelcalifornia.com/ (go to the ’sights’ link)which is about 2 miles away. we had dinner at http://www.restauranteur.com/forge/ . we sat near the outdoor fireplaces under the ivy. they had light jazz playing and you could feel a light mist from the ocean. it was really cool. i had a pulled pork sandwich with haison sauce. my wife had clam chowder. afterwards we all walked around town looking in all the art gallery windows. my 8 yr. old son thought a couple of the pieces would have been pretty good if they didn’t have so many naked ladies in them. haha. we got some apple strudel for dessert at a bakery and then headed back to the hojo.

the next morning it was overcast and raining so we couldn’t go to the beach. we had half planned to go to the monterey bay aquarium but my kid had been there just last month so we decided tak a drive down highway 1 which runs along the coast. we went through big sur, http://www.byways.org/browse/byways/2301/photos.html an absolutely awesome place. henry miller, a local author of note, said that it was when he came to big sur that he learned the meaning of ‘amen’. stunning views, mist, low clouds, heavy forests, steep hills and cliffs, wow.

we collected about 20 large rocks to put in flower beds in front of our house to commemorate our trip. sounded like a great idea until about an hour later when the rocks made the car smell like skunk. we didn’t want to throw the rocks away so we just rolled down the windows and endured it.

on the way back stopped at a couple of interesting places. the first was san lobos nature preserve http://www.monterey-carmel.com/point_lobos_state_reserve_in_carmel_ca.htm . turns out it’s a place you have to hike around some to see much and we didn’t have the right shoes. we’re planning to come back some other time with proper attire. it’s beautiful.

down the road back toward carmel we noticed this place and stopped by and checked it out. http://www.lumigenic.com/photo/articles/HistoryWeb/Carmel.html the chapel was closed for renovation and was scheduled to open the next day. bad timing. but, we’ll come back. we checked out their gardens and too some pictures. awesome views of the ocean too. being here felt like being in spain.

we went back to carmel and had lunch at a deli and then drove around the interior of the town checking out the really quaint houses. check out the carmel website for photos under the ’sights’ link, then ‘cottages’. keep in mind that most of these homes sell in the multi-million range. not cheap. almost got rear ended by a cyclist on a mountain bike when i jumped on my brakes to look at a literal castle of house.

took the kids to the white sand beach for awhile and let the kids play. we had a good laugh when as we were watching this photgrapher photograph a large piece of driftwood on the beach. he kept working the shot, focusing, adjusting, snapping pictures. he’d just got thing situated when a large dalmatian dog strolled over, lifted his leg, and peed on the log right where the guy was photographing. haha. that was too funny. i guess the dog doesn’t have much sense for art. haha.

After going back to the room and showering we had dinner with some bible school friends who live nearby. my friend competes in triathalons as a hobby and told us some great stories about him running the ironman triathalon in hawaii last year. he’s going again this year. he completed the whole thing in 15 hours. can you imagine exercising as hard as you can for 15 hours straight? not me. i can’t even sleep that long.

the next morning we went and did this http://www.montereywhalewatching.com . it was a three hour tour (gilligan, and the skipper too. a millioniare, and his wiiiiiiiife). we saw a couple hundred risso whales. they look like dolphins but with bigger dorsal fins and teeth. and we saw several humpback whales and got lots of really good video with fluke shots as they dove down to feed. a couple of times we were within 30 yards of the whales. they’re huge!

afterwards we had lunch at a seafood grotto place here http://www.montereywharf.com/ .

we went driving again on highway 1 and stopped at a little beach that was actually kind of a cove because it was sheltered on two sides by breaker rocks. the beach was directly across the road from the world famous spyglass golf course. see good pics of that here http://golf.about.com/od/golfcourespictures/l/blspyglasshill2.htm . lots of tame deer roaming around too.

my 8 yr. old went crazy building a sand version of the taj mahal as mom and i watched the baby run around the beach. a harbor seal was out in the cove and it was fun to watch him play too.

as the sun started to go down i looked around at everything and thought of brian mclaren’s observation in his book ‘the story we find ourselves in’ about how we marvel and are left speechless at the small slices of nature we can see, yet god takes all the beauty of the whole planet in at one time and how beautiful and good it must seem to him.

after a couple of hours of that we cleaned up the kids and headed home. we stopped at san juan bautista http://www.jardinesrestaurant.com/San_Juan_Bautista.htm and had dinner at this really cool mexican restaurant http://www.jardinesrestaurant.com/ . by that time the kids were so worn out an older couple commented on how refreshing it was to see to such well behaved children. haha. if they only knew. the kids were too TIRED to mis-behave. not that i was complaining. haha. dinner was good. the atmosphere was incredible with lots of outdoor seating, flowers, bright colors, and old mexico/spanish feel. very nice.

in between our restaurant and another building that the plaque said was built in 1790 was a small fenced in shrine area with several crucifixs. one was made of rope, knotted at the intersection. another was a very ornate, beautiful silver plated cross about three feet long, affixed to an adobe wall. i thought it was pretty cool.

we drove home and i almost ran out of gas because the place i planned to stop at up in the hills was closed. i prayed we’d make to the next place and we barely did. thank god. of course the rest of them were oblivious to my little crisis as they were all too busy sawing logs. we all finally got home at about 10 pm last night, took a shower and crashed into bed.

a good weekend to remember.

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i was reading an op/ed piece (doesn’t that make me sound smart? ) in the paper this morning by thomas sowell. he was writing about how the greenies in the bay area are driving housing costs up because of their strict bans on new housing construction. he quoted t.s. eliot, ‘half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. they don’t mean to do harm-but the harm doesn’t interest them. or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.’ hey, isn’t that the truth? good quote.

this struck me as relevant because i’m in the process of reading don miller’s book ’searching for god knows what’ for the second time. i read it earlier this month. as soon as i finished the last page i immediately began re-reading it. good book. i usually read quickly through a book to get the general sense of it and to determine if it’s worth thinking about. if it’s worthwhile i then will read and re-read it again as many times as necessary to fully disseminate it’s truth into my mind. time consuming, but it works for me. i’m anxiously awaiting ups delivery of his other book ‘blue like jazz’ which i ordered off half.com last earlier this week.

what the heck does thomas sowell, t.s. eliot, san francisco greenies, don miller, me, you, and this blog have in common you may be wondering. well, it has to do with don millers metaphor for life he uses in his book to try to explain the futility of man’s worldview. it goes something like this.

a lawyer, a teacher, a single mom, a garbage man, a politician, a kid, and a preacher were all in a lifeboat together. in order to survive somebody has to be tossed over the side. the moral question for you is, who goes? this is a question to posed to miller and his classmates by a teacher in a lesson called ‘values clarification’. he says they bandied it about, discussing the various merits and demerits of each person, assigning arbitrary value to each person based on their own personal and collective sense of morality. he thinks they determined that the lawyer had to go, but can’t remember for sure. miller says that looking back he is amazed that nobody suggested that perhaps they were all worth the same and that nobody had any more or less value than the other thus the discussion to toss somebody to the sharks based on merits was baseless. they just all assumed that some are worth more than others.

miller uses this story to springboard into a discussion about how humans look at each other, themselves, and their roles in the world versus how god looks at the same. he says that we’re always trying to compare ourselves to each other, ranking one another, placing ourselves in a social line-up based on a screwed up set of values like good looks, wealth, intelligence, usefulness, correctness, etc…

he suggests that we strive to redeem ourselves and prove our worth and significance to ourselves and others in a desperate struggle to keep ourselves from being thrown out of the lifeboat of respectable, worthwhile citizens. we’re all struggling to be liked, to be respected, to be well regarded so that we don’t end up like the kid in miller’s grade school class with buck teeth, dirty hair, dirty clothes, no friends…an outcast, rejected by people who dissassociate themselves from us in their own frantic attempts to validate themselves by invalidating us.

christ, says miller, came to turn all that lifeboat thinking upside down. he defied all of these notions and invited us into a life where our identity, our security, our worth, our acceptance is found in what god thinks about us; he loves us beyond measure. jesus’ life was an example of how to live outside the lifeboat mentality of the world. miller suggests that if we can step out of lifeboat thinking and learn to live in christ’s identity then the things of this world will become strangely dim, so to speak and we’ll have found true peace and happiness jesus advertised.

of course, i’m grossly simplifying what he said and i may have minunderstood some of it. it’s difficult to summarize a 200 page book in two paragraphs and do it justice. but perhaps you can begin to see the connection the quote by t.s. eliot.

jesus used the metaphor of a kingdom to delineate his world from ours. behold, the kingdom of god is near! but to my 21st century mind the metaphor of a lifeboat seems to make better sense, since i don’t think much in terms of kingdoms except when i watch lord of the rings or gladiator or something. there’s a lot of truth in the idea that those of us who have bought into the way of the world are constantly jockeying for position, negotiating our worth in the economy of society trying to position ourselves more favorably in the eyes of others. but jesus told us to not compare ourselves to one another. but we do it all the time, without even thinking about it. it’s as automatic as breathing.

i remember when i was ‘in the ministry’ and connected to a religious group that’d i’d grown up in. i was miserable there and looking for a way out but i had two major hangups to overcome before i could do that.

first, i was ‘in the ministry’ and to do anything outside of that would be a severe blow to my self-esteem. i felt that if i wasn’t in full time ministry then i was a failure, a reject, unrespectable. in my mind, my worth was directly connected to my vocation. it should have been connected to identity as a son of god.

secondly, i felt my identity as a christian was strongly connected to being a fundie of a particular stripe. anything outside of that narrow interpretation of the gospel was akin to apostasy and was ‘watered down’ truth. my place in the religious lifeboat wasn’t based on who jesus declares me to be, nor was i content to live within his grace. my religious lifeboat demanded that if i was to be anything more than an outcast that i had to be a full-time, fundie minister. especially so since my family is much tied into that world as ministers, pastors, and missionaries.

somehow the lord helped me through this. firstly, i resigned my full-time associate pastor job to embark on a para-church endeavor. just enough freedom from the confines of a rigid structure to make me feel free, but also just enough respectability to prop up my religious pride. secondly, i changed my church membership to another church which was a ‘liberal’ daughter work of the church i’d been working at. this church soon was kicked out of the nest because of impure doctrinal positions. but, it was small step in the right direction. baby steps. it’s all my elitist pride could handle at that point. little by little though, incremenatally, the lord was getting me out of that lifeboat mentality.

he still is. i have a long ways to go.

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