Apomo

I’m registered for my classes, finally. I couldn’t register until my financial aid came thru. I’m not going to be able to take my hermenuetics class on campus because the class is full. I have to take it via DVD. That’s not all bad since now I don’t have to go up to Sacramento but once every other week now instead of every Monday night. That saves me about $150 in gas plus wear and tear on my car doing it via DVD. Plus I have the luxury of watching lectures over and over if I want in case I missed something. So, it’s not all bad I guess. It’s a Greener way of doing school!
The Lord seems to be really providing for us financially lately. Here are some things that happened.

I had an outstanding balance on my school bill of $550 from the Spring course I took. Since I had asked for enough money to take 10 units from the financial aid but only actually signed up for 8 units they allowed me to apply the extra money toward my balance. Thus, I didn’t have to come up w/the cash out of pocket today. Which wasn’t going to happen and possibly would have meant I couldn’t go to school this term. But God worked it out. Wow!

Also, I have a $250 deductible on one of my heart meds. I was running out but I didn’t really have the $250. I HAD it but I really needed it for something else. But I need the meds more. So I went down to Kaiser last night to get them and was prepared to pay the $250 figure out some other way to pay for that other thing. But pharmacist lady said they were no charge. ??? I had her double check it but she said the computer said they were no charge! Wow. I like free! So I got 4 months supply and didn’t have to pay anything. Maybe they’ll send me a bill later, maybe it’s God working things out for me. Who cares, at least I have the $250 for the other thing today AND have my meds.

I wanted to start switching my house over to CFL’s so as to save energy and money on our bill. But CFL’s are fairly expensive on the front end, about $3-4 a light bulb. Went to Costco last night to get some food and they had 10 packs of 60W CFL’s for $3.39 a box of 10. Wow! I bought six boxes and replaced all the light bulbs in my house with CFL’s for less than $20 and I still have 1.5 boxes left. CFL’s use 75% less energy, last 10x longer, and give out more light. Very nice!

My son wanted to go to Junior Camp last week. We kept putting of paying the $265 for the camp because we didn’t have it (do you see a pattern here? haha). At the last minute we had to tell him he couldn’t go. He was crushed. We were too. But it was either he went to camp or we paid my health insurance bill. There’s no contest there! Anyway, a guy I know at church asked me if Brenden was going to camp, I said no. He wanted to know why, I said it was because we didn’t have the money. He excused himself and came back about two minutes later and said the church would pay for Brenden to go to camp and that he’d cleared it w/the pastor. Wow, again! On Sunday I was talking to the pastor and thanked him for helping my son out. He asked me if I was signed up for Mens’ Retreat. I said yes. He said that the church would be happy to pay my way there if I wanted. Wow.

(BTW, my wife and I are having lunch at Chili’s w/the pastor and his wife. Plus he and I are having lunch next week. I kind of get the feeling that he’s scoping me out for possible use in the church beyond small groups. A job maybe? Hmmm…that’d be interesting.)

My Mac shorted out on Monday. I shipped it to them on Wed. It got back to me Fri morning repaired and no charge, warranty. Thank God. I was worried about that. I’ve not had alot of good luck with warranties.

So, you take a flyer on God by quitting a career and stepping out in faith and just when things are looking incredibly hairy God comes through in various ways. You pray to be more humble and God humbles you by putting you in situations where things are out of your control and you’re dependent on His help through the body of Christ. It’s humbling for sure, to have your church pay for your stuff, but it’s necessary on many levels to gratefully and humbly accept that help from God. It’s illustration that we are indeed dependent on God for everything.

Just got a call from that church that my prof told me may call. I’d pretty much given up on them. Figured they’d found somebody. The head elder called and we talked for about 45 minutes. I’m going to preach for them on the 23rd and have lunch w/the elder board. From what he was saying it sounds like they are wanting to do things differently than any other church in the area, they have momentum as they’ve grown from 50 to 100 since May, they want to “get dirty for Jesus” as he put it, they want to reach out to the poor, they are primarily 18-40 year olds..lot’s of stuff that really, really intrigues me. I’m excited about checking it out. I’m cautiously optimistic about it. Pray for me.

Just got word that my financial aid came through for school. Now I can register. School starts next Wed nite. I’m skerred. I hope I can keep up.

If you’ve ever been depressed spiritually and wondered if God cares about you, if he knows you’re alive or even wonder if God exists then you must read the article about Mother Teresa in the Sept 3 issue of TIME magazine.

Apparently Mother Teresa had a spiritual drought where she only felt the presence of God once from the time she started her work in Calcutta and the time she died. That’s a 50 year crisis of faith, yet she managed to keep her faith and keep doing the work of Christ in spite of her personal pain and spiritual lonliness. Absolutely stunning. I cried as a I read it. Even now as I type this I am emotional.

This piece will be a great inspiration to me in the future as I continue my struggle with depression and spiritual droughts, like right now. I’m thankful that my times of malaise don’t last as long as hers, but it’s still comforting to know that I have something in common with a saint as great as Mother Teresa. Perhaps her autiobiography with this revelations, Come Be My Light, will have a greater, most longer lasting affect on Christendom than her tireless service to India’s rejected.

Two other notes, one odd, one funny.

The first, a quote on joy from an excerpt from a letter she wrote to her confessor in 1961, “…You have taught me to accept it [as] a ’spiritual side of yor work’ as you wrote — Today I felt a deep joy — that Jesus can’t go anywmore through the agony — but that He wants to go through it in me.”

What’s with this thing about the subject of joy lately for me? The funny thing about that is that one of our family jokes is “You can have JOY!!” because that was the tagline of one of my Dad’s sermons that he preached a million times when we were all young. We still tease him about that. He’ll get mad about something and we’ll say “YOU can have JOY!!” Maybe my Dad is having the last laugh in this one. Like Mark Twain said, “The older I get the smarter my parents become.”
The second, on the front cover is a photo an elderly Mother Teresa in her blue and white robe. On the back cover? An almost full page photo of a completely naked mature woman advertising some sort of anti-aging cream. It’s ironic not only on the surface of things, but also in the underlying spiritual, moral, values differences between the two; one spiritual and others-centered, the other physical and self-centered. A commentary on reality.

My son plugged in my Mac the other night and fried the connection and power supply. Not sure what happened. We just knew it wasn’t good when we smelled burning electrical connections and saw the power light go off. Called Apple and they’re sending a box and will repair it. Hopefully I’ll have it back by the end of next week.

Will prob find out today whether or not I’m going to school this term. The financial aid guy comes back from vacation today. Was supposed to have my money yesterday.

I’ve actually been kind of depressed lately. I think it’s because I feel useless. I feel like my life is passing me by and I’m not doing anything worthwhile. Funny thing is I keep hearing people talk about “joy” on the podcasts I listen to every day. The sermons and lessons have nothing to do about “joy” in the title but everybody ends up talking about it. Maybe God is trying to get me to get in touch with my inner joy self. I’m not so sure it’s working thus far. Joy, joy, joy,joy…down in my heart, down in heart, down in my heart to stay!!! (Wow, that’s an old one!)

It has been cool to listent to the podcasts on my MP3 player. I’ve been listening to Malcolm Gladwell, Erwin Macmanus, Rick Warren, Ed Young, John Piper, Rob Bell, Fermi Project, Relevant Podcast, Mark Batterson, David Fasold, and a few others. I listen to 3-4 a day. Maybe that’s what’s depressing me. Truthfully it is a little depressing to listen to these guys because I want to speak into people’s lives in an effective way but I have no outlet. It’s frustrating more than depressing.

I’ve been thinking about going through all my old posts over the years and picking out the ones that are raw ideas and developing them into podcasts. If for no other reason than for the practice in putting together and delivering talks and to learn how to do podcasts and edit on my computer. Thought about making them vcasts and putting them on YouTube and then use the audio for podcasts. I’ll have to ask N8 how to do that.

We’ve started recycling here in the house and I think I’ve gotten everybody on board this time. The last couple of times I got a “Whatever.” attitude back from my son and wife. This time I pulled out the morality, theology, sanctity of life cards and it seems to have worked. Thanks Rob Bell! I’m going to experiment with line drying and I’m going to start buying CFL’s and replace our burned out bulbs as I go. I re-adjusted the water heater and I’m going to check the air pressures on my tires this week too.

Along that line, I’m going to start getting rid of stuff and stop being a family of consumers. We’re going to start living with less. We’re going to go thru our closets (i’ve already gone thru mine) and recycle our clothes by giving them away to Goodwill. I’m going to sell some of my stuff that I never use, like the foosball table and a bunch of stuff in the garage. I’m going to work toward selling two of my vehicles and then replacing one or both of the remaining two with hybrids. We’re just going to keep learning about this whole thing and adding things as we go and as we are able. Eventually we might actually be green.

Did you see Christiana Amanpour’s “God’s Warriors” series on CNN? I caught a re-run of the Christian episode yesterday and at times I was never been more embarrassed to be an evangelical Christian in America than when some of fundies would open their mouths and reveal their ignorance. The only ones I agreed with were Richard Cisik and Greg Boyd. I think I’ll add them to my podcast list.

Been building up my RSS feeds. Thanks N8 for the education on that. I’ve got almost 100 feeds so far. Prob won’t add that many more. It’s cool to be able to get all my info at one spot and be able to scroll through it all.

Well last night was my final night on the steering committee at the Baptist church. Now the process goes to the Leadership Team. I was invited to be on the Leadership team but the invitation was w/drawn when I told them I was attending another church. Doesn’t make sense for me to be in charge of something if I don’t attend the church. I agree. They wanted me to be in charge of connecting with guests in the auditorium. I hope our current church will do more along the assimilation/mobilization lines because it’s a glaring weakness there. I’m told they’re working on assimilation but that mobilization isn’t on the radar. Too bad.

Funny thing, out of the approx 10 people at the committee meeting last night only two or three of us knew what a podcast was.

I’ve had an mp3 player for about 6 months and never used it. Had planned to take it back and exchange it for an iPod. But, their return policy is 30 days so I can’t do it. Finally took it out of the box and figured out how to use it last night. I’ve been listening to podcasts on my laptop but it’s so much better when you can move around and still listen to good stuff. Today I listened to five messages from Rob Bell’s church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s cool to be able to feed your soul while cleaning the house, going to the post office, getting groceries, etc….The series was called “God is Green” and was about Mars Hill’s (his church) response to becoming green Christians and a green church. The stuff they do there is fascinating and inspiring. I highly recommend anyone who is interested in the subject of a Christian response and proactive solutions to preserving the environment to listen to the series. They’re free downloads. He had a three guest speakers (including one author) in addition to his own teaching on the subject and the information they taught was incredible. One factoid: They assert that environmentalism is a sanctity of life issue as evidenced by a recent study of 10 randomly selected umbilical cords from babies born in the US. On average the cords contained trace amounts of 200 harmful chemicals, many of which were carcinogens. Anyway, check it out. Google “Mars Hill Rob Bell” and it’ll show up. Sorry, I’m too lazy to put in a link.
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Had a three hour lunch with the administrative pastor of our church. He’s a nice guy. He and I are going to co-lead a small group, which I’ve already mentioned. We talked about all sorts of stuff and it seemed like we tracked each others thoughts and passions. He just emailed me and said he’d talked to the pastor and the pastor wants to meet with me too. Cool.

I mentioned to him the fact that we were there a month before anybody stopped to talk to us other than to say “Hi.” He was shocked. Then I mentioned that I’d talked to about a dozen different people about Bethel as we were looking around for a church and that every single one of them commented that Bethel was not a friendly church. He was surprised. I told him how I went to the July 4th BBQ and intentionally sat in the middle of the crowd on the lawn to see how long it took for somebody to talk to me. It took 1.5 hours even though we were surrounded by people. In fact, the only reason somebody finally came to talk to me was because he was the A/V director that I’d met the previous Sunday when I went up to the sound booth and volunteered to help. Otherwise I don’t think that he would have even talked to me either since he’s a reserved kind of guy. Anyway, he took it well, didn’t get defensive and didn’t act angry at me or anything. He seemed to appreciate my observation. He said he mentioned all this to the pastor and the pastor appreciated my candor. They both agree that it’s not acceptable for a person to come to a church for a month and not be contacted at all by the church and that it’s unacceptable for the visitor to have to make the first move to connect to the church by volunteering for a ministry. I’m glad they agree w/me on that and I’m glad they seem to be taking it to heart. I can tolerate dysfunction if the people in charge are willing to admit to it and want to do something to change it. The pastor is new, only two years here, and he’s working hard to change the culture of the church. I can support a guy like that. If he really means it, that is. We’ll see about that. Call my cynical.

That was a title of a CNN show with Roland Martin that I DVR’d yesterday. It was pretty funny to watch. First of all everybody on there talked 100 mph hour. It almost seemed like a MAD TV parody. Then they had this 24 yr old Gecko wunderkind on there who parlayed his $12,000 bar mitzvah money into a $2 million hedge fund. He kept going on an on about how greed is good and that we’re not greedy ENOUGH. Then they had a porn star on there who goes to mass every Sunday, does confessions regularly and takes Holy Communion. She was blonde, and it showed. Dumb as a box of rocks. But HOT! Definitely! Then they had this rabbi guy who was funny as hell. He cracked me up. Then they had a Southern Baptist seminary prez to give the Evangelical fundamentalist viewpoint. I cracked up at him because during one of his segments they split the screen and with him droning on an on about moral failure and the insidious nature of porn on society they other side of the screen showed clips from “Girls Gone Wild”, girls bumping and grinding and pulling up their shirts, and all sorts of naked fare. After about 10 seconds you couldn’t hear a thing the seminary guy was saying. It was “blah, blah, blah” while your eyes took in the flesh. I laughed out loud at the producer’s cleverness. Let the guy say whatever he wants but nobody will hear it because they’re all checking out the blurred out boobs. Anyway, the show wasn’t really worth watching for the most part. But it was pretty funny nonetheless. I’m DVR’ing the Christiana Amanpour series “God’s Warriors” this week. That ought to be interesting.

I’m surprised these numbers are as high as this…

31% Of the $250 billion U.S. individuals gave to nonprofits in 2005, amount that went to the needs of the economically disadvantaged.

24% Of the $101 billion given to religious causes, amount that goes to benevolence.

This is scary,

Christianity Today Poll
Do you believe that the best way to maintain peace is through military strength?
Yes
49%
No
51%

Total Votes: 1037

I alluded to this in my previous post. I volunteered to facilitate a small group for our church at to host it at our home. I figured they’d kind of freak out a little because we’re so new to the church and nobody knows us. Are they cool or are they kooky? I’m sure that’s what they were thinking. Well, after three weeks they finally decided to with me. Last week the lady in charge told me to submit my material and I chose Dallas Willard’s book “Renovation of the Heart - Putting on the Character of Christ”. I figured that was conservative, safe, basic to spiritual formation and would be a shoe in w/out controversy. But it was deemed “pretty intense” by the powers that be and they also decided to not have the group at my house, I have to co-facilitate w/another guy, and the inspiring material we’re going to use is “Attitudes the Attract Success” by Wayne Cordeiro. Fluff. I bought a Cordeiro book once. His stuff was basically a Rick Warren and John Maxwell warmed over re-run, nothing original or new in it. I sold it at a garage sale. Sigh. Now I have to talk about the bubble gum “Be happy and cheerful and you’ll be successful!” crap. I’m actually thinking about retracting my offer to volunteer. Seriously. However, I don’t want to start out on the wrong side of their opinion from the get go so I might stick it out. They said maybe I could do the Willard stuff in the next cycle. The only bright spot is that the other facilitator is the executive pastor of the church so maybe I can create a relationship with him.

My son went to Junior Camp today. He was totally stoked out about that. We are too.

On another note, my wife is pregnant. We’re not sure if we’re happy about that yet. She’s 40 and since we’ve lost 4 babies in the past this puts her at a very high risk pregnancy level. After losing a couple of babies we learned to keep our emotions in check until we hit the fifth month since after 5 months miscarriages are rare.

This last week I’ve been especially frustrated. Frustrated at the pace of my progress, or a lack of progress, toward DOING something. My little experiment online hasn’t produced much and the church I attend won’t let me teach the material I want to teach (they said it’s too intense. Dallas Willard teaching on Christian character is too intense? I don’t get that.), money is tight, my student loans are in a precarioius state at the moment since the fin aid office can’t access my info on the dpt. of ed computer, we have a daycare mom who goe to our former church who is driving us mad with her rudeness…I could go on. Anyway, it’s been a tough week emotionally.

But was reading my new issue of Wired magazine today and got a little spiritual lift. Perhaps I’m still in the flow after all. Last week i had the idea to take an offering at my first underground meeting and take the money to a homeless person. i planned to film the homeless person, record my conversation with them. I planned to do this every week and over time find out their name and their story and show this to the group on video. somehow i instinctively knew that by putting a real face and name on the abstract problem of homelessness would probably connect with people and they’d respond and in the process grow in christ. it’d also set the tone for financial giving in our faith community as the giving isn’t connected on an emotional level to an institution (the church) but on real people.

Anyway, I was reading this article about bill gates and how the writer felt his type helps the rest of us meet the needs of huge groups. he said that people like bill gates are uncomforable in the presence of a small group but they can process the pain and suffering of huge groups of people. They’re more comfortable conceptualizing huge numbers, like 10 to the 20th power, than the rest of us are.

Conversely, the rest of us tend to respond more to the plight of a single person rather than the plight of a large group of people. We cannot conceptualize in our minds the suffering of a continent, but we’ll break the bank to save little Joey stuck in a well in Nebraska. Research shows that people will give twice as much to help a single person than they will to help a group of 8 people. We can understand and empathize with that one person.

So I guess my instincts weren’t far off the mark in my homeless idea. I’m going to do it. I keep grasping at the straw of hope that God wouldn’t show me all this stuff if he didn’t intend to give me the opportunity to put them in action. Most of the time it feels like God is playing some sort of sick joke on me. Kind of like when I hold a treat just out of reach of a dog and he’s jumping on his hind legs and whining and straining to reach it but i yank it out of his reach at the last second. God isn’t twisted like that is he?

Here’s some verbiage from the article…. “Count on the Geeks to Rescue the World” by Clive Thompson.

“I’ve been reading the fascinating work of Paul Slovic, a pyschologist who runs the social-science think tank Decision Research. He studies a troubling paradox in human empathy: We’ll usually race to help a single stranger in dire straits, while ignoring huge numbers of people in precisely the same plight. We’ll donate thousands of dollars to bring a single African war orphan to the US for lifesaving surgery, but we don’t offer much money or political pressure to stop widespread genocides in Rwanda or Darfur.

You could argue that we’re simply callous, or hypocrites. But Slovic doesn’t think so. The problem isn’t moral failing: It’s a cognitive one. We’re very good at processing the plight of tiny groups of people but horrible at conceptualizing the suffering of large ones.

In one recent experiment, Slovic presented subjects with a picture of “Rokia” a starving child in Mali, and asked them how much they’d be willing to give to help feed her. Then he showed a different group photos of two Malinese children - “Rokia and Mousa”. The group presented with two kids gave 15 percent less than those shown just one child. In a related experiement, peopel were asked to donate money to help a dying child. When a second set of subjects was asked to donat to a group of eight children dying of the same cause, the average donation was 50 percent lower….

….We’ll break the bank to save Baby Jessica, but when half of Africa is dying, we’re buyin iPhones….

…We look at the huge numbers and go numb. Gates looks at them and runs the moral algorithm: Preventable death=bad; preventable death x 1 million people= 1 millions times as bad…”

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On another note, saw another article in there about an innovation in art form called pecha-kucah (Japanese for “chatter”). Basically it you’re permitted to use 20 Power Point images for 20 seconds each in a presentation. six minutes and 40 seconds and you’re done. “The result, in the hands of masters of the art form, combines business meeting {or church meeting} and slam poetry to transform corporate cliche’ into compelling beat-the-clock performance art.” I see this to be a useful art form in experiential worship events.

Saw some other stuff in the mag too that looks pretty interesting from a techinical point of view in relation to experiential worship. Brainloop, TxTual Healing, NOVA, ORB, ad FURMINATOR, and MEME.