Today I threw off the shackles of homework and responsibility and I cleaned my room. What a concept, huh? When I get busy I start stacking things in piles. Let’s just say my corner of the room was becoming one big pile. I had a pile on my dresser that was more than a foot high. So I spent my Sunday afternoon cleaning and organizing. Sometimes it’s nice to devote Sundays to something besides what you do the other six days of the week. If only I had the time to treat Sunday like a Sabbath day.

Palm Sunday. Several times today I saw people walking around with palm branches. Once was on the way home from church when we passed another church that was just getting out. The second time was while we were eating at Perkins and a family came in after a Palm Sunday service and the kids were still carrying their palm branches. Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a colt and the people laid down their coats and cut down palm branches to lay in the road. Make way for the king. It’s quite an act of praise, and something a lot of churches try to reenact. But what gets me is the attitude of those people who were praising Christ. A week louder a crowd was shouting for Christ to be crucified. Was it the same crowd? If it wasn’t the same crowd, where were the palm branch people when Jesus was on trial? We see it as quite a triumphant entry, but it wasn’t really that triumphant. The people were hoping for a king who would overthrow Rome. Jesus wasn’t interested in that. Furthermore, Christ knew what the people were thinking. He knew what would happen in a few short days. Can you even imagine the emotions that had to be playing in his heart?

Easter is an immense time. It’s very difficult to understand exactly what we’re celebrating. I think it’s very rare when we actually understand what Jesus did. We like to lay it out in a simple four step plan, print it up in a fancy little pamphlet–but it’s not that simple. It’s one of the most profound and amazing things. And thank God for it.

I heard an interesting thought from one of my professors today. Why do we compartmentalize our devotions? We pray at a certain time or read our Bible at a set time during the day and call it our “devotions.” We separate our devotions into this tiny corner of our lives. My professor made the comment that every moment of our lives should be a prayer, every moment should be lived in an attitude of devotion. When I sit down to read my Bible I have a certain attitude. That’s the attitude we should have through the entire day. Why section it off to my quiet time for half an hour a day? Certainly this isn’t an excuse to completely skip having devotions, but more a different way of looking at it. A new mindset.

For a study break tonight I had a Pop Tart. I went grocery shopping last night and picked them up for two reasons: 1) they were nearly half off, and 2) my munchie supply was dangerously low (peanut butter and crackers has sufficed for the past several months). Now I’ve never really eaten Pop Tarts. But I vividly remember the commercials: So hot they’re cool, so cool they’re hot. They always popped out of the toaster with bright, wild coolness. Yeah, Pop Tarts. But mine didn’t fly across the room when the toaster popped up. It was kind of disappointing.

Poverty has become a rising issue in a few of my classes. Okay, one of my classes is about poverty, but the issue has been coming up in a few of them. How are Christians supposed to deal with poverty? It’s a question I think we’ve terribly neglected. We live in one of the richest countries of the world. It’s kind of difficult, because I don’t feel rich. I’ve got loans to pay and very little cash in my wallet. But I’m still rich. I drive a very nice pick-up truck, I’m typing on a decent computer with all the toys and gadgets, my shelves are lined with books, and my closet is full of clothes.

From looking at the Bible it’s becoming clear that God judges a society by how they treat the poor; the alien, the fatherless, and the widow. How do we measure up? What have I done recently for the oppressed? This is a difficult issue because these are hard, personal questions. And it has more to do with how you spend your money then what you give away. Sometimes I feel good because I put my ten percent in the offering, or I sponsor a child. But what good am I really doing if I buy designer jeans, name brand tennis shoes, stuff I don’t need? I know there’s nothing wrong with that stuff, but how often do we buy the more expensive brands just because we can? What if we lived as cheaply as we could and used the rest to help the poor? It’s a pretty radical concept. I was reading an article about a family that put off buying a new couch so they could use that money to help the poor. Is that something we as Christians can do? It seems like such a bizarre concept. But what really scares me is that’s a foreign concept to us.

What kind of God do you serve? The more and more I think about it, the more I realize that the God of the Bible is very different from the God they teach you about in Sunday School. I remember Sunday School as a world of flannel boards and happy songs about this guy named Jesus and some guy Abraham who wasn’t my father, but we sang like he was. I remember candy bribes, crayon pictures… and being scared and alone.

Continue reading What Kind of God? →

Today is Tuesday, right? For some reason my days seem to be running together. Everything seems to be running together, and it’s kind of like driving in the fog. I drove home tonight in the fog, and I could barely see twenty feet in front of my truck. You have to drive slowly, and follow the yellow and white lines through the mist. Occasionally I would lose sight of them and drift into the other lane or towards the ditch. It’s not a very safe feeling.

Tonight I tried to hammer out a paper and I just couldn’t figure out where to go with it. That’s why professors invented extensions. But part of my paper is something I’m finding really intriguing. I’m writing a paper about reading the Bible as literature, and for my paper I have to interpret a story from the Bible as literature. What I’m beginning to see is that God doesn’t like to be put in a box. We have all these Sunday School, God-in-a-box stories that tell us all about Christianity. They tell us to be humble, loving, pure, kind, honest–all the good things you can think of. But when you really read some of these stories, they don’t fit that mold. Look at Elijah, he confronted the prophets of Baal. From a distance it looks like God proving that he is the one true God. But I think there’s more to the story than just that. Elijah not only taunts the Baal prophets like a stuck up junior higher, he showboats when his turn comes around. What’s up with that? It doesn’t seem like the humble attitude you’d expect from a man of God. Unless of course we don’t really understand what it means to be a man of God.

Continue reading Hammering on Elijah →

The Bible is an intimidating book. It carries with it the weight of history and the authority of God himself. It comes in several dozen translations, from the overbearing King James to the simplistic New International Reader’s Version. The book sits on my shelf between my journal and a clip art book. The binding is giving out and the corners of the cover are bent and torn. Sometimes I try not to look at it. It sits there on my desk, the face of the binding staring back at me with its gold embossed letters. I know what it’s going to tell me, and I don’t want to hear it. So I look away. Other times I sigh, and with a sense of duty pick the book up and drop it in my lap, turning to the bookmarked page and reading my required chapter. The words ring empty and hollow in my ear. I’ve heard them so many times before. Sometimes the words sound cryptic and mysterious, and I can’t fathom their meaning. What was Jesus getting at? I shake my head and wonder if I’m supposed to understand. It’s a scary book to read. It drips with the truth, and even when I pause to think about what the point is, I know have an inkling in the back of my mind that it’s speaking directly to me. Yesterday I read it with a chuckle. For the first time in my life I saw the humor in a passage. Is the Bible allowed to be funny? What an oddly mysterious and wonderful book. Sometimes intimidating, other times enlightening, but always a heavy weight in my backpack. I’m not sure if I really know what I’m carrying around with me.

What are you an evangelist for? Sometimes it seems like we’re better at evangelizing everything else. Have you eaten at Joe’s? They have the best chicken sandwiches. You should listen to Joe’s Rock Band, they’re the best. Why do you eat meat? You should become a vegetarian. Why are we so enthusiastic about everything else in our lives, but when it comes to God we usually keep quiet? It really makes you wonder where your priorities are. Sure, you can say your priorities are in one place, but it’s your actions that really prove it.

I close my eyes and the world falls away. The stuffy gym and the sweaty guy next to me and the fact that I really should have gone to the bathroom all disappear. The music echoes in my mind and the words form vivid images of soaring angels and a God bigger than the world yet He still holds me close. A guitar string broke, one of the singers lead with ‘Father’ instead of ‘Spirit’ and the sound of ripping Velcro to my right all tried to pull my heart from the moment. But as I sang the words in my scratchy, off-key voice I imagined a shield of grace coming down around me as I sang praises to my God. Worship isn’t about being comfortable and having the perfect atmosphere. It’s not about all the right songs at all the right tempos with just the right orchestration. It’s about where my heart is. It’s about glorifying God. Nothing else matters. My aching feet and the desire to sit down don’t matter. If it’s that big of a deal I can fall down on my knees. God deserves my attention now, not the subtle, nit-picky mistakes.

Holy, holy, holy
Lord God Almighty.

A thousand voices echo through the hall, rising and falling in a crescendo of worship. Hands are lifted high in praise, voices strain and tears fall. A powerful wave of emotion sweeps through your body as you catch the tiniest glimpse of the meaning of the words you’re singing.

Worship. It isn’t about the right setting, the right song, or the right instrumentation. It’s about forgetting yourself. Forgetting your wants, desires, needs; and focusing on God. It doesn’t matter if the lighting isn’t right. It doesn’t matter if you’d rather sit than stand. It doesn’t matter if the drummer is off beat or the guitars aren’t right. It doesn’t matter if the songs are too slow or too fast. It doesn’t matter if you sing like a hyena. It’s not a concert. It’s praise to God. If you’re worried about everything pleasing you, how can you possibly be pleasing God?

Do you ever stop and wonder why Jesus died for us? Who are we that the son of God should give himself up for us? And why does it not affect us that he did give his life for us? Imagine a good friend of yours laying down their life for you. It would change the way you see the world when you wake up in the morning. It would change the way you act, it would change everything. Yet we’ve become callused to it. Callused to love, callused to life, callused to Jesus. We need the Holy Spirit to poke through the thick, dead skin that we might feel again.