Did you hear what Susan did last night?
After leaving my older brother and his wife's house this morning on my way to Tulsa, on my way to Ft. Smith, on my way to Nashville, on my way to North Carolina, I stopped by a Starbucks in Edmond, OK to do some reading before heading on up to Tulsa. I felt compelled to order something at the store since I was the only one in there, and I kind of felt like everyone was looking at me. Vain, i know, but they were. So i ordered some frozen thing, i don't know what it was, but there was a picture of it and it looked good, and it didn't dissapoint. I proceeded to go over to the comfortable chairs and that is where the learning began...
Lessons for the day:
#1) On a recommendation from one of my pastors in Nashville, I began to read Geerhardus Vos'
The Pauline Eschatology
. He said that the first three chapters of this book would change my life. Well, I guess I am going to have to wait for a life change because I crawled through 1.5
PAGES
and realized that I did not understand anything that was being discussed. If the Greek and Hebrew words weren't enough to lose me, there were plenty of words in another language that I didn't understand- English. Humbled, I put this little jewel back in my bag to save it for a rainy, rainy, more educated day. And I pulled out...
#2)
Dispensationalism: Rightly Dividing the People of God
by Keith A. Matthison. In order to keep this blog to less than novels length, I will summarize and say this book is very helpful and readable as it discusses the shortcomings of Dispensational theology in view of the Scriptures. However, as I was reading this book, I was often distracted by...
#3) The two middle aged, divorced women sitting in the chairs next to me. I learned several interesting things from them. A. (note the letter for a subpoint, in true outline form) 50yr. old women say the same thing about relationships that my 20yr old students say. A direct quote from the woman who never took her face-engrossing sunglasses off "I just like (boyfriend)Gary because he doesn't play games, he tells me how he feels. He is always real honest." That statement was followed by her talking about how Gary wants her to move with her to the farm(which, agreeably, most 20yr olds don't have) and to live upstairs, because "he says that the upstairs is pretty much its own little apartment. And He says that if I like living with him then I can move in downstairs to his room." Given, I don't know this lady or Gary very well yet, but I am going to go ahead and say- as I would to a 20yr old- that its going to be kinda hard for ol' Gare Bear to stay downstairs when he is supposed to (and visa versa, women aren't above this). If I were still a betting man, I take the odds on the stairs seeing a bit of late night traffic. I also learned that 50yr old women love to gossip. These ladies talked about Susan Somebody till they were red in the face, and I'm telling you, I have some dirt on Susan now. I think that I probably talk about people too much too, but I don't talk about Susan because I don't know who she is.
I hate em, i do, i really do
I hate mosquitos. I'm okay if they bite me on the arm or the leg or somewhere where its normal to scratch them. But why do the little bastards have to bite my freaking feet? Once I start to scratch/itch them, i end up doing it until they bleed pretty much. It just makes me mad more than anything. In a related fashion, I have to get a series of rabies shots before I go to Ethiopia. Why do I have this mental image that this needle is going to look more like an ice pick? Is it because the shots are $165/shot? Is it because dogs who have rabies foam at the mouth? Will I foam at the mouth after I get the vaccination? They tell me that its 'live', and that scares me a little bit. I'm not sure I want a shot to be alive in my stomach. Stay posted, i'll let you know when i start the foaming...
Changed
I am writing about something that has been working its way through my mind and heart for the last 6 months or so. I wanted to write about it last week, but my computer wasn't working, so here it is now.
Do you remember being in junior high or maybe even high school, when people used to tell someone, 'You've changed.' What they might have well said was, you are Satan. By this little phrase, what was meant was that person A did not like person B anymore, and person A believes it is because person B has changed. I can remember girls telling this to guys when they wanted to break up. No, it didn't happen to me, because if you will remember, I was the chubby pre-pubescent kid in 7th and 8th grade with an abridged list of guy friends, and a non-existing list of those from the opposing sex. well, thats not completely true, i had a girlfriend for 1 day in 8th grade, and she broke up because on day 2 of our relationship, i said that I loved her. I don't think i loved her, actually i'm quite sure i didn't. I think i had probably seen a movie and seen some guy say that to a girl, and all of a sudden they were so happy. Its really funny when i look back at the fact that i even liked this girl, because she was what the guys might have considered to be a little bit 'skanky.' But lo, we barely talked, we didn't kiss, actually i'm really not even sure we talked, but I did say I love you, which has to count for something. all of this is a nice intro to something completely different that I actually wanted to talk about....
A few Sundays ago, I went to a church service in Nashville at a church called CityChurch. it is a plant of Christ Community Church PCA, and it is in east Nashville, which has the most diverse demographic of any part of Nashville. Several of the members of the worship team were black, one hispanic, and I think one white girl sitting down playing the mandolin. The crowd that night was predominately white, but there were a few of varying race, and many from different financial spheres I would assume. In an introduction to his sermon, the pastor that night was talking about how if we are ever to love the poor and the oppressed, and the marginal people of this world, we have to have relationships with them. He argued that we can't simply show up and throw food and money at them and think that we are loving them, for all that is is a dressed up form of pity, and people see right through that from miles away. If Christ came to redeem the whole man, then why do we think that we can just care for the physical aspects of some people and think that we have fulfilled our mandate and call to show mercy and love to those around us. I didn't like hearing this, and I didn't like it to the point that I knew it was true.
Earlier this semester, I led a Bible study with RUF over the book of James. One thing I noticed in James, and really, throughout the whole of scripture, but specifically in James, is the idea that we need to be careful about calling ourselves Christians if we are doing nothing to care for the marginal people of this world. Christ was so familiar with this work, that it characterized much of his ministry here on earth. One thing that I noticed this spring is that the Bible goes to great lengths, even devoting entire chapters, to tell about wealthy/powerful men such as Zacchaeus or Nicodemus coming to faith and then seemingly in the several verses following, the Scriptures talk about thousands of poor people coming to Christ and trusting him. This is a theme. It is hard for the rich to understand the gospel (the rich young ruler, prime example), and if you are reading this, then you are rich. We have so much to learn, the pastor said, from those who are poor. Perhaps they have been privvy to seeing kingdom work that we have no idea what it looks like.
To further these thoughts in my mind, I have made friends with a Sudanese guy here in Nashville named Folena , and subsequently with his roomate Goker (pronounced joker) by teaching English lessons to him. I was eating dinner with them the other night, and Goker was talking about growing up in Sudan. Yall, it was unbelievable what they went through growing up!!! Dictators would come in and just annihilate whole people groups and tell them that if they didn't convert to Islam, then they could not get jobs, and basically starve to death. Now I know this is not directly related to the poor, but this is all of the same stuff. I had no idea that this happened, I have no idea what it means to love those less fortunate(at least as is concerning physical goods) why? Probably because I was out playing golf, or because I was wondering if I was having steak or chicken at night. Now before I swing the pendulum completely too far to that extreme, I just want to make this point: I am thankful for what I have. I am thankful for what the Lord has provided me with. I am thankful for my parents provision and their raising me. But I am in love with myself, my comforts, my country, and people who look like me. What does it really mean to repent of the American dream(as Derek Webb sings of it)? I think we stop too short in saying that we refuse to let money drive us. I think that it means that we have to stop seeing ourselves as the only significant people in our worlds. Scoff all we want, but that is what we do. When was the last time we actually prayed for the poor people around us? I would guess, given his actions, that Jesus did this all the time!!!!
So as I was talking to the friend that night in the car after church, we talked, and then there was silence. I asked her what she was thinking, and she said that she was just thinking as to what she could do around her to love these kind of people. In my mind, that is where this gets hard. I mean, are we just supposed to roll up right in the middle of ghetto nashville and start talking to people? Maybe so? Do we need to go through some type of ministry or agency? Maybe so? How do rich white people love those around us who aren't the same without merely showing them pity? Maybe we should move into their neighborhoods? Lots of people I know of in Nashville have done this very thing, and guess what, they know tons of poor people. Maybe we should attend church or heaven forbid maybe even join a church in an area that is different from our normative demographic. I dont' know.
I do know that the way that I see some things has changed though, but I fear my love of what is easy will keep me from desiring continued change. Lord, please that it would not be so. What would it look like if Christians were to humble ourselves to actually love the marginalized people, instead of acknowledging that our church supports a ministry that helps them. Blessed are those who are poor in Spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. This scares me, and I'm sure if you think about it, it will you too. Les Newsom, the RUF campus minister at Ole Miss, was teaching through the book of Mark and and parables, and he came to the rich young ruler, and he said something that I haven't forgotten since. Right after he finished talking about the rich man going through the eye of the needle, he looked around the room and said something to this effect, "guys, 99% of you in here are the rich man. it is hard, if not impossible for us to enter the kingdom of heaven, because we don't see our need." and this is what stunned me, "so do you want to know what our hope of being saved is? do you want to know how it is that so many of the people in this room can call Jesus savior? predestination. that's it, predesination. the P word. that God comes down and chooses people who would never acknowledge Him on their own, and brings them into the family."
I really don't see my need of Jesus like I should because I have so many things that cloud my view. I think that is why the poor flocked to Jesus. They didn't have the clouds in the way, they had a clear view of who He was. When He began to talk about being adopted into his family and made partakers of his great wedding banquet, people's gloom was turned to joy, because to them(and I would suspect many people today) this was an invitation to a life that seems too good to be true. Isn't that it though, the gospel is too good to be true. Jesus calls poor and rich alike to eat together with Him, so why don't we?
Alas, my computer got the hiv
I am writing you, my dear friends, of whom I may know as few as 0, again from my quaint little hometown of Duncan. No good stories about Duncan yet, but they are sure to follow. I have been having some problems with my blogging machine in Nashville and as a result, I haven't been able to post any of the several ideas that I have had over the past few weeks....but wait impatiently no longer.
The first thing that I need to share with you all is something that happened to me at the gym the other day. It wasn't the first time, but it had been a while, and so it caught me off guard again, and rightly so. Picture me walking into the workout room of the Green Hills YMCA thinking of how much I don't want to be there when I see this-> a red headed guy about my age standing in front of the free weight rack (the ones that you would do curls with, one in each hand) looking into the mirror. He is listening to something on his headphones when he breaks into this wonderful and all-together hysterical robotic-like dance routine in which he doesn't even crack a smile. He does it so non-chalantly(sp?) that I wonder if he thinks that we all think he is the invisible man and that we can't see when he does this. I know I can't be the only person in there who has had to quit the exercise that I am working on to just sit and watch in amazement/wonder as this is happening. I can't figure out if I am puzzled by him, or just jealous because he is so fluid in his movements.
Stay tuned, there shall be many more blogs in the upcoming days...
Lets get religous
So I was sitting at this coffee shop a couple of days ago here in Nashville and I overheard a conversation that went something like this...
setting: three men talking as they walk out of the place
Man 1 to Men 2&3, "Man, he used to let my kids come over and play all the time, but man, he got religion and ever since then he thinks I'm the antichrist and he won't let them come over any more."
The use of the phrse 'got religion' has always been very intruiguing to me and it usually always makes me laugh.
Sub-Culture vs. Counter-culture
I stumbled across a discussion between Kevin Twit (RUF Campus Minister @ Belmont University), Derek Webb, and another man who I didn't know about the topic of Christianity as a subculture versus Christianity as a counterculture. The MP3 of this conversation can be found
HERE.
The discussion that they have focuses alot on what our role as Christians is in our culture (as you might guess). The big question which guides their discussion is what does it look like to be IN the world, but not OF the world. The arguement hinges upon these two prepositions, IN & OF. Some Christians say we shouldn't be IN or OF(fundamentalists, withdrawn), some say we should be IN and OF (possibilities are endless when we ascribe to worldliness in our thoughts and actions, we are no longer different in any sense of the word), and then there is the misconstuence of what it means to be IN but not OF(Christian everything- businesses, music, restaurants, etc. etc.).
There was also some questions specifically do Derek about how he does what he does in a Christian industry, yet is so outspokenly against much of what the Christian music industry is doing and stands for as a whole.
It's worth all 83 minutes that it'll take you to listen to it.
We Are BR, the youth of a nation
Greetings to all who are bored enough to read my blog. If you are like me, it is probably after midnight and you have nothing else to do but to look at random people's blogs and see if you can be entertained. Hopefully your wanderings will end here.
I just returned today from an impulsive trip to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I first thought about going last Thursday at about 11:55am and I left Nashville at 12:15pm (20 minutes later) to embark on the 600 mile journey. My friend and co-intern Matt Howell was on the bill to speak at the LSU Summer RUF that night at 7:30pm. I made it at 7:30pm. That was 600 miles in 7hrs and 15mins, which is an average of 83mph. But the truth is that to average 83, I had to cruise at 95 for most of the way b/c the towns and traffic would bring me down somewhat.
Matt did a great job at his talk and afterward we went out with his campus minister, Keith Burger and the pastor of South Baton Rouge Presbytery Church, Scott Lindsey. Friday was so freakin hot. I've lived in Oklahoma for most of my life, but the hot in Louisiana is just different. You take about 2 steps outside and you're sweating like a banshee. So on Friday, we sweated. And we swam, and just hung out. NOW SATURDAY IS A DIFFERENT STORY. On Saturday we went to a friend's house (the Rathbone's) and rode 4wheelers in a mud pit, and then just ended up swimming, sliding, getting really really nasty in the pit before we headed back to the house for a hose bath. It was one of those smells that you only find in Louisiana and that would be very welcome to stay in Louisiana. It was a big time though, and fun was had by all.
On Sunday we went to SBRPCA. I really enjoyed worshipping with them, it really reminded me of the earlier years of Christ the King PCA in Norman. Nothing too fancy, just Word and Sacrament, which is always wonderful. Afterward, the Rathbones invited a bunch of the college crowd over for lunch and then I left and headed up to Jackson, MISS for the night. I stayed with an old intern with RUF, Brian Sorgenfrei and then headed back to Nashville today. Lots of rain in this part of the country recently, really really heavy rain, which makes for really nice hot and humid afternoons.
DORITOS: In case any of you have not discovered NATURAL DORITOS yet, you must. They are the best thing since organic milk and ovaltine. I have managed to plow through a bag of the cool ranch ones while writing this. You must try them. Not an option, a must.
