Pointless News

Pointless news Category: Life This week's news: Keen's b-day is coming up(31st). He's saving up for... another bike. He thinks he needs one of those low-riders that look like a motorcycle. Heidi has a cell phone now (life is complete). Kendra and her great PaPa Lawson like to make fudge together. Their latest batch never hardened up. It's kind of like thick pudding, but of course, we can't let a chocolate dish go to waste. The kids call it "Pudge." I got a "pudge buzz" after dinner today. We're having a yard sale this weekend (pray for us). 8:45 PM - 2 Comments - 2 Kudos

Live it or skip it?

live it or skip it? At risk of sounding self-conscious, self-absorbed, or insecure, I'm going to talk about myself, and I'm going to admit that particularly over the past 10 years I have been a student of life. I suppose we all are to some degree, but I have been a student of myself, not in a student-to-teacher sort of way, but more as a scientist-to-nature. You know, how they go out and live in harsh conditions to observe the ape in his natural habitat. Yah, that's me, both of them, the one seeking to learn and make the world a better place, and the clueless one that just wants to scratch himself in peace and survive life in the wild jungle. What has come to my attention lately is how we go through specific stages in life. We can try to avoid them all we want, but culture and maturity force us into predictable, definable stereotypes. As a teen I just wanted to be an adult (Okay, that was more than ten years ago, but stay with me here.). I wanted respect and independence. Many teens claim their independence by... well, looking and acting like teens with teen clothes, teen music, teen jargon, etc. I, on the other hand, thought that in order to get the respect and independence of an adult, I must look and act like an adult. This makes sense in theory, but the problem was that I lacked the maturity and life experience. So basically, I was an awkward dork. I wonder now how life would have been different, relationships deeper, self-confidence stronger, had I embraced the various phases of life instead of trying to skip them. Well, life is what it is. There's no changing the past, so what can we learn from it? I wonder how often I'm still trying to reach future goals to the point of missing the experiences of the nows. 2:13 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos

Watch you f___ing language

Watch your f___ing language Category: Life My uncle went to a relative's house the other day to drop my aunt off for a while. As he was leaving, he accidentally went over the low cub and set a tire in the wet grass of the neighbor's yard. A little while later, there was a knock at the door. It was the neighbor man. He stood about 5'10" and 150lb and looked as though he had just returned from his morning run. "Some f___ing idiot got in my grass..." "That was my husband," my aunt politely replied. "I'll send him over to talk to you when he gets back." When my uncle returned, my aunt explained the problem. So he calmly walked next door to straighten things out. Now, my uncle is a big, bald, blacksmith with a long beard, and stands about 6' and 250lb. He mows his lawn with a brush-hog tractor. To the neighbor's credit, he was not intimidated by size or appearance. He got right up in the big man's face, "What the f___ were you doing on my grass?..." "First of all, I don't appreciate you talking to my wife like that." "...When you f___ing get in someone's yard, what the f___ do you do about it?" "I get out of my truck, push the sod back down with my foot, and drive on." "...What kind of f___ing idiot.... You'd have to be f___ing stupid to..." Having enough of the foolish discussion, the wise mountain man simply stated, "The way I see it, anyone who has to use "the-f-word" to express himself must be as stupid as someone who would drive in the grass." and he walked away. 8:50 PM - 4 Comments - 2 Kudos

Getting old

Getting old Category: Life It's Sunday afternoon, and I sit in a daze reminiscing the past week. My oldest turned 11! My youngest captured all my chess pieces but my king and knight. And the middle child...well, she tried to pay her brother a dollar to go work with me rather than spend the day with her at Mema's. Well, now, they want to go roast marshmallows on the fire, so maybe as I get old, they'll keep me young. 1:23 PM - 3 Comments - 4 Kudos

Thinking about a mission/purpose in life

Thinking about a mission/purpose in life Category: Religion and Philosophy It's been a while since I've blogged, and my last one was a downer. To follow up, my friend and I worked things out ('nuff said). So to catch things up, yes, I have resigned from BreakPointe, and a lot of people are asking what my plans are and where I'm headed. I wish I had a good answer. I've grown a lot over the past five years while searching for purpose in life. To the simple Christian, it maybe offensive to hear another Christian speak of needing purpose, but I want to get past the "Sunday School answers" to life's questions ("Be a good Christian," "Be a fisher of men," "Follow the Great Commission," etc.) I what to know how to be a useful tool to the Kingdom in our modern and constantly changing world. I don't mean to imply that Breakpointe was just a stepping stone, but God used it to introduce me to a deeper form of ministry. I have been honored to serve there over the past few years, but I've had to come to the humbling and difficult conclusion that in order to take the classes I need and be the parent that I need to be, I must step down and reduce my responsibilities. Frankly, I have little-to-no Biblical / Higher education, and I want to be a more effective minister. To quote an inspirational friend of mine, "To teach in ignorance, only perpetuates ignorance." One of my mentors/advisors refutes that with the fact that no matter how many classes you take, no matter how many degrees you get, no matter how much you learn, you have only gotten your feet wet on a beach in the ocean of spiritual truth. So here I stand, looking at the water�I hope to be licensed and ordained minister with an associates degree in missions by Spring of '09 (2 years). When I say, "missions," everyone assumes foreign, and yes, I have a heart for compassionate, foreign ministries, but I want to understand daily personal missions. I want to think through the life purpose of being a fisher of men. My inspirational friend refuted my concept of personal evangelism with an analogy of a used car salesmen. She says that a Christian that always speaks of spiritual things and invites their non-believing friends to church is like having a friend that's a salesman and every time you meet they say, "Hey, you ought to stop by the shop sometime," because they want to sell you something. But I say, No; it's more like having a friend that loves cars, who lives and breaths cars. That's want they think about and talk about. They can see or hear a car and tell you details about the engine and the various styles. They know you and your lifestyle, and they know the best car for your needs. But we have something far better than a car, and we should be equally passionate about the hope we have found. Will people misunderstand? Will some be offended? Of course, but that fear shouldn't immobilize us. A month later (today), my inspirational friend and I touched on the subject of world religions. I feel the only need to learn about other religions is to better understand them with the objective of sharing the Truth of Christ with the individuals. She argues that we (Christians) do not have the only truth. Every religion has a form of truth. Others have experienced an enlightenment or peace or nirvana. They just don't use the same words or traditions. I pointed out that they still need Christ. Scriptures are unarguably clear on this. But as always, she did get me thinking, and she has helped me define a problem with the thinking of my upbringing. As we consider methods of evangelism, I have concluded that there are 5 kinds of people in the world (with countless subcategories). 1) There are the "Truly Devoted Christians. These are people who are actively living their faith and building the Kingdom as best they know how. They have a relationship with the Savior and are seeking to go deeper on a day to day basis. Some might define them as sanctified. 2) There are the "Sort-of Christians." These are people who have adopted the culture of Christianity, but they rarely live it in their alone time. They know all the right answers, but with little depth. They are in a comfort zone that is only changed by outside circumstances. 3) There are the "People of other faiths." These are people that know what they believe, and they are committed to a religion apart from Christ. Usually it is a part of their heritage, and they are often as "close minded" as we are. 4) There are the "Socially acceptable humanist." These are people that live a basically moral life. They follow the rules of the culture, and they want to live a "good" life, but they deny that there is a greater truth or law that we must follow, or they feel that if there is, there is no way of being sure. 5) There are the "Morally Corrupt." These are people that are self-destructive. They have no hope or respect for themselves or rules. They are selfish; yet it destroys them. They often are involved in the "bigger" more obvious sins, such as substance abuse and sexual immorality. Boy, I didn't intend to write a book tonight, but what I'm getting at is this. The "holiness" setting, by which I've often been surrounded and strongly influenced, focuses so much attention on outward signs of righteousness (these being defined by the American, Christian culture of decades past) that they tend to lump everyone into the fifth category, making a shallow argument for the need for lifestyle changes. This in turn offends and/or never reaches categories 3 and 4. 6:26 PM - 5 Comments - 0 Kudos

Did you mean what I heard?

Did you mean what I heard? Category: Religion and Philosophy Communication has never been a strong point for me, and I have been lived most of my life within a very limited worldview. Therefore, I wonder how often I misunderstand people (okay... stop laughing. Some who know me well are thinking, "dugh-hello!"). So I get this email from a friend, someone I thought to be one of my closest friends, and they tell me that they were a fool to invest so much time into our friendship (ouch!). Where did that come from? I understand that I'm a clueless guy when it comes to maintaining a friendship, and I've heard about making deposits and withdraws from a "love bank," but I have trouble keeping up with my checking account deposits and with draws, and I can look at those online at anytime. I've tried to talk to my friend about it, but it seems that everything I say to salvage the friendship gets misunderstood and/or used against me. One might say, it must have been a shallow friendship to crumble so easily, but it makes me wonder how many friendships, or potentially deep friendships, I have thrown away before they started because I misunderstood or prejudged the person. I've been thinking a lot about prejudging and skepticism lately. This came to a head recently when I attended a conference for Wesleyan Pastors (appropriately for me named, "Summit to Soar") As most people, I used to assume things about pastors and the church. Even though I grew up in the church, I didn't trust the "system." God has been melting my negativity for sometime now. I didn't set out to be a church leader nor did I earn it through some righteous life or remarkable wisdom, but there I was stuck at a hotel for a couple days with a bunch of pastors to talk about church stuff. I expected to see a lot of suits, politics and number crunching. What I saw was a bunch of blue jeans, broken hearts and vision casting. These were simply men that wanted to help the Kingdom grow. Many of them (probably all of them) had been hurt and misunderstood by the very people they so desperately love and wanted to serve. I have for some time now tried to figure out what God wants the church to look like and how it should operate and function, and in turn, how I should live and function in the church and the world. It's so easy to point out the flaws in the church, as an organization and individual people. I'm finding that the church, under God, is managed by a lot of flawed people with good intentions that are struggling to communicate to a world with hundreds of cultures, divided into hundreds of languages, subcultures and forms of communication, and we want it to fit into our comfortable little building and feed us and/or strategically turn the world upside-down. So the question that remains is� if we, the church, can't even communicate clearly, understand and trust each other, how can we build trust with nonbelievers and be the fishers of men we are all called to be? God help us all. I don't know if this will make sense to any potential readers, but... I feel a little better. 6:58 PM - 8 Comments - 6 Kudos

Growing pains

Growing pains Current mood: content Category: Life I went up stairs the other day, and found a dtr on the computer. "Whach' ya doin?" I figured she was playing games or taking care of her online pet. No, she was emailing the president! Just telling Bush how much we love him. The other two have been playing basketball on Saturdays. I can take no credit, but the boy is one of their star players. The coach came out to the middle of the court the other day, and I heard him tell my son, "We're far enough ahead; you can stop shooting for a while." The youngest dtr has had an unusual week. We're in a small school, and she was the topic of the grade school gossip this week. Evidently, a young man (we'll call him "Bobby") asked her to be his Valentine, and she accepted. I asked her about it later, and she claims that she meant nothing by it. She was just being nice, but it wasn't long before she was in tears over all the teasing from the other kids, 3rd - 6th grades. It got so bad that her teacher took class time to scold all four grades. Although, the next day when I saw her between classes, she was glowing. Bobby had given her a rose. (I'm fighting the instinct to hang Bobby out an upstairs window by an ankle.) 10:45 AM - 5 Comments - 2 Kudos