It's been a while...

So I haven't posted much lately, it's mainly because I haven't had much to post. I preached last Sunday night about the need for Christians to do "Works". That didn't go over to well, which is odd because its all over scripture. I am preaching again this Sunday morning so we shall see how that goes. If I have any deep thoughts anytime soon i'll post them.

Black and White, and Gray

I had to attend a thing in North Vernon last night called "5th Quarter". There was a big basketball game at the High School. Jennings County Played Bedford North Lawrence. Apparently their coach is someone important. He helped win a state championship for BNL in the early 90's and played for IU. His name is Damon Bailey I think. Maybe you know him. Anyway, after that game I had to attend this 5th quarter thing. I was kind of ticked off because it was supposed to have been put on by all of the youth pastors in town and...no one told me about it until Friday morning. I showed up anyway. None of my teens were there but I knew a lot of the kids anyway.

When I got there I talked to a few of the youth pastors that were there and they all had some interesting things to say. The first guy I was talking to stopped one of his teens and asked him to show me his shirt which said "Turn or Burn." The youth pastor told me how cool it was and how he wished that he could get away with wearing that shirt. Too bad.

I talked with another youth pastor who attended the same youth specialty conference that I attended. We were supposed to have lunch together at the conference but we never meet up. He asked me what I did for lunch, and I told him I spent it hanging out with some homeless people and eating lunch or talking with them. To which he responded "Did you get any of them saved?" I responded "No" and slowly walked away.

The moments I had with those homeless people in Nashville were honestly some of the best parts of my trip to Nashville. I walked through downtown for 2 hours with one man as he poured out his life to me. We got to the library he was walking to and I asked him if he wanted to go eat with me but he turned me down because he just ate at the shelter. As I went to walk away he yelled "Hey!" I turned around and he grabbed me and hugged me tight and with tears in his eyes he said, "Thanks for listening to me, no one ever listens to me." He let me go turned around and walked inside. Maybe you disagree or you had to be there at the time, but to have said to that man after the hug and emotion "Ok sir that's nice and all but you need to turn or burn." Would have cheapened the moment and made the whole 2 miles we spent together seem like nothing but warming up to him so that he would convert at the end of our walk. Everywhere the man turns he is being preached at. The way a lot of the shelters are set up in Nashville you have to listen to a sermon before you can eat, or get a bed. These men and women are preached at constantly. Maybe we would do better if we just listened more.

I digress...

So after talking to these youth pastors it comes time for stupid games, (that's what they called them, not me) and then one of the youth pastors began to give a short devotional. It was pretty good. He talked about how we are all valuable to God, and no matter what people at school may say to us, or how our parents treat us it doesn't matter because even though everyone treats us like crap we are valuable to God.

All of that sounds good, makes sense and is true...Unless your the kid being picked on, whose parents are a mess, who no one will listen to. I think that if I was in that position as a teenager I would think "Big deal. What does that do for me Monday morning at school when people start making fun of me again? What does that do for me Monday when I am ignored, pushed around and degraded by everyone at school? Do I just put on a happy face and say, Gee this sure sucks but at least God loves me." It reminds me of a t-shirt I saw the other day it said, "Smile Jesus Loves You." and then bellow it in smaller type it said, "Then again, he loves everybody."

I don't say all this to make fun of the youth pastor or say I have it right and he has it wrong. Or I'm better than him because I can see it this way, because really I don't have an answer to my own questions. Should it be enough for that kid to just sit back and say, "Its ok when I'm beat up and picked on because Jesus loves me."

I have a lot of questions. And sometimes it scares me to death.

I read Rob Bells book Velvet Elvis a few months ago and what I remember more than anything is his chapter on Questions. He said something like, "Many people are afraid to ask questions. But what really scares me is when people don't have any questions at all."

Sometimes I think that life would be better and ministry a whole lot easier if everything were black and white. If I could say "Turn or Burn" and We need to save all the homeless people (I just realized his assumption that since they were homeless they obviously weren't "Saved") and here are twelve simple steps to guide you in living your life, and tonight when you get home and you want to accept Jesus into your heart than say this exact prayer. For me things are a lot more gray. Which scares me some. I tend to see a lot of "if's" and "but's". I don't really feel that "if's" and "but's" are too welcome in the church.

I think about where I will be in the future when I leave North Vernon. How do questions fit into a typical Nazarene Church? How do gray areas fit into a typical Nazarene church? These questions make teaching and preaching a lot more difficult too. I have a hard time standing in front of a group of people and proclaiming this is exactly what you need to do and this is exactly how you should do it. I'm a mess!

I was reading 1 & 2 Timothy yesterday and I read this in 2 Timothy 2:8 "Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David. This is my gospel..." I can agree with that.
Where does everything else fit I'm not exactly sure. I'll keep journeying though...

Claxton

Today is the day! I have promised for about 2 weeks now to post pictures of my new dog. The wait is over. Here he is, Claxton.

Oil, Kids, and more kids

Today hasn't been much of an exciting day, its been busy but not very exciting. I started my day off by arguing with a woman at a car dealership about an oil change. I had to get the church van's oil changed. My secretary was supposed to arrange everything and I was supposed to take the van's. Well I show up and the lady hands me a bill for $30. I told her it was supposed to be charged to the church and that should have been arrange by the secretary who made the appointment. She storms off, comes back huffing and puffing, then hands me a receipt and no thank you or anything and says a bill will be sent.

Then it was off to the Melting Pot. I talked with a woman there for about an hour. I see her at the coffee shop a lot but she would never talk to me. She had plenty to say today. She is a foster parent and I asked her what it was like to have them and what a person has to do to have foster kids. Its all really sad. She has been a foster parent for 9 months and has already had 19 different children live at her house. For the most part they stay for a couple days or weeks and then return to their homes but right now she has 2 girls that have been living with her for four months.

The sad part is some of these kids if they come from a home where the parents use Meth show up at her doorstep with nothing on but a hospital gown. Due to the chemicals used to make meth the kids are not allowed to take anything with them when they leave their house, they have to go to the hospital to be sterilized and then dropped of at the foster parents house. This lady told me on several occasions she had to go to wal-mart at 10 o'clock at night with a kid wearing only a long t-shirt. That's it, no shoes, no underwear, no socks, just a big t-shirt. Then the foster parent has to pay out of their own pocket for the clothes the kid needs. Most of the time they do not get reimbused and if they do it takes around 3 months to receive a check from the government.

I though it would be cool if the church did a gift card drive to wal-mart, or k-mart, or target so that if a foster parent gets a call in the middle of the night and a kid shows up in a hospital gown they could call the church and receive a $25 or $50 gift card for clothes. I'm not sure how to get it done but I'll be talking to some people around here and maybe get something going.

I also ended up at the elementary school in town today. A man in my church who is a conservation officer did a presentation on hurricane relief work that he was a part of to all the 6th graders at the school. I had a wonderful conversation with a group of kids after the presentation about how a person would go about hunting an alligator. One kid concluded, "I'd just get my grandpa's shotgun and blow his head off!" as all the other kids cracked up laughing.

I'm pretty sure he was serious though.

Pictures of my dog will be up hopefully tomorrow, sorry for the delay.

My New Dog...

I got a dog last night, and to be honest I'm terrified!!! He is about the cutest dog I have ever seen but I have a feeling he might stress me out. The lady I got him from found him running through a field at her house took him in and then shipped him off to my house. He is a black lab mixed with something else (I'm not sure what that something else is) he is all black except all four of his paws are white, he has a white spot on his nose, and some white on his chest. He is only three months old, so he is still pretty small. His name is Claxton.

I named him Claxton because that is what I wanted to name my first born son but I decided that any respectable woman would never let me name her first born son Claxton...So I named my dog that instead. There is a bluegrass bar in Nashville that I used to go to occasionally and on the wall they had a pencil etching of Roy Acuff's head stone. It turns out that Roy's middle name was Claxton, I liked the name and had been in search of something to name after him since that day. If you didn't know Roy Acuff is a famous bluegrass fiddler. (After a quick google search I discovered that there is a town in Georgia named Claxton and also a law firm somewhere named Claxton & Claxton I bet they are cool guys).

I have been reading up on how to train a puppy and discovered that most people recommend buying a training crate to keep your puppy in at night so he doesn't run all over, and apparently its easier to house train him that way. So I went out and bought one last night and Claxton was pretty calm when I put him in it so I went to bed. I thought it was odd that he didn't make a noise all night. I had a nightmare that I didn't close his crate and he broke out, destroyed my house, went to the bath room everywhere and then came in my room to kill me. Well when I woke up I discovered that my nightmare turned out to be true (except for the killing and destruction part)! He broke out of his cage somehow and when I looked for him I found him sleeping on the couch.

I'll post a picture of him soon. I have a feeling that my mother and my brother are not going to be to happy about my new addition. Oh well! I'm also extremely concerned about having to take care of him for a long time. I told Jennifer that this is my test to see if I should ever have children. I hope I pass.

My thoughts on Christmas

I have a friend that has been encouraging me to start a blog so I decided today would be the day. This is all a little weird to me but I guess I'll get over it. To start things off I'll post some thoughts I wrote out last night as I was researching and reading on Christmas. I have been reading The Liberation of Christmas by Richard Horsley. You should all [which is probably only one of you] go out and buy this book tonight. So here are my thoughts...

Christmas was once something beautiful, something real, something connected to the core of what it is to be human, what it means to hope, what it means to wait. Christmas was once a holiday for the forsaken, the oppressed, the despised, the peasant. Recently Christmas has been made into an event for the rich. The day after thanksgiving has almost become its own holiday of debt and injustice. The original story of Christmas was one of hope, liberation, release from domination, and one of revolution. The poet Thomas John Carlisle wrote about the song of Mary found in Luke,

At our eternal peril
we choose to ignore
the thunder and the tenor
of her song,
its revolutionary beat.

Revolution. There is now hardly any revolution associated with Christmas. We have turned Christmas into a new type of hope and liberation. The hope and liberation is now only real for places such as Wal-Mart, Target, Sears, Starbucks and the rest. They are liberated from debt, low summer sales, and "the Red". I read recently that 40% of all retail sales in the United States take place between the day after Thanksgiving and December 25. Christmas is no longer a story about revolution and liberation it has become a holiday of oppression. We are oppressed by credit card bills, expensive gifts, unhappy boyfriends & girlfriends and spoiled children. What was once a beautiful story of liberation and hope we have turned into a time of domination and oppression. Make it beautiful again. What can you do this Christmas season to make the story of hope and liberation real?