Drive-Thru

I love Taco Bell, especially in my college days. Any restaurant serving drive-thru tacos at 2am to hungry college students gets an A in my book. Recently Kelly and I went in a drive thru at Taco Bell.

Imagine a picture of three loaded tacos full of the works, with cilantro and lime to top it all off. Adding to the picture was a name which made my mouth water even more: “Cantina Tacos!”

I couldn’t resist. I ordered the Cantinas in hopes that they would be perfect goodness.

I opened up the foil around my tacos as fast as I could in hopes of biting into a delicious treat.

There laying inside the foil was the smallest, most unsatisfying tacos I have ever gotten from Taco Bell. These three tacos could hardly cover my taste not to mention my hungry, grumbling stomach.

Has our idea of church become like this?

We drive in, expect to be given something great and to be fed, only to drive away wondering why our appetites weren’t filled like we expected. We often wish church would feed us, when really it was never meant to function as a fast food restaurant. We expect programs to offer us something, and when the programs don’t meet our expectations, we wonder what’s wrong with the church.

Are we Christian consumers?

Does our mentality of church fit that of a drive-thru restaurant?

In the book of Acts, a scene is described in which the Spirit of God moved upon a group of people. These people were concerned with two main things, the love of God and love of each other. The two went hand in hand. They weren’t interested in what they could receive from the community, they were interested in what they could contribute to the community as God contributed His Spirit to them.

Many people who attend church possess this consumeristic mentality.

This bothers some of us. Some of us feel a pull to bring back church in its original context. Some of us are sick of being church critics; we're ready to be solutions.

"Imperfection" IS perfection

I've been trying to see through new windows lately and this is one of the things I've been working on for the past few months. I'll soon write about this when I get my thoughts organized.

Saturated by Ruach Elohim (Spirit of God)

Recently, I finished a book about the Holy Spirit that, quite honestly, messed me up. In this book, it talked about how we as Christians tend to ignore and suppress the Holy Spirit’s active leading in our lives.

Our relationship with God can often become quite one sided. We ask Him to bless us with this thing or that issue. We pray that He would bless our situations, our families, and our nation. We place Jesus fish on our cars to let people know we are Christians. We remain conscious not to swear because, well thats just not a Christian thing to do. Our focus, priorities, and goals continue to be “of this world,” the only difference is we sprinkle a little Jesus on top which makes us feel like a good Christian. My question through all these nice little Christian scenarios is: Are we keeping in step with the Spirit of God? Maybe some of us are in step with the Spirit, maybe some of us front the Spirit’s leading. However our relationship with God works, if we are ignorant of the Spirit of God and His leading, then any relationship with God we have is quite one sided.

The scriptures tell us the effects of remaining in step with the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5). Other phrases such as: “abundant life,” “eternal life,” and “life that is truly life,” tell us of the life God meant for us to live by embracing His Spirit.

The book I read messed me up because it challenged me to seek God in more deep and intimate ways. Instead of being a “outside of the cup” kind of Christian, I want to embrace the fullness of the Spirit in the deepest corner of my soul. I want God to saturate me with His Spirit, transforming me to look more and more like Jesus everyday. This is how God created us. He created us to be temples of the Holy Spirit. If the temple doesn’t embrace what is was made for, then it’s just a shell; useless.

May we all embrace the Spirit of God’s leading. May we all join together in one purpose, one song, opening ourselves to let God work in and through us for his purpose, His Kingdom.

Ideology of Perfection

Jesus once said, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

A day or two ago I was eating an apple. By the second or third bite, I noticed something: this apple was perfect. It was perfectly round, had no bug bites, was picked at the right time, and had a wonderful flavor. That same day I was driving my car into town and I passed a yard with landscaping that probably cost more than my car. While in town, I washed and waxed my car to get rid of the dirt and give it a glistening shine. Whether this is a cultural thing or not; we as a people seem to be obsessed with perfection. Our fruit, our houses, our cars, and our lives often portray this value.

We tend to point out, identify, and correct flaws; some of the flaws we’re most aware of are the flaws in ourselves. We rarely tell people these flaws, and if we do they usually are the closest friends in our lives. Some of us even pretend that these blemishes don’t exist. Many of us like to see ourselves as the apple: flawless. Some of us even pay money to correct our defects. Surgeries, cosmetics, tanning beds, clothing, and plenty of other coping mechanisms are used to divert attention away from our flaws and on to another object.

You have to start to wonder something: If we really learned from Jesus, would we see things differently? Maybe Jesus is telling us that perfection comes not through focusing on ourselves, but focusing on others and following Him. Maybe we need to stop trying to perfect all the flaws in our lives, but embrace them. Maybe by embracing these flaws and looking outward beyond ourselves; we will see a worldview where things become more about “us” than they do about “I.”

Jesus is talking about an awareness more concerned with the needs of others, an awareness larger than the “me.”

The Spirit of God will give us the ability to see beyond the apple to the tree.

So you have to wonder:

What if Jesus really meant what he said?

Creative Life

What kind of creativity did it take to make this flower?

As i try my hand at close-up photography, I see fresh details I’ve never seen before. Like, the God who created us has this unlimited, infinite imagination. Sometimes, by looking at the small, we get an inside view of Big. Creative!

Its interesting.

Genesis tells us God created man in His likeness. It goes on to say He created man in his own image.

Genesis 2:7 says, “the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

Look around.

Cars. Road Systems. Science. Architecture. Technology. Medicine. Farming. Literature. Art. Music. Language.

Incredible creativity and imagination!

You can’t tell me people aren’t creative. God gave “man” the ability to be imaginative and creative.

But lately I’ve been struggling. I find an alarming decline in imagination and creativity when it comes to being a follower of Jesus. We don’t smoke, drink, or do drugs; we come to church every Sunday. Are these few virtues what it means to follow Jesus?

Where did our imagination and creativity go?

Is this what Jesus had in mind when he said, “Follow me?”

Jesus’ teachings are full of unlimited creativity we sometimes miss because of our familiarity. Look at His parables and see the imagination.

I’m convinced that the same Breath, the same Spirit that the LORD breathes into us will give us an outflow of creativity as we love God and people.

Romans 8:6 reads, “The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit (breath of God) is life and peace.

Life and peace.

An eternal, infinite, creative LIFE!

How creative are you?

Ephesians 2:4

One of the glaring -- yet too often overlooked -- failings of contemporary America is that we have become a nation obsessed with justice and retribution. We claim to be The Land of the Free, yet we have lost sight of what it means to be imprisoned; denied liberty and access to one's family, subjected to isolation and violence and unspeakable boredom. We have come to believe, in the most pernicious way, that people should get what they deserve. What a sea change it might be in our public discourse and our civic life if we focused instead upon mercy and forgiveness. A merciful and forgiving culture might find itself with less anger, less social disruption, and even less crime. ~Jacob Appel


From "The Merchant of Venice," when Portia asks Shylock to show mercy. He asks, On what compulsion, must I? She responds:

The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear the kings.
But mercy is above this sceptered sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute of God himself;
And earthly power doth then show like God's
When mercy seasons justice.

Somebody's Reality

We find art everywhere.

Sometimes we notice the beauty of a painting...

Sometimes we don't even realize what we're seeing.

Recently I found myself sitting in a waiting room completely perplexed and conscious by a pair of paintings.

The details.

The scenery.

The temperature created by the colors.

One had a cold feeling as it tried to capture the emotions of an overcast day.

The other was warm as the sun vanished behind the clouds of a summer day.

Strange,

...I was looking at paint dried on cloth.

Sitting there in that waiting room something dawned on me and I began to wonder....

If I were sitting with the artist of these paintings, would they want me to be interested solely in the paint and the cloth???

I'm convinced artists are far more concerned with expressing their perspective of reality than they are about the objects of paint and cloth.

I'm convinced they see art as a portal revealing another way of seeing the world.

People have been doing this sort of thing for thousands of years.

Warm colors

Cold colors

Its not simply seeing the colors, its feelings the colors.

Art reflects reality through the eyes of the artist.

I'm convinced that artists prefer us to look beyond the art into something deeper.

Something bigger.

They don't want us to stop at the art.

They want us to look at the world from another angle.

To appreciate reality from another dimension.

Paintings, sculptures, photography, landscape, literature, music, ...

Look beyond

Look bigger

See the beauty behind the art.

See reality from another angle.

Maybe it will dawn on you like its dawning on me...

...we can be so numb sometimes.

Art is somebody's reality.

Rare People

Many of us often project an image that exaggerates our good qualities.

Many of us want people to think we're better then we really are.

Some would say this sort of trait is quite normal.

We front.

We act.

We pretend to take on characteristics of someone we aren't.

The thing is, the people closest to us notice this kind of activity.

They see how silly we can act.

They might even call us out for being "fake."

The people closest in our lives help keep us grounded.

But...

Rarely.

We come across someone who really IS the way they project.

See, usually the more we get to know people, the more flaws we see.

The more we get to know people, we see how they front and act.

We even come to love people for their flaws.

But what about those people who are opposite of this.

The people who we respect, look up to, and admire more and more as we get to know them.

The people who care more about integrity and character than they care about their "image."

These people are rare!

When we find these people, we should keep them close.

They make great friends

...the sort of friends that we want to have for the rest of our lives.

These people inspire us

...they lift us up

...they show us what it means to be real

...pure

...legit

...these people are solid.

We don't come across these people everyday.

When we do, we tend to notice.

This sort of thing stands out.

...my Dad....

He is one of these people!!!!

Thank You Dad!

I love you!

"Faith" or "Proof"

1 + 1 = 2

Its simple isn't it?

1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 4

Still simple

2 + 4 + 3 + 9 + 23 + 1 + 7 + 11 + 0.6 + 85 + 13 + 0.4 = 159

This is still simple, but it takes a bit more time to add up.

Its interesting; some of the smartest people I know don't solely focus on adding up the knowns.

The smartest people I know are able to conceptualize and work with unknowns.

The higher levels of math don't deal with known numbers as much as they deal with manipulating unknown variables and concepts.

Its quite amazing!

Simple minds need to have all the facts,

they need to be able to add up all the knowns,

they don't work well with the unknowns.

Simple minds need to have a direct flow of logic

proof

evidence

these are all words of the simple minded.

Words like

faith

trust

hope

these aren't the simple minded's favorite words.

The thing is,

a high math person understands simple math

but

a simple math person doesn't understand high math.

The beauty of it is the fact that a simple math person can always learn higher math.

What are your words of preference?

Proof and Evidence

or

Faith and Hope

Think about it.

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