3-year old's birthday party...

I went to a three year-old's birthday party today. When my friends Dave and Julie (Dave is one of our pastors at Northeast) asked their son Nathanael who he wanted at his birthday party, I apparently made the short list of invitees - I consider that a high honor.

As a young single guy, I don't have all that many opportunities to interact with kids, so it was great to hold babies and bat balloons back and forth. (Of course, I'm sure it is easier to enjoy that kind of thing when I have the luxury of leaving and not having to deal with the day in and day out care and stress of having kids - there's a reason I'm not a parent yet! Well, several reasons... not married yet, for one... anyway, I digress). I love that part of church - there are times when it does provide, in pretty real ways, a sense of family for those of us who are away from our families and haven't started one of our own yet. It makes me wonder in what ways we can grow and nourish that sense of community. We're at an interesting juncture at Northeast, really challenging ourselves to move out of any complacency and sin we've let hang around, and I really pray that our people respond well to that. First, though, I have to examine myself and admit that I've not generally been moving forward in measurable ways (although I know God is always working) and that I've been comfortable to let certain sins and apathies exist in a buried tension with my redeemed nature. I need community to help me deal with those things - I think for the last year (as of today I have been in Indy a full year) I've been having to grieve the loss of a wonderful community at college and realize that I can and do and will have a wonderul community here, too, and be ok with the fact that it will be different. But as my time frees up a little bit next quarter, I need to make it a priority to be more intentional about building community.

I'm off-topic - this was supposed to be about 3 year olds' birthday parties. So, Nathanael Pappas, happy 3rd birthday, and thanks for letting me come over and play.

Blue Like Jazz, #1

I posted an excerpt from Chesterton's Orthodoxy the other day - here's an excerpt from another book I'm reading. It's called Blue Like Jazz, written by a guy named Donald Miller, and he tells stories from his own life that somehow meander around to draw a colorful sketch of living an authentic life of faith in today's world. I'm getting really tired of talking about what postmodernism is and what it means for the faith and the church, and it's refreshing to read a guy like this who seems to just live within it and focuses on following Jesus in his time and place, with his friends.

Anyway, this is in a chapter on belief and how society today is so lacking in anyone who believes something strongly that we'll immediately follow anyone who does believe. He says, "Eminem believes he is a better rapper than other rappers. Profound. Let's all follow Eminem." And he talks about how Satan wants people to believe in meaningless little nothings rather than believing in anything substantial - that's where the church has to be different.

"A friend of mine, a young pastor who recently started a church, talks to me from time to time about the new face of church in America--about the postmodern church. He says the new church will be different from the old one, that we will be relevant to culture and the human struggle. I don't think any church has ever been relevant to culture, to the human struggle, unless it believed in Jesus and teh power of His gospel. If the supposed new church believes in trendy music and cool Web pages, then it is not relevant to culture either. It is just another tool of Satan to get people to be passionate about nothing."

On Fooling Yourself...

Earlier today (well, yesterday, since it's Saturday now) I was at work. Having taught my last class for the week, I was ready to leave and start my weekend, but I started thinking about all the things I needed to do before the quarter ends next week and I go down to St. Louis to record and then go home to Kansas to visit my parents. This list of things to do was pretty substantial, and the good angel (or the bad angel, depending on your POV) on my shoulder was telling me I needed to probably stay a little bit longer into the afternoon and get some of that work done.

Now, understand, I really didn't want to stay one second longer. I wanted to come home and read, get my hair cut, clean out my car, go grocery shopping, maybe even squeeze in a nap - I wanted to do any and all of those things, but I just didn't want to stay at work any more. So somewhere deep in the reaches of my mind, probably next to the spot where I store useless information about the 1985 Kansas City Royals, I started cooking up a plan.

The plan went like this (and this is exactly what I did) - I grabbed my little satchel thing that I purchased just for occasions like this, and I packed it full of the work I need to do - papers to grade, next quarter's syllabi to plan, that kind of thing. Now I told myself that I would work on it sometime this weekend. Ok, let's stop for a second - this is where it gets funny to me. I'm not sure how I can be so good at fooling myself, but I can outwit me every time. Because I knew, back there next to the the Baseball Information Department (BID) of my brain, I knew that there was no chance in the world, not even a glimmer, that I would even open that bag this weekend. I knew that come Monday morning I would pick it up and take it back to work, with no less work to be done than when I took it home. I knew that I have pretty much the whole weekend booked already, and didn't figure in paper-grading time.

But I am so good at fooling myself that these facts had very little bearing on how I felt about my plan. All I knew was that I was leaving work NOW, and I was taking some work home with me, and just the mere possibility of getting some work done at home was enough to make me feel like it was a perfectly reasonable solution to my dilemna. Three cheers for self-deception!

Johnny Cash

On my drive to work every morning, I leave my suburban (well, it's actually in Indy, but it feels like a suburb) neighborhood, and drive through farmland and little small Indiana towns to get to Anderson. There's something really nice about driving through the corn, past the farms, through the one-stoplight towns, past the church that for the last few weeks has been advertising a concert with "Geraldine and Rickey and the Royalaires" (I was disappointed when I realized I'd missed that one). And this morning on my radio I heard that Johnny Cash died. The radio station was playing several of Johnny's songs over the course of the morning, but the one I heard was his recent cover of the Nine Inch Nails' song "Hurt." It came on just as I was driving by Geraldine and Rickey's church.

I'm not a big Nine Inch Nails fan, but there was something that grabbed me about his cover of that song. "Hurt" seemed to wrap up his huge contribution to American music very succinctly. The Man in Black spent his whole life singing about pain and the people who feel it, but it had what I've heard called the "redemptive spirit" about it. Somehow when he took on the struggles of oppressed and hurting people, it seemed, without providing any answers, to open those subjects up to grace and healing. He had a voice that was distinctly Johnny Cash, but it was also Everyman, and his persona and the subject matter he explored influenced the music that the teenage sons and daughters of my suburbanite neighbors love, and it also captured the hearts of those who love Geraldine and Rickey. He brought the Folsom Prison Blues to a country that would rather not hear about prisons, and made us see the beauty and sadness in it.

G.K. Chesterton - Orthodoxy

I'm in the middle of a couple good books right now... I don't have time to read much at the moment, as I'm about a week away from the end of summer quarter at the business college and am keeping busy as a result. But Orthodoxy is a book I've meant to read for a while - it had a profound effect on many prominent Christian thinkers, including C.S. Lewis. I'm only a couple chapters in, but thought I would post an excerpt I particularly enjoyed:

"Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also. Thus he believed that children were indeed the kingdom of heaven, but nevertheless ought to be obedient to the kingdom of earth. He admired youth because it was young and age because it was not. It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man. The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand."

Some people go to Amazon.com or some such internet shopping supersite and create these wish lists... basically they click on everything they see that they would like to have, and then hope people buy the stuff for them. And I think, "How self-centered and consumeristic can you be?"

So here's mine...

Right now it's mostly books and music.. as I get more and more narcissistic, I'm sure I'll be adding to it. At least this way people can't say "I never know what to get him!"