News From the Frontlines

Some news:

• Derek picked me up some SkullCandy earbuds yesterday and I’m excited to use them… wish my iPod battery didn’t stop working… Apple fail.
• My brother is getting confirmed in two hours. I’m his sponsor.
• My mother took me shopping yesterday and spent roughly 83% of my Christmas present money on clothes. I’m not a big fan of receiving clothes, but realistically both my mom and I know that I won’t spend money on clothes unless I absolutely have to, so I suppose it was a good thing in the long run. Plus I do enjoy having some sharp-looking threads. Also, the excuse, erm,  reason for the shopping spree was that my brother is getting confirmed today and I need to not look like a slob.
• Another of my pop cans exploded in our fridge… I don’t know why it’s so damn cold in there even after I turned the fridge temperature up. Anyways, there is frozen Diet Cherry Pepsi all over the second shelf, door, and bottom of the second shelf. The top of the can blew clean off, but the rest of the can wasn’t even perturbed in the least. Strange.
• Yesterday was my brother’s confirmation practice (a confirmation in a Catholic Church is very ceremonial so confirmation practice is comparable to a wedding rehearsal). Anyways, the latest priest at St. A’s spent the first 15ish minutes of the practice bragging-up, erm, talking about the newly remodeled sanctuary including a lengthy schpiel about each of the 15-ish new stained-glass windows and their religious symbolism. By itself, this lecture is unremarkable; however, this is the fifth time I’ve heard it since the church was beginning to be remodeled–one lecture for every time I’ve been home. I’m guessing he visits the topic more frequently than just when I’m there, which makes me feel sorry for the St. Athanasius regulars.
• Friday night, Parker House and Theory played at the Hub. They are truly an amazing band and I was stunned that only 40ish people showed up. I watched them open for O.A.R. at the Dome a couple years ago and, in my opinion, they have better music and put on a much better show than O.A.R. Lindsey Sermons and I talked with the keyboardist and bassist afterwards and apparently the Hub was one of the bigger shows that they’ve headlined. They said they always love coming to Iowa because we appreciate them so much more, but they must have a problem getting the word out in bigger cities, because they are an amazing band for how not-renown they are. Navigate to their website and give their songs a listen if you don’t believe me (their website has a few songs on a loop that you can listen to for free).

Anyways, it’s getting to be that time… I need to make the journey to Jesup so I can sponsor my brother’s confirmation. Hope all is well for you.

- Craig

PS: I want to start adding pictures to the posts. Keep me accountable.

Reflecting on Morality and Religious Pressure

Why do my fellow Christians fight me on the elements of my personality which Christ cultivated? Within me there are countless, large imperfections about which they could warn me, but they concentrate their efforts to destroy those parts in me which express Love to the poor and marginalized; the parts of me which seek to deny myself to lift up the powerless. It seems like they seek to make me the Pharisees against whom Jesus spoke throughout the Gospels–the hypocrites who appear to have cleansed themselves of external sins while taking great care to nurture and grow their internal ones. My soul cries out to my brothers, “get behind me Satan! I’m doing my Father’s work!” and it shouts this not out of anger but out of love. Are we so blind that we’ve tricked ourselves into thinking that our evil desires (though cloaked in religion and twisted to look like truth) are in fact pleasing to God? It didn’t work for the religious elite then, so what makes us think that God will favor the religious elite now?

The Spirit in me and the scriptures both testify that God will always, ALWAYS favor the poor and the broken and the powerless over those who appear to be “correct” and “powerful”. Even if my brain can’t find an adequate answer to their twisted logic, God’s truth appeals to my heart–telling me that I may not understand exactly why, but their ways are dark. So it is and will be: I follow God even when the people who’ve taken claim to his name take a different path. I will follow God into the dark places to rescue his precious people even if it means that many of the Christians call me a glutton and a drunk and kick me out of their churches. After all, Jesus endured that first.

On the subject of morality, it seems that there are people who see two kinds of people in the world: those who seek to uphold morality and those who are trying to “lower the moral bar” so to speak. The problem I see is that people with this viewpoint tend to define moral behavior as behavior exclusive of external sins, but the term doesn’t speak to the presence of internal sins. Internal sins (conditions of the heart: jealousy, self-righteousness, judgmentality, etc) get downplayed for the sake of lifting ourselves over those who suffer from external sins (sins identifiable by actions: sexual sins, drunkeness, etc). In this way, we trick ourselves into thinking that we are justified in denouncing the evils of liberalism and homosexuality and alcohol consumption and partying when we have darker sins clouding our vision. We seek to remove sawdust from our neighbor’s eye without first removing the boards from our own. We take great care to wash the outside of our cups, but the insides are filthy. We love to call people out on their mistakes, because it feeds the lie that we’re better than we are–that we do, in fact, deserve love (which stares right in the face of the Cross and the Gospel of Grace). This self-righteousness seems to plague the church, so if someone is truly concerned about upholding morality in our culture, perhaps we should look first at ourselves and then at everyone else. Furthermore, when we stop viewing the world this way, we realize that if our “morality” is only a product of social pressure, then it is empty and worthless. In this way, we are locked in a pointless battle of who’s definition of morality is correct, ours or theirs? When we are freed from this, we realize the only universal morality isn’t measured by actions, but by the motivations which drive our actions (namely the presence of Love or lackthereof). The issue isn’t where the moral bar should be set or whose moral bar should be used; the issue revolves directly around our own loving and hateful desires. The battle isn’t between us and them, the battle is within each of us, cliché though that may sound. We are our own enemies. We are the primary opposition to the cross–not the muslims or the liberals or the homosexuals. Let’s stop scapegoating and own up to our own failures. Let’s really die to ourselves.

Golden Calves

So before I jet off to work, here is a brief list of things I think we Christians worship above God frequently:

• America
• Money
• Success
• Capitalism
• Status
• The Republican party
• Discipline/Legalism
• Christianity (not to be confused with Christ)
• Correctness, particularly doctrinal correctness
• The Bible (well, our twisted interpretations of the Bible that make the above seem okay)

Again, this is brief and probably incomplete, but what is there is accurate. It seems we’ve got a golden heard. Baha. Sorry, lame joke.

Post-Concert Ramblings…

I wrote this yesterday morning on Facebook. I’m posting it here now. Does anyone know if there’s a simpler way of syndicating Facebook notes and WordPress blogs?

So it’s currently 6:08 AM and I’ve been up for the last forty-five minutes. Last night we went to the Rock and Worship Tour concert at the US Cell Center in CR and now we’re staying at Kristen’s parents’ house in Mount Vernon. And I can’t sleep–I think I’m catching a cold slash my lips are burning. And not burning with the desire to share the Word of God or to sing some incredibly artsy creative song, no, I have two canker sores (sp?) on the inside of my mouth and they feel extra awesome [sarcasm] in the wee hours of the morning.

At any rate, I stole one of Kristen’s guitars and snuck away to their computer room for a little late night acousticness (I’m in denial that it is, in fact early morning. Side note: I’m looking out the window and it’s getting light outside… eew). I kind of feel bad about using their computer without asking. :S

Anyways, the concert was amazing… I tend to go into Christian events with thick skepticism, because I know a lot of people put on Christian events because it’s “what good Christians do” or because “kids who are involved in Christian activities don’t sin” etc.; however, I was comforted by the brief ‘tween-acts blurbs by the lead singers of Tenth Ave North, Mercy Me, and Sanctus Real. I don’t worship well if I don’t believe that those who are leading worship have their hearts in a good place. I don’t want to feel like I’m being conned into some manufactured emotion. If my faith is fake, I’ll happily be an honest Atheist rather than a lying Christian.

The first thing the T.A.N. guy said was how he was still working through the complications of growing up in a “Christian” community and attending a “Christian” school (by the way, I use quotes around that word, because it means a lot of different things to different people and the way I’m using it isn’t really how I think it should be used), and he touched on how we “Christians” approach our relationships with people and with God with a lot more arrogance and false-humility than we should… He said the hardest three words for Christians to say are “I don’t know”, which was said in jest but bears a lot of truth. Anyways, the overall theme of the evening was that we’re all broken people desperately in need of a God who loves us. None of us are better than anyone else. Basically, as Bethany and Derek and I phrase it, we’re all epic failures and the only way we succeed is because Jesus loves us enough to succeed for us. And that to me, far more than trendy “Christian” music and Alt-Christian clothes and even being in the presence of “Christian” music superstars, was cool.

So with that I sit here with a lot of thoughts swirling around in my tiny human brain… First of all, I wish that more Christians really believed that we [read "all humanity"] are all the same in terms of worthiness of Grace (in that we are all equally unworthy of His Grace).

Secondly, I wish people who don’t know Jesus wouldn’t associate Him with us Christians. I’ll elaborate on that one a little: Christians can be prideful and arrogant and falsely-humble and hurtful and a variety of other negatively-inclined adjectives that are in no way characteristics of Jesus nor are representative of his feelings towards humanity in general. We’ve taken His name in vain and dragged it through the mud with us and the result is that the people who are aware of their need for a savior won’t know that that person is Jesus because we’ve made Jesus look like the Devil.

Finally, and this is one that I (as an insecure person) struggle with the most; I wish that we who call ourselves followers of Christ would truly meet people where they’re at rather than lead them to believe that they need to be “good enough” to earn our and/or God’s Love. Especially God’s Love. I think we non-verbally tell people that they need to fit in and look the part before we will accept them. They need to cover up their tattoos, change the way they dress, and stop associating with their non Christian friends unless they are getting [read "pressuring"] them to come to Church.

Just so we’re all clear on this, I believe this next statement so strongly that if this isn’t true, I’m converting to Atheism straight up: God’s love for us is not affected by our performance, and if it were, we’d all be effed. There is no reason for God to Love us–we can’t earn it, it’s freely given. We can’t trick God into Loving us, he already does–we just need to accept it. God’s people aren’t shiny and plastic; God chose a people who are real and broken and scandalous and perfect only in our inability to earn His love. He knows this about each of us and this fact is deeply rooted in His passionate, reckless, scandalous, foolish, intoxicated Love for each of us.

Anyways, it’s 6:53 now and the sun is coming up and that’s an event I haven’t witnessed in roughly a decade so I don’t want to ruin such a good track record. I’m going back to bed. Good night. Or good morning. Whatever.

So it’s currently 6:08 AM and I’ve been up for the last forty-five minutes. Last night we went to the Rock and Worship Tour concert at the US Cell Center in CR [Cedar Rapids] and now we’re staying at Kristen’s parents’ house in Mount Vernon. And I can’t sleep–I think I’m catching a cold slash my lips are burning. And not burning with the desire to share the Word of God or to sing some incredibly artsy creative song, no, I have two canker sores (sp?) on the inside of my mouth and they feel extra awesome [sarcasm] in the wee hours of the morning.

At any rate, I stole one of Kristen’s guitars and snuck away to their computer room for a little late night acousticness (I’m in denial that it is, in fact early morning. Side note: I’m looking out the window and it’s getting light outside… eew). I kind of feel bad about using their computer without asking. :S

Anyways, the concert was amazing… I tend to go into Christian events with thick skepticism, because I know a lot of people put on Christian events because it’s “what good Christians do” or because “kids who are involved in Christian activities don’t sin” etc.; however, I was comforted by the brief ‘tween-acts blurbs by the lead singers of Tenth Ave North, Mercy Me, and Sanctus Real. I don’t worship well if I don’t believe that those who are leading worship have their hearts in a good place. I don’t want to feel like I’m being conned into some manufactured emotion. If my faith is fake, I’ll happily be an honest Atheist rather than a lying Christian.

The first thing the T.A.N. guy said was how he was still working through the complications of growing up in a “Christian” community and attending a “Christian” school (by the way, I use quotes around that word, because it means a lot of different things to different people and the way I’m using it isn’t really how I think it should be used), and he touched on how we “Christians” approach our relationships with people and with God with a lot more arrogance and false-humility than we should… He said the hardest three words for Christians to say are “I don’t know”, which was said in jest but bears a lot of truth. Anyways, the overall theme of the evening was that we’re all broken people desperately in need of a God who loves us. None of us are better than anyone else. Basically, as Bethany and Derek and I phrase it, we’re all epic failures and the only way we succeed is because Jesus loves us enough to succeed for us. And that to me, far more than trendy “Christian” music and Alt-Christian clothes and even being in the presence of “Christian” music superstars, was cool.

So with that I sit here with a lot of thoughts swirling around in my tiny human brain… First of all, I wish that more Christians really believed that we [read "all humanity"] are all the same in terms of worthiness of Grace (in that we are all equally unworthy of His Grace).

Secondly, I wish people who don’t know Jesus wouldn’t associate Him with us Christians. I’ll elaborate on that one a little: Christians can be prideful and arrogant and falsely-humble and hurtful and a variety of other negatively-inclined adjectives that are in no way characteristics of Jesus nor are representative of his feelings towards humanity in general. We’ve taken His name in vain and dragged it through the mud with us and the result is that the people who are aware of their need for a savior won’t know that that person is Jesus because we’ve made Jesus look like the Devil.

Finally, and this is one that I (as an insecure person) struggle with the most; I wish that we who call ourselves followers of Christ would truly meet people where they’re at rather than lead them to believe that they need to be “good enough” to earn our and/or God’s Love. Especially God’s Love. I think we non-verbally tell people that they need to fit in and look the part before we will accept them. They need to cover up their tattoos, change the way they dress, and stop associating with their non Christian friends unless they are getting [read "pressuring"] them to come to Church.

Just so we’re all clear on this, I believe this next statement so strongly that if this isn’t true, I’m converting to Atheism straight up: God’s love for us is not affected by our performance, and if it were, we’d all be effed. There is no reason for God to Love us–we can’t earn it, it’s freely given. We can’t trick God into Loving us, he already does–we just need to accept it. God’s people aren’t shiny and plastic; God chose a people who are real and broken and scandalous and perfect only in our inability to earn His love. He knows this about each of us and this fact is deeply rooted in His passionate, reckless, scandalous, foolish, intoxicated Love for each of us.

Anyways, it’s 6:53 now and the sun is coming up and that’s an event I haven’t witnessed in roughly a decade so I don’t want to ruin such a good track record. I’m going back to bed. Good night. Or good morning. Whatever.

Bandwagon

 

Come on, everyone is doing it!

Facebook Update

Facebook said that 9 of my friends became fans… who am I not to jump on the bandwagon?

There aren't words...

Why I Can’t Get A Girlfriend

Reason #435: My sense of humor.

 

I'm just kidding...

Relationshipping

Some nights are just made for a warm cup of tea, a good conversation with a good friend, reading and/or writing, and Death Cab in the background.

Tonight was just such a night. I spoke with one of my friends and she had to tell me a simple truth that was honest, inoffensive, but “impolite” by society’s terms. And for such an impolite person, that cost her a little bit to do so, but it was worth it to her, I think. And I really enjoy mature, well-intended, constructive criticism.

I really think honest communication enriches relationships, even if especially when that honesty isn’t easy.

Good night and peace.

Credibility

I don’t readily trust nice, polite people. I know myself well-enough to be aware of my many flaws. If someone agrees with whatever I say or pays me many compliments, my instinct is to assume that this person is a liar (whether they realize they’re doing it or not) and they have manipulative motivations. I would say that my instinct is generally right, based on my knowledge of my broken self.

I think Christians get love and politeness confused. Jesus was the single most loving person to have walked the planet and he was plenty impolite. Ask the Pharisees. Ask Peter.

The truth is we are imperfect, flawed people. There isn’t anything good about us for which we can claim credit. Anyone who tells you differently is a liar. And based on the fact that people don’t tell me how crappy I am on a regular basis, I have to conclude that I’m surrounded by a lot of liars. The fact that I don’t tell people how crappy they are on a regular basis causes me to conclude that I’m a liar also.

Of course, the opposite isn’t true: just because you’re rude doesn’t make you loving. It’s just impossible to love imperfect people and always tell them stuff that makes them feel better.

The nature of the Truth is that it convicts imperfect people. Our egos–our pride–is/are grounded in lies. The Truth doesn’t appease our prideful natures. We have to die to ourselves, surrender to God, before we can like the Truth. Because the truth stands in opposition to the masks we wear and the inflated images we want people to have of us.

One point of pride for me is my insightfulness. I tend to think that I know a lot more than I really do. And sometimes I arrogantly flex that intellectual muscle to make people think more highly of me. That’s right, I’m an ass. Anyways, I was being bluntly honest with one of my friends in a way that wasn’t loving and served the purpose of cutting them down and building me up (because one of my recent revelations is that the truth is often blunt, as I’m talking about in this post). I was trying to be insightful. She called me out on it and it certainly didn’t serve the notion that I’m an insightful person. It did cater to the fact that I’m an insecure person who believes that I am, in fact, at the center of the universe. Her truthfully calling me out didn’t make me feel good about myself. It convicted me. It made me aware of the reality that I am not the ideal person that I think I am.

This post was written to provide affirmation to loving friends of broken people who know that the truth won’t make their friend happy, but must be said nonetheless. The Bible talks about believers supporting eachother and it recons it to “iron sharpening iron”. When iron sharpens other iron, there is a lot of friction, heat, and conflicting forces. It’s not an easy process–it’s very messy, like nearly every aspect of Christian spirituality. But it’s necessary.

I hope this blesses you in some way. Sincerely.

Culturally Relevant?

Some interesting insights from Derek Webb.