A New Year

So much for trying to blog every day.  Maybe in this new year things will be different.  I won't set such audacious goals.  I will try and make time to write.  We will see what this year holds...

Long Car Rides

Today has been a long day. It began this morning by crawling in a minivan with four of my friends and my wife at 5:30am. Once we stopped for a little Tim Horton's coffee and breakfast, we were on the road for Atlanta. I certainly was not looking forward to the trip. Each trip that I have made from Lansing to Atlanta and back has turned into a longer than desired excursion. What should be 12 hour trips turned into 16 plus hours because of traffic jams, food stops, weak bladders, and what not.

Today's trip was better than normal. We had some required stops like Skyline Chili around Cincinnati. We had multiple bathroom breaks because I had too much liquid today. And, we had to stop for gas. Even with those stops, the drive came in at a "best" for time at just over 12 hours. The silly thing is there is some excitement and accomplishment in making it in that time. When, in reality, we still spent 12 LONG hours in a van driving down the road.

The trip didn't feel long until the last hour or two. By that time, my wife and our friend Sarah had become stir crazy in the back, back seat of the van. They were laughing histarically at almost nothing, which was a sight in itself. Everyone else was simply cramped from sitting too long.

As I sit now in the hotel courtyard enjoying the cool Atlanta weather and the stars in the sky, I've been thinking about our journey. We left from one place to come to another to be challenged by the Catalyst Conference. To get here, we endured over 800 miles of pavement. Life is like that sometimes. We want to get to a different place with life, which means we have to move in some way from point A to point B. While the drive today was long, it was doable. It could have been done quicker by plane, but that would have cost even more.

When we want to make changes in our lives, it costs us something. To get skinny (or at least skinnier than we are) we must eat less junk and move our bodies more. To get smarter, we must read, study, and learn and stop doing mundaine things like playing on Facebook and Twitter. To change, we must realize that where we are at is not where we need to be, and we must move ourselves to a new place. And, doing that takes effort and discipline, while overcoming our feeling of entitlement to where we were.

Where are you? Where do you want to be? What do you want to become? For me, where I am is not where I want to be. I've had goals for change for quite some time. I've always wanted to be skinnier and smarter. But, I have never fully given up my love for food and time wasting and grown any discipline.

May this journey be the beginning of a new me. May you join me in journey.

Dangerous Church

When I was growing up, I wasn't allowed to run with scissors or poke metal objects into electrical outlets.  That would have been too dangerous.  We didn't have BB guns because guns were dangerous.  I lost my bike privileges for awhile because I had crashed a couple of times in one week.  I was being to dangerous.  Being dangerous was something that was not encouraged because being dangerous meant the risk of injury.  My parents wanted me to live past my growing up years without maiming myself.  Thus, to me, the idea of being dangerous was always bad.  Needless to say, when I received John Bishop's book, Dangerous Church, from Zondervan for free to review and blog about, I was intrigued.

Bishop's book, interestingly enough, is about challenging the church to be dangerous in order to give it life for the sake of the Gospel.  Rather than encouraging the church to be safe by sitting still and going through the motions, he calls his readers, the church, to ask hard questions about their motivations in ministry, their vision for the lost, and their actions to those whom Jesus would call, "the least of these".  These are all great questions that we need to be asking ourselves as we live out our faith.

For me, the highlight of this book was the chapter entitled, "When We See Jesus and Want Hand Sanitizer", where Bishop tells of his experience at a leper colony in India.  He shares about what he feels inside when he comes face to face with a leper who has no nose.  Its a compelling story - one that challenges us to think about how we are being Jesus to everyone around us.

I encourage you to take some time and interact with Dangerous Church.  I'd love to hear what you think.

Cell Phones

I remember the day when my brother got his first cell phone. It was an in the car cell phone, all wrapped up in a leather bag/case. It had a wire the ran from the bag to a cool looking antenna that was on the back of his SUV. It was such a cool gadget . . . and so much smaller than the big brick looking cell phones that other people had.

I remember the first cell phone I had. I thought I was so cool. It was small compared to my brother's bag phone, though I still had to pull the antenna up for better reception. It was too big to fit in my pocket, so it had a lovely leather sleeve that fit over it with a belt holder. I could make and receive calls. To check the voicemail, you had to call another number. It did nothing else. Well, I probably could have sent a text at that point, but it would have cost lots of money. I was so high tech.

I currently have an iphone. It is miniscule compared to my brother's bag phone. It has no needs for external antennas or a constant power source other than to charge the battery every other day. And it fits nicely in my pocket. Furthermore, I can do so much more than just make phone calls. I can surf the web, video chat with my friends in other parts of the world, play any assortment of games made specifically for it, control my desktop computer in my office from anywhere I have phone signal, and use it as a compass if I were ever lost in the middle of nowhere--all without roaming charges! What a difference two decades of technological advances can make.

Though, with advances come with a price. Before the age of cell phones, the only way people could reach you was with a land line. If you weren't there, they might be lucky enough to leave you a message on your answering machine, if you even had one. Otherwise, they were forced to call you back at a later time, write a letter, or travel to you to speak to you face to face. Now, I can't get away from anyone. In all honesty, my phone is closer to me than almost everything else. It is always within arm's reach. Which means, anyone and everyone I am connected to is really only an arm's length away, in addition to all the information and stuff I choose to encounter through my phone. I can't get away from anything, unless I put my phone in time out.

More than that, before the age of cell phones, the only way I could really annoy someone with the phone was to repeatedly call them so they had to get up to answer the phone that was in another other room or physically trip (or choke) them with the coiled 30 foot handset cord. Now, I have a plethora of annoyance possibilities from talking loudly in line at the supermarket or texting in the middle of a movie to forgetting to shut off my ringer during church.

I wonder how Jesus would have used a cell phone, had he had that technology available to him. I'm sure he would use it in all the positive ways--sending emails of encouragement and communicating to others about the Kingdom of God. Would he have a twitter feed that stated, "just fed 5000!" or "healed a blind guy today!" Probably not. He certainly would have remembered to silence his phone at the temple and the synagogue.

I want to be honest here. I'll be the first one to admit that I need to gage the amount of noise that I let technology create in my life. I probably do need to put my phone (and for that matter, the internet) in a time out and make some silent space to be still and listen without interuption. It will probably be good for me . . . and the world won't fall apart while I'm gone.

How about you?