Father of the fatherless

Whenever I talk to my dad, he seems to bring up how he use to beat me in basketball when I was a kid (which I remember kicking his old butt all the time). Or he always reminds me of how he would out fish me whenever we would go fishing together (I remember him always getting snagged). He boasts about if we were in high school together he would have been able to kick my butt (all 150 pounds of pure stick against 235 pounds of studliness). I don’t know if he’s crazy or if he's just losing his mind more and more as he's getting older. Regardless, I love my father.
With Fathers Day right around the corner, I’m asking myself what kind of dad am I going to be when I reach the very old age of 40 (10 years from now). My oldest daughter will be 13. Someone once told me that they can’t wait for me to face the teenage drama of relationships when my daughter becomes a teenager. Truthfully, I don’t think they’re gonna come. I trust there will be issues. But for some reason, I’m confident in how my wife has been raising her(I mention her and not me so she can be blamed if anything goes wrong, but I’ll take the credit if she turns out awesome). How can we fail? Candy if she’s good, the rod if she’s bad (don’t call social services, I’m joking……..). In all honesty, I don’t have many fears for her.
I can’t help but to think of all the youth I know who are fatherless in our community. Or kids who have a dad, but he’s a drunk and he makes sure to let his child know how worthless they are. I pray that this Fathers Day we are able to show the ones who don’t have a nice image of what a father is that they do have a Father that is so enthralled by who they are. I hope all fathers can find time on Fathers Day to shed some love to someone who is fatherless. Make it an effort to be the love of the Father to a child who doesn’t know they’re true identity from the eyes of their true Father.

DIALOGUE BETWEEN MY MIND AND A TEENAGE GIRL

This morning I went to my favorite local coffee shop. Like every morning, I was greeted with the Cheers-like friendly hellos from the staff. After I ordered my mug of joe, I asked the young teenage gal how things were with her and her boyfriend. She said “We’re great. He’s sleeping in my bed right now.” After she said that, she answered the question that was running through my mind. “My parents are gonna be surprised when they see him there.” So I was thinking, “Oh boy, he’s a dead man.” But after I thought that, she said “But he spends the night often so it won’t be a big deal.” After that dialogue between her and my mind, I went to my table and my mind starting screaming “SINNER! GUILTY! BUSTED! THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH! OFF WITH HER HEAD!”
After I caught my breath and was able to compose myself, my mind start to clear and than the first thing that popped in my mind was Judge Judy. I don’t know if you watch that show, but if you haven’t, she is one angry woman. If I were in a bar fight, I would want her on my side. But I think her problem is that she gets so riled up she doesn’t hear the other side of the story. She’s not a fair judge if you ask me.
So it made me think of how I had been so quick to judge this teenage girl because her boyfriend was in her bed. Who knows? Maybe he ran 15 miles this morning and was passing her house at 5:30am and decided to crash at her house after she left for work. Or maybe he forgot about the toast he was cooking this morning and it burned his house down and he needed a place to sleep because he was exhausted from fighting the fire and saving his cat.
Whether he being over there was right or wrong, I don’t really know. And even if I did see it as wrong, if she wasn’t taught the same standards of truth that I live by because her parents, or even myself, haven’t taught them to her, than am I not to be blamed for that as well? I don’t know. But I do know that there was a log in my eye as I was looking at the saw dust in hers.

CLOSE MY EYES TO HIDE FROM REALITY

I was one of those kids that would lie in his bed at night and hear the most subtle noise and get pretty freaked out. I was extremely convinced that there was a monster somewhere in my room. I was always too scared to get up and tell my dad to come in and drop some Rambo on what ever it was that was scaring me. So I only had one solution, and it typically worked: close my eyes and keep my mind on other things until I fell asleep.
I’ve come to realize that I do this more often nowadays than I did when I was a frightened kid. I’m never going to know how I can fix things if I always close my eyes when I don’t want to see the reality of what’s happening around me. WE NEED TO BE AWARE.

HUNGRY? TRY EATING DIRT

He who is dying of hunger must be fed rather than taught. – Saint Thomas Aquinas
I am a sucker for buffets. If you ever want to bless me, take me to a buffet. Some of my buddies make fun of me because I have no problem going to a buffet by myself. They say it’s depressing; I say it’s pretty awesome. Here’s how much I love buffets; I proposed to my wife in a buffet parking lot! (If you ask me, it can’t get any more romantic.)
With that being said, one of my greatest pet peeves is seeing someone take so much food and not eat it. I’ve seen a person get chicken strips at a buffet along with 4 other items and eat everything on the plate but the chicken strips. WHY THE HECK WOULD YOU GET THE CHICKEN STRIPS THEN! I always tell them that I should force feed them and whoop their butt. But instead, I take their chickens strips and eat it for them and secretly wish they would be forced to eat mud for a week. Watch the video to know what I’m talking about.

MUD PIES

Taken from The Hole In Our Gospel by Richard Stearns
• Roughly 1of 4 children in developing countries is underweight
• Some 350 to 400 million children are hungry.
• About 1 in 7 worldwide- 854 million people- do not have enough food to sustain them.
• Approximately 25,000 people die each day of hunger or its related causes- about 9 million per year.

"When I was hungry, you fed me" - Jesus

My Daughter for President

I got an email a couple weeks ago suggesting that President Barack Obama was the anti-Christ. A few weeks before that, a fellow Christian told me he will rejoice the day Bush Jr. is dead. I remember as a kid, a popular answer to the age-old question “what do you want to be when you get older” was “I wanna be the President of the United states of America”. Remind me to discipline my children if they ever give that answer. I fear people will get all “Righteous” on them.

Jesus answered, "My kingdom does not belong to this world. If my kingdom belonged to this world, my servants would fight to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But for now my kingdom is not from here."

PROSTITUTES & POTHEADS: JESUS' TYPE OF PEOPLE

> He hung out with a lady who was married five times and was now with a man that was not her husband.
> A woman comes and washes his feet and anoints them. She was publicly known to be a “sinner” which most likely meant she was a promiscuous lady.
> He asked a Tax-collector, one of the most despised people in society, to come and spend time with him. The Tax collector throws a party for him and now he is eating and drinking with other tax-collectors and “sinners”.
> He spent time with a terrorist. A Zealot who wanted nothing more then to see His countries rulers be overthrown through the means of violence so the people of the land can rule as they once did. Jesus wanted to show him a new kind of Revolution. One based off of love.

Jesus, the man who countless of people love and adore. The man who receives praise and worship daily all over the world. The man who so many desire to be like. The man that so many long to be with as they anxiously await his return. The man who longed for his people to see the beauty of God’s love for them and who was willing to go to extreme measures to let them know that truth.

When we see all that Jesus did for us, we fall to our knees in complete admiration and cry out to him because He is beautiful and awesome. But when we see Jesus hanging out with drunkards, we ridicule him. We see him spending time with prostitutes and we are in shock that he would do so. When he asks a terrorist to spend time with him, we can’t believe what we’re seeing.
The person who commits adultery is a threat to our households. The drunkards make our city pathetic. The thieves only deserve jail. The terrorist needs to be killed.
Redrum was a local head-shop business that moved locations because they realized they weren’t going to make it in the town of Cambridge, MN. Inside the store, you would find a wide variety of pipes, bongs and hookahs. The number one clientele were not 50 year-old men who smoke tobacco as they read books at home. It was young pot-heads who wanted the coolest looking bong or glass pipe. When Redrum left our community, I had heard from several people praising their exit. “Praise God! I have been praying from day one that that place would just leave.” “Whenever I’d drive past that place, I would pray that they would go out of business”. When I hear such “Praise Reports”, I am always forced to ask, “Did you ever get a chance to go and spend time with those guys that ran the shop?” The answer has yet to be “yes”.
It is so easy to love Jesus when we see him for who he is; our Beautiful Lord. But it’s so hard to love the people Jesus spent his time with when we see them for who they our: “sinners”.

PRANKS

In 1957, the BBC ran a story about Swiss farmers who were reaping a profit on their farms due to a mild winter. They had never reaped a harvest of this magnitude. The product they were reaping? Spaghetti noodles. After the story ran, they were flooded with calls from anxious and excited people wondering how they could grow their own spaghetti trees. The BBC responded, “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.” This has become one of the greatest April Fools Day pranks in history.

Some people love pranks. Whether dishing them out of taking the brunt end of one, some people have such a fun, care-free, (nuts) perspective of it all. Myself, I have to refrain from biting the prankster’s pinky off and telling them it was only a joke. The youth I work with now know not to pull pranks on me when I’m sleeping on retreats (at the cost of a few pinkies). I absolutely despise pranks…….but I do love watching them. On the TV show PUNK’D, Ashton Kutcher sets up celebrities in walking into a well put together prank. The celebrities think it’s just another day, until a series of misfortunate events start to occur. Eventually, the prank is revealed and it all ends in hugs and kisses.
For the past couple of years, I have really notice a drastic change in the youth after they leave mom and dad’s house and start on their journey through adulthood. One trend that is growing more and more every year is how unimportant church is. Not just church, but even following in the footsteps of Jesus. According to a recent seminar I went to, 82% of youth walk away from their church after they leave their parents home. Other studies say 70%, but regardless, both numbers are alarming. I think it's mainly because they have come to see Christianity as one big prank.
We spend years teaching these kids the importance of reading the bible while a non-Christian kid is volunteering at a food shelf. We teach the youth they need to “pray without ceasing” while a non-Christian kid is raising money for AIDS victims in Africa. We emphasize the importance of having other Christians around them while non-Christians are fleeing from them. We tell our youth to tell people about Jesus when lonely kids are just looking for a friend. We've told the youth how to be a Christian, but we haven't helped them walk in the footsteps of their Christ. So when our youth are done with home life and get to be on their own, they have so much Christian knowledge they don’t know what to do with. All that was taught to them becomes nothing of importance. They're confused on why we emphasized reading the Bible; they get along fine without it. Why pray? They believe God hasn’t answered their prayers in a long time, so praying is nonsense. Why tell someone about Jesus? The youth notice that all that’s really needed is love. But not God’s love. They start to see everything that was taught to them by us as irrelevant. They see it as one big prank. In other words, they've come to see Christianity as one big joke.