NO STRINGS ATTACHED

When I was in high school, I don’t recall ever being asked to attend a youth group. I don’t think I even knew they existed. Whether I was too intimidating, too nerdy, or too cool (I would think it’s that one ;) ), no one ever invited me to attend their church. I find that peculiar because I lived in a pretty small town with several churches.
I did have two friends though that weren’t anything like the rest of my friends. I knew they attended church. I knew they had Christian activities in their lives. I knew one of my friend’s dad was a Pastor at a local church. These two friends were the closest thing I had to Jesus in my teenage years. But they never invited me to go to their church, which in part, I’m thankful for. They did except me for who I was. They would try influencing me in the opposite direction that I was being influence. If ever I had a question about God, they would try and break it down for me. They truly taught me that as individuals, they wanted to show me they loved me by being a friend rather than leaving me at the doorstep of the church to be a project while they fled away from the opportunity to partake in the Great Commission.
How beautiful could it be if the Christian youth of our communities could learn how to be friends rather than project managers? How effective would their lives be if they learned to make friends with no strings attached? How great would it feel to see them loving the person, sins and all?
The youths of our communities are in a daily battle of influence. And I think it’s a battle that the Church is losing. I think the kids that don’t know their identity in God’s eyes will have nothing to do with a friendship that has strings attached. I’ve heard church kids get upset because their non-Christian friends won’t give church a try because they think it’s boring. I had to bite my lip to not tell them that I’ve been to some churches that I didn’t even bother trying to stay awake because it was so boring.
If we can teach the youth that understand the beauty of God that a loving friendship is about THEM showing their friends God’s love by THEIR actions and THEIR words rather then trying to uproot them from their life and having them partake in a church culture they are totally unfamiliar with and most of the time is complete nonsense to them. I think the influence of today’s youth could potentially swing towards the Church if we can learn to love unconditionally, rather than with strings attached.

INFLUENCE OF CULTURE

I was sitting in my living room this morning with my 3 year-old daughter. She was in one of those goofy, yet hilarious moods where everything she says is comical. I was soaking it all in and thinking how much I love these times I have with her. My wife was in the bedroom and says something (can’t remember what….I think it was “Jo-Jo, you are super hot) that made us laugh, and I called her a nerd. So my daughter, in her goofy-mode, says “yeah momma, you’re a nerd.”. I was hoping my wife didn’t hear her. But my daughter was dead set on letting her see how funny she was. So she gets up to walk to the bedroom to say it again. It was like slow motion as I reached for her to stop her but she was too quick. Then she says it again. My wife just looks at her and says, “That’s okay if you say that to mom and dad, but don’t ever say that outside of this house about other people.” I was shocked……….how dare my wife allow my daughter to call me a nerd. 
The beautiful stress of raising children. My wife and I spend plenty of time with parents who tell us their struggles of raising teenagers and how they really couldn’t prepare for it. It’s become so difficult. We try to teach our child to see life as beautiful yet tell them to keep their ears and eyes closed. Today’s culture is such a mega shift away from children raised in the 70’s. The biggest influence: media.
In a recent survey by Teen People magazine, 27% of the girls felt that the media pressures them to have a perfect body.
By the time a young person is 17 years old, they have received over 250,000 commercial messages through the media. Eating disorders have grown 400% since 1970. And this isn’t just with females. Many males are becoming insecure about their physical appearance as advertising and other media images raise the standard and idealize well-built men.
What can be done about this? I don’t want to be the parent that has their child wear a helmet wherever they go. I don’t want to have my kids watch the Princess Bride 10,000 times and tell everyone that it’s the greatest movie ever because that’s the only movie they’ve ever seen. How can we have our kids see culture as beautiful and be able to participate in it and learn from it without having them turn into blood-sucking monsters (please notice the sarcasm….they really won’t suck blood)? The youth really need to see beauty and learn to walk in it. They need to understand how beautiful life is when they understand who they are in the eyes of God. They miss out on so much when we isolate them from God’s gift to man to be able to create culture.
So how can you raise a child to understand that our image in God and to God is where our value comes from, yet not have them walk through life isolated from experiencing the art of created culture because we don’t want them to turn into blood sucking monsters?
When you find out, please let the Church know,because Lord knows, we don’t have the answer.

PROTECTIVE CHRISTIAN GHETTO

TAKING FROM: ADVENTURES IN MISSING THE POINT. BRIAN MCLAREN
Despite our sincerity and best motives, preachers like me mess people up. It’s unintentional, believe me; we’re just trying to protect people. But we damage people nonetheless. We want to protect folks from alcoholism and drunkenness, so we tell them to not drink any alcoholic beverages. To protect them from alcohol, we recommend they avoid establishments that serve it. To be on the safe side, we tell them to avoid people who drink alcohol…and to avoid excessive laughter as you’d hear from tipsy people…and, in fact, to avoid parties in general except boring ones.
We want to protect folks from extramarital sex, so we create so much tension around the subject that we make people uncomfortable not only with the opposite sex, but with their own sexuality, too. Okay, we preachers admit, maybe we’ll create a little sexual anxiety, maybe some of our hearers will become a tad nerdy, weird, uptight-but at least they won’t get into overt sexual trouble. We hope.
We want to protect people from following the crowd and succumbing to peer pressure, so we imply-or outright assert-that good Christians don’t go to R rated movies (or any movies at all), don’t listen to rap music (or any popular music at all). We discourage them from making non-Christian friends. We approve of them spending all their time in church services, church meetings, church activities-safe rabbit holes, a protective Christian ghetto.
We want to protect them from losing their faith, so we warn them against reading philosophy, from participating in culture and the arts, from dealing with tough questions and controversial issues. We exhort them to avoid the sciences (they might accept evolution!) avoid the social sciences (they might sympathize with liberals, criminals, and homosexuals!), avoid the arts (they might have to look at the nudes!). We recite pat answers and platitudes, even when it makes us feel dishonest, shallow, trite, tortured. We feel justified, though, convincing ourselves that even a bad faith is better than a lost faith.
In short, wanting to protect our congregations from becoming the world, we preachers tell them, “don’t be in it.” There’s only one problem: in trying to save people from the world, we miss the point. We actually ruin people (and ourselves) as disciples, and probably damage them as human beings, too. What’s amazing is how patient our parishioners are with us, in light of the damage we do to them. It’s amazing how patient the Lord is with us too, in light of the damage we do to His people and his cause.

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