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.