Don’t Call it a Comeback

Like most people in the area of the world I live in, last Thursday night, I went from depression to exhilaration within a few minutes, 7 minutes and 15 seconds to be exact. The Mavericks were down 15 points to a Superstar team composed of people who really, really want to win a championship, and who are also really, really good. To say that the Mavericks playing the Heat are like David taking on Goliath is appropriate on so many levels. And the fact that they won the 2nd game away in such dramatic fashion is inspiring to say the least.

Now I know the way professional sports works. I’m writing this post a few hours before game 3 of the NBA finals tip off. There is a chance that the momentum we had from game 2 won’t carry over to game 3. There is a chance that Goliath beats David, that is after all, what Goliath’s tend to do. But as long as I live I’ll never forget one thing about game 2.

Toward the end of the fourth quarter, the ABC commentators started showing video feed of the American Airlines center, but not the one in Miami (where the game was actually being played) but the one in Dallas. It was filled with thousands of people who were watching the game on a big screen. Think about that for a second, thousands of people came to a stadium to watch a TV screen that they could probably have had a better experience watching from home. But they came to a stadium to cheer on a team that wasn’t even there, and couldn’t even here them.

In Genesis 12, God calls a guy named Abraham to leave the town he grew up in for a completely unknown experience, and to trust in a completely unknown God. This was in a day and age where the average person didn’t travel over 30 miles from where they grew up…in their entire lifetime. But Abraham breaks that mold and travels off into the great unknown. If you are a believer in Jesus today, it’s because Abraham did that. But when he did it he didn’t know about you. He just had to trust, which he did, and it paid off. READ MORE

True and Better

READ MORE

Benjamin Zander

When I was a kid, my parents made me listen to Classical music like it was going out of style. Which is funny, because it obviously had. But now I appreciate them for doing that. They made me take piano lessons, and study about the lives of the composers who created the music. Which was fascinating, because let’s be honest, Lady Gaga has got nothing on some of the weirdness of those old fellas in white powdered wigs.

In a world where Jay-Z and  Coldplay are the Chopin and Vivaldi of the day, we are missing something vital in our music (I actually like Jay-Z and Coldplay), but there is something that is missing. In a world where most Worship songs consists of G,C,D, it’s good to be reminded that there are songs that have lasted centuries.

That some music has a soul.

My favorite part of this video is where Banjamin Zader talks about finding just the right E chord. That no other variation of that chord could fit, because that particular chord was like coming home.

There is a resolution that music, well done music gives us, that nothing else can. It helps us hope into a better ending.

Thanks Benjamin Zader for reminding me of that.  READ MORE

Risk

A few months ago a college student came into my office with a question. They had felt called to go to into missions, specifically at a country that was in a time of political upheaval. Everyday in this country, bombs were going off, and people were getting killed. Needless to say, it wasn’t a popular tourist trap, but my friend still wanted to go.

The problem was that this college student had parents. And like any parents, they didn’t want their kid to go to this dangerous of a location. Which is understandable. But that didn’t change what this college student felt. They really thought God wanted them to go to this country, but they wanted to honor their parents. And so they asked me what they should do. Should they stay or go?

What would you tell them?

So I’ve been thinking a lot about Risk for the past year or so. I like this way of talking about Jesus-following a lot, it is, after all, s a synonym for Faith. And that’s important, because the word faith has gotten a lot of baggage theses days. It’s started to mean to just believe something cognitively, but that’s a definition that James would take issue with.

But this is a hard word for most churches. Institutions, by their very nature, don’t like risk. But Faith, by it’s very nature, is risk. So what does an institution that tries to form a risk-taking people look like? READ MORE

May 22nd

I remember when I was a teenager, my Indian brother, Simran, had been staying with us for a while, and he had started to freak me out. Most kids might stay up late listening to ghost stories about the hook, or the zombie babysitters. But I had someone living with me from New Delhi, and he would tell me stories about Nostradamus and the Inca’s creepy prophecies about 2012. The ones that were all about how the world would end (in a variety of ways) but this much was certain, it would end soon.

While it’s true that every culture and religion develops ways to talk about the end of the world, I would imagine that Western Christianity has done a bit more than it’s share to add to the mix of this. Think about the things that are out there right now…There is a group of Atheist’s who offer pet-sitting services, and for a mere $150, they will come rescue your post-rapture pet. This is a serious business, and they are expanding.

For 14.95 a year, you can pre-write a message to all your heathen friends and family, and if 3 out of the 5 Christians that maintain the database don’t log in for a 6 day period. The “You’ve Been Left Behind” database automatically sends out your message to the Pagans you care about. Again, this is for real.

For the past year, I’ve been driving past billboards that tell me the world is going to end on May 21st, 2011. The billboard leads you to a website, and if you go there, you hear some people talking about how Noah knew the world was going to end and you can too. If you just do the appropriate math that the Bible has hidden throughout itself, use the correct logarithm, and have just a touch of crazy, you too will come up with the same date.  READ MORE

Mere Mortals

So I spent a few hours Sunday evening at a bookstore. Which is one my favorite places to pass time at. Eventually, like always, I gravitated toward the Theology section, and passed through the Christian Living section. Now I tend to get a lot of books, and most of them come from this section. But I noticed something Sunday, that hasn’t really struck me before.

For the past couple of hundred years, Jesus followers thought about God through the lens of Deism. Basically, the view was that God wound the universe up like a top, and then stepped away. And while we could understand him through things like Scripture or Creation, all we really knew about God was that he was really, really big.

But then, like always, the pendulum swung. We started to realize the defecencies of that single perspective about God. We realized that the God that was revealed in Jesus was intensely personal. He attends the funeral of every sparrow. He knows the number of hairs on our head, and knows the number of tears that we have cried. God, in other words, is love. Ask anybody on the street today to describe God in one word and this is the one that they would choose…hopefully. And that’s a good thing. It’s much better than previous decades of thinking God was angry all the time. But it’s a short move between thinking of God primarily this way and then wearing shirts that say “Jesus is My Homeboy.”

And here is the problem. READ MORE