2 Timothy 1:6-7  |  That is why I remind you to fan into flames the spiritual gift God gave you when I laid hands on you. For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline.

I was meditating on this verse while I was washing the dishes tonight. Kay is gone doing laundry and I turned the radio on, but God told me to “practice what you preach and turn it off.” So I did. And as I was thinking about the verse and going over it in my mind, I found myself praying that God would give me a spirit of self-discipline that I have been seeking so much in the last few days and weeks and months. And I got to thinking about the order they are listed: power, love, and self-discipline.

Now certainly this is not speaking of our own power, because we have no power apart from the power of Christ in us. Which makes me wonder if the reason that it is so hard to get up early in the morning, for instance, is because I have been going about the whole thing backwards. I have been trying to have a spirit of self-discipline, which I thought would lead to a spirit of love as the Word of God transforms me, and then that would give me a great sense of God’s power in my life.

But as I washed the dishes tonight, I realized that I am going about it all backwards. What I need is to beg for God’s power to read and study and memorize and meditate on God’s word. And as I feel him giving me a spirit of [His] power, it will cause in me a spirit of love for Him, that will naturally lead me to spend consistent time with Him – what most people would call self-discipline, or what other translations would call a “sound mind.” 

So my prayer now is that God would give me that same spirit of power, love, and self-discipline. And in that order.

Hi there! Just wanted to let you know that I am going to start doing something a little bit different on my blog here. While there still may be a topical thing that I want to spout off about now and then, at least for a while my posts are going to be exegetical [finding the truths in Scripture]. OK, maybe that’s stretching it a little. They’ll at least not be eisegetical [reading truths into Scripture]. Hopefully none will be heretical.

I’m gonna call this Meditations & Musings:

Meditations

Dallas Willard: “If I had to choose between all the disciplines of the spiritual life, I would choose Bible memorization.” I wholeheartedly agree. Never is my mind and heart so full of God as when I am memorizing his word. And in trying to memorize, I repeat it over and over and over again. And it gets ingrained in my mind, and I begin to think about it differently and more clearly than ever before. That’s meditation.

After a summer long hiatus, I am back on track memorizing Scripture, two verses a day, every day. Romans was bogging me down before… it’s a heavy book. So now I am in 2 Timothy. I thought it was a good practical book that is short, so I’ll have the encouragement of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel!

Musings

Muse: To be absorbed in thought. An interesting thing that most people don’t realize about the English language is that if you put the letter ‘a’ in front of word, it negates the word. (i.e. a theist is someone who believes in God, therefore an atheist is someone who does not believe in God).

I want you to muse on the fact that an a before the word negates it. Muse means to think deeply.

God has convicted me that much of my existence consists of purposely not thinking deeply – being AMUSED. So this blog is an exercise in getting me to muse. Hopefully it will you as well. And I pray that even if you find it humorous at times, you won’t find it the least bit amusing.

This series probably won’t be very fancy. It probably won’t always be coherent. Probably not as grammatically correct and well spoken as my other posts. It’ll probably be more questions than answers. These posts will be a public record of my musings on the Scriptures I’m meditating on… pure and simple.

2 Timothy here we come!

I As followers of Christ, living the Alternative Lifestyle, we must be concerned when people who are created in the image of God with value and worth are used and abused.

 got an email today from Stop the Traffik. Apparently the chocolate industry has missed a BIG deadline, and the Stop the Traffik press release can explain it better than I can anyway. So here it is. Read it and weep (I hope). And then ask yourself whether the extra couple of bucks for that fair-trade candy bar might be worth the clear conscience. 

Luke

On July 1st, people all across our town will be going out of their way to buy more chocolate—a chocoholic’s dream, but it will be fairly-traded chocolate. This is the best way and the only way to eat your chocolate slave free.

July 1st is a very important day around the world.

It’s the day when the chocolate industry promised to make sure that no children were being used as slaves on cocoa farms.

It’s the day when we could eat a bar of our favourite chocolate such as a Mars, Kit Kat or Dairy Milk knowing that no child has been used in the harvesting of the cocoa beans that went to make the chocolate we love to eat.

Sadly there will be no celebrations on July 1st.

Industry has failed to keep its original promises.

Today, children as young as 12 are still being used as slaves on cocoa plantations.

Here are the words of one child after being rescued from a farm. “I will tell you how I lost my arm. I tried to escape, but I could not. They caught me and tied me to a papaya tree and they beat me and broke my arm. I used to dream horrible dreams that they were beating me and about many other things: the hard work, my family … I still have these dreams today”.

Although the majority of farmers would not treat children in this way, there are some who do, and there are an estimated 12,000 children trafficked onto cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast into a life of slavery.

In our community, thousands of people are buying chocolate without knowing that these children are suffering for our sweet tooth to make fat profits for an industry that hasn’t delivered on its promises.In 2001 they said they would certify that farms were slave free. Now they are saying that they are gathering data on some of the areas where cocoa is harvested.

This is not what they promised.

This is not good enough after 7 years of waiting for the freedom, safety and protection of these children.

We have to choose which chocolate bar to buy, at little cost to us when our chocolate is costing some children their lives.

STOP THE TRAFFIK

Appetizer

The very first statement Jesus ever voiced about his concern for the poor, oppressed, marginalized people was when he cried out as one of them – eyes shut tight, mouth wide open, wailing, kicking, shaking and dripping with blood and amniotic fluid … when God voted with his birth, he voted for the poor.

This book studies past orders of Christ-followers that ministered to the world’s poor, and chronicles a movement of young Christ-followers today doing the same thing. The book starts with a couple of introductory chapters, in which it gives the definitive characteristics for the “new friars”. They are: incarnational, devotional, communal, missional, and marginal. The rest of the book goes in depth of each of those aspects.

Meat

When I was in Mozambique, I played with a group of kids about an hour a day or so… they more happy and more satisfied in their ratty, sometimes almost non-existant clothes than any children I have seen in America in a long time. I found myself not wanting to help them get out of their poverty as much as wanting to join them in it, because they were so satisfied.

Bessenecker was dealing with this same issue at one point in his ministry, and he shares a dream that he had. It’s too lengthy to quote here, so I’ll just summarize it: He dreamed that he was in a garbage city, and the dung truck pulled in with a very full load. As he walked by, he noticed to his horror that his three children were on top of the truck, covered in feces, playing happily. And, at that moment, he felt God speaking to him, “”As their father, are you satisfied? Even if they are satisfied, are you satisfied?” [pp. 48]

Often it seems that people who are passionate about serving the poor can seem to neglect actually getting around to sharing the Good News to them. It is easy to get so busy doing God’s work that you forget about God Himself. Bessenecker does a good job of avoiding this in the sections about devotion and mission. Here are a couple of choice morsels:

As wonderful as it is to bring the Kingdom of God to the hollow places on earth, even this is rubbish in comparison to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus. Intimacy with Christ must be first. Without it, mission is empty and self-serving. [pp. 99]

Jesus is the only worthy obsession; all other obsessions must be beaten into submission. [pp. 170-171]

Even though I have heard the term a lot, I had never sat down and thought about the meaning of incarnational ministry. But think about this:

To undertake an incarnational approach to ministry is to be sent as Jesus was sent – to empty yourself of all that alienates you from a people and to become to a significant degree as they are. [pp. 62]

Since Jesus is the perfect example of what we should look like, then is this the kind of ministry he calls us to? As the Scripture Bessenecker quotes there says, “Jesus said, ‘As the Father sent me, so I send you.” I think this is the meatiest part of the book, one that I am going to take a little while to digest. But we’ll get to that after while.

Bones

There weren’t a lot of bones in this book. I thought that the authors writing style was a little monotonous at times, but that’s a writing style thing, not a real issue. He did a fairly good job of balancing sharing the gospel with caring for the poor. Obviously he tends to one side, but the one side is what the book is about, so it makes sense.

The only other thing I would say is that when I first picked up the book at the library I was expecting more how-to. It was actually very little how-to; it mostly chronicled what is already going on.

Digestion

I am not sure what the digestion of this book will look like for me. With getting married in a couple of months, I am not able to move into a slum in Bangkok right now. But I was thinking about the closest thing with consistently have in America: trailer parks. God has been bring trailer parks to my mind over and over again lately. Me and Kay are going to live in a trailer (but not a park) after we get married. I wonder if God may not be preparing us for an incarnational ministry in trailer parks. My dad found the statistics somewhere that show that around 95% of people who live in trailer parks will not leave to attend an outside church. It’s just in the dreaming stage right now, but what would it look life if we were to bring the church to them in their trailer park? The outline of this book will be one I refer back to when we begin such a ministry – are we incarnational, devotional, communal, missional, and marginal?

American Christians have it easy.

When we read Scriptures about persecution, or Jesus saying “In this world you will have trouble”, we think of someone making fun of us because we’re wearing a “Christian” T-shirt. I have come to realize that most Christian T-shirts deserve to be made fun of, partially because of the fact that they are usually either rip-offs of other people’s design work or they are RIDICULOUS clichés like “Jesus is my homeboy”. But I digress.

Anyway, I want to pull my hair out when I hear this kind of talk about “persecution”. I think Foxe’s Book of Martyrs should be required reading.

If you don’t, you should get the Voice of the Martyrs magazine. You can sign up to get it (for free) at persecution.com. I would suggest you not read it right before or right after eating, though. It’s definitely PG-13 or R rated. But it will wake you up, and make you realize that you have it easy. Maybe too easy. Christianity thrives under persecution and doesn’t do that well in freedom.

I’ll end this post with a news bite that I read this morning in my email from VOM. Would you be willing to sacrifice like this for the sake of the Gospel?

The Voice of the Martyrs has learned that an elderly, bedridden woman burned in an attack on January 7, has since died. According to VOM sources in Bangladesh, attackers may have not realized that the bedridden elderly woman was in the house sleeping when they set the house on fire. She awoke when the fire started, but since she was not able walk, she could not escape. Eventually, someone from the area heard her cries for help and pulled her out of the fire. The motive behind the attack was to burn the house which was used as a house church. Ask God to comfort the family of this elderly lady. Pray the house church which met in this home will continue despite this horrible incident.

I have recently been exposed to people who either refuse to participate in Christmas, or do so marginally, because they believe that because of its roots it is a pagan holiday that should not be celebrated by Christians. I want to tackle this subject for a minute today, because I think that it’s also a good argument to celebrate it. 

As part of the Alternative Lifestyle, we try to engage our culture in order to transform it with the Good News, and Christmas is a perfect example! It is true that Christmas was originally a pagan holiday, but when people who had celebrated that holiday their whole lives became followers of Christ, they used the holiday to celebrate the birth of Christ. They impacted their culture, and they are still impacting ours – they changed the world. If you ask 99% of the people in America what Christmas is about, they will say that it is a celebration of the birth of Christ, and we have those Christians to thank for it. It may have been a pagan holiday at one time, but there is no question, at least in my mind, as to whether or not it is still one today. We are celebrating the Son-God this season, not the sun-god.

So if you are going to use that argument against Christmas, you must be consistent. You must also not celebrate Easter, because it also has its roots in pagan culture. And you must completely reject anything that could remotely be considered a Halloween alternative. Even if everyone starts singing about Jesus rather than witches and demons and such, more people come to church than any other time of the year, and there is tremendous potential of sharing the Gospel, you still should reject it because, after all, it had it’s roots in a bad holiday, and apparently the change of focus means absolutely nothing if it is celebrated on the same day as Halloween was.

But there is a deeper principle here – the matter of the heart. While it may be true that Christmas was originally a pagan winter festival, Christmas today is, for me, a very worshipful time of year, the most worshipful holiday. It is the only time of year that I can be at work and hear that Christ was “born that man no more may die” and “come let us adore Him.” It is when I get most overwhelmed with the wonder of it all, that God would send His only son to be born, live, die, and live again – for ME!

So those who choose not to celebrate Christmas have every right to do so, but I think that the logic is flawed. And they are missing out on what has been described as “the most wonderful time of the year!”And that’s why on this blog we are celebrating Christmas – a day we choose to celebrate the fact that Christ came to earth.Merry Christmas Eve Eve!

I don’t like malls. In my opinion, they are places designed to do one thing: to make you discontent. When you walk through a mall, you are immediately faced with the “reality” that you are not as cool and certainly not as good looking as everyone else [Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister]. Your car is old [Saturn], and you need a bigger house [RealOne]. Your hair is ugly [MasterCuts], you are fat [GNC], stupid [B. Dalton Bookstore], and hungry [Food Court]. Oh, and by the way, your shoes [Finish Line, Payless], hat, [Lidz], sunglasses [Sunglasses Hut], and underwear [Victoria Not-So-Secret] all suck. And you stink [Bath & Body Works].

I work at a mall.

The Christmas sign on the front window of Finish-Line sums it up very nicely: “Walking in a winter Want-It land!” No kidding. Whoever thought of that line was pretty witty, although I don’t think it’s the best marketing scheme. It makes me not want to ever shop there. But I digress.

On Black Friday the store I work at did nearly $80,000 of sales. Based on that alone, I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that all together the stores at the mall did over a $1,000,000 worth of business in that one day. Based on the numbers I heard from a team that just came back from Africa, that amount of money would feed roughly 83,000 orphans in Kenya for one year. Eighty-three THOUSAND kids – kids who are starving right now, as you read this. What I spent on a smoothie today would feed one of them for four months.

Don’t think that I am not against buying Christmas presents, because I’m not. What I am against is people who claim to be followers of Christ misusing what God has entrusted to them, especially during the time that we are supposed to set aside to remember that God gave everything to redeem us. We just have to keep the main thing the main thing.

And don’t think that I am against Christmas, because I’m certainly not… see tomorrow’s post for my argument in favor of Christmas. I love Christmas, with a passion. I love (ALMOST) everything about it, mostly the atmosphere, the music, and the expectation, and the joy of seeing my family enjoy the things that I have purchased for them. I have spent some of the money God has entrusted me with in the last few nights on Christmas presents for people that I love. But we must keep the focus the focus.

Here’s a good verse to keep you focused on His mission on earth (and to keep you humble!)

“Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst.”

So, in the comments, throw out some ideas about how to celebrate the Christmas season, A.L. style!

Merry Christmas Eve Eve Eve!

This week I am staying at home and having as little contact with other humans as possible. My family is gone, I don’t have to go anywhere, I can just stay home. I want it to be a time where I can focus on catching up with some things (such as blogging, for instance!), and time just to be still, put away all the noise that distracts me, pray, read, and listen to God’s voice.

The hardest part of this is that I am not talking to my fiancé Kay this week. It’s Tuesday night. It’s been 48 hours since I have been with her, 48 hours since I gave her that last hug and kiss, 48 hours since I last heard her voice. (insert very long pensive sigh here). Believe me, absence is making the heart grow fonder!

Although it’s no fun being apart from her this week, it is encouraging to me because it makes me realize more than ever that we are on the lifelong journey of making one life from the two. This deep down sense of distress and incompleteness is welling up within me tonight, telling me that something is not right. Something (or someone) is missing.

I was thinking of how this feeling does (or should) apply to our lives as followers of Christ, people who are living the alternative lifestyle. The Bible refers to the church as the Bride of Christ. And yet we are separated right now. Does it bother us?

A couple of months ago I read the book Sex God by Rob Bell (thanks Jared!). Now, I realize that I have talked about Rob Bell a lot in this blog, so let me just say that he is not the only guy I read, it just so happens that it has worked out so that I have quoted him a lot in the posts so far.

Anyway, here is the deal: In the 1st century world in which Jesus lived, after a couple got engaged, he would leave to go build an addition onto his father’s house for them to live in. And the thing that blows my mind (especially tonight!) is that they wouldn’t see each other during this time. (I am extremely glad I live today!)

I can’t imagine what this must have been like for the two of them. Not seeing the person you are going to marry for months. It must have been very hard for them. Yet It also would have been a time of great expectation – looking forward with great joy to the time when they would be together again.

So understanding that context, listen to Jesus’ words to His disciples just before His death: “There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am.” [John 14.2-3, NLT]

You know what I’m looking forward to tonight? Do you know why I am counting down the hours (66 to go)? Because I want to be where Kay is. But I wonder as I sit here in the silence tonight… how often we as the Bride of Christ in the 21st century have the same sense of longing to be with our Groom?

Unfortunately, I can’t count the hours until we see Jesus, because I don’t know when we he will “come and get us”. But this much I do know: the more we get to know Him, the more we spend time with Him, the more we love Him, from deep within our souls we should long for our Him to come and get us so that we can be with Him forever.

Let us celebrate, let us rejoice,
let us give him the glory!
The Marriage of the Lamb has come;
his Wife has made herself ready…
…Blessed are those invited to the Wedding Supper of the Lamb.
[Revelation 19.7-10]

Hello everybody!

I just wanted to let you know that I haven’t forgotten about this blog. It’s just that a lot of things have been going on in my life during the past few weeks, and I have barely had time to breathe, let alone write. So please forgive the slowness of my posts.

Here’s the three major things that have been going on: first of all, I have been extremely busy with school. The summer semester ended just before the fall semester began, and there has been some overlap as well, so I never really had a break from it.

Second, my dad had his aortic valve replaced two weeks ago yesterday. He just came home today, so most of the last couple of weeks I have spent in A-2 at Munson Medical Center. He is doing fairly well, but he is starting to feel a little sick, so that is not good. We would all appreciate your continued prayer support.

The last thing is some very exciting news. On Sunday The Orchard had a great picnic at Old Settler’s Park in Glen Arbor. The weather was absolutely perfect! Then after that me and my girlfriend Kay went to Pyramid Point. And that evening, on the sand dunes overlooking Lake Michigan, I got down on one knee, and asked Kay to marry me. And guess what? SHE SAID YES!

So there you have it. I have been just a tiny bit busy over the past three or four weeks. So once again I say sorry for the wait and I will try my best to post more frequently from now on. 

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On an entirely different note, I do want to make clear what my policy about comments is going to be on The Alternative Lifestyle. I don’t want to be a censor, because I am all about the free exchange of ideas, but there does need to be some guidelines in place for everyone’s benefit. So here they are. Please read them carefully… 

Guideline #1 | Personal attacks will not be tolerated. I despise this in politics, I despise it in relationships, I despise it in theological discussions, I despise it period. If you cannot argue your point in the realm of ideas, then, sorry, you have lost all credibility and you are automatically disqualified from the discussion. 

Guideline #2 | Comments must made be with the right attitude. Remember when your mom would say, “Don’t use that tone of voice with me”? I don’t care the least bit if you disagree with every word I write. That’s your choice. But you must say whatever you say out of grace and love, show respect for the others that are reading and commenting, and even at the end of the conversation be able to agree to disagree agreeably. If you are unable to do so, if I detect any meanness or hatred, then, sorry, your comment will get deleted.

Guideline #3 | Comments are conversations, not lectures. We can kick around an issue, disagree about things, try to convince each other, and agree to disagree agreeably, but the comments are not the place to preach your sermon. Comments are not the place for long drawn out arguments. They are also not the place for copying and pasting someone else answers to a question either. When I get the sense that the comments are meant not to enjoy the blog and the community around it, but to advance a certain ideology or theological viewpoint, that is when I start to get a little irritated. If you want to do that, then it only takes a few minutes to set up your own blog. So what I’m saying is this: if your comment is not a logical part of the conversation, then, sorry, it will not see the light of day. Which leads to the last guideline…  

Guideline #4 | This is my blog. It’s where I write about ideas and things that are going on in my head, you read about it, and hopefully respond. Maybe you disagree with me, and someone else disagrees with both of us, and the fourth person agrees with aspects of all of our arguments. Cool. As long as we are responding in a loving way, I am happy, and this blog is fulfilling its purpose. But if I feel that if the comments are being used to railroad the discussion and turn it into something else or used in any way that doesn’t benefit the Kingdom of God, then, sorry, I reserve the right to decide which comments lives and which ones go to that big forum in the sky.

I don’t mean to sound too harsh… those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know that nothing will really change because this is what I have been doing so far anyway. But I just wanted to put them out there so that from now on there will be no confusion and no guessing about where I stand on “censoring” comments. I’m sure that it will be a rare occasion when I need to do so.  

I’ll be posting some more soon… keep checking back!