Community...

So today I'm just so frustrated with my church. It seems so fake to me. I feel like the church is more committed to fancy programs than living in community. I tried to get into a small group, but the only one that meets in my area gathers on Friday's at 6:30am. I could do that if I wasn't a single parent, but I am. Plus, when I go on the weekend services they are nice, but almost too nice. It seems like the church is so caught up in doing these programs right. Plus the leader of the satellite that I go to is so wordy. People that go there don't really seem like they really want community. People want to know their small group and that's it.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm playing the victim here. I guess I'm just so frustrated that it feels so hard to get connected.

I got a newsletter today from The Simple Way and in it Shane writes an article and mentions that the mega church is dying. When I read that tonight I seemed to agree with it. The people that are still found in a mega church are either still really connected or don't want to be known.

It's funny that in a mega church there are so many places to volunteer for the programs that are put on each week. I find that so hilarious! I mean we have all these people volunteering their time to put on a show when they could be out in the world being Jesus to somebody. They could be serving the poor somewhere or teaching their kids what it looks like to be Jesus, but they are putting in the extra long hours to put a nice show together. Just seems like such a waste of time to me. I guess the argument would be that people are putting together the nice show so that unchurched people will come to know Jesus during the weekend services. Lately, it just seems the services are for the Christians already there. I'm not sure another good program is going to do it. I like what Rob Bell had to say in his book Velvet Elvis. He mentions that his church is not into programs. I haven't been to a Mars Hill service, but I'd love to attend.

I just need some community...

Through Painted Deserts

I recently finished reading Donald Miller's book "Through Painted Deserts" which shares the journey of him leaving Houton, TX and eventually arriving in Portland, OR where he decided to stay and live. The book was amazing! A few weeks ago when I started the book I wanted to share the author's note so I spent 45 minutes typing it up onto this blogger editor. Then one wrong move and I erased the whole thing. That was frustrating.
However, I went to Amazon today and found the author's note there! So I'm pasting it in here for you all to read. It is pretty good.


AUTHOR'S NOTE

IT IS FALL HERE NOW, MY FAVORITE OF THE FOUR seasons. We get all four here, and they come at us under the doors, in through the windows. One morning you wake and need blankets; you take the fan out of the window to see clouds that mist out by midmorning, only to reveal a naked blue coolness like God yawning.

September is perfect Oregon. The blocks line up like postcards and the rosebuds bloom into themselves like children at bedtime. And in Portland we are proud of our roses; year after year, we are proud of them. When they are done, we sit in the parks and read stories into the air, whispering the gardens to sleep.

I come here, to Palio Coffee, for the big windows. If I sit outside, the sun gets on my computer screen, so I come inside, to this same table, and sit alongside the giant panes of glass. And it is like a movie out there, like a big screen of green, and today there is a man in shepherd's clothes, a hippie, all dirty, with a downed bike in the circle lawn across the street. He is eating bread from the bakery and drinking from a metal camp cup. He is tapping the cup against his leg, sitting like a monk, all striped in fabric. I wonder if he is happy, his blanket strapped to the rack on his bike, his no home, his no job. I wonder if he has left it all because he hated it or because it hated him. It is true some do not do well with conventional life. They think outside things and can't make sense of following a line. They see no walls, only doors from open space to open space, and from open space, supposedly, to the mind of God, or at least this is what we hope for them, and what they hope for themselves.

I remember the sweet sensation of leaving, years ago, some ten now, leaving Texas for who knows where. I could not have known about this beautiful place, the Oregon I have come to love, this city of great people, this smell of coffee and these evergreens reaching up into a mist of sky, these sunsets spilling over the west hills to slide a red glow down the streets of my town.

And I could not have known then that if I had been born here, I would have left here, gone someplace south to deal with horses, to get on some open land where you can see tomorrow's storm brewing over a high desert. I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God's way. All my life I have been changing. I changed from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains, and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change. Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.

I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.

Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn't all happening at once.

Time has pressed you and me into a book, too, this tiny chapter we share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling our seconds into minutes and minutes into hours. Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was. This is from where story stems, the stuff of its construction lying at our feet like cut strips of philosophy. I sometimes look into the endless heavens, the cosmos of which we can't find the edge, and ask God what it means. Did You really do all of this to dazzle us? Do You really keep it shifting, rolling round the pinions to stave off boredom? God forbid Your glory would be our distraction. And God forbid we would ignore Your glory.

HERE IS SOMETHING I FOUND TO BE TRUE: YOU DON'T start processing death until you turn thirty. I live in visions, for instance, and they are cast out some fifty years, and just now, just last year I realized my visions were cast too far, they were out beyond my life span. It frightened me to think of it, that I passed up an early marriage or children to write these silly books, that I bought the lie that the academic life had to be separate from relational experience, as though God only wanted us to learn cognitive ideas, as if the heart of a man were only created to resonate with movies. No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath:

I'll tell you how the sun rose
A ribbon at a time...

It's a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn't matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were . . . and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be.

So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?

It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out.

I want to repeat one word for you:

Leave.

Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn't it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don't worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.

Passing 30...

Today is the day that I'm 30. In fact I've passed 30 this moring. I want to start sharing songs with y'all that kind of capture certain feelings. It won't always be right on the money, but it will just be a song that hits me that day. And with that here's a song titled "Two Coins" by Dispatch who was one of the best bands around before they broke up not too long ago. If they stayed together they would've grown to be as big as DMB I bet.

Click here to play the song

Last Day Before The Next Set...

What's in the number nine? What does it mean and what does it stand for, besides it obviously reprsenting a number? Nine, it seems, is the digit to avoid. Ignore it and it might go away for nine is the last number before the next set. Everything goes up after nine. Price, age, weight – everything, increases as the nine’s pass.

Well today is the last day that I have before my next set. With that I don’t want to avoid it. I want to welcome it like I welcome a nice little round pastry friend that helps us all get through the nines; a friend that I call – Donut.

Walking Into This House...

Walking into this house. Walking into this house my dreams of doing get dispersed into the stale air of an empty dwelling. No one to welcome me home. Nothing happening as nothing has happened all day here. Hello house, but it does not call out to me the same greeting. Loneliness is more what I'm sensing. Big dreams I had coming home. Things to improve the house and chores to get done, because that is what a mature person does. It all gets lost in the loneliness of this stale air.

The stuff that I felt so needed and so desired to get done are lost in this air. To be a doer instead of a dreamer is my greatest aspiration. I really want to be that person. Dreams are easy to come by. Doing the dreams is what I want to learn and what is not easy to come by for me. These feelings are a big cornucopia of depression, procrastination, laziness, loneliness and entertainmentalism (the state of being where entertainment goes at the top of any list of priorities). Where is the will to get this stuff done? Where is the desire? Why does the desire get extinguished when I walk through that door? What will it take to make desire stronger than this air? This stench of stale air.

Iraq Commentary

Hey all. I read this commentary a couple weeks ago and was reminded of it today. I would recommend that everybody read it and pass it on to as many people as you can. The media in today's world seems out for making President Bush look like he failed in Iraq for some reason. I don't know why. Hey, I have my "issues" with the President myself, but in all humility I don't have the information he has and if I did I cannot ensure that I would make the best decisions. We live in a gray world you know? It's hard to please everybody and get it right all the time.
So, please read this commentary by Ken Joseph Jr. - Who Lost Iraq?

Divorce... and what comes after

Hey all. I just saw a commentary by Lauren Winner on a new book titled Between Two Worlds by Elizabeth Marquardt which details the afteraffects of divorce on children. It seems like a good book and the article by Lauren isn't that bad. Take a read.

Y'all Got to Read this...

I stumbled across this article the other day. It's a really good read on self-esteem and how focusing on it really doesn't matter and could, in fact, be damaging. So, I guess that was a waste of the last 30 years of pop psychology.


Forget about Self-Esteem By John Fischer

Goings On

So, a couple nights ago I was giving Cam a bath and the water ran out. Yep, nothing was coming out of any faucet that I had in my house. I checked my water pressure tank and it was at zero. So at first I thought it was the pressure tank. The next day I dropped Cam off at daycare and went home to try and take a look at the problem. However, I have hardly a clue about well systems. Give me a computer and I can totally fix it right up, but when it comes to house repairs I feel totally stupid.
That's where professionals come in. I called A&C Snelten (used the phone book) and they got out to my house within a few hours. They checked some stuff and found that I had power going to my water pressure tank, but I did not have any power coming back in from the well. So, they went out to check the water pump. The guy told me that sometimes if the well goes on and off really quick it will eventually stop and need to be reset, and that's what he tried to do. After that didn't work he explained that it was my water well pump that went belly up. They spent the next hour replacing the pump. It turned out to be slightly above $1,400 to fix the whole thing. Yeah that sucked. The pump was $1,020 and the rest was labor + misc. materials.

So they got the water running again and I was back in business. I've never been so thankful to be able to flush a toilet or wash dishes. The money I had to spend sucked, but what was I going to do. The last pump I had was installed in 1987 so it lasted 19 years. That's a pretty good amount of time and if I ever move into another house that has a well I'll be sure to check when that pump was installed. Cory, who puts the C in A&C Snelten, told me that a pump should last anywhere between 15 and 20 years. Well, there I go...