It Was a Year

Today, the year, the decade, and my chances of winning the Landis college bowl picks competition are all drawing to a close. Because the decade is too broad for me to recap here, and because my bowl picks are too humiliating, it's time for review of 2009! This last semester, I was accused pretty frequently (meaning every day in my Strategies for Teaching class) of having become a dreary pessimist. So one my expect my reflections on the past year to be a catalogue of everything I didn't like about 2009. But the truth is that I have a good life, it was a good year, and there are a ton of great things for me to comment about from the last twelve months. Besides, I can just save the other list for my post next week.

I'm surprised sometimes that the U.S. hasn't made Super Bowl Sunday at national holiday by now. Practically everyone celebrates, because so many people in our country like football, and if they don't like football, they at least like lil' smokies and crackers and cheese. Last year's Super Bowl was my favorite one, because, as you may remember, the Pittsburgh Steelers won on a game-winning drive capped by an incredible catch. Being a Steelers fan, I don't remember ever having been so happy about a sporting event in my life. No year can be all that bad that starts like that.

Through high school and in my first couple years at Ozark, I heard everyone say how an overseas mission trip has the potential to be incredibly impacting. It's true, as I learned when I went to Honduras with a group of four other Ozark students last March. It's possible to have a pretty good understanding of the world while never leaving the U.S. due to the influence of globalization and the accessibility of information, pictures, and videos. But it really is another thing to actually see it. To see the sick people shoved in a hospital bed with next to no attention, to see the people hanging out on the sides of the broken streets winding up the mountains, to see the multitudes of kids at school chasing my teammates around in a Gulliver's Travels reenactment-style game of tag. There were also times of many laughs, such as I had the perfect outline of my watch marked on my skin due to a sunburn, or hearing the Hondurans try to differentiate between saying "beach" and cussing. Also, Honduras is maybe the most beautiful place I've ever been with it's combination of mountains, beach, and Domino's Pizza. I also had the best Chinese food I've ever tasted in my life, and for that reason, along with all the others, Honduras will remain a place very dear to me.

I'm a big kid now. Or at least that's what my driver's license says. Due to this, it's no longer acceptable for me to spend my summers at home sleeping till noon and watching reruns of King of Queens all day (but thankfully, that still flies for winter break). So instead, I spent last summer doing an internship at University Christian Church in Manhattan, KS, and it was definitely a blessing. I had actually always wanted to do my internship there, so I was very grateful that it worked out. I learned all kinds of things, like how to prime a floor, use a caulking gun, and how to address and stamp stacks and stacks of mailings. But hopefully I also learned something about God and ministry. It definitely helped my self-esteem being able to walk around with a giant roll of keys to all the parts of the church.

In other parts of the country, the Midwest can sometimes be characterized as one vast farmland. Because I'm from Topeka, KS, I'm supposed to wear overalls every day, get my water from the pump out back every morning, and smoke a corncob pipe. When I realized that I was so culturally deprived, I decided to take a vacation to Southern California. I had never been before, and I had a lot of fun eating sushi for the first time, attending an obscenity-strewn improv comedy show, being the happiest I've ever been at the Happiest Place on Earth (though Disneyland isn't as good as places like Six Flags (also, In-and-Out isn't as good as Spangle's)), and awkwardly noticing two bikini-clad women wrestle at the beach ("Well, there's something you don't see in Kansas"). So I returned to my little house on the prairie that much more street-wise and culturally educated.

So that's more or less been my year. As I look back on what I've written, I realize that this is maybe the most self-centered post I've ever posted. So now I have to think of a way to make all of this somehow redeeming. First, once again, I'm thankful for all of you out there that helped make this year a good one. I've gotten to know a lot of my friends even better, and I've made new friends that I am also thankful for.

New years are filled with all sorts of new possibilities, dreams, and goals. This is a good thing, I think. It gives us a chance to refocus on what's important. So let's use the next year to love God and love people to the best of our abilities. I know a lot of my peers are going to be graduating this year and going out to serve God all over the world, so it'll be a really big year of change for them and for me. So bring it on, 2010! Granted, it's looking like a distant possibility of the year starting with another Steelers Super Bowl victory, so how good of a year can it really be?

The biggest question on everyone's mind, though, is whether we will refer to the oncoming year as "two-thousand-ten" or "twenty-ten." I'm in favor for the latter, but I don't know what the worldwide consensus is. Nor do I know who decides such things. But as influential at this blog is, I'm confident that tomorrow morning, we'll all be wishing each other a Happy Twenty-Ten.

Before Garmin

When I was on camp teams, we traveled around in a big 15-passenger van with our school's logo on the side. You may or may not have been to many church camps, but as a general rule, they're out in the middle of nowhere. You don't drive down the interstate until you see a giant sign that says, "So-and-so Christian Camp: EXIT HERE ---->" No, you usually need to get off the highway and then traverse miles and miles of little dirt roads until you see the name of the camp etched into a log on the side of the road, and then you know you've reached your destination.

Fortunately for my camp team, Sy had one of those GPS navigation systems attached to a suction cup that we stuck to our windshield. I had never really been around one of those before, and it amazed me. We would be driving through the desolation of Wyoming, and if we got hungry, we would just tell the GPS that our stomachs were grumbling, and it would tell us where the nearest Wendy's was, all in a courteous British accent. I also couldn't believe that the GPS knew about some of the roads it took us on. When we were in Oregon, it sent us down a nearly invisible gravel strip that basically went off of a cliff. I even had to get out of the van and walk ahead a ways to determine if our van could handle the incline or if it would tip over and fall into the ocean. No one in the world knew this little gravel road existed, yet our electronic guide was in on the secret.

Most people do not like to be unsure what the road ahead of them will be like. Some people do, and they have no problem just picking up and going, without being sure where they're going. If they drive a VW van, we call them hippies. If they carry their possessions in a handkerchief at the end of a stick, we call them hobos. But for the rest of us, we like to have a clear idea of where we're going and what lies along the road, both in travel and in life. High school counselors tell kids to create their own 5-year and 10-year plans. People are expected to know where they're going to go to college, where they're going to live, what job they'll have, what they'll name their pet dog, and where they'll retire, and they are supposed to figure all this out when they're 16 years old.

Whenever I tell my testimony, I tell how I thought I had my life figured out when I was in 8th grade. I wanted to be a journalist, so I was going to write for the high school newspaper, then go to college for journalism, and eventually find myself writing for TIME Magazine with a row of Pulitzers on my mantle. Then when I was at CIY before my freshman year, I felt like God wanted me to go into ministry, so I scratched my previous plan. And since that time, I've usually felt pretty good about myself, forsaking my own dreams in order to follow God and all that. It's a very heroic, courageous lifestyle, you know?

At times, however, I wonder if I still try to maintain too much control over my own life. I try to plan everything out, saying "This summer I'll do an internship here, and next summer I'll do an internship there, and then I'll get my own ministry and do these activities and take these trips, and then I'll go back to school, and then...." And while some planning isn't altogether a bad thing, we need to remember that God may not lead us according to those plans. He may have something totally different for us, and more often than not, he doesn't explain to us everything that lies in store before we set out. He just tells us to follow. It's like when God tells Abram to go to Canaan. He doesn't really tell him where he's going, and he doesn't lay out everything that lies along the road. He just tells Abram to go, and Abram faithfully does it.

I watched a Mark Driscoll sermon last night about the angel Gabriel telling Mary that she would give birth to Jesus. Mary is a teenager from a tiny village who's engaged to Joseph, and Gabriel shows up and tells her that she's going to have a baby, even though she's a virgin. I imagine that wasn't in her 5-year plan. It meant that Joseph could divorce her, which would leave her both ostracized and financially insecure. It meant that for the rest of her life, people would whisper about her and her perceived promiscuity. It meant her son would be laughed at and gossiped about. But in spite of all that, Mary answers, "I am the Lord's servant. May it be to me as you have said" (Lk. 1:38).

Mary didn't know exactly where God's call on her life would lead. She knew it would be difficult, but details were scant. But she's okay with that. She follows God, trusting that he'll work everything out. I've been reading The Fellowship of the Ring, which is the first book of The Lord of the Rings. If you've read it or seen the movie, you know that Frodo and his companions begin a quest to destroy a ring, but they have to travel a great distance to do it. Before they start out, Elrond the Elf says, "I can foresee very little of your road; and how your task is to be achieved I do not know." Later, Gandalf is describing the way that the group needs to travel at first, and Merry asks, "Yes, and where then?" Gandalf replies, "To the end of the journey--in the end. We cannot look too far ahead."

That's kind of what it's like with God. He doesn't show us the whole map at once. He guides us in little parts. He gives us a picture of the end, but everything between here and there is often veiled. Because of that, our own plans often prove meaningless. Our plans are like paintings that we create, but then God takes the painting, cuts it up, rearranges the pieces, and puts it all back together, and somehow it looks better when he's done with it than it was before.

So in the meantime, we can't let ourselves freak out over the fact that the future seems unclear. Now that I'm an upperclassman at college, my future looms large over my head. But the truth is that I don't know where I'll be or what I'll be doing in ten years. I don't really even know what I'll be doing in one year, necessarily. I think the best thing for us to do is to wake up every morning asking how we can obey and serve God with our day, and to ask the same thing in every situation, decision, and interaction we face throughout the day. Because God will guide, and we just need to follow. He may not show us the whole path, but he promises to get us to the end.

While I've been writing this post, I've been watching basketball in my basement. Every once in a while, a commercial will come on for Kay Jewelers. It shows a man and woman looking out the window during a thunderstorm. There is a loud crash of thunder, and the woman turns around into the man's arms, and he says comfortingly, "I'm right here..." and then he pulls out a jewelry box with a necklace inside and concludes, "...and I always will be." At the end of the commercial, the woman wraps her arms around his neck and says, "Don't let go....ever." And then the guy gets a kiss. Lesson learned: If I start carrying jewelry around in my pocket, then I'll have more opportunities to pull it out and say some cheesy line, and then girls will have more opportunities to fall in love with me.

I hope you all have the most wonderful Christmas ever. I hope you get all of the things you want, that you have a great time spent with family and friends, and that you remember that Jesus loves you more than you can ever understand. If I know you, then I'm very thankful for your friendship, and you mean a lot to me and I look forward to the next time we see each other. If I don't know you, then that's a shame, because I'm sure we'd be chums.

Epic

The Bloggolution has been shaken to life in the past few days. It seems like everyone has been writing something new except for me. I've been wanting to do so, but I've been spending so much time playing Halo and Nertz that I just haven't gotten around to it. Or gotten around to working on my big Doctrine of the Church paper, which is due this week and is worth basically my whole grade in that class. But we all need to set priorities, you know?

This week is finals week. Which I am very glad for. Finals week is always my favorite week of the semester. That sounds weird to a lot of people, but I really don't mind taking tests (I actually prefer that to having regular class, usually), and I only have one or two a day, and then I get to just hang out the rest of the time! Also, our dining hall opens up late at night during finals week and gives us free food, and nothing helps me study (or play cards) than being there with everyone drinking glass after glass of soda. Sometimes my kidneys just need to take one for the team.

As I said in my last post, I was recently reading Donald Miller's new book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, and I just finished it a couple days ago. It's good. Really good. It's all about viewing life as a story and how to live a more meaningful story than one spent eating cookies and writing blogs. I really like that idea of life as a story, and it's something I had thought of some before this book came out, so I'm glad that he wrote it and explained it all in a way better than I ever could.

I really love "epic" books and movies. The ones that cover big periods of time and have all kinds of characters that have some bearing on the story. Some stories just cover a little period of time and present some crisis that is solved pretty quickly. But epics are more drawn-out. The plot rises and falls, characters change and change again, relationships are strained and reconciled.

In elementary school, they did this program called Accelerated Reader, where different books were worth a different number of points, and you had to read and take quizzes on the books and get however many points a quarter. In sixth grade, I read David Copperfield because it was worth more points than any other book in the library. For good reason too, because that thing is thick. It was my Everest. After slogging through it for weeks, I finished it and took the quiz. And I thought it was great. The novel basically covers a guy's entire life, all the way from his birth. Because of this, a number of characters enter into the story and then exit, and some die. (It's actually pretty depressing in parts. If I remember, David's wife and dog die the same day.) Although the book is at times slow and perhaps wouldn't be a bestseller if written in today's action-saturated culture, I thought it was fantastic because it was epic. It told a big story about one man's life.

And in that sense, everyone has an epic story of their own. Lives are stories. I'm only 21 years old, and when I first think about it, I feel like my life story is pretty uninteresting, and nobody would really care to hear it. I've grown up in the suburbs, have always had life pretty easy, and I haven't taken too many risks. But when I think about it more, a lot has happened in those 21 years. I've gotten to go to a lot of cool places, I've seen some crazy things, and I've met a ton of awesome people. My life is full of a sorts of different scenes: funny ones, sad ones, unfortunate ones, happy ones--and they're all woven together into a tapestry of story that is my own.

We all spend so much time throwing ourselves into various stories. We read books and watch movies and TV shows because we want to enter into the story. Maybe what we don't realize is that all the time, we're walking in and out among those who are living stories. The world is like a giant library. But often, we don't crack the covers to these stories. We don't ask people about their lives. We're masters of small talk, and we'll sit and chat about the weather or movies or sports. And we leave it at that. There are people we may even consider close friends, but we know almost nothing about their stories, about their lives.

I think that, to a point, pretty much everyone wants to be known. Really known. They want someone to take interest in their story. In Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller writes about a time when he lived with a group of hippies in the woods, and he says that we loved the hippies because they showed real, genuine interest in people. He writes:

They asked me what I loved, what I hated, how I felt about this and that, what sort of music made me angry, what sort of music made me sad. They asked me what I daydreamed about, what I wrote about, where my favorite places in the world were. They asked me about high school and college and my travels around America. They loved me like a good novel, like an art film.

Do we see other people like that? Do we see them as a beautiful story to be enjoyed, or do we just see them as someone to be passed over? Do we ask each other about our dreams, fears, memories, interests, yearnings, goals, and hurts? Or do we remain content to just talk about the latest episode of The Office? Often, we don't do this intentionally. Instead we think that others probably don't want us to ask much about their lives. In our modern individualistic culture, after all, that seems awfully nosy. But I think that, to a point, pretty much everyone wants to be known. Really known. They want someone to take interest in their story. But no one can just go out and tell everyone about their own life, unless they want to look like a jerk, or if they write a book. So we all walk around, wanting to let others into our stories but feeling too awkward to ask about anyone else's. So I guess my encouragement is this: read each other's stories. I'm awful at this. I'm all about staying the surface. But good relationships require something more than that. They need a sharing of story. Sometimes we just need to put forth a little more effort to get past the title page.

I really like winter. Winter makes me feel reflective. Not that I really reflect on anything in particular. But I just feel like I should be sitting by a window reading some insightful book and, if I were into such things, drinking some sort of pumpkin-spice coffee thing. With luck, this reflective mood will result in more frequent blogging. It all depends on how caught up in watching TV I get when I'm home, I suppose.

In Search of Swagger

Thanksgiving has come and gone. We feasted. We watched football. We fell asleep on our couches. And then the next day we reheated leftovers and did it all again. Tomorrow I'm headed back to Ozark to finish out the semester. Thankfully, I'm on the downhill slope of things, and these last few weeks shouldn't be near as stressful or crazy as the preceding ten weeks. But you never know these days. Joplin is due for another power outage, and that always adds a lot of fun to the mix.

Not a lot of people know this, but my blogging days did not begin with the creation of A Chicken in a Cage with a Ferret. For a while in high school, I had a blog called Less Than Heavy Thoughts From David. Each week, I would write a little single-paragraph post about some random idea that I had. It was my little way of trying to be clever, but it probably wasn't very good. However, I did get a lot more comments on it, which either means people liked it more, or my friends were more bored. Caitlyn actually found it last year and commented to me that I sound the same now as I did back then. It's a little sad that I apparently haven't gotten any smarter in five years. I was also a contributor for another blog, and I'm not for sure, but I think it was called The Relationship Experts (how misleading). Basically, three friends and myself would write about all we knew about girls, dating, and relationships. Understandably, it didn't last very long. Today, though, two of those guys are married, so I guess they at least knew what they were talking about. The other guy was a pretty free spirit and could be anywhere doing anything by now, sort of like Carmen SanDiego.

This post will follow the stream of The Relationship Experts in that I will use a lot of space showing how much I don't know. Because, as hard as it may be to believe, I've not had much luck with such things, if you haven't been able to gather that from all of my other self-depreciating posts. Last November I actually wrote a post all about it called "The Bystander Effect," which has been my most popular post by far. Go figure.

People have told me that my problem is that I need to be more confident. I guess I can see why they would think this because I probably don't show a lot of confidence when it comes to interacting with girls. (I mean, why do you need to show confidence when you already know you're the best thing ever?) In part, this is just my nature. But in part, I sit and watch guys who do seem to exhibit a lot of confidence, and I've decided that I don't want to be like that. There's a very fine line between being confident and being obnoxious, at least from where I sit. I see guys go up to girls they might not even know and immediately start getting to work. It's all especially noticeable the first month or so of school due to all the new students on campus. Anyways, a guy will goes up to a girl and starts talking about how great of a high school football player he was and throws in some comments about how nice the girl looks and a few "mean" remarks (you know, the silly remarks like "Dang girl, those are some goofy shoes" that kind of sound like an insult but are meant to show the girl how funny and clever the guy is). Then the guy will steal the girl's cell phone and secretly put in his own number under the name "David the Stud" and will tell the girl that she needs to text him every night, and right before he leaves, he mentions that he and a few people are going to some lake that weekend and that she should go, and she should bring as many of her attractive friends as she can. And through the whole thing, they're always so dang touchy, tapping the girl's shoulder so that she turns around when no one's there; placing a hand on the girl's knee "on accident"; making the girl feel his bicep since he's been going to P90X.

It all seems so ridiculous to me. I assume that few girls wish to talk to me, even fewer want my phone number, and none want me to lay a hand on them. So I see these "confident" guys, and I think, "Sheesh, what a chump. That girl has got to think that's the most annoying thing in the world." But then I'm shown how foolish I must be, because these guys end up getting the girl, and I continue to sit in my basement watching reruns of The Cosby Show. These guys take a fancy to a girl, and they have enough confidence in themselves to makes something happen. They totally ignore the David Heffren Paradigm of Pursuance (noticing a girl, maybe saying hi in the dining hall, facebook stalking for two months, asking "How are you?" on the way to class, facebook-poking a couple dozen times, and then finally chickening out. Crap, I just revealed all my secrets!). These guys act so fast, but yet so successfully! I honestly can't figure it out.

And so, even though confidence can seem so obnoxious, I guess it's something to be admired. Girls evidently like guys who are arrogant and kind of annoying. But whatever works, I guess. I've noticed a show, I think on MTV, where they take a few dweebs and try to make them ladiesmen by being trained by an recognized "player." Eventually they send these guys into a dance club, and they have to walk around and make use of their new skills. So they'll walk up to some girl and pull an act much like the one I described above by saying something like, "Wow, you look like someone I saw in a movie" or just "Hey, I know you right? From that party last week?" And sometimes they strike out, but sometimes it works well. I'm not sure if it's because of the loud music or the already-consumed alcohol, but the girl shows interest in the guy. MTV has nurtured within him a confident, go-get-'em attitude, and it pays off.

This week, I've been catching up on all the TV shows I like. One of those shows is Smallville. Being a fan of Smallville is probably the most girly thing I do, because it's on the CW, so it's full of all kinds of teenage-y drama. Everybody on the show is beautiful too; they never hire ugly or even average-looking actors. Each new season they bring in some new cast member, and I always think "Wow, look, it's another gorgeous 20-something with nice hair." Not a lot of diversity in that cast. But anyways, in this season of Smallville, Clark Kent realizes that he's in love with Lois Lane. He's talking about this with his friend Chloe, who tells him something like, "Clark, if you want something, you need to just go get it." So the next day Clark strolls into the Daily Planet, sees Lois, and walks right up to her and lays a big kiss on her! And she must have been okay with that, because she kisses him back, and within a couple episodes, they're a couple. And I think, "Man, if only I had the gumption of Clark Kent! How does he do it?" Of course, I'd also like to be able to pick up city buses and shoot fire out of my eyes.

But alas, I'm not Superman. Nor am I on an MTV reality show. I'm just a guy sitting on his bed playing with the rubberband he just found on his nightstand. And for now, I'll let others be the go-getters. After all, I don't want to use up too much energy until intramural volleyball season is over.

With all of that said, I leave you with a couple other thoughts about social situations. For the first, I make use of good old Donald Miller. I feel like I quote him somewhat frequently, and that may be happening even more in the near future, because I started reading his new book last night, and I also already have an idea for my next post, which will use some stuff from Blue Like Jazz. Anyways, he writes, "I can get tired when I talk to somebody new, because if there is silence in the conversation, I feel it's my fault." I feel like that even with people who aren't new. I'm really not much of a talker, and I feel really bad about that. It's not that I'm bored or anything, it's just that I don't really have a lot to say. That's why, if I were to gain some confidence and go on a date, I would be terrified. I wouldn't know what to do with it once I got it, much like a dog who chases a car. How am I supposed to keep another person entertained and interested through an entire dinner? I'll probably have nightmares even tonight thinking about such a horrifying dilemma.

Second, don't you hate it when you see someone who you kind of know but not very well, and they look at you and wave, and you think, "Oh wow, this person is glad to see me! I feel so honored! I wasn't even sure they would remember me!" So you raise your hand to wave back, but then you turn around and see that the person was actually waving at someone else behind you, and now you have your hand in the air like an idiot, so you sheepishly lower it and hope that no one saw you, even though you know they did. And it's always so embarrassing.

I think it's Christmas season. At least, The Santa Clause and Elf were on TV yesterday, so it must be. I really love Christmas season, and I love Christmas music, so that's what will be playing here for the next month. And remember, we here at A Chicken in a Cage with a Ferret are honored that you would choose to spend your holiday here with us.

Sabbath

This semester has been out of control. What I have discovered about college, and possibly about life in general, is that it doesn't really get any easier. After every semester, I always take comfort in the thought that the next semester will not be so rough, but that thought always proves to be a myth. So the last few months have definitely been some of the craziest of my time at Ozark. Normally, I'll need to stay up till about 2 a.m. doing homework once or twice a semester, but I probably did so about six or eight times this semester. My problem has been that I have three classes that require an unusual amount of work. I don't know why my academic advisor let me take these classes at the same time. I thought he was supposed to be my friend. Also, I haven't even shaved since mid-October, just because I've felt so busy and lazy and unconcerned about what I look like. It's not as cool as it might sound, because me not shaving for seven weeks is what most guys look like after not shaving for four days.

My body is tired. My mind is tired. My emotions are tired. And now I'm home for Thanksgiving break, sitting on my mattress that doesn't sink in like my one at school, tapping away at my keyboard while I sip a Coke with a picture of Santa Claus on the can. And it's all so refreshing to feel like I can stop and breathe for a change. I don't think I've ever looked forward to a break from school so much before. If I didn't get a break for a couple weeks later, I very well may have lost my mind. It's actually one of my fears in life to go crazy. I'm pretty certain that someday down the road, I'm going to go insane, except I won't know I'm insane and I'll think everyone is out to get me, kind of like in A Beautiful Mind. But at least then they can make a movie about me: A Mediocre Mind. It'll be a hit.

Rest is so important in life, and yet we often do a terrible time of practicing it. This is probably in part because of our culture, where so much is demanded from us in so many spheres of life. When your days are full of classes and homework and meetings and responsibilities, topped off by relationships and hobbies, and then topped off even more with frustrations and disappointments, it becomes difficult to create a little bit of space for mind and body to rest. In addition to that, many of us do waste so much time. When we need to get something done, we sit around on facebook or writing blog posts, which just pushes off our responsibilities, which then pushes into our times of rest. The only result of this is that we feel more and more weighed down, and we drag our aching bodies out of bed and down a canister of 5-Hour Energy just to make it through the day. We're not made to be able to handle all that, and we nearly lose our minds because of all the furious activity of our lives.

I think it's so cool that God wants us to rest. In fact, for the Israelites, he commanded it by telling them to keep the Sabbath day holy and to abstain from work. He knows that our tendency is to work ourselves into the ground, so he wants to make sure that we stop and breathe every once in a while, that we replenish ourselves physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Yes, God wants us to work hard and to serve him with everything we've got. But he also wants us to relax and talk with friends, to sit and be contemplative, to stuff ourselves full of turkey, potatoes, and pie and to fall asleep in front of the TV during a football game. We need to take advantage of these opportunities for rest, these times to refill our empty selves. Otherwise, it's like trying to pour milk on your cereal from an empty jug. And dry Corn Flakes only get us so far.

Have an awesome Thanksgiving. I'm thankful for all of you, whether I know you're out there in Internetland or not. Read the other blogs on the sidebar (especially Charlie's post "Campus Craziness. He makes some especially good points in that one.) Go relax and think about something significant. Go read a book that you want to read, not just one you have to read for class. Watch some basketball. Eat Spangles. Actually, I guess I'm telling you all to do all the things I plan on doing with my week. So what I mean is this: Be like me this week. How egocentric of me.

Life is Stupid. Enjoy.

A few days ago, Charlie, Connor, and myself decided that we needed to take a trip. In the middle of suffering through the trenches of this time of the semester, sometimes you just need to get out of the dorm and go blow off some steam. So we did what any three single, crazy guys would do: we went to Wal-mart and Taco Bell. After Charlie had checked out and were waiting for Connor because he had to write a check like an old lady, I talked with Charlie about how I tend to take the same three or four topics and write about them in pretty much all my blog posts. I just recycle the same ideas and put different words to them. It's really sad, actually. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I've written before about how I use the same few topics all the time. So there's that.

From time to time, I'm accused of being a pessimist. It's a pretty fair characterization. Whereas other people see the glass as either half full or half empty, I usually see it as all empty. I really am trying to work at it. I decided constant negativity is probably a pretty unattractive quality. I don't think I'm quite as pessimistic as some people think, however. Most of it is a joke. A pinch of fatalism and self-degradation can be funny, but there is a fine line between funny and obnoxious, and I probably fall into the latter category too often.

All of that ties in only very loosely with what I'm writing about tonight. This past week, I was reminded several times about just how dumb life can be sometimes. I'm often reminded of this fact, and I often write about it. But this week, I've decided to put a more positive twist on it. Because life is dumb, but it's also funny sometimes precisely because it is dumb. It's full of unfortunate circumstances and tragic ironies that force you to sit back and think, "Wow, I can't believe this is how things work out. It's better than a movie script."

Bad things happen, and as I've written before, they're worth getting upset about. A lot of the time we try to stuff our emotions so that we don't let others find out that not everything is peachy. I think being genuine and open is normally a positive thing, and that's coming from someone who rarely shows any emotion at all. But at the same time, we often take ourselves way too seriously. We think every little bump in the road of life is a cosmic tragedy of cataclysmic proportions, and we drag our feet and hang our head and complain that "no one has ever gone through what I'm going through." And then we sulk in our locked rooms and listen to music that reminds us of how terrible life is while we devour a box of Cheez-Its out of our angst.

It's time for a shift in perspective. When something unfavorable happens, look at the humor in the situation and smile. As cliche as it may sound, a year down the road, whatever problem you had will probably seem like nothing. Yet we become so focused on what we don't like that we're unable to take a step back and enjoy it, not by overlooking or ignoring it but precisely because it kind of sucks. Life is a joke sometimes and people are ridiculous and thing turn out like they were never supposed to, and it's all so awesome. I think one of the best qualities a person can have is the ability to laugh at himself--to see a bigger picture of a situation and to say "Man, my life a joke, and I look like an idiot. That's pretty funny."

At church last week, we were challenged to think about which of the fruit of the Spirit we want to make more evident in our relationships. I decided mine should be joy. If you know me, there's a good chance that at some point in our relationship, I've either ignored you, made fun of you, or just been a jerk to you. And I really do apologize for that. I like people, I swear. I like life, and I like to laugh, and I like to laugh at life. So enjoy it all. So when the glass looks empty, don't just throw yourself into a state of lament. Fill it back up with Coke and drink it down again.

Tonight I enjoyed some delicious Chick-fil-A with my good friend Caitlyn. She's really smart but said she doesn't have much of a desire to write anything. I, on the other hand, am not very smart but like to write. So I thought, "Hey, we should collaborate!" And then I said my thought out loud. So be on the lookout for a Heffren/Lippitt post sometime in the near to distant future. (This is my hook that makes you come back and read again. Hope it works!)

Last One Picked

Sadly, I feel that I end up having to say this at the beginning of many of my posts, but I'm deeply sorry that it has been so long since I have written anything. Life has been out of control. Or more specifically, schoolwork has been out of control. This semester has definitely been the most stressful in that sense than any of my other semesters. If there is ever a chance of me dropping out of school and going back to working at Blockbuster, this is probably when it will happen. But even though things have been busy, they have not been all bad. My good friend Angie flew out from California to hang out with us Midwesterners this last weekend, and that was a ton of fun. We went to a corn maze and made a sweet video that you need to go on facebook and check out. Angie is very cool and good at Wii and is very smart, and she has a blog that you should go check out; there's a link in the Bloggolution bar on the side. Speaking of that, Jessie recently created a blog, so you should check that out too: www.runningthroughmoments.blogspot.com.

Tonight I'm returning to a theme that I know have touched on several times before, but it's an important one, I think, so I will rehash it again now. I've been thinking lately about the various places we seek approval. A lot of people like to come off as an independent renegade, so they say that they don't care a lick about what anyone thinks, but I usually doubt that. We work so hard to make sure that our friends, families, acquaintances, and even random strangers have a positive view of us. We like to be liked, and we turn to the world to receive that approval.

But there's a problem. The world will constantly tell us that we aren't good enough, and we'd better do all we can to pull ourselves up to the level of its acceptance. So we have to change our appearance so we can look like that guy or try to be as smart as that guy or to be as athletic as that guy or to have as much money as that guy, and it goes on and on and on. In effect, we're left to pull ourselves up by our own hair so that we can reach the plateau that the world tells us we need to achieve. But no matter how hard we try and how much we fix ourselves up, we always come up short. There is always some other area in which we need to improve ourselves.

It's similar with God in a small sense, but thankfully, it's much, much different. Like the world, God also tells us that we aren't good enough. We don't live up to the standard that God has set as acceptable. But he says, "You're not good enough. And that's ok. I can make you good." We aren't told to lift ourselves up God's perfect standard. He gives it to us, and he accepts us as we come. He isn't put off by our lack of talent, our asymmetrical features, or our annoying idiosyncrasies. He genuinely likes us and wants to be with us.

One of the dumbest things we do as humans is that we keep chasing after the world's elusive approval instead of God's. It doesn't make sense. We receive our own self-worth from the opinions of others, even though it always fails, and all the while God is saying, "I love you and care about you and accept you as you are!" Why can't we be happy with that? Why do we keep trying to draw water out of a dry well when there is another one overflowing right next to it?

There's a children's picture book called Are You My Mother? In the book, a little baby bird hatches while his mother is gone, so he goes around, asking all sorts of things if they are his mother. He asks a cat and a cow and a dog if they are his mother, but they each say no, so he moves on to asking a boat and a plane and a power shovel. I think we are sort of like the baby bird. It's like each of us is holding our little hearts, and we go through life asking all sorts of different people and things, "Can you guard my heart? Can you protect it and let me know that I'm good enough? Can you satisfy?" But in the end, all of those things fail to do what we ask, because we weren't made for them. As the baby bird is finally united with his mother in the end of the book, we need to turn to God, hand our hearts over to him, and allow him to define us and let us know that we're alright.

Last winter I went on Ozark's Spiritual Formation Retreat. It was really good and helped me get a lot of things on track that I needed to. On the first night of the retreat, one of the professors read Psalm 62 to us, and we just meditated on it a bit. Here's a few select verses from that psalm: "My soul finds rest in God alone; my salvation comes from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will never be shaken...Find rest, O my soul, in God alone; my hope comes from him."

I remember that when I heard this psalm, what stuck out to me most was the repeated use of the word "alone." God alone is enough. God alone is fulfilling. I especially like it in connection with the word "fortress." It makes me think of a castle. A castle is built of a bunch of different stones. If my life is a castle, if my self-worth is a castle, those different stones may be where I draw that worth. So the different stones may be all the different relationships that I depend on to make it through life. Obviously, the biggest stone should be God, but there are other smaller stones for my friends and family and such.

The problem with this castle is that it's unstable. If I build my worth even in part on what other people think of me, I'm sitting on a pretty shaky structure. Granted, I've been blessed with some people in my life that have always been there. But if I establish myself on this friend or that family member or that girl, I'm building on the wrong thing. God alone needs to be my rock and fortress. Even if his stone makes up the majority of the castle, it's not enough. He needs to be the whole thing, because he's the only one who is perfectly sturdy. A castle built on anything else is always in danger of collapsing.

I've written before that contentment can be a difficult thing for me to attain. And I imagine that I'm not the only one. When situations don't work out the way I want them to and when I feel let down by circumstances or by myself, it can be hard to be satisfied knowing that God still has my back. I might feel like I need something else in addition to that, but the truth is that I don't. I'm not totally sure how to deal with that. I guess we just need reminders, and we need each other for encouragement.

It's like kickball. I might be the last kid picked by the world. But I'm chosen by God. And his kickball team generally wins.

When Church Runs Long

"'Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.' When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, 'Brothers, what shall we do?' Peter replied, 'Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off--for all whom the Lord our God will call.' With many other words he warned them; and he pleaded with them, 'Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.' Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand were added to their number that day."
-Acts 2:36-41

I've been a Christian for a long time. There has never been a time in my life when I was not involved with the church. I went to the little kids' Sunday School classes when I was young and I sang "This Little Light of Mine" and I made plenty of crafts out of popsicle sticks and googly eyes. I went to the camps and CIYs. And now I go to class for 19 hours a week and learn about the Bible and how to best tell people about Jesus. And for as long as I can remember, Sunday mornings means church. Because of that fact, along with my own apathy, church can unfortunately seem very ho-hum. When I wake up on Sunday mornings, my first thought is not, "Man, I can't wait to see what God's going to do at church today!" I expect to go church and sing some songs and listen to a sermon and eat some donuts and then come home. Nothing more. Everything that happens at church is completely expected.

But today I saw something that I've never seen before. For the last several weeks, our preacher has been preaching a series called "The Journey." It's been all about what conversion to Christianity means. The first week was about faith, the second about confession, the third about repentance, and finally, today was about baptism. Of course, the sermon ended with a pretty overt invitation for people to be baptized. There was no time like now, the preacher said. It's what God has commanded us to do, and it's how we begin our lives with him.

I tried to keep count of how many people were baptized, but I lost track around 20. I would guess it ended at about 30-35. Old people were baptized. Young people were baptized. Guys were being baptized and then turning around and baptizing their brothers. An Ozark student was baptized. For I don't know, 40 minutes, people just kept coming up to surrender their lives to Christ. The service went quite a bit longer than is typical. It was insane. I had never seen God get so out-of-control. Or more accurately, I had never seen Christians allow God to be so out-of-control.

In a way, I was sometimes skeptical. I mean, there's a system for these types of things, you know? First you mark on your attendance card that you're interested in becoming a Christian, and then one of the elders comes to your house for coffee, and then you meet with the senior minister, and then you read some stuff, and then you come forward at church and are baptized. You can't just run up into the water because you've heard God speak and want to give yourself to him, can you?

We want to have control over so much of what happens in conversion. And for good reason. We want people to understand what is happening when they're baptized. We don't want them making this decision just because it's the "churchy" thing to do or because their friend did it. I was baptized when I was nine years old, and I think it was too soon. I think I believed in Jesus, but I didn't really understand what it meant to be a Christian, to no longer live for myself but only for him. Yet at the same time, there is incredible value and power in someone simply saying, "I don't know everything about God, and I don't know what the road ahead may hold, but I know that I need Jesus and want to belong to him." It's so beautifully faithful and trusting. It's almost like the type of trust a child would have. And word on the street is that that's what Jesus is looking for.

I've been doing a lot of reading about the history of the church recently. Not so much by choice, but due to the fact that I'm taking Church History Readings this semester. What that means is that instead of going to class, I just do a lot of reading and then take quizzes on the books I read. There's a book due every two weeks, but I'm not much of a fan of staying on top of my responsibilities. So I spent this last Friday and Saturday morning reading 400 pages of history. Fun weekend. But anyways, I read about all these crazy revivals in the life of the church where people would travel from miles just to hear a preacher proclaim the gospel, and then thousands of people who give their lives to Christ. Some of the stories are absolutely nuts. Of course, it's just history. The world has changed since the time of the Great Awakening. People are much more sober and well-educated. They won't get caught up in spiritual excitement. Revivals are dead.

What we forget is that there's still a Spirit that likes to reassemble skeletons' dry bones and breath life in them. That there's a God who is still reconciling creation to himself. That there's a Christ that is supreme over the universe. Sure, these great revivals we read about happened a while back, but the God who initiated them is still working. Maybe the problem is that we're too busy cramping his style. We get so concerned about controlling what happens in the church that we're not listening to the head of the church. We want people to come to our churches, so we only preach practical self-help sermons and put the good news about Jesus' resurrection on the shelf. I hope revivals aren't dead, and I wonder why one can't start in little Carterville, Missouri until it stretches across the entire globe.

None of the people at church made it to the buffets as early as they usually do today. But there was a great deal of rejoicing and celebration among the angels in heaven this morning. And somehow, I think that may be more important that an early lunch.

Praise From ______

People like attention. Nobody wants to be just another nameless face in the crowd. We all want to be known, to have people wave at us and yell, "Hey David, how's it going?!" And then there are the unfortunate incidents where you think you see someone unexpectedly wave at you, so you sheepishly raise your arm to wave back, only to realize that they were actually waving at someone behind you, and you feel like a complete idiot and decide not to make eye contact with anyone for the rest of the day.

But the point remains that we all like to be recognized. The reason FFA kids spend so much time learning how to judge livestock is so that they can get a nice shiny medal to drape around their necks. Grown men spend hours playing Pac-Man at the laundromat so that they can enter their initials in the high scores list. Band students nearly make themselves go crazy from practice in hopes of nailing that sweet oboe solo. And perhaps too often, Christians do good things, waiting to be applauded for being so spiritual or loving or pious.

In John 5:41-44, Jesus says, "I do not accept praise from men, but I know you. I know that you do not have the love of God in your hearts. I have come in my Father's name, and you do not accept me; but if someone else comes in his own name, you will accept him. How can you believe if you accept praise from one another, yet make no effort to obtain the praise that comes from the only God?"

If there has ever been someone who had the right to bring attention to himself, it would be Jesus. He could do whatever he wanted. He would have been the most interesting person in any conversation, and he could one-up anyone's clever comment or funny story. He lived a sinless life and could have gone around saying, "Hey everybody! You should all come tell me how great and awesome I am!" But Jesus' focus really wasn't on himself as much as it was on glorifying the Father. He wasn't all that concerned about whether or not everyone thought he was the best thing ever, and he was the best thing ever. Actually, he knew that people would hate him and want to kill him, but he didn't change the things he said or did just to suit their preferences. His sole purpose was making God happy, and he knew that if he did this faithfully, the Father would glorify him (Jn. 8:54).

I wrote for my high school newspaper, and I was always excited on days when new issues would come out. It was always satisfying to see a byline with my name on it on the front page, and I would see a bunch of students at lunch or in classes flipping through the pages that I had worked on. It was even better when I was the editor my senior year, because each issue I would have a column where I could write about whatever I felt like, and not only did my name appear, but my beautiful picture as well. I loved when another student or a teacher would see me and comment that they thought my column was funny.

It's the same kind of desire for recognition that creeps its way into the rest of our lives, even our pursuits to do good things for God. All of us want others to notice all of the great things we do from time to time, unless I'm the only one with an inflated ego. We like it when the little old ladies at church tell us how much they loved our sermon, when we get asked to lead worship for a chapel service, and when all the lazy bums in a congregation notice us dutifully stacking chairs. We put little pictures of ourselves looking thoughtful on the sidebar of our blogs. So even when we're working for God, we try to slap a sticker with our name and smiling face on it, just so people know who's responsible.

I wonder how many of us are willing to be anonymous for God's sake. Would I be content spending my life humbly serving at a little church in the middle of nowhere if it meant bringing more glory to God? Would I be happy if no book ever has my name on the cover, no conference has my picture on the speaking schedule, and no podcast has my voice broadcast to cyberspace? Not to mean that we shouldn't dream of doing crazy-big things for God, but we have to make sure that we're actually doing them for God and not ourselves.

Tomorrow (Sept 22) is National Elephant Day. Go nuts. Life is good.

Going to the Chapel

I went to a wedding this last weekend. That's what Ozark people do on their weekends--they go to weddings, because there's one pretty much every weekend, and we all really like cake and little cheese cubes. It was a very nice wedding, with a very simple service and a ton of guests and a little candy buffet at the reception. Fun was had by all, although the lengthy drive along I-44 was less than riveting, except for the mysterious fog that was centered on an adult video store by the highway on our way home.

Many weddings have a time of special music during the ceremony when one of the participants' friends sings a song while the couple takes communion or lights a unity candle or pours some unity sand or whatever, and this wedding was no exception. I always feel like this time is a little bit awkward, because the song usually goes a little longer than the partaking of community and the sand, so it ends up with everyone standing around while the musician finishes up. During this time, you can see the couple talking to each other a little bit to break the awkward tension of just standing there.

I commented to my friend sitting next to me at the ceremony that I always wonder what the couple is saying when they're talking up there. If they follow the tradition about the groom not seeing the bride on the wedding day until the ceremony, then this is the first time the two have talked all day. It's got to be a terribly odd time, I would think. So I thought about what I would probably talk about, and it would probably involve such enthralling statements as: "Hey...so....how are you?" or "So what'd you have for lunch today?" or "Did you see that the Reds won last night?"

I'm a pretty poor conversationalist as it is, and I can't imagine that I'm going to become wildly entertaining when I'm dressed in a tuxedo on stage with all of my family and friends staring at me. So if the future Mrs. Heffren is out there reading this, I apologize far in advance for that slot in the ceremony. But hopefully by that time, you'll already know that I'm fairly lame and at least have become used to that fact. If you haven't realized it by then, I guess you're in for a pretty long life.

This Is The Song That Never Ends

"Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under his wings. Day and night they never stop saying: 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come.' Whenever the living creatures give glory, honor and thanks to him who sits on the throne and who lives for ever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall down before him who sits on the throne, and worship him who lives for ever and ever. They lay their crowns before the throne and say: 'You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being."
-Revelation 4:8-11

"Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels, numbering thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand. They encircled the throne and the living creatures and the elders. In a loud voice they sang: 'Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!' Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, singing: 'To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!' The four living creatures said, 'Amen,' and the elders fell down and worshiped."
-Revelation 5:11-14

"After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: 'Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.' All the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures. They fell down on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying: 'Amen! Praise and glory and wisdom and thanks and honor and power and strength be to our God for ever and ever. Amen!'"
-Revelation 7:9-12

This may be the best post I've ever put up, simply because it's going to include very few words from me and already has a lot of Bible in it. There's a worship song that's pretty popular in churches right now called "Revelation Song." I've been hearing it a lot for the past several months, and I really like it. A lot of the words are straight out of the passages above, and it very much has a "throne room" feel to it. It's good.

I think there's something really cool about the church singing praises to God together. I understand that worship is a much bigger concept than singing songs at church, but I still think that singing songs is an important part of it, and when I use the word "worship" here, that'll be what I'm talking about. But anyway, communal worship is an incredible thing. The various members of Christ's body coming together to amplify the sound of adoration to him. And of course, we experience this in a limited sense now. Most churches are small, only a couple hundred people or less. Even the biggest churches aren't more than fifteen or twenty thousand. But then we look at Revelation, where all the church is gathered around Christ in worship, and it's absolutely mind-blowing.

During worship at church a few weeks ago, we were singing "Revelation Song," and I thought for a moment just about all the people that I've been fortunate to have worshipped alongside in my life. The guys from my floor as we sit behind the deaf ministry students in chapel. Homeless guys in Atlanta. A hundred sugar-charged sixth graders in Indiana. My friends in California. Villagers spouting off Spanish in Honduras. My mother and grandmother. The old ladies at my home church. And one day, all of us will be back together, shouting and singing and dancing for God. And people won't complain about style or instruments, because all of the focus will be on Christ, who will have overthrown Satan and ransomed his people and is ruling the universe. And all the problems and hurts and crap that I deal with now will no longer press on my mind, but as the hymn says, "And the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace." That's something worth looking forward to, I think.

That's it for tonight. No criticisms or sarcastic remarks or urges for you to change something. Just something I'm excited about, and that I hope you are too.

I preached at my home church last week. The audio from it is up online if you care to hear the voice that unfortunately accompanies my typing: www.tccchurch.org/sermons.html.

Be There

Last August I wrote a post called "Dead Space." It was about how the gap between my weeks on camp teams and the beginning of the fall semester seemed like a barren desert in which I loafed purposelessly for two weeks. And now, an approximate year later, I find myself in a similar situation. It definitely doesn't help that school is starting a week later this year, giving me one more week of staying up till 2 a.m. watching episodes of House on my computer. (By the way, my trip to California was a ton of fun, and it would have been nice if I could have somehow stayed there for a couple more weeks playing Wii and hanging out with movie stars.) Needless to say, and as I've mentioned in previous posts, I'm very excited to get back to Joplin on Saturday. I don't do so well sitting around by myself all day. I need other people to keep me sharp, I think. It feels like my mind is trudging through mud lately, and consequently, the remainder of this post will be pretty uninteresting, I'm sure.

For my internship this summer, I had to read Purpose Driven Youth Ministry by Doug Fields. I've had the idea for this post tucked in the back of my mind for a while, and I thought for sure that I thought of it because of a section of that book. But I just spent 15 minutes trying to track down that passage with no luck. So here's what I will say about Purpose Driven Youth Ministry: It uses an absurd of acronyms that are supposed to help the reader remember the main points (H.I.T.; H.A.B.I.T.S.; S.A.G. 5; S.H.A.P.E.; R.E.L.A.T.I.O.N.S.H.I.P.S.; M.I.N.I.S.T.R.Y.). Obviously, these ridiculous acronyms didn't help me remember anything, nor would they have helped you.

In spite of all these random letters, there was one idea that got me thinking in the book. Or at least I think I was in the book, but since I can't find it, maybe it was actually birthed from my own mind somehow. So now I will finally begin to get to my point. Far too often, we do a poor job living in relation to our current situation. In a sense, we need to live in the moment. I don' t mean living in the moment in the sense that we all go get trashed every night and blow our money on endless luxuries and making out with as many girls as possible. I try to not endorse being an idiot. But what I mean is that, because of our schedules or worries or wishes or whatever, we don't do a very good job dealing with what's laid before us.

Each of us are thrown into numerous situations every day. We're faced with decisions, we engage in conversations, we're confronted with problems, and we perceive needs. It's important that we learn to deal with life according to the moment, according to what it's giving us at any second. But instead, we're often too focused on how things were or how they should be or how we wish they were, and we miss what's right in front of us. We need to be present. We need to slow down our super-charged minds and take life one minute at a time. We need to be attentive to those with whom we're talking. We need drink in all of the enjoyment we can in good times, and we need to ask what we can learn in bad times.

We can't do anything about whatever present situation we're in. For example, if my hand is on a hot stove, I can't change the fact that my hand is on that stove at the moment. It's already done. I can only do something about whether or not my hand is on that stove a split second later, namely by jerking it back. It does me no good to think, "Man, this hurts. I really wish my hand wasn't on this stove right now." Then my mind is disconnected from the present, and I just end up with a charred appendage and a hampered NBA career. So the point is this: Be present. Live in the moment. When you're in some situation you don't like, deal with it. When you're talking with somebody, pay attention to what they're saying. When you're at IHOP at midnight with your pals, laugh hard and eat a lot of pancakes. And when you're at Ozark and see a skinny kid with glasses walking around looking hungry, buy him some Chick-fil-A. It's all about the moment.

One Internshp Wiser

Right now, I could look out the window and gaze upon palm trees. What that means is that I'm not in Kansas right now. We don't get palm trees in Kansas. We get sunflowers and wheat and trees that drop those hot rock things that kids at camp rub on the cement and burn each other with. I have taken a temporary leave of absence from the Midwest and am visiting my dear friend Wendi in California, but she's working right now so I am pouring my heart out to all of you as I sit on this couch with a nice leaf-pattern. I had never been in California before. Honestly, from what I've seen so far, it really isn't all that different from most other places. Kobe Byant hasn't introduced himself to me or anything yet. I feel like I haven't really been on a vacation for a long time. I've gone to lots of places, but they've generally all been for Bible Bowl or conferences or camps and such. I think it's rite of passage from boyhood to manhood to take a mildly irresponsible trip across the continent just to hang out and have some fun.

On Sunday I finished my youth ministry internship at University Christian Church in Manhattan. Along with letting me feel important for having a little desk in a church office, the internship allowed me to learn a great deal about God, myself, and ministry. Because it would a real shame if I walked away from my internship none the wiser for my experience. So even if I really didn't learn anything, I'm at least going to try to make something up right now so that I have something to write.

Maybe the most important thing I learned this summer is the importance of supportive relationships. Ministry is difficult and can be draining. And when you work so much with youth, it can be hard to build good relationships with other people your age that you can just hang out and have fun with. People that you can talk to when things are tough. I'm so used to always being around so many other college students while I'm at Ozark that it definitely felt like something important was missing when I had so much time to myself this summer. All the people I met and worked with in Manhattan were awesome, but I very much missed all my friends, which is in large part why I ended up at Panera every night with a glass of Pepsi and a laptop with facebook open. So what I learned is that it is so important to build relationships with people outside of the ministry, just to help you keep your sanity. I've been thinking a lot lately about community, so I don't want to write out everything now because there's a bunch that I want to save for a later post.

For me, that supportive base is especially necessary when it comes to middle school ministry. I love middle schoolers; I really do. But it's hard for me, and I still have a lot to learn about it. I guess different people are naturally wired for different kinds of ministry. And I don't know if I'm built for middle school ministry. Many middle schoolers like fun, crazy, energetic, entertaining guys. I'm none of those things. I like to sit around and talk and play cards. But that doesn't mean I just back out of working with middle schoolers. It means I work harder at it. A lot of times we abandon our weak spots as a lost cause, forgetting that God works in our weaknesses. And by the end of the summer, I felt like things with the middle schoolers were much better, but there's still room to grow.

One final thing I learned this summer is something that I've already known and written about, but that God constantly reminds me of, and that is that ministry success ultimately depends on God. If we think we can do it ourselves, we'll fail and look like idiots and possibly cause more harm than good. Our job is rather to bring what little we might have and let God use us to accomplish his mission. We join God in what he's doing; we don't stomp into the wilderness as a renegade bent on saving the world by our own might. We allow God to be the force behind our ministry, to use us as his tools for his purpose.

So that's my summer. I'm sure (or at least I hope) that I learned a lot more on my internship, but I guess I've already written about most of it, or perhaps I'm just forgetting it all. I'm becoming increasingly stoked about getting back to Ozark, and the more I think about it, the more excited I become. If you happen to see me at the annual ice cream social, or maybe just strolling around campus, just wave, and if you're lucky I'll wave back and show you my sweet California tan.

Not Living Down to Par

The train of time continues to chug down its tracks with increasing velocity. I'm now entering the tenth week of my ten-week internship in Manhattan, and it feels like I just began. Things at the church have been going great. The youth minister I'm working with is actually in Ecuador with eleven of the students on a mission trip, so for the last week I've gotten to play Youth Minister. So I get to sit at the big desk in our office. It feels nice. As long as I can keep all the students from denouncing Christ for one more week, I will consider my internship a glorious success. I feel like my last week may be a little slow, because I already have my Wednesday night lesson done, so all I can really think of to do is write a lesson for the next Sunday School and clean up the office. So if you feel like coming to Manhattan and taking me out to lunch...I'll probably be free.

1 Timothy 4:12 says this: "Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity."

Youth ministries love this verse. When I was in middle school, our guys' Bible study was called "Platoon." And we had these sweet dogtags with our names on them and the reference to this verse. And I would wear it around, but underneath my shirt because I had another chain with a little flame on it that I wore too. And I eventually lost the dogtag, and I decided I should grow up and stop wearing the flame necklace when I turned twenty-one.

I'm a member of a very demanding generation. We demand our rights! We demand respect! We demand not to be judged! We demand to be heard! We demand drive-thrus that are open till midnight or later! And the same is true even among Christians. So the first half of 1 Timothy 4:12 becomes our mantra as we stream into churches shouting "Don't you dare look down on me because of my youth! God said that you have to listen to what I have to say!"

But there is a second part of the verse. It tells us to set an example through a lifestyle that is pursuing reflection of Christ's. Perhaps such a lifestyle is the means to the end of respect that the first half mentions. How does a young person keep others from looking down on him? By setting an example by his life. By establishing a filter between his reactions and his tongue. By guarding his conduct. By loving everyone as God does, seeing them through his eyes. By faithfully stepping out and trusting Jesus at his word. By grasping purity in the middle of a sensuously powered culture.

Society doesn't expect much from young people. Young people are supposed to go party and drink and have sex and hit the beach for spring break with hopes of landing a spot on an MTV special. They're supposed to be irresponsible, promiscuous, lazy, and self-centered. They're supposed to be everything but what Paul prescribes to Timothy. Culture has set the bar so low for young people, and unfortunately, we've often stooped to match their expectations. Alex and Brett Harris wrote a book called Do Hard Things, which is really geared toward high schoolers but can be easily applied to college students as well. And they talk about the "Myth of Adolescence," which says that young people are incapable of really doing much of any significance in the world. And maybe that's what Paul is talking about too. I'm twenty-one years old and in college. And I don't want to pretend that I'm older than I am. I want to go out and have fun and eat tacos at midnight. But I don't want to be immature either. We sell ourselves way short if we think that it's our responsibility to be foolish before we decide to finally "grow up."

As young, incoming Christian leaders, we sometimes like to complain about those who have gone before. We gripe about how the previous couple generations have crippled the church with their stubbornness and short-range vision. So it's a good thing we're here to save the day! And so we storm into the church making our demands for respect. And to some extent, we'll get it because we went to Bible college and have our names on a door in the church office and on the back of the weekly bulletin. But it's moronic to expect that others not look down on our youth if our lives remain spiritually infantile. Parents wouldn't let their baby make family financial decisions if he can't even wipe his own butt. So we shouldn't expect the church to pay too much attention to what we have to say if we're not willing to develop the lifestyle Paul outlines in 1 Timothy 4:12.

The purpose of Bible colleges are essentially to train Christian leaders. So we take all kinds of classes that teach us how to handle meetings and manage finances and work with other staff members and communicate effectively. And all of those things are important, but they're useless if not supported by a leader's lifestyle. Instead of flatly demanding respect, we need to demonstrate lives that demand to be heard.

Spots

I've been sitting here for a while debating in my own mind whether or not I want to write anything today. It's been somewhat of a long and exhausting week, and I'm pretty tired and want to get home in time to watch Baseball Tonight. But, luckily for you, the chipotle chicken sandwich I just ate has given me a fresh breath of vigor and energy. Now hopefully this Pepsi will spark a few interesting thoughts.

I went to high school camp this last week. It was my third and final week of camp for the summer, and now I just have two more weeks of my internship before I head to California for a bit and then live the thug life in Topeka before school starts. I've been fortunate in that the church I'm interning at goes to King Solomon Christian Camp, which is my home camp. I have an odd knack for retaining random insignificant memories, and I can still vaguely remember when I first arrived at King Solomon as a nine-year-old and my brother and I started the week by playing a game of horseshoes.

I have been to King Solomon as a camper seven or eight times as a camper, as well as five times as a sponsor. So it is the home of many memories for me. Writing direction to the Gnarly Waterfountain on the boys' dorm wall. Watching Jayne Long fall flat on her face because her legs fell asleep on the swings. Celebrating Area-Wide Friendship Day, followed immediately by Playday. Seeing Jr. High kids start bawling because we momentarily made them think the end of the world had come. Granted, none of this makes any sense to any but a few of you, but for me they're vivid memories planted in my mind. King Solomon is also the location for many spiritual milestones, especially in high school. In high school, the summer was always a period of growth for me thanks to the Bible Bowl tournaments and CIY and mission trips. Camp was always the first week of June, so it sort of got the ball rolling for me.

It was a little serene when I left camp yesterday. I'm not sure if I'll ever be there again because right now my future is somewhat up in the air. In my first couple years at Ozark, I had always wanted to do my internship at University, so I knew that there was a decent chance I would be back as a sponsor. But I don't know where I'll be or what I'll be doing next summer. Chances are it won't be in northeast Kansas. And after that I'll be graduated and it's even less uncertain where I'll be. So it's weird to think about how my feet may never again step in a place that has held such a significant place in my life so far.

Places are important in the Bible. This is easy to tell because they're mentioned so frequently, and handy maps are sometimes needed at the end of the Bible just so that we can make sense of what's what. God meets with and works for people at a number of specific places. He calls Abraham and promises to give him a certain land. He speaks to Moses on Mt. Sinai, first in the burning bush and later to give him the Law. Joshua commands that a pile of stones be set up at Gilgal so that people can see it and remember how God brought them across the Jordan. And God has a special dwelling at the temple in Jerusalem where all the Israelites come to worship him.

We too might have a set of places that we consider especially important. Places where we've encountered God and where he has spoken to us in special ways. King Solomon is such a place for me, and I have memories of other places. I remember the basement room in a dorm at Colorado State University where it dawned on me that being a good kid and knowing the answers doesn't substitute for a relationship with Christ. Or the hill near Chanute, Kansas where it seemed like I could see every blip of light God placed in the sky.

At a camp I worked at last year, the speaker once preached on the story of Zacchaeus. He focused on Luke 19:5, which says, "When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, 'Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.'" The preacher had a bunch of "spots" cut out of paper, and he gave them to the students and asked them about their "spots." About places where they met God. Probably all of us have such places. I often hear them described as "sacred spaces." We can think of specific locales where God encountered us.

The sacred spaces are important, I think. It's good for us to have places that we can both visit and reflect on that help us to see God more clearly. But perhaps too often, we rely to heavily on such places. We think that only there are we able to meet God. It's like we have a spiritual battery, and we need these battery chargers in order to maintain a living faith. While these places are helpful in boosting us in our walks with Christ, we can be in danger of using them as a crutch to support a lazy Christianity.

Imagine that Moses never came down from Mt. Sinai. God speaks through the burning bush, and Moses is so awestruck by the event that he decides to pitch his tent there to live out the rest of his days. Israel never would have been liberated from Egypt, and the Old Testament would be mighty, mighty short. I don't think we're meant to stay in these sacred spaces forever. Rather, we go out from there to live out our faith. We can't stay at camp/CIY/Ozark indefinitely. These places refresh us and prepare us for the world.

The beautiful thing is that, in a sense, we all have a portable sacred space. Or rather we are a portable sacred space. 1 Corinthians 6:19 calls our bodies temples of the Holy Spirit. The God who meets us at these physical sacred spaces dwells within us. He goes everywhere with us. We don't have to be afraid to venture out of our places of spiritual comfort because the Comforter is with us each step of the way. It's good for us to take opportunities to visit our sacred spaces from time to time, but it's foolish for us to think that we can't find God elsewhere. A person can't sleep in a crib forever.

With all of that being said, one place that I hold very dearly is Ozark Christian College, and I'm growing increasingly anxious to return there for the fall semester. I miss all my fellow Ozarkans a great deal and I look forward to seeing you all again and hearing about your summers. I hope all is going great for all of you. Plus, there's no Chick-fil-A in Manhattan.

Know Why

One day last week, I was about to begin the unpleasant task of gassing and vacuuming the church vans following our youth group trip to Worlds of Fun. The vans and I have a pretty close relationship, because almost every week, they're taken to camp, and it's typically my duty to take care of them upon their return. Thanks to this practice, I have become more efficient in vacuuming them as I can now clean a 15-passenger vehicle using four dollars of quarters, whereas it used to take five (once I even did it in three). It's not really that bad of a job except for the miserable Kansas summer climate, which makes the vans like my own personal saunas.

Anyways, I was in the church getting some paper towels for the Hershey Kisses that had been smashed into the van floor and melted in the 100-degree heat when I bumped into one of the church elders whom I had not previously met. He is a very unique person, I soon realized. There is not an iota of shyness in his body, and right away he was talking to me about school and what I want to do in ministry and all sorts of things. At times it felt more like a military interrogation than anything. He wanted to be sure that I knew some Bible, so he made me quote a verse. After I did, he quoted 1 Tim. 4:12, which is about not letting people look down on you because of your youth but setting an example in life, love, faith, speech, and purity. He then expounded on each of these virtues, and when he got to purity, he asked me straightforwardly, "Do you look at pornography?" Not exactly a normal "small talk" question that you hear right after meeting someone. So he definitely got right down to the point of what he wanted to talk about.

He also asked me a lot about how I decided to go into ministry and what I wanted to do and all that. When he asked why I wanted to be a youth minister, I mumbled some flaky reason about how I felt God wanted me to be. Honestly, I just wanted to end the conversation, because I was already feeling pretty awkward and was in a hurry to get to the church vans. But what the elder said next made me step back and think a little. He said, "I don't care about what you feel. Feelings go up and down. Now do you know that God wants you to be a minister?"

If you know me, you know that statement resounds with how I work. I don't often make decisions based on how I feel. I think about things. And then I think some more. And then I overthink. And then I write about it on here. And I definitely didn't make a decision as significant as what I wanted to do with my life based only on feelings. But what what elder said forced me to reflect on my purpose in ministry. About why I decided to get into it.

I guess this post is more or less directed at those going into ministry. But the good thing is that, in a sense, all of us should be going into or already involved in some sort of ministry. When I got to Ozark, I had a sense of calling. I knew what I wanted to do and why I wanted to do it. I had purpose. I'm afraid that what can happen as we progress through Bible college is that we eventually get so busy doing ministry stuff that we forget why we're doing it in the first place. We know all the methods and strategies and everything, but the perceived need that pushed us in the first place has become foggy. If you're at Bible college or in ministry, at some point you felt God push you there. But you probably also sensed a need in the world. When we forget that push and that need, our ministry becomes unguided.

I do feel like God wants me to be a youth minister. But it's not just an inner emotion or holy goosebumps. I'm sick of the statistics that say 60/70/80 percent of youth group kids leave the church in college. I've seen way too many students get all hyped up about Jesus at CIY and camp only to forget about it a month later. I think the American high school is one of the greatest misison fields on the planet. And that's why I want to be a youth minister. I didn't think fast enough to share any of that with the elder, but instead walked away feeling like an idiot and questioning whether or not I'm cut out for ministry. So take a little time to think about why you're doing whatever you do. God wants to use all of us. So it's probably not a bad idea to figure out how and why.

I don't pay much attention to the news, so maybe you don't either. But here's some news: There's some crazy political situations in Honduras right now. As I understand it, the president was doing some bad things, so the military kicked him out and a new president was installed, but the old one wants to come back. I was in Honduras this last spring break, and I love the country and it's people a great deal, so please be praying for the political situation in the nation, and especially be praying for Mision Caribe and my friends there.

One Year and Still Truckin'

It was a lazy Wednesday afternoon, and a young lad of twenty years was getting a bad case of cabin fever. He had spent the previous four weeks traipsing about the country in a giant white van, and he longed to once again experience the thrill of the road. Loafing on the couch in his basement was beginning to lose its novelty. However, having heard of this new-fangled invention called the Internet, he popped open his laptop. "Wow," he thought, "I can write whatever I want and put it up on a website. And I can even choose an attractive color scheme and font style, and if I want to get really fancy, I can make it play music whenever people get on and read what I wrote. This is the perfect thing to temporarily distract me for my boredom!" So he began to tap away at his keyboard, not realizing that moment on July 2 would forever change the face of the world. Or at least would change what a very small group of people do with two minutes of their week on a semi-regular basis.

We here at A Chicken in a Cage With a Ferret are celebrating the one-year anniversary of the creation of this blog. Since this time last year, tens, nay, dozens, of people across the globe (or at least across Missouri and Kansas) have found their way to this site, though some of them may have been by accident. Regardless, we spare no expense when it comes to celebrating such a momentous occasion as today. Just mention this post to me the next time you see me, and I’ll give you a high five for free, or maybe even a sidehug if you’re lucky. But if you want the full experience, you should probably take me out to Braum’s and buy me some ice cream.

When I started writing this blog a year ago, I really didn’t anticipate that I would be interested in it beyond October (which would have been two months after everyone else lost interest, I’m sure). I’m rather skillful in starting something, thinking it’s the best thing ever, and then abandoning it almost immediately. But I very much enjoy maintaining this blog. It’s therapeutic in a sense, and I probably do it more for myself than for anyone else. That’s why people have journals, but I’ve never really been able to get into the whole journaling thing. It’s hard for me to get motivated to write something when I know no one else will see it unless I decide to dust it off someday down the road. So this is the next best thing for me. Unlike in a journal, I don’t get on here and write about all my deepest, darkest secrets (and I have many dark secrets, believe me), but it does give me a means of sorting out some of my thoughts.

And the truth is that I have learned a lot by blogging over the past year. Or at least I have learned a lot from life in general this year, and blogging has allowed me to make sense of what I’ve learned. I’ve learned that life can be really unfortunate, but that it’s humorous because it’s unfortunate and that people would rather you make fun of your unfortunate life than read about any serious topic. I’ve learned that we’re not adequate to really do that many great things by ourselves, but that we weren’t made to be adequate because God loves filling in the gaps where we’re lacking. I’ve learned that there is much to be learned from our emotions, even the bad emotions that we would rather ignore. I’ve learned that probably the most important thing we can do is make sure we’re firmly connected to Jesus, but there’s so many distractions both in ourselves and in the world that keep us from that. And I’ve learned that I do a pretty lousy job applying all the things I’ve learned.

Blogging forces me to think. After all, I don’t want this to become one of those blogs that lies dormant on some other blog’s sidebar, saying something like “Updated 5 months ago” under my title. I’ve got to keep it fresh. But truth be told, it’s not easy to come up with something to write about all the time, especially since any original thought is so elusive. Maybe that’s why all I tend to do is recycle the same few ideas but with different words.

One of the biggest problems in the world is that people just don’t think enough. They simply act. Or worse yet, they merely allow themselves to be entertained. The result of this lack of thought is that no one has any purpose, direction, or destination associated with their actions. We’re not like disciplined athletes running a race with focus (1 Cor. 9:24-27). We’re more like hamsters aimlessly running around in those plastic balls, bumping into walls, people, and coffee tables. We need to make it habit to stop running every once in a while and ask, “Where am I going?” When we finally stop moving and start thinking, we create enough space in our lives to think things like, “What can I learn from this experience? How can I become a better friend/disciple/person? How can I get closer to God? How can I do something worthwhile with my life?”

Such thinking isn’t meant to be only individual, however. It’s collective. Life is a conversation. If you meet someone who always walks around talking to himself, you would think he was a lunatic, or at least a moron. But that’s often how we live our lives. We stroll through life alone, paying little attention to anything others are saying. After all, we’re the masters of our own destinies, right? We can figure life out. Who needs the aide of others’ experience and wisdom when we have personal ingenuity? But a trailblazer isn’t courageous when there’s already a trail blazed. He’s an idiot.

I’d like to repeat a quotation that I cited in my first blog post a year ago. In his book To Own a Dragon, Donald Miller writes, “The truth I've learned about life is you can't do it on your own. People don't do well independently. One generation passes wisdom on to the next, wisdom about girls and faith and punctuation. And we won't be as good a person if we don't receive it.” And it’s true; we do need one another, because we don’t do so great alone. We end up having ridiculous thoughts and making stupid decisions. I always think I’m right. If I thought I was wrong, then I wouldn’t think what I thought. But I’m at least open to the possibility that I’m wrong, and I try to be willing to listen to what others say.

This doesn’t mean that we fold to the flow of the crowd or to majority’s opinion. That’s laziness. Individualism and community balance one another out. Sometimes (actually a lot of the time), most people are wrong. So it’s foolhardy to blindly swallow whatever others feed you. But neither do we ignore it. We need to critically listen to one another, weighing what others say first against then Bible, and then against our own thoughts, experiences, and common sense. That’s what conversation is. We speak to and listen to each other. We challenge and debate with one another. We work life out together. It’s like in math class. Sometimes there would be a super-hard assignment, so the teacher would let you work in pairs or in groups. Life is an awfully difficult assignment! It’s dumb to try to figure it out alone. But it’s also dumb to just write down whatever answer some other kid gives you. We work both alone and with one another.

Thanks for reading, whether this is your first time on here or you’ve somehow been following along for the entire past year. It is a great encouragement when people let me know that they read a post and liked it. There have even been times when people I barely know tell me that they like what’s here, which is always quite the shock. And it’s also very humbling when people who are way smarter than me and who have their act together much better (which includes just about everyone) say nice things and say that something on here even helped them. No idea how that happens. But if you all keep reading, I’ll keep writing, and we can keep the conversation going for another year. Otherwise, I’ll just go buy a journal.