Only One Month…

…and the office comes back. I can’t wait!!! Season 4 comes to DVD next Tuesday. Check out this Promo for the new season. Murder Checkers.

Blessed are the Sex Offenders

I was at Jack in the Box yesterday, when a lady who comes off and on from my church saw me and asked me to send out a prayer request to people in my church (if you are comfortable with it, please join me in praying). She asked me to pray for one of her sons who was going to reveal to his fiancee that he is a sex offender. This started me thinking…

I began to pray for him, but the prayer felt so recycled. It was the normal, “give him strength and wisdom/ soften her heart/ let them see eye to eye”. Then I began asking God for some understanding. How do we pray for somebody who has done something that society deems so atrocious? Can we honestly look into the mirror and say that we are okay with this because God can redeem it? I wondered these questions to myself as I walked out.

I know a few sex offenders, in fact, I am directly related to one. When I look at a sex offender, I try not to see an ugly person. I try not to see the broken past that they left behind for me or my family. One thing that I do see when I look at them is somebody that society has forgotten and the only way that they are remembered is when they have to check in with probation officers. Are these one of the least and lost that Jesus spoke of? Are even the sex offenders included in the Beatitudes? If so, then how do we love the Sex Offender? How do we show them compassion and grace without seeing the ugliness of their sin? These, to me, are the questions leading toward true Christianity…sometimes I find myself far from it.

Rabbit Trails of Worship

While I was working at the ‘bucks today, I read a t-shirt of one of my customers. It read: “How can I think outside of the box when they won’t even let me out?”.  This t shirt brought me back to my struggle when I was working at another church as a worship director. When I worked there, I had a few ideas that I felt could help us to teach others and encourage them in leading worship, but usually my ideas got shot down. I felt very stifled and unheard. In fact, I felt like a wierdo in my own church at times – a wierdo with crap ideas of what worship could look like.

Let me tell you, I love my church that I work in now. I feel encouraged to think outside of the box. In fact, sometimes I feel like I live outside of it. I’ve spoken many times about how the church is unoriginal and such, but I really think that it is this idea that we are stuck inside of the box. We cannot think outside of the box, because we refuse to acknowledge the idea that there even is a box in the first place!

All I can do is pray for imagination and encouragement as worship continues to develop into new and innovative ideas for praising God, Jesus, and Holy Spirit at Roosevelt Community Church and beyond. I wonder if we the church, then, should be innovative and one step ahead of what culture tells us is art? Cutting edge is not sounding like the latest trend of music with a painter on stage anymore…but what is it then? What is cutting edge? Why do we even need to be cutting edge?

Maybe it’s not the idea of being cutting edge, but leading our congregation in new ways of worship. Maybe we help them see the Greatness of God, the goodness of Jesus, and the beauty of the holy spirit through ways that they never thought were worship in the first place. Maybe our goal is not to lead our congregation to the cusp of cool, but instead take them to the feet of Christ.

thoughts?

For All of My LOST Nerds Out There!

I got an email from the Dharma Initiative announcing a security breach at Comic Con 2008. I went to YouTube and found this. Season doesn’t start until 2009. Sometimes I really hate this show.

The Ultimate in Whatcom County Dating

If you are married, you know the importance of “Date Night”. It’s a night to get out and away from home to connect with your significant other. Last night I went to the Ultimate Date here in Whatcom County, Washington. Cynthia and I were “lucky” enough to get tickets to the Lynden Fair to watch the hottest ticket in town. Randy Travis? no. Chicago? no again. Though both of those shows are really going on this week here in our little section of the United States, the hottest ticket in town every year is the demolition derby. Yep. You read right!

So we had an evening filled with Fair Food and smashed up cars. Break out your John Deere Hats and “Git-R-Done” t-shirts, because here are some pics for you (Incidently, this first pic is the first pic of Daddy with his baby pai…it’s a family pic of sorts):

All in all it was a fun night. Cynthia and I had a great time. Cars were smashed. Fords and Chevy’s were rivaled. All was right in this neck of the woods.

Mi Vida Loca

Lately, my life has been a little nuts, thus why the sporadic blog entries. To catch you up to speed, here are some of the things I’ve been planning and doing and trying to do:

- Cynthia is 4.5 months along. She is getting more and more adorable. She can’t sleep some of the time because she has to sleep on her side. That means she wakes up with me at 4:30 in the morning when I am working at starbucks. Sorry. We find out if it is a boy or girl on August 22nd (the same day we go see Amos Lee in Vancouver!)

- I’ve been trying to be outside as much as possible. A lot of my work for RCC I’ve been doing at my local starbucks up the road. Really, outside at Barkley Square they have an amazing soundtrack playing. I heard Lucy in the Sky…, Maggie May, and Tiny Dancer all in the same hour! Later they played Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. If you live in the bellingham area, you could probably find me sitting outside working here.

-Speaking of work, I’ve been working a lot these days! I work at RCC (25 hours), Starbucks (20+ hours), Give Guitar Lessons (3-5 hours), and mow our lawn for money from our condo association. I work about 50+ hours regularly. Maybe I am more in ministry than I realize, because don’t all people in ministry work this much?

- I’ve been recording a CD fueled by Burger King (I feel another diet coming on!). I’m really kind of gun shy about it. I like it, but that doesn’t mean other people are going to like it. So my question is why should I play out? When I get it done, I’ll put some tracks on my music MySpace to give you guys a listen. My friend Chris Cochran is helping me with it. He’s amazing really. I swear, all of my friends are so talented. I just wish that it would rub off on me. Chris is moving to Hillsboro, Oregon. He is working in the school district with Kids with Behavioral Disorders. I’m going to be sad when he leaves.

- Cynthia has a birthday coming up on the 13th. I really suck at this, because ”an evening of good loving” doesn’t count as a gift. I think that I disappoint her every year. Hopefully this year’s gifts will be fun for her. (cross your fingers!)

-I’m thinking of doing an “Evening of the Arts” at RCC in November. I don’t know totally what this will look like, but I think it will be awesome.

That’s about it on my end of things.