25 Random Things

From Facebook:

Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.

(To do this, go to "notes" under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.)

For no real reason, here is a screencap of Michael Jackon's Moonwalker for Sega Genesis.

1. I now live in what is very clearly the South. Despite this, however, I can rest assured that my kids won't have southern accents. I have a number of students in my youth group who have lived here their whole lives who have not even a touch of a southern accent. This is not a slam against southern accents (I actually love the Carolina accent), it's just weird when kids have different accents than their parents. Unless the parents have British accents. Then it's cool.

2. I really like sports, but find myself easily able to not care about them. I wouldn't say that this makes me a "fair weather fan," as I still passionately love the Pittsburgh Pirates, who are working hard to make this season the official worst team in the history of professional sports. What I mean instead is that, when life steps in, I can remove myself from sports in a way that a lot of people cannot. I am not someone who gets burnt up about someone revealing a score to them prematurely, or that sort of thing.

3. I like to challenge myself sometimes to expose myself to new stuff. Right now, I'm listening to Bruce Springsteen's collected works. Not trying to make myself a Springsteen fanatic, per say, but trying to learn how to appreciate him. I think I'm almost there.

4. I miss snow in a way that probably makes people up north annoyed right now. I really do like the weather here, though, as it is cold in the winters (30's-40's - not snowy weather, but cold enough to know that it's winter). Much better than Florida's 360 days of summer and 5 days of spring/fall.

5. I love what I am doing (Youth Minister), and love where I am (Mooresville, NC). Five years ago, I would have never thought that I would either be living here or doing this, but I wasn't ready for either of them yet. It really helps me understand how God is always working in our lives to get us ready for what's coming next.

6. I genuinely love spending time with my wife. Pretty much every situation I can think of, I would prefer to have her there. She is the most fun person I know, and is truly my best friend. Things are more fun when she's there. I know that sounds sappy, but it's true.

7. I often get mad/envious at my cats for how comfortable that they look when when they are sleeping. Stupid lazy cats.

8. We have three cats, two snakes, and one dog. We take pride in naming pets. Cats: Akira, Truman, Schroeder. Snakes: Norton & Dinah. Dog: McFly.

9. I really like things to be clean, but I'm also a pile-maker. By that, I mean that I am often making piles of things that need to be put away. Soon those pile build and suddenly I have made a mess. This takes a good effort to organize and put away. Then everything is clean. Then I start making piles. Rinse and repeat.

10. I still consider myself a Mac person, though I have not owned one as my primary (or even my secondary or tertiary) computer for 5 years. Prior to that, though, every computer that I owned was an Apple (IIgs, Performa, iMac, iBook), so I think that gives me some credit. One day I will return.

11. I am not sure how long it will take living in the south before I start saying "soda" instead of "pop." Hopefully never.

12. I'm not sure that there is a movie that I wouldn't watch at least once (and given enough encouragement, twice - yeah, I'm talking about you, Armageddon!).

13. I have now, for the time being, stopped listening to Bruce.

14. I like to collect things, but not in any official way. More like a pack rat. I collect movies, books, and drinking glasses from the 80's. Like the ones that they used to give away at McDonald's that have The Muppets on them. I collect these things as though there will be a nuclear winter someday soon, and our new currency will be movies, books, & drinking glasses from the 80's

15. Two things make me realize that I am getting older: how often I think of what the world would be like if we still were without the internet & cell phones, and my inability to understand why America suddenly decided to love Lil Wayne.

16. Much of my time in my office, I am listening to background music from Disney parks. I love it. It's perfect to work to. Especially music from EPCOT. I don't know what this says about me, but it's true. When I switched from Bruce a few notes above, I put on the EPCOT opening medley from 1982. Hmm. (I don't get it either.)

17. Despite my best efforts to the contrary, I'm not sure that I can legitimately claim to be someone who reads books, especially books that aren't commentaries or something directly pertaining to my job. I wish this wasn't true.

18. The two things that have changed a lot of how I organize my schedule in the past 7 years have been getting a cell phone & getting a DVR. I can't think of another thing that has so fundamentally changed the way I viewed that particular medium.

19. Each of my "random things" are way too long.

20. When I was a kid, I subconsciously gave personality traits to letters and numbers, traits that I have realized are still embedded in my brain. For instance 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, & 8 are all guys. 4, 6, & 9 are girls. I don't know why, but they just are. A, J, K, M, Q, U,V, W, & Y are also ladies. That's just the way that my brain has always seen it, as plain as day. Also, R is really cool, and S & T hang out with R to be cool, but they are not as cool as R. I know that this sounds like I'm making this up to try and sound quirky or clever, but it's absolutely true. X is the coolest letter, and he doesn't need to prove it by being in a lot of words. He and Z just hang out at the end being the coolest. I am kind of that way with months of the year, too. (example: April & May are girls).

21. I haven't thrown up in at least 8 years. My goal is to never throw up again. I have never thrown up from my own behavior (something I did, like eating or drinking), which I think is the dumbest reason to throw up.

22. I have long planned to buzz my head if I ever start going bald, though I have realized over the past few years that I have a very oddly shaped, bumpy skull, so hopefully it won't have to come to that.

23. It is very interesting now living at an age where it makes sense to start having kids, and not yet having any. I am very aware of that sense that someday, I will look back at where I am now, and think, "I can't remember exactly what it was like to not have had kids."

24. I really like the smell of Yankee candles and Bath & Bodyworks Hand Sanitizers, both of which are often seen as rather feminine, but I don't care. They smell good.

25. I always wish there were more time.

Now that you read it, you have to do it, too.

Them's the rules.

Tag me in it so I can read it.

Here We Go

They had a version of this song back in 1995 when the Steelers went to the Superbowl and Neil O'Donnell lost it for them. Adrien and I were talking recently about how this song is the perfect song to be sung in the Pittsburgh accent.

At any rate, here we go.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3uiCRr3dGE

Last Year, round this time

This be that video.

Seeing God through the eyes of The Dark Knight

I started a new thing for our youth group this month that I'm calling "God Goes to the Movies" in which we watch a movie and then have a discussion about ways in which we can see/understand God in the midst of that movie. The key to it is not to watch "Christian" movies like Fireproof or End of the Spear - movies that few people would watch outside of the church, but actually stuff that people would go see in the theaters. The goal is to see that God is present in everything that we do, not just the "church" stuff, but the regular stuff, too.

While there are definitely differences in what motivates the secular and what motivates Christians, to draw the two as two separate worlds really puts God into a box and prevents us from believing that God can speak through anything that isn't inherently Christian. I think that's a poor understanding of both the nature of who God is, and of the world we live in. This is not a universalist "God is everything" kind of view, but rather an omnipresent understanding that God is reflected in some way in everything.


Sometimes we can even see God in the absence of God. The book of Ecclesiastes is essentially that.

For our first movie, we watched The Dark Knight (well on it's way to being the most successful movie of all time). It was a great movie (on many levels), but really gets into the nature of temptation, and the brokenness of humans. As the movie unfolds, you see the face of temptation toward sin (the Joker) as being at the same time horrifying, and yet he is the most interesting and exciting character in the movie. We know he is evil, yet we are drawn to and intrigued by him.

In the end, must chose to take on the sins of Harvey Dent, to become a criminal in the minds of the citizens of Gotham in order to save them... hmm.

We approached the movie thinking that it might be a stretch to find God in The Dark Knight, but the more I watched it, the more the parallels began to clearly emerge.

God is not relegated to Sunday morning worship or church sponsored fellowship, nor is God only apparent in some of the lackluster "Christian entertainment" that is marketed by people who are trying just as hard to make money as anyone in Hollywood. As I said earlier, in one way or another, God is reflected in everything in one way or another.

When you turn out the lights to a room, that doesn't mean that the things in that room disappear, it's just that the light isn't bouncing off of them, giving them a visible appearance. They are still physically there. God can be seen in sort of the same way.

Just because we are living with the lights off most of the time doesn't mean that we are in an empty room.

9

Adrien sent this to me, and her brother had sent it to her.

Good for 10 minutes of wonder.

A full length movie based on this will be coming out 9/9/09.

(click the "HQ" at the bottom of the viewer to see it in a higher quality)

9 Nine Shane Acker Short Animation
Uploaded by FrFKmeron

This kinda feels like it is to Wall-E what 2001: A Space Odyssey was to Star Wars.

When you are done watching the above video, watch the trailer for the movie here (but not until you have watched the video above! You don't want to spoil the surprise).

Merry Christmas...now what? (Sermon from 12-28-08)

There are a lot of weird things going on in Christmas carols. Some of them are just confusing: How does one go “a wassailing”? What is “figgy pudding” and why do we want it?
Many carols use words that we don’t even really understand anymore: How many times does the phrase, “haste, haste to bring him laud” come up in normal conversation nowadays?

Some of them are even rather creepy. The fourth verse of We Three Kings, the hymn we are closing with today is one of the creepiest, so much so that we usually just skip it an pretend it’s not there.

Myrrh is mine; its bitter perfume breathes a live of gathering gloom; sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, sealed in the stone-cold tomb...

Merry Christmas!

That sounds like something out of a Vincent Price movie.

The line is referring to the fact that Myrrh was used as an embalming ointment in the preparation of bodies for burial, a gift for Jesus that prefigured his own death, but it's still weird to sing about it.

A lot of carols reflect masculine language that we are told to shy away from now. "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" is therefore lost from our hymn book, as "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlepeople" doesn’t have the same ring. It’s also one of the few Christmas carols to mention Satan by name: “remember Christ our savior was born on Christmas day, to save us all from Satan’s power, when we were gone astray.”

One of the silliest carols to me is The 12 Days of Christmas.

We’re so far removed from this one that it makes no sense to us in our culture anymore. Christians used to celebrate Christmas from December 25th until the Epiphany, on January 6th (which makes 12 days), hence the title.

Even so, this is a song that’s purely about one thing: getting presents. It represents a lot of what Christmas has come to mean to our culture now, which might be one of the reasons that we like it so much.

It’s also a fun one to sing.

We love to sing this song. People go crazy for this song. The funny thing though is that most people only actually know one or two of the days. Everyone knows the first day – a partridge in a pear tree, and then we get a bit scattered over the next few days. Until the fifth day… EVERYONE knows the fifth day.

There is a British comedian named Eddie Izzard who talks of how astonished he was watching Americans sing this song, and how people seemed to run into the room from all parts of the house just to shout “FIVE GOLDEN RINGS!”

It’s as though we sing that song just so that we can sing that line. Who knows what the gifts are on the other days? What is day 9? Maids a milking? Jumpers Jumping? Plumbers plumbing? We don’t care so long as we get to sing five golden rings again.

Whenever they broke the group up into specific days, it was always a drag if you got stuck with one of the higher days, like day 12. You only get to sing once or twice, and half the time you aren’t even sure what it is that you are singing – what is it, bikers biking? But it always seemed like everyone, regardless of their group would jump back in for “five gold rings” – we love it.

Despite all that, by now, Christmas for us is more or less over.

We live in a culture that has “the one day of Christmas.”

We’ve had a glorious time of advent, getting ourselves prepared, we had a beautiful Christmas Eve service, and now it’s all done. Most of us have already started mapping out 2009. We’re ready to move on.

In a lot of ways, we move on in the church, too. We celebrate Jesus’ birth, and then we are happy to jump right from Jesus as a baby to 30 years later when Jesus begins his ministry. We don’t focus much on those 30 years. We don’t think about them much.

Sometimes, it seems as if we think of Jesus having gone from baby to man in about two weeks. It’s understandable that we overlook the bulk of Jesus’ early life as that is exactly what the Bible does. Luke is the only Gospel with any information about Jesus life in between infancy and adulthood, with a small episode of a 12 year old Jesus going to the temple to question the local teachers of the law.

So why is this left out? Is it not important? And if Jesus life isn’t important until he begins his ministry, why did he even come as a baby? Why didn’t he just show up as a full grown adult, ready to be baptized by John the Baptist? The answer is both simple and complex: while Jesus main purpose in coming to earth was to die for us, he also came to live for us.

Paul gets at this in Philippians 2:5-13

Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross!

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.

Paul is telling us here the core of his understanding of Jesus Christ.

He describes Jesus as God having clothed himself in human form, lowering himself to connect to us, and to save us.

To Paul, the act of the incarnation, of God actually becoming human flesh, is the key to it all.

Jesus understands us because he became one of us.

He didn’t take any short cuts. He doesn’t spend just a day as a human, or even a year.

Jesus lived a full human life, understanding the hardships, the frustrations and temptations that we all experience, as well as the joys.

In becoming Immanuel (God with us), Christ is not simply a God who saves us, or a God who loves us, but a God who is among us, who becomes one of us, that there would be no boundaries.
To do that, though, Jesus had to humble himself, as Paul puts it, to become obedient to a human life, a life that had been bound by death.

Jesus came here to destroy that power that death held, to save us.

Or to put it more bluntly, Jesus came to earth to save you.

Not simply "you" meaning the whole human race, or "you" meaning all the Christians, but you as an individual.

St. Augustine put it this way, “God loves each of us as though there were only one of us.”

Or to put it in even simpler terms, Jesus would have come to earth and died for your sins even if you were the only person on earth.

Think about that.

God became human, lived a full life to connect with you specifically, and then died to save you.

Christmas marks that beginning of that.

So now what? What are we going to do about it?

The Philippians passage and this passage in Isaiah give us some ideas:

Isaiah 61:10-62:3

I delight greatly in the LORD; my soul rejoices in my God. For he has clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom adorns his head like a priest, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. For as the soil makes the sprout come up and a garden causes seeds to grow, so the Sovereign LORD will make righteousness and praise spring up before all nations.

For Zion's sake I will not keep silent, for Jerusalem's sake I will not remain quiet, till her righteousness shines out like the dawn, her salvation like a blazing torch. The nations will see your righteousness, and all kings your glory; you will be called by a new name that the mouth of the LORD will bestow. You will be a crown of splendor in the LORD's hand, a royal diadem in the hand of your God.

Humble yourself.

Be one with Christ in having the humility to empty yourself of your own selfishness and stubbornness, and to be open and willing before God. As creepy We Three Kings reminds us, on our own, we are all destined for a “stone cold tomb.”

God’s plan is better than that, and he promises us salvation, a future that doesn’t end in a creepy tomb, but in heaven. Our response to that salvation should be humble service, just as Christ show us.

Work out your salvation according to God’s good purpose.

A better translation of this would be make your salvation mean something according to God’s purpose.

This isn’t about us earning salvation, as we see over and over that we can’t do that on our own.

We need Christ’s saving acts.

Our work is merely a response to salvation, not a means of our salvation.

But as a sign of our humility, we should respond to God’s offer of salvation with a willingness to serve, just as Christ showed us. Remember that we are a saved people, that God came here to save us, and that everything we do is a response to that.

As "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" tells us, we are to remember at Christmas that our Savior came to us, to save us from power that we cannot resist on our own. In Christ, we are changed, to the degree that we have nothing to dismay, nothing to fear.

Both Isaiah and Philippians give us an imagery of this change, of putting on a new garment, of being given a new name by the Lord, of God working in us to make us something that we cannot be on our own, just as a seed sprouts up from the ground.

Do not be silent.

The passage in Isaiah gives us this direct command. More than anything, this is both Isaiah and Paul are urging. You are a saved people. Christ came to save YOU. Don’t just sit there in the midst of that gift and remain unchanged.

If we are to be moved by this salvation, the best way to show it is to NOT BE SILENT, that we should confess that Jesus is Lord.

Are we doing this in our lives?

Do our lives show someone who is proclaiming Christ as Lord, not just in our words, but in our actions - in everything that we do?

Think of how crazy people get to sing the line “five golden rings.”

Are we that excited about our faith, that we are willing to run into rooms and proclaim it, or are we living like the people who got stuck with day eleven or day seven, not really sure what we are singing, and with no enthusiasm or passion?

Are you silent?

If you are proclaiming Christ in your life, are shouting, or are you just mumbling.

Hear this:

Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; You shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger… Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Jesus Christ was born for you.

Jesus Christ lived for you.

Jesus Christ died for you, and through his resurrection, destroyed the power of death.

What are you doing with that knowledge?

How are you letting that change you?

How does Christmas help you grow?

Are you willing to humble yourself, to let God work through you, and to serve as a reflection of God’s love and grace in your daily life?

Are you being silent?

Has Christmas changed you?

What are you going to do about it?

Merry Christmas…

...now what?

What we did during Christmas vacation.

Here is a video that we made that my sister Addie edited together.

On one of the shots, I ran into a tree and really hurt my arm. Heehee.