And then the sky finally opened…

When we first moved from Mankato, MN to middle-of-no-where, WI, I was convinced that as a family we could survive. In most ways I was correct. We have adapted. We have learned to live on less.

Except in one area: spiritually. It is easy to think (and I am guilty of it as well) to think that living at a Christian camp would be a constant spiritual renewal. I couldn’t be more wrong. Finding a church has been a never ending search for the last 9 months and it looked like we were doomed to a more traditional church with a congregation of elderly folks who could rarely relate to my current life situation.

Well hopefully that changed today. After 4 churches, number 5 seems to be the winner thus far. We kind of found it by accident too. I was looking through the church directory on Relevantmagazine.com, and noticed a listing for Portage, WI. We were already going to a church in Portage, so I was curious which church it was. It was actually a church that was across the street from the church we had been attending for about a month.

The church is Silver Lake Community Church. It is a non-denominational church of about 100 people. There are a lot of younger families, but an overall mix like I wouldn’t have expected in a town the size of Portage. The music is contemporary worship using the iWorship series, but the aspirations to have a band are there. The pastor reminds me of a mix of Jay Bakker and Mark Driscoll (more Driscoll though) which is about ideal for me. He is very intentional about reaching marginalized people which I also appreciated.

The schedule is kind of unique too. The church starts with coffee fellowship time for a half hour which allows the smell of coffee to fill the sanctuary and a time to meet with others (which hopefully we can do once we actually meet people). Overall it was a great experience.

And best of all really is that it really felt good to worship. I won’t get to go in summer, but they do have small groups on Tuesdays which I could probably attend. We are excited to finally have found a place that just feels like a church home where Christ is exalted and loving fellowship is a priority.

I’m smiling right now. I haven’t done that in a while.

An Inconvenient Truth – A Christian Perspective

Jamie and I just got done watching the highly publicized documentary An Inconvenient Truth. I had been meaning to see it for a while but apparently catching up on Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler is more important than the apparent demise of the planet.

While I greatly appreciated the message on a whole, I think Al Gore lost some validity by throwing in an assortment of political overtones. Had it been just straight facts and repercussions, I think it would have been much more accessible for the masses.

The real point of this post though is the burden I feel this movie should have on all Christians (not just environmentalist liberal sorts). As much as I agreed with Bono when he said, “How we respond to the AIDS emergency [in Africa] will describe us for posterity,” I think that there is a much larger issue here.

As Christians, we are called to be the caregivers of the oppressed, widowed and orphaned. We are called to be the wise stewards of gifts and talents. We are called to protect the creation God has give us dominion over.

It is a high bar for sure. When we are doing our best to make the most of this life and to simply try and understand the life of Christ, it can be difficult to even make the token trip to the local soup kitchen once a year. It’s no wonder the world often has a hard time differentiating Christians from non-Christians in most aspects of life.

But what if we responded to this great obligation in simple ways. What if we were more careful about the resources we used? What if we didn’t automatically vote Republican on all issues simply because we once were told it was synonymous with Christian? What if we didn’t just do a once a year fund drive for AIDS in Africa, but did a rolling collection that was always reemphasized with achievable goals?

It’s a lot of what-ifs, and I know I have a lot of work to do in my own personal life. I guess this movie just started me questioning if God would really be pleased with what He sees from me here on earth and if there is something more I can do to glorify Him more.

Happy Birthday Leah!

There are few times in life that it is acceptable to eat cake in your underwear. I have to admit, after watching Leah enjoy the chocolate mess, I was a little jealous. A great way to cap off a great year.

The other crazy thing is that Leah suddenly decided walking is a great mode of transportation. She is actually about 50/50 on walking crawling. She even pulls herself up on my leg just to get a starting stance to walk. It’s very cute.

I found out that next week I have Martin Luther King Jr. Day off. I haven’t had that holiday since high school. Kind of nice.

Also, my GPS unit finally came in the mail today so I am excited to do a few geocaches before the first great snowfall (if we ever get one).

Not much else going on here. Just working, loving the family, serving God…not necessarily in that order.

Songs for Christmas

When it comes to Christmas music, I am an inherently cynical person. It is very difficult to find something I truly enjoy. The typical Christmas music always seems so trite and commercialized that it just flies in the face of what I view Christmas as. Instead of a truly holy miracle, it is cheapened to a synthetic Santa pulled by plastic reindeer.

For a while I was appeased by the remakes by current Christian artists as I felt they often put emphasis on songs I had otherwise overlooked. However, over the years, that has even worn on me. I was still hearing more production values than their heart.

However, on a recent Relevant podcast, they talked about a new Sufjan Stevens Christmas album. I have always been an outsider on the Sufjan Stevens phenomena, meaning to pick up one of his albums but never quite following through. But after hearing a few of these songs on the podcast, I knew I had to hear the rest.

The songs just sound so authentic. You really get the feeling that he means the words he is singing. That he is happy for the coming of Christ and the eventual salvation that He would provide. It doesn’t hurt that the album is huge too. 42 songs huge.

And what would you pay for something like this? $100? $50? How about only $15?!? Yeah. I was shocked too. If you go to Amazon it’s like $22, but on iTunes the album download is $15. Crazy. A must buy in my opinion. It will be in heavy rotation for me through the holiday and some songs (Come Thou Fount) will live long past January for me.

Off Hiatus

It’s hard to believe that it’s actually Blogger that remotivated me to start blogging again. But with this new drag-and-drop layout, it is pretty easy. I typically despise WYSIWYG layout since it is so limited, but in this case I welcome it. Anything that allows me shorten the time and not totally sacrifice my content is appreciated.

So what have I been up to? Well, working. It turns out the true active season of this camp is from May to late November, not October as previously advertised. It’s a great problem to have, but it has kept me on my toes and allowed for little rest in the mean time. I am eager for the rest that Thanksgiving will bring.

I was close to posting last week after the recent Wisconsin election results as well. As a Christian, it was pretty embarrassing. I have often distanced myself from the typical Evangelical outlook on politics, and this only reinforced my reasoning.

It kills me how much Christians missed the boat this year. While many churches were busy taking up their issue of being strongly against same-sex marriage, they may have missed the bigger issue: the death penalty. Even the church I attend here in Westfield was guilty of it. They encouraged people to put up little signs in their yard to vote “yes” on the same-sex marriage bill, but they never even mentioned the death penalty. I have to think that if Jesus was at those polls he would have been much more adimate about the killing of people than anything else.

But I’m off my soapbox now. I am really enjoying the college football season right now. All this crazy stuff is happening in the top 10 and Wisconsin is slowly creeping up the list. I think they are the most under the radar team in the top 25 right now. I’m not thinking national championship or anything, but a top 10 finish isn’t out of the question.

Hope all is well out there. Hopefully I can get more consistent with this thing again.

A Rough Rainy Day

I’m not sure what that is a photo of, but it captured how I felt today. In addition to the rather depressing rain, I also just did not feel like serving people today. On a typical day, I will bend over backwards to help anyone who stays here to enjoy their time. It’s not only my job, but as a steward of this great place it is also my responsibility.

But today I didn’t want to. I know God never said “well, serve with all your heart when you feel like it.” In fact, he said something much different than that.

In Romans 12 it says just the opposite.

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.

I read once that the worst part of a living sacrifice is that they keep trying to crawl off the altar. I think that is where I am right now. I want to serve God with all my heart, mind, body, and soul, but today it just wasn’t there.

The crazy thing is that I have a peace about it as well. I think God is aware of how tired I am and how much my soul is just aching for good worship and fellowship. He knows that I (and my family) are in a dry desert right now.

Tomorrow we are trying yet another church. I am hopeful that God is waiting for us there.

Jesus Camp

I was updating our queue on Netflix yesterday and saw a banner that caught my eye. Apparently there is a new movie coming out called “Jesus Camp.” It’s actually more of a documentary, but anyways…

Since I work at what could be labeled a “Jesus Camp” it of course caught my eye. The sad thing is that even before I investigated it I knew what I was going to find. Go check out the trailer here and then come back.

So really I can see both sides of this. On the one hand, yes, Christian camps are meant to strengthen the youth of America in their Christian beliefs. I don’t think that is anything too earth-shattering.

On the other hand, the comparisons to Palestinians and the military-style performance were kind of off-putting. If I were on the outside viewing this film, I could certainly see how Christians could be labeled fanatical and even closer to Islamic extremists than I think we would like.

It’s funny (and sad) how Christians are often portrayed in mainstream media.

Eating Rocks

Last night was great. It started with Jamie, Leah and I going down to the beach to enjoy what is probably one of the last nice days of summer/fall. I have this fear that the weather is just going to take a turn to frigid soon. Maybe I should buy a Farmer’s Almanac…

Anyway, Leah has a weird (yet normal) aversion with sticking everything in her mouth. I mean, it’s borderline ridiculous. Even when we go grocery shopping I have to have my hands ready like a hockey goalie to stop her constant pecking at the cart handle. Gross.

But back to the story. As we were sitting on the beach, Leah decided that every stone she could wrap her fingers around looked like food. She literally picked up every stone she could. And being the good dad that I am, I would take it from her and fling it behind me.

After a minute or so of this de-rocking on the beach, I realized I could be proactive and actually remove the rocks before she got to them. As kind as I thought this was, she decided to go above and beyond. She started crawling.

And so we crawled together. We meandered the beach and with each half-crawl, she would grab a rock, lift it to her mouth, and then I would take it from her.

It was at this moment that it God spoke to me. In so many areas of my life I try to eat rocks. Even after I realize they are inedible, dangerous and just plain gross, I do my best to eat rocks. When I became aware of God’s presence in my life, I was able to more clearly see the rocks and in some cases even feel God take them away from me.

So what do I do? I crawl my way to more rocks. More sin. It’s sickening, annoying and it’s my human nature. I am really blown away when God uses fatherhood to teach me lessons like this. It happens pretty regularly, but this one really stuck out to me.

No really, I’m going to blog now…maybe.

I’m not sure I could be any more sporatic of a blogger right now. I really want to be more consistent, but my work load is so inconsistent that it is hard to get in a groove. I keep thinking, “well next month should be better…” and then it isn’t. Oh well. At least I’m still posting sometimes, right?

I have been doing a lot of thinking lately, so bear with me if this is kind of “rambly.” The more time I spend out here in the woods, the more I am realizing that I am changing as a person. It is nothing of huge magnitude, but there are small things.

First, I know that I am becoming more laid back than I have been in the past. It’s n0t that my job is a cake walk, it is actually probably more stressful than my previous job. But the difference is my environment. Being surrounded by nature is so different than being in the city. The fact that I bike to the office past deer and turkeys daily. It’s crazy. It’s as if God is literally walking/biking right there with me.

Second, I am learning how to cultivate my faith without being able to really go to church. This is not to say I’m denying the need for corporate worship. There is nothing I crave more than worship right now. Unfortunately Sundays are a rather busy day here which is kind of eliminating worship from the schedule for the time being. I am hoping to change that next year as I value worship, but we’ll see. For now I am listening to a lot of sermon podcasts and doing daily Bible reading on my personalized Google start page.

Finally, I am realizing how culture and the media really impact their audience. Since we now watch all of our TV on a DVR (skipping most commercials), we have no decent radio stations, and I am removed from year-round youth ministry, I am realizing that I am literally unplugged from most popular culture. Kind of scary for a guy like me.

Thankfully I still have podcasts to help me stay connected. Between the Relevant podcast, several videogame podcasts, and of course every single ESPN podcast.

Speaking of the Relevant podcast, last week they had a great cover of Hey Ya by Outkast. This version is by Obadiah Parker. Since I really wanted the song, but I couldn’t seem to find it anywhere, I used some fancy Mac software to chop the song out of the podcast. Not really a big deal, but I did it so we can all appreciate the song. My gift to you for not posting regularly I guess. Wait…I just found a link so I don’t have to host it. Enjoy!

Hey Ya – Obadiah Parker

The Pop Culture Hook

After reading Tim’s blog (http://www.timschmoyer.com/2006/05/17/tired-of-da-vinci-code-hype/), it has really helped me realize how desperate Christian culture can be at times. Is it just me or does it seem like Christians are constantly waiting for the next big Hollywood hit that can be used as a ministry tool? Granted, it does make it easier to convey a gospel message, but I wonder why that is?

Really, I have come to wonder if it is more a matter of Christians becoming lazy or the rest of the world becoming so jadded towards the gospel message. Let me explain.

First, the laziness. In general Christians are lazy. Then again, in general, non-Christians are lazy too. To commit to doing straight up evanglism the way Jesus did it would not only be scary, but also tiring. But then again, it worked. Jesus never waited for some great artisitic movement to hitch his message to. He just proclaimed love and grace. Why don’t we do that?

Well, we usually don’t do it because no one would listen. The rest of the world is so sick of hearing the gospel that they typically won’t even hear you out. They just move on as if what you are saying is some annoying telemarketer conversation. As if the gospel had a timeshare attached to it…

But we can’t change the way people are. We can change the way we present our message though. Rather than waiting for the next great Hollywood blockbuster, why not spread the gospel the way Jesus did?