man.of.depravity

Part One

Creative Chaos @ The Soul.

Today I hope we provide some concrete answers. The beauty of this blog conversation and my conversation with Rose is that there are no concrete answers. As you can tell, I don’t deal with this very well, but I am doing my best to open up to God’s moving without specific answers. Here is the rest of our conversation:

Me: I totally understand that many of the things I feel called to cost money (guitar, schooling, etc.) and I need to have a way to pay for them. I also can see that God has blessed us with jobs, a car, a place to live, and I don’t need to give them up. But we still haven’t figured out how we can serve “the least of these” and also serve money. In some way we are serving money by working jobs, paying bills…all those things are money oriented. So how can we live to do these money oriented things and also serve the God who desires everything from us?

Rose: I think the biggest thing is how you spend your time. If someone chooses to work longer and allows that to be their top priority then I think they have their priorities wrong. In our situation, we don’t have a ton of money, but we do have time that we can give. I think everyone has time. When I spend time with my small group girls, I feel so much more fulfillment than anytime I have a big day at work. I try and focus my mind on eternity and not material things that are of the here and now.

Me: I like to think of how I can sanctify myself from unbelievers. How can I show that I am different? I think a lot of my life and a lot of the “average” Christian life, does show a difference but I don’t think finances is one of those ways. Christians spend lavishly just as much as anybody else. I look at my own life and wonder how much different I look than the average person with how I spend my money. Just because somewhere around 10% of our money might go to a church and humanitarian efforts doesn’t mean I have set myself a part with my finances. At the same time, I don’t think we spend money on anything crazy. But, I want to challenge us to think of ways to be sanctified with our spending outside the 10% we already give away. 10% is pretty pathetic if you ask me, and it is probably sad that I let it be the benchmark.

Rose: This takes me back to when we were really struggling financially and had some unfortunate things happen and people just gave us money…and we still don’t know who those people are. My trust in the Lord and confidence in His provision has never been the same since then. I want my spirit to be listening to Him so when others are in a similar situation, God can use us to help them through. To me the real giving of yourself, is giving of your heart, not just money. As long as your heart is rooted in Jesus and in love then I don’t think money is the problem.

Shane Claiborne was asked this: How do we combat the pull toward materialism, and what does simplicity look like in the 21st Century?

His response has stuck with me since I read it:

“I think the most important question is not what I should give away, because the Scriptures say you can sell everything you have and give it to the poor, but if you don’t have love it’s nothing. So the deepest question around simplicity is about love, and redistribution of resources is only meaningful inasmuch as it’s rooted in love. When we really figure out how to live in the personalism and love of Christ with our neighbor, then that defines what’s enough so that we’re not just driven by an ideology, but by a love relationship to our neighbor.”

Romans 12:8-10

Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

We’d love to hear your thoughts.

As I posted about last week, I hung out with Arnie for an afternoon. Arnie isn’t totally sure that he believes in Jesus. He said his heart wants to, but his head still has questions. Questions that no person can just give answers to, he told me.

The world likes Arnie because he is a “success story.” He was a meth addict and seller, who was homeless and jobless. Now he has lives in an apartment, doesn’t use or sell drugs, and rides his bike 20 miles (each way) to get to church.

I like Arnie because he is honest. I like Arnie because the small blessing of being in a video shown at church was the “highlight of his life”. His exact words to me after the services last Sunday. Arnie put things in perspective for me.

This video is Arnie’s story. It was shown on Sunday at Sunset (video embedded rss readers).

What stands out to you?

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Creative Chaos @ the Soul. Watercooler Wednesdays at Ethos.

I had a pretty busy weekend. Was not able to get near as much homework done as I needed to. I guess that is what Monday’s are for, but I have a busy Monday too………..crap.

Friday, Ross and I got together over coffee after my last class of the day. We are great friends from all the way back in 8th grade.

Saturday night I had the opportunity to be a part of the first annual Wiilympics. Ben Porter was the host and he flat out dominated, but he said that the host couldn’t win (or his wife did). Ben also made this awesome trophy (picture below). And yes, that is a real cup…youth large. It was my first time ever playing on a Wii…I’m not that good. I was in 4th place out of 8 guys before I had to leave for an early morning.

Sundays, I get up at 5:30am to get to church by 6:30am in time for run through at 7am. Today we had 30 baptisms between the 2 services and things went really well. I led “Jesus Paid it All” which is one of my absolute favorite songs. And the baptisms were so moving, especially with so many young people announcing their belief in Jesus.

It was a great weekend and the weather was actually good too.

How was yours?

Those of you who are subscribers or frequent visitors know that I don’t post about myself or my life very often. Obviously this is on purpose. My life is boring. Just trust me, it is. Today is a different day though. I am going to write about myself.

Many of you know that I started a new job almost two months ago. I think it is time for a little update.

• Favorite Part of the Job- Freedom and Friendships.
  • I work weird hours. Practices are at night, band members are free at night. Luckily Rose works weird hours too so it works out fine. I love that I can show up for meetings, go home and do theology reading and then come back for practice.
  • Rose and I don’t know a lot of people in Portland but this job has opened doors to new and awesome friendships. Jill, Jay, and I work really closely together and it has been so wonderful to learn from people who have so much more experience with all this than I do.

• Least Favorite Part- All the weekends run together. When you volunteer once a month you are able to hold onto a special weekend in your thoughts. When you play 3 or 4 weekends a month, you can’t hold onto anything because the next weekend is right in front of you.
• Why This Job Works For Me- I think Jenni said it best a few weeks ago when she said that it is so cool when you are able to do what God made you to do. I think that applies to me here. I knew God had been preparing me for music ministry in church. I don’t know if I only want to be a worship pastor but I do know God provided me with the skills to succeed in this area.
• Biggest Challenge- Being an amateur musician trying to lead should-be pros. I can play acoustic guitar to my little heart’s desire, but easily the biggest hurdle is trying to lead with quality thoughts towards all the instruments. All of the musicians on the team are extremely talented and sometimes I feel over my head by trying to help the team reach a new level of musicianship.
• Creative Crunch- 2 parts
  • Working at a church in the Northwest and being a pastor’s kid growing up, I’ve come to know that Oregon is a place where people don’t go to church. It isn’t a social norm…even on Easter and Christmas. In areas where church attendance is common, the challenge is to help develop spiritual depth in a relationship to Christ (that is obviously still a challenge here too). The challenge in Portland is to actually get people to come to church. This makes my job harder because my job is in the church.
  • The only way for people in the congregation to get to know songs is to do them several times. After doing songs for several times they can easily get old. I find it hard to think of new and creative ways to do a song that has the potential of being done the same ol’ way everytime.

If you want to read more of my stuff, go here.

I have always had a hard heart, unable feel compassion towards others. I would call it a calloused heart. My fingers are calloused from playing guitar, my heart is calloused by my comfort.

Growing up I always said that missions trips and evangelism were for other people, those weren’t my gifts.

I don’t know if it was carrying buckets of water for hours on end in the Dominican Republic, I don’t know if it was driving by homeless people in my boss’s Porsche, I don’t know if it was marrying a woman who has a passion for children in Africa, BUT I have been changed.

On Friday Rose and I sponsored our first child. Her name is Monica, she is from Uganda. My entire life I have always thought her plight was someone else’s problem. Friday, we became part of the solution.

Walking through the AIDS Experience, I was Emmanuel. Both my mom and dad had died and my older brother took care of me because my aunt wouldn’t care for someone whose parent’s had AIDS. Today I am in school and I do not have AIDS. Rose however, was a girl that does have AIDS (hence our plus and minus signs in the picture).

I always hated the guilt trip of not doing enough, so I won’t dish that out to you. However, I do know that when God says it is difficult for the rich to get to heaven I think he is talking to every American because we are all rich. I hope that this small monthly donation not only can bless Monica and her community but will take my heart off of the things of this world.