Quick update. I'm dreadfully weary of shopping. Not because of shopping, I like that part, because of traffic. Driving will test your love of humanity. Anyway, there's a new post over at roadsongs if you are interested.  I'm having trouble keeping up with everyone over the holidays so if I miss you I apologize in advance.

I've started a new blog dedicated to my spiritual work over at wordpress. You can find it at www.roadsongs.wordpress.com, come check it out. I thought about mirroring but I think that will be off more than on. In any case, the fact that I am attempting to return full force to the blogosphere means I might be here on my personal blog a lot more often. So, we'll see. I'll link it soon.

Christmas prep is under way with the busiest weekend we have had for a long long time. Argh! I met myself at the front door yesterday. I have to gather a fruit tray and a white elephant before The Well's Christmas Party this evening, come if you'd like, it's at 6 p.m. and the directions are available at www.thewellinaustin.com. We'd love to see you.

The hunt for a white elephant is an entertaining endeavor, I may post on that later.

So.....
I'm learning to cook.

Now at first glance that probably seems fairly innocuous so let me explain. Up until this point I would have said to anyone that I met, I don't cook. I don't mean I can't make fancy stuff, i mean, I screw up canned soup; Kraft mac and cheese makes my palms itch; Ramen noodles are a challenge and I have actually, not figuratively mind you, burned water. So why then should I go back into this arena of failure?

4. Yes 4, a simple numeral that can be so sweet and meaningless nestled in between 3 and 5. A wonderful integer that only matters in our life when it is attached to the equally sweet word "children." Since our fourth blessed bundle babbled his way into our lives time is of the essence. Between church, house, kids and Karin's job, (Karin's my wife for those of you who may not know me), we have less time to get things done and done well than we ever have. Now my wife comes in from her job around 5:15 p.m. and my kids mob her because she's mom and she's awesome to boot. In the past, she has fought them off lovingly and made our dinner, every day, but it was really beginning to stress her.

So I decided to intervene, because Karin is greatest wife in the world. (I realize some of you might be inclined to argue, I understand if you harbor these thoughts,but don't try to win this argument. My evidence is in surmountable and I am the most mule-headed man in the world.) On the days when I can, i am trying to make at least part of dinner. I am paranoid and hopeless but making progress so, you can pray that I don't poison my family or burn down our house.

So far, let's see...

Bacon and eggs, check
Grilled steaks, check
burgers, check
mac and cheese, from scratch, check
sausage of various kinds, check,
and finally I can actually prepare so called prepared foods that don't just go in the microwave.

When I try something really interesting, I'll let you know.

2. The Problem of Evil-Now that's the philosophical term, for the rest of us it means, "How can a loving God allow (insert suitably horrible circumstance) to happen?"

First things first, almost nothing bad that happens is the "wrath of God" unleashed on man. New Orleans didn't get destroyed because of the Deity Powers act or any such nonsense. If God acts, we'll all know it was Him.

Secondly, s*** happens. Guess what? Again using the New Orleans example, plenty of righteous and innocent people lost their lives because they were in that place at that time. The rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous as the Good Book says!

Thirdly, keeping with our same example, we bring lots of things on our selves, call it karma or reaping what you sow but, New Orleans was destroyed by a hurricane and a storm surge that were abnormally powerful, why? The combination of the destruction of Louisiana coastal wetlands and climate change. Argue our part in that all you want, it is a fact we are contributors. Even then there would never have been a problem if it hadn't been for government corruption which caused a lack of maintenance on the levees. A few misplaced millions of dollars and viola! Instant disaster. Even then much loss of life could have been deterred if not for the stupidity of elected officials on every level of Government. Man hath wrought the destruction of New Orleans, not God.

Thirdly, Christian doctrine leaves no place for the Calvinistic fallacy of predeterminism. If God is just, we must have free will. If God is loving, we must have free will. If God desires us to love Him, we absolutely must have free will. Putting those last points together in a completely non-mystic format you get this:

People do stupid things. Most of the time that makes stupid things happen to us. Sefishness and idiocy (a working definition of sin) cause problems not just for us but for everyone around us and in the world, to the point that you cannot say that sin "a" caused result "b" in every case. I may get result "b" without doing "a," but rest assured I've done something equally stupid and caused someone else a result "b."

Finally, some things are impossible to understand. If God is all-loving and all-knowing, then there are some things I can't explain without His viewpoint, which I don't have so there ya go! Most stuff is explainable, though, with good theology and doctrine.

Okay, so those of you that know me will have heard this before but listen up anyway...

I think most of the problems that we associate with Christianity come from bad theology and incorrect doctrine. That maybe true of every religion but I will just speak to my own.

1. Sex scandals. Bad doctrine and bad theology in this area cause such a plethora of problems that almost everyone I know is screwed up somehow, pardon the pun. here's the thing, the Catholics cut off their priesthood from any normal expression of sexuality, an utterly un-biblical stance, and what happens. If god made man, God made sex. So it becomes pressurized and leaks out of these guys as perversion on multiple levels. The protestants have the same problem, we teach sexuality as tainted somehow and turn everyone into elective prudes and then wonder at our inability to sustain marriages or recover from sexual misconduct or damage. We live in sexless marriages (many of us, I should say you) where we are petrified to actually express ourselves or our desires to our lover. Then we cover the whole subject with a code of embarrassed silence so our damaged kids don't have enough info to make sound decisions that affect their entire lives. Get a clue, Christians! God made sex and He made it good! I'm an old fat guy who's been married to a wonderful woman for 19 years and our relationship is firing on all cylinders. If sex doesn't work for you in some way, get help, you're not doing something right. Respect it's power, yes, but for Heaven's sake, don't let this nonsense continue. Go read Solomon's Song of Songs in the Old Testament of the Bible before I get any half baked comments.

2. The Problem of Evil...(coming soon)

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“Hi, just wanted to make sure that everybody up there was voting today, good day for it, go out and vote for your conscience. Let's get a good leader in.” Auto-Transcribed Voice Post - spoken through SpinVox

Link: The What's Your Signature Weapon Test written by inurashii on OkCupid, home of the The Dating Persona Test

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"It's so hot inside my soul,
I swear there must be blisters on my heart..."

Rich Mullins

You ever have one of those nights?  Where some concern or the other just nagged you all night?  You know the ones I mean.  Where you are anxious enough that you can't actually stay asleep and when you do wake up you return immediately to whatever the situation is that has you so discombobulated.  

And then, to make matters worse, it's one of those deals that you may have no control over or nothing that you could do or could have done to fix or avoid the problem.  It's like driving into a pothole in the rain, you see that there's a hole there but, you can't avoid it without endangering the car, then you hit it and discover that the hole was several inches deeper than you expected.  So you slam into the pothole and bounce out the other side, hoping beyond hope that you just haven't completely realigned your wheels, and not in a good way.

That, of course, doesn't scratch the surface when you include the fact that people you care about are usually involved.  Then it gets really complicated because words like love and risk and loss enter the equation.   Potholes, indeed.

Suffice it to repeat, life is hard but God is good.  Endurance (Patience) is a gift of the Spirit.  And, I'll be preaching this on Sunday, in Matthew 11:6 Jesus says, "Blessed is he who does not fall away on account of me."  That means that when difficulty arises that is born of your walk with Christ, we are blessed if we don't give in, like God wrestling with Jacob all night and Jacob, although way out of his weight class, vowing to not let go until he received a blessing. 

'Course, that's directed at me, not you, dear reader.  You have to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.  

We don't drive through the same potholes.

I was preparing for my sermon this week and looking over famous epitaphs and grave stones and I came to John Keats. Now, for those of you who don't know or haven't cared, Keats is my favorite poet, ever. He embodied a passion and love for life and creation that only one who lived as painful and short a life as he did can apprehend. The candle that burns brightest.....

Anyway, as I contemplated the passing of Keats, two centuries ago mind you, I began to fall into sorrow. I was misty-eyed and melancholy. I thought to myself, "My God, you get down over some dumb stuff..." Then it occurred to me, I didn't really get down over dumb stuff, in point of fact I was sad about what I am always sad about, the passing of beauty and light from the world and the desire for restoration.

Okay, so that may sound sappy and emo but, well, tough. I don't spend a lot of time mourning the good old days, they are a myth. I don't whine about my situation, when I have situation to whine about. I prefer to be a worker for restoration, a harbinger of the return of splendor to the world, and the loss of a voice so poignant and real as Keats makes me sad for us, not him.

Keats epitaph read, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

Would that the good that I do and leave behind is as impermanent as his.

Hopefully, I will begin to journal again, regularly. I still haven't posted my old stuff.

So occasionally my brain goes into this state of, I don't know, hibernation. My spirit follows or vice versa. I don't learn anything in that state and sometimes I feel like a zombie. Many things contribute to the coming of the "gray" and sometimes I am aware of the impending doom.

Then one day, like one day last week, it ends. The sun breaks through, my line to Heaven is reopened, I begin to learn again at a breakneck pace. Thank God.

I feel like I have just walked out of dark room into glorious light.

Hope you are there.

The truth is..........I have nothing to say.

It occurs to me that I just wanted to blog and not think, just see what comes out. Honest to God journaling I guess.

I have very intellegent friends. It strikes me that when you have very intellegent friends, intellegence becomes fairly meaningless. If everyone is as bright as I am then we are just the same. I suppose i could get some stupid friends and feel better about myself.

The real problem, or strength, is that I don't feel bad about myself.

The real strength of that statement is that it lets me like almost everyone I meet.

You see, my foibles, sins, weaknessess are there, on display for the world; but they are common to us all. If I am a reprobate in some ways, well, so is everyone else. That ceases to be a basis for comparison. Anyhoo. I like me, so I like you. God likes us both.

Love, actually.

Which film, incidentally, I loved.

Hey, I am in the process of closing out my old blogger accounts, I am going to move over a few of the posts to LJ, post date them and keep them here so..............I don't know how that will come out, I apologize in advance. Then I think I will return to a normal schedule.

This is just a quick post to say, "Sorry I haven't posted." I have been incredibly busy between planning for next years Well gatherings, writing out our membership and structural framework, finalizing our discipleship model, working on viral ads with Jack, my Inkwell project, contacting the myriad visitors we have had and keeping up with my children. Plus my Friday gaming group kicks off again this week. Anyhoo, I promis to return soon in all my overblown, pedantic, flowery glory. Congrats to my NaNoWriMo friends on the completion of their quests! And, may I add within my authority: Blessings of my Lord Jesus Christ upon you this day. Peace.

I was just reading a great Kerouac quote on my friend
fairey_queens journal. Let me repeat it here for those who didn't see it.

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, made to be saved, desirious of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabuouls yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars..." -Jack Kerouac

Love it, it reminds me that to truly be alive is to matter, another favorite line of mine from the film Pearl Harbor:   "Are you so anxious to die?"  "No, sir, anxious to matter."   To not speak the commonplace, to not yawn, to burn; life would be something.  I read some MySpace memorials today and sad, sad, sites dedicated to missing persons, and they filled me, as such things often do, with a deep sorrow as I considered the frailty of human existence.  I want to matter! I want my work, my church, my friends, my family to matter! 

I don't mean matter in the fame sense but in the sense of altering the course of the river that we are sailing; I want to be able to launch flaming arrows of joy into that dark sorrow of loss.  I want to challenge the assumption of quiet, desperate life!  That's what we're here for.  That's why God spoke us into reality.  Burn, baby, burn!

Today is the day.

Despite being laid low by a sudden onset of "the common cold" (which should be called "the common suck" because it does!) I had a great Sunday! We celebrated Communion and had an All-Saints Sunday worship gathering. So, rather than my usual job of telling the stories, I got to hear several! It reiterated to me the recen revelation that, in many ways, we followers of Christ are the Third Testament of the Bible. We are the living stories and examples, fluid and unbound from the chains of page and word. Every story I heard Sunday morning was worthy of a Sunday School lesson and I am grateful that God continues to speak to me through the people I supposedly lead.

We followed up this joy by hanging out at Detania and Kelly's place to celebrate the anticipated coming of Olivia Jewel Nix. She won't be here for a few months but we threw her a party anyway. There was food, fun, football, and a bouncy castle for the kids. Lot's of presents for Olivia and many relationships renewed, restored or just enjoyed. I talked to my friend Randy, who has been an African-American minister in a white church for a few years, about being black, because I think I would just be angry at everyone if I were black, my views on the desperate continuance of institutional racism are well known. He told me that it just wasn't worth wasting the energy by being angry and bitter. He's better than me at being Jesus in this area, so I listened and learned (I hope). It was a good day.

Capped the evening off by watching the Cowboys take down the Panthers with some of the guys from my church. Built some new relationships.

One of my friends decided to become a disciple of Jesus this last week. Pretty cool. His story not mine. Had a few solid visitors Sunday also.

Greetings, all. Hopefully I can get back on the horse here and get back to blogging on a more consistent basis.

I love rainy days. I can't explain it. Maybe growing up in Austin with 300 days of sunshine a year I just never got enough rain to make me hate it. I love it. I love the color of the day, silver not gray. I love the beat of the rain on my roof and my car and my head. I love the whole curl up in a corner of the world, on a couch, a bed a chair; the whole stay in bed with my love, my wife, holding each other, speaking softly, under the covers, fire born of falling water; the whole kids gazing out the window, making shapes of water drops, begging me to drive on the edge of the road and shoot high plumes of spray; the whole hot tea, hot soup, hot chocolate, coffee, latte; the whole thing.

Jesus said that He came to give us a full life, and rain sings to me of abundance. So much for the sorry, blue, rain haters, who must see the darkness and gloom before the cycle of life. Rain is wonderful. Maybe they are the tears of the sky, but I believe them to be tears of joy.

So, enjoy the rain, look at her with new eyes, embrace her. Let her dance for you and sing to you. She is a mystery and glory. Thank God for this small glory.

As I sit here this morning at Dominican Joe's, I can look out the front window and watch the rain fall down. The day is a slick silver gray with it's own rhythm and melody and I am thankful, as I should be, for the rain that we have needed for so long. It needs to continue, despite the disruption that it represents, it's been a long dry spell.

Thinking about the drought, I wonder what it takes to end one. How much rain is enough rain? How much do we need to restore us to a green spring, when the time is full for vernal awakening? Then I think about church; our church. What will make us grow? What kind of rain is needed to make us grow? Is it a question of rain? What do we need to do? What is God waiting for? Pray for rain.