I’ve Got It Going On

Man, we’re already through the first month of 2012?! How in the Sam Hill did that happen? Well, 31 days into the final year of our existence (if the Mayans can be believed) and I’ve got so many projects going on it’s insanely stupid. I have no one to blame but myself, I admit that. Let’s take a gander at what I’ve got going on:

1. Starting on January 1, I started a “read the bible in a year” program with some other people. Like so many other people of The Way, I’ve started something like this a dozen times only to peter out mid way through January. This time, though, I’m using the YouVersion app on my phone. I listen to the daily selections every morning on my way to work as I am a captive audience for twenty minutes or so. We even have a Facebook group to keep track of each other. So far, so good. I’m still on track.
2. Also starting in January, I’ve taken on the 365 Project again although this year it’s actually a 366 Project. I did it back in 2010 with “From The Cheap Seats” and actually made it through the entire year. I was actually proud of myself. It was as hard as h-e-double hockey sticks to post 365 pictures though…so like any sane person I thought “hey, why not try it again?” The new version is called “Back To the Cheap Seats”.
3. One of my problems with the 365/366 projects is finding a picture for EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. As I was looking for ideas yesterday I stumbled onto this blog. I thought it was such a great idea that, starting today, I’m taking part in #FEBphotoaday. So I now have target photos for every day in February. Let’s just home she keeps that up for  the rest of the year.
4. Today also marks the beginning of “February Album Writing Month” or FAWM. It’s a yearly challenge to write fourteen songs in 28 days. Only this year there are actually twenty nine days in February so the challenge is to write fourteen and A HALF songs. I tried an extremely modified version of this a couple of years ago with modest success. Do I think I can write fourteen songs in February? Heavens no. I can’t write fourteen songs in a year or five years. But it’ll be fun to watch me go down swingin’ huh? And, like the website says, if you only write two songs that’s two songs more than you had at the beginning of  the month. Fun times.

 

So the question that begs asking is “Why in the WORLD would you take on all these projects?” Two reasons really:

1. To see if I can. If my first internal reaction to something is “that would  be impossible” or “man that looks hard” then I’mma try to do it. Plain and simple.
2. By nature, I’m lazy. I don’t mind admitting that. But I also have this creative well inside me that needs stirring or it will dry up. If it dries up then I will probably die. Doing some of these projects is what stirs those waters. And who knows…if I stir them enough then maybe something great will come out. We’ll see.

 

Will these be the only things I take on this year. Probably not, I’m a glutton for punishment. I mean, c’mon…I’m teaching small group, leading worship, the curling club is starting at the end of February and I’m slowing getting into running. Who knows what else I can get into. But like I said…it’ll be fun to watch me go down swingin’!

That’s the view from the cheap seats, kids.

-E

‘Twas The Night Before Christmas

“Here I sit again mixing misery and gin”

Not really. That’s just a line from my favorite Merle Haggard song. But here I sit again. Two and a half months removed from my last blog entry, barricaded in the bedroom watching “A Christmas Story and wrapping gifts. There was no Longboard to be had this year so Mr. Adams has accompanied me this season.

Earlier today, I went back and looked at my last six Christmas eve blog entries trying to figure out what I was going to blog about tonight. I got a kick out of my “Laguna Beach” rant from six years ago. I got a little teary reading about our answered prayers two years ago. Then I read last years entry. This time last year, I listed five “resolutions” that I wanted to challenge myself with during 2011. As I read the entry, I got a little angry. Ok, mabye not angry. Frustrated is probably a better word.  Here’s what they were:

1. Resolved to speak daily of my God and his actions, work, and plan with regularity, passion and plainness.
2. Resolved to be more charitable, more just, more generous and more other-minded than this previous year with the goal in mind to become synonymous with these words.
3. Resolved to make music with regularity. I feel God’s pleasure when I’m doing so.
4. Resolved to be a better steward of my time so that I can never falsely complain “I never have the time”.
5. Resolved to be dedicated to the governance of my weight, exercise and eating habits to the benefit myself and my family.

How’d did I do? Well let’s see:

1. I think I did pretty well.
2. This one is subjective. Part of me says yes. Part of me says no.
3. I wrote music and lyrics this year. I also started leading worship again. So I guess I did ok.
4. This is the first one that aggravated me. I can say wholeheartedly that I failed this one.
5. This one aggravated me even more. I did worse on this one that the previous one.

As I wondered what went wrong, I realized I laid these resolutions out in a blog post but did nothing during the year to keep them ever before to remind myself what I was resolved to do. That is what I’ll have to fix in 2012 as I give it another go. Not only do I need to remind myself, I need to be held accountable to these things. I need resolve to be resolved.

This Christmas seemed to FLY by. I don’t know why, really. It just seems that way. I also find myself saying that we, as a family, need to start this Christmas tradition or that Christmas tradition more than usual this year. I think that’s because I’ve realized that next Christmas is the last one we’ll have Brady at home before he goes to college and life and family will be altered forever. Macy won’t be far behind. That breaks my heart a little.

Abby and I celebrated twenty years of marriage this past summer. A couple of nights ago, as we stared at our Christmas tree, looked back over the previous nineteen Christmases. So many great memories flooded my mind. Two punky kids that knew nothing about life and marriage have made it this far, by the grace of God. Things have changed for us so much. I can’t even imagine what life and family will be like in the next twenty years…when I’m 61. Holy crap. I feel like 2012 is going to be a big year for us. As husband and wife. As a family. Nothing bad, mind you. I just feel like it’s going to be a year that, down the road, we’re going to look back and say “wow, that was quite a year”. I don’t know why I think that or feel that. I could be wrong. I’ll tell you this time next year.

Well, boys and girls, it’s 10:17. I can hear the kids laughing in the other room, I’ve got a couple of more gifts to wrap and can smell what Abby is up to in the kitchen. Mr. Adams and I have some more “Christmas Story” to watch as well. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

-E

All The Motivation I Need

“Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. But John tried to deter him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’  Jesus replied, ‘Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness.’ Then John consented. “
- Matthew 3:13-15

I love the phrase “John tried to deter him”. He was trying to deter Jesus away from having John do something. Why? John didn’t think he was worthy of what Jesus was asking him to do. Instead of doing what Jesus wanted him to, he suggests Jesus should be doing what he’s asked John to. How does Jesus convince him to do what he’s  been asked?

“It is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness.”

What the heck does that mean? Basically, what Jesus says is this: “We have to do this and it has to be done this way so  that we’re right with God”. Isn’t that what righteousness is/means? To be right with God? Jesus, before the Spirit landed on him, knew the importance of being right with God. How does John respond? He relents and consents. Why? He also knew the importance of being right with God.

How many times, in my own life, do I try to deter the Holy Spirit in much the same way John did? Unlike John, why is that not all the motivation I need?

No More Apologies

I’m tired of having to apologize to counselors, teachers and the like for the way churches operate (or don’t operate I should say). It’s happened more than I’d like to admit (especially with one particular church here in Tulsa). If your church meets in a school or business building and you make NO attempt to relevant or consequential in the life and time of the organization you rent your Sunday space from SHAME ON YOU. You’re misrepresenting Christ, the gospel and the body. I’m swimming against the flow when I have to defend your actions and shoddy example of the body of Christ and I’m tired of apologizing on your behalf. So I won’t be doing it anymore. Instead, I’m going to start calling you out.

It’s either that or a deer rifle…

“I know whom I have believed”

A couple of days ago a friend of mine, who teeters on the line between atheist and agnostic, sent me a link to a video. It was a clip of a speech by a man named Christopher Hitchins. If you don’t know who he is look him up. In short, he’s the champion of the “new atheism movement”. This friend wanted me to watch the clip then let him know what I thought. So I watched it. In fact, I watched a couple of others that featured Mr. Hitchens. They were caustic in content. Not only against Jesus and Christianity but against religion in general. He himself is a rather cuastic individual who leans completely on science but that’s neither here nor there. Some people would probably call me caustic.

After watching, I told my friend which videos I watched. He asked how it affected my beliefs and faith. this was our conversation:

me: “It didn’t”
friend: “Wow…seriously. Those videos are the kinds of things that make me question.”
me: “If another person can shake my beliefs or my faith by simple words then I really have no faith or beliefs at all.”
friend: “But how do you defend God when people bring up the kinds of arguments that he throws out.”
me: “First of all, he doesn’t have arguments. He’s just mad. And second…I don’t need to defend God. He does that job just fine all by himself.”
friend: “But he doesn’t seem to be defending himself when he lets people like Hitchins roll on, does he?”
me: “God is not slow as some count slowness.”
friend: “I don’t even know what that means.”
me: “I know. But I’ll leave you with two things. One, the truth is like a chained up lion. It’ll defend itself when needed and doesn’t need your help.”
friend: “K”
me: “And two…God isn’t affected by what that man says.”
friend: “I wish I could believe like you.”
me: “You can. “

But I know whom I have believed,
And am persuaded that He is able
To keep that which He’s committed
Unto me against that day.

Jumping On The Hell Bandwagon

So I think I’m going to jump on the hell bandwagon with Francis Chan and Rob Bell and write a book called “What The Hell?”. Only it’s going to be less about hell and more about the slow demise of Western church thinking and existence. It’ll be broken down into three sections:

Section 1: “What The Hell Are We Doing?”
Section 2: “What The Hell Are We Thinking?”
Section 3: “Where The Hell Are We Going?”

It’ll be hugely popular, wide reaching and will change the way most people do church. Or I’ll get death threats. Probably more of the second. As I’m sure to get flack just for this blog post.

Biblical Pornography

I have a Twitter account. Sometimes I wish I didn’t but that’s a different story. But, because of this, I have roughly 280 people I can interact with on a daily basis. I also interact with a good number of these people via other social media outlets like Facebook, blogs or the like and, believe it or not, I actually know a good many of them in real life (IRL as it’s known on the web). Some of these folks are believers, some of them aren’t. And of the ones that are, some of those are even pastors and/or church leaders. After being in this environment for a couple of years, I’ve been forced to draw a couple of conclusions. The first one is this: I belong to a generation that is, at minimum, functionally biblically and scripturally literate. Based on that, my second conclusion is this: We are raising up a generation that is biblically and scripturally illiterate.

What do I mean by these two statements? My generation, by and large, is functionally biblically literate insomuch as we know just enough to get us by. We know John 3:16 and the Great Commission and the Roman Road. We know the big stories of the Old Testament, some of Jesus’ parables and just to enough of Revelations to be moderately sure that we won’t be here for the end times. We own bibles but rarely crack it open. We know there’s a bunch of other stuff in there, because we hear people preach from and about it, but some of it’s hard to understand and who are we to form an understanding of it. That’s what preachers with degrees are for.

The generation following us is, by and large, almost completely biblically illiterate. Like us, they know some things out of the scriptures but only because someone has told them and the stuff they do know is what I refer to as biblical pornography. It’s attractive and makes them feel good and is applied at just the right time to help them escape from reality but isn’t the whole truth. Some of it isn’t even the truth at all. They operate under a man-centered theology that places them at the center of Gods affections and the reason for all his actions. What’s the worst part of all this? My generation is to blame for this.

Which leads me to the question that started all this: Parents – do you live in a way that proves the validity of the scripture for your kids? My fear is that we, as parents, aren’t living in a way that shows the generations we’re influencing and bringing up the validity and advantage of living a life framed and guided by the word of the Almighty God. We’re not proving to them that we’ve been given, as 2 Peter says, everything we need for life and godliness through OUR knowledge of him on a consistent basis. We aren’t, as Deuteronomy says, talking about simple biblical principles when we’re sitting at home and when we’re walking along, when we lie down and when we get up. They don’t see and hear us respond from a well full and deep that’s fed from the spring of scripture. Why is that? As I said before, it’s because we’re merely functionally literate when it comes to scripture. We, ourselves, don’t drink from that well on a consistent basis so how can that same water flow out of us to others? I took two years of French in high school. I took it the first year because I didn’t know any better. I took it the second year because of a girl. I was horrible at it. My teacher couldn’t stand me because I almost always refused to speak in French. I didn’t study, I didn’t try. I did just enough to get by and pass and never touched it again. Fast forward to today. Do I now have the ability to teach my kids French? Not even if I had a gun to my head. Oh sure, I can teach them phrases like “let’s go to the pool” and “this is my pencil” or the like. Why? It was never a priority, that’s why. I had people in class that I could cheat off of if need be. I never studied then and I certainly don’t touch it now! I’m afraid that a great number of us have approached the bible the same way I approached learning French. And it’s to the detriment of the generation immediately following us AND the generation we’ve brought into the world. It’s our responsibility to get them off spiritual welfare and into a relationship with God based on what THEY know instead of what someone else knows. Otherwise they’re living on hearsay. It’s our job to get them out of the pit of biblical pornography and wash them off in the deep, deep pool of the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth of the Word of God. How do we do that? By talking about the truth we’re sitting down and when we’re walking along, when we lie down and when we get up; day in and day out. By teaching them to hide such things in their heart (Psalms 119). But before we can do that, we need to get ourselves off spiritual welfare. We ourselves need to stop finding quick satisfaction in biblical pornography. We ourselves need to be rooted in the truth.

Innoculation

“I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”
Romans 1:16-17

“For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,  who gave himself as a ransom for all men—the testimony given in its proper time.”
1 Timothy 2:1-6

I’ve been thinking about this most of the day and had to get it out of my head. Sometimes I get the feeling that we, as Christians in America, have done a great job over the last few decades of inoculating people to the gospel instead of infecting them with it. The result of which is a generation of Christians that don’t really know what the “good news” is. Sometime, I would love to sit down with a group of people and talk about the gospel. The weight, the goal, the responsibility and the expectation thereof…

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Crying In Trucks and Keeping In Step

This morning, I was reading in Galatians 5 where Paul says “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.” For us to “keep in step” means we have to maintain the same pace as the object or person we’re keeping step with. Not lagging behind. Not running ahead.  As I thought to myself “how do we make sure we’re keeping step”, I made the connection between that passage and that question and yesterday’s events.

I’m not going to bore you with complete details because if you hang around here enough you know what we do with The OneChild Project but I will give you a little bit of background. We’ve been hit with large number of food requests from schools lately. I take pride in the fact that, in the almost five years of our existence, we’ve never said “no” to a food request. The money has always showed up when it was needed. So when three food requests came in mid-week and the account we use to by food with was empty I started asking God where he was going to get a couple of hundred dollars to feed these people. That was Wednesday evening. An idea came to me in the middle of the night that night. That idea took bodily form on Thursday morning as “Five Dollar Friday”. Within an hour of putting the “FDF” notice out to our social media outlets, that couple of hundred dollars magically appeared. Then something crazy happened. One of our partners stopped by and gave us a ridiculously large check. My mind immediately started thinking about where we could use this money: buy a fridge for storing food, put part of it towards our nonprofit status, on and on and on. In the midst of all those thoughts, though, I could hear God urging me to “slow down”.

Money kept coming in for FDF all day. Fast forward to the afternoon and I’m going to the bank to put Checko El Grande in the bank. Almost simultaneously as I get my deposit receipt from the tellers magic money tube, my phone buzzes with an email. It was from one of the counselors at Springdale Elementary we work with all the time. And the text of it was something like this:

I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s going on but I have four more families that need food. They’re coming out of the woodwork.

Well, I know what’s going on. It’s close to the end of the month and people are running out of food assistance. Because of that, we’ll probably get more calls for food in the next week. So…I’m sitting in my truck reading this email, looking at the deposit receipt and listening to the ding of donation emails come in on my phone. Now a truck is a manly vehicle, usually. You don’t cry in a truck. You cry in a hybrid Prius or a Volvo or a cute little Volkswagen but not a truck. But as it hits me that we now had seven families to feed and more than enough money to do it, I felt this release inside of me as God whispered “now we can go”. I confess to you, brothers and sisters, that I cried in my truck. And not one of those “squeak a tear out of the corner of my eye” cries like that Indian crying over trash. No, this was a “full on, can’t choke it back” cry with Night Ranger blaring on the truck stereo in the background.

So why do I tell you all of this? Because, after reading Galatians this morning, I realized that all these events both prove and demonstrate “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.” Most of us read that verse and automatically start to wonder what WE have to do to keep in step as if we have some huge responsibility or part in this. But our responsibility is both simple and basic. Listen and watch. God is setting the pace here. He’s the one that changes the pace. If we’re listening and watching then we’ll be able to keep pace with the Spirit. For some of you, you’re immediate reaction to that is “way to be generic , Vardeman, and oversimply things.” If I hadn’t listened and paid attention we might have a new refrigerator in the garage. We may have already filed our 501c3 papers. Who know what other stupid moves I might have made (I’m certainly capable). But instead…we’re feeding hungry people like we’re supposed to.  I would submit to you that if you silence all the outside voices and noise that vie for control of your faith and your attention day in and day out…it just may be that simple. And I’m dumb enough to believe that.

I make it a point to not pay attention to a lot of the noise in the Christian sub-culture. Most of it’s just posturing and wind anyway. What noise do you need to silence so you can here God whisper the cadence of the pace today? Keep in step…

The Dirt and The Gospel

At some point following Jesus has to become less about sloganeering, quoting and book knowledge and more about response, reaction and the dirt of the gospel under our finger nails. There’s nothing wrong with proclaiming the gospel from the rooftops but at some point we are going to have to dig our fingers into the soil of peoples lives and the community around us and plant the gospel that way.

If I just hold up a bag of seed in front of my yard and that’s all I do it’ll never grow new grass or cover bare patches. If I talk about how well the neighbors yard looks or how much work he/she has put into it, my yard will never change. BUT…if I get on my hands and knees and dig and pull and plant and water and get dirty…then there’s a chance my yard will grow and thicken and cover. There’s no guarantee but the odds are in my favor. Tiring work? Yes. Not fun at time? Correct. Dirty and thankless? Quite often.  The same is true of the gospel. If we don’t dig our fingers into the dirt of the people around us or the dirt of our community and plant and weed and water then the gospel never grows in those places.

The gospel is “good news”. It’s true and sturdy and ripe for planting. And it came to you on it’s way to someone else. And if the good news comes to you and never goes back out you’re like the Dead Sea. Everything flows into you and nothing goes back out but instead becomes stagnant and useless. That’s why one of the last instructions Jesus gave to his followers was to take the gospel to every corner and every nation. In essence, Jesus was saying “this good news is so true that it’s applicable everywhere so go get ‘em guys!”

But to do that. we have to dig in the dirt for the gospel.