Off to Mex

Ok so I leave this morning to drive for 30 hours with my parents to Puerto Vallarta. Should be interesting. Be back on Saturday night, then leave Monday morning again for Hume Lake for the Youthworkers Retreat.

Spin and Smoking

We saw the movie, Thank You For Smoking, tonight and it was very thought provoking while being pretty funny. Spin is such an interesting and captivating thing. I found myself loving the character who was spinning and smiling and eloquently fontificating on the benefits of smoking and why smoking isn't bad for you and all of these things. What really got me was in the car when Bea said, "It's movies like this that make me think the whole world is spin." Everyone is trying to spin for their product or their government or their religion. And that's when I got a little bit sick. Religion and spin. All religions do it. Christianity does it. We do it at my church. Nobody is being bad, but I think we just need to learn to tell the truth. The whole truth. We believe in the truth of it, not the spin version. Don't we? Their is a deep and sometimes painful cost to following Christ. Their is peace and contentment, but we are pretty much betting the farm on this whole thing right. It better not be spin. Why do we feel the constant need to make church pretty and attractive and not make the cross too offensive. It's really offensive. There are some things that God says about sinners (all of us) and those that don't believe that are gnarly. The Bible is rated R and even NC17 a lot of the time. How should we spin that? How do you spin David with a necklace of foreskins after he massacred his enemies? How do you spin that we do believe a lot of things by faith? How do you spin the sweet and bitter pill of grace and that we really don't earn any forgiveness by ourselves? Because you know you wish you could. We don't spin. We speak truth. We are truthtellers. The truth as we read it and know it in our bones. The truth of love and justice and beauty and pain and unfairness and forgiveness and sin and sin some more and mean people and friendship and betrayal. It's all there. Just tell it like you see it. That's better than a fake smile and some easy religion.

Thesis

I'm going insane with my thesis that was due two weeks ago. I'm frustrated because I did all this primary research and now I'm analyzing and sorting the data into these lame frequency tables that are so FREAKING BORING to do. I'm learning a lot about Excel and how to make tables. Pretty cool stuff. Sarcasm sarcasm sarcasm. My paper is on transitions between age-stage ministries and the quantitative research is basically going to "prove" that it's hard to transition kids from JH to HS to College. Then all the qualitative research will give ways to help them feel more comfortable, provide program, relationships, etc. Then I think of a bunch of witty ideas to make transitioning easier. So anyway, it sucks. I'm also presenting all of the research and my "witty ideas" at the CMTA (formerly GLASS) conference on May 6 so I gotta get it done soon. I'm also supposed to graduate May 28. I hope I can. eeeek.

Anyways, I'm also going to be driving to Puerto Vallarta on Tuesday with my parents. That's really far.

I'm reading Simply Christian by N.T. Wright right now. So far so good. More to come.

I'm coming back

I've had enough of my silence. It's time to return to the blogosphere. Prepare to be blown away. I love Jesus so much and have a lot of passion for Him, but I also struggle with a pit in my gut at times. I'm human and loved by the most powerful being that has ever existed. That's the most intense thing ever. I was feeling kind of down lately spiritually, but we read I Corinthians 15 today - the whole thing, not just the first several verses - and it fired me up. So I'm back.