List Week- Tuesday

Here is a list of ideas for Tuesday:

1. I was never one of those people who felt hurt by the church despite the fact that I saw the church and all of its mistakes and failures, but about a year ago when Rob Bell published Love Wins I finally understood why people hate Christianity. I have never felt more unloved and flat out hated by people who I considered brothers and sisters in Christ than after the publication of that book. I felt like all the ideas and creativity that was surging through me just stopped, and it wasn't God's fault it was my own. I shut it off because I was afraid that if I expressed all of the ideas that I had that people in the church would turn against me. This blog has helped me to express those ideas again.

2. Because of our limited understanding if we were to see God he would appear to us to always be in a state of growth. If you imagine infinity there is always a point in your head which is the edge of your imagination and if you imagine yourself approach that point then you will find yourself getting ever closer to infinity while meanwhile the thing which rest on the horizon never changes, but if you imagine yourself arriving at that point it would be much like Truman in the Truman show arriving at a wall in the middle of the ocean. The one that would be different between the Truman show and true infinity is that once we arrived at that wall which we created in our heads it would then expand further out until it got back to it's furthest point again and the process would continue. Now if we imagine ourselves arriving at infinity an infinite amount of times our mind allows the equation to go on forever and basically blurs everything in between. I used to play this video game for the Atari where you could just drive for as long as you wanted as long as you didn't crash, and day would turn to night and back to sunrise over and over and sometimes you would arrive at a city and sometimes you would arrive at a vast open dessert, but the game could possibly go on forever. After about 2 hours it was incredibly boring and limited, and God is not. So if we were to embark on this imaginary journey to the edge of infinity we would find ourselves experiencing a newer and greater idea of God every time that we arrive at the limit of our understanding. This would be like Truman arriving at the wall only to have it expand into a completely different world where up was down, down was up and pigs could shoot fire. No one would say "ah yes, Truman's world remains steady and unchanging," even though the fact that it is constant and infinite makes it steady and unchanging because it is in a steady and unchanging state of growth.

3. We are only creative because we have a creator. The only reason why we are capable of art and expression is because the one who created everything lives in us and has breathed His breath of life in us. Expressions of creativity are amazing to us because they reveal to us that there must be a creator bigger than humanity at large.

4. God's will for us is utterly simple and it's a product of the fall that we do not ever fully realize it's simplicity. In attempts to grasp at its simplicity we always arrive at complexity but when we attempt to love others to the best of our abilities at all times no matter how limited our understanding may be we find ourselves understanding God and how simple is will is more than any study could offer.

5. Blasphemy is atrophy of the body of Christ. Christianity becomes blasphemy at the point that it stifles and restricts believers from pursuing Christ and doing His will. When we discuss Christianity and debate beliefs it becomes unproductive once we arrive at a crisis of faith that stops us from doing the things God has called us to do. Through my Christian education and my conversations with friends I've gotten to this point multiple times where I felt like I simply didn't know the answer and my fear of choosing the wrong thing stopped me from doing anything, or rather my inability to find an answer equipped me to pursue my laziness. It is easy to use Christianity as an excuse to not actually be a Christian. It is easy to study the scripture about tithing to the point that you justify never tithing. It is easy study scripture about evangelism to the point that you justify never evangelizing. When you do such you commit blasphemy. It speak against the truth of Christ which in itself is faith, an active moving faith that changes the world. When we study scripture to a point of lethargy we portray a Christ who did nothing for us but read the Torah. 

List Week- Monday

This week will be a week of list.

I need to get my mind straight and some times that means break out from the norm and trying something new for just a little bit in hopes of finding whatever it was that was missing from the previous arrangement of days and activities.

So here is a list for Monday:

1 thing about Mondays for every other day of the work week (AKA 4 things about Mondays):

1. Mondays should be filled with an energy that propels you from the beginning of the laborious project that is a full workweek and into the very ends of the final hours of Friday. In my case Mondays are the day that follows Sunday, filled with confusion as though I’m wading in the waters of a tsunami trying to hold onto something that can stay a float long enough to get me to the next Sunday.

2. Garfield is not justified in his expressions of hatred. He’s a cat. Cats have no justification for any hate. They are little nap monsters that pay for food and cleaning services with purrs.

3. I wonder what some of the people whose work ethic I admire are doing with their Mondays, or with the Mondays they had before they were overwhelmed with work. I wonder what Rob Bell does with his Mondays, or what Donald Glover, or Will Smith? A strange group, I know, but still…

4. On a good day 20 people read my blog. On a bad day 0 people do. I wonder who reads my blog on Mondays? If they did they’d realize that this was actually posted on Tuesday.

And now a list of things I feel like need to complete, numbered to the number of completion (AKA 7 things I need to do):

1. I need to take whatever leaps of faith I’m not taking and I need to take them with every ounce of my soul.

2. I need to stop being scared that what happened to me in my senior year of college will happen again and I will find myself burnt out because this life I’m living now doesn’t care for people the way that my life then did.

3. I need to give this wedding to God, and not take even a scrap of it for myself or I will find that this foundation for a marriage is laden with cracks caused by my selfishness.

4. I need to write poetry again.

5.  I need to make PACC Youth Ministries into the ministry that I always dreamed it could be. One that inspires people to find the creator that moves through everything and to express it by allowing themselves to create.

6. I need to change the world for good rather than stop myself from doing evil.

7. I can only do 1-7 by giving my heart wholly to Christ and watching his love unfold in my life and in others. I need to give my heart wholly to Christ.

It’s a new week of a new year and it’s time to kick some expletive deleted!

Random Thursday- Coming soon

Sorry guys, running a little behind. Thanks for understanding.

MW- Who do I do Ministry for?

New Year's Resolution: Shorten my posts. Let's see if I can do it!

Who do I do ministry for?

I went to a soccer game yesterday (which was about 15 hours after this should have been posted, so you can tell I’ve been procrastinating so far in 2012). I went there to see to of my youth kids play soccer. I played soccer once as a kid but they’ll be the first to tell you peewee soccer in Kentucky and High School soccer in LA are very different things. The only other sporting events I’ve gone to are a few swim meets last year. I don’t really understand sports but I understand that attending them are absolutely essential to my job.

I was contacted by this guy who is leading a ministry out in Bell, which is pretty close to me. We had met briefly at a conference in October and he had remembered me because of my beard. He was trying to get some people together to do a make-shift winter camp. After we Facebook’d back and forth for a while we going to meet up and have coffee tomorrow morning.

This past thanksgiving I talked about how our church asks people what they are thankful for and this year a mom stood up and said she was thankful for me and for the youth ministry. It brought tears to my eyes.

At my ordination I had 3 youth kids come up and talk about the ways I had impacted them and one of the things that always came up was the fact that they wore button up shirts with the sleeves rolled up and that was because of me. It was such a little, stupid thing but it was this visual representation of how I impacted their lives.

I was mulling around this question as I went in to 2012 and I realized there are a ton of right answers but in them there was one obvious theme. If I said I do ministry only for youth kids I’d be wrong and if I said I did it to support other churches around me I’d be wrong. If I did it for parents, or for other pastors, or to impress women I’d be wrong, even if Kate swoons every time I preach. :-)

I think even if I said I do it all for Christ I’d be wrong. I absolutely do ministry for Christ, that is my main motivation, but as I adopt Christ into my heart I realize that His motivation is others.

Who do I do ministry for? Anyone but myself.

We do ministry for others. 

IQR- Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

IQR- Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

(In case you start wondering about the numbers inside of the parenthesis randomly, they are a running count of clichés I used in this review, enjoy)

good thing I'm not numbering puns too!

Actual Rating: 3.5 The acting was surprisingly good given the fact that there are no big name stars. The guy playing Dale (Tyler Labine) is probably someone you recognize only as a character actor and Katrina Bowden is know for being that girl in 30 Rock… no not Liz Lemon. The video quality wasn’t the best but the plot certainly made up for that. It was like watching two movies at the same time, a romantic comedy and a slasher/horror film. Pitch perfect (1) script throughout the whole thing.

Enjoyment Rating: 4 I found myself very entertained and it wasn’t from crude sex or fart jokes… or worse, crude sex-fart jokes (I’m looking at you Scary Movie franchise). There was an element of Three Stooges style slapstick that made the whole film come off as funny while not sacrificing the horror aspects of the slasher genre.

Kate’s Cryometer: 5 tears Kate refused to watch this and thus cried sloppy wet tears (totally different than sloppy wet kisses for all those worship leaders out there). She said she didn’t like movies that made death funny. “Death is never funny”, shrug, it’s pretty funny to me.

Blasphemy Explosions (now officially measured in explosions thanks to Die Hard): 

one still seems like a lot doesn't it...

1 explosion. The message of the film is so sickly sweet that it seems straight out of a Feature Films for Family movie (Kate LOVES those). Don’t judge others by their cover, if you take off the “by their cover” part then it’s straight out of the Bible, so really this should get 0 explosions, but of course there is that gratuitous violence, so one explosion. A blood and guts explosion. There might have been cursing but I can’t remember.

Overall: 4 stars.

Who would have thought (2) that such a disposable instant queue movie would have been so good? I certainly didn’t. When I went into this I really thought that it was going to be overloaded with clichés and stupid jokes, but just as the film teaches, we are not to judge a book by it’s cover (3), or a hillbilly by his inability to talk to women.

you judge him by his mullet and awkward body hair.

Don’t get me wrong, this film is loaded with flaws but they are so easily dismissed because of how well the filmmakers capture a spirit of the film. Never once did I stop and say “there’s no way this would ever happen” instead the whole time I was thinking “oh man, I can’t believe this happening!” All the while laughing my butt off (4)… literally (5). I had butt surgery after this film. (It’s jokes like that that weren’t in this movie)

Really what makes this film a 4 star film is the fact that it overcame it’s low-budget straight to Instant Queue origins and made something for itself. It’s the film equivalent of that older brother that your parents always compare you to… I’ll move out of the basement when I’m darn ready mom!

…

anyway.

Other than the gore this move really was firing on all cylinders (6). It a piece de resistance (7) of B-films. It really takes the cake (8). This is a horror film/romantic comedy after my own heart (9).  And

Ummm…

All’s well that ends well…? (10!)

Take that (11) episode of Gilmore Girls where Paris and her boyfriend (Doyle, thanks Kate) only talk in clichés!

SED- Bulimia

I am spiritually bulimic. I’ve known it for sometime now and this post is going to be tough to get through because everything I write I know I’m writing about myself. When most people think of vomit they think of this putrid, half-digested, burning pile of stomach acid. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who gets really excited about vomiting. Growing up I seldom vomited. I often lied about it to get out of school but from the age of 3 to the age of 22 I was completely vomit free.

So at the age of 22 when I was sitting in my Human Rights and International Politics class at Hope and I had this weird feeling like my stomach hurt and the only way to fix it was to sneeze I thought to myself is this what vomiting feels like? I ran out of the classroom confused like a teenager realizing they need to shave for the first time. I saw a trashcan and my instincts kicked in. As I hunched over it and began the unsavory process my first thought was this is awesome! It felt good. There was this stuff in my stomach that just wouldn’t digest and when it finally got out my body was very happy. Sorry for all the details but I promise you it’s all for a purpose.

this sign is also for a purpose.
haha.

See, typically vomiting is reserved only for that stuff that your body knows it can’t digest and process or else it may kill you, so your body takes care of it another way. When it comes to bulimia you force your body to purge things that you have decided are not worthy of digestion. In many ways it is similar to anorexia because it makes food into an enemy. An act that was once reserved only for the most vile food substances is now committed on nutritious things that your body actually needs.

The other aspect of bulimia happens right before the purge. Bulimia is also often referred to as binging and purging. When you’ve been starving yourself your body starts to make you really hungry and then when your will power breaks you take in all of this food until you feel sick and guilty, and so you purge.

this is the censored version of the picture I wanted to use.

Often times I feel like I’m starving for spirituality. I look for it anywhere I can and I see in all sorts of places. When I indulge in all of this and take in as much Christ as my body truly needs I realize that I don’t really want to digest it. I get about halfway through thinking about it and breaking it apart and then realize that if I keep going it’s going to go straight to my belly and I’ll look even more unsavory to the standards that the world has set. If I truly allow myself to digest the spiritual food Christ gives me then there will be consequences on my life. I will not look the same.

So after I take in that big meal of working at a church and spending time reading Christian blogs and talking Christian talk with my friends and I finally go home and settle in I realize that if I practice what I just learned that my life would have to be drastically different from what it is and that’s not going to be a good thing in the eyes of all my friends.

So I vomit it up.

For a while I thought that was my profession. I was meant to take in all of this stuff, chew it a bit and spit it out so other people could digest it easier. It was baby bird food. Now if you follow this metaphor of digestion to its logical end (pun intended) you may find yourself somewhere unsavory, but what I mean to say is that when we digest the spiritual food we take in we get the nourishment from it. We go through a process of struggling with it and separating the bad from the good rather than purging all of it out on others.

I can’t count how many times I’ve given a message to the students that was essentially me repeating something I heard from a blog or another pastor. I remember volunteering at a summer camp and hearing a speaker repeat a story from a Rob Bell book and say that it happened to him. Later I asked him if he liked Velvet Elvis and he said “it was alright, I didn’t get much from it though” and I couldn’t help but think “you seem to have gotten a whole sermon out of it” and I know I do that, but I do it because I don’t want to really process what I’m taking in.

Go to Netflix and watch any food documentary and you’ll see that the things you eat have a huge impact on your life. Not just the way you look but the way you act and your overall health. 

see how ominous this is?!

So, think about how much more our lives are affected by the things we take in spiritually and yet it seems that there aren’t that many people whose lives are greatly changed. You look out your window and you can see people who clearly have good diets and people who clearly don’t but you can’t see what is happening spiritually.

I think it’s because most of us have a spiritual eating disorder of some sort. 

Old Year's Eve!!

This is not a New Year’s post.

I know I’ve been gone for a while and I kind of figure that most bloggers have also taken a break for the past few weeks and now are arriving back at the ol’ laptop to muse about the New Year and their resolutions or fond memories of the year past. The reason this is not a New Year’s post is because I feel like I’m still living in 2011, and for good reason.

The end of December had a lot of adventure.

Firstly, and most importantly because it is certainly life changing, Kate and I got engaged! There will be a post later about why exactly I came to this decision... I'll give you a hint, it's because I am completely head over heels in love with her (even when she's a jerk and reads things over my shoulder... not that that has happened recently or anything, like right now). Check out this video that took me forever to put together. It comes in two parts because YouTube hates me.

Part 1: Pre-engagement

Part 2: Engagement

So, that all took place on the Wednesday night/Thursday morning before Christmas. Later that Thursday Kate and I had our first date as an engaged couple. Originally it was at this date that I was going to propose but if you watched the video you can see that isn’t what happened, instead we spent some time talking about wedding stuff and buying our wedding journal. It’s pretty awesome.

Here are some pictures:

this isn't the one she wanted but you know girls
they never know what they want :-)

Our wedding book!

She'd be smiling bigger if she hadn't skipped breakfast and lunch
out of excitement

my favorite part of the Americana

happy.

super happy!

I love this little trolly.

see... I love it!

To me, that’s enough to warrant this being an “Old Year’s Post” but that is just the beginning. A hefty beginning, but still. The next day (Christmas Eve Eve) I was ordained. My parents and my brother, and my future parents and future brother and sister were all there with a ton of my old friends and some of my new friends from Park Avenue, not to mention my new FIANCE, and Fred and Kendra who I failed to thank in the little ordination pamphlet (which I should thank Lynne and Gary for), so I’ll thank them here profusely. Thank you, thank you, thank you. It was awesome.

The best part was probably having some of the youth kids come up and talk about how I’ve impacted their life, but in a close second was this award:

It’s called the “Salsa de la Tierra” which means salsa of the earth, which is a play on words from the Hope International Salt of the Earth award. It was awesome cause I was always a little sad that I didn’t win that Salt of the Earth award and now I have something 20 million times better. Casey Miller (whose blog is here) made it upon Fred’s request.

it has a butt... in case you were wondering.

So then there was Christmas Eve, where I preached my first sermon as an ordained pastor and my first Christmas Eve sermon. I was crazy nervous and running on very little sleep so you can imagine how that worked out.

And then it was Christmas morning. It was a Sunday so I was back at church for the third day in a row. Luckily we had tamales and awesome board games or else I’m sure I would have fallen asleep, which apparently is a big no-no for Youth Pastors. Afterward it was family time, first with my family and then with Kate’s. It was awesome, mostly because Christmas is always awesome.

I know I’m running through a lot of this stuff, so my deepest apologies for those who came here to hear more about my crazy winter break, but I do need to thank the Homet’s for getting me this domain name as a Christmas gift so I can now officially welcome you to Alexhasofficehours.com  !!!! It’s pretty exciting.

And with that, sorry for my teen-girl-journal-blogging but I hope you’re as excited as me to get back to my normal blogging. With Donald and the Dust Bunnies now over and the Spiritual Eating Disorders series just beginning we can look forward to a new creative story based of a different old idea I had and a whole lot more ridiculous rambles from me. I’m happy to be back but I’m certainly still living in 2011, so HAPPY OLD YEAR’S!