The cheater inches closer...

Link here.

Every time he hits a homer I throw up a little bit in my mouth. The classy move would be to retire before he soils the record with his creams and clears, but that would be asking too much from the biggest ego in sports, now wouldn't it?

Know what sickens me the most? Barry Bonds is the best baseball player in history. And he was before the steroids and HGH. His short-sighted decisions were equivalent to dumping a city's worth of poo all over his career. He didn't NEED TO CHEAT!!!! But he couldn't bear to see McGwire and Sosa the center of attention. Maybe if he respected the game....nah. Too much to ask from someone whose dad and godfather are synonymous with everything baseball used to be about. Hustle, desire, respect for the sport, and love for the game.

Putrid.

The most clearly laid-out reality that every movement (or revolution) must become an institution; or die

From Brian P (who I do not know), comment #7 on this site.

Before you read it, which I highly, highly recommend, I should tell you that I italicized some parts myself for emphasis, the first two quoted sections are Brian responding to the site owner, when Brian says "IC" he's referring to the "Institutional Church," and if you want some great reflections from Scot McKnight related to Barna's insights in Revolution that go beyond his more surface findings, listen to this podcast. I yield the floor to Brian;

“I’ve come to a point where I’m at peace where I am, and I enjoy being with ICers, nonIcers etc etc.”

I’m very happy for you!

” It’s just enjoying life and walking with Jesus, no labels”

Heh heh.

That works as long as it’s just you by yourself.

When it will fall apart is when you get together with your fellow Revolutionaries to do something together. Especially if they start having kids. When the blessed moment arrives, everyone in the church will be happy. But then the questions start coming:

So do we baptize the baby now, or wait until he/she is older?
If/when we baptize, do we do it by sprinkling, or by physically dunking people in water?
What exactly are we going to teach this child? Will we use a formal list of teaching points?
And of course now it’s time for Junior’s first communion. How often does that happen anyway? Once a week? Once a month? And what exactly is Junior drinking, anyway?
Wine? Grape juice? From little dixie cups or from one big communal cup?

I’m just getting started.

Think this stuff is trivial? Well, yes, yes it is. But you’re going to find that, in this and in so many other decisions, you have to make choices as to what you will and will not do together. And when you do, sure as sunrise, you’re going to have a small, offended minority who will walk out, convinced that you’ve fallen into error.

Eventually you’ve got a “way things are done”.

And after the first few times you have guest speakers come in who tear that order apart, you’re going to start making sure anyone who gets in your pulpit (or whatever) has the proper education in the way things are done, AND in the Bible. That means your own seminaries.

Until the day you wake up in about thirty or forty years with your own seminaries, your own governing structure, your own specific doctrine… and you realize that you’re a denomination in all but name. But of course you don’t call yourself a denomination. You call yourself “the community who seeks after God”.

Just like all the other denominations :). You’d be surprised at how many of them insist that they are *the* true church, usually started by rebels not much different from yourself.

And then in the second generation your kids start noticing all the flaws in the edifice you and your fellow revolutionaries have built. They make a noise, and pretty soon THEY are starting a revolution against YOU and complaining about the IC (or whatever the cool buzzword is) and how it ‘doesn’t get it’. And the cycle starts anew.

I say this, because I’m from a country that was started by just such religious movements. Ever hear of the Puritans? The word originally meant those who wanted to ‘purify’ the Church of England from what they considered it’s idolatrous practices … to make a clean church that would just follow Jesus without all the baggage. When they were run out of England, they came to America to build this ‘perfect church’ from the ground up.

The end result of that, four hundred years later, is places like Church O. How well would you say the experiment worked?

I’m not saying that a new denomination is necessarily bad. Very often, the IC *doesn’t* get it. I am banned from my parent denomination’s most prestigious university because I speak in tongues. A new denomination can very well be a move of God to prod the church *as a whole* in a new direction.

What I am saying is that what you and your fellow revolutionaries are doing has been done before many, many times in the history of the church. It can be a very good thing, as long as you don’t expect too much.

After all, what alternative do you have ? Quit associating with Christians altogether and go totally solo? That, IMO, is the biggest mistake of all.

Why? Because the fundamental lesson of Jesus is *love*. Love means learning to live with people who are very different from you. Church — revolutionary or not — is a perfect laboratory for this, because you find all kinds of rude, arrogant people whom you would otherwise have nothing to do with. Learning to function with such people in love is as good a lesson in being Christlike as anything else I can think of.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Gulping and sipping...

What was that? The U.S. is intervening in Iraq and not intervening in Darfur for what reason?

ht: Drew Moser

And you thought ballplayers tuned out the crowd...

Well, maybe Manny Ramirez is an exception to the rule, but here's a fun link for you.

Let's hear the tired phrase about freedom again...

*Cue epic music* "Cause I'm proud to be an...."

Here's a link for your interest. Declassified documents showing the FBI's campaign to completely discredit MLK Jr. because he was upsetting the status quo too much; includes multiple illegal wiretaps. Have fun reading this bad boy.

A little excerpt; "As early as 1962, Director Hoover penned on an FBI memorandum, "King is no good." At the August 1963 March on Washington, Dr. King told the country of his dream that "all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, I'm free at last."' The FBI's Domestic Intelligence Division described this "demagogic speech" as yet more evidence that Dr. King was "the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country."

And another fun read here...illegal investigations into civilian citizens by the military over time. You get stuck on this page for very long, you might start to distrust some institutions you thought were always out to protect your "freedoms."

Hear that?

It's the death of my overly idealistic world...a violent one, I might add.

At some point, if one desires to make a difference in this world, one will find that their ideals and the practicality of applying those ideals to reality often makes a sickening crunch and a grisly wreck scene.

This I find daily...will I live in a fantasy world of constant wheels-spinning-ideals and hypocritical action, or will I honestly engage the struggle to make my ideals reality...which includes ditching some ideals as they are exposed in their inadequacy and shallowness?

I feel like a failure today. Things may feel better tomorrow.



In other news, according to Salon.com, you might want to pass on the salmon from Wal-Mart. Because, evidently it seems, you are eating salmon raised in Chile where they "are generally raised in open-net pens...There is a metal cage on the surface, with nets hanging down to a netted bottom...they grow tens of thousands of fish per net, 1 million or 1.5 million per farm. Then they all go poo. There is a huge amount of waste going into the ocean. People say, oh, that's natural, all fish go poo in the ocean. But not in that kind of concentration. It just smothers the seabed." One million salmon produce the same sewage...as sixty-five thousand people. The ocean pens suffer from another source of pollution -- excess feed. Any food that isn't consumed settles to the ocean floor, adding to the layer of feces. The waste itself contains residues of antibiotics and other chemicals used to keep the fish healthy during the two years it takes them to grow to harvestable size." In the words of Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura, "Yummy."




In more positive news, it seems there are a few diamonds in the rough these days for your kids to look up to in professional sports. I've had my issues with blind idolatry of celebrities before, so I've tempered my view of them greatly, but Brian Roberts is a solid, blue-collar, tremendous example of a young man. I'm not surprised to find kids with leukemia have changed his life more radically, possibly, that he has theirs. Now, I'm hoping the listing of Brian's name in Jason Grimsley's arrest affidavit as a user of HGH/steroids/amphetamines isn't accurate. Crossing my fingers.

Simplicity and Honesty...

Whoever said repentance was an easy one-time turn away (accompanied by punching one's golden ticket to heaven) from one's old life was a liar.

A Georgia friend, Josh Brown explores this. To put it simply, we all live in terrifying hypocrisy, and it is becoming more and more clear to me that we are called to a lifestyle, an attitude of repentance and humility in the pursuit of God.

When I think of the process of change, the picture seems pretty clear, if I (we) want to grow.

1) I recognize what I have been thinking/speaking/doing is against the expectations of God
2) I repent and seek to turn from my former way of thinking/speaking/doing.

This is where most folks stop in description...this is nothing more than behavior modification, though, in my view. We need;

3) Learning to love the way of thinking/speaking/doing God expects so we get to the place we really WANT what God wants.

And honesty demands that I insert
4) Wash, rinse, and repeat steps 1-3 until we die...because while we will see growth, we will not see the sort of growth that eliminates the possibility of falling right back into our old ways, most deeply because we haven't made the transition to running freely after God's desires.

This is messy. Messy doesn't even hint at the difficulty. Menno Simons, a giant in the faith, wrote in his Meditation on the 25th Psalm a personal confession;

"I find day by day that my righteousness is as filthy rags. When I think I walk, I fall; when I imagine that I stand, I am down; and when I think to be something, then I am nothing. O dear Lord, keep me, for the fear of my heart is very great, greater than I can write or say. At times I am as a woman in travail...the dangers of hell surround me, the marrow of my bones is dried up. For here neither money nor possessions are involved, neither flesh nor blood, but my poor naked soul, eternal life or eternal death."

This sort of thought wasn't unique in Menno's life. He wrote over and over again of the need for one's will and mind to be completely committed to Christ; that there was no price he would not have paid in obedience, but his heart was deeply troubled. He had grown to the point where he hated his old way of being, but found in his struggle to leave it behind that in many ways the battle had just begun...because this blackness of rebellion coursed through his veins and the only way he could emerge from that reality was a ruthless trust in and deep desire for the power of God to give him the power to stand. There's a confession in his thoughts here too, I think, in his understanding that in the presence of God he stands naked, with nothing covering his heart, the essence of his being. And he quaked in the presence of God and maintained a healthy fear of him that drove him to action.

Sufjan Stevens tries to put words to this struggle, I think, in his song "He Woke Me Up Again";

"And I hope, I hope you are tired out.
And I know, I know there is joy endowed.
But I was asleep,
And he woke me up again,
And he woke me up again to say...

Hold on, hold on to your old ways
Or put off, put off every old face.
And I know, I know you are changed out.
And I hope, I hope you're arranged out.
But I'm still asleep
And you woke me up again.
And I'm still asleep
But you woke me up to leave"

There's an interplay there; First, "he woke me up again," then "but I'm still asleep."

I have found in my life this happening time and again. I am woken up to the painfulness of the results of my separation from God, and it drives me to weeping and anger that I could be so hurtful to myself and others. So I commit myself to leave the specific thought/word/action behind, only to find it seeks to justify its existence, provides good arguments that pull at both my brain and my emotions, and woos me back time and again. "When I think I walk, I fall; when I imagine that I stand, I am down; and when I think to be something, then I am nothing." I keep thinking I woke up, only to come to my senses some days and in honesty confess I continue to sleep...

So where is my hope?

In the one addressed in Romans 8:12-17 and the life he has freed me to pursue...

And in never giving up.

God is easily pleased but never satisfied...how could I dare to suggest I could get to a point, believe I've traveled far enough, and sit down and wait for the sweet by and by? I know enough of God's character in Scripture to know if I do this, the by and by won't be so sweet.

Menno also said this;

"For we prefer to endure misery, poverty, tribulation, hunger, thirst, heat, cold, bonds, and death, in our mortal bodies, and continue in the Word of the Lord, rather than to lead secure, easy lives with the world, and for the sake of a short, transitory life ruin our souls"