The last week has been an interesting one. It started on Monday when I officiated my first memorial service for a woman who attended our church. My interactions with her since we’ve lived here haven’t been more than a ‘hello’ here and there on Sunday morning but two of her daughter said that as her health faded she requested that I would be the one to speak at her memorial service. I was both surprised and honored when asked. After meeting with her family and hearing more about her life I couldn’t help but be amazed at how firm her faith was. Even while she battled cancer in her last days her hope in God gave her peace and confidence.

Then Wednesday came and the birth of my second son. The mystery of love is revealed in a deeper way when you have kids. You realize you can love each one with as much passion and depth as the other and you don’t run out. With his birth my thoughts wander to what kind of man he will become, what passions he’ll have, and what vision will guide his life.

Birth to life, just a blip in history, and this last week couldn’t have made that clearer to me. In what seems a moment my little boy will have a family of his own and I’ll have grey hair and grandchildren. Along the way there will be happiness and joy, tough times and sadness. My hope though, will always remain the same, just as it is with the birth of my son and just as it was for the woman who passed away. Today, Easter Sunday, reminds me of that hope I have and how it is more constant and firm than anything else in life.

This day reminds me of the impact that Jesus sacrifice had on my life and of all those who choose to receive it. The curse of sin and death have no power to loom over my life like a storm on the horizon. Instead of being bogged down with the worries of life and the fears of tomorrow, I can live with a long term perspective and experience joy even when circumstances aren’t happy. I’m not hoping for eternal life with God someday, I’m living it now. I can’t imagine a better way to live and surer foundation for my future.

Thank you Jesus for what you’ve done and what you’re doing in my life!

This morning my two year old was pretending to write out a grocery list and I had a weird thought.
How long before we don’t write anymore?

I do my large volume handwriting on post-it notes which are scattered across my desk. On a very rare occasion that I write a check I struggle with remembering the proper cursive that I used to write all my school papers with. Everything else is typed out, digitally stored, and virtually non-existent in reality. It’s only a matter of time before typing becomes obsolete as well. With multi-touch technology and a push for better voice recognition software, all you’ll eventually have to do to send an email is talk and wave your hand.

I’m still waiting for hover cars but in the meantime the future that 80’s sci-fi envisioned is quickly passing by.

[Writing from my breakfast bar, listening to the newest Fray album, sipping on coffee, and occasionally glancing out the window at the birds hopping in the snow.]

I finished up our brief 4 week look at spirituality last night focusing in on culture and religion. It’s been one of my favorite teaching series in the last year and we saw some very cool things happen in the lives of our students. There’s been some momentum building in these last weeks as students have been inviting friends and we’ve been filling our meeting space. Next week we’re anticipating around 80-100 students for a special Fuel gathering.

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This week at Fuel we continued on in our series, “Everything Is Spiritual’ and talked about the physical, emotional, and spiritual connections of Sex. We talked about how sex and love are not synonymous and how our culture has cheapened sex, turned it into a commodity, and perverted it. We looked at why God desires that sex would be saved for marriage - not to keep people from having fun but to keep people from giving pieces of themselves away to those that they’ll never have true intimacy with.

Sex is truly a deeply spiritual act as well as a powerful physically intimate one.

I honestly could never have imagined how awesome it would be to be a Dad. I don’t know if it’s the fault of TV or society or what but there definitely seems to be these stigmas placed on certain aspects of life that just haven’t proved to be even remotely true in mine.

The first such stigma had to do with marriage. You’ve got these stupid phrases like, ‘ball and chain’ that get linked to the idea of marriage and make you think, “man I better enjoy life before I do that”. When I think about my life before Jess and with her I can’t imagine anything else and I am truly happier than I’ve ever been.

The other one is having kids. I have enjoyed this new role so much and am super stoked about the new little guy who is due to arrive shortly.
There is nothing like having your two year old son yell ‘Papa’ and run across the room to give you a hug when you get home. From wrestling on the floor with him, to reading books before he goes to sleep, there is nothing that is even close to being burdensome about being a Dad. As he grows up I know our relationship will change and I look forward to the day when we can play sports, music, talk about life, and share in so many other things together. I can’t imagine my life now or in the future without him.

I’m two weeks into a series on spirituality that I’ve been teaching at our youth group. The umbrella title is ‘Everything Is Spiritual’ and each week we’ve been talking about the decisions we make physically and how there is also a spiritual implication to those decisions.

This last week we talked about addictions, how they happen, the chain they become, and the only lasting way to break them. As I sit and type this out I’m sipping on a cup of coffee of which I have a couple of every morning. The reality is that addictions are far more than just drugs and alcohol. Anything we let consume us, we crave incessantly, or become dependent on….like, um coffee. I periodically will not drink coffee for a week to see how it affects me. If I ever get a headache or start to really crave it then I’ll stay away from it for longer.

This last week was eye opening as we had those students who have formed addictions and want to turn from them respond. They did. It’s pretty huge when a 15 or 16 year old kid who depends on drugs, alcohol, pornography, etc. to enjoy life realizes that a change is needed. If they can make the choice to break these hidden addictions now it will literally change the course of their life. So instead of becoming a closet porn addict or alcoholic with a family and a white picket fence, these guys can break that chain now.

Big stuff.

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I just finished reading an interesting book called Counterfeit Revival, by Hank Hanegraff. The book was written at the height of what Charismatic/Pentecostals were calling a fresh renewal or revival in North America. You may remember this time (starting around 1994 and ending in 2001) as a church in Pensacola, Brownsville, and one in Toronto were getting some media attention due to strange things happening in their meetings. Hundreds of Christians were flocking to these towns to ‘catch the fire’ and bring it back to their local churches. My home church was no exception.

As I read the book which recounts tales of people falling down, shaking, and laughing uncontrollably, I couldn’t help but think how impressionable I was back then and how easily people buy into wacko stuff. This renewal ended up signaling the beginning of the end of our church. Within a few years of buying into hyper-charismania our church shrunk dramatically in size with many people falling away from the faith and many more still disenfranchised because the truth of who God was had been exchanged for an experience that couldn’t last.

Unfortunately emotional experience dealers like Benny Hinn still have a stage and many charismatic churches still focus more on the experience than the truth. Even recently, people like Todd Bentley managed to rally and deceive people into coming to a ’spiritual’ experience, while cheating on his wife behind the scenes.

Back to the book. I’d recommend anyone that has grown up or experienced hyper-charasmatic doctrine to read it. It’s a very truthful examination of some very unfortunate practices in the Christian culture. For me, reading some of the stories was a blast from the past.

I told this story at Fuel last night:

A man recently moved into a new town and was looking for a church to connect with. As he walked through the doors for the first time he was greeted by a very well dressed man at the door who couldn’t help notice the newcomer was dressed casually in jeans and a t-shirt. At the end of the service this same well dressed man greeted the newcomer on the way out and asked him, “What did you think?”

“I enjoyed the worship very much and plan on coming back next week.”

“Well,” replied the well dressed man, “before you come back next week why don’t you ask God what he thinks about how you should dress when you go to church?”

The newcomer politely nodded and walked out.

The next week the man returned and the same well dressed man greeted him at the door and noticed he was wearing similar clothes as the week before. He asked, “So, did you ask God what he thinks about how you should dress?”

“Yes,” the man replied, “I did ask God and he said he doesn’t know because he’s never been here.”

One of the biggest barriers that keep people from coming to know God is other people. Throughout history the church is guilty of taking their cultural behavior and transposing it onto their Christianity. And when we do that you take a God who wants relationship and turn him into a God who has a list of dos and don’ts. So today, we have the image of the church being more anti others than loving others. Because the church represents God, than this behavior immediately turns people off to even considering the reality of God and Jesus.

The church has to get back to having God - not culture- be the center of their lives.

It has been snowing since last Wednesday.
Spokane (or Snowkane) normally averages about 45 inches of snow a year and in the last week we’ve had 39. Thanks to frigid temps that have barely hit the upper teens, all of that snow is still on the ground. Another storm is due Christmas Eve which is projected to push us over the yearly average.

Personally us Fooshes love it and I’m days away from starting construction on my first igloo. I’ve always wanted to build one but figured chances were slim since the snow doesn’t usually pile up enough here. Believe it or not it may need to warm up a little before I can start. Because it’s been so cold the snow is crazy dry. So dry it’s impossible to build a snowman (Jude is bummed) and really hard to make even a simple snowball. Someone said that there’s only 1 inch of moisture to 20 inches of snow right now. The stuff is so light it looks fake. Anyways, enough talk of snow. Hope you enjoy a great Christmas Eve Eve and I’ll keep you updated on my igloo aspirations.

(I stole the title post from my friend Delvyn)

Yesterday as I coasted into the gas station to fill up, I was surprised to see gas cheaper than the day before. Just a couple of months ago I was paying over $4 a gallon and you know what I payed yesterday?

$1.47!

I think I was in High School (in California mind you where prices are higher) the last time I saw gas that cheap. I was laughing the other week when I remembered a promotion by Chrysler - from just a few months ago - that if you buy a car from them you’ll also get locked into getting gas at the low price of $3 a gallon for the next few years. That’s now more than twice what gas costs. Crazy!