1. I am the world’s most accomplished harpsichord tuner. I can tune a harpsichord at twice the
speed of light cubed. That is cubed light, not cubed speed, and certainly not cubed cheddar.
2. I dream in Cantonese although I have never been to Seoul. Something about that sentence doesn’t look write.
3. I can swallow a needle and a spool of multi-colored thread and crap out a rainbow-striped onesie (complete with hood) for a size 4-6 months infant.
4. I can kill a person seven different ways using only a paper clip held between the second and third toes of my left foot.
5. I have killed seven different people using only a paper clip held between the second and third toes of my left foot. The world is now a safer, happier place because of me.
6. I once interrogated Jack Bauer for an internal affairs investigation. After 37 straight hours of “questioning” I determined he was not a threat to national security and allowed him to leave with his remaining seven toenails still intact.
7. I am a one-woman rugby team.
8. I once wrestled a bear with my bare hands. The bear begged for mercy and tried to sell me some sob story about its three little brown bear cubs waiting at home for daddy. I knew he was lying, because he was a polar bear. I quickly disposed of his lying bear butt.
9. My beet farm produces twice as many beets as the farm of Dwight K. Schrute, on a quarter the acreage.
10. I create all my own fertilizer for my beet farm. Don’t ask me how.
11. I am the president of the Beet Farmers Union of North America. I am also the president of the Self-Fertilizing Quality Control Committee. Don’t ask me what my job involves. Let’s just say it gets a little smelly.
12. Every Starbucks restroom in the central valley has been graced with my autograph and a personalized message somewhere on the wall above the mirror.
13. Every beet farmer in France lives in mortal fear of my semiannual quality control visitations. I do not go easy on foreigners.
14. There is no Chupacabra. There never was a Chupacabra. I am the only Chupacabra South/Central America will ever need to frighten their little children out of wandering into the woods alone. Do not read too much into that.
15. I snowboard on a single ski. Actual boards are for wusses.
16. I have lassoed a great white shark to employ him as my surfboard while my right arm was in a cast following an unfortunate accident with a harpsichord.
17. I suck on habanero peppers to cool down my mouth after eating Bhut Jolokia whole. Bhut Jolokia is the world’s hottest chile pepper, discovered in Assam, India.
18. I singlehandedly keep all the Bhut Jolokia farmers of India employed.
19. Mother Theresa tried unsuccessfully to nominate me for sainthood.
20. My digestive system works at twice the speed of a normal human, which is why number 10 is a breeze for me.
21. I once declined an offer from the President to guide a Spec-Ops team on a mission to take out Osama Bin Laden in the country where the President actually thinks he’s hiding.
22. I declined because I have already discovered Osama Bin Laden (incidentally in a different country). He is now concealed in a cryogenic freezer whose location I can not disclose in the interest of national security.
23. I have cured cancer in my own body by commanding my cells telepathically to get their butts in gear. I am writing the curriculum for the class I will be teaching to medical professionals in the fall.
24. The Swedish Academy secretly says my vote counts double.
25. What I eat for breakfast every day makes Michael Phelps look like a little girl.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Monday, May 17, 2010
IDK, my BFF Jill?
First of all, the title has nothing to do with the blog. Just to clear that up.
So we were talking about Crazy Love (Francis Chan) in small group and about joyful giving versus begrudging tithes and the point was made that there are verses in the Bible that talk about being wise with your money, and we have to balance that advice with how generous we are. To get right to the point, I don't think that's true. I don't think there is a balance, because I think being wise with your money and being generous with it are, more or less, the same thing. You could compare the "balance" to a see-saw with a super fat guy weighing down Generosity's end and a basket on the other end marked "Money for Food" that may or may not have just enough dollar bills inside to keep from getting blown away on the wind. The thing is though, this see-saw isn't tilted toward the fat guy's end, like you'd think. It's completely level, even though the fat guy might weigh 300 times what the basket weighs. Because that's how the kingdom of God works, isn't it? Oftentimes defying worldly wisdom, practicality, even logic?
Even though the see-saw is balanced, the risk should always be that your security basket will get blown away due to the weight of your generosity, and not the other way around. (Stingy people don't exactly make out very well in Jesus' parables, see Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16. In fact, almost more so than any other kind of sin, Jesus really seems to hate failure to be generous with those in need. He talks about money more than sex and cursing believe it or not, and yet oftentimes as churchgoers we get really hung up on avoiding things like sex and cursing and yet we cling desperately to our money.) We should always err on the side of being generous, even on the side of risking that we might not have enough for ourselves. Because if we live a lifestyle of generosity, we can have faith that God will also ensure that we have enough. Going into credit card debt is unwise, gambling is unwise, no argument there, but I don't think any attempt to be generous is ever unwise in God's eyes.
I was thinking about the story of the widow Jesus saw putting her two coins into the tithe box and how he told everyone that rich people might donate higher quantities of money but she was truly generous for giving all she had. And I think that there might even be something deeper going on in that story. For one thing, it took a lot of faith on the widow's part, faith that giving it ALL away wouldn't result in her starving to death, but in a miracle of God's provision. It wasn't just about her generosity, but her faith. But I think there may even be something else going on here. See, widows were already a burden on society in Jesus' culture. It was the responsibility of God-fearing people to provide for widows and orphans, who were never in a position to provide for themselves, and some probably did it joyfully, and some didn't. But the point is, whether or not widows would have had enough money to eat was dependent on the generosity of others. So for a widow to give away all her pennies meant that she was, in a way, intentionally making herself an even bigger burden on those who provided for her. Which we in American middle class culture might consider being "foolish" with your money. And yet, her action was praised by a guy who didn't save enough money for himself to even keep a low-end apartment...a guy whose meals were often dependent on others' generosity and his disciples' luck with fishing. And we're tempted to say "but he was Jesus! surely he doesn't expect us to actually live the way he did!"
This kind of feeds into another Jesus story in the book of Matthew where the ultimate homeless man says "Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you." Now the previous insight about the widow might have come from my own brain but the following is stolen from a Rob Bell podcast, "Ask, Seek, Knock" in case you want to listen to it later. http://marshill.org/teaching-past/
What if that advice about asking and seeking and knocking isn't simply referring to our ability to find God in a spiritual sense whenever we desire to, but to something else as well? What if Jesus is painting a picture of how Christian society is supposed to look? We all know that God often uses us to work his miracles, that his provision for Person A might come in the form of generosity on the part of Person B. And that ties in with what I think Jesus is getting at in the whole "ask and you will receive" deal. What if he's saying, that instead of trying not to be a burden on anyone else, that we SHOULD take it for granted that our Christian brothers and sisters will desire to help us, to be generous with us, to pay our debts, to buy us lunch, to let us sleep on their floor when we don't have anywhere else to go? The thing is, if you believe God intends for YOU to be generous with others, don't you also believe that he intends for others to be generous with you? The early church did. They recognized that nothing they owned belonged to them, that it all came from God, and so they all lived together and shared everything. That means Lawyer Joe making $150K and Trashman Steve making minimum wage were on the same page. All the time. Not exactly a picture of our current society, even our modern church society, is it?
Maybe that's due in part to the fact that some of us who think we don't have too much trouble being generous with our own money may be terrified of being in debt to anyone else. There are a few of us who'd almost rather skip lunch than have someone else pay, and when we do give in to letting other people be generous toward us, we promise to pay them back as soon as possible. When we do that, though, we're denying other people an opportunity to be Christlike. And we're also revealing the fact that we, in fact, don't especially like to be generous because we obviously assume no one else likes to be generous toward us. And why would we do that? If we enjoyed being generous, we'd want to allow other people that same enjoyment, right?
Rob Bell gave the illustration that if your friend chooses not to call you at 3 in the morning when they're in a bind, "Because I didn't want to bother you," you should feel slightly betrayed, slightly hurt, actually. The friend may have, on the surface, been trying to be considerate of you, but they also exhibited a lack of security in your friendship, a lack of trust that you would WANT to help them out. And as Jesus followers, we're called to be the kind of people who will give away our money, our food, our time, whenever God calls on us to meet a need. Because in the end, it all belongs to Him anyway, right?
So we were talking about Crazy Love (Francis Chan) in small group and about joyful giving versus begrudging tithes and the point was made that there are verses in the Bible that talk about being wise with your money, and we have to balance that advice with how generous we are. To get right to the point, I don't think that's true. I don't think there is a balance, because I think being wise with your money and being generous with it are, more or less, the same thing. You could compare the "balance" to a see-saw with a super fat guy weighing down Generosity's end and a basket on the other end marked "Money for Food" that may or may not have just enough dollar bills inside to keep from getting blown away on the wind. The thing is though, this see-saw isn't tilted toward the fat guy's end, like you'd think. It's completely level, even though the fat guy might weigh 300 times what the basket weighs. Because that's how the kingdom of God works, isn't it? Oftentimes defying worldly wisdom, practicality, even logic?
Even though the see-saw is balanced, the risk should always be that your security basket will get blown away due to the weight of your generosity, and not the other way around. (Stingy people don't exactly make out very well in Jesus' parables, see Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16. In fact, almost more so than any other kind of sin, Jesus really seems to hate failure to be generous with those in need. He talks about money more than sex and cursing believe it or not, and yet oftentimes as churchgoers we get really hung up on avoiding things like sex and cursing and yet we cling desperately to our money.) We should always err on the side of being generous, even on the side of risking that we might not have enough for ourselves. Because if we live a lifestyle of generosity, we can have faith that God will also ensure that we have enough. Going into credit card debt is unwise, gambling is unwise, no argument there, but I don't think any attempt to be generous is ever unwise in God's eyes.
I was thinking about the story of the widow Jesus saw putting her two coins into the tithe box and how he told everyone that rich people might donate higher quantities of money but she was truly generous for giving all she had. And I think that there might even be something deeper going on in that story. For one thing, it took a lot of faith on the widow's part, faith that giving it ALL away wouldn't result in her starving to death, but in a miracle of God's provision. It wasn't just about her generosity, but her faith. But I think there may even be something else going on here. See, widows were already a burden on society in Jesus' culture. It was the responsibility of God-fearing people to provide for widows and orphans, who were never in a position to provide for themselves, and some probably did it joyfully, and some didn't. But the point is, whether or not widows would have had enough money to eat was dependent on the generosity of others. So for a widow to give away all her pennies meant that she was, in a way, intentionally making herself an even bigger burden on those who provided for her. Which we in American middle class culture might consider being "foolish" with your money. And yet, her action was praised by a guy who didn't save enough money for himself to even keep a low-end apartment...a guy whose meals were often dependent on others' generosity and his disciples' luck with fishing. And we're tempted to say "but he was Jesus! surely he doesn't expect us to actually live the way he did!"
This kind of feeds into another Jesus story in the book of Matthew where the ultimate homeless man says "Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you." Now the previous insight about the widow might have come from my own brain but the following is stolen from a Rob Bell podcast, "Ask, Seek, Knock" in case you want to listen to it later. http://marshill.org/teaching-past/
What if that advice about asking and seeking and knocking isn't simply referring to our ability to find God in a spiritual sense whenever we desire to, but to something else as well? What if Jesus is painting a picture of how Christian society is supposed to look? We all know that God often uses us to work his miracles, that his provision for Person A might come in the form of generosity on the part of Person B. And that ties in with what I think Jesus is getting at in the whole "ask and you will receive" deal. What if he's saying, that instead of trying not to be a burden on anyone else, that we SHOULD take it for granted that our Christian brothers and sisters will desire to help us, to be generous with us, to pay our debts, to buy us lunch, to let us sleep on their floor when we don't have anywhere else to go? The thing is, if you believe God intends for YOU to be generous with others, don't you also believe that he intends for others to be generous with you? The early church did. They recognized that nothing they owned belonged to them, that it all came from God, and so they all lived together and shared everything. That means Lawyer Joe making $150K and Trashman Steve making minimum wage were on the same page. All the time. Not exactly a picture of our current society, even our modern church society, is it?
Maybe that's due in part to the fact that some of us who think we don't have too much trouble being generous with our own money may be terrified of being in debt to anyone else. There are a few of us who'd almost rather skip lunch than have someone else pay, and when we do give in to letting other people be generous toward us, we promise to pay them back as soon as possible. When we do that, though, we're denying other people an opportunity to be Christlike. And we're also revealing the fact that we, in fact, don't especially like to be generous because we obviously assume no one else likes to be generous toward us. And why would we do that? If we enjoyed being generous, we'd want to allow other people that same enjoyment, right?
Rob Bell gave the illustration that if your friend chooses not to call you at 3 in the morning when they're in a bind, "Because I didn't want to bother you," you should feel slightly betrayed, slightly hurt, actually. The friend may have, on the surface, been trying to be considerate of you, but they also exhibited a lack of security in your friendship, a lack of trust that you would WANT to help them out. And as Jesus followers, we're called to be the kind of people who will give away our money, our food, our time, whenever God calls on us to meet a need. Because in the end, it all belongs to Him anyway, right?
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Yeah...
I read this on the blog of a random person I don't know. "To blog is to be unafraid of mediocrity, one post at a time." -raksha. But then I thought, now that everyone blogs...and most blogs are made up of random crap that only the blogger himself could possibly be interested by...like what they're eating for breakfast...isn't blogging sort of more like embracing mediocrity? Or at least...jumping on the bandwagon for something that isn't that exciting? I used ellipses to annoy Kyle if he actually reads this. See how mediocre and uninteresting that was? LOL! buahahahaha.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
The Worry? Box
At Saturday Sports today I talked to the kids about worrying. I made a "Worry Box" and planned to have them write down things they were worried about and put their little papers in the box, and then I told them that putting their worries in the box signified that they were letting go of those worries. I realized afterwards that it wasn't quite age-appropriate for some of the younger kids who had no clue what I was saying but hey, I got to tell them that Jesus says we don't have to worry about anything. Some of the older kids took it seriously and wrote about being afraid of not seeing their family members again or of mom and dad fighting and other sad stuff. Some kids did not take it seriously, and I wanted to share those responses because they are hysterical. Besides the ones that just had kids' name tags stuck on them, there was...let's see...
"Wory aboat toast."
"I like pizza."
"Ember doing it on my other cat right now."
and my personal favorite,
"Unicorn."
Just "unicorn".
Then there was the one that started out serious,
"I'm worry my mom is mad and my dad."
...only to end on a surprising note:
"I'm worry if when 2012 come then the world might end."
I actually believe this child was serious, though. My 13 year old sister told me she was also scared of the ancient Mayan faux-prediction.
The last one I want to share had me laughing at first...
"I'm worried getting hit by a car again."
Until I realized that the kid who wrote it was probably the same kid whose mom told me he literally got hit by a car while riding his bike several months ago. I then proceeded to feel slightly bad for laughing. He was not hurt, though, so it's all good!
"Wory aboat toast."
"I like pizza."
"Ember doing it on my other cat right now."
and my personal favorite,
"Unicorn."
Just "unicorn".
Then there was the one that started out serious,
"I'm worry my mom is mad and my dad."
...only to end on a surprising note:
"I'm worry if when 2012 come then the world might end."
I actually believe this child was serious, though. My 13 year old sister told me she was also scared of the ancient Mayan faux-prediction.
The last one I want to share had me laughing at first...
"I'm worried getting hit by a car again."
Until I realized that the kid who wrote it was probably the same kid whose mom told me he literally got hit by a car while riding his bike several months ago. I then proceeded to feel slightly bad for laughing. He was not hurt, though, so it's all good!
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Uh...Jesus
I like C.S. Lewis. He quoted the saying "You can't think straight unless you are cool" and added "But then neither can you think deep if you are. I suppose one must try every problem in both states...remember that the ancient Persians debated everything twice: once when they were drunk and once when they were sober."
Lewis wrote a letter to a friend about feeling forsaken by God. He was writing about Jesus' last words to God: "Why have you forsaken me?" and it hit me that Jesus didn't just say that to strategically enable us to feel that he does relate to us. He didn't say it for some deep unfathomable philosophical reason. He truly felt in that moment as if God...his father...his own self...had abandoned him. He didn't retain some divine knowledge in some coolly aloof corner of his brain that God was with him as he lay dying and in torment. There was no reminder "Hey, I'm Jesus, God is always with me. I haven't been abandoned. I know the future!" How could it have been like that and evoked such a desperate cry? How could we truly believe Jesus was ever actually fully Man if we held onto the belief that he knew what was going to happen at all moments in his life...that he saw the future clearly laid out before him at every moment...that in his deepest darkest moments of despair he retained a prescient knowledge of the truth of God's presence. That kind of savior could not have lived the life we live. That all-seeing savior could not truly relate to our feelings of abandonment and despair.
Lewis wrote: "How can we understand [this]? Is it that God himself cannot be man unless God seems to vanish at his greatest need? The "hiddenness" of God perhaps presses most painfully on those who are in another way nearest to him and therefore, God himself, made man, will of all men be by God most forsaken?"
This picture Lewis painted for me of a Jesus who at his greatest moment of need, felt more truly abandoned by God then any of us ever will, gave me hope. Because I know what happened after Jesus died, forsaken and alone. I know that He wasn't ever abandoned. I know that God was both far off and right beside him. And if in the greatest moment of abandonment ever experienced by a human, that human was never actually abandoned to begin with, I know I don't have to despair when I experience those feelings.
Because when we are truly trying to draw near to God...we will experience some of the greatest feelings of abandonment and distance of our lives. It's evidence that we are closer than ever. But when we've convinced ourselves that all is well and we can "just keep swimming," falling into patterns and habits that serve as mind-numbing assurances that we're tight with God, that's when we should be concerned.
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