Free Tech School in the Bronx

Wow. I ran across this on Boing Boing.net today...

My company in NYC was doing a community service day in the South Bronx. On the way there, I got waylaid on the street by a short older man who said in a thick Jackie Mason accent: "Young man! Do you want to learn electrical engineering?"

I was so intrigued that I followed him a few blocks away, past a whole bunch of disquieting, Wile E. Coyote-style "Free Technical School in basement: GO RIGHT IN! RIGHT THIS WAY!" signs, and found, basically, an underground maker's lair consisting of a big unimproved basement filled with chairs, boilers, and homemade electrical diagnostic devices. Plus LCD monitors mounted on the wall, CAT6 cable, and dry-erase boards filled with math. All the ingredients of a supervillain's lair. Except used in the service of creating more geeks.

I was terrified the whole time (South Bronx! Three stories underground! Genial elderly man who's spouting theories about biodiesel to passers-by!), but it turns out that he's teaching a highly employable skill, for free, to anyone with a clean police record in a depressed neighborhood.

There are some pictures here, if you want to see the "Free elec. school in basement go right in" signs for yourself.

Do yourself a favor and go check out the pictures. This is absolutely hilarious. And cool. Isn't it odd that someone doing something like this (for free) strikes us as freaky?

Guardrails

My mom showed me a newspaper article the other day. A 50-something woman from Michigan stepped over a guardrail in Yellowstone Park in order to take a picture. She lost her footing and plummeted 500 feet to a very messy death.To be brutally honest, my initial reaction was, "How stupid can you get? I bet she was also having her children (who were touring the park with their parents) pose next to the sweet buffaloes for pictures."

But then my mom and I started thinking about the absolute horror of being her husband or her children, and watching helplessly for what seemed like an eternity as your wife or mother fell (approx 15 seconds...try counting that out). The husband ran out into the street in order to flag down a car to call 911. And then a ranger had to rappel down in order to recover her body. And now they have to make arrangements to bring her body home, etc. A pretty nightmarish vacation, really.

And, to think about it further, she probably didn't think she was stepping into a danger zone when she stepped over that guard rail. After all, there might have been a few feet of fairly level ground ... and if it wasn't a total drop-off, the danger probably wasn't all that obvious. I can picture multiple places in Yellowstone where it could seem fairly safe to step over the retaining walls, just to get a slightly better photographic angle on that magnificent scenery...

Later that night, I was reading Randy Alcorn's book The Grace and Truth Paradox. He talked about guardrails -- God gives us commandments (truth) as a way of protecting us (grace). Nobody who is, say, driving down the Beartooth Highway and hits a guardrail will be cursing the guardrail for denting their car. They will be incredibly thankful that the guardrail saved their lives. And the guardrails are there for a reason, even when the danger of disobedience doesn't seem immediately obvious.

There's another Christian reference to guardrails that I've heard. Jim Petty talks about the "guardrails of God's providence." What he means is that when we are trying to discern God's Will for our lives, we can get pretty caught up in looking for signs and trying to figure out what the perfect decision will be. But all along, God, by his grace, is "hemming us in, both behind and before;" when we make decisions that are consistent with the wisdom that he gives us. It's sort of like playing bumper-bowling -- the ball is always on the path to knock some pins over, even if the path it takes is somewhat indirect. On a precipitous highway, you try not to veer all over the road, but the guardrails are sure nice if you happen to let the steering wheel wander, or if you lose control.

I'm sure that this Michigan woman didn't intend to become a "sermon illustration" on her vacation to our nation's first national park. I'm sure her family wishes that they had all been more concerned about staying within the guardrails set for them by park authorities. But, if this family knows the Lord, they have no greater comfort than knowing that this -- yes, even this accident -- is not outside the ever-more-secure guardrails of God's providence.

Liberalism as a White Man's Religion

Mark Driscoll has some very interesting comments on liberalism (the religious kind) and its insistence that all religious beliefs are equally valid. Basically, he looks at what's going on in the Episcopal church and says this infatuation with religious tolerance it has all the earmarks of a "white man's religion." Here's the crux of his comments:

In a curious plot twist, last summer the African bishops of the Anglican Church showed up unannounced at the family feud to condemn their liberal American counterparts as heretics promoting a different religion. American Episcopalians now have their robes in a bind trying to figure out how to spin their defense as Civil Rights nobility: the generally white, educated, and affluent First World American women and homosexuals fighting unjust opposition at the hands of generally black, less educated, and less affluent Third World African heterosexuals.

Admittedly, whatever one’s position on the issue you have to admire the Africans’ willingness to lean over the plate and take one for their team. In doing so they have exposed three very glaring weaknesses of liberal American Protestantism:

1. The liberal insistence that all religious beliefs are equally valid is a very white, Western European bias left over from the Enlightenment’s concept of knowledge and values. This bias has no right to be preeminent over other views, including heterosexual black African fundamentalism.
   
   
2. The Bible’s stance on homosexuality and feminism is "offensive" because of cultural prejudices held by white Americans; the controversy is not universal and is therefore little more than a form of cultural discrimination masquerading as tolerant open-mindedness.
   
   
3. The moral outrage expressed by liberals in defense of feminism and homosexuality is hypocrisy because while they espouse tolerance of all views (especially those from the Third World), they disdain the African position. They’ve exposed themselves as equally narrow-minded fundamentalists.

Did you catch that? What he's saying here is that 'religious tolerance' is actually a product of a specific culture: the rich, white, upper-middle class, American/European (liberal) religious establishment. In other words, religious liberalism is biased to allow us Westerners to do whatever we want (with whomever we want). Driscoll points out that this 'anything goes' attitude is actually antagonistic to the religious convictions of the new center of Christendom - poor, ethnic, non-white Christians in the southern hemisphere (think Africa and South America).

Regardless of what you think about Driscoll (or the issue of feminism/homosexuality), the point he's raising deserves consideration. What makes relativism a 'better' value than the idea that some things are right and some things are wrong?

I'd love to get some feedback from those of you who would be sympathetic to the liberal positions here. Specifically, what do you think of Driscolls argument, and why?

The Message of Jesus

This past semester I got to know a first year Westminster student by the name of Art Boulet (wacky mental flash: picture some guy rappelling down the side of a mountain in Shakespearean garb hollering out 'Art Boulet?' to the folks down below. If that image is not instantly hilarious, then never mind, it's not worth trying to explain). Art weighs in today with some great thoughts on the message of Jesus:

The message of Jesus was a message of restoring “shalom” to a world that has gone desperately wrong. “Shalom,” in ancient Judaism, was the ideal in which God created the world to function. It was the ideal of creation being interwoven with each other; God and human beings interacting in perfect harmony; humankind and creation functioning without flaw, without disease, without hatred, without war, without killing, without suffering, without evil.

The message of Christ is a message of peace; he came as the Truth and the Life to restore humanity and creation to the condition in which they should have been functioning all along. Christ did not say, “Follow these rules and you will have life.” Rather, he said, “I am the Life.” Through following Jesus humankind can taste that “shalom” and live in a way that is truly human: the way it was supposed to be.

Somewhere along the line we have seem to forgotten this message. Instead, we have turned the message of peace into a message of divisiveness that furthers the separation and works against the ideal of “shalom.” Christians tend to shun those on the outside, those who have problems, those who need the message of Christ. This has turned the culture away from Christianity because, when you think about it, who wants to hang around a bunch of self-righteous pricks who tell me that I’m always wrong and am going to burn in hell forever?

The message of Christ was not simply a message about “where you are going when you die: heaven or hell?” It was also a message of “how are you going to live your life today and tomorrow and the next day?” There is a freedom in knowing Christ; a liberty to live as part of creation in the manner that is truly human; to relate to people in a way that is free of sin and guilt and self-righteous condemnation; to get a foretaste of what that “shalom” truly is; to love each other, creation, and God in the way that we were always meant to.

Good thoughts, worth reading in full. Thanks Art!

Feet (Mine)

Feet (Mine). Not sure why I like this picture, but I do. I was going to post a really beautiful sunset panorma tonight - I had to jump into the car, race down the road, then jog out into the middle of a field - but when I got there, the camera batteries were dead. ARGH! So you get to look at my feet instead.

Creating an Inviting Environment

Just stumbled across this paragraph, written by the Jollyblogger as he sumarizes Mark Driscoll. The question at hand is simple - how do we as Christians reconcile these two charges: on the one hand, we are to guard the faith entrusted to us (1 Tim 6:20, 2 Tim 1:14); on the other, we are to go and make disciples (Mt 28:19).

Mark Driscoll has a sermon where he talks about people who spend their lives contending for the faith without ever contextualizing the faith. These are people who are like pit bulls, always attentive to heresy and always ready to do battle against error. These people also often wish more nonbelievers would come to their church to hear the truth. Driscoll says nonbelievers don't come to the church for the same reason that people don't gravitate to homes that are guarded by a couple of pit bulls.

I believe that is a good illustration. This is not to say that homes (and churches) don't need to be guarded. But there are ways of guarding a house that are more discreet and that can give the house an inviting air of hominess, while still protecting the house and keeping it from looking like a fortress.

It seems to me that we could tone down the acrimony in the blogosphere and the church in general if polemicists would follow the example of the apostle Paul and devote the best of their spiritual and intellectual energies first on evangelism and church planting/building, and then let the polemics follow later.

I think he's on to something here. And I would add this - I think we need to love 'the lost' as much as we claim to love 'the truth'. In many cases, I suspect the real reason we love the truth is because we think we measure up to it, and so we see it as something that can build us up, that can buttress our own position. But I wonder how many times what we're really loving is just ourselves, and anything that makes us look better.

If we really love the Truth (as in 'The Way, the Truth, and the Life'), then we will love what he does - and that means the lost. Passionately. Enough to think daringly about how we might go and build relationships with them, about the barriers we erect that keep them from coming.

What would it look like to create a church that genuinely loves and cares for unbelievers as much as it does for the truth? It's something worth pondering...

Murder in Fischer Park

On a more sober note, those of you who knew we lived in Philly may be interested to see what we left behind.

Psychiatric Answering Machine

Don't you hate it when you try to call your shrink and get his answering machine instead... [HT: Julie Shipp]

Real Live Rube Goldberg

(Click here to see the video clip)

You remember Wile E Coyote, right? With all his crazy inventions to try and catch the Roadrunner (Tom and Jerry were great for these as well). At any rate, there's actually a name for these things - they're called Rube Goldberg devices. Seems that Rube was a cartoonist. But the devices can actually be made for real. Here are a couple of examples to illustrate.

The first one (above) is made out of stuff you'd find in a forest. The second one illustrates how you can use a car to start a car (the Honda Cog). And both are simply amazing. These are real - they were photo-shopped or CGI'd. They were filmed in realtime, cameras rolling, and they show what a little creativity can do (I suppose you could think of this as rock-balancing-in-motion). I can't wait to see my kids run wild with this one...

Crap On The Table

Another brilliant Ghetto Monk sighting:

Actually, you, Pete, gave me this picture, probably without realizing it. A few nights ago, you said that when you and Finley struggle with something, with anything, really, that the only thing to do to bridge the distance is to lay your crap on the table and walk through it. Picture that literally for a moment. Sure, this image likely won’t show up on the 2004 Thomas Kincade calendar, but it will show up often in my mental picture box.

Because when I heard that, I heard covenant; I heard God making a vow with and for Abraham, God laying down two rows of death and stench, and Abraham walking through it. And the beauty of it is that even though it wasn’t God’s crap—in fact, it was Abraham’s, mine, and yours—God himself was the first to walk through our crap; so though you will make one vow tomorrow, your life together will be a continual laying down and walking through, and the only thing that will make it palatable is that God has and will continue to walk before you.

You are not promising only to love in sickness and health and those other things; more importantly, you are promising to take Finley’s hand and follow God through your own crap—it will be dirty for a time, but the day is drawing near when he will finally make you clean, erase the filth and grime, color you with a white that even Crayola couldn’t imagine.

That is your vow, and here is mine. Many of you don’t know this, but Pete and I haven’t always been friends. Before he got engaged, before even I started moving in on his turf and on the girl he had been interested in, Pete didn’t like me very much, which led me to think, naturally, that maybe I didn’t like him. After many months of this mutual unliking, Pete asked me to go eat lunch with him. I wasn’t sure why he would do such a thing, though I imagined that a public scene was in the making.

We went to the Mongolian BBQ on Olive Road, where you get to pick your raw meat out of a lineup and pour oil on it. We sat in a booth, small talked for a few minutes, trying to muster up courage to speak our reasons, and Pete poured his heart out to me, repented, and, thus, named me his friend. And this is what he did.

He considered my heart, he recognized that it hurt more deeply than either of us could put into words, and he did the only thing he could: He decided that he would not hold my sins against me, and that he, whose own heart was drying out from bitterness, would quit holding his own sins against me. He put courage into me, courage I needed to speak words of healing myself, to pour out oils of blessing into others’ parched hearts, and I wished at that moment that I could be more like him.

This is the vow that I have been speaking silently over the years, that I would be more like Pete, specifically in his encouragement.

Wow. I don't care whether anyone thinks I'm a freak for posting Jeremy Huggins snippets so frequently... there's just something about them that resonates with me tremendously. Very, very, deep, poetic, and insightful. I'd sure like to meet this guy some day...

Gateways to SLD

So have you ever wondered how people find their way to SLD? Molly did, and a little sleuthing on Statcounter turned up the following "search queries" that brought people here:

• circumhorizon arc (x2)
• why do we lust instead of love
• the world is full of bastards the number increasing rapidly the further one gets from Missoula Montana
• man i got and the rest of the world wears bifocals
• my friend is dealing with lust
• favorite movie quotes
• life is tough it's even tougher when you're stupid movie
• women in ministry
• get rid of lust to women
• see neighbors naked

Interesting to me how many of these a) related to movies, and b) related to lust / sex. Not sure whether they found what they were looking for or not... ;-)

The Missional Gospel

For those of you who are interested, here are some audio links to how I understand the gospel, and how that understanding drives our sense of mission, of church planting.

• Gospel Sanctification (Shane Sunn, April '06)
• Who is the Jesus? (Mk 1:9-28) (moi, June '06)
  
• Our Philosophy of Church Planting (moi, April '06)

As always, comments and feedback welcome. Enjoy!

[ps - anyone out there with the time, skills, and inclination to transcribe one or more of these? if so, please ping me...]

Man Behind the Mask

Ever wonder what some of these bloggers lurking out in cyberspace actually look like? Here's a sweet shot of Jeremy Huggins (aka Ghetto Monk), whom I like to reference from time to time. Wow. Wish I could grow facial hair like that.

Samurai Christianity

Reggie Kidd, over at Common Grounds, has a great explanation of how his attempts to learn Samurai swordsmanship have actually taught him a lot about his Christianity. The short answer: it demands complete submission to the authority of your sensei. Here's a snippet...

From our first class to the time we were allowed to handle sharp swords and cut tatami (reed floor mats rolled up, rubberbanded, and soaked), it was six months. Six months of tutelage in how to take a dull sword out of its sheath and put it back in without losing a finger. Six months of trying to do “forms” that require our bodies to move in stylized, ritualistic, awkwardly Japanese ways. And then another year before being deemed ready to try to earn our first rank. In all, eighteen months of waiting to do “the good stuff.”

Our sensei’s attitude? “We’re not interested in students of the sword who are not students of ‘the way.’” He’s made it clear that if you’re going to be exasperated at “a long obedience in the same direction,” you’d be better off elsewhere.

Really, though, it’s been remarkably easy to submit to a man who himself has submitted to another.

Go on, read the whole thing...

Christians and The City

Tim Keller has an article called A New Kind of Urbanism that is really worth reading. In it, he tackles the issue of how Christians should be engaging culture. Here's a brief snippet to whet your appetite:

My first strategic point is simple: More Christians should live long-term in cities. Historians point out that by A.D. 300, the urban populations of the Roman Empire were largely Christian, while the countryside was pagan. (Indeed, the word pagan originally meant someone from the countryside—its use as a synonym for a non-Christian dates from this era.) The same was true during the first millennium A.D. in Europe—the cities were Christian, but the broad population across the countryside was pagan. The lesson from both eras is that when cities are Christian, even if the majority of the population is pagan, society is headed on a Christian trajectory. Why? As the city goes, so goes the culture. Cultural trends tend to be generated in the city and flow outward to the rest of society.

Keller goes on to make 3 more points:

• Once in cities, Christians should be a dynamic counterculture.
  
• It will not be enough for Christians to form a culture that runs counter to the values of the broader culture. Christians should be a community radically committed to the good of the city as a whole.
• There is another important component to being a Christian counterculture for the common good. Christians should be a people who integrate their faith with their work.

The whole thing is well worth your while.
(HT: Justin Taylor)

Geek Tools

Dang, this is extremely cool. Not only does Google now have a really cool Calendar tool (yes, it allows you to share calendars with people you choose), but just today they've come out with a Browser Sync tool for Firefox. This basically stores all of your Firefox configuration (including bookmarks, etc) on google servers, so if you log onto another machine with Firefox (and the plugin installed), you can simply give it your PIN and bang! It will download and use your config settings. Very, very cool. I continue to be extremely impressed with the direction Google is going...

A Rainbow Like No Other

(click here for a larger version)

This extremely rare rainbow - a circumhorizon arc - was spotted last week near the border of Idaho and Washington. Here's what the Daily Mail had to say about it:

In a breathtaking blaze of glory, Nature puts on one of its most spectacular sky shows. Reds, oranges, blues and greens create a flaming rainbow that stretches above the clouds.

But this circumhorizon arc, as it is known, owes more to ice than fire. It occurs when sunlight passes through ice crystals in high cirrus clouds. It is one of 15 types of ice halos formed only when the most specific of factors dovetail precisely together.

This blanket of fire, covering hundreds of square miles, is the rarest phenomenon of them all. It was spotted in the US on the Washington-Idaho border around midday last Saturday.

... (click here for the full story) ...

Now listen to how God describes the glory of the heavens:

1 The LORD reigns, let the earth rejoice;
let the many coastlands be glad!
2 Clouds and thick darkness are all around him;
righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.
3 Fire goes before him
and burns up his adversaries all around.
4 His lightnings light up the world;
the earth sees and trembles.
5 The mountains melt like wax before the LORD,
before the Lord of all the earth.
6 The heavens proclaim his righteousness,
and all the peoples see his glory.
7 All worshipers of images are put to shame,
who make their boast in worthless idols;
worship him, all you gods!

Psalm 97: 1-7

What I find so interesting is that everyone really DOES see the glory, just like the psalm says. Heck, that's why newspapers like the Daily Times print the picture in the first place - because it IS glorious, people will be moved by it, it will sell their papers and make their advertisers happy.

Nevertheless, even though we see his glory, how do we respond? God speaks to us, he calls us "little gods," and he tells us that the proper response to such glory is nothing less than worship. Yet how do we typically respond? Just like the article - we speak of "Nature."

I suspect we do this a) because it's more culturally acceptable, but b) because it's also impersonal (and thus non-threatening). Nature won't send you to hell because you refuse to recognize the beauty in it, because you won't bow to it. Nature is just there - neither good nor bad, just neutral (that's how we think anyway).

The problem with this way of thinking is that it can't explain beauty. You see beauty can only exist where there is a concept of value - where things are good and bad, beautiful or ugly, better or worse. In a truly natural universe, where everything is a product of time and chance, there really is no room for Beauty. Things are just the way they ARE. Period. End of discussion. Oh, and by the way, there's no room for Meaning either. Everything just IS. Shit happens. Survival of the fittest. We're all going to be fertilizer someday, its just a matter of time.

The problem is, no one really wants to LIVE in this kind of world. That's not surprising, either - Scripture tells us that it is because we were meant for something more, something glorious, something beautiful. After all, God himself calls us "gods." There really IS something splendid about humanity, even in its fallen, bent, messed up state. We were created for something wonderful.

But that wonder and glory is derivative. We are meant to be mirrors, reflecting God's glory back to him. And that's precisely what the rest of creation does. Rainbows are glorious not because of "Nature", not because of random ice crystals floating through the atmosphere - No! Rainbows (and all of creation) is glorious because the Creator is glorious. Creation is a mirror, a dim window, into the eternal, unseen, brilliant GLORY of the Godhead.

That's how creation functions, and we all see it plainly. But we are meant to follow this weight of glory to its source, to God, and to respond to it as worshippers, rather than consumers. The former looks to God, with a humble heart and contrite spirit and praises him for caring about us; the latter looks at creation and says, "Ooh, I like that, I want it, on my wall, in my house." We want to own, master, control creation, for our own ends, not His. And that is rebellion of the worst degree.

Take another look at this rainbow like no other, and ask yourself what you see.

Reader Response 2

And here's a comment from Steve over at A Rainbow Flag in Narnia, discussing his own struggles with homosexuality in response to my post on Gay Pagans Leading Worship.

What an interesting topic.

I did everything I could to resist being gay. From age 17 until 34, I tried living traditional life. I got married, and tried to act my way into heterosexuality. I remained faithful to my wife, but continued to experience same-sex attractions (even though I never acted on them). It drove me to alcoholism, and brought me to the brink of suicide. I was fired from my job, my wife divorced me, and at my bottom, I got sober. Shortly afterward, a friend invited me to church.

I told the pastor, and several of the 20-&-30-somethings there, that I'd been a drunk, a spendthrift, and a general waste of space on earth. They told me about this guy Jesus, who had a penchant for the outcast, the diseased, and who had a habit of transforming lives. Who wouldn't be attracted to that kind of offer?

But I also knew that alcoholism and financial irresponsibility was one thing, especially since I'd repented and left that life behind. However, homosexuality was quite another thing - how do you repent of what you are? So for 13 years, I took my place in the church, spent almost every day praying, crying out, waiting for God to cure me, transform me, to somehow just fix me. I served as worship leader, lay preacher, gave children's sermons, was a choir member, Stephen minister, council member.

I went forward to Billy Graham, at Promise Keepers conferences, and I've even been to seminary. I pledged my life to celibacy (which, before you ask, is where I've been for the last 12 years) in order to serve God. I am still a celibate; so I'm not doing any of the things that Levitical law would have me killed for.

Which prompts me to my first question: do you know for a fact that Bob is a "practicing, self-avowed homosexual"? Has anyone asked the question? Is he actually having sex with other men? Because even the strictest OT reading shows us that just being homosexual is not a sin. And having people gossip about "is he or isn't he?" surely isn't in the Christian standard, either.

Then ask yourself the question: if Bob was straight, and you believed that Bob was having extra-marital sex with a woman, would that disqualify him as well?

But I guess my two main questions about this whole thing would be in the realm of (a) fruits of the spirit and (b) being honest and open about your moral standards.

By your own words, the fruits of this man's contributions to your worship are "a very positive influence on singing and praise." Galatians 5 tells us that "when the Holy Spirit controls our lives, he will produce this kind of fruit in us: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control" (5:22-23, NIV).

It sounds like your "gay pagan" is exhibiting the fruit of Spirit-led service, whether he in fact professes to be a believer or not. Does anyone else see that this as a blessing, and not a problem?

I found the idea that worship of God is somehow tainted by the presence of unbelievers or sinners to be more than a little problematic. If sinners can't lead worship, and "there is no one who is righteous, not even one," then who will lead worship?

And I'm completely undone by the idea that unbelievers somehow stain or damage worship! Can no one worship unless they believe? How will unbelievers ever learn to believe unless they are surrounded by a community of welcoming believers? Certainly the people in my first church did the work of Christ - because took me, a pretty unregenerate, vulgar, angry man, and taught me.

They helped me buy my first Bible; they taught me that asking the embarrassing and tough questions about the Bible was OK. Did they do wrong, somehow? Should I have been seated out in the narthex during worship until I came to belief, and then allowed in? Is that what Jesus did with sinners, thieves, and lepers? Hmmm...it might have been, but that's not what the Bible says... Seems to me that the first person to whom Jesus spoke his lordship was the woman at the well. Would she have been welcome in your worship?

But more importantly, I truly believe that if your congregation feels strongly about homosexuality, then you owe it to yourself and to Bob to address it up front, and be honest with him. If you and your congregation feel that you are "accepting the unacceptable" simply in order to have an accompanist, then I'd say you have the wrong accompanist and he has the wrong church. Otherwise you're just using him - period.

Let's look at this another way, and take the "homo" portion out of this. If Bob was living with Susie, instead of David, would you be having this conversation? And if Bob would not repent of living with Susie, would your decision be the same?

For that matter, if your worship leader were straight, happily and faithfully married, wealthy and came to worship Sunday morning in a Lexus sedan, and yet gave nothing to help feed the hungry or care for the sick in town, would you reject HIM as a worship leader? After all, Matthew 25:31-46 tells us that what separates the sheep from the goats will not be who Bob's sleeping with...

I will suggest to you this is how most evangelical churches approach gays: "Well, friend, you see, God loves sinners - but your particular brand of sin is unacceptable to us. But we want you to know you're welcome here as long as you try to overcome that sin and become acceptable."

That approach doesn't work much. It particularly doesn't work well for guys like me, who fought the way I was made for thirty-five years. I have never "abandoned natural desires" (Romans 1) because I've never had them, to begin with. I've fought to manufacture them, for more than 3 decades - but in the end, I've failed miserably.

So your acceptance of me "until I am healed of my homosexuality" would hve to be a long-standing one...

If that's the message you're looking forward to sharing with Bob and his gay friends, do yourself a favor: don't bother. No matter what the sin, if your message is, "Come on, hang out here, even though we know you're basically not acceptable to us or God. We won't outwardly expect you to change, but inwardly, that's really what we're hoping for, and that's why we're putting up with your sinful nature to begin with...", then your efforts are pretty much doomed.

I'm going to urge you and your to find a copy of Stranger at the Gate, by Mel White. And then read it cover to cover. If you really want to understand about what goes on with gay Christians, it's a challenging (but accurate) description of a very common experience among us.

I am not looking to debate anyone; and I'm done with trying to be changed. But if you want to hear the story of an authentic gay believer, then look here, here and here.

Again, there's no need to spam me with comments about how I'm going to hell. Absent the saving power of Christ, that's absolutely right. Just offering you a chance to see things from the other side of the ledger.

Steve, I didn't respond immediately when I first saw your comments because I was right in the middle of a move, and I wanted to make sure that anything I said would be thoughtful (and that I'd be able to follow up on it, rather than leave you hanging should you respond to comment further). So apologies if it felt like you got ignored - hopefully you are still reading and we can take some time to dialog on this. Thanks for sharing, and I'll try and actually respond to this tomorrow...

Reader Response 1

There have been a couple of good comments lately on old posts, and since these things often go unnoticed (most people just read whatever is new, at the top of the page), I thought I'd take this opportunity to publish their comments as a post of their own.

Here's what Peter had to say, commenting on Dealing With Lust:

i am a 21 year old male and i was directed here by q lee. needless to say i think about sex a lot. i think about it analytically and spiritually as well as lustfully. a few years ago i did a paper in english class comparing and contrasting the 10 commandments and the sermon on the mount. i concluded that those writings are not rules for restriction but rather freedom. thou shall not kill isn't just prohibitting murder but giving freedom to those who choose, to walk around at night without worry. thou shall not commit adultry is not just a restriction on sleeping around but gives a person freedom of worry and freedom for primarily women not be raped or sexually assaulted. in the same way, the sermon on the mount allows women to walk around and not be gawked at. she doesn't have to be friends with men and wonder "what do they really want from of me?". i was more thorough in my assessment, but my point still stands.

i read the link of the samantha post and was annoyed at the discussion. people calling sex "it" does not help the situation and i think hinders progress within the christian community on these issues. i think that being open is in order. i think that it helps tremendously as "steve" learned. being open takes courage, and is hard at times but progress is not made by being subtle or reserved. i have discussed sex with different women and watched talk sex with sue and the more i learn about the opposite sex the more i learn how much women struggle with the same things as men. my little sister has a poster of orlando bloom in her room. granted he isn't wearing a thong like most pictures directed at men but the same battles occur. i don't think they are talked about because women aren't supposed to be the aggressors and men are and the faster the "independent woman's movement" progresses the more the oral sex statistics will rise. i think that women are figuring out that they do like sex just as much as men but don't have the same support system in place that men do and once again this has to do with the willingness to be open and talk about it.

i think another big problem that needs to be dealt with is the lack of breakdown youth group leaders do in regards to our culture. they either embrace the culture or run away from it. this leaves little alternative for the youth. do i embrace the entertainment age or completely reject it? this leaves room for a lot of rebellion. a lot of fence hopping. also the idea of sex being much more rampant than ever is very foolish because homosexuality and sex was commonplace in the ancient world. the jews dancing around an ashera pole (penis pole) and taking part in orgies around it is something that should be discussed. this gives hope to young christians that jesus and paul know what they are talking about and gives hope that it is more possible to be chaste than they would be led to believe. jesus and paul weren't talking to a bunch of amish. the more open we are and the more we confess to jesus and to our brothers and sisters in christ the less room there is for sin to manifest itself and become attractive. as steve found out when he became open to his wife the less his friend became desireable. this applies to all sin not just lust. i once thought about committing suicide and the more i kept it inside the more attractive it became. however once it became open, the more foolish and ashamed i felt.

on that last note, the more "negative" feelings should also be embraced a lot more. just because i am depressed does not mean that i am far from god. the trinity broadcast network does not help in this. there is after all a book in the bible called lamentations and the psalms is chawk full of depressing tid-bits. jesus himself sweated blood and asked his father why he was being foresaken. the more open and honest we are with each other, especially the youth, i think the easier it will be to conquer our sin or at least be held to a certain degree. for example, i keep myself checked at masturbation. do i cross that line? yes. i do masturbate and i repent daily for it (that's not to say i masturbate everyday). but keeping myself checked at masturbation smothers the idea of going further into sexual impurity.

sorry for the rant, but i have a lot of time to think and this blog got my analytical juices flowing. i hope this answers any of the questions or reacts positively and/or negatively with you all. comments are always appreciated.

So what do you think? Care to respond?

Christian Lunch

When my son Micah brought me lunch this afternoon, I commended him for his artful arrangement, and then asked him this question: "So why is this lunch...

...more Christian than this lunch...

...even though neither one is actually un-Christian?"

His first response was to look at me like I had just pulled out a joint and lit up - I'm sure he must have thought something like "Good grief, Dad, WHAT ARE YOU SMOKING????" (which is probably what some of you are thinking now as well). But then he paused, as soon as he realized I was serious, and he began gazing intently at the plate, thinking hard.

Go on. Take a good look. How would YOU answer that question?

"Was it because I brought it to you with a good heart?" Ah, now that is definitely on the right track, and certainly part of the equation (the most important part in fact).

"Well, that is certainly what makes it Christian," I said. "But what makes it more Christian?"

Now I asked this question of Micah, because Micah is our most artistic child - if anyone could see what I was driving at, it would be him. "Is it because it looks better?" Ah! He has nailed it! In fact, I'll bet just about everyone reading these words can see the difference too - you may not be able to explain why, but you can tell that the first picture is better, it is more beautiful.

It's the beauty that makes the first lunch more Christian.

So we talked about beauty - about how when you see something beautiful, you just know it. There is something right, something better, something transcendant there just beyond the edge of the objective. C. S. Lewis talks about it as Joy, and he notes that when you go looking for it as an end in and of itself, you never end up finding it. But when you learn to look beyond it, to what Joy and Beauty are pointing to, you end up getting both of them as well. But it takes eyes to see - it takes faith to apprehend what is unseen.

Most people look at wind blowing through the aspens and think, "Hmm... it's a bit breezy out." An artist, however, sees the sun flickering through the leaves on a warm afternoon and gasps, "Wow. It is beautiful!" And the Christian (those who actually have eyes to see such things, at least) - the Christian looks at the leaves dancing and sees the fingers of God, touching each of them, guiding every breath of air, the buzzing of each individual insect, the scent of sap and earth, all welling up together in an orchestrated cauchophany of Beauty. Simply because God delights in it, because it points us back to him.

Anyone can slap some food on a plate and call it good. But it takes a Christian to see the beauty in all of life - whether artwork, or music, or baseball, or lunch - it takes a Christian to pause for a few moments and to emulate the Creator, drawing the Beautiful to the surface, not simply for the sake of Beauty, but for the sake of Him. Because He delights in beauty. And beauty makes him known.

That's what made my lunch today more Christian. And I think my son gets it...

Ghetto Monk Groove

Ever wonder why Jeremy Huggins calls himself 'Ghetto Monk'? Here's your answer, as he writes about his friend Lamarcus...

After graduating with my bachelor’s degree, I moved into Brookville Gardens, the only state-run housing project in Starkville, Mississippi, a small college town. I knew that no white person had ever lived in that project, and I’d heard stories about its crime, poverty, and general degradation. I’d been considering becoming involved with racial reconciliation efforts in Mississippi, a state with sore racial needs.

Figuring that my talk of “loving my neighbors,” specifically my black neighbors, was only so much moralizing until I understood them well enough to know how to love them, I decided that the best way to even begin to identify with them enough to earn my principles some weight was to live where they lived, suffer the same crime, poverty, and degradation that they did. ...

Soon after moving in, rumor began circulating that I was an undercover cop, a rumor that, given my slight frame, lack of lingual currency, and appalling want of anything regarding caution, I found laughable. It only stopped becoming laughable after one of my neighbors, fearing that I was trying to put his brother in jail, gathered some other tenants, surrounded me one weekend night, and stuck a pistol to my temple...

Now do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. Once again, I really, really like his writing. Very nicely done.

Rock-Paper-Scissors (x25)

Ok, this is insane. And hilarious. For all of you "Rock-Paper-Scissors" fans, I give you.... (drum roll, please!)... RPS25! (Yes, that's "Rock-Paper-Scissors times 25"). For those of you who are confused, here's a summary of what beats what.

So what do I think? Demented. Wierd. Geeky. Cool. From now on, we will be using this as the official way to solve any irreconcible differences on SLD. See an argument getting out of hand? Simply holler "RPS25!" and all commenters will quickly post their sign and we'll settle the matter once for all, like civilized folks. Wow...

[HT: Heath E]