Powered by Twitter Tools.
Something I haven’t been doing lately and started doing today.
Stumbling.
No, not falling down, tripping up or whatever. Stumbling. The use of StumbleUpon, which is a web site (and Firefox extension) that helps you randomly move around the net and find interesting, weird or useful things. Tailored to your chosen preferences. It’s great!! Try it out!
Here’s what I stumbled today:
Very sweet, scroll over city scape time lapse Flash image.
Browser Shots. A site that allows you to test your web site design across multiple browsers. It takes snapshots from each browser and uploads them for you to view. NEAT!
Who is Xenu? Good for a laugh, or depressing to think that people like Tom Cruise and John Travolta actually believe this jibberish. I mean seriously. A science fiction author just so happened to make this vast discovery of truth? Please.
Gorgeous Painting with images of the process. Good stuff!
Creative Imagery by Eric M Gustafson. Nice work.
A Clockwork Orange. As many know this is a favorite book and film of yours truly. Here’s a fun site with images from the film and excerpts from the book. Also some discussion of both. PS – embedded MIDI music
Blatant Photoshops in Magazine Ads. We all know it happens, here’s some examples. I particularly love the 1989 TV Guide of Oprah Winfrey. Man, look at how amateur a “chop” that is!!
Art created on the windshields of dirty cars. I’m blown away! So cool!!
Scotch Tape taken to the extreme! Yeah. Just check it out.
And this is the last one, for now. Somehow, I managed to stumble upon the trailer page of one of my most anticipated films of early 2008.
Be Kind Rewind. This is going to be AWESOME!!! Jack Black, Mos Def and the mind of Michel Gondry.
I decided to include the trailer here for you to view. Watch it and love it!!
Powered by ScribeFire.
This is a conflict I haven’t found peace with.
Is the “turn or burn” approach too extreme? Is it even appropriate?
Does it really work?
I do believe that God can use anything to attain His glory; if He can use death, He can certainly use sandwich signs and bullhorns. I totally get that. But, I really question the results of this approach on a broader canvas.
What good is God if served at the barrel of a gun?
Furthermore, what good is service to God if served at the barrel of a gun?
If people only “do” what is “right” because the alternative (Hell) is scary…has any real good been accomplished? Has a life truly been saved? I never read any words of Jesus that told the story of the Father this way. If peoples’ image of God is this angry man with a cat-o-nine-tails ready to chaste them at a moment’s notice, then somewhere we’ve failed to deliver the Good News and all we’ve done is help them create a warped and feared take on a loving and gracious God.
And what good is God if fear of Hell is the only means by which people reach out to Him? God’s bigger than that.
In a recent podcast I listened to I heard a pastor say something that bothered me. And, his take on that (me being bothered or offended) is that it’s conviction. That my conviction was a result of being offended because I’m not willing to be extreme like Jesus.
But I don’t feel convicted.
He went on to say that Jesus was offensive.
And he was…
…to religious rulers.
Those people were supposed to know who He was and were supposed to know and be in observation of God’s law.
But, man, Jesus would lay into the religious leaders of the day. I’m sure the Pharisees went home scoffing and complaining to their wives (and mistresses) about what Jesus called them that day. Dare I say no one has laid the verbal smackdown on authority figures the way Jesus did. And why? Because they were hypocrites and ruining the entire message of His Father!
In matters of the lost (people who did NOT know God or observe His law), Jesus was not offensive. Jesus never said, “Be gone from me, you vile whore!” Jesus never said, “You’re wallowing in this crap because you refuse to turn! TURN OR BURN!!!” Man, Jesus just wasn’t like that. Jesus reached the lost on their level. He spoke their language. He used their culture.
And I think that’s a real key. Jesus used the culture of the day, to reach the people of that day. Jesus didn’t paint on the walls of a cave. He reached out to people within the culture of their time and related to them on their level.
Jesus did not condemn. Jesus dined with sinners. Jesus fed sinners. Jesus healed sinners.
Jesus died for sinners.
He did all of that BEFORE they knew who He was.
I just think Jesus deserves more from us than service out of fear. Most people will do anything you say when the only other alternative is fed out of the barrel of a gun. That kind of service is not voluntary, it’s driven by fear.
And I just don’t think He intended us to “convert” people by invoking that kind of fear.
I believe God is bigger than that.
And I believe that by showing Jesus’ love in my actions, He can do something with that. In fact, I think He can use that much better than He can a fearful words shouted at a street corner.
After all, Paul said:
1 Corinthians 13:13 (New Living Translation)
Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.
Powered by ScribeFire.
So, it hit me today.
How foolish do we look for the sake of our pets? Especially us dog owners. I mean think about it.
Here’s my example. I’m out this morning, in the cold with wet hair, barely hanging on to a leash which is attached to a dog which is pulling me wherever she wants to go. Not only that, but I have to stand in wait beside her while she takes a poo. Now, fortunately I don’t have to follow that up by scooping the excrement into a baggy and carrying it around afterwards. Praise the Lord for that. But, after all of that, she spots a neighbor and goes into what I call “yay-a-new-person fits.”
Her backside begins to shake with an element of finesse that would shame Ricky Martin and she stands on her hind legs, never missing a butt-shaking beat, while hopping up and down – often, twisting and contorting her body in midair.
There I stand with a dumb look on my face, holding a pink leash while my dog has what looks like an impromptu, epileptic rendition of Swan’s Lake there in front the apartment building. Helpless. All I can do is shrug, yank and use silly human words of reason in an attempt to make my dog seem more civil.
And, the girl – that “new person” that stirred all the excitement – she laughs and probably thinks it’s cute.
And it hits me. Well, God hits me. With as self-conscious as I am, I willingly submit to being made to look silly and foolish for the sake of my dog. Yet, how often do I do that for God?
With all that God has given me (which is EVERYTHING) and all that He’s planned for me, why am I so self-conscious and worried about looking foolish at times? How is it that I can get so pumped up about Jesus, and then in certain situations or around certain people I downplay it?
Here’s an example that I am rather ashamed of. While I was fasting in order to grow closer to God, I’d tell some people it was a detox thing I was doing. Wow. When people asked why I was doing this and drinking these ridiculous concoctions, I’d say it was for health reasons. Or, in cases, I did mention fasting but I’d quickly gloss over it.
When people ask me, “How in the world did you quit smoking like you did,” instead of telling the truth, that after accepting Christ, the desire to smoke was gone, I’ll tell them it just took dedication. I’ll tell them that because I set my mind on it, it was easy. But the fact of the matter is, it was easy because God made it easy. It was easy because I was far more interested in getting to know Him better than I was sucking on a Parliament.
I’ll steal God’s glory just so I don’t look foolish to certain people.
Man. That hurts.
I don’t realize I do it until it’s already done. But then, it’s almost certainly too late.
I’m sick of that.
So, I’m going to work hard not to do that anymore. If David can disrobe and dance before the Lord in the parade celebrating his crowning as king of Israel, I can certainly tell a friend that quitting cigarettes was easy with Jesus.
One thing that Mark Batterson pointed out in his book, “In a Pit With a Lion on a Snowy Day,” was that humility is a small price for us to pay for a much greater reward. Even the most humiliation we can experience for God can’t outweigh the blessing He’ll bring. I mean, look at Jesus. Hanging naked on a cross had to be rather humiliating…but, he rose from the dead, conquered the grave and prophecy says that every knee shall bow before Him.
Yeah. I think I like the way God uses humility much better than the way I avoid it.
Powered by ScribeFire.
My Twitter
|
Recent Comments