"You cheated"....."Pirate"

I can't believe my 100th post on Bumbling Forward is gonna be one of these goofy "what would you be" things but I can't help myself. When I see one, I am compelled to find out what type of drink I am, or flavor of ice cream or in this case Super Hero. As it turns out I am most like Capt Jack with William Wallace and Maximus close behind

Captain Jack Sparrow 92% Maximus 83% William Wallace 83% The Terminator 79% Indiana Jones 63% Batman, the Dark Knight 54% Lara Croft 46% El Zorro 42% The Amazing Spider-Man 33% Neo, the "One" 29% James Bond, Agent 007 25% Which Action Hero Would You Be? v. 2.0 created with QuizFarm.com

(HT M Squared T blog)

Movie Quotes

My buddies from high school and I can carry on entire conversations without speaking an original word or uttering an original thought; not because we are incapable but because we love to quote movies. One of them, Slink, will call out of the blue, every so often and just say something like...."You ask for miracles Theo...I give you the F....B...I...." and I am obliged to reply something like "Yippee kaiyee Mother-'F'er" or another line from...come on now...Die Hard. Slink's wife, who is a very nice woman doesn't speak movie qoute. He needs to share with someone who will appreciate him on that level. That's why I'm here.

I had been married for roughly 2-3 years when my wife and I finally watched the movie Caddyshack together. It was the first time she had ever seen the movie. About half way through the movie she looked at me with this I caught you red-handed kinda grin.

"You're a jerk," she said
"Huh? What did I do?" I replied
"All this time I thought you were a funny guy when in reality all you have been doing is quoting this stupid movie."
I laughed sheepishly..."Yeah...what's your point?" I shot back rather pleased with myself.

You see there is a subtlety to correctly using a movie quote. Slipping a line into converstation, where if someone were paying enough attention and familiar enough with the line, they would reply with the next line of the movie. If the person on the other end of the conversation missed the reference, there might a be a brief pause, as if to ask with their eyes, "I'm sorry what was that?" If the line was subtle enough and appropriate enough the question never really gets asked.

Then there are those quotes that just get shouted out of nowhere for fun. Our friend Cynthia, lived with us for a couple of months, several years back. She and my wife our best friends. The two of them spent a lot of time watching A Few Good Men while she was here. There was an awful lot of:

"You want answers?"
" I want the truth."
"You can't handle the truth"

I have a new line to add to the databanks of favorites, from The Chronicles of the Narnia (as my four year old calls it) or the Chronic-what-cles of Narnia as my friends Chris Parnell and Andy Sandberg would call it.











Mr. Tumnus: (of Aslan) "He's not a tame lion."
Lucy Pevensie: "No... but he's good."


Do you speak Movie Quote?

zzzzzzzzz..........

I dreamt last night. The subject of the dream is irrelevant. The point is that I dreamt. In the midst of my dream, I became I aware that I was dreaming. I was happy, almost blissful, in that moment in my dream. I knew that if I was dreaming that meant I was in a deep sleep.

I don't remember when I dreamt last. I don't remember the last good night's sleep I got. Last night I got both.


"come back here you rabbbbittt.....nighty night"

Bubbles, bad guys, bubbles and blue skies

We spent a couple of hours over at friend's house ysterday afternoon. His wife was away so he was home alone with his two boys, ages 8 and 6 for the weekend. Doing more than the regular amount of Mr Mom activity lately, I felt for my friend. I called him on Saturday and left him a message asking if he wanted a break on Sunday afternoon. I told him Gail and I would bring our boys, whom I have affectionately been referring to as Kayos recently, over and play with his guys and he could go get a cup of coffee or take a nap or something. He called back and said that would be great.

It was an unbelievably gorgeous day. The kind of day that makes you think of every other beautiful day you've experienced. The memories seem to magnify the beauty of the now. It actually got to the point where Kayos actually had to ask Gail to stop saying "what a beautiful day it was."

We arrived at my friend's house, our boys bounded out of the car and his kids came leaping out the front door of their house. After the initial confusion, we got everyone settled in the back yard to jump off swings, not swing on mind you, but jump off of and climb trees and jump on trampolines and blow bubbles, and chase bad guys. My friend decided he would use his kid-free time to hang some wall paper and cut the front lawn. It wouldn't have been my choice with a few hours of babysitting time but hey, it's his time.

My friend's 6 year old, P. is an amazing little guy; blonde 1950's crew cut, thickly built, like a little linebacker, and full of energy and enthusiasm. He and I spent most of the afternoon blowing bubbles. I held a 32oz bottle of bubble juice that he would stick the bubble wand into and blow with all his might. Whether it was a two or twenty, the bubbles were shiny and no matter what shape they came out of the wand as, they ended up as perfect spheres.

Sometimes he would chase the bubbles and step on them, sometimes he would try to catch them in his mouth. Sometimes he would release the bubbles from the wand and they would take off on little gusts of wind and we would watch them float above the trees and dissapear into the perfectly blue sky.

Gail had the other three guys well in hand. They had moved onto riding bikes and big wheels on the front sidewalk. P. and I were still in the back yard blowing bubbles. Over the course of the afternoon, P. and I exchanged maybe three or four words. We didn't really need much more than that. We had the bubbles, the breeze, the blue sky; at the moment it seemed like all we needed. Unfortunately, those are all the words P. really has. You see he suffers from autism; a disorder which drastically impairs his ability to speak, impairs his ability to interact with others, and effects his interests in a way that causes him to fixate on those things you and I might find inconsequential.

I am thankful for my afternoon with P., hopefully there will be many more like it. I went expecting to chase some young boys around the backyard, get frustrated with them for playing too rough, maybe have someone blow their nose in my shirt tails and hopefully help my friend catch his breath for a moment. I left having learned some things. I always respected my friend and his devotion to both his children but especially P. but I learned a deeper respect for him. I learned what a horrible disorder autism is, how it effects not only the child inflicted with it but his brother and parents, and their every waking and many sleepless minutes. Again something that I knew but only at a very superficial level. I learned or more correctly, P. helped me remember what an awesome thing bubbles can be.

You are what you drink

Below are my beverage personalities. Pretty accurate....
How about you?

(Ht to Subvervise influence)

You are a Black Coffee

At your best, you are: low maintenance, friendly, and adaptable At your worst, you are: cheap and angsty You drink coffee when: you can get your hands on it Your caffeine addiction level: high

What Kind of Coffee Are You?

You Are Guinness

You know beer well, and you'll only drink the best beers in the world. Watered down beers disgust you, as do the people who drink them. When you drink, you tend to become a bit of a know it all - especially about subjects you don't know well. But your friends tolerate your drunken ways, because you introduce them to the best beers around.

What's Your Beer Personality?

Loverboy and church

Found some really thought provoking stuff on Pastors "working for the weekend." The majority of our time and energy is spent prepping for one hour. What about the rest of the week?

Below is the stream consciousness that came out of the Loverboy post:

what if we occasionally cancelled Sunday morning and as a local community went and did something, you know as the hands and feet of Christ?

What if Sunday morning was “learn by doing time?”
Maybe a given Sunday Morning was all prayer? Not a message about why we should pray or exegeting great prayers of the bible but the whole community actually praying? Something we are supposed to do without ceasing gets center stage…

I think saying it (There is more to following christ than sunday morning) over and over is a good idea also. In addition to saying it, what if we took a sunday morning and asked the question to the community how can we make Sunday morning part of your journey instead Sunday morning being the journey?

Origins Conference

I spent the last few days in sunny Pasadena Ca at the Origins Conference hosted by Erwin McManus and the folks at Mosaic.

I have read Erwin's stuff before and heard alot of the concepts and ideas that drive Mosaic. A few things hit me this time around.

Creativity is a natural result of Spirituality.
Every person is created in the image of a creative God. As each one of us begin to understand who we are and where we come from creativity should be the result.
Creativity is not the possession of the few but of all. The creative process reflects and glorifies God. Creativity's natural home is the church. We have reduced our gatherings to nothing more than a lecture surrounded by often times completely irrelevant music.

The F-word
The word fellowship is kicked around christian subculture like a hacky sack. According to the folks at the origins project, the bastardized (my term not their's) version of fellowship which so many people settle for kills churches. It causes the people of a given community to become internally focused and they cease to reach out to those who are hurting and lost. They exchange warm comfortable discussions for dangerous messy life changing relationships. Peter Jackson painted a more biblical picture of fellowship in the first Lord of the Rings movie than most churches do. Fellowship is supposed to be what Christ followers do together to reach others with God's Love.

Phrases worth remembering:
Talent can crush character
Adults only learn in crisis. In order to develop character we need to create crisises.
The gospel brings out the beauty of a culture.


Contextualizing conference stuff:
The pace and values of Fairfield county, CT are killing people from the inside out. How do we help people discover the individual they were intended to be?
The church needs to open it's front doors as wide as can possibly be imagined. At the same time the church must narrow the stair that allows people to positions of influence and authority.
Where am I taking wrong turns on the journey of developing Christ-like character?

Origins and Ethos are coming to Manhattan November 28, 29, 30th, 2006. If you are an east coaster and hesitated to make the trek to Cali you won't want to miss this. Click here to check for info as it becomes available



technorati tags Erwin McManus f-word character
arts

Hank Hill goes church shopping

I don't kow whether to laugh or cry....

Newbie

A friend from the "real world" has joined the ranks of the blogosphere. Stop by her blog and show her some love.

Welcome to it Trace. I'm glad you are here.

National Day of prayer-revisited

So for the past few years our little community of faith has been hosting our local National Day of Prayer Event. Every first Thursday in May, people are supposed to gather in their local communities to pray for our country, our government officials, our troops, our families, our communities, the media, the poor, the aged, the imprisoned, and our youth. Each local session is supposed to start at noon across the country. (I don't know what they do with the whole time zone thing)
The national effort is championed by the Dobsons of Focus on the Family, fame or infamy, depending on your perspective.
I went; more to support my friend and boss who was leading the day's festivities. I had a lousy attitude about the whole thing. When I got there, he asked if I wanted to lead a section of the program. I politely declined. Instead of approaching the afternoon with a sense of hope and expectation of meeting God in prayer I had my back up. In hindsight, I feel like the day has become more of a political event rather than a prayer event. The thing felt like it had an underlying religious right agenda rather than a Kingdom agenda. I'm sure a lot of that is my own baggage and hyper-sensitivity to some of the less than Christ-like comments and actions that tend to originate from the right. Whatever the reasoning, I missed an opportunity to meet with the Father, who loves us all, right, left, middle; independent or lunatic fringe.
I didn't intend it to be but there is my confession.

technorati tags National Day of Prayer

Crazy ...Crazy...Crazy

It's been almost a month since my last post. Sorry, this life thing, or more correctly a lack thereof, got way out of hand.

I taught on a Sunday morning. We are discussing the book of 1 John. The series is called Experiencing God. My weekend was called Experiencing God: In Worship. I struggled to put it together but after all was said and done I received pretty positive feedback.

I have done a ton of video editing. We held our last club, our high school outreach, for the school year. I know, a little a early, but we are switching to Ultimate Frisbee for the spring/summer. But I digress. Our last club has become senior night. So for our seniors, I took the last 7 years of video footage from meetings, trips, retreats and hanging out and condensed it to a 20 minute highlight reel. I burned it ( a 12 hour nightmare which culminated with a support tech at apple reading to me from an iDVD manual...ugh!!!) and all the videos from their Student Ministry experience with us into a 2-disc set. The end result was worth it, all the seniors really appreciated it.

We had a drama planned for Palm Sunday which got turned into a video. After the video was shot and edited it got the kai-bash because it didn't express what we were trying to get across. Only to get replaced with another video....more editing.

Both of my sons came down with pneumonia. The four year old, who I have been referring lately to as Crab Man, because his afro is starting to look like the character of the same name from the show, my name is Earl, had only a mild case and was out of commission for a couple of days. The older guy was out of the game for a good ten days, I mean out.

I was asked to read scripture at a local Evangelical Free church at their annual Good Friday service. It's actually six half-hour services that clergy from all over the area lead. It's like a 35 year tradition or something like that. I read at the 12:30 and my boss, Rich, spoke at the 1:00. Jacket and Tie, Platform, really traditional hymns, I felt like a fish out of water. It was good though, to see the body of Christ come together across denominational and traditional lines to celebrate the sacrifice of Good Friday.

That night we held a healing service at Crossroads. There has been a group of 15-20 of us gathering each week to pray, no agenda, just pray for whatever God seems to be leading us to pray for. About half of that group is between the ages of 15-21. Those folks, young people, whatever you want to call them, volunteered to pray for people at this healing service. God worked in huge ways in and through all of us who were there that night.

Family came in for Easter. I had lamb on the menu only to learn my sister and her boyfriend had become vegetarians. So I added a roasted veggie stack and angel hair pasta with pesto to the day's fare. A couple of friends from church stopped by and we spent to afternoon eating and talking.

I was inexplicably overcome with the urge to listen to Carol King. I had this song in my head from elementary school called Really Rosie, from the children's animated movie. I found it online as well as some classics, like, So far away and It's too late. I actually shocked Gail when the sounds of Carol started emanating from my laptop. It's good to know I can still shock my wife.

We went to Boston for two days to visit family and check out the Star Wars exhibit at the Museum of Science. I took some pictures of the life sized annakin and Han solo mannequins. I can't wait to Photoshop my boys faces onto anni and Han. If they turn out okay I'll post them here.

Somewhere along the line, I imploded. I was tired, way over-tired. I was doing stupid stuff like drinking energy drinks to stay up until 3:00am working, only to get up at 6:00 am with my sick kids. My implosions manifest themselves in anger. I'm short with the people closest to me. I live on the edge during these times feeling like I'm always one step away from blowing up. I am in the process of the cleaning up the mess I had let myself fall into and trying to reconnect with my family.

I'm not sure if this post has any other value than for me to see in black and white the ridiculous pace I kept for the last month and maybe try to do something about it....either that or go buy more energy drinks.

2nd trip to the Gulf Coast

We sent a second team of people from Crossroads down to the Gulf Coast to help out with the relief effort.  I stayed behind this time and playeed Mr Mom so Gail could go on the trip. 

I asked my friend Michael to share some of his thoughts on his trip.  Here it is:

So we were down in New Orleans, in St. Bernard Parish, where some of the worst flooding occurred when the levee let loose Lake Pontchartrain, leaving hundreds of homes under 9 feet of water for over 2 weeks.
  
We were heading to a distibution center run by a group called Pastors Resource Compassion. They have a huge tent sitting in the middle of a Wal-Mart parking lot where they're handing out food, clothes and other basic necessities to anyone from the area in need. I say anyone in the area, not anyone living in the area, because the area, for all intent and purposes, is destroyed. The 1000 to 2000 people coming through each day are either living in small FEMA trailers on ttheir devastated property or coming in for the day from friends' or families' homes or apartments outside the area salvaging, cleaning, or just staring at what they once had - a home.
  
 On our way to the center we drive a mile o! r two down the main drag - business after business, store after store, gas stations, grocery markets, banks, car dealers and barber shops, chuches and ice cream shops, you name it, all closed. Not because of a lot of damage, but because there aren't any people to buy anything. The few people in the trailers - they don't have any money - and if they do - they don't  have anywhere to put anything.
  
 But it's the streets off the main drag, whole neighborhoods, block after block, as far as your eyes can see - devastation - destruction - like I've never seen, like World War II news clips of the Allied bombing of Germany, an all to real episode of the Twilight Zone, like the End Times. House after house after house - total ruins - if it's still standing it's an empty shell - 9 feet of water - 2 weeks - that's a foot of water on the second floor of a 2 story home. Most of them were ranches. Some of the homes have been gutted, ev! erything that was in, is out. Look down the streets and you see big piles of debris in front of empty shells. Big piles of debris in front of empty shells? Hell! It's peoples lives, thier stuff, their valuables, their trinkets, their memories, their hopes for the future their home held for their families, for themselves, for their community - picture frames - the photo washed of its' image, broken dishes from family meals, a basketball, a little pink Big Wheel like my daughters we gave away last year, t.v.'s, couches, tables, towels, clothes - God it's like somebody ripped all your insides out and threw em on the ground in front you - its literally sickening to think what these people must feel when they see this, I'm feeling sick all over again telling you about it. Can you imagine what these people must feel? Can you imagine? God only knows. Only God will heal them. Let's pray. Let us all pray.

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2 Cor 1:3-4

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.
2 Cor 1:3-4 NIV

At some level, I have always known, on this walk with Jesus, the self; myself, is at best a tie for number 2 on the priority list...God, others and then me. As I read the verse above this morning I was reminded of this fact. It starts with praising God. We then read how God comforts us. That's nice and comfortable and meets the basic needs we think God should meet. The reason God comforts us is because he loves us....yes but it doesn't stop there. The reason He comforts us is so we can comfort others.
This has been God's pattern from the beginning. He blesses, comforts, equips, provides insights, grows and transforms His people, His children so that they might be a blessing, comfort, meeter of needs, relayer of truth, teacher and change agent in the lives of others.
Pick just about any story from the life of Jesus, He called Matthew and through Matthew "sinners and tax collectors got a chance to meet Him. He raised Lazursus rom the dead so that God might be glorified and because he loved Lazurus and Mary and Martha and so that "many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary, and had seen what Jesus did, put their faith in him."
So I sit here and take stock of what it is God has done in my life. Now I need to fill in the blanks....

God has done xxxx in my life, and met me in the midst of xxxxx, so that I might be and do xxxxx for others

How about you???

Middle School Weekend at Young Life's Lake Champion

Spending the Weekend with 300+ Middle Schoolers at Young Life's beautiful Lake Champion. Should be a great weekend we are bringing 30 students from Crossroads. Please pray for safety as we travel and while at camp and that God would draw each person there at least one step closer to him.
Oh yeah... prayer for energy and love and patience for me and the other leaders would be good too.

thanks.

Can't leave well enough alone

Well, I think I found the right combination of layout; three column, and readability. Props to Thur Broeders at thur's templates for doing the hardwork and making it available.

A different take on fasting

Rick, over at a new life emerging, has some great thoughts on fasting. There is something that rings right and true about fasting being a departure from "me-centered" spirituality. I'm still turning it over in my brain but I wanted to pass it along because it is worth the read.

technorati tags fasting Spiritual Disciplines

Word Cloud

This cool little web-bot scans your blog and creates this thing. Thanks to Holly for the link. I like the way Jesus ended up smack in the middle of the thing

Bumbling may be too generous a term

So I called this blog bumbling forward...Bumbling is generally how I move forward. Tripping falling, grabbing onto stuff to try to stay up, knocking other stuff over but when it is all said and done I usually end up ahead of where I started.

Case and point: Unbeknownst to me, somewhere along the way I did something to my blogger settings that made it necessary for me to approve each comment. Gail was talking to a friend who mentioned she had commented and I was all like "no she didn't." So I started poking around and found the source of the problem. She did indeed comment as well as 18 others.

To those of you gracious enough to comment please accept my humble apologies. If nothing else Bumbling forward is always an adventure.

When everything is said and done: Too close to home

okay...so three days after I write the last post I taught during our Sunday morning gatherings. The message I prepared was about Jesus as the image of the invisible God. In order to get the best picture of God we need to enlarge our view of Jesus to include his birth, life, message, ministry, death and ressurection. The message was heavy with visuals, scripture on the screen, and a video of various artist's depictions of Jesus.

Our first service starts at 9:00 am at 8:58 am after an hour of rebooting and reconfiguring and tweaking and guessing and switching cables I was unable to get any sort of image from the computer that runs our service to the screen. As I thought back to my post and the article that motivated it, I said "okay God...if want me to do this without any of the stuff I had planned then so be it." One last ditch effort...and it worked. At 9:01 the announcement loop started running and the service started.

God's got one sick sense of humor...


technorati tags Church marketing sucks

When everything is said and done

I found this thought regarding creating church experiences on Church Marketing sucks.com.

Yet the questions remain: How much should I do? What should I avoid? What is cool? What works?

Here's a simple approach I've learned...

If the electricity went out, and your walls fell down, and your biggest givers died, what would you have left? Would you have a community of people still seeking after the heart of God? Would you still worship even without a band? Would you still be able to learn about God even though you can't show a video or a PowerPoint slide? In other words, what you have when everything else goes away is what your church is really all about.

What great questions! I'm not sure if I have great answers. These questions are great filters to evaluate what we do in the name of ministry.

Technorati Tags church church marketing sucks