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Man, That Felt Good

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Categories: Things that are too good to keep

Can I share a moment of personal achievement with you?

Yesterday, I went and did something that, to my knowledge, I have never done, ever, in my whole life.

I went to the mall and bought a pair of smaller jeans.

(It was getting almost to the point that I needed to go around holding my pants up with one hand.)

In the past five weeks (since Jan. 1), I have lost 17 pounds. That’s for a total of 31 pounds since I started trying to lose weight in earnest.

To borrow a line from Stacy the Hooting Waiter:

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Life-Altering Moments of Truth

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Categories: changing mindsets, food for thought

I don’t know about you, but looking at my history, I can see certain points where the course of my life was dramatically altered by a “moment of truth.” In other words, I encountered a certain truth or revelation that shifted my paradigm, and after that moment, life looked different for me. Looking back, I can see how my path shifted from that point on.

I think this happens to all of us. Sometimes that “moment of truth” is a revelation from God, or sometimes it’s a wake-up call of something happening of which you were perhaps previously unaware. These moments of truth can be places of great joy, or great devastation and trauma. Either way, your world is rocked when they happen.

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Uh-Oh…Jeff’s Philosophizing Again

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Categories: random stuff, What the heck was THAT?

Here’s another nugget from the Official Collection of Proverbs and Random Thoughts from Jeff the Twisted, Slightly Off-Center Philosopher:

“Most, if not all, of the dysfunction in relationships stems from one of two things:
  1. People who are not willing to deal with their own crap; and
  2. People who feel they need to deal with everyone else’s crap.”
Yep.

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Just Some of the Crazy Weird Stuff I’ve Encountered in Church Life

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Categories: random stuff, What the heck was THAT?

  • We have been invited by passers-by to visit their church on Sunday–after telling them we pastored a congregation. (This has happened more than once.)
  • A local mega-church pastor, who knew who we were, once openly tried to recruit one of our college girls to leave our house church and come to his mega-church.
  • While attending an Easter pageant at one of the larger churches in town, our teenage son was approached by a grinning church volunteer who shoved a tract in his hand, apparently assuming he was not a Christian because he was not dressed like a typical youth-grouper.
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Friendship–Only the Genuine Article, Please

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Categories: Rantings

I seem to be latching on to a thread of inspiration in writing this post. I was inspired by a post Sarah wrote today…and Sarah was inspired by Alan…and Alan was inspired by Steve. (Sounds almost like a genealogy, doesn’t it?) And our posts aren’t about exactly the same thing, but they all resonate from a similar theme: the disconnectedness believers often feel in church.

Here are some highlights from Sarah’s post:

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Beautifully Wrapped Empty Boxes

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Categories: food for thought

It’s awesome to watch babies and small children at Christmas and birthdays–especially when it’s their first one. It’s fun to watch them, because they just don’t get it.

Everybody sings and cheers and smiles and laughs around them, and they just look wide-eyed, with a puzzled confused look on their face.

You buy them toys, and wrap the toys as presents. Babies don’t know what to do with presents yet, so you have to tear the wrapping off for them. The baby gets excited and distracted when he/she sees the new toy, plays with it for a bit…

…and then plops down and plays with the wrapping paper and the box.

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Fences and Wells

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Categories: changing mindsets, church, food for thought

Of all the studying I’ve done over the past two years, one of the most impacting books I’ve read is The Shaping of Things to Come by Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost. Not a quick read by any means, but full of great information and ideas about how church and ministry can be reshaped to better serve this culture. It gave some cohesion to a lot of thoughts I’d already been processing. So I’d like to give credit here and tell you that I’m borrowing ideas from that book to write this post.

In the last two posts I talked about how we’ve come to use the “sinner’s prayer” as a sort of determining factor in deciding who is “saved.” We questioned whether this is really an accurate litmus test, since conversion really is a matter of the heart, not a prayer formula. And this also begs the question: why do we even feel this need to measure this? Why are we bent on deciding who is “in” and who is “out”?

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"Follow Me"

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Categories: food for thought, theological questions

In yesterday’s post, I posed the question as to how the “sinner’s prayer”, which has only been in practice for the last 150 years or so of the church’s history, has become such a doctrinal necessity in the evangelical church, to the point that we essentially measure conversion by whether that prayer has been prayed.

Thanks to all who replied, for your thoughtful responses. (And feel free to add yours, if you haven’t.) It’s time now for me to put in my two cents’ worth. 🙂

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A Question to Make Your Brain Hurt…

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Categories: food for thought, theological questions

The “sinner’s prayer” is the basic prayer where we admit our sin and our need for a Savior, ask for forgiveness, and confess Jesus to be our Savior and Lord. It is generally considered by evangelicals to be the moment when someone is “saved”, when a spiritual conversion and rebirth takes place, and that person becomes a “new creature” (2 Cor. 5:17).

However…out of the approximate two thousand year history since the church was born…the “sinner’s prayer” has been part of our practice for less than 150 years.

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