bon jovi

hi. i'm still breathing real good. thanks for prayin'/askin'/carin'/lovin'/touchin'/squeezin'...

in august of 1993, my friend twitch was a youth ministry intern in gaithersburg, md. some friends and i went down to do a concert for the high-schoolers. a lot of it was christian-type stuff, but we also did a stripped-down version of bon jovi's classic "living on a prayer". (in 2007, we remember that song with an eye-roll and a grin, but in '93 it was still nice and relevant...kinda.) we did it with the intention of building a "cultural bridge": something to allow these kids to connect their culture to the expression of their faith. i remember that being one of the highlights of the concert.


there are many, many examples in our music and other media that express, as mark acuff has put it, "the heart-cry of our culture". for a long time, the church has made indelible distinctions between secular and sacred. it's not nearly that dichotomic. i think of the examples of jesus and paul, who each used cultural tools to teach the eternal truths of the kingdom of god. jesus's parables about farming, servants, virgins, mustard seeds, and expensive pearls may not have much direct impact on our 21st-century ears, but for folks in judea, circa 31 a.d., they provided an avenue of understanding that the pharisees' teaching probably did not. paul, speaking to the high council in athens, quoted back to them their own poet aratos, bridging the "unknown" to the known.

the important thing here is that jesus and paul both studied and knew their culture well and could therefore speak its language. it's no less important today for the church to adopt this posture; in fact it may be more important in the post-christian west.


there is a book that i borrowed from someone (and need to give back) called a matrix of meanings, written by a couple of fuller seminary professors. though i borrowed/usurped it three years ago, i have only read about thirty pages of it (just another brick paving the road to hell), but i know people who have taken courses from these guys and have read their book, and were very impressed by both. also, if anyone knows of records/songs/artists that express well these temporal-eternal tensions, please point me in their direction.

thanks.

nasal passage*

*it was either this or "POST: nasal drip".


hi. sorry i've been out o' commission. i have good excuses.


so i had my nasal polyp surgery two weeks ago today. i went under general anesthesia for a little over two hours (my first time ever experiencing that -- dada no likey), and they shaved out the polyps and straightened my deviated septum. dr. clarke shoved some packing up in there to help it all heal in place.

[warning: please put down your strawberry smoothie for this next paragraph.]

i (slowly) woke up and needed water NOW, so they got me some 'ice chips'. apparently, i had vomited pretty violently at some point right before i awoke; of course, i have zero recollection of this. i also had this "drip-pad" right under my nostrils to soak up the flow of blood. not the most physically ideal situation to wake up to.

i totaled about six (6) hours of sleep the next four days and nights, mostly due to the inability to breathe out m'nose. it wasn't 'til monday afternoon that i began to feel "normal": some of the packing had begun to dissolve, which provided some airflow out m'nostrils. wednesday morning i went to dr. clarke and he sucked out most of the rest of the gunk that was up there. that was the turning point; my first inhalation after that was evidence enough that this surgery was worth it. i was already breathing better than i had in literally years.

it's now two weeks later, and i am a new man. seriously. before the surgery, i would ordinarily wake up about every 90 minutes-2 hours most every night (and fall right back to sleep, but it still was interruptive). the last seven days have consisted of full-ish nights of sleep (barring my three-day trip to boston last weekend to my sister's kick-ass party for getting her Ph.D.), and i feel better every day!! i'm so thankful.

dr. clarke is tha man. i told him he changed my life. he took it well.

i am not a forty-six-year-old female

but i gotta tell you: i really, really love josh groban's voice. seriously.

who's with me?

anyone? anyone at all....

hmmm.

community is still basic

hi.


to paraphrase, uh...something else i've heard before, seven days of not blogging makes one weak. i apologize to the tens of thousands of you all that have had to endure the stagnancy of eyesuppose of late.

i was talking with a college-age friend of mine recently, and she expressed some things that made me realize that there are many of us that feel like we (a) can't and (b) shouldn't have to depend or lean heavily upon others in times of physical, emotional, and spiritual need, and that it's a sign of weakness to do so.

to quote john keating: excrement.

i had similar thoughts when i was in college. going "away" to school caused me to consider the need to make my relationship with god "my own" rather than just My Parents' Faith 2.0. this is valuable in many ways, often even if it means completely abandoning one's journey with god and eventually coming back to a more authentic expression of faith that perhaps looks nothing like our parents'.

those four years at gordon college were fundamental in my spiritual formation. being in an intensely christian environment has its dangers and drawbacks, but the friendships i formed (not to mention that hot chick that i met my senior year) were crucial as i grew in faith and in the knowledge of the lord. but as you get out into the "real world", we were told, you've got to find a way to maintain your christianity (which usually meant espousing the right morality in the face of this immoral culture). now that you are no longer going to be in a solely christian environment, hopefully you will be strong enough and wise enough to survive on your own.

excrement.

not only should we lean and depend on each other, we really can't not do that and expect to have a viable faith that truly reflects god's heart, which is inherently communal. the church is not a cadre of individual pods (a visual from number 13 comes to mind), but a true community formed by god for his purpose. this is true in our times of communal worship as well. as i asserted in my last post about this subject, our worship is far too often expressed inside our "me-and-god" pods when we show up sunday morning.

i've been talking with people about how our church community can have a more relational, "horizontal" experience when we come together on sunday morning. our space is set-up in a manner that would make that a challenge, what with the chairs all facing the action coming from the big lit stage and all. there have been some special times of interaction through small-group prayer or an extended greeting time or breaking up into groups to discuss a topic for a few moments. another way this has been accomplished is through having people share a tidbit about what's going on in their lives, how they are living out his mission in their worlds, or how the grace and love of god and his community have carried them through pain and struggle.

my friend keith, one of the wiser men ever, illustrated this in the example of a song that dorinda holley sang in church a year or two ago. while it sounded beautiful on its own, the song was made even more meaningful by the fact that he knew what tough things were going on in her life during that time. in this way he (and others with whom she was in community) was able to come alongside her and praise god and lament with her in her pain.

excellent.