my life…in text format

Ok…so in keeping with the Ingenuity & Pandemonium genre, (you can check out where this idea started here) I have a story.

The organization I work for, Safehouse, recently partnered with another youth ministry, Next Valley Youth Movement, in order to more effectively reach this valley in which we are located. We hosted the band Fireflight with two other bands to put on a concert this past Friday.

The show rocked. Almost 300 students jumped, danced, screamed, cheered and laughed their way through 2 hours of rock show mastery. Little did they know what happened behind the scenes before the concert…

Myself and another member of our team were fixing a lighting problem. Two of our scanner fixtures had blown bulbs so we got some new ones and proceeded to change them. Well, the problem wasn’t with the bulbs, it was something with the wiring. So as soon as we turned on the fixtures with the new bulbs, they kicked on and immediately blew out.

So we have four fixtures with only two working bulbs. The problem we faced now, was that the two fixtures that were blown were on the same stand. So, we figured, “Hey, we’ll just take one working fixture from the other stand, put it over here and at least we’ll have two lights, balancing out the stage.”

(Enter Pandemonium)

These fixtures are not very light. They are deceptively heavy, actually. As we (my buddy and I) worked to get the fixture off, straining and holding on, we finally loosened it from the fixture.

All of a sudden, the light still secured to the fixture started to lean…and it kept leaning and kept leaning.

Until gravity did what gravity does best and pulled it towards the ground.

Right on top of Fireflight’s drumset.

While the drummer was doing a sound check.

Yes. You read that right.

We let a light fixture drop onto Fireflight’s drumset while the drummer was doing a sound check.

My day was ruined.

No damage was done, thankfully. He was kind, joking, and understanding. The guitarist then made a reference to the light fixture on the other side of the stage and said, “Could you make sure this one doesn’t fall on my guitars.” Or something along those lines. I think he was joking, but he may have been seriously worried now.

It was an awful moment in creative production, but makes for a great post on Monday afternoon!

Needless to say, Fireflight rocked, and the other bands that played that night were fantastic as well.

The Jesse David Worship Project and Eleventh Hour are awesome. You should check them out.

I’m glad that moment is in the past.

Lesson Learned: Never underestimate the weight of a light fixture. (Here’s a model similar to ours.)

Ok…I’m jumping on board with Neil on the ingenuity & pandemonium idea. Each and every Monday. I’ll post something that happened with our creative side of service(s). Something that went horribly wrong, or not so horribly wrong, but just wrong. Or something went off smooth like silk.

I like the idea of learning and growing from each other.

So here’s the first one.

This past Wednesday at our youth service we started a new video series called “Will It Hurt?” The premise: We film something painful happening to somebody and they rate it on our WILL IT HURT scale. The video was a great success and the students loved it. We filmed a student getting duct tape pulled off of his hairy leg. It was disturbing…and wonderful.

Until the end, we added a tag of me, the host, just for fun…goofing off for the camera. Well, the person running the video during service thought the video was on a loop and just started over, so he paused it.

At the worst possible moment, he paused it. I was making the craziest face and he refused to hit play again. So, for what seemed like forever, there I am on the screen with a very odd facial expression. It ended up really loosening the crowd and giving everybody just another reason to have a good time, but lesson learned.

-Don’t put so much black between the end of the video and tag at the end.
-Test run the video with the person running it (very important to test run with the person that will actually be running it that night).

Here’s the video:

I am a talker. If you know me at all, you know that I like to talk a lot. I also love to listen to people. To me, the most important part of communication is the part where my mouth stays closed and my ears stay open. As the saying goes, we have two ears and one mouth, we should do twice as much listening as we do talking.

This is interesting to me because I usually do more talking when I am praying. I try and pray so hard and so well that God will have to hear my prayer. At times I think God simply must be in Heaven calling on the Angels over saying, “HEY! Everybody be quiet and listen as my child prays. Listen to his brilliance as he eloquently seeks my forgiveness and asks desperately for passion. I MUST answer this prayer because I am floored by its brilliance!”

Yeah right.

I have recently been put through a learning process that I am basing God’s ability to answer my prayer on how well I pray. That sound ridiculous doesn’t it? Think about it.

I am trying to earn God’s favor by praying well. I am more worried about clearing dictating every word so that God can clearly hear what I’m saying than I am about the condition of my heart as I seek my Creator’s face.

I am praying…to prayer. I am not praying to God. I am praying to the thing that I use to communicate to God, hoping that I can reach God through powerful words.

Jesus calls people to come to Himself and get their drink from Him. Jesus tells us that what we need is found in HIM. Not in our words, not in our ability to say profound things. Jesus wants to do something in our hearts. He wants to break through the walls we’ve built up and tear down the words we’ve surrounded ourselves with and speak in our lives.

Are you listening?

How much time do you spend being quiet when you are praying?

Do you spend more time talking or more time listening?

I am a broken, sad, sinful human being struggling with bad habits and sinful nature. I have things in my life that I can clearly see are ripping me away from God and I desperately want to rid myself of it. I am slowly realizing that if I go to Christ, instead of attempting to convince God through elaborate prayers, I will get exactly what it is I need and be able to rid myself of exactly what it is that is destroying me.

I think it’s interesting that Jesus Christ is the One person we are so afraid to run to when we have in our lives and yet He is the Only Person we can run to in order to rid ourselves of it.

Maybe God is trying to say something to you. Are you listening?

Turn down the “you” volume and turn up the “God” volume.

We are but dust and earth, yet we get our life from the very breath of God. When we breathe, we are breathing God. When we speak we are exhaling the very being of our Creator.

When He breathes, life forms. When we breathe we speak a testimony of praise to God’s awesomeness.

Keep breathing. Keep listening. Stop talking.

Start…

I’m sitting in a comfy green chair in the cafe section of the safehouse right now. There are approximately 50 young people munching on some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and it’s absolutely beautiful outside. I am tired and at this point, I can feel the weight of leadership as it seems to be heavier today than usual.

All that being said I can’t think of better job on the planet. I just got to tell 50 teenagers, right before there were served their sandwiches, that we loved them and cared about them. I got to tell them that every person that works here was at one time rocked so hard by God that we wanted to do something to share that love with other people and this is the way we decided to do it.

What ways do you share the love of God with people? Day to day as you go through your job/social life/friendships/hobbies what ways do you feel you can share God’s love with those around you?

Maybe a better question to ask is also, if you’ve never experienced God’s love, in what ways can someone who HAS experienced God’s love share it with YOU?

We are made for community.

Let’s engage :: :: ::

By no means am I a perfect person. As a matter of fact, I tell people all the time that I can’t believe I’ve been privileged to do some of the things I have the amazing opportunity to do because I am such a flawed human being. Saying you are flawed though has kind of become a cliche in some ways. It’s a pseudo-humility so people will think you are humble when in reality you are quite proud that you are so flawed, because it makes you seem so human.

That being said, I won’t belabor the fact that we are all flawed. You know it. I know it. Which is the beauty of this post.

Recently, I was talking with a friend and she was describing a trip she was getting ready to go on. A six day vacation to see some friends and I am excited for her and wanted to hear more about it. So I asked, “What are you expecting from this trip?”

That’s an important question, I think. “What are you expecting?” We’ll come back to that later.

To be honest, I was expecting to hear a long silence as she contemplated what I thought was a difficult question but she answered almost immediately with a series of things she was expecting to happen while on this trip. As she was laying out the things she wanted to happen and what she wanted to get she said these words, “Hopefully something happens spiritually.” Those words struck me. Not because she wanted something to happen spiritually, which I think is great, I hope something happens spiritually for her too. The word that struck me in that sentence was the word “hopefully.”

I think I can honestly say that one of my least favorite combinations of words in the English language are the words that form the phrase, “All Hope Is Lost.” I don’t think there is a more tragic statement a human being can utter than when they say they’ve lost all hope. It’s interesting to me because the word LOST can mean a lot of things.

When you hear the word lost, there are several different things that come to mind. Pastors talk about “lost souls” all the time, some people immediately start thinking about ABC’s hit TV show, still others hear the word and they think it’s an exact description of what they feel about themselves. But when it’s attached to the word “hope” what is really being said?

It’s certainly possible to misplace your hope. To put your hope in the wrong things and to expect one thing to give you something else entirely. That’s why people empty bottle after bottle of alcohol or jump from meaningless relationship to another. But I don’t think misplacing hope is what is really being said when the word “lost” is attached to the word “hope.” I can misplace my keys, forget about them and lose them. Searching around my house frantically trying to find what I had lost while they are sitting right where I left them. I had just misplaced them. Misplaced hope is still hope. So when we say “all hope is lost” it’s even more tragic then putting that hope in the wrong thing.

Lost hope is the thing that drives the girl to sit in her room alone, with the shades drawn and the music loud as she drags a blade across her skin in order to relieve herself of the pain that hope in the wrong thing had created. Lost hope is when a young man experiences abandonment from his father at a young age and slowly but surely sinks deep into himself, never being able to become the man that God intended Him to be. Quietly, subtly, he lives the life of a dissatisfied shell of his former self because hope was lost long ago.

What are we risking when we say, “I’ve lost hope.”?

Have you ever felt that all hope was lost?

I don’t like the phrase “All Hope Is Lost” because while hope certainly can be misplaced, it is something that belongs to people and it is one of those things that is difficult to take, but is given away by the owner. Hope can be battered and bruised and abused, absolutely. Hope can allow us to put ourselves in situations that will undoubtedly hurt is in the future. But we enter them anyway, in hope that what we are afraid will happen….won’t happen.

If you are a hopeful person, you’ve probably been hurt. Because hope is the thing that kind of drives us beyond risk.

“I hope he won’t hurt me.”

“I hope it’s worth it.”

“I hope I don’t fail at this.”

Those are statements with huge risk attached but hope is what gives us justification to run into them anyway. It makes it seem possible. Hope.

Call me an optimist but I don’t think hope is taken from people. I think hope is given away. I think the nature of hope gives the holder of said hope the power to believe or to give up.

One of my favorite movies, Catch Me If You Can, has a story that recurs throughout the movie about two mice that felt into a bucket of cream. One mouse quickly gave up a drowned, the other mouse swam and swam so hard and so long that it eventually churned that cream into butter and crawled out. One mouse lost hope, the other mouse refused to give up or lose hope and kept fighting even though all logic pointed to the fact that it was going to die. It believed there was a different way and it struggled and fought until it had enough leverage to crawl out of it’s mess.

I love the word hope because even though we are all flawed, we can choose to hope beyond hope. We can choose to believe that something great will happen spiritually as we take a vacation away from the ordinary.

I want to sit here and type the words, “When all hope is lost, we can still hope” because that’s how powerful hope is. Of course, that doesn’t make sense grammatically but hope is kind of an anti-logic. That’s what makes it so beautiful.

If it weren’t for Jesus Christ, I would be condemned to separation from my Creator forever. But since Jesus Christ came to earth, died a death I deserved to die and was raised from the dead, I can HOPE in Jesus. I can hope that my life is bigger than the breaths I breathe each day and I am meant for more than just a short stint on this ball of dirt. I can hope.

The Bible says that it is impossible to please God without faith. It also says that faith is the substance of things we hope for and evidence, the truth, the things that point to the things we can’t see. Without hope, you can’t have faith.

Hope is one of the ingredients of faith.

I love that. Because I can choose to hope beyond hope or I can choose to stop swimming and drown.

Don’t forget that hope isn’t something stolen from you, it’s something you give away. Don’t give your hope away.

Faith. Hope. Love.

What are you expecting?

::

So, I’m sitting in my dad’s comfy recliner, watching a movie. It’s almost midnight and I’ve spent the last 40 minutes our so typing on my sister’s new computer. She recently purchased a Macbook Air and it is SLICK! Around this time of year, my family gets crazy busy. The sis is gearing up for final exams and papers and all that jazz, my folks are working their normal schedule plus working hard to get Safehouse Summer camp all worked out. It’s all very exciting!

Spring is officially here, the Indians are playing baseball again, the Cavs have clinched a playoff spot and I saw a commercial yesterday for official NFL draft hats. I love Spring time because the jackets come up, the sleeves get shorter, the light stays in the sky longer and the feeling in your heart starts to reflect the weather.

Weird how that happens, isn’t it? When I look outside and I see green, I see color, I feel warmth I feel…more alive. What it is about Spring time that does that to us? I was talking to a parent of a friend of mine just a couple of weeks ago and she was talking about how her mood is effected by the weather. When it is grey, she is grey. When it is cold and rainy, she feels down. I never thought that was something I had to worry about, until I saw the green, and the sunshine and the blue sky and I felt happier.

It’s strange that I didn’t realize the bad weather was effecting me until I saw how the good weather effected me in the opposite way.

Of course, I think this really has a lot to do with our souls. I think we all go through times of “winter” seasons in our lives, when the clouds cover the sun and the rain falls. We feel…cold and dark. But then, just as it always gets darker right before the sun starts to break over the horizon, we can hope that Spring will come.

When Spring comes, the flowers have reason to begin their push to color the world again. The sun starts to call out the leaves from their hiding places somewhere deep within the trees and the grass wins out over the snow, mud and slush from a cold, hard winter. Where is it that the flowers come from? When they begin their journey upward, they have to start somewhere and I love how God made it so they start from such a place as: the dirt. What was just weeks before cold, hard and frozen is now the place that gives birth to beauty and life.

Whenever I think about flowers breaking through the dirt, I get encouraged about my own dirt. The things that try to bury me. I feel refreshed and thrilled that even if there is dirt, I can break though. Reach out towards the Son of God and be pulled from the dirt and create a beautiful example of God’s amazing grace.

As this Spring gears into full swing, think about the stuff that the Son wants to pull you from. Be encouraged that this is a time for new life to be reborn. And that’s true for you as well.

Love.