Solid rock.

Yesterday I got to work and logged into my email as I always do. I found an email that said "Facebook: ..... Invited you to the group; Conservative Christians praying for president Obama."

Ugh. It's potentially the corniest thing I've ever read. EVER. There's so much wrong with it. Like, I know that we're supposed to "pray for our leaders" and all that, but this cause was/is clearly over-labeled. Why not "prayers for Obama"? The label of conservative Christians has so many implications, none of which are good by my thinking. It's some very divisive language.

I wonder how many conservative Christians know that the current president claims to follow the same religion as the last one... I keep hearing about the emails that circulate saying that he was born in Africa or that he's Muslim or that he's "radical." Please. None of those things are true.

And seriously, if you're so concerned about the downturn of this country, start a prayer group at your church. Not on freaking facebook of all places. And then, perhaps pray for things like why terrorists hold the country in contempt (endless wars and killing of innocent people ring a bell?). Pray for the people who own this country. The oil, cigarette, alcohol, entertainment companies. Pray for them. They need it.

For the record, I am not a supporter of president Obama. So this isn't some "liberal" condemnation of conservatives.

The whole prayer group through facebook thing is so typically American. "I'd rather be passive aggressive* and start a pseudo-group on the internet than actually do anything about it." Work on some plank-in-eye removal folks. Change starts with you, not with a politician. Truth is truth regardless of who's in office.

Remember folks, "our hope is built on NOTHING (break it down, no-thing, no-single-thing) less than JESUS' blood and righteousness." Jesus, forgive us for forgetting you, our first love.

Lord, prevent us from trusting in the "sweet" frames of this fallen world. Protect us from the foxes ruining your vineyards. Have mercy on us.

* Yes. I see the irony of complaining about passive aggresiveness and typing a blog about this whole thing.

"Don't just put me in a box..."

I realized relatively recently how I was raised to see God in a very specific way.

I was thinking about how in Mission Year we often mentioned seeing Jesus in the people around us (the homeless, poor, and prostitutes) and how I felt like that's a rather "out there" kind of thing to say. Growing up, Jesus was in a very particular setting, and saying that you could see His glorious, peaceful, loving face in a person, let alone a "broken" person would have been stretching it.

Last night I saw mewithoutYou in Old City and they closed with a wonderful song where the verses said various things like "In everyone we meet, Allah, Allah," and "In every blade of grass..." I loved it. It is a beautiful song.

*I think to put Jesus in a very culturally-specific setting (particularly one that Jesus would not have been a part of) is not only hypocritically dangerous, but also very limiting to him. People see God in so many different ways and he uses them to draw us to himself. To say he only appears and interacts in a certain 5 ways is, to say the least, ignorant.

*This goes for me as well.

Mission Year blog post.

Check out this blog post from a current Mission Year team member in Atlanta. It's entitled "Adventures with Aslan." It's a great read. Thanks Stephen.

Shady folk.

My lovely Lindsey works at a Starbucks and was recently telling me about how she and the other girls that work there often get hit on by their male patrons. She told me of one customer that was taking it a little too far. This guy singled her out, making comments about how they didn't like the weather and were going to run away to the Caribbean together to escape it.

At Starbucks, it's part of the employees job to be nice and smile and customers. Unfortunately, it seems that there's often a misunderstanding among the customers who misinterpret this corporate responsibility as flirting. Why does this happen? I think there's something more than baristas being flirtatious. I think it shows the loneliness that people feel and the desperation we have for affirming human contact. It's our longing for community.

Our society does not vouch for community, for sharing, for struggling with each other. We are not aware that this is wrong because it's just how we're taught to live. I don't believe that people are meant to live such intensely personal lives. We're built for interaction, for coexistence.

Obviously people live together. We see other people everyday. We're surrounded by people. But we're totally alone. We don't live together. We're all just existing in the same place, we're not living. If people shared their lives with each other, the occurrences of shady (but actually just emotionally lonely) guys hitting on cute (or in this case, downright gorgeous) baristas would decrease and real and pleasant interaction will take place.

Look at the people around you. Check out the people you work/go to school/ride the train with and look for the ones that seem to be trying too hard to fit in. I'd say that the chances are that they're not actually complete losers, but rather they just need someone to treat them in a humane way.

Our society eats people alive in a daily grind of (what ultimately boils down to) greed. Time is the most valuable thing we have. Take 3 seconds to say hi to the people you see around regularly and show them some love that way. It'll make a world of difference to them.

NHL All-Star Rant.

This is ridiculous. The NHL All-Star Game is January 25th in Montreal. The game is usually quite boring, with the highlight for me being the Super Skills competition coming the day before the ASG. Anyway, one of the big draws the past few years is that the NHL permits the fans to vote in the starters. It's a cool idea, but with like most other voting scenarios, it becomes a popularity contest. This year's results showcased this unfortunate truth:

Of the six starters in the East (5 skaters and 1 goalie), 4 of them are from the Montreal Canadiens. This makes sense with the Canadiens celebrating their 100th anniversary and all, but the players they voted in are rather ridiculous. They voted in Mike Komisarek (cough), Alex Kovalev (cough), Andrei Markov, and Carey Price (INJURED). Markov's the only guy who should be playing in this game, and he's STILL only a 5th or 6th defenseman (out of 6) when matched up against other Eastern defensemen.

Then there are my Flyers and their 3 players that got the shaft. Mike Richards, Simon Gagne, and Jeff Carter are all in the top 20 in points in the league. Kimmo Timonen's been a solid defenseman all season long. Carter was the only guy to make it because he's tied for the league-lead in goals. And the most ridiculous part of it is that Flyers center Danny Briere was on the ballot despite having played only 9 games! It's absurd. They need to monitor players by how they're playing and not by their supposedly big name and how many points they put up last year.

Ugh. I just wanna watch the shootout event again.

Wealth Distribution Pt II.

The real issue with wealth distribution is that it ultimately won't solve anything. It won't address the issues that bring about situations that lead people to believe that we need to redistribute our resources.

Don't get me wrong, sharing stuff is good. People should do it. Redistributing is kind of a shame. Can you appreciate the distinction? Redistributing and sharing are quite different. Sharing implies a sense of mutuality, there's a mutual reliance between the parties. Redistribution is taking from one group and giving it to a "lesser" group.

The problem lies in how people view each other. We need to shake this idea that we're unequal, and then we need to act on our "newly discovered" (more like finally admitted if it happens) equality. The real issues are in our hearts, not in our policies. The policies aren't even part of the equation because their source is defunct. I recall hearing something from somebody about a plank in our eyes...

We need to fix our hearts. How do we do this? We pursue Jesus, the life-giver. When we see others through His eyes, real change takes place. If we deal with issues at the source they'll actually get fixed. We can fiddle around with the edges of it for as long as we want but nothing will ever get done until we deal with the source.

Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Wealth Distribution Pt I.

With a new president about to take office, I remember hearing people talk about of one of their fears of having a democrat president (and a BLACK one at that) was that they would pursue the idea of redistribution of wealth. The circles I found myself in thought this was the worst profanity ever. The main idea was "how could someone come in and take MY hard earned money and give it away!?!? That's stealing!"

There is so much frustration about the concept of wealth distribution. The right says that they worked for and earned their money and therefore taxing it or "redistributing" it is no ones place but their own. What irks me about this is that it implies a lack of understanding of what's outside one's immediate setting. People are born with different opportunities. Someone born in North Philadelphia does not have the same opportunities that I had growing up on a farm in Bucks County and going to a great school district in the suburbs. People are influenced rather intensely by the environment that surrounds them. A kid in Bucks County is far more likely to grow up and live a "successful" life with a "good" job because those are the things that surround them. They are surrounded by "healthy" things and thus know how to live a "healthy" life.

Kids in North Philly (or any other impoverished, disinherited neighborhood) are not around those things. They're surrounded by hunger, drugs, abuse, and various other acts of violence. They are NOT surrounded by 17 year olds driving BMWs or big TVs or soccer practice or backyard pools or people who have what they need. They're shown by what they see on TV and hear on the radio that having money and things will validate them to others and make them happy. It's not true. You know the old saying; "desperate times call for desperate measures." I recall the Propagandhi song title "Ordinary people do f***ed up things when f***ed up things become ordinary." It's true. Ordinary people do desperate (f***ed up) things when desperate things become ordinary.

The point is that not everyone has the same chances to work jobs that bring one wealth. The playing field is not level. The people born into "good" situations work hard, but they do not have to work as hard to get to the "top" and the jobs they work are not as demanding, making working harder for a longer period of time possible. If everyone had the same chances, this complaint of wealth-stealing would be valid. The slanted playing field makes it invalid.