I’ve gotten awfully comfortable with God over the past year. As I learned how integrated He is with everything I do, I have experienced a great deal of peace as I stopped running, stopped pushing for more accomplishments.
However I find myself now facing some new things in life that could mean some radical changes to the structure I’ve gotten used to. Continue reading
I used to be obsessed with being right. Being right about the bible, being right about the existence of God, and most of all, being right about proving all the godless unbelievers wrong who dared question my beliefs. A funny thing happened though…. I started to experience the love of the God I had tried so hard to defend. And I stopped caring about being right. Continue reading
Over the past 12 years, I’ve developed some interesting skills. I developed the strang ability to mimic the guitar style of Stevie Ray Vaughan, arguably the best blues guitarist of all time. I also taught myself how to build websites in my spare time. Another computer related skill set I’ve also learned is the art of studio recording and video editing. To top it off, I was surprised to learn that I make a pretty good teacher on subjects I care about.
So here were 4 fairly disjoint skills that I picked up, and for the longest time I felt like I had a bunch of square pegs and my life was made of round holes. How in the world could all these things fit together? Continue reading
There are very few ideas that cannot be imitated, duplicated, copied or bested. But there is one man who had such an idea. An idea so good that it befuddled his competition. Hidden in plain sight. Waiting to be discovered.
The idea was based on a mistake. A mistake that millions of people make every day. In a hurry to type in the .com at the end of some website addresses, an awful lot of people type .cm instead of .com. So you end up seeing a website you didn’t intend to see, or you see a message telling you that there’s no website at this address.
But it seems that ".cm" is a special mistake. Every country has it’s own offical "domain suffix". The UK is ".co.uk", German is ".de", and as it turns out, ".cm" is the offical domain suffix for the country of Cameroon. This small twist made one man, a Christian, very rich. Let’s find out why… Continue reading
Yesterday I got 1200 pageviews in one day on my guitar lesson website. At the same time, I got 2300 video views in one day on YouTube. Since December, people have sent me donations, hand made guitar pedals, and asked me to put out DVD lessons for them to buy. I’ve had at least 3 people buy a guitar amp, and one person buy a guitar after watching my videos. Two other people bought the same pedals I use.
What’s even more surprising? 3 months ago, I hadn’t even thought about doing my first lesson. Continue reading
Christians in high-profile positions of ministry have suffered some embarrassing scandals and marriage failures. I’m sure the reasons for this are very complex, but I’m going to take a look at an attitude that I think has contributed to it’s fair share of scandals and divorces. Continue reading
Our friends at CNN posted a gem of an article with this title.
Allow me to tell how I really feel about this situation. Parents push their kids towards a "career" while they are still kids. This forces the kids to deal with adult like situations much before they know how to handle it. They constantly wonder if they’d be "good enough" for their parents if they weren’t a "star". Is it any wonder that so many kids that get involved in show business turn out so screwed up?
And yet, the tragedy of this situation according to CNN is that her precious career could be affected by this situation? Give me a break.
The real tragedy is that this baby will be born into a family that puts their kids into show business instead of allowing them to be kids.
It was already 1:30 and we were walking back into Lowe’s for the 4th time. Not 4 separate trips, one trip. 4 times in and out of the store. Each time we made it through the checkout line and back to the car, we immediately realized we had forgotten something we needed. My wife will tell, this kind of thing drives me crazy. Because when your expectations of what you’re going to accomplish in a given day are as high as mine, there’s not much room for things to go wrong.
I began to realize sometime last year that my perception of what a "normal" day was, had grown bloated. The problem is, I had started looking at certain tasks that I didn’t particularly like as short, get-it-done-and-move-on tasks. The more things I committed too, the smaller those things got to be in my mind. Banking? No problem. Doing laundry? No problem. I’ll do it right after I get done updating the church website.
The problem is, those things aren’t short little things. They take time. And I was doing myself a huge disservice by not accepting that fact. So I’d end up planning my day full of so many things that I’d end up feeling like a failure by the end of the day because not everything had gone perfectly.
This also exposes another problem. My expectations are based on perfection. I base what’s normal on what’s really exceptional. I still remember the night I bowled a 221 back at Manheim Lanes. No one was there to see it, but it became my new "normal" bowling score. From that point on, if I didn’t make 221, I was failing to play up to what I was capable of.
So because there have been a few days where I got an enormous amount of things done because everything went exactly as planned, that has become my idea of a "normal" day. So anytime anything goes wrong, it feels like I’m failing. Because I’m looking at near-perfect and confusing it with "normal".
As I look around at American culture, it becomes obvious to me that I’m not alone. I think that collectively we have a distorted view of what "normal". Of what one person should be able to do. Technology has cut so many corners for us, leaving gaping holes in our day, that we then fill with more stuff. Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if I just accepted the fact that I can only get one really important task done in a given evening, and then limited my responsibilities around that reality….
What is broken? – What do we think of when we read the verse "A broken spirit and contrite heart?" Do we interpret that to mean we give up our strength, and passion? Thank God it doesn’t mean either one.
When a horse is first trained, the process is called breaking. Before the horse has been "broken" it is full of power, energy, and drive. It is dangerous to anyone who dare to ride it. It does what it wants to and cannot be controlled.
It’s strength is basically useless because it knows nothing about using it’s own strength to do anything except exactly what it wants to.
Focused Power – After the horse is broken, it possesses all the power, energy and drive that it did before. The horse has not been impaired, harmed, hindered, or otherwise broken. It is every bit as capable of running fast, jumping high, and kicking it’s legs up as it did before.
What has changed is why it does those things.
When a horse has been broken, it runs when the master wants it to. It stops when the master wants it to. If the master want it to jump, it will jump. When the master calls it, it will come running. It has all the same power and speed, the only thing that has changed is why it uses them.
A Broken Spirit – When God says he wants to break our spirit, it’s not because he wants to take away our passion, our energy and our vision. He wants to change why we do the things we do. Rather than the short-sighted useless things we would do on our own with what he’s given us, he asks us to apply our strength and energy the way he wants us to.
We don’t lose the ability or the passion to do any of the things we can do, all that changes is why we do them.
If people know not to sit in your family’s pew in church…..you might be religious
If you still think heaven’s going to be a quiet place….you might be religious
If it’s been more than a month since you shouted anything in happiness or anger…..you might be religious
If people ask what religion you are and you answer with your denomination….you might be religious
If it don’t take all that…you really might be religious
And finally, if you speak in tongues for longer than you talk to visitors at church…..you might be religious
No Longer Driven 