Category: Uncategorized

“We were built to count, as water is made to run downhill. We are placed in a specific context to count in ways no one else does. That is our destiny.” Dallas Willard, “The Divine Conspiracy”

But we all know that making our life count means expending an inordinate amount of energy, right? Isn’t it so much easier to go with the flow, just show up and take what comes?

Don’t bother trying to make your life count – it’s far too much work! In fact, here are seven ways to live the easy life and to ensure that your existence remains carefree and meaningless:

1) Watch as much TV as possible. Who needs real excitement when one episode of CSI or House can pump the same amount of adrenaline you’d get from flying into a disaster zone and helping with relief, or helping a local organization fight against human trafficking?

2) Don’t get to know your neighbors. You might find out what they need, and you might have the means to meet that need. Sounds complicated doesn’t it? So stay inside this summer.

3) Do what everyone else does: work a 40 – 50 hour work week, then come home and spend your evenings complaining about work. On the weekends watch 18 hours of football or golf or Nascar (unless those are life-giving hobbies that bring out the best in you, connect you with other people, and help you utilize your strengths…if this is the case, avoid them). Then repeat. Whatever you do, don’t bother wasting time on that thing you love to do – you don’t get paid to do it, right? Then it’s not worth doing or practicing or getting further education on.

4) Don’t spend time with people who are not exactly like you. If they’re not a reproduction of you, they’re wrong.

5) Don’t be passionate about anything. Passion produces emotion, which produces hope, which inevitably produces…disappointment. No passion = no disappointment.

6) Spend all of your money on yourself. You’ve earned it; you deserve to keep it all.

7) Finally, don’t ever take risks. Safety is paramount. Remember Andy Dufresne from “Shawshank Redemption”? He took a risk, and look where it got him: barefoot on a beach in Mexico (ie he had no footwear and lived in a place where people are routinely beheaded by drug lords). Who wants that kind of a life?

Now get out there and live the drab life you’ve been dreaming about.

What are things that you do to ensure that your life will not count? Help us out!

Sometimes, on days when the wind galloped down from the mountains, the smell of dead people rushed away before it could rise up to his house. On those windy days he remembered the smell of growing things, or the way rain used to make the mud smell brown. He remembered being a child.

But when the air paused, like a comma, the smell rose up into his shack. This wasn’t offensive – to him the rank odor of dead people was the smell of comfort, of home. He was safe there.

He could see the dirt road as it twisted and turned an angular path through the tens of thousands of stacked graves on which his house was built. They were lined up neatly in rows, five coffins high, hundreds wide, but the road that went through the middle of them was haphazard, as if the person placing each stack thought, at the time, that there was no need for order as surely that would be the last stack ever placed.

As if death would stop.

For a short time (weeks? months?) he had lived on the outskirts of the Great Cemetery, but wandering gangs of people who had escaped the city made his life difficult, so he moved to the middle of the graves, built his house on top of them out of discarded wood. He bartered for a rifle.

The dirt road left the Great Cemetery and darted in a straight line through the dust-laden valley where it became a dark brown thread in a sea of tan. Nothing lived in the valley. Nothing breathed. Nothing moved.

Just at the edge of what was visible, he could see the walled city.

* * * * *

A small, distant cloud of dust swirled along the road. He grabbed his rifle and ran across the stacked, cement coffins. After ten minutes, he stopped and sat down, caught his breath. Three large trucks plodded forward in the cloud’s swirling midst.

He approached the edge of the cemetery just as the trucks pulled to a stop. When their engines shut down, the world stopped – stillness rushed in from the mountains. Before anyone spotted him, he climbed down among the dead, then crept along the road where it stumbled through the stacks. He stopped just inside the last pile. He peered out at the trucks, each one occupied by two of the city’s soldiers. Then he lifted his rifle and aimed it at the head of the first truck’s driver, stopping only when the man’s forehead was in his cross hairs.

* * * * *
This is where you decide what happens next:

1 – He pulls the trigger

2 – He shouts out that he is there and ready to make the exchange

3 – He pulls back in surprise when civilians are taken out of the back of one of the trucks

If you missed the first few episodes, you can read the story from the beginning HERE

If you are a person of faith, have you ever been concerned that by passing your faith on to children you are brainwashing them?

A wise man once said that you cannot enter the Kingdom of the Heavens unless you become like a little child…so why am I trying to give my children my own, adult-like faith?

This is what my guest post over at The Screaming Kettle is about today. Check it out HERE.

* * * * *

Incidentally, if this is your first time here, you can check out the story of how my business failed and my wife and I moved our family of six into my parents basement so that I could pursue my dream of writing full time. That story starts here: Falling Through.

There’s also my most read posts of all time: “Words the Church Should Stop Using: Sin” or “The Opposite of Love is not Hate”

Or if fiction is more your thing, don’t forget to tune in tomorrow for the next installment of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” style story I’ve been working on, where each week you guys get to vote on what happens next. It’s about a girl living in a walled city – she wins the lottery when the attendant from whom she purchases the ticket changes her numbers. Oh, and the lottery isn’t for money. Check that story out HERE.

The little boy wakes up on a spring morning, knowing that there is something he needs to remember, something very important. Sun shines through the window wells into his basement bedroom. Realizations sink in as his mind deserts his dreams: it is morning; it is Sunday; it is Easter.

The last launches him to his feet. He scrambles into sweats and a t-shirt, scurries through the door and up the stairs. His bare feet trip over themselves. His parents are drinking coffee, reading the paper at the small kitchen table. When they see him they smile.

“Can I?” he asks, looking discreetly around the room.

“First, go get your sisters,” his father says, chuckling. The boy runs back the hall and into the girls’ room, shaking them.

“Wake up!” he begs. “Wake up! It’s Easter!”

Soon three children scour the house. Their quest? Find the candy-laden baskets hidden by their father – over the years they discovered his typical hiding places: inside the oven, on top of the refrigerator, behind the television, inside the clothes hamper.

Eventually all three children find their baskets, wrapped in plastic, stuffed with fake green plastic strings that looked nothing like grass. Chocolate eggs, pixie sticks, marshmallow peeps: sugar coursed through their veins.

Easter morning: a Sunday School teacher’s worst nightmare.

* * * * *

On Fridays I work at my mom’s candy store. Her inventory includes all of my greatest weaknesses: Swedish Fish, Sour Patch Kids and grape licorice. In these weeks leading up to Easter her store looks as though someone attacked it with grenades that explode nothing but pastel colors. Candy-coated eggs and jelly beans of every flavor are stacked in containers nearly to the ceiling.

This past Friday I looked through some of her new items. There is a three-foot tall milk chocolate bunny for sale, weighing in at over 18 pounds. There are small items that look like deviled eggs, but are actually made of white chocolate. As I looked through these new items, something made me stop and kind of tilt my head to the side.

A chocolate cross.

* * * * *

The small boy sits in the large church pew beside his grandfather, who smuggles Smarties and butterscotch candies to him during the service. His grandfather wears threadbare suits and smells of KR medicine. A few years later he would die on Easter morning.

At the front of the church, mounted up on the wall, is an empty cross. I say empty, because this is a Protestant church, a charismatic evangelical church, and wherever there is a cross, Jesus is for sure no where near it. The auditorium has a stained wood ceiling. The boy often puts the bony part of his head back against the pew, stares at the ceiling, counts the wooden lines.

But on Easter morning he stares at the cross. Empty. A miracle.

* * * * *

A chocolate cross. This seemed so out of place to me, lying amongst the chocolate toys and content-looking chocolate bunnies and white-chocolate deviled eggs. A centuries-old instrument of torture and degredation that led to the death of who some claimed was God’s son and would eventually be seen, by many, as the means of humanity’s redemption…now a small treat, available in milk or dark, weighing less than a pound.

* * * * *

We want everything to be sweet, to go down easily with a glass of cold milk, but be careful.

Be careful that you do not transform the difficult truths you have learned into easy to digest chocolate trinkets. Sometimes the bitterness of death must be fully experienced in order for the full power of resurrection and redemption to occur.

This Easter, whether you are a Christian or an Atheist, a Buddhist or a Muslim, I have something for you to consider: stop denying the pain that death has caused in your life. Stop looking past the broken relationships, the unmet expectations, the abuse. See it for what it is: not a piece of candy, but the darkest valley through which you have ever passed.

And, finally, pass through it.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.

We Christians sure do love control.

You can’t really fault us, though. It’s kind of in our DNA – we’ve been doing it for a few thousand years. For nearly two millenia we killed people if they refused to convert. Then, when we came to an informal consensus that killing people for disagreeing with our world view wasn’t really justified, we just kicked them out of church (that doesn’t work so well any more either, now that fewer and fewer people want to attend church).

Then, since it was no longer popular to kill people who disagreed with our religious beliefs, and throwing people out of church didn’t work, we resorted to playing the hell card, not out of any actual concern that real human beings might suffer eternal torment, but mostly just because we wanted people to do what we wanted them to do, and fear is the primary motivational force used to influence humanity (by almost everyone, not just Christians).

We ran into a problem – these days the hell card doesn’t work half as well as it used to because not everyone even believes in an afterlife, or a literal hell. And those who do just figure they’ll deal with it when it happens. We panicked. We were losing control.

That didn’t last long, though. Our pending lack of control led us to throw our hats into the political arena. And the first thing we did once we garnered enough support? We used our new, broader platform to trumpet God’s love, grace and mercy.

Yeah, right.

Actually we decided to continue trying to control people by brute force, in this case passing laws so that no one could do the things we considered sinful.

Control.

* * * * *

I have a friend who is in the midst of a huge decision. Of course, I know the right decision for her to make. We always do. We always know what’s best for other people, what the responsible choice would be. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed by a feeling of frustration that I can’t make her do what I know she should do.

In fact, if I was given the opportunity to brainwash her so that she would make the “right” decision, I would probably take it.

Where does this urge to control come from?

It’s not just a tendency of Christians. It’s a human thing. We naturally want the world to revolve around us, to cater to us, to move according to our views and value systems. We want people to do what we think is right, fair, moral or beneficial.

But control has a way of turning the tables. You can’t control someone else without becoming completely obsessive over them, and, before you know it, you are controlled by your desire to control. You can go crazy with anger or depression when you continually try to impose your will on someone else.

* * * * *

Paul wrote in one of his letters to the Corinthians, “So, my very dear friends, when you see people reducing God to something they can use or control, get out of their company as fast as you can.”

When we use God to try to control other people, we embarrass ourselves, make enemies of potential friends, and belittle God’s power. Paul identified this as such a serious situation that he encouraged the Corinthians not to barter or try to change these control-freaks – he said, flat out, “Get out of their company as fast as you can.”

But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard – things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely.

Legalism is helpless in bringing this about; it only gets in the way. (Galations 5:22,23 The Message)

Five things you should know about Bryan Allain:

– if you eat breakfast with him a lot, he will tell you all about what’s going on with him before the food comes, then question you after the food comes so that he can eat his food hot and you can’t

– he is not interested in your pyramid scheme, unless it involves TY stuffed animals or Silly Bandz

– he eats a feta and spinach omelette every morning for breakfast

– like a dog, he is allergic to chocolate

– he is starting something that will span the globe faster than Colin Cowherd.

This thing is called:

Blog Rocket

It’s a new resource put together by the blogging king himself, Bryan Allain. If you sign up now (for free) you receive The BlogRocket 29 eBook: “A 32-page digital download providing insight and advice for the Top 29 frustrations that bloggers face.”

You will also be entered into a drawing to win a $109 Amazon gift card.

Why $109? Who knows. It’s Bryan Allain, folks – do you expect it all to make sense?

I’ve read the eBook, and, from a blogger’s perspective, it’s priceless. There are all kinds of great ideas in it on how to grow your blog’s audience. You get it free – all you have to do is sign up HERE.