Setting A New Bar For Announcement Videos

I tend to take pride in my work (you know, the healthy kind of pride) and it doesn't stop when it comes to making announcement videos. Aaron and I are in a constant journey to make the most compelling and informative announcement video the world has ever seen. It's a hefty task, but somebody needs to do it. This one is our best yet because it features half-court shots, which is one of my favorite things ever.

Video Announcements // February 27, 2011 from Willamette Christian Church on Vimeo.

Dunk Contest, 1987

When it was about the dunk and not the show (click on for actual size):

Fear, Power, and Love in the Midst of a Storm

Jesus calms a storm of some sort in all four gospels. In three of the accounts, the disciples are afraid during the storm, but terrified after the storm in calmed. These are two different words, the second being a much stronger fear.

Why? We can understand the fear during a storm, but after "there was a great calm," the disciples in the boat become terrified - it doesn't add up. There is a hint in Mark's account when the men ask one another, "Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey him?"

They were struck with such great fear because they realized that Jesus was more frightening than the storm.

The storm is scary, but you can manage it in many ways: adjust the sails, bail out water, move and shift weight. The fishermen had survived storms before by just adjusting and bowing to the threat of Nature.

But you cannot manage Jesus. He demonstrated in calming the storm, that he had power and dominion over it. If he can make a stormy sea smooth as glass, what else is this guy capable of?

Jesus is unmanageable. His power is limitless.

Seemingly, our storms (metaphorically and literally) have infinite power to wreck our voyage. But perhaps the more frightening reality is that there is a Master of the Storm.

Or not?

What the disciples spent the rest of their lives doing was discovering that the storm doesn't love them, God does. And when you have the option to bow to nature or bow to God, the option is clear: go with Love. So even though Jesus' power is limitless, his love is as well.

"His power is unbounded, but so are his wisdom and his love."
-Dr. Timothy Keller, King's Cross pg. 54

So often people criticize belief in God because they can't believe the magnitude of God's power matched with what they see of this world (death, disease, disasters). How can he allow it? What they forget is that equal with his mighty power to instigate good and allow evil, is his Mighty Love and Wisdom. He not only knows better, he loves better.

We know his love to be limitless because we see the historical event of Jesus coming into the storm of humanity, involving himself with suffering and going through the destruction of the cross in order to bring us the peace and still waters of a life in God's acceptance. And that is the love that should cast out fear.

I Still Have No Idea What She Meant

SHE: "Would you like chips with your sandwich?"

ME: "Um, sure, I'll take some Cheetos."

SHE: "Oh, one of those days huh?"

ME: "I guess..."

There Is No Try

Remember Yoda before he was completely defamed by CGI? He was wise, wasn't he? One of his best lines (perhaps THE best line) came in the heart of Luke's struggle to grasp The Force:

"Do or do not. There is no try."

This small motivational phrase gave Luke the gusto to lift his fallen X-Wing out from the swamps of Dagobah by simply, but profoundly, The Force. Truly inspirational. And the the junior higher witnessing such an event? Life changing, to say the least.

I seem to meet a lot of people who have "tried Christianity" and decided it wasn't for them. Many went through high school "trying" it and found it to be either 1) existentially dissatisfying or 2) intellectually incredible (meaning what that word is supposed to mean: not credible). These are good grounds to dismiss a worldview, but I'm not completely convinced these triers have grasped the claims of Jesus.

Because they were failed in those two areas, they become despondent and move to a noncommittal philosophical worldview that helps them make sense of some things in their life (self-view, identity, sexuality, etc). Some float through this non-commitment for some time.

I've noticed one thing with "trying out" Christianity for a season: it's impossible.

You see, you're allowed to try out religious Christianity or religion, but when it comes to Biblical, orthodox Christianity, it won't let you try it out. You're in or you're out. There is no try.

Since religion is all about accomplishing moral duty through performing laws, you can try that for a while and fail and then quit; but Jesus was looking for more than performance.

By a simple examination of the rhetorical content of God's askings in the Bible we can see that he's not asking for simple action points and obedience or pillars of behavior - He's asking for our lives. Nothing less.

How do you "try out" giving away your whole life? How do you "give a shot" at giving up everything (Your past, present and future, your dreams and your own mind)?

The people who try Christianity end up trying the cultural religious fluff that has been placed around it because they're too fearful to give everything to Christ. Indeed, this is a frightening ask of God.

And yet maybe in the failure of trying we are only able to see its own inherent weakness. How about we let Lewis finish it?

"Now we cannot...discover our failure to keep God's law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being completely good. Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going to bring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, 'You must do this. I can't.'" 

            -C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

At the center of "accepting Christianity" is total surrender. At first, a seemingly weak action, but in the end it will be much more life-giving than trying to be good.