Santa?

Reasons why I've always found it hard to trust Santa Claus:

1. His gloves - The only men that I know that wear white gloves are soldiers and assassins.

2. His Home - This man lives in one of the most secluded areas in the world in a compound with his hired men constantly occupied in his "workshop."

3. His suit - Why is it red? To hide the blood maybe?

4. His hobbies - This is a man that sneaks into peoples' houses while they're asleep with a sack and eats their snack foods and drinks their milk.

5. His social taboos - I was told as a child never to trust a man that wanted me to sit on his lap.

6. His immortality - He's been around before my grandmother was born. How does he live so long? My guess is the blood of the living.

7. His language - Who do you know that says, "Ho Ho Ho" when they laugh? The only people I know besides Santa are pimps.

8. His schedule - What kind of man only comes out on the shortest day of the year and disappears before sunrise. Sounds like a vampire to me.

9. His powers - He sees you when you're sleeping and he knows when you're awake. Be afraid, be very afraid.

10. His fetishes - What type of person wants to put gifts in your socks?

I Thought Mark Driscoll Was The Cussing Pastor

Wish I Knew How to Quit You

Who's Your Target?

Oh Yes

This Makes Me Happy For Some Reason

I'll Miss You Most Of All Scarecrow

Screw It, Let's Go Watch TV

So, I've been stressed out over my sermons lately. I'm one of those guys who likes to have his sermon down to the tiniest detail. I like to have days to think out my illustrations, look for the right texts, and find just the right transitions and flow.

All of this was no problem when I had weeks to get my messages ready, but now things are a little different. I get up at 5am and don't get home from work until about 4:30pm. Then, I take care of my 2 year old and my newborn until I get them both to sleep somewhere around 9pm if I'm lucky. This leaves me about a half an hour to an hour of alone time before I have to be in bed for my seven hours of sleep before the next day of work. This means that the only time I really have for getting my sermon ready is Saturday, which happens to be my only real day off. For the last couple of months I've been locking myself away on Saturday from morning until sometime in the late afternoon to get my messages ready.

So basically, I was working straight through the week and still not feeling my messages were good enough. The idea of preaching has been weighing on me through out the week. I started getting easily bothered by things that never have bothered me before. I began to dread the weekends. Can you imagine wishing it wasn't Friday sometimes?

This Saturday I woke up dreading the day because my sermon was no where near done. I decided I'd had enough of this and planed to do something about it. First, I forgot about my sermon and hung out with my family for a few hours. Next, I continued to forget about working on my sermon and instead went and hung out with my pastoral staff, aka my best friends, and told them what was going on with me. Then, we went and loaded the church truck and continued to hang out and do nothing for the next four hours. Then, I had to perform a wedding, but I decided to take my family with me and after I was done, we went out to dinner together. We went home and instead of worrying about the sermon that I put off all day, I went to sleep. That's right, I managed a real day off and it wasn't a half bad one at that.

I woke up this morning planning on taking the amount of sermon I had done and going off to work on it alone after we set up and while the band was practicing, like I always do on the Sundays I preach. This didn't go quite as I planned it. It was Bekah's first Sunday leading vocally for us and as I was about to go down the hall and I noticed that she seemed a little nervous. I thought about it for a second and decided I should just hang out in the cafeteria and listen to her instead. I don't think it helped her at all, she was doing awesome and she had Tyson and Autumn there listening to her anyway, but it just felt like it was more important for me as a Pastor and a friend to be there showing support, rather than to work on a sermon that may or may not come together anyway. So, I said screw the sermon.

When, it was time I went up and preached. It went fine. I said what needed to be said. I didn't fall apart. No one lost their salvation.

I'm going to try not to stress about my messages anymore. I'm going to use the half and full hours I get during the weeknights to work on them and I'm going to take real days off. My sermons might not be the masterpieces I want them to be, but I think they will be better if I actually have a life to talk about. They might be a little shorter than what I'm used to, but I talk too much anyways. There are more important things than having the perfect sermon. The imperfect ones will have to do.

Four Days

I've had the last four days off. I mean really off. I didn't go to work, I didn't have any weddings, and Jason preached this Sunday. The only things I did that could be counted as work was loading/unloading the truck, doing a little packing for our big move, and helping Tyson and Bekah hang vertical blinds and install kitchen lights (the former was a success, the latter not so much). The rest of the extended weekend was spent with my family or hanging out with my friends doing my favorite thing, nothing.

A little time off is a good thing. It keeps you from going insane and hurting someone who probably deserves it. I've got a couple busy weeks ahead of me, but then I'll be taking off another four days next month to go to California and see my friend the beach for a little while. I think my sanity can stay intact until then.

Meanwhile, I'm going to keep working on a plan to invent something that will enable me to retire at 30. Unfortunately, until I get the kinks worked out of the car that runs off coffee grinds, it looks like I'll have to settle for the four day weekends.

Thank God For Razors

Multipule choice, is this:

A) A picture of me after I got out of the joint.
B) Another one of my not so great ideas in Bible College.
C) Just one more reason why so many women are jealous of my wife.
D) Your pastor.

First Day Off In Weeks

Today was my first real day off in weeks. I never meant to break the whole day of rest thing, but I guess I didn't think about how busy things were going to be after the church started and it nearly killed me. I have found you have to be intentional about your time off or else you will end up not having any.

This whole switching jobs things is going to make it so that I don't have to do weddings any more to survive, so I plan on cutting back drastically on those. It's really good money, but the money isn't worth the dread I've been feeling every week in knowing that the only day that I had a chance to have off is gone.

My rest really started yesterday after we got the truck unloaded. I have now had a full 24 hours of being able to sit around and not have to think about anything related to work. What's even better is that I still have tonight with nothing to do and all day tomorrow as well. I am a happy man again.

Sermon Prep

I'm supposed to be writing next Sunday's message right now, but here I am in front of my computer doing everything but. It seems like for every six hours I spend writing my messages I manage to produce one hour of work. The other five are usually spent browsing the Internet, listening to music, day dreaming, and playing dumb computer games I find on Yahoo or Vnes.

My wife can't handle the way I write sermons, I think it stresses her out, but every Sunday I have something to bring to the table (so far). I think this is just the way my mind works, in order to create anything I need to have time to process my thoughts while at the same time I need to allow my mind to run through everything it needs to so I can focus on the message completely when it's time.

It would be nice to get things done in one-sixth the time, but you gotta do what works. Anyway back to day dreaming...

I'm So Hot

Church went pretty well today. The only thing I think that needs fixing right now is how hot it is. No, I'm not talking about how sexy I am, we all know about that. I'm talking about how it was 97 degrees in Vegas today and how we were beginning to feel it near the end of service.

We pay for AC in the school but it doesn't come on until 8AM and two hours isn't enough time to cool down that large of a room. I think we are going to have to bite the bullet and pay for the AC to come on a few hours before we get there for set-up so that the place will be comfortable by time service starts at 10AM. It's not that bad right now, but come late July when we start hitting 115+ degrees we'll be in sad shape if we don't do something.

What made today really nice is after church I got to do my favorite thing on a hot day, lay around with a friend in a quiet and climate controlled living room doing absolutely nothing. Man, I love being done working by 2PM.

My Heart's Desire

I really want to slack off. I know, isn't that what I always do? But seriously, with the weddings every single weekend and church on Sunday on top of the whole Monday through Friday thing, it would be nice to have a few days with nothing to do, but hang out and not have to think about tomorrow. If all goes to plan I'll be taking a vacation in about two months. I'm looking forward to it!

I Knew a Guy Like This Once

The Joy of Nothing

I feel awake again, I basically was a zombie yesterday but its amazing what 7 hours of sleep can do. We didn't do much yesterday but we did go catch a movie.

I have to tell you I'm really getting tired of paying a lot of money to sit through two hours of something that is just okay. To be honest I'm getting tired of spending two hours of my time on mediocre movies even when they are free to watch. There are a few exceptions, but honestly the majority of what I watch isn't worthy of the time it takes to see it.

More and more I find myself just happier to sit around and talk with my friends rather than to sit quietly and watch the same rehashed plot acted out by the overpaid and under talented. Just talking might seem terribly boring to most of you, but I guess it depends on your friends. We end up talking about the same things over and over again and most of what we talk about could be called nothing, but every once and awhile something profound comes out and surprises us. Through the talking about nothing and the willingness to be real and honest my core team of friends has became closer and continues to draw closer than any I have ever seen in ministry before.

I think that one of the problems that the church has in connecting with people is that they don't know how to talk about nothing. Everything has to serve a purpose and everything we do, with the exception of a short break here and there, must somehow meet that purpose. This is how businesses are run, but the church is to be a family and families do everything and nothing with each other and talk about everything and nothing with each other because this is how you learn to love one another.

If you are willing to give opportunities for the people in your church to just be together without an agenda or an expectation of it being a bible study or prayer meeting, but just let it be people together, bonds will form and people will start to find a sense of family. Do this and people will be more willing to study the bible and pray because the people they care about do these things and can testify to their benefit not because the business man in the pulpit told them they should.

The Venue starts its connection groups next week. Here goes nothing.

Ode to Tyson

Today, two of the other pastors of The Venue (Jason and Tyson) and myself went out to have lunch and fix somethings on our account at the bank. On the way back Jason and I began making statements about how manly Tyson was. Those of you who are familiar with the facts about Chuck Norris will have probably recognise most of them, but they made us laugh so here is a sample:

1. Tyson doesn't sleep, he waits.
2. Tyson doesn't do push-ups, he pushes the Earth down.
3. Tyson once got into a knife fight and the knife lost.
4. Tyson's tears cure cancer, too bad he's never cried.
5. Tyson's calendar goes straight from March 31st to April 2nd, nobody fools Tyson.
6. Tyson once did a wheelie on a unicycle.
7. Superman owns a pair of Tyson pajamas.
8. Tyson doesn't read books, he stares them down until he gets the info he wants from them.
9. Tyson can build a snowman out of rain.
10. Tyson once had a heart attack, the heart lost.
11. The quickest way to a man's heart is with Tyson's fist.
12. Tyson doesn't play hide-and-seek, he plays hide-and-pray-I-don't-find-you.
13. When the Bogeyman goes to sleep every night he checks his closet for Tyson.
14. Tyson isn't afraid of the dark, the dark is afraid of Tyson.
15. Tyson can speak braille.
16. Lysol can kill 99.9% of germs, Tyson can kill 100% of whatever he wants.
17. Tyson has been to Mars , that's why there are no signs of life there.
18. Tyson ordered a Big Mac at Taco Bell and got one.
19. Tyson often donates blood to the Red Cross , but it's never his own.
20. There's no such thing as global warming, Tyson was cold and turned the sun up.

Nothing Can Be Easy

I just found out that the school we are going to be meeting in needs some extra things stated on our insurance policy. I have ten days to do this before we lose our lease. I'm supposed to be in the school in 17 days. This probably isn't going to be a major problem but the idea of trying to get any large corporation to act fast is scary to me. So pray for us.

In the meantime, here are the other things that scare me:

1. God - Read Job if you don't understand what I'm talking about here.

2. Insects - A bit of a step down from #1, but if you grew up with the kind of bugs I grew up with you wouldn't be laughing. This kinda backs up #1 because for some insane reason God made these things.

3. Musicals - Imagine just going about your business and suddenly everyone busts out into song and dance around you, tell me that you don't find that the least bit disturbing.

4. Jellyfish - Do I really need to explain this one?

5. The People on TBN - I would not want to be alone in an elevator with these people.

6. Christian Book Stores - I've always had a fear of being surrounded by overpriced useless religious nick-knacks.

7. Sourdough - My father was killed by sourdough. The memories are still too fresh...

Well there it is, I'd say for the most part I'm a pretty brave and courageous guy.

Stupid Sayings

Here is my review on stupid sayings:

It's always darkest before the dawn - True. Unless you've been locked in the trunk of a car, in which case its always dark.

A watched pot never boils - False. Although you'd have to be smoking pot to spend the time it takes watching a pot of water long enough to prove it.

There is more than one way to skin a cat - True. In the state of Nevada they are all illegal though.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush - False. I think they are both equally worthless, unless the birds in question are rotisserie chickens. Because who would want to buy two rotisserie chickens that have been sitting in a bush?

The grass is always greener on the other side - False. In Vegas all the grass is dead.

You catch more flies with honey than vinegar - True. But Raid works better than both.

Never look a gift horse in the mouth - True. But I can't think of any kind of horse I'd want to look in the mouth.

The pen is mightier than the sword - False. Yeah, that's why pirates and vikings would never go anywhere without their ballpoints or felt tips.

Ode to Battlestar

I don't watch a whole lot of TV anymore, most of it is awful. Even the stuff I used to love has lost its charm (I gave up on 24 a couple weeks ago). Besides The Office the only show I look forward to is Battlestar Galactica and I found out this week that it has been picked up for another season. This gives me hope and joy for the year to come.

Now most people wouldn't even give this show a chance, it's based on a 70's sci-fi show that was so weird its first run didn't last more than a season. Add to that the fact that the Sci-fi channel in all of its wisdom puts it on at 10:00pm Sunday night so that they can save prime time for wonderful made for TV movies with the worst special effects since Clash of the Titans. Despite this though the show is awesome and here are some of the reasons why:

1. It has Admiral Adama - Imagine if Jack Bauer was put in charge of a fleet of star ships.

2. It has a cranky drunk man in an eye patch - It reminds me of holidays back home.

3. It has a hairy man who sees an imaginary sexy robot - These are the type of people that make life more interesting.

4. It has a sexy robot that sees an imaginary hairy man - Can we say plot twist?

5. It has a lot of people who get angry and hit each other - Once again, the holidays.

6. It has mankind losing and running away - I like my stories dark. What's with this good guys always coming out on top Sci-fi out there? This show would beat up Star Trek and take its lunch money.

7. It has robots with guns in their arms - Pure genius.

8. It has other good stuff - You know deep plot, great effects, awesome camera work, mystery, fully developed characters, etc. But who cares about that stuff?