The longer I think about who Jesus was and the harder I look at the Christianity that surrounds me here in America, the more I think the church is starting to look a whole lot more like the Pharisees than Christ.

When Did It Change?

I don’t think it’s a secret that I’m an anti-establishment soul.  Red tape, processes, and administrative boards make me incredibly angry.  So, maybe it’s this fact that causes me to view Jesus different than others might, but the more I look, the harder it is for me to believe that I’m seeing Him through a personal bias.

I’m just as tired as anyone of these “Radical Jesus” books and ministries and view points.  There’s been a recent surge in pop-Christianity that has emphasized this Hippie Jesus, turning Him more and more into a drug-free Jim Morrison.  So, don’t hear me supporting that movement with what I say here….but….

Jesus was a Radical.  Jesus was anti-establishment. Jesus loved the unlovable and helped the untouchable.  Jesus was angry with the traditions that prevented ‘regular people’ from worshiping God, and rejected the dogma of The Church at the time.  Jesus derided the ‘personal improvement’ piety of the establishment and forgave those who were a miserable mess (telling them to simply be forgiven and go sin no more).

Where has this Jesus gone?

These days, I can’t pass by a church without hearing a message of self-improvement shouted from the pulpit. Many try and mask it by making them ’spiritual improvements’ or simply calling them something else.  Improve your marriage.  Improve your prayer life.  Improve your financial situation.  Improve your connections with people.  Stop drinking.  Stop doing drugs.  Stop being gay.  Stop having abortions.  Stop voting for baby killers.  Stop hating your job.  Stop, basically, sucking at being human.  You can be a good person.  You can live up to our invisible standard.  You can do it if you just stop sinning.

I hope we all understand how asinine that last paragraph really is. Because, guess what?  We CAN’T stop sinning.  We CAN’T improve ourselves.  And we CAN’T be anything but a broken mess.  All of us.  Pastors.  Homosexuals. Bible Teachers.  Abortion Doctors.  Small Group Leaders.  Rapists.  And everyone in between.  We’re all broken and we’re all helpless…there’s nothing we can do to improve ourselves.

What does this mean?  We need to stop thinking about ourselves so damn much.  It’s not about us. Jesus made that clear.  When he preached a message of “Lean on God because you can’t save yourself” that was pretty radical.  That was pretty anti-establishment.  Where has that message gone?

If I were a church

So, here’s the segment where I talk about how churches should change.

1. They need to start being honest with their messages.  They need to honestly identify these sermons of self-help (which they call by many ’spiritual’ names) and jettison them.
2. They need to start preaching brokenness (see previous blog entry)
3. They need to start preaching the REAL Jesus.  They need to stop preaching “suit and tie, Leave it to Beaver, become a better person” Christianity and start preaching “insane John the Baptist, congregating with sinners, knocking over tables in the temple, homeless, mystical, irrational loving, anti-establishment” Christianity.  A Christianity that looks foolish because of it’s over abundance of grace, love, and trust, even when others don’t ‘deserve’ it.

But I’m not a Church. And I don’t want to be.

The problem is, I’m not a church.  I’m not an institution.  And I’m not going to get tangled up in the structure to try and change it.  The structure IS the problem…we don’t know how to live as Christians outside of that structure.  So, if I can’t/won’t change the structure, I’ll continue to chip away at it.  Hopefully, as an archeologist does when uncovering history encased in rock, I’ll be able to destroy the rock without the treasure inside.  Hopefully I’ll be able to slowly destroy the structure of American church while preserving the precious faith encased (and paralyzed) inside.

How?

The other day I saw a news report about The Tea Party Movement. (I’m going to offend people’s politics here, I’m sure, but…whatever.) They were described as a movement based on anger and backlash without any substance of their own.  A politician (believe it or not) made a wise statement when he said “Anger is fine, but a government RUN by anger (if they were elected) is not a healthy thing”.

I immediately thought of my constant attack on the church. Are these blog posts and my frequent rants Tea-Party-esque in the sense that it’s a lot of anger without much substance?  If I could actually change the structure, would I have any ideas based, not on anger, but on positive progress?  If I could be a local church would I be more like the Radical Jesus or would I simply continue reacting negatively to the old ways that angered me so much?

I think it’s hard for me to answer because I see things more complicated than that.  I think my solution would be to destroy the system completely and continue to work outside of it as an individual.  The following of Christ shouldn’t be a systematic thing. If there’s anything that the Lost Radical Jesus showed us this is it.  We should be striving, not to be a ‘good person part of a good system’ but to be a broken person leaning on God and trying to do our best to heal those around us.  We should be more like that individual Jesus I see in the bible and less like the systematic church I see in America.

So, do I have a solution?  I think I do.  But it’s a solution that exists outside of the local church.  It’s wholy dependent on people disconnecting from the system and learning to Live Christ as individuals…so that solution looks different for everyone.

I hope, in some way, you’ll join me in this. Call out your local church on it’s self-help messages.  Reject ‘button down’ Christianity.  Embrace irrational love of your neighbors and personal responsibility for faith. As the famously over-used quote from Gandhi says: Be The Change You Want To See In The World (and, I’d add, ‘dont wait for the church to be that change).   That’s the best I can do, in my own broken way, each and every day.

Learn, Don't Lean.

no time to proof read, spelling errors abound…enjoy!

As you may have guessed (it’s no secret), these blogs are born out of frustrating conversations.  Conversations which just make me smack my forehead and, after a second or two of resistance, give up because debate is obviously pointless.  I’m talking about conversations / discussions / debates where I just can’t respect the other point of view because it’s asserting a point of view that has, quite obviously, been pulled from elsewhere.  The tell tale signs to me are:

• They are one sided, not willing to even look at the other side
• They use the exact same examples I’ve heard on TV, radio, read in the news, or heard thrown around in the local coffee shop
• They rely on ‘common sense’.  They have a “well, everyone knows…” attitude about them without any actual facts or specifics

These conversations are frustrating not because I disagree with a point being made (sometimes I don’t) but because they smack of ignorance.  They are full of popular thinking which was handed down to the person by someone else.  There’s no fact checking.  No critical thinking.  No honest debate.  They’re beliefs without basis, assertions without learning.

One Side Learns, The Other Side Leans

Normally, there’s 2 (or more) sides to a conversation like this.  There’s a belief or point being debated.  We live in a world where ‘everyone is entitled to their own ideas’, but we never stop to consider the fact that some people’s ‘ideas’ are uneducated.  They’re talking points.  They’re never researched or investigated.  They’re easy to assert (maybe because they’re simple) but aren’t based on fact (sounds like sound-byte TV to me!).

For most issues I encounter, there is pretty obviously a side of the discussion which educates itself (usually endlessly) and one that doesn’t.  Now, it seems obvious that logic dictates that the side who is actively educating themselves on the issue is going to be closer to the truth, doesn’t it?  But in this ‘everyone has an right’ society, we overlook this point.  We think that, ignorant or not, everyone can be right.  Guess what?  That’s crap.

One side is usually learning and the other side is ‘leaning’ on someone else’s ideas without actually fact checking or learning anything for themselves.

An Example

Let’s take an example of the learning vs. leaning idea:  Ever since Food Inc. I hear lots of discussions about eating meat.  Some people are against it, some people want to be against it, and some people defend their God given right to devour corn fed flesh.  But did you ever notice something?  How many books are there about how great it is to eat meat?  How many scientists are out there saying “eating factory meat is great for our environment!”?  None, that’s how many.  On the other hand, how many people are writing books about the way meat-eating is wreaking havoc on our planet?  How many news articles are there about what factory farms do to their workers?  Generally, how many ‘for’ arguments vs. ‘against’ arguments are there?

This should tell you something:  The people defending meat eating, to their death, aren’t out there reading book after book about how great it is.  They aren’t pouring over the studies that show it’s great for our world and economy.  They’re not because these things don’t exist.  Yet, those out there against eating meat are sucking up book after book, study after study, learning all they can about the issue. They devour newspapers, news reports, and expert (and amateur) testimony on the subject.

Who here is learning and who is leaning?  Who, is a more reliably source of fact and information?

We didn’t deal with those who want to be meat eaters. These are the folks who saw Food Inc. and think they understand the whole situation.  They’re almost as bad as those defending meat in the sense that they’re simply taking pop culture thinking (and a single source) at it’s word, regurgitating everything they heard.  They don’t continue study, they don’t dive deeper.  They’re leaning (not learning) on a single film.  Better..but still leaning.

Learn to Say “I don’t know”

If we could all learn to say “I don’t know” more often, we’d be in better shape.  If you’re in a converation about food, or government, or politics, and you haven’t actually studied it, dove in, learned about it…just admit you don’t know.  There’s no shame in that.  Owning up to ignorance keeps it at bay.

On the other hand, next time you’re talking about how bad the president is, or how bad the economy is, make sure you’re basing it on concrete information.  Make sure you haven’t taken Rush Limbaugh’s word for it. Make sure you aren’t just believing everything the New York Times spouts off.  Read books & newspapers….LOTS of them.  Once you feel like you actually understand what’s going on (and can defend that with FACT instead of gut feelings) then converse.

But until then, stop leaning.  It’s really annoying (and embarasses you even if you don’t know it)

This morning as I drove to my local Starbucks, I was listening to talk radio.  They were, of course, talking about health care and taking phone calls on the topic.  It was a self-proclaimed liberal talk show, so I was surprised that they took a call on the topic from an unashamed conservative.  The caller mentioned, right off the bat, that he wasn’t happy about the bill’s passage and a conversation ensued about the good and bad points of the bill.  I sat there shocked.  A conversation ensued. Respectful back-and-forth took place.  There was no yelling.  There was no name calling.  There were questions like “What don’t you like about the bill?” and statements such as “I can understand why you don’t like that…”  I was flabbergasted.  This was the political conversation of my dreams.  Respectful adult disagreement on an important issue which was totally devoid of hate. I felt like America had progressed, even for just a minute.

Now, let me say that I have no illusions about why this conversation came easier on a liberal talk show than it might have on a conservative one today.  It’s easy to feel generous and to be a good listener when you win.  It’s easy to respect the other side when you know you bested them, politically.  I won’t pretend I would be writing this blog entry if I was on the other side this morning…but good is good, even if I wouldn’t have felt like saying it after a ‘defeat’ of my ideals.

We Are A People Of Love

That brings this entry back around, as it always does, to my faith in Jesus and my involvement with Christianity.  After hearing this debate on the radio, I sat down to my computer and launched my social networks.  The vast majority of my friends on these networks are Christians and I was afraid to see what was being written.

Stop there for a second.

Why should I be afraid of what Christians were going to be writing this morning? Is it because I knew that a majority wouldn’t be happy about the outcome of last night’s vote?  No, I wasn’t afraid of disagreement (the radio conversation just inspired hope through the voicing of disagreement).  What I was afraid of was hateful disagreement.

The fact that I was afraid of this was based on previous experience.  In the past my political and religious math tells me that Christianity + Politics = Hateful Speech.  I can’t think of hardly a single exchange over the past years where a person of faith talked about political issues in a way that uplifted me or inspired me to follow Christ and love others more intensely.

Why is that?  Why is today’s Christian political discussion seemingly based on mudslinging hate against “the gays”, “baby killers”, and “liberals” instead of on love, hope and inspiration? If I was outside the faith, why would I want to sign up for such hateful religion?

The Proper Response

I want to bring it back to that radio talk show discussion.  Then I want to ask a question that I don’ t have an immediate answer for:  How should Christians who disagree with last night’s vote address today’s world in love? What would a truly Christian response look like?  Would it talk about killing babies or would it be thankful for the millions who will be helped through these changes?  Would it assert the positive (and respectfully voice overall disagreement) or only mention the negative?

I know, I know.  Christianity doesn’t mean being a hippie that only sees good. We know that there are evils that need to change.  Jesus clearly saw those and spoke out against them (but let’s not forget: we’re not Jesus either, so we need to take that behavior with a grain of self-doubt). Is the most effective way for us to change things an approach based on love and respect?  Or on hate and mudslinging?

I only ask for a loving response today.  I don’t ask for agreement. I don’t ask for acceptance of things that go against our faith.  But I do ask for love and respect.  How are you, as a Christian, responding to last night’s vote? In love (be it disagreement or agreement) or hate?

In my family we’ve made rejection of this a priority.  We try and keep work to a minimum.  We don’t over-commit (which means we often under commit) to ministry work.  We don’t sign our child up to do, well, anything. We don’t go out very often and we are getting good at saying ‘no’ when too many options present themselves on the weekend.  Doing all of this has been a great improvement in our lives.  We feel less hurried and we end up spending a crazy amount of time together as a family.  When an opportunity comes up to see friends, to help out with a project that is a good cause, or to just go play at a park we almost always have time.  Friends could call on a moments notice to hang out or to ask for help and we’re here just waiting.

But this is where the problem begins to surface  We’ve learned that making time in life for relationships, family, and friendships is the right path, it’s an awesome step in the right direction.  However, if no one else takes that step with you…it’s lonely and, quite frankly, boring.

You see, now we’ve got all the time carved out and, well, we don’t know what to do.  We sit around the house basically staring at each other because, while family time is awesome, eventually you want to connect with other families (be it friends or extended family of your own).  And, if none of them have the same vision you’re left sitting on the sofa hoping that someone will call.

So, this entry was born in frustration that we’ve made the step to build relationships, we’ve cut things out of our lives to make time…and no one else seems to be willing to put their money where their mouths are.  Why not?

I love my friends.  I love my family.  I understand that everyone isn’t on the same life journey as we are.  But it would be awesome if more people started taking time out of their lives like they say they want to. Everyone says they’re too busy, but no one actually does anything about it.

Sure, it’s a selfish request, but here’s my encouragement.  Stop complaining about being too busy and take some actual steps to simplifying your life.  If enough people actually start living this way, we won’t be so bored.  Now go out there and learn to say “no” more often!! ;)

“Most white suburbanites complain about their taxes being increased because they work hard and don’t want to subsidize a welfare state.  They feel they’re paying for those who are ‘lazy’ and don’t want to work or supporting those with drug or other habits that they don’t think their tax dollars should pay for.”

I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I’ve heard this same old argument about why people don’t want to pay higher taxes.  I’ve heard countless people who are otherwise compassionate declare that they don’t want their money going ‘down the drain’ to social programs that don’t work. I even used to think this myself.  Then three different things changed my view:

There is no qualifier

I’ll never forget the day that Dean made an offhanded comment that solidified something for me.  He was talking about the ‘more taxes for lazy people’ complaint above and pointed out that Jesus gave no qualifier for helping the poor.  He didn’t say “give to the poor…but only if they’re not on drugs” or “give to the poor….but only if they work hard”.  He didn’t even say “give to the poor…but only if it’s done directly and not through a larger government program.”  He asked us to give to the poor…period. There was no qualifier.

The Modern Tithe

The second perspective changer came from a book called Pagan Christianity, which points out that our modern tithe does not equate to the tithe of the Israelites in the Old Testament.  Back then, the Temple was much more like the government than a ‘church’.  The tithe was taken in by the temple for a couple of reasons, but the main reason was to support the poor and widows who can’t take care of themselves.  (do you see where this is going?) If the temple is serving as the government and the tithes are taken to support the poor, you’ve got something that looks a WHOLE lot more like our tax/welfare system than a church offering plate.  God mandated people to pay into the welfare system of the day…and here we are complaining about it (oh, and we conveniently forget about “giving to Ceaser what is Ceasers”)

Corn Syrup Welfare

Now we come to thought #3 that hit me yesterday and brings us full circle back to Rich Benjamin’s “Searching for Whitopia”.  After him quoting this oft-used thinking, he points out a very intersting fact about where our tax dollars are actually going.

Those of us outside the big ‘urban’ states think that our tax dollars are all going to big cities (New York, LA, Chicago, etc) to support these ‘welfare leeches’, but the facts don’t support this.  When you look at where tax money is going, these states that have big cities actually take in less taxes than they pay out.  This means that our Red State money isn’t going to their cities, their city-earned taxes are going somewhere else…so where?

As it turns out, all of our big ‘farm’ states pay in WAAAY less taxes than they get in return from the government as corn and soy subsidies.  Our tax dollars aren’t primarily paying for ‘welfare babies’…they’re paying for corn and, more specifically, processed corn products.

If you’ve read any modern writing on how our food system works, you know that the government is HEAVILY subsidizing our “Fast Food Nation” of processed and packaged foods.  Didn’t you ever wonder why a bag of Doritos is ridiculously cheap compared to, say, an organic zucchini?  It’s because your tax dollars are making up the difference.

So, this brought my mind full circle to an incredible irony.  We suburbanites are chowing down our McDonalds, Cheetos, and Corn Flakes faster than anyone in the nation.  WE are the ones who are benefiting from these higher taxes.  These aren’t “welfare subsidies”…they’re “junk food taxes”.  If you want to complain about higher taxes, you shouldn’t be complaining about social programs, you should be complaining about how our government is pushing cheap, unhealthy, processed foods with your tax dollars. Funny how it’s always easier to point the fingers at others, but much harder to accept that our fast paced, junk food driven lives are really a major cause of our complaints.  I’m not sure if YOU see the irony in this…but I sure do.

Think, don’t rant

I intended this blog entry not as a political debate starter, but as a thought starter.  That’s why I’m leaving comments off.  In the past I’ve seen that posts like this just cause a knee jerk reaction but my hope is that, if you can’t comment, you’re forced to think about it to yourself.  Whether you agree or not isn’t the point…hopefully it’ll make you stop and think about the little bits of truth all around us that are cut off by political hacks and media pundits.

Did you notice that I assumed that most people reading this entry were not people I know in real life?  Sure, there’s some exceptions (“Hi Mom!”) but most people who know me don’t need to read my blog because, well, they know me.  They see me at least once a week.  They run into me at Starbucks.  They stop in for coffee or we work on projects together.  In my new, more analog, life, connections aren’t made or fostered online…they’re carried out around a kitchen counter.  Literally.

I think our society expects us to have too many friends…too many connections. We’re encouraged to put quantity over quality.  We’re expected to stay in touch with people who move thousands of miles away.  We’re expected to run our kids from one friends house to the next.  We have the burden of popularity, the need to be loved by many, the drive to make more connections with our limited time an attention.  I’m done with that.  I will have few friends.  I will make few connections. I will spend most of the time with my family (both immediate and extended).  I will make those relationships deeper and willfully let quantity fall by the wayside.

It’s not that I don’t want to be friends with you, oh dear blog reader.  I look at all the amazing connections I’ve made through my online life.  People I’ve tweeted with, blogged alongside, and facebooked.  People I then met in ‘real life’ at conferences, meetups, and trainings.  You are awesome and I wish I could be your friend.  However, I’m now fully convinced that relationships can’t be built online, only introductions or surface acquaintanceships.  I need some more serious weight on that corrupted word:  Friend.

How can you be my friend if I never see you to give you a man-hug (ya know, with the manly pat on the back so we don’t look too girly)?  How can I be your friend if I can’t give you a hand lifting something heavy or loan you a tool when you need to fix your car?  How can you be my friend if you don’t really know me through day to day conversation?  Sure, you can be an acquaintance.  But not a friend.  Not someone I can call in an emergency or someone I can lean on when I’m weak.  We have too many ‘friends’ in this Facebook-world and almost none in our actual living, breathing, human experiences.

So, (to take this question further to a problem it presents when the premise is accepted) with fewer, better, analog friends:  How do we stay in touch? How do we continue our friendship in a world built on Facebook and Twitter?

I ask this because I sit here in Starbucks alone. I yearn for some of those analog connections, yet to get them I have to fire up Twitter.  I have to text my peeps.  I have to use these ‘tools of distraction’ to make these connections happen.  We no longer live in a time when you can mail someone a letter (that would just be strange!) or even call them and say “let’s hang out”.  These methods no longer fit into lives crammed full of instant and unobtrusive communications.  We’re no longer able to just pop over to someone’s house or show up at their workplace because privacy and efficiency are more important than relationship.  We live in a world so separated and segregated that communicating directly is just plain rude since these connections are not run through our junk mail filter or archived in our Visual Voicemail box.

So, these two concepts sit side by side.  We need fewer and more analog friendships.  Yet, in this world we’re forced to use digital tools if we want those to happen. What’s the cure?  I suppose it has something to do with living closer together (this could mean city or small towns) and putting relationship over work…quality over quantity.

I strive for this change everyday.  The problem is…you can’t do it all by yourself.  So, who’s in?

I’m not sure if everyone else has the level of nostalgia that I do, but it sure doesn’t look like it.

The more I thought about the disappearance of this world, the more I traced it to a single and monumental time in our history:  World War II. I used to think that our country had it’s most radical shift in lifestyles and ideas during the 1960s and Vietnam war…but the further I traced it the more I realized that the 60’s were only the practical and inevitable outcome of a post-WWII country.  The explosion may have happened during the Nixon years, but the fuse was lit on a quiet Sunday morning in Pearl Harbor.

Everything we are, everything we know is almost universally a product of the second Great War. (I can hear a big giant “duh” coming from the history crowd) Lifestyles and expectations of what we ‘deserve’ were all born into existence during my grandparents generation.  We entered the 1940’s as a mostly rural-focused, simple country.  We left that decade an industrial and political super power.

As an example let’s look at the women’s liberation movement.  The 60’s get all the credit for freeing women but it was actually done 20 years earlier when Rosie the Riveter beckoned women to the factories and away from the  kitchens.  This was undoubtedly a step forward for women’s equality (which I embrace and applaud) but it was done at the expense of putting industry and ‘career’ before family (which I heavily regret).  It was Rosie that made women strong but the family weaker.  It was Rosie who was responsible for helping to win that war but made McDonalds meals the inevitable replacement for women who no longer knew how to cook from scratch.

Speaking of McDonalds…WWII is where our concern for our body’s fuel (ie. food) fell by the wayside. We had better things to do, like win a war…we didn’t have time to worry about what we put in our stomachs.  We’d outsource that to Swansons or Kraft.  The problem is when the war ended our culture and habits didn’t change.  We continued to live in ‘war mode’ eating prepackaged or pre-prepared foods which, as we see now, was killing us just as efficiently (albeit a little slower) than a Nazi bullet.

This whole ‘organic’ food movement is a direct backlash on post-WWII life. When the war ended we have a whole lot of explosives material and factories that we no longer needed.  It had to so somewhere.  Then someone had the brilliant idea of putting it in our food.  No, I’m not kidding.  The fertilizer that we now buy in bags from Home Depot is the product of too many unexploded and left over bombs from WWII.  The non-organic food we buy in supermarkets is sprinkled with explosives, which is why it’s so huge and green.

How about The American Dream? (and subsequently our overachieving and non-stop lifestyle) A direct product of the War. We came home victorious and proud to a country untouched by the ravages of war.  We were strong and wealthy and we started to believe we deserved it.  The 1950’s were the living of this dream that we though we deserved. We lived high on the hog in our suburban houses, we all bought cars, we shopped for fancy clothes and built bigger buildings.  We all ‘deserved’ dishwashers and washing machines so we bought them.  We decided that we and our American Dreams were more important than community and relationship.  We worked harder (and more often) to buy more stuff…we neglected our kids and outsourced their development to Mr Rogers, Big Bird, and Ronald McDonald.

I could go on forever but I’ll stop here.  We think that this post-WWII world has always been ‘the way it is’…but in reality it’s only 60 years old. Our previous 200+ years were radically different in this country (not to mention our previous thousands of years before this country).  We shunned self for community.  We worked hard, but not so hard that we neglected family.  We raised our own kids and cooked our own food.  We talked with people instead of e-mailing @ them.  We knew our neighbors and our farmers and we lived with them and supported them emotionally and financially.

And now I wonder how to escape this post-WWII world. How do you live in this era connecting with your family, your neighbors, the land, and God without the distraction and pull of a post-WWII world that constantly tugs on your shirt trying to lead you to a more ‘fulfilling’ life?  I have no answer, but I can tell you that I yearn to disconnect from the hussle (not to mention the bustle).  I look every day for ways to discard digital life for hard cold reality.  Someday I might get there but until then I’ll live each day as an opportunity to move closer to December 6, 1941..just hours before the day that lives in infamy..and the day that changed America and American lifestyles forever.

While I don’t know what I’ll write about, I know why I’m writing.  I want to start thinking again. Back when I blogged frequently, my brain was functioning at a higher level.  I had new ideas, new thoughts, new opinions.  I didn’t write because I wanted to get them out….I had them because I wrote.  There’s something about a consistent writing habit that makes the brain move and operate in ways that it doesn’t normally.  It forces you to put ideas to paper (or keyboard) which means they have to be formed into words and sentences and paragraphs…all with a lucid point.   I think this is why Journalling is so talked about in Christian circles:  It’s the written word that makes spirituality, the un-seen, visible.  It’s thereputic but it’s also inspiring.

In the past, my blogs have mostly been a venue for bitching about the world, the church, or pop-culture.  It made alot of people upset and alot of people uncomfortable.  Those topics caused me to stress-out when people disagreed, but they also help me GET the stress out in a way that, honestly, is currently destroying me.  Keeping that inside makes you sick…and I’m tired of feeling sick.

I’m always passionate about the right and wrong paths that the Christian church in America is taking.  But I think, in some ways, I’m beyond that.  Not because I’ve gotten older or more mature…but because I see The Church (in general, yet not specifically) as a total mess which is beyond repair.  So, while I’m sure I’ll complain about and jab at Christianity, I have a feeling it will be with less vigor…kinda like a Mike Tyson who would rather just eat a cheeseburger than fight Holyfield.

So, here’s to blogging and it’s remedy for the soul.  May it (this time) live long and prosper.

(oh, and yes, this is a Wordpress blog for any nerds that care….)