Recycling is core to the Christian message if you consider the fact that in recycling you are taking something that is spent, used up, and old and giving it new life, purpose, and usefulness. Jesus said that he did not come to destroy the old stuff, but to fulfill/complete it. In other words, he doesn’t throw out the old stuff, he restores it and reinterprets it and gives it new meaning. Some words that can be tossed around here might be redemption, renovation, transformation, new creation, etc. Christians should be all about the idea of recycling. If God isn’t into restoring broken and old things, making them new, and bringing new life all of humanity is in trouble!

As a follower of Jesus, listed below are some of the ways both big and small that I think the invitation to recycle is available. It is obviously in no way an exhaustive list, and neither is it listed in any particular order. So without further adieu here are my top ten recycling habits:

1. Food. If you don’t have chickens to give your old scraps to (and thus produce eggs and great fertilizer) then get a compost pile so that your old food will turn into rich soil. Also, using old veggies and animal parts (eww) to make stock is a great way to recycle stuff that you will not (and should not) eat.
2. Water. There are some pretty amazing ways you can recycle water, but I’m too lazy or inept to practice most of them. I know some people who collect the water from the bathroom sink in a bucket and use that bucket to flush the toilet. I know others who have water from dishwashers and washing machines drained out to use for gardening etc. I don’t do that stuff. But I do collect our rain water and use it to water the garden! I do use my kids kiddie pool water to water my plants (instead of dumping it every few days). Next time you’re about to dump out the remains of your glass of water, dump it in your houseplant instead.
3. Bags. You can buy cloth bags for grocery shopping. We do. But we also forget to use them as often as we remember. So if you have to do the unthinkable (haha) and use plastic shopping bags, they work great as your new garbage can liners. We have nor purchased garbage bags in years ’cause we just use these from our local supermarket. Sure you have to empty the garbage a bit more often, but it’ll shave a few bucks off your grocery bill and it will put those bags back to use.
4. Money. Buy locally. If you buy locally from local businesses and local owners and local shops and local food and…then your money stays in the community you love. The money you use to buy your kids a birthday present will go to a local family who owns the local toy shop that employs local individuals who buy things from their local supermarket who…etc. When you spend and shop locally, your money is recycled within your community to grow and develop the community you love.
5. Clothes. Buy from used clothing stores, give your old clothes to others, but also old clothes can be quite useful for household projects! I grew up with a giant canvas tent for camping. The tent bag for our giant tent was a pair of my dads old jeans. The pockets were where the stakes were kept, the tent slid into the legs (that had been sewed together into one large space), and a drawstring was put through the belt loops. My wife has made purses out of old t-shirts, hats out of old sweaters, skirts out of old shirts, etc. Put those old clothes to work.
6. Travel. Ok, this is a bit of a stretch, but if we change our behaviors so that our travel accomplishes more than getting us from A to B then we are creating more out of something than previously existed. If you ride your bike, not only are you cutting down on emissions and traffic, but you’re also exercising at the same time. If you take the bus not only are you cutting down on emissions and traffic, but you’re also being able to read or work on homework. If you carpool not only are you cutting down on emissions and traffic, but your also creating community and relationship.
7. Death. Even in your death you can allow life to emerge by being an organ donor. Don’t hold out, you won’t need your heart anymore, so give it away.
8. Yard. We American’s love our grass. I’m not totally sure why we’re so hardcore about our grass, because how often do you usually play in it? That’s what parks are for. Our yards can be so much more than pretty grass, instead we can make them work for us by putting garden plots, by growing strawberries and lettuces where grass might have been before. Get some chickens, grow some blueberries or grapes, allow your yard to do something for you, to be useful, and to bring more to your life.
9. Books. I love books. I hate borrowing them, I love owning them. But as I work to get over my ownership mentality I’m seeing that not only is borrowing books from the library a great recycling practice, but loaning your books out to others and borrowing others books is a great way to let books have a greater life than the shelf. How cool would it be if we began to loan our books out and asked people to mark them up, highlight them, and jot down notes in the margins so that when you got the book back it would carry with it some of the life of the previous reader!
10. Paper. This one should be redundant in our culture, but don’t use paper. Read your newspaper or magazine online. Use email instead of snail mail. Cut down on your junk mail by opting out (whats that website to do this again?). Setup your bills so that you don’t receive hard copies but only electronic copies. Dare I say buy a Kindle? Ok, I’m not ready to go there yet, but it’s probably inevitable!

I’m certain there are many other creative ways to recycle. Spend a few hours on Etsy.com and let your brain cram all the amazing and creative ways to recycle old materials. Shop at recycled stores, shop less, etc. There are so many ways we can embrace the beautiful opportunity to be a part of giving old, spent, and used up things new life and purpose. I mean, isn’t this what God does with humanity? Why should we do anything different?

Related posts:

1. Living Green on a Small Budget
2. Holistic Changes
3. Jones’ Story

But sometimes, I realized, it can be a pretty funny habit. What if I started mocking everything I didn’t understand… literally everything…including trigonometry or organic chemistry. So without further adieu here’s my first “I’m Mocking You Because I Don’t Understand You” list:

1. Hey music theory, why don’t you find something better and more productive to do. Notes are for telling people thank you. Loser.
2. Hey laser pens, yeah thanks a lot for helping me to point at my Powerpoint slide show. I only wish there was another easier way to do it…oh wait, I have a finger.
3. Hey you, cellular technology, thanks for the radiation in my ear lobes.
4. Black and white, are you colors? Are you the absence of colors? Or what? I may not know exactly what you are, but I’m pretty sure you’re boring. Go hang out with purple and learn to have a good time.
5. Hey Dow Jones…who are you and why did you eat all of America’s jobs? Hungry? Try a hot pocket next time. Dow Jones jerk.
6. Dear Colin Powell, why isn’t your name Collin? Thats kind of weird, maybe you should stop being weird. Weirdo.
7. Hey there Ugh boots, you’re Ugh-ly. You make me want to Ugh-chuck my dinner.

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1. B-Mac and D-Mill
2. Lots of unrelated things.
3. Bluetooth

And what about the redundancy of the hip-hop scene? While I am fully aware that switching a “K” for a “C” is fun, and while I know that a “$” is always better than an “s” at some point don’t the people within the hip hop scene start to observe the awkwardness of over usage?! We can all spell our names wrong on purpose in silly and interesting ways but it doesn’t make it creative or new. I could call myself “Rye Anne” and probably be quickly accepted within the hip hop community. But “Rye Anne” is kind of a stupid name.

If this is the norm that the hip hop/rap community has accepted, if this is the game they have decided to play, then I’m going to give it a go. I give complete permission to any budding star to use the names I suggest below.

1. Sir Ca$h
2. Cilla’ (No, that’s not Spanish. It’s “killer” with the “k” switched to a “c” and an “a” and apostrophe replacing the “er”)
3. Gnotty Pippen
4. 2-D (like the girl from Facts of Life or as in two dimensional…which just so happens to be how my rhymes are going to smack your face)
5. Ice Latte
6. Ice Cream
7. Cream
8. TMWGMDCIHG (it could stand for something like “The Man Won’t Get Me Down ‘Cause I Have a Gun”
9. 50 Gigs (pronounced “fiddy gigs”)
10. Toast Master Deluxe
11. Deluxe Master Toast
12. Master Deluxe Toast
13. Toasty Deluxe
14. Little Bill (or lil’ Bill)
15. Doc Chicken
16. Mick E. and the Gang Haulas
17. Hypocritz
18. Boossta
19. McPickle and the Pickle Gang
20. Fryd
21. €lvira (Yes, that’s the Euro sign. How awesome and bad ass is a Euro symbol instead of an E?”
22. Christian Bale

While I realize that this rap and hip hop is all about the musik and all that jazz…but…I mean…come on! Can’t you still call something goofy and/or redundant when it is! Ke$ha? Lil’ Wayne? T-Pain? Gnarles Barkley? Ice Cube? McPickle and the Pickle Gang? Those are like kiddie playground names, and they’re…well…they’re just redundant in the hip-hop/rap scene. It’s time we all try to be as innovative as Eminem and spell out our initials.

Sincerely,

Arghdubbleyou

Related posts:

1. Musik
2. Whats in a name
3. I know, another long blog: Thoughts about Racism

by Ryan Woods
July – August, 2010

I tried to be a missionary once. I failed. For two years I spent time in a ghetto suburb of Lisbon, Portugal trying to save the world. The world did not get saved. As a matter of fact I did not technically save anybody. I learned to love soccer, I spent time with teenagers and homeless men, and I grew my hair out. But missionaries are supposed to grow churches, see hordes of people come to Jesus, and perfect their altar calls.

I did none of those.

I helped my Angolan musician friend Rey Kuango write lyrics in English. I fed homeless folk and saw a community emerge at our church from their ranks. I provided a place to stay for my friend Nikko away from his cockroach-infested home, where his light fixture consisted of a light bulb and two wires that he shoved into the outlet. But I never performed an altar call. Being a missionary is nearly one of the hardest things I have ever done. But it was nothing compared to what it prepared me for later in my life of ministry.

Jesus’ Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20 says “…go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you…” This scripture has been core to our identity in the Churches of Christ, developing in us a sending mentality, reminding us of the transformation that happens around baptism, and the absolute invitation into the work of evangelism.

This passage, however, does not simply send us to do mission. The “go” that Jesus speaks of is not one of destination. There is no arrival implied in Jesus’ sending words. Rather, in the original language, Jesus’ words tell us that “as we are going” we are to make disciples, invite people into baptism, and teach what obedience looks like.

You see, if we believe that mission work is something that does not simply happen when we step foot onto foreign soil or speak a foreign language – but rather happens in our homes, neighborhoods, work places, grocery stores, and cafés – then our level of commitment to discipleship and evangelism have immediately multiplied exponentially. When ministry is dependent on my going to a particular place or destination I preclude the as-you-go mentality and replace it with a once-I-get-there attitude. Once-I-get-there is controllable. I control when I leave, I control if I leave, I control where I go, I control. When evangelism is defined as something that happens as-I-go, then I had better be ready for life to be messy.

I had better be ready to miss a mission committee meeting when my neighbors water main breaks and he is in need of help.

I had better be willing to stay at work late when my coworker opens up to me about his struggling marriage. I had better learn to accept that people might stop by my messy home uninvited.

I had better take seriously Peter’s words to “always be prepared to give an answer…” because that moment could happen anytime or anywhere, and often it will happen through my actions long before it happens through my words!

Jesus’ invitation to an as-you-are-going life was marked by such words as death, carrying your cross, dying to yourself, and loving your enemy. It is impossible, then, to follow Jesus down this path of being available to the world as-we-go, all the time, at any moment, without following him down the path to death.

Death is a core tenet of the Christian faith. We are to die to ourselves daily to live for the world. We are to die to ourselves daily to allow the Spirit to bring new life in us. We are to die to ourselves daily because we are following a God who did nothing less.

Neither Objects nor Projects

Moments ago as I sat in a local downtown café sipping on the best locally-roasted coffee, my friend and I knocked our mugs together in mini-celebration over the awkward moment that had just passed. You see we were talking about the church that my wife and I are planting in downtown Vancouver and my friend – who is not a Christian – kept accidentally dreaming with me about what this church might look like. While she does not buy into Christianity, she nonetheless is beginning to take ownership of this fledgling church despite the fact that she does not believe. The clinking of glasses was done jokingly to celebrate her acceptance of the inevitability of using the word “we” when talking about this church. At that moment, she allowed my dreaming to be her dreaming, the potential church activities to be her activities, and the conversation immediately twisted to “we” instead of “you”. It was a valuable celebration.

In Jesus’ other commission in Luke 10, we hear him sending his seventy disciples out to the nearby towns to proclaim the kingdom. Surprisingly, however, he sends them out without the necessary provisions. They were sent without money, a bag, or even shoes. Instead they are told to be open to the generosity and hospitality of the people to which they have been sent. In other words, they have been sent in search of partners. Partnership is also important to Matthew’s Great Commission as Jesus states that while authority is his, he is sending us.

Us? He is the one who has the power, but he has commissioned us as his sent agents of hope in his world. Partnership. Jesus invites us to partner with him. The reason this is so key is that when we transition from an arrival mentality of mission to an as-you-are-going mentality, we are challenged to change our view of humanity around us. No longer are they objects of our mission; no longer is their salvation our goal. Our neighbors are those who surround us as-we-are-going and we are invited to see them as fellow journeyers, as partners in journeying through life. If we believe God’s Genesis 1:31 statement that what he has created is very good and if we believe that “For God so loved the world…” was referencing all of God’s created people, then we must believe in the inherent dignity of God’s loved people. Mission is how we live with these people; it is how we die for these people; and it is how we partner with these people as we traverse this life and pursue a new God-ordained future for us all.

My friend does is not a believer, but she is partnering with us in planting a church. What is more shockingly strange: that we are partnering with her or that God has chosen to partner with us?

Boxes not included

If we accept Jesus’ invitation to mission as-we-are-going about our life, we are accepting the inevitability that everything will change. We cannot die to self as-we-are-goingabout life without a change to the way we live. Mission requires intentionality.

My life, as it normally goes, is about me. I go to a church that fits my preferences and feels comfortable to me. I live in a neighborhood that feels safe for me and my family. I prepare food that I like. I eat at restaurants that I prefer. I avoid people who make me uncomfortable. I value my time, my stuff, my ministry, my thoughts, my opinions, myself. I am not terribly different from you; I am not terribly egocentric – I am just being honest about myself. When I look at a photo, guess who I look for first?

The manner in which I go about my life is not wholly transformational nor on mission for Jesus. Yes, I may have a church meeting or ministry that I am involved in, but those are duties that fit within a scheduling block on my full calendar. As-you-are-going does not necessitate more meetings, small groups, or duties. Quite the opposite: As-you-are-goingtranscends scheduling. As a matter of fact, it necessitates a scheduling transcendence because it necessitates availability and spontaneity. If we take a moment to study the life and ministry of Jesus, which we cannot do here, we will discover that much of his ministry happened as he was going. It happened because he was available, he was interrupt-able, he was willing to be spontaneous.

Strangers do not follow our schedules, life does not cater to our wants or preferences, and mission happens in the midst of the messiness of our lives. So to protect ourselves, we create boxes. We are attracted to boxes. Boxes allow me to sing This World is not my Home on Sunday and spend Monday through Saturday storing up treasures on earth. Boxes allow me to act one way with my Christian family and another way with my coworkers. Boxes give me a freedom from accountability to my neighbor. Boxes make me feel safe. Terrifyingly, dying-to-self requires that our boxes to die along with us. This means that we are on mission every moment of every day, available to the Holy Spirit regardless of time, function, or location. We must allow our boxes to be taken down so that a holy availability can then stand. And where there is a person indwelt by the Spirit, available to his neighbor, there is a missionary. Mission becomes our identity. We become missionaries.

Mission Matters

I may have failed at attracting hordes of people to my soapbox sermons in Lisbon and I may fail in planting a church in downtown Vancouver. Death is the paradox of the Christian faith, is it not? “Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies…” Through Christ’s death, we find life. Through our death, our neighbors find life. And through their death (celebrated in baptism), they will inherit life.

Mission matters. Mission is to attach the phrase “for the sake of the world” to the end of any Christian statement, structure, schedule, or plan. Mission is the invitation to be salt and light in our neighborhoods, at the car wash, at the café, at work, in the car, and in our Sunday worship gatherings.

Mission is to die to my own preferences in order to love my neighbors preferences more fully.

Mission is to listen first and answer later.

Mission is to heal the sick, care for the needy, mourn with those who mourn, celebrate with those who celebrate, to seek people of peace, to receive as well as give, to worship with our hands, our feet, our bodies, and even with our mouths.

Mission is to wait tables for the sake of the world, to sell homes for the sake of the world, to eat meals for the sake of the world, to gather on Sundays for the sake of the world, to live for the sake of the world.

Mission matters because we have been commissioned by the creator of the universe to partner with him in the unfolding of his alternative reality in our broken world.

So the question must be asked: Will you go on mission? Will you be on mission as you go?

And will you die trying?

Ryan Woods lives in Vancouver, WA where he is an associate minister at the Renovatus Church of Christ, a church plant that he and his wife helped to start in 2005. In 2011 he and his wife will lead a daughter church plant in the downtown district of Vancouver. This church plant will be a grassroots, neighborhood driven church where a group of dedicated Christ followers will live and die for the neighborhood until a sustainable church emerges. Ryan enjoys reading, gardening, coffee, and human interaction. He and his wife Jessica just celebrated their seventh year of marriage and have two kids. For more information you can read at [www.downtown.renovatus.com]  or write him at [ryan@renovatus.com].

Related posts:

1. Death
2. Sunday: What’s the Point?
3. Becoming Missional?

The last few days I have been intrigued by a few photographers who took a photo of themselves every single day. The most amazing story is of Jamie Livingston who took a polaroid of himself every day for 18 years until he died of cancer in 1997. You’ve got to check out the website that has posted all of his photos: http://photooftheday.hughcrawford.com/ its sad to see him slowly deteriorate in his final year of life.

More recently you can see Noah Kalina take a digital photo of himself everyday starting back in 2000: http://everyday.noahkalina.com/ You can see his youtube video that has gone viral below. This video only chronicles six years (some 2300 days!) worth but is a fascinating watch!

I’m intrigued by one main thing. One, is how valuable and powerful a steady and consistent routine can be. If we commit to doing something every single day it becomes something more than it ever would have been on its own. This fits positive things like saying something you appreciate about your spouse every night at bedtime, to negative things like drinking a couple glasses of wine. You do either of those things every single day for 10 years and something changes. It becomes something more.

Will we commit to anything? If we don’t…haven’t we then already done so?

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2. Simply Amazing Video
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As a Christian Jesus is my ideal starting point. If I want to better understand the mystery of God I should seek to better understand Jesus. If I want to better understand the whole of Scripture I should seek to better understand Jesus. What does God feel and think about suffering? Look at Jesus. What does God feel or think about rejects and freaks? Look at Jesus. What does God think about money, materialism, and consumption? Look at Jesus.

Let me quickly add one caveat before I move on. Things are not simple! Just looking at Jesus is not simple. The reality is that I don’t have a clear picture of Jesus. I only see him through my own world view, through my own baggage. So while it is an incredible and difficult task in a sense to look at Jesus, I do believe that it is a forgiving task full of mercy and grace along the way. One of the beauties of following Him is that he knows my baggage, he knows my (in)ability to comprehend and understand who he is and what he is about. And most importantly he is able to meet me where I am at and create transformation and a new creation despite my ignorance or brokenness!

My purpose in this blog is to talk about church. If we are honest about ourselves we must accept the reality that most of what we practice and believe about church is solely taught or read about in the book of Acts and the letters in the latter half of the Bible. Very little of how we define and practice being the church is founded in our reading and understanding of Jesus. While I do not believe that Paul (who wrote many of those aforementioned letters) and Jesus would disagree with each other or throw down in fisticuffs if given the opportunity, I do think that we have improperly done our theology about church (in biblical theology circles this is called ecclesiology). Similar to how we try to fit Jesus into our understanding of God instead of the other way around, with church we have spent more time trying to fit Jesus into our understanding of Paul. Would things be different if we started with Jesus? Would things be different if we attempted to define what a movement of Jesus followers (church) would look like based on the life and ministry of Jesus himself and then look into Paul and the other New Testament writings to see what they came up with in doing the same process?

Take a step back and think about the early church. What did they have? They had the stories about Jesus. They had the Old Testament. They had their own context. And they had the working of the Holy Spirit. WE, on the other hand, get all that PLUS the stories of what those early faith communities did, what they struggled with, the questions they asked, and the dysfunctions they developed. If I created a formula to better describe how the early followers of Jesus came up with what church looked like, it might look like this:

• Jesus + History (including the Old Testament) + Context + Spirit = first century church

Couldn’t you look at our churches, our ways of defining how to do church and suggest that our formula looks more like this:

• Paul + your grandpa’s context + Spirit = western church

What if we tried to craft a different formula? Would church today look different if we made an authentic effort to live and practice out of this formula:

• Jesus + Church History (including rest of Scripture) + OUR context + Spirit = ?

I’m no scholar, but I know that much of the early churches structures, practices, and disciplines were not new. They were things that they borrowed from out of their own context, history, and surrounding culture. They borrowed things that were of value in following Jesus. We, in turn, have made those things concrete. Have we made the wrong things concrete? Have we inadvertently practiced idolatry by elevating that which is not holy (the practices and structures) to a place of holiness? In Paul’s writings we see a community of people struggling with the equation, with the formula. In those writings we see the churches journey, their story, their “becoming”.

Have we I ignorantly tried to adopt their culture, their context, their problems, and their journey without following their lead? Would it not be more true to their journey, to Scripture, if I was to follow the early churches lead by looking at my Lord, looking at my context, looking at my story (history), and listening/looking for God’s untamed Spirit? I wonder what type of church I would end up with?

Sorry for the heresy. I’m an out loud processor, I grow most through dialog, through putting things out there that I may not even agree with…though, to be perfectly honest, I’m kind of liking what I’ve come up with.

Related posts:

1. The "Old" Testament
2. Grappling with the Ordered Death of Men, Women, and Children
3. Why I’m Getting Plastered Tonight

It was right about midnight, the day before he died, that we stood at the door and he told us about a time where he almost killed himself driving around a corner on highway 14. We laughed, as usual, at his ridiculous stories that surprisingly always turned out to be true. Earlier on that same Sunday night we grilled Nick about how fast he was driving his new bike. We told him to slow down. My friend said to him “don’t make me go to your funeral”, and he responded by saying that the saddest thing about crashing would be the thought of his bike getting beat up. That’s just how Nick was.

I loved Nick because he was so raw, so authentic, and so passionately in love with Jesus. Don’t get me wrong, at times he could be a complete ass, but he was always the first to laughingly admit it in a proud fashion. It was in that spirit that he smiled as he showed us his shirt he wore that Sunday night at our churches worship gathering (it included the f* bomb) He always left us shaking our heads and smiling because he would say the most off the wall things, like when he said he thought Mother Teresa was in hell…umm…I hope he’s being proved wrong right now. He was passionate about being a missionary. As a recovering addict he saw himself as a missionary to his people, to addicts and homeless and broken people. You rarely saw Nick by himself, he was always inviting others, always bringing people along with him, he really was a missionary. In our short three months with him he went from wanting to be a missionary somewhere overseas, thinking that he had to go somewhere to make a difference, to passionately embracing the reality that God was using him here and now to change peoples lives. Because of that he was eager to plant a downtown church plant with us, a church that was focused on relationships, on loving every person because they’re loved by God. As a matter of fact, it was in our last moments with him that he kept pushing us to get moving with this church plant. He kept saying over and over again how he was ready to live in Christian community, how he wanted to start doing meals together a few times a week where we could invite neighbors and friends (ironically we talked about tonight being the first), and how we should start taking bums out for lunch together.

I love that for most of the Renovatus community the last words they heard from Nick was him yelling “Hallelujah” as he walked into our worship gathering late. It was loud and obnoxious, and genuine…it was totally Nick. The word “hallelujah” can be defined as an exclamation of “praise the Lord”, or more fully as what happens when you are so in love that you cannot help but burst in adoration toward your lover. This word might be the best description for Nick.

The best word to describe my house yesterday would be numb. We all just sat around, some of us crying on and off. We unloaded the dishwasher that was filled with the dishes from the dinner Nick made for us that Sunday night. On our house-mate’s desk sat a dvd that Nick was supposed to pick up on Monday, the day he died. The house seemed to linger with his absence.

I only knew Nick for three months, but in three months he became a dear friend. God’s people who are trying to live his kingdom within our messy world will miss Nicks presence terribly. I am not sad for Nick. I am sad for us, for the three churches he was involved in, for his friends who were in recovery with him, and for the ways God could have used him to be an agent of hope to the world.

Thank you God for giving my family three months of Nick. We feel blessed because of it.

Hallelujah!

Related posts:

1. Sympathy for Jesus
2. Worshiping on Saturday
3. Thoughts From an “Outsider”

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1. Britney Spears, George W Bush, Al Qaeda, Jesus, Pawn Shop
2. Limb Stepping
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A photograph is an illusion. An illusion, not an allusion…though I’m sure you could allude to things in photographs…The whole concept of snapshots, in whatever field of study, gives the illusion that you are capturing life. But you are not. What I love about quality photographers is that they’re able to capture images that I did not even see. We may be looking at the same object but they see and capture that object from a perspective that was invisible to me. The photographer captured an aspect of their own perspective, but they did not capture reality. Reality is three dimensional, it is fluid, and dynamic.

But don’t get caught up too much in the photography application, because I think it’s a much bigger thing that just photos. My wife was learning the other day about how we test our bodies. X-rays, blood tests, etc. are all ways of taking snapshots of our body in order to asses health. But the problem with these snapshots is that in reality our bodies never sit still as they do for those snapshots. In reality our aches and pains are rarely experienced statically and neither does our body function internally in a static manner. At any given moment our body has numerous functions, cycles, and changes. If we then take a quick snapshot of what is happening in our body at a given moment all we learn is what is happening in our body at that given moment or in that particular stance or with that particular food in our body or…etc. Our body is so incredibly dynamic and fluid that snapshots do not do it justice! They do not capture health (or lack thereof) effectively. And, yet, virtually all of our methods for testing our bodies are based upon a static image.

The third aspect that this idea of a deficit snapshot came up is in defining culture. When someone asks me to tell them about Portland or Vancouver they’re usually asking me to explain the “culture of the Northwest”. What I proceed to do is define a snapshot of the NW. Funky, weird, liberal, creative, coffee, beer, McMenamins…This is what cultural anthropology originally set out to do, define and articulate culture. Missionaries will spend time studying the culture that they are preparing to go serve. We speak of churches having a specific culture. But what in the world does that even mean?! If a specific church has a culture are we referring to the youth group? Are we referring to how the elders operate? Are we referring to their history? What about the young families that are trying to bring change? What “culture” are we referring to? Culture is so incredibly fluid and changing, like a stream, that rather than being capable of capturing it with a snapshot maybe our goal should be to run along side it as much as we’re capable. A snapshot gives the illusion of understanding, but in reality all you’ve captured is your own lens. When you describe or capture a culture all you’ve done is created an image that says “here’s how I view this world in front of me from my own unique perspective” even if a missionary goes to a rural African village, lives in a hut for thirty years, an in every way lives with (and like) the people, he will still always be a white dude that made a choice to live in that manner and could at any moment choose to leave. He will always be understanding that culture from his perspective.

Snapshots serve a purpose, but I fear that in many ways we have allowed them to too greatly define reality as we understand and articulate it. I wonder about the snapshots we’ve used to define faith, the Biblical story, and what it means to follow Jesus.

I think our greatest hope is in the pursuit of bigger ears (listening), bigger hearts (empathy), and an understanding of our limits.

* Please don’t get me wrong, I love photography!

Related posts:

1. The Freedom to Choose
2. Heresy
3. Apocacentric

I want to be known as someone who fights for peace, who makes sacrifice for peace, and who is dedicated to bringing peace. It has been interesting to view comments made over the globally loved and universally used Facebook. I’ve been noticing on facebook that we all have a hard time being people of peace. To be a person of peace you have to value other people (yes, even that person), you have to be willing to listen more than you speak, you have to value the other persons opinion, but you also have to be able to respond in love and honesty.

I believe (and have experienced lately) that it requires major sacrifice to fight for peace. Soldiers understand this, but do we understand it within our own contexts and conflicts? Are we willing and ready to sacrifice some of ourselves for peace?

Jesus was a man of peace. Don’t get me wrong, at times he was pretty harsh, in your face, and confrontational. But he was someone who was not satisfied with the status quo but instead fought to bring peace to a broken world. Talk about sacrifice right?

So I guess the big question is whether or not I want to be defined by my identity in Jesus. Do I want to be identified by the reality of the cross? Do I live a death and resurrection life? I think that if I did I might be more at peace with myself. Maybe not.

Related posts:

1. Jones’ War of Peace
2. Limb Stepping
3. Why People Ruin Church