Month: October 2008

mega ditto

Kevin Hendricks shares ::

Bono talks about the $700 billion bailout package:

“I am not qualified to comment on the interventions that have been put forth. I can assume these people know what they’re doing. But is is extraordinary to me that you can find $700 billion to save Wall Street and the entire G8 can’t find $25 billion to save 25,000 child who die every day of preventable treatable diseases and hunger. That is mad. Bankruptcy is a serious business. And we all know people who have lost their jobs this week, I do anyway. But this is moral bankruptcy.”

I agree with Bono on both counts: I’m not qualified to comment on the bailout yeah or nay, but I do think it’s amazing that we can shell out a ton of money for all these bailouts but we can’t spend a much smaller sum of money to save lives.

It’s much more complicated than this, but saving lives seems more important than saving the economy.

I would add this…

“Be generous. Give to the poor. Get yourselves a bank that can’t go bankrupt, a bank in heaven far from bankrobbers, safe from embezzlers, a bank you can bank on. It’s obvious, isn’t it? The place where your treasure is, is the place you will most want to be, and end up being.” – Jesus the Christ

Granted as someone pointed out in The Ordinary Radicals (great film by the way) if everyone just gave away their possessions just because they’re a Christian then it’s rather pointless. It has to be a heart issues and a heart matter. You have to be authentic about it. Don’t just give away your stuff because someone told you Christ said to. Give it away because you really feel its what you’re called to do.

slides from yesterday

Josh and I spoke/led the discussion at encounter yesterday. Unfortunately the audio didn’t get saved so there will be no podcast this week 🙁 but they did record the audio/video stream over at ustream.tv/encounter (I hear its a bit choppy).

Either way, thought I’d share our powerpoint slides. So you can get an idea of what we discussed ::

authenticity and transparency

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: transparency authenticity)

The relationship toolbox

Over the past few weeks Brian’s been sharing thoughts on relationship tools each Sunday. As part of the series he’s been posting clues to the upcoming week’s relationship tool on the blog. Since Brian will be out this week and Josh and I are doing “the sermon” I posed this week’s clues. See if you can guess ::

This Sunday we’ll talk about another relationship tool that like many of the other tools is not only vital to our personal relationships but to the church as a whole. While many of the tools we use in relationships and in church are things “we do.” This tool is something we must “become.”

When I mentioned it to a friend this week we called it “the ultimate tool” and he compared it to a leatherman. I think about as a sweetener or a spice that you add to the main dish and it brings out an entirely new flavor.

When used properly it can fill in for many other tools. It can fill in the gaps or voids that might be missing throughout the day. When used improperly it can wound and hurt and destroy. It’s like taking a knife and digging deep into someones flesh and soul.

Let the guessing game begin.

new community group news

A new issue of the weekly community group newsletter is online.

I try and publish it each Monday — running a little late this week. (of course it’s naturally geared more towards encounter peeps – but hope it’s useful for you as well.

Steven Delopoulos on Noisetrade.com

Steven Delopoulos (Burlap to Cashmere) is back with a new album and Noisetrade.com has a great collection of exclusive downloads.

Of course like all of Noisetrade’s music – you can tell 5 friends about the music and download it for free — or pay what you’d like for the music. Fair trade music! Love it!

For Young Men Only – a guy’s guide to the alien gender

Well I just finished reading “For Young Men Only – a guy’s guide to the alien gender.” Probably not something I would have picked up and read for myself (being 29 years of age) but a surprisingly good read none the less.

The authors, Jeff Feildhahn and Eric Rice do a great job in covering many of the boyhood (and often manhood) misconceptions of “the alien gender.”

While I enjoyed reading both For Men Only and For Women Only, I honestly expected this book (which is naturally geared more towards high schoolers — and the fourth in the “Only” series) to be either way too informative or on the cheesy side of entertaining – but the book does a great job of avoiding both extremes. Throughout the book, both Eric and Jeff share spot-on illustrations from their own lives and interjected relevant ideas and situations for high-schoolers that kept me interested and believing what they had to tell me.

However, don’t expect this book to be a “how-to” or DIY type of dating book. Like the other books in the series, it’s really about debunking the common misconceptions guys (including myself) have about that “mysterious other sex.”

Including ::

  • Girls only go for the good looking Abercrombie guys
  • Girls only like bad boys
  • Girls never make sense (still not sure this is really a misconception ;-))
  • Girls go from “love” to “get lost” in seconds flat
  • and others…

Perhaps if my friends and I had this book many moons ago, we would have had a completely different understanding of young women and written a lot less goofy stories, poems and songs about misunderstanding them — along with saving us a lot of heartache along the way.

If nothing else, the book will be a great resource to start a discussion between you and the young men in your life.