Evolution of Dance

I've never seen this before even though its so popular...the middle and the end is the best I think.

Trying to fix ourselves...

"Our huffing and puffing to impress God, our scrambling for brownie points, our thrashing about trying to fix ourselves while hiding our pettiness and wallowing in guilt are nauseating to God and are a flat denial of the gospel of grace."
-Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel

In the studio...

Raw Nerve was in the studio yesterday, working on their first cd. I heard a rough cut of their first two songs (Red Rider of War & Me & My Memories) and all I can say is....WOW!!!

I was stunned, this cd is going to blow plaster off the walls. I am seriously starting to grow a massive late 80's mullet just thinking about how good this is going to be. I know I'm dad; but the studio really did a fantastic job of mic'n out the instruments, allowed Christian to focus on the vocals, and mixed the whole into one chunky stew of delicious metal sound that goes all the way to 11!

Ethiopian Coffee Ceremony

Our family was treated to our first traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony by our host LemLem Dailey. LemLem is one of the adopted girls, our friends Dan and Melissa Dailey recently adopted. Here she is washing the green coffee beans they brought from Ethiopia. Here she is roasting them, and then she grinds them and then makes coffee with them.Then we were served and enjoyed the traditional three cups of coffee...of course LeeElla got four cups, I guess she is extra special.
It was a precious honor, she is a gift and we are blessed to get the privilege of being part of her and Sara's new life here in Spokane and the Dailey's home. I think Micah got the best treatment...as we were leaving, he got the traditional three kisses on the cheeks from LemLem...of course, he was all smiles.

The 10 Most Redeeming Films of 2008

Have you seen them?

Explode or implode....

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who live outside-in and those who live inside-out. The outside-in folks allow the world to saturate their thinking. They are sponges, absorbing the agendas of this world without a filter. Like the Roman Empire, they are destroyed from within. in contrast, those who live inside-out change the world with what’s inside them… It’s the difference between a black hole and a burning star. It’s more beautiful to explode in light than implode in darkness. And we all know that there are enough black holes in this world already.” -”Godology: Because Knowing God Changes Everything” by Christian George (lifted from http://www.joethorn.net/)

Sex & Jesus....?

Nightline's report "Sermons with an Edge" Sex & Jesus; about Mark Driscoll and the church Mars Hill in Seattle.

Good morning master....

There I am making French Toast for my lovely wife on her day off and in comes the 99 pound family beast, named Kona, our black lab. She looks at me at the stove, makes a retching sound...I in slow motion shout at her to get outside...she scrambles, left, right...pause....puke. A big pile of eggs, water and half eaten dog food, right on my linoleum kitchen floor.

Whew...at least she didn't hit the carpet...I yell again: "GET OUT" but instead of going to the door which was two feet in front of her, she spins around and heads to the dinning room...NOOOOOOOO!!!! I scream....Wretch....gurgle and....puke. A big pile of vomit, right on....the carpet.

I'm yelling mild, almost child friendly obscenities at the 1/2 lbs of emptied bile juice and table scraps that my blasted Canis Lupus Familiaris offered up for her master to enjoy.

Animals...you got to love em, especially the ones you allow to live inside your home....

Oh, and then LeeElla cleaned it up...you got to love marriage. :)

Where will you carry your light...?

The seventy returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in Your name.” And He said to them, “I was watching Satan fall from heaven like lightning.  “Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing will injure you. “Nevertheless do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are recorded in heaven.” - Luke 10:17-20

The first visible sign I saw of the Kingdom of God advancing in power in this East Central neighborhood was when another brother and I, drove out a demon from a tormented woman and mother. The demon had visited her son at his window. The boy would tell her that he saw him. Then one day it possessed him. In her motherly concern and fright, she told the spirit to enter her instead...it did. When we entered the room, she was against the wall and visibly not in her right mind. We ushered out some of the family that had gathered, closed the door and in the name of Jesus told that demon to leave her. Instantly she slumped to the floor and came into her right mind. After ministering to the gathered family, we left. The healed family started attending the church we were ministering within. It was an amazing moment and story of the power over devils that is available in Jesus.

It was the first encounter with snakes and scorpions that I had in this area and when we moved here to plant a church, I didnt expect it to be our last.


Jesus said to them, "Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well." (Mark 16:15-18).

The church is called to move into the dens of scorpions and serpents. To exercise the dominion of the resurrected and triumphant Lord of glory who "...disarmed the rulers and the authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in the cross."-Colossians 2:15.

We are not to fear darkness but expose it with light, bind it, drive it out and crush it by the living and ever powerful One who lives within us. We are living out the prophetic words of our Lord who said: "Now judgement is upon this world; now the rule of this world will be cast out and I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself. (John 12:31-32). He spoke of a day of plunder after the "strongman would be bound": “If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. “If a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. “If Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but he is finished! “But no one can enter the strong man’s house and plunder his property unless he first binds the strong man, and then he will plunder his house. (Mark 3:24-27).With such marching orders, can we do less than dare to enter the strong man's house too? Isn't the ache to see those men and women drawn to Jesus motivation enough to put oneself in harms way? Is there danger? Yes. The odds are against us, the willing are few, the audacity of our God inspired and awakened faith is lamb like in comparison to the foe's that we face.

"After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. He told them, "The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. "Go; behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves." (Luke 10:1-3).

We more than likely will die in the war but even death has been conquered...and what better way to die than standing in dark places...among snakes, scorpions and overwhelming odds?



I have but one candle of life to burn, and I would rather burn it out in a land filled with darkness than a land flooded with light.
-John Falconer

so true...

"The word 'no' is the way you keep your commitment to the people you have already said 'yes' to."
- Phil Schroeder

What gender does your blog lean towards...?

We guess http://www.fcb4.blogspot.com is written by a woman (60%), however it's quite gender neutral. So says Gender Analyzer.

Frozen dinners....

This is cold.

I Love Jesus, But I Drink A Little...

RAW NERVE....Wins & heads to the final 4 competition

Raw Nerve won their round of competition in the metal category and now head to the Rawk Final 4 competition at the Service Station on February 21st.

Obama is the Anti-Christ...?

In response to the "Obama is the Anti-Christ" people...don't you know that Bush IS the Anti-Christ? It's proven right here.

Notice the 3 upside down stars above the elephant...The 5-pointed star is a symbol for man, and the points were originally associated with spirit and the four elements – earth, water, fire, and air. When the point or head of the star is facing up it’s symbolic of spirit ruling over matter, and when down, it symbolizes humanity overcome by our most destructive instincts like greed and violence. Facing up towards the heavens we are under God’s authority, and when reversed, under the devil’s rule. As you can see the stars in the Republican Elephant are pointed down...proving that we've just went through the administration of the Anti-Christ and though his "headship" has been slain though political change...he will most assuredly rise again to political life...so...Obama is probably the mouth piece of the dragon and will usher in a return to power of Bush.“Symbologists (like that idiot Robert Langdon in “The DaVinci Code”) agree that the five pointed star, or pentagram, is an ancient symbol for the number “6”. Let me spell this out. Three pentagrams (on the Republican elephant) equals 666. This is the symbol for our arch-enemy, Satan, or his minion, the Anti-Christ. Why in the world would the Republican symbol have the emblem of Satan on it?”

So you see Bush is the Anti-Christ, the Hitler of our era, because that is what we have been constantly told in the alternative media and through the deep teachings of our internet prophets...

Or....you can see that the scripture foretell a cyclical reality: 1 John 2:18: "many antichrists have made their appearance."

History reveals that..."the (anti-christ) concept has evolved bewilderingly throughout biblical history. As definitively explained in Bernard McGinn's Antichrist: 2,000 Years of the Human Fascination With Evil and Robert Fuller's Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession, the character can be traced to Old Testament authors' horrified response to the oppression of ancient colonizers. When Alexander the Great's conquests led to a statue of Zeus in the Temple in Jerusalem, Jews envisioned a final conflict story wherein the Syrian Greek tyrant Antiochus, reimagined as a beast, got burned in God's "fiery stream" on Judgment Day.

Early Christians grafted the Roman Emperor Nero onto the tradition as the Beast from the Abyss in the Apocalypse, known to current Christians as the book of Revelation, the Bible's astonishing finale about the final days. Nero dressed in animal skins to ravage men's and women's genitals, burned Christians in ghastly dramas, demanded to be worshiped as a god, and was rumored to have disappeared to the East, threatening to return one day to rule the world from Rome, or Jerusalem. Actually, he killed himself, but he lives on in beastly legend. To this day, the word for Antichrist in Armenian is "Nero."

Though the story of the Beast and various other biblical verses are associated with the Antichrist, the word itself, "Antichrist," only appears four times in the Bible, in the letters of John.

Christians have eternally argued about the Antichrist.

Revelation was nearly banned from the Bible, and permitted strictly on condition it should never be used as it is by fundies today.

Church father Augustine ordered Christians to quit reading apocalyptic Left Behind–style scenarios into scripture and think of the Antichrist as anyone who denies Christ—and he said the first place to hunt for him is in your own heart."


But I could be wrong...becasue:

Obama hails from Chicago whose zipcode is: 60606 (do you see the three sixes ?

...(remove tongue from cheek...here.)

Russian mission fields....

These pictures are tragic...they show me that the gospel is needed wherever humanity dwells.

9

This looks amazing. You can watch the trailer here and watch the film short below, which is also amazing...but the short is with no dialogue but sets up the trailer a bit, even though the trailer has more action.

More abortions on the way...

"President Obama not long ago told the American people that he would support policies to reduce abortions, but today he is effectively guaranteeing more abortions by funding groups that promote abortion as a method of population control," said Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee."

Well now that the good feelings are over...the reality sets in...reducing abortions seems to be a great vote getter but not going to be actual policy. Read the article here.

A weeping thirst....

Thy mind, my Master, I will dare explore;
What we are told, that we are meant to know.
Into Thy soul I search more and more,
Led by the lamp of my desire and woe.
If Thee, my Lord, I may not understand,
I am a wanderer in a houseless land,
a weeping thirst by hot winds ever fanned.

-George MacDonald (Diary of an old soul)

Wash you hands after going to the...

"It is unclear how the peanut products were contaminated with salmonella, which is carried by animal feces. Foods can also become contaminated by infected food handlers who do not wash their hands with soap after using the bathroom.""Major-label peanut butter is not suspected to be contaminated with salmonella and is considered safe to eat, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Several major brands, including Peter Pan, Jif and Smuckers, are worried that panicky consumers will stop buying their products and have been taking pains to point out that their peanut butters are not part of the outbreak. Salmonella bacteria can cause an infection that often produces diarrhea, fever, and abdominal cramps 12 to 72 hours after infection. The illness usually lasts four to seven days. While most people recover without treatment, infants, elderly people and those with compromised immune systems can develop severe illness that can result in death if not promptly treated with antibiotics." The Washington Post

Ummm..."not suspected" wow...it makes me feel so confident....bye bye peanut butter.

No damsels in distress here....

Wired magazine wrote this article about the butt kicking, strong female characters in Battlestar Galactica. It's one of the reasons I dig Science Fiction, you can break the molds, the stereotypes, explore alternative paths of human existence and extrapolate on current cultural taboos or stress points. Religion, power, war, race, gender, sex, greed, ecology, ethics, morality all get a through exam in this series...which makes for some controversial and explosive story lines. I hope this season delivers. I'm sure hardline complementarians would have a hard time with these ladies but I sure think its more dignifying than a lot of the belittling eye-candy roles most women get in tv/films...I find this refreshing. Warning: show is for mature audiences only.

Tip of the hat....

No, no, no...Mr. President...You're THE man! Great speech, I will be praying that you will succeed in living out those ideals and that this nation will rally together and live up to the standard you called us to live. God bless you and your family and the days ahead.

I missed Warren's prayer but I thought the best part of the ceremony was the Rev. Joseph Lowery's benediction prayer. That was a work of art, faith, passion, love and history....Dr. King would have been proud. Rev. Joseph Lowery is considered to be the dean of the civil rights movement. Lowery began his work with civil rights in the early 1950s in Mobile, Alabama, where he headed the Alabama Civic Affairs Association. In 1957, Lowery and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

I was also thrilled to see the poet Elizabeth Alexander, getting to be part of the ceremony, with her poem: "Praise Song For The Day" Elizabeth is only the fourth poet to read at an inauguration, following Robert Frost in 1961, Maya Angelou in 1993 and Miller Williams in 1997. Her poem was average in my humble opinion, but I was still grateful for the act of including poetry into the historic event.

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day

What a moment...wish I could be there.

Click on the link below and watch this short video where MLK JR gets prophetic about the future possibility of a Black American President.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/world_news_america/7838851.stmAmazing.

Snatching them out of the fire...

"Keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting anxiously for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to eternal life. And have mercy on some, who are doubting; save others, snatching them out of the fire; and on some have mercy with fear, hating even the garment polluted by the flesh. Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. -Jude 1:21-25

Living on the edge of mission is going to be more dangerous than living in the center.

You can and more than likely will get burned, if you choose to live close to the fires of hell instead of the comforts of heaven. You will smell of smoke; and many won't like it, in fact they may even mistake you for one in need of being saved. But you will learn to strip away much of what one would normally choose to wear for daily life...because of the mission, you choose to let it go. That includes praise, understanding, sometimes a reputation and often that warm glow of appreciation and approval.

But all of that is forgotten, when you are able to grasp that soul who is clothed in polluted garments in an embrace of redemption. Yes, you hate the vileness that they are stained by, the smell, the sin, the corruption...the flesh; but in all the uncleanness of it; you are overwhelmed not by the stench of falleness...but the object of the Son's love.

Love is often blinded by what personal religion, hardened indifference, numbing, self righteous complacency can so vividly observe with such harsh judgment.

Relgion often shouts; "Unclean!!! Unclean!!!....but Jesus, my savior...says: "I am willing...be clean"

A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees, “If you are willing, you can make me clean.” Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!”
Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cured. -Mark 1:40-45

Filled with compassion...oh that is my desperate prayer for myself and our church....so desperate, I am willing to embrace the stigma of leading and journeying down such smoldering paths.

Put your hand to the plow...

"No one, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God." -Jesus (Lk 9:62)

Sunday's are days of miracles for those who have eyes, hands and hearts to see....I watched a man weep as the Holy Spirit embraced him in gentle resurrection power...I knew he had recently attempted suicide and failed....because God is saving Him. I watched tears roll down cheeks of friends who are parting ways, as life sends them in different journeys but know that love will reunite them again. I heard adopted daughters laughter, from lips that had undoubtedly prayed desperate prayers for a family to be part of and now are within. Music was made, reviving prayers were said, words burned, love won out, honey was tasted, heavenly wine for those who are willing to drink. Grace overtaking the creeping darkness....the Kingdom coming on Earth.

"We sense that something magnificent is afoot. We are intrigued by the chaos. We are willing to risk significant change in order to create local expressions of the kingdom of God that are burning with missional passion and practice. We want to explore the meaning of the chaos, the vision of a preferred future, the challenge of being "church."- John Frye

I think back to moments when in church planting you collapse on the dry, hard ground...feeling the heat of reality bearing down on your vision bearing head and wonder if the labor is going to destroy you. Your hands and hearts are blistered by forces that do not release their hold easily. You are tired of the grunts and disapproving groans of the oxen that don't see the purpose of going around and around the same field. The voices that murmur all around you and tell you that the way you plow, the plow you use, the field you have chosen...are all wrong; can if you let it, undermine your confidence. But you press on...you know, what is to come, even if it seems like you are chasing a mirage. You wrestle with the natures and the knowing that greater powers are at work and that you cannot control the outcome of your labors. You are at the mercy of the unknown...you truly plow in hope and faith.

"This process is like the old analogy about an ancient plow pulled by oxen: on the first pass over the field the plow just barley makes a line in the dirt. But as the ox is carefully steered so that the plow passes over the exact same line, there is after the second pass, a slight rut. After several additional passes there is a clear groove. Finally, after many passes the soil is fully ready for seed that will bear fruit." -Todd Hunter "Christianity Beyond Belief: Following Jesus for the Sake of Others" from NextWave

The triumph and brutality of mission...

"God places the lonely in families; he sets the prisoners free and gives them joy..." -Psalms 68"6

I have some friends in our church, who just returned from Africa and this video appears to capture some of the tough stuff they are processing. I see it in the stare, the slow talking, the anguish of two worlds crashing together.

I can feel the unstable emotional equilibrium. I can sense the rage, the powerlessness, the hopeless hope and the mustard seed faith...all kicking and screaming like a baby born...but unable to care for itself...like spiritual mother's who are so exhausted from the birthing, they have no strength...bleeding in heart and soul.

Idealism gets raped by reality in mission.

As a pastor with hands and heart engaged in mission; i've witnessed and experienced this re-entry malaise and mission fatigue. I know God uses it...but I've also seen the enemy use it too. I long to work at building better mission runways for take off and for landing within the local church context, especially the American cultural context. I think people process too much of these conflicting juxtapositions alone....here enters the power of love, community, prayer and journeying together.

I would love to hear more ideas, or helps from anyone else reading this, that could offer some wisdom on this work of aftercare. I plan to use this video in our future aftercare processing.

On another note...it was a beautiful thing, looking into the crowd Sunday and see "Sarah and LemLem" their Africa teenage daughters huge smiles, sitting there with us for the first time. Getting to embrace in love, the girls we all prayed for, helped our friends fight for and now get the chance to walk with.

God is good.

Love truly...bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things...Love never fails. (1 Cor. 13:7)

Love....as I have loved you.

"My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." - John 15:12-13

My 16 year old son, Christian produced this video in November and posted it on his youtube page (http://www.youtube.com/user/CCGBAOcomedy)...I didn't know about until today. I've been looking for a video to use in my message on 1 Corinthians 13...I think I found it.

Yep...me too.

ET...and the Dukes...

Aftermath...

This is a shot from my son Micah's school where I drop him off in the morning. You can see the piles of snow that have slid off the roof, creating a landscape of dirty snow...kinda like a ghetto version of Superman's Ice Castle...but not.

Starwars as a girl remembers it...

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo. From BoingBoing

RAW NERVE....Jan 24th, 6PM @ The Big Dipper

Raw Nerve - The Day I Die from christian blauer on Vimeo.

"Raw Nerve" (www.myspace.com/rawnerve) is the band my son Christian does vocals and plays one of the guitars in. They are competing in a citywide battle of the bands and their first show is January 24th at The Big Dipper. Cost is $8 if you buy the tickets from them, $10 at the door; starts at 6PM.

I just feel safer....

...now that Jack is back.

’seeing through’ things...

“You cannot go on ’seeing through’ things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden, too? It is no use trying to ’see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ’see through’ all things is the same as not to see.” -C.S. Lewis "The Abolition of Man"

Thou art my refuge...

"That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, “Thou art my refuge.”
-George McDonald

God will soon crush satan....under your feet.

The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet -Romans 16:20

In William Gurnall's classic book "The Christian in Complete Armour", he gives much practical advice to Christians. This little snippet is encouragement for us when our peace is robbed.

"When Satan comes to take away your peace, if you do not understand the full significance of your justification in Christ you will be easily overcome. A saint without assurance of salvation is as unprotected as the rabbit that darts into a thicket to escape a fox, but is easily followed by the print of her own feet and the scent she leaves behind. In Christ you have a hiding place where the enemy dare not come: 'the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs' (Song of Sol. 2:14). While the devil may be in hot pursuit of your soul, the very scent of Christ's blood, by which you are justified, is noxious to him and will stop him in his tracks. Run straight into this tower of the gospel covenant, and roll this truth on the head of Satan, as the woman cast the stone on the head of Abimelech: 'To him....that....believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness' Rom. 4:5

Lifted from my Fahdur's blog

New Worlds....

The New World

It begins with a journey.
You must cross an ocean.
Can you imagine...can you feel what it is to cross an ocean?
For weeks you see nothing but the horizon.
All round you, perfect, and empty.
Your ship is small, tiny...a speck in such immensity.

You live with fear, in the grip of fear...fear of storms, fear of sickness on board,
fear of the immensity. What if you never escape? How can you escape?
There's nowhere to go.

So you must drive your fear down, deep into your belly, and study your charts, and watch your compass, and pray for a fair wind...and hope.
Pure naked fragile hope, when all your senses scream at you, Lost!
Lost! Imagine it. Day after day, staring west, the rising sun on your back,
The setting sun in your eyes, hoping, hoping...
At first it's no more than a haze on the horizon,
The ghost of a haze, the pure line corrupted.
But clouds do that, and storms.
So you watch...you watch.

Then it's a smudge, a shadow on the far water.
For a day, for another day, the stain slowly spreads along the horizon,
and takes form...until on the third day you let yourself believe.
You dare to whisper the word...land!

Land. Life. Resurrection. The true adventure.
Coming out of the vast unknown, out of the immensity,
into safe harbor at last.

That...that...is the New World.

-Sir Walter Raleigh in “Elizabeth: The Golden Age”
Picture by Marcin Jakubowski

The Chicken of Depression...

Even the darkness is not dark to You, And the night is as bright as the day. Darkness and light are alike to You. -Psalms 139:12

A common mistake I find in sharing ones journey; is attaching too much judgment or explanation to the phases of our temperaments. Dark is purposeful...imagine a world without the nuances of shadow.
Could one endure the brightness of constant light?
We need the moon to balance the Sun.
We need our sleep life to counterbalance our awake life.
Could you truly appreciate much of anything without the multiplicity of opposites?
Is a walk underneath moonlight to be eclipsed by a stroll in evening colors?
Could the world ever bloom with only sunlight and no spring drenching showers?
I think the problem comes when the winter refuses to give way her hold to the advances of spring.
These are the seasons when we need a savior, an Aslan, a doctor, a rescue.
But it all makes up our story...no chapter should be left unwritten, if it has been lived.
The church is weaker because she pretends to presently live in a city without a Moon...but that day hasn't arrived yet.

Depression is a subject that many Christians have a hard time understanding or even talking about. I've walked in shadows a lot of my life...at times into darkness that I needed help recovering from. In the past prayer has helped, diet has had an impact and listening to my life and understanding what my body was saying to me was essential.

For some medications are part of the path towards health. The mind needs a lift, an extra push, a piggy-back to catch it's breath. Sometimes it's in need of a little refill bio-chemically. It's nothing to feel bad or unspiritual about, all our bodies get drained and sometimes need medication to help our own immune system catch up or extra punch to fight off whatever is attacking.

Faith people are often the wrong people to go to for health wisdom...have you looked in the pews? The church is full of sick, unhealthy, mental, angry, supressed, overweight people...God loves them, but don't look for too much wisdom on self-care from them. I say that as a loving pastor. Get help from doctors...not patients.

Remember "darkness" is often the souls cry for light. It's shouting or moaning about deep issues that need healing or need change. Greyness, numbness are often signs that one is walking in a unhealthy lie of some kind. "hope deferred, makes the heart sick". Treatment should help you catch you breath long enough to unpack the heart or mind issues.
Medications are like a life preserver, it won't propell you but it will keep you from drowning.

I thank God for the moon and the sun...I've been able to accept, understand and enjoy who and I am and who God is, more because of it.

Abraham...

Hearing voices, gazing into the heavens,
Grasping hopes beyond reality,
Kissing lips that laugh at possibilities,
Walking paths that smoke, smolder and bleed,

Embracing alternatives, making love out of fear,

Feeding visitors, entertaining angels unawares...
Encountering the future in the present,
And making deals with sovereignty,
Hoping your hand is the better deal.

Putting a knife to your deepest loves,
Obeying more than receiving,
Giving all...without a hesitation.

Leaving your home...for the unknown,
Living day to day in transition...just walking.

Seeing the crying of promise, the tears of hope,
The trembling joy of mystery.

Burying it all in the tomb of finiteness...with old hands but a young heart.

This is faith.

(1.09.09 Eric Blauer)

As part of my new year goals, I've started reading "The Book of God" by Walter Wangerin, Jr. as a devotional tool for my own spiritual life and I think I am going to use it with my family too. It's the Bible written as novel, so the "story" comes through more than a study of the bible. I long to understand the truths of the word of God within the context of the story of the Word of God. Our culture loves stories but rarely endures lectures. I desire to be a better storyteller this year. This poem came out of my time in the story of Abraham. I often take the written word and after it has "spoken" to me, I re-speak it in prayer, song, prose or poetry...and some of these moments find their way into proclamation.

But the best stuff is reserved for God, angels and devils....the first cut into the orange, its the freshest...and the first bite, the juiciest.

African "WILD" life...?

So a couple friends of ours are in Africa right now...and they send me wildlife pictures, but there seems to be something a little askew about this one..

The best wedding dance ever....

Wanda Nevada...an estrogen induced lycanthropy...

Find more videos like this on www.truveo.com.

Oh my...somehow I fought the urge to leave when this came on last night...one of the dangers of leaving the remote available for anyone to get ahold of...but I'm glad that I didn't leave, because this was one crazy weird flick. I rarely laugh outloud...for awhile...I did in this movie; the line that Peter Fonda made about the dog...stunned me. At times in this movie, I wasn't sure where it was going to go...a 13 year old hooking up with a 20 year older man...it was odd, even though nothing took place....the whole theme got odd...not counting the creepy chicken necking dude with the thin mustache, the old man who gets his throat cut, the gun fight that goes on forever but nobody gets shot, the rotoscope indian with his lightening throwing powers and smoking arrows, the fact that Peter Fonda keeps putting cigarettes in his mouth but never smokes them, the glowing skull, the angry shopkeeper...and the sassy Brooke who perfectly captures that strange gangly place that a girl starts awkwardly changing into a woman...not quite girl, not yet ladyThe whole transition is kinda like an estrogen induced lycanthropy...one that she perfectly pulled off, brilliantly acted. It reminded me of the countless moments as a youth pastor that I got to see this bizarre unfolding take place...poor creatures, some manage it better than others for sure. I think girls have it way more tough as far as becoming adults go. It's laughable and tragic all at the same time.

I'm so jealous....

Here is Jon Foreman, frontman for Switchfoot, playing a little post show, on the street impromptu set for some fans; in fact, he's playing my two favorite songs off of his solo cd "Fall". I know its a crappy video but the rawness of it all is cool. If you don't own his solo stuff, you are missing out. He's a great song writer, has a moving voice and he plays some melodic harmonica on "Southbound Train", not on this version through.

This is weird...but I like it.

Everyone's a suspect here.

Where I wish I was...

With all this snow, sore muscles from clearing it, and the post stress of the holiday season...I wish I was right where these dudes are.