Author Archives: Dave

Ok, so I’ve memorized my verse for the week. It’s one of my favorites, and it actually came into play in our youth service tonight:

“”But God proves His own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us!” (Romans 5:8, HCSB)

That one has always kind of stuck in my head in some form or another since I first read it. I guess it’s because there’s so much theological content in that one little sentence. I was just talking with someone last night about how theology is just straight up overdone so much of the time. But when I think about this verse, I think about something I heard in (ironically) my systematic theology class last semester. There was this big discussion about how we know that we’re saved. I guess I’m more of an emotional person than I am a logical person, and I’m always looking and asking God for a new experience of Him, a way to really feel Him in my life. He’s responded in all kinds of ways from dreams to just an overwhelming feeling of comfort…on time I literally could just feel Him kneeling down beside me. But, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether or not I feel saved. ‘Cause some days, I just don’t. But I always get hung up on a hunger for the experiential side of it.

Like, I remember being backstage at a concert last year, and I was with a group of counselors who were receiving people who had made decisions during the concert. I remember people who had just accepted Christ coming backstage in tears, totally broken, totally overwhelmed at what He had done. And I guess I remember being sort of jealous in a way, ’cause I didn’t have one of those really huge emotional conversion experiences. But I always wanted one. To just feel it. To just feel Him. I guess because I’m a little finite human, I want a referent for God that I can experience and wrap my brain around. And we were talking about this that day in class. A lot of answers were thrown out, people talking about different stuff, and finally this one girl who had been patiently waiting to be called on answered this:

“I know I’m saved because Jesus died on the cross for me.”

That shut us up.

And it’s that simple. “…while we were still sinners Christ died for us!” That’s why we’re saved. Not because we feel like it, or because we said a certain magic set of words, or because we were baptized, or because we spoke in tongues. ‘Cause it appears different ways with different people, and that stuff is the effect of it, not the substance of it. The simple summation of it all is, we’re saved because of what He did for us.

And every time I hear that verse, that’s what I think of.

Thank You, Jesus. ‘Cause You know I can’t deserve this.

Today in class (after I recovered from that horrible Jeep sighting) we talked a lot about attributions; judgements we make about people based on appearance. You know, like thinking someone’s dumb because they’re blonde, or thinking someone’s a jock because they’re in good shape, stuff like that. Presuppositions we make with no grounds about people. Stereotypes.

But I have to laugh right now, ’cause I’m being the biggest stereotype in the world. I’m totally into the coffeehouse scene. Part of it’s my addiction to coffee and any other form of caffeine, and part of it is just the atmosphere. The laid back, welcome feeling, something mellow spilling into the air from an XM station, and a bunch of funky granola artistic types hanging out and discussing philosophy and typing away at their laptops.

Oh, and it’s an unwritten rule…you have to have a Mac if you plan to look cool at a coffeeshop.

So here’s where I admit that, yes, I have a Mac. But it’s just funny how we follow these little subcultures like this. I mean, “don’t stereotype me as a writer/student…I’m just hanging out at a coffeeshop, sipping my white mocha and typing on my Mac…”

Incidentally, that’s exactly what I’m doing right now. Would it be revealing to say that the people who work at this coffeeshop know me by name? Hmmmm…

I think it’s because we want to identify with something. Whenever you’re meeting someone, how early in the conversation do you ask them what they do for a living? It’s because we identify people, at least in part, with what they do. We “attribute” certain behaviors and personality characteristics with certain types of occupations. Happens all the time. I find myself (too) eager to include my occupation in an introduction, because I’m proud of what I do. We want, for some reason, to be able to classify each other in some way, so, apparently, this is the way we choose.

Is it the right thing to do? Absolutely not. But I guess maybe we shouldn’t complain so much when we do so much to perpetuate the myth.

Our American love affair with the automobile is finding itself throroughly undermined of late.

I remember almost gagging when I saw the new Mustangs. I didn’t think they could ruin that, but turns out they did. But it gets worse. ‘Cause today on my way to class, I walked past a new Jeep whatever-it’s-called. I call it a cheap Hummer wannabe.

Where did the originality go? Italian cars have it, but few American cars do anymore. It’s disappointing to say the least.

Okay, I just had to vent that.

I’m having one of those nights where I’m a lot more tired than I should be after the amount of work I’ve done today. I mean, I’ve been busy and all, but I’m completely whipped and it’s not even midnight yet. How much of a joke would it be if God were changing my circadian rhythm into that of a morning person? Somebody in Heaven would get a kick out of that.

I guess I should get used to it. I mean, after I finish grad school, I am going to have to go back to the real world and keep normal hours again, right? It’s been a nice break, though, ’cause the 9 to 5 gets pretty routine, and I can’t stand routines. They just kill you inside. Then again, writers basically set their own hours, so I could be onto something there. As long as I’m not confined in an office all day. That just sucks whatever spark I might have had out of me.

Have you ever turned on the visualizer to your music application and just watched it for a while? iTunes has a really sweet visualizer. I turned it on full screen a few minutes ago (playing jazz of course), and it’s almost kind of hypnotizing.

I’ve been concentrating a lot on spiritual disciplines lately. Especially Scripture memorization. I don’t do so great at that. So my new goal is to memorize one new passage each week.

Which puts me seriously behind this week…

I could have metaphor here! We should stop staring at the visualizers of our lives and start being constructive about what we’re doing with our days.

Then again, I could have been right the first time. I think it was a butterfly.

I never quite know where to draw the line…when I’ve stopped seeing God in little things and when I’ve started over-spiritualizing. This one is walking that thin line, I think, but here I go anyway…

So I’m running late the other day (as usual), and run through a Chick-Fil-A for lunch. This is Chick-Fil-A is one of those double drive-thru restaurants, where you go through one lane if the driver is ordering and the other lane if the passenger is ordering. So I’m sitting in the line, a very long which wasn’t moving at all (it was backed up to the street), and thinking, great, class starts in five minutes!, when my eyes slowly drifted over to the passenger lane, which was, as fate would have it, empty. I’m sure mine were not the only eyes that drifted toward the empty lane as I was caught between my empty stomach, my continued tardiness to class, and the frustration with the fact that I was now locked into the line as two more vehicles had pulled in behind me. One of those days.

Then this white SUV (it’s always an SUV) slips past us all, into the passenger lane, orders, and goes through. Immediately my fiendish mind is trying to invent ways, wondering if I could just hop over into the passenger seat, and somehow still manage to drive long enough to get through the passenger lane to get my food. Isn’t it possible to sit on the center console and drive? I mean, there’s that whole gearshift issue, but rural mail carriers do it all the time, right? I mean, surely there’s a way!

It would have been so much more perfect had I just had a passenger in my car. Someone that was there to help me out…hungry or not, we could have gotten through the line by working together in half the time, by teamwork, helping each other out.

(of course, I would have made this fictitious person late for class also, but…)

I heard a pastor speak on community a few weeks ago. That’s become a buzzword of late in our Christian subculture, but there’s something to it. Ecclesiastes tells us that, “Two are better than one because they have a good return for their labor. For if either of them falls, the one will lift up his companion. But woe to the one who falls when there is not another to lift him up” (Ecclesiates 4:9-10, NASB). The thrust, I think, of what God’s trying to tell us is that we just aren’t really experiencing the Christian life if we’re not living in community, closely connected with other Believers. And the bottom line is that we can’t produce that with church programs. It has to come from within us, within our hearts, ultimately from Christ.

He never meant for us to do this alone. Ever wonder why we so often try?