Coming soon - interview with a Between-the-Lines guy

Monday I get to interview Dale Hendry, who with his wife Vicki runs the local Center of Hope.  Center of Hope is a smaller-scale version of the Los Angeles Dream Center (which is an awesome story all its own; look it up).  This place takes folks who are homeless or just out of prison, who have drug/alcohol addictions, and walks them through a road to healing and restored life in Jesus.  Stay tuned!

How you're like a diamond

(pre-publication excerpt from Between the Lines:  Christianity for Misfit Christians)

 “children of God...seen as lights in the world, holding up the word of life.”

– Philippians 2:15b-16a

What does a human made in the image of God, the imago dei, look like?  Well, for starters, since Jesus says he’s light, perhaps we look like light as well.  Or maybe, a diamond.

Shine a light  into a diamond.  (Red is fine, but green is eye-popping.)  Then, we’re surrounded by brilliant points of light, like stars in red or green.  The pattern changes constantly, with every tiny change in the angles between the laser and the diamond.

The light shines on the diamond, and is reflected from the facets at different angles.  But the light also shines in to the diamond, and is refracted (bent) into many new directions inside the diamond.  Each new ray of light reflects internally and eventually emerges from one facet or another to add another point of light to the ceiling, like another star in a constellation. 

If there were such a thing as a white-light laser, those refracted rays of light would produce stars in all the colors of the rainbow.  All around, all colors, all glorious.

The diamond has no light of its own, at least at first.  But as its owner shines his light onto and into it, it produces a constellation of lights, unique to that diamond, and changing as the diamond moves and lives. Maybe that’s kind of like what the scripture means that says we will shine like stars or lights in the world.  We shine with no light except that which comes from God, but we can reflect and refract that light in a thousand different directions and colors.

Scripture paints a picture of a God who places every star in the sky, and knows each by name.  Such a God shines his light on and through us; he designed and named all of our ways just as he named each star.  Like stars in the night, we were made to be beautiful, and wonderful.  He intended the constellation of his people to be as awe-inspiring as the night sky over Sinai, crowded to unrecognizability with lights.

We are made of mere carbon, the stuff of pencils and coal mines and diamonds.  The difference between us and a lump of coal is the shaping hand of a Creator, a good God, who ordained beauty in all things at the Creation, who said it was all good.

The Last, First

(pre-publication excerpt from Between the Lines:  Christianity for Misfit Christians)

I was spending a long weekend with a former protégé in Auburn.  (The first of many weekends and protégés, friends, as it turned out.)  A local parachurch ministry, Auburn Christian Fellowship, was about to demolish a building and build a new one in its place.  So what to do?  Why, airsoft games inside the old house, of course!  (Capture the flag, but with plastic pellet guns and goggles.  Fun!)

So we’re hanging out while other students arrive, and eventually there are about 20 people on hand for this little episode of spontaneous warfare.  Teams start getting chosen.  And a funny thing started to happen.

After a few minutes in a group like this, it’s pretty evident which are the socially gifted ones, and the less-gifted ones, and the downright awkward or shy ones.  It was obvious that night.  Perhaps it’s easier to see for those of us who were picked last, or picked upon, or just not picked at all.

The gifted ones were calling out the awkward ones, the ones who didn’t know how to fit.  “Aaron, come on over here, be on my team.”  All the gifted ones were doing it.  Just trying to look good, right?  The awkward ones looked surprised...they’d learned their schoolyard lessons all too well.

The game commenced.  At this point, I sort of expected the less-outgoing or less-fit ones to be sort of ignored as we planned and executed our assaults and defenses.  After all, our team is less likely to win if we rely on them, right?  Well, maybe so.  But that isn’t what happened at all.

We were all players that night.  The leaders weren’t just posing their interest in “the last and the least of these.”  It was real; it was happening in the heat of battle, so to speak.  We shuffled sides and played again, and again.  And it happened, again and again.

You see, those young men internalized and personified a key element of leadership in what the Bible calls “ekklesia,” church.  The goal wasn’t to win, or to see which team member could arrive first.  The goal was to arrive together.  The way that’s accomplished is by putting the “last” ones “first.”    It may sound strange to some, but we had church that night.  That night, we were Church.

"Heroes" in the Bible

I could blame Hollywood and the Bible Story Book, but it really comes back to me choosing to believe what they showed me.  Traditional storylines involve a hero, opposition, and overcoming, with some kind of satisfying wrapup at the end.  Often, the hero(ine) embodies how we could be, or wish we could be.  The opponents often embody our darker natures.  We like to think we get better.  

Good so far?

Heroes in the Bible aren’t much like the kid-stereotypes.  Sometimes their flaws were real.  Sometimes, people just thought they were flaws.

Noah was crazy, then drunk; Abraham was too old; Isaac was a daydreamer; Jacob was a liar; Leah was ugly; Joseph was abused; Moses was a murderer and a coward; Deborah was a “just a woman;” Gideon was afraid; Samson had long hair; Rahab was a prostitute; Jeremiah was too young; David pretended to be nuts, had an affair, murdered a man and ran for his life from his own son; Elijah was suicidal; Isaiah preached naked; Jonah ran away from God; Naomi was a widow; Job was bankrupt.

John the Baptist ate locusts; Peter was impulsive and hot-tempered; John was self-righteous; The disciples fell asleep while praying; Martha worried about everything; Mary was so Jesus minded she was no earthly good; Mary Magdalene was demon-possessed; the boy with the fish and five rolls of bread was too unknown (and still is); The Samaritan woman at the well was divorced – at best - more than once; Zacchaeus was too small; Paul was too religious and a murderer; Timothy was too young and had a stomach ulcer; and Lazarus was dead.

What a bunch of losers?  Every one of them, God used mightily.  The first time I read their stories for myself, I was amazed (“Why didn’t anyone tell me this?!”) and delighted (“They’re not so heroic – they’re like me!”)

The real power of those heroes isn’t that they were heroes.  The power is that they became heroes.  God seems to love taking the “worthless” and making us “worth.”  Wow.

Gutenberg 461, the Internet, and you

 I've been reading (again) about the changes in the European world that followed invention of the movable-type printing press.  As the technology proliferated, all sorts of previously-hidden information emerged from the crevices of monasteries and universities.  Suddenly, "how to make" information hidden in the guilds' apprentice/journeyman/master treadmill was available to anyone.  Suddenly, "what to believe" ideas, formerly shrouded in mystery and high-church rituals, were available to anyone.  Information quality ranged from Jesus to junk.  Suddenly, literacy could change people's lives for the better.

Anyone who could afford a printing press could become a publisher.  Gutenberg famously printed the Bible.  A few decades later Pope Leo X infamously printed forgiveness-for-cash indulgences.  The resulting Protestant reformation changed the world. 

Once again, 461 years later, “how to make” information is being freed from its career-track limitations.  Once again, “what to believe” ideas are exposed to light and the eyes of “the common man.”  Once again, the ideas range from Jesus to junk.  And once again, a new technology has made anyone a publisher.

But this time, it’s “free.”  (Not quite, but really, really close.  Read on.)

As I write this book and develop its website and bog, I’m discovering just how cheap it is to publish.  My capital investment/non-recurring costs?  Maybe $300. 

My cost to print?  About $2.50 each, in any quantity.

Your cost to buy via Amazon and other booksellers?  Retail about $9.  Your cost to download from the misfitchristian website, formatted for all four common eBook readers?

Free.

Whoa.  When you look at the gap between production cost and retail price, you see that $6.50 gap, which is the costs of a whole industry devoted to the selling of books.  But I’m discovering that when the objective is only to proliferate an idea, not to make money, it can be done really cheaply for everyone.

I don’t think that this little book will launch a Reformation the way that Martin Luther’s 95 Theses did.  But it might give you a re-forming, a better way, of how to live a God-filled, joyful life.

In the beginning...

...God decided to make each one of us.  Then, came the rest of this stuff.  I never can get my head around that one.