Steve’s Blog

I’m all about the twitter references these last couple posts aren’t I?  While I was doing my internet rotation this morning I noticed that one of the trending topics on twitter was #Godis.  It’s nice to see that other people are thinking about and expressing their feelings about god and it’s even funnier that the subject is sandwitched between Justin Bieber and #iheardyousay.  Here are some of my favorite answers that I saw

God is…
waiting for you.
& always will be a trending topic in my life
gonna get me to my destination despite all the tomfoolery that has taken place thus far
reading this trending topic
teaching me something new everyday
trying to tell you something…listen

There were also a lot of one word answers like “Great”, “Awesome”, “Strong”. “Love”, “Everything” and “Busy.”  How would you answer?  Here’s your chance: God is…

In my last post I mentioned that my friend Barry is exploring how we can incorporate spiritual practices through the use of twitter and it got me wondering; where are the best “spiritual places” on twitter?  Here are a couple of my favorite twitter users that provoke spiritual thought as well as some of my favorite of their tweets.  Enjoy!

@SoulPancake
“List 3 things in our current society that would surprise future anthropologists”
“What experience completely changed your belief system?”
“How do you make sure that you’re constantly ‘growing’?”

@CSLewisDaily
“Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is-C.S.Lewis”
“We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies but he hopes he’ll never have to use it.”
“Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less”

@HolyGod
“I love you all”
“Reviewing extinct species.”
“Me: Knock, knock. You: Who’s there? Me: God. Let Me in.”

@joyfrequencies
“The Kingdom of Heaven is not a place, but a state of mind. – John Burroughs ”
“Rest and laughter are the most spiritual and subversive acts of all. -Anne Lamott ”
“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen. Robert Bresson ”

Are there any other spiritual places on twitter that I should know about?  Hope this was helpful to you as we continue to find ways at exploring a holistic spiritual life.

Hey everyone, sorry I have been MIA from the blogosphere for a while.  Here is what has been capturing my attention:

Great new music: Peter Gabriel, Broken Bells and Gorillaz.  The Peter Gabriel cover album “Scratch My Back” finally came out in the US and is absolutely wonderful.  Really good music to meditate with… it has helped me relax and decompress these last few weeks.  Broken Bells is the funky and folky colaboration between Danger Mouse (from Gnarles Barkley) and James Mercer (from the Shins).  I can already tell that this is going to be one of my favorite driving albums of the summer.  The Gorillaz have come back after 5 years with their album “Plastic Beach” which features some of my favorite hip-hop artists and beat makers.  I haven’t really dug into it yet but there are some really great grooves and lyrics to keep you interested.

I  just finished up helping with a class at Fuller on theology and media culture that turned me on to the HBO series True Blood.  While it certainly has it’s fair share of explicit scenes and over the top violence, the show deals with much more than modern day vampires.  The show deals with the cultural themes of “otherness” and plurality facing us and how we are able to accpet the radically different and create new ethical paradigms in the face of such challenges.  The class has been a helpful challenge in understanding how we  are (and I am) changing with the influence of new technologies and media outlets and how we are to understand each other in the face of these new tools. 

For Lent my friend Barry has started a twitter campaign called SP140… spiritual practices in 140 characters or less.  It has been a really cool way of exploring how something like twitter can help shape  my spiritual life and provide a focus durring this season.  Some of the cool practices have been: “Dont use sarcasm or cynicism today”, “Make a list of your doubts about god Your fears about life and your worries about yourself Then burn it” and “Don’t text today just make calls.” 

So there you go… that’s what has been up with me these past few weeks.  We have some cool things comming up at church that I will post about in a bit.  Until then, enjoy life and continue to pursue God in new ways.

Hey High Schoolers, remember when I freaked out a couple months ago because I had a divine experience watching Daniel Lanois and Black Dub perform “the maker?”  Well here is the video of that performance! (and if you look close enough you can see me grooving in the crowd!)

(these are my thoughts as I read through the first two chapters of Mark… listening to Teen Dream by Beach House)

The gospel of Mark doesn’t start out like we are expecting the story of Jesus to being.  There are no angels talking to Mary, no manger, not even the story of his birth.  Instead we are dropped into this weird place with John the Baptist that leaves us scratching our heads and asking “wait, how’d we get here?”  The thing that really stood out to me in these first chapters is how much mystery there is surrounding the story  of Jesus.  Very little is explained in Mark… How did Jesus get here?  What happens during the temptation?  How is he performing all of these healings?  It’s like we’re in an episode of Lost…we are in a weird place where a bunch of crazy things are happening and we have no idea why or how.  But we do know that Jesus is taken very seriously by all those around him.

There are so many cool things that happen in these two chapters but I am always drawn to the healing of the man with leprosy in 1:40-45.  We already have seen Jesus do a couple healings so we know he has the ability help this guy, but it’s their conversation that is a window into the heart of God.  The guy asks Jesus if he is willing to heal him which implies a whole lot about this guy’s faith.  He must have had the faith and confidence that Jesus CAN heal him but didn’t know him enough to know if he would. His plea is one that comes from extreme faith and the answer he gets comes from Jesus’ immense compassion; I am willing, be clean.  One of the hardest hurdles in faith is approaching God with the confidence that this guy did.  How much do we really trust that God has the power to pull off the miraculous?  In the midst of the mystery and difficult situations in life we have a God who is capable and willing to help and guide us.

(here is a video of a gorilla picking the super bowl winner)

hey everyone.  The oscar nominations came out today and (in an effort to drive people to spend more money at the box office) this year they have nominated 10 movies for best picture.  So far I have seen 7 of the 10 nominees which means I have a little more than a month to see The Blind Side, An Education and Precious… none of which were high on my list this year to see but I guess I’ll give them a shot. 

Of the 7 that I have seen I would rank them in this order.
1. A Serious Man
2. The Hurt Locker
3. District 9
4. Up in the Air
5. Inglorious Basterds
6. Up
7. Avatar

What I think is really cool about this year’s group of nominees is that many of them invite the audience into an imaginative world that works.  District 9, Up and Avatar in particular create an alternate reality that allows the audience to wrestle with  issues such as racism, death and environmental abuse in a way that may have been too much for us to handle in a more familiar setting.  I chose A Serious Man as the best film of the year primarily for it’s theological undertones and how it portrays the human search for divine understanding as the world you know comes crashing down.  It’s a great film that shows the absurdity of life in a way that makes you appreciate what is most often overlooked and mundane or routine. 

I was sad to see that Where The Wild Things Are was pretty much ignored, it was easily my favorite film of the past year.  Oh well… what do you think?  Have you seen any of the 10 films?  What should win?

Hey everyone, here are the things we used in our discussion last Sunday.  These next 8 weeks leading up to Easter we are going to be walking through the Gospel of Mark, inspired by Nick Cave and his unique take on how we can come to know Jesus through his humanity.  If you want to read the intro he wrote for the Gospel of Mark you can find it here… this is my favorite little bit of it:

“The Christ that emerges from Mark, tramping through the haphazard events of His life, had a ringing intensity about him that I could not resist. Christ spoke to me through His isolation, through the burden of His death, through His rage at the mundane, through His sorrow. Christ, it seemed to me was the victim of humanity’s lack of imagination, was hammered to the cross with the nails of creative vapidity.”

Exodus 20:4 “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the watter under the earth… unless of course we are talking about the iPad because let’s face it, that thing is sweet.”

Peter Gabriel is going to release an album, “Scratch My Back”,  next month of cover songs including this version of one of my  alltime favorite love songs, “the book of love” by the magnetic fields.   He is also doing songs by the arcade fire, radiohead, bowie, neil young, bon iver and paul simon… if this song is any indication, the whole album is going to be incredible.

According to Pantone (the company that determines the color palette for all fashion and design) Turquoise is the color of 2010!  Their website says that the color combines “the serene qualities of blue and the invigorating aspects of green, Turquoise inspires thoughts of soothing, tropical waters and a comforting escape from the everyday troubles of the world, while at the same time restoring our sense of wellbeing.”  I think we could all use a good dose of escape and well being, maybe I should just paint my room 15-5519 and see how it turns out.

What I found most interesting about this whole thing is that Pantone says the color “is believed to be a protective talisman, a color of deep compassion and healing, and a color of faith and truth, inspired by water and sky.”  I have never really thought of personifying a color as compassion or that it might represent something as fluid as faith and truth.  But after thinking about it for a while I began to see how influenced we are by the colors around us and that we are trained to respond to certain colors (red=anger/passion, blue=sadness/cold…).  What colors inspire you?  What colors would you choose to represent yourself?  What color would faith be?