The Pursuit

I wrote about this over a year ago, here. Woot.com has a unique business model - they sell 1 item every day. Actually it’s more like 4 items now, they have www.woot.com (the normal site), shirt.woot.com (a new t-shirt everyday), wine.woot.com (for all you wine-o’s), and sellout.woot.com (a partnership with shopping.yahoo.com). Anyways, last year, in July, Woot had their Birthday. On their birthday they sold the ever so covetted “Random Crap” aka “Bag of Crap”. You can buy up to 3 for 1$ and you can expect to get crap. The fun comes in trying to order, waiting, hoping, waiting some more, and finally receiving it. Anyways, I missed out on the Birthday Crap last year, but I added Woot’s birthday to my google calendar and set it to remind me. So this year I was fully prepared to stay up until 1AM. I wasn’t really sure if it would be a BOC, but it was worth the wait, and as it turned out, the rest of the world (slight exaggeration) was waiting as well. At approximately 1:08AM the new woot showed up and BINGO a Bag of Crap! I was able to get my order in (8$ - 3$ for three craps and 5$ for shipping).

Well I received my shipment yesterday and this is what I got:

1x Kodak EasyShare 5300 All-in-One Printer (I’m selling it on ebay since I already own two printers).
1x Verizon Bluetooth (I think - I’m a bluetooth virgin)
1x Loose Screw (looks like one you use on a hard drive mount)
1x Targus Digital Memory Card Case
1x Birthday Card
Overall I’m very please with my crap. They printer retails for 100-150$, so I hope to get at least 50$ on ebay. The memory card case is currently holding my four thumb drives (I know, I know, they’re not “memory cards”).

I’ve never purchased a card for a 4 year old, but the writing on the inside of the card kinda weirds me out. Maybe in 70 years I’ll bring it to the Antique Road Show and they’ll tell me how it’s worth millions of dollars because it was a Woot Crap :).

We have many of poems/songs/psalms in the books of the Psalms written by David. In these writings, David was often brutal in his language, asking God to destroy his enemies. I do not know them all by heart, so I could be wrong, but I believe at the end of these requests he basically tells God, “But not my will, yours.”

Recently I was having a conversation with some blogging-buddies. I posed a question about why we pray for the safety of American Soldiers, but do not pray for the safety of Muslim Terrorists. Someone responded saying that David prayed that God would smash the teeth of his enemies, and so he will pray that God will smash the teeth of terrorists.

This led to a chain of questions that I am asking now: Should we pray that God smash the teeth of our enemies? Are Muslims Terrorist our enemies? Was David wrong for asking God to destroy his enemies? Did David know this and thus redeem himself by telling God “not my will, yours”?

Depending on how you answer these questions could lead you into some muddy waters. For instance, if David was wrong to ask God to do such a thing, then we have to ask. Are those parts of the Bible examples we should follow? Are those parts inspired by the Holy Spirit? Is David an example of someone we should follow? And the list could probably go on.

So, what are you immediate thoughts on these issues?

(by the way, I have already answered these questions in my own mind, but I want to hear what others have to say about it)

We Christians are not transformed simply by hearing sermons week after week. We are transformed by regular encounters with the Lord Jesus Christ. - Page 100

My wife is a big fan of the show How I Met Your Mother on CBS. I usually watch it with her because I generally find it entertaining as well. About a month (maybe more) ago they had their season finale. One of the major themes of this episode was miracles. One of the main characters, Ted, had been in a car wreck and his friend, Marshall, was trying to convince another friend, Robin, that it was a miracle. Robin claimed to not believe in miracles, so Marshall kept telling her different stories that he claimed was miracles.

This video clip is one of the miracles that he told Robin about. It literally had me laughing/crying for about 10 minutes. Whenever I think about it I usually started laughing pretty hard. And now I found it on YouTube! I hope y’all enjoy it as much as I did.

Every Sunday you attend the service to be bandaged and recharged, like all other wounded soldiers. Far too often, however, the bandaging and the recharging never takes place. The reason is quite simple. The New Testament never links sitting through an ossified ritual that we mislabel “church” as having anything to do with spiritual transformation. We grow by functioning, not by passively watching and listening. - Page 77

Somehow we have been taught to feel holier when we are in “the house of God” and have inherited a pathological dependency upon an edifice to carry out our worship to God. At bottom, the church building has taught us badly about what church is and what it does. It is a contradiction of the very nature of the ekklesia - which is a countercultural community. The Church building impedes our understanding and experience that the church is Christ’s functing body that lives and breaths under His direct headship. - Page 42

If the truth be told, we Christians never seem to ask why we do what we do. Instead, we blithely carry out our relgious traditions without asking where they came form. Most Christians who claim to uphold the integrity of God’s Word have never sought to see if what they do every Sunday has any scriptural backing. How do we know that? Because if they did, it would lead them to some very disturbing conclusions that would compel them by conscience to forever abandon what they are doing. - Page 5

I recently had my 28th birthday. I received some money and decided to spend it at Amazon.com. I bought The Ultimate Hitchiker’s Guide (Leather Bound Edition). It looks remarkably like a Bible.

I was sitting around with some friends and family and told them of my new purchase. Joking, I said I was going to bring it to “church” with me and read it during the sermon, so I won’t be bored. Then something happened, a number of people said, “that’s what I do.”

What they meant was, they *usually* open their Bibles during the Sunday sermon and start reading. Some of them said they will read a completely different book/chapter/verse, some said they read the same book/chapter/verse but still ignore/half-listening to what the speaker is saying. To be honest, I do this regularly. Most of the time, though, I read the same book/chapter/verse, but read it in context and then wonder how in the world Joe Blow got his point from that text. Anyways, the impression I got was, that these people generally don’t get anything from the teaching part of the Sunday service, so my question is, why go?

If y’all remember, the last time I taught, during a Sunday service, I was told that I went above the heads of most people in the audience. Apparently it was frowned upon to teach the “meat”. What was funniest is that I had a number of people come up to me and tell me what a great job I did and how much they learned. One lady even showed me a full sheet of notes that she took. By the way, the majority of these people were in the same demographic that I was told wouldn’t understand what I said. I wonder, at what point did we all become stupid? Was it when we walked into the building? Or is it the fact that the teacher is just smarter than everyone else?

In a more recent conversation, a close friend of mine was explaining why she doesn’t go on Sunday mornings. Her complaint, “I just sit there and don’t learn anything new”. I agree. How many times can you be told what the Bible says? I know what the Bible says. For the most part, even when I don’t know what the Bible says, I still know what God would say about a certain topic. This same girl decided that she has better things to do with her time than sit around listening to some guy feed her milk. So she asked herself, “Why Go?” and stopped going.

As far as I can tell, the best answer to “Why Go?” is that these buildings are full of other believers on Sunday mornings. So it is the best possible place to meet other believers. The problem is, most of these meetings are sit-n-go’s. We all sit, listen, and go - fellowship only exists in hand-shakes and smiles.

Why do you go?