Author: Glen

One Of The Most Ruthless Pranks Ever

Cal Berke­ley just took prank­ing to a whole new lev­el. This is the stuff of leg­ends. And night­mares. Ouch.

Counsel To A Student

I recent­ly respond­ed to a stu­dent who was try­ing to mud­dle through an awk­ward rela­tion­ship with­out becom­ing bit­ter. She asked for some coun­sel, and here is an anonymized ver­sion of what I told her. The pain she is expe­ri­enc­ing is com­mon enough, and so I post it here in the hopes that it will prove help­ful to some­one else as well.

You have already said that you are pray­ing and so I will move on to oth­er con­sid­er­a­tions. There are sev­er­al prac­ti­cal things you can do.

The first is to real­ize that you can­not avoid being hurt. You have no more choice in that than you have when falling off a cliff. Phys­i­cal­ly, if you get in a fight then your jaw will prob­a­bly be sore regard­less of who wins. Emo­tion­al­ly, it is unlike­ly that you’ll come out of a rela­tion­al melt­down with­out at least the equiv­a­lent of a sore jaw. Just as in box­ing, how­ev­er, you can choose whether you’ll get hit in the face or the stom­ach. Where you are struck is based upon your guard, so block the blows that mat­ter and absorb the ones you must.

Prac­ti­cal­ly, this is a mat­ter of where you pin your hopes. If you pin your hopes upon roman­tic recom­mit­ment, then that is where you are most vul­ner­a­ble to being hurt. If you pin your hopes to renor­mal­iza­tion of friend­ship, then that is where you are most vul­ner­a­ble to being hurt. The pain of dashed romance is gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered to be far more intense than the pain of an awk­ward friend­ship, but you must choose your own course in this.

As an aside, I’m not so sure that “guard­ing your heart” in the Bible is about pre­vent­ing painful emo­tions (which seems to be the way that it is most often preached–if you can just guard your heart suf­fi­cient­ly then you can avoid being hurt). Jesus and Paul both expe­ri­enced much pain caused by oth­er peo­ple. Jesus was betrayed by Judas and wept when Mary and Martha blamed him for the death of Lazarus, Paul was aban­doned by vir­tu­al­ly all of his friends when in prison and wept when he left the Eph­esian elders to head towards his fate in Jerusalem. Guard­ing their heart did­n’t pre­vent them from expe­ri­enc­ing pain. I think we can fair­ly say that it reduced the amount of the pain that they felt, and it cer­tain­ly helped them to sur­mount pain. But it did not pre­vent pain. That’s a very Bud­dhist notion which just does­n’t fit into the Chris­t­ian faith. Bud­dhists detach, Chris­tians love. And love always seems to involve a cer­tain mea­sure of pain.

The sec­ond is to lis­ten to your mind more than your heart. Pre­tend this was hap­pen­ing to one of your friends and then pre­tend to give them some advice. I’m sure you would have wise coun­sel for them–so be sure to take your own med­i­cine. Your emo­tions are going to be very poor guides up this par­tic­u­lar moun­tain. At the same time you can­not afford to ignore them completely–your emo­tions are the source of your pain. Ignor­ing them com­plete­ly is as fool­ish as a doc­tor ignor­ing your symp­toms when diag­nos­ing you.

The third is to believe that your friend is not inten­tion­al­ly try­ing to hurt you. This is a cru­cial defense against bit­ter­ness. He is mak­ing a lot of choic­es that are caus­ing you pain, but he is not mak­ing them because they cause you pain. He wants you to be hap­py and is just as con­fused as you are about how to achieve that goal.

And so if that’s help­ful to you, take it and be blessed.ghost dog the way of the samu­rai divx

Ben & Robin Pasley of Enter The Wor­ship Cir­cle now have a blog. They’re among my favorite wor­ship artists.

This Goes Cluck!

Tonight we fed Dana fish sticks for the first time. The fol­low­ing is as close to a ver­ba­tim tran­scrip­tion as I can muster:

Me: “Dana, do you like those?”
Dana: “Yes.”
Me: “Those are fish sticks.”
Dana: “Chick­en nuggets.”
Me: “No, they’re fish sticks.”
Dana: “Chick­en.”
Me: “Fish sticks.”
Dana: “Chick­en nuggets.”
Me: “Dana, those are fish sticks.”
Dana, great­ly vexed, shook her fish stick at me and said, “This goes cluck!”

That just charmed my socks off.

Solomon and the Black Eyed Peas

Peo­ple often mock the Song of Songs for hav­ing bizarre roman­tic imagery. Song of Solomon 7:4 is a noto­ri­ous exam­ple: “your nose is like the tow­er of Lebanon” (to which I always want to add “which means you can think of that zit as more of a ban­ner, if you pre­fer”).

Stuff like that keeps many from tak­ing the Song of Solomon seri­ous­ly as a love song. We obsess over the pic­tures that the song employs and fail to get the point.

And we act as though we’ve nev­er seen such out­landish imagery before. Then with­out even real­iz­ing it we turn the radio on and hear the Com­modores belt­ing out “she’s a brick house

she s the man dvdrip

.”

In the cul­tur­al smack­down between us and the ancient near east, I have to give this round to the ancients. Which would you rather be called? A tow­er is slen­der, grace­ful, and curved. A brick house is short, squat, and angu­lar. Quite frankly, we have no stones to throw.

And it’s that way through­out the Song.

So the next time you hear the Black Eyed Peas inquir­ing about the junk in your trunk, cut the Song of Solomon some slack and inter­pret it the way you would inter­pret any oth­er love song–poetically.

Excerpt From A Letter of Consolation To A Friend

Com­put­er crash­es are hor­ri­ble. It’s as though an old-time preach­er was ambushed by an eras­er-wield­ing demon in the night who removed all the notes from the mar­gins of his Bible.

Things Which Interested Glen Last Week

Things I book­marked last week on del.icio.us.

Dis­claimer: these links are post­ed auto­mat­i­cal­ly using the excel­lent yawd hack and are mere­ly things that were inter­est­ing enough to book­mark for future reference–I may or may not agree with the views expressed by the linked pages. In fact, I may not have even read them yet.

Crunch All You Want, We’ll Make More

I real­ly like the fake church sign in this arti­cle from Lark News. Thanks to Church Mar­ket­ing Sucks for notic­ing the sto­ry.

Agenda for next Advisory Leadership Team meeting

As promised, here’s the agen­da for Chi Alpha’s upcom­ing Advi­so­ry Lead­er­ship Team meet­ing.

Agen­da:

1. Review XA 2010 Imple­men­ta­tion Team Work

  • Orga­ni­za­tion­al chart and def­i­n­i­tions
  • Exec­u­tive Lead­er­ship Team, mem­ber­ship and dura­tion, fre­quen­cy of meet­ings
  • Area Direc­tor posi­tion and area maps
  • Task group goals sum­ma­rized
    • Added Non tra­di­tion­al, church led and stu­dent led task group
    • Iden­ti­fied Inter­na­tion­al Stu­dent Min­istry Work Group and Dis­trict Resource Team as sim­i­lar to task groups to report activ­i­ty and goals.

2. Cal­en­dar

  • The World Mis­sion Sum­mit
  • DXAR Con­fer­ence
  • Cam­pus Min­is­ters Con­fer­ence

3. Com­mu­ni­ty of mis­sion state­ment

4. Mis­sion­ary fur­lough sur­vey

5. Cam­pus Min­is­ters Con­fer­ence

  • Lar­ry Crabb
  • Patrick Lencioni

6. Sug­ges­tions for Depart­ment Direc­tors

  • Stu­dent Ministries/ or Stu­dent Mis­sions- E. Scott Mar­tin
  • Inter­na­tion­al Stu­dent Min­istry – Jer­ry Gib­son
  • Stu­dent Mobi­liza­tion –
  • Cam­pus evan­ge­lism –
  • Per­son­nel – Bob Marks
  • Train­ing and Resource
  • Com­mu­ni­ca­tions

At this point I don’t have much info beyond that. I assume the names for CMC are poten­tial speak­ers.

As you will note, we’ve cre­at­ed sev­er­al new depart­ments and so we need to recruit peo­ple to those roles. Sug­ges­tions are wel­come. You can email me, call me, or leave a com­ment on the blog (just remem­ber that com­ments can be read by every­one). I’m there to rep­re­sent folks on the field, and I can do that more effec­tive­ly if some folks on the field let me know their per­spec­tive on things. 🙂