There are two songs about New Year's that come to my mind when its this time of year. The first is by Semisonic, the other by Switchfoot. Check em out...

"This Will Be My Year"

Thursday's crush is a Friday night rush
And a Monday morning cry
It's the tail that you keep chasing
And it gets away every time

New Years Eve and it's hard to believe
Another Zodiac's gone around
While you drank yourself high on hoping
And watched the ceiling spin from the ground

Counting down from ten it's time
To make your annual prayer
Secret Santa in the sky
When will I get my share

Then you tell yourself
What you want to hear
Cause you have to believe
This will be my year

Pound your fist and cross it off your list
But you know you're not that strong
When the man at the stop light catches you
Singing along to a brand new song

Well maybe it's
Trash or the overnight smash that brings a
Ship crashing through your wall
So you can make your grand departure
From a world getting way too small

One wheel in the ditch another
Spinning in the air
Put your pedal down to the floorboards but you're not
Getting anywhere

Then you tell yourself
What you want to hear
Cause you have to believe
This will be my year


"The Blues"

Is this the New Year or just another night?
Is this the new fear or just another fright?
Is this the new tear or just another desperation?

Is this the finger or just another fist?
Is this the kingdom or just a hit n' miss?
A misdirection, most in all this desperation

Is this what they call freedom?
Is this what you call pain?
Is this what they call discontented fame?

It'll be a day like this one
When the world caves in
When the world caves in
When the world caves in

I'm singing this one like a broken piece of glass
From broken arms an' broken noses in the back
Is this the New Year or just another desperation?

You're pushing till you're shoving
You bend until you break
Till you stand on the broken fields where our fathers lay

It'll be a day like this one
When the world caves in
When the world caves in
When the world caves in

There's nothing here worth saving,
Is no one here at all?
Is there any net left that could break our fall?

It'll be a day like this one
When the sky falls down and the hungry and poor and deserted are found
Are you discontented? Have you been pushing hard?
Have you been through and down this broken house of cards?

It'll be a day like this one
When the world caves in
When the world caves in
When the world caves in

Is there nothing left now?
Nothing left to sing
Are there any left who haven't kissed the enemy?
Is this the New Year or just another desperation?

Just as I could find you, do the wicked never lose?
Is there any honest song to sing besides these blues?

And nothing is okay
Till the world caves in
Till the world caves in
Till the world caves in
Until the world caves in
Until the world caves in
Until the world caves in

Indian Food for Thought

Complaining is my trade mark move.

I complain about the noises my car makes when I brake.

I complain a lot about being tired.

Usually once a day I complain about being single.

I'll even complain about the ministry I am doing sometimes - does it really matter? Am I really gifted? Do people really care?

The other day in the midst of me feeling sorry for myself I had picked up a magazine and bolted to Zona Fresca to get a bite. While eating, I began to read about some of the stuff going on in India. The country with the 2nd fastest growing economy in the world but where still more than half the population lives in abject poverty. The country home to New Delhi - a metropolis where on any given day you might see a 4 year old doing a cartwheel in the street, narrowly missing traffic, in an attempt to get a few coins from a passerby so that child can eat. The country home to such a rigorous caste system that you have an infintessimal chance of being born into happiness but a pretty sure bet to be born into a living hell.

The country home to one-seventh of all humanity.

And I read about a pastor in the backwards land of India - the place where cows are king, where Hindu's make the rules, where Muslims are gaining a foothold, and where Christians hold on for dear life.

This pastor went to spread the Gospel in a heavily Hindu village and his first day there had his ears mutilated and his teeth kicked out.

But he kept preaching.

The next time they tried to burn him alive.

But he kept preaching
And loving.

No ears. No teeth.

That village is now home to a church.

What's sad is that this great man of faith and I are both labeled "pastor."

But I started the day complaining and ended it eating a burrito.

Lord have mercy.

The Psalter

I have rediscovered the Psalms.

It's not as if they were lost - they have been that huge book in the middle of my Bible for a while - but they had been lost on me.

The reason is because if you are at all like me than the Psalms have sort of been relegated to "the book you read when you only have 5 minutes to spare for devotions or aren't really in the mood."
Maybe you've done the classic "open the Bible at random and see where it lands" devotional time - if so, you had a good chance of landing on a Psalm.

Now I think the largest book in the Scriptures being relegated to such a role in many of our lives is a direct betrayal of our society's mindset. We herald "facts" or pragmatic rational knowledge as the end all, be all.
All too often I carry the same approach to my Bible - I want to read a book where afterwards I possess "knowledge," some historical or theological "fact" that I can recite back to someone.

Give me the book of Romans or a Gospel.

Psalms?

It's like reading a Chris Tomlin lyric booklet from thousands of years ago.

You see the Psalms don't systematically teach about given topics, rather they are honest, raw, poignant, sometimes offensive hymns, journal entries and prayers.

But they are beautiful.
And they are inspired.
And they constitute more space in our Bible than any other book.
And Jesus often quoted from them.

And I have discovered them anew.

In But Not Of

"Blessed are those who speak in cliche for they shall be called evangelical..."

This is not an actual quote from Jesus' well known Sermon on the Mount (beginning in Matthew 5) but in the minds of many of us who call ourselves Evangelical Christians it might as well be. We love such statements as:

"God helps those who help themselves" (really?)
"...we've always done it that way, thats why!"
"Eternity...Smoking or Non?" (wow)
"It was Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve..." (true but maybe a tad abrasive)
"With all eyes in the room closed, If you prayed that prayer today raise your hand"

All of those statements might not fall into the "cliche" category, though some are available as bumper stickers, but many times I as a Christian will ascribe validity to a statement that sounds great but might not hold water. A phrase that is often heard as frequently as those above is: "Christians are to be in the world but not of it." Now this may have attained cliche frequency but actually does originate in the Bible - both Jesus and Paul talk a lot on this topic.

The question then is what does this truth (not cliche) mean?

Does it mean I can only listen to radio stations whose call number is preceded by "Spirit" "Way" or "Dove?"
Does it mean I have to trade in my mainstream breath freshening products for TestaMINTS?
Do I pull out of society and simply xerox the cultural things I need and "Christianize" them? (see local Christian bookstore for example)
How am I to engage those outside the church?
How do I demonstrate the hope I have within me without being flat out weird?

Or should I be weirder? I mean that seriously. Where is the line drawn on being the village idiot? You look at a guy like Noah - called to build a prehistoric cruise ship in a place where there were no major bodies of water and in a world that had not yet experienced rain - and you wonder if anyone at all who knew him thought the word "normal" and "Noah" could be mentioned together. Maybe thats the problem - maybe I look too much like the world - that is entirely possible but all I am asking is for us to think about it, to question. Before we wear the WWJD bracelet lets stop and think and read and REALLY find out what Jesus did - what he looked and acted like - before we wear something that reminds us to do that.

If you haven't seen The Village (2004), a movie directed by M. Night Shyamalan (Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, Lady in the Water) rent it when you're done reading this even though I spoil the ending. The movie revolves around this isolated village of townspeople who are very closely knit due to their commitment to never stray outside the village into the surrounding woods. One does not stray outside the village, especially after nightfall, because of this mythical sort of creature cloaked in a crimson robe that will overtake you. The people continually hear that evil lies outside the village, evil lies outside the village. However as disapperances begin to increase, people get curious and eventually someone discovers the crimson cloak hidden away somewhere - the creature did not exist but was an apparatus wielded by the powers that be; indeed there was evil outside the village but not just outside the village, it also lay on the inside - in the townleaders plan of deception - as well.

The world is full of increasing wickedness and evil and the above is not a perfect illustration nor is this a call for us to partake of what the world offers indiscriminately but we must understand the evil does not lie "outside" our Christian villages/bookstores/bands/conferences/etc. Evil lies in the human heart, and if you are a human and if you have a heart it is inside our camp. We have been redeemed from it but we have not yet been completely purged of it - that day is coming but is not yet here. As Luther notes we are simultaneously saints and sinners. So understanding we are a redeemed community of decreasingly evil people who have been given a new nature, living in an increasingly evil world - we are in it but not of it - what does this look like?

noinummoc

the cracker - hard and brittle as it is - leaves my mouth drier than before
my throat already mildly parched from sitting in the drafty air-conditioned room
fidgeting slightly but incessantly
not from boredom
not from anxiety
postmodern man is simply a restless creature of movement
sitting still requires contentment
and i do not possess her

the cracker is chased with too little grape
too little to fully quench my thirst
just enough to ever so slightly swell my tongue
and make that spot behind my ears sting faintly but assuredly
this upper room ritual is as old as Christendom
in fact it inaugurated it
not the ritual but the act which the ritual then foreshadowed
and now commemorates
i have just partaken of the communion table
and as I stand up and see the crumbs on my lap fall to the floor
i am reminded of the fetters which long ago fell from my soul to eternity's floor
i am connected for a moment ever so brief to saints and sinners, apostles and parishioners
from the upper room until now

my mouth may not be satiated
but this table is not for it
it is for my soul
and my soul has feasted and been refreshed