Video - Be My Everything

I used the following music video in our service on Sunday. Enjoy!

Comedian Tim Hawkins

Hey...thought this song was funny. Maybe a good marriage counseling tool?

Weddings and Funerals

I have had a string of weddings and funerals in the past month and a half. In fact, this week I had the privilege of celebrating a marriage and grieving a death just three days apart. The contrast is quite stark between these two human events. Weddings, typically, are much like a birth. They are the beginning of a new thing that the Bible refers to as "one flesh," and they come with much anticipation and hope as this couple looks forward to their future together. The ups and downs that are sure to come don't carry much weight in the presence of marital bliss. There will be time enough to deal with conflict and crisis. But in this moment, celebration is the only thought.

And then there are funerals which too is a normal human event. And while we sometimes call them a "celebration of life," they are still times of grieving our loss. We all will be eulogized one day, and yet the arrival of death still feels like an assault on life. Rather than the future, it is the past that occupies our thoughts in these moments. "What if" is a more common train of thought as we pour through the pages of our history with our dearly departed. Just like a marriage, death goes with us into our future. It marks us for the rest of our lives as we hold on to the love we had for our friend, all the while stumbling towards our own last good bye.

In both of these human events we find ourselves. We find our greatest hopes and ambitions for the days that are yet to come, and we find our fears and doubts about what lies on the other side. We experience our own beauty in the face of our beloved, and we acknowledge our own brokenness as we pay our respects for another who has gone on before us.

And so we live, somewhere between celebration and grief.

Desire

I have been invited as of late to consider what it is that I truly desire. The quick answer would be things like a month long vacation in the Colorado mountains, or new siding on my house. But the answer to this question lies much deeper, buried beneath the rubble of my life.

As I have been reflecting on my desire, I have come to realize that much of my Christian experience has been largely Buddhist in this arena. If I may, as an outsider, condense Buddhist teaching - the elimination of desire is the primary aim. Desire is responsible for the corruption in the world and in self, so says Buddhism. And much of my Christian experience has embraced this approach to desire. I am instructed that "all desire is sinful," according to James 1. I am told that the heart is full of sin, and so the desires that come from it cannot be trusted. And so, I have been taught that to consider my desire, as anything more than a case in point of my brokenness, is dangerous.

I recall the first time I read a little book by C.S. Lewis titled "The Weight of Glory" in which he challenges this Buddhist/Christian approach to desire. If I may paraphrase, he argues that God finds our desires NOT to big, but to small. He wrote that we are much like a small child who is content to play in a mud puddle because we cannot fathom the idea of a vacation at the beach. And so we desire much less than what God would have us to desire. And perhaps as we "grow up" in the faith, we learn to supress our desires for something more because we can't imagine that something better than what we are experiencing might be available to us.

Perhaps one of the reasons that the idea of desire has been missing in my life of faith is that the answers are to be found at such a deep place that I have tended to go about my life without even noticing them. And when they have errupted through the surface of my life, I have quickly supressed them and labeled them as momentary lapses in an otherwise desire-free Christian life. As I have in recent months spent some time considering my desires with God, I have come to realize both holy and broken aspects of myself. Desires that both surprise me and frighten me. Desires that sound very much like the image of God in me, and desires that resonate with my own sinfulness. Only in the presence of the Spirit have I felt free to consider such desires.

So Jesus comes to me and asks me, "What do you want?" "What do you want me to do for you?" And only now am I beginning to realize the answer to that question.

"Unfaithfully Yours"

In the June 13, 2009 edition of TIME magazine, the cover story was titled "Unfaithfully Yours." Caitlin Flanagan wrote a wonderful essay on the state of marriage in the U.S. and how it is effecting our children and society. I was very surprised to see an article with this perspective on the cover of TIME, but it is worth a read. You can find it here.

For the less squeamish, Joel Stein wrote a humorous article on the growing trend of preserving the placenta after birth for the purpose of eating it as pill form later in life. If you dare, you can find it here.