I almost broke the chart when I took the Myers-Briggs Personality Test. The people administrating the test had never seen an introvert so far off the scale.  I was taking the test as part of a professional assessment for my ordination process, and I was floored when I saw the results.  I assumed to do the work of ministry I had studied and committed myself to, I needed to adopt the personality of a used car salesman: "What is it going to take for me to put you in this church today?"  But that guy just wasn't me.

The truth is, I am an introvert.  I would rather read for an hour than talk for an hour.  I have a few close friends.  I am NEVER the life of the party (unless I get the opportunity to karaoke Vanilla Ice's "Ice, Ice Baby").  For years I tried to overcome this, to become someone I was not.  I tried small talk and would never let conversations die.  I acted the part that I thought an extroverted pastor should play in a social setting.  To put it politely, I was awkwardness on steroids.  It took years for me to embrace who I am really am; an introvert who knows how to talk to large crowds and share Jesus with people whenever I get the opportunity.  

You and I are uniquely created.  Some of us are introverts, other extroverts.  Some of us are silly and others are serious.  The same way that we embrace our height or the shape of our face as an obvious feature God gave us, we would do well to embrace the gifts of our personality.  John Ortberg has written in his book “The Me I Want to Be,” that life's highest aim is to become who God made each of us to be.  Rather than trying to force ourselves to be someone we are not, faith can allow us to embrace and develop who God made us to be.  In doing so, we will discover gifts that flow from the design of our personality, talents, and God-given capacities. God created us to be us...with love, on purpose.  Trying to force yourself to be someone you are not only creates dysfunction and heartache. 

In a recent article in the Guardian, a nurse to the dying kept track of the most frequently vocalized regrets of the patients.  First and most common was, "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me." 

You and I are not an accident.  Yet the longer we play a part that was not written for us, the longer we miss out on the role where we can truly shine as we are created.  And life is not meant to be a charade, a pretense.  Reflecting on this makes me want to stand and shout “EMBRACE WHO GOD MADE YOU TO BE!”  But that would be a very extroverted thing to do.

Remember school food?  Rectangle pieces of pizza, mystery tenderloins, and mixed fruit with one cherry?  I hated school food, with one exception: the cookies.  The elementary school I attended growing up in Iowa had the best cookies.  Oatmeal cookies with some government milk made for a good dessert. 

At the end of the serving line always stood an older woman, wearing plastic gloves, handing out one cookie per student.  I would beg her- beg her - to let me have two cookies.  There were always extras, always students who for some reason didn’t want a cookie.  I would explain, rationalize, and insist that giving me two cookies would not end the world.  Yet she would always say the same thing,  "If I do it for you, I have to do it for everyone." 

We all know that is not true.  She could have just done it for me and me alone.  She could have just given an extra cookie to the kids who asked politely.  But she fell back on what so many people say - I can’t do it for everyone, so I won’t do it for you.  While that might work handing out cookies, it is a terrible philosophy of life. 

We know that life is not fair.  So do not strive to be fair.  Strive to do what is right, in the moment you are in.  If a neighbor is hungry, don’t tell them that since you can't feed the whole world you won’t feed them.  Feed them.  If a friend needs a place to crash for a day to work through his marriage don't tell him he can’t because if you did it for him you would have to do it for everyone.  Be compassionate to the person in front of you.  Just because I cannot share my faith with the world does not mean I ought not witness to some Good News to the person I see everyone morning at Starbucks. 

I think of Jesus healing the blind and raising the dead.  He did not let the endless mass of human need prevent him from ministry to the person in front of him.  And He did not do what was fair.  He did what was right.  And so should we.  

At PneuProject, we recently partnered with Chris Baker of Ink 180.  He transforms gang and sex-trafficking tattoos into something beautiful.  We have spent the last couple weeks getting to know him and his ministry work better, and I tell you what, it is GROSS - as in human depravity style YUCK.  Not Chris - Chris is awesome - but why he is in business is straight up nasty.


See a tattoo is not an instantaneous process.  So he sits and works on a beautiful artistic endeavor for hours - on someone's body who has literally been violated, stolen, abused, made to BE worthless.  And they tell him their stories.


And since he is working through the law enforcement in order to provide his services, he talks with a lot of officers and agents, the courts etc, and hears THEIR stories about all the icky, nasty stuff that we all honestly hope is not really a part of American society.  But it is.  It is PROLIFIC.  And it is horrific.  I am so ashamed by what we are allowing - each of us - all of us.  Remember in school hearing about the people in the towns next to the gas chambers, how they insisted they didn't know it was happening?  Well we ARE those people - because it is right here, in our towns, on our watch.


Kids afraid, made to run drugs, beaten until they become part of a gang, kidnapped or sold into sex-slavery.  Tattooed by their 'owners'.  Marked, shot, arrested, scarred, lost, incarcerated...hopeless.  


And Chris allows them the chance to move forward without the sign of their oppressors still inked into their very bodies.  He gives them the simple dignity of choosing, perhaps for the first time in their entire life, what their life might look like...literally.  

If you feel obligated to find out more about what is happening right HERE all around us in comfortable suburbia, come out to Tap House Grill on 3/18 at 7:30.  We will be interviewing Chris & showing some of his work.  He may even bring someone who has chosen to make this transformation to share.



Click this image to find out more:

Yes.

Most of the world lives on less than $2 per day.

So stop pretending that getting a kindle instead of an ipad makes you thrifty.

I have coached eight different teams in the last three years and it is as if someone double downed on the drama each fall.  It is never the kids.  It is always the parents.  I have drafted teams based not on talent but which mom would not yell at me.  Which dad would not text me F-Bombs. 

All I ever wanted in coaching is for every kid to get a chance to excel and every kid to want to play the next year.  Too often parents get in the way of both.  Too often which kid plays is not determined by who works the hardest but who knows who. 

Tyler and Cooper are step-brothers (not those Step Brothers).  They shared a bedroom every other night when they started 4th grade.  The first fall of their new life together they ended up on my football team.  They had never played, did not have parents in the in crowd, and often used football practice as the swop spot between homes. 

Small, sheltered and naïve, these two boys ran through brick walls for me.  Both had a nose for the ball and loved to hit, I mean loved to hit.  They might have weighed 65 pounds soaking wet, but when asked to put a helmet on a guy twice their size, they got excited.  Moms and dad from the "in-crowd" let me know that they had never heard of them before, they had never seen them play and it was only their first year (read 'maybe they should be benched or worse still they ought not to be starting over their son who cried the moment they buckled up their helmet.)

No one had ever given these boys a chance.  No one had ever encouraged them to unleash the fury inside them.   Even worse, people around them discouraged it.  They were downright mean about it.  Sound familiar?  Until me.  They had permission to let it rip....to go crush somebody...to be who God made them to be, undersized and underprivileged or not.

God has placed a dream inside of you.  For many, we have never been given permission to go for it.  We have never been encouraged.  Yet, even when we mustered up the courage to play at a high level of life, people around did all they could to drag us down. 

Unleash the dream.  Get in the game.  You have permission from God to get in the game and give it all you have.  Distance yourself from the petty voices that tell you to stay in your place.  Now is the time.  Unleash the dream.   You can do it.               

We have a saying around our house - 'it's easy to be a jerk.'  Unfortunately, we are proud purveyors of sarcasm, quick wits, and sass.  We intellectually flex our mental muscles by toying with one another - NEVER crossing the line to hurting feelings...but honestly we dance pretty darn close.

But it is far FAR more intellectually and personally challenging to be the nice.  Nice is WAY way way more intentional and terrifying.  It is vulnerable, honest, genuine, loving...  S.C.W.I.D.dy.

Mean is just so much more, well, natural...as in beasty, reptilian... Lord of the Flies type... icko.  

Sigh. 

Sooooo... I was thinking a few years ago about love, and it occurred to me that we can't fulfill the 'Golden Rule' - Christ's ultimatum - because we just don't love ourselves.  Check it out:
  Do to others as you would have them do to you... Love your neighbor as you love yourself...you know the variations.

It is predicated on self-love.

So if your internal dialogue is about what an idiot you are, you are gonna live that towards other people.

If you hate your body, your physical self, or worse yet harm it, you are gonna live that towards other people.

If you cannot figure out why someone would want to hang around you, you are gonna live that towards other people.

We cannot LOVE OTHERS until we love US - intentionally, carefully, honestly.  That is not new-age or incense-burning or hip.  That is hard and it is holy.

I am pretty sure most of the ills of society boil down to this bad boy.

Anyway - something to chew on.

Ha ha ha ha ha - it's good to make fun of us!  Laugh  - then do something good!  Click for compassion links.

Ok, so you are getting the sense we don't like church as it is currently being done.  We really love it...deeply.  We just don't want to be it.  Our hearts and minds are positioned towards mission living, and our mission is reaching the unchurched.  For some reason, this is harder to identify-with domestically - for church folk.  Consider if we were leaving Illinois and flying to Africa.  No one would recommend traditional music for our new worship, clothes that make us look like traditional Christian Americans, traditional church language, etc.  Now simply insert urban/ suburban American secularism for Africa, and you will begin to see what we see.  Traditional American church, unfortunately, is RESPONSIBLE for turning many people away from Jesus - music they don't like, long, boring services, rules that are impossible to keep, constant threat of burning in hell, etc, etc.   We are coming for that very group - the people who are aware of but have rejected 'traditional church' but are still in desperate need of the Gospel.  If you are a lover of traditional church, and this site seems weird or cheeky - good - GOOD - we are doing something right.  We hope you pray for this mission, bless it, and know we are rolling up our sleeves for the redemption of the world with everything we have.