Christian Fortune Telling: Our Revelation Fixation

The end times are upon us.  All signs point to the end of days.

So say any number of Christian philosophers and authors.  The interesting thing is that this could be said of any point in time starting with the very first Christian church.

Part of our, uh, shall I say, “charm” as Christians has been our fixation on what will be rather than what is now.  That has nothing to do with our hope, and everything to do with our desire to know what is going to happen in our earthly future.  This fixation plays out again in our generation with everything from fiction works to Jerusalem-based doom-sayers.  Chicken little is alive and well and writing books.  Perhaps the biggest, most notable contributor to our end-days craze of late is the Christian world’s equivalent to tarot cards, the “Left Behind” series.

I remember as a child being scared to death…

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Calling Phillip Part II – Finding Hope

In my former career in radio, I was fortunate to rub shoulders with most of the artists who inhabited the burgeoning country music scene of the 90s.  Some were friendly and common as a dollar bill.  Others were stand-offish and uptight.  A couple were dumb as a bag of hammers.  There were those who lived in a bottle, and others who’d been on Willie’s bus, so to speak.  There were many who’d fit in just fine at any of our family events; these were the ones who disdained adulation and preferred slap-on-the-back friendliness.  Then there was that annoying little nasal toned twerp (who has since won at least one entertainer of the year award) who would only give you the time of day if you were an attractive female.

One truism I learned was…

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Calling Philip

For those of you who are already immersed into church ministry of some sort, you’ve no doubt noticed that there are a mind boggling number of evangelism programs out there.  Books, seminars, flip charts, tracts…  my eyes glaze over just trying to take it all in.  It seems right to me that we don’t need another program.  We need something that those in the world of diet crazes have started to figure out.

The new mantra among diet gurus is that we don’t need a new diet plan, we need a new life plan.  Addressing the harmful and destructive things we do to our own bodies via food intake must be addressed at the lifestyle level.  And that makes sense to me.

To read this article and find out what in the world Philip has to do with this, click here and visit my blog,  www.wherethefishhavenoname.

The Best Frozen Pizza

OK, so I am not wont to making consumer recommendations.  That being said, I have a consumer recommendation I want to make.

Frozen pizza is one of those weird food areas where you realize the topping are going to, generally, be of low quality, freshness isn’t even an option, and the ending quality is something ranging between aerosol cheese spray and Spam.  But then we don’t eat frozen pizza for the pizza of it.  It’s more or less a convenience item that fills the gaps between real pizzas.  That being said, Barbara and I have occasionally happened upon a frozen pizza that’s a tab bit better than the norm.

Living in the arctic circle surrounding Chicago, one would wonder why we’d even bother to buy freezer fried pizza.  After all, with the abundance of some of the best pizza places in the world here, you’d think nothing that ever crossed the gate of the freezer door would cross the gape of our lips.  But that is a philosophical question I’ll leave for the mystics and theologians to sort out.  All I know is, occasionally we heat up one of those stiff discs.

But then we discovered it…

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When Ethan Speaks

God bless our kids.  They’ll say absolutely anything.  They have no brakes.  A though hits their brain, and within 2 seconds, it’s sliding off their tongue.  And some kids aren’t’ even THAT restrained.

I love Ethan.  He’s my associate pastor’s son.  When I first came to GFM 5 years ago, Ethan didn’t really talk.  The autistic five-year-old spoke gibberish that his older brother referred to as “Chinese”.  Every night before going to bed, Ethan’s brother would pray,

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Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?

“Hi, I’m Stewart, I’m an Ivy League Scholar and a Nobel prize winner, but I’m not smarter than a fifth grader.”

“Hi, I’m Brenda, I discovered the cure to cancer, but I’m not smarter than a fifth grader.”

“Hi, I’m the apostle Paul, I survived shipwreck, near-death beatings, I out witted politicians and explained the real meaning of mysterious philosophies, I once killed Christians but then met Christ and changed, but I’m not smarter than a fifth grader.”

It’s one of our favorite programs these days.  Barbara and I howl and laugh and yell at the TV and adore the kids and muse about the questions on “Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?”  We both agree that…

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A Man Named Moose

He was a big lunk of a dude that I hired early in my days as a radio station programmer.  Though he could have a fiery temper, he was usually just a gentle giant.  A country boy through and through, he didn’t pass through life, he bulldozed through it.

I’m not sure how the moniker “Moose” became attached to him.  It seems to me that I recall mentioning in jest (what other way could you mention such a thing to a guy who could pound you into the ground like a tent spike?) that he reminded me of Moose from the Archie comics.  One thing lead to another, and for years after we all lovingly refered to him by the elkian emblem.

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Who Would Jesus Vote For?

Who would Jesus vote for?

That, or something closely approximating it, is the title of a book I saw on display the other day at a Christian bookstore.  I didn’t pick up the book at the time, but later I recalled the title and couldn’t help but laugh a bit.  I’m assuming the title was tongue-in-cheek.  But it did cause me to dwell upon the question and create my own answer.  And the anwer is this:

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Where The Fish Have No Name Redux

Welcome to my first fresh entry on my new location for “Where The Fish Have No Name”.  I started this as a place to simply let off some spiritual steam and creativity.  I never imagined the response it would bring.  Comments have come into me far beyond the blogs comment boards itself including phone calls and emails.  In recent weeks I’ve been blessed to log over a1,000 unique hits a day, which really blew me away.  And then it all crumbled off the side of the mountain.

Read this blog entry in its entirety here.

It’s a Hurt Called Love

Ever have to shake something hard to get it to come loose?  Perhaps you have something unwanted on the bottom of your shoe, so you smack it hard against the pavement.   Or, you find that an unwanted sliver of cellophane has lovingly attached itself to your hand, and you shake vigorously to cause it to fall away.

I’ve learned that’s how it can also be with us when we give ourselves over to God’s hands.  We would love to stick with the status-quo, so God has to shake us hard to cause us to move.  Barbara and I had hoped to minister here at our present church for 10-15 years.  But God had other plans for us.  We could have sworn that it was His will that we stay here to see through all the visions and dreams we had for the work.  Sadly, financial calamity in a particularly economically depressed area has changed our reality.  I’m not sure how anyone can afford to live here in the Chicago region.  The winters are hard and the taxes are harder.  As gas prices sky-rocket, our days left to serve here are diminishing.

I’m perfectly sure that in my desire to stay beyond our short five year tenure I could have become quite comfortable.  I expect that we would have seen more and more of God’s blessings as we endeavored to serve faithfully.  After seeing our families systematically destroyed financially, it has fatally damaged our church’s already skin and bones budget.  So, we’ve been shaken.  Hard.  Buddy, I mean to tell you, my ears are ringing.  We have been shaken loose.  If it weren’t for the massive medical bills still hanging over our head, we would have found a way to stay.  But the earth has moved, the windows have rattled, and we’ve been shaken loose.

It hurts deeply to have to say goodbye to co-workers in Christ who’ve become family to us.  We moved far from our families and God blessed us with…  family!  Christ calls the church His body.  We feel as though part of our body is being ripped from us.  We were made one with these wonderful people, now we’re forced to move on.

Why does God allow us to hurt so?  It’s because hurt is like a thermometer for something wonderful…  love.  The greater we love, the more it hurts to part.  And there’s never enough time anyway.  I learned that the hard way.  When my mother died of cancer, we had several months of warning.  Still, there was not enough time to say goodbye.  As I’ve counseled with grieving individuals who’ve lost family members suddenly, I’ve often heard them say, “I wish I could have had just one more moment with them.”  But there are never enough one-more-moments.  Love is like that.  It is a thick and warm blanket.  Moving away from those we love is like getting out of a warm bed on a cold night.  It just reminds us how comfortable the bed really is.

In a way it is a blessing to hurt this way.  It reminds us of how blessed we’ve been to be a part of this community of love.  And it makes me even more homesick for Heaven.  What a great homecoming that will be.  Love hurts.  Thankfully, love hurts.