Add As Friend?

I have always been puzzled by the need/desire to be connected to so many people I am really not connected to. Sure, I would at least say hi to most of my Facebook friends if I saw them in reality, but they are very few that I would say actually, truly know me. In fact, I would like to think that my wall let's you know me, but is that entirely true? I have a Seinfeld app on my wall. I love Seinfeld, but I haven't really watched that show in years. If I was to be totally honest, I would put up a Battlestar Galactica app, but I don't. Why? Because partially because of Jim Halpert dissing Dwight Strute. But mostly, I want me wall to reflect not me, but the ideal me. I project that which I want you to see. I guess to simplify things: we all wear masks, but my Facebook mask makes me look better than the mask that I can wear in public. My Facebook mask can have videos on it.
Facebook is like a gas station that doesn't take a card at the pump. Or at least that is what makes sense in my mind. When I have to choose between a gas station where I can pay at the pump, or one that I have to go inside to pay, I will choose the pay at the pump every time. In fact, I have intentionally gone a little out of my way, wasting gas, to find a gas station that I can pay at the pump. The reason is that paying at the pump minimizes my contact with people. Crazy thought for an extrovert, but I like the concept of the bare minimum human contact with those I don't really know. Facebook allows me to thrive on this. I can write quick comments on your wall, in and out, and I never have to really look you in the eyes.
Facebook’s popularity must tie into some intrinsic need that people have. Maybe it is a need to fuel my human desire for curiosity. I wonder how this person is doing; what is going on with them; or, the very spiritual: how can I pray for them. Anything to justify my desire to snooping. We get mad at Facebook snoopers, but we publish the ideal us for them to see. We update our status, upload photos from our camera, and send each other posts. The truth is that by our won actions we prove that we want snoopers, or I might word it; we want people to be interested in us. There are few things as odd to me as the update. Who cares if I am doing laundry now or watching a show. I need to publish my activities? To what end? We want/need to be known. Sometimes we are trying to make statements about who we are, sometimes they are the equivalent of a kid screaming in the supermarket, or maybe they are passive forms of asking for investment or attention.
I hit 800 friends on Facebook today. 800 people that I am pretty sure I mostly know. 750 people that I think I would talk to and be at least on the surface polite with. Don’t get me wrong, I am glad those 800 people accepted me as friend, but what type of relationships can I possibly hope to have with all those people. Michael Phelps locked up Facebook after he won the gold medals in the Olympics due to his friend requests over-maxed the Facebook limit of 5,000. 'It’s funny,' Phelps said. 'Every now and then you get on Facebook and you have people you see and you’re like, "Wow, I went to school with them and they never said a single word to me and now they’re trying to be my friend." I think it’s funny.' Why so many, a popularity game for all to see, or maybe a popularity game in my own head? Regardless, I have 800 friends, how many do you have?

You see Facebook is safe. I can be the ideal me, having limited and very protected relationships with people, and find a place where I hope that people will notice me and see me as a unique and special individual. Pity me if this is the only way that I can find it. Sorting through the masks, blinded by my own, just hoping that one more person will add me as friend. Facebook is not the place for me to build relationships, but maybe at its best it can be a place for me to maintain them.

A Life Well Lived-My Grandpa's funeral sermon I got to share at his funeral last week.

My Aunt Noami undertook a great project recently. She assembled a collection of stories and memories about grandpa and grandma. Children, grandkids, cousins, uncles and aunts, and great grandchildren separated by great distances and seasons of life. She pulled in a collected work from people scattered all over the nation. It is quite the accomplishment. With family everywhere at great distances from each other and our grandparents it is amazing that the one grandchild who didn’t turn in their story lives the closest to them, me. Well, Aunt Naomi, here it is.

At Christmas this year we sat down as a family and read some of the stories. We passed around the book reading our stories as Grandpa nodded off time to time and Grandma wiped away her tears. It was there that I noticed something that was later confirmed to me a few weeks later when I sat in Denver in the living room of my Uncle John and Aunt Sheri with my cousins Jason and Marlow. The memories that I have come to cherish about grandpa and grandma were not unique to me, they were shared. All my family remembers private conversations about grandpa keeping his chair and falling asleep. We remember the clock in the living room, the one-piece jumpsuits, the squirrel hunting and feeds, the grandchildren vacations, and prayers around the dinner table before grandpa eventually wipes his plate completely clean with that one last piece of bread. We all remember the love, the acceptance, the forgiveness, the hugs and, at least for me, sometimes awkward kisses on the lips. As I listened to the stories and contemplated all the things that I received that I thought were unique to me I was surprised that I was not even the slightest bit jealous. To receive such an indiscriminant love does not make one envious, it makes one proud. Proud to have received something so special, so pure, that can only come from a truly unique person. It actually makes me feel sad for the one who has not known that kind of love.

A couple of years ago I performed a wedding for a young family. Several weeks after the wedding the father-in-law passed away and the husband promptly left his family. The marriage was to appease a dying man not for love and commitment. I met with the young man in Carthage to listen to his heart and plead the case of his family. He didn’t want to change the choice that he had made and left his wife and daughter. It broke my heart. After our appointment I decided to swing by grandpa and grandma’s house as I was already in Carthage. It didn’t take long for grandpa to pick up on my heart-ache and I told him the story. Up to this point I had respected grandpa as a grandparent, as a man, father, husband, and a good church-going Christian, but I learned to respect grandpa in a different way that day. He grabbed his Bible and said, “Josh let me share with you what lifts my spirits.” He opened the Bible and began to share one of his favorite passages with me. I had prayed with grandpa before, heard him read the devotionals at night, gone to church with him, helped him even mow the church grounds, but it was then that I saw my grandpa’s personal relationship with Jesus more clearly than I had ever seen it before. Ironically he opened his Bible to Hebrews 11, the chapter about the champions of faith. That chapter holds the stories of people who overcame great adversity and held true to right living. Great men like Noah, Abraham, Jacob, and Moses are commended for their greatest achievement: they have become more like God. Grandpa believed in something that I cannot prove to you today. He believed that there is something greater than us and someplace greater than this place, and I believe he is there right now. I believe not because he was simply a good man who did good things, I believe because he had real and personal faith in Jesus. My grandpa too is a champion of faith and his greatest achievement is that he had become always increasingly like God. He loved so indiscriminately, had so much forgiveness, and we all share such equally great memories because that is a reflection of Jesus, grandpa’s Lord and Savior. I believe that I speak on behalf of the family when I say that we will miss him and we are honored to have known him and had him know us. My grandpa was truly a great man whose story cannot fit into an obituary or funeral sermon. But maybe, with the Lord’s help, his story lives on in us as I strive to be like him and who he chose to be like, Jesus.

Let me finish with the verse that my grandpa gave to encourage me that lonely day, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” Thank you.

My first whiff of upcoming college freshmen (My lament for myself)

The college age is preparing to bring in the next high school senior class. *WARNING* *CRITICAL ALERT* Please do not read any farther if you are a high school senior, college freshman, or sensitive person who sees all people as truly and deeply unique.

So, as I was getting to, the college age is preparing to bring in the next high school senior class. I don’t know if it is obsessive amount of House that I have watched lately or just the amount of years I have under me now in college age ministry, but I have a tough time not being bored. All things repeat, all things repeat. It is so hard for me to look at a senior and not describe to them their next 2 years of life, and the worst part is that if I allow myself to do it, I am almost always right. It’s not that I am super intelligent, just observant. Seniors will soon graduate and talk of being friends forever, play the same songs at their graduation, and embrace the extreme perpetual nature of pre-adulthood until they are shocked into reality by true responsibility or irrelevancy. The permission of society to see ones self as an independent individual goes rapidly to the brain and eats away the essence of intelligence. I really don’t think that this is avoidable, it is part of growing up, maturing.

I just wish one thing: that they would know why. I have always stated the importance of the question why. It is what separates the foolish college freshman and the foolish college freshman who understands why they are foolish (Foolishness in college freshmen is hard to avoid). And understanding why is half the battle (No GI Joe history here). Now as I want all those who are Christians to continue to grow in Him, for those that leave Him or will leave Him, I long for an honest look at why. I wish they would own up to the truth: I had my parents faith, I am too weak to avoid temptation, I was a Christian by association only, whatever. Any of those things are better than the trailing off of faith as they sit for the first time ever with their parents in the back of the worship center.

I guess it’s the predictability that breaks my heart. The repetitiveness of promises made and not understood, the pleading of friends, family, and ministers to maintain consistency, the arrogance of believing that one has arrived, the cold shoulder of perceived normality. Maybe I do want seniors to read this, maybe it will open our eyes. And maybe it will push me to the best possible and predicable end: pleading with God again for strength and their souls.

The Freedom of Me (Identity-Part 3)

Who am I? As I was filling out my personal info on my blogger site it asked me to describe myself. I quickly went to what I do, where I live, and who I am connected to. Pity me if one of those things change. I later asked my young adult D-group do identify themselves without using position or action…they couldn’t do it. I guess a better question would be: what are the eternal parts of me? My job isn’t, or my position, or even my family dynamic. My looks, back account, or even my sinful nature aren’t eternal. What is left and how do I measure it?

I would love to think that my hopes, dreams, aspirations are all eternal things, but it is often difficult for me to separate these from my aforementioned damned companion. (My sin nature, not my family). I have to start with the concept of to what end when applied to my hopes, dreams, etc. The surprising thing is that the simple enjoyment of those things is not wrong. I believed for years that it was God’s goal to take all things from me. I would lay all of things down at His feet. Martyrdom. Oh, how sweet. Sitting in a class with Doug Marks helped me see things more freely. Basically I can sum it up into the concept of what God created matters! God made me to love the things that I love and desire the things that ultimately lead me to Him. Sacrifice comes more with the denying of self and the embracing of the eternal, which is at its very essence the very thing we are wrestling with.

Erase the temporal and hold on to the eternal parts of you. They are bigger than your career. In fact, bring them into your career. I had to learn to stop guilting myself into misery. Bring them everywhere and begin to enjoy your life and your identity as Christ enjoys you…His unique creation.

Uniqueness (Identity-Part 2)

I had a conversation with a student the other day about doing an interest speech in speech class. She was trying to decide between two topics that, obviously, interested her. She was having a difficult time trying to decide which one to choose. It was when we looked deeper, however, that we saw another reason: she wanted it to interest others. Most speeches that I have heard around the same topic are things that not only interest us, but things that we would hope that others would find interesting. It seems to me that this classically defines it as unoriginal as the person is giving an interest speech looking to find originality in the eyes of their listeners.

This does hit at a deeper truth. We long to be unique. How does a person identify themselves? Most often a person identifies themselves by either positions or actions. Neither one of these things are unique. While their position or expressions might be unique to the community that they exist within, at the core there are the motives that drive the expression. All of those motives are always that basest of human elements: the desire to selfishly express one’s self for no general gain (sometimes called art); the need to be known; the longing to be loved; ironically, the desire for originality; and so on. It is impossible for a single person to be truly and deeply unique. At best they are simply expressing different

The truly original and deeply unique person is the one that can actually see another as unique. This either makes the person ignorant or God. The ability to see through every normal expression, every vain motive and see true uniqueness makes one truly and deeply unique. In that lies the secret, to understand the uniqueness of the One and to see what that One places inside of man makes another unique. Not that what they do or don’t do is unique, those are mere expressions. But it is what that person chooses to be labeled as and accepts that label that makes one unique. Uniqueness can only be given by One that is truly and deeply unique.

The intense value of human life (Identity-Part 1)

So I watched a special on Marilyn Monroe the other day. What a great way to start my first blog ever. Anyways, the special was on PBS and was told from the perspective of the photographers and the opportunities they had to capture her into film. It was a different time. Some photographers did try to exploit and use her. Others really tried to capture her; the different sides, moods, and emotions that she carried as she moved through her erratic life.

I really do hate the obsession with pop culture. It is amazing to me that people feed their kids with money they make following around individuals with a camera just hoping to catch a famous person getting angry, hurt, or in love. What business is it of ours to invade people’s privacy? A better question is why do we even care? How boring are our lives that we need to be distracted by the lives of others? Maybe we are just envious.

As I watched the impact Marilyn had on the people and the desire that they all had to know her and to be known by her, it made me contemplate on the intense value of a single person. Everyone, and I really do mean this, everyone needs to be known like this. Every life is valuable enough that people should be trying to know them, understand them, appreciate them. I just wonder how much do I really care for an individual? How much time am I spending on enjoying who that person is, appreciating their different sides, moods, and emotions?

It is the DNA of mankind to desire to know and be known. I wonder why do I not seek to know others in this fully? I wonder if I live a life that is worth being known? All these questions lead ultimately to one, who am I?