Have You Been Hurt By The Church?

I would really love some feedback on this one.  Please jump in and give me some real life data here.  I’m wondering, if you could answer two questions:

1. Have you ever been hurt by people in the church?

2. How?  What happened?  You can get as vague or as detailed as you would like….but please…I’m very curious.  And this really is going somewhere….trust me.

Answer these questions here.

An Evening with Brennan Manning: Part 2

So my second evening listen to Brennan Manning really fulfilled what I was hoping for. After hearing him speak the evening before about the love of the Father, his prodigious compassion, his relentless pursuit, his unbearable forgiveness…I left for home feeling like something was lacking.

I told my wife, on the drive back to Baytown from Sugarland, that I understood that the focus of this conference was simply Healing our Image of God and of Ourselves (I knew this was the focus because the conference was conveniently titled thusly). However, once one’s image of God has been restored (and as a result, we learn to see ourselves aright as well) this fundamentally begs the question, “How, then, mus this impact how we image each other around us?”

READ MORE HERE

An Evening with Brennan Manning

Okay, so just twenty-four hours after I spent an evening with Henry Rollins, I got to spend the first evening of two with Brennan Manning, author of such theologically earth-shattering books as The Ragamuffin Gospel and Abbas Child.  His stature, small and frail.  His speech, fast and slightly slurred.  He was as intense as I had imagined he would be and I sat for an hour as I listened and soaked in the wisdom he had to share with us. The name of the conference (and goal of his talks) is Healing Our Image of God and of Ourselves.  This is no easy process.

Early on he challenged us: “Stretch your mind, stretch your heart.  Renounce the security of an unexamined faith.”

I can imagine the paradigm shift I would have encountered had I not read the four books of his that I have read over the last 13 years of my life.  Thirteen years ago, as I read The Ragamuffin Gospel, my life began a slow but extremely profound shift in my understanding of who God really is and what he’s really like.  Over the following years, each of Brennan’s books has helped to shape that change a little more.  If I had not undergone that process, I fear my brain may have exploded last night as I sat there in rapt amazement as I heard his speak of this passionate, intimate, recklessly loving and unreasonable forgiveness.

He then offered what he finds to be the Biblical definition of “The Fear of the Lord”: “The biblical meaning of the Fear of the Lord is silent wonder, radical amazement and affectionate awe at the goodness of God.”

Here was a man who truly knows what it’s like to come to the end of himself, who battles constantly with self-hatred, who desperately looks everywhere he goes for a friend of Bill’s,  and who has met, in Jesus, the real God of the Universe who  tells us all “I dare you to trust that I love you as you are…and not as you should be…because you’re never going to be as you should be.”

I can’t wait to see where this goes from here with Manning and us tonight.

Comment Here.

Henry in September

So last night I got to spend an evening with the aging alternative icon (his words), the man himself, Henry Rollins. I’ve been a fan of Hank’s since his early days with Black Flag, but his Rollins Band stuff and his spoken word stuff since those days have been very engaging for me.

Hank is one of those guys whose brain works at such high speeds and with such intensity that when you listen to him speak, you feel like you should be strapped in to one of those safety seats like on the extreme rides at DisneyWorld….you know…the kind where you have to pull the harness over your head, fasten the straps down around your waist and arms and grip the bar in front of you.

Indeed, you are going on a ride and indeed you have no control…and to try to get out midstream would cause you great inury.

So last night, Ernie, Kent, John, Jonathan and I all headed downtown to enjoy his storytelling and for three straight hours. What can I say about the evening? It seems so passé to say that we sat and listened to the man tell us stories for 3 hours. Enchanting. No, you can’t really discuss it in those terms. Rollins has an intensity like no other. He inspires to live a life to it’s most extreme potential. When I say extreme, I’m not talking about mountain climbing or sky diving or those kinds of second-hand ways of being “extreme”. By “extreme” I mean actually living what you say you think, believe or feel, to such a degree that there is no question in anyone’s mind in those around you. Hank is the king of living what you say you believe or are about.

Being on the second row, I was able to get some great shots (like the one above) and will be posting a link to the whole thing soon.

Comment here.

Shedding The Things That Harm Us Most

I want to warn you of the graphic nature of this video. It has more than a few violent moments of a man being hit by different cars. My wife made me promise I would warn you sufficiently. There is no gore. There is no gratuitous violence (meaning it all has an ultimate point). I don’t want to unpack the entire video for you…I don’t want to make it that easy.

This video is Unkle’s Rabbit In Your Headlights (sung by Thom Yorke of Radiohead).To me, this is a powerful video for many reasons. It has several layers of meaning to explore. Enjoy it and let’s enjoy a good online discussion afterwards.

Watch video and discuss here.

Fake Plastic Trees

I’ve been listening to Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees in heavy rotation tonight. The house is quiet (kids are in bed and my wife is at rehearsal for the new BLT play “The Good Doctor”) and I have Radiohead’s The Bends screaming at full volume in my office. Radiohead are one of those bands that arrest my attention and demand my full emotional and cerebral investment. Quite unaware of it, I am sure, they oftentimes have an amazingly prophetic insight. Fake Plastic Trees is a stunning example of such insight:

She looks like the real thing / She tastes like the real thing / My Fake Plastic Love / But I can’t help the feeling / I could blow through the ceiling / If I just turn and run / And It Wears Me Out, it wears me out
It wears me out, it wears me out / And if I could BE who you wanted / If I could BE who you wanted / All the time, all the time

There is a tiring and listless futility to a life lived with a lack of sincerity about who we are; wounds, scars, hurts, and all that help form us into who we are. I think many of us find that in a religious culture, the value is placed in presenting a nice façade that helps keep up the prescribed image of what someone should look like in a religious life. Jesus himself addressed this with his many comments about “whitewashed tombs”.

For me, the challenge isn’t so much on being real about who I am with regard to my hurts and wounds…those I tend to wear on my sleeves (figuratively) or even on my bare arms (literally). For me, the challenge is on assuming my proper role as to who I really am as I stand rising above those things. We’ve been talking, inside The REFINERY, for many months now, about how God has invited us into a plan of restoration whereby Christ was the firstborn. His life was the illustration of what it meant to be fully human, and we are invited to participate in that re-creation which must begin first and foremost in our own lives.

My own personal difficulty and I would assume I am not alone in this, is in living my life embracing that newly recreated, fully human version of myself….not apart from those wounds and scars, but above them. This is my calling and it is our calling, collectively, as The REFINERY. We’re in a tough time right now. Many families in our community are going through extremely painful relational times. Many people have lost their jobs and are navigating tough financial phases in their lives. Many of us are learning what it’s like to struggle upstream from our wounds and scars to trudge further on in our lives in this journey of re-creation. It’s exciting times, here and our gathering times on Sunday mornings have been proof of that. Our increasing expansion of our community is but one fruit of our ongoing relational growth and the life we’re finding within our community.

This is good stuff, guys. We’re not growing fake plastic trees. That’s one thing I love about this place and one thing I love about our community. I look forward to the upcoming weeks and months as we navigate this new phase in our community.

Good times…

Comment here.

Prayer request….

Hey guys…I have a quick prayer request.

I have a dear friend of mine who will be going in for surgery today and she needs our prayers in a very big way. Becky was diagnosed with Rectal Cancer in May and has been going through concurrent sessions of chemo and radiation in order to shrink the cancer for surgery. Today, she will be going in for a surgery which, in her words, “will make [her] cancer curable.”

Following this, she will undergo 6 months of chemotherapy.

She has a long road ahead and she will be undergoing a huge battle. She can win, and our prayers for her and for the surgery today are very important.

Please pray today when you think about it….