"Stand in the place where you live, now face north. Think about direction, wonder why you haven't before." -R.E.M.

Healing of Heaven

06/05/2010 05:07 AM Filed in: Personal

There are days — days very much like this one — when I long for heaven. I can only imagine that the longing I feel in my heart this evening will grow more robust as I age.

Today I took a friend of mine to the Springfield Zoo for a special evening they host every year. The honored guests are various people around our city with mental or physical handicaps.

I was torn because there were two emotions at work for me today: the joy of seeing these sweet children and adults enjoying an evening of fun was starkly juxtaposed with the pain of seeing the difficulty they had with walking, communication, and thought processing.

As the evening has worn on I’ve reflected a bit on the day. The more I replay pictures of it in my head, the more I realize my own “handicaps.” In many ways they’re more saddening than the ones on display in the innocent children at the zoo today.

They’re hidden. They’re not immediately obvious. They’re ugly.

I have full use of my legs, my arms, my hearing, and (at least a few would agree) my brain. Though this works out well for me in most situations it also comes with a terrible burden: I’m prideful, egotistic, and deceptive. I’m selfish, apathetic, and shallow.

God has been working out all of these kinks slowly for many years. I am a completely different man than I was even a few summers ago. But one side-effect of God’s sanctification is the stark realization of just how ugly the things I still struggle with are. God has purged me of so much . . . and yet still so much remains.

In heaven the lame will walk. In heaven the blind will see. In heaven the mentally handicapped will rejoice at the sheer brilliance of God’s eternal plan.

In heaven I’ll be freed of the burden of my own shortcomings. The sanctification process that began on earth, that has been painful and difficult, that has caused me to shed tears and long to throw off the weight of sin . . . that process will be complete.

We will all stand before our creator, fully healed of our earthly afflictions to the praise of His glorious grace.

Tonight, as I write this, that sounds pretty good.

Tags: heaven, sanctification

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I Can't Hear You

02/22/2010 02:42 PM Filed in: Site News

So for a very long time now I’ve been using Haloscan as the comment system on this website. Unfortunately they were bought out a while back and now I’ve been informed that the hardware and software for Haloscan are failing (which I think is likely a ploy to get me to pay extra money for their alternative solution).

So I’m having to run the site without a comment system at the moment. I apologize for that, and interacting with you guys is one of the primary reasons for having this in the first place. I’m trying to get it taken care of as soon as possible.

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Two Worlds

02/21/2010 12:37 AM Filed in: Pastoral Stuff | Personal

About a year ago Emily decided that she wanted to go back to school and become a nurse. She had a college degree already but couldn’t find much to do with it and she wasn’t enjoying her job at the time. We’ve always wanted each other to be happy with our professions and so I encouraged her to pursue her interests and so did the rest of her family. Her parents even very graciously offered to pay for her school and help us out financially in an incredibly generous way.

At the time I also realized I’d need to bring in a little extra income while she did this because we have quite a bit of student loan debt from seminary and we also have a decent chunk of credit card debt from not having much money and not always making the best decisions from when we first got married.

I’ll write about this in more detail soon, but I started a web design firm and have been getting quite a bit of business. It’s been great: I’m meeting people in Springfield I wouldn’t otherwise meet, I’m helping them out, and I’m bringing in some extra money for our bills.

But some weeks it’s simply exhausting. In addition to the 40-50 hours I work each week at Milestone, I have weeks where I put in an additional 20-40 hours with the web studio (like this last week). This often means little sleep, a perpetual sense of never being “caught up”, and an unhealthy dependency on 5 Hour Energy.

This is not a gripe; I love my work at the church and I’ve found that my work in the web development community has gone hand-in-hand with being a pastor. After all, I’m getting to know and influence people all over the city that I probably never would have met unless I’d been willing to roll up my sleeves and do some work in the secular world. But I’m trying to find a balance and I feel like it’s eluding me. I often feel like I bounce from one world (pastoring a church) to another (developing websites) and the disconnect between the two can often be jarring. One minute I’m working through difficult issues of prayer and counseling with a church partner, the next I’m explaining to a web client that it’s not a good idea to have 80’s hair band music auto-playing at full blast when someone goes to their health insurance website (yes...true story). One minute I’m organizing mission trips and talking to a local pastor about how he should handle a church member who’s poisoning the rest of his people, the next minute I’m trying to figure out WHY THE HECK THE WEBSITE WON’T DISPLAY PROPERLY IN INTERNET EXPLORER 6!!! (sorry...I get a little emotional about that)

So in conclusion: I’m running low on sleep and I’m in a constant state of whiplash. The church is by far my first love and it’s where the bulk of my time is spent, but I’m still having to invest some very heavy hours into my web business. Maybe the answer is hiring more part-time help, but until Emily is done with school we really need the money.

I suppose if I never figure it all out I can at least take comfort in knowing that it won’t have to be like this forever. In a little over a year Em will be done with school and I can take on a few less projects and not have to work non-stop all the time. Until then, you’ll have to forgive me if this blog gets neglected from time to time (as if that hasn’t already happened).

Tags: Pastor, Milestone Church, Authentic Studios

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Theology, Einstein, and Quantum Entanglement

02/03/2010 02:16 AM Filed in: Theology | Science

I’m going to give it to you straight-up: this blog post is probably not going to be of much interest to most of you. Great way to start an entry, eh?

Lately I’ve been pondering what quantum physics, more specifically quantum mechanics, Einstein, and a scientific view of determinism can mean for our theology. This post will essentially consist of me thinking out loud as I haven’t come to any real conclusions just yet.

I am not a determinist. I believe Scripture teaches that God has endowed man with a finite degree of free will. As many of you are aware there have been great debates on this topic, traditionally between Calvinists and Arminianists, for hundreds of years. I spent a great deal of time studying the matter in college and seminary and it continues to be a theological passion of mine, though it certainly pales in comparison to Christ crucified and resurrected.

I do not align myself with either Calvinists or Arminianists as I feel that both schools of thought leave much to be desired in their handling of the full biblical account. If labels must be applied, I would consider myself a neo-Molinist but it’s unlikely that this label means much to most of my readers. The bottom line is this: I believe that God determines much of what will happen but leaves the future partly open to allow for a degree of human freedom.

What’s interesting about determinism/free will debates is they are not confined to the theological arena. Theologians, philosophers, and scientists have all had disputes about whether humans are truly free to choose. I’d like to briefly discuss how this debate has played out in the domain of quantum mechanics and then make a few suggestions as to how this could bolster the beliefs of free-will theists.

Later this week (hopefully) I’ll continue by discussing why Einstein long struggled with the idea that the universe was probabilistic at the quantum level.

Tags: Einstein, quantum non-local connection, quantum entanglement, quantum physics, determinism, free will

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Poets, Prophets & Preachers: Mini-Entry

07/07/2009 07:47 AM Filed in: Pastoral Stuff | Personal

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I’m currently sitting in the performance hall for Poets, Prophets and Preachers and I thought I’d go ahead and post a mini-entry about one of the things that captured me last night.

Rob Bell said he was speaking with a book editor a few weeks ago. This editor goes through hundreds of books on a regular basis. She told Rob that when she starts going through a new book to see if it’s worthy of publication, she necessarily does so with her editor’s hat on looking for the things that an editor would look for; she doesn’t really get to enjoy and take the book in.

But she told him there are rare occasions where she can remove her editor’s hat completely after the first few well-written pages because she says, “I know I’m in good hands.”

Bell went on to explain that the preacher should be able to evoke the same trust within the first couple of minutes of a message. To put in the hard work required to master the art of the sermon is to allow other people to let down their guard, put away their critique, and “know they are in good hands.”

Tags: Poets, Prophets & Preachers, Rob Bell, Mars Hill Church

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Poets, Prophets & Preachers: Day 2

07/06/2009 10:42 PM Filed in: Pastoral Stuff | Personal

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I want to apologize in advance for failing. Day 2 of Poets, Prophets and Preachers: Recalling the Art of the Sermon will be impossible for me to recount in any sort of encompassing manner. We listened intently for around eight hours of pure brilliance today; trying to summarize it would be difficult.

So I’ve decided to take a different approach. Tomorrow is the final day of the conference; instead of giving a “play-by-play” I’m going to take tomorrow and Wednesday to process some of the things we’ve been discussing. I’ll then post a few entries to let you know the things that resonated with me most deeply and why.

Please continue praying for us. It’s been a great week, but we still feel like there’s so much more to learn and take in.

Shalom,
Josh

Tags: Rob Bell, Mars Hill Church, Poets, Prophets & Preachers, Shane Hipps, Peter Rollins

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