Upcoming Event - Are you in?

Upcoming Event - Are you in?

On Saturday, January 19th, we're having some folks over to our house for a night of hanging out, music and what not. Everyone is invited.

It's going to be in Alpharetta, Georgia, so if you're in the area, please shoot me an email at theacuffs@yahoo.com to let me know if you are coming.

I'm trying to get things squared away with the caterer, King Nacho, and knowing how many folks we're having will help.

It will be filmed too so if you can't make it or are in Iraq or Singapore, rest assured you can still check it out eventually.

Rehab, here I come.

Rehab, here I come.

I want to write a book. I want to be Cameron Conant or Matthew Paul Turner and speak at the Catalyst conference to thousands of incredibly hip people from hip churches and see my small, smirky photo on the back of a paperback in Barnes & Noble. I think it's because I want to tell people that are hurting that God loves them but a recent email forced me to reconsider my motives.

The email was an invitation to come speak at a residential rehab.

To tell you the truth, I didn't hesitate for a second. A year ago, my first thought would have been "how is this going to help me get a book published." But I started to realize that God doesn't work that way. I think his work is less of a sprint and more of a marathon. I think we face bears before giants. Or at least that's what David did.

Have you ever had a chance to do something, something that was smaller than what you really wanted to do? You wanted to have your art hung downtown at a gallery but instead got an invitation to hang it in a small coffee house? You wanted to go to Africa for missions but instead were asked to minister to the homeless in your own city? The big neon thing you were expecting was replaced with something less shiny?

At first glance, that's what the rehab speaking gig is. There will be maybe 50 people there. There will not be a big stage or a loud musical introduction from a band. No one will be there to buy the book I self published. I can't invite my friends or ask people that read my blog to come so that there are some friendly faces in the audience. No one there will even have access to a computer so my web traffic won't jump at all. But, this is exactly the kind of thing I think God is calling me to.

I want to tell hurting people that God loves them. Deeply and desperately. That he is ready for them to come home. That he is waiting. And who needs to hear that more than people in rehab? People that have lost their families, their careers, their lives. I can't hope to heal the hurting and then walk away from an opportunity like this.

Imagine if David had done this. Imagine if while tending sheep God had sent him a bear to learn how to fight and he had said, "No thanks, no need. I'm only going to deal with giants. I only want really big challenges." It would have been a mess, but instead he was ready for Goliath because he spent years in the field quietly battling lions and bears. He was even anointed as king and then sent back into the field to wait some more. That would be like a publisher offering me a 10 book deal and then sending me back to write advertising at work for another few years. I would be crushed, but David wasn't.

I'm going to rehab. I'm going to figure out with my friend in PR how to speak at rehab clinics around the country eventually because there's brokenness there and that's where God's love is needed.

I think I found my bear. As the year begins and you feel tempted to look for your giants, don't forget to start with bears.

The kaleidoscope, the microscope and the observatory tower.

The kaleidoscope, the microscope and the observatory tower.

I transferred to an all boys Catholic High School in Massachusetts after a less than stellar freshman year performance in public high school. It had a relatively storied past and was supposed to be a no nonsense environment where I could get my act together. I learned a lot in those three years but one of the things I took away was something I used to humorously call the towel story.

Because I was a sophomore transfer, I got placed in a junior gym class. At the time I weighed about 100 pounds and was only contextually cool, that is I got swallowed alive in that gym class but could hold my own at youth group. On the first day of class, I noticed a strange phenomenon after it was over. People were stripping down and walking toward what appeared to be a communal shower. I’d never had to shower as part of the public school system and would never in a million years thought to pack a towel for school. I tried to hide behind my locker, hoping that the shower scene would complete and no one would notice I had skipped it.

“You don’t have a towel, do you?” a voice called out with glee from the shadows of the green tiled locker room. I peered over the edge and saw one of the gym teachers standing there. “Come with me.” With that, he marched me naked into the showers. He then took out a wooden chair, sat down on it and proceeded to hand me scraps of paper towels, piece by piece in front of the entire gym glass as I dried off. When I tried to leave, he stopped me and said “I’ll let you know when you’re done.” When it was all over I had to pay him 50 cents for the experience, a final monetary punishment for not bringing a towel.

I’ve told that story dozens of times to friends and strangers as something funny that happened to me at one of those crazy Catholic schools you hear about. It wasn’t until counselor number 3 told me it was a form of sexual abuse that I stopped laughing and starting looking at that moment.

Prior to that, I had used a kaleidoscope to look back at that memory. Instead of colorful pieces of glass and mirror, I had added in humor and wit, laughter and lightness, hoping that when I looked at it I wouldn’t see the hurt. It would look big and bright until it became just another random chapter in the story of my life.

The Tower
The problem with the kaleidoscope approach to reviewing the past is that it lies to you. You don’t really see what happened, you just see what you wish had happened. There was nothing funny about that moment. Had I any self awareness I would have noticed that when I tried to tell that story for laughs, most of the faces of the people listening returned shock or sadness. But I needed it to be funny because I didn’t want to deal with it.

The other way we sometimes look back on the past is with a microscope. We magnify words or actions until they’re so big and detailed that they start to dominate our lives. We define who we currently are by something that happened a long time ago. We let small instances grow big and powerful as we peer through the lens of the microscope.

The danger is that regardless of whether you deal with something in your past, it always deals with you. It always leaves an imprint, an unseen lesson that impacts the way you make decisions from that moment on. For me, from that day on, I never forget my towel again. I took careful steps to ensure that for three years I was never without a towel. I became desperate to know the rules in any given situation, because if I had known that the rule was always bring a towel, I never would have been forced to stand naked and vulnerable in front of a room full of strangers.

To this day, I am incredibly uncomfortable trying new things. Not just because change is hard for lots of people, but because if I’ve never tried something before I haven’t had a chance to master the rules. And if I don’t know the rules, I might find myself without a towel in a must have towel situation.

Understanding my approach to rules and where that fear took hold of me came from carefully looking back at my past. Not with the distorted view of a kaleidoscope. Not with the obsessive gaze of a microscope which can trap you in the past, blowing it up out of scale until it suffocates your present with its false largeness. I looked at the past with a telescope. I went to the God’s observatory tower and under his guidance looked back, traveling light years with my eye and my mind until I could see where I had come from.

I was able to learn who I really was and perhaps even more importantly, upon removing my eye from the gaze, was able to see how far I had come. The past didn’t own me anymore. It didn’t define who I was or secretly control my decisions. It became a classroom that I learned from, a distant land I revisited and conquered. A wound I could identify and get healed of. I think that is what God wants us to do. To deal with the past and walk forward into each new day. To shake the dust off our feet and forget the former things because he is doing something new.

So put down the kaleidoscope. Lose the microscope. Visit the observatory tower. The father has a lot to show you.

p.s. Check out www.97secondswithGod.com today for a new post.

Little Einsteins is to Baby Einstein as Heroin is to Crack.

Little Einsteins is to Baby Einstein as Heroin is to Crack.

I love Canada. I have friends there, I enjoy their cheap but plentiful supply of lobster rolls and once spent a vacation on Prince Edward Island, the birthplace of the book series Anne of Green Gables. That’s how I roll, but lately a Canadian kid’s show name Caillou kind of makes me want to punch Canada in the mouth.

If you have kids, you might know who Caillou is. If you don’t, you’ll probably want to print this list out and save it in case you become a parent. That said, here are the seven most important things you need to know about kid’s TV shows.

1. Caillou will turn your kid into a wuss.
Until my daughter watched Caillou she didn’t know the dark could be scary. Then she saw that bowling ball headed punk whining about the dark, sharing toys, loud noises, the wind, butterflies etc. This show is has been banned from our house.

2. Clifford does not use the bathroom.
At some point, your kid may ask where Clifford, the Big Red Dog, goes to the bathroom. The answer to that question is “do you want a lollipop?” Seriously, the implications of a 20,000 pound dog going to the bathroom on Birdwell Island are horrific. Avoid this question at all costs.

3. No one really knows what the Backyardigans are.
My friend is a graphic designer that once illustrated a kid’s menu for a national restaurant chain. After several rounds of trying to get the perfect mix of politically correct kids, they decided to instead draw aliens. I think that’s what happened here. Everything from the oddly shaped characters (are they dinosaurs?) to the grab bag of names (Uniqua is a girl’s name?) this show screams “make a show no one can get offended by.”

4. Dora will send your kid into a cave.
I’m cool with Dora. I’d probably dune surf with Diego if given the chance, but I’d like to light the character “Map” on fire. Every episode he’s telling Dora and her monkey amigo that to get to Tico the talking squirrel’s house they have to go through a cave or a jungle or some other area no four year old should go in. Next time you can’t find your kid, check the old quarry. Chances are the Map told him to go exploring.

5. Curious George has horrible boundary issues.
If your kid steals a hot air balloon or jumps into the dolphin tank at the aquarium you’ll know why. This monkey is no good, plus when he misbehaves it always ends up turning into some great feat of heroism. The hot air balloon he steals ends up saving a man stuck on the side of Mount Rushmore, the chocolate he put monkey paws on at the factory would have hit the ground otherwise or some other such nonsense. They should name this show “Insane monkey” or “Man in the yellow hat that’s an incredible pushover.” Expect trouble, monkey trouble.

6. Little Einsteins is to Baby Einstein as Heroin is to Crack.
Have you ever seen a kid watch Baby Einstein? It’s almost scary how much they love it. And Little Einsteins is kind of the next level of addiction. It’s a gang of four friends that travel around the world helping caterpillars and kangaroos with the power of classical music. It’s not a bad show, but keep an eye on your kids. You might need to stage an intervention at some point.

7. The Doodlebops will terrify you.
What are the Doodlebops? Does anyone really know? Why do they play instruments? Why when they updated the costumes did they tuck their ears in behind their freakishly colored skin? Why do they dance on the bus? These are the sort of questions that will haunt you if you ever cross paths with this show.

There are more shows and whole channels dedicated to kids programming, but these are the most important things I think you need to know. Don’t go in blind. Don’t lose your kid in a cave or get hooked on Little Einsteins or get mauled by Winnie the Pooh.

Now you know and knowing is half the battle.

Strippers, brain science and why some of your friends suck.

Strippers, brain science and why some of your friends suck.

During college I briefly hung around with a bunch of bodybuilders. I know, clearly I’m huge now, but years ago I was not the colossus you see in the white t-shirt. I was skinny, nerdy and I’m not sure why they kept me around. Most nights when we went out I felt like that little guy that sits in the crew boat and yells out instructions to the athletes paddling.

The frustrating thing about going out with these guys was that the girls they always attracted at clubs would never have anything to do with me. I knew I wasn’t massive, but I still thought I was a mildly attractive person with at the bare minimum a B+ sense of humor. But weekend after weekend, strippers and a variety of other scantily clad girls at parties would gravitate toward my neckless friends and never say a word to me.

Eventually I grew tired of hanging around with these dinosaurs of men, but that experience taught me a lesson about friends. It wasn’t that I was a complete loser, it was just that my priorities were different than these girls. My sense of what was important didn’t line up with theirs. The best thing about me wasn’t visible to them on the outside. It was hidden deep inside and that meant it would never be seen by people that put so much emphasize on the surface of life. (I should note that not all bodybuilders think that way. I'm sure a lot of bodybuilders are deep and Christian and a lot of other words that will hopefully encourage you not to beat me up. And Heather Veitch is doing some awesome work for the Lord with strippers.)

I think I learned that you attract what you put out. You get back what you give, and since I was not giving out that “the body matters above all else,” I never got the time of day from these girls. The danger in that idea though is that if you hang around long enough with someone you start to rewire your priorities. You start to become like them.

Parents and guidance counselors have long said things like “the company you keep defines who you are” but something I read recently changed the way I looked at the idea. In the book, “Emotionomics,” Dan Hill introduced the concept of “mirror neurons.” According to him and a host of scientists, mirror neurons are “so named because they fire when performing an action or when watching that same action being performed. Mirror neurons help us learn by mimicking others.”

The scary thing is that it happens without us knowing and that it happens faster than the rational part of our brain can compute. As Hill writes, “the slower, thinking system is dominated by the faster, intuitive feeling system.”

Have you ever experienced that? Have you ever repeated the way a friend felt or started doing something that felt totally foreign but in the company of friends it made all the sense of the world? Have you ever done something and then thought, “That made no sense, why did I do that?” Maybe that’s just a fancier description of peer pressure, but the concept that how your friends act can have a neural impact on your brain is a little scary.

I’m not a scientist, I don’t even play one on TV, but I do encourage you to think seriously about the company you keep. There’s more at stake than just picking up a bad habit or two.

p.s. Check out www.97secondswithgod.com for a fresh look at the Bible and a new post.

p.p.s Special thanks to my foreign readers (Canada, Spain, Singapore, etc.) Shoot me an email sometime at theacuffs@yahoo.com . I would love to hear how you found the site.

The season of start and stop.

The season of start and stop.

January is the best month to start or stop something in your life. It’s fresh in a way a month like April isn’t. What feels impossible in say August, suddenly feels a little more possible when you stare out at a blank calendar. You can stop smoking, start going to the gym, stop watching so much television, start reading more and so on.

But in the midst of all this opportunity, I think there are two dangers lurking. Simple, subtle little snares, but traps nonetheless that all too often hurt our chances of ever really truly changing. So today, instead of a Rah Rah, Braveheart, Just Do It, get sweaty with excitement kind of post, I thought I’d kick out two warnings about staying true to whatever it is you’re trying to start or stop this year.

1. The mixed up missions of the mind.
In the book, Addiction and Grace, Gerald May laid out a simple idea that blew me away. He said essentially that when we determine to start doing something new, the part of our mind that doesn’t want to do this new thing actually pretends to be helpful. It rallies the troops, leads the cheers and encourages us to start. For instance, the part of you that doesn’t want to run or exercise, actually says, “Let’s do it for real this year, let’s get a trainer and some new shoes and tell all our friends we’re going to run a 5K.” For years it might have told you that fat was who you were and who you were always going to be, but out of the blue, it’s suddenly your biggest cheerleader. Why? Because secretly, a bigger goal potentially means a bigger failure, which potentially means a bigger relapse into old behavior.

Your mind, at least the part you’d expect to resist, is hoping that if you fail in a big, spectacular way, your 180 back into bad decisions will be cataclysmic. This was revealing to me, because I never understood the degree to which my own flesh actually plotted and planned against my success. I’ve read a billion verses about that, but the concept of deception like this was surprising.

The lesson I took away was that it’s OK to start with small goals. To run a mile before you plan to run a marathon. To build a foundation of tiny successes before you try to climb Everest. And, to not trust yourself when it came to changing old behaviors.

2. The replacement theory.
Counselor #4 came up with this concept and I think it’s a good one. Basically it goes like this, when we stop something in our lives we have to replace it with something. That’s it. When you take something out, you have to put something else in its place. There’s an example of this in the Bible. A man is healed of a demon but leaves his house and life empty. In that one demon’s place, seven return, more powerful and more destructive than the first.

You see this concept a lot in addiction. An alcoholic will quit booze but become a raging workaholic. One addiction was just replaced with another. The tricky thing is being realistic with what you replace in your life. I have a lot of friends that will stop doing something and tell me that with that new time they’re going to read the Bible. They’ll stop using the Internet at home say instead, with those 20 hours a week, they’re going to spend time in God’s word.

That is adorable.

It’s not real though. What usually happens is that it’s fairly impossible to go from 0 minutes in the Bible a week to 20 hours. And when they finally brush up against this reality, they find themselves right back online.

The other thing that this does is make God really small. Did you notice that when the Prodigal Son returned, the father didn’t replace his junk with a religious ceremony? He replaced it with a party. Instead of working in a pigpen, there was a party. Why don’t we ever treat things like that? Maybe, when you quit doing whatever it is you don’t like about your life, it’s not just that God wants you to read the book of Micah all day. Maybe he wants you to join an ultimate frisbie league. Or go to movies with your friends. Or eat sushi or a thousand other things.

I think he wants us in his word, but I also think he knows we won’t become monks just because the calendar says January 2 and we’ve quit watching television.

I wish you the best in this year’s resolutions. I hope they’re small and real, but above that, I hope you’ll remember that when the Prodigal Son returned, in what was arguably the biggest “fresh start” moment, he didn’t get any. He got a party instead of resolutions.

And that’s what I think God wants to give to you.

p.s. I wrote a new devotional today on www.97secondswithGod.com
It's called "You're not going to Guam." Check it out.

The new blog.

A handful of folks have asked me to write a daily devotional.

So I did.

It's short.

It's Bible based.

It's going to be published every day of the year.

Starting today.

Check it out at www.97secondswithGod.com