Tranparent and Wanting

I am broken. I am tired of apologizing for this. People just need to get over it. Every struggle others have with this reality is a "pot kettle" conversation so today I am done with it. So who gives a crap that I screw up all the time and am certainly broken- wholly flawed and hopelessly found wanting.

Why is it then, that I still feel guilt every day because I can't get it right? Because I fail to meet expectations others put on me? Because I fail to perfect husbandry, fatherhood, and Christendom?

I dare say that it is honestly my lack of faith and hopeless insecurity as a man of God. My sarcasm attempts to cover my insecurities only to come across as arrogance and jaded elitist pageantry.

I am of total depravity. Today I sit in a room with hundreds of pastors who have served more years than I have been alive. How do I then even begin to reconcile my complete "suckiness" as a pastor, Christian, and human? Doesn't honesty blow?

The Prophetic Voice

Finding one's voice is a life-long journey. I am not speaking to the vernacular nor the articulation of one's native language. I am speaking to the God-made prophetic voice within each individual that sees and wants to speak truth to individuals and situations that need critique and correction. So what's the problem with us all to use and speak to the voice within us?

I believe it is blood. You will bleed when you begin to use this voice. You will make good friends angry- even violently seeking retributive justice for your words which cut so deep. The speak truth, is to invite conflict but also ignite change. People resist change at almost any cost.

I hope I can find enough courage, enough guts to use the prophetic voice God has put inside me for it has become like a burning coal shut up in my bones and I have become weary of holding it in and indeed I cannot.

May we all strive to give voice to that which lies within us all for then true joy, true character, authentic living rises and lives.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

Unvarnished and Unapologetic

So here it is: If I am guilty of anything I hope it is the following:

1) loving people too much- all people! So I love gay and lesbian, black, white, Mexican, drug addicts, drunks, trailer trash, suburban middle class, Latino, poor, and I guess rich if I have too- this pretty much makes a lot of people angry. I love the angry too. If I wasn't convicted to do this, I would take the road most traveled and just try not to rock the boat but I can't. It is not that I won't. It is that I can't. It has become a calling, beyond a socio-ethic to a spiritual act of faithfulness. What I struggle with is loving the victim and the victimizer, the outcast and those who has ostracized, the minority and the majority, the angry and the sad, the hurtful and the harmless - all the same.

2) Being faithful. Not the nice neat- they told me so therefore this is how I act sort of thing but the faithfulness that transcends comfort. I want to be so faithful that it drives people crazy. When people see radical faithfulness (by the way there is no difference in true faithfulness and radical faithfulness except its rarity in today's world), they get angry but this is only the first phase. The second phase is hopefully reflection. The questions begin. Things can no longer be so cut and dry. Then searching ensues and hopefully a new reality is established that is more faithful. Myself- I am of the utmost sinners- the list is long, sorted and pathetically repetitive but I am a work in progress.

3) Be able to take criticism- whether jaded or gentle- and grow from it without wrecking my life, my self, and my calling. I am no where close to this one but hopefully someday I will be mature enough to handle this. I want to meet someone who can model this for me- so far everyone I meet struggles with this too. There are a lot of people who do well to dish it out and no one who can just take it- someone who can mine out the Truth and discard the trash and grow from the experience.

4) Listen. The kind that whenever people walk away they know that they have been heard. This comes from the first three actively in place.

5) Being real. The unvarnished, unapologetic real God-made man that I was created to be- even if there are times that my true identity and true self make people uncomfortable or even angry.

6) Beat the stats. Live longer, stronger, wiser, and more generous than what was modeled to me- by the way both of my parents are gonna be hard to beat at this.

So first and foremost I am guilty of a lot of unfaithfulness of two main varieties: 1) my own actual sins- both those I which I know and still do and those of which are off my radar but in my ignorance I inflict on others and 2) fear- that which prevents me from being and realizing the best inside me.

Lastly, in my smoke and mirrors, I try to cover up my ignorance with fancy words and novel idealism's yet I am still me. I hope that I can be me- more me every day- not the me that I want but the me that God wants- and hopefully along the way sort out the two and discard the first. So I guess its time to take out the trash, make some room for some new work, and keep on keepin on.

If I see you on the "via de la rosa" we can bleed together. Peace.

Grace is our only hope- well that and a swift kick in the rear!

Contradictorious to the vindictive tendencies I bury deep inside I continue to pursue enlightenment for whatever it is worth. I am so freakin' human and that is so not cool. I hope to one day inspire to such maturity as that modeled by the young boy reading for his bar mitzvah in "keeping the faith" who embraces the manta "I love that I suck, I love that I suck and I love that I suck". Not just to embrace my own wanting but to embrace it with zeal, fervor, and acceptance. In this quasi-neo-Marxist radicalism I currently find myself, why am I so surprised to find such critique? Yeah that's right- another loud liberal shouting out truth about the institutional sins we have participated in through our ignorant apathy and deaf capitalistic imperialism of which I am of greatest guilt. I have found the enemy, the new Rome, and it is us. God help us.

The British are Coming!

Silence the voice. Shut up and quit talking. Turn out your lights and let us close our eyes. Not only are they happy to blindness, they deny its presence. They pray for silence, pray for darkness. Build some walls, bio-dome it all and maybe it will go away.

Ha! "Such a time is this!"

Cry out into the night.

Stir up a persistence annoyance where eyes grow weary of rest, where ears grow weary of deafness.

We all see it.

There's a big elephant and it very well may be Jesus which is waiting, expecting even, acknowledgment for a start.

I cannot hold it in and indeed I will not.

A is for things I don't know

Ahistorical, Aethical, Atypical, anthropomorphism, analogical predication, axiological grid, blah blah blah.
School is what it is. School.
Give me patience Lord.