Snow

DISCLAIMER: This is a late blog post, so forgive my lack of grammatical cohesiveness in the following paragraphs...I just gotta get this stuff out! :)

I was driving on the thruway earlier this week, and it happened to be during an incredibly snowy expedition as I was returning to my apartment in Fillmore. What really got under my skin was that the roads were very poorly plowed causing my car to slide, skid and fish tail every which way along the road. As I was making every possible attempt not to let my car drive head on into a snow bank, a thought popped into my head. The thought was this: "At this moment I do not like snowplows at all!" You see, I expected the snowplows to do their jobs when the snow hit the streets...and when my immediate need of having a plowed street so that my car wouldn't skid and fishtail everywhere wasn't met, I became a little miffed because the plows were not out there doing what I expected them to be doing in that moment.

All I can say is a deep truth hit me as I was driving that I hadn't realized before. We tend to become bitter and resentful towards anyone/anything that isn't meeting our immediate needs in a particular moment in our life. Obviously a few heated words directed towards a snow plow isn't the best example. But I think the concept rings true. How often do we have deep immediate needs that we're expecting to be met by someone, whether it's a friend, family member, boyfriend/girlfriend, husband/wife? And if that need isn't being met by that particular individual, how do we chose to respond? Will we chose bitterness/anger and close ourselves off? Or will we seek reconciliation/forgiveness among those people we know have been put on this earth by God to meet our deepest most heartfelt needs?  

You see, I think flip side is also true...we have been placed on this earth to meet the immediate needs of people. Do we ever wonder if our choices to become bitter, angry and closed off towards people prevents us from meeting someone else's need in particular moment, and consequently preventing us from having ours met?

I think Jesus words of loving your neighbor as yourself most definitely rings true in moments like this. If we expect others to treat us a certain way...to meet an immediate need of ours, we should expect the same of ourselves when responding to others.

Love Wins Trailer...initial thoughts

Not very often do you get branded a heretic for something you wrote BEFORE it even hits the bookshelf. For this, I commend pastor/evangelist Rob Bell. Much controversy has been generated over Bell's upcoming release, "Love Wins" which is slated for a March 29th release. Countless blogs, video posts and tweets have been spun into the world wide web, all of which condemn, praise, or remain in the "middle of the road" on what little we know of Bell's latest work. I thought I would join the bandwagon and put in my two cents.

Anyone familiar with Bell's literature, mega-sermons and NOOMA videos knows that this man is no stranger to controversy. In his upcoming release, Bell tackles one of the most pervasive and controversial topics in not only Christianity, but religion as a whole: what happens after we die?

Let me be honest in saying that I really look forward to reading this book. I have been a fan of Bell's work ever since I was first exposed to it in youth group roughly 10 years ago. He is an intelligent, charismatic and entertaining individual, and the above trailer highlights this, and the topic of the book very well.

At the beginning of this video Bell shares a story of a note attached to an art piece containing a Ghandi quote. This note makes the assertion that Ghandi is in hell. Bell's response was simply, "Really? Someone knows this for sure, and felt the need to share it with everyone else?" To me, Bell is simply raising questions that others in Christian leadership have simply been too afraid to ask: What is the central message of Jesus' gospel? What do we believe about heaven & hell? How does this affect how I see God? If we take our faith seriously, we can and must ask these questions without being afraid of what we'll find. After all, don't we serve a God who's big enough for those types of questions? Or is God so insecure that He can't handle something like that?

I suppose I should take this time to mention that I do, in fact, believe in the existence of hell...but not as some have previously understood it. I diverge in the traditional sense in that I don't claim to know what it looks like...I've never been there, nor do I plan to! What I do believe is that eternal life doesn't start after we croak. It starts right here, right now. So, we have the opportunity each and every moment of every day to either help bring heaven or hell to earth, to our current existence. And how we consciously choose to live out this life day to day is going to have profound implications for what our lives look like for the rest of eternity. I truly wish I could say hell doesn't exist, but the eternal, resting truth that what we chose to believe, do, say, and how we treat others simply do have consequences. My only reservation in Bell's book is that he may try to overstep that truth.

With that said, I think "Love Wins" will be thought provoking, informative, inspiring and yes, a little controversial. But I refuse to make any pointed judgments/arguments without having read it. To me, it is simply in poor taste and un-Christ-like.