the tindog coffeehouse

When Twitter launched Vine in January, everyone’s initial reaction to the social video app’s six-second limit was something along the lines of, “Huh?” What on earth could you do that was even remotely entertaining in six seconds? Even the stupidest commercials are at least 15 seconds long. And in fact most Vine videos are pretty lame. But there was a subtle brilliance in the limitation. Yes, the short length made it much more mobile-friendly, but like Twitter’s 140-character limit, it also forced creativity. As the Atlantic Wire predicted at the time, “The medium will evolve within the constraints. People will master the Vine. The clips will get less choppy; the rhythm will improve. People will create videos that make sense. And, just like the 140-character limit, soon enough, nobody will call Vine’s rules a limitation.”

When forced to work within severe constraints, there’s no room for fluff. Everything gets boiled down to what’s really important. Think about where you live. How many square feet do you really need to live? Sure, I could be really comfortable in a 10,000 square foot mansion, but I really only need a few hundred square feet. Maybe less.

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Today our baby turns 10. I still can’t believe it. It seems like yesterday when she was first born, all six pounds six ounces of her. From Day One, Erin’s been a spitfire, stubbornly independent and free-spirited with her own sense of style. As a toddler, she’d roam around the house in her jewelry and diaper and announce her presense with a funnel-turned-megaphone, and even today she can’t go anywhere unless she’s properly accessorized and treated like the queen that she is. Most of the time I think she’d prefer sleeping in a fancy dress and high heels rather than pajamas.

A few years ago, Christy and I started tweeting the hilarious “Erinisms” that she’d rattle off, brief glimpses into the mind of this curious little diva-rock star-comedian. What started as the #stuffmy7yroldsays hashtag has grown into #stuffmy9yroldsays and now #stuffmy10yroldsays. Below are all those tweets (so far).

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The Internet is a funny thing. For all its apparent permanance, it’s often times a very transient thing. Technology changes. The way people access the Internet today is drastically different than the way they did a few years ago and is lightyears ahead of the days of dial-up. And the way we interact with the Internet is different, too. The first time I launched a website on this domain, way back in 1998, it was as a “home page”, which is to say a static HTML page (built with FrontPage 98) that had a few images and some text but nothing in the way of dynamically-changing content.

Today we not only expect dynamic content but social interaction as well. Every news article and blog post is followed by a comments section. Readers are prompted to like, tweet, and share it. It’s more than just about generating pageviews, it’s about cultivating a following.

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I’ve been angry and bitter all week. Disgusted, really. As the Supreme Court heard arguments in a couple of highly controversial cases involving same-sex marriage, people all over the country showed their support for gay marriage on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. But it wasn’t just non-Christians turning their profile pics red, it was many Christians as well. And that’s what pissed me off.

I know that we Christians aren’t always going to agree on everything, but the fact that so many Christians not only support same-sex marriage but endorse it just doesn’t make sense to me. How on earth can you read the Bible, claim that you believe what it says, and yet not find anything reprehensible about homosexuality, particularly when the Bible is extraordinarily clear in its opposition to it?

So I’ve spent the week fuming at my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, angry that they’ve chosen political correctness over biblical truth, and despondant over what that means for the future of the Church. If we choose to no longer identify sin as sin, then the gospel means nothing.

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It’s March Madness time again, and once again I’m going on record with my picks for the tournament. And once again, the only thing I’m certain of is that I’m totally and completely wrong. But at least I have enough sense to not bet cash money on it, right?

A few sidenotes: First, I don’t care about college basketball in the slightest. The only time I pay any attention to it is in March, and I lose interest after about halfway through the second round when all my Final Four picks have been beaten. Second, there are precisely zero teams from the state of Texas in the tournament, which means that my interest level is even less than normal. And third, even though I’ve made my picks, I’m not comfortable with most of them. About the only one I feel remotely happy with is Indiana, which means they’ll probably be beaten in the first round. Awesome.

With that said, let’s do this thing.

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I was baptized the summer before my 9th-grade year. At a Wednesday night Bible study my best friend’s dad asked me if would accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I said yes. He led me in a prayer and then told me I needed to get baptized, so that’s what I did. That Sunday at the end of the worship service, I walked to the front and told a deacon what my friend’s dad said, and the next week I got dunked.

That was it, I thought. I’m a Christian now. But I was plagued by doubts for years. I was raised in church my whole life. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting in Sunday school at Oakwood Baptist Church in Lubbock, Texas, learning about Noah’s Ark from a silver-haired old lady and singing “Jesus Loves the Little Children”. Yet I had no idea what it really meant to be a Christian. I thought it was kinda like being Jewish; if your parents were Christian and if you believed in God, then that meant you were a Christian, too. I never doubted God’s existence or that Jesus died for my sins and rose again on the third day, but no one ever explained that that’s only Step 1.

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