the tindog coffeehouse

I began seeing friends on Facebook join a group called I Am Second, and it didn’t really mean anything. Then I saw it mentioned in an article in the Dallas Morning News. Hmm. OK, so what is this about?

That’s the question Plano-based e3 Partners Ministry hopes North Texans will ask as part of “I Am Second,” a multimillion-dollar media campaign intended to promote God as the source of a shared, purposeful life. The initiative – which began this month and is planned to last three years – has attracted professional athletes and Hollywood celebrities and drawn more than 160,000 Web site hits from people in at least 150 countries. …

The mysterious ads list a Web site – iamsecond.com – with provocative testimonial videos by celebrities like movie star Stephen Baldwin, Dallas Cowboys linebacker Greg Ellis and former NASCAR champion Darrell Waltrip.

Dallas-area residents also share stories of eating disorders, loneliness, drug abuse and pornography addiction. The intimate clips appear more like the makings of a professional documentary than a homegrown church movement.

I have to admit, I wasn’t sold on the idea at first. To me, it seemed like another catchy pop-Christian movement like The Purpose-Driven Life, something that everyone at church is excited about for a while but then forgets when the new car smell wears off. What was the point, anyway, to get people to join I Am Second groups at church, probably sell bracelets and T-shirts that say, “I Am Second”? I don’t know. That kind of mass-marketed pop-culture Christianity gets a little old after a while. Why does Christianity have to have a catchphrase?

But that’s not what it’s really about, or at least I don’t think it is. The point of the campaign is to reach out to people, talk to them where they are, relate to the struggles that they’re going through. It’s to provide answers to the question of who Jesus is and why that matters to us.

Donald Miller writes in Blue Like Jazz:

The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: Life is a story about me. …

I hear addicts talk about the shakes and panic attacks and the highs and lows of resisting their habit, and to some degree I understand them because I have had habits of my own, but no drug is so powerful as the drug of self. No rut in the mind is so deep as the one that says I am the world, the world belongs to me, all people are characters in my play. There is no addiction so powerful as self-addiction.

And that’s what I Am Second is all about: realizing that we are not meant to be the most important things in our lives, that there is something — someone — greater than us, that there is a purpose and meaning beyond our immediate problems and circumstances.

I think it’s wonderful that this message would come at Christmas time. After all, that’s what Christmas is all about. “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son….”

Our lives, our problems, our stuff. That’s not what it’s all about. Putting God first, realizing that He is so much bigger than anything we might be facing, that’s when we can finally be free.

The Bible says that we are to die to ourselves, and in so doing, we will be able to live a new life, no longer bound to the problems of our old one (Romans 6:4-6).

And that’s the best Christmas gift anyone could ask for.

Check out the website: www.iamsecond.com