the tindog coffeehouse

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.

Continue reading…

At the very end of the New Testament gospel of Luke in the 24th chapter is a story of two men, a story that on the surface seems out of place with the rest of the book and one that I’ve read numerous times without really thinking about it. It’s the story of a man named Cleopas and his companion (whose name Luke doesn’t mention) on the way back home to the town of Emmaus just outside of Jerusalem. They are (or were) followers of Jesus of Nazareth, disciples, though they’ve never been mentioned before and aren’t mentioned after their story. Although Jesus’s tomb has just been found empty by several of the women in the group, Cleopas and his friend simply cannot believe that he could be alive after having been crucified and buried three days earlier. And now on this road home, everything they thought they believed seems to be crumbling before them.

Continue reading…

I love The Matrix. (The first movie, of course. The others not so much.) One of the best scenes of the movie was when Neo was sat down, plugged into the Matrix, and force-fed a lifetime’s worth of knowledge in a matter of hours, finally opening his eyes and saying to Morpheus, “I know kung fu.”

In A Shot of Faith {To the Head}: Be a Confident Believer in an Age of Cranky Atheists, author and Christian philosopher Mitch Stokes attempts to do the same to us. The idea according to Stokes is that if you can download the secrets of philosophical kung fu, then you can defend yourself (and your faith) from the attacks of militant atheists, who see a belief in God as a danger worse than child abuse. ”Believers must be armed with answers,” he says, “for themselves as much as for those who don’t believe.”

Continue reading…

I’ve had the opportunity to see the new movie Blue Like Jazz twice now, once at a pre-release screening in March and again this past opening weekend. As anyone who’s followed me on Twitter or Facebook can attest, it’s pretty much been all I’ve talked about for the last month or so. I’ve tweeted, retweeted, and posted Facebook status updates galore. I’ve talked to friends, family members, and pastors at my church about it. I’ve blogged about it (multiple times). I even gave out Blue Like Jazz flyers and stickers at work. And my wife has been just as active, even going so far as to wear a promotional t-shirt for the movie for almost a week straight.

I want this movie to succeed, not just financially but succeed in getting the approval of Christians around the country. I want them to see what I did in it, what I saw in the book by Donald Miller, and what I’ve seen in other books he’s written. It’s important. But why?

Continue reading…

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.

I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve. But that was before any of this happened.

– Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz

My wife asked me what Donald Miller meant when he wrote that jazz music doesn’t resolve. I explained that unlike most music, jazz doesn’t follow a predefined formula. It doesn’t necessarily have a distinct beginning, middle, and end; it’s impromptu, meandering, and created from the soul. Most music is like a story with clearly defined elements of setting, character, conflict, and resolution. But jazz doesn’t always follow such guidelines. Still it can be just as beautiful and just as powerful, and it’s often more so.

Based (very loosely) on the Donald Miller book by the same name, Blue Like Jazz the movie tells the story of Don (played by Marshall Allman), whose own story has already been written. Having grown up in a straight-laced, conservative Southern Baptist church in Houston, Don is preparing to transfer from his local junior college to the prestigious Baptist university down the road. A good son to his divorced mother and an assistant youth pastor, the resolution to Don’s story is already planned, but a stunning event suddenly causes him to question everything he believes in and he soon finds himself in Portland, Oregon, enrolled in the ultra-liberal Reed College, described as the most godless college campus in America.

Continue reading…

I’ve been re-reading Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller before seeing the movie later this month, and I came across this passage, a direct response, I’m convinced, to my admittedly whiny blog post from a couple of weeks ago.

Miller writes:

Rick says that I will love God because he first loved me. I will obey God because I love God. But if I cannot accept God’s love, I cannot love Him in return, and I cannot obey Him. Self-discipline will never make us feel righteous or clean; accepting God’s love will. The ability to accept God’s unconditional grace and ferocious love is all the fuel we need to obey Him in return. Accepting God’s kindness and free love is something the devil does not want us to do. If we hear, in our inner ear, a voice saying we are failures, we are losers, we will never amount to anything, this is the voice of Satan trying to convince the bride that the groom does not love her. This is not the voice of God. God woos us with kindness, He changes our character with the passion of His love.

Previously:
Mistaking rocks for fossils
When we worship God
Attempting to translate spiritual realities through scientific equations