I haven't posted here for a while. It was last year, actually. A little over four months ago. I have been busy - I got a job as a youth minister and I have been hanging out with my dad on The Fireside and with my wife and kids here at the house. I am in a play (Nano Romantico) - which my wife directed - and I am looking forward a few weeks to my third class at the School for Lay Ministries.

I have been busy, but mostly I have not posted because I haven't had anything to say.

The investigation into the spiritual disciplines has not been very fruitful. Here is where I am with this whole thing:

This is why people think that Jesus wouldn't like them. This is why people think that Christianity is for fools. I have failed miserably at evaluating my lifestyle and, if I were to subscribe to the common notion that failure and guilt were a popular theme in Jesus' teaching - I would be defeated and give up. I know this is true because I have believed that and I have done that.

I am reading a book right now that was recommended to me at least three times. I am reading "Blue Like Jazz" by Donald Miller. It is changing me.

If Christianity were a person, would it like you? If Jesus were here today, would he seek you out?

I can safely say "yes" to both of these questions, and I can also tell you that I have failed to live out the disciplines that are listed in the widget at the right. I am a person, and that has baggage. I am a Director of Youth Ministries for a United Methodist Church, and that means nothing in terms of my relationship with Jesus. He doesn't care. He is interested in me, and if I fail miserably at my blog and at my job, then I just have to talk to Him about it, because if anyone gets that, it's Jesus.

If the guy on the radio sounds like he would yell at you when you called in, then turn the dial. Find some good music, for cryin' out loud. Or do what I do and find a nice podcast of This American Life. Ira Glass is near Genius. Trust me - it will do your soul more good than the bereavement that you will get from pastor #3 on the local radio station. If you need a sermon - you can get one here. Otherwise, just take a few minutes to yourself and tell God that you miss him and that you wish He were here. It is amazing what can happen.

And read "Blue Like Jazz," it will be pleasant experience for you no matter where you are in your journey through life. My apologies, specifically, to Josh and Ariah for not taking the recommendation sooner.

off to school - camping style

I am off to Indianola, IA, for the weekend to attend the first weekend of the School for Lay Ministries. This weekend is kind of an introduction to the coursework and a workshop on reconstructing the church. I have been reading the material for the first class, and it is really good. Its all about shifting paradigms and how the church is (or, more likely, is not) keeping up. It is all stuff that I have discussed with former church folks and roommates, but to read a fresh perspective and to go to meet with others to discuss it is exciting.

I have chosen to camp for the weekend. I borrowed a tent and a sleeping bag from our pastor (not Josh, Doug) and a nice sleeping pad that he thought might just keep me alive in the Iowa November night. We all have the option of hotels for the weekend, and seeing as how I consider sleeping in cushy beds and eating nice meals while discussing culture, poverty and church action to be somewhat hard to digest, I thought this might be a better way of experiencing the weekend for myself.

Plus, my family doesn't camp, so this is a great opportunity to retreat for myself. I am looking forward to some food and conversation, some study and prayer, and some quiet time with my thoughts and my really cold little toes.

I will have a full report next week (give or take a week or two).

Wesley, Claiborne, and 1607

I was sitting at my desk in tears during this video. (its kind of long, so carve out some time.)



I am going to Simpson college on November 2 for the weekend to start my Lay Ministries class. and I have been reading John Wesley and revisiting Shane Claiborne in my attempt at getting ready to enter servant leadership and embrace what it truly means to be a servant. I am excited, and I want to maintain the kind of excitement that changes my life and impacts the people around me. I think that I will watch this video twice a week until it really sinks in.

It has been amazing to read all of the blogs and emails from the folks from our community at 1607. I am encouraged by the ways that our experiment is playing out in everyone's life. And in my own as well. I think that I will be running on the inertia that I got from that place for a long time, and I didn't really even realize how much of a push I was getting.

I am enjoying Iowa, but part of my heart will always be in Nashville. (How's that for a souvenir t-shirt)

A final food budget...

I think that we have settled on a food budget after our monthly struggle trying to wrestle the budget down to one dollar per person per day. I think that the kinds of sacrifices that we have to make to get there start to interfere with other parts of our value system. For instance, I couldn't shop anywhere other than Aldi, and that store is on the other side of town. No walking and no stopping by on the way home for milk. I read on Ariah's blog that he allowed 100 dollars per person for food in his $1000 monthly budget, and I figure we can cut that in half. Of course, two of our people barely eat, so that has a huge impact. I am capping our food budget at $200 per month, knowing that some months will require more money than others, and I am hoping to average $180. So that's that.

Our weekly bible study is evaluating the spiritual disciplines along with our walk thought the book of Luke, so I am trying to use that as a springboard to be more intentional about this blog. I have to admit, it has been only a little better than a failure so far, but I am still trying to create a rhythm that will lend itself to more disciplined living. I am, sorry to say, a long way off.

I think I will go read a bit and say a prayer. Small steps, you know. Small steps.

Obama, Tornadoes, Wesley, etc., etc...

We didn't get to see Barack Obama last night. We had a babysitter and everything, then these pesky tornadoes came and spoiled our evening out. Since Avery has a new found phobia of tornadoes and all, we felt it would not be fair to have her first experience with one be with the babysitter. Alas, there was no tornado, though the storm that produced one did go directly over our house. Better safe than sorry, but we played it safe and I was still sorry that I didn't get to go to the rally.

I met Dawn during her lunch hour yesterday at the Wesley center downtown and we helped serve free lunch. Well, actually, i did dishes. Then we sat and had lunch with the locals and enjoyed ourselves, and Roman was a big hit. The free lunch is served there the first Friday of every month, so I think that I can make a routine of it and not overwhelm my schedule.

I applied with the School for Lay ministries of the Iowa Annual United Methodist Conference to take coursework to pursue becoming a licensed local pastor. The Pastor/Parish Staff Relations Committee of our church met on Monday, and as far as I know they sent the application on to the charge conference. If I end up going, the course would require four weekends a year for three years and would begin on November 9, so I would be gone that entire weekend. I would leave Friday afternoons and be back Sunday evenings.

I will keep you posted...

Barack or Social Principles...

Tomorrow night, Tuesday, October 2, I have a tough decision to make. Barack Obama will be having an event at the community center less than two blocks from my house. At the same time, our church starts the series "Social Principles of the United Methodist Church."

Decisions, Decisions.

I have been busy posting with my dad on the fireside, but I will have lots of stuff to talk about this week. (not just politics and social principles, either) Stay tuned...

redrawing the map...

I have revamped the list of spiritual disciplines at the right. I got ahold of a copy of "Celebration of Disciplines," by Richard Foster, and have been trying to get more focused and specific. The first four are what Foster would describe as inward disciolines. The next five are the disciplines and the last four are hte outward discilplines, and the last four are the corporate disciplines. I started the Disciple II bible study last night, so I have some extra accountability in the area of study, and I have found a partner to begin fishing with, which I hope to learn as a tool to accomplish several of the other disciplines. I am realizing that the most powerful tool in exercising these disciplines is rhythm (or routine, however you wish to define it for yourself) and I am going to woek on finding my own rhythm in the next few weeks. So much to do, so much to do.

Right now, its off to the park with the kids.

small plates and red meat...

I want to address some issues that I brought up in earlier posts about food and budgeting. I talked about soem approaches to being intentional about what we eat, including using smaller plates and only eating red meat on Fridays. I have discovered that there are some logistics to those decisions that make them hard to implement. For instance, we only have five small plates, and the kids usually get two of them. That means that Dawn and I get two and there is one left. Following alright, I take it? If we don't do dishes in between meals (which occasionally is allowed to happen), then we don;t have enough dishes. Then we go back to big plates and soon we just skip the littel plates altogether. So, I just have to keep at it and remember that using nig plates with small portions still works. But, its hard. When we tried to do red meat Fridays, we found that we had leftover meat from Friday which, on our tight budget, we could let go to waste, so we had to find a time to eat it in the following days. Then, we were invited to a cookout where there were only hamburgers and hot dogs. I could argue that hot dogs can hardly be classified as meat, but that wouldn't serve the purpose of being intentional. So, once we broke the rule a couple of times and instituted some exceptions, it didn't really stick. We are still evaluating our budget and trying to find ways to simplify, but I don't think that small plates and red meat Fridays are going to be part of the regiment. We have lots of food right now, so i am going to try and get to the end of the month without buying anything but milk and bread. We spent about $155 on food in the first week ( we did buy a couple of expensive things like salmon fillets that we didn't have last month), so we will end up closer to $200 probably for September.

The scripture reading is going well, thoug I have skipped a few days (mostly just wrapped up in this online stuff), but I am getting into a routine and it is getting easier to do it first thing in the morning. I think that I will find a way to start looking at solitude as a regular part of my sppiritual diet. One idea is to start fishing on Saturday mornings, so that I can have our fish (reducing our grocery budget) and spen some quiet time alone.

Other ideas?

I have been reading daily in my Bible. All is well there. I have been reading Matthew in th New Living Translation. I think I'll try and have a podcast about biblical translations sometime soon, if anyone wants to try a conference call with me. I am also reading some texts on the Methodist Church, of which Dawn and I are members. We are transferring our membership from Texas to the church down the street. I am researching the social principles and the doctrinal statements because I am considering a course to become a licensed local pastor. I am very interested in what everyone thinks about that. I feel like I need to continue studying in a larger context the stuff that I have been reading lately. If I am raising questions and challenging the beliefs of my family, I think that I need to do it within a structure that provides some direction and that I can rely on to ground me in a faith system that I know and trust. I haven't signed up for anything yet, but I have been checking it all out and want to make a decision soon.

In other news, the grocery budget struggle continues. It turns out we are not as good at it as I had expected us to be. In other words, I am not as good at it. It is easy to sit around here and type and go on and on about sacrifice and the things I am going to do to practice it, it is another thing altogether to change my behaviors and the things that I understand about eating and feeding my family. There is a strong force in our culture that suggests that food comes first, so buy the good stuff and then budget the rest. Food is such an enormous part of our life and routine, and not just sustenance food, I'm talking about gourmet cooking and "eating right," that it is hard to think in terms of spending less money on it. i will have updates on how much we are spending, but for now you can rest easy knowing that we are already over budget.

yikes.

podcasting...

I have been working on the launch of my first podcast, so the blog posts are an opportunity cost. I have been reading in the bible every day, but I just realized that I haven't read anything today and here I am writing a new post. Well, i mostly wanted everyone to have the podcast link so that you all can go and listen and subscribe.

Be sure and check out the fireside as well, my dad and I are having some great conversation over there.

This is another quote from the book "Stealing Jesus" by Bruce Bawer:

"The simple word religion lends dignity to prejudice, muffles opposition and obliges the media to tread carefully. Not only politicians but journalists, too, are less likely to criticize frankly the attitudes of individuals or groups when they identify themselves as Christian and attribute their attitudes to their faith."

I think that this is critical in the upcoming election cycle. So often even I fall into the trap of believing that the conservative candidates represent religion., and the media does little to dispel that myth This bumper sticker that I saw was a little more straightforward:

"When Jesus said 'love your enemies,' I think he meant don't kill them."

reading first...

I have made it a point in the last few days to sit down and read from my bible rather than sitting down and typing on this blog. I want to implement a daily regiment of scripture reading, and if I sit down at the computer it will never get done. So, I think that will be my new routine. Before I sit down at my desk, I will sit down on the couch and read from the Bible. If I don't have time to read, then I don't have time to write. That is what I will work on in September, and I can easily report on my progress, because If I end up here it will only be after I have made time to implement my plan. If you see no posts in September, its because the plan isn't working.

I am doing a lot of exciting stuff right now. I have just started a blog with my father, which will be an interesting endeavor and not something every son gets an opportunity to participate in. I am also working with the audio/video team at our church and will possibly be building and connecting teams to encourage the creative process and help nurture the program. I am meeting with some folks tonight about it. Also, I am hoping to post my first podcast next week, "The Brown Tent." and I will be filling you all in on how to subscribe to it. (Ariah, perhaps we can find time in your busy moving schedule to chat about that. And maybe you would like to contribute.) The community in Nashville is winding down, with the Burts moving into their new apartment and starting their new life together and the departure of the Fines, on their way to Minnesota. I believe Chris has already left and Josh will be heading out at the end of the month, though he is staying in Nashville. I will say small prayers today for all of their safe journeys and for a continued relationship with some of the best friends I have ever had.

pressing on...

Well, we went to Aldi on Monday and spent $69 on food. That puts us about $47 over budget for the month. My goal was $1 per person per day, and we will have come out at about $1.39 per person per day. Some of the food will be left over, so we will just try it again next month. It looks like evaluating our food budget will be more of a process than an event.

My family and I are out of town for the weekend, so its not a good time to implement a new routine, but I think that i will begin a new morning ritual of reading in the Bible for 10 minutes and catching an audio chapter during the kids' afternoon nap. If you have never listened to a reading of the bible, I highly recommend it. I think that the original text was intended to be read out loud, since only a few would have been able to read it. The cadence, style, and even the repetitions seem to make more sense when I hear them spoken. Try it, you can find audio books of the Bible at the library usually. If not, you can download them for free here.

The dynamics of food budgets...

I am finding that eating on $120 is going to be more of a sacrifice than I had thought. We are already close to using up that amount. We spent $61 at Aldi at the beginning of the month. Then, I bought meat for our red meat Friday (more on that later), and spent $11 on meat and a cantaloupe. Then, I had to stop at Hy Vee for bread and milk, where I spent about $26. So, that's $98 and we are not even to the middle of the month. Plus, my wife has to take her lunch to work, so she basically eats two meals, breakfast and lunch, on her own. So, she is a single unit for about 35 0r 40 meals a month, and we lose a lot of the economy of feeding all four of us at the same time. We are still getting adjusted to Iowa living anyway, so this experiment may have to go on for a few months before we get it right. In the meantime, our conversations are very much about what we do with the money that we don't spend on food for ourselves. Josh is having a great conversation about that st the Eikon Project, so it will be interesting to see where it goes and what kinds of things we discover about the needs of our communities and the places where our excess might be put to better use than serving up over-indulgent meals to us.

I think that the next discipline will be reading scripture, because I need to find a routine with it and I can use the strength and wisdom to attack the rest of the list. Currently, I try to read one page a day, but its hit and miss, so I may need to re-examin that. I am still working on posting the reciepts, and I think that I will have my wife transcribe them for me and put them in a widget at the side of the blog. We'll see.

I will be seeing the housemates in Nashville in about 20 hourts and counting. Man, I can't wait. I love those folks.

I'm reading this book, "Stealing Jesus," and I extracted this quote from it. It was originally written by Houston Smith in a paper for The World Religions:

He invited them to see things differently, confident that if they did so their behavior would change accordingly. This called for working with people’s imaginations more than with their reason or their will. If listeners were to accept his invitation, the place to which they were being invited would have to seem real to them. So, because the reality his hearers were most familiar with consisted of concrete particulars, Jesus began with those particulars. He spoke of mustard seeds and rocky soil, of servants and masters, of weddings and wine. These specifics gave his teachings an opening ring of reality; he was speaking of things that were very much a part of his hearers’ worlds.

But having gotten them that far, having roused in them a momentum of assent, Jesus would then ride that momentum while giving its trajectory a startling, subversive twist. That phrase, “momentum of assent,” is important, for its deepest meaning is that Jesus located the authority for his teachings not in himself or in God-as-removed but in his hearers’ hearts. My teachings are true, he said in effect, not because they come from me, or even from God through me, but because (against all conventionality) your own hearts attest to their truth.

I love this passage, because I feel like we so often trivialize our faith into bumper sticker theologies and then invoke the name of Jesus to give what we say authority, when, in fact, the things that we say should have authority because they "are true...not because they come from me, or even from God through me, but because (against all conventionality) your own hearts attest to their truth."

This is a little off subject, and I will be posting our first grocery receipt later today, but I will be revisiting this topic a lot in the future. I am examining the ways that I understand my faith and the ways that I represent it, so close examination of language is essantial. But, hey, more on that later.

wow...

check out this article on our diets.

dialogues on sacrifice...

My wife and I have been having a lot of dialogue about the sacrifice part of simple and sacrificial living. I want to go beyond simplifying my life - I want to do it with purpose. I want to experience the closeness with God that comes from giving something up; sacrificing something so that others may benefit. I suggested that we give up red meat for a period of time, like the first week of every month. After a lengthy debate after breakfast (bacon, eggs, and french toast, by the way) Dawn suggested that We eat red meat only once a week for a month. I realized during our conversation that food is definitely something that we don't evaluate. It is not even something that my wife and I look at in our life. It is one of the things that our society is awkward addressing. Sure, we talk about the food pyramid and carbohydrates, but do we really evaluate our eating habits? Do we look at all the food in our grocery stores and wonder why there is so much available and so many people are hungry? Food, money, sex, and religion are all subjects that we skirt around and only look at the easy parts. That is alright for most of the world, but I claim to be trying to follow the teachings of Jesus and have a healthier relationship with God. So aren't I required to be more evaluative? Shouldn't I examine my actions and constantly adjust my lifestyle so that it comes that much closer to the one that Jesus led? I can make wrong decisions, I can fail at the attempts to improve, I can even turn my back on God and look with lust at the world, and God will wait patiently for me as I indulge my humanity. But I have done all of those things, and I know what my life looks like when indulgence is at the center. It is a life that denies my design and keeps me from experiencing the peace that is at the core of a relationship with God. And I want that peace. In order to achieve it, though, I have to commit to opening up these conversations, even if it means havign hard conversations about what we eat with my wife. So, in an effort to find a starting place, we will only be eating red meat on Fridays this month. this is essential in meeting our financial goal of a $120 grocery bill, and it provides some degree of intent to our experiment.

We will need to go to the store tomorrow, so my month will ofiicially begin there. I will be posting the receipt totals from my grocery trips and giving some examples of meals and snacks that we are trying in order to meet our new standard.

portions...

Dawn and I have decided that it will be difficult to control how much we spend on food and not consider how much we eat (both in quantity and frequency). Genius, no? So, for the month of August, as we try and whittle away our grocery budget, we will use the small side dish plates for our dinners. That's right, we will use the "kid's plates". Maybe they can use the saucers.

Here are some interesting numbers. They make the "kiddie plates" not seem so small.

simple and sacrificial living...

I think that a definition would be a great place to start when evaluating these disciplines. I must know what they mean, to me and to others, before I can begin to own them and implement the actions that will make them part my daily life and routine. I have had some great conversations with my friends Josh and Ariah about what it means to live simply and sacrificially, and what the ramifications for that kind of a lifestyle are. There are some larger questions that arise when the details of this kind of change enters conversations, such as "how much sacrifice is enough?" and "how can you justify one purchase and not another?" but I won't be tackling the difficulties of the details, at least not anytime soon, just focusing on direct actions that I can take to practice the disciplines and reporting on how things are going and what kinds of revelations I am having about my faith, if any.

Simplifying my life is something that I have had the opportunity to take a long look at, but have only applied it to my own life, to be honest, in ways that benefit me. I have been thinking lately about how to implement a tangible element of this discipline in my life that might begin to bear some fruit, not just in my life and the life of my family, but in the lives of others around me and beyond. I'm hoping to create actions that are not only practical, but truly sacrificial. I have to consider that my family must agree if I choose something that affects their lives. I also have to be careful not to make my initial actions so dramatic that I lose my focus on incremental change.

One of the immediate changes that I have noticed since we left our community in Nashville is a spike in our grocery bill. This is something that I was anticipating, but not really prepared for. One of the things that I try to do is to shop locally and stay close to my house. There are no grocery stores in walking distance except Hy-Vee, which is pretty expensive and not really local. A wise man once told me, "never underestimate the value of proximity," (Ariah Fine, 2007). I don't really know how much we have spent on groceries this month, but I am well aware that it is more than most of the world makes in a month. (check out this article about global incomes.) This has been weighing on me lately.

So, as a first step in sacricifial simplification, I will be taking my family through the month of August on a grocery budget of $120. That is roughly $1 a day per person. I do this with some confidence, because I have spent the last year shopping and cooking for seven adults and my two children, and doing so for about that much money. It will be harder now, since it is less economical to cook for four than for seven. Also, I do not have the expertise of my roommates at rummaging food from various receptacles around town. (Although this would be a good time to take on that mission myself, eh?) I will avoid Hy-Vee mostly, and get the majority of my groceries at Aldi. I will continue to evaluate more parts of my life as the experiment wears on, but for now it is the grocery budget, and I hope to have money left.

the journey... a little closer to home

My family and I have just left a community, where we lived for almost a year, in which we lived with other people that shared our values, challenged the ways we lived out our convictions, and lovingly held us accountable for our actions. We are now living comfortably in Iowa (just a short drive from my home state of Missouri), and the strides that we made in taking hold of our lives and living them more intentionally while supported by our pillars of community will carry us to places that we can not dream. Geography has made the support of those pillars less emphatic now, since the community mentioned is still functioning in Nashville, Tennessee, and I want to find a way to continue my walk into a life that I can lead with purpose, one that embraces my gifts and connects me with the communities surrounding me and my God whom I have grown to know and love. The first week that we moved to Coralville (about three weeks ago now), my family and I attended the Methodist church down the street. We wanted to go somewhere that was in walking distance, so we started with the nearest church. That Sunday, Doug Williams, the pastor, was beginning his sermon series in re-creation and the spiritual disciplines. The service was short and simple, and I was refreshed. I felt more spiritually renewed than I had been in a long time. I decided to begin studying the disciplines and use the conversations that are born around me to begin to cultivate a dialogue about who and where I am in my walk with Jesus. I'm excited about this new time in my life and I hope that the journey is worth the walk and that some of you will visit me along the way.

My wife and I have had long and hard conversations about simple and sacrificial lifestyles, so I am going to begin there. I think its best to start where I have some experience (however brief and inadequate it might be.) I am going to do some reading and thinking and I will begin my assault in the next few days.