August 27, 2010

Closer to God When You’re Dumb

For whatever reason, many in general have fallen under an interesting habit of equating holiness with naïveté. The more naïve you are about the “dirty” things or unholy things of this world, the more holy you must be. I can get an idea of where it comes from. In some ways the association is probably made out of gratitude. To meet a young girl untainted by the covers of deprecating beauty magazines, or a thirteen year old boy who hasn’t stumbled upon the pornographic depths of the internet is a blessing. And maybe the idea of that blessing is wrongly interpreted as some holy fortress of provision that could only lead to a good, wholesome, morally upright future.

The reality is that it could just be good-will in timing, but nothing more than a ticking time bomb of rebellion through discovery or a self-righteous adult waiting to happen.

When, in scripture, does God, Jesus, or the discerning nature of the Holy Soul ever lead on that they are completely ignorant to the depths of the sinful heart? When are they ever tricked or deceived by the schemes and traps of man? When are they ever incorrect in their prediction of just how wicked we as people are capable of being? On the contrary, all three members have brought clarity to the reality of our sinfulness. It was God who first approached our doorstep and told us that our best acts are like menstrual rags (Isaiah 64:6 without the PlaySkool translation).

“Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness. But instead, expose them.” Ephesians 5:11

Ephesians 5:11 says that we expose them. We don’t pretend they’re not there, or live in perpetual fear [for why would we fear evil if the Lord is with us? (Psalm 23:4)]

When I see a naïve Christian I usually just feel sorry. I don’t say that in a snickering, superior kind of way; I seriously feel sorry, for they are so young in their capacity to discern. I’m really not that much older. But if I think that a deficit of knowledge is going to ride me up a surplus of faith in God, I am so screwed. People like this are probably so blind to the very sinfulness growing in their own heart. The chains of self-righteous piety suffocate the strongest because the people who have them refuse to acknowledge that they were ever there to begin with.

Dress up your prayers in a white robe and light candles if it puts you at peace. But just know that our cleanness comes from a covering that extends far beyond any ethos or setting that we could ever conjure.

A price had to be paid because we couldn’t pay it ourselves.

Yet and still, I continue to reach for my wallet.

People aren’t more holy because of the less they know about whats going on in the real world or because their limited vocabulary of what I’ll call “Inner-city vernacular.” On the contrary, one is probably further along in their sanctification if they have come face to face with the darkest realms of “worldliness,” and still have managed to keep Christ as their rescuing solid rock in spite of it.

I’m with you, strugglers. I’m with you, doubters. I’m with you, downcast. I’m with you, orphans. But I’m with you because we’ve got to grow together. This is for the sake of the gospel. Not everyone grew up in the small town with the community church where everybody knows your name. Some people’s real life started before they were a teenager. Some people had to trek through some crazy shit. God was with that. God was in that. And he still is. Now that is beauty.

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July 2, 2010

We Suck That Hard

So I’ve been thinking about our “T” in Tulip. Total Depravity. When I hear it, I let out a big sigh. No, not out of disappointment. More out of relief. It gives me a glimpse of the simple, yet complex human condition. As Jerry Bridges puts it, it’s our filth that serves as the velvet black backdrop to the glorious, shiny diamond of grace granted to us.

Where I’m going in this entry doesn’t really have a direction that will revive one’s spiritual life or habits. If anything, it’s pretty morbid. Further, it’s just random speculation and conclusion-drawing. Hardly something I’d take to the bank, though I don’t yap mindlessly either. As anything else that I feel pretentious enough to share with the world, the floor is open for rebuttal and further questions. I may not have an answer. Or I may just forget to respond. Either way, here’s my schtick.

In the traditional understanding of the term, “Total Depravity” – at least according to John Piper and a few Calvinist dudes I know as friends who went to seminary – has less to deal with defining the content of our character as humans and more to do with our inability to “access” God by our own strength. Ergo, making us totally depraved from the glory and wonder of God, rather than just being depraved, ragamuffin people. Of course that’s not to say that we’re not. I personally think that we suck.

As a well-educated friend put it “Total Depravity doesn’t mean that we are at our most sinful state all of the time.”

I think I disagree.

Not that I disagree with the definition of the term. That’s fine. But my argument is this: who is to say that we’re not at our filthiest all of the time?

Here goes the list of vague reasons why:

1. We are disqualified from righteousness
(Jesus’s-perfection-type-righteousness, not I’m-wearing-his-white-robe righteousness)
2. We are incapable of perfect judgment (In the already-but-not-yet)
2. We are incapable of quantifying the depth of sin.

How  would one be capable of quantifying one’s sinfulness? It would be a bit pretentious to not acknowledge we are always more sinful than we actually do perceive. We are disqualified from measuring the depth of our sin because we’ll never be sure. “We are more sinful than we could ever imagine..”

Sin is introduced to us through the revelation of scripture. Though we can understand that we’re sometimes bad, or not the best, or weak, or broken, our sinful nature from our birth is revealed to us exclusively through scripture. And nowhere does scripture itself contain a index or glossary of sins with associative degrees of severity for us to say  “Okay, I’m at about 6 today. I’d hate to see myself at 10.”

Surely, we can sit down over lunch and casually agree that lying to your mother is less sinful than murdering somebody. But if you really look at it, what is our gauge for measuring it anyway? Our gauge is how hurt we would be if it happened to us: our “feelings.” This practice of relativistic pain kinda disposes of God’s perspective on our sin. Is God more or less hurt depending on the sin? Is grace more or less strong? Is a specific sin more or less capable of disqualifying a stainless man from righteousness? No. God is absolute. Sin is always sin. And grace is perpetually enough. God’s perspective is ultimately the only perspective that matters in regards to justice, right?

Dude, how do you “grow” in sin? It’s not a temperature. It’s not outside of us. In fact, it’s our nature. We have a completely different apparatus for assessing things like this. I think Paul Tripp summed it up well in an anecdote that he shared during the 2008 Desiring God Conference.

“Well it was a Saturday when my mother was involved in an evangelistic encounter with one of her family members when she didn’t realize that her brother was very drunk. He was in the room where my brother Mark and I were. And he was saying sexually perverse things while we were in the room with him.

My mom realized that was happening and she ran downstairs, she grabbed my brother Mark and I, and she ran us to the car. I remember very I well; I don’t think our feet touched the steps. And as she stuffed us in the car, she said “Paul and Mark. I’m going to say something to you and I never want you to forget it. It was an elegant summary of this piece of scripture (Luke 6:43-45).  She said, ‘Here me say this: there is nothing that comes out of the mouth of a drunk that wasn’t there in the first place.’

You see that alcohol didn’t create that sexual perversion. That man was actually thinking those thoughts in his sobriety. What did the alcohol do? The alcohol loosened the lips and when the lips got loose, out came the heart.”

John Piper put it another way in some random sermon that I can’t remember: “What do you get when you knock over a glass of hot water? Hot water. What do you get when you knock over a glass of cold water? Cold water.”

We’re only capable of gauging sin cosmetically. But cosmetically, we only get an extremely small glimpse of the real darkness of our hearts. And even as we inspect the darkness of our own hearts, we’re incapable of ever knowing the fullness of any of it!

I don’t have the grounds to biblically declare that we’re always at our worst all of the time, but I know that I have debatable and theological grounding for the reality that we are worse than we’ll ever, ever, ever, ever imagine, and we are incapable of drawing any conclusions about it. On the bright side, I think we’re in a better spot if we do comprehend this incomprehensible truth. It can only add to our thankfulness for the gospel as well as more of a reason to seek humility and do away with unnecessary self-righteousness.

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Filed under Gospel, Ideas

May 16, 2010

Worship: Save The “Music”

People love politics, and because of this I feel like adding this paragraph preface after I already posted is necessary: the reality that Christ decided to pop up and move around furniture in my Darwinist, borderline-spiritually-apathetic life is beyond me. The gospel “clicked” for me a year ago, despite my 3-year long prior draw. And even though daily scripture consumption has provided a world of truth, hurt, exhortation, terribly low expectations out of humanity, and a potential chew toy for my inherent cynicism, it has been accompanied by this American “Evangelical” stigma of church politics that I’m always late to the party for. I have no left or right wing *yet* simply because I only care about what scripture says, not about that someone’s childhood church did when they were growing up. Seeing that this entry has a lot to do with worship music, which is an odd area that – through observation – countless Christians divide themselves over, I want to say this: In my 4 years of “church experience” (what is that?) I’ve sang worship a capella, to an organ alone, to contemporary rock, as well as to Jazz (I attended an awesome church in NYC called Redeemer Presbyterian Church and got to experience that for the first time. Check it out under the “Resources” tab). I don’t have a preference or bent. I wasn’t raised on one so, frankly, I don’t care. Jesus was in all of them, which made it easy to worship. Before I piss people off, I’ll stop prefacing and get into it.

If you’re looking for a passionate plea for a “new” type of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), you are not going to find it here. If you are looking for a thoroughly organized complaint about how droll or vanilla CCM can be, you will also not find it here. That is not what this is about. This is about the painful, slowing and recessive sting of traditionalism making its footprint in culture and driving a dagger into the heart of something I almost love as much as graphic design: music. It’s actually a draw in regards to appreciation, but graphic design (and most fine arts) definitely win in regards to my love for creation. At any rate, the topic I am about to present is an open forum and it has been plaguing my thoughts for the longest time.

The title of this entry was originally going to be “A call to worship leaders from a layperson who isn’t really a musician, but makes a lot of music and knows a lot of them and can relate to them as artists and has some questions and comments about the art form that it really is.” It was clearly too long of a title. Don’t misinterpret the preface for this essay. It’s not really a complaint or even a theological exhortation. This essay is getting more at the craft of worship leading than the theology behind it. I know that they seem to be inseparable, so let me attempt to unpack this well.

An Old Chinese Man’s Mistake
One of the first churches I ever went to after Jesus flipped my whole life upside down was this small Chinese church tucked away in this back road of my hometown. It was just a visit. And even if it were a real candidate, I think it would have become just a visit anyway. I don’t remember everything that the pastor was talking about. I was about 18 or so and a lot of my brain didn’t follow what he was preaching, but I remember him making the most random tangent into how much of a massacre young Christians are making of “the worship music of today.” Now, I knew nothing of church politics or the cultural Christianity that would soon annoy the hell out of me, but I remember these words:

“Electric guitars are sinful.”

Yeah, he said it. I thought it was funny. He also went on explaining that the grand piano and organ are the truly legitimate means of facilitating worship with God. It’s interesting because I can dismiss his frail, dated, unbiblical, and ignorant argument in two fashions. On one end, I don’t even have to open a bible; the guy didn’t even mention the capacity of the Holy Spirit within the context of worship which is just unhelpful. God’s grace through his gifted Holy Spirit is our means of communication with the father (Mark 13:11). An exposition on “holy musical instruments” is hardly meaningful to anyone. Another fashion is if I actually did open the bible. Saving the scripture that reveals the power of the Holy Spirit until the end, I could just open up to Psalm 33:2, Psalm 43:4, and Psalm 81:2.

“Give thanks to the Lord with the lyre; make melody to him with the harp of ten strings!”

“Then I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy, and I will praise you with the lyre, O God, my God.”

“Raise a song; sound the tambourine, the sweet lyre with the harp.”

Even if we wanted to play it safe and stick exclusively to the instruments that were mentioned in scripture, our outlets of praise would definitely be a six-stringed instrument like a guitar. And there could even be a tambourine for those worship leaders who don’t play a real instrument. Nowhere in scripture is an organ or grand piano mentioned, therefore making biblical and holy worship of God not bound by these instruments. If you’re going to be a conservative bigot, at least read the book you claim to be conservative to.

The Heart of The City’s Music
That last anecdote had a purpose that I will revisit later. I started thinking about worship music while in the car with one of my worship-leading friends a month ago. I think I’ve only mentioned it once, but let me just echo that I am a serious fan of the way that Mars Hill and The Resurgence have been “doing” ministry in the city of Seattle. In a world of neutered church boys who make a big deal about having a cuss-free, censored mouth instead of investing the spirit into repenting from a prideful tongue, Mark Driscoll is a fresh, masculine wake-up call to tradition. Further, the city community has been a serious mission field on my heart and mind lately and I can understand why new culture always seems to ripple out from there. As a graphic designer, I’ve come to the conclusion that significant growth for me just isn’t going to happen if I don’t leave the suburban town I’m in and head south to Philly. Frankly, the white picket fences, Honda Odysseys, and sub-engaging conversations about baby strollers have all left me on the cusp of vomiting and I’m pretty excited about changing gears to the city of Philadelphia. In urban places where no single day could ever be the same, I can see how churches like Mars Hill truly seem like this growing organism of new, doctrinally-sound perspectives and vibrant, rooted arts.

Mars Hill recently had their Good Friday service and broadcasted it live on their website. It was simply amazing, and what I loved about it the most was the Grunge-inspired worship music. Of course, no single church’s worship music is meant to be the model for every other one, but – being located in the city of Seattle which is where legendary grunge bands like Nirvana were born – it makes perfect sense as to why Mars Hill’s worship reflects that culture. I was raised on grunge ever since I was a kid. I grew up on Nirvana, The Pixies, Smashing Pumpkins (Currently looping “1979″), Mother Love Bone, Hole, and Soundgarden. That’s all my older sister really listened to and I fell in love the moment I heard it.  Of course I eventually had to throw my cassette tapes away and adopt the iTunes versions. But in regards to worship, it’s only natural that I jump for joy at the idea of worship music to God in the musical language I know best. As I was jamming to Mars Hill’s Chad Gardner and Christian Grunge band Red Letter, amongst the long distorted guitar strums and electronic garble, my worship leader bud couldn’t refrain from saying “I don’t understand how people could worship to this. It’s sounds so gimmicky.”

There are so many things going on in this statement. Many of which come from a close-minded indoctrination into what music is and what worship is. Somehow, I don’t think that I can cover everything in one entry. Especially not without being well-read on specific subjects. Because of this, I will be frank about what I do understand about this position. My friend and I didn’t really have an argument over this. On the contrary, I stated to him what I’m sorta restating and building upon here and we agreed on the final conclusion. For the worship leaders or musicians out there, I pose this question:

How do you approach worship music?

Does the music have a quality that you can quantify? Well of course it does. The sound quality and price tag of the equipment used can all be quantified. Can the genre be quantified? These are all open-forum questions. The first thing to understand about worship music, within the context of my conversation with my friend in particular, is that Mars Hill Church is not like the churches we are familiar with. This has nothing to do with the style or the arts at all. Just speaking membership, we have a church that was placed in the least Christian-populated city in America. There were more dogs than there were Christians when Mars Hill started. Mars Hill’s typical new member was a new Christian, not some Christian who changed churches because they got a new job in a new location, or just had a kid and needed a church with a better daycare center. New talent came from the hearts and minds Seattle-bred residents who probably weren’t raised in a church. In the worship department, this most likely consisted of bands and musical artists who were probably engaging whatever post-modern, grunge-inspired music would look like at the time. These new converts aren’t thinking like suburban PK’s who picked up the guitar to sing Chris Tomlin to the congregation. There is no gimmick-scale. Christian radio and Evangelicalism aren’t determining jack for them. In many cases, these are real musicians who decided to point their talents to the sky. How do people worship to this? Easy. This is how people in that situation were meant to worship.

There are two subtopics that branch from this one topic that I think a lot about:

Based solely on years of observation, to the suburban-church-kid-turned-adult, something that is musically different is perceived as something that is “too much,” as if it were an addition to something that was already there. Is there something overwhelmingly seizure-inducing and “distracting” about this music to me? No. From the perspective of someone who was raised on grunge, I’d like to say on a completely opposite note that there is nothing “super-crazy-innovative” about the music itself either. It’s grunge music. Within the context of it’s genre, it’s just what it is. There’s nothing gimmicky about it at all. It does was the genre says it will do for most of the time. It is excellent music. Excellent. Red Letter’s album is amazing and it even goes bluesy for a few tracks. It is most definitely my favorite Christian album ever. But they’re not selling a new brand of worship. They’re being who they are. And what that is is amazing musicians.

The other subtopic is more like an unanswered question. All the worship leaders I know are people who, on any other occasion, would not be musicians and may not even be playing their instrument as often as they do while they serve. As a ministry media director/graphic designer dude, I was really an artist before anything else. When God saved me, I was now an artist who focused his energies within the church as well as outside of it; on any other occasion I would be honing my craft as much as I do now. If I were to compare myself to the high school Photoshop wonder-kid who only applied his Google-tutorial graphic design to his church and nothing more, I wonder how different we’d think about art. I wonder how different worship might look if one of my experienced music major friends led a worship team. I wonder how that approach to the craft of music alone would intertwine with worship. I’m not really getting at anything, nor am I insinuating that one type of artist is more appropriate than another. If anything, I’m posing a question more about our craft, technique, and theory more than our theology or spirituality.

With the resurgence of reformed theology among college youth and most young adults (at least in the areas that I dwell in NY, NJ, and PA) it seems like a handful of worship leaders have become semi-professionals at giving people what they want, while preserving the doctrinal integrity of scripture. You can’t argue with that at all. It beats the hell out of terrible worship with unbiblical or misleading lyrics. And it also beats the hell out of terrible music. There’s nothing wrong with that. What I’m trying to stir here is difficult to describe, primarly because what I’m getting at is the inner drive of a musical leader that probably cannot be quantified. Here’s a question I am sure most worship leaders are not asked, but should be asked:

Where are you going with your music?

You have taken a responsibility that holds hands with a world of creative direction. Have you bottlenecked it to capital letters that sit below lyrics on a worship sheet? Are you waiting for your iPod to tell you what to do? And this isn’t a direct shot at people who love Hillsong or other poppy Christian music. You can be a straightlaced Westminster graduate who only feeds off of whatever Sovereign Grace Ministries puts out. Same chemistry problem, different elements. Do you really want that to be it? Sure, depth is found in the “Worship” side of it, but that’s only 50% of what your trade’s title assumes. You want to know what biblical worship is? Read Romans 12:1. Do you make your own music? You don’t have to, but would it help you to? Once again, this isn’t a plea. These are just questions I’m asking as an artist to other artists. It would be weird to consider yourself a worship leader and not an artist. You’re not a CD Player up there when you’re doing worship, so you’re an artist in some way.

So what is this all about?
You’re not constrained by what DC Talk did. You don’t have to play it safe. You also don’t have to and probably shouldn’t go crazy-wild either. Music has been around for a very long time. There are so many genres in front of you. It doesn’t have to be anything. It doesn’t have to not be what everybody is familiar with either. If Star 99.1 musically reaches out to your upper-middle class suburban mid-20′s newlyweds then go for it. God will be there and it will be a party. But know that music did not start in 1995 with Jars of Clay. Don’t be stuck up like some of our last generation was. Just like how organs aren’t the extent of how people worship musically, neither are delay pedals and 90% reverb on your voice. Instead of being a lofty traditionalist, a lot of people are just becoming lofty modernists with Contemporary Christian Music. There is no gauge of creativity and innovation. I guarantee you that you will probably never come up with something that people haven’t heard before. I don’t see the correlation between worship music being more hedonistic through it sounding less like 90′s U2 and whatever else you would typically hear on Christian radio stylistically. Delay pedals and reverb are not the cap of what “we” can do. It’s just a style. There’s nothing beyond it or before it. Stop looking at art so linear. Do your missiology research surrounding your community and the people who are attending your congregation. You’re a worship leader; love and explore music.

That came off like a rant, but I’m really not annoyed by anything. Lately, I love the worship in my church. My worship-leadin’ partner in crime, Tim Shin, has been keeping his ears open. He’s still trying to figure things out, like I am with my art. And I think doing things like removing the linear approach to music that many church kids may have been raised in or indoctrinated into could quite possibly lift the chains of … stupidity.

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Filed under Church, Contemplative, Resource

March 21, 2010

The Human’s Guide to iPhone Apps

I think it was only a couple of months ago when the Apple website and iTunes were boasting breaking their 100,000 mark for iPhone applications available for download. It’s a bit overwhelming when one thinks about it. As a developer, the first thing that I think about is the amount of monthly fees Apple is collecting from each company and individual who managed to get their application approved and hosted for download on the iTunes Application Store. You pay a pretty penny to get Apple to back you on a monthly basis, not to mention the grueling hours invested in learning Cocoa. This is besides the point.

One could only imagine that 100,000 apps is too much. You can never have too many resources available to you, but, realistically, one wouldn’t download them all! Studies show that, on average, a person will download an application they see and within two days will either delete it or cease from ever launching the application ever again. We have such short attention spans. Typical Americans, right? This doesn’t surprise me.

I can really only see a single person using a small handful of applications frequently. I’m a reasonably average, tech-savvy twenty-something and have owned an iPhone for about three years now. I decided to compile a “Top Ten” of apps that I find extremely resourceful. Though I have about 5 or 6 more applications than these, those applications cater to my personal preference in entertainment. The applications that I’m sharing here will hopefully make your daily life more efficient. Let’s go:

Let’s put this application under the “Helpful on the road” section. I’m a spur-of-the-moment type of person; if I crave a specific food or remember that I needed to purchase something, I like to get it done right then and there with little interruption. Within 5 minutes of reaching my destination on the road, I had a random urge for Chinese food from a specific, venerated restaurant. I hadn’t the slightest clue what town I was in, nor any information about the restaurant other than the fact that it was called “Hong Kong Pearl” and that it was within 10 minutes of where I was.

I launched the app and, with its almost-flawless voice-recognition utility, said “Hong Kong Pearl nearby.” In a 3G second, three things appeared in front of me: my restaurant’s address, a button which would call them so that I could place my order, and a button that would give me turn-by-turn directions via my Google Maps app. This application has also proven useful when I’m gunning on the highway and want a Best Buy price check on an item to determine if I should make a pit stop or wait for a better deal on New Egg.

Dragon Dictation was featured on Gizmodo as a convenient utility and also as a temporary freebie. Knowing that the price tag would change, I decided to download first and ask questions later. It operates like the Google App in regards to its impeccable voice-recognition software. In regards to functionality, it is also similar to the Google App because it is something that may save your life on the road. I’ve seen two people get hit by drivers who were texting in their car. Texting while driving is incredibly stupid. However, sometimes one gets anxious and needs to reply to something immediately. This app provides a neat alternative to typing.

You launch the app and you’re immediately greeted with a red circular record button. Once you hit it, start talking. It will transcribe everything you say once you finish speaking. From there, you can launch your SMS or Email application from within the app and paste the transcribed text for sending. Further, if you’re using the text for a completely different app, you can just copy the text to your clipboard. Hopefully the likelihood of putting someone in danger through hitting the “Send” button won’t be as high as typing that paragraph of wrath on your phone after finding out that your girlfriend dumped you via text message.

There are literally hundreds of Dictionary applications on the app store. My guess is that the first thing these developers learned was how to build a search database. So the result is a million apps that all do basically the same thing. The most stable, best designed, and ad-light Dictionary app is “Dictionary!” (with the explanation point). This is the best free one anyway. If you want to pay for information you can get free in your Safari web browser, be my guest.

Anyone with an iPhone and a web identity probably has a Twitter account. I have a friend who phrases his opinion of Twitter like this: “I don’t feel that I am important enough yet to have a Twitter.” I agree, but also retort by arguing that the most beneficial aspect of Twitter is missed if you feel that it is another outlet for publishing how you feel and what you are doing. It is an amazing news ticker and great means of subscribing to your favorite news shows, websites, blogs, and local restaurants. Many restaurants and book publishers have gotten on the Twitter train to offer amazing deals and discounts on their goods exclusively for people in the Twitterverse. I can’t say that I follow any more than about 5 of my friends. The rest are businesses, ministries, and great leaders with insightful things to say. Following people such as John Piper or Matt Chandler is always encouraging. Maybe you have what I like to call “Little Pipers,” which are friends who always have super-deep, spiritual things to tweet about, but never actually speak like that or act as mystical in person. Either way, it never hurts to be intrigued, even if it’s for a laugh.

Oh yeah, about the app. It’s the best free one out there. Surveys say that “Tweetie” is the best, but the user interface is extremely dull, not as customizable, and not very innovative. This app has a beautiful and convenient 3-column view that lets you flick through your main Twitter feed, just your “@” reply’s, and your direct messages. You can even add a fourth column for your Facebook statuses. The app integrates with photo upload services, uploads very fast on 3G as well as Edge, and also integrates with the Bit.ly link-shortening service. It’s everything you will need in one app. You can also change the UI skin. Did I mention there are no ads?

Last.fm is an amazing online-radio service. Type in your favorite artist, and it will generate your own personal radio station consisting of your artist and lots of other artists who play similar music. The algorithms used to generate these stations are extremely sophisticated and have never failed me. The Pandora app has a similar function. Don’t like a song in the playlist? Just hit the “Hate” button and it will remove all songs like it, from within the songs it has already chosen. The more you use it, the more awesome bands and artists you begin to run into as the service gets a better idea of what type of stuff you’re into. This is great if you have a Bose SoundDock or any type of iPod speaker dock.

So you and your friends are hungry. Or maybe you’re a lone-wolf, yearning for some grub; you want to go somewhere Mexican nearby and spend about $10 total on food, but you’re far from home and don’t know your area too well. Maybe you do and you’d like to be surprised. This app makes it simple enough to plug in all of those variables and get back a list of restaurants worth a try. The best part about this service, besides its ease of use and perfect library, is the customer reviews. Though there are many apps like this, Yelp is an established service independent of the iPhone and it has a decent amount of reviews. Another great little function is the “Monocle”; if you have an iPhone 3GS with the compass functionality, the app will use your iPhone’s camera and put an augmented reality overlay of where your local restaurants are. Something similar to a quest guide arrow in World of Warcraft. But that was a long time ago, guys. Seriously. I’m grown now.

You’re in a restaurant. Oh my God. That song from the early 90′s that you used to rock out to with your older sibling just came on. There was no Napster or iTunes back then, so you never thought about running a search and getting the song for yourself. What’s that songs name!? Instead of trying to guess the name by piecing together phrases in the chorus, run this app and let it listen to a 10-second snippet of the song. It will find the song title and artist name for you. It will even link you to an outlet for purchasing it. Not near the song? Did it end before you had a chance to pull your phone out? Just sing it. Can’t sing it? Just hum it. This is the year 2010 people. This should be commonplace technology.

How aggressive does one have to be with store merchandise to rip the price tag off? How immature does one have to be to not put the merch back in the place where it was? Simple solution. Boot this app up and use your iPhone camera as a bar code scanner. Maybe you’re on a hunt for the best price. Yeah, I get frugal like that too. We should be regardless because, hey, this money isn’t ours anyway. If you scan the bar code of the item that you would like to purchase, it will give you the retail price, as well as the price from stores in your region via GPS, and online. What else do you need? I know. Nothing.

I wish I were creative enough to come up with an app idea such as this. So you’re in the movie theater and you have to pee. Who wants to leave Avatar right in the middle of the movie? Well if you’re Mark Driscoll, you left a long time ago. But regardless, no one wants to kill their engagement or miss an important part of a movie because of their bladder. So they hold it. With this app, you don’t have to. This app will tell you which part of the movie is anti-climactic enough to leave, and while you’re out relieving yourself it will tell you what exactly is happening during your absence. Problem solved.

Dropbox might not get very frequent use, but it’s nice for it to be there. In order for it to be really useful, you have to integrate the service into your lifestyle. It operates a lot like MobileMe, where it will give you a designated amount of web space for you to put whatever you’d like and share between however many computers you need. Folks nowadays call it the “Cloud.” Dropbox has an app for both Mac and Windows that mounts this cloud onto your computer via a folder on your desktop just like any other folder. I’m a graphic designer, so I do some work on my laptop, some work in the classroom, and some work on my PC. With my dropbox folder, I can put whatever I want in my cloud and access it from any computer. No worries about having the file in the wrong place. With my iPhone, if I take a photo or a video that I want to share, I can upload directly from my iPhone. Further, if I have an image, PDF, Word document, or the like in my cloud, I can view it on my iPhone if I find it extremely necessary.

That about sums it up. My other apps are of personal interest, such as Engadget, IGN, and Cooking Mama. Happy downloading/iPhone coveting.

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January 28, 2010

Never About The Sex

A Preface
Throughout this journal, I will be using the term “idol.” An idol can take on many forms; forms that extend beyond golden sculptures of ancient gods of wisdom. An idol in this journal is anything and everything except the proclaimed God of Heaven and Earth. It can be food, sex, television, Twitter, etc. These are all good and glorious things – seriously, glorious. They become “idols” when a good thing like these is taken and made ultimate in a person’s life. It’s fairly simple to spot idols in people’s lives; we call them “addictions.” This act is referred to in scripture as “idolatry.”

The difference between the way that holy scripture and our society view idolatry is the degree of sensitivity. It’s typically not until a man is writhing on the floor, foaming at the mouth that society will say that he has an addiction to drugs. The bible begs us to check our heart out constantly and question what our lives revolve around. The writers of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and 1st & 2nd John who warn us about idols were in affectionate relationships with God and He sent them to inform us about keeping our guard up against these sensitive addictions for the sake of our fragile, wayward hearts.

Understanding The Idol

The idol brings about slavery … We cannot help ourselves – we must follow our god. They poison the heart into complete dependence on the idol for salvation and hope (Is. 44:17) and yet, when we are in trouble, they cannot save us (Jer. 2:28). In Ezekiel 14:1-11, we have the unique term “idols in their hearts,” which the people “set before their face” (v.3, 4). God says that we set up idols in our hearts, but he will seek to “recapture the hearts of the people” (v.5) This means that an idol is not primarily a material image, but some thing or relation or person or cause that we make the center of out hope and affection.

Dr. Timothy J. Keller

Idols do not rule over us. To clarify, an idol within itself does not maintain the capacity or power to exclusively rule over a particular group of people. Rather than recognizing that we are a people created in God’s image, we make our idol a god created in our own image (Isaiah 2:8). Keller clarifies that it is only, in a sense, “worshiping ourselves, or a reflection of our own sensibility” (emphasis added). This is the only way that one may understand the possibility and reality of a Christian tragically making Jesus Christ an idol.

Making Jesus Christ an Idol
You might ask yourself: isn’t Jesus Christ being our idol the whole point of Christianity? In a word, no. When Christ becomes a part of a person’s life, that person recognizes his finiteness, his inadequacy, his foolishness, and his desire to be loved, and he can’t help but surrender to God through seeking to comprehend Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross; he is surrendering to Who is now his Father and understanding that he was created in His image. He can’t help but find joy in showing love to Him and pleasing Him wholeheartedly.

Making an idol out of Jesus is the exact opposite; in Jesus idolatry, man takes the historical person-hood of Jesus, makes him into the man’s own image – taking and leaving whatever characteristics that he may like – and serving this idolized Jesus for some type of reward or fulfillment in return. This man may serve in his church, memorize the bible, drive people around, but all only in vain. There’s no affection, nor understanding of affection from God. Ultimately, he doesn’t feel loved because he has his eye on something else to fulfill him, let it be praise, poise, pride, or prosperity. The real God doesn’t work like this. We can’t make him owe us through multitudes of good works. The idea is that we’re broken as we are, and that we need a mighty rock to hold onto in a sea of enveloping sand.

What Truly Enslaves
I don’t believe that idols are what enslave us. We enslave ourselves to idols, but in search of something else. When a man overindulges in food habitually, I don’t believe that there is merely an addiction to food. When a man overindulges in video games, I don’t believe that there is merely an addiction to video games. We give the idols power over us because we believe that if we worship it, it will give us the thing that we want. Paul Tripp – a man who makes me feel extremely awkward as I read his books, because most of what he writes on the page is something I’ve mulled over in my head at least 10 times – brings the greatest amount of clarity in his message at the 2008 Desiring God Conference: “The War of Words & The Wonder of God.” We live in a world of “I want.” It’s all about what “I want” and we will step on whoever we need to step on and twist whatever we need to twist to secretly get what we want. All of us.

Last year I lived by myself in a spankin’ new apartment near the “Main Street” of my town: Olden Avenue. In this town, Olden Avenue was pretty much the hotspot for everything fast food and bargain Italian, among your local Blockbuster and Shop Rite. The thing about living in my apartment was just that; I was living in my own apartment with my own kitchen and I was fully capable of cooking myself healthy, hardy meals. I gained a lot of weight that year. My relationship with fast food is pretty intimate. I actually blame it on Evangelicalism and it’s love of discussing, planning and doing everything ministry-related over McDonald’s or Applebee’s. It was only when I became a Christian that I ate out almost every day of the week. I pretty much stayed inside all week before that transformation. However, that year in my new apartment was different. I was eating more and putting on more pounds. I made a real idol out of greasy food. Funny thing is that I didn’t even realize it until this past Sunday.

Finding My Comfort
That year I found myself constantly coming home stressed out. Closing my apartment door behind me was like finally taking the pieces of tape holding my smile up. Just as I put my stuff down and thought about how I could remedy myself, I could only think of one thing:

Taco Bell.

I found myself needing it. At first it was just like “Wow! This tastes really good. I’ve found a new restaurant to add to my library.” But my context of desire changed those nights that I came home. I said to myself “This food will satisfy me, it will fulfill all of the expectations that weren’t filled all throughout my day. Things sucked today and … I’m entitled to this.”

That’s where it was. That’s where it lay: my entitlement. This is, by the way, one of my biggest problems. Who cares that it’s unhealthy? Who cares what it will do to me? I’m entitled to this. And this will fill in the blanks of my life if I can just have it, with a strawberry slushie, and an episode of House M.D. playing in front of me until I pass out on the couch.

This was indeed my plan of salvation, people.

What was my idol? Food. Was it what drove me? No, not really. I wanted painlessness, healing, and comfort. Taco Bell didn’t call my iPhone. I wanted to use it to get what I wanted. And I worshiped it. How? Not by getting on my knees and bowing to a burrito. That’s not how today’s Americans worship. Americans worship in another way: I kept giving it money to it in desperate hopes of salvation. I got no such thing. All I got were false hopes and enough juice to give it another go the next day. Keller points out that idolatry is “a way to perform and appease a god so that it will give you security, influence, comfort, and power.” I wanted it all, and I wanted it all right now.

It’s All Over a Man’s Life
This goes on today in my relationships. Over and over, I do the same thing: I take my faith, this faith that always gives the benefit of the doubt, always assumes perfection in knowledge and action, and always takes everything with a whole salt-shaker, and I invest it in a man who I want to be like. Then the reality of their imperfect humanity hits: they sin. And it hits hard. It takes months for me to recover from disappointment and hopelessness. I stubbornly refuse to give it to God; it’s as if I’m asking to get hurt every time. And time and time again I demand that God be someone I can see, converse with, and hug. Unfortunately, in my travels, I never try to heighten my senses in our relationship so that I’d realize that He is all I will ever need to be and that He can be felt if one seeks wholeheartedly. I fall back down into the world of “I want.”

I want painlessness.

I want male affirmation.

I want the childhood that was taken away from me.

But I think I really just want God.

So what do you say to your obese best friend who is addicted to food? I don’t know. Hopefully you know him or her well enough to find the heart of the issue. Maybe the issue isn’t that they’re hellbent on screwing up their health. In that case, sharing with them the reality that they may have serious medical problems in a couple years may not do much but spark an initial knee-jerk reaction. That may not keep them in a gym if their heart issues have to deal with loneliness or abandonment. Maybe if they could be counseled and shown that God can fill that specific cup to an overflow – and how exactly that can happen – then food wouldn’t seem like much of an escape. The idea is that the light of God is so bright, that everything else appears dim and frail. We’ve all got idols blinding us. Ever thought of searching for yours? How empty does your life look without it?

More to come. This is always on my mind.

This might be too late, but I truly am so, so sorry for the people I’ve trampled along my path towards realizing all of this.

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Filed under Confession, Contemplative, Gospel

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