Category: hmm… thoughts

  • Pause, Remember, Resolve

    It seems with each passing year the resolve remains that we should not forget that day, September 11th 2008. Here’s a comment I left on Ray Pritchard’s blog last year about the day. Ray was our pastor then and in some ways he is still our pastor today.

    Like many other Calvary folks, my wife and I were in the city at work. I went to work at 4:00 AM that day, just like any other day. I took my lunch break from 6:30-7:30 AM and on my way back I remember looking up at the Sears Tower and making a mental note about the crystal blue sky that morning. It was a beautiful day in Chicago.

    Like everyone else, we were sent home about 9:30 that morning. As we crawled through traffic to get home we listened to the radio, made lots of phone calls to check on friends, and went and picked up our daughter from the babysitter early.

    We were at church that night praying with a lot of other people. I guess, like the staff, we didn’t know what else to do but come together and pray. I remember thinking that morning… will they have a prayer meeting tonight? Maybe we should call the church? But we didn’t because we knew there would be. I guess you guys just had the people’s pulse and knew what we needed.

    My friend Patti Gibbons shared a reflection that I published on the YS blog today, I encourage you to check that out as well.

  • Grace vs. Karma

    Without karma, how do you get stuff done in the church?

    Yesterday’s message got me thinking about the mistake many people, even church people, make in regards to grace. Here’s what those two terms mean and why they are opposites.

    Grace is receiving unmerited favor. In other words, you get what you don’t deserve.

    Karma is the effects of your past deeds is your future experience. In other words, you get what you pay for.

    The Karma Conspiracy. I’ll let you in on a little secret. Most people in ministry believe in grace but practice and perpetuate karma in their ministry. Not all, but nearly all.

    1. I missed my kids soccer game because I was preparing for my message on Sunday.

    2. Come be a part of God’s vision and serve at the spaghetti dinner.

    3. Partner with God in the vision of our church by tithing.

    4. Join a small group this fall and be a part of what we’re doing.

    Now, you’ll see those statements and not see the karma connection. Since I’ve been guilty of all four of those let me translate into what most (nearly all) pastors are thinking when they say these things.

    1. If I work hard good things will happen in my church.

    2. I am capitalizing on your false belief that working in the church will merit favor in order to fill a job roster.

    3. I am exploiting on your belief that if you give to God He will give more back to you.

    4. By asking you to do something you don’t want to do, I am perpetuating your false belief in karma with the hope that you’ll discover grace.

    See, this is a tricky thing. And I don’t think any pastor does it intentionally. Yet I think that karma is so engrained in our culture that we perpetuate it unknowingly.

    Question: How do we stop this? How do we allow grace, true unmerited favor from God, to permeate everything we do in ministry and in life?

    Hint: I think both the problem and the solution are found here.

  • Ode to the Remote

    Around the McLane house we have a unique ability to lose the remote. I always blame it on the kids, yet half the time it’s my fault. I’ll get up to go to the kitchen or head to bed and I think it stays in my hands.

    But I’m convinced that sometimes the remote is like a sea creature. When we aren’t looking the shell pops open and it’s little wormy body slides out and drags it into a crevice somewhere to hide. Sure, if we forage we always find it. But I think that creature on the inside of our remote just lngs to eat the Fruit Loops and Cheerios it finds in those crevices.

    My only other theory is that Kristen hides it from me.

  • Web people

    genius or idiotThis is what I’ve learned in my years as a Web dude. People either see you as a genius or an idiot. There isn’t much middle ground. And often in conversation, you can tell the people you’re talking to are thinking you are both an idiot and a genius at the same time.

  • Wow, just wow

    kroc center san diegoThat’s how I felt at the gym this morning.

    I made it through the warm-up act of 20 minutes on the cycle just fine. But next came my “silly idea” of jumping in the lap pool and knocking off 5 lengths. First of all, 5 lengths is a stupid goal as it makes no sense to end a session on the wrong end of the pool. At 13 feet deep you can’t exactly skip over to the other side and be done. Second of all, 6 lengths is a long flipping way for someone this out of shape.

    So there I was, 6 lengths of the pool completed and completely humbled. Swimming is hard work! I was sucking some serious wind when it was all over. The truly humbling part, surrounded at both lanes by people in their 60s and 70s kicking my tail. An older lady of about 220 years old passed me twice. I was having visions of Moses and Noah lapping me and laughing at me. Change the world, huh? Better hope there’s world changing power attached to the keyboard. (I swear, Moses said that to me. He’s kind of a jerk for such a quiet guy.)

    But I’m not done. The plan for Kristen and I is to take turns with our mornings at the Kroc Center torturing ourselves.

    And irony is not lost on me that I’m working out at a place named for the founder of McDonald’s.

  • Legal implications to scientific discovery

    By far, one of my favorite shows is Mythbusters. It’s a big reason we need to spend more money to get better cable service. Anyway, watch how Adam answers this question about testing RFID vulnerabilities.

  • Where are all the Christian Single Men? Part 2

    real menI’m still thinking about this. And typically I don’t carry on like this. But there were so many good comments that, in my mind, this deserved a follow up post rather than endless comments.

    Dave Tucker (that’s my father-in-law everyone else) brings up an interesting wrinkle to this. Technically, in the US there are more baby boys born than girls… slightly. I wonder if it is safe to assume that slightly more boys die in childhood and adolescence since boys like to jump off things and work on more farms and stuff. But, by and large, roughly the same amount of boys and girls make it to an age where they should be looking for a spouse.

    That still leaves a mighty problem though.     I’ve got 20-30 single women in my life who are looking for a Christian man. Preferably, one with a job, doesn’t live with mommy, showers more than once per week, and is more interested in holding onto them than an XBox 360 controller.

    Dave Luke brought up a good idea, maybe these women should expatriate for their 20’s to meet a nice NorIrish boy. Since most women I know love an Irish accent this isn’t a bad idea. And all that stuff about Irish men being drunkards, violent to their spouses, and a few other stereotypes is just plain untrue.
    (At least in the Christian community in Northern Ireland.) The problem with that idea is that it’s pretty difficult to get a visa into the United Kingdom with “looking for a man” as the reason for moving over there. Plus, the standard of living over there is so high they’d have to get married there and then immediately move to Michigan where it is cheap enough to live. (And we know NorIrish can’t say “Michigan.”

    So, single women in my life looking for a nice Christian man to date and maybe one day enjoy Song of Solomon benefits… I have 3 bits of sage advice for you.

    se-xbox shirtSage advice #1 Think about wearing game controllers. Either wear it as an accessory, or keep one in your purse. Occasionally taking it out, making eye contact with a cute Christian man, and hiding it again will send the message. Thanks to Sara for this advice. Get your se-xbox gear here.

    Sage advice #2 Go to Bible college, Christian college, or anywhere else that harbors young men in an environment where video games aren’t allowed. This way you have them trapped. They will naturally follow their God-designed ways to seek after you when these “pseudo-women” have been removed. If college is too long or expensive, get a job at a Christian camp. They lock away men there too with no video games. But don’t get confused, while prisons do have men locked away without video games those men typically aren’t eligible for parole for a while.

    Sage advice #3 Be Blunt. Let’s face it, most men are not that bright when it comes to figuring out woman-folk. In fact, that may be why guys like video games so much… they can figure it out. And if they can’t… they have the ability to make it stop until they have the energy to try again. So if you find a “humanous male-ocous Christiani” just let him know… pay attention to me, love me, treat me right, and I’ll be better than your best friend forever.

    Christian Women Aren’t to Blame for the Shortage!

    I just thought I’d put that out there as something obvious. It’s not that the Christian women in my life caused this problem. And I don’t think it’s a cultural thing we should just get used to. I think, as Adam R mentioned in his comment… guys need to be taught how to be men. And that means that the men in my life (including myself) need to make sure we continue to mentor young men past high school and into college. We need to force them to grow up. We need to help their parents see that babying them hurts everyone. We need to tell their moms that their boys aren’t their husbands… that their role is to raise a man, not substitute a husband. (This is a large problem, in my opinion.) We need to teach dads that their role is to raise a man, not get them into college so they can act like a boy 4 more years.

    And we need to remind men over and over again that they will be irresistible to women when they take care of themselves, fall madly in love with Jesus, live on their own, make their own money, and treat women with respect.

    On second thought, it’s just easier to move to Northern Ireland.

  • Finding stuff, missing stuff

    lost thingsIt seems like every time we move there are a couple items that you find that you think you lost and visa versa. And the one or two things you lose drive you nuts that you’ve lost them.

    For this move the main thing we can’t find is our SD card reader. It’s really not a big deal and it’s only a $5 item to lose, but it’s driving us crazy that we’ve somehow misplaced it. Both Kristen and I know that as soon as we replace it with a new one we’ll find the old one.

    Paul told me yesterday that the main thing he misses from our old house is our couch. When I asked him why he said, “Because I could jump on it. And the new one isn’t comfortable to lay down on.”

    Now that I think about it we’ve not found anything we were missing while in Romeo. It’s more like we keep finding things and thinking “where in the world is this going to go?“

  • Where are all the Christian single men?

    I was starting to wonder if this was just a Romeo phenomenon. But here’s the deal. For every eligible single Christian man I meet there seem to be 20 eligible women.

    Seriously, Kristen and I talk about this all the time. In Romeo, our church had two bucket loads of intelligent, attractive, active, spiritual, employed, never imprisoned, not desperate, and eligible single women. We would scratch our heads and wonder… what’s going on here? Where are all the dudes? It would seem like a church with that many single women would attract single men but it never seemed to work that way.

    Then we moved to San Diego to discover the same thing! Here’s where I’m going with this. Is it that there are no single men? Or is it that there are single boys who are the age of men? I think the latter.

    Equal numerically

    Having been in youth ministry for a while I can honestly say that it was never disproportionately female in high school. There were always, roughly, the same number of guys as girls. So I know there are Christian men out there.

    And I know that in a church environment, especially a small church environment, men and women who grew up going to the same church look at one another more as siblings than as dateabl. I get that.

    But seriously, where do all of the guys go when they hit 20?

    Put Down the XBox Controller

    This just hit me today. It’s not that there are significantly more Christian single women looking for love. It’s that the guys aren’t looking for love. Think about it… they are there on Sunday mornings… they just aren’t interested in love.

    Here’s my observation, correct me if I’m wrong: A woman is typically looking for a man who will care about her, put her high on the priority list of his life, work hard to buy her nice things, and love to spend time with her. The men I know in that 20-25 year old category… that’s a great description for their video game system. They care about that, the work to buy nice toys, they put game time high on their priority list, and they love to spend time on XBox Live. For some reason guys miss the whole dating things because they long for a life of playing video games and not working… let me tell you guys, this is not a good singles ad.

    SWM addicted to Madden 2009, unemployed and hoping to keep it that way. I shower weekly when my mom reminds me. Looking for knockout super model who loves Jesus and will pay my bills so I can be a pro at Halo 3.

    So here’s a little unsolicited advice to the single men in my life. Pack away the controller. Get a job. Sleep at night. Build your relationship with Jesus. Start thinking about things that aren’t connected to a controller. And you’ll be like super hot to the single women at your church.

    What’s the reward? Well, unlike video games a woman provides lifelong companionship, fulfillment, someone to hold your hand at movies, deep friendship, completeness… and if you are man enough to marry a woman… there are other benefits as well. I’ll let you read Song of Solomon to figure that out.

  • We’re adjusting

    Stoney at the dog beachAs much as our family is still “homesick” we are finding our way around and slowly getting used to life in the new house.

    Yesterday, I left work a little early to help Marko move a couple of things from his house to another YS employees house. It sounds weird, but it reminded me of the types of things I did in Romeo all the time… just friends helping one another.

    After that I got home about 6:15 and could tell everyone was bored out of their skull. Since we only have one car… when daddy goes to work the rest of the family is kind of trapped. Since they don’t know anyone and we’re not in walking distance to stuff anymore… they had just chilled at the house all day.

    So, I proposed taking Stoney to the beach to watch the sunset. I love the beach and I adore the sunsets as the sun fades into the abyss of the Pacific. So we piled into the car and made it to Ocean Beach’s dog beach just in time to see the sunset. Seriously, we only got there with 30 minutes of daylight left.

    Stoney is afraid of the water. I know that’s weird for a Labrador retriever but it’s true. Other than when we were at my mom’s and he jumped in the pool we’ve never seen him swim. I even bought him a kiddie pool for cooling off in Romeo and he would only drink out of it. So taking him to the beach was pretty funny. He loved the sand and he really loved that I could take him off the lead so he could sniff every dog butt in the world. But we couldn’t get him to swim in the ocean.

    ocean beach sunsetWith all the encouragement the most we ever got Stoney to do was get his feet wet. As the waves gently came on shore he would run back to the dry sand and wait for the set to roll away before coming back to Kristen and I.

    We’re thinking that with enough encouragement we can get him to enjoy the water. And since San Diego has 4 dog beaches we are confident this won’t be our last trip to the beach with our trusty dog.

    The best part was… this trip was totally free and everyone had a great time. Megan and Paul got to look for shells and mom and dad were reminded again how much we like living here.