Membership has its privileges

Just thought I would take a moment and share that I stepped forward after the sermon this morning and am now an “official” member of First Baptist Church of Plant City. Once I have internet access turned back on at home I’ll post the video so you can share in the moment with me.

It’s good to have a church home again. I never felt like I truly had one since I left California and moved to Florida in 2000, and it’s the first church I’ve been in since the time that I served Filipino/Faith Christian Fellowship Church in Hawaiian Gardens, CA in the late ’90s that I’ve actually felt “at home” and spiritually refreshed.  This is the next step in my starting-over process.

One note in the video once I add it: Tommy announces to the church that I was joining by baptism; I actually marked “by statement” because I’ve already been “saved” (July 24, 1985 on the Youth Night of a Billy Graham Crusade) and “dunked” (June 30, 1998 at Newport-Mesa Christian Center [Assembly of God on the Vanguard campus] out in California before I got married; so glad they didn’t videotape it or they would’ve seen my feet sticking up the air when I lost my footing in their baptismal pool built into the stage). I would have joined “by letter” (meaning transferring membership from one Baptist church to another), but I resigned my membership at FBC @ The Mall after the divorce and moving out of Lakeland to Plant City.

Did I mention it’s good to be home again?

Quick note for friends & family

Update 7/8/09—AT&T pulled the plug on my iPhone too, so no internet access at home for the time being.

Verizon pulled the plug on my Internet at home, as anticipated, but I'm using a hack on my iPhone for Internet access at home to at least be able to check e-mail, feeds, and Twitter, and using the local library for the more internet intensive needs until I can afford to go back to cable modem broadband here at the apartment. If you're emailing me, it'll take a little bit longer for me to respond.

I've started doing some part-time work at my new home church helping them out with multimedia as well (converting their video for a potential podcast at the moment; it may expand later), so when I'm there I'll also have internet access for e-mail. Just very grateful to our Lord for the chance to finally do what I enjoy doing and also do it in a way that can help expand His kingdom.

Thanks for your continued prayers as the economy here is still quite tight, but things are finally looking up. :-)

Moses, my servant, is dead. Now arise…

Now it came after the death of Moses the servant of the LORD, that the LORD spoke to Joshua the son of Nun, Moses’ servant, saying, “Moses My servant is dead; now therefore arise….

“Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous! Do not tremble or be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.”

—Joshua 1:3, 9 (NASB)

God’s first direct word recorded to Joshua in the scriptures repeatedly came to mind during the time that I spent serving in Celebrate Recovery, both as a person in recovery and as someone helping others in recovery. This past week, and especially today, it has come back to the front of my thinking yet again, because it is in this first command to Joshua that God dares his new leader to move on from the past, to get up and move across the Jordan into God’s new promise rather than hang on to the laurels and the shame of the past.  The passing of the command from Moses to Joshua signaled a totally new beginning,  complete separation from past victories and past defeats and the joining into something completely new and completely different from where the people of Israel had been.

God’s first direct word to Joshua is also His direct word to us in tough days like these.

The past is dead. The pain of the past, the defeats of the past, even the victories of the past are over. We will not get our past back. We will never be able to go back and relive it and somehow fix it all. The past is unchangeable, unfixable, and not worth staying where we are to dwell on it.

God gave Joshua a command and a choice. The nation of Israel could stay in Moab and keep mourning for the “glory” lost in Moses, or they can end the days of mourning, get up, and move across the Jordan into their ultimate promise.

We have a choice. Eventually the days of mourning over the past must end, and the decision must be made to therefore arise…and cross this Jordan.

My past is dead. Today I cross my Jordan.

From praise and worship to the Pet Shop Boys.

Is it possible in rough times like these to become so focused on our own problems and issues that we start to shove others out of our lives?

I guess it is. Or, at least, everyone else is trying to convince me that I’m doing just that.

And, to be honest, they’re right. The depression coupled with the preexisting social anxiety and other “issues” has rebuilt the “prison” of wasting energy on “woe is me” rather than using it for things that are more productive or beneficial.  I’ve gone back to the jr. high schooler sitting in the classroom bawling his eyes out again.

The whole story of Job comes flooding back. The Bible is never very clear about what Job’s “sin” was, if he actually did sin. Clearly he didn’t deserve what he got, but it was for the purpose of trying his spirit, testing him. When others said “curse God and die,” he clung on.

In rereading Job’s story, it became obvious where Job failed.  During the course of the story, he changed from praise and worship to the Pet Shop Boys.

Of, if you want to be more specific, from Ray Boltz’ “I Will Praise the Lord” to Pet Shop Boys’ “What Have I Done to Deserve This?”.

Read it—at the beginning, Job loses everything, but take note of his reaction:

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
And naked I shall return there.
The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away.
Blessed be the name of the LORD.”

Through all this Job did not sin nor did he blame God.

—Job 1:21–22 (NASB), emphasis mine

It’s that last sentence that grabbed me this afternoon. “Through all this [trouble], Job did not sin nor did he blame God.”  After this, though, it all goes downhill.

What changed? Something changed with Job, but it’s not entirely his fault. There’s something here that can be applied both to those going through trouble and also to those who are friends/family to those going through trouble.

Job’s error was that he took his eyes off God and started putting them on his own circumstances. It becomes obvious as the story goes along that Job starts become self-centered rather than God-centered, and that in the process of becoming self-centered he starts to blame God and accuse God of being against him. Of course, he doesn’t have the advantage of the reader in that the reader knows the larger picture that Job doesn’t have.  Job doesn’t try to make sense of the bigger picture.  Being self-centered causes us to lose sight of the big picture and of God’s greater purpose in our lives.

Job’s friends—two of them, anyway—are of no help here and in fact cause more grief to Job, and that’s a lesson for those around people in trouble. In the end they’re rebuked by God. But there is a third friend in this story whom God does not rebuke, and the difference between this third friend Elihu and the other two is what draws the reader’s attention.

First Job’s friends enabled Job’s self-centeredness by accusation. Look at their attempted points:

• God only blesses, and does not curse, those who are perfect.
• God only curses, and does not bless, those who aren’t perfect or who have sinned.
• Therefore, Job has done something wrong and he’s hiding it.

The problem with this is that Job hasn’t done anything wrong (yet). They also don’t pay attention to anything Job says. They’re interjecting into what Job is saying to give their own evaluations.  They totally ignore the bigger picture of God’s possible design for Job in the midst of Job’s trouble.  They also ignore the fact that nobody is perfect, and therefore to say that God only blesses the perfect is completely wrong; God’s blessing to His people is in spite of, not because of, His people. (I was about to write that you’d think they would’ve learned this from Israel’s history, but Job was written before the books of Moses, so that’s not quite true).  They pontificate rather than offer genuine help.  They’re putting Job in a position of defending himself, driving him more into his self-centeredness than pointing him to God.

What makes Elihu’s response different, that of the three friends he does not get God’s rebuke?

• Elihu understands the big picture, and he makes an effort to refocus Job’s attention on God’s design rather than his own condition.
• Elihu never accuses Job of doing anything wrong, apart from being self-centered.
• Elihu hears Job out fully before making a statement.
• When Elihu rebukes Job, he does it not in a way to accuse Job, but in a way that puts the center of focus on God and God’s person.
• Elihu recognizes God’s superiority over man, and makes no attempt to try to understand God’s ways; he simply recognizes that God’s ways are often beyond our knowledge.
• Elihu speaks from a position on the same level (or even lower) as Job; he comes alongside rather than pontificating from “up high.”

Eventually, God himself speaks out, and Job’s response was to admit that in the course of his trial he put the focus on the wrong person, on himself rather than on his maker. He comes to the conclusion not of the first two friends, but to the conclusion of Elihu.

I don’t get what God does a lot of the time, but that’s not the point. The point is never to take the focus away from Him.

There are other lessons here that I’ll share in future postings as I start digging through this in more depth.

Colorizing Images with the GIMP

For those who are colorizing their Twitter avatars to show solidarity with the Iranian people, Here's a better way to do it without washing out your image, using the GIMP. I chose GIMP for this tip because it is a free, open-source, and readily-available application that is available for all major platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux).

Specific note for Mac Users: You will need to have X11 installed for the GIMP to run; this is available on your Mac OS X install DVD. Start installer, and proceed until you see a button to customize the installation; at that point you can select to have X11 installed.  X11 is not installed by default with Mac OS X.

Open your image, then select Colors > Colorize from the menu (note for Mac users, it's on the same window as your image rather than up on the menu bar at the top of the screen, don't let that confuse you).

Once you get the "Colorize the Image" dialog, it will desaturate your existing image (turning it black & white), and then you can use the "Hue" slider to set the finished color (I used used a number somewhere around 110 as my Hue value to get the shade of green that's in my new Twitter and Facebook Avatar.

Users supporting the protesters in Iran that have Twitter accounts are also suggesting that people outside Iran update the time zone in their Twitter profile settings to GMT+03:00 (Tehran) in order to make it more difficult for Iranian authorities to find and cut off people who are using Twitter from inside Iraq (although I'm not sure how effective that would be in the end since simply monitoring IP traffic and filtering out calls to Twitter's site would capture the IP addresses of Tweeple inside Iran.

Supporters are also encouraging people to create open and anonymous proxy servers outside Iran that Iranians can access from inside their country to circumvent Iranian restrictions on use of Internet services and social media sites to continue to let the word get out about what's happening in the country.

Does this sound like your church?

And the congregation of those who believed were of one heart and soul; and not one of them claimed that anything belonging to him was his own, but all things were common property to them.  And with great power the apostles were giving testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and abundant grace was upon them all. For there was not a needy person among them, for all who were owners of land or houses would sell them and bring the proceeds of the sales and lay them at the apostles' feet, and they would be distributed to each as any had need.

—Acts 4.32–35 (NASB)

What happened between the First Century A.D. and the Twentieth Century A.D.?

I hereby tender my resignation.

“It is hard for you to kick against the goads.”

—Acts 9:5; 26:14b (New International Version)

This sounds like a familiar pattern: Beg, plead, anger, rant, rave, alienate, push away, fight, surrender.

I’ve done all of the above except for the “surrender” part.

The Greek word for a goad—κέντρον kentron—is translated the four other times it appears in the New Testament as “sting.” The writers of the Septuagint used this word to translate the Hebrew words for מֶתֶג (methegh, "bridle", Proverbs 26:3) and קֹתֶב (qotev, "destruction", "sting" or "prick", Hosea 13:14). The poet Homer uses the term to describe "any sharp point, spike, spur, instrument of torture, sting of a bee/scorpion/animal, [etc.]." Basically, a goad is sharp, painful, something that will only make the pain deeper and the scars worse if one were to resist it or fight against it.

There are things in life that, if we choose to fight or resist them, will only make our pain, anger, and isolation worse and drive us farther away from the direction we should be headed. My unemployment situation and the resulting financial mess is just such a thing, and I've only been driving myself further toward insanity by fighting it and publicly expressing my bitterness and anger and ranting about how selfish and stingy people are.

In all this time that I've driven my focus in pointing my finger at the inactions of others I should have been spending far more time looking inward to what lessons Christ is desiring to teach me. About how my self-worth should never be based on my net worth, About how focusing on my own bitterness and perceived need has kept me from being attentive to others' needs that are far greater than my own. About how the angry focus on what I don't have has kept me from being grateful and content with what I do have.

What I will lose, I will lose no matter how hard I try to fight losing it. Therefore, I surrender. I give up on myself, but in a way that frees me to be whom I was designed and called by Christ to be.

Consider this my resignation notice from the pity party. And for those whom I've pushed away and to whom I've made myself look ungrateful for their prayers and emotional support, please forgive me.