The Hull Truth… and nothing but

 A few updates on where I’m heading these days:

- Congress on Evangelism in Savannah, Georgia – Jan. 2-4 – come hang out

- Sanctuary: A youth pastor retreat – San Diego – Jan 3-5 – January… San Diego… yes

I do realize these overlap a bit and have made plans to be in Savannah on the front end and at Sanctuary on the back end.  Really looking forward to both!

We are currently still on our “Whirlwind Grandparent Tour” and enjoying our time with family.  Right now we’re staying with Carol’s sister and husband, Liz and Joe, and their twin boys, Kyle and Clayton.  Yesterday the kids got an early Christmas present – Xbox 360!  As a father I had to get it out, start it up and give it a whirl last night to make sure it works and is safe and all of that.  I’m happy to report that it works well and seems to be safe (although a little thumb stiffness this morning will be monitored closely).

I can only imagine how many zillion blog posts there must be with this kind of title, but this has been on my mind so much lately. I’m working on part of the paper that cannot avoid this topic and my thoughts continue to go back to this question.

Then yesterday I was doing some research for Christmas on some Jewish/Christian connections in our story and stumbled onto this blog post. It recounts a story from the NY Post about a young Jewish couple and their “run in” with a group of about 14 “Christians”. While this story certainly isn’t typical of the people that I know that call themselves Christian, (in fact it would incredibly atypical), the interesting part to me was the view from the writer/blogger’s perspective. Then to top it all off the story of the Muslim who jumped into help the Jewish couple escape. The post ends with this prayer/benediction, “In the name of the most Merciful, may we all come to break bread together in friendship.” This is a prayer that I would echo in this and all situations. I also pretty much dismissed the story as overdone to make a story especially at the holiday season.

HOWEVER, also yesterday my good friend Jeremy emailed me asking if I had heard/read about this interaction from crosswalk between radio host Paul Edwards and John MacArthur (and you can read Doug Pagitt’s kinda response here). As I read this two part recount, with the prayer from the other blog in my mind, it couldn’t help but sting a bit. Is this what it means to be “Christian”? Really?

As someone who calls himself a “Christian” it makes me wonder what it is we Christians are really doing and being. I know it should have a lot to do with grace, love and redemption. I know it should embrace faith, hope and love. But where is that exactly? I know these are two isolated incidences that have hit my radar in a day’s time, but we could go on and on from here.

My question in this jumbled up chaos is this:

Is this prayer – “In the name of the most Merciful, may we all come to break bread together in friendship.” – a Christian prayer and if so how can we pray it and live it together? In the shadow of the two examples of above?

I know it may seem silly to you, but one of my few pleasures since moving to KC has been their addition of real sports talk radio. I’m not refering to the ad naseum ramblings of some local yokel about the boring and never good Chiefs and Royals. They’ve had that in spades. But real ESPN radio.

This weekend the radio station that I tuned into on the way to work for last nights scores, updates and news was bought and my sports radio replaced by Christian radio. It is a sad day indeed.

Today is the beginning of Advent. Our family has always enjoyed advent and have done some special things surrounding this time of year. This year it has been really neat as our church community has joined the “Advent Conspiracy“. If you don’t know about this movement, please check it out. Awesome stuff. There are four main parts to it…

1) Worship More – It is after all the celebration of Christ’s birth. To quote one of my kids, “Why do WE get presents on Jesus birthday?” (Not that they were complaining, just wondering!) It’s a true attempt to make our focus on Christ.

2) Spend Less – The average American family spends $900 per Christmas. Seeing as how the orinigal Christmas was in so many ways a rebellion from the republic, why not see this celebration as an invitation to stand against the republic of consumerism that creates so much chaos in our world?

3) Give more – This is not about ignoring this time of year or those around us. The idea of gift giving is quite biblical after all. This is an opportunity to re-think gift giving. The invitation here is to give more relational gifts (tons of ideas on the website).

4) Love all – If we spend less and give more, one of the ways tangibly to join together with others is to save some of the money we’re not spending and together work on projects centered around giving clean water to those who don’t have it. There are many places and programs that you can connect with here, but how cool is it that you can help give water to those in need??? I’ll try to find the video and post here later this week, but they showed a great video on this at our church this Sunday.

Consider yourself invited to join the conspiracy!

Updates:  As promised above the video that we showed at Jacob’s Well that was from Ecclessia Church in Houtson and their project last year for Advent Conspiracy can be seen here (I’m sending you through Tim Keel’s blog so you can see his thoughts on it as well).  AND you can see the video about our water project at Jacob’s Well this year here.