While spending time with the Lord today, I was caught up in a sort of thought-picture. I’ve always loved Christmas with all the unbridled platitudes of a hopeless romantic, an utter idealist. But the reason this season makes me feel so alive and so completely happy with that special deep-down happiness is not due to shear naiveté. That is what I am trying to explain to my child in this little thought-picture and, naturally, I began to wonder what I might say to my little one, as I put him or her down to bed on Christmas Eve night. So, with one final clarification that my wife and I are not pregnant (for any of you who might wonder) here is what I’ve come up with:

A long time ago, before you came, Daddy was very sad. And what you need to understand about this sadness is that there is a special kind of sadness that feels so lonely that you don’t even cry. You just sit there and you stare at the wall. That’s the kind of sadness that Daddy felt. I know it might be strange to talk about such a terrible kind of sadness at Christmas, because Christmas is such a happy time. But Christmas starts with sadness and loneliness and the reason Mommy and Daddy celebrate Christmas is because we celebrate how the sadness turned into happiness.

Can you imagine what it would be like if everyone in the whole world felt like that? A very long time ago that’s what it was like. The only difference was that a very few people who felt a little happy. But they felt happy for things that hadn’t happened yet. When you feel that way, it’s called hope. These people had hope because God whispered in their ears that one day He would come and be with them and they wouldn’t feel that very special sadness anymore. It had been 400 years since they heard the whispers, but they still believed that God keeps His promises. Then one day He came.

He dressed Himself up as a little baby called Jesus and that was the first Christmas. But it was a very lonely first Christmas. Nobody wanted Him or His mommy and daddy, So God decided that He would gather up all the lonely people and send them to Jesus and then they wouldn’t be lonely anymore. He let them stay with the animals in a manger, and He found all the poor shepherds in a field and He sent angels to tell them “Guess what! He’s here! He’s finally here! Christmas is finally here and you don’t have to be sad anymore!” In fact, all His life, people never felt lonely when they were with Jesus because there was so much happiness inside of Him. But one day the devil, the bad guy, tricked some very sad and lonely people into killing Jesus. But God had tricked the devil! Because when Jesus died, all the happiness came out of Him and out into the world for all of us to have. Jesus even came back to life so that we can all be with Him, even today!

And that’s what Daddy had forgotten, a very long time ago. Mommy and Daddy weren’t married back then and Daddy liked Mommy very much, but Daddy was afraid that all of his sadness would hurt Mommy. Kind of like how all of those peoples’ sadness hurt Jesus. But what Daddy found out was that the more your Mommy was friends with Daddy, the more Daddy remembered that Jesus is  with him, just like Mommy is with him. That’s why Daddy sometimes cries a little when he looks at you, or mommy. Because when Daddy is with people he loves very much he remembers and he becomes very happy, and just like there is a special kind of sadness that makes you not cry, there is also a special kind of happiness that makes you cry.

And that’s why we celebrate Christmas. We do it to help each other remember that they are not alone because Jesus is here with us. We stay with family who we love very much and we give each other gifts to show our love and our very big happiness.

I’m a big twitter and facebook user. I post a lot of things. If I think something is important, or funny, or interesting, I usually put it on the internet. In that way I’m sort of a product of my generation. But for the past 2 days, I haven’t been able to say anything about on facebook or twitter. I can’t find it in me to say anything to give the appearance that life is just moving on after what happened on Friday. And I haven’t been able to post anything about how I actually feel about it. To put it on twitter in 140-characters or less would just seem to trivialize it.

I’ve been deeply troubled by what happened and yet, life has just been moving on. On Friday evening I stayed home from a dinner party sick and just watched Netflix. On Saturday, my wife and I went and ran some errands. I’ve distracted myself and even laughed and enjoyed my wife’s company, but it’s funny how the emptiness and the anger have still been sitting their, waiting for my attention to come back to it. What upsets me the most is that life has, indeed, gone on. There has been so little stop to the world’s spinning. Different groups have taken the grizzly murder of kindergarteners as an excuse to argue politics of gun-control. The ever despicable Westboro Baptist Church has sunken to a new low, announcing that they were going to celebrate the death of “the least of these.”

What I hate most of all is that all this silly political bickering is really part of the problem, and we’re so blinded by the belief that it is instead a solution. We’re one of the most violent developed nations in the world, and it’s because we love to fight. We love to argue. We hate humbling ourselves or admitting we’re wrong. So much so that our policy makers in Washington are about to let the country fall into another economic crisis because they can’t work together like responsible adults. (Okay, they may do it, but it will be last minute if they do) And what kills me is that we care so little about children. There are so much challenges facing children these days and we’ve built a society around them that thinks that we can do right by the children by simply fighting with people we already don’t like, and them maybe teaching the kids to grow up not liking them.

Fighting over gun control is like arguing over which cough syrup to give to someone who is dying of pneumonia. It’ll treat a symptom at best, but not cure the disease. The disease in this country is our crooked, twisted hearts. Hearts that don’t mind moving on with life when school massacres have become a common problem and when they reach an all time low with the killing of 5-year-olds. In my opinion, at least mandating a national day of prayer for children would do a lot more for our  country than opening another pointless debate over gun control.

So the simple point to this post is this: When a school shooting of 18 children immediately sparks a national dialogue about guns instead of the value of children, maybe it’s time to re-evaluate what is really important to us in the United States. If you don’t agree with this or anything I’ve said here, that’s up to you. This was not one of those blog posts in which I carefully evaluated the way in which I said things. This was one of those blog posts I just felt a need to get out. It was more for me than anyone else, and if it’s therapeutic to any of you, then that’s an added blessing.

This is a picture of an Indian woman adorned for her wedding day. She is dressed in symbols of flowers, gold, rubies and even henna, going so far as to decorate her very skin for the big day. But most importantly, she is wearing a red sari. Just like nobody wears white at a western wedding, nobody wears red at an Indian ceremony. Red is the bride’s color. It is the color of the rising sun. The color of new life, new beginnings. The color of resurrection.

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” Revelation 7:9-10

So, when you picture the Bride of Christ at the Wedding Supper of the Lamb, what do you see? It’s likely that most of us see a white woman in a white wedding dress, designed by Vera Wang. We don’t see red saris. And when we picture the throne room of God in the New Heavens and the New Earth, many of us probably picture this:

rather than this: 

or this: 

And the truth of it is, that’s okay. There’s no need to worship like other cultures do, just because those expressions of worship aren’t as popular. I say, if you’re a westerner, worship like a westerner. On my wedding day, my wife didn’t wear red. She wore white, because for us as Americans that symbolizes her purity before our community, her holiness before God, and her beauty before me. And I wouldn’t have had it any other way. She was (and is) the most lovely one in the room, and the traditions of our culture meant something to us that day.

But the problem comes when we train foreigners to worship like us. You might say, “Well Adam. We can’t allow worship that way because it’s worship for other gods.” Well maybe it should be for Jesus. The Indian Holi festival (pictured above) may have symbolic meaning rooted in Hinduism, but that doesn’t change the fact that acting like sweet, innocent children and chucking fistful’s of vibrant color in the air is a breathtaking act of worship. Maybe the reason it only exists for Hindus is because they don’t know there’s a Jesus to throw paint with.

The point is, it’s not about the expression, it’s about the Jesus. Once Jesus is the center of our worship, we’re free to express our worship in whichever cultural context we choose. And when we go on mission, it is Jesus that we bring, not culture that we take. As we prepare ourselves for a multicultural throne room in Heaven, may we bring it to Earth by releasing all of God’s people to worship Him in their own unique expression. As a celebration of that, I leave you with some unique forms of worship from around the world:

Guess what? I’ve been nominated for “Poet of the Year!” Help me win by voting for me!

Click here to vote

Click here to read “Waco,” the poem for which I am receiving the nomination.

Got a smart phone and/or a tablet? You can vote once per device! Laptop+phone+ipad= 3 votes! Tell all your friends to vote, too!

… because let’s face it, it is a battle. It is not a debate, conversation, or a decision. It’s a battle. Because at some point, someone declared the differences of values in our society to be a “Culture War,” and wars are won by winning battles, not by passionate persuasion, or non-judgmental loving, or understanding dialogue. The travesty of it all is that the Church, with her mission to influence and change every society in which she finds herself into a Kingdom culture, was sucked into these so-called “Culture Wars.” All the sudden the mission was the same, but the methods had changed. Because the American Church got caught in the gravitational pull of the State and it’s politics, she became known for changing society not by winning people with love, but by fighting them with legislation. Long have people argued over separation of Church and State, insisting that the Church would pervert the State to Theocratic Dictatorship, but have we ever stopped to think that the funding fathers intended this great divide to protect the Church, rather than the State?

So we come around to the “battle” of same-sex marriage. With Barrack Obama becoming the first pro-same-sex-marriage president, this issue has pushed its way to the front page of our papers once again. The arguments are all the same: The left says this is a civil rights issue similare to the civil rights movement of the 60s, while the right says it’s a matter of defending a healthy structure of the family unit. When I first started thinking about this issue, I was in high school, and I didn’t really understand it. I had always understood marriage to be a religious sacrement because, after all, it was an institute of religion long before a legal status. In my view of it, real marriage is a union involving God. The legal status is just a good idea, practically, but it doesn’t make you any more or less married. Take the example of CS Lewis’ life: He legally married his friend, Joy Greshem to help her gain British citizenship, but the two never lived together or functioned as a family after that. It wasn’t until Lewis and Greshem later fell in love that they officially wed through the Church and became man and wife.

When I began asking people about this, I was quickly answered with the argument that the State gives certain rights to married couples. Tax breaks, visitation rights, power of attorney, etc. So, as a believer in the word of God, I assume this: Throughout our nation’s growth, the government saw that people living together in a monogamous, covenantal relationship as the Bible teaches was in fact good for society. So, it gave incentives to entice more people to do so. (I’m no expert on political history, this is just a logical assumption of why the government would offer incentives to married couples) The irony is, in the midst of the fray of the same-sex marriage battle, nobody questions these incentives. Is it because we just want our money? No one has stopped to question this… Our little tax breaks have so intertwined the State with a Church sacrement that it has brought this fight into existence in the first place. What’s more, it seems likely that these “incentives” have enticed us into marriage for their own sake, not for the sake of Christ. When a couple weds, if they do so for the tax breaks and our hollywood-created concept of “love,” the marriage is a sham regardless of gender. So it begs the question… When we began viewing marriage as anything less than a life-long covenant that must never be broken except in very extreme cases, we’ve already slid down that slippery slope.

I’m referring of course to the argument that, if same-sex is allowed in marriage, then it is a trip down a moral slippery slope. My opinion is, we’re already here because our atrocious divorce rates have brought us here. If we want to win our culture on this issue, we must do two things:

1. Repent for our hypocrisy. Admit that we have already devalued the sanctity of marriage long ago and change our ways. Stop the epidemic spread of divorce within the Church. Honor those who have been married for years, and support those who haven’t.
2. Lay our weapons down. The rest of our culture is not listening to us because we do not want them to. If you present your argument on a bumpersticker, or a TV show, or hide behind a screen name, it’s clear you don’t want a thoughtful response from your opponent. You want them to respond in anger so that you can further demonize them. You are not trying to win their hearts and their respect. You are trying to beat them into submission.

This is not a post intended to side with a political force. American politics are not my kingdom. The throne of God is. And the throne of God will have only limited dominion in America as long as the American Church attempts to influence the world according to the world’s terms. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” Said Jesus. “For they shall be called sons of God.”

It goes something like this:

 ”I got saved, but somewhere in the process, I lost my way and grew really prideful. But thankfully, Jesus saved me from my pride! He took me through a season of brokenness. This season was very painful emotionally, but when I came out of it, I knew that I had to put the Lord first in everything I do.”

If you are an evangelical Christian, the odds are you’ve heard this story before, or at least some version of it. It’s part of our mythology as western Christians. It’s a linear plot, with a definite beginning, middle and end. It’s told, oftentimes with triumphant conviction from a brightly lit stage in a church sanctuary. And most importantly, it’s very very clean. Complete with crisp clear cut edges and wrapped up with a neat, pretty bow. Bt the problem is, this story is naive at best, and downright manipulative at worst.
It’s manipulative because we all too often use it to fulfill the desires of our religious, law-worshipping hearts.

I think if we’re all honest, we can admit to having seen others use this story, and using it ourselves. I know I can admit to it. I can remember times when I’ve coveted a ministry position of leadership at church. I had known that old leaders were stepping down soon and would be raising someone up to take their place. The first symptom is comparison. You start sizing up the competition. Thinking to yourself, “Yeah. I’ve been more involved with that guy.” or “That guy hasn’t been in our small group very long, but he’s got a really powerful story…” and then you drop the bomb. You meet up with that leader who is looking for a budding young disciple to fill his mighty shoes and you lay it on. The humility story. This communicates that you are in no way a prideful person who will abuse this privilege to lead others, or allow this position to become an idol in your life. But the irony is, if that were true, you probably wouldn’t feel the need to say it.

I cringe to think of my behavior in the past. Looking back, I find it incredibly sophomoric and embarrassing, but I might as well get used to it, because I imagine that feeling will be quite prevalent at the end of time when I am sitting at the throne of Christ reviewing the instant replay of my life. I’m sure there will be some choices I’m currently making under the pretense of wisdom that Jesus will see and then say, with a grin, “Really? How’d that work out for you?” Well. Good thing He payed for all that, right?

Anyway, my central concern with this pride and humility story is that it side-steps quite a lot of scripture. See, in our brand of first-world Jesus-following, we are obsessed with open and shut cases. We like to tell stories in a moralistic problem-to-solution format. We want to tell people about the disease, and the cure. So we tell them that they are sick with sin and that we used to be sick too, but then we took the Jesus medicine (and a spoonful of sugar to help it go down) and now we’re all better! The only problem is that real sin, like it’s described in the bible, isn’t just a little virus that we fight off with some antibiotics. It is a deadly, marching cancer that roars about like a lion waiting for someone to devour. Paul describes the work of Jesus in our lives to be something more like chemotherapy. It’s a long, sometimes painful process. A journey, that isn’t pretty, but in the end, you’re promised to receive life. It’s called sanctification, a theological concept  I’m not entirely sure we’re comfortable with in our culture.

So when we talk about pride and humility, perhaps it shouldn’t be in a cleanly told tale, in which we get our character development like a happy meal. Perhaps it should be told with fear and trembling. Or with dazzling hope. Or both. Perhaps our story shouldn’t be about how we had a “wilderness experience” and are now permanently better for it. Perhaps it should be that Christ went through the wilderness for us and, though we weren’t fixed by a magic bullet, we were given a promise to one day be free of the fetters of this world, and as a token of that promise, we were given the Holy Spirit, who gives comfort and guidance in the journey.

Spoken Word + Electronica. I call it, “Astro Poetry.”

There is a certain kind of movie. Movies that aren’t always action-packed or suspenseful, but instead are filled with characters you fall in love with. They are real, human, whole-hearted characters. The kind of characters who make you feel like they are a part of your family, simply because you want them to be. These movies are often focused on a range of topics, but more than anything else they are simply about a life well lived. Not scrupulously examined and planned. Not wasted in listlessness, but lived passionately from the heart and a beautiful set of values. I am addicted to these movies, and they only come out ever so often, but We Bought a Zoo is one of them.

Spoilers Ahead:

We Bought a Zoo is about a Benjamin Mee (Damon), an adventure writer grappling with the death of his wife. Amid the struggle to somehow move on with life while staying true to his love for his late wife, he is challenged with becoming a single father to his teenage son Dylan and kindergarten daughter Rosie. Somewhere in this midst of it all, it just makes sense to Benjamin to buy and save a struggling Zoo. “Why not?” He explains later in the movie that it was an attempt to move on from the passing of his wife but, as it turns out her memory follows him to the zoo. This is most clearly illustrated in Ben’s relationship to Spar, the zoo’s dying Bengalese Tiger. Johansson’s character Kelly Foster is the primary zookeeper who struggles with her affection for Benjamin while trying to convince him that it is time to let go of Spar. Benjamin’s journey to do so eventually opens him up to repairing a strained relationship with his son, and he finally realizes that it is possible to move on from the loss of a loved one with life-affirming hope all the while holding onto the memory of the good that person brought into his life. All it takes it 20 seconds of insane courage.

Philippians 4:8

This is the kind of artwork Paul must have had in mind when he wrote Philippians 4:8. It is life-affirming, people-affirming and it puts the kind of love the Father has for us first. I find it profound how a movie that may have not been made by Christians at all can preach the Gospel by showing it. It is as if God through this film is saying, “This is how you do family when you are alive in Christ. It is messy, imperfect, and utterly human… But it’s sopping with hope. It’s drenched in goodness. It abides by the law of love.” Perhaps the best picture I can come up with to illustrate the heart of this movie is in the end, when we see that the Mee’s along with the zookeepers, who had become a part of their family, are able to open the park. We see a success story not just of a small business but of a family who have become unified in the process. We see tourists enjoying the park while flying red kites, which previously had been described as a trigger for Benjamin. A painful reminder of his late wife. But they had become something beautiful. An ultimate sign that Benjamin had discovered how to celebrate all the wonderful things about his wife, and still move on into a happy future with his children.

I am not suggesting that you go see this movie. I am asking you to please go see it. In the words of Rosie Mee, you’re happy will be too loud after watching it.

1. The Achievement Gap. Back in the days of segregation, educators noted what they called an achievement gap between white and black reading scores.. Some racist researchers heralded this as a sign of the superiority of the white race, but we now know that, if you throw any people-group into their own crumby schools with lower standards on literally everything, that group isn’t going to learn how to read. The problem, however, is that this achievement gap still exists today. But, since the civil rights movement, it hasn’t been between whites and blacks but rather, rich and poor. So if we’re going to call the plight of the poor a justice issue, we have to then call literacy a justice issue. It stands to simple reason that children growing up in poverty without learning to read well enough to decode say, a job application, are going to stay in poverty.
2. The Problem. Meet the NAEP. It’s considered the gold-standard of tests and can discern reading skills with a tried and true amount of accuracy. Every state in the country is required to submit NAEP scores to the federal government, but they are also allowed to invent their own test by which they will be held accountable according to the standards of No Child Left Behind, as well as the soon-to-be-in-effect Race to the Top program. Texas, for example, often makes its own standardized tests. There was the TEAMS test, the TAAS test, the TAKS test, and this year, Texas students began taking the STAAR test. The reason for this has always been to raise scores. One test is mastered, and the next is made more challenging. But here’s the problem: One look at a graph depicting reading achievement by the NAEP will show that, although State-made tests (which measure students according to percentile rankings on a bell curve) report growth in reading, the NAEP (which measures students according to their actual proficiency of reading skills) shows that reading has remained stagnant.
3. The Very Simple Solution. The very simple solution is to help teachers. Teachers are in great need of many things: Basic classroom supplies, training, and most of all lots and lots of books. But there is simply no money. One fact about the tests I described above that is not well known is that they are exorbitantly expensive. There is a small group of companies which create these tests and they have essentially created  monopolies in their various regions, Pearson being the one that dominates much of the South. For the STAAR and other assessments, it is reported that the state of Texas has a contract with Pearson to, between the years of 2010 to 2015, to pay them $468,392,617.00 of its already dwindling education budget. This is the cost of testing-focused government programs such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Schools are loosing valuable supplies, laying off teachers, and even closing due to financial lack. In my district alone, there are 8 public schools closing in order to balance the budget. Where is the money going? Tests. So the simple solution is this: Stop killing our children with tests. Yes, the federal government needs the scores, but it will get NAEP scores regardless, which are more accurate in the first place. So, let the NAEP do its job and end the STAAR.

For the sake of the poor in our country, we need to move past vain political debate. Republicans and Democrats have equally failed our schools and this is largely because the politicians they produce are well versed in economics, foreign affairs, military, and general politics, but rarely well versed in the educational system. If you look up a list of American presidents and what they did before politics, you will find more soldiers than schoolteachers, and this is very telling of what we value as Americans. I suspect it would be equally as grim in a list of US Secretaries of Education. It certainly is in the case of Arne Duncan, who has never been in a classroom of 10-year-olds for more than 10 minutes…

But I will get off my soap-box now. I am a teacher, so it’s obvious that I might have some bias in the matter. But I got into teaching because I saw education as the door through which a child can escape a life time of poverty and hunger. I began this post by commenting on the justice movement happening in America these days and I’ll end it by pointing out that, in the next few years, as we free trafficking victims and feed the hungry, we’re going to begin seeing that the hungry will still be hungry. Trafficking victims will still be poor and at high risk of being taken once more. This is because we will see that, without the basic skills of literacy, the oppressed and marginalized of our society will only stay in a state of poverty until the day they die. What will we do for them? Will we become the passing pharisee walking by the proverbial dying man on the street, or will we become the good samaritan, who stops and lift another out of their own blood and filth?

Beforehand, I had been told that the movie “follows the book pretty closely,” and for the most part, it did. I could almost name the chapter of the book as I was watching. But it was actually the few departures from the book I found most telling of the film, because to move from a 348 page book to a 142-ish page script is quite a feat without sacrificing precious little pages on a change. So, the filmakers (which included author Suzanne Collins) must have had very good reason to do so.

Spoilers Ahead:

Some of the more minor changes were for fixing problems that arose from the voice change in the adaptation. Here’s what I mean by that: The book was told in the first-person and movies often have no choice but to be in third-person, because it’s annoying to watch a movie with someone narrating the whole thing. So there were some tricks the director had to pull in order to maintain the story. For example, when Katniss finds herself trapped in a tree and, with Rue’s help, devises a plan to release the tracker jackers on her adversaries, the audience needed to know what tracker jackers are. After all, no normal wasps can kill a human that quickly, so it would warrant some explanation when they do. In the book, we are taken into Katniss’ head, where she explains to us the origin of the genetically engineered wasps, while in the movies we cut to a scene of the show’s commentators giving an explanation of the creatures. Another of these changes was focused on the dog-like creatures in the end. If you remember from my review of the book, this was my least favorite scene, because the beasts just seemed like an anti deus ex machina that came out of nowhere for the sole purpose of keeping the story interesting. In the movie, we are shown a scene of a game-maker working on a hologram of the dog and placing it in the arena. This unwittingly helped the story because it gave us some forewarning.

The biggest change, however, was the movie’s side-plot involving the Head Game-Maker and his meetings with President Snow. In the movie there were many cut scenes involving Snow’s discontent with the amount of hope Katniss was creating in the oppressed people of his country and the Game-Maker’s struggle to contain it, resulting in his eventual failure and execution. I have to say, this side-plot was a game changer for me. I loved it. Not only did it explain the dog-like creatures in a way the book didn’t, but it addressed one of the biggest problems I had with the book, and that was it’s hopelessness. While it was still Katniss struggling against an impossibly strong totalitarian government, the Game-Maker became a definite antagonist who Katniss eventually defeated, though she had not technically even meet him. This made the suggestion for us the audience that perhaps it was possible for good to triumph over evil.

 Philippians 4:8

There’s no way to get around it. The subject matter of the Hunger Games story is grizzly and brutal. It goes beyond the question of simple violence, because it isn’t just about enemies fighting for something they believe in. It’s about kids forced to become enemies over something they don’t believe in, or else be killed. This subject alone makes a case for questioning this film as a follower of Jesus, because this is not a subject that is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, or commendable. However in light of the full story, we do get some elements of good vs. evil, and the struggle not to succumb to the manipulation of evil men. I would say that if there is some line between what we should be for and against in the media, this is on or close to the line. I would certainly not want my children to see it if I was a parent. There is, of course, a concern raised over the portrayal of violence in film, as well as sexuality and I have to say, I was pleased that this movie was not as gruesome as it could have been, and there were even a few scenes depicting Katniss and Peeta kissing that I have concerns over. Not because they were inappropriate, but because Hollywood tends to over-sexualize things until they are inappropriate. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was not the case in the Hunger Games. Still, consider yourself strongly cautioned for the violent and brutal nature of this movie’s theme. And please, leave the kids at home.