"death is only ONE heartbeat away from life..."

i went to a wake for a former coworker the other day. it was pretty surreal. i hadn't talked to him in a few months, and hadn't seen him in a year or so. T was 6'8" and weighed about 450lbs. He passed after a normal doctor visit due to a blood clot in the brain. it's crazy to think that someone who i saw almost every day for two years straight, talked and joked with about anything and everything was simply gone. no warning, no goodbyes. i guess i'm at that age where my attendance for friends' functions aren't limited to just their birthdays anymore...but includes weddings, childbirths, and funerals.

the wake was extremely different from any i'd been to before. it was at a church on the south side off 71st and MLK, and was predominately african-american...actually all african-american except for me. i'll just say this about african-americans...they do church a lot different than how my church does church. it was almost like one of those stereotypical scenes you might see in a movie, with the congregation shouting back their amens and hallelujahs to the singers or preacher, and loud mmmmhmmm'ing with everything they agreed with. don't get me wrong, in no way am i poking fun...in fact i was totally humbled by it.. i hadn't really seen this since i went to compton a few years back. there's no self-consciousness when doing all this. it's just part of who they are, and how they worship and respond to the Word. sometimes i wish koreans were like that...no reservations when it comes to Him. the whole service seemed like a celebration of life instead a mourning of death. sure there were tears, but there was plenty of reminiscing and laughter. the reverend even had an altar call towards the end of the service. i thought this was kind of crazy and i still don't know if i'm comfortable with it...but if big t's death could bring a few people to Jesus, what better way to celebrate and honor his life?

the reverend started his message off with the quote, "death is only one heartbeat away from life." his main point was something we've all heard a million times...cherish your life and what you have and the fact that you're still here. He spoke of picking cotton on his grandfather's farm, and his great-grandfather being a slave. He spoke of ladies clutching their purses close to their bodies as they walked by him...even though he had his pastoral robes on. drugs don't put themselves into people's bodies. guns don't shoot people without someone pulling the trigger. babies don't magically pop out of the air. it's not our circumstances that make us who we are...but we are who we are by surviving through those circumstances, and truly learning and moving on from our struggles. do i personally know much about any of the examples the reverend was talking about? not really...but that doesn't mean i haven't felt the same type of insecurities and feelings the reverend was speaking about...

when it comes down to it...we're not christian babies anymore. most of us have grown up in the church. the knowledge is there, but it's a matter of taking action. knowing and doing are not the same thing. in James it says, "faith without works is dead." we come to church thinking it's a mcdonalds. we go to God and place an order. we ask Him for things to give us, to make things happen for us. we expect pastors or small group leaders to wow us with sermons or bible studies. we have all these high expectations for church and for God, but we fail to have higher expectations for ourselves. it's time to grow up. we should be able to make it to church on time. we should be able to serve in some capacity at church. we should be able to contribute to small group and listen to find truth or an application in a sermon. instead we're too busy looking outward instead of looking inward. that's why empower 2010 is a good focus. take ownership of your own church. take ownership of your own life. don't put off serving God, or living your life because you have no idea when that last heartbeat between life and death is going to come. truth.
r.i.p big t.

A 'rhema' moment

I attended a GRIP retreat over the weekend and before we had our devotional, a staff member shared a brief message. He told us about a ‘rhema’ moment he had not too long ago. Rhema is one of two greek words (logos being the other) that’s translated into ‘scripture’ or ‘word’. However, the connotation with rhema is that it is spoken word; words that engage us . Along with having a rhema moment, he urged us to find a verse for the year. My quest for rhema was to begin in Psalm 119, (surely I’d be able to find one verse in that chapter). However, I did not make it that far. I glimpsed at Psalm 118 and had my rhema moment. “Give thanks to the Lord for he is good. His love endures forever” (emphasis mine). Why does that phrase stand out to engage me with God?

With two viewings of Avatar and reading a recent Op-Ed (in the previous post), the ideology of ‘Eywa’ is pretty fresh in my mind. We learn in the movie that Eywa is the deity of the Na’Vi (a tribe of indigenous people); analogous to ‘Mother Earth’ and that the Na’Vi people engage in activities resembling worship of Eywa. As Johnsully (the human playing the Avatar) prays to Eywa before a defining moment in the movie we learn that this deity ‘does not choose sides but rather balances life’. Without revealing too much of the movie, our emotions are moved when we see that Eywa responds to the prayer and intervenes on behalf of the indigenous people.

Revisiting Psalm 118:1, we learn that the God of the universe is good. I don’t believe the writer intends to say that God is a ‘good boy’ but rather God and His glory is the definition of good, a stark contrast of Eywa. (A side note, in Genesis 1 we see where God imparts His glory as being good). Eywa is a deity that does not engage with it’s created but rather manages energy, houses the voices of generations past and is willing to intervene in the interest of self-preservation. However, God is love (1 John 4:8) and seeks to reconcile all created things to Him (Colossians 1:20). So when the writer says in Psalm 118:1 to give thanks, it’s really the only response we can express when we experience the grace of God.

On a personal note, I’ve been told by multiple people that they feel that 2010 is going to be a ‘good year for me’. I’ve had several discussions with folks on what that statement means and how that might be characterized or measured. Reading the rest of Psalm 118, most people would probably agree that those experiences wouldn’t characterize a good year (especially verse 18). (Around the time I arrive to this verse during my devotional, I hear the praise team rehearsing “Forever”, I digress…). Whatever may happen this year, I know that God will brings situations and experiences where He will receive the glory and I’m eagerly anticipating them.

Avatar a brief lesson in pantheism and paganism

Repost of an Op-Ed from the New York Times:

Heaven and Nature

By ROSS DOUTHAT

Published: December 20, 2009

Susan Etheridge for The New York Times

It’s fitting that James Cameron’s “Avatar” arrived in theaters at Christmastime. Like the holiday season itself, the science fiction epic is a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess wrapped around a deeply felt religious message. It’s at once the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, and the Gospel According to James.

But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, “Avatar” is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.

In Cameron’s sci-fi universe, this communion is embodied by the blue-skinned, enviably slender Na’Vi, an alien race whose idyllic existence on the planet Pandora is threatened by rapacious human invaders. The Na’Vi are saved by the movie’s hero, a turncoat Marine, but they’re also saved by their faith in Eywa, the “All Mother,” described variously as a network of energy and the sum total of every living thing.

If this narrative arc sounds familiar, that’s because pantheism has been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now. It’s the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he went dancing with wolves. It’s the metaphysic woven through Disney cartoons like “The Lion King” and “Pocahontas.” And it’s the dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose mystical Force “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.”

Hollywood keeps returning to these themes because millions of Americans respond favorably to them. From Deepak Chopra to Eckhart Tolle, the “religion and inspiration” section in your local bookstore is crowded with titles pushing a pantheistic message. A recent Pew Forum report on how Americans mix and match theology found that many self-professed Christians hold beliefs about the “spiritual energy” of trees and mountains that would fit right in among the indigo-tinted Na’Vi.

As usual, Alexis de Tocqueville saw it coming. The American belief in the essential unity of all mankind, Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s, leads us to collapse distinctions at every level of creation. “Not content with the discovery that there is nothing in the world but a creation and a Creator,” he suggested, democratic man “seeks to expand and simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole.”

Today there are other forces that expand pantheism’s American appeal. We pine for what we’ve left behind, and divinizing the natural world is an obvious way to express unease about our hyper-technological society. The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs — a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of ‘thou shalt nots,” and a piping-hot apocalypse.

At the same time, pantheism opens a path to numinous experience for people uncomfortable with the literal-mindedness of the monotheistic religions — with their miracle-working deities and holy books, their virgin births and resurrected bodies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted, attributing divinity to the natural world helps “bring God closer to human experience,” while “depriving him of recognizable personal traits.” For anyone who pines for transcendence but recoils at the idea of a demanding Almighty who interferes in human affairs, this is an ideal combination.

Indeed, it represents a form of religion that even atheists can support. Richard Dawkins has called pantheism “a sexed-up atheism.” (He means that as a compliment.) Sam Harris concluded his polemic “The End of Faith” by rhapsodizing about the mystical experiences available from immersion in “the roiling mystery of the world.” Citing Albert Einstein’s expression of religious awe at the “beauty and sublimity” of the universe, Dawkins allows, “In this sense I too am religious.”

The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.

Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.

This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it — a deeply tragic one.

Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.

But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.

Empower 2010!

Happy New Year Meet Market!

As we enter into the new year, this blog will serve as one of the avenues that the Meet Market core will use to communicate what’s on our minds and hearts. In addition, we always welcome feedback in regards to how to make our blog better and more relevant as this is somewhat of a test run.


So...does your “spiritual calendar” match your work/school calendar? In the workplace, December 31st marks the closing of the previous years’ books and records and a fresh set is started January 1st. The importance of this marker in the workplace/school, is that we can reflect back on what we did well and the areas that we struggled in. But how many of us do this in our spiritual lives? We crawl to the finish line, so that we can start on a “clean slate,” but many of us stop there. We think to ourselves, “I just want to be done with the sins of this past year, and start anew. Phew! 2010 now.” We don’t take the extra step to reflect on the spiritual areas we were diligent in and failed in, thus causing us to live without solid, focused intentions. Take a moment to reflect today. Ask yourself: “What areas of my spiritual life do I need to work on? How can I become more focused and effective for the Kingdom?” Then commit those things to the Lord. As we start off this new year, let’s make a push to live diligently NOW and not hold off until the busyness of life overtakes us!