Idealistic

Tried by exposure
Sick with existence
Remnant of my many losses
Will this follow me forever?

Stained by the failure
Spent with my striving
Could my life by cleaned of anguish?
My identity is buried

Burnt by their falsehood
Jaded with people
Cynicism lingers longer
I am not the ideal image

Drawn to the hopeful
Eager for trying
The chance to live and dream again
An optimistic man will soar!

Voicemail Greetings

I think voicemail greetings are weird. Take a typical greeting:

"Hi, you've reached John. I can't come to the phone right now, but if you leave your name and number after the beep I'll call you back."

Now think about the assumptions that this greeting makes:

• Somewhere between dialing and getting the voicemail, you forgot that you were calling John and you needed to be reminded.
• The fact of getting a John's voicemail didn't clue you in to the fact that John couldn't come to the phone.
• You have never left a voicemail for somebody before and you didn't realize that you had to wait until the beep to start talking.
  
• You will only receive a call back if you leave your name and number.
• John won't pull your phone number out of his phone's memory, instead he needs you to leave it on your recording.

Just sayin' it's weird, that's all.

Who Are You?

Some time ago I was working through some young adult curriculum. It claimed that there are 3 big questions facing young adults in America today and proposed to help young adults work through them. The three questions are:

• Where will I work?
• Where will I live?
• Whom will I marry?

At first glance, these questions struck me as surprises, because I had honestly never thought of them before. Of course they had occurred to me, but they had never really been so consuming that they paralyzed me. The closest would be when I graduated early from UT with no job or plan. I applied to a number of jobs, but never really got too concerned. The other two questions have rarely bothered me at all.

As I thought more deeply about them, I realized that the reason that these questions surprised me is that they are not the real questions - they are only surface level. The second question is largely determined by the other two, and thus the question of living situations should be tossed out. The other two are deceivers.

The question of where to work and the question of whom to marry are both largely undiscernable and uncontrollable. You can't really know where to work until you receive that phone call saying that you are hired, and you can't really know the identity of your God-ordained spouse until one of you is on one knee and the other is saying yes. Moreover, the control that you think you have in the situations is deceptive. Where to work is largely determined by other people (namely, the employers), decisions that you have made in the past, and your choices of personal identity. You can only really make broad category choices. Whom to marry is largely determined of course by the person you are trying to date, and is also highly dependent on your other choices, including life direction and identity.

One thing is common between both - your career and your spouse are both significantly affected by personal choices regarding your identity. Therefore, I propose that there is really only one question facing young adults in America today:

• Who will you be?

The scope of this composition is not on how to establish your identity or go about that process....I would try to write it if I knew what it was. However, I do know that you cannot determine who you will be without knowing precisely who you are. Therefore, the real point of this article is to say that self-awareness is near the center of establishing your life as a young adult.

Time To Be A Scrooge

I hate to be "that guy" and I really don't want to come off sounding arrogant or angry or rebellious. I feel that I should preface with a brief statement: I most closely align myself with the Lutheran doctrine of the Christian faith. I have been brought up in a Lutheran church, mentored in both life and ministry and missions by Lutherans, and subsequently discipled and trained by Bible Church-attending Navigators. I am intellectual by nature and voluntarily minored in philosophy because I love dealing in the intellectual and the esoteric. What's more, I am considering entering seminary in the spring, and I am currently studying Lutheran doctrinal materials in order to become a Deacon.

Now, with all that off my chest, I have to become "that guy." I only made it 1 page into the introduction of That I May Be His Own by Charles P. Arand before I was ready to poke my eye out at what I was reading. If I may be so allowed, I humbly submit my commentary on the following quotes from the first couple pages of this book.


"Wherever Lutherans undertook the training of the young in the faith, they used this text [the Small Catechism]. Whenever they shipped the message overseas, they equipped missionaries and catechists with this text. Already by the end of the sixteenth century Lutherans had translated it into nearly every language on the continent."

• JFS: Clearly, the Scriptures alone are not adequate for the instruction of our children or the teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness of overseas mission work. I'm so glad that we carry the banner of "Sola Scriptura" and really act as if we believe it. And I'm also glad that while millions live with no Scriptures in their native language, we are hard at work translating Luther's Small Catechism.

"Over the next 200 years, the Small Catechism provided a common text for linking Lutherans together..."

• JFS: As if the Holy Spirit weren't enough to link Christians together. Around the Catechism, let us unite, and if you don't hold to the Catechism, you have no fellowship with us.

"Throughout these years, the catechism was the one theological text of the church, besides the Bible, that was read, learned, and prayed by rank-and-file church members."

• JFS: Make no mistake: Luther's Catechism, has no place beside the Bible. It is below the Bible. It is simply a theological text based on the Bible. The works of John Calvin, some guy named Ryrie, and Donald Miller all fall below the Bible. And should I ever become a "rank-and-file" church member, please beat some sense into me. Being a Christian has nothing to do with "rank-and-file," it has to do with being in the world yet not of the world. If it had to do with being a Club with "rank-and-file" membership, we would welcome everyone into nice comfortable buildings, wear shiny nametags, use our own special buzzwords, focus on ourselves, everyone would have to pay their dues, and we would make sure that non-club members would feel very uncomfortable. Hey, wait a second....

"I can testify that the little book [the Small Catechism] was a constant companion, its every page subjected to memory..."

• JFS: If only the speaker of these words would have dedicated such time and effort to studying and memorizing the words of God instead of the words of Martin Luther.....

Again, I'm sorry to be such a loser, but I am so disgusted by all of this stuff. I am a thorough believer in asking the hard questions, particularly about yourself. Constant self-examination and knowing yourself is the key to avoiding deep problems. So then I submit the following questions for the analysis:

• Are we more in love with our theology than our relationship with God?
• Do we know about God or do we know God?
• Which do we love more: our liturgy or the lost?
• Are we more committed to maintaining our club status or bringing the Kingdom of God?
• Do we experience God as if the veil separating us was torn when Christ died, or is our experience more like the Old Testament: reaching for Him through a priest, an action, rules, and doctrine?
• Are we living as if Christ is alive and on the throne, or as if He's still dead and powerless?
• Do we truly believe that it was better that Christ leave and send us the Spirit, or are we secretly wishing that Christ were still walking along next to us telling us what to do?
  

Seminary

I am a kinesthetic learning, which means that I learn by doing. Others are visual learners, which I guess I'm capable of too, but my lowest is auditory, which is why I can count on one hand the number of classes in college that I stayed awake all the way through. But anyways, because I am a kinesthetic learner, I need to process onto paper, so I am going to go stream of consciousness here on the issue of enrolling in seminary.

John's Good Reasons for Going to Seminary in the Spring

• I want to learn more about God and Scriptures
• I want to have a better ministry
• I love learning and want to keep doing it
• I eventually would like to have a seminary degree and I'm not getting any younger
• I want to expand my pool of people that I am meeting and building relationships with
• I want to have opportunities for networking with influential people and students who will someday be influential people
• I was prophesied over in 2004 that I would be a pastor
  

John's Bad Reasons for Going to Seminary in the Spring

• I want to gain the approval of those around me who have seminary degrees
• I feel inadequate next people who have Masters degrees
• I want to gain the "stamp of approval" of people who believe that you must go to seminary to do ministry
• I feel many people around me getting a Masters and I feel that the expectation is high
  
• I have often prided myself on intellectual ability and I want to continue that
  

John's Reasons for not Going to Seminary in the Spring

• I am still relatively unclear about my whole life's direction
• I do not know if I will be able to finish Seminary if I start
• I also want to get a secular Masters degree in something practical, especially development related, and I have already started that
• I have a full-time job in the ministry and have just begun a nonprofit that will take some time on the side
• I am just beginning to develop a good set of friends in the Dallas area and I want the time to cultivate that and build discipleship relationships
  

John's Fears about Going to Seminary in the Spring

• I fear that I will hate it
• I fear that it will sap all of my free time to the point that I struggle to maintain a social life
• I fear that it will damage my relationship with Christ (have heard as personal testimony from many people)
• I fear that it will make me too intellectual about my faith over the emotional and spiritual aspects
• I fear that I will disagree with what I am taught and that this will either (a) make me bitter, (b) make me an outcast at the school, or (c) make me question my faith
• I fear that it will keep me from doing ministry in my free time due to not having any free time