Odd Ideas

Brant has a new twist on the “God Said It, I Believe It” T-shirt theology…

See it HERE

I like his version better than the usual.

In the well known passage in Mark 12, Jesus says this:
“I tell you the truth, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.”

Obviously Jesus was admiring the attitude and faith of the poor widow. Why then do so many Christians spend their whole lives trying to attain the status of the wealthy?

Is it not “good enough” to live up to the ideals that Jesus valued?

This past Sunday at church, they had invited a guest speaker to come in. Usually, the pastor is very careful about who he lets on the stage to speak. Overall, in the type of large church that this is, it might not be a bad policy. That being the case, however, I’m not sure how this “guest speaker” managed to get up there… or maybe I can.

Within a few minutes of his getting up there and starting to speak, I simply wanted to leave. I just couldn’t, because I was the sound guy!

So much of what he said “sounded good”, but was just off enough to make my skin crawl. The speaker was Brian Klemmer, apparently a well known motivational, “positive thinker” type of speaker that charges people lots of money for going to his seminars.

The one thing I did like from his speech was his analogy of how most people are “born with sunglasses on”, and live their lives while never taking them off. As a result, no matter what you say to them, they can never see things for what they are – they just simply don’t know any better. The only way to change people’s thinking is to get them to take off the sunglasses.

This made sense to me, as it seems that for many years I was wearing those sunglasses. They were the sunglasses of Christianity. Not only were they tinted, but they were also distorted. A few years ago, some of the everyday things in life made them fall off – and that certainly caused some confusion!

Ever since then, nothing seems the same. And once you have removed cheap, distorted sunglasses, there is no way you can go back to wearing them.

The problem is that with Brian Klemmer it seems that he hasn’t actually removed his sunglasses. Instead he has either replaced them with a different tint, or simply rubbed and cleaned the old ones so much that they are now scratched as well. All of his training seminars simply try to make your sunglasses match the ones he is wearing.

I was at the “dedication” of a large new facility for a local church this past weekend.

Part of the service – the official “dedication” part – involved the members of the church staff reciting various promises on the stage, each one followed by the audience repeating something about “dedicating this house of God”.

All I could think of was the words of Stephen in Acts 7.

God does not live in houses made by men.

Guess I’m still cynical.

I’ve re-posted some of my old posts here… May add a few more.

The links to some of the other blogs mentioned in my posts will be “repaired” as time permits.

If nothing else, it will provide some “history” for some hopelessly bored individual who might happen to be reading this blog.

Feel free to comment if you want.

Hopefully this time the spammer/hackers will stay away.

This blog had been neglected for a while. I was just too busy, and really had nothing to say beyond what I had already said.

When I finally got around to thinking of something to post a few weeks ago, I logged on only to find that the database was all messed up.

All of the comments were gone. Not that I had many, but the few I did have were good (I thought so anyway).

Can’t even remember what I was going to post a few weeks ago now…

Anyway – I decided to just re-install Wordpress, and upgrade while I was at it. I was using an old version anyway (maybe that’s why it messed up – who knows!).

I may get around to re-posting some of my old posts. I think they will help to explain some of the new ones once I get around to that!

Rainer