Congratulations to the state of Mississippi which, for the third year in a row has been declared the most obese state in the U.S. Can we say dynasty? Almost one third of Mississippi residents are obese.
You have to be happy for the "Western Alabama Landfill" as they say, because it is the state that finds itself constantly at the bottom in categories such as education. This proves that no one is bad at everything, because everyone is good at something. And Mississippi is good at being fat.
Considering that the United States is easily the number one consumer of resources in the world, you could technically say that Mississippi is the fattest place in the world. In fact, the South is probably the fattest region in the world. Alabama ranked 3rd in this study, with 29.4% of its residents obese. If you don't believe me, just go to Alabama Adventure's (formerly Visionland) water park at any time during the day and look around. You never would have thought so, but it's true. Probably no one else in the world eats like we do. Or maybe they just exercise more. I don't know.
So here's to Mississippi because that state is 1) fat. 2) it has casinos. Congratulations!
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Morning=Grace
Morning has an essence all its own. In my family's new house, the two windows in my room both face east - towards the sunrise. Regardless of whether my alarm goes off or not, I can generally tell if it is time to get up or not. A dim, misty purple color outside means that I still have time, I'm free to roll over and close my eyes again. When the sunlight starts making its way into my room, then I know it's time to get up and get ready for work.
I don't exactly know what it is about morning that really resonates with me. Last week, I had to get up early to go white-water rafting with the church. I got up at about 5 am, but I didn't have to leave until 6. After a quick bath, I fixed myself a mixture of milk and chocolate Carnation drink, and then I went out and sat on our porch - the one that faces east. For about a half hour I just sat there and watched the sky as the sun was about to climb up over the horizon. The sky started off as a light violet and grew into a deeper, darker purple-black as I lifted my eyes upward. I also noticed traces of mist that gathered in the low places, close to the woods.
This period of time, right before the sunrise, is one of the most beautiful times of day. I don't know what it is, but it speaks to me. It's so calm, so soothing, and if you just sit there you will find that no matter what, peace is not as far as you think it is. It's like God created this time of day for the sole purpose of saying, "Sit down, wait, and watch for what's about to happen."
And then the sunrise.
Is there a more hopeful and glorious thing to see in nature? The dark horizon suddenly erupts into a deep red-orange, and a yellow that gradually chases away the hazy purple. Suddenly, lights in houses start to come on and the people of the city begin to stir. Traffic becomes more dense and a world that was once serene suddenly becomes busy.
A couple of the saddest verses in the Bible are in Genesis 6: "The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart" (Genesis 6:5-6).
This verse comes right before the story of Noah and the flood, when God basically obliterates all of mankind except for Noah and his family. It's not necessarily a message that we hear too often, the fact that God actually regretted that he created humanity to the point where it grieved his own heart.
I wonder if God even pondered ending it all then. Or if he thought that maybe we weren't even worth it. God could have ended humanity and tried something else, or gone back to the way things were before we came along. He obviously created a perfectly beautiful world and said that it was "good". Did we get so evil that it was time to get out the eraser and start over? Are we just a page that should have been ripped out and thrown away a long time ago?
I find that answer by going out onto my porch and looking east at about 6 o' clock in the morning. The sun slowly begins its ascent into the day sky, as it did the day before and the day before that. It will probably do the same thing tomorrow.
To me, the sunrise is a sign of grace. It is a privilege for any man or woman to wake up in the morning and have the opportunity to breathe and live life. A person gets the opportunity to see the people they love and do things that they love to do. The most ordinary moment can be something really special. After all, God had the choice. He could have ended it a long time ago, but for some reason he decided that we were worth it. In spite of all our failures, in spite of the fact that we sin like it's an incurable disease, God made his mind up that we are worth all the heartache. Every new morning, every single repeated sunrise is a testament to that.
Monday, August 13, 2007
Tell God Your Story
I've had a hard time praying lately. I go through these phases from time to time. For a week or two all I want to do is pour out myself and tell God everything I can, rather than listen to what he has to say. Other times my prayers are very short, because I really just want to get in the word of God and see what He has to say. But lately I just haven't really felt like praying because I get tired of saying the same things over and over again, and a lot of times I get uninterested and pray out of habit or guilt. This makes my prayer time very boring and also very cliche.
I was thinking about this yesterday because I really want to get back to praying a lot, because prayer is so central to what I believe in and it is a big deal. I deal with a lot of frustrations when I pray, as do all Christians, but that's not necessarily what I want to talk about now.
I was listening to this guy (I think his name was Craig) the other day, and he was speaking on sin. He was encouraging people to start dealing with the sins in their lives. Because most all of us get to this point where we accept the sins that we have in our lives and don't deal with them, when really they are destroying us in so many ways and we don't even know it. It was a message I really needed to hear because a lot of my life lately has been characterized by the realization that I'm so filthy with sin. I am so messed up and I know it. It's discouraging because no matter how badly I want to do good, my heart is always drawn to evil and it's so easy to be led astray. It is so much easier to follow my own selfish desires than to act in a way that is counterintuitive to everything I am naturally. It's so hard to care about other people more than I care about myself or, when faced with temptation, to say "No, this is not God's way. I have to turn from this." And when I truly realized that every day I failed to do this, it completely deflated me, it completely discouraged me.
So I was listening to this lecture about sin and I started thinking about the things I have dealt with in my life, and I thought about how my sins just seem to go back for so many years. I've been confessing them to God for years and asking for help, but honestly I got tired of doing this because it seemed like no help came. The truth is, actually, that help was always there but I never truly wanted to begin dealing with sin. I wanted to hold it in my heart and keep it secret by dealing with it on my own. But God has shown me that I have to let it out, that people can't really trust themselves to turn from sin on their own - they have to be held accountable in community.
But what I'm writing about now is not sin, it's prayer. Thinking about the history of my sins brought up a thought that never occurred to me before.
Everyone has a story to tell. And I believe that they would hardly hesitate to tell it if they were really given the chance. One thing that I have been learning this year is that I have so much baggage in my life because of my story. Things have happened in the past, things are happening now, and after all I am a human. I have hopes, dreams, and fears. Sometimes I have a hard time sleeping at night, sometimes I worry, sometimes I laugh and am filled with immense joy, sometimes I wonder and long for something more: I am human. I have so much baggage that needs to be unpacked, so much that needs to be let out. I have a story, and I need to tell it.
Several months ago I got into a conversation with a person I know and he was telling me about his childhood and about how he had acne as a teenager and, because of that, he had really low self-confidence. The conversation we were having had nothing to do with any of that stuff that he mentioned, it was about something else entirely and yet several months later that's the only thing I remember. I was compelled by that because it was a window into his world, his story. Now he is a well-respected man, someone who is extremely confident and nothing resembling a shy, pimple-faced teenager. The conversation made me want to know the rest of his story. In fact, it made me want to know everybody's story. I mean, I would love to sit down with a person and just hear about his or her life - what happened in childhood, what happened as an adult, what are they proud of, ashamed of, etc. What is tragic? What is good? What makes them who they are today?
About a year ago I went white water rafting with some friends. Six of us were in the same boat and, on the way down the river, we had an accident. Our guide was knocked out of the boat while we were surfing a rapid and thus, we were thrown out as well. I was told that our raft flipped end over end and that it resembled the Titanic when it sunk. After we were all thrown out, we all floated in our own different paths down the river. Some of us were thrown through rapids, some of us bounced off of rocks, some went farther down the river than others: we all had a different story. We all survived, and so on the way home we stopped at Cracker Barrel to have a meal, and we spent that whole time with each person telling his or her story. I don't know about the others but I deeply wanted to share what I went through, how I felt, etc. I wanted to tell them EVERYTHING, and so I got out every single detail that I could.
I think that deep down this applies to everybody. No matter what we have done or been through, somehow we want to get it out. We all have things in our lives that we would love to just sit down with someone and share and make them understand how we feel. Not only can we share our stories with other people (which I think is extremely important to do), but we also have a heavenly father that we can go to. I realized yesterday that I'm so tired of telling God the same old shallow prayers and so I'm just going to go back to the beginning. I'm going to dig up all the old stories of all the baggage and situations in my life and just start telling God my story. He already knows it all, and could probably recite it back to me with much more clarity and detail, but that's okay. God wants to hear my story. He wants to hear your story. He is our heavenly father and he wants for us to go to him and let him father us and help us deal with all of the things that have happened in our lives.
Do you have a long drive somewhere tomorrow? Or do you have some extra free time? I encourage you to take it and bring up something that you and God can deal with. Tell God about how sin entangled you so many years ago and you desperately want to be free from it. Tell him about the best day of your life. Tell him about when you first met him. Tell him about your best friends, or your family. Did somebody hurt you in the past? Tell God how you feel, and be completely honest.
After all, when we come to God we enter into a relationship with him. And the best relationships are the ones where you can tell the other person anything, when you have nothing to hide. I think that if people begin giving God their past instead of just trying to forget, then they can start to heal and start to learn. God can teach us so much by just listening to us and speaking into our hearts. I am going to start letting him do that and I would recommend for anyone else to do it too.
I was thinking about this yesterday because I really want to get back to praying a lot, because prayer is so central to what I believe in and it is a big deal. I deal with a lot of frustrations when I pray, as do all Christians, but that's not necessarily what I want to talk about now.
I was listening to this guy (I think his name was Craig) the other day, and he was speaking on sin. He was encouraging people to start dealing with the sins in their lives. Because most all of us get to this point where we accept the sins that we have in our lives and don't deal with them, when really they are destroying us in so many ways and we don't even know it. It was a message I really needed to hear because a lot of my life lately has been characterized by the realization that I'm so filthy with sin. I am so messed up and I know it. It's discouraging because no matter how badly I want to do good, my heart is always drawn to evil and it's so easy to be led astray. It is so much easier to follow my own selfish desires than to act in a way that is counterintuitive to everything I am naturally. It's so hard to care about other people more than I care about myself or, when faced with temptation, to say "No, this is not God's way. I have to turn from this." And when I truly realized that every day I failed to do this, it completely deflated me, it completely discouraged me.
So I was listening to this lecture about sin and I started thinking about the things I have dealt with in my life, and I thought about how my sins just seem to go back for so many years. I've been confessing them to God for years and asking for help, but honestly I got tired of doing this because it seemed like no help came. The truth is, actually, that help was always there but I never truly wanted to begin dealing with sin. I wanted to hold it in my heart and keep it secret by dealing with it on my own. But God has shown me that I have to let it out, that people can't really trust themselves to turn from sin on their own - they have to be held accountable in community.
But what I'm writing about now is not sin, it's prayer. Thinking about the history of my sins brought up a thought that never occurred to me before.
Everyone has a story to tell. And I believe that they would hardly hesitate to tell it if they were really given the chance. One thing that I have been learning this year is that I have so much baggage in my life because of my story. Things have happened in the past, things are happening now, and after all I am a human. I have hopes, dreams, and fears. Sometimes I have a hard time sleeping at night, sometimes I worry, sometimes I laugh and am filled with immense joy, sometimes I wonder and long for something more: I am human. I have so much baggage that needs to be unpacked, so much that needs to be let out. I have a story, and I need to tell it.
Several months ago I got into a conversation with a person I know and he was telling me about his childhood and about how he had acne as a teenager and, because of that, he had really low self-confidence. The conversation we were having had nothing to do with any of that stuff that he mentioned, it was about something else entirely and yet several months later that's the only thing I remember. I was compelled by that because it was a window into his world, his story. Now he is a well-respected man, someone who is extremely confident and nothing resembling a shy, pimple-faced teenager. The conversation made me want to know the rest of his story. In fact, it made me want to know everybody's story. I mean, I would love to sit down with a person and just hear about his or her life - what happened in childhood, what happened as an adult, what are they proud of, ashamed of, etc. What is tragic? What is good? What makes them who they are today?
About a year ago I went white water rafting with some friends. Six of us were in the same boat and, on the way down the river, we had an accident. Our guide was knocked out of the boat while we were surfing a rapid and thus, we were thrown out as well. I was told that our raft flipped end over end and that it resembled the Titanic when it sunk. After we were all thrown out, we all floated in our own different paths down the river. Some of us were thrown through rapids, some of us bounced off of rocks, some went farther down the river than others: we all had a different story. We all survived, and so on the way home we stopped at Cracker Barrel to have a meal, and we spent that whole time with each person telling his or her story. I don't know about the others but I deeply wanted to share what I went through, how I felt, etc. I wanted to tell them EVERYTHING, and so I got out every single detail that I could.
I think that deep down this applies to everybody. No matter what we have done or been through, somehow we want to get it out. We all have things in our lives that we would love to just sit down with someone and share and make them understand how we feel. Not only can we share our stories with other people (which I think is extremely important to do), but we also have a heavenly father that we can go to. I realized yesterday that I'm so tired of telling God the same old shallow prayers and so I'm just going to go back to the beginning. I'm going to dig up all the old stories of all the baggage and situations in my life and just start telling God my story. He already knows it all, and could probably recite it back to me with much more clarity and detail, but that's okay. God wants to hear my story. He wants to hear your story. He is our heavenly father and he wants for us to go to him and let him father us and help us deal with all of the things that have happened in our lives.
Do you have a long drive somewhere tomorrow? Or do you have some extra free time? I encourage you to take it and bring up something that you and God can deal with. Tell God about how sin entangled you so many years ago and you desperately want to be free from it. Tell him about the best day of your life. Tell him about when you first met him. Tell him about your best friends, or your family. Did somebody hurt you in the past? Tell God how you feel, and be completely honest.
After all, when we come to God we enter into a relationship with him. And the best relationships are the ones where you can tell the other person anything, when you have nothing to hide. I think that if people begin giving God their past instead of just trying to forget, then they can start to heal and start to learn. God can teach us so much by just listening to us and speaking into our hearts. I am going to start letting him do that and I would recommend for anyone else to do it too.
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Make it stop, please...
So I got home from church tonight and I sat down on the couch. I turned the TV to ESPNEWS to see what kind of interesting news the ticker is going to tell me about today. At the very bottom in the right hand corner, where ESPN tells us the important news, it says this:
“Barry Bonds in starting lineup tonight.”
Thank you, ESPN.
Isn’t Barry Bonds yesterday’s news? I mean I know he broke the greatest record in all sports and all, but that happened yesterday. The record is broken, why is the most important story in sports the fact that Barry Bonds will start tonight? Who cares? Why would anybody want to watch him if he already broke the record? What you’re probably going to see is Bonds swing for the fences every time, or get intentionally walked.
Great TV.
I was so relieved last night when I found out that Barry Bonds finally hit number 756. Finally, they’re not going to go out of their way to tell me that Bonds didn’t HR that game. Finally I don’t have to have my TV program cut into so I can see some pitcher walk Bonds intentionally. But no… it just won’t go away. Forgive me, ESPN, if I don’t crap my pants when Bonds comes up to bat.
How about this news story, ESPN: the San Francisco Giants suck and you couldn’t pay me to watch them. They’re last in their division, nowhere near the playoffs, and yet they get more media attention than anyone else. If they cared about winning, they would have traded Barry Bonds a long time ago. He doesn’t give a crap about his team, about winning the World Series; he draws all this ridiculous media attention; and he swings for the fences every at bat. Of course, he does bring in the money because of the vastly over hyped and controversial record he has been chasing. And since MLB is a business then I guess that’s important and all; but I’d rather my franchise be known for winning, not because the media reports every time my star player wipes his butt.
He broke the record. Great, let’s move on. Let’s talk about NFL training camp, or college football season. Last time I checked there were a few good division and wildcard races in MLB. You’ve got golf, NASCAR, NBA trades, Michael Vick, and the list goes on. Stop with Barry Bonds. Just let it end, please stop.
Monday, August 6, 2007
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