Monday Morning Scattershooting

I was once was told that the whole purpose of a blog was to be able to write all those things you can find a way of saying in normal conversation, so I decided to spend each Monday writing things that have come to mind but aren't so well put together to make up an article or sermon or even a coherent thought....

  Remember that kid in Jr high that would always talk about his girlfriend that lives two towns away.  Nobody really believed he had a girlfriend but he had made her up to look cool but it reality it made him so much more pathetic. (OK maybe that kid was me) That is how I feel about the Mantei Te'o hoax. New rule for society: If you never have physically met a person you cannot refer to them with an intimate name (I.E. girlfriend, boyfriend) I blame Facebook for creating this confusion.

  I had this conversation today,

Barry: Linda, did you know anything about my good pen? It is missing
The Wife: I grabbed it off your desk for Calvin to take notes with. 
Barry:  If you bring me my pen now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill you.

  I am very serious about my pen.  Since college I have been very particular about having a good pen to write with.  I still do a lot of note taking and writing with a pen. So I get really upset when it goes missing.  The morning of this conversation I couldn’t get to work because I was so distracted trying to figure out where it was.  This is not the first time either.  Once, I was saw someone at church with a very similar pen and thinking they might have taken it off my desk, I questioned  them like they had just  stole the crown jewels.  If it goes missing, I get mad!  Over a pen!  Why do we get upset over such little things?  It makes me think of James 1:20 “for the anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God.”  The world would be a better place if we put our anger in the proper places.

   In all the recent political issues that have been the focus of about a billion Facebook and Twitter post the last month, I can’t help get the terrible feeling that everyone want to be way to controlling of other people’s lives.  Society keeping passing laws to make people behave the way we want them to. We have become a nation of busybodies, expert in another's business. Remember when you only broke the law when you did something to someone else. Now you can break the law by not doing something for yourself. Rather than let people decide for themselves what is good and right for them, we must force it on people. It is acceptable to control people, limit what they can buy, what they can eat, how they can talk, what they should believe, what they should accept, how they should think.  This is very worrisome for me a Christian because how quickly the modern culture has left the basic principles of morality.  We are now an enemy of the state because our beliefs and practices are not what society wants them to be.   I fear we may soon be illegal. Or more illegal. There are so many laws today I not sure how many I break. I tried to get new software for the church computer and I am pretty sure I broke 10 laws just buying and installing it. (I know you just spend a lot of money on this but it copyright law makes it illegal for you to use it.) Winston Churchill said "If you have 10,000 regulations, you destroy all respect for law". I wish we just had 10,000.

   Preachers; Do you ever wish you could preach a do over? You have a good sermon but you don’t deliver it just right, or a section went a little wonky jaw and you know if you had a second chance you could fix it.  I hate those. You can’t fix it because next week you need to do a new different sermon. I guess I could just repeat it but I have listened to preacher that I think do that and it didn’t get any better…