a brother from another mother

A quote from one of my brothers in Zim:

My hope and faith is God for in him I move and have my being. I'm nothing wthout God. So to say I owe him all I have,my life and my strength. The political situation is so bad but our God is greater than all the powers of this world. In Isaiah he says"no any weapon fashioned against you shall prosper". Prices of goods are hiking like hell broke loose.

jesus for president

Last night Barr Dogg and I checked out the Jesus for President tour, featuring Shaine Claiborne, Chris Haw, and a couple guys with banjos, drums and a premier combination of high and low vocals.

They weren't pushing American political agendas, endorsing Obama or McCain or Bush-bashing.

Instead, they're advocating a subversive lifestyle that counteracts all the noise blasting from political podiums. Real change takes place when small groups of people (in this case, Jesus-followers) catch a vision and start impacting the world around them, not waiting for a political system to administer mercy and justice.)

They illustrate how Jesus undermined the whole Roman Empire to become King over all.

They (and the book) examine biblical history and the establishment of empire(s), challenging America and shaking up sleepy people in church pews. I would slaughter their message if I tried to summarize, but it's a timely discussion.

(On a side note, Coldplay's new album is amazing. Strawberry Swing, Lost! and Lovers in Japan / Reign of Love are special.)

one jetta on the rocks, please

It was an exciting morning. On my way to sign up for my first gym membership in two years, I discovered this scene in my parking lot:


Notice the rocks beneath the tires and the orange cone. On my window was a business card from the city Protective Services Officer, which read:

Your car popped out of gear. It is being held in place by rocks. if you need help please call number front.

Thanks.

I've been debating lately whether my bike or car is more unreliable, and after seeing this, the car wins in a landslide. Last week I was musing about the Jetta, and started thinking about all our trials, and how it would be funny to put together a short film about our life together. Then I thought it might be too much like the rental car commercials where the car talks to the owner, so I'm going to have to be a bit more original.

It would be easy to complain about my tattered ride and it's laundry list of misfortunes, but far less enticing knowing I'm among the elite 8 percent of the world's population that actually owns a car, a figure startling enough to keep my complaints minimal. On top of it all, I was able to take a picture of the scene on my Blackberry, which I can use to send email, photos, browse the Internet, call someone in an emergency, access Google maps or contact the tow truck dudes.

In short, I'm blessed, spoiled, fortunate, yet often ungrateful.

Upon further musing, I realized how easily the Jetta could've rolled into another, more expensive car, which would've been a financial disaster, as the Jetta rolls dirty on PLPD. The kindness of the rock-bearing city parking official is duly noted, making more than amends for the recent $20 parking ticket for parking "too close to the curb."

While my mechanic knows my car repair policy, "Only fix anything that prevents the car from physically moving," this issue may be one to look into, even though it's in direct opposition to the policy,* which I just realized leaves out a key transportation element: functioning breaks.

*(For insight into where I may have picked up such a policy, my Dad once bought a huge red pickup truck in Duluth that we drove back to the UP with very limited breaks. By limited, I mean virtually none. It was a brilliant display of driving by my Dad, planning out turns miles in advance, slowing to the proper turning speed or continuing on if traffic presented a conflict. For the record, there are very few stoplights or turns on the trek from Duluth to the UP. Today, my Dad fixes his own cars regularly and is very safe, even having a revelation years back to stop speeding. The red truck was a long time ago.)

deflated

Sad news from Zim yesterday, as the presidential rival pulled out of the run-off election, though the elections are still planned for Friday. One story claimed that dictator RBM said "that only God could remove him from office," and perhaps that should be our prayer.

In talking to a Zim friend on Saturday morning, prior to this announcement, he talked about the escalating violence in the country. The ruling party was knocking on people's doors, ordering them to attend a ruling party rally, or the police would return to beat everyone who missed it.

small is the new big

The Business Review wrote a story on how the film and video industry is impacting West Michigan, including those taking advantage of the new film incentives. She also talked about our company, and how we're approaching the industry differently. You can read it here.

Rapid Growth: LifeStraw

Rapid Growth did a short story on our upcoming project with LifeStraw, a personal water purification tool. You can read the story here.

go see this

Last night I saw Young @ Heart, a documentary that originally aired on the BBC about an elderly (70's, 80's, 90's) choir that takes on the challenge of rock. It really is amazing: hilarious, strange, sad, hopeful, perfect.

(If you're in GR, it's at the cheap theater: Celebration Woodland.)

(To avoid watching terrible movies, visit RottenTomatoes.com for reliable ratings.)

everything in its right place

I’ve been on a maddening house hunt. The intensity is equal to barking at opposing players on the football field.

Our current place? Perfect, but it holds a now vacant room that used to be our “office,” which, unfortunately, still costs money.

The hunt has been exhausting, sifting through endless Craigslist and rental websites daily, as if panning for gold, then rifling off emails and phone messages to strangers, only to attempt to sound intelligent when they call back, “Which place is this again?”

“Oh yeah, that place. How’s the area? What’s the parking? Laundry? Gas bills? When can we meet? Let me check with my roommate.”

We’ve seen a heap of dives, been stood up three times (gosh!) and once told, “Our landlord is the worst landlord ever. He threw away half our stuff. And this area is kinda ghetto, someone tried to steal my friends car and shot at him.”

Great.

Another landlord told me about an exquisite paint job in her glorious apartment; the way she described it sounded like it would cost a fortune. “I think this is going to be a gem,” I confidently told my roommate Barry on the way there, watching his GPS. Turns out, it was an OCD painter who rented the house before us, who allegedly stopped paying rent, went insane and meticulously painted every square inch of the apartment in wild patterns of purple and green, even pink.

As you can imagine, the often-fragile, single male ego clashes with such a color scheme.

However, there’s something about the east side of this city that’s stolen my heart, and I was determined to continue living in it. Two nights ago I was peddling my bike around the eastern neighborhoods at dusk, pen and paper in hand, scribbling down phone numbers and addresses and little notes (“looks abandoned,”) like a doctor penning illegible prescriptions.

And then I saw her.

She was an old mansion, though we would only take a piece of her. She was perfect: first floor, great area, affordable, available, amenitiable (new word).

I scheduled a viewing for yesterday at 4:45.

At 4:25, the owner called. “Sorry, the place has been rented.”

“Oh,” I said. Not much else to say. I’ve drank plenty of rejection.

It left me angry, exhausted, pissed about perceived perseverance without any tangible results, calling out to God for a solution.

“Okay, one more round of Craigslist,” I reason.

And then I saw her: But she was a new “her.”

“Hi, I’m calling about the place in Cherry Hill,” I said. Now an expert at asking the proper questions to avoid monumental disappointments and pink walls, I was walking through it within 20 minutes of the phone call.

And I knew it was finally her. I called Barry.

“I say we rock this one,” I said. Maybe I didn’t deliver the message with the three C’s (calm, cool, collected). It was probably more like, “Hey dude, this place is tight and I’m tired and I think we should rent it.”

Anyways, back to the story.

At 9 p.m., we walked through: Wood floors, tall ceilings, spacey, amentiable, vintage.

“Let’s do it,” Barry says.

The check was written, handshakes were shared, and everything has its right place.

“Nice work,” Barry says.

“It's grace, man,” I reply.

And it is.

Thanks, Everything.

news

Rapid Growth wrote a story on our company move today. Click to read.

zim aid crisis

A picture is worth a thousand words. Read more about the aid crisis on the BBC.

mountain bike musings

Today, on this Sabbath, mountain biking has reminded me the Deep.

My two-wheeled ride had been out of commission since last fall, the new chain doesn’t fit the other parts, aged eights years and uncooperative with change. I decided to go regardless.

After a brief stop at the gas station for 75 cent air, I arrived at high noon, the weather, hot, sticky, beautiful. The iPod was set to the “Fargo or Bust” mix, opening with Coldplay’s latest Violet Hill. After that, “Something” by The Beatles came on, and I took the ear buds out, tucking them safely into my generic Camelbak straps.

It was time to listen, not to rock.

Work is now downtown, a quick-and-blessed 180 from nearly two years of laboring from home in a small office adjacent to the room where I sleep. Now, our space has been multiplied many times over, with new front-window views of city streets and people everywhere. I’m also considering a personal move downtown to centralize life.

Our space sits on the entrance to a section of the city called The Heartside District, “known for its compassion,” according to a local website. Our street hosts the main hub of the city’s homeless shelters, food distribution organizations, artists, hipsters, punk rockers, mentally handicapped, the list goes on.

Along with all the beauty and diversity comes an equal amount of noise.

I found myself surrounded by silence, minus my breath and the rhythms of the woods. As I peddled down the trail, I was reminded of my physical being. Much of my daily work is thinking, talking, assigning language and images to ideas, clicking and typing, making agreements.

Lately, I’ve been eating like a college student—an unbalanced diet with too much junk food, rarely sitting down for a meal, (minus my mandatory breakfast involving eggs or French toast). The discipline of exercise has been washed away by deadlines, though I know the stress we carry in our bodies, if not properly dealt with, will make itself known.

But there, in the woods, my body was tested. It reminded me of our frailty and strength, of the importance of others coming alongside to refine and push us, as I was passed by a much more experienced rider, who motivated me to peddle harder.

As I began to think about our physical bodies, I thought of the dwelling of Christ in us, how the Scriptures describe our physical beings as temples of the Holy Spirit, as living sacrifices, and the closeness and unity and reverence these heavy statements imply.

And how often I forget these truths.

It made me think of physical desire, how strongly we’re wired for physical connection, how in the beginning the LORD decided, “It is not good for man to be alone.” Friends in The Song of Songs repeat, “Do not awaken or arouse love until it so desires,” while Ecclesiastes (and The Byrds) speak to proper timing, saying, “To everything, turn, turn, turn. There is a season, turn, turn, turn.”

And in moments of peace, how we bow submissively to His timing, and at other times, we wrestle with two clocks: “one God’s, one mine.”

The green trees quietly spoke of the original order of created things, and I caught a sliver into the ecstasy of God walking with Adam in the Garden before the Fall. It was a reminder of how Adam enjoyed his work as I was enjoying the ride, how the death and resurrection of Christ is the “second Adam,” how Christ’s restorative work is fully underway in the here-and-now through the mystery and power of the Trinity.

(Culture tells us to think of work as our identity, something to be segmented, defined by money, but there is good work in the unpaid as well as the paid. Oftentimes, the former is more fruitful.)

The woods remind me that order will reign when I lie down in my grave and ascend to be with God, that someday our existing Earth will also be re-ordered and restored, as Derek Webb puts it in the aptly titled song, “This, too, shall be made right.”

A remote click to the news clarifies that we must be people living with hope, not just academically or intellectually by cleverly adopting churchy buzz-words, but having hope we can feel in our guts, living people who truly believe that in the end, [Insert your current crisis, problem, emergency, hopelessness, etc.,] “This, too, will be made right.”

In the morning I read a chapter on “recollection” by “my favorite monk Thomas Merton,” who wrote of the balance of internal and external peace and the disconnection we must make from results and measurements of the world in order to successfully live in it.

The ride reminded me of the beauty I’ve seen, so concentrated in the last two years through travel and encounters with God and people. For a moment I felt like the famous Yankee Lou Gehrig, who once called himself “the luckiest man alive.”

Michigan’s forest stirred up stored images of the Amazon and climbing trees and shooting blow-dart guns, of walking through the jungle with the Waodani, seeing firsthand how the Creator provided the unthinkable: a tree root that lulls fish to sleep and draws them to the surface of the water, allowing the Indians to pluck large fish with wooden spears and feed a tribe.

As I was cruising down a hill, across the 2 x 4 bridge over the small river, I sensed it was time to stop. Laying my bike down by the river and putting the headphones back on, I caught the end of U2’s Grace, and its lyrics, “Grace, a thought that changed the world,” flooded my mind.

I’ve been the recipient of much grace as ointment for various trials over the past two years, from financial graces to spiritual and relational graces. Lately, I’ve been listening to a Caedmon’s Call song, Lead of Love, which says,

Looking back at the road so far
The journey's left its share of scars
Mostly from leaving the narrow and straight

Looking back it is clear to me
That a man is more than the sum of his deeds
And how You've made good of this mess I've made
Is a profound mystery

Looking back You know You had to bring me through
All that I was so afraid of
Though I questioned the sky, now I see why
Had to walk the rocks to see the mountain view
Looking back I see the lead of love

Looking back I can finally see (I'd rather have wisdom)
How failures bring humility (than be)
Brings me to my knees (a comfortable fool)
Helps me see my need for Thee

I’m certainly still in the stage of walking rocks (and perhaps for the majority of our lives we always are, we just may have multiple mountains to climb), but we’ve been given glimpses of hope in recent times.

Slowly, I’m learning to hold onto life much more loosely than in the past, a result of experiences where I’ve squeezed hard and stubbornly, only to have the mini-worlds I’ve created destroyed, so proper orientation can be restored.

The next song was Out of the Woods by Nickel Creek, triggering thoughts of all the beauty that is to come. The trail is full of mud, hills, rocks, roots, trees, obstacles. It is always changing, much like life. In Africa, we went whitewater rafting on the Zambezi, wedged between Zimbabwe and Zambia. “The river is different every day,” the tour guide said, who had been riding its waters for seven years.

Merton said that each of us is constantly changing—the changes we make either take us closer to the person The Maker intended to be, or further away.

May we all pursue the people we are intended to be, with hope of seeing the mountain view.

to play or not to play?

"It's just rain, it's not going to kill you," the old man says to me, a smile envelopes my face.

standing in summer heat
under cover with open eyes
as the rain pounds the streets

Now is not the proper time for rain, let alone a rain blizzard. Tornado watches, sour-looking radar, the whole deal. But there's a problem: our band is scheduled to play outside at 6:45 p.m. downtown. I'm not smiling anymore.

At first, the rain seemed standard, as it often comes and goes. For a moment, the sun came out, but the rain is still falling hard. Drenched hipsters walk across the street, clothes stuck to their bodies, and as soon as I finish typing another sentence, the rain stops.

And perhaps, tonight we'll play.