It’s been many moons since I’ve blogged, but I have good reason to get started again.

Basically, you need to watch this video a million freakin’ times, and tell all your friends to do the same. 1 view = 1 vote. If I’m going to get anywhere close to being in the running, I’m going to have to hit somewhere around 20,000 views by August 20th!!! Ahhh!!!

Please help by viewing this video, sharing the link with your buddies, and just watching the thing till the cows come home. You’re doing your ole’ pal Jake a favor, folks. Major favor.

I’m sure you’re aware of this, however… especially if you’ve “followed” me at any length.

Updates…

We are staying in the Atlanta area – probably moving closer in toward the city.  This was a huge milestone for us.  Worthy of a stone altar, no doubt.  Clarity and unity are things to celebrate together as a husband and wife.

I have a baby girl on the way.  She’ll be here in about 7 weeks.  I am really in for it.

I have dream upon dream upon dream that God’s given me, and feel quite resonisible for seeing them mature and manifest themselves.  I won’t go into too much detail, but I’ll tell you this – it involves music, visual arts, and video games. I’m not lying about that last one.  It’s something I’ve wanted to do my whole life.  What better time than now?

I have no job… and yet there’s been more money in my accout this past two months than I would have received in two months at my last job.

God. Is. Good.

The question now:  if God’s giving me time right now, how can I avoid wasting it?

Because honestly, the quest for a job is feeling like a bit of a waste.  When they tell you the economy is bad and that jobs are scarce, it’s actually true.  I can’t get a job at a bookstore, for cryin’ out loud.  I can’t remember a time when a Joe-Blow job was so hard to come by.

But I’ll tell you – this time we’ve had to just focus on ourselves as a family has been invaluable. God is always calling us back to discipline, and back to the basic building blocks of the stuff that makes a good human life.  These basic foci have healed us in ways that are hard to describe.

We’ve joined a faith gathering with which we feel completely aligned.  Contemplation, Integration, Communion, and Incarnation.  Lovely.  (Oh… we’re part of the Anglican Mission now, I might add.)

Where are my attempts at huge profound thoughts?  Nowhere, today.  Life is happening.  The kingdom is at hand.  May his will be done now, as it is in heaven.

Make our paths straight, God.

G&P. -jc

I am in the front bedroom of my home in Northwest Atlanta, planning, strategizing, brainstorming, praying (blogging, too)…

All for the first time in a very long time as a non-employee of West Ridge Church, the church I’ve loved and served for almost half my life.

This day marks the end of an era, but the beginning of a new one – and my wife and I are overjoyed.  It is indeed bittersweet – a delicious little morsel of new promise, but one that bites back a bit.

We don’t mind.

We’ve been called to a nameless Ninevah, and we believe in following the call, we are avoiding the mouths and bellies of large fish.  The time has come, we both know it; we are completely uncertain as to our plot, but we are joining God in watching it unfold.  He has deep valleys to walk us through – one of which I’m calling “The Valley of The Shadow of Debt“, to the tune of a mortgage and a credit card.

But we, as Abraham, go without knowing.  Away from the beaten trails.  Into the forest.

Where Aslan lives.

To My Brothers and Sisters at West Ridge Church:

Grace and Peace be with you in Christ Jesus.  Your faithfulness and generosity have been told in lands both near and far.  It gives me great joy that we have acquainted for such a stretch, but it seems good to my wife and I and to the Spirit that our paths should at least for a little while veer from one another, till Christ brings them together again, or until He returns for His own.  Your image and essence is tattooed onto my heart, and it’s a mark I’ll never be able to forget.  I thank God for it, and thank God for you.  I will tell of the stories I experienced in your midst, and I promise to bring God as much worship as I can muster.  As Hezekiah said in Isaiah 38 verse 20:

“The LORD will surely save me; So we will play my songs on stringed instruments All the days of our life at the house of the LORD.”

May you find God in every sunrise and marvel of nature, may your words be seasoned and slow, tempered with God’s perfect love, and may His movement of grace and peace fall freshly on your congregation, so that observers near, far, and to the ends of the earth will see your faith and good works, and bring glory to God the Father.  Amen.

-jc

No.  The reasoning we use is much more subtle than that.  Something much more forgiving in a moment of passion.  We want good things.  We want a healthy sex life.  We want healthy bodies.  We want to enjoy life.

We.  Can.  Not.  Wait.

We want to have healthy bodies (not to mention the aesthetic benefits thereof), but working out and eating right takes a lot of time and dedication.  So we get surgeries and supplements, and focus on the immediate goal of looking healthy; reaping all the benefits without plowing, sowing, watering, fertilizing, and waiting for the time of harvest.

Or perhaps we react the opposite way – we get tired of the toil of eating healthy.  We enjoy the bounty of God’s earth in our foods, but we want too much of it, and we want it too quickly.

We want healthy sex lives, but waiting for marriage is so hard.  Or even in a marriage, we want a good sex life with our spouse, but it hasn’t developed into the frequency that we’d prefer.  So we settle for pornography, or for an affair outside our marriage.

I think these items illustrate the point pretty clearly.  I am reminded of Acts 1, after Jesus has risen from the grave.  The disciples are asking Him, “Is now the time that you will restore the kingdom of Israel?”

And Jesus says something very important:

“It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses…” [italics mine]

The Father has fixed times and seasons by his own authority.  Think about that for just a second.

What’s funny here is the disciples were already guilty of the same impatience we experience today.  We all want heaven – perfection – right now. And we’ve seen people in the early church use violence, of all things, to try to advance the kingdom.  It is an act of impatience.  We are so focused on the problems we experience (like an oppressive Roman regime), and on just eradicating those problems altogether, that we lose our awareness of the Holy Spirit’s present power to guide, convict, save, and fulfill.

There’s something to say for being fully present. Living in the Spirit right now.

Don’t lust after what God hasn’t given you.  Wait.  I heard one person put it this way: “Trade in your lightning bolt for a carrot.”  The kingdom, after all, is like a man who planted a seed in the ground.  It’s not like a plastic surgery or a microwave.

It’s not time.

Grace and Peace.    -jc

… And then you die.

I’ve been stricken (yet again) by this ultra-simple, basic – and yet profound and compelling fact.  You will live a life, and then you will die.  This has loads of implications, doesn’t it?

What kind of life are you living right now?  Here’s a “for instance”…

If you saw a homeless man that needed shoes, would you offer the pair on your feet?  Moreover, would you acquaint yourself with this man?  If the answer is “no”, it may be worth it to ask the question, “why not?”

Because honestly, shoes are an expense – but they aren’t a major expense (not necessarily, anyway).  It would cost you an uncomfortable walk to your car, and an average price of about $40 to replace your kicks.  So you’d lose about 20 minutes of comfort, an hour or so of convenience, and $40.

If this isn’t a sacrifice you’d be willing to make for another human being in need of shoes, then it may be time to evaluate your life a bit.

Because one day, you’ll die.  And you and God will have a chat about your life.

Life is too short to live in normalcy.  Be ridiculous.  Do things that don’t make sense, for the welfare of your fellow man.  Oh, how brightly God shines in the margins!

Grace and Peace.  -jc

And yet, really, it always has been.

I must say, however, it feels a little more personal to me now, as it has hit close to home with my friends getting divorces, losing their loved ones, their jobs, their health.  One has to wonder, “Why now?  Why all this at once?”

I don’t know.  All I know is God’s people need to be honest.  Now is not the time to throw a bible verse at a problem, and let its effects glance off our lives as if they are not real and devastating.  We must be honest with God – look into Psalms or Lamentations for examples – and honest with each other…

Which brings me to an interesting point.  No one can know you are hurting if you don’t let them know.  There is something to be said for confessing your sins to one another, and for sharing in fellowship and community.  Do not let your relationships be shallow and vain.  The welfare of your life may hang in the balance (as I have seen recently).

Just a quick word.  Grace and Peace.    -jc

But you know, it’s really pushed me into further introspection and study of the world, the way it works, and my Almighty God.

One thing really struck me, though. There are people out there who have the pure audacity to say, “There is no God.”

This baffles me… and not because I can’t see it any other way. I’m very familiar with the atheistic worldview. I have several friends who have taken that route, and I’ve debated with them these issues time and time again. I’ve entered the mindset and tried to see the logic.

There is some. Sure there is. As a matter of fact, that’s all atheism is – a pure reliance on logic, and logic alone. If it is not logical, then it is not possible. It is delusional. (that’s the viewpoint)

But there are problems here. Logic is ever evolving. Logic in and of itself really has to precede human perception, because as humans observe the universe and it’s laws, it is only when we discover the cause of what we do not understand that we can claim it is a logical development.

In other words, discovery brings understanding to what was before a mystery (no kidding, right?). Discovery allows our logic to expand.

But the question is, will it ever end?  Do we truly think we are ever going to fully grasp or understand the erratic behavior of so many subatomic particles?  Is there any way to know how some can “bleed” from one dimension into the next, or go from point A to point B without traveling the distance in between?

This is all micro-level stuff.  What about macro-level?  Our universe is currently expanding, and at a blinding speed.

Question:  expanding into what?  What “space” or other dimensional construct exists that can contain such an expansion?  From a scientific viewpoint, there are theories.

But there will always and forever be theories.  Postulations, efforts to understand what is currently a mystery.  There is a wall out there, the likes of which we cannot scale.  Whether that wall is our current state of rationale and research, or whether it is literally the outer wall of a cosmic container in the hands of God – that is the question modern science has to ask.

We are free to draw our own conclusions.  Atheists will say the former, and theists most likely the latter.

The audacity comes when an individual who knows naught of what lies beyond (as none of us do) claims, “there is no God.”  That is folly – stating as fact what can only now be called a theory.

This is when I ask, “Really?”

We, the theists?  If we have truly reviewed the evidence, we can honestly say that our review has led us to a belief in God.  We believe that before everything, outside and inside of everything, and after everything-

Is God.

Is this such a bad thing?

http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/ifyoucanreadthis.htm

Grace and Peace.  -jc

The question that’s been on my mind most lately is about Hell.

I have some legitimate questions about its nature, and about what kind of “hell” the bible is talking about in the scriptures.  Interestingly enough, the first time any other word than “Sheol” is used to describe hell (Sheol being an actual geographic location – a cave with an evil reputation, to be exact) is in the New Testament.

So until the gospels, hell – or what we currently think of when we hear the word – was something people could point out.  They could walk to it.  You didn’t want to go there, because pagan rituals were performed on the cave’s surface in honor of gods other than the one True God, Yahweh…  and those rituals were disgusting.  Evil.  Folks even believed that evil spirits came in and out of the cave.

So we have Old Testament authors talking about being delivered from Sheol and its “power”.

What does that mean?  Are the authors legitimizing the cave as a “Netherworld” of sorts, or are they speaking more of – brace yourselves – human evils?

There’s a reason I ask that question.  I think it’s safe to say there is a hell across the pond called “Darfur”.  There’s another called “The Redlight District”, and another called “Uganda”.  Another in the ganglands of the cities surrounding us.

Another here.

And another there.

Could it be that the church has focused so much on the eternal destiny of mankind that it has overlooked humanity’s earthly plight?

But here’s the good part…  Heaven is also here.  And there.  This little blog could have easily been called “Which Heaven is Better?”, but it just didn’t quite have the same jarring ring to it that probably grabbed your attention, and brought you here to share your thoughts.  Headlines are everything, right?

Heaven.  Is.  Here.  Under the lordship of Christ, we are seated in the heavenlies.  Right now.  The kingdom of God is at hand.

So now we have a legitimate reason for our emphatic activism:  to give ‘em heaven.  Go to the hells of the world, and take them by storm with all of heaven’s glory and mercy behind you.  We can’t be overwhelmed by the present suffering of the world.  We need to be overwhelmed by Christ’s love, which drives us to bring others into it.  This story ends in victory.  God will see to it.  So what are you afraid of?

Give ‘em heaven.    -jc

Holy Spirit, Light from Heaven
Settle down on me
Liken me to trees near water
Bearing fruit for thee

All I am and all I’ll be
Is evermore for thee
All I am and all I’ll be
Is evermore for thee

Dearest Father, slow to anger
Love which knows no bounds
Man awakes each passing morning and
Your mercy’s all around

All I am and all I’ll be
Is evermore for thee
All I am and all I’ll be
Is evermore for thee

It’s just a sweet, simple tune.  Thanks for stopping by and giving it a read.

Grace and Peace.  -jc

If you wanted to play guitar in a church worship band, but were constantly frustrated by “not getting it quite right” – you know, not quite nailing the tone, or the delay, or whatever…

Would you be interested in subscribing to an online video archive, with in-depth, song specific tutorial videos on how to get it “right”?  Do you think it would help your playing?

Please comment below. I’d be interested to see the results.

-jc