Rant of the Exiles

Reflecting on my twenties from the vantage point of forty Meg Jay's book, The Defining Decade , for and about twentysomethings is excellent. She has street cred as a psychotherapist who has worked with dozens of twentysomethings in the San Francisco bay area and on the East Coast. Her book is filled with real-life twentysomething case studies I've heard many times before as a pastor who works with young adults. My first exposure to Jay came her through her excellent  TED talk and then a friend loaned me her book. The gist of it goes something like this:  Stop putting off your most important decisions in your twenties. The life you envision will not happen overnight so start planning and working on it today.  It probably takes at least ten years of distance to determine whether a major decision you made turned out well. So as a forty-year old, I decided to look back on my twenties and evaluate the life choices that gave me the greatest joys and those t...

This is not an easy book to read. It takes awhile to get going. The first half alternates from tedious to infuriating. But the payoff in the second half is more than worth it. If you allow God to speak through Paul Zahl, it's a thrilling, life-changing ride. He defines grace as one-way love. Zahl is rigorously insistent and comprehensive on this definition and its application throughout the course of the book. I highly respect that because I find that I'm inconsistent about grace. I preach the importance of unconditional love but there are vast swaths of heart landscape that lay untouched by grace. Zahl's style is unique. The dude is old and he constantly makes movie references from the 1960s and earlier. He acts as if you should know what he's talking about. That's the infuriating part. At certain points, I had no idea what he was talking about. If that happens to you, give him the benefit of the doubt and keep going. The book is organized like the b...

You know the drill. The worship leader opens his set with a catalog of petty sins he's committed in the past week. He talks about how we're all sinners, how we're unworthy of God's grace, but now we're forgiven. After that brief but necessary bath in self-pity and self-flagellation, we have the appropriate sense of guilt to begin singing songs. I frequently hear Christians describe themselves as sinners. It's being humble and authentic and I respect that. After all, everyone is broken and messed up in some significant way. When a follower of Jesus says he is a sinner, he is coming to terms with his fallibility. He is aware of his weakness and he has the courage and humility to acknowledge that. That's a good thing. I don't want to detract from that. And yet I wonder if sin is the core identity of a follower of Jesus. Some might argue we're both sinners and saints and we must get used to the tension. Thus the fundamental question is this: O...

I helped the older Asian gentlemen put his backpack into the overhead luggage bin. I sat in the middle* and he had the window seat on our flight from London to San Francisco. It turns out he was an Oxford physics professor headed to Berkeley for a workshop. When I asked him about his travel, he told me he had visited the US too many times to count and he was always too busy to have time to sight-see. Later I praised Oxford as an exemplary institution of higher learning. He replied with a perfunctory "of course". After I told him I was a pastor, he kept calling me a priest and asked me about conducting mass. I couldn't tell if he was feigning ignorance or considered religion as beneath his superior intellect.  I love talking to people on planes. I'm an extrovert and it's a captive audience. These situations are great opportunities to get to know people. Sometimes people aren't in the mood to talk and that's fine. They're also my favorite chances ...

LAS VEGAS - CES - February 11th, 2016 - LifeHacker Church, a leader in the spiritual fitness market, today unveiled SinWin, a behavior tracking app, which together with the wearable technology in the SinWinSkin bracelet, make up a comprehensive sin management solution. Never before has behavior tracking been easier or more accurate. Instead of journals, logs, accountability partners, and the "leading" of the Holy Spirit, SinWin wearable technology allows you to monitor works of the flesh in real-time. When you fail to take a thought captive, SinWin will know and so will everyone else. SinWin technology incorporates sensors monitoring heart rate, speech, core temperature, perspiration level, ergonomic state, and electromagnetic radiation to derive your SinScale - a rating for your depravity. The technology is complex but the result is simple. And effective. Here's how it works: Each day your SinScale starts with a score of 10,000 points. Every sin de...

The full text of what she says: Inside every overweight woman is a woman she knows she can be. Many times you look in the mirror and you don't even recognize your own self, because you got lost - buried - in the weight that you carry. Nothing you've ever been through is wasted. So every time I tried and failed, every time I tried again, and every time I tried again, has brought me to this most powerful moment - to say:   "If not now, when?" I feel that way and I know millions of other people feel that way. Are you ready? Let's do this together. Let me first acknowledge that Oprah does not proclaim the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That's the sina qua non of preaching the gospel. And yet there are more gospel redemptive elements of Oprah's ad than most thirty-forty minute sermons. In addition, Oprah is able to move our hearts in a way most sermons won't - and the fact she can do that in sixty seconds is incredible.   Note...

When should one aim to get married? How long should one know his/her significant other before tying the knot? I often hear these two questions and they have all kinds of problems because each person and relationship is different. Plus, other people have answered better than I will. Earlier is Better (sort of) I generally believe opposing the prevailing culture for gospel reasons. The culture of overachieving Asian Americans  emphasizes delaying marriage until career, education, and finances have been sorted. If you're in that category, I believe earlier age-wise is better. I'm biased towards the start-up rather than merger aspect of marriage. Marrying younger has all kinds of benefits - namely building a life together when each of you is the most malleable. A good marriage trumps career, education, and finances. However, for impulsive and short-sighted people, waiting is probably a good thing. What's most important is to become the...