My Blog
Casting Crowns in concert
Sunday, June 27, 2004 at 7:02 am
I am one of those guys who can receive several complements and still feel incompetent. I graduate in less than 6 months and I'm not ready for the real world. The chain reaction off of this is making me doubt God - even doubt His existence. I'm reading the Case for a Creator right now and it's a great book. It gives plenty of proof that there has to be an intelligent designer to the universe. Why do I doubt that? Only this - 'cause I don't feel like believing so. I think that's pretty much it. If it were so, then I would have to admit that I have special gifts and that God has a special purpose for my life. Now how can I do that and still have an inferiority complex? See the problem?
Last night I went with the staff @ LaMoine Christian Camp to a Casting Crowns concert. It was an awesome night. I'm spending the summer out there as a sort of internship to gain class credit for my experience and as much as everyone loves everything I do out there - I don't feel good enough. The only reason I can come up with is that I'm not the best. I feel worthless when I can't do better than a full staff at a full production studio when I myself have no budget nor experience. At the casting crowns concert, the lead singer Mark gave his story. He gave the story of how he went to college in florida thinking he was going to sing and doing very badly at the beginning. He spent 6 years at that 4-year school. He didn't expect to ever be singing for a career. Yet God kept those dreams in his heart and he never totally gave up. He felt so incapable. I can't remember much of the story now - shouldn't have waited till today to write. In the end, well, he's the lead singer for Casting Crowns, and though he only knew 4 chords when he started school there, he played and sang a beautiful song for us after his story.
He was telling the first half of my own story. I feel like a nobody. In reality, the only nobodyness I have is from giving up. After his story, my spirits lifted totally. I felt awesome, I was praising God loudly along with the rest of the music. I felt alive again. It was my own fault - I didn't want to face the God of "you can do it" when I didn't want to feel capable. It put too much of a risk of failure on me to have confidence. I feel better. I can admit the reality of God as well.
This morning, Satan confirmed the reality of God's healing last night. I went online and somehow ended up at the real estate web site that I had done a year ago. Months ago, their web site disappeared. When I made the site in the first place, I spent a lot of time designing the technical end. I didn't give enough attention to aesthetics. I charged as if I did. I felt shameful of not doing well enough. However, I gave them a guarantee that if there was anything they didn't like about the site, I would change it as long as they told me about it withing a few months. They never said anything - they never even said anything when they paid me. Today when I visited the site, it was up again - someone else's design. It had several pages on the site they never asked me for, though I offered to put in. It had a slightly better artistic design, but I could do better (though I didn't). The feeling crept in was that there was no way i could have done what the other person had done with the site. All month I've been closely updating a camp web site that I think is far better in both design and structure, but still the temptation to feel worthless crept in. I recognized what was going on, though. I wasn't about to feel bad. I was ready to thank God for showing it to me. I can't just ignore my past - I want to learn from it now. I watched a good film tonight. It was called "thirteen" and since it had won at the Sundance Film Festival - I thought I would try to learn from it. Excellent movie about understanding junior high times in the city. Very emotional...heavy overtones of the search for love. It was a beautiful movie. It's 2 now. I need some sleep. I need to post here more often.
Unbelievable stupidity!!!
Sunday, May 30, 2004 at 6:39 am
In the '60's, the United States had lots and lots of ICBM's (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles) stockpiled to protect them during the cold war. Don't worry, they can't be launched by a terrorist unless they knew the 8-digit unlock code. How hard would it have been to guess? Believe it or not, that 8-digit code was set to '00000000.' The code was not changed until 1977!!! Read about it in this article.
And that's my stupidity notice of the day.
More Stolen Ideas
Tuesday, May 04, 2004 at 7:59 pm
I can't believe this. I must be the next great mind. Every time I have what i think is a great idea, I never do anything with it and then it pops up in the rest of the world. Last night, I watched a movie and heard the phrase "word vomit." I coined that phrase myself just last year to describe the unintelligibles that come out when you start to go Porky Pig in the middle of a sentence. They used it differently, but with the same pair of words.
The reason I came to Blogdor this afternoon? My OTHER stolen idea. I wanted a toothpaste that wasn't mint flavored, so that I could brush my teeth whenever I want without having a flavor in my mouth that tastes bad with orange juice. Today - I see a commercial for orange citrus toothpaste! I'll be ok :-P
Insight Again
Friday, April 30, 2004 at 3:42 pm
Notice that whenever I'm not posting here at least weekly, I am probably not quite paying attention to my own life. Today is one of self-examination. I am paying attention to wasted moments of time. I sat here in my room most of yesterday thinking that I wanted to do some video work to practice and learn. It just sounded so boring. It's the thing I love to do the most when I have a goal. What changed? Well, I was thinking about that this morning, and a verse that had been on my mind earlier popped back into my head. "If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, " Ok, now I'm looking it up, I don't have it memorized THAT well. "and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing."
That section of 1 Corinthians 13 usually tells me that it's stupid to do things out of selfish ambition. Today, it was telling me that it's useless to do things without ambition. If I think I should get better at something for the future, I think it makes so much more sense to practice by making it useful NOW. Transferring that idea over to the rest of college, it is not about studying and making the grades or even pure knowledge (that's boring too), it's about applying every bit of newfound wisdom to life.
A beautiful poem???
Wednesday, April 07, 2004 at 3:30 pm
Please give me a bagel for the road
And I'll call my sister Dinah
What a wonderful trolley, this arsenic be
That layeth its sprains upon the barstool of incognito
