Prayer as creativity

My favorite  video short from 24-7prayer.com Explores Tribe, a prayer group that uses percussion instruments to pray and pray and play they do!!! Is it possible for prayer to be a drumbeat or prayer to be art?  Here are some favorite lines.  Enjoy!

“Whatever language you speak, whatever comes from your heart, that becomes a prayer.”

“Wouldn’t it make sense that the God who made rhythm would understand what’s in our hearts and how that came out in this language called rhythm.”

“Prayer is about being with God and whatever kind of communication as long as it is authentic, as its honest, its sincere, its vulnerable, then that’s prayer.”

How you connect is really not the issue, the issue is really connecting with God is.

Finding the way ahead in tragedy

If you haven’t heard “I will trust you” by Steven Curtis Chapman, you will likely be singing it in church before too long.  I put it in the same class as “Blessed Be Your Name” by Matt Redman. Could not find the lyrics on the web and so I transcribed them this morning.  In doing so, I find this song is even richer than I previous thought. If you don’t know the story out of which this song arose, here is one story. I have added a few pictures that seem to fit with the song.

I don’t even want to breathe right now. All I want to do is close my eyes. And I don’t want to open them again. Until I’m standing on the other side.  I don’t even want to be right now. I don’t want to think another thought. And I don’t want to feel this pain I feel. Right now, pain is all I got. Feels like its all I got. But I know its not. Oh, I know You are all I got

And I will trust you, trust you, trust you trust you God I will. Even when I don’t understand. Even then I will say again. You are my God. And I will trust you

God I’m longing for the day to come.  When this cloudy glass I’m looking through. Shattered in a million pieces. And finally I can just see you. God you know I believe its true.  I will see you. But until the day I do.

I will trust you, trust you, trust you God I will. Even when I don’t understand. Even then I will say again.  You are my God. And I trust you and with every breath I take.  And For every day that breaks. I will trust you, I will trust you. And now that nothing makes sense. Even then I will say again. God I trust you, I trust you

I know your heart is good. I know your love is strong. I know your plans for me are much better than my own.

So, I will trust you, trust you, I trust you God again. And I will trust you, I will trust you I will.  Even when I don’t understand. Even then I will say again

I will trust you, I will trust you I will. I know your heart is good, your love is strong, your plans for me are better than my own. I know your heart is good, I know your love is strong, I know your plans for me are much better than my own.

And I will trust you. You are my God. And I will trust you

Church for dogs and their owners

I like dogs.  I really do.  I grew up with them.  I would like to have a dog again some day.  I have been to churches here in which dogs roam in and out at will. It’s not that I am not opposed to having dogs in church but . . .  a church service where they are invited? Is there something wrong with this picture?

This really is happening at one California church. Thanks to Kruse Kronicle. Says the Pastor,

The concept is the entire family–2 footed and 4 footed.  There is love, there is God in some form or fashion.  And when we love a dog or a dog loves us, that’s a part of God and God is a part of that.

Fall colors

If you are like me who missed fall (living in the tropics) or you didn’t get enough of it, Vicki Horton has some great shots for your reflections.

 

More pics from Manila Flood of 09

Attended a peer debriefing training seminar yesterday which was helpful.  During our practice session, I was debriefed about my flood experiences–the practice became reality and I realized that I had not talked to anyone about it.  I guess even care givers need to be debriefed. When you look at these pictures which I found last week, you can get some perspective on how deep the water really did get

Monkeys, money and emotion

Saw this piece about Monkey Economics on Kruse Kronicle. What caught my interest is when they said that they obtained “economic outcomes not through sitting down and negotiation, but through feeling and emotion.” Sounds a little like what we learned about in our counseling and member care seminar last week.

Their conclusion on the broadcast, “It’s the law of supply and demand played out along the neurohormonal pathways that deal with emotion in the monkey brain.”

Here is a link to the transcript and the the radio broadcast which is entertaining in itself.

 

Prayer as community

Following is a link to the second video short from 24-7 prayer network called Prayer as Community. First a  few quotes,

• Prayer is talking, living, an ongoing talk with God
• Prayer is not supposed to be cut down to prayer times.  Your whole day is supposed to be a prayer.  Whatever you do is supposed to happen in connection to God and in connection to what he wants you to do and in connection to your calling.

Zinzendorff said, “Unless your day is a prayer all your prayer times are for nothing.”

Bitter-sweet

Intriguing poem by George Herbert from the Desiring God website.

Bitter-sweet

Ah, my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve;
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament and love.

the vendor

the vendor

Originally uploaded by karloil

this guys has great pics of life in the Philippines

24-7 prayer videos

If passion moves you, watch the five short crazy wild videos on the 24-7 prayer movement.  Thanks to missions catalyst e-magazine.  Watched the first four of these already.  You can go find info on their website and see the first video here.

Following are a few favorite quotes from the first short, Prayer as movement

In this short, you learn about the story of a prayer movement started by a missional prayer group in U.K. inspired by Moravians.  They interviews a few people and asked them what words they would use to describe 24-7 prayer

• Subversive, foolish global
• Wild, passionate, radical
• Prayer, mission and justice
• Action, respect and responsibility
• Passion, fun, spirit

“It empowers people whoever they are, whatever circumstances young or old to step into the presence of God in a really fresh way.”

“It made me see how much God can use anyone.”

Not exactly the missionary position

Just to be fair, here is a link to Greg Laden’s post about how missionaries in Africa have set back the gay rights of Africans.   Of course, he only presents part of the story.  Would be interesting to find out the laws against child abuse and attempted murder.  If people are intentionally infecting others with HIV, would that not be the same as poisoning them although with a much higher assurance of success?

What to do about those who beg

People are in need all around us. This is an issue for all of us, not just those of us who live in Asia.  I can still see the homeless people living under the bridges in Houston.  If I am honest, I sometimes avoid those places in which I may encounter those most in need, encounter those begging.  My lack of compassion is troubling.  Two very challenging posts from John Piper on “Giving to the one who begs from you,” out of Matthew 5:42 do not make me feel any better.

Piper discusses reasons why we would not want to give to beggars: maybe they are being dishonest, use drugs or involved in other sinful behavior; we may not be sure if there is a real need; will we create dependency?

He tests my heart with such radical love. And in my heart I see my selfish, unloving impulses that do not want to part with my money, possessions, time, or convenience for needy or evil people.

Piper points out that He asks us to do this not because of what good may happen in the lives of the people we help but simply because we are sons of our Father in heaven (Mtt 5:45). As Piper says, we show that we are God’s children by “the stunning—some would call foolish—way we show generous kindness toward undeserving evil people—the very kindness we’ve received.”

I am afraid that I too often fail miserably in this call to “radical, gospel generosity.”  Pray for me that I might give freely just as I have freely received. Picture below is from buhaypinoy

Debating the problem of evil

Link to a debate between Christian Dinesh D’Souza and agnostic Bart Ehrman on the problem of evil. Thanks to my wife!

Penguins and more penguins

Enjoy

Wholeness comes as we praise the glory of his grace

I love the way John Piper starts out his post, which is a copy of his speech to the American Association of Counselors. He says, I am a man

• who must crucify the love of praise every day;
• who struggles with the same adolescent fear at age 63 that he had at 15, the fear of looking foolish;
• who is prone to feel self-pity and pout when he doesn’t get loved the way he wants;
• who is almost never sure he has used his time in the best way and therefore struggles with guilt;
• who is short on compassion and long on critical analysis;
• who can freeze up emotionally when he’s tired, and feel instinctively that it’s someone else’s fault;
• who loves to praise God in the great assembly and feels a constraint on his spirit in his own living room;
• who has loved his wife of forty years imperfectly and spent with her over three of those years with a Christian counselor trying to become better images of Christ and the church;
• and who never feels sure that his motives are pure, including right now, for why he is telling you all this.

I am sure he does this on one level because he is speaking to a room full of counselors but on a deeper level so that they will see why he needs and loves the grace of God.  The grace of God enables us to behold the glory of the Son of God and beholding that glory, we are transformed (Jn 1:14-16 and 2 Cor 3:18) into that same image.  Thus, we discover what we were created for–that we might praise the glory of his grace (Eph 1:14-16).  Piper says,

If praising God’s glory is our final destiny, then seeing and savoring and praising God’s glory must be at the heart of what it means to be fully human. Seeing and savoring God is, therefore, the heart of mental health.

And here is where Piper makes a point that so many of us get wrong, “Authentic, heartfelt, truth-based, God-centered praise is the mark of mental health, not a means to mental health.”  As we behold His glory, as we praise His glory, we are made whole but that is not why we praise His glory.  God reaches out to us in loves and we have a deep experience of His love so that God receives more glory from our praise. As Piper says,

“. . . feeling loved by God means feeling glad that God not only crushed his Son for me, but that he is now crushing every vestige of desire in my life that competes with the pleasure of the praise of the glory of his grace.”

And for all of us who have had some experience of the healing that God’s grace brings to us, we recognize that we would never have come to this point on our own.  Piper closes out about this point,

There is only one hope for Christ-exalting transformation in our preaching and our counseling—the supernatural work of God giving us eyes to see and hearts to savor the all-satisfying beauty of the glory of the grace of God. When that happens, our obsession with self will be broken, and beholding the glory of the Lord, we will be changed into his image from one degree of glory to the next.

Classic John Piper, bringing us back to the Scriptures and to what is of supreme importance, the glory of God.

Beyond the blog

I have been blogging for about three years now. I have had some ups and downs but have kept posting but unfortunately I have not been able to sustain the time needed to look at other blogs around.  In the meantime, a lot has happened.   I try to stay up with facebook and am barely on twitter.  Nice picture above despair.com. Well, tonight, thanks to Brian Solis I have been exposed to an entire new world out there.

Brian has created the conversation prism, a graphic display of what is happening out there and how it might be utilized.   Here is a link to a clickable version in which you can see what is actually said. Someone else explains, Each category around the “wheel” represents a different type of conversation.

Although Brian’s objective seems focused on the economic importance of understanding what is happening in the social media, there are many things he is saying to which we as Christians need to pay attention! Here are a few gems, I gleaned from some of Brian’s posts.  Bold print is my own.

From one post

Perhaps most importantly, the process of listening and observing will reveal the cultures of the very communities you may wish to engage.

This is about creating and cultivating relationships with people, online and in the real world, and these relationships are defined by mutual value and benefits.

In the social economy, relationships are the new currency.

And another

Conversations are slowly migrating away from blogs and moving to micro social networks such as Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, FriendFeed, and now, Shyftr

Furthermore, new micro networks and content aggregators are allowing for comments directly in the aggregated flow or stream, which don’t make it back to the original post. And, that’s exactly where we need innovation. New tools and services that connect those comments back to the source will help create a manageable universe where people orbit the point of origin instead of creating a series of disparate galaxies of conversations around the same idea. But, I guess that’s the evolution that we need to acknowledge, the point of origin is relative to the reader and where they discover the content, not necessarily where we publish it.

And finally

As Social Media evolves, the value of online conversations is becoming distributed and decentralized. As the host of any given conversation, it is almost impossible to expect your community to discover or congregate around your content in any one given place, especially the point of origin. It’s both the challenge and the promise of micromedia and social networks. The comments section of your blog, for example may not truly represent the community response or reaction because it may thrive across other disparate networks and communities, whether you’re aware of it or not.

Indeed, conversations are no longer relegated to blogs. Nor are they limited to any one community. Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, et al, are not only online neighborhoods (or trendy tools), but they are also forums where your contacts may choose to share their reaction and thoughts directly with you instead of immortalizing those thoughts in the comments section of your blog. Conversations are not only adding layers to the original topic, they’re also more visible and influential than ever before.

Basically, conversation is moving from a very static and slow form of conversation — the comments thread on blog posts — to a more dynamic and fast form of conversation: in to the flow in Twitter, Friendfeed, and others. I think this directionality may be like a law of the universe: conversation moves to where is most social

The best conversationalists are also the best listeners. Conversations are distributed and the tools for finding them are available and increase in functionality every week. It requires a proactive approach to find them, for they may not necessarily find you.

On being different

Here is a fun slideshow

Parents as sculptors of our children’s brains

Several of our speakers last week tried to help us understand what is happening in the brain during various emotional interactions.  One part of the brain, the amygdala was called “fear central,” I suppose since that is the part that regulates emotions.  Another described how anger takes over during “amygdala hijacking.”  Just read an article in which a less than fully functioning amygdala led to poor impulse control.

The interesting point–there may be a link between a less developed amygdala and those who do not have two care givers in the home.  Love actually makes a difference in our neurological development!  I am sure this will not go well in some circles!  The problem–tests were done on small rodents called degus.    The article quotes the scientests,

Of course, the frontal cortex—where thinking and decision-making take place—is more complex in humans than it is in other animals. Thus, says Dr. Braun, it is important to be “really careful” about extrapolating the recent findings to human populations.

“The minute you get into stuff with extensive social and environmental components, the social differences between humans and animals are massive,” says Simon Chapple, a senior economist in the social policy division of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the 30-country grouping of the world’s largest economies.

It remains an “open verdict” whether single parenthood causes these bad outcomes, or is merely associated with them, says Dr. Chapple.

But the bottom line

“The bottom line, says Dr. Braun, is that parents need to fuel their children’s brains with talk, touch and sensitive stimulation that involves give and take.”

Parents, she says, “are the sculptors of their children’s brains.”

Living in the presence of one another

As Typhoon Santi is soon to make landfall in the Philippines coast on this all-saints weekend, our staff have headed home early to beat the weather and traffic.   The ferries (to Mindoro) have stopped running as of this 6 a.m. morning due to a signal two (out of four) being in effect although there were no winds yet blowing.   Pray for our team members previously affected by Typhoon Ondoy back a month ago–before most of us never thought too much about typhoons coming but now, we are paying attention.  Hopefully, there will not be a re-traumatizing of many in the city on this weekend when the cemeteries are full of people grieving and remembering their loved ones.  Here is a little about the day of the dead and a video link as well if you are interested

A friend pointed me to the following reflection by Dr. Melba Maggay on her experience during Ondoy.  Following is an excerpt from which I picked the title of this post.  Ate Melba speaks with a prophetic voice to the issues of our day and when she speaks or writes, I listen.  I think you will enjoy (and perhaps squirm a little?) as you read her full comments.

“I asked God what all this means for me. So far, the one thing clear is that I am being asked to share in the ‘fellowship of his suffering’, in that great mystery of solidarity where the sorrow and degradation of one human being is the sorrow and degradation of all. Whether we are aware of it or not, we live in the presence of one another. The presence of the vast poor among us says as much about the rest of us as the kind of government we live under.

In a small way, I now know what it must be like for those who are swept to the margins, forced to live precariously in cities with no thought nor place for them, squatting dangerously along esteros, river banks and other waterways. Comfortable people tend to see them as obstructions, clogging our life systems. The truth is that it is a horrendous scandal that so many have nowhere else to go.”

Grieving the pain of our losses

Not sure exactly what Andre Agassi was thinking when he was working on his autobiography, Open, but I wonder if there is not a grieving of his past pain going on there.  Rick Reilly writes about the new book and asks, why would a guy write about his dark (and secret) past–a sad relationship with his dad and later drug usage.

As Dr. Jenny Pak said at our counseling and member care conference last week, “It takes a lot of energy to repress our pain.”  I am grateful for the God-given insight about some personal pain I have been repressing and for which I need to grieve. During our conference, I learned that it is necessary for us to grieve when we have lost people (or things) to which we were attached.  I guess the idea is that the pain has to go somewhere!

If I heard correctly, in grief work, we sit with the pain of our losses (feeling abandoned or rejected , not being loved the way we wanted or needed etc.) and after a period of time, we are able to let go.   To quote Dr. Pak again, “Emotions are a package—dampening the ability to grieve will prevent us from fully experiencing the other emotions.”

Of course, most of us don’t need to write books to grieve our losses like Andre (if indeed that is what he is doing) or post blogs about our losses (??) but it does seem that we will likely need others to walk with us on this grief journey. I know I think I do!