Pastor Dave's Blog
Centers of Influence
Posted by: Pastor Dave Lee | Friday November 14, 2008
When I woke up in my San Diego hotel room the morning after the election, i found a complimentary copy of USA Today outside my door. Inside I found a map that fascinated me. It showed the election results on a map of the US county by county, red for Mr. McCain and blue for Mr. Obama. Regardless of how you feel about the results of the recent General Election, I think there is something to be learned from what that map revealed.
According to the map (I've posted an image above that is more complete than the one I found in the paper that morning), the vast majority of the US, at least geographically speaking, went to Mr. McCain. The map at first glance is almost entirely red. But the pockets of blue are what really made the difference. Those areas represent the major urban centers of the US. I'm talking about the big cities.
The cities may not represent the geographic majority, but they are without doubt the centers of influence in our nation. As the cities go, so will the rest of the country. I'm sure my analysis is incomplete and incomplete in some ways, but it just got me thinking that if we are going to reach our nation for Christ, a good portion of kingdom resources must be aimed at winning the hearts and minds of those who live in our great cities.
This is not a new revelation, and I am certainly not the first person to make this observation, not by a long shot. I mention it because our church is working through where we want to aim our energies and resources in the years ahead. As that vision reaches beyond our immediate community, this insight will help guide us.
If you are reading this and you happen to be a Christ follower who lives in one of our major cities, please steward your position well. Let your life and your testimony present Christ and his invitation of hope in a way that is winsome and compelling.
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Hail to the Chief
Posted by: Pastor Dave Lee | Wednesday November 5, 2008
Last night was a historic night for the United States regardless of your politics. I hope that you can see that. Regardless of how you feel personally about Barack Obama or his politics, the fact that this nation put an African-American in the White House only 53 years after Rosa Parks' heroic act of defiance is an amazing thing.
Mr. Obama was elected in part on the promise that he would unite us as a nation and combat the bipartisan polarization that has paralyzed America. Senator McCain made similar promises. Now one of the candidates has prevailed and I trust that he will do what he can to follow through. Whether he succeeds depends quite a bit on us as citizens.
Last night, listening to post-election coverage here in San Diego where I've been attending some meetings, I was dismayed to hear a McCain supporter's response to the question, "Now that Mr. Obama has won the election wil you stand behind him as your new president." That McCain supporter replied flaty, "No. I'll oppose him just the same as the Democrats did to Bush. Two can play at that game." Maybe that man's sentiments are not reflective of most McCain supporters, but it is an attitude that is wrong.
I would like to call on all the folks at Harvest to join in supporting our new president. If you read this as a pro-Obama statement you would be mistaken. God's word clearly tells us in Romans 13:1, "Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God." Let's take that seriously.
Let's give the new president a chance to govern. Let's try for a moment to stop acting like Democrats and Republicans and start acting like Americans. For those of us who follow Christ that is not as difficult as it may sound because Jesus has given us a legitimate alternative identity apart from our political parties: that of disciples.
God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America (so presidential...).
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Insert object of disdain here...
Posted by: Pastor Dave Lee | Thursday October 2, 2008
File under: Perspectives & Pleas
You see them everywhere. Window decals of Calvin urinating on the object of someone's disdain. I think those stickers illustrate a very interesting human tendency to create polarities and choose sides. Think Mac vs. PC, Nikon vs. Canon, Cubs vs. Sox, Ford vs. Chevy trucks (sorry Dodge truck fans), just to name a few. And while I've defintely taken my stand on one side of several of those rivalries, I have to admit that the real differences between the two things being compared can actually be quite few.
So what is it in us that makes us so passionate about our preference for one thing over another, even when they are really not that different? I mean, have you watched a Cubs fan and a Sox fan go at it lately? And even between things where there are substantive differences, such as Democrat vs. Republican, the passion with which people stick to their sides does not always seem to arise primarily from issues. I wonder how many people on either side of the political aisle could clearly and intelligently articulate their party's or their candidates stand on all the key issues of the day.
As I've reflected on why we feel so strongly about the sides we take, I think maybe some of it has to do with a deep human need to belong to, or identify with, something. That affiliation is certainly more rewarding when your side wins some sort of contest (World Series, election, etc.). But even when your side is losing, it seems important to us as humans to care passionately about something, whether that fierce loyalty makes logical sense or not. Just talk to any Cubs fan and you'll begin to understand. Sometimes our present loyalties are rooted more in our history. We love what we first knew, or what someone important to us taught us to love. We can arm ourselves with a list of reasons why, but in the end it is not so much about reasons as it is about how we see ourselves or who we want to be loyal to.
This has led me to consider how much the loyalty that I feel toward Christ and Christianity arises from a fresh and informed conviction day after day, or it is just a mindless defense of the side I've chosen. Am I a Christian simply because I was born into a Christian family and took for myself the faith of parents I deeply love and respect?
And I certainly hope that I can lift up the beauty and virtue of Christ and his way of life without having to resort to the conversational equivalent of having Calvin urinate on something or someone else's treasure.
Now, if I could just apply that same line of thinking to the way I feel about Apple computers, maybe I'd have more friends. :-)
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Want to improve your memory?
Posted by: Pastor Dave Lee | Wednesday April 23, 2008
File under: Pages & Passages
I read an interesting article in Wired magazine this morning about how to boost your memory and brain power. They talked about a Polish guy named Piotr Wozniak who developed a software called SuperMemo that helps you remember things like vocabulary for a foreign language you’re trying to learn, or any other large body of information you want to commit to long-term memory.
His work has its roots in some research done by a German named Hermann Ebbinghaus who realized that the brain forgets things on a predictable arc over time. If you can practice recalling information at just the right time, you can remember it longer.
According to Wozniak, timing is everything. Try to review teh material too soon and it's pointless. Try to review it too late and you've already forgotten and are simply relearning it. But review it at just the time you're about to forget it and you'll reinforce recall over the long-term.
You can find a collection of interesting articles on improving memory on the SuperMemo web site. Now if I could just remember what I was working on when I thought of this blog post...
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If you hate bugs, don't read this...
Posted by: Pastor Dave Lee | Wednesday January 16, 2008
File under: People & Places
The other day I received an email from my brother in Kenya. It was a relief to read about something other than the political unrest in that country, but what he wrote filled my mind with horrific images.
You see, I am not very fond of bugs, and the situation he described had my skin crawling. As you read this, perhaps you will appreciate how different life can be in another part of the world. I've presented the essential text of his email with only slight modifications.
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Last night Noelle started noticing all these spiders crawling around in the school room after dinner. We had problems before with spider broods hatching in our house and then having to kill hundreds of spiders, so we thought it was the same thing. We had the kids running around with tissues killing dozens of them. Judah especially got a kick out of this exercise. :-) Then, they started noticing dozens of ants in the other end of the room. I also noticed that the spiders seemed to all be pouring in from the crack under the back door. I realized something strange was going on outside, so I got a flashlight and a couple of cans of Doom (like Raid) and went to the
backyard to investigate.
There were dozens of these huge black circles on our backyard that, in the dark, looked like dirt patches in our lawn. On closer inspection I realized that they were huge ant piles with thousands of ants crawling on top of each other. They were all connected by these thick highways of ants in this amazing network. I then looked up at the walls of our house and realized that there were hundreds of crickets, roaches, and spiders all climbing along the back walls of our house, trying to get away from these ants. Some of them had found cracks in our windows and doors and were pouring in through them. I'm not sure if this was some kind of a coordinated "hunt" that the ants were doing, but it sure seemed like the other insects interpreted it that way.
I had to be really careful because if I accidentally stepped into one of those ant piles or highways, I could have hundreds of biting ants up my leg in seconds. (I know this from painful experience.)
Carefully avoiding the ants, I began to spray a heavy perimeter of Doom around all our windows and doors, killing many ants and other insects along the way. By the time I got to our back porch where all the spiders were entering I found spiders and other bugs everywhere--it was a like a big sanctuary for them. I began to just spray a fog of Doom everywhere indiscriminately, and then seconds later I heard what basically sounded like rain--but it was hundreds of bugs falling off the walls and ceiling of our porch onto the floor. It was a really sickening sound.
I started choking and gagging on the Doom and then went back into the house and then sealed the entire backdoor with duct tape so that more spiders couldn't enter. After that, things calmed down for the rest of the night. There are these huge ant colonies all over our station and when they decide to mobilize it really is like something out of National Geographic. We've had some other interesting wonders related to insects like witnessing the migration of tens of thousands of butterflies and seeing hundreds of thousands of termites hatch and take to the skies to form new colonies. One of the fringe benefits of living in Africa.
Sorry, I didn't take any pictures of last nights events. :-( Maybe next time, but it's usually such a hectic scene that it's hard to think about taking pictures during the actual attack. Hope that gave you something entertaining to read with your morning coffee. :-)
Steve
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An Amazing Little Artist
Posted by: Pastor Dave Lee | Friday December 21, 2007
File under: People & Places
I just received a CNN video clip of a most remarkable story. It is about a little girl named Akiane who at age 4 began having vivid visions of God and heaven. She described them in great detail to her atheist mother but soon started to sketch, then paint her visions.
The works she produced starting at that young age are stunning. You can visit her web site and see more of her work. The painting on the right is called Prince of Peace and was done when she was 8 years old!
According to the video clip she took up piano a few months ago and is already composing her own pieces. Amazing!
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The Gift of Giving
Posted by: Pastor Dave Lee | Sunday December 16, 2007
File under: Perspectives & Pleas
About a week ago I received a letter from someone named Matt Dalio of the Dalio Family Foundation. He was writing to encourage me to join him in a growing movement to make Christmas gift giving more charitable.
He lamented the runaway consumerism and materialism that marks the Christmas season. He wanted to find a way to nurture the beautiful practice of gift giving while without fueling the shopping craze.
His suggestion was that we ask our friends and family to give a charitable gift in our name instead of buying something for us. He suggested going to the web site www.redefinechristmas.org to find out more.
That site points to another site called www.justgive.org that makes it so easy to give an online donation to over 1 million registered charitable organizations. I searched and found that our good friends at GRIP were registered!
It may be a bit late for this Christmas, but maybe it would be a beautiful way to promote the true spirit of Christmas next year by starting early and getting the word out. Hey, I figure that means more time at home with loved ones instead of out at the mall amidst the craziness. Sounds very appealing to me...
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We Remember What We See
Posted by: Pastor Dave Lee | Thursday October 4, 2007
File under: Perspectives & Pleas
My brother Steve always jokes that I have a terrible memory. Quite often when he hears me give a sermon illustration using a childhood memory, he’ll call or write to give me the historically correct version of the event I was describing. I’ll be the first to admit that his memory is far better than mine. He actually remembers the sounds and smells of the airport the day we landed in the United States for the first time!
It may be true that my memories are not always historically accurate. They may only be my subjective version of what happened and not the factual truth. But it strikes me that it is my perception of what happened and not just the events themselves that shape who I am. Even if the actual facts may be lost to me forever, my version of history stays with me, becomes my autobiographical reality, and continues to exert its influence over my life.
It may be cliché to say it today, but attitude matters. All memories—in fact, all history—is arguably subjective. Historical events pass through a filter of selective retention and we remember what we want and how we saw it. We like to say that the events of our lives shape who we are. I would argue that it is our attitudes about those events that shape who we are.
Our attitudes even shape our memories. A family could experience financial ruin on a single terrible day, and one sibling will recall it as the day that they lost all hope in the future while another will remember it as the day she realized how much she’d taken her blessings for granted. Two siblings who live through the same historical event approach it with different attitudes and emerge with radically different memories.
How has your attitude shaped the memories you hold onto? How historically accurate are your memories? What difference would it make today if you realized the shaping power of attitude?
Addendum - 10.05.07
I was recently reading a friend's blog and he had this quote that I thought really spoke to this present post: "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." -- Anais Nin
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The Contemplative Pastor
Posted by: Pastor Dave Lee | Thursday September 13, 2007
File under: Pages & Passages
I read something in Eugene Peterson's book "The Contemplative Pastor" that really hit me like a brick. "How can I lead people into the quiet place beside the still waters if I am in perpetual motion? How can I persuade a person to live by faith and not by works if I have to juggle my schedule constantly to make everything fit into place?" I've been really wrestling with the sensation that I am in perpetual motion and most of that motion does not move God's real purposes forward. Yes, there is accomplishment of tasks, but inwardly there is rarely peace. Reading that question gave words to the anxiety that often pervades my life.
I appreciate Peterson because he is not one of those prolific but shallow writers that puts out a book every year. He writes what he lives. He served as the pastor of a small rural congregation for nearly 30 years with little fame or fanfare. He thinks deeply and writes succintly. You have to listen to people like that. Check out what he wrote just a page before the excerpt above:
"I am busy because I am lazy. I indolently let others decide what I will do instead of resolutely deciding myself. I let people who do not understand the work of the pastor write the agenda for my day's work because I am too slipshod to write it myself. The pastor is a shadow figure in these people's minds, a marginal person vaguely connected with matters of God and good will. Anything remotely religious or somehow well-intentioned can be properly assigned to the pastor. Because these assignments to pastoral service are made sincerely, I go along with them. It takes effort to refuse, and besides, there's always the danger that the refusal will be interpreted as a rebuff, a betrayal of religion, and a calloused disregard for people in need. It was a favorite theme of C.S. Lewis that only lazy people work hard. By lazily abdicating the essential work of deciding and directing, establishing values and setting goals, other people do it for us; then we find ourselves frantically, at the last minute, trying to satisfy a half dozen different demands on our time, none of which is essential to our vocation, to stave off the disaster of disappointing someone."
Wow! Lord, help me stop running to stand still. Help me not to dwell in the land of low-hanging fruit but reach for things that make a difference. Help me to accomplish as much through quiet and contemplation as I do through the rush of activity that fills most of my days.
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