I’ve been thinking a lot about the “big ticket” issues that have been in the news lately. The sort of issues you see creating huge headlines and fostering a ravenous outcry from parties on both sides. Prop 8, the mosque at ground zero, abortion rights, and the list goes on. More often than not these arguments become “big ticket” fights because the levels of passions flare from what seem to be opposing camps. On one side you have the religious right, the folks who feel it is their God-given duty to, well, defend the cause of righteousness as God’s servants. The other are those who would proudly wear the tag “liberal” as if it were a badge of honor — a shield behind which they lay siege to the ancient bastions of a world long forgotten and fallen into antiquity.

Well, I’ve often found myself between these two groups. Sometimes my opinions on these issues gets me branded as being wishy-washy. What can I say? In a world of passionate extremes, there is little room for a guy to call for discussion, understanding and compromise. Do not misunderstand my desire to to understand each other and work together in a busted world as being soft on what I believe. I have a clear understanding of all of the issues mentioned above — and I’ll tell you those beliefs if you ask me directly. I won’t say here. I’m not up for anonymous internet screaming, and that would only serve to take away from my point.

As a Christian, as a minister of the Gospel, and a guy who passionately loves Jesus even when I screw things up beyond any sort of rational limit — my first and foremost thought is to wonder what He thinks of all this. I just spent the better part of the last year studying the book of John with my college guys. As I looked back on the life of Christ that was reflected there, and in the other Gospels, and lives and teachings of the disciples after Christ’s ascension — I noticed the way in which Christ treated those who were not in line with Himself.

I’m not the first one to bring up the fact that Christ hung out with sinners, prostitutes, lepers, and a host of others that everyone else thought were the most vile of the vile. He had a habit of taking pains to go out of his way to show love to those everyone else had spit on and cursed. He made a tax collector one of his closest disciples, granted peace to a woman caught in adultery, and, again, the stories go on and on. It seemed to me that when it came to those who did not know Him as Lord and Savior — Christ went out of his way to show them love, to show them kindness and to speak truth into their lives through as they enjoyed the rest only the love of God can bring.

On the flip-side, it seemed that the times when Christ got the most biting, the most angry and vicious, the times when he simply could not sit idly by and allow things to go without calling a villain and villain and condemned the sinner — was when it was the religious leaders using the Law of God as a weapon to vilify, beat down, and control those who were not perfectly following the Law. To these men he cried out, turned tables and cracked whips, and shot venom in the form of biting attacks and declarations of unrepentant disbelief.

So what are we to learn from this? I’m sick and tired of Christians feeling the need to defend God. I do believe in right and wrong, what God holds as sin and what God holds as sacred. I also believe that other than Him, none of us has done this right. None. Our faith does not make us perfect, it makes us forgiven. Our righteousness not our own, but imparted to us by Christ. So why do we spend our time condemning those who do not follow? Why do we not spend more time showing what God has done for us?

This past Sunday, the guest speaker told a story of a man that was part of a church plant. They finally had land open up and they were going to build their church where they could regular meet and praise God. The land, however, was on the same block as a porn shop. There was outcry and shouts of action. Some wanted to picket them until they moved. Others wanted to see the zoning board to see if they could get them kicked out. Others wanted to take note of every person that went in and plaster the internet with pictures of all of them. The man, however, had a better idea. He owned a landscaping company, and he offered to landscape the shop for 50% of whatever their current landscape company was offering. Every day he would knock at the door — tell them that the church prayed for them daily — and shared the Gospel. That’s it. After doing this for a while, the porn shop owner came to church one Sunday and the whole congregation told him how they prayed for them. Then after a bit more, he came to the church saying that he couldn’t take it — he needed Jesus.

What I’m saying is that no matter where you fall on the argument — maybe there should be more room for love. Maybe there should be more room for understanding, for discussion, and for knowing that cries and screaming only lead to pain and indifference. Maybe my Christian brothers and sisters should try to act more like Christ, and if you start turning to hatred and calling it righteousness I’ll stand as Christ did before me and tell you how wrong you are.

Maybe those of you who don’t believe in Jesus might take a minute to understand WHY it is that folks oppose the things you favor. That while there will always be those who hate on both sides, there are some who simply understand that to follow Christ means to stand for Him — even if it means you have to stand against something else. Can you understand that standing in opposition does not always mean they think you are evil? Maybe, just maybe, if you stopped screaming too you’d learn why they have such a passion.

Just a thought I hope you ponder — because I’m tired of crying for a cease fire in a war zone.

Likewise, people I’ve known since I was a kid (friends of the family) have passed away, a lot of us have either lost our jobs or find ourselves in jobs that we can’t support ourselves with and have no idea how we’re going to get out, and I just found out that a woman who has been nothing but supportive and loving to me throughout even my foolish youth in the faith is in a coma.

So what do I make of this? What is there to say when in such a short span such highs and lows go hand in hand? This is what I say.

God is good. He doesn’t stop being good when the world goes wrong, and He should be remembered as God when things are good and we tend to forget.

I don’t know the answers to why those terrible things happened, and who knows — there may be more coming. I don’t think there’s any reason the good things have happened either outside of chalking them up to a gracious God that lets me be a part of them. I have seen incredible, awe-inspiring joy and horrible, mind-numbing pain. I have watched as things rise and fall in their time and it makes me read Ecclesiastes in a whole new light.

Sometimes life sucks. Sometimes everything goes your way. You wake up, you take it as it comes, and remember that life itself is a gift. It is precious and must be treasured.

When you play a game. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose — but the most important thing is that you play.

Alright — enough shameless plugging.

I came up with the idea that it would really be an interesting note if my lead character got the idea for using electronics to create a mechanical man, and sited the fictional works of Mary Shelley and the inventive eccentricities of one Nikola Tesla as his influences.  I had to make sure that Tesla and my boy SJ would be chronological contemporaries.  I was thrilled to find out that Tesla would have arrived in the united states in Menlo Park (a hop skip and a jump from my boy) a couple years before my story takes place.  This “research” served to get me absolutely fascinated by Tesla.

Like many ardent Steampunk enthusiasts before me — I’ve really become intrigued by the life of this man.  He’s the unsung hero of our modern advances.  While Edison gets credit for being one of the greatest inventors of any age — Tesla gets tossed aside for guys like me to dig up and tell everybody else that they should dig him up too.

I stumbled onto this cool little animated brief history of the man.  I thought I’d share.

The History of Nikola Tesla – a Short Story from Jeremiah Warren on Vimeo.

Though the fig tree should not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the LORD;
I will take joy in the God of my salvation
GOD, the Lord, is my strength;
he makes my feet like the deer’s;
he makes me tread on my high places.”

–Habakkuk 3: 16-19
Needed that today.  Funny how God can use a mistaken word to direct you to something you need to hear.  I’m sorry for being a schmuck sometimes. Sorry for forgetting.  And most of all, I’m sorry that I have taken You so lightly.

I looked back into a fictional New York and brought about a world where airships cross the oceans and a young tinker by the name of SJ Thatch and his clockwork companion Hodgepodge Von Clockverk dream of taking flight and enjoying the freedom of the skies in an airship of their very own.  Thing is, SJ is the disciple of an ousted scientist and the child of poor merchants, and airships are only for the rich — or the lucky.  So until something else comes along, SJ takes on odd jobs and tries to do his part to help out the people living in the slums of the Five Points.  When the newly promoted Lieutenant Colonel Montgomery Mayweather and his daughter Lucy approach SJ with plans to rebuild the points into a thriving community, he agrees to help.

But are the Lieutenant Colonel’s dreams of a rebuilt community the same as SJ’s?

Tinker is my newest creative project.  It’s going to be an episodic story where I’ll try, with some regularity, to weave together SJ’s story through blog entries.  Check it out and tell your friends.  You never know — Tinker might take on a life of its own, and you can get in on the ground floor!

I’m also looking for folks to come up with some character reference pictures as well.  I have an idea of what all my characters look like, but I don’t have any sort of artistic ability in that regard.  If you are interested, or know somebody that is, let me know.  I’d love to post stuff up on the page.

Today I was called into the office as I was about to leave for the day. Apparently, the corporate offices are coming down hard on the number of payroll hours in the store. We have already been feeling the crunch of not having enough people working to take care of the many needs of the store — and apparently it’s going to be even worse and soon.

I was basically given the following options. In order to maintain my full-time status, I literally cannot have any day or time of day that I cannot work. This is called “Unlimited Availability.” That they can, and will, schedule me at any time or day as needed. Doesn’t sound so bad? Here’s what that means. I’ve already given up meeting with my EMTs on Monday nights. Even though this is the bulk of my ministry as their chaplain, I figured I had to make sacrifices, and they were used to me being there over the phone while I was in Texas anyway. I would have to give up my college ministry. I teach it Wednesday nights, every Wednesday. This means that week to week I can’t plan on what’s going to happen because I will not even know if I can make it until the week’s schedule is posted at work. You can’t run a ministry like this, which means I would have to give it over to someone else. Sunday nights during the school year I help with the youth group. I have been happy to consistently be there for high school and junior high kids in the church. It is some of the happiest work I do. At best I’ll be doing this occasionally when I can fit it in, and again, won’t know if I can week to week. Church, itself, will be a week to week assessment as to whether or not I can go too.

If I choose not to give these things up, I will only work part time (at BEST 32 hours) and will lose all my medical benefits effective immediately. I’ll be making even less money than my less than $200 a week pay check now, and I’ll have to get a 2nd job and probably STILL not have benefits. God help me if I get sick or hurt.

Basically I have a couple days to make a decision that won’t end well no matter how I chose to go. I’ll be spending the next couple days doing a lot of praying and a lot of thinking. I’d appreciate your prayers as well. This is not going to end well.

I believe in a promise keeping God. I believe in a God who provides. I believe in a God who can do whatever He wants as the almighty Lord and Creator. I also believe that sometimes He choses to remain silent, and sometimes stuff like this goes on for a really long time. Who knows what might happen. God has always made a habit in my life of waiting until right before I snap or before I lose everything before He comes in and brings about an answer. Maybe it’s coming soon, because with this — I’m pretty much there.

Pray. That’s all any of us can do right now.

“And when [The Holy Spirit] comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment: ⁹concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; ¹⁰ concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer; ¹¹ concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged.”

I couldn’t help but go through the difference between conviction placed upon us by the Holy Spirit and guilt — often placed on us by ourselves, or by other people.  The reason for this moment of definition and differentiation?  Because I think for WAY too long that the faithful have spent too long confusing the two.

Maybe it is just me, coming from an old school, hard pressed, morality thumping, God misunderstanding church that didn’t teach me anything about God — but when I was a kid, I was told that the feeling of guilt I felt whenever I did something bad was God making me feel bad for turning away from Him.  I’ve been a Christian now for 13 years.  I honestly think it took the first 5 before I realized that this is not how God works at all.  He doesn’t sit upon a golden throne, hammer at the ready like some paragon of Greek myth, waiting to smite us for not following His will.  His modus operandi is not to eat away at us for past sins, forcing open old wounds until we are overwhelmed with our own inadequacy.

We do that, and we’re freaking good at it.

I could spend days discussing all the passages that talk about the fact that our sins are forgiven through faith in Christ.  Not kinda sort of.  Not just the really bad ones.  Not just the ones we happened into accidentally, as if it were some form of fiendish trap set by the Devil.  All of them are covered by faith, our sins forgotten and taken away.  Here are just a couple, quick like, to show you the point –

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” — 1 John 1:9

“He will not always chide,
nor will he keep his anger forever.
He does not deal with us according to our sins,
nor repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
so far does he remove our transgressions from us.” — Psalm 103: 9-12

“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” — Romans 8: 37-39

These passages cry out that God is not about breaking you down with past sins.  He is about calling us towards righteousness out of love.  Why then do we think God does this?  That the Holy Spirit tears our insides apart with how terrible we are for breaking God’s commandments?  It’s easy.  Because we’re not God.

It is a common misconception of mankind to think that God acts like we do.  If you live in Mayberry — this might be a little closer to the truth, but even then it’s wrong.  I, however, live in Jersey — where if you mess with us, we mess back.  If you don’t do what we want, we make your life miserable until you do.  Think I’m wrong?  Watch an episode of Jersey Shore and tell me I’m wrong — and they’re not even FROM here.  It’s this mentality that makes it easy for us to think of God as making life full of pain until we are forced to follow a moral code He laid out for us.

So what happens as a result of this man-inflicted guilt we weigh our shoulders down with?  Nothing.  We spend our time dwelling on past failures, past shames, and remain in a stagnant, pitiful existence — afraid to take another step for fear of failing as badly as we did before.  Guilt is not something God calls us to.  It’s what we do to be carefully snuggled up inside our little blanket of shame.  We can’t do anything.  We’re no good at anything.  ”Look back there.  That’s what happened when I tried to go forward.  It hurt, and I looked like a fool.”  God stands at the front, calling us out to experience the freedom we have in His love to live life the way He has always intended us to, but we’d rather stay back so that we never get hurt that way again.  We hide, because we can’t bare the shame of looking a perfect God in the eyes having failed so miserably.

What the Holy Spirit does, instead, is convict us.  Conviction does not look back, holding us up.  It looks forward to what life could be.  It looks to who God is and says, “Be holy, for I AM holy.”  It is not about reminding us who we were, how we failed, or how we strayed.  The Holy Spirit’s conviction nudges us forward with whispers of “Go and sin no more.”    It is the picture of a holy Christ who loves us enough to die for us.  A God whose authority is perfect and whose grace abounds far beyond our capacity for sin.  It is about the indwelling of the Spirit that points us towards a righteousness we could not obtain by ourselves.  When we look back at a past of hurt, shame, and frustration, He brings us back to a future of hope, security, salvation, and rest.

When I was in high school I was on the track team.  If you know me, you know full well I wasn’t any sort of runner.  I threw heavy things of various sizes and shapes.  However, I did get to hear some of the advice the coaches gave the runners.  One of the things I often heard yelled across the field was, “Don’t look back.  Keep running!”  When runners look back they lose speed, they worry about what’s behind them and who is catching them.  The best runners I’ve ever seen are the guys who have nothing ahead of them in their minds but the completion of the race they run.  So it is with God.  The difference between guilt and conviction is that guilt chains you to a past you can do nothing to change, while conviction calls you out to a future of hope.

This is why the author of Hebrews calls to his people,

“let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

Amen.

So my friend Jay came up with an idea.  It was an idea to hit up diners all throughout New Jersey, checking out the food and letting folks know which provided the best dining experience.  But this isn’t just ANY old blog about diners in New Jersey — arguably the home of the 24 hour diner.  No, no, my friends.  Like every good Jersey resident, Jay hits up the diners after midnight on a Saturday night — and he orders breakfast.

He does this just about every weekend, but this particular weekend I tagged along.  We hit up the Time to Eat Diner in Somerville.  We didn’t get there ’til 1:00AM — which is why, now shortly after 4:00am, I find myself writing this entry.  I had a blast.  There were a number of us that tagged along with the normal Bacon after Midnight crew.  The food was good, at least from my perspective, and I can tell you they make a mean stuffed french toast.

Unlike many of my ventures into the wonderful world of the internet — Bacon after Midnight apparently has over 200 unique hits and its only been up for a short time.  He asked us tonight to keep telling folks about the site and to get the word out.  Well, I realized that I have never said ANYTHING about the site to anybody.  I have come to rectify this situation.

Go — right now — over to Jay’s site: www.12ambacon.com.  Tell your friends.  Tell them to tell their friends.  And watch the updates in the near future for posts about my trip out there with the crew.  Always remember — Banana sounds fantastic.

I started to look through a number of them.  Some are odd.  Some are hilarious.  Some are deeply moving.  For example — my inner nerd chuckled when I saw one written by Leonard Nimoy that said, “‘Live long and prosper’ says it.”  I went crazy when I read from one of the most talented men in TV today, Neil Patrick Harris, said “Barney . . . Doogie. . ! Average names elude me.”  I even got royally pissed when I saw that Terrell Owens summed up his life with “I love me some me, dammit!”

I read so many of these that I found myself bouncing my way through most of the book — 6 words at a time.  So it got me thinking — at this point, right now, how would I explain my life?  How could I condense 30 years of experience into 6 words?  So I thought about it.  Even as I type these words I was thinking about it.  So this is what I came up with –

God found my pen and spoke

It was actually a lot harder than I thought it might.  There is much that could be said — many combinations and thoughts.  It’s like poetry.  Poetry is never about a preponderance of words, rolling like a river.  It’s about using a few choice words to say a lot.  It’s good practice.  And I wonder — have you ever done anything like that?  Ever taken some time in serious thought about your life and tried to sum it up with as few words as possible?  You’d probably find it as difficult as I did — but you might also find it as rewarding.  If you think of one — comment here and let me know.  I’m curious.  It’s part an act of creativity and part of my own hunger to discover people’s stories.

How would you explain your life in only 6 words?