ACU Football

I went to Abilene this past weekend to watch ACU's amazing record setting win.  I never thought I would see a football team score 93 points, but I was wrong. 

Here is a great story about ACU assistant football coach and my friend Desmond.  NFL teams were looking at him  (just like the other starting safety, Justin Lucas, who played in the league for quite a few years) until his tough times. For the eight years that I have known Desmond, he's been a constant encouragement and you will see why.  

Rwanda

In the movie Hotel Rwanda, Don Cheadle playing Paul the Rwandan hotel manager has this dialogue with Joaquin Phoenix's character (Jack an American reporter)  regarding the horrible genocide that Jack has just recorded and the presumed response of Jack's American audience.

Paul, "I am glad that you have shot this footage and that the world will see it. It is the only way we have the chance that people might intervene"

Jack, "Yeah and if no one intervenes, is it still a good thing to show?"

"How can they not intervene when they witness such atrocities?"

"I think if the people see this footage they'll say, 'oh my God that's horrible,'  and then go on eating their dinners."

I am proud to be apart of a church with people who don't just go about eating their dinners after seeing these atrocities. The Rwanda08 mission team has been with Richland Hills for the last few months and yesterday they left Richland Hills. They will arrive in Rwanda in December, so please pray for them and their Kingdom work in Rwanda. 

No to Change

Earlier this week President-elect Obama spoke of something that needs to be changed and I just don't want it changed. 

Obama said the current college football bowl system doesn't work. He supports creating a playoff system instead of the traditional bowl system. If God wanted us to have a bowl system, then when God created college football, God would have created college football playoffs. If it's fine for God, then it's fine for me. Creating a bowl system would ruin the excitement and the uniqueness of college football. 

Obama, we don't want your change in college football. 

"I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercessions and thanksgiving be made for everyone-- for Kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness." 1 Tim 2:1-2

Power

In honor of the transfer of power to our country's new president, I am reminded of Jesus’ attitude towards power. Jesus always chooses power under through service and rejects power over through dominance.

Jesus called them together and said, "You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.”

Here is Greg Boyd from The Myth of a Christian Nation

“Rather than buying into and then fighting over the limited, divisive options of the kingdom of the world, we (the Church) need to be the one tribe on the planet who thinks 'outside the box.' We need to be a peculiar people who live in the otherwise unasked question- what can we do to bleed as means of manifesting life? While others posture and holler, we are to be holy people who, knowing we are the worst of sinners, simply live in the question- how can we bleed for others? How can we sacrifice for and serve the gay community in way that communicates to them their unsurpassable worth? How can we individually and collectively bleed in service to the homeless, the poor, and the racially oppressed? What does 'power under' service look like to drug addicts, battered women, pregnant women, children in sexual bondage, and confused, needy people…”

Miracles

For the last five years Lindsay has woken up to the sound of an alarm clock blaring country music at a decibel level that would cause blood to trickle out of the ears of many earthlings. She couldn’t wake to an alarm any quieter and still many 5am mornings she would sleep through the sonorous sounds of Garth Brooks at ear piercing levels until I gently encouraged her to respond. On many of these mornings I woke with dreams of slinging my Maglite into this evil alarm clock.
But a miracle happened about three months ago and she has changed my life. She has also changed Lindsay’s sleeping. Lindsay now will wake up to the slightest movement or sound by our daughter. I cannot explain how a person miraculously changes like that other than a God placed deep longing to love and nurture.

“Believing in ‘miracles’, in the eighteenth-century sense, is no good as a test of genuine Christianity… the eighteenth-century idea of a ‘miracles’ envisaged a ‘God’ who was a remote, detached Being, who normally kept his hands clean from involvement with the space-time universe, but just occasionally used to ‘intervene’… What if the word ‘God’ itself might refer, not to this distant, remote, occasionally-intervening Being, but to a God who breathed with the breath of the world? … by being active within his creation… He put into their inmost beings, as creatures made to reflect his image into his world, a deep desire for one another, and a deep longing to create and nurture order and beauty within creation.”

NT Wright "Who was Jesus?"

Leadership

"My job is to get men to do what they don't want to do in order to help them achieve everything they want to achieve."

Tom Landry