Help...

Help. It's a word that is used by some and hardly ever by others. Sometimes it is used in dire situations and other times it is used when it seems like no help is actually needed.

I was sitting in The Rooster Cafe (Broadview Ave., across from Riverdale Park), my favorite place to read and get current on youth, church, and neighborhood culture, on Wednesday afternoon and a woman just simply says 'excuse me'.

She had been sitting a couple seats away for pretty much the same amount of time that I had been sitting, but at some point she needed help. She was trying to open up a small container of Tylenol. Why? I don't know. I hope it's not for a headache because she should just stop drinking coffee, but that's besides the point. She simply said 'excuse me, but could you help get this open for me?' I of course obliged and helped, got it open, and she was able to take her Tylenol.

Immediately I thought about how I don't like asking for help. I believe I can do it all and if I can't, I will learn, so I can (yes I am working on this area of my life. I am not the greatest, I know).

Why don't I ask for help? Why do we as a people fear asking for help? Why is it so important for us to be able to do everything by ourselves?

This question intrigues me as I will be leading a conversation at church this Sunday surrounding this topic.

Is it so bad to ask for help when we don't know how to do something?

Maybe it is just me, but it seems like we need to just ask for help more often.

Maybe in asking for help we will find great strength.
Maybe in asking for help we will actually find out how to do something properly.
Maybe in asking for help we will beat down our pride, learn that we don't know it all, and that it is ok.
Maybe in asking for help we will learn that we need people more than we think we do.

Just my thoughts. Let me know what you think...even if it is just you Megan (my wife).




PS. Sorry for being lame in not posting much. I am getting back into it.

The Sun

The Sun. This morning I woke up and it was bright. I walked down the street and it was bright. I made my way to the Starbucks down the street from my house squinting because it was bright. I look up in the sky and there is barely any cloud formations.

Sitting in Starbucks I noticed something though. There are a lot of people that don't like the sun: they close the blinds in the store, or find a place out of the sun, or even more put on some sunglasses. For some reason this has intrigued me this morning.

Why is it that a lot of us don't like the sun?

It's an intriguing question isn't it?

For me, this morning, I am basking in the beauty and the magnificence of that sun. If you have time, go outside and experience such a wonderful creation that God made a long time ago. God separated light from dark and said it was good.

Let's enjoy the light for God created it.


Let me know your thoughts.

Instant Gratification...all we know

We live in a society that is all about having things at an instant.  If things take seconds they are slow; if we wait in line for 10 minutes for our morning coffee we get frustrated.  Why?  Why has it gotten to this point?  Is it technology?  Can we blame all of this on the advancement of technology?

I read an article, The New Internet, in Relevant Magazine's 59th issue and was dumbfounded.  This is what part of it said:

"The most immediate of the Internet’s big changes is an evolution in speed. Recent innovations have made it possible for the Internet to run 250 times faster than its current top speeds, and the National Science Foundation is asking tech-heads to build apps with an assumption of zero load time. Zero load time. In the very near future, waiting for a website will be a thing of the very distant past." (click here for the full article)
 

Wait, the idea of waiting is soon going to be a thing of the past?  Have things gone so far to make the idea of waiting a bad thing or an inconvenience?

I just wrote a message for a service this Sunday on the idea of being satisfied and what dawned on me is that the culture we live in today, at least in North America, is one of being unsatisfied; nothing is ever enough.  Why?

I think that we are looking in all the wrong places and therefore instant gratification is the only thing we can actually grasp and see.

Thinking about instant gratification leads me to thinking about the ultimate instant gratification, porn.  I heard a stat the other day that said that porn websites dominate 80% of the World Wide Web.  Can you believe that?  80 percent of what is on the web is porn.  Take that in for a second.  Is this what we want as a society?

Instant gratification is all my generation (born in the 80s) knows.  We only know things as fast and instant.  Even more, the generation now that I am dealing with as a youth worker doesn't even know what it's like to not have the internet!

In all my studies I keep on being reminded of where true satisfaction lies.  It is not from the world we see, or the culture of the past, although He did walk in this world.

Instant gratification is like junk food because it seems good at first, but it leads to an unhealthy lifestyle that just craves more of it; the more you eat, the more you want.  We need to get back to what lasts, to what sustains.

Let me know what you think.


Till next time...