Rapt in Reveries

Yesterday morning I met my friends Joe and John in Boulder and together we drove up to Rollins Pass behind Nederland to do a little snowboarding. That’s right…..snowboarding on June 29th. We had to hike pretty much straight uphill for about 30 minutes and after a short break we rode down. Below are some photos from Joe DesGeorges. If you look closely at the photo on the bottom left, you can see John on his bike below the mountain we rode down.

This was seriously good times.

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Coincidentally, a couple days after my last post about Facebook and Twitter, a reporter from the Longmont Times-Call emailed to see if she could interview for a story about churches and pastors who are leveraging technology within their churches. So we met last Friday at Starbucks and the article was published today. Here is an excerpt from my seciton of the article:

Opting for a more brief approach is “iPastor” Luke Humbrecht.

Technically, Humbrecht is the creative director and an associate pastor for Vinelife Church in Longmont. Unofficially, he’s the iPastor.

“Somebody suggested it to me,” Humbrecht said of the title. “It was kind of a joke at first.”

But the work is real. Humbrecht, 26, runs Vinelife’s Facebook and Twitter accounts and writes personal and church blogs.

“The younger generation is realizing, ‘I don’t want to go to church. I want to be the church,’” he said.

Getting young people involved with their faith requires changing the church’s model, Humbrecht said. Instead of asking people to come to a building, the church needs to go to its people, he said.

“When you go to the Gospel, what does Jesus do? He comes to where we are,” he said.

In dealing with teenagers, social networking sites can provide insight into teens’ guarded feelings, he said.

“They can rant on Facebook and their status is, ‘I hate my parents,’ or ‘I hate my teacher,’” Humbrecht said. “I don’t know if that would have come up otherwise. A lot of times there is a layer of honesty that comes out.”

The addictive nature of social networking is a side-effect of all this new technology, Humbrecht said. To combat that, Humbrecht attempts to have a weekly “dark day,” 24 hours without using a computer or phone.

You can read the whole article here.

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(Photo via Dave Ferguson)

In the last several months, I have been in and out of countless conversations revolving around the advantages and dangers of Christ followers engaging social media – Facebook, Twitter, etc.. I find this dialogue healthy and expect there to be more of this in the foreseeable future. I would guess that the same conversations took place with the advent of the telephone and television. With every new medium of communication, there are always the questions of: “What do we gain?” and “What do we lose?”.

Now, to be clear, I consider myself an early adopter of such things. That usually means that before I even know what it is, I’ve probably already signed up for it. I’ve already apologized to my cousin Laura as she shares the same initials as mine and would be hard pressed to find the username “lhumbrecht” available anywhere on the internet. However, there are many people I wouldn’t recommend this approach to. We’ve all seen the folks who start shaking when they haven’t twittered or updated there status in the last 5 minutes. These are the people who don’t understand the concept of self-control. Or, they are just so incredibly self-absorbed that they can’t stand the idea of the world not knowing what they are doing. I must confess that I am still working on maintaining a regular “dark day” ( one day a week with no laptop, phone, etc.).

On the flip side, I still believe there are tremendous advantages when these things are used as “tools” to augment relationships not to replace relationships. And I would contend that the same motivation for self-absorbed digital monologues can be reversed to use these platforms to actually encourage and invest in other relationships. Some say that facebook and twitter replace face-to-face interactions, and they sometimes do. But I would push back and say there are also conversations that happen online that would never happen in person. High school students will readily admit in a status update how much they ‘hate their parents’, but I guarantee that this wouldn’t happen when they show up for youth group and a leader asks them how they’re doing.

Since social media is still somewhat in its infancy, it’s hard to see all of the future ramifications of such tools, but I’m willing to test the waters to see what it can do. Besides, this stuff isn’t going away anytime soon.

The inspiration for this post came from a recent John Piper blog post. I would highly recommend reading this post called “Why and How I Am Tweeting”.

I’d be curious to hear your take on all of this. What are the pitfalls and advantages that we haven’t yet see? How can we leverage technology without falling prey to it? What are boundaries that you set in place to protect you and maybe your family?

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I’ve found that I spend most of my day in the right brain – Sifting through new ideas, preparing talks, writing music, critiquing design, etc.. The trouble with this is that like any creative type, I easily fall prey to what Steven Pressfield calls “Resistance”. It’s something inside of me that keeps me from doing what I know I should be doing. I would classify it as sin nature. But regardless of how you define it, we all have it.

More recently, I’ve noticed resistance in the area of music. I tell myself that I only write in seasons so then I just wait for the next wave of inspiration. But I’ve realized that if I’m waiting for something to happen before I can start creating then I’ve already given into resistance. You and I already have everything we need to do what we know we need to do. But if we don’t anticipate resistance in whatever form or fashion, then we WILL give into it.

A couple notable quotes from The War of Art by Steven Pressfield:

“You know Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to love and study. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts and then later to the School of Architecture. Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I’ll say it anyway: It was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.”

“Procrastination is the most common manifestation of Resistance because it’s the easiest to rationalize. We don’t tell ourselves “I’m never going to write a symphony.” Instead we say, “I am going to write my symphony; I’m just going to start tomorrow.”

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I finally made a switch from Blogger to Wordpress. I was long overdue for a change. Anyways, if you use an RSS Reader make sure to switch the blog settings as I will no longer be using my blogger account. You can also subscribe by clicking on the “subscribe” link on the top right.

Also, I am doing some occasional posting at “In the Current”, the Vinelife Church blog. Most of the content there will be specific to the Vinelife community but there may be some stuff that interests you.

Thanks for following along.

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I ordered over $100 of books yesterday. That’s not something I normally do in 1 day, but something I had to do if I want to start learning Koine Greek. It’s been something I’ve wanted to do for some time now, and the other day I felt like it was time to begin. Seeing as how I only have a few more months of not being a parent, it seems that timing is logical too.

Why Koine Greek? Because I love to understand and teach the Bible. I get jealous any time I hear a speaker get up and talk about a New Testament passage in that familiar haughty tone, “…In the original Greek it says blah, blah, blah……so this is what this passage REALLY means, but you wouldn’t understand would you because you’re not as smart as me.”

On the surface, I want to punch that guy in the face.

But deep inside, I’m not going to lie….

I want that.

Badly.

But really, I want to understand the orignial dialect and I hope that this will help me in personal study rather than always having to take someone’s word for it.

Also, I will be able to make fun of people in a new language.

That’s important to me.

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This is freaking hilarious.

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This is an excerpt from Donald Miller’s upcoming release – A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. Don is one of my favorite authors and he hasn’t put out anything for a few years now. I’m particularly interested in this book as he explores the elements of ’story’ and how the in many ways the elements of a good story also apply to our lives.

Chapter Twenty-Five: The Thing About a Crossing

It’s like this when you live a story. The first part happens fast. You throw yourself into the narrative and you’re caught in the water, the shore is pushing back behind you and the trees are getting smaller. The other shore is inches away and you can feel the resolution coming, the feeling of getting out of you’re boat and walking the distant shore, looking back to see where you came from. The first part of a story happens fast, and you think the thing is going to be over soon. But it isn’t going to be over soon. The reward you get from a story is always less than you thought it would be, and the work is harder than you imagined. It’s as though the thing is teaching you the story is not about the ending but about the story itself, about your character getting molded in the hard work of the middle. The shore behind you stops getting smaller, and you paddle and wonder why the same strokes used to move you but they don’t anymore. -You got the wife but you don’t know if you like her anymore and you’ve only been married five years. You want to wake up and walk into the living room in your underwear and watch football and let your daughters play with the dog because the paddling doesn’t move the boat anymore and the far shore doesn’t get closer no matter how hard you work. The shore you left is just as far and there is no going back, there is only the decision to paddle in place or stop, slide out of the hatch and sink into the sea. Maybe there is another story at the bottom of the sea? Maybe you don’t have to be in this story anymore? Maybe you can quit and not have to paddle in place anymore?

It’s been like this with all my crossings. I have a couple boats and take them to Orcas Island and make the crossing from Orcas to Sucia, and it’s always the same about leaving the shore so fast and getting to the middle and paddling in place for hours.

I knew it would be like that when we crossed the country on bikes, too. I sent in my paperwork and did my miles in the mountains here in Oregon and showed up in Los Angels, knowing we would start fast, that the Pacific would fade behind us and we’d be in Phoenix by sunset and then we’d spend all the life of Moses crossing Texas and the Delta and it happened just like I thought it would. We grew into the roads and the roads are where we lived. We slept in rock quaries and on the doorsteps of churches. I slept on the floor of a convenience store just off the caprock in Texas. I put my head by the beer to get some cold air and it didn’t matter to me that I had a condo back home or a bed, because you become the character in the story you are living and whatever you were is gone. None of us thought it would end. We never felt close to the shore. Even in Virginia, we felt as far as Louisiana.

When we left Bob’s dock at midnight I didn’t want to paddle through the night or across the wide inlet. We had to go for hours into the pitch black and the inlet was so large and the dark was so dark for hours we couldn’t make out either shore. We had to guide ourselves by stars, each boat gliding close to another, just the sound of our oars coming in and out of the water to keep us close.

I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought and they can’t see the distant shore anymore and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger. They take it out on their wife, on their husband, they go looking for an easier story.

Robert McKee put his coffee cup down and leaned onto the podium. He put his hand on his forehead and wiped his grey hair back. He said you have to go there, you know. You have to take your character to the place where they just can’t take it anymore. He looked at us with a tenderness we hadn’t seen in him before. You’ve been there, haven’t you? You’ve been out on the ledge. The marriage is over now, the dream is over now, nothing good can come from this. He got louder. Writing a story isn’t about making your peaceful fantasies come true. The whole point of the story is the character arc. You didn’t think joy could change a person, did you? Joy is what you feel when the conflict is over. But it’s conflict that changes a person. He was shouting now. You put your characters through hell. You put them through hell. That’s the only way we change.

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