U2's New Album - No Line On The Horizon

So U2's new album "No Line On The Horizon" is about to be unveiled, and I am feeling like it's my birthday and Christmas rolled into one. Having just read through some of the lyrics of the new tunes, it seems that Bono is continuing to be himself - uniquely, brilliantly, and shamelessly singing gospel songs that celebrate divine Love and reveal his own longing for the Kingdom to come and for God's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, for there to be "no line on the horizon". There's a wonderful review of the album on my favorite blog, Mockingbird. Read and enjoy!

Learning to Pray with Bailout Bill

Are you familiar with "Bailout Bill"? According to an article entitled "The Way We Beg" from Slate magazine, "Tuesday morning, a guy named Bailout Bill set up the Bailout Booth in Times Square and started giving away money. His visitors received anywhere between $50 to $1,000—no strings attached, no taxes to be filed. All you had to do was tell Bailout Bill why you needed the money." This brief intro to Bailout Bail could lead you to believe this is yet another blog post about grace. "I get it", you might be thinking, "We come to God and he freely gives to us". But this post is much more about need than it is about grace.

For Bailout Bill turns out to be less charitable than he seems. Sadly, those who were not able to make it to the booth in time were directed to a web site in which they could post their desperate requests in a forum (please do not finish this without checking out at least a couple posts). Bailout Bill would then pick a couple of pleas a day and offer relief to the lucky ones in need. However, as noted in the article, it is actually a video-classified ad-site offering risky loans. The relief appears to be only for the sake of baiting the suffering into a pretty dark business.

At the same time, this forum has become a remarkable window into the brokenness of thousands of everyday Americans. Some posts are brief - simply asking for cash. Others provide detailed narratives of profound tragedy, including, but not limited to bouts with cancer, the loss of a job, abandonment by a spouse, or all of the above. These individuals, along with their children and extended families, need immediate relief today. In America, people are rarely willing to put their suffering on such public display. It is often something considered to be private and or shameful. We do this, though, when offered even the most remote promise of hope. This virtual bulletin board of grief seems vaguely reminiscent of the impromptu, make-shift displays after 9/11 seeking to locate missing relatives.

Like those boards, this forum reminds of us of two central realities of the human experience - the lack of control and delusion of self-sufficiency. In this time of economic crisis, we are reminded that these two concepts - perhaps the most essential tenets of American identity - are truly beyond our reach. Right now, most people will admit their inability to control the circumstances of their lives, including their health, relationships, and especially their finances. At the same time, our nation's recent woes have proven that the romanticism of self-sufficiency is more a curse than it is a blessing. Even many high-rollers on Wall Street have been challenged to consider whether self-sufficency really is the existential mirage it seems to be at this moment.

With powerful insight, the author of "The Way We Beg" articulates this much better:

"Either the visitors want Bailout Bill to know he’d be doing them a favor ("it would be a big help"), or they’re putting the onus on Bill ("please help"). Either way, it’s a reflection of the recession’s ability to strip its victims of agency. We need the help because we are helpless."

To me, these prayers to Bailout Bill sound like the most desperate of human pleas before God. In fact, most of us could learn a great deal on how to pray from this message forum. Praise be to the one that stands with us in the midst of suffering, while directing us to the only one proving sufficient.

(And if you think about it, you could certainly pray for these people and their situations - again, please visit this site to hear their stories. . . )

Am I In?

Who's in and who's out? Who's cool and who's not? We ask these questions often--sometimes in these words, sometimes more indirectly; sometimes out loud, sometimes to ourselves. At every stage of our lives past third grade, there are in crowds. It's the athletic kids in elementary school, or the ones who have hit puberty in junior high, or the popular crowd who have the parties everyone wants an invite to in high school. In college it's the ones who got into 'that' school, then it's those three or four frats or sororities, then it's the really cool or really thin or really sexy or really rich ones within those groups. Or it's a certain Christian fellowship group, and then the insiders within that crowd. After school it's the people landing the sweet jobs, or doing the 'right' kind of ministry, or getting married out of college. Truth is, in all these situations there are lots of different inner circles. And we want in, somewhere.

But sometimes these inner rings aren't merely concerned with outward appearance, ability, or achievement. Especially as we get older, we look to form these groups however we can. We look to categorize people into little boxes that we can label and dismiss with a word, and assure ourselves that ours is the right box. Oh, how easy and powerful it is to throw around classifications! 'Well, he's a Democrat, so you know...' 'She's in the drama crowd, so...' 'I went to this school...' 'They go to that church, so obviously they're...'. And we want to keep drawing that inner ring so that we can look out on 'the rest of them' with smug disapproval. We want to keep building that platform, so that we can perch atop and look down on those others who 'don't get it.' We love divisions. We love cliques. We love that feeling of being on the inside, referring to each other as 'we' and them as 'they.' We love to exclude. In fact, much of the thrill is not so much enjoying these supposed friends or whatever interest our circle concerns, but instead it's that very act of excluding others that gets us excited.

Did Jesus draw an inner circle? He had his twelve disciples, and it seems like he was really close with three of them. But what did his ministry look like? Did he go around drawing circles? Hardly. He hung out with people who didn't have an inner circle, who had been excluded by all the 'insiders' because they were ugly or poor or addicts or diseased or the wrong religion. And who did he get really mad at? The guys drawing the inner circles. The ones who wouldn't let in the losers or the kids or the drunks or the whores or the heretics. So you could say Jesus did in fact draw inner circles, but then he excluded the ones on the inside and included the ones on the outside. He said if you really want to be an insider, you can be. Have fun. The rest of these jokers are coming with me.

Dinosaurs: They're Back You Know

That's right, dinosaurs are back in style. And in this preview there appears to be some kind of link between dinosaurs and aliens! At long last. This is more than just absolutely brilliant entertainment folks; this is science. I'm not going to say they stole my theory and ran with it, but I think the evidence is pretty clear: It was either from me or the creator of Land Before Time 6. Will Ferrell, you owe one of us royalties buddy. But for now we are only left to hope that Hollywood uses this information to further this important field of study.