Josh & Alli’s Place

I pulled down an old Bible off the shelf tonight and began thumbing through it.  As I opened the pages that had seemed to be sealed for centuries, the smell of an old library permeated the room; you know the smell: that sweet funk of your old elementary school library that you only stepped foot in on “Reading Day” to pick out your favorite “Clifford the Big Red Dog” booklet.  I quickly flipped to the torn pages of notebook paper and spiral bound shreds of scrap my grandmother had scrawled her notes on.  Inside her Bible were the remnants of lessons learned and lessons taught, trails of late night pursuits of God and early morning strolls through the Garden.  One page that fell in my lap all too conveniently had, in elderly handwriting, a list of “sayin’s” she’d heard or invented over the years to better teach and understand those biblical concepts she read.  I thought I’d post a few below for you:

“God never promised it would be easy.  But He did promise it would be worth it.”

“Acceptance is a big word, but a very important one.”

“Knowing something is wrong and doing nothing is worse than doing the deed.”

“It takes a few clouds to make a beautiful sunset.”

And mixed in among grocery lists, recipes, balanced (or unbalanced) budgets, and phone numbers was the following line:

“You can’t do anything about the past.  But you sure can ruin today by worrying about tommorrow.”

Dear All,

First, Allison and I would like to welcome you to our website for the first time.

We are very honored and excited that you’ve decided to join us!  Allison and I are very privileged to have you as friends and family.  We hope that this website will serve as a place of connection and communion;  a place that you and I can collectively call ‘home.’  As Allison and I endeavor onward into the upcoming phase of our lives together, we hope that you might come alongside us and encourage us through prayer and that we might be an encouragement to you likewise wherever you may be.

If you’ve come here today, it’s probable because you’ve received a letter in the mail inviting you to do so.  As a recipient of that letter, Allison and I feel that you are a very special person in our lives and that we’d like to share the coming years with you as we enter into this new phase of life.  We hope that will pray for us, as we will certainly be praying for you.  We hope that you will encourage us, as we will certainly encourage you.  Finally, we hope to share life with you, as we know that we were created and commanded by our God to do so.  We, as believers in Christ, know that we cannot do this alone.  We need your help.

Please remember to visit often, as Allison and I will be posting to this website daily with updates on our lives: where we’ve been, where we are, and where God is leading us.  We hope that you will do the same!

We love you all very much…and we miss you,

Josh & Alli

I read an article this morning that ranked the Top 100 Most Angry Cities. And guess what….
Florida took 5 of the first 15 slots with Orlando(1), St. Petersburg(2), Miami(7), Jacksonville(9), and Tampa(12). Hmmm……so, my feelings that the people here, in what should be one of the happiest places on earth (what with it being the sunshine state and all) seem to hate life to the fullest…is not so far off! Who would’ve thought that Miami, FL is one of the most miserable places in the U.S. to live!?!?

So…that got me thinking: What is it that seems to drive so many people to that perminent state of anger? How does it affect you? How do you deal with perminently angry people? How do you keep them from rubbing off on you….because, to tell the truth: I’m not the same person I was before I moved here.

Every now and then I think its wise to look at a snapshot of ourselves through the eyes of those who don’t follow Christ…..a barometer so-to-speak, of where we stand. So, I found this quote in the “Vent” in the Atlanta Journal & Constitution (the Atlanta newspaper) the other day and thought it peculiar. Keep in mind, this is the Bible-belt….so, of anyone, they’d have little trouble picking us out of a line-up:

“Religion is like good underwear. It supports you; it comforts you. It’s worn on the inside, and it’s bad manners to show it off. I wish certain people would remember this.”

What’s this mean? What do you say?

I was reading Dale’s post this morning @ http://thoughtscrashing.voxtropolis.com/2006/07/15/vicious-cycle-turning/

And I quote: “how easy life and theology are when all we do is give answers but never ever listen to the questions.”

Dale, you get my “Holy crap!” award for the day….its the award I subconsciously give to that person each day that stops me in my tracks with what they say. If only the rest of those who follow our Christ could understand this simple statement! How differently would things be?

Sweet action.

My wife and I arrived back home in rainy South Beach this past weekend. We’d just taken a vacation for a week to sunny Hilton Head. The funny thing…I only call it a vacation because it was away from work. Was it vacation because it was relaxing? No. Exciting? No. Different? No. Slower paced? Kinda….

I came to a realization about life yesterday, while on my way to work. For so long lately I’ve been wishing that life would slow down. This past week, while on “vacation”, I spent some time with some long lost “Slowvillians” (residents of Slowville). It took my breath away…took my heart away so-to-speak. Seeing their lifestyle: the comfort, the leisure, the stress-free-ness of it all, really took my heart away…my desire away…my fire away; not because I despised them for it, but because I envied them. All of a sudden, I wanted nothing more in this world than to be them; to be back where they were, with my friends and family, in that environment of comfort and enjoyability….in Slowville. I dreamed of being where they were: where they spoke of their jobs with fondness…as if they didn’t mind taking a leisurely trip down to the office just to hang out with everyone, where they spoke of their sparetime with excitement, and where they seemingly viewed the people around them as their friends and comrades…whether they knew them or not. I felt love among friends…simple love…not church love…not soul love…just good ole fashion “old-friend-love” , something I’ve missed for a while. And no, its not about desiring familiarity…because I know that even familiarity gets old after a while. It was about lifestyle…and so I began to think:

As I employed the brakes in my truck to stop at the stop light (a novel concept in Miami-Dade County), it struck me. As I watched the world fly by (again, running the redlights as if they didn’t exist), I realized that, if I want my life to slow down, to take on a different note…a different key altogether; if I wanted my life to read more like the Slowville Gazette rather than the RatRace Herald, I WOULD HAVE TO BE OKAY WITH THE WORLD FLYING BY. For some reason, back home, we used to see people in a hurry differently….we called ‘em “crazies”. Now, here, they’re just one of us. So, there I was, struggling to return to that state of mind where I was okay with the world flying by…sitting at that crossroad of being afraid to slow down for sake of missing out on something and being reluctant to speed up for sake of missing something beautiful.

It’s pretty interesting what you come to realize while riding in cars with noise.

Anyone ever been to that crossroad? What was it like for you?

A funny thing happened to me today….and its only 8 AM! I walked into work, still half asleep, and before I could even pour a cup of coffee, Dewey, our general superintendent, comes sauntering down the hall….headed straight for me. He had that look on his face. You know the look: the oh-my-gosh-you-HAVE-to-see-what’s-in-my-hand-and-I-know-you’re-gonna-love-this look. That smirky smile he always gets on his face when he’s about to let some poor unsuspecting subcontractor have it was smeared all over his jolly face. I glanced down to return the coffee pot to the heater and before I could look up, SLAP! He always does this. He slaps you so hard on the back, with a hand the size of a tennis racket, that you lose your life for one instantaneous second. “Here pastor, take a look at this!”

He slaps a comic down on the counter and says, “Now that’s pretty funny, huh!?”

Why is it that whenever someone hears that you believe in and follow Jesus, they find it necessary to email you every peace of “religious” SPAM someone sends them and pin up every cheesy God joke they come across? Perhaps its some sort of attempt at friendship or connection. I don’t know.

What do you think?

The strangest thing happened to me last night. I was boarding a plane headed home after a weekend in the country when I stumbled across an interesting dichotomy. With my boarding pass in hand (like a good little airline passenger), I excuse-me’d and sorry’d my way past the to-engrossed-in-my-$9.00-Forbes-Magazine-or-Wall-Street-Journal to-notice-that-you-need-to-get-by first class passengers back to coach. As I approached 12-E, I noticed a peculiar young man sitting in 12-D. He looked to be in his mid to late 20’s, sharply dressed, and clean cut. What was peculiar was the fact that whatever it was he was reading must have been either top-secret information from the CIA or naked women (maybe they were from the CIA too…who knows?!). (I could tell they were naked ‘cuz I caught a glimpse) Either way, he had the magazine covered by the plastic bag from the duty-free newstand and was almost smothering himself with the pages. As I approached aisle 12 and placed my bag in the over-head compartment, he, all in one motion, dropped the magazine into the bag and skinnied up to let me into the middle seat. “Interesting,” I thought.

I minute later, an older fellow made his way toward us. Hold that thought - isn’t it funny how you always sit there on the plane with an empty seat beside mulling over who you think is going to be the one to sit beside you? And then, when someone heads toward your aisle, they just have that look like, “Yes, its me. I’m the one who’ll be sitting under your armpit for the next few hours.” Anywho, back to the story. He squeezes by porno-boy and me and sits in the always-coveted window seat to my right. About the time the “fasten seatbelts” sign dinged on, he pulled out a small book. From the colors on the cover, I could tell it was probably a self-help deal (what with all the bright, catchy colors and all). Yet another peculiar fellow - he seemed to be desperately hiding the cover. A few pages later, in the yawning-while-putting-your-arm-around-her-in-the-movie-theater-fashion (come on guys, you know you’ve done it at least once), I caught a line or two about “evangelism today” and “Jesus’s call to love”. Finally, lo and behold, the title of the booklet read, “The Fundamentals of Evangelism Today”. So, I, being the crafty fellow that I am, thought I’d see what he’d learned. I asked him nonchalantly, “Whatcha readin’?” Hoping he’d come back with a polished exposition of the book, all I got was, “Aw, its just a book.” Hmmm….. I even pulled out my Bible and plopped it on the tray-table thinking maybe he’d see that I was a follower too and want to talk. No such luck….
So, there I was…on my left, a guy who was ashamed of his sin…and on my right, a guy who was ashamed of his Redeemer. Funny thing is, I was both these people not so long ago. If I were to be honest, in some ways, I still am both those people.

What about you?

Okay. So, for most of you who know me, or have even heard of me or met me once can probably discern that I HATE politics. I know “hate” is a “strong word”…..but dog-gone-it, I HATE politics. Quite frankly I despise it. History, however, I love deeply…even the history of politics. I enjoy it only for its lessons, for its tid-bits of intrigue, knowledge, and the occasional chance it affords us to learn from the mistakes of some of the greatest people to ever walk the world. I had the chance last night to do a little reading; the kind of reading that is truly recreational, extra-curricular, without the heaviness of deep retrospection, theology, just good ol’ fashion cuz-I-want-to reading. I cracked open a history book from college, of all things! Hmmm….weird.

Anywho, I was reading around some political history and I ran across a exerpt from Alexander Tyler. No, he wasn’t writing about the United States. This quote is well over one hundred years old. Tyler was writing about the fall of the Athenian Republic:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.”

Remember my statement about finally getting to do some reading that was free of deep, heavy spiritual introspection? Well, my efforts were foiled again!! Yes….I began asking myself questions; questions like, “What can this tell us about our world…our culture…our community…our families……ourselves?

I’d like to know what you think.