Tuesday, March 20, 2007

On righteous anger, intensity and friggin'

Sometimes I let my wife read my posts before posting them. She often has words of wisdom for me. Last night was not one of those times. She was a little...worried about last night's post after reading it this morning.

I'm not here to apologize, but to clarify.

Last night I experienced righteous anger. I was in no way in sin in my own heart. My anger was at our actions (or lack of) and at the brokeness of this world. It's ok to be angry at those things as long as it doesn't cause you to sin. When Jesus ran the money changers out in Matthew 21 and Mark 11, I don't think he did so nicely. I think he had righteous anger.

I also don't think the people he ran out were happy with him. My post yesterday was not to make anyone happy. It was to cause something to happen. ANYTHING. When you've been on high center so long as we have, we need some intensity to get us going. I don't apologize for anything I said and haven't edited it in any way. We need to hear these things, even when they hurt.

Even if I woke up this morning and thought it was a bad idea, I still wouldn't edit it. I would post something like this. I want this blog to serve as a picture of real-life ministry for young men thinking of going into full-time ministry. I want you to know the ups and downs. I want you to experience my mistakes with me, so hopefully you can avoid the same ones. What we are fighting here is a spirit of religiousness that has prevented us from reaching out to the world. It's what Jesus was here to fight, and I think it's still our main problem. That's going to require shaking things up and stepping on some toes. It's going to require saying things people don't want to hear, and honestly I'm more of a hammer in this respect. I'm going to make mistakes and I'm going to screw up, but I would rather try and mess up than sit back and tell the world to go to Hell. Which is exactly what we are doing if we aren't reaching out to them. And no, just having a Sunday service does not count as reaching out to them.

And on the use of the word friggin'. In the words of the great Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride, "I do not sink that means what you sink it means."

Friggin' in my generations vocabulary is just an expression, similar to shoot or dang in older generations. I think it's become a word that is accepted in that way and not as a stand in for another popular "F" word. It's meant to show the intensity of the word it modifies and bring attention to it. So yeah, I'm gonna say it. It's stuck in my vocabulary no matter how hard I try not to say it, it happens. I write how I speak. So prepare to see more friggins than you can shake a stick at.

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