Sunday, May 3, 2009

How you treat the creation reflects how you feel about the creator

This is one of my favorite excerpts from Sex God by Rob Bell. In reality, there is not just one part of the book more prominent to me than the rest because I find his writings brilliant, and they are unbiased, which can be difficult in the Christian realm.

Besides, after reading the book for the third time, I continued to learn more about myself, my relationships, my friend's realtionships, and all humanity than I ever deemed possible. It is about sexuality and spirituality and how they connect and disconnect and. . .I could go on, but just read it some day.

Here goes, from pages 27 and 28:

When I was five, my family visited my grandparents in California during Christmas vacation. They lived in an apartment building with an alley beside it—very exciting for a boy who lived on a farm in Michigan. At some point in my exploration of the alley, I decided to make a Christmas present for my dad out of the things I had found there. So on the morning of the twenty-fifth, my father had the privilege of opening a gift of a piece of black and green drainpipe glued to a flat gray rock with little white stones resting on the inside of it.

A masterpiece, to say the least.

The reason I remember this is because I visited my dad at his office a few days ago, and while I waited for him to finish his meeting, I wandered around looking at the pictures on his walls and the papers on his desk and the things on his shelves. On one of his shelves sat the drainpipe and rock sculpture, thirty years later.

He still has it.

He brought it home with him and put it in his office in 1977 and hasn’t gotten rid of it.
We know why he kept it. How you treat the creation reflects how you feel about the creator.

When a human being is mistreated, objectified, or neglected, when they are treated as less than human, these actions are actions against God. Because how you treat the creation reflects how you feel about the Creator.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Fix You

The moments I live for are those out-of-body experiences where everything around you melts together save for the one activity, image, or sound you are focusing on. It is that moment when you believe you are on a movie screen in slow motion with the orchestra in a crescendo and the timpanis are pounding to the beat of your heart.

At select Griffins hockey games (my recent job), if there were flag kids, the two mini mites would skate onto the ice, attempting to wave the flags as they drug on the ice. The arena, almost full with 7,000 people would go dark with one red light in the tunnel. The instrumental measures of Fix You by Coldplay played through the speakers and at this moment, I would always stand by a pillar, leaning my head against it and feeling infinite.

It was the power ringing through the arena with the thousands of people cheering but being drowned out by one red light and one beautiful song. I could exaggerate this moment, but it happened. . .on more than one occasion.

This is what life is made of.