Month: November 2008

Review: I recently picked up the How to Use Your Head to Guard Your Heart: A 3(D) Guide to Making Responsible Media Choices by Walt Mueller, founder of the Center for Parent & Youth Understanding. It is a sweet little resource that will empower you to help your students in the high-speed, ever-changing world of media. Using what they call a 3(D) approach (Discover, Discern, Decide), it is a practical tool that parents, youth workers, teachers, and other caring adults can use to engage students in discussion about media. Rather than just telling kids they can or cannot watch or listen to or play something, this tool encourages discussion about how to make wise choices in terms of what we should and shouldn’t be embracing from the media. Only 12 pages long and small in size, it is a great little booklet to keep handy next to your computer or television. Dirt cheap at only about $1.50 each, youth pastors would do well to purchase them and give them to parents … Perhaps as a little Christmas gift. (Hint! Hint!) You look great to parents. Parents will get involved in their kids lives in a deeper way. What could be better than that?

We are engaged in one of the most intriguing, polarizing elections of my lifetime. Whichever ticket wins it is going to be an historic first. Either the first black president, or the first woman vice-president. I am interested to see what happens, and I am praying for GOD’s will to be done.

GOD’s will.

Not MY will.

I think we too often pray for elections, pretending that we are praying objectively, but secretly praying that our candidate will win because we “know” it’s God’s will. It’s kind of like praying for our team to win the Super Bowl and linking it to God’s will. God is so much bigger than our favorites! Let us humbly pray, “Father, not my will, but Yours be done”

Now, I must be totally honest and say, hopefully without getting shot for saying it, that while I care who wins, I really don’t care who wins. Policies and positions on issues are important. I believe a candidates’ professions need to translate into their policies, and I believe we need to vote prayerfully, according to how a candidate’s values line up with our convictions and our understanding of God’s nature revealed in His Word. However, while choosing a leader for our country is an important responsibility we have as citizens, my identity and security do not rest in a man in a position; my life is defined and secure because I am a citizen in the kingdom of God, and more importantly, a child of the King.

My concern is not really in who wins or looses. My concern is that the Church resist the temptation to operate in either panic or in a false hope based on a man in a position, and rather be found praying for (not against!) whichever candidate wins and, most importantly, doing the work of advancing God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, not celebrating a man as our hope or complaining about a man in fear.

Idiot Paparazzi