What I'm reading

After watching the documentary Food Inc., I'm fascinated by the way we eat and why. If you haven't seen that film, it will open your eyes to where our food comes from, why we eat it, and why most of the things we eat are not good for us.

Crazy Heart

Go see this movie. Jeff Bridges gives one of the best acting performances I've ever seen. He plays a broke, has been country singer whose life seems to be headed for a train wreck. It's a story about redemption and one mans search for it. Oh, and the music is great.

The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil

Good video, especially in light of my first post about judgment. Greg Boyd is one of my favorite speakers. He puts things so simply and is not afraid to challenge tradition. Some of his sermons on politics and the church are pretty eye opening. Enjoy...

John Mayer clip

You gotta love this...John Mayer lets an 11 year old kid from the audience play a song with him......then gives him his guitar. Apparently the kid was holding up a sign asking if he could play with him. And he does a pretty good job!

Judgment

Recently, I was reading this book called unChristian. It conducted surveys and gave statistics regarding peoples' perception and idea of Christianity. Sadly, the news was not good. The book is a great eye opener and everyone should read it at some point. But in a nutshell, the perception of Christianity out there is not like the Christlike radical love that Jesus shows us in the New Testament. We have somehow gotten people to think that we are judgemental, anti-gay, religious hypocrites. Isn't that what the Pharisees were? The Pharisees were a religious and political movement of ancient Israel. The word Pharisee is derived from the Hebrew word perushim meaning "set apart". The Pharisees may have been right about how to live their lives, but were very good at pointing out the plank in other people's eye rather than their own. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said some wonderful things about judgment that I think that we can all learn from:

"When we judge other people we confront them in a spirit of detachment, observing and reflecting as it were from the outside. But love has neither time nor opportunity for this. If we love, we can never observe the other person with detachment, for he is always and at every moment a living claim to our love and service."

"Every day man dies the death of a sinner, he cannot raise himself up above any other man or set himself before him as a model, for he knows himself to be the greatest of all sinners. He can excuse the sin of another, but never his own."

If we continually look at ourselves as the worst of sinners and focus on taking the plank out of our own eye rather than worrying about the speck of dust in other peoples eye, we can turn around the perception of modern day Christianity. We can turn it from being like the Pharisees into the radical servant-like love that Christ displayed in every situation.