The Seth Ward Project

Watched a documentary recently about the late, great Hunter S. Thompson entitled, “Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride”. What a journey! This man set new rules. Created a new type of journalism. Set his own bar. Consumed a ton of drugs. Shot firearms – often inside and altered. Was just a living contradiction. Highly moral. Yet living immorally by most folks standards.

By living without limits, he freed many people to see true potential in themselves. He created a persona that dominated non-fiction pieces he wrote. He created a whole new him – Dr. Gonzo.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t live up to his own persona. In the end, he killed himself. In several interviews, Hunter S. Thompson described the frustration of being himself or Dr. Gonzo. When asked to speak in a public, who did they hire? Who did they really want to hear? Could he live up to the wild eccentricities of Dr. Gonzo. Did anyone really want to hear Hunter anymore?

This tension dominated his life. While based on fact, Dr. Gonzo went well beyond even Hunter’s comfort zone – at least for extended periods of time.

Are we any different? Do we create personas of ourselves? Personas that even we can’t live up to. Personas that are mere caricatures of who we truly are. Personas that we ultimately trap ourselves into.

I don’t know for certain, but I’ve often spoken to folks that described a life that didn’t resemble anything at all like what the world really saw. Just a thought… Sorry to interrupt your day.

Sitting around the pool this past weekend, a friend and I spoke about the grandness of God. While everyone knows that God is great and wonderful, few of us really live our lives in light of this reality.

My friend believes that if we truly knew the majesty of God we would be loving, forgiving, and joyful people. Instead, we often look to other things and people to find greatness. This substitution unfortunately pails in comparison to the Lord of the Universe.

As we both soaked in this concept, he stated simply how he had also been reflecting on the fact that God likes us. We all know that God loves us. After all, he is supposed to, right? But what if we really understood that God truly likes us! He enjoys us and even dances over us with joy. Can you imagine?

If I’m being honest, the whole idea is kind of silly. What does that say about my own defenses? But really… God likes us! He really likes us!

Does understanding (and, more importantly, believing) this fact change your behavior towards Him? Do you view Him differently?

Coupling the two conversations at the pool that night really made an impact on me. The Glorious One likes me. He doesn’t just know me, or love me, but He likes me. Pretty cool…

I love Danielle Shroyer… Her thoughts just hit a chord with me. Today her blog post on the Holy Spirit is well worth sharing…

Pentecost is probably my favorite day of the year. My Journey peeps joke that I say that when every single Christian holiday comes around, but seriously, Pentecost is my favorite. I will not waste an hour of your time rambling as to why. As it’s Monday, I thought I’d pass along a true Moltmannian metaphor that explains it well: The Spirit of Life gives us ROOM. Room to live, and to breathe, and to love, and to find meaning. The Spirit is the very force of life that makes life worth living.

“When the heart expands, we can stretch our limbs and feel the new vitality everywhere, then life unfolds in us. But it needs a living space in which it can develop. Life in the Spirit is a life in the ‘broad place where there is no cramping’ (Job 36:16). So in the new life we experience the Spirit as a ‘broad place’- as the free space for our freedom, as the living space for our lives, as the horizon inviting us to discover life. ’The broad place’ is the most hidden and most silent presence of God’s Spirit in us and round about us. But how else could ‘life in the Spirit’ be understood, if the Spirit were not the space ‘in’ which this life can grow and unfurl? We explore the depths of this space through the trust of the heart. We search out the length of this space through extravagant hope. We discover the breadth of this space through the torrents of love which we receive and give. God’s Spirit encompasses us from all sides and wherever we are (Psalm 139). Christ’s Spirit is our immanent power to live- God’s Spirit is our transcendent space for living.” -The Spirit of Life, p.178-179

Too often we have wrongfully believed that spiritual things are “otherworldly,” that they take us away from our physical present lives and move us into some cloudy atmosphere of abstraction. The Spirit of God is not an abstraction. She is not some force that distracts us from our “real lives” by transporting us into another more “spiritual” one. The Spirit of God given to us at Pentecost is the force for life which makes us recognize where our feet are standing, and pay attention to what our eyes are seeing, and awaken to what our hearts are feeling. And this feeling of being fully awakened to our present and rich reality very truly transforms us, because it gives us space to breathe so deeply that everything becomes possible. Love becomes possible, and justice, and peace, and forgiveness. We don’t feel cramped for space and choked for air, because we are surrounded by the Spirit of God that breathes upon us the very force of life. When transformation happens in any and every way for us, it is because somewhere deep within us we have, even if only for a moment, believed this to be true, and felt it to be true, and acted knowing it is true. And when we act from that place, the whole world can change. When we act from that place, we claim that the whole world IS changing, even now, and we are called to be part of it.

This weekend, I saw the Breathe DVD by Rob Bell. Simply amazing…

By simply our breathing… We interact with our God. Intimately. We breathe in His power and holiness. Even in our vain attempts to deny him through word or action, our breath only affirms our praise of Him. Rob Bell mentions sitting at a table and listening to another person state, “There is no God.” Even this is really only affirmation of his existence and reality in our lives.

When our first breath arrives as a child, we begin our worship of Him. Our first breath. Our first praise. Until the very end, when our breathe (and praise) ends.

The simple breath itself is the name of God. The act of breathing is saying His name. The breathe in and blow out form the Hebrew name for God. Whether intended or not, we all praise His name by the act of breathing alone. Irrespective of our thoughts at the moment. Irrespective of our frustration with the world or God Himself. Irrespective of all. Our breath alone proclaims His name. Think about that for a second…

Simply. Amazing.

The following article from USA Today brought to light Jennifer Knapp acknowledging she is gay. As someone who followed Knapp several years ago, her struggle strikes a chord with me. For me, imagining the struggle that must have been raging inside her for years while she performed for conservative Christian groups must have been pure anguish.

Personally, I admire her courage in stepping forward and continuing her career with this new revelation.

Christian singer Jennifer Knapp says she felt pressure to choose between her faith, being gay

Jennifer Knapp is a Christian musician who is in a same-sex relationship.

CAPTION

Eye Photography

Move over Ricky Martin. The hunky Latin-pop singer who announced last month that he is gay has company: veteran Christian musician Jennifer Knapp. In interviews with Christianity Today and Advocate.com, Knapp, 33, a Dove Award-winning folk rock singer, acknowledges that the rumors are true: she’s in a same-sex relationship.

“I don’t want to come off as somebody who’s shirking the truth in my life,” she tells Christianity Today.

She calls the rumors that she left music for a seven-year sabbatical because she was a lesbian …

… a straw (in my decision), but there were many straws on the camel’s back at the time. I’m certainly in a same-sex relationship now, but when I suspended my work, that wasn’t even really a factor. I had some difficult decisions to make and what that meant for my life and deciding to invest in a same-sex relationship, but it would be completely unfair to say that’s why I left music.

Knapp says in the interview that she’s “absolutely” felt pressure to choose between her faith and her gay feelings.

Everyone around me made it absolutely clear that this is not an option for me, to invest in this other person, and for me to choose to do so would be a denial of my faith.

Scripture, she adds, has been her salvation.

The Bible has literally saved my life. I find myself between a rock and a hard place — between the conservative evangelical who uses what most people refer to as the ‘clobber verses’ to refer to this loving relationship as an abomination, while they’re eating shellfish and wearing clothes of five different fabrics, and various other Scriptures we could argue about.

I’m not capable of getting into the theological argument as to whether or not we should or shouldn’t allow homosexuals within our church. There’s a spirit that overrides that for me, and (that is) what I’ve been gravitating to in Christ and why I became a Christian in the first place.

Jennifer Knapp says she’s

CAPTION

Handout

In the Advocate interview, Knapp says she knows her coming out is “going to be shocking and feel like a betrayal to some people” who have been fans. Still, “I’m quite comfortable to live with parts of myself that don’t make sense to you.”

Her new CD Letting Go is set for release on May 10, and she has begun touring, but Knapp tells Christianity Today that her public revelation is not motivated by political activism.

I’m in no way capable of leading a charge for some kind of activist movement. I’m just a normal human being who’s dealing with normal everyday life scenarios.

As a Christian, I’m doing that as best as I can. The heartbreaking thing to me is that we’re all hopelessly deceived if we don’t think that there are people within our churches, within our communities, who want to hold on to the person they love, whatever sex that may be, and hold on to their faith.

Link to original article.

I’m currently reading Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? by James K.A. Smith, which seeks to address the impact of postmodernism on today’s church. The reading is challenging and thought provoking for me. This morning I stumbled on a section that really resonated with me. Smith advances the following idea:

Within the matrix of a modern Christianity, the base “ingredient” is the individual; the church, then, is simply a collection of individuals. Conceiving of Christian faith as a private affair between the individual and God – a matter of my asking Jesus to “come into my heart” – modern evangelicalism finds it hard to articulate just how or why the church has any role to play other than providing a place to fellowship with God. With this model in place, what matters is Christianity as a system of truth or ideas, not the church as a living community embodying its head. Modern Christianity tends to think of the church either as a place where individuals come to find answers to their questions or as one more stop where individuals can try to satisfy their consumerist desires. As such, Christianity becomes intellectualized rather than incarnate, commodified rather than the site of genuine community.

I am extremely guilty of this individualized approach to the church and all too often to see the local churches in my area as a commodity to be consumed rather than integrated communities where relationships transform the participants. Instead, I simply take what I like from certain communities rather than fully participate in one community. It isn’t that I don’t desire this community, but honestly struggle with entering into it. Fear. Lack of authenticity. Judgment. You name it. They all serve to keep me isolated at times.

On one hand I desire to stay true to my reading of the Scriptures (a much bigger conversation), but on the other I know I just need to get off the bench and into the game. This is just the beginning of the conversation, but I look forward to the journey…