Thanks Erica.

My beautiful bride is blogging again; it’s about time.

Go give her some blog love here.

And yes, I’ve updated my links on the right.

I realize I’m now a day late on this, but since everyone else seems to be chiming in with their thoughts on the election, I figure it’s as good a time as any to give you my thoughts; not that you care.

I think there is a segment of the population that has made President-elect Obama out to be the anti-Christ, or the devil or some horrible monster that is looking to find all republicans and Christians and rip their heads off (maybe an exaggeration).

I think there are a lot of people who dubbed John McCain as the next Ronald Reagan when four years ago they said he wasn’t conservative enough to run on a republican ticket.

I think whichever candidate won they were going to step into a mountain of problems and now that Senator Obama has won he needs our support and our prayers.I think Obama seems like a relatively good guy and I think that while he has a desire to help all people, including the lowest of the low (something Republicans or for that matter Christians could take note of) I think the way he wants to do it, history will show, just does not work. 

There is a thought from some people I know that we are losing ground in some battle that the Christian-Right needs to stand up and take back this Christian nation of ours, to which I would say, wake up friends, we’ve passed that turn a while ago. 

American Christianity, settled and complacent, has taken care of itself over the last couple hundred years.  We, and I’m a part of this too, have rested comfortably in our “safe haven” from the rest of the world and ignored an AIDS epidemic which is now worldwide, poverty and hunger in our own cities and towns and we have made non-Christians the enemy. 

Instead of loving people we have called them names and made them outcasts.  Instead of helping people we’ve said “they brought this on themselves” and instead of really being the hands and feet of Jesus we all got richer and richer while people around us sunk further away from finding real peace.

The Bible commands us to pray for our leaders and rightly so.  Barrack Obama is my President as of January 20th and I will pray for him regularly.  I hope he becomes FDR or Abraham Lincoln, because if he wins, we all win.  In all of this, though, the truth is that unless the church becomes the church and takes the gospel of love and peace to all people, any social institution that President Obama sets up will be meaningless.  The Church of Jesus is the hope of the world. 

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for He has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released, that the blind will see, that the oppressed will be set free, and that the time of the Lord’s favor has come.” 

Luke 4:18-19
     

Well, I did it.  I finally cancelled my “myspace” page.  Yep, within 48 hours it’ll be no more.I am free from the unwanted solicitations of “adult entertainment” and the incessant pestering of would-be rock stars that say they want to be my “friend” just so they can spam the crap out of me or “friends” putting massive banners in my comments section that turn out to be pictures of clowns or holiday messages.  It is finished and I am glad.  Good riddance!Now If I can just get people to stop poking me on facebook, I should be golden.  

Blogs are designed so that one can get things off of one’s chest; speak one’s mind and even declare things publicially to the world.  It’s one of those times yet again.

I confess…I am an overuser of exclamation points.  Seriously, I write emails all day, post on this blog, text, twitter and even, ocasionally use IM and I find myself dropping the most gregarious punction mark in our language all the time!  (that one was for effect).

It really is a sickness I think.  Go back and look at some of my old posts and you’ll find at least one or two exclamation points per; it’s a litte ridiculous.  I really must stop, but it is the only way I know of to communicate my enthusiasm for various things.

Glad I got that off my chest.  I’m good now.

So I want to know, who out there has any secret confessions?

Tonight Jenn and I hung out with Luke, Sarah, Erica, and Micah.  6 adults in the prime of their lives, all with exciting roles to play at our respective churches and all we can think to talk about is “what does caffeine look like” and “how do they put it into things or take it out of things.”

We might be officially lame.

This weekend my sister and my nieces are coming into town for the race for the cure, and perhaps the only thing scarier than our family all together is that on Tuesday I’ll be taking my three nieces to the zoo and then babysitting with my sister.

This will be the first time I’ve been around all three of them at the same time, and while Jenn’s present condition means it’s too late for birth control, this may give me serious doubts about adding more kids to the mix later.

They’re adorable, all of them, and I’m looking forward to it a lot, but the fact that taking three babies to the zoo is even on my calendar may be an indication that I am officially an adult.

Crap.

I saw this today on another blog and was floored by who was involved and the vision behind the whole thing.

Essentially, Martin Smith, the lead singer of the band Delirious, put together a group of songwriters, who have essentially written everything sung in the church over the last ten to 15 years, to put together an album to generate money for 16 charities around the world helping combat poverty, disease and helping orphans.  The group is called Compassion Art 

To me, this is how music helps and heals people.  It’s one thing to write a song and sing it on a stage, but quite another to use your music and giftings to draw attention to some of the poorest people in the world.

Here’s a live performance of the first song from the album and a little more info about the group.

This post is going to start with a lot of disclaimers, including the disiclaimer for all of the disclaimers, which is that if I don’t give these disclaimers I might internetally punched in the face for what I’m going to talk about by some of you.

So let me go back a couple of years.  When I started at Clovis Hills it was not uncommon to hear me say that I hate Christian music (meaning non-worship stuff).  I would have said that it’s all crap and the industry is filled with people who couldn’t make it in the secular market, but, because they like Jesus are able to carve out a career for themselves because Christians are too nice to tell them they’re no good.

Over the past two years I’ve had to listen to a lot of this stuff and because of that, along with my wife and Erica Foster telling me it’s not okay to hate christian music I have come to a point in my life where I can say that there is a lot of great stuff out there.  There are a ton of new artists that you can listen to without being embarrassed and without having to really dig for reasons you like them.  It was only until this week that I realized the problem is not so much christian music as it is Christian radio.

We have two christian radio stations in town and both are “listener supported” which means they are constantly having pledge drives.  Now, if you believe in these ministries and they impact you regularly, as they do for many, I’m not telling you not to give to them.  What I am asking is why both stations are having pledge drives at the exact same time?!

This, to me, is ridiculous.  Are you not aware of the other stations?  Was this decided upon by both parties, that we’ll just subject everyone to this at the same time?  I mean, seriously, what’s the deal?

Every other radio station on the planet is driven by demographics.  They do a particular style or genre and attract a fan base from that.  Not Christian radio.  We have one station that markets to all christians and so what you get is a hodge-podge of stuff from rock to hip-hop, new artists to songs like “Shout to the Lord” which are 20 years old being played in REGULAR ROTATION! (sorry about that).

As I’m writing songs more and more and exploring what options music may have for me, I have to believe that there’s good stuff out there and certainly, the secular music industry machine is not cranking out great artists by giving record deals to Paris Hilton and the like.  But come on, two pledge drives at the same time?  Making it impossible to hear even two or three songs in a row that are in the same genre?  And the hosts of these shows?  What the heck is the deal?

I’m sorry for the rant.  I don’t want to come off as some church-hating post-modern, but this radio thing has to be figured out.  If the message is truely “in the music” shouldn’t we be doing a better job of getting the music out to people?  If I want to hear “Breathe” I’ll put on my copy of WOW 95 and go to town, but it really should not still be on the radio should it?

Rant over.

I got together with Tim Douty again the other night and we wrote a Christmas song.  I’m hoping to do it at Christmas, that is, but I suppose it’s not a typical Christmas song; no mention of a baby, swaddling clothes or asses (it’s in the Bible), though believe me I tried.

I’m pretty happy with it, though we’re still trying to figure out a bridge.  I’m really feeling pretty good about where God has me lately in terms of my songwriting and feeling like working with Tim is only making it better; dude is crazy good on the keys.  I’m hitting the studio with cool mo Dee in not too long and hopefully, we’ll have some rough stuff to put up here.  Who knows, in the next few months we may be putting together a bigger project and seeing what happens.  As it stands now, I’m just enjoying writing songs and feeling like if I shake hard enough, some more songs might just pop out of this dome of mine!