Hey, if you’ve ever wondered what to do with all those CD’s you get in the mail to join AOL (America Online), well now you know. Check out this page:

http://stupidco.com/aol_throne_intro.html

Wierd stuff! It’s good to know that I’m not the only one who sees wasting time a fine art.

Are you looking for more out of your life? Does the fact that you have so much more stuff than most in the world get you down? Are you depressed when you flip through your 100 channels of force-fed entertainment and still can’t find anything worth watching? Are you looking for a community of people that will accept you for the self-seeking, pitiful wretch that you are?

Then try Jesus Christ, the Herbal Supplement. We’ve spent hours and hours working our tails off to bring you the help you need. If you put Jesus in your life you can reach those dreams that seemed to linger so far out on the horizon. All it takes is just a little bit of time each week, and you’re made complete.

First off, we want you to come to church. Here at church you will be met by friendly faces that we’ve told to greet you and by good music we’ve put together especially for you so you can sit back and enjoy without having to do anything. And maybe there will even be a message about how Jesus will make your life all that you wanted it to be. We are very interested in making the environment at church comfortable and the most convenient experience imaginable. If you don’t come back, it’s our fault! Come sit with countless others who are wanting to experience the same…together! Let the church meet your whims.

Second, we want you to read a little bit of the Bible each day. We’ve even written up a reading guide checklist so you can get just enough to fit in five minutes, and only the parts that we think really mean anything to you. It is all about you, after all. We want you to have all the pious indications that you are growing spiritually. Checklists can be fun!

Third, we want you to tell others how you got everything you ever wanted by taking Jesus Christ, the Herbal Supplement. We call this “Evangelism”. Tell them that their every dream and aspiration will come true! Families will suddenly enjoy each other’s company at holiday gatherings. Sex will be more exciting. Your kids will leap to their feet to clean their rooms and pick up the hair they leave clogging the bathtub drains. Your pets will even clean up their own pee on the carpet! You can get ahead of the Jones’ when you take Jesus Christ, the Herbal Supplement.

What more could you want? It’s all about you, anyway. There’s no commitment involved that would take you out of the way of your busy life. There’s no easier pill to swallow.

When you want more out of your life, take Jesus Christ, the Herbal Supplement.

…

I hope that my readership senses the extreme “tongue-in-cheek” in my story. I also hope you feel the extreme disgust I have when I encounter churches like this. My parody may be a little over the top, but at the core it communicates a real concern I have.

I watch so many portrayals of Jesus Christ as the missing ingredient you add to your life to make it better. Of course, “Better” means fulfilling the desires of our Western narcissism. Everything is about us. If it feels good, it must be “better”. If it gets us more money, a bigger house, more prestige, more friends, it must be “better”. Follow Jesus because then you’ll have the perfect family, the perfect career, the perfect marriage, hey! even the perfect score on your ACT! But Jesus seemed to have a much different perception of himself and his purpose. Observe:

Now great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and said to them
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.”
- Luke 14:25-33

When we think that to be a disciple of Jesus “gets us all we want” we are Inconsistent at best, and wicked at worst. He had a lot of people following him around who were curious. But, wasn’t afraid to push buttons by pointing out how lackluster their level of commitment was. He told them that it was a waste of time to try and follow him if they held tightly to their own comfortable lives and didn’t consider the price he was demanding of them. Don’t bother. You don’t even know what it what I’m talking about!

Harsh? It could be taken that way. Thought provoking? Most definitely! It is a disservice to tell people that Jesus most importantly wants to be our buddy. True, he speaks often of the friendship he desires with his followers, but doesn’t true friendship have a level of challenge? Are we so shallow that we only surround ourselves with “yes” sayers to soothe our consciouses? Or do we remember how painful it is to grow?

What is Jesus’ point in challenging people to give everything up? Give it up to who? Can you give things up with the wrong motive? Observe a quick story he told:

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.” – Matthew 13

This person didn’t sell everything he had to fulfill some blind duty. He didn’t have a checklist to follow. He found something more valuable than everything he had! Furthermore, in his joy he went and hawked it all away to be able to buy that field. Could it be that the reason we pop the Herbal Jesus pill comes from completely missing what is truly valuable in our lives?

In churches, when we give people this “herbal gospel” message, we are basically neglecting to tell them about the treasure in the field. We lead them to the brink of finding the treasure and tell them, “Well, you’ve arrived. Thanks for coming and we’ll see you next week.” What a damning thing to do.

This Jesus Christ, the Herbal Supplement we are selling is a terribly addictive drug. We push it and tell people that this is the essence of God. Deep inside some wonder if this is what God really meant, but they are dulled by all the pretty programs and subtle comforts lulling them to sleep. Again and again. What a tragedy.

I’m reading an excellent book right now called The Call by Os Guinness. It’s given me great reason for reflection. Observe:

Stone, it is said, was the medium for the ancients and steel for the early moderns; ours is plastic and the name of the game is recycling. “One-and-only” and “forever” are obsolete, and “needing more space” is our most readily given excuse. In our fragmented lives the one thing necessary is to “keep our options open.” The art of “identity building” is more a matter of fluidity than fixture. And since the rules of the game change as fast as the games themselves, we are taught to avoid above all being “stuck” with commitments that might “mortgage” the freedom of tomorrow.
p.176

Whoa! I’ve become very aware of how easy it is to get lost or dilluted in all the options our culture provides. Choice is no longer a rich blessing…it is now considered a right that must always be maintained. Here’s another quote that sums up the problem nicely…

“To achieve anything today, an artist has to develop a conscious scrictness in respect of time which in former ages might have seemed neurotic and selfish, for he must never forget that he is living in a state of seige.”
- W.H. Auden, poet

A while ago I wrote a blog entry on how I’ve begun exploring discipline as the only way to experience freedom (“Discipline, The Art of Freedom”). Whereas before I would be mortified at the thought of setting a fixed bedtime, or scheduling in a two hour chunk of time that I should go off by myself to practice creativity. Why should I be bound to such rules? Because there are too many options! As Auden, quoted above, points out it may be better to live in a way that relentlessly guards what God has given me from being sapped of its strength and zeal by pointless distractions.
On a practical note, one of my biggest wastes of time…surfing the internet. I’m addicted to information. My favorite places to visit? http://www.slashdot.org, http://www.wikipedia.org, http://www.cnn.com, http://www.versiontracker.com, even my friends blogs! I can’t even begin to tell you how much time I lose just by browsing for information!

Of course learning new things isn’t wrong. My personality is a type of “mental sponge” anyway. I enjoy it. The world wide web was one of the coolest inventions in my mind. But do I have to let it control me? If given the option to sit and write a new song, or practice guitar (or write to you my blog audience…) I usually choose to surf. This is just an example of something that would have more impact on my life if it were focused. If I set limits on how much time is spent, then I could be free for other things.

Now, where’s my guitar…

I’m hopelessly addicted to changing the look and feel of my website! Since I purchased the domain name, wavethenavel.com, I believe it has undergone 12 different facelifts. Hey, I must say that it gives me good practice! If anyone out there has been looking at the HTML code through all the different versions, you would notice how much my web skills have improved! I’m on a CSS kick right now. :-) DOWN WITH HTML TABLES!!!

But seriously, I’ve decided to dump www.blogger.com as my blog service provider. I can’t complain about it at all, though. They do a great job. Unfortunately, wavethenavel.com has outgrown what Blogger could provide. I’ve been working on a new website “content engine” for a friend of mine and decided to use wavethenavel as my debugging/usability testing ground.

What does all this techno-babble mean to you, the reader of my blog? Well for one, it gives me an excuse to do another face lift of the site. And, two, I am going to port the 40 or so entries from my Blogger account to my new “content engine” that I am installing on this site. Pardon the dust. If you’re looking for a past entry and can’t find it, it’s probably because I haven’t gotten to it yet.

Once the process is complete, I’ll be able to better organize the archive of old posts and give more advanced searching capabilities. I’m looking forward to it!

Update! (12-4-2004)
Well, I’ve abandoned using my homebrew content management system in favor of this sweet blogging tool, Wordpress. It’s a sweet little piece of free, community developed software that I didn’t want to spend my time trying to match. Why reinvent the wheel, eh? We’re still going to put the content management system I’m designing to use, but it wasn’t meant to be a blogging tool with full comment, pingback, trackback, external publishing ability and the like. Three cheers for open source software!

Perform impossibilities
or perish. Thrust out now
the unseasonal rip figs
among your leaves. Expect
the mountains to be moved.
Hate parents, friends, and all
materiality. Love every enemy.
Forgive more times than
      seventy-seven.
Camel-like, squeeze by
into the kingdom through
the needle’s eye. All fear quell.
Hack off your hand, or else,
unbloodied, go to hell.

Thus the divine unreason.
Despairing you may cry,
with earthy logic–How?
And I, your God, reply:
Leap from your weedy shallows.
Dive into the moving water.
Eye-less, learn to see
truly. Find in my folly your
true sanity. Then, Spirit-driven,
run on my narrow way, sure
as a child. Probe, hold
my unhealded hand, and
bloody, enter heaven

by Petoskey Stone

I’m writing this as I finish up watching the movie, “Requiem for a Dream“. To be honest, I don’t think I can recommend watching it. It’s a movie that is dark, depressing, and filthy. But what compelled me to check it out was it’s thorough exploration of the depths of human addiction. The vivid scenes depict the hunger that exists deep inside the human soul. Hunger for companionship, love, excitement, success, dreams…peace. But what happens when this hunger starts to get louder and louder and we don’t know how to satisfy it? We look for the nearest prop, the next fix. Soon, that prop no longer simply satisfies this soul hunger, but it in itself sets up a myriad of synaptic (or even chemical) pathways in the brain that make it irresistible.

This movie was excellent in the way that it confronts us with how experientially simple it is to walk down the path of destruction. Every step along the way, these characters rationalized their decisions. Of course something in the back of their mind may have given them pause, but they relentlessly thought they were doing what was right…what was natural. While I was on the Internet Movie Database reading about this movie, I found some interesting facts about how they put it together:

• During Ellen Burstyn’s impassioned monologue about how it feels to be old, cinematographer Matthew Libatique accidentally let the camera drift off-target. When director Darren Aronofsky called “cut” and confronted him about it, he realized the reason Libatique had let the camera drift was because he had been crying during the take and fogged up the camera’s eyepiece. This was the take used in the final print.
• Jared Leto lost 25 lbs and befriended real heroin junkies from Brooklyn to prepare for his role as Harry Goldfarb.
• Director Darren Aronofsky asked Jared Leto and Marlon Wayans to avoid sex and sugar for a period of 30 days in order to better understand an overwhelming craving.

Whoa! They put a lot of effort into this.

I (as well as others who have seen the movie) couldn’t help but wonder if there are things we are addicted to that we don’t realize. Sure I may not be a druggie-porno-gameshow addict. But are those the only addicts that exist? Are we too afraid to stop and take a reflective look at how we live? Are we afraid that we may find our addictions just as sinister, if not more so, because they are so subtle (and, in most cases, legal).

Most people don’t experience the painful hunger shown in the movie. Everyone hungers, but it’s often “under the radar” of our society. We have small cravings and find socially acceptably small props to make ourselves feel better. It’s all about making us feel better. Even though we may not be as depraved as those characters depicted in the movie, we would do well to remember how desperate we can be.