my response

it got way crazier than i expected on facebook the other day. (you can see for yourself here.) as most people know, i am for universal health care. i don’t believe in socialism, fascism, communism, capitalism, or too many other “-ism’s” for that matter. ferris bueller taught me that. the only beliefs i truly regard and try to follow are those passed down throughout the bible; specifically, what Jesus taught about loving God the Father and loving our neighbor as ourselves. after reading through the currently 46 comments, i thought i should maybe take the time to explain the reasons about why i’m so vocal about this issue.

i had health insurance as a kid, and like most kids, never really thought about it. then i turned 18 and was no longer under my mom’s coverage unless i currently lived with them and was in school. that only lasted a year. my mom and her new husband moved and i made a very difficult decision to stay in riverside despite not having a car that worked, a consistently paying job, or a place to live. i was a homeless college dropout for precisely one week. i also for the first time realized that i had almost literally no safety net. if i got sick, i couldn’t afford to get help. because i was technically self-employed i couldn’t qualify for low-income care either. fortunately, i’m a relatively healthy person overall and nothing really happened. during the two and a half years between then and when i got married, that was my situation. i got married and my wife happened to be going to a medical school. she had great coverage simply by being a student, but student’s spouses aren’t covered by that. we made just enough money to get by and there was definitely no room in our budget for me to buy health insurance. one day, i got sick. it was different than any other kind of sickness i’d ever dealt with, and i was scared. after a couple days, we made the hard decision to go to the emergency room. my poor wife was so scared and worried about what it was going to cost us. we were just hoping and praying that it wasn’t something worse than it was for the sake of my well-being and eventually our finances. in the end, the virus of whatever it was ended up lasting about five days and i’m no worse for the wear. after a 20 minute doctor visit and a quick lab test, it actually only cost us about $150. it was a ton of money to us at the time, but we were able to pay it eventually. i can’t help but think about what might have happened if it would have been something worse though. it would have put us so deep into a financial hole that, between student loan payments and the the current economic climate, i don’t know we would have been able to get out of for quite some time.

i’m not for universal health care because i so strongly believe that wealthy people need to share. i think they should though, and hope that were i in their position would hold to that value. i honestly don’t care about the particulars of one reform plan versus another. also, the more i think about it, the more i become convicted that i shouldn’t care if illegal immigrants get health care or not. that last one is a struggle for me. my true honest belief that is the one that makes me think that health care for all should be a reality is that according to the Christian faith, money is not something to be withheld to the detriment of others. believe me, as far as political ideologies are concerned, i am for as little government as possible. our government is going to take our money anyway, and if they’re going to take it and use it for something like universal health care, then i’m much more ok with that than the myriad other uses of tax dollars.

i also feel the need to be completely open about the fact this isn’t some conviction i’ve decided upon a whim either. i struggle with this. like i said already, i’m not a fan of big government or even necessarily higher taxes. also, i periodically have to truly check my motives, more so if i’m bringing my religious convictions into play. i truly believe that every human being is a child of God whether they acknowledge that or not. we could very well be spending eternity with those souls our greed and selfishness has caused us to turn our backs on. most of my life i’ve felt like i didn’t totally agree with the idea of “christians are by default aligned with the republican right,” and a lot of the time feel like i’m fighting against a stereotype. if there’s one thing i’ve learned though, it’s that “fighting against” something is rarely, if ever, a better idea than fighting for something.

i don’t expect to have changed anyone’s mind with writing this. the most i’m really hoping is for whoever reads this to have a better understanding about where i’m coming from with this. in the meantime, let’s keep challenging each other. please, let’s all be checking our motives though, especially those of us who are called to have more eternally minded motives

a belated halloween story

i know it’s a little late and all, but this is one of those childhood stories that kinda comes back to you about 20 years later and then suddenly a lot of your life makes more sense. just felt like i should share it is all.

growing up, i never got into halloween stuff all that much. i only went trick or treating a few times that i can remember and the rest of the time i was passing out candy. me and my mom would usually hang out at home and just watch tv. this was back before every church had their “safe not-halloween but you can still dress up” activity. i didn’t really even get into the candy thing very much, because i was never a huge chocolate or candy corn person. by the early teenage years, i was totally over the dressing up thing and just barely starting to show interest in scary movies. in the past couple years, i’ve started to really enjoy some of the halloween type things like scary movies and the creativity of certain kinds of costumes. i’m especially fond of zombie movies, and not just because of the obvious social commentaries the better ones offer. (deep down, i think every guy is anxiously awaiting the day when the undead rise with a taste for human flesh and we get to use that double-barreled shotgun for its true purpose.) but considering the kind of things i enjoy now, i was thinking back and trying to remember why i never got into halloween when i was younger. i remember now.

when i was 5 or 6 years old, i remember that i was very excited to dress up for halloween. my mom asked me what i wanted to be, and i told her very matter of factly, “i wanna be dracula!” she didn’t seem very enthused about that idea, but she didn’t give me an outright “no” either. i think that got my hopes up. it was gonna be great, i was going to go around scaring people and be downright horrifying. i was going to just as scary as nosferatu himself. i was in kindergarten though. like it or not, my mom was the one who would be paying for the costume, so she got the final verdict on what i was going to dress up as. below is a picture that is, to the best of my memory, almost identical to what i wore on halloween that year. enjoy.

thoughts on christian music

i was gonna try to let this one go. i really was. i even had hope that change was coming. unfortunately, my worst suspiscion was proven completely true, and here I am more firmly rooted in my obstinance.

what makes “Christian music” Christian music?  it’s not the notes played or the beat you hear. this is the only genre of popular music today that’s defined by the lyrical content. why is that?  why do we as Christians (generally speaking of course) demand that our music be especially set aside for our enjoyment only? there’s no real reason that a non-Christian would seek out music that only talks about Jesus unless they were specifically looking for music that talks about Jesus. I think that making music specifically christian in nature would alienate those not already in the club. I’m not talking about music written for the specific purpose of congregational worship. I mean the music you’ll hear if you turn on the local church friendly radio station.

so what do you do if you are a Christian who loves creating music but writes about people’s stories whether they experienced God in that moment or not? what happens when you lose hope? should that not be talked about? sometimes it doesn’t feel like God is there, and sometimes things happen to you that are out of your power to help. are we only supposed to write about the aftermath, the moral of the story? judging from the current atmosphere, that’s what it looks like. this doesn’t make sense to me at all, because that doesn’t sound like the Christian lifestyle we’ve been called to live. even if your are “eternally minded,” that doesn’t disqualify you from having to experience this life, warts and all. as Christians, Jesus said we would experience hard times. we’re not called to ignore them, but to learn from them. why wouldn’t a Christian artist want to use that experience as story to tell through the gift of music? it’s not like we don’t already the happy resution to the story: God wins. besides, if there are no troubled times or evil to overcome, then there’s no such thing as salvation or redemption. and in between those two points is the search for God’s freedom and healing. we as Christians need to be encouraging to the process of spiritual growth, not the whitewashing of art to appease those who would ignore the world we live in.

so, why do I suddenly want to write such a tirade? someone in the chrisitian music world had a problem with some lyrics in a very powerful song and asked my friend to change them. the reason was because the lyrics as they are reflect the pain of the moment, and had no actual mention of God, Jesus, or the bible. my friend was told that the changes should be made so that more of the Christian music listeners would more easily connect and mentioned several times about throwing God’s name in the song. this irked me quite a bit. definitely for the reasons already stated, but for another big one too. I beleive that throwing God’s name in a song (the old “change ‘baby’ to ‘jesus’ in any pop song” joke) is in a way using God’s name in vain. all art is an act of creation, which is in itself an imitation of the Creator. God made no compromise when he created the universe and everything in it, including you and I. is not then sinful if we compromise in our imitation of our Lord? this is fallen world and we can’t always see God. not that He wasn’t there, but that while living through the moment overwhelming evil was the only presence sensed. if a piece of art is simply about the hurt when evil occurred and the scar it may have left, isn’t it a compromise of integrity in telling the story of that moment and thrusting the name of God into it? I believe that God’s name would be cheapened in that case. and what would the true purpose be of slapping the name of Jesus into art other than to be able to sell it to Christians?

i’ve written about four different endings to this, and i haven’t been able to write a satisfactory one. i think it may be because i haven’t really come to any sort of conclusion in my mind about this. i guess i could just say that i believe God wants to us tell our stories, and that we shouldn’t hide our stories under the guise of safety. tell yours, and do it without compromise.

seriously,

can someone tell me what’s wrong with free health care in the u.s.? especially if you’re a christian? i honestly don’t understand what the resistance is to it. is it because we’re collectively scared of the word “socialism?” as a christian, why do we even seem scared of socialism? because of evil dictatorships in the first half of the 20th century? read matthew 25:34-46, then tell me what’s more evil: a system that feeds greed and ego, or one that steals from the rich to give to the poor? right now, i’m young and woefully ignorant, so please educate me. i’m probably not seeing every angle and i’d like to. so, what are your thoughts, and how do those align with what Jesus has taught us?

day of the dad

fathers day. or, as it’s been better known throughout my life, “national abandonment day.” here’s a little factoid for you: more phone calls are made on fathers day than any other day of the year. being that half of all marriages end in divorce, I’m pretty sure that the reason for all the phone calls is because half of the country doesn’t live with their father at home. another odd little thing about fathers day is that while a tie or coffee mug seems like an appropriate gift for dad, a spa weekend or week of maid service is a good mothers day gift. kinda makes it seem like even the dads that are at home aren’t really worth but so much. that’s actually pretty sad to me. dads, on behalf of kids who don’t know any different, thanks for sticking around.
by now, it shouldn’t really surprise anyone that the whole subject of fatherhood is kind of a touchy thing for me. in my journey so far I’ve had to come to terms with what I didn’t have growing up. honestly, it’s been pretty painful to go through. I think I’ve kind of come out on the other side of that though. the first stage to any growth is realizing what you’re lacking. but it’s not growth if it stops there. I know what I missed, and in the process discovered what should have been there. now, it’s time for me to move on.
all this time I’ve focused a lot on earthly things. in that, there’s not a lot of hope. but as I’ve said before on this blog, hope is the key and God is the difference. it’s only been very recently that i’ve been able to think about God as a father. that term never made a ton of sense to me, but i knew what it was trying to convey. it’s that God provides for us and takes care of us and watches out for us like a good father should. it’s in learning what a good father is really like and mentally preparing to become one myself some day that’s shown me the kind of father that God longs to be in our lives. a good father knows when their child is ready for certain challenges and how to equip them to overcome those challenges. a good father loves to freely give gifts to his children. maybe most importantly, a good father lets their children know that they are his beloved and can offer them an identity because of who he is. that’s what I want to be for my kids someday, and I’m learning more and more that I get to have my heavenly father be that for me.
so here it is, the first father’s day I get to really celebrate. not for myself, but for my real father. the father that my earthly one should have been modeling for me and introduced me to.
thank you, God, for being who you are and offering to me what no other person could. I’m immensely excited for what you’re showing me and challenging me to become. even more than that, God, I’m thankful that you’ve shown me that you love me as a true father loves his beloved son.